Sigil, City of Doors - Guildhall Ward - Ruins of the Mages' Guild
Judgement of an Artificial God
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A single moment in time is a frightful thing. How does one isolate it, quantify it? How does one measure it precisely, without delving into the very building blocks of creation? A moment can be but a second lost in a stream of centuries, oblivious to change. It can also be the merest fraction of our consciousness, a space of time so incredibly short that to the observer it never existed. And yet such a moment can ignite flame, and shatter an edifice. It can raise civilization and cause it to fall in the space of a breath. It can warp perception, and split the atom. To such a thing, what can the mortal mind do but tremble?
For indeed the mind that shaped space time to her whim was not the mind of man, nor the omniscience of a deity. It was a mind opened to the vastness of eternity, glimpsing truths incomprehensible and yet fully sane. For in
this moment, the Staff and Elianna were as one, indistinguishable. Vessel and vessel, together master. They knew not what they did, neither metaphysically nor scientifically, or even mystically. But the arm that holds the sword need not know why the steel parts the flesh... only that it does. A concept, imposed on a fluid canvas of space-time, is indistinguishable from fact.
Power struck her then, unknown, surging into this mortal vessel alongside her own. The room flooded with light intolerable, shining with the brilliance of a transcendence. Stone and tile boiled at the sorceress' feet, buckling under the growing heat. The staff could no longer be seen, blotted out by brilliance supreme. Its power surged, helices of a force unseen since the birth of the universe, overcoming utter void by creation. Like the tentacles of a flailing sea kraken, they whipped about, anchoring themselves to an intangible edge, the tear between reality and non-existence, and gripped it, curling about it, securing it...
anchoring it.
Light was joined by sound, unnerving, deafening and yet of insignificant volume, a sympathetic resonation that thrummed through the portal, the shattered room, and all within... and all without. The great planar city above and around them... every soul would feel it, their every cell thrumming in rhythm with the strings that bound the universe, stretched impossibly thin by the Great Forming that cast all matter into the boundless depths of the abyss.
Gravity, weakest of the four forces, and yet the most inescapable... Gravity was constant, unerring, instantaneous... and infinite. It was this that those close by might have seen become visible, the skeins of violet stretching across every object and being, interconnected in a lattice warped by mass and time like a great spiderweb in dimensions visible but unresolvable to the mind. At the epicenter, it was forcibly real, encompassing the entire field of view. Those above would see themselves as puppets snarled in a web of their own strings, bound and held by the laws of reality in shocking contrast. But for the briefest of instants... the entirety of the planar city would glimpse... space-time as it truly was.
The shapely vessel before the portal reached out, a delicate hand closing around the strands that bound the entrance to the exit, a tunnel through reality that led only to oblivion... and
pulled. It spooled, launched into motion, violet strands wrapping themselves precipitously around staff and bearer, binding them in place as the star sorceress defied distance and time with the Unified Force, drawing the far end of the portal to nothingness across the vast expanse of space, directly towards herself.
For many long moments, moments that might have been entire universes in themselves, reality warped around the magus, her form immovable even as the surface she stood on disintegrated. Gravity, faithful ally and sworn enemy, now held her aloft, its binding strings irreversibly tied to her goal. Above, metal and concrete groaned, collapsing in on itself as the target neared... and then, with a great, heaving crack, it arrived.
It furrowed the earth and bled the sky, its insatiable maw ripping through the surface of the metropolis ground zero above, its consumption the work of the Machine God but its path the act of a would-be savior. The hole screamed across the battlefield, its edge imperceptible except as framed by helices of brilliant yellow, a non-existent, invisible void crashing through anything and everything, now streaking in towards the homestretch. The wounded colossus too, would find its fate that of a non-entity, the work of its master unraveling it in an act of supreme poetic justice.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it ended. Not with a bang, but a muffled whimper, a soft 'huff' of air as edge met edge, and the portal re-stabilized, its endpoint once again a set point in space... the exact spot of its entrance. An infinite, recursive loop, locked away, unable to be closed and yet leading only to itself. Far and near side ceased to have meaning for it, as did entrance and exit. Like a cosmic Klein bottle, it was a self contained entity, with only one, continuous surface in space time.
The revelations winked away, and only the crackling of splitting, molten stone could be heard in the now far larger crater, the star magus suspended in mid-air by her staff, anchored into a point that no longer existed. She clutched it fiercely, her shivering, naked form wrapped around it protectively... her clothing long burned to ash and beyond.
"It is done."
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