Chương 517: BECMI Chapter 516 - Reverberations

The Entropic Immortals urged the others on with the most energy, having found out very quickly that they were extremely vulnerable to the energies being used by whatever Outsider was doing this. So were many of those Immortals who worked with them the most freely, Burning away their Immortal bodies and power, and not even the mightiest Hierarchs were immune when The Light shone forth and touched them. Some very few looked into The Light and turned away, unable to attack something that spoke to their deepest hearts.

Many who looked upon it knew guilt and shame and reproach without knowing why, but for most that merely ignited a rage at being judged and found inferior, prompting them to attack with ever-more energy. Whole worlds and dimensional planes buckled and collapsed under the fallout of the conflicting energies and the Immortal Storms rocking the firmament.

-We just lost the Nested Worlds. That last shipment of grain did not come through, nor the charge packs, - Sif /reported to me with the air of something long anticipated collapsing. I eyed the empty air beneath the Thisbean Inn. -A remarkable coincidence. The Portal has been shut down, too. There was an utterly massive hyperwave in the Astral Plane just moments ago, crossing through Nown's space. I wouldn't be surprised if every Elemental conduit on the planet was just up and cut off, too.

- -Checking satellites on the Great Maelstrom… the central funnel looks to have collapsed. There's still rotation, but that's from momentum. There's nothing being drained, - she /confirmed. -Which means Fey connections are absent, too, throwing them into the Prime, which I'm sure they're happy about and will be understanding to those who had nothing to do with it, - I /rejoined, and could hear her /snort at the snark. -Got five dozen Masters and Eternals through via the High Walk through the Heavenly linkage.

As you surmised, they aren't going back that way. - She /paused for emphasis. -No more evacuations, Edge. - I looked out from the Throne Room of Castle Doomrose. It had been only forty years. Three-quarters of the mortal population of the world was dead. Much of the rest had caved into the demands of the Carnifex and become slaves or worse, especially the more brutal primitives. We were slaughtering them as we found them.

Monsters and beasts living and undead were assaulting the few remaining bastions of humanity, which basically boiled down to Heavens' Reach, Sythia, and the Bright Empire, and only the latter was holding firm in size and territory, absorbing what immigrants it could and putting them to work. Sythia was being turned on its head by a surge of vampirism and lichdom, encouraged by the Carnifex and executing the fall from grace that had the Immortals destroy it on the Far Shore.

This time, the Carnifex were helping the undead, and there would be no resurgent defense. The Carnifex had started breeding, younger ones with less-developed powers appearing among the teams raiding our hardpoints and the remaining farms. Their numbers were completely at odds with standard birth rates, so magically-boosted and accelerated growth were definitely at work.

Their most common area of deployment was to the Hollow World, whose inhabitants were much less adept both magically and martially, and whose dinosaurs and otherwise extinct species offered an endless palate of meals for them to enjoy as they slaughtered to their heart's content. If the Spell of Preservation made it impossible to kill the last members of a culture, it did not make it impossible to enslave them.

The few mortal clans and tribes preserved down there had been almost completely wiped out, and naturally nothing like the Eonic Empire or Sythia had been moved down there as yet. Keeping the tribesmen there simple and unchanged by the world had only made them horrendously vulnerable to unrestrained forces that were not so limited. The only force defying them down there was the Green Remnant, led by Jorg Turmalez, the Eternal Engineer.

He had built up a quiet little colony of Greens, their descendants, and some of the Hollow World natives that had managed to throw off the magic limiting their understanding. It had grown slowly over the centuries, but it had still grown, to the dismay of the Immortals… and now, they were the only force that could reasonably fight back! The Carnifex naturally desired our high technology, and had seized samples of it wherever they could down there and here.

They had belatedly realized that we could also track most of that technology with great alacrity and precision, meaning that taking our technology was basically leading us right to their labs and lairs. They'd switched to thoroughly destroying technology where they could, trying to destroy our centers of manufacture, but depleted-magic White Zones weren't friendly to magical infiltration, and our fabbers were still on the job. -I'm green-lighting open raids on the fallen enclaves of Sythia.

- Long-standing policy was to leave Sythia alone for the Immortals to do as they liked, but Sythia had plainly lost Immortal favor, and there was no rescue coming from their Patrons for them. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. -Understood. I will inform the dragons here. - Many of whom would be interested in assaulting beings who didn't run and hide and weren't so difficult to dig out of their holes.

Over a hundred dragons of my Ringlands were dead now, mostly younger ones ambushed and killed quickly when they got overconfident on their hunts. The numbers were considerably worse in other Dragon Kingdoms, of course, to the point where whole bloodlines had been extinguished, dracoliches and raveners and drolems made of their remains, and flights of powerful wyrms dead and alive alike were seen being ridden by powerful Carnifex.

Sythian magic was very strong, much revealed to them by Immortals thinking they were helping build a glorious golden land for mortal achievement. They succeeded only briefly before Entropic forces moved in and exploited the have-not lower castes, offering their own 'eternal life' to elite and non-elite alike. Sythian magical knowledge and Pyramid Power was used upon its own, and the desert realm was being torn apart by it.

The Immortals watched, and did nothing as their golden experiment died in death, undeath, and a very un-civil war. This time, it probably would not be removed to the Hollow World. Dragons spoke of offers being whispered on the wind, some of them coming from Carnifex, some very older, ancient things… such as the Night Dragon, a great Immortal foil of the Great One, a very evil and sinister dragoness who had gained Immortality by a method even dragons considered exceptionally repugnant…

but attain it she had, validating her choice. Naturally there would be other dragons willing to use her methods and treachery for power and staving off the long years that had claimed even Great Wyrms among my draconic citizens. Those were who the whispers were for, trying to find them, identify a weakness, and exploit it from within. Whispers had to come from somewhere. Thus, the Whispers could be tracked.

The Ringlands were completely Interdicted, so nothing could materialize in anywhere close to threatening territory. Dragons surveyed all the lands, and nothing was going to escape their notice if it materialized, many having tried. They all knew to shout the alarm, that back-up was on the way, and that if they acted as part of the team, the team would even get them back from death. If they decided to go it alone and died in silence, we couldn't save them, and goodbye to them.

The Carnifex had not contested my control of the Ringlands much, mostly because those who tried to died rather messily. They knew legends about me, from prisoners Charmed, tortured, Dominated, mind-reamed, even brain-eaten. But the only people who really knew anything about me were all Marked, and the Marked gave up nothing when they died. Trying to get something while they lived was pretty trying, too.

Using magic to invade the mind of a Marked had more than once resulted in the skulls of such gifted inquisitors exploding violently from a psychic attack through the Markspace, which was never a good sign for them. The Carnifex didn't know they were Marked, of course, as the Marks vanished on death, exploded if needed, and being inside the nasal cavity, were deuced hard to discover.

They did know that some of the most powerful beings hunting them were totally immune to having their brains or souls interrogated, which was pretty frustrating for them, as the same wasn't true for us questioning their dead skulls.

That was a good deal of my life now: waiting to get news of an attack, seeing if I could get there before they fled, if I could track them if they did flee, if I could not run into an ambush if I did track them, harvesting the heads and making sure the dead on their side stayed dead, rinse and repeat. Nown itself couldn't track them, because of the universally applied Mind Blanks.

It could sense what they did, effects on the Land and people, if they dug out new areas, if things died rapidly in areas without explanation… but these events were very small, Nown was very big, and it had to be paying attention to such things. Even its Avatars being interested in stopping the destruction now being unleashed didn't mean it knew where to look all the time, and it couldn't follow the Carnifex from place to place.

Much of the worst of what the Carnifex were doing was stopped by me, doubtless to their great frustration, although they had no idea it was me. The reason? Pyramids all over the damn place, particularly near or on the ley line nexuses they loved so much. Many were built underground and covered over, others were concealed by illusions, remoteness, second layers atop them, what have you. That was what I had been doing for a thousand years.

As a result, major magical Rituals and especially dimensional Portals could not escape my notice. If Gates between worlds opened, I knew it, I could zero in on them, and could be there in seconds, Forsaken kill-teams in minutes or less right behind me. It had stopped a lot of the Doomsday events from happening, but alas, not all of them, and certainly hadn't stopped everything. -Everything good for Resonance? - Sif /asked expectantly. -It's all in place for when the moon rises, - I /confirmed.

The Spell of Preservation was going to be wildly distorted in mere minutes, moonlight washing across the land and going to circle the globe in twenty-four hours. When it did, Nown was going to be effectively Interdicted against anything less than Immortal-level magic. We had Immortal-level magic. We also had Eternal-level magic, tightly controlled but present, which could bypass the 'no travel magic' restriction of the Spell of Preservation.

The Carnifex would lose their dimensional movement and ability to Teleport, relegating them to flying… and we could vastly outmaneuver them in flight! It also shut down many of the already-severed planar connections through a different source… and by the Resonance, other planar connections that might not have been severed before and left accessible by thoughtful third parties. I watched, and I waited as the sun fell below the horizon, and then turned to watch the first sliver of moonlight rise.

No smile, only grim expectations as the war devolved to a more mundane footing, and the era of Summoned help for the Carnifex faded away.

The eruption of the open Gate Down to the Entropic planes was not a complete surprise. It happened ten hours after the first rise of the Resonance, the Spell of Preservation sweeping around the world at moonrise. The Ritual to get it open would have taken about eight hours, so frantic Sendings must have gone out and equally hasty preparations made to the Ritual before the whole world was Sealed and it was made impossible. They… probably didn't think that matter through.