Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

Edit: This is actually the correct chapter for today. Yesterday's chapter was actually skipped, and has been corrected. If you are reading this for the first time, you may need to back up a chapter and read that.

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“There’s no dimensional magic or residues here on any level I can sense, and if these people dimensionally came together, they would have exploded as they displaced one another. Two objects in the same space and the same time ends up poorly all around.

“Therefore, there was no dimensional movement involved.

“Verify that there are absolutely nothing besides bone remains and potentially degraded flesh here.”

The tapping of her nails remained constant as she focused on what the vibrations were telling her through the ground. “No flesh at all. Some should have rotted, carbonized, or fossilized. There’s none of the spaces in the ground it should have occupied, either. It’s just the bones here.”

I looked down at the silent, staring skulls, warped so horrifically together, the psychic trauma still evident in the air, although Kris likely couldn’t even feel it. “Star Trek transporter tech. You remember how that worked?”

“Wow. You are going back into the memories...” She scrunched up her face. “Okay, they disassembled someone, stored the information in the transporter buffer, beamed it out somewhere, and put it back together, right?” I nodded once. “I recall some engineers saying how horrifically energy-intensive something like that could be, and if they could do it, why couldn’t they make anything?”

“It turned out that they invented transporter-tech because they didn’t have the budget to show shuttles going to and from the planets they were on.” She gave me a look. “Yep. Great sci-fi invention was nothing more than a tool to save money onscreen.”

“You have now destroyed my fond memories of Roddenberry’s achievements. You know ALL of us Ranthas get them, right?”

“Uh-huh.” I pointed at the bones. “They weren’t being teleported. Necromancy, their souls were drawn here. Alteration, new bodies were being assembled for them. Vivimancy, their spirits were being put back into the new bodies. And then, the process was interrupted half-way.”

She rolled that over in her head, her nails still tapping on different skulls, violet eyes glancing at the prizzling spouts of waste energy at the middle of the place. “So... all of these people died simultaneously, were brought here, new bodies were being made for them, and they were killed in mid-reformation?”

“We don’t know what this crystal used to look like, but it obviously exploded, and everyone appeared around it. It’s the incredibly horrible timing which is most suspect here.” I stared at the scores of dead here, a tithe of what was represented in Cragstone. “All of these beings, human and otherwise, died at the exact same time, their spirits were brought here, bodies being rewoven, and then the crystal exploded in the middle of the process, fusing their partial bodies together, killing them all, and leaving nothing behind.”

“Which, if the logic follows through, was soon followed by an attack on human society,” she agreed slowly. “Okay, riddle me this: were there any former magical items, even remnants of dweomer clinging to them, among the dead stacked up in that city?”

“No. I was looking for remnants of them. I’ve only seen the most scattered scraps of magical stuff, and most of that was destroyed...” My voice trailed off slightly, as I considered that.

“The big devices back in the first town, that looked like they blew up, too?” she inquired.

“Those... were tapping the ley line. Sort of like this thing is doing, but there’s something unclean in the mix.” I pointed at it soberly. “So, things that were tapping the power lines were hit with a massive power surge that overloaded them. I assumed the surge had come up and out of the ley lines to do that. What if it was the other way around? The reason we even have residues is because the ley lines drew a bunch of it away if something was tapped into it?”

She tilted her head, considering that. “So, a wave from space, or something?”

“What about a wave from the Veil, a major Portal, disrupted by a massive spike stuck into it, and all that gathered energy reverberating out at a bad moment?”

She blinked. “Mom and Dad disrupting the Viamontian Ritual?”

“If it led back here, look at the plant growth. Would the timing be about right?”

She did get up and look around at the trees that were growing around, making her calculations.

“That... doesn’t seem to be too far off,” she admitted cautiously. “We don’t know how smooth time is between the realms, however. You said it was a day between us, but on Ispar that was a full week.”

“Temporal imbalance might be greater or lesser after what your folks did, we don’t know.” I rubbed my fingers together. “What’s the big difference between Isparian and Matrix Artificing?”

“All Isparian items tend to be charged,” she stated firmly. “There are constant effects you can imbue, but you didn’t see them on noncharged items as often.”

I nodded once. “Which means those items take in power, and those items have a fixed cap with no way to vent it.”

“Because they aren’t tapped into a ley line...” she trailed off, thinking on that. Slowly, she put her fingertips together, then spread them abruptly, an eyebrow raised.

“I’ve never seen or heard of it happen, but yeah, if mana could be forced into an object past its retention limit... well, you saw those forges. Given the size and comparing them to the crystal, I’d say a huge amount of the blast went into the ley lines. They didn’t leave anywhere near the impact craters, mostly they just blew apart the building next to them.”

“So, there’s a massive change or shift in magic, somewhere something happens. Magic comes down, forces itself into all the items using active magical draws, at the same time interrupting constant flows and reinforcing the Veil.” She whistled softly. “And the people who have the most of said magical devices would be...”

“Your wealthiest, most powerful, and most skilled people,” I nodded.

“So, all the strongest people around die at the same moment as the magical gear they are toting around to be ubermensch exploded and killed them all. Contingencies or something tied to those blue crystals kick in. They are in the middle of reforming new bodies, when the blue crystals explode, and they all die permanently in the same moment, probably to their great surprise.

“Suddenly, all the most skilled defenders of the people here are completely dead, the blue crystals with their anti-death contingency are destroyed, and all the most powerful Isparian magical items are obliterated, too. Given how dependent humans tend to be on their Gear, there is a huge and immediate shift in power, and other native intelligent species who are considerably less affected by the magic surge take advantage of the opportunity to attack.”

Kris’ frown turned into a savage grimace. “That makes too much goddamn sense, Ryin.”

“Not a single drudge that I killed even had a trophy weapon or armor on, not a single one. That’s unreal, Kris. No fighting culture doesn’t take the best. All the weapons and armor they had were non-magical. I didn’t see anything I’d call even masterwork, as that is the threshold for magic, as if they were instinctively avoiding anything of quality like that.”

“Meaning some of them got burned, probably while waving around their prize toy, and were killed.”

“Important.” I pointed down at the skulls in front of us. “Contingent resurrection device. You were talking about an army and needing healing? How about die as much as you like?”

It was totally amusing to see how expressive Rantha faces could be. A savage scowl that made her look decidedly less than human became incredulous astonishment of almost transcendent understanding. “You’re shitting me...” she gasped, once again a startling scarred beauty.

“Furthermore, even on Ispar, there’s ways to bind Gear to one’s soul, so they needn’t even lose their equipment, if they’d set things up ahead of time.”

She blinked, looking down, around, back the way we’d come.

“Holy fuck, Ryin. What kind of place...” she trailed off, shocked at the implications.

“Unending karma. Unkillable soldiers. Unbelievably broad magical effects. A dozen sapient species living in close proximity. Monstrous magical creatures.” I trailed off, shaking my head, staring down at the three holes in the ground, sputtering with failed magic, in the middle of all those skulls. “Now I want to know why there’s an unclean residue of the magic left behind involving these resurrection devices.”

Her eyes fell to what I was looking at, almost sparking. “Oh, isn’t that ominous... What’s your first thought?”

“A device to resurrect is also a device to die. Every death is a source of power, potentially a sacrifice.” I knelt down again, staring at those energies. “These energy types are contaminated, I’d have to see a working one. But this stone, it was linked to something unclean, and the evidence is right in front of us.”

Kris took a deep breath and shook her head, her dark hair rippling. “Live forever, but all your deaths are feeding something monstrous...” she murmured.

“And look at those crystals, so bright and glowy-nice. They likely didn’t have the slightest clue it was happening.” I turned up my lip. “They thought they had a free lunch, and built their entire society around it.”

“Well, it went south really fast.” Kris shook her head again, and turned to survey the cold and fallen buildings nearby, the empty eyes of their windows regarding us with steadfast hollow suspicion. “Vivisize it, I’ve seen enough. Let’s discover what else we can, and hope that everything we deduced is wrong.”

Both of us knew that we were too smart for that likely to be true, just processing everything we’d seen and trying to get the facts to gel together.

We hadn’t seen any up close, but the necromancy auras further north had indicated that undead were probably here. If this resurrection protocol worked for the living, it likely worked even more easily for the undead, and they probably didn’t need a big glowing blue stone to make it happen, either.

Living humans matched against undead who kept coming back. Even if the undead were mostly locked in power, that was a death sentence, and no doubts about it. You had to keep killing the undead, but they only had to kill you once, and it was all over.

Probably what so many of the races thought about humans with this protocol active, I thought, as I blasted the thing and vivic flames erupted all over it in hunger and serenity. The spluttering energy leakage dimmed and faded, devoured by the misty whiteness

Unlimited Karma, unlimited lives to harvest it, no fear of death. This would have been like living in a video game or something, with infinite respawns and simply trying again until you got it right.

Killing would have become irrelevant and meaningless, just a game and temporary inconvenience to laugh about later. The deadliest of enemies would just be something to keep trying, or to bury under bodies, everyone knowing it was going to die, and they weren’t.

What a crazy and cruel world it must have been, I thought, wondering who could have come up with such a device. A world where death had little meaning meant that life had the same loss of value.

And when that world came crashing down and death came roaring back, they had to relearn the value of life all over again...