"Ah. Strange happenings abound, this century. Only halfway through, and already there are gods at war and steelborn seek to learn."
"I understand the problems that arise from higher authority. Regardless of what your lord may order done, you have offered us hope in darkness, and for that are thanked in truth."
The world twists for a moment, disorienting and alien, like the vertigo of freefall. Then again, but it does not return to its rightful place. The world seems bent at an angle to itself, and despite no visible change, things seem very awry.
In the Woundbinders' tent, the little plant, in defiance of logic, actually speeds its growth, a wide taproot shooting downwards to give it an anchor as a narrow stalk, headed by several flower buds, reaches for the lantern, and broad leaves, their shape warping between extremes chaotically, fan out from the base. It moves at a pace only able to be considered fast by, perhaps, a geriatric mollusc, but such a speed remains quite unheard of in plant life.
Puttee'd feet trample it, for a moment, then the ghost doughboy's shoes fade back into nothing, leaving the plant unharmed.
For a moment, the drone of propeller engines in their thousands fills the air, a fleet of biplanes rattling past just ahead.
The sky twists into a dozen colors, clouds spun into lace and the now-suddenly-visible sun split into three, visibly spinning about each other, then snaps back to normality.
The little plant, for a moment, is a horrifying monster, then an angel of stalks and petals, its beautiful form matching no know being, but breathtaking nonetheless, then a field of flowers nodding as far as the eye can see.
Golden droplets of a Dancer's ichor rain from the sky, vanishing the instant before they begin to land.
Two armies fight a desperate melee across the plain, moving through tents, boulders, and valley walls without care.
Soldiers fire weapons of no recognizable sort over the edge of a trench that bisects the camp, leaving tents momentarily floating, their faces turning up a moment later, full of fear and resignation as the whistle of a falling shell begins, the stink of the dead filling the air.
Something immense moves in the sky, tendrils of dust and gas wrapping the moon in an awful embrace.
The world itself accelerates downward into non-euclidian geometries, all shapes projecting themselves into ever-higher spatial dimensions.
A terrible instant later, the world is merely real, merely rendered in three dimensions, merely whole, the sun a single dim disk through a thin patch in the stormclouds, the rain merely ashen sludge, devoid of fearful gold.
Elagn's party experiences none of this as they make their way to the access pillar. Aside from the many small chunks of rubble, both stone and various strange species of giant lichen, there is no real damage to the path they take. An uneventful quarter-hour of walking later, much expedited by the well-carved trail in the cavern brush, they reach the low pallisade and stone fortification built around the access pillar, its unlit sides disappearing into the darkness of the ceiling.
Waiting for them there, clinging to the pillar above the entrance, is a massive being of living steel, hide coated with serrated blade-feathers, great wings unfurled to reach thirty meters on either side, eyes and mouth pits of living flame. A great scar marks one side of its torso, where some huge blade or spike must have impaled it, but it seems unhindered.
The workers, understandably, are terrified of the thing, having never seen it before.
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Topic: If Bay 12 was a fortress Part 3: RETURN OF THE CHAOS (Read 235161 times)