HERE'S YOUR UPDOP.
Net and Blaze begin finalizing the ritualized spell of calming, while the three soldiers, by some remarkable luck the only ones in the fortress who can actually read, find good places to activate their scrolls of peace from.
The ritual construct comes into being with an almost anticlimactic abruptness, a phosphorescing, five-dimensional symbol hovering in midair over the center of the circle, absorbing every scrap of energy that can be fed to it. Staring at it for too long would not be advisable, but it holds a strange, incomprehensible beauty. You'll have to get used to this sort of thing, you suppose. Magic works oddly here.
Things begin to go out, first complex machines like the PEA, then lesser devices, the Fanciest Canteen, the occasional emergency light, the dimly glowing runes on Blaze and Wolf's creations, the red alert sign in the barracks above. The ambient energy they rely on, already heavily drained by something out there, is completely exhausted now, weeks away from a recovery even to those minimal levels.
The construct seems to take a life of its own, the odd geometries of the thing attracting the things they always do, but the will of our two mages, barely adequate to the task, holds it roughly on track, keeps it from turning inward, consuming their energies.
At a nod, Amp fires his new gun into the air, the crude black powder cartridges sending a plume of smoke and sparks towards the ceiling, a signal to the soldiers, who read aloud the prime-words on their scrolls, sending twin bolts of precisely modulated energy at the same instant the construct lances the ten meters from its birthing-circle to the maimed Beast.
Backwash flickers around the thing, octarine ghost-flames sparking and lashing from the gaps between scales, and the circle draws more power still, this time from the other beasts in the caverns.
A group of troglodytes, cautiously approaching the disturbance, feel an instant of deep wrongness before falling into seizures as almost all of their vital energy flows away. At the same instant, nearly five hundred other entities, great and small, do the same.
There is a deafening crack as the circle sears itself into the ground, the original chalk heated to the point of softening stone by the power it conducts.
And then, for a fraction of a second, every photon within twenty miles becomes raw energy and feeds the spell.
There is great light, and a great noise, and a great silence.
Living light in a thousand colors, none of them in our spectrum, washes through the edges of things, sparking sights unseen and sounds unheard. Those magically sensitive know something momentous has happened. Those not so much certainly can tell enough to be frightened. And a humanoid insect, with her odd reaction to so minor a spell as a firebolt, nearly falls into madness at an impossible rainbow burning in every corner and junction of the vaulted ceiling.
The cavern is very dark, and our lights have gone out, even those relying on mundane flame.
{Miniedit; HERE'S YOUR FONTS}
Author
Topic: If Bay 12 was a fortress Part 3: RETURN OF THE CHAOS (Read 235849 times)