The twisted forms of the lightning-figures sang. Some of them died, the sparks of their life beginning to drift upward into the sky along with those who had died before.The storm above, they would begin to notice, was beginning to fade. This was not normal, obviously, even mundane hurricanes usually clinging to life for days even after completely being cut off from the warm waters that fed them, and these magical ones were generally worse… Perhaps this was a good thing, perhaps they were damaging it, or perhaps the violent nature of Alex’s ritual had hurt it in some way.
Of course, a few of the students, those with a mind for science and ritual, would see differently. Alex, in particular, having just done something similar, would see a horrifying symmetry between the actions of the storm and the ritual he had just completed. Build up energy below, forge a path to the heavens, and call down the might of the storm in the same way natural lightning courses its route through the sky. But then, if the storm wished to blast them all with some enormous discharge of lightning, surely it could manage it directly?
His mind, trained for such things from birth, racing through the events that had happened so far.
Lightning elementals, laced with uncanny energy, inimical to life and reality, something abhorrent to most elemental spirits, tainted with some primal chaos that had driven them mad.
The storm, with at least the force of an elemental dragon, dying from the inside, the scraps of its soul spinning apart in the air above.
It’s true, they were killing it.
As the creatures below die, their chaos, that malignant blight that had corrupted them, would return, like the rest of them, to their mother storm, and like a subtle poison it was tearing it apart from within, but why? Why create these beings, like some kind of living ritual? What could one possibly hope to gain from…
Then the last piece clicks into place.
The hurricane, an enormous source of magical and worldly power.
The gate, high above, impenetrable, yet clearly still extant, if sealed tightly.
And his own ritual, calling forth the energy of the storm to empower his servant. He realizes then that it would not have worked with just the storm, that it would not have worked anywhere else, some little detail that had slipped his notice in the complex intermingling of forces he had worked. Some part of him had factored it in, but on a level that he didn’t quite notice what he was putting together.
Yggdrasil, the tree of which Yggdra drew the bulk of her power, was a tree that spanned worlds. True it was a force of nature, but it was also the World Ash, and the power of but one world wouldn’t have been enough to cause such a drastic change in one of its agents. No, that would have taken dimensional energy, an energy that spanned worlds itself… such as that bound in the disc of torn space above their heads, a disc which would have been slightly, imperceptibly shifted by the energy torn from it.
And then he realizes: If this is a lightning bolt, the hurricane isn’t the storm in the equation.
It’s the ground.
And then the world exploded, the numberless lightning figures shattering like spun glass, a final scream of static deafening them as crimson lightning streaks up, through the storm, becoming an inverted tornado of screaming chaos that shreds the storm in its wake, pulling the soul of the dragon with it like some enormous, eldritch bore to slam into the Gate hovering above.
The Gate of Domination, some part of him, of all of them, identifies it.
And then the Gate opens, and the sky is blasted clear of clouds as the Fourth Awakening begins.
The sky above was black, black beyond black, the stars blotted out as cracks spread out from the ring of the Gate itself, reality itself having taken a wound from the cataclysmic powers which had been arrayed against it.
but the storm which had surrounded the Gate, the tearing winds which had torn apart any who approached it silenced, and in their place, a familiar crimson glow frames a disc of impenetrable darkness, its unsettling light spreading outward through the cracks in the firmament that surrounded it, and from the heart of the Gate, they could feel that something was approaching, a wordless fear settling into the pits of their stomach.
Except for Alex, maybe, he's generally had weird reactions to nameless terrors in the past.
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Topic: Eventide University IC: The Fourth Awakening (Read 31845 times)