01.155 Breaking

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Everywhere

Across the world, both horrors and beauties manifested, from the trivial to nation-breaking.

A tremor shook across Manitoba down through Texas and the land split apart in a violent motion. The new land that appeared was shrouded in a thick mist. People caught in the strange mists that poured forth first felt an itching and then a burning and then started screaming as their flesh was eaten away.

A young Scottish man, always a bit ashamed to follow the traditions imparted by his grandmother, exited his house to find the ùruisg drinking from milk he left out. They danced around him in glee.

Akhlys exulted as she flew. Nyx, her Queen, Huntress of the Greens, would be freed. The Keres would truly hunt once more. The old ways would be restored.

She flew past the bugs in the room, and down the stairs past another one, the one they had named Adrahasis, who was slowly moving up the stairs. Tremors violently shook this world.

A world that was now fully connected to the larger world out there. A castle surrounded by burnt forests appeared in the middle of Hoboken, New Jersey splitting the city apart in violent disruption. The land split apart to make room for the previously excised, but now returned land. Buildings split and fell and killed thousands.

Ella watched the life blood empty entirely from the Emperors neck: it was drawn into the vortex that was the Dagger.

She could feel the dimensional threads the Emperor had woven begin to fail, unravelling and she desperately grabbed at the tethers but there were so many. Beads of sweat appeared on her forehead and her eyes glowed brightly as she clumsily knotted off what she could as quickly as she could. She frantically knotted one after another in coarse and unsophisticated ways. One knot was too loose and started slipping, and she quickly threw in another strange convoluted eleven dimensional knot. It was a tangle and she wondered if it could be undone but there was no time.

One knot she pulled the wrong way and the dimension floated free of its tether to the world and began to dissolve into nothing. Ella only imagined she could hear the screams of millions as they ceased to exist.

In Boise Idaho, a certain stairwell in a house split apart, the land moving and eventually the pieces of the house and ground spread like a dilating circle and a jungle that had never been seen before appeared. The Nüwa, who recognized the sudden shift as the delivery of their people. Long awaited, their plans to find their gods, the dragons, were dusted off and made ready.

There was another knot, this one contained something massive and it took Ella a long time to tie it off. Whatever was on the other side was absolutely monstrous and so very far away. The knot would not hold for long, but it would hold for now.

A young child sleeping, dreaming of being a powerful mage, died with his family as the blue fires he had created burned the house down.

Strange diseases appeared, long since forgotten or never known to the wider world, both mundane and magical, across the Indo-Chinese border. Leftovers of a race sophisticated in biological manipulation who had killed each other through plagues, they swept through both countries with death tolls in the tens of millions to start.

In central Iraq, the ground began to rise and shake and from deep within the earth caverns and volcanoes appeared: The ancient hell of the Aqrabuamelu, Kur, had returned to the Earth.

Ella kept grabbing the threads of magic which were tied to the crown and tied off what she could, clumsily. She picked up a skein where she could feel a world filled with humans and large homesteading towns, an agrarian society: she couldn’t tie the knot sufficiently and the Atlantic Ocean began to pour into their world, and they drowned in the tens of thousands. All the while the Emperor’s voice mocked her in her head…

Akhlys cursed as she reached the gateway. She could feel it there but it was pulled tight and contorted. But even as she watched it loosened a bit. She huddled down and folded her wings over to wait.

In Berlin, a seam appeared in the sky, pouring torrential water onto Kurfurstendamm and flooding the city, endless salt water from part of the Mediterranean that had been confined a long time ago. Eternal Weeping of Skies, a haixiong dragon, roamed free in the skies for the first time in thirty thousand years.

The Quetzalcoatl, once secure in its hidden demesne, felt uncertainty as magic flooded the world. It reached out with long unused magics to find others of its kind rousing. An impertinent message from that greedy fuzanglong in the North made the Quetzalcoatl laugh in private, but in public standards must be maintained. He waived a feathered claw and one of his new servants, a Nuwa but human in appearance, bowed and set off as an emissary.

As disasters and deaths and magic flooded into the world, the UN convened in New York in special council and held a vote of no confidence and the Secretary General was replaced twice.

The Wolf Prophet and his mobs toppled the UK government, executed the royal family and most of the political class. The followers ran wild in the streets, murdering and slaughtering anything with a hint of magic or that they did not care for, all under the guise of protecting the world

And for those who knew the truth, at the heart of it, a relatively unknown young woman sat slumped on a crystal throne, crowned. The Masked Empress of the Thousand Kingdoms, a glowing crown on her head, a swordstaff with a crystal blade in one hand, her other hand useless, and a dagger at her belt. She was lost in conversation with a dead Emperor, trying to bind threads of magic from breaking loose all over the world.

HERE ENDS VOLUME 1