284 Chapter Two Hundred and Eighty-Four – Payment! (1/2)
His great hand was reaching for me, wrought of the blood and misery of endless conflicts, and all the souls, innocent or enraged, who fought in them. His eyes were battle madness, the desire to fight and win incarnate, His voice the scream of every victor in every battle ever.
He was a gnat before Creation.
I watched His hand come before me, and already felt the resistance as He cut apart the flaming expansion of Creation on His advance. He began to burn, vivus feasting at the raw stolen energy leaking off of Him, cutting away His source of strength, and beginning to burn at the edge of the power He had stolen from the Alignments.
He didn't falter, for this was a fight, and such a fight He could not flinch from. The energies of the other Warp Gods boiled and bubbled about Him, sacrificed to the vivus, keeping Him on His course as He fought upstream, up against the crushing weight of all Creation, directly towards me.
I felt the Rift crunch, starting to pinch itself shut under His implacable will, and I set myself into my Stance. I ignored all thoughts but staying there and keeping my Null out and open, and the Laws of Creation intact so that it could keep flowing in... and sucking out.
At my throat, the Amulet Prince Estemar had given me flared silver, and Mithar Took Note. I saw a dire light flash in the incoming burning eyes of Klaw as the Amulet opened, and He realized He had fought a battle against the General of All Good, and lost...
The back pressure scoured over me, ripped away everything above my skin as my personal Null was forced right back to my skin. Regardless, the Amulet quietly glowed silver and defied it, and my golden hair ruffled in the light of fleeing souls and burning dimensions.
There's a weird perspective when something as big as that closes in on you. His hand grew and grew and grew, like a car arriving from the distance, and then the car is upon you and you realize that it is STILL coming, still getting bigger, and you're a fly to its grill, and still it's coming, more details coming out, and you're a flea, a mote, a bacteria...
The patterns on His hands held secrets of power I carefully didn't examine too closely. The ridges and calluses were the height of planets, and they were all formed from the souls of those who'd died in savagery and bloodlust, howling for my death in mad fury, and chanting the ceaseless praise of Klaw the Unending, Klaw the Inevitable, Klaw the Conqueror, Klaw the Reaver, Klaw the All-Rage...
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Klaw, Slaughter Eternal.
The impossibly huge mountains and hills and valleys swept in and up into my face as Reality compressed fantastically against the force of His charge, piling up like a solid thing that threatened to break my Null asunder. I saw a berserk face there on that burning palm closing on me, far past and at the center of all those souls and faces, staring into my eyes as they came upon me-
And Mithar lit a spark off.
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From the Outside, the impact was immediately obvious, for fracture lines appeared on the Veil itself, spreading all the way up beyond sight, pulsing with unimaginable amounts of vivus that reached up into the shining starlight heavens and far, far beyond. The Rift was expunged and seemingly flattened against the Veil, compressed Vivus of impossible purity shining there, while the fractures seemed to flow and organize themselves into countless Runes and Patterns on a massive wall towering up and beyond sight, their scale incomprehensible to those watching.
What they could see was that those Seals and Patterns were definitely not all Holy. Their souls shuddered at the feeling of Forces so immense they could snuff the planet like a candle passing by, all taking up position on that impossibly tall Wall...
Expectant. Waiting...
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The shockwave propagated in all directions, but especially south. The Aberrant entities screamed in mindless resolve, expending power hoarded over time-lost eons, and reached out to stop the Wave.
It broke around the edges of the Empire, anchored at the Feralbar that warded away the wild tribes of the east, and the edge of the Sidhete that it streamed from, and sealed all the influence the Aberrants were extending out as they trembled to drain away and deflect the power rippling through the Veil, looking on that Wall... and then REALLY looking at the Wall...
The hapless mortals below screamed and swayed as the power of non-finite entities swept by and clashed over them, like ants beneath a thunderstorm.
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Memphistopheles babbled words in languages not meant for men, the second mouth on the vestigial face on his chest contributing imprecations and mutterings in Aklo to accentuate, and lifted his hands as the power flowed, and the ground tore open.
Tentacles rose up on the astonished cultists of Mulguus, the Fungus That Feasts, and shadowy, inhuman forms ascended, tittering and laughing in mad ecstasy as they came forth to dine.
Memphis grimaced as the foul power raged through his system, and burned into the Valences he held. His lifeline rose before him; the sites he had prepared pulsed, ready to accept him, and despite all the dimensional soup this land had been reduced to, he tore himself away from there on wings of magic, as the Mazakam guided him through the murk to their next meal.
The emerging toad-like Elder God Huggastigh, the Eye in the Everdeeps, was going to get a rude surprise... and Memphis was fucking going to kill whatever fool invented these alliterative appellations someday...
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Klaw was hurled back and away by the explosion, but the open connection was indeed severed by the eruption of so much compressed reality. Burned and scarred, the explosion sent Him flying back towards the other Warp gods, who were reeling from the feedback of the power they'd sent Him and were even less braced for the shockwave that followed.
Blasted and broken, their Realms igniting around them, they were thrown back into the depths of the Warp, shouting and shrieking their pain. Around them, areas of the Warp the size of nebulaes flared and burned clean, accumulated corruption, sin, emotion, all of it wiped away into cold serenity, as the Warp once was.
Yet as they were sent tumbling away, they did not fail to notice what had been left behind.
Stars filled a new sky, written on the Edge of the Warp. Runes the size of star systems, emplanted on the barrier they'd long thought sacrosanct. Each Rune was an eye, each power behind it a non-finite deity whose power extended across multiverses and worlds uncounted. They shimmered in the grand pattern of the Alignments United, looking in deep at this world claimed by one small, small branch of Chaos and Evil alone.