There were thousands of eyes watching the sun rise today. A Ten Bishop of Aru, Moncynux Aeon, led everyone in the Salute to Aru, starting a little bit early and with exquisite timing finished the Ritual and movements just as the first rays of the sun came true over the horizon.
With them came the Renewal. Mine was set to midnight, but the default for most people was the New Day, and the sensation rippled frequently through the Marktell as the world turned. There was no mistaking it as it struck, x/day abilities reset, Valences yawned open to be filled, and darkness and foul effects were checked to see if they were overcome. For normal folks, this was the time when they checked against poisons and most particularly diseases. Magic does some strange things to worlds...
But that Renewal brought with it the full power of Creation and the universe behind it. Magic was coming in, gentle and subtle... except when it hit something that Wasn't Right. Then, it was like a tsunami and a rolling mountain.
Plenty of spotters and workers were at the edge of the 100x Shardzone immediately in front, where they'd been dealing with the occasional horde of natives trying to break out. They had first hand eyewitness, sharing so we all could see.
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First, the Zonewall lit up with gentle golden light all at once, instead of the striated blurs and fog. The hole that was punched into it by us three seemed to burn, and then pale red lights started streaming along the Wake in the sky. They cut across the horizon, and as one second lengthened to a hundred, they grew brighter and bright, turning orange, then gold, and then rising into whiteness as the colors blended together.
Those with devasight got to see all the colors ascending and blending, ticking off like a clock of rainbow lights.
The edges of the break burned white, and were eroded, burned, cracked, and eaten away all at once. The entire Shardzone Wall had cracks extend across its three-hundred-mile width, only a hundredth of that from the outside, extending in deeper, patterns at once wild and measured, as if Chance and Fate were coming in together, seeking to reclaim dominance over that which they'd been sealed away from...
The wave of morning smashed into the far wall of the final Shardzone, where the same scene began to play from where we could see it. Looming hundreds of miles into the air, even virtual hundreds of leagues away it was still perfectly visible.
Everyone in the company had evacuated, only the monkeys and the Void Brothers were left, watching this from the inside.
From the third Shardring, the Shardwall tensed, and then shattered.
Okay, not everyone was gone. There were hundreds of Casters there spinning spells, and as these barriers of quasi-solidified time got ready to break, they urgently and repeatedly set up all the traps that they could. Temporal Quintessence was a bitch to accumulate, and this was a rare chance to pick up a whole lot of Time for not much effort.
Now the wall came roaring across, a 100x slow version of incoming reality, racing across the land. As it did, things Normalized.
The biggest effect was all that stolen Time literally evaporated.
It was pulled out of everything extant here, and as it was, everything naturally died as the unnatural millennia they'd lived were pulled away. At the same time, space normalized, the massive distortion collapsing and compressing. Hundreds of miles became fractions of miles, and would have jumbled everything together impossibly, if such things hadn't just vanished, reduced to dust and less.
The extraplanar mass that consisted of this place was measured and that which wasn't pure enough, meaning almost all of it, was simply shoved back towards wherever it came from in the first place.
The stolen time eradicated pretty much everything that lived. What was left was empty landscapes, everything that had lived wiped away, and then the landscapes themselves began to erode, falter, and fail.
Those watching from the beginning of the Fourth Ring saw the ruins of the city start to gather from whence they'd been pulled apart and scattered. Most of it was all rubble, shifted and dispersed by ages passing, worn down and no longer intact. Still, the very rough outlines of streets and buildings came together as nine hundred miles of unreality was wiped away, returned to the mile of reality that was anchoring it.
It took only a second outside. In one hundred seconds inside, Reality came and wiped almost everything.
There were some scattered survivors, things that had enough anchor in Reality to survive the sudden diversion, or had been able to vent the extra Time in a safe manner, or had been brought in from Outside, were timeless or Eternal, and were unaffected.
Like a rather large number of Evilborn.
The company was charging forwards as the wall came through, knowing that survivors would be left behind, materializing in front of them, and plenty fast enough to keep pace. Those survivors found themselves suddenly in front of a whole lot of fast-moving and very dangerous Nulls, Interdictions preventing them from leaving, and not much sympathy for them successfully surviving in their eyes.
Pointed discussions followed. Bodies burned vivic, the unwhite flames bending in the direction of moving Reality, foam on the waves of Creation...
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The same thing happened in the inner zone, only we saw it coming for a longer time, and on a much bigger scale. It painted the whole sky in mystic patterns the Casters tried urgently to memorize, seeing truths of Time and Space in there which would be invaluable, something to build upon for years with both Profound Math and Spellcraft.
That hole we'd made three hundred and ninety-six days our time and one day ago real time grew with incredible speed, the size of a mountain in seconds, reaching up towards the sky, visible from hundreds of leagues away. The grey border of the Shardzone was bright, so bright, nobody could not see it, the Wakes that extended from one Obelisk site to the other along the ley lines crisscrossing the sky, racing up slowly and grandly through the combined visible and thaumaspectrums in a show no fireworks could replicate, building to that key point...
Great cracks shattered across it like a breaking window of the gods. You could feel the pressure of a world, of Creation itself, weighing down on it, forcing its way in and-
Soundless bang. The entire Shardzone rocked.
Beneath our feet, the ground jolted again in reaction. As the light of a new day began its four-hundred second march across this Shardzone, Casters gathered in Quintessence with giddy glee from the 400x wall. That stuff was worth cities...
The volcano rumbled as the air shuddered, Time already beginning to warp and shift, Space to conform. Armies, nations, civilizations evaporated as the Time they'd lived was taken away, wailing as they died, as they watched all that was around them crumble and vanish as they did, and get swept back towards the void they had come from.
They were the dust of another world, and to that world they'd return... or they'd burn vivic.
The volcano shuddered, cracked as the earth around us reacted to its incoming fate. It was less than dust, it was only a dream, and without its own reality, unto dream it would return. Lava blew into the sky, like a slow and grand unveiling flower.
And a roar of defiance, of a mighty power that had defied all the ages, not merely the stolen millennia here, bellowed a thunderous challenge to the heavens that rattled the stones all around us.
I reached out to that Markdoor, to the massive, ancient presence on the other side, and as a massive reptilian head the size of a decent mansion heaved itself up above the lip of the crater, and a hundred-meter long tail with a white-hot burning crest snaked lazily across the sky, I /whispered, -Shhh. Just watch. There is no threat to you.-
A half-mile away, I saw a white-hot eye blink in astonishment.
Fuego the Fire Tyrant, gone from the known lands of men for a thousand years, grasped the lip of the caldera and less lifted himself out then forced a pathway through stone melting at his touch, precipitating a spectacular lavafall as thousands of tons of kaiju proceeded irresistibly forwards. His dark scales were showing waves of heat rippling through him, primal elemental power that had defied eons, let alone this time-accelerated Shardzone that had been feeding him power so similar to that in bygone years.
He looked like a velociraptor, more elegant then a T-Rex or Allosaurus, streamlined, quick, and nimble... except he towered a few hundred feet in the air and was at least two hundred meters long. Massive talons dug unimpeded into the stone, melting and biting in as they did so. He pulled his full mass out of the volcano he'd been happily slumbering in, looking up at the sky, and the incoming Reality Wave that was going to take away his bedroom.
==========
Roughly ten months or so ago...
-They might be really angry you're messing around their sacred territory-, Briggs /chuckled, as we moved noiselessly through the layered green, grass, and trees that had grown over this hill.
-They'll get over it when I save their asses,- I /replied, reaching the end of it, looking down.
In our tremblesense, the hill-sized figure below the ground was completely visible. There was a cave nearby, the sole outlet for his breathing, which was slowed down by hundreds of times... but given the hundreds of times of volume, was still forced clean of obstructions.
He stayed outside while I went in, squirming through the rather wet area of mossy earth and solidified mucus, using my Vajra like a snake to arrive at my destination.
Two large pits yawning ahead of me, currently exhaling in a slow, slow breeze.
I was careful to keep myself scentless as I dug in, as I certainly didn't want to wake the big fellow up.
His skin wasn't scaled, but it was still stronger than steel, and so naturally lacking in tactile sense. Falling earth had naturally cleared a space atop his nose, and I slid over it to a clear spot before I began working.
Yeah, adamant scribe, hardness enhanced, with a minor Blooding enchantment so his fast healing wouldn't mend the damage before it set in. I had to do this right, of course, and certainly wasn't going to skimp on things. When he found out about this, I wanted him grateful and interested, not pissed... but I also didn't want to wake him up.
None of the living apes had ever seen this ancestor of theirs, even Elder Arg, but that was not a surprise. A Golden Monkey Emperor wasn't something you saw every day, but it was wholly the reason this wasn't a zone. Putting up an Obelisk would have disrupted the magic flow in this area, roused him, and the Hags totally didn't want to have to face an angry kaiju ape...
=================
Back to Da Present...
Trees toppled as their thick roots were snapped like cotton. Grass, moss, leaves, and all the animal life therein dropped away and fled in terror as the golden fur beneath began to hum with power. Muscles long relaxed tensed, fragile stone gave way, the earth groaned as a great mass shifted, and began to rise.
-Elder Arg, you need to get to your ancestor if you want to survive the light. Go go go!- I /told him, and the thousands of monkeys and apes surged for the hill that was rising, rising on four limbs, the detritus of millennia of sleep falling away, and a great furred figure pushing himself to his feet with a growl that shook the land.
-Save your people!- I /told the huge presence behind his golden Markdoor.
He was similar to Tyrant Fuego, a massive presence power-wise, but not brilliant or agile of mind. From that Door I could feel the patience of ages, a deep understanding of the cycles of life, and a force of will that had faced time head-on and won.
They were kaiju, and just lived at another scale then us. That said, that didn't mean they were oblivious to us.
I felt his mind jerk at the awareness that came with the words was processed. Time was coming. The timelost creatures of this land were going to die if he didn't help them. He was their Elder, and he could save them.
A great eye looked down, and naturally settled on the largest of the onrushing apes and monkeys racing towards him. Towards, not away, despite how small they were.
Thousands of Markdoors opened, and reverence and awe poured out from these descendants so many generations removed from him. He grunted with more understanding then he had ever possessed before, his thoughts moving quicker and clearer, a fluid sharpness to them that was strange and yet enjoyable.
His grunt was permission to climb aboard!
Flying monkeys descended onto his back and shoulders. Champa-ka, chakon, mandrilla, uranga, and bandob grabbed the long golden hair, which took their weight effortlessly, and swarmed up the great body of the risen Golden Ape Emperor.
Ape Emperor Mono, also long-vanished from the Lands of Men, turned his great head to regard the incoming wall of light, clearly a little discontent. His sleep had been interrupted, and his comfortable bed was going to go away.
And then I stuck him and Fuego into the same /Markchat.