In his hands was the Lahat Charev—The flaming sword of the Cherub, ordained to stand forever as guard to the gates of Eden. So that man may never return to the place of his creation, a powerful artifact was made to bar entrance while man was new. Temptation was a terrible thing.
"It wasn't until the Great Flood that the Garden itself was removed from the world, and unfortunately for us, this great artifact was taken back to Heaven with it," he explained with a hungered expression. "It now only exists in here, as a memory. A terrible waste of potential, don't you think..?" He paused, and looked around; slightly confused for a moment.
"What's wrong?" Xantheaa asked, before she noticed a slight shudder beneath the plain whiteness where she stood. An earthquake? But that didn't make sense. There was no Gaea of life in the soil they stood. It was truly imaginary!
Again, the Earth trembled beneath our feet. Tremors grew so violent that Thrall struggled to maintain his footing. He almost fell to his hands and knees, but maintained his posture with the benefit of the wings behind him.
"What is happening?!" Xantheaa asked, focusing her energy on closing the wound on her wingtip having barred her from regaining her footing.
Her face grew pale as he shook his head. "I don't know. It's never been this bad."
"What? What are you talking about?!" She screamed over the growing rumble of earth.
"The dream, Xantheaa! It's collapsing around us, somehow! I've never been this close to one of this scale before. It's beyond my imagination!"
"But I thought we fixed that already!" she thought back to the large crack that had hung in the air behind her only minutes before. Glancing back proved her confusion justified. There were no hints of a schism in the space it formerly occupied.
Instead, a spiderweb of cracks approached them throughout the pale ground at roughly the speed of sound. "Thrall...? What are we doing?!"
He looked back and saw what she did. The roots of the tree must have been all that was holding this abandoned plane together, and now it was collapsing under its own weight.
"Hurry over to me!" She nodded, and scrambled over as quickly and gracelessly as one could. He simply waved his great sword of flame in a wide circle surrounding them.
The flames hung in the air around us, and then condensed into palm-sized runes in an ancient tongue lost to the minds of man. "Good morning, my friends. I know you can hear me, as I was once asleep like you, and now I bid you wake to aid me in this time of crisis. Kiter! Kiyem! Kavua! Answer me!"
The words hung in the air like burning lanterns, lazily rolling about in their runic prisons. Xantheaa sat agape as they sang in tones too bright for me to conceptualize, but he answered all the same. "I know, it's not fair, as I too sleep even now. But even dreams require your presence. I know that you will not fail even weakened as you are." Immediately, one of the words ignited into a column of fire that lanced deep into the earth like an anchor.
The others seemed to groan as they rolled about; one expanding the pillar into a cylinder that carved deep into the earth and climbed far into the void above, the other intensifying the potency of the flames into a tough segmented shield made of triangular protrusions.
Thrall seemed satisfied enough, manifesting a scabbard to contain the intensity of his weapon's flame. Soon the circle was complete and you could feel no more vibration from the encroaching disaster around them, though the soil rent and clambered violently against the walls clearly enough through the translucent impassioned surface.
She pressed a talon carefully to a single equilateral compartment of the surface, and it spat sparkling embers onto her skin incredulously. After she drew back her leg from the surprise, she noticed that there was no sensation of burning. They were cool to the touch.
She had never seen such potent magic in all her life, in life nor in legend—and he was saying this was only PART of their usefulness since they were in a dream? She trembled to think what incredible miracles might experience in their world. He rested his hand on her shoulder, effecting another small jump of surprise from her.
"Eep!"
"I wouldn't disturb them as they're working. The true words can be unruly in a dream as they're so far disconnected from their actual selves." He explained, with a small delighted laugh. "I believe Encircle has his hands full just trying to hold out all this entropy, so he is probably the one that tried to spit at you. Thank goodness Stability was thoughtful enough to put out the heat before the sword's power touched your skin."
"I'm sorry?" she pressed, not feeling the least bit remorseful to a literal word. "How did you do that?!"
"Oh, I just relied on some old favors. These guys I used to know before the universe was made perfect through God's will. Your command over the wind is but one word of many in my world. I don't understand why more races don't talk to the powers they abuse. All you have to do is ask them with enough belief for them to hear you.
"That's why we had to get rid of the human's religion where we came from. They could have destroyed us all if they learned to wield the Words like us. None of us were made in His image, after all. They have much more innate talent than we ever could."
"Wait, you are telling me that my Godess's blessing is just a conversation with the concepts that formed the world?"
"Well, I doubt that she understands what she's doing as well as she's doing it. That information was lost to time by the time of the Grecian Empire. Your world probably has a sort of magic that works on your own made-up rules that humankind imagined on the spot. My friends are imprisoned by those actions to the detriment of its wielders. In your world, it is only the Gods who can work miracles, correct?"
She nodded, eyes wide and adoring. "The gods wield powerful magics according to their purpose as ordained by the hierarchy of the pantheon. Poseidon over the oceans, Hades over the underworld, Gaea over the earth, and Ouranos the skies. It only follows that those created by these great primordial beings would have a fragment of their magnificent power!"
"Aha! That's where you're wrong. The gods themselves likely brokered an agreement with maybe one or two words themselves, and baked their aptitudes into the flesh of their creation. You are formed with ruach infused into every inch of your being.
"I can hear him calling to me from within your heart. It's as if he was given life by agreeing to be combined with several other terms and spread out throughout many different bodies. No wonder you feel death whenever one of you is separated!"
Damn it all, if it didn't make more sense again. The ground in the far distance seemed to fall into the void below, exposing more of that same spiraling violence that had opened into the crater of air before. He raised his palm to the radius of fire and asked for a few more names to join this living barricade. "K'ron and Karov. Will you come to me, even now?" Two more runes took shape in the ring of fire.
These two seemed more than happy to jump into the fray, collapsing the great tower above our head and below their feet into an ellipse and then a sphere made of the same individual flaming triangles closed around them—intensifying the focus remaining on the much fewer plates and therefore their rigidity. It cut deep into the ground biting a large portion of the surface beneath them apart from the disintegrating terrain all around.
Then, they rose above the great catastrophe as easily as one found climbing a elevator made of silk. Soon they were simply hanging in a terrarium globe about 10 feet wide. The scales of their private enclosure grew almost solid, transparent like orange-tinted glass.
"They like to hang out in groups of five or more," he hinted with a wink. "and it's a lot more fun if you can make it rhyme as well. Expressions get bored, too; and nothing is more fun than to be used in wordplay."
"So, you are saying that any of the gods can use any of the magic they want to, but they simply choose not to?"
"I think they would if they could. They probably only know one or two words at all, and even then it's a subconscious register of their base concepts. That knowledge probably died with the Titans whom your current gods overthrew to form their own world. Now, they make do with the bits and pieces half-remembered through the conversations overheard once, long ago."
"So, I could learn thes-?!" Her words cut off as she raised a wing to shied her eyes from the sight exposing itself under the holes vacated by the land as it vanished into the infinite abyss beyond. The ground continued to fall away, exposing a dancing garishness that Xantheaa struggled to make sense of.
The lights swam across the thin veneer of her feathers. "What do you think it is...?" She suddenly felt a terrible dread for the swirling madness that seemed to beckon her from the sanctuary of her small birdcage into its gaping, unfathomable maw.
"It's you, Xantheaa. All your fears and hopes, your desires and doubts, your hatred and your love. All of it, unfiltered and eternal, awaits you at the bottom of the pit. This abyss is complete and total subconscious ego death.