EdgeCases
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Book 3, Chapter 54 - Seven
🕑 Added 2023-04-16 15:41:50 +0000 UTCA/N: This chapter took forever, partly because it's so short and I kept wondering if I should make it longer. In the end I feel like it stands better by itself, even though it's short - it's too important to pad stuff behind it, and I don't want to artificially inflate it by adding stuff to the front.
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The doors were silent when Misa pushed them open. They slid open easily, like they had been oiled.
That was the first sign that something was wrong.
Well, not really. The first sign was that the Vault — or something that looked very much like the Vault doors — were here in the first place. But the fact that the doors were this easy to open told them that they had been opened; it had been a struggle to open the doors back in the Elyran ruins, where they had been abandoned for centuries.
The room that stood behind the doors was the same. It had the same grandiose marble, the same gold and white, the same pedestal in the center. The primary difference here was that it was filled with people. Eight people exactly, stood in a circle around the pedestal; at the top of it was a strangely-glowing orb that was not unlike the Grand Anchor Vex had claimed.
And yet... different. Incomplete, somehow, like it was only a smaller piece of a whole. It was cracked and fragmented.
"The Wisfield elders," Vex whispered, staring at the men and women circled around the pedestal. His voice echoed in the room, and he grimaced, but not a single one of the elders reacted. They were too engaged in... whatever they were doing.
Sev stepped forward, his expression concerned. "The whole room's... vibrating," he said, his fingers drifting through the air like he could sense something within it. "The divinity in it."
"What does that mean?" Misa asked, casting a glance at their cleric.
"It means this is the birthplace of a god," Sev said. He took a breath, stared up at the orb, and tried not to panic. "We already knew they created an artificial god, but this is worse than that. This is a forced ascension. A forced ascension isn't... isn't safe. It's been tried before."
The last words were almost whispered. Sev winced slightly and clutched at his head, and Misa hurried over to him, supporting him by the elbow before he could fall to his knees. Sev staggered and leaned his weight onto the half-orc, gazing up at the orb like he was desperately trying to remember.
"We lost so much when we tried," he said, his voice a half-whisper. "Divinity is one of the few things left keeping this universe together. Reality, Magic, and Divinity — it's a trifecta. We need all three to keep the universe operating. But if you force an ascension, you drain all the divinity out of a place... and it collapses."
Sev went pale. "That's what happened to Enkiros," he said.
The word resonated strangely.
"That's why this is our last try," he said, grabbing at Misa's arms desperately. She stared at him, confused and uncertain, not knowing what he was getting at. "Misa, we've — this whole time we've talked about the three Prime Kingdoms. Haven't you noticed? We've never said the name of the third. We talk about Elyra and Anderstahl, and the last Kingdom's name is gone, because the whole kingdom is gone."
"Anderstahl represents Reality. Elyra represents Magic. As kingdoms they focus on the development of those aspects, and those three Prime Anchors kept this continent stable. It's the only one we were able to save. But with Enkiros gone — with the Divinity anchor erased — we're running out of time."
"Sev," Misa tried. Vex and Derivan were both staring at Sev; Vex was clutching at Derivan's arm, slightly frightened by the intensity in Sev's tone. Sev's eyes were glazed over and unfocused, and memories seemed to be flooding back into him; there was a resonant echo from him, a feeling in the air that changed. That resonance fed back into the false ascension happening in the middle of the room only a few dozen meters away, and a strange feeling began to build in the air.
"This is the last try," Sev said. "That's what my name is. What I represent. Not Sev, but Seven. Our last try of seven."
The feeling in the air built up. The flow reversed.
In the middle of the room, above the false anchor, a crack in the air formed.
The Void was here.
