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The woman with red hair trembled beneath him, and The Shaper smiled at her weakness, wielding his crushing hammer high. The might of the cosmos in his palm! His master held back the brutes the red-haired woman brought among her, the little warriors with their staves and bows. They were primitives struggling against him and his Master of tentacles and screeches. His Master is of Decay, and Decay is endless, eternal, triumphant at the end, always, always...
His arm stretched, readying to smash her to pitiful bits.
“One less little mouse,” his mouth spoke for him, the terrible twisted thoughts, the ecstasy of death so near, so very near. “Time to—”
“DIE!” The beam of blackfire burst through The Shaper’s chest, the scorching of flesh, burning and blackening inside him, the vile heat of it digging into his heart, the pain, the pain of blackfire and death and…
He was Valdo Caesarius again.
His chest was a smoldering empty core, the last shreds of life fluttering away, tiny fireflies dying where his heart should be. He saw Zana then, his little girl. His beautiful girl. The man who killed him stood by her, helping her to her feet, and they shared that look of love he knew from so long ago. That steady gaze, as if their souls peered into each other’s. Valdo remembered that look, the one he gave his long dead wife, Zana’s mother. The look he gave Zana every day since she was born. She was safe, he knew, and he closed his eyes for the last time…
“Greetings, little shaper.”
His eyes flicked open, much too awake for a dying man. “Who… where?” There was no pain, or feeling of… flesh. Valdo looked down to his chest, but there was only emptiness and darkness there. Far off, endless stars throbbed with energy and light. “Where am I?”
“The space between stars, between life and death.” Valdo followed the voice to two bright eyes in a black face, skin stretched tight as leather. “I am The Envoy, and I’ve come for you at your demise. A fitting time, as any. The fleeting moments of eternal death where we can meet and discuss your new… life.”
Below, Valdo saw Zana and her friends frozen in time, The Elder pulling the man that killed him into a black void of writhing tentacles. Valdo remembered that place, the black hall of mirrors that twist and shred the mind. He remembered it far too well. He almost hurt his little girl because of that place. If his heart had not burned out, it would break for the man that killed him, and the love lost between him and his little girl.
Valdo descended to the battlefield, landing next to her. He placed his lifeless hand on her cheek, but she did not feel it, not when time stood still. “This is the first time I’ve touched her in years,” he whispered. “And only after I’ve met my end.”
“A parting gift,” The Envoy bowed slightly. “For this is the last you’ll see of her.”
“Tell me then,” Valdo said, keeping his eyes on Zana’s face. She looked so much like her mother that his empty chest felt heavier, weighed down by the thought of years lost and gone, her bright hair flashing in the sun. “Tell me of this new life.”
The Envoy straightened, turning his gaze starward. “Look to the stars and worlds of this Atlas, and you will see much more than darkness. Your mind is mortal and infant, but you have perceived beyond your capabilities. You have seen the cracks between the chittering stones, and you know these living stones turn into towering monuments, mountains of black flesh in the screaming distance. There are bright eyes in the darkness, hiding behind bleeding and blinking stars. Rot and Decay shuffle through the endless night, closer, closer… The Fire, crusading, and it comes, as ravenous as the Tangle’s vines that gnash and cling. This, you’ve seen. This, you’ve felt. This, you’ve known.”
Valdo looked up with The Envoy, and felt them there in the endless black. All of them, like a missing limb threatening to return, the terrible tickle of their presence. Writhing, burning, rotting, decaying, gripping, biting… The darkness was full of them, and he always felt them coming.
Valdo gave a soft chuckle. “Greater nightmares yet live.”
“And unlive.” The Envoy turned to meet Valdo’s eyes, and stared deep into him. “They are living and dead, and there are those that cannot truly die among them. It is these beasts beyond brutality, amalgamations ascending ancient aberration, that we must struggle against. You will be a glorious general in our war, Valdo Caesarius. Your gifts are a notable rarity, in a mortal so old. You will be formless, but not without power and purpose. You will be a small drop in the black heavens, but a drop that rages into a breaking tempest, churning the dark ocean and its countless worlds. And… you will serve.”
“Serve?” Valdo sighed softly, but that was some relief. “So, there is Order.”
The Envoy smiled, tight skin creaking into his black cheek. “Some Order in the Chaos. We strive for Order, in any way.”
“May I refuse?” Valdo asked, but he doubted there was any chance to refuse the cosmos’ messenger.
“No,” The Envoy said. “Even I am without choices. I am forced into my willing duty, and I must take pleasure in fulfilling it, even if my soul is scratched to pieces in the process. We must become more Valdo Caesarius. War comes from the darkness, and we do not get to choose if we fight.”
Valdo reached for Zana again, brushing his dead thumb against her warm cheek. “Everything I’ve done, shaped and molded, broken and made anew… it was for her. And now, I must leave her, and tread the starscape for war.” He tried to smile, but it turned into a deep frown. He remembered her dancing in Oriath square, the middle of winter when the flurries fell softly in her red hair, and she laughed as she stomped the snow covering Innocence’s bloody eyes in the pavement. “Do you know what will become of her, Envoy?”
“She will live and struggle. She will suffer, too, but we all do.” The Envoy waved a hand, and a black hall gaped in the darkness. Within, stars blinked and thrummed with warmth. “But she will have a life. Harder than most, but a life. You saved her once from the beast that takes the children.” Valdo and The Envoy both looked back at The Elder, its black nails digging into that man’s pale face. Sirus, Zana called him. Sirus. “And you’ve saved many others in aiding in its defeat. But there are more, always more. Protect her now, as you have before, Valdo Caesarius.” Valdo let his arm fall from her face. “Will I remember her?”
The Envoy gave him another smile, a terribly sad smile. “We can hope.” He floated toward the opening in space, gesturing politely with one black hand. “It’s time we’ve went on, and you’ve become more.”
“So it is,” Valdo whispered. He thought to give Zana one last smile, but she would not see it, not in this instant eternity between life and death. He hoped then, to remember her laugh even if he forgot everything else. Her happiness, the core of his being, the shackles that kept his soul bound and focused. That was his wish. “After all, death is but a chance for rebirth…”
He followed The Envoy into the portal, then he heard the screams of Sirus and Zana behind him. But he could not turn back, not even for his little girl. His beautiful girl…

Redin sighed and tapped the side of his notebook against the stone block floor, yet again running everything back and forth through his head. Some time back he had decided to deliberately stop himself from doing work outside of his appointed hours, but still – he was an archaeologist, a scholar, and he lived for the pursuit and gathering of knowledge. And what he had found there in that ancient tomb today… quite possibly, it predated everything else he knew.

The mechanism did not match the surrounding architecture or motifs. The scholar sat up, opened his journal, and flipped through the pages, seeing all the clean, concise sketches of friezes, busts, cartouches, stained glass windows pieced together from fragments… gods both current and ancient, temples standing and ruined. Notes on thaumaturgy, its workings and fundamentals; ideas and information about this new civilization he had found; and then, abruptly, seven pages of scribbles and mistakes, a sketch that he just couldn’t get right.

It waited for him just here in the same room, apparently set into a divot in the center of the otherwise smooth floor, glistening black stone streaked through with whitish-green. Each of his failed sketches looked so much like it yet missed some vital, central portion, and every time he tried he felt no closer to discovering what it was. It felt almost as though it changed when he wasn’t looking, or that depending on the angle, its very structure seemed to shift… the scholar peered close at the thing, glimmering golden metal like burnished zinc, and for a moment reached out to fetch his quill and ink.

But then he stopped himself. It wasn’t going to help, and he had already had some of the soldiers drag his accommodations down here into the ruins so that he could get right back to it come morning. He sighed again, snapped the journal closed, and leaned far enough away to that it would be a hassle if he wanted to pick it back up, then tugged the blankets up.

The heat from the sun naturally did not reach this deep through solid stone, yet still another heat simmered undeniably up from the earth underneath. Redin hadn’t noticed it before, but as he lay there, organizing and shelving his thoughts and discoveries from the day, he became aware of a slow, ponderous rhythm echoing from somewhere within the ruins, gentle and faint, like the heartbeat of some great sleeping beast. It was this that lulled him to sleep, this low, plodding beat – and it was this that drew him into the world of dreams.

And what great, fantastic, terrible dreams they were. At once they played out in full yet felt as only small, insignificant fragments: massive structures, works of architectural and societal hubris that he recognized yet couldn’t say he had seen before. Names and deeds that sounded familiar, yet not from his own waking world. Redin stepped through the halls of these ruins, yet the civilization that built them was in its prime. The people here had skin like smooth, sweet molten bronze, and when they spoke their words and syllables swung and swam together, lyrical without even trying. They spoke to him, welcoming him forward, beaming and grinning as though they had been awaiting his presence for a long time.

They beckoned him forward, and there in the center of the room before the golden device with its strange angles and nonsense concavo-convex mechanics, stood a hooded figure. He lifted his head, and Redin could still see no face beneath the twisting, swirling fabric, sheer yet solid as though it were woven from cold, shaded water. It looked at him though it had no eyes to see; it tilted its head, appraised him up and down, then spread its arms – then spread a second pair, and a third, the crux of each along the same pair of shoulders.

Redin felt no fear. In awe the scholar stepped forward, only now aware that the figure, the priest, the deity, perhaps, stood a full arm’s breadth above his head. One of those arms came forward and the seven-fingered hand spread out, reaching for his, beckoning him forward. So the scholar looked from the hand, to the figure’s blank face, to the device behind it, the inner mechanism – in the physical, waking world missing – spinning slowly.

He took the hand, and each of those seven fingers wrapped gently yet firmly about his palm. The device spun faster. A low hum issued; the arms of the device creaked and spun and shifted, and…

And Redin woke up, mind already working far beyond his body. He scrabbled for his journal, remembered he had placed it away, fetched it – and then without even dressing in his robe, stepped over to the dismantled device, the vital center portion, the engine, so to say, missing. And he sketched the frame, the exterior, the binding arms, the gear workings, technology inspired and otherworldly. There in the center waited a gap, noticeable to him now yet unidentifiable before.

So he paused, chewed on the end of his quill, and then sketched out that part, too. It just – made sense, and like so many times before, Redin felt like a fool in how he couldn’t see it before. He dressed, had a simple breakfast, and called for a basic shipment of parts from the surface portion of the camp: though the device’s workings were strange and intricate, built around dimensions of thinking and engineering that he could hardly try to conceptualize. But, still, it made sense. It wasn’t some special alloy, as it was still liable to rust, tarnish, breakage, and battering. So the things they had around the camp would still work, so long as he pass them through the smith first.

As Redin sat back down beside the device, getting a look at it from a lower vantage, he couldn’t help but smirk. His brother was a watchmaker; perhaps that discipline would help in the understanding of this device. Even though he had finally managed to sketch down the device and work a feasible blueprint of its setup, still the scholar had more to do. He set his inkwell beside him, unscrewed the top, laid out his other scrolls of study, and got to work.

~ ~ ~

Amala sighed as he scuttled down the hallway, all of these certainly fantastic carvings and remarkably intact structures dimly lit by the torches set up in their sconces along the walls. Master Redin had specifically ordered the freestanding holders, as he wanted to preserve the original beauty and integrity of the structure – which was fair. It was just that the standing sconces were much heavier to move and harder to swap out than the wall-mounted ones.

This would be Amala’s fifth venture today up and down from the surface, and as far as ancient ruins went, these were expansive. His calves and thighs burned just from yesterday’s work, and now the good scholar was sending him back and forth, back and forth, fetch these pieces, bring me this, bring me that, I need a new stick of charcoal, will you heat my tea? I need a gem. I need a hammer.

I need slate. Slates. Several. Ah… twenty, perhaps?

Absurd. He grumbled under his breath and shifted the pack over his shoulder one more time. Since then Master Redin had asked for two more batches of twenty, and wouldn’t let the poor scribe into the room each time he returned. Whatever it was he did in there with all of these slates – well, he might have to start paying out of his own pocket to recover the stores.

This was the last turn of the hall, though, and for a moment Amala considered dropping the bag and throwing it the rest of the way. Thinking about how Master Redin had yelled at him when he had just leaned against one of the walls, though… he heaved another sigh, continued forward, and rapped the back of his dagger against the solid stone of the door, knowing that his knuckle would make no audible noise. That, and it still ached from all the times he had done it before. So he knocked, and waited. And waited. And waited some more.

“Master Redin?”

Nothing. Amala frowned, put an ear to the crack in the threshold, listened for a moment… then shouldered the heavy, carved stone open, the bag of slates sliding on his shoulder. With a grunt he dropped it down right next to the door and was just about to turn to leave – his master often fell asleep on the job, then cited the instance as inspired meditation – when he saw the scholar himself leaning over that strange contraption in the middle, seeming to glow with a light all its own.

“Master Redin, is everything-”

Amala trailed off. Spread about the pedestal foot of the device were all of those slates from before, many of them shattered, broken, sheared apart; many more crudely carved and scribbled; and then, in a neat pile, a handful that seemed carefully, deliberately formed, reduced from their oblong rectangular nature into a clean circle, edges ridged with some indecipherable glyphs in the center. Redin held one of them now, fingers rolling over the edges with anticipation. The scholar licked his lips, looked down at the slate, then stepped around to the console of the device, with the slight indention that seemed, right there…

~ ~ ~

…to perfectly fit the stone he had carved. He couldn’t remember doing many of the others, but still the evidence littered the room around him, botched and failed, not quite right. Inspiration had a tendency to hit him like this, when everything all of a sudden made sense. The device worked similarly to thaumaturgy, in some ways, but the one way to see would be to run it. And he finally had the key. Redin swallowed, peered into the center of the device – his haphazardly assembled core would likely work only the once – then pressed the stone tablet into the console. At first, nothing happened.

And then, in a moment of powerful, dizzying vertigo, it started to spin. Or, really, it felt more like the world around the device spun and twisted, while the device itself held still. Redin found himself grabbing onto the console for support, while a shout from the back of the room alerted him that someone had broken his privacy against his express whim to be left alone. He cast his head over his shoulder to shout – it looked like Amala, his idiot scribe – before another noise from the device drew him back, the same low, constant whirring that it had issued in his dream.

For a moment there was a flash of something else, of some great, three-meter figure with six arms, each capped by a seven-fingered hand. What was that? Where had he seen it before? It seemed familiar yet not, just a flash of imagination and fanaticism and – and then the machine shuddered and bucked, and a terrible, searing crackle filled his ears.

Redin took a step back just in time for a strange, shimmering door to open in front of the console, with five more opening in turn around the circumference of the device. Each one seemed to shear through and between the space around it, rather than conventionally opening – as though he had run a knife through a sheet of fabric, then dug his fingers in and tore the hole wider. Strange, dizzying portals, blue and black like water scrubbed from the depths of the ocean, swirled and shimmered before him. Amala called for him, then shouted for the guards – but Redin was captivated. He looked over his work, laughed softly, reached forward…

…felt another moment of intense vertigo and dizziness, spun, swirled…

…and stepped through onto smooth ground, the sound of crashing waves all around, the familiar taste of salt in the air. Still the whirring continued: he spun around and saw another device behind him, the same yet different, this one older, larger, clumsier. With another step back he realized that two of its siblings stood nearby as well, one of them shattered and broken as though the engine at its core had abruptly burst, astrolabe arms twisted and shattered. More of them? He patted at his cloak, hoping that he had taken his journal along, realizing he hadn’t, then saw the five remaining portals – the one he had come through sucked in on itself, shuddered, and winked out of existence, the space around it snapping back into place – and started to move for a second.

Then, though, the distinct noise of a sword slipping from its sheath behind him caught his attention, as sharply and suddenly as the point of that sword poking up between his shoulder blades. Redin gasped, froze, and slowly raised his hands.

“You are to turn around,” said a voice behind him, strong, confident, male. Immediately he clocked that voice as belonging to a soldier, or a commander, or… “and identify yourself, clearly and quickly. We have had too many mishaps with the map device to trust anyone or – anything that comes out of it.”

Redin swallowed, looked up to the sky, and then slowly turned. When he did so he couldn’t help but press his lips together and suppress a smirk: of course the owner of that voice wore an eyepatch, stone-tan hair slicked back across his head, mustache pointing downwards in a permanent frown. He held a sword in a hand quite obviously accustomed to wielding it, though his other arm hung down at his side beneath the weight of a vicious edged mace; the armor he wore looked to have been forged in proverbial fire, with great, vaulting shoulders and a frontpiece that arced down towards a glowing red central gem.

Around this commander arrayed a handful of other rough types, warriors and soldiers, rangers and, perhaps, other scholars. Redin’s heart thumped in his chest.

“I am – Master Redin,” he said, willing the nervousness in his voice to still. “Pray tell, where am I?”

Concern and distrust shone in the soldier’s single eye. He glanced over his shoulder, nodded to one of the other warriors, and stepped around to the side.

“Wraeclast,” the soldier finally answered. The word echoed and whispered in Redin’s head. “Why are you here?”

Wraeclast. Wraeclast. Beyond the golden gears… A shiver vibrated down the scholar’s back.

“I’m not sure,” he answered, truthfully. The image of the six-armed figure echoed through his mind again. “But I think this is where I am intended to be.

They called me a witch and sent me afar Woke up alone with the sand and a scar Found some old wood and picked up a branch Found an old man and… guess he's now brunch

Along the way were some shiny blue stones Fitting accessories for this melancholy tone One made fire and kept the night warm This girl's all about function over form

Was a nice beach except for, you know, Flesh-eating corpses and a stabby freak-show Called himself Hillock in between growls Asked him to wash, sir, his holes were most foul

Came to a town by the edge of the sea No time to shop, really had to pee Nessa had a tale about some chest that was missin' But this exile could not stay a while and listen

Over the days I stayed and I maimed Items and skills I passively claimed So much potential but no real direction Who knew witching was higher education

Made me a pact and summoned some minions Made me a pack with their own opinions Scoured old fields for the perfect spectre The sour old reaper gave in to hunger

The time for blues had come and gone A new tabula and some greens to try on Cyclone had me dizzy and made me see sharks Must be some whale-god leaving his mark

Round and round the world I spun Till the labs were clear and the quests were done Was it now time for the game to end? Or were there treasures just 'round the bend?

I was a witch, not a thief, nor a mapper of eldritch seas But then a gentle whisper in the wind: all of this, yet no fees! Missed the beta, late to the meta But bet yo soul it'll only get bettah

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