A Hierarch, moving against him?, the Immortal Gulguz wondered frantically, his giantish fiery form looking about warily. They would need copious amounts of power to draw on to take him on with the resources of his own home plane behind him. He had been ranked Eternal more than once, before being demoted after taking ‘undue risks’ for his research into fire and energy flows, an unfortunate necessity of pushing forward the knowledge of energy and magic in the universe. Some oversensitive fools in other Spheres were so blindly insensitive to the possibilities of using mortal souls as fuel for transcendent flames and seeing what could be made of them…
Regardless, unless at least two Hierarchs joined the effort here, he should be able to outlast them, even if he had to draw down several Artifacts made and retained here for emergencies like this. He’d had some of his Avatars killed in the past as object lessons, basically slaps on the wrist telling him to quit offending someone who had better things to do, or the next idle gesture might really cost him something.
Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t. It depended what was required of his research.
His two surviving Avatars and the temporary Constructs were alert and looking around while his Immortal Power was restored at speed here in his home plane.
There was nothing. Looking through time indicated no threats coming, no variables, no magic was alerting him of attacks or invaders. He should have investigated the killing of his giant Avatars more closely, more energetically, but in truth they had more disappeared than vanished suddenly, as if he’d suddenly stopped thinking about them…
Was that a tremor?
The ancient Immortal looked around abruptly, wondering what he’d just felt. He might not even have felt it if he wasn’t sealing Crescendoom from all contact with other planes. He would deny anyone trying to Gate in, and there was no pressure on the one entry-point. Of course, they could already be inside, somehow…
There it was again, like a great pulse…
Sim Ceti-Tau smiled in grim appreciation for what was going to happen.
She was a Construct, without a soul, but not without power, and definitely possessed inherited memories.
She could remember the slaughters and massacres Gulguz was responsible for, wars and killings and upheavals across the ages, other Immortals happily gossiping about some of the things he was responsible for… especially on the Far Shore, where he’d aided Thanatos in bringing down Sythia by turning them away from the largely benevolent Quarizon’s sponsorship and worship.
Gulguz’s entire set of orbital rings was basically a device to generate sacrificial souls of his own for experiments away from the prying eyes of other Immortals. Since he was their creator and protector in his own plane, nobody much cared what he did here, after all, and he brought the same callousness and disregard for others out into the world for his external projects.
Well, then, nobody would miss him when it all came tumbling down.
With no regrets and great expectations, Ceti-Tau linked up all her Valences and inherited magical energies. That especially included the many Runes carved into her to broadcast and magnify these energies specifically throughout the whole of this plane, attuned to its master’s Truenames, and for one brief moment, exert absolute authority over his own home plane in his name.
The Laws and Rules of Crescendoom shook, convulsed, and then began to do some very, very bad things.
The intruding matter exploding across the skies seemed to punch holes into space, holes that gaped open wide and led back and forth to higher dimensions. Every eruption holed the sealed plane more, opening up into the higher dimension, and the solar-system sized plane began to collapse inwards at speeds much faster than light as its substance was blown up out of materiality, to a place even Immortals weren’t supposed to go.
With a crack and a roar, the sky shattered, and the endless vortex of the fifth dimension tore itself into existence up above Gulguz’s nested solar spheres.
Magic shrieked and fell upwards into the sky. Gravity convulsed and all unsecured matter began to lift towards the sky. Mortal creatures there writhed as currents of power pulled past them, through them, and they began to wither and fall apart as the higher dimension drew them to itself.
Gulguz could only gape up in disbelief at the howling vortex of an Immortal Storm, something only the most powerful Hierarchs had a hope of being able to Seal effectively. For a moment, his nested worlds held on, even as torrents of harnessed energy raged up into the endless depths above him, the Vortex only growing larger as more exploding matter ripped apart space, and finally the Storm began to pull apart his grand construction.
The first section of the Chilling Sun ripped free, a rain of snow and ice falling before it as it tumbled into the sky, the icy world on the opposite internal side shattering and spilling countless souls and continents away as it tumbled helplessly into the sky.
With the first section gone, the innards of the spheres were more exposed, and now cyclones and tornadoes ripped sections larger than nations out of the interior of his splendid Fire and Ice sun, looking like little more than clumps of dust. The Vortex above took them in without question.
Gulguz screamed at the sky in fury and rage.
He didn’t know how this had been done! His own home plane had been forcibly altered without him, the energy released from the shattered Matter channeled directly into forced dimensional elevation, something that was patently impossible on this level without his own authority and a tremendous amount of Immortal Power!
He couldn’t run anywhere and escape the pull of the Vortex, which even now was starting to pull at his soul and existence, its grasp on him magnifying with every second he looked at it. He couldn’t Gate or Shift away, because he had Sealed his own plane, and it would take ten minutes to unseal it… if the plane was steady enough to do so.
It wasn’t. The Sealing of the Cresecendoom had been the spark that lit off this whole effort. For one moment his home plane had been clear, independent, and strong, unconnected to the rest of the Multiverse… and now re-establishing that link was going to be impossible, as with the Vortex here, intruding into a lower space, the Multiverse would reject the plane until the threat to itself had passed.
As his many projects, his base of operations, his storehouses of records and deeds, treasures and trophies, monuments and temples, servant races and even hapless prisoners were inexorably drawn up into the sky, Gulguz screamed at the Immortal Storm and whoever had done this, swearing to his vengeance even as the Vortex began to drag him skyward.
Immortal Power was pulled from him in bright streams of energy, writhing and twisting. His Immortal body, so much tougher and stronger than anything mortal, still broke down before the incomprehensible power of the Dimensional Vortex.
As the last of his planar rules broke down, the sun at the core of Crescendoom’s Spheres finally destabilized, all the magicks and Artifice and Immortal Power that had kept it stable finally crumbled.
As the nova went off, the collapsing space there tore open completely, and expanding fire devoured reality and collapsed upon itself.
With a roar and snap and crashing of dimensional weight, the home plane of Gulguz, self-proclaimed master of fire and ice, engineer of the Great Jotun Rebellion, vanished along with him, his servants, his worshipers, and all his legacies to his own genius and power.
The Vortex, the space it was intruding into now consumed and gone, was closed and shunted away at the same time.
Of Crescendoom, there was nothing left to be found by the Immortals who went looking for him after the violent deaths of his Avatar. They only found he had seemingly been erased from the multiverse entirely.
I just nodded as I touched the edge of the Divinations the Hierarchs were performing, looking for any trace of Crescendoom or Gulguz, and finding nothing. The explosive death of his primary Avatar in Nexial was the last trace anyone had of him, and it was months before the disappearance of Nimbus was actually noticed and someone considered it might be linked to all of this.
Who was responsible for all that was also a great mystery. Immortal coordination was needed to pull it off, and the destruction of an entire home plane, especially one as old and invested as that of Gulguz, was no small thing at all. Certainly the bastard had made many enemies over the eons, any of which would have been happy to wipe him away for some of the things he’d done, even if they smiled and were polite on the surface.
Angering other Immortals, especially older ones with private resources, was seldom of use, since tracking down every body and remnant of an Immortal and actually killing them was supremely difficult.
They hadn’t had the Truename of the bastard, so there was a lot more difficulty trying to brute-force the solution.
I knew he was dead because the tablet with his Truename Runes on it broke and shattered, the golden slate falling to dust and grit that blew away and out of existence as his very being was removed from the multiverse here on the Other Shore and no longer relevant.
It was cold and brutal and killed untold numbers of mortal beings, all of which owed their existence to him, and were effectively sacrifices to be expended to his every desire. In the end, they also became the sacrifices needed to kill him forever, and the callous fool was hoist on the petard of his own unstable planar alterations and his engine of souls generating enough Immortal Power to empower a Pyramid and kill him.
I did gain Glory from it. It was entire nested worlds of living beings destroyed to get rid of him, a feat that likely would have to be repeated with every Immortal I wanted to kill, unless I grew powerful enough to confront a main body directly AND kill all the secondary ones, while extracting all their Immortal Power so their spirits were slain.
Yeah, that would not be easy. Easier to collapse their home plane, destroying their ability to recover quickly, and eating all their Immortal Power up with the implosion.
They wanted to play with mortals, and their mortals didn’t have the power to escalate matters to levels the Immortals didn’t want to play with. It took me becoming an Eternal to pull this off.
And now, now came the big payoff!
The Heavenly Pyramid of Darkmoor glowed and thrummed, as its counterpart in Crescendoom was the last thing to go. Incredible amounts of Immortal Power came through, transmitted between the two Pyramids, and this time went off laterally, staying far away from the Fifth and higher dimensions, going right for the multiversal wall and beyond it in a narrow beam on a tight path, wrapped up in a century of faith and worship from people who wanted more from their gods than to be used as blood sacrifices.
I was now calling for some help in a pre-programmed and specific manner, turning the death of one arsehat Immortal into something that in time was going to be the death of many, many more of them, or so I hoped.
Immortal Power and Valence XIII magic sped out into trans-infinity and beyond, borne on Faith and Hope. If they had known the Pyramid was here and that this could be done, certainly some Immortals could have sensed what was going on, but the tides of Faith of other Immortals weren’t so easy to track, and they knew nothing of what was beyond this multiverse and its own infinite number of variant planes and realities.
They didn’t know of the power of the gods and the Alignments, or at least, had never spoken of such things to Emeril’s Avatar.
Now, now an Immortal’s unwilling sacrifice was going to bring them in, and something was going to change…