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The end of the world has come, in thunder and the roar of flame.
At least, so it must seem to the palace servants, scurrying through tall chambers of polished sandstone and engraved filigree, down halls where ten generations of scowling kings and queens loom over all but a panoply of the gods themselves. Their chiseled visages glow from candles piled by the hundreds, streams of scented wax floating up into the vaulted ceilings. Today the scent of agarwood and myrrh is tainted with a bitter edge as the breeze carries clouds of foul black smoke up the city. Rings of crystals dangling from the ceiling reflect the flame outside.
Men and women who have done little save for being born to the wrong generation flee from shouts that echo through the palace halls, barking orders and the tromp of marching feet that bring with them the dreaded orange glow. Amidst the chaos a young girl sits, utterly still, eyes watching emptily. Curled up in an alcove with her knees hugging her chest, she appears heedless of the way the light itself seems to avoid her, scintillating rays bent and twisted out of shape like a reflection upon the water.
The illusion breaks as she unfolds, birdlike, all long thin legs and knobbly knees. Her bare feet touch down silently against the floor—stones that should have been pleasantly warm from the afternoon’s sun carry a hint of a different kind of heat.
She does not quite flee, per se, but she moves with purpose, gliding through familiar halls deeper into the palace. Those who cross her path are too focused on their own survival to pay her any mind. There are no exits where she is headed, and so soon enough she is alone.
Any other day, and she would lose a hand for slipping through the doors to the Princess’ quarters, but today larger problems await the royals racing madly through the city streets somewhere far below. She does not think they will survive. Long ago, she thinks, the thought might have upset her. Five hundred years of lives blurring into a sand-colored smear have scraped away pieces that she once took for granted.
The great-great-oh-so-many-great-grandsons and -daughters of her adopted children kill each other for wealth and power and justice and vengeance and she does nothing, too tired to care. It is funny, in a way—the kingdom is in no golden age, perhaps, but it prospers. The capitol shone from atop the great mount, at least, a sea of gilded roofs and sandy walls, harbor full of bright white sails and flags of a hundred colors. Does it mean nothing, that they would kill so readily for it? Or does it mean everything, and drive them to kill all the same?
The Princess’ quarters have been thoroughly looted and they are still as luxurious as she expects, and she drifts through the room and runs her fingers over lingering toys of solid ivory and precious stones, tiny animals rendered in miniature and cloth so fine it feels like the air itself between her hands. The bare abandoned scraps that could not fit in the hands and cloth bundles of whatever poor souls are even now dying someplace else, in another hall, are enough to rival the wealth of entire merchant houses.
At the far end of the room a curtain billows gently, teasing the translucent suggestion of a small railing silhouetted against burning and brilliant light. The cloth parts around her and she looks.
The sun sinks towards the horizon, a ball of glorious fire illuminating a city at war with itself. A tableau of chaos spirals around a spectacular centerpiece.
High above the city, two titans grapple for dominance, clawing and thrashing and biting with the sound of mountains colliding. A great crocodile the color of bleach-white bone stretches out a hundred stubby limbs and conjures a switch of woven reed a hundred men long, tip burning with green un-fire. Across from it a vortex of sand forms a gargantuan face, individual features as large as buildings. They crash together and chunks of vitrified sand plummet out of the sky like hail.
Flights of golems a thousand strong wheel around the titans on currents of air, firing gold and white beams of stellar radiance at each other and the city below. The world is a riot of noise and color and smoke, and the girl settles atop the railing and dangles her legs over the edge, kicking melancholically. She watches a city burn, and thinks that she will be ready to be done with all of this… life. It is too much. For a few minutes, she sits and watches and takes account. Her fingers half-consciously trace a fractal sigil across the balustrade, smudging out whorls of endless complexity. Tjau flows—nothing happens.
Eventually, voices begin to rise behind her, angry shouts from men joined by the sound of leather boots on stone floors and the crack of doors wretched open. The voices scrape against her nerves: a buzzing fly, a pebble wedged underfoot, pressing into the soft and fleshy meat she has wrapped around herself. A song missing the crucial note. She pulls herself to her feet. Pushing through the curtain, she comes face-to-face with a brace of men.
Five soldiers armed with stave and shield stare at a barefoot slip of a girl. They positively radiate magic: a kingkiller squadron, armed and armored with enough treasured relics to fill a mansion, out on the march to end a dynasty. She is not the princess they are looking for, but it matters little. A man barks an order, and a bolt of light leaps from the tip of a staff.
The man channels his tjau—she can see the path the magic travels as it races through the inlaid gold sigils. It fizzles out of existence a handspan from her face, met and negated by the precise and opposite burst. There is a moment of silence, narrowing eyes, and then the room fills with flying bursts of tjau.
This thin sack of flesh cannot win. Escape, perhaps, an accomplishment already so absurd it would twist the faces in front of her into incredulity, and yet the mere thought of the effort involved has her shying away. She does not want a heart-pounding escape. She does not want to think any more.
There is no going back from what comes next, but that is fine. It is a relief, even. Her lives have grown muddled, tangled, back to back to back with no respite or distance between.
She cracks open the gate.
All at once the room is full to bursting with a presence, a crushing pressure. A beam of scouring light aimed at her eye curves around her, swirling, caught in the gravity where she presses against the skein of reality. Raw energy itself bleeds momentum until it hangs motionless in the air, a pinprick of a star drifting above one ear. Spell-blasts spiral around her, and then she wears a crown of burning fire. Her empty eyes bleed gold. It does worse to her mind.
The men in front of her take it poorly. There is a fear in them, terrified whispers of a name—Wedja. Divinity, her sister-self separated by two thousand years. Memories of another life croon in her ear and trail their fingers down her neck. For a moment there is the temptation to take up the mantle again, to drown the world in burning lifeless sand until all is silent once more, but that is the silence that she has grown to hate above all else.
To open the gate any further would be to kill this self as surely as tearing off her own head. There is no hostility in it—the thing that she once was and will be again is as antithetical to her current existence as catching the sun between her palms. She has done it once before, seen the path play out to its inevitable end, and ferried the experience into the halls of memory. Power is no salve. All the power in the world has not left her any less alone.
Alone…
Air vibrates in strange patters and reminds her that there are creatures in the room with her. Humans. Her thoughts feel slow, thick as molten glass, cracking and burning through a vessel not meant to contain them. The creatures seem… hostile. One of them draws a knife pulsing with power. It is a masterwork of sympathetic sigilwork, a handful of single effects reinforced upon themselves hundredfold. Tjau leaps through its arrays, lines of molten gold forming perfect channels.
She swipes her hand diagonally through the air, watching the currents dragged along by the tips of her finger. To her sight, it forms a path, and if she can see it then it is enough. One of the oldest runes, the polar opposite to the scrawl she tried and failed to etch out upon the railing.
She scribes negation, and the man is not. The knife tumbles to the ground oh-so-slowly, shattering against the stone.
As Wedja, she could have erased the man so thoroughly that his companions would have thought themselves always numbered four. As it stands, they lash out instead. She does not understand why they try to carve out pieces of the world and fling them at her.
A bright white lance spears through her chest. She blinks slowly, confused. The power radiating through her head throbs and crushes and scours. Memories of a dozen lives grind away beneath the weight of one. Then she snaps back.
Oh. She is not Wedja. This vessel is still meat. Still fragile. She had forgotten that such things must be stopped.
Slowly, her eyes drift to the floor. An errant wave—a twitch of the wrist, really, turns the half of the room in front of her to sand: toys and silks and people all. Tottering back outside, her fingers absentmindedly brush at the edges of the fist-sized hole through her heart.
She stares down at the city and the tangled lives within and wonders if the next one will be the one. Likely not, she cannot help but think, patterns outwards extending to a predictable conclusion. No reason to suspect her string of failures will end now, but it would be a relief. She would like to no longer be so alone.
The moon hangs overhead. A moment ago it was not and yet now it is, and only the two titans battling across the sky have the finely-honed senses to notice the world has changed. They draw apart from each other in the space of a breath, a dance of two old and regal desert lions feeling the gaze of an outsider upon their necks, casting their eyes out warily. As one, they wheel—
The railing is empty. The moon is gone, returned to its proper place below the horizon once more. The evening sun shines, the city burns, and another era comes to an end.
The leviathan sleeps within a grey and stony tomb, crater-marred and steeped in starlight. So thoroughly intertwined with the surrounding magic, it is impossible to tell where its strange existence ends and regolith begins. At the edges of a continental form, star-flesh seems to solidify into stone itself, cracked and pebbled and cold. It breathes to the rhythm of centuries as mountain ranges shift and groan, and in its sleep it dreams. From somewhere far away, a mote of its self returns.
It breathes in, and out, and time smears past. All is quiet, and all is still.
A new dream beads like a drop of tar, bulging downwards as it steadily grows. Eventually, it reaches a tipping point. It follows the path of least resistance, falling along familiar paths to the pale blue dot below.
He opens his eyes to darkness, pitch-black and strangely sharp, biting at the soft flesh of membranes and organs and all manner of flesh in a way that is wholly unfamiliar and yet… somehow not? It is new, and that alone is welcome. In those first few moments of existence, the raw sensation coursing over him is overwhelming. He feels like he is going to explode, a tiny shell packed full of emotion and color and life. He wants to laugh; he wants to weep. It feels like taking the first breath after an age underwater. He allows himself to relish in the sensations for long minutes, before he brings himself back together.
It is good to feel again. But he carries too much power—above all else, he will be composed.
His eyes are rather unhelpful at the moment, but he has other senses. The room shines with magic, both in the form of shapes scattered around him and the glowing walls themselves. Hundreds of arrays thread through the structure like veins of ore, individual sigils combined into flowing manifestations and reinforcements both. Some are familiar, but many are wonderfully new. The roiling storm inside of him is dying down, but this is… good. This fills his chest with warmth.
He should do something about the light, however. And the… void? Only when he opens his mouth does he notice there is no air, the absence pricking at his throat the same way it stings his eyes. He picks a suitable array from the wall and channels a trickle of tjau through the sigil for air and air alone, nudging it away from the remainder of the array.
He takes a deep breath, and then another. It is unnecessary and yet grounding, and so he does it all the same. Light follows a moment later.
The room appears to be a vault, or perhaps a tomb. The walls are an unfamiliar grey, so distinct from the red and brown walls of Abydra that he is struck by a wave of… something, adrift for long seconds until the wave of emotion passes on its own. Only then does he turn to the room’s contents.
The wealth of a modest kingdom sprawls across the floor, gold and gems and statues placed not on elaborate plinths but poking out of incongruous boxes of rough unsanded wood and coarse straw. The walls may be unfamiliar but the treasures here are not—he spies brilliant red jasper and deep blue lapis lazuli, and yet even these do not sit in their proper places. Precious stones from a dozen different kingdoms are piled indiscriminately together, no message to be found in the clashing symbols of life and blood and stars and a dozen other meanings besides.
He stares at it for long seconds. He is a stranger in a foreign time and likely land, and he leaps to judgment at first glimpse. And yet the sight of such wealth packed away in this unknown place feels… wrong. It should not matter, and yet it does.
Perhaps the world has truly changed. Perhaps this new age is one where even gold and gems have lost their value. The vault suggests otherwise, but he does not know. This uncertainty, at least, he holds on to with a strange measure of relief. The memories of past lives flicker through his head. It is good to not know things once more.
History is not the only thing murmuring in his ear. Now that he retreats from the depths of his own thoughts, he notices that the return of air has brought with it faint, indistinct noise. It stops, and starts, and stops again, and the thickness of the stone and the noise-dampening sigils within stand testament to the intensity of whatever is causing such disruptions.
The noises, and the likeliness that it is people making them, finally reminds him of his own state.
His body has been shaped largely-unconsciously, falling back on fragments of a thousand different faces and features, molded like clay to form a perfectly-mocked shell. He is a man this life, fashioned into something tall, more lean than stocky, with dusky bronze skin and his head shaved like a soldier. Age remains an elusive concept, but he is distinctly older than the girl that came before. The look of a priest, or a long-standing servant, close to three-dozen winters. Almost a grandfather.
Incarnation did not provide clothes. There is a box of fine silks in the middle of the treasure pile, arrays of stillness and preservation woven into the patterns. They fit well enough, and donning them is a different, more pleasant kind of reminiscence. He twists and wraps and folds them in the most formal patterns he recalls, hands gliding through the motions on reflex.
The noises grow louder, doubly-so as a noise-dampening array goes dormant. He can see the progress through the stone by the way individual sigils wink out or twist into new shapes one by one. The work is impressive, if strangely rigid. Combinations tested one by one, in similar patterns every time no matter the target. Another curiosity to add to the growing list.
He sees the exact moment when the last ward falls and an entire section of the wall begins to flow like liquid. A long hallway squirms open and he stands and stares at three figures: one kneeling, a strange metal rod in hand, one glancing back over their shoulder, and one staring directly at him, eyes wide. He holds himself steady, composed.
A breeze drifts across his face. The air tastes of sea salt and scorched iron, strange and tantalizing. It shivers through him like lightning. He wants to experience it all. Perhaps this age will have the answers that he seeks. But first, he has a conversation to look forward to.