Chapter Text
The transition was not a jarring crash. I don’t even recall when UI and command line vanished. I was testing various balance aspects of the latest product of our studio. Yggdrasil II: The March of Eternals. The game has been delayed twice already all due to the new concept race introduction. As the main developer, my team and I were running final tests on hybrid builds when it suddenly hit me … I am smeared across the world spectating all of it simultaneously. The sensation of serenity and peacefulness comfortably cradled my mind utterly unbothered by the wars, famine, and exploitation that unfolded all around me.
I am an Elder Ethereal. And as one, my natural state is Dissipated. Without the mana expenditure to pull my consciousness into a singular point, I have spread thin across the fabric of reality. It is a sensation of terrifying, god-like passivity. I have no eyes, yet I "see" the rustle of leaves in all forests of the world. Rhythmic breathing of a knight in a castle. I am the wind, the static in the air, and the latent heat of the earth.
My omni-perception is absolute, but the agency is nil. I am the ether in the machine of a world that feels far too organic to be a game I was working on.
What is right there? A massive underground ziggurat. It radiates an immense amount of energy and is full of powerful beings … well powerful compared to anything else around. To my senses it juts out like a mountain in the middle of an endless valley.
The instinct nags at me to coalesce, to move, act but it’s just my mind calling, counter to it my nature calls to be even, uniform, calm. There is something interesting unfolding, a girl named Clementine is fighting something far above her league not even realizing what she has gotten into. She is cocky, manic, and brutal; she reminds me of the main storyline characters from Yggdrasil II. Though that one was more stable. Mmm … I’d like to take a closer look.
I will myself to pull partially into a focal point right outside the town where the battle unfolds. My form intensifies to 15%. Immediately I feel a drain on my mana regeneration. Being corporeal is unnatural to my kind. As my physical form manifests my awareness shrinks, it covers not the whole world now, but just this continent. As most of me still permeates the world, I see and sense myself from the outside. Yet it is not confusing or disorienting.
I am vaguely of a shape of a humanoid, but smudge and oily black, form unstable and shifting like a stain of ink. White wisps like mist shoot out of me. My presence in this world is alien, and warps the fabric of space and time. The tendrils represent an Aura of Fleeting Time. The time flow of all is severely accelerated within it. The grass is first to go, it weathers, dries and falls into a fine dust. The pebbles start to disintegrate into sand. Nearby trees begin to visibly grow. I have to expend mana contantly to suppress it. Tendrils are sucked into me, escaping only momentarily like tiny puffs of mist.
I turn my senses focusing onto the scene of the cemetery. The girl lost, badly, as expected. Her ribcage being crushed slowly. I sense the power radiating from the person that was in black plate a few moments ago. A masquerading higher undead – an overlord. Its potential is greatest on this continent save several entities far in the mountain peaks and the underground ziggurat. I am not concerned, as an Elder Ethereal I possess a trait, “Sliver of Eternity”; my HP cannot be brought below one. A killing blow instead will force my corporeal state to dissipate, preventing me from intensifying into the world until my hp naturally recovers to one fifth.
The girl kicks in agony, her ribcage collapses piercing her lungs. She is dropped to the ground like a sack of useless meat. The spark of life being squeezed out of her. A problem: an ethereal can restore things to their previous state, but we cannot resurrect nor create life. While the overlord, referred to as Mommon by his ally women, is busy recovering some inconsequential trinkets, I carefully use a space-time manipulation from the arsenal of my Dominus class.
Power word: Stasis.
It freezes time for the broken girl locking her on the precipice of death. I am in luck, there is commotion in the city. Soldiers and mercs are gathering to assault the graveyard. The overlord masquerades as a dark swordsman again, clearly unwilling to break his cover; he is on his way with his assistant to claim victory. Good, no one will care much about a body disappearing among a sea of still shambling undead.
Power word: Wormhole.
Darkness spreads around Clementine and in front of me simultaneously, as she starts to slowly sink into that oily pool she surfaces here.