BECMI Chapter 450 – Falling Out and Falling In

The empires were pleased to recover their kidnapped prince and princess, and the fact they were Clones was glossed over and largely immaterial, basically only reported in a terse yet informative report to their Imperial parents penned by Sama herself.As to the relationship that had created the ‘nation’ of Siripha in Shadow Kheper, that had obviously happened later, as the two merely found one another a bit intriguing, and they were allies by convenience, not by mindset. Amusingly, a warrior prince from Delpha found a talented young wizardess from Siricil rather attractive and vice versa, and Sama bluntly told them that Prince Onswerd’s elder brother King Brucall would have a place for them in Eiscall if they wanted to meet up in the future (just like he had for his sister), and he wouldn’t bow to pressure from either of their parents if they wanted to explore a relationship that had obviously gone further than either would have believed outside of such unique circumstances.

After all, they had many, many descendants running around on those demiplanes now, a fact which shocked the both of them when I’d informed them of the matter.

As to the fates of their retainers, that was up to them or their backers to determine. The Mick’s job was done when he returned in triumph with the pair of them to conclude the peace talks… which, between Immortal pressure, the Eismark Federation totally upending any talk of dividing the island, and continued violence on the part of both sides, swiftly went nowhere and resulted in the imperials being whisked off home.

The grinding conflict didn’t so much resume as keep right on going.

The trip down through the connected demiplanes here was a bit more exciting than when the Mick had led his crew through in pursuit of the kidnapped imperials. We were doing so uncounted years before he had, before they had been given to Mother Spider, and when the Immortal making use of them still had some lingering power and followers.

The phanatons and aranea of the future, living in an overgrown jungle forest, had buried and concealed a great hidden planar city, dominated by a cruel theocracy with slaves taken from across the planes… including both the intelligent spiders and the ancestors of the phanaton. What had swallowed their masters on the Far Shore we didn’t know, only that the slaves survived where the masters did not.

Well, that sort of held true again. The Gallivants came into the place with Cirru, Duum, Sif, Thor, and I, and there was instant violence.

A lot of violence. Fanatics certain they were chosen of some Entropic god named Bhelemu came at us, and we, in turn, came at them.

They had lots of priests, undead slaves, yoked monsters, stored magic, and devoted warriors happy to die in the name of their god.

We were happy enough to send them on their way. As we broke their masters, the slaves revolted, monsters freed from chains and joined the fight, and soon the bane of a slave-taking empire, a wide slave revolt, spread through the first layer of the Kheper regression.

The temperate and wet realm was soon free of their government as Avatars and Ranthas did the things they did best, breaking first power, then morale, then faith.

The second realm, one of canyons and dark river valleys between walls of rock, was occupied by cliff-dwelling and vine-hanging numbers of savage beast-men, whose existence had fallen into dust and ruin with the vanished rivers in the future to come. Unable to leave without Immortal Power, they had died when the rains failed at some point and the place was mostly drained dry of true life, the last of them falling in buried caverns, leaving the world there to the occasional haunt, spook, or deathless undead wandering around in frustration and fury at its ancient death.

In this day and time, they formed savage armies of regressed morlocks who threw stones at us and hounded us along the river canyons, eager to meet us and fight us at the places where their crude trails and homes came down to the waters. They could mass to fight us to the death with little more than stones, spears, claws, and teeth, while the serpentine, tentacled river horrors surfaced to feed upon all and sundry as they could. Drums pounded, degenerate savages shouted the name of Bhelemu, and a rowdy time was had by all.

The third tier was a desert realm, but the inhabitants had built up along a strong river valley that was only dust and sand in the future. They were masters of making and using Constructs, and we had to deal with many Living Statues, Lesser Golems, a few Greater Golems, several Juggernauts, and a few unique Constructs of strange and unique variety as we came out several hundred yards offset from the Portal entry and thus caught them by surprise.

They were humanish, but came in sizes, colors, and with widespread genetic anomalies among them from a limited gene code and adaptations meant to improve on humanity, along with a tendency for multiple arms and a degradation to attunement with earth and sand, like ancestors of the sand folk of Darkmoor’s time.

Unlawfully taken from NovelFire, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Also, some of them had laser weapons.

The sphinxes that guarded the vast temple complex were Gargantuas, bound to their posts by ancient science corrupted into magic. The Mick had only encountered the slowly-petrifying female in the future, but in the present we cut their services short by hundreds of millennia.

Construct-bots with stylized eggs for heads assaulted us within using some bastardized organic technology that had a fondness for grenades and explosives, and which power we shut down as part of clearing the entire realm of any traces of that technology.

The high moors and cold, dark plains of the fifth tier’s realm were full of life this time through, nomadic tribes of genetically-made slaves riding on endless parades of supplication from one communication node turned altar-shrine to the next, their painted yellow-skinned qullan masters and priests spouting Chaotic gibberish and directing them to destroy us with hauteur and fanaticism.

Six-legged mounts part rhino and part lizard vied with frog-faced dinosaurs and worm-faced flying polyps and hovering star-fish jellies in carrying the bionids to meet us, ancient armor of technology scattered among them with failing power swords and chainsaw axes, and war machines half-elemental and half crystalline ooze rolled to the attack, while mechs made of animated bones and parts of power armor bombarded us.

Really, it was quite explosive and rather exciting, and without a lot of energy resistance, we would have been as dead as doornails.

Likewise, this Tier had faded monstrously, its inhabitants falling to bones and dust over a x1000 time flow that had seen four million years pass before the Mick had entered his side, and they had long fallen to time’s embrace and the erosion of the world, leaving little to no signs of survivors behind, only the node with Immortal-Power attached to its Portal able to withstand the passing of endless ages.

The name of Bhelemu spilled forth from their lips despite their isolation, the inscrutable egg-like face of their god and probably creator carved everywhere with mad joy, yet all had fallen into dust when the Mick had passed through with no clue they were ever there on the Far Shore.

This was turning the epic trip into quite the distorted science fantasy.

The time acceleration meant that regardless of how long we took here, almost no time was passing outside. The things we were encountering were a mixture of time-lost savages, wildly mutated genetic constructs, and twisted and degenerate planar beings caught in a sealed realm and falling half to madness.

The resemblance to the Egg of Coot and whatever force had been behind its corruption and motivation was hard to miss, especially with advanced qullans running aberrant biotech so seamlessly.

We came through the Portal with the usual hundred-meter offset, not daring to come right on the Portal itself lest things be camping it in great numbers, as they had on the second tier.

The sun beat down with a heavy weight. The realm should have been a rocky, cold desert of abrupt mesas and rocky columns, like the earth itself was rejecting parts of itself.

Instead we found ourselves looking out over an almost perfect salt flat: hot and sterile and tasting of bitter alkalines in the air. Acid resistance went up immediately, as well as Vajras to make sure none of the dust stuck to any of us, while the air was preciously low on oxygen and with a mix of gasses that would prove lethal without Adaptation to the environment.

“Time-severed!” Lunia declared instantly, looking over all of it, the short and dark-haired, dark-eyed Avatar of Aru studying the whole thing with an unkind expression.

Dama Adama whistled softly. “That takes a rare amount of power and commitment to pull off, let alone yoke and chain it to an existing realm. The terrain is very different from what you described, Lady Edge.”

“Time-severed. A timeline that was supposed to vanish, but whose inhabitants realized it and fought to stay in existence?” I asked for clarity.

“Yes,” Lunia nodded. “They are rare, but Chaos makes such things possible. Timelines which should have faded become severed from past and future drift around dimensional spaces, and become like this, demi-planes attempting to justify their own existences and form a new reality, while attempting to stave off the decay eating at their own existences. What you see before us should not be.”

Arbor was kneeling on the ground, running his hand across the lethal soil. “There is no life here,” the most powerful druid among us said calmly. “This ecology failed and collapsed hundreds of thousands of years past, at the least. Time rages through this place, twisted and bent, but this land was preyed upon for everything that could be taken from it, until it had no more to give.”

“It is so dead even death wants nothing to do with it?” Catleya quipped with a knowing sniff.

Arbor just nodded at the quip. “And I think we can all see what is responsible.” He got up, flicking the dust from his hands, his tall and lean figure radiating a rare resolve for combat. Flora had been a goddess of farms and community and agriculture, preferring growing things to battle, but was not above defending her people if required, as farmers defended their fields and ranchers their herds.

“This looks like technology, not magic,” Helos judged, surveying the magic of this place. “The magic feels… repelled by the existence of this place, as if it is trying to grasp it and break it down, and is instead being forcefully restrained. Chaos is being held at bay by Weird Science at its apex.”

“There’s a pattern to the layouts of those domes,” Molniya declared firmly, huntress’ eyes sussing out a formation. “Like… circuits on a computer board?” she half-asked, glancing at me, and I nodded agreement with the observation.

“High tech can stave off temporal collapse? That is some impressive technology… and given its effect on the time-stream and magic, completely antithetical to natural existence,” Haki uttered. “I think a better comparison on such a level would be boils on a baked hide, or leeches attached to a withered corpse.”

“There is nothing to heal here,” Iatro agreed sadly, our best Healer looking around for anything worth saving. “The domes are visual perfection, but to reality, they are a disease it is trying to crush and failing.”

“Then I think that settles where we are going, and what we have to do,” Jian half-laughed, his Bow flipped back over into his Quiver quickly. “Do you think we have to destroy all of them, or merely break the formation?”