The Power of Ten

“It’s down below a million,” I Told everyone, and eyes flickered up at the fading darkness and the lightening greyness beyond.

The sun and open sky were so close now...

Its Shroud was only half a mile across now. Still pinned and burning, the Shroudlord could only watch and struggle futilely as it felt the faint tinges of the last of its faithful slaves perishing.

There hadn’t been any new incorps for the past hour; all that remained to arrive were the undead on foot. Once it dropped below Dark Minister in size at 500k, it would completely lose control over any undead outside its Deadzone (also rapidly shrinking), meaning something trapped under a collapsed wall somewhere wasn’t going to stop the Shroud from shattering.

Div spells, especially Communes, were digging those out, too.

Only the slowest undead were left, trekking in with untiring persistence. Most of the walls had gaps and cracks in them after Guiogg had come down, in addition to them normally being stationed near gates and the like as the inner walls were made, allowing them to be moved back and forth more easily. Thus, getting the undead here hadn’t been as hard as it might have been.

The devastation along the length of the White Road only helped, and if the undead happened to burn up on the way, no skin off our noses.

Much of the damage to the land itself had been repaired, chasms and crevasses split open by the Devouring Moon coming back together, often forming jagged hill lines or valleys as they did so. But they were no longer gaping open all the way to the Felldeep... which some of them definitely had been.

The last few Congregants didn’t even make it to the Wall, focused fire’d down before they could reach it, almost disdainfully. That was when everyone put their Weapons away and just waited for the last of them to come.

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Some days ago...

“So, are you finally going to tell me why you bothered to take out Kali? You could have just left them all to rot in their prison for centuries once the Shroud was done?” I asked Legion softly during our hours of downtime, helping power up Baneskulls.

Not wasting a day. Too ingrained to stop now.

Legion laid a hand on my shoulder, their hair undulating to the eye, and real eyes materializing on their Masked face. “It was because mariliths can bear many children,” they admitted softly.

I fought really hard to keep a smile off my face. “Exactly how many?” I had to ask, a bit of trivia about greater demonesses I didn’t know.

“Twenty.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “And you want to use pathogenesis to have them with me?” I asked carefully. “You know I won’t be here to help you raise them.”

There was golden fire burning on their shoulders, but Master Fred wrote nothing, just showing that he was there. He couldn’t have children; the hellfire had already taken that from him before I met him, before he was Bound to Heaven.

He wasn’t going to deny any of us this, however, for me, and for his Legion and Cohort.

Indeed, he was the one making it possible!

Another dark hand with very white nails rose up to caress my cheek. “There are a bunch of us who didn’t have children, Trav,” Daisy said in a voice with all the desire in it. “We would love to have children by you, and the Hell Pact can’t stop us, now.”

I leaned into a hand stronger than steel, sensitive as gossamer, our Pacts crackling against one another in resonance. “That’s going to take some time to do,” I found myself grinning, and an arc of white blossomed in response.

“We are patient,” Daisy said, moving forwards to meet me as she pulled me closely with irresistible softness. “There are going to be a whole lot of Morningdark halvyri to carry on your name,” she promised.

Halvyri racial dominance followed the gender of the halvyr parent, and pathogenesis only produced females.

That was going to be fraternal icosuplet half-sisters aplenty!

“Well, then we’d better get on that. We have no idea when the Shroudlord is going to push the button, after all...”

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The Present...

It would have been nice to have a long grind, whittling down all the undead with no risk save recovering the bodies of anyone slain. Picking off Constructs in wait, massacring the undead and the incorps, killing safely until it activated the Formation in a grand gesture to deny us after testing us out with a line of champions we could challenge and overcome in some classical format.

Unfortunately, the timesighting Avatar of the Thing had seen the river of fate coming, calculated that we’d had plenty of options to get there fast once we reached a certain distance, and forced the play just in time.

It had totally been the right thing for it to do, as we’d proven. If it had waited even an hour more, we could have made it all the way to the Formation, shattered it, and sent Guiogg and its two-for-one meal of a Devouring Moon and our living world away, leaving it with nothing.

Obfuscating the existence of the Pyramid in the threads of time had been part of my job. Defensive spells that absolutely stopped something generally matched up against spells a Valence higher... but the Thing’s avatar was definitely wielding some post-Twenty stuff, using the Source Code of magic to do what needed to be done.

Astral Ward at VIII thus only cut off Divinatory effects up to IX.

The Earth Spell Metamagic Feat: When Casting a spell while in contact with the ground, it is automatically treated as one Valence higher. Normally, nothing but +1 to the save, and maybe +8 Boosted Elemental damage to my Shards.

Point of trivia... Source Code magic, i.e., Legendary Spellcasting, is always treated as X Valence.

IX Raised Astral Ward about the Pyramid trumped X temporal awareness, and the Aberrant couldn’t see what was going to happen with anything dealing with the Pyramid, making its implementation of its plans look like a roaring success in all the timestreams, instead of the utter disaster it had turned out to be.

Diviners are not people to play Timesight games against, and I had a LOT of inherited experience wielding Divinations and messing with that Sight, even before Beyond Law and Chaos really messed things up for it.

The Morituri Warlocks had drawn themselves up behind me, an odd quiet settling across the group as everyone watched the sands trickle down in the form of undead running haplessly to their doom.

Five hundred thousand undead, and the Haze basically collapsed down to the very limited Deadzone left behind. In the far distance past the horizon, troops and supply workers had run away pell-mell as all the trucked-in fuel and munitions brought here so laboriously started to go off loudly and violently, and everyone wielding a Named Firearm hurriedly Morphed it to an Autobow, just in case.

Grenades and bullets were tossed in the general direction of numbers of undead; sometimes useful, mostly just getting rid of them ahead of time.

All the electronics fried. The valiant air cavalry who’d managed to get back in time and ground themselves could only watch their planes spark, catch fire as plastics and insulation decayed and spontaneous combustion took them. The aviation fuel lit off, and flames roared forth, soon engulfing them forever. The valiant mechanical steeds that had just annihilated the greatest armored cavalry force in history died burning, and their pilots could only stand there and watch them die.

There were some places that had secretly stored refined nuclear material, and the Wild Magic blew out in crazy spheres of random creation, converting everything in their blast areas into something whimsical and magical, including anything living. The number of magical creatures and beasts born out of the explosions would no doubt bedevil the world for a very long time, and what they were doing to the area around the blasts wasn’t any fun, either.

Behind us, a dark shade began to gather up on the point of the Pyramid, where the greatest magic of this world was now gathering.

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A few days ago...

I held up the diamond to Sama. Within it glowed a single soul, partially stolen from the Shroud, Runes racing around and about it that would lead her to reincarnation.

“It took a Boosted Miracle from Haru’Ara to do this,” I told her as she accepted it calmly. “It won’t be effective until the Shroud comes down, but then she can reincarnate, at least.”

Source Code magic just to isolate one soul from the Shroud, and even then, it wouldn’t work until the Shroud actually collapsed here.

Sama eyed the diamond, looked at me with those heavens-blue eyes, and nodded slowly. Without any change in expression, she tossed the gem back and swallowed it, further isolating it within her Null, which even the Shroud couldn’t breach. “Is she okay with coming back as a Rantha Hag?” she asked me directly.

“She lived her whole life without magic. I think coming back as a total ass-kicking bitch who doesn’t need to rely on magic and can take on her own path in life will be totally appropriate for her.”

Sama grinned with all four sets of canines. “Damn right! Don’t you worry, Briggs and me will have this,” she patted my shoulder reassuringly, cocking her hip just so. “The Glory Award is going to make everyone pretty horny, y’know,” she winked at me.

I had to laugh despite myself.

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The Present...

The Shroud was starting to condense, losing its foundation, pushed out by the reality here... and the pressure of the waking World-Mind of Terra, focused on the shiny Pyramid behind us.

That meant all the many, many souls of those here trapped in the Shroud, from this world and those before it, were all condensed into the shaking darkness above us.

The last hundred thousand undead were coming this way, dissolving into nothingness as they hit the Walls of liquid absolution there, streams of dead flesh and bone.

The Shroudlord had dropped all the way down, fallen from Hierophant to Cardinal, then Fellbishop to Bishop, and now to a mere Dark Minister, a guttering shadow of the power it had once wielded. It still would have been terrifyingly dangerous just as a melee combatant, but all the supplemental power and control over a population of nigh half a billion undead it had once commanded was gone.

“I address the Souls in the Shroud.” Thunder rang through the dark clouds above, and the hate lightning couldn’t even manifest as the first rays of Aru’s Light stole through it. “There are those of you who earned everything the Shroud is doing to you, and if and when we ever best the Shroud, you are going to a very, very bad place.

“For the rest of you, I know your existence is torment. You were meant for better places and an existence in the hereafter.

“If you cannot endure this pain, if you cannot watch as we march against the Shroud and attempt to unmake what has been made of it, now is the moment you can declare it is done.

“Normally this point is reserved for the end of your existence in the hereafter, where you merge with the Realm of your destination. But here, at this time, as you are drawn away, you can instead choose to fight it, if only for a moment... and the vivus will rise up, and return you to Mother Terra Herself, instead of the hereafter.

“Your moment comes! Make your choice... endure and stave off oblivion for another day, trust in the living to set you free, or advance your end and return all that you were to the cycle of life!”

The dark clouds churned, and more openings appeared in them. A vortex began to appear, white and grey and black, in the sky over the Pyramid of Terra over there.