MAGUS INFINITE

I had sensed the Caelith falling during my transformation, but like everything happening, this information was just filed and placed aside; now I could no longer ignore it any more because the speed of my descent had accelerated as if the world below had grabbed the Caelith and was pulling it down faster.

Everything that was happening seemed so out of my control, from me finding myself in space to the unexpected return, it was as if the hands of fate was playing withg me, but this may just be the result of a loop that had been familiar for so long becoming something different as I took new paths that I was unable to reach when I was an Arcanist... and now, I had just acquired my first Sovereign Tier skill... I think from this point forward, everything would begin taking paths that I no longer recognize.

This was it... this was what I had been striving towards from the beginning of the loop, and now that it had arrived, I don’t know if I was ready.

I could hear my heart beating in the silence of the void, and that was the only thing I was listening to as I emptied my mind of every thought. I walked towards the edge of the Caelith, and even without Stormsteps, I used only two steps to reach the edge, and I watched the world grow in my sight, and for a while I could almost pretend I was standing still and the world was rising to meet me.

Then the tip of the Caelith touched the air, and the silence ended.

∞

The first wisps of atmosphere hit the base of the pyramid, and the world seemed to remember how to make sound. I closed my eyes as the sound washed over me, before I opened them again, and with this motion, my perception extended in front of me to such a ridiculous degree that I was able to see the entire side of the Caelith where I was standing.

A shriek, like it was coming from a woman in distress, was the first sound I heard. It was thin at first, then it rose to a roar as the air thickened and the Caelith’s speed turned it to fire.

The base of the pyramid began to glow, dull red, then orange, then a white that hurt to look at, as thirty kilometers of ancient stone plowed into the sky at a speed that turned the atmosphere itself into a blowtorch.

The flames climbed the faces of the pyramid toward me, and the roar became the loudest thing I had ever heard, a physical wall of sound, fire and torn air.

The Caelith was burning... and in my eyes, I just found it beautiful.

Sheets of the Caelith’s ancient surface peeled away in white fire and streamed behind us in a tail a hundred miles long, and because of the healing nature of this pyramid, these burning parts streamed after us, pursuing the falling pyramid like a rain of fire behind me.

We had become a comet, dragging tens of thousands of smaller comets behind us. I stood on the apex of a comet, thirty kilometers of falling fire, as the shockwave from my descent tore the skies apart for hundreds of miles.

I had seen the vision of the Caelith falling to the earth ten thousand years ago, and here I was, becoming the subject of my vision.

The flames reached the apex, and reached me. Fire and pressure that would have flashed a mortal and an Arcanist to vapor, and peeled the surface of celestial stone, hit me, and it broke on me, and it did not matter.

That was the moment I began to slowly understand what I had become.

My flesh had learned the Law of what does not yield, and the fire of a falling world was just one more pressure, one more thing that wanted to break me, and my body refused to be broken. The heat came, and my skin drank it and did not char. The force came, and my bones took it and did not bend. I stood on the apex of a burning comet in a river of fire that was eating a god’s prison alive, and I was not burning.

I stood in the white heart of the re-entry, and I laughed, and the laugh was torn away by the roar before it left my mouth, and I did not care. Let the sky have the laugh. The sky knew my name now anyway.

∞

I stood at the edge to see my world more clearly, since I could not believe how it was a hemisphere instead of a sphere, and even with the new sight I had, nothing had changed; I could only see it more clearly.

The world was still half a world, and I could see the edge of it where the land and the sea simply stopped, a horizon that should have curved on forever and instead ended. I did not have time to understand it, even though I knew that this was very damned important; it was still too large for me to hold.

I could see all seven continents from this position, and the only one that drew my concern was mine, and it was a good thing that I was falling directly towards it, but I could already see the lines of chaos spreading across it even from the air.

A tide of demons was rampaging, and even though they had not crossed a thousand miles, the fact that so much area had been devastated in such a short period of time was alarming.

∞

The world came up fast, and despite the flames I could still see my continent, going dark under the demon-tide, the stain of the ending crawling out from the southern wound across the earth... and an arm.

I turned towards the arm; it was one of the Pale Matron’s arms, and it was tearing its way east, shattering space, and causing a tide of demons to erupt from the air as they followed the arm.

At this moment, a crazy thought entered my head, and I did the arithmetic in half a second, and a grim smile touched my face.

For too long I could only stand at the sidelines and watch my world become shattered to pieces. It was time I began taking the fight to those who were responsible for this madness.

All that mattered at this moment was whether I was strong enough... well, it was time to find out. I had been a student of the apocalypse for too long; now, I should become its problem.