MAGUS INFINITE

I lay against the base of the north face of the pyramid and looked up at the miles of stone. The Scripts that had been burning there were mostly dark now. The hardening was failing. The pyramid was groaning like a ship in a storm, and I did not think it had much time left.

The stranger was walking towards me, unhurried. I could feel the confidence radiating from that insect-like body. The more I looked at this abomination, the less I thought of them as gods. They were something else.

I did not think I was looking at a Demon, and I did not think this was a Celestial, but what else could there be?

Getting up took longer than I would like to describe. I should not have been alive. The Law of Flesh did not fix my back so much as decide which pieces it could spare. My spine was in pieces. I got my one leg under me and the stump of the other against the wall and pushed, and I slowly rose.

I was not fond of meeting my enemy on my back.

It was a good thing they had thrown me so far, or I would not have had the time to get back on my feet.

The stranger came over the rim, and behind him the god’s hands closed on the edge, and the great burning skull came over it, and the two of them looked down into the bowl at me.

I saw their mouths moving, but I was not paying attention. I was running the final numbers over and over in my head.

And then, because I am what I am, and I let my mouth go ahead of me, I looked up at the two of them and spoke.

”You asked what I was making.”

The stranger stopped, and he must have sensed something in my eye, because he cocked his head to the side. ”Enlighten me.” Then he looked up and chuckled. ”You want to know something funny... I believe this is the first time in a very long time that I have said enlighten me twice in one night.”

”Ah, interesting,” I nodded. ”It is also funny that I don’t even know what I am making, and yet I have risked my life for it. Well, here goes nothing.”

I put the pen to my own chest, and I wrote the eighty-first mark.

∞

The marks all lit up at once. Every small dim scratch in the walls and the floor and the air and the dead and the god of bones and the stranger’s own wrist. They lit up with a golden light.

My left ear popped and my hearing came back, just as a gasp of surprise came out of the stranger and the Necromancer, and they turned to look at the glowing marks that surrounded us. The scale of what I had been writing was fully revealed, and I could see that both of them were surprised at how many marks I had made.

”What is this?” The cold voice of the Necromancer slithered into my ears.

That was a very good question, since the truth was that I was discovering it myself.

The glowing marks suddenly ripped themselves from every surface I had written on, and they slammed together, and a strange Script appeared in the air between me and the stranger. It glowed so brightly that I looked away for a moment. When I looked back, the glow had gone, the Script was gone, and there was only a faint wisp of smoke in the air that soon vanished too.

What... was that it?

My mouth fell open in surprise, and then the laughter of the stranger boomed out. I collapsed onto my knees, and the light in my pen went dark. Disappointment flooded my mind for a brief moment before I pushed it aside.

It was always a long shot. I was playing with forces I did not fully understand, and it was surprising how far I had been able to reach with Inscription alone.

I really wanted to kill this Necromancer and that damned stranger. It was strange, I did not know when I had become comfortable calling this creature the stranger, but it just felt right.

The ground shook as the stranger began moving towards me, and at first that hid what was happening, but then I noticed that the dust was moving in an unnatural way.

It was moving sideways, with increasing speed, towards the place where the Script had appeared and vanished. All the dust and the loose sand were pouring towards that point in the air, and then vanishing.

I was not the only one who noticed, but the change accelerated faster than anyone there could follow. The living dead closest to it were pulled in, then the broken floor, the pieces of slab, the glass from the trenches, the burning corpses in their hundreds of thousands. Every single thing that was not fixed to something larger was being drawn towards that point.

It was not hard to see that the pull was growing stronger the more material it consumed, and a point of light was flickering in the centre of that small black... hole in space.

The stranger looked down at his own feet. His remaining claws had begun to dig into the ground as the pressure started to affect him.

Somewhere above and behind him, the green fire in that strange world came pouring out of the largest door as the power of this black hole began to draw it in.

Part of me coolly observed that the weight of that flame was so slight, and the pull was still enough to drag it across from another world. You would think swallowing fire would barely affect the hole, and that was far from the truth, because the pull kept growing.

I clearly did not understand all the rules of what I had just made. The one saving grace was that I seemed to be untouched by it.

Above me I heard a long groan as twelve miles of hardened rock, a trillion tonnes of it, began to lean slowly inward.

The stranger slid four feet, then another four, as the force from the point dragged at his bulk.

”What have you done?” the stranger and the Necromancer growled through the rising roar.

”I told you I didn’t know,” I shrugged.