The game was soon afoot, and the Great Technic could not be more excited -- giddy even, for this was what he had replaced most of his body for. The ability to live long enough to have a hand in the summoning of the heroes. To wipe away the scum of the eastern continent. To take one of the shards of the deity and become an immortal in service to his god.
The God of the Shine Song -- He of the many words made one.
Yet the others were here now, the King and the Generals, the Sword Saint and the Shade, the Wizard of the Shattered West and the Wizard of the Watching East, and -- of course -- the most terrible.
That woman, Kliria, the old shaman of the north. The Great Technic could already see here in his techno-vision, though of course the wards in the palace did not allow the usage of scrying and divination magic. The annoying old crone -- her wizened finger extended for some kind of chiding diatribe that went nowhere and served to only lengthen the work that he, The Mind of the Palace and the lands of the West, would inevitably be in charge of.
The work he didn’t mind, it was the delay delay delay. This was the day! The day where he would pluck souls from beyond, where he -- and only he -- would be able to commit the great magics that five hundred years ago and five hundred before were committed.
It was certain, in all calculations and predictions, that the east would also hold their ritual at the same time. Their Sage, the same for a millenia (if not longer), would hold the feeling of the world opening in his chest just the same as all the devices attached and replacing the many parts of the Great Technic’s body. The opening was happening and it would be today!
He dragged whirring bio-mechanics infused with the sourcery of the Wizard of the Shattered West and the baubles (traded over many a year and many a favor) of the Wizard of the Watching East and his feet -- long amputated -- whirred with the increase in speed.
Soon enough, passing the marbled halls of the high spires of his tower, he eventually got to the throne room -- non-coincidentally the same room for the summoning. They were all there, the previously discussed, who all watched the Great Technic enter with aplomb as his installed vox-casters lit up with an especially elegant voice of a soprano singer that he had stolen two centuries ago.
“It seems it is the day!” he sing-songed with the off-putting clarity of the record-static voice. His robe dragged behind and another set of throat-installed vox-casters lit up with the background noise of trumpets to the tune of an old war-march. For now was truly a time of war, and the Great Technic was glad as could be.
“You’re late!” the old crone, Kliria, chided with an outstretched finger. The Great Technic was at least thrice as old as the woman but couldn’t help but roll his blue-lit and glassy ocular apertures. The woman herself was bedecked in furs of those horrid beasts of the north atop their mountains of savagery and her green skin gave her no points of beauty either. Long and drooping ears that could barely hold the weight of her bone-studded jewelry waggled to and fro with the shake of her head. Though she played at being disappointed, the Great Technic analyzed her breathing and the bio-rhythms of her heartbeat all the way from the door. She was just as excited as he was, and that lessened his annoyance if only a little.
“Great Technic, wonderful for you to join. Is it not the most glorious of days?” the king said in deadpan as light shone through the vaulted stained-glass windows in dense bars.
“It is so wonderful, and I dally not for any purpose of fashion nor rudeness!” the sing-song was particularly grating but the Great Technic was (or had been) a vain man and loved the wonder that was installed into his words. “I bring, here, the piece of greatness! The crystal of the summoned wonder!” and, from his mechanical hand hiding beneath his great-gilded cloak, did he produce the polished orb. It shone with three fractures that chased down its sides like lightning.
“Finally.” The wizards of the West and East said in their unearthly unison. The twins did little to dissuade others of the notion that they were psychically linked, and seemed to enforce it with their disturbing gestures of horrid unison.
“Pah!” an old general said while the two others, whose names the Great Technic had always refused to learn as he didn’t learn the names of snake-skin that would soon shed their coil, simply nodded along in annoyance. “You delay regardless! We have a war to win, and every second is a second of wasted resources and pushed back battlefronts. No doubt the Eastern continent already whirs their engines of war in preparation. We have reports of their ships leading towards the archipelago of the north!”
“Then it’s a good thing you have already deployed south in countenance no? And regardless, we hold the air with our ships! Let them muddle about the water, as their fishies are want to do!” Kliria spat. “Now Machine! Now, now!” she stamped her staff to the ground and let the bones there, too, shake along with the ones that studded her outfit and person both.
“Indeed, Great Technic, we all are here for one thing and I would like to return to rule.” the young King said, white hair swaying with the pierce of his golden eyes watching the Great Technic’s blue-luminescent ocular receptors.
“Indeed! Indeed!” He stepped towards the central part of the circle, the suspended platform that genuflecting knights and sweating foreign dignitaries often conversed with the royalty here, and joined the others in the circle. Like a gem slotting into a socket, the ring of runic magics lit with terrible blue clarity.
[Ritual Circle -- Engaged]
[Hero Summoning -- Engaged]
[Present Sacrifice]
Glee lit up long dormant emotional receptors in the Great Technic’s mind, things he thought he had unerringly shut off but was glad he didn’t. The pleasure flowed over him like a wave, and he saw in the eyes of the others those divine questions did much the same.
[ACCEPT] they all psychically shouted.
And from there the crystal shattered -- and the three souls were delivered.
[Hero - Blade]
[Hero - Rogue]
[Hero - Mage]
[Sacrifice Accepted]
[PREPARE FOR WAR]
--------------------------------------
The Chimes hummed with the voice of the bells, and the Great Immortal opened her eyes. All three looked towards the five dogezaing towards her. She flicked her wrist and The Chimes, the eight gilded skulls of poets of the most high, silenced their harmonized song.
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“It is time.” she said, her voice enforced with power that sent a shiver through her vassals. She had to hold her tongue more often than she liked, an unintended consequence of her Path -- or the end of the Paths themselves. She didn’t quite know, as the old Masters were long dead after the last War and the others that could answer her questions were probably meditating uselessly somewhere in the Great Pillars or among forgotten sects.
“Yes, Most Beautiful One, there is little in the way of roadblocks -- we are ready for the new Beautiful.” said her Sage, still living from the first tribes shattering.
“The troops are ready, and the water-walkers are helping us traverse the ice of the north. The West is no doubt doing much the same, as the south skies are filling with the many of their ships -- though they do not know of our countermeasures.” said her general.
“The talismans are ready, Most Beautiful. They are spread throughout the mountains and the sects have been called.” said her minister of state.
“The machines of war have been assembled. They are in place, and the wall is being refortified along with the many rings therein.” said her grand engineer.
Yet her Speaker of Spirit did not say anything. He stayed in his dogeza, not raising his head to stare at the ground nor did he even move when her great vision bore down with the brunt of her curious ire.
“And you, Sheisen?” she asked. And he only shivered. He shook his head. He did not move.
Then he stood, and the other four looked at him in shock. The Great Immortal looked with curiosity. And Sheisen opened his mouth to speak, raising his eyes to meet The Great Immortal’s three.
“Something is different, Most Beautiful. I feel it in the old battlefields. The spies speak of things that change at the land of The West that even they do not understand. The monsters and their kings are different. I fear the old treaties have hamstrung us, for we know not what is happening in the land of the desolate. We cannot speak their names! And the caves -- I have sent my spirits into them and it seems that even they hold strange secrets around this time of the conjunction. Most Beautiful, it is a strange time -- of that we all know -- but there is something stranger still with the way the eddies of the realm flow. There is something strange afoot! I --” he spoke and The Great Immortal raised her hand.
“Silence, for you speak of things We know already. It is a strange time, indeed, and we bring forth stranger partners to our lands. Worry not, Sheisen. We bring forth stranger things still. Now, you hold the orb?” she ended by asking, each word a thumbprint into the fabric of reality.
“Yes, Most Beautiful.”
“Then we begin.” she said, and the roots that made up the chamber thrummed with life. The silks and banners fluttered as her intent became the will of the room itself. The great wonders in the chamber, the eyes of the nine-beast, the skulls of the poets, everything hummed together with her power.
Sheisen held up the crystal and the others lent their power, middling in the face of The Great Immortals. It cracked in three and only then did She sing.
“We will cast the other devils out, for we shall succeed in holy purpose. The Divine shall be as wondrous! For let not the four demons they hold be claimed as divine! Our four shall be true! For in the Four is reality bent to the will of the great! The Greatness that they shall rise and become as one with this world! Rise!” she commanded to the crystal and it shattered into three shards.
[Hero - Path of Blood]
[Hero - Path of Light]
[Hero - Path of Darkness]
[Sacrifice Accepted]
[PREPARE FOR WAR]
------------------------------------
There were very few who knew the truth, and of them that did a majority rushed towards the release of death -- from their hands or another’s.
Shaman Kio did not seek death, that was cowardice when confronted with this demon without a name besides ‘reality’. His people were harmed by this truth, found so long ago and made to be lesser because of it. The others, those on the two main lands, did not have the information or the gumption to end it -- to be heroes in suffering as Shaman Kio’s people were.
They let madmen become their voice, they let the return consume them again and again.
Neither did Kio let the light side of madness take him, the idea that it would be all right in the end and all would come together -- hand in hand -- and nothing would truly be wrong in the end. This, too, was cowardice (and one that Kio held in a higher contempt than the seeking of death itself -- that was at least honest).
No, Kio was old and had many years spent in contemplation but this was not his state of being. He was a man of action denied his time. A warrior with an enemy that was as a mountain, that was as a pillar that held up the world. What use was it to throw oneself against it? Should all the petitioners beneath and around him who held high their soul-stones with the glow of their own life-force and existence?
No, for his people were not cowards. Their convictions were set into their dark rings in their eyes and pallid sweating flesh and chipped nails and the veins of dark black that coursed ‘round their lips and their clawed feet and and and…
And they were ready. They were ready to take it over, if not the whole thing then at least one of them -- throw a bet into the great gamble and the fixed game. To, at the very least, try.
“I call upon you, on our island -- for our souls! What use is it to decay among these stones and dread battlefields that are cast into with a play -- play of gods that we ourselves set on their way like shepherds to our own damnation? What use is it to hide in our hovels of deep stone, drilled into the world to become as our cousins in those caves, who attack us even now as they have forgotten themselves? None. No use. Only one action -- an action that is the last of our decisions. The final death, cast out from even the heavens and hells of the betrayer Gods.
“I am Kio, Shaman of the People of the Land, Holder of the Key of the Old Ways and the Ancient Beasts. We are! We are! We are!” he shouted at the end, he bellowed his cry and was joined by his people.
“Those on either land have thrown to us pearls while calling us swine! They promise freedom and love, they promise if only we would defect from this prison to which we live, and some have -- of that we all know of betrayal. And some have made their descent. And others gave in to despair and walked to the Waterfall and the Mountain and made their bones at their base and rose to the tops with their pearls of pity clutched and acted like the swine they were believed to be.
“We, though in our honor and clear minds, have suffered for not doing so. For not skipping our ways to false power in towers where they claim themselves sage and claw away at the old and great word of ‘wizard’ where their Karma is made due eternal. For not running to the waters and becoming as animal for the east. For not sprinting to the mountains as creatures of war for the west. For not stealing the secrets of the old and defiling them as a raider bucking into the hips of a screaming maiden, child in hand for consumption and savagery. For all are savages when their actions, their lives, are truly taken into account and the effects shown.”
Kio took a sharpened claws of his hand and plunged them into his chest. The surrounding hundreds, hungry and ready, watched unblinkingly as their long ears bobbed with each word and sound as even the wind had shunned this stone desolate land.
“They claim they hold heroes?” he asked.
“They hold horrors!” they answered. Kios chest bled green blood that glowed with potency that those who claimed themselves ‘Sage’ and ‘Wizard’ would gawk openly at something so grand dripped into the ground. Kio’s wife, pride beaming in her face, slit her wrists and let them flow -- along with the hundred all around as their soul-stones glowed a blinding purple.
“It is as the old summons, the old ways, and here in the dry stone bed of the old lake bereft of all but the stones of desolation -- we make the lake our own. They hold horrors, not heroes.
“But we need but a single Hero to cast stones towards their false-pearls. We summon you, thou, thee -- we summon and temper and forge you. And so we call to the Great Concept.
“They ask for this, the eternal rebellion. We bring forth the end of it. So arrive, hero, and do not delay. Though we hold the consternation of the spurned we are not things of hate.” Kio collapsed onto his knees and many others did as well all around. The blood loss was too great and no other light but the green and purple shone forth -- it consumed the world in its entanglement.
“We ask the Hero one thing. Go forth and be -- for we trust you with our souls. Go forth and exist, for that will be what our hero needs to do. Go forth and be. And so shall you sow the seeds into the dirt where others would salt the ground. You, the great blossom. You, our hero.”
And the People of the Land of Desolation died, a great glowing pool of power in a land where none still lived.
[HErO -- HERo -- HERO Su-- HERO SUMMONED]
[UNKNOWN]
[Sacrificial Overload -- Accepted]
[LET CRY THE HEART AMONG THE STARS]
[PREPARE FOR WAR]