The life force, or ‘magic’, that connects all beings has no name by which it calls itself, simply because it has no need for such trivialities as speech. Therefore, in the interests of avoiding confusion, allow me to refer to it by my favourite term among those given to it in myriad languages of humankind — Elariel, a delightfully inventive name meaning “living force of life” courtesy of the nation of Anor. Elariel flows deep within the planet’s crust, at depths that for much of human civilisation seemed impossible to reach. Yet it is little more than a shadow of a greater, far more ancient magic, that runs much deeper still, into the planets very core. This ancient magic is much too old for any lifeform today to know how to harness it, and lacks any name in human language that I can provide you because humans have no idea it exists. Like the drifting of continents, it flows slowly, but with relentless momentum.
As humanity hoarded Elariel for their cities, this ancient magic was drawn from the core of the planet, flowing thick like geological syrup, to fill the void that was left behind. Decades passed this way, constituting a great many generations in human terms, but hardly a blink of an eye in the grand timescales that ancient magic acts upon. As much of the world’s surface grew deprived of Elariel, the natural lifeforms that relied upon it, including most plantlife and many small insects and rodents, entered a spiral towards extinction. However, the same lack of Elariel that triggered this catastrophe had also allowed the ancient magic of the core to reach nearer the crust than it had at any point since the planet’s formation, and it was able to extend its influence towards these plants, rooted as they are into the physical body of the planet, and freeze them in a kind of stasis. Having made this connection, it also became able to exert its enigmatic will upon the surface in more concrete ways, and this is where my kin and I enter the story.
For my own part, I was born naked in a forest ditch, a day’s walk from the nearest human settlement. Hardly dignified, but not out of keeping with my thousands of siblings who were also popping up elsewhere in every corner of the world, both inside and outside of the cities. Our task was simple. We were to mingle among humanity, learning what we could about the state of the world, all the while spreading whispers to ensure that when the time came, they would why. We lived this way for almost a decade, feeling the ancient magic growing closer with each passing day, until we could feel it tickling at the soles of our feet.
The time had come for nature to reassert itself.
The histories, if any are to be written, will likely say that the calamity struck everywhere at the same time, perhaps as the clocks ominously chimed the hour. The human penchant for the poetic is one of the first things I learned in my time among them, and will likely prove their most enduring attribute. Unfortunately for the poets, though it all unfolded with relative simultaneity, their dramatic opening line would not be strictly true. In truth, the first of the cities to be hit was Ingel, in Ashlia. Followed an entire hour later by Yamur in Erva, and the twin cities of Ceral and Greel on the eastern coast of Hera roughly twenty minutes after that. Some consolidation may be found in the fact that the remaining eight, at least, were indeed struck within only a handful of minutes or even seconds of one another.
The ‘calamity’ I am referring to, of course, is the process by which every last city in the world that had grown gorged on the nectar of Elariel was felled by a menagerie of colossal creatures born straight of nature itself, a number of which I will detail here:
Ironically enough, despite being the first to be hit, Ingel was among the last to meet its utter destruction. The reason being that the harbingers of its fate were a trio of unhurried, lumbering tortoises that were not only the size of small mountains, but had quite literally been small mountains only an hour prior, their shells still thick with forests and snowy peaks. In the many years of rapid technological development since they first embarked on their exploitation of Elariel, humans had — perhaps understandably — neglected to develop a means for repelling attack by semi-sentient landscapes, thus providing these great tortoises free rein to walk through the city unimpeded, tumbling skyscrapers simply by walking into them. Apparently working up an appetite from all of the exertion, at one point, one member of the trio stopped for a while to take a bite of, well, an entire public park before carrying on its way.
Scurrying over and around these tortoises, and in fact present in almost every city, were gangs of spiders built like small islands, their long, spindly limbs stabbing great trenches into the ground wherever they were placed. These critters found great delight skittering up to the top of the tallest skyscrapers they could find and swaying their bodies back and forth until the foundations broke and brought the whole things down, often setting off a domino effect on the surrounding buildings. Being pulled straight from humanity’s worst nightmares, the primal fear they instilled in all those who witnessed them was perhaps the only thing they were good for, as their random and uncoordinated destruction did more to slow down their colossal companions than to assist them.
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On the coast of Hera, meanwhile, the twin cities of Ceral and Greel were first struck by an immense surge of water that lurched out of the sea with little warning to sweep clean through most of the city. In its wake followed an enormous octopus that slithered over — or rather through — the sea wall, slapping its limbs around with wild abandon, and on more than one occasion plucking skyscrapers from the ground and swinging them around like clubs. The great cargo ships traversing the oceans were not spared either, crushed between the coils of massive eels or dragged down to the depths by truly giant squids.
From the skies, eagles and falcons dropped an assortment of debris ranging from entire mountain peaks to some more of the aforementioned cargo ships, before compounding the carnage further with hurricane winds produced by a few strong beats of their wings. At the same time, entire sections of cities may be dropping out of sight into vast caverns borrowed beneath them by train-sized worms and moles. Residents of Regua had a rude awakening in the middle of the night when their own destruction was kicked off by a mob of frogs, each as big as a sports stadium, hopping straight out of the wide River Reg that cut through the south side of the city.
There was an aim to the wanton destruction, however, with the ultimate prey of these behemoths being the sprawling power plants in the centre of each city. You can build a wall as many metres thick as you like, with toughest materials know to science, but there is essentially little one can do architecturally to provide protection against a collection of creatures several times the size of the building itself, especially when some of them are armed with other buildings.
The end, when it came, played out in much the same way across every city, albeit with some variation in the creatures responsible. However, as I was personally witness to the fate of Yamur, it is their particular case that I will recount.
It was early evening as the anaconda slithered its way serenely across the ruins of the city, dwarfing many of the fallen skyscrapers it passed over. Before long, it reached a large complex centred on a great metal dome reaching 200-metres-high and as spanning as wide as a small town, with a series of circular silo-like towers twice its height running around the circumference. Across the entire structure was a jostling swarm of truck-sized ants that had been hard at work for some time using their powerful pincers to chip away at any structural weaknesses they could find.
Despite the anaconda’s mammoth size, its smooth scales made little noise as it flowed over the complex’s walls and meandered around the buildings inside. Upon reaching the dome, it began calmly to coil itself around the structure two, three, four times. And then it started to squeeze. Almost immediately, the outer towers began to buckle, quickly followed by a collection of small explosions dotted at random points around the circumference. One after another, more towers crumpled, setting off further explosions each time until, with a sudden jolt, every remaining tower caved in at once in a ring of fireballs, slamming the anaconda’s bulk into the body of the main dome. Greatly weakened by nibbling ants and rocked by numerous explosions, its outer walls withstood for only a handful of seconds before crumbling, triggering a sequence of much greater explosions all over the structure. This all appeared to prove too much abuse for the anaconda, which, rather than die writhing in agony, dissolved back into the river from which it was originally formed, sending a great tsunami flooding into the power plant from all sides.
A few minutes later, the entire landscape was illuminated in a burst of light and shaken by. The explosions and floodwaters had finally overwhelmed whichever fail-safes were in place within the power plant and led to a cascade of failures within its containment systems, violently unleashing the reservoir of Elariel it had been feeding on. A great pillar of light pierced the sky. At its base, all that remained of the complex was a crater scorched completely black. Above, rain began to pour in torrents that would not relent for several hours through the night.
As this scene was repeated across the world, the colossi returned to nature, be it by settling back down into their former roles as parts of the landscape, or dissolving into the sea foam, sand, or soil they had formed from. The atmosphere is once again rich with Elariel as it spreads across the land with the rains, and the ancient magic is withdrawing back towards the core. As it does so, my kin and I will lose the force that animates us, and our bodies will soon die, to fertilise the soil where we fall.
Sitting upon a damp hillside, I feel a faint breeze tussle my hair, and turn to see the sun peaking over the horizon, lighting up a clear, blue early morning sky.
With quickly gathering pace, its warm rays rush across the landscape towards me. Wherever they pass, the dewy flowers open up to welcome them.