Founder struggled to breathe, his eyes rolling wildly as space warped and broke next to his ear. Somehow, things had only gotten progressively worse for him ever since he’d gotten his Fate shroud. Which, frankly, seemed impossible. The ability to manipulate Fate should only result in positive outcomes, logically speaking. It was the whole reason he’d bent over backwards to form this specific shroud for himself.
But now he was being slowly killed by one of the children that had invaded his secret base and broken or stolen half of his high-quality experiments. It was embarrassing, more than anything. More than that, he’d been halfway through getting the heck out of here, wanting nothing to do with the dimensional hole that he’d sort of, maybe, had something to do with making.
But it’s not like that’s what he’d meant to do! Something he’d willingly explain, if this brute would stop choking him!!
Luckily, he seemed to realize the error in asking for answers with your hand around someone’s throat before Founder passed out or died. He fell over immediately and started coughing, trying to suck in a lungful of precious air.
“Pathetic. You haven’t even figured out how to use your shroud to sustain yourself? It’s literally the same as breathing.” The kid with the scary arm scoffed.
Founder wanted to shoot back with a scathing comment, but he still couldn’t catch his breath. He also realized that his shroud was, in fact, trying to help him. He’d just been ignoring it, like an idiot. As soon as he let Fate flow into his lungs like it had been trying to do, his breath came deep and even.
“Huh. I thought only certain shrouds can heal.”
“Shows what you know. All shrouds will move to keep their shrouded alive and healthy. They may not be especially quick about fixing you up from serious harm, but it is within every shroud’s domain to ensure their shrouded doesn’t die from simply being choked for a moment.” His scowling face swung around to face away from Founder. “But I’m not here to give you a lesson you obviously need in how to not be complete shit at using your shroud. Start telling me what you did to my Blade. I need more information.”
Blade? The portal device. Founder caught on. So it was this one that had made that thing. Such an interesting piece of ethertech, especially so since it wasn’t even tangentially based off of one of his own designs. In Founder’s experience, shrouded were an uncreative and lazy lot that had never made an effort to understand his genius. Let alone improve upon it. But now he had such a specimen standing in front of him.
It was not a comfortable feeling.
“Well?”
The growled question snapped Founder out of his introspection. “Right! I was trying to use it to leave this abysmal universe. I recognized that the ‘Blade’ as you called it was capable of piercing the restrictions around our corner of the Material Plane. I figured I could modify it to get me out of here. Honestly, I was ok with being literally anywhere else but here.”
“...”
“That’s what you were actually aiming for the whole damn time.” The shrouded laughed without an ounce of humor. “It wasn’t about being a weapons magnate or conquering the shrouded or even making your own shroud. All of it was just steps to get you out of here. This whole time we were trying to figure out what the grand scheme was, and you were just trying to run away. Because you’re a coward.”
{}
It was almost funny. Almost. Now that he’d realized the truth, Caeden felt bad for not seeing it sooner. After the first couple of times encountering the founder’s creations, it was pretty obvious that their maker was both highly intelligent, full of themselves, and a coward. At every turn, the man made every attempt to obfuscate and distance himself from everything he did. Always hiding, never putting himself in a position where the consequences of his actions could reach him.
Would it make sense for someone like that to, once they had a shroud, to change their ways? No, it wouldn’t. He was still trying to get some distance, to run away, even at the very end. Even if it meant leaving their universe entirely.
This was the villain we were all worried about. The one that nearly killed us on multiple occasions. It was honestly depressing. Caeden sighed, there was nothing he could have done, or would have done differently. It just sucked.
“Ok, so you were trying to leave. But the Blade is a Planar portal, not a dimensional one. And it’s keyed to a specific Plane. So you needed to remove the key and shift it to a dimensional portal. Which is not easy. And then I started messing with what you were doing.”
“Yes! You kept destabilizing the entryway over and over again!” The founder had the gall to sound indignant about Caeden’s attempts to stop him from running away from his own crimes with a portal that he stole! But Caeden let it slide. He didn’t have all the information he needed yet.
The founder was, somewhat surprisingly, fully willing to explain everything he’d done. It was more or less what Caeden had expected, until the end. The founder had done something with his shroud and Caeden had no idea what it was. The answer was outside of even his wildest expectations.
“Fate? Your shroud is actually Fate? That’s just…Nevermind.” Caeden couldn’t even be bothered to be upset at how stupid that was at the moment. He had the collapse of his universe to worry about. “So you tried to use Fate to cause the portal to open on a destination favorable to you, but instead, it latched onto the last karmic connection you’d made, drawing both portals to the Heartstone. And that’s all you’ve got for me.”
“That about sums it up, yes. I’ll admit that controlling a shroud is far more difficult than I’d originally assumed.” The founder shrugged helplessly. “It’s far less intuitive than Ki physics.”
“Can’t relate, being born with a shroud is a solid advantage. But even we go to school to increase our control. It’s amazing that you had the sheer gall to believe that you’d have superior capabilities the moment you got a shroud simply because you have an advantageous domain.” Caeden scoffed.
“To be fair, I’d assumed that I would gain a shroud without the immediate threat of death looming over me. It’s not like I assumed that there would be no adaptation period.” If Caeden didn’t know better, he’d think the founder was pouting…Nevermind, he was pouting. Such a fragile ego.
“Now, you said something about spatial collapse? That sounds…Relatively impossible, considering the functionality of a portal. It’s supposed to stabilize space, not break it down.” The founder sounded skeptical. Which, with his limited understanding, Caeden understood.
“That’s because you can’t see what I can, and you have a very flawed understanding of shrouds and domains in general, it seems. Let alone your woeful understanding of space and dimensional physics. Trying to make a portal to any other dimension? Seriously?” Caeden actually laughed at that. “Most other dimensions operate under entirely different physical principles from ours, and large swaths of them are completely inhospitable, even to a shrouded. You almost certainly would have died, if you even made it, which you wouldn't have.”
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Caeden didn’t bother to explain why the founder never would have made it to another universe. He didn’t need to know that the Starry Sea was an artificial universe, built for an experiment and under dimensional quarantine. Which also answered where the dimensional hole was going to. It almost certainly led to nowhere. An open space between universes. After all, Caeden highly doubted that his portals could break Kendr’s quarantine measures. Unless they were leading to his own domains, of course.
Which meant they had a really, really bad problem. Because Caeden was pretty sure he understood exactly what was going on now. The Heartstone had co-opted the functions of the portals and tried to travel to another dimension, one that would have likely been beneficial to the Magma Titan, borrowing from the founder’s intent to have the portal go somewhere good for him. But it obviously didn’t work because the quarantine was way stronger than the Heartstone, so it got shunted into unoccupied space.
All of which meant that the chaotically enhanced Heartstone was trying to create a new, equally enhanced Titan in a place that it would never survive. The Ki and matter it was pulling in was likely being used up just to keep the Heartstone from dissipating into nothingness. From what little he understood, gaps in reality were extremely, violently dangerous for anything from a cogent universe. The Heartstone was essentially bathing in domain-strength acid.
And now, the Heartstone was eating at the dimensional membrane to sustain itself. Something that Caeden never in a million years would have expected it to be capable of. Now that it was eating at the conceptual space itself, the limited range of the Heartstone’s consuming domain wouldn’t matter. Everything would get pulled in toward it on a fundamental level, like a sinkhole. And if the Heartstone was breaking down space, Caeden was reasonably certain that it would do the same to the Starry Sea, no matter how dense the Ki was.
Well, what are we going to do about that? Caeden thought to himself. There was no more running away. And that meant a solution was necessary. Which had him looking down at his arm. It was currently that of the Cosmic Smith. Once Caeden had recognized what exactly the modified Heartstone was doing, the rest of him had caught on, and stopped holding back.
That’s what had been limiting him this whole time. A large portion of his new soul was outside his body, much too big to fit. And since knowledge and the soul were intertwined, he lost a lot of it when he’d stepped into a meat suit too weak for his soul.
This whole time, his godly soul had been acclimating to his mortal shell and vice versa. It was a process that took time, and the consequences of forcing it were obvious, now that he’d done it. Space snapped and snarled around the limb, breaking down repeatedly and violently. A fraction of his full soul taking over just a part of his body was too much weight for the dimensional membrane to hold up, and it collapsed.
Caeden had known this when he stepped into the Starry Sea, he just hadn't remembered knowing. A frustrating problem. But putting too much weight on the dimensional fabric wasn’t that big a deal compared to it being actively eaten, so Caeden stopped holding back nearly as much. However, he felt that pushing any further might accelerate the breakdown, so he stopped with just an arm.
It would be frankly embarrassing if he ended up collapsing the universe before the Heartstone could do it just because he was overzealous. Lily would never let him hear the end of it, let alone Erik and Cat. Funnily enough, Caeden was pretty sure Asherta would forgive him. She was pretty chill.
“Idiot, focus.” Caeden shook his head, muttering to himself. He was letting the enormity of the problem get to him. Mostly because he wasn’t sure he could fix it. The dimensional hole would eat anyone that got to close, and he couldn’t think of a way to close it from a distance. Or at all.
“Ok, break it down. Problem, possible solutions. Step by step.” Caeden took in a deep breath before letting it out.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the Heartstone is making a dimensional hole. It’s just that it’s eating space. Can we stop it from doing that? Not really. We’d need to directly modify the Heartstone, which has already been massively changed by my Blades and the founder messing with Fate. And it’s on the other side of a dimensional meat grinder. We can’t get to it, at least not safely or quickly.
So, we do have to close the hole in its entirety. Caeden sighed, running his non-Cosmic Smith hand across his face. That was…less than ideal. Why is the Heartstone able to break open the dimensional fabric in the first place? The whole universe is in a quarantine! This isn’t like a normal universe, with permeable dimensional walls! It’s reinforced by…the….Pillar.
Caeden immediately shifted his gaze over to the beam of light in question. “The only reason that the Heartstone can break the barrier is because it is so far from the Pillar and the stabilizing effect it radiates. So, moving the hole closer to the Pillar will stabilize it. Maybe? Maybe.”
Tapping into his new, shroud-enhanced understanding of fundamental reality, Caeden ran some numbers on that. Based on the rate at which he could feel space destabilizing…
“It would have to go into the Pillar itself. Damn.” That was unfortunate. “But how would we move it in the first place?” Caeden continued to mutter to himself. It wasn’t like he could reach out and grab the hole, it would eat him too. And he wasn’t fully sure he’d survive getting pulled outside reality. And that was only if he could resist the modified Heartstone attempting to render every aspect of his existence into fuel.
“Need some kind of dimensional barrier. Or a spatially non-conductive substance.” Caeden’s Soul Anchor flickered, running through the possibilities. The options were limited, and unfortunate. It turned out that things which could resist a universe-ending destruction of the dimensional membrane weren’t friendly materials themselves. Every single one was just as fundamentally caustic and dangerous as the Heartstone had become.
However, one material presented an option. Wraithstone. A type of rock so deeply infused with curses and remnant souls that no kind of death could touch it, even that which destroyed universes. It also happened to infect everything around it with a twisted and pervasive curse that ate at the soul and substance of anything living. It left permanent, stubbornly resistant scars on the mind that warped personalities and essentially rendered everything into hateful, spiteful versions of their former selves.
“So that’s why I want you to use it.” Caeden finished explaining to Cat after returning to the Hearthhome and walking everyone through the problem. “I’m pretty sure your shroud will stop it from affecting you. The only issue is that I’m not sure how well you can resist the dimensional breakdown. But I figured if you chained undead together and had them use it-”
“Let me stop you right there.” Cat interrupted. “You’re right that I wouldn’t be affected by the Wraithstone, I can feel it. But none of the undead I summon can get anywhere close to the hole. I noticed it when the thing first formed. The instability eats at the spellform and collapses the contract that keeps them on the Material Plane. And the range of that effect is massive. They’d never get close enough. My raised undead could do it, but I don’t think I have enough to get the hole all the way to the Pillar. What kind of time frame are we looking at?”
“Days, tops. It’s a problem of exponential growth. The hole eating the dimensional fabric causes it to unravel faster. It seems slow now, but that’ll change in less than twelve hours. By then it’ll have taken half the continent. Three hours after that, it’ll reach the Starry Sea. That might stall it a little, but two days later and we’ll have lost the entire CA. A day after that and all known civilization. The Pillar might survive, but it probably won’t. Every CMS that gets eaten will weaken its link to our universe, and eventually it’ll just…vanish.” Caeden grimly walked them through the facts.
“I won’t have enough time to raise enough undead strong enough to survive being close to that thing.” Cat shook her head. “Do we have any other options?”
There was a collective silence as everyone tried to think of some way around the problem. But they were short on time and shorter on options. If they just had more of either…But they didn’t.
Finally, there was a heavy sigh from the corner of the room.
“I can do it.”
It was Damon.