You watch as Gaius tears open the outer shell, revealing the roughhewn cedar box within.

But the moment you see the box, you know instinctively that something is very wrong.

Reality begins to twist around you, even through the viewing glass you have observed events with up until now in total safety.

One of your companions observing this divination, the scribe Camillus has the presence of mind to flee the ritual chamber for the wizard Alexius and his wife. A moment later, a storm erupts.

You and the rest of your fellow observers are held fast by an unseen power. Ironically, even as your own life is placed into peril by these events, you remain helpless and can only observe the utter insanity unfolding before you.

Gaius attempts to finish the ritual to seal the portal within the box, but he no longer holds it.

Distance has shattered, and each of the future people stands across a massive gulf from the others. The tapes had all been broken, and now the reels spun uselessly.

Beneath them, in the gulf that divides the lab, the savage warrior from the past Sacha looks on unseeing. It’s obvious to you that he’s totally disassociated from what he is witnessing.

The leader of the ancient elven cult holds the open box aloft. The words he speaks are strange, but you now seem to be hovering over him as if in a dream. Although you cannot understand his primitive Sylvan dialect, you know his meaning with perfect clarity.

He is calling forth what he calls the ‘Mother of Spiders’.

What emerges bears no resemblance to any earthly arachnid with you have ever laid yes upon.

One leg emerges from the small box, then seems to grow and expand as it claws itself into the ground. Its chitinous in places, but also clammy like amphibian flesh. It pulls free a body which corresponds to no terrestrial creature you have ever witnessed.

So many eyes and legs. You cannot deny that something in its skittering movement does draw out the primate fear of venomous spiders in your chest, even without any coherent form that you can see. It seems to have no body at all, only eyes, teeth, and legs.

The cult leader falls to his knees, enraptured by the sight. He calls out to his mistress that he has brought her a willing sacrifice. Then the last of his followers steps forward to offer himself.

The beast appraises the space around itself, and appears to both split apart, then refuse back into one piece in many places. It moves towards the sacrifice.

Then, in an instant, the elf was split down his front like an overcooked sausage.

Pieces of him, small pieces - like the tips of fingers - began to sever from the rest of his body by unseen means. Despite the massive physical trauma to his body, the man did not die, or even pass into shock. Instead, his scream echoes all through you, with the same unending pitch of sheer terror.

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The elf doesn’t so much die, as he is simply enveloped into the monstrosity.

The cult leader is utterly delighted by the result. He now commands the creature to destroy the leaders of city he came from, so that he can rule over it in their place. It seems that he is unable to perceive anyone or anything from beyond his own time zone.

The abomination regards the fool that would be its master for one moment. Then, with one smooth movement, it grabs him and somehow puts him inside the small box it came from. And that is the last you see of the cult leader.

That seems to break a trance. At once, Aaja the huntress, Salvador the academic spy, and Jenny the woman from military intelligence all open fire with their respective weapons. All sides involved instinctively understand who their shared foe was.

Gaius leapt down from his perch in the future, towards where the box had been discarded down in the distant past.

He was intercepted in his flight by the witch Nightingale. You can see the blades in her back, and the infect wound on her hip, but she has yet to receive the belly wound from Shogo. She keeps the vampire gripped by the neck as they plummet to the ground.

And then they both vanish from sight.

A severed leg falls from the sky near you.

Rene and Anna were separated from the others involved in the sealing ritual. They stood on a platform of tiled floor, suspended over the chaos.

“We need to find a way down to that box!” Rene calls out in a strange form of Velian, you have never heard the like of before.

“I’ll draw a doorway that leads somewhere down there in my sketchbook.” Anna has already begun to put her stated plan into action. “Then we can travel through that pathway to where we need to go.”

“Anna, that’s insane! You can’t travel through a picture!”

“You can if you draw it right!”

At last, Alexius throws open the doors of the ritual chamber – and witnesses the time storm therein. A whole company are there with him, Camillus who went to get him, his wife Julia, Count Teagan Elf-child, the monk Fra Pierre, the Baron Cosimo, and the Baron’s adopted daughter Agrippina.

“Astounding!” Alexius calls out in utter shock.

You find this somewhat disheartening, as he was your best hope at getting out of this mess safe and sane.

After all, you were only supposed to be observing events. Already you can feel your astral form being drawn down towards the dark aperture of the box. There is a palpable sense of hunger from the opening as it pulls you closer.

The alien thing began to climb up towards the future, where the spies had run dry of ammunition for their strange metal slings. Alexius and his wife use spells to slow their descent, then leap into the fray to assist the future people, hurling elementalist working of fire and lightning at the extradimensional monster.

Fra Pierre, Camillus, and Count Teagan held a rope. Baron Cosimo began to use it to descend into the past. To your surprise, his daughter Agrippina goes with him.

You are now close enough to see inside the box.

Screaming for help does no good. Your voice catches in your throat like a nightmare.

Nearby to you, Anna and Rene emerge from a hastily drawn portal.

Rene runs to the box at once to try and close it, but your relief turns to despair when the lid simply does not move.

“Here! The sigils! Physical force is no good!” Anna dug a pen into her own flesh and began to draw signs on the box in blood. “Hurry.” She threw her remaining pens to Rene.

With a grimace of pain, Rene joined her lover in her work.

Even as feverishly as they weave their spells, you can feel no change from the box as it draws you down inside of itself.

“It’s not enough!” Baron Cosimo calls out. “Only Agrippina can finish it!”

All eyes turn to Agrippina.

There, in the midst of the turmoil, she begins to sing.

The song is unlike any you have ever heard before. It’s in a language that sounds both strange and ancient.

It has the feel of deep stone and old growth trees.

Then…

You realize that you are not where you believed you were.

The spell has been broken, and you’re back safe in your seat once again. Once more, you are the observer, viewing these events only through the means of your scrying glass.

On the other side of that scrying glass, you can see that the box has been closed.