Amdirlain’s PoV - Deep Planes

  Her pace across the desert sands continued to grow by the minute. Yet the first Primordial’s attention came before she was halfway to the entrance of the next Plane. Massive dust clouds rapidly grew on the desert’s horizon, a tornado that could engulf a world, filled with grit and bone. A malevolent awareness cast its attention towards her, and its fury at her presence churned up another tornado that it tossed her way.

  Just hop into the crucible and get to the wound from the inside—no worries, Maker.

  Amdirlain’s will sliced and pushed selectively, transforming the energy within the gusting air that fed the speed with which it ripped across the landscape. As the outer winds ripped across her flesh, her released energy cooled or heated areas, diverting their course. The shift in the tornado currents impacted the raging wall and opened a tunnel to the tornado’s eye. Her opponent, consumed by its own rage, didn’t notice until she stood at the weapon’s heart; once there, she applied harder nudges and the tornado’s course swung.

  Upon the inner wall, the dust formed into a massive face. “How dare you!”

  Amdirlain looked up at the hollow mouth that loomed above her and smiled innocently, hands clasped demurely before her. “What did I do?”

  “How did you touch my winds?”

  “You are a creature of the wind. The presence or absence of heat transforms air into the wind you claim. But without those forces stirring the air to life, you have nothing. Allow me to pass, and you’ll not see me again.”

  “You have intruded upon my domain.”

  Pressures mounted within the wall, and bone dust gathering was a blazing signal to Amdirlain’s senses after the Eldritch’s instant reformations. The greater winds consumed and muffled the sharpened wind blades, and the tornado continued to shift course until they were all drawn back into the greater whole.

  “No, I haven’t. I felt your flexing boundary and politely stayed well back from its oscillations. You sought me. What lie will you tell me next? Are you seeking to create a gust of noise to hide from the truth? Is that all you are — noise?”

  Though it was a simple taunt, it bit home. A bellow of rage smashed the tornado’s wall upon her, and Amdirlain pushed a hand into the scouring winds to blunt its strike. The essence it had added ripped through flesh too late as her fingers clenched. The molecules of the air, grit, and bone swirled in a ball within her grasp. As the winds rushed to fill the void, the molecules transformed and compressed into tight threads that joined the growing mass whose core she’d created. A core that heated further by the millisecond.

  It’s not the fires of a white dwarf, but it’ll do. Thanks for that ancient lesson, Patér.

  “Catch.”

  Exposed ligaments and bones abraded by the shearing winds healed, and new flesh expanded from her wrist to sheath the fingers again, before her will struck. As she planned a chain of gravity spikes to propel the mass towards the still-distant Domain, the living creatures in range of the oncoming devastation were shifted to distant sites. She tripped the closest gravity spike and let it snatch the mass away, using the swirling wake left behind as a wing’s lift to speed her passage. Drips of essence reinforced the flux of the spikes and her own speed to get her to her destination before the impact. As she touched the Portal threshold, millions of tonnes of compressed matter approached the Domain boundary. She threw herself through just as the final gravity spike pulsed before the border and jumped it suddenly to one per cent of the speed of light. The friction alone from the rough mass ignited air molecules into a firestorm that filled its borders. Caught on the wavefront of the explosions, the winds blended with their nature and hurled the Primordial away. The chaos of splitting atoms drew the attention of the Plane’s other primordials. Those primal species she moved to safety eventually saw a new sun briefly chew on the far horizon, once the light had caught up.

  That went through to the keeper.

  The Portal behind her had initially been an opaque, shadowy barrier, but as she oriented herself, it changed into a growing wall of flames. The details she’d extracted from the Sisterhood showed the succubi had flown above the canopy to spot the mountain peaks they’d used to guide them. Not needing line of sight, Amdirlain opted to push her Ki techniques; with the course picked out, she angled to her left. With primal gazes upon her, she raced through the undergrowth, predators advancing only to lose Amdirlain once Phoenix’s Trail transformed her into racing smoke and dust. In her wake, the noise of the jungle shifted as the growing light from the portal reached deeper into the shadowed depths. Creatures that had lived in the eternal gloomy twilight saw direct light for the first and perhaps last time.

  A dozen shadowy primals followed her trail and fed off the energy her passage left among the trees. Amdirlain kept part of her attention on the pack. Their hollow gazes darkened with the influx of power from the velocity of displaced air and bursts of light. Greater beings blocked the Portal, feeding on the glow. Behind them, rustling leaves fell back into silence as the consuming twilight restored the environment. The brief influx of light and restoration of darkness conveyed messages of change and life to Amdirlain. The wildlife here was untainted by the corruption that had soaked into the Abyss, but it was willful and cruel. Its nature was the very opposite of her visit to Bahamut’s Plane. Instead of a regimen that allowed all to grow according to their needs, here the plants and wildlife sought to consume all around them. The stronger devoured not only what they needed to thrive, but glutted themselves on everything they could reach. Without the Plane’s raw vibrance, causing plants and animals to sprout into emptied voids, they would have ground everything to dust.

  A Primordial that embodied consumption appeared well ahead of her course and raised a grasping coil towards her. “Stop.”

  “I’m passing through,” Amdirlain replied, her course angling to curve around it.

  The being shifted to block her course, and Amdirlain swept back the other way, the pair playing a swerving game of chicken as their distance closed. “You will feed me.”

  Even though the entity needed no sustenance, the vines and ivy that extended from its body crushed the surrounding plants into mulch and sucked an Amazon’s worth of nutrients from the soil every second, a consuming hunger that fought against the tide of forces that continually restored the Plane. An aura sucked at her momentum, trying to steal her speed. Birds and fleeing animals crashed to a halt, their speed and energy to even breathe consumed in its grasp. As they perished, the sap within kilometres of plants ground to a halt.

  It will not take no for an answer.

  A Phoenix experimentally leapt from her hand and blasted through the undergrowth, incinerating vast acres of plants, leaving ashes to feed the subsequent growth. The lead edge of its flames shredded even before the force hit; the whole spiralled into the Primordial’s core, the obliterating heat a mere warmth to its appetite. The creature groaned in pleasure and shot shadowy tendrils from the earth; the leaves sprouting from them ripped acres of trees apart and swatted more aside. Amdirlain switched Affinity and slipped into a yin state, dusky flesh turned black while constellations and nebulae shifted into the consuming void beyond the edge of stars. Within her gaze, dying starlight whispered the limits of life. The clash of the Primordial’s song against her own flared insights set Muse’s Embrace aflame with concepts that enfolded consumption and the transformations within the cycle of life.

  “Stop.” The being snarled, vines withering at the absence within her.

  “To you, emptiness brings pain,” Amdirlain whispered, and fed it change. “Yet fullness can feed death.”

  Agony ripped through the creature as its hunger transformed its own flesh, the changes twisting newly gathered strength into a cancerous growth fixated on its form. The heat and other energy it had just gathered proved a threshold past its control, as Amdirlain’s will continued to transform its insides into matter intent on consuming it.

  “Life can be painful when you consume more than you should. Now experience consuming yourself,” Amdirlain cautioned and sped past the now writhing being.

  Though the next Portal soon enough swept into range, she kept her senses peeled to the maximum range, alert for approaching threats, only for her paranoia to deliver a surprising result. A light year beyond her route, the leading edge of her senses found an expansive chasm that sliced into the depths of a mountain range and an unexpected being. Though the Portal tempted her to continue her journey, Amdirlain held her position to study the encampment Tephros had set up. A tunnel complex extended into stone a kilometre below the chasm’s lip, just before the consuming darkness grew oppressive.

  Her chambers stretched deep within the stone, lined with texts detailing her experiments and the readings from arcane relays. The partially consumed remnants of some enchanted sensors showed on the void’s edge, while others still lay set in ridgelines. The first Hidden was busily enchanting more units from materials she’d ripped from the consuming species and plants across this Plane. Her experiments helped sublimate her body’s own need for gratification into a burn of satisfaction from improving her creations.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  The place feels like something the Aspect of oblivion would give off, though I half expected Ruithor to be floating in his own Demi-Plane. Should I help Tephros, or would she not even want to change? She said she’d found being a Succubus had grown boring. If I go near her, it might attract attention from other primordials after I leave. There is certainly annihilation energy in that chasm. It’s a good find; if it’s not Ruithor in there, it might be something related to him, and a learning experience breaching that sort of energy aura.

  She fought off the temptation to check in on Tephros and continued along the Sisterhood’s route. Though stronger beings neighboured the route, most stayed well clear of her, their attention fixated on known enemies, waiting for a lapse in their vigilance. Among the distorted caverns, she slipped along the dimensional rips that had caused Silpar to lose the sisters he’d been following. The caverns reminded her of the fallen, and she made a mental note to check on the cloister once she’d completed Maker’s test.

  They have an odd sense of things; they assigned me a practical exam in my own realm. How does this benefit them? Though who says it has one or registers any importance to them whatsoever. After my first brief study sessions took thousands of years, to Maker the time they allowed for this break is perhaps insignificant.

  The memories of jaunts into hundreds of other realms with Nicholaus that she’d re-experienced nudged at her, and the blinkers Phaedra had subconsciously put in place were clear. She’d buried her strength beneath the childhood nickname. Even as she’d entered her teenage years, her strength already matched her father’s, yet the way they’d branched in different directions, let her point to where she was weaker. Phaedra discovered the paths to take and items to include while he refined them through endless repetition, making tools and perfecting processes. His infinite work ethic was ingrained in her, and her joy in the music blinded her to the effort and strength required.

  As her M?tēr dubbed her, she was Nicholaus’s songbird, there to entertain and encourage, so she didn’t let herself see beyond it. With her sense of normality already badly distorted, she’d lost her sense of Mortal limits in the needed music; piece by piece, they designed, scavenged, or bargained for the elements the realm required. For Amdirlain, it was clear what the smiles and proud looks had meant when she progressed on any piece. Just as he had when dealing with Lilith’s prison, together more often than not, he let her take the lead because he trusted her sense of what her music’s balance needed. With twenty-twenty hindsight, she could see how he hoped it would open her eyes to what her strength meant. Along the way, Phaedra convinced herself that the project was her father’s, forgetting that the core concept was hers. Yet his deference to her decisions and the way he quietly worked in support made it clear he’d never lost sight of it.

  My wounding and refusal to see past a self-imposed veil when my strength was already well beyond it caused us both so much agony. I wasn’t a Goddess. We were both something else. Kronos stabbed me at my most vulnerable time and left the shattered pieces in a state that I couldn’t see to heal myself. I wonder if he did the same to Nicholaus, a manipulation at a key moment, leaving a break in his being to twist the growth. All along, he might have been training us like bonsai plants. The older relative moulded the two traumatised children to be his weapons.

  “I wonder who put the idea of causing Crete’s volcano to erupt into Poseidon’s head?” Amdirlain murmured absently as she flew through tunnels where living rocks swirled and bumped. The chaos of the place had invested them with so much energy that they reproduced like cells of a body.

  “It was Kronos.” Gideon’s voice chimed in her mind. “Whispers to lesser beings bubbled up and provoked the jealous gods into action, all untraceable until he was in my reach.”

  “Which was all too late. No wonder he denied me earlier advice to prevent it,” Amdirlain returned. “He instigated it, which makes me regret kicking him out. I’m more sure I gave him what he wanted.”

  “You avoided the time seeds.”

  “You couldn’t help me avoid the traps, but you had Chrona drop by to conduct temporal housekeeping for the realm once I’d chosen to step away.”

  “There was knowledge excised from that Shard’s memories before its arrival. Modelling shows it was a Trojan horse meant to get those seeds to you.”

  “How do you comfortably mark something as tomorrow’s problem when you’re up against a Primordial of Time? How do you work against them?”

  “You decide, plan, and take the key actions in places where there is no concept of time for them to track when the elements they need to counter occur.”

  It’s a subjective quantity.

  The possibilities offered by Maker’s bubble sanctuary in the Far Chaos brought forth Amdirlain’s playful smile.

  A sense of concerned dread came through Gideon’s touch. “You shouldn’t be deciding anything here. The rules for time in this realm are more restrictive than in other places. Stick to locations where the subjective quantities are mutable; there are realms where you can internally time-travel. Though you always exit after you enter, for him it becomes harder to determine if it’s a future decision or one whose actions are in progress.”

  “I’ve not remembered any of those yet. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Kháos would like to come and help you. Though right now, you’ve got trouble inbound.”

  The contact with Gideon broke as the dimensional slipway ahead churned with an approaching entity. She caught sight of a colossal figure with hundreds of shifting limbs that extended from a bloated octopus core; its veins and skin crackled with black, Chaos-born lightning, blocking the entrance.

  “You could let me pass,” Amdirlain noted, taking a reading from the rip that its body was still partly within.

  “Others whisper of your approach, but I don’t fear you.”

  I hadn’t caught them spreading news.

  “They don’t fear me either. Most are uninterested in my passage while they wait for existing enemies to expose themselves.”

  A limb among the horde speared her way, and three fused behind it to fuel its lunge with increased mass. She blazed backwards, riding the displacement wavefront, slipping through a spiralling course as the limb’s mass churned in unpredictable paths without an energy signature. An icy sensation from Precognition warned her to twist away, and she raced before blasts of lightning that obliterated kilometres of living rock. She tore along an erratic path that zig-zagged between extrusions from the cavern’s sides. More blasts shattered a column and dropped a ribbon of stone across her foe. The material rippled and merged, becoming one with her foe’s form. As it advanced, its bulk shifted entirely to this location, and the rip’s energies went dormant behind it—the power shift fed more information for Amdirlain to study.

  Contoured limbs stabbed out to herd her into the blasts, only for her to land on the first and race along its length. Her sudden burst of speed propelled her forward past other tentacles that sought to scrape her from the first limb. Another limb spiralled around the first, and a flowing step took her from one rocky surface to the next. She burst through the Chaos lightning that sheathed them both, heedless of her steaming flesh that knitted as she ran. Regrown fingers stabbed out as she braced herself and contoured Chaos into Primordial flame. Acres of rock evaporated and split with its own energy turned against it, only for shattered and blasted stone to reform, recreated by her foes’ will. Beneath the conflict on the physical, their wills clashed; her honed willpower against one forged in a crucible of chaos; yet they’d each experienced a continual battle for survival.

  “You will die.”

  With the words and slap of will, the Chaos-fed lightning across her foe intensified, and a wall of blackness tore apart the slipway. With her route obliterated, Amdirlain expanded her form to match her foes, morphing into an airborne Kraken as she went. Living tentacles engulfed the stone, with hooks and millions of suckers seizing its rough stone body. Her mind deflected barrages of lightning blasts, only for more to bite home. Its attempts to grapple and pin slipped free from Enduring Flame even when they got past her defences; with each failure to crush her, its ranting climbed higher.

  Chaos and creation, and it’s a higher tier than me. Its mind is chaotic and unreasonable, so I can’t slip within it, and I can’t reason with it.

  Amdirlain twisted from a Kraken to a smaller living Phoenix, and stone flexed in compressing only to be thrown back by an initial blast. Its outer shell slagged, only to heal and reform; its own resistances grown in the deep planes pushed against the effect. A growing firestorm cascaded from her wings as she flew a twisting path around its limbs. With the flames’ energy under her control, they rippled between affinities, digging for weakness. The shell’s super-heated rock shattered under a sudden freezing draught, but its own chaotic distortions shifted, giving it enough respite to regrow. The flares of energy signalled to others around them and beckoned them closer.

  Primordials nearby are edging closer, waiting for the right openings. That’s why they held back: the potential of getting tied up in an unbeneficial battle.

  As they clashed again, a group of five primordials came lunging from the stones, an uneven split of foes that favoured Amdirlain. Before their attack struck, Amdirlain transformed the inferno she’d created into a spatial vortex. As it threw her forward along her route, the contemporaries of her foes were already landing destructive blows against each other that consumed stone.

  I don’t have to run faster than the monster; I have to run faster than you.

  Feather-light pushes of will against the already contracting vortex caused magnified oscillations that escalated its collapse, and its explosion washed over the clashing foes. It threw them all off balance, and the first to recover took advantage of the transformed battlefield.

  We’re created, we live, transforming the lives of ourselves and others for better or worse. Then passing on transforms the experiences into marks within our souls. Those marks create the foundation that influences our next lives, either seeking what we missed or building on more of the same. Every choice we make while living transforms our own potential, or that of someone else. Life is a continuum of transforming influences that creation enables.

  As insights bloomed and advancement beckoned, Amdirlain transformed to meld against a wall, then diffused her energy through the stone to mask her presence.