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It seemed similar to the aftermath of previous scourgings I’d seen. Visibility was barely more than arm’s reach at the surface; the mists of Aescalon were at their peak in the aftermath of a scourging. It was the hot muggy mist of a steam bath; both water and power, in the form of panultan, packed into the air as tightly as possible. Both would precipitate out in the coming hours, the mists in the form of water, which would carry the panultan with it out into all the Connected Realms, infusing them with the power of Aescalon. Aescalon may have been the beating heart of all creation – thirteen years on I still didn’t have all the answers I sought on that score.
Perception was a better tool than sight at the moment. I knew what I’d see if visibility permitted – a blasted landscape, purged both by fire and water every seven days. Nothing lived in Aescalon. I thought I finally understood how the air remained breathable, but Aescalon itself was lifeless, a cavern roughly ten leagues across, with dimensionality acting in lieu of gravity to hold travelers to the roughly spherical surface. The solid surface was pure igneous material, and gemstones birthed in fire and pressure glittered everywhere. Hills and gullies marked the landscape, as fire was followed by flood every scourging. Pools and lakes and streams and rivers glowed with the power for which Aescalon was a conduit, flowing out to the Connected Realms at 165 visible gates, pits like dimples on a ball. There were nearly countless lesser gates visible only to those with some mastery of power; little pocket universes ranging from the size of a room to astronomical in scope. Petra and I shared mastery of one such – that was what made us Eternals.
The mist did not make it easy to look for the cause of what came out of Migurd’s gate. I was aware that I was probably looking for something that caused every gate to belch forth with amplified force, but visibility of less than a pace wasn’t helpful. Even my perception was only good out to sixty paces or so normally. I could deform it at some minor cost or greatly expand it by with enough energy, but such solutions were inelegant. As an ultsi by habit, I disliked expending large amounts of energy unnecessarily – ultsi never knew when they might need the energy they’d just used. The Fifteen Families might have no idea I was alive, but I was under a death sentence. Every bit of energy I could hold might not be enough if one of them found me.
My current mission, however, was observation. The stream at Aescalon’s exit to Migurd was flowing freely. That much was easy to establish. The lesser realm Petra and I shared had experienced a shockwave – I could tell by wave patterns in the mud – but no apparent ongoing issues. There wasn’t a lot to damage in such a space; we’d barely gotten grasses started. The other lesser bubbles I sampled in the vicinity showed evidence of equivalent disturbance, but nothing ongoing. However, the next closest major exits were each over a league distant, and even if I checked every single one of them, that would ignore issues with the source of Aescalon’s energy at the center of the cavern. The thick fog was damned inconvenient for my mission of the moment, but that was the way of Aescalon in the aftermath of a scourging. Sometimes the facts of the universe are hostile. I’d find an alternative.
I looked hard at the ground to see if I could figure out which direction the shockwave came from. Unfortunately, the exposed parts were all hard-packed and baked from the scourgings – the next thing to rock. Even the watercourses weren’t much softer – and they were lower in elevation and therefore sheltered. Which left spak as the obvious alternative. I even knew exactly what time the shockwave had hit – all I had to do was look back to see it happen. Most spak had sharp limits imposed by power requirements, but simple observation of the recent past didn’t require much power.
I went back a couple minutes before, and watched events unfold. Everything seemed fine until the moment the scourging had begun. The visibility went from essentially unlimited in the moments before the scourging to barely arms’ length when dimensionality dropped, and the wave of energy from the center of the cavern hit. First it manifested as heat, then as water a few seconds after, but both were secondary effects – fallout from pure energy so intense that you could visibly see panultan blanket the cavern like a sudden explosion of snow for a few seconds before it transformed into a less primal form of energy. All of that was normal enough for a scourging. I’d observed it with spak on sixties of past occasions, and experienced it directly twice.
What was not normal was the way the ground of Aescalon twisted and bucked in the playback, followed a few seconds later by an atmospheric blast. The cavern experienced waves of fire, compression, and flood with every scourging, but the ground surrounding the cavern did not. As far as I’d been able to discover, the rock surrounding the cavern was solid and infinite. The surface might be subjected to the scourgings; it could erode from wind or flood, and it could bake from the heat, but below a few handspans’ depth it might as well have been primal rock, perfectly formed in a piece. I’d never found any deep flaws in that rock. The scourgings were violent, but they were above the surface.
The direction of the disturbance was the entry to Siluria – home of the diligar, at least here in the Connected Worlds. Humans hadn’t begun here; I saw no reason to believe the diligar had, either. The big crustacean-like race were the closest thing to cavalry the Connected Worlds had at the moment. Six-legged, massing about five times as much as a human, with four manipulative appendages in their ‘top’ or ‘forward’ segment, they could outrun and overpower most humans on an individual basis. Why they hadn’t conquered every one of the worlds connecting to Aescalon was something I didn’t know, but there had to be a reason. Biological and economic reality were even harder to change than physics or chemistry. But I had to prioritize my tasks, and there was too much that appeared to be more important. Maybe in a hundred years or so, I’d be able to devote some time to finding it – providing whatever was at work here hadn’t just killed them all.
The main exits from Aescalon were all in the form of depressions, something like a ‘dimple’ a couple hundred paces wide, leading to transition zones at their low points. Each of the 165 exits usable by the non-talented led to a different world, ‘instances’ in the lexicon of my homeland – independent three dimensional universes embedded in the eleven dimensional structure of reality. Exploring them was another project that had to wait for now, let alone exploring the less-developed instances that only the talented could perceive.
The ‘dimple’ holding the exit to Siluria had been blasted from the bottom as well as Scourged from above, what loose soil there had been scoured down to bare rock as far as the dimple’s ‘ridgeline’ or, more properly, its military crest, the point where you could look unobstructed by terrain to the bottom. The lake at the bottom appeared to be higher, and draining more slowly than was generally the case. Any diligar looking to transit Aescalon would have to wait longer than they expected for the way to be clear. Migurd’s transition zone was already passable to those willing to get wet, but from the looks of things, Siluria would have to wait another hour or so.
The streams filling that lake, flowing into the dimple from the surrounding area, didn’t appear to be any larger than normal, so the first hypothesis was something was blocking the drain, or at least constricting it. I had been here before; the general warlike nature of the diligar and the hostility of the Sons of Klikitit towards me in particular had been reason enough to scout the terrain. I walked down to the slowly receding shoreline and extended my perception.
The entry to the transition zone was smaller. I’d observed most of the 165 main transition zones; they were consistently the same size, roughly ten average human paces. The exit to Siluria had shrunk by about a pace, which meant roughly a fifth of its previous cross section was gone. The lake was draining more slowly than previous, but the real issue was that one of the major exits from Aescalon had constricted from a standard size. That was an anomaly worth further immediate study. Even if it were temporary, there had to be useful information there, and my divine curse of curiosity was singing its siren song, but I suspected this was a manifestation of a permanent change somewhere. Something had changed, or was in the process of changing. Whether what I was seeing was a leading, trailing, or concurrent indicator, it was worthy of my immediate attention.
My perception cut off at the transition entry, of course. Maybe you could walk through, or at least when it was drier you could, but what was on the far side of that entry wasn’t part of the same space as Aescalon itself, any more than Aescalon and Migurd or any of its other Connected Worlds. The question that immediately popped into my ultsi-trained mind was ‘what sort of risk would it be to go through?’ I wasn’t worried about the diligar in any sense of real physical danger, but a change to the geometry or topology of Aescalon could be completely fatal, without warning. No malice, no aggression, but no mercy and no chance for recovery, either. So I used kored to look instead of travel.
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