Chapter 121: Chapter 121 – Where Gods Dare Not Tread (Zidanya’s Tale)

Of Cador beyond Iavshet, little is known; but of the land between the seas, this continent of ours called Iavshet, this is said: Seventeen are the Temples, and thirty-one the Dungeons. They are found in the highest reaches of the Shieldrange; they are found in the umbral ashfall below ever-burning Arcadia, which once resplendent and verdant was; and they are found deep in the caves and caverns in which only Nayyosa feet tread.

It is written that they are a thinning of the veil, though I would fain know what veil they write of, and how they measure that it thins. When there is more mana inside, is it not at the same time so that the barrier betwixt within and without is thicker? When one travels liminally in directions indescribable in the mean geometries of the world when seen with mortal eyes, when one moves in dimensions spatial and etheric beyond the ken of might and keen alike, where is the veil, that it should thin?

I’ll speak plain: they who write on the Temples and the Dungeons say little of substance and know even less.

Our world is naught but a mote of order in the sea of ravening chaos that lies beyond, away from us in directions no mortal can travel, be they paragons of mortal power as they may be. Even the Firstborn are barred, or perhaps especially they are barred, from the least sight of such; the vision of the seams of the world is forbidden them, though the mathematical representations of them are comprehensible to those who have studied the abstract arts of that most arcane of mundane undertakings. Irons who survived a Reaping were said to be a half-step out of the world, sometimes, shimmering with a power which defied comprehension and ravaged the mind to even consider the ramifications of; the untrammeled hunger they could wield may have placed them as the first of the Voidtouched, but even my honored seniors of history who dwell here with me do not have first-hand experience with the matter.

Not until the Gods rose from the tattered and glorious survivors of the Spirits did any learn of this truth of the world. The universe, the totality of our existence, is vast beyond comprehension, but it is not without its borders. These borders lie not towards the stars or towards the ground below us, nor towards the poles northwards and southwards beyond the Shieldstorm; they are in those directions we cannot see, cannot touch.

They are towards the Void Between, where the Magelord’s mad people of origin go by choice; that depthless abyss which is both the source and the end of all of creation.

When the God who would become the Goddess consumed the domains of all the Gods who had stood against Her, She faced a terrible choice. She had long since subsumed and incorporated into the nature of Her divinity all those Gods who submitted, but such a thing—making an auspex of a God—could not be done with the wretched wraiths that were all that remained of Her foes; and to let those wraiths free would be to guarantee their vengeance in due course, in an eternal, fruitless cycle of war. Instead, then, of futilely struggling to digest their souls, She crafted for them vessels that were as much prisons as they were bodies, and walked the halls of the fifteen Temples that were known to Her, the Godsforsaken Twins being shrouded from the possibility of Her sight by their nature.

In each of them, She grew Herself to encompass the fullness of their form, and thus came into the knowledge of their function; for the Temples are runic machines, and thus are in their immensity and complexity nothing more than the fulfillment of their form. With this knowledge, it was said that She thrust the wraiths that were once her foes into the Void Between, for it was written: In those days did the Goddess reach out with Her hands in each of those Divine Demesnes, and did find in them the eternal fate of those who opposed Her; and that fate shall last unto eternity, for it is the fate of rendition unto that which renders unto nothing; and so, unto nothing were her foes rendered.

They were tears, those apertures, torn wide in that which we can only described as the fabric of our reality. Done anywhere other than within the Temples, they would have consumed the world in instants; they would have been as unto a lightning strike of unraveling, the infinitesimal sheath of all creation torn asunder faster than thought. Even done within the Temples they were like unto any portal opened vastly wider. Mana, that which sustains when all else is gone and which is the gift from the First Creator, the Lifewright Unknown, poured in from the Void even as reality fled, and only in great strain did the Goddess close them once more.

None write of how the Goddess felt in that moment. Lifeblood of the universe erupting into the Between whilst the wraiths She held struggled against the grip which held them; no wondrous leap, no flight of great fantasy, then, to imagine that She moved in haste, thrusting them through those portals and closing them by stitch and crook as best She could.

Perhaps if She had told people, had told the Arcadians and the Temple Lands at least, that the wills and souls that was all that remained of those Gods survived enough to cling and struggle, things would have been different. The Temple holds faith with their ancient oaths and with the Forsaken even unto these days, and we of Arcadia would have respected Her even more for choosing preservation over finishing Her enemies. But perhaps it is the nature of such victory to enforce pretensions of greater strength; perhaps it is the nature of war, that even the victorious bear scars, and those scars forbid showing weakness or vulnerability.

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The Goddess held her mantle and her divinity for more than seven centuries from that day; seven hundred and seventy three were the years which passed from the day She ejected the godwraiths into the Void Between, to cling tenaciously to the bubble of all creation. Those were the years of the Long Peace, the greatest expression of the Stillness. They were weak centuries, in mortal might, with few rising past the third tier; but they were quiet centuries, hundreds of years wherein no great powers dared raise flags of open warfare against another and wherein not a city nor even a town across all of Iavshet was sacked or burned other than by the Islanders, and that even rarely, and even so they kept to the Goddess enough that they would ransom all those who raised no weapon and even some of those who dared.

They were seven hundred and seventy three years in the Void Between, becoming less and yet more, those godwraiths. They drank in mana, and it sustained them; they bled, year by year, that which made them part of our reality, and when they sundered open the first of the two great Rifts, they entered Cador once more as demons out of myth, Chaos-touched monstrosities that had forgotten what it was to dwell in the world.

They had armies with them, each a drop of Void translated into our spatial dimensions and given form and power by the faith of our fears. They had, too, enough of the Void to twist and shape kith and kindred of every ilk but the sed, and their own monstrous power; and this was to be known as the Great War, and it ravaged the lands; blessed Arcadia and her Goddesswoods bleeds now ash never-ending, and of all the Tavedanim who served her only the spirit of the least among them survives, and the greatest of losses though this was it was only one amongst legions.

Lost though Arcadia was, its fleets proud and glorious ended the war. Even as Aldrnari and Vandreina peeled apart the Bilateral Alliance with sabotage and open warfare alike, even as Hytherian and Ionderai left knives in each other’s backs with greedy eyes focused on a future they might never see, even as Kirku slipped past the fleets, they sailed north. Even as the magics of the Goddesswoods began to gutter, even as their evercandles died, spark of the fire that burned once at the heart of the Conclave that they were, they sailed north.

It is not writ on Cador nor in the stars, nor in the reckoning of magery or the annals of historians, what manner of fights they fought, or how they found victory, or what manner of victory they found. But touch you the membrane between reality and unreality, and you can see glimpses.

It is known to those of us who have listened and watched since before the War’s end that there was at the time a true rift, however small, however somehow stable, in the skies above the northern seas, nigh unto the Shieldstorm. Neither bridled nor ridden, it was; leashed to no dynamo, filling no vast reservoir. It hungered, but it hungered not to consume but to subsume; and this is a different hunger, not the hunger of the Void which fuels some part of this Temple.

I believe in many things. I believe in the ravening Chaos without, the Void Between; I believe in that which is within, and in the use of the Temple as filter and catchment for the mana Beyond, that Cador may be sustained; for these things are all beliefs of observation.

I cannot, then, help but believe in something else. That there was a cost to victory; that there is a reason none from the Fleets returned from sealing the rift in the world.

Touch the membrane, if you dare. Taste the certainty of unmaking.

Hear the voices, lost in the Void.

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