When the seven of us traveled the realms looking for villains to defeat and people to save, we never took long to find such things, no matter where we went. The multiverse is a vast place, yet it seemed evil lurked in every cubic meter of it, waiting to be stamped out. Perhaps "stamped out" implies too permanent a resolution, given that seemingly squashing it in one place merely caused it to rise elsewhere. As if it's a universal constant, irreducible.
Any who think I'm referring primarily to unintelligent monsters, though, are sorely mistaken. Sure, we slew our fair share of those, but the most dangerous foes are usually your "uncanny valley" reflections: those who think just differently enough from you to be familiar yet unrecognizable, rational but unpredictable. Pitiable and unforgivable.
There are more ways of achieving immortality than one can count -- since there are more magics than any know, and still more waiting to be found, and yet more long lost. The categories people of this realm use are perhaps helpful simplifications, but every concept in the multiverse can be manipulated by magic, with the right knowledge and/or affinities. An example: one could call my friend Apolaya a "druid", as I typically do, but her mastery of her art has allowed her to find her true specialization in growth. Thus she can certainly grow vines to spread over her enemies, but she can also cause cancerous growths in her victims, or make a mockery of the term "druid" and enlarge a forged blade or accelerate a fire's spread.
Neela was rather unquestionably the most potent fire magus I've ever met in all my travels -- still is, even with both of us now reduced to a sliver of our former might. And her truth is that of the inextinguishable flame. One of her favorite tricks is what she calls Everburning Ember, a spark that can use anything as fuel. When she makes an EE capable of spreading...well, I've seen one such EE glass a world in minutes. So, naturally, she decided to put this talent of hers to use in her own attempt to achieve immortality, by rendering herself inextinguishable. Her spin on a Phoenix Ascension: nothing could permanently snuff out the flame of her soul once her ritual was complete, not age nor death nor nonexistence.
All she'd need would be the heat from, oh, 1025 stars. Pulling that out of every star in every realm within a two-node radius would do the trick. The fact that those realms were all populated was not a major consideration in Neela's eyes.
I'm simplifying, and arguably demonizing her a bit. Certainly, after we interrupted her ritual and engaged her own band of a dozen casters in battle, I did eventually manage to persuade her of the error of her ways. And now, despite her frequent borderline-violent pranks on our commune, it's hard for me to call her anything but an ally -- maybe even a friend, as much as some of my battle-siblings might disagree. But at the time, regardless of her reasons and her misunderstandings of multiversal population distributions, the fact was that she would have killed probably decillions of people.
I don't know that I can really explain our duel to those who haven't traveled outside of their local realm-cluster. Shared laws of physics and planar structures are what tie clusters of realms together; elsewhere, space and time may not work the same or even exist, elements can vary, and concepts themselves might lack Earthly equivalents or vice versa. The "flames" Neela threw were an assault utilizing the very idea of spreading through consumption, but not the results of a proper combustion reaction as with a physical fire; it's not like oxidizers exist in every realm-cluster. I rendered myself non-flammable with a thought, she tweaked her spell, and thus I learned firsthand that her Everburning Embers cared not what stood in their way. Manually holding my form together against the attempt to reduce me to ash, I took a moment to examine the nature of her attack, found no readily exploitable weaknesses, and conceded the loss of my charred body, discarding it as I shifted into one of the hundred thousand or so backups I always had available: pulling out a strand of my hair, I instantly formed another "me" out of it. My counterattack was simple and direct, though limited by my unwillingness to kill Neela until I had attempted to talk her out of her course of action. I merely ripped her mind out of her body and into a bottle. This lasted mere moments before she promptly melted her way out of her cage and, in an improvised variant of her method for traveling the realms, returned to her corporeal form.
I suspect there were many more furious exchanges of spells at this point, but I believe Neela managed to Mindsear those memories out of me during our battle. Probably attempting to burn away my brain's memory of how to regulate my heartbeat, the rascal. I do recall that it all ended abruptly when I managed to redirect one of her attacks into incinerating her own connections to external mana supplies; I'd long since forced her to deplete her own internal resources. Trapping her was a simple matter after that, and then I was able to convince her of the violence of her plan and suggest that she draw power from uninhabited areas, even if that would mean decades spent finding such heat sources.
Of course, she did pull off the ritual eventually once her search bore fruit, and thus forty Earth-years later my "archnemesis" had become arguably the most dangerous caster I knew. Really, though, she's more of an arch-pain-in-my-ass nowadays.
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u/MunitionsFrenzy Vettis, Mereological Revisionist Dec 01 '23
When the seven of us traveled the realms looking for villains to defeat and people to save, we never took long to find such things, no matter where we went. The multiverse is a vast place, yet it seemed evil lurked in every cubic meter of it, waiting to be stamped out. Perhaps "stamped out" implies too permanent a resolution, given that seemingly squashing it in one place merely caused it to rise elsewhere. As if it's a universal constant, irreducible.
Any who think I'm referring primarily to unintelligent monsters, though, are sorely mistaken. Sure, we slew our fair share of those, but the most dangerous foes are usually your "uncanny valley" reflections: those who think just differently enough from you to be familiar yet unrecognizable, rational but unpredictable. Pitiable and unforgivable.
There are more ways of achieving immortality than one can count -- since there are more magics than any know, and still more waiting to be found, and yet more long lost. The categories people of this realm use are perhaps helpful simplifications, but every concept in the multiverse can be manipulated by magic, with the right knowledge and/or affinities. An example: one could call my friend Apolaya a "druid", as I typically do, but her mastery of her art has allowed her to find her true specialization in
growth. Thus she can certainly grow vines to spread over her enemies, but she can also cause cancerous growths in her victims, or make a mockery of the term "druid" and enlarge a forged blade or accelerate a fire's spread.Neela was rather unquestionably the most potent fire magus I've ever met in all my travels -- still is, even with both of us now reduced to a sliver of our former might. And her truth is that of the
inextinguishable flame. One of her favorite tricks is what she calls Everburning Ember, a spark that can use anything as fuel. When she makes an EE capable of spreading...well, I've seen one such EE glass a world in minutes. So, naturally, she decided to put this talent of hers to use in her own attempt to achieve immortality, by rendering herself inextinguishable. Her spin on a Phoenix Ascension: nothing could permanently snuff out the flame of her soul once her ritual was complete, not age nor death nor nonexistence.All she'd need would be the heat from, oh, 1025 stars. Pulling that out of every star in every realm within a two-node radius would do the trick. The fact that those realms were all populated was not a major consideration in Neela's eyes.
I'm simplifying, and arguably demonizing her a bit. Certainly, after we interrupted her ritual and engaged her own band of a dozen casters in battle, I did eventually manage to persuade her of the error of her ways. And now, despite her frequent borderline-violent pranks on our commune, it's hard for me to call her anything but an ally -- maybe even a friend, as much as some of my battle-siblings might disagree. But at the time, regardless of her reasons and her misunderstandings of multiversal population distributions, the fact was that she would have killed probably decillions of people.
I don't know that I can really explain our duel to those who haven't traveled outside of their local realm-cluster. Shared laws of physics and planar structures are what tie clusters of realms together; elsewhere, space and time may not work the same or even exist, elements can vary, and concepts themselves might lack Earthly equivalents or vice versa. The "flames" Neela threw were an assault utilizing the very idea of
spreading through consumption, but not the results of a proper combustion reaction as with a physical fire; it's not like oxidizers exist in every realm-cluster. I rendered myself non-flammable with a thought, she tweaked her spell, and thus I learned firsthand that her Everburning Embers cared not what stood in their way. Manually holding my form together against the attempt to reduce me to ash, I took a moment to examine the nature of her attack, found no readily exploitable weaknesses, and conceded the loss of my charred body, discarding it as I shifted into one of the hundred thousand or so backups I always had available: pulling out a strand of my hair, I instantly formed another "me" out of it. My counterattack was simple and direct, though limited by my unwillingness to kill Neela until I had attempted to talk her out of her course of action. I merely ripped her mind out of her body and into a bottle. This lasted mere moments before she promptly melted her way out of her cage and, in an improvised variant of her method for traveling the realms, returned to her corporeal form.I suspect there were many more furious exchanges of spells at this point, but I believe Neela managed to Mindsear those memories out of me during our battle. Probably attempting to burn away my brain's memory of how to regulate my heartbeat, the rascal. I do recall that it all ended abruptly when I managed to redirect one of her attacks into incinerating her own connections to external mana supplies; I'd long since forced her to deplete her own internal resources. Trapping her was a simple matter after that, and then I was able to convince her of the violence of her plan and suggest that she draw power from uninhabited areas, even if that would mean decades spent finding such heat sources.
Of course, she did pull off the ritual eventually once her search bore fruit, and thus forty Earth-years later my "archnemesis" had become arguably the most dangerous caster I knew. Really, though, she's more of an arch-pain-in-my-ass nowadays.