The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Sixty

She had known when she had erected the shield that he wouldn't survive. Part of her knew that he'd already realized that, too, as the streaking forward momentum of the jetellin had punched the nose of the craft into the towering, ponderous edifice that filled the forward viewer. There'd been no way he could make it. The internal architecture of the ship's bridge was such that, as the mushroom-like invisible umbrella of the energy-shield formed from empty air, the for'ard wheelhouse containing the pilot's console was outside the protective shell's convex zenith and thus excluded from coverage. She wasn't able to reshape and extend the protective force shield.

He'd known that, she didn't know how he knew, but she couldn't shake off the sense that he knew the awful truth of that moment. The shell had closed as impact had occurred. The world had erupted into noise and fury as Durkka-jan had burst into flame.

Still at his post at the pilot console, he had turned partially around, facing her as she'd held both her hands extended forward to shape the power bolstering the shield. He'd given her a sad, brave nod of his head and then turned back towards the front facing the panoramic viewscreen monitor. The inferno had quickly engulfed him.

Then the world had gone black...

Her head still painfully ringing from the aftermath of her exertions and her vision blurry, Nygeia emerged shakily from a sudden, brief blackout. Alive. They were still alive. She was spent, all used up, unable to exert herself to successfully conjure so much as a tiny bird from inside a hat, but she still lived. She supposed that could have been considered some kind of a miracle, but the truth of the situation lay anywhere but in the realm of what could be considered as "Holy".

She had, figuratively and literally, led them across a bridge to the Gates of Hell and kicked open the doors, burning that same bridge behind her.

They all stood on a vast flat surface made from a loamy material of which they were unfamiliar and, no matter which direction in which they looked, there were no familiar geographical features they could lock onto. The sky, if the depthless expanse over their heads could be called that, was an empty, grayish non-color that had been bled dry by the surging, stale and brittle wind that erratically tugged at their hair and clothing. There was illumination, but Nygeia hesitated to call it 'light', instead instinctively classifying the pale radiance as a type of moonglow, and, though she and her comrades were each still deeply drawing breath, the air felt and tasted of chemical-free nothingness.

"Purgatryhssus," the sound of human speech momentarily startled her. Hearing that awestruck whisper, Nygeia felt the beginnings of a pain that burned like a flame. The voice belonged to Municipal Police Deputy Ferunem Oerdyke and, from the atypically slow way in which he spoke, Nygeia knew his mind could barely accept what his eyes were seeing. "By All Gods Hallowed and Vengeful, are we there? How can that be? As a child, the Elders told me of such a place, but I could not believe them. The Lords of Creation could not be so willfully cruel. But now... Has Fate delivered us to Purgatryhssus?"

"Shut up," Nygeia said roughly. "You do not know what you're talking about. Just shut up."

"Damn you, you arrogant witch," she heard a woman say. That voice sounded faint and far away and yet Nygeia recognized it as belonging to the Red Archivist. Yllvanea Razora spoke in clipped tones colored by unrestrained, hard-edged vitriol and resentment. "What is this place? Where have you brought us? What have you done?"

Nygeia tamped down on the feeling of rising dread that threatened to derail her concentration. She could not afford to give in to fear, even if only for a moment. She had done the only thing she could, the only thing she'd known would work, the one thing time restraints and the desperation of combat had forced from her. But she knew she was going to regret it. There were boundaries, laws, governing what Magycke she could freely access as a practitioner of The Discipline. Magycke was formulaic in nature, each spell having two -- or more -- sides, like a complex mathematical equation. And each equation came with its own set of Rules. Those rules existed to limit any individual practitioner's influence over the spell's possible effects on the existing Cosmic Balance --- to contain the damage that could be done by blow-back. But Nygeia had been forced to go beyond the rules. She'd broken the most primary of the Statutes of Spellcasting, endangering her individual psychic bond as a Mage with greater sphere of The Discipline. What she'd done could not be defined as 'spellcasting'. Seized by an overpowering primal mandate to survive, she'd barbarously reached out in an electromagnetically-enhanced telekinetic frenzy and smashed through the Wall of Reality's Veil. She'd forcibly manipulated the Elemental Wall of SpaceTime, triggering a targeted Displacement Schism. Nygeia, Akkitus Orthwaine, Durkka-jan, the warriors Murshipaz and Oerdyke, Pnoom-Aig and Yllvanea Razora all had survived the jetellin's explosive collision with the city-fortress' central towers, but the event had resulted in a ruinous and appalling circumstance...