Chapter 19-481: White Road in the Sky (2/2)

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There was a massive earthquake, naturally, and the gravitational chaos and frenzied winds meant staying close to the ground or getting hurled about like a leaf, even with a maxed-out Stormbound Pact. I found myself down low and on Disk, riding behind Sama with a lot of others as her lightfoot danced over the breaking fissures on the ground, blithely ignoring the wonky gravitics as all the Stormbound who could enter a Heavy Magic Sphere worked together to assist the mages in diverting the tornado-class winds past us.

Guiogg drove in a long way, at least half a klik as the mass of the moon met the planet, measured by how the landscape came up to its ‘teeth’. We made more progress towards the Pattern ahead of us as the undead were completely knocked out of our way, anything smaller than half a ton getting sucked helplessly into the air by the vortex of winds that was sliding past our teams.

I passed off the air control spells to the Stormbound, who found themselves juggling the most powerful Control Winds they’d ever imagined to resist the draw from above, while I concentrated on making a telekinetic road of debris and Ward Walls for The Mick, Briggs, Sama, and Amaretta, whose lightfoot had rapidly made them the tow-trains for the Disk Train the rest of us were now on, along with Shvaughn and Legion, who were Stormbound and powerful enough to bull through it using flight.

The Mick and Amaretta still had their hats on, too, I noticed.

Our link with the outside world was totally cut off right now. The Shroud was being blown back, and everyone could see the Devouring Moon that had come down to do something, setting off a wave of panic in those watching through other eyes than our own.

But we weren’t dead. We couldn’t communicate, but the Allegiances weren’t down. Those outside shouted down those panicking and wondering what to do, repeating that we weren’t dead, we weren’t dead, and it wasn’t over until we were.

The ley lines moaned, and every Caster in the whole world felt them bend and shift this time. The vortex above ignited, and the life energy of the world began to pull away and up, into the Devouring Moon.

The Shroud was down, so the Greyfield was as well. Death Wards prevented the lifedrain from sucking us up for the moment, and we drew closer and closer to our goals.

“There.” The Shadow and the Knife had moved up onto my Disk, leaning over my shoulders, and I sensed the attention flitting across us a moment later.

We were still moving, still alive, and the Formation that was keeping the Devouring Moon here was still vulnerable.

The Aberrant saw us, it measured the time and the distance, and the fact we weren’t dying and weren’t dead.

Ahead of us, the fractured earth had stopped splitting into canyons and chasms, and the unholy light of the Formation had spilled beyond the earth and stone moved aside to form it. All we had to do was make it there, disrupt any important part of the Formation, and the Shroud would do the rest of the job for us.

It would wipe away the very memory of our world and why Guiogg was here, sending it back into the void with only a vague dissatisfaction at having wasted its time on something. The Devouring Moon was gathering in life energy, but focused first on elemental power, radiating out from here, and wouldn’t even reach past the Shroud in the time it would take us to reach the outer part of the Formation.

The Aberrant was trying to Timesight us, looking at all the probabilities spinning off the incoming river of destiny headed up by the big lunk in the lead, and realized that it had to act.

It was looking at the wrong place, as it tried to tie off the incoming knots of possibility that were us.

I felt the sub-Formation activate. Power was diverted from the Pattern ahead to that isolated control node offset, which not at all coincidentally was where the attention directed at us had come from.

The tap I’d made into that node went right down into the ground, and to a fold in space down there where a Pyramid sat in the darkness, slowly powering up... and it suddenly lit up like a light bulb.

The Aberrant thing over there exulted as another pillar of light lit off from within the greater one, this one black, crimson, purple, and yellow-green. The entire Shroud writhed as a massive wave of attention swept past and over us and fixed on the Aberrant, realizing it had been betrayed.

Guiogg was being told to eat the negative energy, too!

The Devouring Moon, trapped in a semi-lucid state of being lured to feed and getting mindwiped by the Shroud, obeyed mindlessly. The nature of the energy being drawn in all around us rippled, and the undead circling in the winds above suddenly became streaks of darkness as they instantly corroded away, and their essence was fed into the world-eating Moon above.

And then... all that energy going back up, started to come back down.

Lights and energies pulsed over the inside of the Maw, perhaps struggling with the dreams it was caught in, but the energies going up were turned around and fed back into the Formation... and they all converged on that one little Node over there.

For just a moment, there was an explosion of overwhelming alien exultation, a terrifying inhuman familiarity with a sensation long-desired: the will and appetite to feast on worlds, a Thing that could eat even the Devouring Moon... and planned to do so here, to satisfy an appetite that had no limit.

It was really bad, a hefty blow to morale, a moment of Doom, the River of Fate coming to an end as we were too late, we’d been held back just long enough. The Pattern wasn’t in range and we couldn’t stop what was coming...

“Gotcha, fucktard,” Briggs murmured, his Voice clearly audible over the howl of the winds, the shattering of the ground, and the reverberating groans of the killer moon over our heads... and the breaking of hearts that faltered and looked at him in shock.

The Pyramid I’d put in place months ago broke the surface, shining white with vivus, and everything ignited with Light. It was a thread of Fate that didn’t matter until the Aberrant itself pulled it into place with its actions, as opposed to the big bright diversion riding in with horns blowing and possibilities flaring right over here.

Timesight was all well and good, but sleight of hand principles were the rule here, and this thing wasn’t playing the game too well.