67 Conduits (1/2)
Li's arm shook ever so slightly, the staff wavering as his vision blurred, his magical energy running low. The rumble that shook the throne room had now become a full on quake, rattling the foundations of the entire place. The solid floor almost looked like waves with how they undulated up and down under the powerful tension of magical energy bursting from the portal Li had conjured.
The portal itself whirled like a buzz-saw. Its outline of warped space fluxed madly, struggling to maintain a circular shape.
Li looked behind and saw Zahaka had started to lean on the basin with one arm and used her other one to tap at floating sigils emblazoned upon a transparent screen. She tapped with urgent speed, her eyes flitting up and down, her brows furrowed in heavy thought.
”The portal is fully configured and stabilizing…”
Li sighed and tapped his staff to the ground, propping himself to his usual upright posture. The gods exhaled in collective relief. Khonsu cancelled his [Shadowborn Void] and floated next to Zahaka. Chi-You held a great wide smile upon his bull face, curls of smoke puffing from his nose. Even Helius seemed to perk up a little, his sunken in eyes widening.
”But my calculations have fallen below the mark.”
”You have to be kidding me,” said Li. ”The portal seems ready enough. I can see the farm right through it. All we have to do is pass through it.”
Zahaka shook her head. ”It is not so simple. To pass an entity of our level of power and scale requires a portal of immense structural integrity and capacity. That portal right now,” she said, pointing to the swirling circle of shorn space-time in the air. ”Can pass but one of us.”
”You didn't think this would be a possibility?” said Li. He was familiar with dealing with operational variables in an experiment, and he could not believe that a goddess could not foresee something as basic as this. ”To me, it seems that if you're experimenting with a method of transportation, then capacity would be the first thing to consider after a viability of initial success.”
”Let us not argue,” said Chi-You his six arms raised up to try and calm the increasingly tense air cloying in the room.
Zahaka narrowed her eyes, but then her expression softened. Strangely, she seemed more content than she should be, merely nodding at the situation, making a mental note of it. ”Eldritch energies are highly unfamiliar to me, I am afraid. I have worked with them only once, and that experiment went disastrously wrong to the point that I could not learn from any of it. I had always thought eldritch energy as possessing limitless potential, as infinite and inevitable as the fundamental forces of decay.
To transfer one of us through a regular portal would require one as large as a country, perhaps even larger. I theorized a portal borne from eldritch energies would simply surpass these restrictions considering how freely it seems to act with space-time, but it seems there are limitations to its power.”
”Then how do you suppose we fix this?” said Li. He motioned to the portal above. It was starting to shrink. ”How long will it take you to modify the ritual? What will it take?””
”Modification is a quick process, taking a few years, perhaps. However, to power a portal large enough to transfer all of us would require you to cast a spell similar in scale to that which you utilized to shatter Chi-You's realm. However-”
Zahaka's lips curved in a faint smile, and she motioned to the portal with an extended finger. ”I do not wish to keep you here for years upon years, for you have assisted us more than enough. Go, take the portal, Old One, and return to the mortal plane. To keep you here for such time while you have mortal connections to tend to would be highly selfish of us.”
”That would indeed be the right thing to do!” Chi-You nodded. ”Knowing you, I thought you would fight to keep the Old One here, and I was about to argue against the matter, but it is good to see the cold Zahaka of old has worn down over the years.”
Zahaka shrugged.
”I knew it. Another failure.” Helius shook his head and limped himself standing. ”A waste of time.”
Khonsu said nothing. He merely floated there, looking to Zahaka, his masked face bereft of any emotion.
Li's skeletal head lowered a little, the jaw opening, wisps of darkness fluttering out. Zahaka seemed the most hell-bent on getting out of here than any of the others. She had been the one to study obsessively for centuries while the gods around her either gave up or waited on her. Yet she was letting Li leave so freely.
There had to be something she wanted in exchange.
As if reading his mind, Zahaka continued, ”I only ask that you may return a little token from each of us to the mortal realm.”
”What would that be?” said Li, a little wary.
”A token from each of us.” Zahaka called out to the rest of the gods. ”Give him your conduits.” She explained to Li, ”Conduits are artifacts connected heavily with us that we fashioned in preparation for our arrival. We hope that if they are distributed across the world, then a mortal compatible with our personalities will be drawn to them, allowing us to mold them to be our vessels to escape the world's oversight.”
”You're prepping something similar to avatars, I see,” said Li. ”But this implies that you have a means to get back. Without me, however, you all have nothing. No battery to boot up the ritual.”
”And without me there to configure a means to hide you from the world's automated system, I believe you will see us again sometime, though I know not when. By then, I am hopeful I will have modified the ritual sufficiently. However, I cannot keep you here while you have your farm to tend to.”
Zahaka reached a hand to her hair and plucked one of the snakes out.
It was a cobra, its hood decorated with the same eye-like pattern of rainbow scales on her tail. When she severed the live snake form her head, it curled up, its mouth eating at its tail before shrinking and calcifying into a bracelet of precious stone.
She gently pushed it towards Li, and it floated over to him. He caught it in his wooden hand.
”You still don't know for sure what exactly it is that takes me to this place?” he said.
Zahaka shook her head, her lips pursed. ”In your case, I do not. But if you ever do end up here and I have not finalized the ritual, it is an easy process to simply replicate this process again and send you back.”
”Fair enough.” Li's strongest hypothesis right now was that he had turned into his original form one too many times or perhaps used one too many powerful spells in the mortal world, but that was, at the end of the day, just a hypothesis.