Extra Shadows
It was the eyes that had given it away when Chronomancer Eden first saw his target. You can make the body look young again, you can fill your movements with energy and excitement but those that have lived many lifetimes cannot hide the effect it has on their eyes. Sometimes it is the tiredness of someone who has seen so many friends (and enemies) pass. For others, like the wizard sat on the other side of the bar from Chronomancer Eden, it is a cold burning rage which takes generation after generation to form leading them further into insanity.
This didn’t worry Eden at all, he had dealt with many situations like this before, the problem was the nagging reminder at the back of his mind that he had missed something. He had initially dismissed this constant low level fear as being related to the location of the bar, which was sitting on the edge of a volcano next to a giant lake, but it still wasn’t going away.
He had scoped out the time period and location in detail after getting the assignment, there was nothing even close to the power level required to threaten someone wielding the sands of time themself and yet there was still that nagging doubt.
He took another sip from his drink and waited for the wizard to finish his and walk towards the door, it was always better to minimise the collateral damage and reduce the impact to the timeline when you could, it just reduced clean up time and effort afterwards.
The elderly wizard slowly followed the path down around the lake and back towards the glowing city that lay in the distance. Chronomancer Eden followed, waiting for him to pass round the corner so he would be out of sight from the patrons in the bar.
As soon as the elderly wizard passed the corner he sped up to cut the distance. Passing round the corner he just had an instant to catch sight of the old wizard standing facing him with a smile on his face before he got hit with a blast of magic so powerful that it shouldn’t have even been possible.
The low level personal shield he always carried was turned to dust immediately, automatic protocols he had never planned to use sensed the wave of energy flowing towards him and sent a signal to a standby core to emergency startup and extract him, milliseconds passed before the core realised it didn’t have time to run the full set of calculations and pull just Chronomancer Eden out, it would have to shift a whole chunk of the local environment out with him. Path, trees and everything within a sphere 3 meters wide had their quantum signature fed into the calculations and executed.
Chronomancer Eden felt like he was looking into the surface of the sun as the white light ate into the sphere forming around him. The final part of the sphere closed in agonisingly slow motion and in an instant he found himself dumped centuries into the future next to a gentle stream surrounded by magnolia trees on a beautiful summers day (along with chunks of the path and burnt bits of rock and tree from his previous location).
A later investigation, after other very senior Chronomancers revisited the location and finished downloading the report from the core emergency transport, had discovered that hundreds or even thousands of years before that moment someone or something had used the ions produced by the volcano to start charging the lake turning it into a giant battery. The probability cascade causing the release had been timed for that exact moment but the report concluded even though the attacker was unknown, it doubted that it was the wizard who was the target of the operation purely due to its level of complexity, he was probably just the bait. The good news was that the emergency defences worked exactly as they should which caused everyone involved in the investigation to relax a bit.
The aged senior white wizard reading the conclusion, which contained a full copy of all the code downloaded from the core annotated to show how close they came to losing Chronomancer Eden, closed his workstation, shook his head and headed off home for the weekend.
He never noticed the extra shadow next to the computer that didn’t seem to link to a light source. Nor did he hear the noise of the computer powering back up after he had left the building.
Entered by: 0xFa43…08e9 and preserved on chain (see transaction)
Silence is the loudest noise
The laboratory was a complete mess. The central core of the main room was built around a huge transparent ball filled with a slowly moving purple substance. It was suspended in mid air using lots of small magnets, each one constantly shifting due to some unknown magical mechanism, trying to ensure the ball would never came into physical contact with anything. The small crack on the side, leaking something dark purple in colour, implied it had not been one hundred percent successful. The purple was so dark it could almost be mistaken for black but it was hard to be certain, as if the light in the room wasn’t able to interact with it in the same way as normal matter.
There was no sign of the alchemist wizard that had been conducting the experiments but there was certainly something else in the room. Chronomancer Eden watched the giant Pigatog that was pacing back and forth at the back of the room hoping it wouldn’t notice him before he was finished.
There was no way it could have passed through the door into the room so it had clearly been created within it. As the Pigatog turned its large eyes towards him he knew no intelligence from before the transformation was left inside, although it would be a matter of debate if anyone trying to run this kind of experiment in the first place could be considered intelligent in Eden’s opinion.
Things created by chaos magic, which hadn’t managed to maintain some of their pre transformation intelligence, basically always attacked.
All chaos weapons, regardless of if they are created deliberately or accidentally, are based on interfering with causality and that is a very slippery slope. The problem with messing with causality is that if you go too far, whatever reason you had for doing it originally ceases to even matter.
You see initially it’s great, a young wizard would rather have a bar of gold in their hand rather than a bar of lead and chaos magic is the fastest way of getting there. Rather than go the long way round, interfering with the atoms, balancing energy levels etc you just make the outcome you want occur without putting in any of the work.
But the universe is a set of scales and everything has a cost. The more a wizard uses this ability, the more unexpected things occur to the wizard that they didn’t actually want. Predictable actions no longer link to expected outcomes until one day you walk through a door and end up inside out or made of glass or something else that causality would never allow.
Many wizards had attempted to control it safely but there was no such thing as safe when it came to purple chaos magic.
Chronomancer Eden hadn’t volunteered for this particular mission. His main fear had been the risk to his own existence of meeting a previously very powerful wizard driven completely mad by purple chaos magic. When it came to chaos magic the powers that be tried to limit the number of wizards who knew how it worked just to cut down on the risk of it getting into the wrong hands, or at least that was the story they told Eden. He was starting to suspect that the truth was they felt he was more expendable than he felt he was.
Still it was interesting to Eden to see how the chaos magic behind the creation of the Pigatog was so clear and clean. Most chaos magic created creatures ended up quite messy but this new creature was clearly just a pig crossed with a hedgehog.
He started building a portal directly into the Chronomancer’s zoo, breathed a sigh of relief that at least this wasn’t a worst case scenario any more and his mind moved onto his plans for later that evening. Slowly moving the portal across the Pigatog with one hand and opening a second one home with the other, he took one last look before heading home.
In the shadows at the back of the room a purple soul staff glowed brightly for a moment as the trapped soul of the wizard scientist screamed a warning from inside. The void holding the staff didn’t have a mouth but if I had one it would have smiled. It had some very important technical questions to ask the great wizard scientist trapped inside about this reality and now it had plenty of time to ask them.
Such a beautiful clean universe filled with logic and structure it marvelled, as it looked outwards through the walls of the laboratory as if they weren’t even there. It had been more than one eternity since it had eaten anything like that.
Entered by: 0xFa43…08e9
