Magician’s End (64 page)

You are here to do one thing, and lingering here and exploring, no matter how long you look, will not change the outcome, for when you finish your exploration, it will be precisely the same instant you left, and nothing will be changed. We have witnessed every conceivable choice, and there is only one outcome that doesn’t reverse the expansion of reality, returning everything to as it once was, before creation
.

Tomas had to die so that the full fury of Ashen-Shugar could be turned upon the Dreadking, a rage unhindered by human sensibilities.

Pug paused, his heart sinking, and he realized now the one piece of this he hadn’t understood until now. Ashen-Shugar hadn’t been needed as a mere distraction so Pug could come into the pit and explore the void and its intersection with reality, freeing Pug of the Dreadking’s attention; rather, the Dragon Lord was the only entity on Midkemia powerful enough to become that one thing, that one moment of distraction, towards which all the Dreadking’s attention would be turned, letting go of everything else across space and time, thereby robbing the void of other opportunities to successfully achieve its goal. Ashen-Shugar and the Dreadking must remain locked in this moment for eternity.

Magnus!
Pug sent to his son.
What is happening?

Magnus saw the smoky tendrils and shadowy creatures pouring out of the fractured dome, and then suddenly they were motionless, frozen in place.

Father, the attacks have ceased!

Get as many away as you can
, Pug sent.

The Oracle’s voice came again to Pug.
You must now lock them into a struggle that will endure to the end of time. Only in that way can the mindless obsession of the Dread be for ever focused into a single, fixed point in time, and then can the rest of creation grow
.

I know
, said Pug, and he realized with resignation that nothing had changed, except more of those struggling above might survive.

When you are finished, I will awake in my cave beneath Sethanon, and from there I will see a new series of time-lines, choices, and possibilities. But only if you finish this
.

Pug was silent, then said,
I know.

If it will comfort you, there is one thing you must understand above all: that one thing separates the realm in which you live, the moving and evolving world, from that which was left behind, that which hungers for that perfect timeless bliss
.
You do what you do for love. You mortals make terrible mistakes for love, and you suffer for love, but you
have
love. The Dread only has longing, and longing drives frustration, and that drives anger, and in the end nothing is left but rage and hunger. Self-sacrifice is the highest form of love.

I understand
, said Pug.

Magnus waited with the moredhel warrior Arkan standing in front of him, his empty quiver and his bow lying on the ground as he stood with his sword, ready to face the next wave of the Dread.

Now!
came his father’s voice in his mind, and Magnus took every bit of the energy in the matrix of magic and channelled it to his father.

For a long moment there was a pause, as if the universe held its breath.

Then chaos was unleashed.

The flood of magic Pug unleashed on the Dread and Ashen-Shugar was like a sledgehammer striking a nail, driving it through a board and out the other side. Both powerful beings were struck so hard they almost vanished as they were blown down into the pit, cast out of this universe, out into the void.

The Dread was the void. The void was the Dread. It folded back in on itself, its sense of time and space contracted to the here and now as it faced a foe demanding its undivided attention.

Ashen-Shugar was suspended in time, in a bubble of reality, like a fly in amber, as he gripped the Dread.

The two of them spun down out of Pug’s sight.

Then he felt the vortex.

The hole in the realms was sucking everything around him into the void. Now came the end, for he had to plug that breach. Pug reached out with the power channelled to him and fed it directly into the void, accelerating the collapse of all the matter surrounding it.

The world started to fall in on top of him.

Magnus felt the magic he was funnelling ripped out of his hands, and started hearing screams of pain. The ruby dome imploded down into the ground, sucking every remaining Dread backward, as if they had been yanked with incredible speed by an invisible cord carrying them back whence they had emerged.

The sound was the sound of a thousand earthquakes, a rumbling so deep that it drowned out the thunder from the approaching storm clouds above. Rain came down in sheets and lightning flashed across the sky, and everywhere Magnus looked he saw magicians and priests fallen and writhing in pain, or lying still in death.

The dragons fled, launching themselves skyward on massive wings that cracked the air. The wind from their wings buffeted those still standing and knocked back even the most formidable moredhel warrior or taredhel Sentinel.

Magnus fell to the ground as it heaved under him like a thing alive. He rolled on his back and scrambled to get away from the terrible vortex storm that was building energy by the minute. He turned and saw that those who were able were fleeing up toward the higher meadow. Over his shoulder, he saw the moredhel chieftain Arkan on the ground, unable to get his feet under him. Magnus reached out and Arkan found himself rising into the air, immune to the strong wind being created by the sucking energy of the vortex.

With a motion of his hand, Magnus moved the warrior to where Miranda stood, next to Liallan and a knot of her warriors. Nearby stood Calin and Calis, along with two stunned but still standing Spellweavers. With a single wave of his hand, Magnus indicated it was time for her to take them to safety, and in a blink Miranda and more than a dozen moredhel, eledhel, and taredhel were gone.

Magnus saw that Nakor and Ruffio were also missing, so he assumed they had followed instructions and were ferrying people away. He felt the energy field around him growing in intensity and he reached out mentally to see if he could contact his father, and encountered a strange emptiness, not as if his father was gone, but rather as if he was somewhere close but Magnus couldn’t reach him.

Magnus realized that in all the planning his father had done for this moment, he hadn’t anticipated how the lattice of magic would be severed, and how much damage this spell might cause. They had planned on utilising the energy Magnus no longer controlled to plug the vortex, pulling down mountains if needed, but neither magician had anticipated the surge of magic and their inability to contain it once the Dread had been forced back into the void. There had been a backlash neither Magnus nor his father had anticipated and its effects were devastating. Magicians and priests, Spellweavers and shamans, lay on the ground, their grotesque contortions and vacant eyes clearly marking them as dead. Magnus and Pug had known some magicians might be lost in this, but nothing on this scale. A terrible price had been paid by hundreds, if not thousands, around the world.

But had it been enough? The dome was now gone, and from where he stood he could see trees bending toward the pit in the ground, and knew that in only a few more minutes everything in this area would be sucked into the maw of the pit. The screaming of the wind in his ears deafened him to any other sound, but the vibration beneath his feet made him understand that the very soil and rock under his feet was being pulled toward the pit.

He used his magic to rise above the ground, and suddenly had to struggle against the pull from the vortex. Gauging his position and how much power it took to hold his place, he knew he was looking at mere minutes before he too would vanish into the maw of darkness opening up in the heart of the Grey Tower Mountains. Once more he reached out for Pug, and once more found an emptiness where his father should be. He felt a dark stab of uncertainty, for whatever he could do had been done. Now it only remained to see if their plan worked and if this sucking pit before him could be plugged and sealed.

Pug battled forces he had almost no experience with: walls of magic energy that swept over him, lines of enchantment that would warp reality if they were unleashed into the world, huge waves of rolling intersections between energy and matter, time unwinding and soaring spirals of thought. The crashing forces at play around him were overwhelming to the point at which he could barely retain his own sense of identity, let alone remember his purpose.

From his perspective, Pug was witnessing the consumption of his world by the void, an in-taking of every shred of matter around the now destroyed city of E’bar, from the mightiest tower or lofty tree to the tiniest strand of a spider’s silk or a dust mote. In an increasing volume at accelerating speed, rock, water, soil, plants, and animals were being pulled into the maw of the pit. He shifted his focus and moved along the time stream, back to his mystic marker, so he could return to being in sync with what was occurring on the surface. Fear rose in him as he realized he had grievously miscalculated how he was going to manipulate the power lent him by so many others. If he let things continue as they were, far more damage would be done to this world than had already been inflicted. Pug assumed the alpine valley where E’bar had rested, the site of the original Tsurani rift, was now a gaping hole torn deep into the crust of the world, deepening by the minute as the spinning vortex he had created ripped apart the essential forces binding rock together, shredding granite into fine sand and powder in an instant, liquefying anything less stout and even ripping apart the very air, causing sheets of flame and sprays of water to erupt as gases were torn asunder and recombined in seconds.

The deafening sound that filled the air, drowning out thought at times, was the dying cry of a world.

Magnus!

Here, Father! I thought I’d lost you.

Where are you?

North of the pit, on that large outcropping of rock. It’s taken all my power to hold here. I can’t endure this much longer
.

Pug sensed the pain his son was experiencing.
You can do no more. It is time for you to cut any remaining tether between me and the world, then flee
.

I don’t know if I can
, Magnus replied.

You must
.

Pug made one last calculation and knew he had to act before he lost any hope of sealing the tear between here and the void.

Now!

Magnus closed his eyes and extended his consciousness for a moment and saw that the energy that had been torn from his control had mostly been torn asunder, but a tiny tether of energy remained between what was left of the worldwide lattice of magic and Pug.
I understand, Father,
he said at last, and he severed what was left of Pug’s connection with the world.

The entirety of the world shuddered.

Then, for a moment, everything was still.

Suddenly the totality of magic in Midkemia that had been confined and used by Pug recoiled, energies exploding out of the pit, and a massive bolt shot through Magnus as he attempted to disentangle himself from it, so that he was shaken like a rat by a terrier, his screams of agony filling the air; and deep below in the pit, Pug felt his son die.

Darkness crashed down on Pug.

Lightning shot down like a barrage of arrows, as the clouds unleashed so much energy at the ground that the forests of the Grey Towers were set ablaze. Flaming trees moved toward the pit, cascading sheets of fire and embers ripped from their branches, all now sucked downward like a waterfall of fury around the entire rim of the pit, as a massive bubble of angry red magic shot upward from the center of the pit, shooting upward through the clouds as fast as the swiftest arrow until, miles above the surface of Midkemia, it reached its limit and lost momentum.

The last survivors not evacuated by Miranda, Nakor, Ruffio, and the others stared at the brilliant ruby pillar amidst the chaos of this massive storm. Then the red magic slammed back into the surface and the world heaved and buckled inward.

Where the Grey Towers Mountains had risen since before the coming of man to Midkemia, a crumbling crater rim miles across now marked the limits of Pug’s magic. An inconceivable inversion had forced geology to turn back upon itself and now a mile-deep caldera remained. At the bottom millions of tons of rock and detritus lay beneath a mile-deep cloud of dust.

Rivers now ran into what would come to be known as the Sunken Lands and the planet seemed to groan as it began its transformation.

Then a wave of energy rose up from the mass of debris on the crater floor and magic began to skip and shimmer along the surfaces of the rock. A second backlash of the magic Pug had harnessed now ran free. It gathered itself as if contracting, then shot up into the sky like a shimmering blue fountain. Energy spat upward as if from a volcano and raced around the world, landing at random.

The forest of the Green Reaches, marking the boundary between the Kingdom and Great Kesh, was awash in the blue light: trees began to twist and grow; once-small vines grew massive and thorny. As if becoming sentient, the forest pushed out from the centre and those who had gone to bed in Keshian Jonril the night before, surrounded by open farmland, would arise the next day to see trees towering twenty or thirty feet higher than before. Where pleasant woodlands had once stood, now an impenetrable forest choked every square mile between the mountain ranges known as the Peaks of Tranquillity and the Pillars of the Stars, reaching all the way to the shore of the Great Star Lake. Every caravan route and game trail, famers’ road, and imperial highway was overgrown and vanished in one night.

To the west of the Far Coast a ripple of energy sped through the water and the Sunset Islands began to sink. At first few noticed, but within an hour ships at the docks were riding high and those in the bay off of Freeport were pulling up anchor. Within two hours, people were fleeing for whatever ship would take them and by dawn the next day only open ocean could be seen.