I send these last messages in the name of the Athasian Survey Project. All will be explained soon…

———————————————–

“I could dominate your mind, crushing your mortal brain and…forcing my will upon yours. But that… will not do. No.”

I cannot feel the connection to my obsidian sphere anymore. I cannot escape.

“You’ve made it this far. That makes you more…worthy a vessel than Margaba. He was strong, but his…thirst for power made him rash.”

This body I’ve used for my carriage of essence has become my prison as I ride on this chariot made of bone and leather, pulled by a rotting animated crodlu. My captor stands behind me, a soldier in leather armour and a carved obsidian mask.

I look out across the vast blackness of the obsidian plane. Even as I remember the crags and ravines through which I chased Maragaba, the blackglass’ flatness seems to stretch on forever in all directions, punctuated only by occasional marks on the surface left by chariot wheels or cracks from some forgotten impact.

“What do you want?” I ask in my mind.

“I want you to…deliver a message for me,” I hear in response. “But to do so, you must understand my message with every fiber of your being. You must not just carry my message back to the Order, but you must advocate my message for me…

“You must know WHY.”

With that, the floor seems to fall away from reality, and I am falling into blackness.

———————————————–

I am in a human body I do not recognise. I wear black and white robes. I am speaking to a strange woman in another language, something that sounds very ancient. But after a moment I seem to understand what she is saying. I also know her name: Magnwag the Preserver.

“…How is Ulariss faring?”

“She’s lost a leg, half her face, and has life-threatening burns across more than half her body, sir. All completely seared away by raw elemental Sun energy. Even with Munavar’s clerical magic we are going to struggle to patch her up completely. Sir, I’m having second thoughts about this…”

“Have you not seen the reports of the seas drying up? The scale of magic the Cleansing Armies are using is clearly more than the world can take. Rajaat in his wisdom knew we’d need another source of power. And he was right. We cannot stop now. It won’t be long before we’ve found the right energies to tap.”

“Sir, this was just one controlled opening of an elemental conduit through The Gate. What if something bigger goes wrong?”

“We have dozens of the best mages in Ulyan, if not all of Uran, placing redundant safeguards and contingency spells on The Gate. It would take something truly catastrophic to break through all of that. I don’t know if there’s even anything left alive in this world capable of that kind of power…”

———————————————–

As quickly as the first memory dominated my senses, it melted away and I found myself in an entirely different place. I’m now in the same body, a bit older, but everything has changed. I’m hiding behind partial cover, firing powerful magical blasts at a massive force of undead. Their assault on our compound has made it all the way to The Gate courtyard.

Magnwag is lying dead on the other side of the makeshift barricade. I knew she fell under the axe of an ogre meorty, buying me enough time to cast disintegrate. We were the most powerful mages in Ulyan, with several generations of mages, clerics, and psions studying under us. And yet here we were, falling one by one to the reanimated corpses of the very same garrison warriors our founding members felled when the Cleansing Armies sacked this city all those decades ago.

In between attacks, my colleague Zaprarus No-iim hopped over a pillar to crouch next to me. He stared at me with a crazed look in his eyes, blood running down the side of his face from his scalp. “Negchar, the gate is more than a power source. I think I know something which could help us repel the attack. Can you cover me?”

At the time, I had no better ideas, so I agreed. As I unleashed chain lightning on the meorties and their namech cannon fodder, I saw Zaprarus dimension door his way closer to The Gate. I see I’m not the only one covering for him, as several surviving senior wizards are attacking anything that comes close to him as he seems to be pushing magic into The Gate itself.

Everyone heard that familiar whooshing sound as The Gate opened. We had found the Demi-plane of Obsidian tucked away inside Magma. It had proven the best answer to our question of an energy source a few months ago, not long after Qwith (our liaison to Rajaat) had effectively disappeared. But Zaprarus was doing something different – he wasn’t just tapping power, he was trying to widen the conduit, trying to bring something through.

It was only a scant few moments before everyone heard an unearthly deep roar like nothing we had ever heard before, as something indescribably big started pushing its way through The Gate, forcing it wider from the other side.

The last thing I remember was screaming “STOP!” as a stray attack struck The Gate, and the world exploded.

———————————————–

The burning screaming pain melted away, and I woke up completely trapped inside boiling hot liquid. It was in my eyes, it was in my throat. I screamed from the pain, and felt something under my chin fragment and crumble under the pressure of my jaw! I slowly calm down as I realise I’m not actually breathing. Eventually the liquid cools around me, first into a clay-like consistency, then into something far more solid. I immediately begin to work my way up, digging my way upwards hoping I’m making my way up to the surface. Eventually I manage to break through into a large trapped air bubble before the material hardens around me - likely my dying breath. As I look around at the tiny bubble and explore it with my hands, I realize both that I can see in the total absence of light - not a good sign - and that the substance around me seems to be dark colored and smooth like glass. Of course, The Gate and the Demi-plane of Obsidian. I slam my fist into the wall of the bubble and a section of the blackglass shatters. I know now how to free myself. As I’m slowly crushing the glass around me with my limbs, it occurs to me the glass is not abnormally weak. I’m just abnormally strong now. I orient myself and continue to claw and smash my way upwards.

After what feels like an eternity, my clawing fingers reach open air. I pull myself onto the surface, looking out upon a desolate and endless field of nothing but obsidian.

The world has ended. Our mission was not just a failure, but we destroyed the world with it.

My lamentation is interrupted by the crumbling sound of a clawed hand forcing its way through the black glass not far from me. While I don’t recognise the porcelain black skin at first, I recognise the face of Magnwag instantly as she pulls herself through the broken obsidian.

The befuddled look on her face is replaced by a familiar look of defeat and loss as she surveys the landscape around us.

“Did… we do this, sir?”

———————————————–

The landscape melted away, and I am standing in the subterranean chamber, working with my team to place the last binding enchantments on the beating Heart on the plinth adorned with carved channels. It occurrs to me that we are all undead, standing in a room carved out of the deep blackglass underneath an entire city obsessively recreated block by block out of obsidian, and here I was holding a carved obsidian heart, the last remaining connection to The Gate which had doomed our entire world with molten black glass. Everything which surrounded us, everything we were, everything we had done to build a stable existence had been not only done by our own hands, but in direct defiance to the course fate had seemingly set out for us.

With the power of this Heart, we could claw back some of the control we lost to the obsidian.

“Sir, we are ready–”

His words are interrupted as the radiant attack flies across the chamber. I hear Sinker Kasgat screaming, and I see his partner Djelj fall, his left shoulder and bicep burning. As they move out of the way I spot the assailant… Ac’nac’wo. He’s looking straight at me with murder in his eyes. I know that I would already be dead had Djelj not been in the way.

———————————————–

The face of my would-be assassin melted away, and now the scenes are coming much more rapidly. They seem to be scattered across… centuries? Millennia? Undeath does such strange things to your sense of time.

Since I went into hiding, I reached out further and further, making connections wherever I could. I soon learned the world wasn’t over, but it might as well have been – the once lush and varied continent of Uran had withered into a dry desperate place, the once mighty Champions we followed turned into psionically enchanted monsters, hiding inside their pet city-states and pretending to be god-kings. Rajaat’s sorcery and the defilers who short-cutted it had taken their bastardised magic to its natural conclusion – the ecological ruin of the planet.

———————————————–

“Do you see, Eshmel? Humanity’s petty selfishness… our short-sighted grabs for power…they’ve all taken their toll. Every move we’ve made for power over this world…has merely hastened its demise.”

As my perception returned back to reality, I found myself and the chariot passing through an extensive no-man’s land filled with torn-up obsidian, and the remains of countless destroyed undead of both humanoid and… insectoid?

Up head, I could see an imposing fortified city built entirely out of obsidian. Even from this low angle looking up the hill, I could see the multiple redundant layers of fortification walls. As we came closer, it became clear we were being taken into this city through a heavily guarded subterranean entrance…

(To be continued..)

Sources:
* Secrets of the Dead Lands
* Faces of the Dead Lands