MAGUS INFINITE

I felt the statement of this new law reach the eastern sea, because I felt the great slow storms out there wake and join, a wall of weather five hundred miles long igniting down its entire length in one heartbeat, like a struck match seen from the wrong end of time.

The sound of this ignition was frightening, and I wondered if lives were lost to this sound alone, and I felt it reach the ruined south, where the sky had become dead black with ash and demon smoke for who knows how long, and I felt all that filth ignite, thousands of square miles of poisoned air remembering that it could carry a charge.

I thought the previous explosion was massive; this one eclipsed the first by an order of magnitude, enough, I think, to silence the entire world.

The statement crossed the continent, and I could feel spots of cold that I could not touch, all roughly in the shape of pyramids, and I recognized that I was feeling the Caeliths that were spread all across the continent.

My mind could not be stuck in this place as I felt the statement reach Aldenmere, the seat of all elements in this world. There are mountains there, and there are always thunderheads sitting on them. In these mountains were the resources that would guide most lightning mages all the way to the peak of Arcanist. Even my Acolyte Staff was gained from the Elemental Fuschia tree that was born in these mountains.

When the statement spread across these mountains, every thunderheads stood stood up at once, and they followed the statement, as the entirety of the continent shook as if they were welcoming the first Sovereign of Lightning.

And then it reached the edges of my continent and did not stop, and I lost the ability to follow it, and the last thing I knew before my senses drowned was that it was still going.

The whole atmosphere of the world was reciting my sentence back to me, and it was glorious.

∞

All of these seem to take a lot of time, but following the law behind the statement I had sent out into the world, it happened nearly instantaneously... as my lightning does not travel; it arrives.

Clouds across the entire continent and behind flared blue, and then lightning began to fall like rain. It was a continuous, downward pour of blue fire out of the sky, only it was not blue fire but lightning that was falling in sheets.

It fell on oceans and mountains and shattered the ground for thousands of miles. The lightning fell like a single sustained discharge between the heavens and the ground of an entire world, and it seemed as if every living being in the world was diving for cover under the fury of the heavens, and in the next moment, the heavens began to scream.

This cry was similar to what I had experienced at my Arcanist Tribulation, but multiplied almost exponentially as it covered the entire world.

I figured that when that much charge moves through that much air at once, the air itself tears, and the sound that comes out of a torn sky is one continuous shriek arriving from every point of every horizon simultaneously.

Perhaps if you have heard the sound of the atmosphere of a world being pulled apart along a hundred million seams at the same moment, then you might understand what I was hearing, and what was important was that it did not stop; it just kept going on and on and on.

Every living thing under that sky heard it in their teeth, and their marrow and the bones behind their eyes, and some of them will never hear anything else.

And as the heavens rumbled, the earth answered.

Ten thousand miles of Aelmar shuddered. I felt it, even though I was a mile in the air, which should have been impossible and tells you exactly how large it was.

It was as if the crust of the entire continent was flinching, and mountains began to crumble, rivers went white from bank to bank, as they released waves that rose for hundreds and thousands of meters.

∞

As this was happening, the facility around me was crumbling to pieces. A lot of the lightning pouring down from the clouds was being directed towards the facility, and it could not withstand it.

Entire lengths of metallic columns, hundreds of meters, began to go soft from the heat. Structural spines sagged before they crashed as entire decks folded into the decks beneath them. Plating opened in slow, bright ribbons that peeled away and fell, burning through the building they had been part of.

I don’t know the magic that went into the creation of this place, but it was potent and maybe even alive, but it did not matter, as the lightning melted everything in its path.

And then, with a groan that came up through everything, the entire facility caved into two pieces and began to fall from the sky, including me.

∞

I fell faster than the collapsing facility, since I suspected that the wrecked Celestial vessel was still fighting to remain in the sky.

My body punched through three decks before I stopped counting. Molten Celestial alloy came down with me in long bright threads. Something the size of a house went past, going the other way.

My eyes could see nothing but red and white flashes as the magic in the structure combusted and exploded, most likely from the many law fragments being harvested in this place.

It was a good thing that I had gained Adamantite flesh, or I would have become one very roasted Elric as I fell through the wreck of this prison.

Then the brilliant glow that had filled the entire clouds in the sky converged once more into a single blue dot, hundreds of miles above me, and then it descended, blowing through the falling vessel in the sky and slamming into me, before passing through me and into the earth a mile below.

In that instant, my falling body froze in the air, and the massive facility crumbled past me, and the few metallic pillars and melting halls that smashed into me could not even shake me a single bit.

My mind was filled with a single statement: Heaven above... Earth below.

A scream burst out from me as a line of white lightning erupted from my body that reached towards the highest part of the heavens and the deepest depths of the earth, and I was in the middle of both halves.

For forty seconds, the lightning that connected my body from the heavens to the earth shone across the horizon.

I have thought about that number a great deal since. Forty seconds is nothing; it is less time than it takes to cross a courtyard, and it is not even enough time to be properly afraid.

However, I think this moment stayed with me for a long time because this was the first time I think my actions were seen by the entire world, and I think this moment marked when I began truly changing the loop to reflect my desires.

Here is what happened on my continent in forty seconds.

The war... stopped.