007. the unbroken and the crack in the sundering.

“ELIDIBUS!”

someone shakes you awake and wrests you from the ground. you reach a hand up at sluggish speed and find ink and blood drag it back to the ground; fire lurches and cuts through the aether of former friends and fellows and roars for you to move on. that is your first exposure to the end of the final days.

the muck sticks to the walls of your throat and burns where it drips from your eyes. the world is sweltering, agonizing to pass through, but the hands around your back and arm push you past the thick fog. it’s filled with crimson, streaked in orange and gold, flashes through your vision in waves, and contrasts the tar and dried blood on your skin and the ground. you are feet away from where you first awoke when your throat clears enough and you manage to speak.

“Lahabrea.” that wasn’t who called you earlier, you know. it was… it was— “Emet-Selch. What are the two of you—” a hack ripples through you. you squeeze your eyes shut and dip forward, but one catches you and the other rubs your back. “What are the two of you doing? I should be with Him—I shouldn’t be here—”

“We know,” someone says. your ears bleed and you can’t recognize who’s who anymore. it hurts. “There has been a change in plans. We have to go.”

“But—” they don’t quiet you. the wound of bereft aether forces you first. you shut up and nod and try to push forward through the holes in your shoes and the gashes through your flesh.

it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. you want to moan and sob and they won’t let you. none of you have time to. as disconnected as you are, as broken as you are, you can still sense the change in the aether. it repels your skin in the air and cracks if you get too close, hisses the further you move from where you began. it all has gone horribly wrong.

the world doesn’t want you here. the world doesn’t want to be here, either. you don’t need either of your coworkers to explain the dread in your lungs: you already know it wants to split you in two and leave your aether in pieces and rot. it’s clear enough what it’s done to the rest of the city; now it wants to ravage you.

how? how are you meant to escape this when you’re sure it’s consumed so many of the friends who were left from His hold? your head swarms with suggestions and voices not wholly yours. if you’ve mumbled it you don’t hear it, at least in your own voice; one of them sighs and you have to guess who.

“We’ll find a way. His—their lives cannot be for waste. After everything—after everything we did—!”

“It won’t be,” you rasp. you wonder if emet-selch, with that keen sight that gave claim to his position, can look through what’s left of your flesh and soul and see that you are lying. “Do you know where to go?”

“Not yet,” emet-selch heaves. “We’re still looking.”

what a stubborn man. you can’t bring yourself to break his spirit any more than it already seems. so you weakly nod and tell him, “That’s a start,” and you see his aether glow. “How much do you have left to look through?

“Most of the western portion of the city,” lahabrea interjects. “Emet-Selch has already attempted to look through the rest of it. The city is walled in by the monsters and the devastation.” and the bodies of the damned, you don’t add. “We will be hard-pressed for escape depending on our abilities.”

“Don’t try yet,” you close your eyes, letting your body go slack and weighing over your coworkers’ arms. you don’t know if you’ll get the strength to move on your own in time. “I would not… risk the potential of our magicks going awry. Not in this condition.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” emet-selch snaps. “I will have us all make it through these days alive, and I have no idea where someone like Emmerololth is in this chaos should our plans go awry.”

he’s trying to protect you most and you know it. he’s gripping you so tightly as you work through the rest of the city that you think your lungs will collapse and there’s nothing about it to be done. if there’s anyone here to stay strong for, it’s him. “Then we must do our best to avoid it. There must—” you thread in the conviction, keep it from drowning under your terror— “there must be another way out. Have you seen nothing so far?”

“No. No, I have not. It’s as Lahabrea says.”

you don’t push after that. “Then we keep going. I know you will be able to find some means of escape, and Lahabrea and I will be able to support you. If anyone could, it would be you, Emet-Selch.” that’s all you say before your vision grows hazy and your stomach churns. the two of them catch you before the worst comes, and you shut up for the rest of the journey, your eyesight dim and your health bleaker in the fire and roiling storm.

it’s no surprise to you, then, the next memory you remember, even for a moment in an eternity, is that of emet-selch rousing you from forced slumber. the murmurs of your name sound as whispers between the death of monuments and the roars of terror that plague the streets. your hand’s outstretched already between lahabrea and emet-selch’s own. you struggle to focus on the scene in front of you: your two coworkers in harsh, frantic debate, eyes pointed from overlaid hands to a bleary, open path ahead. emet-selch’s hand locks yours in a vise grip, nails digging around new scars in your skin.

“Emet-Selch. You do not need to grip my hand so tightly, I assure you…” you stretch your fingers out and mumble. it’s but a breath between the fires, but he hears it anyway and whips his head back to you.

“Elidibus—” he shakes his head, stammers out a low no before meeting your gaze. he looks as though he’s ages away and just by you all at once, and the images never merge to one. “I am only holding as much as is necessary for your safety. You were unconscious for as long as we kept searching—we were concerned for your health.”

you faintly mark lahabrea’s restrained silence and nod. “I assure you, Emet-Selch… I will be fine. Truly.” you tell him, placing your other hand over his, but you know it won’t be enough, accept it, and move on. “You talk as though we have avoided the past, but we are still confined in the city… what have you found since?”

“We—” he stammers— “I uncovered a feasible manner of escape, without need for arcane creation.” he points to the open path that debris has left unclaimed, and your eyes wander up towards the sky. “The aether there is stable, unlike the remains of the city. I trust you need no explanation as to why…”

you furrow your brows, peer through the half-shattered mask. then it dawns on you.

“A… confluence, yes? I admit, I can scarcely see it now, but if it remains stable, then…”

“Then with force and accuracy, we can open it, yes. And we will escape.” lahabrea nods, moves you all a step closer. “So long as we picture where to go—a destination from the confluence that we cannot return through, and this destruction cannot follow.”

“Then where does that take us?” emet-selch furrows his brow, stares slack-jawed at lahabrea’s revelation long before it dawns on him. lahabrea looks to you with his usual expectations, and you don’t cast them down. you open your mouth, and for a second, nothing comes out.

“The other stars,” you answer. “We have to leave.” just the same as that familiar azem claims never existed came and went, in reverse. you think of how thin her aether was, like a speck of fallen stardust carried quickly through the wind. were the aether of your bodies any thinner, then the universe above might have less qualms with your escape.

you swallow the bile rising in your throat. what results is far quieter than your last remarks. “Lahabrea. Were we to escape in this manner… what would the cost be to escape at that length and speed?”

you don’t get anything, at first. so you follow it up yourself. “I have given up enough of myself already, Lahabrea. I am not opposed to giving more if it saves our kind.” then you gather your strength in a final burst and wrench your hand from the pile, freeing a channel for the aether you so seek to abandon.

“You have warned Emet-Selch in the time I was unconscious, yes? If not—” you summon the aether into a singular lance, a needle tip at both ends. you plant it into the ground to keep yourself standing as your stare bores into the path ahead. “You ought to, now, before ‘tis too late. I trust you have the strength to see the invocations through. Emet-Selch—’” you step past them, drag the spear through the broken ground, ignore the protests from your stubborn senior. “The confluence you mentioned. Where precisely is it? My aim here cannot miss.”

you can hear emet-selch frowning. lahabrea warns you not to shoot, not yet, and the excess aether returns to your palm. emet-selch describes it to you: if you focus your gaze in the very center of the road, then look up at the height of the cracked windowpane at the corner of the street—then the confluence is flawed there. that would be the easiest segment to destroy.

“Here?” you ask, pointing the violet end of the lance between lahabrea’s tale and warning. emet-selch doesn’t respond. you take it as a nod. you aim, you press a finger’s worth into the aether, and you still in the silence of his story. you nearly drift before he’s finished, before the invocation is even begun. you feel a second trail of aether drift from your own fleeting reserves and surround the three of you and the confluence, wards against the ash and hail. and once that is done, and once your coworkers have proceeded through the chant—

you whisper the ends of the invocation beside them. it’s hardly used and slippery on your tongue; you’re never meant to use it. your return to the star prevents it from being necessary. but you told yourself you would remember every spell you needed and this—horrific as it was—was one of them.

a last resort. it’s the only reasonable option when the world is shattering around you. you look up at the song of cries that aren’t just your group’s own and watch as a ripple of aether pushes towards you, splits the world into halves in front of your own eyes. and then the invocation is done.

“Now!” a cry—but you’ve already charged the lance with aether and pushed it through. the confluence opens to you all and pulls you through. you feel nothing; then, you are gasping for air where it doesn’t exist, caught in a limbo between one life and another. the three of you open your eyes and you pull up your head, searching for the confluence you traveled through and the star you abandoned.

and you don’t find anything at all.

“It’s gone,” you mumble. you’re caught remembering suddenly you don’t know where you are. you’d barely escaped with your lives.

everything we had worked for. everything we had built. everything we loved is gone.

and you can never go home again.