Chương 470: BECMI Chapter 469 – Capping Your Doom

I led my Sims through the forced conduit and into Thanatos' home plane. I looked around without looking around, not daring to Commune with this place, but using a very Upcast Eagle's Vantage to elevate my sight to planetary levels, and my Mask combined with Upcast Eagle's Eyes to give me range of vision. This was definitely Thanatos's realm, which in a nod to His unwritten origins and connections to the Sphere of Death was named Tarterus.

The whole plane reverberated with His Immortal Power, invested into the size and strength of the Plane in proper tribute to his age and might. From what I could see, multiple star systems with dark-lit suns and gibbous moons were extant here, all likely homes for Damned souls of various types.

They served as underworlds for multiple Prime worlds and the hapless souls therein, and places where His forces and servants could labor for whatever causes He put them to, or carry out the punishments or ordeals He devised for those who came into his clutches. I was sure this place hid heroes and monsters in places Thanatos had no intention of letting others see, and it surely would have been an interesting and macabre place to poke around in. Maybe later, or rather, in the past.

Right now, I had an absolute lock on this time and place by Thanatos' own Truename, and this looked to be exactly the kind of place that was needed. This world was mostly devoted to hordlings and errant spirits, churned out by the soul-forges and cauldrons established over the eons by Thanatos from those who purported to serve Him, and really were nothing but disposable resources.

He did what He pleased to further the causes of Death and Devolution, the falling of the great and glorious crashing into the river of time by His manipulations and actions across worlds and times uncounted. I wouldn't have been surprised if those worlds bore the remains of the nations, empires, and kingdoms that had fallen to His machinations, the souls of the Damned forever populating the ruins of their grandeur and knowing they had contributed to its fall for their own pride and pleasure and desires.

Well, it was a basically useless plane from a multiversal standpoint, regardless of what He thought was darkly majestic. It was a multi-world empire, and it, in turn, had a time to fall into darkness and ruin… and from that ruin could rise something new, the very antithesis of everything He desired to have happen.

The 'banshees' Sang as they worked. The souls of the undead idling nearby, mostly ghostly forms themselves as the hordlings would mindlessly rip apart corporeal undead, shivered and nearly tore apart in the shuddering doom in the Song and words that were spoken there, reverberating with the power and authority of the Immortal who was the ultimate master of this place.

The hordlings, half-insane and mindlessly violent, instinctively gathered to what was rising here, a structure on a world where nothing of civilization was allowed to rise. Any buildings or abodes were normally immediately set upon by numbers of hordlings and razed down to the stone, even caves were repeatedly emptied of whatever chose to dwell in them.

No, down here on this world, only the wandering Damned were allowed, and if you couldn't carry something, there was only to abandon it where it lay, forgotten and decaying under the pressure of this realm, where naught that was new and original dared to rise. And yet, something was rising here.

When the hordlings saw the stones being stacked on stones, they were drawn relentlessly by the Chaos churning through them to madly fall upon the structure and those making it, desiring only to tear it apart and remove any sign of its existence. They died. The Keening that arose as they touched the stones literally blew them apart, and darkly shuddering, struggling forms Burned with a ghostly fire as they were drawn into the stacked stones.

Those stones pulsed inside with a ghostly pale light shining through the hungry, empty Runes carved into every single stone that rose out of the lifeless, inert ground, as if begging to be filled with the souls of the Damned who looked upon them. The Pyramid took place with speed and skill with all the 'banshees' working tirelessly upon it, their dread Song both luring and a warning that a great number of hordlings never learned to acknowledge.

The lesser Fiends in all their numbers, the most minor of Immortal Creatures, came to the Pyramid to destroy it, and instead they fed it. Ripped apart, bodies of timeless flesh and essence shredded and consumed by ghostly fires, their Damned spirits were drawn into the stones and devoured hungrily, endlessly, only seeming to stoke the ghastly flames within even more as they opened up and consumed the maddened Fiends as endlessly and enthusiastically as the hordlings themselves came.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Alas, as it took shape, the hunger emanating from the stones soon became palpable to those who set eyes upon it, and even the nigh-insane masses of hordlings realized that the stones were something that was going to feed upon them endlessly, and all that they would be doing was delivering themselves to its gullet.

Alas, for many of them that was no dissuasion at all, as death would be release from torment, and torment included anything that smacked of building or creation or civilization in the slightest. Unable to stop themselves, the hordlings came charging in at the waiting stones, and the stones devoured them without fail. The Banshees sang, and the stones stacked higher, pulsing in eerie time to their wailing Song.

Some dead, their desire to end their suffering greater than their drive to keep existing, came swooping in and threw their ectoplasmic forms upon the Stones. Ghostly flames reached up, devoured them, and fell back, leaving nothing behind of their torment and Sins. There was no surge of Immortal Power to empower and energize this thing, no warning given that might alert Thanatos that something was taking place there.

No, this was merely stones and ghostly fires, hunger and loss and an ending that the Damned could easily desire so greatly, and could at last be satisfied as they were unmade forever.

The Pyramid of the Maw arose towards its height, and the Damned came slowly and constantly from their countless hordes and swarms. Coming here to die. The connection to the Mortal Plane was not open, as Thanatos could sense such a thing. Indeed, right now that connection was Sealed under the weight of this Pyramid, and the vivic flames here were bound and sealed within the stones, unable to spread.

But like the deadly dark fires of undeath and balefire could Burn on the Mortal Plane and slay the living, so too could vivus survive in other realms and perform its function: devour the unnatural and the negative, convert it to life, and endure. Here, there was no life to generate that was not either Immortal or Entropic, and vivus could empower neither.

No, the only life was the sparks of magic in the Pyramid, and so vivus fed the energies of death, dissolution, destruction, and decay into the magic of the Pyramid, the Runes wrought on each and every stone fixed into place and stacking into a great and deadly monument to the Death of Empires, Sealing the access point from the Mortal Plane and the only thing which existed in the crater of the wasted and inert landscape there.

The Damned who wished their end came to perish forever to the hunger they could feel there, and the vivic fire, ghostly and ghastly without an active connection to the Prime, reached out and ate them. The Pyramid of the Maw gained in power, beat slowly with strength, and the temple attuned magnificently to Thanatos and His Immortal Power rose clean and starkly simple on its summit, awaiting His Immortal attention in a place He no longer had a use for. But the hordes of Tarterus wandered in.

They mounted the steps that led to the altar above as if called to do so, and as they took each step, they left parts of themselves behind, Burning away in tribute to the glories of Thanatos. None made it to the top level. Most didn't clear the first twenty steps. Vivus came up, devoured them whole, swept them away, and left nothing on the dark stones that waited so patiently for future victims to arrive and perish as well.

When I was done, I raised a Gate out of sight of any, and my Sims and I flitted away. The slightest gust of wind or motion, stirred constantly by subtle Permanent Gusts of Wind, continued our haunting Song through channels cut through the stones. It was ghostly, ghastly, wailing, keening, driving, and pulling, calling out to the locals to come and die, die, die. The Damned came for an ending they could not gain for themselves.

Word didn't spread, for those who looked on saw only fools rushing to death, while those dying told none that they were forever free. If Thanatos Himself came here, the only Immortal Power He would sense would be His own, the echoes of His name hidden within the Song here and displaying that this was indeed of Him. He would likely be both mystified and intrigued, feeling a closeness to it that He could not explain, and certainly could not feel the power or influence of any other Immortal upon the stones.

And so, He would leave it there as a curiosity, doing the double duty of killing the weakest-willed of the damned and double-Sealing the area beneath it where the Writhing Well had once drawn in hordlings to unleash upon the Prime plane. It was also a beacon across time and space that could not be stopped, allowing us to access Thanatos' homeworld as we liked, completely non-magical in that regard, only so unique that magic could not be mistaken it was aught else and so could seek it out with ease.

There only remained now to repeat this procedure on the Other Shore, where the Writhing Well was still connected and active and ready to bring down mortal empires when fools chose to use it and unleash its armies of hordlings upon their foes, in the end destroying everything they wished to save as well as their foes. Yes, I was going to have to do something violent about the Well there, too.

The difference over there was that there was a Heaven, connected to the Prime, and it was a Heaven that could use a great, great deal of power right now to expand in more ways than one. Eating an entire Immortal Plane would be one heck of a meal for the Realm of New Elysium to truly become the proper home of Good souls going forward. I had plans to execute, spell research to do, and layers of magic and traps of power to weave upon the Immortals.

And now, now I had demigods beginning to pluck at the strands of Fate and Chance and work that Source river that was pushing back against Immortal influence on the world of the Other Shore. We all had work to do, things to accomplish, but we also all had the same enemies at this point, and the Immortals were not going to like it when they found out everything we were going to do together…