Location: New Atlantis
Timeline: Sixth Age, Winter 50
The world has become a smear of bruised violet and bone-white static.
I am walking—if you can call this erratic, drunken lurching “walking”—across the Great Shadow. Behind me, the first inner wall has vanished into the murk. Before me, there is only the howling void of the southern winter. With little sunlight to warm this part of the world, there is only a sickly, amber bruise on the horizon. I am alone in the Blue Twilight.
The crude snow-skiff mech I’d been riding for a week didn’t just stop working; it suffered a catastrophic “organ failure.” Remember, I was fueling that prehistoric machine with my own flickering essence and stolen energy. In my descent into madness and the frantic race across the tundra, I pushed the mech far beyond its Mylar-engineered limits – unable to handle the “dirty” violet energy I was pumping into it, the skiff eventually became too erractic for me to control — it shrieked, skidded across the black ice, and slammed into a jagged outcropping of Vril-crystal. I was thrown from the deck into the drifts, and the crude craft itself became a crumpled heap of useless gold and shattered quartz. It was yet another insult to me – yet I knew more were coming.
My hellfire was no longer even a flame; it was a stutter. Every few seconds, my vision flickered. I saw the snow, then I saw a grid of gray nothingness, then I saw the snow again. The bones of my skeletal hands were worse. When the flicker hit, I could see the wind-blown ice through them. I was unravelling, a divine tapestry with a loose thread being pulled by the cold.
“Look at you,” a voice hissed.
I stopped, the pointy bones of my feet sinking into the drift. There, standing atop a jagged shard of Vril-crystal, was…Me? Not this bedraggled, salt-stained wretch, but the High God Azazel. I was wearing robes of woven starlight and…I held Dagaal—the true Dagaal, humming with the power to split the Firmament! My eyes were not flickering; they were twin suns of absolute authority! It was glorious!
“You aren’t real,” I rasped dejectedly, my voice sounding like dry leaves skittering over a tombstone.
“I am the only thing that is real,” the vision of me mocked, stepping off the crystal and walking on the air. “You are just the necrotic leftovers of a failed rebellion. You’re going to freeze here, Grim One. You’ll become a landmark. ‘The Frozen Fool of the Forbidden Zone.’ Travelers will use your stiffened finger to point the way to Lemuria.”
“Silence!” I roared, swinging a fist at the air. My hand passed through the image, and the momentum sent me face-first into the snow.
I stayed there for a moment, the cold biting into my jaw. I needed fuel. I needed it now, or the High God was right—I would become a statue of frozen regret.
I crawled around the landscape like the pitiful creature I had become – looking. My fingers clawed at the permafrost until I found them: Aeon-Spores. I knew they grew here in the lee of black rocks. Pulsating with a rhythmic, bioluminescent throb, they looked like clusters of bloated, translucent grapes filled with liquid lightning.
I didn’t hesitate. I scooped them up, dirt and all, and shoved them into my cavernous mouth.
Screaming. That is the only way to describe the taste. It wasn’t flavor; it was a frequency. The spores burst against my insides, releasing a flood of unrefined, ancient energy that had been siphoned directly from the earth’s deep ley lines.
My back arched beneath my robes. My green eyes flew open, and for a terrifying second, I saw the world in infrared. The energy was “hot,” jagged, and utterly toxic to a celestial being. It didn’t merge with my hellfire; it fought against it. But I wasn’t going to be denied.
I stood up again, forcing the energy into myself. The madness, which had been a whisper, became a chorus. The snow wasn’t snow anymore; it was a carpet of crushed pearls. The wind wasn’t wind; it was Lilith whispering my secret name into my ear, over and over, until I wanted to tear my own head off just to get some peace.
“Dagaal,” I whispered, the word a prayer and a curse. “The Bone. The Key. My throne.”
I began to run just to prove I was still alive.
Time passed. Was it hours? Days? A month?
The storm was intensifying again – a Vril-cyclone that whipped the snow into jagged needles. My stolen energy was peaked briefly, making me twitchy and hyper-aware. I saw a dark opening in a ridge of Black Ice—a cavern that promised a momentary reprieve from the wind.
I scrambled inside, the darkness swallowing me. The cave smelled of ancient minerals and something else… something warm.
I collapsed against the freezing wall, hoping to enter a Death-Sleep – a trance where I could bypass my physical senses and force the stolen Aeon-energy to bind to my essence. I closed my eyes, but alas I didn’t find peace. I
found a nightmare. I saw myself back in Illyria, standing before A’H. It wasn’t angry; It was disappointed. That was worse. The Great Creator reached out to touch my brow, and It’s finger was made of the same bone as Dagaal—
Scritch. Click.
My eyes snapped open. I wasn’t in Illyria. I was in a tomb of black ice, and… I wasn’t alone.
At the mouth of the cave, silhouetted against the blue twilight, stood an Atlantean Sentinel. He was massive, his armor etched with protective runes that hummed in the dark. In his hand, he gripped a Vril-Spear, its tip glowing with a steady, lethal sapphire light.
“Shadow-Stalker,” the mortal boomed, his voice echoing off the ice. “The Seers said a blight had crossed the threshold. They did not say the blight would be… so small.”
I rose slowly, my clawlike hands trembling. I didn’t feel like a god. I felt like a rat cornered in a larder. “You have no idea what I am.”
“I know you are evil.” the Sentinel said, leveling his spear.
He charged. The spear whistled through the air, trailing a wake of frost. In my weakened state, I couldn’t teleport, and I certainly couldn’t use my hellfire to cast magic against him, so I threw myself to the side in time to avoid the blow – the spear tip ripping through my robe and cracking into my collarbone.
The battle that followed was a frantic, ugly thing. There was no grace, no divine art. We grappled in the pitch black, lit only by the rhythmic strobe of my flickering essence and the blue flare of his weapon. The mortal was stronger than he had any right to be, his Vril-enhanced muscles straining against my necrotic grip.
I felt his gauntlet slam into my jaw bone, sending a spray of black ichor across the ice. The pain was a shock—a reminder that I was currently tethered to this miserable, fragile form.
“Kill him,” A vision of Azazel as The High God hissed from the corner of the cave. “Take his heat. Drink him dry!”
I let out a gutteral scream—not of power, but of pure, unadulterated malice. As the Sentinel raised his spear for the finishing blow, I reached out and grabbed the glowing Vril-core embedded in the center of his chest plate.
I didn’t use a spell. I used my fingers, reinforced by the dying surge of the Aeon-spores, and I tore.
The armor shrieked, then snapped. The Sentinel’s eyes went wide as I ripped the pulsating blue crystal from his chest. He slumped to his knees, his life-support failing, the warmth of his body steaming in the sub-zero air.
I didn’t wait for him to die. I pressed the Vril-core against my own chest, feeling the “clean” energy wash over me like a bucket of ice water. It was a temporary fix, a stolen spark, but it was enough to keep me from vanishing.
As the Sentinel’s Vril-core fused with my dying embers, the connection was more than just energetic; it was a violent, psychic intrusion. I didn’t just take his life—I took his history too. For a searing moment, the black ice of the cave vanished, replaced by a blinding, architectural splendor that made my old memories of Illyria ache.
Through his dying eyes, I saw New Atlantis, the capital city that dominated this frozen No-Man’s Land. It was a terrifying testament to what mortals can achieve when they are fueled by spite, born with a prowess for advanced technology, and then gifted with the ultra advanced Mylar technology to take them to new heights.
New Atlantis was a city of concentric circles, rising like a stepped pyramid of brass and “Star-Glass” from the center of a vast, geothermal lake. The water there didn’t freeze; it steamed, heated by the same ley lines that fed the towers of Lemuria. The city also didn’t have streets; it had “resonance-ways” where gliders moved on tracks of pure sound. I saw the Grand Spire of Oceanus, a needle of reinforced quartz that pierced the permanent twilight, topped with a Vril-Beacon so bright it acted as a secondary sun for the surrounding tundra.
But it wasn’t just the stone and glass. I felt the Sentinel’s pride like a cold heart beating. These Atlanteans hadn’t forgotten the First Fall caused by my Leviathan. This new city was a fortress, guarded by legions of Vril-Knights and fleets of submersible “Aero-Skiffs.” They had become a civilization built on the singular goal of standing guard against the “Shadows from the North” and the Evil that was Azazel!
Seeing it through the dying Atlantean’s mind, I realized why they hunt edme so relentlessly. To them, I was not just a myth; I was the reason their ancestors fled to this icy wasteland. I was the Great Deceiver who turned their paradise into a tomb. The thought gave me a bit of joyful energy.
“New Atlantis,” I whispered, wiping the Sentinel’s blood from my lip. “A lovely cage you’ve built for yourselves. It’s a pity I’m in a hurry… I should love to see it burn.” I looked at the Sentinel’s cooling corpse. “Thank you for the contribution. Your sacrifice will be forgotten immediately.”
Even still I didn’t leave the cave for a long time. I stayed there, hunched over the body, using my fingernails to carve frantic, jagged maps into the black ice walls. I drew the towers. I drew the blade. I drew the face of Lilith with her eyes gouged out. I was a god playing in the dirt, lost in the fever of my own obsession.
Then came the Climb. It was the final part of my journey.
I stood at the base of the Second Inner Ice Wall—The Lemurian Barrier.
You cannot understand the scale of it. It does not look like ice; it looks like a vertical ocean of violet-gold crystal, polished to a mirror finish and humming with a frequency so powerful it made my teeth ache. It reached thousands feet into the dark sky, its summit lost in a crown of auroras.
“I can’t,” I whispered, looking at my tattered, frostbitten hand bones.
“You must,” the wind answered. Or perhaps it was Dagaal. The blade was countless hundreds of miles away still, yet I could feel it—a cold, heavy weight in the center of my mind, pulling me upward like a magnet.
I reached out and jammed my fingers into a decorative relief-carving in the ice—a Mylar sunburst. The ice was so cold it felt like fire.
The ascent that followed was a vertical agony. Every handhold was a battle. The wall’s resonance tried to “shake” my divine soul loose from my body, vibrating my bones until I thought they would turn to powder. I climbed through visions.
At a thousand feet, I saw Michael the Mighty. He was standing on a ledge that wasn’t there, his flaming sword sheathed. “Fall, Azazel,” he said softly. “It’s easier than the climb.”
I spat at him—a glob of black phlegm that froze before it hit the ground—and kept climbing.
At two thousand feet, the madness peaked. I wasn’t climbing a wall; I was climbing the spine of a giant serpent. The Mylar runes began to move, crawling over the ice like golden spiders. They whispered my failures. You lost the War. You lost the Dagger. You are losing your self.
“I am… Azazel!” I screamed into the gale, my voice snatched away by the wind.
My fingertips were gone, replaced by bloody, frozen stumps. My robes were ribbons. My hellfire was a single, microscopic spark at the base of my throat. I was no longer a god. I was a parasite, a tick clinging to the flank of a monument.
Eventually, who can say how long it took me or how high I climbed, with a final, soul-shattering heave, I threw my arm over the top of the rampart. I dragged my battered, flickering body onto the summit and… collapsed.
I had reached Lemuria, but at what cost?
The Apocrypha of Azazel 