Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’d escaped. I’d only gained a brief respite but I was still stuck in a sensory nightmare – a shadow-god trapped in a world of high-definition light. I wasn’t just an intruder; I was a walking sacrilege – but unlike you people who complain at every nuisance in your sad, pathetic lives, I eagerly embraced my role.
The fact is that the Spire did not just welcome me; it inhaled me. After the violent surge through the Vril-conduit, I was spat out onto a floor of polished, translucent pearl. The transition was a physical blow. I stood, my knees clicking like dry sticks, as the iridescent Vril-sludge from the gardens began to harden on my scavenged shroud – the liquid-silk cloak shifting between silver and grey as it covered my skeletal frame and hid the blackened cavity where the Shard once sat.
I looked down at my hands—skeletal, ashen, and still stained with the industrial filth of the Dregs. Reaching into into the hidden folds of my new cloak, my fingers brushed the Shard of Varysha. It was cold—bitterly, impossibly cold—yet it throbbed against my palm with a heartbeat that gave me some measure of solace in this antiseptic world of the Mylars.
I looked around the base of the Spire, my shadow flickering against walls of living quartz. The name “Hall of Scripted Sorrows” came to me through the aethyr – the place was a cathedral-like expanse where the very architecture was an act of mourning. Thousands of lines of glowing, cursive script spiraled upward toward the unreachable ceiling, casting a pale gold hue that felt like it was trying to bleach the very soul out of me. Ha, fat chance on that one, suckers!
The name Lyra then drifted through my mind, thick as the scent of burning cedar. She was the “Scribe” of the ancient scrolls, the first custodian who had birthed these very towers long before time began for most mortals on the flat earth. To the humans of your age, Lyra isn’t even a myth of forgotten grace; to the Mylars, she was THE saint of the Great Alignment. But I remembered her when she was merely a minor thorn to be removed from my pinky toe – and remove her I did.
I observed that Lyra’s name was scrawled on nearly every wall as a savior, but I knew the truth – she didn’t “save” her people; she’d merely tried to <tune> them. Lyra was the one who first learned how to harmonize these quartz needles with the Flat Earth’s core, teaching the Children of Mu to learn to make their bodies vibrate at a frequency that made them forget the taste of dirt and the reality of a world they once loved but which I had begun to spoil for them.
“Oh, Lyra,” I rasped, my voice sounding like a rusted blade dragging across silk, “how pretty you once thought you were, but look at your people now – is this really the beauty you had in mind?” I traced a line of her Lamentations etched into the stone. “If only you could see your children now—hiding in their glass cages, terrified of a little fur and manual labor.”
My arrival here stirred old, dark memories. I remembered the Brutz—my first solo creation. I had taken the clay of the earth and the fire of the deep and forged the first trolls of the land and the ancient leviathans of the sea. I did it because I wanted to give the world-dominating Mylars a reason to bleed – a reason to feel the “Friction” of existence – and to remind them who was really in charge of the world. To my great delight, my creatures absolutely terrified the Children of Mu. They quickly abandoned their peaceful gardens, pyramids, star Forts, and the like the world over and retreated into these white towers on the continent of Mu (aka Lemuria) – pulling their skirts away from the world I had begun to reshape.
But it was my second masterwork that truly broke them. I had captured a colony of Mylars who were foolish enough to try to live apart from Lemuria and warped their genetic code back in my Life Labs – turning their beauty into a leathery, winged hunger. The flying blood-suckers I birthed would later become your modern day chupacabras, but I’d always preferred to call them my little gupz. More importantly, their creation was The Trigger that sent the Mylars to truly run for the hills. The Mylars didn’t even try to fight their bastard brothers – instead they committed the ultimate act of cosmic cowardice: they built themselves an Ice Wall – terraforming a literal cage around the entire world, cutting themselves and Lemuria’s islands off from the harsh realities of the flat earth they didn’t feel equipped to deal with – talk about anxiety, huh?
Meanwhile, as Lilith’s children hid behind their frozen barrier, I watched as Alyssa’s kids rose in the power vacuum as the Atlanteans then took over control of the world of mortals. Eventually I destroyed Atlantis and chased Alyssa’s people away too. They Mylars built their friends an ice Wall as well and both of those foolish races thought their precious Walls would keep them safe – they never realized it just made them easier for me to trap them – which I did when I used Varysha’s Shard to seal them inside ages past.
The Inversion of the Elevators
A sudden, sharp chime echoed through the hall—a high, crystalline note that made my teeth ache. I guessed that the Spire’s internal sensors were “de-fragging” the atmosphere – and I was the fragment that didn’t belong. I could feel a kind of Acoustic Net—a field of invisible sound waves—sweeping through the pearly corridors. If it touched me, I knew that the Mylar Archons wouldn’t just know I was here; they would know exactly how many bones I had left.
I need to move. I told myself. Now!
Rapidly moving towards the nearest wall I came up on what looked like some form of Harmonic Lifts—shimmering columns of vertical, liquid air that appeared to act as the Spire’s primary arteries of transportation. At least that’s what I hoped they were. In this world of order, I was guessing that these lifts functioned on resonance – my mind pictured Mylars stepping into the light, and their internal frequency carrying them upward like a seed on a summer breeze.
I stepped into the column, hoping it would do the same for me – and then the universe screamed!
The golden light that bathed my form instantly turned a cold, blinding white—like the color of a dying star from The First Fall. The system doesn’t recognize my vibration! I guessed. It doesn’t seem me as a passenger; it seems me as a blockage. The gravity within the column tripled in a heartbeat, slamming my skeletal frame against the floor. I felt the pearl beneath me groan as the lift tried to crush me into a singularity. But that wasn’t going to happen.
“You want a different tune?” I hissed, my vision swimming with silver spots. “Fine, we can do this the hard way!”
Reaching into my shroud, I gripped the Shard of Varysha. I didn’t tap into it’s full power because I feared the exposure would have blown the Spire’s apex, instead I forced a surge of its necrotic, jagged energy to bleed through my fingers and into the lift’s floor. In essence I poisoned the frequency. The golden light began to turn a dark, swirling vortex of violet and black.
“Now isn’t that beautiful?” I laughed as the “Schedule” of the Spire broke. Immediately the lift hurled me upwards with bone-rattling speed. “What a wild ride!” I cackled in delight as the walls of the Spire became a blur of glowing Lamentations – the history of the Mylar race streaking past me in a dizzying smear of gold. I felt like a bullet of entropy screaming toward the upper balconies – exactly where I wanted to go.
The Balcony of the Damned
The vortex of this old world elevator spat me out with a violent, bone-shaking heave, but instead of injuring me it only energized me. I tumbled giddily across a floor of frosted glass, feeling like a younger version of myself, my silver shroud billowing around me. OK, I’ll admit that I lay there for a heartbeat, gasping, but it wasn’t because I was tired – instead I watched in delight as the elevator column behind me collapsed back into a placid, golden glow – never to be the same.
I stood, my joints popping like dry kindling, as I moved toward the edge of the Spire’s Walls – towards a balcony overlooking Lemuria. I was now thousands of feet above the Glass Forest. The air here didn’t just feel thin; it felt sharp, crystalline and freezing, scraping against the bones of my skeletal gullet. Clutching a railing made of Solidified Light, I looked out, and for a moment, even my cynical soul was stilled.
The silver mist of the Lemuria’s interior lay below me, a vast, swirling sea of mercury-vapor that hid the foundations of the world. But rising out of that mist, dominating the horizon like a tethered moon, was the Great Pyramid of Mu. Even I was impressed – for the pyramid was a machine of impossible, terrifying scale – far beyond any of the other pyramids that Mylars had abandoned on the inner part of the flat earth. This wonder of the world, Mu’s pyramid had surfaces that weren’t static stone, instead they were composed of millions of interlocking obsidian plates that shifted and slid with a rhythmic, sub-sonic thrum.
“By Baal,” I gasped, amazed. “It’s a gargantuan, geometric beast breathing in time with the planet’s core.”
I’d been here before but didn’t remember Mu like this. Yet before I had time to ponder further, suddenly, the atmosphere groaned. A jagged, black streak of obsidian light erupted from the pyramid’s apex, piercing the golden sky like a splinter in an eye. It wasn’t a beam of light so much as a tear in reality, a void-line that sucked the color out of the clouds surrounding it.
Meanwhile, the Shard of Varysha at my hip didn’t just vibrate; it shrieked! A white-hot needle of agony flared in my side, the Shard pulsing in perfect, terrifying synchrony with the Pyramid.
“Dagaal!” I yearned, the name tasting like ash and iron. “It’s really there!”
The Black Sun was calling to its master and I wasn’t about to lose it again. I now knew that the Bone Dagger was indeed entombed in the heart of that machine. And soon it would be mine!
Yet I wasn’t about to walk into a trap. “Beware, old boy, that light isn’t a beacon, it’s a siphon.” I could feel it through the Shard—the Pyramid was working as a massive energy-leech. “The Mylars are desperate to mend the fractures I caused in their precious grid. But are they draining the Dagaal?”
The thought that Lilith’s children were using the power of my lost rib bone against me was enough to send me into a panic. I feared they were somehow drinking Dagaal’s ancient, necrotic power and refining it into their sterile golden light. I watched as the obsidian beam flickered. It was thinning.
“No,” I hissed, my grip tightening on the railing until the solid light began to crack and hiss under my necrotic touch. “You will not consume Dagaal! You will not turn my wrath into your utility. And you will definitely now use its power against me!”
My fear increasing, I worried that if I didn’t reach the Pyramid within the hour, Dagaal would be nothing more than a hollowed-out relic. I’d been trying to recover Dagaal for milennia and now that I was so close, there was a chance I might lose it forever? Surely that could not be – could it?
Not on my watch! I vowed. My path was clear – Dagaal was there. Between me and the Pyramid lay a kind of Aether-Gap, a mile of open air and drifting stabilizer platforms – it was nothing for a god to cross. “Wait just a little longer, my precious. I’m coming for you now!”
Yet just as I turned to find a way down from my perch, I felt the air grow heavy. The wind had died. The silence became absolute, broken only by the distant, rhythmic throb of the Great Pyramid in the mist.
“They know where I am.” I sighed, annoyed at the nuisance, yet realizing that the obsidian pulse from Mu had acted as a tracer – pointing out this balcony for every Mylar sensor to see. “Well, well, it seems I wasn’t just watching the Pyramid; the Pyramid was watching me. Fine, my friends, come and get me!”
The Archons on coming!
The Apocrypha of Azazel 