Far beneath the base of the Sphinx

  “It’s not time! We’ve been over this several times in the last millenia!” Ramses argued, his jeweled brown hands gesturing to the outside world even as the warm darkness of the Mayan ziggurat did not bring the comfort it once did. “This is the last place on the planet where scraps of magic gasp for breath even as our own life force fades away!”

  They’d been waiting, for what exactly they weren’t sure. The greatest minds that magic had ever known were playing it by ear. Living in fear of the moment that their precious stores of encapsulated mana and power ran even while they knew the whole time that it was their very breath was keeping all of Earth safe, for now. The burden of time, endless ages of slowly grinding their immense psyche to dust, was the worst torture for an Immortal.

  Even though it was worth it.

  Even though they were once on the edge of being completely wiped out by the Abhorrent so long ago, the remnants of the last group of Titans, Wizards, and Demi-Gods gave their all for one final working that sealed off Earth, veiling it so that no deity or scrying could pierce it for as long as their souls powered the fracture concealing their homeworld.

  “Cleopatra, Mythe rest her soul, gave her life to feed the Great Seal! This does not give you the right to complain every other second with your foul breath!” Dedi argued back, kicking the five-tiered checker board over. “Centuries of your whining have a way of making my brain bleed! Remember, each and every one of us Immortals signed the Pact and have given our all. From blood to bone and soul to spirit!” His bones audibly cracked as his ancient body moved. “But hope is not lost, while we’ve been stuck here sacrificing ourselves one by one to keep the ritual going, I’ve scryed the far corners of their world and seen!”

  Dedi’s aged exuberance lent him an air of barely constrained inventive insanity. Any hint of muscle had long since faded away to gristle. Age spotted hands shook as he deftly caught flying board game pieces headed straight for his wine glass. “They!” He growled, pointing at the floating hologram of Earth slowly spinning over a sandstone console. “The base humans can talk with one another across the globe without magic! They fly, without magic! They number in the multiple billions and have tamed the wilds that once ravaged their lands! Small metal arrows that fly from a flick of their fingers and kill hundreds while fat people in chairs press buttons that blow up thousands! This! This we could not have foreseen!”

  The Great Seal not only kept Earth separated from the rest of the known universe and the primal tides of chaos and essence at bay, but the global ritual was updated only a few short years ago so that it could tap not only into the ever shifting ley lines but also into the web of connected satellites that the ephemeral humans had sent into space. The last of the Grand Wizards infused a costly update, partitioning part of the Great Seal to draw up on the symbolic significance of the satellites connecting the world in a way that nothing had ever done before. With the advent of this invention, even the Immortals could learn new things through tapping into the power of the world wide web.

  “Being good at war isn’t enough!” Ramses screamed, reaching down and smashing another small glass orb, bright blue light escaping as he breathed it in. While it acted like a gas, it appeared as dense as a liquid. His thick mustache jumped as the rush of mana infused life into him. Their stores of mana orbs ran egregiously low. It was only the supply of the mystic substance that allowed them to endure these dusty eons.

  “They will have to contend with the Abhorrent first. Even these long years cannot make me forget their atrocities. Even now, Earth is ripe for our pollution to spawn native hordes of them.” He grimaced before sucking in more air to spew his bile. “The Corpse Hordes ravage worlds we don’t even know about past the Outer Mists and the depths of space itself hold the Endless Swarm. Do you think the elves or dwarves will come to the rescue when the weakest race is thrust back into the fold? The pink ants care more about cute baby animal videos than bettering themselves! They’re little more than monkeys!”

  “Humans, bah!” Ramses spat in disgust as his liver-spotted finger pointed at the hologram. Flickering images pulled from Google Images and Youtube floated around, their tenuous connection to the still-living world giving them a sense of purpose. He took a deep breath to continue spewing his disgust. “And their latest global quarrel is over preference about what’s between their legs? As if it isn’t obvious enough?”

  “But they’re not the weakest species anymore! Their numbers are about to hit the tipping point!” Dedi grinned, smashing his own thin glass orb and breathing in the sweet, sweet mana, the liquid evaporating as soon as it came into contact with the air. “We raised up the Great Seal, which means that we can take it down but in the manner ‘we’ choose! No one is left to gainsay us! Think about it, controlled devolution of the Great Seal in such a way that it benefits our children.”

  “But when the Great Seal falls, make no mistake, it will kill most of the populace, further weakening their race.” Ramses glumly sat back in his throne, the silver and gold arches molding themselves to fit his aged frame. “Do you feel that it was pointless? Do you still feel the pain of losing the greatest powers of this world to a blood sacrifice, even if that is what it took to separate this world from the others?”

  “Pointless?! My own daughter gave her life for this and three of your wives did with the same strength that they all displayed in the last War of Eons! But now we know that it wasn’t in vain, even though the Mayans were wrong, their calculations were off. It wasn’t two thousand and twelve when it would start to break down, it was two thousand and twenty one! They had the last two digits switched! Regardless, it will break on its own, whether we want it to or not, but there is another way.” Dedi corrected. “Since we know it’s happening, we might be able to give it a push in the right direction, it might just fall in such a way as to push them into greatness!”

  Ramses' middle eastern features turned white with fear as he intuited the twisted paths of Dedi’s genius. “Death rituals are never the way, Dedi! We swore we wouldn’t speak of this! The last one was the LAST time!”

  “Do you see another way?!” Dedi roared, forcing his feeble old body to its feet, clutching at the rounded edge of the stone table. “When it falls, they fall. But if they could be guided using the energy fallout of the Great Seal as a catalyst, then their own vacuums of power could be jump started! Nine billion! There are over nine billion of them!”

  Ramses looked away. “And how many would it kill, Dedi? How many would survive? Who are you willing to sacrifice so that some may live? How much blood would be shed as the Seal falls so that magic can be granted to the last of their number? It is already a perilous journey, and that is unavoidable.”

  Hands older than most mountains shook with liver spots that even magic couldn’t hide but Dedi’s eyes held an ancient burning will. “And how many will die if we do nothing? Do you remember how many died in orcish slave camps? How many died in elven experiments and the heinous breeding labs? DO YOU?” He turned away as the soft multi-colored light of the hologram showed the scars of age marking his body. “At least this way their gods will have a chance to siphon their due.”

  Their age-old fighting had reached the point of contentious brothers over the centuries, both full of biting strife and mutual understanding. Ramses' thinking was clear to Dedi . . . weighing all the options with a calm mind and then working the shreds of empathy to find a middle ground. Dedi cared for none of that, he only cared about results. Results were what mattered, especially if he thought that there might be the slightest chance he was wrong.

  Ramses reached forward touching an invisible floating glyph above the table. “You’ve already set it in motion, haven’t you?”

  “The plan, no. It requires both of our willing life forces to finish,” Dedi answered. “But the simulation, yes, that is right in front of you.”

  A green and blue globe made of light, a simulacrum of Earth, floated above the table as Ramses pressed another invisible rune. The atmosphere of Earth bored uncounted tiny shields of purple light, each sealing the anchor points of Yggdrasil’s influence. Slowly, the Aurora Borealis leaked through the atmosphere setting off a chain reaction of shattering seals, and like a tide of blood, the surface of Earth was covered in red.

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  Ramses' eyes widened. “It will kill them all!” He breathed. “You didn’t even build in a buffer, time to prepare!”

  “Most of them,” Dedi snapped imperiously. His twisted sense of justice gave weight to his words. “But! But only! Only if we do nothing. They’re unprepared, soft, not ready for the incoming tide.”

  Ramses other hand touched a glyph on the table, bringing up a holographic menu. Selecting the only option available, he pressed a glyph atop a crystalline tile. The simulacrum rewound to the point where the overcharged Aurora Borealis began shattering all of the floating translucent seals.

  Dedi kept right on about his mad plan. “Earth is sealed right now, a completely closed environment devoid of magic. If we use the resultant energy of the fallout, we can-”

  “That will kill most of them, right? I may be old but I’m not blind!” Ramses interrupted, pointing at the simulated red wave of death eclipsing the holographic projection of Earth.. “How do we ‘guide’ that? It’s worse than the last decades worth of projections?”

  “Yes, many will die.” Dedi agreed, his rheumy eyes squinting with anticipation. “But we won’t choose. As mana rushes in like a tidal wave filling their system, they will have to hold on through the cleansing force or it will completely wash them away, a clean death. Their old and their weak, their pollution, their radiation, their disease, gone, it will be swept away as well; a rebirth if you will. The energy of their souls, their spiritual power, will give the flexibility required to pull this off but the filter will allow them to return to the Wheel.”

  “It will be just like the first time.”

  “No! It won’t! It will be better! We’ve learned from our mistakes!” The stone table cracked from where his hands grabbed it and then repaired itself. “This time we can channel all of that death for good instead of letting it go to waste!” Dedi’s breathing grew ragged as his enthusiasm slowly morphed into madness. “Seventy to eighty percent will perish, but the energy of their deaths will be captured by the remnants of the Great Seal and channeled into what I call, ‘The Great Collective’! We can provide a Framework!”

  Dedi took another deep breath. He gestured as the simulation rewound and then played a new plan. “The pooled human knowledge will connect the survivors, bolstering their will, creating a telepathic network girded by mana and strung along the newly grown roots of Yggdrasil that start their work as soon as the way is free! Their knowledge won’t be lost! Their arts and sciences will be saved! Even their ‘internet’, especially their ‘internet’, their repository of every piece of data, whether it is silly or sensible, it holds metaphysical weight, it will be channeled into them! Like their ‘internet’, they can be connected! It will be held in, contained by the mana-sphere! They can be warned! They can be saved!”

  Carefully pulling his last few intact spheres of liquified mana, Dedi placed them on a nearby table next to a glowing sphere filled with clouds and sparks of light. Suddenly, Dedi coughed up blood, his rant interrupted. Looking down, a slender blade protruded from his chest. “After all this time, why?” Another cough of blood. “Figured you would have tried around the fall of Rome.” More blood dribbled down his lips.

  Ramses sighed heavily, his hands shaking only a little as the action he’d contemplated for centuries was finally brought to fruition. Regret only made him reconsider his actions briefly. It pained him to admit that he also envisioned similar schemes to empower humanity to face their re-entry into the wider Multi-Verse.

  “You care too little for their fate,” he said, solemnly chastising one of his oldest friends while a solitary tear creased his cheek. “They’re simply insects to you, but they are where we started and you always seem to discount that. Unnecessary casualties have always been a part of your method. Not that many have to die. Your calculations are wrong.”

  “But I even added in the divination globe!” Dedi said, pointing at the mana spheres next to his personal window to the outside world. “It opens the rituals to more powers than just magic! You say I have no mercy, but the Knowledge Monuments will provide guidance.”

  As Ramses briefly looked away, a surprise cannonball of air slammed Ramses off his throne. The stone arm of the chair smashed into his side. Dedi suddenly levitated to his feet, blood dripping from his chest as the enchanted dagger glowed black with power. “And you don’t have the balls to get it done!” Dedi snarled, coughing as his hands couldn’t reach the handle in his back. “They need a reset! They need to be forged in fire and blood! They need POWER!”

  The knife in Dedi’s chest magically twisted as Ramses rotated his wrist from where he lay on the floor. Hacking up his own blood from broken ribs as he lay on the floor, Ramses gasped. The pain was almost too much, but years of slowly starving from strict mana rationing allowed him to hold on. “But you won’t actually allow them the chance! They’ve forgotten magic in all its forms! All they have is useless without the Veil. They do not even remember the effervescent tunnels of the Labyrinth and both the wonders and horrors it brings. Mark my words, the Labyrinth will return!”

  Dedi slumped forward as his lifeblood began to pour out, enriching the sympathetic magic and empowering the ritual. Reaching out with the final remnants of his magic, Ramses supporting his dying friend and enemy with a bit of air, gently moving him closer to the round stone table. Dedi’s blood dripped over the hologram of Earth, the light beams soaking up the crimson pearls of power as Ramses touched another glyph. Twisting his hand one more time, the knife in Dedi’s chest opened the wound a bit more. The resulting flow splashed onto the table causing carved runes to light up.

  “I, I will at least warn them. They deserve that much.” Ramses declared weakly, drawing on the hologram of Earth with a blood covered finger. Speaking softly to Dedi even as his oldest friend’s last breaths slipped away powering the barely leashed ritual, Ramses whispered, “If someone is going to end the world as they know it, to break the slowly weakening dam that keeps out the wider universe, then it should be someone with at least a sliver of mercy.”

  With a few motions and bursts of mana, the last mana spheres and divination orb gently flew into the hologram of the ritual. Blue and silver lightning crackled as the magical representation of Earth shifted, the arcane equation governing the imminent tsunami of extraplanar energy shifting to accommodate a dying man’s wish.

  The choices Ramses made with his dying actions were both far better and far worse than what Dedi originally intended. While they both yearned to see Humanity take its rightful place in the wider Multi-Verse once more, foolish kindness won out through guile and trickery. Ramses intervention simply allowed humanity a greater chance of surviving based on their will and faith but it also applied restrictions by region. The fewer people in an area meant that there would be less people to share the influx of power in that particular area, but areas full of people with high mortality rates would also have extra power as the resulting deaths would enhance the total volume of available power searching for hosts. Lastly, the magical nature of the ritual would fuse with the existing technological infrastructure and produce columns of indestructible crystal that functioned as memories, a database for the supernatural, and as a way to promote community building but it wouldn’t happen for at least a week.

  “Confirm.” Ramses coughed, his own blood taking on a life of its own, floating out to extend three fingers that wrote crimson runes and activated the hovering blue glyphs around the simulacrum. Even as Ramses watched for his last few minutes, his working continued to write until the ritual drained every bit of power from his body.

  “Confirm.” A gnarled, bloody finger scraped a downward trail against cold, heartless stone.

  ********

  Words etched in blazing yellow fire appeared on every reflective surface across the world magically mirrored by the bold crimson words that flickered across the sky. Every phone, every electronic device with a screen, every still pool of water, every mirror and window, every shiny piece of plastic and silvery metal, every smooth surface that caught the sun’s rays, everything reflective temporarily bore the last recorded official words of Earth’s Grand Wizard.

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