The Clanker Republic
18-03-2007, 20:22
A world on its last legs.
Rainbow auroras flare above the heaving surface of the sea. Breaking waves flicker uncertainly from water to jade to lead and back again. Here and there, helpless conglomerates of wood and copper and cloth and steel spin round and round, dwarfed by waves taller than skyscrapers. They were once the pride of empires - now they are reduced to splinters one by one, crushed under colossal weights of water and chaos-fed winds.
The land on the horizon shatters and spins and comes back together again. Mountains pump up and down like pistons, sending shockwaves of hills and valleys rippling across the muddy rain-soaked ground. Cities try to ride out the storm - they fail and shatter into islands of individual houses, spinning anchorless across the mad unsolid ground.
Lightning flares across the sky. A few mad thrill-seekers are up there too, cavorting on wings of canvas and wood, brass and nullmetal, treemuscle and skyfiber, rockglass and stranger materials still. They swoop and tumble amongst hurricane gales and vertical waterfalls, waiting for the final gust that will smash them into the unyielding earth and end their final thrillride.
The core of the world cracks, spitting white-hot fluids up through the crust. As the oceans boil away and the land disintegrates into dust, the lightning and the auroras flare. Brighter and brighter and brighter, until you can see nothing but white. And then not even that.
Light. White-hard light, bright enough to sear and blind the retinas if it was anything normal. But this is witchlight, the light that is Seen but not Felt, which makes its mark upon the mind but not the body.
It shines through the few survivors' closed eyelids, through the hulls and walls and wings, through kilometers of rock and ocean and iron and atmosphere. For one brief instant, the dying world flares brighter than a hundred supernovas, brighter than a quasar jet.
The universe s not supposed to contain that much light. Something snaps deep in the fabric of spacetime, shattering local space around the planet into a thousand little fragments that whirl free, bubble universes without time, spinning free through a void more empty than vacuum for untold aeons and eternities.
And then they collide with other universes, and merge.
Miniature flares of witchlight herald the arrival of fragments from the broken world. From a single pebble to entire mountains, they pop into existence randomly, uncontrolled. Some of them contain artifacts - pieces of shattered brass, tiny stone figurines, a shred of cloth. Some of them contain technology - a clockwork computer, a mechanical loom, a multi-armed monstrosity.
Some of them contain survivors.
Rainbow auroras flare above the heaving surface of the sea. Breaking waves flicker uncertainly from water to jade to lead and back again. Here and there, helpless conglomerates of wood and copper and cloth and steel spin round and round, dwarfed by waves taller than skyscrapers. They were once the pride of empires - now they are reduced to splinters one by one, crushed under colossal weights of water and chaos-fed winds.
The land on the horizon shatters and spins and comes back together again. Mountains pump up and down like pistons, sending shockwaves of hills and valleys rippling across the muddy rain-soaked ground. Cities try to ride out the storm - they fail and shatter into islands of individual houses, spinning anchorless across the mad unsolid ground.
Lightning flares across the sky. A few mad thrill-seekers are up there too, cavorting on wings of canvas and wood, brass and nullmetal, treemuscle and skyfiber, rockglass and stranger materials still. They swoop and tumble amongst hurricane gales and vertical waterfalls, waiting for the final gust that will smash them into the unyielding earth and end their final thrillride.
The core of the world cracks, spitting white-hot fluids up through the crust. As the oceans boil away and the land disintegrates into dust, the lightning and the auroras flare. Brighter and brighter and brighter, until you can see nothing but white. And then not even that.
Light. White-hard light, bright enough to sear and blind the retinas if it was anything normal. But this is witchlight, the light that is Seen but not Felt, which makes its mark upon the mind but not the body.
It shines through the few survivors' closed eyelids, through the hulls and walls and wings, through kilometers of rock and ocean and iron and atmosphere. For one brief instant, the dying world flares brighter than a hundred supernovas, brighter than a quasar jet.
The universe s not supposed to contain that much light. Something snaps deep in the fabric of spacetime, shattering local space around the planet into a thousand little fragments that whirl free, bubble universes without time, spinning free through a void more empty than vacuum for untold aeons and eternities.
And then they collide with other universes, and merge.
Miniature flares of witchlight herald the arrival of fragments from the broken world. From a single pebble to entire mountains, they pop into existence randomly, uncontrolled. Some of them contain artifacts - pieces of shattered brass, tiny stone figurines, a shred of cloth. Some of them contain technology - a clockwork computer, a mechanical loom, a multi-armed monstrosity.
Some of them contain survivors.