The Numidiad: Part VI

NUMIDIAD | C0DA

The world flashed white and a soundless shock tore through the sky, rushing across land and sea and flattening everything in its path. The unnatural silence lasted a mere instant before thunder roared as the shockwave expended itself and crashed back to the center. The air around the shattered tower turned a jellied blue as it was crushed under unimaginable pressure, and the heat ignited grass, dirt, and the ruined pages drifting through the sky. The firestorm blazed for an instant before starving, leaving only ash drifting down like black snow.

The gently falling ash billowed and parted as a colossus creaked forward. Metal pieces, tarnished, burnished, and dull, rained down from it with every motion. The ground where it stepped cracked and sunk under its weight, and bolts of baleful blue lightning speared outwards from its skin, crackling around it in a jagged nimbus. If there had been birds, they would have flown clear of it, for to stray within that haze was Death. If there had been animals, they would have fled from its footprints and its path, for in its wake was Pain. If there had been Folk, but no, there were no Folk.

The world was silent, with neither animals to call nor wind to gust nor Folk to shout. The only sound was the interminable creaking, clattering metal as one step led inexorably to the next. As the colossal machine reached the beach, its left knee seized, then shattered, spraying metal fragments. Metal groaned, and slowly at first and then with gathering speed, it pitched forward and crashed into the water which erupted in a spray of mist and steam. Its head, once a mile in the clouds, now lay as far offshore. The sea pulled it home, and foot by foot the ruined legs and feet slowly slipped beneath the waves.

The Ur Tower, still circling the White Gold, screamed a loud, vibrant Blue, the light bathing the City of the Cyrodiils in eerie, sacred tones from earth-thrumming Midnight to shrill Sky. All across Tamriel, Jills flashed into existence, their cries harmonizing with the coruscating Spire. The Tiberian Wars had left scars across the continent that all could feel, though only the Minute-Menders could see. From the sands of Elsewyer to the ash of Vvardenfell, from Skyrim's shrieking blizzards to Valenwood's whispering forests, the Jills raced along the rents in Akatosh's flesh, stitching together the wounds writ by Numidium's passage. As they flew along the shattered and scattered detritus of Time that Numidium left in its wake, picking apart, examining, discarding, and stitching pieces into a rough approximation of continuity and sanity, sometimes proceeding slowly and carefully and (more often than not) racing ahead with wild abandon, feasting on Akatosh's wounds even as they work to mend them. The life-threads of those they encounter are often snarled and sometimes cut, but such is the nature of the imperfection of scar-healing.

AMATIVE TIIDDE FENT BO

The waves didn't crash anymore; they hadn't for a long time now. The waves brushed up against the beach almost accidentally, like a young boy unsure how to handle his first crush. They approached timidly, struck the beach with barely enough force or distance to qualify, and hastily retreated. The sea wasn't calm, no, she was surely agitated, but for once she was the slave, not the mistress. There shouldn't exist anything that makes the sea a slave. Whatever it is, it's wrong. Not wrong like the undark men are wrong, calling this world a blessing and a gift, but wrong like the world is. But worse.

The sea stills, but only a fool would think it is a good stilling. It is the stillness of the doe who first catches the whiff of the huntress; it is the stillness of the man on the headsman's block. It is the stillness of awareness of Death's touch, lightly brushing the shoulder, not yet a grip but suddenly intimately, desperately close.

There, far out from shore, there is a bulge. The sea bends up towards the sky, then runs outwards, almost as if fleeing. Bright, painful blue jagged lines rip through the water, visible even through the distance and deflection. The weather grows fragmented, confused. It isn't sure whether to be sunny or stormy or cloudy and so it is all of these and none. Finally, the sea parts around a gleaming yellow-bronze helm much as butter parts around a knife. The enormous helm raises its face from the waves to the shore, its eyes burning with a horrible light of no particular color. The helm continues to rise, exposing a ruined facsimile of a face, then broad shoulders a league across surge above the water, cascading waterfalls and steam from each crevice and surface.

The rent, ruined, torso smashes through the water, its head by now rearing almost to the low clouds. Metal gantries and beams and pipes and gears push skyward, in an endless stream of machinery and artifice. After almost half an hour, the beginnings of its legs appear. One is twisted, torn, and thin; although the machine is covered in burns, gashes where the metal had melted, ran, and frozen again, fractures, and every sign of abuse, its left leg is in by far the worst condition. The hulking mountain of metal limps out of the ocean, dragging its left leg, and rears to its full height. It makes no sound besides the creaking and groaning of its metal parts, the hiss of steam, and the crackle of the lightning surround it, yet it emanates an unmistakable aura of fury.

The helm turns slowly on its perch, nearly a mile above the sand, and grimly it lumbers up the beach.

The Jills are everywhere across Tamriel, but the largest flock has been retracing Numidium's route. They swarm around the pit on Balfiera, around which silver and mnemolichite and marble wreckage are strewn, and just beyond sight the air blazes with leftover myth from the Talos Apotheosis. One of the Jills sinks her talons deep into a wound and screeches. Whatever she's gripped, it's pulling her farther in. Her cohorts gather around her, tearing the wound open and dragging her back into reality. Finally, she springs free and the rift snaps shut. In her claws dangles a limp ash-and-aurum figure.

Hammerfell's population had begun trickling back to the coastal cities almost as soon as word was received that Numidium was within the Alinori Seal, but now that it had returned they'd fled back to the Alik'r in droves. Those who stayed and tried to hide could only watch in horror as its mountainous form crushed buildings and ground alike. Its footprints gouge deep into the sand and rock and the sea rushes from one to the next, burying the city acre by acre in the metal-monster's wake.

It neither flails nor roars, though it is unmistakably angry. Rather, it moves with implacable resolve, methodically crushing the island city until only scattered islets remain of Stros M'Kai. Where the seafloor cracked under its heels, the ocean smoked and boiled, wreathing the ruined remnants in soot and steam.

Satisfied with its destruction, it turned its gaze northwards and strode back into the ocean. Its wounds are plugged with dirt and stone, and its left leg no longer limps.

Time has been ordered for most of Tamriel, with splinters fetched and crushed together and divergent branches pruned, and while Akatosh is scarred, at least he is no longer bleeding. The great Dragon coils tightly around Mundus, forcing time into some semblance of a line, though it still has small fractures and loops in places. It looks back and sees a sharp cut where Talos had resumed its brother's shouting, though appending WE ARE to the ages-old I AM NOT. Far to the side and forward another Dovahjoor eye gazes back, pondering reunion with its stunted twin. Aka squirms, endless coils shifting and grating, and on every scale-world-point, its son-Drakes erupt into existence.

The ever-present cries and screeches of the Jills to which Tamriel had gradually become accustomed are joined by the deeper roars and Shouts of the Drakes, which had been dwindling for two Eras but now returned in force. In Skyrim, the resurgent Dragon Cult was soon brought to heel and pushed across the resisting holds. The Dragon King, YOLMOROKRON3D, perched atop the Ur Tower high above the Imperial City, drinking deep its power and breathing out with Royalty and Splendor the long fire to back Cyrod's tangled jungles, leaving dry plains and desert behind.

As Numidium crashes onto Hammerfell's southern beaches, massive pistons thrustings its fists into walls and palaces and homes and refugees, the Mundane world is crushed in a mirror of the Mythic. In dimensions imperceptible to the mortal eye, the Dragon-forks crash together, the longer-running head biting down on its shorter brother. AKA-DROG crunches its crystal jaws, shattering the bones and scales of his smaller brother Z1M and swallowing them.

AKA STATUS

AKA FETCH Z1M

AKA MERGE Z1M DROG

JILL AURBIS MUNDUS T1ZOK1N

JILL VEY J8R L1S

DRAKE Z4R4M3K SULCKSEJUN

AKA LORKHOM3T

Numidium staggered as Mundus cracked, shattered, and reformed in infinitesimally small zero-points of Creatia. Hammerfell's rocks and sands and sea rose and fell and gusted with the mythic collision of the Aka Krenne and the Jills' frantic Mending. Numidium roared its refusal in return, attracting swarms of Jills to the continuing fractures and negations emanating from the golden smoking skin of the metal-mile mountain-machine. They screeched as they tore into the fissures in reality Numidium left trailing, struggling desperately to keep Reality together as the BorMaHu consumed itself. Numidium crashed through Hammerfell with abandon, crushing the land beneath its boots and hurling clumps into the sea and sky. Nirn's boiling blood rushes to the surface, mixing with the seawater and flooding the air with smoke. Flocks of Jills, over-eager and angered and desperate, rush the Numidium, only to be swatted or shouted out of the air and the world. With impossible speed, the God of Refusal finished its work, leaving the once-desert of the west sunken, pitted, burning, and flooded. Islands rise here and there from the mist-blanketed waves, ruins both Yoku and Dwemer jutting like broken bones. The crushing weight of the Aka Convergence grinds down on the Machine, and it turns its gaze to the sky. There, hanging low and huge and bloody, lies the land of VelothII. Fueled by rage and revenge, Numidium stares up at Masser, seething in hatred.

The tower-legs collapse, folding and telescoping in massive complexity, crouching the Colossus to its minimal height.

Belching steam, hissing and burning NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO against the Void, the NUMIDIUM flings itself from Nirn and erupts into the sky.