78 – Bandage

For once, Vivi demonstrated some wisdom. She closed her eyes and did not watch the dimensional boundary break into pieces.

She might have in another scenario, but after several minutes of talking with the most iconic cautionary tale in existence, her usual wild disregard for the dangers of esoteric magics had been replaced with a rare, uneasy caution. She wouldn’t stare eyes-wide-open at the Shattered Oracle’s personal, enthusiastic violation of the barrier between worlds. She knew, somehow, that she would be inviting at least a seed of his madness.

She would study those magics on her own, with proper safeguards. The world didn’t need a second Shattered Oracle, and especially not one so many times stronger. The damage she could bring would be—unimaginable.

Even with her eyes closed and senses dampened, though, the resulting hammer-blow into the already-weakened dimensional pane had her magical nerves exploding with stimulation. It was horrifying, and fascinating, and she desperately wanted to open her eyes and witness the phenomenon in all its horrible glory, but she forced herself not to.

The shattering lasted a quarter of a second. The sensations passed, and Vivi stopped blocking everything out.

She opened her eyes and appraised the damage.

It was the abyssal pit at Meridian, but much worse. And of course it was—the first had been performed by a mortal mage against a healthy boundary, not a former Cataclysm on a half-broken one. The sky was ruined. Before, it had presented to her senses like a pane of glass with a rock thrown at it: with spiderweb fractures, but still in one piece. Now, the shards had separated, the pane fully disintegrated with the force of the blow.

And in the center was a gateway. A portal leading into the heavens, many times larger than the previous—which likely meant it would take longer to heal, and would allow more voidlings to come flowing out every second.

Wonderful.

“Wonderful,” Remian Voss rasped. “There is…such beauty, in violation.”

She stared at the man. A wave of sadness and pity washed over her, seeing this representation of a person who might not have been evil, not in the core sense of that word, but whose unrepentant passion had certainly formed him into a monster through the actions he took.

Maybe the reminder was good. She needed to be careful when diving too deeply into the powers she’d been granted.

The supernatural fauna of the void responded to the breach without delay. Vivi watched the many sleek black creatures scattered throughout the sky freeze, then slowly point to the eye of the storm—the puncture that would lead them to a near endless source of life, on which they could glut themselves.

They began slithering toward it.

Time to be leaving, then.

“I do apologize, Vivisari,” Remian Voss murmured. “If merely for how we were once again at odds. Go. I will kill as many as I can…if I remain. What is a shadow without light to cast its shape? I suspect I only exist in this form through your perception.” He half-looked at her, a sly smile sneaking onto his lips. “Not that I think you’ll need the help. You would have at least tried to stop me, if you were worried.”

Vivi sighed. Indeed, she did have a plan, and one she felt confident in. It just wasn’t going to be pleasant in the short-term aftermath. Manaburn was an excellent tradeoff for preventing a city’s destruction, though.

She grabbed Isabella’s wrist and [Blinked] them to the mouth of the dimensional rift.

“Keep your eyes closed,” Vivi ordered her—then thought better of the weak instruction, and cast an enveloping seal of darkness around her. She layered as many of her strongest defenses onto the girl as possible, then onto herself. With the strides she’d made during the trip from Meridian to Prismarche, and the many, many void creatures she’d killed, she was far more confident in her spells than before. But she was terrified for Isabella nevertheless, because who knew how she would respond to the trek across worlds? Vivi could defend against the void, but this was something even more fundamental.

She would never be more prepared, unfortunately. Not in any reasonable timeframe. A city needed saving.

“Here we go,” she muttered.

She flew through.

This time, she was smart enough to block the experience out as thoroughly as she could. Not doing so last time had left her incapacitated, and while she wished to undergo those strange phenomena again for curiosity’s sake, she couldn’t afford falling insensate when Prismarche would soon be under attack. She needed her faculties about her.

Even so, the passage nearly peeled apart her mind. People weren’t supposed to traverse the dimensional boundary, on almost as basic a level as how they shouldn’t move through the stream of time. What she was doing was unnatural, and reality screeched at the violation.

She emerged into her own world with a gasp. It was only when sensations flooded in that she realized how true her suspicions from earlier were. She felt real again. Whole. She couldn’t point to any specific aspect of her existence that had unnerved her in the void realm, but reality was so vibrant, so visceral, that she wondered how it had only been a suspicion. Her presence there had definitely been more conceptual than physical.

If that was true, then where had her body been in the interim? And Isabella’s? Gone? Reconstructed on arrival? She shook those thoughts off. There were more important things to worry about.

She checked on Isabella first. She seemed rattled, but so was Vivi. The trip through the boundary hadn’t broken her mind or body, which was all that mattered, and so she chalked that part of this misadventure up to a success. Her apprentice’s friend had been secured, retrieved from past the dimensional horizon.

Now the world-ending threat that had come as a consequence.

Monsters would begin pouring through any second now, so she had no time to spare. The moment had come to enact her emergency plan.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It was hardly a revolutionary idea, but the best strategies were often simple. The recurring visualizations she’d had when looking at the gateways had prompted the core of the concept. Wounds. As if the dimensional boundary was reality’s skin, and a tear in it was little different from a tear in her own flesh.

Trying to weave together reality’s flesh was one logical fix to sealing the gateway, but it was also madness to tamper with those forces without a strong understanding of the underlying principles. She didn’t trust herself to do that properly, yet.

So what was the next best option for dealing with a cut? What had humans done for thousands of years?

Bandages. Stop the flow of blood, and let the body heal itself.