Mydia's End

by Sean Davies

  “Up we go then, I guess,” Constance said, as she gently pulled away from a display of old coins.

  “Huh, sorry?” Genevieve asked distractedly, as she scanned across a shelf of classic fantasy novels from Mydia’s middle-ages.

  Connie rolled her eyes and dragged the gorgeous blue-haired Vampire up the stairs, along with her Alternative friend. However, every floor was filled with cultural marvels, ranging from marble Tropican statues, ancient Imperian portraits and landscapes, rare items from known history and the murkier Archmage era before, and priceless knickknacks, gems, and jewellery that turned even the Book Wielder’s head. As they progressed up through the floors, the three friends passed by several cosy living areas, but even they contained more antiques and oddities than furnishings.

  “I want to live here,” Stitches said in admiration.

  “It is pretty impressive,” Constance admitted, eyeing up a flat bronze plaque on the wall with three turning gears, moving without any visible mechanism behind.

  “Lend me a book or two if you move in, Stitches,” Genevieve joked.

  Connie, Genevieve, and Stitches reached the top floor and looked around the domed room for Quoronastra. There were several chalkboards arranged around the room, covered in elegant runes, equations, and diagrams. Alchemy and chemistry stations stood alongside workbenches, clusters of bookshelves and large armchairs sat together, and many more display cases and lavish exhibits could be found here too; one appeared to contain the interior mechanisms and eyepieces for the telescope they’d spotted outside. The middle of the room was dominated by a large piece of copper-coloured metal, shaped like a ‘V’ on its side, and appeared to be a broken section of an enormous gear. The curved ceiling was painted white and decorated with metal dragons of all colours, in-between the thin golden supports that met in the ceiling’s centre.

  A figure rose from one of the armchairs on the opposite side of the room, drawing their attention away from the wondrous contents of the chamber.

  Quoronastra was unsurprisingly in his humanoid form (seeing as a Dragon in its true form wouldn’t have been able to fit inside the building), and holding a large book that he reluctantly closed to eye the three friends. He looked human enough, but instead of flesh he had black and purple scaled skin, with small white scales emphasising his brows, ears, and knuckles. His eyes were a brilliantly bright shade of violet that moved and flickered, making them seem as though they were made of fire. Most of Quoronastra’s body was hidden underneath a thick brown robe that seemed incredibly humble compared to the tower’s ostentatious décor.

  The Dragon took his time walking around to the group, giving them a disinterested glare without saying a word.

  “I’m Constance,” the Book Wielder announced, fed up of the awkward silence, “and this is Genevieve and Stitches.”

  “Hey, nice place you’ve got here,” Genevieve said.

  Stitches nodded. “Yes, it really is amazing.”

  “You don’t smell like the other Gloom dwellers,” Quoronastra said to Stitches bluntly. “What’s different about you?”

  The Alternative looked baffled. “Um… I can copy other people’s abilities. Some things like spells are a bit harder, though.”

  “Hmm… fascinating,” the Dragon mumbled, before walking away from them and over to a workbench.

  “We’re here to—” Connie began.

  Quoronastra raised his hand, rudely cutting off the Book Wielder’s explanation as he rummaged around in a drawer, and returned with a pair of spectacles. “These should help you perceive magic and enchantments with ease,” the Dragon explained, swapping Stitches’ glasses without permission. “Book Wielder, perform a spell. Puppet, try to copy it.”

  “Since you asked so nicely,” Constance grumbled sarcastically.

  The Book Wielder opened her hand, and yellow lightning surged from her finger tips into the palm of her hand, where it ignited in a blaze of yellow fire that crackled with electricity.

  “Electric fire?” Genevieve asked with a smile.

  “I couldn’t pick what I liked more, so I use both,” Connie replied, scowling at the arrogant Dragon.

  Stitches studied Constance and held out his hand. Bright green energy zapped out of his fingertips and created a ball of raging emerald fire and electricity in his palm, almost identical to Connie’s spell except for the colour.

  “Interesting,” Quoronastra mused before grabbing a notepad and pen, frantically scribbling notes. “Near enough complete mimicry… Gloom magic persists in colour…” he said to himself as he wrote.

  Stitches looked beside himself with joy, but Constance and Genevieve were both growing impatient. Connie cancelled her spell by clenching her fist shut, and the Vampire Nightclaw coughed loudly.

  “My friend’s husband, the Primary Regulator—” Genevieve began.

  “The half-Archmage Emperor of Mydia, you mean?” Quoronastra interrupted.

  “Right,” Genie said, beginning to lose her patience but trying to keep a neutral expression. “He’s fallen ill—”

  “How unfortunate,” the Dragon butted in sarcastically.

  “Winston’s completely unresponsive, and a mask keeps appearing on his face. It looks like his becoming a full Archmage, or Omniosis is taking over his mind,” Genie continued, louder and much angrier than before. “Can you do anything for him?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Quoronastra said nonchalantly, as he began to sketch Stitches. “I have never heard of anything like that happening before, but I would keep an eye on the other one; the Lord Imperator. She may be the next to fall prey to her power-mad tyrannical blood.”

  “Nothing in here can help at all?” Constance pouted.

  Quoronastra tilted his head and spoke in a mocking tone. “Considering that your Emperor is one of two half-Archmages seemingly planted by Fate, both the first of their kind… no, there really isn’t.”

  Constance and Genevieve frowned and gave each other a knowing look.

  “It might be for the best if Reynolds were moved aside,” the Dragon continued. “The world needs a better leader, one who is kind, heartfelt, extremely intelligent…”

  “Like Alexander?” Genevieve guessed, her face looking unimpressed.

  “Yes, now that you mention it, Alexander would make a fine Emperor,” Quoronastra said airily.

  “How did you even meet?” Stitches asked, annoyed that the Dragon showed little regard for Winston’s well-being.

  “Your Emperor invited my kind to Central Isle, thinking he could cajole us as easily as he did everyone else,” Quoronastra replied. “I was one of the few Dragons who attended, and I was not impressed. I’ve suffered through one age of Archmage dominance; I shall definitely not be embracing a second.” He paused thoughtfully, before adding, “I was, of course, impressed by the tour guide, Alexander.”

  “Winston’s different to the other Archmages,” Stitches said, defending his idol.

  “Omniultrix, the lead persona in the being you know as Omniosis, was different once too,” Quoronastra chided, “but he succumbed to the greed and desire for more power, as all of his kind eventually do. Yes, there were a few good ones, but the bad apples far outnumbered the good.”

  “Been carrying the same grudge for a few millennia, huh?” Connie snapped.

  The Dragon growled, releasing a little burst of purple fire from his mouth, and yanked down the top of his robe to reveal his lower neck which was deeply scarred with several evenly spaced puncture wounds.

  “Considering that the Archmages enslaved my entire race to serve as their personal battle mounts, complete with mind-controlling collars that they sealed around our necks,” Quoronastra snarled in a beastly voice, “I’d say that my grudges are perfectly justified.”

  “Let’s move on,” Genevieve suggested hastily.

  “You need to keep this to yourself, but the world is in trouble,” Connie began flatly.

  “Yes, I had already deduced that, what with the earthquakes, fluctuatio
n in magical levels, and ghost sightings,” the Dragon replied arrogantly. “I’ve already been working on my theories. And you needn’t worry about me keeping your secrets; I really don’t like people.”

  “You like Alexander,” Genevieve corrected with a smirk.

  “True,” Quoronastra admitted in a blasé voice.

  “Well, can you share those theories?” Connie asked after a long pause.

  The Dragon sighed and put the notes he’d made about Stitches down on a workbench. “Very well.”

  The Dragon walked over to the telescope and stopped at a clean blackboard, picking up a piece of white chalk. “I have two main theories in the works, both of which could be connected,” he began, as the others moved to join him.

  Quoronastra drew a flat line on the board and labelled it ‘Mydia’.

  “The world’s flatter than I’d remembered,” Constance joked under her breath.

  Quoronastra shot the Book Wielder an evil look, before continuing with his presentation. “Imagine this line is the original Mydia, existing within this dimension just as it was in my era,” he told them, beginning his sermon in a formal tone. “Now, in order for the Twin Rebels to bravely—and somewhat foolishly—expel the magic from the world in an effort to defeat the Omni, they gathered the planet’s magic together like this…”

  The Dragon scratched a rough chalk circle above the line, and labelled it ‘Source of Magic’. “The magic was then pushed through the boundaries of our dimension, like so…” He drew a thick arrow down to show the source of magic crossing through Mydia’s dimension and into a new one, marked by a line which Quoronastra labelled ‘Sub-dimension One (Gloom)’. He then re-drew the circle of magic above the Gloom where it had been relocated to, before continuing, “…banishing the most of the Archmages, and the majority of the world’s magic in a new, unintentionally created plain of existence.”

  “No offense, sir, but we already know this,” Stitches said politely.

  “Let me finish, puppet,” Quoronastra chastised, wagging his chalk in the Alt’s direction. “What you may not know is that instead of ending up in the Gloom, some structures—such as the Archmage ruins that damned Ricardo Stern keeps beating me to—and some beings, myself included, were all pushed into what I have dubbed ‘the void’; a timeless expanse of nothingness that exists between all realities.” He sketched some buildings and stick-men in the area between the ‘Mydia’ and ‘Gloom’ lines. “When your Emperor restored the world by merging the Gloom and Mydia back together and re-dispersing the source of magic throughout the land, I and the rest of the void’s occupants were also brought back, with no real recollection that we had ever left.”

  “I think I’ve seen it—the void,” Genevieve gasped, instantly feeling stupid when everyone stared at her with puzzled looks. “I was close to death once, and I had this… experience, where I was standing on some massive chunks of severed machinery, floating in an infinite void,” she summarised awkwardly while playing with her locket. “There were other things suspended within it—plants, animals, buildings—all just stuck there doing nothing. It sounds mad, but it was all so vivid and real.” The Vampire Nightclaw decided to omit the part where she had spoken to Annabelle’s spirit, for both Connie’s and the rude Dragon’s sakes.

  “I think I remember you saying something about that when we got smashed at the Endless Overlook restaurant,” Constance said, trying to recall the finer details of that drunken evening, whilst also kicking herself for not sleeping with Genevieve when they’d had a hotel room full of naughty delights all to themselves.

  “Fascinating… completely impossible, but fascinating nonetheless. No time passes within the void, therefore you could never experience anything in the place… nor could you even reach it, for that matter,” Quoronastra said, brushing off Genevieve’s contribution completely. “So, for thousands of years Mydia was split, essentially residing in three separate plains of existence, and at any given moment our entire dimension could have been sucked into the void for all of eternity. It’s a miracle that it wasn’t. Therefore, in my opinion, the force of Fate influenced your half-Archmage friends to bring about the merger in order to save the universe as a whole, and not necessarily to save our planet.”

  “You think that the merger irreparably damaged the planet, and Mydia might be destined to simply end?” Stitches asked, shocked.

  “Everything ends, eventually,” Quoronastra said philosophically. “You’re sharper than the other ones, aren’t you?” he added, scrutinizing the Alternative once again.

  “What’s theory number two?” Connie asked, unwilling to believe the Dragon’s morbid initial notion, especially as her intuition was telling her that he was barking up the wrong tree.

  “Well, it’s a lot less believable, as it is built upon an Archmage creation myth,” Quoronastra began. He walked over to a table on the other side of the telescope, which had three plate-sized discs made of white stone and blue crystal resting atop a folded purple cloth. “However, it links into a lot of the historical records that Alexander and I have been uncovering, and what started as a passing whimsical fantasy now seems to be too coincidental to be… well, a coincidence.”

  The Dragon tapped the discs one by one, and after a short chiming sound, holographic images of various planets appeared in thin air above them, rendered in high detail and full colour with floating Archmage text beside them.

  “These data storage units belonged to Book Wielders from the original Conclave,” Quoronastra explained. “The images of planets here were supposedly gleaned from an entity in the centre of the planet, known only as ‘the Creator’. Cycle through them and tell me what you think.”

  Constance’s skin prickled all over, but she powered through the sensation and waved her hand in front of one of the holograms. The image moved aside, vanished, and was replaced with another planet.

  Stitches and Genevieve soon joined in, taking a display each, and they studied each one of the varying globes in awe, marvelling at cities that spanned entire continents, towers that reached up into the upper atmosphere, and solitary domed outposts on barren worlds which made the Continent of Desem look lush in comparison.

  “You see, some humans and Archmages—primarily the Conclave—believed that our world was created by three god-like beings,” the Dragon began. “I was born just before the dawn of the Omni’s tyrannical turn for the worse, so my own experiences of their beliefs are limited, as I spent most of my early life in hiding. Then, in my adolescence, I was captured and forced permanently into my natural form so that I could ferry the pompous Archmages from social function to social function in style…”

  “That’s terrible,” Genevieve said, understanding why the Dragon wasn’t a fan of other people.

  “Crythoapia,” Constance muttered to herself as she looked at a red world with a rusty brown ocean, before swiping through the planets in quick succession. “Darkheart Prime, Ascendancy Prime, Decion Arthem, New Terra, Lunaria, Psytech’s Deep Space HQ, Grand Holy Terra…”

  “You can read Archmage?” Quoronastra asked, clearly impressed.

  “No,” Constance replied airily. “What?” she asked, noticing that everyone was staring at her.

  “How did you know what the planets were called if you can’t read Archmage?” Genie asked, looking slightly concerned.

  “I just… recognised them,” Connie replied, creeping herself out in the process.

  “Maybe you are more interesting than you look,” Quoronastra mused as he appraised the Book Wielder.

  “Why are we looking at planets, anyway?” Constance asked sharply, feeling flustered.

  Genevieve gave Connie a worried look.

  “I’m fine, I promise,” Constance lied. “Please, can we just get on with this? Alice and the others are waiting, after all.”

  “Very well,” the Dragon conceded as he scratched his scaled chin, still studying the Tropican Book Wielder intently. “What have you noticed about these worlds?” he asked, as he tr
aced the outline of a rune onto the central disc, causing an image of Mydia and its twin moons to appear.

  “They’re really diverse?” Genevieve guessed half-heartedly; she was still inwardly fretting over Connie.

  “They’re completely different to our world?” Stitches shrugged. “Mydia looks smaller than most of the others. There are no craters—not on the surface, at least—and the landmasses look neater, like they’ve been arranged.” The Alt then chuckled, as the idea sounded preposterous.

  “Correct, puppet-man!” Quoronastra beamed, before patting Stitches on the head like he was praising a good dog. “The more you look at our world, the more artificial it seems—even down to the behaviour of the tides, the weather, the seasons…”

  “Is that what the creation myth says, too?” Genevieve asked.

  The Dragon nodded. “According to the records we’ve deciphered, three ancient beings with unfathomable power grew tired of sailing the cosmos and decided to create life around a lone star, life that would be in the image of their former selves from eons past. That’s what these planets apparently are; the distant memories of the being that created Mydia, a being the original Conclave believed was settled in the very core of the planet. I know it sounds ludicrous, but Alexander and I keep finding correlations between the Book Wielders of old and ‘the Creator’.”

  Constance felt overwhelmed and faint, but kept her expression neutral so as not to worry the others.

  “You said there were three god-like creatures,” Genie began slowly, “so what happened to the other two?”

  “The twin moons,” Stitches gasped.

  “Precisely!” Quoronastra cheered joyfully. “According to the legend, two of the Ascendants channelled their energy into the third, giving it the power required to create life and alter reality on such an enormous scale. Making genuine and permanent life is nigh on impossible without enormous amounts of power—even the Omni couldn’t do it.”