the sky is falling.

[baedalites]

Who: Everyone.
What: Part two begins.
When: Evening, a few hours before the end of the 24-hour siege period.
Notes: Feel free to thread in comments here or make your own posts! NPC your own monsters, team up in locations anywhere you like, and feel free to plot things at the plotting post, which has the relevant details. Remember that this is city-wide, so you are free to do what you like with locations.

Just after dark, the air of Baedal seems to change. While it was tense before, with the stand-off in Mafaton, a new kind of electrical energy begins to spread through the city, leaking from the sky itself. The horizon is clear tonight, even starry where the city lights don't obscure the view, but soon enough it begins to blur with color, and at an alarmingly rapid pace. Bright streaks of pink and green begin to spiral across the sky, in an approximation of the auroras, though it is much nearer and brighter than any common demonstration of an aurora should be. The geomagnetic storm swirls and dances, initially beautiful, but its intensity is ominous.

It's also growing. Most geomagnetic storms stay to one corner, but this spreads across the entire sky, green-purple-pink-red illuminated and inching further into the dark, leaving the city of Baedal tinted with a dim, eerie glow. This continues for about a half an hour, until that tension reaches its breaking point.

The magical boundaries holding Mafaton crack and then completely shatter. It is audible, and the backlash sends flying many of the Candlelighters trying frantically to preserve the borders of their siege. A few of them are killed by the backlash of their spell's combustion, but more are simply shaken; having one's magic work so thoroughly broken is not a pleasant experience. The sound covers another tearing, this time a metaphysical one that rips the heavens open in places the common eye can't see. Those whose vision allows them to observe different layers of reality will notice, but others will only see the incoming flood of creatures from other universes.

One siege has ended, but another has just begun, and this time, it's not just Mafaton at risk.

Comments

[closed narrative]

[cerebral]

The sky is falling

Writers in the Romantic era used to speak about the breathtaking splendour of nature, its innate beauty and terror—

the sky is falling

—they called it the sublime. It's something that Charles Xavier has only a moment to reflect upon as he looks up and thinks how small everything is in the scheme of things—

the sky is falling is falling

—how small he is, how small this canton is, how small this city, how small how small—

is falling is falling the sky is

—and he hears a shout and turns, eyes full of sorrow, because he can already feel what’s coming for them, coming for him, and he has to go while all around him hundreds, thousands, millions of minds scream out

the sky is falling the sky is falling the sky is falling

- - -

They try to tear at his mind with teeth that don't exist in the sense that they're not really teeth but there is sharp pain that isn't pain because it's not attached to his body.

They take the forms of things more terrible than humanity could ever dream of, these things that come from the darkness between stars, and twist and become something worse. They are coming for him and he feels his mind burning like it never has before. Although he's not only holding them off and it’s not for survival alone —other citizens who can access the astral plane are present and they are doing the same as he is. Quite apart from the city, they fight an invisible battle that few will see. Some succumb to the vicious attacks to their psyche and, somewhere else, their bodies become cold and lifeless.

Abstractly, he remembers Remy once said something about the attraction of certain creatures to the brightness of minds like his. But if they are the juiciest morsels, they are also the first line of defense.

What will stop them once they’re gone?

And so he battles on trying not to let the people he might never see again, the things he might never do or accomplish, distract him from his task. And in his weariest moments he thinks about nothing but them.

- - -

Later, when the fighting is done but he is too exhausted to try and pull himself back into his body, he drifts. That's when he senses it again —the unceasing, mindless hunger that he encountered when he first explored the fog.

Seeing it is worse. It’s nothing. An absence in existence, something that the human mind isn't meant to comprehend. It fills him with as much dread now as it did then, and even though he's far away, he feels a need to flee further, even though he knows there is no further.

So he does the next best thing and reaches out to the minds around him, as if they were guiding lights pointing the way home. But they're not; they're humans and xenians alike and he can feel them. Their pain and distress, their cries for help, their screaming need to survive.

Many of them fade out completely. Others simply stop.

He keeps going.