Rune Seeker

“Genesis?” Hiral asked.

“It’s the name of your planet,” Tomorrow said. “Your world. Or, I guess, it’s what we named it.”

“You, being the Progenitors?” Seena said.

“Correct, but look at me, jumping ahead in the story like that. This,” Tomorrow gestured to the wide space around them. “This isn’t that part of the story yet. So, let’s get on with it. The time for questions is over. For now.”

With that proclamation, Tomorrow lifted her arms and vanished yet again. At the same time, everything around the party stretched like they shot backward at an incredible speed – though they felt nothing. The next second, they floated near the white sun, Tomorrow – back in her draconic form – swimming through space in their direction.

All at once, her head snapped up and to the left – in the opposite direction of the party – as a new shape emerged from the darkness.

“While I was the first to arrive at the white dwarf,” Tomorrow’s voice echoed from all around the party. “I, unfortunately, wasn’t the only one who sensed something different about this sun. My two rivals had also sniffed it out.”

Far from the party, it didn’t take long for the first new arrival to take shape, lightning arcing along wings made of storm clouds, and thunder somehow booming in the otherwise silent space. Even bigger than they’d seen it before, Heaven’s Punishment carved a bright line through the blackness of space. And it wasn’t the only one, another pulse of power coming from below the party.

When Hiral looked down beneath his feet, he spotted another massive shape rushing up. Riding what – unbelievably – looked like a titanic wave, a third gigantic dragon approached. At a size somewhere between Tomorrow and Heaven’s Punishment, this could only be The Final Tide.

A deep blue, like an unfathomable ocean, its scales glistened as it approached. Whiskers that almost looked like fronds of seaweed hung from its chin and above its eyes like eyebrows that waved in the air and trailed down half its neck. From just behind its skull, two fins ran down the length of its body, all the way to the end of its tail, with the widest part above its back extending out like huge wings to both sides.

Wide, flat blades extended from its elbows like a fish’s limbs, while the dragon’s tail likewise ended as a fish’s would, though made of the same blue material of the dragon’s scales.

“You should both leave,” The Final Tide said as it arrived.

“At least you’re still living up to your name,” Heaven’s Punishment retorted. “Arriving last. I only came here because I smelled something interesting, but now you two are here? Perfect. Let’s fight.”

“I was here first,” Tomorrow’s draconic form said. “This find is mine by right.”

“The only right is power,” Heaven’s Punishment said. “Prove you’re worthy of whatever this is by beating me.”

“All you ever want to do is fight,” The Final Tide said. “But, if that’s what I must do to secure this treasure, so be it.”

That was the last word spoken, like the three had had similar encounters dozens of times in the past, and energy like three new suns being born exploded outward. Space rippled around the dragons as those outward pulses of energy suddenly retracted back towards each of the combatants, dragging even more energy with them as they went.

It was as if each of the Progenitors had cast a wide net out, and now hauled in their bounty of energy – easily triple what they’d gone fishing with. And, triple of an unimaginable amount was enough to shake the sky. The nearby suns – the real ones – vibrated and then grew dark in comparison to the balls of energy forming in front of the wide maws of each of the dragons.

Heaven’s Punishment formed a sphere of condensed lightning, the crackles and arcs of it leaving tears in nearby space. Tomorrow’s growing breath attack had the same sense of finality to it that Hiral had experienced with the Weight of Tomorrow – only hundreds of times more potent. This wasn’t just death, this was the also the end of anything that had a hope of coming after. Around this, space simply frayed and vanished.

Finally, the Tide’s breath carried a crushing weight of inevitability with it, and stood a blue so deep it was almost black. This attack pulled space into it, further crushing it down as if it was using it as fuel to empower the attack.

Each of the three, prepared assaults screamed danger to Hiral, and none of them were even aimed in their direction. But, they didn’t have to be. Just releasing the energy would send waves of destruction cascading outward.

“They’re going to destroy the sun they’re fighting over,” Seena said, even as Romin and Wallop placed themselves between the party and the growing trio of cataclysms. “Get ready to use any defensive abilities you have…”

As she spoke, a tremendous tearing sound filled their ears, and each of the three breath attacks was released. Then… they just… stopped.

“That’s how it was every time we met up until this point,” Tomorrow’s narrator voice said. “Progenitors you called us, and it was true… though not yet. At this point, we were little more than warlords, traveling the universe in search of power. Or, things that would make us more powerful. Each of us had peaked, you see. Our personal growth, stagnated.

“We still had our goals. I fought to create something that would endure. That would survive. When I failed – as I did almost every time – I destroyed it with my own claws. Or, moved on and let nature take its course. Iterations were important. New experiments. But, looking back, even that had stagnated. I was never going to succeed, and I couldn’t admit it to myself. So, I lied and said I needed more power. New ideas.

“Maybe it was true, or maybe it was an excuse to rage at my own impotence. The other two weren’t much better. Heaven’s Punishment just wanted the best battle he could find. It didn’t matter if he won or lost, as long as he had fun. The Final Tide? She claimed to be ushering in the end of times. And maybe she was? Maybe that’s why we fought tooth and nail. She brought the end while I tried to build something that would survive it.

“And through all this, we ruled worlds. Galaxies. Fought for more. Won and lost it without a care. We were all strong, but not strong enough to kill one of the others. Not unless we teamed up – which we would never stoop to doing. Not then.

“But,” Tomorrow went on. “This… this is where something new happened. We’d all come to this dying star because something about it was different. Something about its death was different. This star was actually quite young. Almost a baby. It should’ve had millions of years of life left, and yet… look at it.”

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At the command, the sky around them rotated, taking the dragons out of the focus of their vision, and instead putting the giant, white star right in front of them. “You feel it, don’t you?” Tomorrow asked. “Or, you don’t feel it, is probably more accurate.

“Your bodies were designed to absorb and process solar energy, even in trace amounts, to in turn power magics. There’s more to it than that – we made you individually weak at the beginning so you had the potential to get strong, so on and so on – but I’m sure you’ve heard all that by now. Dr. Benza loved to talk in his Tutorials.”

“Benza?” Hiral asked, shock at the dragon knowing the man’s name running through him like an electric shock. Too bad Tomorrow didn’t stop to answer his question.

“So, you have to have noticed this sun isn’t giving off much solar energy. Barely anything,” Tomorrow continued. “Because of this…”

As she said that, there was a flash to the side of the party – the breath attacks unpausing and meeting in an explosive CRASHof mixed energies. At that central point where the three cascades met, a growing sphere of even more chaotic energy was born, ripping outward in the blink of an eye.

“See…” Seena said as the wave of destructive power washed over the sun. As naturally powerful as the sun looked, its plasma exterior vanished in front of the combination of draconic might. Whatever was under the plasma didn’t do any better, the whole sun getting carved open by what looked like another sun being born right beside it.

It continued and continued, until half the sun was gone – the rest of it bleeding out into space nearby as it seemed to come undone – and something at the core was exposed. A pulse of… not energy – almost the opposite of it – and the apocalypse of power went from expanding to getting sucked in. It only took seconds for the energy to vanish, leaving even the three would-be-Progenitors staring dumbfounded.

Staring at a black crack standing miles tall where the sun had been.

“That,” Tomorrow continued. “Was our first time encountering a Black Gate. It had just consumed one of our most powerful attacks like it were little more than a snack. The same thing it had been doing to the sun. We’ve learned since then that the Gates feed on energy and life, and it had drained the sun dry. Enough that it could do the same to our breath. Something even we likely couldn’t do.

“At that moment, though, none of that was going through my mind. No, because that strange energy that had drawn me here in the first place was even clearer than before. And it was coming from the other side of the Gate. I knew then and there I had to have it. It called to me like nothing I can even explain.

“It was… potential. The thing we’d lost. A chance to grow and improve. And I dove for it. We all did.”

As she spoke, the three dragons lunged recklessly for the Black Gate, heedless of each others’ slashing claws and biting teeth. The aimless attacks as the three massive bodies struck and wound around each other almost seemed incidental, their lust for whatever was in that Gateblinding them to everything else.

Then, as soon as they touched the Black Gate, they completely vanished.

“Aaaaand, that’s the end of the story. Thanks for watching.”

“Wait, what?” Seeyela asked. “You obviously didn’t die there.”

“Woo, can’t get anything by you,” Tomorrow said, and the world shifted again.

This time, the party appeared on a barren plateau, wide and flat as far as the eye could see. Reddish-brown dirt covered the ground, a sudden wind kicking up the dust to swirl around the party’s feet where they stood.

In the distance, they saw a much smaller – thought still dragon-sized – Tomorrow push herself to her feet, lines of blood running from the wounds she’d gotten in the melee getting through the Gate. Not that she noticed them, her head tilting back like she was taking a great, deep breath through her nose.

“It was the strangest thing,” Tomorrow narrated again. “When I crashed here, in this foreign place, I felt… rejuvenated. Despite my injuries, serious as they were. Just don’t tell those other two I said that. But, coming here, to this place, it was like it unlocked something sleeping within me.

“Not physical power, though I could feel my body healing from the moment I breathed in the air. No, it was like a weight had lifted off my mind. Ideas sprung up out of nowhere, like a geyser, illuminating all the ways I could progress my experiments. Even those I’d considered failed, suddenly I saw paths forward for them. Forward, to tomorrow.”

The narration trailed off as Hiral watched Tomorrow take another deep breath, more of the dust swirling from the power of her lungs. But – Hiral squinted – it wasn’t just dust swirling. No, there was solar energy mixed in there. Tomorrow was… Cycling? Or something very close to it.

“As I stood, basking in the energy washing through my body, awakening a creativity I hadn’t felt in eons,” the narration continued. “I let me senses expand around me. The other two who’d come through the Gate with me were nowhere to be found. Had they been deposited somewhere else on this new world? Destroyed outright?

“No, as much as I’d wished it at the time, I knew that couldn’t be true. They could no more be killed than I could. They had to be here. Somewhere. And if they were, could something else be? What was this place? How had I never even heard of it before? These were questions I pondered as I began to walk. Yes, of course I could’ve flown, covering hundreds of miles in a flash, but I wanted to savor this new experience. And so I began my journey.”

The world shifted around the party again, just a blur at the edges of Hiral’s vision, and they were in a new part of the barrens. It wasn’t much different – just some rock formations to break up the endless flatness – but Tomorrow had stopped again.

“It was here I sensed something different for the first time,” Tomorrow continued, and a shadow loomed above the party. The dragon stood directly above him, her wide chest looming overhead. “Another kind of energy. This one wasn’t the same as what had drawn me through the gate, but it was also foreign. There, just beyond those rocks, though I couldn’t see it yet.”

As she spoke, Hiral and the others turned their attention to the columns of crooked brown stone. Impossibly, it looked like individual shelves of rock had been stacked haphazardly one atop another, forming hundreds of individual pillars. Each stood at least fifty feet tall, and close to thirty feet wide. Due to how many there were, it was impossible to see past the first few, though there were clearly paths one could take.

And now that his attention had been drawn in that direction, he could feel something too. It was an energy, but not the same as the solar energy he was used to. It felt… foreign. Invasive. Lingering.

It also wasn’t just coming from the direction of the stone pillars. It was all around the party. Most notably, directly above them.

Looking up, Hiral narrowed his eyes and focused on Cycling. Just like that, he saw a greyish energy coating Tomorrow, like steam wafting off a body after getting out of a hot bath on a cold day. For the most part, it got pulled back to her body before it got too far, but the tiniest bits of it broke off here and there, vanishing into the air with a pop.

“Maybe you’ve noticed it by now,” Tomorrow picked up. “The same energy signature clinging to me as what was in those pillars. At first, I didn’t know what it meant. Was it Punishment and Tide hiding in there, waiting to ambush me? Good luck with that! After finding this place – and the way it opened my mind – I was not going to let them take it from me.”

Tomorrow’s claws flexed to either side of the party, tearing ditches in the red dirt, and a deep, rumbling growl echoed in her chest. Dust danced on the ground from the vibrations of it, while Hiral and the others braced against what nearly felt like an earthquake. He almost asked how long it would last… until more growls echoed from within the pillars in response.

As soon as that answer came, some of Tomorrow’s tension faded.

“No, that wasn’t my rivals,” Tomorrow said. “It was something else.”

That something else turned out to be a trio of hulking forms that stepped out from between the pillars. Eight feet tall and bipedal, that was about where the resemblance between the three ended, aside from they all looked like some kind of cross between a person and an animal. One had green, scaled skin, and a heavy shell around its torso and back. A turtle?

The next was unmistakably a rat, though it stood shorter than the turtle, it reminded Hiral a lot of the Bristle Pack-Rat King, though it had significant grey hair, and wore a loose robe. The final member of the trio had enough muscles to make a Shaper envious, leather armor stretched across its bulging chest. Tusks protruded from the lower jaw, and the nose was unmistakably pig-like. Definitely a boar of some kind – Hiral had killed enough Chimericversions to know that face.

“I can’t see those being much of a challenge to Tomorrow,” Yanily said, pointing at the dragon still looming above them.

“Let’s watch how she handles it,” Seena said, crossing her arms.

The shadow around them vanished in an instant, and every head snapped up. Tomorrow was gone.

“I believe I mentioned something about audience participation,” Tomorrow said.