“The fun thing about picking up the pieces is that what appears to be wreck and ruin is so often the seeds of a far more fascinating project.”

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame standing amidst the ruins of the Imperial Academy following the Descent of Magic.

The Empire fell. 

Just as I’d planned.

Or hoped. ‘Plan’ was far more generous than my ramshackle ideas deserved given how little I knew and how much I’d been taking on pure faith and dreams.

In the end though, the Empire crumbled.

Which wasn’t surprising. There really wasn’t any way it could continue on as it was. Not with the changes we’d wrought on it. In our defense, and largely thanks to the Empress’s Last Guardians and their allies, the fall was a slow one though.

Empress Mysella took control of the chaos that erupted the moment I…there’s no nice wording for ‘exploded’ I suppose. I mean, I didn’t cover the room in a shower of gore or anything. From their perspective I put the Imperial Crown on and light blasted from my eyes, mouth, fingers and toes. 

Then I glowed somewhat brighter than the sun.

And then I exploded.

The blast wave was purely aetheric and only covered about an twentieth of the Empire. It was the result of my tapping into both my home realm and the Clockwork Cosmos. 

All of the subsequent explosions came from other people. From those who formed the bridge for the other realms to settle into an orbit of the material world. 

And there were a lot of them. We blanketed the Empire a dozen times over and more. Explosions of light and magic scouring the sky clear of every cloud and outshining the sun itself.

Even with all the thousands of souls who pitched in though, we wouldn’t have had enough understood how the magic they were connected to could co-exist with the world around them. How together the two, or three, or a dozen, could become something far greater than the sum of their parts.

We were lucky there too. As it turned out, we didn’t needed to fix all of the realms on our own. Just enough of them that the more distant planes could learn from the constellation of worlds that built up and overlapped and interleaved themselves with our own.

Crashing into each other and then crumbling to Oblivion wasn’t any more thrilling a prospect for the Transcendent Realms than it was for us I guess. 

I know. A reasonable reaction. I was shocked too.

The evolution of the realms beyond was a process that took from the moment we started it, out to the far end of eternity, but to those we’d left behind, it was over in the space of a few harrowing minutes.

A harrowing minute which somehow we emerged from apparently intact? 

I had no words to explain that.

It was simply put a miracle. No other possible explanation was available.

A miracle forged by those who loved us enough that even death hadn’t parted them from our hearts. 

Trina was my guide and shield, but she was not the only one who stood by my side in that liminal space between all worlds.

I had no name for the others – because we had never used names – not with how continually we changed and flowed. I didn’t need a name for them though. I knew my cousins. I knew my siblings. I knew my parents. I knew everyone who’d been pulled through the rift with me that fateful day. Everyone who’d died in a foreign and terrifying world while I alone had survived.

They hadn’t left me either and no matter how much I’d changed, we would always be family.

That reunion had been joyful, but even in a timeless realm, all things must eventually pass, and my life in the material world wasn’t yet done.

Returning to that life was an interesting experience.

I didn’t shapeshift a new body for myself. I didn’t need to (which was good or none of the other people who channeled the planes would have been able to manage it). Instead I precipitated back into the world, like rain falling from some ethereal plane to fill up the body that I hadn’t really lost in the first place.

It was good that the experience was a brief one because while it wasn’t painful it was as deeply disconcerting as dying and being born in the same instant could be. 

The spear tip at my throat, on the other hand? That was somehow strangely comforting.

“You can break my heart again, as often as you need,” I said, gently pushing the spear down till it pointed towards the center of my chest, “but I’ll still keep loving you.”

It sounded better in my head than when I said it, but it had the impact I was looking for so I can’t say I regret a word of it.

The spear clattered to the floor before dissipating in a puff of light. 

“It’s you,” a disbelieving Idrina said.

“Never doubted it for a moment,” Doxle said, wiping a finger across one eye.

Grammy didn’t say a word, she just shuffled over to me and wrapped me in a nice warm hug.

“What’s happening?” the Speaker for House Greendell asked.

“Magic is descending,” I said.

“Tell them what that means,” the Empress said, her voice drunk with delight.

“Magic is coming to the world.” I wasn’t being terribly helpful, but I wasn’t feeling particularly generous with information where the Great Houses were concerned.

Then I saw the Empress’s point.

I could gloat!

“We already have magic,” House Astrologia said.

“You’ve borrowed sips of magic up till now,” I said. “Tiny motes of power which you’ve lorded over those you’ve believed beneath you. You’ve ripped holes in the world to steal even more, all the while thinking yourselves ‘Great’. But that was fine. The commoners could never throw off their yoke! And the creatures from the worlds beyond could never reach you! You were safe and secure and untouchable.” I took a moment to smirk. “You’re about to discover how that has changed.”

A page burst through the doors, which I was pretty certain was the Empress’s handiwork given the perfect timing of the moment.

“My Lords!” he called out struggling to catch his breath. “The city! It’s… it’s gone!”

It wasn’t actually gone.

It had simply changed.

We were one of the first points of the convergence and so the townspeople were the first to feel the touch of the other worlds washing over them.

Everyone in the room had technically experience the same thing, but the Clockwork Cosmos and my home realm were giving me a measure of breathing room to recover in, so the area immediately around me – in other words, the High Council’s hall – stood as an oasis in the sea of change.

The Speakers surged out of the chamber to witness what had occurred, which drew them each past the Empress.

It was such a subtle thing to watch her work.

One by one they passed her by, and with hands deft enough to weave a net that bound a million realms, hands I point out which were no longer burdened by the weight of those worlds, she gently brushed them as they passed and lifted away their citizenship.

A minor, trivial little thing.

Hardly worth of notice.

Except for the part where, in our new world, it was citizenship in the Empire, or more specifically a connection to the land, which opened one up to the realms which were bound to the material world. Which they now lacked.

None of them felt her touch and none of them grasped the implications of their loss.

And none of them would until the first of them tried to cast a spell.

And learned that they, alone in the Empire, held no more magic.

I wasn’t gloating though.

I had plenty of time for that later.

I had a more important message to convey.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” I asked Doxle.

“I do indeed,” he said. “I could sense when the pact bond faded. You are now as free of me, as we are of them.” He nodded towards the departing Speakers who would never trouble us again, for a variety of reasons.

That, however, was not what I was referring to.

And not something I’d been paying any attention to.

But once he mentioned it, it would have been easy enough to feel if the bond was gone.

Except it wasn’t.

Or rather, there was still a bond there.

Just not a Pact Bond.

I gave it a tug.

Playing around with new and unknown magic effects wasn’t terribly wise? I mean I’d done far more foolish things already, so why not?

“Did…did you just call me?” Doxle asked.

“Oh. Is that what that does?” I asked, evil ideas already forming in my mind.

“Whatever all this is,” Enika said waving her hands at the two of us, “you know that’s not what she was referring to.”

Doxle looked at her, completely baffled for a change.

“Is he always this obtuse?” Enika asked the Empress.

“You were the one who married him,” the Empress said.

“That was annulled,” Enika said. “It never happened.”

“Not to interrupt on this most momentous of days, but what, pray tell, are you referring to?” Doxle asked.

“She’s free,” Enika said, pointing to the Empress. “Which means the rest of them are too. So, don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“Oh. Why, yes.” and he vanished. Instantly. Faster than any invocation could have been cast.

“Predictable,” Enika sighed and added, “Shouldn’t you be there too?”

“I have an Empire to hold together, for a little bit longer,” the Empress said. “Also, I’m talking with her as we speak.”

Because if there was one thing the Empress of the most magically empowered land in the world could do, it was multi-task.

That turned out to be rather crucial as tidal wave of chaos that I’d unleashed crashed over every city, town, village, and hamlet on the continent.

With the Transcendent Realms evolving into a natural coexistence with the material world, every citizen of the Empire gained access to magic beyond the wildest dreams of the most powerful casters of the Great Houses.

That was not an entirely good thing.

Some people did not handle their new abilities well.

Some people used their new abilities to object to how those who’d been in power had treated them. Those objections were rather crimson colored and tended to splash around a much larger area than they needed to.

Some tried to found new kingdoms within the Empire.

Some believed it was the end of the world and talked the gullible and easily swayed around them into believing it too.

Some were just miserable people and giving them more power simply made them more miserable.

Some were too scared of losing what they had, and so refused to accept that the world could change. Those unhappy souls fought with a deadly small mindedness to prevent the world they knew from becoming something strange and unrecognizable.

For as horrible as all that was though, it was far from the only way things went.

Yes, there was chaos everywhere, but a staggering number of people just dealt with it. 

In the face of the whole world falling apart, the vast majority people simply started putting it back together.

In families, in small groups, even alone when they needed to, people learned to navigate a world where all the rules had changed, and together they started to build something brand new.

I, of course, did not quite escape the consequence of my actions.

I hadn’t thought I would. I had a lot of optimism, but even I wasn’t delusional enough to think I’d get away from the reckoning that was coming.

I had hoped I’d at least make it out of the High Council chamber but, alas, that was not to be.

“We need to speak,” Empress Mysella said, and I knew that conversation wasn’t going to be pleasant small talk.