Interlude 4: Mystrix Pallas, Part 3

Previously: If a few words could describe the history of Atlantis it would be an idiom I have come upon since my return to earth, “Pride comes before the fall,” and if it fit the history of Atlantis, none embodied more than Atlas himself. His pride, his hubris snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Zeus the patriarch of Olympian clan of Earth Gods, wielding one last bolt of lightning targeted the device itself, even as it’s terrible light tore him from reality.

What happened next occurred in mere seconds. Damaged, the device began to crack apart under the strain of the titanic energies contained within. It then exploded, a furious storm of magic and the wild dimension’s energies shredding everything in its path. And what it shredded was carried on the explosion’s waves like flotsam. 

In the moment of the explosion I began weaving the root-like pathway of the strongest shield spell I knew. Before the explosion could reach me at the Vanguard’s rear and my finished shield spell closed around me, a spinning shard launched by the explosion, struck me like shrapnel. 

The storm swept over me even as I was knocked unconscious and needless to say, somehow the shield held.

I wasn’t in Atlantis, nor even the Wild Dimension when I came to. I was lodged in a wave of the colour speckled wave of white energy. A few probing spell arrays later and I realised both that I did not know where I was and I was travelling many times faster than light. At these speeds, my world was limited to the inside of my shield spell, trapped in a wave of tumultuous energy. Even near immortals need air, water and sustenance. In this bubble I had none.

Now I might have been travelling at speeds faster than the mind can grasp, but reality is vast and quite empty. I could have been travelling months, years, maybe even centuries before I was deposited elsewhere or the wave petered out as its energy dispersed over greater and greater area. 

Time might be relative, but I would be experiencing it in my bubble.

Stasis. Temporarily separating my consciousness from my body, before sealing the latter off from change. An impossible solution rendered merely difficult due to the raging inferno around me to draw upon. At least it gave me time to think.

I had almost expended the breathable atmosphere in my bubble before I finished the spell. I’d been getting extremely light headed and then I suddenly wasn’t. I was detached, free to think and dream without the intrusion of bodily needs. I had a lot to think and reflect on.

Given how I was hurtling through the space between space, how I was no longer in the Dimension I started, how the explosion was tearing across reality, I realised the explosion was far too big. I hadn’t taken part in the making of Atlas’s Godmaker, nor did I know it’s specifications, but even the larger theoretical design couldn’t have contained this much energy.

The surrounding energies, both magic and Wild energies must have undergone a chain reaction, ignited by the initial explosion. If that was the case, Atlantis was the worst possible location for the device to have been destroyed, a city or magi in the Wild Dimension saturated in both energies. 

Knowing this didn’t change my current situation in the slightest, but I was an academic, knowledge didn’t have to have purpose to be worth discovering.

I’d said I’d have time to think, but what I really had was too much time to think. There was only so many times I could reflect on my life or my current predicament. I found myself slipping more and more into what counts for sleep in this disembodied state and letting myself dream. The dreams were strange, fragments in startling clarity of events and places I had never seen. Memories of things I had never experienced. Some I had experienced, albeit from a different perspective.

Memories devoid of the context that grants them meaning. I spent hours, maybe days of ‘wakefulness’ trying to understand them. Trying to understand why I was dreaming them. I was almost afraid my mind was fraying the face of the long isolation I was facing. I found myself straining to hear the quiet half heard whispers drifting up from the recesses of my mind.

 As much as I wanted to hear what the whispers were saying, I was fighting them. Trying to distance myself from them, fearing a trap or my own slow slide into insanity. A stalemate formed, even as my dreams became more vibrant and frequent, the whispers were held at the ‘edge of earshot’ where I could not make out a single word.

Even hibernating and drawing on the storm around me for energy, I could feel myself slowly weakening. If I continued to both fuel my barrier and fight off the whispers I would eventually waste away. If I released my barrier, I would surely be torn to less than atoms by the tempest.

Slow death by wasting away, a quick death shredded to unimaginably small pieces or potential loss of sanity. 

Choosing option three wouldn’t rule out the first two options once I was beyond reason, but option three wasn’t as certain as the others and it came with the comfort of knowing that, at the very least I probably wouldn’t be lucid enough to care. 

I’ve never been much of a gambler, but I was going all in on the chance of winning a jackpot miracle. I ceased my resistance.

The stalemate ended.

The whispers rose into a cacophony of speech. Like the buzz of an entire city whispering, speaking and yelling at you. Yet it was only one woman’s once a million times over.

Silence.

Revelations.

Understanding.

The whispering voice that had once been the other, a stranger, was now a part of me. A merging had occurred. The voice and I were now one. I was still Cleta, born in the Iberian Peninsula, first disciple of Atlas, Leader of the Resistance, but I was also Athena Pallas, daughter of Zeus among many siblings, a Goddess from the Olympus divine family. 

Or at least a large fragment of her.

Just as I could remember looking on as Cleta, summoning my barrier as the wave of chaotic energy surged towards me, I would also remember the wave consuming me as Athena, only to spit out a part of my core as shrapnel. There was millenia of memories from both lives and all I could do for now was sift through them, cataloguing what came from each part of me and work out what-, who I am now.

* * *

It is strange.

It was only after I had undergone my apotheosis that I truly knew who I had been beforehand. The nature and character of my former self. Despite my flaws, the biases I had accumulated during life, the untold mistakes I have made, the wool Atlas had pulled over my eyes, I was a person who loved my craft, a person who loved and sought the accumulation of wisdom and knowledge, loved to teach, a person with a strong sense of justice, even when it was misguided.

Knowing this I now believe my two selves only merged because of the similarities in who we are. Perhaps my shard collided with me for that very reason. Perhaps with my body destroyed and the core of who I am damaged, I sought out what I felt was most familiar.

It is weird thinking about this, both those lives are mine and yet I was once two different people. Two different types of existence.

* * *

It is funny how finding yourself can change the way you look at a problem.

For most of the trip so far, in my barrier, I had been like a ship without sails or oars caught in a storm, waiting for it to deposit me on some distant shore. That was however no longer the case, this ship now had a sail and something was finally happening.

Gods are different from mortals. As aspectals, they begin life as an ideal given form by magic and the mass consciousness of living things. Once fully formed they can mature on their own and change with time, but their link to mass consciousness remains. They can gain strength from it and can resonate with places linked to their image and aspect, whether it be a sacred ground, a place of worship or an embodied depiction of them.

Stretching out our, my, senses we had detected a cluster of resonances and treating it like a lodestone, I let it draw myself towards it. 

I had thought it would be harder, but it seemed like it was already in the path of the shockwave. We just can to align myself in the wave where it would wash over the point of resonance and pray we would not be dashed upon it like a ship on rocks.

For the span of less than a second, a great blue and green orb appeared out of the storm before me. 

Then everything went white.

From the whiteness emerged a ceiling of storming clouds flashing the lights of the weapon’s tempest and below it the skyline of an immense city. I was hovering in what appeared to be a park situated in a district of multistory red brick buildings. Even ignoring the buildings, the shape of the land and it’s horizon was nothing like the lands around Olympus nor any of the islands or lands surrounding the Aegean.

This was not where I expected the resonance to take me.

The statue directly below me was probably the reason, it was a statue of me. Well a statue of Athena, the only statues of Cleta disciple of Atlas that I knew of, had been in the city of Atlantis.

Is it possible to be jealous of yourself? Apparently yes. A side effect of the merging and a sign I had yet to acclimatise to this state of self.

The statue even had the helmet I was wearing. I hadn’t even realised I was wearing it till that moment, or either the silver breastplate over my robes and the Aegis hanging off my back. All of which was quite convenient given the chaos that was erupting around me. 

With all the noise it was like I was back at the battle for my home city again. Harsh repeating wails reminiscent of warning bells and a sound like the sharp crack of many whips snapping in succession rang out across the city that I found myself surrounded by. Along with the crashes of breaking masonry, the rumble of thunder and the roar of some great beast.

Outside the park, a metal self powered carriage with flashing lights raced down a road of what looked like black rock that had poured molten and allowed to cool. 

Humanity had created an Atlantis of their own and we had brought our own ruination to it. The energy waves of the Godmakers explosion may have not torn this world apart but it had done something and given the mix of magic and wild realm energies that it comprised of, I could guess the possible implications. 

The twisting of reality directed only by the unfocused gestalt of millions, no, billions of minds.

A dragon of immense size rose up from behind the city’s towers and let loose a flaming roar as it flew up into the clouds. I had to wonder if we had brought it here or had the storm birthed it.

Following its example I let myself levitate into the air, it was time to do battle. 

I had a city to save.

* * *

Disappointed I stopped?

You expected me to recount all of my first night back on Earth?

There is no need. 

You all saw it, you were there. 

Ruined bits of Atlantis were transposed all across the world. 

New Islands, mountains, rivers, lakes, seas appeared. 

Creatures of legend returned, either carried by storm’s waves or woken from millenia long hibernation. 

People were altered by the empathetic energies that washed across the world, many becoming the monsters there were inside, some becoming the heroes needed to meet them and others gaining something they always needed.

An apocalypse staved off by the efforts of a few noble champions, leaving this world and its society to limp on and adapt to its changed circumstances.

For me, I faded into the shadows as the sun rose again and then watched and learned. Magic makes a wonderful toolkit. In a day I learned the language, mongrel bastard of many parents may it be. In a week I managed to disguise myself and build an identity among the masses of  humanity in New York city. 

Tricked a few banks and their computers into generating accounts and the funds I needed to start over here.

I found a job working in a college library, a perfect way to learn about the world and make an honest living. I found myself a nice brownstone to live in and adopted a shelter cat. I was actually content for a time. Yet…

Many of the Emerged heroes from that night returned to patrol the streets, helping people and fighting wrongdoers. I had not and people were asking where the Athenian magic-user they had dubbed Magistrix Pallas, had gone.

Was it fair for me to retire into obscurity after my part in the cataclysm we had wrought on the Wild Dimension, that had engulfed Earth? Someone guilty of uncounted crimes allowed to live out my probable immortality in peace?

No.

I was, I am sorely in need of redemption. If that is at all possible? I know now, the truth of our arrogance. The lie of our belief that we need to rule over and protect the rest of humanity.

In our absence, the absence of magic, of gods, their servants and the myriad of creatures empowered by magic, humanity had flourished. Sure they were still learning,they made mistakes, they had their problems and were yet to find necessary balances, but they had done all this with their own strength. 

Our absence had helped more than our presence ever did.

But now? Now we had changed the game, we had reintroduced that pandora’s box and I had a duty to help. Help, not rule over, not protect them out of an arrogant sense of paternalism. Try to guide them away from making our mistakes all over.

As Mystrix Pallas I set out to find and meet with those heroes, pretending to be just like them. They wanted to be heroes, some out of a desire to do good, others out of a desire for fame and recognition and a few out of a desire to prove that Emerged were a force for good, to fight against a growing undercurrent of bigotry and fear.

Most just wanted to do their own thing, laws, politics and public opinion be damned, but there were a few from the very start who saw the need to band together. It is funny how much the people of this world frown on the idea of a union. Is banding together in order to combine your strengths and gain the power of a collective, something wrong here?

The few of us that saw its value managed to convince others of the need to strike while the iron is hot and people were still adapting the Emergence to make a union for heroes. To establish protections for our existence before any laws could be made against us. 

It was hard work winning over not just other heroes, but also lawmen and demagogues, I mean lawyers and PR folk, in order to control public opinion and to effect laws before they were passed, but also to protect us from weaponized legal proceedings. 

When the second shockwave hit earth we were ready and able to do our part to limit the chaos.

The second shockwave was a message to the public and to governments that the world had changed and would continue to change. There would be no going back to a world and status quo from before the Emergence. 

Also as one of the only groups that was ready for a second Emergence it granted us a level of legitimacy. The Heroes’ Organisation for Mutual Assistance and Resources or OMR for short was here to stay and expanding.

* * *

Again I return to my reasons for writing this. This letter, my memoirs, my warning.

If I were to die this history might be lost and the world, without the lessons within, might be poorer for it. I don’t want Earth to repeat our mistakes, I don’t want one branch or another of humanity to become invested in the idea of its own superiority over the others again.

There is more though.

I am afraid the destruction of the Godmaker may have unseen consequences aside from the Emergence. I am afraid of Atlas, the chance that he or any of his followers might have survived, that they might have been carried like I was to this world or another like it to start their mad schemes anew.

I should be handing a copy of this letter to every authority on this planet, so that they can understand why the Emergence happened and so they can be prepared if my fears come to pass. Instead I am filing this letter with my lawyer in the OMR as a part of my will in the event that I die. It is because I am ashamed. 

Ashamed of my part in this tale and afraid if this truth got out, people would see me, not as the hero people believe me to be, but as the monster I am. 

If you have managed to make it this far, thank you. Thank you for reading this.

Regards
Cleta Athena, Mystrix Pallas