02 – Failing Axiom

The small party of four made their way across the dense vegetation, deep in the Forest of Perpetual Dusk. At the head of the group their mage, Toora, was holding her magelight aloft to light the path. Despite it being midday, in fact, the forest was immersed in an eerie darkness that swallowed everything. Tinted in reds and purples by an unknown magical phenomenon, the colors of the leaves and trees appeared wrong and ominous to their eyes, and the bright glow of the magelight seemed powerless to reach further than just a few meters around the glowing gem that emitted it. But light was not all that it did, for there was a second purpose to Toora’s magic, which was of protection.

Huddling close to their only source of light, the group marched forward towards the towering structure at the center of the forest. They were all experienced, although low-ranking, adventurers coming from the nearby city of Farcall in search of fame, none of them really believing the old legends surrounding Lightsbane. They thought that the legends were just bedtime scary stories, exaggerated over time as they were retold time and time again, confirmed by adventurers whose only fault was being unable to enter the tower proper. Toora was the only one who was not as convinced as the others that all the stories were fake, but she didn’t say anything to the group, being the one who had suggested that they take on this strange mission.

That was the problem at the heart of it all: the tower was inaccessible. Even if they believed that the rumors of missing adventurers and mysterious deaths were due to the dangers of the forest, for which most teams stationed at this frontier town were comically ill equipped, they still needed entry. On paper, it made sense: due to it being completely sealed off from the outside world, the only adventurer teams who tried to reach the tower were the inexperienced and low-ranking groups of this rural town, for there was no reason for the real teams to come all this way here just to be stuck at a locked door, and therefore all these teams were falling prey to the dangers of the forest. They, on the other hand, were different.

They were not from Farcall, and despite their rank, they were miles ahead of their peers from this remote place at the same rank, both in terms of equipment, expertise, and preparation. As to why they had chosen to challenge the seemingly impregnable tower, in search of supposedly easy fame and power if not for the fact that it was all locked away behind an impassable obstacle, had to do with Toora’s innate magic.

“We’re getting close. I can feel it now.” She said, looking up at the hulking shard of black that had grown bigger and bigger the closer they got to it.

Marcus, her trusted companion and the party’s ranger, frowned. “I can’t feel nothing,” he said, sniffing the air.

It tasted like forest, but wet and moldy, dark and heavily oppressive. It was, however, no different than how it felt the very moment they crossed the threshold and entered the Forest of Perpetual Dusk.

Toora shook her head. “Trust me, it’s better that you don’t feel what I am feeling. Anyway. The tower is still sealed, but the seal is about to crack.”

She smiled confidently, and swung her glowing staff in a theatrical motion towards the black tower. Marcus sighed, but said nothing: he knew that when the boss was like this, there was nothing to do but indulge her. Also, but this was not something he was willing to say in public, she had been right enough times, and had brought the party enough money and fame thanks to her intuition, that no matter how outlandish her claims were, they were worth taking seriously.

He had no idea how she did it, honestly, and neither did the big heads at the academy she went to. Everybody born with magic had a particular ‘system’ but some special individuals also happened to have an extra ability, an innate talent in something that could either be very specific, or very, very vague. In Toora’s case, it was the latter; her ability was best described by herself as being able to see things, but she had never been able, or willing, to explain it further not to him, nor to anyone else as far as he knew.

Magic worked in weird ways, this much was clear to him, and he didn’t care how much the researchers at the academy claimed they understood it. It was a complete mystery to everybody. Period.

They made camp at the top of a small hill. The sun set quickly, plunging the already dark environment into complete pitch black darkness. Even with a perimeter of glowing rods set up, a roaring fire in the middle, and personal glow stones for each of the four people, the darkness felt so persistent and omnipresent that it drowned everything else. Sounds, smells, thoughts themselves. It felt like they were in a sensory deprivation chamber, he was sure, despite never having experienced one himself.

Lisa, sitting across the fire in front of him, was polishing her armor. Her big, towering shield was resting on the ground beside her. Her deep brown eyes were focused and intense, as her hands methodically went over every square inch of her silver armor. He wondered how she even managed to walk in that thing, for it must have weighted more than her, without counting the comically oversized shield. Almost as if she sensed his thoughts, she stopped and smiled at him playfully.

“Is it just me, or is it weird that we didn’t encounter anything on the way here?” she said.

He shrugged. “Maybe… maybe. Or maybe it was my skills as a superior ranger? What do you think?”

“Nah. I’ll go with weird...” she winked.

“Whatever,” he waved her away, “So, boss, what’s the plan?”

Toora was staring at the silhouette of the black tower, dark and inscrutable against the deep blue sky. “We wait here.”

“Here?!”

“Yes. Do not step outside the perimeter either. The air is changing and you don’t want to be there when it finally happens.”

“When what happens?” he looked at the glowing rods impaled in the dirt, the only layer of protection between them and… whatever was happening outside. Looking past them, the only thing he could see was darkness, not even the sky was visible any longer. The tower too had vanished, black against black, invisible.

“I don’t know for certain but… did you not feel a certain oppressiveness in the forest as we approached the tower?”

“Yes.” He paused, and as understanding dawned on his face, he saw her smirk. “Wait, you mean it was the tower itself?”

“I think so, yes. It’s how it defends itself. To you, it might have been just an oppressive and uncomfortable feeling, but to me as a mage, it was different. It was constantly trying to drain my magic, and you know what happens once you run out of magic?”

“You… die.” He swallowed. “So, we were all in danger??”

“No, I monitored you, of course. But now it’s getting worse by the minute. That’s why we have the perimeter rods set up at maximum power.”

“Do you think we can wait it out?”

“Yes. And once it’s over, it will leave the tower defenseless. Then we move.”

***

There was a shield that surrounded the Pylon, the very same shield that also functioned as a safety measure to contain the excess energies extracted from the void in the deepest recesses of the Pylon itself, where the heart of the mechanisms resided. It was called Axiom of Choice, a fancy name Edmund came up with, that also happened to be very fitting of its nature. It wasn’t a simple shield, in fact, rather being more of a pervasive field that enforced within itself, and even more so at its edges where it confined with normal space, particular rules onto reality.

Those rules were enforced using the very same power that gave Edmund the ability to bend reality, leading him to name the construct Axiom of Choice.

Without access to Hume Energy, however, Edmund was unable to determine if Axiom was still active. He remembered from the report he received just before passing out that there were some issues with it, namely a crack of some kind was forming on the inner surface right where the portal was, but he wasn’t sure as to what it meant in practice. Luckily, he was going right there himself to check what was going on.

By all means Axiom should still be active, or the void would have swallowed everything already. Yep, there’s no power, and Axiom is the only thing that can run without it.

The corridor opened up into a small room, he remembered. Even though he could not see anything, he felt the wall curve into the wider space of the room, and got confirmation that he was where he thought he was when he felt the small bump of the light switch and of the elevator button. The stairs, then, were just on the right.

Keeping a hand on the handrail, tight in case he ever stumbled on a step, he made his way down. There were a hundred stories: two hundred ramps of eleven steps each. His stomach rumbled in hunger, telling him that this was going to be a long and uncomfortable trip down. A trip that, unfortunately, he had to make, so he grit his teeth and tried not to think about his current predicament. Instead, he let his mind wander.

I’m thinking: if there is a problem with Axiom such as an imminent failure, then the Pylon is programmed to seek me out as soon as possible. What if it was this that made me wake up after all that time unconscious? The Pylon is on its last dregs, and has used what little power it has to jolt me awake somehow. It does have reality-bending capabilities built in, after all. I wonder, though. Is the AI still working, or was it an automated response to the failure condition?

He hastened his steps. If Axiom was about to fail, things were not looking good. Under normal circumstances there would be redundant systems making sure that even a failure as catastrophic as that would not cause big problems, but now?

If there’s no electricity, then half the contingencies aren’t working. The backup generators are not working, or have stopped working, and the batteries are dead. Even the nuclear ones. This puts the time frame at, what, a couple thousand years? No, more than that, because all these systems only spring into action after the Hume energy stops flowing. Let’s say it was left unsupervised because the event that knocked me out killed or incapacitated everyone else too. I think it can comfortably run on its own for at least a millennium. This puts the whole time frame at… Three thousand years at the very least. Shit…

If Axiom fails, there’s nothing left to contain the void energies. I need to hurry.

Outside, unknown to him, the runaway field that Axiom had transformed into in the span of millennia was rapidly shrinking. In a last effort to prolong its own existence, Axiom was withdrawing from its former domain known to Toora’s team as the Forest of Perpetual Dusk. But it was a battle against time, a last ditch attempt the automated systems of the Pylon were enacting to give Edmund as much time as they could to fix the issue.

Axiom of Choice was built to run on its own, feeding directly from the interdimensional portal to the void that also supplied everything else with Hume Energy. This meant two things: for starters it meant that Axiom could run even when everything else had failed. The second thing, which was the reason why Edmund was running down the stairs with no care for his own safety anymore, was that if it failed and there were no other active contingencies, the portal would lose containment. The void would be unleashed upon the world.

And that would truly be the end of the world.

Edmund bolted down the last flight of stairs, now faintly illuminated by a red glow coming from deeper inside the Pylon. He ran through the corridor, and into the central room, where he stopped to stare at the floating ball suspended in the air at the center of the room.

It was a red cocoon with dense, swirling void energies inside. And it was not looking good. It was full of cracks like broken glass, that were visibly spreading across its surface like an expanding spiderweb. Pieces of intangible forcefield were falling to the ground and dissipating, leaving behind a small gap that was quickly filled in by the failing shield. But with every piece that fell, the shield grew thinner, and more brittle.

Edmund rushed out of the room in a panic, and into the adjacent one. There, he frantically rummaged through the stacked boxes and shelves, in search for anything he could use to stabilize the shield before it was too late. As his hands still rummaged through one of the boxes, he felt distinctly that the outer edge of Axiom’s field had just passed through the room. He ran out and into the portal room, and got his confirmation: the outer edge had shrunk and was only as wide as half the diameter of the room, shrinking rapidly.

30 seconds until it’s gone. Then… a minute, perhaps? Shit, shit… what can I use?

He struggled to find something, anything. With his eyes closed, his mind navigated the tower inside out, in search of anything he could use from memory. Then his eyes shot open, and he sprung out of the room.