The Furies are at home in the mirror

[MalfGuy2]

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Act I

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"Ao Lendthys Shun."

Soulsteel chains rattle securely against your wrists and ankles. Golden flowers pervade your sight as the distant sense of the Spirit Realm's oversoul having changed.
Whatever sword swinging into infinite darkness you were doing before,
It no longer comfortably hangs by your side. Let alone crests your talons.

"You stand here today stripped of your title and rank unto Salvation."

Our rank?
What were we before?
Who were we before?
When, even? The Timestream flowed so differently in the Spirit World, did you fail your charges or something?

"For your failure to adequately protect the entourage of the Angels Ezekiel and Aurmiel, you are sentenced to an eon of servitude in their following ritual."
"A thousand years."

"--A ritual?"
You barely sputter it out before your vision fails you once more. The distinctive tastes of heavily metals from the platinum family & teak wood varnish overwhelm you, as does the screeching sound of a distant portal being opened into the Spirit Realm that contains you.
Air Mana, in its most dense, most concentrated form, a shard of emeraldine and prismarine power splits itself off from the local Timestream near you,
And all you are left with is a distinctive view of oceans.

---

A vast, empty ocean,
Of nothing but storms.
Something that should never have been tamed to begin with.

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Act II

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Your wings crest across the faerie vale with ease.
Another day, another set of Monsters to hunt and sell, as far as you knew.

"I want an economic powerhouse."
"We need a navy to defend us. Five-thousand pounds of iron. Five-thousand pounds of copper."
"...As much wood as Her holy forests' exteriors may permit."

The command comes through clear enough.
Three clear groups form, with an Ent or a Lumin-King at either end.
For whatever reason, as you are lead into the various mines of Meranthe, it feels...

"Like another home."
"Maybe a little too snug to be home, but..."
"More ammunition lines the walls. Convenient."
"Money, money, money..."

With everyone in attendance in agreement, your large, lumbering form drills holes in the ground that rival your immediate superiors.
A vaguely surprised face or two accompany the sound of talons ripping dirt to shreds.
The look of dull, red, ferrous ores stains your pristine silver coat.
But it feels so good.

"Give me a moment. I will cast another invocation for our purposes."

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The months turn to years.
The piles of ores turn to beams and crossbar supports.
Delphina rules the northerners' waves, even if the northeast crumbles apart.
Over three-quarters of the material effort...

"Love is like fire; A passion previously unknown."
"We were meant to be a worker bee. So why does both feel alright?"

All you can comprehend is that the feeling of the world being shaped around you,
To your will, and your will alone,
It is the most satisfying feeling of them all.
After a short pause in local industry and economiya, you find yourself looking out over the Delphina Bay vista...

"Let us bathe the truth in a different kind of red."

---

Sterling voices some concern and dissent as the ball at the top of her stave leaves its convenient crook.
She had, after all, paid good money for this contraption, judging by the sheer amount of jewels that crust the pommel.
...
But after the split-second had passed, and it was clear you're just holding the ball between your teeth,
The tension relaxes somewhat.

"..Okay. But remember, I need you to remove /all/ the Wind Mana, and imbue the crystalline shape of it like it was a Metaphysical Rune onto it."

The goal is clear.

"I love the spinny disk move. Can I do the spinny disk move now?"

It clearly calls for you to incant something from deep within yourself,
A tap set to tree sap that didn't notionally exist,
An accretion disk of raw Magicka from The Hole In The Universe.
A mirror to something that, in and of itself, shouldn't have been able to affect anything to begin with.

"Just hold it..!"

Sterling's plea goes unheard to you.
The shiny, monochrome ball is clearly at home in the center of your impromptu personal ritual.
And even moreso that, somehow, in a stroke of divine genius,
You're able to cast in such a way that you overwrite any and all traces of the Air magick within.

"It's mine! It belongs to me! I madededed it!"
"Equivalent exchange still holds true, no matter which layer of Eternia we're in."

The emeraldine crystals fade away, only to be replaced by monochromes.
And only monochromes.
Sterling effectively just fed you the raw Mana Circuit of a third of her experimental stave to us.
Brimming over the top, it feels so...

"Freeing."

You find yourself aimlessly wandering in-between Monster hunts or mining expeditions, and even casually hit the million-coin mark somewhere along the way.
Business is booming, even as the peasantry complain about the constant Demon threat.
Another vaguely familiar, gaunt brunette of a man holds up a few fingers (or a whole hand. it's hard to see.) to generally motion for you to approach.
One practically right after the other.

---

"Don't you mind it, I just need a powerful Absorption Mage. Think of it as a project that pays you at the same time!"

Your inner businessman senses tingle.
As does the predator drive.
He's holding up a singular chunk of Austereia, near as you can tell,

"I really do just need you."

Hard to believe, but you might as well humor him.
Christophore's red sash disappears over the horizon as you somehow rapidly land in the vicinity of his home.
The portal was so fast, we didn't even process it happening.

"I know I had them here somewhere..."

You wait on one of the ritual circles.
It was just another moment, a flicker of the light, but Christophore's arcane shicanery had brought you several samples of Austereia.
No idea why he'd be doing this,
But you're not about to pass up such a useful, free meal.

"Hail to the king."
"Maybe we'll be nicer to this one."

Dozens upon dozens of pounds of Austereia enter the same accretion disk spell you'd cast on Sterling's stave.
A slow trickle of Aether, a distant calling, harkening back to your time in the egg:

You need more.
You can mine more.
And there can never be enough of the gods' leftovers to go around.

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Act III

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It happens too fast.

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One second, you were talking to one of Gloomlight's resident slimeball Monsters, the next, another creature entirely had risen from the shadows of the tree line with a random Drakanite bodyguard in attendance.
They were, mysteriously, unarmored and otherwise unwarded & unprotected.
Even more mysterious was when it casually tossed aside the approaching Werewolf you were planning on destroying yourself,
And she - If it could be called a she? - Aims a blast of Gravity-attuned runes directly at your accretion disk.

"[...An interesting mutation, machine and reality...]"
"[Maybe you will pose some actual entertainment. Evolve to the next stage, or perish.]"

You both trade blows across the battlefield.
Massive area-denial spells erupt from the both of you, competing for which neighboring Monster den gets destroyed first.
Sediment mud clings to the edges of your wings, but it fails to make a definitive crippling to you.
The next wave of illusory & psychedelic magicka bounces off of one combatant and to the other, ad infinitum.
Perhaps one of the flashier and more skillful displays the lot could manage.

"Sinnerman, sinnerman, sinnerman, spin me around that can..."

Unfortunately, even with the overwhelmingly vast majority of your attention on the battle,
Your personal willpower waned at the wrong moment.

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Arcs of vines burn across the periphery. You'd sundered their defenses,
Only to leave your own open in the very last few seconds.
The strangely humanoid-looking Monster brings you to heel,
Slamming their staff into the ground and you along with it.
Various layers of the top nine meters of dirt crash against you as your predator left a single, trailing beam of Mana,
Ripping into your inner structure.

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New Magicka Acquired: ?
New Magicka Acquired: NaN
New Magicka Acquired: Critical exception at core memory handler.
New Magicka Acquired: Ping to tertiary target tracking failed.
New Magicka Acquired: Ping to Soul Engine tether failed.

---

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You manage to drag yourself back up out of the ground, just barely making lift-off.

"Run the damage report from the others."

Only you and Judgement are responding at all.
Both runic shields breached. Core status unknown.
We're melting apart around the edges even more than usual.
You angle your body back towards Gloomlight, to The Hole In The Universe, but there's no guarantee of anything or anyone there to help.

---

"Kyno's not dying on me just yet."
"Come on, stop melting..."