Chapter 4 - Part I

The world was black, unfeeling and soundless but for the swirling energy of a hundred billion neurons reaching out to touch each other. For now, though, they remained torn and disconnected. The whirl of disorienting emptiness penetrated inward as much as it projected outward. In a realm with no direction to go, she extended herself in every direction, searching for a hint of the familiar.
Where were the clouds? Where was its web?

The web had been broken before, but never completely destroyed. And here, this side of the world, away from the people of the Spider, was guarded by its own spirits and enchantments. With the destruction of the web, the introduction of forces foreign, once carefully spurned by a carefully constructed web, invaded its being and for the first time on this plane, the heartbeats of old gods shook the Spider.

So it fled.

But with the carefully woven web build over the years gone, there was nothing to guide her. Instead it fell, or rather flew up above and underneath her own broken connections flowing the gravity of the world. Another mind, or perhaps the old gods themselves drew her out of her own mind, to a sphere of rock, clay and water. Like a fly, the more it struggled, the harder it became for it to escape.

And it saw the struggle and toil of the old gods. The people had forgotten that truly, they were gods. They had adopted a new name, Thal, Keepers, under the banner of religious unification, but they were true gods; the creators of the world.

Bound to the clay crust from which they spawned their visages hung inches away from the viscous fury of their hosts. Six known old gods, Ganthay and Sheg, Vera and Rüern, Dagleth and Rel, as they have been known to men for eons, forever bound face to face with their complement, but with the span of their violent warriors between them.

Six right hands, palms flat to the rock and clay roof of the earth, lifted the world, that mankind not fall into the flesh hungry bowels of the core. Each hand, blistered and bloody, seemed to it that they trembled with such strain that the fate of the surfacer man seemed certain. But the brittle crust did not break after these quakes, and the hand again grew strong.

Six left hands of the old gods stretched out against their hosts. Ever ambitious, ever searching for the weaknesses of their Keepers, six hosts pushed and climbed, desiring to escape their imprisonment in the core and expand their influence on the world. Against this, Heilthian Keepers struggled for eternity.

They were not always successful, it observed. Individual flares of energy and might would free one or two of the entire host and run their course upon the surface, changing the hearts of men as they roamed. When Vera slipped, into the world escaped fits of passion and obsession among mankind, in a world so wide and free that none of Rüern's Host of the pure and naïve were likely to meet them in perfect counterbalance. All that mattered was to escape and expand, and for the Thal, their lone duty was to slow that effort.

So it refused to struggle anymore, that she might escape the fiery forge of the hosts. It did not flee again, and instead sought out a memory, any memory, to use as wallpaper amidst the broken connections of her mind.

Self projection; no longer the formless observer, it became she and her toes, a recent memory, projected themselves upon a dirt path, also projected.

She knew instantly where she was.

These were not the paths of the continent- built to perfection with purpose and plan, degraded, even if slightly, from the date of construction onward. These were paths that had been forged out of convenience and necessity. These paths reached perfection as more traveled in similar patters to the first. These were the paths of the infant City, Deezhul.