Genesis — Session 26 Recap

The engines died an hour and a half out from Murmansk.

It wasn't a collision. It wasn't an explosion. There were no screams. The crew of the SS Nadine woke because the one constant sound of the voyage — the low, bone-deep drone of the engines — simply stopped. The captain had given the order: cut the engines, drop to silence, let the ship drift the rest of the way in. They knew the party was coming. There was no sense handing them any more advantage than they already had.

Topside, the water lay so still it looked like black ice, and the great hulking vessel slid across it without a sound. Behind the party the sun was just beginning to color the eastern horizon — that suspended moment of dawn when the sky bleeds from black to purple and the stars are still out. Ahead, a mile and a half off, sat the skyline of Murmansk, lit far brighter than it had been the night they left. By the time the ship drifted to a stop, it would be just outside heavy cannon range — and the city's guns would be pointed right back.

In the Viroc hold below, Ansel and his shard-addled R&D crew had worked through the night. They presented the result with wild eyes and wider grins: a makeshift contraption of glass baubles, frozen gears, and a single pull-pin, all three of the remaining refined Shardisite ingots suspended inside on delicate needles. It was a bomb. They had never built one before. Pull the pin and it would reach out for the strongest intention nearby and try to make it real — in this case, the total annihilation of Viroc HQ, contained within a seven-hundred-foot field. Probably contained. They were fairly confident on the containment.

Because raw, untapped shardisite “reaches out for potential,” the device couldn't be carried near loose shard slivers without risking premature detonation. The party stripped their unpurposed shards and handed them off. Then, rather than carry the thing in his hands, Viktor stored it inside the cavity of his chest — the shardcube tattoo that lives on his skin. There was a one-in-one-hundred chance it simply went off and ended everything right there. He did it anyway. The moment held. The world drew inward with a deep, collapsing pulse, and the bomb settled inside him.

The ship's lifeboats were unpowered and would never reach shore in time under oars. So the party did what they always did. Five of them piled into a raft, each pressed a chip of shardisite to the hull, and together pushed a single shared intention into it: go fast.

The shards melted into the wood. The raft lurched, stalled, and then a green light bled out into the water and a massive wave rose up behind them. They surfed it toward the center of the city at 80 knots, wind tearing at them, holding on for their lives — until the wave reached the shallows and broke. The raft barrel-rolled. Half the party went under. But when the wave crashed across the waterfront it washed out an entire platoon of soldiers, leaving fourteen of them coughing and prone in the surf, with no idea what had hit them.

The party recovered first. Viktor rode the wreck off the raft and cut down eight of them with his rift glaive in a single sweep before they could rise. Carl, Thorun and Bogdan finished the rest — a thunderstep here, a slash there, a hammer to the skull of the last man standing. But the alarm had been raised. Troops were mustering somewhere close. They had perhaps fifteen minutes before the bombardment began, and four hundred feet of patrolled streets between them and Viroc HQ.

They went quiet. Bogdan went invisible. Hunkered into the cover of boarded-up storefronts and barrel-fire shadows, they began the trek toward the great black brutalist cube standing dark and silent at the center of the city.

Lusat and Viktor split off and dimension-doored ahead into Anton Erikson's old office — four floors down, a nearly abandoned sub-basement that the party had never properly found, still reeking of charred mahogany and the burnt bodies they'd left in the fireplace days before. In the corner sat the directory globe, no longer hovering but still faintly enchanted, settled on the floor.

Before setting the bomb, Lusat placed his hands on the globe and reached through it, the way he had once done in St. Petersgrad — searching the building for Minerva. His mind spilled across the city, shrank down, pressed through the black concrete of Viroc HQ. The moment it entered the building, something seized him. A hand closed around his throat and pulled him in until he was inches from the face of Minerva Sedgwick. She spoke, but he was warded in silence and could only read the words on her lips “You're mine now” as her nails dug into the flesh of his neck.

Lusat answered with a fifth-level Mind Spike. In a world where belief manifests reality, a spell cast at a scrying-image is not a spell cast at nothing — the magic tore through the veil between them, and suddenly Lusat's feet landed in her actual office, eight floors up, the two of them locked in a real duel. He poured arcane force into her mind; veins stood out on her neck, blood ran where her nails dug in, and green energy welled up from beneath her coat to shield her. She answered with a curse and a magical command. He resisted both, which only enraged her further. Something in her unhinged. She let go, stepped back, vibrating with fury, and reached for the pendant at her throat. Somewhere in the building, heavy doors slid open — shink, shink, shink — but Lusat was already gone, dimension-dooring back down to Viktor with her curse-mark burning on him, marking his location wherever he fled.

Erikson's office was as good a place as any — deep in the building's bones, eight floors below Minerva. Lusat and Viktor set the device down and Viktor gripped the pin. The whole world filled in another notch as he drew it. Time froze. Dust hung motionless in the air. One by one the tumblers turned, the needles pierced the ingots, and a containment bubble began to swell — one foot wide, three foot wide, larger — as the device started drinking in every source of magical energy it could reach. It reached for Lusat and Viktor too, clawing at the magic they carried, and for a genuine moment there was fear that it might take them. Then a radiance rose up between them and the machine. Something greater than themselves decided they still had a few more steps to take. The bomb was set. Time snapped back. They started a stopwatch and agreed to hold for ninety seconds before teleporting clear.

When the time came, Lusat grabbed Viktor's shoulder and cast Dimension Door for the rendezvous point where they'd left the others — and the curse-mark yanked the spell off course. Instead of the alleyway, they coalesced at the front foyer of Viroc HQ, beside the rest of the party, who had since fought their way to through the doors. Short time no see. There was no time to explain. Thirty seconds left. Everyone ran.

They made it fifty feet from the building before it happened. A massive inward rush of air, a sucking implosion, and then a single deep thunnnggg as everything within a hundred feet of the building — dust, debris, anything not bolted down — flattened to the ground at once. The party felt it on their backs like a sunburn. The bombardment from the SS Nadine had already begun; shells were dropping across the waterfront, cannon fire screaming in both directions, eardrums near to bleeding.

But it appeared that Viroc HQ still stood. Heavily damaged, crumbling, floors collapsed and gutted — but its external walls standing. And Lusat was no where to be seen.

The curse had caught him at the threshold and held him at the door while the others ran. When the bomb went off, Minerva's voice whispered in his head — “if I go down, you're coming with me” — and a white flash took him out of the world entirely.

Viktor turned around, did the math, found it short by one, and charged back through the doors into a building that no longer resembled the one he'd left — floors missing down to the fourth sub-level, rubble and open sky, embers drifting down. Lusat's crumpled body lay against a wall, breathing but unconscious.

In the space between, Lusat opened his eyes to the smiling face of his divine patron. Nadine — no longer featureless, manifest and present in a world of her own making. She placed a hand on his shoulder. There was a sadness in her smile. “You've done well. If you want, you can rest now.” Lusat asked if the task was finished. Told that it wasn't, he refused: “Then I can't rest yet.” The gentle hand on his shoulder became a gentle nudge, and he was sent back.

Viktor was inches from his face when he woke, screaming obscenities while casting Prayer of Healing. Rather than trusting his own limits as a healer, he called out to Nadine directly for the help he knew he couldn't give. Lusat came back to the world of the living carrying the heavy, sobering knowledge that his god had been fully ready to receive him, job done. Carl slathered restorative ointment over him as he contemplated his resurrection. They turned back toward the heart of the ruins.

As Lusat caught his breath, the click of a woman's boot heels approached across the shattered marble.

Minerva walked out of the rubble half-limping, disheveled, maniacal — magic literally dripping from her fingertips, her eyes lit with green fire. She had survived the blast wrapped in the highest-grade Viroc wards, and the detonation had burned through every protective trick she had. There was no taking her alive, and it showed in her face. Viktor had promised that she would die today. She had every intention of taking the party with her.

She opened by throwing everything she had — all that dripping rage coalesced into a single wave of necrotic force that splashed over the whole party, burning flesh, eating armor. But she let out more than she could hold. Viktor replied with Rebuke the Violent, and the wave of necrosis was returned in kind. It roiled back over her, Viktor channeling the Minerva's own power back into her. She howled, her magic went wild, her cold, calculating visage was erased in an agonized fury.

In the roofless ruin of fallen floors and drifting embers, she stood up coughing blood, magic tears running from bloodshot eyes, hair singed wild — she saw the writing on the wall. The maniacal confidence collapsed into an insane sorrow. “Look what you've done. It was going to be mine! All mine! I would have changed the world!!”

She tried one more time — three Scorching Rays thrown towards the party. Lusat counterspelled them from the ground, burning last ounce of ability die to do it, the rays curling in on themselves and dissipating into nothing. Lusat took the last of his shard slivers, stepped into the body of his freshly summoned lesser angel. It's wings spreading from his own back, saying as he raised his hands high: “With this, my task is complete. I can rest.”

He cast the fireball through the angel's aura. It arrived as pure radiance and engulfed her. In the final instant — refusing to leave no mark on the world, determined to brand herself onto her killers — Minerva reached for one last Hellish Rebuke. But she had already given her last, her spell never came. Her final gesture of revenge, her last ability to leave any impression on this world at all, was snuffed out utterly and completely. Surrounded by her enemies, her once great influence and greed was reduced to this crumbled marble rubble. The divine fire erased her from this world, and with her demise, the last of Viroc Industries leadership was gone.

The stain of Viroc Industries on the world was not gone. The marks of unchecked ambition and inhuman greed left by the Drekanov dynasty — Seraphim, Lucian, Harold, Ernst — would take years, perhaps decades, to scrub away. The world had been changed irreversibly: an entirely new species of magical being was already spilling out across the countryside, born of what those men had done. A still-coalescing dragon was birthed onto the Earth, somewhere past the horizon, far beyond the party's reach.

But in answer to that terror, something else had been born into the world. A force for good. A force for cleansing. A hope the world could rally around — the promise that things could be better. Made real in a tattoo parlor, in a waterfront warehouse, in a cobblestone effigy, in a colossus of evil rechristened in an angel's name, and in the people who had named her and carried her light all across Europa. As the sun crested the horizon behind them, the survivors stood in the ruins of the legacy they had come to unmake.

The task was complete. They could rest now.