[center][h1]Epsilon[/h1]

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[img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/893273948526108742/894758899872317440/YUDAIEL.png[/img][/center][hr]

Epsilon had remained in the halls of the palace as the gods had both been born and begun their tasks. They came and went, working their destructive capabilities upon the once-dead planet below; some writing upon his Codex as requested, and some not. Anger filled him as he watched Jiugui drunkenly scrawl upon the Codex without a care in the world, but, for now, he maintained his composure.

He hid his feelings well; nothing but an expressionless golden visage to be read. He always gave off an air of vague displeasure; over enough time, one could get used to it, dulled to consider it wholly neutral. He watched as gods blew holes in the ocean, a ring was formed, and, finally, the God of Earth got to work. It did not befit a god to swim, or so he believed.

Once the continents were raised, he stepped out the main doors of the palace out into the void beyond. Gravity nor air seemed to concern him; he stepped on nothing as though it were something. Then he told himself he was at Galbar, and the self obeyed. He was upon the barren land when plants took root, watching them wind around himself.

Then, he looked up at the sky as oxygen flooded the atmosphere and a misty blue color overtook the void beyond. The rings; something was happening to them. Another god wreaking destruction, no matter how controlled; to create something new. He let the plants wind around his body, not caring to shake them off as his golden visage remained locked skywards.

Slowly, he realized what was going on. A second Galbar? An interesting proposition, though one he did not entirely understand the point of. It was smaller, it was lifeless, and it just [i]sat there[/i]. He watched it for a time; having spotted a speck nearby, though he was not yet clear on what it was. The speck flared; it picked up momentum; it shot across the sky as a star in motion.

And then it slammed into the moon, hanging silently above Galbar. Epsilon could see the impact, the dust thrown up, and the marr upon the perfect surface. The emotionless golden visage gazed on as the moon refused to abide the blow; it began to dance in the sky, flying through the void. The shockwave -- divine in nature, Epsilon could feel it -- washed across Galbar. The land was strong, foundations laid by the god of the dirt and the stone, and it refused the clarion call of divinity.

But the water was not. The smooth surface of the seas, from which he could once spy his reflection as though a mirror, roiled as though a tilted lover. Waves crashed upon the shores, and he could see the tides shift, imperceptibly to all except one with the eyes of a god. Of course, as a god, Epsilon was built of a more serious stock than even the land; he had not once even considered falling to the demands of the shockwave.

[hr]

Well secluded within her perch on the moon, the prescient goddess meanwhile peered through the cosmos with calm and icy intent. Her gaze was unhindered by the sun’s mundane brilliant glare, and she had it fixated upon that heavenly palace where the Monarch of All made his dwelling. Now the Monarch himself was descending down unto the Galbar for some dubious purpose (she would have to observe his doings later!), but that potent instrument that she now needed -- the [b]Codex[/b] -- remained in the palace where Epsilon had left it. And better yet, the Monarch was ordering out all those stragglers that had remained in his palace! It looked as though there would be nobody to stop her from seizing the artifact. 

Even here, as far away from that palace’s warmth as any of the gods had ever come, her Sight was potent enough to look upon the Codex and read it, but she instinctively knew that merely reading it was not enough. Something about the object’s presence granted greater understanding, and its possession surely granted power...Yudaiel cast her vision forward, into the future, and saw one vision of herself clutching it all to herself there upon the lonely moon, channeling the artifact’s power while her great nemesis and all other interlopers were helpless to stop her, if not blissfully unaware.

Yudaiel’s gaze darted left and right, prescient Sight tearing across countless timelines and trying to determine possible outcomes. She devoted the entirety of her willpower and mental faculties to make sense of what she Saw: the chaotic and immeasurable tapestry of Reality, and the discord of the needles and threads weaving it all together. She Saw that there would not be any riper opportunity than this one moment, at least not for a good deal of time, and so without a further thought she spurred herself into motion. Yes, this was destiny.

The Reverberation erupted from the scarred crust of the moon to which it had clung and permeated. She surged upward and away, easily escaping her moon’s gravity, all the while invisible even against the pallid glow of its surface. Then she cascaded across the heavens as an unbound stream of consciousness and will, rapidly making her way to the great bridge that led to the Monarch’s heavenly palace.

[hr]

Epsilon noticed the essence as it fled from the moon; he tracked it briefly, towards the palace; recognizing Yudaiel, one of the two that had fought to write in his Codex. Then, he looked back down at the ground beneath his boots. The plants protested only briefly before his divine strength tore them from their roots, and he shook his body clear of them. His clothes remained unmarred, still as white as snow and as golden as ever. One boot in front of the other, he walked across the landscape; he found his destination far faster than should have been physically possible. The advantages of divinity were evidently manifest.

He was at a vast pit in the ground, surrounded by miles-high water on each side. It seemed, for all intents and purposes, that the land repelled the ocean. A vast shadow cast on the land from the mountains of sea on each side, and in the water he swore he could spot something; another divinity perhaps? It was long and finned, he swore, but as quickly as he saw it, it was gone. Nothing but the echo of a song in his mind. The mask’s gaze fled from the water, and he stomped across the island, exploring it.

It was empty for now, but he expected it would not remain that way. He stepped into the water, beginning to walk across the ocean floor as he sought the western continent. The volcanic vents kept visibility low, Epsilon cleared the smog as he went, just to keep sight on the path ahead of him.

[hr]

Through rock and empty space Yudaiel’s consciousness had glided. The incorporeal Eye was in that moment more like an amorphous stream of essence, an invisible comet that was blinded by purpose and hate and desire and fear and dance -- [i]motion[/i]. Yet she was so much more than just some imponderable comet. For a start, the Lady of Far and Near was swifter than any comet, much swifter. Within seconds of her departure from the moon she’d already reached the bridge. She tore her way up its whole expanse, storming into the palace, unseen and hopefully unfelt, even as Ruina and Iqelis quarreled over destroying [i]her[/i] moon. She heard them; she saw them. Still, she passed right by, for every moment was precious and she had far more pressing matters at hand.

Yudaiel found the Codex just where she knew it had been and where it would be -- and then it was hers, that easily! Even with the foresight of her visions, she was incredulous that claiming it had been so trivial; had none of the other gods thought to do the same? [i]Fools.[/i] 

The ethereal wind that had been Yudaiel swept up the Codex. She spirited it away and back to the moon nearly as swiftly as she’d come, with so much alacrity that to any observer it would seem as though the Codex had just vanished in an instant, evaporated into nothingness.

[hr]

Light slowly returned to Epsilon as the ocean became shallow; he was close to the western continent. It was covered in plants just the same as the eastern continent, but otherwise it did not have any terrain, either. He stomped across the ground, trodding some of the plants underfoot with careless steps. An idea was swirling in his mind; a place he could call home on Galbar, and he needed to consider where he could place it.

He let his gaze err to the far south, letting his divine senses reach out to feel the great tree that sprouted far into the atmosphere. [i]Another variable to consider[/i] he thought as he explored it with his senses, before bringing them back to his immediate surroundings. It was certainly a start, and he was excited to see what Galbar would look like once the other gods had finally completed their duties.

[hr]

Since Yudaiel and Iqelis had written of Time’s arcane nature, paths, and endings within the Codex, there had been no further additions scrawled by other gods. All was just as it had been, just as she had remembered, just as she could have read if she had looked upon the thing with her farsight. Possessing a tome to which you’d already memorized all the words should have meant little.

Yet in that moment, with the Codex in her possession, she somehow felt as though she was…[i]more.[/i] Her knowledge was more perfect, her prescience more refined and accurate, her total omniscience that much closer. There was a power that clung to this thing and filled any who clutched it; perhaps Epsilon had anticipated this? Had he intended to lull all the gods into writing within it and contributing to its might, only to then claim all that power for himself? Well, now it was hers, and perhaps he would come to rue his lack of foresight or caution.

The Prescient’s plan was set into motion: first, woven into gaps between the countless revelations and descriptions of Time and Fate, she began to append a new passage. Her Sight had allowed her glimpses at the outcomes that would result from her changes. She had already determined just what glyphs and knowledge to impart upon the Codex, down to the tiniest detail, the most exact spacing, the perfect style and diction, every bit of minutiae had already been meticulously accounted for and committed to memory. She was prepared and needed only to act, and so she did. She became motion itself, [i]doing[/i] and hardly even thinking except to savor the moment, the taste of her coming and inevitable triumph.

She filled some of the bits of space remaining in the margins that had been left between the countless annotations and definitions of Time, and wove around the unknowable secrets hidden beneath Tuku Llantu’s ink, the wine-stains of Jiugui, and everything else. She even wrote over some of it. The writing grew and warped and twisted like a writhing snake. It wrapped into a circle, then turned back upon itself; now she was writing over even her own works in the Codex, its readability vanishing like dusk’s light even as the power and meaning of the many-layered words and symbols remained.

Her addendum to the Codex was, in short, a scathing and utter rebuke of Luck and random chance...she expressed and precisely described the nature and mechanics of nigh all physical phenomena that she could think of, at least those that did not utterly spit in the face of such consistency as magic did. Even the most seemingly inane and insignificant things were accounted for, such that foreordination became that much more undeniable. Her own power surged into the Codex; she poured far more of herself into it now than she had when she and Iqelis had competed to fill the pages before. So much additional divine might was imbued into the Codex that it began to glow with a blinding light, to hum and sing audibly with power even in the near-vacuum of space, to even throb and shudder as if it were breathing raggedly.

[i]’Thump...Thump. Thump,’[/i] sounded the living Codex’s heartbeat. Slowly, subtly, but perceptibly, it began to influence Reality itself. First it was just the immediate surroundings that felt the change, but the effect was spreading through the cosmos.

This Codex had more potential than perhaps even [i]he[/i] had ever realized. Consciousness could beget reality, as she had shown through her [i]willing[/i] this moon to take form around the fiery maw of its molten heart. Here, what Yudaiel had done would leave Ashevelen very confused and weak, if not outright agonized and crippled. But alone it was not enough, so Yudaiel moved to the next stage of her grand design.

It was in that moment that Ruina’s primitive telepathy reached Yudaiel -- it contained memories, and yet this was unrefined and raw, akin to a long series of guttural growls and hand-gestures when compared to the beauty, passion, and perfect imagery of her poetic ideabstractions. At least Ruina’s message was somewhat concise, if nothing else. The slight bit of her mind that it distracted grew annoyed, but as she looked down upon Galbar to focus upon Ashevelen -- her nemesis, her prey -- she found it in her to deign reply to that Ruina. Through space, a seeking dart of her essence raced to the goddess of destruction, laden with an ideabstraction:

[hider=The Path][sub][color=9966CC]The world faded, but from the void of its absence there appeared a narrow and treacherous path. This was no ordinary path -- in some places it had been overgrown by vegetation, in some places flooded by seas, in other places crushed beneath great and grand looming towers and keeps and alcazars, imposing structures so beautiful that they could only have been inspired by the Monarch’s palace...but they were not of the palace; rather, they were those great works that had yet to be.

It made no difference to the fiery one that walked the path all day and into the night. Even as it grew dark, the path-walker toppled and burned and knocked aside whatever she pleased, walking down the path laid before her whilst loudly declaring that she went and did as she pleased. On one side of the path was the great white eye of the moon, and on the other, a tiny but-many legged black fly. The fly drew close to the one who trekked the path, and it buzzed something inaudible, but the words were still quite clearly so laughable as they were pretentious. That was just a fact; that the puny fly and its decrees had such a nature was obvious and as readily apparent as the path. That the fly would fail was inevitable as the dawn that soon came to end that night upon the road.

The path was bright once more, but the moon remained in its place, above and to the side. The sun rested abreast it at an equal height, but [i]it[/i] did not speak with its gaze like that eye-in-the-moon did. [b]‘Tread carefully,’[/b] the glare warned. And then that look was gone, along with the moon and the sun, and the trail and everything else.[/color][/sub][/hider]

Projecting that ideabstraction had cost only an instant, taken one thought. Within a breath’s time Yudaiel’s focus had returned to her mark; Ashevelen had left that northern continent where she’d played with bjorks and birds, and now wandered some empty and desolate country in the northwestern reaches of the largest continent. That was good; with so little nearby, the massive collateral damage that Yudaiel was about to inflict would affect little.

The Great and All-Seeing Eye, socketed within the most enormous crater on the moon’s surface, pulled the Codex up to her very pupil. From her heart, the densest clump of Yudaiel’s vast and disparate essence, there welled a massive flow of divine power. She directed its flow such that it surged into the humming Codex, but was not absorbed.

Instead, it was focused, [i]magnified, [b]amplified[/b][/i]. Yudaiel brought to bear the Codex’s own innate power (and that power had already been immense, even before she had just poured more into it!) and joined it with her own, and then she unleashed what was perhaps the mightiest single attack that this pantheon had yet witnessed: a massive telekinetic blast manifested upon the planet with no warning, and it shook the Galbar to its very core. 

The result was tremendously potent. In an instant, entire mountains were ground into dust and hurled aside, rolling hills were crushed into flatlands, and in other places flat and open prairies were soon made into highlands as the debris strewn from elsewhere came to be deposited onto them. One of Astus’ colossal collectors had been in the wrong place and the wrong time, and it was torn asunder and cast skipping across a league or two of land like a tumbleweed before it at last was arrested by crashing into a hill that had been hardy enough to survive the blast.

As for Ashevelen, who was at the very epicenter of this blast, somehow -- infuriatingly! -- she had survived. Yudaiel had seen that there was a non-zero chance of this happening, so fortunately her disappointment was not accompanied by surprise. She was far from finished -- the Reverberation prepared her next attack, even as a confused, distraught, wounded, and [i]lucky[/i] Ashevelen scrambled about like a fleeing bug.

[hr] 

[hider=Battle Music]
[center][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX53EmL3wYQ[/youtube][/center][/hider]

Something was wrong. Epsilon could feel the power and see the destruction. Galbar tore itself apart in a great conflagration, the shockwave ripped him off of his feet. The divine fire, following closely behind, losing the furious race outwards, tore at his body. The air around him buckled, and for a brief moment, he lost all orientation. Epsilon floated, battered and bewildered, in a timeless and spaceless void of consciousness borne from his own senses.

But that did not befit a god: A god did not get lost, in deed or in direction. The world ordered around him, clearing him a path to the only place he could go. The pale gem floated far above, in its endless dance, and now it also housed his Codex. Fury fueled him, his declaration of love for the universe used to destroy that which was loved. He instructed his form, measured its distance from the moon, and found it to be far closer than thought.

He had misjudged his measurement in his fury. He had not arrived at the Codex; an error had brought him perhaps some twenty feet away. Epsilon’s voice cut through the void, hoarse with fury, “You have sullied the Codex! It is our love for our universe, not a weapon to be abused!”

But he had conveyed himself right into the midst of Yudaiel’s vast form, and now he was deep within her sea of consciousness, surrounded on all sides by her smothering and overpowering essence, [i]drowning[/i]. There was no resisting her ideabstraction; the world around him faded and became a dreamscape, even as his body was propelled away at well past the moon’s escape velocity by a telekinetic shove.

[color=9966CC]Epsilon found himself above one of Galbar’s oceans, the waves rolling far below him. But he was not really himself; he was a mere seagull, wings flapping to stay aloft. There was an island before him, he knew, and yet he could not see what was on it, and nor could he go visit it -- every grain of sand upon its shores was enclosed within a massive shield that he sensed was nigh impenetrable, and the trade winds carried a tang of fear and trepidation. He realized that he did not want to go to that island, and whatever terrible entity was hiding behind that shield certainly did not want [i]him[/i] to go there either.

[b][i]”L̫̜̿̃Ë̩̬͛̉͟Ã̼͍̊V̠͕͊̅E̛̘̪͓̐̆ ,̨͔̰͑̀̚   I͚̻̾̚͝ͅN̯̝̋̈͐͟T̝̋͢͞E̠͔̿̔R̬̘̭̓͌̃L̩̪̃̎̅͢Ó̩̜̥̃͗͟͡P̛̭͎̣̬̅̅̃E̗̥̼͙̎̈́̏͘R̥̪͕͔̃̅͂͗!̪̪̹͌̿͗”[/i][/b] he thought he heard an eldritch and terrible voice echo from all around, but perhaps it was just the roaring wind; suddenly, buffeting and deafening gales slammed into his frail avian body, throwing him backwards and into somersaults through the air. He tumbled and flapped as hard as he could to regain altitude, just barely skimming over the water’s surface below, and found himself aflight once more -- oriented directly away from that island.[/color]

The seagull was mortified for one brief moment, content to leave the island behind, but then a thought struck it. [b][i]A seagull is a median creature of Galbar, possessed of only instinct and the deep-seated desire of survival. I think, yet I am a seagull?[/i][/b] The seagull flared its wings and turned back towards the island, thinking further, [b][i]I am one of the smallest and menial creatures of Galbar, yet I can so easily refuse the orders of my betters?[/i][/b]

Something was off with the situation. Realization slowly began to dawn on the seagull, and, finally, with one burst of inspiration, the answer came to Epsilon. His voice cried out, his body morphing into its proper identity, “Your visions lack consistency, Yudaiel! You will be punished for your desecration!”

The visions cleared, for the briefest of moments; he remeasured his steps. He had never left the moon, the golden-masked god instructed his self. He corrected as much as he could in the moment he was granted. He was no longer twenty feet away from the Codex, but a little closer.

The vivid color of the radiant Codex, the light of the sun reflected upon the moon’s pallid surface, and even the distant twinkling stars seemed to all fade. Hope and life itself seemed like forlorn and futile, fleeting dreams; such frivolous emotions and thoughts fled of their own volition from the heart, and a foreboding sense of [i]doom[/i] and despair arrived to fill the void left behind.

But that was not Yudaiel’s doing.

Something terrible approached -- a wave of ruinous power conjured by Iqelis -- and Yudaiel suddenly found herself beset with yet another distraction. Her mind rapidly compartmentalized as she devoted a piece of her consciousness towards dealing with each obstacle. There was bickering -- one wanted to spare Ashevelen for the moment and redirect the Codex’s full power towards deflecting Iqelis’ attack, but that was utterly unacceptable. The Reverberation crushed and suppressed those thoughts; her beautiful moon was not so precious that she would sacrifice this window of opportunity for the fleeting chance of sparing it further disfigurement. This preemptive strike [i]had[/i] to work.

The interloper, however, had stubbornly returned, discarding his momentum and transposing his body back from the depths of space into which he’d been cast out. Yet through teleporting once more into the heart of her vastness, Epsilon’s mind was opened anew. He resisted, and his intellect was sharp and could cut through illusion like a knife, but through sheer willpower Yudaiel overcame his senses and thrust him once more into a realm forged through ideabstraction.

[color=9966CC]Epsilon was himself, so even as he found himself looking at a surreal and altered dreamscape, the transition was not so jarring.

He observed a familiar island directly ahead, but around it there were no rolling waves, just as there was no sea breeze or salt spray or even water. This was an island of waxen stone, floating amidst a sea of stars...a moon!

But he knew that the magnificence before him was no mere rock, island, or moon, for it radiated power and was wreathed in a raging storm of thought and energy and godly power-made-manifest. This moon was an immense cyclopean deity, and from its unblinking oculus cascaded a withering and fiery beam of energy. The floating motes of dust and space-stuff that drew too close to its gaze were cast aside, evaporated, reformed, and aligned into perfectly ordered jewels too small for any mundane eye to perceive, yet Epsilon’s godly perception sensed the microscopic adamant left drifting through dead space.

Mercifully, the eye’s insatiable and implacable stare was leveled elsewhere, lest he too be ripped asunder and forged into some diamond. The storm around the moon grew in fury, its feverish intensity and puissance growing with every instant. What had been a veil around that moon’s naked body became a billowing cloak, an enormous obscuring cloud, then finally a broiling sea the size of a nebula. The rapidly approaching storm was too much; instinctively he righted himself about and made to flee the other way, only to see [i]another[/i] storm coming: this second one was terrible and dark, a looming stormcloud that grew into a great shroud that swallowed light, and then a smothering blanket that seemed to swallow up all the stars. Epsilon was about to be caught between the two, and he needed to flee.[/color]

Epsilon was not one to back down from a challenge; Yudaiel’s mistake was to leave his mind and form untouched. A prodigious ego was a hindrance in many ways, but this time, it was his saving grace. He knew with his very being that he was [i]better[/i] than all the other gods, second only to the Monarch. No ideabstraction could threaten him when he had his faculties. His voice projected, needling towards the great eye-moon, “You are but a mote of dust compared to my control! I will take your gaze, and in the act I will only grow stronger!”

The golden-masked god let himself be swallowed by the dark wave, to ride it like a great wave across the void. He could feel the threads of exhaustion ripping at him. His mind briefly frayed under the stress as he measured once more his being, clearing the visions from his mind. Battered by the raw power of the codex radiating like waves in the wake of the great beam, he took another step forward.

The power was intense. The power was blinding. Epsilon flung up his arm to cover his mask, desperately holding on to his progress as the Codex threatened to launch him back.

[hr]

While Epsilon had been raging against the imagery of her all-too-real warning, and therefore subdued for the moment, Yudaiel had diverted her attention back to Ashevelen. The goddess had been scattered by that first telekinetic blast like a leaf on the wind, but divine resilience combined with some residual Luck had spared her from a fatal reunion with the Galbar. When brute force proved insufficient, the application of ever more force was sometimes a viable answer. 

With icy resolve even in the face of so much distraction, the Prescient calibrated a second attack. Mere moments later, a half-dozen imperceptible rays erupted from the Codex that was her conduit, forming a perfect cone of telekinetic power. Lady Luck down below was not faring so well, Yudaiel Saw; however, she nonetheless had staggered to her feet and taken flight to evade her unknown assailant. Such evasive maneuvering made targeting difficult, but prescience could account for her movements. In any case, Ashevelen was not the direct target of this cone -- instead, Yudaiel grasped at a few tenacious mountains that had survived along the rim of her first concussive attack, as well as some great chunks of.the Galbar’s crust that had been cracked in the same explosion. All of them groaned for a few moments, and the Galbar seemed to tortuously heave and cough once again as the whole mounts and plateaus were uprooted as easily as weeds. The ground  from whence they’d been torn was made into great gorges and valleys, and the sundered pieces of Galbar soared into the sky. Friction with the air embellished them with a spectacular burning glow, but that was only the beginning. 

First Yudaiel hurled a mountainside at Ashevelen, just to test her weakened foe’s remaining strength. The mountain aligned itself peak-first, then cut through the air on a path directly towards Lady Luck. The first fiery weapon of the goddess ignobly missed its mark; Ashevelen’s fortunes hadn’t fully rubbed off yet. But that was no matter! Even as that first mountain, half-burrowed into the ground, crumbled and collapsed into a pile of rubble, the goddess sent down two of the flatter pieces of crust. From the moon, these flat pieces of stone looked like mere mudcracks, but each one could have housed a sprawling metropolis or ten. Like the enormous hands of a giant clapping a bothersome fly, the plateaus aligned perpendicular to the ground on either side of Ashevelen and then came slamming together.

Far below, Ashevelen sensed the incoming attack and steeled herself -- with a massive surge of her own divine power, the goddess of fortune worked some thaumaturgy that made the massive slabs of rock miraculously tilt and crumble. The change was almost imperceptible, but it was just enough. The two clapping hands of Yudaiel came together with world-shattering force, but where their uneven surfaces collided was a gap in precisely the right spot such that Ashevelen’s miniscule form was sheltered within a tiny pocket, spared from the crushing impact. Even as the two plates blasted one another apart and crumbled, Ashevelen was left standing serendipitously -- nay, miraculously -- unscathed by the raining sand, gravel, boulders, hillock-sized rocks.

Yudaiel brandished another mountain just as one might raise a fist. She now had three such fists left and was sure of her inevitable triumph -- her nemesis was weak and tired and surprised, and could not possibly endure this assault for much longer -- but then Epsilon was suddenly free of the ideabstraction’s shackles. He had imposed himself right in her way, [i]exactly[/i] blocking the line of sight between the Codex at her pupil and the wretched and distant form of Ashevelen. He was now elevated in her eyes to something beyond a mere nuisance, and she grew weary of the insect.

Her next ideabstraction was not wrapped in elegance or complexity or thought; it carried no image, and bore only one sensation: [b]pain.[/b] 

[color=9966CC]Epsilon was wracked with overwhelming, searing, unbearable agony of the likes that no words could describe. In situating himself directly in the center of the Prescient’s piercing gaze and before the pupil in the very heart of the Reverberation, he was now caught precisely in the place where her grip was a near unbreakable vise. Epsilon’s physical body had metaphorically entered the storm that he had seen in the last vision, and now its colossal and unyielding waves slammed into him, washed over him, swept him down and forced themselves into his flesh and body. Each wave was a throb of anguish and torment, and they came one after another, rapidly and unceasingly. 

Deprived of any additional sensory information, his mind was left to conjure and invent whatever it could, that there could be something, anything, to perceive and see and process. So horrors and torture implements and his worst fears manifested, to explain to his desperate mind where all this suffering came from. And hope, that stubborn and tenacious fire that was so hard to extinguish, conjured other things too: landscapes and objects and equations and poetry of beauty, that his body could try to find release from its torment in fleeting distraction.

All of that was futile, of course. The raw emotion could not be so easily overcome, and the torturous waves began to break and destroy him. He was strong, but he was no dauntless fjord that could withstand tsunamis and tides for a thousand thousand years; he was made of something more malleable.[/color]

Epsilon focused himself inwards, bottling his rage as he suffered his torments. His body and his mind were one, and he could choose, freely, what implements were used in his tortures. Imagination flared in controlled directions as he told his visions what form they were to take; that of Yudaiel’s abuse of his pride and joy. He imagined Yudaiel laughing at him as she terrorized Galbar, and of her triumph as she tore the palace down and with it the universe.

The anguish and the rage gave him focus and clarity. The scenes tore at his heart; he could feel idealism fading, replaced by a deep cynicism. Epsilon knew, deep within himself, that he would never recover what was lost. [i]It is a worthy sacrifice on the pyre, if it means I may stop this monster,[/i] the golden-masked god thought, the real world slowly honing in.

He felt weak. The Codex’s awesome power had been turned against him, and he could hardly stand the stream of power that washed across him. Had it not been of his own creation, he could have been wiped from creation entirely. He focused on the pain, letting the exhaustion guide him back to reality,  and then release suddenly came -- perhaps bought not even through his own exertions, but by the [i]other[/i] calamitous wave, Iqelis’ black tide of doom.

[hr]

Yudaiel’s grip had not merely caught the insufferable maggot that called itself [i]Epsilon[/i]; the ideabstracted surge of pain had genuinely washed over him in waves, but those waves did not stop until they found their way all the way down unto the Galbar and crashed upon Ashevelen’s conscience, and she was even more frail, even more easily incapacitated. Triumphantly, Yudaiel slammed down her mountain-fist, but then her grip had slipped as Iqelis’ wave of doom had finally struck the moon.

The effect was cataclysmic.

The moon’s crust shattered. Cracks and fractures erupted across the body’s beautiful alabaster skin; the power seeped down into the ground and made wormwood of the once-solid sphere. In places the crust heaved and collapsed, even as in other places it erupted up with an almost volcanic quality and the explosions created hailstorms of rock and ice. Time itself was distorted and perturbed if not outright shattered. With little rhyme or reason, the entropic force of Iqelis decayed the unstable ores within some rocks, ground others into dust, and left others seemingly untouched.

The mountain fell upon Ashevelen, pinning crushing her limp body even as the goddess had been trapped comatose in the nightmarish torture of the ideasbtraction, but with the arm behind it having suddenly lost half its strength, the fist had lacked enough force to truly kill. Yudaiel’s tenuous grasp over Epsilon’s sharper intellect had likewise slipped, and she sensed the wretch breaking free of the ideabstraction. Again!

Epsilon took another step towards the Codex, a wordless, mindless scream emitting from his mask. Both of his arms had been raised to his face now, his body leaning deeply forwards to resist the push of the Codex’s power. The cloth and gold seemed to waver as though seen through a wave of heat, the exhaustion of the mind exhausting the form in turn.

Yudaiel, too, was raging against the grip of exhaustion and pain. Only her burning desire for vengeance drove her on. Immaterial as she was, Iqelis’ wave -- no, waves came and then were gone; this was something else, something relentless, an endless monsoon of ruinous power -- could not harm her physicality. While Iqelis’ foul breath passed unimpeded through her vastness to impact the moon below, his own essence threatened to muddle with hers, to become so integral and ingrained into her as Rosalind’s own essence that had instilled Yudaiel with a sliver of desire to dance. It was nauseating, the thought of becoming even slightly attuned to Iqelis and allowing that [b][i]fly[/i][/b] into her very being, so she raged against his corrupting touch with every fiber of her will. It was not a pleasant experience, but she suffered his withering storm and let it pass over her without seeping deeper, like a brief splash of water over the oily outer fur of a bjork.

Epsilon was hardly spared from the deleterious effects of Iqelis’ attack either, and had the additional worry of having to contend with the debris of the moon’s ravaged surface. It still erupted forth from below and soared round the sphere from all angles, and soon some of the massive chunks that had been flung high into suborbital trajectories would come raining down from above too.

The last two of the goddess’ fiery fists still loomed over the Galbar and the battered, unconscious form of Ashevelen. With all her might, Yudaiel brought them down to shatter and crush her bane. Lady Luck’s fortunes had run out, and she was staked, driven into the ground, and finally crushed. Aside from the impact of another two mountains striking the surface with meteoric power, there was one final explosion as Ashevelen’s divine essence came unbound. [i]Victory, at last![/i] The relief was palpable, and now Yudaiel was so, so tired. But she could not rest yet!

She settled and drifted down deeper into the great crater-depression that was her throne and socket upon the moon, even down into the newly forming cracks below and around it that were being carved by the fly’s insipid touch. For a moment she peered not at the physical world as others saw it but at the future that had yet to manifest upon the tapestry of Reality...and how chaotic the needlework had become, how furled and wrinkled the cloth!

The Codex still had its uses. Amplifying her psychic strength through its power, the Reverberation smoothed over the tapestry all about her, subduing most of the time anomalies affecting the moon through destructive interference. Iqelis lacked focus, and the impulsive and unguided decay and destruction wrought by his hand was insufferable. [i]She[/i] gave purpose and intent to what remained, and doom became fire. Where the remaining power writhed deep below the moon’s cold and dead crust, there suddenly gushed burning red blood. The magma erupted forth, filling some of the tubes and ravines. When it would finally cool and the wounds scab over, the damage would be lessened, but the dark and sunken igneous rock would still be scars upon the moon’s pale face. She would [i]not[/i] forgive Iqelis for inflicting such hideous injury upon her prized jewel.

What last breaths of the storm of doom still billowed towards her moon, she blasted with her own will and nullified, though there was a large backfire and some had been deflected back toward Galbar. She sighed, the pain of that luck-induced blurriness and of Iqelis’ ruinous power alike finally gone. Rest could come soon, for there remained only one more nuisance.

Her piercing gaze fell upon Epsilon right as his groping hand seized the Codex; in those last distracted moments that had felt like ages, she had not Seen him finally perfecting his calculation to transpose himself perfectly before the artifact, but he had done just that, and there he was. Avarice and desperation overcame her then, and like the jaws of a leviathan her unseen telekinetic grasp manifested to bear down upon the Codex, with a death grip, to twist and squeeze him and wrest the Codex away -- Epsilon stumbled, pressing the Codex’s open pages against the molten ground of the moon, safe from Yudaiel’s grasp.

And then he unleashed it. His use of the Codex was far more precise; his blast sublime in its focus and intensity. He allowed the shockwave to spread across the moon, sending vast waves of dust in all directions as the immaterial form of Yudaiel as well as the (now vaporized) raining moon debris were forced back as a strong wind might clear a fog. It served a second purpose; Epsilon was near to death, and attempting to calculate further teleportations only lanced him with terrible pain. His form was hardly material, transparent as a sheet of glass.

So he launched himself from the moon with the pure kinetic force of an unrestrained release of energy from the Codex. He rocketed out from the dust cloud, wreathed in a fireball. The plunge to Galbar was magnificent to behold, dancing across the sky, visible across half the planet and even through the rings. It only grew in luminosity as he plunged into the atmosphere, still clutching the Codex.

The last thing he remembered before he was jarred into a lull was the ground approaching, and a great crack of earth.

[hider=Summary]
Epsilon spends the beginning of this post wandering around on Galbar, checking out the various creations made by others. Yudaiel, on the other hand, sneaks into the Monarch’s palace while he’s off doing his business during the cycle change post. Ignoring Iqelis and Ruina as they plot in there as well as anybody else, she hurriedly spirits away the Codex.

Realizing that alterations to the Codex can have a subtle impact on reality, Yudaiel exerts a lot of effort into writing additions to the Codex to nullify Luck. This weakens and hurts Ashevelen but isn’t enough to kill her on its own.

Yudaiel hears Ruina’s message and quickly responds with an ideabstraction directed towards the goddess of destruction.

Spying Ashevelen down on Galbar, Yudaiel then proceeds to use the Codex as an amplifier of sorts to channel her telekinesis. She makes a massive boom that grinds mountains to sand, flattens a huge area, and totally wrecks one of Astus’ harvester colossi. The epicenter of this blast is the area that will become Nalusa/Pars, where Ashevelen happened to be at the time. 

This is probably the most destructive event to happen on Galbar since mortals and continents were created, and it’s probably equivalent to the eruption of Krakatoa. [u]The alarmingly nearby bjork clans may suffer from the effects of this; think huge clouds of dust and sand in the air and maybe even some giant bits of stone flying at suborbital trajectories and landing similarly to meteorites. The blast may also be audible even on other parts of Galbar.[/u]

Epsilon senses all this and teleports up close to the moon, trying to get his Codex back and accusing her of abusing it. Yudaiel uses three successive ideabstractions to keep him at bay. Meanwhile, she also rips six mountains and/or huge chunks of earth out of the area around Nalusa and starts throwing them at Ashevelen, who is still alive. This further shapes Nalusa, creating what will probably become some rather odd geography.

Eventually Ashevelen is rendered comatose by one of Yudaiel’s ideabstractions and then slain by being crushed beneath the final two mountains, and her unbound divine energy causes yet another explosion.

Iqelis’ wave of doom dramatically reaches the moon and everything starts exploding all around Epsilon and Yudaiel during their struggle. Yudaiel is pained and distracted by its arrival and uses the Codex to mitigate its damage as much as she can; some of the wave is deflected back towards Galbar as a result. Epsilon manages to capitalize upon the moment and grab the Codex. Then he uses its power to create another explosion, this one sending it and himself hurtling away and out of Yudaiel’s clutches, all the way down to Galbar as a fiery comet.
[/hider][hider=Vigor Expenditure]
Yudaiel begins with 10 vigor.

4 vigor, enhanced by the aspect of prescience, is spent on empowering the Codex with anti-luck passages. Combined with Ashevelen’s death, the power of Luck is now going to fade. Eventually it will become mere superstition, and with its unpredictability out of the picture, Yudaiel’s power of foresight grows more potent.
6 vigor is spent on the telekinetic attacks that kill Ashevelen and inadvertently shape the geography of Nalusa.

0 vigor remains.
[hr]
Epsilon begins with 14 vigor.

1 is spent making the moon even more magical. People who stare at the moon may now get the equivalent of dwarf fortress strange moods and be inspired to create or explore. This is a side effect of Epsilon megablasting the moon to escape.

13 vigor remains.
[/hider]