ATLANTIS and CATACLYSM...

LATER.

The storm arrived with relatively little warning.

This was inevitable, because even at its height, the Antediluvian Age
had a much less effective world-wide communication system than our
world has boasted for many years. The advanced Atlantean culture had
sophisticated telepathy, and thus very little motive to develop or to
perfect long-range ‘conventional’ communications, even such ‘low-tech’
expedients as heliographs and their cousins. The fallen Goravian
society had developed a crude form of radio, and the ProtoAthenians
had retrieved it, but it was still very primitive and certainly not
yet suitable for large-scale global use. Even though the
ProtoAthenians had the radio technology, it was so crude that they
could not use it communicate much beyond the Mediterranean.

This was important in several ways, not least because it prevented the
ProtoAthenian expeditionary mission from sending back word to
ProtoAthens of Atlantis’ weakness.

Also, until the last few years, the Atlanteans and their colony-states
possessed ESP so well-developed and sophisticated that their
development of fine-quality scientific instruments was more than
somewhat retarded, again for lack of _need_. Though ESP could not
perform all the functions that advanced instrumentation and sensors
could perform, it could and did take the place of most of the features
of the various cruder instruments that are necessary to achieve the
most advanced devices.

Then came the Static, and gradually but inexorably it had interfered
with the use of psionics and the Flux , the problem growing steadily
worse until, by the mid-4700s B.C,, telepathy and ESP were all but
useless. Telepathy was reduced, even among the mightiest psions, to
such a degree that it was barely useful for more than a face-to-face
exchange, and ESP was even more completely blocked.

Thus it was that though Atlantis was nominally a TL5 culture, it
lacked anything even approximating the telegraph, or any kind of large
weather service. In the chaos of the time, long-distance messages
were rare, which meant that the first warning of a coming storm such
as the hurricane bearing down on southern Atlantis was the evidence of
the physical senses.

The first sign of the coming storm was lookouts on the southwest coast
observing the distinctive ‘fan’ of high-altitude ice crystals above
the hurricane’s central updraft. Such storms had been coming up from
the Caribbean often enough that this sign appearing on the horizon,
and the pattern of the rising waves, told their tale, but they gave
only a brief warning and even then sometimes the storm missed. This
time, though, the warning was all too accurate and the huge storm
continued to bear down on Atlantis.

Though the storm was bad news for the Unity, it was little if any more
welcome to the Unity’s attackers, in the face of nature’s fury none of
the combatants could do anything but cower. As the winds whipped
across the land and the rain turned freshets into torrents and
torrents into floods, all forces found such shelter as they could and
dug in to wait out the terrible storm. The ProtoAthenian force dug in
and encamped in a sheltered mountain valley some miles to the
northeast of the initial combat zone, Zadatharion and his Rhaemyi were
more exposed but hanging on in ravines on the opposite side of the
southern foothills, and the Unity was struggling to contain the damage
to the central control complex.

As far as the geography went, the site was ‘so-so’, not totally
exposed but also not as sheltered as the Unity might surely have
wished. The wind howled throughout the later part of the day on
September 10th, and gained speed as the Sun set and the main part of
the storm came ashore, and the Unity was forced to draw upon drugged
and half-mindless servants to dare the wrath of the storm to protect
the complex. The worst part for the Unity was not the wind, however,
but the water. There was a shallow, wide river flowing toward the sea
not far from the site, and not this became a channel up which the
storm surge came flowing, to flood much of the land around the control
complex.

It was well into September 11th before the slow-moving storm swept
entirely passed Atlantis, have spread floods and destruction across
much of the southern Isle. The Unity was continuing to struggle to
contain and repair the damage to its constructions, amid the still-
heavy rain trailing behind the great storm. The collective considered
it likely that it would be at least a few days before the attackers
could again mount a serious threat, in this it grievously misjudged
the matter, because Zadatharion and his highly-motivated Rhaemyi had
endured the storm and had recognized that Unity’s distraction.

It was a gamble, but Zadatharion and his men were reinforced by
additional troops who came in shortly after the storm passed,
surprising even them. With the extra men, they decided to make the
gamble and launched another attack on the northwest perimeter and this
time, almost as much to their own surprise as the Unity’s, they broke
through the thinned lines and attacked the central complex directly.

MORE LATER.

LATER.

Zadatharion immediately began doing the only thing he could reasonably
do under the circumstances to hinder the Unity, i.e. destroy
everything within reach. Normally the oldest of the Avatars used his
vast psionic strength with considerable restraint, out of both policy
and natural inclination, now he unleashed at full power in a veritable
whirlwind of destruction, which his soldiers engaged the enemy
Zadatharion proceeded to strike at the key components and systems of
the vast complex, freezing, melting, shredding delicate apparatus in
vast sweeps of his psychic power.

The Unity rapidly moved to stop him, dozens of collective-components
engaging him with the Unity's own vast power, while the Unity recalled
combat personnel to deal with this invasion of its central complex.
Zadatharion knew he did not have much time, and he used what time he
had with devastating effect, spies had long identified key sites in
the complex, and Zadatharion was sufficiently skilled in the sciences
of the Flux to recognize other vulnerable points once he was actually
inside the central complex.

In the meantime, the Unity realized that the situation had become too
fluid. The control complex was not yet truly ‘ready’, but it _could_
be activated. If it tried and succeeded, the power it would gain
would enable it to immediately crush its foes, if it tried and failed
the consequences could be extensively negative, but from the point of
view of the Unity the temptation had become too much. The Unity was a
calm, cool entity, its vast intellect rarely troubled by anything that
might be called passion, but it was not without its own analogues to
individual human emotions. Now the emotional temptation of the power
it so craved proved sufficient to overcome the ‘better judgement’ of
the collective.

For that reason, in the early afternoon of September 12th, 4750, the
Unity activated its central complex, and began to bring the other
distant sites of its globe-girdling mechanism ‘on line’.

As the Unity recalled its perimeter forces to deal with the
penetration of the core complex, some of these suddenly moved units
almost literally stumbled across the hidden teams of the strange
creatures that Ahkrinor had brought into the area in secret. Fighting
broke out, and Ahkrinor, recognizing that its hope of secrecy was now
destroyed, and more importantly sensing the activation of the Great
Project, realized that it was ‘now or never’ and immediately gave the
order to launch its own attack on the Unity.

Suddenly the Unity found itself facing attack by creatures it had
never imagined before, nothing in its centuries of experience matched
up to these strange, multilimbed living fighting machines. Between
the battle within its own corridors and structures against Zadatharion
and the Rhaemyi penetration team, and the sudden eruption of combat
all over the area nearby against these new creatures, the Unity found
itself with much of its combat power occupied near-at-hand and the
rest cut off, for the moment, from response.

The fighting went on throughout the remainder of the cloudy, rainy day
of what we would call September 12th of 4750, and continued into the
night. Though the Unity had more than sufficient armed force at hand
in theory to contain the situation, communications had been totally
disrupted. Some of the Unity’s large armed forces continued to keep
watch on the sea approaches twenty miles from the battle zone,
blissfully unaware of what was happening until overland messengers
finally reached them with news hours out of date by the time they
received it. Attempts to respond were confused, slow, Unity forces
encountered each other in the dark and fratricide arose from the
confusion.

In the early dawn hours of September 13th, 4750, the ProtoAthenian
force entered the chaotic fray, emerging from their valley where they
had sheltered from the hurricane. They had fresher troops, of higher
discipline and training than many of the Unity’s forces, and in the
chaos they made themselves felt through their careful discipline and
their use of (locally) effective non-paraphysical means of
communication. [1]

Amid all this chaos, Aradel and Vylyrades tracked Ahkrinor, who still
carried the barely-mastered Great Focus. As Ahkrinor moved toward the
central complex in cautious but high-risk movements from hiding place
to hiding place, Vylyrades tracked the entity from just a few miles
behind. Both Ahkrinor and its pursuers were hindered by the chaotic,
shifting lines of combat around them, but as Ahkrinor moved closer and
closer to its goal, Aradel and Vylyrades and their tiny force were
slowly but steadily gaining ground.
They were able to gain ground in part because of Aradel’s vast power
added to Vylyrades’ own Flux strength, and in part because they had a
more direct goal than Ahkrinor. The later was trying to sneak into
the central complex while avoiding being caught up in the insanely
fluid combat, it had to balance secrecy against speed, conserve its
strength against the moment when it would challenge the Unity
directly, and at the same time keep track of its own scattered forces
as best it could.

Aradel and Vylyrades and their team, for their part, were merely
trying to survive and close in on Ahkrinor. This meant they could
move more swiftly, ignore some of the considerations slowly Ahkrinor
down, and because of the instruments Vylyrades used to track the
Focus, they always knew where their quarry was to be found at any
given moment, while Ahkrinor continually had to reevaluate its
physical route.

All the while, a faint hum of tingling energy was filling the air, as
the Great Project began to actually run.

MORE LATER.


[1] From years of experience in war against fellow Atlantean-
descended people, the ProtoAthenians had mastered any number of
‘conventional’ means of local communication useful in battle, from
flashing mirrors to hand signals to drum codes to trained fast-
riders. It was a key advantage in the chaos of that particular battle
zone.

LATER.

It was well past sunset on September 12th when Ahkrinor, accompanied
by a handful of his creatures and shrouded by one of the most complex
Flux-illusions ever woven, reached the outer wall around the central
complex. By this point, even totally untrained non-psionic amateurs
could feel the tingling hint of power in the environment around them,
to the highly tuned and trained senses of those of Atlantean descent,
the 'feel' of gathering potential was unmistakable. To Ahkrinor,
still highly attuned to the Flux even if its ESP was lost to it, the
sense of the power of the Great Project was utterly clear.

It took Ahkrinor several hours of delicate, careful work to get past
the carefully warded wall, which run well below the ground level and
rose fully fifty meters above. It would have been trivial to cross
the wall itself, of course, but to do so _secretly_ under those
conditions was far more challenging. Ahkrinor, as a human, had long
planned for such moments as this while he was part of the Unity’s
empire, and his own loyalists had constructed hidden ‘back doors’ into
most of the Unity’s facilities as they were first created. Even the
central complex of the Great Project was not an exception to this.

It was almost dawn by the time Ahkrinor had located the entrance it
wanted and managed to get inside, still hidden from the perceptions of
the Unity and the physical observation of the Unity’s servants.
Though Ahkrinor did not realize this, the time had enabled Aradel and
Vylyrades to close the gap, they reached the same entrance and used it
to pass inside only an hour past local dawn, less than ninety minutes
behind their quarry. Though the pursuers had been hindered many times
by combat or by the need to avoid combat, they were still steadily
gaining on their would-be target.

In the meantime, Zadatharion was still within the complex as well.
His initial orgy of destruction could not last long, of course, but he
had done a great deal of damage in a very short time during it, and as
soon as the pressure became too great, Zadatharion and his surviving
Rhaemyi had scattered, and what amounted to a miniature combination
intruder hunt and guerrilla battle had begun that was still raging.
The central complex was the size of a small city, and had countless
places where one man or a handful could hide, and the Rhaemyi were
_good_ at this sort of work. As for Zadatharion, he was all by
himself more than a match for platoons of ordinary soldiers, and he
was fighting with ruthless determination. Even as they evaded the
Unity’s search parties, Zadatharion and the Rhaemyi were also engaging
in acts of sabotage and destruction whenever an opportunity became
available.

They had not yet managed to disable the complex, but it was taking
all the Unity’s attention to keep the Project coming ‘on-line’ and at
the same time deal with the steady sabotage. There was nothing left
over for other priorities, which was part of why the battles outside
continued to rage unchecked.

Through it all the goal of Zadatharion and his Rhaemyi was the great
Ultimate Paralens near the center of the huge control complex.
Towering three hundred meters above the surrounding terrain, this
great golden object was visible in all directions for miles, and
represented the most important single piece of equipment in the entire
complex. Should it be destroyed, or even moderately damaged, the
entire complex would be rendered useless until the damage was
repaired. Knowing this, Zadatharion and his men made attempt after
attempt to get close enough to do some harm to the glisteningly
beautiful device, with little success. Every layer of security in the
entire complex was calculated to make this point the most secure in
the facility.

The Ultimate Paralens itself was suspended by a vast and intricate
‘gantry’ or ‘frame’ of high-quality metal, towering even higher than
the Paralens itself and suspending the device above the ground in such
a way that that bottom of the ovoid Paralens was suspended about
twenty meters above the actual ground level. Here, in an open space
directly below the Ultimate Paralens, the surviving components of the
Unity were now assembling, ready to complete the process toward which
they/it had been work for so many centuries.

Along with the few hundred remaining components (save those the Unity
was forced to deploy to combat Zadatharion and the Rhaemyi) with
mortal fluxons, ready to help establish the connection between the
Unity and the Flux, in the fast-approaching moment of activation for
the Great Project. Surrounding the components and the fluxons were a
circle of heavily armed guards, the last line of defense around the
center of the complex and the key site of the entire Great Project.

As the hours passed, Ahkrinor passed through the maze of the complex,
accompanied by several of his strange creatures, and they left a chain
of dead guards and Rhaemyi behind them as they went. Though Ahkrinor
had no wish to engage in combat, when it came across either a Rhaemyi
or a defending unit, it rapidly slew them to avoid giving any sort of
alarm, leaving the bodies (those his creatures did not consume) hidden
as well as could be managed in a short time.

All the while, Aradel and Vylyrades and their tiny group was following
the trail of the entity, gaining on it bit by bit as they approached
the center of the control complex.

The Sun was setting on September 13th by the time Ahkrinor drew close
enough to the center of the central site to perceive the guards and
the Unity components with its own physical senses, and though Ahkrinor
had no idea of this, by this point Aradel and Vylyrades were only a
few minutes behind it. Now Ahkrinor had to prepare for the coming
critical component, and from a hidden niche about two hundred meters
from the outer ring of guards, the creature began preparing.

(Normally, there would have been no chance of hiding so close to the
Unity’s massed components, or the fluxons and psions in its service,
but at that moment they were fully occupied with other matters.)

Just as the Unity and its supporters and slaves had no idea of the
presence of Ahkrinor and a handful of his pet creatures just a tiny
distance away watching them, Ahkrinor in turn had no idea that Aradel
and Vylyrades and three other men were hiding a tiny distance further
away, watching Ahkrinor and the Unity as well, and trying to ascertain
what their next move should be, even as the sense of Flux power
concentrating now filled the air with a tingle of energy and an
audible hum of vibration.

MORE LATER.

LATER.

The evening of September 13th and early hours of September 14th were
long and slow for Aradel and Vylyrades and their three surviving
companions. They had left some of their companions at the outer wall,
with orders to make their way out of the battle zone as best they
could, since they knew that only a handful of people could hope to
maintain secrecy as they crossed the central complex. Even with just
the five of them there had been many close calls as they tracked
Ahkrinor across the facility.

It was a long night because of the danger, at any moment they could be
discovered, and they knew it, and it was a long night because of the
fear of both discovery and of whatever waited when the Unity was
finally ready to use its Great Project. It was a long night because
there were nothing to do but wait, wait for the moment when they could
act, a moment that could only be recognized when it came, not
predicted.

Though they had no way to know it, outside the battle was turning
against the distracted Unity. Though the battle started out with an
overwhelming numerical advantage, circumstances had made it impossible
for the Unity to apply those forces usefully, and the opposition was
skilled, disciplined, and highly motivated. Many of the Unity’s
forces were low-quality mercenaries or half-trained conscripts, and
some of them, as it became clear that the battle was going against
them, broke and ran or simply abandoned the field.

That still left the defending forces with a numerical superiority of
skilled, motivated troops, but not by so huge a margin, and in the
chaos and confusion of the time there was little proper application.
Bit by bit, the ProtoAthenians were mastering the field, and this was
becoming clear to everyone. The Unity, however, was now fully
occupied with its own work and could not take the time to do anything
about the matter.

When the Sun finally rose, it caught the attention of those with
enough freedom to notice on both sides, because it rose in a red blaze
as if the eastern horizon was aflame. Clouds had come in during the
night, a cold front was sweeping in and the rising sun was light them
in a crimson glory as it rose.

It was shortly after sunrise on September the 14th that the Unity
finally reached the point it had been striving for since the middle of
September 12th, the Great Project, albeit the minimal version it had
constructed, was finally ready to activate! Vylyrades sensed this the
moment it happened, nobody in that time and place was as tightly
attuned to the Flux as he was. Aradel sensed it as well moments
later, and of course so did Ahkrinor, who immediately began executing
its own plan.

The hundreds of individual components of the Unity, assembled under
the lower pole of the Ultimate Paralens, made a strange and eerie
sight. Males and females, of every physical description, ranging in
physical age from extremely elderly to barely toddlers, but all
equally part and parcel of a single mind, stood in motionless trance
under the Paralens as the Flux was concentrated into their physical
environs and their servitor fluxons began to process of ‘connecting’
the Unity to the Great Project.

Almost in that moment, as the components went into their trance and
the fluxons and other technicians were fully committed to their work,
Ahkrinor used a weapon it had brought, a gas weapon that rapidly
disabled many of the armed guards and left others retching and nearly
helpless. He unleashed his creatures on those still able to fight,
having armed them with more of the gas weapons and other high-power
devices, and then the living corpse-thing lifted itself with a Flux
manifestation into the supporting beams around the Ultimate Paralens,
making its way directly toward the actual surface of the Paralens.

Aradel and Vylyrades would now have pursued immediately, except that
at that moment some more of the strange creatures, having followed
their master’s path into the complex, arrived, forcing them to divide
their attention. A moment of discussion left them with the reluctant
conclusion that Aradel would have to stand the ground against their
attackers, since Vylyrades of the two of them had by far the best
chance to do something about Ahkrinor’s ‘hold’ on the Great Focus.

Even as this was happening, additional combatants arrived, Zadatharion
and a number of his Rhaemyi, already engaged in a running battle with
forces of the Unity, came smashing into the ‘central square’, and
Aradel and Zadatharion met again for the first time in months. There
was little time for greetings or any comparison of notes, however, as
the combat was rapidly escalating with more combatants arriving on all
three sides even as Aradel and Zadatharion met each other in the
middle of the chaos.

In the meantime, Vylyrades was pursuing Ahkrinor through the complex
of beams and girders overhead.

MORE LATER.

LATER.

It took only an instant to actually _do_ what he did, and as soon as
he did Vylyrades, through his vastly amplified perceptions, 'saw' the
gas-charged, high-pressure magma blast up against the 'roof' of the
magma chamber, the impact of that _alone_ shook the entire Island of
Atlantis, from the North Country to the Hidden Bay in the south. The
earthquake that resulted fractured the rock of the island and the
magma came rushing upward through the cracks, amplifying the quakes
and the cracking process.

Vylyrades perceived buildings falling in every city in Atlantis, he
saw waves beginning to form in the seas around the Island, and he saw
that the process was only going to accelerate. A strange calm came
upon him as he perceived this, however. Having just condemned
millions upon millions of people he had never met and who knew nothing
of him or his causes to death, some part of him found it hard to be
overly concerned with the fact that he himself was very shortly going
to be dead.

In the moments left to him, it occurred to Vylyrades to do a few last
things to, and with, his Great Focus, not firmly in his control.
Ahkrinor and the Unity, who had barely been aware of Vylyrades’
presence in their shared connection, had been so caught by surprise
when Vylyrades acted that Ahkrinor had lost its grip on the Focus, and
it had been the effort of an instant for Vylyrades to hurl Ahkrinor
from their perch with a Flux-bolt. Now, he felt oddly detached from
events as he completed his last work with the Focus.

Aradel...
--------------------

As Aradel fought the eight-limbed monsters and the Unity's guards in
the fluid, three-cornered struggle, part of her mind was on
Zadatharion, as the two Avatars coordinated their forces, but another
part of her mind was on the constantly-mounting Flux stress from the
Great Project, and part of her mind was on Vylyrades, working his way
through the web of girders overhead toward Ahkrinor. She managed to
spare a very occasional glance his way as he made his way toward the
quarry they had pursued for so long, but most of her mind was on
keeping her troops alive in the swirl of battle.

When the ground began to shake, suddenly and abruptly, it cause her
just as much by surprise as it did everyone else, including even
Zadatharion, usually an earthquake set off her innate danger sense at
least some minutes before it began, but this caught her completely by
surprise. The ground rocked and shifted, and a strange, eerie sound
filled the air, a sound unlike anything Aradel had ever heard before
even though she had lived through any number of earthquakes during her
millennia in Atlantis.

The sound was indescribable, it was a sound so low-pitched that the
ear could barely make it out, and yet so loud that it made one’s very
bones vibrate in sympathy. It was a sound of rock sliding against
rock, of stone giving way under pressures beyond anything any stone
could endure, it was a sound of the very ground groaning as if in
terrible pain. The earthquake did not stop, it did not slow, it went
on, and on, and on, as seconds turned into minutes, the ground
continued to shake, and the strange sound filled the air.

It was then that the Ultimate Paralens began to flash and glow in a
way no paralens ever should, and then the immense glassine structure
simply exploded with staggering force, filling the air with countless
tiny shards of broken, shattered golden glass!

As one, Aradel and Zadatharion raised their psychokinetic shields,
protecting themselves and those within their reach against the shower
of shattered glass, even as it flayed the very flesh off the bones of
most of the living things in the area. Most of the Rhaemyi and
Aradel’s little band of companions were within the zone of protection,
but the eight-limbed monsters were slain instantly, as were the
Unity’s guards, its fluxons caught up in the explosion...and the
components of the Unity themselves.

Aradel turned her head just in time to see it happen: hundreds of
Unity components, all assembled in one place as they had not done in
centuries, caught by an explosion and a hurricane of broken glass and
psychokinetic force that mowed most of them down in an instant, many
of them reduced to piles of mangled, broken meat by the impact of
razor-sharp shards moving at near-sonic velocities. In one moment of
broken time, Aradel felt the psychic ‘pressure’ of the Unity’s
presence evaporate away to nothing.

So loud had the explosion been that Aradel’s head was still ringing,
even her protected hearing was somewhat affected by the noise. She
rubbed her eyes, keeping her shield up against the presence of glass
dust in the air, even as she looked frantically around for some escape
route, as the ground continued to shake and rock with a longevity no
normal earthquake had ever possessed.

The Watcher...
--------------------

When the Watcher realized what the human was about to do, it came as
close to panic as it was capable of doing. It was not its own
survival that the Eldren feared for, nothing involved in any of this
was potent enough to harm an Eldren in any significant way. What the
Watcher feared, in much, was a repeat of what had happened not even
seventy million planetary orbits previous, when the Earth, the most
fecund, vibrant, and fascinating of the Solarigen biospheres, the
primary source from which the Familiar Eldren had seeded all their
other experimental Solarigen biospheres, had been utterly devastated.

Along with this frustrated fear was another concern, one that would
have been quite foreign to the Watcher even a few thousand orbits
previous, the Watcher was now much more aware of the perspective of
the tiny tool-using beings of the planet, though it and its fellows
had found such beings fascinating, in both their Helian and Solarigen
manifestations, for half a billion years, it was only in the last few
thousands years that the Watcher had given them much thought as
_individuals_, and with that thought had come a certain distant
empathy. In a way it could not have comprehended only fifty thousand
orbits previous, the Watcher wanted to prevent the loss of the lives
of as many of these beings as it could.

Already the Watcher had managed, by great effort of its drowsy will,
to send a summons to its followers, and to have them pass on a request
from the Watcher to the vastly older Eldren who had laid down the
edict of non-intervention over sixty thousand planetary orbits
previous. Now it reached out again, and with its new driving urgency
it touched the awareness of its waking, free followers and through
them, reached out to the Celestial in question, and they made contact,
though the Celestial was not in any great hurry to consider the
matter. Now the Watcher made what in a Homosentient would be called
an impassioned appeal, nearly a pleading, for a release from the
edict, or at least for a dispensation. It was a torment for the
Watcher, because the Celestial saw no urgency and was in no hurry
whatever. Accustomed to thinking on a scale of billions of Earth
orbits, the Adult’s idea of ‘hurry’ might be measured in geological
periods.

The Watcher, however, once accustomed to the same scale of perception,
was now acutely conscious of the passing _seconds_, the window of
opportunity to salvage something from this situation was not long and
might be no more than a few minutes. Even as the Watcher made its
desperate plea, it felt Vylyrades do exactly what he had said he would
do, and through the physical senses of its Avatar, Zadatharion, the
Watcher felt the inevitable consequences begin to unfold, as the
ground began to shake from the released pressures in the vast magmatic
furnace below.

As the precious seconds ticked by, the Watcher waited...

The NEMESIS base...
--------------------

Still safely concealed in a trench off the eastern coast of Atlantis,
not that far from the inlet that led to the Great Tunnel from the
ocean to Atlantica, the hidden mobile base NEMESIS had established
still remained, doing relatively little, but gathering information
from hither and yon constantly for regular reports to its distant
master. Infiltrator robots in various guises watched Atlantis and the
other continents as well, rarely _doing_ anything but constantly
accumulating information.

Indeed, the nemetic brain had not actually _done_ much to intervene in
Atlantean affairs since the murder of the Eldest. Instead it had
waited and watched, observing the complicated consequences of that one
act, and making regular reports to NEMESIS by careful, safe,
clandestine, but all-too-slow methods. The most recent report had
been sent off and new instructions and updates received by floating
laser-buoy to and from a hidden transceiver in space some five decades
previous, and another was not due for about that length of time.
NEMESIS, and its ‘offshoots’, were nothing if not endlessly patient.

When the seafloor nearby began to tremble, the nemetic brain made a
note of it and otherwise ignored it, such things were routine. When
the faint trembling rose into a full seaquake moments later, the
nemetic brain took notice, put its systems on survival alert, and
braced itself for whatever would befall before the quake came to an
end. As the quake went from seconds to over a minute and continued,
the nemetic brain raised its alert status to the highest level,
cranked up its sensors, and tried to ascertain what might be going
on. It was still in the process of this when a massive landslide came
pouring down the underwater ravine, burying the machine in moments,
and fracturing the temperature-sealed container within which the
cryogenically-cold nemetic brain lived. The entity was granted no
more time to realize its time of existence was over than the Eldest
had received, centuries before.

All over Atlantis, various robotic spies suddenly stopped, their
telemetric control interrupted, and began implementing contingency
programming. Though this might have caused some humans to observe
some very peculiar behavior in certain people and animals, few had
time just then to think about such things.

Nalissaar...
--------------------

Nalisaar was bored. Though she had always loved the Games, ever since
her mother had first taken her to watch them when she was nine years
old, today they seemed dreary. She was not quite sure why, perhaps it
was simply that the slaves fighting today were inept, or unmotivated,
they seemed tired, anyway. With things the way they were, it was hard
to get fresh, healthy slaves for the Games on a regular basis, but
still, that was hardly an excuse for putting on a bad show, and if she
lost money on the wagers again, she was not going to be a cheerful
person to deal with.

Her birthday was approaching, she would be thirty-two, and she was not
sure she wanted to spend it with her current mate. On the other hand,
he might not react well if he found out she was already grooming his
replacement...still, it made life interesting.

Nalisaar looked up, there was a strange sound in the air of Atlantica,
something that she could hear, or almost _feel_, even over the roar of
the crowd in the great Games Arena. It was a sound unlike anything
she was familiar with, and she was still straining to discern it even
as the ground began to shake.

MORE LATER.

LATER.

Along with the earthquake and the sinking coastline, the burst of
Static had rendered every paranormal ability useless, only by
completely shutting their minds could any psion function, and attempts
to tap the Flux were futile. Yet the very air tingled with psychic
power, clouds overhead flowed _against the wind_, driven by the Flux
in accordance with impulses no mortal could contain, the waters
twisted and jumped not just from the physical impetus of land and air
but also from less definable but potent sources of force, the Flux
seemed to be running mad.

Even as the surviving ships struggled, unable to aid either the
handful of surviving companions still in the water or each other, one
of them was suddenly shattered into several pieces, by no visible
force.

Southern Atlantis...
--------------------

The battle was over. None of the surviving forces on the field around
the crumbled walls of the what had until a few minutes before been the
central control node of the Great Project were still fighting, though
some still lived. The central facility was now totally undefended,
and none of the former combatants had time to care, all were too busy
merely trying to survive from moment to moment.

Many had been killed by the initial earthquake, and then had come the
blasts of psychokinetic energy as the Ultimate Paralens and then the
lesser paralenses of the central facility had begun to explode, and
then a gale-force wind had risen for no obvious reason, seeming to
come from nowhere and blowing _against_ the direction of motion of the
thickening clouds above, and then the river which flowed through the
area, already swollen with rain from the hurricane, had suddenly
reversed direction as the ocean began to pour up the river, using it
as route to penetrate the southern lowlands. The former field of
battle was now flooding, shallow yet but still coming, and panic had
set in among all the combatants.

The Watcher...
--------------------

The Watcher, more nearly ‘awake’ than at any time in thousands of
years, observed in horror as the sequence of events continued to
unfold, precisely as it had feared, the pressure of the magma below
and the incredible strain on the Flux already conspiring to produce
catastrophe. The Watcher observed volcanic eruptions beginning to
occur along the central spine, spreading southward just as the Great
Eruption of months before had done. Indeed, the pattern was repeating
_because_ the previous Great Eruption had left a particular pattern of
crustal weakness behind, now faced with far greater pressure.

The east coast of Atlantis had subsided slightly in the initial
reaction, the subsidence had paused, though tsunamis were certainly in
motion already, and the Watcher knew that the catastrophe was only
starting, by any measure. Every second that passed was begrudged by
the ancient being now, as it waited impatiently for a decision from on
high.

Zadatharion...
--------------------

Zadatharion’s memories went back over ten thousand years, and never in
all that time could the Avatar remember feeling as utterly, completely
helpless as he did in that moment.

He, Aradel, and those of the Rhaemyi assault force who still lived
were gathered atop a hill of rubble and broken metal and junk, along
with a smattering of the Unity’s forces and ProtoAthenian
expeditionary men, all former quarrels forgotten for the moment as
they sheltered behind the combined psychokinetic shields of Aradel and
Zadatharion. The burst of Static that had stripped everyone else of
their psionic power had left the Avatars able to function, albeit
painfully, the Static continued to ‘roar’ silently, but the Avatars
had enough discipline, experience, and native power to function in
spite of it...for a little while yet, anyway.

It was only a matter of time, though, because the Static was weakening
the two Avatars and the forces they were defending against were only
mounting up. The ground continued to shake periodically with varying
force, making the unstable hillock of shattered rubble shift under
their feet, weakening their concentration, and the waters around the
rubble pile were rising. Both the river flowing down from the
foothills and the ocean waters coming up the riverbed were meeting in
this lowland area, and the situation looked grim.

The North Country...
--------------------

The volcano had been quiet for months, since the Great Eruption had
calmed, now it had burst forth anew, great pyroclastic clouds rolling
down its flanks, larger and more deadly even than the ones from the
previous year, and now the entire western side of the mountain began
to slide, as if some great force had broken the mountain in twain, and
from its exposed interior came an eruption of such force that
everything for twenty-five miles to the west was leveled in a matter
of minutes. Entire towns, that had survived the previous year’s
activity by a hair, were wiped away, blasted down to their
foundations, by the force of the eruption, rivers that had managed to
begin to flow again clogged new, tens of thousands of people lost
their lives in a few minutes.

MORE LATER.

LATER.

The Familiar Eldren arrived on Earth, allowed to approach so close for
the first time in close to seven millennia, to find that their
primary, original Solarigen biosphere was on the verge of a total,
complete disaster on a scale not to be matched since the end of the
Cretaceous Period. The several hundred Eldren immediately set to work
trying to prevent the situation from escalating any further out of
control, a task which was made the more complex by the extreme
_delicacy_ at issue.

The last time the biosphere of the planet Earth was so threatened,
immediately after the impact of the Dinosaur Killer sent by their
unknown opponent, they arrived slightly too late to prevent most of
the damage, they could only try to clean up the mess. This time,
though, they arrived at the _beginning_ of the mass extinction event,
which meant they had a chance to prevent the worst of the damage, _if_
they could balance the necessary factors of speed, decisiveness, and
delicacy.

The Watcher...
--------------------

The Watcher was helpless to lead the Familiar Eldren, as it normally
would have done. Still trapped in near-somnolescence by the Rival’s
misfired trap, the Watcher had expended most of its current ability to
focus is making its appeal to the Celestials and then in directly its
followers into action. Now, it could only issue a last few general
instructions to them, and then trust to the skill and judgement of its
lieutenants to carry them out, and hope for the best.

In the meantime, with the last of its fading consciousness and will,
the Watcher turned its attention to a matter it _could_ still do
something about, the issue of its Avatar. The Watcher had used many
such synthetically-formed biological beings as its ‘eyes and hands’
since the Rival had trapped it, but it had grown rather fond of this
one, and it would be a great deal of work to create a new one...and of
late, it had begun to develop a certain empathy for these tiny,
ephemeral beings, a certain level of sympathy. The Watcher felt it
ought to at least make an effort, before it was forced back to sleep.

Aradel...
--------------------

The water was almost up to the level of their feet, and Aradel herself
was on her hands and knees from sheer exhaustion. The Static simply
continued to intensify, almost as if it were rising toward infinity,
and her powers were fading, exhaustion pushing, and her fellow Avatar,
toward a state of final exhaustion. She was aware that she could not
keep up her part of the protective barrier more than a few more
minutes, and she was sure that her fellow Avatar was in little better
straits. When that shield failed...Aradel knew none of them could
last more than a few seconds under these insane conditions.

The winds were howling with hurricane force now, and changing
direction at random every few moments, driven by the Flux as it
spasmed and shook in reaction to the impossibly complex phenomena now
interacting under, over, and around the Island of Atlantis. Rain
dropped from the clouds in vertical floods, adding to the flow from
the river and the ocean. The ground no longer shook so much as
rocked, rolled, twisted, what psychokinetic power she and Zadatharion
had to spare from their shield was being used up keeping their
unstable mound of rubble from collapsing out from under them, and
still the water rose. To make matters worse, if the Static continued
to intensify, soon their very minds would begin to collapse under the
force of it, as surely as if they had been struck by some overwhelming
telepathic attack.

The Sun had probably set some time before, Aradel thought dazedly,
though there was no way to be sure with the thick cloud cover, it
would have seemed just as dark whether the Sun shone above or not.
They were in utter, pitch darkness, or would have been save that there
was lightning. Lightning! Sheets of lightning, rivers of electrical
fury pouring across the sky with a brilliance such as Aradel had never
seen in thousands of years of memory, cascading blazes of lightning
that turned impenetrable darkness into a scene lit like a nightmare by
blue-white blasts of radiance coming so quickly as to be almost
constant.

When a bolt of that lightning rippled from sky to ground, it blasted
out _craters_ in whatever solid ground it touched, or generated great
clouds of steam when it struck water. Aradel knew that even one
direct or near hit by such lightning, in those sodden conditions,
would instantly overwhelm their shield and kill them all in a blink of
an eye. Under such conditions, exhausted as they were, she knew she
and Zadatharion could not hope to repel such a torrent of energy.

The noise? How to describe such noise? It was a banshee wail of
every hurricane ever to blow, a grinding rumble of every earthquake
ever to shake the land, it was a roar the filled not just the air but
the water and the land and that made every solid object vibrate, it
was a sound that actually made thinking, feeling, even breathing
difficult, a sound that would _itself_ have been dangerous if not for
their fading protective shield.

Then, in the distance to what she suspected dimly was the North, came
another light, dim at first, but growing brighter. It was a red-white
light, a hot glow that she took several moments to place in her foggy
exhaustion. It was the peculiar sort of light that marked the
emergence of lava. The volcanoes to the north were erupting, not with
great pyroclastic surges as they had done a year before, but with
rivers of lava.

‘If this is the end of the world,’ Aradel thought blearily, ‘at least
it’s putting on a show for us as it does!’

Then she actually giggled, drawing incredulous looks from the
terrified people around her, at her own inane, if not indeed insane,
thought. Idly a part of her wondered if she _was_ going insane,
certainly this was the appropriate time, if there had ever been such a
thing. She gasped for air after her giggle, the effort of that little
sound had taken a great deal of what remained of her strength.

“Zad,” she said, “h-how long do you think we have left?”

Her compatriot, who had been sitting back-to-back with her, bracing
their shield with her, made no answer, in fact, he seemed to have
stopped moving entirely, sitting there still as a statue.

“Zad?” Aradel asked again, raising her voice as much as her remaining
strength would permit, which brought it up to barely more than a
whisper. “You still with me?”

She knew he had to be, because their shield was still, just barely,
holding. Without his help, it would be gone, and with it them.
Still, he was not responding to her words or motions. At all.

“Come on, Zad,” Aradel managed to get out over the howl of the wind
and the rain and the lightning, “if this is our last few moments, at
least talk to me!”

For a moment she thought he was not going to respond, and began to
wonder if even he had lost it, his mind broken, a thought she found
scarcely credible. She had known him for centuries, and she was quite
sure that anything that could break him would break her first. In
fact, she had never met _anyone_ she believed had as much sheer will
as Zadatharion. Still, his did seem to have gone catatonic, if not
for the fact that he was still holding up his part of their combined
shield, she would have been sure of it.

Then, suddenly, Zadatharion did speak, but when he did his voice
sounded strange, it was his voice, all right, but at the same time it
was somehow indefinably _different_, calmer, even colder, perfectly
inflected without a hint of feeling or imprecision. It was also
_stronger_ than Zadatharion’s voice had been in hours, without a trace
of fear, anxiety, or nervousness.

“Everyone get ready,” he intoned, “in a few moments a psi-gate is
going to open, and if you want to live, you _have_ to get through it,
it’ll only be open for a few moments and then it’ll be gone and if
you’re still on this side when it does you are _dead_.”

Aradel gasped, and gaped in shock and disbelief. Perhaps he _had_
gone mad!

Then, to her stunned amazement, the darkness was broken, not by the
blue-white flame of the impossibly great lightning flashes and not by
the hot glow of some new tongue of lava, but instead by a cool sparkle
of polochromatic light, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand brilliant
pinpoints of rainbow color, emerging from a single point in the midst
of the tiny group and expanding into a swirling circle of light, and
within that ring of light appeared a dimly-lit forest of fir trees!

She gaped for an instant, before the realization penetrated her nearly-
numb brain that Zadatharion had been right, and she screamed, “GO!
Get through it before it closes!”

The survivors staggered toward the circle, stumbling through it,
running through it, a couple had to be dragged through it, Aradel
wanted to cross it herself so badly she hurt with it, but she made
herself wait, until the less physically-capable were through it, and
then she headed for it, and in the moment of passing through it she
fell to the ground in exhaustion, amid the water that came through the
gate after her, and finally, last of all, even as the gate was
beginning to collapse, Zadatharion stepped calmly through as if
nothing of any significance were occurring.

The gate collapsed almost the moment Zadatharion was through it...and
he immediately passed out on the ground, utterly and completely
unconscious.

MORE LATER.

LATER.

To say that the Cataclysm was over is slightly misleading, however.
From the point of view of the Eldren, the primary threat of mass
extinction was over after fourteen days, but to the surviving humans
the nightmare continued. Vast reaches of the world were devastated,
on every continent. Atlantis itself was now totally uninhabited,
scoured down to bedrock, and still slowly sinking as the Eldren
drained the vast magma chamber below the Island. Elsewhere, rivers
were swollen to many times their natural size, or else drying out as
their water was removed. Lakes had drained and new ones formed, and
the very climate was different now, alternating between immoderate
cold and searing heat, flooding rains and killing drought.

The Familiar Eldren had not been given permission to act freely. They
had only a few hundred orbits of the planet Earth around its primary
before the edict of nonintervention was restored. In that time,
guided by the will of the barely-awake Watcher, the Eldren had to
restore Earth’s balance sufficiently that it would remain on track
once they were out of the equation once again.

In truth, by the previous standards of the Familiar Eldren, the only
thing that _had_ to be done to put the mostly intact Terran biosphere
into a ‘safe zone’ was the removal of the sealed mantle-plume that lay
under Atlantis. As such things went, this one was _tiny_, without
previous Eldren intervention it would have created, at most, a tiny
island smaller than Iceland. Now, the Familiar Eldren worked deep
within the Earth, rerouting this plume, drawing its heat away from the
surface and dissipating it throughout the immense mass of the Earth.
As this happened, the bulge of crust which had held Atlantis above the
surface of the sea began to subside, and the waters slowly engulfed
the Island, which the Eldren proceeded to ‘dismantle’ as part of their
plan to reroute the ocean currents and to rebalance the distribution
of mass on the Earth’s crust to help suppress the remaining after-
effects of the Cataclysm.

Five centuries after the Cataclysm, Atlantis, as a land mass, had
ceased to exist. The Familiar Eldren restored the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
to an approximation of the state it would have held had they never
intervened in its substructure to begin with. They proceeded with
care to make sure their impact on the shaky climate and ocean-state
was minimal, though some side-effects along the coasts were
inevitable. [1]

The rest of what the Familiar Eldren did was mostly because of the
Watcher’s newfound, if very distant, empathy for mortal humanity.
During their period of activity on Earth, the Familiar Eldren ‘cleaned
up’ much of the aftermath of the Cataclysm. The damage done by
volcanic activity, superstorms, earthquakes and superfloods and the
other damage of the Cataclysm was in much reversed, the healing of the
biosphere that would normally have taken tens or hundreds of thousands
of years was reduced to a few centuries.

By the time the Edict was restored and the Familiar Eldren had to
retreat back to the perimeter, Earth was in many ways healed from the
damage through their intervention. Many scars remained, but they were
such that natural processes could repair much of it in a relatively
few more centuries.

For the humans, though, the centuries after the Great Cataclysm were a
horrific time even so. A global population of well over a billion had
been reduced, first by the Cataclysm and then by the aftermath, to
several tens of millions. A civilization had perished, the energies
released into the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere had
destroyed entire cities so completely that there was _nothing_ left
recognizable as the work of Man in some places, and in other places
the Flux had, during its strange rampage, focused on population
centers more than wilderness and rural areas.

The survivors of the Cataclysm and the period of starvation, thirst,
predation, disease, and chaos found themselves without tools,
equipment, or knowledge, in a hostile world, still filled with the
after-effects, physical and paraphysical, of the Cataclysm. Life in
those centuries was one long, unending struggle to survive, just
survive, and almost the entire multi-millennia legacy of the
Antediluvian Age was forgotten, save for some confused legends and
stories that rapidly degenerated into pure myth and folk tale.

But about that, and the other after-effects of the Cataclysm (of which
there were many), are the subject of another coming thread.

The END (of this thread)

[1] That the Eldren could do such a thing is one indication of just
how powerful they are.