Back to the palace for reinforcements

The rift pulsed obscenely, tendrils of eldritch energy crackling across its surface like St. Elmo's fire on a savage sea. Each convulsion widened the unholy aperture, the very air around it shimmering and distorting.

Eleanor gripped her sword's leather-bound hilt until her knuckles turned white, the rain-guard across its razor edge glinting in the harsh sunlight. To her left, Shane shifted his weight uneasily, eyes narrowed against the disturbing phenomenon.

"So..." His usually sardonic tone was subdued, laced with uncharacteristic trepidation. "I take it this little light show isn't part of the scheduled interdimensional peace talks?"

Despite the pit of dread gnawing at her core, Eleanor flashed him a humorless smirk. "In my experience, uninvited cosmic incursions rarely bode well for continued diplomacy."

A thunderous bellow, louder than any beast should be capable of, ripped across the slums like a cannon's roar. The queen's guards flinched, gripping their pikes tighter as their disciplined ranks wavered.

Eleanor refused to let her own Resolution falter. She straightened, lifting her chin in grim defiance as the rift's unstable edges thrashed wider still. From deep within its core, something monstrously large began to stir awake.

First, tentacles thicker than tree trunks undulated outwards in grotesque, boneless rhythms. Their scaled, chitinous lengths shuddered and twitched with spasmodic strength, slick with vile ichor that sprayed in ropey arcs with each convulsion.

Eleanor felt the first sickening lurch of dread clench her stomach. Not tentacles...appendages. The forward harbingers of some unspeakably enormous entity.

More and more of the fleshy, quivering tendrils whipped forth through the rift's dilating nexus. They lashed and coiled with a dread sequence, searching...questing for a purchase in this world where they did not belong.

The closest ones snapped out towards the Queen's defensive perimeter with blurring swiftness. Eleanor's sharpened instincts alone saved her from being impaled; she hurled herself aside just as one serrated appendage sliced past with grotesque power.

Her guards were not so fortunate. The aberrant tendrils tore through their rigid ranks like a rapacious scythe, shredding heavy plate and mail in sprays of crimson. Grown men's anguished screams mingled with the deafening shrieks of tortured steel as the lashing appendages flung broken bodies in all directions.

"Pull back!" Sir Roderick's gravelly bellow cut through the pandemonium, equal parts terror and unbending discipline. "To me, you dogs!"

His words choked off in a gurgling rale as an entire bank of spasming tentacles smashed into the knot of knights around him. Like grasping hands of some profane god, they coiled and constricted with horrific force, instantly reducing the metal-clad warriors to so much pulp in their mailed cylinders.

Eleanor could only stare numbly for a moment, one hand pressed to her mouth as her steeled stomach finally heaved. Shane gripped her shoulder hard, snapping her out of her daze as the dwindling remnants of her personal guard broke ranks in blind panic.

"Fall back, Your Majesty! Fall back to the palace while we still can!" The engineer spun them both and shoved her into a stumbling run, his own blade coming up warily.

Eleanor chanced one look over her shoulder at the escalating chaos. Amidst the lashing, snapping tentacles, a new horror had begun emerging ponderously from the rift's core.

An immense, convex eye, easily fifty feet across. No pupil or discernible iris - simply a depthless, oily disk of abyssal darkness. Slowly, hideously, it squirmed and pressed forward through the containment breach, polycular cilia wriggling across its repulsive surface.

No mouth articulated the bone-rattling THRUM of unmistakable AWARENESS that rumbled out in merciless pulses. But Eleanor felt that primal call of ancient, implacable malice resonate through every fiber of her being.

This...entity, this profane interloper...it PERCEIVED their pitiful world. Hungered for it in ways no mortal mind could comprehend. And its initial, slithering tendrils were but the vanguard of its threshing, world-devouring bulk.

Jarring her leaden feet into haste, Eleanor fled alongside Shane towards the looming silhouette of her palace in the distance. Behind them, fresh screams tore through the slum as more and more tentacles whipped out from the ever-widening rift.

One defiant cry rose above the carnage momentarily before being silenced forever: "The wards! Somebody hold at the wards unti--" Then, wet, pulverizing finality.

Eleanor fought the full-body shudder threatening her composure. The wards...if the initial barricades had been breached, then what hope did her kingdom's deeper defensive magics have against such an invasive, cosmic force?

Shane seemed to sense her trepidation as they hurtled headlong through the winding slum streets. "Don't worry, Your Majesty! Once back at the castle, I can activate the--" he trailed off.

Ahead of them, the ornate walls encircling her royal demesne simply...ceased to exist. One moment looming defiantly, ancient wardings thrumming with protective power. The next, an absence, a hungering void in reality itself as the monumental castle simply UNMADE itself in an implosive wink of annihilated existence.

Eleanor stumbled, staggering to a halt as vertigo tilted her senses. Where the indomitable heartfortress of her rule should have been, radiant and inviolable...there was now only a shuddering, unstable aperture of featureless erasure.

A localized black hole scouring everything into seamless oblivion, ablating the very atoms which had comprised that hallowed sanctum of civilization. All trace of her ancestral keep unmade, leaving only a choking, anti-reality wound in its place.

Eleanor's stricken whimper was drowned out as a fresh, deafening HOWL Of INFURIATED HUNGER blasted outwards. The ringing, telepathic summons of implacable gulfs beyond comprehension, forcing her to her knees.

She pressed her hands over ears that bled in sympathy, Shane beside her doing the same. The ground itself quaked and heaved as the cyclopoid appendages renewed their multitudinous, slithering advance with fanatic zeal.

All across the dissolving slumscape, the indescribable tentacles whipped down in profane frenzy, smashing and pulping every dwelling, eviscerating every soul still staggering in their path. They raked wantonly through hospitals and orphanages alike, shredding all in an obscene obliteration without even detectable malice.

Simply a single, all-consumping purpose to unmake and un-exist all that stood before them.

DISOPTION, Eleanor's rattled mind somehow supplied through the gibbering unreality. The absurd term emerged from some insensate, alien pocket of her fracturing awareness.

Disoption. The annihilative meta-disposition of a higher universal entity to not simply consume or destroy...but to recursively UNMAKE layered reality itself down to its most foundational, codified levels.

Whatever that blasphemous, cyclopean THING was that now manifested through the rift with its gnashing, undulant ...it did not seek mere devastation of her world.

Its existence rendered all contingencies and continuities before it to a null state. Its eldritch, trans-entropic passage left no wake of destruction to rebuild upon, only where all causal substance had been UNMADE.

Eleanor pressed her brow to the disintegrating ground, cowering in blank despair as the city's remaining bulwarks were methodically UNSCULPTED into a vacuum of decay. No horror epics or Apocalyptic myths could have braced her for such totality of negation.

Her kingdom, her bloodline, her very world reduced to not even ashes beneath this unrelenting, cosmic inevitability. She clenched her stinging eyes shut, simply waiting for the final UNHAULING to eclipse her own annihilated existence.

"Eleanor!"

Shane's hoarse cry snapped her eyes open in shock. She hadn't heard her given name from his lips in...had he EVER addressed her so informally?

The engineer had crawled on top of her, pinning her to the shuddering ground as all around them, reality itself sheared away in unstable, profane hieroglyphics. His face was scant inches from hers, eyes wide with desperation.

"You have to listen! There's still...a chance!" His words fought to reach her through the oscillating, unreal roars reverberating from the eldritch rift.

"I can override this! Rewrite the up converting matrices before they cascade any further!" His breath was hot on her cheek, achingly human and lucid despite the madness overwriting their plane of existence.

Eleanor blinked, a last spark of hope rekindling despite the utter clawing at the very atmosphere around them. She seized Shane's tunic in trembling fists.

"Yes! DO IT! Anything, I--"

Somewhere beneath the gnawing, reality-flensing din, a thunderous crack resounded...then another...and another in rapid, spitfire cadence. Concussive compression punches displacing all surrounding matter in miniature, percussive flashes of annulled vacuum reaction.

Shane’s eyes went wide, staring off sightlessly over Eleanor's shoulder. A gaping wound blossomed across his sternum, puncturing through to the other side painfully.

"Nn--no..." His voice was barely a whisper, garbled gouts of blood spilling over Eleanor's ashen cheeks. Shane's expression locked into stunned rictus as the first shot found its mark.

Then a full mag-buckler opened up, a streaking red fusillade ripping into his body in an eruption of supersonic shrapnel. The once mighty engineer was blown backwards off Eleanor in a rag-doll tangle of eviscerated, tumbling remnants.

A harsh ringing filled Eleanor's ears as she stared numbly at the vacancy where Shane had been a split-second ago. Shock deadened her senses so thoroughly that she barely registered the footfalls rapidly surrounding her prone form.

Combat boots marched into her narrowing tunnel vision. Strange, quasi-formed humanoids in tactical armor, cartridges still smoking from their angled emission casters.

Eleanor managed to tilt her head back despite her jellied muscles, locking eyes with the faceless soldiers as they snapped their weapons towards her in differing, staggered trajectories.

One stood apart from the angular strike team, armored bulk broader, heavier. Some droning, parasitic rapport crawled along the edge of Eleanor's consciousness as it regarded her coldly through an opaque visor.

"Identity: Confirmed. Authorization to dispatch Target ELEANOR-A1 and wipe board 281-8900ZaY4..." A rhythmic sonoritic warble like speech engines engaging.

A snap-hiss of compressed ordinance cycled then depressed from a rotational caster rising towards her. Eleanor didn't have the strength left to flinch away.

She simply met the pitiless, alien gaze with her own dull stare as the terminal HEAT washed over her in world-shattering, flesh-unmade finality.

And somewhere beyond the threshold of being, she knew that a final, ancient purpose had at last been served...

Eleanor spurred her horse into a gallop, racing back towards the imposing silhouette of her palace in the distance. The slums and surrounding squalor fell away behind her as she and her dwindling escort of guards pounded across the arid scrublands.

She risked a glance over her shoulder. That nightmarish rift still pulsed in the city's heart, widening with each grotesque convulsion. Flashes of blurred, unspeakable motion within its core betrayed the initial emergence of...whatever cosmic entity was using it as a bridgehead into her reality.

The sight sent a fresh frisson of dread lancing down Eleanor's spine. She wheeled her head forward again, focusing on the castle's rapidly nearing battlements with a white-knuckled grip on her saddle's pommel.

If that...thing managed to fully manifest on her world, no brick or bar would halt its annihilative procession, of that she was grimly certain. But her kingdom's capital wasn't undefended - its sanctums housed eldritch armaments of last resort, secreted away for just such an existential contingency.

Lost civilizations had bequeathed forgotten technologies to the royal archives over the ages. Weapons and wards that could, in theory, counterbalance even the most cataclysmic of extra-dimensional incursions. She had to reach the vaults and activate those doomsday safes before the rift vomited its malignant intruder fully into her world.

The towering portcullis opened at their thundering approach, Eleanor and her mounted escorts clattering over the deep rock-grooved drawbridge. Dismounting in a clatter of plated boots, she whirled to address the rampart's officers.

"You there! Deputy Marshal!" She barked out the name of her fortification's second, a graying lifer with stocky build and jaw like an anvil. "With me at once! And summon the under-armorer from the vaults!"

The man's bushy eyebrows shot up but he gave a curt nod, clearly recognizing the naked urgency in her tone and manner. "At once, Your Majesty!" He wheeled, bellowing for runners to retrieve the sworn powder monkey to join them.

Eleanor stalked across the courtyard, resisting the urge to break into a full run unseemly for monarchs. Shane stuck close at her shoulder, features taut with grim trepidation.

"Whatever sort of armafolik or fundamentors you've got squirreled away, I just hope to high hell they're up to the task," he muttered lowly, eschewing his usual gallows humor. "After what we've both seen...I shudder to think of the sort of extinction event that thing was trying to set into being."

Eleanor shot him a sidelong glance, surprised by his frankly spooked demeanor. Shane always came across as the quintessential cavalier technocrat, dodging and wisecracking through even the direst of straits - to see him so visibly rattled gave her pause.

With effort, Eleanor straightened her spine as they entered the gatehouse foyer. She would NOT show any of her own rising panic before her arms men.

"Rest assured, my chief armorer and her predecessors prepared for any contingency, no matter how...cosmic." She carefully measured her tone as the squat form of Chief Under-Armorer Kalina joined them at a half-trot.

The grizzled little hawthorn's eyes were pinpricks in her parchment face, already analyzing the situation for which of her esoteric caches would be required.

"Your Highness! The rift in the city, I saw it from the parapets. What are we dealing with?" She wheezed it out without preamble, hands twisting together anxiously.

Eleanor exchanged a sobering look with Shane before leveling her gaze fully on Kalina's. "Potentially the unhinging of all known reality within this plane. I want our deadliest, most archaic instruments of denial readied immediately. No system is off the table."

The under-armorer sucked in a sharp breath but otherwise kept her poise admirably. With a grave nod, she turned to shamble deeper into the armory vault maze, barking terse summons for her staff to execute the revered Protocrisis protocols.

The group moved at a furious pace through the dust-shrouded antechambers, Eleanor in the lead. Her guards and Deputy Marshal struggled to keep up as she diverted down ancillary passages, relying on her own recollection of the deepest vaults to guide them.

After several tense minutes of descent, their path sloped into an obscenely vast open chamber, hewn from the very bedrock of the continent. Eleanor felt her composure waver and her step falter when she beheld the raw cosmic might housed within.

Sculptured warding engines etched with the most profound reality topology she had ever laid eyes upon channeled beams of coherent probability through a radiant gyre.

But it was the central artifact that shook Eleanor to her core: a towering machine comprised of interlocked yet flawlessly levitating segments of incongruent mineral alloys and densities. Its surface perpetually shifted in geometric patterns of dimensionstrific complexity, playing host to infinitessential gauge phase transitions.

"It...it can't be," Shane's hushed rasp broke the cathedral silence. "That's a true genius omega resonator...I thought they were just a hyper-theorized construct! These things haven't existed since the--"

"Sixth Archon convocation, in my dynasty's earlier epochs," Eleanor completed the thought with furrowed brow. "We are two of perhaps a dozen souls now living who have laid eyes upon their handiwork."

She turned to regard her chief armorer and deputy marshal with an expression of grave solemnity as they joined them.

"The aperture Kalina saw...it represents not merely an ontological tear but a RECURSION INVERSION in our native reality dimensions. A clear and present threat to all that exists."

Eleanor took a fortifying breath, hands finding the hilts of her ceremonial Tempest blades as she faced the towering abyssal diadem system.

"So I want every exotic faculty, every PARA-CONSTRUCTOR and planar inversion chamber primed and brought violently online.”

The response was immediate. Klaxons began blaring, accompanied by the stamps of heavy armored boots transiting the vaults in chaotic patterns across the flagstones.

Technicians ran frantic final diagnostics as knights and arms-soldiers assembled containment phalanxes around the central Omega array. The lightning ports spat and hissed with preliminary ionic light discharges.

Eleanor moved to stand before the central platen, palming a pair of ornamental projection plates at the control dais. Readouts flickered to bio-animus warmth in the proto-astric cogniters of the hyper shunt impact matrices.

"If that breach is NOT resealed within sixty minutes...we'll have no choice but to execute The Exclusion Protocol in totality." She spoke solemnly, lilac eyes tracking the chaotic assembly around her as reality's edge approached.

Shane remained at her side, expression drawn and pale. But Eleanor could see his blistered technician's fingers already sketching intercept computations in the shimmering air.

Somewhere in the distance, a thunderous rapport signaled the preliminary phase transitionals breaching ballistic above even the howling sirens. Eleanor curled her fingers around the firing stones, watching the ever-increasing bright fury flash across the walls.

Her brow furrowed, chapped lips murmuring under her breath to any deity that would listen as the power cyclers reached their killing potential:

"Here our surrender breaks eternal..."