Fade to Dust

Doomlord Pereid sat motionless in her sandstone throne. All but her eyes were concealed by the mask of her office, glaring at the air in front of her. Tiny rivulets of grey dust slid from her shoulders, down her back and chest with the almost imperceptible movements of her breathing, forming small hills in her lap. On the quasi-elemental plane of Dust the fine particles were nearly all-pervasive, making travel seem like swimming through an endless sea of grey-brown dust. But here in the Doomguard’s Citadel the effect was lessened so that the dust became only a constant presence, collecting on anything which remained motionless for more than a few minutes.


Beneath her fingers, the throne felt rough and gritty. It was fashioned from pure dust, cemented into the shape of an undecorated throne by magic. Even in the furthest depths of this plane of existence, the dust was not pure; other elements strayed from their own planes through conduits or vortexes, polluting this one. Pure dust, or any pure element for that matter, was a rare occurrence. The magic which had shaped the throne also connected it to the underlying ebbs and flows of power and energy within the plane, and her through it as well.

As her essence rode the pathways of power, drifting with the flows of raw elemental energy, a small corner of her mind wondered idly how long she had been sitting there. Time seemed meaningless when she meditated on the nature of entropy. It was truly beautiful, she mused. It was the resting place of existence, the final destination. Stone crumbles and erodes, metal corrodes and breaks, life dwindles and dies. When the last pebble finally disintegrates into nothing and releases its hold on existence, entropy’s purpose will at last have been fulfilled.

Suddenly an alien presence rippled across the fabric of the plane, causing Pereid’s muscles to jerk and sending up a cloud of disturbed dust. Her fingers gripped the arms of the throne with white knuckles. She convulsed again as pain ripped through her mind, cascading down her arms and legs. An involuntary cry escaped her unseen lips and she arched her back in agony, lifting her body away from the stone. If not for her death-grip on the arms of the throne, it seemed she might be thrown into the air by the force of her convulsions.

Something was pulling at the lines of power that crisscrossed the plane of Dust, dragging the entire plane of existence along with them. As the very nature of the plane was being altered, the intimate connection she shared with it through the throne forced her psyche to follow. Before, the throne had only given her a general sense of the plane’s nature and energies, but now she could now sense every nuance of the entire plane of existence. The infinite span of dust, spanning the bridge between the planes of Earth and Negative Energy, was forced into the narrow confines of her mind.

Even in all the pain, Pereid reveled in the sensation. She was confronted with the seamless perfection of the plane, the patterns hidden within the shifting dust. It was everything she had envisioned. This was why she had come to the Citadel of Dust, why she had become Doomlord. She loved the perfection of dust. The other citadels maintained by the Doomguard were useless. Salt, Vacuum, and Ash, none of them expressed entropy more succinctly than Dust. The universe would end in a climax of shapeless dust.

And as she beheld that beauty, enveloped in her own world of cold white pain, it was destroyed. Something was grasping those lines of power and pulling them. It seemed as if the very fabric of reality would be torn asunder. Patterns were broken apart and pieced back together. The endless network of conduits and vortexes was stretched nearly to the breaking point and forced into new shapes. The tiny corner of her mind which always remained lucid during her meditations realized that she was screaming.

Then as suddenly as it had come, the force withdrew its influence from the plane. As a taunt bowstring suddenly released, the foundations of reality snapped back into place. The changes, made in violation of the plane’s very nature, fell apart once the driving force behind them ceased. Similarly, the increased awareness which had been forced upon Pereid’s mind was no longer able to hold itself within the confines of her limited consciousness.

The Doomlord’s fingers lost their hold on the throne, and she fell forward to lay on the stone dais it rested upon. For several minutes she lay gasping for breath on the dust-covered floor. When she finally felt the strength return to her limbs, she slowly stood. Her throat felt raw from screaming. Every muscle was cramped, and she saw that her fingernails were bent back and bleeding from digging them into the throne.

Looking down to the concave floor before the dais of her throne, Pereid was surprised to see the eight Lesser Doomlords who served beneath her in the Citadel. They stood huddled together, their unsure eyes visible through their own masks. “How long?” she rasped at them.

After a long pause one of the eight stepped hesitantly forward. “You’ve been screaming for nearly six hours, Lord Pereid,” he said. From his voice, Pereid recognized him as Swieg. She made a mental note of the man’s courage.

Taking a quick inventory of her body’s condition, Pereid decided that six hours was a likely amount of time. As fast as she dared, she descended the steps to the floor, forcing her sore and weakened legs to move by sheer willpower. The eight masked figures parted for her as she walked through them.

“Expedition, you prepare,” she said, pointing to Swieg. She wanted to see if her estimation of the man was correct.

They were all familiar with her broken speech, and Swieg hesitated only a moment before asking, “What type of expedition, Lord Pereid?”

Pereid allowed her cracked lips to form a small smile beneath her mask. If she had asked any of the others they would have immediately agreed and made their best guess rather than questioning her. “Fully searching, provisions of a month.”

The swish of cloth behind her signaled his bow. “As you command, Doomlord.”

As the Lesser Doomlords silently filed out through the misshapen door of the throneroom. Pereid looked to one of the wide horizontal windows. The all-pervasive dust outside the citadel churned and blew in the aftermath of the assault on reality. The inumerable layered planes of existence had not escaped unscathed from their violation. In those last moments of her connection to the dust, she had felt something uncovered by the tumult. Something that had been hidden, lost, and now all but forgotten.
 
Apeiron.