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PART ELEVEN
It's all gone wrong. She can tell from the quiet.
Rips are... explosive. The force of tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time is enough to set off a stream of natural disasters, and yet... nothing. She's afraid to open her eyes, just in case she's become deaf and senseless to the world. Taking a deep breath, she opens them a crack and squints out in that funny way people do when they don't want to look at something.
Shaman has gone.
Just... gone. All around her is a pulsing, blue-back starfield, twinkling mysteriously but otherwise almost completely empty. Almost. Strangely, she's facing what appears to be a long, wide corridor of heavy wooden doors. She seems to be standing on nothing, yet she isn't using magic to sustain her position. Nervous but intrigued, Aura approaches one of the doors and wriggles the doorhandle, but despite her best efforts it won't open - not even when she tries to use divinity on it. And yet - and yet other beings are coming in and out of those doors. Horses and wolves, humans and fairies and all other manner of strange creatures, large and small, realistic and mythical - including some she's never come across before. Only one of the doors - the one directly behind her - is marked; a large 'S' is carved into its handle. Aura has the strangest feeling that only she can see that 'S', and that to anyone else looking at the door it is simply a door; just as those other doors the other creatures seem to recognise instantly are nothing but doors to her. S for Shaman. She places her palm over the handle and turns it; the door responds instantly to her touch and swings easily open, revealing nothing but blackness. Taking a deep breath, Aura passes through to the other side...
...and reappears in an orchard. There are no orchards in Shaman, she's reasonably sure... certainly none like this. It seems to expand forever, and the apple and fig and plum trees are all in perfect lines and planted a perfect distance from one another. There doesn't seem to be any life, apart from the little brown and red-breasted robins flying around and chirping to one another. The trees are heavily laden with fruit swollen far beyond their natural size, bursting with sugary sweetness. Aura takes an uncertain step forward and starts in shock as the ground shifts and swirls all around her, reappearing as a place she recognises - Mahogany Forest. She closes her eyes and shakes her head.
'I need to get out,' she thinks desperately, 'how do I get out of here?'
When she opens her eyes again she's standing in the Silver Cove opposite a strange hole in the air; through the hole, which is roughly the size and shape of a doorway, the orchard winks at her. Behind the orchard-room is the rip - a great, black mass, swirling and glimmering and even twinkling as the occasional star shines through. Beyond that there's... nothing. The rip had been explosive; she hadn't felt it because somehow, she'd managed to create it around her and suck herself through it. The cliffs have completely collapsed, destroying not only the Old Ruins, the Shrine and the Desolate Plains (all located on or in the bluffs) but also Land's End, since the flying rocks had to go somewhere. The shape of the coastline has been ripped apart - changed forever. Rather than close the rip, Aura kicks her heels into the sand and shoots into the air, flying back across the island.
She'd succeeded in opening a rip, but it doesn't lead to Earth. Aura has heard of Stargrounds before but has never visited one... they are a kind of neutral area between worlds, where residents of different worlds can interact and mingle but not cross over into each other's worlds. The funny orchard, which actually sits inside Shaman, must have been generated from the rip's magic. Correcting that little mishap could take a great deal of time which she doesn't have - it's better to simply go somewhere else and try to set up the right rip, then deal with the first one later. 'It's incredible,' Aura muses to herself as she soars over the land, 'that one can get to be as old as I and still come across something new and unseen.'
She lands in the Mirror Tributaries, somewhere near the border to Shingle Brook. Here is as good a place as any. Determined to get it right this time, Aura summons her magic once more and lifts her hands to the air. Divinity responds instantly, but it's like trying to convince a naughty child to hold her hand while crossing the road; it slides in her grasp and would occasionally slip away altogether if she weren't grimly clinging onto it. As the fabric of space and time gradually tears apart beneath her fingertips, she can feel the earth trembling and splitting under her feet. She grits her teeth, trying desperately to hold it together, but the earthquake is already rippling across Shaman. Through her connection with the earth, Aura can feel Sunburst Coast actually break away from the mainland and slip into the ocean. Mirror Tributaries has shattered, Shingle Brook is breaking up and the volcano at Falcon Point has exploded once more, sealing that territory's doom.
The strain on her magic and physically on her body is unbearable. When she can stand it no longer, Aura slices off the supply to her divinity and shoots up into the air, unwilling to be caught on a land which is tearing itself apart. When she reaches a safe distance, she takes a deep breath and looks down at the great black rip which now occupies the space where the three territories of Mirror Tributaries, Shingle Brook and Falcon Point once were. Through the rip she can see a smidgen of blue - just a glimpse of Earth.
Although she knows she shouldn't, she lets a little smile creep across her face. "Calling Houston," she mutters, "Operation Kemet is go."
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