Magnum Opus

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:root{
--header-title:"STILLBORN SKIES";
--header-subtitle:"STUNTED EARTH, DEADLOCKED SEAS ";

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|name=Poltatherian]]

If you enjoyed this consider checking out my [[[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/poltatherian-s-pelagic-pantry  |Author Page :)]]]

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[[module css]]
:root{
--header-title:"STILLBORN SKIES";
--header-subtitle:"STUNTED EARTH, DEADLOCKED SEAS ";

}

[[/module]]





++ 29.5, 9.43, 32, 23, 17.8, 3.





You wake up to the smell of burning flesh. You begin shifting in the bed, your dirty clothes from last night twist uncomfortably. You look up to see the morning sun shining on the walls through a slight slit in the curtains. Youre mind shifts to the smell at hand, the slight itching in your right ear causing youre hands to clasp it. Said hand immediately recoils at the heat; you practically jump out of your bed onto the floor. Your vision finally adjusting to the Odd-Orichalcum pyramid reflecting sunlight directly towards your ear.


Feeling exhausted from the interruption to your necessary sleep, you decide to go through with your morning routine regardless. You take from the empty kitchen sink exactly one-half cup of water to wash your mouth, the bright purple line in the cup denoting how much to pour. You walk to a --random-- patch of grass in your backyard garden. Posing with your hands down right before smacking a wind charm with your backhand. The resulting sonic booms shake the grease off your brain as you go back to your bedroom, the curtains now fully open.


You bite down on your wrist, the time exactly what you expected. You don't bother to gather any mana to redo things. Whats done is done after all, today should prove that. Prove it to all of Three Portlands. Prove it to the school. Prove it to you.



You begin to review the writings on your walls, the leather you wrote it on angled at a perfect 90 degrees. All the poems, equations, and calculations are the work of a madman to even the most pretentious of Mages. You continue to do this for five hours, five minutes, and five seconds.



The timer eventually sounds inside your soul, and you let out a sigh right when it does. The exhuasting youve become so used to weighing heavier than usual. You begin to walk around youre house, ripping all of the writing from the walls. You roll them up perfectly as you stack them on your car's trunk. The car's been with you for so long, you dont even remember what it was called. Not like you wanted to, the working is done better with a brain clear of the self. Grabbing your phone off the counter, you turn it off silent. A torrent of notification sounds floods your ears as you try to read all of them.


Everyone worried about you, but it's fine. Today will carve your name in the minds of all mages; there's no turning back now.



 A finality washes over you, wrapped in a metaphorical sheet of pride and doubt. You get in your car, turning to look back on your house one last time before driving away.

It's not there.


++ 29.5, 9.43, 32, 23, 17.8, 3.




The dry roads of Three Portlands feel warmer than usual. You suppose it's been a while since the place got so much sun. You dangle one arm out of the car, your body taking in the refreshing breeze. Despite that, you can't seem to get that knot out of your stomach, you hope itll leaves on its own after the work is finished. But youre not one to take any chances, so you begin to delve into the core of your troubles.





One fireball fired upwards every day.




It was such a simple idea back then, a spell that went on forever. After your many achievmtns you wanted to give back something to everyone who helped you get this far. And you decided on a permanent monument. It would have been directly connected to the core of Three Portlands, youre bludgening friendship with the mayor would make that possşbel. You hoped it would be studied by man or magister, be a love letter to everything you had built your life around.



So you began working, day in, day out. You met with professors you hadn't seen in decades and so-called monsters you thought you'd killed. Gathered every piece of magical knowledge you had ever memorized and more. Begged every librarian who could understand you for pure knowledge. From the Head Archivists to the laymages.
They gave you shortcuts, illusions that could fool the dimensions themselves, spells that could last for a trillion billion years. But that's not what you wanted, for what you truly wished for was something truly unknown. Not the faux "mystery" the wizards at highroller tables clang on to, no. You needed something truly otherworldly, something so inexplicable only you could make sense of the madness, something truly....anomalous. And eventually, you found.


You suppose "found" isn't the best way to put it. As there was no single discovery that held as the crux of your masterwork. No, it was the collective hopes, dreams, and anxieties of countless mages gathered into a purely consistent formula.



You left your foot off the gas pedal as the car approached a decrepit diner. Apperantly the Ambrose location here was shut down over backlash from a workers' union a few years back. However, since the restaurant was in such a rural location, they never really bothered to demolish it. (Though you suppose the underground drug deals didn't help with the process either.) You carefully pull over to the empty driveway, angling the car exactly 90 degrees. You take a deep breath before pushing the gas and brakes at the same time, the waypoint you had set up there long before opening up right beneath you.



++ 29.5, 9.43, 32, 23, 17.8, 3.



Staring at the vibrant meadows you appeared in, your mind drifts further and fuırther down itself.


You remember the last official victory you had as a combat mage. Grand finals in Eurtec's 23rd national tournament, seventh Magus bracket, ISCUT Arena-4. Most of your audience had just tuned out of a Corpseball halftime show into the fight. Your opponent was an Akivamancer named Hassan with mere punches and prayers to his name. You don't remember much of the details, but you remember his last words to you.



"You're the biggest narcissist I've ever seen!" He said, bursting out laughing as he layed on the arena floor half-dead.


You couldn't help but agree.


++ 29.5, 9.43, 32, 23, 17.8, 3.




You continue walking through the meadow, the wet grass brushes against your feet as the sky above twists and turns into strange shapes. You had set this pocket dimension up even before you decided to perform the working. Grabbed most of the topological details from a homeless fairy's corpse. But you needed a safe location for testing after all, and what better safe space than one's own mind?


As the false sun slowly moves within the pocket dimension, you eventually reach a giant patch of whitespace within the center of the meadow. The paper circle you based the work around was draped over it like a cloth. The sight of the working sends your senses into overdrive, that rising feeling in your stomach reaching its zenith. You dont bother to catch your breath, nor to dive into your mind again. It doesn't matter if you knew what the problem was. Because you already did, trying to process it would never help. So you walk, slowly, with your body practically convulsing as you get closer and closer. Every detail of the work you had craved into your mind rushes back with every inch of the paper your eyes register. As your feet finally reach the circle, you slowly open your arms. Your fingers on each hand lay above the circle, pushing against each other, only your thumbs standing straight.





You look towards the coming sunset and.....
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[[size xx-large]]CLAP[[/size]]

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One...


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Two..-



[[size x-large]]WHOOSH[[/size]]



A fireball shoots into the sky, disappearing exactly twenty-two seconds after.



You stare blankly at the circle. If it had been five years ago, youd probobly be more angry. Youd try the spell again, use a different paper differnt equation, or whatever possible angle you could use.


But you know better now. The spell never worked, and it never will. Youre not even sure why you came here today in the first place. You should have just faded back into your work, pretend like everything anyone knew about magic was a poor attempt at contemporary regulation made by the few authorities that didn't bother to lord over what they had no say in. The three laws or magic, backlash, workings, affinities, all bullshit that only existed because the collective faith in their rigidity made them exist. 


And that's what it was all about, wasn't it? Rigid certainty. Because the world is built on a shared mystery antithetical to all the desires of consciousness, every single mathematical equivalence was another blow to the truest foundations of magic. You had spent so much time analyzing every single minute aspect of the spell that you never realized why it didn't work the way you wanted it to.




 29.5 centimeters in circumference. 9.43 centimeters in diameter. 32 minutes per second travel. 23 seconds of existence. 17.8 Kilocaspers used for the EVE membrane. 3 MicroAkivas emitted on average.


Those were the measly variables you had wasted so much time on, yet you could never account for yourself. Your humanity. Your belief. You knew that every action had its opposite reaction, yet never realized that forcing your vision of ordered reality onto a chaotic membrane would spring back as resistance. You suppose there's no point in sulking, whats done is done. And what won't be done won't be done, no matter how many times you try.



You walk away from the circle, letting your bare feet rest on an untouched patch of grass beneath two dead trees. You stomp on the grass a few times, the wet floor gripping your heels as you slowly begin to bend your knees. Your knees drop down on the muddy ground along with your rough hands, both shaking with a mixture of dead calm and steady panic.



You take a deep breath, close your eyes...


and [[[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/firstborn-soul |pray.]]]



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+++ Unkown
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[[div class="sent/recv"]]
[[span class="text"]]Alessandro, it's me. Come to the anchored riverbank with the blue flowers, and you'd better hurry. [[/span]]
[[/div]]

[[/div]]
[[/div]]



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| previous-url=https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/count-to-ten| previous-title= Count To Ten
| next-url=https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/perfect-preparation | next-title= PERFECT PREPARATION 
| hub-url= https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/stillborn-skies-hub
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Magnum Opus

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