Etherwinds-Beginning

It was the time of the Great Calling, and all the beasts of the Nethersphere had gathered, responding to the silent signal. Kortek stood and watched them as they approached, two by two, and bowed their heads at the altar. He was their leader, not god as much as a tool of the beings they served, and it was more to the beings he represented than he himself they were now showing their respect to.
Fools, he mentally spat, although his face and demeanor showed no sign of the contempt he felt. He’d been their avatar, their ruler, but it was not by his hand that they served, rather by the things that empowered him. This will soon change…the thought warmed him, and his smile grew more beatific and radiant as he greeted the next pilgrims.
When all were assembled, he strode to the center of the pavilion, his verdant robes gleaming in the reflected light of a thousand thousand astral entities, and he turned to face his arrayed charges as they gazed upon him in eager anticipation of the message he’d brought from his recent journey to the seat of the Divine Powers.
“Your gods,” he began, his barely contained glee forcing his voice into a booming echo that even the lowliest beast in the darkest corner of the pavilion could hear, “are dead. I know this as fact, because I killed them myself.”
Shocked silence filled the pavilion, the unbelieving eyes and ears of the assembly waiting for some sign of jest, not quite certain if the message their Avatar had delivered was truth.
“They didn’t put up much of a struggle, I’m ashamed to say. For gods, they went quite quickly, snuffed out like candle flames one…by…one. Now, don’t think I didn’t enjoy this immensely anyway, for I did, especially Nurgan the Harvester, she went out screaming like a babe when I pulled her soul out with my bare hands and rent it between my teeth.”
By now the assembly had dissolved into utter chaos, those not immediately stunned into inaction by Kortek’s blasphemous words already calling for his head and vital organs upon a platter. He’d expected this; no, he’d eagerly awaited this, for the rage he felt washing over his body in orgasmic waves simply fueled his own powers. He raised his hand, as if signaling for silence, and released but the barest fraction of his might…it was as if his fist, multiplied a trillion times over, had struck each beast individually in their most tender places all at once, simultaneously.
Naturally, silence followed, as each creature struggled to regain their collective breaths,
“NOW…” Kortek continued, as if the call for his blood had been nothing more than a moment’s unruly disruption, “I suppose you’re all wondering why I went to the trouble of proceeding with the Great Calling even though I bear no message from the gods but their dying screams, which I will share with you all momentarily. Simply put, you are all here in order to save me the trouble of hunting you all down and killing you one-by-one as well. I figure, how better to deal with one’s enemies than to gather them all in a single trap and crush the life out of them all at once. I do hate you all, you know, and have for much of my time as your Avatar…but, do not worry, I will rule over all your realms as if they were my own, which, in about a second, they all WILL be. Goodbye.”
The collected death screams of the assembled beasts resonated throughout the Nethersphere and into the realms beyond, echoing in the souls of every creature, vibrating among the atoms of the very air and rocks, and all knew, whether consciously or in some deep, dark, untouched recess of their beings, that something had been changed, that some unwritten law of the multiple realms had been irrevocably broken. Nothing would be the same again, but, perhaps worse, no one had even the slightest inkling of what would change or how it would happen.
Kortek was overjoyed by this.









































“BREAK TIME!”
Bridget breathed a sigh of relief as she set the massive pipe-fitter’s wrench she used on the job down on her designated workbench. The steamworks was a hot, dreadful place to make a living, but at least it was steady work, even for a tintype like her. She pulled the rust-resistant gloves off of her huge steel hands and set them with her wrench before grabbing a grubby square of absorbent cloth from the passing intern and mopping her face with it. As part of the modifications made to her body to enable her prosthetic limbs to work as if she’d been born with them, her remaining human parts had to be toughened and strengthened as well, which meant that she was able to handle temperatures that would be lethal to any normal, baseline human.
Which, of course, doesn’t make the heat any easier to deal with, she though as she stripped off her coveralls and handed them to the metallic intern that had been assigned her and began swabbing the sweat from her lithe, gangly frame. It just means I get to work in the places they can’t shove anyone else into. Especially since I’m so…petite.
She glanced at her reflection, giving herself a quick once-over to make sure no steam-fungus had begun to grow anywhere on her body. To all appearances, she was the spitting image of a young teenage girl, despite her advanced age; the prosthetics modifications had stunted her growth shortly after puberty, when her accident had occurred, so she was often mistaken for child labor. Fortunately, in a place like the steamworks, which provided the pneumatic power to the entire pipe-grid of the city, her size and synthetics were an advantage, allowing her to get into places that no other tintype or wrencher could reach. Job security, about the only security you can get these days…
Bridget sighed as she toweled the sweat off her body before her intern handed back her coveralls. Sure, life in the Bowels was dank, miserable, and dreary, but at least she had a room to herself, two squares a day, a couple of hours of sleep once in a while when the “neighbors” weren’t feeling rowdy…all in all, not TOO bad a life, all things considered. In fact, if she made enough overtime this pay period, she might even be able to afford some cheap hooch from the corner vendor, have herself a private little celebration, what with her birthday approaching and all. How many this made, she’d lost count decades ago…well, they say you lose track once you hit the triple digits…
As she tied her close-cropped blonde hair back with a bandana, more to keep the sweat from her eyes than anything else since her hair hadn’t grown any in years, either, her intern’s eyes began to blink, signaling the end of her daily break period nearing. She took a quick swig from the nourishment canteen hanging on her workbench before pulling her gloves back on; by the time the metal intern shouted,”BREAK TIME OVER!” she’d already clambered into the crawlspace she called her work domain, her wrench dangling from her shoulder by its strap as she crawled through the claustrophobic tunnels, seeking leaks in the pipes for her to seal or cinch tight with her wrench.
It’s a living…if you can call these 40-day work weeks living…


They say you never hear the one with your name on it. You can be just walking along, minding your own business, when all of a sudden-WHAM!
Destiny works a lot like that.
It doesn’t play by any rules but its own, it doesn’t take things like “place” or “time” or even “job security” into consideration, it just sneaks up behind you like a mugger and WHAM! You suddenly find yourself in a much less comfortable, although often more interesting, place than you were a second ago.
Destiny doesn’t take things like “triple-digit birthdays” or “I REALLY have better things to do with my time” into account when it chooses who to hit, either. Much like the proverbial book depository sniper, it just takes aim and fires…and, more often than not, misses entirely, because another destiny was aiming from the grassy knoll across the motorcade way and managed to pull its trigger first.
Yes, destiny often contradicts itself, too; as previously mentioned, it doesn’t take “time” or “place” into consideration, so it’ll often show up two or three dozen times, with each one jostling one another for dibs. A pretty chaotic way to do business, one would say, which probably explains why so many people deny the existence of destiny in the first place. “After all,” one could say if you were so inclined, “What kind of sane universe runs itself in such a haphazard manner?”
The key word there is “sane.”
The universe isn’t sane, and hasn’t been for some time. You try maintaining the destinies of untold billions of realities all at once without even a sweat break and see how well YOU fare, especially with all the gods dead and all. Of course little things will slip through the cracks once in a while, and even all-powerful divinity serial-killers like Kortek can’t notice EVERYTHING that slips through.
The denizens of 1347 Barglewood Drive, however, most certainly noticed.
Those that survived anyway…which, all in all, totaled approximately one, who happened to have been delayed on her way home from the steamworks due to picking up some cheap libation in order to toast another year of survival. Ironically, this ensured her continued survival, as well, but, this is almost to be expected.
After all, destiny works that way.


“MY HOUSE!”
It’s not that Bridget was a heartless woman…far from it, truth be known. She would occasionally set aside a coin or two for the local charities, or share some of her gruel with a homeless kitten or stray waif; some would call her a romantic at heart, especially those with no concept of what “romanticism” actually entails. Still, one doesn’t live to the triple digits in a place like the Bowels, or even a place CALLED “The Bowels,” without having some level of inborn pragmatics firmly in place.
It was this inborn pragmatic nature that called attention to the smoldering crater that now marked where the tenement slums, and that was the politest term used to describe them, that she once called “home” once stood BEFORE mentioning to her “Oh, yeah, there’s also a lot of bodies, or at least bits of them, falling down around you at the moment, too.” In fact, it only mentioned that because one of those bits happened to be the remains of what was once known as Gertrude Steinway, proprietor and designated slumlord of 1347 Barglewood Drive and, due to her vast size, even that piece of her outweighed Bridget, metal limbs and all, by a considerable margin.
Of course, Bridget managed to avoid a large, sloppy death-by-chunk of her former landlord…destiny sometimes works that way, too, but not this time...before common sense dictated her to move from the rain of body parts before another, more dangerous part of Ms. Steinway headed her way.
Of course, pragmatics dictated that she head TOWARDS the crater in order to see if, by some chance, some fragment of her former domicile had somehow managed to survive the near atomic-level destruction of everything around it. Sometimes pragmatics doesn’t think things through, you see.
It and the laws of physics often butt heads in situations like this.
Regardless, Bridget sprinted the rest of the block to her former residence, which turned out to be an unwise course of action as she immediately slipped on a piece of another former neighbor (little Jonnie Harban, just turned five last month, to be precise, not that you’d recognize him in his current state) and skidded over the edge of the crater to tumble down its ragged banks towards the center, deepest point.
It’s worth noting that her bottle of cheap liquor survived. Not only will this be of minor importance later, but, as anyone who witnesses such a catastrophe will tell you, it’s always important to catalogue the survivors.