#etherflow

Two thousand five hundred and twenty five years had passed since the Calamity destroyed the previous iteration of the universe. In a callous assault against the fabric of time and space, everything that ever was was instantly undone in an unending demonstration of demonic moderation... Until Calorius Giordano ended it and took control of what was left.

Of the thirteen realms in the universe Calorius presided over, LandRealm was his favorite. It reminded him of his old home, the universe he was born in. Not many others from that era were still around. Or maybe there were, in other universes. Not that it would matter if there were; it was impossible to reach other shards. And even if it weren’t, the risk posed by breaking through the walls of the multiverse again was too great. Reality had taken enough abuse, Calorius thought. This was why so many forms of advanced technology were outlawed under his rule. Calorius would damn anyone who ever tried building an omniverse-traversing hypership.

Calorius jumped into the crater to examine more closely the realmship that had created it. Oddly, the ship was not smoking or on fire or anything. Rather, it looked like it had crashed here a long, long time ago. It was from Pastrealm, Calorius realized. Whenever there was some kind of unexplainable time discrepancy between realms, nine times out of ten, Pastrealm was involved. (The other time, it was Futurerealm.) Calorius hated unexplainable time discrepancies almost as much as he hated homosexuality. He traced out a Remembrance Sign onto a piece of the ancient ship and watched the ship’s past from the future play out in his mind’s eye.

There had only been four people on board during its last flight. Calorius couldn’t make out their faces; the ship was resisting him. Two of them were humans--women, maybe--and were standing close to each other. On the far side of the memoryspace was a male, also impossible to see in detail, but Calorius could tell from the psychic residue that it was Thompson. And right in the middle of them all was a shadowy figure surrounded in a veil of electricity magic. Ferris. He stood in a defensive position, making a Sign Calorius had never seen before. Ferris completed it with a quick upward flick of his wrist, and then everything began to shake. This must have been when the ship entered the realm. The memory stopped there, with everyone trying to persevere against the turbulence. Everyone except Ferris. By that point, Ferris was already gone.