Avarice

It was midday and the fierce Zataran sun shone at its zenith in the sky, casting its unforgiving rays down upon the ash grey desert dunes that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. A mysterious figure clad all in black cocked his head up towards the harsh sunlight beating down on him like a white blazing fire. It’d been sometime since he’d seen real, honest-to-gods sunlight. Even through his encapsulating helmet and its dark visor he had to squint when not in the shade. Compared to where he came from this inhospitable land wasn’t all that strange, but it was for this plane that was otherwise so brimming with life. Was that part of the reason why this was the place where it would all happen?

The magic was thickening, or more specifically, the chaos magic. Raw, unmatched arcana. The fuel that feeds worlds and gives them their vitality. With enough of it he could wrestle control over and shape his realm with his own hands in the manner he wished. In the manner of a god. Siphoning that much off in its purest base form and transferring it back to his own world was technically feasible, but still a challenge. The hardest part was keeping it from being rendered inert and dissipating into the air like dust in a sandstorm.

Six figures approached him. The two shorter ones among them carried a long black metal case between them.

“Sir,” they all said in unison as the latter two placed the case on the cracked, sandy desert ground before him. Kneeling, the pair of men flicked up the steel latches and opened the case, revealing the four black diamond-shaped objects stowed inside. The four more average looking of his men each picked up one of these heavy metallic objects and followed behind their master.

The mysterious figure held up a small metal black cube that thrummed with a dull purple light. Glowing like a heartbeat as he grew nearer to the apex of the Chaos nexus in this part of Aeran. He silently pointed out among the nearby sand, tracing out a six-by-six foot square piece of space, and the four went to work placing them precisely where he had directed. Sitting the diamond-shaped objects upright, they stepped away quickly before the devices kicked to life, letting out a soft ‘wub wub’ sound in time with the emanation of a dull pulsing glow that was barely discernible beneath the glare of the Zataran sun.

As the mysterious figure watched the devices do their work siphoning chaos magic from the arcane layline, the other subordinate figures seemed to take up a guard position standing with their backs to their leader, protecting him as if it was their life's purpose. The process had become rather dull to him at this point, having done this countless times in countless places of strife, draining them of their essential chaos, like a vampire or parasite. He waited patiently until eventually the devices’ rhythmic thrum slowed down until it grew silent, indicating their work complete.

The figure raised a black gloved hand and snapped his fingers twice. Snap. Snap.

At his signal the men set to packing up the camp with mechanical precision, reversing the process of the original orderly setting up. Once the two shorter, squat figures heaved the heavy case up onto their shoulders, he took the cube out once more that he used to arrive. He twisted its etched faces into a new configuration and when he held it out before him a jagged oculus tore open in the fabric of space. A strange land could be seen lying beyond it. Blackest of black, coldest of cold, and oldest of old, the place was a forbidding and hostile realm to any but he and his men that dwelled there.

First the shorter of them entered the portal, followed close after by the others, and filing in last came the mysterious figure himself. Looking one last time at the now grey aura left in the wake of the siphoning mechanism, he allowed himself a slow, smug smile.

He would return again soon. Oh, yes, he certainly would.

According to his instrumentation, a surge of chaos was building at a level he had never previously seen before in his lifetime. It was building so fast that were its current rates to continue it would likely overtake the whole of Zatar, and change it, destroy it, recreate it? Only the gods knew—if even they did—how events would all play out. Chaos was anything but predictable, however from his long and exhaustive studies of the recovered scriptures of a certain forgotten elder goddess, he knew himself to be one of the few to understand what Chaos truly was: a source of nigh limitless potential, the very spark of life and possibility unborn—and in the tumultuous days to come that would violently tear this petty land apart, an incalculably large quantity of chaos was his for the taking!

~~Later~~

The Figure walked the long arched hallway of the ‘home’ he’d made for himself here. He was well used the groans and creaking of the metal half cylinder that composed the habitat. The metal walls and ceiling were the tone of tarnished brass. Strange lights spotted in even intervals, leaving only small blind spots in their ghostly green illumination. Every twenty feet was a heavy metal door of the same brass metal that opened at his approach, with a nearly silent woosh before closing behind him with a clank as if it locked.

Finally he reached a door, different from the others. Black liked the color of his helmet and armor, and looked far older, and it didn’t open in his presence. The Figure just stood looking at it for a short time. His shoulders raised as if he were taking a large inhale. Taking the black cube from his inner pocket holding it before the door it opened like a vertical eye. The room beyond pitch black save for an illuminated tinted glass tube. Filled with a liquid, and a floating mass, amorphous in form but roughly the size of a person.

Just inside the doorway The Figure grabbed a chair that had been placed against the wall. Dragging it over to the center of the room devoid of anything other than the strange cylinder that was the focal point. He took a seat staring intensely at the tube. Resting his elbows on his legs and steepling his hands, he tapped his pointer fingers against the bottom of the helmet's visor as he thought.

After several minutes of silence The Figure stood once more. Approaching the tube, he slid the cube into a recess on its pedestal, and returned to his chair. The fluid within it began to bubble, and the mass began to glow, and wriggled in its confines. The mass’s form began to shift, slowly beginning to assume the form of a humanoid. The Figure shot up from his seat, his body language intense and on edge. Could this be it? Had he done it? But his excitement was crushed as rapidly as it had come to him. The mass struggled and writhed some more, and then suddenly like a rubber band snapping back it was a mass of illformed flesh once again, the bubbling ceased.

With one hand the figure wrenched the chair from the floor and catapulted it against the wall so that it exploded into a shower of splinters, violently ripping the cube free of its housing before the last splinters fell to the floor. Before he returned from the blinding white anger he’d just felt, The Figure was already past the third airlock painfully aware of his continued failures.