Call it speculative, call it non-canon, but Vorar isn't quite the type to simply cease, even if it isn't in Altera so much any more.
Consider a century. An impressive lifetime for many. The passing of years like the ticking of a clock, ongoing, blending in, and so terribly similar.
Now expand your perception to a millennium. A full thousand years to know the world. To make friends and know love; to make enemies and know hate. To live beyond the wildest stretch of a lifetime.
To lose those friends. For the enemies, so passionate in battle, to be forgotten by the world.
Vorar was two and a half thousand years old.
In two and a half thousand years even the greatest of feats becomes a half-forgotten legend, its witnesses ancient and forgotten, their testaments the meals of moths in the furthest reaches of a library. Vorar had known friends and loved them dearly. It had guarded their children through their lives. Their grandchildren. It had struck down foes now forgotten, whose very names would summon unnatural silence and the thick fog of unbreaking tension. Eminu. Tzemik. Scardrac, as the Beast and the Man. The Silver Queen, The Observer, the General. The defeat of Sorrow and the ascension of Silas. Gods themselves had met gory ends at its metal hands. It had seen dynasties and empires rise and fall in turn.
Everyone needs a purpose: something to overcome the spiral of nihilism. For mortals, the drive to leave a mark before they were extinguished. For Vorar, to protect them so they could fulfill their short lives.
It had been a typical day for Vorar. A simple exploration through nature. Examine the world as it is, take its pulse by the passing of decades, and return to see what the mortals had done in their rushing, frantic lives. But over vast spans, years blend together. Vorar returned unchanged to the world to find that the world had changed again.
The world was stable. It had shepherded its mortal flocks through two Exoduses. It had been present at the Council of the Blackened Skull that saw Grief herself critically wounded before her final embrace of death. Nothing since then quite compared nor bore as deadly a threat to the world. The conclusion was inevitable: Vorar was no longer needed. A shepherd needs a flock.
And so it began to consider the world and its incarnations. There was this one, and its predecessor of Second Exodus. The first Exodus. And the world that fell in the Cataclysm: its first home.
Why, if there were so many worlds, were there so few mortals? Certainly after the Immortal Kings' death any mortals in the unprotected wilderness of the cosmos would need tending. And so the automaton got to work.
Perhaps it was a decade. Perhaps a century. Bootstrapping arcane machinery and eldritch knowledge is no trivial matter. And yet, guided by millennia of having known/befriended/fought the most powerful and diverse magics, Vorar persevered.
It stood in front of Eminu's Fountain and gazed at its handiwork. Eight feet in diameter, its swirling membrane green and fizzing. A hole to someplace else.
Vorar was not one for sentiment, but this occasion should perhaps be marked. It placed its gauntlet under the running water of the fountain and lifted a cupped handful. One last memento, it decided. With practiced precision, it removed the ancient bronze plaque from the fountain and placed it within its cavernous satchel. Eminu may be long gone, but its memories of her would persist with it, forever.
Vorar stepped forward with full confidence. The runes were correct and its calculus impeccable. In one long stride it stepped through the portal to someplace else. The portal fizzed, began to bubble, and in a violent burst erased itself and its evidence from the world in a perfectly annihilated sphere, thirty feet across. The calculus was impeccable.
Vorar looked upon the world before it. In the distance, it could see a port town, sails billowing from departing trade vessels. It saw the figures from afar: human, but not Alteran. This would do, for now.
With singular confidence, Vorar strode into a new world, with renewed purpose.
-
Consider a year. A relatively short span of time. It can become crowded with events, but as one experiences more years, they seem to blend together. They get shorter.
Consider a century. An impressive lifetime for many. The passing of years like the ticking of a clock, ongoing, blending in, and so terribly similar.
Now expand your perception to a millennium. A full thousand years to know the world. To make friends and know love; to make enemies and know hate. To live beyond the wildest stretch of a lifetime.
To lose those friends. For the enemies, so passionate in battle, to be forgotten by the world.
Vorar was two and a half thousand years old.
In two and a half thousand years even the greatest of feats becomes a half-forgotten legend, its witnesses ancient and forgotten, their testaments the meals of moths in the furthest reaches of a library. Vorar had known friends and loved them dearly. It had guarded their children through their lives. Their grandchildren. It had struck down foes now forgotten, whose very names would summon unnatural silence and the thick fog of unbreaking tension. Eminu. Tzemik. Scardrac, as the Beast and the Man. The Silver Queen, The Observer, the General. The defeat of Sorrow and the ascension of Silas. Gods themselves had met gory ends at its metal hands. It had seen dynasties and empires rise and fall in turn.
Everyone needs a purpose: something to overcome the spiral of nihilism. For mortals, the drive to leave a mark before they were extinguished. For Vorar, to protect them so they could fulfill their short lives.
It had been a typical day for Vorar. A simple exploration through nature. Examine the world as it is, take its pulse by the passing of decades, and return to see what the mortals had done in their rushing, frantic lives. But over vast spans, years blend together. Vorar returned unchanged to the world to find that the world had changed again.
The world was stable. It had shepherded its mortal flocks through two Exoduses. It had been present at the Council of the Blackened Skull that saw Grief herself critically wounded before her final embrace of death. Nothing since then quite compared nor bore as deadly a threat to the world. The conclusion was inevitable: Vorar was no longer needed. A shepherd needs a flock.
And so it began to consider the world and its incarnations. There was this one, and its predecessor of Second Exodus. The first Exodus. And the world that fell in the Cataclysm: its first home.
Why, if there were so many worlds, were there so few mortals? Certainly after the Immortal Kings' death any mortals in the unprotected wilderness of the cosmos would need tending. And so the automaton got to work.
Perhaps it was a decade. Perhaps a century. Bootstrapping arcane machinery and eldritch knowledge is no trivial matter. And yet, guided by millennia of having known/befriended/fought the most powerful and diverse magics, Vorar persevered.
----------------
It stood in front of Eminu's Fountain and gazed at its handiwork. Eight feet in diameter, its swirling membrane green and fizzing. A hole to someplace else.
Vorar was not one for sentiment, but this occasion should perhaps be marked. It placed its gauntlet under the running water of the fountain and lifted a cupped handful. One last memento, it decided. With practiced precision, it removed the ancient bronze plaque from the fountain and placed it within its cavernous satchel. Eminu may be long gone, but its memories of her would persist with it, forever.
Vorar stepped forward with full confidence. The runes were correct and its calculus impeccable. In one long stride it stepped through the portal to someplace else. The portal fizzed, began to bubble, and in a violent burst erased itself and its evidence from the world in a perfectly annihilated sphere, thirty feet across. The calculus was impeccable.
-----------------
Vorar looked upon the world before it. In the distance, it could see a port town, sails billowing from departing trade vessels. It saw the figures from afar: human, but not Alteran. This would do, for now.
With singular confidence, Vorar strode into a new world, with renewed purpose.
