Witches Reign

[Time Compression, in its purest form -- a tangled ball like a naked singularity, where space and time are points rather than dimensions, and no standard laws of reality apply.]

[The Gate of Truth: a portal between this world and another, the means by which alchemical energy comes into this world, capable of separating those who cross it into body, mind, and soul.]

[Mixing the two might have been a bad idea.]

[From a circle on the ground in the very depths of Tears Point, a yawning void opens. From it pour hands -- hundreds, thousands, millions of tiny shadow-hands on endlessly long, shapeless black arms. Though nothing seems to be guiding them, they unerring seek out everything and everyone living nearby. Slash them, cut them, burn them, blast them -- they simply reform and redouble their efforts to seize living beings.]

[Suddenly the flow shifts. Whereas before the circle disgorged Cthonian nightmares, now it pulls with unearthly strength. The shadow-hands wrap around their targets, seize them, and pull them in fast and hard.]

[All is blinding white.]

[The scene abruptly resolves into coherent shapes and images again. Where before, they had stood under a sky red with monsters, now the heroes stand beneath a sky full of clouds, whose whiteness is the same ominous density that grey-blackness would be in a normal world. Lower in the sky, nearly blotting out those clouds, hung Lunatic Pandoras, countless Lunatic Pandoras, limitless temporal repetition of the same monolith.]

[In the center, where the Time Compression Distortion had touched Tears Point, now all that was visible was the bloated, decaying husk of a spider. A massive spider, whose sprawled legs stretch far off into the distance. Atop it, a spider that was miniscule only in comparison to the titan frantically weaves another line into a great web that seems poised to catch a descending crystal as it lurches laboriously groundward from some far-off point in the sky.]

[And if all that is strange, wait till you look around...]

[But there's still a job to be done.]

[OOC: Discussion post is here, and you really ought to read it before you post! Again, no tag order, multiple locations.]