Shimite

The Tsol’aa known affectionally among his peers as Embertail reclined in his chair, fingers pressing the bridge of his nose while the parchment rested open upon his lap. Ink smeared the page in a hurried crawl, Ponder’s hand racing ahead of sense. The missive spoke of Ashtan, where citizens laboured through sleepless days to retrieve an elderly man from an alien world, filch a volatile explosive, and unmake the Weave once bestowed upon them by Lord Aegis. The tale carried the sharp tang of truth mixed with lunacy, a familiar Ashtani blend. In any other city he would have blamed fermented mushrooms, yet the north rarely bothered with restraint.

All of it unsettled him, yet the final paragraph sank its hooks deepest. Lady Pandora poured Her essence into Imyrr Invictus, reshaping him into Her avatar, then sent him through the rift torn open by the explosion. From that breach he returned with a monstrous prize, rewoven by Her hand into a new font of power. One word burned into the page and refused to fade from his thoughts.

Shimite.

Dusty tomes and scattered journals crowded his memory, each recounting the ancient clash between Divinity and an immense being of Chaos. They spoke of a planar prison wrought by the Gods to contain the beast, a prison to bind the creature beyond reach. The living tattoos painted upon his own flesh traced their lineage to that day, patterns born from a sky split open by writhing limbs and screaming light above Achaea. That name belonged to history, to ink, ritual and glyphs, not to the present hour. Seeing it rise again, unburied and uncontained, tightened his jaw.

Lady Pandora assured Her city that the new font served them alone, a gift bound to Ashtan. She declared that the entity known as Shimite remained contained, and that what now flowed into the font came only from one of her innumerable offspring and a not so small portion of the Wayward Heir’s power. The words carried confidence and ceremony, yet ink held no weight, and to his mind promises rarely survived first contact with Chaos.

The Tsol’aa known as Embertail poured himself some more tea. This worry would remain with him, and only time would tell what would come of this new development.

—

Elsewhere, upon deep within the Chaos Plane, Eldritch Imperator Glaaki observed the revels of the Seat through a jagged, screaming aperture torn into the air. Below, citizens celebrated around their newest engine of power, contained and already bent toward the familiar business of conquest. A celebration three centuries in the making; the sight satisfied him. The opening snapped shut with a violent recoil, and a thin smile crept across his features. Plots within plots. A comforting tradition.

From the shadowed flank of the Eldritch Throne, Lady Pandora emerged, an obsidian dagger spinning with careless precision between her fingers. She dropped into the seat without ceremony, the throne accepting her weight without complaint, and turned Her gaze upon the Imperator.

“I have upheld my end of the bargain, Glaaki. You will uphold yours.”

Glaaki answered with a sneer, sharp and wordless, a gesture that promised nothing and implied everything.

—

Summary: After many trials and mounting complications, Ashtan tore its way into a world already obliterated hollow by Chaos and drew out its final living survivor. With his guidance, the city seized an artefact of sufficient potency to unseat their existing font and fashion another in its place. What now anchors their font defies sanity, a child retrieved from the prison an immense Chaos entity remembered as Shimite, calcified, repurposed and bound to serve the ambitions of the Seat.

Penned by My hand on the 13th of Lupar, in the year 992 AF.