Forgotten Runes Logo
Book
Recent Lore
Lore with Images
Search
World Map

Sacred Key Master (#777)

Owner: 0x24D7…e52b

Chapter 1: Sacred Key Master

Nothingness. Silence. Darkness veils darkness. The void stirs; ripples flutter at the edge of creation. Pockets of space unfold, stretch, and collapse upon themselves. A sudden flash… a spark of magic?

A vast explosion of brilliant light sears space and time. Shards of reality spin in the void. Galaxies ablaze, roiling clouds of cosmic gas and dust billow across the Runiverse, surging ever outwards on incandescent waves.

Beams of light spray in all directions, bathing the galaxies in a multi-coloured glow, streaming ever onwards to the edge of existence.

A sky full of the immensity of innumerable galaxies, innumerable worlds, innumerable possibilities. And then a rainbow….

The celestial images wavered and then faded from his mind as he opened his eye wide, casting his gaze over the Seventh Realm. Fields of golden grass stretched in all directions, stirring on the undulating hills.

Sacred Key Master exhaled slowly, flexing massive shoulders as he continued to trace the Rune of Infinity in wide, lazy arcs around the head of the golden tool lying in his lap. He hung in the air, legs crossed, and allowed the thrill of the magic to course through his veins. This time he was sure it would work. He could feel the pull of the cosmos moulding the magic, driving it towards its intended purpose, transforming the key into a device of great power.

The Wizard focused all of his intent into the Rune, urging the magic onwards. He could sense the key responding. It was as though a myriad voices spoke all at once: some laughed with unadulterated joy, others howled in the depths of agony and despair. And in the midst of it all the Key Master hovered, revelling in the sense of power and purpose… the thrill of creation!

In the distance, the landscape distorted, stretching impossibly upwards into the purple sky. All the energy of the Seventh Realm seemed to flow inexorably into this one point. The fabric of reality knitted itself around the spot, swelling and contracting… With a hideous tearing sound, the sky split. The stretched golden fabric ripped at the seams and a wide hole appeared. With an overpowering WHOOSH, it began to hungrily suck up the surrounding space. Thousands of blades of grass twice as tall as him were torn free from their roots and vanished through the opening. Sacred Key Master gaped. He let his feet drop to the ground as the winds created by the suction tugged at him. He fought it, but the outcome was inevitable and the storm picked him up and tossed him into the air as lightly as though he were one of those fragments of grass.

He spun through the air, vaguely aware of Derek buffeting against his side. The sphinx tried to beat his vast wings against the torrent of air, but to no avail. A serrated feather caught him in the face and made his giant eye water and together the pair hurtled end over end towards the cosmic hole as all manner of creature and plant were swept with them into the mouth of the vortex. He caught a glimpse of a startled beast, a look of sheer terror plastered across its scaly silver face, clawed paws scrabbling helplessly at thin air as it was sucked through the gap in the stratosphere.

Sacred Key Master gripped the magical device tightly to his chest as he was flung twisting through the vortex. The sphinx had given up trying to fly and had curled his wings tightly around his belly. His tufted feline ears were plastered against his head, and he clung desperately to the Wizard’s broad thigh muscle with his forepaws, eyes and mouth clamped shut.

As they shot through the split in the heavens, he had no time to think. Instinctively he thrust the key outwards with all his might. The incantation swelled from the depths of the tool, perfect and fabulous, pure and spectacular. It surged up his bulging arms and into his barrel chest, building to a crescendo until he felt his lungs would burst. The words radiated and sparkled through his pyramid mind, bringing tears of joy to his eye. As he wept at the rapture, a deep and profound bellow burst forth from his lips, drowning out the roar of the cosmic wind.

“BEHOLD, MY QUANTUM STYLE!”

… everything went black.

Chapter 2: A Gateway in Space and Time

Nothingness. Silence. Darkness veils darkness. The void stirs; ripples flutter at the edge of consciousness. Mental pockets unfold, stretch, and collapse upon themselves.

A sudden flash… a spark of magic? He opened his eye groggily. No… I’d say that was a flash of pain. As his head slowly cleared, memory returned.

“Derek?”

“Derek, where are you?”

He looked about him frantically, but the sphinx was nowhere to be seen. He was about to call out a third time when the words caught in his throat. Slowly he raised his head, his gaze wandering up the doors into the heavens.

Filled with wonder, he walked silently around the doors, but as soon as he passed their side, they disappeared. He walked back over the ground where the doors should have stood. A weird prickly sensation washed over his body and when he turned around, there they were. He repeated the process a couple of times to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. Frustrated, he pounded his gigantic fist against them, and the echoes rolled across the surrounding mountains.

Nope. The doors were definitely real. Wait… mountains? He turned to survey his surroundings, shielding his eye against the glare of the white carpet covering the mountain slope. He had never seen snow before, but the name popped unbidden into his consciousness. The colourful radiance of his body refracted the light; tiny crystalline rainbows danced across the slope. A row of peaks descended in a jagged spine below him towards an impossibly blue lake that shimmered in the bright sunlight. A verdant forest hugged the shores of the lake.

Turning from the lake, he could just make out a sprawling city out in the open plains. He wondered how he knew what a city was. Hundreds of rectangular buildings shot up from the flat ground. In the centre of it all stood a hill, green grass dotted with outcrops of speckled white and grey rocks. For some reason, he felt as though the empty hill should be filled with a blocky castle built of glittering blue stone.

This was all very confusing.

Lips pursed, his pyramidical head somehow managing to take on a pensive expression, Sacred Key Master pondered his predicament. He was good at pondering… indeed, for countless aeons, it had represented the vast majority of his day-to-day activities.

After what to you or I might seem an awfully long stretch of pondering, but what was essentially the blink of one sizeable eyeball to Sacred Key Master, reality suddenly dawned upon him. “Derek!” he boomed. “Behold! I have created a portal between dimensions!”

He beamed. The smile wavered as he remembered he still hadn’t found Derek. It was just like his familiar to disappear on him instead of being there to exalt in this triumph. By all things bright and colourful… he had torn a hole in the very fabric of space and time! Yes, perhaps that had been slightly reckless, but he had repaired it. He glanced admiringly up at the gate, nodding smugly at his handiwork. Conveniently, he chose to ignore the fact that he had no idea in the Seventh Realm just how he had managed to do it.

Must have been something to do with that incantation I used. Could uttering the words have conjured this gate as a way mending the breach? Yes, that must be it, the spell obviously held celestial significance. It had been handed down to him by the cosmos to heal the skin of the Runiverse that separated dimensional realms.

He sniffed back another tear at the remembrance of that phrase of cosmic perfection, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Lifting his eye skywards, he spotted a dark hollow set high into the gates that stretched away into the clouds. Arching his eyebrow, he slapped the key to his back, where it clung amorously to his skin. Then he crouched down, steeling his muscles, and leaped.

Soaring through the air, his foot connected with the gate door and he pushed off, driving himself upwards. In a small and musty brain chamber somewhere in the dark recesses of his pyramid head, a small voice whined about how this defied the laws of physics. He momentarily wondered what that meant, but then a cavernous keyhole was looming before him and he grabbed at its lower lip, catching hold with his fingertips just as he reached the apex of his jump.

He pulled himself up and thrust his arm into the depths of the opening, managing to find a grip, then dragged himself up over the ledge and flopped onto his back.

Derek sat there licking his paws, eyes gleaming in the darkness.

“Finally! Well, we’ve got a door. When are you going to build the house?”

The Wizard puffed out a sigh of poorly-disguised relief. “Very amusing sphinx. I trust you have been making yourself useful?”

“Sure, I’ve been looking around. Tried to wake you, but you were deep in Cloud Cuckoo Land,” smirked the sphinx.

“Err… what’s that?”

“Oh don’t worry, you’ll see… there is a lot to tell you. Let’s start with the fact that this is the world where I came to get the energy to make that magical device of yours.”

Sacred Key Master’s mood brightened instantaneously. “Aha! Excellent! So that means you know how to get back?”

“Afraid not, champ,” Derek flashed him a toothy grin. The beast really was quite infuriating sometimes.

“But I can see the Seventh Realm right there!” he exclaimed, gesticulating at the view of the rolling golden hills that filled the far opening.

“Go on then, Rainbow Cakes, see what happens,” Derek purred.

He flounced past his familiar. “You know I hate it when you call me that,” he muttered, ignoring the sphinx’s sniggering behind his back.

Halfway down the dim corridor, he suddenly slammed into an invisible wall that knocked him flat onto his ample backside.

“Invisible force field… totally impenetrable!” The sphinx’s laughter floated through the air. The Keymaster cursed the creature under his breath, then dragged himself to his feet.

As he walked up next to Derek, who was now leering at him from the lip of the keyhole, he stuck out a meaty foot and shoved the sphinx out into the air. Derek squawked as he fell then twisted his body in mid-air, managing to right himself so that he could flap his wings to halt his fall. He glared up at the Wizard indignantly.

Sacred Key Master gave him a flamboyant shrug, then launched himself out into space. “Come on then,” he called out as he sped past the sphinx, forcing Derek to dodge his massive frame. “Let’s go figure out how to open this lock!”

Chapter 3: “THE GAYTEKEEPER” – Extract from “Kronikells of the Sevin Relms” (Author Unknown).

Publisher’s Note: Most scholars believe this text to have been written sometime during the first 200 years of the First Age of Magic (F.A.M.) by famed historian Bastian Bluemonger (F.A.M. 12 – 983), self-proclaimed founder of the Blue Wizard Bastion, First Head of the Wizarding Council, and Guardian of the Sacred Pillars. Some argue, however, that the ‘Kronikells’ could not have come from one source alone, and were in fact written by at least five different wizards over the space of roughly 3,000 years between the First and Third Ages of Magic.


Story Arc Index:

Prologue: Wizard #777

Part 1: Wizard #4298

Part 2: Wizard #292

Part 3: Wizard #2261

Part 4: Wizard #3911

Part 5: Wizard #1177

Part 6: Wizard #2876

Entered by: 0x24D7…e52b and preserved on chain (see transaction)