The ballroom is still crowded, and as you glance about looking for Meenah, you see that some of the other beds have begun to lose their canopies. The canopies of other beds seem to be shrinking and retracting into themselves, slowly uncovering the sleeping "gods" beneath them. There are no sarphidians present any longer, and the room is somewhat drab. You see a group of githzerai moving through the beds, each carrying a wad-like bundle of what looks like fabric woven from flow-jetsam. They are fully retracted canopies, and they look something like cocoons or egg sacs.
Clareh is off like a shot, and she plunges into their midst, talking loudly, Morning bloods, where's our canopy? One of them leads her off by the hand, and she returns to the bed several moments later, carrying a large crystal sphere about the size of a pumpkin. Bi, who has been awake and quietly watching, sits up and gives her a puzzled look.
Hmm. They said just wanted the silk. This belongs to you, Rhys. She plunks it on the bed where everyone can get at it. You'll get a pretty decent price for it too. Wild stuff.
The surface of the sphere tingles as you touch it, and a vision flashes into your mind.
[SBLOCK]The trees grow and prosper. The races merge into a unified civilization dedicated to preserving freedom, striving against the limitations of the world, and to music and song. Great turtles the size of islands with flesh of stone and coral branch off from the center and explore the oceans. Whale-like creatures sprout from their backs and ply the skies, buoyed aloft by giant gas-bags. Cities of treehouses and reef-platforms rise against the outer shores, nomadic boat communities follow the turtle islands and airwhales, taming them and sharing wisdom. Civilization grows and prospers, and your names are sung and shouted and etched into monoliths. Temples are raised to you, wars are fought between your followers over trivial matters, but a loose, just freedom persists.
The ice responds. The alien voices that called you there unite against your world in hatred and fear. Alien armies of diseases and abominations attack and are driven back. Counterstrikes are mounted across the endless dark ice. As towers are contained and conquered by invasion and rebellion, all issue the same frantic call of defiance, calling you once again down upon them. More great trees sprout from the blast craters, and light creeps relentlessly into the world. Your peoples are unstoppable. The alien voices eventually go silent and stop resisting your peoples' retaliation, seeking instead only escape. Great psionic engines are put into motion, hurling ice-shrouded matter away from the world into the void beyond, escaping. Some of your people are taken with them, or follow them into the void. Trees and light blossom across the face of the world like wildfire, and the ice thins.
The very shell of the world begins to melt, and your peoples only realize that the world is hollow and fragile once the damage done is too great to repair. They call to you for guidance, and gather in your temples to be received by you. The shell of the world cracks and falls inward, revealing a white-hot point of light surrounded by an alien consciousness, long held within the ice, milked by trees and towers alike for its magic and power. It writhes free and devours the world. You and your people are powerless to stop it, and those who try to fight the end rather than accept your protection after death are utterly devoured, forever lost and uncountable.
As the world falls into the star it held within itself for so long, many of your peoples accept their fate, and their massed souls form an expanding bubble around the star as they rush out from it, bourne upon its light and pulled by the uncontained joy of the freed thing within. Its flame devours their bodies, their civilizations, and the sum of their accomplishments. The souls form a crystal shell around the void and the ice-covered matter fired from the towers toward the end, imprisoning them within the bubble your hand is now resting against. The ashes of the old world surround the star within, slowly cooling as they spin into a disc around it.
The trapped presence that was within the world had settled around this bubble, forming into great sheets and folds of space-time and starlight and background radiation, too distant to ever be touched or contained or explained from within again. This is the fabric being bundled up and whisked off by githzerai, who, according to Clareh, make use of it as sails for their plane-travelling vessels. The crystal shell, however, bears your mark, and is thus yours to do with as you will.
[/SBLOCK]
