The Shores of the Land

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Usual fanfiction disclaimers apply.

THEME/BACKGROUND

AFAIK, Sheriff Lytton and Jeremiah's sisters survived, so to bring IRL people back into the mix, I'm having these be the ones who are summoned to the Land's plane of existence. The premise is that not only did the Despiser inspire a cult in our world, but so did the Insequent, in the form of a group known as the Inheritance, who actively seek to enter the other world by self-harm or even suicide. Now one of the adventures Covenant and Avery and Jeremiah went on later was a reconciliation with the ghost of Roger, but in that moment, the Despiser reached out with the small remnant of his contained power to the vestiges of his imprimatur on Covenant's son, in order to reach across the void of worlds...

And he whispered a word or two here and there, and awaited events...

PART ONE Execration
Synopsis: Lytton is about 70 years old, and Jeremiah's sisters are around 40. An insane man brings a gun into a grocery store where the three are shopping, and starts shooting. Before he kills Lytton, the former sheriff asks the man if he is with the Community of Retribution. The man, Thomas Powers, says no, he is taking vengeance on the survivors of Linden and Jeremiah's murder. He has his own motives. He is from the Inheritance, who he has foresworn.

Jeremiah's sisters, I don't recall if they had names but I'll call them "Elinor" and "Philomena," have two sorrowful POVs. One thinks they hate each other, the other doesn't know the one thinks this. To defy her hatred, which she wants to stop feeling, the angry sister took her sister to the grocery store out of a genuine attempt to be nice and helpful and caring.

Powers tells Lytton that he's going to kill himself too, to cross over. Lytton doesn't know what Powers is talking about.

When Lytton comes to, it is in a Land 10,000 years past its apocalypse. Well, not the Land, but its Earth. He explores the region with Jeremiah's sisters. They have no idea where they are or are going until one of the Inheritance, known as the Immersed (all their names are like this: the Inspirant, the Intellect, the Insurrection, the Indolent, the Immense, the Insolent, the Impossible, the Implausible, etc.) shows up to help them. They learn (somehow) that Powers is using three of the handful of surviving skurj to go assail the One Tree in order to make "the False Staff." Powers succeeds but also awakens the Worm.

By now, Covenant, Avery, and Jeremiah dissipated into the peace of the Dead (though there is a rumor that Jeremiah left a living construct behind in its own timeline, one therefore still very much alive). The Elohim decide to sacrifice almost all of themselves to save the Arch of Time, drinking all of the Blood of the Earth and extinguishing its presence in their demise, depriving the Worm of its two sources of apocalyptic nourishment. (There is still a gravitationally-induced seepage of EarthBlood under Rivenrock, but this is too little to feed the Worm's doom for the time being.)

Powers murders his skurj, using bone from one in a hideous marrowmeld ritual to create the False Ring, using all the rest of the bones of all three to make a Jeremiah-inspired construct that, if struck by the Worm's lightning, will open a special rift in Time. Lytton and Jeremiah's sisters follow Powers into the past.

PART TWO: Exoneration
Powers is not right now strong enough to just kill them, but he can perpetually push them backwards by bending space slightly with the False Ring. So they warily follow his obscure course in the Land. They wonder why they were summoned to a different place, when they crossed over.

Eventually, they follow a fissure deep into the Earth, into the ambiance of SWMNBN's power. Powers explains that the Land was always important for two reasons: one, the Land as a united entity unto itself was the source of the uniquely profane Ritual of Desecration's power, and two, the fabrjc of reality in the Land was thin enough, due to the Earthpower and Her might, for the Staff of Law to make the original connection between the worlds. Powers is going to use the skurj-ring to emulate Kastenessen's manipulations of Her effluence, not to recreate Kevin's Dirt, but to solidify reality in the Land by dissipating this effluence. This will prevent the Staff from bridging the world, and the time they are in right now is the era leading up to Covenant's first translation.

I don't know how this situation is resolved but eventually everyone ends up in the future again.

PART THREE: Imperfection
Powers' last goal, in case of his other failure, is to prevent people in the future from crossing over. His ring is able to simulate the manacles of the ur-viles, and he uses this to capture the last of the croyel. It is revealed that these beings effectively survived by feeding off the subtle emanations of a-Jeroth's attar, so that with the Despiser having dissipated inside the ghost of Covenant, there is only enough residual attar around to sustain the existence of one croyel. Worse, Powers stole the periapt that once held one of the Wards that Jeremiah found, and Powers used it to gather up a concentration of attar with which to addict the croyel, as well as to store the Illearth Dust, the powdered remnants of the Illearth Stone that he has painstakingly gathered using the croyel's sensitivity to the banes of the Despiser's original imprimatur.

Powers heads to the shores of the Land, manacling some Ranyhyn as well, and he draws on a vestige of the Sunbane itself, during the rising of the sun over the Sea, by performing a Clave-like blood ritual using blood from the horses. The Sunbane's corona is manifested recursively by this act, even more strongly, so that the captured croyel is mutated by the shadow of the Sunbane, given new power. Powers uses this to have the croyel attempt to possess the still-shifting Worm, to direct its huge power into the Illearth Dust and a crystallized fragment of one of the dead Elohim. By this means, Powers wants to mock Avery's recreation of the Staff of Law by recreating the Illearth Stone. But this new Stone will become the Illearth Tree by fusing with the False Staff, and what was made possible for the Land first and then the rest of the Land's Earth later (the possibility of being summoned to some place in that world, no longer just the Land...) will be interdicted.

Again, no clue how this is resolved, exactly. Also, once that situation is over, Lytton, Elinor, and Philomena have to help the Inheritance and others in a massive confrontation with the Worm, which though not a danger to all of reality, still is on a rampage. They get the idea to balance the Worm against the Second Tree, to weaken and calm it, I think, but the precise means of salvation are not clear to me.