The First

It was the definition of tranquility.

A tranquility, in which no sound could be heard, nary a peep nor fuss. Not even the desperate scream of a dying cream skinned bipedal creature dragging out a soundless scream while its skin is being peeled by a hole on the ground.

Smoke drifts from the middle of the pit and caress its abdomen. Not unlike jump ropes, it's small mangled body lets blood covered intestines flops out a gash between its stomach only for it to be snagged by a clump of teeth and shredded, adding more injury to the creature's misery.

This scene is a courtesy of said bipedal creature foolishness, slipping and falling into a very large hole that could be mistaken for a sinkhole had it not been for the teeth decorating its interior. And while scenes of visual carnages such as this plays out on almost all corners of the forest, the deafening silence hanging in the air of this unnatural biome hung thickly still.

All is quiet as it should be. The spindly, crooked but unthreatening trees. The bushy, peaceful but poisonous shrubs shone in many luminescent colors.

Insects with leather skin covering their innards instead of carapace.

Grotesque globs of rolling slimy translucent meat with skulls of their last meals still visible bobbing along as those abominations twice the height of a human being saunters along.

Gigantic veined plants with too many teeth too count crawling and lashing with its tentacles, tearing, goring, and mutilating everything in tentacling distance and those unlucky enough to be in its path, and if it's not doing that, prey not used to this silent biological hell would learn that sometimes resting beneath the shade of a tree with visible pile of bones surrounding it isn't a very good idea.

Humanoid monsters with the barest sense of sentience awakens and panickingly rallies its kin to do the same. The elementals stirs, swarms of azure cinders burns down anything that crosses their path, swarms of wisps rains down beams of crepusculent lights that spells death. And last but not least, a curious round object gathering mana in quietly nestling itself right in the center of the forest. A balance of continuity guided by a silent orchestra. But like all else, it wasn't destined to last forever.

*BOOM*

Suddenly, the deafening silence of the forest was replaced by an equally deafening blast of a collision between a brightly shining essence of destruction and an equally brightly shining crab.

The rarity of this event triggers the entire biome into wild activities, for a sound that goes for farther than ten meters of land inside this forest is something considered mythical. While this particular soundwave...

It spreads across the entirety of it.

*AaaaAAaAagh!!*

*chirp - chirp?!*

*CRACK*

*Screeeeech*

It was chaos.

The forest has become a pandemonium of sound. The howling of the forest's overlords cracking bark covered body from their inability to consume the soundwave

Sudden roars from beasts in furs and scales both humanoids and their more beastly cousins whose voice evolution hasn't seen fit to remove.

The chirping of insectoids covered in skin, flying erratically and turning more crazed by the second the silence is broken, rendering anything that encounters the panicking swarm into nothing but bones in seconds, and sometimes not even bones were spared.

Globs of amorphous beasts swipes the forest in a tide of pinkish melting embrace, leaving nothing but poisonous ground behind them.

The largest lake inside the forest shudders. Enormous volumes of the blue water in it and unfortunate aquatic life went down a truly gigantic drain as the very sediment of earth that makes the lake bed slakes off and those too are sucked into the yawning abyss of inky black that began to show itself in the absence of the centennial flooring.

The many irregularly sharpened boulders formation that makes the lake different from other more mundane reservoirs of nature, dotting the slopes of the lake with some still having the skeletal or decaying remnants of those unfortunate enough to be skewered on them, began to shake. Those still alive to see the lake transforming began to realize those aren't rocks at all.

Gyrating, rotating, an array of ten thousand teeth lets out a string of clacks clacks clacks, signaling the end of another long slumber for their owner.

...

While all of this is happening, the core gets the unfortunate, or perhaps fortunate, treatment of having a tree falling on its form, the result of it's trunk becoming too unstable due to most of it rupturing from incapacitation. A fate that befell many trees of the forest in this particular day.

The core remains unharmed, albeit a bit surprised. It would take far more than the fall of a cellulose composed corpse to destroy a creation of the deep.

Despite the recent rough treatment it just received. The core never felt any better. For what it gains for this wondrous event, it doesn't just receive a falling tree crashing on top of it from this turn of event, but considering all of the death and carnage going on around it, it's not that much of a surprise that it also finally obtained enough mana to finally began to do its job.

As of this moment, it is possible to observe in the mundane spectrum of light how the mana, which is normally invisible in lower density, swirls around the core in a rapidly revolving spiral pattern. The mana twists and bends in complex and alien patterns, a runic pattern in the formation of an overly decorated circle. The mana that made up the runes circle, starts to solidify from its ethereal form to plasma, and plasma changes to gas, and gas changing to liquid, and the liquid itself almost managed to convert itself into solid, before promptly giving up and settles for a near solid liquid status.

All of this wild discharge of mana then settles down into a structure. Which consists of two runic circles swirling and orbiting around the now floating core.

...

In the midst of this chaos, a decorum of normalcy that are the trees once again became active. Done recovering by greedily drinking and feasting on the sound of the magical collision, the overlords of the forest turns their attention back into eating the forest's sound once more. At once, the silence of the forest is being returned as trees rapidly awoken from their stupor of mana.

Gulping, devouring, and drinking in all of the ambient vibrations magical and non magical around them. But nevertheless, the damage has already been done.

A single fog wurm, length as long as half a dozen hoodoos stacked on top of each other, the apex predator of this ecosystem. The sinkhole with teeth encountered early on in this very chapter. Its full body drawn out from the earthen confine it put itself in. Enormous in size and lit by a luminescence scarlet glow pulsing from between green carapace. Beneath those chitin shields, blackened leather skin riddled with pore exhumes clouds of mists that covers its entire form.

With a mouth filled to the brim with razor sharp teeth and the ability to turn it into a blender for its victim at will, eight jaws works in tandem to dig through the ground.

Rushing through a forest like a bendy freight train diving deep into the earth for one moment and having its massive mass drawing an arc through the air the next at breakneck speed. The gas it exhudes shivers in delight, invisible nerves of the wurm spread sporadically inside its gaseous exhaust quivers as it takes into account the hardness of the ground and the pressure of air.

A four legged titan with seven eyes and height that towers over even the tallest of the tree only has a few second to process the giant gas covered serpentine being rushing out of the ground in front of him before something bisected it with the bisected part subsequently eaten by the wurm for its sin of standing on its way.

Dancing elongated transparent limbs tore through flesh, shell and bark. The gas bent their shape to the wurm's whim, with pressure making it sharper than enchanted blades and its amorphous nature making it more versatile than fists.

The residents of the forest survives encounters with these beasts by the merit of hiding and hoping the wurms had fulfilled its strangely small appetite. That, and the known fact that all except one of the adults fog wurm have been exterminated.

While the last of the surviving adult grows wary and began to resort to spending its time by mostly doing, or was doing, its best impression of a hole on the ground. Dragging things stupid enough to be attracted by the sweet scent of saliva.

Though it could birth near a hundred juveniles for each cycle of the fallen moon, without the same control over their innate defense, the thick skin, nor the fluidity of an adult worm, the juveniles fails to claims the peak of the forest's food chain.

Coupled with The Law that dictates that adulthood for monsters will not as simple as simply waiting for The Clock to turns, the fog wurms fails to upset the balance of the ecosystem. Until now that is.

With the return of voice, the appetite in the adult fog wurm was stimulated, caution thrown into the rushing wind. Emitting a soundless pheromone signal that the wind carries, its brood began to follows in the berserk hunt. Juveniles going at speed that would put arrows to shame begin to follow the call and rampage throughout the forest.

This results in scenes of quadrupeds and tribes of bipeds attempting to outrun a being that moves faster than trains owned by the more civilized society and getting steamrolled into fleshy goops mixing into the dirt all across the forest.

Insects with poison both crawling and flying tries to sting a wurm only to find their stingers broken and their tiny bodies dragged insise the waiting pores dotted on the wurm's skin by many gaseous limbs.

In all this chaos, a tribalistic gaggles of humanoids usually referred to as saurians and kobolds huddles together in their settlements as they momentarily forgets their grudges to do their best at hiding, praying and trying to summon their pagan deity's avatar to protect them. This requires them to form a metaphysical spear of faith to wound the thin veil of realspace and create a pathway for their god to enter.

Unbeknownst to them, this particular chaos and thus their little ritual are being observed by The Audience. Though they remain blinded to its presence, the spear of condensed faith is more than aware of many eyes that beholds it.

Losing its composure over being stared at by the masses, the spear veered off its course. For instead of skewering through the particularly thin fabric above their settlement, the misguided mass of belief went deep underground instead, where it zooms towards the direction of the slowly transforming lake.

The Audience guffawed in polite laughter as the spear pricks the belly of a millenial beast groggily waking up from its slumber.

Sounds returns at once.

Except this time all noise was suppressed by a single bellowing roar, ancient and terrible, swiftly accompanied by fog exploding out of the lake in such quantities that not a single inch of the entirety of the pocket of space that contains the forest was uncovered. Those that breathe finds themselves choking on their own breath and perish by the time the fog reaches the edge of the forest's crevice.

And then, the elder fog wurm pulled in.

The Audience politely claps along as The Puppet bows humbly, following the whimsy of strings.

...

This date marks the dissappearance of Iulrin Sedaris, the wild untamed forest laying in the western region, three pockets away from humanity's fortresse, alongside entire settlements of abhumans and human encampents posted there. This close to home, no doubt this will stir the hive of man into rustled activities.

Though what happened to The core?

It was in the middle of shaping mana into the form of a ziggurat at the time a swarm of bug pricks an animal they shouldn't have.

Before it can complete the roof of the ziggurat, the ground trembles. And not just the ground, the whole forest itself trembles.

The core could see massive silhouette of white is rapidly rising from a certain point in the distance and becoming the center of the whole forest's attention.

It keeps rising and rising, it rises still even when it hits the very limit of the incomprehensibly high ceiling. Rubbles rained down from the firmament, causing even more havoc.

The core could see the pillar of white abruptly crashing down to use the momentum contained within it to make itself travels in speed from the hypocenter in a single wave.

The massive mass of white travels from ground zero. Coming into contact with the core's ziggurat faster than before it could process the event happening before it.

The core felt the white mass rubbing and touching it, searching for non-existent holes before turning prone after finding none. The edge of the wave by the now has gone beyond the horizon of the core's sense.

And then, the core felt the entire ziggurat and the ground below it freed from the clutch of earth and dragged towards a place the core recognize as the source of this white mass.

Dragged until the world turned to blur, the core felt the ziggurat around it being destroyed and deactivate itself.

...

'tHe wAYwaRd wANdErS fOR WAyS,' An architect from within Abyss more absolute than depth contemplates.

Pieces of many forms below it fills the never ending board with life, sliding into every which way, replacing empty path with themselves and replacing themselves with empty path.

Acts of annihilation were enacted by the pieces upon one another, hoping the empty path left behind by a destroyed piece would be better than the empty paths already available to them.

Among one of them, a round orb, perfectly spherical in nature, shatters. Though, before the gleaming shards could truly scatters, fingers hold it in its place.

The orb returns to its pristine nature, at the cost of something filling in the cracks between.

Construction plan made clear, ancient trees devoured by a beast not as ancient, once again closed their eyes.