The Heavenly Host

“Nah!” Phaestus shook his head. “They know me, they trust me. They are also linked to Mount Doom, so anyone linked to Tommus is safe, unless he doesn’t want them to be.” He turned to grin at the two demons. “They are here as a welcoming committee in the highly unlikely event someone manages to open the World Gate from some other side. Or more specifically, someone we don’t like opens the gate. I use them in most of my gate rooms.”

Phaestus walked to the center of the room, where a large stone tray sat on a smaller stone pedestal. The stone tray had a large array of different-colored crystals packed into it. The crystals were tightly arranged in a twelve-by-twelve array. There appeared to be a good-sized handprint indention on a smaller stone pad at the base of the crystals.

The array looked somewhat familiar, but Reggie cold not place it. He looked up from the array to the back wall of the chamber and blinked. There was a large set of concentric metal rings standing up against the wall. The rings were freestanding and carved with various runic symbols at various intervals around each one. The rings were supported by a large stand that held them at their base. A ramp allowed one to walk up smoothly to the top of the innermost ring. A large indicator that seemed to be made of the same colored metal as the base capped the top of the two rings. The indicator had a pointer to a symbol on the inner ring, and an opening to display the rune selected on the outer ring.

The rings looked even more familiar to Reggie than the tray of crystals. But it was different enough that he couldn’t quite place where he’d seen something like this. “So is that the World Gate?” he asked.

“It is,” Phaestus replied over the klaxons. He was busy rearranging the crystals in the array. Apparently they were removable and could be turned to different orientations so that different facets of any one crystal could connect with different facets of other crystals. “I need to concentrate for a few minutes,” the smith warned.

It took Phaestus a few minutes to get all the crystals arranged as he wished, but finally he seemed satisfied. He placed his right hand in the hand-shaped indentation below the tray. Suddenly there was a large screeching sound as metal that had not moved in nearly four thousand years began to move again.

Reggie looked up to see the two concentric rings rotating in opposite directions. The two rings spun around at different rates and then stopped briefly. As they stopped, a rune on the top ring lit within the indicator, as did the rune the indicator pointed to in the lower ring. After a brief pause, the rings started rotating again in the opposite directions, again at different rates of rotation so that they completed different numbers of rotations per ring before stopping on a new set of two runes.

Reggie suddenly realized it was like a double-combination lock. There was an inner combination lock that had to go around so many times to land on a specific rune, and the outer combination lock had to rotate the opposite way some other number of times to land on a different rune, the two runes matching up at the same time. Reggie shook his head trying to conceive of how many combinations there could be with all the various runes and different numbers of rations of the two rings.

Boggy and Reggie were mesmerized as the rotation continued for what seemed like several minutes. The screeching of the metal had been replaced by a deep humming, almost roaring noise and a very physical, bass-like throbbing of the air and stone of the room.

Finally, the rings came to a final set of runes and Phaestus removed his palm. Golden light flooded the chamber as a highly reflective pool of liquid gold appeared inside the two rings, perpendicular to the floor. Suddenly it was as if a giant stone had splashed into the center of the golden pool as the reflective liquid seemed to splash inward in a giant spike, with a surrounding counter ring splash coming back into the room. The roaring turned to a giant whistling and then died down into a sustained throbbing beneath the roar of the klaxons as the reflective pool became somewhat quiescent. Small waves rippled in the golden pool of light within the rings.

“A Star Gate?” Reggie had suddenly realized what the rings reminded him of.

“No, a World Gate; Star Gates are much simpler technology. Star Gates are basically very high-powered, long-distance Runic Gateways. A World Gate, on the other hand, can literally go anywhere in the multiverse where another World Gate is. Any distance in space, any distance in time, any distance in inter-planar space.” Phaestus grinned at them. “It can also connect to a Star Gate, of course, but it has to provide the power to keep the link open. A simple Star Gate can’t manage that; it can only act as a destination endpoint for a World Gate.”

“Blimey! You built this?” Boggy asked, impressed.