Naked

[Tearen Wover]

The first time Tearen had come to the void, he hadn't really paused to take in the atmosphere and climate of the place. Though the trackless hallways of striped obsidian were not necessarily off-putting to the eldritch human, he did now realize that the Void was actually apparently devoid of temperature. Even though he had just used a considerable amount of Omnilium to shunt his essence here directly from a steaming jungle, the darkened world felt neither cool nor warm. It provided an uncanny sense of limbo – that anything could exist here indefinitely. Neither hunger nor thirst would kill a traveler within the Void; only trackless ages and a withering mind.

This was, of course, just a poetic assumption on his part. Still, it left him feeling restless and eager to proceed onto his final destination. Tearen stared down at his own hands, half covered by his ceremonial robes of the Enigma and sighed. He was closer here to his natural state than anywhere else, and now that he had finally departed the Omniverse proper, he no longer felt beholden to its mortal mores. The elder Prime shed his cloak and other clothes, one article at a time, until he walked bare-skinned along the smooth, glassy floor. As expected, it felt no cooler, having peeled his trappings away, but that still wouldn't have changed his mind. He had taken on so much baggage during his travels across Omni's playground that he had barely had time to meditate or take stock of himself. Holding on to these worldly bindings would only hinder his resolve, and besides, to stand before the pinnacle deity of a given reality was to expose one's self in many ways.

The symbolic nature of traveling in the buff lost its novelty after what Tearen presumed to be a few hours of trackless wandering. Based on what he knew about the Void, the placement of various dimensional Gates was arbitrary. Any number of the whirling vortices he had already walked passed may well have conveyed him directly into the fabled Oververse, but this was time that the Shadow wished to see through in its full...though, some company may have been nice. As tempting as it might have been to drag one or more of his disciples into this world of inbetweens, having another Prime along on this venture would defeat one of its most important aspects; that none could know of what would come to pass. There was only one person he trusted in this matter, for she had been a part of him for the better part of two months now. It was strange, thinking back on it, that his daring escape from the Underverse had been so very recent, but the Omniverse had a tendency to drag its temporal feet in that regard.

Finding a secluded place to summon, Tearen sat down on his bare haunches and allowed streams of Omnilium to flow from his very pores, out into the obsidian blackness. The prismatic power cast rainbow scintillation across the honed angles of the looming, senseless architecture. The storm of light illuminated the angles of that particular patch of Void for almost two hours; the longest and most meticulous summoning that Tearen had ever performed. No less could be accepted, for the subject of the conjuration deserved nothing less than perfection...