A/N: I wrote this for Camp NaNoWriMo, July 2011. This is a massive multi-universe crossover story. The primary crossovers are Warhammer 40,000 and (old) World of Darkness (Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse) Also appearing are Star Trek, Stargate, Ender's Game, and Bolo.

Also, like my Stormseeker Saga, it's centered around Torn Elkandu, an original universe designed as a sort of crossover hub.

The Nature of the Void

It was on Til'raine that I discovered it. Perhaps I had always known that it existed, but it was then and there that its nature truly became clear to me.

It is death. It is the destruction of the universe. It is the end of all things. And it had come to claim Til'raine.

Rarely can it work directly. It cannot merely obliterate things without consequence. But it works slowly, corrupting and unraveling what had been built, until everything comes undone and all is unmade. It is the driving force behind all age and decay in the universe. It is entropy, chaos, oblivion. It is the force that drives everything into nothingness.

It is the Void.

It has gone by many names in many universes. Chaos. The Wyrm. The Echthroi. The Dark Side. But even in universes where its presence isn't so obvious, it is still at work. It's always at work. Always looking for some way to unmake reality.

I personify it a bit much. It is not sentient. It is a force of nature, neither good nor evil, and yet it is the source of much evil, and darkness in its purest form. It is not the shadow cast by a light, it is the darkness that would swallow all light that ever was and ever will be.

It cannot be fought directly. One can as soon destroy destruction, or kill death. Only its symptoms can, and must, be fought. Even the smallest victory can mean salvation, and even the tiniest failure can spell doom.

It wears down the universe like wind and water grinding away at rock little by little. But it does not merely work on the physical plane. It decays the mind and soul as well. It can make people forget. It can drive people insane. It can turn good people into monsters by corrupting their very spirit.

And then I realized what had happened with the Elkandu. They were to have been the greatest defenders of creation, protectors of life, guardians of the universe. But they had been corrupted before they were even born, twisted into tools of the Void, and much destruction was unwittingly wrought by their hands. A disaster of multiversal proportions had only been averted by the narrowest of margins.

What could have been... and what could still be... I had already traveled millions of years into the past. There were countless paths leading off before me, and I could see myself going off in many ways. I cannot bring myself to blame the versions of myself that I saw going back to resume a normal life and try to forget about all I had seen.

But this version of me, however, chose another path. I've chosen to fight. I've chosen to stand against the Void.

And this time, the Elkandu will be redeemed. They will be the champions of light that they were always meant to be.

It's difficult to say what the original timeline might have been like. There have been so many branches and offshoots that did not come naturally, due to excessive and careless time travel. The first thing I did when I established myself in this timeline was prevent any sort of time travel into and out of this universe. That will be necessarily to avoid any sort of interference with my plans, either from inside or outside the timeline. I didn't bother stifling "prophecy", though. Knowing what might happen and knowing what will actually happen are very different things, and there is no certainty in the universe, not even for me.

I believe I have a lot of work ahead of me.

Til'raine was already doomed when I had arrived. It was already too late to save it.

Vel'kira will not last, either. It's too unstable. All that will remain of it, in the end, will be Torn Elkandu and the Seven Planes: Sasherey, Wilderplane, Mezulbryst, Straegarx, Hasaris, Corstad, and Thalassa.

The beings wrecking destruction upon Til'raine are agents of the Void, though they do not realize it. They do not fight for honor or glory, nor for resources or territory. They had died long ago, although they did not know it yet. Now, they are but soulless machines bent only on extermination. They have even forgotten their own name.

So when Til'raine is destroyed by these machines, Vel'kira is constructed inside the Ethereal Plane in hopes that the enemy would not be able to reach them here. They are correct in that regard, but completely fail to realize that the dead machines are not the only enemy. Not the only agents of the Void. And the Ethereal Plane is even easier to corrupt and destroy than the Material Plane.

Vel'kira is long in dying, but it was dying from the moment it was made. Physical beings cannot expect to live for generation upon generation within the Ethereal Plane and remain entirely unaffected by it. Although the Vel'dari are the direct heirs of the Til'dari, the exiled El'dari remain closer to the original strain. In the end, even the elves most closely physically similar to the original Til'dari are diminished and mutated - smaller, weaker, more frail.

But the El'dari still live, and have spread across the stars. There's a time when one might even say that they thrive. But only a brief time, in the face of history. They endure many hardships, and the machines of death return again and again to destroy more and more of them, seemingly unstoppable engines of destruction.

For my part, I spend the intervening time learning and solidifying my control over this universe. If I am to be the self-appointed guide and guardian of reality, I must make myself a supreme entity.

And then Vel'kira endures its last spasm and finally starts breaking apart. While some frantically try to evacuate the plane and retreat to the Material Plane again, the most powerful wizards gather in the capital city, Til'aris, to make a last-ditch attempt to preserve what they can. They manage to anchor their city to a planet in the Material Plane to prevent it from being swept away, and tie seven other regions to it in order to maintain them. And all else is lost forever.

Til'aris. One day, it will be called Torn Elkandu. Its Nexus is the only one of what was once a network to survive the Fall of Vel'kira undamaged. Some others, such as the one in what will become Iron City, are intact but nonfunctional. But the Nexus network was only intended to teleport people from one Nexus to another. Without any other intact Nexi for it to connect to, it would be useless. So the wizards step in and seek to modify it...

I realize instinctively that they're doing something wrong, and that this is what will have led to many of the problems that the Elkandu faced. The Nexus of Til'aris will have been modified to be much more powerful than it had been before, to be sure, but at the same time, it was also corrupted. The beacon that they intend to turn this Nexus into would also attract untold numbers of undesirable elements. If anything, the Nexus of Torn Elkandu could be said to have been too powerful. Perhaps some restrictions aren't such a terrible thing.