Urania’s Mirror(4): The Temple Conduit Pt 2

E. B. Shriver
3 min readJan 12, 2023

The Night Before.

“Rest Emil. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow, and we do not know what we will find on the other side.” My mother lovingly said to me, as she closed the door to our cabin.

Many weeks had passed since we found this ancient Atlantean temple, and tomorrow we were finally going to turn the Conduit on.

My parents were planning on spending the evening going over their translations of the inscriptions on the temple walls, ensuring we didn’t blow ourselves up, or worse, send us all barreling into the Realms Beyond, fractured into multiple soul pieces.

Father says these Conduits are living manifestations of the Aether. Like crystalline fungus, The Conduits represent the fruit bodies of the Aetheric Causeway. Coursing throughout the temple are the mycelium like tendrils of aetheric rivers feeding it. With that much Aetheric energy about visions, hallucinations, and strange occurrences were an inevitability.

While working long hours in the temple, my mother, More than once saw fleeting images of my brother running past out of the corner of her eye, or the disembodied voice of him calling for her in the dark. My father said that they may be actual memories of future or past events, but that they also could just be fabricated from our own psyche.

After my brother fell into Urania’s Mirror, my parents quickly realized that the best hope we had of finding him was to understand the magic which was used in its creation. As Urania’s Mirror is a mythical object that many believed did not even exist, so books on its origins are non-existent. So my parents did what they knew best, and studied it, which led us to the Conduit.

The Conduit, practically speaking, is a meditation chamber grown out of Aetheric Crystal. It amplifies your own latent aetheric potential, and manifests what is deep within your mind, good or bad. It essentially allows a Magi to become like the Grand Architect. Forming thoughts into matter. Nothing is more revealing of one’s true nature than to remove the barrier of creation and see what they produce. Through our investigations, Over the Last few weeks, we discovered that these conduits were used to create the Uranic Mirrors, and so much more. A mythical workbench of epic proportions.

Based on our excavations of the site. We’ve discovered some information regarding the Council of Shamballa, and its intentions with creating the Aetheric Causeways. It seems they wanted to prevent the cataclysmic destruction of the previous ages, by attempting to control the Aether. In their hubris, they believed they could order and structure the Aether to behave predictably. A recreation of “Heaven on Earth”, or at least that was their belief. However, caging a wild thing, with the hopes of domesticating it, often leads to violent backlashes. Like building pressure behind a weakened dam, portions of the causeway became brittle, and fractured. And it was only a matter of time before it all came tumbling down.

It’s still unclear whether the backlash was caused by this aetheric cracking. Or if the Chitahuri had some larger role to play in it. To be frank I didn’t care. I was just excited to hear my fathers final plan in the morning. I knew the broad strokes. We were going to use the Conduit to track and find the dark entity, and save my brother from his torment. However, nothing ever works out as planned.

Continued in Part 3 (Coming Soon)

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E. B. Shriver

I'm E. B. Shriver. A collector and curator of an emporium of magical wares. Welcome, and beware of what you touch!