She is on a beach. There's sand, and water, and a collection of crudely built huts nearby. A young boy and his mother are roasting fish together over an open fire.

How nostalgic. The ragged edges of the tear in reality behind her fade back into normality. She fondles the hilt of the long silver sword hanging at her side as she slowly walks over to the fire.

The mother looks up, sees the stranger and what is behind the stranger, and murmurs something to her son. He follows her gaze, looking somewhere between curious and concerned, then gets up and scampers off toward the huts.

Oh no you don't.

She reaches out a hand in the boy's direction and mutters a spell, locking him in place.

He yells in fright.

An old woman with a concerned frown emerges from one of the huts. She looks at the boy. She looks at the stranger. Her frown deepens.

Are her actions upsetting to the village elder? Wait until she sees this next bit.

Drawing close to the fire, she stops. She allows the hunger to come to the fore once more and a gaping maw opens from her torso. Lashing tentacles reach out and snap around the mother, dragging her in. She'll have just enough time to scream before being consumed entirely. The maw snaps shut and vanishes.

The Spirit-eater licks her lips.

The village elder actually doesn't look all that upset; her eyes narrow a little, that's all.

The hundred tons of seawater coming up the beach, on the other hand, look downright aggrieved, insofar as water is capable of emoting. The precisely-targeted wave arrives very rapidly, with surprisingly little noise for that much stuff moving that fast, and lands like a very large, very wet hammer.

The bulk of the water parts around an invisible barrier just above her body. She staggers a little, but is otherwise unharmed.

That was unexpected. She'll take a moment to renew and amplify her defensive wards before proceeding.

The first wave is followed by several more in rapid succession. The village floods. The old woman is swept away without a trace, dissolving into the churning foam.

It's possible she will sense a vast power flashing by, racing through the water with the speed of a lightning strike, from the old woman's hut out into the open sea. Then again, it's possible she might not.

The water pulls at the boy, attempting to dislodge him from her spell.

New magic. Interesting. An elemental? A shaman of some sort? She hungers.

She raises both hands and mutters, and a burst of intense cold radiates out, freezing the boy and the water. She strides over, drawing her sword. With a swing, she shatters him into pieces.

The water, abruptly, leaves.

All of the water. The bed of the nearby river is now bone-dry. The village is crusted in salt left behind by the vanishing flood. The ice she made sublimates and is sucked away without a trace into the all-devouring dryness of the air. The ocean recedes, dropping away to leave the beach littered with dessicated fish.

Hmm.

Is there high ground nearby?

The ground rises gently as you go inland from her current position; there are also a few low hills on the other side of the ex-river.

Not likely to provide defensive benefits.

She begins walking seaward.

In the distance, past a mile or so of the desert formerly known as the ocean floor, she may observe the retreating water gathering itself up into a vast wave.

That's more or less what she expected to be happening. She casts two spells in rapid succession: one to straddle the boundaries between planes to greatly reduce the effects of physical attack, and one of true seeing. Is the old woman located in any particular spot?

Not... as such, no. She's out there somewhere, but very diffusely, hardly distinguishable from the ocean itself.

Also, the wave isn't dropping. It's just standing there, tall and... pointed?

...It's an arrow. A mile-high arrow embossed on the surface of the sea, pointing directly at her.

Calling for help, perhaps? But from who, in such a fashion? Doubtless she will learn, soon enough. And then they shall learn of her.

In the meantime, she approaches the sea more closely.

It stays well out of her way.

A man descends from the sky on great grey owl's wings. He circles once, high above her, and then glides down for a landing on the vacated seabed.

There is... a lot of him. Not physically - he's tall, but well within the range of ordinary human variation - but magically; the well of his power seems just about bottomless.

Mmm. She wants-

She's fondling the hilt of her sword again as she watches him land.

He asks her a question, in the local language which she does not speak.

There's a spell for that.

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that."

"I said," he repeats patiently, "mind telling me what's got the ocean so alarmed about you?"

"I'm not quite sure. It seems to be a rather disproportionate response to two simple murders."

"Oh? Who'd you kill?"

"A woman and a boy. Her son, I assume."

"People normally don't get my attention over a number of murders less than a few dozen. But somebody really wanted my attention over here."

"Most puzzling indeed. Who exactly are you?"

"The Emperor of this world, most relevantly."

"An emperor, hm." She taps a finger to her lips consideringly. "...No, I haven't killed an emperor before. This ought to be interesting."

—he starts giggling.

He's entitled to his sense of humor.

And while he's doing that, she flicks an empowered magic missile at his face.

It hits him, but he hardly seems to notice, certainly doesn't seem to be at all hurt.

Promising.

Lightning bolt.

The energy is tracelessly absorbed into his body.

He gives her a 'you done?' sort of look.

No, she's in the mood to play with her food some more.

"Resilient, aren't we?" Drawing her sword, she advances on him with a quick attack. The blade's edge shines white.

He catches the blade in his hand. Whatever it was meant to do to him, it doesn't.

His grip is strong enough to crush steel like paper, but he's not all that surprised to find her sword more resilient than ordinary steel.

Her face twists in anger, and the sword emits a deafening, concussive shriek.

He winces slightly at the sound, shakes his head, sighs, and lets go. His general demeanour is as of one outwaiting a child's tantrum.

All right then. She takes a step backwards.

A great yawning rift opens in front of her, or in her, it's hard to tell. It is a mouth, and it hungers to consume everything that it can, and Solekaran specifically. It wants his magic, his power, his life, his soul, his very essence. All that he is, it will strip away and devour. Tentacles snap out to bind his body in place, and begin dragging him closer. He can feel the presence of the maw as a metaphysical weight upon the world, pulling all things into it, as relentless and inexorable as the march of time.

He looks, in the brief moment before the tentacles get him, slightly annoyed.

At first it seems there's no end to him, that his life and his power just go on forever and anything that wants to consume them completely will be occupied for the rest of time.

And then—there is an end—but not the end; as the last drop of power breaks free, the whole thing comes roaring back to life, restored in an instant, good as new—

—and then he explodes?

It's not really an explosion per se; it's a chaotic storm of power, centered on the spot just in front of her all-devouring maw where his body was just beginning to reappear when instead it started doing this. Blazing light and utter darkness, searing heat and bitter cold, lash out in whirling arcs from that central point; and other things too, less nameable things. A wave of force that flings her into the air like a doll and carves deep furrows in the sand of the seabed, shattering the parts that have fused into glass. An energy that turns scattered fragments of seaweed into enormous plants sprouting amid the wreckage, no two alike; a second, opposing energy that crumbles all living things it touches into dust. All the parts of this storm move independently, spinning around and over and through each other, so that over the course of a second a single scrap of seaweed is burned, frozen, given new life as a ten-foot-tall flowering tree with a crown of peacock feathers, then violently torn apart by opposing arcs of force and each of the dozen pieces crushed, warped, half-destroyed at random by the invisible energy of decay, and burned and frozen all over again, all the while being alternately illuminated by near-blinding beams of light and veiled in impenetrable darkness.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, there might or might not be a wavering silhouette that might or might not be the Emperor. It is nearly impossible to detect him by any means, and entirely impossible to reach him; and the storm is growing, reaching outward to encompass the debris it scatters across the sand.

Ugh. Why can't something be easy again, just once.

She levers herself off the ground and starts moving out to stay out reach of the explosion. Her sword, which was knocked out of her grip, shatters into pieces and reforms next to her. She grabs it out of the air.

It takes a couple of minutes for the storm to reach its full size. The active area is about a hundred feet across, and secondary destructive effects reach for another thirty feet or so outside of that - sprays of molten glass or ice-cold shards, blasts of fire, scorched and frozen chunks of unidentifiable organic matter, all being thrown out of the storm at dangerous speeds.

Shortly after the storm stabilizes, the suspended ocean drops back into place. All traces of the old woman are long gone from the vicinity.

Mmrph.

She essays a couple analytical spells. Doesn't get much beyond 'highly magical, very dangerous, no useful way to poke it'.

...He flew in from somewhere. Likely relatively close, given response time. Where might that have been?

Perhaps it was that distant speck floating in the sky above the horizon.

She has a good feeling about that speck. She will go see what it is.

A flight spell lets her step into the sky, and she makes for it.

It's a city, on an island, in the sky.

It may not be quite the most beautiful place she's ever seen, but it's definitely in the running.

Well. That just about makes this plane worth the trouble.

The emperor's palace is likely to be the biggest. That will be her first stop.

The biggest and prettiest building in this floating city is that one, and it definitely has an imperial look. It's either made of a single seamless piece of stone, or very cleverly constructed to look that way. There are several distinct parts to it: just inside the front gate, a low section with a straightforward layout bustles with activity. Next to that, closer to the center of the complex, a taller central section with numerous balconies is remarkably quiet, almost deserted. And finally, surrounding both of those is a maze of gardens, courtyards, and elegant colonnades, which at first glance look nearly random, but on a closer look seem to hint at the pattern of a stylized sunburst radiating from the central tower.

There are a couple of people standing on the roof of the front hall, looking in her direction; one of them has a pair of binoculars. When he spots her, he dashes into the building, and his companion follows.

Possibly looking for the return of his master. Well, here she is.

She lands in front of the entrance. Is it open?

The gate is open, and so are the doors into the front hall. Everyone seems to be very busy, for some reason.

One wonders why that could possibly be. Who seems to be in charge and/or likely to accost her?