From his vantage point above the city, Hornir saw the sudden storm rise and hit the port of Valorus, by its speed and ferocity clearly the product of a Sage, Raylin or Damien depending. Hornir watched the storm build and toss about the docked ships impassively, seemingly caught up in its own mounting fury. Such displays of power from the Sages often rendered each other redundant--a low-level hurricane and an incoming tsunami were hardly complementary in the same time and space. Mephisto would have criticized it, said it was far too much power for so small a target; but Hornir felt differently from his erstwhile companion. To his view, where the goal was mass destruction, there could be no such thing as gratuitousness--power fed upon power, and in the end analysis that was all that mattered. But the storm must have had some other objective, because it died down just as suddenly as it had begun, without drowning the port or the surrounding ships, and out of its decline Hornir saw Elrick's ravens wheeling off further inland, following some invisible path out of the city and into the surrounding plains. It seemed whatever goal had brought the Sages here was now escaping in that direction, and it was probable that the progenitor of the storm had followed. Well enough....
Hornir shifted two black spheres in the palm of one hand, rotating them around each other, careful not to let either touch, like the ancient medicine balls Aeora occasionally used in her meditations. Each was a condensed portal, an opening into a passageway Elrick had constructed from pure darkness, leading to one of the two sites the Sages considered most likely that Verisophiles would flee to--one to the capital city of Rhalla, the other to the underground haven of Klax. He had given two to each Sage in the unlikely event that Verisophiles should escape to either and the Sages would need to move quickly to intercept him. At the moment, Hornir rolled both between his fingers, unsure of which, if either, to crush and activate. He found it doubtful Verisophiles would make the strenuous overland route to either site with even one of the Sages in pursuit, but Elrick had insisted on unusual caution in his taking. It would not do to let the matter rest on assumption.
Still, he concluded, there remained one matter of business and pleasure to finish in the city before rejoining the pursuit. Locating that shifting fault line five miles out and below the ocean's surface, Hornir felt out the magma building between the two plates, forces he had set in motion and left to follow their natural courses. He decided now to give those natural courses a sort of a push. A shrug of power was sufficient to break the magma through the surface crust, and the heatened plate slipped, falling just a few meters relative to its neighbor. Those few meters displaced, quite literally, an ocean of water, and as the ocean surged in to fill its gap, the displacement rippled outward, a rough circle of a wave spreading out from the epicenter of the quake, soon a mile and more in diameter. Most of that wave went out into the deeper sea, gaining in speed and volume until it crashed into distant shores. Part of the wave, however, drove straight inland, building in height rather than length, toward the still shocked and bloodied city of Valorus.
There were no warning bells, no calls of alarm, as the first swell approached the city. Under the chemical glare of fireworks and the mingled sounds of songs and joyous explosions, half of the city was not even aware of the Sages' presence or the happenings along its coast. As the wave approached, dark against the black sea and horizon, it pulled the tide back from the docks, taking along some of the less securely moored ships and wrecks left over from Damien's hurricane. There were, perhaps, a few shouts and screams of shock from onlookers as the ships were pulled suddenly twenty meters into the air, silhouetted against a swell now too large to be clearly visible, but these came too late. And as the wave came in, cresting and falling, a mass of devouring black water descended upon the city, pulverizing the remaining ships at dock, spilling irresistibly into the streets and alleyways, filling every courtyard, crevice and hiding place. The human buildup, more than half of the city's population who had descended for the festival, was swept up and carried away, or dragged beneath and drowned, like chaff and straw being purified from the streets. Buildings that could not withstand the strain buckled in and collapsed as well, forming temporary dams that diverted the water and then disintegrated and flowed away themselves in person-sized chunks.
A second, and then even more devastating third wave came in, but by then Hornir was moving swiftly away from the doomed city, the black sphere labeled 'Klax' crushed in the palm of his hand.
(OOC: Apologies if this changes anyone's field of play still in Valorus, but I intended to describe only the tsunami's general effects; how your individual characters handle themselves in the mayhem is entirely open.)
