153, 2/2

The sun set to one side of the horizon while the moons teased their presence upon the other, and a rainbow of reds, yellow, and blues stretched across the heavens between, covering the world in color. All around, grasses swayed under northern winds. Though this was Veird’s equivalent of Spring, it was still cold at night, in this part of the world. Erick’s breath fogged in the chill air, producing streamers of visible warmth that whipped away in the breeze.

In the distance, and all around, tiny dots of light danced among the grasses. They weren’t fireflies; they were much larger, each about the size of his thumb. Erick had heard them called lightbugs, and they were harmless. They flitted among the tall green grasses, glittering in whites and greens and yellows, bringing light to the deepening night. They had a few slim uses. About one in a hundred thousand had Light Essence in their glowing bodies, which was about the most expensive thing about them. Hunting for those specific lightbugs was like hunting for dropped gold coins on a beach, though; no one did it unless they were a rather odd person or had some method to shorten the search. Either way, only the foolish or needy would go hunting for such a specific payout, since hunting the monsters which were out here at the same time would provide a much more steady paycheck.

But the lightbugs were pretty to look at. Erick had chosen this spot because of those lightbugs, for they gave rise to the idea that even in the dark, there was light, and even when the world seemed empty, that was just an illusion.

Ah.

Yes.

There’s the mindset.

Erick relaxed into the moment. With one hand, he channeled his mana through [Lightshape]. With the other, he channeled [Shadowshape]. He found the harmony almost instantly, like someone else had taken the vocals and the instrumentals of a song and pulled them apart, and here Erick was, putting them back together.

He cast.

The world in front of him took on an unreality. Small natural damage done to the grasses all around him, like bent blades and chewed stems, vanished. The breeze turned more hospitable, warming up by degrees. Lightbugs appeared, but they were fake, too; all the real ones had stopped glowing around Erick, for they would not glow in the direct presence of others. That was one of the ways that a grass traveler could tell if there were monsters waiting in the deepening twilight, just out of sight.

A blue box appeared, but Erick ignored it for a moment, as he tested the control he had imposed upon the scene. He made the false lightbugs glow brighter. He made the night deepen. He made the air turn frozen, and chilly, sending the dancing illusions of lightbugs to the ground like scattered, glowing ice cubes, their glows rapidly giving out. And then when even the distant lightbugs noticed this and shut off their lights, Erick went the other way with his illusions. He warmed the world, bringing high summer to the night, making the world muggy and false, and bright with buzzing lights. He hid himself, Poi, Jane, and Teressa, in the illusion.

It didn’t take long for the lightbugs to notice the happening scene in front of them. The real bugs all began to relight. They moved into the area and seemed to love the false warmth.

The night danced with illusions of brightness.

The spell soon ran its course; Erick had asked too much of the Shaping magic. The cold night returned. The fake lightbugs vanished. The real lightbugs saw Erick, standing in the middle of their glow party, and they stopped glowing. They dropped into the shadowy grasses and hid, once again.

Erick checked his spell.

It was a good outcome. The ‘unreal control’ is what made the spell Mystical, while [Illusionshape] would have retained the normal ‘fine control’ of its parent spells.

Erick played around with [Mysticalshape] for a little while, targeting the images he could see in the mana whenever he activated Meditation. Fake eyes and fake monsters in the mana became real, for a certain definition of real.

Tigers made of arms. Floating, swimming fish in the grasses made of scales and webbing. Lizards made of claws. Mouths made of tongues.

And then Erick shifted those unreal sights into something nicer. Tigers made of orange and gold, with gold that turned black in the shadows, and white in the light. Fish made of emeralds with diaphanous fins made of starlight. Lizards made of obsidian, that hid in the darkness like it was their homes, with bright red eyes like cherry red iron. The mouths and the eyes simply went away; Erick didn’t need those in his life.

As he got a feel for the magic, night deepened. Stars came out. Twilight was here, while the sun set far beyond the western horizon. In the half-light of almost-night, Erick went onto the next part of this magic.

He held out a hand and listened to the Growing tale of [Treeshape]. He mixed a tale of decades of easy life, under the sun and growing tall, with the sounds of [Stoneshape] producing a life that stretched out into time frames measured in eons.

A transformation. A mutation. A permanency of solidness that still managed to reach for the sky and make itself known.

He told this tale to a seed he had gathered from a tall, strong tree, back in Alaralti.

And then he set the seed into the ground, and cast.

Stone raised from the land like a sapling trunk, then grew tall, and strong. Erick directed the growth with a bit more trouble than he usually had with [Treeshape], but only because the stone tree did not want to grow as fast as a normal tree, and Erick was pushing against that limit. A blue box appeared but Erick was concentrating. He pushed the message to the side. With focus and goals, the stone tree grew. The spell ended. The tree stood mighty, thick of trunk and reaching of branch, with bright orange, red, and brown bark, and with black leaves that drank in the world, making the world just a bit more solid. The tree was ten meters tall and did not wave in the wind. Even the leaves were like chips of unmoving stone. It would take a hurricane to move this tree.

Erick looked at the spell.

Erick nodded, then turned to his creation. With a swipe of his lightform, he grabbed a seed pod in the upper reaches of the living petrified tree. It was the shape of a walnut, but a bit bigger, almost the size of his palm. The outside was vibrantly orange but Erick’s mana sense told him the inside was crystalline white.

The scrolls from Devouring Nightmare had said using a seed from his first working wasn’t strictly necessary for the second working, but upon seeing the size, the heft, and the interior of the seed, some inner part of Erick knew that he had to use this nascent tree to grow the next.

He stepped away from the original tree. This next one would be much, much larger.

With the stonetree seed held in his palms, he channeled [Mysticalshape] into the seed from his left hand, while [Living Petrified Treeshape] channeled into the seed from the right. The seed began to glow. The interior crystal shone through the petrified surface; a white light under oranges and reds.

Ophiels danced around Erick, their eyes focused in reverence as they sang a syncing song to the night, to the seed.

Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye held in the sky above Erick like a fourth moon, gazing down upon the working with a focus to rival Melemizargo.

That Old Dragon was probably watching this, wasn’t he? Eh. Whatever.

—The seed shifted. The exterior turned black as the interior became as bright as the sun. Mana flowed from Erick into the seed; he had cast the spells in the middle of the working, somehow, only realizing that he had cast after the fact. The seed soaked in his power and greedily drank thousands of mana from his soul.

He felt a tether take hold.

He let the seed go.

The seed did not drop. It floated away, like a leaf upon a slow river. Ten meters, then thirty, then fifty; traveling like a coconut upon unseen waters to where it needed to be. Suddenly, the grasslands turned to liquid, swirling away like so much sand and mud, and the seed buried itself according to its own desires. Erick felt himself connect to the magic, and the magic asked what he wanted.

Erick spoke, “A kilometer tall, or more, and strong enough to withstand whatever the world brings to bear against you.”

The seed seemed to laugh, as though Erick’s request was too easy.

The tether snapped.

From one flashing second to the next, as though Erick had seen a bright light and his eyes were adjusting, the tree appeared. Fully grown. White as Erick’s magic, and almost as bright. Fifty meters wide at the thickest part of the trunk. A kilometer and a half tall. Its branches blocked out the sky with a million billion white leaves, upon branches that were just as brilliant. It was a version of Reality that was close to reality, but not exactly.

And then the magic faded. The white light faded.

The tree remained.

In the twilight purple sky, the tree was a lot less white, a lot less unreal. Purple shadows played in the boughs while dark wind played among the leaves. The tree had become real, and yet remained a bit inscrutable. It did not sway in the breeze, except in the smallest of ways. The Arbors of Treehome at least swayed a bit. This one was solid as, well, rock.

From an odd direction, Erick felt a demand.

Yggdrasil demanded; a wordless expression of need.

It was an overwhelming emotion, one that Erick almost gave into right away, but he did not. Erick looked at Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye and said, “You’re going to have to wait. The scrolls from Devouring Nightmare were very clear about what the good version of this spell looked like, and since the blue box hasn’t appeared yet, we don’t know if it turned out well. Even if it did turn out well, though, you only have one body right now, and I don’t want you experimenting on yourself when you only have one self to experiment on.”

Yggdrasil… still demanded, but it was less forceful. After a moment, Yggdrasil’s eye bounced along in reluctant understanding.

“Thank you for understanding.” Erick nodded at the [Scry] eye, and then turned to the open air, openly wondering, “Now where is that— Ah. There it is.”

The blue box had finally appeared.

Erick smiled. He showed Yggdrasil the spell, saying, “It turned out well. Soon as I get to Spur and grow you a new body to replace the one you lost, we can experiment. Okay?”

Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye tumbled through the air in reluctant understanding.

Erick added, “You know, if you grew up enough for me to plant one of you on this side of the world, maybe I could grant you the spell here. Would you like that?”

Yggdrasil’s eye went rigid in contemplation. Then he began to vibrate a bit like an excited child, rapidly transitioning into elated nodding.

Erick smiled. “Good. You work on growing, then. Besides that, it might be nice to have one of you on this side of the world. Less distance to cover with [Scry].”

Yggdrasil’s eye danced through the air, understanding a bit, but too excited to comprehend. He went to join Ophiel, who was already flying around the big white tree. Erick simply watched for a little while.

Poi, Teressa, and Jane watched from a bit further away.

Soon enough, the [Familiar]s all came back to Erick, and Erick moved on to the final part of the evening’s magic. He focused, he imagined, and he cast, transforming that which was partially illusion, partially real, into adopting a different form that was no less impressive.

The massive white tree transformed into a craggy white boulder a few hundred meters across, set halfway into the ground. It had only two architectural accompaniments; a staircase that led up to a plateau at the top, and a house upon that plateau. The house was a familiar three stories tall, with two mage towers on either side and balconies here and there.

Erick smiled as he gazed upon his craft. He had recreated his house at Spur, here, in this open land north of Holorulo.

“Ah ha!” Erick turned to his people and handed out the spellwork. “That’s the good version, too!”

Poi, Teressa, and Jane, had silently watched the whole time. Now, they read the blue boxes they had been given.

Jane read and discarded the boxes, then asked, “Why’d you make it like the house in Spur?”

“A summer home! Or something. I’m not sure yet. Maybe I’ll make a whole lot of these homes all across the world? It could work.” He started walking toward his own, private clan mountain, saying, “Come on! Let’s go see what it looks like on the inside!”

While Ophiels twittered and flew ahead of Erick, everyone else began to follow.

Erick stepped upon the white stonetree, onto some stairs he had shaped into the working that went all the way to the house at the top. Now that he was here… The stairs were a bit uneven, and a bit too shallow, like someone had hewn stairs out of a real rock mountain without any care about how stairs should be. OSHA would not approve.

Erick mumbled, “Eh. Good enough for a first try.”

Jane asked, “You didn’t use [Metalshape], did you? Why not?”

Erick hummed, thinking.

Jane let him think.

It didn’t take long to get halfway up the white staircase. While he was thinking, Erick saw room for improvement everywhere. Water would collect and putrefy in that divot over there, while those steps right there were a tripping hazard, and this whole place was rather unprotected. He could have easily made his clan mountain harder to assail if he had been thinking about defense when he cast. He could have made sheer walls on the sides, instead of slopes that allowed easy scaling. He could have made extra houses here and there, too. Guest houses. Garden spaces. Places that, with a bit of carving, or better Shaping, could be made into a nice set of waterfalls and small ponds and—

Ah. Erick realized Jane was setting up for a joke.

Erick asked, “Why would [Metalshape] have been good?”

Jane smiled. She stepped to her father’s side, and said, “You could have called the spell [Adaman-tree-um].”

Erick burst a laugh that filled the silent night sky. Jane smiled brightly.

Erick said, “Puns aside, the scrolls didn’t go into alternate versions, but I can imagine a ton of reasons that they didn’t use metal. When I researched for Yggdrasil, I found out about metal trees that grow in the deep parts of Nergal, as a way to protect themselves against the various toxic monsters and life that also grows all around down there. They’re probably not natural, though, so that evolution idea is rather thin. They’re rare trees, because they’re very easy to [Metalshape], because of their second property, of being living, magical metal. You can chop off a branch and immediately use it to make some magic item, or what have you. This is likely the main reason that metal trees are not part of the clan mountains; they’re not secure from a simple tier 2 spell that is purchasable from the Script.”

They had reached the house, and it looked exactly the same as Erick’s house back in Spur. He smiled as he looked up at it. And then he walked in, with the others following. With a flick of his intent, lightwards spread throughout the entire space, illuminating the house almost exactly as the house in Spur was illuminated.

This house was a mess.

There were many places where the Shaping had failed in the details. There were holes in many walls, and the staircase was half melty. Erick frowned, as he walked deeper into the house.

Erick continued, “Another problem of including metals into this magic is that such a spell might only produce small trees. The steel trees of Nergal are all stunted things that only grow large when you give them lots of metal. They’re not able to just take the rock in the ground, the water in the land, and nutrients in the air and make themselves as big as they can be. This spell can do that. Plus, eternal stonetree is electrically insulated. Lightning is not a problem for clan mountains.” Erick looked around the kitchen as he said, “There’s probably more reasons not to include [Metalshape] in the working but I can’t think of many.”

Jane asked, “But to include illusion would circumvent many of those issues, wouldn’t it?”

“Possibly. I’m not too experienced with illusions yet, but illusion seems to be able to make Reality into reality, but only if reality is already rather close to Reality. You probably have more experience with illusions than me. You made all of the Shaping spells, didn’t you?”

“I did, along with a few subsequent spells,” Jane said, casting a spell at the ground and achieving nothing. “Didn’t make anything that I’d be unwilling to break and try again, though.”

Erick walked into the main room, then up the central staircase. Everyone else stayed nearby as he explored. He said, “Anyway. I won’t be making a metal version of this spell; I’m almost 100% certain that the existence of [Metalshape] would invalidate the whole working.” He stomped his foot upon the floor and it sounded like stomping on a boulder. “Heh. This stuff is a lot more solid than I thought it would be.”

Jane cast another spell at the ground, then said, “Yup. None of my Shaping spells work on it. Not even [Illusionshape].”

Erick teased, “It’s only ten days to remake the clone spell you have at tier 3. Try to remake [Illusionshape] into [Mysticalshape].”

“I might.”

“If you had a truly good illusion spell, you could use it for practically everything.” Erick said, “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Yeah. When I read about it, it sounded like a good way to get myself killed.”

“Yup.” Erick said, “But the utility of illusion is not to be diminished.”

“Maybe.” Jane said, “Anyway. Let’s go home. I got monsters to kill in the morning.”

“Sure sure.” Erick looked around again, and paused.

He had felt a bit homesick the second he saw this remake of his house at Spur, but now it hit him pretty hard. Jane and Poi noticed.

Teressa did not. She asked, “Are you really going to leave this house here?”

“Sure. Why not?” Erick said, “It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

Poi said, “Operational security. Best not to have outside forces know what your house looks like because they can scout it out before an assault.”

Teressa nodded. “Yes. That.”

“… Oh.” Erick looked around. He frowned. “Well. I’m leaving it here. It’ll have a natural illusion layered over it, so it should be fine from most casual views.” He tapped a hole in the wall between the main staircase room and the sunroom. “After fixing these small problems, of course. Can’t have intruders come into a messy house!”

Teressa laughed.

The second Shaping went much better. Holes in walls were patched over. Staircases became normal, instead of looking like they had been copied from a funhouse. The sides of the mountain turned sheer and Erick erased the staircase leading up, turning the whole place into a miniature Holorulo clan mountain. Places for dirt for gardens and water for lakes were carved out on top, along with places for waterfalls and some small internal plumbings.

… A third Shaping, because he could, created two small guest houses in the local, pagoda-based style.

Another Shaping vastly improved on the plumbing, allowing for a system that cycled on the interior of the tiny mountain, and places in which Erick could place sand, and gravel, and various other filters, to allow the place to naturally clean itself, as well as funnel into the waterfalls and lake system he installed. There was no water yet. There were no fish in that nonexistent water. But there could be! Theoretically, all it would take to keep the place stocked with water and fish and keep everything alive, would be some [Gravity Ward]s to draw liquid to the top of the falls, and some plant life to clean it all.

Another Shaping had the living eternal stonetree adjust its illusion of itself.

From far away, it looked like a mirage, with the parts closest to the grasses looking like grass and the parts above looking like sky. Once you got within a kilometer of it, though, that illusion was easily seen through.

Erick rapidly decided that he needed to get some more experience with this spell before he went and repaired Red Ledger’s clan mountain, but the night was here, in full, and he would have to gain that experience later. He bid his secondary house farewell, and lightstepped himself and his people back to their temporary residence in Holorulo.

– – – –

Erick’s eyes shot open. He was laying in bed, on his side, the sheets pulled up around himself. He had been dreaming, and then something happened in that dream. It had awoken him. The dream was already fading because Erick didn’t know why he woke up. He had woken up because… Something…

A quick check revealed that the world was not on fire.

No… He had woken up because of something… else…

“Oh!” Erick sat up, and laughed a little. “That’s how you Remake a Shaping spell! It’s aura control for Mana Shaping and Altering at the same time!” The formula used in the clan mountain scrolls that turned [Eternal Stonetree] into [Eternal Stonetreeshape] was the same formula that could be extrapolated to every other type of Elemental Magic out there! “Ha!” And then Erick thought a bit more, and mumbled to Ophiel, who was eyeing him, “I’d have to figure out aura control then I need to Remake Mana Altering and Mana Shaping. Not even sure how to go about Remaking something that is not a spell, but there has to be a way.”

Ophiel twittered unsure guitar twangs; he didn’t know either.

Erick nodded, saying, “Another question to ask at Rozeta’s Orrery, for sure.”

Ophiel agreed, singing tiny violin sounds into the darkness.

Erick smiled as he laid back down.

Eventually, sleep returned.

The next morning, Erick scheduled a meeting with Tsung Red Ledger.

It was time to apply his magic to practical applications.

He was already excited.

– – – –

The Alluvial District of Eralis was much diminished from how it looked before Terror Peaks attacked. The white bridge leading from the city to the noble district had been repaired, along with the winding roads that went around all the clan mountains. But the clan mountains were a different story. Some were fully repaired. Most were half repaired, and in the process of spot fixes here and there, using stone instead of eternal stonetree. That was why there were runes against [Stoneshape] inside Star Song; normal stone was used for repairs in most cases. A few clan mountains were broken beyond repair, reduced to little more than rubble and broken walls, their inhabitants gone from this world forever.

Everywhere Erick looked, people were rebuilding. Everywhere he looked, there was still a lot of work to be done. Apparently there weren’t a whole lot of people who could cast the spells Erick had learned last night, and they were all booked up.

There were clan mountains that had half fallen down in landslides, with rooms and hallways exposed to the world. In some places, the mountains had been cratered on the side, where something inside had exploded outward. Fixing this land was harder than fixing the rest of Eralis, for when the dirty bombs exploded everywhere, they tainted the land. [Cleanse] helped to get rid of the fallout from those dirty bombs, but [Mend] didn’t work here.

As he walked down the white road, toward his meeting, Erick saw where and how a few of the mountains had failed in ways that went beyond the simple trauma of war. Mostly, he noticed many perfectly smooth, cliff-like areas, that he supposed were some sort of fracture that went through the whole of the mountain. A stress break, along a fault line? Very likely. Some mountains had been exploded outward with massive, breaking spells, leaving jagged edges where the eternal stonetree had snapped away from its interior, leaving behind edges that looked a lot more like broken branches than like stone.

Now that he knew what he was looking at, the true nature of the clan mountains was practically on display. Surely, others would come to the same conclusion Erick had originally arrived at, that these were stonetrees of some kind, but how many would guess that there were Illusion Magics here, as well? Not many, for sure.

Eventually, Erick came to Red Ledger, and nowhere was the true nature of the clan mountains more evident than here, in the southern part of the Alluvial District. One of the [Gate] bombs had been planted just beyond here, weakening the area for a decisive strike against Red Ledger. It was here, upon the corpse of this clan, where most of the early fighting had taken place, by all the rest of the Alluvial District, against Terror Peaks, who had [Gate]d in here and established a beachhead.

The mountain had been cracked open like someone had taken their hands to a birthday cake, and pulled half of it away. All that was left of the original structure was a thirty meter tall arc of eternal stonetree that had been an outside wall, and which was now just a lonely spire, like a leaning gravestone.

Erick stood beside that arc of stone. Tsung stood on his other side. A man from Void Song, a Building Overseer by the name of Huu, stood on the other side of Tsung.

Poi and Teressa stood behind Erick, to the side, while a few other survivors of Red Ledger stood near a table that had been pulled from the wreckage. Those other survivors had placed a scale model of the reconstruction plan upon that table, along with architectural maps that detailed every floor and every pipe and every vent.

When Erick showed up, Tsung was already here with his people, and he had rapidly told Erick a few things about what was going to happen, showing him the model and acting rather informal the whole time. It was nice.

But then the BO showed up, and Tsung briefly turned contrite, before realizing that he was a patriarch now, and his words turned stronger. Huu was a bureaucrat, and he needed to be sure that Tsung had filled out all the proper paperwork, and gotten his models and architectural maps approved by Void Song.

Erick got the distinct impression that Tsung had spoken at length with Huu about the model and about the plans, long before today, and that Huu didn’t like something about what he saw. But Huu never said what his objections were, directly. Tsung had answers for all of Huu’s problems, and soon enough Tsung was speaking rather shortly at the man. Eventually, Huu accepted that everything was good to go.

Eventually, it came time to cast some spells.

Huu hadn’t spoken to Erick beyond a cursory greeting before this point. He did not make a great impression.

Huu said, “It is no trouble if you fail, for we have casters on standby. Please erect your Domain and ensure that this land is not spied upon by outsiders. Patriarch Tsung. Everyone else. You may leave the area. You are not authorized to see what happens here.”

Tsung did not argue. He simply gave Erick a pained nod, said, “Thank you, Archmage Flatt,” and walked away, down to a space in the white road that had been cleared of clan mountain rubble. His people followed him.

Huu spoke again after Tsung removed himself, “Your people too, Archmage Flatt.”

Erick said, “There’s no need for that.” And then he threw out a [Domain of Light], easily stretching his spell to the white roads that surrounded Red Ledger’s land. As the world inside the Domain turned saturated, Erick twisted his working, and the world outside vanished from sight. Every single nosy [Scry] eye in the area popped, except for Yggdrasil’s. Erick felt out his Domain, finding a few more esoteric sensory spells. He couldn’t tell exactly what they were for, or what they did, but he crushed them anyway. It took less than ten seconds before he said, “There we go. We’re secured now, Mister Huu.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Huu glanced to Poi and Teressa, but said nothing. He turned back to the rubble. “Clean up comes first. Save whatever stone you can, but be sure to excavate every object that is not stone. Dump the trash over there.” He pointed to a mostly clear space on the white road, acting like he knew best.

Erick had included that part of the white road in his Domain, though, specifically because he knew he would have to clean out the remains of the clan mountain. Erick could tell a lot about Huu from what he had seen, and heard.

Huu liked things done perfectly, and that he brokered no disrespect from anyone. He valued his job, and from how Huu glared at the broken bits of the clan mountain around them, and how he had spoken to Tsung, it was apparent that Huu thought that his predecessor had done a shitty job. If the crafting had been better a hundred years ago, when the mountain was first erected, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

Unfortunately, Huu was completely unaware of how to not be a jerk about it.

Erick did not feel the need to respond in kind, so he said, “Of course.”

[Eternal Stonetreeshape] soaked into the grey and black rubble, spreading like an echo, chiming off of every bit of broken clan mountain. The magic soaked in, and the debris began to melt, to liquefy. There was a lot of rubble, and it had been gathered and piled back into the original space where the mountain had been, but most of the original mountain had been erased by [Cleanse], in the process of cleaning up the land from the dirty bombs. In effect, the rubble that was present was not the rubble of a full clan mountain. It was less than a quarter.

But it was still a lot of material.

Erick pressed the spell into a dome, first, turning a large pile of boulders and otherwise into a pile half the size it had been that bubbled upward in the center. In that center, it was maybe 35 meters tall. On the edge, the bubble met the white road, exactly.

Erick flexed his cast again.

Here and there, like surprises appearing, furniture surfaced. A broken chair tumbled upward, out of grey eternal stonetree, then rolled down the half-liquid slope of the mountain. A dresser shook grey goo from its top and began to slide down the slope. More objects came, faster and faster.

Furniture and carpets and fabrics and bodies—

A few bodies. Several.

Erick breathed deep.

Tsung and his people had cleaned up the land well before Erick came here, but they did not get everyone. If the broken bodies were of people from Terror Peaks, or from Red Ledger, Erick did not know. He maintained the spellwork, causing everything that was not eternal stonetree to float up onto the grey surface. And then, all at once, he understood the spell a bit better. With a flex of control, and a designation of the illusionary eternal stonetree as supremely dense (which it was not, at all), making everything else comparatively light (which was the opposite of the Truth), every last treasure and horror breached out of grey sands, everywhere across the kilometer-wide base of the clan mountain.

The magic faded.

The grey bubble turned solid.

Huu mostly contained his surprise as he said, “It takes a proficient hand to achieve that. You’ll still need to do that again to get all the debris, and then maybe a third time. Allow me to help with the cleanup.” He cast a spell.

A many-armed blue-noodle thing popped out onto the ground in front of Huu, looking like a jumble of ramen with gloves on the ends of its appendages. It barely came up to his waist. Huu silently gestured forward and the creature instantly rushed forward onto the grey bubble. The ramen summon grabbed the nearest object, which was a broken painting, and tumbled down the side, holding the broken painting above itself until it reached the edge of the area, where it dumped the painting onto the ground. And then the noodle boy went back into the mess.

Huu cast another summon, his voice oddly stiff as he said, “I am sorry you have to see this death again, Archmage Flatt. Nasty business, that.”

Erick glanced at the man.

Huu’s eyes were wide, and unnaturally focused on the job ahead of him. Ah. He was unsettled. The bodies had triggered something within him.

“Don’t worry about the bodies, Huu. Ophiel can get them.” Erick directed his Ophiel to where they needed to be, saying, “This war was quite awful. I hope to never see its like again, but I suspect I will before the year is up. Maybe sooner.”

Ahh… Maybe he shouldn’t have been that honest. Perhaps Erick had been unsettled, too.

While Erick was moving the bodies to a space to the side, Huu stared at them for a moment too long. He was at his breaking point, and then he broke. Huu turned and vomited onto the ground, apologizing even when he was in the middle of his second vomit.

Erick’s opinion of the man improved.

No more words were exchanged. Erick laid the bodies upon conjured white cloth, and then he helped to move out the actual trash from the site. Huu continued to summon more noodle boys and together, both finished the job of moving items to the side. There were a lot of items. Mostly furniture, but a lot of personal effects, too. Books. Papers. Letters. Clothes.

When the piles of trash had been collected, Huu went to the center of the pile and cast a large [Mending Aura]. Half of the objects returned to their original forms. The other half did not. They had likely been damaged by the Extreme Light dirty bombs. Still, he did not [Cleanse] the trash away. He merely separated the piles between broken and non-broken. Red Ledger could further separate the piles from there.

Erick went over the site with his Ophiel and his mana sense, then used another Shaping to bring up a few more items, but nothing of note. With everything cleaned out of the site, Erick helped move the bodies and the items outside of his Domain, to where some people from Void Song and Red Ledger were already waiting. Red Ledger was there for both the items and the people, to see what was salvageable and who needed to be mourned. Void Song was there to see if any of the bodies were Terror Peaks soldiers.

Erick left them to it, not wanting to be involved in all that, and went back inside his Domain to continue. It was time to begin the real work. He handed off a seed he had plucked from a tree outside, to an Ophiel, who planted it on top of the grey hill.

And then Erick cast.

In seconds, a kilometer tall white tree appeared, its branches stretching off half a kilometer in every direction, while its roots dug deep into the grey ground. Erick’s creation shimmered in the saturated white light of Erick’s Domain, its leaves glittering in sunlight like chips of mirrors. It was beautiful.

Huu’s eyes went wide, and then he resigned himself. “Ah. Of course. The white version. I suppose that’s appropriate enough.”