216, 1/2

Erick glanced at Quilatalap’s presentation and saw very little that he didn’t already know, and since the archlich himself was not in residence at the moment, Erick did not go inside. He did, however, read all the lightpaintings with a quick tour of Ophiel to figure out Quilatalap’s path for the past year.

The Archlich of Necromancy had lost a body to Tania Webwalker’s magic, near the end of Last Shadow’s Feast. Erick recalled Tania using [Chaining Soul Destruction], or something similar to that, for the spell she actually told him was surely not the one she truly used. For Erick, Quilatalap’s absence had been noticed, then passed over, but for Quilatalap, he had taken a month to come back to himself. When he came back he saw that the Armory had been destroyed and everything had been looted, so before he started couch surfing, trying to find a new home, he moved to collect the more dangerous artifacts before they could do too much damage. As the Caretaker of the Armory he had tagged every single one of the truly dangerous items so he could locate them if they ever got taken without his permission; and that is what he did.

Collecting many of those items had been a simple matter of picking the item off of the floor where the inexperienced user had attempted to use the item, and had failed spectacularly. Most of those people Quilatalap had been able to [True Resurrection] back to life, but sometimes the trails of bodies had been weeks in the creation, or the artifact he had been pursuing had been a soul-destroying artifact. Quilatalap was an accomplished archlich with the power of Time on his side, but even he could only bring back a portion of many of those thieves.

And then Quilatalap shoved all those artifacts into a deep hole somewhere. If the ‘Trials of the Dark’ should return, then those items would likely go into those trials, to be won by test takers and the worthy, as was intended.

In a private conversation during the course of the Sovereign Cities war, in one of their many Hasted spaces, Erick had heard a lot of this. He had also told Quilatalap that he should just destroy the lot of them. Quilatalap had vehemently said no; some of those artifacts were priceless relics which taught basic fundamentals about mana, and which must be preserved. The Fang of Darkness was Quilatalap’s preferred example of artifacts that must never be destroyed, for that tooth had been directly gifted from Melemizargo to a Shade many years ago, in order to teach that Shade Destruction Magic in ways that were impossible to know otherwise. With that artifact in one’s possession, one could even Remake [Cleanse] without killing oneself, or make such fabled, yet simple spells like [Destruction Bolt].

This specific example had led Erick to asking if Quilatalap knew [Destruction Bolt], which he did.

The Archlich of Necromancy then threw a Bolt of seeming-darkness at a rock, erasing half that rock from existence.

And then Erick had done the same thing, easy as flicking a finger, because that was what Erick had been doing every time he had tried to channel ‘Shadow’. He had been accidentally channeling Destruction.

Standing here now, walking by Quilatalap’s presentation and seeing the Fang of Darkness listed as one of the recovered artifacts… Erick remembered Quilatalap’s surprised expression at seeing Erick’s dark Bolt, and then his laugh, which only got louder as Erick told of why he had thought he had been doing Shadow-altering all this time, and then louder still when Erick asked why he didn’t get a blue box for that spell.

“Destruction is uncodified magic, Erick!” Quilatalap had guffawed. “Of course you can’t get that spell in a box! And of course you can do it that easily! Ha!” And then suddenly more serious, “Don’t use that spell in combat unless you absolutely have to, okay? Elemental Destruction is still exceedingly dangerous, no matter how much anyone thinks they’re good at it.”

That had led to a conversation about the grass traveler clans of northern Songli, and the [Cleanse] Archmage, Koori Pale Cow, who was very good at Destruction Magic.

This had completely surprised Quilatalap, his eyes going wide and his mouth dropping open. And then he had shut his mouth, and said, “Maybe I need to go see this woman. She’s a rare talent.”

“She had hated magic, but I think I got her to like it again.” Erick had added, “And I think she might become Empress of Nelboor, or something, eventually. That’s what I saw when I mana sensed her once. It was a really weird thing to see, too.”

Quilatalap had nodded, then said, “Then I suppose I must meet her; if not now, then later.” He smirked, teasing, “It’s good to get in on the ground floor of knowing people before they become too important.”

Erick had laughed. “Is that what’s going on here! Am I just a page in your fuck book?”

“Ohhhh… You’re more than a page. Maybe two. Two and a half if I feel like writing an essay, which I probably will.”

Erick had laughed at the time.

Now, as he passed by Quilatalap’s unmanned presentation, he wasn’t laughing.

The writing on the wall was clear; the man moved around a lot, and he never set down roots. Had he even had a real relationship in the last… thousand years? Or however long? Was the time between the two of them a fling? They were both immortals, after all, so maybe relationships between immortals were only ever flings. And yet, Erick was still only 49. Perhaps it was crazy to get into a relationship with the 3000+ year old archlich, even though they were both so comfortable with each other…

And yet, if Quilatalap actually did think that Erick was Xoat, then who was the truly older one?

… Erick didn’t want to think about Xoat anymore, because the simple fact was that Erick wanted Quilatalap and Quilatalap had wanted him… Had wanted? Had that changed? Or had Quilatalap never wanted Erick at all, and he was simply happily enthusiastic for Erick’s own constant and enthusiastic consent?

Did Quilatalap actually like Erick—

Erick chided himself. Yes, Quilatalap did like Erick in the same way that Erick liked him, but everything was weird right now.

Hopefully it would work out.

Erick moved on.

– – – –

Erick walked into the presentation for Ar’Cosmos.

He paused, as he saw, and he recognized.

There was a lot.

Names of people he had never met, along with their dragon forms and horns, and their new lands, which were sometimes old lands which had belonged to other people and yet which were stolen by these dragons. They were the new movers and shakers of Ar’Cosmos, the ones who had arrived due to the Dragon Exodus and taken everything that others had built and made it their own and expanded, but they were only half the story of the recent horrors of Ar’Cosmos.

Another part of the presentation, and about that whole Dragon Exodus story, was about Erick’s gift of runic [Renew] rings, which could be used by anyone to prop up any existing magic. In addition to that original instantiation of [Renew], Redflame and Inferno Maw had worked hard on making new rings. They had also semi-perfected the Renewal Tanks, which would cleanse people of their mutated dragon essence problem, and also imbue people with levels of accretion at a rate that far, far outstripped a person’s innate ability to gain themselves. Erick’s concern over super soldiers was a reality, and it had only taken a few months for that to to be halfway-perfected, and even less time for those soldiers to go on winning wars far out of sight of all normal people.

But those soldiers were just small potatoes compared to the original purpose of the runic [Renew] rings, which were to allow anyone to pump mana into a node of Ar’Cosmos, to fortify and expand the land. This was where the major story took place; the stage upon which everything unfolded. As Erick gazed upon the presentation, he realized that this expansion of land was a microcosm of what would happen when Erick eventually opened up new worlds. What had happened in Ar’Cosmos was nothing at all like how new lands were cleared here in the real world, for here in the real world there were monsters in all these lands. Always more monsters, and from every possible vector. From under the ground, from the air, from visitors unknowingly bringing them into town, to outsized threats rolling across the land, spotting a new village/town/city/etc in the distance and then attempting to roll over that land and eat everyone they could find.

But not in Ar’Cosmos.

There were no monsters in Ar’Cosmos.

And so, the expansion of that land had been the only real expansion of safe land that Veird had seen since the Old Cosmology. It was war. It was genocide. It was death and destruction and complete expansion into pristine, virgin territory, which would remain free of the largest threat on this planet. No monsters meant every bit of land gained would be kept.

Erick was having trouble wrapping his mind around just how big of a change all this was, but he knew it was big. Everyone did. But it was too big to really calculate in any meaningful way.

The unseen war of Fairy was magnified by the number of dragons vying for power, so perhaps looking at this war and seeing possible future parallels between the opening of new worlds was disingenuous, but…

Not too disingenuous.

Erick gazed across the presentation, and saw maps upon maps, of a world half-there; of an overlay of Fairy upon the real Surface of Veird.

Ar’Cosmos remained the solid center of the main map, located in the near-center of the Forest of Glaquin, surrounded by fogs that delineated the ‘edge of Fairy’, but tendrils of forest expanded away from that initial land, like someone had cleared the fog and laid down roads. The center of the map remained Ar’Cosmos, in about a thousand kilometer diameter sphere, but to the north, along the edge of the coast, lay another city called Coast. To the far southeast, where Treehome was located in the real world, lay a city called Arbor. To the east of Arbor, in the Wyrmridge Mountains, where the Firemaws lay, was a city called Volcano. Rather unimaginative names, but those were the ones Erick focused on because of their locations. They had likely been named in their simplistic way to allow others to easily know them. Many other cities had opened up all inside the Fairy side of the Forest of Glaquin, but Coast was on the other side of where Erick’s Gate to the Forest lay, and Arbor was on the other side of where Yggdrasil grew, and Volcano was… Well it was at the Volcano. Erick wasn’t sure what made Volcano special, but it was probably special, if for no other reason than its size. Volcano was easily the largest new city in Fairy, rivaling even Ar’Cosmos for size.

And yet, those cities were just the cities on the major maps.

Ar’Cosmos was divided into layers of reality, with at least 5, and probably as many as 10 different ‘Ar’Cosmosi’ within the same geographical location as the city itself.

That division spread out on 5 other maps. Each one of them had different lands upon it; different tendrils of cleared space made in the Edge of Fairy, where a dragon or a group of people had laid claim to some new town or space they were building upon that layer of Fairy.

All of it was a shock of information to the system.

But even more than that—

A single second had passed. Fairy Moon stepped away from the wall where she had not been until suddenly she was. She was already smiling—

“You have so much space!” Erick gestured to the layered maps. “This is the opening of an entire Surface continent! WHY WAS THERE A WAR!”

Erick was weirded out. Furious. Curious and caustic all at once. His words came out harsh, and Erick made them harsher halfway through when he realized exactly how angry he was.

Fairy Moon smirked and chuckled. She cared not for Erick’s anger. “Because dragons are dragons! And there was a bit of a bother about a runic [Renew] ring that briefly fell out of our control. But the war is won now. Bright Smile secured it all, and she’ll be securing all of it more and more as time ticks on. We’re a decade or two away from Carnage accretion tanks, though the numbers on that estimate will need to be re-estimated on the gaining of [Renew] itself in the Open Script.”

“… I suppose I will never understand normal dragons, and that is how it will be.” Erick shook his head lightly, changing the subject, “Are you finding the Feast acceptable?”

“Oh yes! Your Cooks cast a fantastic Feast of cookery and charm in overabundance and overmeasure. I even asked for some favorite foods and Donny assayed an appreciable awalotia.”

“… I have never heard that word before?”

“It’s a type of bread and meat and cheese, which is that son’s specialty.”

Erick waved off the presentation, saying, “Congrats on winning your war, then. I hope it is less bloody going forward.”

“Then you will visit?” Fairy Moon said, with a great grin. “You have a piece of property that remains untouched, waiting for your Wizardly ways.”

“Maybe when I’m actually immune to your power I’ll think about going in there again.” Erick changed the subject again, because he wanted to, “So as an ally of House Benevolence, what are your thoughts on the House so far? About anything I’ve done recently, or whatever you feel like commenting on.”

Fairy Moon had looked like she was about to say something, and then Erick changed the subject, and so she looked lost and a bit frustrated. And then she turned curious, and then contemplative. After a moment she said, “The correction of the Cities was a terrible thing on the level of horrors untold and unable to be told. Souls should not be snipped and rearranged and then Blessed into Benevolence like you have done. And yet, I also hate the Cities with a carving passion that predates my hate of Forgotten Campaigns. So… Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving domain.” She added, “What you did to the dragons that defenestrated themselves from Ar’Cosmos was less than divine, too, but the Benevolencing was and will continue to be amazing, and many things are forgiven in the creation and stabilization of a civilization.”

“You’ve been to the Cities, then?”

“Many many times! Truth to tell, I can never stay there overlong for finding a person that needs to die is like finding a pebble on a beach; sure as the surf serves up stones. Hopefully with some Benevolence dragons and the rebels and the Blessed Nobility in charge, that place will perchance to change.”

Erick was not expecting that sort of sentiment from Fairy Moon. She hated his [Blessing of Empathy]. And yet, she thought it was… Not fine. But okay. Also, she seemed rather stable right now. Unusually stable.

Happy, too.

Erick decided to ask her a question that was somewhat in her wheelhouse, “Got any words of advice regarding making new nodes for gate spaces?”

Without a single change in her generalized mirth, Fairy Moon said, “Split a splice from your soulcore and make of it a copy of your core-core, but without the soul at all. Simple!”

“… That somewhat tracks with what I heard from Quilatalap.” Erick was not comfortable around Fairy Moon at all, but he wanted to be; which is why he had asked her a question that she might have known something about. He did not want any sort of antagonistic or mind-controlling relationship between them, and so the only other type of relationship to have was one of calm talking… Maybe. The only problem was that he couldn’t really trust her; she had already broken trust once, and she would have broken it again had Erick allowed his walls to come down… Aaaaaand there. Erick turned himself around from trying too hard with Fairy Moon, for now. His walls were staying up. For now. “Appreciated, Fairy Moon. I hope you find the rest of the Feast well.”

Fairy Moon raised an eyebrow, and then she lowered it, simply saying, “When the horns of war blow, I will be there by your side, my Wonderful Wizard of Benevolence. I wish you would not see what I do as something other than what is deserved, though; I act with ages of knowledge hard-fought and hard-learned; not with simple truths and simple actions.”

So she wanted to get deep into it, then?

Erick said, “Maybe you do act in a deliverance sort of way, but it still seems odd to me that you… Well. I suppose it doesn’t seem odd at all that you want your family back above all the concerns of mortals and the mayhem your desires cause. But…” Erick paused. “Honestly, you probably made the right call with the Dragon Exodus. I can admit that. And I’m probably fucking up a lot of things I don’t want to fuck up. I can admit that, too… But it’s the providence of the young to believe in better, new ways, and so I will make of that my providence.” Erick said, “I find it very distasteful that Bright Smile had to go to war to secure Ar’Cosmos. But I also find it distasteful that I had to go to war, too, to do the same with my own lands. Whole buncha’ shit happened recently that I wish had not needed to happen.”

Fairy Moon looked upon Erick—

The Last Fairy suddenly stood at her full height, looking rather regal in her white/pink/green dress, her heterochromatic eyes seeming to sparkle in the light, as her mouth turned into a knowing line. She nodded, like an empress. The effect probably should have been subdued by her stature, at being a full head shorter than Erick, but it was not subdued at all. Fairy Moon was regal, and she had always been.

She spoke, “It is the realm of the young to know what is unknown by elders. It is why I die and am reborn every so often, and why my family does the same. But we can still draw on those older parts of ourselves when necessary, and I am far, far older than anyone else in this land. Whenever you need it, you are always welcome to ask me for guidance, and I will always give that guidance true.”

Erick saw too many sudden-loopholes in those words. He could only utter:

“… Really.”

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

For an uncomfortable moment, Erick had knocked Fairy Moon off of her metaphorical throne.

“… Outside of certain topics, like family and friends and countries and men and— Most topics are fine!”

“How about for verifying history? Would you talk true on that?”

Fairy Moon shrugged. “Easy enough. What do you want to know?”

Erick opened his mouth to ask about Xoat and all of those stories that Quilatalap had spilled out this morning. But then he had a different thought. Erick began, “The Feast is made up of several necessary parts; opening song and ceremony, presentations of growth, the Tellings of History, and closing ceremony. Gifts happen somewhere in all of that, too. As far as I have been told, these are the necessary parts of the Feast in this day and age, with everything else from dinners to days spent doing this to housing and whatever, merely to allow the host to show off as much as they can, but since I don’t care to show off, we had a light schedule. I planned for 2 and a half days. With a real Feast Barrier, though, and with 5 days, we’re stretching out the events. Tonight is the First Telling of the creation of the Old Cosmology. The Second Telling is the Sundering and the Creation of Veird, and that’s tomorrow. If all goes well with the next century, then what we —you, I, House Benevolence, the gods, Melemizargo, the wrought, everyone… What we do here tonight could be spoken of in a theoretical Third Telling. But at this juncture, we have two Tellings that need to happen. The creation of the Old Cosmology, and then the Sundering Story. The First Telling will happen in 3 hours, after a meal prepared by the Saucery. I have yet to tag someone for that, for I was assuming to do it myself.” Erick asked, “But do you want to give the First Telling?”

Fairy Moon’s eyes sparkled as Erick spoke. By the time he finished, and actually asked his question, she was grinning wide. With strength, she declared, “I would give the Prime Telling, and then all the rest, for all the other days of this Feast.”

“… Your enthusiasm is noted, and appreciated, but I am not interested in a Prime Telling, whatever that might be. I want this Feast to be as normal and as non disruptive as I can make it, so a First Telling and Second Telling are acceptable. I also won’t accept any ensorcelling Fae Magic in any of your words.”

Fairy Moon smirked. “I’ll give everyone here a True Telling; something that I doubt even Melemizargo has witnessed in ages. It will be informative!”

… Erick was less sure by the second that he should have offered this to Fairy Moon. But he had. And he wasn’t about to take it back. So he said, “Try not to make it too special.”

Fairy Moon gave a regal chuckle. “It will be exactly as it needs to be, to be as memorable as it needs to be; not too much, and not too little!”

“Are we talking ‘memorable’ in the sense of a nice day from yesteryear? Or ‘memorable’ in the sense of recalling a near-death, or such?”

“As memorable as your song last night!”

Erick stared. He began, “Fairy Moo—”

“I jest! I jest!” Fairy Moon said, loud and giggling. “It’ll just be a bit jarring. Nothing too terrible, or too tumultuous. But it will be a True Telling; I would have it no other way.”

“… Please don’t ruin whatever peace and calm might be growing here.”

“Ohhhh… Erick.” With sad eyes, Fairy Moon said, “Clinging to calm in a time of trials is to falter hard, and heavy. So rise up, our Wizard of Benevolence, on the waves you yourself are sending into the susurrus. Ride the waves, and soar as we haven’t seen in an age!”

“… Has Bright Smile heard this story before?”