Ar'Kendrithyst

Erick invited Ta’Kamoil into a work room at the top of House Benevolence, to one of his private offices, where a spell diagram floated in the air in front of them. It was [Cascade Imaging], but with a bunch of little tweeks.

“So I have all of it figured out,” Erick said, “The spell is going to function by curving through infinity to see targets in distant lands. The only place where I’m a little stuck is that this spell is going through infinity to see distant lands, and by that same token, it might be vulnerable to back-tracking magic through infinity. How would you solve that vulnerability?”

Ta’Kamoil narrowed his eyes at the spellwork diagrams and adjustments, going back and forth between the basic spell and Erick’s notes. And then he pulled back, and said, “Yeah. So that’s a whole lot different from my own Imaging magics. Oddly enough, I think the only place we differ is in the level of containment and self-reinforcing of our styles. I’m… A whole lot less solid than you are, apparently. This gives me a lot of insight into the Imaging in the command center, and why it isn’t working right—” Ta’Kamoil said, “Sorry about not getting to that before now. It’s been a busy week.”

Erick smiled. “Completely understandable. So how do you— Wait a second. I need to take care of this. I’ll be back soon.”

Erick turned to lightning, zapped out into the sky to become a dragon hovering over the geodesic dome of House Benevolence, just in time to see a 20-kilometer-wide cylinder of metal falling out of the sky. It was thick and grey and jagged on the bottom. It was also mana dead and completely invisible to all of Erick’s magical senses. He had only noticed it because his Lightning Path was screaming at him to move.

And now that he was here, Erick was worried for the first time since—

Shadow appeared in the air beside and above him, like a speck of grey, wreathed in black. She smiled, and teased, “How about learning some Dark Magic, too?”

And then she raised her hand and the sky flashed black.

When the black vanished the cylinder was completely gone and so was all the atmosphere that had been there. The world collapsed overhead, the sky screaming as it filled in the gap, the domed city down below flickering with power as the myriad of protective magics held it all together while wasteland outside of the city flowed up.

And then the implosion of the sky turned into an explosion. A crash of thunder rolled across the world and blasted down the rising wasteland, the shockwave rolling across the world and flattening dust clouds everywhere. More dust clouds rose up when the wave passed. It looked like a sandstorm had just passed out there, beyond House Benevolence. Inside the dome things looked… well. Things looked fine-ish?

Erick turned his gaze back upward, and then toward Shadow. “I don’t think anything broke?”

Shadow turned back to facing Erick, too. She had been looking at the House. She began, “Sooooo… I haven’t actually gone to war in a long time. Forgot about collateral damage.”

“It’s fine.” Erick said, “If this were Veird I would have swallowed it with a [Gate], but no [Gate]s here, so I flubbed that one.”

“That would have been the safer way to solve that, yes. Alternatively, less large-scale Dark Magic, or a simple disk of Darkness.”

“You chose correctly, I think,” Erick said, “No way to tell if there was some hidden magic up there. But anyway.” Erick flexed his aura to the side, conjuring what he had long suspected to be ‘Darkness’. An orb of black held in the air, like a void in the world that sounded like everything and nothing, all at once. It was almost Elemental Destruction, but it was a Destruction flavored with some sort of Void. “Is this Elemental Darkness?”

“Nah,” Shadow said, surprising Erick a whole lot. “That’s Elemental Annihilation. It’s close enough for basic House magic, but it’s not Darkness. Probably safer to use than Elemental Destruction, too. Using Darkness to do what I just did requires you to open yourself up to your true power and then express that power outward in an effort to take apart whatever you’re looking at. That use of Darkness is disintegrative in a way that nothing else truly is, because what Darkness wants to do is pull apart things and see how they work. That’s where the Destruction part of the original Creation, Destruction, Paradox trio comes from.” Shadow said, “Elemental Annihilation truly is good enough for basic magic, though, because only Destruction Wizards can truly touch upon the Destruction parts of Darkness’s domain, and Annihilation is easier to work with than Elemental Destruction, because it is cleaner. And yet, it is not as clean as Darkness. If I would have used Annihilation to get rid of that cylinder there would have been some metal shrapnel left. Probably could’ve added in some resons to make that work as well as Darkness. Keep that in mind! I’m headed back.”

And then she left.

… Erick detoured to the wastelands where he did a bit of spellwork using what he had thought was Darkness to make a beam that he aimed at the ground. A darker-than-black beam of power erupted from Erick’s aura to the side and traced a line of black across the world below, drawing a trench into the ground a good hundred meters deep. The ground caved in around the beam’s path, dirt and stone collapsing back together. The spell failed to penetrate further than a 100-ish meters due to the lack of power Erick had put into the working, at maybe only 400-ish mana for a 5-second-long, meter-wide working, so… Was this okay? Or did he need to do actual Dark Magic? … Hmm.

This was more than fine.

Erick decided that since this was the lowest hanging fruit right now, that he should work on this for a while. Someone in the Den had thrown a city-sized block of strange metal at House Benevolence and it had proven surprisingly effective, if only because Erick had never considered that someone would actually do such a thing… But of course, as soon as Erick had seen the big cylinder of metal in the sky, he knew that he should have expected such a thing.

Absolute destructive spellwork was not something that Erick really liked to do, though.

And yet, Slaver’s Den was bringing up all these old and new ideas of spellwork that Erick had let slide over the years. The update to [Cascade Imaging] was only a few steps beyond that update from hooking up [Cleanse] to that working and auto-targeting every single instance of ‘demon’ within 500 kilometers, for instance… or further than that, actually.

Erick’s update to Imaging could probably reach through the very universe itself to hit very distant places…

Ah.

Well that was a bit distressing, actually.

… Erick hovered in the sky and distracted himself with various workings of Elemental Annihilation.

Beams, Bombs, Bolts, Disks, and a whole lot more. Erick carved up the land with a few different ideas, getting a hang for this magic. Sometimes the spellwork broke itself, blackness spilling out in every direction as it attempted to consume everything. Sometimes it worked well. The ‘disk’ type worked less well than Erick would have liked. He kinda wanted Annihilating Walls of power that he could set in front of something and erase that something from existence.

Blasts and cones of power worked the best for Elemental Annihilation.

This was one of those Banned Elements of Veird, for sure.

Erick experimented with Destruction versus Annihilation versus Void, seeing what the real differences were. He had never done much with Destruction before, either, so this was a good use of his time, too.

The Annihilation form of Elemental Destruction was cleaner than Destruction because Annihilation had a singular purpose to it, which was erasing everything, while Destruction was kinda… weaker? Well. No. Destruction was used in [Cleanse]. Destruction turned matter into thick air, into mana. Thus, Destruction was good for creation, because it left behind stuff that was useful to make more stuff.

Annihilation was more like Void in that it erased everything that it could erase, but it was certainly more destructive than Void because Void sought to make voids in the world where nothing existed. But the edges of Void still existed. Annihilation came through, erasing itself and everything as it tried to escape confinement all the time and then eat the world.

At the end of 20 minutes, Erick was done with his experiments.

Then he wrangled Annihilation into a few different spells, putting them into Benevolence crystals in his soul, but every third or fourth time he tried pressing that button the spell broke apart. It took him another 15 minutes before he managed to make some spells that did not break apart when he rapidly ‘tapped’ them.

Erick temporarily turned himself into a disco-dragon of darker-than-black beams of Annihilation that spun around his body, at his command, and carved the world up like a cheesemaker cutting curd.

Then came thousands of little Bolts of black.

Finally, Erick pointed his power at a mountain in the far distance.

Here now was the ‘greatest’ of these new Annihilation spells.

A dot of black shot from Erick’s aura, and all the world whined at its passing. Air twisted. The sky fell into the dot. And the dot kept going.

The Black Dot struck the mountain and then splashed outward, upward, downward, in every direction, cloying at the entire mountain and then going further, deeper, the mountain collapsing, the atmosphere draining down into that collapse in a rapid, yet controlled manner. The world did not implode and then explode in the destruction of one large mountain. The world simply settled down into a new configuration around a new crater a good ten kilometers deep.

Erick nodded.

He was happy with these new spells.

Annihilation Bolt, instant, super long range, 500/1 mana/reson

A bolt of annihilation inexorably strikes a target, attempting to erase the target from existence.

Annihilation Beam, instant, super long range, 1,000/2 mana/resons

A beam of annihilation aims at your discretion, attempting to erase all caught in the beam from existence.

Annihilation Dot, instant, super long range, 10,000/100 mana/resons

A cleaner version of a spell from long ago, but made with annihilation and updated for new threats. The Dot will destroy a large swath of the world designated at the time of casting. If the Dot is prevented from doing this, it will destroy itself instead.

Erick left behind the new crater in the world and headed back to House Benevolence.

He dropped out of his draconic self, reentering his offices at the top of the main structure, his glowthreads wrapping around his body once again as he went to the office where he had set up the [Cascade Imaging] diagrams.

Ta’Kamoil was not there.

Erick already saw him down in the command center, looking over the [Cascade Imaging] that Erick had put up earlier. Some engineers and other mages were looking it all over alongside Ta’Kamoil, discussing the spellwork, figuring out how it worked, for real. Ta’Kamoil hadn’t been kidding when he had said he simply hadn’t gotten around to doing that yet, but now that Erick had asked for his time he was getting to work on this specific project instead of the tens of other things he had to work on.

The Overseer had left some paperwork behind in Erick’s office, though.

A note rested on top of the papers.

So this all looks like it will work, but the real question is the one you posed about how such a scanning magic could be traced back to its source, making the whole scan vulnerable to corruption and such. The only real answer to that concern is located in Scry Theory.

In a short ways: Make the scanning magic easily disrupted so that the Scry won’t be able to be traced back to the original spell. This is the common way to make Scry magics, because those sorts of magics always do open the user up to Bad Things.

This will not work for the deep connections you’re trying to establish with a truly powerful Imaging spellwork, though, which could allow you to cast spells through this Scry Magic. In my opinion, you should leave the two spells separate. Make a better Imaging with Scry Theory and the ‘curved through infinity’ power. Make another, much more hidden and actively-defensive spellwork to allow that mainframe spell to power other spells. Gate Theory is much more useful for that sort of spellwork than Scry Theory. You might need to make gate nodes.

Erick rapidly read the full diagrams and workings that Ta’Kamoil had left in the rest of the paperwork…

And then he paused.

Yeah.

Using a special core of himself, with some magics in it, would be a great way to do this thing.

And yet...

“I’m recreating [Familiar] but more complicated, aren’t I.”

Erick had a long think about all that.

He came to the conclusion that he was not about to have another child. Not in the middle of a war. Probably not for a long time, too, and if he used his core along with a bunch of soul work and other magics then he might just make a [Familiar]...

Erick missed Ophiel—

Oh, gods, did Erick miss Ophiel.

Erick sat there for a while, thinking about Ophiel, and how they hadn’t gotten the chance to spend much time together after his birth. Did he still have a mana debt? He probably did. Was he rescuing people and getting himself killed? Probably.

Erick would have fallen deeper down a thought hole, but his expanded senses caught sight of something far, far below the ground level of House Benevolence, entering into the massive cavern that Erick had created down there to keep eyes open below the city. It was a gooey thing. Some sort of blood ooze had erupted out of the ground unexpectedly, and then it kept coming. Pretty soon a ten-Olympic-pool-sized animated blood occupied a tiny part of the underground. Red glop flowed, and spotlights on the cavern roof locked on the creature. The creature froze, its gelatin, red body crystallizing into rock in that moment, as though it was trying to pretend it was nothing special.

Or maybe it was thinking.

And then the creature screamed and turned around, vanishing back into the hole it had made in the bare dirt.

The bombardment from the underground turrets struck the hole a second later, caving in the hole.

Erick tracked the ooze for a few more kilometers as it raced down and away from House Benevolence, back through the caverns it had made to approach, to attack. Erick chose to ignore the ooze when it got really far, for he would have needed to pull his sight from other areas to keep looking at the blood ooze.

Erick turned back to his work.

He missed Ophiel.

He was not going to make another [Familiar].

He chose to go the more complicated, non-sapient route with [Cascade Imaging]. The ‘better scanner’ was easy enough to make using Scry Theory and curve-through-infinity resonwork, so that is where he started.

Instead of one giant ball of cascading light in the sky above the Imaging, Erick went with countless smaller cascaders that all worked together and through many different spectrums of light and sensory magics to produce a coherent image at a given location.

He did have to use [Conjure Force Elemental] tuned to be more like [Conjure Benevolence Book Elemental], though, to make the spellwork actually work as desired. It wasn’t a [Familiar] at all, but more like that old spell of [Summon Jewels], his rad-collector spellwork from long ago. He also ended up using [Scry], because of course the spell needed [Scry]. That put his spellwork at 2 parts of the 3 part recipe for [Familiar].

Not the big piece, though. Not [Telepathy].

Knowing what Erick now knew about [Telepathy] having a Mark of the Fractal Universe inside, the fact that this spell was missing [Telepathy] pretty much ensured that it wasn’t sapient, and it would never become sapient.

Book Magic, Scry Magic, Particle Magic, Light Magic, [Ward] and Illusion for display purposes, [Renew] for adjustment purposes, and resonwork, all eventually came together into a working, cohesive whole, 15 hours after Erick started attacking this specific problem. He cast the spell four different ways before he decided on how he was actually going to make the imager, and also the next version of this particular magic.

- - - -

On a plateau outside of the city, Erick stood as a dragon under the dim light of the ‘night’ that sometimes took hold of this land of Slaver’s Den. The sky was still bright, but the world was cooler and the land was dimmer.

And then the light began to return to the land in a gradual brightening. Day was coming.

And Erick spoke,

“Of knowledge vast, this woven art,

“To make all seen, through realms apart.

“Spectrums plied, viewed true and keen

“Touch the sky, and sights convene.”

Erick wove his aura and Benevolence as he worked and Benevolence worked with him, ten thousand bits of power and creation flowing on its own, into positions and into alterings, and throughout his soul. Much like how Erick had created [Grand Reincarnation] in his soul without actually making that magic himself, this magic did the same.

Text appeared.

Infinite Imaging, instant + time, special range, 500/10 mana/resons per Cascader

Conjure a cascader that will build up an image of a greater surrounding area over the course of a minute, or less. Resulting map lasts until dismissed. Recasting Infinite Imaging on the same location will create more cascaders that will network together to make the image clearer faster, to scan from multiple directions, and to extend the range of this spellwork.

All cascaders linked to the same image work together.

If you designate a target, then the image might show that target.

If you designate a search for a target in a different slice of infinity, or a different layer of infinity, then the resulting images generated on the map will be from that slice or layer. Costs of spellwork increased commensurately. This spell’s duration drops from ‘unending’ to 100 minutes when used in this way.

+1 resons added to cost per Slice pierced.

+100 resons added to cost per Layer pierced.

And then the magic appeared.

A soft white mist glowed in front of Erick, while a bright white orb flashed into existence high overhead. As the orb above cast waves of dissipating power into the world, that power echoed out there and came back to the light. The ‘cascader’ began to inform the mist in front of Erick. That mist slipped into place here and there, rapidly forming a map of the surrounding area.

Erick smiled.

He cast the spell a few more times to test it out. He designated stuff that he knew should work first, like his own DNA. Soon, there was Erick’s body glowing in the center of the Imager map, while softer blues were back in town, with a lot of blues on his perch at the top of the House. He was kinda surprised that he still shed DNA like that, but he had built this body to be ‘normal’, so yeah, he shed DNA like a normal person. Kinda nice to see, actually. Made him feel somewhat grounded.

Erick flicked through a few more searches, like ‘blood’ and ‘plants’ and such, and all those normal options still worked as expected, and then he searched for something he knew that [Cascade Imaging] could not do; he searched for Elemental Evil.

With great joy, Erick watched as a great deal of the places beyond House Benevolence, a hundred kilometers away, lit up blue. He could search for intangibles, now.

Erick focused on finding Elemental Evil and also Elemental… Hmm. Stone? Sure. Elemental Stone and Evil, and make it a dual search.

The map shifted, and Elemental Evil remained, while Elemental Stone appeared as well, and the colors shifted. Elemental Evil turned black on the map, while Elemental Stone turned yellow. Evil was black? Eh. Erick supposed it was black in reality, so it was black on the map, too. Much of the land here turned yellow, but it was a thin yellow, as though the Elemental Stone in the land wasn’t that dense at all, and it wasn’t, so that made sense. The spots of black out there were pretty thick, though.

Erick looked into the sky where the cascader continued to image the land…

Erick cast the spell again, and this time he designated an image of the land about 750 kilometers... that way, way beyond the edge of the current image, over by the city of Den, the main city of Slaver’s Den. He did not see the cascader come into being, but he certainly saw when the imager populated with more fog in front of him. That fog rapidly coalesced into another image of more land, all the way beyond the edges of the current image, and the two images flowed together to form one.

The city of Den and the hundreds of kilometers of land around it rapidly came into focus. That image gained the search parameters of the Evil and Stone of the previous cascader command, too, and soon Den was a showcase of black dots and a whole lot of thin yellow everywhere.

Erick switched the search to ‘Dragon’. House Benevolence and himself lit up; a scattering of tiny blue dots on the field. He grinned at that. Long ago, he had been warned about searching for and then finding dragons, but his old [Cascade Imaging] couldn’t actually do that unless a dragon was in their draconic form. This one could find Elemental Dragon anywhere, though, in any form, because Erick’s Dragon had been Paradox’d into Benev—

Shadow stepped into the air beside the spellwork, saying, “That’s pretty neat.”

“I’ll have to figure out a way to make others able to interact with it but it should work a lot better than the Imaging we have in the command center.” Erick asked, “Got something you’d like to search for?”

Shadow was a short 2 meter woman floating amid a 40 meter-wide map, and she was also a tiny dot of blue next to Erick’s own dot of blue at the center. She felt like a whole lot more than who she was as she focused.

Shadow said, “Search for Powers, as in the designation made by Margleknot.”

“… Ah. Well. Let’s scan all of Slaver’s Den, actually, see if there are any out there.”

Erick pressed the button inside his soul that made more cascaders and soon the relatively small, 40-meter wide map, spread out wide, Benevolent white glows rapidly falling down into the shapes of cities and wastelands and forests and rivers and all sorts of places. Mountains, defensive structures, coliseums, and more and more cities, villages, villas hidden in the woods, castles on mountainsides, hidden ports on inland seas and one particularly tall sculpture out in the center of that sea. It was a sculpture of Captain Shackle, the demon Walara, and the pseudo-power Chains, all standing atop the backs of slaves, crushing them underfoot.

Erick looked at that sculpture for a moment. “I’m going to blow up that sculpture.”

“You should leave it until the end and then blow it up. It’s more demoralizing that way.” Shadow added, “And you can make that your final ritual to officially make this land ours.”

“That’s a good option, too.” Erick studied the map for a few more moments, before he declared, “No Powers out there besides you and I, but this isn’t that conclusive.”

“Scanning magic never is. Are you really going to make the zealot zombies you’re planning on?”

Erick skipped past asking her how she knew of that, when he had been purposefully vague about all of his musings and diagrams in the air. Obviously Erick was being spied upon, but…

Had Shadow been listening in at the classroom with the ex-slaves? Maybe Erick had leaned too far into appeasing them, and yet… He had been going for a double-misdirect sort of thing there, but… He wasn’t very good at all that stuff and he probably never would be. That was fine. He didn’t like doing that sort of thing, anyway.

Erick asked, “Do you feel I shouldn’t?”

“I feel that the best thing to do is to be as ruthlessly caring as you can be, and this spellwork might be exactly that.” Shadow pulled out a rather large book from Elsewhere. It was bound in gold, iron, and platinum spider legs, and it looked ancient and yet brand new. Erick tried inspecting it with his various senses, and the only thing that worked was visual sight. She floated the book into the air in front of her, toward Erick, saying, “It’s a Book of Beings and Non-Beings. What you want to make is in there, and this book will help you find the line between a magical effect that makes a person, and a magical effect that you can erase when you’re done with it. When you’re done reading it, it will come back to me, but it would be better if you would hand it back to me yourself. Only open it when you’re sure you’re alone, too. Anyone else reading it will be turned inside out and made into an abomination. It’ll try to do the same to you, of course, but it will fail.”

Erick shrunk down into a person and took the book in a hand, and then he looked to Shadow, floating there above the Image of Slaver’s Den with him, all the world like a map of white light around them. Freely giving information was… Well it was a pretty nice courtship gesture, Erick decided.

Erick smiled softly, and said, “I suppose I should gift my Queen a fitting exchange. Do you have a desire?”

Shadow chuckled, grinning. “You’re already doing it, Erick.”

And then she stepped away into Elsewhere, vanishing from sight and senses.

Erick looked to the side, to the map. Shadow’s little blue dot reappeared at House Benevolence. Erick smiled at that, and then he shifted the big map to search for Evil. The entire map of Slaver’s Den repopulated with blue, all the way to the edges of the continent where these lands melded into other lands, far beyond sight.

And then he held up his hand and canceled the spell, crushing a facsimile of it in his grip, giant white claws breaking every cascader out there and the image floating before him.

Erick turned attention to the ‘Book of Beings and Non-Beings’, looking the metal thing over, and then Erick turned to lightning. He moved away from where he had been to wrap himself in a [Hasted Shelter] and a few other magics, to settle down onto a [Force Platform] before he opened the book.

Golden, silvered iron unwrapped from the book’s cover like spider legs pulling back from a web, the whole book radiating a vicious power briefly, knocking off a few hundred thousand points from Erick’s Mana, Health, and Psyche, before the damage settled down to a low-drain. The pages beyond the first were filled with information that jumbled for a while, before it settled down, and Erick could make sense of the swirling words.

It read to him:

That’s a complicated magic you have in mind.

Ah? A sapient book?

Maybe.

Erick couldn’t see its soul.

The book extended its spider-leg-like clasps and set down on the [Force Platform] before it opened wider, the smallish book expanding till each side of the book was a meter square. Pages flipped until the book reached somewhere closer to the back than the front. Spell diagrams began to appear alongside images of the creation of the spell.

They were four-meter tall sexless warriors with crowns of burning light and swords for wings. Two long arms ended in large hands with larger claws.

Words appeared.

Is this the general idea?

“More or less? Yeah. I guess that kinda works.”

Please read the marked chapters and then we can iterate on this idea.

The book closed. Eight bookmarks, each in a different color, fluttered down from between the pages. The book then opened up to the first bookmark.

… This was a pretty neat book.

Erick started reading the section titled, ‘Making magic, not minions’.

It turned out to be a pretty good place to start, even if it was mostly a refresher course.

- - - -

Erick alighted upon yet another plateau far away from the city.

He was in his human form, and wearing normal clothes.

It had been four subjective days since he started reading the Book of Beings and Non-Beings, though it had only been 2 real days. He had needed to take some breaks now and then in order to establish his new [Infinite Imaging] inside the House, and to prevent a few smaller attacks here and there. The Imaging in the House was already hooked up to the command center and working quite well; a lot better than [Cascade Imaging] did, and probably because this one had been designed to be more friendly. What truly made it easier was that Erick had figured out a way to allow someone to channel mana into a runic web that cast another cascader into the Image. From there, it was just a matter of personal ability to use some basic Elemental Book, and the rest was all computer engineering stuff from the engineers and Ta’Kamoil. They added a whole bunch of new functionality to the new Imaging, enabling the command center to function very, very well.

Slaver’s Den didn’t seem to have an answer for the new version of [Cascade Imaging], either, which was great. A whole bunch of previously unseeable places were now fully revealed down at the command center, and Querkooda was busy at work charting out new threats and responses and war plans.

Slaver’s Den didn’t seem capable of stopping the new cascaders at all. They saw the glowing white orbs, of course; those brilliant cascaders were impossible to miss. But when they approached those orbs with any sort of power at all, the orbs popped. Erick was pretty sure that someone would eventually come up with some ways to attack through those ‘scry orbs’ or block them well, but that was true of all Scry Magic; there was no be-all-end-all solution to the ever-evolving arms race of Scry versus anti-Scry magic.

For now, it worked well.

And now Erick was going to make the Absolute Grand Violence war magic he had originally set out to make.

… He thought of Solomon again.

And then Erick dove into his soul and copied [Infinite Imaging]. With eyes half-lidded and his soul holding onto the copy of [Infinite Imaging], Erick spoke as he adjusted the power inside of him,

“With incantations, weave the base,

“A canvas for all spells to trace.

“Through solidity of magic streams,

“Here holds a power; frightful schemes.”

The copy of [Infinite Imaging] shifted inside of Erick, becoming something simpler, but only vaguely, like turning a computer into a monomolecular wire. The new spell held a promise of endings in a way few of Erick’s spells ever did, because this was the spell that Erick had told himself he would never make. This was a spell that was, perhaps, worse than attaching [Luminous Beam] to [Cascade Imaging], because he could attach any spell to this one.

Erick pulled out of his soul and summoned the new spell to the forefront of his mind.

Words appeared.

Spellsurge Weave, instant + time, special range, 500/10 mana/resons per weaver + Special Cost

Conjure a weaver that will build up an image of a greater surrounding area over the course of a minute, or less. Resulting map lasts until dismissed. Recasting Spellsurge Weave on the same location will create more weavers that will network together to make the image clearer faster, to scan from multiple directions, and to extend the range of this spellwork.

All weavers linked to the same image work together.

If you designate a target, then the image might show them.

Each Spellsurge Weave image is a magic completely unto itself, made at the time of casting, for each main cast of Spellsurge Weave will accept 1 imbued spell from the caster that must be a spell that exists within the caster’s soul. Freeform magic is not accepted. Targets of that imbued spell can be changed by casting Spellsurge Weave again, but the imbued spell cannot be changed once imbued.

Spellsurge Weave will support the imbued spell as it is able, acting as a Node Network for that supported spellwork.

Erick breathed out as he read over [Spellsurge Weave]. The words said a lot, but the actual spell would do so much more than what it said it would do.

As just one not-fully-intended consequence of this magic, Erick could see that he had solved the problem of needing to [Reincarnation] people himself. He could hook up [Reincarnation] to this magic and let the weave work its magic to reset people to a younger age. Maybe he might need to make a few different versions of [Reincarnation] + [Spellsurge Weave] to account for different types of [Reincarnation]s, like one Weave for ‘male human of X variety’, and then another for a human woman… And then all the rest?

That would be a pain in the ass, for sure.

… But not that bad, actually. If that’s the way it worked, then that’s how it worked, and people could just get thrown into temporary bodies to start.

… Or maybe he could make the magic take the person and settle them down to ‘just past puberty’, or something like that. Erick imagined it would be truly difficult for magic to target ages like that, but a massive biological change like ‘the end of puberty’ was an easy target, comparatively.

If he really wanted to go the easy route, he could do two reincarnators and make one male dragon and the other female dragon. Or male protean and female protean. That would remove the necessity for giving people specific bodies at all; just make them all immortal shapeshifters and be done with it—

Oh!

He could make one reincarnator make a male version of his own protean body, and then a female protean version of someone else, and if he ran millions of people through both versions then maybe he could walk around looking like himself and people wouldn’t recognize him as himself. They’d just go ‘Look at that! Another dude who used the House Benevolence reincarnator for male.’

… Whatever the case, this Weave would be wonderful for all the good things it could do… theoretically. Erick would experiment with it for a little while and find out how it all worked, exactly, but it should work exactly as expected; both better and not-quite-as-good as possible. It wasn’t sapient, after all; It was a machine of spellwork with certain inputs and certain outputs.

But that’d come later.

For now, it was time to make the magic that would get Lord Dakka on his side.

Erick focused.

There was no practice for this one. There did not need to be. For when Erick finally put together all the parts on paper, he knew that this was going to work, and that was going to work too well. There was no way around that. There was no stopping that.

To steer away from this course of action was to invite inevitable disaster, for this spell was going to be what he used to fight Nothanganathor, and so much more.

This, then, was the birth of a terrible angel.

Erick intoned,

“By Bloody war, I chant this verse

“Of creatures fierce, in Death immersed.

“With Carnage claws they will disperse

“in battlefields; soul will be hearsed.

“Fallen flesh becomes conscript!

“The warmachine is crop-full crypt.

“A soldier’s style! A Vile hive!

“Spread Siphon wings! Exalted shrive.”

Erick shifted his aura through an array of spellworks as he spoke, a spark of Benevolence in the air before him transforming into a drop of red Blood. Grey Death flowed through that redness, and then the drop of power flashed deeper into Carnage crimson. The hovering spell turned as faceted as a ruby, becoming a red diamond sphere that flickered black and brilliant white-gold at the same time, like the sphere was reflecting and refracting light from two different, invisible sources.

Inside Erick, the spell came together as a Benevolence crystal in his soul.

As for the spell itself, Erick held the red crystal ball in his aura.

It was dangerous.

It was impotent, at the moment.

It tried to Siphon some power from him, but it was too weak to drain more than a few points of Mana, Health, and Psyche per second from his body. Erick heavily inspected it for a full minute, watching as it tried to eat his power. He was looking for signs of infection of himself, and also for signs of a soul. There was nothing there, though. No infection. No soul.

Which was good.

He had not made a [Familiar]. He had made a spell which should have enough Necromantic tricks to make a fully functioning ‘zealot zombie horde’, as Shadow had said.

The spell description certainly seemed like it had worked.

Blood of the Valkyrie, instant, medium range, 50,000 mana

Infect a target until death and then watch the birth of a glorious Valkyrie! Behold, a plowshare of supreme violence that begets more of both. Fly and siphon and harvest and infect without mercy. Exalt in vile war to gather the souls of all, constraining them with Vile Exalted power, to bring them to the Apparent King so that they might live new, better lives, free of war of all kinds.

Erick put absolutely no power into his voice, to test if this worked, as he spoke to the red crystal blood, “I have no need of you at this moment. You can stop now.”

The red crystal stopped Siphoning Erick, and then it burbled as if sighing in sleep.

The spell disintegrated into broken mana.

Erick breathed out, “That worked.”

Shadow was there, standing to the side. She looked at Erick, and said, “Propagation magic always has a way of getting out of hand. That one might not have a soul right now, but it will be gathering lots of them. It will gain sapience eventually. I give it 40 years of use or 50 billion lives touched, whichever comes first.”

“That short, eh?” Erick rhetorically asked, settling himself for what was to come. He stepped into the air. “I’m going to do some experiments with [Spellsurge Weave] and then move on to one of Querkooda’s plans. What are you up to?”

“Checking on you.”

Erick froze slightly. He thawed fast enough. “… Oh?”

Shadow said, “Ultimately, what is going to happen here in Slaver’s Den is a good outcome for all the rest of the universe, for cutting a cancer at the source always makes the body healthier. The problems from this happening will be in how you have hurt yourself to make this happen. You’re not used to what you’re about to do. I don’t want you to become used to that sort of horror. It’s not good for the House, or for you.”

Erick smiled softly. “It’s not that bad, Shadow. I appreciate your worry, though.”

Shadow looked at Erick, and then she nodded. She moved on, saying, “We’ve been contacted by some liches that wish to be not liches anymore. Would you be willing to reincarnate them?”

Erick’s eyebrows went up. “The ones from Wraithborne?”

“Correct. Kakalakot of the Slavehold, Odarimisu of the Depths, and Witch Aragathara. I told them to wait until you were done with your projects, and since you’re done, here we are.”

“I’ll…” Erick decided, “Yes. In an hour. I’ll be ready for them.”

Shadow nodded, then said, “I’ll let the liches know you’ll see them soon, over on the downspire side of the city. If you ever want the Book of Beings and Non-Beings back for a different working, let me know.”

“Sure.”

Shadow vanished.

No time for rest.

Erick set up a few [Spellsurge Weave]s to test out some imbued spellworks.

It wasn’t long before he understood how Weaves functioned. Erick would press both of the ‘buttons’ for [Spellsurge Weave] and another spell in his soul at the same time, and the Weave would come up as normal, with that other spell imbued into the working. From there, Erick cast another Weave into the main Imaging to designate a target, and then, once the spell had a target, it would move the cascading weaver closer to the target in order to enact the imbued spell as soon as it could, the very moment it got within range.

Erick cast a Weave and a [Fire Bolt] at the same time, making a blank map, and then he cast a Weave again while designating a stone pillar in the distance as the target. The weaver blinked through the sky, reappearing a long-range distance away from the stone pillar, and then it released its Bolt payload.

Just one Bolt.

And then the spell went inactive.

Erick had to [Renew] into the imaging to make the weaver spit out more Bolts, but as soon as he did that, a veritable stream of Bolts flowed out of the weaver to impact the stone pillar. The spell stopped long before its wealth of mana ended, though, because the stone pillar could not keep up against the damage, and so the weaver no longer detected the stone pillar as the stone pillar.

Erick went out and conjured another stone pillar. The very moment there was another pillar in range the weaver moved to get into range of the new pillar and then it started unloading Bolts until it ran out of power.

A bit more experimenting had twenty pillars scattered across the land, and Erick feeding [Renew] into the image that was the base control of the attached weaver.

What happened next was odd, but it was also acceptable.

Erick fed power into the image, and the weaver went around to shoot one Bolt at one pillar, and then it moved to the next pillar closest to it, or maybe at random, and then it released another Bolt at the second target. The weaver went on to the next pillar and the next, doing the same thing, until it wrapped all the way around to the first pillar again, to continue Bolting pillars. Once it was done with one circuit, though, it did not do the same circuit a second time. Instead, it went around a different way, Bolting each pillar in turn until the weaver finished a whole different circuit, whereupon it started again. The third circuit was different from the first two.

“I’m not too sure what that’s about, but it’s fine?”

The weaver moved pretty darn fast.

When Erick conjured a second weaver into the same spellwork, the two of them began working in sync to Bolt all 20 pillars and then restart the process, going through mana and the whole route a whole lot faster than when it was just one weaver. There was still travel time, though, so the Bolts did not flow. Not yet.

Erick conjured 18 more weavers, and now each pillar had one weaver Bolting it with streams of [Fire Bolt]s, like ribbons of fire trailing from each cascading white orb to each solid tan stone below. When the first stone pillar became ‘not stone pillar’ according to the image, that weaver began weaving a route among all the other pillars, Bolting once, and then moving on. The remaining weavers continued to stream Bolts.

As more and more weavers ‘killed’ their targets, then the rest of the weavers began to move around to attack what was left.

Very soon, Erick had 20 weavers hanging out in the sky, doing nothing, for all the targets were dead.

Erick did a few more experiments with different magics just to make sure he was seeing what he was seeing.

Spells with durations, like beam spells, chained themselves so that the end of one spell was the start of the next. The weavers didn’t just cast a hundred beam spells from one weaver all at once. Instant spells got chained.

Spells that cast stationary objects here or there, like [Ward] spells, cast the spell where Erick wanted it cast, and then, when Erick damaged the [Ward], the nearest weaver [Renew]ed the spellwork. In that case, the weaver acted as a part of a node network, keeping the [Ward]s solid.

For his next experiment, Erick set out 4 lightwards that would naturally decay from white through the spectrum of red to blue, before finally popping at the end of their power. Each lightward would decay at different rates. For those lightwards, Erick set up the [Spellsurge Weave] with [Renew], and had the weavers keep the lightwards functioning. That worked pretty well. The weavers kept the 4 lightwards at ‘white’ until the mana Erick had put into the Weave began to run low, and then the Weave kept the lightwards going as best it could, eventually putting all of its power into the constantly-failing lightward until the system was drained dry. And then the lightwards popped one after the other, due to a lack of power into the Weave.

The weavers, meanwhile, simply watched that decay… Or rather they ‘hung out’... And yet that wasn’t a wholly correct way to describe their behavior either. Erick tried not to ascribe too much intelligence to them for they had no soul; just orders.

“… I wonder if the tech side of Margleknot has artificial general intelligence that could help with this?”

A question to be answered another day.

Erick had some liches to visit.

- - - -

Kakalakot of the Slavehold, Odarimisu of the Depths, and Witch Aragathara.

They were the three liches of Wraithborne that Erick had tentatively agreed to [Reincarnation], though he had never actually followed up on any of that. He was busy. He expected them to show up when they wanted, which was pretty much what had happened.

And now they were nearby.

Erick only saw Kakalakot of the Slavehold standing before him, though… or at least that’s who Erick assumed this was, since the other two were both many kilometers away and much more easily recognizable as who they were. The witch, far over that way, was an old woman trapped in a cauldron that was filled with murky black liquid. When the liquid cleared now and again, it revealed the witch below the surface. The other guy, far over that way, was a sphere of floating blue waters with an eye far below the surface; that screamed ‘of the depths’ to Erick.

And so, by process of elimination, this guy was Kakalakot of the Slavehold, though that much was kinda hard to tell. There was a man dressed in black clothes hovering inside of a bright orange crystal that anyone could have mistaken for a coffin, while also mistaking the guy inside the coffin as dead. A little skeletal lizard held on top of that crystal, though, and that little skeletal being was an easy match for some of the larger powers that Erick had seen in this world, and back on Veird. It radiated power and control.

Erick set down in front of the ancient lich, asking, “And you’re Kakalokot?”

The lizard spoke with a man’s voice, “Yes, good Wizard Flatt of Benevolence. Please ask your questions and demand your prices in a quick manner, but know that I have already given away everything of true value. I am risking true death to be here at this hour, away from my true wards, and so are those other Great Evils who are here, but we are all dying anyway. If you deny us then we will throw our whole weight behind Slaver’s Den and attempt to end whatever you have going on here.”

Casual threats.

… Eh!

To be expected, anyway.

Erick did not hold it against him.

“Okay, sure.” Erick asked, “ ‘Of the Slavehold’, yes? What sort of intel can you give me over this land of slavery?”

“Lots.” The little lizard skeleton cast a bunch of light into the air, to the side, creating a map of Slaver’s Den. And then he added some glows. “Those glows are the last known locations of the Slave Systems I set up here thousands of years ago. They have probably been moved. You must take those out to erase many of the Contracts out there. The backlash of ending those Contracts in this way would be the deaths of those people, but at least they wouldn’t be sundered. There’s probably a billion people attached to those Contracts. Those places are going to use these hostages against you when you move on them. I have explained all of this and more to Shadow.”

“… Okay. Good to know!” Erick felt a bit angry that they really were going to use slaves as hostages and warriors against him— He banished that emotion. “Wanna join the House and make up for all the wrong that you’ve done?”

“No. I wish to leave and be reborn in some better land, far, far away. Make of me whatever you want. I care not for details. That will be my penance.”

Erick nodded. “What are you escaping?”

“Corruption unending. I touched too deep into the depths of broken universes to ply my magic into power that once raised me above all my peers, but corruption has a way of eating at you even when you think you’ve beaten it. Heed this small warning that you probably already know, Wizard of Benevolence: do not go to corruption for salvation. It turns rights into wrongs and health into death. It does everything you could ever possibly want, and then it extracts everything from you in turn.”

… Erick nodded. “Your warning is appreciated.”

And then he struck the ancient lich with a reson-empowered [Reincarnation], lightning flashing out of the sky—

- -

Erick stood in front of a man in the foyer of a black-marble mansion fit for any emperor in any grand world. The man had orange hair and orange eyes, and he smiled as he looked down at his hands.

Kakalakot softly said, “I can move my hands again…” He paused. He looked to Erick. “We’re in the middle of it now, then. I can see why Wraithborne is eager to extend to you their hands instead of their fists. I can’t feel anything of who I used to be at all, and yet I know I am here. All the power is gone, but I… I am here. All that remains…” He looked up, and then all around. “… Is me.”

Erick smiled a little at that. “Got any big requests for the next life?”

Looking at his castle, Kakalokot said, “A path to power that will result in eternity, and not in an eternal self-prison.”

Erick raised an eyebrow. “I don’t really know what happens to you past this moment in time, but you still have your memories, and your future will be much more Benevolent. What comes next is up to you.”

“I look forward to it.”

- -

—Lightning dissipated from a broken orange crystal to vanish into Elsewhere, vaguely taking the shapes of non-euclidean branches as it soaked into those branches of Margleknot, and left this world behind.

Shadow stepped to Erick’s side. “We have received a great deal of data from Kakalakot’s estate, as well as 4.7 billion resons. It’s more than he promised, but less than we knew he had. We’ll work on the intel in the next few hours after I have a chance to go over all of it and check for traps. I don’t expect there to be any traps.”

Erick nodded. “Good to know.”

Shadow vanished.

Erick moved on.

- - - -

The witch in the cauldron, Aragathara, rested at the bottom of her own soup, little bubbles escaping from her closed lips to rise to the surface, to say, “I’ll be real honest real fast, because I cannot stay away from my anti-corruption wards for long. I know everything there is to know about Nothanganathor and Malevolence because I helped him make all that. I am a former companion of his. I know how he killed Margleknot’s person in the Painted Cosmology. I am dying. I am betraying him by helping you. Let me help you, so that I might help myself.” She added, “I am also one of the original Witches of Wraithborne. Witch Agatha is my sister. She is Morbion’s right-hand woman. I wish to be promised to Creator Shadow in whatever form you desire me to be, and to work with her however she wishes. I filled out paperwork.” Some of the bubbles popped, becoming some of Erick’s reincarnation papers. They floated for a moment and Erick read them in a flashing instant. “You need not follow the paperwork.”

So that was huge.

Erick let his paranoia run wild for a moment, to see what he could see. The paperwork was fine; no problems there. She just wanted to be herself but young and kinda dainty. The witch in the cauldron didn’t look dainty at all; she just looked old and tired.

As for her desires to work with Shadow and her history with Wraithborne...

That all seemed like a desire to integrate into the House and then work from the inside to undermine the House for Wraithborne, or something like that.

… And yet, on the other hand, she knew way too much for Erick to ever not agree to her requests.

Erick rapidly decided, “Sure. You can be promised to Shadow. I’m sure she’ll have you swear some specific oaths. You will be answering questions about Nothanganathor and Malevolence to both of us, though.”

Bubbles burbled to the surface of the cauldron, “I readily agree.”

Erick said, “Bring down your wards.”

Suddenly, the water in the cauldron vanished, exposing the corpse inside. Aragathara started screaming softly as her flesh began to melt—

[Reincarnation] set her to rights, though.

The cauldron evaporated as soon as the world turned to a fractal splash, filled with thousands of… all rather good futures, actually. Erick saw Aragathara as a mother, a grandmother, a teacher of students, a lover of books and a caretaker of babies. She was also a tempest queen of destruction and wrath, but mostly she was a woman of small pleasures and small powers.

Erick picked for her a future of small powers and growing things and a love for community, and gave her the body she wanted.

Shadow appeared at the end of the spell, saying, “Hit her with another [Reincarnation].”

… Erick did exactly that, and the fractal splashes of futures looked… more or less the same?

Erick looked to Shadow. “Expecting subterfuge?”

“Yes, and no.” Shadow said, “Yes; I always expect liars and cheaters. No; I did not expect it of her. But she worked with Nothanganathor and Malevolence, so if anyone was capable of evading a reset then it was her.” She said, “Wake her.”

Erick passed a [Benevolent Cleanse] across the woman and Aragathara blinked. She opened her eyes as she lay there on the bare ground, and then she looked to Erick, and Shadow. She sat up, closed her eyes, and looked inward.

Aragathara smiled, opening her eyes again as she said, “The corruption is finally gone.” She got to her knees and bowed to Erick, and Shadow, saying, “I pledge my life and my fate to House Benevolence and its just rulers, and to Shadow the Creator.”

Shadow said, “I accept your life and your fate on behalf of the House. You’re with me, now.”

And then Shadow waved her hand and shadows rose from the ground, swallowing her and Witch Aragathara in a crash of darkness, before falling back down to vanish beneath the bottom of every pebble and the undersides of every ridge in the rock. Shadow had moved on with her new person.

Erick moved on, too.

- - - -

Erick looked at the floating pool of water that held Odarimisu of the Depths, deep within that dark water. The guy was an eyeball that vanished in those dark waters when he closed his eye, but otherwise he was just an eye.

The water vibrated to allow for speech, “Greetings. I have not been able to leave my Depths more than this right here for the last few thousand years due to the corruption I have drowned in for so long. I would like to leave this cursed existence. Make of me what you will. I have not filled out paperwork at all.”

Erick paused his judgment of Odarimisu’s ‘demand’, because his Lightning Path was angling backward, hard. Something was happening over on the other side of House Benevolence. Erick said, “One moment. I need to check on—”

“Please I need to leave this horror of my existence. I don’t care what I become. I need to move on!”

Erick zapped him with a reson-empowered [Reincarnation]—

- -

“A big fish in a big ocean,” said the glowing goldfish floating in front of Erick, in the air.

“… Sure!”

- -

The water holding the goldfish collapsed, and Erick zapped away to see what was up with the lands on the other side of the House—

Some sort of giant beam made of green-black light fell out of the sky like the advancing finger of a god, moving fast, the world exploding around its advance. Clouds vanished in the sky, expanding outward under the kilometer-wide beam.

Erick threw a lot of Annihilation at the beam as he also expanded to full dragon size, turning on his Mana Siphon to full blast, extending his aura out kilometers in every direction. The green-black beam broke apart on that Annihilation and then fell into Erick’s power and Siphon. It did not get past him, and Erick was kinda surprised at that.

Erick watched as his Status started shooting up by tens of thousands of Mana, Health, Psyche, and even resons, every second. Still, the beam came on, and Erick turned up the Siphon, moving deeper into the black beam, soaking it up, transforming it into his own power.

Erick remained there for a full two minutes, sucking up the power, while nuclear bombs dropped on the other side of the city.

He almost panicked.

But Shadow was there, flying through the sky, swallowing each nuclear warhead with absolute Darkness.

Half an hour and four more all-out attacks later, one of which was an underground surge of olympic-pool-sized blood oozes, the attacks stopped.

Shadow reconvened with Erick in the underground cavern, the two of them in their human-shaped forms, for now. She asked, “Time for the counterattacks?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Erick said, thinking of what could have happened if he or Shadow had been a little less strong, or a little less quick. He missed Ophiel again, and not just because he loved Ophiel. He said to Shadow, “You were great today, Shadow. I appreciate it. I ask for your advice, now. Should I make the Valkyries sapient? Was it the right thing to make them simple tools? Or was it a cruelty? Or did you want them for House Benevolence’s defense? Or for your own use? Is that why you gave me that Book of Beings and Non-Beings to use?”

Shadow floated regally in the dark of the cavern, and in the bright backlights of the many spotlights overhead. She said, “You made what will eventually become a people and I wanted you to make them well. That is what that was. That is what this is. Neither you or I have the power or possibility to raise a child right now, but I would not hesitate to call the Valkyries mine if that is how it would work out.” She smiled a little. “I imagine that how the spell actually works is not at all how you think it will, anyway, but that isn’t the real issue. The fact is that there’s no way you’re getting a positive outcome with the Fae Enclave against Nothanganathor without capitulating to either Lord Dakka or Lord Eldraki, and I am 100% certain that you committing absolute war against a people will be easier for you, mentally, than whatever shifting trick that Eldraki would have you perform in order to gain his vote. So unless you’re willing to give up ‘a single mote of your mana’, which could be taken any sorts of ways, then you’re doing a Grand War, and that’s that.”

Erick sighed a little. “It’s all rather simple, isn’t it.”

“It’s not simple at all, but it could be, and yet, it won’t, because that’s not who you are,” Shadow said, “They’re trying to get you to compromise yourself in some fundamental way, and you are, but not really.”

Erick sighed a little bit more.

Shadow nodded.

Erick floated there for a moment longer.

And then he flashed away.

- - - -

Erick spent half an hour on an otherwise desolate part of House Benevolence’s grounds, near the edge, setting up a [Reincarnation] [Spellsurge Weave] ‘machine’. The space for the machine was about a kilometer in from the edges of two white-knife-wall pieces that Erick had lit red with giant pillars of light. The actual defensive wall between those two red edges was relaxed; shieldwork and otherwise pulled in, like a dimple, to allow people and valkyries and such to come inside the big dome some.

That was where the imager for the ‘[Reincarnation Weaver]’ floated, with a white circle on the ground next to that space. That white circle was just a detection area made with a few different spellworks that would turn that white circle to pale red, then orange, then all the way through the rainbow until it arrived at blue, which was the trigger for the weaver to [Reincarnation] the single person standing inside the space. Erick did it that way so that the [Reincarnation] wouldn’t accidentally trigger. It would take 20 seconds to trigger.

It only took a minute to actually set up the various magics, but then it took 29 more minutes of troubleshooting for Erick to discover that yes, he could ‘simply’ set the Weave to turn ‘the person who steps into this blue area into themselves, but past puberty’ and ‘Make them a benevolent, good-ish person’.

It had not been simple at all to make that happen.

He had needed to do some sapient experimentation to make that work. Conveniently, some raiders weren’t too far away and they were trying to set up bombs, so those guys made for some rather ethically-sourced material.

Those guys were already back in their drop ship and leaving, seeming remorseful and happier. They were already talking about leaving behind everything and starting new, now that their Contracts were gone.

And now Erick had a ‘machine’ that turned people young and gave them a randomly-chosen ‘good future’. So far, from Erick’s short experiments, that ‘random goodness’ usually defaulted to ‘have passion in a positive, productive pursuit + kids + long life’, but the system would need to be watched for aberrations anyway.

And so, Erick got Ta’Kamoil and a few nascent Soul Mages to watch over the place, while he also set up a very large expansion to House Benevolence. Four more apartment buildings, three more mess halls, some other lands… It was good enough. Erick was distracted, anyway. This was it. This was his first use of ‘real’ Propagation Magic. It wasn’t based on corruption, but instead on a whole bunch of interconnected magical systems.

Soon enough, valkyries were going to drop off their captured soul-cargo to this red dimple in the side of House Benevolence’s lands, to make new people out of those souls. From there, Ta’Kamoil and others would pull people out of the machine and set them on their way into the House, into housing and otherwise. The slaves would become ex-slaves, and Erick foresaw that whole event being a whole bunch of trauma, but it was workable trauma; solvable problems. The slavers would become better people, but they would need to go through a different housing system, of course; keeping the slavers with the formerly-enslaved was just asking for killing all around.

Erick went over the ‘machine’ once more.

He spoke of his fears to Ta’Kamoil.

He spoke of instructions to Lanzoil.

He had Querkooda and all of the House go to high alert.

Shadow was already talking with Witch Aragathara of the true defenses of Slaver’s Den and otherwise, but she got ready to defend the land, too.

And then Erick moved on.

To war.