Ar'Kendrithyst

A journey of years versus the work of maybe two weeks; that’s what Erick was thinking of as he flew through the sky as a massive black dragon. He could either spend years journeying through the lands of Layer 1 to reach the way out or he could help out a penal colony achieve a better standard of living and maybe they could make a portal back to Layer 0. He was pretty sure that Eldawae was lying somehow, but even if he was, then Erick would simply be helping people who needed help. The fact that they were prisoners presumably guilty of various crimes meant they needed more help.

… And yet.

Maybe ‘Evil’ people were fundamentally different from everything Erick ever knew, but most people only turned to evil when they had no other choice…

Probably.

It was what it was.

It took Erick a few days of flying, but eventually the land changed.

The storm Erick had cast was on the horizon, like a layer of grey filling up the mirage of the distance. It took Erick another day of flying to reach the greenery that the storm had left all over the Endless. There the desert lay, transformed with green and water. It was not a permanent transformation, though. Erick saw where mud had turned to dried, cracked land, and where trees had toppled over from lack of root support. The sand here was sand, after all. Sand was not a good holder of water at all.

And yet some grasses and cacti lived.

Erick had been toying with the idea of instantiating a crystal mimic into this land because those things were hardy animals that supported desert ecosystems very well. There were problems with that idea, of course. Majorly, Erick had no idea how to actually instantiate a crystal mimic and he wasn’t sure he wanted to try. Secondly, Erick had no idea what lay beyond this land, so unleashing one of Veird’s most virulent invasive plant species could be a catastrophically bad thing.

The time worm was probably bad enough—

And speaking of the time worm.

There it was. Or rather, there was its track.

The green land below was a threadbare carpet, except where the mountain-sized time worm had carved through that carpet, exposing sand once again in long lines and curved dots of tan. It was a good sign. The time worm wasn’t able to eat the greenery faster than the storm could make more, and that’s what mattered.

The worm itself was somewhere up ahead.

Erick transformed into his largest form and plopped down onto the ground in the way that an aircraft carrier would plop.

Sand went everywhere. The world thumped with the weight and power of Erick’s claws. His wings cast away the green surface, exposing the bare sand just below the thin life. His tail thrashed the land, sending up a wave of sand that would have drowned at least ten people, if this land had had people and if they had suddenly appeared in the way of his tail strike. Which would have been rather silly on their part.

… And no worm yet?

Erick stomped down with all four legs a few times and thrashed his tail again, and then he roared Benevolence across the dried desert surface. Lightning crackled kilometers out like a dread storm, crashing and breaking and reforming the world with cacti everywhere the lightning touched.

… Erick waited.

He waited.

And then he waited some more.

“… Where is that darn worm?”

The worm turned out to be having the time of its life another two days further along.

The sky rained hard and tendrils of shadow from an unseen [Undertow Star] pierced the clouds, reaching down from unseen heights above, to touch down upon most of the life below. Erick watched from that rainy, lightning-filled sky, as the time worm leapt in and out of the wet land, aiming for each puddle like the universe’s largest child, playing in the mud. The thing was easily 8, maybe 12 kilometers wide at the front end, and that bulk continued all along the entire length of the monster, of which maybe a few hundred kilometers were visible.

It stitched the green, wet ground like a piece of tan string, stretching out far behind Erick, and racing far forward. It crisscrossed itself. The entire length of it shuddered as it swallowed lake after lake, that water passing down through the entire creature. Where it ended, Erick could not see. Perhaps it had no end?

Looking at it from up here, Erick didn’t really want to kill it. That storm would last forever and thus this land would be green around here forever. Perhaps Da’luwe could find another horrific monster to use as a guard dog?

Hmm.

The worm was obviously having fun drinking all that water and probably plant life. It didn’t seem to care that Erick was up here watching it, either.

Erick knew this because it had eyes all alongside its length. They were tiny, near-invisible eyes, but they were there, and they were all looking everywhere, including at Erick up in the sky. The time worm kept on keeping on, aiming at the largest puddles of water it could see and then swallowing them whole like the world’s biggest suction tube.

Erick had guessed that the worm would have had some sort of reaction to the spellwork Erick had put into the sky. He had assumed the worm would have aimed for the center power of the spellwork, high above the clouds, in order to destroy that [Undertow Star]+[Terraforming]+reson combination. Instead, it merely enjoyed all the water everywhere.

The tendrils of that [Undertow Star] didn’t touch the worm, either. Erick would have assumed that it would have, but of course it didn’t, and seeing that it didn’t, Erick realized his blunder. The worm didn’t have Mana or Health, or even basic mana, and those were the things that the Star would drain. The only things that had mana around here were all the plants and stuff growing out of the [Terraforming]-changed wasteland.

In that moment, a bunch of different minor revelations of Margleknot combined for him.

He reevaluated a lot about the general power level of Margleknot and all the surrounding lands.

Those water towers he had put up in Da'luwe, with their node networks and draining spellworks, would only function by absorbing the mana generated from the life that the water towers grew. Those drains wouldn’t touch any of the people in that penal colony, so they weren’t a deterrent at all to anyone who walked in those lands.

No one had investigated the towers while Erick had been building them, and now that Erick was gone he expected them to be thoroughly investigated by a few elite troops, or whatever. Those who could survive the drain or ignore the drain would be among those explorers and takers.

But there would be no drain for those people at all. Therefore, those towers would rapidly be investigated and probably torn apart by every single person that needed anything at all, from plants to water to whatever, which meant that they would likely be denuded by the time he returned triumphant from this quest.

But also, maybe some people would start actively accreting Benevolence, and thus make themselves both vulnerable to the towers and also able to use Benevolence themselves. Thinking about that, it was kind of amusing that people would need to make themselves vulnerable to the drain of those towers in order to properly benefit from the accretion aspects of those towers.

Strength through vulnerability was a nice idea.

No one was going to do that, though.

Besides that…

This worm was something of a conundrum. Here it was, eating and eating, and the storm would literally never run out. Did Erick need to do anything to it at all? Could this be a ‘solved’ problem?

… It was supposedly intelligent. Could Erick talk to it?

He checked his Status to look at his Psyche.

Over 200 million Psyche.

“It’s enough.”

Erick reached out with [Telepathy], touching the mind of the beast below—

Pain.

Ah.

Right.

Erick had a few different thoughts as he jerked from the unexpected sensation of pain ripping across his entire dragon body, causing his very scales to hurt and a headache to pressure his head so hard that blood gushed out of his snout. He snorted that blood away and blinked out more blood. Rain washed away the evidence of his misstep, and he resumed flight. He doubted if anyone watching would have noticed his pain, but he certainly did.

He hadn’t felt pain like that in a very long time, because it had been a long time since he had been rebuffed telepathically.

Unwanted [Telepathy] gave a blowback that was commensurate with the ‘no thanks’ from the recipient, after all. If the time worm far below had had any sort of reaction at all, then Erick didn’t recognize that reaction. The time worm didn’t change course. Didn’t scream. Didn’t do anything aside from pursue more bodies of water for gulping. It hadn’t been pained, after all.

Had it even felt Erick’s telepathic touch?

Erick needed to fix this.

Erick took a moment and he went into the sky, above the clouds, high into the air. The clouds were stacked up for kilometers upon kilometers. Flashes of white and tendrils of shadow occasionally illuminated the rainy gloom, like some monster lurking in the depths, which is exactly what the [Undertow Star] became when anyone got too close to it. It only took mana from its surroundings while someone was far enough away, but when they got closer it would rip their very bodies to shreds. Erick had seen a few people over the years try to get too close to one of his Stars without any Health or Mana to protect them. It was not pretty.

Maybe he needed to remake the towers in Daluwe with some [Undertow Star]s. Such an action might not protect the bounty on the ground, but it would certainly protect any [Terraforming] the star was attached to, and that might be enough.

Erick avoided the center of the storm, and went higher.

The rain thinned. The lightning disappeared below.

Erick popped out over a land of clouds both white and grey, looking like a slow hurricane of continental proportions. He took a moment to appreciate the sight, and then he cast a bit of Platform and Time spellwork in order to give himself a protected space.

Once so protected, Erick dove into himself to poke at the [Telepathy] spell, to try and understand what was going on with that particular Mind Magic. His goal was to take away the backlash part, or at least mitigate it somewhat. He wasn’t too sure if he could do that, though; he wasn’t a Mind Mage, and he didn’t want to be a Mind Mage. To hear Poi talk about it, being a Mind Mage was not for everyone.

Very few people wanted to know what everyone around them was thinking all the time, but born Mind Mages were able to ameliorate and understand what was going on with themselves and others in a way that wasn’t destructive to oneself, or to others.

Erick peered inside himself.

He saw his goal.

The [Telepathy] crystal was like many others, but there was no such thing as Elemental Mind, so it had none of that in there at all. What it did have, and what almost tossed Erick out of his meditation, was a nexus of ethereal soul-stuff that did not look like soul-stuff at all, now that he was looking at it again.

When Erick had checked out his soul for Malevolent Influences, there had been a little bit in all the Mind Magic, and he had carefully taken that out and eliminated the problematic Nothor Beasts that had come out of those fixes. When he had done that, the spell had looked like a normal crystal spell with some illuminated streamers inside. Those streamers were what Erick thought of as the tendrils that Poi always had around him, always out there and touching the minds of others. They had looked like a weird form of spellwork that he didn’t quite understand, which was pretty normal when it came to Mind Magic.

But here, a week later, and after obviously experiencing some natural soul healing, Erick looked at the [Telepathy] crystal and saw pinpoints of light that looked like the glitter-crystal that made up the Fae Enclave’s greater tower that ran through all of Margleknot, the denser crystal tower at the center of that main tower, and the very matter of the Fractal Fairy itself. It was soulstuff, all tendril-like and simultaneously made of dotted-stars.

It was the mark of this universe.

Just like how Darkness made a mark inside people, giving them Darkness that made mana.

The center of [Telepathy] was a spot of this Fractal Universe.

And since it was the mind that made resons, it stood to reason that this thing here was the thing of the Fractal Universe which allowed for resons.

Or at least that was a working theory.

Okay.

So.

This was a big deal Erick was seeing.

Erick’s ‘spot of Darkness’ was an ocean compared to this ‘spot of Fractals’, if that’s what this thing was, anyway. Perhaps this wasn’t a mote of this Fractal Universe. Perhaps it was just a creation of Melemizargo’s? Did Erick have another marking of this universe anywhere inside of him?

… He didn’t see any, but then again there was one spot of his soul that he couldn’t truly see, and that was the Darkness. That whole part of him was actually all throughout his entire soul, until he frameshifted himself into an observable mode, allowing him to make sense of the separate parts of himself. When he did that, his Darkness became like a floor, or a core, or something that underpinned everything else, but also not really that at all. It was rather indiscernible. Perhaps the ‘spot of Fractals’ was somewhere inside that Darkness? Who knew.

… Were all his ‘universal markings’ in there? ‘Under the floor’, so to speak?

Erick tried to frameshift himself into finding his ‘universal markings’, but even with knowing that he had one due to the Fractal Fairy implying as much in their speech, Erick couldn’t find it.

So he went back to his [Telepathy] crystal.

It was not just a spot of Fractals, it was also a Benevolence crystal, because Erick had remade everything with his own power when he transformed what the Script had given him into his own True Wizard body.

Erick popped out of himself for a moment and simply looked up into the sky, at the Layer 1 Fae Enclave up there. He recalled a story about how Melemizargo had made Mind Magic in the early centuries of the Script, in order to undermine everything and everyone, and to show them the truth of their cage. He had obviously taken a piece of the Fractal Universe itself and turned it into a superpower, because what Erick had seen inside of himself was not a spell that originated in mana at all.

Mind Magic was not mana-based magic at all, and yet it could be used like that by most people born to that power.

More than that, though…

Erick thought of sensing capabilities.

Mana sensing was what people with mana did. And yet, not everyone had mana, and not all manas were sensible in the same ways. There was a lot of mana in Margleknot, though, so everyone could look around with mana if they had some sort of capability in that way. And yet, mana sensing in Margleknot was iffy. Spotty. Not very sure. That’s what Erick felt in those oddities in the air when he mana sensed and felt other powers inside the air that were not the mana of the Painted Cosmology, or similarly comprehensible powers.

Even with all the varied manas out there: Anyone could mana sense and become one with the mana and sense the world through the mana. And through that sensing, they could make miracles.

Or at least sensing the world was the first step toward changing the world.

And so: What was telepathy, except for mind sensing?

Sensing was just the first part, though.

Through sensing came interaction, either on others, with others, or on one-self.

Erick reconsidered his goal of changing [Telepathy] to remove the backlash, and his history with Mind Magic.

He could probably break open the crystal that was [Telepathy] and integrate the Mark of the Fractal Universe into his very soul, ‘awakening the mind slime’, as it were.

He did not want to do this. He liked that people could express who they were without him knowing they were lying, or the fractions by which they were lying. Erick certainly didn’t need to know that this person or that person were thinking about horrific acts left and right, while in reality all they ever did were good things—

The fae mind controlled people all the time.

“Well that makes a whole lot of sense now, too, since they’re empowered by this universe and its mental magics.”

Erick thought for a minute more.

The next revelation came soon enough.

“Ah. You can probably use the mind slime to interact with other realities of the Fractal Universe in a more direct, concentrated way, than Wizardry. That’s probably what this Fractal Mark is meant for. Communication across the— Hmm. Actually. No. Probably not. Maybe that’s what Melemizargo meant it for; for universal communication.” Erick said, “But anyone who actually managed that would have run into Nothanganathor and been killed. Therefore, the only thing that this bit of the Fractal can do is exactly what Poi has been able to do… Or actually... A whole lot less, probably.”

… Hmm.

Well.

Poi can contact people without them being able to say ‘no thanks’.

Could Erick change this spell in that way? To force a mental connection?

Yes.

That was his goal.

Envisioning the whole thing, Erick saw himself being able to contact another peacefully...

Which would require a bit of mental translations, actually, because speaking the same language was a big deal.

… Or could he just do some sort of ‘pure thought’ sort of thing, that would not allow others to lie in the [Telepathy] connection?

… Hmm. This was a big change, actually. Lotta moving parts that would open Erick up to attack because true interaction could allow for the passage of memetic threats, and people surely had a lot of those out here…

Hmm.

“… I’ll just see if I can remove the backlash part, or mitigate it somehow.”

Erick dove into himself once again and found the [Telepathy] crystal looking like a spot of glitter-crystal that was also made of tendrils inside a Benevolence crystal shell with a whole bunch of unknown little bits to them. Erick focused, and everything else vanished off to the sides. All that remained was [Telepathy], coming into superb focus.

The little bits and bobs connected to Erick’s Body and Mind most of all, like overlapping pieces of puzzles that would allow his physical mind to interact with his mental self.

This was unnecessary, from what Erick was seeing. Through some more frameshifting, Erick saw that the tendrils of the glitter-crystal were wholly attached to his Mind. He didn’t need the Body connection at all…

Did he?

Erick came halfway out of himself and summoned a spell he hadn’t used in a long time.

[Imaginary Work Animal].

A large toad appeared and then it started singing which was about the easiest thing for Erick to imagine an animal capable of doing, and Erick liked the sound of frogs in a rainstorm. Even though the rainstorm was far below, the big frog sang anyway. It sounded pretty great.

The animal was a normal animal of its type —giant rain frog— and therefore it had a rudimentary mind.

Erick poked at it with [Telepathy] as he watched the spell work inside of his soul.

A tendril connected to the frog and the frog sent an inquisitive question back up the way, almost as though it was asking ‘what’s up?’.

Inside Erick’s soul the spell functioned ‘normally’. Or at least Erick supposed it did. Erick sent out a tendril of thought, and a bit of some odd tendril came into Erick, allowed inside by his own [Telepathy] extension. The frog’s return signal brushed through the part of [Telepathy] that touched Erick’s Body, which acted as something of a check. Then the frog’s signal passed the Body check, and went into Erick’s physical body, whereupon Erick understood that the creature was asking ‘what’s up?’.

Erick guessed a few things about what was happening there, but he chose not to explore those guesses too deeply at this moment.

All Erick really understood was that he needed to keep the Body check in order to understand the frog. Perhaps a more trained Mind Mage would not need to use the Body to understand anything, but Erick seemed like he needed that right now.

Erick braced himself and sent a [Telepathy] questing down below the clouds, to the time worm far below—

The return signal was a reverse river that crashed into the pipe that was Erick’s tendril outlet, to strike the Body check, and then crash outward, like a river hitting a dam, harming everything in that crash of a return signal.

Erick sighed out blood, dripping red onto the platform underfoot.

The only thing Erick understood at this particular moment was that he had no idea how to fix this problem at all.

The Body check was used to check the incoming signal for ‘no’, and also used to send the signal to Erick to allow for that connection, and thus connecting Erick’s physical mind to the other physical mind at the other end of the spellwork.

Perhaps the ‘physical mind to physical mind’ was itself a check, in that ‘connecting to a non-physical mind’ usually simply killed a person. Erick could easily see that connecting to an eldritch mind could go very, very bad.

And so, changing any part of that stuff right there would allow for anyone to directly attack his mental resources, and possibly break the [Telepathy] crystal itself…

… Hmm.

“The only thing I actually understand is that this [Telepathy] spell is a work of curated art, specifically created in this way to both make it a strong spell, and to disallow anyone messing with it… I guess this is why they didn’t want anyone taking more than one or two Mind spells in most places back on Veird, either. If I had a few tens of Mind Magic spells to poke around with, I could figure out how they all worked and do some reverse engineering.”

Even on Veird, though, no one had access to their soul like Erick had access to his soul right now; the Script obscured the soul. But, Erick supposed, multiple layers of obfuscation were simply good security practices.

This particular [Telepathy] crystal was likely the public result of generations of iterative changes, too.

All the initial glitter-crystal-empowered people on Veird were likely long dead.

… This [Telepathy] crystal probably had a bunch of safeguards to disrupt the power within if anyone ever fucked around with it too much. Erick had likely removed those safeguards, though, when he removed the Malevolence inside.

Once again, Erick considered simply breaking the crystal. Could he break this thing open and ‘awaken his mind slime’ instantly?

Maybe!

Erick didn’t want that, though.

So thinking in another direction…

Erick dove into himself, and checked out how the damage from the [Telepathy] crystal was processed. He might not be able to muck around with the crystal itself, but he could certainly change some wires on the back end—

Ah ha!

There they were. The False Damage threads of the [Telepathy] crystal. They attached directly to his body, bypassing much of his Health barrier—

Oh.

Erick saw how the Fae of the Fae Enclave had been able to muck around with him mentally. The entire [Telepathy] crystal had some lines going directly into his Mind, Body, and Soul, bypassing, in small ways, all of his various pools of power.

Well that was an easy fix.

Erick switched out all the transfer lines of influence onto their correct paths; into his millions upon millions of Mana, Health, and Psyche. With a final ‘Yes’ to the changes, they took hold.

Erick sighed as he came back to himself.

With a quick [Telepathy] toward the time worm far below, Erick felt a return stroke against his Psyche and Body. No False Damage equivalents happened at all. No bleeding. No headache. Just a wash of power against Erick that drained a few 10,000 Health and Mind in the return ‘no’…

Oh!

Erick could probably shunt that power directly against anyone who said ‘no’ to him.

He could make the ‘return the False Damage’ go right along his initial questing tendril…

“… Nah. That seems… wrong. Very wrong.”

An idea to keep in his back pocket, though.

Actually.

Erick could copy spells inside of his body and use the second one just fine. He had done that with [Reson Gathering] to make [Reson Wallet]…

But that had been done using mana. This [Telepathy] crystal was not wholly mana. This was Fractal power, or something like that. Erick had no real idea how to copy this spell, or he would have done that and made [Offensive Telepathy].

All of that was something to keep in mind for the future.

For now, Erick dismissed the little singing frog—

He couldn’t dismiss the frog that easily. Right. He forgot he couldn’t do that.

Erick looked down at the little frog, chirping along, doing what Erick had created it to do. The ‘little frog’ was about 3 meters tall and so it made a lot of noise. It seemed really happy, too. Erick found that he truly did not want to kill it.

… Welp. Here’s another experiment, then.

Erick whispered to the frog, lacing his voice with resons, saying, “You get to be a whole bunch of genetically diverse and compatible vegetarian frogs to inhabit all these stormlands. Live well in the lightning, little terraforming frogs.”

Benevolence crackled from Erick’s draconic lips to the frog’s body, breaking it into ten thousand smaller frogs in every possible color of glowing pastel that all rolled away from the main body, all of them singing and chirping and spreading.

Erick dismissed the platform underfoot. The frogs fell alongside Erick, all of them chirping and spreading and trying to fly, but finding themselves unable. They were just frogs, after all. With a flicker of power Erick cast bubbling spellwork across the entire pastel release. Colorful frogs in little bubbles, two or three or four a pop, filled the sky, falling down like illuminated balloons. They’d spread far and wide in all the many, many new marshes down there, scattering on the wind in their little bubble parachutes. When they hit the ground the bubbles would pop.

And Erick fell through storm clouds, leading the way for the frogs to swirl down behind him.

Erick hadn’t gotten far with the [Telepathy] work, but he did learn something deep, and the spell didn’t hurt now when he aimed it at an unwilling target. That was good enough for now.

It would be great for poking at the mind of someone to get their attention.

It was good enough for what he planned to do next.

- - - -

Erick floated a few kilometers above the devouring maw of the time worm.

And he poked it with [Telepathy].

The poking did nothing that Erick could see. He got the return signal, of course. That knocked out a few 10,000 in mostly Health and Psyche. It didn’t do much else. And so, Erick poked. He poked—

The worm eyed him strongly, and then kept worming through the various lakes of the new stormlands.

Poke.

Poke. Poke.

Poke. Poke. Poke.

… Poke.

pokepokepokepokepokepokepoke—

A return signal blasted into Erick’s mind, flowing alongside his outpouring rivers of Psyche and Health and a bit of his Mana, too, sounding like rage and hate and nothing intelligible at all. Far below, the time worm eyed Erick with a bunch of its surface eyes. It continued on into the next lake directly ahead, most of it looking at Erick, but when Erick didn’t do anything else the creature fully focused on the water ahead. It swallowed that lake and then the next.

Erick telepathically poked the worm some more. A lot, really. Well beyond what could possibly be considered good manners for any normal sort of interaction at all. If Erick had left the channels open for [Telepathy] to throw False Damage directly at him then Erick would have fallen out of the sky for the pain, but this sort of return ‘no’ only cost a few hundred thousand Mana, Health, and Psyche so far.

Eventually the worm stopped eating water and went after Erick, flowing into the sky like the sky was sand and easily able to support its weight.

Erick allowed the monster to get close, to try and eat him, and then Erick sent a telepathic ‘No’, of his own. That sort of call for ‘no’ went uncared for. The worm wanted to eat him now.

And so came the [Luminous Beam]s.

Nuclear fire exploded along the entire length of Erick’s strongest spell as the spell and all the coincidental damage ripped down the mouth of the monster and out the sides. The time worm instantly realized it was way over its head and retreated, reversing its personal time, even as Erick followed the beast with his nuclear beam. Erick cut off the spell before the monster reached the ground.

And the time worm seemed to consider something.

Erick watched. He poked it with a few more telepathic touches.

This time the time worm ignored him completely as it went about eating the next lake in sight.

Erick poked it some more.

pokepokepokepokepokepokepoke—

“NO TALK MEAT! NO TALK. GO AWAY!”

So the time worm could talk.

It had also thrown some sort of world-shaking [World Quake] at Erick, using some sort of innate power over all the world around it that it seemed to have. [Quake] was a rather versatile spell and Erick doubted the time worm had that spell for so very many different reasons, but what the monster had done was very similar to [Sky Quake] and other variants of that particular high-tier Thunder Magic.

Erick smiled. The beast was intelligent, just as Eldawae had said. That was one point in Eldawae’s favor. Not lying was always good for a point.

Erick let loose a ‘[Quake]’ of its own, shaking the entire sky and a lot of the world beyond with [Physical Domain].

“I can talk louder.”

The flesh of the time worm and the grassy, lake-filled ground, and all the sky and the rain itself, pulsed away from Erick as he filled the world with his own declaration of presence. And then he spoke softer,

“Or we can talk like normal people.”

The time worm glared at Erick. It stopped moving.

It turned its lamprey-like, mountain-wide face at Erick. Or rather, its tiny eyes all around that maw. The maw closed a little and the creature looked at Erick, moving higher in the sky to look at him from his own level.

“WHAT?”

“Do you like my rain I made?” Erick hovered, easily sweeping a wing outward, gesturing at the sky. “I made this rain. Do you like it?”

The mountain-sized creature closed its lips a little. Perhaps it was a ‘brow furrowing’ gesture? Erick wasn’t quite sure. The thing opened its mouth a little more, though the mouth had never been closed completely at all.

“FINE.”

And then it turned around and went back to the ground and ate some more lakes.

Erick flew overhead, getting closer, asking, “If I put some people here, would you eat them?”

“YES. MEAT MEAT.”

Erick did not sigh, but he wanted to. He gestured back to Da'luwe, saying, “That’s the way to the city. Meat there.”

Erick had no idea what he expected the thing to do. Perhaps it didn’t know where the city was? Therefore, pointing it out would show it the way. If the worm turned around and went for Da'luwe then Erick would kill it. Or maybe the beast wouldn’t care, and then Erick wasn’t sure what he was going to do next.

The worm surprised him.

“DEAD MEAT NOT MEAT.”

“There’s meat there. Lots of meat.”

“NOPE. NO MEAT AT GREY LIGHT.” The worm stopped. It looked at Erick specifically. “I KNOW MEAT MEATS.”

“How?”

“BOUNCY BOUNCY. BIG FLAP FLAPS. SHAKY SHAKY IS MEAT MEAT. HARD FIND MEAT MEAT IN WATER WATER BUT WATER WONDERFUL. I DRINK DRINK.”

Erick flew forward, ahead of the beast, and then he grabbed a whole bunch of water in a sphere around him and said, “Water here. Hold open.”

And then he used [Duplicate Aura].

Water exploded out of him, gushing in every possible direction like he was the center point of a release of an ocean. The time worm squealed loud enough to shake the sky as it opened wide below Erick, and then wider. It tried to swallow him, but Erick increased the [Duplication Aura] and the time worm simply could not drink that fast. It certainly tried, though. Erick held out some solid aura above him gradually increasing the flow pointing downward instead of having it flow everywhere. The time worm could not keep up, but it tried. It faltered, falling down in the air—

It stuck itself there in the sky, using some sort of odd Force magic, holding itself open.

Erick wondered who would give out first.

The worm’s eyes rolled back all along the rim of its maw. It seemed really happy. Erick watched with all of his senses…

And it was dying.

The time worm’s soul was gradually fading in strength, like the soul of anyone who was near the end of their life and about to exit their mortal coil. Erick almost felt bad about that, but the worm was happy. That much was obvious to anyone. So Erick kept the water flowing.

Five hours later the time worm died by fractions. Here and there the eyes rolled back and did not roll ever again, as the soul around those eyes dissipated into the rest of the universe, like cotton candy disappearing into water. Those parts of the creature turned solid, like something freezing in the air, locking it into place. Gradually, and then rapidly here and there, the time worm died, half of its soul evaporating into nothing and the rest of it following in the next ten minutes.

Erick kept the water going for a little while longer.

He kept going after the entire ‘hose’ of the worm’s body filled up and water poured out of the top, unable to get anywhere else inside because the worm was full. Holes popped here and there all along the time worm’s body, water pouring out of those holes—

Suddenly the monster’s maw broke away, crashing to the ground, turning to meat itself as its freezing-in-death magic began to fade.

Erick turned off the water.

The worm crashed to the ground, dead and gone. Its body began to crust over in the [Terraforming] rain, lightning striking here and there, erupting the body into glowing mushrooms that grew too tall by far. Erick sighed as the creature’s corpse littered the land.

Growing to full size to allow him to use all his senses to search the body, Erick flew low and slow back the way he had come, toward Da’luwe, sensing the worm’s body for survivors. If the thing came back every 50 to 100 years, then it had a life cycle of some sort.

Or maybe it was Da’luwe’s weapon, to keep the hordes of civilization at bay, and it resurrected it every so often as needed.

Probably.

Erick searched for eggs for 2 days, or something like that. He even spent some time with [Cascade Imaging] to try and find eggs, and then he spent some time working on [Cascade Imaging] itself, to figure out how the spell worked inside of him and also in the world out here. [Cascade Imaging] was a huge spell inside his soul. One of his most complex, but also one of his most simple Particle spells.

Complex in effect. Simple in execution.

Erick either supplied something physical to search for similar things, or he supplied an idea, which was tougher to match for. There weren’t any real adjustments he could make to the spell because of that, too. Sure, he could probably hook it up to his little Mark of the Fractal Universe, and go off of some sort of ‘universal-consciousness-aided’ search, but that seemed ill-advised for reasons that Erick couldn’t quite articulate to himself at the moment. Mostly, he had no idea what would happen if he tried that.

So he left [Cascade Imaging] as is.

And he didn’t find any eggs, or worms that would become big, or anything like that. He spent a full day trying to dig the entire time worm out of the ground, like a cable, but it snapped somewhere far, far below the ground. The entire thing was already disintegrating from being dead, too, and the parts further underground were somehow almost exactly the same as the stone all around it.

The part of the worm up top was meat, and then meat/ground after several hundred kilometers of twisted worm, going all up and down and all around in the stormlands, and now it was simply ground/ground but with slightly odd-colored parts. It was also mostly washed away.

Hard to find anything in this mess.

Erick called it quits and took to the sky of the stormlands, where mushrooms grew tall on the various remains of the time worm, and tiny, pastel light frogs hopped and chirped and ate mushrooms and plants and made a lot more little frog tadpoles in the watery land.

There were several tens of giant lakes now, too.

And the rain kept on, keeping on.

Erick flew toward the grey pillar in the far horizon, far beyond the edge of the stormlands.

- - - -

A few days later, from high, high in the sky, Erick spotted Da’luwe’s obsidian illusion wall like a line of black dots on the horizon. Those dots rapidly resolved into 100 meter tall obsidian knives, each several tens of meters away from each other. Erick didn’t have to wonder if they saw him because the illusions covering the top of the large space beyond flickered. A large hole opened up in the roof defenses, showing the greening land beyond. It was a lot greener than how Erick had left it, and the hole in the roof was Large enough for Erick to fly on through as a large dragon.

So that’s what he did.

The roof of the land was only a hundred-ish meters from the sandy surface where he had been let in, so Erick had to duck to get all the way inside the space. Ducking wasn’t becoming of a dragon, though, so Erick transformed back into his human shape with black horns. His sunglow and nightglow robes reformed from their holding positions on his horns, onto his body, and soon Erick was flying with clothes fit for his power directly to his very first Benevolence tower…

Which was a smoking ruin.

“Not an auspicious start.”

Erick zapped across the land, rapidly checking the other towers he had made. 7 of the 9 were broken, everything stolen out of them, the spellworks that could be removed had been removed, the [Terraforming] storms simply erased. Even the duplicator stations had been taken, but those were surely non-functional without the node network to power them. The node networks were simply gone, as though they never existed.

In the 2 remaining towers, though, everything was working as intended, but only because some standing armies guarded those towers.

One of those armies looked strong and getting stronger, with wraiths in ethereal chains bound to spires around the tower, protecting it from all oncomers, while giant flesh golems protected it further. Inside that wraithbound benevolence tower (ah! That’s where ‘Wraithborne Tower’ comes from. The ghosts! Duh) everything was exactly as Erick had made it. Benevolence slimes grew and prospered. Trees and duplicators made resources of all kinds, from Benevolence to matter.

The other tower had been taken over by the inmates of Da’luwe. People lived inside half of it, cutting down trees as those trees grew to build houses outside the central place, and to burn for firewood. They took the water and made fields of plants out of it. There were four more duplicators outside of the tower itself, but someone had jury-rigged some sort of metal spellwork to attach those duplicators to the node network of the tower. Those captured and relocated duplicators now made gold and jewels and weapons, and everyone living in the shantytown that spread all throughout the second tower’s land looked to be having a… a life. Not a great life, but they looked more lively than before.

There were 20,000 people here, easily.

Some of them saw Erick and they waved. Some bowed. Some prostrated. One guy carved his chest with a knife, saying something about pledging his undying life to Erick, if only Erick would ask for it. He used a lot more colorful language than that, but Erick didn’t feel like hearing all those particular words—

And there was purple-robe. The very first guy Erick had seen inside this land. He was an elven-sort, and he stepped out of a covered staircase onto a platform atop a building, saying, “Greetings, to Ascended Flatt!”

Erick landed next to the guy. From the words he was picking up all around him, he learned this guy was named Nilton. “So. Nilton. Care to give your side of the story why 7 of my towers are down, and why you have some extra copy machines that were obviously looted from the destroyed towers?”

Nilton had an odd look about him when Erick asked that question.

A lot of things had probably happened in the last, what, 15 days?

Instead of being cowed at all, Nilton had a fire in his eyes as he said, “The nobles stole from all of us! They took your bounty and your power, but we were able to save this one! We guard this one with our lives, and the wraiths cannot have it! But we are not as strong as you. Could you expand this one some? Your people need the strength to come, and we cannot defend so many locations against the predations of the Chancellor and his soul shackles!”

Ah.

So Nilton was a con artist.

Welp!

This wasn’t the first time Erick had been taken in by a guy asking for nice things. It would not be the last. As long as he tried to help people, some would take advantage. He certainly wouldn’t stop helping people because of one bad experience, though.

Oh well.

Erick flew away without another word.

He went to the center city.

- - - -

Erick sat down at a nice table with Chancellor Eldawae as some ghosts served chilled wine and little cakes and expensive meats. It was all rather delicious, and Eldawae was not using his other, more intimidating body. He was wearing a simple elven-looking man today, and he enjoyed the treats alongside Erick. Normally, Erick would try to get down to business, but Eldawae had respectfully asked for Erick to sit down and have a little snack before they got down to it. Erick agreed.

And so, he was here, under the center dome, spying and eating, because Eldawae had plotted this well.

Stacks and stacks of information about all of Da’luwe sat on a table just to the side of the eating table. The table of paperwork contained a whole bunch of log books and histories and timetables and everything anyone running this city would ever want to know about this city, from reson production/consumption, to how they handled inmates, laws, and otherwise. There were even dossiers on all the infamous inmates out there.

Erick had joked when he saw the pile, “You’re the ruler here, but the Tower is the bigger ruler. Should I be seeing these books?”

“What books? All I see is some stuff I have to get through today, and you’re also here at the same time. Don’t go spying now please, Ascended Flatt, though there’s nothing I could do if you did. Now tell me: Have you ever had tri-berry tarts? Those are these ones right here. They’re actually a single berry, but everyone tastes them as the perfect combination of whatever three berries they love the most.”

The tri-berry tarts were a delicious combination of strawberry, purpleberry, and blackberry. Ophiel would have loved them.

Erick was mostly focused on the paperwork.

He finished off the paperwork long before they were anywhere near the end of the food. It was all rather grim.

Erick thought. It could all be propaganda, of course, but some of those books were old. Or they had been thrown in a time chamber for a really high time-dilation coefficient. Erick didn’t believe they were magic’d into existence, though.

Soon enough, Erick finished off half of the plates before him, while Eldawae finished off the other half.

When there was only one tri-berry tart left, Erick got down to business, saying, “This has been a wonderful meal. I apologize that my towers got taken down that easily. I do wonder at how much of that was purposeful negligence on your part, though, or active destruction on someone else’s part. Obviously, the inmates have destroyed a lot of all that out there, for there’s something like half a million of them to the 50,000 in this city. I’m surprised that the true power only exists in a handful of people though, and not in these 50,000 people here.”

The 50,000 in the city only existed because of horrific reasons, as far as Erick could tell. Not ‘horrific’ as in mutative, corruptive. But rather from a sapient-rights perspective. From what he was reading, Eldawae was a good caretaker from a monetary perspective, but awful in every other way possible.

Sometimes inmates had children so that they could pay off their debt faster, dumping the child in the center city so that they could grow up raised by undead who didn’t care for them at all. Most of the kids born here ended up awful people themselves, and thus inmates after they committed this or that crime.

Eldawae nodded, then began, “There are 475,000 inmates here at Da’luwe at the moment. 135,000 of them are alive in the traditional sense. For the most part, all they have to do is live here to serve out their time and then they can die and end up in the Waiting Room, and then leave Layer 1. It is a harsh existence that doesn’t teach anyone how to be a better person, and we really don’t care if they are better people at all, because they are all dropped here because they are terrible, and if you spend long enough trying to fix that, only to reach some great new milestone that is torn down by the next tyrant to fall into your lap, you’d stop trying, too. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Probably not, really. You’re young.

“And because you’re young, you tried to put more Good into this land and none of it was cared for by these people. We protected one tower from those people out there, though. That one tower is now supplying everyone here in the city with so much more than we have ever had before. That is why we were able to have this little feast; all because of you. As for all the rest of the towers, number 2 through 9, all we did was give them to the inmates.” Eldawae said, “What happened to those towers is exactly what the inmates made happen to them.”

Erick had already seen a lot of that out there, but it was still disheartening. He sighed. “I know you’re Evil, but why not try to eke out better margins? You could eat like this all the time. You could have a positive reson flow, instead of having to take from the Tower—” Erick realized what he was saying even as he said it. “Ah. If you’re not dependent on the Tower then you’re a threat. Right.”

Eldawae smiled slightly. And then he outright lied, saying, “I don’t know what you mean, Ascended Flatt. We’re doing the best we can here.”

Erick Looked at Eldawae.

Eldawae shrugged. “Would you like to discuss Da’luwe making a portal to Layer 0 now?”

“How about you keep the two towers I made, and you ensure that the inmate tower doesn’t fall apart. They’re using it way too hard and I saw caravans trailing across the land out there, toward the inmate tower. Their population is going to boom and then bust hard.”

“Easily done. It shall be so.”

Erick moved on. “That one guy. Nilton. The one in charge of the inmate town. So he’s a professional con man?”

“Oh yes. That Nilton fellow is one of the worst forms of Evil in the Tower or any other Evil organization. He’s the destructive type. I let him do what he wants and he gets himself and several people killed every few years, but he always has plans to come back from the dead through the sacrifice of others. I’m amazed that people believe anything he says at all, but his Truth is rather insidious in that it only affects him, making him the perfect speaker to anyone who would listen, for one cannot normally and easily detect those sorts of internal magics. You did wise up rather fast in that second interaction, though.”

Erick frowned at that, but it was a fair assessment of what had happened. “If I’m ‘spying’ on your information right: Now that Nilton is not indebted he’s allowed to act as a normal citizen of the Tower out there. I see what is written there, but… He could come in here, to the main city, couldn’t he? Why doesn’t he?”

“He is a tyrant fallen from grace, guilty of soul sundering 16,756 people in order to pay his gambling debts. Of course he wants power. It’s the only way he gets to get his kingdom back. If he can convince enough people to support him then he’s going to buy his way back into a portal to go to Layer 0, which is a mere 1,000,000 resons. Your support of him at the beginning of your time in Da’luwe granted him 300,000 resons of that particular price tag.” Eldawae asked, “Would you like to buy passage back to Layer 0 now? Once payment is accepted, all it takes is a day of preparation and we can have that formation ready to go.”

“Later. I’m going to fuck Nilton up, first. I just need to decide how.”

“Be my guest. When you grow tired of dispensing the justice they all deserve, then you can simply leave them to make their own abyss. That’s what I do.” Eldawae asked, “Will you be staying with us for a rest? Or will you head right back out?”

Erick stood, saying, “I appreciate the repast. It has been very enlightening. I would like to know if the worm is a weapon of Da’luwe, though. You hinted as much, but I would like to know.”

“When the time worm comes back it comes back completely devoid of all intelligence and filled with the unending desire to eat. And so, we graft souls onto it in order to awaken an intelligence within the beast so that the beast can understand certain things, like friend or foe or ‘not worth eating’. It’s not a weapon we control, but it is one we influence so that it cannot be used against us.” Eldawae said, “The time worm has been here in the Endless long before I was mortal born and it will be here long after I finally fall to some nefarious or Good plot— Ah. I was born 17,000 years ago. Most people who live here know that, but you might not. I expect to live about that much longer, but ideally forever.”

“… Want to be a Benevolence Dragon?”

Eldawae grinned. “Not for myself, but I do have some brilliant young persons who could benefit from immortality and power, who have not been able to grasp at power themselves and who are unwilling to dive into Evil to do so. It is a common arrangement inside the Tower for the Talented among us to support the growth of those mortals who are less than capable of being threats to our power.

“I have a city administrator, born of the inmates, who would make a wonderful dragon. There are a few different guards who have been begging me to let them stop the rampaging of the inmates, but I won’t let them go out there and get themselves killed. Those few people are mostly former inmates. And then we have several bound revenants who saw what could have been of this land they love, and who are disheartened by the backslide to anarchy and predation. I wager their feelings on how this whole Benevolence tower event has happened are a lot stronger than yours.”

Erick skipped over how Eldawae had insinuated that he was merely Talented, and not an actual Power. Perhaps it was a simple act of humbleness, but the man was very much not a simple ‘Talented’ on the scale of ‘Fae’, ‘Power’, ‘Ascended’, ‘Talented’, and ‘Mortal’. He was Ascended, at least. Perhaps he was simply being humble, though, in order to hide his true thoughts from whatever spying magics lay all around this grand hall.

Morbion and the Wraithborne Tower were certainly watching this, if not right now, then when Erick left, for Eldawae was a low man on the Tower and he certainly reported to those above him. Eldawae’s goals were to be here, in his city, undisturbed and relatively happy.

Erick’s goals were bigger than Da’luwe.

Erick said, “If I support those people, they would be capable of becoming a threat to you and yours.”

“Doubtful.”

“… I would meet them without the overview of any others.”

“Of course.”