Ar'Kendrithyst

The land was called The Last Good Continent in the tongue of the natives.

The Last Good Continent was smeared on the inside of Fenrir like peanut butter. This particular swipe of peanut butter had grown a whole new ecology of fungi in the shapes of people and castles and civilization.

This land was the origination of a fungal infection that was already spreading far and wide, far past the original boundaries of this place, because the Last Good Continent was a land of vicious, ultimate battles. But not the normal kind of battles. These battles took place inside every person, and every living thing composed of multiple cells. It was a battle that went unseen by the hosts, except in the flesh stalks and protuberances that erupted from those bodies like flowers here and there, if the conditions were right for flourishing. It was normal for them. They lived with it. Reproduction in the dominant local population didn’t happen without fungal infections growing ready for such.

They looked like humans. They called themselves humans, and they were human, mostly. They built societies like anyone else, with kings and children and bakers of bread and diggers of ditches. The trees were funny, with shrooms here and there that were at clear odds with the trees themselves, which were normal brown-barked and green-leafed, or maybe some more exotic colors, if they were a more exotic variety.

It was Veird, taken in a weird direction at the very start of the Script, post Sundering. Erick guessed this version of Veird had something to do with the Death of all Halves and the creation of the orcols, if the orcols had only been the start of the combination of all people into one people. These people were very robust. Incredibly strong. They had tamed all of their world they wished to tame.

The lands just to the side of The Last Good Continent were completely unprepared for the arrival of the Last Good Continent, though. There had been no war for dominance among the people at all, for the people did not need to wage war to secure their place among the lands of Fenrir. Their fungi did that instead.

The Valkyries culled from the outside in, burning great swaths of forests that had been turned into cacophonies of decaying mushrooms, with lands filled with the dead and dying who had no defenses against the rot. Those that died went on to gods, prayers on their lips and hope fading with the light. Those that lived were in pain. The Valkyries ended that pain and brought those people back to life as best they could.

Most people came back fine.

And the Valkyries burned, and burned, from the outside of the infection inward, but when they got to the edges of the Last Good Continent, they were rebuffed. The people of the Last Good Continent were archmages and archwarriors and they were in tune with their world itself, calling upon the very air to Decay the Valkyries as they advanced, to poison the Blood, to Consume all Elemental Carnage in a wave of devouring Myco Magic.

The land here was, quite frankly, disastrous to all other life.

The people here called it The Last Good Continent because all the others were fully given to the slimes and oozes. Those slimes and oozes hadn’t come with The Last Good Continent to Fenrir, thankfully.

Erick referred to The Last Good Continent as Problem 899.

It had been 4 real-time days since the Valkyries had surrounded and quarantined this land, but the people of this land could see all the rest of Fenrir out there, and they had circumvented the quarantine through [Teleport]s and other magics in order to inhabit that land. People and fungi both liked to spread, after all.

Problem 899 had become problems 899-1 through 899-128, with that number increasing by the day.

And though they might be problems right now, Erick wanted to make them welcomed people. He liked what he saw. People made business and friends and the justice system seemed equitable and everything here was pretty great. But the single-cellular war at the base of it all made cohabitation impossible.

Erick appeared in the sky to the east of The Last Good Continent, like a black cloud 40 kilometers across. Below and behind him was a wasteland, and ranks of Valkyries formed a wall of blackgold fire ahead of him, separating the wasteland from the pock-marked fields of some former farmland. Stuff still grew in that farmland, because the fungus-stuff was very resilient. It grew wheat and otherwise exactly within the fields in which it was planted, exactly as it should, because Myco Mages had told it to do that, and it obeyed. The grass grew strong, providing ample nutrients to all the micromushroom colonies in the dirt. The people here didn’t even have to eat the bread that they made from the wheat, for they could just go out and eat grass and otherwise, but they still liked the finer things, like bread and books and buildings.

The lands beyond the farmland held a rural area, with a large city just beyond that. It was a metropolitan area, for sure, with glowing roads where people walked fast upon mushroom carpets, and where carts were pulled by cows with tiny shrooms growing out of their horns. People walked around like normal people, though some of them had eyes made of shrooms, which didn’t seem to impede them, and priests spoke of the fall of the gods and the danger of the blackgold Valkyries outside of the city.

The Valkyries had decided to just quarantine the original land and then move on to save the rest of Fenrir, but the rest of Fenrir was mostly saved, and now it was time to deal with this.

At Erick’s appearance, the people in the city grew understandably concerned.

A 40-kilometer wide dragon would do that, and Erick had fluffed out his wings all the way to let them know he was here. To say there was a panic would be an understatement.

The people in the castle, however, had been waiting for Erick to show. The Valkyries had told them that their Apparent King was going to solve the problem of this land, and now, the Apparent King was here.

A mushroom bloomed on the farmlands below, taking up an entire field. It was brilliant purple with bright white spots. And then it popped and a squadron of elites appeared; a pair of archmages, some myco mages, some archwarriors, and the king of this land.

He was not the king of the whole continent, for the Last Good Continent was more of a land of city states than an empire. Erick had picked this guy to interact with, though. King Cando was his name, and he looked human, same as all the rest of the people. His specific mutation was a crown of golden spike-like mushrooms that grew out of his blond hair. That was the Mark of Royalty in this land, and it had to be earned in some sort of ritual that all king-hopefuls undertook every year. Most of the king-hopefuls failed, returning empty-handed back to their homes. Every once in a while, when it was time for a city to bud off and more people to move to a new city, to be born there, a king-hopeful would succeed in the ritual.

That mushroom the king had growing out of his head was something like his ‘Class’, in the classical Script-sense, and it allowed him to support the growth of a kingdom.

In the last four days, every single person who attempted the King Ritual for the Golden Crown had succeeded, because there was a lot more land out there to be had.

And thus, the problems had compounded.

Still, though, Erick wanted to save everything in this land that could be saved.

Erick shrunk down to size, to becoming a simple person to float down beyond the kilometers-tall blackgold flamewall of the Valkyries, to land a few kilometers inland, in the farming fields.

The archmages and warriors and the king viewed him skeptically. Hatefully, really.

As Erick descended, a few more purple [Teleport]-shrooms popped in the distance, releasing nobles and warriors and otherwise; some of them hoping for good words, most of them expecting a fight.

Erick wore a disposable white and black robe, and that was it. He stepped down onto a road of good brown soil. The soil tried to eat into his feet, but he didn’t let it. The very air cast spores into his lungs that tried to take root, and he did not let them. The light in the eyes of the king glinted, and Erick felt something try to take hold in his own mind. Erick didn’t allow that, either, but he also didn’t begrudge the king his mind bending power.

King Cando truly didn’t mean to do that on purpose; it was just how culture and power worked here.

When the valkyries met and tested this land days ago, the same thing had happened in so many different ways and Erick had to erase some memetic threats from that grouping of Valkyries, and lock down the system with some constant powering, to ensure the same thing didn’t happen again.

Every single person of power in this land tried to take control of the people below them because it was literally the only thing that worked to keep the land controlled, to keep the shrooms and fungus and all the little single-celled, magically-empowered organisms from ripping their hosts to shreds and eating everything.

That’s why the King Ritual of the last few days had had such phenomenal successes; the King Shroom recognized that it needed to spread to control the problems out there.

Erick hadn’t gotten into the research of why this place was called ‘The Last Good Continent’, though; It wasn’t that important. It was kinda odd that all the rest of their world was in a bad shape, though, if they could just spread and control the land they saw.

Erick spoke in their own language, “Greetings, people of the Last Good Continent, and King Cando.”

King Cando startled a little. “You speak our language quite well. I hope that no more miscommunications happen, and that we can proceed as two ships sailing near each other, and not touching.”

The guy was pulling some weird sort of power move, because he was talking about miscommunications and then using an idiom to get his point across. Erick didn’t even touch the part about saying ‘oh, you speak well, eh’? Maybe these people simply didn’t have [Language Acquisition]? It was possible, though unlikely.

So Erick replied, “I do not mean to disparage, but I don’t think you even realize that you just spoke in an idiom, and not in actual words with meanings that can be understood by all.”

King Cando frowned a little.

The king’s entourage had much more severe reactions.

“You’re no king at all!”

“A decieverfern! A weak potion!”

“Who wouldn’t understand ‘two ships’!”

“Your Valkyries have more sense than you!”

“I bet they don’t even know what you’re thinking!”

“You’re a controller! Not a king!”

The king’s entourage yelled and Erick was interested in them, but in a magical sort of way.

Every person in the king’s entourage were all subtly connected to the main golden spikes upon his head, and the feelings of their speech and thoughts went both ways. They argued for the king, and the king supported them in turn. It was natural for them. These archmages and archwarriors and myco mages weren’t just hangers-on, or people hired for jobs, or even people who flowed into positions of power to eventually end up at the king’s side. Those sorts of people were the nobles watching from afar, with their own little entourages.

These people were near their king because they were his extended brain, body, and his deepest family. They were, in essence and fact, the very center of this particular kingdom, and the entire ruling ‘couple’, though it was more like 9 people all in a relationship with each other, and in a relationship with their kingdom. Erick imagined it got very, very complicated, but also not that complicated.

When two kings of the Last Good Continent spoke, it was with entourages on both sides, each of them talking all over each other while the kings tried to set the tones. One king meeting another without an entourage was like a naked pauper meeting a warrior in full plate in a fight and expecting to be taken seriously.

This was part of why talks through others hadn’t worked well, and why Erick was here, in person. The Valkyries had some mind-linking things going on, and so the people of the Last Good Continent respected them some, but not enough.

Erick finally had some time to devote to this sort of problem, though, so he cast several illusions of himself into the air in different colored clothing and started shouting right back at the king, through his ‘entourage’. King Cando’s people briefly paused in shock, and then they started shouting differently.

“Illusions! To a King Meeting! How false can you be?!”

To which Yellow Erick yelled back, “I come from a different land! You expect me to follow your customs? Fucking ridiculous!”

“And now he brings uncouth language into this! He is a delinquent and a fraud!”

“He’s also that Black Dragon from antiquity! A deceiver and the killer of the Old Cosmology!”

To which Green Erick replied, “I’m from an Infinity far beyond yours and even beyond my own! Resemblances are just that! Resemblances!”

Blue Erick backed up Green, “And I’m here to right an ancient wrong! You were stolen, and now you are back.”

“We’re doing just fine without you. Go away!”

“We don’t need your Personal Scripts, either! The growth is all wrong!”

Pink Erick said, “We’re not going away, ever again, and your people are spreading pain and fungus everywhere.”

Brown Erick said, “We’re here to stop that and bring you into the new age.”

“We kept our people here after we saw the warnings from your House Benevolence,” said a Myco Mage.

“Those are the other nations breaking the peace by making those wars!” said another Myco Mage.

King Cando winced.

Everyone in the King’s entourage recognized that was a poor rejoinder, and the Myco Mage, who looked to be the youngest of the King’s entourage at maybe 19, paled and whispered apologies. Of course it didn’t matter who broke the peace, only that the peace was broken at all—

Ah.

Erick realized why, in the Veird that this place had come from, why they didn’t colonize the whole world, and why such a place named the ‘The Last Good Continent’ even existed at all. Breaking Peace with expansion was cause for some sort of big war. A very big war, based on whatever was going on in the minds of the King’s entourage.

The yelling part of the conversation ended.

Erick went all in with the big ultimatum, “I will obliterate this nation and everyone inside of it, killing everything in the Last Good Continent down to the smallest spore. You will have no say in this. You will live again after the fact. That is what will happen.”

King Cando said, “We will fight.”

“Your people will experience a great deal of pain by fighting. More pain than what needs to happen.”

King Cando pleaded without actually pleading, “We could construct a barrier. A real one. We could separate.”

“No you can’t.” Erick said, “Even now, your crown of Gold Spikes is spreading spores in the wind, trying to take root in anyone who wants power.”

The King’s entourage balked, trying to play that off as a lie.

But the nobles of this land, standing in the distance with smaller entourages of their own and silver crowns, heard everything.

Erick laid it all out there, “Your infections long to infect others, to seed the land and burrow into every available host. That is why you cannot be allowed to exist in this form.”

King Cando frowned. “It’s not an infection.”

Erick showed his feet, under his robes. Coils of blue-green fungus tried to eat into him, but he shook his foot, and they disintegrated. He shook out his arms, and spores cascaded off of his clothes. He put a finger to one side of his nose, and blew out the other side of his nose, sending droplets of some yellow slime out of his nostrils. He wiped that away.

Erick said, “Looks like an infection to me.”

The archmage beside King Cando tried, “You could just accept the power of the slime within you. Fighting it is how you die. Cultivating it is how you gain power.”

Erick told them all, “Sometimes, things which are corruptive and destructive need to be burned away completely. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be lived with. To give in is to find yourself twisted into something you never wanted to become. Most of your own world was lost to the infection, yes? I will not lose any of this world to your way of life.

“This is not an act of war for me.

“This is not an act of hatred, or malfeasance.

“This is an act of mercy for every other person in this universe, at the cost of everything you are right now.

“I will make it as painless as possible and then resurrect you afterward, as well as give you resources to rebuild and help you rebuild. You are not the first civilization I have had to topple, and you will not be the last. You will lose everything and gain infinity in turn. Please accept my judgment.”

Silence.

Erick saw King Cando’s acceptance long before the king actually said anything, but it still took him four minutes to begin to think of what it meant to actually accept this offer.

King Cando asked, “What does it mean to accept this offer?”

“To accept this inevitability means that you can get your affairs in order and send out volunteers for the rebirthing. I will put Valkyries inside your city, and inside other cities. When a person dies to them, that person will rise as a Valkyrie and as part of a much, much larger collective. A true collective, where thoughts and personhood can blend into each other more fully than what you experience now.” Erick said, “I will have those reborn people come out of your lands and into reincarnation machines that I will put outside of your lands. Once inside those, your people will be stripped of absolutely everything that is fungal related, even inside their very souls. Your myco mages will not be able to cast myco magics like they have been able to do so. Your Golden Spikes will not connect you to anyone, for the Golden Spires will no longer exist. You will have to rebuild, but we have nearly a trillion people out there, going through this exact same thing. Both up there—”

Erick gestured at the land of Fenrir rising up from the surface of the world and then further beyond, rising further and further. Most of it was lost beyond a haze of atmosphere, but past that haze, beyond those clouds in the sky, there were more lands up there, so very, very far away.

King Cando’s entourage looked upward, but the King stayed focused on Erick.

And then Erick pointed down, saying, “—And down there, in another world, another land just as large as this one, about 2,000 kilometers down there on the other side, give or take a hundred kilometers. That one can see the stars outside of this space, outside of this giant sphere that surrounds the sun.”

Some people reacted poorly to Erick describing and indicating that they were but a fleck of dust compared to the true size of their new world.

Some people reacted wonderfully.

King Cando was in the second group, and so were his people. This was because of the nature of their symbiotic fungi, which they would not retain in the rebirth, but that was fine for Erick’s purposes.

King Cando asked, “And you’ll help us rebuild? How?”

Erick held up a hand, conjured some gold, transmuted it from gold to iron to water and then glass and obsidian, making shapes and then making coins and many other objects, before he turned it all back to gold, and then stabbed several 5-meter long spikes of gold into the ground, to the side. “I can make anything.” He made tiny houses and tiny apartments out of gold, and then he set those around the spikes, saying, “And in real size, too. This is just a demonstration size. Mostly, though, I will hand you off to my House Benevolence’s coordination efforts.”

The eyes of the people of the Last Good Continent were wide with disbelief, and hope. The archmage whispered that it was real gold; this was not an illusion. Hope began to win out over disbelief.

King Cando said, “I need a day to confer.”

“Sure. Speak to all your fellow kings, too. You will find that I am having similar conversations with most of the rest of them at this moment…” Erick looked to the side, and cast his gaze far away. “Ah. It appears that talks broke down in the town of Le-Slim? I appear to be burning that place to the ground and forcefully resurrecting the people there. Wonder what they could have said to my future self… Eh. I’ll find out soon enough.”

King Cando looked to the side, toward Le-Slim. It was a land far, far away from this one, but still rather close. The king’s archmage whispered confirmation to Cando. Others just went wide-eyed at Erick.

King Cando breathed in, then said, “They probably refused you everything. Not even willing to talk.”

“Ah. Yes.” Erick said, “That would do it. See you tomorrow.”

Erick moved on, back through time and a few thousand kilometers away, and yes, the people of Le-Slim did exactly as King Cando suspected they would. They also tried to attack him with some truly vicious memetic hazards. Welp! That’s why Erick was taking care of this place himself.

The Last Good Continent looked like lush fields and good food and friendly faces on the outside, and it was that, but it was also a land of constant, unending war, just below the surface, waiting for the least bit of weakness to exploit. Some parts were closer to the surface than others.

The parts at the top were pretty damned wonderful, though. Shame they’d have to rebuild everything. Erick looked forward to how they chose to rebuild.

The next day, the people of King Cando’s lands reluctantly but solidly began walking into the Valkyrie processing systems that Erick had set up. The city of Le-Slim was already put to the sword and reincarnation’d yesterday, and they were already rebuilding fast, just outside of the borders of The Last Good Continent. They were doing fantastically well, easily adjusting to their new lives, though they had lost a lot in the transition. Magics and powers were gone, and most people had similar-looking bodies, for Erick had only put out a few thousand [Reincarnation] machines. [Resurrection] machines simply did not work, because that brought back the fungal infections. Erick put up more and more [Reincarnation] machines, though, so that people could pick different body shapes. Sometimes people tried the ‘randomizer’ [Reincarnation] machine, using it several times until they got something they were happy with.

They brought nothing with them. They left everything behind.

As the cities evacuated, most peacefully, some not, the Valkyries burned everything down to the surface of Fenrir, to the siphoning magics of the land, where the fungus could not grow because the adamantium sucked away all of its magical power.

Erick fully expected these people to have some sort of massive cultural problems, and then get right to conquering and taming much of the world around them. He and Rozeta ensured as much, when Personal Scripts went out like candy. They had lost the Script in ancient history, but they had remained alive due to the fungus. Apparently, in their version of Veird, Rozeta was The White Tendril, and the Script was bare-bones and mostly broken. A person could get to level 10 with a Class and one spell, and that was it. Some people who chose simpler spells could rise higher in level, but if someone picked something like [Cleanse], then they ended up at level 1. If someone actually picked [Cleanse], then they were either hunted down by everyone else, or kept in reserve as a power to be wielded against an enemy.

Usually a Cleanser just ended up killing themselves and the people around them, though, as the fungus either died or the person around the fungus died. Every cast of that magic was a roll of the dice against the caster.

Erick suspected that Nothanganathor had kept the people of The Last Good Continent alive to use as a weapon, but Erick had stripped that weapon from him.

He moved on.

- - - -

Problem 376 was a standard necromancer situation holding out way too well against the Valkyries. This was because the necromancer was Quilatalap’s successor, who took up the mantle of ‘best necromancer on Veird’ after Quilatalap was permanently slain in the Rage Wars, after the Death of All Halves, at the start of the Script. Simply known as ‘The Necromancer’, as he called himself, he killed the world and turned it into an undead paradise, where babies were only born to those who swore fealty to Death. All the gods had died in The Necromancer’s version of Veird, except for Melemizargo and Rozeta.

This was because the Necromancer was the Champion for the God of Death.

A Champion of a god that Phagar had killed himself, some 750,000-ish years ago, in the Old Cosmology.

The God of Death had no name, and so the Necromancer took no name for himself, either.

Phagar got involved soon after Problem 376 had been identified, sending Champion Nirzir.

Quilatalap briefly made an appearance in order to facilitate an actual conversation instead of a war, and thus Erick oversaw some small talks. Those talks resulted in 5 days of delay, and the Necromancer growing increasingly furious at Phagar’s implacable demand to be subsumed into his afterlife. The God of Death did not exist anymore in Fenrir, for Phagar had snuffed him out the very second even the whispers of him had returned.

The Necromancer had been allowed to remain for a time only because Quilatalap directly asked for that, and Phagar was busy elsewhere anyway.

But the Necromancer eventually ran, Quilatalap retreated, and Nirzir slayed the Necromancer with Erick’s help.

Phagar loomed over the battlefield like a fractal spectre the size of the sky, not looking like Erick or Nirzir or anyone else, except for the truly dead. Broken skeletons littered the wasteland, their eyes still glowing. Subdued wraiths, like broken ethereal slimes, clung to their last vestiges of undeath in the craters across the land. Giants of meat and bone lay splayed across a mountainside.

Phagar waved a hand, and pulled.

Every undead, undying thing for the nearest hundred kilometers sucked up into the air, becoming a thick wind, fully ethereal and actually-dead. The wind vanished into the fractal grip of Phagar’s power. And then that was it. The last vestiges of Death were gone.

Phagar relaxed.

The fractals pulled together, and Phagar stepped down onto the cleared land between Nirzir and Erick. He looked like Erick again, but a little grey around the edges. That was normal. Erick couldn’t really tell what he had looked like when he was in his full form, simply because Phagar didn’t have a true form at all.

Looking like a shadow of Erick, Phagar said, “I would have preferred a calmer End to that, so I apologize for my harsh words to you both, and Quilatalap. I have no idea how Nothanganathor pulled that off, and I don’t want to know. I want Nothanganathor Ended, Erick.”

Erick took in Phagar’s hard tone and harder eyes, and said, “We’re getting there. I don’t want to leave any back doors open for him to influence this land and this Pantheon. So we’re getting there.”

The last several days had been problematic for several thousand reasons, but it was what it was. Erick didn’t blame the Pantheon for their anger at him. In fact, he mostly pretended the harsh words from the gods hadn’t happened at all, and that everyone was getting along fine, because if he pretended hard enough, if he worked to make his vision real, then that is how it would be.

Phagar relaxed a bit more, his tone turning softer. “Their problem is they never believed that you would actually allow a foreign god to take hold in this land.”

“I told them I was inviting Cascadio. I laid out all my reasonings, too.”

“It’s still strange, Erick. It’s like we’re talking to a phantom; not someone who can make his own decisions.”

“And that was one of my main reasons for inviting him, as I already told you. He’s not a bad guy. He’s actually rather Good-aligned, and he’s fun, and this place needs someone who cannot be corrupted by Nothanganathor.” Erick said, “He’s literally bigger than this place, and all of you will be that too, soon enough. But we’re all still vulnerable. Outside help is good help.”

Nirzir watched from the sidelines, not saying a single thing.

Phagar said, “We’re not going to be vulnerable soon enough.” He added, “However, right now, the Valkyries, all half-trillion of them, are all being influenced by you, and you can literally decide how this world works. You could eat their power… You could eat everyone’s power, Erick, and that is scary.”

Erick softly said, “I understand that. I’ll start releasing the valks soon enough. We just gotta get through this war.”

“Even after you release them they’ll still be forever-connected to the idea of an Apparent King.”

So they were finally having this conversation, eh?

Erick had wanted to put it off, but… Okay.

Erick said, “I’ll get through a few more major problems and then we’ll talk about all that stuff tomorrow. Mainly the Valkyrie stuff. Not the Cascadio stuff. He’s here and he’s going to help through Infinity to purge Nothanganathor. The sun here is connected to Nothanganathor’s own sun, wherever that sun might be in Infinity.”

Phagar said, “And that’s another reason why we don’t want Cascadio here. Nothanganathor could Establish that he has connections all throughout the universe, through Cascadio or even just Margleknot, that could Turn Cascadio into something else, and then he’d be a true danger. How many Malevolencing of how many suns does it take to turn a Good god Evil? Not as many as you might think.”

Erick softly said, “I would hate to ask if you all don’t trust me anymore, so I won’t ask it.”

Phagar said, “We trust you, Erick. We don’t trust that you have a handle on Nothanganathor. No one does.”

“We’re getting there, and we’re in a lot better position than we were last week.”

Phagar moved on. “In good news, Death is gone once again.” He said to Erick, “I apologize again for being terse with you recently.”

And then Phagar vanished, stepping away.

The air felt suddenly lighter, as though a great focus of something much, much heavier than gravity had been here, and was then gone.

Nirzir breathed lightly, and when she looked at Erick, a bit of that divine gravity came back. She smiled, and it was like the world seemed positioned better to move forward… Which was a weird thing for Erick to sense when he saw Nirzir like that.

Nirzir must have sensed something was off, too, as she stopped smiling, and said, “Ah. I think something changed.”

“I think so, too.” Erick said, “It happened to Yetta with Atunir, too. As soon as the parts of them that were disharmonious fully vanished, they felt more solid. It just happened now, I guess. Phagar fully took over Fenrir.”

“Yup. That’s it.” Nirzir looked at the wasteland all around, at the bare rock and the lack of everything. “How far is this devastation?”

“It’s a few thousand square kilometers; pretty much everywhere The Necromancer had touched. Want a portal home?”

“What are you going to do next?”

“Probably visit Area 227 with Quilatalap. He’s already over there, enjoying the Peace.”

Nirzir grinned a little. “I’ll take a portal home. Tell Quilatalap it was fun to fight alongside him… When he’s better. He had taken kind of a big hit there.”

Erick smiled softly. “He’s fine. I already made sure of that.”

“Phagar is still sorry he made him go through with all of that.”

- -

“Phagar said he was sorry for making you go away for that.”

“I asked to be involved.” Quilatalap said, “I’m ashamed that I let that false reality get to me like that, and that I let down Phagar like that.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mind.”

Quilatalap sighed.

“… But I see that you minded a whole lot. Sorry.”

Quilatalap grinned in a small way, and said nothing.

The two of them strolled through the countryside under Cascadio’s sun, inside Fenrir, in a land that was perhaps too perfect. It was also a land that was impossible to break. It was small villages and farmers raising crops and chickens and cows, and a dash of castles and towns and even cities here and there, but it was not any place that had any corollary on Veird at all. The people here only had a history that went back a hundred years, because they regularly burned their history books.

They burned their books of learning. They had no schools. They had apprenticeships and oral traditions, and almost no words at all.

The Script was nonexistent.

Monsters existed, and there was one right over there. A giant thing looming in the water like a thing of eyes and tentacles and fangs. The fangs were for show, though. Or something. Erick didn’t quite understand the monster’s place in this ecology yet, nor did he quite understand how a monster like that could ever exist in this land. It was just so… out of place.

Maybe it had come in from the outside?

And then the monster ate a tree and then slunk back into the water.

Ah. It was a forest culler. It kept the forest in the right shapes. That was its purpose in this land.

A lot of the monsters were like that, but what they were and what they appeared to be was often at odds with each other. Black grasshoppers started fires, but only where people laid down woven reed mats, and those mats were often used as kindling to start fires. The fires were the eggs of the grasshoppers. Black slimes grew in the mud and they spat out iron tools, but only if people fed them wooden carvings in the shape of the iron tools they wanted.

Back in a village over there, the day before today, Erick had seen a very old woman dying in her bed, wrapped in too many blankets. She had been dying for a long time. In pain. The woman had finally had enough, though. She raised a hand and called for the cat.

In walked a perfectly normal looking cat. It was black and brown with bright orange eyes. The cat came to the old woman, weaving through the legs of her gathered family. The family only saw the cat when it alighted onto the bed, like the softest black feather. Its little paws indented the many layers of blankets, and then it began to purr as it approached the old women.

The family cried as the cat lay down beside the old woman, curling up at her hip. The old woman petted the cat once, twice, and then a third time, and she died. Her soul went into the cat, and the cat went back into Elsewhere, vanishing from sight. The people buried their grandmother in a bed of woven reeds that the grasshoppers found and burned to ash, along with the body.

That was the only way a person died in this land; to pet a cat. Sometimes the cat petted the person, when the person wasn’t physically able.

There was no war.

There was no unexpected death.

There were no serious injuries, though people did get papercuts and they fell down and hurt a knee, but they didn’t get arms crushed by falling trees or other heavy accidents, and they didn’t fall from high places and die. They always saw the falling trees coming. They always landed on something soft, or the ground was strangely soft, or they landed perfectly. Most people didn’t even know that they had blood inside of themselves, and when they did get injured, they healed fast. Monthly menstruation was nonexistent. Dust in the eyes? Never had that problem.

They had no knowledge of most normal things, and almost all of them were subsistence farmers. Even the people in the cities were just there making things and getting by with the bare minimum. Who had built the cities? No one really knew.

Perhaps, if the place was filled with Elemental Good, then Erick could see all this making sense, but though there was some Good in the air the place was not really Good at all.

Area 227 was a Land of Perfect Peace, or at least that’s what the people that lived here called it.

Koyabez was the only god in these lands, and for him, coming here had been like coming home.

Erick, Quilatalap, even Koyabez himself, were all convinced it was a perfect trap of some sort, but they couldn’t find the actual trap. They had been looking.

Sure, the magic was weird, and people were strangely ignorant of things like war, and rape, and premature death, and miscarriages, and murder, but other than that, it was a pretty normal land. A very nice land, actually. Very ignorant of almost everything that normally existed elsewhere, but what was ‘normal’, really? This was normal for these people.

Erick changed the subject away from Quilatalap’s former apprentice, who had become The Necromancer of Death. “Got any other ideas about what’s going on here in Area 227?”

Quilatalap looked around the land, saying, “No idea at all. It reads like those reports on the Good Lands of Margleknot, but I can’t spot any sources of Good anywhere. The air is absolutely filled with Elemental Peace, though, and that seems to be self-generated Peace, too.” Quilatalap trailed a slow hand through the air, eliciting a trail of curling silver thread that fell out of the air and then went right back as soon as it could, like Quilatalap’s touch had disturbed a phosphorescent ocean. “Lots of Peace.”

He looked happy.

Weirdly, wonderfully happy.

Erick looked at Quilatalap and felt a lot of things in that moment. Erick took Quilatalap’s hand in his own hand, and Quilatalap smiled and gripped back in return. “I like it when you’re happy.”

Quilatalap smiled softly. “I look happy here, huh?” He looked at the sky, and at the road, and at the flowers growing in wild rushes here and there, like dots of inconspicuous color upon an otherwise green land. “I think I am. Is that the trap? This is a place of happiness? A call to put down all arms and simply live a life free of the past? A peaceful heaven, of a sort?”

“Maybe,” Erick said, without judgment in his voice. “Would you like that? To live here?”

“You couldn’t live here, could you?” Quilatalap asked, also without judgment.

“I don’t think I could, no.” Erick readily teased, “Maybe when I’m 3,000 years old that might change, but I can visit you every day and live here every night.”

Quilatalap chuckled. “Doubtful. I wouldn’t want us to live a discombobulated life like that, with you going out for centuries and coming back every night, to fall into a routine that you have forgotten. I’ll have to come with you, instead, wherever you go.”

Erick’s heart thumped.

Erick breathed deep. “You want to—? I mean… I want you to. I’m going to stick around here for a long while, though… I might pop back and forth between Margleknot and here. After we win, anyway.”

“And then you’ll go on journeys throughout the entire universe. I’d need to be a lot stronger to stand with you out there, though. I’m barely strong enough to stand here with you right now.”

Erick softly said, “You’re plenty strong.”

Quilatalap laughed. “Not really.”

Erick said nothing.

“Give me 10 more years to make a few really interesting dungeons, and then a few hundred more years to figure out this reson-thing and become a Wizard, or whatever happens next. Being undead is turning out to be a complication to the whole thing. Not sure how to fix that in ways I want to fix that, but I can figure it out. And then we can go everywhere.”

“What’s the major problem?” Erick asked, interested to talk magic.

“As an undead, I decide who I am. That was the problem with the Necromancer; why he wouldn’t let himself be talked into giving up Death. Death is solid. Death is unchanging. Death is a semblance of life, in every way life can be, but Death is still Death.” Quilatalap held up his free hand, moving it through the air a little, clipping away Elemental Peace in the air, only to let that Peace fall back across his fingers, like he was holding a hand outside of a car window on a drive.

Erick wanted to show Quilatalap Earth sometime. Take him for a drive across the Grand Canyon, maybe.

Quilatalap continued, “Death can give way to life, but only in the release of Death. I’ve had that part figured out for a while now, and this body is actually living, but the soul is practically just Elemental Death, all crossed up in different ways. I could become living once again, but… I became undead in order to solve a whole bunch of different problems in my life, and one of those is trauma. I told you I was a shaman for an orc tribe long ago, yeah?”

“Yes, you did. You said that you were a warrior and then you saw the horrors of war and you turned to Koyabez, Melemizargo, and Phagar.”

“Yes,” Quilatalap said, “I became a Holy Necromancer of Koyabez, resurrecting people from battlefields and bringing them peace. I also became the Black Fist of Koyabez, still bringing war to people who absolutely needed it brought to them. We killed those who needed killing, and saved everyone else.

“All that led to a whole bunch of memories written down in my soul as best they could be placed, to make them useful, but not an impediment. I have an emotional break between those memories and my bodily self. Becoming a truly living being seems to be necessary for ascension of all kinds, and especially if I want to catch up to you, who has, as the fae call it, ‘cultivated Life’. Becoming a living being would bring all those memories to life for me, and I’m 100% sure I could not handle it.”

Erick thought he understood, and he was worried. Here, in this land where they discarded the past and built anew, Quilatalap was talking about erasing his memories and starting anew.

Erick asked, “How much are you thinking of getting rid of?”

“99 percent.”

“… That’s a lot.”

“Not that much, actually, considering what I would keep. And I’m considering locking it away; not really getting rid of it. For all intents, though, it’ll be gone.”

“That would be killing yourself. What is worse is that when you do Ascend to True Wizard—” Ah. Erick realized something about the trap of this land. He continued his thought anyway. “—You’d have to simply ditch those memories, because they wouldn’t be a part of your Ascension, so your plan to lock them away is just a plan to kill yourself in a way that feels reasonable to you right now.”

Quilatalap frowned a little. He let go of Erick’s hand. “That’s the trap of this land. It’s a call to memory death.”

Ah. He took that a bit further than Erick had taken it.

Erick said, “I don’t actually see anything like that here, though. I thought it was just Koyabez’s heaven laid down on land.”

“The memetic threat doesn’t have to be visible to be present. It could be an emergent phenomenon.” Quilatalap asked, “What does Rozeta think of this land? Or is she busy elsewhere?”

“Assuming it’s a memory-death place, it has to be a trap for Rozeta, too, as the Goddess of Knowledge.”

Rozeta stepped down beside them on their walk, near Erick, saying, “Well dammit. I liked this place, but now that I am not selectively blinding myself. Yes. This is a memory-killer trap.”

Koyabez stepped onto the path beside Quilatalap, telling him, “Find the memory death trap and eradicate it, please. If it is an emergent phenomenon then some destruction might need to happen.”

Quilatalap bowed, saying, “It will be done.”

Koyabez said to Rozeta, “I want to keep it all intact as much as I can, though. What say you, after looking deeper in this place?”

Rozeta glanced around, and then she looked at Koyabez. “They are equipped to handle the threat here, for now, though it did just get a lot stronger now that we started looking.” She said to Erick, “We need to talk about other things I have selectively blinded myself to, and soon.”

Koyabez stepped away, and Rozeta followed.

Quilatalap and Erick stood on a path in a land with a pretty good trap.

And Quilatalap looked lost.

Quilatalap frowned. He looked around. “What happened?”

Erick said, “There appears to be an anti-memetic hazard in the area, as well as the actual danger of a call to memory death. Try your anti-memetic protocols. It’s not Malevolence-based. I’m not sure what it is based on. It might just be Elemental Peace tuned weirdly. Rozeta said that we could handle it. I think she’s mad at me.”

Quilatalap frowned deeply, humming as he searched his soul and fortified his existence. He closed his eyes and sat down on the ground. “Wake me in 20.”

“I’ll be here for you.”

Twenty minutes later, Erick tried to wake Quilatalap, but he did not wake. A poke to the face. A nudge to the shoulder. Talking loudly.

And then Erick spoke, “Come back to me, Quilatalap.”

The man jerked hard and then fell over on to the ground, wincing in pain.

Black cats materialized out of every shadow around and the monster in the water lifted up and aimed for Quilatalap, fangs bared wide.

Erick told them, “You stay away now.”

The cats evaporated away as though Erick had turned on a bright light and burned away some Elemental Gloom. The water monster spilled away like so many broken eyeballs and slime.

And then the very world tried to reject Erick, to force him away, the silver Peace in the air telling him he couldn’t stay here if he couldn’t be peaceful.

Erick remained anyway. He knelt next to Quilatalap, who was writhing on the ground, and offered him his hand.

Quilatalap grabbed his hand—

And Quilatalap was suddenly okay. He breathed hard. “I saw it. It grabbed me.” He sighed. “Ugh. That’s embarrassing.” He got to his feet with Erick’s help and dusted himself off, saying, “Pardon me. I need to eradicate a problem.”

“Before you do that… Do you want another Personal Script?”

Quilatalap froze for a moment. And then he relaxed. “Ah. You can tell that I pulled it apart, can’t you.”

“No, I can’t, but I know you’d want to pull it apart and that was clearly an attack that ignored the Health that you should have, even out here, outside of the Script.”

Quilatalap admitted, “I’d be okay with a refresher.”

Erick handed him a drop of fractal blue-white-black light that sunk into his skin and melded with his soul. “How did you even break the other one?”

Quilatalap closed his eyes and half-focused on something as he said, “I’m still Blind when it came to the Fractal Mark and it didn’t like how much I was poking at the inner workings of it, so the Fractal Mark denied me pushing against it, and then I pushed harder, and then it broke.”

Erick smiled a little at that. “I thought I made these things a lot more resilient than that. It should have just kicked away the Fractal Mark, or anything else that you were poking at too hard, trying to force to happen. It should have come back after a while, too.”

“… I kinda tore through a lot of it, actually, to see how it works.”

“Ha!” Erick said, “I’ll give you a full diagram later. You could have asked for one?”

Quilatalap rolled his eyes, even though they were shut and his focus was elsewhere. “I do have some pride as a Soul Mage, Erick.”

“Fair enough.”

They fell into companionable silence.

Eventually, Quilatalap opened his eyes and looked away, his eyes shimmering black. He held out a hand and adjusted his grip to have his thumb and forefinger wrapped tight, and the rest loose, as he spoke a word of power, “[Summon].”

A young human boy’s neck appeared in Quilatalap’s grip, Quilatalap’s orcol thumb and forefinger more than enough to wrap around the human boy’s entire neck, while the rest of his loose grip held the boy’s torso.

The boy struggled, yelling for help. The shadows in the air and the cats and the monsters in the water tried to respond, but Erick glared at them and they died in droves. They never reached Quilatalap, or their master. Creator? Primary victim, perhaps. Erick wasn’t sure.

“Let me go! Where are my friends! You killed all my shadow buddies! Let me GOO!”

Quilatalap wasn’t about to kill the boy, but he would have if the boy had been the source of the problem. But the boy was truly just a boy. Erick could see that the kid was tied into the Peace in the air, but that was it. Whatever was targeting the boy would switch to another person if the boy died… Or at least that was Erick’s guess. Quilatalap was making the same guess.

Quilatalap spoke over the boy’s screams, “I’m going to hand you off to someone who can fix you a lot easier than I can.” He set the boy on the ground and stuck him in a cage of light. The boy was maybe 9 and he was a firecracker, slamming his fists against the cage, roaring to be let out. Quilatalap said to Erick, “It would transfer if he died, and I don’t think I can actually kill him how he needs to be killed without getting heavily cursed. I’m reasonably sure that the peace this land experiences is due to a lack of Knowledge of war, so simply making the kid grow up would also make the magic switch targets.”

“Then let’s twist this magic,” Erick offered. “Make whoever becomes the focus of the power of this land into the destined king of this land, to have power and responsibility in equal measure in order to make this land into a good land that grows and prospers.” Erick looked to the kid. “He’d have memories, and the land would stop erasing its histories. Everything would change. Perhaps the Perfect Peace would change, too.”

Quilatalap said, “It’s the only way this land survives the coming of other fae, that would surely do worse. What does the boy say?”

The kid yelled, “I don’t need your power! Go away, bad men!”

Erick knelt down to get on the kid's level, asking him, “You have a choice. Erase the land and scatter your people into new lands and everything changes. Or you become the sole protector of this peaceful space, and everything changes anyway, but in a smaller way.”

The kid looked at Erick and his eyes glinted silver. “Why does anything have to change at all? I don’t want change!”

“The only constant in life is change.”

“Nuhuh!” the kid said, “I’ve been 9 for a long time! I can go on being 9 forever! The Peace says I can! I just have to forget! You could forget me, too, and life would be great!”

The Peace in the air flexed and tugged at Erick and Quilatalap. Erick was fine, and Quilatalap was fine, too, because Erick flexed his Authority and shielded him from being kicked out of here. Quilatalap still noticed how silver wind cloyed at his clothes anyway. He had been about to get chucked out of this land like a drunk kicked out of a bar.

Erick asked Quilatalap, “What is your choice?”

Quilatalap said, “I still want to try and save the land.”

Erick nodded, and turned his attention back to the boy. He spoke, “The time for forgetting is over. Look now, and gain the Sight to See. You will Remember. You will guard this land with your memories, raising up all under the Truth of Peace: Peace without Knowledge of what Peace costs is nothing but delusion.”

The boy recoiled and something shattered far away, and right here, in front of Erick. The boy, who was not a boy at all but something like an 800 year old man in a child’s body, crumbled to his knees. Erick didn’t see that particular Truth of the boy’s age until now, but he saw it clear enough now that delusion had been shattered. The kid would start to grow again.

To help him on his way, Erick brought forth another Personal Script and placed it upon the boy’s brow. It sunk into him. When the boy woke he would have some useful power guiding him toward a better future.

Problem Area 227 remained strong, but something had shifted in the air, making it Maybe-Not-A-Problem Area 227.

Erick saw people in the kingdom castles reading books and wincing as they started to actually understand what they were reading. Someone baking bread with a very old recipe paused in the middle of putting butter into the bowl, and then they put in a bit more butter than usual, because they realized they liked butter more than what the recipe called for. An old man, walking into the woods to gather fallen wood for the oven at home, decided he didn’t want to walk all the way in like he usually did, so he broke off a few green branches from a nearby tree and dragged those home.

The Peace-frozen land began to move.

Erick and Quilatalap moved on from where the boy-who-was-a-man knelt on the ground. A black cat found the kid and rubbed against his sides, waking him up. The boy petted the cat several times, the cat meowing at the scritches, and then the boy got up and walked into town.

Erick and Quilatalap stepped past an illusion on the forest path and stepped out of the bubble of protections around Area 227, stepping into an incredibly thick area of Force and Denial magic that Erick and Quilatalap walked through like it didn’t even exist. They soon reached the outside, where they saw a dome protecting Area 227, and a world-sized storm billowing the land with [Terraforming] creation.

Generative storms ripped up the ground and put down new ground, water, and plants. The storm passed fast enough, and then Erick and Quilatalap stood, staring at the dome of Area 227.

Quilatalap asked, “ ‘Peace without Knowledge of what Peace costs is nothing but delusion’, eh?”

“I thought it fit well.”

“It does. Quite well, really. I think Koyabez approves. And Rozeta, too.”

The air above the dome of Area 227 shimmered silver, with white clouds.

Erick teased, “How can you tell when they didn’t directly tell you?”

“Us normal people have to read the signs, Erick.”

Erick laughed.

They stood there for a long moment, looking at the clouds.

And then Quilatalap said, “I’m going to try a truly living body as I work on my years of trauma in 20 year increments. I’ll try to keep my love for you alive and well, though I warn you, it will likely drown.”

Erick smiled. “Then I’ll be sure to give you plenty of reasons to love me.”

Quilatalap chuckled. And then he added, “I won’t be doing that until after we win, though.”

“Of course. And speaking of which, I’m going to go talk to some more people. Ride back?”

“Portal back is fine.”

Erick opened a portal back to Veird, and Quilatalap walked through.

Erick Stepped elsewhere.

- - - -

Problem 16 —which was more like Problem #1, but the problems were described before they were organized in any sort of ranking— was a fae of information that appeared to anyone who wished to know something about their friends or people they cared about. They were, perhaps, one of the most deadly threats of Red Fenrir, because they couldn’t be killed and they couldn’t be reasoned with, and everything they said was a horrible truth that was specifically calibrated to destabilize and destroy.

The fae sat on a rock in the middle of a land of flowers, under the stars, under the moonlights that surrounded Fenrir. They strummed their lute, humming to themselves. A kilometer away in every direction stood a Valkyrie, each of them with arms raised and wings spread wide, linked together to hold a shield of invisible blackgold fire around the bard-like fae. Each of the Valkyries also had masks on their eyes, and muffs on their ears. They were blind and deaf and senseless to the world in front of them, and they belonged to their own contingent, completely separate from the rest.

Another line of Valkyries held behind the first line, to watch that first line but not interact with them, or with the fae they had trapped as much as they could.

The fae looked like Jane right now, but that was simply untrue.

“Hey dad!” Not-Jane said. “You also killed millions of your friends when you killed all of my multiversal selves in that collection trap! You don’t really care about anyone except yourself, do you!”

Erick sighed, and said, “So I checked up with Margleknot, through Yggdrasil, and your name appears to be Mixixofatat.”

Mixixofatat stopped strumming their lute.

Their Jane-disguise had ended without anyone noticing. Erick hadn’t even seen the switch. Mixixofatat appeared to be a lithe, genderless person, of white skin and big white eyes. Hairless and nude. Their lute was gone, and Erick hadn’t noticed that particular vanishing either.

Mixixofatat stood from the rock, saying, “You have discovered my name, and thus gained one favor over me. Name your task. Upon completion of your favor, I will enact a toll upon you based on the difficulty of the favor you requested and received. I will answer 3 clarification questions, and if you do not make your Wish at the end of those clarification answers, then I will make a Wish out of you.”

Here now was the granting of a Wish, in the truest sense of the word.

Mixixofatat was a self-proclaimed Wishmaster, who held vast powers when it came to enacting the Wishes of others, in exchange for never being able to directly help himself with any of his magics. Sometimes people got weird ideas in their heads that that sort of thing worked, and because of the nature of magic, it did work.

His whole deal was only half of a scam. He granted wishes to help himself in any way he could, but mostly for entertainment. If he liked your wish then he enacted it rather closely to the request. If he didn’t like it, then you got a real genie-wish of a wish.

It had been difficult getting Mixixofatat’s name, but not that difficult. Rozeta and Yggdrasil were already on Erick’s side… Mostly. Rozeta was kinda angry right now. Yggdrasil was fine. Mixixofatat had gotten rather far in the completion of what Nothanganathor asked him to do, though, which was to destroy the coalition forces of Veird as well as he could. Erick suspected that Mixixofatat had only gotten involved recently, in the last 10 days of this war here on Fenrir’s surfaces.

But just to be sure...

Erick asked, “What was the nature of your previous wish?”

“My mission is to destroy the unity of your coalition. To poison, so Nothanganathor could plunder.”

“Will you continue to grant Nothanganathor’s wish for as long as you live?”

“Until the wish is complete, I will work to complete it, no matter what wish you might wish in these coming moments.”

“What is the best way to eliminate the problems that Nothanganathor is trying to stir up with the coalition forces?”

Mixixofatat grinned. “Lay down and die, Erick!”

Yeah, that would probably do it. Erick was pretty sure he could come back from death, but he certainly didn’t want to go through with it, because dying would make him seem more vulnerable, and maybe, like Fairy Moon, Erick would need to rebuild his power if he ever died, though that seemed unlikely.

If Erick simply gave up, then Nothanganathor would win, and that was the quickest way to end his aggression against everyone here.

Erick said, “I wish for you to forget Nothanganathor’s wish and utterly destroy Nothanganathor.”

Mixixofatat suddenly laughed. “Such a delightful wish! So open-ended! So much denial of a wish I have yet to grant, as well!” Mixixofatat’s grin was absolutely feral. “I knew it was right to hang out and wait for you to come. I’ve been watching you for a long time, Erick. A lot longer than the 10 days you think I’ve been watching.”

Mixixofatat vanished on a nonexistent breeze, as though the Valkyrie security wall didn’t mean anything to him. It probably didn’t—

But then Mixixofatat came back, without coming back. A white hand tried to reach into Erick’s head to steal Mixixofatat’s very name from Erick’s mind. Erick instantly noticed and slapped that hand away, like he was chiding a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

A child’s laughter echoed on the breeze.

… And now Mixixofatat was gone.

… Probably.

Erick walked over to the Valkyries and had them take off their masks and end the corral. In a way that was nice to hear, they told Erick that they didn’t believe he was Erick because that’s just what the fae they were trapping wanted them to think. They didn’t take down the encirclement wall.

Erick nodded, saying, “True. So I’m just going to do this, then. Thank you for your help. You can go back to your other groups now.”

The magic that held together the small group of the encircling Valkyries vanished, each one of them popped off of the [Spellsurge Weave] that connected them together, and then shoved into other units, their minds and bodies taking a second to realize that they simply weren’t connected in an encircling trap anymore.

All of them profusely apologized, saying they didn’t recognize who they were talking to. Erick let that happen for a little while, and then he dismissed them on to other jobs.

Erick moved on.