Broken Lands

A Species trait like that was enough to make Notii wonder if the Et’Unii were Suras as well as Archon. Crossbreeding was not at all unusual and it would certainly explain why only the Et’Unii and their close relatives could project enhancements across the Lifeweb.

They didn’t look much like Sophia; the Et’Unii were not mostly human the way Sophia was. Like most of her mother’s Clan, Imatin was far closer to a capybara than a human. She had wings like any other Archon and unlike Sophia; hers were mottled brown and gray with cream undertones, which was an excellent color suite for a woman like her. She also was completely uninterested in Notii, something she told him bluntly when he finally worked up the courage to ask.

No, the only thing in common between Imatin and Sophia was the horns. Imatin’s were solid black where Sophia’s were silver, but they did both have horns that didn’t match the rest of their conformation and they were both relatively thin spikes. Notii remembered them well; they made Imatin exotic and sexy.

He remembered telling his friends about how they punctured his heart when she rejected him. Figuratively, of course, but that was what it felt like.

He was a lot younger then. These days it would probably be more of a bruise; plus, it wasn’t like he was single anymore. Joli was more than enough to distract anyone from Imatin, in Notii’s opinion.

Notii pulled his thoughts away from his old crush and his current love. “Right, I guess that makes sense. Those horns … yeah, I can see it. I thought you said-”

He was interrupted by a loud crashing noise, like one of the meteors Falling but even louder. A glance at the Event Status showed that it was four minutes past the beginning of the final Fall.

Oops. This absolutely was not the time to talk about how things worked; this was the time to figure out what needed to be done.

It didn’t take long to find the source of the crash. Almost exactly between three Pillars, slightly farther from their Pillar than the other two but still close enough to be a threat, lay a fiery but intact stone brightly illuminated by light that seemed to descend from the suddenly dark sky. As Notii watched, the glowing meteor seemed to melt and stretch upwards, twisting like a solution of oil and water.

Other meteors crashed down around it. They were far smaller, which made the point about just how big the first meteor was. They also finished first, revealing larger than life-sized double-headed half-melted humanoid figures of stone.

When the large meteor finally finished, it was revealed to be a golem nearly four times the size of the smaller creatures with pointed claws on the ends of its arms, a pair of spikes on its back that stuck upwards like a parody of proper wings, and a fat teardrop-shaped hole in its chest that glowed and occasionally blinked like a giant eye. Its rocky surface constantly flowed like lava that was somehow brown instead of red or black.

Notii wanted to spit.

The smaller golems would be roughly ten feet tall, while the large golem was thirty-five or maybe forty. He knew that because he knew exactly what it was, and they were always the same. They were creatures out of legend, and it wasn’t a good legend. “Molten Cleansing Golems. Fire and Earth, that’s good but did it have to be Cleansing Golems?”

“What do you mean? Why are all of you horrified? They don’t look that scary.” Sophia sounded puzzled. That made it extremely obvious that while she might be part of the Lifeweb, she didn’t grow up as an Archon.

There was time. Molten Cleansing Golems were slow. All Cleansing Golems were, but the Earth-based ones were especially so. It was a story rooted in their past, a story every young Archon learned first from their parents and then in the schools, a story that touched on who they were and who they were going to allow themselves to be. A story that was repeated every year as part of the Remembrance and the Arrival.

It was also the story that set them as the first guardians of the Ways. That was the version Notii preferred.

“In the time before time, Archons flew through the skies of another world, a world where all who lived touched on the Lifeweb. We Archons were the first to fly above and the first to share our Blessings with each other. Little is known of those times, for they did not last. We descended from the skies to speak with the ground. All was well for generations, but in time there came an answer: the ground itself rejected us. We were creatures of the sky and the stars and our very presence hurt the ground. It brought the world to reject us. The black blood that runs thickly through the heart of an ancient world turned against us and brought us to death.” Notii took in Sophia’s expression. She was concentrating, which was a good expression for someone hearing the Call of the Way for the first time. Not that he’d ever told it to anyone who didn’t know it, but it still seemed right.

“Cleansing Golems rose; creatures of the ground formed of earth and fire, air and water, wood and metal, even the space between things, everything that makes up the world around us. They fought the blood of the land … until they too were changed by it, for they were of the land and it could follow them. Many flew as far and as fast as we could. Those who fought, be they of the ground or of the sky, died or were turned against us. We fled beyond the sky to a new world, far from the power that took our old world from us. Remember those we lost, for we shall never see them again, and remember those who sacrificed all that they were to hold off the threat until a Way was found that future generations might live untroubled in a world beyond a distant sky. ” Notii dipped his head in ritual remembrance.

Sophia’s eyes widened. “And that’s why the Goddess of the Way doesn’t want to open a way to my universe! She thinks the … whatever it is that you fled from is still there!”

“It is still there,” Notii stated firmly. “Its children seep through the Gateways even today, vastly weakened and mostly powerless. We have learned to kill them and harvest them much as we kill the monsters of the World Tree, but they are pale imitations of the real thing.”

“The black goo that seeps through the Gateways and takes on the shapes of malformed animals or monsters,” Sophia muttered. “Not oil. Right. I still don’t know what that stuff is, but it seems to stabilize Gateways. It followed you? That doesn’t make sense.”

Notii nodded. “The black blood came through the Gateway after our ancestors and fought them, but while it tried to infest Arcatiz, it could not. It created mountains where once there were plains, yet that did not let it join with the land for it was as foreign to this world as we were. Arcatiz rejected it for the pain it caused Her and shrouded the mountains in a healing mist that chilled and slowed the black blood until we could defeat it. It tried to infest the monsters of this land, then imitate them, but it could not stand against the might of those who walked across worlds.”

“The Inchoate Mountains,” Sophia stated firmly. “The fog there is cold, but I guess I wouldn’t know if it heals. That’s not near here, is it?”

Notii snorted. “They were lost in the Memory War.” Sophia frowned and shook her head, so he tried the other name; she clearly knew something of their history or she wouldn’t know about the Inchoate Mountains. “The War of Two Mimirs, that ended in the death of both and the birth of the World Tree and the Guide? Surely you know of that.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Sophia said, even though she still looked a little lost. “But it wasn’t destroyed; there were people harvesting things from a flood downstream of … what did they call it? Mimir’s Refuge? In one of the Challenges we saw in the World Tree. I guess that doesn’t mean it really happened.”

“I said they were lost, not that they were destroyed,” Notii clarified. “Though they might as well have been. No one knows where they were. As for whether what the World Tree showed you was true … it’s as true as any memory. That is why we know the World Tree is a remainder of the true Mimir; it carries the stamp of Memory.”

“HONK!” Tellix made the loudest noise he possibly could, right behind Notii.

Notii jumped, then flung his wings out to spin him around so that he could smack his friend.

Tellix dodged. It was obvious he’d known what Notii’s reaction would be. The goose always did. “The small golems are almost to the lanes! You didn’t answer when I called your name!”

Notii growled and glanced away from the Pillar, towards the outside. This time the goose even had a good reason to be annoying! “Right, fine! Sophia, we need your golem-killing enhancement. Lith’e, the lanes aren’t going to do much but that’s a lot of pollen-producing vine there. Can you wind it around the golems so that they’re hurt by the pollen? It has to be cheap, so don’t worry about restraining them.”

“Of course.” Lith’e’s calm voice was a soothing counterpoint to Tellix’s frantic pacing. “They’ll burn up the vines, so we probably won’t be able to use them more than once or twice. Should I save some for the big one? Will there be more than one big one?”

“Uh,” Notii temporized. He wasn’t sure; he recognized the Cleansing Golems but he’d never seen them as an Event. They were the subject of a Challenge chain a few years back and that time there was only one giant Gleansing Golem, but it was also the culmination of the Challenge chain and on the second branch, not the third. It wasn’t the one they used to earn their way to the third branch; instead, it was one of the ones they took on while trying to earn the Wisps they needed to finally step into the third upgrade for themselves. Third upgrade monsters were too tough to fight at the second upgrade unless you were a true elite or the only second upgrade member of a third upgrade team, and Notii preferred to stay with his friends. “For this one, yeah. I bet there will be more, but hmm. They move really slow; maybe you can take advantage of that?”

Lith’e frowned. “They’re tall and there aren’t many of them so the lanes aren’t very useful; that’s why you want me to cover them in vines. I could put up pollen-trees instead of the vines, but I can’t put up that many. There’s no way to cover that much space.”

“Would they go down the lanes if you narrowed them?” Tellix asked.

Notii frowned at his friend. Tellix sounded really reasonable, which meant he was about to suggest something absolutely harebrained. When they worked, his plans were good. When they didn’t, they went very, very wrong. “They’re really singleminded, so they’d probably try to push through. They’d probably make it too since they’re fire as well as earth. The lanes might already be too narrow.”

“Then we should take advantage of that,” Tellix said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Lith’e can grow plants, plants can move dirt as they grow. Build berms or pits to slow them down.”