BECMI Chapter 397 – The Sculpted Land
Three Iotari captains had joined us for the celebration feast. Since Lady Hydrosa had also deigned to attend, Morphed into the form of a queenly water-haired human who was sitting at the head of the tables there with me, they really had no choice but to attend, and were tripping over themselves with apologies for their conduct.
Admiral Gehundil and his men were wondering if I knew Lady Jaderose, especially given that Lady Hydrosa and Jaderose were widely believed to be sisters as well, if taking different paths. Hydrosa was more than happy to confirm that she spoke with her Sister of the Rose frequently, and was quite confident that if they had done anything as gauche as fire upon me in earnest, half of Omicra’s capital and main city might have slid into the harbor from the resulting earthquake.
I didn’t have any problems with their attitudes. Instead, as the Heroes’ Feast passed and conversation turned earnest, words about where things would be heading were brought carefully forwards, with the Iotar significantly taking the lead from Lady Hydrosa.
The gist of it was that my fleet would be taking its resupply from the Merchant’s Guild that had arrived with ill intentions, and the Omicrans and the Iotari would launch a joint assault and invasion of Thatallix. Hydrosa would not participate as that being improper, and she had greater duties to attend to in Elemental Water, but she would be watching, as would Lady Jaderose.
More importantly, I would be visiting both Omicra and Iotar’s acclaimed wizard schools, and they would prepare their students to accompany me to my homeworld to learn true Elementalism on mine… and I would be setting into motion the Formations they had labored long and hard to prepare for this day.
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“See here, gentlemen.”
It was impossible not to pay strict attention to Hydrosa’s voice, because it seemed to come from your own blood, reverberating through your flesh and heart, echoing in the ear like the sound of the sea, shaking in your bones and eyeballs, and generally letting you know where you stood in the place of things.
Very Upvalence Magevoice variant, and she was quite proud of it.
Water bubbled and space cleared in the middle of the room quickly as shining aquamarine water spilled out in midair, forming a perfectly controlled sphere in the midst of the chamber at Hydrosa’s idle gesture.
It was obvious it was the Remnant of Delpha at merely a glance, a shrunken realm with so much of the planet scoured away by the Spiteful Storm that had shattered its empire long ago. Much of the planet still dotted the heavens as asteroids and skylands, spreading slowly through the windbands of Meandral over the decades and centuries.
She magnified the view, focusing on the Maelstrom at the channel of the Emperor’s Flight.
“This Portal to Elemental Water has been here for centuries. You are too young to know that it was once an outflowing Portal, ripped into the realm of Elemental Water and used to drain an ocean’s worth of water from the Source of All Water by the Delphan Empire.” She paused to glance over them sharply. “The Maelstrom is there to return that water to whence it belongs, thus it is actively watched over by Elementals, and is one of my responsibilities to oversee.
“In time, the seas of the Remnant World will fall. Inch by inch, year by year. As they do, the true shapes of the Remnant Lands will once more be exposed.”
Spellbound, the captains here watched as the waters drained from the shores of the small continents and islands they called home. The lands grew, expanded, began to reach towards one another as underground rifts and ridges became jutting islands, then the ridgelines of hills and mountains. The ocean of the world began to partition off into visible seas, and the greatest of lands slowly extended out and began to link with other nearby lands, until a complex and living world no longer over ninety percent seas, but closer to fifty/fifty was displayed before them.
“This process will take about five hundred world-cycles to finish, at which time the Water Portals will be balanced incoming and outgoing in various places about the world.”
“About a thousand foot recession of the waters,” I judged. “That will leave the current ports high and dry, indeed, although I suppose you have time to adjust to the changes as they occur. Regularly moving your harbors and docks will be a necessity, but the opening of more land should be welcome to your populations.”
Indeed, a whole new world was opening up before them, and all they had to do was wait for the waters to drain away and deliver it to them!
It would be the work of centuries, but it was indeed coming!
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Duum and I headed for Omicra, while the fleet eagerly turned about and sailed for the Merchant Guild headquarters.
The Omicran fleet was strengthened by the Iotari mercenaries and likely would be joined by more of the Iotari navy on the way to Thatallix, which was about to have a very bad time.
Taken from NovelFire, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The Merchant’s Guild could scream about mutual defense treaties and everything all it liked, but two of the Remnant Kingdoms were currently attacking the third, and the Merchant Guild had been involved in the attack on ME. The natives weren’t going to do anything for someone who had gone up against Lady Hydrosa, or her verified sister.
Me punching through a score of Thatallix vessels running from their attempt to flank my armada also made people rather wary of me for some odd reason, as did treating with Hydrosa like an old friend. Incidentally, King Kroklar was doing wonderfully under her tutelage, and the big dragon turtle would be back with us in a few months. Ten times faster time passing on the Elemental planes was helping him in that regard...
Reaching Omicra itself wasn’t hard, only a few hundred miles away, and I could enjoy a leisurely hour or two atop Duum, zipping through the sky Invisibly so as not to alternately terrify, alarm, or encourage any attackers.
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I did a flyover of Omicran City, the main port and harbor of the nation. Jaderose’s statue dominated it, erected after her passing by grateful students (led by her ex-Sim Chalcedony), but I could see the basic design and engineering knowledge passed down to us by Aelryinth, dominating and shaping the nature of the city, and through it, all of Omicra’s culture over the thousands of years my Sims had lived here and shaped the people slowly and subtly.
The concentric layouts, orderly streets, organized levels leading down to the town and port, buildings of stone, and layered walls bespoke Stone Shaping on massive levels, and very advanced architectural and engineering knowledge. I could tell they had basically carved out the sides of a mountain, turning the stone into walls and buildings, and then the harbor had expanded out and down as the waters fell over the years, former harbor areas and docks turning into another layer of homes and workshops, and the walls of the city pressing out into the sea.
The highest point of the city was where the Terrestria was located, the grounds of Omicra’s famous geomancy School encapsulating the peak and sprawling through and down the back side of the mountain. It was both at the center and high point of the city, yet away from the heart and the teeming numbers of people deciding the course and direction the nation would take.
The great rotunda of the Omicran capitol and senate was halfway down the mountain, in the literal center of the city, and I could see that the whole thing had actually slid down at least two tiers over the centuries, keeping it in that relative position.
I saw the quiet Temple to the Morning at the eastern side, first to face the sun, and a respectable amount of land about it for its attendees. That Chalcedony and thus many of the wizards and her supporters attended the church and its philosophy influenced all of Omicra society, and the blame attributed to both the Immortals and the wizards for the destruction of Delpha and the slaughter that followed meant the Remnants tended to be skeptical of the intentions of Immortals at best.
All the Immortals had done was chase away those who had destroyed the world. There was no justice, no prevention, no interventions. Those who had survived had done so via luck or having methods in place to survive and endure, and even most of those hadn’t made it.
Deep within the heart of Mount Omicra were the original caverns that the survivors of Omicra had taken shelter in from the Worldstorm, originally used as storehouses and training areas by Lady Jaderose long ago. Today they were regarded as holy sites, proud remnants of the skill and cunning that had allowed the Omicrans to survive… and were still used as emergency shelters and storage areas, an entire underground realm that dwarves and gnomes would be gravely impressed by, and still being built out today.
Give a gamer a millennium, and they can shape an entire culture, even if Time doesn’t want them to, I thought, finding a fierce pride in my Sims for their slow and careful work of millennia. It wasn’t perfect, of course, because Immortals would interfere, they wanted dreams of empire, and a healthy distrust of the idea of wizards in control of the governments and being the only ones with true rights meant public opinion could be manipulated by the clever and the ambitious to unwelcome ends.
But Chalcedony and the students of the Terrestria, combined with the Church of the Morning, had been a very, very big cultural and moral centerpiece of these people, and as such the Omicrans had developed into a true White society overall, which was heartening to see.
Keeping their righteousness and belief in their own success away from self-righteousness and elitism was another problem, but I was sure Chalcedony had it in hand.
The fact this city was laid out in a Rune Pattern that could power an Elemental defense powerful enough to shunt another Worldstorm away was probably not known to the people, but that was fine.
Beyond the city proper, the Omicrans had spread out into the many mountain valleys and hills of the continent, which was basically dominated by upthrusting spires almost everywhere. Flat areas were not natural, carved out by long generations of labor and Shaping the Stone in great volumes, great long and picturesque tiers snaking along the hills and mountains for miles and miles in tribute to those who had retaken what they could of the surface world, and with mutual strength and effort made it a place of beauty and productivity.
Day by day, year by year, the Omicra had and continued carving their terraces into the mountains. They made them gardens and grazing lands, homes and what fields they could. It was a fantastic, almost artistic sight when seeing them from high in the sky, like painted sculptures stretching along the mountainsides for miles and miles, roads traversing them, tunnels punched through them, even crude trains moving along tracks on more direct paths driven through the stone.
But above those terraces, the real work went on.
My eyes glittered at the sight of the Runes and Wards worked into every mountain peak, laying a blanket of coverage over the valleys, warding them from extreme winds, weather, and heat. The people looked up, and they knew the mountains protected them, and the instrument of that protection was the wizards of the Terrestria.
Wizards, a secret Allegiance, and a disdain for the ambitions of Immortals that had seeped in over centuries and millennia, by deeds and not words, and wrought of this Remnant of Delpha a hard and industrious people.
This had been Jaderose’s great work, conflating Cryptomancy and Earth Elementalism on a grand scale, and yet she had for some reason spurned Energy’s offer of Immortality, instead graduating to her current status as a Primal Elemental of Earth.
Not an Immortal. Never an Immortal…