BECMI Chapter 421 – Time is Passing
Not interacting regularly with humans would make time pass by far too swiftly and leave me not grounded. Even if they grew old and died as the years went by and I changed little to not at all, elven and now Eternal views on time and life passing me by buffered me against living in the past and clinging on to what had gone before.
The Markspace also helped, always full of energy and young minds striving for newer and better things. They held one another’s hands, helped one another up, joined together to build and expand and explore, and they made rediscovery of things new and exciting once more as they climbed up the ladders they held for one another, looking for new heights to see the world from.
The past couldn’t hold onto me. There was always something to see, a new wonder, new knowledge waiting out of sight, and the reactions of those who came behind me was just impetus for seeing how valuable and appreciated what had gone before was.
The problem was Immortals kept their same view of the future, but their past was frozen and they clung to it hard. They were defined by it, instead of defining it and stepping beyond. As the people of their mortal lives passed away, so did their inhibitions and restrictions. Not wanting to see more of their own die, they increased their distance, and so human lives became just things passing in the day and the night, not things of great personal value at all.
They were like goldweight, and there was precious little to distinguish one gold coin from another, in the end. Only spend and accumulate the gold as desired, and it keep its value to you before being spent.
I hadn’t invested all those skills in meditation and psychoanalysis not to use them on myself and track the changes to my mentality. I was aware that I had deviated significantly from my core of Aelryinth after being reborn an elfin, and the changes only continued with time on the surface, adding layers of complexity and emotion to my own existence that only made me my own person, instead of a rubber stamp of him.
That said, many of my core motivations remained the same, and I was proud of that.
I still leaned into my goth image, because it was so very, very useful to be misinterpreted by that image. Those Marked knew better, everyone else had very different opinions of me and my magic because of the trope.
It was an act that was complete reflex, but only those most trusted knew it was an act… and knowing that, they went right along with it, because it was both fun and useful to do so.
Immortals spying on me saw I hadn’t changed much, which fit into their preconceptions that I was easy to predict and, if really powerful for a mortal, could be figured out and adjusted into their plans, or easily overcome if need be.
So nice they didn’t have omniscience or Divine Awareness or anything. A bunch of them really didn’t like me, what with me daring to live through the Doom of Darkmoor AND killing off bunches of their agents… repeatedly… and mucking up the Bleaklands and spreading the truth of Darkmoor and all that.
Me dealing with dragons was strange. Me making a Dungeon that would unapologetically kill those entering it and just letting random heroes run through it and die was considered some crazy chaotic stuff by them, and I was a bit cloud cuckoo doing that sort of thing.
I didn’t really seem to be doing anything active on the surface, except maintaining a land of rings of fire that were basically inhabited by dragons and foolhardy adventurers willing to die delving in a crazy magical dungeon for a shot at some great loot and excitement.
Lots of excitement. It was crazy entertaining to watch at times. Soon enough some sneaky Immortals had snuck in, put permanent scrying sensors in areas that generated a lot of high-risk thrills, both test/trap areas and fighting grounds where seeing a good scrum and how different teams of warriors handled it happened frequently.
Then they sat up on their little moonbase of a city up there (Nexial, the center of Immortal civilization, dun dun dun!), the standard meeting place for Immortals of all Spheres, as verified by Captain Emeril, and there they watched adventurers doing exciting and death-defying stuff, usually winning, sometimes losing, and didn’t do much else while they were enjoying the show.
Some of them wanted to join in on the fun and show those silly humans how it was done. Alas, the environs of Castle Doomrose had a lot of darkstone in them, and it was really unfriendly to unattuned (i.e. not bound to the world) Immortals. They arrived there in their mortal Avatars, prepared to sweep through everything with skill and foreknowledge and their own awesomeness… and promptly got really sick and nauseated and rather massively incontinent as the Immortal Power was sucked out of them, leaving them quite weakened and in danger of losing portions of their soul if they pressed on.
Alas, no Immortals got to show up mortals in the Dungeon of Castle Doomrose.
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The remnants of the Erto had been driven east across the ocean, into the lands of the continent that hosted Delpha on the Far Shore. What they did there was only of import to the sages, as they’d been reduced to survivors eking out a bare existence once again. I’d check up on them occasionally, just to make sure they didn’t go and outbreed some rabbits and come back for vengeance, but the Erto basically faded into history, Grimr mostly going with them as the Bolle abandoned him.
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Rising were Sif and Thor.
They didn’t take anything like the title of Jarl yet, but every warrior in the kingdom knew who they were, and none wanted to cross either of them. When the Hammer and Sword announced they were going to be exploring Castle Doomrose, there was both great expectation that they’d succeed in plumbing all of its secrets, and relief that they might get themselves killed off from their rivals.
I was scrupulously fair and didn’t give them any hints, they had to dig up their intelligence themselves, assemble their own party of Morning priests and Runemages and the like and head inside to explore and chart and fight.
They had Power of Ten memories. They didn’t know squat about Exudar IV, but video game logic was old hat to them, and they were Ranthas, fighting well above their level and loving it as they did so.
They very rapidly became the go-to guides and scouts for the Dungeon, venturing through level after level, sniffing out hidden areas, solving puzzles and riddles and logic conundrums, defeating monsters, rating out the over-powered boss-type monsters and their special powers, tactics for defeating them, and even tracking and updating the regular changes that the Dungeon cycled through over time.
They also sniffed out every copper of treasure that they could, pulling out tons of coins and precious metals and magical items. They identified the quest triggers, where they led, Dungeon Instances, monsters that would spawn in to stop you, and how the Dungeon responded to stronger parties by making mightier and more varied monsters to stop them.
Soon enough the entire adventurer community was using their lingo and guides, comparing and contrasting their ideas with what worked and what did not, and the adventurers started pushing in as they never had before.
Dungeon Doomrose was happy to oblige them by becoming even tougher and more dangerous, which only saved to make the adventurers even more professional, skilled, wary, and inquisitive about all the crazy and weird stuff going on inside the mountain. It was like there was an entire metropolis or world inside of my mountain, and they were only exploring the edges of it…
It was gold and combat, all of which was Karma. It was Quests and challenges, which was more Karma.
It was Levels they needed, reputations to be harvested, and best of all, for the quick and the skilled, it was a fine test, challenge for their prowess, and it was FUN.
Explorations continued, and the legend of Dungeon Doomrose continued to rise…
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“Well, it was a good idea. Small wonder that she thought to try again,” I muttered to nobody in particular.
The cavern was lit by the same pools of fire that heated it to a tolerable level for the creatures living there. They looked nominally familiar, except this time their various forms were all much closer in nature now, the random chaos removed from them to make them more predictable, if still easily mutated.
Goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears, the tripartite race of goblinkind.
This time, instead of leaving them on their own to founder and just work as savages, they were actually being taught, the hobgoblins specifically being groomed as empire-builders and militaristic, disciplined people who were destined to conquer the world.
Being born a goblin was no longer punishment for evil souls, doomed for a nasty early death. Nope, now they were being used as tools for the reincarnation of faithful followers of the Entropic Immortals, the nasty, brutal, and short lives being replaced by care and cunning.
Nifl and Uingmar were not happy when I collapsed their primary cavern on the underground empire being founded there on the continent of Eignhum, all the way around the world from Darkmoor. The resulting volcanic activity destroyed their nascent civilization and threw them into savagery, and it cost Nifl another Avatar while doing so, as I used its destruction to power the upheaval.
It was plain She wasn’t going to give up on the idea, sticking true to the flow of time that said humanoids had to rise to bedevil the other races and form a challenge to them.
I didn’t disagree with that, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for them to do so. Rather, I was going to make it damn hard, and spreading the news of the existence of those races and their tendencies, the way they would infect the land and steal up from the worlds below again and again and again if not killed formed the basis for a lot of hunting parties of all the races in every land where Nifl dared to start Her little Project up again.
If they wanted to be a scourge on the other races, the other races could damn well be a scourge on them, too! The sooner Nifl lost interest in this project and they could evolve without Her, the better, and if they went extinct in the meantime, nobody would care except the Fates trying to bring the two timelines back together.
Pity them that wasn’t going to happen.
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This particular cavern had no exits or entrances larger than that required to admit a mouse. It was located in the middle of nowhere in the high plains of the continent, with nothing around it to make the location memorable in any way, or indicative of the fact there was an incredible treasure trove beneath it.
“Well done, Captain, well done,” I congratulated him, strolling through the rows of salvage from the mangled remains of the FS Barhund. It had been much sooner than my pre-Crimson Cataclysm raids, so the generations of mutants that I’d had to deal with hadn’t quite evolved yet, and a thousand less years had passed, so stuff was in much better shape, and not buried quite so deeply.
He had four more working shuttles here than I’d managed to recover on the Far Shore, among other things.
“There are a few collectors among the Immortals who liked to pick up things from the ship that I had to be careful of, but for the most part they just figure other Immortals were doing the same, or the technophobes were quietly getting rid of anything that might be threatening when others weren’t looking. As long as it didn’t affect the reactor and what they are trying to do with it, nobody cared too much,” Emeril told me, pointing ahead to where he’d assembled all the scrap stuff he could unearth.