BECMI Chapter 536 – Leaving the Nests
For a year, the Empire and Heaven’s Reach did nothing.
Oh, the Eternals returned to their duties on Arktos. With them came twenty-four new Eternals, risen to eligibility on the strength of that Glory Award, the largest wave to ever do so on Nown. With them came whole teams of Master Aspirants, none of them daring to go to Arktos alone after hearing the countless tales and action reports.
The Vanguard teams who protected the borders of the Empire were slowly drawn back. There was still corruption in the seas, but now the move was made to hunt down the beasts that didn’t belong, remove them one by one as they were located, and drive them to extinction if at all possible.
Internal vigilance could be eased against the things trying to infest society, and more effort made on focusing on the weaknesses of a society that no longer had to be aligned to Total War. Things that had been allowed to fester, in the forms of blocks of criminals, cartels, monopolies, and similar networks that contributed just enough to stay intact while a more important fight was on, soon came under Imperial scrutiny.
People wanted a better world, and now the dark underbelly of society that thought itself so important was revealed as the leeches and parasites that they were. They didn’t take the attention well, and oddly enough, so many of their forces that had served in the military were rather unwilling to face the full ire of the Empire once it didn’t have an existential threat to focus on.
Mandatory military service was flatly abolished, thousands of soldiers were offered immediate leave of service, and many took them. To absorb them, new businesses were started, new factories were put into service at great speed, and new items for both the military and consumer goods were put into production, using the new work force to do so.
The fighting was not over. But hundreds of thousands of folk deployed as guardians and sentries at the borders of the lands were not needed to stand watch any more. The forces on Arktos were contained, had been contained for over a thousand years by the unrelenting efforts of the Eternals and by grand spells and Obelisks set in place on the frozen shores, and were not allowed to escape into the greater world.
But they were still there, and if the Eternals fell, the things of Arktos would spill out, bring down the Obelisks, and take the whole planet.
That much was made very clear to the people of the Empire. They still had an enemy… but now, the world was against their enemy, and not against the Empire.
They had won the Mortal War.
Now they would win the Eternal one!
The engine of war continued to churn, but now, its focus sharpened, as instead of a broad shield, it could now be a spear and a lance.
This time, the enemy had to fortify against them, and they already had a great, great deal of experience overcoming this type of foe...
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Space shuddered, the influence of the Spell of Preservation pushed back by the Obelisk erected nearby.
Power was fed into a pair of Arches that had been standing unbroken and unweathered for twenty-five centuries. Magic swirled, reached out, and for the first time in millennia, found what it was supposed to.
The Portal to the Nested Realms opened wide.
Cheers rose from the gathered citizens of Heaven’s Reach all around, and only rose higher when the first shadows gathered out of them and emerged from the Portal there.
The phanaton soldier atop an aranea was as iconic of the First Realm now as it had been then. There were squeals of excitement and yells of delight from the Spider Cavalry, the descendants of the soldiers trapped on Nown when the Portal shut centuries ago waving in enthusiasm at their long-lost cousins.
Communication had never been lost. There were Marked on both sides, and the Immortals Captain Emeril and Ialo personally made trips back and forth delivering letters and briefs. Scrying devices had no problem reaching one another, but the dimensional severance was absolute, and there was no passage directly from the mortal plane to the First Nest… and nobody wanted to open the Astral Plane to the things waiting outside to get in.
But the end of the Mortal War was a devastating blow to the morale and prestige of the Immortals, crushing their confidence in themselves and making it plain they had already lost the fight. The dimensional barriers and watchers around Nown had been let go, at first in trickles, and then when Eternals started selectively wiping Avatars out, in droves.
That said, time flowed faster in the Nested Realms. What had been two thousand years and more to Nown had been twice as long on the First Realm, and each of the five Realms had at least doubled that.
Of course, the last realm was New Elysium, or Heaven, and how much time passed there was meaningless, as it had been co-opted for the dead, and was a destination of souls, not people.
This was still the only known physical way to get to Heaven. Not even Immortals had other ways to get there.
Human settlers and colonies on the Second and Third Nests had expanded enormously over eight and sixteen thousand years, each. Emeril had made massive investments in both Realms, as had the gods, who had never been cut off from them.
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The Fourth Nest, once frozen in looped time, then wiped by the rebound of that loop cracking, had been restored to a boundless natural paradise, perhaps a fitting place to sit on the doorstep to Heaven. Empowered by Celestial energy, it had thrived on its own merits, a paradise hidden among the Spheres raised from devastation and ruin.
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All of the Nests had been expanded in size dramatically to fit the rising populations there, and had reached the size of full planets, with multiple continents settled and developed by those there.
This was one of the reasons the Empire could cut back on its military. The Nested Realms had been cut off from the fight for thousands of years, but they had been aware of it the whole time, and that they were trapped in their own pocket planes, unable to leave because Immortals and their servants were waiting in the Astral to destroy them if they tried.
They had been aching to join the fight for a very long time, and so they had contributed the only way they could: sharing information, making sure the training and tricks learned by the Brightmoor Empire and Heaven’s Reach was put to use, and making stuff.
They didn’t have the conflict that drove character Levels, and could afford only one Dungeon per world to Level up adventurers towards the Apex. The wars and conflicts between different tribes didn’t happen with Realms that guarded the entryway to Heaven, so the number of high-Level beings were low… but that didn’t stop low magic from proliferating, and it didn’t stop technology from developing at all.
The first Spider Cavalry coming out were wearing Force Armor, and bearing shock lances and pulse carbines, aranea and phanaton rider both.
They were here and ready to fight!
Golden pulses shot out from the circular Portal as the cavalry continued to emerge, and shot up into the air before expanding into much, much larger Portals that gaped open to the admit the first of the Sky Carriers, some of them over a thousand years old, long waiting for the chance to soar the worlds of Nown.
From the decks, dragons sprang into the air, rippling in metallic and jeweled tones of brass, bronze, copper, silver, gold, ruby, crystal, and sapphire, along with scattered blues. When the conflict had first begun, dragons had been approached to flee possible devastation, and sent to the Fourth Nest to survive. They knew what had happened to the dragons here, but sixteen thousand years was a long time to recover their numbers… and so they had.
The second ship to come through actually bore towering ivory-skinned and black-haired cloud giants, with snow-white great rocs with sharp ebon beaks beside them on their decks.
The surviving clans of cloud and storm jotuns had also been sent to the Fourth Realm to recover their numbers after the annihilating raids of the Carnifex, before the Nests were severed. Their descendants had not been able to return and take up that fight, but they well knew the Eternal War was here, and the things they’d be facing.
They would need all their strength.
Elegant crystalline ships flashed through the Gates focused through the restored Portal, and swept through the skies alongside the much larger Sky Carriers and the smaller dreadnoughts and frigates of human design.
Most of the elven clans of the world had been vacated to the Fourth Nest as well, along with most of the hyn tribes. They lived in a world of paradise and guarded the doorstep to Heaven, yes, but they also knew they were prisoners in a cage they could not leave.
They had built a mighty magical civilization alongside the hyn, yet one dispersed and little affecting the paradise they were built in. Their ships looked like armed flowers with razored petals, ready for war, and from each ship a dozen artificial butterflies lifted off, small and swift and joining the Gunwings on escort duty around them.
The gods had long ago confirmed they could not erect an Arch of Eternity off the Prime Plane. The closest they could do is elevate a Saint to Demigodhood, but even that would be tied to the Realm they lived in.
For humans, elves, hyn, phanatons, and aranea alike, the restoration of the Portal and the end of the Mortal War meant the Road to Eternity was now finally open to them. Every living Saint and Demigod among the races was here and readying themselves for the conflict on Akros.
There, they could earn the recognition of Nown, and truly step into Eternity!
There was no one and nothing pursuing Immortality. The Immortals had kept them imprisoned in a pocket plane for millennia, and pure resentment made those Paths impossible to pursue. Doro the Explorer chafed at his faithful being unable to wander the greater cosmos, but he had expanded their worlds from little more than large islands to entire worlds worth the wandering over time. The Master Chef and the Postal Guy kept up communication between the Reach, the Empire, and all three Nests, making sure all knew what was going on.
The gods made sure they never forgot where they came from.
They didn’t have unlimited numbers, like Leng potentially did, able to draw from dreamers from all over Creation and harness their nightmares as troops and minions. But there were a lot of them, and after all this time, and watching thousands of kin and kind die in wars they could not join while the planet of their ancestors was scoured to the bone, they were spoiling for a fight.
The Spider Cavalry was still coming through, but behind them would be grav-sleds full of troops, hovertanks, and mecha built for more than humans.
The transports were already drawn up and waiting for them, all of this planned out days ahead… and more importantly, two Sky Islands had made the long trip back from Rikada and were floating at the edge of the plateau here, waiting to receive entire armies and transport them south.
When the dinosaur riders from the Fourth Nest finally made it through, they earned a lot of cheers, too. Elves were riding the armor-clad saurial Kings and Queens, while the hyn rode the smaller and swifter Barons and Counts as escorts, and they presented quite the daunting sight as they trotted across the ground.
There was one thing these troops all had in common, which the Immortals paying bitter attention could not see.
They were all Marked, and they were all in Allegiance.