Metaworld Chronicles

First stop.

Cuzco.

The Regent of Shalkar, now more Goddess than priestess, decided she would no longer make mistakes.

The Bloom had said that her Master, Henry Kilroy, had made many mistakes, mistakes that, ironically, had held back the reaping of the Prime Material by Elemental forces. In Sydney, her Master had taught her that her Void-craft was to be an enticing toy balloon among jealous children armed with pins.

Kilroy had taught her this because he had given the world a calamity named Elizabeth Sobel, and had been wounded enough, and had felt guilty enough, to relent on his control of the Towers.

Without his Towers, he could only tell his new student from Sydney to first hide her powers, then present her powers as a friendly, harmless alternative, wholly in control, and under the thumb of whoever acted as her patron.

For her Master’s sheltering love, Gwen could only feel gratefulness and grace.

But she was not Henry Kilroy. And she would not make his mistakes.

If the Bloom in White had taught her anything with her talk of husbandry, it was that Gwen had unknowingly outgrown her Master by magnitudes.

She had a monopoly on the Dyar Morkk, and that wasn’t about to change, not for the duration of her hunting of Elizabeth Sobel. In the future, when her network had reached every corner of the Prime Material, she would gift the world Legion, and civilisation as it presently existed would change to fit the new mould. If so, why bother with the song-and-dance routine of a malleable merchant?

No. She was husbandry now, as Malakath intended, as Solana had decreed.

A Guardian of the Prime Material, arriving by manipulation, yet here by choice.

The low-way into the southern Suyu was not yet a year old, and it already smelled like the root tunnels made by her World Tree. The air was damp, fecund and rich with loam; yet the tunnel walls were smoothly shelled, drenched in the stench of Klad exhaust.

She was in a transit tram, her Shadow Guards beside and below her, watching the distance supernaturally recede.

There was nothing to see. That was the point of a low-way. The tunnel was a tube of grey basalt forty feet across, lit every hundred metres by a Lumen globe, and the only thing that changed from one kilometre to the next was the colour of the Runes. Here and there, the living roots that had married themselves into the stonework were golden filigrees, as though a sculptor had coaxed the tree of life into a stone relief. Further south, toward Arica and the sea, the roots would thin into cables. Under Shalkar, they were the ceiling, and they decided to cross the tunnel; entire sections had been bored through the middle, so that the walls were polished warm wood.

Sufina was not awake. But she was a light sleeper. Gwen could feel the Dryad’s consciousness stirring in her own, feeding on the Faith, on the causality of psychic belief.

Behind her, the troop of Shadow Guards had given up pretending not to kneel. The Dwarven driver had not knelt, but when she had boarded at the Bunker, he had looked at the luminosity coming off her, touched the brim of his helm, and said, “Regent,” in the tone of a man who had seen the Ancestors. No doubt, hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years later, when he finally perished, his soul would rest in the restored Hall of the Ancestors, and he would say to those at rest, “I was there, in the epoch of the New Lumen.”

On her lap was a data slate with Inti’s dispatch on it, three days old.

Beasts of the Antis in numbers not seen since the Tide. Driven. The riders of the Qulla report that beyond the Wall of Woods the canopy has gone white. Amazonia is alive with creatures that have not seen the sun.

White. Meaning pale. Meaning silk.

Gwen had been to Che’ell-Cressen once, as a tourist. She had walked under the webspires with a Daughter of Quar-Tath at her elbow, and she could perfectly imagine what the Antisuyu now resembled.

The carriage pulled to a halt.

The platform was enormous, built for cargo and rapid exfiltration of a population. The geofront was furnished by Dwarves and styled in the visual motifs of the Temple of the Moon; it was ironically much larger than the actual temple and the palace above it. It was a shelter, as well as a way to escape the city should it be overwhelmed.

Between evacuation by Tower, by sorcery, by low-way and by the regular means, Inti’s people would be preserved, even if their city was not.

But Gwen didn’t see any reason why the Tide could not be repelled.

After all, she was here.

On the far side of the platform, Sapa Inti, Inti junior, Tica and their procession awaited her arrival in full regalia.

Gwen approached them with open arms.

She informally embraced Tica first, to show deference to Mama Killa, then formally greeted the King and Prince while Tica retreated from the business of war, which was beyond her domain.

The Sun King had not changed. He was as vigorous and youthful as he had been when they first met. That first time, when she had stood in the courtyard of Sacsahuamán, Inti’s father had come down off the dais to shake her hand, and his uncles had followed him.

Now, the Sapa was her equal, and behind him the Masters of the four Suyus stayed on their stools, acknowledging that they were not her equals. With her hand on the Sapa’s hand, she walked into the circle of colourful llama garbs and flowers, of caramel-complexioned men and flower girls whose faces were marked with the silvery blessings of Mother Moon.

The King, Sapa of the Four Corners of the World, looked at the light coming off her for a long moment, then bowed his head.

“Regent of Shalkar,” he said. “You are very bright.”

“I burn,” Gwen smirked. “How’s the situation?”

The gathering laughed, nervous but clearly glad that Gwen was not big on ceremony. To have another God visit the demesne of the Sun made poor optics, and held a great many unknowns for a theocracy such as theirs.

“Allow me.” The man who emerged from behind the Masters of the Suyu was Amaru, their resident Tower Master. He and Inti junior exchanged an unspoken look. Amaru himself looked… tired, with dark bags under his eyes, and he looked wiser than when they had first met, if only because of the wrinkles and the deep lines scoring the corners of his eyes.

Amaru spoke in Quechua, and Gwen found that she needed no translation, not from her Ioun Stone, not from Inti.

Beyond the Wall of Woods, Amaru read from the reports that, where the Madre de Dios came down out of the Antis and met the Tambopata, the forest had become a hunting ground for the Silk Tide. The canopy had been wrapped, tree by tree and then valley by valley, in a silk so fine that the first riders had taken it for mist until a horse had walked into it and summoned spiders by the hundreds. The silk had climbed the ridges. The silk had crossed the river. And under the silk, the beasts of the Antis had begun to flee, all at once and all one way, from Trolls to Harpies, Gobs to boas.

“The silk is from the Great Orb Weavers,” Amaru said at last. “The riders say they are the size of aurochs, pale as nephrite. With limbs that span from tree to tree. They do not hunt. They herd.” He paused. “The creatures, the other spiders eat. The people…”

In the silence that followed, Manco, Magistrate of the Antis, bowed his head in shame.

“The Shuar,” the Magistrate said, without raising his head. “My people are taken, for food or sport, I do not know. Forty villages between the fork and the Wall. The riders found most of them empty.”

“Fled?”

“Empty, Regent,” Amaru spoke for the Antis of the East. “If they had fled, we would know.”

Amaru showed her a slate, an older model, the type the Frontiers still used, and she had used. It had a rudimentary mapping Divination, which showed Cuzco had been tracking the progress of the Silk Tide as it swallowed everything in its path.

The tide had already crossed the Wall of Woods. It had arrived at the borderlands and would, in nine days, reach the great rise where the IIUC had been held, and Cuzco in fourteen, assuming they fought it every step of the way.

“I will meet it at the source,” she said.

“And the Qulla?” said Caquingora, chief of the Qulla.

“My Tower will hold the throat of the tablelands with my Rat-kin. Place your troops with them. You will be safe. You and your people. You will have my word and my Kirin.”

She waved her arm, and Ariel leapt into the Prime Material with a mighty “EE–EE!”

“Protect!” her creature said in its rudimentary, developing speech.

A different kind of radiance, warm and celestial and soothing to the mind, washed across the geofront. All who felt its touch felt encouraged and courageous, buoyant with irrational hope.

All who lacked the blessing of Faith felt their bodies tremble, lowering their heads and bending their knees.

“And I?” said Inti, from behind his father.

“You stay in the sky,” Gwen said. “On my Tower.”

He opened his mouth, and she saw the I can scorch a city or two arrive in it, and she shook her head once, and that was that. Inti was far too precious to risk.

And his Faith too limited. His power vast but shallow.

“Your nation runs on you,” she told him, more gently. “As mine runs on me.”

She bowed to the Sapa.

The Sapa agreed.

“Don’t you worry.” She gave Inti a smile that made hearts tremble. “When all this is done, we’ll walk together, a pair of golden gods, strolling through the dark, welcoming the light of dawn.”

Madre de Dios.

The Amazonia Black Zone.

Shalkar Tower’s bridge smelled of HDMs and mana vents.

Its horizontal configuration also meant that, compared to a classical Henry Kilroy-epoch Tower, hers was enormous, with an aesthetic closer to that of a science-fiction ocean liner than the cosy dark-space of a Spectrometric chamber.

Between her first visitation and now, the bridge had been fully furnished to spec.

Faux windows, each utilising the same Magi-tech as the fully enclosed Dwarven Klads, formed enormous panels that showed every detail the Tower faced, showing a two-hundred-and-forty-degree capture of what was above and below the Tower’s spearhead in a semi-sphere.

Gwen stood on an elevated gangway in the middle; a Greybeard had the Captain’s chair. Around them and below them, three dozen Tower officers manned the Tower’s various functions, channelling commands and orders to their respective sections.

Inti stood a little behind her, and she could see from his expression that he was blown away by the display of magical technology that was so far above and beyond what Cuzco possessed.

For her part, she was impressed by how deified the Radiant Mage looked.

He wore a cloak of vicuña over the toga, because a Sun Prince must look the part, and his Divi earrings winked at his jaw, and his hair was loose, and he had been anointed with sacred oils by Tica, and his markings pulsed with the protection offered by Mama Killa.

Behind Inti stood his bodyguard, the timeless lyricist of Peruvian poetry, Tupac.

Her own companions attended to their respective tasks. Strun was mustering the troops below. Lulan was overseeing the deployment protocols, and Slylth was here and there on the bridge, asking questions and taking notes, having the time of his life.

Below them, it was obvious where the Tide had progressed, because that part of the forest had been completely transformed into an ivory white.

She had never seen such a thing as a Silk Tide. She had fought Undead Tides, mostly, and Beast Tides, and Mer Tides. The fact that parts of the forest were visibly turning ivory, while she could see enormous spindly legs penetrate the canopy here and there, made her skin crawl.

On her bridge, instruments blinked on and off. The innumerable cranks, levers, and buttons that had to be monitored and pressed, the constant stream of communication, the Greybeard’s intense, singular focus while moving the Tower forward, reminded Gwen just how good her old world had it. Magi-tech, for all its miracles, lacked programming and automation, meaning the operation was more akin to steampunk or dieselpunk.

“Yours doesn’t switch off,” Inti said after a moment, breaking the tension.

He was talking about her Faith-derived halo.

Gwen laughed, just a little, accepting that this was indeed the awkward truth.

“Mine does,” Inti said gently, and then, with nought but will, made his markings glow and fade. “It has to. Tica won’t sleep with the lights on.”

Behind them, Tupac, already in his were-puma form, stopped licking his enormous paw.

Gwen laughed, for real this time, and the sound came out of her golden, so that her light flickered and the bridge took on shifting shadows.

“I think there’s something Cuzco can offer,” Inti said. “We’ve developed a unique methodology of… harnessing Faith that’s not tied to the Disciples of the Nazarene.”

Gwen looked at the prince in surprise.

The boy was good.

VERY good.

He knew that there was nothing more Cuzco could offer her.

But a way to channel and manage her Faith? One that’s untethered to anything and anyone, devised by the founder who had fought back the Spanish?

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

That’s a deep debt.

“I would love to receive your tutelage.” Gwen nodded with affirmation.

The door behind them hissed open.

It was Lulan and Strun.

Strun knelt. Lulan did not.

“Regent. We’re ready to deploy,” Lulan informed her.

Strun saluted. “Nine legions, Regent. Two cohorts of every clan from the Isthmus to the Bajío. The Jildam have the privilege, as is their right.” Strun’s whiskers were very still, which was how the Rat-kin showed excitement. “The Commandrumm sends his regards from Neo Tenochtitlan and says the Iron Legion will be on standby if needed.”

“It won’t be,” Gwen said with complete confidence.

From behind Lulan, a bald head, reflecting the radiance of her body, stepped into view. “Hello.”

“Ollie.”

“Regent.”

“You want me to be here?” He looked at the ground below them.

“Just for a few hours, to watch.”

“To…”

“To bear witness, so you can write up the reports,” Gwen said to the bald man. “You’ve got time, right? God. You smell like a fish.”

“Ahhaha…” Ollie sniffed his Hawaiian shirt.

Gwen almost smiled. Then she looked at the slate the Chief Engineseer was holding out to her, and the smile went a little rigid.

“Single shot?” she asked the Greybeard.

“Aye, lass. One displacement at full mass; the rest we need to bring the men back up, ter keep us afloat, and to keep the guns firing.”

“I don’t think we’ll need the auxiliary guns,” Gwen told the Dwarf. “Keep the main gun primed, fire when I am done.”

“No bombardment, Regent?” Lulan moved her head an inch.

The Marshal of Shalkar looked at the living, three-dimensional sand map. Even with their best Magi-tech, they could only penetrate into the middle layer of Amazonia.

“Regent, the forward batteries alone could thin that tide by a third… We have the HDMs.”

Gwen gave her Marshal a pat on the shoulder. “I am feeding Caliban.”

Strun understood first. His whiskers trembled.

“Of course, her hunger must be satisfied,” he said.

“Ariel stays with the Legion. I’ll go forward with Cali. Tower provides support and air superiority—not that we need it. When you see the Murk rift where they’re all pouring from—take the shot.”

“Full mass, Regent?” the Greybeard asked.

“Full mass,” Gwen confirmed.

The Dwarf’s eyes glowed. Then he took down her orders on his slate and had her sign them. Then he walked away, speaking rapid Dwarvish in coded orders that went straight to the Core.

Lulan lingered at the chart table.

“I am just watching, right?” Ollie raised a hand.

“That’s it,” Gwen assured her hairless wonder of an administrator. “Just watch, and learn, and tell the folks back home exactly as it transpires.”

Gwen glanced at Slylth and sent the Dragon a Message to come and see something fun.

Like Ollie, Slylth needed to pass on a message as well.

Amazonia.

The displacement Mandala opened over the fork of the Madre de Dios at eleven minutes past noon, and Shalkar Tower came through it segment by segment, bulkhead by armoured bulkhead, with the concussion rolling out ahead of her across a valley blanketed in thick silks.

From the prow, standing with Slylth behind her, the Regent of Shalkar looked down on a landscape wreathed in faux winter.

She had visited this part of the forest before, and while it hadn’t been pleasant, it had been green and fecund with life. Now, it was ivory from ridge to ridge. The silk lay over the canopy in sheets so even that they caught the sun like water, and under the sheets the shapes of the trees showed through, and in these gaps, white bodies of arachnids crawled back and forth unchallenged.

Once again, goosebumps kissed the length of her legs and her arms.

She wasn’t arachnophobic, yet even so—

The horror. The horror.

And at the fork, where the Madre de Dios met the Tambopata, she spied a giant funnel in white.

It was a sinkhole of sorts, half a kilometre across, its surface covered in a protective layer of silk. The membrane looked thin from here, though Gwen deduced the thickest strands to be the circumference of her calves, elastic and nearly impervious to damage.

That was the unstoppable thing about the Silk Tide. A conventional military wishing to push it back would need to venture into the web-woven domain, expending all of their energies untangling themselves.

A Tower overhead couldn’t even bombard them if the firepower could not get through the silk. And even if it did, there was layer upon layer of silk, all of which could be easily regenerated.

Additionally—under all that cover, who was in command? Were there Spire Witches among them? A Sister? A champion? A Fang of Quar-Tath?

Under such cover, it was impossible to tell.

She could see the creatures fleeing the forest as well, steering well clear of the gargantuan Tower in the same manner as the spiders below. The most obvious escapees were the Harpies and the Da-Peng, who even now were eyeing a smirking Slylth. There were thousands upon thousands of Harpies, from the filthy carrion species to the vibrant women feathered in bold cobalt and scarlet. The Da-Peng were merely in their hundreds, and were it not for her Tower, they truly would have blotted out the sun.

Below were hapless victims too slow or too exhausted to escape the advance of silk. Titan Boas as thick as trunk lines on the low-ways, jungle cats and maraquees, a pig like a flayed tapir the size of a house that was screaming and would not stop.

And at the edges of the herd, pale against the pale silk, she saw the weavers.

The reports had said the size of aurochs. They should have said abdomens the size of aurochs. With speed and grace, the creatures moved on the silk the way a weaver moves on a loom, and every few seconds one of them would reach out with a foreleg and lay a thread across an exhausted creature’s back, with the silk dragging the victim into the silken dark.

She stretched her mind toward the tablelands. Toward the Qulla. Toward the coast, and the harbour, and the low-way, and Arica, everywhere her World Tree’s roots had reached.

“Regent,” Strun’s voice echoed in her head. “The legions are being teleported to the battle lines. Good hunting, your Paleness. May the young miss feed well.”

The Tower’s shadow reached the valley floor.

Then, from the prow of the Devouring Ark, Gwen gave the order the bridge crews had been waiting for.

“Divination to maximum capacity,” she commanded the bridge. “Gwen Song, deploying.”

Nobody argued. Nobody said, Regent, you are too precious to risk fighting outside the Tower’s protection.

Gwen stepped from the prow and shot forward in a flash of dazzling lightning.

Inside her Tower, the crew readied themselves for the Regent’s first act of husbandry.

Lulan Li had the bridge while her Regent was away.

From a series of vast displays that resembled windows of a Magi-tech cathedral, she watched her benefactor conjure Caliban into place, then watched the terrifying Void Worm slither and fall into the webbing.

To think, nearly a decade ago, she had chopped a dinner table at Fengbo Village and covered her Regent with Beggar Chicken.

Even now, on quiet nights, she woke up gasping, covered in cold sweat, her nostrils filled with the delicious scent of twice-cooked chicken in lotus leaf, dreaming of Caliban’s embrace.

Gwen’s Night Walker rose from the valley floor, from the deep forest, larger than she had ever seen, a colossus of magnificent proportions, faceless, ivory-white, in the borrowed likeness of her benefactor, and wearing no clothes, because Caliban was still a creature.

“She” waded chest-deep in the woods for only a few seconds—until the forest around her wilted and died, shrinking and shrivelling from the irradiating aura of Negative Energy.

Thankfully, Caliban’s modesty, if she even had any, was now preserved by a cascade of hair, or something that resembled hair, that fell from her faceless head, across her breast and shoulders, and down to her knees.

Hair that writhed.

The bridge fell completely silent.

Ollie Edwards, their observer, gripped the rail with both hands.

Where she walked, the silk parted, the trees withered, the ground itself grew blighted.

Then Caliban’s skin began to crawl.

From her hair, from her pale and bubbling dermis, Hydras materialised from her body, dark against the ivory, conjured into being by Essence and Faith, hundreds of them, thousands of them, ten thousand, a hundred thousand.

Innumerable Hydras, dark and lamprey-bodied, each head a crown of tentacles around a circular mouth, capable of infinite regeneration so long as there was biomass, fell from Caliban as her body began to shrink, the great volume of her towering form dissipating into a roving flood of eyeless maws hungry for life and Essence.

From her hovering Tower, Gwen’s worshippers watched their Regent, marvelling at how the air around her flickered, forming a semi-transparent dark egg as her halo burned.

Lulan placed a hand on her own forehead, as if to confirm, very lightly, that this wasn’t some feverish vision.

The spiders came on, fearless at first.

So many spiders, white against black, two Tides of opposition, one white with chitin and carapace, the other formless and slithering, splattering goo as they marched forth.

“Marshal!” An aide pointed her toward a screen on the right, where a clairvoyance had been projected forward toward the funnel web.

Spiders, ivory with jewelled eyes, were emerging from the silk-smothered orifice in clusters and clutches, some as large as buildings. Their beady orbs burned when they hit the sunlight, but the pain seemed only to madden them as they skittered forth, commanded by unseen voices from the deep dark.

On the left screen, their Regent formed a Mandala in the air that grew to the size of a football field.

The Negative Energy that radiated from her golden body was enough to sizzle the Shielding array of the Tower, causing a dozen alarms to flash across the Shielding Station displays.

Below her, Caliban shuddered as if in ecstasy and began to expand.

Her feminine silhouette grew gravid until it was an enormous being of pale, oily expansion.

With a grotesque contortion, her belly, where the skin was stretched thinnest and near translucent, split—and from within Caliban came the all-too-familiar nightmare of numberless tentacles, all mouths and maws and Gwen’s green eyes, all hungry, all-consuming. Lulan knew those tentacles. They had belonged to the Shoggoth, and then, for a long time, they had adorned the blessed body of Lei-bup.

One Tide met the other.

The sound transmitted from below made them sick to their core, and a quarter of the crew, the non-Dwarven personnel, had to expel their sickness into their storage devices.

The screeching of spiders.

The clash of chitin on shell.

The wet sound of Void Worms latching onto prey.

The visceral, fibrous unzipping of flesh being rendered.

The tide kept coming out of the hole.

And Gwen’s Tide continued to feed and feed.

“By the Sun…” Inti and his entourage finally understood why Gwen did not need them to join the battle. Far from being aides, they would be food.

On the prow of the Tower, the Red Dragon Slylth watched, finally speechless.

Lulan relayed the vision back to Strun and his troops, who could receive the Lumen-cast through the Tower’s internal Divination Array, and they too watched in reverent silence.

Ollie Edwards scratched his head as if it itched.

For now, the slithering tide was being beaten back.

But they knew.

They all knew—that it was a matter of inevitability.

Her Caliban had a second wind, and a third wind, and a fourth and a fifth…

The spiders, ferocious and mindless and maddened as they were, realised this as the sun began to fail.

It began with a single kilometre.

The dark ring of slithering horrors expanding into the silken whiteness.

Then the silk began to recede, the trees fell, and the spiders began to trust more in their own instincts than in whatever commanded them.

Gwen realised that the largest spiders must possess consciousness and independent thought. These creatures, fed by the Svartálfar, bred to form an impenetrable ring of defence around Che’ell-Cressen, had existed for countless aeons. They must have possessed a civilisation unto themselves, bolstered by the Essence of the Midnight Queen.

And for once they had been loosed upon the world to wreak havoc and to feed as they pleased.

Only now—they were the hunted.

Caliban might be insurmountable by means of venom, chitin, claw and fang, but her Hydra Tide had one self-evident weakness—it was slow and steady.

A few thousand more arachnids were consumed by the counter-Tide—but the rest were making for the funnel, too fast on their silk-lines for her Hydras to follow, and too many for Caliban to pursue.

From the epicentre, at the heart of the funnel web, a pair of legs began to emerge, ivory and encased in gleaming dark spines, each stalk the size of a skyscraper. Waves of Dragon Fear radiated from the centre, restoring the Silk Tide’s sanity.

When it shrieked, the sound sent ripples through the silken forest so that the entire landscape undulated as if alive.

It challenged her, a chosen one to its fellow chosen. Vessel to Vessel.

A scion of the Midnight Queen?

Or a remote-controlled behemoth?

In truth, Gwen didn’t care.

Nor was she a Vessel, not since hers had overflowed after it was ruptured.

“Cali!” she called out to her creature, her writhing, lashing, whirling figure in glistening ivory, the pale avatar of the Goddess at the heart of Lei-bup’s Mer. “Withdraw!”

The “SHAA—” that rang out echoed from the valleys and the trees that remained. The Hydras scrambled for their mother, melding into her porcelain skin.

The tsunami of writhing shale oil stopped, because such was the influence of Caliban’s psychic pressure, her new role as a manifested fragment of the Devouring Dark.

“Lulan,” her command echoed through the bridge. “Fire at will.”

The Leviathan Cannon, despite every other time it had been used, was not a water cannon. It was a Core that had once been the heart of a living God, now captured by the Regent and turned through the miracle of Magi-tech into the largest Elemental Water gate in existence. A Leviathan was physically too large to truly move itself through the mechanical propulsion of its body; its infamous ability to traverse oceans was not founded in the dozens of limbs it used as oars, but in its very Core.

As such, the Core did not fire.

First, it drank a small nation’s yearly revenue in HDMs.

Then, it collated the mana into the hundreds of Mandalas housed in the length of the Tower’s horizontal superstructure.

Then, the Divination Station pointed the foci of astronomical Conjuration not through a nozzle formed of force panes, but through a gate opened into the Elemental Plane of Water, carving into the cold space of the Fifth Vel to materialise a portion of it in the Prime Material.

The first sign was rain out of a sky with nothing in it: fat, warm, tasting of the Vel.

Then the air went thick as broth; the Rat-kin on the ramps breathed in mouthfuls, the Marshal’s hair lay flat as a drowned woman’s, and every surface seemed to bead with liquid.

Then the salt came. It bloomed across the Tower’s barrier lattice in white ferns and frost-flowers, thickening into panes as the Elemental Plane of Water poured through the Core.

—until the Tower wore a rime of salt from bow to stern, a ship of crystals resembling Lot’s wife, held aloft with a Levitation Engine.

Every slate on the bridge lit at once. Lumen gauges that had never left green went amber, white, then abandoned numbers for symbols the Greybeard read aloud like scripture, in rapid Dwarvish.

Above the funnel web, the rain stopped falling and began to gather, forming into Job’s Leviathan, made of water, hanging in the air as if by pure faith.

The mana engine screamed like insane children. The Core glowed white-hot.

Finally, the collated mana materialised.

A sea formed over the fork of the Madre de Dios in a teardrop three kilometres tall, grey-green and lit from within like a cathedral window, and obeyed gravity.

It did not fall so much as descend.

The aim wasn’t perfect, nor was the timing.

But ten billion tonnes was ten billion tonnes.

The silken funnel, the trees, the locality itself, were gone before the teardrop arrived; the valley floor simply evaporated, a kilometre of forest punched flat as a struck coin, the weavers and their silk and the tunnels beneath them unmade in one breath. The gargantuan spider, perhaps a Fang of Quar-Tath, perhaps a spawn, folded like wet origami.

She didn’t hear its scream.

The sonic shock wave was muffled and wet, shattering the salt, clearing the Tower and sending debris the size of cars crashing down into the churning brine below.

The Prime Material itself, the very ground of Amazonia, rang like a temple bell from Cuzco.

Visibly, the earth rippled outwards, upturning trees, breaking rocks, and disintegrating anything that was remotely alive.

A wall of brine the height of the Wall of Woods took the river for its bed and went down it, fifty kilometres to the first bend, like a concentric Red Sea closing over an arachnid Pharaoh’s chariots—while the Prophet of Profits hovered overhead, ringed by a nimbus of gold, watching impassively.

Then the back end of the teardrop, the tail, folded in upon itself.

The aftershock made itself known.

Ten billion tonnes came up for the rebound.

Green on green, the water rushed out from ridge to ridge: mud, and salt, and roaring surf. Above it, the Da-Peng circled, Noah’s dove in reverse, wordless and docile, knowing that they were once more homeless.

Her Tower hummed, its mana exhaust filling the atmosphere with swirling mist and vapour.

Caliban stood waist-deep in water, obscene and unclothed, dripping, her milk-white body covered in soot, grime, mud and debris, penetrated in a dozen places by flung stone and jagged tree.

From up on high, the Regent looked down upon the devastation and saw that her devastation was good.

Very GOOD.

Her halo grew blinding as yet more Faith fuelled her Astral Body.

From this day forth, where the Regent makes her home, there will be no more Beast Tides.

And the Pale Goddess willing, there shall be no more Undead Tides.