Metaworld Chronicles

Puerto Vallarta.

Two hundred and thirty thousand was the number of civilians on file who had been saved, at least according to Hanmoul.

The Dwarf’s data slate had a field for it. It also had fields for tonnage landed, berthing capacity, and the projected labour yield of a resettled population once the Fabricators were hot. It had no field for the other number, because they had arrived from the other side of the world, stocked to the gills with supplies and troops.

Shalkar Tower was here to rescue and resettle. Not conduct a census. A rescue Op accounted for what was rescued.

That, and Neo Tenochtitlan did not have a census program. Why would it? Every living thing that existed in the empire and beyond was there for the sole purpose of Malakath bringing the Devouring Dark into the material, to make Elizabeth Sobel into a Demi-divine being capable of overthrowing World Trees.

It was astounding to Gwen that, had Henry Kilroy not lost to love, fear, and conscience, Spectre would have succeeded.

And then, in the final two years of his life, he had found himself a girl to take Sobel’s place.

Thus far, Gwen rationalised, her Master’s Hail Mary had been spot on.

From Sydney to Auckland, the South Pole to Tianjin, even the Fifth Vel and Deepholm, she had steadied almost every major domino the elf had stacked to sow anarchy and chaos. If Sydney had fallen as planned, its millions of souls would have perished, leaving the entire east coast open to Mer invasions.

Had the East Coast been removed from the equation, Auckland and Wellington would have been effectively isolated and gone, leaving Tryfan with no proxies in that entire southern hemisphere. At will, at whim, Malakath’s allies could have abused the Grove of Illhîweth, along with Illhîwenthiel’s divine body. And, in the resulting chaos of losing Australia as a breadbasket of Southeast Asia, trade would have ceased, and Humanity’s border would have shrunk. Meanwhile, the Mer would have been corrupted from within, becoming vast swarms of Undead in the billions. Deepholm, for what it’s worth, would never have existed as a safe system of transit and trade for Humanity and the terrestrial races. Tianjin would have blighted and exhausted the largest Human population on the Prime Material, transforming the Asian continent into a raging forever-war against the cultists of Juche.

And without Shalkar, the Fire Sea would have dried up and become a domain of Zordiam and his kinfolk of flames.

It was… or had been, a fantastic plan.

And this is why you shouldn’t feel bad, Gwen told herself. For the undetermined number of civilians you just failed to save.

Yet, she felt sick.

There was too much responsibility to having too much power and too much consequence, for a woman inadvertently playing God. So she still made Hanmoul account for the dead and process the result. Too much death in one place, in a time like this, was an invitation to Undeath.

Below the Pale Goddess’s golden radiance, the Pacific had been rearranged. Aristotle’s landfall was three weeks old and had already begun to look like geography—a smooth grey scoop a kilometre across, running from the headland to the river mouth, its edges rounded by rain, the crushed strata weeping mineral water in long ochre stains. Verdant grass had already taken root. In the shallow end, the Mer had built a coral kraal and filled it with fish for the survivor camps, and small brown children stood at its lip with nets on sticks, shrieking, and their mothers watched from the tents and did not stop them, because the water was clean and the fish were free and nobody had eaten this well in a month.

From her Glyph-cooled, spacious command bridge, from the vantage of statistical projection, it was an extremely successful humanitarian operation.

Lulan looked like she wanted to give her a hug.

But one did not simply hug a glowing goddess in public.

“I’ll be back,” the glowing Regent declared to her aides.

Then Gwen willed herself back onto the ground.

Gwen had learned by now not to arrive by Teleport. The version she employed manifested a Mandala before she arrived, and for indiscernible reasons, the damned thing flashed like a halo before thunderclapping her into existence.

The sound, the light, the arrival of her glowing body, was enough to send her worshippers toppling in every direction, weeping at the sight of a deity made real, adding to a pool of Faith Gwen did not want. So she walked in from the perimeter with humility.

Or whatever humility a golden goddess could afford when walking among long lines of queues outside the field hospital and refugee camp her Rat-kin had set up.

The Rat-kin and the Coatls prostrated without question.

The Humans, after a moment, did likewise.

The Demi-humans followed after some hesitation.

Bodies fell like scythed wheat as she passed, in waves.

“Please get up,” Gwen said, in Nahuatl, which she had not spoken a month ago and now spoke perfectly, because her followers spoke to her in the same tongue, and somehow, the proficiency had arrived with their prayers. “Please. You’re in the mud.”

They got up. They rose from their knees or joints or bellies, radiant with the honour of having been given a command.

Gwen walked into the enormous pavilion, large enough to house a thousand beds, sectioned and segmented into triage stations.

The Ordo Clerics were here, dozens of them, and they averted their eyes as she entered. The aversion made Gwen feel better, more grounded.

Gwen wasn’t exactly sure why she had come to the Field Hospital. Certainly, rationally, she needn’t be anywhere. She could simply nap in her floating Tower and her will would be done by Strun or Lulan or Hanmoul, and their lieutenants.

Maybe I am doing this for my own sanity, she informed herself. Indeed, that made the most sense. If she kept herself aloof and above her people, she might just become the likes of Tyfanevius, or the Yinglong, a being so removed from the mortality of the everyday that their whole perspective grew warped.

That was the point, right? Malakath had ascended her, specifically so that she would no longer be among peers. To her former friends, she would be an alien, an unknown.

The beloved Regent is now a foreign entity… just what shall we do with her…

She walked among the survivors, raising their spirits and, in many cases, their literal health.

Her first petitioner was a woman, tanned until her skin had the consistency of leather. The Rat-kin nurse told Gwen with trembling hands that she had been found in a collapsed granary for two days before the Mer lifted the roof off her, and the left arm had gone black to the elbow. She was feverish. The healing injectors could only do so much. They did not have an upper-tier Biomancer among them, meaning the woman was waiting on a surgeon to strip the arm back before healing the stump.

The Ordo Healers on loan from Shalkar had triaged the woman, then left it at that.

Gwen knelt down on the dirt beside the cot, which caused a small crisis among the Rat-kin watching. She was still wearing the dress she had chosen to visit Neo Tenochtitlan’s former Land God, which made her presence all the more inspiring.

She took the stump in her hand and felt the wetness of the flesh, the soft muscle fibres that had given way to sickness. She pressed her thumb to the black skin.

There was no spell for this: that was the part that made Gwen aware that she really wasn’t performing Spellcraft anymore. There was no Mandala, no somatic, no conduit-load to calculate and no backlash to plan around. There was only the wanting of it, and a bright bead of Golden Mead standing on the pad of her thumb like sap.

The colour went out of the necrosis the way ink goes out of cloth in water. Tissue took hold under it, pink and obscene and new, and the woman made a sound that was not a scream and not a word. The arm was still gone—but the flesh had mended.

And so was her fever.

The woman opened her eyes, and Gwen saw relief and gratitude. Then the woman sat, and she saw behind the lady’s eyes a door opened to fanaticism, and the woman’s whole face wept.

“Teōtzin,” the woman said.

“I’m really not,” said Gwen. “I am just… I am sorry.”

“Teōtzin,” the woman agreed, warmly, forgiving her the joke.

By nightfall there were four hundred more, and a queue had formed that was not for rations.

And unlike before, the Regent of Shalkar had plenty of Faith to go around.

The priestesses came at dusk with a question about friezes.

Nine of them, the surviving seniors of the Cōātlīcue Communion. The serpent priests had spent four centuries administering the land in the name of a feathered God, and they were struggling with their new roles as civil servants. Presently, the priestesses wanted to know how the Martyr was to be depicted.

“The… Martyr?” Gwen observed the near-naked serpent women, though she wasn’t sure if creatures clad in colourful scales could in fact be naked. Unlike their Burmese cousins, these were more Coatl than anthropomorphic. They had the face of exotic women, but their torsos had the likeness of cobra hoods, and their arms were long enough to reach the floor.

They also took very well to the Golden Mead, probably because Almudj’s Essence was mixed into the concoction.

“Saint Lei-bup, Pale One. He who fed the Shoggy.” The eldest had a wax tablet; she had sculpted options. “The master mason asked whether the Saint is shown as he was, or as he became. There is precedent for both.” She passed Gwen the tablets.

Somewhere in aether, in a storage ring she would not open until her end of days, there was a set of bones that belonged to her first Pope. She had promised those bones an Elf.

The first design was of Lei-bup, as he was, piscine-mouthed, reaching out with a fin to the Shoggoth.

The next was Lei-bup, in his squid form, before the Shoggoth’s descent.

The final one was of Lei-bup, as a saint, with Gwen’s likeness behind him.

The Cōātlīcue’s eyes glowed golden. She must have heard the stories from the Twins.

“All of them,” Gwen said. “Show all of them. A great relief, as tall as you can make it, where the Devouring Dark descended.”

The eldest bowed, delighted, and went to tell the masons, and Gwen stood in the dark inside the tent and discovered that her hands were shaking a little.

Poor Lei-bup…

All this, for a sack of rice and a shopping bag of SPAM.

The damage came in at the end of the week.

Strun, in true Rat-kin fashion, had figured out that he could triangulate the population by using the Coatl tithe-rolls from the yearly sacrifice levy. If there was anything the priests bothered to keep as accurate as possible, it was grain weight and sacrifices.

Between them: of the people living on the western coastal shelf on the morning the Feather Serpent died, somewhere between thirty-seven and forty-three in every hundred were no longer among the refugees.

Not dead. That was the wording Hanmoul had presented to her. Dead was a category with a body in it. That, and it really wasn’t Gwen’s fault.

Hanmoul explained her innocence as follows on the bridge.

One: the Devouring Dark, summoned by Malakath, had stretched across the city and the continents. Its influence was everywhere, and the Precious Feather had been used as fuel. Ergo, the most faithful, those most blessed, simply perished.

Two: The crazed Coatl ceased being livestock and started devouring the nation’s citizens en masse. That had to be accounted for.

Three: Aristotle’s arrival had erased what was already largely erased, so it couldn’t possibly be Aristotle who reduced the population by about three-quarters.

Four: pacification. Velahi and Pelahwi cleared four ports and lost, in Hanmoul’s summary, about half the towns. They did it fast. They did it thoroughly. They did it because their goddess was loved. Anyone who resisted salvation was…

“Did you know there are canning factories inside Aristotle, Lassie?” Hanmoul asked her.

Gwen stared at the Dwarf uncomprehendingly.

“Aye, I had a look with the Divination gizmo. There are yonder tankers in there, with functioning canneries. Making SPAM.”

Gwen sat with the news for a long time.

Then she realised, with a little horror, that she was… alright with it.

The interest in investigating such a part of her followers’ lives simply wasn’t that important to the other matters at hand. Matters like Sobel, and Malakath, and the World Trees, and the Prime Material falling apart at the seams, and about three billion humans across the continents and countless other Demi-races trying to live a normal life of general, localised conflict.

“Strun,” Gwen fought the throbbing in her temple.

The voices were starting up again. The faithful were restless, and they demanded spectacle.

“Go… go and check out this factory. Just make sure it’s not…”

People. She imparted her red line internally.

“At once,” Strun saluted, his ears standing to attention. “Your will be done, your Paleness!”

Gwen sighed.

Presently, codified monikers were also beyond her ability to bother.

DING!

Her Message device chimed.

Now that she could communicate with her faithful across the Planes, waiting for reciprocal Divination Signals felt primitive and strange, like going back to dial-up internet.

Natalia’s projection came through at two in the morning, while Shalkar was still in the day.

“Yes?” Gwen answered from her chamber inside her Tower. She no longer slept. There was no need. She merely meditated while keeping the Faithful at bay.

“Regent. Shalkar. Magus Huang requests.”

“Patch him through.”

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Richard came through a moment later with his tie off, which meant it was bad, and a mug that said “Best Regent In Shalkar” in his hand, which meant it was not yet catastrophic.

“Your Paleness. I bring ill tidings,” her cousin gave her a cheeky, familiar grin, keeping her tethered to earth. “News from the Sparrowhawks. The Americans sailed. Task force out of Norfolk and Mayport, joined at sea by two more groups from Guantánamo. Eleven capital hulls, thirty-odd auxiliaries, and a landing element: Marines, engineers, a full Tower-support train and nine thousand tonnes of prefabricated harbour. News says it’s for Unilateral Humanitarian Access.” He set the mug down on something she couldn’t see. “They’re making for Tampico.”

“Tampico?” Gwen’s geography wasn’t great. “One second.”

She punched in a few Glyphs, and a living sand map came to life in the middle of her room, on a platform that usually served as an enormous coffee table.

“Huh… that’s opposite where we are.”

“Indeed, it’s Gulf side. Deep enough for the heavy cruisers, close enough to the interior that whoever holds it holds the road inland, and—you can thank Ollie for this—outside every single shipping lane we’ve been re-flagging through Arica. If they land, they’re in. In two months there’ll be an American port on that coast with an American Tower going up behind it. Nothing like ours, of course. But it’s not like we can shoot it into the sea.”

There was a pause. “Can we shoot it into the sea?”

“No,” Gwen refuted firmly.

“Damn.”

“How long?”

“Nine days at their speed. Six if they push and lose the slow auxiliaries.”

“I was thinking,” Richard said, looking sheepish. “Aristotle’s still around, right? She can move through the Elemental Plane of Water, bypassing our terrestrial geography. If she reaches the fleet in the next five days…”

Richard raised both hands.

“Horrendous Incident at Sea! The US Fleet lost to Rogue Leviathan! The Gulf Mer Vel to blame!”

Gwen considered it.

A part of her said absolutely.

Another part of her told her that there were at minimum thirty thousand sailors, civilians, engineers and troops on those ships. One Aristotle encounter, and there would be at minimum a hundred thousand dead Mer and twenty-five thousand Humans floating in the Gulf of Mexico.

Perhaps, one day, she would have to make such a decision.

Today would not be that day. If for no reason other than that she lacked the courage.

“Forget it,” Gwen said. “The central continent isn’t mine…”

“Right,” said Richard, slowly. “Tell the world that…”

“Well, look around me,” Gwen sighed. “Neo Tenochtitlan is built on the corpse of a vast serpent God, and I am trying to rebuild a city that doesn’t want to exist. If I put Aristotle across an American landing to contest a country I never declared war on and inadvertently took control of for humanitarian reasons, Ravenport will have to renounce all support.”

She turned her hands over. “I’ve been wearing this costume for a few weeks now, Dick. God knows Sanari made it comfortable forever, but I need a break. Let them land. Let them build a port and staff it and pay for it. Then let them find out what it costs to run a Black Zone with no Dyar Morkk, no Tower network and no local support, while we sit on the western ports, the grain, and the only working mass-transit on the continent. Let’s see their stock values after the third quarter spent bleeding out on the beach…”

Gwen took a second to catch her breath. “You know what, I am changing out of this.”

After some grunts, rustles, and groans, Gwen returned into view, glowing and golden, in an inexpensive white tee and golfing shorts.

“I think that look could incite more followers,” Richard said seriously. Then he whistled.

“Dick,” Gwen sighed. “Don’t ever change.”

Her cousin looked at her appreciatively from across time zones and space.

“So, we’re leaving them alone?”

“Give them a helping hand, even,” Gwen decided after a moment. “Let them commit resources.”

“Meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile, get the Consortium to sell them everything they need,” Gwen glowed a little brighter at the thought. “But…”

“But?”

“Find the HDM types they need to feed their version of Fabricators,” Gwen said after a moment’s thought. “Stockpile it. Raise the price.”

“Gotcha.” Richard made the hand signal for OKAY.

“Hold up.” Gwen stopped Richard before he could reach for the Glyph. “When they finally find another supplier—flood the market. Sell off everything.”

Richard raised both brows.

“Then find their next critical infrastructure, Magma and Fire HDMs, for example… and start all over…”

The bedchamber turned the colour of coin.

Truly, the Prophet of Profits was worth her weight in Golden Mead.

Shalkar Tower.

Number Three Fabricator Deck.

Hanmoul Bronzeborn, son of Dwomrul, Commandrumm of Deepholm’s Companion Legion, did not think much of her Paleness’ new lumen-talents.

After all, Nörn-Zur of the Lumen had glowed herself.

But his faith—or rather, his lack of faith in Faith—was wavering.

Hanmoul had done the measurements. In the twelve days since the Regent came aboard glowing, the Fabricator crews had posted a fault rate down thirty-one in the hundred; the Greybeard Engineseers were logging four hours’ sleep and waking inspired; and a Heavy-Clad seal that ought to have needed a reforging was found to have repaired itself, as if visited by the Ancestors themselves.

A Dwarf could ignore the glowing lady wearing shorts, with most of her limbs exposed to the mercy of the Himsegg—but he could not ignore a thirty-one per cent yield improvement for mere theological discomfort.

So: the light was good. Hanmoul decided. Hanmoul filed it under materials, alongside flux and vacuum grease and the strange singing steel that came out of Vethr Hjodlik when the Dyar Morkk got flooded.

“Commandrumm,” his Regent asked him from the commander’s chair, her feet dangling, one arch resting on the control consoles. His Regent had been tired of late, and he could see it in her golden eyes that the glow was getting to her as well. “How are our supply lines?”

Did the lass see the light behind her eyes when she closed her lids? Hanmoul wondered.

He put the form on the desk and turned it to face her. “Requisition. Deepholm Directorate o’ Health, countersigned Hildenbrandt, countersigned Axehoff, pendin’ yer mark.”

His Regent read the slate, her eyes scanning a dozen lines a second, then signed the manifest.

She picked up another manifest; her painted nails rose and fell like a hypnotist’s pendulum.

“Hanmoul. This is a requisition for eleven hundred litres of… me?”

“Eleven hundred an’ forty, over eighteen months, at a delivery cadence tae be agreed.” He kept his voice level. “Yer Blessed Essence, cut nine tae one wi’ the Shalkar mead-stock, held at temperature, distributed through the Citadel Directorates by lottery an’ by exposure risk. Schedule’s on page six. Priority one is Deep-Klad crews workin’ open shafts in the mid-way. Priority two, Engineseer parties past the Vjeit at Red Peak. Priority three, general population o’ the regions exposed to infection.” He paused. “Priority four’s bairns. Ah’d nae argue if ye moved four tae one. Hilda would.”

His Regent sat back up. “There’s THAT much Golden Mead available now?”

“Aye,” Hanmoul folded his gauntlets behind his back. “And it’s a conservative figure, Regent. The roots of yer tree’s all over the Dyar Morkk now. We’re clearing them now and then, on account of them blocking the trams.”

He watched her absorb the fact. The Regent was in deep thought.

Then she looked up with those golden eyes that seemed to pierce his mobility-Klad.

“Recovery’s yours then,” she said. “Port works, the Vjeit survey, the Bunker at Puerto Vallarta, the lot. Strun holds the Legions, Lulan holds liaison, you hold the ground. Richard will send whatever you ask for and won’t ask why. I’ll be gone about a fortnight at least.”

This was not surprising to Hanmoul. His Regent was not one to stay in one place. She couldn’t even wear the same armour for three weeks and four days. “Aye, Regent. Where will ye be, if Ah’m tae send word?”

“Tryfan,” Gwen said.

Tryfan. Hanmoul nodded. The World Tree of their knife-ear cousins of the light.

Supposedly, there was an Irøngut’s Grudge against the knife-ears. With the Deepdowners lost, however, and the Hall of Records destroyed in the exodus of the infected, none of the surviving Dwarves had an authentic basis from which to build their hostility.

“Aye,” the Commandrumm bowed, his Klad moving with him as he paid his respects to the luminous Regent. “Safe roads, yer Paleness.”

Then her Paleness was gone, lanky limbs and all, in a blink of an eye.

Arica.

The circle on the command deck put her into what Hanmoul called a Himsegg Vjeit, ninety metres under the Sierra Madre, meaning she teleported from one Teleportation Circle to another, and from there, she took the tram just to see what her people had built.

And to see if the World Tree’s roots had gotten this far.

It was still amazing to Gwen that, of all the things to escape the notice of her foes and allies, it was the Dwarven Dyar Morkk that made all the difference.

On the surface, the Mageocracy watched the Tower, the Tower watched the Demi-human cities and the Mer, the Mer stalked the coastal cities, and among them was a glowing woman who commanded all three. Yet, here in her low-way, she could come and go as she pleased…

Or, at least, she could, were it not for the prostrating Rat-kin and amazed Dwarves on her cargo carriage. These were the hard-working men and women, and… rats, who had spent three years quietly cutting a road through the Elemental Plane of Earth that now ran from the Isle of Dogs to the Andes, from European Bunker to South American Bunker.

More Dwarven Vjeits tying the Dyar Morkk to the overworld now existed near the Himsegg than at any other time in Dwarven history. The Dwarves, if one discounted the fact that Gwen was the de facto face of Hilda’s Orthodox Deepholm Dwarves, were also unified behind her promise of retrieving the stolen bodies of their ancestors from the Sinneslukare.

Speaking of which… Gwen made a few quick calculations.

Within the next six months, the encirclement of Amazonia would be complete. What she had promised Hilda and the others for their unconditional support would have to come to pass.

But that would be for another time.

At Arica’s Geofront, she was greeted by gawking workers with their mouths open. Rat-kin dropped to their knees in supplication.

This damned glow…

A Shield Golem, twelve metres of dormant brass with Fabricator manipulators where its hands should have been, saluted her.

She passed the threshold, smiled at her people, then stepped into air.

From the sky, Arica was disgustingly pleasant. The port did its unglamorous work below the headland—cranes, gantries, Dwarven steel coming off the freighters, Creature Cores going on—and above it the town climbed the hill in white and bean-green, and two nautical miles out the lagoon grown from Aristotle’s shed skin glowed a soft chemical blue under the afternoon.

They had customers already, largely well-to-do industrialists and their families from the Mageocracy. The resort was operational, at least in marginal fashion, and the guests seemed to be enjoying themselves.

She drifted downwards, sensing Ollie Edwards by the sheer amount of Golden Mead her fellow Magister had imbibed since becoming one of her hands.

She found the Regent of Arica on the open deck of his hilltop office, in a hammock, topless, holding a drink with fruit in it, tended to by Mermaids.

“Regent!” Ollie Edwards waved at her with the umbrella drink. “Care for a Dragon Fruit Smoothie?”

He did not get up. He did not kneel. He waved, from a hammock, with a drink, while two Mer girls of alarming beauty and no discernible occupation lay in the rock-pool beside him, joking in the Fifth Vel dialect. As with the Serpent women, the Mer wore shockingly little. Unlike the Serpent women, the mammalian Mer sub-species famous for dragging sailors to the depths were outrageously anthropomorphic. Ollie Edwards, Magister Edwards of the Shard, formerly prudish and British, did not seem to mind it at all.

Ollie wore a straw hat.

It was a very good hat. The band was Shalkar blue.

“Tsk,” Gwen made a sound. If only she could be this happy.

The Mer prostrated.

Gwen regarded the hills and valleys of Ollie’s aides. “... Rise… and Ollie, are those Sirens?”

“Maybe…” Ollie turned to the girls and spoke in fluent Mer.

The girls giggled.

The image of the hyper-competent bookworm in Gwen’s heart shattered.

“What can I say? Regionally, I am beloved,” Edwards shrugged. “I am your Regent of Arica, dear Regent.”

“Regional magistrate,” Gwen said, “is what you are. What are you wearing?”

“And you’re wearing…” Ollie’s eyes narrowed. “Nice golf shorts.”

Regent and Regent, golf shorts and boxers, hung side by side in the wind while the Sirens giggled.

Thankfully, Ollie was still competent.

For the next few hours, he gave her the commercial read on Tampico—better than Richard’s, because Richard read intentions and Ollie read manifests, and an American fleet could not lie about how much prefabricated harbour it was carrying.

And then, at the rail, with the lagoon glowing below them, Ollie took his hat off and turned it over in his hands.

“Can you grow hair, Regent?”

Gwen almost stumbled. “What?”

She considered it. “Are you taking the Golden Mead?”

“Miss Elvia said… it was Faith-related.”

“Then…” She paused. “Should… should I try…”

Ollie shook his head. “Not while I am still a Protestant.”

Gwen looked at the Sirens, one pale blue, and the other aggressively pink, like a flaming arowana.

“Keep me posted,” Gwen told her Regent of Arica. “We’ve got plans for the East Coast, but it only works if we let them do as they please. Sell them supplies, minimum 200% markup, if they ask nicely. You can also sell to our allies, and have them resell to the Empire Tower. Oh, and refuel our depot as soon as possible. Draw it from the Fifth Vel.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Ollie Edwards saluted her with his hat.

The Sirens prostrated again before she turned to leave.

Well… Gwen felt strange as she teleported back into the main station. At least someone’s happy.

Shalkar.

The Bunker.

It took six days of glowing to traverse the distance between Arica and Shalkar on the internal cargo freighters, which to Gwen was blessed rest, and time to meditate while she stemmed the surging Faith.

True to Hanmoul’s observations, her World Tree had indeed inundated the Dyar Morkk, resulting in extensive reworks, not to mention borrowed labour from their Elven allies at Tryfan, involving Sanari and her Druids.

Thankfully, the roots heeded her will—albeit she had to physically touch and coax the enormous structures to shift and move, and to form spiralled tunnels so the freighter-carriages could pass.

At the Bunker itself, as expected, Richard had prepared a spectacle—not for her, but for her city’s citizens.

The moment she emerged from the substation, standing on the fore of the cargo barge next to the work Golems, the lights of the entire geofront dimmed, leaving her golden self to illuminate the entirety of her former home.

The first thing she noticed wasn’t the hundreds of thousands of faces that had turned out to see her, but the roots. Hundreds of them, tendrils the size of buildings, snaking through what was once Dwarven geometry. The indescribable amalgamation of living matter and magi-tech, between the greenery and the lights, looked like a scene a movie maker from her old world had dreamed up in a fever.

Someone had even coaxed the roots into accommodating escalators and elevators, with levitational platforms built into the Rune-covered wood.

And on top of all this, standing in the middle of the teleportation circle, was Richard, in a three-piece military dress uniform, wearing his usual fox-like grin.

“A true Goddess wears whatever the hell she wants.” Richard couldn’t wipe the smirk off his face. “But Regent, do you have any idea what you’ve started? Rat-kin, in golf shorts and tees, I cannot… cannot begin to imagine.”

“A fine hello to you too.” Gwen opened her arms.

The two embraced.

The Geofront erupted.

An hour of performative waving later, the two of them arrived in the Sky Garden, where Phaelera made her home. The Harpies were now well grown, and they dove down in great flocks to greet their hostess.

Once the hens were satisfied with their Golden Mead allotments, Gwen hovered with Richard to the apex of the pocket dimension, where she could reasonably see the scale of her tree without entering the liminal “Grey Space” that made it impossible to perceive size.

For weeks now, she had been channelling Faith into her tree, as a kind of deposit space, so she herself wouldn’t go insane from the tiny mewling voices begging her for one thing or another.

“It’s bigger,” Gwen noted, drily, unsure of the implications. “WAY bigger.”

“Yep,” Richard concurred.

When she left for Teithuacán six weeks ago, the World Tree of Shalkar had cleared the Geofront’s upper gallery with room to spare. Now they could fit another two Geofronts between the old one and the Sky Garden.

Her World Tree had gone through the metaphysical roof. The Dwarves had noticed weeks ago and set to work without complaint reworking the plumbing and the conduits, because in Shalkar a growing tree was not news. The trunk went up past the terrace and past the gantries and out into the desert daylight, and the canopy above the city was wide enough now to form a glowing umbrella.

“Harvest’s up three hundred per cent,” Richard said drily. “The wheat has medicinal qualities now. It cures constipation, indigestion, and a range of minor illnesses. We had one field sprout and ripen in sixteen days. The corn has rainbow-coloured kernels.”

Gwen regarded her Regent.

“It’s true,” Richard nodded. “They’re selling like meat pies fresh out of the oven.”

They sat on the branches, listening to the swaying of the wind and the fluttering of Harpies with their bright plumage overhead, conversing in soft, melodic tones.

“Petra's joining us for dinner,” Richard informed her.

Gwen nodded. It would be good to chew the fat with Petra and catch up on the mundane matters of life.

The sun set, and the tree began its nightly bioluminescent glow, joined now by a Goddess who couldn’t tone down the psychic energies leaking from her divine body. Below her feet, a city of millions milled about happily, unburdened by the horrors she had made manifest across the ocean.

In the hours after Teithuacán, with a billion Mer minds coming down the Soul Tap at once and her Astral Body ballooning toward heat death, she had channelled the flood into her World Tree, because it was the only vessel in the world big enough to take it. And then, for however long at Neo Tenochtitlan, she had repurposed Sympathetic Life-Link to pump her surplus into the same place, over and over, at an industrial rate.

“Richard…” Gwen’s voice came as a whisper to her cousin. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure thing.” Her oldest friend and family sat next to her, his jacket finally off. His eyes were pale blue. Lea was watching as well.

“I am scared shitless,” Gwen said, allowing the oppression to escape her chest. “This… whatever this is, I don’t know what I am doing.”

Richard laughed, and his laughter carried no further than the next branch before it was swallowed by the space.

“Did you ever?”

Gwen kicked the air, feet dangling. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Richard patted the trunk. For a second, the whole tree seemed to shiver in response.

Gwen looked around them in alarm. The sensation, the presence, the playful mischievousness—it was far too familiar.

“Sufina?”

The leaves rustled—there was the trill of a woman’s sharp laughter—then all at once, their world filled with the living flames of amber leaves.