Chapter 18: Reversal of Fortunes
“You are not being held responsible for this disaster.”
Marus relaxed at his father’s words. To say that the loss of so many worlds at once – especially to an outside force – was unprecedented would be to undersell the scale of the catastrophe. Obviously it had spread far outside of Marus’ own assigned world, but to many he was the originator of the problem. He’d heard the whispers that blamed him for allowing Cato to enter the System at all, and it would have been all too easy for Clan Eln to use Marus to take the fall for such a thing.
Not that it would have actually solved the problem. Nobody actually knew the extent of Cato’s forces, or where he was getting them. There was no way that he should have been able to put so many forces on so many worlds without even a hint beforehand, but Cato clearly had never cared about what was possible.
“However, this is something serious enough to take to the elders.” Marus’ father swiveled his head a few fractions to regard the map of territories. Clan Eln had hundreds of worlds, but fully half of the ones lost to Cato’s activities were theirs, putting a large bite into their steady expansion. Two millennia of work gone in days. “Come with me.”
Marus fell into place behind his father, feeling dwarfed and almost childlike in the shadow of the patriarch’s enormous frame, even if he was hundreds of years old. It was rare for Marus to go any deeper into the family complex than his father’s office; that was, effectively, the limit for anyone who was not a direct heir of the core worlds. They passed through halls lined with trophies and keepsakes, items that were rare even among the gods, and down a long passage to a great dark disc embedded in the wall. A portal connection.
It blossomed into life at the touch of his father’s deity icon, and Marus stepped through with some degree of trepidation. The core was a different place altogether; the deities there were not merely the family members who had been raised in the realm of the gods, but those who had fully committed to the divine path. That rarefied company had an understanding of the System that Marus could never hope to match, and in fact had no desire to try.
The System Space was a place of great crystal pylons, each of them stretching across the interior from one end to the other, the world wrapping around itself like the inside of an enormous ball. The estates dotting the space, arranged around where the pylons touched the ground, were reminiscent of the Temple buildings in mortal cities, with carefully curated lawns and terraced balconies. Yet what most struck Marus was how thick the essence was, saturating the entire space and almost intoxicating with each breath.
His father invoked his movement Skill, crossing to one particular estate with a flicker of will, and Marus followed, the two of them entering an ascetic vestibule that was neverthless as large as Marus’ entire deity domain. It wouldn’t have been surprising if they would have been made to wait weeks or months, considering the status of the elders that had to inhabit this particular System Space, but instead a mortal servant showed them through immediately.
The Eln Clan Elder waiting for them, meditating at the base of the palace-width crystal, actually looked old. Marus hadn’t seen anyone that appeared aged in longer than he could remember. It just didn’t happen. Yet when the gray-furred, slightly hunched man opened his eyes, there was nothing frail at all in the power glowing there.