Chapter 260, 1/2

Chapter 260, 1/2

“Would you say that Da’luwe is representative of the overall nature of the Wraithborne Tower?” Erick asked.

The city administrator, who was an ancient crone of a woman with long, white hair and one good eye, said, “No. Many places are far less kind. The slave ways, for instance, are among the worst locations for the individual among all of the ‘verses. People are chopped up and sent along the path to be resold as goods and services for others down the line who don’t want to do the chopping and mutating themselves.”

Her name was Vondria Irons, and her soul was barely there among her body. She had stitched herself together in a hundred small ways, keeping her existence going long after she should have perished. Erick counted at least five major ways in which she was falling apart.

Her brain was half technology, firing with sparks of some density that Erick didn’t know, but which he suspected was some sort of mind expanding magics or power that allowed her to hold onto distant memories. Blue light filled what might have been mana veins inside her body, but which looked a whole lot more like circuitry, with lines that were too straight to be wholly biological. She had something going on with the insides of her bones that may or may not have been some sort of nanomachine thing, but it was too small to see without proper imaging and it seemed to cloud Erick’s mana senses, as though it was inimical to mana. Her heart was doubled, the second heart pumping in time to the original, central heart, and her liver was some sort of symbiotic organism with a completely different soul than Vondria’s own.

Other than those internal things, Vondira was an old, heavily wrinkled woman, with a hardness to her eyes that well-matched her last name of ‘Irons’.

“You would count Da’luwe as kind?” Erick asked.

“Aye. I would. Eldawae doesn’t give a shit about this place as long as the numbers are meagerly positive and he can have his peaceful view of the Endless, and occasionally flex his magic to destroy great swaths of uppity tyrants. We got it pretty good here.”

“... When you say ‘meagerly positive’ and ‘destroy tyrants’ and ‘view of the Endless’... If this place were to improve to be highly profitable, all tyrants were to be eradicated, and the Endless turned into lush green land, what would happen?”

Vondria grinned, showing off teeth that were only in her gums because she had technology making sure her teeth remained in working order. “I don’t know! It’s never happened before. I’d like to see it happen. I’d like to see a land where people don’t fight over drops of water, and the cost to get to Layer 0 wasn’t so huge.”

“I gotta say, Vondria, I wasn’t expecting you to badmouth your boss so much.”

“If you give me the power to overthrow him, I will do it. But that won’t happen for a number of reasons. First, you’re not sticking around, which means: Second, we need Eldawae to keep us safe from the true forces out there because: Third, we’re a safe haven in Layer 1 for all who come by, and there are a lot of people who come by because the Tower represents safety. Honestly, if your gifts of power work in my favor, I’ll try to keep Eldawae happy however he wants to be happy as well as institute new measures to expand the bounty of this land. I fully expect with a changed attitude in life that I would want to actually help those evil fuckers out there, and with enough power I’ll actually be able to do that.” Vondria said, “But we get the most Evil sorts of people here, Ascended Flatt. We’re at the bottom of Layer 1. If someone fucks up bad enough to get sent deep enough, to here, then they’ll come in and fuck up everything you try to do, while the strongest of us hide and wait out the storm as Eldawae kills and enslaves those tyrants and makes them into ghosts, or sends them on their way.”

Erick thought.

He said, “I’d like to have the names of the worst offenders in the inmate population right now. Those would be the ones I remove from this land.”

“And you shall have it.” Vondria said, “The only thing I ask of you is for you to review the production logs and to attempt to keep our production positive.”

“I’ve seen the logs. You all make 750,000 resons per day, at a cost of 700,000 resons per day. I wonder if those are the true numbers, though, because with those Benevolence towers out there you should have been making a lot more than that.”

“Only those who are Contracted to the Tower produce any resources. The mana of the Darkness-wrought life you created out there does not pay any bills.”

Erick looked at her. She wasn’t lying. Not really—

“We do capture the mana they made, and the water created,” Vondria said, without the barest of breaks in her outflow of words. “But more water than mana. Your systems are rather solidly made, Ascended Flatt. The only real resources we’ve gotten from your systems would be the mana made by subsequent life outside of the towers, and the water created by the copy machines. The mana produced inside the towers seems to remain inside the towers, though. This does decrease our bottom line, but not much right now.”

She left it there.

Erick got the distinct impression that Vondria didn’t have to watch her words around Eldawae at all, which is why she had been so easily willing to speak a half-truth to Erick. She was simply unpracticed with courtly intrigue, which... well. Good for her? It spoke well of Eldawae that his people were so easy with their words. That meant that the intrigue that happened around here wasn’t that deep. There weren’t many courtiers here in Da’luwe as far as Erick could tell. Eldawae might have been the only one.

This was probably on purpose.

Erick stood up. “I’ll speak more later.”

- - - -

Erick was in the third interview with a third city guard, and aside from individual reasons and individual ideas of what needed to be done, he was just like the other two in every way that mattered. They were also similar to Vondria, in that they had little patience or virtue in the courtly arts.

Kylychbech shot his hands into the air, yelling, “I don’t know what to fucking tell you to get you to intervene! Those fuckers in fifth section are set to run over the defenses of the outer rim of that new city by the inmate tower and do exactly to that land that they did to three others!” He scowled, pacing, saying, “You have power! Go out and fucking USE IT! Or use me to enact your will! Eldawae said that if I got dragon’d that he’d let me go end that fucking threat— My mother is in that inmate tower town, sir! I’m about ready to commit treason to go out and save the bitch! She won’t even fucking care if I killed myself to save her fucking bitch ass, but I still gotta do it!”

Erick had heard more than enough. “I appreciate your candor. I got some more interviews to go, then I’m going to go solve that warfront problem. From what I saw the marauders still had hours to reach the inmate tower.”

Kylychbech looked stunned. He collapsed to his knees. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Erick left for the last set of interviews.

- - - -

Erick stood in an open courtyard beside the large wall of the inner city.

Four ghostly beings stood halfway out of the wall, their forms indistinct here and there, but they were intelligible enough to understand. One of them was a traditional dragon who had given his name as ‘Solid Sky’. The others hadn’t wanted to give names.

Solid Sky spoke with a whisper, “I was born in a land of green and blue in a time far from time. I was cast to this land by the cursed fae. The land grows and I want to see it grow more. That is all I need to tell you.”

The flaming bedsheet said, “The desecrators must be desecrated themselves.”

The amalgamation of arms and eyes, said, “Rip and tear those who would rip and tear, Ascended. Water the land with their blood! Let new death fuel new growth.”

A being of faint light, barely visible in the air, whispered, “The Endless consumes and we are forever on the precipice of falling deeper into the maw. Too deep to ever escape. Too far gone to ever come back. We struggle. We survive. I would have us thrive. You have given us a lifeline. Wings to soar out of the depths, and into the light! Secure your power through my soul, Ascended Flatt. Use me for the betterment of our lands!”

The dragon bowed. The ghost bowed. The amalgamation bowed. The person of light bowed, kneeling before Erick, showing themselves as a person-shaped sexless existence.

Erick said, “I’ll be back.”

And then he flew away, into the sky, headed toward the inmate tower.

The ghosts watched him go and then they spoke amongst themselves as they faded into the wall once again, asking each other if that went well, or not. Solid Sky spoke of how there was no way to truly tell. Erick was too chaotic to read.

- - - -

The warfront was getting ready for war and Erick hovered high above like invisible and intangible light.

The inmates of the Benevolence tower were to the west, while the marauders were to the east.

Or at least those were the directions that Erick was calling ‘west’ and ‘east’, since there was no real north, south, east, or west out here as far as Erick could see.

... And yet. Hmm. That thought prompted him to actually test that theory by making a little container of water, a floaty bit, and a magnetized bit of metal to sit on top of the floaty bit. The magnet pointed at him, for some weird reason. Erick dismissed the compass, opting to figure that mystery out some other day.

And he looked to the warfront.

The war looked to be fought with sticks and blades, for not a single person down there had spellwork going around them at all. That would be because of the manaminer of Da’luwe, for sure. Perhaps some of the people down there had been true persons of arcane might, but they had been laid low in the enactment of disastrous Contract spells, and now they either hid out in the back lines making dinner out of sand rats and grasses, or they learned to pick up a sword and stood shoulder to shoulder with allies-of-convenience.

The armies were only a few hundred strong on the Benevolence front, but they were the real warriors of the Benevolence town. They had the best equipment and the best weapons. Or at least they looked the part, with those shiny bits.

The marauders were 15,000 strong, but they carried their entire civilization on their backs, with almost everyone there being... Well. Strong-looking men, mostly using sticks fashioned from trees that had grown in the towers. So. Great job, Erick. Arming them for this war. Fun times. Anyway. The demographics of Da'luwe were pretty skewed. Most people here were elven or human or orc or generally bipedal-shaped men, but there were some outliers here and there.

One of those outliers was a woman with four white wings hovering behind her back. She flew forward, ahead of the marauders, carrying a flag of red on black. It was a black bolt of lightning. She was flying to speak to a man who was walking out of the lineup from the Benevolence tower.

That man walking forward wore a light purple outfit. It wasn’t Nilton, for Nilton was far behind the frontlines, watching this all happen from atop a watch tower with a pair of binoculars as he spoke into a walkie-talkie, or something like that. There was technology everywhere, apparently, which was really quite odd for Erick to see since he had been without tech for a long time. Some guys down there even had gun-like things.

The marauders looked like they had a whole contingent of riflemen, each of them holding onto homemade metal tubes with sparkly bits to them.

Erick wondered at their range.

And then he wondered what sort of technology he should import to Veird when he got back to Layer 0, and solved this Fae Enclave nonsense...

They wanted him to kill things to prove his power, right?

Erick looked down at some ‘armies’ that could be considered a ‘proof of power’? Maybe? Of course the Enclave would just say, ‘they were weaklings, go have another challenge’. So Erick would have to do something... special.

Erick hummed.

... He had a solution, there. But...

... Hmm.

Yeah.

It was a good solution.

Kinda extreme.

No better place to test it out than here, though. It would have a lot of moving parts. It would be a great solution to this whole Da’luwe issue. They’d keep their production... Hmm.

Anyway.

As Erick toyed with that solution in his mind, he listened to the representatives of both groups meet and speak to each other.

“Greetings,” said the mouthpiece for Nilton.

“Death to you and yours,” said the not-angel woman, in a way that was so easily given and without rancor that Erick imagined it was a common greeting for her, for whatever weird reason.

“As much of a witch as ever, Totte.”

“As much of a murderous bastard as always, Peten.” Totte said, “Give us access to this tower or we burn it down.”

“Try it and die, yet again.”

“I seem to recall chopping off your head before you blew the fail safes and destroyed the last four towers. I bet you’d die again this time.”

“This tower is rigged to blow this time, too.” Peten said, “Maybe you’ll believe us this time when we tell you that you cannot have it.”

“If I can’t, then you can’t either.” Totte said, “This time we’ll pursue your deaths until you’re so deep in debt that you get dusted, your soul forever bound to Wraithborne.”

“Yet another empty threat. That’s all you’re good for. Here’s a real one for you, crafted by your betters, so you might learn the difference: We’ve got half a million resons in reserve. We’ll pay to triple your debts and then live fine while you’re dusted. Or. You can go away and buy from us, like we offered. We’re the kings. You’re the slaves. So either be good slaves or get stomped from on high. We have the resources to fuck you over quite well and you have nothing.”

Totte raged at that answer, cursing at the man, her flag transforming from wood and cloth into a long glaive as she beheaded Peten right then and there.

Peten just smiled, even as his head fell to the ground. He looked truly happy as his body turned to dust and his soul flowed away into the sands, headed elsewhere.

A small part of Erick wondered if Peten was so secure in his victory-in-death because he had come back a few times already. The majority of Erick was somewhat furious at Totte for not playing along at Nilton’s conquest, for pursuing a path that was bound to end in nothing for anyone. And then Erick grew mad at Nilton on Totte’s behalf. Blowing up places he had lost? Terrible form.

Erick’s anger was a quiet anger. The calm before the storm.

The storm built as fast as war broke out all across two kilometers of space between the tower defenders, and the marauders. Rifles fired metal balls that cracked wooden shields and sprayed blood into the air. Swords flashed at limbs, cutting and severing. People roared. Some marauders flew to the sky, having powers of flight that were not mana or reson-based or able to be stolen by the manaminer of Da’luwe. One marauder fired bright red lasers from his eyes. A man in black on the tower defenders’s side opened up holes in the world that swallowed all flying objects with absolute precision. Totte screamed, disrupting everything around her as she flew forward, her glaive leading the way.

And now Erick was mad.

He stared down a Lightning Path. He saw many different ways to remake the world.

He could talk to them all / They weren’t willing to talk.

He could force a compromise / [Reincarnation] could only do so much without oversight to keep people from reverting.

He could build a tower for the marauders on the other side of Da’luwe / And thus begins a different sort of war.

He could separate this war right now / And put off the problem for another day.

In his flight over here, and after getting some dossiers on the major actors of this warfront, he had considered transforming some of those major actors into Benevolence dragons at best, or maybe trying to work out some Empathying magic again. Erick didn’t actually have his Empathy magic anymore, because he had used that up to make the Crystal Star, and then the Crystal Star had moved on, back into the hands of Koyabez’s Church, and Erick had been granted the [Blessing of Empathy] spell from Koyabez, renewed automatically every time he used it. But that spell was from Koyabez, and it didn’t transfer over with him when he left the Script.

He could have made his [Blessing of Empathy] again; he was absolutely sure.

And yet, leaving behind that soul twisting magic had been kinda nice. Once that particular weapon was out of Erick’s hands, it had been like laying down a bloody and effective knife; it had been cleansing.

And besides that, Erick still had lots of ways to make people more empathetic. Kinder ways. Fresher ways.

That’s what Erick focused on now.

He focused on his Lightning Path as it stretched out from him, down into the center of the battlefield and stretched out in every direction, touching everyone on the field and arcing all the way into the Benevolence Tower town, and beyond. At the same time, a spell in Erick’s core vibrated with need. With Erick’s own desire.

As warriors killed warriors, and souls vanished into the sands, the Lightning Path coalesced.

Not five minutes ago a barely-conceived solution to the problem of war among the inmates had presented itself to Erick. Now, that solution proved as easy to walk as the Path.

Erick’s Benevolence laced his words as he spoke with mana and resons,

“In thunderous words, these strifes I mend.

“With proven power, a path’s creation

“pierce hardened hearts to gently bend.

“To distant shores! To tranquil stations.

“These souls released, on love we send

“down life's grand cycles; a Grand Reincarnation.”



A lot of things happened all at once.

The spell did not take just from Erick’s Mana. It took from his Health and Psyche, too.

White Benevolence arced down from all of Erick’s Everything, into the center of the battlefield where it split and hit Totte and the man she had just killed, ripping both of their souls out of their bodies and ashing what was left. The ash rapidly turned to plants. The lightning did not stop. It continued right down both sides of the conflict, hitting people in the heart, or head, or leg, and then traveling out the other side, where it split again, and arced further.

That lightning then flowed into the sky, worming through cracks in reality here and there like it was struggling to escape, but escape it did.

Erick’s body automagically created the magic he had done, marking it down as a Benevolence crystal inside his soul, and words popped up. Erick had not consciously done that. He had been prepared to do that, but he had not actually done that.

Grand Reincarnation, instant, special range, 500/500/500/100 resources/resons per target

Bestow bountiful existences upon a set of targets.

May those so touched by your power forever find themselves on a Benevolent Path.

May their new forms fit them better than the ones that came before.

For some reason the ‘spell creation message’ wasn’t there, which was fine. That was marginally less concerning than the fact that the spell had made itself into a pressable ‘button’. At least the spell cost went down from 5,000 per person, to 500 Mana, Health, and Psyche. Probably because Erick had no control at all over any part of this spell. People were getting put into the multiverse left and right, zapping away to Fractal or Darkness knew where, being placed in bodies that Erick had no control over at all.

Hopefully the people had some control over the spell themselves.

“Solidisuoskai.”

“Ah. So... was that an insult, or something else, to call you ‘Solid Sky’?”

“... I was 750 years old when they captured me on a world far from here and stuffed me into this wall of Da'luwe. This was 5,000 years ago. I am beyond insults and... beyond my homeland a great deal. I had thought I was fond of captivity but... I am not. I wish to be done with this conversation and to escape while you and Eldawae are distracted with each other. May I go?”

“After you tell me what I should know about Eldawae.”

“... He is a hermit, at heart. He wants power, and to go unnoticed. The biggest advantage you have right now is that you have ended a war in his lands and set up these lands for a better future for all further inmates who should fall here.”

“I was going to go with ‘you’re only making 50k resons per day, anyway, so what’s the big deal’.”

“... He’s making a lot less than that right now...” Solidisuoskai looked beyond Erick, at the large dome tower, saying, “Uhh—”

Evil Death blasted out of the central dome, casting wide and far, shattering the double door of the dome off its hinges and then disintegrating the door into metal shavings that rusted and fell apart, to wash like red sand upon Erick. Solidisuoskai escaped that wash of black-grey power and then the red wave, hiding behind Erick until the worst of it passed, and then fleeing as fast as he could flee directly away from Eldawae and the sandification of the entire central square of the center city. Black and grey pillars turned to rubble and collapsed in every direction, except in one, over there, far beyond a low hill on the other side of this starting combat.

Erick assumed that the small buildings in that direction housed the people that Eldawae cared about, or at least the ones he cared enough to save from Erick’s [Grand Reincarnation]. If Vondria, the city administrator, and those guards had survived, then if this fight calmed down, Erick would ensure that they could rebuild.

Eldawae stepped across the black sands that he had created, into the rubble of the main city center, onto the crumbling courtyard where he and Erick had first met.

Erick stepped toward him, saying, “It’s going to take me more work to fix these buildings now, so thanks for that.”

Eldawae twisted the air at Erick’s ‘thanks’, trying to capture something from him with a brush of unseen power. It was Fae Magic. It was useless. He went, “Bah.” And then he looked at Erick with silver glowing eyes. “Why did you do it?”

Erick spread his arms wide. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

Eldawae stared. “Where did my sister go?”

“Into 108 different lives. Her goal is to help those who she helped here, and then to come back with power to retake this land from the Tower, and maybe from you.”

Eldawae relaxed a fraction, even though outwardly nothing changed at all. Erick could tell, though. His Lightning Path was working well. A real fight had been avoided.

In a softer tone, Eldawae commanded, “You will rebuild my city.”

“Sure. Was gonna offer that anyway.”

“You will lift up Vondria to Benevolent dragon, and at least one of the guards. Kylychbech survives. You will raise him to power, too.”

“Sure. You need help to return this land to what it used to be, right?” Erick commanded, “Because you will return this land to the billion-plus metropolis in the Endless that it used to be, before Wraithborne came here.”

“Impossible. If we are productive, then we are targets.”

“Who do you have left to defend, Eldawae? Nothing.” Erick said, “So make your sister happy when she comes back. Take the inmates who fall to your land and make of them people who would wish to live here—”

“I tried! No one appreciates what is possible! The bottom line is the only thing that matters, and when that is satisfied too much then Wraithborne desires to take more and more and more.” Eldawae said, “No more.” Eldawae stared, his eyes pools of hateful silver light. “You are right in one thing, Wizard. I have nothing left to defend.”

Ah.

A fight, then.

The Lightning Path had been misled.

Eldawae opened with skeletal hands reaching out of the ground to grip Erick, his voice laced with power, “You come into my home and destroy my people. You have broken hospitality. I claim the Rite of Master and I name you my newest Slave.”

Erick easily dispersed the skeletal grips with a flash of light, responding with power of his own, “I have given the greatest gifts that anyone can give another; new beginnings, new lives, new hopes. And I have also given you the resources to begin again.”

Eldawae gathered black wind in the skies, flashing large, becoming both a black skeleton kilometers tall and the same elven lich standing ten meters from Erick. He pointed with his true self, which was both of him, saying, “Accept the pain you have caused.”

Erick tried to move to the side, to avoid the bolt of black aiming for his heart, but he couldn’t step out of the way at all. The very nature of reality itself held Erick there as Evil Death pierced his flesh, drilling deep, soaking into his core. It pained. Or at least it tried.

Erick disbelieved the pain.

The image in the sky vanished, the beam of Black Death splashed against Erick’s bare chest like a mirror scattering a laser, as Erick said, “I’ll accept my pain, if you accept yours.”

Great glowing draconic wings of Benevolence flashed out of Erick, rising high and breaking the Evil sky, dispersing the absolute-black clouds. Rain fell, bright white and destructive. That rain fell upon buildings that were not there. It fell upon history. And where it fell, it revealed towers and people moving on stone traveling blocks and rivers and libraries and Eldawae’s sister with her eight wings, standing beside him, one hand on his shoulder.

Ten pairs of feathered wings emerged where the rain fell behind Eldawae, as he saw the past.

Eldawae stared at his sister, his silver eyes unclouding, the grey of Elemental Death and the black of Elemental Evil fading from view, revealing a glowing brightness that was every color of every sun. He stared, his skin turning to supple, tanned flesh, his black bones vanishing from where they protruded.

Eldawae’s sister said something, her lips moving

And Eldawae breathed, exactly like a lich did not need to breathe at all.

A bolt of static came for Erick and touched off across his skin, leaving tiny black marks that quickly healed.

A ten-meter thick column of Benevolent Lightning crashed out of the sky and obliterated Eldawae in an absolute radiance of power.

All the world was light.

And then the light began to fade.

Erick floated above a crater that had once been the courtyard of the center of Da’luwe. The crater extended a good twenty meters down and thirty-ish wide. Eldawae was nowhere to be seen and the clouds in the sky were already vanishing, the illusions of the old city vanishing, too, under the light of the Margleknot sky.

“So that’s probably not over,” Erick whispered to himself.

Erick went to the well-protected storage room behind the hill, far, far behind where Erick had confronted Eldawae. It was, as Erick had suspected, a protective safe house. Erick ripped the roof off of it, exposing a nearly-dead Vondria who looked catatonic for whatever reason, a very angry Kylychbech who had a whole bunch of words against Erick, and a few different people, from two elven children with little wings to a scattering of people who had powers swirling around their bodies, trying to make a formation around the winged kids.

Erick said, “I’m going to fix this first, and then we can talk.”

And then he took Vondria and first [Reincarnation]ed her into a younger version of herself, free of all her tech and ailments, then he turned her into a benevolence dragon and set her aside. When he was done with the city administrator Vondria was a rather pretty pale violet, quadrupedal, 2-winged dragon. She’d probably mostly be the same person. Probably. She’d be missing externally-held-in-tech memories and grafted power because Erick had removed all that, so...

Whatever the case, the transition was A Lot for her so she was sleeping now.

Erick let her sleep.

He tried to turn the soul that inhabited her liver into a person, too, but when he saw that fractal splash of possibility around that soul he recognized the soul as that of a rat. So he turned it back into a rat.

And then he went to Kylychbech who was organizing the ‘resistance’.

Erick sat on top of the wall of the now-roofless building, looking down at the people. He focused on the kids. “So Eldawae has a few different backups. Those kids are two of them and you’re all slaved to protect them as best you can. Do you see that?”

“They’re kids!” Kylychbech pointed his sword at Erick and shouted, “Why would you want to kill them?! I’ll kill you before I let you get to them!”

Erick frowned—

One woman suddenly held a knife to her own neck, saying, “Leave or I’ll kill myself!”

That seemed to be a much better idea to Eldawae’s defenders than Kylychbech’s idea. Within four seconds every person had a knife or a weapon held against their own necks. Erick didn’t bother telling them that that wouldn’t stop him from doing what he needed to do, because he could just heal them. He could bring them back to life, too. The only ones not threatening their own lives were, of course, the two little boys, who were not little boys at all.

The first clue was that they looked like Eldawae, but with small black wings. Only single pairs of wings, too.

The second was that Erick’s Lightning Path was pointed here.

The third was that Eldawae was a freakin’ lich. Of course he survived a little thing like a proper Wizard Duel.

Erick said to them, “Splitting your soul to hide from standard magics is a good one, but I know that trick. I know practically all of them, including Chaining Soul Destruction, which is a very good solution to this predicament. I’m sure you can survive that at least the first few times, but I can figure out something eventually. So! Would you like to drop the act and talk about the complete removal of Evil from this land? Because that’s my goal. I want all of Wraithborne to be ‘not Evil’. And that starts with you all as an example of a better way forward.”

One woman sliced her neck, followed by two others rapidly attempting the same. Erick simply healed them and then set them down in another building sleeping under some [Merciful Ether]. And then Erick did that to all the rest of them except for Kylychbech, who remained with the still silent Eldawae-phylacteries. The boys were staring pretty hard at Erick the whole time, too. They were very mad, but they couldn’t do much about it—

“Oh,” Erick said, as he realized something. “You have a lot of soul damage. You probably can’t talk.” As the two angry boys stared harder, Erick looked at their weird souls... he hummed, then guessed, “And one of you has to die to make the other one whole, too... if I’m reading that right. Not sure. There’s probably five more of you scattered out there in the Endless. Probably on another Layer, too... That’s a bit harder to deal with.”

More than five? Less than five? Who knew!

Kylychbech, tied down with stone and unable to move, threatened, “I’ll bite off my own tongue!”

Erick frowned at the man. “Go ahead. I’m waiting.”

And then Kylychbech did exactly as he threatened.

“Oh Koyabez fuck!” Erick said, disappointed that he didn’t see this exact thing coming. “Let’s put you back together and you can go to sleep, too, unless you’d like to talk openly?” The guard tried to bite his tongue off again. “Well okay then!” Erick put him to sleep and then did a bit of normal [Reincarnation] followed by draconic reincarnation on the man. When that was done and all of Kylychbech’s soul twistings were gone, Kylychbech’s everything replaced and enhanced with draconic might, Erick set the grey-colored dragon sleeping in a square down the way. He patted the guy on the nose, saying, “Wake up well, Kylychbech. Your name was already draconic, so this is all quite poetic, in my opinion.”

Erick returned to Eldawae’s phylacteries.

The two boys were in the middle of trying to kill each other and one of them had nearly succeeded, having stabbed the other boy with a length of broken rock on the side of the head. Erick cleaned up the mess and healed the wounds, and then he looked to the two silent boys.

“... I’m not sure how to handle this.” Erick admitted. “Neither of you are the whole Eldawae, and while my [Reincarnation] can restore a person to wholeness, the person that comes out of the parts of you that you have obviously partitioned might not be the whole ‘Eldawae’, and the other pieces are still out there. They’ll likely be coming here to rebuild once I’m gone. Likely as a single person and with the full power and the support of Wraithborne behind him.”

The twins didn’t offer any solutions. They just stared at Erick with hate in their eyes.

Erick couldn’t do much in the greater scheme of things. Not as a single person, anyway. That’s why he had built House Benevolence. But he was just a single person here, and Da’luwe needed defenders. Powerful defenders.

There were still inmates out there in the land... And the whole place was still under the effects of a manaminer, and there were probably a whole bunch of lich-secrets buried here and there, waiting to bite Erick in the ass the second he got complacent.

He knew what he needed to do. Theoretically. The biggest source of Good he could accomplish would be to go and free the Celestial Observatory from Wraithborne influence. And to do that, he needed to get back to Layer 0.

Hopefully reincarnating half a million souls into new bodies across the multiverse, and also killing the time worm, would be proof enough of his power to satisfy the fae of war at the Enclave; Lord Dakka. Probably not? Hard to say. Freeing the Celestial Observatory might, though, and Lady Aelorika and Lady Seraphaka wanted more ‘good’ in Margleknot, so supporting that growth of Good would be good for that.

Erick wasn’t giving up on manhandling Wraithborne into Good. If he could do that with the Shades of Ar’Kendrithyst, he could do that with some lichs and ancient evils of the Wraithborne Tower.

Probably.

“Wraithborne wanted a whole bunch of truly Evil lichs gone anyway, right?” Erick asked the twins. No answer came, so Erick said, “I need to lower my scope, anyway. Veird is still the main concern.”

Erick paused.

And then he made a decision that was not a decision at all. “I need to clean up this place anyway, and you both get to be city administrators once again.”

As Erick put both boys to sleep, and cast [Reincarnation] on the first one, he smiled a little as the fractal splash of possibilities opened up all around the boy, showing Erick all of mini-Eldawae’s possible futures. The same thing had happened for Vondria and Kylychbech, and it was just one reminder that all magic was connected, even if one didn’t fully understand it all at first. This stuff here was already Fractal Universe Wizardry long before Erick even knew that this universe was thought of that way by the Fractal Fairy, the Voice of this Cosmology. Phagar’s fractal splash was probably connected to this universe, too. Erick wondered a lot about all of that stuff as he searched boy #1’s Benevolent futures for a good one.

Most of the futures ended in death, either permanent or Elemental Death.

And yet, Erick saw a future that was the rebirth of the white city in the Endless.

Erick picked that one.

The boy transformed into man, all of his soul damage filled in with Benevolence, Renewing his very existence itself. Erick set aside the 6-winged man and looked to boy #2—

Who collapsed in a pile of dead flesh.

Erick paused.

“... Circumstantial proof that the bodies were all connected.” Erick wondered. “Will there even be an Eldawae hidden out there in the world, coming back to strike with Evil Death?” Erick wondered some more. And then he shrugged.

Erick [Reincarnation]ed every single person in the city, erasing all of their soul controls and putting them into younger bodies. He knew nothing of many of them, but he knew enough based on the reports and paperwork that he had overseen in Eldawae’s dinner in order to pick for people who fought him every step of the way due to the soul controls put in them.

Erick felt vindicated that he was doing the right thing because every single person he cleansed of influence came back thankful.

By the time he was done with the city his glowthread clothes had regrown enough to give him a loincloth, which was nice.

Erick flew over the city and began planning for his repairs. [Mend] did not work here at all, since that was based on a manasphere imprint of an item and returning that item to its previous manasphere imprint shape. But [Stoneshape] and other spells worked well enough. Erick almost wanted to do a [Cityshape], but that would be way too widespread and likely break stuff under the surface.

Erick hummed. This whole land had once had a much larger airspace, with white spires reaching high. Erick wasn’t sure, exactly, how it survived so long and so well here on Layer 1, where war seemed common. Heck! Erick glanced up in the Margleknot sky, past the horizon of blue, and saw people fighting giant kaijus and ripping up the land far, far away. Planet sized monsters? Maybe.

They looked like barely-moving pinpricks from this far away; like the smallest stars in the sky that a person without enhanced vision would need a good telescope to see. Erick saw them just fine.

Anyway.

Erick began demolishing all the black buildings with great swaths of power, ripping up black stone and setting it to the side of the main city. And then came eternal stonewood trees. Those trees grew massive and they were very alive, even if they didn’t look the part. A few Shapings later and the trees were still alive, but they were shaped into apartment buildings and courtyards and all sorts of city spaces that were similar to the ones Erick had seen in the vision of Da’luwe’s past.

But a bit shorter.

The pools and the waterways and the farming lots and all of that of the current city —before Erick and Eldawae trashed it— were all somewhat still there, but now they were done in white and black instead of black and grey. Those were the city’s colors now. White, for Benevolence, and Black, because Wraithborne was Black because Evil was Black. But in Erick’s mind this Black was simply Darkness. He grinned at that little trick. Melemizargo would have hated them using ‘black’ to mean Evil, and Erick was kinda mad at that too. Black was a great color that did not deserve to be lumped in with ‘Evil’ at all.

Erick added some small [Terraforming] storms and node networks here and there, and then he wrote down how to take care of it all upon a large, white obelisks. He described [Renew] magic with Elemental Benevolence, and [Terraforming] magics with all the accompanying physics and particle interactions. He spoke of harmonies and Mana Altering and Shaping, and a bunch of different Elements besides Benevolence. He wrote down how to create more nodes in the node network, with all that Draining spellwork and otherwise.

And then he copied that large white obelisk and scattered those copies all across the land, in the center of Da’luwe’s new town squares and fountains here and there, and inside every one of the 9 Benevolence Tower out there. During the course of that travel, he came across 34 people. 16 of them hid from him, even after he spoke aloud, telling them that they could move on from here if they wanted. Erick left them be. Most of the people he found wanted to move on, and so Erick bid them a Lightning farewell. One of them, an old witch woman with some sort of highly-protective personal magic and wearing white, wanted to stay here, but she wanted a safer life.

“I’m old as dirt and I usually live outside of the walls anyway. I want to stay here, especially if things are getting better.” The old woman said, “Can you do that? Make me young but let me stay here?”

Her skin was tan and wrinkled, but there was a mirage around her edges. She looked almost not-there at some angles.

Erick looked her over, and said, “Probably. Unless whatever you’ve got going on is... What is that, anyway?”

“Witchy witchy. Stops the bad stuff unless I’m nervous, then it stops everything.” She shrugged. “Try anyway?”

“It might go away after this change.”

“If you can break it and get me normal, I’d take that option.”

Erick hit her with a [Reincarnation].

Every single one of her futures had her as an invisible person walking through life, never knowing others and always being overlooked. She was a hole in the world, untouched by all. Except in a few spots. Erick saw an image of her as a mother in a nice house, serving a family dinner to her husband and their five children and their tens of grandchildren. Another image had her as the leader of a town and raising thousands of people to power, transforming sand into arable fields with coordination and then transforming that land into crops with Benevolent Rain. A third image was her killing a few people and then being sent to the executioner’s crush.

Erick picked the one with her as a leader.

The woman rose from the sands transformed to a young elven woman in her late teens. Erick set her down in a safe spot in the nearest Benevolence Tower, along with a blanket, some extra clothes, repaired versions of her own clothes, a knife, and some fresh fruit in a stone bowl.

By that time several hours had passed and the people in the central town had been awake for hours, except for the new Eldawae. Hopefully that had been long enough for them to get through most of their anger at each other and the situation.

But they were still quite mad at Erick.