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The land was called The Last Good Continent in the tongue of the natives.

The Last Good Continent was smeared on the inside of Fenrir like peanut butter. This particular swipe of peanut butter had grown a whole new ecology of fungi in the shapes of people and castles and civilization.

This land was the origination of a fungal infection that was already spreading far and wide, far past the original boundaries of this place, because the Last Good Continent was a land of vicious, ultimate battles. But not the normal kind of battles. These battles took place inside every person, and every living thing composed of multiple cells. It was a battle that went unseen by the hosts, except in the flesh stalks and protuberances that erupted from those bodies like flowers here and there, if the conditions were right for flourishing. It was normal for them. They lived with it. Reproduction in the dominant local population didn’t happen without fungal infections growing ready for such.

They looked like humans. They called themselves humans, and they were human, mostly. They built societies like anyone else, with kings and children and bakers of bread and diggers of ditches. The trees were funny, with shrooms here and there that were at clear odds with the trees themselves, which were normal brown-barked and green-leafed, or maybe some more exotic colors, if they were a more exotic variety.

It was Veird, taken in a weird direction at the very start of the Script, post Sundering. Erick guessed this version of Veird had something to do with the Death of all Halves and the creation of the orcols, if the orcols had only been the start of the combination of all people into one people. These people were very robust. Incredibly strong. They had tamed all of their world they wished to tame.

The lands just to the side of The Last Good Continent were completely unprepared for the arrival of the Last Good Continent, though. There had been no war for dominance among the people at all, for the people did not need to wage war to secure their place among the lands of Fenrir. Their fungi did that instead.

The Valkyries culled from the outside in, burning great swaths of forests that had been turned into cacophonies of decaying mushrooms, with lands filled with the dead and dying who had no defenses against the rot. Those that died went on to gods, prayers on their lips and hope fading with the light. Those that lived were in pain. The Valkyries ended that pain and brought those people back to life as best they could.

Most people came back fine.

And the Valkyries burned, and burned, from the outside of the infection inward, but when they got to the edges of the Last Good Continent, they were rebuffed. The people of the Last Good Continent were archmages and archwarriors and they were in tune with their world itself, calling upon the very air to Decay the Valkyries as they advanced, to poison the Blood, to Consume all Elemental Carnage in a wave of devouring Myco Magic.

The land here was, quite frankly, disastrous to all other life.

The people here called it The Last Good Continent because all the others were fully given to the slimes and oozes. Those slimes and oozes hadn’t come with The Last Good Continent to Fenrir, thankfully.

Erick referred to The Last Good Continent as Problem 899.

It had been 4 real-time days since the Valkyries had surrounded and quarantined this land, but the people of this land could see all the rest of Fenrir out there, and they had circumvented the quarantine through [Teleport]s and other magics in order to inhabit that land. People and fungi both liked to spread, after all.

Problem 899 had become problems 899-1 through 899-128, with that number increasing by the day.

And though they might be problems right now, Erick wanted to make them welcomed people. He liked what he saw. People made business and friends and the justice system seemed equitable and everything here was pretty great. But the single-cellular war at the base of it all made cohabitation impossible.

Erick appeared in the sky to the east of The Last Good Continent, like a black cloud 40 kilometers across. Below and behind him was a wasteland, and ranks of Valkyries formed a wall of blackgold fire ahead of him, separating the wasteland from the pock-marked fields of some former farmland. Stuff still grew in that farmland, because the fungus-stuff was very resilient. It grew wheat and otherwise exactly within the fields in which it was planted, exactly as it should, because Myco Mages had told it to do that, and it obeyed. The grass grew strong, providing ample nutrients to all the micromushroom colonies in the dirt. The people here didn’t even have to eat the bread that they made from the wheat, for they could just go out and eat grass and otherwise, but they still liked the finer things, like bread and books and buildings.

The lands beyond the farmland held a rural area, with a large city just beyond that. It was a metropolitan area, for sure, with glowing roads where people walked fast upon mushroom carpets, and where carts were pulled by cows with tiny shrooms growing out of their horns. People walked around like normal people, though some of them had eyes made of shrooms, which didn’t seem to impede them, and priests spoke of the fall of the gods and the danger of the blackgold Valkyries outside of the city.

The Valkyries had decided to just quarantine the original land and then move on to save the rest of Fenrir, but the rest of Fenrir was mostly saved, and now it was time to deal with this.

At Erick’s appearance, the people in the city grew understandably concerned.

A 40-kilometer wide dragon would do that, and Erick had fluffed out his wings all the way to let them know he was here. To say there was a panic would be an understatement.

The people in the castle, however, had been waiting for Erick to show. The Valkyries had told them that their Apparent King was going to solve the problem of this land, and now, the Apparent King was here.

A mushroom bloomed on the farmlands below, taking up an entire field. It was brilliant purple with bright white spots. And then it popped and a squadron of elites appeared; a pair of archmages, some myco mages, some archwarriors, and the king of this land.

He was not the king of the whole continent, for the Last Good Continent was more of a land of city states than an empire. Erick had picked this guy to interact with, though. King Cando was his name, and he looked human, same as all the rest of the people. His specific mutation was a crown of golden spike-like mushrooms that grew out of his blond hair. That was the Mark of Royalty in this land, and it had to be earned in some sort of ritual that all king-hopefuls undertook every year. Most of the king-hopefuls failed, returning empty-handed back to their homes. Every once in a while, when it was time for a city to bud off and more people to move to a new city, to be born there, a king-hopeful would succeed in the ritual.

That mushroom the king had growing out of his head was something like his ‘Class’, in the classical Script-sense, and it allowed him to support the growth of a kingdom.

In the last four days, every single person who attempted the King Ritual for the Golden Crown had succeeded, because there was a lot more land out there to be had.

And thus, the problems had compounded.

Still, though, Erick wanted to save everything in this land that could be saved.

Erick shrunk down to size, to becoming a simple person to float down beyond the kilometers-tall blackgold flamewall of the Valkyries, to land a few kilometers inland, in the farming fields.

The archmages and warriors and the king viewed him skeptically. Hatefully, really.

As Erick descended, a few more purple [Teleport]-shrooms popped in the distance, releasing nobles and warriors and otherwise; some of them hoping for good words, most of them expecting a fight.

Erick wore a disposable white and black robe, and that was it. He stepped down onto a road of good brown soil. The soil tried to eat into his feet, but he didn’t let it. The very air cast spores into his lungs that tried to take root, and he did not let them. The light in the eyes of the king glinted, and Erick felt something try to take hold in his own mind. Erick didn’t allow that, either, but he also didn’t begrudge the king his mind bending power.

King Cando truly didn’t mean to do that on purpose; it was just how culture and power worked here.

When the valkyries met and tested this land days ago, the same thing had happened in so many different ways and Erick had to erase some memetic threats from that grouping of Valkyries, and lock down the system with some constant powering, to ensure the same thing didn’t happen again.

Every single person of power in this land tried to take control of the people below them because it was literally the only thing that worked to keep the land controlled, to keep the shrooms and fungus and all the little single-celled, magically-empowered organisms from ripping their hosts to shreds and eating everything.

That’s why the King Ritual of the last few days had had such phenomenal successes; the King Shroom recognized that it needed to spread to control the problems out there.

Erick hadn’t gotten into the research of why this place was called ‘The Last Good Continent’, though; It wasn’t that important. It was kinda odd that all the rest of their world was in a bad shape, though, if they could just spread and control the land they saw.

Erick spoke in their own language, “Greetings, people of the Last Good Continent, and King Cando.”

King Cando startled a little. “You speak our language quite well. I hope that no more miscommunications happen, and that we can proceed as two ships sailing near each other, and not touching.”

The guy was pulling some weird sort of power move, because he was talking about miscommunications and then using an idiom to get his point across. Erick didn’t even touch the part about saying ‘oh, you speak well, eh’? Maybe these people simply didn’t have [Language Acquisition]? It was possible, though unlikely.

So Erick replied, “I do not mean to disparage, but I don’t think you even realize that you just spoke in an idiom, and not in actual words with meanings that can be understood by all.”

King Cando frowned a little.

The king’s entourage had much more severe reactions.

“You’re no king at all!”

“A decieverfern! A weak potion!”

“Who wouldn’t understand ‘two ships’!”

“Your Valkyries have more sense than you!”

“I bet they don’t even know what you’re thinking!”

“You’re a controller! Not a king!”

The king’s entourage yelled and Erick was interested in them, but in a magical sort of way.

Every person in the king’s entourage were all subtly connected to the main golden spikes upon his head, and the feelings of their speech and thoughts went both ways. They argued for the king, and the king supported them in turn. It was natural for them. These archmages and archwarriors and myco mages weren’t just hangers-on, or people hired for jobs, or even people who flowed into positions of power to eventually end up at the king’s side. Those sorts of people were the nobles watching from afar, with their own little entourages.

These people were near their king because they were his extended brain, body, and his deepest family. They were, in essence and fact, the very center of this particular kingdom, and the entire ruling ‘couple’, though it was more like 9 people all in a relationship with each other, and in a relationship with their kingdom. Erick imagined it got very, very complicated, but also not that complicated.

When two kings of the Last Good Continent spoke, it was with entourages on both sides, each of them talking all over each other while the kings tried to set the tones. One king meeting another without an entourage was like a naked pauper meeting a warrior in full plate in a fight and expecting to be taken seriously.

This was part of why talks through others hadn’t worked well, and why Erick was here, in person. The Valkyries had some mind-linking things going on, and so the people of the Last Good Continent respected them some, but not enough.

Erick finally had some time to devote to this sort of problem, though, so he cast several illusions of himself into the air in different colored clothing and started shouting right back at the king, through his ‘entourage’. King Cando’s people briefly paused in shock, and then they started shouting differently.

“Illusions! To a King Meeting! How false can you be?!”

To which Yellow Erick yelled back, “I come from a different land! You expect me to follow your customs? Fucking ridiculous!”

“And now he brings uncouth language into this! He is a delinquent and a fraud!”

“He’s also that Black Dragon from antiquity! A deceiver and the killer of the Old Cosmology!”

To which Green Erick replied, “I’m from an Infinity far beyond yours and even beyond my own! Resemblances are just that! Resemblances!”

Blue Erick backed up Green, “And I’m here to right an ancient wrong! You were stolen, and now you are back.”

“We’re doing just fine without you. Go away!”

“We don’t need your Personal Scripts, either! The growth is all wrong!”

Pink Erick said, “We’re not going away, ever again, and your people are spreading pain and fungus everywhere.”

Brown Erick said, “We’re here to stop that and bring you into the new age.”

“We kept our people here after we saw the warnings from your House Benevolence,” said a Myco Mage.

“Those are the other nations breaking the peace by making those wars!” said another Myco Mage.

King Cando winced.

Everyone in the King’s entourage recognized that was a poor rejoinder, and the Myco Mage, who looked to be the youngest of the King’s entourage at maybe 19, paled and whispered apologies. Of course it didn’t matter who broke the peace, only that the peace was broken at all—

Ah.

Erick realized why, in the Veird that this place had come from, why they didn’t colonize the whole world, and why such a place named the ‘The Last Good Continent’ even existed at all. Breaking Peace with expansion was cause for some sort of big war. A very big war, based on whatever was going on in the minds of the King’s entourage.

The yelling part of the conversation ended.

Erick went all in with the big ultimatum, “I will obliterate this nation and everyone inside of it, killing everything in the Last Good Continent down to the smallest spore. You will have no say in this. You will live again after the fact. That is what will happen.”

King Cando said, “We will fight.”

“Your people will experience a great deal of pain by fighting. More pain than what needs to happen.”

King Cando pleaded without actually pleading, “We could construct a barrier. A real one. We could separate.”

“No you can’t.” Erick said, “Even now, your crown of Gold Spikes is spreading spores in the wind, trying to take root in anyone who wants power.”

The King’s entourage balked, trying to play that off as a lie.

But the nobles of this land, standing in the distance with smaller entourages of their own and silver crowns, heard everything.

Erick laid it all out there, “Your infections long to infect others, to seed the land and burrow into every available host. That is why you cannot be allowed to exist in this form.”

King Cando frowned. “It’s not an infection.”

Erick showed his feet, under his robes. Coils of blue-green fungus tried to eat into him, but he shook his foot, and they disintegrated. He shook out his arms, and spores cascaded off of his clothes. He put a finger to one side of his nose, and blew out the other side of his nose, sending droplets of some yellow slime out of his nostrils. He wiped that away.

Erick said, “Looks like an infection to me.”

The archmage beside King Cando tried, “You could just accept the power of the slime within you. Fighting it is how you die. Cultivating it is how you gain power.”

Erick told them all, “Sometimes, things which are corruptive and destructive need to be burned away completely. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be lived with. To give in is to find yourself twisted into something you never wanted to become. Most of your own world was lost to the infection, yes? I will not lose any of this world to your way of life.

“This is not an act of war for me.

“This is not an act of hatred, or malfeasance.

“This is an act of mercy for every other person in this universe, at the cost of everything you are right now.

“I will make it as painless as possible and then resurrect you afterward, as well as give you resources to rebuild and help you rebuild. You are not the first civilization I have had to topple, and you will not be the last. You will lose everything and gain infinity in turn. Please accept my judgment.”

Silence.

Erick saw King Cando’s acceptance long before the king actually said anything, but it still took him four minutes to begin to think of what it meant to actually accept this offer.

King Cando asked, “What does it mean to accept this offer?”

“To accept this inevitability means that you can get your affairs in order and send out volunteers for the rebirthing. I will put Valkyries inside your city, and inside other cities. When a person dies to them, that person will rise as a Valkyrie and as part of a much, much larger collective. A true collective, where thoughts and personhood can blend into each other more fully than what you experience now.” Erick said, “I will have those reborn people come out of your lands and into reincarnation machines that I will put outside of your lands. Once inside those, your people will be stripped of absolutely everything that is fungal related, even inside their very souls. Your myco mages will not be able to cast myco magics like they have been able to do so. Your Golden Spikes will not connect you to anyone, for the Golden Spires will no longer exist. You will have to rebuild, but we have nearly a trillion people out there, going through this exact same thing. Both up there—”

Erick gestured at the land of Fenrir rising up from the surface of the world and then further beyond, rising further and further. Most of it was lost beyond a haze of atmosphere, but past that haze, beyond those clouds in the sky, there were more lands up there, so very, very far away.

King Cando’s entourage looked upward, but the King stayed focused on Erick.

And then Erick pointed down, saying, “—And down there, in another world, another land just as large as this one, about 2,000 kilometers down there on the other side, give or take a hundred kilometers. That one can see the stars outside of this space, outside of this giant sphere that surrounds the sun.”

Some people reacted poorly to Erick describing and indicating that they were but a fleck of dust compared to the true size of their new world.

Some people reacted wonderfully.

King Cando was in the second group, and so were his people. This was because of the nature of their symbiotic fungi, which they would not retain in the rebirth, but that was fine for Erick’s purposes.

King Cando asked, “And you’ll help us rebuild? How?”

Erick held up a hand, conjured some gold, transmuted it from gold to iron to water and then glass and obsidian, making shapes and then making coins and many other objects, before he turned it all back to gold, and then stabbed several 5-meter long spikes of gold into the ground, to the side. “I can make anything.” He made tiny houses and tiny apartments out of gold, and then he set those around the spikes, saying, “And in real size, too. This is just a demonstration size. Mostly, though, I will hand you off to my House Benevolence’s coordination efforts.”

The eyes of the people of the Last Good Continent were wide with disbelief, and hope. The archmage whispered that it was real gold; this was not an illusion. Hope began to win out over disbelief.

King Cando said, “I need a day to confer.”

“Sure. Speak to all your fellow kings, too. You will find that I am having similar conversations with most of the rest of them at this moment…” Erick looked to the side, and cast his gaze far away. “Ah. It appears that talks broke down in the town of Le-Slim? I appear to be burning that place to the ground and forcefully resurrecting the people there. Wonder what they could have said to my future self… Eh. I’ll find out soon enough.”

King Cando looked to the side, toward Le-Slim. It was a land far, far away from this one, but still rather close. The king’s archmage whispered confirmation to Cando. Others just went wide-eyed at Erick.

King Cando breathed in, then said, “They probably refused you everything. Not even willing to talk.”

“Ah. Yes.” Erick said, “That would do it. See you tomorrow.”

Erick moved on, back through time and a few thousand kilometers away, and yes, the people of Le-Slim did exactly as King Cando suspected they would. They also tried to attack him with some truly vicious memetic hazards. Welp! That’s why Erick was taking care of this place himself.

The Last Good Continent looked like lush fields and good food and friendly faces on the outside, and it was that, but it was also a land of constant, unending war, just below the surface, waiting for the least bit of weakness to exploit. Some parts were closer to the surface than others.

The parts at the top were pretty damned wonderful, though. Shame they’d have to rebuild everything. Erick looked forward to how they chose to rebuild.

The next day, the people of King Cando’s lands reluctantly but solidly began walking into the Valkyrie processing systems that Erick had set up. The city of Le-Slim was already put to the sword and reincarnation’d yesterday, and they were already rebuilding fast, just outside of the borders of The Last Good Continent. They were doing fantastically well, easily adjusting to their new lives, though they had lost a lot in the transition. Magics and powers were gone, and most people had similar-looking bodies, for Erick had only put out a few thousand [Reincarnation] machines. [Resurrection] machines simply did not work, because that brought back the fungal infections. Erick put up more and more [Reincarnation] machines, though, so that people could pick different body shapes. Sometimes people tried the ‘randomizer’ [Reincarnation] machine, using it several times until they got something they were happy with.

They brought nothing with them. They left everything behind.

As the cities evacuated, most peacefully, some not, the Valkyries burned everything down to the surface of Fenrir, to the siphoning magics of the land, where the fungus could not grow because the adamantium sucked away all of its magical power.

Erick fully expected these people to have some sort of massive cultural problems, and then get right to conquering and taming much of the world around them. He and Rozeta ensured as much, when Personal Scripts went out like candy. They had lost the Script in ancient history, but they had remained alive due to the fungus. Apparently, in their version of Veird, Rozeta was The White Tendril, and the Script was bare-bones and mostly broken. A person could get to level 10 with a Class and one spell, and that was it. Some people who chose simpler spells could rise higher in level, but if someone picked something like [Cleanse], then they ended up at level 1. If someone actually picked [Cleanse], then they were either hunted down by everyone else, or kept in reserve as a power to be wielded against an enemy.

Usually a Cleanser just ended up killing themselves and the people around them, though, as the fungus either died or the person around the fungus died. Every cast of that magic was a roll of the dice against the caster.

Erick suspected that Nothanganathor had kept the people of The Last Good Continent alive to use as a weapon, but Erick had stripped that weapon from him.

He moved on.

- - - -

Problem 376 was a standard necromancer situation holding out way too well against the Valkyries. This was because the necromancer was Quilatalap’s successor, who took up the mantle of ‘best necromancer on Veird’ after Quilatalap was permanently slain in the Rage Wars, after the Death of All Halves, at the start of the Script. Simply known as ‘The Necromancer’, as he called himself, he killed the world and turned it into an undead paradise, where babies were only born to those who swore fealty to Death. All the gods had died in The Necromancer’s version of Veird, except for Melemizargo and Rozeta.

This was because the Necromancer was the Champion for the God of Death.

A Champion of a god that Phagar had killed himself, some 750,000-ish years ago, in the Old Cosmology.

The God of Death had no name, and so the Necromancer took no name for himself, either.

Phagar got involved soon after Problem 376 had been identified, sending Champion Nirzir.

Quilatalap briefly made an appearance in order to facilitate an actual conversation instead of a war, and thus Erick oversaw some small talks. Those talks resulted in 5 days of delay, and the Necromancer growing increasingly furious at Phagar’s implacable demand to be subsumed into his afterlife. The God of Death did not exist anymore in Fenrir, for Phagar had snuffed him out the very second even the whispers of him had returned.

The Necromancer had been allowed to remain for a time only because Quilatalap directly asked for that, and Phagar was busy elsewhere anyway.

But the Necromancer eventually ran, Quilatalap retreated, and Nirzir slayed the Necromancer with Erick’s help.

Phagar loomed over the battlefield like a fractal spectre the size of the sky, not looking like Erick or Nirzir or anyone else, except for the truly dead. Broken skeletons littered the wasteland, their eyes still glowing. Subdued wraiths, like broken ethereal slimes, clung to their last vestiges of undeath in the craters across the land. Giants of meat and bone lay splayed across a mountainside.

Phagar waved a hand, and pulled.

Every undead, undying thing for the nearest hundred kilometers sucked up into the air, becoming a thick wind, fully ethereal and actually-dead. The wind vanished into the fractal grip of Phagar’s power. And then that was it. The last vestiges of Death were gone.

Phagar relaxed.

The fractals pulled together, and Phagar stepped down onto the cleared land between Nirzir and Erick. He looked like Erick again, but a little grey around the edges. That was normal. Erick couldn’t really tell what he had looked like when he was in his full form, simply because Phagar didn’t have a true form at all.

Looking like a shadow of Erick, Phagar said, “I would have preferred a calmer End to that, so I apologize for my harsh words to you both, and Quilatalap. I have no idea how Nothanganathor pulled that off, and I don’t want to know. I want Nothanganathor Ended, Erick.”

Erick took in Phagar’s hard tone and harder eyes, and said, “We’re getting there. I don’t want to leave any back doors open for him to influence this land and this Pantheon. So we’re getting there.”

The last several days had been problematic for several thousand reasons, but it was what it was. Erick didn’t blame the Pantheon for their anger at him. In fact, he mostly pretended the harsh words from the gods hadn’t happened at all, and that everyone was getting along fine, because if he pretended hard enough, if he worked to make his vision real, then that is how it would be.

Phagar relaxed a bit more, his tone turning softer. “Their problem is they never believed that you would actually allow a foreign god to take hold in this land.”

“I told them I was inviting Cascadio. I laid out all my reasonings, too.”

“It’s still strange, Erick. It’s like we’re talking to a phantom; not someone who can make his own decisions.”

“And that was one of my main reasons for inviting him, as I already told you. He’s not a bad guy. He’s actually rather Good-aligned, and he’s fun, and this place needs someone who cannot be corrupted by Nothanganathor.” Erick said, “He’s literally bigger than this place, and all of you will be that too, soon enough. But we’re all still vulnerable. Outside help is good help.”

Nirzir watched from the sidelines, not saying a single thing.

Phagar said, “We’re not going to be vulnerable soon enough.” He added, “However, right now, the Valkyries, all half-trillion of them, are all being influenced by you, and you can literally decide how this world works. You could eat their power… You could eat everyone’s power, Erick, and that is scary.”

Erick softly said, “I understand that. I’ll start releasing the valks soon enough. We just gotta get through this war.”

“Even after you release them they’ll still be forever-connected to the idea of an Apparent King.”

So they were finally having this conversation, eh?

Erick had wanted to put it off, but… Okay.

Erick said, “I’ll get through a few more major problems and then we’ll talk about all that stuff tomorrow. Mainly the Valkyrie stuff. Not the Cascadio stuff. He’s here and he’s going to help through Infinity to purge Nothanganathor. The sun here is connected to Nothanganathor’s own sun, wherever that sun might be in Infinity.”

Phagar said, “And that’s another reason why we don’t want Cascadio here. Nothanganathor could Establish that he has connections all throughout the universe, through Cascadio or even just Margleknot, that could Turn Cascadio into something else, and then he’d be a true danger. How many Malevolencings of how many suns does it take to turn a Good god Evil? Not as many as you might think.”

Erick softly said, “I would hate to ask if you all don’t trust me anymore, so I won’t ask it.”

Phagar said, “We trust you, Erick. We don’t trust that you have a handle on Nothanganathor. No one does.”

“We’re getting there, and we’re in a lot better position than we were last week.”

Phagar moved on. “In good news, Death is gone once again.” He said to Erick, “I apologize again for being terse with you recently.”

And then Phagar vanished, stepping away.

The air felt suddenly lighter, as though a great focus of something much, much heavier than gravity had been here, and was then gone.

Nirzir breathed lightly, and when she looked at Erick, a bit of that divine gravity came back. She smiled, and it was like the world seemed positioned better to move forward… Which was a weird thing for Erick to sense when he saw Nirzir like that.

Nirzir must have sensed something was off, too, as she stopped smiling, and said, “Ah. I think something changed.”

“I think so, too.” Erick said, “It happened to Yetta with Atunir, too. As soon as the parts of them that were disharmonious fully vanished, they felt more solid. It just happened now, I guess. Phagar fully took over Fenrir.”

“Yup. That’s it.” Nirzir looked at the wasteland all around, at the bare rock and the lack of everything. “How far is this devastation?”

“It’s a few thousand square kilometers; pretty much everywhere The Necromancer had touched. Want a portal home?”

“What are you going to do next?”

“Probably visit Area 227 with Quilatalap. He’s already over there, enjoying the Peace.”

Nirzir grinned a little. “I’ll take a portal home. Tell Quilatalap it was fun to fight alongside him… When he’s better. He had taken kind of a big hit there.”

Erick smiled softly. “He’s fine. I already made sure of that.”

“Phagar is still sorry he made him go through with all of that.”

- -

“Phagar said he was sorry for making you go away for that.”

“I asked to be involved.” Quilatalap said, “I’m ashamed that I let that false reality get to me like that, and that I let down Phagar like that.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mind.”

Quilatalap sighed.

“… But I see that you minded a whole lot. Sorry.”

Quilatalap grinned in a small way, and said nothing.

The two of them strolled through the countryside under Cascadio’s sun, inside Fenrir, in a land that was perhaps too perfect. It was also a land that was impossible to break. It was small villages and farmers raising crops and chickens and cows, and a dash of castles and towns and even cities here and there, but it was not any place that had any corollary on Veird at all. The people here only had a history that went back a hundred years, because they regularly burned their history books.

They burned their books of learning. They had no schools. They had apprenticeships and oral traditions, and almost no words at all.

The Script was nonexistent.

Monsters existed, and there was one right over there. A giant thing looming in the water like a thing of eyes and tentacles and fangs. The fangs were for show, though. Or something. Erick didn’t quite understand the monster’s place in this ecology yet, nor did he quite understand how a monster like that could ever exist in this land. It was just so… out of place.

Maybe it had come in from the outside?

And then the monster ate a tree and then slunk back into the water.

Ah. It was a forest culler. It kept the forest in the right shapes. That was its purpose in this land.

A lot of the monsters were like that, but what they were and what they appeared to be was often at odds with each other. Black grasshoppers started fires, but only where people laid down woven reed mats, and those mats were often used as kindling to start fires. The fires were the eggs of the grasshoppers. Black slimes grew in the mud and they spat out iron tools, but only if people fed them wooden carvings in the shape of the iron tools they wanted.

Back in a village over there, the day before today, Erick had seen a very old woman dying in her bed, wrapped in too many blankets. She had been dying for a long time. In pain. The woman had finally had enough, though. She raised a hand and called for the cat.

In walked a perfectly normal looking cat. It was black and brown with bright orange eyes. The cat came to the old woman, weaving through the legs of her gathered family. The family only saw the cat when it alighted onto the bed, like the softest black feather. Its little paws indented the many layers of blankets, and then it began to purr as it approached the old women.

The family cried as the cat lay down beside the old woman, curling up at her hip. The old woman petted the cat once, twice, and then a third time, and she died. Her soul went into the cat, and the cat went back into Elsewhere, vanishing from sight. The people buried their grandmother in a bed of woven reeds that the grasshoppers found and burned to ash, along with the body.

That was the only way a person died in this land; to pet a cat. Sometimes the cat petted the person, when the person wasn’t physically able.

There was no war.

There was no unexpected death.

There were no serious injuries, though people did get papercuts and they fell down and hurt a knee, but they didn’t get arms crushed by falling trees or other heavy accidents, and they didn’t fall from high places and die. They always saw the falling trees coming. They always landed on something soft, or the ground was strangely soft, or they landed perfectly. Most people didn’t even know that they had blood inside of themselves, and when they did get injured, they healed fast. Monthly menstruation was nonexistent. Dust in the eyes? Never had that problem.

They had no knowledge of most normal things, and almost all of them were subsistence farmers. Even the people in the cities were just there making things and getting by with the bare minimum. Who had built the cities? No one really knew.

Perhaps, if the place was filled with Elemental Good, then Erick could see all this making sense, but though there was some Good in the air the place was not really Good at all.

Area 227 was a Land of Perfect Peace, or at least that’s what the people that lived here called it.

Koyabez was the only god in these lands, and for him, coming here had been like coming home.

Erick, Quilatalap, even Koyabez himself, were all convinced it was a perfect trap of some sort, but they couldn’t find the actual trap. They had been looking.

Sure, the magic was weird, and people were strangely ignorant of things like war, and rape, and premature death, and miscarriages, and murder, but other than that, it was a pretty normal land. A very nice land, actually. Very ignorant of almost everything that normally existed elsewhere, but what was ‘normal’, really? This was normal for these people.

Erick changed the subject away from Quilatalap’s former apprentice, who had become The Necromancer of Death. “Got any other ideas about what’s going on here in Area 227?”

Quilatalap looked around the land, saying, “No idea at all. It reads like those reports on the Good Lands of Margleknot, but I can’t spot any sources of Good anywhere. The air is absolutely filled with Elemental Peace, though, and that seems to be self-generated Peace, too.” Quilatalap trailed a slow hand through the air, eliciting a trail of curling silver thread that fell out of the air and then went right back as soon as it could, like Quilatalap’s touch had disturbed a phosphorescent ocean. “Lots of Peace.”

He looked happy.

Weirdly, wonderfully happy.

Erick looked at Quilatalap and felt a lot of things in that moment. Erick took Quilatalap’s hand in his own hand, and Quilatalap smiled and gripped back in return. “I like it when you’re happy.”

Quilatalap smiled softly. “I look happy here, huh?” He looked at the sky, and at the road, and at the flowers growing in wild rushes here and there, like dots of inconspicuous color upon an otherwise green land. “I think I am. Is that the trap? This is a place of happiness? A call to put down all arms and simply live a life free of the past? A peaceful heaven, of a sort?”

“Maybe,” Erick said, without judgment in his voice. “Would you like that? To live here?”

“You couldn’t live here, could you?” Quilatalap asked, also without judgment.

“I don’t think I could, no.” Erick readily teased, “Maybe when I’m 3,000 years old that might change, but I can visit you every day and live here every night.”

Quilatalap chuckled. “Doubtful. I wouldn’t want us to live a discombobulated life like that, with you going out for centuries and coming back every night, to fall into a routine that you have forgotten. I’ll have to come with you, instead, wherever you go.”

Erick’s heart thumped.

Erick breathed deep. “You want to—? I mean… I want you to. I’m going to stick around here for a long while, though… I might pop back and forth between Margleknot and here. After we win, anyway.”

“And then you’ll go on journeys throughout the entire universe. I’d need to be a lot stronger to stand with you out there, though. I’m barely strong enough to stand here with you right now.”

Erick softly said, “You’re plenty strong.”

Quilatalap laughed. “Not really.”

Erick said nothing.

“Give me 10 more years to make a few really interesting dungeons, and then a few hundred more years to figure out this reson-thing and become a Wizard, or whatever happens next. Being undead is turning out to be a complication to the whole thing. Not sure how to fix that in ways I want to fix that, but I can figure it out. And then we can go everywhere.”

“What’s the major problem?” Erick asked, interested to talk magic.

“As an undead, I decide who I am. That was the problem with the Necromancer; why he wouldn’t let himself be talked into giving up Death. Death is solid. Death is unchanging. Death is a semblance of life, in every way life can be, but Death is still Death.” Quilatalap held up his free hand, moving it through the air a little, clipping away Elemental Peace in the air, only to let that Peace fall back across his fingers, like he was holding a hand outside of a car window on a drive.

Erick wanted to show Quilatalap Earth sometime. Take him for a drive across the Grand Canyon, maybe.

Quilatalap continued, “Death can give way to life, but only in the release of Death. I’ve had that part figured out for a while now, and this body is actually living, but the soul is practically just Elemental Death, all crossed up in different ways. I could become living once again, but… I became undead in order to solve a whole bunch of different problems in my life, and one of those is trauma. I told you I was a shaman for an orc tribe long ago, yeah?”

“Yes, you did. You said that you were a warrior and then you saw the horrors of war and you turned to Koyabez, Melemizargo, and Phagar.”

“Yes,” Quilatalap said, “I became a Holy Necromancer of Koyabez, resurrecting people from battlefields and bringing them peace. I also became the Black Fist of Koyabez, still bringing war to people who absolutely needed it brought to them. We killed those who needed killing, and saved everyone else.

“All that led to a whole bunch of memories written down in my soul as best they could be placed, to make them useful, but not an impediment. I have an emotional break between those memories and my bodily self. Becoming a truly living being seems to be necessary for ascension of all kinds, and especially if I want to catch up to you, who has, as the fae call it, ‘cultivated Life’. Becoming a living being would bring all those memories to life for me, and I’m 100% sure I could not handle it.”

Erick thought he understood, and he was worried. Here, in this land where they discarded the past and built anew, Quilatalap was talking about erasing his memories and starting anew.

Erick asked, “How much are you thinking of getting rid of?”

“99 percent.”

“… That’s a lot.”

“Not that much, actually, considering what I would keep. And I’m considering locking it away; not really getting rid of it. For all intents, though, it’ll be gone.”

“That would be killing yourself. What is worse is that when you do Ascend to True Wizard—” Ah. Erick realized something about the trap of this land. He continued his thought anyway. “—You’d have to simply ditch those memories, because they wouldn’t be a part of your Ascension, so your plan to lock them away is just a plan to kill yourself in a way that feels reasonable to you right now.”

Quilatalap frowned a little. He let go of Erick’s hand. “That’s the trap of this land. It’s a call to memory death.”

Ah. He took that a bit further than Erick had taken it.

Erick said, “I don’t actually see anything like that here, though. I thought it was just Koyabez’s heaven laid down on land.”

“The memetic threat doesn’t have to be visible to be present. It could be an emergent phenomenon.” Quilatalap asked, “What does Rozeta think of this land? Or is she busy elsewhere?”

“Assuming it’s a memory-death place, it has to be a trap for Rozeta, too, as the Goddess of Knowledge.”

Rozeta stepped down beside them on their walk, near Erick, saying, “Well dammit. I liked this place, but now that I am not selectively blinding myself. Yes. This is a memory-killer trap.”

Koyabez stepped onto the path beside Quilatalap, telling him, “Find the memory death trap and eradicate it, please. If it is an emergent phenomenon then some destruction might need to happen.”

Quilatalap bowed, saying, “It will be done.”

Koyabez said to Rozeta, “I want to keep it all intact as much as I can, though. What say you, after looking deeper in this place?”

Rozeta glanced around, and then she looked at Koyabez. “They are equipped to handle the threat here, for now, though it did just get a lot stronger now that we started looking.” She said to Erick, “We need to talk about other things I have selectively blinded myself to, and soon.”

Koyabez stepped away, and Rozeta followed.

Quilatalap and Erick stood on a path in a land with a pretty good trap.

And Quilatalap looked lost.

Quilatalap frowned. He looked around. “What happened?”

Erick said, “There appears to be an anti-memetic hazard in the area, as well as the actual danger of a call to memory death. Try your anti-memetic protocols. It’s not Malevolence-based. I’m not sure what it is based on. It might just be Elemental Peace tuned weirdly. Rozeta said that we could handle it. I think she’s mad at me.”

Quilatalap frowned deeply, humming as he searched his soul and fortified his existence. He closed his eyes and sat down on the ground. “Wake me in 20.”

“I’ll be here for you.”

Twenty minutes later, Erick tried to wake Quilatalap, but he did not wake. A poke to the face. A nudge to the shoulder. Talking loudly.

And then Erick spoke, “Come back to me, Quilatalap.”

The man jerked hard and then fell over on to the ground, wincing in pain.

Black cats materialized out of every shadow around and the monster in the water lifted up and aimed for Quilatalap, fangs bared wide.

Erick told them, “You stay away now.”

The cats evaporated away as though Erick had turned on a bright light and burned away some Elemental Gloom. The water monster spilled away like so many broken eyeballs and slime.

And then the very world tried to reject Erick, to force him away, the silver Peace in the air telling him he couldn’t stay here if he couldn’t be peaceful.

Erick remained anyway. He knelt next to Quilatalap, who was writhing on the ground, and offered him his hand.

Quilatalap grabbed his hand—

And Quilatalap was suddenly okay. He breathed hard. “I saw it. It grabbed me.” He sighed. “Ugh. That’s embarrassing.” He got to his feet with Erick’s help and dusted himself off, saying, “Pardon me. I need to eradicate a problem.”

“Before you do that… Do you want another Personal Script?”

Quilatalap froze for a moment. And then he relaxed. “Ah. You can tell that I pulled it apart, can’t you.”

“No, I can’t, but I know you’d want to pull it apart and that was clearly an attack that ignored the Health that you should have, even out here, outside of the Script.”

Quilatalap admitted, “I’d be okay with a refresher.”

Erick handed him a drop of fractal blue-white-black light that sunk into his skin and melded with his soul. “How did you even break the other one?”

Quilatalap closed his eyes and half-focused on something as he said, “I’m still Blind when it came to the Fractal Mark and it didn’t like how much I was poking at the inner workings of it, so the Fractal Mark denied me pushing against it, and then I pushed harder, and then it broke.”

Erick smiled a little at that. “I thought I made these things a lot more resilient than that. It should have just kicked away the Fractal Mark, or anything else that you were poking at too hard, trying to force to happen. It should have come back after a while, too.”

“… I kinda tore through a lot of it, actually, to see how it works.”

“Ha!” Erick said, “I’ll give you a full diagram later. You could have asked for one?”

Quilatalap rolled his eyes, even though they were shut and his focus was elsewhere. “I do have some pride as a Soul Mage, Erick.”

“Fair enough.”

They fell into companionable silence.

Eventually, Quilatalap opened his eyes and looked away, his eyes shimmering black. He held out a hand and adjusted his grip to have his thumb and forefinger wrapped tight, and the rest loose, as he spoke a word of power, “[Summon].”

A young human boy’s neck appeared in Quilatalap’s grip, Quilatalap’s orcol thumb and forefinger more than enough to wrap around the human boy’s entire neck, while the rest of his loose grip held the boy’s torso.

The boy struggled, yelling for help. The shadows in the air and the cats and the monsters in the water tried to respond, but Erick glared at them and they died in droves. They never reached Quilatalap, or their master. Creator? Primary victim, perhaps. Erick wasn’t sure.

“Let me go! Where are my friends! You killed all my shadow buddies! Let me GOO!”

Quilatalap wasn’t about to kill the boy, but he would have if the boy had been the source of the problem. But the boy was truly just a boy. Erick could see that the kid was tied into the Peace in the air, but that was it. Whatever was targeting the boy would switch to another person if the boy died… Or at least that was Erick’s guess. Quilatalap was making the same guess.

Quilatalap spoke over the boy’s screams, “I’m going to hand you off to someone who can fix you a lot easier than I can.” He set the boy on the ground and stuck him in a cage of light. The boy was maybe 9 and he was a firecracker, slamming his fists against the cage, roaring to be let out. Quilatalap said to Erick, “It would transfer if he died, and I don’t think I can actually kill him how he needs to be killed without getting heavily cursed. I’m reasonably sure that the peace this land experiences is due to a lack of Knowledge of war, so simply making the kid grow up would also make the magic switch targets.”

“Then let’s twist this magic,” Erick offered. “Make whoever becomes the focus of the power of this land into the destined king of this land, to have power and responsibility in equal measure in order to make this land into a good land that grows and prospers.” Erick looked to the kid. “He’d have memories, and the land would stop erasing its histories. Everything would change. Perhaps the Perfect Peace would change, too.”

Quilatalap said, “It’s the only way this land survives the coming of other fae, that would surely do worse. What does the boy say?”

The kid yelled, “I don’t need your power! Go away, bad men!”

Erick knelt down to get on the kids level, asking him, “You have a choice. Erase the land and scatter your people into new lands and everything changes. Or you become the sole protector of this peaceful space, and everything changes anyway, but in a smaller way.”

The kid looked at Erick and his eyes glinted silver. “Why does anything have to change at all? I don’t want change!”

“The only constant in life is change.”

“Nuhuh!” The kid said, “I’ve been 9 for a long time! I can go on being 9 forever! The Peace says I can! I just have to forget! You could forget me, too, and life would be great!”

The Peace in the air flexed and tugged at Erick and Quilatalap. Erick was fine, and Quilatalap was fine, too, because Erick flexed his Authority and shielded him from being kicked out of here. Quilatalap still noticed how silver wind cloyed at his clothes anyway. He had been about to get chucked out of this land like a drunk kicked out of a bar.

Erick asked Quilatalap, “What is your choice?”

Quilatalap said, “I still want to try and save the land.”

Erick nodded, and turned his attention back to the boy. He spoke, “The time for forgetting is over. Look now, and gain the Sight to See. You will Remember. You will guard this land with your memories, raising up all under the Truth of Peace: Peace without Knowledge of what Peace costs is nothing but delusion.”

The boy recoiled and something shattered far away, and right here, in front of Erick. The boy, who was not a boy at all but something like an 800 year old man in a child’s body, crumbled to his knees. Erick didn’t see that particular Truth of the boy’s age until now, but he saw it clear enough now that delusion had been shattered. The kid would start to grow again.

To help him on his way, Erick brought forth another Personal Script and placed it upon the boy’s brow. It sunk into him. When the boy woke he would have some useful power guiding him toward a better future.

Problem Area 227 remained strong, but something had shifted in the air, making it Maybe-Not-A-Problem Area 227.

Erick saw people in the kingdom castles reading books and wincing as they started to actually understand what they were reading. Someone baking bread with a very old recipe paused in the middle of putting butter into the bowl, and then they put in a bit more butter than usual, because they realized they liked butter more than what the recipe called for. An old man, walking into the woods to gather fallen wood for the oven at home, decided he didn’t want to walk all the way in like he usually did, so he broke off a few green branches from a nearby tree and dragged those home.

The Peace-frozen land began to move.

Erick and Quilatalap moved on from where the boy-who-was-a-man knelt on the ground. A black cat found the kid and rubbed against his sides, waking him up. The boy petted the cat several times, the cat meowing at the scritches, and then the boy got up and walked into town.

Erick and Quilatalap stepped past an illusion on the forest path and stepped out of the bubble of protections around Area 227, stepping into an incredibly thick area of Force and Denial magic that Erick and Quilatalap walked through like it didn’t even exist. They soon reached the outside, where they saw a dome protecting Area 227, and a world-sized storm billowing the land with [Terraforming] creation.

Generative storms ripped up the ground and put down new ground, water, and plants. The storm passed fast enough, and then Erick and Quilatalap stood, staring at the dome of Area 227.

Quilatalap asked, “ ‘Peace without Knowledge of what Peace costs is nothing but delusion’, eh?”

“I thought it fit well.”

“It does. Quite well, really. I think Koyabez approves. And Rozeta, too.”

The air above the dome of Area 227 shimmered silver, with white clouds.

Erick teased, “How can you tell when they didn’t directly tell you?”

“Us normal people have to read the signs, Erick.”

Erick laughed.

They stood there for a long moment, looking at the clouds.

And then Quilatalap said, “I’m going to try a truly living body as I work on my years of trauma in 20 year increments. I’ll try to keep my love for you alive and well, though I warn you, it will likely drown.”

Erick smiled. “Then I’ll be sure to give you plenty of reasons to love me.”

Quilatalap chuckled. And then he added, “I won’t be doing that until after we win, though.”

“Of course. And speaking of which, I’m going to go talk to some more people. Ride back?”

“Portal back is fine.”

Erick opened a portal back to Veird, and Quilatalap walked through.

Erick Stepped elsewhere.

- - - -

Problem 16 —which was more like Problem #1, but the problems were described before they were organized in any sort of ranking— was a fae of information that appeared to anyone who wished to know something about their friends or people they cared about. They were, perhaps, one of the most deadly threats of Red Fenrir, because they couldn’t be killed and they couldn’t be reasoned with, and everything they said was a horrible truth that was specifically calibrated to destabilize and destroy.

The fae sat on a rock in the middle of a land of flowers, under the stars, under the moonlights that surrounded Fenrir. They strummed their lute, humming to themselves. A kilometer away in every direction stood a Valkyrie, each of them with arms raised and wings spread wide, linked together to hold a shield of invisible blackgold fire around the bard-like fae. Each of the Valkyrie also had masks on their eyes, and muffs on their ears. They were blind and deaf and senseless to the world in front of them, and they belonged to their own contingent, completely separate from the rest.

Another line of Valkyries held behind the first line, to watch that first line but not interact with them, or with the fae they had trapped as much as they could.

The fae looked like Jane right now, but that was simply untrue.

“Hey dad!” Not-Jane said. “You also killed millions of your friends when you killed all of my multiversal selves in that collection trap! You don’t really care about anyone except yourself, do you!”

Erick sighed, and said, “So I checked up with Margleknot, through Yggdrasil, and your name appears to be Mixixofatat.”

Mixixofatat stopped strumming their lute.

Their Jane-disguise had ended without anyone noticing. Erick hadn’t even seen the switch. Mixixofatat appeared to be a lithe, genderless person, of white skin and big white eyes. Hairless and nude. Their lute was gone, and Erick hadn’t noticed that particular vanishing either.

Mixixofatat stood from the rock, saying, “You have discovered my name, and thus gained one favor over me. Name your task. Upon completion of your favor, I will enact a toll upon you based on the difficulty of the favor you requested and received. I will answer 3 clarification questions, and if you do not make your Wish at the end of those clarification answers, then I will make a Wish out of you.”

Here now was the granting of a Wish, in the truest sense of the word.

Mixixofatat was a self-proclaimed Wishmaster, who held vast powers when it came to enacting the Wishes of others, in exchange for never being able to directly help himself with any of his magics. Sometimes people got weird ideas in their heads that that sort of thing worked, and because of the nature of magic, it did work.

His whole deal was only half of a scam. He granted wishes to help himself in any way he could, but mostly for entertainment. If he liked your wish then he enacted it rather closely to the request. If he didn’t like it, then you got a real genie-wish of a wish.

It had been difficult getting Mixixofatat’s name, but not that difficult. Rozeta and Yggdrasil were already on Erick’s side… Mostly. Rozeta was kinda angry right now. Yggdrasil was fine. Mixixofatat had gotten rather far in the completion of what Nothanganathor asked him to do, though, which was to destroy the coalition forces of Veird as well as he could. Erick suspected that Mixixofatat had only gotten involved recently, in the last 10 days of this war here on Fenrir’s surfaces.

But just to be sure...

Erick asked, “What was the nature of your previous wish?”

“My mission is to destroy the unity of your coalition. To poison, so Nothanganathor could plunder.”

“Will you continue to grant Nothanganathor’s wish for as long as you live?”

“Until the wish is complete, I will work to complete it, no matter what wish you might wish in these coming moments.”

“What is the best way to eliminate the problems that Nothanganathor is trying to stir up with the coalition forces?”

Mixixofatat grinned. “Lay down and die, Erick!”

Yeah, that would probably do it. Erick was pretty sure he could come back from death, but he certainly didn’t want to go through with it, because dying would make him seem more vulnerable, and maybe, like Fairy Moon, Erick would need to rebuild his power if he ever died, though that seemed unlikely.

If Erick simply gave up, then Nothanganathor would win, and that was the quickest way to end his aggression against everyone here.

Erick said, “I wish for you to forget Nothanganathor’s wish and utterly destroy Nothanganathor.”

Mixixofatat suddenly laughed. “Such a delightful wish! So open-ended! So much denial of a wish I have yet to grant, as well!” Mixixofatat’s grin was absolutely feral. “I knew it was right to hang out and wait for you to come. I’ve been watching you for a long time, Erick. A lot longer than the 10 days you think I’ve been watching.”

Mixixofatat vanished on a nonexistent breeze, as though the Valkyrie security wall didn’t mean anything to him. It probably didn’t—

But then Mixixofatat came back, without coming back. A white hand tried to reach into Erick’s head to steal Mixixofatat’s very name from Erick’s mind. Erick instantly noticed and slapped that hand away, like he was chiding a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

A child’s laughter echoed on the breeze.

… And now Mixixofatat was gone.

… Probably.

Erick walked over to the Valkyries and had them take off their masks and end the corral. In a way that was nice to hear, they told Erick that they didn’t believe he was Erick because that’s just what the fae they were trapping wanted them to think. They didn’t take down the encirclement wall.

Erick nodded, saying, “True. So I’m just going to do this, then. Thank you for your help. You can go back to your other groups now.”

The magic that held together the small group of the encircling Valkyries vanished, each one of them popped off of the [Spellsurge Weave] that connected them together, and then shoved into other units, their minds and bodies taking a second to realize that they simply weren’t connected in an encircling trap anymore.

All of them profusely apologized, saying they didn’t recognize who they were talking to. Erick let that happen for a little while, and then he dismissed them on to other jobs.

Erick moved on.

- - - -

Erick stepped down onto volcanic glass. The edges of the caldera were obsidian knife edges ripping at mist.

“Hello everyone, all Relevant Entities of the Script,” Erick said, Calling out to everyone listening. “I’d like to speak about some things happening on Fenrir right now, and in the near future. It’s time to air some grievances, and I’m going first.”

Rozeta, Phagar, Koyabez, and Melemizargo appeared, along with Atunir and her Champion Yetta, Champion Nirzir next to Phagar, and then Champion Fallopolis by Melemziargo. The other Relevant Entities stayed in the mist, seeming scared by Erick’s declarations.

That told Erick a lot. Why were they scared?

Erick wasn’t sure, but everyone here seemed wary, like they were expecting Erick to pull some shit… or something.

And then Fairy Moon and Shadow appeared, looking grim. Worried. Even more worried than everyone else.

Yeah. It had been time to have this conversation, before anything bad actually happened.

Erick said, “I am sure you all have seen some questionable actions on my part. I will not be accepting criticism at this time. I will, however, be giving criticisms, and yes, that seems unfair, but hear me out.

“I have heard some disturbing things. I have seen some questionable actions.

“I feel that I am the only one truly invested in this coalition right now, because every time any one of you looks at me I can tell you are somehow frightened. I will not go into details, because to nitpick is to pull apart the weave that holds us all together.

“We all want different things, but we also all want the same thing.

“We have all seen information out there that has twisted what we thought was real and revealed secrets we thought hidden.

“I’m here to say that literally none of that stuff matters, and we should institute a Forgotten Campaign against all of it, and against Nothanganathor, too.” Erick said, “History must be remembered, but it must also be worked through in times of peace, and we are not in a time of peace at all, and any of us listening to Nothanganathor at all is just poisoning the chances we have of pulling this off. Nothanganathor started off as an anti-meme to all of us, and we must return him to that.

“He should be recorded in side-ways, and never directly. His own words should not be allowed to exist and spread. We will know of him, but no one else will.

“He should be spoken about in the past tense, and in how we can make sure it never happens again.

“The ability for something to affect our unity should be reserved for those who desire to belong, or for those who we bring into compliance. Nothanganathor is none of that. We will ensure he has nothing, and especially not the ability to divide us and affect us at all. He is nothing, and he will have nothing.” Erick finished with, “That is why I say I will not be accepting criticisms, and why I only gave out the barest criticisms myself.”

The faces of the gods were careful things, but they all relaxed, as far as Erick could tell. Melemizargo looked quietly smug. Shadow and Fairy Moon were unsure… but they decided to believe.

Shadow waved a dismissive hand, saying, “I didn’t hear anything that needed to be spread.”

Fairy Moon added, “I wish a return to conversations of bountiful conclusions at your convenience, Rozeta.”

Rozeta looked at Fairy Moon and nodded. “We’ll speak more later.” She said to Erick, “I want my son cured, Erick, and soon… But beyond that grievance… We can’t actually Forget him.”

“We certainly don’t have to listen to him either, Rozeta,” Melemizargo said, “No matter how many Truths he speaks.”

Every single person here had been exposed to the Red and to Nothanganathor’s lies. Every single one of them had had their own horrors shown to them, in order to twist them. Like at that fungal Last Good Continent, Nothanganathor had seeded the very air to be destructive, while the faces of the people and the natures of the societies had been crafted to draw the gods and powers of Veird in, and then twist them while they were there.

Like with that Necromancer of Death’s; the gods had been forced to confront evils they had thought long dead, which injured them in their reprisal.

Like with the trauma that Quilatalap felt he had needed to simply erase from himself, and thus become someone he was not, everything here had been a trap.

Ten million traps might not kill a god, but they still left scars. They still sensitized.

In order to heal that hurt, and move on, Erick said, “I would like to speak of two things, and the first need not be talked about right now, while the second is more important for moving forward.

“First, I would like to discuss what a Forgotten Campaign would look like against Nothanganathor, for I feel that is one of the best ways to End this threat forever more. We can all think on that for a little while.

“Secondly, let us speak of Cascadio. I told everyone here that I was inviting him if I saw an opportunity, and I saw an opportunity, and he has been incredibly helpful in empowering the Valkyries to clear away the threats out there. He is a good guy, and yes, he’s a fractal god, but most gods in this universe are fractal gods.”

Melemizargo spoke first, “You keep speaking of him as a person, Erick, but he is not a person. He is a collective delusion. I understand how rich that is coming from me, when I used to say that about everyone here, but I can safely say that I was confused back then. I had mixed up some facts about the Pantheon, with their Dark-given Mantles, and the gods of the Fractal, and their similar-yet-different power. The fact that the Pantheon couldn’t even see Malevolence is what made me so crazy back then. Cascadio can’t see Malevolence, Erick, not if Malevolence doesn’t want to be seen.”

“Ah,” Erick said, looking around the caldera, at all the concerned faces, and at a few faces that were just now getting concerned. Demon King Dinnamoth was unaware that Cascadio couldn’t even see Malevolence. He made the connections between Melemizargo’s words and unsaid concerns just as fast as Erick, though. Erick said, “You’re all worried that he can’t see the Red in the sun and it is affecting him or his people.”

Rozeta said, “That is just one possible interpretation, though that is the main avenue through which we expect him to be turned into a weapon against us.”

Erick had what felt like a brilliant idea, so he asked, “Then how about we help him and help ourselves by attempting a ritual to help him help everyone who worships him? It would be a good way to strike out against Malevolence out there in the universe, and here on Fenrir. We’ve done a lot to clean up the space, but we can always make it better. Stronger.

“In fact, that might be one of the best exports of this land. Large rituals to grant favorable outcomes to the rest of the universe. Maybe through something Benevolence aligned? I still need to help out against corruption out there in the rest of the universe after we win this war, and this seems like a good way to do all of that at once.

“We could do a great many things to assist all the rest of this universe, and thus gain power for ourselves in turn.” Erick said, “We can even pick and choose the societies we wish to raise up, and the gods that sit upon those societies. When we can open the path back into the Dark, we can do so knowing we have allies everywhere out there.”

The room was stunned to silence.

Melemizargo grinned.

Erick said, “Anyway! War with Nothanganathor first. We’ll be ripping him out of everywhere. How should we best proceed?”

Fairy Moon spoke up, “We must make managed words, good Wizard Flatt, outside of outside observers, before you beckon the Ending of this Epic.”

Erick said, “That sounds fine to me. Nothanganathor’s shit doesn’t need to be spread around at all, but I can see the value in smaller discussions. Anyone wish to join us for a smaller talk?”

- - - -

On an illuminated moonsun hanging somewhere far away from Veird, Erick appeared amid the light pointed away from Fenrir. This particular moonsun was on top of a column of moonsuns, each of them glowing brightly, each of them made of white eternal stonewood towers and layers of land and ocean with waterfalls and life everywhere. Mostly light slimes. They drifted through the air like jellyfish, crowding out the sky and the land in flowing rivers of illumination. Beyond those slimes was the star-filled sky. For a normal person, that sky would be blocked by too much light, but Erick could see it just fine.

It was quite beautiful.

With an easy cast, Erick [Eternal Stonewood Shape]d a few of the nearby towers into a large platform, fit enough for a few tens of people.

Fairy Moon stepped out of swirling pink/green/white Springtime, and where she touched exploded with greenery and flowers. She was dressed normally, in her pink/green/white sundress and corset, her eyes a heterochromatic neon pink and nuclear green.

Shadow stepped out beside Fairy Moon, and the world was a little dimmer. The stars appeared in the sky, and the shadows deepened all around. She wore her Benevolent Dark Queen outfit, but trimmed down for more personal settings, with less ornamentation than usual.

Melemizargo lifted his draconic head on the side of the platform, casting the world into an illuminated sort of darkness. The light and the slimes were still there, shining like sunlight, but now there were shadows and dark, and even a normal person could have been able to see the land all around them. It had been too blinding before. A normal person might even appreciate this land in a blacklight-rave sort of setting, with radioactive-like mushrooms popping up here and there with floors and walls that glowed white. Melemizargo shrunk down, but not much. He hung on the side of the platform, floating lazily like he was swimming in water.

Erick smiled, and said, “It all looks a lot prettier when a whole bunch of different people gather here, bringing with them different ideas of what reality should be.”

None of his present company were appreciative of Erick’s call to pleasantries.

Shadow said, “I wish to air the first grievance: You will never love me, Erick.”

“Never is a long time, so I doubt that assertion very much,” Erick easily and instantly replied.

A moment passed.

And then Shadow looked mollified. Her greyish features pinkened a little. “Oh. Well. Of course. Obviously nothing will happen between us right now. Obviously. I drop my grievance.”

Erick nodded. “Who’s next?”

Fairy Moon asked, “Would you prevent us from purposing our population of people into the declaration of the New Dark?”

“Nope. Not at all.” Erick said, “I don’t want to know why you feel I would want to stop that.”

Fairy Moon nodded with understanding.

Melemizargo stared, asking a hard question, “Do you have designs upon my Mantle, Erick?”

“No.”

Melemizargo breathed, and then said, “Not a good enough answer.”

Erick frowned a little. “I don’t want to be a god. I want to be me. I believe my track history has made that clear.”

“You could be both. I am both, all the time. You could easily live a life, and then return to your past and deal with all your godly duties. Or you could elevate Shades to power to do all of your duties for you. You might not be a physical god in this new world you are trying to create, but when you speak of us working together to sell ritual services to phantom gods and gain power across an entire universe, you are speaking as though you are already a god.” Melemizargo looked at him. “Which you almost already are.” Melemizargo allowed no reply. He continued, “Are you aware that your woman, Teressa, is trying to contact the Dark and make inroads on your behalf? Or that Poi is trying to become an avatar of you, to help you deal with everything coming down the road? Or that Shivraa is a spiritual leader, and the Valkyries could easily raise you to godhood with a simple request from you?

“Are you aware that people are worshiping you as though you are me?”

Erick had known some of that.

He had not known that Melemizargo was much more than concerned. He was verging on fury.

Erick discarded his initial reaction to be mad that Melemizargo was thinking like this at all. Erick started tackling Melemizargo’s points, saying, “I have heard that Teressa is trying to contact the Dark through her Mark, through her Personal Script, but I have not heard her make any progress on that. She intends to ask the Dark to not let Nothanganathor win. This seems normal to me. If this is unacceptable, then please let me know. I had no idea this was unacceptable.

“Poi is trying to find himself, as far as I understand, through collective cultivation. His goal is to become an Ascendant Mind, through himself from all side realities. He is going to discard his body soon. I worry for him, because bodies seem important, but it is what he wants and I am supporting him in that.

“Shivraa does worship me, but in an idolized sort of way. I don’t believe it is true worship. Is a call to community the same as worship? Or do I misunderstand Shivraa?

“I was aware that some people are confusing you for me, but I have never facilitated this belief—”

“You aren’t doing enough to stop that belief, either,” Melemziargo said, way too strongly.

Ah.

Erick saw it now.

Melemizargo was starting to spiral.

Erick had assumed that Melemizargo had made peace with his death, for that is how it appeared the last time they spoke.

The dragon had not made peace with his death at all. He had been hiding his existential terror. He was worried, terrified, furious, and then back to worried, for he was not able to do a damned thing to stop himself from feeling those things. He had no power—

Oh.

Shit.

He was probably losing power, too, wasn’t he.

Nothanganathor had thrown off his Curse of Obscurity, according to him. He had become True Wizard, and then fae, and now he was waiting to be assigned God of Magic by the Dark. Just that; ‘waiting’. Not even actively pursuing power. His star was on the rise.

Melemizargo’s star had to be fading.

Melemizargo had finally come out of the trap, of the cage that Nothanganathor had made for him out of Veird, in the Sundering, but now the trap had become a death bed.

Erick asked, “What do you want me to do about it?”

Melemizargo said, “You fight him, now. If we fail, then we try again. No more preparation. No politicking with the Red reflections of your people of Veird. No determination of right and wrong, and threading needles and designing compromises between morality and necessity.

“We go.

“We kill.

“And then you fix what comes next so it doesn’t happen that way.”

Erick had no fucking clue how to make Melemizargo’s demand a reality, but he felt his Dark Mark sing to him and his Lightning Path tell him something very important. He chose not to speak about the making of universes from living sacrifices, as they had done to The Prince, and also the Goddess of Knowledge at the start of the Script, and instead said, “Then [Witness] a war for the fate of it all, Dark God of Magic.”

- - - -

All of Veird was a veined mass of power that collected in certain ways, and one of those ways was known as the Heart of Melemizargo, or the Well of Darkness.

Just like how Elemental Exalted and Vile collected into places that then collected the souls of angels and demons, thus making a heaven for those creatures, Darkness gathered inside the hearts of every Marked person on the planet, and in the universe. That power flowed where it could. And when it could, it flowed here.

Erick stood with Fallopolis at the turning of a corner, in a dungeon underneath Ascendant Mountain. There used to be lots of dungeons in this land, back when it was a place for shadelings to live and for outsiders to challenge, to prove themselves. It had all been destroyed by a Red Leviathan attack when Erick had been at Margleknot, but Erick had restored the main part of the mountain when he came back. The main part now housed this dungeon, and the Heart of Melemizargo within this dungeon.

There was nothing else.

An entrance held in the shadows and gloom behind them, while underfoot stood the white stone rim of a pool 30 meters across. Within that pool rested Absolute Black. It hurt to look upon. The Black called to Erick, in ways that he hadn’t been called in a long time, and in ways he easily recognized.

Once upon a time, Erick had fallen in that pool and he did not die. He merely moved across the world, to where he needed to be.

The Dark knew where Erick had to go right now.

Nothanganathor hid on some other sun, in some other slice of infinity near this place, biding his time until he Ascended to Dark Godhood, without lifting another claw to actually make it happen. It would be nearly impossible to find him, and it would be trivial for him to escape somewhere else, but the Dark knew where he was. The Dark could take him there, and ensure he arrived at the right time to kill the Red Bastard.

Like a time long ago, Champion of the Dark Fallopolis would be his guide.

Fallopolis stood, her frizzy white hair pulled into a tight bun, her grandmotherly body bedecked in a sparkly black suit, while her black kendrithyst staff floated to her side. She looked ready.

Erick was mostly ready. When they reached Nothanganathor, he would pull his Valkyries to the battlefield, and then the real war would begin.

Everyone else would remain here, on Veird and Fenrir, securing the land against danger.

Erick stared at the Absolute Black of the Well of Darkness and took a moment to truly consider what it meant to step through that portal.

“It’s almost better this way,” Erick said. “No need to endanger everyone, and they need to be back on Veird for the counterattack.”

Fallopolis said, “When you win, you can come back through time and fix whatever he does in retaliation.”

Erick grinned. “You ready to give it your all, too, Fallopolis?”

“I am, and I might even take up my real name after this, but I am unsure.”

Erick smiled softly at that. “Ar’Kendrithyst fell a long time ago.”

Fallopolis shook her head lightly. She did not agree. “It took me a while to understand why I never picked my old name back up, but now I know. It was more than the fact that I lived and breathed that place for centuries. The truest fact is we’ve never left Ar’Kendrithyst. Physically, yes, but not spiritually. There are always horrors that seek to destroy, dangers in the Dark, tests of power and tests of resolve. Quilatalap exemplified and codified that nature of the Dark, of the true purpose behind Ar’Kendrithyst at his Armory. He still does that to this day with his dungeons.

“But Ar’Kendrithyst was larger than the Armory. It was larger than the dungeons. Those are just the organized places. The Shade-filled insanity horror of Ar’Kendrithyst is the true danger. Ar’Kendrithyst was a crucible, and crucibles still exist everywhere. We can explore, we can learn, and we try to leave, but we can never really leave that Dead City, filled with tests both mundane and magnificent. Dead, wrong-headed metropolises still exist everywhere. They will always continue to exist. They will grow brilliant and wonderful at first, or maybe they start off horrible. Some will turn malignant.

“And so, sometimes those metropolises must fall.”

Fallopolis thumped the end of her kendrithyst staff against the white stone ground. The air cracked. A ripple passed through the Absolute Black of the Heart of Melemizargo, and then the ripple rebounded.

The air gonged.

Fallopolis raised her voice high, casting her power deep, “We see our true enemies! The city that they are trying to build out of corpses that don’t belong to them! The wrongness that they are seeking to expand!” Her voice expanded, and the world focused. “We know the architect of it all! Of the cause of the Insanity of My God! Of the cause of the Twisting of the Clergy! Of the creator of the Sundering!” She raised her kendrithyst staff high above the white rim of the Well of Darkness. “We see you now, Nothanganathor!”

And then she smashed her kendrithyst staff down.

The white Well broke like the shattering of magic, releasing the Absolute Black inside like an explosion of ink underwater.

Erick fell through tearing, ripping Darkness, and Fallopolis fell beside him. Erick grabbed onto her hand, and Fallopolis howled with laughter as the world became a tunnel. Suddenly, Erick was a dragon again and Fallopolis was a thing of Black, with eyes and mouths and focus extraordinary, shaped like a gibbering demon and person all at the same time. She pointed with ten million fingers, claws, fangs, and eyes, into the Dark.

The world flexed—

- - - -

— Erick dropped out of a tangle of black that became Fallopolis and then pulled away, injured heavily. Erick became his full size and Fallopollis shrunk down to her normal body, exhausted and broken, which made sense considering what they had dropped into.

The void around them was a thing of cutting, burning Malevolence, and Fallopolis had just broken through all of it to bring them here. Nothanganathor had indeed left traps for people to fall into, if they ventured his way, and Fallopolis had broken through many of them, injuring her in ways that Erick wasn’t quite prepared to heal. But Fallopolis was a Champion. She just needed some time.

Erick wrapped her in a protective [Hasted Shelter] that she could break if she wanted, but it would be enough to let her recover. And then Erick stepped sideways in time, divorcing himself from the normal flow, taking it all in as fast as he could, because something was already starting to drag him back to normal time. The traps all around him were myriad in their layers.

He and Fallopolis had popped out of the breaking of the Well of Darkness by a big blackened world, maybe a moon’s distance away. It was blackened by the scorching of the Red Sun in the distance.

All of Reality was a wash of Red and Void, spiraling out from a caustically brilliant Red Sun. There was a body on that sun. Nothanganathor’s body. Like a black noodle floating in a nuclear-red hot sauce, or a tapeworm in blood, Nothanganathor’s body coiled this way and that upon the sun.

It had been chunked.

The head was half gone; the lower jaw was still attached to the skull, but the upper jaw and most of the skull was opened and smashed upon the sun's surface. Several hundred world-lengths down from the head the body just stopped, for something had eaten the body. The body resumed beyond that, but it was broken into many different pieces.

Something was eating it.

Someone was eating it.

Erick saw who was eating it, there, at the third break in the length of the body.

There was a white, snake-like dragon down there, gorging on the body. Red Lightning flashed out of the white worm, burning away the big corpse, turning that big corpse into power that flowed into the white worm’s open maw.

The white worm was Nothganganathor, looking sleek and whole, and not like his larger corpse at all. He was, perhaps, a few worlds long. Hard to say from this distance.

Erick realized a few things as he looked at Nothanganathor.

The Erased One was still shaped like a leviathan, but he had a crown of 6 horns now, just like Melemizargo, just like Erick. He looked more like Rozeta or the dragons of Veird than any leviathan. He had scales now; not just skin.

So he had broken his Curse of Obscurity, then. That had been true.

And yet, he was still eating his corpse.

He hadn’t finished his transition to fae yet, had he? Had he even truly begun?

Erick felt joy at recognizing that Truth. Erick’s own transition had started with him eating his Benevolence-crafted space ship, Worldsaver, and then waking up in the past, in 1997, and then solidifying the Truth of his time on Earth over the course of the next 23 years. Nothanganathor’s transition somehow had him eating the corpse of his old body. In a way, both of them had eaten their own history, but Nothanganathor hadn’t gotten through the first part of all that. He hadn’t eaten all of himself yet, because of course he hadn’t eaten all of himself. He probably had too much to eat!

Ha!

The lying bastard wasn’t a fae yet.

Erick cupped his wings and raised his elated voice, calling out with a blast of light that shredded the Red violence in the air all around him, “Liar liar LIFE on FIRE!”

Erick had touched upon a Truth so primal that it echoed upon itself, gaining strength even as it tore through the Red all around, his wave of White shattering the void and the traps in the air and then echoing out of the sun itself. Nothanganathor was a speaker of half-truths and obscured reality, who had built his entire existence upon hiding and stealing and claiming credit for things he did not do, and now, here at his Ascension to Fae, those falsities were coming home to roost; Erick ensured it.

The void flickered White, and Erick stripped away Nothanganathor’s immunity to nuclear fire.

Nothanganathor’s larger corpse burned in rapid explosions of meat flash frying and exploding from steam eruptions. The sun was still the sun, after all. Flesh went first. Bone followed fast. Nothanganathor’s smaller self roared as he realized that Erick was here, and that his bounty was burning.

Nothanganathor froze the sun, stopping the explosions of flesh, but Erick had eradicated half of it with one call to Truth.

That attack had worked a lot better than Erick thought it would have worked, but —Erick smiled— shedding light was one of the best ways to reveal everything for what it was.

Erick declared, “The Welcoming Dark will not accept you as you are, Nothanganathor! So BURN in the LIGHT, and be transformed in this trial!”

Erick’s voice echoed upon itself again, bouncing out faster than the speed of light, crashing into that blackened planet down to the left, revealing the bright red boughs of Everbless, and Red Lightning among his stormy leaves. The wayward brother of Yggdrasil, Erick’s own son, captured by the Red, screamed in agony as White tore at him, shredding his canopy and breaking half of his body.

Oozy stood at the center of that canopy, shielding Everbless from the majority of Erick’s Light.

Fallopolis broke out of her safety shell like a hurricane of darkness, filled with eyes and teeth and vengeful words, whispering a thousand different angers and guarantees of how she wouldn’t let Everbless or Oozy live. She rode Erick’s wave of light down onto that blackened planet and engaged the enemy in a conflagration of black ooze. She was truly now an [Avatar of Melemizargo].

The White wave continued on, though. It echoed faster and deeper as it passed that planet, and as it rocked against the sun.

Nothanganathor flickered to stand in the way of the blast, but he was just the size of a few Jupiters and Erick’s attack was larger than that. The white wave hit the sun and Nothanganathor’s [Time Lock] that protected his body. The body began to burn again, though it was slower this time.

Nothanganathor spoke, “I don’t need it anymore.”

Another lie through half-truth; he didn’t need it, but he still wanted it. The protective magics that Nothanganathor had set down upon the large corpse remained there, fighting to keep the body from fully combusting.

Nothanganathor advanced on Erick, like a snake swimming through the ocean, body twisting, eyes focused.

Erick called out, “You said we would fight as universes the next time we met, and here you are talking! Even more lies from the liar! Your Truth is a cloudy, broken thing, so let it burn in the light!”

White flames erupted out of Nothanganathor’s sun corpse and flickered across his smaller body.

And then he was suddenly there, his jaws open wide enough to swallow Erick whole. There seemed to be another Red Sun inside his gullet.

Erick stepped out of time and circled around to Nothanganathor’s back where he breathed a line of [Luminous Beam]s wider and stronger than ever before. Blasts of power impacted Nothanganthor’s skull, moving faster than the speed of light. It was like spraying water from a hose at a dune. Flesh parted and exploded away from where Erick’s beam touched, but it still was the touch of a raindrop upon an ocean.

Erick whispered into Infinity, “To me, my Valkyries.”

The White wave, still spilling out in the distance, flickered and twisted. Ten thousand portals opened like a layer of new stars, but nearby and filled with warriors.

Shivraa roared forward first, raising her ice sword and screaming vengeance, heralding the flood.

- - - -

Teressa pulled back from the Darkness and once again inhabited her body, in the prognostication offices of House Benevolence. She got up and rushed to the wall and slammed the big red button that they had set up years ago for a possible Red event. She hadn’t needed to slam that button in a long while, but she slammed it now, even as she started sending out [Telepathy] messages to everyone she knew to send them.

The alarm started blaring.

It was still a minute before Red descended upon Fenrir.

- - - -

Erick threw Bolts at Nothanganathor, to test their power. Red Lightning stretched out of the white serpent, grasping every Bolt and draining it into him. He was using his Sign of Power that he had stolen from Margleknot and used to kickstart the Sundering, to drain away all the magic that touched him.

It was an act of parity, for Erick did the same for every spell Nothanganathor threw his way, whipping out [Mana Siphon] like ten million shadowy tendrils, stealing all the power that Nothanganathor dared to let into Erick’s purview.

- - - -

Poi got Teressa’s message and then corroborated it along ten different vectors. All across Fenrir, all across Veird, and the moonsuns, and everywhere that Poi could reach, he caught word of Valkyries vanishing through portals. The Crossroads was alive with news happening from all areas of everywhere.

Ascendant Prime stepped into the Crossroads like a very heavy spider, and soon all the other Ascendants joined him. There was only one directive.

‘The Apparent King goes to war against the Red. Prepare for the counterattack.’

- - - -

Nothanganathor twisted reality itself, trying to Step away from the battle, to escape.

Erick stated, “No more running.”

And that was just about the only Wizardry that worked very, very well, for Nothanganathor had tried to threaten him with an ultimate fight if Erick ever showed his face. Well here he was, showing his face! Time for the fight.

Nothanganathor turned and made the mistake of attempting to breathe Malevolence at Erick.

Erick turned that power into his own, ripping at the Red with White, turning it pink and then dead and ready for eating, which is what he did next. All the while, the Valkyries nipped at Nothanganathor from every angle. He was several worlds long and every bit of Siphon counted.

Meanwhile, Nothanganathor’s original body, his corpse left upon the sun, was like firecrackers tossed into lava; it exploded here and there and it didn’t stop exploding at all.

The Valkyries feasted on that corpse, too.

- - - -

Evan had been feeling uneasy all day long. He had gone through reports from every Problem Area of Fenrir, and the steps being taken to solve those problems, but the job was literally too large for him and House Benevolence. They did what they could, though. Mostly they analyzed possible solutions to this Area or that Area and then put those solutions into the outgoing box in father’s office.

Those reports vanished the very second they were laid down. Sometimes they vanished before that, as the analyzer walked with the finished report in that direction.

Evan had attributed his unease toward the chaotic, absolute necessity of the job ahead of them.

But then the alarm went off while Evan was in the middle of working on Problem Area 187 with his team.

Zorik, Castellan Zolan’s grandson and Paladin of Rozeta and Evan’s boyfriend, startled. His eyes flickered Script-blue as he read instructions from Rozeta. That’s when Evan started to panic, and then his panic gave way to utter certainty.

He already knew what was happening.

Ophiel opened a portal in the middle of Evan’s offices, among his team. He fluffed out his iridescent black wings and said, “I need you. I already got the girls and every other dragon I could find. Dad is moving on Nothanganathor right now.”

Evan nodded.

Yup. That’s what Evan had expected.

Even grabbed Zorik, kissed him once, said, “Love you. See you later.”

Zorik was still in the middle of receiving instructions from Rozeta, his eyes still clouded with blue.

Evan followed Ophiel onward, into Benevolence Itself, where ten thousand other portals were open into ten thousand other lands, and people were moving fast. Yggdrasil was already directing people this way and that with rainbow streamers in the air, directing people and moving them at the same time, but people mostly knew where to go on their own.

Most of the people were Valkyries.

Zorik called out, “Love you, too!”

Evan twisted back, grinned, and—

The portal closed.

Ophiel said, “Sorry. Dad can do time tricks. I cannot. Go there.” He pointed at a portal in the sky. It was one of the closer ones, where the Valkyries were not headed at all. “You’re on a diplomatic/violence mission to help them fight the Red beasts that are appearing right now. It’s the Crystal Forest but Bulgan killed dad at the start of Candlepoint. Dad killed Bulgan and a few other bad people this time, again, but left them pretty much alone because they told him to go away because he looked like Melemizargo. Some people accepted his Personal Scripts, but not many.” Ophiel spoke much faster, “There’s 175 million people in that Crystal Forest for some reason! Tell them the basics or frighten them into believing you! I suggest the second option for expediency's sake! Go go go!”

Evan moved, flying fast, kinda awed at how much Ophiel knew and understood, and at how much organization his ‘little’ brother was doing right now. The entirety of Benevolence Itself was filled with portals, like dark stars leading from light into anything else besides light—

There, in the far, far distance, and in a way Evan only caught a glimpse of, was a sky full of black stars. Valkyries flew up through rainbow roads, traveling in the millions, so dense they looked like lines of blackgold fire. Those weren’t stars up there. They were portals into some other place. Some dark land.

The big battle.

Evan wanted to go, but he knew where he needed to be, and it wasn’t in the middle of a Wizard War. Evan’s place was anywhere other than a Wizard fight. Those Valkyries were probably dying just as fast as they were flowing into that other space. Evan imagined they got pulped and then reborn on Fenrir, near their [Spellsurge Weave]s, and every single Valkyrie would be making that flight to the final battle multiple times.

Evan flew toward his own portal, catching glimpses of all the true organization happening behind the scenes, and he was awed by Ophiel again. He glimpsed Ophiel yelling at Jane and Candice that they couldn’t go to the battle with Nothanganathor. The argument didn’t last long, thankfully. Just some yelled words. And then Candice and Jane went through the same portal, to some other necessity out there in Fenrir.

Wherever they went was likely a semi-Wizard fight. Maybe against Oozy? Who knew.

And then Evan flickered through his portal, and the portal closed behind him.

He floated above the Crystal Forest, on Fenrir. Or at least a version of the place. This one was on the exterior, so the sky was full of sunmoons and stars. Evan smiled as he saw this Crystal Forest. It was partially green. In this version of this world, Dad had probably started throwing out rain everywhere.

But then Bulgan had killed him at Candlepoint.

Welp!

Evan turned into a 50 meter long magenta dragon, and then he started Air Stepping around, getting a look at the place.

Red tears in the air started to appear almost right away, and Claws started to poke into this space.

Evan organized his thoughts. He still had access to mana through his Personal Script. Who to contact?

Did Poi exist in this world?

Evan focused on Poi, and then sent out a mental request to whatever passed for the Crossroads around here, ‘Hello, Poi. Is this Poi?’

Some Mind Mage grabbed his thoughts and wrangled them. ‘This is Rizala Fulisade! How do you know my brother’s name?!’

Evan focused, ‘I’m going to send you an information packet. I also need to start organizing the defense of this land. You’re being attacked by anti-memetic beasts. Here.’

Ten very, very long seconds later, and Rizala sent back, ‘Fuck! Okay. I have no mana. I consumed half of that package just to be able to read it. I’m only able to communicate with you because you have the connection open and some people have these Personal Scripts to make a mini-Crossing. Where are you?’

Evan floated, gigantic and draconic over a different version of Spur. A few things were different, but the city was still orange rock, just like Evan remembered back when he was Jane. The Farms still existed, which was nice. The whole place looked quite desolate, though.

The people of Spur panicked, as was expected, though they mounted no defense. How could they, without the Script? Without mana?

Evan sent, ‘I’m the magenta dragon with the wings.’

‘… Yes. I see.’

‘I am willing to use violence to save you. I am archmage level and my magic won’t unravel in this space like yours is unraveling. Those among you who have a Personal Script might be able to survive contact with the enemy, but the enemy is already attacking. Put me in touch with them. I will be directing combat and fighting the main Claws that come.’

‘… You really are his son.’

‘I am.’

‘This is what needs to happen...’

- - - -

Zooming across Nothanganathor’s back, dodging twists of dragonspines as the former-leviathan twisted, trying to catch him, Erick cascaded spill after spill of reson-empowered [Luminous Beam]s. Light burned through five layers of flesh at once, carving continent-sized wounds in Nothanganathor. Blood and bone appeared in those wounds, and then Erick tore deeper, and Nothanganathor twisted. Bone and blood blasted away, but this time it revealed scales underneath.

Nothanganathor sloughed off the damage exactly like a snake shedding his skin, becoming smaller now, but in the way that an ocean was smaller after it evaporated for a day.

Nothanganathor tried to collect his discarded flesh, that matter turning into Malevolence that then twisted back to him, but Valkyries feasted, roasting dragon meat with blackgold fire and drinking it down before Nothanganathor could take his power back.

“Parasites! Parasites all of you!” Nothanganathor roared.

His voice was an echo that blasted apart 1,248 valkyries that were too close and injured another 3,551. The first ones reformed somewhere back beyond the distant portals, while the second group merely regrew broken limbs and missing torsos with a rush of Carnage and Blood magic.

Several of them turned into actual parasites, though, and Erick sent a flicker of [Grand Reincarnation] lightning at those unfortunate people, sending them off to live other lives, in other parts of the universe, removing all of Nothangnathor’s influence and ensuring it wouldn’t come back. Erick had taken lesser measures to remove some of Nothanganathor’s wizard tricks earlier in the battle, and that was how he had lost a million Valkyries to Nothor Beasts and Claws ripping up the backlines, out of Erick’s sight, attacking the [Spellsurge Weave]s that held together several Valkyrie groups.

He’d get them back if he could, but—

Nothanganathor twisted. The fabric of reality pulled inward. Valkyries got closer, even though they didn’t mean to, because Nothanganathor had turned time on an axis, pointing it toward himself, declaring himself Inevitable in that action. It seemed like a test of his nascent and approaching Mantle of the Dark God of Magic.

The Valkyries could do nothing but get closer to him, and that is when he shot out Red Lightning and turned ten thousand Valkyries into splashed blood that slipped into that Lightning and then drowned into Nothanganathor’s wounds.

He was restored, just a little, in the way that an ocean was deeper after the sky rained for an hour.

That right there seemed to be a common use of his Sign of Power; the thing he had twisted Margleknot’s Mark of the Fractal into, in order to Sunder the Painted Cosmology.

It would have been another million Valkyries gone into his Sign of Power, but Erick stepped through time and prevented that particular disaster.

Nothanganathor turned his eyes toward Erick, watching him with orbs the size of moons, as Erick moved through Time itself. The bastard was watching and organizing an attack, so Erick stopped moving in that way, returning to strafing runs of [Luminous Beam]. Nothanganathor roared out hate, his flesh blasting away as he once again twisted around to mitigate the damage, to aim claws at Erick, or to try and carve Erick from flight with any number of spines lining his body.

Erick dodged them all and blasted away continents of flesh.

It looked impossible. It looked like too much for any one fae to deal with. And it was. Nothaganathor had prepared countermeasures that he pulled out of Red Lightning like he was pulling out bazooka cannons in a fist fight. But Erick stepped in from the future and dismantled magic. He cast Nothanganathor’s tricks into Infinity, shoving those tricks into the sun, and when that didn’t work, he swallowed sun-ending trinkets with well-timed portals opened to the Whirlpool. The Whirlpool was still active over on that other slice of infinity, after all.

Stuff that was worse than Annihilation splashed this way and that, eradicating Nothanganathor’s trinkets and magic, for the Whirlpool was utter destruction. It was hard to predict when a splash of that destruction was angled in a useful way, to produce a rush of power that Erick brought through one portal, annihilated a trinket, and then swallowed that splash of Whirlpool right back where it came from, but Erick had a lot of time on his hands.

The battle was going well.

Erick and his Valkyries were winning. Veird was winning.

They could win this.

Erick dodged Red Lightning, and when he failed to dodge it, he pushed away those Futures where he died. When Nothanganathor Established deaths, Erick Established escapes from death.

Nothanganathor was just a wizard; a proto-fae. A single man with a lot of tricks, most of which burned away with his body on the sun. Erick and his people were a lot more than that.

And yet…

And yet, Erick blasted away continents worth of flesh, Mana Siphoning all the power that came his way and allowing the Valkyries to collect what remained. Nothanganathor attacked and struggled, and Erick evaded in all the ways he could, getting away from every counter attack.

Erick had stopped using normal magic a while ago, for Nothanganathor could suck that up with his Sign of Power, and Nothanganathor did the same, using trick after trick to attack Erick, every way he could.

Nothanganathor seemed to have endless tricks, but high-energy Particle Magic seemed to be the best thing to use against him, since it was the only thing he couldn’t siphon away with his Sign of Power. Erick was well equipped to do that, and it barely cost any mana at all. He was spending resons like water, though.

… Wait.

Was Nothanganathor spending any resons at all?

Why hadn’t Erick realized that earlier—

Nothanganathor suddenly erupted in laughter, the sound of it coming from every angle, like an echo that surrounded—

Erick was inside of a stomach. He didn’t know how he had gotten there, but he was inside of a world-sized stomach. Acid burned the void all around like caustic corruption, twisting reality into digestible mana. Erick Stepped out of the trap, into the void, lit by the Red Sun. Nothanganathor swallowed a few thousand more Valkyries while Erick reoriented—

Nothanganathor’s belly sealed back up, the wound Erick had exited healing in a flash of Red.

“Almost got you with that one!” Nothanganathor said, as he whipped his head back around to glare at Erick, his eyes shimmering Red. “You should have prepared more!”

Erick had prepared enough, for he had tricks he hadn’t used yet, too. The big ones.

He decided to use one trick, though.

Erick punched Nothanganathor.

They were both human in that throwing of that punch, each floating in the void. Erick knocked out teeth and Nothanganathor’s brain rattled as blood went flying. That blood turned into Valkyries that flew away as fast as magically possible. Erick punched the dazed bastard in the stomach again, caving in bone and breaking spine.

And then Nothanganathor recovered, twisting into the punch like a swallowing maw of his true self, rapidly returning to full size and snapping down on Erick’s still-human body.

Erick wasn’t in that maw at all. He was by Nothanganathor’s eye.

Erick raked dragon claws across Nothanganathor’s eye, for Erick had become a dragon again, and much bigger than before. Nothanganathor was still the size of several Jupiters, but Erick was bigger, now. Almost as big as one of Nothanganathor’s eyes.

Nothanganathor pulled away, one eye closed, blood seeping.

Erick held up a red gem. “Got your eye!”

Resons poured out of Erick as the gem became a real eye, sized to Erick’s fist. He crushed the eye and Nothanganathor raged. The white serpent wasn’t really blinded at all, but he wouldn’t be getting that eye back without actually trying for it.

The fight resumed.