Chapter: 400 Bonus - Existential Views (Patreon)

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The City Lord sat within his home, glaring at Pallaun.

The Eskau of the accursed House of Blood didn’t take particular notice of the City Lord’s glare. In fact, he didn’t even notice it. After all, the hue-man was more than a mile away even just including true distance in the measurement.

If one were to include expanded space, the Eskau was closer to eight miles distant.

The City Lord stared at him all the same, malevolence in his glare.

“Is it you? Is it your defiance of my authority that keeps me from advancing beyond Revered?”

That whole House was a pox upon his city.

They had once been ardent supporters of his, and he had helped to uplift them, despite their…odder beliefs, but not anymore.

They practically flouted his rule altogether.

Unfortunately, he was stuck with them for the time being.

Eskau Meallain of that House had torn through the upper echelon of the other Houses. So, if he banished the House of Blood from Platoiri it would leave his city significantly weaker than it was at the moment.

That woman—that elf—was a perfect example of ignorant power and a false branch. She would never reach Sovereignty.

Even if those she strove to serve had survived and reached it themselves, she’d never have achieved it.

She would never advance beyond her hollow, Hallowed status.

Eskau Meallain simply didn’t have the authority, nor the mindset to gain any authority.

Still, if he drove the House of Blood out, he believed that his authority would advance and solidify. He would step beyond Revered and into the Hallowed realms.

“But do I wish Hallowed authority over a bare remnant?”

He didn’t, and so he would strive on.

The commonly accepted next step from his current level of advancement would be for him to become synonymous with the city, to reach the point that he was Platoiri, and the city was him, but that was difficult to achieve.

He’d already shed his own name long ago.

Simply being known as the lord of the city was power in and of itself.

But he had never been able to force the next step.

He sneered at himself and his own failings. “The humans have managed a butchered version, and I can’t make it a reality even with thousands of years.”

True, the gated humans moved their cities so often that the authority they had cobbled together was superficial at best, hardly extending over the population and buildings. It didn’t extend to the land or sky at all.

But it was still there.

It was greater authority over a lesser thing.

Wasn’t he already on that path?

Hadn’t he already decided to make that trade?

He was seeking to be a City Sovereign. He and all of his colleagues on this island continent were.

Only the Mountain Kings had succeeded in their three strongholds in a line from the east to the northeast.

Even as he thought of the Mountain Kings, he felt his own conceptual nod to their authority over their homes. Even as a group, their titles held power.

Triplet dwarves, they had bound their power together, and then spread out to each claim a sacred mountain.

Each broken peak held the remnants of the great war deep within its roots, magic-engines of such power they’d been meant to collectively terraform a planet.

They were broken now, far beyond repair even by those who knew how.

No one living knew how.

Yet, even broken, the three massive magic-engines leaked power, and they would continue to fill the mountain halls with magic until the sun grew cold.

Their neighboring continent was said to have smaller magic-engines that could be moved about, but they were both weaker and prone to failure.

If those broke, they would be useless.

The City Lord knew of the rumors of three more great magic-engines on that other continent as well, to the north-west of Platoiri, but he’d not confirmed their existence himself.

But that was irrelevant. Even if he had an army of loyal Houses—and even if he knew exactly where such engines were hidden—he wouldn’t waste his power on a campaign to claim any of the fallen artifacts.

No, his path, his eternity, was one of the slow accumulation of power.

Platoiri was his, and he would be Platoiri in the end.

One way or another.

* * *

Nadro leaned back in a soaker tub within his own dimensional storage space.

Here, he had utter privacy, so long as he didn’t check his Archive connection.

Retson was kind enough to leave Nadro to his contemplations.

It had been quite the day.

Nadro had had a long, long day of talking with the young about their issues and troubles and fears.

His exhausted sigh sent ripples through the water.

He wished that he could do more.

He wished that solving their problems would actually solve their problems.

Sadly, life was more complicated than that.

If he swept in and made all the trouble go away, then when the next issues arose, they would be less able to handle them, and he’d be needed once again. The cycle would quickly spiral from there.

On one side, he’d find it rather gratifying to be able to look over humanity, keep them safe, and draw them toward eternity, but he couldn’t be their slave.

That was mostly for their sake. Having every need and want satisfied without effort made for weak, lazy, sick people.

He had to be a gardener, helping influence the plants to grow in the right directions, fixing what they couldn’t, and keeping away the worst pests, but allowing them to still grow according to their nature.

It would be so, so much easier to just fix them, to just make them into my own image.

But that would be the height of arrogance.

He was not their creator or owner.

Forcing himself into such a position was the arcane way: to dominate and control, seeking authority through dominance.

Nadro’s way was better, cleaner, more in line with existence.

Existence did not demand authority.

It simply was.

It simply existed.

All bent to its strictures because all was within it.

There was no contest, just authority.

Nadro didn’t pretend to reach for such heights, but it was a picture of what should be.

Instead, he made himself available to others.

They came to him, seeking his wisdom, listening to his counsel, and allowing him to exert authority over their choices, not by dint of command, but by free-willed choice.

That was the true basis of power of even the most long-lived resident of Zeme.

The willing are always more powerful than the coerced or the fearful, and thus the power—the authority—they granted willingly was greater as well.

Eternity for the slave master would be almost as much a torment as for the slave. It would be greater in some respects, but Nadro wanted no part of either.

If it were up to him, Nadro wouldn’t allow anyone to suffer either.

For the time being, however, he needed to acquire enough power so that it would, in fact, eventually be up to him.

He also had to ensure that there would be a humanity to protect, and worth protecting at that, when he achieved his lofty goal.

One step at a time.

* * *

Master Jevin sighed, leaning back after what felt like months of concentration.

By his Archive connection, it had only been a day, but that was still far longer than he’d hoped.

Even so, he felt himself smile, unable to contain his jubilation.

The distal phalange of his middle finger was no longer a wood that was—by its very nature—more durable than tool-steel.

It had been Reforged by his power and his will, broken down and rebuilt in his chosen manner.

It was bone once more.

True, it was a bone that could crack an anvil without breaking—if used with a proper application of force—but it was bone.

Human bone.

He felt his whole body shaking as a mirthful laugh bubbled up, seemingly from his very soul.

“It worked… It finally worked!” He shouted the last, laughing nearly maniacally by that point.

He’d succeeded in Reforging some of his soft tissue back to human-standard in the past, but the bones were literally the core.

Finally, finally, the first of them was back as it should be.

Unfortunately, his traitorous body was not as jubilant as he was.

He watched as his finger began to necrotize, the bulk of his physical form trying to reject the human bone.

But he was master of his domain.

He was a Paragon, and his eternity was his to shape as he willed.

It would not end here, and he would be human once more.

He seized his autonomic responses and suppressed them, forcing an acceptance of the ‘foreign’ material, at least for the moment.

With this success, he was on the clock.

His best guess was that he could keep this suppressed for a decade at the most.

His own body was too powerful—and too misaligned with his soul—for him to control for any significant length of time.

He would need to Reforge his torso and head before then. More would be better, but if he achieved that, he could at least cut off his own limbs if he had to, in order to survive.

From there, it wouldn’t be much effort to rebuild the limbs properly.

That was the lazy way, the easy way that would give inferior results, but if it was necessary, he would do that in preference to death or reversion.

He felt his heartbeat speed up with excitement at the challenge.

His own drive swelled in response to the chance at finally reclaiming his humanity.

‘To err is human, to strive is eternal.’

* * *

Xeel was—most technically—nowhere, having allowed his physical form to fall into its natural state.

Light.

He wasn’t moving, so his light was somewhere, even though that strained the nature of light.

Light moved, that’s part of what made it light, but he was his own master.

At the moment, the light was near the top of a mountain close to the center of the range about which gated humanity built their cities.

He was ready to respond at need, his connection to the Archive most of what he was focused upon.

Please have need of me.

If he wasn’t needed, he didn’t need to be.

And so he wasn’t.

At need, though, he could move almost nearly at the speed of light.

There were oddities that he had long since gotten used to, of course.

His body of light couldn’t hold any magic at all, nor could it hold inscriptions.

Thus, he had no spellforms of any kind at his disposal.

His every working was—by necessity—entirely freeform.

He even had to manually forge his own keystone every time he returned to human shape.

Even beyond that, whenever he arrived anywhere, he had to refill on magic, leaving him vulnerable and unable to assist for precious seconds in an emergency. If it wasn’t an emergency he was responding to, he was so hampered for hours if he wished to be at full power before acting.

On the positive side, he didn’t have to deal with magical resonance limiting his speed of travel.

As light, when he moved, time was… odd.

He understood it well enough, but he had a hard time describing it.

Finally, he’d resorted to simply saying that time stopped for him when he was light, even if that was an oversimplification bordering on the edge of being deceptively inaccurate.

Because magic flowed through his gate at a given rate per second, with no seconds passing there was no magic.

There was none in his body and none coming through his gate, so there was no magic about him to resonate with the zeme that he passed through.

He was the perfect cheat to bypass the limit on speed of travel that hampered every other being with even a smidgeon of magic.

It wasn’t perfect by any means.

After all, he couldn’t bring any of his soulbonds with him, and that was… irritating, but it was worth the price.

After all, he had purpose.

He had a place within eternity.

He was a protector of those who were like him but who lacked the ability to resist the tyrants of the world.

A defender of the innocent.

An uplifter of the downtrodden.

If he had been other than light, he would have smiled at exactly how fitting his place in existence truly was.

Even so, the slope of the mountain beneath him was briefly illuminated by a light that mirrored the warm glow of a summer sunrise.

He was—and would forever be—a light for humanity.

* * *

Jenna flicked the forehead of another training golem.

The magically reinforced stone turned to powder under the influence of her Reforged action, not even bending her nail at the impact.

She sighed. “These are…” She hesitated. They were meant to help train lower level Archons. “These would be sufficient for weaker Refined, but I expect anyone worthy of being a Defender would tear through them without getting much from the exercise.”

The Constructionists swarming through the room all heard her, she’d made sure of it.

They would take her assessment into consideration, and analyze how their construct had failed under her brief attack.

She hoped they wouldn’t rush forward, but she doubted she could hold them back.

Still, these might be useful for the training of Fused, and there was value in that.

Jenna shook her head. She shouldn’t let best be the enemy of good.

These were good.

They would help her children grow stronger than they would otherwise.

Humanity needed more Refined and above, and these might just make that happen.

The heavens know that Mages need to be hardy to Refine.

Her children were numerous recently. She was glad that she hadn’t seen the early days, when they were struggling just to survive.

Now, with twelve named cities—with two more names to be added in the next hundred years or so—and with nearly ten and a half million souls, humanity was finally coming into its own.

Her children were thriving like never before.

Still, there were stirrings in the surrounding lands.

The wolves were acting oddly of late, and that bore investigation.

The moving settlements in the plains beyond the forest were agitated and not willing to share what they knew.

They kept what trade there was open, but representatives from the gated human cities were not welcome to remain in most of the massive magical marvels for long.

The arcanes had just undergone an odd sort of internal conflict.

Jenna’s information sources were imperfect, but from what they had been able to glean, a Hallowed had gone on a killing spree, purging a significant number of Honored, and even a few Revered across several cities before the tide of blood had lessened.

Jenna didn’t know why, but she hadn’t devoted energy toward figuring it out.

After all, none of the City Lords had fallen, so there wasn’t really any opening to strike out against that ancient foe.

Not to mention that that would break the tentative cease-fire that’s lasted for millennia at this point.

True, there had been… incidents in the past, but it had never devolved into a true conflict.

They needed the arcanes to continue to dismiss humanity even as humanity grew to be a true power in their own right.

My children are almost ready to stand on their own. A smile pulled at her lips. I will make them ready for whatever comes, and then I will stand beside them.

* * *

Ingrit lay on her information couch, data pouring through her mind.

Her cognitive scripts were set to pre-filter a truly staggering amount of information, searching for what she needed.

It was a silly little project, requested by a mere Bound, but it had interested Ingrit enough that she was digging into the Archive instead of sleeping or using her personal time for other purposes.

Her family had graciously given her the evening to herself after their standard meal together.

They knew how important this was to Ingrit.

Research was the cornerstone of society, and information was the only way for humanity to advance.

Gated humanity all stood on the shoulders of those who came before, and the only way to do that in any efficient manner was to pass understanding down through the years.

It was her job to keep track of that information, sort it, and then delve through it at need.

Hers was the best job in the world.

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