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Erick floated in the air, his glowthread regalia glittering on his human skin like a soft whiteness, rimmed in black.

He was alone, and yet not.

The city of Anomalies lay before him; an edifice of greed and luxury a good hundred kilometers wide and built upon the backs of eons of slave trading. Physically, it resembled a rather nice utopia. Sleek silver buildings. Parks. Private gardens. Lakes and rivers. Restaurants and book sellers and bright lights and discipline in everything. Multiple levels in some parts of it. Nice houses over there on those hills. It was a city for a million people, too. Some buildings were rather more works of art than wholly useful, and sculptures were everywhere; art was in abundance.

Erick wasn’t impressed.

He had done enough to this place and seen enough to fully understand their entire business model, and that business was in producing both perfectly obedient slaves, and selling the inborn talents of those slaves to the highest bidders. None of this was made by anyone of their own free will. All of it was built upon misery and pain, and here and there, that misery and pain lay exposed beneath the thin veneer of civility that Slaver’s Den adopted like a demon wearing the body of another.

Over there was a coliseum where slaves killed each other in battle. Over there was the slave dancery, which was a theater-type place. Lots of theater and other forms of performative art everywhere, actually. Over there were the sex halls filled with slaves and some of the worst depravity Erick had ever seen since the Shades at the height of their power in Ar’Kendrithyst.

Erick didn’t want to look too deeply.

Perhaps, if he had been looking more deeply, if he had been more prepared for this sort of war, he would have turned time back several days ago, when those 112 million people died to the breaking of that Contract Nexus. In the end, though, Erick knew that those people were always going to die, because this war was not going to end due to the actions of terrorists, and drawing this war out would just lead to more suffering in the end.

What would have happened if he would have ended the war, allowing them to live? They’d just go on killing and slaving. The people they had trapped in Contracts and slavery were always going to die, somehow, some way.

From what Erick knew of the stories of many slaves, they would have preferred to die than to be slaves.

And honestly, Erick hadn’t expected Slaver’s Den to do that. To wage that sort of war; holding hostages in hopes for better terms. Here Erick was, completely willing to send all of them away into new lives, in new places, as decent people, and yet they wanted to hold onto their evil powers. And so, they had displayed those evil powers, holding them up as some sort of deterrent, as if Erick would ever deal with terrorists.

Erick should have expected it more, though. These people had no morals at all.

When that Major Contract breaking had happened, Erick had finished up the war efforts on all the rest of Slaver’s Den, but he had left Anomalies alone, and so, there hadn’t been another Major Contract breaking since then… Or maybe they simply lacked the capability to do that a second time. Erick doubted that possibility. You didn’t use a weapon like that and then kept defending yourself when you only had the one weapon. If all they had was the one weapon, then there was never any use for it at all.

One nuclear bomb is a horror.

Ten nuclear bombs are a deterrent.

… Erick’s mind returned to the frantic defense that had occurred in all those other places out there in the Den.

All across Slaver’s Den, people had fought to the bitter end, even when they knew what was coming for them. Oh sure, some people had surrendered, but most had not. It was an odd culture clash, in Erick’s mind. The slaves, of course, had no choice but to fight… Which was perhaps the crux of it. The slaves had no choice, and so they fought. The valkyries always caught up to the fleeing leaders, though.

Was it a ‘lizard dropping its tail’ situation, then? Was that why no one had tried to surrender?

And they all thought that they were smart or strong enough to get away?

Probably.

Erick would have sighed at that thought, at finally having the time to think at all, but people were watching. The last few days had been hectic as fuck. Around 35 million people now belonged to House Benevolence, and almost all of them were refugees picking up the pieces of their lives that they could, which wasn’t much.

Erick had annihilated all the other cities of Slaver’s Den, quite literally. [Annihilation Dot] did well for clearing out the land. Sure, some stuff that some people could have used got destroyed, but it was better than letting some unknown horror crop up later. Better to start off fresh, and with some new lakefront property.

And so, Erick had made some cities and assorted buildings before he came here to Anomalies, to finish this. [Cityshape] did not work very well out here in Margleknot, where the spell didn’t interact very well with all the various expended powers floating around in the normal Margleknot air, but it worked well enough for hovels, for now. New dungeons were spitting out lots and lots of mana, securing the land for all those 35 million people. Most people simply sat in their designated zones, waiting for the war to end. The only people allowed to move around right now were those who actually pledged themselves to the House…

Erick’s mind was wandering too much.

He shouldn’t let it wander this much.

He was here, waiting at Anomalies, for someone to come out to speak to him.

All the rest of Slaver’s Den was destroyed and remade. Erick’s [Infinite Imaging] and valkyrie squadrons did very well for finding all the last holdouts out there, in the wastelands of the Den. The holdouts here at Anomalies were of a different problem altogether. Several million people crammed into a place meant to hold 1 million, and even the owner’s quarters —the parts of the houses where slaves were not allowed to be— had slaves sleeping in the less used hallways. The streets were worse by far, because many of the owners of this land did not like to share space with ‘those country bumpkins’ from outside the city. It was a madhouse of pain and injury. Slaves slept on the streets. Slavers killed each other over minor spats. Everyone was in a state of panic. Everyone was in a state of loss. Suicides were rampant.

Some slavers had put up signs saying that they would sunder their slaves if Erick came into the city.

More threats from terrorists.

Some slavers had their slaves out on the streets, ordered to beg for their lives at all hours of the day, and they were doing a great job of that. But their efforts were rather inconsistent. All around the city, in every part of the lands near the walls, slaves stood or kneeled on the concrete or, if they were allowed, on the grass, prostrating themselves to whoever might be looking. Only 1% of those ordered slaves were actually within Erick’s direct view right now.

This begging had gone on for days. Some of the enslaved were dead from mistreatment, and still there where they had fallen, their corpses bloating and the slaves nearby weeping over that, and because they were not allowed to stop crying out for succor.

Erick was kilometers away. He was pretty sure that the owners of the city could see him, but people down there could not.

Erick saw it all.

And he was going to tear it all down, soon enough.

All that remained of Slaver’s Den was here. That statue of Shackle and his underlings on that mountain in that lake was here, too.

This city also had a manaminer. It was the only one with a manaminer. That manaminer is why the valkyries could not penetrate the area. This particular manaminer was not like the manaminer of Da’luwe, either; it had actual power behind it. Authority.

Erick was still working out what Authority really meant.

He had heard a few different descriptions of it over the last few days. Ta’Kamoil had called Authority ‘preeminence among all’, but that was really just domainwork but stronger. Authority sort-of worked like Domains, but not really. They did share a lot of similarities, but not enough that the words were interchangeable.

Shadow had called Authority ‘the logical conclusion of one being in power in an area’, which was supposedly ‘as simply as I can explain, Erick, without lying’.

Yggdrasil had been there with Shadow when Erick had been asking those questions, and he had called Authority, ‘The setting scene for a Wizard War, begun in a particular Wizard’s favor’.

And that is what made ‘Authority’ click for Erick.

Shadow had been perturbed that Yggdrasil had managed to come up with such a good wording. Usually she was all about that. That particular moment of banter between them had been a brief spot of light in the ‘elfitarian crisis’ that was this war, because you certainly couldn’t call it a ‘humanitarian’ crisis. Humans were in pretty short supply here in Margleknot, because elven bodies healed a lot easier than human bodies, because...

Erick turned his mind back to the current moment.

Slaves cried out in the streets to be left alone, extolling the virtues of how good their masters were, and how much Erick should just go away. Some of those slaves made this claim even with fresh whip markings on their backs, though, so that sort of ruined the whole idea that their masters were ‘the good kind’. And then there were the soldiers, looking to harm people to make Erick leave, and…

And Erick was tired of waiting.

If this was to be a Wizard War, then...

Erick revealed his draconic self, several kilometers away from the city, hovering high in the air, but he was still 2 kilometers long himself. He had grown recently. His tail was as thick as a submarine, and it lashed the wasteland ground, making thunder roll across the world. His wings buffeted a hurricane briefly, and then he simply hovered, opening his mouth.

Lightning flashed across the sky, and Erick’s voice thundered overhead.

“Captain Shackle! Show yourself, and prepare for the end of your reign!”

The people of the city who could run, ran. Those who had orders to stay and call out to Erick, to plead for their lives, yelled louder, their eyes turning his way. Erick noticed a drain on his Status, and surely, beyond the turrets and the wall and the Authority that surrounded Anomalies, Shackle was trying some shit. Whatever it was, it was ultimately inconsequential. Erick strengthened his aura, his Domain, his sense of purpose, and whatever shit Shackle was trying to pull simply stopped.

Erick waited ten seconds for an answer, and then he decided he had waited long enough.

He advanced—

“Impertinent dragon,” came a voice from the city, louder than the rest. Light suddenly projected out of the walls of Anomalies, forming into the shape of Captain Shackle, matching Erick for height and width, but only because of Shackle’s four black feathered wings. He was surely inflating the size of those wings, Erick thought. Shackle scoffed. “You are courting death. You think I leave my largest powers out there, outside of my direct control? I have much more than Grand Contracts ready to deploy. Test my patience more and I will weave death far and wide, and you will be responsible for all of that.”

Erick scoffed right back at Shackle—

“Do you know how many nuclear bombs it takes to kill a defenseless world?” Shackle asked, his voice a poison upon the world. “The worlds we have raided before, and will raid again, and have prepared long in advance if we should lose ground there at all?”

Erick kept his draconic expression schooled at that horrible threat.

And then he realized something deep.

Benevolence never twinged at him about the Major Contract activation and the deaths of those 112 million people. It didn’t twinge at him now. Rather than warning Erick away, his Lightning Path demanded Erick act to remove this threat, no matter the cost.

Shackle would always have threats. He would always have people under his thumb, waiting to die instead of him.

That was why Erick’s Lightning Path had always been pointed forward in this war. That was why he did not rewind time to save those 112 million people. Ultimately, there was never any way to kill this Great Evil without a grand loss of life in this way, or that way, or some other hidden, third way.

And yet…

Was there a way to have everything? To end Shackle’s threat, and save those people under nuclear threat?

Erick rapidly thought through a few plans, discarded almost all of them, and then rapidly came upon an idea that he foresaw he would be using a lot, for this was not the first time he had encountered a bad guy holding people hostage, without a clear path forward to save them all. The first time this happened, or at least the first time that truly stood out to Erick, was that time at Last Shadow’s Feast, with that Charisma mobster with those bone bombs planted inside those children. And now, here was Erick, decades and Layers of infinity away from that time and place…

And this was a Wizard War, and Erick was a Wizard. A Paradox Wizard. A Time Wizard, who never really stepped into that application of this power… not truly. Not as much as he could have. Erick didn’t want to do the whole ‘time hopping thing’ anyway. He wanted to do the Establishment thing.

And so, here now was a Wizard War, with Erick the only Wizard present.

To all the people he harmed, Shackle was like a god.

But to Erick, he was nothing but an annoyance to be worked around.

An annoyance with a lot of power-through-Evil. An annoyance that Erick had learned a lot about during the last few weeks. From the dancery over there in the city with a sign that read ‘Captain Shackle approved!', to the narcissism of having giant statues of oneself in his land, to the way in which he liked to break people by stealing their powers for himself because he was inadequate on his own, to how he poisoned the land all around him through Contracts, through his words, through how he needed to be sure to inflict massive collateral damage in order to be left alone to amass even more stolen power from others…

Erick Knew Captain Shackle more than enough to do what came next.

A Truth came out of Erick’s maw,

“Hey Shackle. You’re an asshole, right? A guy who isn’t very bright?”

Shackle’s image scowled at Erick, as he said, “I’m a brilliant leader! The best slaver there ever was!”

“Only when you’ve forced slaves to give you applause.”

“Of course I force them! Idiots need to be educated!”

“That can be debated. All I see is a man who’s hated.”

“Provincial idiot! Uneducated. You make me rather aggravated.”

Erick did not smile as Shackle got caught up in Erick’s scheme, dragged into the flow. Into Erick’s power. Erick doubled down, putting a little more power into his voice, saying, “So educate me, little slaver. How much to get you to sign a waiver?”

The Captain’s holographic form wavered as it turned more solid, and he scoffed, not noticing the change. “Waive my rights to what? You human mutt?”

“For you to give up all you own; to show us all you could atone.” Erick continued, “I am the ultimate forgiving sorts, for all of those who are good sports.”

Shackle’s wings fluttered behind him, his scowl thunderous, the air moving at his flex, even though he was still holographic light. “You think you’ve won already? Even for dragons, that’s heady!” He scoffed. “By what right of power do you claim any end of this war game?”

Erick didn’t have him yet, but he was close. Slowly, Erick began to shrink his draconic self down, saying, “The fact that you think this a game means you have no real, true shame, and that’s a fault that lies with you; your morals are all deep askew. Like building nations upon a swamp, without checking for dragons first, the dragons have come out to chomp, and now you’re here to get versed.”

Erick was a 2 meter tall dragon.

Shackle was a 2 meter tall hologram, and then he was a person. He was Shackle, here, in the flesh, and his eyes were too focused on Erick to realize anything was wrong at all. He sneered, sweat collecting on his brow and in his armpits, a rank sort of smell coming off of him that wasn’t present in the hologram, for the man had been run ragged recently. His mouth smelled, and Erick was rather sure that he had stains on his underwear.

Shackle scoffed, “Instructed by a lowly king? I sell to emperors, gods, and Powers. I’ll peel your scales and make you sing, playing in your soul to wile the hours.”

Far away, too far for them to ever affect this Working, were Underling Chains in his many corpse-bodies. He was in the air, about a kilometer away, struggling against an impossible wind to reach for this confrontation, to yell and have his voice heard. He threw power at Erick, and that power went wide, turning to nothing under the fae rust sky.

Underling Walara and ten thousand demons poured out of the city, arriving second to Chains and with backup, attempting to reach Erick and Shackle, but none of them able to get within a kilometer before the pressure of the moment pushed them back, too.

Valkyries flew in and killed who they could, but they couldn’t get near Erick or Shackle at all, either.

The war happened all around Erick and Shackle, and Shackle glanced around himself, vaguely aware that something was happening out there.

Erick slowly increased his size, but Shackle was not a hologram anymore, and he could not adjust anything. He stared upward, becoming smaller and smaller, as Erick intoned down at the man, “I guess if you’re reduced to threats, the meeting of these minds is done. I hope you’re empty of regrets, because you’re getting thoroughly undone.

“From here to there on every world, all of your Slaver’s Dens, everywhere your Contracts have curled, here to there and back again, I send sparks through you to ages past, a simple reach, a deep broadcast, in bombs and spells this does amass, a little trick, tiny trespass. With dancing sparks defusing bombs, we weed the land that he has planted, enchant him now to give us these alms, until his evil is recanted.”

Erick was two kilometers tall, his fangs ten times the size of Shackle, Erick’s tail casually curled around the ground, below the man, his wings wrapping around, blotting out the red sky and the golden light of Yggdrasil’s Quarantine. Erick stared at Shackle, floating amid the half-light, Erick’s eyes blazing white, his mouth spilling radiance into the meeting between him and a dot of a man who would be digested like he had his demons do to the freshly captured, before they took them to Layer 1 and sundered them there. Erick wasn’t sure if he would be doing that second part, but the first part? Yes. He needed time to fully disassemble all of Shackle’s evil, to plant the seeds of his destruction deep into the man’s own past.

And Erick would take that time.

He would take all of Shackle’s Time.

Shackle had damned himself by his own participation in the magic, drawn along into depths he never imagined he would suffer. And so, the slaver watched in fear, within the dark world within black wings, where bright-eyes and white teeth and an abyssal-white maw declared the end of all his monuments and power.

Shackle trembled.

Erick spoke, “We take this soul, we bind it deep, we have a goal: to make it weep.”

Lightning ascended.

- -

The void flier known as Captain Shackle hovered in a white abyss. His four usually-hovering black wings were bound in Benevolence crystal, with more crystal stretching across his back, locking his wings to him, making sure he couldn’t move them at all. His limbs were spread wide, and each joint was similarly locked in crystal, like his wings. Crystal covered his face and most of the rest of him, and that crystal was growing. The covered parts of Shackle’s body were effervescing soft glows of various colors into the white abyss. It was in those colors that the crystal was growing the most.

There went some bright orange power from Shackle’s exposed left bicep, and crystal grew on that exposed section, locking the man down just a little bit more.

Something grey and green evaporated from Shackle’s fourth wing, and the crystal there grew larger.

The only parts of him exposed at all were an expanse of thigh and a part of his bare chest and stomach. And then something red evaporated out of a part of his chest, and the Benevolence crystal grew over that part of his chest, locking him down just a little bit more.

And then there was his eye. Shackle retained his right eye. That one eye was wildly looking left and right, and then straight ahead, as he spotted his captor. Fury lay within that mind, behind that eye, and yet, that fury was impotent. Crystal grew slowly around that eye, as something black evaporated away from that eye, and the white crystal barely grew. It would take a little while to fully encapsulate the man. His eye would go last.

And then the true dissolution process would begin.

The dissection was already happening.

Erick floated in front of Shackle, in the white abyss.

Shackle wordlessly screamed, his eye vibrating in its socket, his mouth fully covered by crystal. His covered face was serene, though.

Erick said, “You already said your last words. What were they? ‘Playing in my soul to wile the hours’?” Erick harrumphed. “I won’t cause any more pain than necessary, but since your evil is rather well embedded, there’s going to be a lot of pain. For starters, all your deeds will be erased. All your planning is falling apart. Even now, my lightning is being sent through the cosmos upon your own timeline. I’m not too sure how it’s working out myself, but I can tell that’s what it’s doing, and I’m figuring it out as it goes. You are a wonderful test subject.

“... Anyway. Every world you have touched. Every hostage situation you have created. All of it, undone, as well as whatever powers you stole and put into yourself. That’s probably the most understandable part of this. You have parts of you that are not you, grafted on to your soul, and those are easily seen.

“Those are going first.

“You feel it, right? I’m pulling apart your soul, plucking at the blessings you have, at the power you have, unthreading it and using that to… Ah. I get it now. Yes. All of it.

“That’s how this is working.” Erick nodded, then he said, “It’s all a frameshift, really. The crystal is locking you down when it touches on a part of you that has laid a deadly plan, and then it evaporates that plan through an application of resons and Benevolence.

“I had wondered why my fate prognostication didn’t work so well with you, and why you were allowed to sunder 112 million people. I thought, perhaps, that you were underneath Authority, hiding out. That wasn’t it. A much more reasonable answer was that innocents were always going to die in the process of ending you, and it was better to end your evil now than to let you bring millions and billions more people under your yoke. That was half of the answer.

“The full answer is this right here.

“Those people were sundered so that every single person who comes after you is truly afraid of what I can do, if they piss me off enough. The horror you caused leads to this horror here, which will save countless people later.

“It’s not a perfect answer. I’ll figure something better out another time.

“But for now, this is the answer we have.”

If Shackle could have screamed in rage, he would have.

He could do nothing.

And then the crystal broke Shackle’s legs as it moved his lower body for him, violently, bloodily, putting his spread-eagle legs together, into a state of repose. It was bloody, and then the blood evaporated. From Shackle’s pelvis to his toes, what remained was locked below a simple 6-sided, tapered-point Benevolence crystal. He was a bit shredded down there, with bones and flesh mostly where they should have been, but Erick didn’t feel sorry for him.

If Shackle could have screamed in pain, maybe he would have.

Erick explained, “We’re halfway to the real show now. When your wings and arms break and reform—”

The crystal around Shackle’s spread arms broke violently, whipping the man’s arms to lay upon his chest, shredding his flesh. When the red evaporated, Shackle’s body was locked down to crystal from his neck to his toes. And then his wings simply broke. Those wings were a manifestation of his aura and soul, after all. They weren’t truly physical things, so they went away.

“Nothing here is actually physical, though I’m sure it feels that way to you,” Erick said, as Shackle impotently raged. “It’s all inside the soul. My soul, actually. You’re already very dead.”

Shackle’s rage stilled.

The crystal flashed over, and now Shackle was inside of a floating white quartz-like crystal, like a fly trapped in amber. The only part that wasn’t covered was his one eye, where the crystal had a cracked hole in it, like a rift, allowing him to peer out. Soon that hole would be gone. Soon, Shackle would be a soul contained.

“I don’t like giving these ‘winner’ speeches,” Erick said, “It’s too megalomaniacal of anyone to talk like this, but it’s an important part of the magic; to explain to you what is happening, so that you are both trapped and that you know the key to your escape. Hope is important, even for people like you, Shackle. To hope is to live, and you could live again.

“And so, here:

“A carrot: You can get a [Reincarnation] and complete forgiveness in your next life.

“And the stick: This whole magic happening right here, and forever more, until you repent. You are a rug being beat for information and targets, Shackle. So accept your beating like all the slaves you have beat before now, and learn how to be a better person for it.

“That’s how you do it, right? To break a person? Yes, it is.

“When you fully capitulate, and all your plots are undone, and you never want to seek revenge, and you always want to help others for all always, to the same extent that you have damned and doomed so very many, then you will be released, Shackle.

“With any luck, you will never see me again.

“But I will be seeing you.

“Goodbye.”

The crystal sealed over.

Shackle’s one eye remained open. Could he see? Probably. Erick needed an ingress into his memories and visions, anyway, so the eye would remain open; it was the window to the soul, after all.

The real magic began.

Shackle could not scream.

The white abyss all around revealed itself as a river of power that then flowed into that prison. Where mana and reson touched, images flickered out of Shackle’s single eye. Erick saw glimpses of ten thousand worlds and more as ten thousand little sparks took ten thousand little trips through Shackle’s prison, into his past, into the present, into lands far, far away from Margleknot.

It took 100 resons to cross a Layer, and then to cross into the next one, and so on and so on, Erick’s power linking glimpses of Elsewhere to Here, so those other places could be affected by this magic. It was 1 reson to find the center point of Shackle’s industries in those lands. It was hundreds of resons to visit each side reality in those Layers, where Shackle had built his slaving empire. The numbers added up fast, but Erick had a billion resons to use for this magic.

He had gone into this war with a stock of resons for some big magic. He had thought he would be [Grand Reincarnation]ing all of Slaver’s Den. But this was a much better use of that resource. Not a [Grand Reincarnation], but a whole lot of tiny nudges here and there, to save billions of people he would never know, and who would never know that they had been saved.

A spark of Benevolence danced upon a crucial control system, spreading acid mushrooms on motherboards to eat away at nuclear warheads, disarming them forever.

A giant series of cannons atop mountains, all controlled by ten separate systems, were now useless, as ten different jolts of Benevolence cut through systems that the local slavers had no idea how to fix, because Shackle never wanted those systems to be used against him.

An army fighting off a slave rebellion was hoping for a resupply within days, but there would never be another resupply from Slaver’s Den. That was how the true empire crumbled; in pieces of lost logistics.

An array system on yet another world was disarmed by a few stray jolts of white, ensuring that the control magics placed upon the populace of that world would fail the next time they were tested. And those magics were tested hourly. Rebellions began that night and the streets ran red with slaver blood.

A bloodcurse mandala, erected upon a hidden mountain, set within the most secured castle upon the most secured world of a tri-planet system that was filled with incredibly strong powers, had a misflow of Malevolence, thanks to a jolt of white Benevolence. A very hungry white mushroom began to grow where it should not grow at all, along the edges of a formation, and then growing toward the center. That mandala kept the slavers of Slaver’s Den invisible to all the strong cultivators of that system, so that the slavers could capture and consume those who they wanted to, like plucking ripe fruit from an orchard. But now the mandala had mushrooms, and even if anyone could get in there to repair it, it was too late, and to enter that room was to die to Malevolence anyway. Within a week, an entire culture of Evil sects was revealed and rapidly annihilated by all the powers they had been preying on.

The images of other worlds kept coming, pulled out of Shackle’s eye and then punched through with Benevolence, destroying everything he had built and everything he had ever touched.

And Shackle was slowly losing everything about himself. The images began to turn hazy. Indistinct. Shackle was shrinking, his flesh fading under the crystal, his soul being used up.

He began to cry there, at the end, when he was reduced to a collection of feathered black bones and skin and a single eye.

Erick kept going.

- -

Erick was a dragon again, floating above the wasteland outside of Anomalies. No time at all had passed out here in the real world, but a whole lot of time had passed inside Erick’s soul. Days or weeks or even months, he could not tell. Shackle’s soul was almost all gone; consumed to fuel the fires of his own eradication. But he still lived, somewhat.

And the war was still on.

All around Erick Valkyries fought demons and slave soldiers.

Erick obliterated most of the evil army with a [Grand Reincarnation], signaling his return to the moment. The Underling demon Walara and the Underling abomination Chains were the only major threats of the Evil army that remained after Erick’s lightning passed them by—

The city of Anomalies began to crack in a way that Erick took a moment to understand. Everyone else took a moment, too, from the slaves on the streets to the Underlings in the air, to the soldiers and the wall guards and even a few mindful valkyries. If the mindless valkyries would have had any luck actually injuring Walara or Chains, then Erick was sure that they would have continued the assault, but they had no capability to injure those high Talents. And so, they also watched the breaking of Anomalies.

The air of Anomalies cracked, white breaks appearing midair, like rifts in the world. But they weren’t rifts; they were the degradation of the Authority of Anomalies—

The manaminer of Anomalies fully shattered somewhere far, far away, in the center of the city, and probably far below as well.

Underling Warala and Chains both turned absolutely terrified, and not of Erick or anything else happening around them. They were terrified of Anomalies.

They rapidly tried to escape, flying away as fast as they could, but Erick wasn’t about to let them leave. With a casual flick of his tail and an application of Wizardry and aura control, Erick wrapped both of their physical forms in solid Benevolence and dragged them back to the war. They screamed about no one being able to survive what was coming. Erick cut their screams short with some high-reson-enhanced [Reincarnation] in Walara’s case, and a reson-empowered [Grand Reincarnation] in Chains’s case. Both worked exactly as Erick wanted them to, with Walara stripped of all of her demonic power and being sent off somewhere to restart life as a mortal, and Chains’s 378 separate bodies all being merged into one and sent off to be reborn as a normal mortal man on some distant world.

Erick didn’t pay much attention to them. He just wanted them gone.

And then Erick turned back to the dissolving Authority of Anomalies, saying, “If my magic worked right, and I think it did, then that failsafe is disabled.” Five minutes of nothing later, and all the air all across Anomalies was clear. The Authority holding back Erick’s armies was gone. Erick commanded the valkyries, “Go, and bring them all to new lives.”

Valkyries flew.

And people turned to blood.

The horde converted Anomalies within the hour, with only a few holdouts managing to remain for that full hour. And then Erick turned the whole city into a land of craters. With that done, Erick had his valkyries separate themselves into those who would become a part of the House, and those who would move on to new lives somewhere else.

Of the 7 million people who had remained in Anomalies, maybe half of them had been slavers who had run there seeking shelter from the war. Lightning ripped through a serene part of the valkyrie horde as Erick sent 3.9 million of them away, through a [Grand Reincarnation], into other worlds. That ate up 390 million resons, as well as five times as much Mana, Health, and Psyche. Erick could not do that forever, but he was able to do that once more, if needed.

Erick was tired.

But there was still work to be done.

Shadow stepped to Erick’s side, hovering over the craters of Anomalies with him, saying, “You advanced rather far in that final battle.”

“We’ll talk about it later, and what it might mean,” Erick said, “There’s one more thing to do.”

Shadow nodded.

Erick flew forward.

Shadow followed at his side.

They arrived over a large inland sea that was less filled with water than it had been, for Erick had obliterated the coast with [Annihilation Dot]s. The sea was wider.

They flew on.

It wasn’t long till they reached their destination; a mountain-sized statue of Shackle, Walara, and Chains, all of them standing atop slaves. The base of the mountain statue was already crumbling a little, for the lake no longer supported some of the base structure, and the valkyries had already been here, eradicating the people who had retreated here. The statues were kinda beat up now. One of Shackle’s wings lay crashed on the coast, broken.

Erick said, “Goodbye, and good riddance, Slaver’s Den. Places like you simply should not exist.”

With a wave of aura, Erick sent a Black Dot at the statue.

Annihilation cloyed at stone, spreading fast, across slaver sneers and narcissistic stances, erasing rock. Where it retreated there was nothing left.

The lake of Anomalies crashed into a crater. Water frothed and splashed and rocketed into the air.

And Slaver’s Den was no more.

Erick breathed out.

It was over, for now.

Erick asked Shadow, “Name the land, please.”

“Tir Geal,” Shadow said, “Or ‘Bright Land’, if you prefer.”

So she was going with some Earth language stuff, eh? Erick turned into his human shape and tried to smile, saying, “Where’d you even hear about Earth fae and Irish stuff?”

“Ha! We fae have our ways.” More seriously, she said, “A lot of people have done a lot of digging into your past, but don’t worry about Earth; I’ve already made a claim over it since we’re courting each other. Apparently that place is rather backwater, though. No one really cares about it.”

“I’ll trust you, then.” Erick had enough on his plate, anyway. He asked, “Not ‘Shadow Lands’?”

Shadow grinned. “This land is ours; not simply mine. And besides! Shadows live best where there’s brightness to be had, and there’s a lot of brightness here to be had. I do wonder why we haven’t gotten a prompt from Yggdrasil about owner transfer, though. We have killed all the slavers and converted all the rest.” She looked into the Quarantine and Rust Cloud sky, asking, “What’s the impediment, Yggdrasil?”

“There’s still Propagation Magic active and Shackle is still alive. This land cannot be transferred while either of those things remain true, and even after that there’s a 1 year waiting period for ownership transfer,” Yggdrasil said, stepping into the air with Erick and Shadow. He looked to Erick. “And what you did with Shackle there, in the end… It has hints of what was done to the Painted Cosmology. In the Sundering.”

Yggdrasil could have said a lot more, but he left it there, for now.

Shadow lightly looked at Erick, knowing that he did not want to speak of this topic at this moment in time, but Erick could tell that she deeply wanted to speak of this topic.

Erick said, “I am aware of the similarities. I don’t believe it was the same thing at all, for a lot of reasons. But now that it is done, I am aware. I wasn’t sure what I was doing until I did it, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.” Erick said, “Surely others have done similar magics, weaving time through a soul to pull that soul apart and send almost-Fateful levels of Establishment through the universe and time to erase the threats laid down by a departing enemy.”

Yggdrasil glanced at Shadow.

Shadow glanced at Yggdrasil.

Okay. So maybe what Erick had done was rather rare.

Erick tried, “Certainly not unique.”

Shadow allowed, “Not unique. But certainly rarer than fae. Benevolence is uniquely tuned to Time Magics and making good outcomes, so perhaps this is the true nature of what Benevolence can do.”

… Well that was a thought.

“Definitely not unique,” Yggdrasil said. “Though the scale of what you did…” His voice trailed away. “I’m not sure you understand just how difficult it is to do what you did. The fae can erase people and their works like you did, but once a person gets too metaphysically large then they can’t do what you did at all. Usually, the fae can only do that to newborns, and only a stronger-than-average fae could even attempt such an action.” Yggdrasil added, “What Lord Dakka did to the person who flipped the Major Contract switch, in order to erase them from all reality in a Hunt, was a common display of a strong fae’s ability to erase a person.”

Erick had not known that until this moment, and yet it made sense.

“I was thinking a bit about that, actually, when I went about this magic,” Erick said. And then he moved on, adding, “We’ll speak of Nothanganathor’s Sundering more later, for this is obviously how he did some of that, though the scale is off by several orders of magnitude. In smaller ways, I now recognize that this sort of thing is exactly what Nothanganathor has done to every single person he ate with Red Sparks, and what he did to Debby.”

“I’m glad you said it,” Shadow said, “Because I did not want to dance around that for much longer. Nothanganathor does this regularly. It’s a piece of how he did some of the Sundering, but not the whole story by far. Perhaps the Fae Council never truly believed that Nothanganathor could have caused the Sundering because none of them could envision this type of erasure working on the scale of a universe, and yet, perhaps that’s exactly what Nothanganathor learned to do.” Shadow looked to Erick, saying, “And now you have learned the same power as a strong fae, Erick.”

Ah.

Well that was kinda worrying in many ways.

Yggdrasil looked like he was holding back. He probably was, and for a whole bunch of reasons, for sure. From Fae Council secrets, to stuff he had learned from Aragathara, and probably whatever conversations he was having with various other powers out there right now about Malevolence. He was busy, and now there was this whole thing happening.

Erick commiserated.

“So the Sundering definitely came from this universe. 100% confirmed?” Erick asked.

Shadow said, “Pretty safe to say.”

Yggdrasil looked deeply worried about many very large things.

Erick said, “So let’s move on for now.”

Yggdrasil nodded. “Moving on. Are you going to keep Shackle?”

Erick did not have to think much, to say, “I should, because that’s what I promised him, that I would be looking over his shoulder until he repented and all his Evil seeds had been unsown. But I don’t want to look after what remains, and for a good reason.” Erick lifted his hand and expressed a fraction of his soul into the real world, pulling a crystal out of Elsewhere and into this reality. It was a white, 6-sided crystal, tapered at both ends, and with a splash of black frozen inside, like a bunch of feathers in a jumble. There were also tears inside, though Erick couldn’t see any eyes. “Didn’t know it would be that easy to pull him out of me, but here he is. He’s much diminished. I don’t think he has the mental capacity to actually repent at all since I used almost all of him while targeting his planted evils. A [Reincarnation] could fix some of that, but whoever stepped out of that magic would not be Shackle. He’d have holes in his memory the size of centuries, and that would do crazy things to a person.”

Shadow held out a hand. “Then you have done your duty to look over him until he repents in true, for an invalid stripped of Evil is not capable of knowing Evil, and that crystal is clearly crying. You have done enough. Give him to me.”

Erick handed him over.

And Shadow crushed the crystal, turning magic to dust and air, pulling out a tear-flecked black feather from the crystallized Benevolence. With a flick and twist, the black feather became white, the tears cast away, and then she released the feather into the air, where it slipped on a gust of wind into Elsewhere and was gone.

“… That’s that,” Erick said, feeling some kind of relief to be truly done with Slaver’s Den.

Shadow nodded.

Yggdrasil stared at where the feather had vanished for a lingering moment, then he said to Erick, “That only leaves the presence of the valkyries causing the Quarantine. As soon as all the valkyries are people again, I will end the Quarantine. I suggest you prepare well before you end that magic, because—” Yggdrasil pointed to different directions on the horizons, naming off, “Slaver’s Union, the Slaver’s Pit, and Slaver’s Ransom. Go far enough in those directions and you’ll end up in those lands. The Veiled Syndicate Hideout is over that way, and over there are the Dread Arenas.” He dropped his hand. “You could conquer some of those lands, but you probably shouldn’t, because Margleknot is close to being Balanced and you’re still trying to win over Wraithborne. So you can choose. Wraithborne becomes not-Evil, or you erase those other Evil lands out there and Wraithborne becomes empowered to get big, and fast.”

… Balance sucked.

Shadow said what Erick was thinking, “Balance is a terrible way to run a land.”

Yggdrasil frowned. “All life exists in equilibrium, or it collapses. Acknowledging that the Balance is real means that you can keep life alive. The forest needs wolves, the oceans need sharks, and people need freedom of choice, elsewise the Balance asserts itself into populations in cruel ways. Without wolves, deer die of starvation from overeating. Without sharks, bloated and diseased fish pollute the waters. Without Evil being known, then even Good civilizations fall to civil war.”

Shadow said, “Or, you could have an ever-expanding world where there’s always more to be done, and more growth to be had.” Shadow frowned, saying, “Honestly, Yggdrasil. It’s quite vexing that my universe is arguably less infinite than yours, and my solution to problems-of-growth was to always grow, and yet you’re the ever-growing-tree over here in Infinity, speaking about Balance as a virtue.”

Yggdrasil raised an eyebrow at Shadow. “And which universe still exists?”

Shadow scoffed. “My universe exists. It just needs to be made again out of the corpse of the Evil that consumed it. It’ll be a Grand Reincarnation!”

Erick listened to them speak, but he was still thinking about Wraithborne versus the other Evil lands. Erick decided that he did want Wraithborne to change away from Evil.

“About Wraithborne,” Erick said, “I’m still going to pressure Wraithborne to change. The Contracts are more of a blight than slavery is a blight, because the Contracts enable truly detestable slavery.”

Yggdrasil nodded. “Moving on. I suspect these other Evil lands might put in official requests for me to adjust how their lands attach to this one—” He stopped. He looked away, and then Yggdrasil turned back to Erick. “Actually, they already are. Or at least the Dread Arenas are. I’ll fast-track those requests…” Yggdrasil asked, “In other concerns: How much mana and resons did it take to erase all of Shackle’s Evil? I need to know to gauge how far out I need to look for issues to arise.”

890 million resons. He only had a few million resons left. Erick wasn’t quite sure how much of everything else, but he was down to less than a quarter million Mana, Health, and Psyche, so that meant 3.4 billion of each of those resources, at least. Erick had done all of that magic manually.

But he could have done it Propagatively.

With [Spellsurge Weaver], if he fixed up that spell so it worked across multiple infinities, like the original spell [Infinite Imaging], Erick could… He could do a lot. Erick had purposefully made Weaver not able to work across infinities, but…

Had Nothanganathor done something like this already?

Erick saw a path that could be taken to erase an entire universe…

Well. Maybe not. That was pretty reductive. No. He couldn’t do that magic this way at all, now that he thought about it. The problem was other people, and actual defenses. All Erick had done with this latest magic was to Paradox away some problems far, far away, using Shackle’s soul as the transfer/targeting medium, and only targeting inanimate things.

Going up against actual other people would have been difficult, so this was not how Nothanganathor had done the Sundering. But it was close.

“900 million resons. Something like 3.5 billion Mana, Health, and Psyche. I’m feeling pretty tired. The more I think about it, though, this was not how Nothanganathor had done the Sundering.”

Yggdrasil and Shadow looked at Erick.

Shadow asked, “Explain?”

“I didn’t go up against other people; the Sundering did. I didn’t do this propagatively; the Sundering was a propagation event…” Erick thought a bit more, and then said, “But maybe Nothanganathor had a propagation magic that made little Malevolence dungeons on every world, and those dungeons then made mana, then those dungeons acted as lightning rods for his Primal Lightning. From there, he’d just need some Node Network magic to join it all together. He’s already got the Siphon down, too, because Malevolence eats things rather well. Tons of magic can steal mana, though. Elemental Pirate down on Veird was one. Do they have that here, too?” Erick moved on, “Whatever the case: There are a lot of pieces here that fit how the Sundering could have worked. I would like to know what sort of methods there are to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Please tell me some other time, though.”

Yggdrasil looked worried again.

Shadow seemed vindicated. She grinned a little at Yggdrasil.

Yggdrasil decided something, and then he calmed, and said, “That might be possible, but it is doubtful for a lot of reasons which I am not allowed to share right now. I can say that the Fractal is probably watching Nothanganathor through his Mark of the Fractal. Any big moves made against this universe would have Nothanganathor turned to mush as the universe began to directly lecture him. It isn’t something that the Fractal does often at all, but it does happen.”

Erick said, “And yet, the Fractal likes to speak through action, not words. Maybe we should all take a hint that Malevolence should not be an Approved Evil anymore. It’s not even really ‘Evil’ at all.”

Yggdrasil had nothing to say to that.

Shadow almost said some quips, but she decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

Erick stared at his green son, saying, “You need to purge Malevolence from Margleknot, Yggdrasil. I’m almost 100% certain that it’s blinding you and many others to quite a few truths around here. I saw at least 3 world-systems with Malevolence-backed industries that used that power to cloak people and then prey upon those world-systems. I mentioned Malevolence-mana dungeons earlier? That’s what I mean when I say that there are seeds of destruction planted within Malevolence, and you need to do some weeding.”

Shadow smirked. “Benevolence seems great as a replacement! You ended those systems!”

“Mostly I injected disruptive power to induce cascading failures, which the locals are already capitalizing on, now that nuclear armageddon isn’t looming,” Erick said, “Those systems were all too well-ingrained for several billion of any resource to take out at all.”

“Still worth celebrating,” Shadow said, with a firm nod.

Erick felt himself smile at that, but it was a tired emotion.

Yggdrasil said, “Your words are heard and recorded. We’ll talk more later, father. Get some rest.”

Shadow said, “More like ‘put up a few more cities’ and then you can rest, Erick. We’ve got work to do. Your people call you to action.”

At that, Erick managed a chuckle. “A coffee break, and then back to work. See you later, Yggdrasil. Drop by anytime, you hear? I’m gonna make an office here for you. Love you, son.”

Yggdrasil floated closer to Erick, and then hugged him, saying, “I love you. See you soon.”

Erick smiled on his son’s shoulder, feeling a wonderful connection that filled him with warmth and joy. “I think we’re calling this land Tir Geal.”

Yggdrasil pulled back, saying, “Then that is what it is, though it will take a year for your claim to be officially recognized. For now, people can leave however they want, but they can only come in on places I designate, like how you had to come into the Den on the edge. When you set up some designated entry squares, based on the allowances of the law, then the gates can start working in those areas instead…” He glanced away, then turned back to Erick, saying, “And now I have a whole bunch of lands asking to be moved. I would rather solve those requests by moving this land, instead. Can I move you closer to my trunk?”

“I’d love that,” Erick happily said.

Yggdrasil smiled. “Good. That’ll take a while to happen; a few days. Lands shuffle when they change owners, though, so it’s pretty normal. See you soon.”

Yggdrasil stepped away.

And then it was just Shadow and Erick.

Erick said, “Time to make some housing and not think about apocalypses at all for at least a week.”

Shadow added, “And roads and rivers and lakes and more dungeons and city halls and infrastructure and so on and so forth and I have a lot of fun ideas about architecture! We can do speedy roads, yes? Trains? Air cars would be nicer for the wildlife I want here, though, like horned rabbits and garms and little Benevolence slimes and such.”

Erick grinned at that.

And then he got to work.

- - - -

Erick started building and he only stopped building to check on his overseers and the House, to make sure things were running well.

Things ran well enough, considering there were a whole lot of people living in stone shacks. It would be temporary, but it was still rough. Some of the former slaves were absolutely joyful, though.

Lanzoil, the Overseer of Governance, rapidly adjusted to his new responsibilities over millions of people. He had done this before when he had been a grand administrator for Paradise Rises, which was sort of like an emperor, but more ‘voted for’ instead of ‘by right of power’. Maybe more like a ‘super president’.

Lanzoil focused on the people, and on mapping out the future. Erick had saved roughly 39 million people, and while Erick was providing bandaids for the problem of that many displaced people, Lanzoil was working on long term solutions and the groundwork to implement those long term solutions.

At the low estimate, maybe 18 million of those 39 million people would remain in Tir Geal, once the people were allowed to leave the Quarantine and venture out into their own worlds. And yet, the high estimate had all 39 million people remaining, and more coming in besides. Most of these people had nothing to return back wherever they came from, because Slaver’s Den captured whole villages, and those who had been here for a while, as slaves, had nothing of their own to return to anyway, since their previous lives were way too far in the past to ever be called ‘home’. Still, some would leave, if only to find out if their worlds still survived, or for any of a thousand other reasons.

Querkooda, the Overseer of Enforcement, had his hands overfull, dealing with the same sort of issues that Lanzoil was dealing with but from a different angle. 39 million homeless people meant a whole lot of people sleeping wherever they could, eating whatever they could, and taking what they needed from others who had more than them. When the most anyone had was the bread and other things that Erick copied here and there, there wasn’t a whole lot to go around. There were a lot of small fights, and some very big ones. Erick did everything in his power to make sure that resources, like food and water and shelter, were in abundance, but simply setting out copiers and telling people to go at it had produced a problem similar to when he set out copiers at Da’luwe. Still though, Erick set out copiers and Querkooda set warriors on them to oversee the dissemination of resources.

Surprisingly, but not that surprising actually, Ta’Kamoil, the Overseer of Magic, had laid down a bunch of groundwork, just like the other two, in preparation to accept a grand number of new people into the House. Mostly through prognostication efforts. Thanks to him, Lanzoil and Querkooda had an easy time finding people who would be good fits for governance. Ta’Kamoil also found a whole bunch of people who were being dangerous with their new magics before they killed themselves, or others. People were experimenting with their valkyrie-given blueprints for magic, and doing a lot of Valkyrie Fire stuff.

That name was catching on; ‘Valkyrie Fire’.

Erick didn’t get to spend much time with the people playing with fire, both because those people didn’t need him to learn their own ways, and he was building. A lot. Previously he had used [Cityshape] to make temporary structures, but now he was making something more permanent. He did not use [Cityshape] this time, because this wasn’t Veird, where the Script supported [Cityshape]. This was Margleknot, where the very air was filled with competing powers and intents that nudged other magics out of alignment.

The valkyries seemed to be doing fine sustaining themselves, though, because of course they were. [Renew]-based magic was a part of their basic structure, part of their Siphon magic, ensuring that they didn’t break down at all. Erick would have ended that spell after the war, but as soon as he ended that spell, the Quarantine would drop, and who knew what would happen when that happened. And so, Erick kept the valkyries around, and left Querkooda in charge of them.

They were pretty good copier-guards.

They also helped to clear out people from where Erick was building, which was pretty far away from the main refugee camps. And so, to build properly this time, Erick went with a dense, yet nice, Parisian-sort of building plan, and then he repeated that plan a lot, over and over again. Paris only held about 2 million people, last Erick checked, but that was the entire city. Erick focused on making the center part, around the Arc de Triomphe, but big.

He started with 10-kilometer wide central parks, each with a Benevolence tower made of eternal stonewood at the center, and a whole bunch of magics making that tower a good source of mana for the surrounding lands. From there, Erick made roads that led in a variety of directions, each of those roads either leading off into the wasteland so that people could build more in those directions, or off to other central parks where other Benevolence towers held strong. Roads made of speedy directional magics held on those roads connecting towers to towers, making sure people could move around fast and safe, if they wanted.

In the areas between the central parks and the roads, Erick made apartment buildings that were like slightly shaped-to-fit blocks, each holding 5 stories of apartments on top of business spaces, each building with a variation of footprint, from 50 meters by 50 meters, to a whole lot larger. Each of those buildings had large open courtyards in the center, nice tile in every room, railings on balconies made with art in mind, brilliant white outer walls, big windows and nice living spaces, and pastel roofs of many different colors.

The cities of Tir Geal would be white and full of pastels, with white-and-black reserved for government buildings and other public spaces.

Every mansion was almost like a block, but they were a lot nicer than just ‘a block’. They were more like mansions wrapped in squarish shapes. Or L-shapes. Or U-shapes. They were nice, and they were made of normal stone that was simply magically reinforced, because Erick fully expected people to customize them at their leisure, and no one had shown the ability to manipulate eternal stonewood yet. Construction people could work magically-reinforced stone just fine, though, and since normal people couldn’t work stone that delineation was a good one, in Erick’s mind.

Erick made a few really nice designs of those buildings, from 25-family structures to 250-family structures, which were truly giant buildings. Those buildings then formed the basic building blocks for the entire rest of each city. Once he had an initial design, Erick wrapped his aura around whichever one he wanted to copy and [Duplicate]d it, gaining an entire new building, already magically strengthened with his own Benevolence aura

From there, it was a game of Tetris to put everything together. Once the blocks were in place, people from Ta’Kamoil’s mage division came in behind Erick and started hooking up sewers and water mains, and then enacting magics to add trees and greenery to the cities.

It took Erick a full 9 days before he was done with housing and laying down basic sewer systems, main lines only. Erick moved on to business spaces next, but only farms and warehouses for farms, because he had put people into housing and that was enough, and he had needed to add a bunch more utilities to the area, anyway. After a trip by Lanzoil to hear of new developments, Erick heard that the engineers wanted electricity, and Erick had no idea how to do exactly what they wanted, so instead, Erick went to the engineers to have a talk.

In the new ‘Engineer’s School’ of House Benevolence, Erick stood before some self-appointed teachers and a few students, and also Tris from the actual House, and conjured some metal from the air. One bit of metal was only the size of an ingot. The other was three meters long and cylindrical. Both were bright copper colored.

Erick floated the rods in his aura, saying, “This small one is steel inside and copper outside. The larger one is the same. I don’t know how to give you the electricity that you want, so instead I will give you this.” Erick tapped both of the metals. The smaller one sparked some, conducting in the air where Erick allowed it to conduct. The larger one became the home of a lightning bolt that struggled valiantly —but futilely— to escape, white lightning lashing within Erick’s containment fields, making the whole thing look like a lightning-egg. “I have enchanted [Small Spark] onto the small ingot. The base spell lasts about 10 minutes, but it will last forever when properly contained and fed mana from the node network I’ve installed all over the place. The larger one is [Battery], which is a lightning bolt. That one also lasts 10 minutes. These particular items are also temporarily enchanted to be superconducting. That spell also lasts 10 minutes. The more you use them, the more power they draw from the node network, to keep those temporary magics running. And so...” Erick asked, “What can you do with this?”

The entire class was completely silent. Dumbfounded. Surprised beyond words, and also not surprised at all.

Tris said, “Of course. Why not? Sure. The magic I’ve been trying to make out of my new aura has already been made. Of course.”

And then someone started to giggle, either from nerves or from complete joy, and maybe it was a combination of both. Another person giggled. Someone laughed, completely happily. And then the questions started. No, Erick did not actually know the power output of any of these spells. Yes, you can learn this stuff if you want, at the arcanaeum. Yes, they’re rather easy to learn, but you’ll injure yourself a lot trying to learn this stuff. So why not learn this other spell, [Insulate], first?

Erick demonstrated [Insulate].

Oh sure, they understood everything Erick was doing and a whole lot more besides, but they couldn’t replicate his magic at all.

Erick ended up building them a testing center for the [Battery] rod, which was probably going to become a power station as soon as the Quarantine ended and they could go out and buy real supplies and remake their lives here, at Tir Geal. The general consensus with [Small Spark] was that it was nice for small-scale projects, but [Battery] was the big draw. Still, [Small Spark] was made to be learned by everyone, so [Small Spark] would see a lot of use, as soon as people learned how to make that magic and have it be a uniform output.

“When this is over, you can take a trip to Veird and learn that magic rather easily,” Erick said to Engineer Tris, as they stood outside of the power station and watched engineers all try to figure out what Erick’s magics actually did. “I imagine that there will be a lot of Skill and Magic tourism to Veird.”

Tris asked, “What about [Battery]?”

“You’ll have to reach level 50 and get Particle Mage for a Class,” Erick said, “I imagine that won’t be too difficult for many of you.”

Tris hummed in thought—

Lightning sparked and someone almost died, but Erick was there to prevent that, rapidly healing up the guy who had gotten too enthusiastically close to the [Battery] with his testing equipment. After adjusting the [Insulate] areas of the ‘power station’, Erick said to them all, “Don’t die. A lot of people are dying in a lot of preventable accidents out there right now, and I have yet to set up the full structure of House Benevolence, so hospitals and healing are kinda rare right now.”

Tris spoke up, “Lanzoil set up the Waiting Room already. We’re all tied with the Waiting Room under House Benevolence.”

Erick raised an eyebrow. And then he smiled. “Oh! Good! I thought that was coming down the line today or tomorrow.”

Tris said, “Everyone here is Waited, but we’ve been told that coming back to the House is impossible while we’re under quarantine.”

“What’s the Waiting time like? Did he tell you?”

Tris shrugged. “A year? That was the warning Lanzoil sent out; to discourage people from taking stupid risks. The problem is that a lot of people just don’t realize that the Waiting Room is horrible. They hear ‘Waiting Room’ and they think it’s just a boring room, and not a brutal soul-fucking—ah… Language, Sorry.”

The guy who had almost died had the decency to look ashamed.

Erick decided, “I’m ending the Quarantine in three days, and I’ve got too much shit to do. Good luck with the lightning.”

Erick left in a flicker of Benevolence.

He reappeared by Lanzoil, in a meeting with a bunch of newly-appointed governors. He was laying down the laws of the land in a casual tone, but he stopped when Erick appeared. Several of the 27 people in the meeting instantly got out of their chairs and bowed. A few people kowtowed.

Erick said to them all, “Don’t mind me. Just telling you all that I’m dropping the valkyrie spell in 3 days, thus ending the Quarantine.”

Lanzoil said, “That’s a fine time. Thanks for letting us know.”

Erick nodded, and then went to Querkooda. The man was with some of the big red valkyries, and with some non-valk-valkyries. Around .1% of people who got turned into a valkyrie got turned into a mindful valkyrie, able to control the power grafted onto them. Of those people, maybe 1 in 20 wanted to remain valkyries afterward. All of those people found order and power as valkyries under Querkooda’s wings, and they wanted to keep that power. Erick wasn’t allowing valkyries to just walk around fully powered all the time, but people who were valks were allowed to be valks at the moment, and Erick had promised that if he were to ever use the spell again that the people in the valkyrie squadron would be the ones he called on to be the captains of those armies.

As such, Querkooda was training a whole bunch of people in the arts of war, most of whom had only ever seen war from the perspective of an unstoppable killing machine. To say that these people had an incorrect idea of war and force was perhaps a Grand Understatement.

Almost all of them were trying to close that gap, though.

When Erick had appeared, Querkooda and some maybe-captains were speaking of war and plans to defend the land when the Quarantine fell.

Querkooda stopped talking as Erick appeared, to ask him, “Ah! Speak and he shall appear.”

The valkyries all turned toward Erick, like reverent priests meeting their god. It was, perhaps, an uncomfortable situation, but it was what it was. He said to them first, “Hello. You can relax around me.”

The valkyries all went, “No can do, sir!”

Erick moved along, “So what was being said? Something about ending the Quarantine?”

“They were asking when the valkyrie spell would end.”

Erick smiled, saying, “I came here to tell you that, actually. 3 days. I’m getting the word out now. Next to tell is Ta’Kamoil.”

Querkooda told his valkyries, “Then there you have it. 3 days.”

The valkyries bowed, and spoke as one, “Sir!”

The two actual-valkyries looked sad about that, but the two elves looked secure.

Erick departed.

Erick reappeared next to Ta’Kamoil, who was sitting in a lotus position on a nice purple pillow, in a quiet room. His eyes were closed, lightning flickering on his eyelids, as his hand and pointer finger hovered over a rapidly rolling list of names on a screen. He was doing some prognostication magic to figure out a person for a job, and probably some sort of sewermaster, based on the various diagrams around the room.

Erick wrote the man a note and set it on the ground next to him.

The next visit was to Shadow.

She was working with Holy Mother Caa and Witch Aragathara in a dark room filled with lights and diagrams that reminded Erick a lot of Lionshard’s universal-scry room, or the Benevolent Sky with its grand strings of white with black tangles. Lights and powers and diagrams floated here and there, but instead of on the scale of the universe, it was simply the scale of Margleknot.

Erick asked, “Deciding where to best put forth effort to ensure that Tir Geal’s return to Margleknot-space goes well?”

Caa turned slightly faster than Aragathara. Both of them had turned well before Erick finished his first word, and both of them had bowed fast.

Shadow continued to work on some lightning-stuck problem with what appeared to be… assassin lands? Also the Mortal Lands. Erick almost wanted to know what that was all about, but he saw enough, and Shadow spoke without turning, “We have three days to return, do we not? We will be prepared, Erick. Don’t worry about this stuff, unless you desire to worry about it. I’m taking care of it.”

Erick felt touched. He smiled softly. “Glad to hear it. I won’t worry.”

Shadow added, “When the bankers come to us demanding we pay off Slaver’s Den’s debts because we took their land, and paying debts on captured land is what they do around here in order to keep things civil and orderly…” She looked at Erick. “I’m going to politely tell them to fuck off, and then when they politely tell me that I am courting death, I am going to tell them that we’re going to out-banker them with your 9-1 reson conversion rate if they keep pressing the issue. Do I have your agreement in this stance?”

Erick chuckled. “That sounds like a fine plan. I don’t want to become a banker, though.”

Shadow nodded. “Think about it. Genuinely, too. You could make lots of money here. Or, you could at least make lots of influence through money here, which is much more important.”

Erick thought for a second. “I’ll... figure something out with regards to money. Lanzoil was talking about all of that stuff.”

“Aye. He was talking to me about all of that as well. If you don’t want to do any of that banking nonsense, then I’ll be taking that opportunity.”

Erick nodded, humming in thought, his mind going elsewhere… “Sure, Shadow. A separate bank, if you want. Keep it separate from the House.”

Shadow nodded. “Of course.”

And then he got back to work.

The red rust sky of Lord Dakka was gone, and had been gone for five days now, but the golden ‘QUARANTINE’ hexagons of Yggdrasil’s power still remained up there, completely blocking out everything beyond Tir Geal. If you didn’t look directly up, the land looked as though in a state of permanent sunset. Aside from the big, ominous letters, it was pretty.

Two days later, the housing was done.

People were in homes. Except for the architecture which was well done, everything else was quite plain right now, with almost everyone owning the same sort of bed and other furniture because Erick copied the same one over and over and over again. Everyone had the same sorts of foods in their kitchens, for much the same reason as the furniture. Every local grocery stocked the same stuff, and all of the houses had the same sort of cold box, kept enchanted and working due to Erick’s node networks.

Most people out there were elves, but there were a lot of other species, too, and so Erick had needed to do some special accommodations for centaurs and such.

The cities looked beautiful from the air, all white and rainbow, with each city with its own Benevolence tower in the center, and all of the different apartments and otherwise looking rather unique-yet-similar. The people were out and about, and communities were reforming, and life was moving on.

Mostly.

Money was an issue for some bizarre reason.

Like. Erick understood that it would be an issue later, when the Quarantine was gone and people could actually spend resons to make food from thin air, or, more realistically, to buy stuff from other places in Margleknot. But it was an issue now, because everyone wanted more money.

There was an economy even in a Quarantine, of course.

And so Erick installed some [Reson Gatherer]s in each of his 185 Benevolence towers for each of his 185 starter cities.

Those 200-story-tall dungeons, each a kilometer wide, were more coliseum-shaped than tower-shaped, and were absolutely filled with happy Benevolence slimes and trees and grasses and water plants and mushrooms and so, so much more, who were pumping out a lot of mana. [Terraforming]s spilled water out into rivers and into the sewers and all of that. Some of that mana was getting used by their respective cities in order to power those cities, but most of it was going unused. Erick funneled that excess into [Reson Gatherer]s at the top of each tower, to form the basis for those individual city budgets.

There was, at a rough estimate, maybe 1 slime per 10 square meters, and since a single slime made 1 mana every 3 days, Erick did some rough calculations at mana production and reson production, and came out with around 5.2 million mana made per day per tower, which meant about 570,000 resons per day, if all of that was converted to resons, which was not happening. The draw was actually pretty minimal right now, at only maybe 20,000 mana draw per day, but that would go up eventually, and fast.

But for now, with 185 cities, that meant over 100 million resons per day, for the entirety of Tir Geal. More, if Erick actually fixed up the towers for maximum production.

It was a lot.

It was way more than was necessary, too, because Erick still had his Benevolence Sun.

“If we can, I want to give more of that Sun mana to Yggdrasil, for universal problems,” Erick finished saying.

Shadow looked at the numbers with raised eyebrows. Then she looked to Lanzoil. “We could pay those banker debts. Or at least the ones we care to pay.”

Lanzoil hummed, looking down at the numbers.

Erick said, “These numbers are at max rate, though. Expect a tenth of this with the node network taking most of that mana to [Renew] appliance magics and such, once people learn those magics.” Erick added, “Though that sort of thinking is going off how it is at Veird. I don’t know if Margleknot would have the same numbers, or needs.”

Lanzoil said, “The Engineers think they can power all of Tir Geal with those [Battery] spells. Soon as the Quarantine ends, I want to go the electricity-route for basic household stuff. With these dungeons, with both options, that means we’ll be one of the richest lands in Margleknot. With this, I can hand out budgets to city leaders and ensure a good transition to great future wealth and prosperity.”

“… Huh,” Erick said, “Let’s do that, then.”

The mayors of those 185 individual cities were absolutely thrilled to be handed budgets of 100,000 resons per day. It was not as much as they could have been given, but Lanzoil said it was way more than enough.

Tir Geal was still poor, though. For now.

Despite all that Erick had done, this was such a bare-bones approach to life that many of the former slaves of Slaver’s Den were complaining about what they had lost, when Erick annihilated all the previous cities of the land. People talked like they could have stolen stuff from those mansions and otherwise and had a good start on a new life.

The thousandth time that Erick heard that sentiment, he put out a formal statement through Lanzoil, stating, ‘Some of you are unhappy that House Benevolence did not pillage the Den for their treasures. I say now, in no uncertain terms, that House Benevolence does not condone slavery, and is very much against slavery, and all the products of slavery. What was made by your hands can be made again, and this time you can benefit from all that labor yourself. So prepare for a new life and new financial freedom, because whatever you might have made for the slavers, this time you get to make for yourself, in houses that you own, and through walking wherever you want without anyone watching over your actions all the time. Slaver’s Den is gone, and it is never coming back.’

Most people were ecstatic that Erick had annihilated Slaver’s Den, so his message seemed well received, but only time would tell if that sentiment won out. It seemed like it would. Lanzoil was pushing that message well, even though there was pushback from some communities that were organizing themselves and calling themselves the ‘Valued Workers Collective’.

According to Shadow the Valued Workers Collective had a few former ‘good slave masters’ at its helm, but its intentions seemed ‘okay’, so Erick decided to leave them alone for now.

The night before Erick ended the valkyrie spell, and thus the Quarantine, Erick supplied millions of people with booze, made possible through ten thousand workers of House Benevolence who copied that booze within the copiers, for their local communities. It was a party. Everyone was invited.

There was absolutely nothing approaching true organization, but people had as good of a night as Erick could make for them.

Erick had 39 million people to look after, now.

Dawn rose on day 4 after Erick had told people that only 3 days were left on the Quarantine.

The last valkyrie turned out to be Shivraa, who turned out to be a very competent commander, and who would likely turn out to be Querkooda’s Third, behind Ruby. Shivraa walked through a reincarnator at dawn, and came out a young void flier elf, with gold-blue wings and pale violet skin. Her fellow valkyries lined up behind her, on the valkyrie training fields of the Valkyrie Command Center. There were 40,000 of them, and Erick would likely be taking 20,000 of them to Veird when he left Margleknot.

But right now, the time of the valkyries was over.

Their time would come again.

Erick gave a small speech about his further goals for Veird, and then dismissed the valkyries into Querkooda’s care.

And then Erick went to the map room. The last red weaver map held in front of Erick. There had been a roof, but Erick had removed the roof to expose the sky overhead. He was alone with the map, and the sky above was hexagonal gold.

With a twist of his hand, Erick crushed the phantom image in his hand, and simultaneously crushed the red [Spellsurge Weave]. The valkyrie magic ended, officially. The war was over. It took a minute, but the expected result happened soon enough.

The golden Quarantine sky began to fade. The letters went away first, and then the gold turned to mist, and what looked like roots pulled away, fading into Elsewhere, revealing…

The Margleknot Sky.

The spear of glitter crystal that was the Fae Enclave, like an icicle crossing the heavens. The cylinder of the Quantum Nexus Hub, piercing the center of the Fae Enclave. The Escher-esque layers of lands out there, all piled up on each other and facing the center, where several other lands floated like planets in the distance, orbiting unseen forces—

And over there, on the horizon known as upspireward, lay Yggdrasil. Erick’s son was as big as a world, with his flaming green canopy crowned in rainbows, and his trunk looking like it was made of white lightning. Erick felt his heart lift to see—

Yggdrasil, in his orcol guise, stepped to Erick’s side, smiling. “Welcome back to normal space.”

Erick smiled back, and then grabbed his son in a hug. “Glad to be back.”

Yggdrasil hugged Erick, and then let go, and turned a little serious, saying, “You’ve got another month, and then the time dilation has to go away. I’ve been too long helping you settle as is, and the complaints have gotten vicious after you killed Slaver’s Den. Now people are worried.”

Erick nodded. “Heard and understood. Thanks for the heads up. I’ll get my House in order as much as I can. I do want to ask you about putting up some Grand Unified Churches here, like the ones we have on Veird, though. Will that break Veird’s Quarantine? Will that call those gods here?”

Yggdrasil said, “They’re too far away for that to work and they’re under strict Quarantine, and that Quarantine I know works well, because that Quarantine is like a sieve. Small things like you can get out, but big things like gods and other larger-than-reality things can not.”

“… And that works?”

“Total security does not exist, so that Quarantine works well enough,” Yggdrasil said. “Nothanganathor is manually overseeing that particular Quarantine, too, so I doubt he would let Veird’s gods out anyway.”

“… Ah,” Erick said, “Right.”

… Erick could actually poke a hole in that Quarantine with [Infinite Imaging], though, if he really wanted to. Maybe the gods themselves could not get out, but Erick could certainly get their attention and maybe they could send avatars?

Shadow stepped into the meeting, saying, “Then we’re making those churches. When that Quarantine ends I will have those gods here where they can speak for themselves about what they saw in the Sundering and other events.”

Yggdrasil nodded. “As bountiful a path as any.” He said to Erick, “Father. Don’t break the Quarantine with an [Infinite Imaging].”

Erick scoffed. “Tell me exactly why I shouldn’t.”

“Because until Nothanganathor reveals himself in Court as something that must be eliminated, he still has a higher stance in this land than you.”

Erick was flabbergasted. “Really?”

“Yes, really, and I hate it.” Yggdrasil said, “He stole a piece of me, father. He was a friend, and he betrayed my trust. I’m furious at him and I’m already weighing in against him. You don’t need to add more fuel to the fire right now.” Yggdrasil took a moment. “Please. Just… build your lands. Make a space for the people you rescued. And prepare for Court.”

“… Fair enough.” Erick could see he had upset Yggdrasil, and that Yggdrasil was being pulled in a bunch of different directions right now, so Erick said, “I won’t poke holes.”

Yggdrasil stared for a moment, judging to see what Erick might be thinking, and then he nodded and stepped away.

Shadow said to Erick, “I’ll get started on those churches.”

Erick almost sighed, but then he put on a grin. “Sure.”

Shadow stepped away.

Erick spoke to the empty room, and a little bit to the sky, “So is that Good/Evil sun Balanced yet?”

The sky did not shift at his question.

The land was still in transition, it seemed, so Erick could not change the image of the sky overhead. Tir Geal was not fully House Benevolence’s and it wouldn’t be theirs for a year, due to rules and regulations. And probably Erick needed to establish his Authority somewhere. That’s what the manaminers were for, though.

Now that the Quarantine was over, they could actually get some of those manaminers. Erick went back to the main House and started getting things rolling on a whole bunch of projects, from talks with Powerminer Incorporated to the electrical grid, to more housing concerns. Mostly, he assigned people to tasks, though.

There was absolutely no way to be personally involved with a country of 39 million people, and so delegation was the order of the day.

- - - -

Four hectic days passed, with Erick running around like a never-ending bolt of lightning, passing from this side of the kingdom to that side of the kingdom.

The day found Erick hovering in the sky over city #104, fixing up the dungeon tower’s node network connections because someone had busted them and he was the only one who could fix them right now. And then the world shifted. He felt the shift before it actually happened. It was as though the foundations of the world had been shifting and something finally fell into place, and everything seemed more solid.

He looked up at the Margleknot sky.

The sky changed.

Gone were the layers of land, and the crisscross of Fae Enclave and Quantum Nexus Hub. Here now were the suns of Margleknot. They were colorful orbs in the sky, each spilling out a different color into the universe, while the black-and-white central sun held all the rest in orbit. That central sun was the source of the fundamental shift in the universe.

Because it was changing.

It still got Erick sometimes, even when he was now a 2.5-kilometer tall dragon, when big things moved fast. The scale of it all was still awe inspiring. Scary. Thrilling. Magical.

The black sun with its white ring became something that was less of both extremes, and yet more of both at the same time. The black sphere and white halo became one, and the end result was a larger sphere than before that was black in some places and white in others, like a real sun, but turned to shade of grey, or static on an old cathode-ray television screen. It was easier to look at, mostly. That’s what really got Erick. The Balanced Sun was a lot more… Balanced—

Erick felt a surge within, and the lightning river that was his soul, mind, and body, surged with strength. The Darkness within turned absolute and the lightning that poured out of that Darkness was larger than ever before. Erick felt his draconic body growing again, his tail lengthening into the ground, casually brushing away hills and a small pond by the tower he was working on. His head poked up above the tower a lot more. His wings widened—

He hovered upward, careful not to make too much of a draft, but to at least get away from the casual damage he was doing with his mere presence on the field. Soon enough, he regained control. His body had grown a few hundred more meters long, but Erick stopped that continual growth, for now.

His Status was suddenly a lot more than it had been, though. He had been sitting at a large increase due to clearing out Slaver’s Den, but the sudden restoration of the Balanced Sun seemed to have… triggered something?

Erick Flatt, [60-ish] [Current Year: 1453 (Veird, layer 789), ??? (Margleknot)] [CURRENT REALITY=Layer 0, Margleknot]

Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 31%, 30%, 30%

Reson allocation rate: 9%

Soul: 231.73m per day / 2,682.16 per second , [Darkness Level = 15.8x Ascension baseline]

Body: 891

Mind: 1086

Overall Stability: ↑↑ [+2,440.76, -9] Basic upkeep

Mp: 594.7m/∞, ↑ [+831.46, -3] Basic upkeep

Hp: 581.1m/∞, ↑ [+840.64, -3] Basic upkeep

Pp: 582.8m/∞, ↑ [+840.64, -3] Basic upkeep

Resons: 33.4m [+241.39 = +26.82]

His Stats were about 20% higher than they had been an hour ago and his Darkness Level had jumped from 10x Ascension baseline to 15.8x… And he still needed to hook up some sort of time/layer-check with Yggdrasil. That need had been on the backburner for a while now.

And it would continue to be on the backburner until Erick could fix up Tir Geal to the point that he didn’t have an emergency every other minute.

Erick got back to work.

Nine days later, it had been two days since the list of emergencies had started coming in slower, and then dried up altogether.

Ten days after that, Erick actually managed to sleep a little inside a [Hasted Shelter].

- - - -

Erick woke and felt wonderful. He stepped out of his upper rooms in the mountain stronghold of House Benevolence, located off the edge of City #1, which was still called ‘City #1’ because no one could decide on a better name, and Erick had already named it #1, even if that was a temporary name. The name had stuck. It would probably be City #1 for the rest of Tir Geal’s existence.

The Wizard Dragon of Benevolence was a mere human-shaped person right now, as he rested his hands upon the railing of his balcony, feeling the warmth of the Margleknot sky upon his skin, as he stood there wearing some simple glowthread boxers. Wind tickled across his body, carrying with it the scents of little white flowers, like jasmine, that were growing upon the gardens outside of his room. It was a nice scent, and this place was rather wonderful.

People were probably watching him now that he was out of his [Hasted Shelter].

Let them watch.

Erick cast his sight wide, to the world beyond. The cities of Tir Geal stretched out before him, all orderly and yet organic. Trees cropped up between houses and in the centers of wide roads. Farms were growing a lot of good grains and otherwise out there, in the distance, while some buildings had been torn down and replaced with more unique structures, according to what the people who lived there wanted them to be. That was good. Erick had never intended to dictate the architecture of Tir Geal; only a starting point.

In addition to the new buildings out there, it appeared that the Engineering Department was doing well with its rollout of electricity, which was great news for getting people reconnected to the rest of the universe. Erick saw quite a few screens out there in peoples’ hands and on room walls and in cafes and restaurants here and there. There were an uncountable number of interdimensional news stations and television stations and all sorts of tech-side-of-Margleknot people that broadcast in Margleknot. Erick didn’t bother to watch any of it except what he caught as he flew around here and there, solving problems.

It was all rather incredibly entertaining, which was kind of a problem, because Erick found himself pausing sometimes when some people nearby were watching something interesting. A few stations even advertised as ‘Margleknot Approved!’ which meant that even Yggdrasil was watching those stations.

Yggdrasil seemed to like the family dramas, which was kinda cute. Erick found himself liking them, too, and also toying with the idea of spending a lot of money to get people to make certain shows for him. He had no idea what kinda shows he wanted to watch, but the idea of it was interesting.

Some people watched some truly horrific shit, though, and Erick kinda wanted to censor some intakes to Tir Geal, but he had spoken with Lanzoil about that sort of stuff, and decided against it. Right now people were free to watch and do whatever they wanted, which was leading to some weird stuff out there, but it was fine. Lanzoil was keeping an eye on it.

Erick had been sleeping for a full 65 hours under the [Hasted Shelter], so only about an hour in real time. He had not known that he had needed all of that sleep, but he was glad he had taken it. The world had not burned down while he rested. It would not burn down later, either.

With a quick look, Erick turned back to his room and activated a tablet near his bed, marveling for a moment how he had gone for so long without technology assistance, and how much he missed having this sort of easy access to information feeds. Of course, with all this access to tech, the workload increased a lot. These lists of tasks were collated by a whole lot of people numbering in the tens of thousands, instead of how it had been on Veird where agents of the House and various networks moved at the speed of people-talking-to-people.

Lists of requests flashed open on the tablet, already organized into degrees of urgency. Erick scrolled for a little bit —feeling less than happy that he needed to scroll at all, and how paper-plus-mana-sense did better than tech sometimes— and found nothing too urgent. Sure, there were things to be done, but nothing too pressing. Everything was labeled as a ‘request’, not a ‘necessity’.

Erick had asked Lanzoil about printing out this list every morning for him instead of giving it to him on a tablet, but Lanzoil had looked at him like a crazy person, because the list was 10,000 pages long, and so Erick just flicked through fast, on a very fast tablet. It worked well enough. It certainly wasn’t instant, though.

There were some ‘high priority’ requests for him to make decisions about property rights for new buildings and resettlement requests for people to own land outside of the city, to make that new land their own. There were also a bunch of meeting requests from ‘other Good’ nations out there, even though Erick had definitively said that Tir Geal was not ‘Good’, not really. It was more Benevolent, which was better in his opinion. But places like the Celestial Observatory, and Astrologer Moonarcher in particular, had called Tir Geal a ‘Good nation’ in her letter to the House…

Erick wondered where, exactly, the Good lands differed from House Benevolence in regard to politics.

He smiled.

It was a ‘paperwork and decisions’ sort of day. A ‘meet some nice people’ sort of day. No one was at war. No one was threatening the realm. A lot of people wanted to move here, actually, which was great. That 39-million-person number was probably going to double in the following decades. Free housing, healthcare, and close to Margleknot? Yes please!

Erick adjusted his glowthread clothes to full coverage and went about meeting people.

It was one of the things he loved doing the most. Solving problems through words. Enacting positive change through the organization of people. Making people happy.

Lanzoil brought up the issue of the economy halfway through the day and Erick attended a Hasted meeting with tens of city governors, all of whom had great ideas and lots of people behind them who wanted to enact those ideas, from farming initiatives to warpdrive repair stations to entertainment sectors, all eager to get to work. Erick shook some hands and approved some things and even got a copy of 100 seasons of some show that Margleknot watched now and again, from the company that produced that show. Erick smiled as he held that ‘infocube’ in his hand, and then asked how he was supposed to watch it. That got him a good chuckle from the movie producer and a few others in the room.

Erick decided to figure out how to watch it later.

Querkooda spoke with Erick about security and wartime response, and the adjustment to smaller readiness levels, since Erick was the main force in the war and most of the valkyries —who remembered and liked being valkyries— were happy to turn to guard duty and city guard duty, in their normal, mortal forms. Most people didn’t even remember piloting a valkyrie at all.

Ta’Kamoil spoke of arcanaeums in every city, and how he had used prognostication to easily locate former teachers and professors and mages of all sorts, who had been listless and eager to open schools. He also spoke of how the vast, vast enlargement of governing structure was going rather well.

“Suspiciously well,” Ta’Kamoil eventually said. “Benevolence is acting like a partner-in-the-mana to a great many people. It’s great. It’s also concerning for a lot of people. What do I tell them, officially?”

Erick smiled, and said, “Those who find that the mana loves them are just experiencing what I experience all the time when I make magic. The mana is a great friend to have, but they speak in a bit of a different language than most people, so you have to adjust how you think and have some real empathy in order to communicate well.”

Ta’Kamoil raised an eyebrow. “I suppose that’s a good way to put it.”

The meeting with Shadow had Erick overseeing a prison full of infiltrators and assassins and otherwise that she had caught skulking around practically everywhere. From the main House to the lowest hovel out there in the parts of Tir Geal that were still wasteland, she had found assassins and saboteurs, and then she had put them into a prison where they slept on beds of soft shadows.

Shadow said, “I separated the ones that have Contracts with Wraithborne from the rest. They spoke of ‘just doing their jobs’ before I put them under.”

Erick frowned a little as he surveyed the hidden prison and sleeping prisoners. “Wraithborne did ask that we simply smack them around and send them back.” He asked Shadow, “Should we do that?”

Shadow shrugged. “I’ve got my Queen’s Guard everywhere, all of them empowered to see these sorts of malefactors long before they commit harm. They can’t do shit against us. If you want to work with Wraithborne then I suggest you accept their request and we can capture and contain problems as they appear.”

Erick nodded. “Yeah. I agree. So let’s wake some assassins up and slap some wrists. The other ones are getting reincarnated.” He asked, “You’re sure about the delineation of Wraithborne-versus-not?”

“Absolutely.”

Erick woke some people up, slapped some wrists, and then turned the rest of the prisoners into younger versions of themselves. From there, those people went into the reintegration programs that he had needed to institute for former slave owners, which occupied all of Cities 30 through 52.

If any part of this Tir Geal wasn’t working, it was Cities 30 through 52, and not just because the people there didn’t want to actually work, but because half of them truly wanted to climb the ladder in their new world order, half of them were too deep in depression to do much besides barely take care of themselves, almost all of them had well-honed instincts to wound others for their own gain even though they had been reborn in Benevolence, and almost all of them actually didn’t know how to do anything themselves, at all.

After checking on those cities again while he was putting the assassins down there, Erick went back to the house and spoke with Lanzoil about all of that.

Lanzoil said, “Reintegration is a problem that can only be solved with time. From what the governors of those cities tell me, things are going about as well as they could go. Of particular note: individual citizens and about 8 different citizen groups are asking about stipends in order to hire people to work for them. They ‘swear that they won’t treat them like slaves’. Other former slaves are asking for money to buy things that they’re missing, and blaming us for ruining what little money they had coming in. Some former slaves want to go back to their masters.”

So that was a heap of issues.

Erick asked, “And people donating mana through the systems to make resons for themselves isn’t enough to hire others?” Erick said, “Every single person out there is making at least 50 mana per day, if they took the time to go through Awakening here at the House’s manaminer. That’s 5 resons per day and a little bit of mana left over. That’s a fuck ton for a normal person. Five resons are groceries for a week. A cow-leg, a big bag of rice, and a lot of veggies. … Right?”

“Correct. But—” Lanzoil said, “People aren’t coming to the House to Awaken like we thought they would, and those that have come through the Awakening appreciate using their mana in Ta’Kamoil’s small classrooms. I think we should allow them to learn to use their mana, and not spend it to make themselves money. That’s only in a general sense, though. Some people in those former slaver cities are doing very well learning magic and making resons and buying people’s work to make their lives easier.”

“… Well then...” Erick had a few ideas, but he decided, “Let’s do Basic Income. Three resons per day? Per citizen of Tir Geal? We can afford 10 per day per person, but I don’t want to do that. They can use it to buy stuff outside of Tir Geal, too.”

Lanzoil hummed, thinking. He offered, “Let’s start with 1 reson per day?”

“Sure.”

“You should know that this decision will make more people want to come live here. Our population will rise, and fast.” Lanzoil said, “We’ve already got people coming here seeking to abandon their Contracts for this or that reason, so we’re going to run afoul Wraithborne in a big way, but this will speed up that rate of population increase and conflict with Wraithborne.”

Erick nodded. “Yup.”

Lanzoil smiled, saying, “I really like that none of that is an actual concern, and that we can fight them if needed. I wasn’t able to do that back in my day.”

Erick smirked. “It’s a new world, with a whole lot of new possibilities, Lanzoil.”

Lanzoil grinned. “I knew you were practically a world emperor before you got here, but most of those types never make it as big here in Margleknot as they made it back home. But you... You do even better when you have even more people and problems to solve.”

Erick softly smiled. He changed topics, asking, “Are there any other Benevolence dragons that need raising?”

“Oh yes!” Lanzoil held out a hand and a filing cabinet on the other side of the room opened up. Papers flew to his fingers, whereupon the Book Magic ciphers decoded themselves, and Erick saw a bunch of names of people he did not know at all. “Another round. Some to be raised at Overseer discretion, some that we Overseers feel you should look at and make some decisions for yourself, and some that are iffy, because we only think they should be raised due to prognostication feelings. We haven’t actually interacted with that third group.”

Erick took the papers, saying, “See you later.”

- - - -

Several days later, and only 3 days till Margleknot’s time rejoined the universe’s time, Erick felt secure enough with Tir Geal to leave for a little while.

His first trip was back ‘home’, to the castle Yggdrasil had built for him upon one of his roots in the Old Dragon District.

The place was exactly as Erick had left it. Erick almost wanted to take another nap in the bed that Yggdrasil had installed in the place. It was a really nice bed. Erick did indulge in eating several scarlet kings in the waters below his house, though. Those giant red fish from Veird tasted delicious, and thanks to [Duplicate], Erick only had to kill one of them to make a feast worthy of his draconic body. It was pure gastronomic pleasure to eat several thousand tons of fish at once. Erick did make himself smaller so he could enjoy the crackle of the bones more, which was fine.

Erick was sure to save that memory for Poi, to give to him later.

And then Erick went to inspect the Nothor Beast, still stuck in the mage tower.

It looked the same as ever, stuck there under strong applications of the Authority that Yggdrasil had granted him in this space.

Authority wasn’t that tricky to understand anymore.

Thanks to Veird, Erick knew what it was like to live under the Authority of another. Thanks to Erick’s encounter with Shackle, he knew what it felt like to attack Authority with his own nascent Authority, which was kinda different from Wizardry, but not. Thanks to the manaminer from Powerminer Incorporated, Erick knew what Authority felt like from another borrowed perspective; a perspective that he got the chance to poke and play around with a little, but not much, because there wasn’t much to a basic manaminer except a bunch of Authority sinks. The Script was a whole lot more different. And finally, thanks to Yggdrasil’s application of Authority here in Erick’s home in the Old Dragon District, Erick felt what true Authority actually felt like.

All of life was an eternal disagreement between oneself and the rest of reality, where the speaker acted one way, and reality stated otherwise. Authority was the manifestation of one's own argument against reality that reality actually felt compelled to accept, at least in a local sort of way.

Thinking in terms of mana versus resons, though...

Domains were the enacting of magical authority upon reality; not one’s own Reality upon reality, as Erick had once thought. In the case of Domains, the one with the stronger Domain made the rules of mana-based-magic in a certain area. Before coming to Margleknot, Erick had conflated some terms improperly, but now he knew what ‘Reality versus reality’ really meant.

And so, here in the Fractal Cosmology, Authority was the enacting of personal Reality upon reality, where the one with the stronger Authority dictated what parts of Infinity were present in whatever given personal slice of reality.

Here in the Fractal Cosmology, Authority was the stronger force, superseding Domains.

Perhaps Domains were stronger than Authority in the Painted Cosmology.

Erick would probably never find out.

Erick looked at the red lightning beast in the other room, and considered Authority.

He could try to enact Authority upon this piece of Nothanganathor in front of him, like he had done with Shackle, in order to bring Nothanganathor forward for a chat and a kill. It would be tougher to do than what he had done with Shackle, because this Nothor Beast was a mindless construct of Nothanganathor. Such a draw-and-kill might even be impossible in this instance, because this thing wasn’t even connected to Nothanganathor at all.

This Nothor Beast was not like Ophiel or Yggdrasil, back when they were inside Erick’s soul, back during the Chelation War in the Songli Highlands, where Terror Peaks had used those Soul Spears against Ophiel to attack Erick. This red lightning magic was a set-and-forget magic…

Probably.

Erick stood in the rooms beyond the Nothor Beast, looking at the lightning thing with his mana sense and Authority. It was a monster of red lightning in the shape of a lion, sitting down on the stone, unmoving…

Erick almost wanted to appear in that room and start talking to the beast, to see if Nothanganathor would respond.

… That seemed like a bad idea, though. Erick doubted he would be able to draw Nothanganathor here, and even if he did, the guy was a solar-sized dragon. Not only that, but even if he brought Nothanganathor here, then the Fae Council would berate Erick for getting involved in this stuff so closely, especially when Yggdrasil told him to cool it for a while. And besides that, what was much more likely to happen is that Erick would get dragged to Nothanganathor instead, and Erick would experience what Shackle experienced, but worse.

Nothanganathor had already proven quite adept at pulling Wizards to trap locations, after all, and even if Nothanganathor wasn’t ascended, he was certainly powerful like one. Maybe he was ascended, and no one realized that, because his Malevolence kept them ignorant.

… Erick decided to let the Nothor Beast be.

Erick decided to fix a different problem. He spoke to the air, “Yggdrasil? I want to be able to measure where in infinity I am at any given time, so that I’m not lost. Is there a way to do that?”

The air felt tense for a moment.

And then Yggdrasil appeared to the side, his bright green eyes full of concern as he asked, “You’re not going to go break the Quarantine directly, are you?”

“Nope!” Erick said, “I have too much to do here to ensure that Tir Geal succeeds when I am absent, but I fully expect to be pushed around by Nothanganathor or others when they get the chance. So I need to be able to measure where I am in infinity.”

Yggdrasil went, “Ah. Okay.” He calmed and smiled a bit. “Then sure. Measuring where you are in reality is kinda simple. It’s that Universal Mapping ritual you did to ping the systems here to open a rescue door at your location outside of Veird’s space. You don’t want to do the full ritual, though, because then you’ll hit the Margleknot Emergency Response Communication Yorddle. You’re going to want to do a small, personal yorddle, and to do that…”

Erick listened to his son, and though they talked of magic and Erick figured out a personal yorddle magic, the conversation soon changed to other topics, like governments and banking and all of what Erick was doing with Tir Geal. From there, Erick spoke of having technology again, like tablets and the internet, and the conversation went on to shows and entertainment. Yggdrasil spoke of his favorite shows, like ‘My Three Slice Life’ and ‘Roots of our Dreams’, and then he laughed as he showed Erick how to watch an infocube. It was really quite simple once Yggdrasil showed him.

It was a wonderful conversation.

Erick felt like a person again, and he was so happy to talk with Yggdrasil again.

When they were talking over tea and types of fish, Erick smiled and chuckled, and said, “I still remember when you sent me million-word telepathy messages about fish. I loved those.”

Yggdrasil smiled softly, looking into his tea, and then off into the distance, saying, “I’m really glad you made it up here, father.”

Erick smiled wide. “I am, too.”

With a hint of small joys, Yggdrasil said, “You know that they’re putting together those [Battery]s in Tir Geal and thinking they’re the first to do the whole mana-to-energy thing, right?”

Erick laughed. “Some of them know they couldn’t be the first. But then a whole group of them went to the tech side of Margleknot and talked to some people and then they came back even more convinced that no one had ever done a [Battery] before. They brought some representatives of a few different consortiums, too, though I never talked to any of them. Just waved hello as I installed a few more [Battery]s. The way those jaws dropped as I flicked on the lightning…” Erick smiled. “It was kinda wonderful.”

“It’s all been done before a few times —most notably with mana production formations from the Garden Universe— but the problem usually lies in getting a decent conversion rate from base source of power into electricity, where the fragility of life isn’t killed by the lightning, or the fragility of lightning elementals aren’t consumed by the systems they power. You solved that with Benevolence’s natural life-and-lightning capabilities.”

“What about entropy, though?”

“What about it?” Yggdrasil asked, grinning.

Erick rolled his eyes.

Yggdrasil chuckled, then said, “Entropy is a thing to be overcome.” He continued, “There’s a few different systems like what you’ve set up that are rather jealously guarded out there, with people calling them ‘ancient magics’ and ‘too valuable to mess with’, like the Lightning Array of the Quantum-Tech Foundry and the whole general nature of the Electric Lands. There are whole societies that will try to come in and copy what you’re doing with Benevolence once they figure out they can actually do stuff like that.”

Erick smiled, saying, “I’d love to meet those people, but that’s for another day. Got any favorite foods around here? I haven’t actually eaten much of anything since Ascension except for snacks.”

“There’s lots of great places out there.” Yggdrasil said, “Want to go to some of my favorites?”

“I absolutely do.”

Erick ended up spending a good half a day with his son, touring Margleknot, both of them pretending to be normal people, with Erick making himself a little older and Yggdrasil turning back into that young, black-haired kid who first appeared to Erick after he separated, in that ritual of birth. Just a father and son out for a day on the town.

It was wonderful.

When the day was over, Erick went back to Tir Geal with Yggdrasil.

Floating high over the pastel-rainbow roofs of City #1, Yggdrasil said, “It’s a nice place.”

“I think so, too,” Erick said, smiling.

“The time dilation is ending in 2 days,” Yggdrasil said, his voice melancholy.

Erick simply nodded, saying, “That’s good, then. You probably can’t keep that up forever anyway, right?”

“I could, but politics.”

Erick chuckled. “Yup.” And then he hugged his son, saying, “Love you.”

Yggdrasil hugged him back, perhaps a little tightly, perhaps a little much, his voice a quiet thing, “I love you, too.”