Spellheart 10: Chapter 40 (Patreon)

We entered the control room, glancing around to catch any traps that might appear. None popped out at us. Many rows of orbs lined every wall, with several more prominent consoles on pedestals in the middle. Most were dim, but one was in the center larger than the others. At the very least, it looked like it was a captain’s chair or belonging to a commanding officer.

The console in the entrance drew my eye more than the others. A pink note on the seat before was just like the one that had led us into this room. Once again, I recognized the handwriting. Just like the other, this one had to be from Elara.

I rushed over to it as fast as caution allowed and picked up the note. The handwriting for this one was smaller, as the note was far more extensive.

Beloved husband-to-be,

I’m sure this note finds you in some distress. Or if not, it will cause you some distress by the time you finish reading. For that, I’m sorry. I suppose I should just come out with it right away and explain myself. I’m the one who pulled the trigger that destroyed the World of Sanctuary and Serenity, you know and love.

I wish I could tell you why I did it, but truth be told, I’m not really sure. This whole situation is very complicated, and I think the only one who understands the big picture is you. Or rather, it will be you eventually.

On the center of the console is the activation module for activating a ground-based laser weapon that utilizes the full power of the Planetary Defense Array’s original power source. Only an artifact on the level of our world’s permanent guardian was sufficient to breach the hull of another artifact, such as The Challenger.

The interaction between the two triggered an energetic reaction great enough to destroy the world, as you have witnessed. Regrettably, this has resulted in the exhaustion of the shield, as well as scattering the majority of The Challenger to far distant corners of empty space. You cannot easily acquire components from either and assimilate them with The Wanderer. I’m told this is by design.

In short, your world has been completely destroyed. You must relocate to another one by journeying through the Primordial World. Don’t bother trying to restore your lost one. No one short of a truly exceptional Immortal Ascendant could do that.

Faithfully yours eventually,

Elara.

PS: I think destroying the World of Sanctuary and Serenity makes me extremely evil, doesn’t it? One might even call me naughty. Something to keep in mind for when you finally meet me for the first time.

“What’s it say?” Nela asked.

I passed the note to hers, and a frown soon covered her face. She passed the note to Assyrus, who looked at the note and shook her head.

“There are far simpler ways to win our man’s attention than blowing up our planet...” Assyrus grumbled.

“This is suspicious. Very suspicious,” Nela said. “It almost seems as though she’s trying to manipulate us. Or manipulate our beloved Patriarch, that is.”

“Well, it’s working. I don’t see any option but to go to the Primordial World and look for a new home.” I scanned the room, hoping for a clue that would tell a different story than the one in the note. Nothing did, though.

Things still weren’t adding up for me. Had Elara... betrayed us?

I’d worked with plenty of shady and duplicitous people before, but I didn’t think I’d ever quite been stabbed in the back by someone who I believed to be an ally. I was usually pretty good at placing suspicions, and I’d had none placed on Elara.

The part of me that looked at the situation without any regard for the woman herself told me she’d betrayed me. But knowing the woman herself, it just didn’t sit right.

I’d trusted her, and then she’d gone and blown up my entire planet while I wasn’t looking. I should have been feeling bubbling rage down to my very core. Rage enough to race into the Primordial World and teach her a lesson, no doubt.

And yet, when I focused on it, the rage didn’t come. More than anything else was the feeling of baffled confusion. I still didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on.

At least now I’d have someone to ask when I finally tracked her down.

“She’s not here. And it looks like whatever power source kept the Planetary Defense Array together was destroyed with the same blast that took out our world. Salvage whatever you can, and we’ll bring it back with us.”

At my words, my companions dispersed to scour the area clean of anything worth salvaging. I did the same.

When I told my companions to salvage what they could, they weren’t shy about taking everything. If I told them to take everything that wasn’t nailed down, they’d remove the nails before taking the nailed stuff, too. I wasn’t the only one who ripped a few of those fancy orb stations out of the ground and tried to pocket them.

Unfortunately, most of them broke upon removal. Still, there was enough for the taking that we were able to puzzle out how to unplug them through trial and error. When I got to the big central console, I knew exactly how to sever the chords connected to the bottom of the deck so that the whole thing wouldn’t be torn to pieces when I pulled it from the floor.

Whether or not we could get these things working again when we brought them back with us would be a tougher question to answer. Presumably, we could find a technician from the Primordial World. Or perhaps recruit Valanda. Had I known this little expedition would involve less in the way of deadly traps and life-or-death battles and more in the way of beating our heads against computers like cavemen, I would have brought her and a few others from her era along.

Perhaps I’d bring her here for a second trip or when we went to hit other facilities. I knew this wasn’t the only one that had been part of the Planetary Defense Array. However, whether or not those other facilities survived the destruction of The Challenger was still undiscovered.

Once we filled the cargo ship I’d found, I fired it up. The seat was three sizes too small for me, so I ended up switching out with Nela. She proved even worse at controlling the ship with me, so she switched with Assyrus, who took with it like a bird to flight.

“Good. I feared we’d have to abandon the ship and take my Pocket World Passage.” I cast Assyrus a smile as she deftly switched gears on the spaceship, or whatever the big stick in the middle was supposed to do. I heard a dull thrum that might have been an engine, but liquid fuel should have dried up long ago.

Assyrus landed us down on top of Castle Mac, the only wide enough area we could find to use as a landing pad. The shield wrapped around us as Mac fiddled with settings to let us pass straight through it. Assyrus landed us on the roof as gently as a feather.

“I think you’re a natural pilot, Assyrus.” I congratulated her as she sighed deeply and relaxed her tense shoulders.

“I hope you aren’t counting on me being able to pull that off every day...” Assyrus laughed.

***

We took a few more trips to the station, this time with Valanda and several other people from the Elven Star Dominion in tow. None of them had Elara’s experience, but that day-to-day familiarity with how a civilization was put together made them seem a little more at home in the big bronze boxes than the rest of us.

By the time we had both mapped and salvaged everything we could from that facility, Argona and Mac had identified two others. We raided those as well, recovering wisps, material, and, most importantly, the beginnings of how the Planetary Defense Array worked.

The power source that enabled the Planetary Defense Array to operate had truly been a marvel of magic and engineering. The shape and structure of it also lacked the feel of elven work. Though I still could only see it in diagrams painted on walls or drawn on paper, I had a vague idea of what it was now.

It was a matter-to-magic conversion device. Like a sun, it could take raw materials in and spit out a powerful form of energy. The elves of the Elven Star Dominion considered it a higher form of energy than zeal, and I suspected it was the same power I found in my Mana Generator.

If I could have absorbed such an artifact into The Wanderer, would my points restrictions go away entirely? If this thing could truly turn anything into power, then that just might be so. Unfortunately, it was completely gone.

I had feared the same would be true for The Challenger as well. The attack had clearly been well placed and intended to prevent me from absorbing The Challenger. I was quite surprised when Argona’s golems turned up a piece of the hull.

“Is that what I think it is?” I asked Mac.

[It certainly appears to be a fragment of The Challenger,] he said in agreement.

“I’ll be right back!” I rushed out to get the hull fragment and hall it back. Once I had it close to The Wanderer, it was up to Mac to figure out how to merge it. Fortunately, that ended up being far easier than I thought.

Compatible subsystems detected.

A damaged spell library has been added to The Wanderer’s rooms.

A damaged Reprogramming Chamber has been added to The Wanderer’s rooms.

A damaged Indoctrination Center has been added to The Wanderer’s rooms.

A damaged Primordial Portal has been added to The Wanderer’s rooms.

“Not a bad haul. How long do you think it’ll take to get these rooms online?” I asked Mac.

[Do you plan to use them?] Mac asked, voice slightly suspicious.

I chuckled. “Truth be told? Yes. But not for their intended purpose. These are the very tools the Cult of the Unblinking Eye used to make their mind-controlled minions. Perhaps they’ll be better suited to fixing the damage than what we’ve come up with.”

[Then, I will prioritize their repair as resources become available. As for the library, I assume you want that added to your existing library?]

“You assume correctly. Once it’s operational, I will see if I can brush up on my mind magic a bit more. But before you deal with any of the others, I want you to get that Primordial Portal operational. I have a feeling my friends and I will be using it soon.”

With everyone hard at work, I gathered my allies again, along with most of my matriarchs. The time had come to plan our next move.

***

“It looks like we’ve done all we can here. It’s time to move on,” I said grimly.

“I’ve heard a lot of talk about this lately. What’s it going to be? New world here? Camp out in the Primordial World? Try to find another iteration of the World of Sanctuary and Serenity that hasn’t been destroyed?” Yeminel glanced at the other Demigods, shrugging bare shoulders as she toyed with a pen.

It was a ball-point pen, which I was pretty sure only we in the Hearthwood could create. I’d personally helped Argona set up the workshop that made them. That workshop had been in Queenshold though, which no longer existed. It wouldn’t exist on any other world no matter how many we searched as we traveled the Primordial World.

“Should we take it to a vote?” Lyssandra suggested. “That seems like a fair way to do it.”

Melaris shrugged in apparent agreement with whatever we decided. Arien followed suit.

“Before we do that,” I waved down the pair of Demigods eager to move on, “I want to be clear that we’ve put all of our options on the table. So far, we’ve talked about finding a planet or moon here in our version of the Ten Thousand Worlds and building a home there. The other option was going to the Primordial World and finding another iteration of the elven homeworld and making ourselves at home there.”

“The latter seems more pleasant to me,” Lyssandra said. “We might talk or act funny to the locals, but it will be less troublesome than defeating and enslaving whatever local race lives on the planet we are trying to conqueror.”

“But what if it isn’t a primary branch?” Arien turned to her fellow Demigod, head askew. “I’ve heard it said that sometimes those false realities sometimes break down and merge back into primary timelines. That could mean trouble for settlers like us.”

“That won’t happen so long as we continue diverging it from its path. Doubly so with a few chaka with us. The humans are anomalies and will force the universe to remain stable,” Lyssandra argued.

“Ladies! Please!” I held my hand again, and the two quieted down. “I’m proposing another alternative. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live anywhere where we have to compromise. If I plant roots somewhere, I want it to be perfect. Not something like what we had. I want exactly what we had. And more, if possible. To that end, I have a suggestion.”

I turned to Sam. “Sam, is it possible to go back in time? Not far, just far enough to where our version of the World of Sanctuary and Serenity is still around?”

Sam frowned, rubbing his chin. “Possible. However, the moment we did that, we would have irreversibly altered that world’s timeline. It won’t be saving the world that we lost. It’ll be creating an identical copy of it before it exploded and claiming that.”

I clapped my hands together. “Sounds perfect! Let’s do that then. Now we can call it to a vote.”

“Hold on, Theo.” It was Sam’s turn to hold up a finger and squash my enthusiasm. “There are a few problems with your plan. First, there’s a reason why people aren’t branching worlds left and right. A lot of people think there’s a limit to the number of branches we can have before the Ten Thousand Worlds starts pruning. Nobody wants to lose their favorite utopia, so the Elven Star Dominion excludes anyone attempting it. As do several prominent Immortal Ascendants. Secondly, how do we even stop this from happening? If our world was destroyed once, without intervention, it will just happen again.”

Those were serious questions, and they needed serious answers. I was glad Sam brought them up because I’d been thinking about them myself.

I let out a deep breath, stood, and looked around the room, meeting the eyes of all my allies, companions, and lovers.

“Before I answer those questions, I have one for you. Are any of you really willing to settle for second best? To find some new home in an unfamiliar land? Who’s saying it will even be any safer for us? We could land on a nearly barren planet only to find it houses in ancient Immortal Ascendant who spent the last thousand years in seclusion.”

I had their attention now. My voice rose higher, and I held my arms wide. “The same would be true for other iterations of our homeworld. The elves among us will probably have to deal with alternate copies of themselves roaming about. And who knows what other minor differences might be that define the differences between this parallel world and our own? No, we can have everything we had before and more if only we’re willing to fight for it. And fight we can. Remember, we overcame the Cult of the Unblinking Eye, their ship, and the enslaved Immortal Ascendants they sent to fight us. We took them down and then salvaged that power for ourselves. Every day, we grow stronger, and I’m sure it won’t be long before one of our numbers reaches Immortal Ascension in truth.”

I looked each one over again. “The Ten Thousand Worlds may be a big sea, but we are sharks, my friends. Not minnows. We should not hide in the shadows or flee from a fight. Not after all the victories we’ve won. All of us are strong, and together, we’re unstoppable. Let’s craft the world we want to see with our own hands and accept no compromises. Who’s with me?”

I looked around, and one by one, people raised their hands.

“Hell yeah! Save some of that for the victory speech next time, buddy!” Dean grinned.

“I suppose we can give your way a try.” Lyssandra shrugged.

“I’m confident you can lead us to victory again if you feel this strongly,” Nela said.

Yeminel fanned her blushing cheeks with one hand while she raised the other. “Keep talking like that, and one day, I’ll accidentally wake up in one of your infamous sex dungeons.”

With that, our votes were cast. It was time to enter the Primordial World once more.