[A Day in the Life of Aelryinth] - 1200 hours

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            There was a lull and break at Mithar’s Salute, or high noon. It was just a break, as everyone involved on my side was Sustained, so the eating and drinking were perfunctory and light.

            Mostly it was about letting our brains relax and stretch before doubling down for the next few hours and finishing up.

            “Dunno how you guys do it, performing to that level for so long,” Garm admitted with a rueful head-shake, joining us on the half-completed newest levels for a drink of cold water. The elevated watchpoint was also useful. “Staying focused on one task for that long, and for all these years!” he shuddered in exaggeration.

            “On ONE task?” Boneriver smiled, the pale, white-haired man swirling around the ice in his drink. “You should know by now that’s not how the boss there rolls, Garm.”

            The Fire/Wind-using Dragon Hand just looked at me and sighed in defeat. “Really? You’re tossing around six-meter cubes of stone like they were dice, carved so hard they make my eyes hurt, and you’re still doing something else? Dare I ask what?”

            “Most of my Allegiance management occurs while I’m making Blocks, Garm,” I admitted to him, and he just threw up his hands in defeat as everyone grinned at him. “This is the middle of the working day, so it’s when most questions pop up and matters should be addressed. If people have questions for me, now is when they ask, not later. Now is when I issue directives and orders to the overall Allegiance.

            “I’m looking through some language on trades with Tetrin’s Allegiance; reviewing Mulcaster’s latest geo-scaping analysis; I had to put the kibosh on a line of magical research whose explosive results we aren’t capable of containing yet; verifying six different judicial cases that came up on appeal; reviewing Grand Central applications for graduation requirements with Argos; delineating the sixteen people who need to be moved around to communities who need them; allocating production resources to goods we are falling behind on; reviewing Briggs’ and Sama’s moves and directions in their military campaigns; reading Orbus’ reports on continued worldwide infiltration by extra-planetary parties; making sure those in Stone Stasis marked for freedom today are released; talking with my kids and seeing how their day is going; helping six different women going through labor, and sifting through the intelligence reports by Master Tomlins’ people for signs of subtler infiltration.” In other Allegiances mostly, or areas without Allegiances...

            It didn’t take any real effort on my part, just talking with different parts of my head at and with various people in Allegiance and the Markspace.

            “Like the Cultivators?” Garm asked knowingly.

            “Like the Cultivators,” I confirmed with equally cool words. “Cults of Mythos Entities are another one. They spring up like weeds among the Apostates.” I closed my eyes as I took another sip. “We rotate duties among the Council Monarchs on cleaning them out, led by the Inquisitors of Harse. It’s not fun stuff.”

            “Man, I don’t even think I want to know more… but how often do you have to clean them up?” he asked with a wince. His duties kept him and his Allegiance out here on the front lines of the border. Internal stuff was not something they were called up much for.

            “On average, we find a new cult about once a month.” The first clue often being locals going missing and nobody talking about them, hoping we’d miss the fact they were no longer around. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize how diligently the Church of Harse paid attention to people and communities, especially the places which were not under a Banner and who actively resisted being governed by an Allegiance.

            Tons of bad shit happened to those people, and it was always festering, growing, and trying to become large enough to be an open threat or bring in something really, really bad on top of us. The people involved didn’t realize the problem was their mindsets, their beliefs, and not being under Allegiance, and instead they blamed it all upon us cursing them and using our powers to bedevil them while they stayed true to their beliefs.

            The first time I’d said Truth to a batch of those fanatics, three people had instantly died and half a dozen had committed suicide shortly thereafter. As a result, I was absolutely reviled among those not present as a mindbender and murderer, the biggest example of a traitor to God and His Son.

            None of them dared listen to me speak Truth, however. Hearing I was present was enough to send Apostates fleeing in terror that I was going to scourge their minds and souls and brainwash them, like all the others who had heard my voice…

            It was a horrible situation. I would not have cared a whit if they wanted to be godless folk staying true to a pipe dream in normal circumstances, and it was even admirable from a certain point of view. But with no Allegiance, no God, and with darkly Neutral or outright Evil mindsets in many cases, the honeyed words of Warlock Patrons, Mythos Entities, and the Dark Gods and their servants had ways of finding root among them that they didn’t among those in Allegiance.

            The problems that resulted from that the people too often couldn’t take care of in the slightest, which meant they became OUR problems.

            When it involved the children of Mythos Entities being conceived here, it could get really bad.

            “Man, I just have to make sure your Pyramids stay untouched while going up. That’s pretty open and shut.” His eyes hadn’t shifted from tracking his sector, constantly scanning the skies and treetops for signs of intruders, while the other members of his Allegiance were on other corners of the Pyramid doing the same, or patrolling out in the wilds here on the border of Montreal. Sentinel Class Levels at unceasing work!

            “Anything interesting?” Remus asked, the normal lunchtime topic of conversation.

            “Dire wolves gone wild after their riders died. Some nasty flora and fauna popping up here and there. Random goblin undead who died and didn’t get cleared up before midnight.”

            “And that since yesterday,” Ash Dorell shook her head as we all shared a common look. “Welcome to the bright, wonderful magical world of the future. Enjoy your deathworld, everyone!”

            “Yeah, Coswell’s team was not happy to find some shock lizards teamed up with a shamblemung having moved in along that lake to the north.”

            “The one with the giant frogs? That fast?” Remus asked alertly.

            “It was at the other end of it, Coswell switched up their route, but yeah, same body of water. The frogs were keeping down the spiders in the city nearby, so they let them be after kicking the damn things around a bit to show them not to bug humans, but no reason to let the lizards and the mung off. Bringing the former back for supper, actually, and the mung core was sent off to the Alchemists for a Plant Control Potion.”

            “If there’s big spiders, there’s a bigger spider queen. You know how that works,” Remus warned him.

            “Klover reported the spiders are definitely being directed, as all the webs are indoors, not outdoors,” Garm nodded, referencing one of the Ranger-Scouts serving under him. “If anything wanders inside a good chunk of the buildings, the spiders will be on them pronto. She didn’t see what they were eating, but the normal suspects are rats and giant bugs. If it’s the former, they are probably centered to the north of the city. Rats might be down in the sewage systems, but there hasn’t been much trace of them on the surface.”

            “Which itself is evidence of something directing the rats,” I sighed for him. “No bone piles from the spiders?”

            “Covered up indoors, possibly.” Garm shook his head.

            “Ecosystems with outsized and magical animals and plants are so damn broken,” Boneriver declared with a firm head-shake.

            “I can imagine the outrage said magical beasts and plants have when ideal prey-size bipedal monkey-critter turns out to have Class Levels and is so goddamn deadly,” Remus scoffed back in amusement, his wolf-like features standing out more sharply in canine irony to accentuate his point. “Kids growing up Forsaken and Powered are changing bloody everything, you know, along with knowledge of the Class System even existing, breathing magic in the air from the moment of birth, access to ki, Soul Magic...”

            “To the next generation.” I offered up my glass, and everyone solemnly tinked it. Everyone here had at least four kids, and Garm unapologetically had three wives and ten kids between them. 

            Very importantly, all of those kids were Forsaken. Powered here didn’t have Powered kids.

            “They still aren’t going to be enough, are they?” Garm murmured, looking at his glass of chilled water. “Our next generation.”

            “The Archmage made the game the third generation for a reason,” I answered him quietly. “We don’t have the numbers to hold, only to make it very, very hard for other forces to hold. To hold places all over the world… we’d need to get back to a billion or more, with fifty to a hundred million able combatants. It’s a big world, and there’s a lot of crap in it, all of it breeding and growing with nothing to stop it, to say nothing of that coming from other places to mess with us.

            “I’ll be satisfied with the coming generation being able to hold all of North America. Taking back the rest of the world… lots of grandkids for the third generation, maybe. There’s no way the whole idyllic image of quaint little villages in a pastoral setting exists in any world with man-eating flying creatures, spellcasters, and hostile intelligent species of all kinds.

            “Worlds with magic are deathworlds, and yeah, our kids and grandkids are going to be far, far more dangerous as kids and adults than we ever were, or would be without the game.”

            “And the real cool shit?” Garm pressed with a touch of a longing note in his voice. “Planes-walking and all that stuff, for fun and adventure and maybe a bit of profit?”

            They all knew I’d been off-world a couple times, and not just to Jotun. Every Ten worth the name had been to Jotun at least once, then come home and decided we had enough shit to do here to not need to muck around in a place where we were all the relative size of hynfolk, or even shorter.

            “My experience has been colored by the distinct need to kick the shit out of everything around me and try to get home before I was overwhelmed or killed, or any of my people were,” I said quietly. “Dimension-hopping for the thrills of exploration…” I just shook my head back, tilted up to look at the sky. “You heard about Tiberion and the stupid crazy shit he did?”

            “Tiberion, Tiberion…” Garm went through his Visual File as the rest of my crew stayed silent. Garm had been off last month when my Block-making was interrupted by the need to ride herd on him. “He’s a Skylancer, isn’t he? What’d he do?”

            “He built a voidship and went up into space.”

Garm gave me a look of disbelief. “He went spelljamming?” he managed after a moment.

            “If you want to call it that. And guess where he went.”

            My flat tone indicated it hadn’t been a great and grand thing. He did look up at the sky, reasoning it out quickly.

            “Verdun is a no, too many bugs there and in the space around it. Niord is a water world, unimaginative. Flying to Jotun is useless. Sylune is supposed to be almost airless and uninhabited…” He looked at me sharply. “He went to Shoul?” he asked in disbelief.

            “Yeah. No bugs stopping us, imagine that. And we found out about Shoul, and now Tiberion is having something of an existential crisis, as he got a big fat Quest dumped on his I’m-gonna-see-the-stars arse, and he’s almost paralyzed with fear and indecision.”

            “Is that so.” Garm winced at the thought. “How bad?”

            “You think Jotun is the playground all us Tens and post-Tens are supposed to be working for?” I asked him calmly. He stared at me, then at the sliver of the great red world of the giants receding below the horizon, and just let out another breath, shaking his head.

            “That’s good. Because we’ve got a fucking Quest ahead of us that’ll take every single Powered on this planet and more to Twenty and beyond, something that’s going to take a thousand years to prosecute effectively… and worse, the gods can’t do anything about it. It’s ALL on us mortals to get the job done.”

            “Fuck,” Garm said after a moment, contemplating that. “A thousand-year Quest? Ael, what the fuck? We haven’t even been inside magic for ten years!…”

            “Yeah, Tiberion is even more overwhelmed. He doesn’t know where to start, he’s overwhelmed by the size of what is required, and he knows every day he delays more people are dying. Conversely, if he acts… he’ll be seeing all the new worlds he’s going to want to see for the next thousand years, wrapped up in a nice package and delivered to him.”

            “Mithar and Valus. I’m not even sure I want to know what is going on,” Garm admitted.

            “Yeah, it’s Tiberion’s job to get the ball rolling, but he hasn’t even been back out into space yet, let alone recruited the people to start the thing off.” I drained the last of my water and put it away. “His thousand-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to discover annihilated life and slaughtered civilizations; to boldly go and massacre whole worlds of undead like no man has done before!”

            Garm grimaced. “Oh, gods,” he murmured. “Whole worlds, where they lost against Dead Marches?”

            “Nice set-up, and yes, but no. The gods have no awareness of it, and they and their subjects can’t recall anything about it. So, they can’t intervene or really help. You know that Urlhmenuus and his forces don’t even know Shoul exists?” He blinked at me in disbelief. “I can point right to it, name it, they’ll nod, turn their eyes away, and forget it instantly. Likewise, all of the undead who once inhabited it and marched off to other worlds now Shroud those worlds, took those worlds from the gods, and then killed every living thing on those worlds.

            “The Divine have no idea they are there, were there, at all. If someone is going to stop them, it has to be mortals.”

            Garm looked at the rest of my crew, who just looked down and shook their heads. The scope of it was beyond them, too.

            “Did the Archmage know about them?” Garm had to ask faintly.

            “No. There’s some post-Ten stuff in his study we’re allowed to read, and the Shroud is not referenced anywhere in them. My guess is that nobody has escaped from a world they Shrouded to tell the rest of the multiverse they are there and need to be fought.”

            He was silent as he stood up, and then it hit him.

            “Whole planets of undead, huh.”

            “Yep.”

            “Probably magical worlds, huh?”

            “Yep.”

            “Carte blanche… no, required to kill every single damn undead thing on those worlds, huh?”

            “Yep.”

            “And the loot of an entire world, plus the invading force of undead?”

            “Yep.”

            “And here we are, a bunch of Tens wondering how to make it to Twenty, who just so happen to be massively optimized for fighting undead at size and scale.”

            “Yep.”

            He actually shivered once, a look in his eyes coming over him, one that I knew very, very well, programmed into us as gamers.

            The grand and glorious hunt for Karma and for loot! It never went away, and apocalyptic violence was the fastest way to get it!

            Fighting a world of undead… would be inflicting an Apocalypse upon Armageddon!

            “Fuck me, Ael. How many worlds?” he asked faintly.

            “Don’t know, Garm. I’m guessing thousands. We’d have to scout them out and see.”

            “How, how long before we start going after them?”

            I glanced in the direction of Shoul, currently on the other side of the world, forever in our shadow. “First, we have to light up Shoul itself. I have some ideas for that, but, you know, lots of things to do.”

            “Lots of things to do. And… we’ve got the time to do it,” he agreed after a moment of hesitation.

            “That we do…”

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