Crytalis, the capital of the Aluatha Empire, was located on the same piece of land that, on Earth, was named the Yucatan Peninsula. On Daihoon, they called it the Crying Peninsula. The name was derived from a bunch of historical things that Mark barely grasped, but he did know that the Crying Peninsula had been the seat of many different empires over the last 5000 years, since Earth split from Daihoon.
The Aluatha Empire was simply the latest in a long line of empires to call this land their homeland.
Mark wasn’t quite sure why anyone would want to live in a land that was named after the amount of tears that had been shed over that location, but people made homes and then they wanted to defend homes and rebuild, so, in that sort of way, Mark understood. The people of the Crying Peninsula had been shedding tears, sweat, and blood in this location, for a very long time.
Overall, the land was nothing special. There were some great barrier mountains to the south that separated the Crying Peninsula from the not-Pacific ocean, but there were no other great defensive measures anywhere else. In the late summers, they got hurricanes from not-Africa just like what happened on Earth, but most of the hurricanes, and the kaiju that lived in them, veered north, into not-the-Floridas, passing the Crying Peninsula almost entirely. Sometimes some hurricanes spun up just north of the Crying Peninsula, but those hurricanes mostly went north, too.
Due to that rather predictable series of kaiju storms that always passed by and kept going, the not-Floridas were a land of desolation on Daihoon; a no-man's land, usually filled with kaiju.
Some very powerful archmages and Skilled people did a lot of work to keep the Crying Peninsula free of the largest of horrors, and if those largest of horrors did make it on land, then there were always holes in the ground for the people to crawl into. Cenotes formed the original defensive locations in this land.
These days, there were a lot more than holes in the ground to protect the people.
Mark held onto the railing of the noble’s viewing bar of the Grey Whale, watching Crytalis come into view, in the early afternoon. The sky was bright blue with clouds on the horizon, the roof of the world was blue rainbows, and all the land below was inhabited. It was a collection of metropolises, spread over hundreds of kilometers.
Pyramids of glass and steel and stone rose in the sky like shapely mountains, all across the land of the Empire, while castles and wooden houses and farmland and more small crystal pyramids abounded in all the leftover space. Every single pyramid was what they called an arcology; a city unto itself. Each one was fully capable of both absorbing all of the people in the surrounding areas, and defending itself against almost any kaiju attack.
Mark wouldn’t get to see the inside of any of them. Not this year, anyway.
Mark leaned on the railing of the noble’s viewing deck. The wind blew on his face, but mostly stayed outside of the viewing deck, the air pressure of the closed deck and various small magics keeping the wind and the noise to a minimum. Streamers unfurled on long poles on Grey Whale, heralding their arrival to the Empire. The streamers meant something, their orange and yellow and written words full of meaning, but to Mark, they just looked pretty. Fliers flew out in front —the guy that Mark had met the other day, Lee, and a few others— in formation, carrying ribbons of their own. Mark watched as Lee’s small group met a group of fliers that came up from below. They spoke, and did some sort of twirl in the air, and Mark knew it was mostly for show, but it was a show that was steeped in tradition that Mark didn’t fully know, but which had to do with checking people for monsters and other such horrors.
People in the bridge down below Mark’s feet talked through radios, or some other devices, to bring them into port, while the show of the fliers meeting and then parting peacefully was a big cultural thing. Mark didn’t pay too much attention to all of that, though.
Mark was busy looking at all of the things down there.
Crytalis had a lot to see.
City walls cordoned off every giant pyramid and their surrounding lands, while leaving miles of thick woodland between the ‘islands’ of cities, with their individual walls. Layered holes in the ground here and there looked like the interiors of multi-level hotels. And then there were the open slums, which were hard to miss and a real bummer, actually. Mark hadn’t expected to see slums, which was weird. He had thought that the Empire was better than that. They were giant apartments that looked half-defensible, but mostly like death traps. Mark was absolutely sure that those people, so far away from the cenotes and the arcologies, would be forced to fend for themselves in a kaiju attack.
And then there were the wilds between the city walls, and Mark had no idea what to make of them.
The wilds existed in long ‘green rivers’ of trees and whatever between the city walls of each arcology because of some sort of treaties between each city state, or something like that.
Moving on…
There weren’t a whole lot of big skyscrapers, actually. This was surprising, and not that surprising. The airspace of Crytalis was already occupied, after all.
Giant death crystals floated over every crystal pyramid, and those death crystals needed lines of sight in every direction, so of course they didn’t allow building over certain heights. They looked like black and silver twists in the light, floating over every pyramid of Crytalis, ready to vaporize any monster that would be foolish enough to approach.
Mark stared at the death crystals and wondered about them—
Isoko spoke up from Mark’s left, “It’s so much bigger in person.”
Mark asked, “Which arcology is your cousins’? Can we see it yet?”
Isoko shook her head. “They’re over in Nook; over there to the northwest, by the Meteor Sea. The Grand Guard is everywhere, though. Those were the flags that the fliers were flying.” Isoko gestured to the east, saying, “I probably would have been stationed over there for a few years if you hadn’t come along; somewhere far away from the family. I would have moved over to the Nook after a while. They don’t like people stationed near their family for their first years.”
“Will your family visit us at the settlement?”
“Probably! When we get a real settlement to visit, you know.”
Sally spoke up from Mark’s right, “It shouldn’t take that long, yeah? Not with Eliot here?”
“Maybe a few months?” Isoko asked, unsure. “Initial building should only take a day, though. Eliot can build fast.”
“We’ll know more when the meeting is over,” Mark said.
Eliot was in one of the cargo holds right now where they were putting together a greeting station, or whatever it was they had called it. Eliot had spoken about the ceremony and what was expected of them, but mostly Aurora, and how they would receive the mandate of Aluatha during that meeting, empowering them to break ground on a new settlement in the name of the Empire, but Mark wasn’t a part of all of that, and Eliot didn’t really know what was going to happen, either. What had he called it, again? Some sort of… Oh, yeah.
“The Expansion Ceremony shouldn’t take too long,” Mark said, looking out across the land… “I don’t see the docking tower yet… though I do see other airships.”
Isoko and Sally said nothing as they stared outward. Other conversations mumbled around them, some people talking about how it was annoying that they weren’t allowed out of the ship to see Crytalis in person, and some explaining about pathogens. Talk of contaminants was countered by ‘We’re not sequestering people who come visit the settlement, but they’re sequestering people here? Not quite fair, in my opinion,’ and other rehashes of the same complaint that Mark had been hearing for the last week of travel.
Aluatha didn’t like strangers in its land, but they liked being in the lands of others; that was the bottom line.
Mark brought out Quark and floated him in front, saying, “Where’s the dock, Quark?”
Quark lit up, the phone’s screen turning into an augmented overlay of the land ahead. Mark couldn’t see what was out there directly, but Quark painted lines in the sky, on his little screen, showing air traffic control and, when Mark moved the screen, Quark highlighted small towers here and there, as docking towers. All of those towers were small things, though, with personal hovercraft around them. According to Quark, there were layers of sky reserved for certain travelers, and Grey Whale was at the top layer, at around 1000 meters, for guests flying over and not stopping. From 500 to 1000 meters was general traffic, and that sort of traffic was pretty light today. Mark didn’t see many ships out there, but Quark pointed out a few as Mark swung the phone this way and that.
General air traffic over Aluatha was basically skiffs. A few hovercars, like on Earth, but mostly skiffs, looking like boats in the air, meandering between squat buildings here and there.
Quark soon pinged on the dock that the Grey Whale was traveling toward, painting arrows in the augmented sky of his little screen.
Mark extrapolated, “Maybe a minute away? It should be in view right now… I can’t see it, though.” Mark moved the phone this way and that, looking past it to see where Quark was seeing, but Mark saw nothing.
Isoko and Sally stretched to see, but they couldn’t see anything—
Isoko saw it first, smiling wide, and then Sally saw it and she said something, but her words vanished to the wind because Mark finally saw the tower.
The Grand Port of Aluatha was a spike of crystal, twisted into the air, just as tall as any of the pyramids but nestled against a background of clouds that had obscured it, and Mark wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before now. It was massive. Several hoverships held against the sides of the port like puffball mushrooms on a telephone pole.
And then a warning flashed on Quark’s screen, and Mark realized why he had not seen the Grand Port until now.
Mark read off, “ ‘Due to anti-viewing magics, seeing the Grand Port from a distance further than 3 kilometers is nearly impossible for most people.’ Well that’s fucking weird.”
Sally inhaled sharply. “I forgot about that! Yeah. You can’t see it until you’re close.”
“Well that’s weird,” Mark said, absolutely disliking the idea of big invisible things hiding on the horizon.
“Not that weird,” Isoko said. “This ship is under similar magics. The settlement will be, too. ‘You can’t see it until you’re close’ is pretty much exactly the same magics that kept the Moon Veiled, until they broke the Veil. It’s apparently easy to replicate for certain sizes of structures, but I have no fucking clue what that actually means. It’s just something I’ve heard.”
Mark and Sally both had an introspective moment.
Mark said to Sally, “Yeah, okay.”
“Makes a lot of sense, actually,” Sally said. Then she asked Isoko, “You think there are other places in Crytalis that we can’t see?”
“Oh sure,” Isoko said. “Most of those magics are for, like, strategic use. You can’t hide everything everyone does everywhere. That much magic attracts certain kaiju just as much as a city. These places try to do as little hiding magic as possible…” She shrugged. “I think Hearthswell Castellan magic takes up 90% of a city’s safe-level magic defenses. The ‘you-can’t-see-me effect’ on the tower is probably the other 10%, if you include all the airships running the same spellframes.”
‘Spellframe’? What was that?
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Isoko continued, “Eliot talked about it once, but not a whole lot. It was a ‘Hearthswellian Secrets’-thing.”
Mark didn’t begrudge Hearthswell her secrets of Castellan. Not much. Freyala had a few secrets of her own. One of the biggest Freyalan secrets Mark knew about was one he used all the time when he had to actually kill something; a Union of Vein Decay to make something leak from the inside out. It was powerful stuff that usually only Inquisitors got, but which Lola had shared with Mark because they wanted Mark to be an Inquisitor of Freyala, eventually.
Mark knew that Hearthswell wanted Eliot to become a High Priest for her church, so they had given Eliot a lot of secrets that he couldn’t share. Mark still imagined what Hearthswellian secrets would look like.
It was widely known that Castellan, the Power granted by Hearthswell, was good for healing and harming in the domain of the person who was running the Power. It could do a lot of things along those lines, the likes of which Mark had only ever read about online. Castellan could prevent and reverse monsterfication on people and animals…
So could Castellan make monsters, too?
Mark raised his eyebrows at the thought of such an idea… and then he instantly wondered if Union could make a monster, too. Could he… breathe in, like, ‘Stability’ and breathe out ‘Mutagen’? With the idea that ‘mutagen’ was the cause of monsters?
Mark wasn’t sure what actually caused monsters beyond a vague ‘they’re mutated!’ sort of idea.
Mostly, though...
Mark asked, “I’m not the only one who isn’t quite sure what a ‘spellframe’ is, right?” He looked at Isoko. “Eliot had used that word before, but he never explained it, and he kinda brushed me off the last time I even thought to ask about it.” But now Mark was thinking about it again.
“It’s what artificers use, right?” Sally asked, though she was clearly unsure about her guess. “Like the things inside of a hoverbelt that makes the gravcrystal ‘gravify’ in the right ways?”
Mark nodded a little, considering that a good guess, but he wasn’t quite sure if it was the right one.
“Maybe,” Isoko said, “All I know is that Eliot is gonna do some sort of mana flow thingy, like with the roads and pipes and whatever, and that’s a ‘spellframe’. It’s not as complicated as an actual artifact, at all... I think.”
Mark smirked. “You don’t know either.”
Isoko rolled her eyes. “I know that it’s dead simple and it goes off of ambient mana, and it keeps the monsters from spawning inside city limits.”
Mark said, “I thought the Hearthswell magic was in the walls. That’s why there are so many monsters outside of big cities; because the walls have so much magic in them.”
Isoko shrugged.
Sally asked, “Smaller walls mean less monsters, right? That’s what I was told.”
“What we were all told,” Mark added.
“Yeah,” Isoko said.
Sally asked, “Soooo... With the smaller walls, are we gonna have walks in the woods, killing 10 monsters every day, or spawnfests like at Memphi, with non-stop shit 20 hours out of 24? Memphi is fucking crazy, by the way. Fun, yeah, but damned crazy.”
“Oh for sure walks in the woods,” Isoko said, “Should be plenty of time to build up the city, which is mostly going to be us following Eliot around and guarding him when he’s not directly working with, like, Aurora.”
The conversation kinda died, because they were approaching the Grand Port, and all of them were mesmerized at least a little. Sally had seen it all before, though.
Mark had a small feeling of dissonance, now that he could actually see the Grand Port up close.
Growing up, Mark had watched movies of Daihoon, with all these magical things like towers made of crystal and floating mountains and underground housing, so the overall architecture of Crytalis, the capital of the Aluatha Empire, was rather normal… Sort of. It was normal in the way that seeing a grand waterfall for the first time was normal. Or seeing a beautiful spear was normal. It just conjured up a good feeling of awe and wonder; a lightness in the chest, and a joy in the soul.
So seeing Crytalis was pretty fucking amazing.
But the Grand Port was a damned skyscraper, with walls made of windows and holes in the walls, like open aircraft garage hangar doors, and the center of the place, like, 10 different cargo elevators, or whatever. It was the single most magnificent, absolutely-mundane airport that Mark had ever seen.
He was pretty sure a great black slick down the side of it, right over there, was spilled engine grease… Maybe. Some flying guys were wearing dirty overalls and cleaning the black mess with mops and floating buckets that they towed in the air behind them, on strings.
Mark asked, “Isoko? Hovercars have oil in them, right?”
“The big enough ones, yeah,” Isoko said, looking down at the grease slick, too.
“What could have happened there?” Sally asked.
Isoko, who had studied for her hover license, said, “All hover vehicles have engines for electric amenities. That stuff takes up most of the space in a vehicle, actually. I’m guessing that someone’s engine had a breakdown, and they had to get some maintenance on one of the side panels, but they sprung a leak, for whatever reason.”
Soon, the ship moved away from the guys cleaning the building.
Docking was a ponderous affair, with wait times and ship movements and fliers everywhere, and then finally the Grey Whale got to park up at the very top of the spire. Mark couldn’t see in that direction anymore, where one of the cargo bays was currently locked to an extendable bridge, connecting it to the tower. But there were cameras set up in the cargo bay, broadcasting to the whole rest of the ship.
Mark hung out with Isoko and Sally, eating and drinking at the ship’s bar while they watched the scene play out down below. Right now it was just Eliot setting the stage, literally; crafting a nice meeting location between the storage boxes that had been pushed to the sides of the hold. It was mostly faux stone walls and a stone table.
Mark and them weren’t invited to attend, like 99.9% of the people on the ship, but the meeting concerned everyone on board, and so, it was broadcast. It was a public-record thing, too. A recording of the meeting would be kept in perpetuity at some hall of records somewhere… Mark wasn’t quite sure where, actually. So he asked.
Isoko said, “In Domal’Takela. It’s the seat of the Aluatha Empire. It’s supposed to be a really impressive place at the heart of its own pyramid.”
“Like a hundred superhero towers and buildings all enmeshed together,” Sally said. “All under a fucking awful crystal pyramid shell. I saw a picture of it and all I could think was ‘this would look better in the open’.”
“It probably can’t survive in the…” Mark had been about to say that Domal’Takela couldn’t survive in the open, but that made no sense at all. “Old historical buildings don’t get old without being able to survive. Domal’Takela has probably survived thousands of horrible events.”
Sally smirked. “Yup! I want to see it eventually. You can sign up for a tour, but the wait list is years long.”
Isoko said, “The place gets like 5 million visitors a year, or something like that. It’s a pilgrimage-thing for a lot of people. I hear they put on shows of great historical fights in the sky, on the underside of the pyramid. A tour with a show is supposed to be like living through one of the great events of the empire.”
The conversation meandered to Sally asking about Isoko’s family, living at the Nook of the Aluatha Empire, to which Isoko spoke of uncles and cousins and aunts of all kinds, who mostly moved here 60-odd years ago, or who grew up here, born and raised. Mark listened.
And Mark watched the screen and smiled a little —while also feeling a great deal of second-hand embarrassment— as Eliot put some black spikes onto the furnishings down below and spoke of having a ‘proper villainous showing for his team of villains’. High Paladin Azocar Sanchez, of Hearthswell, with Hearthswell’s original last name as his own so he was a big deal, stood with Eliot, telling him to tone it down and to go more normal in presentation. Or at least that’s what Mark assumed was happening. The video was pointed at the stage, and not at the pair of men, so Mark couldn’t read lips or anything like that. Mark could only read some body language, but Mark didn’t know Azocar that well.
Eliot had had different people helping him to learn Castellan back at Memphi, and at Mexico City for a few weeks back there. Mark had only ever met a few of them, but not really. He couldn’t even recall their names right now, and Eliot had never brought them around, and Mark had never sought them out. Eliot’s current instructor on Castellan, and the man who would be teaching Eliot for the foreseeable future, was High Paladin Azocar Sanchez—
Oh. Well there was the one guy Mark ‘knew’. Apparently, Eliot had gotten instruction from Holy Father Rafael Pardo, the spiritual leader of the Hearthswell Church, just as Mark had gotten some help from Holy Mother Julia Garin, the leader of the Church of Freyala…
“I need to send messages back home,” Mark said softly, to himself.
To Lola, to David, to his uncles Alexandro and Gabriel. He should tell them he was okay, and that they had made it safely through the Southern Crossing, and here to Crytalis.
Sally and Isoko Looked at Mark.
Sally asked, “You haven’t done that already?”
Mark felt a bit sheepish. “… Not yet.”
Isoko and Sally both gave Mark another Look.
Mark pulled out Quark and was already tapping away at menus as he said, “They got the messages that the ship made it safely through!”
The girls shooed Mark away, telling him to go send messages already and that his uncles were probably worried sick. Mark didn’t disagree with them, so he went down the hall and started composing messages.
Lola and David got a pair of texts, but Alexandro and Gabriel got a call. The girls had been right; they had been worried about him. Lola and David’s reply texts came through while Mark was on the phone with Alexandro. They had been worried, too, but both of them had already seen the news through Citadel of Freyala Resources; Mark’s ship had made it just fine.
Mark felt a lot better when he walked back into the viewing room.
Isoko and Sally both noticed, both of them looking satisfied at the small joy that must have been on Mark’s face.
And then Mark remembered that his parents were dead. The main people he would have wanted to talk to were gone. It was like a splash of horrible, freezing water on an otherwise nice day.
Mark pretended nothing was wrong.
The ceremony was about to start.