Aurora stood in the open air, above Castle South by a few meters, watching a tram head east, toward Mage Society’s compound. Below her, thousands lived and worked, making plans for monster kills or for expansion efforts, or for the trade and gathering of resources located all around the settlement. Already, Captain Gearhead had sent for courier ships to come to the settlement, to pick up the first shipment of resources that had been gathered by the warriors under Aurora.
The first shipment back home would do a lot to assuage fears that Aurora and her people were some sort of rebellion group of reactionaries, or hidden dragons, going off and depriving the Empire of its necessary people and without any plans to give back at all. Aurora felt she deserved greater latitude than that; than the usual impolite inquiries about loyalty and unity of direction that the Sentinels always gave everyone else. But she knew better than most that those inquiries never ended. Proof of loyalty was required, forever and ever and ever.
Which made the facts she had just learned rather irritating.
Aurora set down onto the stone roof of the castle, saying, “You’ll take the hit too, Mother. I will not shield you from the Sentinels to come.”
“That’s fine, Aurora. Isoko knows how to play the game. Mark will likely never learn, but that is fine. They won’t do anything against him, either. He’s too valuable. All of this is theater, because we can’t have the real actions anywhere at all. It is enough.”
Aurora had listened without looking.
But now she finally turned and looked at her unrepentant mother. Elaria was solid, and unworrying. Aurora sighed. And then she pulled out her phone and tapped away—
“What are you doing?” Elaria asked.
The phone started to ring.
Aurora answered, “I’m calling Solari—”
“What?” Rekaro Solari asked, perhaps too tensely.
Aurora responded with a smile on her voice and tact that the Grand Mage never seemed to learn, “There’s an event unfolding, heading your way…”
- -
Under a bright sky, in grasslands far away from any inhabited lands, a hulking beast of muscle and thick skin lumbered on four legs, dripping blood from its mouth and many other places. Coughing. Hacking. It was blue and big, with three large horns and a long tail with spikes upon it. It had never lost a fight, and that fact was still true. Technically.
It was the size of a hovervan, though it had never seen one of those and it had no idea what those things even were. If it had seen one of them, it would have thought it a flying box-monster and it would have bellowed at the box-monster. If the box-monster didn’t take warning then the beast would have shot light from its horns to try and cut the silver thing from the sky.
Horn light was usually enough to kill something.
It had been enough this time, too.
All around it, the beast’s enemies lay dead. Stomped. Burned and sliced. They were small things, green and weak. But they never stopped coming. The herd was gone, and some of the green monsters were blue, like kin. Those ones had been harder to kill.
The beast had never stood a chance.
The beast’s wounds were numerous. Spears of simple wood and daggers of stone and crude metal were lodged in its blue hide. A massive tear at its gut threatened to open any second now. The guts of the beast roiled within those wounds like red tendrils. Shit leaked from the wound. The smell was awful.
And then the shit stopped leaking, and the blood suddenly coagulated. The intestines roiled—
The beast roared one last roar, its insides ripping this way and that, but not lethally. Just painfully.
The beast had never lost a fight, but it had lost the war.
It collapsed, most of it dying, but the important parts lived. The internal transformation had left the heart, the lungs, and the brain alone. The transformation ate at everything else, leaving the hide intact and sealing up the wounds from the inside, and then it devoured. The monster was parasitized.
A nutrient system to deliver itself to the little ones growing inside.
Muscles deflated.
The belly inflated.
The beast’s eyes rolled in its head.
Finally, blessed death, the heart and lungs and brain sucked inward, eaten by the young.
And then came life.
The wound split fully and a hundred little goblins peeled out into the world, a new infestation for a new day. They were ready to go the very second of their birth. Some of them grabbed the weapons out of the corpse they had come from. Others grabbed sticks and stones.
Some goblins had blue skin and big horns.
7 goblins had 3 horns each.
… There were no other monsters, though. No war to fight. No one to lead.
The goblins evaluated each other.
After a small fight among all of them, and then finally among the most powerful, 3 tri-horns remained alive, and 4 tri-horn bodies gave birth to more young ones that did not have any horns at all.
The rest of the new tribe was already making leathers out of the blue beast’s corpse, taking the remains of its brain and their own piss to turn skin into leather, while others were stacking stones to make shelter. Some of the very stupid ones, with venom dripping from their teeth, tried to eat nearby trees and rocks.
One of the no-horns found a survivor huddled on the top of a cliff, in a nook in the rock. The survivor had been bleeding, but he would survive. He had survived such wounds many, many times before. He was old. How old? Who knew. The old one spoke words that the new ones barely recognized at first, but eventually they learned what words were.
They learned their history.
“We are of the Bleak Grass Tribe, located far to the west,” spoke the old goblin, who they called Old-slave. “When a proven warrior comes of age they are granted the honor and chance to craft their family from a worthy beast. The master who was sent against the lumber-beast was killed in battle, but he Touched the beast anyway, and thus you now exist. I was from the previous generation who fell against the beast. I will serve you now, if you would have a name.”
The 3 tri-horns conferred with each other in the way brothers sometimes did.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
When there was only one tri-horn left, he stood tall, covered in the blood and ash of his brothers, and said, “I’m Grax. I am your master now. Where is the next conquest, old-slave?”
Old-slave said, “Wherever we wish it to be. I will teach you the ways of hiding, and the ways of tactics, and the ways that are too complicated to be learned from birth. These things will allow us to survive in the death-death of this big world.”
Grax’s horns lit with light and he became a shadow of himself. “Is this not good enough?”
“Won’t fool the smart things. The humans, demons, dragons, or the Elders of our kind.”
Grax backhanded Old-slave across the chest. “I do not like your manner. Grovel and then teach us, Old-slave, and if you are not worthy then you will feel the front of my claws instead. Your first test of worthiness is to tell of tales of this world, and of meatbags to Touch.”
Old-slave grinned, toothy and hungry. He groveled, “The old becomes new again! Of course, my master. Old master, new master, same master as always.” From on the ground, he began, “The first of the many wonders to Touch are the humans. The next are the dragons, though—”
“I know of dragons. We leave them alone.” Grax’s eyes glittered darkly as memories almost breached the surface. And then he focused on Old-slave. “What is a ‘heeu-man’?”
“Imagine them now! Tall as two of us and capable of strong magics that we must take for ourselves, but beware! For they are as tricksy as demons...”
- -
A jolt.
A flex.
Kardi woke up from her afternoon nap and she moved. She was in her room, but then she walked out, slamming the door open, headed for the front door—
“Kardi?” Shawn asked, sitting on the couch, hand in a bag of chips. He stared. “You okay?”
… What was he worried for?
Kardi looked down at herself.
Oh.
Yeah.
She was in her underwear, but no top. Hair was probably a fucking mess, too. Whatever. She raised her voice as she moved back to her room, “We got trouble coming! I’m not sure what, but my senses are tingling!”
And then she was putting on her webweave and started pulling hard, getting her feet into the holes, as her Luck prodded her like constant sparks of static all across her skin. The only time it ever got this bad was when…
Kardi didn’t want to think about that.
She was freaking out.
Shawn was at the open door. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t fucking know!” With a brush and some spray, Kardi put her hair together rapidly, asking, demanding, “Where’s Tartu and Lenny?” She shouted, “Put on your armor! Right now!”
Shawn rushed to his room and Kardi heard metal clanging, as he said, “Lenny and Tartu are at the arcanaeum!”
“FUCK!” Kardi slammed her guns into her holsters and that was the last thing she had to wear. She rushed to the living room, then to the door to the porch beyond, saying, “Catch up! I’m stealing a hovercar!”
Or whatever she could find.
Shawn complained behind her but Kardi was already running down the garden, past the vegetable vines and to the neighbor’s house beyond. They lived in the Noble’s District and everyone here had a hovecar, but Kardi did not. She only had her Luck—
And just like that, some valet guy was driving around a hovercart with a big load of crates on the back. The guy was alone and in a rush. He did not notice Kardi at all as he rushed to park next to the roadway leading into the neighbor’s back door. The guy hopped off and grabbed the crate in the back and just like a brawny he picked up the whole thing as though it weighed nothing. He rushed toward the house, away from Kardi, leaving the cart for the taking.
The cart was still on.
Shawn came up behind Kardi, his armor barely clanking. He almost asked something—
Kardi was already going for her target, saying, “Come on!”
Shawn, to his credit, was right there with her, and soon Kardi slammed the hovercart into drive, zipping away—
“You fucking— BRING THAT BACK HERE!”
Kardi stood up and turned, locking eyes with the delivery guy, even as she held onto the wheel of the fully-throttled hovercart, shouting, “Where’s your buddy, buddy!”
The guy’s face fell. He knew what was up. He was out without a buddy, and therefore fully vulnerable to the demerit system.
Kardi kept her eyes locked on the guy, making sure he knew that she was serious, even as the cart flew forward. Luck twitched at her, just as much as Shawn complaining about something in front of them, freaking out in a minor sort of way and almost reaching for the wheel, but Kardi turned the wheel at the last moment, never breaking eye contact with the delivery guy. Shawn got forcefully sat back down in his seat, Kardi kept the cart from crashing, and she merely swayed in her seat, as the whole thing unbalanced for the briefest of moments.
The delivery guy muttered something as he took out his phone, flipped Kardi the bird, and walked away.
Kardi nodded.
And then, with a grin, Kardi turned back around and sat down, saying, “Call Tartu and Lenny. Something is happening. I can’t tell how bad it is, but it’s gonna be bad.”
Shawn muttered, “Crazy fucking woman…” but he took out his phone and called as ordered. While it rang, he asked, “Local bad, or widespread bad?”
“Local. Not the settlement.”
This was not a ‘kaiju alarm’ sort of issue.
Shawn held on to the cart with one hand, his other hand to his phone, waiting for the other side to pick up.
The arcanaeum was only a kilometer away, but they were in the middle of the Noble District. There were other people on hovercarts and builders with loads on the road and artisans installing point-defense systems that looked more like sculpted statues of great people instead of the arcane cannons that Kandi knew them to be. It was a maze and the hovercart couldn’t go more than a meter above the ground, and it was only a little faster than flat-out running.
They weren’t going to make it, but they’d get there fast enough.
Shawn flicked through his phone, saying, “Tartu didn’t pick up. Trying Lenny.”
Kardi’s stomach dropped, and then she pressed the pedal to the floor and stressed her Luck to the edge.
All the little things ahead, the people walking, the carts going this way or that, even some cow that was in the Noble District for whatever reason, all got out of her way, like fate had thrown a switch somewhere. It drained Kardi to do that, her lucksense turning dull as shit. Kardi knew she would be practically useless in less than 2 minutes.
But Shawn was still good to go.