“Me moment,” Lord Mick repeated, tilting back his chair and looking to the wisdom etched in the featureless gray stone of the ceiling, stained by smoke and humidity. “Seein’ the T’thuun tentacles? Nay… Not the Deru trees, nor the Graveyard emergin’ out o’ nowhere, nor the Portals to Bur an’ the alien temples and places there...

“Even the Virindi mazes and places, nay…” he closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them slowly, a dim fire in them. “Grael’s Chamber,” he admitted softly, looking down into his mostly-empty tankard, and lifting his arm to signal for another. “There be eyes there. Eyes o’ things not ever born nor died, things from beyond, an’ the pure malice an’ hate an’ scorn in those eyes, lookin’ down at all of us like we were less than ants an’ still darin’ to kill their little tool…

“Aye, that were me moment I be realizing that there were some truly monstrous things out there in the night, with no love for anything mortal-born, an’ e’en now, knowing it might well be a game t’ them, I know they still need be fought t’ the death an’ beyond.”

Those words thrummed with my memory of the Title Aelryinth was most proud of. Not Ringlord. Not Sage of Focus. Not even Monarch, or Heavenbound, or Lord of Pyramids.

Champion of Creation.

Standing between the Mortal World and all the things from Outside Creation that wanted to do it harm, things slipping through the Veil and the vigilance of gods and elementals to wreak plans unspeakable upon the hapless creatures living upon the Prime Plane.

Things like the… Thing (I coughed and looked away to hide my expression at the unavoidable revulsion in the memory) that had almost eaten Terra, with no gods around to protect it.

As there were no gods here to protect this place, and yet so magic-rich a place was only populated by random Aberrants and looked at by such Entities, and not completely overrun. One had to wonder why that was so.

“Did ye both have moments, too?” the Mick asked carefully, eyeing us both cautiously.

“Yes and no here,” I nodded, glancing at Kris.

“All Ranthas have them, as soon as they are born,” Princess Kristie sniffed.

“At birth?” Lord Mick exchanged tankards with the stolid lugian maid smoothly. Nobody harassed lugian maids, of course, as a stony fist was like to smash them right to the ground instantly.

“Us Ranthas are imprinted at birth with the founding memories of our Curseline progenitor. Which was a mite confusing until my mother and sister explained to me what was going on. So, yes. I’ve been awake, aware, and capable of fully independent thought since the day I was born, Lord Mick.”

He studied her calmly. “So, like as not, yer near as old or older than I am?” he asked leadingly.

“Hah!” She reached out to tunk with him again. “Now there’s a proper rogue’s mindset, Lord Mick! I’ll be sure to tell your mother you’re a fine Black Aluvian still!”

“Aye, she’d be right proud o’ me, palling about with princesses an’ kings an’ whatnot, right around her cursin’ me for giving her no grandkids t’ spoil shamelessly despite all me efforts.” He looked away a moment. “She’d probably have t’ do so from the grave though, aye?”

Princess Kristie nodded slowly. “Aye, pretty sure she has passed on, Lord Mick, though I’ve no true news as to that effect.”

“Well, I did give up on seeing them a long time ago, an’ enough o’ me brothers there were t’ look after them.” He lifted a salute toward ceiling and took a draw. “And you, lass?”

I smiled brittlely. “Oh, that would be when a greedy mage eager for power arranged for a Summoning ceremony and I lost my previous soul.” He blinked at me. “No need to fear, I have a new one, and the thing that ate the old one paid dearly for it. But it was still my moment.”

He looked down at his tankard, then offered it to me.

Well, it was appropriate. I reached over and took the drink made from phyntos honey and barley for a good, hard pull of my own.

Mira didn’t particularly enjoy ale, but this was new, and even if it had a stiff bite to it, not bad. I kept my eyes closed as I handed it back and wiped the foam off my mouth. “I don’t like remembering the moment,” I confessed.

“Well, I only were under the countless eyes of things that wanted t’ eat me soul, it never actually happened,” the Mick shuddered on my behalf, and took a drink of his own again. “Now, thinking things like them might be responsible for losing me lady an’ all me friends an’ colleagues an’ so many folk I knew…” he trailed off darkly.

“We don’t know that they were, or that anything intelligent was. I can totally promise that the thought of doing so definitely wouldn’t deter any of them from doing so, just like pouring water into an anthill to see the fun isn’t going to deter you, even if a bunch of the ants are going to die.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“Until the fire ant stacks come bouncing along on the water, break on you, swarm, and take you down?” Kris smiled fiercely.

“Yeah, if you’re dumb enough to wade through the water into them. Which, mind you, I’m not saying they aren’t dumb enough to do. ‘Hey, what’s this?’ tends to be a gateway to interesting events among more than Isparians.”

“Fire ants?” the Mick asked fatalistically. “Dinnae tell me ants get big enough to eat people, too…”

Kris and I both laughed lightly, thought about his statement, and stopped laughing.

“They totally do,” I informed him, and actually flicked up a Holo of an average giant ant, about eighteen inches in length. “Standard giant worker ant.” He looked at it and its mandibles in disquiet. “Overgrown giant soldier army ant.”

The whole tavern quieted down as a deer-sized, angry ant with dripping mandibles and a very obvious plunging stinger shimmered into view above our table.

“You actually ran into something like this?” Princess Kris asked, wrinkling her nose.

“Ran into them? They made use of them! It turns out the army ants in the Amazon are good for eating undead, if mutated correctly.”

“No shit. And the rest of the places?”

“We hunt them down and exterminate them at all costs. One of the moons around Terra hosts all manner of giant-sized insect life of various sorts, and they keep trying to colonize Terra.”

I flicked up images of life-size giant bees and bee folk, giant wasps, giant dragonflies, hideously dangerous giant mantises, giant scorpions, giant beetles, and of course giant ants and dozens of varieties of giant spiders.

Had quite an audience by the time I was done, watching this parade of enlarged insect life in horror and fascination.

“That be nigh as bad as the olthoi an’ the grievvers,” the Mick pronounced after I was done, and the mixed crowd around murmured much the same feelings.

“We’ve very good reason to believe that the progenitor creatures of each of these species are Devastation-class monstrosities, kaiju, the size of castles and bigger.” I inflated the scale of one of the beetles, a scarab beetle, up and up and up, with a human standing next to them getting smaller and smaller in comparison, and some of the tavern-goers actually choked in horror at the size of the resulting monstrosity.

“How do you kill something like that?” an older lugian looking on gasped for everyone.

“Ah, it gets worse,” I told them wisely, and they just stared at me. “Bugs that size all have magical powers of some kind or another. Spitting out virtual rivers of acid. Cracking pincers so loudly the sound can break bones. Venomous auras that can reduce everything organic around them to gooey sludge. Carapaces that bounce spells off like sloughing water.” I considered the last image of a massive horned and spiked beetle, then let it all fade. “But fire ants aren’t anything like those. Fire ants are a completely mundane pest.”

The Holo this time was a simple ant mound, but with an Isparian hand next to it for scale. “They are called fire ants because the little buggers are all venomous, and they are all very aggressive. If you get caught close to their nest, they swarm out, and they start stinging and biting you.” A stream of dark red bodies scuttled up and out of the nest, and proceeded to start biting and crawling all over the hand and up the arm of the nameless man there, who quickly snatched it away. “Naturally if you don’t know they are there, and, say, pitch a tent right on top of them, you are in for a very active night.

“More to the point, they are ants. They spread. And they have no problem setting up shop at the corner of your home and heading indoors. When they stumble across you in bed, in a chair, in anything, they are happy to repeat the same behavior, and they are a true pain to get rid of.

“So, fire ants. Proof of why you need to get rid of hostile bugs, and that’s way, way before they get to giant-sized or start walking upright.”

“Olthoi,” came the answering rumble, heads nodding all around. The lugian settlements hadn’t been troubled by them, but their warriors had all fought the bugs, as had everyone else, and they were well aware of how dangerous the things were.

“The grievvers, too, even if they aren’t as sly and cunning about it.”

“Aye, heard the olthoi were the dominant species on their homeworld, the grievvers just nuisances keeping their numbers down… or trying to. Haven’t seen much about ‘em that suggests they are good at killing olthoi, unless they get them in webs. Olthoi don’t seem to use webs,” the Mick grunted.

“Oh? The grievvers actually spin webs?” I hadn’t known that, and hadn’t done a good study of the random Summons we’d seen to discern the fact they had spinnerets. That village had been festooned in silk, but that had been more like… cocoons, not hunting webs.

“Aye. There were a Dungeon out in the direlands stuffed full o’ grievvers, festooned with the silk o’ their webbing, and wrapped-up prey inside. Ye could even find wads of it in some o’ the critters after ye killed ‘em, good for making silk.” His face segued into that look he got when he realized how damn odd that was when the bodies of the grievvers had dissolved into nothing after mere minutes. “Loot drops. Miss ‘em so!” he called out, and some of the older lugians shouted out in support and drank with him.

“Who wouldn’t miss free, easy money?” was Kris’ only comment to that under her breath, her expression wry.

“Welcome to the real magical world, where things still don’t make sense!” was my contribution to that insanity.

“Hear hear!” the Mick agreed, and had another pull.

---------

Oddly enough, the lugian speaking halls were full of standing lecterns and posts. Lugians tended to either stand or lay down, as sitting for long periods of time annoyed them and wasn’t very comfortable, partly because they weren’t the most flexible of folk.

Given they were eight feet tall, that also meant a human needed quite a boost to be visible to all of them, which I satisfied by just having Kris stand on a Disk as she made her speech to the gathered lugian elders.

There were about forty of them, and like Lord Mick had said, they came from all three main branches and the ancillary disciplines of them: Warrior, Miner, and Maker, as it were. Maker included both smiths and mason/sculptors, and even a few who worked with hides and wood, although such were not held in the same esteem as the classic jobs.

They were still looking at the Sword with the spirals of Lost Light flowing around it, driven a foot into a nice chorozite boulder that should have defied any such magical effect which could do such a thing… but adamantine’s ability to cleave through softer materials wasn’t a magical effect, it was Weird Science, and Earth Tungsten was a step up from mere worldbone, or plain tungsten.

None of them dared to claim they could make a better Sword of worldbone, although half a dozen had stepped up to examine the Blade shoved into the semi-transparent hunk of rock closely, eyeing the Blackfire Stones embedded into it, forming their own silent questions as they considered the level of smithing skill needed to do such a thing, integrate so many different applications of power, and defy the null-magic property of chorozite that they so loved…