It was one thing to know that the mage-kings were coming eventually, and another thing to know that they’d arrive in a week. That didn’t seem near enough time to prepare, but at the same time there wasn’t much we could do without knowing more about their plans. I could at least tell that they were somewhere out over the ocean to the east, but that was of very limited use.
“We’ll have to close our ports again,” Iniri sighed, more resigned than actually upset. By this point I imagined she was used to just one thing after another. “As much as it might be useful to have other nations fall victim to the mage-kings, I can’t do that. We’ll have to make the announcement and get all our foreign visitors out.”
“I can go ahead and move all the cities to a safe place.” I wasn’t sure if the mage-kings intended to spread out and do some sort of broad-scale invasion, or if they were going to come directly at Meil and myself, but it was probably best to put all the cities inside the Caldera. They’d be basically just as safe as inside a spatially-expanded chamber, and with the benefit of having real sky and less claustrophobic surroundings. Even if it wasn’t done yet, the Caldera was already bigger than Tarnil proper, so I had plenty of room.
“Everything but Meil, I think,” Iniri decided. “Even if they’re coming for you, they’re still attacking Tarnil, and either we can defend one city or we can’t.”
“I’d like to get my lair at least started before they arrive,” Ansae added. It was a meeting of Companions, plus the resident dragon, which seemed to be happening more often these days. I figured I might as well call them my council and be done with it. It might not have been appropriate for a Power but I sure didn’t have all the answers. “Having some defenses up would be better than none.”
“Right, yeah, let’s go ahead and figure that out after we’re done here.” I actually felt kind of bad I hadn’t started it for her yet, but even if I were to give her a nice tall mountain, or tower, or whatever, it wouldn’t take me long to set it up. I’d only be doing the rough outline. “Oh, can you ask Iniri if the Fortress is repaired yet? Not that we can afford to use [The Light of Eschaton] but the rest of it might be helpful.”
“Not yet,” Iniri said after Shayma asked her my question. “Though with Blue’s gifts, I may be nearly its match in being able to use [Shield of Tarnil].” That was probably true, though it was still possible for her to run me out of mana faster than I could regenerate it. Difficult, but quite possible when she was making solidified light. That stuff was expensive.
“What should I focus on producing?” Taelah asked. “Thanks to Blue’s Alchemistry I can make things in bulk, but I don’t really know what kind of fighting you’re intending.”
“I very much doubt there will be any Classers fighting. Aside from Iniri and Shayma anyway.” We’d already seen that Classers didn’t do too much when it came to the mage-kings themselves, and I was sure these four high-powered ones arriving with war cores were going to be even more potent than Vok Nal. Assuming these cores came with armies like Tor Kot had, there’d be too many enemies for normal Classers to deal with anyway. The defense would fall to me.
Defenses I was already starting to set up. To some extent I couldn’t do too much, since I had no idea where they were planning to land, but I was setting up some broad-scale, army-destroying traps that I could simply Relocate. Now that I was all of Tarnil it was easier to think about wiping out armies, since I could use hundred-kilometer Lost Woods Fields and teleport chunks of armies into glaciers or lava fields covered in Purgatory. Or I could flood them out with multiple lakes worth of water, which probably wouldn’t hurt them directly, but for any monster not specialized in swimming it would be pretty easy to wash them into a multiple kilometer deep hole in the ground.
Targeting the mage-kings themselves was of more concern. I knew that my lasers and other things of that nature wouldn’t do much to them, not if a fourth-tier couldn’t scratch them, but I also knew that if I ate their attendant dungeon they were pretty much harmless. Now that I was the size of a country, dungeon-to-dungeon combat might well be easier for me, and if it wasn’t, the idea was for Shayma to hopefully be able to pop in and steal it right from under Vok Lim’s nose. Or whoever’s.
Then there was the [Contained Star]. I hadn’t figured out yet how to use it to pump up my existing normal weaponry, but at the very least it was a very mana rich and very energetic bomb. I was going to have a second one ready by the time they arrived, and though I wasn’t really eager to set them off it might be better than the alternatives. That was another reason to evacuate to the Caldera; it was a lot easier to use massive weapons when I didn’t have to worry about collateral damage.
“I have enough mana from Blue, but if you have anything for alertness or mental fatigue, I’ll take it,” Iniri told Taelah.
“Oh, and explosives. Explosives in bulk would be good.” Even if I couldn’t fling them at the war cores, Shayma could deliver them easily enough. Since Taelah would be making them out of my materials, they ought to hold my mana and thus the [Bane] effect, making them actually effective. That was my hope, anyway.
“We’ll have to talk,” Shayma added. “I don’t know what you can make, but if Blue is going to have me jumping into close proximity with the mage-kings I’ll want all the boosts I can get. Besides which, my mom can definitely take one down if she gets a good shot, so she’ll need anything you can give her. She doesn’t have Blue to draw on, so potions will help.”
Oh, right. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Sienne’s Void Affinity would be effective against the mage-kings. I was worried that maybe it wouldn’t be quite as effective as they thought, considering the sheer amount of power involved, but if there was any ordinary Classer the mage-kings needed to fear it’d be Sienne. Vok Lim didn’t seem quite as dim as his son, though, so I wouldn’t bet that he’d come out personally like Vok Nal. The sad fact was that none of us knew what to expect well enough to come up with anything more than the vaguest of defense plans.
“So can anyone scry out what these war cores they’re talking about are? Are they coming with a huge army or by themselves or what?” If it was just the mage-kings and their cores, it’d be a lot easier to deal with than a huge invasion force. Mostly for the fact that it’d be simpler to get the things that could hurt the mage kings near them.
“One moment,” Ansae said, runes flashing as she pulled a ring of rune-scribed stone, placing it in the center of the table. A silver film snapped into existence, momentarily mirroring the ceiling before it cleared to show ocean and sky and nothing else. Ansae made a negligent gesture with one claw and the view rotated, bringing into view four islands.
At least I thought they were islands, until I realized the reflection in the water didn’t quite fit.
Suddenly I realized they weren’t just islands, they were flying islands. As Ansae manipulated the view, I could see they weren’t just flying islands, they were flying island fortresses. Each one of them had walls and ramparts reinforcing the sheer cliffs on each side, buildings on the interior and a number of towers studding a central crag of a keep. Each one was at least the size of Meil, probably larger, floating along in a broadside formation with pennants snapping from hundreds of flagpoles.
It was easy enough to tell which island belong to which mage-king. Each of the keeps had a big symbol on it that was a stylized representation of the mage-king’s chosen monster – ogre, ooze, flame elemental, amphibian – echoed by the pennants that flew from every spire and tower. From the size of the things, there could be thousands of monsters inside. Or more, considering the islands were tall as well as wide.
“It’s difficult to show a closer perspective,” Ansae told them. “They have so much anti-scrying and mana interference.”
“That’s close enough for me,” Shayma said, staring at the scry-ring with the rest of us. “That’s not what I was expecting.”
I was intimidated too, if nothing else because I was pretty sure I could spot artillery on the walls, and I would bet my lasers weren’t going to be nearly as useful as whatever those big, blocky pieces of metal did. Plus, I was jealous, because I always wanted a flying island of my very own. Even my [Reified Manastone] wasn’t going to be any good for that, because it stayed where I put it rather than being actually free of gravity.
“Yeah, definitely need to evacuate the cities into the Caldera. Maybe all the coastline settlements, too. Just so they don’t have any targets besides us.” Though considering that the mage-kings hadn’t shown much interest in anything outside of cities, I doubted they’d actually target any of the small villages or homesteads sprinkled throughout Tarnil. My worry was more in the nature of collateral damage. Tor Kot’s army had been something like forty thousand; four such armies might well scour any land they marched across, even if I was picking them apart at the time.
“The very fact that moving entire cities is not a problem is quite absurd,” Iniri pointed out. “But being attacked by four giant floating fortresses is absurd too.” She tapped her fingers against the table, staring at the scry-ring. “One week isn’t nearly enough time to call on anyone for help, not that we have any serious allies anyway. Anyway, there isn’t much most people can do against mage-kings. We should warn our neighbors, though.”
“Yeah, well, when we wipe out this invasion we better get some thanks from said neighbors for keeping the mage-kings away from their borders.” While it wasn’t fair to expect anyone to be able to come to Tarnil’s aid, I did find it annoying that they weren’t upset with someone invading a neighbor unilaterally and without diplomacy. I would have thought that would be the kind of thing they’d want to quash before it became common.
“Oh, believe me, I’m going to make sure everyone knows how much they owe us,” Iniri said grimly.
The meeting didn’t last much longer, especially since Iniri had plenty to do in order to get people prepared for yet more trouble with the mage-kings. Though this time Tarnil ought to be able to weather the attack without much of a hiccup, since everything would go into the Caldera and get put back when we were done. If I didn’t weather the attack, well, they would be in trouble no matter where they were.
Taelah and Shayma headed off to the Alchemistry, with Shayma swinging by Duenn to fetch her parents on the way. It was actually a little silly to consider teleporting to an entirely different city being on the way, but for Shayma it absolutely was. The four of them put their heads together and, now that Taelah had a better idea of what I had available for her to use, she came up with a long list of things she could make. No miracle cures, and apparently it was effectively poisonous to boost too much, but there were enhancers and restoratives that she could make easily enough.
Iniri returned to the Palace to replace the normal morning session with a more private one, inviting the various foreign representatives as well as the highest-rank nobles still around to tell them what was going on. The audience included the first non-human-kin, non-monster sapients I’d seen around. They had to have been hanging around before, but for some reason I’d completely missed them. Though it wasn’t like I was paying overly close attention to Meil, not with everything else I was doing.
There were two of them with a human interpreter, which they needed because it was pretty clear they operated a lot differently than any human-kin. They were roughly avian, with four wings folded against their backs and clawed, raptor-talon feet. Their heads were narrow hatchet-edges with no eyes whatsoever, and they had four small arms with delicate, three-fingered hands.
They clearly weren’t blind, especially since as far as I could tell they communicated at least partly through color. The fuzzy, downy feathers that covered them could flash and strobe in a variety of neon hues, which seemed to be what their interpreter watched when they wanted to speak. Though they could hear well enough, so far as I could tell. The Overlay marked them as Chiuxalti, and since they had Classes it was clear they weren’t monsters.
Huyaceotl Four-Wind
Level 32 [Slicer-Of-Lies]
Nixaceti Eight-Flint
Level 45 [Shield-Of-Innocents]
To be honest they were a little more disturbing than the Scalemind, to my sensibilities, but mostly because they had those narrow, eyeless heads. Iniri, of course, didn’t show any discomfort with them, though maybe some of the others were a little taken aback. I was damn curious now that I’d actually noticed them, but I’d have to wait to grill Iniri about them until she had time.
While my Companions did their own things, I had business with Ansae. She was actually packing her stuff from her old lair, which showed she had a heck of a lot of faith in my ability to create her a new one. Admittedly, I’d raised a palace from basically nothing in a matter of hours, so it wasn’t like her trust was misplaced.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
“So, what did you have in mind for your new lair? I’m going to assume big, but beyond that I have no idea what you might like.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. I like my comforts as well as the next dragon, but mostly what I want is room. I want enough room to put things, to do experiments, to walk around and lounge, to do magic, to simply sprawl.”
“Hmm.” I played with a few ideas up in the Caldera, sketching out foundations and possibilities. The Palace work had given me some experience, but I didn’t want to do the same thing for Ansae. If nothing else she didn’t need that kind of room. “Okay, I’m thinking of a big tower, I mean, big even for you, and landscape the surroundings for you. So you’ll have that for your main living space, and maybe when I get time to make [Reified Manastone] I can make it float, or make your personal quarters float, or something like that, and the rest of the land can be whatever you like.”
“Now that sounds amazing.” Ansae’s eyes glittered. “Do make sure to have some sort of path to an audience chamber. One with that Field that erases everything.”
“Oh right, yeah. Purgatory. Certainly, I can do that.” I liked the idea, though at this point I had already established what my audience chamber was like. The purgatory audience was for people who’d annoyed me. Ansae, though, was sharper to begin with so it seemed to fit her personality well. “Would you like to come up top so we can collaborate on it?” Even if the expansion wasn’t finished by now the Caldera was big enough that she could fly a fair distance without bumping into the walls, and a more than fair height without rising out of my influence.
“Yes, yes I would.” Ansae flicked her claws, turning all her items into runes that subsequently vanished, and paced toward the teleport spot I’d set up. I’d picked out a hundred-kilometer radius area near the center of the Caldera for her, which sounded like a lot but really wasn’t, even with the expansion incomplete, and I teleported her into the middle of it.
Immediately she spread her wings, launching herself into the air at a speed that was damn impressive even after seeing fourth-tiers fly around. She wasn’t supersonic, but I got the impression she very easily could have gone that fast. While she did a circuit around the Caldera, just for the freedom of flying I assumed, I marked out the area I was thinking of with a low stone wall. Considering it was bare stone to begin with that didn’t stand out too much, so I ended up coloring it white against grey-blue just so it was obvious. While that much didn’t take long, Ansae just zoomed around for a good hour or so before finally returning to the marked plot, casually hovering a few hundred meters in the air.
“Rather ambitious size for a tower, don’t you think?” She asked with a grin.
“Ha. Well I figure that’ll be enough room for both your tower and your environs. I dunno if you want to do gardening or just want a dark and foreboding forest or what, but you’ll have room at least.”
“I will at that.” She glanced around, pirouetting in midair even though there wasn’t anything to see other than a giant circle on the ground. “I’d really like to have a bunch of those Climates, all intersecting in different ways. They’re intricate and interesting, enough to keep me busy when I’m not dealing with other crises.”
“Huh, sure. I was going to do that anyway so doing it here isn’t an issue.” I also wanted to see what resulted when I gave Climates more room. Considering that scale made things different, like how a mountain wasn’t just a big hill, I figured that really big Climates might generate some unique stuff. Many thousands of square kilometers would be a good start, even divided among almost a dozen Climates. Though I would need to duplicate some of them, as trying to figure out all the combinations of intersections with just one instance apiece would be a boggling exercise in topology.
Before the Climates, I needed the centerpiece and anchor of the Tower. I started off with a half-kilometer wide foundation and, at Ansae’s urging, expanded that to a full kilometer. She wanted her space and I didn’t blame her, considering that she was something on the order of fifteen to twenty meters in length, so even adequate floor space was going to require heroic proportions, let alone something she’d consider roomy.
The basic outline was just a circle, lifted up into columns and walls. I gave her windows, of course, and plenty of them, as well as light pipes to keep the interior from being too dark. I kept the ceiling vaulted so I’d have room for utility spaces, such as air or water or light. Though to some extent I imagined my dungeon-ness would keep certain problems from occurring, I was intending to eventually float the whole tower so I couldn’t rely on that for everything. Ansae would probably be able to fix issues like light or airflow herself if they got too off-kilter, but I wanted to do things right.
I didn’t really know how to furnish the place, but Ansae had a lot of ideas, enough that I figured she’d been considering this for a lot longer than I had. Not to mention she’d had lairs before, so she had actual practical experience with what she wanted and how she wanted it laid out. To nobody’s surprise, she wanted everything big.
The first floor had the audience hall at fifty meters wide, running five hundred meters to the midpoint of the tower and completely walled off. Aside from the enormous arch of the entrance, it had a pedestal for Ansae to sit in judgement of whoever came to her, a human-kin-sized opening in the left wall, and a dragon-sized opening in the right. The human-sized opening went to a guest complex, bedrooms and meeting rooms spanning three stories up against the outer wall of the tower, while the dragon-sized one went to a similar, if obviously larger, complex.
Similar in function, but very different in form. Dragons, or at least Ansae, apparently favored a more vertical approach, with a number of roofed platforms at various heights and anchored to the outer wall. Some of them were connected by ramp, but most were not. Each of them had a mostly-enclosed interior room surrounded by other rooms that were open to the air, but not really each other. It reminded me of an extended, segmented balcony, and it kind of made sense for a winged race.
Both the guest chambers were walled off from the remainder of the ground floor, which Ansae had me leave blank for now. I did add a big ramp leading to the next floor, but considering that said floor was nearly a kilometer in height it was quite a walk. Since it was already inside a spatially expanded area, that meant I couldn’t use spatial shenanigans to keep the tower from collapsing under its own weight and instead I had to reinforce the whole thing with mana. Which I was glad I could do, since otherwise I would have needed to use higher tier resources than hardened stone and cultivated steel.
The next level up was meant to be a workspace, meaning one enormous floor with a vaulted ceiling. Ansae said she’d arrange things once she got settled in, but did have me add big landing areas with flying buttresses to the outside of the tower, and I added in a bunch of windows because lighting up a huge interior area like that took some doing. Ansae had the ability to do that herself, and probably would at some point since she could do better than I could. I had a few of the landing platforms dotted about the interior as well, on the columns anchoring enormous glass windows, but overall it was a big empty floor.
After that, there were no more discrete floors. Ansae was fully in charge of how things looked, aside from what was necessary to keep things from actually collapsing, and what she wanted was far different from conventional construction. I had four enormous arches leading to the top of the tower, some five kilometers above the ground, and ran lesser lattices and buttresses between those to support various platforms, some large and some small but none of them quite the size of a full floor, leaving plenty of room for flight paths. Rather like the guest area, there were enclosed rooms on each of these platforms, but a greater number of open ones, and I used rather less glass there, reserving it for areas on the platforms themselves and leaving the framework open to the elements.
Not all the platforms were for living. Quite a few of them Ansae had me fill with water, and some of them with fifty meters of it, for bathing or swimming, and I piped the overflow down and out toward where I was going to put the swamp Climate. It wouldn’t be difficult to tweak it to filter a little bit, and I wanted to figure out how to do that anyway. I didn’t want to always rely on composting chambers.
I’d have to ask Taelah to find me a bunch of creeping vines or convert some of my normal flora to that kind of thing. The white marble looking stone was nice enough but there was a ton of it that could easily be covered with some type of greenery or another, especially in the upper portion where there were relatively open spaces between the four arches.
Overall the thing was incredibly huge, much larger than the pillars I’d put up all over Tarnil, but it was still well below the protection of the Caldera walls. There were scores of platforms and hundreds of buildings, which was far, far more than I could imagine Ansae needing. Considering the size of dragons, I wouldn’t say it was a city, but at least a village.
“Lot of room here.” I observed to her.
“I need to think about the future,” she replied. “I’m the only dragon here now, but that won’t always be the case. If nothing else, there will be dragons who would beg you for a [Contained Star]. One of those would be enough for any of them to become a stellar Affinity Dragon. For entire families to evolve themselves as much as they wanted – and that’s not counting the effects of all the Climates you have.”
“You’re expecting people to immigrate?”
“Among other things,” Ansae agreed. “There aren’t any dragons with a compatible enough magic for me to have children the usual way. But you have [Genesis], and if your magic is powerful enough to Purify me, it should be powerful enough to give me children.”
Wait, what?
“Whoa, whoa, wait. That’s a hell of a thing to spring on me.” It had made sense when Taelah had wanted children, because she was an ordinary woman, in all the good ways, and wanted to be an ordinary wife even if she had some dungeon abomination for a husband. Ansae, on the other hand, hadn’t really evinced any real desire to be motherly.
“I’m not exactly springing it on you,” Ansae pointed out, landing on one of the upper platforms. “It’s not something that will be an issue until after I’m Purified, but it’s still something I want.”
“Well, okay then. I’ll, uh. I’ll keep that in mind.” I didn’t know what to say to that. Though once I got past the initial shock it made sense. Ansae was old and pragmatic and if she said that she was too powerful for any dragon men running around, or flying around, I well believed it.
I chewed over Ansae’s request for a minute or so, but I didn’t really have anything to say. In part because I didn’t have any questions to ask and it was just sort of there, so it wasn’t like I could grapple with it too well. I did notice that she didn’t press me, or demand any answers, or even feel the need to bring it up again. I’d have to talk it over with the others anyway, but she was right about it being far off. I had absolutely no idea how to get myself up above the seven hundred thousand mana cap I needed to Purify her.
Eventually I went back to making up the landscape for Ansae’s gigantic tower. I gave it a moat, just because, and set that as the Coastline climate, then started in with mixing and matching. The Swamp-Coast mix was pretty much exactly what I wanted for wastewater, being a dense network of filtering roots. I could make the Coast water salty too, but in this case I didn’t, letting the moat, which itself was a good half-kilometer thick ring, act as a giant lake. Something I had noticed when setting up various water features is that I didn’t actually have to worry about things overflowing, even though they definitely should have, so long as I used Climates.
While I was working on combinations, Ansae had started unpacking, but soon enough she stopped to come over and watch and comment on what I was doing and I found she had a lot of interest in some combinations I found boring. For example, the Glacier-Grassland mix just gave me a sort of scrubby, icy tundra, but according to her it was really rare to see glacial and nature Affinities coexisting at all. To me, it was the triple or higher ones that got really fascinating. Glacier-Volcano-Forest was really neat, forming pools of boiling water venting steam from an ice sheet, with a black-barked and white-leaved tree growing from each pool. They were called Smoulderroot Ghost-thorns, which I didn’t understand until I took a closer look and saw almost entirely transparent thorns made of what looked like ice growing from the branches. At least the description upgrade I’d gotten from transcribing Taelah worked, since the Smoulderroot Ghost-thorns actually had a description.
Smoulderroot Ghost-Thorn: This tree harmonizes glacial and volcanic Affinities into living wood. Properly grown and cut, a plank or weapon may be both cold enough to encase a room in ice and hot enough to melt stone.
So that sounded like it’d be really useful, if nothing else by making refrigerators and hot plates. Possibly that was too mundane a use for the stuff, but something that was simply grown that could do that was a lot more scalable than cutting runes.
I’d have to get Taelah to have a look. Since she had [Body Reinforcement], she could actually travel the more exotic Climates, but it wasn’t comfortable for her. Another thing for me to figure out. It wasn’t fair that everyone else could hike about all these strange and amazing places with impunity, but it was hard for her to deal with.
“Blue? I think I’m going to go take One-Eye-Green to meet Annit and Keri,” Shayma said, pulling my attention away from what I was tinkering with. I’d been distracted, and not noticed that both she and Iniri had finished up their initial meetings and gotten things straightened out. Taelah was happily working away in her Alchemistry, doing complicated things with a pile of ingredients that she’d probably sent Shayma to get, considering she was using heavy gloves to handle them.
“Oh great! I hope that it helps.” One-Eye-Green wasn’t as adept at mind magic as Dreams-Ahead, but she’d also been warned not to make any real changes. Just maybe nudge Annit a little bit, and hopefully jar her out of the funk she’d been in. Besides, the Scalemind was naturally cheerful so she’d probably get along with Keri. That was the hope anyway.
It was also, vaguely, the first step toward maybe getting the Scalemind Classes. Sure, they went out hunting for food, but that wasn’t the same as adventuring. Not to my mind, and since magic was based on intent there might be something different there. Or not. But it probably wouldn’t hurt, and it’d get One-Eye-Green exposed to the surface for more than a brief jaunt.
Speaking of Annit and Keri, I had noticed when they were discussing me earlier, and also that there were still some people following them about wildwood. The consequences of celebrity, it seemed, though most people didn’t have anything malevolent in mind. It seemed Monat was doing a good job of keeping them safe, but I still stepped in to block off someone who was lurking suspiciously. It made me annoyed that splitting my attention resulted in serious brain-drain, because I could really have benefitted from keeping an eye on everyone at once, plus watching out for any foreign power or mage-king talking about me. Alas, I had to focus my attention on one thing or the other and that meant I missed stuff.
Fortunately, I could trust everyone to fend for themselves for the most part, so after a brief conversation with my fox-girl I went back to wrestling with meshing Climates for Ansae’s territory. Unfortunately, she didn’t have much helpful to contribute, since Climates were very much a purely Dungeon thing, so I was on my own in trying to fit together impossibilities like Rainforest-Desert-Coast. It took me quite a while to work out how to do that one, but eventually I hit upon it.
Instead of a normal sand desert it was salt instead, pocked with tidal oases. Every few minutes, when the waves hit just right, the cenotes at the center of the oases would turn into geysers, showering saltwater over the surroundings. Instead of just being white, minerals stained the salt in the oases in vibrant greens and oranges and reds, and strange colored grasses and squat fungi and bamboo cacti sprouted up around them. It was especially impressive because I had to make that section of Coast, and only that section, salt sea in order to make it work.
Even Ansae was impressed by it, but it had taken so long and gotten me so involved that I missed the actual meeting between One-Eye-Green and Annit and Keri. When I glanced over, everyone was hugging. Which was kind of amusing in One-Eye-Green’s case, but it seemed things had worked out well.