“Mother! Is this the place for this!?” VII cried, wriggling from within En’gem’ia’s crushing embrace.
“It most certainly is! I thought you would just be a voice of reason, maybe stop the war for a little while, so I can figure out how to get your aunts and uncles together, but then you get hurt! Let me take care of that,” she said. VII’s body suddenly shattered, surprising Mori and Fara. The pieces of VII’s form dissolved into light and, in the place where VII stood, another VII stood. Her body was not immaculate, unlike the previous VII, and had a series of massive cuts along her body. En’gem’ia’s mechanical body hovered an inch above the gashes and, as she moved her hand, they slowly closed up. After a mere minute, VII was completely healed, “There we go! Now you should be fine!” The goddess sat the two of them down, turning to Kel’rk’ath and Sa’ar’kik.
The other two gods in the room lightly shook their heads at En’gem’ia, “En, you should act like a god, you know,” Kel’rk’ath said.
“She can act however she wants, but you should always make sure your children are safe, En. Don’t send them off into battle!” Sa’ar’kik answered.
En’gem’ia shrugged, seemingly uncaring of the other two, “When you two have kids of your own, you’ll know why I love mine so much, and why I don’t coddle them. Anyway,” she said, sitting at the table, “If I recall correctly, you two wanted to talk to me about my predictions?”
They nodded, “We do,” Kel’rk’ath agreed, “But first, we apologize for not understanding your prediction. We are all a bit…”
“Different, yes. I still don’t understand what the two flame-heads are going on about when they talk about ‘cleansing and starting anew,’” En’gem’ia replied.
“Exactly. Your talk of ‘things that cannot be avoided’ did not make sense to us. Your daughter, however, explained it much better.” Kel’rk’ath snapped his finger and a plate of odd fruit suddenly appeared in the center of the table. He took an white, apple-like fruit and bit into it, somehow chewing the food and swallowing it, “We understand what you’re trying to tell us, but now, after so long, what do you want to do about it?”
En’gem’ia nodded, grabbing a banana from the plate and peeled it, taking a bite with a pleased expression on her ‘face,’ “My answer is the same as it was at the beginning of this war, Kel, Sa.”
They glared at her and she flinched back, “You want to cripple our siblings?” Sa’ar’kik asked angrily.
“What? NO! Never! Why do you think that!?” En’gem’ia cried, “My plan was and still is to scan all of our siblings for any abnormalities and then consolidate our forces into a massive superstructure where we can effectively rule from. We would have safety in numbers, know no one would stab us in the back, and we could continue expansion of our power until we were safe. Nothing about crippling anyone!”
The two hosts recoiled in surprise, “But, I remember you saying that you would cripple anyone we thought was against the idea. Didn’t you say that?”
“That wasn’t me! That was Vel’lav’eck was saying! She kept calling me a traitor and things like that!” En’gem’ia said, scowling, “Then you guys started getting up in arms and, when I wouldn’t drop it, declared war on me… Kel, your twin is still secretly attacking my worlds…”
“She is doing the same to ours as well,” Kel’rk’ath replied, scratching his skull, “I have tried to talk to her and all she says to me is that she won’t let me side with you. I think that there is something very, very wrong going on.”
“It sounds like someone’s trying to turn you guys against each other,” Mori said, “My money’s on whoever’s closest to this Vel’lav’eck goddess.”
The three gods turned to Mori, two with considering expressions and one with a calm smile, “Ah, you must be the lich I was betting on,” En’gem’ia said casually, as if commenting on the weather.
“Betting on me? I didn’t even think I was on your radar,” Mori said.
En’gem’ia giggled, “You were and, judging by how things ended up, I was right to do so. You see, I have been taking a side interest in these ‘dimensional tears’ that Granulous has.”
“Wait, you know what causes them?” Mori asked, interest piqued. She had made a conscious effort to ignore as much as possible from her previous, lost life, but she was quite interested in the tear that brought both her and the other earthborn to Granulous in the first place. Hearing that a goddess had learned about it.
“I thought we talked about it, Mori,” Sa’ar’kik remarked, “Or at least told you why tears happen.”
Mori shook her head, “You never did talk about it and I never asked; it wasn’t my problem anyway. As far as I’m concerned, I’m a native of Granulous with knowledge of Earth. Not a native of Earth thrown into Granulous or anything else like that.”
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“Well, either way, you might as well know, even if you might not be able to help with it like you will for reanimation and the like,” Sa’ar’kik said, “To properly explain it, you need to know more about how reality, on the largest scale, works. So-”
En’gem’ia raised a hand, “I can explain it,” she said, “I might as well, seeing as she’s my daughter’s first friend.”
“Aww, I am?” Mori asked VII, who looked down with a red face.
“Alright, I’ll let you tell her. Do you want to continue our earlier conversation with another soul clone?” Sa’ar’kik offered, taking a slice of some blue mellon from the plate.
The guest smiled in response, “That would be nice. I would love to figure out where our misunderstanding is coming from. Now then, let’s start with the highest level of known reality: the Rift,” En’gem’ia began, addressing Mori and Fara, “You see, the Rift is like… the trunk of a tree…”
“I believe there are better metaphors,” Kel’rk’ath stated.
“Maybe, but I like this one. So, the Rift is like the trunk of known reality. From it, everything else grows. The Rift itself is an infinite expanse of space and mana, with the remains of ended worlds dotted around on floating islands in the void. Without getting into specifics here, that’s all the Rift is. An infinite space of an infinitely growing number of dead worlds. That’s what we think it is, anyway. Any questions?” Mori shook her head while Fara looked far too distracted by the situation to think of one, so En’gem’ia continued, “Now, with the other part. The mana.
The mana in the Rift is dense to a point that, were a world-- we’ll get to that later-- to have a mana density even slightly close, it would break and be sent into the Rift. This mana is dense enough to cause catastrophic changes to the soul of non-Riftborn. Changes that, for one, turn them immortal and escalate their power to the heights beyond what a normal mortal is capable of. As you see, we are Riftborn gods, so we are almost absolutely immortal. We can’t-”
“I already told her about that,” Sa’ar’kik said, “It came up when your daughter explained that prediction of yours.”
En’gem’ia nodded sagely, “I see. Then the point is that being exposed to the extreme amount of mana in the Rift causes a permanent change in the newly Riftborn soul. You become like a beacon to anyone with any semblance of mana sensitivity and your body is refined to a near-perfect degree. Though, ‘perfect’ will hardly get you anywhere if that’s all you are.”
Shaking his head, Kel’rk’ath held up a hand, “No need to go that far into it. Once this affair is over, we were planning on retiring her to the Rift and out of Granulous. They will have eternity to learn about the Rift.”
“Fair enough, I suppose. Now then, back to the explanation. The second part of reality are the worlds, or dimensions. There are, again, an infinite number of them. They are mostly in the form of solar systems, but some are truly different, like a dimension-sized flat world or something similar. They are connected to the Rift via the ‘life clocks,’ big red pillars that show roughly how long a world has before it is about to die.”
“And we gathered every one of Granulous’ life clocks, put them all into our fortress, and used it as an experiment,” Sa’ar’kik added.
“Which is usually a terrible decision, since forces can sneak into worlds through who knows how many ways and cause a lot of trouble for someone. I never did something like that because, at the end of the day, I don’t want to waste fighting power when some calamity could swoop in any day now.”
Mori nodded along, understanding what was being told to her: two layers, one an infinite expanse while the other was an infinite number of dimensions, with weird pillars linking the two. When the smaller one ‘died,’ it was broken up and sent into the bigger one. Mostly simple, “Alright, so what does this have to do with the tears?” she asked. Mori noticed Fara perking up a bit at the question, so simply waited for an answer.
“Ah, that’s a result of the containment of Granulous,” Sa’ar’kik began, “Because we basically quarantined your world from the rest of reality, nothing should have been able to get through. Yet, things still do. That causes a bit of an imbalance, which needs to be righted, or else the seal gets broken and your world learns why we gods are so candid on having massive armies. It has to do with mana density and the structural integrity of the fabric of reality, but, again, a bit above your paycheck until you get promoted,” she giggled, holding a hand up to her main mouth, right below her main pair of eyes.
“So… it’s a coincidence? It’s a coincidence that everyone from Earth got sent to Granulous?” Mori asked, a bit… saddened, she discovered. She disregarded her previous life, but somewhere within her, she hoped that there was a reason why she and her once-fellow passengers were torn from Earth. That was not meant to be, Mori found, but she still found it saddening.
“Are you not going to mention the fact that this ‘imbalance’ always links to newly-awakened worlds? Or the fact that everyone who appears in Granulous always undergoes the changes being introduced to mana causes?” En’gem’ia asked, tapping her foot before turning to Mori, “Awakening is what we call a world being connected to the Rift. I did forget to tell you before, but not all worlds are connected to the Rift. Others exist outside of this dichotomy, as evinced by every new planet that is linked to the Rift. They existed before, is the important part. That brings up the possibility that there are even more dimensions out there, simply too far away for us to find. But…”
Mori rolled her eye-flames, “That’s above my pay grade?” The gods nodded, “Alright, so what you’re saying is that Earth just awakened and… what? Gained mana?” They nodded again, “Huh… so if I go back, it’ll be a world like this one?”
They, once again, nodded, “With a lower mana density, yes,” Kel’rk’ath said, “Is there anything else, or is it alright to continue discussing your retirement benefits?”
Mori and Fara nodded. They may as well have gotten that out of the way before anything else, even if the goddess of the Clockworks was present.