The world burned below as the Steward looked down contemplatively. From his vantage a kilometer in the sky, what plants he could see were burned or burning. The previously-great forest below was little more than charred toothpicks, it’s centered churned up and blasted by a large creater hundreds of meters wide. Nothing alive moved below.
Nor was the earth itself firm. For dozens of kilometers around, the ground had been tilted several degrees to one side, and a new set of mountains and foothills rose nearly. The smoke from the burning here and elsewhere was precipitating a huge amount of rain out fo the atmosphere, albeit typically in certain specific areas where the geography affected the atmosphere enough to do so. In short, dozens of new small rivers ran out and away from those new mountains. But they were turbulent, muddy things, picking up the soot, ash and detritus of a world gone mad.
The Steward watched as one of these new rivers filled up the crater in the forest below. Whether it would become a lake or just a mud pit, he couldn’t say, but it would be days still before the other edge of the crater was breached.
In contrast, the Steward himself was pristine. Bleach blond hair, a short beard, high cheeks, well-hued of skin. It was gone now, but the ghost of a constant smile on his face couldn’t entirely be ignored. His white, flowing robes were cinched tight, but unmarred by the devastation below.
A presence tickles at the back of his mind.
“You’re a hard person to find sometimes, you know?” a high-pitched male voice speaks softly from behind him.
The Steward pauses for a moment to let those words fade. “I used to keep an estate here. Small, no more than a dozen servants, but it was isolated and peaceful here deep in this forest. Now, though? The estate’s gone, the servants are gone… and best I can tell, no animal, let alone mortal, is alive for dozens of kilometers.”
“It’s true in most places. Still waiting for Sturge, but Horus and I found the same thing on Eurial and The Ayres. The collateral damage is… indescribable.”
“When gods die, so do the mortals in their wake.”
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“I suppose. The good news is that we found Myria hiding out from the war. She’s never been a fighter, but I convinced her that she needs to stay on our side and oppose the Brute.”
“So we’re up to eleven survivors then.”
“We’re hardly all equals though. You, the Brute and the Sentinel are way ahead of the rest of us.”
The Steward grunts non-commitally at that.
“But still,” Adonite continues. “I know we call ourselves gods, but I wouldn’t have ever thought that we could do this, that we would do this.”
“No, you’re right. We can’t let this happen again. But it’s going to be a long slog just to coax mortal life to recover.” The Steward looks up at the moon. “I’ll talk to the Brute about us leaving Ager for Caelium. We can set up there again, perhaps like before, and if for whatever reason we fight again, at least they’ll be something left for the victor.”
The silent is pregnant between them still as the Steward looks up and Adonite looks done. Finally, the Steward asks, “Have we found the control gem for the System.”
Adonite shakes his head. “No, we haven’t. We’ve been through all of Systia’s known labs and residences and we can’t find it.”
“With Systia dead, I’m worried about whether we can control the System well enough to recover from this. If we have to go back to individual fiefdoms, we’ll just have another war far too soon.”
“I’ve been speaking with its avatar at length, and it is shockingly more sophisticated than I thought it was.”
“Explain.”
“It’s self-actualizing, it’s creative. When the war started, it says that it foresaw this ending, and worked on guiding groups of mortals into relatively safe spaces, then began working on plans for how to recover. It has a lot of ideas of how to modify the system in order to cost-efficiently improve the recovery of life on Ager with a relatively modest XP tithe.”
“I thought we already let the mortals keep some of the XP.”
“Yes, that’s true, but it’s mostly unstructured, with just a little bit of assistance. The avatar has plans to provide a lot more structure to the whole process, reducing our tithe something about health and magic points. Admittedly, I’m not sure I fully understood what he was proposing, but it seemed like a convincing argument.”
“Fascinating. But I don’t see why that would necessitive reducing the proportion of XP we harvest.”
“Hmm… it’s optional it said. But it predicted that decreasing out tithe from 63 out of 64 to 60 out of 64 would allow the mortals to fully recover in only a third of the time. Maybe five centuries, rathern than fifteen.”
“Hmm. I suppose the current XP harvest is but the smallest tricle anyways. I’ll see wht I can do to convince the Brute. He’s never bene particularly interested in the details before this war, so I don’t think he would care now, assuming he cares at all about the XP harvest.”
“For all that he seems to relish in war, he is a god. He has to care, right?”
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