The location of, ‘the southern tip of the stripe duran is on,’ sounded vague, but on the tip there was an island connected by a land bridge not more than six feet in width.

While he did stage the area, explosives, acid vats attached to said explosives, a gravity array that would flatten the entire area down to below sea level rather than 200 feet above, likely the greatest protection was that he brought Carmilla.

She knew less than she would’ve liked about Ur, but compared to Seraphallen, he was… not a saint, but sane.

Ur arrived past noon, along with Sholl, and once their feet hit the ground Fomoria and Carmilla dropped their invisibility.

The Hand was unsurprised by her presence, but the Finger found himself in a combat stance, waiting for his death.

“I hope there is no issue with my guest, but I knew that you wouldn’t come alone either.

Carmilla, you seem-”

“Do not speak with me unless spoken to. I am here to ensure Fomoria’s safety, not to chat.”

She spat her words with venom.

“Fomoria, I am sure that you want to know why I am here.”

“No, not really. You asked me to use my empathic powers to fix the Cast, so I assume that is why you called me here.”

“Well, yes, but-”

“Ur, what are we doing here? Why are we-”

“Sholl, listen, don’t speak. Emperor Fomoria, I know that you and he have-”

“He murdered my fiance.”

“Technically, Sholl was only part of the-”

“When a commander gives an order, even if it is carried out by another person, the deaths are still on their head.”

“Fine, yes, he murdered your lover. But-”

“But nothing. I’m not going to kill him now, but I want you both to acknowledge it.”

“Sholl, apologize to the man.”

“I don’t want an apology, that would change nothing. I want him to just admit what he did was wrong.”

“Yes, I took part in the mission with the intent to kidnap your child, and as a direct result I caused the death of your lover.”

“Now, may we continue?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Sholl, show him your power, conjure a tree.”

He didn’t intend to second guess his superior again.

“Oh Emperor, heed to me, grant a tree.”

It did not grow from the ground, it just suddenly appeared, a full tree, roots and all.

Immediately Fomoria began to study it, though Carmilla was unimpressed.

“So you can make a-”

“Quiet.”

Fomoria’s reaction was strange to her.

After almost ten minutes of Fomoria rubbing the tree, striping bark, eating pieces, he was satisfied.

“This is a tree.”

Both Ur and Sholl understood the meaning, but Carmilla was starting to wonder if this was a joke.

“Yes, we can all see that it is a tree.”

“Carmilla, are you much of a nature mage?”

“I’ve dabbled.”

“I could grow a tree from a blade of grass, but it would not be a tree, it would be a blade of grass in the shape and with all the properties of a tree. I would still be able to find that grass inside of it.

This tree is not something else grown into a tree, it is just a tree.

Sholl, make another, gold leaves, purple roots, and an alcohol content of 92.1% in the sap, a weeping willow.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Follow the command.”

Ur understood the intent behind the request.

“Oh Emperor, heed to me, grant a tree as described by he, I beg of thee.”

When the tree suddenly appeared, Sholl staggered slightly, the specificity of the request along with the fact that nothing like it naturally existed meant that the cost was significantly higher than just a tree.

Fomoria plucked the leaves that bent the branches, and they really were made from gold.

Part of asking for that was how it could be interpreted.

What he wanted was gold colored leaves, not leaves made from gold, he wanted to know if this magic actually knew what it was doing or if it worked from what Sholl believed.

As a final test, Fomoria sent a small fireball at the tree, which went up in flames in an instant.

“So, you want my power, and you are offering the power of Sholl. What limits can I expect? I saw that it clearly stressed him to make my odd tree.”

“You already have something in mind, don’t you?”

“Yes. Bring me your raving mad, and I will personally see to them. I won’t make any guarantees of course, but if I say that I’ve cured it, I expect you to first give me what I want before I turn the solution over to you.”

“I will believe you if you claim to have the solution. But I ask that you say what you intend for Sholl to do.”

“No. I am also going to be pursuing other avenues for a solution as well, but, for the good of the world, I will uphold my end even if I don’t need Sholl’s power.”

“Why?”

“I said, for the good of the world. And to that end, you said that I washed up on your shore. I assume that means you have control over some stretch of the world, and the other falls to Seraphallen.”

“Without the emperor, each hand is given half of the imperial lands.”

“Then start changing your lands. Start removing the cruelty. I won’t ask that you collapse your economy with the complete dismissal of slavery, but start with not allowing the owners to murder them without consequences.”

“I’ve always found that to be rather distasteful as well. Work is fine, but to kill for no reason but the pleasure of it is insanity. If you correct the Cast, then perhaps they will find it unsavory as well.”

“You have a month to implement this policy change. If I don’t see that it has happened, I am going to unleash a flesh eating virus that attacks only Cast.”

Ur had begun to reach his hand out, but then pulled back.

“What?”

“The same thing I infected Hellik with. It is going to be a short but painful death, and millions will die.

I can spread it across hundreds of stripes in just a day, and nobody will realize they’ve been infected until it is too late, since I designed it myself. The clock is ticking, would you like me to send you somewhere with a void gate?”

“5000 miles west, same latitude. To spread this information, let alone give it time to-”

“I’m not asking for details, it happens or it doesn’t. I will decide if you really tried or if it was a smokescreen when the time comes, and I won’t be telling you what my choice was.”

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Fomoria opened the gate, and the two of them stepped through with haste to start the process.

It wasn’t going to be enough to rely on pigeons or even drones, Ur would need to recall his hands, and then focus them on enforcing the new law once it becomes known to those under his rule.

Seraphallen would know, which Ur didn’t want to happen, but he could at least say that he was doing it under threat of an attack that might cripple the empire; Seraphallen would’ve deployed it months ago.

Before he went on to his next location, he wanted to stop at Redhaven and have some tea, give some blood, chat.

“What is wrong?”

“Be more specific.”

“Releasing a biological genocide agent against any people is not you. I would have no issue doing so, but you are soft.”

“Just like I wasn’t willing to fight the child soldiers?”

“That wasn’t the same. It’s written all over your face that something is wrong, so, after all the time we’ve known each other, I am asking not as a queen.”

“But as a friend?”

She flinched.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“It’s not that I dislike you. I can train myself to not flinch at the touch of a man, to hide my disdain at the sight of them. But the mind is the mind, it is not so easily changed.”

It was clear to him that this conversation would go nowhere, her issue was pathological, feigning friendship was the best he could hope for. He considered her a friend, and perhaps she did as well, but that block meant she couldn’t interpret her feelings as true friendship.

“Yara and I can’t have a child together. That has been upsetting. I am going to Tochter today to ask them about a possible solution.”

“And yet you never asked me?”

“If I wanted to get Yara to become pregnant, I could do that, but she refused the idea. She wants a child, but only with me. I know she would agree if I tried to get her to adopt a child, but I worry she would be unhappy.”

“All fertility magic has a base, the same man who would breed a stronger horse could help a woman bear a child.”

“Perhaps. But is your magic soul based or genetic based? I believe that the issue with Yara and I comes from the soul. If I shared genetics with my child, but it lacked my Fomorian abilities, I would have no issue with this.”

“I… don’t know. The soul is the building block of life-”

“The soul is a worker, the mind is the blueprint, but cells and mana, those are the blocks.

The soul builds the body, but the mind can overwrite the soul, and the mind is made by… Life? Aarde? Reality?”

“I don’t understand the difference.”

“When I got out of the facility where I was kept from 11 to 14, I realized from others who had gone through normal training that I was ignorant of basic facts of magic, because I had become very specialized, never being taught those things that others consider simple. Xol taught me things that are far outside of anything we know here, but a child of just 15 would know, perhaps even understand. And so, I don’t expect you to understand the difference between RNA and DNA, or what a mitochondria is. What you are doing is magic, what I want to do is based on physical laws which should hopefully bypass the soul.”

“I’m no longer offended that you never asked. But why do you believe that those in Tochter would understand?”

“Because I’ve been examining Elk and Ox, and her soul is normal, but her body is changed in a way that cannot be explained through the rudimentary soul magic that they have. They call themselves Vatborn, which would make sense if their method of growing new people is like something Xol mentioned, a process from his world where they grow new organs for people. It’s also probable that a piece of an ancient ship from his world landed where Tochter is, and that is the origin of their ability to do this. His world didn’t have magic, and-”

“I understand. Just go there, find out if your problem can be solved.”

He gave her several vials of his blood, just a small gift.

When he had spoken the idea of a visit to Mother Lion, she was, at minimum, apprehensive.

But she became intrigued at his request, and brought it before the council.

He arrived in the center of Tochter, which was a single fortress city.

The first thing that he noticed was that they built higher due to the lack of ability to build too far outward.

Each building stretched at least 200 feet. They were smooth, small windows were the only feature on the outside.

Xol once showed him images from his home, and Tochter was like a twisted vision of it.

The bright streets full of stores and colorful art replaced by a uniform sprawl of stone buildings.

The flashing signs became floodlights which scanned the sky.

The chatter and music became the intermittent hail of gunfire followed by airbursts in the sky, sometimes an explosion from a hit would flash, mostly they just flew back into the clouds to restock on missiles.

The Castians plan was just to just win a war of attrition, hoping that the Tochterians ran out of bullets before they ran out of missiles aimed at the AA guns.

The second thing he noticed was that the sky was green.

The third, and most important, since it made a chill run up his spine, was that there was something under the city.

“Sir Fomoria, are you alright?”

He staggered slightly, and became used to the feeling.

His mind flashed to when he first entered the NLZ, the cage of Fae souls.

But this wasn’t like that, it was just something down there that shouldn’t exist, a mass of power which absorbed everything in the area, weakening him.

“Yes. Whatever it is that exists under the city simply pulled on me for a moment.”

“That would be the defense system left to us by our First Mother.”

“Is that the cause of the green sky?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting, but ultimately irrelevant for the moment. Please, let’s move inside.”

During their walk, Fomoria found himself being ogled by the women in the streets, most of them have never seen a man who wasn’t Cast.

The thought came to him, the towers, it was like the city was a soul in physical form.

They now stood at the doors to one of the lab buildings.

“Emperor Fomoria, before we enter, there is something important which-”

“You stole my semen. I know. Elk tried to tell me before and I didn’t let her because of how uncomfortable she was speaking about it. Finally, she came to me and explained. You don’t have wombs able to carry life, just ones that hold genetic material. I must accept that if it helps you, then I will overlook your transgression.”

Mother Ox stepped in front of Lion.

“Mind your tongue. Sister Lion-”

“No. If you want to fight me for what I’ve said, we can, but you won’t win in a one on one match.”

“Sister Ox, there is no need for this. I did trick him, and I deceived him once I had his material.

Now, I will leave you to Sister Elk.”

Mother Elk, as the healer, was also the one in charge of the creation of the Vatborn, so she took over the tour.

“As you can see, we have state of the art facilities that can sequence, splice, and mutate genetic samples.

The ones taken from you are already being used to make new Daughters which will be the baseline for the future. In another 20 years, every Daughter will be pale skinned and blue eyed with black hair.

Would you like to see the first successful batch?”

He wanted to refuse, worried that seeing what could be would only upset him, but he accepted.

They were still small, just toddlers, but he could already see the differences in their structure, their heights, muscle mass, muscle distribution.

Each were kept in playpens of sorts, five to a pen, each would be raised as a squad.

“How old are they?”

“Six months. Their latent genetic memories will start to be unlocked by nine months, and by 13 they will have a complete understanding of them and the training to use these memories.”

“How long will they live?”

“Well, if what you said about a longer life for your kind is true, along with what I was able to read in their code, 60 years at the maximum.”

“And when the war is over, what then?”

The Mothers went silent.

They all thought at some point about what came after, but never for long.

“We will find out once the war is over.”

He could feel their emotions, these Daughters were not mental mages, but they were more sensitive to others.

One of them walked up to him and grabbed his leg.

He looked at her big blue eyes, though they hardly moved compared to his.

“Ba.”

It was just a noise, it wasn’t really speaking.

He lifted her up and she began to cry, reaching for him to hold her closer.

“Would you like to keep a group? I am interested in the results of Daughters raised outside of-”

“No.”

Fomoria continued to rock her for a time, much like Pixies, these Daughters were mildly empathic, but only through direct contact, his wanting became her wanting.

But he had to set her down; they could all see how he was feeling.

“We should move back to the labs, get some samples. Continue the conversation we had before.”

“Of course.”

He gave more samples, blood, semen, hair, fingers.

The entire day passed with Mother Elk running tests on everything.

Most of the work was done in a vial of clear liquid.

Whatever she put inside of the vials would dissolve almost instantly, and then she put it in another machine which spun it until the clear liquid and other parts were separated, letting her examine the fat, muscles, and bones of his finger in three separate layers.

These vials were then added to another machine, which output numbers and letters along with a light display.

“Have you learned anything?”

“You mentioned that there was something within both you and your wife which was not supposed to interact with one another. I found some unknown markers which I have not discovered in any other races.

They share a similarity to other pact entities, so I will assume that this is the part you mentioned.

I will need to check this against the data we have on Golden and-”

“You have data on Golden?”

“Should we not?”

“I didn’t think any existed outside of the veil.”

“The First Mother gathered information from all corners of Aarde. When the veil went up, we remained as a withdrawn scientific center, and when the Cast swept across the lands, we closed off entirely, and she made the First Daughters, who are long since passed.”

“So, was she a Wizard or a Witch?”

“I do not have authorization to tell you more about her. Could you bring Yara here? I would like to harvest an egg as well as the tests I have run on you. Over a thousand years has passed since we were able to gather data on Golden, and genetic changes may have taken place.”

“I can contact her. But don’t offer to show her the children. She has been as upset as I am about this, and I don’t want to bring up those feelings again.”

“Very well.”

While those of Tochter ran their tests, Fomoria gathered everything he needed to help Rosewell with her massacre.

His feelings about it were mixed. Yes, the rebels deserved it, her reasons were just, but it didn’t seem like her. Was this for the best? Or was she pushed to her limit, acting irrationally?

The irony of his thoughts was lost on him.