A ripple travelled along the tatzelwurm’s sinuous, furred body as it adjusted its grip on the tree. It had to be three or four times as long as a goblin was tall, and the mottled grey-green of its pelt blended near-perfectly into the shadows of the forest. If it hadn’t moved, Teekas realized with a chill, she never would have seen it, even with [Awareness] boosting her senses. She suspected that the one-level advantage she had over it wouldn’t mean much in a fight — if this was a “lesser” woodland tatzelwurm, by the Great Chain’s reckoning, then she hoped she never had to run into a greater one.
Of course, she wouldn’t have to worry about running into a greater tatzelwurm if the lesser version killed her here, but that was an outcome she’d nevertheless prefer to avoid if possible.
Enshunna was still crouched, frozen, between two of the tree’s great roots where she’d been picking the white-petalled catbloom flowers that Persephone had asked them to gather. “Don’t look up,” Teekas said to her, doing her best to keep her voice level. “But start moving back this way.” Tatzelwurms weren’t a type of beast she had ever seen before, but it was a safe bet that making eye contact with it might be taken as a challenge — and this was not a beast they could afford to challenge right now.
Enshunna did as Teekas said, slowly shuffling backwards, gaze planted firmly on the ground. One hand reached out as she went for the wicker basket she’d unslung from her back, overstuffed with the fruits of their foraging mission.
“Leave it!” Teekas said. She could see Enshunna hesitate, visibly reluctant to part with the medicinal and magical bounty they’d gathered. It pained Teekas as well, but their lives were more important. “Come on, now’s not the time.”
A catch in Immir-shesh’s breath and a tightening of his already-tight grip on her arm prompted her to glance back upward. The tatzelwurm’s long neck had peeled away from the tree, its body bending back on itself and twisting in a distinctly unsettling way to follow Enshunna with its gaze as she retreated. Enshunna, as if alerted by some instinct, abandoned the herb basket and began scurrying backwards with greater haste.
“Come on come on come on come on,” Immir-shesh hissed frantically at his younger sister, grabbing at empty air with his hands like he could somehow draw her to him faster. The tatzelwurm, meanwhile, was uncoiling even more of its body from the tree, in no particular hurry but with unmistakable menace. He reached down and yanked her upright as soon as she was within arm’s reach — just as the first pair of the tatzelwurm’s paws touched the ground. There came a gasp from Enshunna, and Teekas knew at once that she’d looked up and seen the monster — stared into the green lanterns of its eyes. The tatzelwurm went very still. Ensunna went very still. Teekas and Immir-shesh went very still. There was a long, frozen moment. Then, [Awareness] alerted Teekas to the slightest shifting of posture, bunching of muscle, digging of claws into the bark and humus. The tatzelwurm was about to pounce.
“Run!!” she yelled, and everything erupted into motion.
----------------------------------------
While Nar-shesh and Teekas were away from the dungeon, I wasn’t just sitting around doing nothing. I’d asked Ergiza to continue instructing me in formation-craft. Her baby was cradled in her arms, nursing, as she sat cross-legged in the laboratory cave and taught me how to do magic.
The kid was cute. Fat li’l cheeks and all — even with the goblins’ hard march south, it seemed to have been spared the cruel marks of deprivation. I’d asked about its name: it turned out that goblin children weren’t named until their first birthday, a cultural norm that spoke grim volumes about their infant mortality rate. Ergiza’s kid only had a couple of months to go, though. Hang in there, buddy, I’m rootin’ for ya.
“So we don’t know why formations will work differently depending on where they’re set up?” I asked.
“Not the deep anatomy of it, no,” Ergiza said. “We can observe the ‘what’ of the variation, but we have no way to peel back the skin of the world and see exactly the ‘how,’ and so can only make reasoned guesses at the ‘why.’” Her child had apparently drunk its fill, releasing her breast with a contented gurgle. The breast she wiped dry before pulling her tunic back over her shoulder: the baby’s head she rested on said shoulder, and rose to walk around the room, gently rubbing its back for an after-meal burping. “All formations are derived from the world around us — the way that azoth moves in the water, the earth, the wind. Even the body itself is a kind of formation — the weave of muscle and sinew, the coils of gut and organ, the paths of the meridians, all have their own significance. Formation-craft is the art of reproducing, amplifying, or suppressing the azoth effects naturally arising from the material shape and arrangement — the formation — of the world.”
“Form makes function, in other words,” I said. I made a mental note to circle back to her mention of meridians. In a fantasy world, the existence of channels within the body that circulated vital force or spiritual energy could be an utterly mundane fact of life rather than a figment of pseudoscience or traditional medicine. However, it did raise the intriguing possibility that this fantasy world was drawing on a broader palette of inspirations than just “generic fantasy RPG.”
Did it even make sense to talk about a real world drawing on inspirations, though? Why did this world so resemble the fiction of my own world? What forces had shaped its history? In which direction had the inspiration flowed — or was there no causal relationship at all? I wondered if I’d find the answers once I’d cracked open the vaults of Heaven. I did not allow myself to wonder if, having done so, I might find a way home.
I realized that Ergiza had still been talking while I’d been sinking into existential despair. I did my best to set aside my rapidly-souring mood and tune back into the conversation. “...And it’s all relational,” she said. “A formation is of the world — part of it, not separate from it. You aren’t working on a blank canvas, but on one that’s been painted upon in countless layers, back to the beginning of all things.”
“Kind of sounds like a miracle any formation works at all,” I said.
Ergiza seemed to puff up defensively, at that. “The knowledge we have is the inheritance passed down to us by countless generations of our ancestors,” she said. “Bitterly accumulated, through long work and tireless study — but it has accumulated. Goblin-kind has not been idle, nor do we squander the time given to us.”
Her tone, more than the content of her words, jabbed at me. “I wasn’t-” I started to say. Wasn’t implying otherwise. Said that in a tone of joking commiseration, not judgement. Lighten up, unclench, mind your fucking tone when you speak to me- I swallowed those responses back down, and they tasted like bile. It would be better to just move on with the lesson. “Alright. I get that. What are some of the environmental factors that influence how effective a formation will be?”
She thankfully didn’t press the issue any further. “Too many to list. There are two really foundational ones though. Assuming that you’ve drawn the formation correctly, and there’s no problems with your materials, the number one reason a formation might not work well is you’re trying to do something that goes against the nature of a place. A formation to create fire wouldn’t work at all underwater, obviously, but it wouldn’t work well on the banks of a river either. Unless it was a very steep bank, of course — something about the clear dividing line helps. The other most common reason is that you’ve set the formation up in such a way that it’s fighting against the physical flow of the world’s azoth. Say, for example, that you’re supposed to orient a formation towards the Three Brothers-”
“The what now?” I asked.
She blinked in confusion. “The Three Brothers. They’re… have you never-”
“No, I’ve never. Whatever it is, you can safely assume that I have never,” I said. A little bit of my bad mood bled through into my voice. “What are the Three Brothers?”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“They’re a constellation,” she explained. “Do you know what a-”
“Yes, I know what a constellation is.” Okay, maybe more than a little bit of bad mood was bleeding through. I sighed. “Sorry. I don’t mean to snap at you. It was a reasonable question, you have no way to predict what I do or don’t know. I just…” I trailed off awkwardly. I couldn’t exactly say oh yeah, I’m just cranky because you reminded me that I’ve been snatched from my life and dumped into a fantasy world! All of my knowledge is now useless, and that’s a profoundly lonely and scary situation. I wasn’t ready to have that conversation yet. If ever.
“I have never met anyone like you, it’s true,” she said, inclining her head in acknowledgement. I could tell from her tone that it wasn’t a compliment — although it wasn’t quite a complaint either. “But saint, one so mighty as you has no need to apologize to one such as me. I dare not accept it.”
“I don’t follow,” I said. “Why not?” She made a scrunched face of hesitation, rather than answer. “This isn’t a test, it’s a genuine question,” I said, attempting to reassure her. “Explain it to me, if you can.”
Her face was still scrunched up, but now in the way of someone trying to put words to something they’d always known wordlessly. “It’s… I do not know how it is with realmhearts, but for us, to apologize is to confess wrongdoing. The one who is wronged is naturally the one who decides what must be done by the one who wronged them to repair their relationship.”
“I’m with you so far,” I said. If I had a head, I would have been nodding.
“But power is power, always,” Ergiza continued. “Ask too much of a powerful person, and they may decide that the cost of repairing their relationship with you is less than the cost of casting it aside — casting you aside, like a broken tool, like a rind or bone gnawed bare. Falter under a heavy burden, and it will crush you. A thing that seems very light to one so great as yourself, Lady Persephone, may still be too heavy for your lessers.”
I chewed on that for a bit. I was no social genius, but I didn’t need to be one to tell that Ergiza was speaking from bitter experience. Maybe it was connected to what she’d alluded to in an earlier conversation, the impossibility of advancement within her cult lodge. Whatever the case, it was no surprise that she didn’t trust me — we were still strangers to each other, really, and I’d given the goblins more than one reason to doubt my judgement. She was drawing a clear boundary, and I had to respect that.
“Alright,” I said at last. “You were saying about the Three Brothers?”
“Right,” she said, visibly relieved to move on. “If a formation was supposed to be oriented northwest, towards the Three Brothers, but you’re setting it against a dragon vein that runs towards the southeast, it’ll pop like a bubble even if you draw it perfectly.”
Oh, dramatic irony. Just as soon as I have a mini-breakdown about how all of my knowledge was useless, I hear another word I recognize. Dragon vein. “A dragon vein, I’m guessing, is a place where the azoth of the world is denser or more active? Maybe has magical effects on its environment? Valuable real estate that people fight over control of?”
Ergiza blinked, and then tilted her hand back and forth noncommittally. “Not quite,” she said. I experienced a moment of intense, crushing disappointment — one that ended as quickly as it began, when she continued speaking. “We call those demesnes. Dragon veins are more like…well, veins. Channels that the azoth of the world flows through. If dragon veins are rivers, demesnes are lakes.”
Ha ha! Gottem! This isekai shit is easy!! This wasn’t just Generic-Fantasy-RPG-Land. Those tricky bastards were trying to do a genre bait-and-switch and thinking I wouldn’t notice! This was actually a xiānxiá setting! Formations, meridians, currents of power, regions of dense spiritual energy that factions fought over, cosmic laws restricting the free exchange of information and punishing those who seized forbidden power — it all made sense now!
Of course, this meant that there could very well be cultivators out there somewhere, and that thought sent a chill down the spine I no longer had. The last thing I needed was some extra-ruthless, extra-powerful sword wizard deciding that my [Valuable] ass would make a tasty snack to fuel their quest for greater cosmic power. Though, that didn’t really change my situation — being killed for my loot drops wasn’t a new threat on my radar.
“Okay,” I said, my voice impressively level given how my mind was whirling. “I think I get it. So, conversely, if you set up a formation to draw on a dragon vein or a demesne’s power, its effects would be amplified?”
“Yes, theoretically,” she said. “Although it’s not always that simple. Tap into too much power, and the formation will just burn itself out, or worse. And demesnes, of course, have their own effects. To be able to command the azoth of the world is the mark of a formations master.”
“What sort of effects?” I asked.
“Well, first and foremost, you can respire azoth more quickly within their boundaries,” she said.
“You can what?” I asked, suddenly giving this conversation my total attention. Ergiza visibly staggered a little under the weight of my domain.
“You can respire azoth more quickly within a demesne,” she croaked, voice strained. “That’s one of the reasons they’re so coveted. Much blood was spilled over control of them before the lodges interceded and set them aside as sacred.”
“Alright. Okay. That’s very interesting.” And it was very interesting. If I could, say, find a demesne and relocate the dungeon there, that would potentially be a huge power boost. What I’d built here was rudimentary enough that abandoning it and starting over somewhere new wouldn’t be too painful. A week’s work, perhaps. Of course, there was the problem that if they were such valuable real estate, any demesne I found would almost certainly already be occupied. We’d burn that bridge when we came to it, though. “Is there any way to locate demesnes, other than just stumbling across one?”
“There are divinations that can be done to better understand the geomancy of a place, and dragon veins and demesnes are geomantic features,” she said. “I wouldn’t know how to go about locating a demesne specifically, though. That sort of skill would be something the lodges guard very closely.” She placed particular emphasis on the last two words. I was not exactly Comrade Chairwoman of the People’s Committee on Picking Up Subtext, but I got what she was hinting at clear enough. As much as the cult lodges played a vital role in goblin society as keepers of knowledge, they did keep that knowledge. Knowledge was, after all, power, and there was very little that the powerful wouldn’t do to keep a hold on their power.
“Duly noted,” I said. “So I’d need to talk to a goblin settlement with a sufficiently senior lodge initiate to do that for me, if I wanted it done.”
Ergiza was silent for a moment, visibly wrestling with whether to say whatever was on her mind. Her eyes flicked towards the laboratory entrance, as though checking to make sure we were alone. “Abzu might be able to do it,” she said at last in a low voice.
Abzu, the enigmatic and taciturn goblin elder. He was out somewhere, I didn’t know where — not like he kept me apprised of his movements. The last I’d heard from him, he’d told me he’d be gathering materials to set up the protective measures necessary to continue instructing me in the mysteries of goblin history without drawing Heaven’s attention. No timeline on that, said he’d tell me when he was ready. This dude seemed to know a lot about a lot: if Ergiza thought he might have studied closely-guarded core inheritances of the cult lodges, that suggested he was deeply initiated into his own lodge, the Nine Coils. It made me wonder if I was underestimating how powerful Nar-shesh’s tribe had been, before the plague devastated it.
“If I ask him about it, should I keep your name out of it?” I asked her. It seemed like, despite her misgivings about me, she was putting herself on the line a little bit in terms of potential social repercussions for spilling secrets. I didn’t want to repay that by hanging her out to dry.
She shrugged. “The only people left alive in the tribe who’d even know enough to suggest that you ask him are me and Immir-shesh. It wouldn’t exactly be difficult to guess which of the two of us it was.”
“All the same,” I said, letting the question stand.
She sighed. “All the same,” she repeated, mostly to herself. “No, you don’t need to bother. Who’s he going to complain to? What could they do to me, if he did?” She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “They’re all dead.”
Well, that was good enough for me. I’d ask Abzu about locating a demesne when he got back.