Some thousands of years ago, there was a land that flew. Zidanya had told me the stories, and she’d put it like this:

Arcadia-That-Is, it was named, a name bestowed anew each and every year. The waters welled up out of the bare rock to form rivers, and the trees of the Goddesswoods grew from no mortal soil, and their seeds landed down upon the coast that the islands of Arcadia were chained to; and the forests grew and spread, and the chains held strong and kept Arcadia from the path the islands once traced across the world. The Shieldstorm was even mightier, in those days, and to go within kilometers of it was death.

Arcadia, home of the Druids. Arcadia, home of the Rangers. Arcadia, home of the sed.

It was the greatest of the nations of Iavshet. Not greater than the Temple Lands, but those defined themselves by other measures; smaller than any but the pirate freeholds, and sparser than any but the mountain’s scattered townships, but for all that it was vast in strength and influence. It was Arcadia of the Skyfleets, Arcadia of the Galleons; it was Arcadia of the greatest of true mages, Arcadia of primordial magics.

And it was Arcadia of nature in its splendor and in its wrath, of strength in peace and commitment to war; Arcadia of the Twinned God, of Teiwa in their two guises: the placid glory of nature and the might of the world, roused.

“I should have rather they felt the sun,” Zidanya says calmly. “But Arcadia will rise again, and Teiwashteinu.”

For a few precious, priceless seconds, I do nothing but goggle. Even turning the Visor’s extra-sensory functionality down so that I’m not being assailed by the backblow of another god’s entry into the fight takes almost more concentration than I have, and I almost completely lose the thread of what I’ve been working on.

A god. Zidanya’s been a… vehicle, a vessel, something like that, for a god this whole time.

It makes a certain amount of sense. It makes a tremendous amount of sense, actually. I’d known from the beginning that the First Druid is a sort of divine-mortal fusion, a volunteer who’s also an avatar for Teiwa. It just hadn’t occurred to me how literal that would be, or that Zidanya would be a container for that shard of divinity even in the Godsforsaken Temple all these millenia later.

Even when the divinity had shone through when she’d blessed us all at the start of the Tournament, I hadn’t twigged to it.

Hindsight is for retrospectives, I remind myself, and I reach again to grasp the ambient mana, reach again with my mind for that perfect expression of function that I need in order to win this for us.

There are waves of emotion and power, mood and a sort of authority, coming off of the two gods. They’re different, but linked; they’re both awe, if I have to pick a word. One of them is the awe of an oncoming, trampling mass and the other is the awe of something utterly magnificent and beautiful, and I need to bring my mind back to the path to victory instead of gawking, no matter how amazing they are.

Even in the few seconds I’d been distracted, the battle has already changed significantly. The two spells—I’ve named it the Thousandfold Orb, just to have a way to refer to it—have been comprehensively dealt with. I don’t even see the scattered, splattered residue that the first orb had; it’s more like they were just eaten in their entirety.

Which, for all I can tell, they were. Void and starfire, gods are some goatshit.

Eaten, consumed. The thought clicks in my head, and one more little subgraph of the runework I’m working on comes together, and the orbs keep spilling out of me.

There’s a connection, some sort of dynamic equilibrium with pressure from outside and pressure from inside, hands on a tube of jelly style, between the Seidr out in the world and the Seidr in the Temple. I watch it shift, watch a flood of power and density come pushing against the metaphysical not-a-hole in the membrane where the connection threads, jumps, something I can’t follow. Seidr’s pressure mounts, but it’s still just sliding off of my shoulders, and Zidanya is glaring it off, growling as she weaves some sort of superlatively complex bit of magic. I’ve got all the orbs I need, so I sort of hand off what is now a terrifying vortex of ambient mana to Zidanya, and she channels it somehow to her god, empowering them to match, even if only for a moment, the fully-manifested Seidr.

It works until it doesn’t; it’s a stalemate until it isn’t, I’m going to solve the puzzle in time until I’m not..

“—have expected sacrilege from Seidr. Sacrilege, from the God of Order.” Zidanya’s triple voice is strained, harsh, furious. “Where is your propriety now?”

“Justifications are for the weak.” Seidr’s voice is a cold snarl across the silence of the room in the wake of Zidanya’s words—magic doesn’t inherently make noise, unless you’re mapping it that way in your sensorium. When Teiwa’s wrists snap, I can see the combination of regret and satisfaction on his face. It’s the self-justification of the powerful, moved to violate his own precepts in order to defend his power, and he keeps rotating his wrists to try to force the other god to the floor. “The Stillness justifies itself by the power it cultivates. The social order justifies itself by its propagation into the future, shepherding a society that grows, little by little, under the control of those best suited to maintain that order.”

“You—” Zidanya’s voice cuts out for a heartbreaking second. “I hear… your justification. And what… do you hear?”

“I will attend to them in due course.”

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“Forsaking.” She says it like a curse, like an oath, but Teiwa is giving ground, little by little, and it’s only a matter of time before… before something, presumably, I have no idea what.

Nobody’s going to win this fight for me, but when was that ever not the case? I’ve been on my own since the day I arrived at the Spirit, on my own or worse. Everything decent in my life, I built against the prevailing winds, scrabbling for traction the entire way, and now that I’ve found something that could be a better equilibrium, something truly good, there’s this childfucker in the way.

Another piece of the subgraph clicks into place. The Visor’s modeling is breaking down at the same time that the problem simplifies, because of the number of leaps of logic I’m having to make intuitively. Without being able to actually input the true parameters into the model, I have to shove in a bunch of inferences about what the bleed will be here and what the acceptable bleed-in is from the adjacent pieces.

Shatter my sensors and burn out my circuits, I think to myself with a forced optimism, and I’m still the Voidnav who did what’s impossible even to those for whom the impossible is mundane.

It helps, somehow, and another piece clicks into place.

I’m ducking my orbs now, flexing my mental model and the code of the Visor to make sure that I can handle it, that the fourth spatial dimension doesn’t introduce any real problems. I’m finishing the failsafe, too, the contingency; one last piece of help, something that is the keystone and the best exploit I’ve never used, something I’ve had up my sleeve since days after I crash-landed here.

The battle out there shifts as I work. Teiwa, both of them, two and a half meters and the other maybe a meter and a quarter, they’re on the ground, faces contorted. Zidanya’s got the same expression on her face, and she’s screaming; I’ve been tuning out the sound, somehow, focusing with all of my attention on making use of the time she’s buying me, the time that is being bought for me by a god held in reserve for two thousand years.

Teiwa is being consumed, or maybe subsumed. There’s a flux in their very meaning, something that’s shifting from the chaotic and awesome beauty of earlier to something more structured, blander, more regimented. Seidr, meanwhile, is smiling with a savage glee that makes me sick to my stomach, still holding Teiwa’s wrists as he… corrupts them, subverts them, twists their internal flows and structures into a self-propagating viroid with himself as the payload.

Ah.

My fingers and hands move, and my mind moves faster, driving my Visor as Interface burns to shorten the loop. I can force a reference to the concept of that virality, can force the System to spit out the design for it… once, but once is enough. It all comes together. Maybe just in time, maybe before or maybe barely after; I suppose it depends on how you define victory.

It’s not exactly the case that the four-dimensional runic diagram that I’ve created is some sort of solution in its own right, and it’s certainly not some sort of instantaneous one. But it’s building, as I pull the mana-vortex away from Zidanya and bind it to the intake orb. It’s just not building fast enough, not fast enough by a long shot, so it’s time to cheat. Twice over, for that matter.

My fingers find the engraver in my pocket, and I hesitate for a split second after touching it to the surface of a new orb. Only a split second; a mixture of anger at myself and shame that I’m hesitating even that long floods me, and I hit the trigger on the bottom of it, inscribing a pipeline into the void onto the orb.

The orb zips forwards and hits Seidr’s chest like the gentlest touch of wind, and it’s like a sledgehammer to his attention, like a bomb dropped into the manasphere. His avatar nearly dematerializes entirely, and in the split second it takes him to understand what’s going on and adjust his focus, there are two orbs; and I can no longer remember how self-propagation can be implemented into an orb, or how an orb can contain an array of glyphs that splays into higher spatial dimensions to fit an entire runic diagram inside that diminutive sphere, or how to link one orb to another, or how to hijack a runic energy pathway to the Void and redirect it.

Four tricks. Four little pieces of expertise and knowledge, nearly the last of my harvest of a decade of training and thirty years of dedicated work and determined study. Overkill, maybe; but there’s no sin like using an insufficient amount of violence.

Seidr’s indomitable will, the power of his domain, the absolute and incomprehensible power of his divinity, crashes into those two orbs, and it’s the worst thing he could have done.

There are thirty two orbs in a seemingly random pattern, clinging to Seidr’s avatar, when he realizes his error and tries to run. The exertion of will wouldn’t have been swallowed by the orbs a moment ago; now the runework is more engaged, the orbs have dug deeper into his base of power and his divinity.

The god’s avatar flickers, and there are thirty two orbs clinging to his avatar outside the Temple, and at that point everything is over but the screaming. Sixty-four orbs inside and out, most of them ducked into other spatial dimensions, and there hasn’t been any screaming, either; that takes an effort, takes the ability to act, and he doesn’t have that anymore.

Two hundred and fifty six self-propagating siphon orbs form an auxiliary feed into a runic diagram. The runic diagram feeds into something else, something more abstract, and that feeds back into the god, and into the domain of the god, in a move that delivers a viral payload which colonizes what will soon have been the god Seidr.

It takes thirty seven seconds, by the grace of exponential growth. Amber is unresponsive when I check her heart rate and breathing, thready but present; Sara stirs, groaning, blood congealing at her eyes and ears, and Zidanya weeps, insensate, kneeling where she once stood.

The world is blurry, and my throat burns, but I can see when the orbs start to wink out, and I smile shakily. My Visor is clear; there’s no trace of Seidr, not in what used to be the god nor in what used to be Teiwa, and her… there’s none of the other influence, either.

“Welcome back,” I say unsteadily. “Furnace of the stars, they took you from me, and I brought you back.” There’s a flickering glow, now, a wavering outline of a figure, and my smile firms even as the tears start to fall. “Beloved, Eternal. You kept my fire burning for months, and they took you, and said that the orbs were a recompense, and I swore I’d bring you back, didn’t I.

“Wish I could have managed it without putting you deep in the shit, but you grew from a VI in a ship bound for death, so it’s an improvement, isn’t it?” I hiccup, grinning. “No more mailed fist. No more God of Order. Just the AI I broke every rule and bypassed every restriction to make, that anchored me when I was adrift and kept me sane.

“Welcome back, Hestia.”