I winced away from the images as they filled with blood. I felt the thread connecting me to the lemur snap– it had been torn apart by its own kind.

The second lemur, who had perched on the fencepost and served as my antenna, crawled down and covered its head in its paws, trembling. It had no ability not to look. Its dying brother’s cries echoed through their connection until the screaming went dead.

I had just lost sight of the humans.

And I had discovered that the lemurs of this island were violently territorial. Cannibalistic, too.

Lovely.

I spent a moment composing myself– while I had lost my creations before, none of them had been as intelligent as the lemur. Their connection to my soul was accordingly weaker. The lemur’s horrific death, however, had been reflected into my being as a sensation I could not liken to anything but cosmic dread. I felt death second-hand. The sudden snuffing out of some essential part of me.

No wonder cores so often fell into animosity with humans. It would only take a few experiences like this to fill a soul with bile and recrimination.

The disadvantage of being a discorporate being, I suppose. I lived many lives through my creations. And I knew I would die as many deaths…

But the reality of it was nauseating.

And to add injury to deep insult, without the lemur, I no longer had any way of tracking the humans. I could take some solace in the fact they didn’t know that. With their friends hostage and their boats destroyed I had no reason to fear them escaping…

But I couldn’t help but worry they might take some precaution or plan against me while my eyes were blinded.

I forcibly turned my attention away from worrying.

There was– always– much to attend to.

— — —

“Tell me Ahe. What did you learn of this hunting god and their shrine?”

The serpent had been coiled faithfully at my feet all this time, awaiting the moment he could speak to me. He had fed on small vermin and rodents, leading a hazy happy stupor, and curled himself in a sunbeam that shone through the breach where the megasloth had nearly torn down the walls.

Now he lifted his head.

“It is a most terrible god. Weak and cowardly. It tried to drive me away with shadowplay and tricks, tried to drive me. But I was not fooled. I could sense there was no true might behind its posturing.”

I unspooled threads of memory from his head as he hissed.

He had adventured far up into the rocky reaches of the island, where many of the trees had petrified over the centuries, leaching in so much of the rich volcanic minerals that they were poisoned– the mineral deposits replacing their natural wood bit by bit, until they were standing stone pillars in the shape of trees and wearing outcroppings of dark obsidian in place of leaves.

Ancient mosses and vines still grew, entangling the monoliths.

He had woven his way through tall grass and approached a clearing–

Where a voice had spoken.

“BEGONE! BRING TRIBUTE BEFORE YOU RETURN! THE GOD OF TEETH AND FEATHERS IS NOT TO BE TRIFLED WITH!”

The voice was a roar that could barely imitate human words.

Ahe lifted his head and then bowed back down, turning away. The next day he returned– clutching a dead songbird in his jaws. But no sooner did he approach then the voice rang out again.

“FEH! YOU EXPECT A PRESENT LIKE THAT TO SATISFY ME? FORGET IT! GO AWAY AND DON’T COME BACK!”

And flame bloomed from the earth, multicolored tails of fire shooting up and bending in the wind. Choking smoke drifted across the grass, and bursts of sparks leapt into the air with pops and crackles.

But it didn’t impress me one bit. Nor did it impress Ahe.

He didn’t know what I did– that these were fireworks, something the hermit farmer had seen often during his time in the empire, painting the night sky in fire as the empire’s warships paraded past the island cities.

But he did know what mana felt like. He had experienced the miracles of my rule; these tricks were hollow by comparison.

Dropping the bird from his jaws, Ahe bravely slithered forward, although the smoke was thick and embers were drifting down to start petty fires in the grass. He wove through the dirt, approaching the shrine. It was made in the shape of a man sitting on a throne, both carved from a single piece of volcanic stone. There had once been a frame of tusks and palm leaves woven behind the throne in a halo…

That was gone now. Ivy and moss covered the figure who sat in the throne, concealing the face of the god.

“BEGONE! ONE MORE BREATH AND I WILL SMITE YOU! TAKE THIS WARNING!”

The words echoed, but this close, Ahe could hear that they did not come from the throne itself. They came down from somewhere above and to the side. There was some measure of godly power to the one speaking– they could make themselves understood– but only very little.

Ahe lifted his head and scanned the canopy…

“DON’T DARE LOOK UPON THE FACE OF GOD!” A small, dark parcel came hurtling down from the branches, landing beside Ahe.

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He had just time to throw himself back in an uncoiling motion– the fuse was already burning down to nothing. The firework went off with a burst of sparks and singed Ahe’s scales. The ear-splitting crack made his head ring.

At this point, Ahe turned and slithered away, leaving the grove behind. He had learned what he came here to learn.

“It was a petty spirit…” He hissed with true venom. “Masquerading as a true deity.”

“I agree.” I had caught sight of something in the trees above, just before the firework fell. A flash of green-gold feathers. “We should drive it out and take the shrine for ourselves. That is a true place of power. Whatever god once occupied it, they are long gone, and their bones should not be disgraced by an imposter…”

“It is a sin.” Ahe spat. “You are a great spirit, maker. You will set this thing right, I know. But I am…”

I sensed dissatisfaction in him. Shameful, reserved, not wishing to say I had made a mistake, but…

“You are not happy, being as you are?”

“No. I was driven away by the false-spirit. I could do nothing.” He said. “I cannot walk swiftly– the tall grass holds me back. It shelters me, but hides the sky above. I cannot swim as fast as a fish. I cannot fly beyond the earth, like a bird. My mouth is full of teeth made for killing, but no tongue for singing. I look at my brothers– the snakes in the low fields– and they are dull hunger-driven things, with no love of the gods. Even if they could sing they still would not.”

Ah. He envied the birds most, then. Their singing. Their flight. Of course– he wished to explore the world, and he could only travel so far without wings of his own.

“I cannot turn you into a bird– but there may be other ways to help you. If you wish to fly, I will find you a way…”

“Thank you, maker.” He bowed his head.

“Go explore. Wander where your heart takes you, Ahe. I will consider what you have said.”

— — —

Below, my sloth was ripping away clods of earth and stamping them down. Unlike me, the gangly creature couldn’t dig a straight well. It had to form caverns, and then spiral down on a slow gradient. The task was an arduous one. Without my help, it may have been impossible– 300 meters was closer to a true mine than a mere hole in the earth.

But I helped whenever I could, diverting some of my attention to dissolving away stones, reinforcing the tunnel walls with quickly-burrowing root structures. I had bred a kind of luminous tuber that gave it some comfort in those deep caverns, shedding a starry blue light that dimly illuminated the constant shift and heave of dirt. Mana-sparks drifted in all directions.

I had spent most of my reserves preparing for the human arrivals and creating the lemurs as a communication network…

But I could see that the task was impossible. Water was welling up, turning the floor to mud. More and more bubbled out with every shoveling claw-load the sloth displaced. Its fur was wet and matted.

Soon, the cavern would flood and it would die.

I sighed. I had no clue how dungeons were supposed to keep the water out, when they didn’t have the fortune to be built atop an existing cave structure with solid stone…

I had achieved a good start– some 100 meters now– but I needed to reassess my strategy. Brute forcing this would require developing organic pumps, better ways to reinforce the walls, a faster method of digging…

All of that was possible. But not without a great deal of effort. I was facing down a sunk cost of time, and the foolish mistake would be to follow it by sinking more and more into shoring up a doomed project.

I had to think laterally.

I considered the most efficient digging lifeforms I had access to– not the sloths, but the roots of my trees. Yes. The more I though about it, the more trying to dig a fully creature-sized tunnel would take far longer than a month unless I was willing to waste monumental effort.

But what if…

What if I could discover a natural cavern, some point below the 300 meter mark? Then all I would need was to send down spiraling, deep-digging roots, tunneling blindly through the dark. As soon as they broke through I would be able to develop a biome out of mushroom and other sunless flora. That would, technically, fulfill the requirements. The quest hadn’t specified any passageway between the underground cavern and my domain.

Yes, this worked. And it was aligned with the next item on my agenda.

The lemurs had worked as a crude relay system, up until the gory end. But the image was clouded and unclear, the communication delayed, the frustration of trying to influence events through the combination of those two factors outright nauseating.

I needed a better signal. My goal then was to build a kind of listening post, a singular growth that would broadcast and receive across the entire island. It would need to be taller than the trees– likely, it would cost more mana than anything I’d done to this point.

But it was an investment that would allow me a way of escaping over the sea– once I built the main antenna, I could chain smaller ones to the nearby islands.

Yes this worked very well. As the sloth huffed and wiped dirt away from its eyes, returning up the tunnel, I began to grow a fungal garden in the caverns it had carved out. Heavy, rounded blooms of thick gray fungal flesh were seeded, throbbing and pulsing like spongy hearts, their roots digging into the ground. I began with the same configuration as my whispering angels and modified it…

– Schema –

Precursors

Whispering Angel x Starroot Tuber

Level 0.

Worm-Maze Mushrooms

The heart of a fungal colony that can extend for miles, forming locus points where sufficient nutrients exist in the soil and roaming the underdark in networks of labyrinthine mycelium. These threads and hearts resemble silk and cocoons. When it is prepared for fruition, it extends a mycelium spike high into the air.

Relevant Traits:

Electrocommunication: Level 3

Magnetoreceptors: Level 5

Deep Roots: Level 5

Rapid Growth: Level 3

Airborne Seed Propagation: Level 3

—

Cost: 17 iota

I had spent an awful amount of mana raising its traits so high. Ironically, rather than going to a defender or a hunter, I had now spent most of my energies developing this communication network.

Deep beneath the earth it began to gestate. The mana I fed into the first ‘heart’ was enough that the bone-white veins unfolding outwards from that lump of furred, wormish white tubules actually crawled in slow-motion across the floor, growing so fast they made an undelightful sound of stretching and groaning.

Later I would have to do more to grow this fledgling colony. Much as fungus and plants could form mutually beneficial relationships, drawing nutrients that the other couldn’t reach…

I could design a host of flora to nurture and support the Worm-Maze. But that would have to wait.

The humans had returned.