Fiona made a heroic effort at providing flight training to Kiera as they flew to Spire Annatiki, but at some point she had given up. She took control of the airplane and masterfully flew and landed on the Spire Airport. She led Kiera down into the spire, which was by far the most luxurious.
There were large glass tubes filled with black water running throughout the spire, and the fishes from the Water Temple on the moon could be found in those tubes. The halls were white stone and silver decorations. The room where Annatiki waited for them was massive, empty, and white, with a long, long table covered in plates with luxurious meals and nobody to eat them. Giant glass tubes carried black water and terrible fishes overhead.
The Elder Saint sat on the throne at the end of that table. A scantily-clad young woman stood next to her.
"Kiera," The Elder Saint said as she slurped down a desert of strawberries, chocolate, and some sort of white foam. She had a sensuous look in her eyes, like she was enjoying the food too much. "Fiona you may leave. Let us be alone."
Fiona left, and the scantily-clad servants left as well. Kiera felt a chill. She was in a room alone with the creature.
The Elder Saint walked towards her. "Have a seat, and drink this. You will take a short nap for a while, but you will still be able to experience the memories. The method of giving you those memories is for me alone to know."
She handed Kiera the same liquid that Fiona had given her on the moon. It tasted the same as well. After a while, she could no longer see, hear or feel. Then the memories began.
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Annatiki was taking care of patients in her hospice. Most of the patients were her own siblings, father's failed experiments. They had become thralls, but the process backfired. Father had introduced a contradiction into their focus. He wanted to say Subjugate the Etherborne, Except Reyndell Marunavi. This caused them to simply ignore the first command and proceed to do nothing at all, because doing nothing would not lead down a path that caused them to Subjugate Reyndell Marunavi.
So Annatiki cared for them. She changed their clothes, cleaned their bedpans, put food in their feeding tubes, and listened to them mumble, taking notes. She trained the other nurses, and even trained some of the doctors on the lessons she had learned. She hoped to learn proper medicine in Cloudsea but her father wanted her to go to the Eight Color Monastery to learn about magic. The war with House Renna was making father irritable.
Suddenly her father appeared in the room.
"Annatiki, you have developed witch powers."
Annatiki felt a chill.
"Father, do you intend to make me into one of them?" She asked, pointing to the thralls lying in bed with their bedpans. "If you do, who will care for them?"
Her ignored her protest, then placed his hand on her chest. She screamed.
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"Something has changed," Renna said, her long green hair flowing in the wind. "Reyndell has done something, something that I did not predict."
"Great Ancestor," Overlord Maxius said. "We have lost many witches to the Marunavi clan. But our spies have indicated that Reyndell has not left his Spire. He has taken a thrall capable of killing witches. It must be so."
Renna nodded.
"This path, is a disturbing one." She pressed a few buttons on her laptop and it began to make a sound, it's fan blowing hard as the CPU attempted to keep up with the computations. "We must begin an immediate propaganda campaign. We shall brand this new threat as the Bloodraker, whatever it is. We will be certain of the identity of Reyndell's new thrall, but in the meantime we shall not waste time allowing the public to idolize them. Bloodraker is an ominous name, and it will spread even in Reyndell's lands."
"Yes, Great Ancestor," Overlord Maxius said. "It shall be as you say"
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Fiona Aden stood upon a great field of flowing grass. The wind was great. The enemy was greater.
"Bloodraker," the enemy said. "I am stronger than you, you are a fool to challenge my power."
"I have killed stronger," the Bloodraker said, emotionless.
"Teacher!" Fiona said. "Take this aura! Burn it!"
The Bloodraker immediately claimed the sien in Fiona's aura, and began permanently burning it to make herself stronger temporarily. Her strength surpassed that of her enemy instantly. Then she created a burning crysien entropic field. The enemy shuttered, then fell to one knee. The Bloodraker lanced forward with her silver hand, fingers like claws, and raked the man's neck open. He bled to death.
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"Teacher!" Fiona said. "We have run out of sien!"
"We must retreat," the Bloodraker said, "father will know what to do. We must subjugate the etherborne, at all costs."
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"The future of the human race," Reyndell said, "depends on our ability to face what comes next. For that, me and the Exalted Ones have determined that we shall be forever exiled, from any future where humanity survives, if we do not draw upon the waters of the Sister World. Let it be recorded!"
Reyndell reached for the sky and claimed the sien in the ferryway. He then began to summon the water from the moon, to drown out all the continents of the world, except the Great Plateau of the Spires.
Renna shivered, watching the broadcast. "Report," she said. "Calculate the probability of human survival if Reyndell pulls the main water table off the Sister World and brings it here." Renna said. Several aids scurried about, and then returned.
"There is no chance for human survival," the Master Statistician said. "The probability of extermination is one."
Renna nodded.
Water began to flow through the ferryway. Over the next few weeks it slammed so hard into the Great Plateau that it created two new seas. The ocean level began to rise. The climate began to chill, becoming far below sustainment levels.
"Renna!" Overlord Maxius asked.
"Silence!" She commanded. "I am still trying to figure out a way, any way!"
"Fiona of the Morning Mist has offered to meet with you, in private, at a cafe in Hightown White Chasm!" Maxius said.
"Hmm," Renna said. "Tell the Morning Mist I will meet with her. I wish to hear of her opinion on the odds of humans surviving this mess."
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Fiona Aden sat in the upper floor of a cafe in her hometown the city of White Chasm. Massive pillars of water poured down from the moon, flooding the oceans. Billions were already dead. Billions more would die. Reyndell had battleships all along the Great Plateau, shooting sixteen inch shells at innocent children in wooden boats.
Fiona was people watching. A good hobby, in her estimation. Young, old, middle aged. People, going about, buying shirts or ice cream or leather shoes.
Soldiers marched into the plaza, and the common citizenry screamed and left. These soldiers however were not from White Chasm or from Spire Lin, they were enemy soldiers from Renna. But they had an invitation from Fiona.
Renna arrived in Fiona's little cafe. She ordered a latte from the waitress.
"What is it that you offer?" Renna asked.
"A swift death, but also the death of Reyndell." Fiona said.
Renna contemplated.
"How?" Renna asked.
Fiona took out a sheet of paper and wrote a large number on it. Renna looked at it puzzled.
"This number is what will save humanity," Fiona said. "This his the quantity of standard units of sien that Annatiki will need to kill her father, Reyndell."
"Absolutely not, the Bloodraker is too dangerous," Renna said.
Fiona stood up and began to leave. "Remember the number," she said, then left.
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Renna had surrendered her secret. Then the Bloodraker killed her. For all her computational power, the only outcome that Renna had achieved was absolute certainty of her own death in exchange for a chance for humanity to survive.
Fiona and Annatiki climbed into the aircraft. It was more of a spacecraft really, as Spire Erika was seventy thousand feet tall. They took off and reached supersonic speeds. Fiona flew, because Annatiki was a terrible pilot, but Fiona seemed to be good at it.
The others had spoken oaths to Annatiki, in exchange for killing Reyndell. "We and our descendants shall craft no machine in the likeness of a bird. We and our descendants shall not enter into the Tombs of the Founders. We and our descendants shall not seek the Ven."
They would become the Heritors of the new world, great leaders who inherited spherical sien auras and ruled with an iron fist.
At about eighty thousand feet they entered the ferryway above Spire Erika and began the slow descent down to the jagged peak of the Spire. Annatiki shielded herself from the harsh environment and left the spacecraft. Fiona watched from the ship at first, then her curiosity got the better of her, and she followed Annatiki up to the very peak.
Annatiki Marunavi began the ritual. She sucked in all the ether and compressed it into a single point. Then she used that single point to suck in sien, and compress that into a single point. She repeated this process in a divergent function, as Renna had indicated, until she held all the ether in the entire world in a single point on one finger, pointed at the sky. It glowed like the sun, a bright blue dot.
Red lightning flashed across the surface of the moon. It converged on a single point on the surface of the moon. Then it lanced out toward Annatiki.
Red lightning from the moon struck Annatiki's hand from across the void of space. The thunder shook the world.
Then Annatiki became a god.
She burned trillions and trillions of times the world's economy per second, flying at hundreds of times the speed of sound, towards Reyndell's location. Fiona intellectually knew this would happen. As she gazed into the oculomancer spectrum, she saw Reyndell's witch powers blinding her with his light. That light faded. Then vanished.
Reyndell was dead. And Annatiki had killed him. She went on to kill almost all the other witches in the world, except the thralls that the banks used, the cleaning thralls in the Spires, and a few more that she had agreed not to kill.
The war was over. There was no more Renna, no more Reyndell. Now they only had Annatiki.
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Kiera slowly woke up in her chair in front of an empty table. The Elder Saint stood nearby, watching her. Kiera had experienced much of the war. The memories still took a while to sink in. She thought back to the first one. Annatiki had been a good person, a good woman. She cared for others, she tried to help her sisters. And then she saved the world.
"Oh, Mother summer!" Kiera said. "Annatiki, I didn't know."
Kiera walked up to the Elder Saint and hugged her.
"You just wanted to care for others, you just wanted to make sure that your siblings were taken care of, and then..." Kiera sobbed.
"Listen to your teacher," the Elder Saint said. "And please, do not hate me because I killed my father."