"Thank you," Annatiki said to Diana. "That is all, you may carry on with your work."

"Wait," Diana said. "Kiera, I would like to tell you another story. It is quite amusing, in my opinion."

"Sure," Kiera said.

"So you are the first witch to join us in a thousand years. That is because the last thousand years have been absolute hell for us. The first few centuries were total chaos. The Heritors quarreled endlessly and we witches were still trying to figure out how to work with each other. The bank was constantly creating hyperinflation bubbles, pyramid schemes, or outright fraud, and we didn't have enough oculomancers to take control of them yet. Furthermore, there was actually another civilization out there in the world."

"Where?" Kiera asked.

"On the exact opposite side of the world, in the blind spot that we oculomancers cannot see. The core of the world glows so brightly that it creates a shadow where we cannot see. It turns out there was a mountain range there, and those mountains were still above the water as an island chain. There were other mountain ranges above the water as well. However, no islands had any people, because Reyndell made certain to depopulate the islands after he was finished bringing the water to this side. The islands are also quite small, and could only support a few hundred people at most. The conditions are very cold and food is hard, but not impossible, to acquire.

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"As guardian of the sea, me and my submarines are tasked with guarding these islands to make sure people don't move out there. However, a very clever Heritor family invented a very silent submarine that was powered entirely by mechanical energy. It was not magic at all, so we oculomancers could not see it, and my submarines could not hear it. They set up a little breeding colony on that island chain. They lived in cellars, essentially, and they knew our patrol patterns and hid in their cellars when we went to the surface to survey the island. They lived there for hundreds of years before we found them and by then they forgot why they were there at all, and they had several witches living there. I was stronger than them, so I promptly killed the witches and sent a ship to pick up the other people on that island.

"However, this is an example of how we didn't quite know what we were doing back in the early days. We made many mistakes that could have led to a powerful witch being born and challenging Annatiki here. Sometimes we were too efficient, and that created fragilities that would lead to sudden crises. When that happened we would often have to backtrack on our methods. But recent centuries have been quiet. It's a good time to recruit new witches, I think. There may be many more witches that join us, after you."