Diana left the Spire, and Annatiki led Kiera to a chamber near the center. Thralls were busying themselves running around with plates of food for non-existent diners or cleaning the floors as they walked. Then they entered an area where nobody could be found, an empty maze. Annatiki led Kiera through the maze to a massive, glowing red spike hanging from the ceiling.

"Kiera, I give you permission, just this once, to attempt to draw the sien out of this spike." Annatiki said.

Kiera did so, but she found that the maze she had just navigated was orders of magnitude easier than the shifting, evolving, self-repairing maze that guarded the sien in this spike.

"Enough, stop." Annatiki said. "It will take you tens of thousands of hours of objective time to gain enough experience to be able to reliably pull the sien out of this spike. If I see any witch in this chamber practicing, I will kill them. Even Fiona."

"I understand, Annatiki. I promise that I will never attempt to pull sien from any of these spikes," Kiera said. "This seems very important to you."

"It is important to me. Kiera, you have likely begun to suspect, as your skills continue to grow, that you are stronger than I am," Annatiki said.

"I did not want to say anything, but you are right. I did have my suspicions. But I promise Annatiki, I just want to be your friend. I don't ever want to hurt you."

The Elder Saint nodded. "Me and Fiona needed to know how my condition would react to having another etherborne around with your strength." Then she froze. "Wait, you said that you wanted to be my friend?"

Kiera nodded vigorously. "Let's be friends."

"I may consider it," Annatiki said. "Follow me, there is something else you need to see."

Behind the spike there was a long narrow hallway that ended in a chamber made of natural stone with a broad borehole in the center. The borehole was lined with the tops of those glowing red spikes. There must have been a hole drilled into the wall of the borehole so that the spike could be inserted like a peg. There were thousands of the spikes, snaking down into the borehole.

"This is my life's work," Annatiki said. "Every day for a thousand years I am either working on making a new spike or inserting it into the wall of the borehole here. My spire is twenty-eight thousand feet tall, the tallest of the spires with the exception of Spire Erika in the center of the continent. I chose this spire for this purpose. These spikes are designed to be dropped from aircraft and impale themselves into the ground. I will have an emergency supply of sien on demand to consume and destroy any witches, even if they are stronger than me. There is enough sien in this borehole to kill my father ten times over. And I am only halfway down the spire.

Stolen novel; please report.

"Every decade or so, Fiona flies me to the top of Spire Erika on a day when the fog is very thick. I pull down more sien from the Sister World, and magic stops working for about a day because I must claim the entire world's supply of ether. Charlatans at the universities have been instructed to tell people that this is a natural phenomenon. However, this task is absolutely critical, and I cannot suffer the risk that somebody from the surface will invent a flying machine, which will be available to a witch who somehow manages to puzzle out the methods that we use to get our sien. That might put the world at risk.

"And so, Fiona expends some of her effort on making sure that the people on the surface do not have access to flying machines. And she generally does a very good job in an efficient way."

"Why don't you have the oculomancers just ask people if they are trying to make flying machines?" Kiera asked.

"We tried that, it had the opposite effect. Every teenage boy in the world wanted to invent the flying machine."

"I can see that," Kiera said.

"Diana left out an important detail when she told you about Renna's plan. Renna saved Diana from being turned into a thrall, and likely does not want you to think badly of her. My father wanted to use Diana's submarines as a sort of deterrent. If he was ever killed, the submarines were to surface and use the Aden Clan techniques to kill all of humanity. Renna intercepted Diana, and Diana was certain that she was going to die. However, Renna instead warned Diana of my father's plan, and encouraged her to mutiny, which she did. Then she vanished beneath the waves for the rest of the war.

"What Diana failed to tell you is that Renna intended to keep a bank of male genetic material in a safe location, and then exterminate the entire male population. Male fetuses would be aborted, and humanity would continue as an all-female race, under the absolute control of Renna after she returned from the Ven with her new powers. I think that both my father and Renna made the same mistake. We cannot solve the central problem that Ven presents us with through killing off half the population or by turning everyone into a thrall. I rejected both of these answers.

"And thus I have my own answer. Kiera?"

"Yes, Annatiki?"

"I will accept your offer. I want to be your friend as well." Annatiki said. Kiera squealed.

"Yes yes!" She said. "And I think I understand what your answer is. You want to create a society where people who are stronger than you, can still be trusted to follow your command. That you can subjugate even those who stand above you in strength, not through force but through trust and respect. And, if something goes wrong, you have a backup plan."

"And the cost is very small," Annatiki said. "The only downside is that sometimes young men look to the sky and dream of flying, only to have those dreams crushed."