Caeden didn’t waste a moment. Hesitation would only benefit the Titan. Caeden had no idea how long it would take for the monster to reconstitute from the damage Damon had dealt with his literal dying breath, but he wasn’t about to risk anything on a bad guess. He was also under no illusion that it was permanently dead. Although Caeden was fairly sure that Damon’s blow had killed the Titan, it was still the spawn of a modified Heartstone. It would be back.
And that meant he had limited time to deal with the dimensional hole before he was faced once more with an enemy that he wasn’t truly confident he could kill. After all, he was certain that the wind that tore it apart would have done exactly the same to him. He’d felt it’s passing, he was more aware than anyone except the Titan as to what that horrifying gale could do.
With that in mind, he flexed his new shroud harder than he’d ever done before. If he’d been back at the far-lung continent where this had all started, doing this would have ripped the dimensional wall wide open and dumped into nowhere, and he wasn’t nearly as resilient as the Heartstone. It would have been the end of him. But now he was closer to the Pillar than most shrouded would ever go in their whole lives. The dimensional wall was robust enough to put up with a little abuse.
In between one blink and the next, his body shifted to match his arm, fully covered in Cosmic Smith aspect. His Soul Anchor shifted as well, changing for the first time into something other than a sword. Ki and Domain power surged through it, forming into a Hammer. It was plain, but the power flowing through it was enough to cause ripples of spatial disruption to radiate off of it like those from a rock tossed into a still pond.
The Hammer of Beginnings and Ends swung out once, it’s physical form nowhere near the dimensional hole, but the blow reached it regardless. Something as simple as distance was no barrier to the potent Shroud aspect. Even covered in the Cosmic Smith aspect as he was, Caeden still barely managed to swing it with both hands and put his entire body behind the blow. It was not something that was meant to be used outside of his Shroud’s Domain.
Still, he managed it, and the effects were nothing to scoff at. Despite the nature of the dimensional hole, it reacted as if it was a normal ball, rather than a gap in the fabric of the universe. It shot off towards the Pillar at speeds even greater than what Damon had managed while carrying it in Wraithstone.
Caeden would have done this to get the dimensional hole if Damon hadn’t offered to carry it, but he hadn’t been sure he could make it. And this one swing was enough to prove to himself that it never would have worked. His entire existence felt sore from that one swing. His body outside his Shroud’s Domain simply wasn’t capable of handling the strain of using the Hammer of Beginnings and Ends. He wouldn’t have even made it a tenth of the distance Damon covered before his body shattered like glass.
As it was, Damon’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain. That single blow was enough to fling the hole across the intervening distance toward the Pillar. The hammerblow redefined the way time and space interacted with the hole for a scant few moments before the effect was consumed, and that got it halfway to the goal. Despite his sore soul, Caeden could manage another swing.
“Oh come ON!” Caeden yelled into the uncaring air as a fist once again emerged from the hole scant moments after the last Titan had been destroyed. It seemed that he wasn’t going to get another swing. At least, not on the hole itself. Despite his complaints, he readied his hammer once again.
“Enough of that.” A voice Caeden didn’t know spoke next to him. Shocked, he looked over to see an incredibly old man, festooned in white hair, wrinkled, and bony limbs. He was standing in the air. And Caeden, in spite of all his advantages, hadn’t felt him.
Caeden had never seen a shrouded so old, and there wasn’t a single doubt in his mind that he’d never met one more powerful. Yet he let off not even a single wave of Ki. It was like he was next to an unshrouded man, perhaps eighty years old. Caeden would be surprised if this man had lived anything less than 100,000 years.
The old man was looking at the spot Damon used to occupy before he faded away. “It seems the student had passed before the teacher. A travesty.” His gaze swiveled to take in Caeden, and the Hearthhome off in the distance behind him. “At least it seems he followed my final advice quite well. Is that his granddaughter on that vessel?”
“Yes sir.” Somehow, Caeden didn’t even think about lying. More than that, any worries he had about the Titan felt insignificant. “She’s a friend of mine. Damon knew what he was doing. That thing needs to reach the Pillar, or the Starry Sea won’t survive it.”
“Oh, I’m well aware of what it’s doing to our universe, my boy. I felt it as it passed over my abode. A nasty, vile force is contained within it. Are you sure the Pillar will be able to end it?” He peered at Caeden with a piercing intensity.
Caeden smiled grimly. “It’s not like I didn’t think this through. If it’s in the Pillar, I can deal with it. I guarantee it. Just…Things might be a little different than they were. We’re beyond the point of maintaining the universe in its current state. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, that’s alright. We have quite enough problems with the status quo as it is. I hardly think a bright young man like yourself could stand to make it much worse than it is.” The old man waved off his concerns. “Alright, lad. I’ll take care of this annoyance so that you can get back to dealing with the real problem. As the teacher of your teacher, I can hardly leave you to handle this on your own.”
He extended a hand, within which a paintbrush appeared. “I’ve been refining my technique these past few millennia. I think Damon would have been rather impressed.”
A flick of his brush, and Caeden felt the ambient Ki bend around the head, where it thickened into a paint-like liquid form. A few sweeps caused brilliant constructs of shroud to surround the Titan, seizing it in bands of burning light and power. Even the golden flames that had so easily eaten at Caeden’s shrouds were smothered. It truly brought home how important age was for a shrouded. Despite all his advantages, in raw power and potency, Caeden couldn’t hold a candle to Damon or his teacher.
A swirl of the brush sent a column of searing light straight into the Titan’s chest, throwing it back into the hole. It wasn’t consumed, interacting with the gap in reality just as the Hammer of Beginnings and Ends had. It was obvious that the result was intentional. Damon’s teacher must have realized that his shroud would be eaten by the force of the dimensional hole just like anything else, so he’d used the Titan as a buffer to move it.
However, it wasn’t enough to get the hole into the Pillar. And it wasn’t for a lack of power on the teacher’s end. Rather, the hole was stopped in place as another fist pushed its way out, revealing a second Titan, identical to the first.
“Ok, that’s completely outside my expectations.” Caeden sighed. “And I had some pretty outlandish expectations.”
“Hmm.” The teacher frowned. “I’ll clear them away. You get that abomination into the Pillar and deal with it.”
“That works.” It wasn’t like Caeden had a better plan.
So, they got to it. A few swipes of the brush threw the two Titans away from the hole, along with the third one that followed them before Caeden could slip through space and pop up next to the hole. When he did, he was already swinging the Hammer of Beginnings and Ends as he appeared, not wasting a moment.
That hit was more than enough, and the hole finally slammed into the Pillar, disappearing into the endless flow of light. Of course, that wasn’t enough to solve their problems. At this point, Caeden had figured as much. Rather, it seemed to just make everything worse. Dozens of Titans popped out of the Pillar all over the place, which filled the whole of the horizon with how close Caeden was. The scale of the Pillar was overwhelming this close, and he wished he had more time to appreciate how physically massive it was.
“I hope you truly have a plan, because even I will not be able to handle an infinite number of these things.” Caeden wasn’t even surprised to find Damon’s teacher next to him, despite not having felt the man move.
Instead of responding, Caeden cracked his knuckles. “Keep them off of me, I don’t know how long this will take, but things are probably going to get worse before they get better.”
The teacher snorted. “Quite cheeky, aren’t you? Very well, young shrouded.” He turned toward the rapidly growing army of Titan’s. “My name is Warick, by the way. I was once known as the Dread Salvation. Carry my memory, Caeden. With Damon gone, there is no one left to know my name. At least, no one that I would wish to speak it.”
Caeden chuckled grimley at that. “Sure thing, I’ll name a planet after you or something.”
“What?”
Caeden placed his hand on the Pillar. I really hope Erik and Asherta didn’t slack off. This would be really awkward if they did. It was an uncharitable thought that Caeden couldn’t help as he shifted his Soul Anchor to an ethertech construct designed to tap into and interact with a specific, universe-wide Ki frequency. One that hadn’t been present a week ago, but now covered the entire Starry Sea.
Instantly, his awareness spread, connected through his Soul Anchor to every Central Management System across the entire universe, all of them linking back to the Pillar beneath his hand. “Well, step one is a go. Here’s hoping this next part doesn’t kill me.”
Caeden activated his new shroud fully for the first time.
A wave of Domain power exploded outward from his hand, digging into the Pillar and then flowing backward to every CMS before spreading out and covering continents and islands across the breadth of the Starry Sea. It also started following the Pillar back to its original source somewhere outside their universe, but that distance was so far and so fraught with energies Caeden couldn’t even conceptualize that he had no idea how long it would take to reach. He really wasn’t even sure if he wanted it to.
Rather than the distant origins of the Pillar, Caeden was more concerned with the connection he now had to the entire Starry Sea universe. Immediately, he reached into the Pillar and tried to intensify the dimensional wall through it. Considering one of its main abilities was maintaining the quarantine around the Starry Sea, it should have been easy.
His attempt bounced off another will that was completely locked around the parts of the Pillar’s makeup that governed the dimensional wall. Caeden had already realized that the modified Heartstone had changed far more than he’d guessed, but that it even had a will and awareness enough to interfere with the Pillar through the dimensional hole was a further surprise.
“Well,” Caeden sighed, lowering his head. “Plan C, then. I’m sorry.”
He wasn’t even sure who he was apologizing to. It was a meaningless sentiment anyway. Everything that had happened up to this point was bound to happen anyway as the dimensional hole ate at the universe. It just would have been slower and more violent.
Still, Caeden couldn’t shake the regret that he just couldn’t think of another way. If he’d had more power, or maybe more time…But he didn’t.
Reaffirming himself in the necessity of what he was about to do, Caeden took the last step that crossed the line he couldn’t take back. He pulled on his shroud, and dragged the entire Starry Sea with him.
Everything shifted. Perspective became a malleable thing as the entire universe was dragged into the Domain of Caeden’s new shroud. It hovered above the Anvil of Ages, just another material to be worked. He could see through the eyes of the true form of the Cosmic Smith as it watched over the Anvil, Hammer in hand. At the same time, his mortal body remained with his hand pressed against the Pillar. It would have been disorienting if he didn’t already have experience dealing with having multiple bodies.
With a thought, The Cosmic Smith breathed out, and a roar of choatic, primeval fire surged from his mouth, blazing across the Starry Sea as he readied it to be forged anew.
This was the plan that had sprung unbidden into Caeden’s mind the moment he’d tapped into the full potential of his new shroud after he’d realized what the dimensional hole was really doing. He hadn’t realized it, but his shroud was incomplete.. It was called Universal Union, and it was composed of both the Forge and Forged. Drawing from One Body, One Blade, it was a shroud of two pieces. And at the moment, Caeden only had the Forge. He had yet to forge something worthy of being the Forged portion of the shroud.
Even the creation of his new Divine soul hadn’t qualified. The base material, a shrouded mortal soul, simply didn’t have enough potential to reflect the potency of the Forge. But a universe? That was more than enough to fulfill the conditions necessary to truly get the Forge going.
If he was willing to wipe all the life from his home and kill even his friends, he could have ended things here. He could reforge the Starry Sea and destroy the Heartstone in the process. There was no way it would survive. He would ensure it. After all, inside Universal Union’s space he had even more power than within Blade Forge. It would have been easy.
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But he wasn’t a genocidal sociopath, so that meant some extra work would have to be done to get things into an acceptable state. Luckily, Caeden wasn’t alone. Warick was defending his mortal body, but his friends were also there, pulling the Hearthhome up alongside his weaker, smaller body. He hadn’t told them the specifics of how this was going to go, because he hadn’t been exactly sure until the Starry Sea was finally in his Forge. Now, he was going to have to get them up to speed very quickly. They were on a timer.
“Ok, this is going to be disorienting for everyone, but I need you all to adapt as quickly as you can. Ready?” Everyone, bless them, nodded immediately. Without another thought, Caeden pulled on Universal Union and his new soul’s Divine nature. More than that, he flexed the aspect that marked him as a Progenitor Deity, and the founder of his own Pantheon. And then he peeled off portions of both shroud and soul and passed them to his friends.
A smith didn’t always work alone, after all. The most challenging projects needed a range of experts to create a true masterpiece. His friends would slot nicely into the rolls he needed. In the Domain of Universal Union, pieces of the Cosmic Smith, Anvil of Ages, and the Hammer of Beginnings and Ends flaked off before gathering into four distinct groupings.
Swirling kaleidoscopes of energy clashed into each other, bursting into brilliant light that rapidly dimmed to reveal figures just as grand as the Cosmic Smith. Each with their own accompanying tools. Caeden immediately recognized each of his friend’s new forms. Not just because he could feel them as they were now a permanent part of Universal Union, but because each was an obvious representation of their shrouds.
Erik’s new Divine form was composed of two halves, a man split down the middle, but each side with two arms and its own face. One half was swirling darkness that sounded with the clinking of chains. In it’s hands was a series of locks and keys on a ring as large as he was. The other half was closer to a plant in the shape of a man than an actual human, with bark-like skin that had fresh shoots of emerald green breaking through every crack. It’s gnarled wooden hands held onto a porcelain vase that was filled to the very brim with water that smelled of rich loam and fresh growth. Behind him was a web of strings like a halo, thrumming with the power of both sides and drawing the two together.
Cat was a skeleton draped in grey in green cloth that radiated sickly light, including a veil that hid most of her bleached white appearance. She held a wooden ladle in one hand and a small hand sickle in the other. Her shadow was cast even on the darkness of the Domain; but the figure it reflected was not that of a waifish skeleton. Instead, it revealed a massive armored warrior standing guard, an army with brilliant, burning green eyes at his back.
Asherta was massive, her draconic form dwarfing all of the rest of the group put together, including Caeden’s Cosmic Smith form. Her metallic Mithril tail wrapped around them all, placing the Anvil of Ages and the Starry Sea at the center of a protective ring of metal scales. Three ephemeral images hovered along her back, trailing along Asherta’s scaled limbs seemingly at random. They all were identical to her human appearance, one a child, one an adult, and the last visibly aged.
Finally, Lily. Her Divine body had formed across from him on the other side of the Starry Sea. Her body was similar to his own, composed of stars, nebula, and the deep dark in between. But she also had a long main of icy hair and a swirling cloak of multi-hued mist that wrapped around her like a cloak. She cradled a small bear cub seemingly made of snow, while a bird with shooting stars streaking it’s pitch-black feathers was settled on her shoulder.
Caeden wanted to take a moment to be impressed with their new godly forms, but there wasn’t time. “Ash, I need you to start making a hoard. Pull from the edges of the Starry Sea for the material. Erik, Lil, we need to stabilize the basic principle of the universe before we can start dealing with the heartstone. Cat, I need you to start saving souls.”
Despite how disoriented them probably were, everyone hopped in. Caeden had a sense for everyone’s capabilities, since they were now not just in his Domain, but a part of it. Asserta’s sprite-like trio swooped in, pulling off scant edges of the Starry Sea that was now warmed and malleable from Caeden’s Cosmic Smith breath. The trio brought the pieces of universal space back to her Divine dragon body, which swallowed them up. Caeden could see the glow of brilliant blue flames leaking through her teeth as she breathed godly dragon’s breath on them.
Meanwhile, Snowball and Sky’s avatars dispersed, swirling together into a stylus and pair of glasses made of ice and starlight for Lily. She started poking at the Starry Sea, drawing symbols Caeden didn’t understand into the universe’s firmament. Erik was right next to her, pulling locks off his wheel and hooking them into specific spots before locking them closed. In other places, he used keys to remove locks.
Cat was standing off to the side, her ladle outstretched. Streaks of light constantly flew from the Starry Sea and settled within, yet somehow never managed to fill the wooden implement. Caeden watched it all. He couldn’t see the same things that his friends saw, each of them experiencing the Starry Sea in a different way. But his position as the Cosmic Smith allowed him a deep insight into anything that rested on his Anvil. Occasionally, he let out a small huff, cosmic flame caressing the universe just before Lily drew a symbol, or Erik placed a lock.
It took an almost impossibly short time to reach the next stage. The inherent knowledge that came with being a god was both comfortably familiar and deeply overwhelming. Caeden felt like he’d been doing this from the moment he was born, perfectly understanding every step, even if he’d never done anything like this before. It was obvious from how everyone else was moving that they were having a similar experience.
“It’s almost time. We’re just waiting for…” Caeden trailed off, as his words seemed to have summoned the very thing he’d expected. In the Starry Sea, near the edge of the battle Warick waged against the Titans, a portal od swirling light formed. Out of it stepped the Founder. Immediately, he reached out with his shroud, trying to connect to the Titans, even the Heartstone within the Pillar.
“A coward to the end.” Caeden licked his tongue. The Founder waited until he was certain everyone was fully occupied before he moved. Everyone’s mortal bodies were hovering, comatose, in front of the Pillar. If Caeden didn’t have the experience he did with using two bodies at once, he would have been just as helpless to stop the Founder as everyone. With Warick too occupied with ever-growing number of Titans, the Founder was seemingly free to fulfill whatever scheme he’d come up with to run away from the Starry Sea again.
So he must have been incredibly surprised when a metal-covered fist shoved through his chest.
“This is for lying to me.” Travis growled, ripping out the Founder’s heart. Caeden had told him to be on the lookout, and he’d been ready.
“Cat, I need that soul. Separate it out from the rest, please.” Caeden smiled, watching the Founder’s comuppance. “It’s time everyone, this is where it gets real.”
Finally ready, Caeden let out a massive roar, thick bands of raging light blazing across the Starry Sea and causing the Anvil of Ages to vibrate in sympathy. Then, he brought the Hammer of Beginnings and Ends down in a blow strong enough to shake the universe to its foundations. The Starry Sea cracked like an egg.
In perfect sync, Cat reached out with her hand sickle, swiping it across the whole of the Starry Sea. Streams formed from countless individual lights streamed toward the ladle, settling into it as she reaped the souls of everyone in the Starry Sea, including the Bladeborne. Finally, as the stream of souls finished pouring off the Starry Sea, Cat’s ladle reached its capacity, filled to the brim with an iridescent glow.
“Ash, we need that hoard.” Caeden called out before returning his full focus to the Starry Sea itself. He didn’t have a single thought to spare on anything else, as the true work was just starting. The universe had cracked into pieces from Caeden’s hammerblow, but Erik and Lily’s efforts had caused those breaks to form along specific paths. Instead of a busted up and irredeemable mess, the Starry Sea had broken into neat sets of workable material.
The only thing unaffected by the breaking was the Pillar itself, being made from something truly beyond Caeden’s understanding. That made the next step difficult, only possible because the rest of the universe was essentially unbound. Erik and Lily, moving in concert with Caeden’s intent, laid out a set of locks and symbols around the Pillar, holding it still and suppressing the constant roaring power that flowed into it from whatever distant source had spawned it.
Caeden eyed the process carefully, waiting for his moment. He knew he wouldn’t have long. Finally, it happened. The Pillar dimmed to about half its normal radiance. The dip last for a scant moment, but Caeden was ready. His hand, made of stars and swirling galaxies, snatched out at incomprehensible speeds, passing in and out of the Pillar in a fraction of a second.
Even then, his starry flesh was scarred and warped from the forces inside the Pillar, causing fissures the size of nebulae to form that vented golden Divine Ichor into the Domain space. The damage was slow to heal, the wounds tainted by power eclipsing Caeden’s own, even within his Domain.
Despite the injury, Caeden smiled. Clutched within his warped and broken hand was a small gap, an absence in dimensional space. Even now, it was trying to consume his flesh. But the forces it contained were far lesser than him here, so its efforts were futile.
Carefully, Caeden observed the dimensional hole. “Whew. Ok, we got lucky. It worked out even better than I’d hoped, even if we are in the second-most worst-case scenario.” The edges of the hole bulged out dramatically, almost collapsing back in on themselves. Caeden had hoped that the PIllar would be able to stabilize and close the hole, but failing that, he’d been hoping for this. That the hole would eat pieces of the Pillar, consuming power that it wasn’t qualified to possess, and essentially get the dimensional equivalent of indigestion.
That left a gap he could exploit. The Hammer of Beginnings and Ends shrunk down within his grasp to the size of a jeweler's hammer. With three careful blows, Caeden exploited the nearly-ruptured edges of the dimensional hole, causing it to burst open, spewing out everything it’d swallowed, along with Caeden’s actual goal.
“Hello there, you little troublemaker.” Caeden wrapped his fingers around the utterly transformed Heartstone. It was the last piece he needed to complete his plan. But it was also problematic. The rock, roughly the size of his Cosmic Smith form’s thumbnail, was still spewing out all that oily, corruptive energy. And that wasn’t what he needed.
So he, Erik, and Lily got to work. More effort and time was put into the Heartstone than they’d spent on prepping the Starry Sea, but it was a much more delicate task. Once they’d triple-checked their work, Caeden’s hammer fell again. The very concepts of the Heartstone were split cleanly in two. One half contained the oily energy and the ability to create Titans, and the other held its consumptive power and the burning, golden force that the newly spawned Titan’s had shown that was so reminiscent of the Pillar.
“Less than one percent crossover.” Caeden sighed, impressed with the outcome. Only tiny, infinitesimal sparks of the split concepts remained in the other halves. Caeden’s main concern was the corrosive force remaining with the consumption power, which held minimal overlap.
Taking the Corrupt Titan half, with its tiny sparks of Consuming Sun, Caeden rolled it between his fingers, compressing it down and down, until it was the size of a pebble. A normal pebble, barely an inch across. Its power was suppressed by both Erik and Lily, until the iridescent sheen faded to a purplish-grey. Caeden couldn’t destroy the thing, not at the moment. It contained too many concepts he had no understanding of. But he could lock it away for the next hundred million years until all its power bled out piece by piece, and it turned into a normal rock.
With that, the worst threat to the budding new universe he was trying to build was dealt with, and he’d even gotten a useful material from it. The Consuming Sun half of the Heartstone was immediately introduced back into the remains of the Starry Sea. It formed the very center of the massive formation they started to incorporate pieces of the Starry Sea, forming the basis of the new universe.
It was slow, tedious work. Time flowed wholly differently within Universal Union, especially during the crafting process. Caeden became lost in the work, pouring every ounce of his concentration into making the very best universe he could possibly imagine. Step by step, it took shape.
The Heartstone formed a core, fulfilling a similar function to the Pillar. It had been tuned through Erik and Lily’s efforts, consuming instability of all kinds and producing energy that flooded out into the rest of the universe. It was a star of incomparable size and power, extending its light across time and space in impossible ways. They’d needed to tinker with fundamental physics to get it to work.
The laws of the universe were far different from those of the Starry Sea. Ki did not rule here, and shrouds were no longer something inherent to the population. Caeden had seen the failures of having people simply born with more power than others. Rather, they would have to be earned. Caeden had to peel apart the Founder’s soul to get at his shroud to get that aspect of the new universe to work. Fate was a powerful concept, especially when it came to determining who could be trusted with the immense power of a shroud.
But there were still many types of power raging through this new universe. It was perhaps even more chaotic and wild than the Starry Sea had been. The mortals would need abilities of their own to combat the environment until they earned shrouds. Everyone worked together to come up with different ideas, and they managed to come up with a few things that worked well enough.
Finally, they were ready to set it in motion. The laws of the universe were set, and Caeden had left some wiggle room for them to make changes without having to split the whole thing up like he’d had to do with the Starry Sea. He took a deep breath, looking down at their creation. It was a little rough, but he was proud of what they’d accomplished.
“Ok, here goes.” He exhaled, breathing out a portion of his own soul and power into their universe. “Let there be Form and Function. Division and Unity.”
Lily spoke up after him, power pouring from her stylus. “Let there be Heat and Cold. Stars and Skies. The Dark In Between.”
Cat was next. The order was important if this was going to work. “Let there be Souls, Death, and Bones.”
Asherta followed. “Let there be Fire. Let there be monsters. And Let There Be Dragons.”
Erik finished. Power was swirling within the heart of the unborn universe, just waiting for a spark to start it. “Let there be Light. Let there be Bonds. Finally, Let There Be LIFE.”
Then he poured out the entire contents of his pitcher. The baby universe absorbed all the life-infused Divine Water without leaving a drop.
The former Heartstone, now the Star Anchor, sparked. Power and force and light and everything poured from its center. Waves of brilliant creation flowed from it and into the connected dragon hoard. Asherta’s magnum opus, the Vault of Stars, surged. From within, souls surged out, filling the rapidly, explosively expanding universe. Gasses swirled, stars were born and died. Billions of years passed.
Life was born.
“We did it.” Caeden sighed. “They should all be reborn shortly. With their memories intact.”
“I don’t know how the shrouded will deal with being on the same level as everyone else.” Lily said, not for the first time. There had been a lot of discussion about the way they were doing things as the universe was forged.
“They’ll deal with it.” Asherta stated bluntly. “The monsters will not let them grow lazy. No more safe islands to hid on and leave the fighting and dying to others. They will have to earn their safety.”
Caeden grunted. He was of a similar mind to Asherta. “They’ll be fine. We didn’t leave them without defenses. Just, not shroud-level power. I don’t know what Kendr was thinking when he set up the Starry Sea.”
“To be fair, he didn’t know how to implant shrouds into adults. The Founder was the one to figure that out. We just stole his research. And his shroud. Not that he didn’t deserve it, the dick.” Cat snorted.
“Well, you guys want to see what’s going on in the Anchorverse?” Erik looked eargly down at a particular landmass that was already teeming with life, much farther along than anywhere else in their young universe.
“Ugh, I don’t like that name,” Caeden groaned. “It sounds tacky.”
“Well, you got outvoted. Lobby harder the next time we make a universe.” Erik snarked.
“Yeah, yeah. Will do.” Caeden rolled his eyes. A flex of Universal Union created five mortal bodies for them to explore in. “Let’s take a look.”
The five friends, newly minted gods and part of their own young Pantheon, stepped into their universe together, ready to explore.