Truth hadn’t even made it to the other end of the village before he was forced to confront an inconvenient truth- Snakes generally don’t travel at high speeds while clinging on to other animals. Perks was doing his best, bless him, but he literally wasn’t built for this.

Truth briefly wondered if it would be safe to put a living organism in his spatial ring. He couldn’t remember what Sally had said about it, but he was going to guess… no. Had he even asked? Ehhh…

“Alright Perks, we gotta figure this out.” Truth slowed a stroll, a bare dozen kilometers an hour. “Now, even though I love the image of appearing out of the thin air, snake wrapped around my arm as I do terrifying things, there are practical problems. Like, how do I keep you alive as I, for example, punch through a cement wall and rip the person on the other side through the hole?”

Perks didn’t nod, but Truth wasn’t really expecting him to. The snake wasn’t spiritual or anything. Very ordinary snake, if well outside its comfort zone.

“Also, as mythic as that sounds, it does drop us straight back into ‘Paint the bedroom black, ‘Call Me The Dark Dragon Of Eternal Doom-Hell, The Demon God-Emperor-Supreme Of Night Shadow Assassins' territory. Not a great look. Not the place I am trying to move to as a rat and a mage.”

Hmm. A rat snake that didn’t stir at the mention of rats. Could you… train a snake to respond to verbal commands? He had no idea. Probably not, but who knows?

“I swear, the problems you run into in this job. Well, I guess it’s not a job, really. Vocation?” Truth vaguely remembered some quarter-wit saying that if you do what you love, you would never work a day in your life. Spoken like someone who never did what they loved, he thought.

“So, again, what do we do with you?”

“If I may, Master?” Thrush hopped out of his token and perched on Truth’s shoulder. Truth nodded at him. “Simply tuck in your shirt and cinch your belt. He will settle down there well enough, and it won't slow you. It might feel a little strange to begin with, but the animal is incapable of piercing your skin even if it spent a lifetime gnawing on you.”

“Huh. Well. Let’s give it a try at least.” He did. It did, in fact, feel very strange. Still, Perks was warm enough, and pretty still. Good enough.

“Hey Thrush, can animals turn into demons?”

“Oh yes. I assume you mean the sort of demons that exist on this world, rather than the infernal sort?” Truth nodded. “Yes, quite common, or it was.”

“Not enough magic?”

“Magus is wise.”

Truth just waited. And waited. Eventually Thrush coughed,

“There are some other factors.”

“No. I-am-so-very-surprised.” Truth’s voice was utterly flat.

“It is not easy to describe, and “not enough magic” really is the core of it. Not enough meaning is the other part. Jeongo breaks down when you try to talk about concepts so divorced from ordinary human experience.”

Truth shrugged. Was there a human language that didn't break down when discussing the divine?

“Demons usually arise in a place of some sort of significance. A special tree or a rock or some other natural phenomena. They may be spirits of the rock or tree, or they may be animals that simply inhabit the area. It takes an immensely long time for the animals to absorb some of the meaning of the place, and most don’t live long enough for the magic to transform them. You need both.”

This was tickling something in the back of Truth’s mind. “Like how Incisive works, or similar spells. Belief gives it shape, the power comes from the universe, the transformation comes from the spell. But this is the belief of the planet or, infinitely removed, God. The energy is the ambient magic, maybe concentrated by a special place. But what would be the spell?”

“I cannot possibly say. Perhaps the universe itself? No spell is needed for a fire to burn or water to float an apple.” Thrush hopped around on his shoulder, weighing nothing.

Truth picked up his pace. Perks seemed perfectly comfortable. At least, he wasn’t shifting around or anything.

“So it would be possible to manufacture demons?”

“Hypothetically. Actually, I’m certain that it has been done. In Siphios, if nowhere else. It’s just that, why bother?” Condescension dripped from the tiny bird. “Stupid, weak, painfully limited creatures, barely sapient, still painfully mortal without immense good fortune. The maggot’s not worth the peck.”

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Truth snorted at that, then picked up the pace. It was a long way still to Gamphe. He was curious to see if he read the future of the war correctly. Besides, as a diligent employee, he was looking forward to his performance review from Starbrite.

Truth’s bare feet slapped into the road, driving him forward. Quite content knowing that his sealed body was keeping anything, cosmic energy very much included, from leaking out. Forgetting that between his blessings, Incisive, the Meditations and the impact he was having on the world, he was very much a locus of “meaning.”

____________________________________________________________________________

The roads were eerily empty. On the Onis side of the border, traffic was sparse, but present. On the Jeon side? Nothing. The tiny villages he passed seemed split between huddling in place and utterly empty. In a few others, there were only corpses. Needle rounds. Apparently the locals didn’t feel like listening to orders, and the soldiers didn’t have time for keeping peace.

Maybe they had wanted to evacuate but were told to stay put. Truth wondered how many internal security agents mysteriously woke up in Hell the last few days, shortly before their charges vanished to hide out in the mines or hidden mountain valleys. More than a few, for sure. A wonderful time for settling scores, in the moment between the outbreak of war and the arrival of soldiers.

He was right about how Jeon was planning to fight this war too- lots of conscripts digging trenches, commanding demons to construct quick and dirty pillboxes. Lots of mines being laid, roadblocks being set, summoning traps installed. Nothing designed to stop an advance dead, just slow it. Hurt the advance elements badly enough that they would stall while heavier troops moved up.

Hit- fall back past the next line. Hit- fall back. Repeat until you reach a point you can actually hold. Bleed off some of the absurd advantage Onis had in soldiers. Keep hammering them. Cost them in materiel and morale.

Onis knew Jeon was doing it, but what could they do? Call of the invasion? Go around with boats? They might try that. Once. Jeon’s almost sociopathic commitment to underwater curse delivery systems was legendary. Not something Truth ever dealt with himself, but everyone had heard the stories.

Actually, based on what he saw in that army outpost, Onis was downright eager to accommodate Jeon’s strategy there. Why were they so determined to throw troops directly into the meat grinder? Truth wouldn’t randomly accuse people of altruism, but even for military brass that seemed callus to the point of madness. These were the opening moves of a war no one expected to be quickly over and done with. It wasn’t ruthless. It was just stupid.

He mentally shrugged and turned his attention back to Earth Folding Step. There were a lot of details he wanted to be clear on before he tried to use it, and the spell wasn’t remotely user friendly. Just why had their ancestors taken it with them to this world? Was it some kind of ancestral spell for some migrating clan? Or was it like the Meditations of Valentinian? So universally available, why not chuck it in the checked luggage?

Just pinch to points of reality together and step over the gap. Sure. Easy. Why not? The spell manual had been at pains to explain just how much energy was required, and the strain that ‘step’ put on a body. He would have to find a place to stash Perks before he tried it out, or he would have a very exploded snake in his shirt.

Running to Gamphe took most of the day. He hardly noticed, as puzzling through Earth Folding Step was actually pretty interesting. It just didn’t look like anything he had ever seen. Unlike the mountains of northern Jeon. At this point he had seen so many of them, he was quite sick of them.

Gamphe was one of those places that existed, and that was the best you could say for it. A good sized city of several million, it sprawled at the delta of a major river (the imaginatively named Long River, despite being only the fifth longest river in Jeon) and its tributaries. Truth looked it over carefully from a hill outside the city. The enormous fortifications being built around him were barely a distraction.

The city managed to combine many of Truth’s least favorite features in a city. It was both sprawling, to accommodate the wide rivers, and yet so densely built that light was practically forbidden in huge swaths of it. Dense clusters of mass-produced apartment buildings clustered together near factory complexes. There were the occasional parks and stadiums, and he could only admire the depths of invention it took to make them somehow dingier and bleaker than the apartment-hives.

The color palate of the city hardly helped. Even solidly into summer, the city could be described best as Shades of Misery. Gray was such a limited word to express the rich texture of depression on display. There was “Chronic Air Pollution,” “Never been washed,” “The Local Cement Is This Color,” “Paint Costs Money,” and his personal favorite- “Gray Concrete Looks Professional.”

This is not to say the locals were entirely dead to the concept of color. They did put up some blue roofs here and there. Mostly over factories, but sometimes over administrative buildings. Generally it was a very inoffensive shade of blue- dark and rich. Somehow, set in all the gray, it too looked hopeless. Less the blue of royalty and more the blue of arteries desperate for a gasp of oxygen.

Perhaps it was psychological warfare. The soldiers would come over the hills, take one look at it, and march straight back to Onis. It would be hard to argue they could make things worse.

He smiled grimly, then turned and looked at the enormous wards being built behind him. Summoning circles tens of meters in diameter. Earth demons building brutal fortifications, as tens of thousands of talisman mines buried themselves in the earth north of the fortifications. Dozens of batteries of tactical curse launchers were already in place and being calibrated. By the end of the day, there would be more than a hundred. Give it a few days, and it might be closer to five hundred.

Angels hung over the soon-to-be battlefield, holding station like streetlights. Little heads with wings, glowing orbs of light, even the shadows of far mightier beings in the form of balls of eyes with wings jutting out at every angle. Rows of Seraphim stood above the airfield, even their shades concealing their eyes and feet with their wings.

Truth had spent most of his short adult life in or around the Army or mercenaries. Even with that background, he couldn’t imagine what all this cost. The sheer scope of it all was beyond him. Wagons rumbled back and forth from the city below, carrying troops, supplies, ammunition. Constructing the war machine before the cannons were fed their fodder.

That was what he was feeling- he was looking at a vast, hungry machine, built to consume lives. Why it was built, he could only guess. It had been under construction since before he was born. But as the spark that brought the terror to life, he felt some thread of responsibility for how it operated.

This might be the last great mage-war this world would ever see. As the man who pulled the trigger on it, he had a duty to see it play out. While not otherwise engaged.