I only looked on as, empowered by the Blessings of Queen Diana, Leviathan Emperor took on four Sea Emperors at once. He succeeded at devouring the Krakenoid Empress who was coordinating and commanding the overall effort, something He had been longing to do for countless millennia. Her Tribal subordinates and those the Krakenoid Empress was commanding Psychically outright died when the feedback of her death, thoughtfully amplified by Leviathan, swept through them all, and so the backbone of the invading Aquatics was broken.
Queen Diana and her Family also proved the power and worth of the Royal House of England with their use of the Blessing Magic and ability to use Psychic Magic and Water Magic to attack in harmony with the Whales and coordinate all their efforts. Time and time again, Whales enhanced by Blessings had broken through opponents that thought they knew the power of their foes. The shattering power was seen and acknowledged by the Tribes of the Whales and by Leviathan Emperor, saving the lives of many of the pods doing battle here, and the power of the Human mages to weaken the powerful Aquatics before combat was also noted and acknowledged.
Leviathan’s new Vassals were off to a very good start displaying their worth in combat. It would remain to see if they could do so in the peace, but that was not my concern.
I Brought Down the Moon and Stars for an entire day, Healing Whales and Humans alike wounded in the conflict, doling out many silver and golden scars to display. There were certainly deaths, and the number of them was not small, most of them devoured or torn apart by swarms of Aquatics in overwhelming numbers, but those hordes usually quickly became meals themselves, swallowed and compressed to tiny masses for the endlessly hungry Whales to enjoy.
In the end, the assault on the islands of Great Britain was completely broken, which also meant the assault on the nearer shores of Europe was shattered.
Tellingly, Queen Diana decided that a show of Human solidarity was also a useful thing to show their new Emperor, and promptly came to the relief of the nations on the continent that the Aquatics were still harassing. Stung by the show, the hugely embarrassed Dutch and French also joined in the attacks, and in a rapid series of battles over the next few weeks, the attacking Aquatics were routed from the littoral zones across Europe.
But I was doing other things by then, so those events played out without me.
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“Your Imperial Majesty could certainly claim the entire North Sea and Arctic Sea, with the great approval of the surrounding Tribes and Rulers of the Land, this one is certain. It is not the territory of the Deep Oceans. May this one understand why Your Majesty is not doing so?”
The Whalesong thrummed around me while The Moon and Stars danced in the sky. For miles around me, Whales the size of warships lounged on the waters, occasionally venting hundreds of feet into the air, and thousands of soldiers of English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry sprawled on their broad backs and basked in The Light coming down.
“WHALES NEED TO FEED,” Leviathan murmured back for my benefit. I indicated my lack of understanding of His point calmly, and He sent a wave of Psychic information over for me to digest.
Most Humans, even Sages, would have collapsed bleeding out their orifices at the information download. I found it marvelously detailed and incredibly aware, a true pleasure to behold and sift through.
I was also sure Leviathan Emperor was testing me just a little bit, and my ability to digest everything He sent me raised me another notch in His eye.
Huh. Whales were the most important ecological lynchpin against explosive boom and bust cycles in the oceans?
The fecundity of the lower forms of life in the seas was not to be underestimated. Krill and plankton could multiply explosively in the presence of enough Water Mana, and their numbers basically supplied the spiritual energies devoured ceaselessly by the spiritual Fish in the seas, who in turn were preyed upon by all the other Species.
The problem was the territorial wars that happened in the deeps, which slaughtered uncounted millions of the Aquatics every year in self-destructive battles over areas defined by currents and flows of Water Mana, which changed all the time.
You didn’t hold the sea floor in the oceans, you held the Waters.
When the top of the food pyramid’s voracious appetites died off, the lower rungs swelled, sucking the Mana out of the oceans, prompting massive surges of population as the predators rapidly bred on the excess food, their own numbers exploding in turn, until they out-ate the existing food supply, and starving for more, went hunting.
The biggest sign of this happening was the Red Tides, where specific blooms of plankton went uneaten long enough to devour all the Mana in the waters and then perished, turning massive areas of the oceans into deserts of spiritual life, driving the Aquatics to kill one another over fertile grounds... or driving them onto the land, as the broken cycle attempted to correct itself.
The biggest force keeping control of this was the Whales, who monitored the populations of both the lowest order of food and the highest, and impartially moved in to kill and eat them to restore the ecosystem to something workable.
A single pod of the baleen Whales could easily devour several times their own mass in krill and plankton without any difficulty. Their exuded waste could restore barren sections of the oceans with remarkable speed. Carnivorous Whales could sweep through and devour armies of starving Aquatics, removing the threat of destabilization and restoring a status quo.
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This was also one of the driving forces behind the Littoral Zones active around the world as Humans began to overreach. As Humans grew more powerful, the Aquatics started expending their excess populations against the Land instead of one another, and the Humans were forced to do what the Whales normally did, controlling the numbers of Aquatics, whose teeming populations still madly out-numbered all Beasts on the land combined, Humans included.
It was for this reason that the Whales took no territories of their own and migrated constantly. They followed the food sources that were blooming and waning as the seasons and currents changed, going where they were needed and doing what they needed to do. Whales not doing what they needed led to massive wars in the deeps that would spill over onto the land, nothing of the like having occurred on a global scale since the last Great Flood.
I wanted to say that the Whales operated like Sharks, but the observations of Leviathan made it plain that Sharks only added to the problem. They were eating machines of the highest order, and there was no overarching plan to what they did. They could and would eat out entire areas of weaker Species if they could, and then turn on one another if the food was scarce enough. They could come together in predatory packs that would utterly ravage whole swaths of the ocean, and then shatter and hunt by themselves, just feeding and feeding more, always seeking to grow and become stronger.
There were a lot of Sharks, and their Rulers were powerful. The Whales were basically the only Tribe that preyed on them regularly; for the other Tribes, it was a case of their Commanders killing Shark Warriors and the like. The Sharks had few competitors at their own levels.
The political and ecological scene in the oceans was complex, savage, and terrifying in its scope and brutality. While it didn’t move and evolve as fast as, say, Human society did (I dumped a lot of political stuff back on Leviathan Emperor for His casual perusal, which deepened His understanding of Humanity’s erratic nature as a Tribe), it was always constantly changing in response to the currents and Water Mana flows, and it was generally resolved by violence. Willing reproductive control was just not something the Tribes bothered with, happily eating one another just so they could have more children in a continual cycle of survival of the fittest.
In the end, the Sea Emperors and wiser Rulers knew what the Whales were doing, and even if they resented them mightily for doing it, they didn’t gang up to kill the Whales and make the situation worse. The time before Leviathan rose up and started doing His ‘policing’ were indeed some incredibly savage times both within the seas and with the Land, with regular Aquatic surges onto the shores to kill and maim until there was nothing left to be slaughtered.
It was why The Sea Emperor didn’t hunt down Leviathan and destroy Him, among other things. The Whales never claimed a territory, enough of their numbers died fighting powerful things of the Deep to control their own population, and they could control the populations of the oceans as those Tribes’ Rulers and Emperors did not bother to.
Claiming a ‘small’ Demesne under the Arctic ice, which had no true Tribes doing more than wandering through, wasn’t going to change anything in the seas proper, especially since the White Death Wolf technically had Dominion there, too. Likewise, an Island Tribe of Humans bowing to Leviathan was totally in the proper order of things, and wouldn’t create a stir.
Claiming the North Sea, which had numbers of Titans, Krakens, and Finmen there? That would immediately create a true war. To keep that territory, the Whales would have to give up their migrations and control of all the species, instead ‘herding’ and farming the Fish populations of the North Sea, becoming a part of the population wave problem, instead of the solution to it.
No, it was better to just eat and run, as it were, chomping down on what needed to be chomped, then swimming off to the next meal.
The Whales were disciplined enough to control their appetites and their population to go with it, so they never overbred and became a huge existential threat that had to be eliminated. That didn’t mean the Sea Dragons weren’t watching them carefully all the time, but the Whales basically did the job the Sea Dragons themselves were supposed to be doing, without direction or instruction, leaving the Dragons to laze about and do whatever they wanted down in the Deeps.
The Whales never challenged them, and were happy to eat those things that might grow up to challenge both the Dragons and the Whales. The status quo was just fine for The Sea Emperor and His Court.
For the Tribes of Krakenoids, Mertaurs, Sharks, Finmen, and others who wanted to dominate all other Aquatic races and hugely resented the power of the Whales, not so much.
“Leviathan Emperor,” I said carefully, after surveying much of what He’d dumped to me. “This one thinks Your Imperial Majesty should share this with the True Emperors on the Land. Your Majesty may think it does not concern them, but when failures bring the Tribes of the Deep onto the shores, it most certainly does.
“This one thinks that they might be quite supportive of Leviathan Emperor and His deeds, and this one thinks that even Your Majesty cannot have too many friends who understand them and appreciate them. Also...” and my voice dipped lower, “with the Blessings of Island Queen Diana and her people, the power of Your Majesty and your Tribe is going to rise appreciably. The doubling of Your Majesty’s power over Water will not go unnoticed...”
He could have chosen any Element of His four, but He had chosen Water, which was needed to put Him in a position where He could stand off against The Sea Emperor. Queen Diana had quietly promised to make the power of Blessing Magic available to all the Rulers and Emperors of the Whales, a Boon of magic that no other Tribe in the Seas could claim, doing what might take thousands of years of understanding and Meditation otherwise.
The Archmage-level Permanent Blessing of the Moon could enhance one Element of a being up to +150%, stacking with all other such bonuses, dependent on their own ability to retain the Blessing. The Sage-level Blessing of the Stars enhanced all other non-Dark Elements by 50%, as well!
The Whales were finding out, as had so many other Tribes, just how powerful working with Humans could be! This was especially true as very, very few Beasts (notably Unicorns and Phoenixes) had Blessing Magic, and it could only work on a narrow range of Elements for them if they were to bestow it on other creatures, while Humans were not so restricted!
His Song thrummed through my bones, and I listened calmly as He asked and explained and proposed and related, all in a flowing style unique to the Whales, which surprisingly took a lot less time than it could have, at His will.
“Yes, this one can do that for a second Element with Your Majesty,” I confirmed. That spell was called the Blessing of the Sun. “This one has not done so with the other Emperors this one knows because, like you, that will immediately raise them to the power of the High Emperors in their Elements, and there might be... consequences for doing so. If this is to be done, and to endure the certain response from The Ice and Sea Emperors, the True Emperors must stand together against the High Emperors, or they will not survive.”
Leviathan Emperor rolled that over in His thoughts, and Sang back to me.
He would speak with the True Emperors of the Land about this...