“That is a matter for the Land, not for me. Nature Spirits can be fussy about granting Pacts to the Powered, because the Powered often regard the Pacts as little more than convenient sources of power, and they play the obligations off against other things, particularly Divine Patrons. That said, the haror are often the favored of the Spirits of Air if their souls are free of demonic influence.

“Just be aware that Windbound are wanderers, and the Landbound, like all Warlocks, roam their lands. Your time here will come to an end if you take a Warlock Pact. Warlocks return to their homes, but they do not live in them.”

His blue eyes were brighter as he looked over the sea and the beached, rusting hulls stuck out there, an energy and enthusiasm lighting up in them that had not been there earlier. “I believe that leaving the children to surpass what I have done is the correct choice, then.”

“I have a question.” I turned my eyes to Matron Osellyi at her words. “You have said that those of my people who throw off the yoke of demonkind are the Favored of the Silver Queen. I confess that I have heard nothing of this being, aside from what you have told me.”

“Oh!” I inclined my head for them to sit down again, and they quickly did so. “While none of the gods are mortal, or even ex-mortal as far as I know, Sylune is believed to be the progenitor of the haror. You are, in effect, her people, her children. It is not that you are throwing off demonium, so much you are returning to She who made you.”

The matron blinked in shock. “Is... is this true?” she had to ask.

“I don’t know. However, Her favor for the haror is indeed true. Furthermore, the haror have magical gifts that other elves never develop, at least in our experience.”

“You call her the Goddess of the Moon and Stars, and Silver Magic.” I nodded calmly. “I... have never seen a moon or stars. These are things of the other... Outer World?” she asked me.

I flicked my head. “Duh! Apologies. A true night sky looks something like this.”

I wove the illusion easily, taking over the entire area around us.

“On the surface world, you are living on the outside of the sphere, instead of inside one.” I held up a chopped-off globe for her to picture. “Thus, the world drops away, and reveals what is open and beyond, instead of what is easily reachable. Suddenly, you realize that the world is a very small place.”

I gestured, and the lands rising in the distance began to fall away, sliding away, until all that was left was the blue sky, the white clouds, and the sullen orb of the molten sun far overhead.

I could tell she was massively disoriented, standing up to stare with wide eyes at the horizon, and the blue that was full of... nothing.

It was like living in tunnels and suddenly no longer having a roof over your head. It had to be borderline terrifying.

“You know what Natural Renewal is, as a spellcaster.” She nodded quickly, still staring at the illusion in stunned rapture. “Natural Renewal is the moment when the sun rises, every twenty-four hours, as the world spins into Him.”

“The world... spins?” she gasped.

“Yes. Let me take you through a day. We will start at noon, highsun, with a sun high overhead. As the world turns, and the sun remains in place, the shadow of the world creeps over and past.” She turned to watch a demonstration of a light and a ball, with a glowing dot on it indicating where we were. I turned the ball, and the position of the sun in the sky seemed to change, which she followed with wonder.

As it reached the horizon, the sky changed colors, darkening, and different shades flowing into existence beyond the blue. Astounded, she watched the sun fall behind the horizon in a play of colors.

“There. That moment. You saw when the sun touched the horizon?” She nodded. “That is the Dusk Renewal, standing opposite the Natural Renewal. It is also the time of Aethra’s Salute, when you stand and prepare to face the night. For now, there is darkness... until the dawn.”

She turned, and beheld the night full of stars, and the moon rising in the east.

I showed the view of the moon behind the planet, us turning into it, the pale whiteness actually the sunlight reflecting off it and making it easy to see... and where the sun was not shining, it was dark.

But of course, she was riveted by the stars.

Even Professor Shellington gasped. “Lady Traveler, these... are not the stars I remember,” he spoke up slowly.

“That is correct,” I stated. “But they are the stars that are there now. This show is taken from an opening in the Haze that let us look out on them.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“The stars that are there now...” He sucked in a breath, going over the implications. “They, we... the Shroud, it moved the entire planet?” he asked softly.

“Correct. If you were to return to the surface on the Solstice when I open the Haze, Professor, you would also see something wrong with the sun.” I let him ponder that as I returned to the Matron. “As you use the world around you to navigate, the people outside learned to plot their positions using the sun, the moon, and the stars. They painted lines between the stars and gave them names, watching them rise and fall over the ages, guiding them away and back during the night.

“It is this shining light in the darkness, the stars that show wonder and paint the night, showing the way to new places and guiding the wandering home, that Sylune exemplifies. If one but learns, one can stand tall in the darkness, and face the night and all that seek to hide in the dark.

“Thus is Silver Magic, the light in the darkness.” I swirled up a display of Shards she caught out of the corner of her eye, stunned when she saw their number before I let them go. “We discover. We enlighten. We stand against the dark. We show the light in the darkness. We guide people to a better way.

“That is the path of Silver Magic, and Sylune is our Patron on that road.”

She was captivated by the stars and the sky, the light and the dark that reflected her own jet-black skin and pale white hair.

“It makes one feel so small,” she murmured, watching the moon arc across the sky, clearly sped up faster than was natural.

“The universe is a big place,” I agreed. “Outside, you can see how small you truly are... but at least you can see. Here,” I waved around, “not so much.”

She saw the sky beginning to brighten in the east as the moon went down. “And this is?”

“The Dawn. Natural Renewal. The moment when the sun breaks the horizon, and the new day begins. As above, so below... you possibly have not realized it personally, but if you move around this Hollow World, the time of Natural Renewal changes, even as the light races across the world without, turning into a new day.”

Her eyes moved back and forth between my small display of the planet and the sun, and the brightening light.

When the first edge broke across the world, she gasped, feeling a thousand Natural Renewals sweep past in memory at the touch of the light. The molten orb she was familiar with began its climb into the sky, the colors there were banished as blue washed across all, and a new day began.

“That is what it means to live on the outer world?” she asked in astonishment. “So much change!”

“Ah, you’ve not seen seasons, either. The outer world is considerably more active than this place is,” I confirmed. As the sun reached the zenith, I let the illusion fall, the horizon rose up and closed in, and suddenly that blue sky was gone, as if netted away and imprisoned by the world around us.

I could tell that the feeling shook her. There was a whole planet between her and the wonders of the stars, and the glory of Sylune. It was no wonder that she had not heard of it.

Likewise, the beauty of the sun rising at dawn and falling at night. I saw her glance up at the still and angry orb of light and heat that glowered unchanging above them all, and slowly shake her head in comparison.

In the outer world, the sun was just one more small voyager across the heavens, not a tyrant glowering down upon all, all the time...

“Was this place designed to defy the gods?” she had to ask suddenly, having an epiphany.

“I do not know about defying them, but it was built to the standards of older, more finite powers than the deities that I serve. I’m sure you know the names of many of them, as their influences are everywhere. Facing the true Divine powers, they are small, but in mortal terms, they are still extremely strong.” I waved my hand at the sun overhead. “I can tell there’s an Old God living in that, possibly more than one. But I do not know their names or motivations, or even if it matters. I am sure that people somewhere pray and venerate them as the mighty things they are here... but they are prisoners here, as surely as are you.”

“Omos the Burning Eye,” the Professor said quietly. “Said to both birth and imprison Jiaffry the Wildfire, and be the home of Lugunsokch the Sun Wyrm, progenitor of all the dragons of fire.”

“Entirely possible, each in their own way. It’s definitely no more alive than any other Nature Spirit, and may just be a magical Construct of sorts they all dwell upon.” I shrugged.

“Some of these old Powers are indeed very strong,” Professor Shellington informed me. “You speak as if you’ve met them before?”

“I’ve killed three of them.” They both looked at me in shock. “Probably weaker ones, as they’d been caught and contained by the Shroud, but Old Gods nonetheless. With more active worshippers and stronger magic about, I do not doubt the ones down here are stronger.

“But, they’ve managed to remain free of the Shroud, so they are not the priority here. The priority is to bring down the Shroudzones. After that, well, the Old Gods are going to have a great number of other problems to worry about.”

“The Shroudlords are reputed to be unkillable, so after several minor attempts by the forces of several of the gods here, their worshippers have pulled back and largely ignore them. Some attempt is made to cut down on the numbers of undead they attract to them, but given how much they’ve grown over the decades, it has not been enough,” agreed the Professor.

“If things go well, you’ll begin cutting them all down,” I replied. “And once you do, then perhaps you can actually start making some real changes in this world.”

He looked out and around at the world arrayed for all to see, the mind he prided himself on so much picturing it as a very different place.

Well, it was so British, right, bringing proper civilization to the savages? Sure, he’d been here long enough to adapt to local cultures and the like, but that underlying drive from men of his time was still there, the sun never setting on the British Empire.

What, then, could a truly powerful Professor do in a world like this, even if it was eventually going to lose the tech edge? There were still levels of technology that could be employed. One just had to get the infrastructure to get them going...

------

I waited as March 21, the second day of Spring, drew to a close. I softly sang Aethra’s Salute atop the cliff I’d remolded into living quarters earlier in the day.

“... where rest the weary, and dream of the wind at dawn.”

The polite, subdued ding sounded, and I eyed the Use Magical Device Mastery/1, perhaps not so valuable to me, but core to the power of an Artificer.

A boost to the ease of using random unknown magical devices that might not want me using them. That might never come in useful, nope, nope...