When we decided to move, we ended up moving kind of fast. That was only made easier by Bridget, who was better at carrying people places than Jess and I were, befitting someone whose artifact was essentially the sandals of Hermes, messenger of the gods.

She, Jess, and I stood outside, and Bridget knelt down on the ground in a classic sprinter's pose. When she pushed off the ground, wings of red fire appeared around us all--one set for the three of us, not one set apiece--and we were hurled forward like a gunshot, putting my own attempts to cannonball myself around with telekinesis to shame. If my power gave me black powder, hers was a railgun.

In a blink, we were over the disaster area, and the wings flapped forward with incredible intensity, negating our momentum and sending a massive bolt of air moving forward to compensate. I sensed it, vaguely, and looked ahead to see it tear apart clouds in the far distance. Neat. I felt us settle on an invisible platform, well up on the air, and closed my eyes to feel it out with the Bracers, deciding that it was immaculately solid to stand on, but wouldn't stop even a mortal arrow from passing through. Far more than mine, her power seemed entirely dedicated to a niche.

Finally, after using up every excuse to distract myself, I looked down at the crater where seven hell-portals had become one massive breach into the netherworld.

Jess had said that the magic was warping the surroundings, and that understated things. There was, first, a massive fog of magical darkness that extended up thousands of feet--ending slightly below where we stood--and obscured everything to my eyes, but not to the power of Will. With that, I could sense that the hole in the ground was increasing in size all on its own, stone melting upwards into giant spires that seemed to form themselves into rune-etched towers. Plants of some kind were also growing in that darkness, their roots breaking stone into soil and their leaves occasionally catching fire, I assume shedding some kind of light in the darkness, but that wasn't something I could easily sense.

Already, creatures were pulling themselves out of the stone--born from nothing, and emitting an aura that made my Bracers disquieted. The first of these creatures were feeding on the rocks or the plant life, but already some were feeding on the others. All of them had sharp teeth, and all of them had liquid fire in their veins.

"Well, shit," I said.

Jess was looking in all directions but straight down, perhaps because she couldn't see through the murk. "We should start by putting up blocking columns," she said, pointing towards a spot of ground in the direction of the town, one as yet untouched by the corruption. "It doesn't have to be full height. Let's say, five hundred feet tall, fifty feet diameter, spaced a thousand feet apart."

I glanced at her, a little worried; I'd taken the tower construction slowly, to make sure I did it right. But neither could I deny that this was an emergency, so when Bridget pushed off of her sky platform and brought us to the ground, I immediately placed my hand to the ground and willed a spire into being.

My first attempt was a hollow ring, to save on weight, but Jess immediately shook her head and told me to make it thicker. By the time she was satisfied, it was ten feet thick of stone more dense and perfect than I was comfortable with, given the lack of a foundation--which only meant that I had to address that lack while Jess got to work enchanting the cylindrical obelisk.

It took both of us just a few minutes to complete our tasks, but the stress I felt from even just this task told me that I wasn't going to enjoy repeating this a few dozen times, let alone a few thousand. Of course, my math was off on that--but still, even once we settled into a pattern of repeating the same work over and over, taking it from ten minutes to barely two minutes to raise and engrave a tower, we ended up working through the day and deep into the night to raise about three hundred fifty-something towers in a ring.

On a detached level, I couldn't help finding it amazing. We worked tirelessly across varied terrain, our efforts reshaping mile after mile of terrain. Jess' enchantments linked up automatically and spread a barrier far into the sky, and I could feel them sucking part of the magical energy out of the air. As we got close to finished, and the shadows from the crater crept closer to the wall, I could tell that her enchantments were both repelling and consuming the corruption that hid within the shadows.

On a more pragmatic note, though, I was getting completely exhausted, and the novelty of using my power to make stone towers was quickly wearing off.

Still, when we finished and the last tower reconnected to the first, I found myself looking past the barrier to the land on the other side. In the night, the starlight somehow was barely dimmed by the field of magical darkness, leaving the place almost as visible to the naked eye as the world on this side of the barrier. Despiet that, I could tell that magic--aether, the gods called it--hung thickly in the air on that side, and now that the barrier was restraining it, I could tell the sharp difference in power on this side compared to that.

Jess, of course, had stopped and sat down, taking a well-deserved rest, one I knew I needed too. But some part of me wanted to be on the other side of that wall. It was silly; since I'd gotten the bracers, I'd never found a task I couldn't do. But the feel in the air there of pure possibility, it was...

"Whatcha thinkin'?" Bridget came up beside me, her being of course still fresh after doing not much more than carrying the three of us around.

I tore my concentration away from it and shook my head. "This plan to use up all the power with giant towers," I said, as much to distract myself as anything. "It almost seems..." I wanted to say 'silly', but went with, "...crazy. It's like I'm playing in a sandbox, doing nothing but playing with toys, but I know I'm reshaping the real world. It makes no sense. Stone is supposed to be... stone. Solid. Unshapable. Almost eternal, and I've just..." I gestured at the towers, words failing me.

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"Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, that's fab work, but it does feel a bit weird." Bridget walked up to the nearest column and touched it, arcane energies flickering against her skin as her skin disrupted the engravings on its surface. Still, the walls didn't show any sign I could see of even the slightest ripple. "It feels more like we're trying to hide it rather than dealing with it, doesn't it?"

I felt my mouth snap shut with a muted click, as her simple statement changed the context of what we'd just done.

"Sure I get it, gods are havin' a war and we don't want to see people's towns destroyed. Now obviously, I'm new here," she turned and looked at me in the darkness, and I saw a ruby light in her eyes, "but is this really what we want to do? Seal magic behind barriers so it never gets out? Use it all up ourselves so that nobody else has to deal with it? Is that what the world wants? What if the people here," she gestured towards the nearest town--which I was realizing now, was probably the capital, Aurnal, and not Kurnal, "actually want magic to be stronger, even if it means they have to fight a war with demons?"

I turned to look at Jess, who was half-turned in her sitting position to look at Bridget, who was still looking at me. We all registered this triangle after a moment, and it broke down, with each of us glancing at the others in an almost random pattern before we all shook the thought off and returned to the question at hand.

"I don't have a problem with that," I said. "But that assumes they're ready."

"I don't think I'm assuming anything," she said. "It might be a disaster. But I'm not sure they'll want to be trusting you--I guess I should say, us--when we've already failed to keep those demons in check. They'll want to grow stronger and prepare, and without a big, like, news-generating disaster, I'm not sure they'll take it seriously."

I considered that, and Jess spoke up in the silence.

"You're assuming we don't put any of this power to good use," she said. "Once we have a tower flying over the site, we can extract power, put it in magical artifacts and give it away--"

"To who?" I snapped, suddenly turning to her. "One way or another it'll all end up in the hands of the Grand Vizier, and you know the first thing he'll do with it is take over from the idiot king, or whatever his title was."

"Maybe, if we don't stop him," Jess returned, a little defensively.

"Right, so, I like the idea," Bridget said, clapping her hands to make sure we focused on her, "but that's maybe something to think about after a quick nap?"

There wasn't much arguing that.

Bridget had us back at the tower in a flash, where we found that Alice, Steve, Miun, and Carli were all sleeping comfortably, each separate from the rest. Jess, without comment, returned to her own bed, leaving me and Bridget, as I explained.

"...with Miun still here, that leaves us short a bed," I said, a little grouchy. "If you give me a minute, I'll make you one--"

"If you're okay with it, I could just stay with you," Bridget said, without shame.

I stopped and looked at her, raising my eyes. "If you want."

The redhead shrugged. "I don't figure you're in a mood to get touchy-feely, and to be honest, I feel better not sleeping alone. We can talk about it more once things have settled down, but yeah, I'd be down to cuddle for tonight, if you're good with that."

I just blinked, shrugged, and accepted. We ended up... not exactly drifting off to sleep immediately, and we both discovered that the other's artifacts, forever sealed against our skin, could be just as soft and warm as flesh, when we wanted them to be.

Morning came too soon for me, but Bridget was up and gone.

I found Bridget and Jess outside. Jess met my eyes as I came out, and there was no judgment--maybe even no recognition that anything had happened. I didn't really care which. "Good morning," she offered. "I've been thinking about the tower--"

"Where are the others?" I interrupted, and after a moment, turned to look for my goat. She was already hurrying over, having been out munching on the thin grass when I came out.

"Talking to the town. I talked with Alice a lot about what we want to do, and she thinks that plugging this hole to stop the corruption was still the right thing to do, for now."

I nodded, bending down to pet Carli, and looked to Bridget, who was... apparently practicing soccer moves with boulders substantially larger than a soccer ball. I watched her bat hundreds of pounds of stone into the air with casual movements of her foot, ankle, heel, calf, and shin. She had a look of focus on her face, but not total distraction.

"Bridget's right, though," I said, giving Carli a good, double-handed scratch. "We didn't think it through. We weren't ready for this to happen. We're still not really ready. We don't have a plan, and we haven't asked anyone else what they think."

"Happy to help!" Bridget said, with what I think was just a tiny bit of sarcasm. Or was I just misreading that?

"When they get back, Alice and I will go back to Aurnal and consult the experts there--there are more than just the Vizier, if you're curious," Jes said, turning to glance at me. "You and Bridget can find other nations to talk to and get their opinion."

I gave a vague wave at the horizon, which stretched in all directions without any sign of road. I knew there was a trader's path out there, but I hadn't paid attention to where. "Where should we start?"

"Don't worry about that," Bridget called back, now balancing the boulder on her toes for a long moment. "The Talaria've got a built-in map. Not quite as good as GPS, but it does some things trivially, like finding the nearest major city or capital. It even tells me where territorial boundaries are." She tossed the boulder up and caught it on her knee, wobbling only a bit as she balanced it. "Did you know your tower's not in the city limits? This area's claimed by someone else."

I stretched my memory to recall what the nomads in the area were called. "The... Sha'lim?"

"That's correct," she said, nodding, and then turned and punted the boulder. I caught a flash of red wings as she did, and the large rock took off like a shot into the distance. "You've met them, then?"

I shrugged. "No. They're nomads, and they might have some relationship with the mountain, which... the locals think is cursed. Ghosts appear here on the blood moon."

Bridget turned to me, only to discover that Carli was immediately in front of her, one goat eye fixed on her. She squinted, then squatted down in front of the goat, not reaching out immediately. "Hello, and what's your deal?"

Carli is strong!

"I bet you are," she said, and picked up a smallish rock--only about the size of her fist. "Can you break this, then?"

I immediately tensed, but when Bridget tossed the rock into the air, Carli pulled slightly on the power of the Bracers and gave the rock a firm headbutt. Not only did it not hurt her, but it broke into pieces and scattered into the near distance. I frowned, considering that, but Bridget just grinned and tossled the goat's fuzzy head.

"A good start, my young apprentice," she said with a wicked smile. "But I feel like you need more practice."

"That's--" I started to complain, but Jess moved in and laid a hand on my arm.

"If you're going to have a familiar," she pointed out, "they're going to need to learn to fight. Carli's young, but... do you really have a choice?"

I watched the redhead grab a head-sized rock and let the flinch that rippled across my body answer for me.