With a simple twist, I stepped onto the trading floor of the mage's tower. My sudden appearance drew eyes, but it was the essence leaking from me in an invisible wave that created a pool of silently staring mortals. The merchants had quickly consumed the expanded floor space; carts, stalls, and tent-covered stands crisscrossing the nearly square mile of the bazaar. Despite the expansion, the open space had been reduced to small pathways between the new stalls. Surprised at the market's development, I used a scrying viewpoint to check the town's bazaar. Sure enough, many of the booths that had been overflowing before were now in the tower itself. The dragon lady must have cut a new deal for rental space. I imagine that suddenly housing most of the cities merchants would see a significant increase in her income.
Other tower modifications allowed for the increased occupancy: widened hallways to the outside, gates with retracted barricades, guards walking the trading floor. The work was subtle, but I could see the remnants of mana used to carve the larger doorways and move rooms around wholesale. I could nearly taste the dragon's mana slathered over every surface. Keeping my face calm, I began to wander the market as a wave of silence then whispers formed as I passed. I could feel my divine instincts nearly preening at the dumbfounded looks and stares. It wasn't worship, but it was a strange kind of awe. They could sense my divinity, even if they didn't know what they were feeling.
A calm voice cut across the floor from within the silence behind me.
"Who are you?"
Turning, I was confronted by the archmage's illusion. I was honestly surprised by the way the illusion now felt to me. It had been obvious before, but it had still appeared solid and deceptive to my senses. Now, the illusion was wrong. The lack of life - a feeling I hadn't been aware of before - was apparent. The deception now felt unclean and improper without the spark of life and soul within, like a moving doll. Despite my distaste, I still smiled. The dragon pretending to be an archmage had manipulated me, yes, but she had also been willing to make a deal with me for what I wanted. Even now, a single shard of myself was still slowly reading through the pile of texts in my dungeon. Multiple other shards of me were organizing and cataloging the scrolls, books, tomes, and random sheaves of paper that her scribes had produced. It was a tedious process that would take a great deal of time, but I would eventually finish. The real difficulty was that the other me's were not machines. They were copies of my mind, duplications with all the same tendency to boredom. I had been immune to boredom before as a dungeon, but my divinity didn't offer the same. I was sharding off duplicates for the tedious task when I found myself mentally prepared for the work. However, I still gained memories of each shard as they completed their work. I was producing a great deal of progress and a great deal of boredom to match it. It was going in fits and starts, but it was advancing.
Smiling at the apparition, I crossed my arms. Letting the voluminous sleeves of my robe cover my arms and leaving only the shield of swirling black hanging free from my cloak. At second thought, it might not have been my essence drawing the eye of every merchant. The endless black of space formed into clothing was eyecatching. It was likely the disturbing swirling maelstrom of eye-piercing black on my arm roughly shaped like a shield that produced the dumbfounded silence. The illusion showed no signs of fear, nor did she flinch from my movements. After all, it was merely a projection of light and fields of magical force.
"Hello, archmage. I've come to fulfill the last of our agreement," I said with as calm a voice as possible.
Without moving, I sent out my essence and latched onto space, twisting and expanding it many times over. I had already stretched the floor so that there was hundreds of times more space than before, this time, I also twisted the area as I had in my vestibule. A great deal more than three hundred and sixty degrees was needed to turn around completely from the tower's center point. My new renovation added nearly four times the space of the indoor bazaar. Vast swaths of the floor were newly added, my mana surging through my body to add tiles and reinforced stone to the stretched space as I expanded the area. I didn't need to add it; the stone would have extended with the space given enough time, but this way, I could perform my miracle nearly instantly.
Again, my essence drained away with my efforts, but my power surged back as my work slowed, then finished. The new space split along the bazaar's winding paths, leaving some places stretched further and others with less. It wasn't as smooth and even as my previous work, but I was pleased with it. Though the strange bending will make things seem odd if they ever empty the floor or the stands move too far from their current locations. It might even be a selling point - a magical, distorted funhouse bazaar where anything could be found around any corner!
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The illusion remained frozen without reaction while I quickly reformed the bazaar, but I hadn't expected a response. It was an illusion maintained by the dragon and stayed frozen unless intentionally moved. The stillness would be off-putting and confusing to humans. This was a feature, not a bug. She could keep it moving realistically with her skill when she wanted to and could leave it frozen when she needed to stare someone down. Or, in this case, stare blankly as the dragon in my scry point gaped her jaw wide and reflexively clenched her claws into her stone perch.
I had looked down the dragon's gullet once before. The long tunnel pretending to be a mouth had a scaled surface studded with inward-facing fangs and a jaw filled with sharp teeth. It had been upsetting even when I was a stone, but it was underwhelming as a god. I could see the sharp teeth, and I knew that they could rend and shred flesh, but that didn't connect to me. A broken, mangled body wasn't something I concerned myself with. My divine instincts made it clear, she could try and take a bite out of me, but it wouldn't work. Still, seeing a multi-ton, scaled, fanged, and winged creature confounded in slackjawed surprise was a true delight. It took real effort to keep from smirking with smug pride.
When the dragon regained control of her illusion, I was given a piercing stare. A few subtle lines of mana tried to touch my body, clothing, and shield, but I was able to rebuff them without even flinching.
"Dale! Oh, you are causing a huge number of whispers. Wow! Nice job with the twisty-thing here," Vis said as she wandered out of the crowd.
At the sight of the little goddess, the illusion glanced concernedly between us.
"Oh! Hey, archmage! Oh man, you should hear the gossip about you! Do you really nearly kill your apprentices?" Vis asked as she casually walked around our stand-off, her body twisting and turning without care to see all the stalls and products on display.
The tension that had been forming slowly bled out of us, the crowd still watched and whispered, but they no longer seemed ready to run at the first sign of danger. The small goddess was too casual, too blatantly curious, and relaxed to make the confrontation appear potentially deadly.
"Hey, did you hear your archy-ness? Dale, the God of Space, has agreed to once again interact with the world! I personally think it was your petition and agreement with Coldona, Goddess of Challenge and Dungeons, that pulled his interest back to the mortal world. He liked your expanded space idea - why wouldn't he! - but offering him knowledge of the modern world to entice him back? Brilliant! We're all glad your idea worked. The big lug can be a bit hidebound and disconnected from the world. I mean, just look at him," Vis said in a stream of consciousness running commentary.
The illusion of the archmage was calmly smiling and nodding appropriately to Vis's words. Yet, in my scry view, I could see the emotions flashing across the dragon's face. I was surprised that I could read the scaled visage so well, but I would bet she wasn't used to hiding her emotions that often. When Vis's words ran down, the dragon seemed to be staring into the distance as she thought, but her eyes suddenly snapped to my scry point. With a glint of anger, my scrying viewpoint snuffed out, leaving me staring at an illusion with a subtle twinkle of annoyance hidden in her eyes.
"Thank you…Vis?" at the nod to her question, the archmage continued, "I'm glad my request of Coldona had that benefit, but I can't take credit for the idea. I just wanted to expand my tower. I'm sure that one of the gods was the mastermind of the larger plan to entice Dale, the God of Space, back into the world."
When the archmage's mouthpiece stopped speaking, Vis suddenly appeared next to me, her hand yanking on the edge of my robe.
"I'm going to go show him where I've heard the best whispers! I can't wait to show him how the world has changed since he was last here! This is going to be great!" Vis shouted with all the excitement of a pre-teen with endless energy.
Pulling me along, Vis tried to tow me through space and back into the Hall of the Gods but couldn't really move me. Once I knew where she wanted to go, I pulled her along and stepped into the odd dimension that was the home for the Gods.
Stumbling away from me, Vis nearly collapsed, her small body showing exhaustion even if she didn't need to heave for breath.
"Oh, man. That could have been so bad, Dale!" Vis said while Denda helped her upright.
Both Denda and Vis were giving me concerned looks. Conflict rushed over to join the two goddesses, the three staring me down with an exasperated look.
"What?" I finally asked as the silence grew.
Conflict crossed her arms at me, but she seemed more worried than angry. Denda, on the other hand, looked both angry and bothered. I was having trouble reading Vis, but she also seemed to find the entire thing entertaining while still showing concern.
"Dale, the mortals determine who and what we are. You are newly ascended, and no one knows who you are. The System introduced Vis to the world on her birth, but you had no such announcement. Don't you think the mortals would find it interesting that a new god has suddenly appeared from nowhere? One linked to an agreement with the archmage? An agreement that was also linked to the dungeon? The world has rumors of ascension, but we suppress them when we can. Those who seek godhood are willing to do horrible, terrible things to gain it. The gods they become are equally horrible. We would like to avoid another god war if possible," Denda said. However, Conflict looked a little conflicted about Denda's words.
Vis was the first to drop her cross-armed stance and resume her playful act.
"It's all right, though! I convinced everyone that Dale is an old god returned, though, so no worries!" Vis said with a smile, though the other two did not look convinced.