"I have an urgent message for the Progenitor," Vita snaps, and the soldiers stand aside.
What incredible social power. They don't question her, they don't inspect her, they simply obey, because she is Athanatos. Back in Skyhope, if I tried to demand an audience with the king I would have been laughed out of the castle! Back when I was a First Lady, I mean. If I tried to do that now I'd be attacked. Ineffectually, of course, but still attacked.
Anyway, it's notable to me because of the trust involved. The Athanatos aren't just an immortal ruling class with absolute power, they're a family. The Progenitor may as well be a goddess, but if any of the other Queens demand to see her immediately there's an implicit expectation that it will be important, that it will be worth her time. It's not questioned, because the idea of bothering her for something trivial is unthinkable in the first place.
I wonder if it's literal. As in, are Athanatos souls designed in such a way that they are unable to question their leader? Queen Zalrenza's absurd statements about perfection certainly imply a degree of indoctrination, but it could just as easily have been an issue of her being uniquely stupid. It's important to never discount the possibility of people simply being rather dumb, and Zalrenza is a prime suspect for the eternally common condition. 'Perfect form.' Pah!
"Are you getting mad about something?" Vita asks hesitantly, having apparently learned the polite way to introduce the idea that she knows with absolute certainty that I am getting mad about something. Ah, she's getting better all the time. I'm so proud of her!
"Yes, but it's nothing important," I assure her. "Thank you for prodding my attention."
"Of course."
I smile at her and she smiles back with her eyes, our attention then returning to the hallway. I must confess, I don't entirely know what's going on at the moment. She just stiffened up all of a sudden, becoming unresponsive in the way she tends to do when speaking with Nawra, and then came back to us in a panic. Not really a great sign, but I respect the fact that she doesn't want to explain it more than once. To the Progenitor's audience chamber we go, then, to see what my little demigoddess fears so much.
We soon make it to the massive, utterly ostentatious room where I first met the small moth woman of unfathomable power, the glittering columns leading the eye up to the high ceiling on which a mural of the Mistwatcher, its massive tendrils stretching in every direction rather than curled up in a ball, floats through a black background patterned seemingly at random with white dots. It's a very odd image, one that seems utterly fantastical and completely imagined. Yet while I don't know the Progenitor all that well, she doesn't seem the type to feature an image of no import above her own chambers. Curious, very curious. I catch myself swishing my tail in anticipation and forcibly calm it. This is a room in which we meet one of the most powerful people in the entire world. I must remain utterly in control at all times.
"I was having a fucking bath," the Progenitor grumbles, walking into the room completely sopping wet and dressed in only a towel. "This better be good."
What.
In some sick way I have Galdra to thank for keeping my composure in that moment. Not because of the way she violated my mind and soul, but because her general audacity at formal functions before that all came to a head. I am prepared for a person that acts utterly outside my expectations, but this is a tactic I hadn't anticipated from the Progenitor. And it is a tactic, that much is clear. At the very least, she could quite trivially dry herself with magic. Her small form is not weak like it appears, it still houses the full might of an ancient soul. So why this display? Why show herself like this? Why subject herself to the discomfort when she could, instead, not?
"Apologies, Progenitor," Vita says, bowing her head slightly. And isn't that about as different from her human self as you can get. I spent days impressing on her the importance of respecting those with the power to end your life and she still managed to piss off every noble she ever met. Myself included, oftentimes. Now look at her, bowing her head without prompting. How far she's come.
Ah, no time for those thoughts. I need to focus on the Progenitor. What's her game? It can't be a misguided attempt to put me at ease, she saw through me in our initial meeting and would know that this is how I'd react. An attempt to actively put me on the backfoot, then? No. Don't wonder, think. What are her goals in this situation? What are her assets and threats? Why is she wearing a towel?
"Don't just apologize," the Progenitor grunts. "Out with it."
What does she gain from putting me off-balance and keeping me guessing? What does she gain from breaking her illusion of godhood to me, even if superficially? What does she know about me that she could use as a fulcrum here? Why does she care? This is the same woman that purposefully snubbed me for hours straight for no reason beyond the fact that she could. She went out of her way to demonstrate how much she doesn't care about me, so… oh. I'm being an idiot.
This isn't about me. This show is for Vita. Of course it's for Vita! The beloved great-granddaughter that obtains a godlike power strong enough to potentially challenge her, entirely by chance? Something that could easily, even casually disrupt whatever long-term plans she has in motion? She either destroys or controls that, there's no middle ground. The Progenitor is showing weakness to Vita in order to foster closeness, because she wants emotional leverage in the event that the two of them disagree.
I relax slightly, since that is the best-case scenario here. Vita has spoken with me a lot about her time with the Progenitor, and none of it has sounded like abusive manipulation. Which means it's non-abusive manipulation, and that's fine. Because that's the thing about people like us: we are never not manipulating. Once the mindset has become ingrained enough, once you are trained to look at the world as a series of pressure valves and levers, it doesn't go away.
Sure, there are times when we forget for a moment, when vulnerability and intimacy allow our thoughts a time of peace, but we never stop knowing that the gift we give creates an intangible debt that weighs as something to repay, we never stop knowing that planting a kiss on her neck changes the feel of the cuddle just the slightest bit, nudging her thoughts just a little more towards 'I'm curious how it would feel to go further.' Sometimes I don't even want things to go further, I just want to kiss the neck of the woman I love, but that does little to change reality. Vita is not and probably will never be interested in sex, but she—or I suppose more specifically Taal—is coming around to the idea of it simply on the basis that I'm interested in it, and I've been subtly pushing her further towards that. Not out of a desire to pressure her, it's just… a natural result of our actions.
…But I should probably stop thinking about sex in front of her great-grandmother. My point—which I'm already second-guessing because I've used sex as the example and that's always a messy topic—is that being unable to stop manipulating people doesn't mean that you want to hurt anyone. It just means you're very hyper-aware of how the things you do could hurt someone, and consequently it often makes you better at avoiding that. And from what I can tell, while the Progenitor is habitually presenting herself in a way that she intuits will be most likely to appeal to Vita, it's not out of malice. She seems to genuinely love Vita, and though she has the capacity to choose a dozen other methods of manipulation, she is opting for the softest and kindest one—mutual respect. Which, again, is the best case scenario.
…Unless of course this entire charade was a calculated play specifically to make me think that, but I should probably meet the woman more than two times before I make judgements about manipulation recursion. Also I'm still fairly certain she doesn't give a flying fuck about me.
"Nawra contacted me and said that somewhere in the area of sixteen hours from now there's going to be something called a 'Skybreak,'" Vita reports. "I don't know what that is but she seemed really freaked out about it."
The Progenitor pauses, her body going still as the mask of the disgruntled yet loving grandmother comes off and is replaced with the cold calculation of an immortal monster.
"...This is one of the few things you could have said that would spur me to immediate action," she says, "and so I must, for the sake of completeness, ask: what are the odds she is lying to you? For any reason? Fun, malice, whimsy, it doesn't matter. Is it possible?"
Vita hesitates, taking a moment to give that the consideration it deserves. Good.
"I think… very low," she decides on. "I'm much younger than her, obviously, and I'm sure she's the type of person to look into this sort of thing, but I'd legitimately be surprised if she can obfuscate her emotions from me. The way we interact, it's… I mean, it's mostly emotion. Before we could speak a common language, we spoke with each other through impressions of the other's mood, and I think that's inherent to what we are. So to that end… I'm confident this is real. Nawra was very flustered. I think she was warning me out of legitimate concern."
Well. I'm not sure I want to know what sorts of things can fluster Nawra, of all people. She said it's called a 'Skybreak?'
"What else did Nawra say?" the Progenitor presses.
"Um… that The One Below All was hungry. And that I should return to my own island to defend it."
The Progenitor is silent for a moment, quiet and calculating. If we assume Nawra truly does care about Vita, or at the very least wants her to live, there's two logical possibilities here: the warning is genuine, or the warning is a ruse to get Vita to depart Liriope before an impending invasion of Liriope. The Progenitor is no doubt judging the odds of each with far greater access to knowledge of Nawra's schemes than I have, and ultimately neither option particularly affects me personally. I stay respectfully silent, hands clasped behind my back, as I will likely continue doing for this entire conversation.
"Yes… you probably should," the Progenitor says slowly, thoughts opaque behind her alien eyes. "The term 'Skybreak' isn't some dramatic euphemism. It… the entire orbital structure of the islands are about to change, and that will just be the start of it. The One Below All is about to be very active."
It takes some amount of effort to refrain myself from immediately interrogating her for details, but Vita thankfully picks up on—and shares—my distress.
"Are we about to get hit with perception event-scale problems?" she asks. "Am I in danger of being noticed?"
"No and no, I believe," the Progenitor says. "Skybreaks tend to be the time Nawra is most active, and if she's telling the truth I suspect her distress is about how early this one is occurring. It's long before we expected, so her plans might not be ready, or she might just be rushed in implementing them. These things are hundreds of years apart, you understand."
"What are they though?" Vita presses.
"That would require a lot of background knowledge to properly explain, and we are very short on time," the Progenitor says. "All you need to know to protect The Plentiful Wood is that the entire island will rapidly decelerate, causing catastrophic damage to any structures not prepared for a pseudo-seismic event. And considering what I know of your island's history and general lack of immortals, I doubt any human-designed structures will survive."
"I'm sorry grandmama, what does 'seismic' mean?" Vita asks, sparing me from having to admit that I don't know either.
"The entire island will shake and lurch like The One Below All has grasped it. Imagine the shock waves associated with perception events, but affecting the whole landmass simultaneously rather than a localized area."
That's… utterly horrifying. Skyhope might survive—maybe—as I did my best to redesign the city to collapse less catastrophically under the conditions of another perception event, but my best isn't likely to be very good in these circumstances: I didn't have anywhere near the influence required to redesign the entire city under new standards, and even if I did the new standards are only our first attempt at solving the issue, likely to be riddled with mistakes and incorrect assumptions that will literally collapse on our heads in practice. And no other cities in Valka even have that much!
"After that event," the Progenitor continues, since there is apparently still more we must prepare for, "you'll likely have to intercept large amounts of falling debris. I'm not terribly worried for you on that front, however. Most of the meteorites large enough to cause catastrophic damage will inevitably impact islands higher up in the atmosphere."
Hrm. I agree with the Progenitor's assessment there. Falling debris is a far less dangerous issue than the initial 'pseudo-seismic event,' as she calls it. Her own people have been the ones to adequately train our defending forces to deal with rocks dropping from the sky, ironically, and while that's amusingly fortunate I can't find it in me to feel thankful since she was very much trying to kill us all. Oh, well. Better allies than continued enemies.
"This is gonna be such a pain," Vita groans. "Soldier-designed buildings should hold against the seismic hit fine, right?"
"Of course," the Progenitor nods.
"So anything made by To-Kill is fine, but Skyhope is fucked. And there's no way they're going to actually listen to us when we tell them to evacuate, right?"
I respond, since I'm being directly addressed.
"It's likely we will require either significant proof or significant force," I agree. "And I don't believe we have any proof."
"You don't," the Progenitor confirms. "I can't even gather any. I've not a clue how your older sister senses these in advance, Malrosa."
"I'll see if I can convince her to teach me when we meet," Vita nods, picking up on the subtext. Fuck, I'm so proud of her. She's so consistent about it lately!
"Good," the Progenitor nods. "You should head back to your island, then, Malrosa. There's no need to worry about Liriope, but it sounds like you'll need all the time you can to prepare."
"Alright," Vita nods. "Then—"
"I-I'd like to go too!"
I glance behind us, where Princess Talanika, looking rather terrified with herself at the prospect of barging into the Progenitor's audience room unannounced, has… well, barged into the Progenitor's audience room unannounced.
"I want to help Mal-Mal with her island!" she says again, more as an outlet for her own anxiety than any real need to clarify the situation to anyone in the room.
She and the Progenitor stare at each other for a tense moment.
"Fine," the Progenitor relents. "You will wear full metallic combat gear the entire time, you will not resist any emergency teleport procedures, and you will be punished for this interruption when you return."
"Th-thank you, Progenitor!" Talanika chirps.
"You're welcome," she dismisses, waving us all off. "Now get out of here. I have to prepare as well."
I bow as the others signal respect with their eyes, and the three of us quickly depart, Vita grabbing our wrists and teleporting us to the long-range teleportation platform the moment we've departed the Progenitor's residence. Hmm. Does teleportation not work inside it? I suppose that makes sense.
"Thank you for coming with us, Tala," Vita says. "I was hoping to introduce you to the rest of my family under better circumstances, but… well, this is just my life I guess."
"Aw, Mal-Mal, it's fine," Tala insists. "I'll probably make a better impression with them if I'm helping out anyway. To contrast all the, uh, y'know. Murder."
Well she's not wrong, but I can't resist the opportunity to prod at her.
"There's no need to worry Tala," I assure her sweetly. "I defeated you in battle before you could kill anyone, remember?"
"Wh—! You! That! You and that vrothizo barely nicked my armor!"
"Forcing you to retreat, and thus defeating you in the engagement," I explain with as straight a face as I can muster. Which is to say, perfectly so… barring the blooms of blue from my traitorous chromatophores. "That is how defeat works in war, you know."
Tala just groans and orders the nearest man to fetch her combat armor, which I shall consider a satisfying victory.
"I can't believe I'm going to have to try to convince Skyhope to do a full evacuation," Vita groans, leaning up against my side. I wrap my tail around her, extending my wings to counterbalance her as I lift her up by the thighs and bring her up so I can kiss her forehead.
"You don't have to do it alone," I promise. "I'll help you every step of the way."
"I really appreciate that, Penelope, but the last time you were in Skyhope you publicly threatened to murder thousands of people," Vita reminds me.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time," I hedge. I, ah, had a somewhat self-destructive view of my own reputation during that particular episode. "But you know I've been slowly repairing my relationship with the nobles who would actually be responsible for making a decision like evacuation, and… well. Worst case scenario, darling, having someone who both can and believably might slaughter everyone in the city is a rather valid way of convincing everyone it'd be a good idea to evacuate."
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"True," she concedes. "The question then becomes 'where do we evacuate them to?' Mimas can't support even a fraction of Skyhope's population, and… I mean, where else is there? Every other city in Valka will be destroyed for similar reasons."
"You have your answer, then," Penelope shrugs. "There is nowhere. We simply have to account for and deal with the fact that nearly everyone is going to become homeless, and organize the reconstruction efforts accordingly. In the time we have, we need to secure food sources, water sources, and distribution routes to as many places as possible. We need to get people to safe ground to survive this 'seismic event' before it happens, and most other things will be ad-hoc simply because we don't have time for anything complicated."
"I hate that," Vita hisses. "I don't want anybody to have to be homeless."
I smile, and kiss her again.
"I know, honey. It will just be temporary, though. We can lament the issues later, as well as be thankful we're getting any time to prepare at all. Most islands won't."
"We should help Baldone and Sigulda as well," Vita sighs. "They're part of my island too."
I find my eyebrows raising of my own accord. I honestly hadn't even thought about that.
"That will be… difficult," I decide. "If for no other reason than travel time. We don't have enough teleportation-capable people to cover that much of the island in the time we have, let alone take the time needed to explain the situation and organize the required response."
"You, me, Tala, Capita… maybe Lark?" Vita hedges. "Though her capacity is kinda low so I'm not sure if she could safely channel enough mana for an advanced spatial alteration."
"I'm also not sure we could trust Tala or Capita to negotiate with foreign nations alone," I muse. "Even Lark would do better."
"Hey! I have plenty of negotiation training!" Tala objects.
"And yet I still rank you behind a literal soul-eating monster," I smirk, then glance at Vita. "Two of them, even. At least your sister can speak Valkan."
"Well, gimmie a Valkan that you don't care for all that much and I'll extract the language from them," Tala says, crossing her arms indignantly.
"See, it's Athanatos sensibilities like that one which I think will muck up any attempts at peaceful communication."
"What do you mean, 'Athanatos sensibilities?'" Tala grumbles. "That's speciesism!"
"Yes, the speciesism is definitely a major reason humans don't like Athanatos," I reply dryly. Fuck, she just makes it so easy. It's hard to not get distracted from the upcoming crisis. Gah, I'm such a mess nowadays. Push forward, don't stagnate. "Worrying about the rest of the island can happen after we've got a way to deal with any of it. Is there any reason to delay our teleportation any further?"
"...My armor," Tala reminds me.
"No, Penelope's right, we can take two trips," Vita nods. "Meet us when you're prepared, okay Tala? We'll have someone on the teleporter, don't worry."
"...Okay," she agrees. Vita and I step onto the platform, and the next thing I know the air is humid, the light is natural, and we're back on Verdantop.
It's good to be home.
"Penelope, you handle the evacuation of Skyhope," Vita orders me. I can't help but be surprised by both the order itself and the decisiveness behind it.
"You sure?" I ask. "I'm not exactly well-liked over there."
"I don't need you to be liked, I just need you to be listened to," she says, lifting up into the air. "Skyhope is basically your baby, you'll focus better on making sure it's safe. Meanwhile, I need to gather a workforce."
"Understood," I agree, weaving a teleportation spell. "You'll take care of informing everyone of the situation here, then?"
"Yeah," she says, launching herself towards Mimas proper. Her next words are carried by spell, for my ears and my ears alone.
"I expect you to save every single person in that damn city," she demands. "Not. One. Casualty."
I lick my lips, suddenly overcome with an urge to do so.
"Yes, my Queen," I purr back, only half joking, and then teleport myself into the open air above Skyhope. These poor, unsuspecting civilians don't understand what sort of day they're about to have, and I have been tasked with correcting this.
…With no casualties. Which means no inciting panic. That's the easy way ruled out, I suppose. At least the hard way should be here any second now.
"Lady Vesuvius," Braum says, appearing right on time.
"Braum, please," I chuckle lightly. "You know I'm not legally a First Lady anymore."
"And you know that you're not welcome in Valka for the same reasons," he responds. "What are you doing in our skies?"
I smile. Braum is both a good man and an intelligent one, a fascinatingly rare combination. He's learned his lesson about trying to arrest me, at least. How laws fall apart when you lack the strength to enforce them, hmm? Alas, the situation prevents me from indulging in taunting him about this.
"I bring dire news, I'm afraid," I say, shifting my posture to something appropriately serious. "A natural disaster the likes of which you've only seen in scripture is due to rock this and every island in the next fifteen to sixteen hours. If you want to avoid a catastrophic loss of life, we need to evacuate the city before that time."
Braum regards me for a moment, taking the time to consider my statement with the gravity it deserves. He truly is a difficult man to dislike.
"...Do you have any proof of this?" he asks. Which is, unfortunately, an extremely reasonable question to which I have no reasonable answer.
"I do not," I answer with genuine regret. "In truth, I'm not even entirely certain I trust my source, but… I trust them enough, and the structural damage we're risking is likely to kill or at least seriously injure anyone with a roof over their heads or a sewer under their feet. We're talking a level of destruction comparable to the perception event two years ago."
"Evacuating a city in the amount of time you describe is… unlikely to be possible," Braum says. "And it would leave the citizens of Skyhope completely vulnerable during that time."
"I understand your hesitation," I nod seriously. "But you have my word that we will be doing everything in our quite considerable power to assist you during this crisis. Because it is a crisis, a worldwide crisis wherein we will all have to work together if we want to survive. This is not a trick or a threat, this is… it is divine intervention, Braum. The Mistwatcher will be changing the orbits of the islands. All of them."
"...Absurd," Braum says. "I can't possibly…"
He trails off, his illusion showing no tells I can reliably dissect for clues about his thoughts. But my guess is… fear. He's found something.
"What is it, Braum?" I press. "Do you see something I don't?"
"The hole in the city," he says. "Down below it. The Mistwatcher is… moving."
I raise my eyebrows in surprise, immediately flying over to the center of the city to look down. Braum will have no trouble keeping up, seeing as he's already there. Sure enough, as I look down the giant hole via which our city now deposits its non-recyclable waste, I see the mists peeling back and revealing our great, evil god in all its glory, beautiful and writhing with its uncountable blank eyes and incomprehensibly vast tendrils. This in itself is not unusual; the mists reveal their Watcher with regular frequency, but rarely do they reveal this much… activity.
The Mistwatcher is prone to simple, passive movements. Its tendrils slither and undulate like a ball of restless snakes, but they are idle movements that seem to serve no particular purpose. Occasionally an eye will rotate to indicate that some island or another is about to get slapped, and the wrath of this wretched false god makes itself known, but then things quickly return to the status quo.
Not so, anymore. If the Mistwatcher's normal movements are the idle twitching of a sleeping beast, I am now witnessing the stretches of a waking giant, its tendrils unraveling in every possible direction, its eyes moving with conscious purpose. The Mistwatcher wakes. Our fates are shattered before its will, and mercy is as alien to it as it is to us.
"Believe me now?" I ask the air, unable to keep my horror from my voice.
"...I will begin the evacuation," Braum answers, another of his bodies appearing beside me.
"Good," I respond evenly, keeping any emotion from my voice. Fuck, this is really happening, isn't it? A god is going to yawn and the whole world is going to suffer. "If anyone asks, I believe the name for the catastrophe is a 'Skybreak,' by the way."
"A catastrophe unlike any in recorded history has a name already?" Braum asks.
"You forget you're dealing with immortals, little Templar," I sigh. "They seem to have a lot of records they don't share with us. Shall you do the announcement, or should I?"
"Allow me," Braum sighs. "My words are less likely to incite a panic."
He's right, I suppose. A blessing and a curse, that. While he does so the two of us discuss our evacuation plan. It's simple enough, in practice: I will clear away nearby areas of forest to create open space in which Vita's incoming forces can start preparing for the refugees. As long as they stay low to the ground and don't have anything fall on their heads, the people of Skyhope should be fine, so all we really need is a wide-open space that can accommodate everyone. Afterwards, I will join the High Templars in airlifting as many people as possible to maximize our exfil, with crisis and riot management performed as needed, and once everyone is safe from the immediate crisis it will be time to manage all of the many secondary crises of distributing water, food, and shelter after Skyhope's destruction.
I head off to the forest to start clearing immediately, though I keep an ear on Braum's city-wide speech. He keeps things relatively straightforward, framing the situation with a little white half-lie—a mandatory lockdown is being initiated, and all people are to clear the streets and return to their homes within the next two hours. A worrying demand, but a surprisingly clever one; tell people they need to evacuate, and the streets would become a chaotic mess as those returning to their homes clash with those trying to get out of the city first.
Wasting two hours putting everyone exactly where we don't want them to be is somewhat counterproductive, but I begrudgingly agree with Braum's reasoning, here: it's better than mass panic in the streets, it allows us increased control over when to evacuate various parts of the city, and getting people to cease working and return home is much easier than convincing them to abandon their homes entirely. It's also something the people of Skyhope know how to do, as it mirrors procedure for Hiverock nights.
Shortly into my work clearing the forest, High Templar Interitus the Fractured joins me, speeding along the situation considerably. Using her talent to obliterate large swaths of the forest lets me focus on preventing those swaths from simply regrowing, playing to each of our strengths. It still takes us the full two hours to clear out an area to my satisfaction, however, and I can't help but stress about that a bit. Fourteen hours left.
Once the streets are clear, the evacuation begins. Braum had already started directing specific sections of the city to pack any food, water, and essential valuables, and so on his order they begin to depart. Cassia and I are directed to the center of the city to collect people in a telekinetic field and fly them to safety while Braum manages the exterior of the city, covering as much as he can but ultimately being limited to a radius of influence far smaller than the city itself.
It hardly even takes a few minutes for the problems to start. Many people immediately begin to panic, trying to rush out and flee into streets already filled to capacity. It's also not hard to find those taking issue with being forced to leave their homes at all, even at the cost of their own life. These people become my responsibility, as Braum refuses to force them to safety. Irritating. Very, very irritating.
Zero casualties. Such is her command, and so I will accept nothing less.
The hours tick by. Braum is completely invaluable to the entire evacuation process, smoothing over every single thing he becomes a part of. This is, unfortunately, part of the problem: despite his moniker he cannot literally be everywhere at once, and as the evacuees grow restless we gain an increasing need for cool heads both inside and outside the city. My… preventative measures to avoid full-blown riots aren't ideal, but they are unfortunately necessary.
"Open your eyes, the draconic bitch has been flying all over the place and kidnapping people! This is a full-blown invasion! A takeover!"
"And what if it is?" I challenge, descending from the sky next to the loud and insipid idiot riling up an entire street's worth of people, risking catastrophe. My talons impact the earth with a deafening thud, cracks in the stone road forking outwards underneath me. "Are you going to stop me, little man?"
He gapes, terror rippling through the crowd. Which is fine, at least for now. I need to undermine this man's authority, cow him, and leave this street shaken but compliant. Undo the damage. It's a short-term solution at best, but we are dealing with a rather short timetable in the first place.
"I-I… you…!" he stutters, which is all I really need him to do before I barrel over his words again.
"I'm not taking anything over," I correct him, "nor is anyone else, for that matter. It is how you have been told it is: for your safety, we must move you. My people simply do not need as much help evacuating from the incoming natural disaster as the great and utterly massive city of Skyhope, and so I am assisting. If you insist on getting in the way of the evacuation, if you keep trying to rile up a mob and endangering the lives of everyone who lives here, I will remove your voicebox. Understand?"
He doesn't answer, just staring at me. I don't have the time to waste forcing an affirmative, so I just act like that is one.
"Good," I say firmly, then take back off into the sky in a dramatic enough fashion to effectively count as winning the argument. I have more people to ferry.
This isn't sustainable. I know it isn't sustainable but I don't have enough trust to use methods other than fear and the city is too big for fear to keep hold for long. The slightest trigger could cause a complete collapse, but we just have to keep going, keep being as efficient as possible, keep stamping down on every leak that springs up one at a time because we don't have the time to do things any better. Everything blurs together for me, from airlift to airlift, crisis to crisis, I cast and I shout and I force this horrid, fragile bomb of a city in line. I will save them all, and not even their own stupidity will stop me. Four hours. Six hours. Ten hours. Fourteen hours. We are almost done, and yet we are still out of time!
"Vesuvius!" Cassia shouts at me. "There's a group outside the city trying to march back in!"
Watcher fucking damn it. I pass off my current collection of humans to her, waiting to feel her aerokinesis peel them from my grasp before blasting out of the city at speeds said humans wouldn't be able to survive. Looking over the walls, I scowl at the sight ahead of me. Pah! A 'group,' she says! That has to be nearly four thousand people! They're still in the temporary encampment, but they're riling up more and more of it, gathering a following that I'm not sure I have a safe way to disperse. What do I do? Shock and awe? Or do I just knock them all unconscious to discourage any further dissent? How can I… oh. Well, perhaps I don't have to worry about it after all.
Off in the distance, Vita appears from thin air, floating high above the forest. The mob is well within her sensory range, and so it doesn't take her long to scowl, accelerating towards them. Back to evacuation work for me, I suppose. She will keep them in line.
Still, I can't help but keep an eye on her as I turn around, my highly advanced optical system able to spot details even from the miles between us. Cracks start to form in the sides and back of her armor, and underneath them matching cracks in her carapace follow, the inside of her body glowing a bright, brilliant blue. And then, from within them, she starts to emerge.
Tendrils of blue slither out from within her body, not quite physical and not quite ephemeral. They grow and grow and grow, snakes of power with no apparent end, plainly visible to the naked eye. The form my love has been incubating since she first determined she could: a soul that is a body. An impossible thing, made possible by her otherworldly genius.
It's far from fully emerged, and yet it is nonetheless gorgeous, indescribably so. Pure translucent turquoise, bright and demanding. They fork into the sky, first six, then twelve, then twenty, as many as she desires and as many as she needs. They expand around her, dozens of feet to her left and right, a presence in the sky that can be ignored by neither man nor beast. The mob shouts at her, pointing up at the coming of a new goddess, and She speaks.
"ENOUGH!"
The volume of the sound carries physical weight, and the mob staggers.
"Remain where you were directed, and you will be taken care of!" Vita promises. "Continue this selfish, suicidal rebellion, and you will be taken care of. Now disperse!"
Then she starts flying towards me, a trajectory that has some of the people I'm ferrying start to scream. I just smile and open my arms, though, and when she collides with me in midair I squeeze her with all my might, planting a kiss on each cheek. Her face is colder than usual.
"Vita," I greet her, my heart overflowing with joy. "You seem to be hatching, darling."
"Neither Sigulda nor Baldone were happy to see me," she sneers. "So I got fed up with them and 'confiscated' all the metal I could find. Which was, well, a lot."
Oh Watcher, she ate their national stockpiles, didn't she? That's one way to force a country to listen to you: walk up to the greatest artifacts from their entire history and just start shoving them down your throat. Baldone had far more metal than Skyhope as well, what with all the defense systems. Vita probably ate dozens of times more metal in the past ten hours than she has in the rest of her life combined.
"Can you take care of the stragglers for me then, darling?" I ask her.
"Easily," she agrees, extracting from my hug and starting to snake those rapturous tendrils into nearby homes. The moment they touch someone, that person vanishes. Oh, darling. Multiple instantaneous teleports? It is no wonder you frighten your great grandmother. With the right resources, you could surpass her in barely a week.
"It's happening soon," Vita warns me. "I… I can feel it. He's moving in the other world."
"How long do we have?" I ask.
"Minutes."
"Then you returned just in time."
We extract ourselves from each other, I continuing my flight and she continuing hers. There is no time left to think, to speak, to do anything other than act. Exhaustion crushes me on all sides, stifling me physically and mentally, but I continue to work. It is all I can do, and with one of the largest groups yet straining my magical capacity, I touch down in the evacuation site and feel the world end.
Everyone collapses to the ground in a single screaming jolt, the rumble of god's wrath shaking the entire island at once. The whole world shudders, crashing and screaming and breaking as everything starts to move, the very ground beneath our feet turning against us. We collapse against each other, what was once a society now nothing but a screaming, panicking tangle of limbs, clutching to the grass below us for life. Cracks form in Skyhope's mighty walls and, where not even a perception event could fell them, they start to collapse. I watch helplessly as the great city I was born in, that I ruled in, crumbles to rubble.
Above us and around us, every other island suffers a similar apocalypse. They shift in the sky, their predictable patterns shattering against the will of a god. The islands. Shift. In the sky. The titanic landmasses on which all life exists, the predictable cycles which define every waking moment of our lives, the years we measure time by and the nights during which we rest… it all becomes naught. They slow, they stop, they change direction, and together our world opens like a clamshell, bisecting a path through open air from the lowest mists to the top of the sky.
And then the Mistwatcher, a passive observer no longer, begins to rise through it. As the islands drift further and further from the empty column in the center, more and more tendrils rise to fill the void. At first they are somewhat familiar, the thin, tapered tips known to us by scale. But then they move higher, and higher, and higher, and they grow thicker, and thicker, and thicker, and we remember in that primal, incomprehensible way that something which already looks large from thousands of miles away is impossibly scaled up close. Tendrils thicker than our island undulate past us, on which eyes larger than my imagination grow. Everything I have ever known, ever could know, is smaller than a single pupil in the impossible mass that rises past us. Its mere presence tugs on us, pulls at us, threatens to lift us off our feet and yank us careening towards the Mistwatcher's rising body, but something holds us firmly to the ground.
The Mistwatcher goes higher, and higher, and higher still, until we finally learn the origin of this calamity's name. Piercing the veil of even the highest islands, I watch in horror as the Mistwatcher opens up the sky and steps directly through it.
And for the first time, there is darkness. And for the first time, there is light.
The yellow mists above us dispelled, the sky broken, we see what lies beyond. Blackness, infinite blackness, salted with specks of white in gorgeous, impossible mosaics. The Mistwatcher swims out into this incomprehensible void, this sky of night, and leaves us behind like a discarded shell, heading towards the only feature in the blackness above: a giant, bright sphere, floating in the darkness, colored white and green and blue. Like a colored glass marble, it rests, gorgeous and impossible. I can't even begin to guess what it might be, the whole event so far beyond my comprehension I may as well be a fly trying to build a city.
All I know is that when the Watcher's tendrils start to wrap around it, the beautiful blue orb cracks, and when the flakes fall apart they fall towards us.