“Breena,” I said forcefully. “I get it, but I don’t appreciate how manipulative you’re being right now about my—pizza rations?” I finished with a blink.
“Right,” Breena said, sharing an inscrutable look with my adopted sister. “Stell preserved the leftovers from your dinner yesterday, since you liked it so much.”
“But I didn’t leave any leftovers,” I protested weakly, because food really did sound good right now, and I definitely wanted a reality where I could have eaten all the pizza one night and still wake up to leftovers the next day. Val giggled. I didn’t really hear her.
“She baked you a second pie when you went back to bed,” Breena said sweetly. “She said you deserved it.” The little fairy began muttering under her breath. “It was right after she gave us another lecture on keeping things professional and not obsessing about you so much. I mean... cough, sneeze. Sure is dusty in here... Anyway, yes, there are pizza rations. You should sit down, so you can eat them.”
I decided I needed a minute to rest after all.
“Is everyone else okay?” I asked, because part of my brain still remembered I was the group leader and all that jazz.
“Yep,” Val piped up. “I did a quick sweep with my eyes and shadow magic, and the Testifiers are double-checking for any leftover wards. But it looks like Avalon deactivated any remaining traps in here after the freaky tentacle things all died. So we’re just carefully exploring for now. We’ll update you if we find anything.”
That was the last protest I had. I sat in the chair, which was probably covered with the leather of some sort of sea animal. Breena and Val exchanged a nod before Val walked off. Breena grew a bit larger and began fishing something out of a pack I had never noticed her carry.
The next moment, my mindscreen chirped.
The Challenger has overcome an ancient Tumult pre-dating his world’s current recorded history. The majority of the leftover power will be allocated to restoring objects, lifeforms, and data taken out of reality by the hostile contaminants. The Challenger and his retinue will each gain ten points of Intelligence and Wisdom as reality reasserts its grasp on the current inhabitants. The bonus will be doubled for any participating Challengers.
As the key element for reverting the Tumult, the Challenger will receive an additional 50 points of Will, including the Challenger’s natural bonus. The Challenger’s mind has been further strengthened against external assaults. Current internal trauma must still be processed naturally.
ERROR: Showing that Avalon’s Challenger and Planetary Lord simultaneously played the most important role in vanquishing hostile contaminants. Increasing the total bonus to 100 points of Will. The Challenger will be more likely to resist the influence of others and will be more successful in imposing his own will upon the environment.
The influx of Atlantean energy and memory is affecting dormant bloodlines within the Challenger. Stand by for further information.
Weight shifted around inside my chest, the familiar weight that stood in the way of another Rise. This one seemed to whisper, pulling at memories the Flood’s attack had unearthed. I gathered as much of it together as I could, heaved, and pushed.
The next moment, I was in the familiar emptiness that had accompanied my recent Rises.
A heartbeat later, I realized this emptiness was not familiar at all. The heavy, oppressive sky was gone, no longer pushing me down. The ground did not pull at my feet and head. I felt as if I had broken through something upon coming here, as if mechanisms once determined to stifle me had finally been broken for good.
I was knee-deep in water. All around me, rubble from buildings, made from different materials, and different styles of architecture floated by. The water was clear enough for me to see more ruins partially buried beneath the muddy earth, and here and there, I thought I could make out the outline of a body entombed.
The sky over my head looked to be of a lighter metallic cover than before, except where it had cracked wide open. I could see the night sky beyond it, and an endless expanse of stars twinkling far beyond my reach.
But the sight to my right pulled my focus. One of the frightened old men, the same color as the rubble he sat on, hung his head low as he looked at me.
“Well, you’ve reached this point,” he muttered morosely. He sounded like the third voice. The one that came the closest to being bearable, on a good day. “A matter of time, I suppose.”
“Explain what I am seeing,” I commanded.
“An embarrassment,” Third grumbled. “A miscalculation so humiliating that I must work to hide it from the other two watchers.”
“And how were you chosen for that job?” I asked as I raised an eyebrow.
“By being the last to die,” he answered bitterly, not meeting my gaze.
That explained a bit more than it probably should have.
“You’re all ghosts, then,” I guessed. “That’s why you threaten me all the time, without acting. You can’t act. You can’t do anything to me. You’re just posturing.”
“It is all the dignity we have left,” Third spat. “Our empires are gone. Our Council has fractured under its own machinations, wielding but a small shred of the power it once commanded. Most of the Expanse no longer even knows of its existence. Our former glory is all gone, just when we had hoped to gain it a hundred times over. So I can either admit to the other two that we are nothing but the dead remnants of a former empire that once claimed all the stars as its footstool, even as we watch some broken Earthborn child trample over the ruins, or I can pretend we are all still glorious, and that our watching you still serves some purpose. I choose the second one.”
“How did you all die?” I asked, sloshing through the water. “And be more specific than claiming it was the Earthborn’s fault.”
“What,” Third scoffed. “And admit it was all our doing? That we were wrong to take offense when the Earthborn decided to manage themselves, forsaking untold aeons of tradition in the name of so-called progress? To be further offended, when the Expanse prospered from said progress, instead of withering apart like it should have under such unrealistic ideals?” The old man sighed bitterly. “Your people overturned everything. We were too angry to see how well it worked. And when we saw them threaten to expand their power even further, throwing down old things we never dared to confront ourselves, we acted.”
“Old things?” I asked, since that was actually new information.
“Things from beyond the stars,” Third answered. “Powers not understood, and best left undisturbed.”
“Then why did my ancestors disturb them?” I asked, stepping around some drifting rubble, looking for dry ground to stand on.
“To save lives we never bothered to care about,” the gray old man grumbled. “That’s the problem with sleeping monsters. They eventually wake up. Then they rampage and send Tumults through many worlds of the Expanse.”
“You know, I feel like an idiot,” I replied sarcastically. “Because every single time I ask you guys to explain yourselves, I just get more of a headache. But since headaches are so normal for me anyway, explain why stopping threats from ravaging the Expanse irritated you all so much.”
“Because it was unnecessary,” Third replied. “Sleeping monsters go back to bed after they eat enough. And there were plenty of worlds for them to eat, that frankly didn’t matter. The Council had their own way of managing them, and it was part of what preserved our power throughout the ages. The fact that the Tumults did so little damage after our rise should have preserved our empires indefinitely. Instead, the Earthborn rose up, and began to empower other worlds without us. Worlds intended to stay weak, to be a buffer between certain death and the rest of the Expanse. And then, whenever they reached a world that couldn’t be trained in time to defend itself, the Earthborn crawled into the dark, roused whatever sleeping giant lurked there… and ate it. They came back, stronger than before, more loved than before. The Expanse all shouted their names, instead of the names of those who
preserved everything for so many star-ages.”
“So they made you guys look bad by doing a better job than you did yourselves,” I said bluntly. “That’s why you went nuts and caused all of this,’ I gestured to the surrounding rubble.
“It was not our fault!” the old man snapped. “Your people’s ways should never have worked! You had a stupid system, and stupid ideals, that kept producing results you never deserved! You kept saying every world deserved to have a chance to exist! Every race should have a chance to grow, and overcome Tumults! More than that, your people took it on themselves to nurture them all! Even if the rest of the Council had already voted that it was more practical to use the inhabitants as labor, or fuel, or as a pleasure source for those who had more important things to do than be gentle during mating!”
“And now you’re giving me that look,” Third continued, “that look your people gave everyone else when they thought we were the crazy ones. That we were the ones barbarous and uncivilized, despite the fact that our traditions had worked for longer than the age of most stars! We should have been able to laugh your people right back to your planet, but instead, they found victory after victory, until we were forced to consider their ways. Forced to return our labour and tribute! The resources that you forced the greatest council members to give up nearly gutted our empires! All because your people insisted that there was a better way!”
Third sank his face into our hands.
“And that was our real mistake,” he muttered. “For a while, when your people began pulling wealth out of thin air, without selling a single child of even the cheapest race to one of the pleasure dungeons. Razing those dungeons should have been the end of you all, military might be damned. But the Expanse still didn’t turn on you yet. They sang your praises, and somehow we had all grown richer for it. And for a while, we let that blind us. You were making us all wealthy, and surely your power would diminish at any moment, and your kingdom built on flimsy logic would collapse right out from under you. If we just did nothing for a bit, surely you would all burn yourselves out, and we would get our control back, a little richer somehow, thanks to your people’s idiocy. And that should have worked.”
“But even then, we thought we caught the warning signs just in time. The old behemoths died to your unnatural ancestors. The Earthborn returned flush with stolen power, then spread that power further among the rest of the Expanse. We knew we were about to be replaced completely, thanks to the—what do your people say—’free bread and circuses,’ that you were tempting the rest of the Expanse with.”
“You’re almost using that term correctly,” I said dryly. “Except that protecting people from eldritch abominations and sexual slavery doesn’t quite fall into the same category.”
Third sighed.
“You have no idea how frustrating it is to hear you parrot the same words as your forgotten patriarchs. And matriarchs, I should add. Your womenfolk were no less frustrating to deal with.”
“Thank you. That’s really encouraging. But go ahead and explain how stabbing my people in the back for fixing the galaxy didn’t work out for you.”
“We didn’t stab them in the back,” Third snapped. “We weren’t stupid. That would have been too incriminating, and we’d all survived too long to know that you don’t strike directly when your enemy goes around killing planet-eaters. We just… whispered the right words to the right enemies. Like on Avalon.”
“Why did you go after Avalon?” I asked. “Who did you hire to do so? Was it the Umbra?”
“The Umbra,” the old man sighed. “Those. Those things were our true mistake. We thought we could use them. They were mad, and they were hungry, and they ate the first of our delegates. But they were new. An undiscovered thing, different from the other creatures that lurked beyond stars. They did not slumber. They merely watched. And when we sent the second batch of ambassadors, they listened to them and did not eat them. They moved between worlds easily, almost as easily as the Starsown could. They could find Pathways effortlessly, crawl inside them, and then use them as vehicles to other worlds. When they parleyed with us, they found they could bring others with them, move whole armies across worlds in mere moments. Avalon was a perfect test case. At the time, it was a weak world. Their unnaturally powerful Solar High Kings and Planetary Lords were not present, and without them, they qualified as little more than one of the slave races the Council had conscripted in the past. The Earthborn were about to change all of that. That could not be allowed. Your ancestors were too powerful to trust with such allies.”
Third actually looked up, a small smirk on his face.
“We thought we were being ingenious. And indeed we were. That was the most intelligent part of the whole process. We only shared the news with one Umbra. He would have to take a number of currently disenfranchised creatures with him to run the attack. He could have the world, as long as he was the one to reimburse the other parties involved. And it went beautifully. The Earthborn were dealt their first embarrassing defeat in thousands of years. The Avalonians were removed from their world, freeing us from the worry of another Solar High King rising up and allying with the Earthborn. And, somehow, the entire force invading Avalon disappeared completely from the surface of the world, taking the proof of their invasion with them.”
“No, they didn’t,” I snapped. “There was a giant Shelter with bodies right beyond the doorway, Earthborn and mercenary alike.”
“Indeed,” Third nodded proudly. “But in insufficient number to have accounted for planetary genocide. And with most of the bodies of the Avalonians unable to be produced, there was insufficient evidence to prove that Avalon had ever been invaded to begin with. When the Earthborn stood before the Stellar Council, protesting Avalon’s invasion and demanding that the planet be liberated, we mocked them with impunity, and shamed them in front of all their so-called idolizers.”
“Congratulations on being total bastards,” I replied angrily.
“Right,” he blinked. “You’re on Avalon now. Probably forming all sorts of squeamish attachments to people not of your own race. The evidence you’re finding would have been a problem, if the Council hadn’t already broken.”
“Your people had better hope I decide they’re broken enough to not have earned a reckoning from me,” I replied, thinking of the bodies I saw when I first arrived, the desperation of dying men and women trying to live just long enough to get Avalonian children to safety.
“I don’t know what’s more ironic. The fact that you think yourself powerful enough to threaten the remains of a star-spanning empire, or the fact that said empire may very well be too broken for you to bother with,” Third chuckled. “We thought we could hold onto all. All of the wealth and expanded territory, because your people were idiots and they still made it look so easy. But once your people were finally broken, our fortune died with you. More threats rose up, bringing more Tumults, and this time, the old ways did not work. Various upstart outlaws carved out their own empires, too many for us to police, but constantly warring and replacing each other. It all cracked apart, with some pieces burning, some vanishing without a trace, others being swallowed up by powers we could no longer combat. It was all over. Everything we had gained over the aeons, as well as the wealth the universe had laid at the unworthy Earthborn’s feet. We somehow lost it all.”
“And you think the saddest part of all of that was the loss of your prestige, your own power,” I said quietly. “Instead of just how many billions of people went through the same thing the Avalonians did.”
“Naturally,” the asinine old man said with a shrug. “We lost reputations, fortunes, armies, and slaves. The races you just mentioned only lost their lives, families, or freedom. And they only had those things for the few brief aeons that the Earthborn were present. And yes, since I am apparently making you angry for speaking of such issues in such fashion, I should probably close the matter for now. I will, however, briefly point out that the Expanse has operated under views such as m
ine for a much, much longer period than it did under views such as your own. But I have no idea if we will speak again.”
The old man looked up to the stars sparkling far beyond the broken sky.
“You have broken through the containments my people had forced into your mind,” he said softly. “Restrictions that restrained thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of generations before you snapped them like old wood, with your self-destructive goals. I have no knowledge of the next level of barriers.”
“Why did you even bother to throw up barriers?” I demanded. “You should have designed it to allow us to help you in the future, in case you ever screwed things up. Which you did,” I spat.
But the tired, obnoxious old man just shook his head.
“Even now, I do not regret our actions,” he replied. “I merely regret that we were not more careful. Your people turned the Expanse on its head, destroyed all of the old ways. Our biggest mistake was not stopping you sooner, or more firmly. But we did not, and you somehow heard the Destroyer’s call, and answered him. Goodbye, Earthborn. I hope we never meet again.”
He turned to walk away.
“You should hope instead that you are really dead,” I called out to him, then I turned my own heel. I looked up at the starry expanse peeking through at me, and realized that it was not my heaven, and not my sky either.
And whoever came up with the Council’s mindset sure as hell was not my god.
Chapter 13: Give Me Back My Deep
“Is it usually this long?” a feminine voice asked.
“I don’t know, Petal,” Breena replied. “This all just started happening right before we came to the Woadlands. I don’t have a good frame of reference yet. But this has definitely been one of the longer times he’s been out.”
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