[←37]
The prohibition against assembly applied only outside of the planet of the Time Destroyers. Nobody could quite muster up the courage to go down to the vast planet’s surface and try to prevent them from gathering in presumably huge groups … but as long as they didn’t do it anywhere else, it was generally agreed that it was probably fine.
[←38]
For assorted highly varied definitions of ‘exercising’, and ‘power’.
[←39]
Or shedders, there was little to no consistency in their status and it tended to depend on whether you were talking about them as an academic discipline, a cultural category, or a species.
[←40]
Although they ate it anyway, for whatever reasons Ogres do things.
[←41]
Except you probably wouldn’t sip from a cup of coffee if you were at parade-ground attention. Ludi didn’t know this for certain, since she had no military experience. If you could do it, though, Ludi was quite certain that Magna’s first sips of morning coffee was what it would look like.
[←42]
The club itself was continuing to operate as always, but in an astonishing feat of architecture and covert workmanship, all trace of its connection to the tunnel system and the nest was gone. However Gabriel was getting down there to look after things, it wasn’t through the club.
[←43]
Well, the Ogres were perfectly content to stay inside the warehouse. They weren’t known for their swooping and flitting.
[←44]
The Ogres did, on the other hand, tell jokes. And the TrollCagers had no trouble taking Frogsalt’s jokes in stride as a consequence.
[←45]
Or milk, or nectar, or beer, or … let’s say a variety of other things.
[←46]
Or that one might expect, if one was just a little bit juvenile.
[←47]
At least as far up as the point at which the Void’s stellar vault merged with the stellar vault of Zerf’s Dimension, and as far over as the point at which the Ice Wall separated the Void Dimension from The Unknown. Dimensional physics was mind-bendingly complex at the best of times, and the Void Dimension was worse than most.
[←48]
Several noted theologians had suggested that the Pinian God had just really wanted to make flatworlds, and the only place in the Void Dimension they could be successfully constructed was in the Face of the Deep. There were plenty of other Dimensions where it was possible to make flatworlds … but not while keeping an eye on the Darkings at the same time.
[←49]
Even before it was a seared realm, Cursèd was … not a particularly polished world.
[←50]
Terminated, it was widely understood, meant continued down into Castle Void but seriously, stop at Cobler’s Farm.
[←51]
And she wasn’t absolutely certain they didn’t. It was possible they had read more books than she had on the subject of Dragons.
[←52]
Dragons passed little water, and what little they did pass tended to emerge as steam from glands between their scales. Their droppings were generally odourless and dry. It was possible in this case that the humans hadn’t read quite as many books about Dragons as the Drake had assumed … they had not removed the trough, though, despite its evident lack of use.
[←53]
He’d called it a nolo-retcon technordial datengeist, knowing perfectly well that his friends would come up with their own name for it by the time he’d finished telling them its actual name, let alone by the time he was finished perfecting it. Sure enough, Magna now referred to it as “the nolo-thing”, while Ludi called it “the colorectal techno-beast” and Frogsalt called it “Galatine’s nolovirus”. He wasn’t certain which of the nicknames he loved more.
[←54]
Red kangaroo, a semi-domesticated livestock marsupial and one of the last remaining pillars of Old Meganesia’s meat-farming industry.
[←55]
The Ogres might have survived, although they weren’t big fans of the heat. It was a moot point, however, because the conversation they could have offered her would hardly have been useful even if they hadn’t simply curled up and gone to sleep.
[←56]
Or so it had become known after the worlds vanished and the Eden Road had blurred into an empty gulf just below Heaven. The previously-sparsely-inhabited step had gathered a large community of researchers, pilgrims and miscellaneous lunatics over the years of the Flutter.
[←57]
The ship hadn’t really had a designation so it wasn’t technically accurate to say Bayn Taro was a ship name – Bayn Taro was more of a personal identity for the ship’s guiding intellect, which was in turn a part of the Destarion’s wider self.
[←58]
After losing the ability to travel easily from continent to continent for a few generations, many of the Earth’s regions essentially forgot the others existed, and were then outraged when they got in boats and figured out how spherical planets’ oceans worked and started exploring again. For a long time, they basically refused to believe the humans they found in different places even were humans. This proved to be a depressingly enduring blindness.
[←59]
Or 242 ExE, or whatever you wanted to call it.
[←60]
The actual position of the sun on its complicated sweep between Heaven and Earth and past the Eden Road notwithstanding.
[←61]
Magna did her best, most days, to pretend it hadn’t been her stupendously wishy-washy prophecy that had sent him away in the first place. It had seemed so clear when it was happening, but the past half a decade or more had offered only the tiniest glimmers of insight to see her through. Full-blown prophecy appeared to be off the table.
[←62]
Coffee didn’t grow well on the Eden Road, and was prohibitively expensive to either grow or import. The discerning Milky Way Cultist’s alternative, naka, was a highly-caffeinated lichen hybrid that boiled up into something that tasted like socks but at least kept you awake just in case someone poured more of it into your mouth when you dozed off.
[←63]
And most of the undead.
Table of Contents
Notes
Greyblade Page 68