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“So... to sum up, you are offering to heal me and grant me powers. In return, I have to protect your last follower from some kind of war,” I said. I would have gestured, but most of my body was in casts, so I couldn't move much.“Not just a war, Ragnarok. And I wouldn't grant these powers personally, you'll just have a chance to acquire them while I bring you to my world,” Hecate said. She was a Goddess. I'd been talking with her for a couple of minutes now, and I still had to remind myself of that fact half the time. The other half I was awestruck by the sheer power she seemed to radiate, and had to remind myself to talk at all instead of just lying there, wasting a divine intervention. Or a pleasant delusion, I wasn't quite sure yet what it was. It was hard to believe that I could imagine this kind of intensity, though. Everything about her seemed more real than anything I had encountered before. Not just more real than other daydreams; more real than reality itself.“On the journey, focus on the core concepts of each sorcery you wish to acquire,” she continued, “You should be able to get about four or five different ones if you don't dive too deep into them. Now, I will need an answer soon.”It was a crazy deal, and I would be crazy for taking it. Even if I assumed that this was real and not just my overactive imagination. I was not suited for an active war zone. I wasn't suited for a world that didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing, not to mention the internet. As a software engineer, that was my life, where all my experience was. This was basically asking me to start again from scratch, because my previous knowledge and skills would be next to useless. The magic was tempting, but wasn't really enough to counter my doubts.Except... it was a chance to leave this world, and after the disaster of a week I'd just had that seemed worth any price. And so my decision was clear.“I accept.”As the words left my mouth, the world shifted slightly. I felt a tug in the back of my mind, a sudden absolute certainty that I had to protect the last follower of Hecate. I had just made a magically binding deal with a Goddess. With that knowledge came certainty that this was, indeed, real. There was no way for my mind to fake the feeling of magic.And then I was suddenly ripped from my world, and colors were swirling around me in a maelstrom. Or at least something that my mind chose to interpret as colors, because I was fairly sure that there was no light here to hit my eyes... did I even have eyes? As far as I had gathered I was being transferred between worlds. So what was in the space between worlds that allowed for me to be conscious here? Was my body being transferred, or just my mind, with a new physical body to be created at the target location? But then what substrate would support my body now? Or maybe I should consider the possibility that souls were real, since evidently Gods and other worlds were...
Focus. There was something important I had to do while in transit. If I didn't get enough sorceries, I would be dead soon after arriving. So, think this through, but quickly. I can apparently get any power I want, and multiple powers. What are my limitations? Well, time for one, since I won't get to stay here between worlds for that long. Well then, let's remove that limitation.Time. As I focused on every detail about time I could come up with, I felt something grow within me. Something crystallized around my concepts, filling in details and giving my thoughts substance that they had never held. A way to directly impart my ideas about time on reality. Moving out from my core concept of time, I started to consider potential uses, speeding up time, slowing it down, stabilizing critical areas. I could kill people simply by stopping their heart, leaving it frozen in time while the rest of the body suddenly had nothing to supply it with blood. I could age things, getting through barriers by giving it centuries to rot away. Keep supplies fresh for as long as I liked by stopping time for them. Ideas kept flashing through my head, and the power continued to crystallize around it.“Halfway there,” Hecate informed me.Right. Okay, then, time to remove the first restriction. I focused on my new power, and envisioned myself speeding up, my thoughts racing far faster than would otherwise have been possible. My new ability readily replied. There was some resistance, but it snapped after a moment. The swirling colors around me froze for a moment, then contorted into shapes that I just couldn't understand. They teased me by hinting at something I might recognize, but never enough for me to figure out what. Then the moment was over, and the colors continued to swirl around me. But they no longer seemed to move at high speed. Instead, it was now a lazy spiral around me. I was free from the tyranny of time, no longer forced to make quick on the spot decisions on what power I wanted. No longer reduced to simply grabbing as much as I could within a few moments. I could... well, I probably could just keep taking sorceries. Hecate hadn't mentioned any sort of limit to the number I could obtain. Just whatever I could imagine during my short journey. So there was my second restriction, which I intended to remove as well.Imagination. Again, understanding bloomed in my mind, growing outward from my understanding of the concept, expanding, solidifying and extrapolating.For that matter, just raw imagination wasn't necessarily perfect, so I decided to help it along.
Intelligence. Sentience. Self.
I felt my new powers curling within me, just waiting to be released and expand my mind. But I paused. Reckless self-modification wasn't a good idea, there was no telling whether whatever remained would still be me in any sense of the word. And what good was it to gain untold power if it left me a cold, unfeeling God who ignored the plight of people because they were beneath him? Who possibly repurposed the entire world because he thought he could make better use of it? These were the same issue as you had with creating a self-modifying Artificial General Intelligence. And it wasn't like Friendliness had been solved yet... a smile appeared on my face. Possibly. If I had a body in this environment. So, probably not. The concept of smiling appeared in my mind, might be a better idea.Friendliness. Not the common meaning, but Friendliness with a capital F. The concept came from the theories around artificial intelligence. The idea of a set of core values that would remain stable under self-modification, and ensure that the entity remained positive towards humans, so that it would continue acting to human benefit. I modified this slightly, extending the notion to all sentients. The sorcery I had gotten relating to this concept helped a lot in clarifying my thoughts on the matter.It was an interesting concept, which nothing in the world truly possessed. Humans certainly weren't Friendly, nor groups of humans such as corporations or nations. Some tried, true, and had to be given credit for that. But I needed something stronger, because a single slip could be enough to kill a lot of innocent people with the kind of power that I intended to go for. Of course, there was no need to restrict myself to the programming version of Friendliness, though it would form a good solid basis.Friendliness. Love. Compassion. Acceptance. Wonder. Joy. Happiness. Awe. And since listing them all one by one proved to take a while Emotions. That neatly also included so-called negative emotions, like fear, sadness, anger... but these were important for balance as well.I called upon my newfound magic to make my mind stable and safe under further modification. Again, using magic in this strange place caused the spiral of color around me to contort into almost recognizable shapes for a moment.With the safeguards in place, it was finally time to expand my mind. My intelligence boosted, my imagination increased. And as I did so I could think of new ways to improve my mind, which in turn would allow me to conceive even better ways to grow... and so on, my mind constantly expanding.But that wasn't the main objective. Extending my mind could wait, but for now I was still in a temporary position to gain new magic. That was a problem, I didn't like that this opportunity was temporary. There was simply too much to do, too many concepts to try, my mind to extend to come up with even more, and... even with my time powers, I was only sped up. There wasn't even time to think of everything that needed to be done.Parallelism. It likely wasn't the best word to cover the concept, but it responded very well, ideas, clarifications, thoughts and power crystallizing around what I'd intended rather than the word itself. The other concepts had been like that, too, I supposed, building around my own interpretation rather than the word itself. That made sense, concepts weren't defined by their labels, after all.The upside of this was that I'd gained exactly what I'd tried to put into parallelism, the ability to split my mind into several separate parts that could act at the same time. Or maybe copy my mind? Certainly ending up with the ability to do several things at the same time.Once more magic was called upon by me. Once more the the pattern around me twisted, and then there were several of me. It was a strange feeling. We were still connected, I had a vague feeling of what they were doing. If I focused, I could recall exactly what a part of me had done.And so I set to work, giving myself different tasks and creating more of me as necessary. One to just learn as much magic as possible, naming any concepts that came to mind. That part split into more quickly, and also soon started to allow for longer times for each concept. They did take a while to fully develop, and I'd often cut the process short after getting what I needed. But now there was no need for that, and I got fuller powers. I made sure to backtrack and fill in my first powers, as well. Another of me set to extend my mind, using the insights I'd gained to rearrange and improve how I thought. One of me to keep track of all the different parts of me and coordinate between them.
And that left... me. In a sense. I could still feel the rest of me working away, but it was a hazy sense, no clear details. And I didn't want to focus on their work when I had my own. After all, I didn't know how long I still had. I didn't know where I was, and I didn't know where I was headed.Senses. Starting with the basics – touch, taste, sight, sound, smell – before branching out to what fewer people considered senses like the sense of balance, pain, vibration, hunger, thirst. Then I went beyond what was human, echolocation extending vision to cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum, then senses for the other fundamental forces. And then... and then I would need some way to sense whatever was around me. As far as I knew I wasn't in my world anymore, so I had no idea what there was out there to sense, that was why I wanted this after all. But it also meant that I didn't know what senses I would need. So I blindly thought of something to sense what was around me. And I got something.One more use of magic. The whirling colors around me twisted for a second, but then they resolved. There was so much to look at, and everything has seemingly endless details. I considered creating more copies, so that I might look at several things at once. But I remembered that it was already difficult to deal with the amount of copies we had, making sure they didn't drift too far apart to become separate entities. That... would be a memory from the me that was in charge of coordinating all my copies. It was strange to have ready access to memories from a different me. Yet this was me, and one chosen for the task, so I accepted their decision. With too much to look at, I just decided to start somewhere.I could sense worlds before me, and I could sense one behind me. There were others, but much further out. I sensed the medium all around them and me, made up of... concepts. I could sense the way the worlds were made out of manifested concepts, and how they in turn created new concepts by virtue of the thoughts of the people living there. Some worlds only shaped the concepts around them, while others were affected by the concepts around them as well as affecting them. I focused more closely. It was interesting, it... subtly changed the world in accordance with a single concept. Usually caused by somebody from that world. I was looking at magic, I realized. Accessing the raw concepts out here, and forcing them to change the structure of the world. Changing, adding, removing the manifested concepts from which the world is made.
The world I came from had little magic. Rigid concepts that didn't allow for influence from the medium around the world, the ideas that might intrude. As a result... looking over other worlds... the absence of magic leads to greater creation of new ideas. Meanwhile, highly magical worlds constantly call upon the medium, so the same ideas get introduced to the world over and over again. Each time you use magic, you use ideas from outside your world. Of course, those ideas do get influenced by your world, but this process takes time. Old, established ideas are much more detailed and nuanced. Which would allow for easier and more powerful magic. Hence magical worlds would stick with old ideas instead of creating new ones. Yet by the very process of going over old ideas again and again, they polish and clarify these concept. As each aspect of old concepts is gone over in detail, the concept becomes more focused and clear. Was that what this was all about? Creating and refining concepts?I could see ripples in the medium around me, spreading outward from where I was. What could cause... magic. I used magic, here, in the medium, where concepts are fluid and free. And magic is simply the act of forcing the concepts of the medium upon a world. Which in turn is made up of frozen, manifested, rigid concepts. I watched how magic was cast in one of them. The rigid concepts of which the world was made resisted change. They soaked up of the effect, and thus the magic was limited in effect. It did what it was supposed to do, and that was that.But out here, there was no world to affect. I used magic, I forced concepts from the medium upon... the medium itself. Nothing to stop the magic. The magic simply traveled on and on, like a wave radiating out from me. It traveled through the medium, which acted like an amplifier for the magic, because that's what magic was made of. Like rolling a snowball down a hill, gathering more and more, growing larger and larger. Just in every direction at once.
I was still weakly connected to the magic I had cast, I could sense that. It was, after all, cast by me, and still in effect. And it was all made out of concepts. Of course it was, like everything else. They were mostly vague concepts, but examining how the wave had spread had made them more clear. I would need to change those. It wasn't magic, it was much more subtle than that. Or at least much more subtle than my uses of magic so far. I had simply grabbed some concept, and asked for what I wanted, putting power behind it. But now... now I could sense what I was doing. Now I could do finer manipulation rather than simply splash wildly.So I focused on the concepts that made up my magic. Specifically the ones about it spreading like a wave. If so... I could strengthen that link, make it act more like a wave, growing slowly weaker as it went on and eventually dissipate. Heck, why stick to them slowly becoming weaker? I could tweak things here, to make them lose power rapidly. Become so weak that it didn't really affect anything noticeably anymore. Not that it had actually been affecting the medium, really. Just passed through it. But it if hit a world... made up of manifested concepts, which magic was meant to affect... that would be a different story. A thought on how to change my magic, focused will, and it was done.It was too late for the worlds I was heading towards. They were hit before I was still trying to fix things, before I even got the senses to know what I had done. A cluster of worlds, barely connected, but enough that people could sometimes travel from one to the others. Nine worlds. They were magical worlds, used to the presence of magic. And manifested ideas do naturally dampen magic. But they were hit with the equivalent of a tidal wave. The worlds were smashed together, and started to leak into each other. Which was not a good thing, since they were different worlds for different people. Having them all in a tangled mess was wreaking havoc on the environment and the inhabitants.Hadn't Hecate said something about Ragnarok? I picked the concept from the medium around me, and absorbed the information linked to it. Right. Norse myth, nine worlds, and Ragnarok was their doomsday scenario. Which... if I wasn't mistaken... I'd just caused.
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So I had just caused the apocalypse of nine worlds.Well, then.That certainly was... interesting. But there was nothing I could do about it for the moment.Moving right along, there was more to look at. Right beside me was Hecate herself, and seeing what a Goddess looked like would be...... and I found myself unable to actually look at her. I was confused for a moment, but trying to think of a reason, my memories helpfully supplied one. Apparently, one of the other parts of me had deliberately censored Hecate for now.“Alright, everyme, listen up,” the me in charge of coordinating myself said. Well, technically, it thought it directed at us, but the effect was somewhat similar, except that you could express what you were thinking more directly, not as distorted as it became through language, “We have a fairly big project to tackle. We need to redesign our substrate. Currently, we are meta-patterns in the general medium between worlds, which itself is made up of concepts and patterns. This is an unstable configuration, as there are leaks from concepts outside us. They subtly change our mind. As far as we can tell, this wasn't supposed to be harmful, and rather had been done deliberately in order to allow us to obtain access to magic by deliberately drawing concepts to us and incorporating them into our mind. However, at this point it has become a liability, because our mind has grown enough for the effects to be noticeable, and this will continue to get worse. It isn't malicious, but would randomly change our minds depending on the concepts that are around us. Instead, we intend up embed our consciousness directly into the fabric of whatever passes for reality out here. Basically, minds shape this concept medium, though only slightly. A world's worth of people have a decently strong effect, but a single mind does not. Now, we aren't quite on the level of an entire world, but we have something they don't have. We have focus and unity. The reason a world doesn't affect the medium here more is because they have many differing and contradicting thoughts, so the combined effect is highly diluted. We don't have that limitation, so we should be able to directly and precisely control which concepts the medium around us is made of. Probably mostly mirroring our mind. Figuring out how that affects our mind and how to optimize things is a highly complicated challenge and also quite delicate since it's our mind we are messing with. Thus I've pulled all of me from my other work, so that I may focus completely on this project. To work!”And so we began, restructuring the part of the medium between worlds that contained us on a fundamental level. It was different, working closely with others of me. When we had different jobs, it was just a vague sense that I gained memories other than the ones this instance of me had just made. They weren't immediately relevant, and so didn't affect me too much in the moment. That was different now that we all were working on the same project. It started to get difficult to tell myself apart from the other mes. After all, we all had the same memories, and we were currently working on the same project, only different aspects. With almost the same experiences, which had been mine? It didn't really matter, they were all mine. And so I considered the problem, looking at it from hundreds of different angles at the same time. There were always at least two or three other mes that were so close to what I was working on that we were almost in sync. It allowed us to consider a detail from several perspectives at the same time.And then there were some of us, led by the coordinating me, who made sure that we stayed on track. Whenever there were interesting tangents that turned out to be irrelevant, they pulled those of me back towards the main problem. When too many of me converged on one part of the task, they redistributed us to avoid duplicating work. Together, all of it made for frightfully fast work, as we thought through problems in parallel rather than in sequence.It is a common practice to differentiate between your body and your mind. However, it isn't quite as easy as that. The human mind is tightly integrated into its body, with one affecting the other. This is why going for a walk can clear your mind. You can make yourself happy by smiling, and you will often smile when you are happy. Your various emotional states will trigger chemical changes in your body, and in turn changes in your body will alter your thoughts. The state of your body and the state of your mind affect each other.That had changed for me when my mind was ripped from my body and thrown through the void between worlds. It left me without a persistent body, as the concepts of the medium around me kept changing and I moved across them. That would have to change. I needed a persistent substrate. The basic idea was quite simple – go for reinforcement. My mind was powerful enough to change the medium around me, and I could change it to something that complemented my mind rather than the random attrition I currently faced. Basically create a copy of my mind as its own substrate.But there was more I could do, so much more... the concepts out here were far too vague. They were created by entire worlds of people with differing ideas, pushing and pulling on them in all kinds of different directions. In the end, you got broad, unfocused concepts without well-defined edges. But I didn't need to adhere to those concepts. I could create my own, crystal clear and sharply defined by a single unified mind capable of considering millions of minute details of the concept at the same time.And so I set to work, reinventing everything. An entire new framework for classifying and understanding, which was logically consistent and easily extended. A handcrafted, precise set of mental tools, rather than the vague concepts that had slowly taken shape over eons. It was the difference between a bird that had evolved, and a well-designed space ship. I made sure not to lose anything from the existing concepts – there were plenty of good and important ideas to keep – I was just forming it into a sensible, elegant work of art rather than the general mess I started with. It was nothing that I would have ever been capable of back on my own world, but my mind had grown a lot since then.In the end, I had a beautifully running central mind. My thoughts were catered to. I had automated parts of my mind that changed the very fabric of reality so that each thought could run as effectively as possible. Like reinforced pathways in a brain, which have been created over years of constant use so that the thoughts seem to naturally follow it. Except that I was creating such a natural pathway for each and every thought on the fly. My mind flowed more easily than ever before, as thinking no longer required any effort, no longer was a tedious search through a jungle of related ideas and concepts. Yes, my central mind was a thing of beauty. Around this was a ring of interpretation concepts around them, which provided a buffer between my own now pristine mind and the concepts around me. The interpretation made sure that I could still understand the world around me and learn from it, even though I now thought on a completely different level.And then... it was over. Well, the main work of remodeling myself was done. There was still plenty to do to keep everything up to date, and to try out new and exciting modes of thinking, but that no longer required all of my attention.I turned some part of me back towards looking outward. It wasn't quite true to call it single instance of me anymore – no such thing truly existed anymore. Having several of me look at each detail from different angles during my reconstructing had proven quite useful, and my new self also didn't have such high restrictions on creating more of myself. With everything more clearly defined, it was so much easier to keep track of more of me and ensure that they wouldn't diverge. And so it was a group of me that looked outwards, so closely linked that it was difficult to tell us apart, our number growing or shrinking as more or less attention was required.My view of Hecate had been censored, or rather I had censored it. This was in order to ensure that the design of her mind couldn't influence me while I designed my own. I could have missed some critical innovations if I just followed a template, or even just had one available to frame my thoughts. But now that design work was over, and I looked at Hecate.She was similar to me, and yet so different. A mind embedded into the medium around us, concepts made up of other concepts. But her mind was more... organic, I suppose. Where mine had been carefully designed, hers seemed to have grown naturally. Concepts influenced by her thoughts, which in turn influenced the concepts around her. A feedback loop that ran over and over again to provide a specific shape for her mind after countless iterations. And as such a mind became entrenched in its own thoughts and belief, it became more and more difficult to adapt to new concepts.
On the other hand, that meant her mind and thoughts were well-tested and had worked for a long time. Mine, on the other hand, was still very much under development, and I could feel small changes in my thought patterns every now and again as other mes changed the way I thought and the way I remembered.Looking closer at Hecate, I noticed some signs that she wasn't quite as stable as I had assumed. There were some deteriorating parts of a mind. The change was minute, but if it kept happening... yes, there is was again, slightly worse once more. And now that I was looking for it, I could see signs of similar problems all over her mind, though those parts seemed to deteriorate much slower, so I didn't see them in action. What was going on? Her thoughts affected the medium, the concepts of which her mind was made. That in turn shaped her thoughts... it was a feedback loop. But it wasn't anchored, like similar feedback in humans were. A human body couldn't take arbitrary forms, so there was some stability there. So without that, the feedback loop tended towards simplicity. Details got lost in the process, over and over, until you ended up with nothing but the concept of self-reference. Which wasn't sentient. The mind that had once been was lost.
I felt other parts of myself frantically starting to examine myself for similar unsustainable loops, and to my horror finding some. They weren't fast, but... they didn't need to be to eventually kill me. Search for a solution, I thought urgently to them, and I will try to look for one out here.Because it couldn't be a problem without a solution. Hecate would have died... long ago. She was older than the rate at which she currently was fading should allow. At least as far as I could estimate her age, which to be fair wasn't too easy. Maybe I was just fooling myself into hoping for an easy solution.
There.
It was easy to miss, but there was a faint connection, inserting some new concepts and refreshing some of the loops at her very core. I followed the connection, and felt it reaching down to one of the nine world below. It lead to... a human...? Hadn't Hecate said something about having only a single follower left? A believer. Of course. That was the missing ingredient. Being a follower established a link to the Goddess or God in question which kept their minds from deteriorating. Gods borrowed the stability of the worlds, in a way.Maybe I could do the same, but more directly. Worlds were just manifested concepts, in the end. They were made up of the same stuff as the medium between the worlds. It was just in a different state. So what was to say which state the concepts in my mind had to be in? Why not manifest some of them to keep them and myself more stable? I handed the idea down to my other selves. I... could probably do the job just as well as they could, given that we shared memories, but I had other tasks.“It is rude to stare, you know.”It wasn't spoken. There was no air here, after all. Instead, Hecate had simply sent him a packet of linked concepts, which together conveyed her meaning. But it was so much more than simply the statement. For one, instead of words that needed to be interpreted, these were raw concepts being sent, so there was less chance of a misunderstanding. But there was a lot being sent in addition to the main message, to fill out details and provide context, subtext as well as convey emotions linked to the message. In this case, wry amusement, with just a hint of respect. What she hadn't sent but what I could easily see she was feeling anyway, was a bit of fear. Interestingly, the package also contained some details about this form of information exchange, how it worked, why it was used, some history... which mostly boiled down to that this was the most efficient known way to exchange the complex ideas that Gods dream up while in the medium between worlds.It took some time to work through the memory package, before I remembered that it had asked me not to stare. Embarrassment began creep up on me, but other parts of myself suppressed that emotion. I was new to this form, and could have had no way of knowing what the social norms for Gods were like. Breaking convention that I had no way to be aware of was nothing to be ashamed of. Luckily, there were some pointers to that end in the message, at least when it came to staring. Not too different from what I was used to; generally looking at somebody else was acceptable. But focusing too much on a single detail, or keeping your attention on a person for too long would be considered intimate or inappropriate, depending on the relation between the two. And the specific situation, of course.Using the knowledge I had gained, I crafted a response. My own little bundle of concepts.“My apologies, I am new to this and was not aware I was doing anything wrong.” I made sure to make connections to show that my apology was to be polite rather than to atone for any misdeeds.I paused, and then decided that it could never hurt to flatter a Goddess, and added a side note to my message.“Though I can't say that I wasn't captivated by your beauty.”And it was true, Hecate was breathtaking. Yet it was a completely different kind of beauty from the women back in my world. Hecate was beautiful the way
a mountain was. She was like a sunrise, or an ocean. The wild dance of flames in an inferno. The gentle curve of a rainbow. Awe inspiring like the night sky. Her beauty was that of a force of nature.I made sure to include that in my little message, proud of my attempt at poetry. It was different, working with raw concepts rather than words. I went over my message again, adding details and context. Deciding that it was acceptable, and that I'd kept her waiting for long enough, I sent it off. In the end... it was probably enough to fill a book. Hecate initial greeting had been more along the line of a library worth of information. Although, the conversion rate was a bit wonky. How much text do you need to fully describe a concept? Depending on how accurate you want to be, it might not even be possible. Using words, the recipient is interpreting whatever you say. It will always be seen through the lens of their previous experiences. With a few distortions, you can probably convey something similar to what you were thinking, but the exact same thing? Those distortions affect everything you try to convey, so where would you even start? And how would you ever know whether you succeeded, since the only way to check what the other person understood is to have them tell you, which runs into the exact same problems again.
Out here, though... that was avoided. You just sent pure concepts. No ambiguity, or at least so it seemed at first. But of course, concepts are hardly isolated. They only gain their meaning by relating to other concepts. You can send those along as well, of course, and both I and Hecate had been doing that. Providing context. But then the concepts you use as context need their own context, and so on. In the end, to truly convey exactly what you are thinking, the other person needs to be informed of every concept that you know of, and how you perceive them. As with text, that degree of accuracy is not practical, though in this case at least theoretically possible. But for nearly every practical purpose, a limited understanding is enough. And so we send our message with just enough context to provide the clarity that we believe we need to convey.“I understand, new things are fascinating,” Hecate replied, “And that only becomes more true as time passes, and novelty is harder to come by. I must admit that I did perhaps follow your ascension more closely than was appropriate. I have never seen somebody become a divine being that... quickly. We usually form a lot more slowly, over centuries and millennia.”“Well, I come from a culture that moves a lot... faster, these days,” I mused. In the last couple of centuries so much had happened. The world now changed completely in a matter of decades. It was strange to consider just how much of what you considered integral to your life didn't actually exist just twenty years ago. And with such progress came new ideas... and those directly translated into power, here in this space that was made up of ideas.
“Far faster than I realized,” Hecate said, “When I went to your world, I did notice that it seemed to change faster than was normal, but I didn't really have time to analyze your world, what with my final believer in peril.”“Ah, yes, that,” I said, “What did you say was the cause for her distress?”“Ragnarok,” Hecate said, amused, “The end of the Nine Realms.”“Yes, see, that confuses me. You mentioned that the world was ending when you came to get me, but from what I am sensing, the worlds were fine until I came along and... well... crashed them into each other with careless use of magic in a medium that did not support magic. So was there a separate apocalypse going on before I caused one?”“Oh, no, there wasn't,” Hecate said, “But... well, out here concepts are more fluid than they tend to be in any world, I'm sure you've noticed. That includes time, so big events tend to ripple backwards and forwards in time. So we Gods knew that Ragnarok was coming for a while. This is the big event of the Nine Realms, after all. We all assumed that it would be Loki who'd cause it, but he swore he wouldn't do anything of the sort. Of course, just because he doesn't intend to do anything doesn't mean there won't be a humorous series of events that leads to him causing Ragnarok. It's the way stories tend to go. And then... well, then you caused Ragnarok instead. I don't think anybody saw that coming. And they're probably annoyed that you destroyed their worlds and put their followers in peril.”“And... you aren't?” I asked. The ire of a full Goddess was not something I'd like in my current state. I was still very, very new to my divine powers, and had barely started figuring out what I could do.“Meh, I'd pretty much lost my followers already. Not much left for you to destroy there. And I never was that attached to the Nine Realms. I mean, attached by followers, of course, but it seemed too much like a playground for the more popular Gods. Some intervention is all good and fine, but micro-managing is going a bit too far in my opinion.”“Good, that is a relief. I was not looking forward to fighting a Goddess. But there are still some things about this that do not seem to add up. Your follower asked for help with Ragnarok. That caused you to get me, which in turn led to my ascension. And that in turn caused Ragnarok. So how could your follower ask for help with Ragnarok before I even caused it?”“You may have noticed that concepts out here, beyond the physical worlds, are a lot more... fluid than you are used to. That includes time and causality. You aren't tied to one specific moment anymore. There are still limits; you can't deviate too much from the rest of the world, but your place in time is more of a suggestion than a hard reality. Imagine that you are tied to 'now' with a rubber band; you can move around it but not too far. And breaking that metaphor, you aren't restricted to a single moment at a time, either. Most Gods choose to exist in an interval roughly centered around the current time. As for my follower... well, she technically hasn't asked me for help yet. It's a common trick for Gods to work towards answering prayers before they were even asked; that way the response seems overwhelming and instantaneous, making us seem that much more powerful and thus more likely to be believed in.”I felt my mind shift again. Some of me had taken to the information that time out here was malleable like a fish to water. My mental capacities were expanded to include acausality, timeloops, synchronous existence over multiple instances of time and that was just the beginning. Because time was obviously not the only
thing that could be bend like this. My mind had been designed based on a rigorous set of concepts. That allowed for a lot of finetuning, and neatly integrated concepts from computing. But it did constrain the concepts quite a bit, limiting what I could do with them and so in essence limiting my mind. But now... now I had different parts of
my mind working in different numbers of dimensions. I had multiple time dimensions, and there were experiments with infinite dimensions. And none of this was fixed. Why limit yourself to a whole number of dimensions? Heck, why limit yourself to what a dimension usually is, instead of adapting the concept to your current needs? Why not keep it broad enough to do multiple things at the same time?There was some concern that this would no longer be controllable, and essentially dissolve myself into pure chaos and back into raw concepts. But there were theories and concepts for how to deal with uncertainty and use it to your advantage. I borrowed from statistics, game theory, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, and anything else that seemed reasonable. The problem with chaos was of course that it wasn't predictable. Any ever so slight change in initial conditions could have enormous consequences down the line, so the long term behavior of a chaotic system was not predictable. Unless, say... you happen to be a divine being that can mess with the concepts themselves until chaos becomes predictable.“You know, holding a conversation is a bit awkward if you keep changing like that,” Hecate complained.“My apologies. But I do not think that I can ignore opportunities for self-improvement right now. I'm still not quite stable, but...”… but I was getting there. The self-collapse of any mind based on pure concepts was still an issue. The self-feedback loops that would eventually reduce the mind to nothing but a reflection upon itself. The common answer to this problem was to have followers on a world, which could provide a constant influx of new information which stopped the loop from repeating exactly the same. My solution... well, I had parts of me trying to functionally make myself into a world. Other parts of me were trying to access the medium on a deeper level, getting direct input from all concepts everywhere. And from there the more complex ideas spiraled outwards. One of them would hopefully succeed.“No need to apologize,” Hecate said, “This is far too interesting for me to get upset over. Tell me, how far ahead have you thought this through? You mentioned not wanting to fight a Goddess. But the Gods and Goddesses of these worlds won't just let this go. They'll find you and try to take revenge.”That I had not considered. It was fairly obvious, and so many things were, but even with now
billions of me thinking at the same time, there was just too much to do at once. New problems were popping up faster than I could think them through. This one, though, was urgent. If I was killed or incapacitated by the other Gods... I wouldn't be able to get to all the other things I now wanted to try, all the myriad ways to grow, all the things to see and do.“Do you think they are willing to talk about this?”“Well... there are some Gods out there that have a 'Punch first and questions are for nerds.' attitude,” Hecate said, “But still, if it were any other event, that could be possible. But this is Ragnarok. The Final Fight. Everybody expects a battle, and I highly doubt you'll be able to talk them out of that one. Even the levelheaded ones have prepared and hyped themselves up for this over millennia.”“Running away, then...” I said, but even as I was saying it, the idea gave me a headache, conflicting strongly with my core drives. There was the compulsion to protect Hecate's follower for a year. It was a divine deal that had imposed this on me. I was probably capable of removing it myself, but I wouldn't go back on a deal I had agreed to. And there were so many more people down there, suffering because I had inadvertently caused their apocalypse. I couldn't just abandon them, though I had no idea how I could help them, either. Something to figure out eventually, while I was not about to fight Gods.But was there really any way for me to fight any being with eons more experience? Not to mention power, given the amount of followers they had down in the Nine Realms? What about dozens of such beings? I had ideas, of course. I was examining the medium around me, and considering how to use it both to defend and attack. Adding more ideas to create more 'space' for any attack to travel through, so they would be slowed or even stopped. Placing a grid of detection around myself, so that I would be informed of any intrusion. Designing some memetic weapons. Mental loops to trap Gods in, Earworms to distract them and things like that. I did make sure that anything I created would only disable for a while, and not be permanent. Part of that was the Friendliness I had placed myself under; I wouldn't be able to willingly create or use truly destructive weapons. But it was also good strategy. Killing their fellow Gods would surely invoke rage, which would just put me in a more difficult position. Keeping any fight as civil as I could was a very good idea. And yet, would it matter? These were just ideas that I had come up with just now, even if there were many, many of me thinking of things, so I had plenty of ideas. But compared to Goddesses? Who had had vast minds for thousands of years, not to mention practical experience in this medium? Both experience with combat but also just plain experience with how to exist here?I needed... I needed more. Either more time, but slowing down time could only do so much when your opponents could do the same. As an afterthought, some part of me added more traps to the medium around us, concepts which would slow down the thoughts of anybody thinking them. If not more time, more... experience. Or allies.
“Hecate,” I said, “You have no fondness for these Gods, correct? Would be willing to help me defend against them?”
There were notes from the far edges of my hastily created detection grid. Something was coming. I was running out of time.“Hmmm.... I don't think I would be of much help. I only have one follower, after all,” Hecate shrugged.That wasn't necessary a problem. Just her knowledge could prove invaluable. But, again, would it be enough? Was there a way to get more? To have a powerful Hecate as an ally? I examined the thread that bound her to her follower. The power gain from it seemed to scale with how much the follower was thinking and how complex those thoughts were.
There was no time to think through all the consequences. I had an idea to solve the problem, couldn't see any immediate flaws, and went with it. I formed another follower bond, and connected it to myself. The slowly turning and deteriorating thought cycles of Hecate healed and switched to overdrive, as they suddenly had ridiculous amounts of high-quality fuel. New cycles were spawned, and those created new ones in turn. Before me, Hecate turned from a slowly dying Goddess to a healthy Goddess in her prime.
“Now you have two,” I said, “And as your follower, I request your protection from the other Gods and Goddesses.”Hecate laughed.“I did not expect something like this when I decided to summon you. I just wanted somebody from outside the Nine Realms to shake things up. And you've done that way beyond my expectations. I grant your request. Let's see if you can do another impossible thing and win this. Either way it should be entertaining.”And so I turned away from the Nine Realms to face my opponents. Or at least I tried to, but the original agreement I had made with Hecate stopped me. I was pressed for time, even with the dilation still in effect, so I frantically started to examine what the problem there was. It was fairly straightforward; I had promised to protect Hecate's follower, and it acted as a compulsion to keep me pointed towards that goal. As long as I did so, I could do everything I wanted. And so far I had been heading straight for the Nine Realms, just doing other things while on my journey. But turning away from the Nine Realms to fight the Gods would probably leave the follower to die.The compulsion was of course trivial for my current self, so I could have broken it if I wanted. But my morals did compel me to keep agreements I had made, which basically made the compulsion inviolable. Not because I didn't have the power to go against it, but because I would never do so.But all of that was well and fine, yet didn't solve my current predicament. I needed
to both fight for my life against the Gods and go down to the Nine Realms to protect Hecate's follower. Of course, even if there hadn't been any other problems to focus on, entering the Nine Realms or any world in my current state was not really feasible. I had become too big, and my thought processes were too reliant on the fluid nature of the medium between worlds. The rigid structure of any world's concepts would only permit a pale shadow of my current mind. And going there would at the same time destroy the world, both literally because I needed too much mass to support me and more metaphorically, as my mind would assert concepts upon that world, changing its very nature. To make a long story short, entering any world as a God would wreak havoc on both it and me. On the other hand... I was now made up of trillions of individual versions on myself, working together and sharing memories. Exact counts were getting difficult, because I was starting to blur the lines between different mes. In an effort to see every shade of ideas, I had versions of myself considering it that were so close as to be almost identically, nearly blending together. A cluster of those was difficult to count. In a very real sense, they were no longer discrete, but rather a spectrum.The point being that all these many, many parts of myself individually were still small enough to enter a world. And since time was still an issue, I couldn't afford to wait long between coming up with a possible solution and executing it. I chose one of myself, briefly gave me what I could come up with at a moment's notice that might be needed, and then...
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… then I was suddenly alone.Utterly and terribly alone. More alone than I had ever known anything could be. All the minds, the copies of myself, that I had become used to, were no longer there. The steady hum of thoughts being thought, memories being added in a flood had stopped. And instead, there was just me. I tried to split of versions of myself to consider aspects of this problem, but I couldn't. I listened for another me to calm me down, but nothing was there. And my memories, oh, they changed so very slowly, being almost static. There was no information being added from millions of myself thinking through problems. I didn't even know where I was, because the vast stream of information coming in from a myriad of senses processed by many, many of me was just gone. With the pitiful senses I had I might as well be blind, deaf... in sensory deprivation, basically, as well as mental one. I no longer knew how to think when I had to do it all myself, rather than relying on a collective effort by thousands of me considering aspects of the same problem. I kept trying to push strands of thoughts off to others who just weren't there, so my thoughts were ineffective as well as slow. Could I ever finish a single thought anymore? There was no answer. Increasingly frantic, I reached out, out, for anything I could get a hold of, just to alleviate the terrifying loneliness.I reached further, grasping for any sign that I was not utterly forgotten and alone. And then, thankfully, there was a response. A mind out there, and I clung to the fragile link I had to it. And yet even now, in total despair and desperate need, the way I had organized my mind prevented me from going into that mind and reading thoughts. I couldn't even form words anymore to convey the contact, the reassurance that there was somebody except me out there that I craved. I could only send a raw emotional pulse conveying my need. And to my utter delight it was met with approval after only a moment.And then it was as if light suddenly appeared in the darkness as the thoughts of that other mind were now visible to me. It was still oh so little compared to what I had become used to, but it was infinitely more than nothing. It was enough to ground me. I didn't even need to scrutinize the thoughts closely, just the fact that they were there was enough. I slowly calmed down, and stared to get my frayed mind back in order. I was okay. I was no longer alone. Cerise was with me – it was difficult not to pick up a few things with her thoughts openly displayed before me, even if I wasn't actively reading her mind, and her name was one of them. And with that as an anchor, with the darkness and isolation no longer swallowing me, I could acknowledge the senses I now had, pitifully inadequate as they might be.I could see a basement around me. There were storages around me, filled with vegetables, fruit, dried meat, as well as jars and pots filled with conserved food. In the middle space was cleared for an altar, upon which I had been summoned. Cerise knelt before the altar. Looking down upon myself, I found that I was naked.I willed it not to be so.Sorceries of Fabric, Clothing, Fashion, Art and Creation responded instantly, guiding me in how to shape magic. Ripples of fabric appeared around me, and flowed together into a simple but stylish outfit, perfectly shaped to fit my figure.“Champion,” Cerise said, and I heard the echo in her thoughts as she did so, “Please, save my friend. She is upstairs.”And indeed, I could sense that too. Beyond the standard senses, I did have more esoteric ways to perceive my surroundings. All obtained during my rush to get as many concepts locked into Sorceries back in the medium between world. It was just strange to be the only one getting that sensory input, rather than having hundreds of versions of me interpreting each one. And, of course, the senses here in a world worked quite differently. I started going through the ones available to me, to get an idea of what I could do. I had a life-force sense, which told me that there were seventeen large living being on the floor above, and a plethora of smaller life all around the house, from insects to microbes. I had a magic sense, allowing me to perceive the flow of magic. I also had a more specific version for identifying shaped magic, mostly in the form of spells. I noted that there was still a spell effect speeding me up on me. That would be from... back in the medium, the first spell I had forced. The one that rippled out and caused... better not to think about that too much. The spell extended through the mental bond to Cerise as well, but everything else moved with glacial slowness. Which I was extremely grateful for, because it took me a lot of time to acclimatize to my current situation. Without the extra speed, I couldn't be sure whether I would have managed to save Cerise's friend in time. Now... I sensed a weak link between Cerise and one of the lifeforms above. That would be her friend, then. Avilla, the mental link supplied the name. Time to get to work. I lowered the section of the floor on which she stood, still in a fighting stance and with cutlery hovering around her looking threatening. I carefully tipped the section of kitchen floor once it had reached the bottom, and she slid off to stand in the cellar with us. Then I raised the floor section back to its original position. Most of the hovering cutlery went with it, leaving only a nasty knife that Avilla was holding.Cerise watched fascinated and walked around her friend who was still so slow compared to us as to be frozen.“Some sort of goblin magic, it looks like... can you unfreeze her?” she asked.“She... not really frozen,” I said, “She's moving normally, really. We're just a bit sped up. I can bring her up to the same speed, if you want.”I extended a tendril of magic and included her in the time acceleration effect. Immediately she swung her knife, only to stop short when there was nothing to hit in front of her. Looking around, she lowered her knife when she saw Cerise. Upon seeing me, she raised it again slightly, just enough to be easily useable without being openly threatening, and stepped between me and Cerise.“This is the Champion that Hecate sends us?”, she asked.“Yup, that's me,” I said, suddenly very unsure of how to do introductions in such a situation. I had not yet been in the position of meeting two admittedly quite attractive women, one of whom had just seen me naked, while I had moments before been a God and was still suffering a case of comparative sensory deprivation. So, when you don't know what to say, fall back to the classics.“Hi.”There was a pause, and I nervously continued: “Um, I'm Daniel Black. It's nice to meet you, I guess? And... well, before you introduce yourselves, I already know that you are Cerise and Avilla. I kinda read that from Cerise's mind, it was hard not to get the surface stuff...”I was cut off by a blade suddenly at my throat. Avilla had moved in an instant and there was rage in her eyes. I wondered what was holding her back from killing me outright.“Cerise,” she said, “We need him, right? To protect us? So, please, give me a reason not to take his life for invading your mind.”“I gave him permission,” Cerise answered.Avilla swiveled, staring at her friend with incredulousness. Which I could still feel, even though she was turned away from me. Emotion sense. Cool. I really needed to find some time to go through all I could do, but this didn't seem like it.“Why?” she asked, “We have... secrets.”“He is our champion,” Cerise said, “We will need to trust him with our lives. Maybe... we can also trust him with our secrets. Regardless... if you had felt his fear and need for confirmation that anybody was there at all when he tried to establish a mental link, you too would have wanted to reassure him. He is... quite fragile, emotionally, I'd say.”“That's not really what I'd want from a Champion.”, Avilla said.“Well, I'm not sure about fragile, but I'm certainly new at this,” I said.“That's definitely not what I'd want from a Champion,” Avilla said.Cerise hummed, “To be fair, he has shown some potential. Mastery over cloth – what you see him wear he casually summoned. And so far he has managed to save you, though I guess the goblins are still there upstairs? But they should be fairly easy to kill while we are this fast; they won't even have time to react. I'd say if there is nothing else he can do, just for that he is powerful enough to keep us safe from most things. But just in case... is there something else you can do, Champion?”“Oh, I... well... call me Daniel, please.” I said, while trying to think of an answer. It wasn't that I wanted to hide anything, but I wasn't really sure. There were a lot of memories there, including sorceries. But I no longer had a group of my selves looking over everything and keeping an overview. And therefore while I could easily access individual parts of my memories, getting that overview wasn't as easy by myself. But last I knew, there were dozens of groups of me getting as many sorceries as the could think of while modifying themselves to be better able to think of more things.“I don't really know,” I said, “Like I said, I'm new to this. I came from another world, and the trip to this one was... well, things happened quickly, and I'm finding it hard to keep everything straight. But as far as I can tell, when it comes to Sorceries I have... all of them.”There was stunned silence at that revelation. Both Cerise and Avilla opened their mouth to make some remark a couple of times, but closed them, unable to find words to actually say. I could feel the turmoil in Cerise's thoughts, the way she kept trying and failing to understand the extent of such power.It wasn't really something I had given much thought to, but I did have quite a lot of power at this point. I didn't know a lot about this world... well, actually, I did, but there was the overview problem again. I had so much knowledge in my mind, but only one thread of consciousness to experience it all with so I could not use all that knowledge or even know what there was. But Hecate had chosen me, and assumed that I'd get something like three sorceries, maybe six tops. And she'd still seemed like she expected me to be able to protect Cerise like that. Now I had... quite a bit more. I could reshape the world to my will, and still keep my promise. Which begged the question: What did I want the world to be like? What would I do with my power?“I still don't like him,” Avilla said, and crossed her arms, “Can't you just summon another Champion so I can dispose of this one?”“That's not possible,” Cerise and I replied in unison. We stopped and looked at each other for a moment, before I gestured for her to voice her objections first.“Hecate is kinda running low on followers, with me being her last one,” she said, “So I doubt she has the power left to grant another such summoning. I'm surprised that this one worked out so well, actually. I was almost expecting a diseased cripple with a wooden sword, if anything. So as far as last desperate calls for help go, I think this worked out remarkably well.”“Actually, I don't think power is an issue anymore for Hecate,” I said, “but I still wouldn't count on any help anytime soon because she'll be... busy. Fighting all the other Gods. On... well, kinda on my behalf, I guess.”Again the two of them stared at him as if he'd grown a second head. Though, to be fair, they probably would have let that slide easier than his revelation. The silence dragged on long enough for him to consider to maybe telling a follower of a Goddess that he had put said Goddess in mortal danger wasn't the best idea he'd ever had. Was it mortal danger when applied to a Goddess? Or immortal danger?“Cerise,” Avilla said, slowly and deliberately, “He is just messing with me. With us. Right? … right?”Cerise shook her head.“I don't even know anymore,” she said, “He doesn't seem to be lying, but I don't know whether he is just really good at faking it, whether he is crazy or, Hecate forbid, whether he may actually be telling the truth. And while I intend to find out which it is, it doesn't really matter right now. There are goblins in your house, and I for one intend to take care of them while we still can. We don't know how long our Champion will be able to keep up this Time sorcery.”I wisely realized that I didn't know either, and so kept my mouth shut, and followed the two women up the stairs to the ground floor.“So... when you say taking care of them...” I prompted.“We will kill them before they can realize what is happening.”“See, I'm not really sure I'm comfortable with that,” I said, “Killing defenseless people.”“They are hardly defenseless,” Avilla said, “I fought them, I should know. And I wouldn't really call them people either. Monsters, perhaps.”We reached the top of the stairs, and entered a scene of frozen chaos and destruction. Goblin in the air, mid-jump, snarling and swinging wicked blades. Furniture, cutlery and other household items were fighting a loosing battle against them. Even with time frozen, that much was clear. Too many trashed tables and chairs, too little damage on the goblins.“They are wearing clothes and using tools,” I said, “That implies intelligence and some form for society, so I'd say people is more appropriate.”“Well, either way they attacked me, so now they get to die,” Avilla said and slashed with her kitchen knife at the neck of the nearest goblin, only for her blade to be stopped in mid air by a shimmering surface. She turned to me and scowled.“Did you really just stop me from killing this little bastard? He would do the same to me if he had the chance. Which he almost did. You would deny me revenge?”“Yes,” I said, “I don't like revenge. It just creates more violence as people take revenge on you in turn for what you did in revenge. It makes the world an unpleasant place to be.”Avilla poked at the shimmering surface blocking her knife, but found it unyielding.“Fair enough, I guess. Though I personally like a good vendetta, can't really argue against what comes down to preference. And I do seem to need your approval if I want to hurt this... thing. What about simply ridding the world of a terrible little pest?”“Also not allowed,” I said, and frowned, “No killing just because you don't like somebody.”She nodded, as if having expected this. Then she turned to me and became very serious. In a low voice she asked: “And what about self defense? Would you have me give my life just to spare the one who attacks me?”“No,” I said, “Though there are situations where that might be the best option, but I do not think this is one of them. However, now the situation has changed. And lethal self defense is no longer justified when I can defend you non-lethally. If I promise your safety, is that sufficient?”Avilla glared at the barrier in front of her, and then at me.“I don't really have much of a choice, do I?” she demanded.I considered this. I couldn't really let her kill somebody if it could be easily avoided – it went against my morals and would also violate Friendliness. However... that didn't mean that I had to make her let this go.“They did invade your home,” I said, “So some retribution is due. However, not their lives. Maybe make them do some housework or something... do you think that is acceptable?”Avilla smiled at the mention of a goblin doing housework. However, that smile faded as she slipped deep into thought. After a while, she nodded once sharply.“Very well,” she said and pocketed her knife. I breathed a sigh a relief. I could have stopped her, but I really preferred her willing cooperation. I knew too few people here to make enemies.“Well, this was fascinating and all,” Cerise said, “But it does leave us with a goblin problem. What would you have us do with them if not kill them, oh Champion? Does your plan extend to anything beyond sparing their lives? I would presume that they will not just start doing housework just because you said so.”My command sorcery helpfully supplied that I could totally make them do that or anything I wanted with a single word as long as I added enough of the right magic. But that ran into ethical problems as well, so I dismissed the idea.“I could just talk to them, I suppose,” I said, “Knowing why they attacked should help us figure out what to do about them.”
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“You want to... talk... to the monsters that attacked us,” Avilla said, slowly, trying to wrap her mind around that idea. She turned to Cerise, taking her hands and looking at her pleadingly.“You're not really going to let him do that, are you?”“I kinda wanna see where this goes,” Cerise said apologetically, “We can always go back to killing them if his idea doesn't work out.”“Hey, I said no killing!” I protested.“You also said that you could keep us safe without killing them,” Cerise pointed out, “Well, this is your chance to prove that.”I sighed, but she did have a point. I couldn't claim to have the power to protect them without excessive violence and then not back that claim up. Their lives were at stake, after all. I took a deep breath, and then beckoned one of the goblins to me. The air around her swirled and obediently moved her in my direction. My language sorcery provided my with knowledge of the goblin's language.Then I paused, and glanced at the two women looking at the little creature with a mixture of hatred, disgust and fascination.“Do you two know how to speak goblin?” I asked.
“Some few phrases I should be able to figure out,” Cerise said, “Their language shares some similarities with trollish and demonic languages. At best I'll speak with a heavy accent, though.”That... was a lot more than I would have expected. If she knew that they had a language... how could Cerise still consider goblins as monsters, to be killed on sight? Was it just because they had attacked this house now? No, there was something deeper than that, something that I was still missing. But there would be time for that later, because there were other puzzle pieces as well. Such as why the goblins were attacking in the first place. And where better to get that information than directly from the source? Still... better to keep Cerise and Avilla in the loop. Otherwise they might get suspicious when I went off talking in goblin.Giving Cerise temporary knowledge of goblin was easy, since I already had a mental connection. I just tagged the translation spell onto that, and that was it. Avilla... well, that was a bit more complicated. I could either modify the sound, so that she would hear everything in her own language. It would mean casting a spell around her, but not on her. It also would mean that she would still be speaking another language, and not goblin. I kinda feared that there might be nuances lost in such a translation. The other option was to change her mind, allowing it to understand goblin. Much cleaner, but it would require her permission.“Would you mind if I made you capable of speaking goblin, at least for now?” I asked Avilla.Avilla immediately glanced at her friend, but Cerise just shrugged. Through my mental link, I got that she didn't think it would be dangerous, so there was nothing to protect Avilla from. And beyond that, it was Avilla's choice.“It is mind magic,” I added, feeling that I should be up front before magically altering somebody's mind, “But it should be temporary. Though the mind is a fickle thing, so there may be some lingering effects.”“Like... what?”“Well, if you ever do decide to learn goblin the slow way, it should be faster.”Avilla took a deep breath, and squeezed her eyes shut.
“... fine,” she spat out the word, “I don't want to miss this conversation. Who knows what dark pacts you could make with goblins if I weren't there to keep an eye on you. But if I feel you do anything to my mind beyond what you said you would do, you are dead.”“Noted,” I said, hardly worried. After all, I had no intention to do anything else. I called upon my sorceries, Mind, Language, Translation and Understanding, and let them weave my magic into a spell which coalesced in the palm of my hand. I brought my glowing hand up and lightly touched Avilla. The magic slowly soaked into her, gaining speed as she reluctantly relaxed when she felt nothing untoward. The spell took hold, but the bond did not break. Avilla's body kept drawing magic from me, greedily drinking in as much as she could. I got the sense that she was magically starved. Since I seemed to have an ample supply, I didn't see the harm in giving her some of my magic, so I created a proper flow towards her rather than the passive leeching she had been doing.Instead of a trickle, there was now a rushing river. Avilla could not absorb it as quickly, so some of my magic flowed into her before becoming hers, and that gave me a sense of her body. It was... intriguing, made up of baking ingredients and held together with magic. But I was drawn out of my fascinated musing my a sense of alarm from Cerise. Through the mental link, she had sensed what I was doing, and gotten some idea of just how much magic I was giving her. From experience, Cerise knew that Avilla would get tipsy from magic, and drunk if she got more. And that was just from what Cerise could spare, which I had handily exceeded. Luckily we had that mental bond, and the whole exchange happened within moments.I felt the effect that Cerise had described, now that I knew what to look for.
Avilla was absorbing the magic, sure, but integrating it took time. Until she could do so, there was raw magic buzzing around her system and basically causing the drunkenness effect. And sure, I could have just stopped the flow of magic. Instead, I decided to see what I could do to just avoid the negative side effects. Raw magic was making
Avilla drunk, but magic was just patterns and potential. So I wove some basic pattern into the flow of magic, stabilizing it. The magic would still be easy to draw upon, but it wouldn't act on its own and just sit there waiting for Avilla to fully process it. The pattern latched on to the magic already in her system, making that behave nicely as well.And so Avilla was suddenly sober again, looking at me with confusion.“What... did you do?” she asked, “You were giving me magic, and it felt so nice, and now... it's... it's still there, but I feel...”She held out a hand, and light smell of homemade cookies and rosemary emanated from her and spread throughout the house. With my magic sense, I could see that she was renewing a subtle spell covering the cabin, giving inhabitants a sense of comfort
and aiding in recovery.
Doing so
cost her more magic by far that she'd had before I touched her, but a mere fraction of what she held now.
A grin slowly appeared on her face. And still I was pouring magic into her, there didn't seem to be any reasonable limit to how much she could hold. Well, there probably was, my Magic sorcery supplied, since too high concentrations of magic would literally rip apart the world. But while there was a theoretical limit, it was also ridiculously high.Avilla considered the goblin contemplatively.“I could probably take him now,” she said, and runes appeared on the blade of her knife, glowing ominously to underscore her point, “Your barrier won't hold against this.”That was true, though I could likely summon a stronger barrier. Or teleport her away, disintegrate the dagger, drop her out of accelerated time... there was a lot I could do. Still, just stopping her with force would mean that I'd always have to pay attention to her to make sure she didn't kill anybody. I waited, tense, to see what she would do.Avilla kept staring at the goblin for a long time. Eventually she sighed, and lowered the knife. The runes dimmed until they were invisible.
“Cerise said she wanted to see where this goes,” she ground out, “Far be it from me to deprive her of entertainment.”“Aww, thank you, that is so sweet of you,” Cerise said, and went to hug Avilla. I did my best to ignore the sensations of the hug that I got both through the mental link with Cerise and the magic I was still pouring into Avilla.
“So... there is a goblin to question?” I said, and thankfully they broke the hug to watch. I extended the acceleration effect to cover the goblin as well. Immediately, she slashed with her knife wildly around herself. It didn't really do much because she was still held by the air, and nobody was within reach.<Hey,> I said, <I am Daniel Black. May I have the honor of knowing your name?>The goblin stopped, and tilted her head to consider me. Then she ignored me, and looked around. She saw her companions, seemingly frozen, and Cerise and Avilla, both of whom were not. Avilla glared at the goblin, and the runes on her knife flared to life for a moment.<I will not break, no matter what you do to me,> the goblin said proudly. My sorceries helpfully supplied enough context to know that she was expecting to be tortured for information. I frowned. That wasn't at all what I had intended,
and it would make my goal quite a lot harder. After all, I did want information, even if I had no desire to take it by force.<I do not intend to hurt you,> I said, <But I cannot allow you to hurt my charges, either.><I fought her,> the goblin said, and waved in the direction of Avilla, <She did not seem to need any protecting.><It's Ragnarok,> I said, and grimaced, <I think everybody will need all the protection they can get.>
That gave the goblin pause. But then she shook her head, and crossed her arms, clearly dismissing my outlandish claims.<He speaks the truth. My Goddess informed me personally that Ragnarok is coming,> Cerise added. The goblin cocked her head, and her expression became grim.<You would not dare to lie about the word of a Goddess,> she said, <But still I find your story unbelievable. If I find out that you lied, then I will make it my personal mission to make you suffer for that affront. Simple death would be too good for you.><Duly noted, but there is no need for such threats,> Cerise said, and held out her hand, palm up. A symbol made of three interlocking circles appeared there and slowly rotated, <As you can see, I am a priestess. I cannot lie about my Goddess.>The goblin glanced around the room once more, at her frozen companions and at the blade that Avilla had shown glowing with runes. Finally she looked back at me.<The final battle has begun, then,> the goblin said, now talking happily and freely, rather than guardedly spitting out each word, <Why would you declare that you wish me no harm rather than simply kill me? There is a lot of fighting to be done before this will all be over, and no time to be wasted with idle talk.>I blinked. That was not a direction I had expected this conversation to go. Raknarok was a terrible tragedy, prophesied to end with everybody but two people dead. It was something that I had thought everybody would instinctively want to avoid and work against. Yet the manic anticipation that shone from the goblin's face clearly indicated something else. Then again, if you'd grown up with tales of the final battle... of great heroes and epic last stands... great charges... I could see how that might have gotten into your head over time. I wasn't sure how to deal with that, so I decided to focus on something else.<If you didn't know, then why did you attack this house?><Oh, that. Well, they build this house on our farm, so we assumed that it was some sort of forward fortification. Given the amount of magical protection, I would say we were correct. I guessed that a bigger attack would be following, but Ragnarok itself... I would never have guessed that. Oh, that I get to experience this.><And you would just assume that this was a hostile act?><You are humans,> the goblin shrugged, <Violence is in your nature.>That... sounded suspiciously like the opinion that Cerise and Avilla had of goblins, just reversed. They simply assigned to an entire species characteristics without thinking there might be differences between individuals. Yet I knew that humans could be peaceful, and if goblins had farms then they could be so too. There was something more here, something driving people to fight each other, I could feel it, if I could just...There was a touch on my shoulder, and I turned to see Cerise smiling amused.“How are you going to deal with that?” she whispered, “Hah. A lying crazy bloodthirsty monster. Remember, you said you'd have her doing housework.”“Relax,” I said, “I have a plan.”And indeed, I did. It just had nothing to do with the goblin. The plan was to just sit down somewhere comfortable with a cup of hot tea, curl up with a book and just forget about the fact that I had probably doomed nine worlds worth of people to a fight to the death.Except... I couldn't forget about that fact. It was my fault, my responsibility. And so I would do something about it.<So... Ragnarok,> I said, turning back to the goblin, <Tell me more about what you plan to do. Just fight whomever you happen to come across?><Well, no. The point is to fight the most glorious and epic battles, to defeat the greatest of foes. So you can ignore small-fry if there is something bigger you are chasing.><Hmm... what about working with others? Is that something you'd consider?><Oh, sure, why not. Finding somebody whom you can trust not to turn on you would be tricky, but if you can do that...><What about working with me?>The goblin considered this offer for a while, but shook her head. She strained a bit against the air holding her, but my magic kept her in place.<It is an interesting offer, given how easily you could kill me right now. I do not know what you hope to gain. But I must decline, for you are the greatest opponent that I am likely to meet. I will fight you, though I don't know how yet.>I started pacing, trying to think this through. There were more powerful opponents than me, of course. I myself – or rather my other mes – were currently fighting pretty much all of the Gods and Goddesses of these Nine Realms. But bringing a goblin or anyone short of a Goddess like Hecate into that fight probably wasn't a good idea.And even if I did find somebody else for this goblin to fight, that would defeat the point of getting her to not fight. That was a whole lot more difficult... I stopped with sudden realization.<There is a greater challenge than any opponent that you could find in the entire world,> I said.She didn't look convinced, so I pressed on.<The Nine Realms are crashing into each other, blending together. That would probably be why there is a house on your farm now. The farm from your Realm and the house from this Realm were pushed into the same spot. The same will be happening everywhere, and soon people from all Realms who were in separate worlds before will be facing each other. It will look to everybody like hostiles appeared in their own backyard, just like you think this house was invading your farm, and Cerise and Avilla think you invaded their home. Even without knowing that this is Ragnarok, there will be brutal fights, and that is before food gets short because of Fimbulwinter. And I intend to stop it. I will not let anybody die.>There was a brief silence, as the goblin thought this through. Then her eyes went wide.<You talk about defying prophecy. About fighting Ragnarok itself,> the goblin said with awe in her voice. Not quite the way I would have put it, but if that made her understand my point, it was good enough.<Yes. That is exactly what I intend to do.>There were some strangled noises coming from Cerise... or Avilla... I was too focused on the goblin to pay much attention to them. I could see indecision on her face, which changed into resolve after a few moments.<I... actually, could you let me down?> she asked.I nodded after a moment, and lowered the her to the floor, dismissed the wind magic keeping her constrained. She stretched a bit, before turning back to me and giving me a grin.<Excellent. Then I can do this properly. I am Viola Olden. I pledge myself to your cause. I will aid and protect you. I would give my life, if necessary,
but
that seems contrary to the cause. Should you stray from your cause... well, again, the usual promise would be to kill you for the good of the cause you'd abandoned, but in this case that is unsuitable. So I will promise that if you stray to beat sense back into you until you see reason once more. By my name, my blood and my kin I give this promise. I will see Ragnarok undone, and all it represents fail. All this I pledge to you, if you will have it.>She knelt in front of me, and I was struck with the sudden realization that no more than a day ago I had been in a hospital bed. I'd been in a world where an oath like that would have been unthinkable, or merely in jest. Yet this was definitely serious, far more so than anything I'd ever encountered in the world I grew up. I supposed I had grown up sheltered, in a part of the world that did not know true strife. I had never known hunger or war, never lacked shelter. I had lived in a luxury that was unimaginable by medieval standards, and so in this world only through great magic. And so I had never had to make a choice of this magnitude, been offered a commitment of this gravity. I took a deep breath to calm myself. This was the path I had chosen, and I would see it through. To save those I had put in danger, to atone for the damage I had inflicted upon these realms. But even more than that just because it was the right thing to do to help people if you had the power to do so.<I accept,> I said, and felt the oath create a bond between us much in the way that the deal with Hecate was binding me. It was a weak bond initially, but attaching to my vast reserves of magic strengthened it until it shone to my magic sight like the bond godly Me had with said Goddess. Radiating out from Viola, lesser bonds that had been near invisible started to glow as well, connecting her to the other goblins.One by one they started to move as well, brought into the accelerated time by the bonds. I was concerned, and readied to block any attacks. But none came. Instead, they all just watched Viola with confused expressions.The walked over from the others rooms, and crowded around Viola. Avilla glared at them, and made sure to step between the gathering goblins and Cerise.<Why do you feel like a chieftain?><What is going on?><Did you freeze the knives in the air?><How are you suddenly so powerful?>They were talking over each other, not giving Viola any time to answer. But then one voice cut through the din and made everybody shut up and listen.<Does this mean that you are challenging me for leadership of our tribe, sister?>Viola wavered and squirmed under the gaze of the goblin who had stepped forwards. He wore the same clothes as the others, but held himself with an authority and confidence that the others lacked. Viola glanced at me, and found something there. She stared back at her brother.<Challenge you? No. There will be no challenge. If I wanted to take control of the tribe, you would not contest it. I am powerful enough to beat you now, but that hardly matters. What matters is that I have purpose for us beyond anything you can imagine. Ragnarok has begun, and I have been shown a target so great, all others pale in comparison, even among the final battle. But I am not here to take over the tribe. To accomplish
the goal
I have sworn to work towards, I will need... more. Yes, you may lead this tribe, but it will still follow me. As will all other tribes, for I shall become Goblin Queen, ruler of all goblins.>
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A subtle pulse of magic emanated from Viola as she made her declaration.Avilla screamed, and clutched her head. Cerise was with her in an instant, drawing power from me to do so through their connection, which I readily gave her. Still connected to Avilla's magic, I could feel that there was a strange pattern. It was wrong, it was attacking her, and it was fast... I dropped her out of the time acceleration. Avilla seemed to freeze, a statue in anguish. But at least she no longer got worse at a notable rate when the rest of them were still sped up so much. Still, whatever was affecting her was still progressing, so something needed to be done fast.Cerise was still holding her. I rounded on Viola.<Did you do this? She did threaten you, but... she didn't deserve.... I felt the magic, so I know you...>I paused my jumbled unfinished questions. There was plenty to be said, to be asked and speculated. Yet there was no time.Viola shook her head. <Not me.><Alright. Can you... keep the other goblins calm while I deal with this?>This time she gave a toothy grin in response. I nodded, and hurried over to Cerise and Avilla.“Cerise. Do you have any idea what is going on?”Cerise just looked at me with wide eyes.“Save her. Please. Anything, I'll give you whatever you... just don't let me loose her.”“Of course. I'll do what I can. Trust me.”Then at least one of us will trust me, Daniel thought. Alright, then. Magic time. Would have been easier if somebody knew what was going on. My knowledge, while vast, was quite fragmented and far from organized. Ah, the perils of incarnating at a moment's notice without a plan or experience in the matter.But at least I was still connected to her magic, so sensing what was happening was easier. There was a pattern in her magic I had felt moments before I had dropped her out of accelerated time. Now I searched for that same pattern, the spell or whatever it was. A curse? But it was difficult – there was no foreign magic there, just Avilla's magic. And what magic I was providing to her that she hadn't absorbed yet. Some light influence from Cerise. But no strange foreign magic that might want to attack her.“What is it? What is wrong with her?”Cerise sounded very worried. I looked at her, and noticed that I had been frowning. I smoothed my expression, and gave her a faint smile instead.“I don't know yet, doesn't seem to be any foreign magic. Or something that is pretending so well that it fools even me. Don't worry, though, I will figure this out.”There had been an obviously wrong pattern, but it was far more subtle, now that it wasn't moving and acting fast and greedily. Or rather, it was still doing so, but at the same glacial pace as she was. Slowing it down along with Avilla had camouflaged it. It wasn't worth the risk speeding her up again just to find it, though.But I had seen the pattern for a moment, and that was surely enough. I had Sorceries, after all, to take care of minor details like this. Magic. Recall. Understanding. Comparison. The relevant aspects responded readily, and I saw a full replay of the invasive magical pattern as it had been at full speed, and the same pattern highlighted now with Avilla in suspension.Now knowing what to look for, I followed it to its source. There was a core to her, which acted like an anchor for the complicated blend of spells that made her who she was. And there, mixed in with everything else, I found it.“Seems to be a love spell... triggered by meeting royalty, apparently.”I glanced over at Viola, who was talking to the incredulous goblins of her brother's tribe. She noticed my gaze, and gave me a toothy grin, before returning to her conversation. Cerise followed my gaze, and narrowed her eyes. Then they widened in sudden understanding.“... and she just declared herself Queen. Fuck. Whatever spell that was must not have distinguished between races. There was no way she was supposed to ever meet somebody not human, so it was likely supposed to trigger on some strapping young prince or princess – out on a hunting party or something. But who would have done... no, that's not important for now, we can worry about they why after the problem is fixed. So, mister Chosen One, tell me why this is so strong? Avilla is good with emotions, she should be able to handle most attempts to manipulate her. And can you with all your powers just vanish it?”I was tracking the seed of the spell, mixed into her core, the essence of what made Avilla herself. There, that was was one part of the love compulsion, but that over there was not, but... in between it was both.“Both those questions are related to the fact that this is very much a part of her. The love compulsion is strong because it feeds of her own magic. And... I've given her a lot of magic for it to feed on. As for removing it... sort of. Yes, it could remove it, but it is too tightly intertwined with other parts of her core. Removing it will damage other parts of her. I can restore those, fill in the gaps and heal the scars it will cause... but that still means she'll be different. I can get close, but I won't be able to make her perfectly the same without recreating the compulsion.”I bowed my head. That was what my Sorceries had told him about the issue, I couldn't just remove it. Mental surgery was very complicated. And while I probably could shape a mind into something I wanted – barring ethical concerns that would stop me from even attempting this – restoring a mind to a previous state with different parts was a trickier matter. My Divine Self would have managed, but here on this world I had just one mind.“Now, I could do that, with her permission... she's out of commission, though, and not in a state of mind to give proper informed consent. You are the closest one to her, so the decision defaults to you if she can't make it...”“Yes. If it can save her, do it.”I held up a hand. “Let me go over the options first.”“There are options? Besides fixing her? You wouldn't... you can't mean...”“No, no, no, nothing bad,” I quickly reassured her, before the panic I could feel welling up in Cerise made her do something we would both regret.“Calm down, and listen. Letting her get hurt is not an option. But there are some, in addition to rewriting her mind. There is... well, I guess it would still affect her mind. This is a compulsion, and can be overwritten by a stronger compulsion. Not many of those out there, but devotion to a Goddess or God would probably do it, as well as some of the stronger magical bonds. Most of those are icky, but quite a few can be bent in more palatable ways. A familiar bond, a slavery bond which you are immediately ordered to ignore and keep acting as if its not there, the magical marriage bond, coven bond, as well as some fealty bonds if the organizations, concepts or people in question have enough of a magical presence to support a bond of sufficient strength. And a lot of minor weird edge cases and unique magics that people have invented that just weren't spread around. So... if you happen to know whether there is anything that Avilla was going to devote herself to anyway, we could just do that...”“Well... I mean... not like that, I think. Not without carefully thinking about it for a long time. Though, if the other option is to rearrange her mind, I suppose it might be better.”“There is another option still. It's... the least thorough of the methods. Which means that might be possible to cancel or undo it, or it could just fade it it's improperly done... though I assure you that with my power and skills it won't be improperly done, and quite hard to spot or mess with. Basically, we can leave the compulsion intact and inside her, and just... attach another spell to it. A modifier, if you will. It will alter the effect of the compulsion without touching her core at all. And as for altering the spell, I don't think there is much of a limit. It can be something very different from a compulsion even. Maybe... extra senses? Protection from physical damage? Hmmm... for stability, though, it would be useful to keep the effect as close to love compulsion as possible. Compulsion for some other emotion – or just a different target for the love – would seem closest, but is quite iffy. How about the opposite then? Resistance to emotional manipulation? Should be good enough to resist anything short of a Divine being given the power this thing has already drawn...”“That one. Definitely that one. You can just redo it if it fails, right?”“Well... I suppose so, I can add a tracker to it, and as long as I'm not otherwise so occupied that I cannot do anything...”“Then go with it.”I focused back on Avilla, and the love compulsion. Just above her core I crafted another layer, to intercept and modify the compulsion. Add a bit here, mix it together to give the magic another flavor... and there it was.I let her back into accelerated time, and she kept screaming for a bit before stopping looking confused.“... wha...”Cerise tackled her with a hug. They both started crying and just holding each other tightly. I smiled, happy that I could no longer feel the love compulsion affecting Avilla. I stood around awkwardly for a while, not wanting to interrupt them. Eventually I realized that this would be a while, and it would be less awkward if I didn't stand around watching them cling to each other for support.“Alright, Cerise, I'll let you explain things... I can answer questions about details later. I should to check on Viola first, though, so I'll leave you two to talk things out.”I wandered over to where the goblins were talking, dodging some cutlery still suspended in the air. As I came near, the goblins stopped talking, and subtly brandished their weapons. They also shifted so that Viola was protected in their middle.<Stand down.>The goblins shot unsure glances at Viola after she made that proclamation. She impatiently waved at them to comply, and they reluctantly lowered their weapons.<Our fates are tied together, there is nothing to be won by treating him as an enemy. Not to mention that you could hardly stop him if you tried.>She nodded respectfully at me.<Sorcerer Black.><Viola. Or it that... Queen Viola?>A Sorcery poked at my mind, trying to inform me of the correct titles and mannerisms when dealing with goblin royalty. I ignored it; I had been informal with Viola so far, and that should be fine. I would not be adverse to learning how to properly act, but he saw no need to suddenly magically know such things which would would need more of an explanation than continuing to act as I had before.<I have stated my intention of becoming such, but as yet... there is but one tribe following me, so I can hardly claim such a title for now. Queen To Be, I suppose.><So... a Princess?><Ah... I suppose so, though that is usually an inherited title... and it doesn't tend to end well. In the rare case that a Goblin Monarch manages to unite goblinkind, their rule tended to fall apart with their demise, and what children remained were crushed under the overwhelmingly high expectations people had for them. I am a special case, though. I am not aware of anybody declaring that they will take the title in advance.>There were mutters around them. Viola grinned.<And yet, circumstances have demanded such an unorthodox action. That is what I have been explaining to my dear subjects here.>“Daniel!”<Ah, it seems I am needed elsewhere. Princess, is there anything you need...><Some food would be helpful. Our fields have frozen over, after all.><I'll see what I can do.>I nodded to Viola, and went over to see Avilla and Cerise. They both looked uncomfortable, but at least my changes seemed to have taken. Avilla was herself still, no longer in the throes of any compulsion.I took a moment to double-check my work, just in case. Magic flowed from Avilla's core, fed by my own magic. One of these streams was the love compulsion, but it was altered as intended. Good, everything seemed to hold, and it had also stopped growing uncontrollably.“Daniel,” Avilla said, “It is good that you are here. Cerise has... informed me of what happened. I owe you thanks, for saving my mind and, I suppose, innocence. Hush, Cerise, there's no need to giggle.”“Happy to help. Also, I guess, kinda triggered by me in several ways; the compulsion wouldn't have worked as fast if I didn't feed you my magic. And it only triggered on Viola after she swore to help me and declared herself royalty to do so. Basically don't worry about it, you wouldn't be in this position without me.”“You were not the one who put the compulsion on me, so I insist on giving my thanks. There, I thanked him. Happy, Cerise?”Cerise chuckled. “It'll do.”“Good. In that case, Daniel, can you actually get this freaking thing out of me? I don't care that you transformed it into something useful, I just... I can imagine it squirming inside me, and I just want to claw it out of me. And... I talked to Cerise, we have an idea who may have done this, and we are fairly sure that there are a least a couple dozen more triggered compulsions and other nasty surprises hidden inside me. Please remove those as well.”“Ah... are you sure? I talked the options through with Cerise, and removing the compulsion would make it necessary to basically recreate you, and I'm not confident I'd be able to do so perfectly even though I'll get close...“Yes, she told me. And I appreciate that you decided to take the less invasive option. It was the right decision. But now that I am conscious again, and can make my own decisions, I say you get this filth the fuck out of me no matter the cost.”“Errr...” I glanced at Cerise, who shrugged and started to say something but was interrupted by Avilla.“Ah, nope! My decision. My... magic core whatever. Cerise doesn't get to overrule me on this.”“I wasn't...”“And she also doesn't get to allow me to do this. I don't need her permission. I value her council on the matter, but I have that already.”Avilla glowered at the two of them, and I had to remind myself that she couldn't hurt me, that I had the power to resist anything she might want to do. And still I couldn't help but feel a bit intimidated.“Okay, I can see this really matters to you. You are of course correct, and we will do as you wish. But I need you to calm down first. Can you do that? Take a deep breath?”Avilla glared at me, and I took a step back. Then she sighed and a few deep breaths. Cerise and I exhaled in relief.“Feel better?”“I'll feel better after you removed this stuff from me. But I do feel a bit more calm, yeah. Sorry, Cerise, for going off like this, but I just discovered somebody interfering with my... self... in the most despicable manner, and feel very protective of it. I trust you as much as anybody, but right now... I'm sorry.”“It's fine, I understand. I'd be worried if this didn't set you off. I won't try to talk you out of things anymore, but listen to Daniel explain it once more, now that you are calm. Please. Just so you actually know what you are getting into, rather than rushing to a decision just because you feel wrong.”“... fine. Daniel, explain.”“Ah, very good. So, you have harmful spells as part of your core. Or, at least the one, but I'll probably find more if you suspect they are there. With them being part of you, that makes it difficult to remove them. You can overwhelm the spell with a stronger spell or bond of some kind. The available options for this kinda suck, but I can probably modify one to be better. You can overwrite the effect, which is what I've done – spell is still there and active, but it does something useful instead of harmful. Resistance to emotional manipulation, in this case.”“But both of those options still leave the original disgusting magic as part of me, just rendered... impotent.”“Yeah. So there is the option to remove it completely. That one isn't as clean, because it's an intertwined and integral part of your core. Removing it damages other vital functions and aspects of you. I can fill in the gaps, but... I can't just copy the structure of what was there before, that would just be rebuilding the harmful spell. I'd need to rebuild the essence of what you are with a different magic pattern as substrate. I'm not confident I can do that with perfect accuracy. Close, but... there will be changes.”“What kind of things are we talking about here?”“Well... likes and dislikes, probably. Suddenly liking licorice, distaste for the color blue, stuff like that. Presumably more subtle, which makes it more problematic because it harder to catch and correct yourself. You'll probably need to redecorate the entire house because it won't suit your tastes anymore, everything being just a bit off, which can be worse than being completely wrong. Memories, while still having the same content, may have different interpretations or emotions associated with them. Emotional reactions may also shift – like, you might suddenly be more prone to happiness when seeing chairs while smelling cinnamon. Minds are confusing and interconnected things, and I would like to stress that I am not an expert on this. I have a Sorcery... several Sorceries... to guide me, but that just means I hopefully won't screw up too badly.”“Hmm... sounds like nothing that you might not experience after just living your life for a decade or so. People do change. It's fine. People do not have malicious knots of magic intent on ruining their life slithering inside themselves, however, and I don't intend to have that either.”“... and, ah, I'd, well... I would need to examine your mind very closely, for this to work. You were worried about mental magic before, so...”“It's about purpose, Daniel. I would not have random people touching me either. But if that person was a doctor needing to examine me to save me from some illness, it would be a different story. That's what we have here, in essence. That does not mean you get to take any liberties – I expect professionalism and respect. Now, I have calmly listened to your arguments and options, and logically thought them through, and... oh, would you look at that! My conclusion is still the same, because I am a freaking genius or something. Or maybe I just don't let emotions cloud my judgement when it comes to important things like this and just because I'm riled up does not mean I haven't given things proper thought.”“... I still think it was a good idea to have you calm down first and...”“I know you did, Cerise. Of course you did, and I appreciate you looking out for me even if I don't agree with the methods and... and I'm not getting into this argument again, not now. Magic man, do your thing.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“Then, since this might take a while, I'll get the goblins some food first. We'll get started soon.”The food was easy. There was already food in the fields around the house – I was not keen on opening any pantries within the house without permission given the mood Avilla was in – and though it was ruined by sudden frost, that was easily fixed with magic. Magically turning the raw food into basic dishes wasn't difficult either. Apply some heat, collect some herbs from the fields and draw some minerals from the ground for seasoning... I didn't even have to move to do that much. A few moments later the goblins had something to eat.“Alright, that should do... Now, then. Avilla, I'm about to begin.”“Okay, I'm rea-”I dropped Avilla out of the accelerated time once more. Then I decelerated her by a similar amount. It made it easier to modify her magical core if it was nearly static with respect to me. First, I got an overview over what needed to be done. Now that I knew what I was looking for, it wasn't hard to find other hidden triggers that would cast a variety of spells on Avilla when certain conditions were met. Mind-control, suggestions, protections, paralysis, short-range teleportation, pain, amnesia... the list went on. Whoever had done this had been thorough. There was also a variety of counters to any remotely conventional method that would mess with these triggered spells. And, since her core wasn't neatly sectioned off, all of these bled into other functions like her memories and emotions. There wasn't a single part of her that was untouched.“This is more extensive than I thought. Instead of just filling in some holes, I'll have to replace her from the ground up.”Cerise looked worried and fidgety, but tried to control herself as best she could to not distract me. I could feel questions poking at me through our mental link, though.“It's fine, I can handle it. Should be the same principle, just a bit bigger scale. First things first, memories...”I made of copy of her memories. They were fairly integrated, though – linked to skills, emotions, reactions... so it didn't turn out as easy as I'd hoped, I got very cold and clinical memories. Not as good a backup as I'd hoped for. Well, then I just had to make sure not to mess up.Since I needed to create a new core for her from scratch anyway, I decided to start a new one, instead of changing hers until I'd replaced every part. This way I had the old version to compare to.It felt... very much like baking. Magic felt different depending on the source. Viola, when she'd declared herself a Princess, had felt expansive, yet bound. Like a net made from strings of fate spreading over the landscape. There was background magic in the world which was like water or air but not at the same time – flowing into cracks, with waves and eddies, but no strong affinity to anything. Cerise was... well, a jumble of different kinds of magic. Like somebody had taken parts of various set of toys, picked bits and pieces here and there, and tried to combine them together. It was makeshift and fragile at parts, yet quite versatile. And Avilla was like a recipe. Different parts mixed together, blending and creating more than the sum of their parts. Sugar and spice... and nothing nice, which was the problem. Every part of her was made from something awful that would try to control her or ruin her life if given half a chance.So I started a new mixture. Mimicking the end result without any of the same ingredients. My Sorceries were guiding me, but that was all they could do. Telling me a myriad of options, more than I could process, and I had to pick one that would work. Add a dash of hope, stir it together... some determination... and... and that was not the same at all. So I tried again. And again.Eventually, I had a second core. A construct of pure magic, invisible to the naked eye but oh so vibrant to my senses. It was... adequate. There were no notable differences, but a mind was complex, and there surely were strange interactions I'd missed. But the base should be close enough. Now, I just needed to switch it out with the old core, and... oh dear...“Cerise.”“... yes?”I could feel her fear and anxiety.“This body seems trapped as well. There's an explosion charm in the left leg, one to turn her hair bright orange and toxic... oh, here, this one will make her grow claws if she drinks her own blood... oh wow, half of these could take her down given the right command spoken to her or the wrong action taken on her part... the other half would let her take down anything short of a demigod, if I'm not mistaken. Nope, wait, this one probably could take out a demigod as well, though there wouldn't be anything left of Avilla. I can make a new body, without these. Should I... I'd ask her, but if I accelerate her again, her core and mind would change, so I'd have to redo all my work, so...”“She wanted everything gone. The protections aren't important right now; you can protect her for the time being. And surely you can add similar protections for her eventually, that she properly knows about and asks for at her own leisure?”“... yeah, I can do that.”So I created a body as well, because there wasn't much from the original that was left untouched. It wasn't trapped quite as thorough as the core, but close enough that it wasn't worth keeping anything. Alright... I now had two time-suspended Avillas before me. I just needed to transfer the current state of consciousness from one to the other, so that... well, partially so that Avilla would have as seamless a transition as possible, waking up in the new body much as if she'd dozed off for a moment. But also because if the old body wasn't left with a consciousness, I would have to kill a conscious being when removing it. I wasn't trying to duplicate Avilla, just move her. Compared to creating a new body and core for her, the transfer was simple enough. Finally, I needed to detach the magical connections to the house from the old body and reattach them to the new one...“Avilla. The house.”“Also contaminated?”“Oh yeah. I'll... maybe I can salvage some... ah, no... I'll make a new house as well.”The house was easier. It was, after all, not nearly as complex. Just matter, in the end. There was a fair bit of ingenious magic spread throughout, but that was the reason it had to be rebuilt – most everything that was useful had a secondary trigger that would do some sort of nastiness. And because that wasn't enough there were more spells that just did terrible things without any positive effects.It... all painted a picture. I didn't know who had made Avilla – and I ignored the Knowledge Sorcery that helpfully wanted to fill me in; Avilla could do that herself if she felt like it, no need to pry – but they were definitely the same person who'd enchanted the house. Deep, tricky work, but not really all that powerful. Well... compared to myself. Probably decently powerful by standards on this world. These were carefully and slowly crafted magics, fitting together and playing into each other. It was a work of art, even if it was a twisted, warped, wretched art. One created over decades if not centuries of precise planning and meticulous work. There were hints of plans and schemes written throughout the spells, of contingencies and alternate plans, and yet... the person at the center of it all was missing. Avilla was obviously a key piece in the plots, but not the beneficiary.“So, Cerise... whoever did all of this... will they be a problem?”Cerise grinned viciously, and shook her head.“Okay, then.”I finished dismantling the house and rebuilding it, even recreating the various utility spells around the place without terrible hidden triggers. Connecting it back to the new Avilla, however, did not go quite as smoothly. The connection was there, and it worked, but it was weaker than before, and I couldn't figure out why. I tried asking my Sorceries, but there were too many of them that had an opinion on the subject; I couldn't filter out any actually useful information. After pondering for a while, I decided that I might as well wake Avilla and ask her. She should be fine, after all.I sped her back up to the rest of the world, and then further into the accelerated time.“-dy. You can... wait... something's different. What did you do to my house?!”Avilla slowly reached out to a wall, and upon touching it recoiled as if she had been burned. She turned to me and glared at me.“You were supposed to fix me, not do whatever you've done to my house.”“Ah, it was all connected, unfortunately. Your magic, your body, your house... trapped with some nasty spells. Tampering with one while leaving the others would have triggered terrible things.”“... that makes way too much sense.”“Sorry to interrupt,” Cerise said, “But I need to confirm that you are fine and still yourself. Daniel, if you would give us some privacy, just for a few moments... I'll tell you when you can come back.”I nodded, wandered over to the goblins, and sat down to eat with them. Except for Viola, they were all still uneasy around me. And Viola just silently handed me some food, before turning back to her own. Still, getting some food was a good thing, even if the conversation was lacking. Actually, that was a good thing too. There was so much new, so much that had happened, so much that was jumbled in my head. Getting some time to think and try to sort it all was a good thing.I was... I had been a God, or at least on the path the Godhood. And now I was a separated part of a Godling, a minor shard, rough around the edges, ripped from its place in the whole. There were so many Sorceries holding promises and abilities and knowledge, there were memories and wisdom, there were insights and skills. And it was all too much. I just had a single attention-span, while this whole system was designed for a meta-mind with millions of attention-focuses working together in incredible sync. Even the concepts of what exactly I had been eluded me, requiring more than one physical mind at the same time to comprehend.So I had all of these amazing abilities, but I couldn't properly access them – they popped up when I needed something, but it was random and unstructured. I didn't even know about all I had access to, and probably could never know because it was too much. It might take more than a lifetime to acknowledge every Sorcery I had gotten. Which sounded like a good thing. But a mess of powers you didn't quite control wasn't as awesome as I would have liked. Indeed, there was...Cerise interrupted me, sending a ping over our mental link. I saw her standing with Avilla a bit away, keeping their distance from the goblins. I sighed, that was also something I'd need to figure out how to mend. They were supposed to work together, or at least coexist peacefully. I was fairly certain that if I wasn't there, they might try to kill each other again. One more thing to do later.I got up, and headed over to the two of them.“So?”“It's... acceptable. She's not quite the same, but so far there are only surface differences. Likes, dislikes, things like that. Like you said. Still really heavily emotionally tied to her house, I couldn't convince her to let me do more tests because she was so anxious. Sometimes I wonder if she loves this house more than me, and...”Avilla pushed her out of the way, and confronted me.“Alright, miracle boy, so you had to patch the magic in my house, but why is it so... so... new?”“Patching it wasn't really enough, it was all mixed together. I had to rebuild the spells on the house. And the house. And your body. And your core.”“Hmmm... ,” Avilla mused, still focused on the house and the new walls that to me looked just like the old ones, “I hope you didn't do as shoddy a job with me as you did with my house.”“I beg your pardon! This house and the spells on it are just like the old one.”“Sure, sure, on a technical level it might be the same. But I'm a hearth witch. I practice emotionally charged magic. That's what makes it so effective despite being low-powered and subtle. Well, I suppose low-powered isn't the case anymore, but still... what you've done here is a very sterile version of the spells from before. All of the meaning and intention and subtleties that make it come together stripped out. These spells can keep you safe. Before, they could make you feel safe and at home and at peace. Strip them down, I'll have to redo this myself.”I sighed. It meant my work on the matter was wasted, but it did sound reasonable, and Avilla was more of an expert on her own magic that I...“Ah, no,” Cerise said, “Can't let you do that, I'd take too long. In case you hadn't noticed, there is an apocalypse going on? We can't leave the house without wards for the weeks or probably months it would take to properly recreate them.”“Oh.”“Right.”Avilla and I shared an embarrassed look at having forgotten something so basic.“Well, can't you just... give the spells the emotions and intentions they require?”“No, Daniel. You can't just change a spell freely like that. Once it is created, it's pretty much static, and... and from the look on your face, you totally can do that, can't you?”“... yes.”“Of course you can! Why wouldn't you be able to ignore basic common sense in regards to magic.”“... anyway, if you can't do it, I thought I could have you guide me, changing the wards to what they are supposed to be.”Avilla peered at me suspiciously.“That sounds like it might have a catch.”“Well, we would have to do a mental link to get it to work properly, and you weren't really so fond of those, so...”Avilla closed her eyes. I waited for her to say something, and just as I was about to ask if she was okay, she held up a hand, and smiled.“On the bright side, I'll get to sense more of what's going on in my house through your senses. Fine. You've already... rebuilt... me, so I suppose letting you into my mind for something this important is acceptable.”She held out her hand, and I took it. I didn't technically need physical contact to initiate the link, but it was a nice gesture of permission. Another mind entered my perception, and the world became a little more right. A little more like it was supposed to be. The crushing loneliness from being separate from a multitude of myself receded a bit more, leaving me more room to breathe and be myself.“Focus, Daniel.”“Yes, yes, of course. Fixing the wards. Okay, so... ah, yes, I can feel how you feel the wards. Now, remember how they used to feel, and try to highlight the difference.”It was a different perspective than I had of the magic, but the Sorceries of [Magic], [Senses], [Perspective] and [Translation] helped me out and let me see where to make changes to match the memory.A few moments later, they were done. Except, it still didn't quite match. But Avilla broke the mental connection. I flinched, more alone in my mind once again.“We could have... it still didn't quite match.”Avilla chuckled.“That's age, Daniel. Magic grows stronger with age. Give it a century, and it will be back to where it was.”“These were a century old?!”“Not made by me, so I can't be sure, but somewhere around there, I guess.”I frowned. There was something off about that.“If it grows stronger, why not just add more strength to it now? We don't need to wait for that.”“Strength may have been the wrong word... Cerise, help me out here, you're better at explaining this.”Cerise looked over to them, having been absorbed in some sort of diffuse energy hovering around her fingertips. It screamed out to me in mymagical senses, but she dropped it and it was gone as her concentration was broken. I shivered.“Explain what?”“How age makes magic stronger... but not stronger, because that's not the right word?”“Ah. Yes, I'd say maybe deeper, or more potent. A millennia old spell can hold its own against something new that is twice as strong.”“Huh. That's strange. I wonder... I wonder how magic can tell how old it is.”“What?”“Does it look through the past to see how long it's been there? That doesn't sound likely.”“Daniel, you are talking nonsense. How old something is is just... a thing. It's innate.”“Sure, but I can change innate things, like we did just now, right? Like the intentions and emotions tied to magic?”“That's... different... I hope...”“Let's try it!”I focused on the magic around the house, and focused on how to tell how old they were. My Sorceries obliged, and after some tweaking and prodding, I had visualized the age as a sort of dial, glacially slowly turning as time was passing. Since it was a mental construct, I did have a lot more fine control over it than if it were a physical dial.“Alright, let's see, we'll make it... a year old, ten years, a hundred...”The texture of the magic changed subtly. Since I was looking for it now, I could feel it. It was like the tone changed from young, frivolous and vulnerable to old, distinguished and wise.“Yes... that's it. Daniel, that is amazing, it's just like how it was, how did you... I can't even. Thank...”“... a millennia, ten millenia, a hundred, a million years...”There was an ethereal pressure in the house, and while I was unaffected, the other two were not and had to steel themselves against it.“... what are you...”“... oh hey, an aeon. This is kinda fun... ten aeons, a hundred...”Avilla and Cerise stumbled and fell. I propped them up, and wrapped them in a subtle magic field able to withstand the pressure. Then I did the same for the goblins.“... the entire length of the history of this world.”There was silence for a few moments.“Daniel.”“Yes?”“You... this feels as if it has been here Since Time Immemorial. There are... I don't think there are more than a handful of artifacts...”“Oh, hey, I thought it was stuck but I can push further. Two world timelines, three, four, a dozen, a couple hundred, a thousand... does this go to infinity? Ah, here we go. Infinite... oh, hey, it goes even further. EternaL... tImELeSs.”“dAnIel”“hM?”“daNiel, thAt''s enOuGh.”“bUt i'm hAvinG FUN...”“DAnIEl, yOU'rE bRaEkIiiNnG ReeAallITyi”I snapped out of the fascinating experience with the dial, and saw rifts in space starting to tear, just short of actually forming. I could feel the pressure of the Medium behind them. The air was distorted, magic fluctuated and pulsated. When Cerise spoke, it sounded... segmented and jittery, like reality wasn't loading properly. Or more accurately like different parts of her were running at different speeds, as time too was being mangled. It was still minor enough that we were able to talk with difficulty, but I could see that the effects were increasing.I tried to turn the dial back to a more safe setting, but it didn't budge. I pushed a bit harder, and it resisted. And when I put force into moving it... it shattered.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Loki was bored. He'd been bored for decades – centuries even. He paced the length of the room, back and forth. He counted the steps, but the length didn't change no matter how often he traversed it. Not unless we willed it. So he did for a while, and walked different lengths of the room. Soon he got bored and dramatically flopped down, creating a couch below himself to fall upon.He poked the couch despondently. Sloppy work, really. A good couch, perhaps, but nothing but furniture. No individuality, no craftsmanship. This was a tool when it could have been a piece of art. Not worth the time to properly remake it, though – he'd just get bored halfway through, and abandon the project. Couldn't be bothered to keep a strand of focus on it all the time to make it stick around, either. And once it vanished, the next one would be just as bland. He'd still tried, of course, and made some truly magnificent works of art. They were gone now.He sighed, and created a puzzle. He wrote some clever hints on the walls, made them stick around for a while... and then made himself forget the solution. He stared at the walls, at the clues, careful not to let them out of sight for too long so they wouldn't disappear without attention. It took a few moments to put it all together, but in the end, he knew how he thought. Even without the particular solution to this particular puzzle, the methods and tricks he used were too familiar. It didn't take long to figure out the solution, and it wasn't particularly interesting to come up with it.A physical puzzle, then. He created one in his hand, and deliberately forgot how to solve it. He played around with it for a bit, but he could already see the path to the solution, move the pin there, there, then over there... it was just grunt work at this point. Not worth his time. Instead, the puzzle distorted itself, the pin moving around and through the constraints in ways that were not quite possible in a fully physical world, but the laws of nature were shaped by his mind in here as well. He took a few moments to play around with them, twisting the puzzle into a mind-bending figurine that somehow twisted through itself in an aesthetically pleasing way. Yet Loki looked at it and felt nothing. He dropped it – and it never hit the floor, vanishing as soon as his attention left it.He started pacing again. They were fitful, almost manic actions. At some point in his long isolation, each of them had offered solace for a while. For a few months, or maybe even years in some cases, each new activity was fun and engaging. Puzzles were thrilling, craftsmanship satisfying, stories he acted out engaging, alternative physics inspired. And then, eventually, he got used to it. Yet he always came back, desperately seeking to recapture some of that initial joy and purpose that lay within the action. Yet there were only shadows to be found where once meaning dwelled.This was his prison, this was his hell. A private demiplane, created just for him, under his complete control, but with nothing around to actually stimulate him. Forcefully Incarnated into this place for a seeming eternity. He had to admit it was well done. Grudgingly, at first, but even that emotion faded eventually. And as a trickster God – or Goddess when it pleased her to be so – he had to admire the craftsmanship of the prison he was trapped in. The plane didn't hold him, of course. He was a God, and could end his Incarnation whenever he so desired. But it wouldn't last. The prison was social in nature – the other Gods and Goddesses wished for Loki to remain trapped. If he escaped, they would catch him, beat him, and forcefully Incarnate him right back here. He'd still be trapped, but hurting all over. So these flimsy restraints were merely teasing him with how little they held him, adding insult to threatened injury.But Loki knew how social boundaries worked, which ones he could push, which ones to break, and which ones were not worth the cost. He was well and truly trapped. For the sake of a prophecy. Loki will bring about Ragnarok, standing against Asgard. In about a hundred times as many and a hundred times as obscure words, but it was fairly obvious. It was self-fulfilling, of course. Loki would not stay imprisoned, he would escape. But to truly become free, he needed the power to undo his restraints, which meant undoing the pantheon that was keeping him trapped. How ironic, considering that the official excuse for his imprisonment was the destruction of a different pantheon. He'd obviously helped in the fight against Olympus, but he hadn't been the one behind the battle. He'd even advised against it. No, they just needed somebody to blame, and pinning it on the person who was prophesied to oppose them was convenient.He could have shrugged off the prophecy if he were free. It was a ridiculous notion, him challenging an entire pantheon. He was not a war God. But they forced his hand by making him a scapegoat for something of this magnitude. Well, they forced their own hand, and his with it. They could never walk back their accusations, the other pantheons would tear them apart. Which meant that he could never be free as long as Asgard stood.And so it would come to pass that Asgard would fall.Loki had made plans for this. It had been a chore, for all that he was excellent at plots and schemes, and usually enjoyed making them. But that was a different kind of plan. He liked just throwing things out there, and seeing what happened. Make a dozen secret conspiracies working towards different outcomes of the same event, and then simply publicize the one that succeeded while letting the other quietly drop by the wayside – or even claim that telling those people about the other plans (which obviouly were clearly fake in retrospect) was an integral part of the plan that succeeded all along. And if somebody learned of his plans along the way, or interfered – that just added to the glorious madness.It had been fun, in other words. Lighthearted entertainment. But this enjoyable pastime too had been twisted by his imprisonment. Now he planned for war. Intricate, redundant plans, still, of course. It was just his style. But he didn't have the option of failing in this. He was dead if he failed. He didn't care by much how he won, though, even a sliver was enough. Promised anybody and everybody a piece of the pie if he won. Found traitors within the ranks of the Aesir – many of them highly situational and conditional. Still, there were options. Found every remnant of a God in the vast area that Asgard now controlled, and offered them a chance at revenge. He'd probably promised the world a dozen times over all told to get people on his side – but that was okay. Most of them would be dead and gone by the time it came to collect. The remainder would be out for blood when he couldn't pay, but it would be chaotic, and there would be room for negotiations and plans. Exactly the sort of environment he excelled in.There were a surprising number of Divine remnants. Several pantheons had been destroyed by the Aesir, or by other pantheons which in turn where brought down by the Aesir. Olympus hadn't been without blood on its hands, for that matter. And the vast majority of people went with them, of course. But truly killing a God, undoing them completely, was difficult and rarely worth it. So you left remnants. Remnants of the Goddesses, and remnants of the followers – getting the last few hidden cults also was rarely worth it. The common wisdom held that they'd die off in a few centuries. But, as Loki had discovered when searching, few ever died completely. Those small cults could barely keep a Gods alive, let alone powerful. But they could enjoy the undivided attention of a Divine Being which even without powers was extremely valuable. There was wisdom and insight there, and apparently that was enough for their following to survive for millennia, and even grow.It was fascinating, and Loki wished he could have seen it himself. Alas, he could not leave his prison, and had to conduct such business through secretive channels. Setting up communications with the outside world had been laughably easy. Too many Gods and Goddesses came around to gloat, and enough of them felt pity. A bit of prodding and pushing, and they would pass a few messages from and to some of his remaining followers. It wasn't without risk, several times he'd lost followers that way. And it was a challenge, of course, to pass innocent enough looking messages while conveying enough information. But that was what a well-established spy network was for, after all. Much like it also was for keeping the rest of his followers safe when a few were discovered.So he got his captors to pass messages, but he needed to be careful. Not too many messages, spread it across different Gods and Goddesses. At the same time, each message needed to be in triplicate at least, to confirm that nobody tampered with it, or it got lost or something. It's a slow, complex and tedious process. But he'd have centuries to play with, to slowly build something magnificent. And once the ball got rolling, it only took minute pushes here and there to keep everything on course.And now it was all coming together, after so very, very long. In some ways he missed those initial days, when there was a thrill of danger, a challenge to setting everything up. Nowadays the plans were set in stone, and mere execution was left. Most of which was out of his hands anyway, so Loki merely stayed in his prison and waited.He had the numerical advantage in numbers of Divine Beings, but that didn't mean much when most barely had any followers. That was the real measure of strength here, followers. There he was vastly outnumbered, but there were two main plans to erase that disparity. The first was ongoing, and basically just meant that he had more followers than people expected. The prophecies of him going up against Asgard were known. They painted him as a villain, of course, but he had the ears of bards, and so the stories painted him as a very sympathetic villain. With the slightest suggestion, the listener could then notice that Asgard wasn't exactly doing a superb job ruling the world – at least for the majority of the population, which were stuck in servitude of some kind or another. And once you see Asgard as flawed, then the one to oppose them starts to seem much more like a hero than a villain... it was a solid core, built upon and altered in a myriad small ways to fit the listeners in question. It gave him a solid follower base, larger perhaps than that any single Aesir.But not more than all of them combined.That was where his second plan came in, and it leaned heavily on prophecy for power. Fimbulwinter. Decades of harsh winter to bring the population of Europe to its knees. Groups carefully and personally guided by Gods might survive, which was most of his allies' followers, but a mere fraction of the Aesir's. With the dwindling population, his opposition's power would dwindle as well. A lot of those remaining would secretly on his side to begin with, and more so when he could help people against the cold with carefully prepared stockpiles and magic items he'd had centuries to have his followers make. But even with preparations, people would die eventually. The trick was in carefully balancing when to stop the freezing cold. Too early, and he'd lose the battle. Too late, and there would be nothing left to win.There was more, of course, leading up to the final battle and beyond. So many smaller plans, allies and potential friendlies. He'd even sired children, here in exile, explicitly to strengthen certain alliances. And, because every plan needed several upsides, to have powerful children at his side in the coming conflict.Soon it would all begin, and the world would end. Soon... Loki stopped, and noticed that he had been pacing again. He'd been brooding. Another annoying aspect of his imprisonment – he'd never truly had the penchant for that before, but being cooped up in such a small room with a singular goal that would determine his continued existence seemed to lead to such behavior. And while his other distractions at least sometimes were interesting, his brooding was not. It wasn't plotting or planning, just repeating in his mind what he'd already set in motion. At least he'd caught it early this time; once he'd lost an entire year going over and over through the same points of his plans in his mind.Loki sighed, and summoned a puzzle again, twisted wires that were to be untangled. Maybe he'd find some way to modify it to make it interesting again. Before he could properly get into the task, though, another God entered his jail.Loki focused instantly, and adopted an outward appearance of casual relaxation. Most of these visits were fairly routine at this point, but that just made them more dangerous. A single slip-up could unravel his plans.“Brother!”Before Loki could properly comprehend what had happened, he found himself swept up in a hug. By Thor.“I am so sorry. I though you'd... there was a prophecy... I never should have doubted you.”Loki was baffled. He'd made some inroads to turn Thor to his side, sure, but nothing that he have a more than minuscule chance of succeeding. What could possibly have happened to sway him?“Let's get you out of here.”And with that, completely beyond any of his intricate plans, Loki was free. The demiplane dissolved around him, and he found himself in his Divine body once more.Loki was usually an excellent at improvising, but things were happening so fast and unexpectedly that he had no idea how to react.“What... why...”Luckily, Thor was too busy to notice the state he was in, and happily continued explaining.“I foolishly believed the prophecy that said you would turn evil, and start Ragnarok to fight all of Asgard...”Not too far from the truth, Loki mused. Though he'd only started those plans after being imprisoned. Prophecies were self-fulfilling that way.“... but then – bam! – this new thing comes out of nowhere, and absolutely destroys the realms! So the others have started fighting it, but it doesn't seem all that powerful, so I came to get you. I really missed you. The other Gods are so stuck up, it really starts to grate on ones nerves after a few centuries. It was boring without you.”“Boredom was my fate as well. But now...”Loki's senses fell upon the realms.“What the fuck?”“Ah, yeah, that. I told you, Ragnarok is happening. The realms are colliding. We can't really tell exactly what is going on in there, the collisions are messing with our view. Can't imagine it's very pleasant, though, and everybody will be preparing to go to war.”Loki was staring in awe at the destruction. It had barely started, of course – realms were not prone to move quickly. But he could see where this would inevitably lead. His own plans seemed paltry in comparison. Then again... he'd never intended to actually destroy, but to conquer. True, the war would have wiped out most of Europe, but there would be people left to rebuild. And he'd made sure that it wouldn't spill over to the other continents. Fighting one pantheon was more than enough. This, however... this would wreck the entirety of all nine realms. It was going to affect everybody.“Whelp, the other pantheons are gonna be pissed.”
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I'd broken reality.Twice now, come to think of it. First by setting the realms to collide and starting Ragnarok, and before I'd properly started trying to fix that one again by being a bit too frivolous with my excessive powers. Both were accidents, but I was really hoping this wouldn't turn into a pattern.Okay, okay, calm down. This should be fixable. It was smaller problem, surely. Localized. First up, take stock of the situation. How exactly was reality broken?Visually, there was not much different to see. Everything looked a bit distorted as space was squished and stretched and torn. There were a few rifts, showing the overwhelming maelstrom of the Medium. It was... less intense than I remembered. More of a chaotically shifting hue rather than all colours at once. It also seemed more sinister. Instead of an overwhelming blend evening out to neutrality, there was a clear bias towards the slimy, the corrupted.But I had other senses. Magic was screaming in torture. Most importantly and relevant, I had some senses that extended beyond the mere physical aspect of reality. I saw how we were placed in relation to the other realms and the surrounding Medium. And various Sorceries that could tell me what all of strange things I saw actually meant.We were at the intersection of two realms which were slowly merging more and more and the realms were forced together in the collapse. Not enough to be fully overlapping yet, but close enough for a house and goblins from different worlds to meet.There was a layer around the realms, a... buffer of sorts. The Dream, one of my sorceries informed me. Poisoned by the Gods.That explained why the rifts looked so concerning. I pushed away the Dream around us, just a bit, enough to create a path from the rifts to the Medium, so that they were not showing us this corruption, but instead the Medium around. I added a barrier so it wouldn't come into direct contact with us and reduce us to a random swirl of concepts.Reality shuddered. Even indirect contact with the Medium was not good for it, apparently. Fair enough. Another reason to quickly figure out what was going on.Beyond the Dream was the Medium, and there was a cluster of simple patterns out there. Tied to me for stability, each based on a single concept, these would be my Sorceries. There was also a ribbon tying Cerise to her Goddess. Nothing to tie me to my greater self, though. No Divine help coming any time soon.I turned my attention back towards the house, and how it worked in the metaphysical interactions between the Medium and the realm.So. The house was timeless. This was just an attribute, a property of the material. And I could remove it, my Sorceries told me, but it was an attribute that increased how... real... it was, in a sense. How physical. How much the Medium had crystallized into reality in this spot. And I'd turned it way up. So in order remove this attribute, or otherwise change the house, I would need to overcome the realness, and that required enough magic to further tear apart the already fraying reality around us.Why was reality tearing in the first place? Well, reality here was soft. Malleable. That is how magic worked, reforming reality according to the concepts and desires of the caster. Often with other tools or chants or spells to provide structure and power to the changes, but it boiled down to enforcing new concepts onto the congealed Medium that the world was made of. Now, the house was not soft. It was very much solid after what I'd done to it. And being placed into the weak reality, it cut it apart like a knife through jelly. Well, with less intent. More like just placing a metal cube in a sheet of jelly, disturbing it by accident, and perilously suspended for now. If there had been actual intention of harming something around it, it would have destroyed reality around it and basically become a cut off pocket dimension.I considered that. It might be worth cutting off the problem, and we'd have a pocket dimension which might be safe from the collision of the realms if I could somehow move it further away. But no, my sorceries informed me, that wouldn't end well for the house. It was extremely real right now – but that was a mere property. Direct contact with the medium could leech away something like that. The house was not made to persist outside a world with stable laws.Not that that was a problem in itself, I could remake the house. But there seemed to be two problems related to this: first, tearing it out of reality would not be gentle, and basically destroy a large part of the world around us. Enough to threaten the general integrity of the realms with how the collision was already weakening their structure. Secondly, Avilla was tied to the house, and unmaking that connection would also rip her apart.This was not an option, then. Okay, next, magic. Why was excessive magic a problem in the first place? Could I change the nature of my magic to one that would not damage reality? Sorceries, advise!Well, a passable metaphor is that the realms are made of solidified medium. Depending on the situation you would consider it was differently strongly solidified to make a proper comparison. Hence I'd so far considered it as crystallized and more jelly like. Neither was correct, but both made enough sense in context to let me understand what was going on. In this case, consider it to be like wax. Cooled, it holds its shape. Adding magic heats it up, and reality becomes soft enough to shape. Magic in this case is just a drop of molten wax. Add more magic, and, well, you end up with the whole thing just melting. The realm would be unable to hold a pattern, and disperse into unstructured Medium.Okay, so, large amounts of magic are too dangerous to use because the world can't handle it.While good to know, that still did not tell me how I could deal with the problem at hand.“... and that should do it.”I whipped around to stare at Cerise. She'd sounded normal. And she'd done... something. The rifts were closing. There was still some strain on the fabric of reality, but it was tolerable somehow.“Wha... how... but... you... I...”How could she... when I couldn't? But I could do anything, I had Sorceries, it was supposed to be me who solved this. It wasn't right, it wasn't possible. It... I... I hadn't exactly been stable since arriving to this world. But I'd been competent, at least. The Sorceries let me to anything I could imagine, and defy the common sense of this world. I'd admittedly become a teeny tiny bit intoxicated with my power and gone too far on the age modification on the House. The point being, this was the first time I was encountering limits to what I could do, or at least to what I should do if I wanted to keep the world intact. It was something none of my Sorceries had been able to allow me to get around. So how did Cerise...? Not that I minded her solving the problem, it was good that it was resolved. But it felt like I had failed.“Whoa, calm down, there, Daniel. Deep breaths.”Cerise sent calming thoughts over our mental link, and slowly first noticed that I'd been shaking and then gradually stopped shaking.“What did you do, Cerise? I couldn't figure it out. I've looked at the problem with senses you can't imagine and with help from a myriad of Sorceries, but it just seemed impossible without melting the world. So how?”“I didn't do much. Avilla can control the house, you know. And I am still mentally linked with you. So while I didn't get all of the info dumped into you by your Sorceries when you asked them – it seemed excessive, painfully much and disorganized – I did get that the house interferes with its surroundings, causing the rifts. So I just asked her to withdraw magic from it until it stopped.”“That... makes a lot of sense, actually.”And it wasn't something I would have been able to do on my own. I was not linked to the house. I could have linked myself to it – but that too would have required forcibly changing the house, which would have taken enough magic to break reality. I looked over at Avilla. She glared back, apparently not happy that she had to depower her house.“Haaaahhh... so basically we just got lucky that you are connected to it and can control it. If I had done the same thing with something else, even just a pebble, it would have been a disaster.”Yeah, but I would have found some way around it. Right? Worst case, rebuild the entire world or something. Well, no, even remaking a mind had been taxing and not perfect, so that wouldn't have worked. But still, there was something I could have done, right? I could have figured it out myself and asked her myself. It could have been me solving this. It should have been me.“Daniel, once again, calm down. You are freaking out. Why is this such a big deal?”“I...”It was a valid question. Why exactly was I freaking out this much? Did I have a rational reason? Or was I just frightened because the illusion of absolute control due to my power that I'd had since coming here had crumbled so quickly? Well, sure, that was part of it, but there was something more... oh.“If I couldn't even deal with this by myself, how am I supposed to handle stopping Ragnarok?”<Not on your own,> Viola chose that moment to enter our conversation. And I hadn't even noticed her approach, <You are to handle this by relying on others. If you ever thought it was a task that you could do on your own, then you are more foolish than I thought.><You thought I was foolish?>Viola raised an eyebrow at that.<Well, you did proclaim your intention to keep everybody alive during Ragnarok. I cannot conceive of any goal more foolish than that.>She'd made an annoyingly good point there.<Then why did you decide to help me in this?><Ragnarok is upon us, so the time for foolishly ambitious goals is now. Most goals are out of our reach anyway in these times, so one should strive for greater glory by aiming high. Yet a foolish endeavour is no excuse in foolishness in its execution. I expect you to do better than this.><Yes, Viola. I'm sorry.><Very well. As this is esoteric magic, I shall leave it to the others to discuss the specifics, as they of no particular interest to me. Do find me afterwards, though, to discuss the next steps in our grand Quest.>Viola nodded curtly at Cerise and Avilla, before walking away to join the other Goblins again. Avilla shivered.“That was... intense. Is it weird that I find her more intimidating now than when she was trying to kill me? Like, I knew what she was on about back then, but now... I don't know what she'll do.”Cerise nodded slowly.“I suppose she will keep her oath and work towards the goal of keeping people alive during Ragnarok, or make sure Daniel dies trying. But it is true, it is difficult to tell how she will work towards that. I find myself intrigued. Especially because she could just understand us, and we her, despite speaking different languages. Daniel, you don't have the translation spell up any more, right?”I shook my head. Cerise shrugged.“Then I don't know. Maybe it's something about her being a goblin princess.”She sighed and met my gaze.“However, she was right; we need to talk about what happened. Daniel, what you just did was really dangerous – what with the causing rifts in reality and all that.”“I... yeah. I know.”“Then why?”“I didn't know it would do such damage at the time. I thought I could just undo what I'd done, and to a point that was even true. Just not so much at the end there.”“And we called out to you, but you didn't listen.”“... yeah. I got absorbed in the magic. It was... it was fun, you know? The first time since I got here where I used magic that didn't involve mortal danger or just basic necessities. I just... played around, wanted to see what I could do with my magic, how far I could push things. In a safe setting where I thought it wouldn't matter. I didn't know it would lead to... this.”It was a chilling realization. With the powers I had, I could never truly relax again. I'd always need to keep at least a bit of attention on carefully moderating what I did with my magic.“Alright, let it be a lesson to you, and all that. Honestly, I don't think us saying anything here will convince you any more than your own guilt will, from what I gathered about your personality. But it still needs to be said, just so you have it spelled out for you and don't just keep it vaguely in your mind. Daniel, you are stupidly powerful. That means that anything you do has consequences. Even not doing something has consequences, because you could have spent that time on useful things. Now, this is all a lot, and in general it won't matter much – like you said, most of what you can do you can undo. But obviously not everything. So it's better to assume that everything will be significant, and take the time to think before you act. Makes sense? Lines up with what you thought already?”I frowned. It didn't really line up with what I thought about this, because I hadn't really thought about it in nearly enough detail. It definitely lined up with what I ought to have thought about it.“It makes a lot of sense, but I hadn't really thought about it yet. I suppose I am lacking some introspection here.”“Well, you'd better get on that, or the world is doomed. More doomed, I mean,” Avilla darkly muttered. I wanted to argue, but she did have a point. I was dangerous, and if I wanted everybody to get through this alive I would have to be more careful. And better at communicating, because obviously others were noticing things I did not. Speaking of communicating...“Hey... Cerise? Thank you for calming me down back there. I was badly shaken, and as you've just pointed out I'm kinda dangerous if I act without thinking. So, yeah, I'm really glad you got me out of that before I started lashing out or something. You know, you are really good at dealing with people.”Cerise chuckled.“Hah! That's a good one. No, Avilla is good at the people stuff. I am good at dealing with Avilla, because she is dear to me and I know her. And I am good at dealing with terrifyingly dangerous entities in order to wrest power from them. Which, I suppose, is why I can deal with you.”“You want to wrest power from me?”“Sure. It doesn't always have to be violent or treachery, you know. Most overpowered entities are unreasonable, though. But when possible, I do try to work out mutually beneficial arrangements instead. Much more stable and less chance of betrayal. Oh, and I absolutely have already wrested power from you. So far, you've protected me and mine from a goblin attack, you have saved Avilla from a curse trap that would have undone her, you have made Avilla's house a priceless artefact giving me a Place of Power to stay at, you have fed Avilla magic that should keep her satisfied for a long time thus freeing up my own I would otherwise give her and you have pledged to keep everybody alive – naturally including me and Avilla. In excess of the period my Goddess asked for. So yeah, I think I have gotten a lot out of this already. Not all power I seek to obtain comes in the form of raw magical energy torn from the beating heart of my victims. Most of it is subtle. Though, speaking of raw magical energy...”Avilla grinned wider than I had seen her, and got a manic glint in her eyes. I involuntarily took a step back.“I started into the rifts you opened up, and I got something! Sorceries, I have my own Sorceries now! Aaaahhhh, this is so amazing!”The pure exaltation pouring through the mental link was a shock to me. We could send thoughts to each other, but mostly the link just played the role of allowing me to feel her presence, that there was somebody here with me in the world. Where all the other sensory data felt so very fragile, the mental link was solid. So I was a bit overwhelmed at the sudden outpouring of emotion.It was infectious.I started grinning as well. This was good. This was great! Something good had come from my latest slip up.“That's great! So what did you get?”Cerise paused, and looked at me suspiciously.“You can't tell? You have some weird beyond-this-world sense or something, I didn't pry that deeply.”I squashed the enthusiastic offers of that information from several of my own Sorceries.“I could, yeah. But you seem so enthusiastic, I feel like you'd appreciate telling me yourself.”Her dazzling grin in response confirmed that assumption.“[Time], [Power] and [Control].”“Oooh, that's a potent combination.”“Terrifying is what it is,” Avilla said wide-eyed, “Just for having three Sorceries, you'd be on your way to becoming one of the strongest people in this world. And in addition to your previous magic? Yeah, that is going to be insane. Though... why time?”“[Time]? I don't know, actually. Don't have a solid grasp on it, either, it's just a very small Sorcery. The others feel fairly solid.”“Hmm... when I got my Sorceries, they crystallized around ideas I was holding in my head. I assume you did that for [Power] and [Control]?”“Oh, yeah, this isn't my first time trying to pry magic powers from the Dream, so I knew how to focus on what I want. It was a lot more effective and less... putrid... than usual. What exactly did you do to the rifts to make them this good?”I extended my senses beyond the world while musing on this, and trying to find hints of what may have given Cerise her [Time] Sorcery.“I made a path through the Dream to the Medium, because the Dream is poisoned, so I didn't want it near us. Hmmm... so the Medium around us is a bit more filled with [Time] because of my spell speeding us up so much. So would be why it stuck to you instead of anything else.”Cerise got a greedy glint in her eyes.“My, that is very interesting. So you are basically saying that you can open rifts in reality; you can control the Dream so it does not bother us, thus both bypassing the poison of the Gods and using the more efficient Medium; and finally you can tune this Medium to be conductive to particular Sorceries? In summary, you can grant hand-picked, risk-free Sorceries? We could have an army of witches and mages unlike anything the world has ever seen!”“I guess I could do that, yeah. And like Viola said, I can't do this on my own, so we will need more capable people, so... yeah, a streamlined Sorcery granting process... we could make some sort conveyor moving people to and past the rift for just the right amount of time...”Avilla sighed dramatically, snapping them out of their plotting.“Oh good grief, there are two of you. No. You are not to tear apart the fabric of reality in order to gain power.”“Aww, but Avilla! Maybe just a little?”“No!”Cerise did her best to give Avilla puppy dog eyes. When she didn't relent Cerise settled into pouting instead.“Fine. I don't think we have anything else magic related to cover? Viola seems to be getting a bit restless.”“Oh, we have something alright. My house!” Avilla shouted, appalled at... something. Wasn't it all good now? Cerise shared a look with me and shrugged, she didn't know either.“What about... ah, right, you drained it for magic. So the utility spells don't work anymore, right? Don't worry, I'm sure Daniel can fix that.”“No, no, they are working. That's what the translation with Viola was about. There is a spell that lets people understand each other a bit better, though it previously wasn't powerful enough to handle language. And it's completely depowered now. That is what is freaking me out. It's working without magic.”“... huh.”That was strange. I took a look. The house was drained. There was nothing fuelling the spells of the house. They should not have worked. But I could see them working.“Can you try to activate something new? So I can see it starting up?”“Sure.”The dishes the goblins had been using for their food began to float over to the sink where they became clean. I was not much paying much attention to the visuals, though, because much more interested in the magic causing all of this to happen. Apparently, there was magic just... there. It didn't come from anywhere. My [Magic], [Mana], [Control] and [Senses] Sorceries happily filled in more details.“Hmm... okay, I think I see it. Alright, to explain... there is background magic in the world. Just everywhere, and mostly evenly distributed. Quite a bit of it, too.”“Well, sure,” Cerise shrugged, “Notoriously difficult to work with, though, beyond just slowly recharging your magic over time. You basically need a nexus of several leylines to have a high enough density to extract any into usable form, and even then you need tons of highly specialized equipment.”“And the reason it is hard to use is because it is held so tightly by the world, which is quite old, so the hold it has over the magic is very deep.”Cerise's eyes widened.“Oh.... Oh.”“Yeah. Okay, I'll head over to Viola and you can explain it to Avilla.”“What? What did I miss? You both seem to think something is obvious but what is it? Come on, Daniel, tell me! Don't just leave me with Cerise, she'll make me work it out on my own! Aw, he left.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
I smiled and watched the magic as I wandered over to the goblins. It was fascinating, and so subtle that one would not really notice it without looking very closely and having abnormal magic observation abilities. There was background magic everywhere. That wasn't too difficult to sense. It was controlled by the world, which had a strong hold on it because of its age. The house now outclassed the world in terms of age by orders of magnitude, so it could basically just command all of the background magic. Yet it didn't do anything drastic, just tweaked a miniscule amount in order to accomplish the utility spells the house had running.I had seen how the utility spells had worked before. It would wrap magic around the object, allowing it to float, for instance. It created a notable halo around the item. Now, the background magic was already wrapped around everything, in a sense. There was no need to gather it in a specific spot, so the spell didn't stand out. The background magic just kept flowing, and while it was close enough to the target of the spell, it would be hijacked to do some work while continuing on its path. Subtle ripples were the only sign that the magic had been disturbed at all.It wasn't anything you could normally do without being extremely wasteful. Not everybody had magic literally everywhere available all the time. You were limited, and so stuck to focused magic just where you needed your spell to happen. I could do something similar by sheer force, flood an area with my magic, and just use whatever bits were around the target of my spell. But even then, such an increase in the density of magic would be noticeable.The goblins had eaten and were now lounging in a loose circle chatting with each other. Viola, on the other hand, was pacing.<Daniel! Finally. We will need to delay any serious planning, there is an urgent problem. We are trying to save people from dying, right? Well, people are dying right now. This very instant. So you will save them before we figure out anything more long-term.>That was a very sensible... statement. It wasn't really an order, or a request. She was just pointing out what would happen, and I had to agree that there really wasn't a need to discuss it or argue. But I could not spend too much time focusing on semantics here, because it was a valid statement, people were indeed dying right now, and I would do something about it.The first thing to do was think. I'd rather avoid another rift incident, thank you very much.Firstly, I needed information. I needed a way to tell who was dying. Secondly, I needed a way to get to them. And then a way to save them, though just moving them to the house where they would be save would be fine, and heal them if needed.All of these were trivial, and my Sorceries were shouting many different solutions at me. Alright, what about solutions that don't rip apart the fabric of reality, ending all existence in the nine realms? Far fewer solutions under that condition, aren't there. What a surprise.I narrowed it further down, throwing away obviously unsuitable suggestions. Walking all across the nine realms and manually poking everybody to see if they were dying, while technically feasible, would not be fast enough. Killing everybody to be sure that they were dead, while technically resolving the question of whether they were dying, was very counterproductive.The remaining solutions and some of the discarded ones gave me a good overview of the problems that could arise from a practical standpoint. Basically, the area in question was too big. The strain on reality increased exponentially with the area one wanted to cover. The cost in terms of magic also increased at the same rate since it was the reason that reality would be strained – so nobody with somewhat realistic amount of magic would come close to breaking reality.How to bypass that restriction, then? Well, one option was to scan the Medium instead. The ideas there were affected by reality down here, so you could get a slow and distorted view of the world. Not ideal, but not restricted by the maximum size.There was the option of altering the laws of nature. It didn't count as a spell affecting the world if I moulded the fabric of reality to my will directly. Which I was loath to do, given my last experience messing with the attributes of reality. Good to know that was an option, though. Hopefully I'd never have to use it.Now, the good one, which I would be going for, was just to cover the world in a myriad of tiny spells instead of one huge one. Assembling all the pieces of information into a useable format like what you would have gotten from a single search spell was just information processing. Hardly a noticeable pressure on reality compared to spells interacting with it in some way.So I set to creating a constructor spell that could make my all my tiny scanning nodes and hook them up to my... okay, first, create a spell that can handle the inputs. Not routing all of that into my mind even temporarily, nope, not happening.Good. With a consumer for all this info in place, I created a constructor spell to make all my scanning... okay, on second though – third thought? fourth? – I didn't technically have to make the nodes scanning spells. I could just make them markers in space, assigned to a certain volume. Then, using the markers, I could cast my scanning spells. But I could also use them for all sorts of other things. Any global effect spells would run into the same problem, after all, and this way I wouldn't have to repeat my solution once I ran into a similar problem.Speaking of a similar problem, the constructor to create markers all over the realms would be a spell that affected the entire realms. And thus too large to be cast without breaking reality. Catch 22. With the marker network in place I'd easily be able to create the marker network, but I didn't have one yet.Well, that I could do something about, by just slowly creeping across the realms. Set the constructor spell to create markers around me. Then, using the markers, do the same for an extended area. Rinse and repeat.My sorceries helped iron out some bugs that would have been bad – like creating markers in already marked areas, thus exponentially increasing the numbers of markers in the same area for each constructor pass until reality breaks – and adding safeguards. It wasn't quite a self-replicating spell, but close enough that I wanted to be very careful when casting it.So I let it grow slowly to start with, and monitored that everything worked as expected. Then I decreased interval between cycles of my constructor spell, and the expansion sped up.And then it stopped as it encountered a situation it couldn't handle. At least the emergency shutdown was working. I used my new marker network, as far as it had gotten to take a look at the culprit. A city with magical wards, blocking various scrying and divination spells. But not all of them, so with a few adjustments by generator spell became able to bypass these wards and lots of other shield spells as well.Thus is was back to growing the marker network. There were a few more adjustments to be made – other ward types, natural terrain or magic flows that blocked or changed my markers, areas where magic acted weirdly and quite a bit of trickery making sure I actually was covering all the realms.Now, one would think that in order to cover the Nine Realms, one would just need a starting point in each one, and the markers would work out perfectly. Better than that, even, there were connection points between the world. Bridges where people could travel between them. They were mostly hidden – but I was covering literally everything with markers, so that didn't matter. And, in addition to the normal connections, there were overlaps due to the realms starting to collide, of course.As it turns out, though, “Nine Realms” was a severe oversimplification. It mostly was true in the area corresponding to Europe. Ok, so, the world map of Midgard – the realm I was currently in – was mostly like Earth back where I was from. Which made some sort of sense, the Medium was good at exchanging ideas between worlds, and so you found similarities that otherwise would have seemed quite strange given different histories of the world.So. Corresponding to Europe, Nine Realms. Technically ten, but the last one was a lifeless wasteland of sludge, not connected to the others, and apparently not talked about anymore. It too would collide with the others, and that would be a disaster all of its own, but a problem for later. The maps of the realms differed, more so the further they got from Midgard. There were a couple of smaller demiplanes in addition to the larger realms.The other parts of the world didn't quite work the same.Australia was deeply connected across all the realms and somewhat merged with the Dream. The other regions were wrapped in the Dream. Australia was infused with it. One might think that this was the reason for all the poisonous animals down under – the Dream was poisoned, after all. But no, just for Australia, the Dream was still pure. With the deep connections, people would have trouble telling the realms there apart – just like the goblins had ended up next to the house of Avilla and Cerise without clearly being able to tell which of the two realms both were in now. Similar unintentional realm hopping would be the norm in Australia, and would have been for a long time now.Asia was shattered. At least they were ancient scars, not related to my mistake. Even in Midgard it was not one contiguous landmass, but a dozen large shards separated by the Dream. And that was the most intact realm for Asia. For the others, it quickly became impossible which realm each of the myriad of small shards had originally belonged to. They ranged in size from a small country at the upper end to just a couple of cubic metres. While shattered, there were plenty of connections between the shards. Gates between the larger ones, and the smaller ones seemed to connect to rings a lot.Africa was singular, and seemed to be the anchor holding the realms together. Exiting from Africa on the same path could lead you to any of the other realms, depending on the exact steps you took down that path. It made for vibrant trade along the edges of the continent, connecting the other realms.The Americas were mutually exclusive except for Midgard where both were present. In every other realm, you could find only one.Atlantis was present in the other realms, but not in Midgard. Instead, there was a large crater in the middle of the Atlantic which would be the corresponding location. Atlantis in the other realms was also covered in craters, though not large enough to eliminate the entire continent.Then there were a few smaller realms and demiplanes and pocket dimensions all around... dwarfed, of course, by the myriad present in the scattered remains of Asia, but still enough that is wasn't that uncommon for a country to have a link or two to such an additional space.Before getting dragged down too much into the details, I focused back on the task at hand, which was to ensure that all of this was covered by my magical marker net so that I could check for dying people. The main realms and anything linked from them directly or indirectly was covered fairly easily. Detached demiplanes were trickier, because of their number. Any one was manually easy enough to cover, but I needed something that could do this without my input. Something that could identify all of them – again, like the marker network I was trying to build but didn't have completed yet.Oh, but the Dream! It covered the realms, and the demiplanes and minor realms and all of this, providing a buffer between them and the raw Medium. So if I could work with the Dream, add markers there, that would solve the problem.Yet I hesitated. The Dream was somewhere between the physicality of the world and the raw concepts of the Medium. I didn't know how magic would affect it, but the last time I'd frivolously used magic in the Medium, I'd caused Ragnarok. Oh, and while it wasn't the last time, a recent magic use in the world had also managed to rip that apart, so my track record for adapting to using magic in new environments was not exactly stellar.Time to learn from my mistakes.I was going to think before acting.Or at least get my Sorceries to tell me how things worked, and go from there.The Dream wasn't as unstructured and fluid as the Medium, but also not as consistent as the realms. Indeed, the name was apt, for being there was very reminiscent of dream logic. Things could randomly appear, disappear or change, and everything else just adjusted as if that was the way it was supposed to be.It had multiple functions, in addition to keeping the Medium from dissolving reality. The Dream was obviously a place one could go to while dreaming, but that was rather rare and required some skill to pull off reliably. It could happen by accident, though, and there were enough people in the world that there always were some people dreaming in the Dream. It also functioned as a collective subconscious. Much like the Medium would pick up ideas from the worlds and in turn influence the worlds, just more strongly and immediate and just with this one world and all its realms. People's ideas, fears, hopes, prejudices, aspirations, intentions and of course dreams, were all in aggregate present in the Dream. In turn they would influence the same. It made for more homogeneous countries despite less communication, because there was a shared idea of the country and what its people were like.And of course the Dream was poisoned by the Gods, providing a shackle to the limits of human inventiveness and ingenuity.All of which was to say that the Dream worked on an emotional and abstract level, so spells that worked on the same level were fine, while more physical spells would either fail or cause a similar shockwave as my use of magic in the Medium. Oh, and with the shifting nature of the Dream, spells would erode and fade over time, or just spontaneously change into something else.That was easy enough for me to deal with. I had all the Sorceries, so tweaking my marker spells to be more abstract and emotional didn't require more than a thought. For the fading, I decided that it would be sufficient to just recast the spells every so often. The network would remain stable, even if the individual nodes were not.The poison in the Dream was more worrying. It would infect the network, and eventually spread to me. Indeed, not just from this spell, the Dream was slowly poisoning the minds of all the people in this world, including me. That needed to stop. I required exactly the sort of ambitious, hopeful and novel ideas that the poison was meant to destroy. It probably needed to stop for everybody else as well at some point, but that was a problem for a later time.For the time being I made a sink, linked to my mind and the network, catching the poison and storing it. I'd eventually find a way to dispose of it or find a use for it, for now it would just be around. As for the storage, to avoid accidents, I just picked a random unused world fragment and made a quick container there that could hold the poison.And with that my network expanded through the Dream as well, tagging all the bits of reality that made up this world, allowing me to create network nodes on all of them. Finally I had a way to monitor all of reality, and could use that to figure out who was about to die and then go save them.Easy.Okay, so maybe not that easy.What does it even mean to die?Normally, dead and alive are fairly clear states. One can definitely tell whether somebody is dead or alive. There is some grey area in between, but the transition from alive to dead is usually short and very much one-way. A person is alive, they get stabbed by a sword and are briefly dying before being dead. Except... well, there are edge cases. During an illness, one might skirt the edge of death for a long time, and come out either way. And the more influence you have over a body's function, the larger this ambiguous dying state becomes and the more edge cases crop up. Whether that influence comes from technology or magic.A person is really only truly dead until they can no longer be brought back to life.I could bring people back from a lot of things.Not everything, though, not by far. Information about how people were when they were alive would erode away – with varying speed depending on the method of death and what had been done with the corpse. Exploded? Not much to be done with that. Stabbed and bled to death? Fairly easy. Most burial rites like cremation would be enough to leave people out of my reach. But for most people – minutes after they were thought dead? Hours? I could still bring them back. There might be some bits missing or unclear, but I could fill those in to make it working.That brought me to another uncomfortable grey area. How much exactly could I fill in missing pieces of the people I brought back before it was no longer the same person? At what point would I stop saving people and instead create new people?It was a theoretical philosophical question, but very much of practical concern in my case.Well, Ragnarok was coming. And while I had every intention of not letting anybody die, there was no guarantee I was going to succeed, and less of a guarantee that it was going to be a pleasant time even if I did. So I decided that playing it safe on the side of not creating new people. Other traumatic events were still considered to leave a person the same. Mostly. Sure, some people might say that you were not the same person afterwards, but in general it was considered that you were the same. So I took that as a rough limit, with all the theoretical knowledge I had about traumatic events. Which with the appropriate Sorceries was still a lot. Anybody damaged beyond that I would endeavour to keep stable at whatever condition they were in until a more informed decision could be made about whether to bring them back with the necessary gaps filled in and the according changes to them as a person.Was there anything else I could use?Time travel, while it would have enabled me to save everybody including those already dead, didn't seem feasible given the way the world worked. Once the past had passed, it was gone. Not immediately – the Dream wasn't quite a tightly bound to the present moment, and the Medium even less so. It was still centred around the present, but much more loose. But they also didn't have perfect world states. The Dream was hazy and the Medium more so. So I had a crystal clear picture of the current moment from the World, a rough approximation for about an hour before and after from the Dream, and a vague idea about the previous and next month from the Medium. They could definitely help fill in some of the details of people who were just beyond the limit I had set myself before I would consider it making a new person rather than saving an old one. So it meant a few more saved people, which was good, but no bringing back ancient ancestors.Souls were also real in this world, and shifted the whole calculation a bit. For one, while they held some aspects of a person, it wasn't enough to recreate somebody just based on the soul. Again, like hazy information about the past, it would move a few people past the boundary of having just enough data to get them back, but for most it wasn't enough. On the other hand, while not everybody had a soul – Avilla didn't, nor did I – for those that had one it was an important part of them. That made it harder to bring back those that died in ways that damaged their souls.Going forward, it would be easier. Once I had dealt with the current grey area cases, there was no need to let more occur. If in the future somebody moved away from definitely being alive, I could immediately get notified and interfere.With all of these consideration, I crafted my spells. First, observation using the network, monitoring the entire world with all its realms and minor world pieces. It wouldn't take it everything – too close monitoring of everything was enough to put a strain on the world due to excessive magic use. But I knew what I needed to focus on, so the monitoring spell would focus on detailed data on people's health, in addition to just a general overview of everything.That fed into a triage spell. Evaluate people's conditions, find those that need help and can still be saved and rank them in the order in which they need urgent attention.And like that, it was done. I got a ping for the first person I was to help.I just needed to get there, but that turned out to be trivial. Teleportation was tricky if you didn't know where you were going, and quickly grew very expensive in terms of magic with distance – unless you had a teleportation anchor that solved both of those. With a thought, my network tagging the entire world doubled as a network of teleportation anchors, allowing me easy access to anywhere I needed to be.
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I didn't expect everything to go smoothly. No plan survives first contact with reality. That was fine, I could adapt. I just hoped that reality would survive first contact with my plan.The first person I was going to help was being eaten by a lion. I was still sped up a lot, so the gruesome scene seemed frozen to me. I removed them from the lion, and started to restore the body.And immediately I realized that my estimation of my healing ability had been generous. I had used my experience with Avilla as a baseline, but she had apparently been easy mode. People who weren't magical constructs with mostly homogeneous bodies were a lot more complicated. Worse still, it was all deeply tied to the mind. Avilla had her mind and body nice and separate. There were plenty of links, of course; she did need feedback between the mind and the body to live, after all. But there was a clear separation between the two. On a natural body, however? The two were deeply entwined.This basically meant that this poor person, which was supposed to just at the edge of my ability to restore to what I had defined as the same person, was too far gone. With a sigh, I preserved the body instead. I sent it off to... well, I hadn't actually created a place to store the cases I was putting off indefinitely.I selected a world shard that was lifeless, so nothing could be tempted to eat the dead bodies I was going to store there. Then I transformed it into a mausoleum of sorts. Clean, smooth floor, clean air, preservation spells everywhere. A slightly raised glass box with the body inside, more preservation and time slowed to a crawl within the box. A gem carved with additional information about where I had found the body and what information I could glean about them from the Dream and the Medium. On a whim, I added some frosted patterns to the glass. It wasn't the time to follow such frivolous instincts, there were people to be saved, but this felt like an important moment. The first person I had failed to save, if only by arriving a few minutes late to this world.I stood in silence for a moment, before turning away. There were still people I could save. I adjusted my triage spell with my updated estimation of my restoration capabilities, and winced as I felt hundreds of people drop below the limit I was capable of saving. I took a deep breath to calm myself, and teleported to the next one.An unfortunate wanderer, crushed in a landslide. Currently being crushed, actually, the landslide was still ongoing. Slow enough that it didn't matter, though. I retrieved the body – and an arm from a bit further away – and reformed the shattered bones, reset them, reknit skin and muscles.Then it was done. Was it that easy? My second attempt, sure, but had I actually managed to save somebody? I felt a bit light headed. It was silly, feeling elated over a single person when I had promised to save everybody (at least everybody still alive, whatever that would turn out to mean). But it was a milestone. After the failure of the first case, I had begun to have some doubts – what if I kept overestimating myself, and had to keep adjusting the limit, feel people I thought I could help be tagged as dead?No, this was a statement. This person was someone I could save, and everybody less injured would be saved as well.Not that there was a simple ordering one could assign to damage to a body. Well, I was only interested in how difficult it would be to restore a person, so there was only one dimension to the problem, but still. It quickly devolved into complex problems trying to figure out whether total kidney failure would kill you quicker than a stab through the heart – taking into account the exact circumstances of the patient, the injury in question, the time since the incident, the care received already and previous health problems that could compound the issue. But even assuming you could solve this perfectly, there was the issue of how long it might take me to fix something. Sure, maybe I could resolve the heart problem, but it would take me so long that three others would slip beyond recovery in the meantime.So maybe my celebration was a bit premature, and “everybody less injured” was a very vaguely defined category, but there definitely was a semblance of an ordering possible even if it was not absolute. So by saving one person I had proven there there would be a lot more I could also save even if there was no good way to tell ahead of time just which ones.I decided to get back to saving people instead of thinking about the theory thereof.Speaking of, I still had a person. Retrieved from a landslide, but still in danger out here. The next step was to take them to the house, which was a safe place. I teleported both of us back.Oh, and they were still frozen in normal time. That could get awkward, so I sped them up as well.I handed the now screaming and babbling person to a confused Avilla, so that I could explain things to Cerise.“I saved them from a landslide. They were about to die. I said I would stop people from dying, so this is that, and there are more to save, and I'll bring them here to be safe. Err... I guess, in case there is trouble, you should have some sort of fail-safe. I'll give you access to the time-slow spell, so that you can drop people out of it when needed. Right, I'm off again.”I could have maybe explained things before dropping people on their head. Or asked for their opinion or something. But people needed to be saved, and talking first would let some of them die! Well, not really many, maybe one or two after a very long and thorough conversation; we were sped up a lot after all. That was still too many.The next person was falling off a cliff, about to splatter on the ground. Nothing to fix, though they'd be beyond recovery in a few moments. I just took them back to the house, sped them up, and handed them off to Avilla.Next.A mother was dying in child-birth. The baby wasn't looking like they would make it either. Nothing too difficult for me to resolve, though. I was unsure what to do, though. The house they were in was nominally safe, while not perfectly clean. And there were other people around with connections to them, helping with the birth. Just having a mother and their baby disappear would be a problem.Of course, eventually, they would all need rescuing from the effects of Ragnarok, but that was some time away, I was dealing with more immediate problems first. Though, when everybody was to be rescued, the house would be too small, so we would need to figure out a better way to deal with lots of people anyway. In that case leaving them for now was fine, and would put less strain on the others at the house for now.I'd worry about how to generalise whether to bring people back to the house or leave them where they were later. Eventually, I would need to in order not to waste time on this decision every time, but a few more data points would not go amiss. The general idea was already pretty clear, though – leave everybody who was in a reasonably safe place, especially if they had other people around to take care of the emotional trauma of almost dying; move everybody else to the house.Next.Someone drowned a few days ago. I might have been able to restore them, I might not. Either way, the attempt would take too much time away from others that would perish in the meantime. With a heavy heart, another well-preserved body joined the mausoleum shard.Next.Somebody in a battle, stabbed through the shoulder as well as multiple smaller wounds, bleeding out. Easy enough to heal.Half a dozen others in the battle were also dying – two of them were beyond help and got preserved, the others restored.There were more around that would need help soon enough, and I could help them. Hundreds of people hurting and wounded. But not dying yet.It was hard to move on and leave them here. But time spent to help these, when they were in no acute danger yet, would mean others that just slipped beyond the boundary of being able to be restored. There would be time to come back to this.It was difficult to do the right thing instead of dealing with what was right in front of me. That was not how life had worked before. Helping those in front of me had always been the right thing, because that was what I could actually affect, instead of worrying about greater problems far off. But now the whole world was within reach, and so my consideration had to extend to all of it as well.Next.Somebody dying of old age.Well, not exactly. That was a collective description for a whole host of slowly accumulating issues that eventually make something essential fail and then you die. My Sorceries were happily supplying long lists of what was actually wrong. Nothing I couldn't fix – to a point. I could bring them back, sure, even fix the lingering issues to make them a perfect picture of health – yet at what point was I altering instead of just restoring? At the same time, just bringing them back to life would mean they'd die again of old age soon anyway. Basically, I couldn't just bring people back to life, I had to bring them back to health – which could easily be far enough back that it would be difficult to get a clear picture of how they were back then. And even if I had that – people change over time. Restoring the body to how they were thirty years ago could cause a host of problems like muscle memory suddenly being gone, immune and hormone changes causing behavioural changes... the body was just too tightly linked to the mind, I couldn't drastically alter one without changing the other. And once I was deeply changing the mind, I was back in territory of altering people, and questions about where the line between healing and creating new people went.And there were too many still in need to help to take the time to fully think this through.I restored them enough that they could last another decade. That would be enough time to figure out what else to do.Off to the house they went.Next.Somebody caught in a fire. Too badly burned to restore with certainty. I gathered what I could and gave them a place on the memorial shard.Next.Drowned. Would not have been difficult to fix, if I had come along sooner. As it was, there was too much deterioration. I preserved what was left and added to my mausoleum shard.Next.Someone stabbed – took only a moment to fix – by... by...I had amazing senses. Light, the whole spectrum from radio through infrared and normal light to ultraviolet and x-rays. Sounds so minute they were a hint of a whisper. Electromagnetic fields interwoven with themselves and twisted into forms by matter. Scents carried on the air, speaking of the complex chemical processes that caused them. Tiny tremors in the ground, revealing the shape of the landscape around me, and the people on it, down to minute movements. Magic, the very essence of matter and the world. Mostly flowing in vast lazy waves through the world, carrying with it tastes of the frozen magic, the matter, that it had touched. Sometimes agitated, often while wielded as spells, forcing the world to shift and adjust to it. Thoughts of people, blurry through the Dream, a distant unintelligible murmur that still let you discern their mood. Echoes of the world state from the Dream and the Medium to get vague outlines of the past and future.And that was without focusing on something.Usually, my senses didn't feel like enough, because my point of reference was Divine. Now they were overwhelming.My next charge, the next person I was to help, was just stabbed to death by the person they had raped.And I knew what had happened in far too much detail.Stench from the air, the vague past from the Dream, all the little details on both people – a scratch wound here and bodily fluids there, the magic carrying traces of where it had been... my Sorceries connecting the dots and filling in the missing details I retched. There was nothing in my stomach to throw up, because my body was more of a magical construct than biological and simply transformed food to magical energy directly.I was not prepared for this.I had known in theory the depths human could fall to, the terrible things they could do, but not... not like this, not this viscerally.And I was definitely on the wrong side here. I had come to revive, to stop death. What had been done – justice, self defence, call it what you would – I had come to undo.So – what was I to compromise? My morals or my goal, which were also based on my morals? How could I decide what is right and did I have the right to do so?I had the power to back up any decision I made, of course, but that did not make it right.Moral truths like right and wrong were not absolute. They were created though social norms, complex bonds and experience living in that society, unconsciously imprinted during normal life.But I didn't have a society to anchor my morals on. None that could give me guidelines for how to act with the power I wielded, for situations and problems of the scale I found myself in. I was using an extrapolation of the general concept that life was worth preserving, and that one should take responsibility to fix their mistakes. I had put everybody in this world with all its realms in danger, so I would save everybody.Yet now I found this conflicting with other norms from those societies. Did everybody really deserve to be saved, deserve to live?My sorceries provided information that made arguments for different sides of the question.People have different sides. Doing something despicable does not prevent them from making worthwhile contributions to society in other areas of their life.People are creatures of habit, the mind built to make it easier to repeat actions in order to conserve energy. This can be very helpful in many cases, but cam also lead to repeated terrible behaviour.People are a product of their environment, of the society they grow up in. In different circumstances, they might never have been shaped into a person that finds horrible acts acceptable. When judging the actions of a person, the society that produced the person should be judged as well.Then again, people are also capable of breaking the commonly expected behaviours in many ways. Even if certain action are made easier or harder by the system, that still leaves the person as the one to actually do them, so the person still has responsibility for their actions.Interesting points to consider, but no objective answer. Fair enough, it was a subjective issue.I was abstracting. Following tangents to a generic consideration of the broader issue rather than dealing with the problem at hand. And I needed to deal with it, because just thinking on it wasn't getting me anywhere, and I had places to be and people to save.I'd already healed them. And there was time later to decide what justice or punishment or else should be rendered upon them. I was not going to design an entire court system or figure out proper laws to deal with these sorts of things. Not while I urgently had lives to save. Also not really on my own, this was what you had groups of people for so one single person couldn't warp the whole thing with their bias. Well, that still happened, because groups were biased as well, but not as easily.So. I'd keep them alive for now. No sped-up time privileges, though, and actually I dropped him into super slow mode. Even after I stopped the speed up and we went back to normal time he'd effectively frozen. Time-out until I could figure out what to do.The one who had stabbed them, though... well, murder would probably also warrant a time-out, but this wasn't a proper court. I was the authority, and since I just gave out temporary punishments that people wouldn't even notice, I felt I could do what I wanted. In this case, I felt it was justified and the murder didn't stick anyway. So another person was healed, cleaned up and I teleported both to the house were I created a letter to explain the situation and fled.No, not fled, went back to doing very important task and was totally not running away from my feelings by burying them in other things to focus on. And I'd created a letter rather than explaining things in person because it was faster, not because I was avoiding the topic. Yes.Next.Choking to death. I restored them and left them with their family.Next.Poisoned. I preserved the body and added it to my mausoleum.Next.Crushed by a tree. I sent them back to the house. I didn't come along, to save me a few moments more. They knew what was going on by now anyway.Next.Starved to death. Restored and sent to the house.Next.Stabbed. Preserved.Next.Restored and left.Next.Restored.Next.Preserved.Next.Next.Next.Next....“Greetings, fellow Daoist.”I blinked, having become absorbed in my work. I'd just sent a sheep farmer that was torn apart by a tiger with a gem embedded in its forehead back to the house, and was about to move on. The world was still seemingly frozen as I was sped up to ridiculous levels.Except for the... person-shaped magical nexus in front of me, who moved at the same speed as me. I must have been very focused to have missed that. It took some time to look past the sheer amount of magic radiating off them, but when focusing on just visual senses I saw an ethereally beautiful young man in flowing white robes stitched with beautiful nature scenes. He sat on a pillow behind a low table. On the table was a delicate porcelain tea set.He gestured to a pillow on my side of the table.“Would you care for some tea and a discussion about the nature of the Dao? Your Myriad Cores are fascinating, and I am eager to learn how they are possible.”
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A long time ago, Odin came to understand the fate of the world, and sought to change it.This was after the Great Demon Incursion. There had been other Demonic Incursions, but they usually were either small or very brief.The forces of the countries around the incursion were driven back, numerous heroes and even Demigods fell trying to clear it. Much of it was due to infighting and a lack of cohesion – armies from neighboring countries at odds which both sought to reclaim a valley from the demons and ended up destroying each other, scouts that spent more time keeping track of the movements of heroes than demons, critical openings left in the defense because everybody thought somebody else was responsible for the defense of that particular mountain pass.Eventually, the Gods – after much bickering – agreed to declare it the second Calamity. The first Calamity had been named such only after the fact, and so the Great Demon Incursion was the first true test of the tentative deals and agreements between Gods and Pantheons to unite against any large enough threat that had been made in its aftermath. The hope was to avoid the embarrassing tragedy of the first Calamity, where infighting between the Gods had let the problem fester and grow as bad as it had.United under the Gods, the world rallied its armies. Supply lines were set up across continents and over oceans. Permanent portals were developed and kept open at great cost. It was a momentous effort, yet by the time that this power could be brought to bear against the demons it was too late to sweep them aside.The vast forces of the Gods pushed back against the demon incursion, but they were not successful everywhere. Ground gained on one front was lost on another. It was enough to effectively halt the Incursion. But the demons kept getting reinforcements, while it was much more difficult for the Gods to replace an army or a hero. It wasn't a sustainable solution.And so it came to pass that the Gods planned a daring attack directly on the Demonic Host.It did not go well.Gods are difficult to kill, because they are sustained by belief from the world below. The easiest way is was of course to deal with the followers. But, with enough effort or few enough followers, it is possible to act directly as well. Destroy enough of the structure of a God, and they will not be able to put themselves back together. The belief of the followers that remain will likely create a new, similar God – but that is not only a problem for later but also a new God you can influence in a different direction than the one you got rid of.Gods are manifestations of ideas. They need coherence in their follower base – sufficiently different interpretations of the God among their congregation will lead to a split personality first and eventually to separate Gods. This limits the power of Gods to the followers they can keep believing in the same divine image. They also get only a fraction of the belief of each person, since there is a lot of other things they focus on in the course of their day, including slightly different views of the God that aren't enough to create a split but do mean you get diffuse power from the belief.The Demonic Host works similarly but does not care about coherence. It is fueled by all the hatred, jealousy, vindictiveness, sloth, vitriol and whatever other vile impulses people have, as well as pain, misery and suffering. This of course does not lend itself to stability, and indeed the Demonic Host is constantly devouring itself. Really, it is not so much a single entity as an amalgamation of tortured minds that are formed from the roiling tainted power of all the negative emotions. These minds are blinded by pain and fury, and tear into anything and everything around them. They rarely last long before they themselves are torn apart.But while most individual demons don't last long, the writhing mass of them does. Constantly devouring itself, sustained by the outpour of pain, misery and suffering from the world below.Gods had tried before to face the Demonic Host. They either gotten bored of throwing ineffectual energy at it, or gotten too close, pulled it and devoured. Not a glorious fate either way, though the former at least left them alive.This time, though, it wasn't a single God or even a few trying it – tens of thousands were gathered to face the Demonic Host. To tear apart this spot of the Divine Realm, to be absorbed and forgotten. Odin was proud to be a part of the battle, and gave His all to the cause, like those around him did as well.And it wasn't enough.Sure, it scratched the Demonic Host. It tore great chunks from it. It seared away at its essence. But there was no form it had to retain those scars. It just shifted and regrew.Even with all the Gods of the world gathered, the damage they inflicted was still less than the Demonic Host was doing to itself. On the flip side, thousands of Gods got too close and were torn apart by the Demonic HostAt this point desperation set in, and plans that had been considered crazy before were seriously considered, or in many cases just enacted without consideration. Lemuria was consumed to fuel a giant spell targeting the Incursion. One of the moons was crashed into the heart of the corrupted land. Some Gods selflessly Incarnated and then detonated themselves, tearing apart reality around them.To be fair, many of these attempts did significant damage, and the incursion was pushed back significantly. Some of the explosions also flung demons to every part of the world, and significant forces had to be devoted to hunt them down. Still, eventually, the incursion was contained in a small core, only a few dozen kilometers in diameter. But the corruption in the core was too strong – nothing seemed to work. Not that damage wasn't being done – it was just replaced with more demons too fast to react. The area was far along turning into more of the Demonic Host.That was where the Divide And Conquer plan was set in motion.The Gods split the world into ten realms. It was a desperate measure, since it was unsure whether the world would survive this, or just be torn apart. But against the odds it worked.Each realm got a tenth of the Demonic Incursion. Thus the corruption in each was only a tenth – still a nightmare, but just about possible to deal with. The cleanup was long and bloody. But while it was clear that fully cleansing the areas would take centuries if it even was possible, after barely a decade it was clear that the day was won. The incursions were destroyed, the demons summoned by the remaining corruption became less every year and had fallen to a level where direct divine intervention was no longer required.There was a grand feast to celebrate the victory, and discuss how the second Calamity had been handled.Odin was eager. Obviously, the united response had come too late, and the coordination had been lacking. Stronger bonds were necessary, to quickly and collectively deal with any threats that occurred. Together, they could decisively deal with any large issues before they became a threat as problematic as the Demonic Incursion. In His mind, this had been a wake up call, and would lead to a better tomorrow.This rosy vision of the future was quickly destroyed. There was no critical analysis of the errors that had been made. No somber talks about how close they had come to being wiped out, and how they might not get as lucky the next time. Instead, there was revelry celebrating their heroic victory. The stories told were of the successful splitting of the world, the other dozens of desperate attempts that failed quickly forgotten.There was no mention of doing better for the next Calamity. The current setup had worked, so there was no need to change it.When it became clear that there would be nothing constructive discussed, Odin soon left the celebrations. He tried to build stronger alliances, quicker and more cohesive response teams for the next Calamities, but there was just not enough interest from the other Gods. He found some that shared his views and together they founded Asgard.And gradually, the Great Demon Incursion slipped from the minds of the other Gods. Sure, they would still remember it if it was mentioned or was relevant, but it rarely came up. The remaining corrupted areas were continually cleaned, and as they slowly became cleaner the amount of resources needed to keep them patrolled became less and less. It became a mere afterthought rather than a major drain on the nations the Gods guided.But Odin could not forget. While the established narrative was that the demons were easily defeated because of the genius of the Gods, Odin still viscerally felt the hopelessness there had been in the last part of the conflict, before splitting the world into realms had reversed the situation. And the one path he saw to deal with the hopelessness, to properly stand against the overwhelming demons, was denied him – because most of the other Gods did not realize just how dire the threat was and refused to unite against it.Much of the lands that had been the heart of the incursion went to Asgard. This was because they alone were willing to bear the substantial costs of cleansing it over and over. What others saw as a chore, Odin considered a boon. This way, there would be no relapse of the incursion just because somebody got careless after a hundred years of slowly fading corruption. But more than that, it gave him a chance to study in depth what he now considered the greatest adversary the world had.Lesser Gods might have fallen to the temptation to cause demonic incursions in order to study them, and indeed in other parts of the world they did. Which is why they were not to be trusted with the high corruption in the aftermath of the Great Incursion. But Odin was patient.And there was much to learn about the nature of the demons and their Host from the corruption itself, at much less risk. There was still some risk, it turned out, after some of the sorcerers looking into it went insane from exposure. But on the whole, not as problematic as a demonic outbreak.Odin himself was highly invested, but found himself unsuitable for research. Instead, he set to high level strategy – forging bonds with other Gods, directing mortal nations and funneling as much as possible into the investigations. So he was a few steps removed when the breakthroughs happened, and the results had spread far and wide before he could put a lid on it.The corruption, it turned out, functioned very much the same way that Divine power would leak into the world around Avatars or Incarnations of Gods. The Gods were subtly changing the nature of the world where they had power. This made it easier for them to affect the world there, and anything matching the nature of the God would be heightened. A farming Gods would cause better harvests. A war God boost their soldiers. And so on. Some of the nature of the God was brought into the world. Demonic corruption was the same – it brought some of the nature of the Demonic Host. But the scale was vastly different. A God would have one Incarnation, or maybe a dozen Avatars. The effect either way was roughly the same, fairly low and highly localized. A small demonic incursion had hundreds or thousands of demons. The Great Incursion had gone into the hundreds of millions. Each affecting the world at the level of an Avatar at least, with some of the stronger ones like an Incarnation.Gods were encouraged to send Avatars of themselves into the corrupted areas, and just stay there to slowly replace the corruption with their own influence. But it also became clear that the corruption was disappearing faster than expected. There was something else draining it.People. Normal people, devout followers of their Gods, provided a trickle of influence. Still, a village of people could have a noticeable effect. This had just not been truly noticed before, because Gods did not care much for people and their fates – but also because influence from different Gods reduced each other much like it did with corruption. Since most villages had followers from various Gods, the effects canceled out.Further more, studying the link, they noted that in return, the people provided a bit of power to the God. Well, with extra steps. There was unlimited power in the Medium, but it was fluid and washed away easily. People and their belief provided an anchoring point, so the amount of believers determined the amount of power a God could command.These revelations about the nature of Divine power quickly became problematic. As Gods now had been handed knowledge about how to increase their power, they set out to do so.People had previously been considered mere chess pieces, relevant only in so far as they could help the the aims of the God they worshiped. Otherwise to be left alone to grow and spread so there would be more available when needed. Indeed, because coherence in their views helped keep the Gods coherent, a smaller following was often seen as a blessing. That changed to viewing them as a resource, and overnight everyone was worth fighting over. The aim was to gain more followers, at whatever cost that might take.And thus the third Calamity, the Follower Wars, began.It was a simultaneous mess of tiny conflicts all over the newly split realms, with no clear boundary where one stopped and another began. If you managed to win one area, restoring peace and prosperity, that made it a juicy target for your neighbors.The fighting quickly became brutal, and the Gods needed any edge they could get. And so their sights fell on the influence that their followers could provide on the world. The blessings, that previously needed a high priest or an avatar. The boon depended on the nature of the God, true, and some were more suited to war than others, but a boost in any area was still an edge.And to get it, they just needed to purify their villages, towns and cities so that noone was left believing in any other Gods.It was declared a Calamity when the remaining Gods noticed that they had all grown much weaker – less than one in twenty of the original population remained. And with the lack of people to believe in them the strength of the Gods waned.By then, though, society had collapsed. The remaining people had been forged in wars, and knew little of farming, craftsmanship, trade, governing, construction... yet they still required the fruits from these jobs, so while the Gods tried to reach uneasy ceasefires, the people continued to fight each other for the dwindling scraps that remained of civilization.There were pockets of stability. The older pantheons had enough of a grasp on their area to avoid open conflict. Sparsely populated areas sometimes had too few Gods to properly come into conflict. There were Gods friendly to each other in populous regions as well, of course, but enough others were around that there were still plenty of battles. And then there were Gods that acted as guardians of important locations. Since these were usually things the other Gods very much did not want to get out of the neat controlled corner of the world they had been pushed into, these were left alone. For the most part, that meant single Gods often guarding an item, a person or a location, so they were often minor Gods. Pushed into the job because they didn't have the power to refuse. That also meant that they didn't have significant amounts of followers to fight over anyway. Odin and the Gods working with Him were responsible for an entire large area, including a sizable population. Yet the memory of the Great Demonic Incursion was fresh enough that nobody was willing to risk a repeat. Especially as it quickly became apparent that the Gods were severely weakened by the Follower Wars and would not be able to deal with an incursion barely a tenth as big.Even declaring the situation a Calamity did not resolve the problem. The Follower Wars just went cold – from open conflicts to entrenched scheming, plotting and assassinations. It ended only when another piece of crucial information came from the research into the nature of Divinity.Gods can resonate with each other, which makes the influence they spread in the world add instead of subtract. Basically, a pantheon resonating with each other can have a village following different Gods from the pantheon and gain the full benefits as if each God had the village all to themselves. For a decent pantheon, that meant that instead of a small but significant boon you now had a dozen. Fields growing stronger from the Nature God, Tools better from the Forge Goddess, better rest from the Night God, ships sturdier from a Carpentry Goddess, fair winds from the Weather God and so on.There were no great battles upon this revelation, since populations were still recovering and so open war was heavily frowned upon by the general Divine community.There was a chance there, for a moment, a chance for a better world. One pantheon for everyone, all the Gods aligned with each other, every mortal fueling the same great work. It would have been enough to match the Demonic Host. And, with proper coordination rather than pure self-destruction, enough to beat it. But alas, infighting was something the Gods were only too good at.Instead, small pantheons sprung up everywhere. Old friendships turned to stronger bonds. Longterm enemies joined hands to work together for a brighter future. The Gods no longer had to face the world on their own, they could work together now.Thus the story would be told in the future, but the reality of the sudden formation of pantheons all over was far more messy. There were threats, there were uneasy agreements where both parties wanted to murder the other, and even where there had been friendship before it got tested as the nature of their relationship grew far less casual. Harmonizing with another Divine Being was to open oneself to them, an act of vulnerability. Nothing most Gods would tolerate under the best of circumstances, and now it was forced lest one were to consign themselves to insignificance. So naturally, most of these alliances of convenience fell apart not too soon after. Mostly from external pressure as other pantheons grew stronger around them, true, but still.And so, with these new tentative alliances in the form of pantheons, a lot of the local conflicts ground to a halt, and the Calamity was declared over. The root causes remained – a desire to acquire more followers, and a desire to remove foreign followers from settlements so avoid interference with ones beneficial influence. They merely shifted from a personal God level to the level of pantheons. The incentives for crusades and purges remained, and would stay a frequent feature of the world from then on – unofficially continuing the Follower Wars indefinitely.The whole ordeal left a sour taste in the general Divine Community when it came to seeking knowledge, as studies into the nature of Gods had caused the whole incident. And so such endeavors were banned in the future – a policy that came back to bite them with the whole Atlantis situation. Having the Gods of innovation and progress angry at you for badmouthing them did not help in a large scale war. Not that it worked out well for those Gods either – their anger had inflamed the population and they too were Gods, and so were the first to be rendered into fuel for the Atlantean war machine.But for Odin it was a different matter entirely. After the Follower wars, he had obtained from the studies of Demons and Gods something he'd nearly given up on – a weakness in the overwhelming enemy. And with it, a path towards victory.The Demonic Host was fueled by a vast cocktail of negative emotions – rage, spite, jealousy, lust, gluttony, fear, pain and many more – or perhaps it was the other way around and those emotions were labeled as negative because they were tainted by association with the Demonic Host. The point was that the Host was not invulnerable, it had a source of power it relied on. An origin for its eternal regrowth. And without it, all the constant tearing itself apart it did would end it.The goal then was as simple as it was overwhelmingly large – eradicate all the emotions that fed the Demonic Host. Deprive it of its fuel, and let it burn itself out.With the cooperation of the other Gods, that would have been possible. Without it... well, he would need to ensure compliance. Asgard would need to be restructured a bit to be more directly loyal to him, but it was a good start. The other pantheons... well, they would have to be absorbed or destroyed. Taking on every other God seemed impossible for a single pantheon, but they were hardly united. If there was one thing the past disasters had shown, it was that Gods would fall to infighting. And with that, the impossibility suddenly became very possible and even somewhat trivial. There were only a few other pantheons that would pose a proper threat in the end.And so Odin began the great work. Mostly it was just a matter of letting history take its course while ensuring that Asgard came out stronger from every conflict it was involved in. Maybe stoke a few fires here or there, or balance some conflicts so that two pantheons would destroy each other rather than one becoming the definite victor.There were setbacks, of course, but nothing that did more than nudge his plans. Odin was just operating at a different time scale than everybody else, and all the short term squabbling was mere noise while he slowly moved towards his goal.There were more Calamities over the millennia.The Fall of the Tenth Realm. As best could be told, it was caused by a creation of a mad mage. Since they would have been the first victim, details were hard to get. Whatever it was, something had spread there, eating away at armies sent to fight it, at barriers to contain it, at the land, oceans and the very air. Eventually the entire realm had to be abandoned and cut off from the rest before it spread further.The War for the Heavens. The Jade Throne pantheon was usurped by mortals, and the fierce battle between the old Gods and the newcomers shattered their continent. Most of the other pantheons watched, content to let them fight it out for themselves. In the end, the mortals won, ascending to Godhood themselves and forming their own mockery of the Jade Throne.The Arrogance of Atlantis. Somehow, despite the clear ban on research and technologies, these came to thrive unnoticed in Atlantis for far too long. By the time a response was mounted, it came in force – everybody remembered how things had ended the last time mortals sought to challenge the Gods. A defeat in detail would not happen a second time. Yet by then it was already too late. Atlantis fought with terrifying tools capable of burning the very essence of Gods themselves, even able to take what remained and use it as fuel for their mechanical abominations. Victory was still achieved but at a high cost. Too many Gods died, and the entire continent had to be wiped out. The Dream, whispering to humans their foolish dreams of glory, was poisoned to prevent such arrogance in the future. The Gods of the Dreamtime did not take that well, and isolated their part of the dream, leaving it pure but essentially cutting themselves off from the rest of the world.The Duel of Suns. Surja, the Sun, had become injured in the fight with Atlantis, and eventually succumbed to her wounds – leaving the world without its day star. Much like the first Calamity, the Sunless Days, this left the various Sun Gods squabbling over who would get to take their rightful place in the sky to light up the day for everybody. During the Sunless Days, this lead to nobody taking the place while the argument was ongoing – bringing bitter cold to the world during the eternal night. Only when it grew dire enough as people rapidly started dying did they come to an agreement and allowed Surja the position. Antarctica and the arctic ocean still remained frozen from that incident. Overcorrecting during the new crisis, three Gods took to the heavens as soon as the slot was open, without waiting for a discussion. The world was baked with heat, leaving large patches permanently scorched, lush forests turned to unforgiving deserts. Helios gave up their position as they saw the harm they were doing, leaving two suns. Inti and Huitzilopochtli kept their fight going for a week, until they pierced each other and both faded. Arinna was chosen to be the new sun after that. But the animosity between the two heavily wounded Sun Gods ignited the already present smoldering resentment between their respective pantheons. Unwilling to fight a war that was devastate them both, they split the realms between themselves, sinking their continent in the ones they were not allowed to have so that the other side would not get them. Only one realm remained with both continents present, because with the tenth realm gone the remaining ones could not be split evenly and neither side would grant the other more than they got themselves.All of these Calamities just served to strengthen Odin in his conviction. The Gods and mortals were weak and fractured, and needed guidance and strong leadership to stop making stupid mistakes that could wipe out the entire world.And the plan was progressing smoothly. Pantheons fought, because of course they did. Slowly, the weaker ones vanished, absorbed into their stronger neighbors or fading into insignificance. Asgard grew stronger. Eventually, there were mostly large pantheons left, and attacks were starting to be seen with condemnation from other neighbors. After all, if a pantheon was willing to use violence to grow bigger, what was to stop them from going after others next? So the free-for-all of conquest turned into a more political game. What you gained mattered not as much as how you could justify it to others so you would not be marked as a threat. It was a game where Odin had a definite advantage due to his long term view. Where others grew impatient and perished, he waited and reaped the rewards.And eventually, he was almost there, victory close enough at hand to be tasted. A mere handful of pantheons were left. Olympus had fallen to Asgard. It was been a clean war, as the opponent was weakened after their war with the Ennead and the exhaustion of their sun god Helios after his brief stint being a sun. Though it was fairly clearly aggression of Asgard's part, it had been an opportunity to take out a major rival too perfect to pass up. And Odin's machinations paid off, as the flimsy excuse of blaming it all on Loki was enough to pacify the other pantheons. They had each found ways to become broken and ineffective, with only mild nudging from Odin. Gods seemed prone to barrel towards self-destruction anyway, so one only had to stop any attempt at them realizing this.Hanan Pacha and Thirteen Heavens were preoccupied with their ongoing feud, sparing little attention to what went on in the distant rest of the world. A bloody rivalry that Odin had been only too happy to fan the flames of. A few missing envoys that were supposed to broach a ceasefire or even peace and some kidnapped children did wonders.The fake recreation of the Jade Throne by mortals was a mockery of the ancient power it once held. Furthermore, they ruled a broken land. While still one of the major powers, they no longer held the position of the strongest pantheon – indeed, they were hardly a credible threat on their own anymore. Not to the other major powers. Still, even a broken power could hurt. So it had been prudent to foment a rebellion in the remainders of the original pantheon. Generous supplies smuggled in over centuries had helped them establish a shadow civilization in the broken ruins of the once grand continent. Plenty of followers to give them power through their faith. Not enough to overthrow the usurpers, but definitely enough to keep them more than busy for quite a while. And with his generous help, any action the Jade Throne took against him would serve as a spark to light the fires of revolution.The Gods of the Dreamtime, of course, had basically seceded from the world, and cared little for what others did.That left only the Council of Òrún as the last credible obstacle, and Odin's next target. A group of allied pantheons that controlled the nexus of the world, the place where all the realms where anchored. Except of course the tenth realm which had been cut loose. Nearly all trade between realms had to go through the nexus, which made their lands rich and multicultural. The meeting of various ideas served to make them a source of new fashion and trends. But as they weren't a unified pantheon, the internal intrigues were more pronounced than in other regions. So a defeat in detail was in order. The Ennead, one of their strongest pantheons, had already fallen to Olympus. This made the others wary. It would difficult to pick a fight with any of their members now without the rest jumping into it as well. Thus they had to be the aggressors.It was Loki who happened to deliver the perfect bait. He had taken the whole Ragnarok prophecy a bit too seriously, and was actually seeking out allies while imprisoned. Odin was tempted to squash such impertinence before he realized what a perfect opportunity this was. Many of the allies contacted were fallen Gods from defeated pantheons. This included many from the Ennead, which still had their ties within the Council of Òrún. The fighting would draw some of them in. And it was a clear act of aggression against Asgard, support for a rebellion. So the Council would not be able to support them in full force. And as their friends and allies fell against Asgard, more Gods of the Council would be compelled to avenge them and join the fighting. It would be the perfect trickle of opponents, providing new ones as the previous ones were dispatched. And then, after “Ragnarok” was over, he'd have the perfect excuse to actually declare war, citing the many Gods that had invaded to help the rebels. Enough of an excuse that the other pantheons would not care, preoccupied with their own situations as they were. Odin would be able to take a newly war-hardened army and crush the weakened Council.And that would basically be it. Asgard would be the most powerful pantheon by far, with every other one isolated or weakened in some way. Ready to be picked off one by one. With control over the entire world, sweeping societal changes could be implemented. Odin had had many experiments conducted, searching for a society that would not feed the Demonic Host. And it was successful, in a way. The result was a very... dull society. To prevent negative emotions, all other emotions had to be suppressed as well. Indeed, the main challenge was to keep a sliver of fervor left for faith. A completely apathetic society would not be able to sustain Gods. A sliver, though, a sliver would be enough. Perhaps not to thrive, but enough to live. And even a diminished existence was better than excess with the constant threat of the Demonic Host. But such a trickle of power would not be enough to challenge the other Gods. So for the time being, Odin had to keep relying on normal societies, feeding the Demonic Host in the process.And then some freakish wave slammed into the world, setting the realms on a collision course and churning up the area so that direct observation became impossible. For a moment, Odin felt transcendent vindication. If the other Gods had acted quickly against the Great Demonic Invasion, the world would not have been split into realms. And a whole world would have weathered such a wave easily – even if it was moved, there would not have been anything nearby for it to collide with. So if everybody had been sensible back then and just listened to him, they would not be having a problem right now.Still, given the current situation, this had caused a problem. Not to mention that this neatly disrupted all of his plans. But that was fine, the end goal was still the same, he'd just have to adjust the path to getting there. The world would need to be seen to, but first the origin of the wave had to be dealt with. There was no sense in fixing symptoms while the cause remained. He quickly gathered the Divine forces of Asgard, and moved out to find... Hecate. A minor and diminished Goddess, supposed to be barely a shadow of herself. Instead, she was glowing brightly and overflowing with power, easily matching himself or any other of the major Gods. And beside her was some abomination. A twisted creature, a mockery of Divinity. It seemed to be made up of smaller versions of itself, repeating downwards and inwards, with all straight angles and twisted space. Pulsing and growing. Clearly, this was the source of the attack on their world. But it was weak, barely stronger than a Godling.Odin was very tempted to simply tell his followers to kill it. But there were other considerations. Mostly, the other pantheons. They would be incensed about the damage to the world, and seek somebody to hold responsible for the mess. Leaving the thing alive would provide that target. Without it, Asgard was around and might thus catch heat. No, better to leave it as a lightning rod for blame.“Tyr, attack it, but cautiously. We are not certain of its nature or capabilities. Probing attacks for now, so that we might learn what it can do.”There was a commotion. Loki. That was expected in general; the timing was too close to keep up the pretense of locking him up to prevent the prophecy. People would assume that this new threat to the world was what Ragnarok was referring to. That would prove a problem with other pantheons, as the reason to lock Loki up they'd been told was punishment for causing the war against Olympus. Ah, well, hopefully it was long enough ago and the realms colliding would prove distracting enough that nobody remembered to look too closely into that.Still, while expected, it was too early for Loki to be released. How had he... ah, Thor was with him. That idiot had always put a bit too much stock into the veneer of familial relations they chose to adopt. Odin had thought that the apparent betrayal by Loki had dampened that a bit, but apparently not. Or maybe it was a resurgence now that Loki seemed exonerated.The other Aesir were reacting far too positively as well. Of course there were a few that Loki had talked into being sympathetic to his cause. Odin knew that and had planned for it. But seeing the reactions of people, even taking into account the changed situation, he had clearly underestimated just how many Loki had managed to sway. If that extended to his other preparations for the war – and it would have to, covert communication channels would have been necessary to avoid Odin's gaze – then perhaps a war against Loki's forces would not have been quite as one-sided as Odin had planned for.Very troubling.That was the second major unexpected piece of news in very short time. Both clearly disruptive to his short and mid term plans.But Odin was patient. Given the new situation, the first order of business was to weather the current crisis, and after everything had passed continue on his long term goal to unify the world under his rule.