Year 300

  Darkgard III

  They didn’t immediately wage war on Darkgard II, even if Alka really, really wanted to. In the end, scouting and gathering information came first.

  Darkgard III was not covered in ash or soot. But instead, the entire pce was dry. The ground was sandy, and the air was non-existent. As far as they saw, the skies were just burning white, and a white sun burned the world overhead.

  The sand was hot. So hot that the grains of sand were at the very edges of melting, but their magical protections prevented them from harming the two domain holders.

  We walked.

  It was a sea of sand as far as the eye could see. There were no mountains other than mounds of sand that were somehow higher than others. The winds of this pce only brought hot, dry air. The sun also bsted strong waves of energy that messed with magic and confused our magical senses.

  For a tree like me, I didn’t like this environment very much. I could imagine my roots drying out, my bark falling apart.

  But as we walked and walked, we noticed that the sun began to sink behind us, and the winds grew stronger. Colder. Then, the once hot sand gave way to warm dirt. More dirt. The hot winds were now cold.

  And it was a nd of darkness.

  There, we saw fortresses filled with demons. These were not dwarven parasites like in Darkgard II. Instead, the fortresses were filled with demonic spiders the size of cows with fangs the size of horns.

  The demons were not the problem. They couldn’t detect us. Instead, what was interesting was the presence of retively new corpses. This was a fairly recent fortress, with corpses that were probably a few years old.

  “Dwarves.” Alka sat as he examined a body. “Regur dwarven kind fought, and somehow the body didn’t rot.” Instead the body looked like it was desiccated. The face shriveled.

  “It’s the dry air.” Lumoof said. The way the fortress was designed had included deep wells and tunnels. “Let’s search the tunnels, if the weather is so hostile, they are likely to be underground. Like Gyroworld.”

  The demonic spiders clogged up the tunnels, but ultimately they were nothing. Lumoof and Alka sughtered their way through the tunnels and eventually found themselves traveling deeper and deeper.

  The tunnels were trapped to hell and back again, and they got to a point where there was a mountain of dwarven corpses that formed an impassable wall.

  Of course, only if one didn’t have magic. The two teleported past the mountain of corpses and continued on. The tunnels led further in and there were still more corpses here.

  Eventually, they led somewhere. An underground city.

  But first, a checkpost.

  “Who goes there!” Two dwarves, armed with axes, shouted. They sensed some movement in the loose pebbles or dirt of the tunnels, but not enough to detect them.

  Alka and Lumoof were cloaked and just walked past them.

  They stared.

  “Strange,” one of them walked to the puddle and muttered. “Why’d the puddle move when there’s no one.”

  ***

  Home to about fifty or perhaps sixty thousand dwarves carved into tunnels. Here, they had a rge central well that extracted water from deep below. Then, there were magical crystals throughout rge parts of the city that produced light, and also crystals that produced air.

  They were ruled by a king. A City Guardian.

  The City Guardian was an extremely old dwarf, and dwarves, as far as I remembered, generally lived to about 200 to 300 years. But Lumoof, through his senses, could roughly estimate the man to be close to a thousand years old.

  There were many old records kept in this city. It was known as Stragmar, and interestingly, we soon discovered an object at the heart of the city simir to one we had seen before.

  The Leyline Focusing Lens of the Margmarian Dwarves, located beneath the City Guardian’s chambers, pulsed and still possessed strong magical energy. Ancient, but unlike our leyline focusing lens, this one still retained a great level of power.

  “The blood of the fallen.” He held in his hand a bowl of blood and poured the blood on the relic. The relic buzzed as the blood flowed around it, and we felt minute increases in the relic’s power.

  The city survived, but did not prosper. The spiders would attack them if they were ever discovered, and though the dwarves frequently sent out scouting parties to explore the surface, these scouting parties were instructed to avoid leading the demonic spiders towards any new exits they made.

  Tunnels were being made all the time, each with traps and defenses. Dwarven stubbornness seemed to have possessed them, and these folks were not like the Urans.

  The Urans had given up on the surface world. The lords were content to be masters of their underground irs, away from the demons of the surface.

  But the dwarves of Darkgard III did not. Lumoof and Alka soon discovered the presence of multiple such dwarven cities, about twenty scattered over the world. They’d been trapped for the past ten to twenty thousand years, but the surface remained a nd that they always sought to recim.

  These city guardians told tales of their old legends, of when they were surface dwellers, and the dwarves had dedicated historians that chronicled their past and built massive records about what they’d achieved.

  A myth to inspire their people to keep going.

  It was perhaps this difference in where Snek’s Urans and the dwarves differed and how they viewed their historical records. The dwarves, as we’d seen on many worlds, pced great value on their past, and that became their strength in hard times.

  The Urans were less beholden to it, and thus adapted to their new situation.

  The two returned to Treehome and prepared for our next steps.

  ***

  Also, this year we had three demon kings; two ter than expected and one earlier than expected. The two ter worlds were Sarlpi and the Great Steppes. The annihition of the demon king went smoothly, and we also added the two new heroes, Sandra and Perry, to support the war effort.

  The two were very nervous to face the demon king on Sarlpi.

  The first demon king they faced had been so severely weakened that this second demon king would actually be their real challenge. They made a few mistakes here and there, but the hero’s innate sensibilities meant they were spared of the problems.

  Lumoof was also around, just in case the demon king wanted to try its usual end-of-life nuke.

  The domain holders then handled the demon kings on the Great Steppes and then, Landas. The demon king on Landas came earlier than expected, and the native elves panicked. The idea of another disaster like the previous demon king was still fresh in their minds. The defensive forces prepared for battle, but with the domain holders around, the war ended swiftly.

  Still, after the intense preparations the local militia made, a lot of this energy was unused. So, we organized a military expedition to demon worlds for the native militia to sort out their unspent energy.

  ***

  “Have you thought of what you wanted?” Aeon asked Ebon, and the knight looked uncertain. It’d been years, and yet Ebon continued to put off his choice.

  “Do you imagine me to be a teacher, Aeon?” Ebon countered. The knight was a diligent practitioner, frequently practised combat even on his own and also was regurly seen around the various leyline dungeons of our worlds. His presence was often as a guide, a role that perhaps seems like that of a teacher.

  But how one perceived themselves was not the same as how the world and others perceived them. “I imagine not. But it is for you to imagine for yourself, who you want to be. This choice is very much a personal one. It is not us who will live with those choices. It is you who will face them.”

  “And you imagine correctly. I’ve served as a knight for decades, and yet even all this time I’ve devoted it to the front lines. A teacher, a master to young students? I think it is not for me.” Ebon nodded. “Which is why I do believe the Castle Knight to be a better choice for me.”

  “Then why hesitate?” It was a silly question. In the end, it was always something else.

  “Perhaps, I just want to see what happens when I do. Perhaps, after being denied my domain for so long, I thought I should relish it, and let the choice linger until I am finally over it.”

  It was entirely his call, and he then proceeded to ugh. And ugh. It felt like he was ughing to release some kind of long held frustration.

  “I waited and toiled for decades. The system can wait a few years.”

  “Very well.” In the end, Ebon left it as it is. Was this his way of getting back at the system?

  ***

  Twinspace’s new continent was already a quarter settled within a few years, mainly by the believers of the Temple of Aeon. They had a tremendous advantage because Aeonic priests and druids were skilled when it came to purification of the corrupted nds.

  Hoyia’s power was so strong that she could single handedly clear a city-sized area of demonic blight with a single use of her holy powers.

  Expedition’s Landing grew massively in the past few years, as it became the main port of call for glory seekers, adventurers, and hunters. Many came to the new continent in hopes of finding treasure hidden underneath the muck of demonic corruption.

  This surge of migrants helped relieve the overcrowded stresses of the old continent, but it still remained a heavily overpoputed pce. Food scarcity continued to be a problem, even if improvements were had.

  Expedition’s Landing also recruited farmers heavily in order to initiate rge scale food exports. The nds of the new continent were extremely fertile, and the excess food produced by the new continent would help alleviate the food stresses for the Temple’s believers. The priests began to preach about stewardship and how to properly manage the nds to prevent overexploitation. There was likely a time long ago when the old continent was just as fertile, but centuries of overfarming and extraction turned it into the husk it is today.

  The people of Twinspace, many of them came from modest origins back on the old continent, farmers, soldiers, and others of simir status. These came to the new continent to pursue wealth, but wealth is all around them.

  Farmers were unsure how to deal with the fertility of the nd. The skills and methods used to enable farming on dry, almost barren nd was very different from that of the fertile nd. Hoyia had to call on the expertise of druids and farmers from Treehome in order to help the settlers and pioneers on the new continent.

  It was a matter of excess. On these super fertile soil, they had to deal with other kinds of problems such as insects, limited use of certain types of fertilizers that often messed up the nd’s natural bance, and managing water. On the old barren nds, they could throw anything at the nd and the nd would soak up any excess.

  In other words, pnting the way they used to often poisoned their crop, because the natural environment already could provide what the crops needed.

  Even inftion was an area where we had to think and manage carefully. Crystals and gems were found so easily that we noticed some of the natives treating them as if they were disposable, instead of using them carefully. We knew that these crystals were only abundant now, but in a matter of decades the easy sources of these gems would dry up and the scarcity would return. So rationing and proper management of these resources was key.

  When it came to managing such cyclical resources, we found that the dwarves and the treefolks generally had a better track record. It was quite strange that many treefolks were genetically inclined towards the changes in the seasons, so to them, storing the excess to use during shortages came naturally. Dwarves, who were also historically heavy miners, also understood that the nature of metals depleted after a while. For the other races, these sort of concepts needed to be taught and drilled over years.

  So, we had treefolk lords and leaders from the FTC deployed to Twinspace to help manage these new settlements and control the settlers’ innate need to harvest and consume all they could. Hoyia, then created the first New Continent Resource Preservation Fund, and had my [Giant Attendant Trees] function as a long term [treeasury] of these resources. A portion of these precious gems and metals were redirected to the treasury for future use.

  Bringing in external experts and leaders did create friction between the zealots and the Order, so we needed the priests to heavily lubricate the interactions. A key point Hoyia thus emphasized was that the local leaders needed to be trained to repce the Order officials brought from afar. Without the transfer of knowledge and a commitment to ensure that the natives of Twinspace would eventually lead their own organization, it would cause dissatisfaction over the long term.

  It would also reek of colonialism, if the leaders of Twinspace were always someone from elsewhere.

  Hoyia, thus, had a lot to do. Mainly, selecting, promoting, and training zealots that could take up leadership positions and deal with me directly. As it was, Hoyia’s pce as the voice of god that brought about the settlements of the New Continent meant she had the weight of accomplishments and success to justify her leadership.

  Any appointed leader, especially from other worlds, would not have that same history and pedigree.

  Though Hoyia was now immortal and could sit in that role forever, we needed her skills and abilities elsewhere, and also, it was unlikely that Hoyia herself would want to remain a leader of Twinspace forever.

  We needed to start preparing for leadership succession, even if the work of developing the New Continent was only in its early stages.

  ***

  “Emperor Erranuel, I see you’ve done well!” Lumoof’s appearance on Shasan was greeted with a meal. Erranuel looked happy to see him, and the two hugged briefly.

  Erranuel’s Hawa holy empire now expanded to cover ten cities and they had a strong, standing force. But the challenges of Shasan’s seasonal shifts pced significant hurdles for expansion. Even moving forces from one pce to another required a lot of work.

  Olivia was there too, and she looked as pristine as she always had. She seemed a bit stronger, a few more levels gained. “Greetings to you too, high priestess.”

  “Since you’re here, Lumoof, I want to negotiate for a rger shipment of people and goods from our world.” Erranuel said. As it was, Erranuel’s goods movement between the two worlds was fairly limited. There were two steps to move goods or people. From Treehome to the nearest node world and from the node world, a void portal to Shasan.

  “Any particur reason?”

  “My expansion requires more military equipment. I ask that you carry these messages back to my regent’s council and have them begin production-”

  “The regent’s council have messages of their own.” Lumoof handed the Emperor a letter. They expressed their frustrations with the Emperor’s absence and the recent splinter factions that denounced the Emperor’s actions as heretical. “They want you back.”

  “The hell with them.” Erranuel cursed. “They can appoint a new Emperor if they so wish.”

  “Only after you’ve dealt with the splinter states.” Lumoof smiled.

  “Those useless nobles.” The emperor covered his forehead with his palm. “Can’t they keep a country together?”

  “Not so easy without your abilities, [Emperor].”

  He sat and thought about it for a moment, and wondered. “Can I send Olivia? Olivia’s borrowed divinity should be the perfect response to these foolish heretics.”

  Olivia blinked. “That is not what I agreed to-”

  Erranuel added. “Don’t you want to visit Roon’s homeworld? It’s Aeon’s base, and where you can feel what it’s like being next to another divinity at full strength.”

  “Being near to Lumoof is sufficient.” Olivia countered, and she was right. Lumoof’s avatar mode recreated the same sensation.

  “I argue that being in that burning valley is an experience in itself.” Erranuel countered. “I don’t want to leave. My people here need me, and I honestly have more things to do here. There are problems I have to solve.”

  Erranuel recruited heavily and borrowed heavily from our pybook. He instituted civil and social reforms and used his [Emperor] abilities to create benefits for his people that the other city states of Shasan didn’t have.

  Shasan, a world with fragmented city states separated by deserts, had never seen an Empire. There was also no real way of controlling the fragmented city states without a special set of powers.

  Erranuel, thus, as an Emperor, created the first series of portal gates to connect the various cities. It was a heavy expense, only made possible with a set of resources provided by Olivia and the Hawa’s Core worlds, but necessary for them to function as a cohesive empire.

  “Tell them no. I’m not going back. Olivia, go on my behalf.” Erranuel said. No, he commanded, and Lumoof felt the Emperor use some kind of holy power on the high priestess. The High Priestess squirmed as she raised her own powers to resist.

  But in the end she buckled. A Holy emperor was something else, and she sighed. “Fine. I will have some unpleasant words about you when I return.”

  “I look forward to them.” Erranuel ughed.

  ***