Noira

A dimensional gate tore open at the far end of the bridge.

The rip started as a jet-black vertical slit in reality. The edges of the gate shimmered like heat haze over summer asphalt as the gate bloomed into a perfect circle and popped like an inky bubble.

Noira stepped through.

Seven feet of Mothman Omnid, festivus-sweater wrapped body a patchwork of white and gray and charcoal-black spots. The Deathmoth’s massive wings trailed behind her like a white, regal cape dotted with matching dark spots. Two compound eyes, larger than Laika’s fists, glowed a deep arterial red, each one fracturing the bridge lights into thousands of tiny reflections like rubies shattered in a kaleidoscope. White, fluffy antennae, long and feathered, swept forward like the whiskers of a predator tasting the air.

She looked immensely… annoyed. More so than usual, which was saying something, because Noira’s resting expression generally sat somewhere between “disgusted by existence” and “contemplating arson on a planetary scale.”

“I can’t fucking reach her,” Noira announced.

Laika’s ears flattened. She arranged her face into concern. “Comet?”

“Yes. I’ve been probing the perimeter of the… drinking establishment with pinhole gates for hours on end. No luck,” Noira growled. “The Frontenachii have a Corpse Seeker parked over the building. Barrier fields across every dimensional frequency I can open a stable aperture on.”

She closed her fists.

“Eventually… I ran out of mana and had a nap,” she admitted gruffly. “Woke up, tried again a few minutes ago… and still nothing. Anything from your end? Any Astral clues as to what those fucks are doing with Comet?”

Laika had been waiting for this moment.

“Comet is fine,” Laika lied, leaning back on the supportive fox eyes behind her.

Noira’s antennae wiggled.

“You managed to make… contact?”

“Yep.” Laika smiled. “Comet embedded herself with the Emperor! She reported a successful infiltration in progress!”

Noira processed this, relaxing a fraction. “She was not targeted specifically?”

“She was and she was able to convince the human Emperor that she’s harmless,” Laika lied. “The Frontenachii division at the pub and their Seeker defected to the Emperor of Earth and now serve him. The null-barriers are there so that the rest of their women in orbit and other Scruts don’t detect the defection.”

“I see,” Noira muttered.

“Comet is leaning into the situation. She’s working on the Emperor, slowly seducing him into the truth.”

“What’d she learn?” Noira asked.

“The Emperor of Earth isn’t operating alone. He has many Frontenachii defectors, local Omnid allies, and an incredibly powerful fox archmage running Astral interference. Comet is… doing what she does best. Getting close, making friends, extracting information, looking for weaknesses, dispensing gifts that will bloom when the time is right. She simply needs more time.”

Laika leaned back in the Navigator’s chair, projecting relaxed confidence.

“Comet believes she can identify the Emperor’s base of operations and unravel his entire clandestine archmage network in a few days,” the dog continued. “She spent the night cultivating trust with several humans connected to his inner circle!”

Noira’s mandibles worked slowly. “Great. Why didn’t you V-cast me ‘bout it, making me worry all night?”

“She was only able to reach out to me via the Astral about two minutes ago,” Laika lied.

“Very well,” Noira said. “We’ll leave the Maned Wolf to her mission for now.”

Laika nodded.

“You… look like shit, Rudy,” the Deathmoth commented.

“The local Astral is like thick jelly. Diving through it is… emotionally draining on a whole new level,” Laika commented.

“The local… Everything is fucking soup. The state of this mana-starved mudball disgusts me.” Noira spat.

“Oh? How… doomed do you judge this planet as?” Laika wondered. “There’s no obvious magic or dungeons here, right?”

“I’ve been gating the Heralds from place to place since we got here,” the Gate Archmage ranted. “Listening. Learning, sampling the locale with the doc and others. Here’s what we’ve found out: There are indeed no dungeons or monsters… But! That is not where their doom lies. Picture it, Rudy…”

The moth spread her wings slightly.

“Every river and lake is contaminated with chemical runoff. Their oceans are dissolving from the inside out. The atmospheric carbon levels would classify this world as actively self-harming by any civilized standard. These humans burn ancient corpse-oil to propel themselves to shopping complexes where they purchase items manufactured by children in poison factories. I listened to local human NPCs. They know that they are killing their own biosphere and they keep doing it because the alternative requires mild personal inconvenience.”

The moth tisked.

“I will be glad when the Conversion cleanses this fucked up, doomed world,” Noira’s voice held the kind of warmth a gardener feels surveying a weedy, neglected lot she is about to transform. “One hundred trillion beautiful pines drinking the poison from the water, scrubbing the filth from the air. The script-bound humans will perish and awaken as Sleigh Residents, happy and purposeful, crafting gifts in the Workshop instead of creating endless landfill garbage. Their shopping centers will be root systems. Their highways will be river corridors. Every parking lot, a meadow! Every smoke-spewing factory, a grove!”

“Lovely,” Laika commented, frowning internally.

Before, she would have wholeheartedly supported these words. Now, she knew that there was more to the story.

“This world deserves the Conversion more than any we have seeded. The brainless NPCs chose profit over oxygen. Billions of them chose convenience over long term survival. They made their Choice, Rudy. We are simply providing the consequence, a dot to their absurd narrative.” Noira fluttered. “An ocean of trees growing over their monuments to greed.”

Laika looked at the Earth. At the clouds swirling gradually over blue oceans. It looked pristine, clean, so full of promise from this vantage point.

“The Seeds aren’t taking root,” the mongrel said. “This dimension’s linearity is choking the Conversion.”

“I am aware,” Noira stated. “We made a plan to use the Gardeners. The Frontenachii will do our heavy lifting without knowing they are watering our merry, everlasting forest.”

“That’ll take too long,” Laika said. “The Sixth Fleet moves far too slowly. I don’t want to hang around this magic-dry dimension longer than necessary, being here gives me a migraine.”

“What do you suggest then?” Noira asked.

[Yass, tell her about our lovely tree,] the fox eyes purred.

“There’s an incredibly handy potent source of energy nearby,” Laika said. “The shear made by the destruction of the Frontenacii capital ship.”

“Isn’t it incredibly entropic?” the moth asked. “Blooming the moon… doesn’t bloom the Earth.”

“You’re not thinking with portals!” Laika smiled. “In my Astral dives… I found a still spot. I calculated that there’s an eye of the storm in the center of the shear. You can open a gate to it and funnel mana through it via gates to each of the Festivus Seeds on Earth from the ship!”

“That… sounds like a lot of work for me,” Noira huffed.

“Would you rather do nothing while our hard-working Saint is diligently and bravely bamboozling the Stabalists and the Frontenachii green Admiral?” Laika asked.

“Ugh, fine,” the moth huffed. “Give me the gate coordinates. I’ll open a pinhole as a test.”

“Not yet.” Laika said. “First, I need… manual navigation.”

“Why?”

“I require a manual override on the helm. Full steering authority, no avatar interference. The shear is VERY uneven and can only be observed properly by a high level navigator like me. I need to get closer to the dimensional fold on the moon.”

“A serious deviation from protocol, Rudy,” the Omnid commented.

Laika squared her shoulders. The ghost plushie sat in her lap. The pendant pulsed. The fox eyes watched.

“I am the best damn navigator this Sleigh has ever had,” she let the words land with utter conviction. “I dove through the Blizzard of Railagrathia. I charted the Shear of Vemrixth blind, by scent alone, because the instruments got fried by the entropy wave. I navigated the Recursion Fold of Earth-Aroblaith backwards while the entire bridge was on fire and Prancer was laughing in the corner because she thought we were all going to melt that day. We did not.”

Laika bared her teeth. “I want full navigation and shield controls so I can get the ship close enough to the shear without getting it damaged. Once I’m closer to the Frontenachii capital ship crash site, I’ll finish my calculations and tell you the exact coordinates.”

The Mothman stared at her for a few seconds. Laika held the ruby gaze of compound eyes. The Gate Archmage was incredibly powerful, but trapped in her own specialty, an absolute expert of her particular domain. She couldn’t discern truth from lies, couldn’t see or sniff prad souls that well.

“Fine. Confirmed,” Noira said. “Full manual navigation and shield authority granted to Stratonavigator Rudy in this dimension for the duration of this seeding. Sleigh Avatar, acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged!” the Sleigh sang. “Stratonavigator Rudy now has full helm control! Please remember to check your mirrors and signal before changing lanes! Safety first! Merry navigating!”

Merry shut up, Laika thought, and grabbed the crystalline, white and red steering yoke.

The helm responded instantly. She felt the ship through the controls, the vast mass of the Sleigh, the hum of its engines.

She adjusted course. The Sleigh groaned softly, settling into the new trajectory.

Good girl, Laika thought at the ship. Cooperate now. Die later.

Sage’s eyes sparkled around her like a halo, invisible to the Omnid gater and the ship’s avatar.

Noira observed the course correction.

She didn’t see the liminal tree like Laika and Sage.

On the holo-feed and through the hexaglass, the space above the Moon’s surface looked like space. Stars. Vacuum.

Laika’s navigator-senses said otherwise.

In her mind, the shear registered as an absence. An inversion-of-the-rules zone. A region where the readings simply stopped, as if mundane reality decided to leave a blank page in the middle of its own book. Her Astral senses felt it thrumming at the edge of perception, an eldritch vibration in the fabric of what-is, like standing next to a bell the size of a continent that had been struck once and never stopped ringing. The sound was below hearing. Below feeling. It lived in the marrow, in the spaces between heartbeats, in the void between one thought and the next.

A large gate opened into the heart of the horrid shear would be a catastrophic event.

Dimensional gates functioned by establishing stable resonance between two points in space-time. The gate’s aperture maintained itself through balanced energy exchange, the same principle that kept a soap bubble intact, equal pressure on all sides. The shear’s entropy field would eat the balance. The gate would begin decaying the instant it opened, the aperture collapsing asymmetrically as the null-space consumed the stabilizing energy faster than the Gatekeeper could replace it.

A Mothman caught in a collapsing gate inside an entropic void would have no air, no stable dimensional reference points, and no way to open a return gate because every frequency she tried would be swallowed by the shear before it could establish resonance.

Laika’s claws tightened on the festive helm.

She thought about Noira’s speech. The rant about chemical pollution. The utter contempt for humans. The absolute, bone-deep certainty, that turning eight billion humans into ornaments and then toy-makers was mercy, a perfectly acceptable solution. The absolute satisfaction in the Omnid’s voice as she described the forest she was glad to plant over their graves.

She thought about the comicon she attended with Ash.

The people in costumes, laughing, taking photos, buying overpriced pretzels. The barista at the tea shop. The boy with the paper crown who said sad stories could have happy endings. The dragon girl with crystalline flower hair and tears that could bloom anything.

Hope ignited in Laika’s chest.

Noira was wrong. Magic could fix things. Slowly, carefully… without wiping out an entire planet worth of culture and life.

Noira wouldn’t change her mind, she was a stubborn, selfish Omnid, the worst of her kind.

Noira had to die today so that the non-magic Earth and Laika’s new friends could live.