Eighteen Sixty Five
The Legate hung up on the Serval.
Ixthia released her kobold and lay still for a moment, listening to Bradberry suck in air beside her and work very hard at not having visible opinions about the call he’d just overheard.
She reached over and scratched him lightly, three short lines drawn along his ribs, just enough to produce another sharp intake of breath and a bit of blood.
“You may relax,” she told him. “You did very well last night in annoying my bestie.”
“Have you and the ex-Admiral been friends for a long time then?” The wolf asked, gaining a pitch of courage.
“Yes.” Ixthia looked up at the ceiling and let her mind wander to the summer days of…
August 8th, 1865.
The Dreadspine Mountains at the edge of Cradlefall, the Omnithornian sky so thick with violet stars it looked painted. The shattered, half-crystallized moon framed the landscape, reflecting in the waves of lake Eerie below.
Their tent was an extradimensional acquisition from Arx, much larger inside than its footprint suggested, which the seventeen-year-old Ixthia used as an excuse to annoy everyone with lewd jokes for a bit.
The fire was cosy, amber sparks flying towards the endless sky. The soup with dragonsteak meat bits was hearty.
Aconia was inside the tent, attempting to teach her kobold bestie to braid Omnid manes or something, demonstrating a frankly impressive commitment to the project given how badly it was going judging by the sounds they were making.
Evely sat across the fire from Ixthia, young and sharp and believing the universe was a problem she could personally resolve through force of intellect and will.
Ixthia’s nuntix kitlix suddenly vibrated at her side.
“Who calls?” She asked. The small crystal kitten twinkled. “Zexxy” it said in Zexxia’s voice.
Ixthia tapped the kitlix, accepting the call. “You’re calling rather late, Zexxy.”
“IXY!” Zexxia’s voice declared loudly. “Guys! You all listening?”
“We are,” Acony shouted from the tent innards.
“Yep, yep,” Evelyn agreed. “Whatcha so excited about?”
“Right then. Listen up good. My fiancee Winston just found this dead-ass dimension and it is genuinely the most unhinged thing I have seen in my entire life and I have seen a great deal of many unhinged things.”
“Who is Winston again?” Ixthia asked.
“You know, Koppernacht,” Acony said from the tent. “He’s one grade below us. A Mothman nerd… hella talented gater though.” A pause of pure teenage dismissal. “Keeps making puppy eyes at Zexxy in Zalimar’s delving class. It’s embarrassing. Guess they finally decided to get together, hum?”
“When did you even get blood bound?” Evely asked.
“A few minutes ago,” Zexxia stated. “He showed me this freaking place and I was so freaking happy that I decided to keep him forever.”
“Great job. I’m very happy for you,” Evely commented, not sounding happy in the slightest.
“Are you knobs freaking listening?” Zexxia’s voice rattled from the kitlix. “It’s a freaking dead dimension! A whole dead dimension, with intact ruins!”
“I’m listening, Zexxy,” Ixthia said, resuming sipping her soup. “Many dead dimensions have ruins.”
“This one is legitimately amazing though. It has… baller time dilation!”
“What, like Arx?” Ixthia wondered.
“No you beerch, it’s quite minor a few steps from the gate! A fraction of a second.”
“That’s not very impressive, sis,” Aconia drawled.
“Sis, you’re not getting it,” Zexxia huffed.
“So explain.”
“The time dilation gets worse deeper in! I wandered away from Winny for a minute or two and then our wind-up watches didn’t match at all! Eeeeeeee!”
“Oh,” Acony’s silver eyes lit up as she stuck her dark, sparkly, antlerred head out of the tent, “that… does sound interesting.”
“Told ya. Soooo… Are you guys interested in a little, fun adventure?”
“When?” Evely asked.
“Right now! I can get Winny to open a gate to your camp and we can go inside the Corpse World for a bit, measure out the exact dilation shift? It’s tolerable there, if a bit dusty. Air’s breathable too and not freezing cold. We dropped my infix kitlix inside so Winny can open a gate into that place anytime! Sounds good?”
“Mmm… How long of an adventure?” Acony asked.
“Five minutes,” Zexxia promised. “We’ll be in and out before you know it and you guys can get back to your chill camping or whatever.”
“Mmmkay,” Aconia agreed and emerged from the tent, pulling Colette behind her.
The sixteen year old Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu stretched, brown mane and scales undulating to aquamarine, seashell dress clicking. Evely critically examined the hemp, cork and seashell outfits on Acony and her ‘bold.
“What in the Slayer’s name are you two wearing?” She asked, staring at a flowery thorn-crown atop Acony’s head.
“Mbielu aquatic-fashion,” Acony stated. “S’neat right?”
“Everyone can see your tits,” Evely pointed out judgingly. “Remind me, which one of you is the kobold?”
“The word ‘kobold’ implies ownership,” Colly pointed out. “Aconny doesn’t own me. I willingly submitted myself to serve Princess Aconia as her first Knight. Look, I grew her a cute crown!” The aquatic dragon Omnid girl pointed at the Wendigo who made an overly-dramatic regal pose in her pearlescent seashell dress and violet rose crown.
“You’re just a kobold page for now,” Evely insisted. “Being a Knight implies being issued a Celesteel sword by your Lady’s family.”
“Sixie,” Colette stated. “She gave me a stick sword. It counts, because I’m a Terraformer. I made the stick bloom.”
“What.” Evely stared at the Wendigo and the Mbielu. Colette indeed now had a vaguely-sword-shaped stick covered in violet flowers sitting on a rope belt.
“I’m a Sixie!” Colette declared, offering a regal bow. “Your Sixth! Get it?”
“Yeah,” Acony giggled, bobbing in her seashell dress. “Arx delving teams consist of five. Colly’s gonna be our sixth. We’ve just invented the term! Sixie! Sounds better than a boring-ass ‘page’, right?”
“You’re both such absolute knobfolds,” Evely groaned. “I swear if someone sees this, everyone at Skyfall is going to make fun of you two forever.”
“Pfff, lighten up Evvy, let ‘em have fun,” Ixthia giggled. “Ain’t nobody here but us and the stars.”
A dark slit opened in the air above the campfire, spreading sideways like a rip in old fabric. It wobbled, shuddered, expanded into a dark circle that popped, revealing two figures within the gate’s interior.
Zexxia and her fiancé stepped through the portal. The Wendigo girl was dressed in sensible dragonscale expedition gear with Wyvern leather boots mud-caked from whatever dead dimension the two had been roaming in. Winston Koppernacht arrived behind his fiancee in a white silk vest with mother-of-pearl buttons, neat pressed trousers, celesteel spectacles and shoes that belonged at a parlour gathering.
His large, reddish-gray Mothman bespectacled eyes landed on Aconia and Colette.
He stared. Zexxia noted what her fiancé was staring at, and smacked him on the back of the head.
“Eyes up, Winny.” She rounded on Aconia and Colette. “What in the Leviathan’s crawling underbelly are you two wearing?”
“Mbielu aquatic regal fashion,” Aconia said serenely, tipping her flower crown at her sister.
“Go change!” Zexxia growled.
“Nah.” The Wendigo sibling fired back.
“What do you mean ‘nah’? Are you going to wear cork and seashell dresses to another dimension?”
“Yes.”
“Acony, we are going into a Corpse World,” Zexxia said. “A dead dimension. Ruins. Probably traps. Possibly massive entropy leakage.”
“Yes.”
“Your tits are fully out, Acony.”
“The seashells cover the important bits.”
“Your damned seashells are held by itty bitty hemp ropes!” Zexxia glared at Colette. “You! You’re supposed to be the responsible one! You ironed your delving class notes this morning at the Librarium, I SAW you dressed properly! The Abyss is this fish-wife, scandalous glamour?”
Colette glanced at her own seashell arrangement with quiet dignity. “You said it’s tolerable in there.”
“That doesn’t mean that you should go in half-dressed like you’re attending a solstice festival by the Cradlefall ocean shore!”
“Relax, sis,” Aconia said, wiggling her wrist where a Lazarus bracelet sat. “Resurrection guarantees total freedom of fashion!”
Evely pressed her fingers to her temple. “That is genuinely the worst argument for outfit choices I have ever heard.”
“Feh. It is a goodliest argument,” Acony countered. “If I die, I come back. If my clothes get destroyed, I don’t come back WITH them. The less clothing I wear into a dangerous dimension, the more clothing I preserve. Mom is perfectly fine with me dying buuuut she screeches at me for hours on end if I demolish an overpriced dragonscale dress.”
“She’s right, you know,” Ixthia said, finishing her soup.
“IXY!” Zexxia whipped around.
“Acony has a solid point.” Ixthia set down the little dragonskull bowl and stood, brushing off her dragonscale and diamondust dress. “Lady Westigartha Frontenachii really doesn’t like waste. Anyway. Winston. Lovely vest. Very fetching. You planning to open a gate or are you going to stand there making eyes at Acony and Cotty’s seashells all evening?”
Winston cleared his throat, straightened the mother-of-pearl buttons, and produced a compass-shaped gate artifact from his breast pocket with the look of a very serious Mothman pretending the last few minutes had not occurred.
“The gate’s already anchored,” he said unnecessarily. “I simply need to reopen it.”
“Lovely,” Ixthia said. “Go on then.”
Zexxia grabbed Aconia by the arm. “You are going to get a rock through your ribcage and it is going to go right between the seashells and I am going to laugh.”
“Death is just another fun adventure,” Aconia said pleasantly.
“What, you enjoy staring at the Wheel?” Evelyn asked.
“The Wheel is hungry for souls,” the Frontenachii Primaborn stated, “but we have beaten it back thanks to Saint Lazarus stealing these immortality bracelets from Eureka. Whenever I die, I get another chance to laugh at death. Someday I’ll rule a great Empire across the stars themselves and laugh extra-hard.”
“As if,” Zexxy chortled. “Mom’s never giving up her good hoard stuff, not to speak of our extra-greedy Elders.”
“I’ll make my own hoard!” Aconia declared, stepping through the gate into the gloom beyond, “with a million blood bound legionnaires, one hundred thousand sky-warships and a shared harem of a billion sexy kobolds for everyone!”
“Everyone?” Winston asked excitedly.
“Not you, obviously,” Acony huffed. “You’re Zexxy’s property now and she’s a jelly beerch. If you sleep with another girl she’ll prolly rip off your antennae and stuff you into a suitcase.”
The Mothman huffed, wiggling his gray antennae nervously.
Everyone laughed, following the haughty Frontenachii princess into the dark portal.
Time. Everyone was excited to witness a world where time didn’t work right. Ixthia felt her best friends’ future plans with her mind-hooks.
Acony wanted more time to build an Empire. Evely wanted to become an Admiral that made every nation piss their pantaloons at the mere sight of her. Zexxia and Winston wanted to find a way to step outside of the finite boundary curve of doomed Earths, to some day find a world filled with linear life instead of extradimensional death. Colette wanted to grow the biggest tree in the Omniverse.
Ixthia loved her best friends very much and decided to help them accomplish their wonderful life goals. Slowly. Carefully. With fear and love in equal measure, enough so that her own goal of a hedonistic lifestyle would be satisfied as much as possible one day in some distant tomorrow.
…
The five minute adventure lasted a hundred and sixty years of linear Omnithornian time and even more centuries of accelerated time.
Ixthia opened her eyes and thought of the fate of her best friends.
Koppernacht.
Gone. According to the reports her Scrutimancers shook out of Zexxia’s kobolds the poor moth was inverted by his fiancee, shoved into a configuration he had never agreed to, and used as a key to open doorways to places past the finite boundary curve.
Zexxia.
Gone. Most likely killed by a little runaway Wendigo princess, since all of her kobolds were liberated upon their Master’s death.
Colette.
Colette had done alright for herself. She had done consistently, stubbornly well, even when the others rewarded her by assigning her the lowest-prestige jobs, as the Frontenachii Wendigos found sustained, patient competence less interesting than dramatic wins.
Colette had made it as the Green Admiral, found her place as the slow, grinding inevitable tide, the Gardener fleet’s patient leader, the one who came after the burning was done and pressed seeds into the ash and grew planet-spanning world trees.
Evely.
Focused, fiery… inflexible, foolish Evely. The girl who treated fear the way a carpenter treats a hammer, seeing every problem as a nail. Now sitting in a tiny room within the lower decks of the Abyssal Sorrow, plotting treason and murder, probably weeping into the kobold-type mattress, absolutely certain she had been wronged by everyone.
Ixthia felt something move in her chest. It lasted perhaps four seconds. Tough love was still love. Evely needed to be taught a tough lesson.
The Legate pressed her claws into Bradberry’s ribs and the feeling dispersed.
“You were listening to my convo with the kitten,” she said.
“I wasn’t trying to,” Bradberry replied nervously.
“Of course you were.” The Legate ran one claw along the line of his jaw, “You may ask.”
A deep pause.
“You and the ex-Admiral,” the wolf began, “are you actually going to bury her?”
“Evely will bury herself when given the right kind of shovel,” Ixthia said. “She was always far too inflexible in her ways.”
Bradberry absorbed this. His tail had stopped its anxious twitching as he once again considered his dream. “You were in my dreams,” he started. “As a… Regional Manager. Watching me. Watching… everything.”
“Yes?”
“The husky girl said… some stuff,” He let out.
“Uh-huh?”
“She said she’d find me in every dimension. She said I’d end up serving a manager older than a prad should live.”
“She did,” Ixthia agreed pleasantly.
“She looked at where you were sitting when she said it, I think.”
“Yes.”
“And she said you’d drink from my soul in my sleep.”
“Mhhmmm.” Ixthia tisked. “Nessy Whitepaw. She smelled your potential future the same way a dog smells a coming storm through a shut window.” A small, fond pause. “An exquisite specimen. One I’d love to acquire to add to my hoard.”
“You… didn’t make her say that, right?”
“I did not,” Ixthia smiled. “I only injected myself fully into your memories after she walked away from you.”
“How could a dog I met two lifetimes ago know about you?”
“Riffers who can smell the future often state it plainly without even understanding it themselves fully,” Ixthia said. “It’s one of their more precociously unnerving qualities.” She pressed one claw lightly to the hollow of his throat. “Did her words frighten you?”
He took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“Good,” she said jovially. “Fear keeps the blood pumping. We’ll review more of your memories of this curious prad later.”
“Why?”
Ixthia raised an eyebrow.
“Right,” Bradberry said. “You eat fear.”
“Such simple wisdom.”
“I don’t get it. Is the future set in stone then? Is it impossible to escape from fate? What if I never signed the contract with the Frontenachii? What if I never recalled these fucked up memories of my previous life… of a Ferguson without magic?”
“Riffer precogs don’t simply predict the future, darling,” Ixthia smiled. “They set a soul on a path with their words, gradually skewer the probability of outcome in a particular direction. How many times have you spoken to the black and white husky?”
“Not a lot. Mostly she spoke… at me. Far too damn often and for far too long. She’s the type of a girl who just doesn’t know how to shut up.”
“Exactly.”
“So she… cursed me to a certain future through a thousand mundane conversations?”
“Is that what I am to you? A curse?”
The wolf drew into himself, shuddering. “N-no, my Lady. I love you.” He half-lied.
The Legate laughed.
“Uhrm,” Bradberry let out thoughtfully. “Nexxali Everrim is a Riffer. She sings the Hymn of the Frontenachii Empire to the Third Fleet daily over the fleet-wide V-cast. Is she… maybe skewering the entire fleet in a particular direction?”
“She is,” Ixthia agreed.
“And you… let her do that, why?”
“She’s skewering the future for me,” Ixthia stated simply. “She’s my best piece in a great game of thrones that me and my friends started a long time ago.”
Worry and fear danced across Bradberry’s soul. How far has Ixthia planned things? He thought. What if the singing serval breaks her leash with a dungeon artifact or something, like those other idiot kobolds that dared to raise a hand against my beautiful, terrifying Omnid Alpha?
“My little kitten’s leash is unbreakable,” Ixthia grinned, reading his mind. “Even if she thinks she’s working against me, she’s digging probability into the direction I desire.”
“Our knob Culimancer managed to overcome his blood contract,” Bradberry insisted. “He almost got you with a cleaver.”
“Almost doesn’t count, Bradberry. There are deeper darker things in the Abyss,” Ixthia leaned her dark snout across his face and whisper-purred into his fluffy, gray ear. “Invisible chains far stronger than parasitic soul-bonds. Patterns that cannot be unbound by linear dimensions or dungeon sentinel artifacts. Beings of absolute Syntropy that stand far above the Song of the Wormwood Star. Endless yellow halls. The Infinite city. A mall where you can buy anything. Dungeons… in dragons. Lines between lines on contracts signed by my little, adorkable prads of Division Eight-Eight-One. I wanted the fleet to be stranded here, Bradberry. This place will be my Pleasure Planet. This is the inevitable, inescapable outcome, the path I have set in motion long, long ago when I set foot into a dimension where time itself was torn asunder.”
Bradberry gulped, struggling to imagine a dungeon inside of a dragon. What the fuck was Ixthia even talking about? He assuredly wasn’t a fan of eldritch, liminal bullshit.
“It’s quite funny, you know,” she added, twirling her claws through his mane. “Eventually, my besties and I found out the reason why the time on our Corpse-God Citadel was broken, reached the event horizon at its heart and peered through it using an Astralscope.”
“What did you see there?”
“A man with a goddess.”
“Huh?”
“Citadel Zero exists because of a disagreement between a foolish Eurekan Administrator and his tools, the Numbers,” Ixthia revealed. “A man our scope tagged as Alexander Gromov ordered the essential Laws of reality deleted, starting with Number Zero, the Archangel of time. He thus stands in the heart of our citadel along with an Avatar of Eurekan Omnisystem control, all powerful and eternally suspended in halted time, trapped like a fly in amber, unable to do a single thing ‘bout it. The knob doesn’t know that the omniverse moved on without him long, long ago.”
The wolf frowned.
“It is a lesson in management,” Ixthia narrated with a devious smirk. “One that I saw quite clearly and Evely never managed to grasp. Absolute power must be used sparingly and softly, lest you break everything around you, including the linear continuation of your own existence.”