The Yaldev Project

Yaldev is an exercise in worldbuilding, the practice of creating fictional settings and fleshing out their details. It started with the idea of taking the creations of digital artist Beeple and adding written stories that set all of his work in a single continuity. That means everything you see here is part of the same fantasy/sci-fi world, a planet very similar to ours, but in a very different universe.

The Doylist premise: I use Creative Commons art by Mike "Beeple" Winkelmann, a digital artist who's made a piece every day for over 15 years, as writing prompts. I add short stories, lore blurbs and in-universe documents that set all of the art in a single fantasy/sci-fi world. Beeple specializes in landscapes and objects, so the natural result has been a narrative with the setting as "the real protagonist."

The Watsonian premise: Yaldev is a planet in a strange area of space where mana—the energy-substance that underlies all magic—flows freely between the Aether and the physical realm. The abundance of mana, "potentiality incarnate," has given rise to rich ecosystems and fantastic natural wonders, but also results in inherent chaos: spontaneous energy bursts, supernatural disasters, improbable mechanical failures. This severely limits the maintenance of large-scale infrastructure, and the four continents are blocked from mutual contact by perpetual mystic storms over the deep oceans.

There's many ways we could explore such a world, but we use the point-of-view of the Ascended Nation. This theocratic country invents towering engines that suppress the free flow of mana within a given radius… and then it uses the resulting infrastructural advantage to launch an imperialist project, both against other peoples and the nature of the world itself.

Setting aside, we have two main characters:

Acolyte Decadin, the magical engineer who invents the suppression towers and comes to regret it

Commander Bruzek, an ambitious Army officer who spends as much time fighting military bureaucracy as he does the Enemy

While Yaldev is theoretically military sci-fantasy, depiction of combat is extremely rare. Entries are more often snapshots of institutions, Earthlike fauna with fantasy twists, non-boring loredumps about the magic system, and the mechanisms, attitudes and horrors of Empire. Also there's a running gag about blowing up the moons.

Table of Contents:

Yaldev, the Project

Yaldev, the World

Yaldev, the Name

Yaldev, the Person

Additional Links

King Naui VII would be the last monarch to visit this grave. Like all kings, he was destined to die, but he was fated for a tomb like six Nuais before him: a stone box topped by a blanket of gold sculpted to his likeness, and warded from foul luck by a floating sphere of the same material. From the hallowed cemetery, his castle was the last thing standing—such as it was—between Nuai and the enemy. Artillery shells were picking off every chamber, hoping to strike down the Nildenese regent. The barbarians would not even spare the glasswork for posterity.

At the end of all hope, Nuai VII looked to his dynastic beginnings. No doubt Queen Nuai I was memorialized as a caricature, she could not have been so tall, but her presence was a towering generosity. Such was his power that all in her kingdom, not just herself, could afford to feast on elk and starberries. That was when Nilden reigned at the peak of its strength, when all Oxado knew the meaning of respect.

Nuai VII lowered his gaze. The least he could have done was to keep Nilden alive, to preserve the memory of the feasts and what they symbolized in an age when food was no given. The will of Nilden’s people and the wisdom of its leaders kept the plates full for many kings after, but the glory days ended here. Even the starberries had been dwindling beneath an alien sky, and what diminished the fruit diminished the hunt.

When Nuai VII fled for the valley beyond the cemetery, he was not dressed as a king, merely dressed for the weather. If he could be alone at last, there would still be time to make peace with the gods, that he may find his way through the Mirrorvoid.

High Commander Bruzek was the first Ascendant to visit this grave. He preceded a squad of armored soldiers, a white glow emitting from both eyes as well as his open palm that pulled information from the world. The High Commander stopped, his soldiers halted, and as he read the recent past he pointed to the valley.

“There.”

The shelling broke the silence. One of the soldiers shifted his grip on his rifle. “Sir?”

Bruzek turned his head, watching him with eyes of pure white.

“Do we need the target alive? What use for him remains?”

King Nuai VII liked to watch the sun rise over Frei, the town closest to the City of Nilden. The morning light would reach his castle walls, and as it passed through the windows it would fill the air with iridescent sparkles. Lately he'd felt especially smug about these glass panes. No matter what advantages these “Ascendants” had in the field of battle, and no matter what luxuries their distant emperor enjoyed, Nuai VII would always wake up to a better view.

Nuai IV had been on the king's mind since the latest intelligence reports. “The Crafty King,” the old epithet declared. Had he enjoyed windows like these? Frei was around back then, but was it anywhere as populous as now? Could he have saved this kingdom where his descendant would fail? Nuai IV had only one significant failure, but it had cost him the throne: hubris. He challenged the gods to send a sign if they disapproved of his rule, so they took one of the moons. He commissioned replacement moons to keep the secret with decoys in the sky, but these too were taken, and Nuai IV had no choice but surrender.

“I swore I would avoid his pride,” his descendant muttered, “but I cannot allow humility to become cowardice.”

To Nuai VII, the reports had confirmed that it was the Ascendants, not the gods, who destroyed those replacement moons. That made this personal. And last night they taunted his lineage by floating their own replacement moon, ending its artificial gravity spell directly over Frei, and crushing the town’s commercial district under worked iron.

Despite the invaders’ hatred of mana, their spellcasters were just as skilled as Nilden’s own. Their technological superiority was never in question. Intelligence on their homelands was scarce, but they surely had a numbers advantage. If it was possible to outwit them, Nuai VII would have to be even craftier than the Crafty King. It wouldn’t be easy. But this morning, as he gazed past the window sparkles, he pondered.

Ever since his youth, he had believed he was cursed by the gods for the sins of his ancestry. But this was an illusion. His enemies were not divine, but mortal. The Ascendants were capable of no more than the Nildenese, and if they could create and destroy moons, what could Nilden accomplish? And then what power would come of an Oxado fully unified in resistance? Was that it?

The mist in the mountains of Nilden began to stir as foreign ships closed in on the Oxadon coastline half a continent away. Ascended soldiers prepared for deployment in uncomfortable silence. Their instincts told them that hostile forces were hiding behind every tree and aiming artillery from behind every hill, but aerial photography had proven the contrary. High Commander Bruzek kept his soldiers’ interests at heart; every Oxadon defensive fortification within four miles of the shore had already been surgically removed with ballistic missiles. As the sand was pressed with its first print of an Ascended boot, the mist of distant mountains swirled into itself and manifested the Oracle. She materialized mid-stride, her careful steps driven by the purpose that accompanies a deadline.

From within her mind, Decadin’s consciousness heard the faint echoes of some god demanding to know what had brought them all back to Oxado. The Oracle gave no answer, but she was polite enough to share her senses with her spiritual guests. Soon Decadin could hear the rhythmic squeaks of mountain birds, feel the ambient mana in the air, and endure the pebbles poking the soles of the Oracle’s bare feet. To receive the Oracle’s senses with no limbs to control, no lungs with which to breathe, and no eyes to turn was a helplessness the Acolyte had never known in life. He paid more attention than she to the moons drifting away from her position, with trees dwelling along the top and vines draped down the sides.

The unanswered god growled, and Decadin felt its presence float toward his soul: spite beyond reason, ancient beyond reckoning. It spoke only half of its thoughts with words, a god’s impression of a mortal’s mimicry of the Oracle’s tones. The rest of its meaning was radiated as patterns in an aura of heat, patterns that Decadin could not help but understand.

“MORTAL. SPEAK WHAT THEY TEACH YOU OF MOONS.”

“What they teach?” Decadin tried to remember what his tutor had covered so many years ago. Had the loss of a flesh-brain eroded his education? “What do you want to…”

The heat was growing. Soon it became a fire that blistered his formless body. Phantom pain tore at his coherence.

“No! Stop! I cannot think if you—”

“SPEAK WHAT THEY TEACH.”

The heat was still growing.

“Moons! Moons! They’re flying rocks! They’re round! Or they’re round if they’re old! The young ones are lumpy, they smooth as they age. Please!”

The heat stopped growing. The pain stopped getting worse, but it burned all the same.

“Moons! They’re rocks from the ground! They have empty pockets inside, and mana gets in the pockets and makes them fly away. There’s a way to calculate their height but I can’t… Auuuhhhh!”

The pain was not easing. There was anger in the fire. Knowing things was all Decadin had been good for, but the inferno torched his awareness like so many Deftist books.

“We had to break them! They hit buildings! Some people worshiped moons. They were idols. We wanted to kill them! I’m sorry if you loved moons but they had war value for Asterians so we blew them up! But it wasn’t me! I didn’t do it!”

As the Acolyte’s outer layers turned into smoke, his desperation dug deeper.

“Moonsmoonsmoons! They can take plants with them and the plants can live on the moons! They… they… I can’t think of anything! Please!”

Decadin could not see through the Oracle’s eyes. The smoke blinded his sight. Everything was gone. He was back in the burning house. Before he knew anything. Before he could do anything. Before he was an engineer. Before he was an engineer…

“When plants are on moons, there have to be birds and bugs! There are nests in the trees on the moons and the birds live and sing so the nests sing! The bugs! They pollinate the plants. The bees buzz and the hoppers buzz and the moons sing! Ants dig and bugs dig and the moons fly so they move so they live! The seeds fall off the moon to the dirt. They spread. The seeds spread and live and sing and the dirt sings! Everything sings, and there was empty pockets I think, and everything was empty pockets! Everything was home! Everything lives! Everything burns!”

The fire pulled away. The pain ceased. There was no burning flesh.

“THEY KNOW NOTHING OF ME.”

“Everything…” Decadin rasped, “we knew nothing of anything…”

“I began building this Aether Suppressor,” Acolyte Decadin spoke from a podium, “while my house was burning down.”

He spotted Lhusel in a front row seat, rolling her eyes as that stupid opener silenced the last distracted murmurs among the audience. All attention belonged to the Aethereal engineer, his eyes gleaming in nearly the same shade of violet as the disk floating forty feet in the air. Ambient mana was high today; farther above the disk, streaks of pink and turquoise discoloured the sky. These were safe, but as ever, they threatened to evolve into something worse.

“The Aether struck well past my bedtime. I awoke to a mana burst: the blinding radiance, the screams of my mother, the roar of ancient evil as it shot up from the ground and tore a hole through our home, leaving elemental fire at the edges to consume the rest. I don’t remember my tears. I don’t remember my father guiding me out through the smoke. I don’t even remember the smoke, whose unholy poison took my father’s life within days. I only remember the flames and the wish they sparked: as the Aether destroyed my house, I wished through coughing lungs and blurred eyes for something to make this stop and make it never happen again.”

Decadin reminded himself of his first rule for debate club: slow, the hell, down.

“That is where the Aether Suppressor began. Invention does not start with a formula, a component or a market demand. Invention starts with a wish. In the days after I made that wish, I encountered a wise woman. She told me to have faith in my destiny. She told me that order shines through the chaos. She told me that the future can be more than our past. So while our church helped my mother resettle, I arrived at Resolution with clothes, pencils, a pocket-sized Boundless Wisdom, and my wish.”

———

After Decadin and Lhusel had got this thing thing teleported out of the workshop, levitated it to campus, and spent the whole day adding the outer layers of crystal to the floating disk while offering no explanation to baffled spectators, the Aether Suppressor floated complete at a diameter of 132 feet. The depleted gemstones in Lhusel’s necklace matched her tired head, but no, Decadin insisted that now was the time she had to listen to the unveiling speech he was working on and give feedback.

At least it was short. Decadin sounded more excited about the final words than anything in the speech: “So, what do you think?”

“Good enough,” Lhusel sighed, “but the opening’s stupid. It’s like you’re making this whole event about you.”

Decadin’s conviction rose. “No. If someone doesn’t share my experience, they still share my fears. That opening makes this about all of us.”

Lhusel’s hands rose. “You wanted the feedback.”

Decadin’s conviction fell. “Yeah. Sorry. All your work should be done now.”

“I changed the designs.”

“What.”

Lhusel stepped away. “Just the start/stop function. Everything else is as you planned.”

He stepped closer. “I trusted you.” His voice wavered, and Lhusel shut her eyes. “Despite all your biases, despite how you obviously felt about suppressing the Aether, I thought I could trust you.”

Lhusel opened her eyes and stepped closer. “And I know I can trust you, but I know I can’t trust people like you. I’m sure something good can come of this technology, but not if people like you can turn it on and off by casting a message spell at it.”

Decadin clenched his fists at his sides. “Then who have you decided is so much more worthy of that power that you overrode me on my own project? Yourself?”

“And you.” Lhusel took a breath, and continued after Decadin’s expression softened. “I added runes for voice recognition. There’s a command word that I, and only I, can speak to activate the Suppressor. You, and only you, can disable it by saying ‘command: stop.’ No one has complete control.”

Decadin faced away from her to look up at the device in the nighttime air. Somewhere in his magnum opus were runic components that were not his, that he had not approved. He was not the one to achieve his greatest achievement. He swallowed, then returned his attention to the culprit, who had put more distance between them. “Whoever owns the Aether Suppressor could easily circumvent your voice commands by adding new ones. New start/stop functions are not hard. You went against me to make a point to yourself.”

Lhusel shook her head. “I made a point to Pelbee. When his disciples abuse their power, he can’t blame me for doing nothing.”

Decadin’s mouth fell agape. “Is that the whole reason you volunteered to help?!”

She met his stare. “I will see you at the unveiling. I’ll time the activation for when you finish the speech, so don’t change the ending. Just the opening.”

Lhusel turned to leave. Decadin called after her: “And why did you rig it that way? You could’ve let me activate the Suppressor when I found the moment, and given yourself a backdoor to stop it. Why do I just get the power to turn it off?”

“Because it’s the last thing you’d ever want to do.”

She disappeared into the darkness.

———

The unveiling was open to all, but half the seats were taken by Resolution faculty and students. The farther seats were taken by those members of the public conscious that they were witnessing history: administrators who would need to regulate this machine, police officers with an interest in order, engineers with an interest in nitpicking, and Empirical priests who knew not whether they looked on a miracle or a blasphemy.

“...Until it took the form you see today,” Decadin continued. “It is never easy to build something worth building. A machine, a friendship, a church, a nation.”

He peered back at the disk, still marveled by how different it looked in the daytime. Sunshine fell through the crystal, filtered itself through invisible runes, and emerged as vibrance. His audience could hear him well, but the Suppressor drew all eyes. This was ideal. Decadin needed the Ascended Nation to remember the exigence, not the speaker.

“But we build because of dreams. We build because of love. My fear of mana bursts, of elemental fire, and of losing everything—these were no fears at all. Our fears are but childish reflections of our love. I feared bursts because I loved tranquility. I feared fire because I loved peace. I feared loss because I loved everything that Parc Pelbee has given me.”

As the sun slowly descended in the afternoon sky, the Aether Suppressor became a prism that shone its spotlight on Decadin, casting his hair and shoulders in otherworldly tones.

“That love unites us today. That love protects our prosperity. That love brought Science and Faith together, and made the Aether Suppressor possible. That love allows Parc Pelbee to act through his faithful, to fight the evils whose immortality we took as a given. That love lets us change our world.” Decadin placed one hand over his heart and raised the other to the sky. “And that is the love that sets us free!”

People in chairs leaned forward expectantly. Decadin’s eyes fell on Lhusel. Not now. Betray me any time but now. We were friends.

Lhusel silently mouthed a few words.

The wonder rang all at once like a giant chime and a deep drum. From its center, a field of almost-invisible energy spread to conquer the air, and as it spread over the crowd, waves of nausea ended as fast as they started. Within ten seconds, the entire campus was surrounded by a faint bubble, resembling the clearest glass.

As the machine’s power climbed toward the sky, the streaks of color grew unstable, wavering until they collapsed into lightning that fought back against Decadin’s creation. Electricity coursed across the surface of the bubble, failed to even slow it, and dissipated. The universe was still. At peace. In order. The Aether Suppressor hung in the air, its gradual rotation in alignment with the movement of Yaldev itself.

Resolution faculty provided polite applause. Most of the rest erupted into cheers of excited wonder. Acolyte Decadin showed his practiced smile and maintained the pose that ended his speech, as though his raised hand would propel this glory through the halls of Heaven.

I prefer games suited to braindead players, like League of Legends. Within League, I prefer roles suited to braindead players, like Top. Within Top, I prefer characters suited to braindead players, like Mordekaiser, the Iron Revenant. And I must admit that today, on my 25th birthday, I am still so braindead that an overpriced Mordekaiser skin is tempting me as a present to myself.

To summarize Mordekaiser's lore, skipping connections to other characters: in life, he was Sahn-Uzal, a powerful warmonger who united the Noxii tribes under his might and used them to conquer some unstated-but-implied-large territory for himself. Centuries after Sahn-Uzal's death, a cabal of sorcerers bound his soul to a giant recreation of his old armor. They wanted to use him as a weapon for their own nefarious purposes, but the immortal iron construct that now called itself Mordekaiser—his human name translated into the secret language of the dead—simply killed them and started conquering everything a second time, now with a suit of armor for a body and a mastery of death-magic from his time in the afterlife. After turning the souls of his soldiers and servants from his first life into a new army, Mordekaiser built a second empire more horrific than the last, one that lasted for generations. It ended only when Mordekaiser's inner circle stirred the Noxii tribes into rebellion, then used this distraction to banish Mordekaiser back into the realm of the dead. Yet this fate was part of Mordekaiser's plan, for in the afterlife, the fallen victims of his second empire were now the building blocks with which to create a kingdom of the dead and raise an even larger army of revenants. This is where Mordekaiser remains in the present day lore, preparing for the day when he'll be able to return with an undead army to conquer the entire world. In-game we play a future Mordekaiser who has just recently had that return, "twice slain, thrice born."

The League of Legends wiki says the following about the Iron Revenant's personality: "Mordekaiser is a brutal warlord that desires to conquer everything and destroy all those that stands [sic] in his way. Having died twice before, he does not fear death, as that would merely send him back to his own hellish dominion."

That is all. The complex history behind Mordekaiser can only do so much to support him as a one-dimensional "evil death-magic in pursuit of power for power's sake" villain, one who feels cartoonish even in an era on Earth where cartoonish evil is increasingly normalized. Though I am a connoisseur of edgy characters—Shadow has been my unironic favorite Sonic character for the last twenty years—I cringe a little at some of the Iron Revenant's voice lines.

Yet Mordekaiser's power over the living is undeniable, and even now he uses it to tempt me into giving my money to Riot Games. The overpriced skin in question is Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser, which renders him as he existed in his first life: the Unconquered King of the Noxii, Tyrant of the Great Grass Ocean, who united his people under his strength and lead them to glory while espousing a might-makes-right religious philosophy. 

What makes fantasy warlords interesting? Surely part of this is the faction they're connected with. After defeating the Iron Revenant, the Noxii went on to found the nation of Noxus, which values strength above all. As Sahn-Uzal conquered the known world, his gospel spread on the wind, so when the overpriced skin replaces Mordekaiser's self-aggrandizing nihilism with Sahn-Uzal's musings, it replaces the self-justified edginess of the death-emperor with an origin story for one of League of Legends's most important factions. It is ultimately because of this man, and the words we hear from him, that so many other important characters become what they are, shaped by the culture seeded by this ancient leader.

But that's all worldbuilding; theoretically, it should be something that colors the faction, without giving much interest to the figurehead, who could simply exist as a setting element rather than a proper character. Something that makes fictional warlords interesting to me, as a student of rhetoric, is their implicit exploration of an eternal question in history: what makes great leaders? Fantasy warlords outwardly present strong wills alongside a set of skills and some character trait which inspires the kind of loyalty that makes humans fight, kill and risk death for a cause.

When I listen to Sahn-Uzal proselytizing, I have to imagine him preaching the same ideals to his fellow barbarians, convincing them of their truth with his sheer confidence and gravitas. This is purely headcanon, but I must imagine that what followed was a Noxii empire that imagined itself to be the exemplar of Sahn-Uzal's faith, yet at a deeper level was motivated by desperation. "Those who cannot keep up," says Sahn-Uzal, "will be left behind." His initial followers may have been pursuing dreams of glory, but they must have also seen in Sahn-Uzal a man destined to be one of the strong, and that following his lead was their one and only chance to not become one of the weak.

"Long ago," says Sahn-Uzal, "the Rakkor shunned us as 'people of the darkness'. They called us the 'Noxii'." We know little about the early Noxii, but this tells us that they were the outcasts from the Rakkor, a people who religiously venerated the sun and moon as the sources of light. For the memory of this origin to persist long enough that Sahn-Uzal can recite it suggests that in his lifetime, the Noxii were still a people stirring in pain and resentment over their rejection. Sahn-Uzal did not just offer a spiritual philosophy that defied the values of the Rakkor: it threatened any Noxii who refused it with a repetition of their prior rejection. Never forget that beneath its flimsy self-image of strength, glory and traditionalism, fascism is motivated by deep fears and deep insecurities. Fantasy fascism would be no different.

All of this makes Sahn-Uzal a more interesting character than Mordekaiser, but that's a low bar. For me, what fantasy warlords need is a subversion, a disruption to the fantasy that motivates their ambitions. This can take many forms, and Sahn-Uzal is a good example. He carved his nomadic kingdom out of sacrifice and blood to fulfill his faith's ideals and ultimately earn his place in the Hall of Bones, where he would live with the gods in eternal glory. His earthly accomplishments were ultimately important only in securing his place in his ideal afterlife, and all the victims of his conquest died to earn him that place. But when Sahn-Uzal died, there was no Hall of Bones, only an empty wasteland for souls to briefly experience before disintegrating into dust. Sahn-Uzal earnestly believed his own gospel, and became one of the Great Men of his world's history solely in pursuit of its endpoint, only to discover his own preachings were a lie. It was Sahn-Uzal's rage and willpower that allowed him to refuse the fading, spend centuries listening to the voices of the crumbling souls around him, learn the secret language of the dead, and "survive" long enough to be summoned by sorcerers into a huge suit of armor.

What makes Sahn-Uzal compelling enough for me to consider wasting money on his overpriced skin is dramatic irony. We play him as he was in life, crushing his enemies beneath a massive mace, motivated entirely by his fantasy of the Hall of Bones, confident that in doing so he is earning eternal glory, unaware that all of his strength and brutality is utterly futile. The glory of his image, the Mongolian-inspired music that accompanies his kills, the strength he both venerates and embodies—we know that all of this is hollow and empty. This narrative is almost undermined by Mordekaiser's existence, so in the context of Sahn-Uzal's story, I prefer to imagine that Sheer Willpower was not a sufficient force to hold a spirit together in the wastes, to imagine that Sahn-Uzal's ghost existed only long enough to witness the futility of his ambitions, to know that all he destroyed was all for nothing, to rage until all that remained was despair, and to collapse into the exact same dust of nothingness as the weak.

When Riot announced the Sahn-Uzal skin, I saw a kindred spirit to Commander Bruzek, the antagonist of my fantasy writing project Yaldev. The skin got me thinking about what makes warlords so compelling to me, and I think their commonalities reveal more general insights on what makes for effective warlord characters.

The comparison is curious on the surface, aside from being military leaders. Bruzek is an army officer we've only seen in direct combat once, who climbs the military hierarchy but always operates in service of a superior, who follows the dominant faith of his society without strongly rooting his activities in his religion, and who orchestrates his conquests from an office desk with the powers of logistics, investments in military science, efficient cultural genocide and "the lowest quantity of bullets expended per mile secured". Bruzek also operates in a technological epoch far more advanced than Sahn-Uzal's, in a period where warlords are an anachronism.

Warlord studies is an academic field focused on warlordism as a system of governance, an antiquated model once dominant in Europe and China, but which now only emerges while states are collapsing, in spite of some historians' observations that warlordism is the default state of humanity. Perhaps it's merely a marker of my own attitudes, and bias toward historical analogy, that I don't consider modernity nor centralized statehood to be disqualifiers for warlords. The Wikipedia entry on warlords opens by calling them "individuals who exercise military, economic, and political control over a region, often one without a strong central or national government, typically through informal control over local armed forces." Control over regions sounds like statehood itself, and as the illusion of institutions as anything other than the whims of the people running them collapses in contemporary times, formality reveals itself as mere aesthetic. In the most radical interpretation, we are left with "warlords are leaders of violent states that aren't leaders of violent states", which may as well be leaders of violent states. How different can Noxus be from the Noxii that made it?

Bruzek does not call himself a warlord. Nobody calls him a warlord except the Oracle, while speaking to Decadin:

"There is no plausible sequence for you that earns an audience with Bruzek, but there is for me. He’ll seek my answers, and we’ll pry out some of our own.” Decadin chewed at the inside of his cheek. “You foresee it?” “No, but Bruzek is a warlord. Of his ilk, he’ll be the greatest the world has ever seen, and there is no great warlord who doesn’t seek my counsel.”

I'm not quite as omniscient as the Oracle, but I think that when she says this, she's looking deeper than state structures. She's looking at souls. She sees in Bruzek a warlord's tendencies, which he fulfills far as his environment allows. Warlord is not a job, but a mode of being. Bruzek is not just an officer working in service of his state and the ideology he espouses; when he lets the death of his son motivate him to seek revenge on the general he sees as responsible, that is a personal drive, a revenge-fantasy that only differs in the scope of its ambition from Sahn-Uzal's dreams of eternal glory. Neither of these men appear to enjoy any other activities—they are single-minded in the pursuit of conquest, with little concern for the riches or privileges they could enjoy as the fruits of their horrors.

Where unstable states struggle to hold themselves together, they often co-operate with regional warlords, who are granted a degree of autonomy, including permission to extract their local population's resources. In return, the warlords swear nominal allegiance to the government and commit to the slaughter of the insurgents causing the wider instability. The Ascended Empire is stable, but Bruzek comes to operate like a semi-independent unit within his state structure: he commissions a unique banner for his own troops, he engages in his own cultural genocide strategies, he funds potentially unsafe military science projects, and he employs secret teams of mages behind the High Commander's back. Perhaps the true significance in some of these actions is the development of his own reputation. Instead of exploiting his underlings, he maintains friendly relations with other military leaders. He builds the trust of figureheads like Acolyte Decadin and the Emperor. He cultivates the loyalty of advisors like Demlow, who seems to realize the same truth about Bruzek as the Oracle:

“I am preparing. And when the day comes…” Bruzek opened his fist. The remains of his rock fell through the mist. “When Cosal, and Apian, and the emperor, and the world all turn on me, will you stand by my side?” Demlow gazed at the sky above the fog, imagined Ascended ships with gold-plated hulls crashing into the mountain, shattering the granite and schist. “If the answer was no, what do you figure I’d say?” Bruzek brushed his hands, freeing the last of the crumbs. “I did not ask what you’d say if the answer was no. I asked you for your answer.” Demlow met his commander’s gaze, and understood that a hundred years ago, Bruzek would have only dreamed of violence. In that stare was an Aether Suppressor drenched in blood, a vertical spike with Cosal’s head on top, a young boy’s laughter and a Demlow being waterboarded.

Underlying Bruzek's modern, methodical approach to warfare and conquest is a violent impulse no less brutal than the vicious warriors and pillagers of bygone eras. If Bruzek was born in an earlier era, he could've been a primitive conqueror who would have burned Origin down for its own sake, but the days of that kind of warlord are in the past, so he has to content himself with being an especially important cog in a state apparatus, his destiny as a true Great Man cucked by modernity. After all, what could Sahn-Uzal have done if he were born in the modern world, where the swing of a great mace could crush ten men but make hardly a dent in a main battle tank, even with his ultimate stealing 10% of its stats? Nowadays, building an army of angry men by yourself takes more than strong muscles and a deep voice: Sahn-Uzal have to take his First Truth gospel to social media, speak it to young men who can’t get girlfriends, earn their respect with muscle selfies, orbit manosphere content creators to siphon some of their fans, issue orders through Telegram chats, and enhance his posts’ virality with AI-generated images depicting himself as an ancient Mongolian conqueror—the more people repost those pictures to laugh at him, the more young boys see him and tap Follow. Destiny, Domination, Deceit. Would the Tyrant of the Great Grass Ocean have been up to the task of gaming the TikTok algorithm?

We do not know what Bruzek dreams of, but if Sahn-Uzal dreamed of an impossible future, it seems likely Bruzek dreams of an impossible past. The violence in his heart wishes it could be a Sahn-Uzal or a Ghengis Khan atop a horse's back, taking his vengeance on this world with his bare hands, driving spears through the backs of the innocent while all around him his loyal hordes burn down the city in service of the man they know is destined to take the world... but by the time Bruzek was born, the barbarian hordes eager to enact mass inhuman violence in the name of a chosen one were long gone, extinguished when his forebears united their continent under a monarch's rule. Instead, the best Bruzek can do is sign off on invasion plans in his office, distant from the front lines, so that bombs can fall, guns can fire, and another people can be folded into "his" empire.

I find compelling warlords require a disruption to the fantasies that motivate them. Sahn-Uzal found his disruption in death; Bruzek needs to live his disruption every day. And if the former created a death-king raising a revenant army to subjugate all living creatures, what will come of the latter?

We won't know until I put down the game and write that shit already. Neither Bruzek nor Sahn-Uzal would waste their time playing League of Legends, let alone spinning gacha wheels in pursuit of a legendary skin with only half the character-specific voice interactions it deserves.

Links to the Discord and Patreon!

Living in the Oracle’s consciousness came with certain inconveniences. Decadin had no sensory inputs but those shared by his host. His eyes were not closed, but removed—he could not see the darkness. Maybe the gods in here could handle it, but Decadin was only ever a man.

He distracted himself with what faculties were available. He recreated old songs and cursed when he forgot a lyric. He trawled his imagination and dug up an old idea of a Terminus office building, which he modeled in three dimensions and rotated at ludicrous speeds. When the entertainment value ran dry, he fixated on old memories. He handled crystal bugs, ate soup in a sunrise and argued with titans of industry and military, struck now by the wiser things he could have said. Most of all he replayed his first meeting with the Oracle, telling himself this was the most important memory to keep alive, as it came closest to explaining how he, or whatever was left to call “he,” was now here, whatever “here” could mean.

The Oracle could see it all. “Anything to never think of Lhusel,” she thought, and it intruded on Decadin’s mind.

Decadin shoved that thought away.

“You think so much of one broken friendship, and not the families slain in your Empire’s name.”

He was not getting away from this. “Why would you even ask that? You know that bothers me too, but they weren’t part of me and my story like Lhusel was. That’s just how humans work.”

“Want to see something? You’ll go mad if I don’t feed you.”

“I’ll take anything.”

“Perhaps you can make better sense of this than I,” she said, and she poured a vision into Decadin’s mind. His eyes faded back in, and his ears and nose and skin. He was a ghost at a ceremony.

Bruzek unraveled a scroll, read its magic nonsense aloud, and shoved it back in his pocket. “Test,” he said, and all could hear him as clear as if he were standing right before them.

Decadin tried to frown, but he had no mouth. “When was this? Or when will it be?”

“Now,” thought the Oracle, “but far away.”

Bruzek started talking, and the acolyte ignored what he said to focus on how he said it.

“He’s bad at this,” Decadin thought, “can’t imagine he wrote this himself, but he memorized it word for word.”

“You’re so sure,” the Oracle thought.

“Debate society kids like me did the same thing. If he hasn’t fixed it by now it’s because he hasn’t had to. You don’t need to say anything interesting in the military, you just stick to the script. What are those banners?”

“Battle flags, Bruzek’s own. Now that he’s High Commander, he can institute them—”

“He got to High Commander talking like that?!”

“Don’t be so harsh.” The Oracle smirked. “He’s just trying to copy you.”

“...never seen before,” droned Bruzek, “but the vision you have demonstrated in your studies and training has given your Empire confidence that you can face those threats and do what needs to be done.”

Decadin wished his ears would fade back out. “Getting millions killed? Is that how he copies me? You can mock my style but I was never this… generic.”

Bruzek was not worth Decadin’s attention. The acolyte turned his gaze to the audience, the commissioned commanders in shirts and ties. They looked more like desk workers than warriors. At least that was honest. There was no life in their eyes. Whatever the speech was trying to do, it…

Decadin’s attention went back. “Maybe genericism is the point.”

He felt the Oracle’s interest pique. “Go on.”

“Ideas aren’t the reason he leads, but it’s not about following a script either, because then the words would matter. No, this isn’t about what he says to them. The point is, he’s at the front and they have to listen. This is a graduation speech?”

He felt the Oracle nod.

“So this is what the Army is about now. What learning is about, if you’re Ascended.”

Bruzek’s tone changed. “Okay, I could go on another five pages or we could skip to the important part. You’re adults, your time is valuable, you get it. What do you say?”

Decadin saw consciousness return to the soldiers’ eyes. They answered with mild laughter here and there, but no objections.

“Alright! Ascended commanders, you have come this far!”

Violence shone in Bruzek’s eyes. His words pulled memories from the Oracle’s mind, and they polluted this vision. Illusory steelflakes descended on the scene.

“Your power is the Empire’s, and the Empire’s power is yours. What can stop you?”

“Nothing,” was their resounding answer. Lightning mines erupted all around.

“Tell me, in all you have learned: what is it to win?”

“It is love.”

Conversion cities assembled in the distance.

“And what is it to lose?”

“Growth.”

Suppression towers sprouted from the concrete.

“And what is it to reach?”

“Life.”

An Orb of Darkness loomed over them all.

“And what is it to relent?”

“DEATH.”

Decadin’s thoughts were racing. “So they knew this part. They had gut answers. He made the speech bad on purpose, because that was the Army, but the chant was Bruzek. He gave them a part in the script, and sidestepped the formalities to involve them.”

“The Army belongs to him,” the Oracle added, “he could change anything with an order.”

“But he doesn’t. He’s drawing a line between himself and the institution. He’s building a cult to himself, something separate. He’s planning something, what’s he planning?”

“Yes, you are right,” thought the Oracle, “thank you.”

Decadin’s eyes began to fade, and ears and nose and skin, as though the Orb of Darkness were consuming it all.

“Oracle, what’s he planning?” He asked again, but she had sectioned him off again, cast him back to his songs, buildings and obsessions. He pouted and thought of all those men, the true killers in all the Conquests, petty tyrants with computers and annual reviews, Bruzeks in the making. Decadin dreamed up a bomb that could’ve killed them all where they stood, and rotated it at ludicrous speeds.

———

Two generals coordinated the new continent's ground offensive. One of them had plans. The other had conversations.

Cosal examined the first artifacts found on Yaostay. Axes and spears—they'd be dealing with primitives. Bruzek sent a greeting and a request to some Heavenly Authorities from the Air Force. One of them replied with a report-in-progress on Yaostayan weather patterns. Cosal pored over research findings, looking for the biggest tanks physics would allow. Bruzek read the report. There was more ambient magic in Yaostay's air than anywhere else on the planet. Cosal petitioned High Commander Apian for a 15% funding transfer from the Navy to the Army. Bruzek phoned a few Admirals, invited them to dinner. They went to Carnifeast and vented to each other about Cosal. Cosal got the transfer he wanted. Bruzek asked the Directorate of Agriculture for input. They said Yaostay had an abundance of volcanic soil, conducive to cash crops. Cosal unveiled a new infantry training program, inspired by his experience waging war against primitive Asterians. Soldiers under his jurisdiction would learn the psychology of the savages.

Bruzek invited Cosal to dinner. Cosal accepted. Bruzek said it was good to see him outside work for once. Cosal said it was interesting to finally talk to Commander Bruzek as an equal. Bruzek said murder was less efficient than conversion. Cosal said he's still not taking orders from a former subordinate. Bruzek shrugged. Cosal covered the bill.

Bruzek met with Brigadier Demlow, asked for his opinion. Demlow said this "slavery" idea was unsustainable for the State, but good business for private enterprise. Cosal spent a night arguing with the Holy Admiral of the Navy. Bruzek spent a day off at church, asked a cleric for his opinion. He said the Empirical Truth would lend full support to civilizing efforts if Bruzek were to initiate them. Cosal spent a day off arguing with the Solar Authority of the Air Force. Bruzek recruited urban planners. Cosal recruited rhetoricians to argue with High Commander Apian of the Ascended Armed Forces. Bruzek hummed over a blueprint, tried to figure out how far apart the housing section, the labor section and the penal section should be from each other. Cosal invaded the savages with a storm of bullets, high-powered explosives, and the biggest tanks the Army could muster. And all Bruzek did was build an empty city.

———

Long after the Collapse, piles of broken brass and iron provided cover for Oxadon marauders and warring shamans, but offered no protection from the burst storms that ravaged the continent. Beams of mana incinerated flesh, swallowed stone and blasted open the ruins, exposing the basements of ancient factories. There explorers found enchanted pistons that once powered the manufacturing hub of a planetary empire. Yet circumstance denied the machines their rebirth: the instructions on the adhesive labels remained legible, but they were written in the language of ancient Tokel, whose last speakers were long slain by marauders and warring shamans.

———

Arqich was gone, Redwood was a smoking ruin, the king was dead and Tarle was a captive. The war was over.

Wojpier had been the most powerful force in Northern Asteria. The Ascendants did not realize until after they seized power that Wojpier was something more than a nation, something their language called an “empire.” They’d retained this status until the latter half of the war, when they had to forsake their Southern territories to move all defenses against the Ascendants. Supply line problems plagued them ever since, and the remaining Wojpierian military leaders grumbled that internal politics, not Ascended power, had brought them down.

Soon after the loss of her colonies, Wojpier became one herself. She’d lost her most prized possessions, from her natural resources auctioned off to private firms, to the Royal Family commandeering nearly all her political institutions. But her imperial status, her meaning, her proper place in human history, this was the hardest to surrender.

But for all that was lost, much was kept. Native sailors were more experienced than Ascended navigators in traversing the Asterian coastline, and the conquerors would pay them well for their services. The country's network of aqueducts was nearly as efficient as the Ascendants' own water infrastructure, and scholars from each society had much to learn from the other. The colonies were lost, but two of the continent's most important rivers originated in Wojpier, so retaking the colonies would be trivial—if not as subordinates to Wojpier, then as equal partners under the Ascendants.

Most importantly, Wojpier had its own institutions of higher learning, ones specialized in different fields than the Ascendants. Of all the spoils of conquest, knowledge was the most prized. Later historians termed this post-war period the Synthesis Era, in which the specialized knowledge of Ascended and Wojpierian academics, craftsmen, scientists, artists and mages were blended in a scurry of mutual excitement and curiosity. Over the course of a generation, technology advanced at a speed never seen before in Yaldev’s history.

The industrial production capacity and electrical specialization of the Ascendants combined with Wojpierian expertise in the mining and processing of exotic elements. Soon after, a new company called Digil Laboratories introduced a device we would call a point-contact transistor. Electronic circuits debuted a few years later, and microchips followed in turn. The First Conquest rewarded the winners, and eventually the losers, with the gateway to a new age of abundance and might.

The First Conquest was the end of the Ascended Nation, but the beginning of the Ascended Empire.

———

When the Aether Suppressor was a newborn, the development team huddled around a sheet of parchment that spilled over the sides of the workstation. Decadin drew lines with his finger between different runes adorning the page.

"...four, five, six. And these are all connected, right? So this thing can make bursts."

Miash clicked his teeth. "So it's a weapon?"

"I bet it's a lot of things."

Lhusel looked at the others. "We're keeping that a secret, right?"

Decadin nodded.

When the First Conquest was finished, Decadin bowed with hands and forehead against the Royal Palace floor. The Highest Ascendant, by never telling Decadin to rise, had kept the Acolyte like this the whole conversation. At least the carpet made this tolerable.

The King spoke with a pleased smile. There was a rush in knowing that however high Decadin stood in public esteem, even heroes were bound by Royal authority.

"I've also heard that the Aether Suppressor could be used as a weapon. That it has the power to kill a man if he remained still. Is that true, Acolyte?"

Who in Pelbee's name had babbled? Had anyone? Or was this just a coincidental rumor, the kind that always sprouts around new technology? Decadin could not risk lying to the Highest Ascendant. "Yes, your grace."

The King hummed in thought.

"Although," Decadin added, "if you were going to do that, you might break it. The Suppressor would need metal plating, or something like that."

"Then you have a new task, Decadin."

———

Never in Ascended history had two kings come face to face. Transfer of the Royal Throne was instantaneous, and the laws of succession made no allowance for a division of powers. Yet in two weeks, there were two kings: the rightful monarch delivering his victory speech with a self-satisfied grin, and the Wojpierian despot bolted to his open coffin.

Commander Bruzek held the neutralest expression he could muster. There were eyes on him tonight, and the best choice was to cast no judgment until history had shown its path. This ceremony was a controversial choice, but the Highest Ascendant had consulted with trustworthy advisors, and made the strategic choice to indulge his ego and terrorize his enemies. Those enemies lived in the ministry offices, in the Church, in what remained of the Wojpierian resistance. They lived in the military, the noble houses, and in all the nations of Asteria he would task his descendants with bringing low.

Decadin, his eyes concealed by tinted glasses, stood beside Bruzek. He did not know of this man, but he had good posture. The Acolyte was suddenly conscious of weeks spent hunched over workstations, so he mimicked the Commander: upright, hands together behind the back, strong.

The Wojpierian despot was restrained against a metal obelisk held aloft by a levitation spell. He was directly across from the Aether Suppressor, the tool that enabled his enemies to build recklessly, the tool that would make his subjects love the conquerors. Decorative lights on its armor plating blended in with the stars behind. The Highest Ascendant was lower; he delivered his speech from the same podium below the Suppressor that Decadin had once used to unveil this device, before it was a weapon. Arranged behind him were other Royals, prominent nobles, advisors and National heroes.

An elbow nudged Bruzek. He looked to the side, then down. A pair of tinted glasses were in Decadin’s open palm. Bruzek took the spectacles, adorned them and returned his hands to their designated position. And sure enough, when the King finished his speech with a dramatic “now die!”, nothing happened.

Bruzek raised an eyebrow. Decadin clicked his teeth. Somewhere in a hidden control room, some klutz from Terminus was fumbling with buttons—enchanted gemstones, really—trying to find the right switch. So he watched the Highest Ascendant’s victorious stance become increasingly awkward to hold until, twenty seconds later, the Aether Suppressor began to hum. Its lights grew brighter, and nobody had the chance to hear the last words of the last Wojpierian emperor.

The energy beam traveled too fast for the human eye to see, and when its light burned itself into the nobles' eyes, they bowed their heads to shield their gaze. Even the King turned his head. Only two heroes watched without flinching. When the burst ended, no skeleton nor scrap of flesh remained to insist that a human—the last of a dynasty—had once been there.

———

Tarle was a grey shadow inside a black sphere, the source of this malevolent power clutched by his hands and supported by crossed legs. But could such power save Tarle from the peak of Ascended ingenuity? Colonel Bruzek shot at the head, watched the bullet vanish in the blackness, and guessed the answer was yes.

The head turned toward him. Bruzek’s weapon was an experimental model distributed to field-deployable officers for small-scale testing. You loaded it from the breech. So Bruzek’s next shot came fast, and when it vanished with a ripple in the darkness, Tarle reached out a hand and yelled something in Wojpierian. Bruzek reloaded and shot again.

“I said stop!” Tarle shouted in the Ascended language as his aura of darkness shrank back into the orb in his lap. He had side-parted hair, poorly cut, and dressed unassumingly. No facial hair. The accursed artifact simmered in his lap, radiating purple energy into a night lit by bursts of white mana. “Ascendant, who are you?” Bruzek still aimed at the head. Tarle looked him over. The Dread Fighter’s accent was heavy, but decipherable. “You not dressed for the weather. My ball protects me. You came to die?”

A diplomatic solution sounded too stupid to be true, but with the futility of his attacks, Bruzek saw no loss in laying his gun on the grass. It was empty, and Tarle wouldn’t know how to reload it.

“But you have that,” Tarle reasoned, “and you dress as commander. You came to kill.”

Bruzek took two steps forward. Tarle raised a hand toward him, his eyes glowing purple. Bruzek jumped back.

“You came prepared,” Tarle said as the light faded. “You do not look a wizard, but full of magic.” “In our language, these enchantments have names.” Bruzek resumed his advance, pouring sacred menace into his tone. “We call them Holy Aura, Protection From Evil and Death Ward. I borrowed them from the holiest scrolls. If you’re luring me into tricks, none of your darkness can touch me.”

Tarle watched the Colonel’s shins. “There is difference, Ascendant. You one god, and trust it with your life. We many gods, so we know gods better than you.”

Bruzek stopped an arm’s length from his target. “I put down my weapon. Will you come peacefully?”

Tarle looked down. “You cannot rely on gods save you. They fallible.”

Bruzek grabbed his target’s hair. “Peace? Do you know that word?”

Tarle drew a chef’s knife and grabbed Bruzek’s pant leg. Bruzek raised his knee, but too late to dodge a deep stab. He yelled in pain, and as he fell forward he drove his knee into Tarle’s eye socket. The other eye glowed purple as the Orb of Darkness channeled power in the Dread Fighter’s grasp. Bruzek panicked and cast the only combat spell he knew: mana coursed through his bleeding leg as he struck the Orb with his heel and “jumped.” He and the artifact flew in opposite directions, both out of Tarle’s grasp. Bruzek spotted his gun in his peripheral vision, rushed to retrieve it.

“Fine!” Tarle shouted, taking cover behind a tree. “I won’t need it!” A bang, and the tree vibrated. Another bang, and the tree trembled. The Dread Fighter listened close, barely caught the Ascendant cursing to himself, and sprinted with knife in hand toward the invader. Bruzek grinned, fired his last shot, saw it break the grass just behind the target, and frowned. Tarle shouted his courage and drew closer. Bruzek swiftly drew his bayonet, feinted a thrust to slow the coming charge, plugged the blade into his gun barrel and stood his ground.

Tarle resumed the offensive, maneuvering hand and blade to catch the makeshift polearm and force it from his path. The soldiers were two wild men wrestling against their own natures, repressing their human instincts to reach rational clarity in the eye of adrenaline’s storm and find a deathblow at the center. This war was the clash of two continents, and though one was defying orders while the other was forsaken by his country, Bruzek and Tarle were the impact points.

For just a minute, their attacks were conservative. Mutual threats had sparked newfound appreciation for their own continued lives. Bruzek remembered what he knew from his early policing training, the intended trajectory before war had returned to the Ascended Nation, and educated officers were in short supply. Tarle watched for the attacks these Ascendants always tried, the ones he’d foiled in every melee before. But Bruzek wasn’t sloppy like they were: he made no attacks that assumed their own success. When their maneuvering gave them a moment of space free from each other, Bruzek clutched his leg—the bleeding was slowing. Tarle prayed in his native tongue, asking for the aid of any god who would see Wojpier thrive. Tarle, forsaken by his country, begged for its life. Bruzek, defying his orders, didn’t know whether to hope for his survival.

Then they remembered what really drove them to this night. Tarle feinted and lunged forward because he had nothing left. Bruzek fell for it, shuffled back and countered because he had nothing left but grief. All around them, bursts of mana raged up from the ground and rendered the nighttime duel bright as day. Yaldev itself lamented the combat and threatened its participants with death, but Bruzek could not run, for his leg was cut too deep, and Tarle could not run, for his brain could not dredge up that tactic. Even the animals, who’d learned by instinct honed over generations to hide from storms like these, peaked from burrows and hives to watch the two-legged ones undo each other. Out in the denser wood, birds stood ready to fly, and crystal bugs crawled toward the bursts in search of food.

Tarle kept the fight where he needed it: the open grove, with no chance for stealth tactics to reverse the fortunes. Here they circled each other, flesh always too evasive for wounds worse than trifling. Metal clashed on metal, or it scratched the gun’s wood carved from trees an ocean away, but always it reflected the glinting white of Yaldev’s life bursting all around.

Bruzek’s style combined standard Ascended melee combat training with police incapacitation techniques—it was the blend of one taught to live and one ordered to die. He aimed for the torso, aimed to subdue. Tarle had trained himself on practice alone and evolved into a lethal opportunist, specialized in targeting heads and throats with his current weapon: a chef’s knife that shone with bloodlust ever since the first strike. Bruzek could see its enchantment in its approaching victory, as every clash of blades wore at his own but never blunted his adversary’s edge. Tarle had time on his side, and he was faster, and evidently the more practiced of the two.

But there were three reasons Bruzek won, and he knew two of them: his arms were just stronger, he had double the functioning eyes, and he was a sonless father. Tarle reached for Bruzek’s weapon, tried to rip it from his grasp, knocked it to the ground instead, and swung his knife. Depth perception failed his aim. Bruzek grabbed Tarle’s arm, wrestled him to his back, and both the Colonel’s hands held the Dread Fighter’s fist shut around the handle. Tarle gripped his own wrist and pushed back with all his remaining might, his eyes flicking desperately between the slowly-approaching point and Bruzek’s eyes of malevolent red. All the arms trembled with exhaustion, but Tarle’s trembled more when the knife pierced his ocular surface, and his strength gave way as the knife drove handle deep into his head, severing memories and motor function. In one fast move, Bruzek pried Tarle’s fingers off the knife, held his hands apart, rose and stomped the handle deeper into the skull.

The Dread Fighter wailed, and Bruzek clutched those deadly hands until the wails shrank into weeping murmurs in his native tongue. Bruzek’s heart sheltered no pity. The mangled face looked a little more like Cosal’s now, and his imagination imposed his commander’s begging over the Wojpierian nonsense. But Tarle’s fading breath was a prayer, begging the aid of any god, any god, who would see the Ascendants fall.

The hands stopped struggling. Bruzek let them fall to the grass. He pulled the chef’s knife from the bleeding socket, examined it. A nice blade, nothing godly but better than anything the Army would issue. He looked back at the corpse, stomped its knee. No movement. He watched his surroundings while he caught more of his breath. A cloud cover had moved in, and the bursts raged on, but were slowing. Blackness intermittently flooded the grove before another beam of mystic power could blast from the earth, sparing any trees it touched but threatening all flesh.

Bruzek’s heart sheltered no celebration. He holstered his rifle, slid the chef’s knife down the side of his boot—an awkward feel, but it worked—and pondered about the odds of making it back alive with Tarle across his shoulders.

The clouds swirled and scattered before the orangle-gleaming soul of a moon in the sky. It radiated meaning and Bruzek’s soul, enveloped in ancient menace, told him to run. He dropped the corpse and did a backwards magic jump just before the ghost-moon unleashed a burst of red mana and holy flame that devoured Tarle. Bruzek barely landed on his feet, stumbled back shielding his eyes, and uncovered them to see Tarle standing again, head down, fire pouring toward the sky from every wound. The air was yellow with ambient mana, and already the grass in the grove burned and withered under the heat of holy vengeance.

“WILL FALL MOONSLAYERS,” said Tarle in Wojpierian, and Bruzek understood every word. “WILL FALL BREAKERS OF MY CHILDREN.”

With a flick of his wrist, Tarle threw a fireball at Bruzek. He magic jumped back again, but not fast enough to escape the blast. The shockwave rocked ground and threw Bruzek further than he wanted, faster, until his body hit a tree and fell limp to the forest floor. Just enough sense remained to break the fall with his forearms.

A distance away, Tarle roared with divine tones. Bruzek lay flat on his stomach, chin against the dirt. Only by Tarle’s holy glow could Bruzek see the dead man through the wall of flames the fireball had raised.

“I BURN REDWOOD TO SMOKE YOU OUT!”

Tarle threw out a hand. A beam of fire shot from his hand, setting a mile of trees on fire in the wrong direction.

He can’t see me, Bruzek thought. It can’t see me. He leopard crawled while the planet burned around him, barely distracted by the cold metal surface against his ankle. The bursts were gone now—elemental fire was the only threat.

Bruzek never took his eyes off the divine avatar. If he couldn’t escape Tarle, he couldn’t escape whatever in Pelbee’s creation this was. It threw more fireballs with its sacred tantrum, blowing apart the woods. With another flick of the wrist, Tarle shaped a new knife out of fire, made it thirty times longer, and swung it as a whip to cleave entire trees. It said nothing, but the fires radiated heat and meaning in equal measure. They demanded Bruzek repent by offering himself as a burnt offering.

No chance the knife would do anything, cute as it would be to finish Tarle off with the thing. Bruzek kept crawling, circling the grove—it was expanding as the innermost trees, ancient and wise, lit as candles and fell. His bayoneted gun was futile. The wood would catch fire before it came within ten feet. The birds were long gone now, and the crystal bugs were conflicted, repelled by apocalyptic flame but lured by delicious magic. Only one thought, one shred of reason untouched, bounced in his skill. It propelled him despite his stinging thigh and burning hope. If a force such as this wanted the Ascendants dead, then they survived only because something greater wanted them alive.

Bruzek panted. His crawling sped up, his eyes locked on the raging god, until his hand slapped something cold and smooth.

Tarle was floating a foot above the ground, swirling flames churning as an ocean storm at his feet. Elemental fire was not wild mana: it played no favorites and spared no life. With one hand he swung his ray of fire, chopping a dozen trees with every vengeful swing. With his other he made strange gestures and worked forgotten magics, healing his body just as fast as the moon’s presence in his body was scorching it away.

“YOU MEAT TO BURN.”

He heard a cold whoosh up a tree, and he knew which. He looked to the sky, threw a hand upward and called down another pillar of flame from the heavenly spirit. The beam broke the old wood as much with sacred fire as with blunt force—but just before impact the whoosh sounded again, and through the roaring flames and a sky of smoke, Tarle could not tell where it went. The god in his body squawked in frustration. He spun in place, swinging his arms in unison to drop more pillars on the tallest plants.

“YOU FLESH TO EAT. I KNOW YOU. YOU KNOW ME.”

Tarle charged a swirling sphere of annihilating heat in both his hands, clutched it against his chest.

“YOUR KIND FORGETS, BUT KNOWS. SPEAK! SPEAK WHAT I AM!”

Bruzek landed on Tarle’s back. The force crashed him onto his stomach, and Bruzek bashed the back of Tarle’s head with the Orb of Darkness.

“Fallible.”

And the void devoured everything.

Bruzek screamed into infinity and heard nothing. The darkness tore ravenously at his essence.

Holy Aura offered resistance, but fell. There was nothing in the void to believe in.

Protection From Evil offered resistance, but fell. This was his own doing.

Death Ward offered resistance, but fell. It could not stem the inevitable.

All remaining force crashed into Bruzek’s body, brain and being. It swallowed. He was gone.

The darkness vanished, and Bruzek was in Redwood, his throat making inhuman sounds as it gasped his life force back into his body and coughed out the smoke. He was curled up on top of an unburnt corpse that glowed with the remnants of divine presence. He was curled around the Orb. It was pouring more instructions into his mind, whispering compulsive instructions to unleash more of its potential. The darkness inside his skull was still clamping down on his brain, and in the midst of that pressure, Bruzek only understood the one technique that mattered. With clawing motions from his hand, a shadowy portal appeared under the Orb and disappeared as fast as it swallowed it, and half of Bruzek wished he could vanish just the same, for good.

The other half dragged him up to his knees, then to his feet, took shaky hold of Tarle’s pant legs and dragged him across the forest floor. The darkness had doused the fire, but the cold could never undo the damage. As far as the Colonel’s smoke-tainted eyes could see, ash was Redwood’s main ingredient now, and as he dragged Tarle’s body through mounds of the stuff, it left a barren trail.

---

Three minutes into their conversation, Colonel Bruzek snapped. "Never say his name again!"

Brigadier Cosal glared at him, motioned for him to lower his voice.

"I'll shut it when you hear me," Bruzek shouted, "I am trying to forget, and there is nothing more insulting to my boy than plastering his title on your fucking mouth!"

"The tents are thin," Cosal hissed, "and this is private, and I am your commander."

"You killed my boy, Cosal. You commissioned the mines, you killed him with your damn mouth."

Bruzek made his sob as subtle as he could. Cosal cleared his throat.

"Are you ready to listen?"

Bruzek nodded.

"First of all, I didn't choose to bring your family to Wojpier. That was you. I didn't let your son play outside the civilian quarters either. That was your wife, or whoever else you brought. You're right to be upset, but you're wrong to blame me for what your own actions cost you."

Bruzek put Cosal's severed head on a spike and waved it as his battle flag while he lead the charge against the Ascended Nation.

"Also," added Cosal, "the mines are necessary defensive measures, and you would have made the same decision in my stead. I picked lightning mines for a reason. It's not just material conservation or rechargeability, it's that they leave bodies intact and dignified. I'm not a demon, Bruzek. And lastly, you need to thank Pelbee for your fortune that you're having this talk with me, because any other brigadier would've had you flogged or put to the sword."

Bruzek couldn't meet him in the eye. "Yeah. You're right."

Cosal waited for the caveat.

"You're not a demon."

Cosal waited for the insult, but Bruzek just turned to leave. "Bruzek, I have not dismissed you."

"Flog me," he grunted as he left.

"You're a good soldier," Cosal called after him, "so I will forgive you this once. We'll talk tomorrow."

Bruzek was too far now to hear any of it.

"...Dismissed."

---

Despite the Church and all its crusaders, regional heresies flourished in the Central Yaostayan Desert. Their god was Parc Pelbee in name, but not in spirit. Cultists along the desert’s edge hid their traditional ways under Empirical garb, using Church-issued candles as cover for their smoke-centered rituals. Further inland, shamans lay surrounded by gemstones full of mana and dreamed under the stars in pursuit of lost wisdom. When police kicked them awake, they claimed their practice was Imperiomancy, and Imperiomancy was legal in this district, so fuck off. Yet further into the wastes, a hundred miles out from Triult, the strangest faith of all manned a satellite dish, an ear pointed to the sky that waited for a constellation-god’s instructions on how to destroy the false deity that ruled in his stead.

---