The Second Lord’s Madness
For over three hundred years the remote realm of Sengorod had experienced steady growth, all thanks to the careful stewardship of its lord, a mysterious divine spirit. With their passing and the ascension of a new lord, that growth ground to a halt. A wandering traveler who stumbled across the backwater recounts their time in Sengorod during the turbulent reign of the second lord, their investigation into the murky origins of the realm, and the increasingly misguided attempts of the lord to return Sengorod to prosperity.
I will forgive you if you have never heard of Sengorod. Indeed, I imagine—no, I know—that no sane man would fault you for being ignorant of Sengorod, up to and including the very residents of Sengorod themselves. For the entirety of its existence, the most notable fact about the realm was its remoteness. It was surrounded by unclaimed Shards, most of which were inhospitable. This region now sits in the heart of the Monochrome Dominion, but in Sengorod’s time, it was simply a desolate wasteland. In its demise, Sengorod did briefly played a part in the founding of the Dominion; however, its role here was a readily replaceable one, so much so that most studies of the Dominion’s origins refer to Sengorod in passing as a mere “minor settlement,” if they even mention it at all. All of this is to say that to the universal community Sengorod was inconsequential; were I not now writing about it, the realm would be consigned to the dustbins of history.
I owe my having been introduced to Sengorod to a man named Assyl. Assyl was born in the Dawn Caverns, but when he was still a youth his family moved to the Great Steppe, where they hoped to “save” the natives from their Giyometiri beliefs. As is often the case with such missionaries, they were enslaved within the month. Assyl was placed in a copper mine, where he toiled for a decade. During this time two things happened to the adolescent. First, he slowly drifted away from his family’s beliefs, assimilating into the local culture. Given the young age at which he had been enslaved, this was to be expected. Second, and much less expectedly, Assyl became what the locals called a “dreamteller.” This meant that he began to experience fantastical and unnaturally vivid dreams with which he then enchanted his fellow slaves. This secondary occupation of his earned him a good deal of popularity within the otherwise oppressive and dour mines, which in turn likely led to his becoming a gregarious if slightly underhanded sort. Then on precisely the tenth anniversary of his enslavement, he experienced a very different type of dream. Instead of a hypnagogic adventure, Assyl received a vision from one of Giyometi’s archangels—the Dreaming Void, naturally. The young man’s sclera glowed blue for a week, proving the authenticity of the event to his masters; Assyl was thus immediately proclaimed a prophet, ascending from slavery to nobility overnight. All these factors combined to make Assyl quite the character, a jolly trickster equally at home among slaves, rulers, and proselytizers.
Assyl spent the next decade learning a more orthodox version of the Geometer’s Word—the version he had been taught in the mines was more a mishmash of superstitions. However, his impoverished life as a slave had left him ever so slightly greedy. The various morals and philosophies of past prophets were fascinating, but he found himself truly drawn to the more tangible aspects of the Blue Faith: Giyometiri rituals. The byzantine system of personalized yet mathematical rites spoke to him with their guarantee that they would be heard by the Geometer’s angels. Moreover, the risk they carried if done incorrectly, that of a Barrier breach, did not deter him. Assyl’s education was thus extended as he slowly mastered this field. Discovering his basis of rites, which for him consisted almost entirely of chants and incantations, took six months of cautious meditation. Learning the math necessary to correctly construct rituals from this basis took him another decade. And so, at the age of thirty-eight, Assyl finished his growth into a holy man of Giyometi. His arsenal was complete; the only question was what he would target first.
As it turned out, Assyl retained more influence from his parents than he had realized. Traditionally, prophets in the Great Steppe went on to either found monasteries or become rulers, but neither path grabbed his interest. Instead, Assyl wished to spread his version of the Geometer’s Word to those who were not already of the Blue Faith; that of course meant venturing out from the Great Steppe. He was a good deal more successful than his parents, in that no harm ever came to him from proselytizing. The man had learned, presumably in the mines, how to not push people too far, and his personality was naturally charming. However, his mission drives had an alarming tendency to develop into hypnagogic adventures, much like his old dreams, and derail into absurdity. Inevitably, the man would become overly comfortable, drugs of an unknown variety would be consumed, a Geometer chant would be slurred, and so on until the entire shard was overrun by crabs made of velvet and razorblades. That incident in particular brought Assyl to my attention, and I made it a point thereafter to join the prophet on his journeys.
Five years after I began accompanying Assyl, I found myself touring the swathe of shards trailing the Great Steppe. This region was traditionally viewed as a wasteland, with most shards being too inclimate to support native populations and too small to attract potential lords; however, there were some scattered pockets of civilization. Assyl had recently clued in to these settlements’ existence and had immediately developed an intense interest in “the forgotten shadow of the Steppe.” Our journey initially found very little, confirming that the area’s reputation was well-earned. What we did find were temporary encampments of nomadic peoples, most of whom were only a few generations removed from the Great Steppe and thus already followed Giyometi. As we traveled further, the population shifted towards small villages of luminous folk, most of whom were faithless. They were not atheists, mind you—they were familiar with many gods. This region was spiritually desolate, however, so none were immanent to the people. When Assyl tried to convince them of the Geometer’s goodness, they countered that their ancestors’ prayers had never reached Noble Blue. When he offered to teach them the more reliable system of Geometer rituals, they balked at the added personal risks. All of these exchanges were polite and respectful, which is to say not one had been interesting, so it was with little fanfare that we came to what our previous stop had called a remote farming shard.
Sengorod immediately set itself apart from the other settlements: not only was the gate we entered through guarded, but the guards were humans armed with muskets. Mind you, there were only eight, five of whom were dozing off, but it was still a notable upgrade. The three waking guards called out to us in a language neither Assyl nor I recognized, an unnatural hodgepodge of Slavic roots the likes of which only exist in pastiche worlds, though the two of us could comprehend it. Assyl explained our purpose, and we soon found ourselves being escorted by one of the guards to be “processed.” Our escort, a tall, lanky man in his late twenties with red hair and a beard that hung to his waist, explained that we were being taken to the head of the shard’s militia to be interviewed. Apparently, Sengorod saw enough sapient visitors for there to be an established security protocol, but few enough that their visitors could be handled directly by a higher-up. I tried to follow up on how frequently people were permitted entry, but the man had no clue.
Incidentally, our escort was one Bogdan Bogdanovich. Even though he plays no major role in this story, I would feel negligent were I to pass over his introduction. He was a good deal older than he looked, having been granted longevity half a century ago; he has the most confounding tendency to appear in strange places throughout Sengorod’s history, even though his significance was often minor.
Contrary to my expectations, Assyl and I were not brought to a detention center, or even an official building. Instead, we arrived at the militia chief’s personal residence. It was clearly styled as a feudal manor, although the implementation left something to be desired as the building looked more like an overgrown, mutant log cabin. Once inside, we were whisked away to our interlocutor, Stepan Anatolievich Fedotov. Rather curiously, Stepan Anatolievich managed to exude less of a sense of authority than did the sleeping men that he commanded. The reason for this became clear once he opened his mouth: he was giddy with excitement. Most of Sengorod’s visitors, he later explained, were destitute traders of the luminous folk, and human visitors, let alone well-off ones, were nearly unheard of. Consequently, our interview devolved into our regaling the militia chief with tales of Assyl’s misadventures. For ten hours. When Stepan Anatolievich finally relented, he gave us only the briefest of descriptions of Sengorod: the realm was ruled by a Lord Vladislav with the assistance of a group of six ensouled known as Sengorod’s witches, although “witch” was here used as a mere title. Moreover, the realm contained two cities: the City of Sengorod, from which the shard got its name, and Siniysk, named for a nearby azurite vein. He also clarified some geographical details. Sengorod was an inverted cylinder, which we could well see; it was fifty-seven hundred meters in diameter and four times that in length, which we could have guessed; and its gravitational field pulled away from the cylinder’s axis rather than towards the nearest surface, which wasn’t all that useful.
With this scarcely serviceable summary out of the way, he then assigned Assyl and I lodgings in Siniysk, which was apparently the smaller of the two cities, having only been constituted last year. Indeed, Siniysk consisted of little but administrative halls and empty apartments, awaiting the arrival of civil servants that did not yet exist. The only person of importance who truly lived there was Lord Vladislav himself. Given his isolated presence, the de jure capital took on the air of a toy village rather than the future nerve-center of the realm. The imperfection of this toy was not even well-hidden: most glaringly, Siniysk had no businesses of any sort. Its hypothetical denizens had nowhere to relax, to shop, or even to eat. This rot continued down to a more base, concrete level, as the town lacked basic pieces of infrastructure such as walkways and streetlamps. It was bluster, a prop, a show, and I wasn’t sure for whom.
My question was answered rather quickly. I had assumed that we would soon be called upon to have an audience with the lord, or at least one of the witches; so it was to my surprise that Assyl and I found him instead waiting on us. In sharp contrast to the giddy excitement of Stepan Anatolievich, Vladislav appeared nervous of all things. The man could scarcely introduce himself without stumbling over his words, even though I was quite certain he could slaughter us—well, I was probably safe, but at least Assyl—with scarcely a thought. It was almost as if we had power over him. Luckily for the lord, before I could explore this weakness further, Assyl cut through the tension by breaking into a musical version of his standard sermon. This number had specifically been designed to make its performer look a fool, and Assyl used it liberally when he sensed discomfort; apparently, he was quite used to playing the fool to head off fights back in the mines. While its effectiveness was in general questionable, here the tactic worked flawlessly: Vladislav ceased to care about our impression of both himself and Sengorod.
With Vladislav once again able to function, the three of us set about talking. The lord ended up being incredibly talkative, giving a rather thorough history of Sengorod. He was, in fact, the second Lord Sengorod, having ascended to the position five years ago, and his predecessor and progenitor, the Lord Shawthuloghk, had claimed the realm three hundred thirty-one years before that. As Sengorod had no preexisting population other than its witches, Shawthuloghk had procured a force of some three hundred colonists. Through his careful stewardship, the first lord had grown the realm to its present, stable population of forty thousand. The vast majority were farmers, though Sengorod-the-city was mostly artisans. Poverty, or at least relative poverty, was low, and the people were happy. Moreover, since Vladislav had taken over, neither of these facts had changed. Therein lay the problem, the source of the new lord’s discontent: nothing had changed. Towards the end of Lord Shawthuloghk’s reign, these metrics had begun to slow in their growth; under Vladislav, they had fully stagnated. He had been casting around rather desperately ever since, looking for a cure to this malaise. Siniysk was the latest and largest attempt, though Vladislav would not say how it was faring. I presumed that meant the early results were not promising, but I was rather unsure how such a large public works project could not be aiding the economy. Of course, I pointed out that Sengorod might be at the limits of what a medieval society could manage, but Vladislav seemed to wave this off: modernizing was a difficult, long-term proposal, and he wanted relief for his citizens now.
Eventually, Vladislav tired of our discussion and left Assyl and I to retire. The lodging that we had been given was a rather strange, open room. It clearly had been intended to be divided into a common space, kitchen, and bedroom; however, no walls had actually been built. There was also no bathroom, although I didn’t know if that was another oversight or a technological shortfall—did Sengorod have indoor plumbing? Similarly, the Fedotov mansion had been almost purely made of logs, but our apartment was made of lath and plaster. The whole realm, at least technologically speaking, seemed rather anachronistic. As I drifted off to sleep pondering this, I was interrupted by Assyl muttering to himself. He was sitting on his bed on the other side of the room with an utterly predatory smile on his face.
When I awoke, Assyl had been replaced: sitting in his place on his bed was a woman. She was of a rather small stature, and I had great difficulty discerning any other details about her as she was draped in papers. Indeed, she appeared to have eschewed regular clothing in favor of a veritable cocoon of reports, forms, and scratch paper that she detached and reattached as needed. This “fashion” had been popular with the bureaucrats of the Old Empire just prior to the fall of the Drai dynasty, but it had since fallen out of favor for being a “waste of divine ability.” As the only divine beings in Sengorod other than Lord Vladislav were the witches, I assumed this was one of them, though I had no hint which. A few seconds after I woke up, the witch noticed and turned towards me; I saw immediately she was of unnatural beauty. The “unnatural” portion was in fact overplayed, for it was as clear as day that she was a fox-spirit. And that answered my question: this was the witch tasked with building Siniysk, Circe.
Circe led me out of the room, explaining her purpose as we went. She had taken it upon herself to give me—and Assyl, though he had apparently gone straight to Lord Vladislav—a tour and survey of Sengorod. Apparently, she didn’t trust her lord to handle guests in a diplomatically acceptable manner; to be fair, that had proven true. Before we began, she asked what the purpose of our visit was. I was quite amused to note that Circe was the first person since Bogdan Bogdanovich to inquire about this seemingly important fact. When I explained Assyl’s mission, a rather dark look came over the witch’s face, but all she did in response was pull a few papers from her work-cocoon and cross out some sections. She then dragged me off to see the actual center of the realm, the City of Sengorod.
If Siniysk was a skeleton of a city, Sengorod-the-city was a tumor. It twisted and turned in a practically byzantine manner, with seemingly major roads dead-ending at random, connected by spider-webs of alleys that rejected the very concept of blocks. There was no rhyme or reason to the placement of buildings save for the fact there was an almost magnetic pull towards the city’s center, the sole island of order and where the buildings of governance were. This ravenous pull in turn meant structures existed in a perpetual cycle of being abandoned and reclaimed. All of these aspects combined to give an alarming illusion of scope, making the city feel less like an entity in and of itself and more like a district of a larger city that had been snipped out of space and transplanted to Sengorod, even though it was ultimately little more than a small town. I was left nearly dazed by this tour, but I suspect that may have been intentional on Circe’s part.
This is not to say I learned nothing from my excursion. For one, I learned a great deal about the system of governance in Sengorod. While the lord’s authority was absolute, most of the realm’s day-to-day runnings were managed by executive committees, called boards, that were usually chaired by one of the witches. Circe currently chaired the Board of Public Works, hence her directing Siniysk’s construction, although she usually chaired the Board of Rites, which coordinated and optimized the thaumaturgic duties of the witches. Apparently a lot of authority was often exercised in the name of “optimization.” There was the Board of Defense, to which Stepan Anatolievich and the militia answered; the Board of Chancellery, which maintained all public records; the Board of Finance, which managed taxation, banking, and the money supply; and the Board of Justice, which headed the courts. In addition to these six primary boards, there were a smattering of ad-hoc ones of more narrow purpose, such as the Board of Education, although these were usually run by the mundane citizenry. This scheme felt rather reminiscent of the division of government used in the Old Empire, which in turn was based on an Imperial Chinese system. Taken in combination with Circe’s attire, I was beginning to suspect a connection, though how the Old Empire could have any influence on this backwater eluded me.
During my tour of the city, I became a good deal more acquainted with the Board of Justice than I had any desire to be. Assyl and I had apparently come at a most sensational time, as a series of cases involving corruption and abuse at Sengorod’s sole orphanage were reaching their conclusion. Most of the charges were financial in nature and would be handled in ways designed to deter similar crimes: lesser offenders would be fined, and greater offenders sentenced to hard labor. Simple prison was not a possibility, as it was strictly less efficient than forced labor, or so Lord Shawthuloghk had felt. This system did make sense from the perspective of a realm constrained by severe scarcity, although that constraint seemed a thing of the past to me. This fierce utilitarianism pervaded the entire criminal code, even to matters such as capital punishment. While it was self-evident—again, to the first lord—that there were certain individuals too dangerous to allow interaction with others, simple execution was a waste. These inmates were instead consumed by the witches for spirit vampirism. Rather typically, the more humane methods were less efficient. The method of choice involved the condemned being swallowed whole by one of the witches while simultaneously being tagged with a healing charm, leading to a cruel equilibrium between digestion and restoration. This would give the witch until the charm wore out to extract every last bit of divinity from the consumed. Now, none of the witches were sociopaths, so they actively lobbied against this sentence, but the orphanage cases threatened to overrule that preference: a tutor employed therein had been poisoning some of their youngest charges. The public were enraptured by the revolting affair.
I promise that I included the above for reasons beyond shock.
On a lighter note, I also learned much about the Board of Finance as well, albeit against my will. Setting monetary policy represented the lion’s share of the board’s work; it was also a task that the witches hated with a passion. No one on Sengorod had much of an understanding of economics, least of all the witches; moreover, there seemed to be a general inability or unwillingness to learn. As such, at least from the witches’ perspective, discharging the duties of the Board of Finance involved copious amounts of stressful guesswork for nearly random results. In normal times, the witches would draw lots to determine which unlucky soul would chair the board. Occasionally, however, Shawthuloghk had assigned the position as a punishment for witches who had disappointed the first lord; Circe increasingly worried Vladislav would soon do the same to her, lest Siniysk not produce results. I was not and still am not sure if she was simply venting or if she had a goal in mind telling me her fears—you never know with foxes.
When we had exhausted the sights of the City of Sengorod, I returned to my room. Circe had offered to accompany me further, but I declined, instead agreeing to have her give me a tour of rural Sengorod tomorrow. Alone, I spent the few remaining hours of daylight leafing through my records, trying to determine if there was a connection between Sengorod and the Old Empire. All I had to go on was an eccentric outfit and a fairly generic government structure. These were almost certainly both coincidences, but I felt it might be a fun exercise regardless. I saw three possible connections: the witches, the colonists, and Lord Shawthuloghk. I felt very confident in eliminating the first possibility, as the witches had come into existence in Sengorod, although the surrounding circumstances reeked of the Hands Of Fate. The second possibility I also felt safe eliminating, albeit for two lesser reasons. First was the fact that Sengorod was simply so remote: it had been twenty millenia since the Empire of the Barrier had even claimed the region. If the colonization force was officially sanctioned, there were many better locales to target; if the force wasn’t, there were closer, less regulated populaces to recruit from. The second reason was that they simply didn’t seem all that Imperial. Even at its height under the Kwun dynasty, the Old Empire had never housed many slavic-speaking peoples. Now the number was nearly zero. That just left Shawthuloghk. I very quickly realized I lacked sufficient information about the first lord. Their name came from the Vulgar Tongue, which told me literally nothing; their human-like, or more accurately elven, appearance was common across the universe. While their face, according to portraits I had seen, had traditionally male features, they eschewed any and every gender, as was official Imperial policy since time immemorial. They were probably well-educated, given that they had given the witches names from Greek mythology, but so were most officials, Imperial or otherwise. I needed to know what languages they had known, who their progenitor had been—anything, really. And so, while parsing through Drai dynasty personnel records, I resolved to pay the chairwoman of the Board of Chancellery a visit tomorrow.
Assyl eventually returned shortly after sundown. He had a haggard look on his face, looking every bit of fifty years old. I enquired about his day and was promptly treated to a rather lengthy rant about Vladislav. Assyl had made the connection last night that Vladislav wanted prosperity for the realm, and the Geometer’s Word was about nothing if not collective prosperity. It should have been a perfect match. Unfortunately, Vladislav seemed to be having trouble with the idea that the rituals for summoning Noble Blue’s angels were not simple, fixed formulas he could quickly follow. When the lord had learned that it would take months at a minimum to discover his basis of rites, he had almost thrown Assyl out. Eventually, they settled on a subset that Assyl felt could probably be used to construct harvest, fertility, and combat rituals; this subset might take a day to learn. Assyl felt deeply uncomfortable about this shortcut, as it came at the cost of much more involved computations to derive the rituals as well as greater complexity and fragility in the final procedures. When he explained the general costs of failure to Vladislav, the spirit was not phased. Assyl had then gone into rather gory detail describing the horror stories he had witnessed involving failed rituals, usually pathological Barrier breaches, but the lord could not be dissuaded.
Unfortunately, Assyl soon concluded that Vladislav’s surety came not from confidence in himself or a reasoned consideration of the risks but rather a lack of appreciation of the danger, almost as if he had ignored Assyl’s warning stories. Vladislav had been impatient and jittery, largely unable even to fall into a meditative trance. Moreover, when he had succeeded in entering a trance, the lord had almost started communing with miasmatic spirits across the Barrier rather than Giyometiri beings. The derivation of one’s basis strictly speaking also risked a breach, but Assyl had never seen anyone blunder into one that badly. The two of them ultimately had spent hours trying to discover the lord’s basis of rites to little avail; Assyl had then written Vladislav off as being in an incompatible mental state, opting instead to explain the theory behind combining those rites. Alas, that had gone just as poorly: Assyl’s lecture almost visibly in one ear and out the other, the lord instead opting to continue searching for his basis. Assyl went on for a good deal longer, but his main thrust was that Vladislav had acted less like the lord of the realm and more like a fidgety child, although I suppose he was technically still young for a spirit. In spite of his frustration, however, Assyl was undaunted and planned to try again after resting.
Come morning, I had once again been beaten to wakefulness by Assyl, who presumably had gone to tutor Vladislav. Circe, however, was not there waiting for me. Instead, as I left my room, I was greeted by a coating of clear slime spread across and along the hallway. The slime almost immediately snapped into a single mass in front of me, reshaping and recoloring itself until it was nearly indistinguishable from a mundane woman, save for the fact that its—or rather, her—hair was clearly a solid mass, and her clothes were clearly just textures. I took this to be the witch Tethys and asked if anything had happened. Sure enough, there had been a severe construction accident with a building on the other side of Siniysk; Circe was busy running damage control. Tethys had only just been roped into escorting me and so had no agenda. I wasn’t quite ready to visit the Chancellery, so I brought up the previous plan for rural Sengorod. We set off at once.
I did not gain nearly as much from the tour of Sengorod’s farmlands as I did from the city. Part of that, I hate to say, was the fault of my tour guide. Whereas Circe had been talkative and provided an almost perfect amount of context, Tethys erred in both directions. At one moment, she would be rather terse and brief in her explanations; the next, she would begin almost babbling about minutiae. Mind you, I don’t want to impugn her candor. She simply had no clue what I’d find interesting. However, the greater reason for my shallow experience was that there was simply less to learn. I had expected clever crop rotations and rigorous central management to account for the general absence of malnutrition, and instead I got wheat. Endless fields of wheat. There were other crops—corn, cabbage, and potatoes, among others—but they were dwarfed by wheat; most of the finer details were handled by the witches’ thaumaturgy, usually the witch Theia specifically. The livestock was in a similar state, typically handled by the witches Echidna and Scylla. There was a fun little fact about land ownership that stuck with me: three families—the Fedotovs, the Sobchaks, and the Patrushevs—owned half of Sengorod’s farmland. My previous analysis had thus been mistaken: Stepan Anatolievich’s mansion wasn’t modeled after a medieval manor, but rather was one. At the time, this briefly revived my interests, but after visiting a series of hamlets with barely one hundred souls each, I all but begged to go to Sengorod’s archives.
The Board of Chancellery operated out of a building just outside of central Sengorod-the-city that was oxymoronically both large and discrete. Although I have since learned that the building was not considered either an archive or a library, stepping inside I could not tell the difference. Lining the walls were birth and death records, land deeds past and present, accounts of every tax ever collected, logs of crop yields and livestock slaughters, histories of every intrusion into Sengorod by both sapients and beasts, minutes of every meeting of every board—I could probably go on for some time. It was a collection that likely surpassed all of its peers in single-shard realms; quite honestly, it could probably stand on its own next to the archives of some of the greater powers. I was quite confident now that any information to be had about Shawthuloghk would be present here. However, I had no clue wherein that information might be. Tethys was not available to help: she had not accompanied me into the building, almost superstitiously refusing to enter. As the not-an-archive was almost certainly not a mundane feat, it seemed I would need to literally ask the chair of the board for directions.
The chairwoman of the Board of Chancellery was the witch Mnemosyne. I found her ensconced in a small room in the back. She was a small woman, yet she wore what appeared to be a monk’s habit sized for a giant. I was mostly certain she was either human or luminant. As I approached her, I felt a pressure on my mind, the force of information saturating the very air. I let myself sample some of the free-floating memes and found them to be memories. That would explain how the archive’s records were being gathered—an impressive display of clairvoyance, perhaps even bordering on infomanipulation. I took the risk of interrupting her trance and introduced myself. When no catastrophic explosion of information occurred, I gave a quick summary of how I came to be there. It was immediately clear that I did not have Mnemosyne’s full attention; in fact, I doubted she was capable of giving anything her full attention. Her information gathering was visibly putting a severe strain on her, and she seemed unable to do much beyond listen and occasionally offer a brief comment. When I concluded my tale, the witch remained silent for several minutes, and when she finally responded she spoke in a slow, halting manner, as if she were looking up every word. She informed me that there was a connection between Lord Shawthuloghk and the Old Empire, but she was not free to explain further. She then gave me directions to a number of manuscripts. Bidding her thanks and farewell, I tracked these documents down and found them to be the volumes of the first lord’s autobiography. I spent the next several hours leafing through the text and gained a good deal of insight into Sengorod’s first century, but the only useful clue for my quest came from the first sentence of the work: Shawthuloghk was the spawn of one Juurtychel of the Divine City of Min-Tal-Lyur, a direct subsidiary of the Principate.
As I left the chancellery building, I was reunited with Tethys, who had waited for me even though night had long since fallen. She had seemingly spent the time playing with her form, for she had redone her clothing to look more like clothes and less like paint. This had apparently put her in a talkative mood, as she immediately started telling me the latest news about the construction accident in Siniysk. The original accident had been less of the severe issue we thought and more of an embarrassing setback: a section of scaffolding had collapsed. Circe’s damage control had been to personally assist in repairing the damage, presumably to show candor. Unfortunately, even accounting for her divine capabilities, Circe was about as competent a construction worker as metal is fluffy; the building the scaffolding had been on was now nearing collapse itself. Tethys then treated me to a very in-depth summary of how the incident should have been handled. I got the distinct impression Tethys had actually wanted to build Siniysk. She seemed to bear no ill-will to Circe; instead, all was directed at Vladislav, who I learned had made the assignment as a punishment to Tethys for a poor performance as chairwoman of the Board of Finance.
We soon arrived back at my room, where Tethy bade me goodnight and left, melting back into an amorphous blob. Inside was Assyl, who managed to look even more miserable than he had the night before. Lord Vladislav had been an even worse student today, although he had an excuse this time: while I had been reading, the Board of Justice had reached a verdict on the orphanage’s murderous tutor: death it would be. However, the chair of the board, the witch Theia, who was to actually perform the execution, was highly disinclined to use the usual method. She had spent much time messaging with Vladislav, trying to convince him to allow a guillotine execution. So far, the second lord had not budged. Throughout this back-and-forth, he had insisted—against Assyl’s advice, of course—on continuing with the exercises to discover his basis of rites. While some nominal progress had been made on this front, Assyl did not trust any of the results. His patience was wearing thin, and he would give Vladislav only one more chance to be a competent and safe student before abandoning the lord.
Neither Assyl nor I slept much that night, for before dawn had broken we were awoken by the witches Scylla and Echidna, whom neither of us had yet met. Both lived up to their names: Scylla had four thick, tail-like entities protruding from her lower back, all of which ended in maws; Echidna was a snake-spirit, her lower half a serpent’s body roughly nine meters long. The two shared an expression that was equal parts frustration and panic. Some time during the night, Vladislav had brought about a spiteful conclusion to his disagreement with Theia: not only would the traditional execution occur, but it was to happen the following morning, and in a square in Siniysk no less. This had sent nearly everyone into a frenzy as forces divine and mundane marshalled to organize this unexpected event. In the midst of all this, Vladislav had isolated himself to perform more of Assyl’s exercises; he had since refused to come out. The witches hoped Assyl could talk some sense into the lord. On this count Assyl was doubtful, but he also feared that Vladislav was unqualified to perform the exercises alone and might again invoke something less controllable from beyond the Barrier. He set off at once with Scylla and Echidna to Vladislav’s residence. I for one felt that a Barrier breach was exactly the sort of craziness that tended to follow Assyl; thus I expected the intervention not only to fail but to backfire spectacularly.
With this thought planted in my head, I found it rather hard to motivate myself to do much more in Sengorod. After all, what was the point of getting to know a condemned shard? Instead, I spent the time until dawn preparing scripts and charms to help Assyl and I escape. I also made a few spares should any of the witches wish to flee—the ones I had met had been a pleasant enough bunch. As for the mundane citizens, I really saw no way of helping given the lack of preparatory time. In truth, even if I had more forewarning, I would likely not have risked organising an evacuation. It had been quite some time since I’d faced a Barrier breach, and I did not trust my instincts to still be sharp. If Vladislav were simply corrupted or puppeteered, all would be fine; but if the breach were to be physical, anything beyond a few wisps would slaughter Assyl; and if a cumulus got through, I would be in some danger. The last thing I needed was to be guarding thousands of panicking citizens, all of whom were doomed anyway were I to fall.
As the sun appeared, I finished my preparations and set out for the execution. I had no real desire to see a person eaten alive, but it seemed a better use of my time than waiting in my room for Sengorod’s apocalypse. I found the event being set up in a square in the center of the city. Circe and Tethys were supervising a work crew that was erecting raised seating. The one completed section was notably higher than the incomplete ones; presumably this was where Lord Vladislav and the witches would sit. Right now, only Mnemosyne was seated there. She appeared entirely lucid and was talking with Theia, who was standing just in front of the seating. Theia, I had not realized, was of the luminous folk; she was specifically of the infamous Mernum luminad and thus stood at four-and-a-half meters tall, bringing her head roughly level with Mnemosyne. Given the never-ending stream of allegations that the Mernum are man-eaters, I found it most amusing that Theia had been so dead-set on mercy. The end result looked to be rather ironic. I also couldn’t help but wonder how the other, smaller witches were able to perform these executions. Were their bodies all equipped with the same elasticity and spatial distortions that the Mernum had? Such a setup was difficult to obtain for little gain: being able to consume more and larger things typically was only beneficial if you hibernated, although using such capabilities for spirit vampirism wasn’t entirely novel. The whole situation felt like more evidence that the Hands Of Fate had played a role in the witches’ creation.
I snapped out of my wondering to find Theia looking rather distressed. Mnemosyne was trying to calm her down and, when she caught sight of me, waved me over, apparently hoping I might serve as a distraction. I was not half the raconteur Assyl was, but I was happy to play along and joined her atop the raised section. After I was properly introduced to Theia, I regaled the two witches with an abbreviated recollection of the more severe misadventures of Assyl and I. This had the desired effect, for Theia was swiftly absorbed in my tales, although she seemed to find them less like the dark comedies I had intended and more like pulpy thrillers. She also worried a good deal about the collateral damage caused by the strange disasters, but her empathy thankfully did not translate into distress. Mnemosyne in contrast understood my intent and spent most of the time chuckling to herself while smiling almost sadly. I’ve often noted that people with vast experiences tend to share my sense of humor, so I could not help but wonder if the same was true here. Mnemosyne was not well-traveled, so I could think of only one way that she could have received such exposure: her memory absorption. She must retain some amount of the information, though it couldn’t be too much—otherwise, she would catch major crimes like this orphanage case. Many years later, she tried to explain the specifics to me, but her description was so tortured as to be incomprehensible.
People started to meander about the square an hour after I arrived; an hour after that, the work crew finished up. Circe and Tethys joined us in the focal section, naturally sliding into the conversation. Yet another hour passed, and still there was no sign of either Vladislav or Assyl. Or catastrophe for that matter. When the clock struck ten, Circe took control and began the spectacle—over a thousand people had gathered to watch, and waiting any longer would cause too much of a disruption. The tutor was soon brought out; they were a bloody mess, beaten so severely I could not even tell if they were man or woman. Were it not for the faint glow of a healing charm, I would have suspected them dead. Things might have been better were they dead, for the appearance of the condemned immediately sent Theia back into a foul mood, albeit one more resigned than panicked. A pang of sympathy hit me, and an idea began to take shape: could I—deniably, of course—give the witch her desired form of execution? It would surely be an embarrassment to Lord Vladislav, but given his behavior, along with the fact that he might not be long for this world, I had difficulty bringing myself to care. Shorting out the healing charm would be a loud, noisy, and bright affair easily traced back to me; so too, thinking about it more, would most methods to outright stop the charm. To be fully safe, I would need to overpower it, to kill the condemned faster than the charm could heal. That, however, was a fairly straightforward task for one such as myself. I could even make it painless, though I felt no sympathy for a child killer. I stretched out my senses, feeling the blood flowing through their body; I isolated the arteries entering their head and pinched. Had they been conscious, the prisoner would have almost immediately collapsed, but now nobody noticed. The charm set about bypassing the collapsed blood vessels, attempting to force them open. It even tried to grow new arteries, but I simply crushed those as well. After a few minutes, the healing charm abruptly ceased all activity, presumably no longer recognizing the corpse as alive. At this same moment, Mnemosyne’s eyes went wide. She stared at the body and then turned to face me. I did my best not to react, but after a few seconds, the melancholy look on Mnemosyne’s face fell away, and she flashed me a smirk.
Twenty minutes later, Circe finished reciting what had clearly been intended to be Vladislav’s remarks, a horrifically dull diatribe about justice; she then noticed that the prisoner had expired. Pandemonium broke loose, and I used the chaos to quietly flee the scene. I spent the next hour hiding in my room as the witches and the militia struggled to restrain the frenzied crowd. When the situation had calmed down, I sought out Stepan Anatolievich: while he had been a bit of a bore, I was curious how he felt the repercussions of today would play out. His main insight was that, so long as Lord Vladislav did not overreact, the incident would be forgotten in a few months. It was nothing more than a minor embarrassment: the healing charm had been optimized to handle slow digestion, not violent beatings, which Stepan Anatolievich assumed were the cause of death. The militia chief generally seemed disappointed that the execution by swallowing had not occurred, not because of a sense of justice or cruelty, but rather because he had simply been curious what one would be like—the last had been fifty years ago, when he had been a toddler. If Stepan Anatolievich was at all representative of Sengorod’s mortal populace, then I suspected his analysis to be correct.
I spent the rest of the day at the Fedotov manor doing little of importance; I opted to spend the night there as well. I reasoned that the estate was relatively close to one of the gates and thus was optimal for a sudden escape, though with each passing hour I became less confident that disaster was nigh. My misadventures with Assyl had always had a narrative quality to them, and the climax of the day had passed. However, in the dead of night Assyl appeared in my room and declared that we were to leave Sengorod at once. Assyl had arrived at Vladislav’s side before any significant risk of a breach arose, but when the lord had refused to stop with the ritual exercises, Assyl had been all but forced to supervise. They had finally uncovered the necessary part of Vladislav’s basis and retired an hour ago, but Assyl’s patience had run out: he would no longer talk to Vladislav, let alone teach. Assyl had spent the rest of the day writing up a text explaining how to calculate various rituals; when he finished, he left it in Scylla's care and then fled. This was rather cold for him, but he had a rationalization for his actions. In-person instruction was clearly not working, and Assyl reasoned that his supervising the lord’s first few rituals wouldn’t make any long-term difference. And so my first visit to Sengorod ended: with our leaving unannounced in the darkest hours of the night.
Assyl and I journeyed for nearly three more months before insanity struck. We had stumbled upon a rather primitive settlement notable for the seemingly peaceful coexistence of humans and luminants. Their chief invited us to a session of a strange gambling game where, as he had scarcely explained how to play, he doubtlessly hoped to fleece us; instead, through sheer luck, Assyl won the hands of two of the chief’s daughters and one of his sons in marriage. Needless to say, we were no longer welcome and had to fight our way out, during which one of the emanations Assyl summoned razed most of the shard. It was a rather grim end even by Assyl’s standards to our venture, and it left him so guilt-ridden that he refused to go on another mission drive for three years. As the man had never been one to pursue longevity, age soon began to slow his rate even further. Do not think Assyl’s life faded into oblivion, however, for as he aged he began to touch the Ideal of the Holy Man. With this crowning achievement, Assyl died a legend to the people of the Great Steppe.
My story in contrast would eventually return to Sengorod, though I suppose that’s rather obvious to you, reader. That would not be for another century on account of that same game of chance: I too had acquired one of the chief’s daughters, a young woman named Sarangerel, albeit as a peon rather than as a wife. She managed to survive the destruction of the shard and, since I now owned her debt, followed us back to civilization. Her debt was a fascinatingly cruel one: it was unforgivable; the total value was unknown; it could only be paid off with labor that was demanded by the creditor; any assets she owned, earned, or was given other than sustenance had to be transferred to the creditor; and so on. We, for I still own the debt to this day, have yet to find a loophole to void it. Though this struggle probably warrants its own tale, it is largely extraneous to Sengorod’s story, save for the fact that one lead sent us to the Divine City of Min-Tal-Lyur. There, after we had exhausted the lead, I happened to remember that the city had been home to Lord Shawthuloghk’s progenitor, Juurtychel.
It took very little research to find, to my genuine amazement, that Juurtychel was still alive. More specifically, she was known across Min-Tal-Lyur for her unnatural longevity—she was nearing thirteen hundred years old. Unfortunately, she was a courtesan, supposedly the favorite of the current mayor; consequently, it took me quite some time to meet with her. When the meeting did occur, I immediately saw some part of my information was wrong: Juurtychel was clearly of the Uai clan, which meant she was no more related to Shawthuloghk and Vladislav than I was. She did recognize Shawthuloghk’s name, however, indicating the error—or, perhaps, lie—lay in his autobiography, rather than with me. Juurtychel explained that she had been more akin to a godmother to the first lord, who had developed from a fragment of a close friend of hers, one Luoyek. I tried to learn more about this mysterious figure, as their name was almost stereotypically Imperial, but was stymied by Juurtychel on two fronts. Firstly, the courtesan simply knew very little about her friend’s past; secondly, what she did know she was too preoccupied to tell. Apparently, I had given her her first piece of news regarding Shawthuloghk in half a millennium. She all but demanded a full recounting of my knowledge. I started with the first lord’s autobiography, which I will reiterate was several volumes long. Moreover, I had to recite what I could remember verbatim, as Juurtychel was quite interested in the precise wording, presumably looking for coded messages and double meanings. A week later, when this arduous process finished, she proclaimed the manuscript as clearly having been ghost-written and thus suspected its veracity. I felt this was a rather extreme, paranoid reaction, but I said nothing and continued on to what I knew of Vladislav’s story. I gave a much briefer account and in turn was asked far fewer questions. When I finished, the courtesan fell silent, and I briefly thought this strange encounter over.
Juurtychel then declared that she would go to Sengorod to meet her “grandson,” and that I would guide her. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I agreed to this command. Certainly it wasn’t for Juurtychel—her imperious personality grated against me. I was confident any journey with her would be sheer misery. Nor was it for Lord Vladislav, who seemed unstable at best. I had only spoken with the man once and had no fondness for him. Honestly, I can’t even say Sengorod itself had yet left much of an impression on me. It had been pleasant enough, but it was just a medieval backwater, and one with a sadistic justice system. I suppose my only reason for going was a vague gut feeling that a meeting between the courtesan and the second lord would be something beyond an awkward encounter between two strangers. I can’t say I was particularly right.
Returning to Sengorod proved far harder than I had thought. My plan was to simply retrace the route Assyl and I had taken as the region had not been mapped out; I even started in the Great Steppe, at the giant monument marking Assyl’s grave, a hundred meter tall pyramid made of pure lapis lazuli. This had worked well at first as myself, Juurtychel, and Sarangerel successfully found the settlements Assyl had tried to convert. Most had been abandoned and reclaimed by nature, the previous residents having either migrated or perished; however, a few villages had survived, and some even thrived. One in particular stood out where the encampment’s elder, a luminant man of one hundred and twenty-three years, remembered the time Assyl and I had visited and arose from his deathbed to welcome us. This stop in particular had a rather curious effect on Juurtychel: it inspired her to write a composition honoring Assyl. I learned that her skill both as a composer and with a myriad of instruments had been what had earned her the favor of the mayor of Min-Tal-Lyur, but lately she had been lacking inspiration. This new task had the added benefit of mellowing out the courtesan—almost overnight, she remembered Sarangerel and I were here as guides and companions, not servants. This change came none too soon, for as we arrived at the last leg of our path we found Sengorod seemingly missing. As I doubted a realignment had occurred, I concluded I had made a wrong turn. In fact, I had not; the gate to Sengorod had simply been buried in a massive landslide. Not a week after we had been there, a work crew led by Scylla tunneled through, reopening the connection. By that time, however, we were hopelessly lost in a non-euclidean tangle of shards that we had accidentally wandered into while searching for Sengorod. We spent a month trying to escape the tangle, which cartographers later determined to contain forty-seven shards, all of which were functionally identical inverted spheres with tundra climates. During this time, we suffered from a severe lack of food, although as a pure spirit this was merely a nuisance to me. Luckily, when we did emerge Sengorod was easy to find: in their memoir, Shawthuloghk had mentioned this cluster, which had been the death of many overconfident hunters, and had detailed its location as a warning. Annoyingly, the first lord had not seen fit to detail how to survive once inside.
I was once again welcomed to Sengorod by Bogdan Bogdanovich. The only real change the man had undergone was that he was now the official leader of his sleeping compatriots rather than the leader by default; he now wore a deep blue officer’s uniform. As before, we were taken for processing to the head of the militia, one Ruslan Ivanovich, the patriarch of the Bukhalos, one of the less notable but still major landowning families. The Bukhalo manor was much the same as the Fedotovs’, a sprawling mansion made entirely of logs, but had the added feature of being crisscrossed with stripes of blue paint that had been splashed onto the logs. It was a shockingly shoddy job for the estate of one of Sengorod’s wealthier families. I considered for a moment whether the Bukhalos might be in decline, but after a moment I dismissed the thought—the place looked otherwise pristine. The inside was much the same save for a similar smattering of slipshod blue lines.
Ruslan Ivanovich kept us waiting for over an hour; this would have been more forgivable if he hadn’t been audibly dining in his bedroom. When he finally deigned to grace us with his presence, I saw Ruslan Ivanovich fell far below the bar Stepan Anatolievich had set for me, a bar which had not been high to begin with. I had never gotten the impression Stepan Anatolievich was a particularly skillful or even competent commander, and he was almost certainly a mere figurehead, appointed for political reasons and expected to defer to the chair of the Board of Defense on any matters of importance; however, I was relatively confident that he knew all of this. That is, Stepan Anatolievich, for all that he had been overcome with childlike wonder when we first met, generally struck me as a sensible man. Contrast that with Ruslan Ivanovich, who carried himself with absolute confidence—confidence that his position meant something, that he had earned it on merit, and that, if faced with a worthy opponent, he would show himself to be the next Subutai. Naturally, I doubted this was anything other than delusional arrogance. He also immediately revealed himself to be a philanderer of the worst sort: his gaze latched onto Juurtychel, whom he clearly thought a human, and to a lesser extent Sarangerel. I may as well have not been there. Our conversation did not last ten minutes before Juurtychel grew tired of the man’s slavering overtures and dismissed him. Thankfully, Ruslan Ivanovich was so taken aback that he complied automatically. However, he assigned us lodgings in the Bukhalo manor. He also did not report our arrival to Lord Vladislav, although I think this was out of sheer incompetence rather than malice.
I stole away from our lodgings that night, wanting to physically distance myself from Ruslan Ivanovich. I offered to take my companions along, but both declined, probably on account of the fact it was winter in Sengorod. I made my way to Siniysk, hoping that it was still full of empty apartments that I could squat in or even buy, but before I arrived I was warded away. The city was bathed in an electric blue light, as if the nonexistent streetlamps contained sparks instead of flames. I couldn’t help but draw a connection between this light and the blue paint; although I hoped the two were unrelated and what I was seeing was merely an atrocious play on Siniysk’s name, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. I rushed over to the City of Sengorod, where, as I saw more blue paint, my worst fears were confirmed: Vladislav had colored the shard in the Geometer’s image. It was a display of faith only the most fanatical would approve of—certainly Assyl had never risen to such levels. The very beings to whom Vladislav was praying would give him no rewards for this. In fact, some of the archangels, should they notice, might be offended by the apparent idolization of Giyometi, although they might also view it as a pitiful, desperate display and thus overlook the slight. Regardless, this did not bode well either for Sengorod’s development since my last visit or for Lord Vladislav’s stability.
I very much wanted to talk through the events of the last century with an unbiased observer. I could think of only one such person in the realm; I just hoped she still held the same position as before, and that she was still in her office. Setting off, I wound my way through the streets to the home of the Board of Chancellery. In the not-an-archive, my hunch proved correct, and I found Mnemosyne in one of the back rooms. At first I thought her asleep, but on closer inspection I saw she was in her half-lucid trance, although this time rather than absorbing records and memories she was transcribing them, ink etching itself into open books. Unfortunately, this meant I couldn’t learn much from her. I was able to discover, through a series of yes-no questions, that Sengorod’s economic and social metrics were largely flat, although personal satisfaction, however that was measured, was drifting downwards. On other topics, from herself to Vladislav to the blue paint, she either would not or could not answer; when the clock struck one, I took my leave. Disappointed, I wandered about Sengorod-the-city looking for a more suitable place to stay. Given the season, most places were shuttered at this hour, although I eventually found one that would receive me, a tavern called Stone Hall. It was a seedy place, I was fairly confident it was doubling as a brothel, and the owner insisted I pay for a month’s stay. In a fit of self-defeating spite, I instead purchased the room outright. I did not get to enjoy my new property that night, however, as I spent the next several hours exorcizing the room of its filth.
For some reason, I found myself missing the Bukhalo manor.
As dawn broke, I finished stripping my room down to its plaster and decided to step outside. The city was locked down, with the militia patrolling the streets and a dull klaxon blaring in the background, though how this medieval land operated a klaxon was beyond me. As some incident had clearly occurred, I made my way back to my companions, paying the patrols no mind. There I found an even greater concentration of militiamen; they had the Bukhalo manor being treated as something between a crime scene and a siege. Leading this operation was Scylla, who was currently serving as the chairwoman of the Board of Justice. She was surprised to see me but otherwise was happy to loop me in. Sometime last night, Ruslan Ivanovich had propositioned Juurtychel. When she naturally rejected his advances, he had tried to force himself onto her—with emphasis on “tried.” One of the servants had found the militia chief all but dead, burned so severely as to look more like a lump of char than a human. And so the event was being investigated, although there was very little to uncover: Juurtychel had freely given her testimony. Moreover, Scylla had already passed judgment, ruling the courtesan’s actions self-defense. In fact, the witch seemed almost happy with how events had unfolded. Apparently, Ruslan Ivanovich had a reputation for not respecting consent, but he had never faced any consequences, as his past targets had either been his own serfs, poor townsfolk, or others he held power over. Moreover, extralegal action against the man was not a possibility, as he had ingratiated himself to Lord Vladislav by paying gratuitous lip-service to the Geometer’s Word. As a result, Ruslan Ivanovich, while not powerful, was as prominent as he was a pariah; many, including all of the witches, had been trying to build a case against him. Now none of that was necessary: he had made the dual errors of mistaking a courtesan for a common prostitute and a Uaian vampire for a mundane human. Putting it in those terms, I suppose the man had gotten off quite lightly, as few who face the wrath of the Uai survive, nevermind that death would surely have been a more merciful outcome for the burnt husk that was Ruslan Ivanovich.
I found my companions behind the mansion, along with Theia, the almost-corpse of Ruslan Ivanovich, and a dozen militiamen, who were supposed to be guarding the site but were instead cowering in fear at every movement of Juurtychel’s. Rather amusingly, Theia appeared to be in almost as much distress: as the resident healer among the witches, she had been called to treat the militia chief, but several hours had passed between his being burned and his being found, and she was struggling to even stabilize him. In sharp contrast, Juurtychel seemed to be, if not quite enjoying herself, in high spirits; in particular, she was congratulating herself for not killing Rusal Ivanovich. However, I worried how Vladislav would react to her actions—in fact, I was rather shocked he was not already here. After checking with Scylla for his likely whereabouts, I dragged Juurtychel along to meet the lord. Our destination was Siniysk, although Scylla had not been more specific.
She hadn’t needed to be.
The source of the electric glow from last night made itself known as we approached: the city was now dominated by a massive tower planted in the same square that had housed the failed execution. It stood just shy of forty meters tall but not more than four wide; inside was nothing but a spiral staircase leading to the top, at which there was an eight meter wide platform, circular and open to the air. My first thought was that this structure was a hanging burial tower, an obscure and oxymoronically named but otherwise harmless tradition from the Lower Spine. However, as we drew closer, it became clear no bodies were hanging from the platform. Instead, it was ringed with spikes, impaled on which were bloated, decomposing corpses. I will not fault you for mistaking such a monstrosity for a simple monument to terror, but in fact it was something called a pestilence spire. It is one of the rare fixed components in Giyometiri rituals, in particular ones designed to call forth plagues. You’ve likely never heard of these as they are prohibitively complex and resource-intensive—mundane biological warfare is usually more efficient. Rather alarmingly, when we arrived atop the spire we found Lord Vladislav in the midst of one such ritual. He had modified it quite extensively, and quite strangely at that: he was trying to retrofit it into a harvest ritual. Most of his safety work was correct, so the novel rite would not cause a breach, but the underlying logic was nonsensical. Vladislav would be lucky if it had any effect at all.
No sooner had Juurtychel and I announced ourselves than the second lord whirled about, locking eyes with me. He had one question for me: was Assyl here? I was rather taken aback by this; after all, the last time we had spoken, Vladislav had been, in spite of his nerves, acceptably polite and a passable conversationalist. The blue paint had been worrying, the pestilence spire alarming, but this? This was merely depressing. The mood spread when I told Vladislav that Assyl had died seventy years ago. Immediately, he clutched at his chest and bowed his head, falling silent. After a minute, Juurtychel ventured to break the silence, at last introducing herself properly; however, her “grandson” stopped her with a dismissive wave of his hand. I then ventured to speak as well, mentioning my concerns about his pestilence-harvest ritual, but I received much the same treatment. At length, after another full minute of silence, Vladislav let out a strangled sob. He then cast his hands into the air, threw his head back, and declared, in a divine voice the whole shard could hear, that the next two days would be days of mourning, with all work to be halted. He then kicked off of the tower, jumping to who knows where.
He had forgotten to halt the ritual.
After Juurtychel and I managed to deactivate the pestilence spire, we descended. She had a look on her face that was equal parts confused, offended, and hurt. It was clear that she felt some attachment to Vladislav, but whatever fueled that connection was tentative and indirect. I asked how she was; she started talking at great length, and about Shawthuloghk at that. She had had a much stronger parental bond with the first lord than she had first let on, which made her stoic reaction to the news of his demise all the more puzzling. I sadly couldn’t gather much more out of her, for she soon started babbling—presumably she was not the type inclined towards introspection. I took that as my cue to distract her from this train of thought and invited her to help restore my new room to habitability, a job that I hoped would be menial enough to numb her mind. I seemed to guess right, as she took to the task with a surprising amount of enthusiasm, particularly for one that I doubted had much cause to perform manual labor. We started work around nine o’clock; by seven, the two of us—well, technically three, for Sarangerel eventually made her way to us, though how she tracked down our whereabouts I never did ask—had the place a good deal nicer than a room in Stone Hall had any right to be. Afterwards, my two companions bade me farewell and set off to find lodging of their own: mine was still rather small in spite of my efforts to dimensionally stretch it, although I had given it an extra fifty-two centimeters of width. I understand they appropriated one of Siniysk’s vacant apartments. In contrast, I did little else that evening, as it was a sleepy, snowy night.
I was awoken just before dawn by Sengorod’s fox witch, Circe. She was most amused by my choice of residence: Stone Hall was de-facto under her control. In fact, the ”owner” I had purchased the room from was an agent of hers and technically lacked the authority to sell anything permanently, let alone the deed to a single room, a concept rather alien to Sengorod’s legal system. For this, he had been reprimanded; Circe was now here to renegotiate this arrangement in a more official manner. Originally, she had hoped to just refund me the cost of the room and find me a more respectable place to stay, but our renovation of the space put an end to that—the witch could not evict me with a clear conscience, even though I was not all that attached to just a single day’s work and said as much. What followed was a rather curious event loop in which she made an offer, I accepted, she acted as if I had rejected, and then she made a more generous offer. By the end, she all but gave me the deed to the entire building, provided I did not hinder her indirect management of the place. And so I became a front for whatever it was Circe did with Stone Hall; I generally never pried, although I gathered it usually served the purposes of the Board of Rites, even when the other witches chaired the board.
Circe had also come bearing a message: Echidna wished to meet with me. After the negotiation concluded, I went to meet with the snake-spirit, finding her in an empty coffee house not that far from Stone Hall. With her was a balding but young man named Nikodim Petrovich Suvorkin, the acting militia chief. As today was the first day of mourning for Assyl, this was a purely social call; however, our talk, wholly by coincidence, turned to a hypothetical scenario where a gargantuan horde of semi-divine boar were to descend on Sengorod in two day’s time, and whether I would be inclined to assist, hypothetically of course. I had no objection and indeed was quite happy to help, although they would probably have been better served recruiting Juurtychel to assist. They of course were aware of this; however, they were also aware of how Lord Vladislav had treated her. They thus hoped I could handle this aspect of the upcoming defense as well. This honestly made me laugh—anyone at all familiar with the Uai clan would have had no doubts about their willingness to join in a fight. Still, they had forty-eight or so hours before the sounder attacked; they had time to learn.
With that matter settled, I proposed we go sight-seeing, coincidentally in the direction of the oncoming horde. They were in an adjacent shard, one consisting of nothing but rock and lichen. The gate connecting the place to Sengorod was for all intents and purposes a cave, emerging on Sengorod’s side as a sinkhole; I tried not to think too much about how gravity transitioned from shard to gate. Still, I failed to see what the concern was: the opening was not more than ten meters across. Surely the militia alone could lock such a chokepoint down. Even if not, the witches were, as a group, decently potent. In answer, Echidna led me through the gate, into the barren yet infested shard and, after a few minutes’s travel, pointed out the sounder, which was now slumbering. They were stone-skinned. Bullets would be meaningless, and any divine attacks would need to be concentrated on single targets. It was purely a matter of numbers. However, that begged another question: why couldn’t Lord Vladislav help? After all, the Geometer’s Word detailed a number of rituals that could weaken, bypass, or even invert stone-skin. But I suppose the answer there was obvious, for how could a man who built a pestilence spire for a harvest rite hope to help under the time pressures of battle?
Actually, thinking back to the tower brought yet another question to mind. Namely, where had the spire’s corpses come from? I asked Echidna and was rather tersely informed that they were from Sengorod’s latest batch of executions. On the one hand, this did mean a new form of capital punishment was in use, one which I suspected was more humane, if no less grizzly. On the other, the bodies, while in a state of advanced decay, could not have been more than a month old; it struck me as unlikely that the realm had had a cluster of capital crimes in such short succession. As Echidna did not seem inclined to elaborate, I pressed Nikodim Petrovich for details and was told they were blasphemers. While Vladislav did not yet require his subjects to worship the Geometer—honestly, I doubted most even knew how “Geometer” was derived from “Giyometi”—he did require the Blue Faith be given due respect, with such violations being judged by himself, rather than the Board of Justice. This last batch had been quite intoxicated when they had sullied Giyometi’s name, and Tethys, as chair of the Board of Justice, had asked that they be granted clemency, but Vladislav had heard none of it. Morale among Sengorod’s denizens was understandably low as a result.
The three of us spent several more hours scouting out the pack of boar and playing with possible strategies before we returned to Sengorod and went our separate ways. Thereafter, I attempted to track down my companions, to little avail; I later learned that Juurtychel had been composing and Sarangerel working with Theia on Ruslan Ivanovich. It had been a tiring day, so I returned to my room rather early, but even there I was denied peace: awaiting me was Stone Hall’s new manager, a cantankerous old woman who positively wreaked of the criminal underworld. To her credit, she did give me a rather thorough review of the establishment’s activities, but I did not care for what I learned. In addition to being a tavern and a brothel, Stone Hall was also a drug den. I had not even realized Sengorod was large enough to produce a meaningful supply of recreational substances.
With the dawn of the second day of mourning, I found myself in the curious position of having no agenda. My only real obligation had been to ask Juurtychel about tomorrow, but awaiting me was a note from Nikodim Petrovich. After chancing upon the courtesan last night, he had taken my advice and invited her to defend against the boar. She had accepted immediately. I was rather surprised by the acting militia chief, as he had not made a strong impression on me; I thus decided to acquaint myself with him further. My visit to him was quite different from my previous social calls, for unlike the Fedotovs and the Bukhalos, the Suvorkins were not landowners in any meaningful sense. Mind you, they had originally owned quite the estate alongside the the Fedotovs and the Sobchaks, but two and a half centuries ago a series of poor harvest had all but bankrupted the house, forcing them to sell most of their fields, the majority of which eventually came to be owned by the Patrushevs. Since then, the family had relocated to Sengorod-the-city, where they had slowly rebuilt their fortune as bankers and merchants. On this topic of family history Nikodim Petrovich was most excited to discuss and became quite animated. Evidently, he was the first member of a non-landowning family to hold a position of consequence in the militia, a fact which led to his veritably beaming with pride.
While I found Nikodim Petrovich to be enjoyable company, the man had other engagements, and so I bade him farewell. However, his talk of history jogged my memory that I had never returned to Mnemosyne after our unsuccessful conversation three nights ago. I found the witch where I had left her, although this time she was properly lucid. However, I found her in a rather curious position: she had discarded her oversized habit in favor of what I can only describe as a biohazard suit made of burlap. Woven through this article were a number of tubes that were filled with what appeared to be milk, creating the appearance that she was circulation-cooling herself. It was rather disconcerting to look at, and I got the impression it was not meant for my eyes. I was not that far off on either account, although I wouldn’t learn more until my next visit to Sengorod.
Regardless of how I felt, Mnemosyne was content to speak with me, brushing her appearance off as part of an experiment. I first brought up my previous questions about Lord Vladislav, but I honestly learned little from the witch—the past few days had told me all I needed to know about the second lord’s mental state. Afterwards, I returned to my original mystery, Lord Shawthuloghk’s origins; I updated her on my revelation about Juurtychel and Luoyek, and how the former’s ignorance of the latter had me at a dead end. This greatly amused Mnemosyne; in fact, she burst out laughing. Thankfully, she explained herself. She had sworn under the Light to never reveal the first lord’s origins, hence her rather vague breadcrumb of the autobiography. However, she had not counted on Juurtychel still being alive. Luoyek was thus wholly unrelated to uncovering the truth, or at least the path Mnemosyne had in mind. She then encouraged me to look in Min-Tal-Lyur’s archives, in particular their civil service archives. I had but one more question for the witch: why had Shawthuloghk insisted on such secrecy? The smile on her face was replaced by her usual melancholy, and she told me she only had a guess: inherited paranoia.
After my visit with Mnemosyne, I decided to renew my acquaintance with Tethys, the sole witch I had not yet seen this visit. I knew she was one to dive into overly technical details about her work and thought hearing such information about the Board of Justice might be interesting, when I suddenly realized my error. While Nikodim Petrovitch had implied Tethys to be the chair, just two days ago I had seen Scylla in that role. There were of course two possibilities: either they were co-chairs or there had been a shuffling of positions. Considering that Tethys’s appeal for clemency had been ignored, I suspected the latter to be the case. Moreover, I had a hunch where she had ended up.
In the century since Siniysk had been built, only one board had fully moved its offices there: the Board of Finance. Their headquarters, a rather gothic building made of smoothly carved stone, served as Sengorod’s mint and treasury; it also housed the closest thing the realm had to a professional class, those with a working knowledge of math beyond basic arithmetic. The place made for a sharp contrast with the rest of Sengorod in that it at least strove for modernity, even if it fell woefully short. Had Lord Vladislav been more stable and competent, this would have been the place to invest in, rather than hoping he could navigate the whims of the Geometer’s archangels, a task which so rarely scaled to the level of realms. It’s a fun counterfactual to consider, imagining the shard’s steady growth and industrialization, eventually becoming a small regional power, and at last culminating in its either joining the universal community or collapsing in a small apocalypse. It’s also a common and dull story, one which would not have caught my attention.
Ah—apologies. I am a lover of alternate histories, of which Sengorod is positively teeming; I sometimes let myself get carried away.
As I hope you’ve deduced by now, Tethys had indeed been punished for her merciful inclinations by being made chairwoman of the Board of Finance. Arguably, she was the witch most qualified for the position, but that did not change her hatred of the job. Indeed, she seemed to be going out of her way to remain ignorant of the job, for when we spoke none of her usual technical exposition materialized. At first, I thought this was a matter of principle for her, which struck me as rather petty; however, she hastily clarified: the new year’s tax policy was in the final stages of being drafted when her reassignment had occurred. Most of the work had been farmed out by the previous chair, Theia, to an accountant for the Sobchak family. In addition to having a clear conflict of interest, this man had personally monopolized all knowledge and development of the upcoming code. Consequently, as Tethys was quite confident the proposal would cause a minor scandal among anyone not named Sobchak, she wished to give herself as much deniability as possible. Already, she was telling people that the contracted accountant was too pressed for time to explain it to her. She was somewhat distressed that the blame would fall on Theia, who had doubtlessly hired the man out of naivete, but people had apparently come to expect such blunders from the Mernum. Additionally, I cannot help but note that the blame was technically deserved as well.
After we exhausted this topic, our conversation lapsed. Now, task-focused personalities such as Tethys’s were fairly common in the bureaucracies of the larger powers, but while I had no shortage of experience interacting with them I had never fully figured out how to deal with them, per se. As such, we, by which I mean I, flailed around for a while looking for a new subject. I never fully succeeded, but I did unearth one key fact about the slime witch: namely, she was developing a personal loathing towards Lord Vladislav. She did not openly say so, but her actions belied a growing trend of passive and not-so-passive aggression towards the second lord—even her working now was in defiance of the day of mourning. As I returned to Stone Hall, I merely wondered when she would become cognizant of her hatred. However I did not permit myself much time on this subject, for tomorrow promised to be an eventful fight, a challenging extermination. I spent the night preparing.
With the end of the day came the end of the period of mourning, and orders were sent out mobilizing the militia and the witches. As if by unspoken agreement, we all arrived at the sinkhole as dawn broke. Our total force consisted of sixty militiamen, led by Nikodim Petrovich; all the witches save Mnemosyne, who was in one of her trances, and Theia, who was still treating Ruslan Ivanovich along with Sarangerel; and myself and Juurtychel. Theoretically, Lord Vladislav should have been there as well, but we had not been expecting him, and sure enough he had opted instead to pray on our behalf. His presence wasn’t needed—this force was more than sufficient. At the end of the day, we were fighting boar. They were aggressive, destructive, and smart creatures, all on top of being divinely tough, but they were not man-slayers. If left unchecked, they would ravage Sengorod’s farms, knock down fences and loose structures, and eat anything not locked away; but these damages could be repaired given a decade or so. Sengorod’s safety was not at stake, but that made this fight all the more critical. With the executions last month, morale was low, and a poor showing here threatened to make that drop permanent. For all that he was arbitrary, unstable, and tone-deaf, and for all that his actions worked against his goals, Vladislav did want Sengorod’s people to be happy. Everyone feared what a resounding failure on that front would do to him.
With that in mind, we did not in fact set up a defensive line around the sinkhole; instead, we went through. We were going on the offensive. The militia split into two groups, with forty remaining just beyond the gate, there to serve as a last line of defense. The other twenty attached themselves to myself, Circe, and Tethys. Our job was to herd the boar, to guide them away from the gate and to keep them together. Being fully honest, we were tactical bait. Finally, Scylla, Echidna, and Juurtychel were to actually exterminate the horde. It was a rather simple plan, but then again simple, flexible plans often work best. We were worried slightly that the sounder had grown, and now it stood at almost one hundred, mostly sows and young males. However, this did not change our strategy. Juurtychel began the extermination, unleashing a massive detonation that mangled a dozen. The rest scattered, quite literally flying away. We hadn’t known they could do that.
Unbeknownst to us, as we were dealing with this annoying new development, events were kicking off back in Sengorod. Just as the pigs began to fly, Ruslan Ivanovich awoke. Theia and Sarangerel had not meaningfully healed the man, so just about all of his skin was melted scar tissue. Nevertheless, he stood up and moved about as if uninjured. At first, the two healers tried to restrain the militia chief; however, he proved quite agile. Then Theia noted that the whites of his eyes had gone blue—his body was being puppeteered by one of the Geometer’s angels. Suddenly he cried out, in a voice not wholly constrained by mundane sound, calling for Lord Vladislav. Sengorod’s ruler appeared a few minutes later, a confused look on his face. The two began speaking in Meti-Thiarofani, which we later learned Ruslan Ivanovich did not know a word of, and continued on for several more minutes. When they concluded, they roped Theia and Sarangerel into the scheme: a ritual had to be performed. To complete it, they need a collection of odds and ends, a net at least ten meters wide, and as many armed men as they could muster. The four set off to gather these.
Geometer miracles tend to be rather trite, so I’m sure you can guess our hunting party was struggling. As I hope I’ve made clear, we were not in any danger; our enemies were, offensively speaking, mundane boar, most of which were trying to flee. A handful were charging us, and two militiamen had gotten themselves mauled, but their wounds were skin deep at worst. We merely could not kill them at a meaningful rate. The animals were too dispersed in the air for Juurtychel’s explosions to hit more than one or two at a time, and Echidna and Scylla, who relied on their physical prowess to fight, could scarcely reach any. As I could fly, I joined in as a hunter, but my cognitive attacks, which were largely limited to sensory trickery on the boar, were rather orthogonal to stone-skinned defenses. We briefly tried shifting our goal to simply dispersing the sounder, but no matter how much we scattered them the boar always seemed to regroup. Circe and I tried a rather atypical combination of glamor and sensory editing to make them attack each other, but they could not damage their fellows. Tethys tried turning herself into a giant net, but the animals were nimble enough to evade her. Even the militia opened fire, loosing volley after volley on the swine, all to no effect. Disaster struck after one such wave seemed to anger the boar. The sounder, now reduced to about fifty, charged the militia as one. When the men did not scatter, the beasts swerved up, flying through the gate.
On Sengorod’s side of the gate, the last-minute ritual was complete. Theia and Sarangerel were holding a fishing net across the sinkhole; surrounding them was a ring of wooden planks, piles of stone, animal viscera, boots, hoes, and other miscellania, all of which were both aflame yet not actually burning. Just outside this circle were Ruslan Ivanovich and Lord Vladislav. They stood opposite each other across the gate, perpendicular to Theia and Sarangerel, all the while chanting a gibberish string of words in Thiarofani. Finally, just beyond them was a motley crew of three dozen irregulars, armed with anything from old muskets to bows to spears to even slings. As the boar flew through the gate, the net turned transparent, becoming almost invisible. They collided with it and passed through unimpeded, save for a hissing sound that eerily resembled a vacuum seal being broken. As the swine flew up into Sengorod’s skies, the irregulars loosed their weapons. As each bullet or arrow or spear or stone hit home, two curious things happened: the projectiles phased through the animals, and the boar were transformed into mundane turkeys.
All told, about five boar made it through untransformed. Our hunting party returned, passing through the fishing net with no ill effects, and hunted down these stragglers with ease. However, no sooner had we done so than Ruslan Ivanovich collapsed, his sclera returning to normal. Theia and Sarangerel rushed to help him, but Vladislav held them back. Over the next hour, the militia chief dragged himself to Siniysk, then to the pestilence spire, then finally up the spire’s stairs; all the while we followed. Awaiting us at the top was a featureless figure, a solid black silhouette surrounded by a neon blue corona, whom we all somehow knew was smiling. Yes, it was an emanation of the archangel Dreaming Void. The lesser angel walked over to Ruslan Ivanovich, who began croaking out a prayer. He was rambling and incoherent but generally begged for a second chance and promised to be a better person. Now, the sociopathic mind of a rapist is not easily changed; I am sure his prayer was made not out of any true desire to reform but rather came from a place of fear. However, the Dreaming emanation was not to be outdone. It placed its hand on Ruslan Ivanovich’s head, and instantly the militia chief’s scars began to peel away. To those of us with better senses—myself, my companions, Lord Vladislav, and at least some of the witches—however, we saw the man’s mind being erased, the various patterns, circuits, and synapses that made him a monster fading into oblivion. When nothing remained but memories, a new personality, a new person began to appear on the blank slate of a brain. The figure drew its hand back when the process was complete. Ruslan Ivanovich was now well and truly dead, his mind overwritten. The new man did not yet recognize this, however. With his newfound sense of empathy, the “reborn” Ruslan Ivanovich beheld the crimes of the old, and he began to weep.
I later learned of an obscure Giyometiri folktale called “The Sapper’s Rebirth”; it is quite similar to the tale I just recounted. Some notable differences are that the boar were instead lions, and the rapist commander was instead a cannibal field engineer. It delivers an ambiguous message about mental self-modification, a power only the Dreaming Void grants. Their fanatics view the parable as a celebration of the ability, while those wary of the ability interpret the tale as an exaggerated warning—after all, the cannibal did not want to be reborn. Others still view the story as a mocking satire designed to trick the archangel’s followers into celebrating a monster. Assyl, who I will remind you was awakened by the Dreaming One, apparently loved this tale not because of its meaning but because of the debate surrounding it, which he never tired of. I suspect the archangel intervened to recreate the legend as a fun little way to honor Assyl after Vladislav ordered the period of mourning. Unfortunately, the lord took it as a sign, although of what he could not say. When we left Sengorod the next day, I struggled to forget the rapturous look on his face.
It did not take our group long to return home. We made a brief detour to the resting place of Sarangerel’s old tribe; there she did—well, honestly, very little. Although she had requested the visit, it was apparent that, over the past century, she had moved on from her origins. In contrast, Juurtychel was not so well off. As we had left Sengorod, her relationship, or lack thereof, with Vladislav had remained unresolved; this continued to gnaw at her mind for some time. On the one hand, as I have alluded, the courtesan felt that some transitive property ought to connect herself and the second lord; but on the other, he was just a stranger, and an eccentric, unstable one at that, who had been dismissive and outright rude to her. The positions waged war in her mind, with some days leaving her grief-stricken at their estrangement, and others leaving her cursing Vladislav’s name. When we parted ways in Min-Tal-Lyur, she was no closer to making peace, and indeed I was worried she might lose coherence over the mental quandary. However, she assured me that she would be fine. Many years later, I received a communique from Juurtychel updating me: she had poured all of her conflict and confusion into what she deemed her magnum opus, a seven hour long symphony that so moved the city’s mayor that he had married her on the spot. I suppose that’s as good a resolution as either of us could have hoped for.
After we parted ways, however, I remained in Min-Tal-Lyur to follow up on Mnemosyne’s updated hint on the first lord’s origins. Sarangerel and I parsed through the city’s records, or at least those publicly available, looking for Shawthuloghk and, for good measure, Luoyek. On the latter, we found nothing; presumably they were officially known by a different name. On the former, however, we found four general hits. First and least helpful were the city’s census records, which told me their residence and occupation. Nothing therein told me about their past, although I did learn Shawthuloghk had been employed as a chef specializing in Common Earth’s cuisines. Second, we found his tax records, which showed the spirit had segregated his funds into dozens of pseudonymous accounts whose link was known only to the city. This is, of course, a common way to hide oneself from financial observers and seemed to fit with Mnemosyne’s diagnosis of paranoia but again was less than helpful to my goal. Third were their visa records, which showed where they had entered and exited the Principate but not their intended destination; I assumed the latter must have been classified for some reason. Here I learned the first lord had frequently traveled in Sengorod’s direction, which possibly meant they had been traveling to the March of Bluedowns, although this travel predated the march’s becoming well-known. Fourth and lastly, as Mnemosyne had suggested, we found Shawthuloghk’s records in the Min-Tal-Lyur Civil Service, where they had served for a brief four years before being discharged by the Hands Of Fate. They had spent most of that time as a clerk, but one easily overlooked note stood out to me: the first lord was listed as being fluent in Tengyrskic, a language I had never heard of in all my travels.
Apparently, neither had the Min-Tal-Lyur Civil Service. Nor had any of the linguists I asked. I will admit that I never pursued the matter with a high priority, as the mystery of Shawthuloghk, while fun, was one of a dozen leads I was following after at any given time. However, I was nothing if not patient: I had the hook I needed, and Mnemosyne was confident it could be followed, so it stood to reason I would eventually find someone who had heard of Tengyrskic. And so fifty years passed. I finally had my breakthrough during a diplomatic incident of all things, in particular during the Lenguaan Rebellion in the Old Empire. I had gotten permission to sit in on the meeting of the Directorate where they fatefully decided not to intervene. There, I had the idea to ask Westminster—surely one of the thousands of souls subsumed into their mind had heard of the unknown language. I was right: while none of the bound spirits spoke it, they knew Tengyrskic to be one of the languages native to the Drai homeland of Xihuek Province, which rather annoyingly was one of the rebelling provinces. It seemed unlikely I’d find anything more of value in my search outside of the province, and so I resolved to visit Xihuek when it wasn’t a warzone. The insurrection took another twenty-eight years to put down.
Not a year after this revelation, I received a most curious communique from the marquess of Bluedowns. The March had recently made contact with “The Vicarage of Sengorod,” which of course raised the question of when Vladislav had styled himself a vicar. Also, “vicar” was a term wholly unused in the Blue Faith—why had he chosen it? If he was drawing from the quasi-Russian aesthetic Shawthuloghk had established, “patriarch” or “bishop” made more sense. Regardless, relations between the two polities were not good. The route connecting them was rather arduous, consisting of two weeks of travel through inhospitable shards; as such, contact was limited. However, three missionaries had made the trek from Sengorod to Bluedowns, where they had disruptively preached a horrifyingly ascetic version of the Geometer’s Word, promptly broken those ascetic restrictions, gotten arrested for disorderly conduct, and finally begged for asylum. Now, whereas Sengorod had a population of forty thousand, Bluedowns numbered in the millions, so three crazed preachers was a truly miniscule issue. Unfortunately, the latest missionary, in her drunken rampage, had accidentally hurt a child, and the march’s press was demanding an armored brigade be sent to put a halt to the incidents. Luckily for Vladislav, the marquess wished to first try regular diplomacy. As I had a rapport with Vladislav—or so they believed—I was thus officially invited to “cordially discuss the matter” with the vicar. I saw no reason to decline, and honestly I felt morbidly curious about what I correctly assumed to be Vladislav’s continued decline.
I set off at once, not to Sengorod but to Bluedowns. I was alone, as Sarangerel was working on ascending from an ensouled to a divine spirit, a transformation she honestly could have done a century ago but had put off with every excuse possible. It had been three leap cycles to the day since I had been to the march; then, not only had the current marquess not been born, but his mother, the previous marchioness, had not either. Indeed, the place had just been colonized a mere two centuries before that, with an initial population of twenty-five thousand. Its primary industry had been logging, with a secondary focus on exporting furs. While I had kept abreast of developments since then and had maintained a correspondence with the lords of the realm, I truly did not appreciate the monumental changes that had occurred to Bluedowns—it was now, strictly though not ekistically speaking, an ecumenopolis. There were no longer any trees to fell or animals to hunt; to keep growing, the march had reinvented itself numerous times, many of which had come with painful tradeoffs. It made an alarming contrast with Sengorod. There, Vladislav had pursued the Geometer’s blessings as a way to continue growing while avoiding such changes. Now his chosen path threatened to reinvent Sengorod anyway, if it didn’t destroy the realm entirely, and all without having brought any benefits.
When I finally met with the marquess, he informed me that Sengorod had in fact sent a delegation to apologize for their missionaries’ behavior. This struck me as wildly out of character for Vladislav, but I rationalized it away as an insincere move done to placate Bluedowns. The delegation had confirmed that the missionaries were formally sent to spread Sengorod’s version of Giyometi’s Word; they further confirmed the ascetic sect to be the vicarage’s official faith. However, on the topic of their priests’ drunken, disruptive behavior, the representatives had given a most curious excuse: the three were apparently junkies, all addicted to an unknown drug that was spreading throughout Sengorod. Consequently, their drinking to excess was nothing more than an ignorant attempt to deal with withdrawal. As an explanation, it rang false to me. Every case of withdrawal I have ever seen has been debilitating, not merely uncomfortable. I found it much more likely these missionaries were part of the first generation of people raised under Vladislav’s new faith, and that they were reacting poorly to a world with both different beliefs and a higher quality of life. The marquess agreed, but he regardless felt that the claims needed to be investigated, if for no other reason than to ascertain if Sengorod was acting in good faith. My mission was thus twofold: prevail upon the second lord to stop sending missionaries, and research this mystery drug.
Immediately upon seeing the delegation, I knew they were not here on Vicar Vladislav’s orders, or likely even with his knowledge. It consisted of just two people: Circe, who had a history of acting independently, and Bogdan Bogdanovich, who was not a diplomat, even though he had been introduced to the marquess as one. When Circe saw me, she seemed to deflate and generally took on an air of hopelessness. She made an effort to conceal this from me, forcing herself to smile and converse, but her efforts were unconvincing. Of course, since she was a fox-spirit, I couldn’t discount the possibility she wanted to seem miserable; but, as I have considerable experience dealing with her kind, I was quite confident by this point that she was less a social mastermind like her brethren and more just sociable. At length, after we had put some distance between ourselves and Bluedowns, the witch dropped the act. She changed from the suit she had been wearing, which I neglected to mention before but feel I should note was far too modern for Sengorod’s aesthetic, back to her Drai-era paper cocoon, which I also feel I should note she had paired down, so that her pair of fox ears and her tail were no longer hidden. She then confided everything to me.
Sengorod had been ruined by the miracle, she began. Lord Vladislav—and yes, she refused to call him “vicar”—had taken two major lessons from it. Firstly, everything that the old Ruslan Ivanovich represented was evil. Obviously his rapist abuses were horrific and his arrogance undesirable, but Vladislav instead focused on the militia chief’s hedonism, a trait that I had not had much chance to observe but was not surprised to learn about, and from there extrapolated that all pleasure was sinful. This was how he had come to demand asceticism, never mind that traditional Geometer teachings explicitly warn against the practice. Secondly, Vladislav took the miracle to be a reward for his own faith. This he madly concluded was proof that Giyometi would always, without fail, reward their devotees. Combined, these created a rather toxic ideology: suffer and you will be rewarded such that you need not suffer anymore; if you are not rewarded, you clearly did not suffer enough. I was particularly suspicious of the “such that you need not suffer anymore” portion, as I didn’t see how it followed from either of his conclusions. Circe didn’t either, but she speculated it was a subconscious admission that eternal suffering ran against his original desires. In retrospect, I suppose it might have been a bastardized equivalent of Heaven, Paradise, or Elysium, but I doubt Vladislav put that much thought into it.
With this new spin on the Blue Faith developed, Vladislav set about forcing it on Sengorod’s denizens. Now, the citizens did not practice a particular faith—while Shawthuloghk had modeled the realm after pre-twentieth century Russia, the first lord had quite conspicuously omitted Christianity from the picture. Presumably they had determined that a closed, monotheistic religion made no sense when a god walked among the people and was lord of the realm. Instead, they followed the “Practical Faith,” bowing to any and all divine beings that might help or hurt them, which usually was just Sengorod’s lord. Thus there was no objection a priori to worshipping Giyometi. However, few felt there was much benefit to it either, and to most the prospect of a purely ascetic existence seemed to be a clear negative. While nobody dared to resist Vladislav’s orders, the faith consequently only took root skin-deep. Had that become the new normal, Circe thought, things might still have been fine. Unfortunately, this equilibrium, if you could call it that, quickly broke down. Vladislav had wanted the reborn Ruslan Ivanovich to lead the new faith and so had sent the man to the Great Steppe to learn more about Geometer rituals. Unfortunately, the man, assisted by his new morality, quickly realized Vladislav’s interpretation of the Geometer’s Word was sheer lunacy; after a drawn-out series of denunciations and counter-denunciations, he was banished. After this incident, Vladislav grew ever more erratic, declaring himself vicar and forcing stricter adherence to his new religion. Of course, the wrath of Vladislav was more than enough to terrify all of Sengorod into compliance; that had been thirty-five years ago.
The witches had been content to indulge Vladislav in his initial obsession with the Geometer’s blessings, as it had first been an altruistic and mostly personal endeavor. Sure, they had been worried about his declining sanity, but it had seemed likely he would lose coherence before he could do any major harm. When he had started to force his nonsense on the people, there had been some pushback, primarily from Tethys, but her lack of patience with the second lord’s antics heavily undercut her effectiveness. And besides, his changes were largely topical. Was it so awful to mix the Blue Faith into Sengorod’s quasi-Russian veneer? It was only after the miracle that they had realized the seriousness of the situation, but even then confrontation seemed a poor choice, for Lord Vladislav was more potent than the witches. They cravenly—and yes, that is Circe’s opinion, not mine, even though she agreed at the time—decided to trust that the newly minted moral paragon that was Ruslan Ivanovich would moderate the lord. Only when that too failed did they agree that they could wait no longer. As direct confrontation was not an option, they agreed to instead sabotage the second lord’s efforts; that is, they would make sure that the new faith did not become a part of Sengorod’s culture. Under normal circumstances, they figured, a full generation under the vicarage would spell doom to the old ways, as people who knew only the new would begin to dominate those who remembered the old. Thus the solution was obvious: find a way to ensure memories before the vicarage stayed in the public consciousness.
Circe did not get to explain the witches’ scheme, as I was able to guess it from there. Anything overt and publicly visible was out, which meant they were left only with more esoteric solutions, such as inducing visions or even directly inserting memories. Luckily, they had amongst their ranks an infomanipulator of sorts. Of all of this I was certain. From there, after racking my brain for any details about Mnemosyne, I recalled a few key points. First, I knew she could transcribe her memories and records into books. Second, I knew from the first time I met her that the memes she was absorbing would saturate the air around her. And third, I remembered that time I had seen her wrapped in liquid-cooling tubes that were seemingly filled with milk. From there, I conjectured that the witch could imbue liquids, or at least some type of matter, with her absorbed memories. From there, she could spread them discreetly through the semiotically-charged but otherwise mundane objects or substances. For example, if milk was her preferred medium, she could spike all of Sengorod’s dairy products with memories of Shawthuloghk’s reign. And—here I was wildly speculating—if the memory-sharing system was addictive, then there was the mystery drug the marquess had mentioned.
Circe was impressed, as I had gotten it mostly right, although the drug part was incorrect; that had been a bald-faced lie she had made up, hoping to goad the marquess into retaliating. I gathered she thought a near-invasion might speed up Vladislav’s eventual loss of coherence. Everything else though she verified, even the portion about dairy. Apparently, once consumed, the “memory milk” would cause the consumer to dream of the dairy’s semiotic payload. To avoid arousing suspicion, they only created this intermittently, and only with milk destined to become cheese. This all combined to create the illusion that Sengorod was suffering from outbreaks of what Vladislav called “retrocognitive illness.” While I, were I in his place, still would have suspected Mnemosyne, the vicar thought it punishment from the Dreaming Void for some unknown transgression. Thus, even though thirty-five years had passed since he had truly begun enforcing his religion, Vladislav had only a handful of true believers, and their faith was so fragile as to shatter at the mere sight of Bluedowns.
Needless to say, this was all very clever on the witches’ part, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was an overly passive plan, little more than a reaction to Vladislav’s provocations. I was not at all confident that Vladislav was anywhere near losing coherence. While it was true that erratic behavior and insanity were often correlated with memetic contradictions, in all of my travels I had seen countless broken and disturbed spirits that had lived to one thousand years, or even longer, before succumbing to quiescence. To borrow the parlance of intelligence philosophers, it was very possible that the Vicar’s utility function was, while increasingly skewed, quite consistent; hence he would not lose coherence. Instead, it could be his optimization function that was decaying. Such models are, of course, overly simplistic and not all that useful for organic intelligence, so feel free to disregard it as an explanation—Circe certainly did. My point was simply that I didn’t think the witches could maintain their resistance over centuries without getting caught. They needed to proactively fight the second lord. According to Circe, she and the others knew this; they already had a few ideas, although they were suicidally risky.
The rest of our journey to Sengorod passed without incident, save for the brief stretch where we lost sight of Bogdan Bogdanovich. Awaiting us was a shard in chaos, as Vladislav had gathered a full quarter of Sengorod’s population into the fields outside Siniysk, where he was leading them in a mass ritual. It was not a formal Geometer ritual, as almost none of these people had uncovered their basis of rites. Instead, the citizens were self-flagellating, begging to be forgiven for their excesses; this was the exact type of prayer that Giyometi rarely even heard, let alone granted. The participants were clearly miserable and resentful for having been forced to join the pointless display, but none dared leave. Even Circe hid her displeasure, flashing only the briefest scowl when we saw the orgy of penitence. I still intended to do my job on behalf of the marquess, so we waited for the ritual to stop. However, after almost an hour it looked no closer to finishing. People were bruised and bleeding, and a few had even collapsed, but Vladislav still led them on, dancing and chanting as if in a trance.
From there we returned to Circe’s current offices, which were of course under the Board of Finance. In fact all of the witches were now vice-chairs for the infernal board, with the sole exception of Mnemosyne—she alone could manage the chancellery, a fact not even the vicar would dispute. The other boards were now run by those few fanatics that had developed; naturally, they were making quite a mess of things. We learned from the other witches what had prompted the mass flagellation: yesterday, Vladislav had had a “vision.” Everyone knew this had merely been a mundane dream, but none had dared to speak this thought aloud. The gist of the dream was both simple and alarming: the “retrocognitive illness” was not, in fact, a punishment from the Dreaming archangel, but rather was a trial to be overcome. The ritual was thus merely a prayer to grant him the wisdom necessary to overcome the challenge. The witches, or more accurately Scylla and Echidna, felt the timing of this was most lucky, as they had just spiked another batch of cheese; it was their hope that, when Vladislav received no guidance, he would be crushed by despair over another outbreak of dreams. Circe and Tethys for their part doubted that the vicar would do anything other than reinterpret his false vision, but otherwise saw no risk. Only Theia worried that he might actually receive guidance—or invent it.
After the strategy meeting concluded, I returned to Stone Hall, which I found surprisingly unchanged. The new faith had put a stop to its being a brothel, but its manager, the granddaughter of the last manager I had met, had adapted by turning the tavern into a gambling hall. It was also still a drug den; the current drug of choice was some type of opiate-like serum refined from the blood of a lizard-deer hybrid that occasionally wandered into the shards neighboring Sengorod. It was nice to finally have that question answered, never mind that the answer was anticlimactic. I asked the manager why the vicar had not banned this creation. She had no concrete answer, but there was a rumor going around that Vladislav himself routinely partook in it. I had the manager give me a jar of the serum, hoping it might come in use in my negotiations. Unfortunately, it soon became clear the rumor was wrong; looking closer, I saw the drug was similar to a reagent that the lord needed to ingest for one of his basic rites. He probably used it as a replacement. Regardless, I still felt the substance might be of some value to me, although as I retired for the night I had no clue how. The answer came to me as I drifted off to sleep: to me, the refined blood was indeed worthless, but to the witches, it might prove invaluable. Unless Vladislav had taught them the theory behind the Geometer’s rituals, which I supremely doubted, they likely didn’t realize that the rite that required the second lord to ingest the fluid was used in a number of combat rituals.
When I awoke the next morning, I immediately rushed to Sengorod’s not-a-library, where I found Mnemosyne both lucid and making a new batch of memory milk. I explained to her how the drug could be used, and she began to implement my plan before I could even finish explaining it. She all but ripped off the tubing full of milk, held the jar of serum close, and began to semiotically infuse it. The payload this time was not memories of Shawthuloghk’s reign; instead, it was sensory memories, in particular memories of pain. Additionally, the effect was changed to deliver the payload well before the victim slept. It would likely not be enough to immobilize Vladislav, or even enough to weaken him, but it would distract him.
Mnemosyne was ecstatic at this turn of events, or at least as close to ecstatic as was possible for her. She rushed to tell the other witches of this new development, almost forgetting her monk’s habit; I followed thereafter. However, we had not even exited the City of Sengorod when Vladislav’s voice boomed across the shard. He was summoning “all interested individuals'' to the central square of Siniysk, by which he meant that same square as from my past two visits, the one that had first hosted the failed execution and then housed the pestilence spire. The tower still stood there, but it had been repurposed, transformed into a monument to Ruslan Ivanovich’s rebirth. Consequently, it no longer glowed with the divine energy of Giyometi. Instead, it had been covered with that same sloppy, blue paint. Vladislav was standing atop the tower, looking over the edge of the balcony. Our eyes briefly locked, and a look of surprise came over his face—apparently he hadn’t noticed me the day before. He made a series of signs, as if to say he wished to speak to me afterwards, and then began his announcement.
Over the past several hours, the vicar had determined how to solve the outbreaks of dreams. He had not received a vision, nor had he gotten the answer from a ritual. He had simply worked it out by simple problem solving. This made me quite nervous, as I suspected it was those very critical reasoning skills that were fraying in the Vicar. The answer, he claimed, lay in the name he had given the outbreaks: “retrocognitive illness.” Quite simply, if it was an illness, it could be handled by epidemiological techniques, the most basic of which was a quarantine. As such, effective immediately, any resident who experienced a vivid dream of the past would have to isolate from Sengorod in one of the neighboring shards for a month. Of course, as the dreams promoted disloyalty, Vladislav and his fanatical acolytes would examine the populace daily using a charm he had developed to look for anomalous memories. As far as mitigation strategies for diseases went, it was not horrible: most infectious agents only became transmissible shortly before the infected person became symptomatic, and a month was probably enough time to let the illness run its course. The setup likely wouldn’t eradicate a disease, but it would buy enough time to research the phenomenon.
Unfortunately, the outbreaks weren’t caused by an infectious agent. The people’s loyalty was succumbing not to plague but to poison.
Of course, there was one other gaping flaw in Vladislav’s plan—namely, the quarantine itself. The shards neighboring and generally around Sengorod were inhospitable at best, suffering from extreme temperatures, inclimate weather, hazardous terrain, hostile fauna, and an utter dearth of resources. Hunting trips to these places were notoriously perilous, with hunters requiring weeks of training and copious amounts of supplies. Throwing a random serf or peasant out would be a death sentence, a guarantee that they would be dead of exposure within the week. To be sure, shelters could be constructed, supplies could be provided; however, Vladislav had mentioned none of this. All of the witches seethed with fury at this omission, glaring with hatred at the vicar. Tethys was the first to break the silence, asking if any such plans were in place. Her years leading the Board of Public Works arguably made her the most qualified person in all of the realm to lead such an endeavor, but Vladislav ignored her unsubtle hint all the same. Instead, he asserted that any truly faithful citizens would, through their suffering, come into the Geometer’s favour, thus gaining protection. As for anyone who was not so lucky, they were clearly too far gone, right?
A few moments passed as the witches digested this, their faces turning red with fury. As they stood there, batch after batch of semiotically-charged cheese was being prepared for sale; over the next few days, hundreds if not thousands would thus be exiled to the neighboring shards. Briefly, they considered whether they could run their own relief operation, but I could see their expressions fall as they realized the infeasibility without Vladislav’s support. Tethys later told me she thought that they might be able to save half of the exiled people. Suddenly, Mnemosyne passed the jar of pain serum to me and stepped forward. The other witches followed suit, moving into a unified line in front of me. Then, as one, they challenged the vicar to a duel. Vladislav stood silent for a moment, looking utterly shocked. Obviously, he knew the witches did not endorse the vicarage—why else would he demote them all to the Board of Finance? However, he clearly had not even considered that they would cross the line to open defiance. I could see for a moment a look of doubt cross his mind as his original, unwarped motivations briefly resurfaced. However, he seemed to decide rather quickly that the witches were not an integral part of Sengorod. A manic smile spread across his face. He accepted the challenge and would face them tomorrow at dawn. With that, he and the witches departed to prepare.
I caught up with Vladislav roughly an hour later. He had led me on a chase around the realm, presumably as he did a sort of patrol of his demesne, before he eventually returned to the tower. Apparently, he largely resided there now, working and sleeping on the open platform; I could not help but credit him for sticking to his ascetic principles. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to get out of this conversation—Bluedowns had sent me to politely threaten the vicar, and just an hour before I had been helping the witches plot his downfall. The line had been drawn, and I stood opposed to Vladislav. Now, I’m sure you did not read this to hear an old wanderer muse about ethics, but permit me a brief digression. I do not consider myself much of a warrior for good: in my travels, I have left many an injustice uncorrected. It always struck me as irresponsible to upend a place I would not be staying around to then tidy up. When the situation is particularly egregious or particularly straightforward to rectify, I will step in, but otherwise I keep my interference to a minimum. Sengorod was neither, however, and although I was only advising the witches, I was still meddling a good deal more than I usually do. As such, I felt I owed it to the lord to at least hear him out, to have more than one proper conversation with him.
Vladislav did not say anything to me at first, even though he had asked to talk. I tried kickstarting things by asking about the duel, but he was disorganized in his responses, speaking in a stream-of-conscious babble. He was not all worried, even though he would be outnumbered six to one; his main concern was whether or not to be merciful. Rather surprisingly, he did understand their discomfort at his quarantine plan, though he dismissed it as a lack of faith. While he did not approve of how they flaunted his version of the Geometer’s Word, they were his oldest and longest-standing acquaintances. He wanted to convert them. Unfortunately, and probably correctly, he doubted that a magnanimous victory on his part would move them. That in turn begged another question: if conversion was out of the question, should he exile or kill the witches? He did not want to kill them, but that feeling came from a place of pure sentimentality. On the other hand, he could not find a compelling reason to kill them either, save for a vague sense that order and discipline needed to be maintained, which was borderline nonsensical as Sengorod’s mortals already did not dare defy their vicar. He would likely not decide until the time of the duel, perhaps not even until the moment of his victory. He fell silent at this point.
After a minute, Vladislav suddenly became alert again, remembering that he had wanted to speak to me. He had surmised that my presence here was no coincidence and asked who had sent me. When I told him that I came on behalf of Marquess Bluedowns, he went into a rage. The vicar cursed the marquess in a hundred different ways, furious over the killing of his missionaries. When I corrected him that they had defected rather than been executed, he berated me for unquestioningly believing the marquess’s “lies.” Now, it was strictly true that I had not seen the priests, but the very idea that they weren’t alive was conspiratorial garbage. The marquess was a miasmatic with a standing army larger than the entire population of Sengorod. Meanwhile, there were three people in the whole universe with direct knowledge of Sengorod, excluding the marquess: myself, Juurtychel, and Sarangerel. There was simply no conceivable reason why they would even bother to lie to Vladislav. However, I saw very quickly that Vladislav did not want to be persuaded of this; I did my best to drop the topic. I had my answer for Bluedowns: if the vicar won his duel, the army would need to come in, for he would likely never stop his provocations.
I soon turned to leave, when I caught an idle remark from Vladislav. He wished Assyl could see the vicarage, confident that the holy man would have been proud. I was surprised at how this comment upset me. Hearing the holy man’s name be so perversely invoked made me feel at ease with aiding the witches in a slightly more impactful manner. I would not fight alongside them: that still struck me as a step too far. Moreover, it struck me as unwise. As I said, I did not intend to stay around and rebuild Sengorod; the greater my involvement, the less legitimacy the witches, or whoever took over, would have. Of course, that is a vast oversimplification, but, just as you are not reading for my treatise on ethics, so too do I imagine you do not wish to read my guide to nation building. Instead, I put on my most convincingly kind and supportive face, reached into my coat, and tossed the jar with the spiked serum to him. I rattled off a string of different combat rituals that would need the substance, telling him they would help with the duel. He looked surprised—I reckon he had thought of me as a neutral party—and thanked me. I had no clue if he would follow my advice, but I had done what I felt was appropriate.
I returned thereafter to the witches, hoping to help them strategize. The issue they faced was one of potency. Vladislav was a traditional generalist in terms of his divine abilities, having competent if somewhat mediocre command of a number of feats, such as enhanced strength, sensory manipulation, glamor, and so on, although his mobility was somewhat better. In contrast, the witches, on account of their lesser individual potential, had specialized—Circe with glamor, Scylla and Echidna with brute strength, Theia with healing, Mnemosyne with her quasi-infomanipulation, and Tethys with traditional slime arts. Collectively, in a strictly additive sense, they were thus of roughly comparable power as Vladislav. However, combat is so very often not additive. There was very little any one of them could do that the vicar could not at least mimic and plenty in the reverse category; as such, whatever parity existed at the beginning would vanish as soon one witch was isolated. Moreover, Mnemosyne’s specialty was worthless in a duel, and Theia woefully lacked experience healing mid-battle. Thus they had two main approaches they could take: they could either boost their potency until they were not individually overwhelmed by Vladislav, or they could try to consolidate their divine strength into one. The former category contained most of the suicidal plans that Circe had mentioned. Unfortunately, without fail, those strategies had assumed it would be years before they challenged the second lord and required resources that they did not have. That just left some type of unification of their essence. Of course, there was only really one option here that was available to the witches: spirit vampirism, of which they could perform only the most basic kind, involving contact, envelopment, and consumption. They had perhaps come to rely too much on the latter, as their first thought was to mimic their past executions. Namely, they would affix themselves with healing charms and then swallow each other whole, creating a rather macabre living Matryoshka. Thankfully, they quickly realized the, to put it gently, infeasibility of that approach. Instead, they realized that Tethys could simply stretch herself around the others—which I suppose could also be viewed as swallowing them. This would effectively allow them to pool their divinity, albeit at a severe hit to their maneuverability. As Echidna put it, they were taping themselves together.
Put like that, it all seemed rather silly.
The witches spent the night gorging themselves on livestock, one last desperate attempt to give themselves extra potency. Tethys additionally spent hours in one of Sengorod’s small lakes, absorbing enough volume to be able to execute the plan. And finally, some time in the middle of the night, Mnemosyne paid me a visit, bearing a rather thick book. She asked what I had found in Min-Tal-Lyur’s archives; as soon as I mentioned Tengyrskic, she tossed the book to me. It was a dictionary for the language. Before I could touch it, however, she asked that I wait until after the duel. She did not feel that there was any chance that she was violating her oath to Shawthuloghk but nevertheless wished to take no risks. She left at once to prepare, and I slipped into a meditative trance. It was not a ritual per se, just a conversation with my original benefactor. I hoped to arrange for a certain observer to be at the duel. My intervention, however, proved to be unnecessary: while the one I had in mind was unavailable, a close associate of theirs had caught wind of it and already planned to be present.
At dawn, the witches assembled in the center of Sengorod, not anywhere on the ground but rather in the sky, along the cylindrical axis of the shard’s inverted-cylinder topography. This axis, rather unimaginatively named the Axial Skyway, was the traditional region where duels were held. As gravity was almost nonexistent here—its pull fell as one approached the axis—this setting made sense when dealing with mortals, for they tended to flail around, completely unable to harm each other. Now it gave a rather large advantage to Vladislav, who could freely fly. In contrast, the witches could merely propel themselves with a force comparable to that of a ceiling fan. The vicar was late, however; the witches used the time to assemble into their combined form. Tethys let go of her assumed shape, expanding into a green-tinted but otherwise translucent gelatinous blob, spherical and ten meters in diameter. The others then pressed into the slime witch until they were fully suspended within. They did not optimize their form any further: Tethys didn’t reshape herself into a giant slime exosuit for the others, or even make herself opaque to hide them. Perhaps their night would have been better spent practicing and optimizing. I was about to start giving suggestions when Vladislav at last arrived. He did not have the jar on him, nor any other items for a ritual. I could only hope he had taken the serum beforehand. Unlike the witches, he was clearly at home here, flitting about and performing loop after loop, almost as if he was being judged for style. When he settled down, Vladislav asked me to officiate, which really just meant calling the start and end of the duel.
No sooner did I begin the event than Vladislav shot forward, stopping just short of the witches and then reigning blows down upon them. He appeared to have been going after Mnemosyne, who was little more than an essence battery. However, his assault had no clear effect, as Tethys simply absorbed the force; I still do not know if that was within her standard capabilities. She countered by sending a pillar of slime out against Vladislav. It is always hard to tell who is responsible for what when spirit vampirism is involved, but, through some combination of Tethys’s own strength, Scylla and Echidna’s more specialized strength, and the witches’ pooled potency, the second lord found himself pushed back by the slime. He quickly broke contact, darting to the side. A glamor formed over the tendril, turning it into a long cluster of bombs. However, before they could detonate, Vladislav circled round to the other side of the witches, putting them between himself and the explosives. Then he broke the glamor anyway, returning the arm of slime to the corporeal world. It retracted back into Tethys, and Vladislav drifted back to where he had started the duel. Round one—insofar as unstructured fights could have rounds—had ended indecisively.
When Vladislav moved to engage again, he tried engulfing the witches in fire, I presume hoping to dry Tethys out, but Theia’s healing kept this from having any effect. He tried another series of blows, combined with circling round the witch-ball at high speeds, but this diffused his force too much. He tried glamors of his own, but Circe broke them before he could use his creations. For a time, by which I mean just over thirty seconds, the two sides seemed at an impasse: with his lack of specialization, every attack that Vladislav threw fell just shy of being able to penetrate the witches’ defenses. However, he always held the initiative, whereas the witches could only counterattack. Moreover, their counters were rather stiff and easily avoided. As a generalist, Vladislav had a wider arsenal at his disposal; it was only a matter of time before he settled on an attack that bypassed their defenses. He found one soon after when he telekinetically grabbed a chunk of land from below and hurled it at the witches. Though it had to travel over two kilometers up to the Skyway, the witches with their horrendous mobility could not dodge. The collision did not harm them, but instead sent them careening, drifting ever so slightly back into the clutches of gravity. It took a considerable bit of effort for them to return to the gravity-free axis. During this time, Vladislav brought another, larger chunk of dirt to rest just behind him.
The vicar was aiming the projectile when suddenly he cried out. He had indeed taken the pain serum, and the payload was now assaulting his mind. A serf who fell, breaking his femur; a tanner who was mauled by a bull; a drunk who wandered into a street and was run over by a carriage—all these sensations and more hit Vladislav. He was not overwhelmed, but for just a moment, he lost control of his telekinesis, and the mass of land erupted into a cloud of dust and mud, blinding him. Pure chance, or perhaps subtle nudging by either the Geometer or the Hands Of Fate, had led to the semiotic attack taking effect at the single most optimal moment in time. Through this all, the witches sent another pillar of slime at him, which caught his undefended form in the back. There was a sickening crunch, and the lord went flying. He came to a stop some ten meters away, where I got a clear look at his injuries. His body was shattered, glimmering at the edges where the projection was breaking down. Combined with the pain memories, he was clearly struggling to stay conscious. However, the witches were now too far away to attack again; all he had to do was regain his composure and then he could call forth another boulder. As the witches inched towards the lord, hoping to land another attack, the whole duel came down to a rather absurd race.
Everything was interrupted, however, by a tearing sound, accompanied by the hiss of depressurization. The dirt cloud imploded, sucked through a crack that had ripped open in the very air. In fact, so great was the suction that Vladislav, the witches, and even I were drawn towards it. Then, a silhouette surrounded by a blue glow leaned out of the tear: Dreaming Void, the final onlooker, was once again in Sengorod, this time directly rather than via a lesser angel. They fixed their eyes on Vladislav and let out a shriek, equal parts hysterical laugh and disgusted shudder. They then leaned back into the crack, which closed up. Having been accelerated by the vacuum, the witches sailed into the lord and threw one last punch. I do not know whether Vladislav had simply not regained his composure and thus could not defend himself, or whether Giyometi’s betrayal via the archangel had caused him to give up. Regardless, the second lord of Sengorod fell from the Skyway and into oblivion.
Strictly speaking, Vladislav did not die: he simply never regained consciousness. In fact, it would be another ninety-four years before he slipped into quiessence, but we’ll get to that later. The distinction was largely academic to the witches. After they extricated themselves from Tethys, which I must note took several hours, it was a rather trivial matter to take control of Sengorod. A crowd had already formed around the vicar’s still body, and they were merely awaiting a formal announcement. When the witches descended, the vast majority behaved as if liberated, breaking into celebration. Curiously, since there were no statues or monuments to be toppled, many revelers instead brought out wire brushes and took to scrubbing off the blue paint that had for so long coated the realm. A few overzealous celebrants tried to destroy the tower in Siniysk, but they merely managed to entertain a crowd of onlookers. This craziness continued all day—recall that the fight had started just after dawn and had lasted for only a minute—and tapered off sometime around midnight. The witches, once they ensured public safety was not at risk, held their own private celebration, which was decidedly more sober, more circumspect. That is, they held a memorial of sorts to the past fifty-one, one hundred fifty-three, or one hundred fifty-eight years, depending on whether they counted the miracle, Assyl’s visit, or Vladislav’s ascension respectively as the beginning of Sengorod’s troubles. They never agreed on which date was most appropriate.
The next several days saw the witches rooting out Vladislav’s fanatics. They went through the people one by one, all forty thousand, and asked them to renounce the Geometer. A few hundred declined but happily refuted Vladislav’s sect; this group was heavily surveilled but was otherwise allowed to remain. Only thirty-eight refused outright. I could not help but feel sorry for this group, whose misplaced courage when defying the witches impressed me. Not wanting them to face a life of hard labor, I volunteered to take charge of this group and escorted them on the long, winding journey to the Great Steppe. There, I was able to place thirty-one of them in various monasteries, where proper Giyometiri clerics began the slow process of deradicalization. The seven left over proved too militant even for the Great Steppe. I tried to find more professional help, and set out with them for the Principate. On the way there, however, six of them ran away; I presume they died of exposure. The last, one Ippolit Yanovich, waited until we reached civilization to abscond. He has his own story, which I might tell another time.
Thereafter, I made a habit of visiting Sengorod every few years. At first, this was to simply keep an eye on this almost hidden realm whose history I had become intertwined in. As I said before, I had no desire to control the place directly or indirectly, but providing advice and occasional help seemed the least I could do. Unfortunately, the witches did need help. Mind you, they had no issue managing the shard—that had been their job up until the miracle. What they were unable to do was to fully and truly claim the shard, which involved regularly performing a host of background activities related to keeping Sengorod habitable and safe from external threats. For example, the witches could change the day-to-day weather just fine, even changing the seasons; but eventually the climate began to drift colder, and it became too difficult for them to maintain a long enough summer. I often was called upon to lend them my potency in such crises so that the shard could be serviced. Consequently, in spite of their unchallenged leadership, the witches always styled their reign as a regency, waiting for a new Lord Sengorod. They tried on numerous occasions to foist that role onto me, variously appealing to our friendship, offering me bribes, and even, in one comical instance, trying to seduce me. However, after my numerous refusals finally sunk in, they instead opted to wait for Vladislav to fragment, hoping that his spawn would be both potent and sane.
Personally, I had urged them either to seek out vassalage under Bluedowns or to recruit a new lord from some divine city.
Regardless, that brings us to the aforementioned passing of Vladislav. I was not there to witness this, but ninety-four years after his fall, even though he was clearly still unconscious, the lord began to murmur in a strange tongue. Circe was of the opinion that he was merely moaning, but the others swore they heard names scattered throughout his speech. Vladislav remained in this delirium for almost a week, to the point that everyone began to assume this was simply the fallen lord’s new state. Then, with a sound like shattering glass, he fell silent. A portion of Vladislav’s identity had torn itself away, taking his arm with it. Vladislav’s body soon reformed another arm, but he then grew less and less active. After nine days, no one could sense either cognitive or physical activity coming from him. The witches declared him quiescent, and he thereafter began to fade, having lost cohesion. The arm, in contrast, showed great activity, thrashing about and grabbing and feeling everything in its vicinity. Over the next two months, the arm projected a new body, one that was decidedly novel to Sengorod. Unlike the male form of Vladislav or the almost androgynous form of Shawthuloghk, the new spirit had a female-leaning form. When it had fully formed, the spirit stopped exploring the late lord’s prison and instead waited for the witches to assemble. The spirit introduced herself as Valeriya and confirmed that she was indeed Vladislav’s spawn; with a quick demonstration, she confirmed herself to be just as potent as Vladislav; and finally, after a not-so-quick discussion, she convinced the witches that she had not inherited any of Vladislav’s instability or beliefs. That night, the witches unanimously dissolved the regency council. A summons was sent out for the people of Sengorod to assemble at Shawthuloghk’s old residence the next morning. Of course, as such assemblies were rare, a plethora of rumors began to spread, mostly centering on the impossibility that Vladislav had somehow risen from the dead and slaughtered the witches. When instead the ascension of Lady Valeriya was announced, the people were most relieved.
There is but one remaining thread to this story now, that being the continued mystery of the first lord’s true identity. My investigation was stymied during the duel: when the Dreaming Void opened his crack in reality, the dictionary, which I had been carrying with me, was sucked into the void. Both Mnemosyne and I took this as a sign that her giving me the book would indeed have broken her vow. As such, I had to wait until I could visit Xihuek Province. I made my way there some forty years later, and quickly found another such dictionary. I learned then that “Shawthuloghk” was not a Vulgar Tongue name, but rather a transliteration of “Shawth-u Loghk.” “Loghk” meant “Brave”; it was, and indeed still is, a very common given name. “Shawth,” however was a surname that meant “river.” Of course, so does “Drai”—I’m sure you can see where my suspicions lay. After several checks with the Xihuek Archives, I was confident: Shawthuloghk’s progenitor, Luoyek, was the spawn of Drai Luokiung, who was in turn the spawn of Drai Jwngci, the man who had tried and failed to restore the Drai dynasty. Luokiung had been the only member of the clan to evade execution. The only proof I had connecting Luoyek to Luokiung was a possibly apocryphal tale about the hunted princling, but all else just fit too well. I brought my hypothesis to Mnemosyne, but her oath prohibited any confirmation. I couldn’t help but laugh at Shawthuloghk’s paranoia—had they been outed, the Empire’s then-fading Surai dynasty would have welcomed them as a celebrity. Regardless, I didn’t get my final confirmation until I met Lady Valeriya, where I decided to address her first as “Lady Drai.” She found my whole investigation quite amusing.