Zeki’s Folly
The County of Nulvatch is a pariah state. Shunned by its neighbors for its brutal, authoritarian rule, the realm has survived by virtue of its low profile and disproportionately large military. Of late, however, that equilibrium has been changing, with Nulvatch’s countess having precipitated numerous diplomatic incidents. Amidst this geopolitical instability, she orders her new first minister, Zeki, to organize a colonial mission, all in the name of science.
If one looks at the breadth of all sapient life in the universe, a clear law emerges: every race has either a clear origin or a clear purpose behind its existence. Humanity, for example, evolved over the aeons in the Void Plane on Earth before eventually and repeatedly spilling over into the Shard Web. So too did fox-spirits, snake-spirits, and a dozen other races whose sapience does not emerge until they are divinely awakened. While no force other than natural selection led to their creation, everyone knows how these species came about. In contrast, consider the Thoth race. Their origins have long been lost, and we may never know their creator’s motives. However, their purpose is clear: they were made to resemble Thoth, an ibis-headed god worshiped by the people in the overwhelming majority of ancient Egypts. A strange, incomplete reason to be sure, but a reason nonetheless. This pattern fails only for one race: the luminous folk. They have always been somewhat of a mystery to both historians and natural philosophers alike. We assume that they were created, but that is only because no one has put forward a sensible hypothesis as to how such an arbitrary, complicated race could evolve. We do not know when they were created, for populations of them have been found well into prehistory. And we do not know why they were created, as they house within their ranks such a mishmash of forms, themes, and abilities that no unified purpose has ever been discerned.
There are two competing hypotheses about the ethnogenesis of the luminous folk. The first, called the Ensemble Hypothesis, asserts that the luminous folk are not in fact a single race but rather are a collection of several. Under this proposal, each luminad—the racial subunit identified by uniform eye and hair colors—is its own creation. Consequently, there must have been a number of creators, the eponymous ensemble. This group presumably existed in prehistory, where they worked together only loosely. The diversity among the luminous folk is thus a result of the differing aims of the individual creators; the byzantine, arbitrary, and non-Mendelian rules behind inter-luminad breeding emerged from a horrifying patchwork of deals within the group; and the sole shared trait of all luminants, their glowing eyes, was nothing more than a simple identifier for the ensemble. Of course, unless a staggeringly potent retrocognitive comes along and is able to directly observe the creators, this hypothesis offers no testable predictions and will forever remain unproven.
In contrast, the competing proposal, called the Genetic Engine Hypothesis, does offer verifiable predictions. Under it, there was originally only one luminad, usually conjectured to be one of the handful that are all but indistinguishable from humans. (The Scaram, with their blonde hair and pale blue eyes, are the most frequently cited possibility.) Thereafter, new luminads were created periodically by some background process resembling a genetic algorithm, combining and mutating various properties of the preexisting luminads. Nobody knows what the Genetic Engine’s fitness function is, nor what triggers the creation of a new luminad, but these are rather beside the point. The hypothesis predicts that such an event should be observable, and fortunes have been spent in the pursuit of catching this elusive moment.
For some time, the most popular endeavor in this vein was to send expeditions out into the uncharted reaches of the universe. These missions were not so deluded as to think that they might witness the birth of a new luminad; rather, they hoped to find others who had. They all usually followed a standardized procedure. The expedition would charge through unexplored shards and gates, trekking deeper and deeper into the unknown, looking for uncontacted peoples. Once found, they would scour the natives’ histories for anything resembling a creation event, such as the sudden appearance of a luminous tribe. This process would then repeat until the expedition either ran out of supplies or found a promising record. Alas, after millennia of searching, no solid evidence was ever uncovered. The true reason that these missions ceased to be popular, however, was not their lack of success but rather their extreme cost. By the time of the Xiraon dynasty seventy-five millennia ago, most of the unmapped universe remained so because it was actively hard to explore. Surveying involved struggling to survive in inclimate clusters of shards, looking either for valleys of habitability or realms with a sufficiently potent and hospitable lord. Famous catastrophes such as the Kurosawa Cartographic Expedition (thirty-one millennia ago), which saw half of its men die of altitude sickness while exploring the Upper Spine, illustrate the risks rather well. While the creation event search forces were decidedly more nimble than full-blown cartographic survey teams, the danger they faced was only minimally reduced. After the Thow Genetic Engine Verification Expedition (seventy-five hundred years ago), which the then-fledgeling Principate sponsored, was slaughtered by a gargantuan murder of fire-breathing crows, independent missions into the unknown all but ceased. Now, they have been replaced by small attachments of linguists, diplomats, and historians that accompany much larger, traditional survey corps.
There might, however, be a second way to verify the Genetic Engine Hypothesis. A minor fraction of its supporters believe that it is possible to induce a creation event, although there is not much consensus as to how. One approach posits that new luminads are created whenever an existing one goes extinct. Thankfully, there is minimal crossover between researchers and genocidal maniacs. Alternatively, some postulate that a creation event will occur if a sufficiently large cluster of empty, desolate shards are connected to the Shard Web. Given the expense of creating even a single shard, proposals to test this idea have languished. There are even a handful of religious sects, mostly Giyometiri, that have taken a faith-based approach to the question, and many a prayer has been sent begging to witness the birth of a new luminad.
Insofar as it is a field devoid of any evidence or justification, the study of how to induce creation events is not considered a serious discipline, a branch of philosophy unlikely to evolve into a science. However, a handful of individuals disagree with this dour assessment. They make the argument that those in the field could begin producing results if they would “just stop proposing such absurd experiments,” as one young man put it. That man, Eyoab Eyasu Gizaw, was not even a part of the field; he was primarily an urban planner. In the fiftieth year of the Directorate, when Eyoab traveled to the new federation’s capital for a conference, he chanced upon some philosophers belonging to the obscure little discipline. The impracticality of their schemes was evident to him at once. On a lark, Eyoab published a list of twenty-three small-scale, “easily testable” ideas that could be implemented “cheaply.” The article gained a rather wide readership, albeit primarily for its sharp wit rather than for its academic value. (He had intended it to be mocking satire.) However, a handful of wealthy philanthropists and businessmen, charmed by the piece, began making offers to fund some of the proposals. As Eyoab was not yet awakened and needed resources for his divine development, he welcomed the interest. Unfortunately, news of his work also made its way to his homeland, the County of Nulvatch.
The County of Nulvatch was a part of the network of realms originally under the patronage of Iehnu-rhe Ctaognol that later constituted the Liminal Kingdom. However, compared to its peers, Nulvatch was a rather recent creation. A mere five centuries ago it had been nothing more than a collection of baronies and viscounties, all of which were decidedly hostile to each other. When the petty states were simultaneously attacked by the mercenary Thorndike Swein, most assumed that the realms would easily prevail. Swein, however, proved to be both a cunning tactician and a potent thaumaturge; he seized the region and declared himself Lord Nulvatch within a month. The newly minted count was also a shrewd diplomat, successfully playing Nulvatch’s often-feuding neighbors against each other while positioning himself as a neutral party rather than a common enemy. When Ctaognol next toured the region, the liminal spirit saw no reason to disrupt the new status quo.
Count Thorndike was never fully accepted by his neighbors. The man eschewed the region’s tradition of mundane self-governance and instead ruled as an authoritarian, creating something akin to a police state. He used his surveillance apparatus to enforce strict lèse-majesté laws and made even minor crimes punishable with hard labor. While such sentences were hardly uncommon in the region, the extent to which Swein handed them down alarmed the surrounding lords. (One study estimated up to ten percent of the realm’s GDP came from prison labor, although most accept that to be high by an order of magnitude or two.) However, Swein ultimately faced few consequences for his brutal rule. At a surface level, this was because he oversaw a vast expansion of Nulvatch’s mundane military. While not enough to fend off his neighbors, the force was large enough to make intervention a messy, unappealing affair. The only hope to cleanly remove him would be to assassinate him in a risky decapitation strike. More subtly, however, Swein was protected because he was otherwise not a poor ruler. The quality of life of the average Nulvatcher soared during his reign. Life expectancy rose from fifty-three years to seventy-four, and unemployment dropped to almost nil as seasonally employed serfs transferred to newly created factories. For many citizens, the tradeoff was one they were willing to take. Thus the other realms under Ctaognol’s sway allowed the county to persist.
And fester.
After three and a half centuries of rule, Count Thorndike lost cohesion, and his daughter Ada ascended the throne. She immediately made it clear that she was not content with the state of the county by formally dissolving the barronies and viscounties that Nulvatch consisted of and transferring their territories to her personal demesene. These titles were already largely symbolic, having been held by bureaucrats for over a century, so this development did not alarm the surrounding powers. After all, the old realms hardly made for efficient administrative units. However, this seemingly prudent move set the stage for the countess’s future treatment of Nulvatch—namely, as an object that was hers to do with as she pleased. When a new housing development struck her as unsightly, it was demolished the next day; after she took a fancy to luxury soaps, the next year’s economic plan suddenly focused on fostering a local equivalent. Most absurdly, she came to dislike her own name and amended the lèse-majesté laws to forbid its use, changing herself from “Countess Ada” to just “the countess.”
From these examples, one might conclude that Lady Nulvatch was a “spoiled brat with no sense of perspective or understanding of the world,” as one diplomat from the neighboring Duchy of Croanidge put it; and this would not have been incorrect. However, even more startling than her arbitrary and capricious meddling in her realm’s domestic policy were her sadistic and malicious tendencies towards her subjects. At first this manifested in a mere disgust for the less fortunate, shuttering shelters both wet and dry and arresting their erstwhile inhabitants for vagrancy. Reports emerged soon after that she would engage in vast punitive campaigns against individuals who had slighted her rather than prosecute them under the lèse-majesté laws. Rumors even began to circulate that she would abduct and then hunt random citizens, although no hard evidence supporting such horrors was ever discovered. More concretely and most infamously, just prior to the Directorate’s founding, the countess had a significant fraction of the population of her demesne take part in a hunting trip to a nearby shard, wherein she forced her unarmed, mundane subjects to herd divine moose. Making matters worse, the beasts were in rut. Over three thousand people were either injured or killed in the ensuing chaos. The surrounding powers were naturally horrified by these atrocities. Unfortunately, by then they had missed their chance to easily intervene, largely due to the mistaken belief that the countess’s behavior would normalize. Indeed, the neighboring realms had tried at the beginning of her reign to increase their engagement with Nulvatch, hoping that a good rapport would allow them to better influence her. When they finally accepted the futility of such an approach, they were no longer in a position to help her subjects.
The countess’s style of leadership did not lend itself well to good governance, and her reign saw many state organs atrophy. However, this decay never extended to the security of her rule, albeit by luck rather than by any competence on her part. Much like her father, she was protected by Nulvatch’s mundane army, which she further expanded almost threefold. The neighboring realms would still emerge victorious in a direct conflict: they simply had more high-potency lords on their side. However, the sheer size of the countess’s force would have the liberators on the defensive in more places than they could handle. Time would rectify this, but it would be at a high price. Much of the regular citizenry would resist as well. The countess had, after a number of rebukes, come to espouse that her neighbors’ concerns weren’t genuine. Instead, she claimed that they were mere opportunism and projection, and that any regime that replaced her would be horrifically exploitative and cruel. This line of propaganda was fed to the people of Nulvatch continuously. Thus, so long as the countess lived, her subjects would fight on. What had previously looked to be a challenge that offered more downside than upside had now metastasized into a brutal potential campaign that would be followed by decades of insurgencies and guerilla warfare.
This rather rosy scenario faced one further challenge: it assumed that the entire surrounding region would participate in the hypothetical intervention. Unfortunately, such a unified front was hardly guaranteed, for Nulvatch’s diplomatic corps also remained halfway competent. The countess was blessed with a string of first ministers who miraculously managed to divert her attention away from the men and women working tirelessly to stave off war, allowing the Nulvatcher diplomats to continue their strategy as under Swein of positioning the county as a neutral third party to any surrounding disputes. This worked up until the moose-hunting massacre, at which point the sheer revulsion of the neighboring powers towards the countess led to the formation of the Coalition to Liberate the People of Nulvatch, or the CLPN. Before any action could be taken, however, providence intervened one last time: not a month later, Ctaognol declared his intent to form the Liminal Kingdom, which would then, along with the Sarkaic Kingdom, Westminster, and others, federate into the Imperial Directorate. The countess, on the advice of her first minister, Rediat Essayas Gedeyon, acceded to the proposal immediately. This left the CLPN in a terrible bind: the newly anointed Liminal King did not want disputes between his vassals, but refusing his call was an almost suicidal proposition. While they briefly considered presenting King Ctaognol with an ultimatum demanding that he choose between them and Nulvatch, the growing number of other polities joining the kingdom left the coalition with a rapidly dwindling amount of leverage. Ultimately, the CLPN dissolved after a brief three-month existence, and the individual members joined the Liminal Kingdom. An icy peace settled over the region as everyone waited for the king’s patience with the countess to run out.
Amidst this standoff, Eyoab’s article caught the attention of a member of the Nulvatch Foreign Ministry. Due to a clerical mistake, the ministry was unaware of how Eyoab had come to be outside the county—the borders had been closed for four centuries. After verifying that the urban planner wasn’t a defector, the ministry set about trying to weaponize the piece as a propaganda win. This saw the publication eventually passed up to the foreign minister, who forwarded a copy to the first minister, who in turn included it in one of the countess’s regular briefings. Usually, she disregarded such extraneous information. However, happenstance had it that she was currently interested in the luminous folk, and she read Eyoab’s work through. While most of the article did indeed bore her, one of the more overlooked proposals caught her eye. It stated that “...the birth of a new luminad might be induced by the unexpected spread of luminants to previously unsuitable environments.” The experiment was designed to involve only a handful of individuals, but the countess ran with her subject’s idea, turning it into something much grander. In particular, she envisioned establishing an entire colony of luminants, maybe even somewhere in the uncharted reaches.
Research into the Genetic Engine Hypothesis thus again turned to sending an expedition into the unknown.
Five years prior, First Minister Rediat, then a decagenarian who had been senile for fifteen years, died in office. He had trained a vast and competent staff, a feat which saved the realm during his dementia. While any one of them would have made a serviceable replacement, the countess found them all lacking. Some bored her, others she found chafing, and a few she dismissed as “unsightly.” The other ministers were passed over for similar reasons. Instead, she appointed one Zeki Ketema Nahum to the position. To the civil servants’ alarm, nobody had any clue who this man was—or even, for that matter, where he was. The countess had not seen fit to notify him that he had been selected. Or that he was even being considered.
Zeki was a thirty-three-year-old sculptor. He was not particularly well known, nor was his work followed by the countess. It is not even clear how he came to the countess’s attention, for a look at their itineraries in the weeks surrounding Rediat’s death put the two on opposite sides of Nulvatch. In his memoir, Zeki did claim that he had met the countess as a child when she had visited his school, but records of any such visit have been lost, and even if the account were true, the countess was never known for her memory. The more conspiratorially minded claim that his name must have been provided by the Hands Of Fate. The answer is ultimately irrelevant: for whatever her reasons, Lady Nulvatch had made her selection, sending the civil servants into a panic. To their (admittedly resentful) eyes, Zeki might turn out worse than the senile Rediat. While able to contribute nothing, the late first minister had also not been able to interfere in governance, allowing an informal organization of his staffers and ministers to run the county. Zeki, in contrast, could cause harm in his ignorance. Yes, they could ignore the man, but what would happen if the countess found out? It was just as likely she would not care as she would decapitate her own government—far too risky.
It is quite hard to express how singularly unqualified Zeki was. He had seemingly been born molding a lump of clay, and the great arc of his life had been his shifting preference of material to sculpt with. (He had gone from clay to wood to sandstone to marble to bronze; just prior to his appointment, he was considering returning to clay.) He had never held an executive position, nor did he have any education beyond his primary schooling, during which he had stood out in no areas. His sole saving grace was that he was, according to his fellow artists, quite clever, if prone to arrogance. Thankfully, this last foible was not triggered by his newly gained importance. Zeki understood the gravity of his position—and just how unsuitable of a minister he was. For this reason alone, his tenure did not become the disaster many feared. He retained Rediat’s competent staff, deferring to them on almost all matters. At first. Here his arrogance reared its head: he had no desire to be a figurehead. Thus he rather audaciously apprenticed himself to his staffers and deputies, a task which only deepened their resentment for the new first minister. After all, what could a man with only a general education learn about governance?
What Zeki lacked in education he attempted to make up for with pure candor. During his first year, he took remedial lessons on topics such as mathematics, economics, and foreign relations. As the countess felt it would be embarrassing for him to be seen at actual classes and the bureaucrats were conveniently too busy to teach him, Zeki hired a number of personal tutors. He spent far more than he was permitted to, dipping into the budgets for actual agencies. This caused a scandal, but only a minor one: such graft was common throughout Nulvatch. While his marks were middling, he soon felt confident in his literacy on public policy. Zeki then moved on to a more immersive approach to learning, embedding himself in various departments, bureaus, and agencies, sometimes for weeks at a time. His numerous questions were a great nuisance to Rediat’s men, the very same who had refused to tutor him; but the occasional word from the countess left them more receptive to Zeki’s efforts. By his third year, his less ardent detractors began to admit that he was no longer an embarrassment. Brimming with confidence, Zeki allowed himself to take on actual responsibilities. His highest profile job involved an overhaul of the process for designating historical landmarks—not a major initiative in any concrete sense, but one which the countess highly publicized. When this met with success, he took on even more of his official duties. He did not meet with nearly as much success, but neither did he meet with any failures. Or at least any major failures.
At this point, Zeki had served for four years. He still had the countess’s favor, and he had not brought ruin to the county. There was no longer any chance he would be removed. As a consequence, a most curious phenomenon arose: Rediat’s old staffers began to retire. Many of them had been working in the highest levels of government for decades, and only naked ambition for the position of first minister had kept them going. While some left as a matter of (unvoiced) protest, most simply felt their age catching up to them, although both groups were still equally resentful of Zeki. Thus, over the course of a few months, the team that had kept Nulvatch together for the past twenty years dissolved. Replacing them were junior staffers who were arguably less experienced than Zeki.
When the word came that the countess wished to organize a colonial expedition, the new administration—for the first time, his administration—faced its first true test. Unfortunately, all of Zeki’s training proved to be for nought: nobody in all of Nulvatch, his previous advisors included, had any relevant experience. They all had to fall back on their most basic problem-solving skills.
A majority of the universe had come to be inhabited by colonial expeditions, generating uncountably many technical documents and retrospectives for Zeki’s team to review. However, much of the recent writing was geared towards expeditions led by beings of high potency such as aspiring lords. Such endeavors were, if not easy, rather straightforward: the divine being could handle most concerns as they arose, be it taming the local climate or physically clearing a path for the colonists. This was the preferred type of mission for great powers: as naturally habitable shards had been largely exhausted, colonization only made economic sense when it required minimal state assistance. At the same time, as the universe still had no shortage of “untamed” land, lone spirits looking to independently start a demesene frequently organized these expeditions as well. Unfortunately, this option was not available to Zeki: there was nobody in Nulvatch of sufficiently high potency, since anyone who posed even the slightest threat to the countess was preemptively neutralized. Arguably the countess herself could have performed the role, but she refused to leave Nulvatch, fearing that she would return to find the county conquered.
Much to Zeki’s relief, being limited to a largely mundane expedition was hardly unprecedented. All but the most inclimate shards could be conquered with careful planning and extensive infrastructure, and many minor-to-regional powers, which were often unable or unwilling to spare a potential lord, organized such missions. (Usually, this was to establish a claim to the area surrounding the colony.) The literature called these “long-range pre-targeted expeditions.” Under this model of operation, a specific shard was pre-selected and then colonized via a military-scale logistical operation. As attempting to emulate the feats of a lord allowed no margin for error, it was critical to gather as much information as could be found beforehand, involving precise details on the route, the target’s climate, any flora and fauna, the average atmospheric pressure, the spectrum of the local sunlight, and any native sapient populations, among many other things. Nulvatch could not hope to match these standards: the county had technologically stagnated at a level comparable to that of Earth’s early twentieth century, with the countess throttling any further advancement. Even if they were able to accurately measure all of the necessary variables, there was no one in the county skilled enough to service the pressure-controlled, radiation-shielded habitats and unmanned defensive systems that the literature would recommend. And while Zeki and his team could always hire outside technicians, they didn’t even need to ask to know that the countess would veto any proposal involving long-term foreign dependence. No, the Nulvatcher’s would have to cut corners and accept the elevated risk.
Before they could even begin cutting corners, however, the Nulvatchers had to identify a shard to colonize. Their mission statement was far too vague for them to choose a location: what was a “previously unsuitable environment,” after all? Zeki thus summoned Eyoab, hoping to get more specific requirements. Regrettably, the urban planner proved rather unhelpful. He had written his list with only the vaguest idea of a harsh shard with no nearby luminous peoples, assuming that there were appropriate definitions somewhere in the colonial literature. (There weren’t; “nearby” and “unsuitable” were weasel words, their use a sign of uncertainty on the part of the author.) When pressed further, Eyoab admitted his ignorance; he only felt strongly about the proposals he was likely to receive funding and payment for. Zeki did not take kindly to this and dismissed the young man. Ultimately, Zeki chose an eight-gate threshold for “nearby” with the further stipulation that the target should experience inclimate weather for at least half of the year. He believed anything more lax might arouse the suspicion of the countess.
Zeki and his team were not able to find any shards meeting these criteria that had already been mapped—or at least not to any degree of confidence. There were innumerable barren regions on the map that were at least sixteen gates in diameter; picking one of the central shards in these wastelands would thus trivially satisfy the requirements—but only if the surroundings truly were barren. Nulvatch’s information on these regions was often out of date by at least a century. Rectifying this was a simple matter of requesting updated maps from the Liminal King, but the sheer volume of information Zeki had to send for slowed the process to a crawl. While expert cartographers might have been able to winnow down the number of queries, nobody in the county was knowledgeable enough to make such educated guesses. Ultimately, the countess grew impatient and put an end to the plan after four months of waiting. She declared that “it would be much more proper” to colonize an undiscovered shard instead.
Besides, that had been her initial hope to begin with.
The new dictat meant that an additional scouting mission would be needed, one into the unknown. Although there was again a wealth of literature on this topic, most of it was geared towards full cartographic surveys. Nulvatch once again lacked the capabilities to perform such a task, which required either a high-potency escort or an army’s worth of supplies and men—several orders of magnitude more than the colony would. Strictly speaking, they were up to the task for the latter option, but sending a non-negligible fraction of the army halfway across the universe and keeping it supplied would bankrupt the county. The countess herself suggested appealing for funding to her peers and superiors in the Directorate with the argument that it would improve the young federation’s prestige, but the first minister and his team quickly dismissed this idea. Given how politically toxic the countess was, it was difficult to imagine anyone in the Liminal Kingdom helping, and although her reputation was less tarnished in the Directorate’s other kingdoms, her clout there was equally reduced. Moreover, the Directorate didn’t need prestige; it was an equal of the Principate and the Old Empire, not some regional power. Of course, no one dared point these facts out to the countess, and Zeki instead told her that such a negotiation would take even longer than the failed cartographic exchange. He eventually sidestepped the problem by concluding that they didn’t need a full survey team; instead, they just needed a path to follow. So long as each shard was screened for some basic hazards—extreme heat and cold, gravitational anomalies, a thin or toxic atmosphere, and hostile and divine fauna—the expedition could probably be trusted to handle any complications independently. There was still plenty that could go wrong, but they were already cutting corners—what was the harm in cutting a few more?
Not wanting a repeat of the previous cartographic debacle, the countess had Zeki hunt down and “hire” foreign cartographers to identify promising splotches of terra incognita. These experts initially returned a list of over sixty regions that they felt might permit a viable colony. As these were still ultimately educated guesses, Zeki sent out more queries to determine if these areas had been mapped or colonized. This time the Directorate’s cartographic offices were able to respond in a timely manner; their answers cut the number of targets in half, an outcome that the cartographers were quite pleased with: given just how out of date some portions of Nulvatch’s maps were—half a millennium for three of the regions—they had expected at least two thirds to be taken. Zeki pared the list down further to eighteen sites, doing so on a vague heuristic of distance; only if none of these panned out would the more remote regions be explored. Finally, at the last minute, the countess added an additional two sites, although both were mercifully close by.
To perform the preliminary screening, Zeki planned to send out small, nimble scouting parties consisting of anywhere from three to ten survival experts, of which Nulvatch had no short supply. (In the last fifty years, the county’s agricultural sector had become slightly unstable.) These teams would secondarily be tasked with performing sweeps for settlements of luminants. So long as they kept a rudimentary “point map” that merely tracked gates, they would be able to tell when the eight-gate requirement had been met. Zeki would only have to provide the teams with a reserve of emergency rations for particularly barren shards along with funds to pay for messengers, lodgings, and regular rations. Within the week, several hundred people applied, of which sixty were recruited. The survivalists were divided into twelve scouting teams, each assigned to explore anywhere from one to three regions.
After a month of gathering supplies, the scouts were loosed on the universe. Each team was supposed to check in with Zeki every three days while near civilization, sending a status report via specialty couriers. Due to a “slanderous campaign” by the former CLPN members, however, the letter carriers were beginning to refuse to accept the county’s credit. Consequently, each team’s funds were supplied as cash. This proved to be too great of a temptation for many of the teams, or so Zeki later deduced, for seven of them deserted immediately, vanishing into the ether. Nulvatch’s minister of state security dispatched troops immediately to catch the traitors, but Zeki naively countermanded this action, hoping that the check-ins had simply been delayed. By the time he admitted that the scouts had fled, any chance of finding them had vanished, their trail buried by the ex-CLPN. The debacle left the countess furious with her first minister, although she curiously decided to defer any punishment. When she did not follow up on the matter, Zeki hoped she had forgotten.
Of the five loyal teams, three found nothing of note. The five sites that they examined all proved to be unsuitable for one reason or another. In one case, what looked like it might be the entrance to a large swathe of shards ended up being a three-shard cluster; another turned out to have a sizable native luminous population. (Missteps such as these were to be expected, the abducted cartographers assured.) The only locale of any note ended up being one of the countess's suggestions: the entire shadow of the Great Steppe, a region large enough to comfortably house the entire Directorate. It was also known to be consistently (if sparsely) populated with luminous folk, primarily in the form of nomadic tribes. Zeki had reluctantly ordered one of the teams to randomly wander about the area for a few months, hoping that they might stumble upon a wholly uninhabited “dead zone.” Rather shockingly, they succeeded, finding therein a shard shaped like an inverted cylinder and with a decidedly miserable subarctic climate—just what the colony needed. Alas, the scouts soon learned that the shard was wanted by the Hands Of Fate. The team then beat a hasty retreat to the Steppe.
The two remaining teams met with somewhat more interesting fates. One was assigned to three sites, all on the northwestern edge of the Old Empire, requiring the team to trek the full length of the ancient realm. Normally, such a passage would have taken fifteen weeks, during which the scouts would have been unmolested save for occasional passport checks. However, over the past three and a half centuries, Imperial power had frayed, and local corruption and mismanagement had led to banditry becoming endemic. The Nulvatcher scouts thus chose to travel less like a spry group of survivalists and more like a small mercenary troupe. This arrangement, while safer, proved to be their undoing, for after just a week of travel Emperor Eryek, the penultimate ruler of the Surai dynasty, passed into quiescence. Eryek, in the brief ten years they had reigned, had developed a reputation as a reformer, albeit an ineffectual one; and the hope they engendered was one of the few factors keeping the peace. As the new Emperor Kairong had no significant interest in reform, those dissatisfied with Surai rule opted to make their discontent with the status quo known. Insurrections broke out across the realm as local prefects and magistrates were captured by violent mobs. These rebels were scattered and unorganized, but Kairong nevertheless mobilized the full Imperial military. When few citizens answered this call, the emperor ordered that press gangs be formed. However, training was expensive, and the Imperial treasury was already strained. The gangs were thus ordered to prioritize conscripting the many already experienced bandits. One such force mistook the heavily armed Nulvatchers for brigands and forced them into the service of the crumbling dynasty. They would not be freed for another nine years, when forces loyal to the rising Kwei dynasty created an opportunity for the scouts to flee.
The final team met with a far less dramatic fate. They were to examine just one site, an uncharted region between Junho and Iehnu’s Maw. It looked to be a rather small region to Zeki, and the fact that it remained unclaimed in such a densely populated region seemed to be a poor omen, but the cartographers insisted that the place would be a good match for the colony. Junho was off the northeastern edge of the Empire; thus, while the scouts did chart a course through, their path was far shorter than their ill-fated comrades’—only a three-week trek. When Eryek passed away, the team managed to sprint through the realm unmolested, cross the border, stop at Junho, move towards Iehnu’s Maw, and then finally enter their target. Three months later, the scouts stumbled out of the uncharted area and sent an update back to Nulvatch. They had met with success. The region they were exploring was not a traditional cluster but rather was one of the myriad lesser maws surrounding Iehnu’s, something neither Zeki nor the cartographers had realized. While not nearly as harsh as its more prodigious cousin, their target was inclimate enough to be entirely devoid of sapient life. Moreover, the scouts reckoned that the maw was “at least” thirty gates across. They lastly attached their perfunctory survey, including a map showing a path to the center. With this communique sent, the scouts returned to their target, ostensibly wanting to get a more complete image of the lesser maw’s flora.
They never reemerged.
As the other teams had turned up failure after failure, Zeki was left with an unpleasant choice. He did not care for the maw as a colonial site. He knew next to nothing about maws; no Nulvatcher did. Bringing in outside advisors was looking to be an unlikely option: his almost-forcible hiring of the cartographers had kicked off another round of denunciations, and just about everyone with some degree of specialized knowledge was avoiding Nulvatch. (At the very least, this blunder wasn’t his fault, since the countess herself had ordered the abductions.) However, even ignoring this matter, something about the survey of the lesser maw struck Zeki as off. Portions of the report seemed alarmingly vague. Why, for example, had the scouts reported a lower bound on the maw’s width? Whatever path they took was by definition an upper bound. Even stranger, the map they had provided was some bizarre mixture of a point map and an orienteering map, as if the gates between the shards were sometimes hard to discern. And of course, looming over everything was the matter of the scouts’ disappearance. In spite of all of these concerns, however, Zeki had few other options. While he could still have the dozen more-distant areas examined, another round of surveys would take years. Though he had no precise deadline, the countess was again growing impatient; when she learned of the lesser maw, her attitude only worsened.
In retrospect, there wasn’t much of a choice at all. To the maw it was.
Now that they had a location, Zeki and his staff were able to begin developing a plan to actually establish the colony. Like Iehnu’s Maw, their site had an arid, desert-like interior. Since many settlements had been forced to adapt to such conditions during the Kwun Desertification, Zeki’s team had access to a veritable how-to guide on appropriate crops, weather-resistant structures, efficient air-conditioning systems, reliable water-collection techniques, and more. Even better, the required upkeep for many of these was suitable to Nulvatch’s level of technological development. The Nulvatchers set about acquiring these resources—and ran into their next major setback: the blowback they were receiving for the abductions wasn’t fading. The former CLPN members had been (and still were) engaged in a diplomatic blitz, and now no one in the Directorate would do business with the county. They similarly had no hope of dealing with producers in the Principate, which had been locked in a cold war with the Directorate since the latter’s foundation. And while the Empire usually took a lax stance on foreign trade, the ongoing revolution meant that there was little to buy. This quasi-embargo did not threaten Nulvatch in general, for Swein and his daughter were both major proponents of autarky, but the specialized goods and crops that the colony would need couldn’t be obtained domestically. Eventually, Zeki found suppliers in the Satrapy of Gynokh, a desert state to the east of the Empire, but at an extreme surcharge. The supplies were sent ahead to one of the safe camps surrounding Iehnu’s Maw that Zeki had covertly rented. (Apparently, mundane missions into the maw involved similarly protracted stockpiling.) This de facto supply depot would serve as the forward base for the expedition to establish the colony.
The next challenge faced was that of finding actual colonists. Zeki’s original plan was to simply gather up every luminant in Nulvatch—six hundred and seven individuals over five luminads, as per the last census—and conscript them into the colonial mission. However, inter-luminad breeding can lead to chaotic and sometimes random outcomes. In particular, one of the potential luminads that might spontaneously emerge shared its colors (lime-green eyes and maroon hair) with the flag of the neighboring Duchy of Croanidge. There was only a six-percent chance this scenario would occur, but the countess felt that was far too much of a risk. Consequently, the colonists now had to belong to one single luminad. Alas, the largest of the luminads in Nulvatch had only two hundred and fifteen members, whereas a minimum viable population was supposed to be five hundred individuals. The Directorate at large had more appropriate luminous populations, but Zeki’s attempts to negotiate were rebuffed. Zeki shifted his efforts to independent lesser powers, reducing his request from actual souls to merely permission to recruit; however, even this goal proved challenging to obtain in a timely manner. With the countess growing ever more impatient, the first minister reluctantly turned to a less legal, more ethically frought source for colonists: the slave trade.
At first glance, slavers offered Zeki little upside. While they could supply him with five hundred young, healthy luminants within a month, it would be shockingly expensive. Even the cheapest luminad would cost three orders of magnitude more than all previous expedition expenses combined—and the Satrapy was already fleecing the county. For the same price, he could fund a new division of Nulvatch’s army for a decade. Could they afford it? Yes. But Zeki and his staff were obligated to take a deeper look into the problem. The issue, they found, was one of supply. Most luminous slaves were sourced from the Old Empire, where anti-luminous slave raids were common. The Surai emperors had particularly encouraged these, granting their dominion an even greater monopoly on the supply than usual. Now that the dynasty was in its violent death throes, the market was in chaos, with prices having risen by a factor of fifty at a minimum. There were non-Imperial suppliers, but they simply could not meet the surge in demand.
Scouring the market more thoroughly, however, revealed a solution: slaves from the luminads with decidedly inhuman traits—the so-called monstrous luminads, which had long been expelled from the Empire—were available at a comparative bargain. The suppliers for these slaves were less reputable; moreover, given their unique physiologies, not all of the monstrous luminads were suitable for Nulvatch’s expedition. For example, the Garhym, naturally emaciated walking skeletons, were notably maladapted to extreme temperatures. In fact, none of the well-known monstrous luminads were suitable for desert environments. There were many lesser-knowns available; however, nobody in Nulvatch knew much of anything about them. The slavers were happy to suggest suitable luminads, but their suggestions were, without fail, for more expensive specimens. Eventually, Zeki simply gave them a fixed budget, enough to pay for a viable population from one of the mid-range monstrous luminads, and left any other details to the slavers’ judgement, save that the slaves-turned-colonists would also be sent to the safe camp.
At this point, Zeki felt an overwhelming sense of relief: all he had left to do was to order a contingent of soldiers to escort the colonists to the target shard. Everything else would be handled on-site by the unit’s commander, or even by the colonists themselves. His part, in contrast, would be finished, allowing him to put his full focus on Nulvatch’s diplomatic crisis. While his team had been handling matters competently, the crisis was still deepening. Zeki, succumbing to his arrogance, suspected that he alone might turn the tide. However, before the first minister could get to work, the countess asked to see him. Zeki, she felt, had a lot to answer for. There was of course the desertion of the scouts, which he had already taken full responsibility for. However, she also blamed him for the current crisis, claiming that he had let the fallout from the abductions fester while instead monomaniacally focusing on the colony. Zeki objected to this characterization, conveniently omitting how relieved he had just been. He brought to bear every explanation, excuse, justification, and rationalization that he could think of, yet the countess was not to be swayed. She had already passed judgement and was there only to deliver a sentence. And for that, she had something in mind beyond mere dismissal yet more creative than prison or death—something that she appeared to take an almost sadistic pleasure in. Zeki was to personally accompany the expedition, not to return to Nulvatch until either he had seen the colony founded or the commander of the escorting force scuttled the mission.
In spite of his sentence, Zeki was still first minister and would still be first minister upon his return. While good for him on a personal level, this meant that Nulvatch would be without a head of government for the entirety of his leave of absence. And it was going to be quite the extended leave: simply reaching the safe camp where their supplies were being stored would take at least a third of a year. A hair over a month would be spent reaching the Imperial border, another two and a half would go into crossing the Empire, and then one last half month would be required to navigate from the far border to Junho and then finally to the camp—and that assumed the expedition could safely pass through the Empire. The eastern frontier suffered from a dearth of roadways, so circumnavigating the troubled realm would add an additional five months. From there, it could conceivably take anywhere from one to three months to shepherd the colonists to the site within the lesser maw; who knew how quickly such a group might move? Next would follow anywhere from two to four months to plant farms, secure a water supply, build infrastructure, and otherwise establish the colony. Finally, there would be another half a month to return from the maw plus again either four or nine months to return to Nulvatch, all summing up to a trip lasting anywhere from eleven and a half to twenty-five and a half months. Given how the civil war in the Old Empire was going, the mission would likely be on the upper end of that range. Even the lower end, however, was plenty of time for Nulvatch to suffer a disaster; they seemed to be occurring with increasing frequency. Of course, Zeki had deputies—it wasn’t as if his entire team would be gone—whom now had four years of experience working at the highest levels of governance. Still, he did not fully trust them: none seemed to be as competent as Zeki had been—or rather, thought he had been—after four years. He hoped he was just being arrogant, for the alternative left him terrified. He spent the better part of a month crafting contingencies, wargaming crises, and otherwise ensuring that his team had to think as little as possible. Finally, he prayed to Veerofa for a speedy return, not that the brain-dead god could or would help.
When he was not preparing the realm for his absence, Zeki worked to assemble the military escort for the colony. Joining him would be four units of Nulvatch’s military: the three-hundred-man 3rd Riflery Battalion, the seventy-five-man 19th Mechanized Battery, the two-hundred-and-fifty-man 2nd Engineers Battalion, and the twenty-five-man 108th Medical Attachment. The 3rd had been unanimously recommended by his generals as being uniquely qualified to defend a crowd, although to Zeki’s eyes they seemed more experienced at crowd control. The 19th had just been outfitted with the county’s latest light machine guns. The 2nd were the only engineer formation with any recent experience with civil works. And finally, the 108th, arguably the least decorated of the chosen organizations, had worked extensively with the 3rd. These units were organized into the newly formed Nulvatch Colonial Expeditionary Unit and would be led by Colonel Rahel Liben Mengistu, who had been the commander of the 3rd a few years back. (Rahel had left upon being promoted to a domestic intelligence position after her awakening; her divine talents lay in remote viewing.) By the standards of the literature on colonies, it was a rather small force: the recommendation was a full brigade, or at least fifteen hundred men, at least half of whom should be engineers and a tenth medics. Unfortunately, while the generals had cleared sending twice as many men, the treasurers insisted on a more conservative approach. Apparently, the quasi-blockade Nulvatch was under was having a greater effect than anticipated. However, imperfections aside, the expeditionary unit was a well-qualified group that Zeki had full confidence in.
The force was seen off only by a handful of border guards. The citizenry had been barred, and the countess had not deigned to appear. The Nulvatchers set out in a motley fleet of vehicles, a veritable storm echoing from their primitive, early-twentieth-century combustion engines. Technologically, the unit was slightly above average for a mundane force: plenty of minor polities on the eastern frontier still fought with spears and bows. However, from a divine frame of reference, the Nulvatchers were quite weak. Rahel was the only person of any potency, although a handful of others were technically awakened. For this reason, the expedition was still unsure whether to avoid the Old Empire. Not three days before their departure a response had arrived from the Surai forces granting the expedition passage, much to Zeki’s surprise. However, none of the many rebel forces had even dignified Nulvatch’s request with a response; it was safe to conclude they would treat the force as hostile. There was a narrow corridor of Surai-held land that would take the Nulvatchers in the maw’s direction, but the frontlines were fluid. The risk of being caught out was, if not high, notable. Then again, the safe route would add almost another year to their journey, a prospect that filled Zeki with dread. While Rahel was leaning towards taking the extra time, Zeki convinced her to delay making a decision until they were closer to the Old Empire.
Actually reaching the Imperial border proved to be easier said than done. Legally speaking, the expedition was free to traverse the Directorate, which had amongst its founding principles freedom of movement between the member kingdoms. Each founder had supported this right for a different reason: Westminster believed it would promote unity within the federation, Sanctum suspected it might lead to economic prosperity, Ctaognol hoped it might let them better integrate the Sarkaic Kingdom, and so on. This heterogeneity had the unfortunate effect of leading to disagreements over what “freedom of movement” precisely entailed, and the lowest common denominator won out. While a member polity could not deny the citizens of another member entry or exit, the former was free to route the latter as they saw fit during the interim.
As Ctaognol’s Liminal Kingdom was only three months old when it joined the Directorate, the newly minted king had somewhat lazily mirrored the Directorate’s law within his realm. While most of his vassals effectively permitted true freedom of movement, the countess did not, instead keeping Nulvatch’s borders closed via two technicalities. First, she largely refused to grant passports to her subjects, trapping them within. (Cases such as Eyoab were a rare exception.) Second, foreigners were only allowed to visit border checkpoints; isolated “alien only” transportation lines facilitated travel between these locations. It was a gross perversion of the law. However, since the countess had been such a key early backer of the kingdom, Ctaognol chose not to close these loopholes, presumably out of a misplaced sense of gratitude.
As the Nulvatch Colonial Expeditionary Unit wound its way through the Liminal Kingdom, they found this tactic turned against them as they were shepherded between border crossings on tortuous, torturous paths. Passing through the Earldom of Greenryetch, usually a three-day-long prospect, took almost a week after the expedition was ordered to avoid paved roads due to “security concerns.” In the miniscule Barony of Weastfyorn, the Nulvatchers were confined to a flotilla of slowly drifting barges for three days as they traversed the eponymous Weastfyorn river, a journey the local freighters could manage in an afternoon. The most inventive delay came from the Duchy of Croanidge, where the force was routed through a mountain pass so narrow and unstable that only one person at a time could attempt the passage. On foot. (The Croanidgeans concurrently towed the expedition’s vehicles along a paved highway that was easily visible from the pass.) All told, what should have been an eighteen-day journey to the Liminal Kingdom’s border took a full month. Moreover, none of these routes gave the Nulvatchers a chance to restock their food supplies. Zeki and Rahel disagreed about the root cause of this last mistreatment. The colonel felt it was a gambit to prematurely exhaust their supplies; she was unsure whether the goal was simply to scuttle the mission or to actually starve the expeditionary unit. In contrast, Zeki suspected that it to be nothing more than an insult. Regardless, the expeditionary unit simply bore the sabotage.
The men were understandably in rather low spirits by the time they crossed the border into the otherworldly Sarkaic Kingdom. Although it was a member kingdom of the Directorate, the Nulvatchers were the largest military force to enter since the realm’s inception three thousand years ago. Arguably, they were the largest since Faaruthe’s First Incursion eight millennia ago, when the old Surai khagans and their Drai dynasty overlords had been driven out. As the entire region had been subsumed by a kaleidoscope of hiveminds that could manipulate nearby biomass as they saw fit, no one dared send in so much as a scouting party. After the hive that called themself Mursili exterminated the others, this newly anointed “Red King” sought to normalize relations with the rest of the universe, but millenia of terror were slow to fade. Few people trusted the conqueror enough to even bother sending ambassadors. It did not help that the region was still just inhabited by one super-organism: Mursili had no subjects to allay the outsiders’ concerns. The kingdom remained a pariah state until Ctaognol invited them to the informal alliance that would eventually evolve into the Directorate. Since then, Mursili still had yet to master the intricacies of diplomacy.
As the expedition marched through the hivemind’s lands, this inexperience was prominently on display. While the Nulvatchers intellectually knew that they were submerged within an all-encompassing being that could commandeer any and every scrap of organic matter within it, they would rather have preferred to not be reminded of this fact. Unfortunately, Mursili allowed no such luxury. Every animal that passed by stared quite intently at the colonial force. Even the plants turned to face the men—and on a few occasions sprouted eyeballs. The hive assigned no sapient-looking escort to the expedition, instead reasoning that these same flora and fauna could be used to render assistance just as effectively. However, after two days, when Rahel asked a snake-deer-shrimp chimera for directions and Mursili reformed the creature’s mandibles into a human mouth in order to answer, the unsettled Nulvatchers began to keep to themselves. The Red King, blissfully unaware of their guests’ discomfort, let the expedition proceed unmolested.
This arrangement lasted for four days, until catastrophe struck: the potential delaying gambit from the former CLPN members had worked. The latest tally revealed that the expedition did not have enough rations to reach their next resupply point, an open port on the border between the Empire and the Sarkaic Kingdom. Zeki and Rahel had known since Weastfyorn that they would be cutting it close, but a tally the week earlier had shown them in the clear. Alas, an improperly sealed crate of meals had spoiled in the Sarkaic Kingdom’s humidity. Now they had only three days’ worth of food but nine more to travel. Mursili was quite happy to reverse the spoilage; however, the men were terrified that consuming anything touched by the hive would mean their own subsumption. These rumors were false—the air they were breathing was already teeming with subsumed microbes—but persistent. Instead, the expedition chose to ration their supplies, an uncomfortable but otherwise bearable prospect. However, further setbacks ensued. One of the men, distracted by hunger, caused a large petrol spill, halting the caravan. Again, the Red King happily volunteered to assist, and again the men balked, although this time Rahel and Zeki ignored their fears and accepted some limited aid, specifically requesting to be towed. Unfortunately, the lumbering beasts that Mursili brought in proved rather ineffective. Men began to collapse from hunger. When Zeki himself lost consciousness, the hivemind intervened, restraining the expedition members and forcibly feeding them. Then, Mursili had the very grass itself spirit the restored force to civilization, albeit not to their original destination. Instead, they found themselves a few gates to the west, in the Atarage Autonomous Zone.
Atarage was a refugee camp. At the beginning of the Surai civil war, the violence had been relatively dispersed, more a collection of prefectural putsches than an actual rebellion; as such, very few displaced peoples initially sought to leave the Empire. In the six months following Emperor Eryek’s passing, less than one hundred appealed to the Sarkaic Kingdom for asylum. Mursili handled these cases in an ad hoc manner, opting to simply let the refugees squat within the realm as they pleased. Consequently, they all but vanished to the outside world, a fact that Emperor Kairong was quick to exploit. With the local insurrections threatening to spread into a greater anti-Surai movement, Kairong sought to distract by stoking fears of their ancestral enemy and claimed the refugees had been kidnapped by Mursili. This triggered an emergency meeting of the Directorate, for the other members wished to remain uninvolved in the Empire’s affairs. They proposed gathering the refugees in a single, centralized location, one with actual permanent infrastructure. Mursili countered that they could better provide for the refugees’ welfare by keeping them within their wilderness. Moreover, Mursili believed that Kairong’s gambit was doomed to fail—the Empire was too weak to retaliate, and the rebellion had already spread too much to be contained. Unfortunately for the Red King, the other members opted to be cautious, outvoting their colleague. And so the autonomous zone was established.
Two weeks later, the easternmost rebels united under the banner of the Glass Willow Front, proving Mursili right. Moreover, the normal-looking Atarage—that is, normal compared to the greater Sarkaic Kingdom—attracted the attention of more refugees, swiftly overcrowding the one-shard-large region. By the time that the Nulvatch Colonial Expeditionary Unit arrived, both disease and crime were rampant, to the point that some refugees were returning to the war-torn Empire. While the problem could easily have been solved by expanding the autonomous zone, the measure that had created Atarge offered Mursili no latitude to do so. Unfortunately, unrelated disputes left the issue perpetually tabled. The crisis would ultimately last for another eighteen months, at which point Ctaognol successfully convinced the Red King to disobey the edict.
The autonomous zone brought good tidings to the Nulvatchers: the corridor of Surai territory that they needed to pass through was not only open; it was widening. An ambitious young general named Siung Ruakci had recently taken over command of the northeastern front and was routing the Glass Willow’s forces. On the other side of the empire, the frontlines were steadily moving closer to the Surai capital, Dädeu, and sooner or later this General Siung would be recalled for its defense. However, extrapolating from current trends, this occurrence wouldn’t be for several more months. Offensives could falter just as easily as defenses could collapse, but Zeki and Rahel both agreed that, even if all of Siung’s forces were to vanish, the anti-Surai rebels would be hard-pressed to cut the expedition off. All signs pointed towards it being safe to pass through the Empire, and so Zeki and Rahel marched the men through the gate connecting Atarage to the Empire’s Chuanrak County. There, the local magistrate gave the Nulvatchers the papers necessary to pass through along with a Surai banner to make clear their non-rebel status. Over the next month, the expedition passed from county to prefecture to commandery—the administrative structure had become quite tortured under the Surai—keeping the banner aloft at all times to avoid any confusion. While a few of the men had picked up a rather persistent bug in Atarage’s camps, the march towards General Siung’s territory otherwise began without incident.
Unbeknownst to Zeki, however, events were unfolding that would throw the eastern front into chaos. At issue was a well-hidden fact about Siung—namely, that he was not human. The general, originally named Uolevi Kivelä, had been born to a small tribe of the Marowiie luminad. The Marowiie, characterized by birch-colored hair and green eyes, are one of the luminads that can pass for human; after the rest of his tribe was killed in a pogrom, the young Kivelä fled to the nearest city and assumed his present name. (He had thought that he was choosing a Mandarin Chinese name, but due to his illiteracy and the surface-level phonological similarities between Mandarin and Barrier Thiarofani, his selection quickly morphed into a more traditional Imperial name.) Siung dreamed of getting revenge on the Empire for their treatment of his people—but only prior to his awakening. Afterwards, the system that had so nearly killed him began to reward him. His goals shifted to slowly climbing the ranks of the Empire’s vast power structure, and he pursued a career as a military officer. Since his divine talents were of an analytical nature, he proved wildly successful, earning the adoration of his subordinates. With his recent successes during the rebellion, his troops were more loyal to him than they were to Emperor Kairong.
No record exists of what led to Siung’s heritage being discovered. He meticulously wore tinted glasses to hide the glow his eyes gave off, even though the glow was all but unnoticeable outside of pitch darkness. At the same time, he was the only survivor of his tribe; there was nobody left to recognize him as Uolevi Kivelä. And while he had many friends, he had neither confidantes nor romantic partners. Nevertheless, as the Nulvatch Colonial Expeditionary Unit was approaching Siung’s territory, the emperor received a report outing the general. Siung’s army was the only Surai force that wasn’t in retreat, but Kairong’s bigotry, their contempt, their hatred for the luminous folk knew no bounds, and they at once ordered the general be arrested. Siung’s men were shocked, and their offensive against the Glass Willow Front ground to a halt as confusion reigned. However, while many of the men shared the emperor’s feelings towards luminants, their loyalty to Siung was greater, and their dismay began to transform into conspiratorial denial. A rumor began to circulate that asserted the emperor had fabricated the information in a craven attempt to neutralize the general as a political rival, which was itself absurd since the general was clearly a patriot. Confusion gave way to discontent, and anti-Surai sentiments arose in the army.
A week later, as the Nulvatchers drew ever closer to Siung’s former jurisdiction, the emperor announced that they would have the general executed. When the news arrived at the front three days later, the nine commanders directly subordinate to Siung met in secret. They all agreed that they would not stand for their superior’s treatment but were rather undecided on how to follow through. None were comfortable with open mutiny, be it in the form of refusing orders or joining the rebellion; but at the same time merely threatening to resign seemed rather toothless. The nine eventually concluded that the proper course of action was to covertly rescue Siung and then smuggle him out of the Empire. It was a daring, risky, and seditious idea, and considerable mental gymnastics were necessary to differentiate it from insurrection. Miraculously, this absurd heist succeeded, and the general was secured—without his tinted glasses. Unable to accept that they had committed treason for a “filthy” luminant, the conspirators’ distress again morphed into disbelief. Clearly Kairong had replaced Siung’s eyes with a Marowiie pair. When Siung tearfully confirmed that he was not human, his subordinates decided that their leader’s memories must also have been tampered with. Appalled by these gross abuses, they now found themselves amenable to defecting. They continued their plan and spirited their “broken” general away to foreign lands; after consulting with more officers, they decided unanimously to rebel. Siung’s former army became the Brass Mink Army, so named after the general’s personal emblem.
Twelve hours after the Brass Mink revolted, an unsuspecting Zeki approached the border of what had been Siung’s territory. A quarter of the 3rd, just under half of the 19th, and just over half of the 2nd were now suffering from the illness that had been picked up in Atarage. The 108th were medics rather than infectious disease experts and were unable to help. While so much of the expedition was not in fighting shape, the force had marched itself to exhaustion, driving uninterrupted for forty hours in hopes of reaching the relative calm of Siung’s territory. (The prefecture they were departing had been plagued with bandits.) As was their routine, they were flying the Surai banner. When the Brass Mink saw this, they did not stop to check who this small infantry unit might be, nor did they wonder why the force also flew a Directorate flag. Instead, they waited until the Nulvatchers were deep within their range; then, the artillery, both mundane and divine, opened fire. Colonel Rahel’s clairvoyance gave her a few seconds’ warning, and she immediately ordered a retreat. However, the many exhausted and feverish troops were slow to respond. The barrage hit home, overturning a majority of the Nulvatchers’ vehicles and turning the retreat into a rout. While those now on foot scattered, another five volleys went off before even the fastest runners exited the artillery’s range. The Brass Mink did not even bother to pursue. When everyone had regrouped, Rahel counted two hundred and eighty-four as dead or missing. The 3rd had lost one hundred and three, and the 19th twenty-two. The 2nd, however, had lost one hundred and forty-five engineers, and the 108th had lost fourteen medics—in both cases, over half their unit.
Zeki and Rahel both agreed that they needed to return to Nulvatch, if for no other reason than to replenish their ranks. (While Zeki was reasonably confident this would not violate his sentence, he was terrified to see whether the countess agreed.) The expedition thus limped its way back to Atarage. However, upon returning to the autonomous zone, they learned of a rather alarming development: Nulvatch was under blockade. Apparently, Ctaognol had taken the opportunity of Zeki’s absence (or so Zeki presumed) to codify true freedom of movement into the laws of the kingdom. Naturally, the countess had refused to comply. While the king had initially hoped to resolve the situation diplomatically, the former CLPN members pounced on the opportunity, sending “tourists” to Nulvatch. While most of these agents were merely turned away, a few were detained, and one was even shot, which was all the justification needed to take action. Ctaognol reluctantly approved the blockade thereafter—after all, the countess was now in violent defiance of his orders.
Every instinct in Zeki cried out to return to Nulvatch at once, to try to negotiate a new accord, or even a favorable surrender; the sight of his homeland in danger physically pained him. Rahel took a more pragmatic approach: the CLPN, she felt, would never let the expedition through. At best the expedition would simply be blocked; at worst they would be arrested. However, the colonel was a woman of action and had no desire to remain in Atarage for months on end. If they could not return to reinforce, she reasoned, the expedition might as well proceed onwards. After all, they still had enough of a force to oversee the colony’s establishment; it just might take longer. While this prospect made Zeki recoil, he could hardly countermand Rahel on this matter; that would certainly violate the terms of his punishment. The Nulvatchers thus began charting the long course around the chaotic Empire.
Six months later, as the expedition neared the far side of the Empire, Rahel sent Zeki away along with the 3rd’s most junior captain, one Zanta Neguse Mebrete. The two were tasked with gathering additional, locally available information on the colony’s locale, something the original scouting party would normally have done had they not vanished. The Nulvatch expedition was too far along to make any major adjustments to its plans, nevermind that it had just been decimated; yet Captain Zanta had been quite obdurate about the missing report, annoying the colonel to the point that she ordered the young man to personally complete the research. Zeki had been sent along for similar reasons: his desire to return to Nulvatch was manifesting in a manic urge to proceed faster. His unrealistic demands were dragging the other men’s morale down.
The two decided that the most profitable destination would be Junho, the largest nearby archive—and the original demesne of Iehnu. The shard was ever so slightly off-course from their new route, an extra twelve days of travel to the west, but the duo traveled far faster than the rest of the expedition and were not concerned about falling behind. They made their way to Junho City’s public library, wherein they found a plethora of information, albeit mostly about the wrong maw. For example, they learned about the oldest written record of Iehnu’s Maw, a map preserved in the Grand Shrine of Iehnu but that was supposedly a millenia older than the shrine itself. The map primarily depicted the surrounding shards, but at the top was a large, black splotch, labeled “endless sandstorm.” Nearly every factoid about the primary maw was accompanied by an account of the first expedition to the center, undertaken by Iehnu themself. The god had journeyed in after hearing an old folktale that wisdom awaited all who survived the sandstorm, but all they found at the center was a minaret of stone.
The duo took almost a week to sort through these history lessons before they reliably learned anything about their quarry. Even then, however, the information they obtained was indirect: the “lesser maws” surrounding Iehnu’s Maw, in addition to being smaller, were weaker and otherwise less formidable. They were largely ignored by the authorities, as they were (usually) too easily conquered to attract tourists yet simultaneously were too harsh to justify developing. Consequently, there was almost no recorded data on individual maws in the public archives. That’s not to say there was nothing to be learned, but almost everything could have been inferred from information about the primary maw. For example, nobody had ever been able to determine how many shards made up Iehnu’s Maw. While this was partially because of the maw’s hazardous nature, the greater issue was the strange shape of the gates connecting the maw’s shards. Unlike most gates, which are rather discrete entities such as portals, doorways, tunnels, or bridges, the maw’s were vast, almost seamless transitions, so much so that, until Iehnu reported back on their journey, most assumed the maw was a megashard such as the Great Steppe or the Lower Spine. This same oddity held for all of the lesser maws. This information in particular cast a new light on the scouting party’s map. On the one hand, it explained the many orienteering details; but on the other, it raised the question of why they hadn’t even made mention of the seamless gates. Perhaps they had judged it to be common knowledge, Zeki hoped. Doubtfully.
Just about everything Zeki and Zanta uncovered raised questions when cross-referenced with the scouting report. Iehnu’s Maw consists of ten rings, or layers, plus a central shard; the colony’s had three “phases” plus a central cluster instead. The outermost ring of all maws was a mountain range, the maw’s “teeth.” While Iehnu’s Maw’s teeth were not all that high—the tallest peak stood at twenty thousand feet, and the lowest-charted pass a mere twelve thousand—they were treacherous, combed with vertical sheers and unstable formations. In contrast, the teeth of the expedition’s target were more hills than mountains, never rising above the treeline and always at a shallow incline. The outer three layers of the greater maw were a mostly mundane desert with a perpetual sandstorm that became more severe with each ring, whereas the lesser maw's interior, while incredibly hot and arid, lacked even a steady breeze. Within the more central layers of Iehnu’s Maw, more esoteric effects came into play, although accounts differ on what these hardships precisely are. (Iehnu and Ctaognol reported amnestic and antimemetic fields, Tsao-uai reported gravitational anomalies, and the Kwun emperors reported anything from the sand becoming molten to the atmosphere becoming a vacuum.) At the colony? The scouts noted nothing even slightly anomalous.
Since neither Zeki nor Zanta knew much about maws, the two had no basis with which to judge whether these differences were normal for lesser maws. They sought out the advice of more knowledgeable locals, but the responses varied. Some were adamant that the scouts’ report had to be erroneous, while others thought it quite in line with lesser maws. Complicating matters even further was the curious fact that nobody seemed to be familiar with the colony’s maw in particular. While it was uncharted and unclaimed, both terra incognita and terra nullius, that did not mean it had never been ventured into. The locals eventually directed the Nulvatchers to an almanac, self-published by maw enthusiasts, containing many informal surveys. Zeki and Zanta quickly purchased a copy, excited to find out what the archives had been missing. Flipping through the tome, the two determined that their maw (as described by the scouts) was just on the edge of being an outlier—“two standard deviations,” Zanta had joked. The maw’s entry, however, was barren, neither corroborating nor contradicting, let alone expanding on, the scouting report. The place wasn’t even named, instead designated as LM-92. Dejectedly, the pair agreed that they had exhausted their search and left to rejoin the rest of the force.
Zeki and Zanta reached the safe camp that the supplies had been forwarded to almost a day ahead of the expedition. However, they were still not the first to arrive: awaiting them was Eyoab of all people. The urban planner had quite the story to tell. Apparently, he had succeeded in funding a number of his proposals but failed to obtain his true goal, a personal stipend large enough to cover his divine awakening. Frustrated and impatient, he embezzled “a minor amount” from his research budgets to make up the difference, reasoning he would still have more than enough to complete the experiments. Unfortunately, after the diplomatic storm surrounding Nulvatch erupted, Eyoab’s sponsors pulled out; and during the severance negotiations, the businessmen and philanthropists quickly spotted the misuse. The young man had already spent the stolen funds on an awakening attempt and had no hope of paying back his former associates.
A common crook would have faced a lifetime of liens and perhaps a short stint in prison for such a crime. However, Eyoab’s awakening attempt had succeeded, and he was now nearly as potent as Rahel. This ironically left him far worse off, increasing his value enough to warrant peonage. He naturally fled at this prospect, but he was never quite able to shake his pursuers. At roughly the same time as the expedition’s foray into the Empire, Eyoab had sought a more permanent solution to his woes and begged for refuge in his homeland. The countess turned him down, giving no further explanation, but a sympathetic bureaucrat suggested that the colony might be more accepting. While it would be miserable for a few years, no debt collector would venture off the known map. The urban planner raced off, narrowly missing the expedition twice before ultimately arriving before them. And so Eyoab now stood here, begging Zeki for protection.
None of this was exactly surprising to Zeki: his first impression of Eyoab had been rather poor. The young man seemed to be a self-serving, greedy fool. However, he had only been embezzling money, and that was par for the course by Nulvatch’s standards. If anything, Zeki actually appreciated the young man’s candor, as it would have been far easier to make up some trite claim of wanting to observe his experiment. Moreover, Eyoab’s potency overshadowed any concerns about his character. With half of the force already dead, the expedition would need all the defensive help it could get—particularly if the scouting team had not died of exposure or disease. Making matters even more pressing, when the rest of the Nulvatchers arrived, Zeki learned that there had been additional losses: of the three hundred and sixty-six survivors of the Brass Mink’s bombardment, another twelve had died of cholera (picked up after his departure for Junho), and a full forty-three had thereafter deserted. The urban-planner-turned-academic-turned-fugitive was not just welcome; he was necessary.
Eyoab then led Zeki and Rahel to meet the colonists, with whom he was already briefly acquainted. Unfortunately, there was a minor issue regarding the plurality of the term: only one luminant had been sent, a young woman in her early twenties, with yellow hair (not to be confused with blonde) and black eyes (again, not to be confused with dark brown). After he had been calmed and persuaded not to order the remainder of the expedition on a punitive mission against the slavers, Zeki asked the luminant directly for clarification. She introduced herself as Wivin, a queen of the Khumori luminad. She meant “queen” in the eusocial sense of the word: the Khumori operated like various ant and bee species. She claimed to be carrying the sperm of well over one hundred and fifty drones in her spermatheca, ready to fertilize herself as soon as the colony was reached. She further explained that due to a divine skill she had, she could functionally be just as many genetically distinct queens, thus serving as a minimum viable population. Zeki and Rahel were practically dazed by this strange, alien explanation, enough so that neither questioned whether three hundred simulated individuals were actually enough to be viable. What did catch their attention was how Wivin did not seem the least bit like what they had been led to believe about chattel slaves. That is, she seemed less traumatized, less meek, and more assertive. It was suspicious even to the rank-and-file. However, Wivin was irreplaceable. The Nulvatchers could do little but accept this convenient set of circumstances as a rare stroke of good luck.
Before the group could depart, the logistical plans for the actual colony had to be reviewed, as they had been designed with a much larger population in mind. For example, there was no longer an immediate need to build an entire city. However, since the 2nd was not about to remain behind in LM-92 for several years, Wivin and Eyoab would need to expand the settlement on their own. Moreover, they would have to do so quickly: apparently, the Khumori laid clutches of anywhere from ten to fifty golf-ball-sized eggs every year. Stripping the prefabricated structures down until they were scarcely more than reinforced tents was a possible solution, but at the same time it was hardly safe—if a sandstorm did materialize, the colony would be wiped out. Ultimately, the group decided that the engineers would repurpose the supplies to build a single, large, open dormitory to house the children in. It would be a spartan existence lacking in any privacy, but only for a short while: once the first clutch was physically mature—in five years, according to Wivin—the luminants could expand the infrastructure further. Throughout this debate, Wivin kept silent, all the while wearing a bemused smile.
There was a similar problem to deal with regarding food supply. The expedition had followed the prior literature meticulously, investing in two separate solutions. The first had been to acquire a number of self-contained, fully automated hydroponic farms. These required no work on Wivin’s or Eyoab’s part; however, they also were not enough to sustain a full colony. The other half of the food supply would come from a number of specialty crops that were designed to grow in pure sand—overkill, according to the scouting report—but required intensive care, more than the two initial colonists could provide. It was debatable whether the crops would survive until there were enough hands to work the farms. The issue of water supply offered an analogous challenge: the colony could not in the long term thrive on the solar sills Zeki had purchased. The secondary supply—specialized succulent crops—were similarly demanding with their upkeep. Here the 2nd proved unable to develop any solutions. Had they had more money, the force might have been able to acquire more appropriate supplies, but the full faith and credit of Nulvatch was still rather worthless. Eventually, Wivin ended the debate by claiming that, since the Khumori were native desert dwellers, she was more than capable of sourcing additional food and water. Although Zeki, Rahel, and Eyoab doubted her claims, there seemed to be no better alternative. Thus the Nulvatch Colonial Expeditionary Unit set out for the last leg of its journey to the colony.
The journey into LM-92 ran into difficulties almost immediately. The scouting party had made note that the mountains making up the maw’s teeth were low, gently sloped, and largely unnotable; but nothing of the sort awaited the expedition. Instead, snow-tipped peaks towered two and a half miles above the men, with the treeline terminating three quarters of the way up, at around nine thousand feet. Rahel immediately called a stop to the march; after all, if the scouting report was wrong, proceeding any further would be senselessly risky. However, after scrutinizing the precise wording the scouts had used, things did not seem quite as amiss. By mountaineering standards, these mountains were rather low. Moreover, climbing them looked to be no great technical challenge, for there were no sheer faces, no crevasses, nor even loose terrain. The only true error was a line claiming that the peaks were below the treeline, when instead there was a pass below. It would have been quite the significant mistake on the part of the scouts; more generally, the reconciliation process required more charitable reading than either Zeki or Rahel were comfortable with. Given the absence of more detailed notes—the orienteering map had all but elided the teeth—the two decided that the most prudent course of action was to send a small force ahead to verify the report’s integrity for the next few segments.
This plan was promptly scuttled when Wivin left with the advance party. Repeatedly. She was far too valuable to let take such a risk, but not even shackling her to a wagon put a stop to her stowing away. After the forward unit returned the slave for a fifth time, Rahel gave in and ordered the entire expedition forward, albeit only over the mountains.
Unfortunately, the pass that the scouts had (possibly) mentioned was too narrow for the expedition’s supply caravan. (They had traded their remaining vehicles for carts and wagons on account of the lack of roads.) Instead, they had to take a much higher pass which doubled back on itself several times and was likely around fifteen miles to the crest. This path was quite overgrown, with strange, yellow vines criss-crossing the trees. They were a chore to cut through, to say nothing of the trees, which were towering, thick oaks. As just about everything seemed to be as dry as tinder, the 19th suggested that the expedition burn their way through the untamed trail. Rahel approved this scheme, and the mechanized battery set to work with their flamethrowers. Twelve hours later, she halted the fires, which were proving to be an exercise in futility. Loose branches and leaves went up just fine, as did anything that the men manually broke off. However, the trees and vines proper refused to do anything beyond slowly smouldering. Over the course of the day, the Nulvatchers had progressed only half a mile along the pass.
That evening, while everyone else was trying to puzzle out the trees’ mysterious fire resistance, Eyoab was overcome with an oppressive, almost unbearable sensation that something was watching him. He first brought this up with Wivin, who had noticed it as well but was wholly unconcerned. He then brought the matter up with Rahel, but she was far too preoccupied by the failed burns, dismissing the sensation as “probably just a few curious animals.” Eyoab looked for these hypothetical animals but alarmingly couldn't find any; there were neither birds chirping nor insects buzzing. Though he was an urban planner, he felt rather confident that this was not how forests were supposed to be. As such, he went one last step up the chain of command to Zeki, who was also mired in the debate over the barely flammable trees. (His opinion was that the phenomenon was proof that the heavens, by continuing to prolong the expedition at every step, were against both him and Nulvatch.) The first minister was able to focus for long enough to absorb Eyoab’s warning, though he personally had noticed nothing awry; and dragged Rahel into the conversation, who now proved much more receptive to the concerns. The three collectively decided to make camp for the night outside of the forest, an annoying but manageable mile and a half away. If anything was lurking amongst the vines and trees, it would have to face three hundred and eleven men head-on.
Come the next morning, a quick inspection revealed everything to be in order: all the men were unharmed and accounted for, and no supplies were missing. The Nulvatchers thus marched their way back up the pass through the portion of the trail that had been burned clear. The previous night’s debate resumed, and a fight of sorts broke out between the leaders of the 3rd and the 19th. The 19th wanted to try torching the path again, whereas the 3rd believed this a waste of time and proposed that they take up axes instead. As nobody had succeeded in deducing why the bone-dry trees refused to burn, Rahel sided with the 3rd, ordering all units to begin hacking and chopping at the vines and trees—even the medics. This did indeed speed up the expedition’s pace: by midday they had progressed two and a half miles. The sense of being watched then returned, and Rahel ordered a halt for an hour, at which point the feeling receded. From then until nightfall, the expedition progressed an additional two miles. As the force still appeared to be alone, they made camp on the trail, and the evening passed uneventfully. The next thirty-six hours passed without incident as well, with another four miles being cleared the next day, and—as the trees thinned out—another six the day after.
That night, the expedition made camp at the highest point of the pass. They were well above the treeline, surrounded only by grass and bare rock. A fog covered the inward side of the mountain, but it merely obscured their view of LM-92’s interior. There was quite literally nowhere to hide, yet the hidden stalker somehow returned. This time, Rahel felt the presence most acutely. Twice she awoke screaming, feeling as if the invisible presence’s gaze was literally torching her. She thought about ordering the group to decamp and descend the mountain, but her rational mind won out. They were already a good mile away from the trees, giving the camp just as much forewarning as they had had the first night. Moreover, the men wouldn’t march fifteen miles in the dead of night. She checked in one last time with the watch, which had seen nothing, and once again forced herself to sleep. This time, she suffered a nightmare. In it, a dragon—or at least a gargantuan, floating snake—emerged from the forest and glided, oxymoronically both listlessly and with purpose, towards the camp. The dragon’s form was translucent and glowing white, with the notable exception of the dozens of eyes scattered along its body, which looked to be carved from wood. When it drifted above the expedition, the dragon came to a halt, and its eyes turned into searchlights. After sweeping over the camp dozens of times—including over the guards, who did not react in the slightest—the beams of light settled their focus onto a handful of men and turned red. These men then began to smoulder, much like the trees before.
At this point, Rahel woke up. Alarmed by how vivid her dream had been, she began verifying that it had indeed been nothing more. Thankfully, nobody had seen a translucent dragon, and no men had been immolated. In fact, the spotlight-eyes had converged on empty tents where no men were sleeping. (Strange—everyone had been out in the open in her dream.) The only thing amiss was that everyone else, with the notable exception of Wivin, had also slept poorly. However, reassured that her hypnagogic vision had no relation to reality, Rahel explained this away as an effect of the altitude; they were over two miles above where they had started. In the morning, Rahel called the force to order, and their march resumed. Exactly three hundred men belonging to three units began clearing the path down the mountain.
The expedition took only two days to descend the mountains. In addition to having gravity at their backs, the woods were notably thinner, although the fog grew denser as they progressed, making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. At the base of the teeth, the trees abruptly vanished, and in the course of a few feet the ground transitioned from damp, mossy soil to coarse sand. The temperature rose, the humidity cratered, and the fog gave way. It was a gate, a boundary between shards, just as topologically seamless as those in Iehnu’s Maw, though still quite noticeable. (That must have been how the scouts had been able to find them; there was one mystery answered.) It was also the boundary between LM-92’s first and second rings. Since the Nulvatchers planned to put the colony in the central cluster, as far from other luminous populations as possible, they were, by a rough measure, a third of the way there.
Unfortunately, the information in the scouting report again seemed to be off. The second ring was supposed to consist of scorched shrublands with intermittent pockets of sand; however, the expedition instead found itself confronted with a sea of dunes, some almost one thousand feet tall. Unlike before, there was no charitable explanation—the survey was patently wrong. When Rahel, Zeki, Eyoab, Wivin, and the top officers of the 3rd, 19th, and 2nd met to discuss how to proceed, they spent much effort trying to diagnose how the scouts could have made such a mistake. Some suspected the scouts had surveyed the wrong maw, while others theorized that they had written the report while suffering from cognitive impairment, perhaps caused by hypoxia or cerebral edema. (LM-92’s teeth weren’t high enough to cause either.) Others still felt that the report must have been tampered with by the countess’s enemies. Regardless, with the exception of Wivin, everyone agreed that at the very least they needed to return to the safe camp. However, as the expedition prepared to turn around, the fog on the teeth’s side of the boundary gave way to a blizzard. Their path was buried within the hour.
A week later, the snow still lay several feet deep. Men who ventured in fell ill, complaining of debilitating muscle aches, violent bouts of nausea, and more. These symptoms tended to fade quickly, but only once out of the snow. Without a medical team to actively treat the strange ailments, the Nulvatchers had no hope of traversing the pass. Even if the snow were mundane, the expedition hadn’t been outfitted for winter weather. Such was the risk Zeki had undertaken when he had foregone the many safety checks of a mundane expedition. Rationally, he knew it was simply a gamble that had not paid off, but still he found himself cursing his own foolishness. It seemed fitting that these setbacks were directly stopping him from defending Nulvatch. Was the county still in a standoff with the CLPN, he wondered, or had the blockade metastasized into the invasion he feared? He could practically see the coalition sweeping in, with the ensuing carnage revealing their “humanitarian concerns” to be nothing but meaningless propaganda.
Zeki shook that nightmare from his mind. Some snow must have blown onto him, for he had a roaring headache. Still, he couldn’t deny the plausibility of such a scenario. Moreover, events were transpiring in a way that seemed practically designed to ensure that it came to pass. The string of bad luck almost seemed to be enemy action. If that were true, however, then who was the enemy? The CLPN was out: they would have been better served by simply killing the expedition. That reasoning applied to most rational agents. The Hands Of Fate were known to use more subtle machinations, but even Zeki was not so arrogant as to think that his force warranted their attention. While his migraine made it hard to reason, he eventually concluded that, assuming there was an enemy, their actions only made sense if their divine talents were extremely restrictive—never a good bet—or if they were looking for deniability. Deniability, however, implied that someone else was actively observing the expedition. Who, then? For some reason, Ctaognol floated to the top of his mind. Ah! Perhaps the colony’s success was important to the Liminal King; maybe he would once again support the countess if she could prove her worth by claiming LM-92.
Before his pounding head immobilized him, Zeki rushed to share his analysis of the situation with Rahel, assaulting the colonel with an onslaught of rambling noises that put the blizzard to shame. She thought the idea mad, clearly the crazed delirium of a man who had been in the sickening snow for too long. Speaking as clearly as she could, she began to point out the many issues with the theory. First, the storm was not all that suspicious. It was well in line with ordinary bad luck. Second, diplomatic crises rarely simmered for over half a year. The county would, by the time the expedition succeeded or failed, have already been invaded or saved, if it hadn’t been already. Third, it was hard to imagine that this colony would be in any way beneficial to the Directorate. If anything, the claim would be a net negative, a perpetual headache that would serve to siphon off valuable diplomatic and military resources in exchange for nothing. Fourth—but at this point Zeki interrupted. He was in no mood to listen to rational arguments. Rahel was outranked, and the expedition thus resumed its journey into the maw. However, she was not overly worried: as she saw the situation, Zeki would eventually calm down, at which point they could turn back.
As the force progressed through the sea of dunes, the errors in the scout’s report came into puzzling focus. The orienteering notes became even further off: while the scouts had detailed a maze-like carpet of tangled shrubs along with the easiest path through, the expedition was lucky to find any sign of vegetation in a given day. In contrast, the number and topology of the shards proved to be roughly correct, as the few noticeable shard boundaries that the expedition passed through were positioned as reported. This seemed to rule out the theory that the survivalists had explored the wrong cluster; it was also a mark against the idea that they had become mentally impaired. Two new theories emerged. The first held that the maw’s interior, though not the shards themselves, was constantly changing, and the second that something had been modifying the scouts’ memories.
Neither seemed particularly likely.
As this debate raged, Zeki’s and Rahel’s mental states began to decline. In the former’s case, rather than calming down, the first minister became more obdurate regarding the mission. It was clear to all that he was unwell, and had the expedition had a medical unit present, they would certainly have declared him incapacitated, perhaps even diagnosing him with the early stages of a brain fever, one presumably caused by complications from his exposure to the snow. However, no doctors were present. While Rahel might have begun the byzantine procedure of making such a declaration unilaterally, she found herself too preoccupied by her own issues. The dragon from before was now a mainstay of her dreams. Every night, the translucent creature emerged from the dunes and fixed a handful of men with its gaze, although now rather than smouldering the victims turned into sand. Without fail, no men were actually harmed; however, the colonel found herself increasingly confident that the dragon was more than just a figment of her imagination. She was fully lucid for the hypnagogic episodes, yet she could not seize control of the hallucinations. It was as if her clairvoyance was supplying her with visions. It usually worked via supplying her with sudden insights, so why the sudden change? And what was to be gleaned from the dreams? She was at an absolute loss. As she became increasingly deprived of rest, she forced herself to spend her strength on more immediate concerns. After all, she had two hundred and thirty men to take care of.
After two weeks of traversing the second ring, the Nulvatch Colonial Expeditionary Unit arrived at an oasis, a welcome break to the tedium of the sand dunes. It was not the traditional pond surrounded by grass and palm trees; rather, it contained a network of hot springs surrounded by frigid, mossy rock. The air temperature was somewhere just below forty degrees, a sharp contrast to the desert’s ninety-degree heat. Only a few inches separated the two extremes, indicating another shard boundary; and sure enough the scouring report had the place marked, albeit as a “random pine grove.” The force informally voted to spend a day in the strange locale—or, more accurately, threatened to mutiny if not given a rest. While Zeki eventually accepted that Rahel had no choice in approving the break, the halt sent him into a simmering fury.
Part of the reason the men had demanded to stop was that they had been having increasing difficulty towing the caravan of supplies for the colony. Most of the raw materials were being kept in jury-rigged sleds—the wagons were useless in pure sand—which the men took turns pulling. The number of sleds they had was more appropriate for a larger force, however. Three hundred men might have managed it, but the Nulvatchers numbered only two thirds of that. Rahel, in consultation with the other officers, concluded that they would have to abandon a portion of the caravan, a prospect that horrified Eyoab on many levels. The colony was supposed to be his new home, after all. He was already nervous about Wivin’s insistence that she wouldn’t need support, but this would guarantee that he faced a life of squalor in LM-92. Why, it would hardly be better than peonage! It wasn’t as if he could abandon the colony either: his absence would leave the place defenceless. While he personally could live with that, he feared what might happen to him with such a reputation. The entire universe would join the hunt for him, and then, once he was caught, if he wasn’t killed by vigilantes the countess would purchase his debts. Being her slave would be a fate worse than death. No, his only escape was for the expedition to be aborted, not that that would happen so long as Zeki remained intransigent.
As night fell, Rahel once again dreamt of the dragon. The beast swam out of the hot springs, water dripping off its body. It drifted and floated around the oasis for much longer than usual, seemingly unsatisfied with the featureless men. (Rahel had realized a few nights ago that the soldiers in her dreams all had their faces melted off.) The vision then took a turn for the original: the dragon came across Zeki, who in contrast was quite well defined. The creature wound itself up a few feet above the first minister and turned as many eyes as it could on him. The searchlight beams turned red as usual; however, Zeki remained unharmed. The dragon contorted itself further, managing to twist a few more eyes towards the man. Suddenly flames erupted along the red beams, the light itself burning. The fire spread up to the dragon’s body, and the beast let out a cry, a strange mixture of a snake’s hiss and glass shattering. It thrashed about, crashing into the ground as it tried to extinguish its eyes. With each collision, it left behind a luminous pillar pointing straight into the sky. After a minute, the dragon, now fully alight, dove into the hot springs, which exploded in a plume of steam. The screams of her men then dragged Rahel back to the waking world. A number of towering pine trees had burst forth from the ground, all eerily colocated with the pillars the dragon had created; and the hot springs had suddenly frozen over, only for the ice to shatter in a spray of frozen needles. These had both caused much mayhem, for a dozen men had been lethally tossed about by the trees, and that and a half more were bleeding out, lacerated by the ice. Zeki had also taken a turn for the worse, although people were much less concerned about this. He was comatose, and his whole body was aflame with a scorching fever.
In the ensuing chaos, Eyoab sat dazed and confused. He had awoken just as the hot springs froze over and had heard the ice begin to crack. He was more than potent enough to divinely block the debris but had been too slow to respond. Now his back was bloodied, and he had a possible concussion. Several minutes later, when he learned that Zeki was now unconscious, a seed of hope sprouted in his mind. Rahel had been ready to turn back at the mountains, back when they had… however many men they had. (The number had to have been two hundred, right? They hadn’t lost any in the desert, yet that count seemed off.) Now they had just lost another thirty. With Zeki unable to countermand her, surely she would order a retreat. Eyoab collected himself and rushed to start lobbying the colonel. He found her already meeting with the other officers; however, she was not even considering aborting the mission. Instead, she had decided that the expedition needed to advance even faster than before. Pursuant to this, the supply caravan was being stripped to its bare essentials, and the 19th (all twelve of its surviving members) were abandoning their weighty materiel.
When Eyoab pressed for details, Rahel merely stated that they were being hunted. She did not mention the dragon in detail, instead merely conveying that what she thought to be a dream-based being meant them harm. It had been killing non-existent men up until now, which she suspected was its way of taunting or warning them, and had just tried to actually kill Zeki. When that had backfired, the creature’s agony had spilled over to the waking world. She continued by considering the counterfactual where it had succeeded in killing Zeki. Surely, the force would have fled, which presumably made that outcome its goal. Thus they clearly had to do the opposite. It was a rather unsound justification, predicated on the beast being both malicious and intelligent. After all, it might instead have been aggressively territorial, in which case fleeing was the correct course of action. Rahel, however, was adamant about her interpretation, although she acknowledged that she had no evidence. Since she was a clairvoyant, the others seemed inclined to trust the colonel.
At this point, a rather dark idea began to form in Eyoab’s concussed mind. Could he, by chance, force the expedition to turn back? Obviously he wasn’t in the chain of command, but he was perhaps the most potent person present, at least tied with Rahel. If he could neutralize her, his dominance would not be in dispute, and the men would surely obey him instead. He could then send the Nulvatchers on their way home, sell the supplies, and use the funds to pay back his creditors. If the supplies weren’t enough, he could even sell Wivin. Sure, the countess would eventually go after him, but she had more than enough enemies who would appreciate his sabotage and might protect him. There was only one issue: Eyoab was no murderer. However, since awakened people were hardy, he believed it might be possible for him to merely incapacitate the colonel. Once, he had read of a case study where a recently awakened human had fallen into a lake and become trapped under the surface. By the time the man was freed, he was brain dead. However, his active soul slowly healed his brain, eventually leading to a full recovery. Eyoab convinced himself he could possibly replicate this with Rahel—no, given the alternatives, he had to. But he would have to act quickly, before they left the oasis. She had said they would depart at dawn; he glanced up to check the sky.
It was red—not the color of the pre-dawn sky, but rather as if tinged with blood. Twisting through the sanguine backdrop was a thin cloud that was rather peculiarly shaped, almost like a snake with lines sticking out of it. Eyoab couldn’t help but feel that it was looking at him.
Eyoab had minimal time to prepare his attack. Every minute that passed allowed the men of the 3rd and the 19th to further regroup, and he doubted that he was capable of fighting both Rahel and the mundane troops. However, Eyoab was aware that overly complicated plans tended to be fragile and thus concluded that his tight schedule might also be to his benefit. The plan he developed was indeed simple: he would hide somewhere, remotely push the colonel into one of the springs, and then hold her under. He had no idea how to thread the needle between brain death and total death, nor had he considered that the soldiers, possessing some intelligence, might connect him to the assassination, but such concerns were secondary to the urban planner—he would deal with the consequences afterwards. Most of his talent lay in advanced telekinesis and field projection, a high-utility track that excelled at improvisation, rather unlike Rahel’s clairvoyance. He hoped this intrinsic advantage would make up for his lack of experience.
Eyoab hid himself behind one of the new pine trees, which is to say that he wasn’t hidden at all. Dozens of meandering men stood about him, and the 19th’s light machine guns were assembled a mere twenty feet away, where they were apparently being discarded. (Or not: some of the 19th were arguing that their weapons deserved to be buried.) Nothing indicated that Eyoab was paying any attention to Rahel; in fact, she was on the other side of the oasis, almost entirely out of sight. The only way he could keep track of her was by softly circulating some air around, an amount so minimal that it was dwarfed by the natural wind, and feeling where his control encountered resistance. To anyone else, he appeared to have lapsed back into a stunned daze, staring into space. Thus disguised, he began marshalling his willpower, preparing for one great telekinetic push. Before he committed, he glanced up at the sky. The snake-cloud was still staring, almost goading him on. He willed with all his might that Rahel would slide to her left—just a few feet would do—and down—again, just a few feet—under the steaming water. She did just so, falling in too quickly to even make a noise. For a brief moment, Eyoab celebrated: he had done it, and stealthily at that. Surely no one could have heard; the men near her might not have even noticed. Even if they had, their first suspicion would doubtlessly be the dream monster she had been ranting about. Everything was proceeding as planned. Now all he had to do was keep the woman under.
Immediately, the unit as a whole leapt to action. The men of the 19th jumped over to their discarded turrets, turning them towards Eyoab; the meanderers similarly took out their rifles, pistols, and in one case even a saber. All they had heard was a splash (which had not been nearly as quiet as Eyoab had thought), yet they knew who to suspect. Rahel’s clairvoyance had proved its superiority: before, when she had been meeting with the other officers and Eyoab had been genuinely dazed, she had felt her typical flash of insight, warning her that the dragon was using—or perhaps conspiring with—Eyoab. Consequently, she hatched her own scheme, one to bait out the attack in a controlled environment. She came up with the swill about pressing onwards as an excuse to keep up the appearance of disorganization. (As if she would willingly spend another moment in this accursed desert!) The men had only one true order: if anything suspicious happened, neutralize the city planner. Now they were doing just that. They did not ask for his surrender or demand that he let the colonel go. In fact, they did not even wait to coordinate. Instead, they opened fire as soon as their weapons were so much as vaguely pointing in the direction of the hapless, shocked, and subverted man.
As soon as he heard the first cracks of gunfire, instinct took over for Eyoab. He dropped his focus on Rahel, shifting it to the task of projecting a defensive field around himself. This met with modest success, as the bullets slowed down and hit him with a force more in line with a projectile from a sling than from a gun; however, as more men opened fire, he realized the field would soon be overwhelmed. He would be overwhelmed, if not by the soldiers then by the presumably recovering Rahel. He needed to get out of this position. In a rather desperate attempt, Eyoab threw the field outwards in a pulse of force, hoping it might at least stagger a few of the men. Instead, they went flying, a feat he shouldn’t have been able to accomplish for another few years. He stood stunned for a moment, staring at the soldiers splayed across the ground. He tried forming a cutting field and took it to the dead (or unconscious) men; it flayed the corpses. As a handful more men approached him, he threw the cutting field at them, skewering them. He wasn’t sure how he was able to perform such feats, but he also wasn’t about to look a gift-horse in the mouth. With this, he could go on the offensive.
He chuckled; it sounded like a strange mixture of a snake’s hiss and glass shattering.
Eyoab began darting around the oasis, looking for any trace of Rahel. He checked about all of the trees, to no avail. Similarly, she was not in any of the few tents that had been set up. He then moved on to the less obvious spots, such as the supply sleds or the dunes outside the oasis; again he found no trace of the colonel. He briefly thought about taking Zeki hostage, but he doubted Rahel would trade herself for a delirious and quite possibly dying man, regardless of his official position. All the while Eyoab was engaged by small teams of the 3rd’s men. Most understood the situation and actively avoided the crazed debtor, but a not-insignificant number bravely continued to mount a resistance. None of the latter survived, either being tossed about or stabbed. Eyoab eventually found his quarry in the hot spring he had originally thrown her into. The bubbling water had turned red with the blood of the flayed corpses—was she trying to use that as camouflage? She also seemed to be playing dead, floating face-down. To her credit, it had worked: he had missed her twice, each time mistaking her for a corpse. Eyoab gathered up another cutting field, preparing to unleash it on Rahel. Then, a searing, burning pain stabbed through his abdomen. He glanced down and saw a claw of sorts, like a human hand mixed with a wasp’s stinger, sticking out of his stomach. Before he could even process this turn of events, he collapsed; within the minute, he was dead, in part due to blood loss and in part from the stinger’s poison. His last memory was of the snake-cloud, the dragon, floating away, and the night sky returning to its proper black.
As Eyoab faded, Wivin removed her claw from his body. She tried to wash it off in the spring, but the water was also rather bloody, and she merely scalded herself. She was forced to wipe the blood off on the moss. When her hand was clean, she let it transition back into its regular, human form. She called out that the situation was under control. A number of the surviving men answered her, but Rahel continued to float listlessly in the water. Wivin marshalled her own divinity, willing the colonel up, into the air. The luminant had pursued a different path in her development than Eyoab—telekinesis was not her specialty—but she was more than potent enough to perform such a simple feat. Lifting Rahel revealed a gash on the right side of her forehead. When she had been pulled under, by pure chance her head had clipped the stony edge, rendering her unconscious. While Eyoab had been looking for her, she had drowned, just as he had intended.
In his rampage, Eyoab had killed thirty-three soldiers from the 3rd, nineteen engineers from the 2nd, and all of the remaining members of the 19th. The chain of command was decimated, albeit unintentionally on the traitor’s part, with the 3rd’s Captain Zanta now nominally in charge. However, now that Wivin had been outed as awakened, the men quickly forced the burden of command onto her. As she had no intention of turning back, the expedition, now consisting of herself, Zeki, sixty-one soldiers, and forty-seven engineers set off into the final ring of LM-92, which saw the dunes replaced with salt flats. The temperature soared even further, and all signs of life vanished. One by one, the men began to come down with heat stroke. Exacerbating the issue was their lack of water. In another cruel coincidence, Eyoab’s cutting fields had sliced open half of the expedition’s water tanks, leaving their supplies too low to adequately treat the heat’s victims. As an emergency measure, the 2nd set up the solar sills, even managing to make the contraptions mobile. Alas, so dry was the air that this setup produced scarcely a liter per day, all at the cost of slowing progress to a crawl. When the number of unconscious men hit thirty, the majority of the lucid engineers, a group of twenty, broke off, hoping to return to the oasis. This proved to be comically ill-timed, as the next day the main force stumbled upon a much larger, more verdant one of their own. Per the scouting report—which had said the final ring was supposed to be a mesa—the inner cluster and the colony’s site were only a three day’s march away, a fact that left Wivin in very high spirits. Beatific, she allowed the men two days of rest. Many of the incapacitated men began to recover, limiting the number of dead to just six poor souls.
During this rest, Zeki’s fever broke, returning him to lucidity. Most of the men had written him off, ready to abandon the first minister. His revival consequently led to something vaguely resembling a celebration, for what else could this miracle signal but a changing of their fortunes for the better? Zeki did not remember anything of the past few days; in fact, he scarcely remembered anything after the mountains. As the survivors recounted the chaotic massacre at the previous oasis, he remained silent. When their tale finished, the first minister dismissed the men and sought out Wivin. He found her conferring with Zanta and the newly appointed acting officers, a rather pathetic group with no real logistical experience, discussing the approach that the expedition would take for the last march. Wivin remained in control even now that Zeki was alert; had she suggested that they march backwards, naked, while singing sea shanties, the fearful men would have obeyed. While she did not wish to be a tyrant, her advisors were not in any meaningful way able to assist her decision-making. (In contrast, if a firefight broke out, they were some of the best men Nulvatch could field.)
When she saw the first minister, Wivin concluded the planning meeting, sending the officers away. The two exchanged a few pleasantries largely related to Zeki’s health. He asked about the meeting and what had been decided for their journey’s final leg; she rather frankly replied that they would have to wing it—after all, everyone who knew better was dead. The pair lapsed into an awkward silence. After a minute, Zeki asked, “You’re not a slave, are you?” Decently potent awakened beings simply weren’t sold as chattel, or at least not to minor powers such as Nulvatch. For that matter, Zeki had never been wholly satisfied with the reasoning behind the slaver’s only sending one individual. Was the Khumori luminad even real, or was she perhaps a full-on spirit whose form passed for a luminant? And more importantly, why was she here? His first inclination was that she was a saboteur, likely sent by the countess’s enemies, but that did not fit with her decision to subdue Eyoab. Similarly, she was far too assertive to be a spy. If she were not here for malicious purposes, however, then why the deception? Had the actual colonists simply not arrived, yet she had wanted to proceed along with the expedition regardless? The questions, partially accusatory and partially stemming from genuine confusion, poured forth for several minutes.
Wivin would not answer, instead merely assuring the man that all would be explained when they reached the colony.
The expedition arrived at the hub of LM-92 without incident. There, the environment returned to that of a desert, albeit a quite cold one. There were no dunes, for the air was perfectly still. Jagged, stony outcroppings jutted out at irregular intervals, their color a lifeless grey that matched the sand. Overall, it looked more like a lunar surface than a terrestrial biome. Most disconcerting was the sky. On the one hand, it looked like a perfectly normal if perpetually overcast one; on the other, it was also a black void, but one altogether alien and not at all like a starless night sky. These two existed simultaneously in a type of superposition, albeit in an unequal manner: the dull, cloudy sky somehow seemed to be the original, the natural state of affairs. Although both were visible at the same time, they were not in any way mixed together, each simultaneously and distinctly being perceived, almost as if the grey sky was being seen in one eye and the void in the other. There were apparently two competing realities, with the barrier between them having grown so thin as to allow effects to cross over. Zeki, upon hearing this last analogy, realized that it was, in fact, quite literal. It was not a barrier but the Barrier that was weak here; the alternate sky was the Miasmic Plane. The alien blackness was the eponymous miasma, trying to break through and churn their reality into a pulp.
Wivin ceased using the scouting report to navigate and instead started moving in the direction that the Barrier was weakest. Presumably, this would lead to the epicenter of the phenomenon, which either was or had recently been a proper breach. Before he could even think through the implications, however, Zeki retrieved the discarded survey and saw to his horror that they were still, in fact, approaching the intended site of the colony. Was that the conclusion of this sorry tale—that the promised destination had been swallowed by a storm of miasma? In that case, they had been marching towards a mirage, although ever since they had seen the dunes of the second layer that had never truly been in doubt. Still, while the shard that would have housed the colony was certain to bear little resemblance to the harsh but inhabitable locale that the scouts had described, the expedition might have been salvaged so long as the place was at least slightly conducive to permanent habitation. A breach offered no such possibility. Not even the countess would disagree.
The expedition reached the colony’s planned location after a few hours’ march. As they approached, the thinning Barrier allowed the alien blackness to grow more prominent, eclipsing the natural sky, which became nearly unnoticeable. However, the barrier never completely failed. At the weakest point the expedition found a rather grisly scene: over one hundred corpses, arranged in a circle. They all wore Nulvatch uniforms, many complete with dog tags identifying them as from the 3rd and the 19th, along with a handful from the 2nd and eleven from the 108th, although that seemed impossible—the medical attachment had been wiped out by the Brass Mink, hadn’t it? These bodies were undamaged, all with their eyes open, staring vacantly into space. At the center of the circle were five more corpses: the lost scouting party. They were, in contrast, mutilated quite severely, warped by miasma. Surrounding the survivalists was a formation of concentric circles inscribed with what Zeki thought to be Meti-Thiarofani script. The party must have attempted a Giyometiri ritual and botched it severely enough to create the quasi-breach.
After the scene had been thoroughly examined, Wivin marched forward, raised her hand, and transformed it into its stinger-claw form. She then shattered a glamor, revealing the dragon. It was on the other side of the Barrier and consequently could not physically reach anyone. Probably. However, the beast looked to be in no shape to even try. Ethereal burns covered its body, and the search lights coming from its many eyes flickered, as if nearly broken. The dragon moved about sluggishly, and it appeared pained. Had Rahel still been alive, she would have noted that it looked far worse off than it had after its failed attempt on Zeki’s life. Of course, she was not there to clarify, and most of the Nulvatchers ran, reforming on the perimeter around the circle of corpses. Only a few such as Captain Zanta had the wherewithal to realize that they were in no danger. Zeki remained as well, albeit out of depressed resignation.
Wivin walked over to where the dragon’s head was floating. Finding it to be scared of her, she asked the remaining men to surround it, hoping to corral it into place. When this rather miraculously worked, she reached her clawed hand up to its face. With a sound akin to a vacuum breaking, her hand passed through the barrier, and she grasped the beast’s snout. It made a pathetic whimpering noise (mixed with a hiss, obviously) but made no effort to resist. Wivin let out a pulse that rippled through the beast. The dragon began to dissolve; after a few minutes, it was gone entirely, leaving behind nothing but a mundane snake, a desert viper likely native to LM-92, wrapped around Wivin’s claw. She drew her hand back through the barrier, taking the viper along. The snake was covered in burns, just as the dragon had been, but was still alive. She put it down in the grey sand, and it slithered away, never to bother anyone again.
Wivin gave Zeki the explanation she had promised him. She was a specialist of sorts. A divine spirit, she was rather distantly related to some liminal deity, although certainly not Iehnu. This granted her some minor ability to cross the Barrier, albeit not enough to serve as a planar ship’s anchor or shielder. (Dragging the viper across had actually been quite strenuous.) Hoping that her capabilities might expand with time, she spent much of her youth apprenticed to various sailors on vessels of low repute. Her dedication paid off on one journey when the ship’s shielder, in a momentary lapse of judgement, accidentally allowed a lone wisp aboard. Before the defenses could be mobilized, Wivin stumbled across the miasmic being and disrupted it with ease. Again, she lacked the might of a proper defender, but she found a niche dually serving as a person of last resort for managing miasmic incursions and as an assistant to the anchor or shielder. For almost a century, she made an acceptable living serving on ships too small or too poor (or too cheap) to fill these roles separately. This period of her life came to an abrupt end when, while serving aboard a much larger vessel, the shielder failed entirely, bathing the craft in miasma. Throughout this catastrophe, Wivin found herself able to resist the various mind-altering effects of the miasma. At the time, she dismissed this as a mere curiosity, a new item to place on her resume. However, the Hands Of Fate took a much greater interest. They “offered” her a job not a week after the incident, directing her to a far-flung shard with scarcely one thousand inhabitants. A Barrier breach had occurred, and the locals were not up to the task of containing it. Wivin dealt with the situation single-handedly, with her mental defenses and miasmic disruption enabling her to freely use her liminal abilities to speed the breach’s repair. Her employers were impressed and rewarded her handsomely, although they never did explain the importance of such a remote incident. This became her new career, in which she served for almost three centuries.
A decade ago, Wivin’s thoughts turned towards her legacy. She had no interest in leaving progeny, nor did she wish to found a clan or claim a demesne. Politics actively repulsed her, as did the business world. Instead, she found herself drawn to the idea of creating a new sapient race; thus she dreamt up the Khumori. Their name came from her mangling the Uzbek word chumoli, meaning ant, for that was what she wished to create: ants—or any eusocial members of Hymenoptera—of human intelligence. As is the case with most things, the Hands Of Fate came to know of her ambitions. Since Wivin had always been an exemplary agent, they were quite supportive, even going so far as to start paying her in the resources necessary to craft a species. However, when the Nulvatcher scouts disappeared, the Hands changed track and offered her a different opportunity: she could instead create a new luminad. In exchange, all Wivin had to do was handle one more breach. Her target was quite atypical, for it was no longer even a proper breach—the Barrier had already resealed. It was also quite near to major population centers and quite far from her location. All she needed to do was neutralize a corrupted beast that was just potent enough to reach through the weakened Barrier. The creature primarily operated by subsuming its prey into an antimemetic field, which was uncommon, but it was hardly something she was uniquely qualified for. However, questioning the Hands Of Fate was always a losing proposition. Wivin accepted the proposal and set out for her new target.
The situation proved to be a good deal more challenging than it had appeared. The people who had caused the rift—namely, the Nulvatchers—had taken meticulous notes on the surrounding region since sending their first summary back, and the Hands provided copies of these. Thus, when Wivin first arrived, she felt confident enough to plunge into LM-92 on her own. She turned back when she saw a storm of miasma, presumably left over from the breach, dragging the maw’s teeth up into the sky. She made a second attempt a month later, this time having brought a considerable amount of wilderness survival gear along. She made it a week into the newly-created dunes before turning back. She simply wasn’t a skilled enough survivalist; she needed an escort. She did not have adequate funds on her to make such a hire, so she began the torturous process of transferring a portion of her wealth to her location. As the Imperial banking system was understandably non-functional, this took—or rather would have taken—almost two more years. Luckily, Eyoab then arrived at the safe camp, giving Wivin the idea to travel with the Nulvatch Colonial Expeditionary Unit. However, the expedition had no colonists: either the slavers had stiffed Zeki, or the shipment had been lost in the Empire’s civil war. Thinking quickly, Wivin broke into the camp and assumed the role of her promised luminad, all before Eyoab realized the situation.
When the expedition began its journey into LM-92, Wivin immediately noticed the dragon. It remained too far beyond the Barrier for her to take any direct action, but she could observe it almost perfectly. She was most bemused when the creature’s mere gaze left the divinely awakened Nulvatchers terrified. She was decidedly less amused when the dragon demoned away the 108th’s survivors. If it was attacking the medical team first, it had to be somewhat intelligent. However, Wivin also saw a weakness in the creature: it had not just subsumed the victims antimemetically. Prior to removing the bodies, it had feasted on their minds. In other words, it was an infovore. Since it never went after the expedition’s books, manuals, or notes, it likely ate thoughts. That in turn meant that she might be able to poison it with delirium. Speculating that it would eventually target Zeki, Wivin used the toxic snow as cover to induce a slow, simmering, and decidedly unnatural brain fever in the man. This gambit proved successful beyond her wildest expectations, although she proved less successful at protecting the rest of the expedition; and she was taken completely unawares by the dragon’s frenzied counterattack through Eyoab. Wivin had been loath to reveal her potency, as she did not wish to raise the beast’s suspicions, but her hand was forced. (Pun definitely intended, Zeki felt.) The rest was public knowledge.
Zeki was not pleased to learn of how the expedition had been used. However, he also recognized that Wivin had saved at least some portion of the force. In the counterfactual where she had not intervened, then—after they obtained new colonists—the Nulvatchers would surely have perished at the dragon’s hands. Moreover, getting angry at an agent of the Hands Of Fate was like yelling at gravity: cathartic but ultimately meaningless. He asked what her immediate plans were. She clarified that she would be staying. As she saw things, LM-92 would be a fine home for the Khumori. Zeki graciously decided to gift her the supplies for the colony; that way, he could also say that the colony had been established. He and Zanta began to prepare to depart. Before they left, however, Zeki realized he had one more question. By any chance, did Wivin know yet what was specifically involved in creating a luminad? She laughed—of course not!
The expedition, unencumbered by the supply train, departed LM-92 far more quickly than it had entered. They found the group of engineers that had split off waiting safely at the first oasis. There, the Nulvatchers took a few days to rest and to make an acceptable memorial to Rahel. They then made short work of the rest of the dunes, as well as of the teeth. The survivors squared their accounts with the safe camp and set out for Nulvatch. There were a mere one hundred and two of them left, excluding Zeki. The Empire was still in utter chaos: while the Brass Mink had sacked Dädeu, Emperor Kairon had defied tradition and escaped death. Moreover, no longer facing the strategic genius of General Siung, the Glass Willow Front had regrouped. On the other side of the Empire, the rebels had organized into no less than three major factions. As such, Zeki and the expedition took the long way around again. For the next six months, Zeki refused to look up any news about Nulvatch. He had come to accept that Rahel’s prognosis was correct. If the situation was going to escalate, it would have already done so. He was too late to help the county and wanted to remain blissfully unaware of the carnage that must surely have followed.
When the team reached Atarage and the Directorate, Zeki braced himself for a deluge of terrible news too voluminous to avoid. Curiously, however, Nulvatch was not mentioned; people were much more interested that the Director of Kwei had joined in with the Yellow Cactus Alliance. As he moved farther away from the Imperial border, the news shifted to infighting within the Directorate, in particular the neverending squabble about increasing the number of refugee sites. Within the Liminal Kingdom, coverage shifted further still to the recent marriage of the Duchess of Mellyure and the Duke of Croanidge. Even at Nulvatch’s border itself, the county remained hidden from the public eye. Zeki wasn’t sure what that could mean—was there a gag order of some kind? Had the realm been wiped off the map, reduced to an uninhabited wasteland? Eventually, he decided there was no point in speculating. At the very least, he didn’t need to negotiate passage through a blockade.
The expedition passed into Nulvatch, and Zeki found nothing to be amiss. He was even greeted by the same border guards who had seen him off, although they were beyond horrified at how few survivors there were. Indeed, almost everything was unchanged, for there had been no invasion. Contrary to what the countess had instilled in her subjects’ minds, her opponents weren’t as heartless as she was, and their humanitarian concerns were genuine. As such, when the blockade hadn’t worked, the coalition decided to forego a traditional military operation, opting instead for a risky decapitation strike. The various barons, counts, and dukes of the CLPN personally took action, infiltrating the county in the dead of night. They made their way to the capitol and overwhelmed the countess, summarily neutralizing her. Shocked by the suddenness of the strike, the people, indoctrinated as they were, found themselves unmotivated to resist. The matter was finished three days later when the countess recovered cohesion: rather than mount a resistance, she fled. Ultimately, only thirty-two people died. Scarcely a month later, the Liminal King appointed one of his descendants, a third-generation spawn named Yotruxhes, as the new count. They had since ruled benevolently, allowing many of Nulvatch’s officials to retain their positions. Zeki was even still the first minister, nominally.
When Zeki presented himself to Count Yotruxhes, the latter commended him for his perseverance. The two discussed the catastrophe, coming to a number of conclusions: Rahel was posthumously promoted two ranks, the survivors were to be given a living wage, and so on. Zeki, however, made a most curious request: he wished for a year’s sabbatical. The count was perplexed by this (they had assumed Zeki would retire) but consented. During this vacation of sorts, Zeki studied, trying to gain a basic literacy on the topic of the luminous folk. When he finished this task, he wrote a pamphlet entitled “Implications of the Nulvatch Colonial Expedition on the Question of the Origins of the Luminous Folk,” which he forwarded to the journal Eyoab had published his original list in. The new report baffled the philosophers: it was too thorough to be satire but hinged on outlandish details. (That the new count vouched for Zeki seemingly meant little.) Four years later, however, the Khumori ventured forth from LM-92 and made their debut on the universe’s stage. Thereafter, Zeki’s article gained a much larger readership.