Ansae wanted nothing to do with Fate weaponry.

Her Slate told a story that was enlightening and terrifying both. Depletion was bad enough, but at least now there was a way to deal with it. Blue had some way yet to go before she could benefit from it, but his growth was impressive enough that she was confident that all she needed to do was wait. Still, he kept particularly strange and dangerous company, even more than she’d expect from a Power.

She included herself in that, too. He’d arrived almost literally on her doorstop, when she’d put herself in a quiet spot an entire ocean away from the mage-kings. Yes, he had to do a lot of digging to get to her, but it was still strange. Admittedly, it made sense that the mage-kings would come here first if they were to leave their shattered archipelago – it was the closest landmass, and Tarnil was due almost west along the best wind. That was why she was here; it was the closest safe spot after she’d been quite thoroughly thrashed for her hubris. Centuries later, she was only barely recovered.

But who would have guessed that there was a Fate-fueled weapon in this very country? It wasn’t surprising that a Tier Five would leave behind some Artifact or another, but that particular one was more potent than most. It was a little bit humbling to run into something that a Tier Three could wield and was actually a danger to her. Just a reminder that the world just kept turning up new things to be wary of.

If the circumstances were less regrettable, she would take the Fortress herself. Not just because it was powerful and an Artifact, and therefore a worthy addition to her hoard, but because it was far too dangerous for short-sighted mortals to wield. Kingdoms and empires rose and fell all the time, but a weapon that consumed Fate Affinity mana and then wielded it to destruction was something that left permanent scars on the world. In a thousand years it wasn’t likely Tarnil would exist, even with Blue helping it along, but the changes wrought by the Fortress would.

It wouldn’t be the first overly dangerous toy she’d taken away from mortals who posed more of a threat to the integrity of the world than they realized.

By contrast, the massive effort by Blue to undo the damage done was more impressive than he seemed to think. It was one thing to apply force in a personal manner, to destructive effect. True, few individuals could match her in that regard, but almost anyone could manage some degree of carnage if they were properly motivated. Taking personal control of thousands of square miles of mana-wracked and mana-ruined land and forcing it to work again was something else.

True, he had dungeon biology on his side, and a Bargain that had given him the foundation, but the sheer scale and complexity was breathtaking. It also had rather unsubtly shoved Blue’s pure mana and high density into the land and its people, which would have interesting effects over the next century. Century and a day, to be exact.

She had to admire the flourish. Even after all this time she wasn’t certain such things made a Bargain work better, but they certainly felt right. Some Powers didn’t bother, of course, but they flamed out and died with alarming regularity. Of course, compared to her, most things died with alarming regularity.

She would far rather that Blue hadn’t dealt in such a Bargain at all. Both because it was a strange one by her standards, becoming a kingdom, and because it bound him in place and behavior. If the mage-kings came by again it’d be impractical to simply take him and go, because who knew what breaking that Bargain would do to Blue. Not to mention that it kept him from being as aggressive an agent as he really needed to be, now that there was some breathing room.

For example, if she were in Blue’s place, she would have been far more aggressive with punishing The Hurricane. Maybe the rest of her family, too, considering how complicit they were in moving against him. Blue was rather less wrathful, which could be a problem but could also pay off. In this case, gaining him a servant to do things he couldn’t, even with all his reach. Nor would she have tied herself to Tarnil beyond a single act, just because of the danger of investing in that uncertain a future.

But any advice would have to be delicately placed. Blue wasn’t about to abandon Iniri, which she applauded in theory though perhaps not in the exact execution. Friends and allies were useful, but should be acquired with understanding and discretion. She didn’t think was exercising enough of either, but she needed him as a friend and ally, which meant letting him make decisions she didn’t agree with. That approach was more coldly calculating than most would prefer, but many mortals didn’t apply enough calculation to the warmer emotions that bound fellow creatures together.

Out of all the various beings and Powers she’d run into, she would have expected an Artifact and a Dungeon to be on the side of ruthlessness and cold logic, rather than being soft-hearted if not actually soft-headed. Of course, if he were then he wouldn’t have chosen the odd and convoluted path that gave him the ability to remove Depletion and gain Companions. Not to mention the special knowledge he had was of the wholly and fully rational variety, making his emotional side even more unusual. Ansae was pretty sure that disconnect was an intrinsic part of the riddle of Blue.

She mused over her Slate, manipulating it simply by circulating her mana through her claws – no actual expenditure needed. It was one of the most unusual artifacts that she’d acquired over the ages, and considering her collection that was really saying something. It recorded every battle in history, all on its own. There was no divination involved, and she’d checked. Instead it seemed to tap into the nature of mana itself, and its all-pervasive presence.

There was certainly some aspect of mana that held knowledge. Classes and Skills, once created by some enterprising soul, recurred frequently, and any technique could be stumbled onto and refined without any help from the original master. The only ones that were ever truly lost were the ones tied to bloodlines, such as Lineage Skills, and since those were effectively fifth-tier Skills to begin with it wasn’t like they were in common use. This dimension of knowledge, the Akasha, was almost impossible to tap into aside from Status, but Artifacts were things that tended to bend the rules.

She’d noticed something fairly odd when she was reviewing the conflict between Iniri and the monster army, something that had gotten her thinking about Blue’s knowledge. It was all stuff that was not in Classes or Skills or otherwise demonstrated anywhere she’d seen, which meant it was private to just him. For example, when she’d looked at the battle it had said that a dungeon had killed monsters with a trap. Just that. A trap. She knew for certain he’d used his light-weapons, even if it was not to great effect, and those were not any sort of trap by any sane standards.

For reference she decided to dig into the past, to see when the Fortress had been used before. Specifically, when its weapon had been used before. She was half surprised she hadn’t heard of such a weapon being deployed, but Tarnil was in a relatively quiet corner of the world. The devastation in the northern wastes was impressive, but very contained, so perhaps it was little surprise that it hadn’t crossed her attention.

It took a little bit of effort, but being near where the battle took place helped, as did knowing that the name of the artifact she was looking for was the Adamant Fortress. The Slate had a rather obtuse method to its organization, but by this time she was used to its foibles and it only took her a few hours to coax it into displaying its records of the War Of Nine Kingdoms.

Of the nine, of course Tarnil and Haerlish and Nivir and Orrelin had all survived. The other five kingdoms had been lost to history, either at the time or later on, weakened by having their Classers decimated by the weapon. She also found the name of the weapon, which was more than a little ominous. [The Light of Eschaton] had warning signs in the very name, and Skills and Abilities didn’t get terrifically overdone names. She would say they didn’t get ambiguous ones either, except for the fact that some of Blue’s really were.

Of course, Blue’s Status was aberrant in many respects.

She wasn’t too interested in the details of the battle itself, since she’d started with the outcome and she didn’t much care about any of the mortal powers, but she did want to check on the types of details it showed. Skills and Abilities used. The names of combatants. Who killed whom, which was quite interesting when it came to [The Light of Eschaton]. They weren’t listed as killed but ended, which was a nomenclature unusual for the Slate. Like the names of Skills and Classes, the words mattered.

When she started combing the histories further, she found that by contrast dungeons were very poorly represented. She was pretty sure that the monsters inside Great Dungeons did fight, and that it might rise to the level of a battle. Not to mention the enormous parties of Classers that went forth on occasion to try and tame the various levels of the Dungeons, to mixed success.

But the Slate recorded none of that. Even the Classer incursions only recorded fight against monsters, with at most only a description by species and level. It was only those with Classes or a very expansive species line that made a habit of learning Skills – like dragons – that merited proper inclusion. She had some very expansive entries, which was actually one reason she’d gone to the lengths of tracking the Slate down. It made it extraordinarily difficult for an immortal like her, one with a proclivity for violence, to move about with any privacy.

Though she’d put a lot of effort into her research with magic, dungeons hadn’t much figured in her investigations. They certainly produced enormous amounts of mana and had their own mana structures, but had nothing of the scale and complexity of structured casting. They were more like mana springs writ large, and the core of the dungeon was buried deep under miles and miles of hostile, mana-rich territory. Dungeon monsters had long been completely unthreatening, but the one time she’d gone digging in a Great Dungeon, just to see what was down there, she’d gotten deep enough that she should have come out the other side of the planet before turning back. Quite aside from possibly pissing off the gods if she did too much damage to one, even she didn’t want to deal with that much territory turning hostile on her.

The holes the Slate left led to a certain conclusion, which was to be Dungeons had some sort of special exemption from the Akasha. Dungeons specifically, since even Artifacts didn’t. When she did divinations on her own Artifacts, they accrued their own history as if they were people. Shayma’s ring was already starting the process. Until now, she hadn’t given much thought to the fact that Dungeons were unnaturally resistant to divinations, ascribing it to the natural circumstance of generating so much mana. Now she was suspicious that it was a side effect of whatever special dispensation Dungeons had.

It might also be why Blue’s Skill and Ability descriptions were so bad.

But it was ultimately reassuring, because it meant that Blue’s potentially extremely dangerous knowledge would be relatively contained. She’d already noted [Blue’s Armament of Light], which would either evolve into a more normal Skill or be retained as a Skill to be given at Blue’s leisure, but wouldn’t turn into the scaling destructive technique Blue had demonstrated. Of course, Blue’s technique didn’t carry the weight of light Affinity mana and was susceptible to certain types of defense, but there was no such thing as a perfect attack.

That said, offensive knowledge wasn’t the only kind he had. For example, he was making a brand new lodestone out of nothing as she watched, by employing storm mana of all things, without any apparent regard for how Storm and Metal usually interacted. The Hurricane seemed to be too absorbed in her pique to notice what a tremendously rulebreaking thing was going on, which was good. Not that Ansae thought the ability to make lodestones at whim was particularly dangerous, but if she didn’t understand how it worked it was hard to make that judgement.

“I shouldn’t be surprised you can just make lodestones. How does that even work?” The question came out unbidden.

“That’s more of that knowledge you told me not to tell you.” That was obvious, and she had to suppress the urge to roll her eyes at his reply. “I’m probably going to be doing more of it in the future, too. Not like I can do Spells, and since it seems like I can give things I make to Companions in some ways, best to make as much as I can.”

“Mmm. You’re right, but it’s a little disconcerting.” Disconcerting, but exciting. Especially since it was so simple. She could probably reproduce the process, just from watching. Unlike his anvil, which was very firmly and clearly in the realm of his Power and nothing else. She didn’t understand how it worked, she’d never seen the stuff it made, and if it were anyone else it would be an Artifact itself. But he could make as many as he wanted. It was like he’d reached into something fundamental and pulled it out to play with.

It reminded of her own, Primal mana that way.

“I can casually do magic that most mortals can’t dream of, yet you casually do things I didn’t know were possible.” It was such a strange reversal that she had to wonder if Blue had been something like her, before. “It’s wonderful. Clearly there’s an entire world of knowledge I hadn’t stumbled across yet, and I do want to sink my teeth into it.”

“Well, at some point I do have some advice on that,” Blue said, which pricked her instincts. Knowledge about knowledge was the most valuable thing of all. “It’s going to have to wait until I get a few things done though,” he continued. “Maybe a lot of things done.” Which was fair enough. He had a country to deal with, and to judge by his efforts with the Hurricane, he was giving more thought about how to bend his unique knowledge to his advantage.

In the meantime, she was going to start exploring the direction that Blue’s very oddities suggested. Whether it was him in particular or dungeons in general, she’d stumbled on something she needed to chew over. The only problem was, she had to be very cautious. Blue’s fruits did restore a few points per day, but it would be easy to sink several thousand points of mana into such a project and there was nothing worse than wanting to do something and being completely unable to.

That sort of annoyance was why she usually napped, instead.

But a few points per day was more than the fractional regeneration she had before. She accessed her hoard, the runes writ into her very bones and needing barely more than a thought to activate. By now it actually had more spoils than would fit into a small city, with precious metals in both bar and coin form, entire libraries of books, weapons, armor, artifacts, and curios that most collectors wouldn’t even recognize.

The extensive runework let her mind flit through her hoard with little enough effort. There was one divination set that wouldn’t even fit into the current lair, massive columns meant to be laid out in precise patterns and empowered over time. She’d used them once, to track down every last member of a particularly rotten family where they’d fled and hid like cockroaches from their proper judgement. It was tempting to try and use them, especially since Blue’s ridiculous mana density meant they could probably charge up on their own, but if her suspicions were correct it’d just be a waste of time.

She didn’t need power, she needed subtlety. If Blue and the other Dungeons had some special exemption, they’d be visible as holes in the records of history. It would also explain why she hadn’t noticed a new Power wakening right on top of her, not until he’d literally shoved his way into her lair. Even if she hadn’t been awake at the time, she had all sorts of senses that ought to have warned her about something like that coming so close. The mage-kings too, though to a lesser extent.

She pulled magic tools out of the hoard, most of them frustratingly sized for humans or demihumans. A few of them were from the Deep kingdoms, and even harder to handle. It was only the Dragon- and Leviathan-made ones that she could easily use without shifting. Fortunately, it was one of the Leviathan ones she needed first.

The Great Dungeons were not unknown in the sea, of course. The Leviathans were not very forthcoming about how they got in and out, or what they found, but they didn’t tackle the Dungeons without tools. No matter how mighty a species might be, proper equipment always made things better. She still had her old barding, from before she’d learned to scribe effects into her bones and her scales grew tougher than any magical material.

Until Firmament, anyway. She really wanted to get her claws on some of that. Now, she would probably have to learn to craft it with her own mana for her to be able to work it, but it would be well worth the investment. Indestructible was not a description that she saw very often.

The Leviathan tool was straightforward, but quite complex. It simply recorded everything, a complex construct of divination and mind magic, searching for the Status of anything nearby and, if one wasn’t found, constructing its own by observation and inference. The observation and inference of the mind using the tool, of course, as it wasn’t actually intelligent itself. But it did a lot of boring and annoying detail work, which was something Ansae was definitely a fan of.

The tool itself was a blue and pink disk the size of her paw, whirled and mottled and floating free to eagerly take up station between her wings. It was made by the Leviathan’s own strange processes, using corals grown together in strange and mana-rich waters at the bottom of the sea. Powerful and ancient minds had infused their intent into living matter at every step of the process, which had been reproduced faithfully by the corals and incorporated into the fundamental nature of the material. Compared to shaping and rune-stamping it was a slow and tedious process, but the quality of the result was beyond question.

The thing clicked into activity as she touched it with her own magic, feeding her its own observations of their surroundings. Ansae had most of the senses it mimicked already, and more powerful versions, but not all of them and especially not the cataloguing and comparison. She would need to keep it active and compare it what she found out through some of the other tools she’d gotten for her experiment.

There was a mirror, meant to bring up visions of the past, but only the past where the mirror was. It would be interesting to see if it could track down Blue’s origins. Then there was a pointing bone, modeled after [Seeker] and designed to point to hidden things. She’d have to test how well it worked with Blue, though she doubted it’d get far. The real [Seeker] used Fate Affinity mana, and even if dungeons were hidden from that, Blue certainly wasn’t as a Power.

Actually Ansae was a little bit jealous of that [Skill]. Fate was one of the Affinities that Ansae had very little ability to use herself really only being able to access it through Bargains. Mostly because her experiments with it had wound up showing her that it wasn’t a good idea to cast freely. Having it rebound and take out all her bone-inscribed protections had not been a pleasant experience.

She flipped the bone, asking for Blue’s core, and got nothing. Asking for the greatest mana density still worked, so long as she blocked her own presence, which was an interesting loophole. The compass she’d seen the adventuring idiots use worked on the same principle, pointing to mana gradients that usually denoted the next level down in a dungeon. With Blue’s lack of levels, that gradient still went directly to his core. It also amused her to know she still had a greater density, even with all the excess mana Blue was spilling out into the world. Of course, if Blue did start having a higher density than her, it’d be simplicity itself for her to match it, since she could just eat the excess. Being a thaumovore came with a great number of benefits.

While she was at it, she decided to check on what could be divined of the mage-kings. Though she knew roughly what they were and what they were capable of, it was always better to know more about an enemy, and it would be instructive to see what their dungeon connection blocked. While she could have performed the divination with her own magic, she wasn’t completely certain that it would be safe so she picked up the next tool.

The rune-scribed circle of stone was carved out of some dungeon rock, which was an amusing bit of irony. But the Great Dungeons were the best source of mana-transmuted material, capable of holding and channeling all kind of Affinities. She energized it with a tiny trickle of mana, a silver film snapping into existence within the circle. It was one of her favorites, actually, since unlike a lot of divination it simply showed what was going on where she pointed it. No further connection, no messing around with the past or trying to puzzle probabilities from the future.

She started with Tor Kot, since it was far simpler to know the name of her target. Not to mention that she’d actually caught a glimpse of him when he’d arrived in Blue’s audience chamber, though she hadn’t wanted to draw attention to herself. She’d always made certain she never caught herself thinking she was invulnerable, because that was a sure way to wind up dead, but actually being afraid of someone was depressing. Hopefully she’d be rid of that weakness soon.

The silver circle fuzzed, rippling waves bouncing from one end to the other as it tried to find the subject of her interest. For someone as powerful as Tor Kot, she would expect both blocks on scrying and for his natural mana density to offset those blocks. If nothing else she ought to be able to feel out the edges of whatever warding field he was using.

Nothing crystallized for a while. That wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was still impressive that he had good enough wards to lock her out for so long, even if she was using a tool and was thus maybe less of a deft touch than she could be. From what little she’d seen of Tor Kot, he was the intelligent sort of madman, so it was conceivable that he used strong anti-scry protections all the time.

Even if his wards were strong or clever, she had a few thousand years on him so it didn’t take all that long before the silver calmed and she had a view of Tor Kot. It seemed he was over the ocean, standing at the helm of a flying ship. Those things had always amused her. There were a number of ways to fly magically, but any time it was done without proper wings it always struck her as a little pathetic. Still, it was an extraordinarily large vessel, packed with his mantis monsters and, she was sure, bearing his extra dungeon cores.

As she had suspected, it was impossible to locate the cores themselves by simply designating them as a target. It took shifting the scry through the actual vessel to locate them, packed up in a cargo hold and glowing a soft red. They weren’t completely exposed, each one having a plug of stone at the top and the bottom, anchoring each of them into the ship. For all she knew, the dungeon cores were helping power it, since it seemed the entire ship was a magical item and was simply being operated by Tor Kot’s monsters.

Unfortunately he wasn’t doing anything interesting, simply steering the ship as he headed back toward the Shattered Archipelago. It was tempting to keep an eye on him just to make sure he wasn’t trying anything duplicitous, or to see what he told the others, but it was far too boring to hold her attention. Besides, Blue clearly had some divinatory abilities and likely could keep an eye on Tor Kot on his own.

She put away the disc and combed through her hoard for another tool, one she actually knew how to make because of how valuable it was. Called a libram, it was simply a slab of metal that held dozens of surfaces within it, ready for inscription with writing or low-powered runes. Anything too potent would break the intricate spatial constructs, but she mostly used it in lieu of anything so flimsy and volatile as paper.

Ansae pulled the libram from storage and started scribing it with a clawtip. It was nice to have a project again, though there was every possibility she wouldn’t have time to follow through. Once Blue started getting known, it was inevitable that her presence would be revealed as well. She didn’t have much to fear from anyone that was not a mage-king wielding depletion – or at least, wouldn’t normally. If she had to deal with problems continuously, though, it could wear her down. To say nothing of the collateral damage to Blue.

While she was thinking about it, she pulled out another libram. It had been a very long time since she’d worried about setting up serious defenses. When she was hiding, what she’d inscribed on the interior of her cave was meant for just that, hiding her presence. Anything powerful enough to slow down the type of adversary who worried her would have been a glaring great beacon for anyone who knew how to look.

For now Blue was helping mask her aura, mostly because he had so much mana himself, but as he drew more attention it would probably swing back the other way. Not being able to scry or find Blue directly, they’d focus on his location and find her instead. Not to mention the bits and pieces of unresolved business that were still around all these centuries later, which would be inevitably drawn to her once she became known once more. She had to be ready for them.

The libram listed runes, magical items, and Artifacts, though a good number of those were obsolete, taken over by what she’d graven on her own body. She’d learned things since the last time she’d gone through the process too, both subtle and overt changes to her approach and structure. Pragmatically, the most important part would be Blue, since he would provide the initial foundation for every other layer of defense. It was the normal effect of a Power to draw in events around them, and one she could use to her advantage if she were careful. Especially once she became known as well. She’d have to sift opportunities from threats and spot the enemies that would surely swarm in, but there’d certainly be things in the inevitable chaos worth keeping.

Ansae stretched out on the grass and started to work, looking forward to the day when she could actually step back outside.