“And so Otharo said ‘No longer need you fear the darkness, for the fires of Prometheus shall light your way.’ And, lo, did the flames of the gods appear, so that the people would not fear the shadows along their path...”

Blake puttered about as Samanta read from the Writ of Otharo, listening with half his mind while he inspected a series of high overhead views of the border between Otharia and Eterium. A series of gray dots scurried over the terrain below. Each dot was a scout skitter patrolling the border, its path and timing coordinated to cover the maximum area while being as unpredictable as possible.

These skitters were just one facet of the border security system Blake had created after his latest near-death experience. The ultimate goal was as simple as it was ambitious: to close off the border from foreigners absolutely, allowing not a single soul to enter Otharia without his knowledge and permission. The people who’d nearly killed him this last time had surely come from outside Otharia. If they had been Otharians they would have struck sooner to save their country, when he was weaker and less established. This felt like the actions of an outside power, one that had decided he'd become more than just a silly curiosity. Specifically, it sounded like Eterium.

The Republic of Eterium just made sense. They were the largest power on the continent. They were the only country to share a border with Otharia and the only one that really had anything to fear from Otharia growing in power. They’d stolen chimirin during the fall of the old Otharia, which the assassins had used. And the poison on the one assassin’s knife was an obscure poison that only Eterium had access to. There were just too many coincidences for Blake to come to any other conclusion.

He wasn’t about to give them, or anybody else, a second chance. Dozens of flitter drones hovered high above the border, keeping a tireless watch over every inch of the border with a combination of sensors that covered both the visible light and infrared spectrum. The skitters down below were the muscle, investigating anything the flitters picked up as well as searching with their own sensors just in case. Between the two groups, nobody stood a chance of crossing the border unseen. At least, nobody above ground.

In a world where people had super strength or could just will rock to melt away like wax, Blake knew he could not ignore the likelihood that some group would try to tunnel their way past his blockade. That was why he’d also installed a series of “listening nodes”, as he liked to call them, designed to sense even the slightest of tremors below the ground. These nodes could sense somebody as deep as one hundred and fifty feet below the surface. That depth was more than enough; in his paranoia, Blake had drilled down into the earth and found that the water table for the border area was about one hundred to one hundred and twenty feet below ground.

Otharia was surrounded by water on eighty-five percent of the country, with that last fifteen percent being a relatively thin connection with Eterium to the north-northwest, similar in Blake’s mind to how Spain stuck out from the bottom of France back on Earth. That meant he only had to concentrate on guarding fifteen percent of his borders, making the task far more feasible.

Still, the main reason any of this was possible was that Blake knew he didn’t have to worry one bit about guarding Otharia’s coasts. The oceans of Scyria were so deadly that nobody would ever make it to his shores. Massive leviathans lurked beneath the waves, large enough to swallow a cargo plane whole. Schools of smaller, ravenous fish capable of chewing their through wooden hulls made the coastal waters their home. The ocean here was so inhospitable that, as far as Blake understood, not a single culture had ever built up any sort of naval technology. There were no fishermen, no trading ships... not even fishing from land worked well because even when a fish was caught, the others in the school would almost always chew through the line. With all of that said, it made sense that one of the locals’ favorite expressions to tell somebody to fuck off and die was “go jump in the sea”.

Only thanks to those two facts was Blake able to create his border security system. Even just that much had required some repurposing and reassignment of existing robots, meaning his ability to monitor Otharia itself was now somewhat hampered. Regardless, Blake felt that the price was more than worth it and that it would pay for itself soon enough.

“Thank you, Sam. It’s time for bed.”

“But I want to keep reading,” the girl protested. Samanta enjoyed reading the Writ of Otharo and other old religious books for Blake more than almost anything else. Blake found this fact to be incredibly depressing. She likely felt the somewhat familiar passages to be comforting amidst the sweeping changes this past half-year that had swept her life away. He wished she enjoyed her studies as much as she enjoyed reading that trash. Still, she’d started actually trying to learn a while back, so he couldn’t ask for much more from her.

“And you can do it more tomorrow,” Blake replied. “But for now, it’s sleep time. Leave the book here. It’s old and delicate.”

Disappointed, the child put the book down on a nearby table and left, with Alpha, her metallic companion, clicking and clacking just behind her. Blake closed the door after they left, unconcerned with Samanta’s activities. He’d already sealed the fortress’s core for the night, and all that was in here was his rooms, her bedroom, and the lesson room, so there was nowhere else for her to go. If she wanted to walk up and down the hallway instead of sleeping, he didn’t care.

At least, not tonight. Tonight he was too tired to care, even more so than usual. Making his way to his bedroom, Blake lied down on his bed. His metal casing melted away and he fell into slumber in mere seconds.

*     *     *

Pain stormed through Blake’s body, roughly dragging him quite literally screaming back to consciousness. His body trembled and shook as he clenched his teeth. These fits were the hardest to deal with because unlike when he was awake, he didn’t have any warning that an episode was about to strike. He was never mentally prepared for the agony coursing through his veins. Still, he knew that just like any other, this wave would pass soon enough.

Less than a minute later it did. Blake opened his eyes to check the time and a curse escaped his lips. Only two hours since he’d fallen asleep? With an angry sigh, he closed his eyes again, willing himself to relax, but relaxation would not come. Blake rubbed his face and fought against the frustration building inside of him. He was getting stuck in a vicious cycle that had plagued him since college, where he’d try so hard to sleep that he’d keep himself awake, which fueled his frustration as he watched the time he had left for rest dwindle away, which only kept him awake longer. He knew what was happening, but even the knowledge didn’t make it easy to stop. An hour and two bathroom breaks later, Blake finally fell back asleep.

*     *     *

“You guys have something for headaches, right Leo? Please say yes.” Blake sat in the Council room the next morning, wishing he could take his helmet off to rub his head. But no, Leo was here, and the rest of his ministers were filing in as he spoke.

Last night had not been fun for Blake. After hours of falling asleep and waking and falling asleep again, he wasn’t sure exactly just how much sleep he’d gotten, only that it was nowhere near enough. Now not only did he feel tired, his head felt like it was going to crack open any second now.

“There are some teas that might help,” Leo said. “Should I have some prepared?”

“Yeah, after the meeting. Can’t hurt I guess,” Blake replied. He tapped his fingers against the metal table. “Let’s get this over with. There’s some important stuff to talk about so let’s get all the rest of it out of the way first.”

Quickly the group went through a variety of topics, from finances to agriculture to food storage. Little had changed on those fronts since the last meeting, which was good news as far as Blake was concerned.

“Leo, how much longer until we have toilets in every home in the city? This is taking far longer than I hoped.”

“My apologies, Lord Ferros. The task turned out to be far more chaotic than I initially assumed. I’ve doubled the men working on the property surveys.”

“Good, hurry it up. There’s no point in a sewer if the people can’t use it... actually, that gives me an idea. Porta potties!”

“Porta...?”

“Public toilets! I want you to find areas in public, well-trafficked places where we can put some stalls. Each will likely be about, I don’t know, five feet long and wide and perhaps seven feet tall? Something like that. We’re going to place them around the city and have people use them. That should get them comfortable with the toilets by the time they’re installed in their homes too. Hmmmmm, I guess that means we need to hire some people to clean them too...”

“That will, of course, add more expenses to the budget,” Finance Minister Zigmars Vietnieks chimed in. “At this rate, we will have to raise taxes by next spring.”

“Eh,” Blake said, brushing Zigmars’s concerns aside, “we’ll deal with that when we come to it. For now, we have something much more important to talk about. I’m sure you all know what I mean.”

A series of serious faces gave him his answer. He nodded to Simona Jumala, his overenthusiastic Minister of State. Even she seemed a little subdued today, for reasons that were quite understandable.

“According to the Eterians, Vlesa fell yesterday,” she said. “They have re-upped their pleas for our aid.”

Blake understood why they were begging for his help. According to the reports that had been filtering in the last few weeks, the Ubran Empire’s invasion was not going well for the home team. Rul had fallen almost immediately, with Nefin falling shortly thereafter, followed by the capital city of Lita.

“Now that Vlesa is no more, Gustil has been completely taken by the Ubrans,” Simona explained. “Now all that stops their armies from sweeping across the entire Republic of Eterium is Begale. They are desperate, my Lord. We could get much out of them in exchange for joining the fight.”

“Not happening,” Blake immediately stated, shooting the idea down immediately. “But it does leave us with an important set of decisions. The way I see it, the Empire has three main options once they take Begale, which at this rate will happen in just a few days. Either they will head straight for Crirada in the hopes that taking the Eterians’ capital will cut off the rest of the country for easy pickings, or they’ll hit the other cities first so they can concentrate on Crirada without needing to watch their backs, or they’ll just sweep across the country in a wave, hitting everything as they come to it. Two of those three options means trouble for us sooner than later, and at with how well the Ubrans are rolling, even if they focus just on Crirada that will probably just delay things a week or two at most. Either way, we’re about to have a lot of people heading our way.”

“If you are concerned about the Ubran armies, why not help stop them now?” asked Justice Minister Gunta Izkapts.

“I’m not worried about their armies,” Blake answered. “I have full confidence that they will never take Otharia while I’m alive. But I’m not talking about the Ubrans. I’m talking about the Eterians. Does anybody know how many people live in Obosall?”

Eterium had a city close to its border near each of the other countries except Stragma. They apparently referred to these cities as “gatekeeper cities” and used them to control the flow of goods between nations. Surprisingly, there was one even for Otharia: Obosall.

“It’s small for an Eterian city,” Simona replied. “But still a couple hundred thousand at least. And that isn’t counting smaller towns and villages in the area.”

“When the Ubrans close in, the vast majority of Obosall are heading our way,” Blake predicted. “The question is what we are going to do about it.”

“Hundreds of thousands of Elselings heading into this country?!” Minister Izkapts gasped in horror, before realizing her error. “I-I meant no offense, L-Lord Ferros-”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” Blake said darkly, fixing her with as withering a glare as he could manage with a mask over his face. “Don’t let me hear that word coming from your mouth again, or there will be consequences. That goes for all of you.” He leaned back in his chair. “That said, the public will likely react like you just did, except worse. Does anybody here believe that if the Eterians were let in, the people of this country would be able to handle it without panic, chaos, and violence?”

The silence around the table told him all he needed to know.

“Alright then, what if we were to let them camp near the border on the Eterian side?”

“They’d need food,” Fricis Upeslacis, Minister of Agriculture, said with a dismissive shake of his head. “We have enough food stored from the harvest to last us through the winter, but not enough to share with an entire extra city of people. There’s just not enough.”

“Do we have to help them at all?” Simona asked. “Why not just let them pet the beast they raised? They brought this on themselves, let them suffer for it.”

Right, Blake remembered, Simona had no love for the Eterians. Likely much if not all of the country harbored ill will towards their neighbors to the north. Centuries of being mocked and pushed around would do that.

“While I share your feelings, I don’t want hundreds of thousands of people dying on my doorstep,” Blake replied. “When those people get desperate, they’ll try something stupid like rushing the border en masse and I’ll have no choice but to shoot them. Then suddenly I’m the bad guy. Now does anybody have any suggestions that don’t involve the likely death of more than two hundred thousand people?”

The ministers looked at each other, but nobody spoke up. Blake sighed.

“Well, one way or another, they’re coming and I plan to be ready for them. I want a list of possible solutions ready for me within the next five days. And I want each of you to have gone over that list and prepare possible issues each solution might have with your area of expertise. Understood? Good. Meeting adjourned.” Blake stood up, fighting back a tired groan as he did so. “Leo, I’ll be in my quarters. Bring me some of that tea you were talking about.”

Walking back towards the fortress’s center, Blake couldn’t help but feel disappointed in the results of the meeting. He’d been hoping for somebody to provide a suggestion that would show him the way, but nothing had come. He was still stuck on square one.

The problem that Blake faced was that he didn’t know what, if anything, he should do about the whole situation—not just the refugees but the war as well. On the one hand, when Blake had told “I will enjoy watching you burn”, he’d meant every word. He felt no obligation whatsoever towards helping the same people who’d tried to kill him. That being said, he’d expected them to put up more of a fight. The ideal outcome, in his mind, had been the nation-equivalent of two drunk assholes beating the shit out of each other in an alley out behind a bar, and him standing off to the side enjoying the show. Once the two had taken enough damage, he could step in and end the fight whichever way he so desired.

That plan seemed out the window at this point. Now Blake had a host of new questions to deal with instead. Should he just sit back and watch Eterium fall to is doom, with Kutrad, Drayhadal, and maybe even Stragma to follow? If not, when should he step in? Did he even have the ability to stop the Ubrans with his current resources? What if he could, but it would require sending everything he had and opening up Otharia to attack? He didn’t have answers for any of these questions just yet, even though he’d been pondering them for a while now.

Blake couldn’t deny that being able to protect those people when the Eterians couldn’t do so would be a glorious middle finger to those asswipes, especially that stuck-up condescending Amatza Motrico. Yet he didn’t dare allow the refugees into Otharia, not only for the reasons expressed during the meeting but also for his own more paranoid ones. If he were in the Ubrans’ shoes, he would absolutely try to sneak as many undercover agents as possible within that group of people fleeing for their lives. Letting the refugees in would undermine the border security system into which he’d invested so much time, effort, and resources, and it would destroy the sense of security that he needed to function as a sane human being.

Ugh, his head wouldn’t stop aching. Leo couldn’t get here with that tea soon enough.

*     *     *

“Alright Sam, here’s the deal,” Blake said to his ward as they began their daily lesson. “I’m not feeling so hot right now and your country’s tea is nothing but snake oil and placebo, so we’re going to do something a bit different than normal. Today I want you to talk about the books you’ve been reading.”

“Ummmm...” Sam replied, uncertainty plainly visible on her face.

“Specifically, I want you to discuss with me everything about them that seems wrong or off to you. Things that struck you as weird as you read them. Things that made you have questions. This should help develop your critical thinking skills.”

Her face soured immediately. “You just want me to say that Othar isn’t a god or something, like you always do.”

“Not today,” he said assuringly. “The point of this today is for you to come to your own conclusions. So tell me, what parts of those books made you think something was strange?”

“Um, in the Word of Othar it says that Othar slew a dragon with his mighty sword, but in the Writ of Otharo it said that he used a spear-”

“No no no, not like that. The details between those two are going to differ all over the place. It’s like if you told me a story and I told Leo and he told Simona and so forth, eventually the small bits are going to change. But what about things that seemed to disagree with the world itself? Did anything make you say ‘huh, that’s strange’?”

Samanta didn’t reply at first, instead staring straight ahead, lost in thought. “Well,” she said after a while, “I did think it was a little weird that they talked about Othar’s fire so much last night.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I mean, um... everybody can make fire, right? At least a little bit. But it said here that... uhh...” The girl picked up the Writ of Otharo, which sat on a small desk to the side. Blake had brought the books in with him just in case they would be needed. “Here!”

“And so Otharo said ‘No longer need you fear the darkness, for the fires of Prometheus shall light your way.’ And, lo, did the flames of the gods appear, so that the people would not fear the shadows along their path,” Samanta intoned. “I remember thinking that it was weird that they talked about how he made fire when everybody can do it.”

“So then let’s think about this. What could explain that?”

“I dunno.”

“Start by asking yourself some questions. For example, are they remarking upon the fact that he’s making fire, or something else about it?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, sure, anybody can make a little fire, but this isn’t claiming that he just made any old fire, did it?”

“No, he made the ‘flames of the gods’.”

“And that did what?”

“Chased away the darkness.”

“Indeed. But for whom did it chase away the darkness? Just a person or two?”

“No, it was for the people of Otharia.”

“So...?”

“It must have been a super strong flame!”

“Or he made flames everywhere, all over the country, or both. Could anybody else do that?”

“No!” The child smiled, proudly. “I get it now. It wasn’t so weird after all.”

“And now we know that Othar’s power was to be able to make super strong flames or something to that effect, like how I can control metal. So he must have been from my world and not a god.”

Sam scowled. “You said you weren’t going to do that today.”

“I guess I was wrong,” Blake chuckled. “Anything else catch your interest?”

“Well, in this passage...”

*     *     *

The pounding in Blake’s head refused his silent pleas for respite as he shuffled into his private area. As much as he needed sleep, it was still too early in the evening for him to sleep just yet, even if he went to bed extra early today. That left him wondering how best to use the hour or two remaining before he conked out for the night.

At first, Blake considered heading out to his facility outside the city where he kept his current pet project, but he didn’t have it in him this night. His brain hurt too much to have to wrestle with precise weight ratios and the limits of tucrenyx’s tensile strength. It was coming along nicely enough that he could leave it for a day or two. Perhaps in a few weeks, it would be ready for a test run.

Instead, he decided to spend a little time on his next big project post-sewers: trains. It was time that he opened up the country to its people. How much better would Otharia be if somebody could just hop on a free passenger train and go from Wroetin to Nont in just a few hours? And they would be free trains—Blake wanted as many people to use the trains and get used to them as possible.

Already he had most of the periphery worked out. He had routes drawn up between the cities. He had Samanta’s voice reading messages about stations and instructions. He had cabin designs and several different ideas for propulsion that he’d get around to testing shortly. But for now, his concerns were with something more basic. How was he going to build the tracks, and with what metal?

There was only so much tucrenyx available to Blake, and he didn’t think it wise to waste any of it on railroad tracks. And then there was the foundation beneath. Blake didn’t know too much about railroads, but he knew enough to realize that the tracks needed to be on something far more solid than just dirt. Rubbing his face, he decided to talk to Leo the next morning about just how many blacksmiths and stone Observers lived in Otharia these days.

Lying down once more on his bed, Blake stared up at the gray ceiling as the rest of his armor melted away. He hoped he’d be able to sleep alright for once, and not just because he was tired. With the war going on, something told him that he’d be sleeping even fewer hours every night soon enough. The sweet bliss of emptiness took him, if only for a little while.