Chapter 120
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Today is an important day, and I cannot say that my heart is still.  My traditional schooling is complete, and so today begins my [two-person study—“training”/“apprenticeship”?].  [Friend 1—using the translations found in the Emperor’s Tome, I’ve started trying to figure out phonetics, but it’s still early and I don’t know if I am even close to being right.  Still, my best guess right now is “Ardemun”] believes that my choice to study plants is a poor one.  He thinks that I will squander my life with my head buried in a bush.  I can tell that [Friend 2—this one my best guess is “Pionmi”] agrees, though she, at least, has the tact to keep it to herself.  They each seem to think that I would be better suited entering a field like the ones they chose, and perhaps they are correct.  Ardemun is surely correct, as studying the reproduction of a meadow flower will never impact the world in the way that the constant rapid advancements in [cantacrenyx-technology—I’ve managed to confirm that the first word is definitely referring to the same crystals you use.  Still just calling it cantacrenyx technology like it is here is rather blah.  Let’s call it “Crystech”.  That reads better] change our society every day.  I find myself wondering every night what new marvel will be revealed the following morning in the papers.  Still, Ardemun seems to forget my thoroughly mediocre grades in all technical subjects.  He has managed to go his entire life so far without learning that things that are easy for him are not always easy for others, and I do not see that changing any time soon.

Pionmi is under no such delusion, which only makes her sentiments all the more puzzling.  She knows full well that I am not suited for the study of [tiny-object-existence-movement-space—“physics”, maybe?  “Tiny” suggests perhaps “particle physics” but it might be something a bit different.  Hard to say].  I wonder if, perhaps, she simply fears being alone again.  I may be wrong, but I believe she will find far more comradery amongst her peers than she ever did with the other schoolchildren.  The others could never understand just how frighteningly brilliant Pionmi is—or perhaps they could, and that is why they [hate-ignore-avoid—I think this means “shunned”... poor Pionmi] her so mercilessly.  We are all but animals, after all, and animals fear what they cannot understand.

Ardemun thinks it’s simply because Pionmi is one of the rare girls here, and I have no doubts that her gender does her no favors.  Most people I know still believe that women have no place outside the home, my parents included.  I, myself, believed the same for much of my life.  However, that alone does not explain why she was treated so much worse than the other girls.  I think it was that she made the boys feel [bad-short—either “insignificant” or “inadequate”, I think] intellectually.  Her name atop the student rankings year after year—with Ardemun right beneath her—surely hurt their collective pride.

Looking at the last sentence, I once again laugh at all who lumped me in with that pair simply because we spent time together.  How I became friends with such a genius pair, I cannot say.  I lack their intelligence and their intuition, and even my best efforts, combined with their ample assistance, barely put me [ancient math notation is kind of weird, but if I understand it right, he’s saying basically “three-quarters”] of the way up the rankings.  Still, I cannot say that I regret whatever [missing-plan-blind-event—so, if I understand this one, an unplanned, unforeseen occurrence... “happenstance”, perhaps?] led to our association.  I will miss them both dearly.

As for their thoughts on my choice of vocation, I will allow the possibility that they are correct in some aspects.  It is very possible that I will grow old and die without a notable [big-action-permanent—“achievement”] to my name.  Almost every [plant-scholar—“botanist”?  Or maybe just “plant scholar”.  Not sure what we think of as a botanist matches this perfectly] devotes their [life-labor—“life’s work”?  Or just “career”?] towards creating new and better crop strains, but such endeavors do not excite me.  I just love plants.  I want to discover their secrets, not just breed better crops.

I never thought I would ever willingly go to [Place 1—Oh boy, this is a reach, but by my current phonetic attempt is... “Trazac”?  Feels wrong but it’s what I have].  I have heard little good about the place from those who have visited.  The facts seemed impossible when I was a child.  An entire country that is nothing but [a double one for you:still-water-land-together and still-many-water-land-meet—I think this means swamps and marshes.  This place sounds horrible.  Let’s never go there]?  How could that be possible?  Where would they build their towns?  How would they farm their food?  I struggled to imagine how such a place could ever function then, and even now it strains credulity.

Still, when I heard that the Trazac Assembly had founded an Institute dedicated to the deeper questions of plants, I knew it was where I needed to go.  It is the only place under the Great Ones’ skies with others as interested in this as I, and so it is my only choice.  I can only hope that Trazac is not as miserable as the stories say.

Blake leaned back and rubbed his eyes.  Whether he was coding or reading, his eyes always got dry and tired when he spent too long staring at a screen, and he’d been doing that a lot recently—too much, if you asked the others, but he wasn’t asking.  It needed to be done, to soothe his persistent worries if nothing else.

The texts were finally becoming fully intelligible, and he could not be more relieved.  He’d been waiting for this moment for weeks now.  When Sofie had scanned in her first translation, Blake had found the documents to be an unreadable mess of brackets upon brackets.  Now, it finally looked like actual text!

Sofie’s system consisted of several steps.  First, she would take one of the unknown squiggles found within an ancient text and try to parse it using her existing lexicon.  If she didn’t know for sure what the word was, she would put it in brackets and add notes, guesses, and the like within.  The problem at the start had been that her knowledge at the time had been so measly that what were now simple sentences like “Father says that I must attend a preparatory school for the next four years” had started as “[??-??—person/authority figure of some kind??] [speak/say?] I [??-??] [live?-move?—very not sure on this one] [??-??-??-??—noun?] [??] [front?] four [cycles—I think a cycle is a “year” but not 100% on that yet]”.  There was no way Blake, or any sane person for that matter, could parse meaning out of that mess!  He’d seen spaghetti code that was easier to parse than that!

The good news was that, as Sofie had plugged away at it with the help of the Emperor’s Tome and some other texts that Blake had acquired from the old man at the archive, everything had slowly shifted into good old understandable English, meaning that Blake was finally able to use the documents in his inquiry.  The bad news was that nothing he found within the texts refuted his worries.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

Of the documents translated or currently in translation, despairingly few had ended up being relevant to his current interest.  The main text for his needs, the one he combed through with every new update, was the rambling, rarely updated journal that Sofie had found somewhere in Stragma, written by an ancient scientist who seemed to think that slathering one’s prose with layers of meandering pretension made better writing than just fucking saying what you meant like a normal person.  Like, what sort of twit would write “As for their thoughts on my choice of vocation, I will allow the possibility that they are correct in some aspects” instead of “As for my job choice, maybe my friends are right”?  The answer was the millennia-spanning duo of this dude and Sofie Ramaut, who was certainly adding her own ‘delightful’ flavor to it all.

Still, as Sofie had updated the various documents she had over time, the journal of this scientist—whose name neither of them knew, as it seemed he did not ever mention it in the journal itself—had floated to the top, becoming his go-to source.  While it was maddeningly vague in regards to certain important topics, it was still written in the time frame he was most concerned with and had given him some great insight into much of that era.

There were other documents from around that time—books he’d acquired from the archive, mostly—but while written in that era, they did not provide anything of value.  One had even turned out to be an invoice for fabric delivered to a tailor, which told him nothing worth knowing at all.

There were a few other documents that he’d found worthwhile enough to not dismiss outright, though they were far less reliable.  One was an old offshoot of the Work of Othar—a second one, somehow.  The Revised Writ of Otharon was the most recently written document in his research material, several centuries newer than the other offshoot that he knew of, the Writ of Otharo.  Still, he found it at least somewhat useful because it hit an important middle ground between the Word of Othar and the Writ of Otharo when it came to content and completeness.

The modern Word of Othar was the the longest and most complete version of the three, but it went to great lengths to whitewash everything and present Othar as nothing less than the infallible god the Church had professed him to be.  In contrast, the Writ of Otharon talked about bad things during the time of his presence as well as good.  While it still presented Othar—or Otharon, to be exact—as a great being and god, it also mentioned suffering and pain during his time on Scyria, which the Word of Othar never talked about except to stress how his arrival brought an end to all that bad stuff.

The Writ of Otharo, on the other hand, was older and likely even more accurate than the Writ of Otharon in its depiction of events, but what he had in his possession was just not complete enough to use.  Infuriatingly, it was cut off at the part he wanted to read the most.  So, the Writ of Otharon would have to do.

The second document was a book that Sofie had acquired after the Ubran’s defeat at Crirada, which had no official name that he knew of.  Sofie and Blake called it the Emperor’s Tome, and it was the Rosetta Stone of ancient script that had allowed Sofie to make so many leaps and bounds in her translation progress these last weeks.  While only the first few entries were written in both the ancient squiggles and the other old but still existing language, that had been more than enough.

Unfortunately, the actual contents of the book were less helpful for Blake’s needs, and that was because, well...

He brought the start of that document up onto the screen.

[Blake, the first few entries here were written both in the ancient script and a more modern and normal common trade script, a dialect of which Arlette says is still used on both continents today.  I’m translating these from the latter language for accuracy, since I have verified that, as best I can tell, the contents are identical.  I’m also going to stop putting stuff in quotes because thanks to Arlette I can actually know how to pronounce these words.]

Harken, all who follow in my path, for I am Rahul Batra, First and Founding Emperor of this great empire!  It is I who united the Six Tribes, I who conquered the wild north, I who forged order from more than four centuries of chaos!  Heed my words, for to know my deeds is to know true sovereignty!

Born the first son of the Batra [huh, I guess this is where the last name came from] Clan patriarch, I was raised for greatness from the moment I first took breath!  I slew my first mishna at age six, caught and tamed my life-long vekkel partner Locura at age ten, killed my first enemy at twelve, and conquered the Ruovi Clan before I reached fifteen years of age!

None can stand against my might!  I can lift a boulder the size of a hut and leap ten men high with a single bound!  Whether it be the sword, the spear, or the bow, I am unparalleled!  My roars make the heavens tremble!

The entire book went on like this.  It was nothing but a giant dick measuring contest—page after page of people proclaiming how much more awesome they were than the people who came before them or would come after.  After reading the entirety of the tome, he felt like he better understood the last emperor’s decisions.  From what Arlette had told him once, the tome had been physically attached to the man’s body with chains.  If Blake had been forced to spend his entire life chained to a book filled with ancestors telling him he sucked ass, he would probably have tried some wild shit too.

Still, exclamation-clad proclamations about striving against the heavens didn’t provide much clarity, and the contents had been written centuries too late to provide much worthwhile data.  All of the insights he was able to glean from it were extrapolations, one or two leaps of logic removed from the simple confirmation he still sought.

Everything he had found so far, after poring through every document he could get his hands on and constantly updating his understanding of them with each new translation, combined to paint a blurry picture—the sort of image that could be a variety of different things depending on what angle you viewed it from and how hard you squinted at it.  Blake had his theories, but he wanted to be sure—no, he needed to be sure.

Blake massaged his forehead with both hands and let out a sigh.  All this reading had given him a headache, and he was starting to have trouble focusing both his vision and his attention.  He needed to get out of this room for a bit—take a walk, perhaps.

With a groan and a stretch, Blake levered himself to his feet and moseyed out of his sterile office space.  As he meandered through the hallways of his fortress, he noted that traversing them was getting to feel rote and mundane.  He’d have to restructure the layout again—to keep the others on their toes, of course.

Not having anywhere to go, he found himself drawn to the sound of voices not too far away.  Soon enough, he arrived at one of the internal courtyards, the one Sofie had convinced him to turn into a test yard for the minuscule menace in order to keep all the various explosions, poisonous gasses, and other war crimes contained in one place.  There, he found both of the aforementioned people ducked behind a safety barrier as they looked through a slit in the metal toward something placed out on the field.  It wasn’t much of a field anymore, he noted.  What had started as flat earth covered in lush green grass meticulously imported from the nearby farmland had devolved over many days into a war zone devoid of plant life.  To his eyes, it appeared now to be more crater than ground.

Blake’s gaze fell upon a long wax cylinder lying lengthwise on the testing platform.  It had a similar diameter to the candles that the rambunctious rapscallion usually crafted but was far longer, its overall shape more resembling a tube than the compact can-like form he was used to.  One end, pointed away from the three of them, sported a large wick that was quickly burning away.

The flame sank into the tube and a moment later the burning end of the tube erupted, shooting something bright out at high speeds.  The projectile struck the far wall and rebounded off it before bouncing several times against the ground, all the while blazing with a bright, near-blinding purple flame.  The tube erupted a second time, launching out another item that similarly bounced off the far wall with a loud ‘pang!’  Blake recognized this one easily; it was a slightly smaller version of the diminutive demon-child’s usual fare, its wick somehow already lit.  The boomcandle went off a moment later, the sound of its explosion echoing off the courtyard walls while the tube belched forth a third payload.  This time, the projectile did not bounce off the far wall.  Instead, a large mass of flaming goo stuck onto the metal and hung there, burning with gusto.

“You losers branching out into roman candles, now?” he called out.

The pair turned around and Blake felt a small, unwelcome tingle of terror run up his spine when he met the furry-eared fiend’s glare.  He had nothing to fear from the little miscreant, he reminded himself.  Sofie had clearly instilled in the pint-sized pyromaniac an understanding that they’d both be thrown out if she tried to gas him again.  Still, part of him still felt like she might try it again anyway.  She clearly still wasn’t happy with him, and he couldn’t help but remember just who had raised her and the philosophy he’d espoused to her.  If she saw weakness, well... there was no guarantee that he’d ever get the smell off him the next time.

“Metal meanie go away!” the dragon-raised devil called back.

“Stuff it, twerp,” he shot back.  “I just want to talk to your minder for a minute.”

Sofie rolled her eyes but came over, joining him as he retreated to the adjacent hall.

“Did you seriously just teach that lunatic how to make fucking napalm?!” he hissed.

“Blake, come off it.  She already knew how to make napalm.”

“That’s... even worse, somehow!”

Sofie sighed.  “Blake, what do you want?”

Blake shrugged.  “Just taking a break from reading your latest translations.”

“If you’re going to ask for another pass, think again.  I already told you I’ve hit the limit of what I can reliably translate without more documents to work with.”

“I know, I know.  As I said, I’ve given you every book in the archive.  If I find more, I’ll let you know.  I just needed to clear my head, that’s all.  That bastard’s journal is so aggravating.  Now that I can finally fully understand it, it’s driving me up the wall.”

“About what?”

“Plenty of stuff.  Like, reading about cantacrenyx technology—”

“Call it ‘Crystech’.”

“I’d rather stab out my own eyes than call it ‘Crystech’.  And you tell me my naming sense is bad,” Blake huffed.  “Anyway, reading about cantacrenyx technology makes me want to scream.  I mean, I knew that the ancients knew how to make it, of course.  But reading about it now and learning about how common and fundamental it was to their everyday lives just makes me want to tear my hair out sometimes.”

“What?  Why?  Isn’t that basically your goal?”

“Because they figured out a way to mass-produce it, that’s why.”

“Wait... you have no idea how to mass-produce Crystech?  Seriously?”

“Of course not!  I’ve tried a whole bunch of things, but nothing worked.  The only way I can create the energy channels is with my powers.  What the hell did you think?  That I knew how to but just didn’t?”

“Yeah, I thought you didn’t like the loss of control, with you being you and all,” Sofie snorted.

“Are you kidding me?!  Do you know how annoying it is to have to make every single machine myself?  I’m making fucking bespoke robots here!  If I could just make a factory and crank them out, I’d have done it ages ago!”

Sofie couldn’t keep from her face her amusement over his frustration.  “Looks like there were people out there smarter than you after all.”

“Oh, give me a break.  Those people figured out how to make a machine that pierced through goddamned dimensions.  I’m not going to act like I’m their intellectual superior.”

“So, you just think you’re the intellectual superior of everything alive today.”

Blake patted Sofie on the shoulder.  “Exactly.  You’re finally starting to get it.”

Sofie rolled her eyes again.  “Anything else you want to waste my time with?”

“Nah, not really.  Well, I was wondering if you know what’s up with Arlette.  She’s been acting weird ever since this meeting we had a few days ago.”

“I’m not sure,” Sofie admitted.  “I doubt it’s anything to worry about.”

“It’s probably all the drinking.  You know what I always say: alcohol is a crutch relied on by the weak and weak of spirit.”

“I have never heard you say that.”

“Well, I think it, and that’s what counts.”

“Are you seriously telling me that you’ve never gone drinking before?”

“I consumed more than my share of alcohol back in the day” Blake admitted.  “That’s why I know enough to not bother with it anymore.  Haven’t had a drink since college and not going to start now.”

“Cool, great, good for you.  If you have nothing to say worth hearing, I’m going to go back to having fun with my sister, thank you.”

“Since when have you had fun blowing up dirt?”

“Since I started imagining your face on the target.  Bye.”

Blake watched the two inspect their roman candle for a moment before heading back to his rooms.

*     *     *

I hate this place.  I came here to study plants, not bugs, and yet insects are what have taken over my life.  I understand now how the Trazacs never starved.  Anybody who is hungry need only run with their mouth open for a few moments and then chew on the fresh and crunchy feast caught between their teeth [ewewewewewew nooooo this place sucks so bad!  Blake, I don’t care what you try, you’re never getting me to go there.  Stragma was bad enough].  To make matters worse, the heat here is sweltering and the food lacking in any sort of spice or worthwhile flavor.  Before, I wondered how Trazacs didn’t starve.  Now, I wonder how they don’t all kill themselves out of sheer boredom.  I find it hard to interact with most Trazacs when a [double-speaker—a “Many”, I think?  Since a Many is two people speaking together] is not available, and stay within the Institute as much as possible.

Right, Blake remembered this entry.  There wasn’t much in this one worth rereading that he could recall.  He skimmed ahead until he found a certain section that had heretofore been still only halfway translated.  Seeing that the section’s translation now appeared nearly complete, he dug in.

Riben is gone.  The little-people are all dead, slain by the Great Ones.  Almost the entirety of their species is gone forever, their lives lost and their land burnt to nothing but lifeless rock.  They say that even their great underground city is no more, incinerated to ashes by the Great Ones’ wrath.

I remember, back when I traveled to what was known to outsiders as the “Shrunken City”, being struck by the beauty of their lands.  Their fruit orchards, in particular, were impressive and pleasing to the eye.  I cannot imagine what the land looks like now.  I have heard reports that nothing remains, not even a blade of grass.

I weep for the fate of the remaining little-people.  They were a very concentrated society, far more than the rest of us.  Very few little-people moved elsewhere to live amongst those twice their height or taller.  My single vacation to Riben told me all I needed to know to understand why that would be.  They built their cities scaled around their height, and just moving around the place was a nightmare for me.  I can only imagine it would be equally obnoxious the other way around, when every door handle is too high to reach.

There are, actually, two little-people here in the Institute, though neither are in my department.  I do not really know either of them, but I cannot imagine their pain right now.  I would not be surprised if they were to leave, nor would I blame them.  In my view, their best course of action now would be to meet up with what scant few little-people remain and try to do whatever they can to rescue their race from extinction, though I imagine that would only be possible if the Union created a program to support them and their breeding efforts.

I don’t know what to think anymore.  For so long, I have been able to live my life as if the Great Ones did not exist.  The same could be said for practically everybody.  Outside of our tribute, they have never seemed interested in even acknowledging that we exist.  They seemed content to live in their own world and leave us all alone.

Now, nobody can say that ever again.  For seemingly no reason, they descended as a swarm to destroy an entire civilization, wiping everybody away and then leaving without a word.  Does the same fate await the rest of us in the near future?  Nobody can say.  In a way, the not-knowing is the worst part.  I find myself tensing at every unusual noise from above, half expecting it to be the [disaster-warning-omen—“harbinger”] of our doom.

Nobody knows what to do, and I am no different.  For now, at least, I will try to carry on as normal, for my own sanity if nothing more.  Uncertainty has a way of corroding from within.

There it was: the annihilation of an entire society—the spark that ignited everything.  After Blake’s experience with several Great Ones—he didn’t have to think long and hard to know who the author was referring to with that term—the idea of them wiping out an entire city seemed very much the sort of thing they might do.  Actually, now that he thought about it, they had destroyed a city recently, back when he’d been running around the countryside with Sam and building an army to overthrow the oligarchy.  This latest incident felt different than the one talked about here, though.  There was no mention of there being a crater, nor any dragon dying.

He skimmed ahead some more and stopped when he found the next section that he recalled still needed work in the previous revision.

A long time ago in a previous entry, I mentioned a project in Riben that I found particularly [outside-reason-funny—“ludicrous”].  It was a project to create a flying machine, and the very idea at the time seemed laughable.  I even got a look at it in its early stages when I visited and seeing it in person did nothing but reinforce my opinions, regardless of how excited Ardemun was about it.  Well, surprise, surprise, it seems that the Crystech creator’s thoughts on the feasibility of a Crystech project are worth more than those of a simple scholar of plants.  Somehow, the project succeeded.

The test of the craft came on that very fateful day.  According to Ardemun’s one surviving Riben contact, the craft managed to take flight and they ran several successful low-altitude flights.  Then, for the third test, they decided to see how high it could go and still function.  As Ardemun tells it, the craft flew higher and higher until disaster struck.  A rare occurrence came to be at the worst possible time—a Great One decided to fly through the area.  Great Ones do not usually bother to fly over Riben, but for some reason, this time one did.  It saw the flying craft and, with a single snap of its massive jaws, broke it in half.

Then, as if nothing had happened, it just kept flying and left the area.  The project members were devastated, of course, but that was all.  Given the lack of reaction from the Great One, few if any little-people thought that dozens of Great Ones would descend upon them that night.

It is clear as day to me now what caused the Scouring.  It was a punishment.  A few little-people dared to dream.  They dared to try to make a world where they could soar through the skies like the Great Ones, and for that daring, the Great Ones decided to wipe out the near entirety of their race.  This was more than just retaliation for a non-existent slight.  This was meant as a message to the rest of us.

The Great Ones want us to know our place.

The last few decades have been a time of massive technological and social progress for all of us who lack wings and scales.  Our capabilities have grown immensely and the speed of our progress only continues to increase with each new discovery or innovation.  Is it any shock that our ambitions would grow to match our potential?

But no, the Great Ones cannot tolerate that.  They cannot tolerate anybody being able to explore the skies but them.  They cannot tolerate the thought of us being their equals.  It would mean that they would no longer be revered, worshiped, and bribed with gold and gemstones.  Their pride cannot allow it.

Well, that explained a lot.  Blake couldn’t help but think about the dragon word for all non-dragons.  The meaning conveyed through speech whenever Bazzalth said the word was not reminiscent of what Blake received when anybody else spoke of people.  No, he remembered how the concept of personhood and the respect that came with it could only be found in their word for themselves.  The word they used for everybody else was something far more demeaning: crawler.

The difference in their minds was stark.  Crawlers were not people, or else they would be referred to as such.  No, they were silly little things, unable to soar through the skies, stuck forever pathetically crawling about on the surface with their sad little limbs—so very much unlike themselves, the noble and powerful “people”.

Blake knew in his bones that the author of the journal had the right of it.  If this airplane trial had happened and events had truly unfolded as described, there was no doubt that the dragons had struck that night because the idea of crawlers not crawling would be anathema to them.

He made a mental note to park his airship farther away from their territory the next time... much farther.

I believe firmly that the [many-pieces-join-one—“consolidated”] races, given time, would be able to create an age of wonders, to ascend to a level of greatness that eclipses anything the Great Ones are capable of.  The Great Ones have declared that they will not allow that to happen.  They want to put a ceiling on our progress, and they are willing to destroy an entire civilization to make that happen.

And yet, progress cannot be slowed so easily.  There will be more discoveries.  What will the Great Ones do?  Which discoveries will trigger the next Scouring?  There is no way of knowing, other than the knowledge that it will happen again eventually.  We are all seated beneath a precariously-balanced boulder.  The question is not if the rock will tumble down to flatten us, but when.  The only way forward is to move ourselves... or destroy the boulder.

Of course, none of this would be knowledge I would normally be allowed access to, and Ardemun would get in massive trouble for telling me, except I’m now involved in this whole mess myself.  The Union has decided to relocate the Institute to a different part of Trazac—a brand new facility hidden in an undeveloped valley, isolated from most of civilization.  What’s more, we have a new mission.  No longer are we dedicated to largely scholarly pursuits.  Now, we are to leverage our amassed knowledge to create new crops and other plants that can be used to sustain a [hurt-tired-worn—“beleaguered”] populace through hard times.  My department, in particular, is tasked with creating new types of wood that can be used in places where metal would normally be needed—wood that is strong, durable, and if possible, fire resistant.  This is because the metal will be needed for something else.

We are going to war.

Blake had to hand it to the ancients: they had courage coming out of their ears.  The thought of going to war with the dragons—one where the penalty for losing would almost surely be total annihilation, at that—was enough to make even him think twice.  Yet these people had done it.  They could have bowed their heads and accepted their place below the dragons, but they chose to reject their oppression and vie for their futures with everything they had.  He couldn’t help but respect the hell out of that.

Still, this scenario left a lot of questions that he still had no answers to.  For example, the journal’s entries spoke of vibrant societies and large cities, with a large enough total populace to be able to take on many dragons, and yet there seemed to be far too few ruins these days for that.  Where had they all gone?  What had happened to the rest of their civilization?  If they could construct bunkers like the one he’d first arrived at and, according to Sofie and the others, a large metal building that still stood and even somewhat functioned after so long, where were all the other buildings?  So much still didn’t add up.

The several entries that followed were ones that Blake knew well, having read them many a time.  In them, the author described the state of the ongoing war, or “Grand Crusade”, from his vantage point tucked safely away in his research institute, securely hidden and far from danger.  The entries lacked details about the state of the struggle, but that made sense given the author’s circumstances.  There were plenty of interesting other details to be found in them, but he didn’t find much that felt particularly relevant, sadly.  It was also filled with line after line of the author bemoaning his own inadequacy like a little bitch, so Blake didn’t mind skipping over them for the moment.

But then, there came a certain entry, one that he made sure to read every time so he always had every detail in his mind straight.  He noted that the end had finally been fully deciphered, and so, his heart pounding with anticipation, he dove in.

A journal can be useful for venting one’s feelings, allowing one to release pent-up emotion and clear one’s mind.  It can also be vital for chronicling one’s thoughts to create a record for the future.  As I sit down tonight, however, I hope to use this journal for a third use: to lay out my scattered thoughts in the hopes that, by doing so, I can finally resolve the confusion that has plagued me these last few days.  To put it simply, recent events have left me confounded.  Hopefully, everything will seem far more clear by the end of this entry.  I supposed we shall see.

If you had told me thirty days prior that the Crusade would be saved—more than saved, [strength-return-more—“revitalized”]—by the sudden, unexplained appearance of a handful of [many-heard-tale-focus-person—ahaha, if I’m right, he’s literally calling these people protagonists of well-known stories or myths, which I guess would be the ancient equivalent of saying that they’re the main characters of superhero movies on modern Earth.  That’s why I’m just going to shorten it to “heroes”] with strange and formidable abilities, I would have determined that you had secretly continued the [think-see-hear-change—“psychotropic”] specimen study that was put on hold after the relocation and were currently trying out the results.  Yet, somehow, this is essentially what has happened.  The Union armies once more gain ground, slowly but steadily reclaiming territory lost in the couple of years since our winged adversaries’ resurgence.  At their head are some of these heroes, while others protect the people from attack.

Othar and company, saviors of the ancient realm.  Blake didn’t know what to think about how their origins seemed to have been kept secret from the public.  Had the Union been trying to keep the locations of the bunkers a secret, perhaps?  Had they feared the dragons somehow learning of them and destroying them?

The next few paragraphs were newly updated, Blake noted with relish.  He quickly resumed his reading.

I have not seen one of these heroes in person, but the talk of the town has been about nothing but them since their appearance.  I know not to take most of what I hear as the unvarnished truth, of course, but given the sudden turnabout, it seems that there is more truth to these stories than one such as I would normally give credence to.

For example, one story is that one of them appeared when [Place 7—“Ghuvan”] was assailed by a group of twelve Great Ones.  It would normally take a major city’s defense force, fully equipped and fully manned, to have a chance at fighting off that many at once, and we have not had a garrison at that strength in years now.  This one hero, according to the tale, single handedly slew seven Great Ones and forced the others to retreat.  Even if it is an exaggeration and they only slew five, or even four, that is still a mind-boggling feat.  I literally cannot comprehend how such a thing could be possible.

“You and me both, bud,” Blake muttered.

Seven dragons?  Seven?!  What sort of gods were these people to be able to take on twelve dragons at the same time, alone, and singlehandedly kill seven of them?!  He’d had trouble just dealing with a single one, and he’d had help!

Still, I am not one to reject fortuitous events merely because they bewilder so heavily.  The appearance of these saviors could not have come at a better time.  I, and so many others, had all but consigned ourselves to our inevitable defeat.  The [consume-always-no-full—“insatiable”] hunger of the war effort has been eating away at our society and our quality of life for years now, finally reaching even me and my family here at this high-priority base.  Outside the Institute itself, you will find nearly no Crystech.  All of it has been taken to be converted into weaponry and other machines to hold off the Great Ones’ assault for one day more.  It is like we have all traveled back a century into the past.

In a way, it is often worse than I would imagine it would be living back then.  Societies of the past were structured around the realities of the time, and the people there were comfortable with their capabilities.  Nobody today knows how to live without Crystech.  It has become such an important part of our lives that many of us barely know how to function now that it is mostly gone.  Life skills common back in the day are now mostly lost.  Everybody is struggling.

Well, this was new.  It helped explain why there wasn’t cantacrenyx technology everywhere, given how it had supposedly been widespread back then.

Whoever these amazing people are, the Union is very clearly involved with them.  As the head of the Institute, my ability to acquire answers to things is stronger than ever, and yet I find myself running into insurmountable walls whenever I try to learn about the heroes.  The same is true for Ardemun, who is far more important and influential than I could ever hope to be.  My best guess—and the guess of many, I would suspect—is that these people are the product of [best-strong-best-sharp-blade—“superweapon”?] research that has been underway since the beginning of the Crusade.  That would explain why the Union leaders are being so secretive, I assume.  If only I could figure out why Pionmi would be involved in all of this.

Pionmi’s latest letter is the first in years where her calligraphy has returned to the smooth, precise strokes that I knew from before, as if a massive load has been lifted from her spirit.  That this happened concurrently with the arrival of the heroes feels significant, but I don’t understand where the overlap would be between them and her.  Her area of expertise has nothing to do with experimentation on people.  Perhaps her project was needed to supply something to the other projects?  Or maybe it provided energy somehow?  It’s hard to say without knowing what she was working on.  She even expressly told me she cannot tell me what she worked on, which feels almost like a confirmation that it was related to our new champions.  She did, however, finally send me the energy sensor suite that I asked for over two years ago, saying that she made enough improvements to the new design that they don’t need this old one anymore.  Though late, it will still come in handy given the direction our research has headed.

I must admit, it feels awkward getting Pionmi’s hand-me-downs.  It’s like I’m back at the preparatory school all over again, constantly walking in the shadows of my pair of friends.  Ardemun contributed greatly to our armies, while Pionmi helped bring forth our saviors.  Meanwhile, I, while somehow stumbling into positions of higher and higher influence, have managed to contribute practically nothing—some crop strains with improved yields, plenty of theoretical research, and little else.  Our primary mission remains unfulfilled, despite the wealth of time, people, and resources thrown at it.  As always, it just goes to show that I never deserved to walk alongside them.

Pionmi.

The woman was one of only two people who got mentioned in nearly every entry during the war and pre-war sections, along with this dude Ardemun who sounded to Blake like a total chad.  Their inclusions felt like such incredible teases to him, as having to hear about them through the words of a plant-obsessed luddite only made him crave the journals they might have written all the more.  Ardemun would have surely given him incredible new understanding of cantacrenyx technology, and Pionmi had most definitely played a part in bringing him to Scyria.

What would Pionmi have been able to tell him?  Would she have been able to answer the important questions that plagued him?  The ones keeping him up at night?

Surely, she would have been able to give him more concrete answers than this stupid journal and the annoying rambling found within.  The author had this annoying habit of spending paragraphs recounting some lame story or pseudo-philosophical musing while in the middle of writing about important subjects.  The next entry, one of the most important in the journal, was a perfect example.  Instead of just getting straight to the good stuff, it started with him reminiscing about his childhood sports fandom for half a page, filling it with bland, nostalgic remembrances like “Unable to watch my chosen team during the most crucial time, I sat outside the stadium and stared at the stones in the wall as I listened to the cheers and roars of the crowd, trying my utmost to glean from my ears some understanding of the action within.  All the while, my insides churned like the clothes in my family’s clothes washer.”

Perhaps that was just the point of a journal—Blake wouldn’t know; he’d never written one, himself—but for the hundredth time, he wished this man had had an editor.  Still, the rambling got to the important stuff eventually.

The final push has begun.  The town is noticeably quieter now than it used to be, as the draft has slowly drained it of people until a final massive sweep took away all non-essential people of fighting age who still remained a season ago—including Chevet.  I know that I should have been mentally prepared for this for a long time, even since the gender restriction was lifted two years ago, but I foolishly believed I could protect her.  Just one more failure to add to the list.

The commanders have decided it is time to end the Great Crusade once and for all.  With the heroes, we finally have the advantage and the opportunity for total victory, but as I understand it, our window is relatively small.  Our saviors arrived too late to avoid the [material-move-location-need—“logistical”, I think] resource nightmare that was already developing.  Every city and town has been pulled apart and entirely relieved of its metal, just like ours was.  Ardemun says that all that metal went straight to the remaining factories and that once a factory uses up its intake, the factory itself is disassembled and sent to another factory to squeeze another half dozen weapons of war or wagons full of ammunition.  The finality of this shows how serious the upcoming assault is.  Other than the rare specially designated locations like the Institute, essentially every single resource that we have has been taken and reworked. When I say we are throwing everything we have at the Great Ones, I am being very nearly literal.  We do not have the luxury of holding even a single weapon back.

Each of these buildings is a monument to our advancement as people, and it hurts to know that we are losing them all to this blasted war, but I remind myself that the earliest metal building was only constructed a few years before my birth.  Even now, wood and stone remain the main materials for construction.  After we win the war, we will be able to rebuild with great speed what we have had to demolish, so it is no big loss.  And make no mistake, we will win.

Perhaps I am a fool to write this, but despite how my guts seem to want to rip themselves in half with worry, I am confident that we shall emerge victorious.  Despite a sustained and frenzied assault from our adversaries, the Union armies have pushed forward every day since the time the heroes appeared almost a year ago.  Though I do not doubt that the resistance in the upcoming fight will be fiercer than anything that our valiant troops have ever seen, I know that we shall prevail.

But, then what?

This will be an unpopular opinion, but I worry that, once the Great Ones are gone, the heroes will fill the gap left behind.  If they all worked together, I have trouble believing that our armies could defeat them, so what is to stop them from ruling over the rest of us?  Would we not be simply trading one set of tyrants for another?

Perhaps I am overthinking this.  It is one thing to fight a single [large-horn-lizard—some kind of... large horned lizard, duh.  Pronunciation: “trallak”], and another thing entirely to battle a frenzied swarm of [spotted-venom-wasps—nopenopenope not even thinking about this another second].  Plus, unlike the Great Ones who live, soar, and rule from the skies high above, these heroes would rule among the rest of us.  They could be disposed of in time.  After all, while we as a people have become rather accomplished these last few years at slaying a Great One, that aptitude still pales in comparison to an entire history spent getting better and better at killing each other.

Still, that is all for another day, a day that may never come.  As for now, I find myself paralyzed, unable to focus, even while there is work to be done.  Even though half of the scholars are now in the army, those that remain have made great progress recently.  We may be finally close to achieving our goal... now that it is no longer needed.

Blake hummed and scratched his chin as he considered the entry.  Bits of it were freshly translated and new info, like the part about needing metal so badly that they salvaged their own buildings.  Along with the earlier part about cannibalizing cantacrenyx appliances, it laid out just why he wasn’t stumbling over ancient ruins everywhere he went.

The fact that they needed to stoop to such drastic measures, even with people on their side capable of killing seven dragons by themselves, made him ponder just how strong the dragons must have been back then.  Clearly, they had been a terrifying force.

What about now?  Blake was reminded of just how little he knew about the dragons of today.  He knew there were some—more than two, at least—but how many, exactly?  Five?  Five hundred?  It all tied in with one of the biggest questions bouncing around in his mind: who had won the war?

The fact that both people and dragons still existed made it hard to know for sure.  Looking at a map of the world today and seeing how the “crawlers” dominated all of the lands but the northeast mountains suggested that the ancient people had won.  Yet, the author clearly made mention of the dragons’ homeland being the northern highlands, and those mountains were most definitely highlands and the most northern of them, so the dragons’ presence there today meant that the invasion of their homeland had ultimately failed.  Neither party had been wiped off the face of the world, as had seemed so inevitable in the journal writer’s mind at the time.

And yet, to Blake’s utter frustration, there was no answer to be found within the journal.  No, instead, the next entry—and all the ones that followed—only brought a hundred more questions.  He scrolled down to it and read it again anyway, hoping that the final translation would offer him something new to work with.

It is cold.  So cold.  I am so very tired, but I know I cannot sleep here or I will never wake up.  So, with nothing better to do, I return to you, my trusty journal.  Perhaps writing within you will keep my mind occupied enough to stave off eternal slumber until the sun rises once more from its home somewhere beyond this cloud-covered sky.  If I am to be honest, my poor journal, I brought you with me on a whim, telling myself that your pages would make good kindling if needed.  I regret to inform you that you are not safe from such a fate just yet.

Speaking of kindling, I cannot feel my feet.  It seems that the small fire I was able to create from the remnants of dead branches has finally gone out.  It did its job, at least, melting the nearby snow down to the ash so I have a small hollow to shelter from the wind.  The ash grinds against my skin, and I have to be careful that I do not sink too deeply into it lest I get stuck.  Still, it remains better than freezing to death.  I have used up all the wood I foraged during my travels yesterday, so I must bear with the cold for now.  Dawn will come soon, and then I must strap on my [big-wide-float-snow-feet—“snow shoes”?] and venture forth once again.  I do not have time for dalliances.

Traveling through Trazac was hard enough before.  Now, it feels almost impossible.  The ash layer rendered the terrain [see-not-know—“unrecognizable”], and that was before the constant blizzards deposited dunes of snow atop it everywhere.  Before, I had to be somewhat careful where I stepped lest my feet end up in a bog.  Now, every step is a potential hazard.  I have no idea what I am walking over.  Is it solid ground, deformed by layers of ash and snow, or a pond, frozen over below my feet but cracking little by little with every successive step?

Like with so much of my life, I look to the trees to help guide me as I continue south.  There are many species of tree that grew in shallow freshwater like that found in the Trazac swamps and marshes, while other trees need firmer soil.  Other people would not be able to identify which are which, especially not with only the bare, leafless branches visible above the snow, but I can.

I am near my objective, or so I believe.  Central Trazac is home to a [below-ground-hot-rock-pit—it has been years since I learn geology, but I think he’s referring to a “volcanic caldera”].  I remember hearing about it from geologists during a convention before the war.  The subterranean heat warms the local area, creating heated pools and even a handful of geysers.  It is the only place I know of that is both close enough to reach and potentially warm enough for plants to grow in this eternal winter.  But I have to be sure.  Aytra is suffering every day, and if I am going to spend a single moment in the laboratories, away from her bed, then I must be sure that my desperate hopes rest upon a stable foundation.

I cannot dally any longer.  The light grows bright enough for travel again, and the snowfall has lessened.  Time to go.

Blake let out the world’s longest groan as he finally acknowledged that the information he sought was not hidden in the final untranslated bits and pieces.  It just wasn’t in the journal at all.  It was almost like the author expressly avoided talking about the outcome of the final invasion, as if it were a bad omen or something.

That wasn’t to say he had nothing to go on.  There were mentions elsewhere, most notably in the various Otharian bibles.  He still didn’t entirely trust their versions of events, however.  They were far more Othar fanfiction than authentic historical records, and it didn’t take profound wisdom to be able to spot how they twisted everything to better serve the narratives they wanted to push.

A series of beeps and boops interrupted his musings to remind him that it was time for Sam’s class.  Even when busy, he tried to make time to educate the girl, as he still hadn’t forgotten what he’d said to her back then.  He was going to ram enlightenment into her tiny skull until she finally understood the totality of her crime and repented in full.  Now, that would be a fine day.

Blake found Sam waiting in the classroom, which was not surprising these days.  She’d become very diligent about class, which was a nice turnaround from those loud and contentious early days.  It was especially good today, given how drained he felt right now.

“Alright, Sam, where are we on the subject wheel today?”

“Yesterday was Math, so...”

“Ah!  Physics, then.”

To keep the lessons from getting too same-y and stuck on a single topic, Blake had decided to rotate through a series of subjects, with a different one every day.

“Well, then I have an idea.  We’re going to be building a lake in the near future—”

Building a lake?  How?”

“Very carefully, Sam.  So, let’s talk about water pressure and fluid dynamics.”

The lesson went well, Blake thought.  It was nice to not have to think about those stupid documents for just a little bit.

“Alright, that’s enough for today,” he said, disassembling the hydraulic piston filled with liquefied metal that he’d constructed to demonstrate many of the day’s lessons.  “Go blow shit up with the giggling goblin or whatever.”

Sam got up and headed towards the door.

“Oh, one more thing...”

The girl slowed to a stop near the entrance.

“Sofie says you were really helpful with translating the Writ of Otharon, so I, uh... wanted to say thanks.  I know you don’t like the non-canon versions, so I appreciate you helping us anyway.”

Sam’s face scrunched up like she was eating a lemon.  Clearly, she hadn’t liked reading the apocryphal text much... or she didn’t like him thanking her.  Probably both.  They got along better now than before, but better was a very relative term, and before had been quite atrocious if he had to be honest.

“You’re... welcome,” she muttered.

“You did a great job,” he told her, trying to be supportive and all that.  “It’s just a shame that the other one, the Writ of Otharo, is unfinished.  It might have been able to help me fill in the blanks I still have, even after Sofie translated all the ancient documents in that archive.”

Samanta’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.  “He really gave you all of them?”

Blake ground to a halt as Sam’s words drilled into his brain.  “What’s that supposed to mean, Sam?”

Simultaneously, Sam seemed to realize her mistake, her face going pale.  “Nothing, I was just joking,” she quickly responded, hastily making for the exit.

The door slammed shut in her face and melded with the wall, locking her inside with him.

“Sam, is there something you’re hiding from me?” Blake asked, slowly approaching the child who seemed to shrink under his gaze more and more with every step he took.

“N-no...”

“Sam, after I just complimented you for being so helpful, if it turns out that you’ve been keeping something important from me, I’m going to be very, very upset.”

He bent down and grabbed her shoulder, trying not to let weeks of frustrations get the best of him.  The child flinched and looked away, avoiding his intense gaze.  Just as he was about to reach out with his other hand, seize her chin, and force her to look at him, she spoke up.

“It’s just that...” she began, her voice quavering, “...back when we first went there and you told the elder to bring you all the oldest books, I don’t think he brought everything.  You couldn’t see it but I saw it from my angle through a gap in the shelves.  He definitely took some things and tucked them away instead of bringing them over.”

“Is that so?”  His grip on her shoulder tightened and she squirmed.

“I think so!  I didn’t get a good look at what it was!  That’s all, I promise!”

“Hmmm.  Hmmmmmmm.”

The door reappeared and slid open.  Blake released his grip on the girl and stood back up.

“Go have fun, Sam.  I have to go pay a geezer a visit.”

*     *     *

Arriving outside of the archives, Blake stared at the entrance door and fought back the urge to kick it in.  As tempting as it was to make a cinematic entrance, he was a world leader.  As the ruler of Otharia, he had an image to maintain, and gallivanting about and kicking in doors in full view of the public was unbecoming of his position.  Also, because the archive was a building constructed by the old regime, it had a thick, sturdy stone door that would probably stand up to a kick or two, and that would just make him look silly.  No, as satisfying as it would be, he would not be busting through said door using sheer calf and thigh power like an action hero today.

He had a skitter do it instead.

The large machine’s bull rush shattered the stone door, and Blake entered right behind it, stepping through the now-empty frame and over the rubble to survey the scene.

“You been holding out on me, old man?” Blake called out, spotting the Otharian document keeper on the other side of the main chamber.

The elderly librarian recoiled from Blake’s sudden invasion like a Floridian finding a hungry gator waiting for them in their living room.

“N-N-No, Lord!  I would never!” he sputtered as Blake quickly advanced on him.

“Yeah?  Because a little birdie told me that there might be some bits and pieces you’ve kept to yourself.  I told you to give me all the ancient stuff you have.”

“Books!” the old man managed to get out.

“What?”

“Y-You told me to get all the ancient books, Lord!” he pleaded.  “I-I-I was merely following your command!”

Blake paused for a split second.  Had he said that?  Now that he thought about it, the geezer might be telling the truth.  Still, he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that the old man was hiding something.

“Doesn’t matter,” he decided.  “Get me everything this time.”

“L-Lord Ferros, what remains is of no worth to you, I can assure—”

“You don’t get to tell me what I care about!  Everything, now!

Blake wanted to haul this insolent old geezer into the air by the front of his shirt and give him a couple of solid shakes for emphasis, but it would probably just break the man.  Bent and withered by age, the geezer looked like he would crumble from little more than a stiff breeze.

“E-Everything, yes,” the archivist wheezed.  “...p-please don’t hurt me.”

“Go.  I don’t have all day.”

Not too much later, the man returned pushing a rickety wooden cart covered in large sheets of the ancient people’s durable document material—halfway between paper and plastic, but not quite either—and several long, thin metal tubes.  He walked like a man being marched to his own execution, with a hint of sadness mixed in that reminded Blake of a someone saying goodbye to his beloved for the final time.

Blake took one look at the cart contents and the geezer’s behavior suddenly took on a much different light.

“Pfft!  Hahahaha!  You perverted old fart!  Snrk!  Why didn’t you just say so in the first place!  Bahahahaha!”

Blake’s chortles grew quickly to full-blown guffaws as the Otharian deflated under Blake’s ridicule.  Blake found himself fumbling for a seat before he fell over from laughing too hard.

Laying on the cart were ancient posters, but not just any sort of poster.  No, they were lewd posters—the sort that you found hanging on the walls in the dorm rooms of male college students, the sort that were just an inch away from being straight-up pornography, and, apparently, the sort prized by lonely old perverts working alone in a long-ignored document archive.

“Ooohhhh, Sofie will have a fit when she sees these!” he cackled as he inspected poster after scandalous poster of scantily clad women in various inviting poses—only to check for information, of course.  Interestingly, they all looked like prints, but prints of paintings.  Of the twenty-odd posters here, none of them looked like photographs.  Nor had he found a single photo in any of the other texts, now that he thought about it.

Finally, when his laughter had died back down to giggle-level, he waved the archivist away.  “Don’t worry, you old lecher, you’ll get your wank material back eventually.”

In all honesty, he could probably just leave them here; he doubted they would help him even the slightest in his quest.  The mental image of Sofie having a conniption over them, however, was too good for him to pass up.  He put them on a nearby table for the moment and turned his focus to the three tubes.

Each tube was made of smooth bronze—not tucrenyx, he noted—and looked to be airtight except for what appeared to be a screw cap on one end.  Carefully, he unscrewed one and removed the contents.  Unrolling the bundle of documents inside, he found... advertisements?  After a moment spent sifting through the collection, that was all the sense he could make of them.  Made of cheaper-feeling material, the flyers all seemed to be hawking a different product, from appliances to what Blake guessed was a farm tool.

Having seen enough, he rolled the advertisements back up and put them back into the canister before opening the second canister.  This batch proved harder for him to figure out.  They were a collection of posters, but they varied in quality and size, and most of them just had large ancient script plastered over brightly colored backgrounds.  Still, something about their styles felt familiar, prodding the back of his mind at some long-buried memory.  It wasn’t until he got near the end that he realized what he was looking at.

One of the last posters had more than just words on it; it had a drawing of what could only be a squad of soldiers striking a valiant pose.  Each member of the squad was a different species: a human, an elf, a beastkin, and... a fourth, smaller person who resembled a normal human in all aspects that Blake could see.  Was this one of the “little-people” mentioned in the botanist’s journal?  Either way, all four wore matching red and white uniforms with spiffy-looking, tall hats with a feather sticking out of each.

If their uniforms and general demeanor weren’t enough to mark them as soldiers, there was the large weapon behind them that sealed the deal.  Large and boxy, the machine reminded him almost of a World War One-era tank, with massive treads and four massive gun barrels pointing upward at a high angle like artillery pieces or an anti-air battery.  The whole design seemed strangely high-tech and low-tech at the same time, almost like steampunk designs back home except without the steam—crystalpunk?

This poster finally clicked all the pieces in place and he found the connection that had eluded him.  The bright colors, the bold, striking text, the martial themes... these were propaganda posters, possibly for some sort of war effort.  He couldn’t read any of it, but even so, he could almost feel the exhortation in their script urging the reader to do... something patriotic.

He flipped through the last few posters just to be sure and came to a halt on the second to the last one.  Here, there was another drawing, but the image was not that of a soldier—or at least, not the sort from the previous poster.  No, this person looked more like a knight, clad in full plate armor and holding two massive swords, one in each hand.  The thing that brought him to a halt, however, was the color—everything was pitch black, almost crystalline, just like Gabby’s sword.  In fact, the two blades this figure held even somewhat resembled her weapon, except they appeared far more sophisticated.  Gabby’s sword was simplistic to the extreme, with a blade that was little more than a rectangle with a triangle stuck on top.  If he were to be honest, it looked like what you would get if you asked a first grader to draw the shape of a sword.  These blades looked far more advanced, with smoother gradients, a more rounded outline, and more.

These blades and the armor had to be related to Gabby’s sword, Blake had little doubt.  The artist had captured that telltale black crystal gleam that Blake would never be able to forget, no matter how hard he tried.  But what did it mean?  He wasn’t quite sure.  Tucking the posters back into the tube, he moved on to the final canister.

The last of the containers held only a single item.  Curious, he pulled it out and found a roll about five feet tall, taller than the tallest posters—and equally long, as he discovered as he unrolled it.  Moving it to another, larger table, he opened it fully and gazed down upon... an ancient map of the world, printed in color, filled with precise depictions of even tiny geographic features, and covered with ancient writing.

“Oh...oh, no.”

He couldn’t read the ancient squiggles that covered the document, but he didn’t need to.  His mind went back to Bazzalth’s words, the words that had placed these worries in his mind, and suddenly, things started to click together.  He needed to read through the documents again, right away.

*     *     *

Blake leaned back in his chair and took a swig of Otharian brew.  The liquid tasted unctuously sweet, though the cinnamon-adjacent aftertaste wasn’t half bad.

He wasn’t horizontal enough.  The metal of his chair shifted, letting him lean back even more—far enough that, when he let his arms hang limp, he could easily set touch the floor with his palm.

Blake felt tired—so very tired.  He had so much on his plate already; what was he supposed to do with this on top of all the rest?!

Nothing, he decided—at least for a bit.  He needed a break.  He’d already spent the last few hours rereading literally everything he had with his new knowledge and perspective, and everything only served to further cement his theory.  Even the journal entries that he’d once thought largely irrelevant read differently now that he knew what to look for.

He was done with reading for now.  Maybe forever.  Letting his body go limp, he set the bottle on the floor beside him and let his mind drift slowly along the lazy currents of inebriation.

Far too early, a loud chime shattered his reverie.  He jerked in surprise, his hand knocking the bottle over and spilling its contents onto the cold metal floor.

Blake hurriedly tried to grab the bottle with one hand before he lost too much alcohol while fumbling with the intercom control panel with the other hand.  A moment later, he lurched upright, a slightly-lighter bottle in one hand and the fingers of his other on the intercom camera button.  A screen rose up behind the control console and lit up, revealing the visage of one Sofie Ramaut sporting her usual infuriatingly discontent scowl.

Ugh, not her, not now!  He had more than enough to deal with without more annoying demands and questions... unless she was here to deliver more texts?  No, she’d already done so this morning.

A finger depressed the talk button and he distilled all of his considerable irritation into a single slurred “What?

“Blake, let me in,” she said in that insufferable tone of voice that she loved to use with him.

“No, go be annoying somewhere else,” he replied.

She paused for a split second.  “Blake, are you drinking?”

“What’s it to you?!” he shot back.  “Fuck off!”

“Alright, if you’re going to be like that... let me in or I’ll tell Pari that you were a big meanie to me.”

The threat gave Blake pause.  The last thing he needed piled atop all his other problems now was the tiny terror’s wrath.  Maybe if he let Sofie in just for a little, he considered, he could appease her enough that she would then go away.  As unpalatable as the prospect seemed, it was orders of magnitude better than another incident involving the cat-eared catastrophe.

With great reluctance, Blake let Sofie inside.  The gadfly marched quickly through the intermediate chambers and arrived at his room.  Immediately upon entering, her nose scrunched up and she grimaced.

“What the hell, are you bathing in alcohol?” she coughed.

“I had an accident, shut up.”

“So, you really are drinking, then.  What happened to all that stuff you were spouting about weakness of spirit?”

“Why do you care, Sofie?  Did you just come to bother me or something because you’re bored?”

Sofie marched up to Blake’s desk, placed her palms down upon the smooth metal, and leaned in.  “I’m here because you’ve freaked Leo out so much that he begged me to find out what’s gotten into you, that’s why.”

“That’s it?”

“Blake, you—the man who nobody has ever seen take a drink of alcohol and was being insufferable about it not even a day ago—went to Leo after days and days of acting all weird and cagey and asked him not just to get you booze, but to, and I quote, ‘get the hardest shit you can find, and lots of it’.  What is he supposed to think after that?”

She leaned in more.

“I’m trying to not freak out myself, Blake, and seeing you like this is not helping.  You found something, didn’t you?  In the texts.  That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

Blake poured some more booze down his gullet, avoiding her worried gaze.  Why did she have to be so perceptive all the time?

“Don’t want to talk about it,” he grunted.

“Why not?”

“Nothing to say.  Don’t know what it means, don’t know what to do, don’t know anything.”

“No, no, stop it with the cryptic vague crap.  What is going on and how bad is it?”

Blake took another gulp and said nothing.

Sofie groaned with exasperation and turned towards the door.  “Alright, have it your way.  I’m going to go see Pari.”

Blake sighed.  “You suck.  Fine.”

“Well?  Spill it.”

Blake shook his head, causing the room to swim a bit even after he stopped.  “Not now.  Wait until Gabby gets back.  She needs to hear it too and it’s... it’s going to take a while.”

“Blake, Gabby might be gone for months!”

Blake let out a grunt.  As much as he didn’t like to admit it, even Sofie made a good point every so often.  He reached down to a desk drawer to his right and fumbled it open.  Pulling out a small bot the size of a deck of playing cards, he opened it up and pressed the single button inside.

“What’s that?” Sofie inquired.

“It’s a... a signal.  For emergencies.  She’ll be back soon.”

“An emergency signal?  You know how important her mission or whatever is to her, right?  Is this an emergency?”

Blake burped.  “Depends on your definition, I guess.”

Sofie pinched the bridge of her nose while biting her lip so hard that it drew blood.  She slammed her hands down upon the table and shot him a heated glare.

“Blake, you cannot tell me that something is an emergency, while also refusing to tell me anything about it and making me wait in ignorance like this for who knows how long.  Tell me something.  Anything.  Just one sentence.”

He stared back at her for a moment.  He knew she was right; he couldn’t keep it all to himself forever.  But, he still didn’t want to say it—not until he’d double-checked, no, triple-checked the other texts.  Not until he was one thousand percent, undoubtedly sure that his findings were correct.  Still, if he gave her just a little bit now, maybe he’d get some peace and quiet again.

“Fine, but it stays in this room.”

“What about Leo?”

“Tell him whatever you think is best, as long as it’s not this.”

“Blake, I—”

“Promise me, or I won’t say anything.”

“You’re obnoxious, you know that?  Okay, I promise I won’t tell Leo about this.”

Or anybody else.”

“Yes, or anybody else.”

Blake lifted the bottle to his lips and let more liquid burn its way down his throat.  Judging by the weight and how high he had to tip it, the bottle was nearly empty, and he was nowhere near sufficiently drunk.  He needed something stronger than this.  Maybe it was his upgraded body, or maybe Otharian booze just sucked—probably both.

Staring past Sofie at the wall over her shoulder, he let his alcohol-addled mind slowly sift through everything he’d learned and distill it down into a single thought, something good enough to appease her so she’d leave him alone for a while.  A few moments later, he tipped back the bottle and let the last remnants of the grog enter his system.  The bottle wobbled as he set it down rather indelicately upon his desk.  He had his answer.

“I know why we’re here.”

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