Gabriela’s legs blurred, kicking up a kilometers-long dust trail behind them as she shot southeast through the Otharian countryside.  As when they’d left Otharia not too long ago, she carried Chitra in her arms, the Batranala’s arms wrapped around the Earthling’s neck.  Every so often, the Ubran would release her grip with her left arm and use it to point in the right direction, correcting Gabriela’s course to prevent any circular navigation mishaps from occurring.

They’d made the trip back in just a handful of hours, traveling at well over two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, the wind howling in their ears so loudly that it drowned out all other sound.  Gabriela’s chest felt tight with worry.  The little chip continued to vibrate in her pocket even now, a constant whine urging her to go faster.  She did, the landscape blurring by as she streaked through farmland and along dirt roads.

The landscape was growing familiar even to her.  If she was correct, then Wroetin would be visible any moment now.  True to her expectations, they flew over the crest of a hill and the Otharian capital did indeed come into view far off in the distance, the city and the land surrounding it as pristine and calm under the cloudless sunny sky as she’d ever seen it.

Her stride faltered and she almost tripped as the urgency bled from her, confusion and anger rushing in to fill the void.  They came to a halt and Chitra slipped out onto her own feet while Gabriela searched the landscape for signs of a struggle, an emergency, anything that would justify that man calling her back like this.  She found nothing.

“Are you sure you understood the meaning of the message?” Chitra asked.

“I was very clear with him and he agreed.  Only ‘absolute emergencies’,” she responded.

“Mmmm,” the Ubran hummed.  “Well, emergencies can come in many forms, I suppose.”

“Not the kind they would need me for.”

“Perhaps.  You go on ahead and find out,” her partner said, slipping her supplies off of Gabriela’s back, making sure to not slice anything on the Sword of Eternity as she did so.  “I’ll traverse the rest of the way on my own.”

“You sure?” Gabriela wondered.

“You’re the person they summoned; I was just along for the ride.  I’m not very popular in that place, anyway.  I’d only be a distraction.”  Chitra leaned in suddenly and gave Gabriela a quick peck on the cheek, causing her cheeks to flush so hard they felt like they were burning.  “Now, go—and perhaps give them a moment to explain before you show them your displeasure, alright?”

“Uh...” Gabby stammered, her thoughts still focused on the feeling of the Scyrian’s soft lips on her skin.  She had not been ready for their first kiss of sorts to be a surprise attack.

Chitra poked her in the side.  “Go on.  I’ll see you later.”

“Alright,” Gabby capitulated, adjusting her pack and weapon.  With a nod, she kicked off the ground and hurled herself towards Wroetin.

*     *     *

“Oh, you’re already here!  Thank goodness!” Sofie greeted Gabriela as she landed on the inside of the outer wall.

What was Sofie doing here?  Had she been waiting for her to arrive?

“What’s going on?” Gabriela demanded to know.

“Come on,” Sofie said, turning away and heading toward the fortress proper.  “Do you have to go to the bathroom or anything?  I imagine you were running for a while.”

“I’m fine.”  She grabbed Sofie by the wrist, causing the other woman to spin around.  Gabriela studied her face for a moment, noting the tightness around her eyes and the way her jaw clenched.  “Tell me what’s going on.”

“It would be fastest for all of us to just go see Blake.  He promised to explain everything once you got here.”  She tugged against Gabriela’s grip, but Gabby didn’t let go.

“Sofie, you’re afraid.  What has you like this?”

“He’s terrified, Gabby.  So much that he started drinking.  And he told me just enough to make me scared that he’s scared.”

“What?”

“He said he’d explain it all once you got here, so let’s go.  I need answers as much as you do.”

Sofie tugged her arm again and this time Gabby let go.  They hurried into the fortress and made their way to Blake’s quarters.

“Alright, she’s here,” Sofie said into the microphone.  “Enough stalling, Blake.”

The door slid open and they went inside.  They found Blake—mask off but otherwise armor-clad—in the farthest room, sitting behind an imposing metal desk that was far too wide and deep, nearly two meters in each direction.  Several empty bottles stood near the edge of the desk, but she didn’t smell much alcohol in the room and he didn’t seem drunk at the moment.  Looking at the bags under his eyes and his generally disheveled appearance—or as disheveled as one can look wearing a suit of metal—set her on edge.

Sofie sniffed the air with a disapproving scowl.  “I thought I told you to stop drinking,” she said, her gaze settling on a small pile of bottles in the far corner.  Gabby counted at least seven empty bottles in the pile.

“Anybody would need to drink after dealing with you,” Blake grumbled in reply.

“I swear, if you’re drunk right now,” Sofie began, but Blake pleadingly raised his hands.

“I’m fine.  This stupid body burns through alcohol way too fast,” he insisted.  “I’ve been sober for the last two hours or so.  Two long, interminable hours that would have been better served being drunk.”

“Would somebody please tell me what’s going on?” Gabriela interjected.  “You called me back when I was busy with important work, and I can’t help but notice that nothing is on fire.”

Blake looked at her with deadened eyes and said, simply, “I know why we’re here.”

Any thoughts of haranguing the man vanished in an instant.  She opened her mouth to say something, but couldn’t figure out what, so nothing came out.  The way he was acting, combined with Sofie’s demeanor, set her on edge, a bad feeling welling up inside her.  The two of them sat down in a pair of chairs on the other side of the desk from Blake and together, they looked at him expectantly.

“Well?” she pressed after he didn’t speak for a few moments.

“Fine,” Blake sighed, leaning forward.  He paused again, and Gabriela felt her ire rising at his constant delays.   “Alright... so... this is going to take a while.  There’s a lot to go over.”

“I didn’t run all the way back here for a lecture, Blake,” she snapped.  “Just tell us the part that matters.”

“I... don’t want to,” he returned weakly.  “If I just lay it out like that, you’ll just tell me I’m a nutcase.”

“Blake, come on,” Sofie joined in.

“Look, if we have to do this, this is how I want to do it.  I’m going to walk you through everything—all my reasoning, all my evidence—and you’re going to poke holes in it and tell me how and why I’m wrong, and then we’re all going to forget about all of this and pretend it never happened, alright?  Please.”

“Just... whatever,” Gabriela grunted.  “Start talking, then.”

“Alright, so... I haven’t really put much thought into how to best explain this, so it’s going to be messy and unorganized—”

“Blake, you’ve had all day to think about it!” Sofie moaned in frustration.  “What the hell have you been doing instead?!”

“I’ve been not thinking much at all and very much enjoying it,” Blake replied.  “But since we’re doing this, I guess the best way to do it is to break it down into two parts.  Who brought us here, and why would they do it?  Let’s start first with the question of who.”

“Last time we spoke about this, you told me you thought our arrival here was a glitch.  An accident of the machines,” Sofie recalled.  “Now you’re talking like you think it was done on purpose by somebody?  What changed your mind?”

“New information, time, a bunch of things.  Maybe the biggest thing was just learning more about the creation of the bunkers.  Pionmi changed my thinking a bit.”

“You’re both losing me already,” Gabby told them.

“So, you know how I’ve had Sofie translating things for the last... however many days?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, she’s been working on a bunch of different old documents, making them make sense for me.  The biggest one is this journal that Sofie found in an ancient ruin a while back.

A vertical panel grew from the desk, complete with a screen that lit up, showing a large block of text.

“This is an example from the journal.  It was written by a botanist—”

“As I said in my notes,” Sofie interjected, “I’m not sure if botanist is the proper term—”

“It’s close enough for our purposes.  Now, calling him ‘the botanist’ a thousand times as we go is going to get annoying, so I’m going to call him, uh, ‘Larry’.”

Sofie sniffed.  “Larry?  Really?”

“We can go with ‘Curly’ or ‘Moe’ if you care so much.”

“Fine, Larry it is.”

“Anyway, as you can see—”

“Um...” Gabby cut in.

“What now?” Blake groaned.  “You people want me to explain it all but you won’t even let me finish a sentence!”

“You know I can’t read that, right?” Gabriela said, indicating the block of English text on the screen.

“...Shit.  I forgot.  I guess we’ll have to read it out loud then,” Blake sighed.  “This is getting better and better...”

He rubbed his eyes for a moment before continuing.

“Anyway, Larry had a friend named Pionmi, who, despite being very dead, might be one of the most impactful people in our lives.”

Gabby cocked an eyebrow.

“You see, Pionmi was a genius, and not just an ordinary genius—she’s an Einstein, prodigy in the field of dimensional physics,” he continued.

“Particle physics,” Sofie corrected.

“Well, yes, your translation in Larry’s journal is ‘particle physics’, but you would agree that ‘dimensional physics’ more accurately matches her work, right?” Blake argued.

Sofie cocked her head in thought for a moment.  “The literal translation is definitely closer to particle, but... I guess they’re close enough.”

“Cool.  Let’s do a quick run-through of what Larry tells us about her after they both graduate.”

The text on the screen shifted and he began to read aloud.

“Pionmi, as I alluded to, had to travel even farther than I, going all the way across the Great Range to the western end of the world to join Imbran Empire’s Imperial Academy [yes, Blake, I checked—from what I can tell from the Emperor’s Tome, this is not the Ubran Empire.  This is something from before that, though I think that their lands at least partially overlap.  Even the Emperor’s Tome doesn’t really mention past nations and whatnot].  At least according to her, it is the only institution with the funds, expertise, and interest in her chosen field.  As such, our correspondence comes with significant delays, but that has not affected the frequency.  As I hoped, she has already found others who can see past her gender and recognize her abilities.  Perhaps attitudes towards the weaker gender are laxer over there.”

“So, Pionmi moves west.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that the Great Range is the Divide, meaning she relocated to Obura.”

“Alright, so what?” Gabriela asked.

“We’ll get to that in a minute.”

The text shifted again.

“I have not heard from Pionmi in a little while, which is not entirely surprising given the news that she and the other researchers in her department are busy relocating.  As she said last, they have depleted all that they can study while in the capital.  They are moving to a small town southeast where the conditions will be far more optimal.  I cannot profess to understand much of what she tells me when she speaks of the knowledge she and her cohorts are mining from [space-matter-energy—“reality”?  More of a guess here than I would like.  Still not entirely sure what it is that Pionmi is working on] itself.  If I had to try to explain it simply, it seems that there are places where certain energies converge and said energies weaken the [edge-membrane-be—to keep it matched with my last guess, we’ll go with “boundaries of existence”], or perhaps the boundaries are already weakened and bring about said energies?  I am not sure.”

“So, here we learn that there are apparently places on Scyria where the boundaries of reality are weaker than elsewhere.  Sofie, I think your interpretations here are spot on.  She is a dimensional physicist and she’s looking into places where the dimensional edge is weaker.  Do you see where this is going?  If you were to build a machine to pierce the boundaries of your reality and pull something through from a different reality, where would you do it?”

“Somewhere where the boundary is weak,” Gabby answered.  “I’m following so far.  This person built the machines that brought us here.”

“Well, helped in some way, at least,” Blake said with a nod.  “Next part.”

“Ardemun continues to do what he does, creating greater and deadlier machines.  As for Pionmi, I finally heard from her again after what must have been a year.  She has been very careful not to tell me the details of what she is doing these days, though she told me she is still at the site with the anomaly, doing whatever it may be that she does.

I can not just feel the stress she is under in her writing but also see it.  Reading her emotions through her script has always been easy.  Whenever she was tense or worried about an upcoming exam or the like—why somebody like her would ever worry about school exams, I cannot say—she would grip her quill harder and it would show in her form.  Her straights become harsher, her curves distorted and often sharp.  I don’t think she realizes it, or perhaps she does and simply doesn’t care.

The script of the last letter was the worst I’ve ever seen her handwriting.  She must be abominably stressed right now.  I can relate.”

“Now, a crucial thing I haven’t told you yet is that during Larry’s life, a huge war breaks out between the people and the dragons.”

“Huh?”  Gabby blinked in surprise.

“Yeah, we’ll get to that in a bit.  But from what we can tell from this, Pionmi and her group seem to have been conscripted into the war effort.  Suddenly she isn’t telling Larry anything about what she’s working on.  So, what she’s building or studying is top secret.  This will be important in a minute.”

The text scrolls.

“Pionmi continues to stress about things she refuses to talk about.”

“Okay, this one doesn’t really matter, but once again, she isn’t talking about her work.  Now, here’s where things get very, very relevant to us.”

Again the text scrolled.

“I’m going to skip part of this for now.  The short version is, the first Earthlings appeared and helped fight the dragons.  It’s a big, huge thing, but the government won’t say where they came from.  But Larry... he has a very strong hunch.”

“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.”

“So, there we have it.  Pionmi and her cohorts designed, built, and probably operated the machines that brought the first Earthlings, and later us, to this world.  If you need more proof, I even have something in the Ubran Emperor’s Tome that suggests their site is the one that brought you here, Gabby.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, check this bit out.”

A new document appeared on the screen.

“Now, the Ruovi, Sheno, Wellira, Epp, Qid, and even the bloodthirsty northern Mu bow before my eminence!  All who know me know fear!  Even the southern barbarians shudder when they hear my name!

Not even the realm of the ancients could evade my grasp!  That’s right, I, in my great wisdom, located the legendary realm of the ancients, that mythical place spoken of in the secret legends of the Batra, passed down from patriarch to patriarch!  Now, the great working, the object of legend that brought forth the Champions of old, belongs to the Batra!  When the working reawakens, it will once more summon a Champion chosen by the spirits, and that Champion will lead this empire to heights beyond your comprehension!

To my future descendants, I lay down an insurmountable challenge!  Live a life that can best mine!  Entertain my spirit as I watch you struggle with this impossible task!  Most of all, guard the great working with your life and prepare for the Champion that shall one day come!”

As Blake read the words, a chilling recognition formed in Gabriela’s mind.

“The Prophecy...” she said softly.  “The Emperor would speak of it from time to time, but I never heard it directly before.”

“There’s another entry later about it too,” Sofie noted.

“Right,” Blake agreed, triggering another screen change.

“Harken, forefathers and offspring, for I am Sharad Batra, Fourth Emperor of this abundant Ubran Empire!  It is I who transformed Ubrus from a society of nomads living in sorry yurts to a strong people living behind impregnable walls of stone, unconquerable by even the fiercest of foreign armies!

My exquisite, unrivaled Imperial Palace stands atop the ancients’ divine device, the greatest protection the ancients could ever ask for!  It is the perfect site for the founding of Ubra, the eternal capital of my great nation!  We shall protect their great workings with our unbending fortress until the prophecy comes to pass!  With the blessing of the spirits below, Ubrus shall prosper forevermore!”

“Alright, so Pionmi worked on Gabby’s portal machine,” Sofie agreed.  “But what does that matter?  You had a point about all this, right?”

“I bring all this up because you asked about why I don’t think the machines just activated on their own, like a misfire.  There was plenty of good reason to believe this, in my opinion.  No disturbances in the dust on the floor, no sign that the door to the outside had opened in millennia.  The same was true for you too, right, Sofie?”

Sofie nodded.  “The place definitely felt entirely abandoned,” she admitted.

“Right.  So, Pionmi is what first made me doubt my conclusion.  Scientists love control.  It’s fundamental to the scientific process.  What’s more, the military loves control.  Nobody likes a gun that goes off on its own.  The more I thought about it, the less plausible it felt to me that they would build a machine capable of such a... well, dangerous function and not make absolutely sure that it’s only doing its thing when they want it to.

“So, I went back and checked.  I missed it the last time—though I wasn’t really looking for it back then—but there’s actually a piece in the system that would prevent any uncontrolled activations.  There’s no way that we got here by pure accident.  And no, there was no multi-millennium-long timer set to count down, either.”

“Which means...” Gabby began.

“That somebody activated the machines,”  Sofie finished.  “Somebody brought us here.”

“Right, but back to the first question at hand: who?!  Let’s break down the question even further.  First, who would even know the facilities exist?  Look at the Pionmi passages again.  She is tight-lipped.  The government is tight-lipped—so much so that Larry and Ardemun, who had considerable influence, couldn’t find any direct information.  The public knew nothing about where the Earthlings came from.  There’s no mention whatsoever of where Othar came from in any of the different versions of the Otharian bibles, other than some vague stuff about him descending from the mountains or hills or whatever.  Nobody knows about these places!”

“The Ubrans know,” Sofie pointed out.

“They know about one, not all of them,” Blake argued.  “And that brings us to the second half of this point.  Let’s say you know where every single one of them is.  Is that enough?  No!  You need to be able to turn the machines on!  Gabby?”

Gabriela shook her head.  “I don’t think the Ubrans know how to activate the machine, no.  Other than when they... pretended, at least.  Just look at the prophecy—it’s about waiting for the machine to turn on by itself.  If they could have activated it, they would have long ago.”

“So, you’re now at an important point, the same one I was at before.  Who else could it have been?” Blake pressed.

“Some kind of secret society?” Sofie suggested.  “A Scyrian Illuminati of sorts?”

“You can’t prove a negative, so I can’t declare with a hundred percent certainty that what you say can’t exist, but I find it hard to believe for a dozen reasons.  For one, this would need to be a world-spanning organization, which seems nearly impossible.  Not only would communication be a huge challenge, just being world-spanning would be practically impossible with the Divide blocking travel.  Cross-Divide travel only opened up in the last millennia, right?”

“I think that’s accurate,” Sofie replied, sounding perhaps half-certain.

“And then, there’s the whole aftermath of the war, which would make organization of any type difficult.”

“That’s true.”

Gabby, for her part, didn’t have much to contribute.  She hadn’t spent much time learning Ubran history or Scyrian history in general, and she’d never laid eyes on the contents of Sofie’s books.  As such, she felt somewhat left out of the conversation, unable to contribute or keep up with the others as they discussed things she didn’t have knowledge of.  Still, she tried her best.

“What do you mean by the aftermath of the war?” she asked.

“Right, we haven’t mentioned that yet,” Blake acknowledged.  “We’re going to get into that soon, but the relevant thing is that basically, after the war, all of civilization collapsed, which is why we lost all this history and knowledge.”

“Oh... that sounds bad.”

Blake snorted.  “Oh man, you just wait.”

“But Blake, if it isn’t some secret society preserving knowledge, then there’s no way for anybody to know about the facilities and the machines,” Sofie protested, still pondering the question at hand.  “No country could do it.  There’s nobody.”

“What about the dragons?” Gabby wondered.

“Indeed, Gabby,” Blake replied, a grin growing on his face.  “What about the dragons?”

“Sorry, huh?  That makes no sense,” Sofie protested.

“Why not?” Blake returned.  “Think about it.  They live for thousands of years—Bazz told me he’s the youngest dragon, and he’s over three thousand years old.  They are intelligent.  They can travel across the whole world without issue.  They would know about cantacrenyx technology when others would not.  They would have thousands of years to track down all the bunkers.  If you consider it, they’re the single faction that has all the factors needed to pull something like this off.”

“But... but they were the first Earthlings’ enemies!  Our predecessors killed more dragons than anybody!  Why would the dragons want to bring in more?!”  She shook her head.  “It doesn’t make any sense.  You’re right, I guess, in that they had the opportunity, but there’s no motive.  In fact, I’d say there’s the opposite of motive.”

Blake’s smile faded into a frown.

“And while we’re at it, how would a dragon even accomplish something like this?” Sofie pressed on.  “You said your facility was covered in dust and untouched, right?  So was mine.  Wouldn’t there have been some sign if a freaking dragon somehow got inside?  And how would a dragon get into the basement of the Ubran imperial palace without anybody noticing?”

“That’s true,” Gabby added.  “It is very deep beneath the palace.”

“Alright, let’s go through this one at a time.  One,” Blake began, holding up a single finger, “there were actually signs, we just didn’t know to notice them at the time.  For example, I’ve been back to my bunker multiple times, and it’s always looked and sounded like normal nature.  You can hear insects and see birds flying and lizards chilling on rocks and all that nature-y stuff.  But, when I first came out, the area around my bunker was as silent as a morgue.  Not a single animal to be seen or heard anywhere.”

“Well, I did hear the people who caught me mention something about not being able to find anything to hunt near the place, and it was super quiet,” Sofie allowed.

“But wait, there’s more.  The village I first stumbled into had been devastated by something they called a ‘beast wave’—in other words, a giant stampede of all manner of animals trampling their crops and the like as the creatures ran through.  Now, combine that with the eerie silence, and what do you get?  The animals all hightailed it out of there as fast as they could.  Now, what would trigger all manner of animals to run for their lives like the devil’s on their tail?  I don’t know, maybe a giant, terrifying super-predator that probably triggers every flight instinct that they have?”

Sofie still didn’t seem convinced.  “But if that were the case, wouldn’t we have seen evidence of that happening elsewhere?  It wouldn’t have just been just here in Otharia.  We should have seen weird animal movements...”

She fell silent for a moment, then gasped.  “The ranutepos!”

Blake leaned forward.  “The what?”

“Big, giant, acid-spitting toad things in Stragma!” Sofie explained with nervous excitement.  “They migrate into the caves where the Stragmans make their summer city, which is what makes the Stragmans move to the fall location.  But last year, the ranutepos migrated early by more than a month, and nobody knew why!  But if they were running from a dragon...”

“And the Stragmans have their own Earthling,” Gabby stated.

“See?  It’s all piecing together,” Blake said.  He held up a second finger.  “Two, what if I told you that a dragon wouldn’t need to enter a bunker to trigger the machines?”

Sofie gave him an incredulous look.  “What?  How?”

“Apparently, it is possible to trigger cantacrenyx circuits from afar using specific energy pulses.”

Gabby didn’t feel any more convinced than Sofie looked.  “And you know this... how?”

“Bazz told me.  He discovered it while researching.  Made a device that could do it and everything.”

“Did you see it?” Gabby asked.

“No, because he doesn’t have it anymore.  He traded it to another dragon for some materials or something.  But, he wouldn’t lie about that sort of thing, and I can see it being real.  I’m able to send signals between machines in a similar way, I believe.  It’s how my whole system communicates.  So yeah, if they wanted to, they could force an activation from a distance by triggering the activation mechanism.”

“Does Arlette know about this?” Sofie asked.

Blake rolled his eyes.  “All it does is force a circuit to activate.  It can’t make something not work.  Her bullshit about my tech being hacked or whatever is off the mark and also not on the docket right now.”

Gabby rubbed her chin, thinking through everybody’s arguments.  This was all so much information, so quickly.  It was hard to keep it all straight.  “So, let’s say everything you said is right, and the dragons did cause us to come here.  Sofie still has a major point.  Why would they want that?”

Blake frowned.  “And that brings us to the second part of all this: the question of why.  This is where it gets complicated.”

“It wasn’t complicated already?” Gabby complained.

“Not like this.  Buckle up, because I’m about to throw a lot at you all at once.  First, let’s set the stage by going back to the start of the ancients’ war, or, as they called it, the Great Crusade.  Back before even that, the ancients lived all across Scyria—”

“How far back was this, anyway?” Gabby asked.

“Unknown.  At least three thousand or thirty-five hundred years ago, probably more.  Long before the birth of the Ubran Empire for sure, which is the oldest contemporary event I can find—unless either of you knows something more?”

Both Gabby and Sofie shook their heads.

“Alright, so... ancient civilizations.  Here’s some of what we know from Larry’s journal.  First, from what I can tell, they were mostly multi-species, or at least Larry doesn’t really mention any societies that were exclusively a single species—except for one that we’ll get to in a second.  He talks about beast people, humans, elves, and also another species that lived in their own society more than the others.”

“The little-people,” Sofie said with a sad frown.

“Right.  Second, the societies, from Larry’s descriptions, were in a weird state of rapid progress throwing everything out of whack.  His society was just starting to move past patriarchal mores, and he mentions how there were still a lot of people who thought that a woman’s place was only in the home.

“On top of social upheaval, they were also going through a technological revolution of sorts.  Cantacrenyx technology was discovered only a few decades before Larry’s journal entries and it spread far and wide.  Soon, there’s cantacrenyx washing machines and all sorts of other shit, and everybody is using it.  There’re even rudimentary computers popping up and everything.  And they basically did it while skipping the industrial revolution the whole time.  As far as I can tell, they never even invented the internal combustion engine—hell, maybe they didn’t even invent serious steam engines.  The way I understand it, it’s like if you took a European or North American society from the start of the nineteenth century and progressed it to where we were at a decade after the end of World War II, except instead of taking a hundred and fifty years, they did it in maybe thirty or forty.”

“Alright,” Gabby nodded.  “So, why does this matter?”

“What I’m trying to establish is the vibes, the collective psyche of these people at the time.  The lives of the people of this world were in a period of great expansion—expansion of living standards, expansion of knowledge, expansion in capabilities, and expansion of what was possible.  They were discovering new things every day, advancing scientific knowledge and all that constantly.  This was a global society hitting the afterburners.  They were inventing all sorts of things.  Cars, computers, and even... airplanes.  And that’s where shit hits the fan.

“There’s one other group I didn’t mention yet, of course: the dragons.  Until now, the dragons basically ruled over the world.  They lived high up in the northern mountains and, judging by what Larry writes and my own personal experience, they didn’t really care much about what the people down below did on a day-to-day basis.  Weren’t worth thinking about, I imagine.  The various nations paid them tribute and the dragons left them alone to spend their days ruling the skies and, I don’t know, count their gold or whatever dragons did back then.

“But then, one day, a dragon was flying along, took a detour on a whim, and saw this thing buzzing through the air.  It’s those insignificant peons, except now they were flying around in the sky like a dragon.  When you’re a dragon, that sort of thing can’t be allowed to stand.  And so, the dragons did as dragons do and went full scorched earth—both figuratively and literally.”

“Scorched earth?” Gabby repeated.

“They killed them,” Sofie explained.  “The entire society of Riben, which is where the little-people lived.  They killed everybody there and left the land itself uninhabitable.  That’s why we’ve never seen a little-person.  They almost all lived in Riben.  After every little-person there was killed, there weren’t enough left alive to survive.”

“Isn’t that too extreme, even for dragons?  The one you’re friends with seemed at least a tiny bit reasonable.  He cares about Pari, too.”

“Bazz is... how should I put this... an eccentric, at least for a dragon,  The others are less accommodating, I can assure you,” Blake informed her.  “You have to look at this from the dragons’ point of view.  Remember when we first found Bazz in his lair?  Remember what he called us?”

Gabriela thought back to that harrowing day.  In truth, what the dragon had roared at them had been one of the least important facets to remember about that time.  “Crawlers, or something?”

“Right.  Crawlers.  They only refer to each other as ‘people’, while everybody else is just a ‘crawler’.  That isn’t an accident of language.  It’s a distillation of what in their eyes makes them better than the rest of us.  They are the ones who lord over the world from above, while we are just sad little things herping and derping around in the mud down below.  So, this dragon encounters the unthinkable: crawlers with the gall to try to be people.  And, well, they just can’t have that, now can they?”

“So they wipe out everybody they think is responsible,” Gabby finished, following along in step with Blake’s explanation.

“Right.  A combination punishment, pest extermination, and show of force to the surviving crawlers,” Blake agreed with a nod.  “But, this is where the stuff I was talking about with the societal advancement comes into play.  If this had happened forty years prior, all the other races would have kept their heads down and begged for forgiveness and that’s the end of that forever.  But at this point, it was too late.  They’d taken bites from the forbidden fruit and it tasted too delicious to stop chewing now.  Their standard of living is shooting through the roof.  The whole world is going through a knowledge boom, an economic boom, the works.  For the first time ever, they’re starting to feel powerful in their own right.

“And what’s more, they don’t know dragons like I do.  They don’t know exactly why the dragons wiped out an entire species, but they know that if the dragons are willing to do it once, they’re surely willing to do it again.  So, the nations come together and make a pact, and they start building weapons, and training armies, and more.  And then, a few years later, they launch an uprising they call the Grand Crusade and kick it off by massacring a bunch of dragons in a massive ambush.”

“So, they haven’t even figured out the internal combustion engine, but they can wipe out a group of dragons?  That seems hard to believe, to be honest,” Sofie pointed out.

“That’s a good point,” Gabby agreed, her skepticism growing as she recalled all that she’d had to do just to chase off a single dragon.  “They had machines like yours, I assume?  Because yours didn’t really do much to stop Bazzalth.”

“Yeah, I know where you’re coming from,” Blake acknowledged.  “The thing is, they had two things we didn’t: numbers and prep time.  They had years to plan, to make weapons...” 

He swiveled his chair around and grabbed a nearby tube leaning against the corner of the room.  Gabby had not noticed before, but several tubes rested there.  Blake screwed off the cap of his chosen tube and pulled out a stack of something.  After he flattened them out on the desk, Gabby realized they were posters of some sort.  He shuffled through them too quickly for her to really take any of them in, until he finally stopped at a certain sheet.

“Look at this,” he said, holding it up for both of them to inspect.

The poster was a drawing of four people, each holding up their fists towards the sky.  Gabby’s gaze focused on each one.  On the left, there was what appeared to be a human man, with features that vaguely resembled people from the Pacific Islands she’d seen in magazines and television.  To his right was a thinner person with sharp ears, about a head shorter than the human—an elf.  On the far right was a large beastkin man with tiger-like ears and hair, and even a striped orange and black tail peeking out from the side of the waist.  The figure between the elf and the beastman, however...

“Is that a little-person?!” Sofie gasped, leaning in close to study the poster with wide eyes and rapt attention.

“Probably,” Blake responded with a shrug.  “Don’t know what else they could be.”

The figure stood far shorter than the others, with the top of their head barely reaching the top of the human’s hips.  They didn’t appear too similar to the stereotypical dwarf, like the ones she’d seen in those Hobbit movies long ago.  They weren’t wide like in the movies, and there was no beard to speak of.  In fact, it looked like they had no hair at all, which was a little off-putting.  Also, their ears appeared to be fused to the sides of their heads instead of detached like a human’s were, though Gabby wasn’t sure if that was just a casualty of the artistic rendering or not.

“Woah...” Sofie breathed, tracing the person with the tip of her pointer finger, the original topic of discussion completely forgotten.  “This is so cool!”

Her finger slid over to a set of swirls lining the right side of the page.   “Stand... unbend... oppose... hold-beneath...” she slowly muttered to herself.

“It’s a propaganda poster, right?” Blake asked.

“Something like that, yeah.  Maybe a recruitment poster.  Rough translation, it says something like ‘Standing straight against the oppressors’.”

“Cool... but anyway,” Blake pressed on, “the reason I brought this up was not the people but what’s behind it.  See that thing in the back?”

Drawn in the background of the picture was a boxy machine, one that almost reminded Gabby of old-school construction vehicles, except for the four comparatively huge gun barrels sticking out.  Pointed up at a forty-five-degree angle towards the sky, their purpose was clear to them all.

“One of those might not pose much of a threat to a dragon, but a hundred together?  Five hundred?  A thousand, even?  That dragon’s going to get messed up.  And what’s more, they almost surely had explosives, chemicals, and all sorts of other nasty stuff in their ammunition, while I’m basically just throwing big, sharp rocks.  I think that the course of events I’ve laid out is very plausible.”

“These are so neat,” Sofie commented to nobody in particular as she leafed through the pile of posters.

“The old fart at the archive had them.  He had some other ones too that I’m sure you’d just love,” Blake answered with a smirk and an almost-concealed snicker that oozed mischief.

“Totally!  I can’t wait!” Sofie obliviously chirped back.

Gabby decided to not get involved in whatever that was about.  “So, you were saying they tried to kill the dragons?”

“Right, right,” Blake said, sitting up straighter and returning to his more serious demeanor.  “So, yeah, big war, much killing, bad times all around.  Even with their preparations, the people’s momentum slowly grinds to a halt and then they slowly start losing the war.  They lose land, they lose entire cities, and things look bleak.  But then, Pionmi succeeds and our predecessors show up—the first Earthlings.

“Now, the first batch of Earthlings kicked ass, because once they showed up, the war does a complete one-eighty.  Suddenly, the dragons are on the back foot again.  Eventually, after, uh...”  He quickly switched back to the journal and scrolled around for a few seconds before finding what he was looking for.  “After about a year of constant battle, the Earthlings and the crawler armies are knocking on the dragons’ front door.  They decide it’s time to end everything, once and for all.  One final full-scale assault—pull the goalie, all-in.  It’s the global-scale war equivalent of the Thunderdome—two sides enter, one side leaves.  And then...”

He leaned forward, his eyes glinting with anxious energy as he tapped the tip of his armored pointer finger to emphasize every word.

“Something.  Happened.”

Sofie scoffed at Blake’s theatrics.  “Yeah, no shit.  Got any more ground-shaking revelations for us?”

“What, I’m serious!”

“You’re telling me two plus two equals four and acting like it’s the discovery of the century.  Save the dramatics for something actually surprising, please.”

Gabby cleared her throat.  “Could you explain why this is so unimpressive?  I’m sorry I’m so out of the loop—”

“—No, no, you’re right,” Sofie conceded.  “Sorry, it’s just that I translated everything that Blake has been studying, so we both know these documents already.  I keep forgetting you haven’t seen them yet.

“The first thing should be obvious already.  If the armies and the dragons had their final climactic battle and everything went as Larry foresaw, there shouldn’t be any dragons left.  Their armies would have slain all the dragons in their homeland and hunted down any stragglers in the days that followed.  On the other hand, if the dragons had won, do you think there would be people still alive today?”

“Probably not,” Gabby answered.  “I mean, they could have forgiven the people—”

“Would dragons do something like that, though?” Blake pressed.

“No, I don’t think so,” Gabby admitted.

“Right,” Sofie continued.  “So, that’s sign number one that, as Blake so astutely put it, ‘something happened’.  But, there’s much more direct evidence than that.  Show her, Blake.  Read her the first entry after the battle.”

Blake nodded.  “We don’t know how long a gap there is between the final battle and this journal entry, but I would guess a few months, at least.  Here we are...”

“It is cold.  So cold,” Blake began to read, his already-weary voice seeming to take on an otherworldly exhaustion as he channeled the author’s words across thousands of years.  The world he spoke of was a nightmare, a dead and dying land covered in meters of ash and snow, where the sun itself had been seemingly smothered by an eternally clouded sky.  The contents of the journal entry chilled Gabriela to her core, though the poor author had surely felt far more frozen.

“Terrible,” she muttered, shaking her head to banish the sights and sounds her imagination had cooked up for her as she listened.  Still, one thing bothered her more than the rest.  “But... ash?”

“Yeah,” Blake nodded, his eyes burning with intensity.  “Larry complains a while back about how hot and sweltering Trazac is.  Now, after the battle to end all battles, there’s ash covering the land, unending clouds covering the sky, and terrible blizzards constantly piling layers of snow and ice atop the ash.  Everything is dead.  Something went down, something so big that even the Writ of Otharon mentions it.  Check this out...”

He brought up a third document and quickly skimmed to the section he was looking for.

“And so, Otharon ventured north to the lands of the Elselings to slay the tyrant dragons and liberate the people once and for all.  Otharon fought valiantly, but the Dragon King was mighty and fierce.  There was a great battle as the Dragon King and Otharon fought for many days and many nights as the people prayed and watched Otharon’s fires until, one day, Otharon’s flames above vanished into nothingness.  The people wailed and wept, and even the world itself cried out in agony, as the earth did shake and the winds did roar and the skies did tremble at the loss, but Otharon had not abandoned his subjects.  With his great power, he slew the Dragon King and ascended to his great paradise, where he built his great halls to await his loyal subjects.

As the Dragon King lay dying, he howled out his vengeance at the Ascendant One.  “You have killed me!  I curse you, Otharon, you who dares covet what is ours by right!  This world and all things on it—if we cannot have them, then no one shall!  I curse it all!  I shall steal the sun and bring about a great winter upon all peoples, and their bodies will grow weak and they will perish in pain and despair!”

And the tyrant’s horrible curse did spread across the world, bringing death and destruction everywhere.  The land became covered with darkness and shadow as the skies grew clouded.  Snow that was not snow fell across the world, burying the land deep beneath its piles.  The weight of the snow that was not snow crushed crops and collapsed roofs, forcing the people from their homes.  The air grew colder by the day, and great storms swept across the land, covering the snow that was not snow with true snow and ice taller than a standing man.”

Though it was warm in the room, Gabriela shivered.

“That sounds like a volcanic eruption—especially the line ‘the earth did shake and the winds did roar and the skies did tremble’,” she observed.  “Seems simple enough.”

“No, that doesn’t add up at all,” Sofie disagreed strongly.

Blake was about to say something, but stopped, surprised by Sofie’s vehement rejection.  “Really?”

“Why not?” Gabby added.

“This comment here... ‘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.’  How deep would you have to be in ash before it got hard to climb out of?  Up to your thighs?  Your hips?  Maybe higher?  That’s not a dusting; that sounds like a meter of ash, maybe more—and that’s an absurd amount.  That sounds like multiple feet—at least three, probably more.  That’s an absurd amount of ash.  Normal eruptions do not spit out enough ash to deposit even a fraction of that anywhere.”

“Normal eruptions?  And, since when did you become a volcano expert, Sofie?” Blake asked, skepticism in his tone.

“In my last year of school before university, we all had to do presentations on various natural disasters and other ways the world could end.  I was assigned the Yellowstone supervolcano.  You know of it?”

“Uh... sure...”

“I have not heard of this,” Gabby stated plainly.

Sofie rolled her eyes.  “See, Blake?  At least one of you understands that there’s no shame in not knowing something if you can admit it.”

“Fine, never heard of it either,” Blake sighed.  “Teach us, oh wise one.”

“Simply put, there is that there’s a giant volcano under Yellowstone, a supervolcano.  The last time it went off, it threw so much rock into the air that it left a hole fifty kilometers by seventy kilometers, spewing out over a thousand cubic kilometers of material.  Think about how much that is.”

“Sounds like a lot,” Blake acknowledged, “but it sounds to me like you’re proving Gabby correct instead of debunking the volcano theory.”

“My problem is with the ash.  I remember looking at maps scientists made about what would happen if Yellowstone erupted again.  It would be really deep right around the eruption, about a meter of accumulation, then less than a meter for those further away, then less than a third of a meter outside that area, then less than a tenth, etcetera,” she explained, tracing larger and larger invisible rings on the desk with her finger.  “It drops off pretty fast.  By the time you get to the eastern third of the United States, we’re looking at a centimeter of ash at most, with the east coast getting even less than that.

“For an eruption to drop a meter or more of ash on all of Trazac would mean one of two things: either the eruption happened right on top of them, in which case they’d be dead, or it would have to be something so large that it makes super-eruptions look like child’s play.  Add in the level of ash buildup in Otharia, and I just can’t see it being a volcanic eruption.  Not unless it was one that just lasted for multiple years, going and going and going.  And, yes, Larry mentions a volcanic caldera, but it’s clear from the later entries that it isn’t what erupted or they wouldn’t have moved there later.”

“That would mean that the ash would build up slowly over time, right?” Blake asked.  “Because I don’t think that fits the timeline.  Larry’s town only had so much food saved up, and they hadn’t run out when the ash was already deep.  So it sounds like it would have accumulated very quickly.”

“Right,” Sofie confirmed.  “So, either we have an eruption so large that it would blow up an area bigger than all of Otharia, or it wasn’t a volcano after all.”

“It wasn’t a volcano,” Blake said with complete certainty.

Gabby and Sofie both paused for a moment.

“Weren’t you just arguing that it was?” Gabriela inquired.

He nodded.  “I wanted to hear her reasons to shoot that theory down.  Might I remind you that this is, in a way, you both checking my work?  Finding flaws in my conclusions?”

“It’s hard to check your work when you won’t show it,” Gabby pointed out.

“Right!  What brought you to my conclusion, if it wasn’t my train of logic?” Sofie pressed.

“For a long time, I did think it was a volcano.  After all, unlike a certain someone here, I’m not a volcanologist, so I didn’t know the problems,” Blake admitted with a bit of a cheeky smile.  “But, the conclusion always bothered me, because it only explained the ash and the winter.  I spent a long time trying to get the rest of it to add up, but I just never could.  To start with, how would a volcanic eruption cause the Withering?”

Gabby started to speak but Blake held up a hand, saying “Yes, yes, Gabby, I know.”

The text on the screen blurred for a moment before reforming to another section of the journal.

“Sofie, my throat needs a rest.  Would you mind?”

“Sure, just bring it closer so I can read it better, please,” she replied.

“Today is the first day in a long time I have truly felt hope.  Today, Aytra took her first steps since becoming bedridden with [I think that the words used here are some sort of disease name, probably something scientific.  Given the described symptoms, let’s go with something more poetic, shall we?  “The Withering”] not long after that fateful day.  Her case of the Withering has been one of the worst I know of, but it finally seems to be passing.  She will live.  The knowledge brings life to my weary, fatigued body and soul.

Watching her slowly waste away has been one of the worst experiences of my life, made worse by the fact that nobody knows anything about the disease, so we do not even know what it is or how to fight it.  All we know is that every child contracted it around the same time.

We first knew something was wrong when they all began to bleed from their nose and mouth.  Then, over the days, they became weak and their bodies began to thin as if their bodies were eating away at themselves.  A large number of the children died, while others bounced back after a matter of days and seem completely fine now.  Then, there are the ones like Aytra who have been stuck on the edge for what feels like an eternity.  She has suffered so, so much.  I am overjoyed that her pain is almost over.”

“We can come back to the rest of this later if we need,” Blake interrupted, scrolling down some more.  “Let’s skip to the beginning of the following entry for now.”

“The Withering has returned, wreaking havoc across the survivors.  The children seem unaffected this time.  Now, it is the adults’ turn.  I have not done a comprehensive study, but the path the disease is cutting through us seems to follow our age.  I and the two others who would have been drafted were the first to show signs, followed by those older, until it struck the eldest generation.  I cannot explain this pattern or what it might mean.  It is unimportant, anyhow.  What matters is that our numbers fall with frightening speed.  As deadly as the Withering was when it swept through the children, it is doubly so now.  Perhaps we simply lack the strength of youth.  Regardless, what remains of the town is starting to crumble as more and more people die, leaving behind children with nobody to care for them.  We as a community have banded together to care for those left behind, but it is hard.  Most of us doing the work are ill as well, including me.”

“So...” Blake began, “that’s what Larry has to say about that.  The Otharians mention it too, writing: And the people did suffer terribly.  First, the children became frail, then the adults, and last the elderly.  The curse wreaked death and destruction upon the people, and they did despair as more and more died pitifully.

“Now, I ask again how a volcano can do something like that on a global scale?”

Sofie shrugged.  “Some sort of contagion in the earth, released by the eruption and spread through the air?  An ancient bacteria or virus or something.  Didn’t they find some sort of ancient disease in the ground in Siberia?  Could be something like that.”

Blake went silent for a few moments before meekly asking, “...is that a thing?”

“Are you kidding?!  Of course it is!” Gabriela scoffed.  “Have you never heard of tetanus?  Botulism?  Valley fever?”

“Alright, so it’s Rub Blake’s Ignorance In His Face Day!”

“We’re just checking your work,” Gabby told him with a tight smile.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he grumbled.

“It’s only a possible explanation, mind you—just conjecture,” Sofie reminded him.  “You asked for a way to explain how it could happen, not something I can prove.”

“Yeah, but we’re stuck working in the realm of theory for most of this exercise, so I can’t deny that you might be right.  See, this whole time, the symptoms reminded me of some sort of radiation poisoning.”

Sofie shrugged.  “That could also be a possibility, but what sort of event could cause global radiation poisoning?”

Blake opened his mouth to say something but then hesitated.  After a moment his jaw clenched back shut, and he went quiet.

“Blake?  What is it?” Sofie asked after several seconds of awkward silence.  She eyed him with suspicion.  “What do you know?”

“I—”  Blake frowned and bit his lip.

“Enough with the delays,” Gabriela told him.  “Whatever it is, just say it.  You called me back here saying it was an absolute emergency, and so far you’ve done nothing but give me a history lesson and claim that the dragons brought us here—which, while interesting, and maybe even important, is not an emergency.  If you don’t have something more substantial soon, I’m going to be beyond angry.”

Blake held up a placating hand.  “Alright, alright...”  He sighed again, his weariness clear to the others.  “So, I’m sure you’ve been wondering why I’ve been so... preoccupied recently.  And why I needed Sofie to translate all this stuff in the first place.”

“Yes, it’s been bothering everybody in the fortress,” Sofie told him.

“I know, but...”  He shook his head.  “Anyway, it all started back when I was spending time with Bazz in his lair.  You see, he builds machines too, just like me, except he makes them out of flesh.”

Sofie cringed and let out a grunt of disgust.  “Ugh!”

“Biotechnology is one of his fortes, you see.  He’s very capable with them; it’s really impressive, actually.  He does stuff that I would never have imagined you could do with just organic matter.  But still, the process he had to go through to make new machines seemed really cumbersome—he had to grow what he needed, for example.  So, at one point, I just asked him why he bothers with all of that when he could just use cantacrenyx technology like me.”

Blake leaned in again and looked them both in the eyes, his face grim.

“And he looks at me like I’m a complete idiot—an absolute buffoon—and he says, basically, ‘why would I put any trust into a technology that didn’t even work until two years ago?’”

Gabby shared a confused glance with Sofie.

“I’m paraphrasing here, but that was the gist of it.  He also said something about how there’s corruption and how it’s now weakened enough that it doesn’t impede the energy flow anymore, and that cantacrenyx tech has not worked for his entire life.”

“But...” Gabby said.  The rest didn’t need to be spoken.

“Yes!  I didn’t know how to take such a statement at the time, so I kind of just shoved it out of my head for a while, but it wouldn’t go away.  It started needling me, bugging me more and more.  I could feel that this was important somehow, but I didn’t know why.  There was something just out of my grasp, something crucial, but I couldn’t say what it was.  I just knew that I needed to find an answer, and to do that, I needed more information—information about the past.”

“So you came to me,” Sofie finished.

“So I came to you.  And you really have come through, I have to admit.  I cannot thank you enough for this.”

The twenty-year-old harrumphed and crossed her arms over her chest.  “I was going to do it anyway eventually.  Your documents helped too, I guess.”

Blake turned back to the screen and began searching through the text.  “So, first off, I found mentions of the phenomenon Bazz mentioned.  Not much, but enough.  Obviously, before the war and even up until the final confrontation, cantacrenyx technology was everywhere and working just fine.  But after the ‘event’, we find offhand mentions like this...”

He gestured to Sofie, who cleared her throat.

“Perhaps the energy sensor suite Pionmi sent would have picked up something, but it ran dry a while ago.  Almost the entire Institute is dead and dark now, with the last of our power reserved for lighting select laboratories, like the one I’m in right now.”

“And then later, these little bits,” Blake cut in.  “‘I would include more, but most of our data was lost when the mechanical brains died’, and ‘I can hear the others calling for me.  It takes all of us now to properly seal the outer doors, so my presence is required’.  That last bit sounds to me like they had powered doors, but now they have to push them shut.”

“There were automatic doors there, yes,” Sofie confirmed.

“The way he’s talking makes it sound like they had a limited amount of energy that they were trying to ration out, almost like a collection of batteries or something,” Gabby mused.

“Exactly,” Blake concurred, excitement clear on his face.  “What it sounds like, to me, is that all the cantacrenyx crystals suddenly stopped absorbing energy, meaning all the machines had to work with were the small amounts of energy still held within the crystals.

“So much clicked into place once I realized all of this.  For one, there’s been a lot of weird oddities with the ancient machines that didn’t make any sense, like how it seemed as if somebody had wiped all the data from every one of the computers in the bunkers.  But now, I can see it for what it really is: they designed all their technology with the assumption that the crystals and their energy flow would always be around!

“Like, back on Earth, you never saw normal cars with their own air tanks to feed oxygen to the engine, right?  Why would you?  We designed the machine with the assumption that the air that was all around us would always be there for the engine to use.  It’s the same with their tech.  Their computers don’t hold any data because their storage relies on a tiny crystal to constantly feed it a little drip of energy to maintain its state!  Once those all ran out, the data just evaporated into thin air!

“Also, it totally explains why everybody has ignored cantacrenyx tech for all these years!  This whole time, I’ve just thought that the people of this world were idiots, but how would they discover something when it literally can’t work?”

“Wow, it’s a miracle that anybody survived, really,” Gabby observed.

“I know, right?  First, they got ground down by years of war and attrition, then they’re not just shoved into an eternal winter and deluged with ash—not to mention the mysterious ancient-ground-based contagion or radiation poisoning—and to top it all off, all the technology their civilizations were built to rely upon for the last fifty years just stops working all at once!  Can you imagine what would happen if everything based on electricity and fossil fuels on Earth just stopped functioning all at the same time?  Planes falling out of the sky, pacemakers shorting out, people no longer able to order pizza delivery on the internet?  It would be utter chaos!”

“But what could disable all the crystals like that?” Sofie wondered, the question tamping down Blake’s sudden burst of enthusiasm.  “You say Bazzalth called it ‘corruption’?”

“Bazz calls a lot of things corruption, honestly,” Blake sighed.  “Here’s what I can say about the energy that collects in the crystals.  As far as I know, no material can prevent the crystals from accumulating energy.  He said the corruption had ‘weakened’, not that it was gone, so if it was somehow something physical—you know, something absolutely insane like... nanomachines, or whatever—there should be something that we could detect.  I haven’t been able to detect anything, and I’ve tried a variety of different ways over the last week.

“If it isn’t matter, then that just leaves energy.  What kind of energy and how it interferes with the crystal energy, I haven’t a clue, but it would have to be incredibly strong to affect everything across the world.  It’s fading now, at least.  If this were Earth, I would assume that means it’s dispersing into space or getting absorbed somehow, but conservation of energy and conservation of mass seem to be suggestions at best in this place... so who the fuck knows, really.  But, what I can say, fairly confidently, is that this energy wasn’t around before the final battle and it clearly was after.”

“Some sort of dragon weapon, surely,” Gabby postulated.  “We know they can build things, why not a bomb?”

“Right, it’s what any of us would start with, right?” Blake agreed with a nod.  “But, much like the volcano theory from before, a lot of the more peripheral aspects just don’t add up in my mind.  Where would the dragons get the frankly absurd amount of energy needed for something like this?  And, perhaps most crucially, if you had a weapon that would shut down the entire opposing side for good, why wouldn’t you use it as soon as you could to end the war in your favor?  If the dragons had a bomb that could do this, the war should never have lasted to a final climactic confrontation!”

He exhaled deeply and leaned back, slightly spent.

“So... ash, winter, Withering, cantacrenyx.   This place where we’ve worked ourselves to now, this set of facts and theories, is what I was stuck on for days while Sofie steadily chipped away at the documents.  I spent days reading through them all, checking the new passages as they came in, running experiments, and anything else I could think of, trying to find something to... to break the stalemate, I guess.  It just didn’t feel right, you know?  I know we’re practicing the most ghetto brand of archeology imaginable here, trying to divine the nature of events that transpired thousands of years ago from a handful of documents translated by someone who has been making it up as she went along, but still... I kept feeling like I was missing something really important.”

He reached back and snagged a second tube, the largest of them. 

“And then, just yesterday, I got my hands on this... and my entire perspective changed.”

Unscrewing the cap, he slid out a single large rolled-up sheet and slowly unrolled it on the desk.  Much larger than the posters, it covered almost the entirety of the desk.  This was why the desk was so large, she realized.  Blake had known he would be showing this today.

As the sheet unrolled, it became immediately clear just what sort of document this was: a map.  Covered with the telltale swirls of ancient script, it depicted the world of that time in intricate detail.  It was, without a doubt, an amazing document and a stellar find.  There was only one problem.

There was too much land—far too much.

“What... what is this?!” Sofie gasped with a mixture of awe, puzzlement, and concern.

The screen beside her flashed and a depiction of the map she was used to appeared on it.  As always, it roughly resembled a thick, bloated letter ‘C’ in Gabby’s mind, with the letter rotated so the gap faced north, and with Otharia tacked on to the southeast part like a reflected, malformed Spain.

But on this new—or, perhaps, old—map, that gap and the hollow it fed to, the one that formed the sea north of Gustil and the Divide, was nowhere to be found.  Instead, the map depicted land.  Thousands of square kilometers of high, mountainous land.

The vast majority of the land looked to be one massive mountain range, with some of the peaks in the center comparable to the towering giants of the Divide.  While many dots of various sizes covered most of the map, showing the spread of the ancient peoples across Scyria, most of the land in the heretofore missing area was conspicuously empty.  Almost all of the towns marked were fairly close to the edge of the section, with one massive exception.

While Gabriela tried to wrap her mind around what this meant, Blake placed his finger on a single, giant dot in the center of the mountains, located on the tallest peak.  “Sofie, is this what I think it is?”

The bookish woman didn’t respond, her wide, overwhelmed gaze darting around the map like a starving man suddenly thrust in front of an all-you-can-eat buffet.  Gabby poked her in the arm and she twitched.

“Wha—!  Um...” Her eyes refocused and she swallowed.  “Sorry...  Yeah, it says, uh...”  She mumbled under her breath for a few moments.  “Dvorga, Seat of the Great Ones.  That has to be the home of the dragons.”

“And where the final battle took place,” Blake added with a nod.

“But... but what is this?” Gabby asked.  “I’ve been to the northern cliffs of Gustil!  There’s nothing there but the ocean!  What happened to the land here?!”

“It became ash,” Blake stated.  “It’s the only explanation that makes sense.  As Sofie pointed out earlier, even a supervolcano shouldn’t be able to put out so much ash that it covered the entire world.”

“B-but, that’s impossible!  This area that is gone, it’s huge!  Maybe as big as all of Mexico, or bigger!”

“At least as big as all of western Europe,” Sofie agreed.

“Volcanoes can’t do something like this, right?  No matter how big?”

Sofie vehemently shook her head.  “Not a chance.”

“But... then, what did?  Some kind of nuclear weapon?”

“I can’t imagine a nuke capable of doing something on this scale,” Blake said.

“Then... then...”

Blake leaned forward again, resting his armored elbows on the cold metal, creating a pair of soft clanks.

“This blew my mind when I first saw it.  It destroyed the volcano theory I’d been working with, but more importantly, it showed me something very important: I’d been operating on unacknowledged assumptions this entire time.  Larry refers to the homeland of the dragons as the ‘northern highlands’, and I just assumed that what he meant was the mountains north of Kutrad.  Obviously, that was wrong.  But if I was wrong about that, what else was I wrong about?  What other assumptions were in my head, unnoticed?”

He turned to Sofie with a cold intensity in his eyes.

“You’ve read through everything as much as I have.  You know it all as well as I do.  Can you point to a single time that Feeling or Observing is mentioned in any of Larry’s journal, or even the Otharian texts?  Even in a way that doesn’t use those terms?  Any manifestation at all of the supernatural magic shit that we see everywhere these days?”

Sofie looked at him like he’d gone crazy.  “What, are you serious?” she scoffed with a cocksure smirk.  “Of course I...”  Her words faded into silence, and Gabby could see her mind churning madly behind her eyes, trying to find the thing she’d felt so sure of just a second ago.  She watched as the confidence on the woman’s face slowly melted away and a hint of panic entered her eyes.

“I... I need to go get them,” she said, her voice tight as she stood up.

“No, stay,” Blake insisted.  “Here, just use the screen.”

A computer mouse emerged from the desk, popping out beside the screen, and Sofie seized it like a drowning man grasping at some nearby flotsam.  She immediately brought up what looked like the journal document and began feverishly spinning the mouse wheel, scrolling through the text with a worried look in her eyes.

Gabriela leaned in closer to Blake, giving Sofie a concerned glance, and muttered, “Could you please tell me what is going on?”

Blake wearily rubbed his eyes with his hands.  “From the start, we have been operating on the simple—and entirely understandable belief that the world of the ancients is the same as the world we live in now, at least when it came to the simple, fundamental things.  I mean, if you read a book about something that happened in, say, the Roman Empire, you would be perfectly logical in assuming that gravity worked back then the same way that it did the day you were swept here, right?”

“I guess I follow, sure.”

“I cannot find a single mention in anything of the sort of everyday superpowers that everybody has nowadays.  Not a single one.  There’s even little, tiny things that I only noticed when I went back and looked for them.”

A second screen quickly rose beside them and flashed to life.

“I thought this section was just a bunch of useless rambling for the longest time, but check this out.”

“The championships were a different story—even the cheapest tickets were more than I, or even my parents, could afford.  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.  The lack of knowing twisted me inside so strongly that I ended up vomiting onto the pavement and getting a stern lecture from a nearby [broom-warrior—okay, this might be the funniest thing in the journal.  I’m totally calling every “janitor” a broom warrior now].”

“Stones in the wall.  Stones, as in plural.  You’ve seen the stadiums they have in this world, right?  Would you describe one of their walls—any of them; take your pick—as made up of multiple stones?”

“No, that means something different to me,” she replied, her mind immediately jumping to the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City.  The magnificent stonework had been the product of nearly 250 years of labor, and the sweat that had gone into it made her look differently upon such grand Scyrian efforts as the grand Ubran Imperial Palace.  While far larger and even more ornate, somehow the knowledge that it had been raised by a team of stone Observers over a comparatively short time with far less effort made it feel lesser.  “I see what you mean.”

“There’re bits in the Otharian stuff too that I’ve known about for a while and I just never put two and two together.  In all the different versions of the Otharian myth, they always talk about Othar like he’s performing miracles, right?  Like this from the Writ of Otharon...”

“And so, Otharon did make many great flames to banish the darkness from the night, so that the people could rest without worry, for never again would the evil dragons strike from the darkness.  And Otharon said, “Heed mine fire, for as long as I still breathe, they shall burn with mine righteous fury.”  And so it was, and it was good.  The people rejoiced, for they no longer needed to fear the death that came in the darkness.”

“Or, if we want the older version,” Blake continued, switching to a second document, “there’s this...”

“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...”

“Even Sam thought it was odd at the time, and I didn’t see it,” Blake sighed, rubbing his eyes again.  “I mean, sure, I’m sure Othar’s pyromancy or whatever was super impressive and all that, but everybody can make some sort of fire, right?  If the people didn’t want to fear the shadows along their path, they could just make light all on their own.  The more powerful fire Observers, especially, are nothing to sneeze at; Othar was just a bigger version of stuff people had already seen and done a thousand times over.  So, why did they act like it was the hottest shit ever—pun very much intended?”

“Because they hadn’t seen it before...”

“Exactly.  And for that matter, why did they only fight with technology?  I mean, I just went with it because I would have done the same as them if I were in their position, but it seems like there’d be a few other tactics that could be used.  Like, with enough volunteers and doses of chimirin, they’d do quite well, I would imagine.”

“But, why does this matter?” she wondered.  “I mean, I guess it’s a big thing, but you both seem to be freaking out over it a bit more than seems justified.  Feelers and Observers exist now; why does it matter if they existed back then?  Does this change our situation at all?”

“This alone?  I mean, I guess not, at least not directly,” Blake allowed.  “But it’s not alone, and it’s scary to think about.  Just how much power would be needed to literally change the laws of physics?”

“The—the Many,” Sofie sputtered, reentering the conversation.  “The only thing I can find is the Many, but it’s something.”

“What about a Many?” Gabriela asked.

Sofie cleared her throat.

“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.”

“Ah, you caught that one.  But... that’s just more assumptions,” Blake pointed out.  “You decided that ‘double-speaker’ must mean a Many, because of what?  Why wouldn’t you jump to the more obvious interpretation: a translator?  Look at the sentence and tell me that ‘translator’ doesn’t fit the rest of it far better than Many would.”

“Wait, are you saying—”

“That the ancestors didn’t have today’s incredibly convenient universal translation?  If Scyrian magic didn’t exist back then, why should we assume the translation existed?”

“Ugh, I’m so stupid!” she groaned.  “How could I have missed this?!”

“Because you were operating on the same assumptions that we all have been.  Why would anybody need a translator when the world takes care of it for us?  I fell into the same trap.  I distinctly remember reading that double-speaker sentence the first time and thinking ‘Wouldn’t translator make more sense here?’ and then immediately saying to myself, ‘No, you idiot!  Why would they need translators?’  The truth was shouting right in my ear and I just ignored it for weeks.  If I hadn’t found this map, I might have never realized it.”

“I have no idea what to think about this anymore,” Sofie sighed.  She looked truly shaken by these revelations.

Gabriela, on the other hand, didn’t understand all the hullabaloo even now.

“Maybe I’m just not smart enough or something, but I still don’t see how all of this qualifies as an emergency,” she told them.  “It’s all things that happened a long time ago, but that’s all.  How does this affect me?”

“Well, it affects you because it has to do with why the dragons would bring us here,” Blake explained.

“Blake, that was, like, over an hour ago, and you haven’t mentioned it since.”

“Well, it’s about to come back around.  I talked about all of this for a reason, you see.  There’s been a lot to go over: ash falling from the sky in unthinkable amounts; terrible winters caused by eternal cloud cover; the complete shutdown of all cantacrenyx energy accumulation, and the halting of all technology; the utter destruction of more than a quarter of Scyria’s landmass; the war and the appearance of the first Earthlings; the old world lacking Observing, Feeling, and translation; and more—a cornucopia of mostly unrelated things that all seemed to happen in the same time frame.  Now, the ash and the destruction of the northern land are pretty clearly one event, but what I told you that I can give an explanation that explains every single one of these things and ties them to a single event?”

“I’d say you’re reaching,” Gabby replied.  “Only conspiracy theorists think the world can be that easily and neatly explained.”

To her surprise, Blake threw his head back and laughed for a little.  “Oh, that would be nice,” he snorted after his giggles faded away.  “But, unfortunately, I think you’re off the mark this time.  Here’s what happened: the great final battle went down up at... what did you say it was called again?”

“Dvorga.”

“Dvorga, right.  Giant final battle at Dvorga.  All the heavy hitters are there—the armies, all the Earthlings, the dragons, all in one place.  During that battle, there is an explosion—a sudden release of concentrated energy—one of a magnitude almost beyond comprehension.  That explosion is so powerful that it destroys an area of land large enough to be a minor continent, sending at least some of it into the atmosphere and maybe vaporizing the rest.  That energy spreads out, blanketing the world and interfering with the cantacrenyx crystals.  What’s more, the release is so apocalyptically destructive that it actually changes the very nature of reality itself!  Things that were once impossible become possible, and Scyria becomes what we know today.”

The two women shared a look for a quick moment before turning back to the man on the other side of the desk.

“Blake, you just took the explosion that we figured out happened with the ash and the northern land and then said ‘that also did all the rest of it’,” Sofie sighed.  “That’s not some galaxy-brain theory, that’s just making things up.”

“We’re dealing with an unknown exotic energy that can straight up shut down a fundamental energy process worldwide for thousands of years.  Are you telling me that an event on that level, a release of that sort of energy at that absurd magnitude, couldn’t also do the rest?”

“I mean, none of us has the expertise to know one way or the other, and to make it even more complicated, this place doesn’t operate on the same rules as what we know.  You say that there has to still be some of this energy around and it’s still interfering, but you can’t even detect it,” she reminded him.

“So, you admit it’s possible,” Blake countered.

“Anything is possible.  We’re working on conclusions based on almost nothing.  But, fine, let’s say that the explosion caused it all—as hand-wavey as it sounds, I can’t come up with anything better right now.  What about it?”

“The question that follows is, obviously, ‘where did this explosion come from?’  So, let’s look at the possible suspects.  First, you have the Scyrian people and their armies.  It is hard to believe that they would do something like this.  They were winning, so why would they destroy their entire world?  Even if it was a desperation move from them—some crazy bomb of some sort—it would have to be portable to get it to Dvorga, and if it’s portable, then they would have been able to build a way to get it there without sacrificing everything they had.

“Second, the dragons.  We’ve gone over this already, but if they had something that could have singlehandedly won them the war, they would have used it, and not on top of their own home.  There is, admittedly, a non-zero chance that they were able to finish something right in the middle of the battle while they were about to lose and so they set it off as some sort of giant middle finger to the rest of the world, but that sort of thing only happens in bad movies and shit.

“So, where else could the explosion have come from?  There’s only one other possible answer: the Earthlings.”

“Weren’t the first Earthlings from thousands of years ago?” Gabby pointed out.

“Yeah, Blake, are you saying that a dude who literally worshiped Zeus and Poseidon built and exploded a bomb?” Sofie snickered.

“No, what exploded was not a bomb that they made.  What exploded was them.”

For a long, tense moment, the only sound audible within the chamber was the soft sound of the air passing through the air vents.

“I’m sorry, what?!” Sofie exclaimed.

“Here’s the thing,” Blake explained.  “There’s one more huge assumption that we all overlooked, one that is the key to all of this—and one I should have realized long ago.  You know how I started with Pionmi?  This was why; we all made a mistake about Pionmi and her colleagues.  We assumed that they were working on a project to bring Earthlings to Scyria to be supersoldiers, because that’s what happened.  But when you really think about it, there’s no way that was the case.

“I mean, look at it this way.  First, how would you even manage to specifically snatch people from across dimensions?  I’ve seen the machines; there’s no precise aiming involved with those things.  They’re like... like if you threw one end of a garden hose into the ocean and then started sucking on the other end.  You’re going to get something coming through, but you don’t have any control over what.

“Second, let’s say that you do bring people to Scyria.  How do you know that they’re going to be superhuman?  You don’t.  How would you even know they’d be able to live in this world?  For all they knew, the person would just melt upon contact with Scyrian air!

“And third, even if they could precisely target individual people and bring them here, and even if those people were guaranteed to be awesome, how could the Scyrians assume that those people would cooperate?  ‘Sorry we pulled you from your life!  Would you please risk death every day by fighting all these giant killer murder lizards for us?  That would be just swell!’  I mean, come on, who would agree to that?!  Especially when the people asking are the same people who ripped you from your life on Earth?  They’d be more likely to attack the Scyrians than help them.  Hell, if there was really no auto-translation back then, how would they even communicate?”

“But, that’s what happened, isn’t it?” Gabby pointed out, not pointing out that he’d nearly described both her and his experiences.

“In a way, yes, but my point is that no sane decision-maker would ever look at the various elements of this hypothetical proposal and think it was anything close to a good idea.  It would never get the support it needed to get off the ground.  So, clearly, Pionmi’s goal was something else.”

“And you know what that is, do you?” Sofie said, crossing her arms.  “Is there some other new document you’ve neglected to show us?”

“I don’t need documents for this.  There is nobody in the world more qualified to talk about the problems of the ancients’ military machine,” Blake told her.  “Cantacrenyx technology is pretty amazing, and you can do some incredible things with it, but it is not without its issues.  Namely, there are two things.  First, the way their energy flows really changes the way you have to design things, and it can limit just what you can do.  It’s really hard to make things that can produce a burst of power—you can’t ‘hit the afterburners’.

Second, your ability to make new weapons is limited to the quantity and quality of the crystals you have available.  Don’t have enough, or the crystals are the wrong size?  Tough luck, you’re boned.  The bind this puts you in is not fun, let me tell you.  Look at what they ended up having to do as the war dragged on.”

The screen closer to Gabby flicked and the text changed.  With a quick cough, Blake began to read.

“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.”

“There’s only so many crystals you can dig out of the ground every day,” he continued.  “And soon enough, they were losing more crystals each day than they could produce, to the point that they had to rip apart the machines of their daily lives to keep the flow of crystals going.

“What the ancient Scyrians needed, more than anything, was energy.  They needed a new source of energy, one that could be used in ways that cantacrenyx crystals cannot.  That was Pionmi’s mission, I’m sure of it.  There were probably other groups with the same goal, all approaching it in different ways.  Pionmi’s group, being the dimensional physicists they were, approached the problem by trying to tap into the energies of other, highly-energized dimensions.  And they succeeded, except that when they turned on the tap, instead of energy, people came out.  So they just rolled with it.”

“But, what does that have to do with the people exploding?” Sofie pressed.

Blake blinked.  “...did I not mention that we’re all crazy full of energy?”

“No, Blake!”

“Sorry, sorry, I got mixed up.  So, according to Bazz, we are—or at least I am—just stuffed to the brim with some sort of exotic energy.  You know how higher frequency light is higher energy than lower frequency light?  It’s like that, I think.  Bazz has this machine, and it measures like, soul energy frequency or something.  The average Scyrian has a... a soul frequency or whatever—he used some fancy term that I’m sure he just made up—of somewhere in the high eighties, I think.  Definitely lower than a hundred.  Guess what I registered at.”

“Just tell us,” Sofie responded.

“So high that his meter couldn’t measure it.”

 After a moment of stunned silence, Blake continued.

“I mean, it makes sense.  All of us are capable of doing some absolutely wild shit.  Wouldn’t we need some sort of energy to power it?  I mean, Gabby, how in the world are you able to reform?  And your strength, where does it come from?  I’ve never seen you fail to lift something, no matter how heavy it might be.  It probably explains what happened to my body as well when I first came here.  We all are filled with a tremendous amount of energy.  Maybe our reality just is that way, and everything in it is incredibly energized relative to Scyria.  I don’t know.

“What I’m saying is that Pionmi got what she wanted.  She got the energy.  It just came in humanoid form, so they changed plans and somehow convinced the Earthlings to be heroes, and everything was hunky-dory... until it wasn’t.

“Look at it this way.  If some energy blocked the function of cantacrenyx crystals, where did that energy come from?  An amount of energy that massive... wouldn’t it have existed in the world already?  Wouldn’t it have been known of already?  How could it come out of nowhere like it seems to have?  There’s an easy explanation: the energy didn’t exist before... or at least, not on Scyria.”

Sofie suddenly gasped, going as white as a sheet.  “No... you can’t mean...”

“You see it now, don’t you?  The final destination of this long and convoluted journey.”

“But, then, the dragons, they—!”

Blake nodded.  “They’ve had thousands of years to research this and perhaps even first-hand knowledge from the time of the war itself.  I am convinced that they came to the same conclusion as us.  And if you think about it, it answers the question of why they would bring us here, given that they shouldn’t want a second round of dragon-slayers running around.  All they would have to do is sit back in the northern mountains, unknown to the world, and let us do the dirty work of bringing civilization to its knees a second time.  Then, they could just clean up in the aftermath and have their revenge for all that the ancients did to them.  And, let’s be honest, there’s a sort of appealing symmetry to be found in the idea of killing your enemies with their own weapons, wouldn’t you say?”

Gabby watched Sofie’s eyes become wider and wider, her face in her hands as she started to hyperventilate, and she frowned, feeling rather miffed. 

“Would you please explain to me what I’m missing, so I can be upset along with the both of you?” she asked Blake.

“Hmmm,” Blake hummed, thinking for a moment.  “So, Earth has much higher base energy than Scyria, right?  It’s what gives us our abilities.  Another way to say it would perhaps be to say the energy ‘pressure’ is far higher on Earth.  Now, you’ve been to a carnival before, right?”

“Of course.”

“You ever see a kid lose their helium balloon and it just flies up into the sky, lost forever?”

“Yes?  It happened to me when I was a child.”

“That balloon rises into the air, climbing higher and higher as the ambient air pressure lowers around it, slowly pushing back against the higher pressure inside it less and less, until, eventually, the pressure difference is too great, and... pop!”

A cold pit of dread formed inside Gabriela’s gut, quickly growing wider and deeper until she felt like it could swallow her whole.  “And there’s a lot of this energy ‘pressure’ inside us.”

“Exactly.  The dragons knew this, and so they came up with a plan.  As soon as the ‘corruption’ allowed them to, they would activate the machines and let nature take its course.  It didn’t matter who came through, only that there were people like you and me, running around Scyria, oblivious to the true nature of things.  Then, all they would have to do is wait for the natural conclusion to our existence in this world.”

Finally, it all hit home, almost all at once.  Gabby’s heart thundered in her ears, her hands trembled, and she found it hard to breathe, like a vise was clamped down tight around her chest.  It turned out Blake was right after all; this truly was an absolute emergency.  “We... we’re...”

She couldn’t finish the thought, but Blake sighed and nodded regardless.

“That’s right,” he told her.

Her gaze met his, and within that gaze, she saw the hollow hopelessness of a man lost and terrified.  It was the gaze of a patient receiving a cancer diagnosis, of a mother being told of their child’s untimely death, of a deer staring at onrushing headlights only a few meters away.

“We’re bombs.”