Lillene

Enjoy!

Over the next several days, Serenity found out that the work of connecting it to other ley lines was straightforward. It was also slow, mana-intensive, headache-inducing, and massively frustrating, but at least it was straightforward. It would have been far faster if he still had the extra mana that he’d used up to create the anchor and the dungeon, but that was all gone. He had to do it the normal slow way, repeatedly half-emptying his mana pool. Senkovar fully emptied his, but Serenity knew better. He didn’t want to pass out or injure himself.

At least he no longer glowed. The hassle was worth it.

It took roughly a week for each ley line connection. Once he’d connected three, Senkovar and Berinath both agreed that was enough; it was time to start creating the conditions for a dome. That turned out to be massive ley line powered rituals that linked together to cover the full initial area of the dome. 

They’d have to create the necessary conditions and the dome itself then slowly transition to the control and protection of the Forest that was planted within the dome. Once that was done, there would be a secondary ritual emplaced to serve as an emergency backup; Senkovar said that most were never used but the ones that were used saved their domed cities more often than not.

Senkovar clearly expected the rituals to be more difficult for Serenity than the ley line linking, but he found it far easier. It was a combination of memorization that was unnecessary with Aide’s assistance and comprehension that was simple with Serenity's background. He saw several places where the rituals could have been changed to optimize one thing or another, but the entire system was complicated enough that the analysis necessary to confirm those changes didn’t mess anything up would take longer than simply using the old, time-tested rituals, even with Aide’s help. It wasn’t worth the effort, so Serenity simply noted them for later.

The first task was the ground; it was the key to everything. Without the right foundation, nothing would work. The dome would fail and the Forest would die. The second piece was the temporary dome; it had to be in place before anything else or it would all simply vanish into the sky. 

The third piece was air; as Senkovar painstakingly explained, at first it would be unbreathable by anything, then it would be usable only by the trees of the Forest. They would have to purify it before anything else could live there. Serenity knew he’d be fine, because he’d finally accepted that Blaze was correct: he didn’t actually use air for much other than speaking anymore. There was no real reason to demonstrate that, however, since the same protective spells that let them work in the near-airless environment of Berinath’s unprepared surface would work inside the temporary dome, even with “poisonous” air.

The fourth step was water, as nothing could survive for very long without it. After that, it was back to the ground; neither rock nor moondust would do. This step was the first that wasn’t primarily done with rituals; instead, it was a combination of rituals and the direct importation of soil from other domes. Once the soil was in place in a section, planting could begin.

None of the steps were as easy as their categories sounded. Temperature was a continual issue and apparently would be until the dome’s Forest was fully in place. The dome’s transparency had to be managed so that they could see and the first trees could grow without being baked. Senkovar’s explanation of UV light was arcane and incomplete but Serenity could still tell that was one of the major problems the continual dome adjustments were compensating for. 

Everything they did was a process of tuning then checking then tuning again. As time went on, the task shifted from mostly setup work to a little setup interspersed with repairing and modifying the existing rituals. Few of them were completely removed, which meant they all had to deal with the interference of the others. It was easily one of the biggest projects Serenity had ever been involved with. The Final Reaper had done many rituals that were more powerful but few that were more complex.

It took months. Serenity stayed in regular contact with Rissa; she’d finally managed to clear her name of the allegations of insider trading. Even with that, she was not certain she wanted to continue her stock market trading profession; it was good money before everything changed but the legal fight made it clear it was now possibly more of a liability than it was worth. She hadn’t decided what she wanted to do instead.

Lord Cymryn and the two Imperial guardsmen joined them on Berinath once things settled down a bit. Senkovar must have invited them; Serenity found out when he saw Cymryn in the fancy hotel’s lobby about a month after their initial arrival on Berinath. He was provided a suite near the one Serenity and Senkovar shared, which he had to share with the two guardsmen. Senkovar insisted.

Senkovar limited the two of them to six hours’ effort each day with an hour break in the middle for a meal and some rest. More than that led to mistakes that simply weren’t worth the time, though he did allow another hour each day for teaching Serenity what they were building that day and answering questions. 

Evenings were for hobbies and relaxation. Senkovar used much of the time playing a board game known and Mhna or Mahona on different planets with some of the older dryads; it was a gambling game and somehow Senkovar always seemed to come out just slightly ahead of the dryads, often because of a string of “bad luck” that happened whenever he got too far ahead. 

Serenity knew the trick Senkovar was using. That particular game was actually developed as a mana sensitivity training tool; if you were sensitive enough, you could tell what was going to happen in the game’s internal working for several steps in the future. Turning that knowledge into a strategy that dealt with everyone else was the real, hidden point of the game, but it became something very different when it was played against people with a different sensitivity. You could essentially choose what happened. It was clear that Senkovar was able to play the deeper game but the dryads he was playing with couldn’t.

Effectively, Senkovar would always win just as much as he wanted to. The fact that he always came out near-even, usually winning a small enough amount of the local currency that it added up to less than an Etherium each week even after several hours’ worth of play each day, meant that he wasn’t playing it for the money. 

Serenity didn’t feel the need to interfere, but he did wonder what it would be like to play a one-on-one game of Mahona against Senkovar. He was very rusty on the game’s strategy while also being fairly confident that he was notably more sensitive than Senkovar was. It would be an interesting competition. Senkovar would almost certainly win at first but Serenity would probably be able to turn it around eventually.

He never seemed to quite get around to it. Instead of challenging the reigning Mahona champion, Serenity spent his time working on the runescripts he’d promised Elder Omprek. The Echa rune was complex to replace because it had to handle both detection and immobilization quickly without harming the undead. The original rune simply patched over that limitation with Faith; Serenity couldn’t do that. 

Serenity didn’t like the feature where it drained the Death mana from any undead it caught. That might sound good to the dryads but it was squarely opposed to the goal of immobilizing them without harming them. Removing the feature made the new rune significantly simpler but naturally it wasn’t that easy; he ended up also modifying the ritual they used to convert people back to living. They’d depended heavily on the properties of Echa’s rune, which was dangerous and might well not work at all now that Echa was gone. Serenity knew several alternatives, but none were perfect.

The ritualist who usually performed the rituals was impressed enough that he started calling Serenity “Holy” respectfully instead of sarcastically. Serenity wasn’t sure what to do about that, so he ignored it. It wasn’t like he was going to stay on Berinath.

At the same time, the original rune didn’t have any way to let people know it had caught someone. Serenity considered that a major oversight. The good news there was that having a way for a rune to either send data or simply call home was something Serenity had used a lot over the years as both Vengeance and the Final Reaper; he had a number of design options available that could be added to almost any basic rune structure. Unlike his other modifications, it only took a few evenings to rebalance the rune after adding the reporting. He also had to set up receiver runes, but that was easy enough.

The real problem came when it was time to turn the designs into reality. These weren’t simple one-time-use runes that he could scratch out with a monster core on an appropriate surface. That would work but it wouldn’t solve the problem. He had to actually design the substrate for the runic inscription as well.

More importantly, he needed to make the one everyone else would copy. They could use their own materials; he couldn’t use anything flimsy. He had to use something that would both last and show the runic structure well enough that others could copy it even if they didn’t understand the notation he’d used on the runescript’s blueprint. 

It was notation common enough among those who designed new runescripts but most journeymen and some masters simply created runes based on what they knew or saw instead of going back to the basics every time and following the directions. Some of the people who copied the rune would almost certainly be at that level; the dryads would probably make a lot of them.

That was how he ended up in a small obscure shop one evening. He’d tried the general markets in the dome he was in, but almost everything was based around plants and that wouldn’t work for Serenity. No matter how sturdy the plant matter was, it required appropriate conditions to be preserved. Most metals would be just as bad; he couldn’t afford it to corrode or tarnish at all and it had to be sturdy enough to stand up to moderate abuse. The shops just didn’t have what he needed until one of the weapon stores pointed him at a specialty shop for exotic materials.

Like most of the indoor shops on Berinath, this one was inside a tree. Unlike most, it wasn’t at ground level, but with the directions from the weapons shop he didn’t have trouble finding it.

The door made a clicking noise when Serenity opened it. It was clearly there to let the owner know when someone walked in because before Serenity had the chance to do more than glance around at the piles of paper-wrapped parcels that filled the shelves, a woman walked onto the shop floor.

She tilted her head and wrinkled her forehead at him. “I don’t know you. Did someone send you here?”

Lillene

I pull a lot of names from history and legend. In this case, I needed a board game name and I wanted one where we didn’t know the rules - where they’d been lost over the years (in world, this is because people stopped playing it when magic became too weak). The game I picked is called Mehen.

It’s actually a coincidence that Mhna / Mahona is similar to “Mana.” I do like the coincidence, though.