The New World-Chapter 390: A Warped Past

It gestured to a circle made with mosaic stones on the ground. Everywhere else was beaten and bare earth. I sat cross-legged in the ring.

"Thanks. So, about Hod, what was he like before being eldritchified?"

The elders peered at one another, murmuring with guttural tones and noises. Making out what the others meant, the second elder raised dark wings.

"There was never a time before Hod was taken by the monster within him."

The white eyes under his hood narrowed.

"He has always been lost in his shadow."

I tapped the ground.

"So he's like Althea, being part eldritch or something?"

The elders murmured once more before the most disabled one of them spoke up. Her voice rasped with each word.

"Hod was the outcome of his parents fiddling with dark magic."

The other elders stared at her before a second elder stood up.

"You speak ill of our protector. Hod brought us to this land. He's the only reason we've survived."

In a wheelchair, the most disabled of them gurgled her words.

"But Hod is not like us."

Her eyes narrowed.

"You all remember what became of his mother when she gave birth to him."

Curiosity spiked in my chest as the wind brushed against the tent, leather bending back and forth. I crossed my arms.

"Unfortunately, I haven't got a clue what happened. Mind offering a refresher?"

She took a staff and pointed it at me.

"Harmana was covered in the same runes you have across your body."

I raised my left arm, a rune etched across it.

"Huh, then it's not really dark magic. It's cipheric, which is worse if you ask me."

She stabbed the staff into the ground.

"It was a defiling thing, and it's a miracle he didn't kill us all."

Flashes of Yawm's twisted body and Elijah turning into writhing flesh flashed before my eyes. I shivered, a cold pulse traveling up my spine.

"You're right about that."

The second elder hissed.

"You...Cease this blasphemy."

I raised a hand.

"I need to hear all of this, so just let her talk for now. I'll let you guys know if anything said is actually blasphemy."

Hint: it wouldn't be.

The elder bowed, his winged hands shaking. The decrepit woman stood, her eyes dim compared to the other Eltari. She hunched, her back like a spine's worst nightmare. She waved her cane.

"Harmana and Ahkam were Hod's mother and father. They bent reality in a corrupted pursuit of power. They created monsters that flooded into our world. They devolved our home planet into the twisted wasteland it became."

The second elder shouted.

"Our world was dying. They gave us food and water."

The hunched lady eltari narrowed her dim eyes.

"Yes, life may have returned, but it was a deformed version of it. Corrupted. Evil. The same could be said for the dark water they gave us to drink."

She raised her staff high.

"I still remember before Schema took away our world's life force. It changed everything. Even the monsters began to die."

My curiosity peaked. I leaned forward.

"Wait a minute."

I thumped the ground.

"Plazia, come here."

Seconds later, insects crawled out of the ground. I waved my hand at everything around us.

"Isolate us from Schema. You need to hear this, too."

The bugs etched cipheric markings that I charged with mana. Combined with my dimensional wake's pressure, we isolated this space from Schema. I tapped the ground beside me.

"Plazia, I'll send you a guild request. You can join because of a few privileges from my lottery. Also, keep a fragment of your mind here. Ooh, and thanks for all the help. I owe you one."

I sent the message, and Plazia accepted. A cluster of bugs huddled beside me before I raised my hand.

"Let's touch base. Dungeons are eldritch havens. From my understanding, Schema punished you for messing around with forbidden knowledge, right?"

The second elder sighed.

"We do not know. Many of our kind had dabbled with the prime language before. We understood it could warp reality and disrupt many things. However, Hod's parents...They evolved its usage."

I put the muddled pieces of their history together. It sounded like they'd been playing with fire for a long time, and eventually, Schema had enough after something devastating happened. Also, the fact they even elicited that kind of reaction meant the Eltari were gifted in the cipher. Interesting.

The second elder waved his wings.

"They tried to push for something more. I think Ahkam was driven mad by it."

I raised a brow. The woman elder scoffed.

"If you ask me, the real insanity was in the mother. Harmana agreed to have Hod born in one of the changed spaces."

I winced.

"She birthed Hod in a room corrupted by the cipher?"

The hunched elder hissed.

"Hod was conceived and lingered within the space the entire time."

I furrowed my brow.

"Like, as an egg or something?"

I didn't understand much about an Eltari's anatomy, and I didn't know if I wanted to fix that. The lady elder tapped her cane on the ground.

"She made the egg and laid it there. This was before the world faded into a shell of itself. Those two used dungeon cores to feed the ritual. It was excruciation to uncover what they had done."

The less crippled elder waved a wing.

"Ahkam and Harmana tested the space using other creatures first. They didn't want to harm their child."

I put my face in my hands.

"It's a space warped by the cipher. If you play with fire, you get burned. In this case, it sounds like they messed around with fire and acid by the sounds of it."

The less crippled elder tapped a wing on the ground.

"Perhaps, but perhaps not. There was nothing normal about Hod, even from an early age, but his differences were initially a blessing. He spoke near his birth, growing faster than the others. He saw through people's minds and understood their intentions. Nothing was hidden, and we considered him a seer who lives in prophecy."

I frowned.

"What's your names?"

The crippled one spoke up.

"I am Shahjk."

The less crippled one bowed.

"I am Monaba."

I nodded.

"It's great to meet each of you, and thank you for your time. So, Hod became more eldritch over time?"

Shajk paced up to me, her breathing painful and wheezy.

"He warped into something unrecognizable, not that he was ever like us. As we all bent and broke, Hod grew taller and stronger. He ingested the poisonous air, turning it to power. It fed on him as well, and the shadow unleashed."

I spread my hands.

"Er, so Other Hod wasn't there from birth?"

Shajk shook her head, her beak still glossy despite age's war against her other features.

"He was born without darkness, a creature of the light. It cast a shadow, one that enveloped him with time."

I narrowed my eyes.

"And after that, Schema's interference began, not before?"

The elders nodded, except for Monaba. He swung a wing, a feather dropping down.

"We don't know that for certain."

The first elder put a wing over his, lowering it.

"It hastened the fall of our world. That much we do know."

I tapped my thigh.

"How old is Hod?"

The woman elder laughed, the sound painful and strained.

"Many times older than you, child."

I stood up.

"Alright then. That's what I needed to know. Thanks, everybody. You've given me a lot to think about."

I jammed my arm into my pocket dimension and sliced it off. I melted, molded, and cooled the limb into rings within the space before pulling out new rings and my grimoire. After charging each set of runes, I floated the arcane sigils onto each ring. I handed them to each elder, and their conditions improved when they wore the trinkets.

Turning to leave, the Mobana gave me a deep bow.

"Let us know if there is anything else you need...And thank you, oh savior."

I smiled back. free𝑤ebnovel.com

"Remember, Hod saved you. Not me."

Walking out of the tent, I assimilated the dimensional fabric I had left outside. Growing much larger, I flew up and out of the village. Peering down, the mosaic across the village gleamed with a glossy sheen.

In a flash, I recognized a pattern across the ground. It mirrored much of the artwork for the village. Flying over the other Eltari settlements, I found other mosaics, each made in its own style. They symbolized their villages, the full marks visible when flying over them. It gave the spattered dotting of villages a surprising harmony.

As individuals, they chose their path, but they all were members of the eltari. It was a beautiful thing.

A pang of guilt crossed over me. I allowed those elders to suffer here for years before coming to help them with basic rings. Another one of my psyches mentioned how the system helped them immensely along with my legacy. In that regard, the rings were a piece of what I could give, not the whole.

Still, I let them rot. I would do everything in my power to stop that from happening again.

Letting that feeling settle down, I headed back over to my golems. I considered what the Eltari elders said. From the sounds of it, Hod could be decades, maybe centuries old. The Eltari's sense of time was different than my own, making that difficult to pin down. It wasn't like they had a clock to verify, either. The closest thing to that was the deterioration of their planet.

If I could get a grip on the time frame for that kind of advent, then I could pin down their ages. The thought of that erupted alongside a spike of anxiety racing through my chest. The Eltari's fallout had unnerved me since I learned about it. It made me question Schema in many ways, but I had always thought the Eltari were lodged in a rift that Schema protected.

I mean, they founded their village around a dungeon core that protected them from devolving. Schema was why that core came about, and it kept them from becoming nearly as monstrous. However, I was never certain of that. It was a blurry spot in the AI's already dubious morality. Based on what the Eltari said, Schema cursed their planet before Hod was born, but it accelerated afterward.

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Hm. It was an act of mass extinction, exceeding what Elysium did to Giess since it killed every species on an entire planet and for no discernable reason. I sighed, giving props to Schema. I mean, it was damn hard to out-evil Elysium, but somehow, someway, Schema had found a way.

Why would Schema do that? It made no sense to destroy an entire planet over something so trivial. I flipped the question in my head, turning it into a statement. This wasn't something trivial. To get a better understanding of the situation, we needed Hod to be fully returned. Outside of that, I'd need to inspect some dungeons and see if they couldn't unveil the situation some as well.

No matter how I sliced it, figuring this all out would take some time. Ooh, but I'd get my answers or die trying. Well, after making the golems, finishing my legendary compendium, making Torix's body, securing Blegara, er, uhm...A hundred other things? It was hard to remember them all.

I sighed, unable to handle all of this myself. Before anything else, I had to iron out a system for delegating some of my responsibilities to others. I couldn't do this alone, and I didn't have to. Those thoughts swirled in my mind as I floated beside my golem factory. While in the air, I gawked at several new roads that crossed the forest around Mt. Verner.

Grecian columns lined the roads with statues atop them. They immortalized several guild members, including many of the soldiers I remembered from the battle against Yawm or Elysium. It was a majestic sight. The more I saw, the more that feeling grew.

Every few sets of pillars, a statue would support an archway, and the artwork was sculpted to match one of my guild's followers. From Amara to Plazia, they exposed our guild's top talent. Hod's statue stood half flowing with shadow and half in his goofy gaze. Althea's statue carried her rifle with wings sprouting across her back. Kessiah carried her blood beside her, a patient below her. Even Krog and Chrona lounged about, each of them midway through a tail swing.

After a few of these sculptures, lifelike statues of me stood peering out from the roads that circled the mountain. At Mt. Verner's peak, a bronze statue of myself stood, peering forward. It held one hand up in a fist, standing tall and defiant. It radiated out with quintessant mana, the light-laden wind drifting into the clouds like a bleeding ichor from a god.

It was beautiful, but it embarrassed the hell out of me even just looking at it. Near the mountain's base, the fanciest sets of pillars signaled the entryway to an elaborate stage. Someone constructed a half-colosseum. Flowers, mana crystals, jewels, and precious metals decorated the entire area. Twelve pillars stood behind the stage, each with a plaque and banner.

They were the main players of my guild: Shalahora, Plazia, Krog, Chrona, Hod, Amara, Althea, Kessiah, Torix, Helios, Florence, and the newly appointed Diesel. The executive commanded two architects who whittled away at the project. They worked overtime to get the decorations set up.

I winced at how grandiose it would be, but that's what I made the executive for. If he was shameless, then I wouldn't have to be.

Before I let my growing dread dig deeper under my skin, I dove into my own work. I planned out a few delegations. I'd make a dungeon research team of interested individuals, including Etna. They'd focus on learning how dungeons were established, why they were teleported or changed, and monitoring how corrupted a dungeon was.

On a scale of one through ten, they'd assign values. Ten was a dungeon like L-7, where eldritch literally rained from the skies. One would be a fully contained dungeon like some of the earlier dungeons I visited. The dungeon-finding group would rate and list these dungeons in order of intensity. This would give me a solid set of places to visit for my own curated research should I ever get the free time.

It was doubtful, but hey, why not plan ahead?

As for Blegara, the planet needed the eldritch rebellions to be put down, but I didn't want to just kill the Vagni and the eldritch responsible for it. Well, most of the eldritch would have to go, but the Vagni were more than redeemable. Instead of eliminating them all, Plazia could dominate the planet via psionics and his general presence.

To make that happen, I needed to talk with the hivemind. I scheduled that after I finished making the golems. Getting to them, I etched in the runes I planned out earlier. The peaceful work preoccupied my mind, pulling me away from all the world's worries. Hours passed as I stayed still, compressing time to get the most out of each second.

I marked the pages telekinetically, not needing to move to write in my grimoire. As time passed, some of my psyches wandered. This...It was a strange life I lived. The compression of my wake gave me many advantages, and it trained my mind in a way few challenges could. However, it made quiet moments like these a torment.

The sickness in my stomach and malaise of my mind never relented, becoming a chronic issue I adapted to rather than dealt with. Finding a way out of my torment required a better understanding of my dimensional wake and its properties. At the same time, I felt the limits of my flesh and bones.

To be more precise, my humanity. I was no longer a human, but my mind thought and perceived reality like one. That, in itself, was a shackle, and I would need to overcome it at some point. It would allow me to unchain myself from limits I didn't know about. Not just the mental barriers but even perceptional limitations, all of it could fade if I took this next step.

I trembled at the prospect. It was a wild thing. Limits, they didn't just hold us down. They anchored us. They gave us a sense of perspective and kept people low to the ground. It's what we were built for and evolved to. Anytime I'd ever seen a human try to step across that boundary, it ended with horrifying consequences.

And yet, it felt inevitable for me. I would develop new senses, create a more efficient body, and craft a mind that exceeded a mortal's psyche. Hell, I already had split my mind into a dispersed cloud of magic pixy dust, basically. I wouldn't stop there, either. This was the tip of an iceberg, one that led deeper than any ocean.

And that terrified me.

I'd seen Yawm devolve into a deformed shade of himself. I'd watched Lehesion become the whipping dog of Elysium, his guilt eroding his will to live. Valgus lost his entire being to his desire for power, and Shalahora had also lost every aspect of himself. Even factions like Elysium extinguished their common sense in the pursuit of influence.

Absolute power corrupted absolutely. I'd heard that quote since I was a child, and I believed it. I would need to be different. Immutable. Unchanging. An unwavering force at the minimum. To make that happen, I devised a plan to maintain my sanity. It required two things - socialization and a reference.

It seemed simple, but every person I just mentioned failed to consider either factor. Yawm isolated himself from his species whenever he became Etorhma's avatar. Lehesion's reincarnation resulted in a mental isolation that caused some crazy disassociation from his species and world. Valgus was the same as Yawm, and Elysium was like an echo chamber of crazy people.

The odd man out, Shalahora, had kept his species with him, so he talked plenty. It was no coincidence that he was the only one out of the bunch who wasn't outright insane. Like Shalahora had, I would foster the other perspectives around me. Otherwise, I'd be driven mad like the others,

and my insanity would be one that never ended.

This plan gave me direction, and it mitigated my fears. That was something I'd uncovered on this journey into Schema's system. Even if I developed my body and mind, it didn't mean I was immune to emotion. I cherished that, knowing my emotions kept me grounded in this insane pursuit.

Listening to my fears, I would keep my personal relationships grounded. In a dichotomy of action, my efforts for self-strengthening would be matched by my pursuit of everyday mundanity. In a sense, I would outsource my sanity to the people around me. After all, it was a burden I didn't need to bear all alone.

That series of thoughts left me feeling good about moving forward with my wake's powers. It also burned through a decent chunk of time as I carved, something I had let several minds do while the others channeled mana and handled the finishing details. Once finished with the etching, I charged and guided the glowing runes onto one of the floating golems.

The markings sizzled into the metal, letting out a deep hiss that echoed in the facility. As the golem sparked to life, quintessence flooded into the markings. It lunged to a knee.

"Creator. It is a blessing to see you."

I raised a hand.

"At ease. Let's head out for a while."

I turned and waved a hand. It followed, and we left out the upper entryway. Instead of going around Mt. Verner, I bolted away from the place. After crossing a hundred miles South, we followed an interstate road before getting off at a random exit.

The dilapidated town rested in ruins. Crushed buildings and forested lawns covered every block. Streets split them up into a nice set of squares like some overgrown checkerboard. No monsters roamed the streets since my guild cleared this place out a while back. We hadn't cleaned this spot out since.

That's why this was an excellent spot to find a test dungeon.

To that end, the golem and I walked the streets. Side by side, we took up an entire four-lane highway. Standing at my full height, I stared at the streetlights. Well, the few left here. Something uprooted them from the ground, taking the power lines with them.

It wasn't that unusual. Many scavengers harvested the wires for the lightweight aluminum. Still, they took great care to pick this town apart. Setting that aside, we crossed many smashed homes before I looked into one. Someone or something had stripped the utilities and machinery from the place. These were metal-starved scavengers.

Minutes later, we walked through the dense cluster of the town. As we did, my golem crushed the ground, and its steps shook the earth. While cool in theory, its thudding stomps shattered windows and destroyed nearby walls. It wasn't a problem when the houses were further away, but these buildings were erected beside the roadside.

They felt every ounce of the golem's mammothian steps, and in turn, the buildings screamed out in agony. As one collapsed, I raised a hand.

"You really need to-"

The golem found a small eldritch nearby. Fueled by an immutable objective, it leaped through the air. It smashed through a house and sent cars flying from its gravitational strength alone. As a truck clapped into a building's roof, the golem crushed a squirrel-sized monster with its fist, releasing a shockwave of bone and blood.

Taking the chunks in its hand, it slammed the creature into the ground.

A house nearby disintegrated. Planks of wood gouged three feet deep into the soil, portions of the grass scrubbed clean. My golem stood from its crater, mana oozing out its runes like a thick fog. Its voice was a dark metal.

"Creator. The eldritch has been eliminated."

I facepalmed at the wanton destruction. I was somehow impressed and horrified at the same time. That kind of overreaction would need to be fixed. After letting it know not to break everything in sight, we walked past a suburb. Nostalgia passed over me, the sights of a bygone past swimming over me like bittersweet memories.

We turned down an intersection to the heart of the ruined town: a strip of shops that used to house the local businesses. I gazed at the miniature buildings, full-sized structures looking like large model houses at this point. Between two buildings, we found the piled-up power lines, the wires coiled around a set of monster corpses.

They were green, poisonous griffons, and something tied various batteries and engine blocks to the rotting bodies. Appliances littered the entire space, and gas cans sat around the area. As my imagination searched for an answer, reality heard its call.

A set of rats crawled out of the buildings, all coordinated and in sync. Their tails glowed a cerulean blue, and they let out a symphony of squeaks wherever they crawled. They swarmed over the restrained monster corpses, electrocuting them. The monster corpses reared to life, their bodies responding to the electrical signals.

Some ooze poured out of them, and the rats feasted on the material. The batteries charged, but nothing happened with the engine blocks. Once the rodents finished feeding, they cuddled up to the car batteries, calling it a day.

I furrowed my brow.

"How did they get the powerlines here?"

Hearing my voice, the rats turned to me. Electricity built around them, arcs of lightning spiraling. They huddled together into a ball while streaks of light sparked around them. The engine blocks levitated into four limbs before wires wrapped around them. The now thirty-foot junk colossus stood, composed of the town's magnetized machinery.

I frowned.

"Ah. That's how."

The terrifying monstrosity leaped over the wires, and I gestured to it.

"Alright, golem, show them what you're worth-"

The golem dashed forward in a blur of movement. It smashed the rats into a pulp with its body, blood splattering everywhere. Violence and force erupted. Shards of bone stuck halfway in the buildings, engine blocks hurled through stone walls, some lobbed miles into the air. The windows shattered near us from their collision's shockwave.

An oppressive panel of gravitation enveloped the entire expanse. The golem used it to fight, and it pulled the remaining rats together. Everything nearby siphoned further into a collapsing point, including the buildings ripping out of the ground. The gravitational well ripped out every bit of the concrete, rebar, lamps, and pavement to a singular, circular bulk.

As magic coursed through the golem, quintessence billowed off of it, a semitranslucent cloud infesting everything nearby. In its radius, wildlife expanded in cancerous growths. With the mana, the golem siphoned all inward. The nearby trees were uprooted, and dirt flew. The golem compressed the mass with overkill energy, thin needles of rat blood spurting out of the hulking orb.

The blood spiraled around the sphere. They were like red rings orbiting a rocky planet. The rings splat against the ground as the golem released its sorcery. The ball crushed into exposed earth, ripping out crags of compressed dirt. The soil crags reached for the air like drowning men.

The golem flew up, inspecting the nearby area, ensuring no monsters survived its slaughter. I gawked at the mass destruction and leveled blocks. The gravitation alone would've killed anyone nearby, let alone the mana or shrapnel. As the golem landed beside me, the ground quaked around us, another crater forming. It lunged to one knee.

"I have done it, creator. All is dead."

I dragged my hand down my face.

"Yeah. Everything. Did you even check the buildings to ensure people weren't in them?"

The golem gazed back. It nodded in slow motion.

"Ah...I am sorry, creator. That...Is advisable for future clearings."

I sighed. These golems caused different problems than my old ones. Instead of dealing with weakness, I dealt with absurdity. The golems were too strong; even with limiters, they'd wreak havoc. The blue cores fixed that issue, but I maintained a limited supply.

Using all of them for this would leave me without any cores for actual cities. Without an obvious solution to the problem, I considered the issue for a while. Nothing came out of the woodwork of my mind, and even having multiple psyches argue didn't help. Getting a fresh perspective, I sent a message to Torix, Plazia, and Diesel, wanting them to meet the following day.

Leaving the abandoned town, the golem and I headed back to Mt. Verner. I stopped golem production and spent my time researching various memories of my cipheric runes. In particular, I paid close attention to the saved image of Baldag-Ruhl's sigils from so long ago. They still boggled my mind after all these years, his inscriptions far outweighing the complexity of anything else I'd ever seen.

From Schema's spear shard to the Old One's scripts over Yawm, nothing rivaled Baldag's work in both scale and magnitude. It was magnificent, and he was a true visionary. Using my memory, I gazed at the incantations. They reminded me of gazing at galaxies, an endless set of secrets all hidden in plain sight.

As that awe passed over me, I parsed through some of what they implied. The most relevant information came from Baldag-Ruhl's perspective. Unlike most of my magical understanding, Baldag-Ruhl associated mana and the mind with a soul. This changed the outcome and product of what he created.

By attaching a changing and developed mind to something, Baldag-Ruhl created a growing potential in whatever he made. My armor was the best example, but even his mana pools worked under the same premise. They soaked in the ambient mana that Schema used to contain his dungeon rift.

In fact, it was more genius the more I looked at it. He evaded the limitations of his situation while enabling himself in the long term. My reading solidified Baldag-Ruhl's status as a world-ending horror if he'd escaped. That's why Schema had isolated his rift and given it a Sentinel guard.

That required an enormous amount of mana to maintain, and Baldag-Ruhl infiltrated that mana like a parasite sucking blood from its host. Hell, the guy might've set up the situation for just such an outcome. I couldn't put it past the hive. His ritual also drew extra mana from an actual dimensional tear to finalize the product.

These dimensional energy sources instilled the characteristics that eventually changed me into a living dimension. Wanting to know more, I pulled out the portion of a dimensional slicer I obtained from the twisted Sentinel on Blegara. I compared the cipheric markings with Baldag-Ruhls, finding quite a few differences.

Schema's cipher markings were resolute, efficient, and defined. They carried many optimizations that lowered the cost of wielding and using the spears. To me, that made perfect sense. The AI was a master of managing limited resources, after all. Baldag-Ruhl's carapace project did the opposite.

It only operated around maintaining stability and adding growth potential. Since it drew from a seemingly infinite source of energy, Baldag-Ruhl wanted an infinite outcome. That goal gave the armor an insidious nature, one that had an impact on me occasionally but was, in all honesty, very limited.

The final pieces of runes I analyzed were the cipheric incantations over Yawm. Something about the Old One's usage reminded me of a mad scientist; they used wild, insane combinations of runes. On the surface, they guaranteed corruption. At a deeper glance, they promised power, pure and palpable.

And corruption.

If I could find a way to fuse all of their runic qualities, I could become a runic master, the likes of which I'd never seen. Even after my hours of study, that was all I gained from observing and testing sections of their sigils. All the individuals far exceeded my own abilities, but they gave me hints of how to proceed moving into the future.

Optimization for my fundamental runes would come from taking Schema's approach. For larger projects, Baldag-Ruhl's sheer vision would be necessary. A drop of madness from the Old Ones would magnify my inscription's potency. It could all come together and create something heaven-defying.

Closing my grimoire and status, I left my golem production facility at dawn. I headed towards the third floor of Mt. Verner, flowing through a few ducts lining the interior. As I coursed into the library, I pulled off an enormous amount of dust from myself. The ventilation shafts needed a clean-up, and I was the duster.

I hovered a two-foot-tall ball of lint beside me. I landed near several bookshelves, condensing the dust orb into a dense fabric. Keeping myself fifteen feet tall, I hovered another mass of dimensional fabric behind me. It reminded me of a ball and chain, though it gave me freedom rather than taking it away.

Sliding between two tall shelves, I found the others waiting. Diesel stared forward, wearing the same workman's outfit as before. Sleeplessness etched lines on his face, and dozens of satchels held tools that smothered him. He paled from the last time I saw him.

Finding his cause of concern, Plazia rested on a basalt throne in the middle of the room, having moved a few bookshelves to do so. Torix rested on a leather couch like Diesel, and the lich's metal skeleton gleamed darkly in the lamplight. As he approached, he turned to me.

"Ah, Daniel. You mentioned issues with a number of projects."

His fire eyes flared.

"Perhaps we may be of assistance."