“It is effectively a IX equivalent. I am a High Cryptomancer of Zanzyr, and because I effectively became one three thousand years ago, just after the Crimson Cataclysm, while trapped inside the Inn, I’m also the first Cryptomancer and High Cryptomancer on Nown.”

“You can Cast IX’s,” Sama seized on the important point. “The Power of Ten only went up to V’s...”

“I am sitting at maximum base Levels for an Elf,” I informed them, “and as you know, the Rules are Different Here.” Their heads bobbed in unison. “Our source world is now called Terra-Luna. It suffered a catastrophic assault by what we now believe might have been an elder, primal Gargorian, although we are by no means certain. It is simply… the Thing.”

I coughed and my eyes averted from theirs as I tried not to choke.

Fuck the… and the mother it came from. Even diluted by soul severance, the visualization of it didn’t go away. I shoved the memory of it away resolutely, weaving thought-screens around it so I wouldn’t think of it again.

Both of them were studying me quietly. “That does not look like something anyone wants to recall,” Briggs observed kindly.

“Sama might be able to take it as a Rantha Hag.” She gave me a strange look. “Or not. There are things even Hags don’t want to know, after all.”

She pursed her lips, but nodded slow agreement.

“Whatever, the Archmage saved the world. Activated twenty Great Seals, pulled us away from the… and sliced open a rift the Mazakeem came through.”

“The Chaos Pact-Grantors?” Briggs recalled curiously.

“Yes. It turns out they feed on creatures from Outside Creation, and were plenty, plenty happy to tear into a weakened… and totally ignore us spinning away through the skein between worlds… until we exited in a realm that followed the Rules of the Power of Ten.”

I spun up the image of Terra-Luna, and the two of them leaned in to inspect the changes in terrain, murmuring softly at the alterations to the world of Earth.

Then I drew it back, and showed them the Rings of Thaumic energy about the world, forged from the remnants of shattered Luna. Back further, and the four new moons around the world, and back yet further again, to show great red world of Jotun that Terra-Luna orbited in circumpolar orbit, and a dozen other moons and more in traditional equatorial orbits around the red world.

It drew even further back, but the quality went from visual to representative as the whole Aruan System was laid out, all ten planets and their moons, two asteroid belts, drifting nebulae and shattered worlds here and there.

“Damn,” Briggs half-grinned. “They’ve been out in space too, eh?”

“Only in local space. There’s some nasty threats from the four moons, let alone from the other moons of Jotun, and Jotun itself is a Titan-world.” I waved it away. “They don’t even have control over Terra-Luna. Stage Six and higher are already in effect, gods and other Entities bringing in their own favorite vassal races into all that unclaimed living space in a new habitable magical world just brimming with potential from all those billions of slain human souls.

“My presence here is a direct result of the dark moon, which we naturally call Shoul.” An image of the dead black, lifeless sphere hanging in space, mostly visible only because it occluded the stars behind it. They watched as I zoomed in, and then blanched in unison.

A Tombworld. Not just dead on the surface, but the very spirit of the world slain and used for something magical that had transformed the whole surface of the world into a massive mausoleum with twelve focuses, any seas drained into cracks that plummeted towards the cold, dead heart of the slaughtered world, and massive Arches a mile high and twice that wide sputtered and spat with dying yet unimaginably potent necromantic energies.

“This moon of Terra-Luna is the anchorpoint for a Legendary-tier Ritual Spell of absolutely incredible scale and size. It is called The Shroud, and it is a Cancer upon Creation.” I didn’t bother to hide my loathing for the thing. “It blankets a world in a darkness that wipes it away from the very memories and observations of greater powers. Then undead from a world fallen to the Shroud comes through a Death-Gate, and a hundred million undead march across the world and slaughter every single living thing, turning it into another tombworld that musters its new undead armies, and sends them out to slaughter more worlds in turn.”

A circle with twelve lines extending coming out from it formed before them, intersected twelve red worlds, and encircled them in darkness. The image shrank, and each slain world generated six more lines, reaching out to claim six worlds in orange… and did so.

The Orange worlds reached for six worlds in yellow, and in waves and patterns, they went black.

The first worlds in green were being reached out for from the fallen Yellow…

Briggs and Sama clenched their fists to see the pattern repeat.

Taken from NovelBin, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“How long for each cycle?” Briggs asked roughly.

“We don’t truly know, but the entire world has to be converted to a Tombworld to become a Shroud anchor and build the Deathgates. The native living population also forms the army for the next wave, so it must be completely converted, equipped, enhanced, and then dispatched.

“Best estimates are about a thousand years, but we truly don’t know.”

“Is this coming here?” Sama asked shortly.

Green worlds blossomed in black, reached for Blue. The sphere shrank, but the numbers increased.

Indigo. Violet. White, Gray, Misty… Worlds in numbers uncounted falling, and increasing in number ever faster and faster.

“In time, they will come for all worlds. In what time they arrive, that is a different matter.”

Briggs closed his eyes and wiped at his face. “And one of these… iterations found its way back to Terra…” he murmured.

“A world that had just gone through an undead apocalypse and was madly optimized against undead.”

And so I showed them images from the Fall. The Dead Marches, the Cardinals, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions and hundreds of millions of undead, all doing battle with the living.

Some of the battles involved undead who literally covered everything to the horizon, the amount of magic and violence being unleashed truly worthy of being called Armageddon.

“And they won that.” Sama’s blue eyes sparkled.

“Commander Briggs, Warlord of Terra-Luna.” This Briggs widened his eyes at the sight of his progenitor, the original of the name, in his full Armor and Endure beating in his grasp, Shardings ripping out from it in all directions and undead exploding to meet those images as he was pointing and roaring out orders non-stop, surrounded by throngs of soldiers with Named Weapons blazing with Wrathfires… and a whole lot of Amazons, pointedly.

“And Sama Rantha, the Golden Hag.”

An image of Sama Rantha, racing through a battlefield packed shoulder-to-shoulder with undead, Tremble and Quaver just blurs spitting out scythes of slaughter to the front and sides of her, like butterfly wings rippling up and down against the waves of blackness. From the distance, rippling waves of multi-hued light burned a path as blazing antennae reached out to find the way for waves of death.

Ding! Ting!, echoed off the clouds, and a hag’s laugh cackled in the distance.

Sama stared at it in fascination. “I can recognize what she might be doing there, but how in the world… that wouldn’t work here...”

“The Rules are Different there,” I nodded agreement.

“And your Aelryinth?” Briggs inquired pointedly.

I zoomed in on a different section of the battlefield.

Shards swirled and shot forth in complex and radiant wheeling and whirling arrays, a volley of a score of them in different hues and teardrop blades swirling with at least six different flames flashing out. When they hit the undead, they exploded into blasts of flame, and then Chained out rapidly through the packed undead, blowing apart more of them and spreading the line of blasts back through the crowd.

From above, the patterns of slaughtered undead opened up spacing for those fighting below to gain breathers, relieved pressure, revealed commanders, broke the solid press, set the ground to unwhite the Dead March had to gather dark energies to nullify or it would Burn every undead to step where their own had died...

“Well,” Sama muttered, looking at the original Rantha harvesting hundreds of undead by the second, and a Powered Magos doing much the same thing with beautiful precision and deadliness, “I guess she didn’t have things too nice, either.”

“Aelryinth seems to be far deadlier than I remember him,” Briggs noticed shrewdly.

“Master Archtheurge of the Seven Traditions, the most powerful Powered on Terra-Luna, Rank M,” I stated bluntly, startling both of them. “And the Monarch of both of your originals.”

“Ah,” they said in unison, not even looking at one another. “Thus your familiarity with us,” Briggs went on smoothly, assessing me. “Are you expecting us to Swear under you now?” he asked, clearly interested in my answer.

“I don’t think that would be possible, from a Karmic standpoint.” They both nodded at that. “How long have you been here? At least a century, by what you said…”

“One hundred and twenty-nine years,” Briggs admitted candidly. “We met sixteen years after birth, when I came down from the Hiawathan Plateau, carved my way through the Jaguar Clans in a raging fury, and a certain blonde bitch was putting in for supplies at one of the natural bays there.”

“This bloody brute of a neanderthal comes running out of the jungle with nigh a thousand howling tribesmen screaming at his heels, grinning like a fiend and covered in so much guts and gore you couldn’t even see his skin.” Sama’s face lit up at the memory. “We shot down a bunch of them when they decided to try firing at us, and this ugly son of an ape swam out to us, clambered aboard, and well. There was my Briggs.”

They were both grinning like kids as she slugged him, he batted her back, and then they were throwing slappy-hands at one another with the cheerful ease of lovers who had spent a LONG time together.

I watched with nothing but a bit of envy for their easy camaraderie and clear love for one another shining in their eyes. “No children?” I asked softly.

The slappy-hands ended with her smoothly sitting on his lap and smothered in his arms as hers were wrapped around his head against her flat chest.

“No,” Sama said directly, her tone indicating it was something that she hadn’t been ignoring at all. “We both know if an Immortal finds us here, they’ll attempt to slaughter us and any children with great prejudice and no mercy whatsoever. We have a great deal of time to have children, and we will have children… once we have a reliable way to protect them,” she snarled savagely.

Briggs’ eyes were like chips of purple ice, and he barely nodded. “We’ve had a lot of adopted kids of various kinds over the years. This whole stint in Siricil is just a break in our travels, looking for something.” He made a slightly pensive face. “Aaaand, it probably brought you to us…” he admitted with neither smugness nor regret.

“Which means we need to know where this relationship of ours is going to go from this point forwards,” Sama said to me pointedly.

I inclined my head to them. “I know you wonder at trusting me enough after being on this world so long. After all, it was just a game back then, but you’ve gone through so much here, seen so much, and there has been no sign of a greater power having your back, a way out for the hapless mortals helpless before the machinations of Immortals.

“I have an answer for your wariness.” My smile was cool and calm, and they waited expectantly.

“TRUTH!

“HOPE!

“VALOR!”