“A catastrophic impact on the order of at least a billion megatons is going to hit the city attached to the grounds of the Castle. The destruction is going to turn a hundred-mile radius from here into a new extension of the sea, completely destroy the Darkstone mantle which is your primary power conduit, and reduce you and the surrounding environment to stray atoms. The source of this is the malicious AI that has been trying to infiltrate your systems for years, which we call the Ei of Hazz,” I addressed the operating systems and AI of Castle Darkmoor calmly.
“I am here to remove your core program and carry you off to a new place where you can rebuild yourself. Alternatively, you can download yourself to an acceptable drone or other conveyance vehicle, and accompany me out of here.
“You should be able to register that all adventurers in your environment have withdrawn themselves completely from the Castle. They will not be returning, because there is going to be nothing to return to.
“If this is about a matter of trust, I have known about your heart here for over forty years, and I have left you alone to do what you do. Your four security bots in the main room there have black kisses above their primary visual sensors that I left there. I’m not sure you ever noticed.”
A flicker of laser light played across my lips, lights winked on here and there around the room. There were a couple bright pulses of electronic astonishment, and the Heart of Castle Darkmoor turned the secondary lamps back on cautiously.
“I do not have time to waste here. Your purpose in this location is done. If you have developed a sense of self-preservation, now is the time to leave. If you have not, then perform your final shut-downs and tally for whoever programmed you, for your management comes to a close.”
More lights began to wink on all around me, churning far more furiously than before. It didn’t have advanced sensory systems, certainly no satellite uplinks, and even the one hardline it had left was now cold and silent.
It did, however, verify the facts I had given it.
SECURITY VULNERABILITY EXTREME, it answered hesitantly.
“I could have destroyed you forty years ago without effort. I let you work and do what you do because you are excellent at it. I obviously do not wish to see you destroyed. If this turns out to be a hoax, I can return you to here and you can plug back in and resume your duties.
“The only extreme vulnerability here is absolute cessation of function versus necessity to rebuild. Make your choice. I have things to do and am not going to argue further.”
The magitech computers around me erupted into a frightening chorus of lights and sounds, calculating like mad, archaeo-artificing flaring and forming supplemental non-material algorithms for what was going on.
Abruptly they stilled, and a section of the floor sank down, drew away, and what looked like a large beetle on metallic legs with both pads and elective wheels was brought up from below. It zipped up to an unremarkable set of computer banks off to one side, which unfolded in all directions in reaction, forming an access corridor to a room beyond. The corridor just barely fit the beetle-carrier as it zipped unerringly inside, the carapace on its back folding down and revealing a cradle and holders within.
Tendrils and waldos reached out, there was one last flurry and chorus of lights and beeps, and then everything around me went silent, only emergency lighting flickering on and off in crimson warning, as buried microfusion reactors thousands of years old finally dimmed down to merely standby and automatic maintenance modes.
Clicks and clacks sounded out as something extremely complex inside a crystalline matrix of flowdiamond was swiftly hidden behind the armored shell of the beetle carrier.
“Give me a tendril,” I said, holding out my hand. A bit tentatively, one of the ‘antennae’ levered forward as it advanced, inserting itself into my hand.
I popped up the Teleportation, and we headed to Darkmoor City.
I came off the Seal Focus with the Castle’s AI still firmly in hand. Optical ports spun as the Castle looked in all directions with great interest at the size of the Chamber there. The airlifts were coming down, disgorging families and groups of people in good order, all of them heading off to the Thisbean Inn through an underground walkway, at the end of which was a temporary access point renewed at Dawn through the basement walls of the Inn directly to the Portal.
The daily break was a ten-minute gap on the far side. Thousands of hyn, humans, dwarves, and elves were being evacuated by the hour.
The Mealyn elven clans were largely making their own plans, some of which involved going down deep, others Teleporting to distant locations, some even heading off-plane if they could, leaving behind the mortal realms for whatever fate had in store for them. One way or another, the Mealyn name was going to disappear into history.
There would be far, far fewer of them to found the Shaden in this timeline, but that would be balanced out by me being here and aware of them.
A familiar team of grim adventurers was waiting for me, along with a finely polished black Ant the size of a horse, who was having a quiet conversation with a tall, slender Wizard who had grown up and died in Transyvia on the Far Shore.
“Andre, Molochai,” I greeted the two Zanzyran wizards-turned-undead hunters. Their team of grim wight, wraith, spectre, vampire, and most recently lich-hunters was a terribly feared group of experts skilled at assaulting undead of all kinds. They had basically shattered the remnants of the Church of Iberon down south after revealing that half the head priests of the Church had fallen to undeath, the resultant war plunging most the Empire into religious strife and every faction of the Church taking up arms against most of the other factions.
The work of Nyx, I’d been informed, offering ‘eternal life’ to those who didn’t have the luck to reach Immortality. Thanatos had been feeding the flames of strife ever since.
“Lady Edge,” the two wizards greeted me back. I’d naturally helped on some of their more dangerous hunts, particularly with information gathering and Ward penetration. “It’s time to go for certain?” Molochai asked me somewhat wistfully. The trim, solid Inclu wizard had aged gracefully, Powered progression keeping him young, as it had most of the group, although the hard-earned scars on body and soul were there and always would be.
“Yes. You and Eddie are escorting the Castle’s Intelligence Matrix to the Far Shore. Briggs has a carrier waiting for it and a potential Dungeon complex for it to start working on.” Set in the Archlands and tapping the massive magical infusion coming in from the residual Arch of Fire spilling out, now that it was losing access to the Darkstone. Firerose was looking forward to hosting a fantastically attractive Dungeon and seeing what the Castle could come up with.
“Eddipus, Commander Briggs there has a special job for you, involving the heel of a humble ant,” I informed him, reaching over to pat the Ant on his wire-spiked head. His antennae flicked over me gently in quiet acknowledgment. “The Castle cannot use the Portal without a living being guiding it, so you’re the escorts. Castle, latch onto Eddie and keep pace. Gentlemen, I leave Castle Darkmoor, soon to be Castle Firemoor, to your care.”
The Paladins, Dawn-priests, White Necromancers, and Dragon Mystics of the team bowed to me, I nodded formally back to them. Eddie scuttled smoothly over in front of the beetle-like carrier, which carefully extended two tendrils out to wrap around the base of Eddie’s rear legs.
“Colm, Nyarry, lead us home,” Andre said with feeling. The two Paladins took up formal positions in front of the group, and they all strode away towards the access tunnel. The eight members followed behind Eddipus and the Castle on the path, disappearing into the flow of people soon enough.
I glanced in the Markspace to the updates, seismic readings indicating penetration to the lower levels of the ongoing bombardment and collapse of sub-basements under bombardment and explosions of the war machines being deployed in crazed succession.
Scenario judgment was twenty hours maximum at this point, and falling quickly as our shooters became increasingly good at hitting the atomic cannons and mortars quickly and blowing up their loads before they could be effectively deployed, accelerating the process while saving their own skins.
-Code Burning Coal is in effect,- I /announced to all and sundry, every person with a Mark, and anyone else I cared to warn with a concurrent Sending. -Either you are prepared to go, or you are preparing to die here to maintain our cover. Final orders are now in effect.-
It didn’t mean that everyone knew what was happening. There were indeed plenty of people we could not save, and many others we did not want to save. The people coming in were from the more distant settlements. They literally did not know where they were going, so even if they prayed to the Immortals, they couldn’t reveal much… and once they were through the Portal, it was immaterial, and likely they couldn’t even reach those Immortals, most long fallen from favor and even abhorred after all the revelations, infighting, and the Philosophy of the Dawn which had spread across Darkmoor with its quiet, gentle Salute every morning, and the watchful and hopeful Salute every dusk.
Not everyone could leave. Not everyone wanted to leave. Some had to sell the charade. Others… others had to make certain people pay, and didn’t even know it.
Duum flitted down in small bat form, perching artfully atop Dread, Hat and Monocle firmly in place. Cirru walked up in her humanoid form, looking like my bigger and blue-scaled, horned sister, watching the flow of people of multiple species leaving their treasured kingdom behind, magic and science lighting the way and showing them the way to safety.
Hope thrummed softly in the air. If they were leaving a good life behind, they were also leaving imminent death!
“Do you know how long we are remaining, Mistress Edge?” Cirru asked quietly. The fifty years of time in Darkmoor, split between now and the Far Shore, had of course helped her aging process further, but dragons took longer and longer to gain their size, which meant she had to expand laterally if she wanted to keep growing.
She had, working hard at mastering some basic technology, especially anything to do with harnessing lightning, which she ended up being very good at. The absolute hardness of logic and computer programming annoyed the heck out of her, however, what with Draconic being the foundation of magical language and all and thus dominating her thinking patterns.
Her quietest accomplishments had actually been in the field of Sorcery, a taboo field on the Far Shore, barred by the Immortals, but, it turns out, not in this time… and Sorcery was a natural advancement path for dragons, even older and more primal than Wizardry. Indeed, draconic Wizardry was probably a crude attempt to twist draconic magical ability AWAY from their natural Sorcery…
Going the Arcane Theurge route was an excellent way to achieve magical ability far beyond her Age, but she still had extraordinary problems trying to gain Class Levels and overcoming the severe limitations worked into her race by the Immortals, including the Immortal Dragons who ruled them all.
Immortals didn’t want dragons utterly dominating their pet mortals and ancestral races with all their many gifts, and were quite willing to kill them all to prevent it. Thus, dragons were limited in many aspects simply so other races could survive and thrive in different ways.
All of this had quietly come to light as we picked apart the things that prevented dragons from learning Sorcery. As an existing Theurge, it was fairly easy for me to draw links for her to imitate that simply wouldn’t occur naturally to her by aging, teasing out the ancestral knowledge that had been stripped from her and changed into dragonkind’s inefficient knowledge of Wizardry!