Chapter 12

The world of Darien was not large, when you were looking at it from orbit. When you had a jump drive. When you were thinking in terms of galaxies and solar systems.

Well.

I had just been reminded, most unpleasantly, just how very large a world was when you had to get around with your own two feet and using sail boats when I had asked Thirsha and Lokken how long it would take to get their siblings, the nominally ‘heroic’ Elisn and Kirenna, to arrive for a discussion of what to do next: Merely getting either monarch a message would take weeks, days if we used a magically enchanted flying creature, and then getting them here or us to either of their throne rooms would take weeks or months more.

And we didn’t have weeks or months. Hell, every hour I spent in this strange construct and away from dealing with the Dark Lord made my skin feel itchy, my fur tingly. My tail lashed as I stood in the bridge of the Menagerie and tried to think through all the possibilities.

Right now, the Dark Lord could have dispatched his other fleets to other solar systems. How many people had been killed?

Well, maybe a dozen, I thought. The reminder felt like a serious kick to my pants – I was used to thinking, at the end of the day, of scales that matched sizes. Like, if someone destroyed a planet, back in my universe, that would mean wiping out literally every single human being that had ever lived. Ever. It would be the total end of my species, of the history of my race, all of it from the beginning of time to wherever we could have gone. Meanwhile, in this universe, destroying a planet had a twenty percent chance to have ruined a single person’s summer house.

So, I didn’t need to immediately panic.

“What is taking them so long?” I asked.

Kanagoraga, who was sitting with Keke, the two of them bent over a large, leather bound tome full of ornately scribed pages in a language they were translating entirely through magic, jerked her head up. “Probably scheming,” she said. “A man like Lokken seems like he’s never happy if he’s not scheming.”

I pursed my lips. She had a worryingly good point there.

The door to the bridge hissed open and Thirsha ducked her head, frowning up at the metal doorframe as she moved through it. She had doffed her plate armor and was going about in what she thought was a fairly normal, modest set of clothing for the interior of a flying battlecarrier: A thin loop of cloth over her breasts and a loincloth. If I had not gotten used to hanging around with a girl like Ara Ara, I was pretty sure that this would have been entirely arresting, as opposed to merely mostly arresting.

“Lokken believes that the lodestone infusion will work,” she said, her lips curling as she slowly tilted her head around the whole bridge. “I still have a hard time believing that you prefer to live in this metal coffin.”

“Who said anything about preferring?” I asked, sitting on my command throne. “I mean, I don’t hate it, but at this moment, I’d trade the Menagerie for a nice house in the suburbs and a chance to retire with Keke, Kanagoraga, and Alin.”

Thirsha nodded, curtly.

A sudden shudder went through the entire Menagerie. I felt it not just in my body, but in my soul too – it was as if some great weight had shifted atop my shoulders, as if my belly had just done a triple flip. I wobbled, even in the command throne. Thirsha frowned, her nose wrinkling and her long, pointed ears twitching up slightly.

“Ough, that felt bad,” Kanagoraga wheezed, while Keke bent over and vomited onto the floor, clutching her belly. I was on my feet and at their sides in a second, kneeling down. The acrid smell of Keke’s sick was almost as unpleasant as the greenish expression on her face – which was impressive, considering her features were so chitinous for an elf.

“Are you two okay?” I asked, stupidly. Mentally kicking myself, I added. “What’s wrong?”

“It felt like all my nerves and cells started to go bleh,” Keke whined.

As if summoned by my angry thoughts, Lokken came through the door, followed by Alin-1, who walked into the wall with a thump, fidgeted to the left, then stepped into the bridge properly. Lokken was looking rather annoyed. “Your construct-”

“My girlfriend,” I said, my hand on Keke’s shoulder, gently. “All my girlfriends are sick.”

“Zep-blorp twillip woom!” Alin-1 said.

“She appears to be under some kind of disjunction,” Lokken said, leaning his fire-tipped staff against the wall with a click. His fingers stroked his long white beard as he regarded Alin-1 curiously. I frowned, and then it hit me. The whole idea behind the lodestone infusion was to try and replace the Menagerie’s reliance on arcanite with the inherently magical energies of Darien, to essentially allow us to kick ourselves off planet, into orbit, and beyond the warping field that made Darien possible. Once there, arcanite would resume its normal functions and ... well ... we’d be able to start getting to work again.

“The lodestone infusion,” I said. “All of these girls used arcanite to enhance their bodies – in Alin’s case, arcanite runs her brain. Can you insulate them from the infusion and it’s effects?”

Lokken looked quite irritated. “You ask me to do a great deal in a very insolent tone, child,” he said, his eyes narrowing to slits. “You come from a world without much in the way of respect for monarchies.”

“My ideological ancestors had their monarchs put into guillotines,” I said, irritated enough to forego the recent Franco-American disruptions in positive relations to harken back to the two centuries of fairly study cooperation between America, Britain’s most restive colony, and France, Britain’s most intractable enemy.

“I have no idea what that is,” Lokken grumbled under his breath as he reached out, touching Alin’s forehead as she spoke.

“Zip-lop fop- chop’s your head off, it’s very efficient,” Alin said, her voice becoming understandable midway through.

Lokken sighed. He turned to face me, his eyes glittering – and there was a note of sheer hopelessness in them. “Your pets are, as always, quite amusing ... but I believe that this flying castle should be able to take off now and move me away from a reminder that everything I ever cared about doesn’t matter and onto something important.”

I shook my head. “Lokken, your origins may be fictional, but you’re real right now. That has to matter for something.”

“You’d be surprised at how little comfort that facile statement grants me,” Lokken said. I had talked to arrogant, huffy elves for a while here, but Lokken’s tongue had a silvered edge that made Kanagoraga’s most adorable snits seem like warm bubbly cuteness.

Thirsha, who remained standing in the corner of the room, unfolded her arm and did something that genuinely shocked me.

She reached out, grabbed onto the Necromancer of Tarous, the lord of undead, the man who had reshaped a continent and had been poised to thrust the whole world of Darien into a conflict of unimaginable scale and violence, and twisted his ear fiercely. The elderly man yelped and leaned into the twist in the exact same way that I might have – and the expression on Thirsha’s face was pure older sister. She leaned forward and muttered.

“Stop whining, Lokken,” she said.

Lokken grabbed for his staff and snarled – a crackling wave of flames exploded around his body, throwing Thirsha’s hand off. She regarded the display of magic with little emotion, her ears showing the only real affect by twitching up and backwards a little. She smirked at him, while Lokken growled. “You are not my older sister,” he said. “For we aren’t anything at all – just contrivances for some entertainment, dreamed up by-”

“Stop whining, Lokken,” Thirsha said again. “You always thought too much. That was your biggest problem.”

“Ah, yes, your strategem of running off into the woods to play with the beasts-” he started.

“Animals don’t care how they got here. They know only the moment, and that’s enough,” Thirsha said. “It takes a human being to be so utterly foolish that they might get upset over things that have already happened and can’t change anything. Yes, you were written. Now you walk. Do something about it.”

Lokken glowered at her. Then he glowered at me. Then he turned and stormed off the bridge.

“I thought that was a good way of putting it,” Alin said, nodding to Thirsha.

Thirsha grunted, which was how she seemed to indicate thanks. Or. Maybe I was reading a bit into that tone. She turned towards me and asked: “Can this thing fly?”

“It should be able too,” I said, sighing. “Once we’re in orbit, the transfusion will switch off.” I didn’t mention to her that there was a tiny possibility that leaving Darien would alter reality so that she no longer thought. Or, at a less dangerous level, she might lose access to her magic. But since Thirsha was an ancient being, easily as old as Kanagoraga or Ara Ara, it was entirely possible that losing access to her magic might lead her to age rapidly into dust. We just didn’t know.