This chapter contains disturbing imagery, violence and death.
Supplicant: The Servants of a Tyrant. They are created from the demesne and serve the function of worshiping the Tyrant. Like blood cells carrying oxygen throughout the body, supplicants grant the Tyrant easy access to the magic of the demesne. Should a Tyrant lose its demesne, it can survive so long as it is worshiped, and its Supplicants can survive by continuing to worship, or by constructing a new demesne for the Tyrant to occupy. Their power and appearance and their number reflects the state of the demesne and the Tyrant.
Lyudmilla’s ‘autopilot’ mentality crumbled as she soon as she found herself faced with the dreadful creature of girders and gears and cables that Moloch had become. Despite the difficulties she found doing magic with the so-called limiter off her homunculus, she had managed to keep a semblance of cool. Compartmentalizing her fear and anxiety, she managed to outwit the monster and aid Minerva with a bit of luck and good timing.
It was a fight, a battle; she had fought those before. Fighting wasn’t easy, but she could.
But she’d fought people. She froze at the sight of a monstrosity dozens of meters high, towering over her. Its shadow could have been its own separate malignant beast.
Milla felt as if she had been thrust into a completely new reality, as if pushed through a mirror into another world, and the glass had cut her, and her face and chest had felt the impact of crashing through the barrier. She struggled to stand, craning her head up as high as it would go and still not seeing all of the monster that stood in front of her.
Something had gone terribly wrong in the world around them.
Things had stopped making sense. Everything had gone stark mad.
She heard Minerva say, in a low, breathless voice, “is this his legend?”
She didn’t understand it.
Milla had seen magical creatures before. One could not avoid them! There were commonplace things, like kobolds, gnomes; and there were all kinds of videos on the internet about bigger things. Army camera footage declassified after a decade by activists that showed men firing rockets and guns and wand blasts at Mother Hydra before the peace had been brokered; cryptid style videos of blurry beasts in dense jungles far away; quickly cut news footage of academy diplomats meeting with ancient things; and so on.
And yet here she stood face to face, in the dense, hot atmosphere of this demesne, in the presence of a real Tyrant. Those beasts whose history ran parallel to all of humanity, who when mindless threatened to destroy the world and when sentient threatened to rule it. Those primordial beasts who were magic in natural form. Moloch, Lord of the Wildfire!
She was nothing in its presence. She was reduced to quivering, aware suddenly of death.
Everything was insubstantial. Under her the floor felt hollow. Above the sky was gaseous.
Minerva looked over her shoulder briefly, standing before Milla like a guardian.
Ahead of them, the looming fleshless cow head of Moloch unhinged its jaw by the turn of a gear, and smoke billowed out from a dark orifice between the bones. He raised with much effort one of metallic skeletal arms, and flexed the scissor-blade claws at the end.
Minerva whipped back around to face him and raised her wand.
Her homunculus lit up and rapidly processed the gestures for her spell, a globe of vibrating, unstable force that flew from the tip of her wand and struck Moloch right in the jaw. She waved her wand as if conducting instruments, and from the tip several more of these globes peeled off and hurtled toward the monster, crashing into its jaw and eyesockets and shoulders. As Minerva’s waving grew faster the barrage became more intense, like a machine gun of thick magic bullets. All the while Minerva mumbled the maintenance chant, continuing to channel the spell alongside her homunculus.
Not one of these missiles left a mark on Moloch save for thin trails of smoke.
As the projectiles crashed and sputtered on its metal surface, the monster’s arm lit up in red. Seemingly hundreds of vein-like, pulsating, glowing orange and red lines traced and crisscrossed the length of its gear-studded shoulder and down the cable-laden forearm. Steam and smoke billowed from the gaps in the elbow and from the joints of the claws.
“Target is concentrating heat in the left arm–”
Minerva’s homunculus aired its warning as Moloch’s claw descended upon them.
It shot toward the platform like a rocket and Milla was sure she would die.
Her limbs felt as heavy and immobile as stone.
She shut her eyes, and turned her head as if about to be slapped.
A wave of hot air blew past her and she heard an ungodly metal on metal screeching.
She felt the ground rumble.
Soon Milla realized her body was left untouched and she opened her eyes.
Moloch’s metal arm lay twisted and smashed palm-up against the metal floor.
In front of Milla, Minerva stood, her hands glowing brilliantly red.
She had grabbed hold of Moloch’s arm, her claws (claws?) digging glowing orange holes into the metal. She looked as if she had taken both his hands into her own in an arm wrestling contest, and smashed aside the defeated arm in the process. Moloch’s body, suspended in front of them, seemed unaffected, and its cow-skull head did not emote.
Red smoke blew from Minerva’s hands as she pulled her claws loose from the metal and then vaulted over the jagged wrist of the mechanical arm and onto the forearm.
Milla watched in awe as Minerva ran up the arm without the impediment.
Moloch started to raise its right arm but could not do so fast enough to stop her.
Soon as her feet hit the creature’s shoulder she leaped easily onto the cow-skull head, standing with a foot on one horn and another on its crown. Smoke billowed from the creature’s eyesockets, mouth and its open chest. Glowing red veins streaked across both its broken and functioning arms and the gears all over its body grinded violently.
Moloch was struggling to counterattack, but it was far too slow to respond.
Atop him, Minerva raised her hand skyward, holding her wand, cried out “Barik!”
A massive black and red aura collected around her, thicker than any Milla had seen.
She was brimming with power. Her whole body lit up as bright as her claws had been.
Suddenly several points on Moloch’s body started to light up.
Milla realized it was everywhere Minerva had shot a missile before.
She must have done as Moloch had before and hidden something in her projectiles!
“Sudes!” Minerva cried out.
At her word, from each of the glowing points a thin, small metal prong surfaced.
Her purpose became obvious when, from the seething, smoking sky overhead a dozen bolts of lightning descended on Moloch’s body. Minerva leaped out of the way as the lightning smashed Moloch’s crown open and spread across the metal, striking every glowing point along the surface. Gears blew out, cables burst; high-pressure jets of smoke escaped the joints of the metal body and split apart the metal linkages in the frame.
Moloch thrashed in front of Milla like a puppet jerked about on its strings.
High above them the metallic supports and cranes and manipulator arms holding the monstrosity aloft tore with a terrific noise. Unceremoniously the metal body broke free and fell, its jaw clapping, its arms flailing. Milla nearly took a tumble, the floor shaking under her as the creature smashed into the platform and slid off into the abyss.
While Moloch was in the midst of vanishing, Minerva dropped back onto the platform.
Her hands, wreathed in a furious red aura, looked as big as her torso for an instant.
Then without transition they were simply back the way they always had been.
Almost as if Milla had hallucinated the whole thing. She blinked rapidly in confusion.
Minerva looked at her, and gave her a thumbs up with a sweet little grin.
Milla stood silent for a minute, sweat trickling down her nose and over her dry lips.
“Is it gone?” She asked.
Minerva sighed. “God, I hope so–”
“Temperature spike detected,”
Minerva raised her wrist up to stare in shock at the homunculus’ screen directly.
Milla however read the Alternate-Reality text overlaid in air by the homunculus.
It had started at forty degrees, simultaneously very hot but not convincingly hot at all for a place surrounded by fire and made largely of metal. Milla thought in a place like this her shoes would be melting and her hair would have caught fire. Then the number started to climb so quickly that it made no sense. Surely Milla would have been a desiccated corpse in those kinds of temperatures, but she only felt a little bit hot.
Hot enough to sweat, to have a little trouble breathing–
Sweat started to dribble down her forehead. Long rivulets of sweat, trailing down her face, down her neck, between her breasts. Sweat streaking down her thighs.
Each breath she took ripped down her neck like a cloud of pepper.
“It’s the furnace! The furnace was the Tyrant all along!” Minerva realized.
Milla stumbled toward her, and grabbed onto her arm, coughing.
Minerva’s face seemed to go pale. She was sweating also, though not as badly.
Her hand turned red again.
She pressed it down on Milla’s forehead.
For a split second Milla remembered an unpleasant feeling.
A child, drowned in the baptismal water–
But this was fire, a great fire enveloping her and for the most minute possible instant, the smallest unit of experience that could still pass off as a lived and breathed feeling, Milla felt pain. An unimaginable pain like burning to a crisp from head to toe.
It was there and then gone and yet,felt so thoroughly that it shocked her.
She gasped, and screamed, and ripped herself from Minerva’s touch.
Sweat dripped off her body like the thin rivulets of water following a fresh shower.
But she could stand, she could move and breathe. It wasn’t getting any hotter.
“Please, I’ll explain everything when we’re safe, but right now, I need your help.”
Minerva looked at her with a curious expression. Concern, probably. But visibly, it was shame. Her defiance and confidence was gone for a small moment, and she looked deeply, awfully ashamed, in the way Milla herself, often felt ashamed. When she was caught smoking or asked about her childhood or her parents; when she hit too hard with a ball at the sports club; or when she looked away from a girl who was too pretty–
In those fiery, eerie eyes, there was so much pain and shame and helplessness.
Milla couldn’t help but feel that she had to help Orizaga now.
She couldn’t look at that vulnerability and not feel ashamed of her own cowardly self.
She spread open the pages of her grimoire and held it by the spine.
“Tell me what to do, Professor.” She said.
Spared from the heat of the arena she felt it much easier to keep her wits.
Minerva smiled a little. “I’m just a teaching assistant.”
On the edges of the arena, smoke belched into the sky from unseen chimneys.
Around the demesne the fiery pit burned brighter and redder than it ever had.
Once more the platform began to rumble under Milla and Minerva.
All of the gears and mechanisms hanging in the air around the demesne, seemingly attached to nothing, turned with noise and violence, suddenly alive. Though their positions correlated to no rational device, turning and pulling on nothing, the machine seemed to have some effect on the platform. As they cranked away at the air the platform shook more and more strongly, until from the abyss the smashed Moloch machine started rising. Two interlocking pieces extended from the platform, attaching the Moloch animatronic to the platform furnace and supporting him, and more cranes and arms descended and attached a mess of cables, pipes and pumps to the machine.
Grimly, several arms twisted Moloch’s head into place and snapped its limbs together.
It was like they were building up a toy. A figurine of what the God should’ve been like.
Its call hissed out into the air and sounded filthy. It seemed to come from under them.
“You stole my fire to begin your journey to the throne of the world, and yet, you stand before me now so feeble, so alone, not one supplicant to your name!”
Suddenly the Moloch machine began to smoke and turned an offensively bright red.
“I’m insulted! I’m offended! I’m vexed! Return my flame so I can be king!”
Red-hot gears on the cow-skull’s cheek turned its mouth open.
Red particulate aura traces, and smoke, and fire, all began to collect in its mouth.
It was as if the creature were vacuuming the surrounding heat and shaping it.
“Witness the Doom of Canaan!”
Jets of smoke burst from the back of the Moloch machine’s head.
Its mouth erupted in a stream of red.
Milla leaped away in one direction and Minerva in the opposite.
Pure heat swept past them like a hurtling comet, a red wall slicing across the platform.
A sudden wave of gas followed the attack, and threw Milla back in mid-air.
She landed ungracefully, crying out as she slammed into the metal floor.
Had it been any denser she would’ve been broken upon it.
But she felt almost like she had landed on a sheet of foil rather than a sturdy floor.
She raised her head from the ground.
When the fire subsided, there was a residual slag, glowing red, bubbling across the floor.
This substance formed a line at every point stricken by Moloch’s attack.
It was as if Moloch’s attack was not a beam or laser at all, as it seemed to Milla from the fanciful things she had seen in popular fiction. Instead she started to think he had sprayed molten metal at them so fast that it just seemed like a giant stream of heat.
In a sudden panic, she looked around for Minerva and thankfully found her on the opposite edge of the platform, doubled over, breathing heavily. Minerva raised her own head and she and Milla made eye contact. Minerva waved; she gestured off the edge of the platform, and then to the Moloch Machine, which was hunched over and steaming.
“I’ll distract him! Jump down into the furnace! That’s the real Tyrant!” She shouted.
Milla blinked. She looked behind herself, over the edge of the platform.
There were all kinds of pipes and devices and chutes but no clear way inside.
Eyes open wide, mouth hanging and quivering slightly, she shook her head at Minerva. Her twintails swung this way and that with the effort. She started to feel hopeless again–
There was a terrifying, dominant sound, the shearing of metal, the grinding of a gear.
Heat began to pump into the Moloch machine once more.
Again the cow-skull head on the animatronic swung its jaw open.
“You’re protected from heat Lyudmilla! Go!” Minerva shouted.
She then stood up straight and swung her wand at the machine.
From thin air in front of her a stake flew out, as fast as a professional baseball pitch.
Flying without resistance, it stuck in one of the Moloch Machine’s ribs.
Minerva summoned another bolt of lightning and this one launched out of her wand.
The bolt struck the stake and lashed across the Machine but could not stop its attack.
All of the arms and cranes reoriented the monster, jerking it toward Minerva.
Even as the lightning tore through its body, the heat around it grew fiercer.
It was her she wanted; it didn’t even care about Milla at all.
“This is the fire that consumed Canaan!”
A second blast of heat and molten metal erupted from the machine’s mouth.
In an instant it sliced through the air, a cannon shot to Minerva’s mere fastball pitch.
She thrust skyward, stirring the air in her wake as if she had flapped massive wings.
Milla saw her form disappear inside the mass rushing her way.
Her heart sank–
Within the gas billowing up after the shot, Milla saw a speck of something.
Minerva shot out of the cloud toward the machine, dashing in the air.
Before she could cast anything the Moloch machine spread its mouth once more.
Milla realized Minerva, for all that she could dance in the air, could not stop it shooting.
Following the teacher’s body, leaping around as if from cloud to cloud, she also realized what she herself could do. Her eyes settled on the Moloch body and the pipes and cables.
She held her grimoire by the spine, with a thumb inside the pages, and took off running.
Moloch fired a third blast from its mouth, its breath attack sweeping across the sky. Minerva continued to dash to and fro around its head, getting in a kick here and there as she used the machine as a platform to take off again. She was a mere nuisance, but she was a great distraction. Without resistance, Milla ran the length of the platform, to the edge where the machine was connected. It grew larger and larger as she approached it, until she had to crane her head up high as it could to try to watch the fighting play out.
Milla looked down off the edge of the platform, breathing slowly and heavily as an unimaginable heat emanated nearby. It was as if she stood steps away from a star. This must have been what standing on the sun felt like, she thought. Looking down she could see where all the pipes and cables and metal supports reached out from the furnace, like a replacement spinal cord winding up into the hovering Moloch Machine from below.
Taking in a deep breath, and swallowing hard, she leaped down toward the pipes.
She morbidly expected her whole body to melt and end up a puddle atop the monster’s makeshift spine; though she landed clumsily and hit herself again, she found herself surprisingly whole. Her hands, touching the metal, did not sizzle or hurt. It felt eerily room temperature, no hotter than anything else. Bolting up to her feet, she looked around for a way into the furnace. Far overhead, Minerva and Moloch dueled mightily.
Milla did not need to look very long.
Right in front of her, the platform bore a massive, bull-like face. Those smokestacks Milla had seen sticking out resembled horns when viewed from this angle, and the mass connecting the Moloch Machine to the furnace stuck out of the bull’s cavernous mouth like a tongue. She could easily run across the spine and into the furnace’s interior.
There was a plan hatching in her head but it depended on what she found inside.
She made for the gaping maw only to stop a few steps short.
Several pairs of glowing eyes approached from inside the furnace.
Intermittent flashing from inside the furnace revealed many of the kilnling creatures that had been trying to harvest Cheryl and the others. They dragged themselves forward, their exposed ribs snapping open and closed like jaws. The Kilnlings lurched out of the furnace in clumsy stopping-and-starting movements, as if their locomotion went on and off the way the burners inside the furnace did. They were very large and solid, however, and their size and presence alone was enough to put Milla on the defensive.
She took a step back out of the furnace’s shadow and grit her teeth.
She remembered an old commander who admonished her for cowardice.
Tightening her grip on the spine of her grimoire, she swept her hand over the pages.
“Kladenets!” She called out.
Her grimoire left her hand of its own accord and hovered off the ground.
Standing between her and the approaching monsters, it produced an image of a sword.
It seemed an ordinary sword, the butt coming to rest a few centimeters off the pages.
Milla thrust her hand forward with the palm to the enemy.
Her grimoire launched toward the kilnlings, and the glowing sword swung at them.
No arm held it, and it appeared to have no mass, but the blade nonetheless swept across the head of one of the kilnlings and battered the monster aside. Rather than slice through them the sword rang aloud on impact, screaming metal on metal as it clubbed the monsters. Despite its visible position atop the grimoire, the blade had deceptive reach. It struck as if held on an arm that could stretch, twist, and handle a blade deftly.
From head to head the blade turned, striking in turn each kilnling as they approached, and rattling their skulls with every hit. When stricken the beasts toppled off their legs and onto their sides, reacting as if concussed. No sword could have rent the metal on them, not even this one, but a good clubbing made an effective deterrent instead.
Milla rushed forward, and again by itself the grimoire charged with her, and the blade threw its terrible weight every which way. Dazed kilnlings fell aside and Milla charged past them, never staying long enough to pick a real fight. They were big and she was not terribly damaging them, but it was not her intention to brawl with them at all.
Leaping and dodging her way past the monsters, Milla penetrated the mouth of the furnace and instantly found herself faced with its immense interior. A short hallway, guarded by kilnlings, led to a massive set of interior works that funneled metal to burners, which fired off every so often to melt the metal instantly. Then the metal was dropped into a massive, glowing red pit recessed into the ground in the center of the furnace, where it was siphoned through red-hot pipes out to the Moloch Machine.
Everything was decayed, eroded, rusted, sharp and haphazard, like the kilnlings were.
Every surface in the demesne wore its armor like moth-eaten clothes.
Behind her the stricken kilnlings began to get back on their legs, and in front of her, several more started to close in from the furnace interior. She had surrounded herself.
She was not driven to panic despite this. In fact, she smirked instead.
Milla had figured there was something important inside the furnace, after fighting on top of it. She could not have been entirely sure, not being a student of engineering, but she knew it was not just a hunk of metal as it had been prior to Moloch’s transfiguration. She knew it was home to a lot of those pipes and cranes that she saw everywhere on Moloch.
Even so, she had no ordinary means to affect such a massive thing. She knew no spells that could launch an armor-piercing rocket or set off C-4 inside this furnace and damage its works. Mages could throw around lightning and fireballs and cast massive reavings and disintegrations at people and things but the larger and sturdier the affected object, the more raw power had to go into it. She could batter kilnlings, but she could not tear down this massive edifice by herself. Lyudmilla Kholodva did not have raw power.
She was tired, too.
Even at her least tired she might not have been able to tear down the furnace. She did not even really know many spells. She figured the basic packet from the Academy did not include a full combat suite; so she was relying on things she picked up here and there.
Lacking in options and in the raw strength to execute them, Lyudmilla substituted a bit of inventiveness. She was not surrounded; she had the kilnlings where she wanted them.
Sometimes, physics alone could be a force multiplier for a dynamic magician.
“Lets hope this works!”
Closing her fist, she caused the sword atop her grimoire to dissipate.
In a blink the book was back in her hands.
She held it by both covers and thrust the pages forward, trying her best to copy Minerva.
She had read her lips as she cast, and seen something of the gestures.
As for mnemonics, Milla just tried to focus on stakes and hoped for the best.
A metal stake; a metal stake; a metal stake–
It was crude mnemonics, but it had an effect.
Like Minerva, her spell conjured a metal stake that flew out from between the grimoire’s pages. Lacking the precision of a wand or advanced knowledge of the spell, Milla’s casting went wild. She felt the metal portion of her very human, mixed metal and fire aura, suddenly peeling almost right off. Her whole body glowed black and red and the black burst out of her into a wave of particulate aura, lost magic consumed by the spell.
Some of this particulate, but not all, attached to the stake in the instant of conjuration.
Instead of a clean shape, it became irregular, lumpy, its weight poorly distributed.
When the stake exploded into being out in front of her, Milla felt like it not only ripped up her aura and took it with it but also ripped the breath from her lungs.
She nearly doubled over in pain, but she retained enough composure to watch.
Flying haphazardly with the speed of an artillery shell, the stake bowled past several kilnlings in front of Milla and sailed over the red pit and embedded into a gear.
No one spell could stop the machines from turning. Though there was a stake clearly stuck in the gears, the conveyors continued to turn, the burners continued to blast, and metal continued to be fed into the Moloch Machine. They had no physical logic after all. Many were not even attached to anything, and operated in an almost metaphorical way.
Milla never intended to target the machines themselves.
She was gritting her teeth from the reckless exertion, but still managing to grin.
Behind her, every Kilnling struck by her sword glowed momentarily.
Instead of following the initial taps with the Alwi spell Barik, as Minerva had, she instead reached for a trick closer to home. One that would not cook her alive from inexperience.
Taking in air, calm even as the remaining kilnlings started to close, Milla shouted:
“Lord Pherkhan, we become to metal as Earth is to the Moon! Pherkhan’s magnetism!”
As she pronounced each word a little bolt played about her grimoire and hands.
She needed all the focus she could get. A full incantation gave her time to gather energy.
Milla locked eyes on the stake and reached out mentally.
It was her favorite spell of the suite developed by the Rus War-Mage, Pherkhan.
At first the little bolts extended from one end of her grimoire to the other like the poles on a horseshoe magnet, suspended between the open pages. After receiving the full command, they traveled up the grimoire and left the pages altogether. As soon as the bolts leaped off the metal-bound corners of the grimoire they extended across the entire furnace in an invisible instant, connecting the numerous kilnlings behind and around Milla with the stake she stuck to the interior of the furnace. Dozens of tiny bolts of lightning danced between the kilnlings and the stake like blurry, flashing strings.
For a moment the kilnlings were given pause, but their relentlessness soon returned.
When the kilnlings resumed their advance, the bolts sharply, suddenly contracted.
Had they exhibited any kind of magical talent that instant could’ve been crucial.
The Kilnlings did not cast spells; so Milla’s sloppiness instead had a devastating effect.
Dozens of the metallic monsters all around Milla and in the interior of the furnace works launched into the air as if their weight meant nothing. They bounced as readily as rubber balls, drawn toward the stake as if lassoed by the strength of a giant. Milla ducked and covered her head with her grimoire. Chunks of metal flew off their bodies as the kilnlings collided with the walls and with each other hundreds of times on their way toward the stake. For a moment the hallway into the furnace works was a churning, vibrating mess of ricocheting metal. Once free of the confines of the hallway, the kilnling mass slammed into the stake faster and harder than Lyudmilla could’ve ever imagined.
Boilers cracked and burst under the violence, cranes were smashed into the furnace pit, gears knocked out of place fell heavily upon the conveyors and other works and battered the whole mechanism apart. The furnace roared and quaked as great masses of metal rained down into the pit, clogging up the lifeline to the Moloch Machine outside. Molten metal began to rise out of the pit and spill over into the corridor. Around Milla the walls started to crack and glow red, and to bleed molten metal as if grievously wounded.
That’s as far as she had planned for. It was time to run!
Milla turned around and bolted for the exit, a wave of molten metal rushing after her.
Crawling up the walls as if chasing her, the cracks in the furnace spewed and sputtered with fire and gas and searing red metal that landed around Milla in fist-sized globs. She ducked and dodged the streams, swatted away the metal with her grimoire, all the while running as fast as she could, and breathing in less and less air as it seemed to burn up.
Her vision started to waver, and the tunnel felt endlessly long, the outside world too far.
Struggling for breath, she screamed as loud as she could, “Sudes!”
In a flash of light, some of the metal flying around her collected itself into a stake.
Once fully formed the lumpy, misshapen stake shot off into the distance like a rocket.
It ate up almost all her remaining metal aura, but she had purposefully held back.
She only needed a small stake this time.
Milla pulled a chain from her blazer pocket and wrapped it around her arm.
She shut her grimoire on the end of the chain as her legs gave out on her.
Falling, she mumbled again the name of the great Pherkan and prayed.
Blue bolts of energy trailed up and down her body.
She jerked forward, and back and suddenly launched out of the tunnel.
Screaming, Milla leaped clear over the ever-burning pit.
Behind her the mouth of the bull-head furnace choked with molten metal.
All around the demesne the fires started to go out, the gears stopped turning.
Fuzzy lines like the static on a busted television started to divide the walls, the seemingly endless pit and the skybox of the demesne, and once those cleared more of the outside world, the real world, became visible again through the distortion of the demesne.
Sailing off into nothingness, Lyudmilla watched with a self-satisfied little grin as the Moloch Machine began to choke, its cow-skull head leaking molten metal from the eyesockets and from the pipeline inside its jaws. It spewed its red-hot pyroclastic attack into the air at random, vomiting up metal with no target, screaming and out of control.
As she fell she saw Minerva, briefly, and saw her light up brighter red than ever.
“Wyrm!” Moloch screamed. “Wyrm!”
Minerva’s voice responded, deeper and richer and more beautiful than ever.
“I’m, Minerva Orizaga. Wyrm isn’t here. Thanks again for the fire.”
Something like a massive whip (a tail?) lashed out from Minerva and cleaved Moloch.
Just as she watched Moloch break apart, she heard Minerva’s homunculus again.
“Entity MOLOCH unstable. Temperature drop exponential. Containment successful.”
Next thing she knew, Lyudmilla Kholodova hit the ground. It was dirty, dusty.
She felt as if she had been dunked suddenly in freezing water.
Hugging herself, Milla squirmed and twisted herself onto her back.
There were trees. A canopy; she could see the blue sky and the stars.
Nothing was burning anymore.
Milla pushed herself up from the ground, to her knees.
How much time had passed? She scanned her surroundings. It was still dark.
Suddenly she heard a scream, a girl’s scream.
Milla struggled up to her feet, stumbling and swaying, a little dizzy.
She managed to maneuver herself through the trees and found herself back at the clearing where the Moloch statue had first been unearthed. She arrived in time to see the crumbling statue, Phillip struggling to stand and trying to snake away, and that armored man, Ajax, menacingly approaching Amber, Jenn and Cheryl. The girls squirmed away from him on the ground, crawling on their backs until they hit the treeline again.
“Let go of that.” Ajax hissed. His voice was eerie. It sounded as if it was coming from a broken radio in his helmet, hissing and scratching and becoming inaudible for a second or two in the middle of this syllable or that. It made it difficult to understand him.
He was dragging one of his feet, and his hands were limp at his sides.
Milla summoned her grimoire to her hands, and stumbled out of the forest.
“Get away from them!” She cried.
He turned his head partially over his shoulder. His eyes glowed on and off, sparking.
Ajax stared at Milla, and then at his own feet, where his two subordinates lay beaten.
He stared at the Moloch statue, broken, its once incredible aura sputtering away.
He charged without warning–
But in the direction of the treeline, to escape!
Milla grit her teeth and made to follow. Could she get him?
Ajax did not get far; in the next instant he bounced back into the clearing and hit the dirt.
From the wood, Minerva appeared.
Vorra leaped down from the canopy, visibly wounded, but alive and seemingly mobile.
“Milord, he is faltering.” She said.
They had Ajax surrounded. Judging by his last attempt, he was on his last legs.
Ajax picked one of his subordinate’s clubs off the floor.
“Alwi trash– you–” His voice broke up. “Undone– I’ll–”
He threw himself forward and swung his weapon.
It stretched to cover the gap and came at Minerva’s side like a whip.
She held out her wand at her side and the metal bounced off of it.
Ambling casually toward Ajax, Minerva then swung her wand at him wordlessly.
A wave of force blasted the weapon off Ajax’s hands, and took several fingers with it.
Surprisingly he did not whimper, did not cry out, despite this brutal amputation.
He was clearly done fighting but he continued to try to escape.
Minerva would have none of it.
Ajax struggled to stand; a second blast from Minerva’s wand threw him back to the ground. Her eyes were fixed on him with a cold, steely hatred that shook Milla in its intensity. Each step she took, Minerva swung her wand, and Ajax was blasted in his chest, and thrown back; blasted in his legs until the armor was pummeled off them; and blasted in his head, jerking his neck left and right until his battered helm fell off.
Beneath the plate legs, there was nothing. Beneath the breastplate, nothing.
There was nothing beneath the helmet either.
Ajax had been nothing but a construct. Had it been the entire time? Had he swapped?
Minerva disregarded the empty suit of armor and walked over to the girls.
She knelt beside them with a smile. “You all have been through a lot. It feels silly to ask this, but are you ok? Are you hurt? Do you need a hospital? Can you talk to the police?”
Amber and Jenn stared dumbfounded at Minerva for a second before throwing themselves at her, hugging her and crying, shaken thoroughly by their experience. Minerva seemed to not know what to do other than stand there and allow herself to be thoroughly grappled. She eventually started rubbing their backs in a motherly way.
Vorra hid in the wood, sitting solemnly with her back to a tree, breathing heavily.
Cheryl sat at the edge of the clearing, staring at the Ajax armor, empty-eyed. In her hands she was turning over the orange-red orb that had come out of the Moloch statue’s head.
Somehow despite everything, they all had survived that mess.
Lyudmilla sighed with relief. She nearly dropped her grimoire out of exhaustion.
She managed to keep a steady grip on it.
So she was ready when she heard the dirt sifting.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
She turned her head and fixed a murderous glare on Phillip, his face caked in his own blood, weeping, gritting what was left of his teeth through a broken mouth. He had been trying to crawl up the steeper side of the clearing and out of anyone’s sight. He said nothing, and merely stopped where he had been. Milla pointed her grimoire his way.
“Sit down or I’ll sit you down.” Milla said.
From across the clearing, Minerva let go of Amber and Jenn, who then clung to Cheryl.
“Yes, Phillip Theimer, we’ll need to repair your face so you can talk to the police.”
Minerva spoke, and Milla thought she saw Phillip shake. He knelt down, giving up.
Whatever glorious night he thought he might have was now over.
Next morning, having gotten no sleep and talked to too many different uniformed persons, Lyudmilla Kholodova and Minerva Orizaga found themselves in the office of Miriam Hirsch, who was disheveled, having had to dress quickly and arrive at the Humanities’ main department very early to deal with the ugly situation. Word was getting around about what happened. Police were investigating, the students were variously in hospital care and out of it, and the Department itself was in a furor about it.
Minerva rarely spoke to Miriam Hirch without Beatrix around. Her office felt empty and oppressive. There was nothing separating Minerva from Miriam, nothing shielding her.
Miriam had an intimating expression, full of barely restrained anger.
“University Police tried to explain it to me, and I couldn’t believe a word I was hearing, so I would like to hear it from you instead. What the hell happened last night, Minerva?”
Minerva was annoyed by everything, but she tried to keep things matter-of-fact and she spoke so quickly and in such a tone that Miriam, try as she might, couldn’t interrupt.
“It is my understanding that at around midnight three boys identifying themselves with the Otrarian nationalist group ‘Iron Flags’ cooperated with Phillip Theimer to lead several girls to a clearing in the Whispering Wood with the intent to perform a dark ritual to summon the Tyrant Moloch. They intended to make sacrifices to a statue that had been popularly mistaken to represent Baphomet that had appeared suddenly some time ago in the woods. This statue had a carved orb of Agnicite that was sealing some of Moloch’s demesne, and upon its release, the Tyrant was unleashed. However, it was severely weakened from having to express his main element of Fire through its antagonistic element, Metal. With Lyudmilla Kholodova’s help, I contained the Tyrant and detained Phillip, Trent and Arnes. Ajax, the fourth conspirator, was piloting a construct from afar all along. I called the authorities and an investigation is underway.”
At several points in the story Miriam Hirch seemed to want to interrupt as if it was inherently a ridiculous thing to say. Minerva talked over her enough times to keep her quiet and get her whole message across. At the end of it, Miriam sat dumbfounded.
“You contained a Tyrant?” Miriam asked at last, regaining a bit of composure.
Minerva reached into her coat, withdrew the fire orb and put it on Miriam’s desk.
“Put that under the tightest security you’ve got, ma’am.” She said.
Miriam picked up the orb and instantly shook with goosebumps and dropped it.
“It’s not something to take lightly, that’s for sure.” Minerva said.
Miriam looked momentarily offended. She left the orb on her desk.
“Setting all that of that aside for later. I want to know about the facts I can confirm right now. What happened to Phillip Theimer? He claims you injured him.” Miriam said.
She had seemingly ignored the part where Minerva implicated him in the crime.
Of course, the word of a white Otrarian boy with a donor father carried a lot of weight.
Minerva sighed. “He was attacked by the leader of the Flags, nom de guerre Ajax. Ajax had manipulated him into providing his own girlfriend, Cheryl von Schutzherr, as human material for the ritual. Whether he intended to seal Moloch in her or otherwise–”
“You realize how ridiculous that sounds?” Miriam said. “The Theimer family have been supporters of the Academy for generations. They’re a completely above-board family.”
She sounded strangely and specifically outraged about this.
“I say nothing of the family; only what I collected at the crime scene.” Minerva said.
In truth she hadn’t been there at the time, but she had Lyudmilla’s testimony.
Miriam sighed heavily and rubbed her palms over her own face.
“Minerva, I support the teachers under my direction, but to engage in such unserious he-said she-said talk, and where it concerns a student claiming you assaulted him–”
Lyudmilla cut Miriam off and spoke, her accent thicker owing to her anger.
“Ms. Orizaga did not hurt him at all! I’ll testify to that. I smacked Phillip in the face!”
“You’ll speak when prompted, Miss Kholodova!” Miriam shouted. “Tread lightly!”
Lyudmilla scowled at her, squeezing her own knees as she sat on the couch.
Miriam sighed and rubbed her own forehead and started sifting through some papers.
Minerva’s heart beat faster. What was going on here?
She had contained a Tyrant and saved the lives of those girls.
Did she not care? Was she ready to ignore all of that as a fabrication?
This was so ridiculous, unfair and unjust to an unrealistic degree, and yet, possible.
A fleetingly possible thing that somehow happened all of the time.
Miriam was just outright ignoring her words and defending Theimer.
Minerva was an Alwi, a person hated in this society. She had this etched in her skin.
Was Miriam trying to frame her for the entire situation right now?
“Ma’am, I’m not sure I understand what your point is. Please speak plainly.”
“Fact of the matter is, Minerva, Lyudmilla Kholodova is not exactly a trustworthy prospect in a situation like this. Phillip Theimer claims he is innocent and a victim. I can believe Trent and Arnes were implicated in something, though goodness knows what, but I’m struggling to believe stuff about rituals and tyrants and a mysterious fourth man.”
Minerva couldn’t tell if Miriam was really so tortured over this or faking all of it.
She certainly sounded and acted annoyed and uncomfortable but it seemed all too easy for her to abandon Minerva and Lyudmilla at this juncture for well-moneyed words.
“And all this talking about Tyrants– yes you have that orb, but it’s just, it’s too much! I cannot believe that a Tyrant was summoned, that it attacked, that you contained it–”
“I’ll give you the data collected by my Homunculus!” Minerva shouted at her.
Miriam glared at Minerva, clearly offended now at her tone. “I don’t want it! Ugh. It’s not enough I have to deal with Beatrix now you’re also making problems. At least when Beatrix comes up with some scheme to endanger students she owns up without excuses!”
“Now it’s a scheme? Nationalists attack your students and suddenly it’s my scheme?”
The Department Head was taken aback by this and quickly retreated from her rhetoric.
“I’m not saying that!” Miriam said. “I’m not accusing you! Goodness. You’re clearly giving in to emotion, Minerva, we can’t have this discussion and I can’t defend you if you’re showing this kind of attitude! It’s Academy policy to first side with the students–”
Minerva intended to shout ‘you were never going to defend me,’ but then someone did.
Bursting through the door into the office was the blonde-haired, starry-eyed, and clearly furious young lady known only as Cheryl, but actually named Cheryl von Schutzherr.
She stormed into the room and charged right up to Miriam’s desk, her eyes afire.
Behind her, Beatrix Kolsa ambled in with a bewildered expression, and shrugged.
“You’re the Department Head? What the hell is this?” Cheryl said. “Why did you summon Ms. Orizaga and Milla instead of that no-good piece of shit who just tried to kill me!”
Miriam blinked, taken aback. “Language! Ms. Schutzherr, I’m just, I wanted to–”
“Minerva Orizuh– Minerva saved my life! Milla Khalod– Milla saved my life!”
Minerva and Lyudmilla both wilted. Cheryl couldn’t pronounce their surnames.
“That’s–” Miriam seemed to shrink in her chair. “That’s– well– Phillip Theimer also–”
“I’m sure that fucking rat has something to say too! Then he should say it to my face! To all our faces! To us and to Amber and Jenn, he tried to get us all killed for his buddies in the Iron Whatever! Instead he’s trying to hide behind you, isn’t he? You’re covering up for him! He should be in this room so I can shout his face off along with yours!”
Miriam turned bright red and nearly fell over with her chair. “Why I– I never–”
“You listen to me! I’ll tell the cops, I’ll tell the courts, I’ll tell the tabloids, I’ll talk to anyone! I’ll vlog about it! I got 3000 followers! I’ll tell everyone that Phillip Theimer is a sick, lying freak who seduced and led me along so he could literally kill me! And I’ll tell my daddy to donate all the money you dirtbags get from him to animal shelters! I’ll call him right now!” Cheryl, breathlessly shouting at the top of her lungs right in Miriam’s face, produced a cellphone and shoved that right into Miriam’s face too. “I’ll make these rickety walls come right down on you if you think you can get away with hiding this!”
“Please– I wasn’t– I didn’t mean to–” Miriam, a grown woman, was almost in tears.
Cheryl continued to shout, at the top of her lungs, her voice bravely holding out.
“Minerva and Lyudmilla better leave this room with medals! Medals! You, and your cops, and your stupid department, you didn’t do shit to help me! I was nearly killed by a bunch of LARPers and a big ugly metal bull! KILLED! You didn’t do shit about it! I was nearly killed! A bunch of lunatics go to this school planning to kill innocent girls and you didn’t know, you didn’t do anything, who knows how many girls have been victims here?”
“Of course not– Our school– we pride ourselves– we’re very safe–”
“Are you going to do something?” Cheryl put her face to Miriam’s, baring her teeth.
Miriam backed her office chair up to the wall behind her in fear.
Cheryl’s eyes watered, her nose ran, and her face was beet red. She was shaking.
The full force of everything that had happened to her, and of everything that could have happened to her, hit right there like a dam bursting. She had screamed out as much of it as she could, but now she was shivering, hugging herself, weeping openly, sobbing loud. Her knees shook. She looked to be in agony, unable to contain herself. Lyudmilla made to stand but Minerva shook her head and put out an arm to stop her. She had to be delicate.
Beatrix moved closer to the desk and took Cheryl by the shoulders, giving her someone to cry on. For once she looked almost like a responsible adult, comforting Cheryl.
“There, there.” Beatrix said.
Miriam Hirch, nearly weeping herself, glared daggers at Beatrix, who smiled in return.
“Miriam, I caught wind of what happened from the university police when they came to the Department last night. I predicted you’d handle this situation very poorly. I want to believe you’re just trying to get out of doing paperwork, because you are lazy. At any rate I felt that, out of everyone involved, this girl deserved to have her voice heard, and I wanted to make sure that she did.” She turned her head a little and winked at Minerva.
Minerva allowed herself a restrained smile back at Beatrix.
“Yes, very– very well.” Miriam stuttered.
“If I remember correctly, the von Schutzherr grants go directly to the Humanities, do they not? It’s twice the Theimer grant money too.” Beatrix mused aloud. “As someone whose research depends on things like that, I also felt my voice mattered too.”
Miriam sank atop her desk.
“I’ll– I’ll take care of things. It’s fine. Everyone please. Go.”
Beatrix led Cheryl away slowly, rubbing her back and wiping her tears, smiling at her.
Before she could be taken through the door, Lyudmilla turned around on the couch.
She shouted, “Cheryl! You’re really cool, you know?”
And Cheryl held a shaking thumbs up in response, before vanishing out the door.
With Beatrix and Cheryl gone there was a sudden silence.
It dropped between everyone like lead walls.
“Ms. Hirch, perhaps I should take this orb for safe-keeping.” Minerva finally said.
Miriam sighed. “Yes. Yes. Please leave.”
Nodding, Minerva quickly swiped the orb from Miriam’s desk and left the room.
Soon as the office was vacated Miriam slammed the door.
There was another sudden falling of silence. It was as if the world itself, having held its breath throughout that entire drama, could finally breathe and take stock in things.
Everything ended up working itself out somehow.
Out in the halls again, Minerva checked the time on her homunculus and sighed.
The National waited for nobody. Life, outside oneself, had to keep going.
“I’m gonna be so late for my office hours.” She groaned.
“You’re gonna hold office hours? After all this?”
Behind her, Lyudmilla Kholodova approached with a questioning expression.
She looked mightly disheveled, her blazer frayed and spotted, her hair messy, a distinct ashen pall over her otherwise fair skin. Probably owing to the smoke and the fire. Minerva wondered what was going through her head now. She didn’t look tired or shocked or vulnerable, like she had been in the demesne a few times. She seemed well.
Minerva turned fully to meet her. She recalled Lyudmilla’s heroics in the demesne.
This girl had potential, and some hidden depths to her. Minerva kinda liked her.
“Well, the students need my help whether or not I was nearly killed by a monster.”
Lyudmilla seemed amused by the answer.
“And whether or not your Department nearly betrayed you.”
“That’s not the student’s fault. They have a right to an education you know.”
“That’s dedication. I’m straight-up blowing the rest of class this week after this shit.”
Minerva grinned a little. “That’s honestly fair. I’d encourage you to show up though.”
“Yeah, you would do that, Professor.” Lyudmilla grinned back at her.
“It’s just Ms. Orizaga, please.” Minerva said.
Lyudmilla then reached into her blazer and pulled out a letter for Minerva.
“I got this in the mail. Just uh. I guess I want you to know, that I got it.”
Though she seemed conflicted at first, she made up her mind quickly.
Minerva took the letter and unfurled it. It was the notice of apprenticeship.
Officially signed by Miriam Hirch and dated about a day before Minerva was told.
“How do you feel about it?” Minerva asked.
“Well, I can’t say no now. This is too cool, you know?” Lyudmilla bent forward, her arms stretched behind her with the fingers interlocked, rocking. She had an air of mischief.
She spun her finger idly and one of the hair bobbles on her twin-tails spun with it.
“I won’t tell anyone you’re some kind of superhero if you teach me your tricks.”
Minerva sighed. What a little devil she had on her hands! She should’ve known.
“I’m not a superhero.” Minerva said. “I’m just a teaching assistant.”
“Yeah, and I’m just an innocent maid, never smoked a joint, never touched a boob.”
Lyudmilla stuck her tongue out at Minerva.
“You’ll find I’m far less impressive outside of a fire-rich demesne.”
“My standards are very, very low.” Lyudmilla said, cackling.
“You’re a handful.” Minerva said. “Listen, if you’re fine with this arrangement, then I’m glad. I know I promised I’d explain everything to you, and I will, but right now, I really need to work. So lets meet somewhere private later and we can discuss all of this.”
“Fine. But I’ll tag along for today anyway. No discussion necessary.”
Minerva nodded. “It’s gonna be boring you know. I plan to act like nothing happened.”
“Me too. It’s too early for me to have a big cry and scream like Cheryl did. I’m too icy for that. Anyway. I’m here at your service for both mundane and magical tasks, master.”
“Oh god no. There’s enough people who call me master. Just, Minerva, or something.”
Lyudmilla grinned. “Ah, yeah, how’s that subby dragon of yours doing, Professor?”
“Nothing happened.” Minerva said dangerously.
“Ah fine, fine.” Lyudmilla replied cheerfully.
Together they got going to Minerva’s office.
At least, regardless of everything, her job always gave her something else to do.
Right now, the only world she knew or wanted was her students and a pile of papers.
She was the first Alwi magician of the National! She had to keep performance high.
“If I’m your apprentice, can I look at the quiz keys?” Lyudmilla asked.
“Yes you can. They’re all there in the textbook if you read it.” Minerva said.
Lyudmilla started to whistle intermittently. “I guess I should’ve expected that.”
That night, Minerva arrived at her home just off the edge of Lake Bratten and the Whispering Woods, feeling exhausted, and like the feelings she had been damming for the sake of the world were about to burst through the wall of her heart. Still, she made herself smile for the little girl at the front desk, and waved at her when she passed.
“Oh, Minnie!” Laksha called out. She looked sad. “Your girlfriend came in this morning looking a little, bad. Did something happen to her Minnie? Is she going to be okay?”
Minerva continued to smile. “She did a big heroic thing, Laksha. But she’ll be okay.”
“Wow! I’ll get her some meat sometime to thank her for being a hero.” Laksha said.
Her frown had immediately turned into a starry-eyed smile.
“Thank you. She’d love that. Good night, Laksha.”
Upstairs, Minerva practically fell through her front door. Using the back of her foot, she shut the door behind herself and practically crawled up to Vorra’s mound. Sitting atop the pile of magazines, again dressed only in one of Minerva’s ill-fitting button-downs, Vorra sat, looking out their window to the lake and the moonlit, cloudless night.
She turned her head over her shoulder and gazed fondly at her arriving partner.
Her tail wagged slowly and gently. She had bandaged her sides up, but there was damage to hidden things, like her wings, and her ribs, that would take time to heal inside.
“Milord, good to see you. This Academy ill deserves your tireless effort.”
“Yeah, it sucks, but it’s good to have on the resume, you know?”
“I do not, milord, but I am pleased that your efforts fulfill you.”
Minerva got herself up to Vorra and sat by her side. She kissed her on the cheek.
“How are you?”
“Milord, of course I am on the mend. I am a dragon. I am power itself.”
“It’s really been a day.”
“It has been a day, as you say, milord.”
Vorra rested her head on Minerva’s shoulder and vibrated, with a slight hissing purr.
Tears built up in Minerva’s eyes and feeling Vorra at her side caused them to spill.
“Vorra, Wyrm was a monster, wasn’t he? Am I a monster too?” Minerva asked.
She clutched her chest, where, in her deepest nightmares, she felt Wyrm exist.
Everything that she had seen and heard in Moloch’s demesne, all of the horror and power and hatred, seemed to fall upon her at that very moment. It hit harder than the craven cowardice of Miriam Hirch or the abject cruelty of Ajax. Both of those things were evil, but they existed outside of her as verifiable lies. Neither of them could say truthfully that Minerva was a monster, that she was abominable and inhuman. But then Moloch–
“I say milord, with the utmost certainty, that you are you, and whatever you desire.”
Vorra turned to Minerva and kissed her briefly on her lips.
“Wyrm would have never accepted me as a Queen because I was not born one.” She said, staring directly into Minerva’s eyes and centimeters away from her face. “Denounce me for my bias, but I prefer you as King.” She laughed gently. “I love you, Minerva.”
“I love you too.” Minerva said. Those kinds of sentimental things were a bit hard and almost felt embarrassing to say, but Minerva really felt it at that moment. It was not at all what she expected as a child, that she would be the beloved of a dragon staring at the moon from the National Academy just a day after containing the evil of a Tyrant.
“Minerva,” she was pointedly not saying ‘milord’, “You possess the bravery to transmute all that you once thought fundamental, and to struggle against that which you are told you are unfit to change. I admire that about you. It draws me to you. Truly, I believe you can become anything you desire. I believe even by desiring it alone, you will become it.”
Minerva felt fresh tears coming up, and she clung to Vorra with a smile. “Thank you.”
Vorra purred at her side. “I was discarded, alone, unwanted, without future. Now I am here. To me, that is the greatest portent signalling that anything is now possible.”
Whatever it was that lay ahead, surely a series of hardships; Minerva felt she could do it.
She had made it this far and changed so much. There would be more change coming.
All of those tyrannical things that had once chained her up — she had wounded them.
“God, what am I even going to say in my report to the Party. This is really a lot.”
“It is, as you say, a lot, milord.”
Bright blue waves filtered into the elevator through glass panes.
When the doors opened at the bottom floor, Miriam Hirsch walked through a hallway of glass, reinforced by titanium supports. She followed a long carpet to a dead end with a wide, unobstructed pane of glass with a view into the massive aquarium all around it.
“I requested an audience, headmaster.” Miriam said, her voice trembling.
All around her, a cold voice reverberated through the water and glass.
“I am listening.”
“Phillip Theimer has been taken into custody. The Theimer fund has pulled from the Academy. I thought you should be made aware. It’s– it’s rare for this to happen here.”
“Theimer deserved his fate. He aided the heresy of summoning a Pretender God.”
Miriam was surprised to hear the headmaster already knew.
Then again, the headmaster was a strong diviner. His water aura was massive.
All of the water around her was like a scrying glass. He could see her.
He could see through her.
And yet, it was in her nature to lie, to conceal, to conspire, and so, she did.
“Yes, headmaster. I felt compelled to seek your input. Our elite families are valuable–”
“I am aware of what has happened. I am aware, that you thought to shield him of his crime. I am aware of your connection. I am aware of your small mindedness.”
Miriam flinched and drew back a step.
“I– I simply couldn’t believe such a thing could happen at our school.”
“I care not about the the Iron Flags; I care not about politics. Summoning Pretender Gods is becoming quite a trend again among you. I care about that. It is a heresy.”
In the next instant the water outside the glass became obstructed.
In its place was a massive eye, more complicated than that of any human being.
Miriam nearly fainted from shock. The depth of that eye felt like it might suck her in.
“You are all forgetting the purpose of humans to me. Call me by name, human.”
Miriam choked up, nodding her head. “Yes, Great Lord Leviathan.”
Slowly the eye retreated from the glass, and became smaller, until it was clear that it was one of many along the side of a sleek serpentine head adorned with many-colored crests.
“I desire to meet Minerva Orizaga. Teaching, is valuable. Learning, is valuable. Discovering, is valuable. As long as they remain valuable I will not interfere. Minerva Orizaga, might be valuable. I desire to confirm that.”
Leviathan, the God of Water, surged forward again until his eye covered the glass.
“Do not forget what is valuable to me. Do not confuse it for what you value.”
Miriam, feeling suddenly the weight of the plutocratic kickbacks that got her into her position, that got her clothed, that got her respectability, bowed her head to Leviathan.
“Yes, headmaster, great lord.”
Story 1 — Lord of the Wildfire, END