Tree of Aeons
341. The Long Hedge

341

Year 314

“If we use the bomb, the Sun-Rings and the Erasian Gates will be disabled. That is a downside we need to mitigate.” Stella flagged a concern one day as we were traveling through the Aivan peripheral worlds. 

It came from one of the void mages, who brought the topic up for discussion. Structurally, most issues were flagged through the chain of command, but some matters got picked up by my artificial minds and then discussed at the highest level. 

“As it is, can our rift gates reach them? We have the coordinates. Either that, or nodes.”

“We can’t spare nodes. Aeon’s level gain has been fairly stagnant.”

“But Stella’s level 200. With her extended abilities we could overcome these limitations.”

“Or someone can finally pick something.” Edna gave Ebon a look.

Ebon shrugged. “I recommend alternatives. Stella’s void explorers are a decent one. We should restrict the use of nodes. As it is, too much of our logistics relies on Aeon’s abilities. What if the demons have some way of taking this ability out?”

Edna continued to smile mischievously. “Are you explaining your choice, Ebon?”

“Not at all.”

“It’s not a major dealbreaker.” Stella said. “But we just have to mitigate the consequences of disabling the Six Sun-Rings and their Erasian Gates.” 

“Is there a risk that the entire rift gate network is taken out with it?” Hoyia just asked out of curiosity.

Stella nodded. “Possible. If this bomb somehow causes extreme turbulence within the void seas, we could temporarily stop the movement of demons as well. But, it also means we won’t be able to actually step into the demonic lands until this turbulence subsides.” 

“Unless you figure out how to overcome them.” 

“Only if I know what I’m dealing with. I do not have models on what happens when we destroy such a large void barrier and cause all the six massive Sun-Rings to experience a potentially catastrophic overload. Hawa’s bomb is up there in the “we have no idea what happens” tier.”

Hawa himself only knew it was strong enough to break the barrier, but the Hawan god had no insight on the consequences of the bomb on the Sun-Rings or the void sea. It was just unnecessary details that a god of that level didn’t bother with. 

It made me realize how callous the gods were. They built a powerful bomb to blow up the status quo, but they didn’t consider the consequences on those caught in the aftermath. Maybe, they didn’t even care if we got caught in it.

“The thing has a timer, and I can activate it remotely.” Lumoof answered. “Aeon can warp me back once I activate it.”

“This means only Lumoof can go alone.”

“Not quite.” Roon pointed at Edna. “Your ability should work.”

“I do not want to test what the limits of my powers are. Especially not with a bomb of such divine tier.” Edna countered.

“Focus, guys. Let’s stick to the topic. Mitigating the consequences of losing the Erasian Gates should be our priority. Given that Aiva and Hawa are both friendly thus far, we need to make sure we retain the ability to contact them for aid. Unless Aeon somehow gets more nodes.”

“We let Aeon reach Level 275? Should that be our priority?”

“When’s the last time Aeon gained a level? Specifically, look at how long it takes to get a level at where Aeon is. If you look into that you’ll realize that’s going to be a huge time sink. We need alternatives.” Edna countered. “We’re sitting on two options we have immediately.”

Both Ebon and Stella’s domain and subdomain choices respectively offered the chance to overcome these limitations.

“Is waiting really that bad?” Ebon countered. “I think it’s fairly short term thinking if we solve a problem with what’s convenient, rather than what’s right. The bomb is in our hands. It is our choice when to blow it up. I really don’t see why we should rush. We can travel and destroy multiple demon kings per year with just the three of you. I really don’t see the drawback of just waiting perpetually until we’re even more powerful.” 

Alka paused and nodded, but decided to play the role of the skeptic and act paranoid. “I can see merits to both sides, but delaying assumes that the other gods are really our ‘allies’, and they won’t stab us in the back while we wait. They get stronger too, after all, like Hawa, he gains faith points since he no longer has to support fifteen worlds. Same for Aiva once we start helping them with the peripheral worlds. We also know that the demons are subtly meddling with the [System] through their collective votes, and they are expanding into the peripheral parts of the Gods. So, waiting has the side effect of letting the demons make more changes to the system over time. We don’t know what this leads to, and how close they are to victory. It doesn’t help that none of the gods know how big the demons are, because all they see is only their part of the world.”

“Unless we let go of the peripheral worlds.” Roon said but instantly regretted it. “No. That’s too cruel. We can’t do that.”

Alka countered. “I just explained that we can’t let go of peripheral worlds! We have to help the gods hold on to the periphery, if only to defend the system from being overwhelmed by demonic changes.”

Roon nodded along. “Yes, yes. My bad. But it does mean we are bearing the brunt of the peripheral worlds, which benefits all these other gods.”

Hoyia defended the other gods. “I do not believe Hawa and Aiva have much to gain by stabbing us in the back. The way their sphere of influence works is designed to create powerful, dense regional areas of control. It is not in their interest to spread outside of their own region.”

“I also agree.” Alka answered, reverting out of his paranoid persona. “The only god that we have to fear is Eras, should we actually free it, since we are encroaching on traditionally Erasian territories.”

“I think we have better problems to worry about, Alka.” Hoyia rejected Alka’s argument. Eras is either imprisoned, or an enemy.

“I know.” Alka continued. “But, from what we heard from Aiva, Gaya, and Hawa, the stronger opponents are likely all in there, behind that barrier. If there were divine-tier creations, they are all likely to be within that barrier. They are the things that will give us levels. So, back to Stella’s question, it doesn’t change our earlier decision. We hold. We find more gods. We get more power.”

Roon frowned. “So how long do we hold?”

“Our best bet and most reliable method is still Aeon’s node trees. We’ll need to put nodes on all the other sides of the Sun-Rings, somewhere far enough from the Sun-Rings themselves, just in case that the void sea becomes too… turbulent?” Alka proposed. “Hoyia, do you have any matriarch or patriarch who is close to their domains? Level 125 and up?”

“Most of them are in the lower level 100s. If you intend to use the subdomains to unlock more clones and node tree slots.”

“Yes. If Aeon can’t level, the best bet is to use the priests to gain a subdomain. The subdomains add to Aeon’s strength.”

***

“I need my domain holders to explore and make contact with more gods.” I sent Lumoof back to the Aivan core worlds. “So, for the defense of your peripheral worlds, I need something else from you. Something to allow my lesser domain holders to move between them.”

Aiva shrugged, and handed me a small golden divine object.

“Very well. It has been a really long eternity since I last granted this to any of my people.”

 An Aivan variant of the [Ancient Worldkey]. It was a ring with golden feathers around it. 

[Aivan Worldstone - Allows movement of a small party between two neighbouring Aivan worlds]

“These work by harvesting the faith energies of my worshippers, so they have to be charged at Aivan temples. But they will allow movement between nearby peripheral worlds, on condition that both have my worshippers. They are, however, region restricted and will be unusable far from my center of power.” 

“Got it. That’s good enough.”

“The World Faith System tends to influence all our creations, such that faith becomes a key part of our items. Moving outside this inherent tendency thus consumes more faith points. I do not know whether the World Faith System works the same for my peers, so, maybe some of them have lesser versions of this limitation.”

Naturally, the opposite was also true. Working within the world faith system’s limitations meant Aiva didn’t even need to spend extra faith points to move between worlds.

I could use my void archmages, and I think some of them would love to visit the Void Cocoon. Yet, Stella cautioned against sending them there. To her, it was a recipe for madness, and those not protected by the domains would suffer the brunt of the void’s cacophony of indecipherable transmissions. 

In fact, some of the void archmages professed that they want to see it for themselves, once we updated the rest of the Valthorn’s elites on how Stella got her level 200.

“Madness.” Stella countered. “I fear I will lose some of you to it.”

Stella now had five void archmages, and all of them wanted to see it. Just having the knowledge of such a thing seemed to make that void cocoon call out to them. 

A few void archmages quickly had dreams of it, and incredibly, their dreams were unusually vivid and descriptions of what they saw really did resemble what Stella saw. 

This naturally horrified Stella.

The Void Cocoon had the ability to reach through the void sea and influence the dreams of others so far away. Almost all my void archmages worked around my main territories, the furthest of them mainly as a supporting department to the Delvegardian and Darkgardian dwarven forces. 

The void cocoon was on the other side of the void sea. 

And mere knowledge could do this. The reason why it could do this was obvious once Stella considered the nature of the void layers. Each void layer was a different arrangement, a different ‘fold’ of the star maps. Each void layer placed each world in a different part.

The void cocoon could be right next to them in one of those void layers.

If every world was a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, a void layer was one way that the jigsaw puzzle was arranged. 

Each layer arranged everything differently, and Stella’s understanding seemed to interpret that there were always an infinite number of void layers, just that each void layer was thought, though not confirmed, to be an iteration of the layers before it. 

“That really puts your gallery choice in context.” I realized. “Your custom gallery is really you picking those pieces personally and making your own arrangement. You’re folding space with that ability. Well, maybe not folding space, but you know, when we’re designing things, there’s an order, a method of how each system sorts files and documents. A file-arrangement system.” 

“And with any pool of things, you can sort by many different attributes, names, dates, or many other categories.” Stella nodded. 

“Yes. It does then lead to the question, is the current ‘clustered’ structure of the void sea that we see today, is an ‘owner’ oriented arrangement? When the void sea expands in our view, does it apply to all the layers, only to this specific layer?”

“I have no way of testing that. I don’t even know whether it is that the void sea is expanding, or just our ‘reach’ is somehow shrinking.”

“Yet. Have you wondered what you want to do with the choices?” I asked the newly Level 200 domain holder.

Stella shrugged. “I don’t know. I like all of them. I used to wonder why Ebon didn’t pick one, but I realize that now I have the choice myself, it’s really not easy at all. Why does the system make us make such substantial choices and lock us in for the rest of our lives.”

Somewhere far away, I could probably feel Ebon having a good laugh. Not everyone was like Edna or Lumoof or Hoyia, who knew what they wanted to be. 

I suppose my priests were not a good example, because priests were by nature, creatures who believed in a higher existence, a greater purpose, and thus, they naturally could refer to a higher power to choose. 

But for someone like Stella, it was not so obvious. 

***

Lausanne, Alka, and my newer domain holders thus had to move about. I was going to work them harder, and make them cover more worlds, while my three strongest domain holders played offense. 

“So we just went from five or so worlds, to twenty, and now we’re adding another twenty more?” One of them vented. 

We have three core worlds, with a few more growing ones, fifteen peripheral worlds, and some of the connected Darkgardian and Delvegardian worlds, and now we had Aiva’s peripheral worlds. If the Order was already stretched before, we were going to be even more stretched. But thankfully, Aivan’s peripheral worlds were pretty regular worlds, and unlike Hawa, Aiva wasn’t going to surrender these worlds to us. 

Aiva merely asked for assistance to deal with the demon kings for a while. 

“Yes.” I answered the group of domain holders.

“If it takes an average of one demon king every twenty five years, we’d be fighting three demon kings every two years.”

“On average, yes. This is the fastest way we know to gain levels and prepare our strength for whatever is behind the curtain. We must.”

“I mean, Lady Lausanne could probably hop from world to world every other week, but the rest of us would need some downtime to heal.” Roon and Johann clarified. 

The demon kings were not significant challenges for my three level 200s. But for the newer domain holders, each demon king still necessitated a large preparatory period and some downtime to heal between battles. Alka, for example, needed time to work on his tools and bombs before any demon king and would often tune and adjust his weapons to optimize them for a specific demon king.

For Hoyia who also had other responsibilities on her hands, her affairs on Twinspace and the other worlds also took months of her time, even if a large portion of her original duties were delegated out. 

It was not a choice, in the end. We had to do it, and so, we would have to mitigate whatever drawbacks and obstacles that we faced.

***

Year 315

Sun Rings V

Neira was quite a mystery to me. Even the White Statue claimed that Neira is the God of Arcane Magics, a definition that didn’t help, because most information about Neira was expunged during the White Statue’s purge of Neiran influence from his world.

Those who worshipped Neira on Treehome had declined over the years, and in the first place, Neira wasn’t a large religion. Gaya, Hawa and Aiva were larger than Neira by quite a bit.

Based on local Neiran lore, the god claimed to be one with a focus on magic, self, healing, and the sea. 

A strange combination, and as it turned out, Neira was many different things on different worlds. 

“Have you ever wondered how we would fight against a god?” Lumoof asked, a little curious as we contemplated the odds of fighting a hostile god. 

“We don’t.” Edna just answered blankly. “Gods are where they are, and we are where we are. If they are hostile, we leave and that’s it.”

“If.”

“A useless exercise. From what we’ve seen, the only way to kill a god is to kill all of its followers and unless a god is so abhorrent, that is something I will refuse to do.”

“Can we achieve stalemate?”

“Yes. We leave.” Edna was clearly not in a good mood on some days. It was just constant travelling. It wore them down, even if they didn’t say it. “And I would like that outcome very much.”

“Fine, fine.” But what Edna claimed is not wrong. Our own models struggled to contemplate a good way of destroying a god that existed as a sum of all the faith of its believers. A war with such an existence would be so catastrophic, we might as well be demons. 

So, I hoped that Neira, at the very least, was ambivalent to our existence. We knew little of the god, and if we did find his peripheral worlds, we would like to learn about them a bit more.

***

Neira-Erasian Peripheral World

The first Neiran peripheral world was a surprising dwarven-heavy world, and it was a world with two main religions.

Neiran and Erasian.

“We’re on the right track.” Stella was at least relieved that we found a clue to follow. We initially discovered worlds with animistic religions, where local objects and features were worshipped as gods, and after six or seven worlds with such similar outlook and religions, we were worried that there would be no god on this side of the Sun-Ring V. 

The Neiran faith on this world manifested as the god of the spirit. The god of brilliance, of whimsy, and sudden bursts of creativity. A chaotic god. Giant leaps forward. The God of the Eccentric Genius. The Reclusive Expert.

Erasian faith, on the other hand, represented Order. Structured development. Ideas that moved the needle bit by bit. Constant, continuous improvement. The technical master. The dwarves were thus split across these two lines, even if they lived together. 

The local dwarves could not help us much. Like all the worlds before us, very few could see the path of the stars, and fewer still could tell us where Neira was. 

So we moved. 

We moved some more. 

And peripheral worlds of Neira were different. There was an elven-dominated Neiran peripheral world, where they worshipped Neira for being a god of the elves. 

Then another peripheral world of Neira, that was filled with multiple islands. The people of these were humanoid, but more like half-mermen and had exceptional swimming and water abilities. They moved from island to island by boat, but many of these people-of-the-water could also breathe underwater for long periods, and there were some that even possessed full amphibian capabilities, capable of living in the shallow waters full time. 

Here, Neira was worshipped as the goddess of the calm seas, while a god Neire took the role of the god of the storms. There were multiple island chains, and though they spoke a common language, the island archipelagos waged war against each other.

Like Treehome in its early days, unity only arrived when a demon king came along. 

The third Neiran world was where Neira took the role of the god of light and honor. Strangely, in this world, the Neiran faith was one of a pantheon of gods, with Neira as the main king of the gods. 

***

“Neira’s story changes from world to world. Is there a reason for this?” Lumoof tried to consider how the world faith system would react to someone with a variable story across different worlds.

“I suppose it shouldn’t matter.” Stella answered. “Faith points are faith points, right. As long as they believe, who cares what faith that takes. Most of the other three gods maintain a similar persona across their worlds, but even they allow for some variation here and there.”

“But the god is the sum of its faith, and each god has a particular bias. Doesn’t this shifting difference between worlds make Neira the most untrustworthy of them?”

Before we set out on this journey, I had Lumoof question both Hawa and Aiva about Neira, and it seemed that their knowledge of Neira was different too. To them, Neira took whatever form that so suited its whims. 

The gods, at least, generally found Neira to have a fondness for liquids. Water. Blood. Oil. Neira perhaps, personified movement, and in the earlier days, was seen to take the form of a gigantic blood serpent. 

“So, if there was no reason for consistency-”

“Consistency makes it easy for us to run our world.” Aiva answered during that trip. “Consistency reduces the faith cost of things we are good at. That makes it cheaper to maintain each of our worlds. Perhaps Neira found it more preferable to spread its abilities across a wider range, but doing so it loses the benefits of specialization.”

We were expecting to find a god that was a generalist. Instead, what we found was a god that took a different narrative and story in each of its worlds. 

Another three more peripheral worlds later, and realizing Neira’s depiction took on different more variations. As a god of water. As a goddess of the mountain. As a set of three gods who represented the cycle of life. 

Then we finally reached a world where divinity felt more present. 

A place where Neira was dominant. 

***

Neira Outer Core World

The world we landed on was one of different islands, and continents, though we noticed that each of the islands worshiped a different body part. A hand. A leg. A horn. Its left claw.

Those who worshipped the Claw fought with those who worshipped the Horn. And they were all blessed by the gods. 

The people were strange. They glorified battle. War. To suffer pain on their god’s behalf, was to offer their blood. Blood spilled in the glory of war was most sacred.

“Is Neira trying to be a war god?” Lumoof sat, as we summarized the discoveries of the world. Though it was a core world, and we felt Neira’s acts of divinity present in the representatives of the various Neiran factions of the world, Neira was not here.

We found claws that carried Neiran divinity and tried to talk to it. It did not respond.

I had a feeling it knew, but it did not respond. 

***

We were exploring more worlds, and making contact with more people. 

Each of these were now a little extra brick in the fortress. An extra moving piece to add to our war arsenal. A little bit of knowledge of the wider world.

The void sea was a literal fog of war, and each of us did not know what everyone else was doing. 

But gains at this point felt miniscule. An extra world or two, was it really going to be meaningful in the fight, especially when they were not occupied as part of the Order’s key holdings?

A part of me knew we needed to go exponential. I needed the Order on hundreds more worlds, if we were to face the depths with the strength of at least a full god. 

“If it takes 50 to 100 years to train a domain holder, then could we flood the demons with 100s of domain holders?” I mused one day.

“The system isn’t going to let that happen. I believe it will step in and stop that.” Lumoof answered, my closest companion.

I felt like a huge presence in his life, and in turn, his thoughts had a mark on mine. We knew that the system had inbuilt mechanisms, and something would slow down the growth of domain holders. 

“But I think 25 to 30 domain holders should be possible.” 

“Can we get there in a hundred?” I asked my artificial minds and they got to modelling the results. From where we are, a hundred years should be possible.

“Why not a thousand?” 

“Do I really want to run an empire for a thousand years? Do you want to?” 

“It is not a question of want, Aeon. The Order in its current form is a good thing for the world. People live better, grow healthy, and have good vocations, even if they surrender a fair bit of their liberties and administrative rights. The way the [System] works in the peripheral worlds only encourages the creation of dictatorial states dominated usually by a single individual, followed by a violent power vacuum when that individual dies, and this cycle repeats infinitely. The Order is infinitely a better option to the default governing cycle and structure of most worlds.”    

I once again thought that it was time for me to sleep for a while.