“Wakey-wakey!”

“No no no, that tickles!” I snatched my feet away from the insidious tracing on my tarsels and soles, hissing in dismay as my eyes popped open and I burrowed into the silk sheets. “Hateful hag! They were THIS CLOSE-!”

Abruptly my vision was filled with depthless blue eyes. “WHO were so close-?” she asked with a complete shit-eating smile, eight canines gleaming.

“I had FOUR different dreams going at the same time, and you blew all of them up!” I huffed back at her, pushing her and her smug smile away from me. “Ahg! You know how rarely I get to dream even on one thoughtstream!” Definitely not enough, if anthro Thunderbird and Flowing Silver were any indication. Those foxy lips and that haughty smile...

I was just about to taste all the Lightning and all the Winds and emotion-!

Sama batted away my flailings with polite nonchalance and ease. “You’ve been out of it for an entire day! That’s like two weeks in normal people time! Vacation over! Back to work!”

I glowered at her. “You’re beaming like someone who just made out for a whole damn day.” My eyes narrowed as her smile somehow managed to spread even wider. “Don’t tell me you interrupted my dreams because Briggs is too tired to keep going!”

Damn, did she eat shit with that smile so well. “Fuzzy performed well, but he cannot compare to his Hag!” She raised her arms and shimmied her flawless hips and drool-worthy torso in a hypnotic grind I had to avert my eyes from or go investigate closer, it was that good.

“Ugh!” I just rolled my eyes and flopped back on my pillows, all my thoughtstreams in a huff. “Seriously, Sama, it was just getting to the good parts!”

She just plopped face-first down on the bed, propped up her elbows, and continued to smile at me. “You were out for thirty-two hours. It was time, admit it.”

I eyed my Detect Time, confirmed that. “Yeah, well, I deserved it,” I muttered back, sighing deeply.

“Hey, at least you kept the bleeding out the nose out of sight until after all the civilians were left behind,” Sama complimented me. “The whole damn planet heard you Singing that Ritual into existence. You sing two notes of the Chord, and every single magical being on the planet will recognize you instantly now.”

“Wow, so popular. Can we monetize it?” I groused sourly.

“Hahahah! You are such a sweet thing!” She reached out and hauled me over for a warm hug. Despite everything, I only struggled perfunctorily, as Sama did great hugs, and she smelled like cherry wood smoke and mayflowers today.

Yeah, it had been fucking magnificent of me, I had to admit. That was a bunch of QL 100 checks in Perform Song (Sound Element) and Spellcrafting, Concentration to keep it all going, Meditation to keep it all harmonized, and testing the limits of my Perception checks with monitoring it all in real time.

Sublime Chord a five-part Forbidden Curse Ritual for the whole Planet, woo-hoo!

Still, I’d done it, it had worked, and it was possible the Beast Emperors and Rulers of the Lands might be able to do something similar by themselves... or they could help us do it if we needed to do it again.

“Has Ice Emperor threatened to drop an Ice Age on us?” I had to ask.

“Not as far as anyone knows. Maybe you’ll find out when you finish up His little ring of vivus for Him.”

Aaand it was back to the grind, of course. “When all this is over, I’m going to go take a walk in the gardens of K’un-Lun for a whole goddamn year, Sama,” I sighed as I leaned into her.

“Tell me about it. Fuzzy and I been wanting to start a family, but there’s too much shit to do and we ain’t gonna let our kids suffer for it. Fuck, Fae, there’s a lot of folks wanting to settle down and just raise a family right now, but they are too goddamned scared to do so, knowing what is out there, and what might be coming.”

I just closed my eyes and leaned into her. “Everyone’s celebrating because we accomplished this one great thing, Sama, and it might lead to something great for Humans. I get it, it’s wonderful. If Axiom and Sin start their pissing contest tomorrow, it all means absolutely nothing.”

“And we don’t have any control over that. Well, the only control we do have is to get them to start it all the faster, which means before WE are ready,” Sama nodded coldly. “Don’t think I don’t understand why you won’t let me go into the Basilica and just wipe them damn Archangels out entirely. The hissyfits would start tomorrow.” She leaned her jaw on my head. “You can cut this Broom Closet off from both worlds and send us spinning out into the Aether, can’t you?”

Well, she got that, too. “Yeah. One of the reasons it’s so small relative to what a Pyramid can do is so the shell will be tough enough to stand on its own.”

“Do the Emperors know?” she asked reasonably.

“Once I told them about Axiom and Sin? If they haven’t figured out it’s an ark, they’re nowhere near as smart as I think they are.”

“And they’re not saying anything because they know they can’t come along...”

“Aye. If there’s an Emperor on board, any Realm Lord will be able to track this place down, no hiding a presence that powerful from them.”

“I shouldn’t even ask, but what do you figure the odds are we’ll be in time?” Sama asked softly.

“Odds-balling it between twenty and thirty percent.”

Her arms tightened around me. “Fuck me, that’s horrible. If I wasn’t Dauntless, I think I’d fucking crack right now,” she swore softly, and we were both silent for long moments as we processed the fucking moon-sized executioner’s blade metaphorically hovering over us. “What can you do to stretch things out, get better odds?” she finally whispered.

“The only way is to confuse the shit out of them about what is actually going on, but they’re already starting the elevation process. Flowing Silver casually snuffing out the Dark Curia’s terrorist teams is going to confuse the piss out of all of them with the power of a fourth High Emperor, which I’m sure He figured would be the case, or He just would’ve sent out some of our kill teams to handle it all more discreetly, or even warned some authorities. We’ve already gutted their mortal organization, and while it doesn’t really make a difference because of the sheer number of overall Dark Mages, well, me pulling that shit in the seas was definitely noticed.”

“Tell me about it. People are running Braziers down and leaving them out in the waters along the shorelines everywhere just to Burn the blood out of the water. There’s hundreds of pictures showing entire bays, harbors, and coastlines steaming vivus as the blood from the conflicts washes in constantly, and bits and pieces of the dead Aquatics like little stars Burning with it.”

“And they’re still Burning.”

“And they’re still Burning,” Sama confirmed. “It’s like half the Beasts in the sea fought the other half, and didn’t dare eat them for fear of contamination.”

“I imagine that amused the shit out of the Netherlords, because the plankton have no such wariness, and so that Dark Mana is going right back into the food chain regardless.”

“And so they want Vivic Braziers, and a lot of them,” Sama reminded me. “Twenty bucks that Dragoness is sitting out there waiting for you with a HUGE order.”

“Someone tell the invading Realm Lords to take a gods-damned vacation so that I can.”

“Be happy to, if you have their mailing address,” Sama snickered sympathetically.

“666 Four Fucking Farts Plaza, The Afterlife Yo Mama Warned You About. Care of Arsehole #1.”

“Mail service?” Sama inquired drolly.

“The Pharaohs’ Canopic Couriers. ‘We Carry Rotten Once-Precious Things Inside’.”

“Sounds like a reputable outfit. I’ll make inquiries.”

“Maybe they’ll lose track of time vacationing in Phelegos’ sex parlors or something.”

“I would include a map to there if you have one, but I have the sneaking suspicion the bastards would run in the other direction if they even got a whiff of there actually being a true Hell around,” Sama said after a moment’s consideration of that amusing possibility.

“Yeah, yeah, let me pull those thirteen-dimensional coords out of my ass and encourage them to break the multiversal barrier just so they can see how totally irrelevant they are out before the real powers in reality.” Fucktards that they were.

“Y’know, we could fit a LOT of fucking people and Beasts in a demiplane with a hundred-mile radius and multiple levels,” Sama brought up after a moment of silence.

“Crazy, right? Who’da thunk?” Certainly not me, nopers.

“And I never went down to look, but I’m betting those ants are making layers two hundred yards apart out of all that stone we’re sending down there. It’s just been expanding faster than they can build up, so there’s still that huge distracting gap there.”

“Ants gonna be ants. Build build build.”

“Just leave the sides open and there’s a shadowy sunlight, and I didn’t pay much attention to it, but the incoming water flow has never really stopped.

“It’s like we could build a world of endless rains and waterfalls, all going down to the sides of the sphere, where they flow around the sphere in manifold streams filtered by powerful Plants, back to the top.

“You probably have the ultimate form all plotted out in your head, shared it with Briggs, and he’s trying to build this crazy amalgam of tech and wilds just to see if he can.” She rolled her too-blue eyes with total ditziness at me, fascinatingly and completely empty somehow.

“Humans favor humanity, but there’s plenty of room to save a lot of the Beasts,” was all I said.

“Is there a way to stave off what you think is coming?”

“Everything revolves around Faith in the end. If we accumulate enough, we can call in Aru or any non-finite Good deity who can resolve all this shit.

“I have a couple end-plays revolving around the Pyramids I’m making. You know that the Beasts living in an Emperor’s Demesne have Faith in them?”

“Huh.” Sama considered that enlightening fact. “You can teach them how to tap it for Miracles...” she deduced slowly, analyzing the implications. It basically meant straight-out messing with reality.

“And if they are attuned to Heaven, that also increases our Faith reserves...” I pointed out absently.

I could feel Sama’s wicked smile behind me. “Oh, you total bitch,” she hissed. “Faith in Emperors congregates on them and the Pyramids, not in Heaven. So, if they sense Heaven rising, they won’t realize that it’s already on the way until it’s already far too late...”

“That’s the hope.”

“Problems with that? Seems like a great sleight of hand play...”

“Gotta have Good Emperors who believe in Heaven and what it means and who want to invite them in.”

“Ugh,” Sama groaned. “That’s a small list. The Emperors have never been exposed to the Alignment Wars, and won’t until Axiom and Sin start going at it, at which time they’ll realize they want nothing of it...

“And without Heaven there for contrast, they won’t realize that what they want doesn’t matter and they actually have a meaningful choice based on mutual respect.” Sama sighed. “And you don’t think we’re going to have the time needed to hit a critical mass.”

“We’ll need a big distraction, and I’m not sure where it’s going to come from...” I could only respond, and we both lapsed into silence as a Cosmic Sword of Damocles gleamed above us, ready to fall...