The high war council members in Zukal’iss were sitting around the ovular table, sheets of paper strewn and crumpled up throughout the room while a massive holographic map lay suspended over the table’s center. General Hor’well was noting the progress of the platoons they’d sent to Godora’s western border, several small indicators inching forward in real time. Several groups had encountered resistance, but in the minutes and hours following Corvid’s capitulation, such resistance had slowly ground to a halt, allowing the platoons to continue unhindered across the country. “They’ve reached the flatlands. Not long now before our men reach Corvid.”

Euryphel’s eyes were glued to a glosspad, its thin form balanced on the edge of the table. “Kyeila still shows no signs of mobilizing?”

Hor’well snorted coldly. “They aren’t going to sit still. I’d sooner expect the Kyeilans to be hiding in Godora than waiting peacefully for us to conquer them.”

“In Godora?” General Milfins muttered softly, his eyes narrowing.

“A joke, James,” Hor’well replied lightly. “We’d have noticed if Kyeilans crossed the border: Our Beginning practitioners have been observing the pass between Kyeila and Godora for the past month, ever since we suspected the Skai’aren’s ascendant status.”

Secretary of Intelligence Kur’sha nodded. “They’re probably hiding the movement of their troops underground: They’ll have the element of surprise if they dig their way into Godora’s interior.”

Secretary of War Iffis gave his fellow cabinet member a penetrating look. “Did we not have spies, Nemir?”

Kur’sha frowned. “They were uprooted, unfortunately. A visit from one of the Eldemari’s generals prompted Kyeila to send the Dawnseer.” The first prince shook his head. The worst possible combination: Remorse and End, reading both fate and memory to illuminate false bonds and promises. If she personally scoured the ranks of the military or even the citizens in the capital, their agents would be unable to hide.

Euryphel’s eyebrow twitched. “When did they send the Dawnseer?”

Kur’sha sighed. “While you were in Fassar.”

“I think we should send out the Skai’aren’s constructs now,” Milfins interjected, pivoting the discussion. “There’s no use in wondering over the strategy of Kyeila if we’re only speculating. The sooner we root Godora with the Deathseeds, the tighter our grip on the South.”

Euryphel considered the general’s words. After they decided on their plan to invade Godora, Ian had not only trained with the blitz team, but also enacted their other strategy: construct dominance. At the strategy’s center was the Deathseed.

“We only have fifty prepared,” Iffis pointed out, running a thin hand through his thick, white hair. “Is now the ideal time, Godora the ideal place? I thought we’d wait until Kyeila or Brin started their offensive. Godora has already surrendered and we have numerous troops therein to solidify our hold.”

Hor’well leaned back in his chair. “I’m also in favor of using the Deathseeds now. We can’t afford to lose Godora, and our enemies know it. Leave it to Selejo to send a strike force into Godora to liberate the country out from under us. Waiting to mobilize until our enemies tip their hands isn’t going to work.”

Euryphel nodded. While I haven’t sensed anything definitive...the arrows of fate are shifting. There’s a subtle turmoil, an unease...whatever calm Kyeila and Selejo display is but a mask concealing dark turbulence.

“Malast,” Milfins called out, seizing Hor’well’s attention. “Are you going to activate the head node in Ichormai?”

General Hor’well hummed his consideration. “I’d prefer to oversee deployment along the Bay of Ramsay.”

“I’ll activate it,” Euryphel said.

Iffis nodded. “Excellent. We’ll strengthen our defenses at home and bring further deathseeds across the border to hold our Godoran positions.”

“Are we all in agreement, then?” Euryphel asked, his eyes scanning the room.

Everyone present raised a weary hand.

—

Instead of returning to the surface, Euryphel remained in the dungeonesque basement of Ichormai. He entered a large, stone chamber with a sunken floor; it was almost shaped like a lecture hall, or an inverted pyramid. The prince stepped downward until he arrived at the room’s center where an obsidian soul gem hovered above a simple white pedestal.

Euryphel stepped gingerly over a spread of bones nearly filling the first level of ground, reaching up to mid-shin, sweeping some away with a gust of wind. He stared at the soul gem for a solid minute, his eyes entranced by its dark, prismatic surface.

“You made this in a single day,” Euryphel murmured, his hand reaching out to cup the hovering soul gem.

The past two days they’d quietly arranged for slaughtered animals, as well as dead pests, to be brought to a single location approximately an hour’s hovergloss ride outside of Zukal’iss. Ian had then stripped the raw materials of energy, forming a series of potent soul gems. While Ian could always go out and devastate large swaths of jungle, such actions were best avoided if possible: For one, the SPU’s jungles were some of its national treasures; but secondly, the wide-scale destruction would be noticed.

The prismatic soul gem before Euryphel, as well as the bones scattered across the floor, were the two main components of the Ichormai Deathseed. Euryphel reached into his pocket and withdrew what Ian called “gem juice”; in other words, liquified soul gems. According to Ian, he could place the liquid in his eyes and simply have a decently-powerful Life or Death practitioner extract the liquid out later.

After a moment of quiet hesitation, Euryphel grabbed a small cup he’d prepared and poured out approximately half of the gem juice until he had two even amounts. Then, he tossed the two doses onto each eye, respectively.

The world distorted, typical colors covered in opaque blankets of white, black, and gray. Euryphel squinted and the image sharpened, the vital gradients fading to become shifting, misty overlays.

Euryphel blinked rapidly, the soul gem sight disorienting. He’d seen the world in shades of vitality before, but years ago, long before he’d met Ian. He hadn’t been able to make much use of it, parsing the sensation provided to him by his Wind elementalism and his fate arrows devouring his focus. Vital vision was interesting, but there was a reason they left it to the decemancers and vivimancers, and specialists among their number at that: Using it effectively took dedication and practice.

Euryphel took in a deep breath, then activated a small array on the soul gem’s surface, pressing a cinchbinding key onto it such that a red dot little larger than a pinhead lit up and dissolved away. The gem began to glow violet, the color lighting up a bright white in his vital vision; after a few seconds, it suddenly ignited into soundless ebony flames, sparks of reddish-pink falling to the ground. Each spark seemed to start a Death fire, sable flames licking over the strewn osteal offerings and spreading until Euryphel was surrounded in a sea of burning black.

The flames suddenly seemed to shrink; Euryphel knew from Ian that the bones were absorbing and concentrating the energy inward. After a few seconds, they began to glow a reddish-pink color visible to the naked eye and started twitching, rocking back and forth and occasionally popping off the stone floor. The jittering intensified until it stopped altogether, the bones within ten feet of the soul gem now collectively suspended off the ground, still as though waiting for the world to release its breath.

Euryphel stared intently as Ian’s artistry began to display itself. The bones began to rearrange themselves, with thin, sinew-like tethers forming between them. Another array activated on the soul gem, causing it to emit oily pulses through the bone circuit, bones shifting around and tethers rearranging until the bones settled into what seemed to be their final positions.

But Euryphel could discern a quiet tension in the bones, a subtle shuddering in place, as though they were all being pulled apart. Moments later his intuition was proven right: The bones began to break into pieces, shards growing ever-smaller until all that remained were shards the size of human knucklebones.

As each bone broke, its interior oozed out, forming gooey tendon tethers between shards. Now that all the bones had been broken down, they began to slowly rotate, the tethers between them seeming to stretch and bend with the motion, building up tension.

But Death energy didn’t play by the same laws that governed the physical. As the bones continued to rotate around the soul gem, they grew increasingly twisted and twined, forming a braid of black sinews. When the rotation halted, rather than snap back to their former position, the bones tied themselves into a knot centered around the soul gem, wrapping it up in a sphere of Death energy tethers five-feet across.

Everything grew still.

—

Ian stood before the nascent Deathseed, his brow furrowing in concentration. After General Var’dun’a informed him of the change of strategy to employ the Deathseeds now, rather than after their neighbors declared war, Ian resumed production.

Ian welcomed the distraction from his thoughts, even if Var’dun’a had ordered him to create the seed on the spot that he’d originally touched down in Corvid. The ground there was dead and cracked, the formerly-bustling downtown square turned empty. A pile of bones several feet tall stood off to the side, some wet with meat and blood, other old and dusty.

Even if nobody was coming nearby, Ian could feel the eyes of regulars on him as he worked, noting the many heads peeking at the Deathseed’s formation from nearby buildings.They wouldn’t be able to view much of the formation process without vital vision, but they’d be able to understand what came after.

The observers were too far away to hear, but Ian suspected that they were talking about him, blaming him for their city’s capture. Since the SPU was the aggressor, Ian couldn’t fault them for judging him.

There will be time to think about what happened today later, Ian thought, grimacing. There’s no use dwelling on it now when there’s work to be done.

Ian directed the Deathseed into its final stage of formation. Unlike those that he prepared for Euryphel and the others to activate remotely, Ian didn’t need to worry about setting up arrays to keep the seed dormant: He could create a fully-functional seed now.

As Death energy tethers tied themselves into a knot over their core soul gem, the tightly-wound mass fell still. The tethers were dense enough to be visible to even the naked eye; people would be able to see what he did next.

Ian made a motion with his hand, grabbing broken shards from the bone pile and delivering them to the Death energy bundle. The bones sank into the Deathseed, disappearing from view. They then jutted out from its surface as thick limbs, each terminating in energy-webbed talons. The Deathseed swam through the air, its claws dragging it toward the pile of bones; upon arriving, it began to convulse arrhythmically until its bottom half collapsed inward, forming a concave cavity. It lowered itself down, covering the upper portion of the bone pile with its inky shell.

The turtle-like Deathseed shuddered, then began to sink a little lower; a boney limb simultaneously emerged from the top of its shell, swiping at the air. A full-bodied construct soon crawled out and tumbled down the bone pile, a pink-violet soul gem winking from its torso.