The dignitaries filed in, following some incomprehensible pattern based on rank followed by power, then seniority and in one case, height.

The shorter of the two dukes of identical age glared at the man ahead of him as they entered and found their seats.

Calvin, being a Marquis, was toward the front of the pack, just behind the Hash’Maje and his dukes, Ahead of the earls, viscounts, and barons.

Why is your king called a Hash’maje, but all the other ranks are from british royalty? Elliot asked.

Ask a scholar.

Ah yes, you’ve the education of a nineteen year old shepherd. Nadia chimed in.

How dare you insult my lord Ravager!

Oh yeah, what’cha gonna do about it, tubby?

Hey, quit yelling, you’re distracting Calvin! Kala stepped in, adding to the swirl of thoughts and sound rattling around in his head.

Calvin rubbed his temple and closed himself off to their voices until they calmed down.

I need to make some room in my skull. Getting rid of Nadia is looking more and more appealing, Calvin thought as he shuffled forward. The Marquis of Surrak walking ahead of him. Once upon a time, this was the guy Calvin’s taxes went to. He was with Calvin at the back of the line on account of Surrak’s recent troubles.

They had some difficulty placing Calvin, as his ‘power’ was mostly hearsay, rather than an established fact. Even his train tracks moving through the duchesses’ land were lauded as the old woman’s accomplishment.

As if by giving Calvin permission to build through her territory, she’d somehow achieved the trade boom singlehandedly.

Calvin rolled his eyes.

Still, he wasn’t eager to be at the front of the line, so he happily went by seniority.

This backfired somewhat as he found himself standing directly in front of a grey-haired Earl that looked to be in his eighties, eyeing Calvin like a juicy trout.

Does that guy want your land or your ass? Elliot asked. Elliot was the only one he couldn’t shut up, because he wasn’t part of Calvin’s abilities.

Does it matter? Calvin asked. Answer’s no.

They filed into the meeting room, and Calvin was awestruck by the size and the haste with which it had been built. The theatre hadn’t been there a week ago, and yet the ceiling soared a hundred feet over their heads, with magical chandeliers powered by Bent rising above the room.

There were tiered seats from the circular table at the center, rising up into the dizzying heights for the most minor nobility. Calvin suspected they would have a hard time hearing the discussion.

The round table at the center had a hole cut out of it, resembling a massive circular bench rather than a proper table.

As they entered, Calvin spotted lines coming in from half a dozen other doors. He noticed the King of Iletha, a dark haired man with piercing eyes taking his seat at his respective location.

There were half a dozen countries he hadn’t even been aware of. The Emperor of Boles had sent one of his sons as a representative, a slender young man who seemed to be constantly sneering at everything.

That’s gotta make his face sore after a while, Calvin thought, blinking as the young man sneered his way to his seat.

He must practice in the mirror. Elliot said.

Yeah, I bet.

In a strange turn of events, there was a Genosian representative, a boy maybe twelve years old, who watched everything with a sort of detached interest, seemingly distracted. He wore light leather straps and bright colored feathers, sitting beside the representative from the Plainlanders, to a fair amount of discomfort from the bead-wearing woman.

Those were the people who spawned rattlebones, Calvin thought to himself, eyeing the woman’s interesting style composed mostly of large, quilted leathers studded with colorful beads. She stared daggers at the child seated beside her, but the boy didn’t seem to notice or care.

The chair for the representative of Juntai was empty for obvious reasons, Murak was sitting in the Uleisian seat at the center of the circle, the wedge of seating dedicated to Uleis conspicuously empty, reminding Calvin of the irreversible damage that had been done.

Wait a minute, how did Murak become the representative of Uleis?

Murak had been in Calvin’s March, organizing the shipping lines and acting as a consultant on trade and tax law when Carem had destroyed the old man’s home country.

including the handful of survivors that had been outside of Uleis at the time, Murak was the wealthiest Uleisan left.

I wonder how much money the old man has left? I’m sure the destruction of his home set him back drastically.

Murak caught Calvin’s eye and winked.

Or not.

People like him have so much money that tons of it gets tied up internationally, Elliot said. No way he’s not still rich.

The assembly gradually came to a halt, and Calvin found himself only two seats up from the action, with an excellent view of the proceedings, and thanks to his relative proximity and the room’s acoustics, he could pick up the entire conversation.

“Lords and ladies,” A speaker in the center of the chamber spoke, followed by several different translators. “We are honored to receive you. Now I will introduce each of the representatives and their court.”

“His majesty, King Jonathan Ilestar the fifth, of Iletha, guardian of the north and protector of its peoples. He is joined by his dukes, Cole Bisset, whose demesne stretches to the the East and provides…”

Oh my gods, this is so dull. I thought this was going to be an interrogation, not torture by dullness.

Calvin’s eyes were open, nodding attentively, but he was involved in a serious conversation with Nadia about leather clothing’s breathability when the endless slew of names and domains finally came to an end.

“And now, I open the floor to you, lords. Jonathon Ilestar has the floor.” The announcer bowed and left the podium at the center of the stage, leaving the dozen men and women to speak.

“So,” Jonathan said, folding his hands in front of him. “We need to decide what to do with Uleis.”

“You mean, which one of you vultures gets the biggest pickings,” Murak interjected, breaking the meaning of ‘having the floor’ immediately.

“Sir, you don’t have the –“

“Get out of here, flunky,” Jonathan said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “We’ve put up with enough protocol, and this situation is absolutely outside of protocol.”

The announcer’s chin quivered, but the other leaders nodded, and he shut up and sat down off to the side.

Must be hard to officiate an event where everyone outranks you.

“Calling us vultures implies there’s pickings to be had. Uleis has been erased. All we have left is a blasted desert oasis. The country’s value lied in its infrastructure that allowed it to turn sand into money and host travelling merchants.” The prince of Boles sneered. “Now it’s just an empty expanse of sand.”

“I disagree,” Kala’s father said, adding his voice to the discussion. “Let’s not dance around the metal spike in the room. There’s a rod the size of a city block in the center of the crater, made of an unidentified metal the likes of which we’ve never seen. My wizards tell me it extends nearly a thousand feet below the surface, though it is hard to determine the exact depth, as the stone around it has been fused into place from the heat of its landing.”

Kala’s father scanned the room. “This metal is both tougher and harder than anything we’ve ever seen, and we haven’t found a way to take samples from it without using Abilities. If nothing else, Uleis has that.”

Murak grunted, glaring at the Hash’Maje

Oh shit, I didn’t even think about that.

Reminds me of people mining meteor strikes.

“It’s obvious the rights to that monolith belong to me. I own the majority of the land around it.” Murak said. “I’ll not allow the rest of you to take what doesn’t belong to you.”

Jonathan ilestar gave a simple smile.

“You and what army?”

“Oh, what was that?” Murak said, eyeing the Ilethan king. “Your men need to eat, don’t they? I own a large portion of the farms outlying Iletha. Let’s see what happens when I drive up prices until your men have to eat their boots.”

“…and what army?”

Murak’s eyes narrowed.

“You might be one of the richest men in the world, Murak, but you’ve no longer got a country. With the core of your power structure blown to bits, what you’ve got is little more than numbers on paper.”

“Gadvera would be more than happy to aid our cousins to the east,” Kala’s father said with a grin.

“In exchange for a fat cut of the profits, and control over the country that spawned you ungrateful brats,” Murak said with a scowl. “Not a chance.”

“I think we’re focused on the wrong thing.” The twelve year old genosian with the button nose said, his childish voice a pure tone that cut through the bickering.

“Who gets to mine the metal that fell from the sky does not concern us. What does concern us is how and why Uleis was destroyed. These…documents, we’ve received state that the she-demon who terrorized all our lands stole an average of six Bent from each person she met, and was sighted in every hamlet, village, town and city, on the continent, even reportedly appearing in multiple places at the same time.”

“If these numbers are accurate, she stole at least sixty thousand Bent. Later the same day Uleis received what can only be construed as divine punishment. These two things cannot be unrelated. Any individual or organization that can put that much Bent to use needs to be addressed.”

Sharp kid…or should I say the old bastards inside him are sharp. If the boy was chosen to represent all Genosians everywhere, there was no question that he had a Chained Spirit, along with generation upon generation of wizened leaders and fierce warriors connected to it, watching through his eyes.

Kid’s got a curated collection of the tribe’s best and brightest.

I wonder how he stays sane with all that chatter. For the kid’s sake, he hoped the spirits had a fair amount of discipline when speaking.

“Eyewitness accounts of the event are sparse, but troubling,” Murak said. “A few desert dwellers and merchants outside of Uleis mentioned seeing a dark cloud surrounding Uleis, one that seemed to be composed of flying people, and there are thousands of eyewitness report of the hammer that fell from the heavens, but no one who was close enough to see exactly what happened is still breathing.”

True. Calvin thought. Sometimes he stopped breathing when he was asleep, without consequence.

“However, something that bothers me more, is reports of the rapid shift in Uleisan policy that had no grounding in precedent or current events, dating back to approximately two weeks before the hammer fell. The king began to encourage his citizens to report to various ‘stations’ to review their citizenship.

From that point on, contact with, and word of Uleis rapidly dwindled and became sparse. Those we did hear from said that those who attended these meetings were subtly changed, and the ones who didn’t were forced to go by friends and family. Toward the end, the more cautious Uleisans fled the city, but not in the quantities I would have preferred. The last three days before the event, there was no word at all.”

“Do you think that Uleis went the way of Malkenrovia?” The child, known as Juahe-ma’na hebahua, said. The mouthful of a Title translated to The Descendant, in Genosian.

Descendant, huh? I’m just gonna call him Dez.

Same here.

At the Dez’s mention of Malkenrovia, their eyes turned to the empty seat with the Malkenrovia placard in front of it.

“You suspect an Aberration?” The plainslander asked, her eyebrows raised.

“The circumstances described match Elder Maehamu’s experience with one of the creatures. It has happened before, why couldn’t it happen again? I think the question we should be asking is, what was it fighting? The last aberration was defeated at a great cost in life, but this one was…crushed handily, for lack of a better word. I doubt it did it to itself.”

“Aberration. You keep throwing that word around, but I doubt you know what you’re talking about.” Jonathon said. “You’re just trying to shift the focus from the movement of Genosians over the last year.

In response, the boy stared placidly at him, seemingly waiting for something before responding.

“You are correct. I do not personally know what I am speaking of. However I trust the word of my advisors implicitly. With your permission, I will call upon him.”

Without waiting for aforementioned permission, Dez closed his eyes, his pupils flickering back and forth under his lids for a moment as if he were reading, then a gout of green smoke resolved into an incredibly thin, withered old man, weighing maybe ninety pounds soaking wet, he leaned on a staff, his arms trembling with age.

“Greetings Descendant,” He said to Dez, who bowed deeply to him before facing Jonathon. “When I was much younger, about two hundred and forty years ago, a young warrior did not spend all his Warp, but rather than become disfigured, he seemed fine. Everyone simply assumed someone had miscounted and he had spent all his Warp.

The Chained spirit held up a shaking finger. “That was incorrect. The boy began visiting people in their dreams. First a girl he was infatuated with, causing her to suffer greatly in her sleep. We dismissed her complaints out of hand, as he’d shown no outward sign of misbehavior.”

“Before long he realized the power he could have over people, and began sneaking into other’s dreams in the guise of friends and family, changing this memory or that, imprinting memories and desires they had never previously had. It took him little under a year to gain control over the tribe. In deed if not in word. It was then the child started experimenting with even darker aspects of his power, spreading his influence far and wide. Those who resisted his nightly depravations tried to flee, but were prevented by the hold he had claimed over their friends and family. When we finally thought to discipline him for his actions, he struck back against the elders – violently – killing many of them in their sleep and replacing them with…something else.”

Calvin listened to the story with rapt attention, as the old man was a natural storyteller, describing the harrowing war against the Aberration who would eventually become known as the Dream-Eater. The story just sucked him in.

Which was why Calvin was unprepared when the topic of conversation turned to the empty Juntai Seat. While the leaders of Juntai had been killed, most of the citizens had survived, and no one could ignore the rumors of Body-hopping aberrations that had bloomed there over the last couple months.

“ – Which is why I think we should bring forward a witness with experience on the state of both Juntai and Uleis,” Kala’s dad was saying.

Oh, crap. Calvin felt his malaise from the boring meeting shaken off in a matter of seconds. If his heart was still beating, it would be singing in his chest. As it stood, he felt a strange, squishy kind of thrill. Just as potent, but more fluid than the intense hammering sensation of human adrenaline.

“I’d like to call the newly minted Marquis Gadsint, whose land borders the two nations in question, to come down and share his experience.” The Hash’Maje said, motioning towards his son-in-law.

All the eyes in the theatre turned towards Calvin.