The first two days of the voyage were mostly uneventful. Linduin discovered as soon as they hit open waters that he was terribly prone to seasickness once the motion passed a certain threshold, and spent most of them either throwing up or groaning in his bunk; Pellamin ignored everyone and focused on making what little progress he could on a paper he was hoping to publish upon their return. Cheis, to all outside observers, spent fifteen hours a day meditating in her cabin, but she was in fact alternating between one of her most productive coding frenzies in memory and breathlessly reading her way through a deplorably lurid and unrealistic romance novel on her internal storage.

On the third day, however, Linduin's suffering became too noisy for her to tolerate any further, and she showed him how to use another command on his collar to turn off his vestibular sense, which caused him to fall over if he was standing up but at least allowed him to lie in bed without nausea. Linduin, thus freed of unproductive torment, abruptly found his time simultaneously extremely dull and uniquely unoccupied, and he at last found that he could no longer resist disregarding Cheis's instruction not to experiment with the collar's functions, albeit exceedingly cautiously. He quickly discovered that the command preventing his seasickness could also turn off other senses; he dabbled in deafness and blindness for a while before moving on to more exotic options. He discovered, somewhat disappointedly, that he was unable to turn off his sensations of touch or pain; Cheis had seen the results of such things in the past and had no desire to be responsible for them a second time. He did figure out how to turn off his sense of taste, which improved his meals dramatically, and shortly thereafter his sense of smell, which improved his quality of life overall a fair bit when he was belowdecks (which was almost all the time). Eventually, however, he realized that he needed to acclimate to the ship's motion if he wanted to do anything besides lie in bed the entire voyage, and carefully turned his awareness of his inner ears off and on for a period of several hours until the swaying ceased to make him vomit. That night, he slept blissfully; the next morning, he was up and about with the dawn, pestering sailors and nearly blinding himself with the sun's glare off the waves until one of the crew put him to work swabbing the deck.

At lunch, he spotted Pellamin sitting by himself in the canteen, making notes in a journal and dipping his hard biscuits into his coffee bitterly. Their eyes met across the room. There was a long period of tension, during which any number of things could have occurred; in another story, they might have opened up to one another, or at least had an honest discussion about their differences. But Pellamin, quite frankly, despised Linduin; their initial meeting had quite put things off on the wrong foot, and very little had been done to remedy the situation, with most attempts it at merely exacerbating the problem. And so instead, Linduin sneered at Pellamin and took his meal back to his cabin. The consequences of this would not be felt for some time, but would be significant.

***

One of the problems with the concept of division of labor, often encountered by possessors of rarified knowledge, is that when only a small number of people can perform a task, the task becomes a commodity to anyone who cannot. For example, if a city contains exactly one master blacksmith capable of a particular feat of metallurgy, other people will simply assume that that the master blacksmith can and will reliably perform said feat. This is fine when the task to be done is rote or safe, but when the task carries a certain amount of risk or requires a particularly heroic effort from the performer, it is often difficult to convince or even inform other people that such a thing might be true. Galar Kayle was, at this moment, discovering such a thing intimately.

"Let me be certain that I understand you correctly," he said crisply. "You are projecting the numbers of the enemy army to exceed ten thousand, and you expect me to defeat them with one-tenth that number?"

"You have the White Gift," replied Orána, as if that should explain everything. "What possible greater power could we hope for? The gods themselves come at your call."

It should be noted that Galar Kayle -- who was a veteran of two wars, a lifelong government employee, and the father of a teenager -- had extraordinary amounts of patience and tact well beyond what would even be imaginable to most people. So, despite his fervent desires, he did not lecture or complain about the myriad of apparent problems with the specified approach. Instead, he gave rational, relevant information regarding obstacles that would need to be solved for the plan to be feasible. "While that is true, the White Gift is not all-powerful; I am still new to its use, and tire quickly when using it. Furthermore, many of the insights Magister Ivorious recorded are not applicable to my particular talent; he worshiped Gregorim, not Santorana. Many of his uses for the gift, such as creating earthworks or heating metals, do not respond to my call. At first I thought it was merely a matter of practice, but other techniques have had no such difficulty, and I am forced to conclude that Santorana herself is merely unwilling or unable to provide such miracles." This was in fact not remotely true, but Galar believed that it was, and so the effect was indistinguishable. "Even if I manage to master the Gift and bring it to bear at its full power against the enemy, we will need more troops and support to have any hope of success."

Princess Oránad deflated, like a begowned balloon. "There are no more troops or resources, Sir Kayle. The kingdom's casualties have been heavy in the most recent battles, and our treasury falters as my father's ill health emboldens the nobles to place their own interests above the nation's."

Galar did not become frustrated (though he very badly wanted to). Instead, he asked the princess to leave him alone with his thoughts and the logistical data they had been poring over for nearly an hour. She acquiesced gracefully and departed, promising to send up refreshments.

There were skills that Galar Kayle did not possess. He was a terrible cook, for example. He was tone-deaf; he had two left feet when it came to dancing, and was totally incapable of playing any musical instrument. He was often incurious, frequently disdainful of many of life's joys, and was quite frankly a tedious bore in conversation. And he was particularly bad at expressing his emotions, often struggled mightily with empathy for others, and was perhaps the worst person in the entire kingdom of Temurin at admitting fault (though his time as a paladin of Santorana had made inroads, however feeble, upon these last three). But he was, in fact, very good at solving problems. He had commanded men in war; he had operated the apparatus of government in peace. He had made very solid progress at discovering unique uses for his Gift in a very short period of time, and he was confident of those capabilities which he possessed. When Orána returned several hours later on the heels of several political functions, Galar Kayle was asleep in a chair, and a new plan for the battle was on the table.

***

When the ship arrived in Ciel-Upon-The-Sea, everyone was glad that the voyage was at an end. Linduin and Pellamin had continued to have awkward run-ins aboard the ship, the crew was running low on grog, and Cheis was already regretting the journey. She'd twice had to deal with metaphysical hazards invisible to the rest of the crew (a hantu that had fled out over water and possessed a storm, and a particularly nasty strain of weaponized ether, left over from a war nearly five hundred years ago, that had been pretending to be a mysterious eruption of scurvy). She had been hoping to be attacked by pirates, as killing a shipful of buccaneers would have been a welcome boost to her energy stores, but unfortunately piracy in the area was at an all-time low due to the recent rash of supernatural incidents rippling outwards from the port in the wake of the incursion. In the end, she'd settled for reaping a square mile of fish, which had made her feel bad and only been a mild top-up. Her mood was unlikely to improve.

To Linduin, arriving in the Painted City was quite a bit like traveling a few hundred years into the future. As a young man from the rural areas of a society with deep and persistent cultural and economic divides, he was astonished to discover that Ciel-Upon-The-Sea boasted a thriving consumerist economy, widespread social and technological advancements, and greatly divergent fashions relative to his personal scope of experience. He gawked at cafés, stared astounded at men in leather coats riding bicycles, and had something very close to a religious experience when Pellamin purchased them all scones and iced coffees. Needless to say, he fell in love with the city almost immediately.

"I can't believe this," he whispered to Cheis for the twelfth time. "And you chose Veraleigh over here?"

Cheis shrugged. She could clearly see that he was too enamored of the place to listen to her actual reasons, and she felt little desire to explain herself anyway. She had missed the iced coffees, though.

Pellamin led them out of the wharf district and hired a coach, instructing the driver to make haste for the city's financial districts. Linduin expressed confusion almost immediately. "I thought you were taking us to the people in charge. Shouldn't that be the king, or something?"

Cheis rolled her eyes. "You'll have to forgive my apprentice, Pels. He's an idiot." She turned to Linduin, clearly loathing the fact that she was having to explain this. "The city is ruled by merchants. They don't even have an actual government." The city did, in fact, have a secret government in the form of a ruling council of mages, but she felt no urgent need to elaborate. She expected further questions, but Linduin, who had no concept of commercial employment beyond general authoritarianism, seemed satisfied. She counted her blessings and hoped the ride would be short.

The carriage dropped them off at the corner of two bustling streets, in a district with large buildings nestled so close together that they crowded out the sun; Linduin promptly craned his neck to look upwards at them and almost fell backwards into traffic. They made their way into one of the buildings, ascended three flights of stairs (with Pellamin suffering greatly and Linduin enjoying it tremendously), and finally emerged in a large office. Cheis, who had been dreading this moment, was not disappointed.

The office was large and spacious, with expensive hand-carved furniture and deep, luxurious carpets. A large window afforded a fantastic view of the hustle and bustle of the city below, and several strategically placed potted plants kept the air fresh and added pops of color to the otherwise dark and earthy tones of the decor. The most striking thing about the room, however, was its occupant, a slender young lady in her mid-twenties wearing a fashionable white sleeveless dress. She had thick, slightly wavy hair the color of fresh honey which reached to her waist, and eyelashes twice the length of any other woman Linduin had ever seen. Her lips, painted with a fetching red dye, parted in a smile to reveal brilliant, perfectly-straight teeth.

"Hello, Umbria," said Cheis, wishing she were dead. It might have cheered her up to know that within seven days, one of them would be.

***

Typically, its minions preceded it when the Black Oak arrived at a new location. At Pols Sedis, however, it led the charge, so eager was it to see what had signaled it. When it crested a hill and came upon sight of Velinaer's signal tower, it paused, tentacles writhing, for many minutes while trying to make sense of what it was seeing. When its (admittedly limited) analytical faculties failed it, it decided caution was better than gratification and sent in some oakspawn anyway.

The creatures swarmed into the estate, unhindered by trees and landscape, and attacked anything that looked even roughly humanoid. Among the first casualties were some mid-sized boulders, a large number of shrubs, and Velinaer's undead minions. Under normal circumstances, they could have defended themselves quite handily and perhaps even given the igg's forces some pause, but unfortunately with Velinaer unconscious while his cognitive systems performed the thaumatic equivalent of a recursive cyclic redundancy check, their newly-installed security queries of "DEFEND SELF FROM ATTACK? Y/N" went unheeded, and virtually all of them were destroyed within minutes. The only survivor was a particular zombie that Velinaer had locked in the burgon's root cellar because the wave of embarrassment he experienced every time he saw her had gotten distracting.

His class-four jujora, on the other hand, were a different story. The specific details of their construction were quite interesting, and the patent for them had made a particular necrotology firm very, very rich in the latter days of the Shul Empire. They were technically a two-part construct, with a weave of animating and fortifying spells surrounding an encysted demonic presence, which in turn provided resiliency and autonomy fallbacks in the event of various sorts of disruptions. Among other impressive capabilities, they were superhumanly strong and fast, thoroughly immune to normal weapons, did not tire or weaken, and were highly resistant to various forms of harm and dampening which would have been quite fatal to zombies, demons, or both under normal circumstances. Additionally, once certain conditions were met (such as the imminent threat of hostiles and an absence of authorizing commands from their directing unit) they were capable of performing limited overrides of such conditions and executing defensive protocols unsupervised. As a result, the oakspawn were quite unprepared for what happened when they came across Velinaer's unconscious form and his three attendants.

The oakspawn attacked without hesitation, predictably, and their attacks bounced off the jujora with no visible effect. The zombies, required conditions met, retaliated with appropriate force and began to tear the oakspawn apart with impressive speed and efficiency. A few oakspawn made it past their guard to attack Velinaer's recumbent form, but all of them dropped dead instantly upon making contact. For several minutes, a weird, silent battle took place as the three zombies impassively slaughtered rank upon rank of swarming monstrosities with complete impunity.

The igg, which eagerly looked for and capitalized upon any attempt to test its work against new challenges, redirected its forces to concentrate upon the site of the battle. The dozens of oakspawn became hundreds, then thousands, but the jujora were quite immune to being swarmed or overwhelmed, and only a small number of oakspawn could actually engage them at any given time due to the tremendous numerical difference in the two forces. Even the igg's more unconventional capabilities, such as the acid-spitters or ground-burrowers, could not harm them. Intrigued, the igg decided to personally investigate.

Although its physical form and sensory organs were in many ways inexpert and haphazardly assembled, the igg was not in fact a wholly tangible being. The animating force which had spawned it, though from a form of existence deeply orthogonal to the material world, was not without its own unique senses and capabilities. Most of the time, these were not particularly useful, being roughly analagous to a human's sense of smell while underwater or something equally inapplicable; but confronted with the jujora, it eventually drew close enough to recognize elements of creatures akin to itself within their totalities. And while it was still often befuddled by the particulars and complexities of material existence, it knew how to deal with other demons particularly well.

It would be deeply incorrect to call what happened next a battle, or even a contest in any meaningful sense; the igg simply became aware of the li-juja before they became aware of it, defined a function inimical to their continued existence, and applied it against them along a defined vector of relevance. The other demons, not so much destroyed as simply translated into different essences, became instantly incompatible with both their previous existences and the spellwork which bound them and functionally ceased to occupy the same frame of relevance as either the igg or the jujora themselves. The result was both unexpected and visually spectacular.

The zombies surrounding Velinaer turned bright white, blinding those members of the Oak's forces which relied upon sight, and evanesced into the ether, leaving behind wet rags of flesh and bits of bone dust. The components of the magical bindings which had surrounded the demonic essences, given form to the jujora, and bound them to Velinaer's consciousness threw a core exception, attempted a recovery, failed, and triggered a copious set of self-correction protocols. The jujora, spawned as a set of three, had redundant failover capability which allowed the energies empowering one to flow to the others in the unlikely event that one of their number were destroyed; the unforeseen event of all three crashing at once caused an impressive array of errors in the binding layer which executed a sizable number of flailing recovery attempts before being squelched by an even more impressive and ironclad top-level exception handler. The handling function, executing a last-ditch attempt at finding a path to route the near-critical energies, picked the only option open to it. Channeling the energies and astral structures through the one available path, it began the slow and laborious process of converting the raw materials at hand into a suitable vessel.

With all apparent resistance defeated, the igg felt it safe to approach the signal tower. It stepped over Velinaer entirely, which was a pity; if its tentacled roots had made even the slightest contact with his body, the resulting backlash of protective energies would have disrupted its form to such an extreme degree that it would have been forced to sever large parts of its body to even have a hope of survival (and not a very good one, at that). However, neither its physical nor metaphysical senses could identify him as anything other than a pile of clothing around an inert form, and thus it discounted him entirely. This was a fortunate event in many ways, particularly for Velinaer, though he would never know it occurred.

Reaching the base of the signal tower, the igg performed a large series of calculations and eventually determined that it was too small to accomplish the objective it had now decided upon. Fortunately, there was no shortage of available biomass. It absorbed first the corpses of the oakspawn that had perished in the assault, then several hundred of its living minions; it shot cartilaginous fibers and swarming nematodic nerve endings through the corpses at high velocity, binding them to itself while simultaneously extending its nervous system. Using its tentacled roots and branches as attachment points, it slowly and laboriously ascended the spire, then spread itself downward to cover as much of the structure as it could. It observed, investigated, and adapted, learning about useful tricks of load-bearing physics and necro-harmonic signal amplification, its assimilation of the structure accelerating as its interest increased. Finally, nearly an hour after it had started, it executed a few nebulous etheric actions, received a signal in response, and decided to move to the next phase of its plan.

The roof of the burgon's manor, in no way prepared for such structural abuse, detached and shattered as the igg simply incorporated the tower into its form and strolled off with it, its army in tow. Velinaer, the last reluctant operations of his error-check cycle completing, regained consciousness just in time to see two deeply improbable things: his signal tower striding away over the horizon under its own power, and the glowing white form of Meloria Athbel's body now housing the combined magical energies of his three destroyed jujora. He twitched slightly as his locomotive functions came back online, rolled back and forth a bit like an overturned tortoise, and finally managed to clamber to his feet. A number of possible responses to such farcicality flittered through his mind, but eventually settled on one.

"I," he intoned, very solemnly, "am not paid nearly enough for this shit."