Calvin patted Tzen on the back.

“There there,” he said gently, “So your home town is a burnt out husk and everyone you know is probably dead. I’ve been there. Next thing you know you’re gonna get shotgun married to a warrior woman, have a thousand year old dead guy chatting your ear off, and a real shot at making your own kingdom.”

Calvin gave Tzen a weak smile as they stood on the guard tower overlooking the cindering corpse of the capital city.

“Why would the Hapain do this?” Tzen said, falling to his knees. “They could have just taken the city! They would gain the mandate of Soscath! The war would be over!”

“Have you stopped to consider that perhaps a protracted war is what they want?” Calvin asked.

“But why? It doesn’t benefit anyone.”

“It benefits the people they’re working with,” Calvin said. If people is the right way to describe it.

“How?”

“Because a divided country is easier to invade?” Calvin said with a shrug. “I spent a couple hours listening to a history nerd –“

Hey!

“And I think an outside force is trying to weaken your country so it can be annexed.

“That’s obvious, you shepherd!” Tzen shouted, seemingly losing his temper a bit. “The question is who!? There’s nobody with the capacity to do this anywhere near us! The people to the north are starving frozen nomads without a care for subtlety, the plainslanders lack the power, Juntai is a broken nation under your control, and Uleis doesn’t exist!”

“When you put it like that…” Calvin muttered, touching his chin. “What’s east of Boles?”

“Nothing.” Tzen said, waving a hand dismissively. “Just thousands of miles of monster-infested forests and rugged terrain.

“And beyond that?”

“Ocean,” Tzen said. “A vast ocean leading to the edge of the world.”

“Elliot, do you happen to have –“

Yeah, I got one right here, Elliot said, and a globe popped up in front of Calvin’s face with Visualize.

Multi-shaping

Calvin recreated a duplicate globe, making sure to mark different countries where he saw them.

Calvin held the globe up in his hand, inspecting the territory of Boles. It was massive compared to Iletha and Gadvera, fractured by the terrain and its own size. Uleis was almost as big, but mostly desert. The plainslanders were sandwiched neatly between Juntai, uleis, and Boles.

“So here’s Boles,” Calvin said, tapping the massive section of the continent with his finger. “And if we keep going east….” He dragged his finger across the ocean and landed on the far side of another massive continent.

“The world is not a sphere,” Tzen said, talking to him like a child. “It is supported on the back of the World Tortoise At the edge of the shell, everything simply falls off, to be renewed by the rains.”

God, you’d think this flat-earth thing would die when a billion people witnessed the spherical planet Earth implode with their own goddamn eyes. From Space! Guess they’re classic conspiracy theories for a reason.

“Sun’s round,” Calvin said with a shrug, “Moon’s round. Why should we be any different? Aaanyway, on the off chance that the world isn’t suspended on the back of a giant tortoise, wanna guess what continent you share an ocean with?” Calvin asked.

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.” Tzen said sourly.

“Right you are,” Calvin said, tapping the continent with a finger. “This continent houses the Country of Malkenrovia.”

“Yeah, on the other side of it,” Tzen said, joining Calvin and pointing out where Maleknrovia’s primary city was located on the other side of the continent and much, much closer to Iletha and Gadvera.

“So let me get this straight,” Tzen said. “You think that Malkenrovia went west, crossed all this territory, and rather than stop and grow into the land it had just taken, they sent ships filled with drugs to my country across our poorly defended eastern shores?”

“It would take years to drag an army across an expanse that big,” Tzen said. “Decades, maybe. The logistics of feeding them alone…”

“Would nineteen years be long enough?” Calvin asked.

Tzen frowned, stroking his non-existent beard. “Yeah, probably.”

“Ah, shit,” Calvin muttered.

“I mean, it’s totally impractical and downright stupid,” Tzen said. “The soldiers who were in their early twenties would be in their forties by the end of the march. You’d have an army of…old men.”

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s not going to be a problem,” Calvin said, thinking back to the soldiers that One’s armies had birthed on the spot.

“Wanna make a bet?” Calvin said.

“Depends on the bet.”

“You bring your army with me further east rather than joining your brothers in this succession war. If we don’t find anything, I’ll provide even more support when we return.”

“Define ‘anything’.”

“Oh, let’s say…a huge army of mutant creatures following a hive mind that warps the very landscape to its will.”

“And what do you get if we find that?”

“I get you to come back to Boles and sound the alarm.” Calvin said. “You can be the hero who saves the country.”

Tzen snorted, glancing back at the smoldering capital.

“I’m the forty-second son. They’re not going to give me the time of day, let alone rally behind me.”

“Tell you what,” Calvin said. “I’ll sweeten the pot by murdering or convincing all of your brothers to follow you, and crushing the Hapain clan personally.”

“That would definitely violate the Royal Oath.” Tzen said, glancing at him askance.

“Ehhh…” Calvin said, waggling his hand. “If what I think is happening is happening, they’ll probably let me off the hook for murdering a couple princes and amputating a gangrenous limb.”

The purpose of Royals was to purge Aberrations, and One was pretty much the definition of one. As long as Calvin didn’t wind up the ruler of Boles after the dust settled, he had plausible deniability.

“You realize I’m still going to betray you in four years, right?” Tzen asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” Calvin said, waving him off. “East or west?” he said, hiking a thumb over his shoulder, pointing toward the setting sun in the east.

Tzen glanced down at his army waiting on the grass beneath them, then east at the vast stretch of wilderness before him.

He looked west, along the cobbled roads that led deeper into Boles, where the battle for succession raged on.

“Alright. Something tells me this war against the Hapain clan won’t end any time soon. Let’s go check for these monsters of yours.”

***Nadia, halfway across the world***

A droplet of water fell from the cavernous seiling of her cell to the ground with an annoying plonk.

“I wish they would get to the torture part already,” Nadia muttered, waggling her head back and forth in impatience. Despite being kidnapped in the middle of the night and restrained with a Bent-draining collar, her pulse never rose above the even forty-five beats per minute she was used to.

She’d been tortured by people with more imagination, in more exciting ways.

This was just boring.

Maybe they’re trying to bore me into submission? She thought.

“Princess Nadia, my deepest apologies,” The mayor of Brennoth said as he entered the room, flanked by several of his cronies. The man was actually wringing his hands in consternation rather than gloating.

What a let-down. Calvin would gloat.

“I didn’t want to do this to you. I tried everything I could think of to bore you, to warn you away, but you kept digging. Now you have to become an unwilling part of the greater whole.”

“Is this the part where you tell me your evil plan? How inevitable your victory is?” Nadia demanded, tugging on the Abyssal steel strapping her down to the unnaturally strong table.

Gotta put on a good show for them. Make them think they have the upper hand.

The mayor looked…sad. “It won’t be my victory,” he said, motioning to one of the nearby nobles, who pulled out a vial of something clear.

“Not your victory?” Nadia asked, infusing her words with a simple technique, a copying behavior that made people drop their guard.

“I’m just an extension of it, now, and the only way to retain my precious self is to throw away what humanity I possess. And soon, you will, too.”

His face looked…tired.

Huh.

He nodded to the noble beside him, and the man grabbed a metal device she recognized as a dental gag.

Her heartbeat rose substantially as he loomed over her prone body, reminding her of her death as the man forced the metal spreaders between her teeth and ratcheted her mouth open until her jaw began aching delightfully.

Then they shoved a cold, hard metal tube into her mouth.

Nadia’s heartbeat ticked up just a bit more. It was finally starting to get interesting. She could handle drugs. Maybe once they thought she was loopy and suggestable, they would spill more information.

“Do it,” the gangly mayor said.

Just as the man was lifting the vial of whatever the abyss to the tube, an explosion rocked the dungeon, nearly knocking them off their feet.

“It’s her companion!” the mayor shouted. He pointed at the man standing over her.

“Keep going, this is a distraction! The rest of you find him! Search in pairs of two!”

“Sorry princess,” the noble murmured, pouring the slightly musty smelling gunk down the tube in her mouth.

She felt it hit the back of her throat, a cold, wet sensation that forced her to swallow against her will.

Once she’d swallowed, the noble took the tube out of her mouth and rushed out of the room, joining the chase for George.

“Hmm.” Nadia groaned through the dental gag the bastard had forgotten to take out along with the tube, tapping her heels against the slab she was bound to. I wonder how long it takes to hit. Half an hour, perhaps?

Despite being force-fed a foreign substance with unknown effects, she couldn’t quite care enough to bring her heartrate above resting anymore. Shame.

A few minutes and some explosions later, George burst into her cell.

“Princess!” he said, rushing over to her and scanning her body with a sharp eye.

He dabbed a finger in the spot of spilled stuff on her cheek and smelled it, wrinkling his nose.

“Oh gods,” George said, paling. “They’ve already given it to you.”

“Ai eee o.” Nadia said, trying to point with her eyes at the guy sneaking in through the door, approaching

“Princess, I’m sorry I failed you.” George said, hanging his head for a moment before his head came back up, his eyes filled with determination.

“I promise I won’t let you suffer, princess,” he said, drawing a dagger.

“Gaaah,” Nadia rolled her eyes. She bit down on the steel jaw spreader, which sheared off and folded under the pressure, compressing it into a tight snarl of steel before she spat it at the fool about to stab George in the back.

The ball of wadded steel struck the man between the eyes causing him to yelp and take a step back.

Which prompted George to turn and grab the knife in the man’s hand, beginning a life-and death struggle over the blade.

Quaint.

Nadia let dimensional warping energy slip out of her fingertips, cutting the abyssal steel restraints by simple generating extra space between them.

Nadia sat up and cut the Bent suppressing collar off her neck while George was fighting for the knife. With contemptuous ease, Nadia kicked the noble in the head and dropped him to the ground like a sack of potatoes, dropping on top of George.

The detective rolled the man off of him with a grunt. He wasn’t much in a fight.

“You came too early,” Nadia said, plucking the remains of the cuffs off her ankles. “They were this close to spilling their whole scheme to me.

“That’s just it!” George said. “That drug is their whole scheme!” George said. “It makes people into puppets of some nameless…thing in the distance. I haven’t figured out what. They’ve been force-feeding the entire town that stuff, one at a time. They plan on spreading it through the entire country!”

“Huh,” Nadia grunted as she stared at her hand that was suddenly expanding in front of her, becoming an entire world to explore. Nadia was small, truly small, and yet big, host to so much life, and yet a single creature.

What was she on the cellular level, but a hive mind?

Her hand expanded into a tan canvas. A thin barrier between this reality and that of perception, through which burst the evil Malkenrovian witch, standing above her bed with her black tubes writing, seeking her flesh.