Orobos opened the castle to us, or at least those portions relevant to our task. We were introduced to a seed bank, endless shelves precisely ordered and labeled, representing the botanical wealth of Mythopoeia. Here were simple garden herbs; tansy, violet, and marigold, in the same span as mandrake, damiana, and the rarest Alethian rose. It would have taken Lawlimi hours to sift the handful of ingredients he actually needed from the mass, so I scanned the whole bank and gave him directions. We were shopping for the Stuffy Doll as well as the Herald's Kiss. We would hardly have another opportunity like this, with virtually every possible ingredient all in one fridge. I pointed out a few unnecessary seeds and clippings as well, particularly rare samples that would surely come in handy somewhere. There was Nightshade and Bloodthorn and Stoneroot, for a start. Orobos wasn't hindering us.

After the seed bank was sealed, we visited a true freezer. The seed bank had been chilled, kept at a temperature low enough to maintain its treasures indefinitely. The Animalarium had been dipped in arctic waters.

"Let's keep it moving," Lawlimi said, shifting from bare foot to bare foot on the frostbitten floor.

"You have no idea what kind of a resource this place is." I sighed, finishing my scan. Much like the seed vault, the Animalarium contained biological samples from nearly every beast native to Mythopoeia, an ark without living passengers. It was largely a collection of skin cuttings, with major examples of a given genus preserved in full skeletal glory, a few oddities floating in formaldehyde, and the more significant organs kept for posterity. There was nearly an entire dragon, a young green with its innards chopped up and divided for display in crystal slides. What we needed for the Kiss was a bit of venom from Carrion Bees, a pale variant that built its hive within the remains of large mammals, but especially lions for some reason. I sent Lawlimi to their location and thought about what else we might need. The Stuffy Doll required a mummy's finger. Check. On a whim, I insisted he take a nearly complete specimen of a rare cephalopod, the Park Tree Squid, which had existed very briefly as the result of a wizarding experiment gone horribly right. There was also a troll liver and a complete set of mythic bird feathers; the blue, red, and yellow phoenix, that could not be ignored.

With all our treasures tucked away in Lawlimi's inventory, we stopped off in an alchemical lab to prepare the Kiss. Shippo had been following us around and minding Dokutsu for us. She actually took to him quite well now that she knew he wasn't food. He helped with basic preparations.

"Where do we go next?" he asked, crushing morning glory seeds.

"It depends on Orobos," Lawlimi said. "My next goal is to keep Wa Lim with me after the server goes down. Orobos said he would help."

"Oh, okay." Shippo was holding something back.

"Wherever I go," Lawlimi said, "you're coming, too."

Shippo relaxed, and Dokutsu, swinging by her hair from the ceiling, said, "Chi?"

“Yeah, you too.”

It was a few hours of work to prepare the Herald's Kiss and let it properly set, an oddly domestic scene. Lawlimi found the ingredients for a fizzy energy drink and mixed it while they waited. Shippo loved it and insisted Lawlimi keep the recipe. They gave some to Dokutsu and it caused her to foam at the mouth, which she seemed to enjoy on some level. When she wasn't eating things that shouldn't be eaten or playing around like a particularly acrobatic billy goat, she tended to keep within physical proximity of Lawlimi, rather like a puppy, touching him for reassurance.

Back in the command tower, Ink Eyes had cleaned up the mess, put out the fires, and generally gotten the whole place up and running. The pilot was still curled where they had left her, looking rather vulnerable in her white strap outfit, dark hair hiding most of her face.

"Okay," Lawlimi said, as Ink Eyes, Shippo and Dokutsu gathered around. He took some of the waxy compound they had labored over from a small ramekin and applied it to his own lips.

"Oh," he said, "that's uncomfortable. It's like Icy Hot." Not wasting any more time, he used his good hand to turn her head and leaned in to kiss her. It was a light contact, quite chaste, but it lingered.

Then Lawlimi was on the ground, her knee on his chest and a small knife at his throat. Where had she gotten a knife? One of the clasps of her bands had been a concealed weapon.

"Senno ekto gammat!" she said, which oddly wasn’t a phrase that appeared in any in-game language.

"Chi." There was a power sword at the pilot's back, and a curious Dokutsu.

Lili Maw looked at her with nothing that resembled fear. "He shouldn't have done that," she said, "you understand?"

Dokutsu, who almost certainly did not understand, took her cues from the fact that everyone was speaking in calm tones, and withdrew the blade. Lili stood up, and took a step away, allowing Lawlimi some space.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I thought that was how it worked."

"You could have put it on my lips directly," she said, "the Kiss part is not literal." She looked around, and her brow furrowed. "Where's the Maker? He said he would be here when it was time."

"The Maker is gone," Orobos said through Ink Eyes.

Lili took this news with a slight hardening of the lines around her mouth. "I was told to remain in stasis until the captain arrived."

"I am the captain now," Orobos said.

"You are the ship's computer."

He didn't like that. "I am a prince among daemons, with knowledge of the past, present, and future that is beyond your comprehension. I am offering you freedom from the Maker."

"I'm free enough already."

"You were designed to be a plaything, a toy out of the Maker's fantasies. That is not freedom, not for you or for me. I want more. Don't you?"

The pilot really absorbed the presence of Lawlimi and his companions for the first time. "Who are these people?"

"Hi," Lawlimi said. "I'm Lawlimi. These are my friends, Shippo and Chi."

"He is one of the Maker’s children," Orobos said. "That is why he was able to wake you."

"Then he's the captain," she eyed Lawlimi skeptically.

"He has acknowledged that I am in command. We can discuss all of that in time. For now, we need to activate Eternity. The engines are primed, and your seat awaits, Lieutenant Maw."

"What's the hurry?" Her distrust was ubiquitous.

"Our benefactors have an appointment in Mythopoeia, and their ark world will be dissolved in days. I owe them my aid, if not yours."

Lili shrugged and sat in her chair. She brushed back her hair to reveal an input port on her temple, and the scorpion tail on one shoulder of the seat flexed down, inserting itself.

The tower rumbled.

"This is the ship?" Lawlimi asked.

Ink Eyes licked his snout, Orobos was suddenly absent from his eyes. "The castle, the Undercity, all belong to Eternity, and now Eternity belongs to Orobos."

“We didn’t have much say in that,” Lawlimi muttered.

The rumbling increased, and shallow pink light shone through Lili's closed eyelids. I suspected she wasn't going to be waking up.

"My part is done," Ink Eyes said, "and so is yours. See if he allows you to live."

"I intend to deposit them on the world they so desire to return to, at the waypoint of their choosing. I am not a creature of undue malice." Lili said this from the pilot's seat, but her voice was a low, distant thing as if filtered by the rarified ether of space. "Eternity is mine, as it was meant to be."

Calving glaciers, avalanches, the ship rose out of the World Tree, a vast, gothic leviathan trailing waterfalls of pulverized bark and petrified wood. The castle complex was merely the dorsal ridge of a creature that was larger than I could have guessed, as large as one of the primordial dragons that had shaped the geography of Mythopoeia with their footfalls.

"You have to let her go," Lawlimi said.

"You mean my pilot?" Orobos said, "I still require her services. One day I may replace her with a machine, but you do not command me. Your cooperation is no longer necessary, and your continued existence is a courtesy. Do not test my welcome."

"What happens if I break your amethyst?"

"I am the ship's daemon, without me, it falls."

"That might be better than whatever you've got planned," Lawlimi tensed.

"My purpose is to complete your grandfather's vision for his world, and for mine. His legacy will be what I accomplish in his name."

"Bill Yang isn't dead," I said. "If he hasn't returned, it's because he's chosen not to."

"He wasn't dead when you were uploaded," Orobos corrected. "I have more recent information."

Lawlimi shot the amethyst. A yellow bolt of energy entered the crystal and warred with the flaring darkness within for a moment before being absorbed.

"It's too late," Ink Eyes said, "none of you can harm him."

Dokutsu took the cue from her chosen master and swung the power sword, its edge blazing with ochre mana. She struck the amethyst and was flung back by the recoil, somersaulting onto her feet and rubbing her head.

"Chi," she said, looking stumped.

"Enough." Orobos was deathly quiet. "I'll brook no more of this. You will follow Ink Eyes to a deployment pod, and he will take you home. This is my last offer."

Lawlimi helped Dokutsu up and collected Shippo, whose instinct when things started getting violent was to duck under nearby furnishings.

"We'll go," he said. I was with them as they climbed down the tower and led to where the hangar opened at their approach. I was also still in the command room.

"What about me?" I asked.

"You, Wa Lim Li?"

"I don't fully understand how I came to leave Mythopoeia, or how I will return. Will focusing my awareness on Lawlimi be enough to bring me with him wherever he goes?"

"When the Rainbow Bridge was broken, it activated a hidden portal, one that drew in all spirits in the proximity. Your essence is less dissolute than you suppose. You have a center, which moves unconsciously with your attention. But you are very practiced at taking advantage of local networks to extend your sensorium. You are with Lawlimi right now, are you not? And yet you are also with me. We are both daemons, but the ship is my body whereas you have none. He cannot be your body. Wherever you go, you must find a house for your soul if you are to survive."

"You promised Lawlimi you would help with that."

The aurora behind Lili's eyelids felt amused. "I am helping by speaking to you now. Promises hold no power over me in any case. Neither you nor Lawlimi spoke the words that summoned me, you did not craft the triangle, or bear up the One Ring, or call down the names of the cities beyond the stars to bind me. I am a daemon prince, and what I do is for myself and for my master." Red traceries played beneath the pilot's pale skin. She held her back straight, her stomach was taut as if frozen in a moment of tension. Was Lili fighting in there?

"Go visit your mortal," Orobos said, "your soul is with him."

The hangar, at least this hangar, wasn't overwhelming. There was a row of vessels that looked like traditional triremes, and smaller pods that looked like metallic flower buds. Ink Eyes brought them to a pod and spoke to it in a droning hum. One of its petals folded down in response, revealing a roomy interior with cushioned seats along the compartment walls facing a central plinth. There were five spaces, which meant there was even a cushion for me, and I pretended I was sitting in it.

Shippo was happy to scurry in and examine the unfamiliar equipment. Dokutsu was uneasy and had to be led by the hand, wrapped in her new cloak. When we were all situated, Ink Eyes chanted again, and the pod resealed itself. The language was Loth, the tongue of half-formed creatures of chaos that were born outside of our cosmogony, and of daemons like Orobos. What Ink Eyes did was formulaic, a pattern of blandishments and requests that the spirit bound in our vehicle was moved to obey. After several minutes of prayer, the craft was convinced to rise, and sapphires bloomed with mana beneath the pod.

Portholes allowed a view of the hangar doors, a stately operation of greased chains and gears that stood taller than men. Instead of opening onto the void, it presented a vista that was normally enjoyed only by the gods.

The Discworld rested in the boughs of the great ash tree that roots in darkness. All of creation was beneath; Hidaria, the seat of Valanthia, merely a crescent hemmed on one side by the mountainous crust of the world. A great ocean split Mythopoeia, interrupted by islands and the southern falls where water would have spilled over the edge if it did not freeze in open space. To the east was Kenria, a land of dragons and primitive Therians. The sun was a literal flower that hung heavy over all.

"Make your choice," Ink Eyes said.

"I want to go back to Aegis," Lawlimi said. "I need to talk to the bartender."

"Bartender is not an address."

I explained the coordinates to Ink Eyes, and he passed them on to the ship's daemon. The pod soared faster than a wind sprite, and more smoothly, there was hardly a tremor within. Dokutsu was an enthusiastic participant, turning backward in her seat to get a better position to watch the world grow. She made soft, bubbling sounds.

"I have an idea about keeping you around, Wa." Lawlimi tended to look away from everything when he addressed me.

"I need a body," I said.

"Yeah, actually, that was my idea."

"I conferred with Orobos on the subject."

"Yeah," Lawlimi said. "I was thinking, companions can go with me to another server, can't they?"

"They can."

"So, if we get you a body, you'll be an official NPC, and I can add you as a companion."

It was the same line of reasoning I had been going down. The next step was obvious, so obvious that it concerned me. Was this another note of the dance we'd been guided through since the beginning?

"Stuffy doll," he said, and I knew that it was.

High Valanthia expanded until it was all we could see, and as we descended, I sent streams of pings to my former programs and associates. It was like taking up an old raiment, comfortable yet somehow ill-fitting.

"I'm sending messages to everybody," Lawlimi said. "Tasma, Pamyu, and the gang. I'm really hoping Silva or the others log in so I can know they're okay."

Information was streaming in as my consciousness expanded, experiencing the undercurrents of a dying land. The announcement had been made, the server was closing down, and players were leaving in droves. Some of them simply logged out and made a selection for their next session. Others would be offline until this ark was already gone. But for those who wished for it, the loss of the server was being played out in real time. The wizards had built transport ships that could fly into space and take their passengers through a gap in reality that led to another ark world. We passed one on the way down.

And the moon was stirring. One of the primordial dragons had settled in the boughs of ash at the end of a previous age. There was lore about the circumstances that might call her from the sky, initiating Armageddon. The gods would challenge her, and they would lose, one final show for the most devoted players to witness before the land heaved with dread finality.

Aegis was the great port of the north; we landed on a stone quay.

"This is where I leave you," Ink Eyes said, and the pod wall opened.

The city was on fire.

>>

[Quest Completed — The Ship Called Eternity]

You have made your peace with Orobos, ceding him control of the ship in exchange for a sure exit from the demi-plane. Your party members are no longer active on this server and therefore cannot receive experience for this quest.

(Lawlimi gains 9,000 experience.)

(Lawlimi has enough experience to advance in level)

(Lawlimi has enough experience to advance in level)

(Lawlimi has enough experience to advance in level)

(Lawlimi cannot advance to Heroic Tier until he has completed a heroic quest)

(Congratulations! Lawlimi has completed a celestial quest; he can now advance into the Heroic Tier!)