It was the ground underfoot, shuddering in a decisively unnatural way. Before she could focus to hone in on the source of it, the Moneychanger rose from her seat and performed a series of quick gestures involving all four arms, rumbling an otherworldly incantation. A flickering point took shape in the midst of her connected palms, flickering out into an undulating slit in the air that bled Fog and the sound of another place in equal measure.

In the few seconds it took her to do this, she looked to Zel and Zef, warning them that, “An earthquake is coming. Get your money and hold onto something.”

The Moneychanger proceeded to rattle off several sentences in Kargarian into the rift, and moments later… It hit, and in a few minutes, it was over.

All of Willowdale shuddered, yet it was not as an earthquake - it was as a ship rocking atop stormy seas, even as the earth around the city and its fertile fields broke apart, shifting in place, faults arising and fissures spreading.

Kanbu looked out from the roof of his house, eating a pierogi as he smiled over it all. He had felt the surfeit of Terra-adjacent essentia flooding in from the direction of that accursed battlefield, an arcane flood seeking to undermine Willowdale, to carve cracks into the city in preparation for Ubul’s revival.

Even if the land around the fertile valley were to be washed away, the valley - and with it, the city - would survive.

He had contributed to that Great Work, of burying the Foundation, all those centuries ago. Whilst a small army of geomancers, illusionists, and counter-diviners toiled to bury an edifice to rival the works of Ankhezia, he and his comrades worked to play keepaway, to distract the Pretender from the incompletion of his genocide.

Indeed, Kanbu smiled, for he had been there when the city was first built. He found amusement in the reactions of those who either did not remember, or who had fallen for the deception - the great deception that had fooled even the Divine Emperor himself. As far as history was concerned, Willowdale was built over the ruins of a feudalist city, which itself had been built over the razed remnants of the Third King’s Capital.

It was mostly true, excepting several historical facts that had been buried not by the Emperor, but by Willowdale’s own protectors.

The first was the true scale of the Third Capital, whilst the second was a direct consequence of the first.

Distant mountains still told the tale, the tale of a colossal crater at whose center once stood a great ziggurat, and whose mountainous walls had been used to house far more than a single Dungeon.

A fraction of that truth was unveiled in this brief quake, for a clear, rectangular pattern of earthly disturbance had outlined the very top layer of that great ziggurat, upon which Willowdale and its surrounding fields were perched.

He took a bite of the pierogi.

“We are not Gods, but Men. Gaze upon our works, ye mighty, and despair - for they shall remain even as you rot away into the foundations of our world.”

A quote that Kama’tok had falsely attributed to Ankhezia’s second emperor, said to have been uttered when the Suncage Receiver was first awoken and lit up the heartland of the empire with seething artificial ley lines of primordial essentia, cutting the heavens into a mosaic. It was long before Kanbu’s time, but meeting the architect of that great work was not.

Kanbu wouldn’t - nay, couldn’t - divulge such secrets freely, having willingly bound himself by geas long ago… But at this rate, he very well might not have to.

At this rate, he only hoped that his forest-dwelling recluse of a comrade would have the good judgment to report back.

Even as Arnys’ every thought was occupied by the minutiae of facilitating the greater trade deals while the attention was fixed on the many bombastic shows she had worked to enable, for each thing that went right, another went wrong.

Several of the caravan’s geomancers and seers foresaw what seemed to be an all-consuming deluge of Terra-adjacent essentia, only for it to come out as nothing more than a minor quake, and yet the landscape surrounding Willowdale told a different story.

The spread of upheaved and shifted land almost made it seem like there was some unimpeachable subterranean edifice acting as a tidebreaker, and although such stable places were not exactly rare settlement locations, it was the origin of that deluge that concerned her.

By all accounts, it had come from the direction of Ubul’s Tomb.

Even if he didn’t wake before the foretold date, this alone was a sign of how severe his reawakening would be, what a monster he had already fashioned himself into.

With the markets and the caravan at large to manage, however, the best Arnys could do was move schedules around and ensure that Willowdale would receive its Second-models as quickly as possible.

She opened an aetherwave communications channel to the governor’s office, finding him fiddling with the machine even as its mechanism recognized her soul signature and automatically accepted the call. Even if she had had the good courtesy to omit spying-devices, this small backdoor was something Arnys had ensured would be built into every single of her aetherphones.

“Hu- I’m sorry? Hello? Someone calling?” a somewhat confused voice sounded from the other side.

“It’s me, Estoras. Small change of plans, we’ll be unloading the Second-models before the reactor parts. Ensure your armories are ready to receive them before the end of the day.”

Arnys cut the call before Crovacus could even muster a response, quietly chuckling to herself as she opened another channel to the Serpent’s Head relay center. From there, she could deliver messages to many aetherphones at once, and thus easily alter the movements of the caravan.

In the middle of a forest, at the edge of the battlefield known as Ubul’s Tomb, within a small, warded lookout post, an old man sat.

He peered out over the desolate field, watching and rapidly sketching depictions of what he saw, occasionally marshalling his arcane skill to create quartz-slip pict-captures.