I’m not sure what I was expecting from the golgari when we showed up on their mountain. A friendly reception? Certainly not. However, I really didn’t expect something like this.

Marzban roars something and the whole ship changes.

The boat rattles with brathian feet pounding on the wooden deck.

[There’s going to be a fight, let me down! I can kill them. Kill them all!]

[I said I’m not letting you down until you relax, and I meant it.]

[Gaaaah!]

Odin thrashes about uselessly, but there’s nothing he can do.

[See? You need to work out that anger. I’ll float you up some Biomass later, so be quiet for a minute.]

[I’m not a pet!]

[That’s the spirit.]

In the distance, a stone is arcing toward us through the air, fired from… something about halfway up the giant mountain in front of us. Obviously, I’m not an expert when it comes to siege weaponry or anything, but I don’t think this is going to hit us.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, as the brathian mages get together and blast it out of the sky, sending a shower of stone shards crashing into their hastily raised shields.

[Need any help?] I ask the brathian warrior.

[What can you do in this situation?] he asks tersely.

He’s not being rude or anything, he just genuinely wants to know.

[I can catch the rocks in the air and float them away from the fleet, but I suspect they aren’t trying to hit us anyway.]

He turns to me with a brow raised, light glittering off the scales on his bare arms.

[You sure about that?]

[Nope, but look at the trajectory of this next one. I think it’s going to miss.]

[What next one? Oh, sand and seashells!]

He roars something else at the crew and I can see people are freaking out all over the fleet. Shifting my head slightly I take a better look at the Legion fleet behind me. Right now, they don’t appear to be doing anything, but if things devolve any further, they might launch an attack.

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I might as well take control of the situation.

With a flex of my will, I begin to pull in vast amounts of mana, channelling it through a gravity magic construct in a furious torrent of power. With the resulting energy, I start to weave, utilising dozens of my mind constructs to compress the energy and shape it into the spell I desire.

As the enormous boulder reaches the peak of its arc and begins to descend, I judge the distance carefully and prepare to release my spell.

[I’ll take care of it,] I tell Marzban, and unleash the magic.

Infused with power from my Altar, the sheer raw energy that floods out of my monstrous form is shocking, an invisible shockwave that radiates upwards. Hundreds of metres overhead, a gravity well snaps into being, catching the offending boulder in its irresistible grip.

It doesn’t take much to redirect the boulder once I’ve got it under my influence. I spend a bit of energy to slingshot it around my well and it catapults harmlessly off to the side.

[I’m kind of surprised that they defend themselves by flinging rocks at people,] I remark to Marzban. [It’s not like there aren’t more impressive options available to us than that.]

The martial leader of the brathian expedition hardens his expression as he continues to stare at the mountain before us, watching for any sign of another projectile.

[Don’t underestimate them,] he warns me. [This time, it was only simple rocks, but they can throw far more deadly things than that, and much further than you might expect. Greystone is known as an impenetrable fortress for good reason.]

Living up to its name, the mountain in front of us is indeed formed of grey stone, with little green life marking its rocky cliffs, as one would expect to see here in the fourth. That’s not the only modification that the golgari went and made to this particular mountain.

Far from it.

More than any other mountain I’ve seen on this stratum, Greystone is massive. Rather than doing the normal thing one would expect a mountain to do, which is get smaller the taller it gets, Greystone is almost a pillar, rising up in a near straight line from the water’s edge, right up to the top, where it touches the bottom of the third.

Now, I don’t need to be told this isn’t natural. The mountains on the fourth aren’t formed this way, which means they changed the shape of the mountain manually, conjuring up new stone using mana. Perhaps that doesn’t sound impressive, the Colony could do the same thing, but staring up at the absurd reality of Greystone, and its sheer, unimaginable weight, really drives home just how much of an effort it would have been.

We are talking about BILLIONS of cubic metres of stone. BILLIONS. Maybe more than that! These mountains already made everything I’d ever seen back on Earth look tiny, but this is absurd! It’s like they created a second Everest and then moulded it around the original Everest!

The sheer amount of magical energy that was poured into this, the boggling amount of stone shaping work that would have required…. It must have taken them hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand, years.

Honestly, the Colony would never do something like this, because we would consider it a waste of effort and energy.

For whatever reason, the golgari didn’t feel that way. They wanted to make a statement, and they succeeded. It’s impressive as heck.

As we continue to sail towards this absurd pillar of stone, there are no further incidents, thank Gandalf. That doesn’t mean the tension is gone, though. Eran is furious.

It doesn’t bode well for our stay amongst the people of stone.