Chapter 9-293: Of Mortals and Time (1/2)

“Yes. Yes, they could.” Was my smile reassuring? Surely it was. ”Let me give you an analogy. Mr. President, you have leprosy.” I flicked a tube into existence in my hand, and set it down in midair. “The cure for leprosy is right here. You can just walk over and take it at any time, and fix your leprosy.” I took a finger, and pushed the tube around behind me. “But, you, Mr. Mother Land, must let your leprosy heal itself, because I said so.” I wagged my finger at him, grinning very sincerely ear to ear.

Their faces all fell again.

“Gods want mortal Free Will. They don’t particularly care about Nature Spirits and Fey and Elementals and whatever at all. Mortal Free Will, the thing which drives Creation. Nature Spirits are finite, fixed, limited entities that do not have Free Will, merely Elemental desires and motivations. True Divinities don’t have such restrictions. The Elemental Spirits do not have the power to defy them.” I fixed my eyes on his, my shit-eating smile getting even wider. “Suffer your leprosy. I’m sure it will clear itself up in time. You cannot just go ‘fix’ it, sorry.”

Surely the Land wouldn't resent the gods for that, no, no.

High Justice Emil Brosk, the dwarven Patriarch of Harse, finally rose to his feet. “You paint a dire portrait, Lady Traveler, but, there is a catch to all this.” He paused for emphasis. “That is time. We have until the Shroud is gone, do we not, to put all this into effect? Could we not just... go slow?”

“Mmm, that is a very wise, pragmatic, and practical view of things. We can take all the time we want, as long as we can live with the Shroud. Forever, right?” And I let that trail off, and let the ominousness of it grow.

The dwarf sighed, which seemed like a signal for everyone there to slump slightly. “We do not have that much time, do we?” he asked softly.

I smiled brightly. Beamed, really. “Why, no. No,you don’t have that much time at all.”

“Can you clarify that for us?” he asked quietly, pressing.

Two points flipped up behind me in Holo in reply.

They all groaned softly. Of course, of course!...

“The Shroud is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the Curse of the Dawn. Probably four. The only reason the Curse of the Dawn has endured is that the Shroud here was cut off right at the beginning, and has been unable to grow... and that its power is diluted over thousands of worlds.”

The layers of lost worlds rose up in counterpoint, this world blinking among the Blue.

“The Shroud will overcome the Curse of the Dawn. How long that will take, I don’t know. You don’t know. When it happens, that horde of incredibly powerful undead, the elites of Pentara, slaughtered and Animated to serve their Dark Cardinal master, are going to move out, kill everyone, Animate them, and add them to their Dead March.

“It would probably be a really, really good idea to kill them before they can break free of their cage.”

“Yes,” the dwarf agreed somberly.

“Two, do you think that Dark Cardinal is just going to sit around and wait for true death?” I asked archly. “This was a heroic, mighty figure of another world, a great legend there, now an undead horror. It is neither stupid nor weak.

“And it has sensed the Shroudzones, the demesnes of its competition, start to go away.”

They all winced. “Yes, that’s right. It knows the Shroudlords are all Cursed, just like it. It knows they aren’t fighting one another over the bones of the living, consolidating, and gathering to face it. It wouldn’t care, because if they could get free of the Curse, so could it.

“But now, it has felt them vanish, and they are going to keep doing so!

“Has anyone come for it? Nobody is that stupid... yet. But what happens when all the other Shroudzones are dead and gone? Obviously, we managed to kill them. Obviously, we will come for it... and perhaps we do have the power to threaten it, fight it, and kill it...

“It will go looking for solutions, and you are talking about a thing that has demigod levels of power at the least! It will find a solution, and it will enact it, and at that point, if the Shroud is still up, the Divine cannot save you, and our whole world is going to die.

“Of course, once that happens, it need only wait for the Curse of the Dawn to finally wither and fail, and our cold, dead world and our souls belong to it. Congratulations! You bought yourselves time!”

Nobody responded well to my hearty encouragement, strange.

Camilla, the queen of England sent here by king Charles, rose next. “Tell us, then, what do you expect us to do?” she asked me directly. “These... changes will be quite great, difficult to implement...”

“I expect that you’re going to have to fight, and fight hard for them. There are many, many factions invested in the current balance of power. They simply don’t want to change, and will not do so willingly.

“They are going to get you killed, or they are going to make life miserable and hostile for everyone. But they won’t care and won’t believe it until it is stuck in their face, and even then, it will be someone else’s fault.”

Despite themselves, they nodded. It was what it was, it was how people were.

“First of all, you need to Level up armies of individuals. No, not just one or a handful of powerful people you think you can control. The opposite will happen, and they will control you, and try to eliminate threats to their power, making you all collectively... weak.” Their eyes flashed, and hesitant nods agreed with me.

“You all have the tools to Level your populations, and I have given you the route to do so. Racial Levels or Class Levels, I do not care: Level them up!