Chapter 225 – Two Weeks
Of course, shifting a portal between worlds from one site to another was not something you did on a whim. Even with Shalaevar Ilimys, the Archmage who conducted the initial ritual, here to help, it was still a technically demanding process. More importantly, it was a process that demanded precision. You did not half-ass things, when playing with the fabric of space and time.
The spellwork for the initial ritual was a thing of beauty, really. I could say, without exaggeration, that I was one of the most powerful beings, magically, in two worlds. I knew more about magic than most mages would ever learn. However, I was honest enough to know that I did not know everything, and, outside of Death, I did not have the deep wells of knowledge and experience that other Archmages had. So, I was neither surprised nor offended when looking at Ilimys’s spellwork showed me concepts I had never considered, before.
Experience, knowledge, and perspective were the three pillars of mastery, my old teacher used to say, when we’d first been summoned. And that was why it was important to keep from believing that one being, any being, had all the answers. Because those pillars cast shadows, and offered blind spots. Experience could be a cage, when novel things happened. Knowledge could trap you, when what you uncovered gaps and exceptions to the rule. And perspective could blind you, if you focused too narrowly, and did not take in other points of view.
The ritual that Ilimys and the other elves had done worked with magic as I knew it, but the perspective they had to bridging the gap between worlds was different from mine. Part of the ritual had been a seeking spell. They were looking for me, in particular. That, plus the fact that they were conducting the ritual in a place where the path had already been walked twice before, made things easier than they otherwise would have been.
Naturally, I took extensive notes on the spellwork, and its implications. Beyond simply traveling between worlds, there were concepts in the ritual’s composition that could be useful for other things, as well. The entire shape of things was important, but so, too, were the connections that bound the ritual together. And those connections could be copied and used in other settings, for other rituals.
Of course, I also forwarded the ritual spellwork, along with my notes, to Onedeirth, in his ‘human’ persona of Akaryu Kiba. I had promised the dragon that we would work together to find a way to get him back to his homeworld. However, both of us were powerhouses in our own rights, and we knew the dangers of brute forcing a connection, to both worlds. This ritual would not work as it was now, since it was keyed primarily to link Onerth and Earth, with a search for me as the conduit. However, it gave us a platform to build from, and a template we could follow. Instead of trying to build a working car from raw metal, like we’d been doing before, now we at least had schematics and a pile of parts.
As for the portal in Seattle, I had a small force of ten Death Knights stand guard at the portal, mostly to keep people from trying something stupid, but also as a first line of defense, should something slip past the elves, or break through them. I had set the stage for monsters to ravage Onerth, after all, so I wasn’t going to assume that the other side of the portal was safe. And I also wasn’t going to let random idiots start trying to study the portal’s makeup. Because there was no way that would end well.
I did, however, offer a concession to the Americans, since I knew that being too high-handed, even if I was right, would only move us back towards the adversarial relationship the last president had towards Risen Athelia. After the ‘gas leak’ that wiped out everyone on the White House grounds, the new president had a bit more fear towards me than his predecessor, but fear compounded with insults led to desperation. And desperation led to stupid decisions. Better to extend an olive branch.
My concession was that I allowed Dr. Daniel Fletcher, the head of the Thaumaturgy department at the University of Seattle, to observe as we dissected the spellwork, and worked on changes. That, and I gave him a minor enchanted item, allowing him to speak, read, and understand Elvish. An exception to my ban on works from those attached to Athelian Arms or Phantomline being held by Americans, and only because I bound the amulet to his soul, so no other could use it. Minor concessions, but ones that allowed me to control any narrative, and the flow of information. And it also meant that Dr. Fletcher’s star would rise in academia, since he was one of the few humans in the US who could understand the elven language, for now.
Archmage Ilimys had her own enchantments to understand foreign tongues, so that was not a problem. Actually, she was fascinated with the idea of Thaumaturgy, since its structure ran counter to everything she knew about magic. I understood that feeling all too well. When we were not working on retooling the ritual so that the portal could be moved, she was speaking with Dr. Fletcher, as they compared their magical knowledge. It looked as though there might be a connection forming there, but I left it be. No reason for me to intervene, at this early stage, when it could just be academic curiosity on both sides.
Still, even with bringing in the Magelords of the Athelian Spire, so that there were ten Archmagi working on the problem, converting the spellwork to shift the portal in Seattle to the one my Earth mages had constructed on Pagan took two weeks. Well, the initial conversion was done in one week, but no one objected to my insistence that we take an extra week to carefully check, and double-check, each word and rune of the rite, to ensure that everything was correct.
The portal on Pagan was not the smaller version I’d constrained the Seattle gateway into. Since I did not need to worry about a tide of monsters, I intended to have the gateway be the full forty meters tall and thirty wide, like the Onerth side of the portal. Large enough that I could send some of Risen Athelia’s airships through, if I wished. The ships would be good scouts, capable of roaming the lands of Athelia-that-was, without drawing the attention of any of the undead monsters that remained in the land.
Normally, having such a tall structure, out in the open, unsupported, would make it vulnerable to storms. However, the magic tapped into the connection between two worlds, stabilizing it, strengthening it. The only way to damage the stone, while the portal remained, was to have enough force to shatter the boundary between worlds. Even for me, as the Heroine of the Elements Undivided, Dragon Ascendant, Archlich and Archmage, that was not a simple task. I could do it, if I focused my intent on that goal, but it was far simpler to blow away a mountain than it was to blow a hole into the fabric of reality with raw power. Such things usually happened with ritual magic, or where a confluence of events already weakened the structure of reality in the area, and a stable portal actually reinforced the fabric of reality, rather than fraying it.
Two weeks after the initial connection, I successfully led Archmage Ilimys and my Magelords in the ritual which shifted the portal from Seattle to Pagan. As a further concession to the Americans, once the portal in Seattle was taken apart, and the runework in the stone wiped clean, I donated the hewn stone blocks to the University of Seattle’s thaumaturgy department. They would not be able to recreate the portal from that, and there was little risk of them doing anything dangerous with the magically enhanced stone, but it would give their researchers something to study, which was its own kind of gift.
The Elves of the Blood Oak, as the survivors of Elthara were now being called, had not been idle those two weeks, either. I had sent several of my civilian undead through the portal, with supplies. Not food or water, for the elven mages could take care of that. No, I’d sent laptops, projectors, and speakers which had solar chargers and could also run off ambient mana. The laptops were loaded up with history documentaries, covering Earth history from the beginning of civilization to the present, though with more focus on the colonial era, the world wars, the cold war, and what had happened since the Awakening.
It was a very basic overview of Earth history, obviously. Even if you’d had a full semester course, instead of two weeks of TV documentaries, you still wouldn’t have been able to cover more than the highlights of that much time. That was fine, though. A more thorough understanding of Earth could come in time. Right now, I wanted them to understand what had shaped the world I came from, and the kind of world that they would be living in, now.
That wasn’t just so that they could better acclimate, of course. The elves were, frankly, all far too powerful to be allowed to roam free without someone putting some common sense into their heads. I, at least, was fully aware of how much more powerful my forces and I were than the common people of the world. But, up until this point, my people were essentially divided into undead from Onerth and living mortals from Earth who were only the first generation to start growing their mana pools. If the elves tried to go around without having some true understanding of their relative power, then they’d cause a great deal of damage, and forcing me, as their liege, to pay reparations. There was even the chance that I would have to put them down, if they were too rambunctious. Which would not be in anyone’s interests.
The first people through, once the portal reopened at Pagan, were members of the Chapter of the Ebon Skull, the death cult which had sprung up, worshipping me as an unliving avatar of vengeance and the wrath of Murena, Goddess of Death and the Hunt. According to the cult’s tenets, I was the cleansing blade, Murena’s answer to a world that had fallen into decadence. The use of Slave Collars to strip the will of people, and Hero Summonings to kidnap others and force them to combat threats that the leaders did not want to put in the work to preventing from rising, much less ending them when they were true threats, combined with how the world so eagerly allowed Risen Athelia to handle all the fighting against the Demon King and his people? Well, was it any wonder that Murena had sent someone to ensure that the mistakes would not continue?
Chief amongst these cultists was Ailmar Venrel, High Death Speaker of the Chapter, and an Unholy Priest who had once served Vildon, God of Peace and Hope. His faith had been shaken during the time leading up to my class’s summoning, and the fact that no heroes could be summoned after Athelia-that-was fell sent shockwaves through the Free Kingdoms. When the ‘hope’ for an end to the Demon King and the Long War came from an Undead, who used the bodies of every fallen soul in every cemetery or battlefield she passed to add to her legions? Hope, as Vildon’s church preached it, died within him, replaced by the first vestiges of belief in my being an avatar of divine vengeance. Now, Ailmar stood as an Unholy Priest of the Queen of the Damned.
Magic responded to belief, and Holy and Unholy mana were no different in that regard. Even if the object of veneration was not a god, the pure belief allowed the wielder to cast spells in their name. This was how a Holy Priest of Justice, or an Unholy Sword of Anarchy might still use their powers to the fullest, even though they did not worship a godhead, but instead venerated an ideal. So, I was not surprised that Ailmar’s devoted belief allowed him to cast spells in my name.
The purity and intensity of the belief, however, did give me some surprise, however. Divinities gain power from the belief of their people. I was used to the tendrils of energy that linked me to those of my people, living and dead, who believed in the cult’s tenets. But I was not used for over five hundred thousand new sources of energy reaching out to me, in a way that I could absorb the energy sent my way, without needing complex arrays or preparation. I had no way of knowing what was coming, but I figured it was going to be spectacular.