Zegantha, leader of the first cohort of the planar sentinels, rubbed his temples and sighed in frustration as he looked at the map in front of him. There, on a piece of paper, dozens of different images constantly flickered and changed. In one moment, the map showcased a map of the greater planes - a tangled mess of twisted lines, dimensional passages, and lesser planes. In the next moment, it showed images of what was happening in those planes - or, in more worrying cases, what wasn’t happening in the empty patches of space where entire planes had once been.
He gritted his teeth as the piece of scrying paper looked at three dimensions in a row that had somehow been obliterated. Just a month ago, those three dimensions had been fully intact, functioning parts of the greater plane network. Now, before he’d even had a chance to respond, they were already gone.
The invasion of the Universal Tree was proving hard to fend off. Ever since the Tree had begun invading, the planar coalition had suffered a near constant string of defeats and setbacks. The three attempts to counterattack the tree by invading its main body and inflicting some damage had all met with disastrous defeat - twice at the hands of the inhabitants of the tree, who were as powerful as the average inhabitant of one of the upper planes - and once due to the strange monsters that dwelled near the trunk of the tree, who were far more powerful than even the most high level and dangerous archmages and warriors.
Their knowledge of the enemy was woefully inadequate, and any victory on the battlefield seemed transient and unimportant.
He leaned back into his chair, and turned to his vice captain, Veldomyr.
“Veldomyr, why do you think it’s so hard to win a real victory against these damned invaders?” he asked.
“Scale, commander. The exact same answer as the last seventeen times you asked me this question.”
Zegantha sighed, but nodded. It wasn’t an answer he wanted to hear, but unfortunately, it was reality.
The thousand planes, as the name implied, had originally constituted about a thousand different planes that were all linked together by sturdy dimensional passages. These passages made it easy to travel from one plane to another. For thousands of years, Zegantha had never even heard of someone coming from a place outside of the thousand planes.
Apparently, that was testament to their ignorance, rather than reality. The invasion of the Universal Tree had proven that there were definitely things outside of the thousand planes, and they were much scarier than the powerhouses of the thousand planes. The Universal Tree, as far as he could tell, was comprised of billions of different planes - or perhaps even trillions. They had all been woven together by some… accursed plant, though how a mere plant could possibly eat an entire plane of reality was beyond his understanding.
A mere thousand planes working together were obviously no match for billions of planes working together. Worse, unlike the faction of the universal tree invading them, the thousand planes had never been particularly united. The five upper planes had nearly forty different top-tier factions that had once squabbled and fought amongst each other, establishing their own kingdoms, theocracies, and nations as they battled for supremacy.
While the Universal Tree seemed to be divided into factions as well, there was a big difference between a faction that ruled several hundred thousand plans and a faction that ruled a fraction of one upper-tier plane.
Even if the factions of the thousand planes were united in fighting against the invasion of the tree, it was far from a perfect union of factions. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be eighty-three different military cohorts within the planar sentinels, all belonging to different factions and squabbling over internal resources.
Zegantha felt another headache start to well up as he thought about the wastes of oxygen that ruled over each respective nation and somehow didn’t seem to fully grasp the bigger picture. For all of the power and magic they had accumulated over the millenia of rule and dominance, it seemed that their brains had aged and rusted after the long stretch of time where their only rivals were each other. None of them seemed to understand that if they couldn’t fully work together now, there wouldn’t be a later.
“Any word from the front lines?” he asked Veldomyr. Even though the scrying paper could show him pieces of each dimension, it was still never as accurate as reports from the front lines.
“The Universal Tree got another eighteen planes last month. They made a big push to punch through the Aladrian fortress that guarded space in that area, and managed to rip it apart before reinforcements arrive. Without the spatial lock in place, they flooded most of the protected planes with monsters, and then hit them with tree roots before we could re-establish the lock. Thirty two of the planes survived, but they were mostly less important, weaker planes that both sides placed less importance on. We lost a Tier 11 and a Tier 9 plane. The Tier 11 plane was a large jungle populated with lots of reasonably strong civilizations and a unique type of blood-magic related spark, while the Tier 9 plane had few remarkable features, but acted as a retirement home for several Tier 11 through 13 powerhouses.” Veldomyr sighed. “Just like every other dimension devoured by the tree, there are likely no survivors. All the people in those planes are also lost to us now.”
Zegantha gritted his teeth.
Yet another group of planes lost to the universal tree. He had grown very used to hearing that in reports. And he also hated hearing that in reports, because it seemed like every year he heard it again.
“How many planes do we have left?”
“There are only two hundred and seventy eight planes left of the original thousand. I can’t help but feel that we’ve already passed a breaking point in this war, though. Many of the remaining planes are less populated or have weaker access to mana. The enemy is growing stronger every year, while we’ve lost nearly three quarters of the worlds we used to pull resources from. Even if the five upper planes are still intact… I don’t see a way forward anymore. Even a desperate counterattack where we committed all of our forces probably wouldn’t work.” Veldomyr laughed bitterly. “Not that it would have even at the start of the war. Somehow, they always seem to know what we’re doing.”
Zegantha sighed.
The divination mages of the upper planes had been trying to figure out why the intelligence of each side of the war was so lopsided. They had spent years trying to understand how the universal tree always knew where their reinforcements were, where their weaknesses were, and where their top tier combatants were. Several attempts to find traitors hadn’t yielded any results. Anti-divination measure seemed to work temporarily - but the tree always found ways around it, given enough time. According to the divination mages, the Universal Tree didn’t even have a System - instead, they somehow made use of the fundamental energies the System ran on and used them to cast weird and incomprehensible spells that they had never seen or heard of before. Even though it was possible to defend against those spells, the constant stream of never-before-seen spells, magical inventions, and monsters made it nearly impossible for the front lines to adapt to the enemy. By the time they finished learning how to handle a new threat, the enemy would simply rotate it out and throw an entirely new problem at them.
There were no signs of the situation improving. Ever. In the last decade and a half of warfare, there had never been a stop to the losses. Never a way to really fight back. Zegantha fought back a wave of hopelessness. It truly felt like this war was unwinnable from the very beginning - and the fools at home squabbling over influence didn’t help, even if they weren’t really the main problem.
“If things continue this way, we’ll never have a moment of peace. The tree will just whittle us down, until there’s nothing left but broken planes and fertilizer,” said Zegantha. His heart felt heavy and weary. He was unwilling to let their civilization perish like this. He didn’t want the thousand planes to be reduced to mere fertilizer for some damn plant from outside of their home. And yet, no matter how he thought about it, he couldn’t see any light in the darkness. There was no hope of a comeback. The difference in power, resources, and potential on both sides made the war feel nearly impossible from the beginning.
Zegantha sighed, returned to his desk, and began poring over the images on the scrying paper and the reports from the front lines. Veldomyr stood by his side as the two pored over the reports and searched for a way forward.
Despite how bad things were, Zegantha still held a faint hope that there was a way forward. Something that he had missed, that would reveal itself if he just looked more closely. Somewhere, there had to be hope of turning this war around, even if he hadn’t seen that hope as the years passed and more worlds were annihilated by the invaders.
He just didn’t know how much longer the candle of hope could last before it burned out.
Author’s Note:
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