Millennial Mage

Tala watched as Walden settled himself, clearly believing that their business was done for the moment, his words confirming that assumption. “So, once again, I will await your summons, trusting you to connect my domain to the battlefield so that I will be of actual use. Though, I fear I will be but a rabbit among wolves until the hunt concludes.”

She smiled, bringing her authority to bear, finally ready to show her hand, if just a bit. “But Walden, Immortal Elk of the Sanctum’s Woods…”

As she spoke, the whole of the realm vibrated with her underpinning authority. The elk’s head snapped around to look at her, his feet stomping and shuffling under him as if he’d just noticed a predator that was all too close. The confidence he’d built up as he understood part of her overarching plan—seeing how he fit into her machinations—seemed to evaporate like the morning dew.

Her growing smile didn’t reassure him, and neither did her words. “You have forgotten something of great import.”

Lisa let out a soft chuckle, even as he moved to sit beside Rane in a chair that hadn’t been there before.

Rane eyed the fox-kin questioningly. “You know?”

The smaller man shrugged. “Guessed. The wording was very well laid out.”

“You didn’t want to say anything? Isn’t it your job to clarify?”

His vulpine grin grew. “There was no misunderstanding. If one party forgets the house in which they sit, that is no concern of mine.”

Rane grunted, turning his focus back to Tala and Walden.

For the elk’s part, Walden’s eyes were practically rolling in his head as he tried to look in every direction, clearly utterly uncertain about what was happening.

Tala felt that she left a sufficiently dramatic pause. It was time to truly begin.

She lifted a hand in an unnecessary gesture, but it felt right all the same. “I grant you this domain as your right, your source of power and authority as a creature of magic beneath my auspices. This space and all that is within it rests with you.”

Walden’s eyes widened yet further in sudden realization, his whole body stilling. He understood, and he began to practically tremble in anticipation, clearly unable to believe that what he’d guessed might be true.

Long ago, in their initial bargain, Tala had granted him the forest—the concept and idea of the nature within this limited domain—even while she’d filled it with power that was explicitly not his and which he could not touch.

This sub-expanse was a sphere that he’d only ever been granted a disc of, a three dimensional band through the middle. Even in that, he’d been denied the magic which remained suffusing the dimensionality, and yet, he’d still gained more power than even before his capture from the fact of the growing domain.

There was power in the zeme within a magical beast’s domain, but that wasn’t what actually empowered them, not at a fundamental level. It was the area itself, the continuity of it, the coherence of it, the power of oneness and the need of a guardian that gave birth to a magical beast’s might.

Now?

Tala pulled his authority outward, subinfeudating the entire globe of expanded space and all of the Reforged level magic that saturated it under the immortal elk.

No, more than a standard Reforged level of power. Tala had always had greater magical density than her peers and that had only continued to be true as she’d advanced. It was not quite to the level of an Ascending, but it wasn’t far off.

This space matched her density of power over a far vaster volume than her own body could ever encompass, even with her mirrored stone- and starward selves. Though, it could be argued that this space was her body as well, but Tala saw no reason to split hairs on the particularities of that. It was hers, and she was placing it under this beast’s stewardship.

Walden sucked in a breath, the sound like the oncoming rush of a hurricane as the barest tendrils of power reached him and began to link him to the broader whole.

Terry flickered away, arriving on Rane’s shoulder rather than Tala’s, clearly sensing that Tala needed all her focus.

Why?

Well, for one, simply the granting of power to another didn’t make them capable of bearing it, nor did it truly tie them to it in any meaningful way.

Had this been something granted to Walden when Tala had claimed his cell, he would have slowly grown into it as she, herself advanced and saturated the reality of the domain more and more, but she hadn’t, and so he hadn’t.

If Tala tried to do this all at once now, and simply sat back and watched, the elk would likely have been obliterated, utterly unable to take the raw intensity of the magic involved. In the best case, a facsimile would have then been recreated, a new creature in similar form, likely lacking most of Walden’s memories and personal history if it had any of them at all.

Worse, all of his oaths and compacts would have been rendered moot, and that would have created more work for everyone.

With that as the unpleasant ‘baseline’ option, Tala was understandably unwilling to simply let things take their course. Instead, she bent her will and perception to the task in ways—to the best of her knowledge—only she could.

Her authority within this space was beyond question and her power without equal.

The thick cords of reality bent and moved as she directed them, tying to Walden, and increasing not only his connection to this domain but also the strength of his substance. Flow flickered into her hand briefly taking on ending-forms to let her splice existence itself into a configuration more pleasing to her will.

To be safe, she never left Flow as an endingblade for longer than a single action, always determining exactly what she wished to do, then summoning the power, performing the action, and letting go without giving herself permission to consider delaying or thinking while so influenced.

As to what she was doing? She leaned heavily on what she’d seen Lisa doing, even if she lacked his concept and finesse to accomplish what he’d been able to do.

What she’d learned from him hadn’t been necessary, but it did help fill in quite a few knowledge gaps that she’d had, which was one of the reasons she’d gotten his help and remained to witness all parts of the process.

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Regardless, even without what Lisa had demonstrated, she’d seen and slain magical beasts without count, and she knew their binding to reality and the magic of a region better than almost any human alive—possibly better than all but the most specifically researched arcanes as well—and she knew what needed to be done.

Could she have done this anywhere else? Absolutely not. Out there, she’d have had to contend with innumerable conflicting authorities.

Here, there was only her. This was her, and she had absolute authority over her own body and self.

Beyond the dimensionality and materiality of the situation, there was the magic. In the zeme of Zeme on the superficial, the magic wouldn’t have cared for her, no matter her power, no matter her Reforged nature.

Here, she was Hallowed to this power. Not sovereign, but in a world without Sovereigns? She was supreme.

Then, there was the reality of what she was trying to do, the causality, the primal connections that had to be forged. On the superficial, the world’s interconnectedness would have muddled the potential with overlapping webs of linkages and relationships beyond count, the very complexity of existence working against any such potential action from one such as her.

Here, there was no other existence. This space was defined and finite, the void neatly keeping anything external from interfering. Existence ended at the borders of this sphere.

The singular point of connection outward was to Tala’s sanctum, and she controlled that point of contact as fully as all the rest.

All of that covered the inert portions of what Tala was striving to do, but that left the matters of will, authority, and the sapient being she was working on.

In that, Walden himself was primary.

He’d spent centuries in the cell which was the foundation of this space before Tala had claimed it, suffusing it with his being, his authority, his will.

The fact that he’d deferred that to Tala in their original bargain gave her actions and will weight here.

He was the historical liege of these lands and all within it, one who had willinging bent knee to a new ruler. All of the weight of his history now backed her, deepening her authority in this place to an extent that her young life—however well lived—should have made impossible.

She could not have stripped Walden’s standing away and given it to another. She could not even have accomplished this with a space she’d built herself or with some other being.

What she sought to accomplish was uniquely possible because of Walden himself and his pre-existing unity with this forest.

Just as he will be uniquely positioned to rule the southern woods.

Power roiled, reality nodes met and melded, spheres of existence pressed the void free—even as the void moved to make prominent the outer delineations, thus solidifying that which was together—and reality threads twisted, interwove, and became cables that could hold up the sky.

On a more visual level, Walden’s very bones became saturated with power before that might flowed outward, suffusing his every part.

His eyes glowed with an inner flare of power, and his antlers seemed to all but pulse with lightning.

Every hair across his enormous form slowly began to glow, starting at the follicle and flowing outward to the tip, somehow unified and yet distinct despite the brightness. Each was uniquely luminescent even as they improved the whole.

Then, contrary to expectation, the elk shrank, compacting and solidifying until he was the size of a mundane elk. As the power solidified within him, his coat settled to an iridescence but was no longer glowing.

Tala felt a lot of things click into place within the elk, while there were clearly still a few things missing for him to fully be what he would be.

As a magical creature, he was now an arch-beast, a god-beast in all but scope. Though, one could also be an arch-beast by having great scope without much depth.

In this, Tala had facilitated Walden’s rise, giving him immense depth of connection with his domain. It simply wasn’t large enough to fully elevate the elk.

To be fair, arch-beasts had a large range of power, even if most were considered equivalent to Reforged or Ascending, just as god-beasts were equivalent to Sovereign or Transcendants. In this, the density of power in ‘his’ region would put him higher up, while the relatively small volume would lower his estimation once again.

Only time will tell. He’d be clashing against arch-beasts under the Forest Spirit soon enough.

There was more to Walden now, however. In this space, Tala was more than Hallowed. She was the Hallowed with none above her from the perspective of the magic here.

The magic here had come through her, and though it had been stripped of her aspects, it remembered its origin intrinsically.

Now?

Now, Tala had granted it to Walden, setting the elk up as Hallowed to this power, even if he had no concept, no true authority of his own over it.

He was a hollow Hallowed, much as Eskau Meallain was, holding the power without true authority or conceptual might behind their actions.

Tala frowned at that even as she continued working. That’s not right. Eskau Meallain has a concept and powerfully so. She simply lacks authority all her own…

-Just as you have buckets of authority, but no true concept in the arcane sense.-

Tala disagreed with that—and Alat knew that—but she saw no point in arguing.

She finalized the last twist of reality thread with her will and authority before letting everything settle into place.

She had set everything in motion, gathered the ingredients in close, to the right proportions, and now it was up to Walden to make his own concoction.

Tala didn’t have the ability to alter existence itself… well, she might have been able to, but she didn’t know how to make changes at that level. Regardless, she could make changes to her own expanded space, her own self as gained through her oneness with Kit.

She could change gravity, move anything around at her pleasure, or even erase anything under her authority among so much else.

As such, she layered her changes into existence within that space, preparing the ground for when it would be spliced back into Zeme, her changes and edicts to be carried forth by Walden’s expanding domain.

She couldn’t have changed anything major—this wasn’t some miraculous existence altering workaround—but she could ensure that all power within the elk’s domain was equally bound, and that all stoneward or starward branches of Walden’s forest would fall under her sway, allowing them to contain her density of power without issue.

Only time would tell how well that would work out for the elk and for humanity at large.

If she was right, it might even solve the arcane’s magical issues to some degree, but that was getting ahead of herself.

She was still but one gate, after all, and she had no intention of breaking herself open to become the flood needed for all that might be required.

Toward that end, she’d also added one quite needed feature.

All around the circumference of the forest that was centered in the great sphere, endingtree saplings now grew, pressed hard up against the edge of existence, ready for their upcoming task, a dike of magic poised to press outward.

The working done, she sagged, smiling toward Walden. “It is complete.”

Walden looked down to the ground, a still pond blossoming into existence at his bidding—with not an ounce of magic required—that he might look upon himself more clearly.

The great elk was clearly in awe of what he saw and took long minutes before he lifted his head once more.

“This… With even just this, I am bound to you more tightly than I’d have believed possible.” He let out a great billowing huff. “And we’ve yet to actually lay claim to any of my sire’s domain.”

Tala chuckled. “Oh, my deer Walden, we are just getting started.”

-Your pun is bad, and you should feel bad.-

Hush you.

Rane quirked one eyebrow in clear question: Was there anything else?

Tala gave a tired smile and shook her head. They were done.

Terry flickered to the elk’s back in clear interest, trilling inquisitively.

Walden bobbed his head a final time toward Tala and turned to regard Terry, clearly done with his conversation with the humanoids for the time being.

Without further goodbyes, Tala and Rane willed themselves back to the sanctum proper, bringing Lisa along with them.

There was much yet to do.