.
It was certainly a long evening, as Amelia and Chiara listened to my story. The evening grew cold and they had to start the ‘fire’ in the ‘fireplace’, which was actually a magic heating tool, running on Fire element magic stones.
Many times, they had trouble believing me, of course, although Brigitte defended me pretty vigorously. The fact that I had known about Ilim Below, and was able to trace Amelia all the way here after having found her from above, had convinced her that my story was true.
I included my connections to the Fairy King and my troubles in Tëan Tír. I did leave out Oranos and Eurybia, but I told them about the Elders and the immortals and my origins, and explained that the person who had helped them was also an Elder, albeit one that I didn’t entirely trust, considering he’d been the real vampire threat in Copen.
Needless to say, the shock of Chiara’s betrayal and my own story left my foster sister with an awful lot to think about when the mortals settled down to sleep.
“Aren’t you going to sleep as well, Tiana?” Amelia asked as she watched me using one of the rags that Amelia and Chiara had received to polish Durandal. She had already slipped out of her outer clothes and gotten under the cover. They had already dimmed the magic lanterns, so I was mostly working from firelight and the small amount of moonlight coming through the frosted windows.
“I’m heading out to check a few things,” I told her. “I need to take a soak, as well.”
I stood and straightened my clothes, then put Durandal in his scabbard and looked over at Chiara. “Miss Brigitte may look small and harmless, but she’s a seasoned adventurer, and quite dangerous.”
Earlier, after the discussion about Chiara’s involvement, I had convinced Brigitte to take my dagger back and thread her loincloth cord through the belt loop to carry it. Contrary to her expectation, it really did work out. She was now properly armed. Although a fox girl and her claws are never truly unarmed.
Chiara pressed her lips together, but nodded and declared, “Understood.”
I’m sure she wished she could protest not being trusted, but she understood why she wasn’t. If I had something to tie her up with properly, I would be doing it.
I slid the front door open and slipped out onto the stone porch.
Just like the simulated sun earlier, a pair of first quarter moons now hung in the sky, the very same moons we had left, up on the surface. They showed the right phase for this date, the seventh of the month. As I suspected, the sky we were seeing was a reflection of the sky at some spot on Huade. I wondered if the managing spirit construct matched the weather to that location, then realized that it wouldn’t. This small world was created back during the Ice Age as a refuge from that eternal winter, after all.
After sliding the door closed, I first headed to the pavilion. Unlike the cottage that Amelia and Chiara had watched being built, the pavilion had been the only artificial object here other than the monolith when they arrived, unless one counted the garden and the gardeners. I was curious about it.
It was built in the same Elder Age style as the pavilions I remembered from the pleasure domes of that era. This didn’t necessarily mean it was that old, but it could be. The Servants had known spells to restore old wood and metal to its original condition. If the gardeners or some other creation of the Elders knew maintenance magic here, they could have kept this building for that long through repeated treatments.
A colonnade of square posts covered in enamel marked the boundary between the outer patio and the inner sanctuary. The building was an octagon, but the roof of jade tiles that the colonnade supported was the same shape that I had seen in the ceilings of the stairwell, the Planetary Observation Display room, and the pleasure dome itself, a cloister vault. This one’s corners were truncated to fit the octagonal floor that the roof sheltered.
I passed through the colonnade into the inner pavilion, but didn’t step up onto the raised floor. That would have been where the tables and sitting cushions were placed, but there was no carpet or matting. For some reason, I didn’t feel right about not taking off my slippers, but didn’t want to walk on the unfinished floor barefoot either…
After resolving the quandary by turning about-face and sitting on the raised floor, I tapped on the pouch hanging from the leather thong around my neck.
“Lucy, can you come out?”
“Out!” she declared as she appeared.
I smiled at the little creature. Although smaller, she reminded me of Kiki, whom I was starting to really miss.
“Are you able to contact Lady Dilorè’s Wind spirit or Lord Moram from here?”
Actually, I knew the answer, but I figured I should confirm it, just in case the deceased owner had rigged something up.
Lucy shook her head. “Far!”
She meant she was out of range. And she was right. She was in entirely the wrong universe at the moment.
“Thank you. You can go back into the stone when you get tired.”
She flew off, instead, becoming a firefly in the distance very shortly. She seemed to be curious about the garden. Or perhaps, the gardeners, who were still patiently laboring there, unhindered by the darkness of night.
I closed my eyes and expanded my vampire sense.
As I expected, this pavilion was the center of this particular pocket universe. It was an ellipsoid, a flattened bubble with a radius of an astonishing eight miles horizontally and one mile vertically. Rock and basins of water filled the bottom half and atmosphere filled the top half. It began with a copy of the physical rules of Huade’s universe but imposed custom spatial curvature rules to create gravity and govern its boundaries. Nothing lay beyond the ellipsoid: such a thing as ‘beyond’ simply didn’t exist. It was like defining the sound of one hand clapping.
If I tried walking outward in a straight line I would simply find myself having turned at some point to walk around the perimeter. If I was walking along the perimeter, turning outward would result in turning 180 degrees and walking the other direction along the perimeter. The two directions had no midpoint between them.
I discovered that animal life existed here, and some of it was extraordinary. One example was a certain magical species that the demons had driven extinct during the end times of the Elder Age, while converting them all into a certain demonic breed…
For a moment, I was seeing this as preposterous and impossible. No world of this size could possibly support such large creatures. Then the scale registered. These were preposterous, all right. Preposterously tiny. Also, there seemed to be one flying straight toward me at that moment.
I stood and faced it, sliding the safety loop off Durandal’s cross-guard when it didn’t change course.
“Do you see it, Old Man?”
Indeed, My Lady. I’ve never seen such a creature.
It confirmed its scale by flying into the pavilion between two columns with room to spare for its fully extended wings. It then flared and alighted on the raised floor.
Ancient dragons had been the toys of the primordial gods of Huade, golden creatures they had fashioned by converting the naturally evolved wyverns from monsters into magical beasts and scaling them up. Along with naga, kirin, gryphons, baize, xiezhi and others, they were the magical species that the primordials had frittered away their time on, while ignoring the naturally evolving mortals and monsters and the developing disaster that would almost wipe them out.
But ancient dragons most definitely were never this little creature that could ride my shoulder like a parrot if I could persuade it to. I seriously wanted to try.
“Greetings to Commander Senhion!” it declared in Ancient Fairy. “The creature addressing you is one of my vessels. I am the Autonomous Reasoning Construct maintaining this space. My name is Busy Lu.”
The creature did not move its mouth to speak, and neither would the ancient dragons. All their throats could produce were breath attacks and roars. The voice was a product of an innate Wind magic skill.
I smiled and bowed to the creatures. “Greetings, Busy Lu. My respects to your late master, Subcommander Taihimel of the Tenth Legion. She was a respected colleague. And my thanks for the gift of shelter for my companions and me.”
“This humble entity remains ready and able to support the Twenty Four Legions in whatever way she can.”
“I am troubled by this vessel who addresses me, though. The full-sized Ancient Dragons were intelligent creatures. Are you truly subordinating this one’s mind to support your own?”
The creature looked down, then back up, and stated, in a different voice, “Greetings, Commander Senhion. I am Runiwar, the particular dragon who came before you to provide a voice to our world manager. Our superior borrows only a small part of the brains belonging to each dragon, peryton and xiezhi to host herself. The core vessel had difficulty managing such a large space, so Subcommander Taihimel requested this assistance to her from our species in order to expand her capacity.”
When it said, ‘managing the space’, it meant it literally. It was a particular challenge to keep a small world this large orderly and stable. Networking brains in this way was a novel way to address the problem.
I shook my head. “I’m truly amazed at your size though. You know that in the outer world, all your species were far larger?”
The perytons and xiezhi that I was seeing were even smaller than this parrot-sized dragon, hardly as large as field mice.
I remembered the term “Insular Dwarfism”. Animals evolving smaller to fit the ecology of an island. On Earth, the paleontological record included the evolution of dog-sized mammoths and rhinos and even miniaturized humans, to survive isolated islands. But populations of creatures of this size couldn’t have survived in this small space long enough to evolve.
Runiwar answered, “Our species were miniaturized by the immortals in order to insure our survival. To avoid difficulties of survival among normally-sized species, we were held in small worlds such as this one. My ancestors chose to remain here at the Subcommander’s invitation.”
Perhaps this was a detail Senhion hadn’t been aware of. It was natural, since during the repopulation of the surface she had been involved strictly in oceanic work.
I nodded. “At any rate, if Busy Lu is using part of your brain without causing you harm, and with your permission, I have no qualms about the arrangement. May I speak to her again?”
“Certainly,” it answered with a bow of the head, and when it rose back up, the managing spirit was in charge again.
“It would be troubling if you disapproved, so I thank you for your tolerance, Commander,” she said. “May I ask if there is any assistance I can provide?”
“Right now, you’re doing fine as is,” I assured her. “I would like to ask, is there any way for you to arrange for my trained spirit to communicate with the outer world?”
“It would be difficult to arrange this, Commander,” the mini-dragon answered apologetically. “I have means to communicate with Elders trained in spirit arts outside, and if they so choose, immortals such as the supervisors can communicate with me, but only on their initiative. I can also communicate with other house managers in the network through my portal system. These are my only external communications systems which have living correspondents at the current time.”
I suspected that the first category she mentioned was a reference to Diurhimath. I filed that away for future use, then asked, “Is it possible for me to go out and come back?”
“Observer Diurhimath of the Orbital Survey Squadron of the Twenty Fourth Legion has left a message for you in case this question arose.”
I sighed, then asked, “What is it?”
Diur’s voice issued from the creature. “My Lady, I don’t believe the manager will enforce it even if I try, so there is no point in forbidding this, but please take extreme precautions if you go out. I don’t believe the demons currently know about the pleasure dome or suspect that we are accessing it, but if they detect you, they can certainly get to you there. Please use your cloak and avoid coming back into the greater cavern.”
With a wry smile, I nodded. “Alright. I only want to get back to the outer world to communicate, anyhow. Will you permit my re-entry after I leave?”
“Certainly, Commander. Consider this small world at the disposal of the Third Squadron until Subcommander Taihimel returns. The portal system will respond to your commands. If you ever need to speak to me again, please inform the portal or the proxies taking care of the garden.”
I was tempted to ask, “Why are you guys maintaining a vegetable garden?”, but I didn’t want to extend the conversation. I smiled and thanked it, and it flew away. After summoning Lucy’s avatar back to the stone, I went out to the pleasure dome, cloaking before I went through.
After settling down in the moss, I had Lucy connect me to Dilorè’s Wind spirit. I jumped as she responded, “YOUR HIGHNESS, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN???”
