BECMI Chapter 129 – The Destiny of the Barhund

“You seem to have some plan in mind for my ship and people,” Captain Emeril stated as we stepped along the corridors, taking an escalator down towards the lower levels, where dozens of the green-tinted humanish crew were hurrying around. Uniforms were in evidence, but supplemented in very non-regulation manners, with shirts, skirts, belts, packs, and other accoutrements on those about me as they hurried to and fro on duties, pushing hovercarts stacked high with various supplies in this and that direction.

Nobody wearing crimson and black, strangely enough.

The floor was vibrating with work being done. The online planners had already designated the ship’s modules that were not essential to the vessel and most useful for salvaging and repurposing, including the stasis pods that nobody wanted to re-enter. Some would be kept for emergencies, but whole sections of the ship were being uncoupled and prepared for fabbing into necessary production facilities for what was going to be a new colony city. The crew numbered thousands, the majority of which wanted to get off and out of here.

If they were trapped here, they wanted to explore their new world and live out under the sun, not in a metal shell, however advanced it might be.

“I intend to secure your technology and make sure it survives the point when the Immortals inevitably get tired of your utter lack of veneration of them. That means it must be dispersed beyond your people and mated to the local magical field to produce something better and different.

“However, it means that the is inevitably doomed. Therefore, vacating the crew and their descendants to a safe distance is also a priority. They will seek to bury your technology and your people, and we must secure them.”

The captain’s mouth set in a grim line. “I see. How long do you think we have before they get tired of us?” he asked firmly.

“Two generations, three if you are suitably entertaining in the interim. Anywhere from forty to sixty solar cycles, in my estimation.” And the past of my own timeline.

Federation genetic treatments could and had greatly extended the lifespans of its citizens. “Will they hunt us down if we escape their wipe attempt?” he asked reasonably.

“Perhaps, but that means you simply need to raise up Immortals of your own to defy such things.” He blinked down at me in surprise at the idea. “Yes, that can be done here. Many of the Immortals here were once mortals of this world. Others, not so much…”

“That… seems like an extraordinary opportunity to work towards,” the captain said cautiously.

“I’m glad you think so. How would you like to become a hero of legend, securing the future of your crew and people against the uncaring Immortals, a patron of technology and mortal advancement?” I asked reasonably. “And who would you like to take along with you on this great and grandest adventure, the ultimate challenge of mortal souls?”

He was silent as we proceeded down to the hangar deck, which was also serving as the temporary center for guidance of the colonization efforts.

The new colony’s mayor, elected from among the senior managers of the research teams, would be needing to sound him out and bring him onboard.

She was solidly White, and if the harsh Blue of the captain was softening towards White almost by the minute, he had a lot to repent for… and, it looked like, was committed to doing so.

The past had changed the instant the Free Company and I had come here, and now I was swinging it even more.

I had plans, you see…

was a very powerful spell that was basically unknown here.

It was , a V, but Cast as an IX, it completely blew past the Metas of a to a colossal one hundred miles per Caster Level. Notably, it extended well underground when I first Cast it, giving me an unparalleled view of the innards of the land, the flow of heat and stone and…

An almost unbroken surface of anti-magical lava, swirling and seething with elemental energies down below us, forming a direct sphere impervious to divination magic about a hundred and fifty miles below the surface.

That would have been… interesting in and of itself, but the divinatory wall couldn’t stop me from seeing that the whole thing had a gravity incline there. As in, a gravity reversal, very, VERY similar to the surge of the field which split the cavern of my birthplace of Sternvult in two.

It also didn’t stop me from seeing the massive hole punched into the planet up at the North Pole, also surrounded by a radiating field of anti-magic that was NOT put there by the planet, resonating with Immortal power.

The outer edges of it looked like either a massive asteroid impact that had smashed square into the planet, or a colossal explosion had punched a hole in the planet.

I stared at that hole far to the north, a hundred miles across, and considered stories from the future.

The water from the surface drained down in numerous cracks and crevices to that layer of molten, anti-magical lava, was reheated under pressure and forced back to the surface like a great elemental circulatory system. There were no flows of water that passed the lava at all and went deeper, which made sense. Pressure of the stone alone would force any water back to the surface, combined with the temperatures.

In spite of that, there were places where winding tunnels of stone somehow defied the great lava oceans down there, plunging right down into the lava and through them without being harmed at all.

There were persistent legends of a land with a red sun that could be accessed through dizzying long and persistent tunnel caverns in the future, and strange creatures and savage peoples could be found there. My had seen that there were tunnels that descended deeper into the mantle than even the shadenelves lived at, but they hadn’t stretched to see the anti-magic layer, only that the tunnels did indeed wind off into the darkness below… and that there might have been some dimensional stretching going on within them.

Nothing but random creatures had lived in them, there’d been no traffic there, but now, looking at what I was, they were highly suspicious.

Not the least because they looked like burrowing worms eating through cheese, and the number of tunnels piercing the mantle actually numbered in the hundreds, just in my area of view.

Very few of them connected directly to the surface, but they all connected to a vast and sprawling underdark of incredible size and magical fecundity, just like existed in the future, only less developed and with almost no sign of civilized creatures existing down there.

The dwarves didn’t delve that deep. The dwarves of this era were not tied to the earthpower and stone like those in the future of my time. Indeed, they loved the out-of-doors and, while comfortable with caves and caverns, actually preferred to live outside, under the sky, and were excellent farmers and herders.

There was only one active group of beings dwelling in those deep caverns, the center of which was located to the north and had organically spread in this direction and up to the surface.

I had found the homelands of the beast-folk, a system of massive underground tunnels several hundreds miles away, under a range of mountains in cold and inhospitable terrain that couldn’t really support any surface life about. They had obviously spread out from overcrowded caverns in all directions, finding the south had lands that were open to the sky and survivable, and so they came up from below, hit the surface, met other races, and fighting happened immediately as all those unchanging, weirdly similar races reacted rather badly to savages coming up and trying to kill them and take all their stuff.

But I had it all up, mapped out, even if the areas they’d dug out and shored up themselves were blurred and black and impossible to see inside, ‘civilized’ in a savage way and no longer natural. They were great dark snakes and pits in the stone, like watching colonies of mold growing underground, pumping out a constant flow of new beast-folk into all the surrounding lands.

Perhaps very unsurprisingly, despite all of what must have been constant in-fighting for food and shelter, hostile living conditions, and an unremittingly violent culture, there were still hundreds of thousands of them. The earth could feel the movement of them and their feet and hooves, moving through the earth, over the earth, spreading slowly and constantly away from their home caverns.

If they were a created species, it was clever and insidious. Even if they utterly lacked the ability to organize, inquire, learn, adapt, and improve themselves, it was still a basically hidden and unassailable homeland, constantly sending out more bodies to spread havoc and violence. What improvements they were making socially they were learning after making it to the surface and encountering other species who had managed to advance their cultures.

I had a long-term goal here.

I also noted there were a LOT of places the couldn’t reach, scattered across the surface of the continent, and sometimes plunging deep. Some were obviously magical places, the energies of Immortals about them clearly covering up something, while others had more mortal magicks wound about them. In any event, the stone was or mined, and the could read nothing.

Likewise, any civilized town, village, mine, or even inhabited forest rapidly began blurring and unable to be read, keeping its secrets by losing the natural ties of pure wilds, and this even meant the elven lands. I could see the magic and influence of hynfolk, dwarves, and elves clearly where they dwelled and by how thoroughly they stove off the natural energies or aligned themselves with only part of it, while almost all human settlements were unapologetically attempts to control and constrain nature in the viewpoint of this spell.

I also had a very clear map of the terrain for four thousand miles around, land and sea alike, more than accurate enough to to the edge of it, re-Cast the spell, and so blanket the world in my and get a very accurate map to match an orbital .

To the great regret of the Northmen, I could very, very clearly see all their settlements spread across the fjords and islands to the north of us, places no maps were drawn of, known only by scattered stories and the memories of the captains and navigators of the Ertobelle tribes and clans there, that none come by land or sea to harry them as they harried us.

Secrecy, as always a great defense.

Likewise, the Ei of Hazz. Its entire island realm was a gray wall of nothingness, a combination of civilized manipulation and magical disruption that made sure none could see within it.

It was shared by at least two other such places further to the North, areas extending underground and sprawling out in isolation and secrecy under stone and mountains, not connected to the Underdark, and very much not natural in the slightest.

Either the Ei of Hazz was not alone or unique, or it had more than one holding, and this island which the elves confirmed had been dredged out of the bottom of the Black Sea was just one area it could threaten the lands of civilized races from.

It was a magical world, and very unsurprisingly, it was full of many, many secrets, hinting at a history that was very convoluted and suitably epic in nature.

I noted at least fourteen sites that were buried in the ground that were almost certainly technologically-forged holdouts, city sewage systems, underground vaults, or buried military bases, too, along with dozens of scattered ruins covered by time and nature and yet still unnatural, still defying everything, and yet buried from sight and knowledge by a thorough yet hasty hand that was plainly concealing them from accidental wandering discovery, but not by magic of this level.

Yeah, there’d definitely been a high-tech society here on this world at some point. And if the ages were right, it had died at about the same time that hole in the world had formed. Then the Immortals had taken advantage of the event to bury it forever…