Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

Chapter 584: The First Pillar of Civilization

My mango trees were burning.

Half the mountain was burning, one of the endless wildfires dotting the landscape. A cursory look suggested some asshole Classer had dropped a [Firebomb] or something similar on our villa - it was nearly charred black, with burnt and blackened trees surrounding our home, followed by a ring of fire around it. Trees crackled and popped, sap boiling out and exploding, while flaming branches fell over, spreading the fire more. The enchantments I’d laid on my orchard had slowed the flames down - only sensible, given that I lived with Auri - but it was clear at a glance that the trees were beyond saving. They weren’t in the ‘edges of the trees are getting crispy’ phase, they were full-on ‘burning bush immolation’ phase.

As much as I loved them, as often as I’d enjoyed their tender, succulent fruits, they weren’t what was important right now.

“Bunker.” Iona and I said at the same time. Fenrir needed no encouragement, immediately diving down towards his burning lair. He unhinged his jaws and a mighty [Ice Beam] went through the inferno, the temperature plummeting to an uncomfortable degree.

Sentinel Skater whooped behind us and dove straight in, firing Icy blasts from her hands. Auri fluttered down as well, and while not quite as dramatic as the other two, she was remarkably effective. The moment she got near, the flames were simply snuffed out.

Fenrir pulled up near the concealed entrance to the bunker, and Iona and I fearlessly dove off. A suspicious rockslide had buried the entrance, and Iona swore as she started to grab rocks larger than she was, and simply hurled them away.

“Everyone’s alive.” I said, seeing them through [The World Around Me]. “They’re unhappy, but alive. Going in.”

I [Teleported] through the meters of rocks, appearing inside the bunker.

We’d dug it out over the years, and when it became clear that we wanted to also have a safe spot for Orthus village, we’d spent significant time and effort expanding it again and again and again, enough room for some 200 souls. It wasn’t comfortable room, to be sure. The bunk beds were four to a room, the sanitation was basically a line of holes over a single deep hole, the food was as basic as could be, Iona had to bend her neck to navigate the low hallways, the ventilation was questionable, and there was always the lingering question of ‘what do people DO while stuck in here’, but the point wasn’t comfort, the point was pure survival.

People had survived, which was more than could be said for the citizens of Sanguino, and a hundred other cities.

I teleported sideways, close to the ceiling, and grabbed on with my fingers and heel to the top of the hallway. I clung to the ceiling like a spider, an impossible maneuver without my dexterity. Being able to grab things with my heel just made perfect sense.

The tiny part of my [Luminary Mind] that remembered Earth was screaming that it made no sense at all.

It was the only way I could fit in - the hallway was packed with people, and to my poor senses and understanding, was threatening to start a crush.

I spent a few leisurely moments in the confines of my mind working everything out. There was time, a hasty move now could make this dramatically worse.

We had to bow to natural sciences when making the bunker. We couldn’t assume people with particular skills would make it to the bunker, either due to an accident, them traveling, or, pure and simple, dying of old age before needing it. The place was built entirely agnostically to skills and magic, no enchantments requiring arcanite to upkeep. People needed to breathe, there was no way around it. That meant we needed ventilation - and the fires raging outside were happily sucking the air out of the bunker on one end, and pouring smoke in the other. Add in the doors being blocked by a landslide - we’d picked a place where there couldn’t be a landslide - and the place was a dry mass of grass that had a flaming torch thrown into it.

It really, really didn’t help that the bunker was hilariously over capacity. A quick skim suggested around 600 people were inside, which was absurd. We didn’t have the capabilities for that many people. What started off cozy for 200 had turned into downright cramped for 600, and that was before endless objects had been dragged in as well. We did not need grandma’s favorite dresser… okay, to be fair, it was pulling serious weight storing things. There had been rules set down for use of the bunker, rules that had been put aside and disregarded.

Then again, if I were Skye and 400 people showed up demanding entry, it might be hard to turn them away. In the end, if it worked out, I wasn’t going to complain that our preparations had saved triple the lives we thought it could.

It wasn’t like people had decided to lie down and die. A strong light from deeper in the bunker was letting people see, a cleaning skill kept the latrines from stinking, [Musicians] were playing and kids were being entertained. Food was being spiced up, and most of the smoke was being pulled into a tight ball, then released back out through one of the vents.

Skye and the [Mayor] were surrounded by angry - panicked, really, but one emotion flowed into the next - [Villagers]. Varuna, Skye’s bonded unicorn, was behind her, an intimidating show of muscle and horn brought down quite a bit by how much he needed to hunch over. The place was not unicorn-sized, but the magical effects of his hooves, horn, and mane were magnified in the dark. Titania was being a gem, as always, keeping a portion of the bunker clean and tidy on her own. Secondus Nix, my once-apprentice and grandson of Nix, was cuddled up with his wife and baby. More friends and familiar faces were here, a testament to the decades of preparation.

They’d worked.

Alright. With Iona about to show up, all I needed to do was to keep a lid on everything for the next hour, tops, and stop people from self-destructing. I mentally flipped through my spell list before deciding that I needed to manually draw a rune big enough for all the power and mana I was going to shove into it, and [Teleported] twice next to Skye.

[Luminary Mind] was a champion, letting me do a half dozen things at the same time to regain control of the situation.

With one thought I cast [The Mantle of Dusk and Dawn] in the stars, or dawn, configuration, boxing in everyone into their own private hexagon. My mana flickered as people crashed into the cage, and the cold truth of my shield skill tried to rear its ugly head again. I spent mana per impact, and boxing in slightly north of a hundred people all at once wasn’t cheap or simple, not when all their physical stats came to bear.

Except my mana regeneration came out like an angry bear, laughed at the drain, and smacked the cold truth back into its lair.

Efficiency? Power? Cost? All was made futile in front of overwhelming System-granted power. I caught the thought and chucked it down a mineshaft. Maybe the Shluggoth would eat it.

Overwhelming levels and power was no substitute for good governance, or letting me think I should push people around just because. Down that path lay becoming a [Warlord], and Night’s earliest lessons resonated the hardest with me.

I would not become a warlord, I would not use my strength as an excuse to do what I wanted. Sometimes, rarely, I needed to be a brute to save a bad situation, but leaning on that excuse was a sure-fire way to go down a bad path.

The road to hell was paved with good intentions, and I had to remember that.

The second thought was casting [A Light Shining in the Darkness] behind myself, lighting the room up like a shadeless day under the noon sun. A ‘Pay attention to me’, when combined with popping my halo from [Sunrise Halo] made me impossible to ignore.

The third was conjuring up a pot of ink and a quill, then using a short, powerful Radiance pulse to etch a rune as large as I was into the wall, molten stone starting to drip out. I [Teleported] it into a cooling slag heap at my feet, then my hand blurred as it filled in the gap with ink, using [Reality, Writ As You Will] to create the largest single Jiwa rune I’d ever cast. Size did matter - the larger the rune, the larger the strokes, the more mana could be channeled through it, the bigger the impact. No teeny tiny runes with gigantic effects.

[Immaculate Purification] was cast a moment later, purging everything from smoke to stink, from the latrines to the frankly criminal lack of bathing. My ruminations on not being a [Warlord] crossed the [Luminary Mind’s] barrier, suggesting that maybe I should simply campaign really, really hard to get everyone to agree on bathing being legally mandated.

A fourth thought cast a spell I only had one of, and it was going to be really unfortunate that my next spell was going to directly contest it. Mana against mana, power against power, odds were decent that I’d be murdering my own mana pool trying to cast and use both at the same time. A strong [Silence] spell muted everyone.

A fifth cast a simple voice amplification spell, one I’d used a thousand times.

Stolen story; please report.

“This is Sentinel Dawn. Please calm down, we’ll get you out in a few minutes.” I announced, my voice booming across the bunker. It fought the [Silence] spell, and I reluctantly stopped feeding mana to it, making a mental note to figure out a ‘I can talk, nobody else can’ spell.

I’d like to say my overwhelming presence and immediately solving multiple issues did the trick. That the cold blasts of air coming through the vents - thank you Fenrir and Skater - were reassuring.

Mostly, I think I just scared the shit out of everyone, and stopped anyone from successfully attacking with overwhelming skills. That one guy tried to really attack my barrier, but a quick manifestation of the event horizon, or dusk, aspect to my shield made short work of his move.

“Skye. Varuna. Mayor. Anything super urgent I need to take care of?” I asked them.

Varuna nuzzled me with his snout, horn poking over my shoulder.

“Elaine. Thank the gods, you’re back.” Skye practically sagged against me, and I caught the yuki-onna before she could fall over.

[*ding!* [The Mantle of Dusk and Dawn] leveled up! 860 -> 861]

[*ding!* [A Light Shining in the Darkness] leveled up! 854-> 855]

[*ding!* [Reality, Writ As You Will] leveled up! 704-> 705]

An hour had been an overly generous estimate. Iona plowed her way through the landslide in less than five minutes, and slowly, in sections, I let people go.

Titania was fine, and Skye caught us up on what had happened. Short version: When there wasn’t a huge initial strike, several enterprising fellows had left the bunker, ran to our neighbors, and invited them in. Skye had been in the middle of making the hard decision to refuse them when everything went to hell, and bowed to the inevitable, letting everyone in.

Then they’d just… waited.

“Do you have ideas what to do next?” Iona asked. Skye straightened up, smoothing the non-existent wrinkles in her clothes. That had to be a skill.

“If I may be so bold?” She asked, and we nodded in unison. “Yes. Many. I was raised as a [Princess], and while I wasn’t studying exactly ‘how to rebuild civilization as the monarch’ at the School - the professor was a well-known ass, and the fewer classes of his I took, the better - I do know how things should work. I know what I believe the optimal layout of a town looks like, I know the field divisions for crops, I know economics, trade, law, history, and governance. I have a thousand ideas and one, I just need some help. It’s been highlighted to me that nobody listens to me, that I don’t have the pull, weight, or charisma to make things happen on my own.”

Iona and I traded a wordless look.

Sounded much better than my plans, and someone else was taking charge.

We shrugged.

“All hail [Queen] Skye!” I cheerfully said.

It started with maps.

Iona and Fenrir flew around, drawing the literal new landscape around us, while I was Skye’s steely-faced enforcer.

“Look.” I explained for the dozenth time. “The war’s still going on. I understand it’s too crowded. I understand you want to go out. You must go out under invisibility. We don’t want to draw attention here. I’ve been attacked a dozen times in the last week. We’re close to Sanguino, Immortals are going to be in the area. Let’s not get everyone killed because we want some fresh air, yeah?”

This was not what I had imagined life during the Immortal war to look like.

“But my kid needs to run around!” The mom protested. “He’s full of uncontrolled energy cooped up inside all day! He’s a complete terror.”

I sympathized hard, but I took the position that it was better for everyone to be driven a little nuts than to die. Only one kid had managed to slip past me at the door, taking advantage of when I went to use the restroom. I’d simply [Teleported] her back inside, and I was more than happy to write out dozens of [Greater Invisibility] runes for any adults with enough mana regeneration to support it who wanted to go outside. There’d already been one incident where people had run into each other, but all in all it was agreed that this was better.

I sighed.

I hated feeling like a [Jailer].

After the maps was the planning. We didn’t want to do this by committee, but we did need buy-in and knowledge from the minds here. We might know the theory of fishing, for example, but none of us had ever worked the docks and could intelligently comment on the impact of the layout combined with prevailing winds. As one example among hundreds.

“This town we’re planning is a pipe dream.” I pointed out. “It’s going to be years, if not decades, before it’s liveable.”

“That’s both true and not true.” Skye rebutted, circling the outer walls and the residential area there. “It’s much easier to build bulk housing like this than to build a home for everyone. Yes, it’s a longer walk to the fields than building on top of them, but that stage comes after. A single point of protection works better in the short term while we settle down, and planning it out now lets us naturally expand in the future without all the headaches inherent to ‘whoops we did it wrong the first time, let’s rip it all out’.”

“Massa couldn’t do this because the population was far too large.” Iona said. “The gang I talked with had it somewhat right, but enough people were going to make the same decision that encouraging it would cause people to trip over each other to stay. That, and we’ve got some food stores.”

“Eight months.” Skye said grimly.

The prior two years of food had been cut down harshly with how many extra mouths there were to feed, cutting our margin of error down to nothing. That was ignoring my personal food stores in my [Tower], which I was keeping real quiet about. Skye and Iona knew about them, but the consensus was to keep it safe. Gods knew people were already getting squirrely about food, but the bigger question was storage.

Where would we put it? There wasn’t a good answer.

Then we got to the fun part.

Under a thick mist Fenrir and Auri cooked up together, along with two Mist users, a modest group of us left the bunker. There were two ‘groups’ as I saw it. The Classers, like me, Iona, Skye, and a few others. Then the ones I was calling ‘potential’ - teenagers and young adults willing to torch a number of their current skills and classes to get the skills and classes needed.

I thought quite highly of them, willing to do what needed to be done now. They had the grit, the spark, and the opportunity to become Classers. I thought less of the ones who could’ve been involved, and decided not to. Life would teach them a harsh lesson soon enough.

We went down to the new edge of Bloodmoon Bay. Sanguino had been founded there for a reason, and given the speed of the Immortal War and the fact that it’d been two weeks since we’d last heard from anyone - on our side or not - we figured it was safe enough.

It was a little morbid, but the remnants of the city walls made for a large, easy source of already-cut stone. No need to quarry and level and haul tons of rocks - they were literally right there for the taking. The stones were barely cool, a grave marker of a million souls, and we went straight to planning on how to chop them up and use them best.

If the infernal ashfall didn’t stop before next spring, if we didn’t start getting good sunlight and soon, starvation was an ugly specter looming over our shoulders.

I’d spent the last four weeks zipping back and forth across the country, finding small settlements and communicating information between them. The last two weeks had been fairly unsuccessful, a number of the settlements hiding, moving, or vanishing, hence the long time between contact. The Sixth were the only people still in position. We were basically glorified [Couriers], a vestige of communication. Given how many people were trying to hide from prowling Immortals looking to get one last lick in or the final levels before they ascended, I didn’t blame them. We got quite a few ascension notifications. I was convinced most of them were on a mountain of bodies, and mentally resolved not to pray to any of them.

“Ready?” Skye asked us.

“Ready!” I replied, with various noises of assent being made by others.

“Start here.” Iona gestured to the exact spot we needed to start. A small stake was down at the ‘starting point’, a fine thread wrapped around it. It was on a large, flat rock that jutted into Bloodmoon Bay, near where we expected a harbor to eventually end up. The bay, and the Sea of Stars at large, was too useful and vital a resource to simply ignore. Life came from the oceans. Fish and seaweed, clams and oysters, the sea was a vast bounty rich in harvest.

I was still a little unconvinced that we needed to lay down the grid of Orthus Town before, you know, plowing, but I was out-voted by people who spent their lives studying this sort of thing. I had books upon books of academic knowledge, Skye had more targeted experience. Sure, a lot of it was academic in a sense, but it was also vastly different.

There were a dozen different skills we could use for this, but my ability to have them ‘all in one’ was a big help. I used [Reality, Writ As You Will] to draw a mandala that included several exact right angles, along with a couple more ‘anchor’ angles so I was going in the right direction. I carefully laid down the array, knowing any minor deviation here would be etched in stone for decades, and if I was lucky, centuries. Also, it would ruin the further plots. I had a rune drawn on a rigid material, and I’d made a half-dozen more for everyone else to use as a compass. The spell itself was barely functional and didn't make any sense, but it was technically a complete spell.

“Three, two, one, LIGHT!” I shot a tight beam of light down the line, marking where the wall needed to go. A girl I’d mentally nicknamed ‘Surveyor’ had won the honor of unraveling the thread, and she quickly vanished into the ashen mists, followed by Iona, Skye, Secondus Nix, and several others. I upped the amount of mana I was pouring into [A Light], trying to penetrate the thick haze.

Should be great levels for the two Mist elementalists, and I’d eat my hat if Surveyor didn’t get a fantastic [Survey] variant from this. Helping a legendary Sentinel rebuild a town after an Immortal War? Her levels should be rolling in, regardless of her class, let alone the skills offered.

The harsh part was the skill was only good for a few weeks, a month tops, before we would have everything measured and she’d need to ditch it for something else more useful. It was part of why I held the ‘potentials’ in such high esteem. A brief taste of greatness, only for it to be mothballed for the next taste… and they’d probably need to take a class entirely unrelated in the end.

I’d mentally marked all of them, and would do what I could for them later on. I had some serious weight to throw around System-wise, and that was before my personal power, skills, and endless supplies stashed away in my storage.

Iona came jogging back a minute later, untied the string, and with a quick peck, jogged back into the mist. We only had so much string, and one length wasn’t nearly enough. I had rope in my [Tower], just not… that much rope. Good luck Surveyor!

Being a human flashlight was boring. I popped a book out of my [Library] onto the rock, and started reading it with [The World Around Me]. I had to carefully ration my new books, it was going to be a while before operating a printing press and writing stories was viable.

Naturally, I’d kept a printing press in my [Tower] to help jump-start book production. I was not waiting a moment longer than I had to.

My hand was remarkably steady. Not only was my dexterity through the roof, but [Handy and Dexterous] was basically designed for these sorts of maneuvers. I even tested it out, flapping one arm like a maniac while seeing my finger dead still, like it had been hammered into the fabric of creation.

Iona came jogging back through the mists as I was dancing a merry still-finger jig, and everyone else was quickly behind her. I did my best to rearrange myself into a still and Very Serious Sentinel, not a dancing lunatic.

“We’re ready for the marking!” Skye was more excited than I’d seen her in years. The normally reserved and chill Yuki-Onna was practically vibrating with excitement.

“Spot’s marked?” I asked.

“Spot’s marked.” Secondus confirmed, reflexively answering his teacher out of habit.

“Everyone’s accounted for? Nobody’s in the way?” I double checked. It looked like everyone was here, but blinding flinging around [The Rays of the First Dawn] was a great way to hurt someone unintentionally.

“Aye.” Skye confirmed. “Fire away!”

I dipped my finger down a hair, then fired [The Rays of the First Dawn] in a blistering line, going straight down until it hit the rock I was lying on. I bounced up, ready to move after what had felt like an eternity staying still.

We headed out, my Radiance having melted and seared a perfectly straight line into the ground. We reached the first corner, a large X having been exactly crossed through by my beam.

A right angle marked the second stage of the measuring we needed to do, and we marked it off before returning to the corner.

With shovels and pickaxes, we dug a hole, and placed an old wooden beam down, marking the corner of Orthus Town, marking the first spot where we were rebuilding.

The first pillar of civilization.