by Demi Harper
On the third day, I heard another ping from my Augmentary. Seeing the new flashing circular symbol on my map, I investigated and found that the first gnomehome – a relatively large, circular building with a conical roof, thatched with dried mushroom gills – was finally complete.
Immediately, I selected the template for a second gnomehome and dropped it near the first, further around the base of my gem’s hillock.
Far from jumping straight to work, the four non-Faithful builders were instead looking very pleased with themselves; they were slapping one another on the back, laughing. Their laughter doubled when a particularly stupid pair of them went to high five one another with their little stone hammers still in their hands.
Two pint-sized concussions later, Granny bustled her way over.
After eying up the gnomehome, she jabbed a crooked finger at the lounging builders and set them back to work. The four builders – two of them swaying dangerously, as though drunk – began digging foundations and hauling boards from the lumberyard.
‘So having Granny as an overseer means she can assign idle gnomes to certain tasks?’ I mused.
‘Yes,’ replied Ket, ‘but she’ll generally focus only on gnomes who’ve been given a vocation, like your builders here.’
Interesting. Also interesting – and more than a little disappointing – was the fact that the builders had not become Faithful upon completion of their first building.
When I asked Ket about this, pointing out that the lumberyard’s construction had made Jack instantly Faithful, she suggested it might have something to do with the fact that they weren’t personally invested in the gnomehome.
‘Jack is a woodcutter,’ she said, sounding thoughtful. ‘When he saw the lumberyard was complete, he knew he would continue to be involved with it. Perhaps the builders don’t feel the same way because they aren’t going to be living in the house they built.’
It was an interesting theory. I decided to test it.
Using my Augmentary – it really was proving to be a useful tool – I selected one of the gnome builders, then used my new options to assign the gnomehome as her dwelling. She didn’t travel back over to the home, as I’d expected, but she did fall to her knees in worship, her eyes wide with what I presumed was gratitude.
Her prostration lasted only seconds, but as she resumed her work – with a spring in her step that had certainly not been present before – the faint green aura she now emitted reassured me the ranks of my Faithful had just swelled by one more.
On my map, a small circular icon above the completed gnomehome had begun to glow. Upon closer inspection, I realized it contained a tiny symbol, presumably representing the builder I’d just assigned to live in the home.
There were more of these icons, a series of tiny circles – twelve in all – surrounding the new gnomehome on the map. Only one of them was glowing; the others were dim and almost invisible. I guessed that meant I could assign up to twelve gnomes to each home, and the map would keep track of this.
It was all very neat and tidy. But something was still bothering me.
‘That builder only became Faithful after I’d rewarded her. Why?’
‘Isn’t that the case with most civilizations?’ Ket pointed out. ‘Hope and blind belief can only get you so far. The sad fact is that most people tend to be pretty miserly with their devotion unless they stand to gain some sort of reward.’
I hated to admit it, but my instincts – perhaps from some personal experience with religion in my own forgotten past – agreed with Ket. There was no way around it, so I grudgingly assigned the three remaining builders to the gnomehome dwelling too, all of whom immediately became Faithful.
I then assigned eight of my already-loyal gnomes to the same dwelling, including Gneil, Granny, Elwood, and the five gnomes who had been constantly worshiping me for nearly four days straight now, pausing only to eat and sleep.
Their auras grew stronger, and they seemed to put more energy into their tasks once they’d been assigned their dwelling; the morale boost referenced by the Augmentary, I assumed.
Better yet, the new influx of Faith from my four newly Faithful builders meant the next tier of my triangle was nearly full. Not long to go until tier seven! Perhaps I’d finally gain something useful that would help me to defend the Grotto, or at least persuade the gnomes to start upgrading my altar.
Speaking of Ascension, it was time to experiment with my latest ability. When I’d reached tier six, I’d gained something called Evolution.
I hadn’t used it until now, because there had been more pressing things on which to spend my mana – namely growing my shroomtrees to aid with construction, and populating my tunnels with more god-born creatures.
Now, though, I took a few moments to examine the ability.
Evolution
Tier 6 ability
Mana-based
Upgrade or evolve an existing life form.
Ket had already explained that this would enable me to either add new attributes to my existing god-born creatures, or simply imbue them with more mana to make them larger and stronger – something I’d previously only been able to do during the initial Creation process.
My gaze landed on Ris’kin. My forrel avatar was already much more than the sum of her squirrel and fox parts; she was intelligent, and possessed enough will to choose her own actions.
I’d been so busy since all this began, I’d barely had chance to even think about commanding her, but thankfully she’d proved herself useful regardless, and could often be found helping out around the settlement, providing guidance and generally boosting morale. Which was, essentially, her entire purpose.
Right now, Ris’kin was attempting to sharpen her claws on one of the altar’s rocks while Gneil looked on somewhat disapprovingly. One of her claws had snapped while she aided the builders in digging out overlarge rocks on the site of the in-progress second gnomehome, and she was trying to smooth away the damage as best she could. It gave me an idea.
I focused on Ris’kin, bringing up her blueprint before me. I realized with growing excitement that while I was unable to actually remove either of her core aspects – the squirrel or the fox – I could now use Evolution to enhance either one, and even add more elements, potentially altering her primary physical attributes.
She was almost entirely fox already, and I decided to keep it that way for now. Instead, I searched through my additional blueprint selection until I located the one I’d had in mind.
Dragging the salamander blueprint up beside Ris’kin’s, I painstakingly began to locate the strands of symbols that represented the amphibian’s regenerative capabilities.
Over an hour later, I finally found what I was looking for, and pulled the strands across onto Ris’kin. The blueprint showed that her outward appearance would not change, which was good; I didn’t want to risk unnerving the gnomes, who seemed very fond of the red-furred, bushy-tailed avatar.
I initiated the upgrade, expecting the usual flash of white light. Instead, a gentle glow momentarily surrounded Ris’kin.
Gneil, still frowning at the avatar for daring to use my altar as her own personal whetstone, came over to investigate the glow. When he saw Ris’kin’s broken claw smoothly grow back in the time it took him to gasp, his jaw dropped, and he began babbling excitedly.
The glow around my avatar faded, but Gneil continued to jabber, gesturing wildly at the five worshiping gnomes and then leading them down the hillock toward the pile of displaced rocks beside the completed gnomehome.
I waited until they started lugging the rocks back up the hillock to my altar before I dared to celebrate this new victory.
Yes! I’m finally getting my shrine! Military buildings, here we come!
The achievement did not come without cost. The Evolution process had drained four entire globes of mana. Four!
Yet it was worth it. I felt satisfied. Smug, even. Ris’kin might not be the most powerful of creatures, but the ability to regenerate in m
id-battle made her far more useful than even the biggest, strongest fighters. I couldn’t help but bask in this new feeling of confidence, the first I’d felt since Grimrock’s last visit.
The thought of that villain brought me immediately back to reality. It had been more than two days since he’d sent his kobold scouts to reconnoiter my territory. Why hadn’t he sent raiders to follow? He certainly didn’t seem like the type to renege on a threat, however impetuously made.
Still, I had my skelemanders to warn me the instant his forces did choose to begin their inevitable incursion. And of course I had my recently bolstered god-born creatures to defend the tunnels and – hopefully – drive back any attacking kobolds.
So rather than fret, I chose to make the most of this unexpected reprieve. Since I wouldn’t have access to any martial buildings until the gnomes were done with my shrine, I decided I may as well use this time to assign more of them to work on other projects while I waited.
In addition to Gneil and the five worshipers who were currently building my shrine, I had eleven Faithful who were as yet unassigned. Ideally, I would have made at least some of them permanent worshipers, but that option was not currently available to me. Ket suggested it might be later – perhaps when the shrine was built – and so for now I decided to allocate them different roles.
Time to get off your grubby asses and earn your keep, I thought as I assigned each of them a new vocation: four sawyers (bringing the lumberyard up to its capacity of eight), two additional woodcutters, and four more builders as well as one forager. The latter would scour my Sphere of Influence and bring back resources for use in cooking. So far culinary-wise, the gnomes had fended for themselves, dining on the scrubby fungi that dotted the edges of the Grotto. But I saw no harm in ensuring their stomachs were full; perhaps eating new ingredients would even boost their morale.
Naturally, I set the woodcutters to cutting, the sawyers to sawing, and the builders to building. It turned out I was unable to assign more than four builders to a single building, which seemed to me both stupid and arbitrary, like so many of the limitations I’d encountered so far in my role as a God Core.
Still, I saw no way past it; the Augmentary remained stubbornly inflexible on this point. Since this meant the extra builders could not be commanded to help with the second gnomehome, I instead set them the task of constructing a third.
Ris’kin padded over to help with the latter, once more resuming the task of clearing the ground and digging out stones too large for the gnomes to safely handle on their own.
Despite my resolve to be positive and productive, I couldn’t completely push the threat of Grimrock from my mind. What would he do next? Why was he waiting? If any of my previously captured gnome denizens were still alive, I might have used Observe to revisit his base, but my mind rebelled at the thought.
What if he was somehow able to sense my presence there this time? What if he trapped me there until my mana drained and my gem shattered, just like the yellow Core Ket had shown me?
Thankfully, the next intrusion into my Sphere of Influence was much less terrifying – and far more entertaining – than any agent of Grimrock, though it was no less a potential threat to my very existence.
Twenty-Three
Lost
‘Benin. Benin. Benin.’
‘What, Coll?’
‘I want to see the map.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to know if I can read it better than you lot.’
‘Huh. I didn’t know you could read at all.’
‘You know, Benin, you’re just as mean as Cassandria is. Well, was. She told me I was stupid every time I—’
‘Shh. Lila and Tiri are talking. I want to hear.’
I watched with interest as the big, armored idiot grumbled, then fell silent. He and the smaller male, Benin – a mage, I recalled – both sat still, straining their heads toward the far side of the cave in which they’d stopped to rest and gain their bearings. The latter was proving to be a hilariously impossible task.
Across from Benin and Coll, the two female adventurers sat side by side, their heads almost touching as they pored obsessively over the battered, crumpled piece of parchment in Lila’s hand.
In her other hand, the redhead held an open jar containing a flickering flame – presumably the one Benin had conjured after Coll tossed away their alchemical light globe the first time I’d encountered this group.
‘Maybe we should just retrace our steps,’ Lila said. ‘That cave we found before had plenty of alternative routes we could have taken.’
Tiri’s forehead creased into a frown. ‘Have you forgotten about the enormous spider?’
‘No, but I shot one of its legs off, remember? How dangerous can it be?’
‘Cut off an arachnid’s limb and it’s still at least eighty-six percent combat effective. Aim for the nerve stem next time.’
Lila rolled her eyes. ‘Learn that in a book, did you?’
‘Yes, actually. Would you like to know more?’
‘No. Life is more than books, girl,’ said Lila. She put down the map and flame and rummaged in her pack. ‘This is your first time leaving the academy, yes?’ She pulled out a whetstone, and began to sharpen the head of one of her arrows.
‘Yes, I—’
‘Why did they send you, and not someone with more experience?’
In the dim light of the magical flame, I saw Tiri’s cheeks flush. Lila said nothing, inspecting the arrowhead and then continuing to hone it in silence. After an awkward pause:
‘I—I didn’t want to come,’ Tiri confessed in a whisper. ‘I hate the outdoors. And I like living in the Academy. I was top of my fields.’
‘Your fields?’
‘Theoretical Crypto-Entomology, and Cartography.’
‘That sounds… hmm. So what happened?’
‘The Arch-Academic didn’t like the fact that his son was only the second-most expert in Theoretical Crypto-Entomology.’
‘Ah.’
‘He arranged for me to be shipped out on the Guild’s latest quest, citing that my expertise would make me useful.’
Tiri sounded thoroughly miserable now. She dipped her head, and her long black braids fell forward to shield her profile from Lila. ‘Cassandria hated me at first sight. Said I was a waste of resources. That she hoped I’d be eaten by something on the first day so there’d be more food and water to go around the rest of you.’
She fell silent. For a moment, I thought Lila would reach out and tuck the girl’s hair back behind her ear. Instead, she held out the arrow so that Tiri could clearly see it even through the curtain of her hair.
‘This arrow,’ said Lila, ‘didn’t begin its life as a sharp weapon. No, it was a hunk of stone, a broken tree branch, a bundle of bird feathers. Only after being put together and carefully honed to a specific purpose did it become dangerous. The same goes for people. It’s experiences like this,’ she gestured around the cavern, encompassing the pair of clearly eavesdropping human shapes in the shadows opposite, ‘that hone us to our purpose.’
Tiri tilted her head and looked through her hair at Lila. ‘But I don’t want to be dangerous,’ she said timidly.
‘Neither did I,’ replied Lila with a shrug. ‘I just wanted to survive. You’d be surprised how often the two overlap.’
She handed the whetted arrow to Tiri, then shrugged her pack back onto her shoulders, picked up the map and flame and climbed to her feet.
‘We’re going this way,’ declared Lila, pointing toward a downward-sloping passage.
Coll’s metal armor rattled and jangled as he struggled to his feet. Benin reached out an arm to help him, but Coll batted him away impatiently, muttering, ‘I’m fine! I can do it myself!’
Benin and Tiri trooped obediently after Lila, but Coll hung back. ‘Why this way?’ he asked, peering doubtfully at the dark passage, almost identical to the other three that egressed this particular cave.
‘The air smells fouler down here,’
came Lila’s echoing reply. When Coll still didn’t follow, she added, ‘Do you really want to be left alone here without a light?’
The retreating flame she carried had already left the cave in near-complete darkness. Shooting a glance behind him, then up at the ceiling, then back toward the tunnel Lila’s voice had emerged from, Coll gulped and hurried after his companions’ receding light.
Twenty-Four
Sinkhole
Tiri seemed to have finally pinpointed the group’s location on their map, and was leading them on a wending yet sure way back toward the Heart.
At one point on their travels, a sudden loud noise had ripped down the tunnel from the back of the group. All four of them nearly leapt out of their skins in fright, and Lila came close to accidentally shooting one of her fellows amid the panic. It was eventually revealed the sound had simply been Coll releasing a long-held-in fart. Lila looked ready to shoot him on purpose for a long while after that.
Damn it, I was beginning to like these humans. Even though I knew they’d been sent to destroy me, I didn’t want to kill them. But I couldn’t let them find the Grotto, either.
Last time, I’d created Septimus to chase them away. I couldn’t use that particular trick again right now: my mana was still sorely depleted from evolving Ris’kin, and since my worshipers were all busy with their respective tasks, I had nothing to replenish it with save the ambient mana from the natural life within my Sphere. Since it mostly consisted of moss, mushrooms and minibeasts, it was – unsurprisingly – taking rather a long time.
However, I could use the resources already at my disposal. Commanding my existing god-born cost nothing, and I could think of one in particular that would be very useful in, say, stealing that map.
