I had no time.

  The judgement loomed, and yet there weren’t enough moments to prepare for when I would stand in front of my people and explain to them why my brother should be granted the utmost of our mercy. Thoughts of it seemed to lurk at every corner of my attentions in the days to come, darting in to distract me between every task and conversation. But endless distraction was the opposite of productive thought, and I had little to show for all the time that I spent dwelling on the hour of judgment.

  The wake of a battle such as the one we’d had with Palimpsest could have been enough to occupy all the hours of my day, even after we’d finished hunting out their minions.

  For one, the battle had left the area around our keep covered in a sea of corpses. We’d converted the flesh of most of the insects to a mulch that would be sifted through by our earthshapers for the purpose of making fertilizer, and we’d crushed the exoskeletons of the insects into a dust that had a variety of uses, both industrial and magical.

  Abroad, the shells of the seed-nodes were of interest to our enchanters: they were a strong and flexible material, and their gathered aspect was apt to hold [Mind], [Wild], and [Armor] keys. But they were heavy and unwieldy, and carrying them to our settlement was a long-term effort.

  Then there was the distribution of keys. This was in Hassina’s hands, but naturally she sought our counsel: in particular, passing around almost six hundred [Mind 3] skill keys was a task that required no small amount of considerations and became the subject of long hours of debate.

  The telepaths, windcallers, and wildhearts all had sound cause to desire the keys. So did the firedancers—while the term was used interchangeably with ‘pyromancer’, the traditional firedancer was a fighter who used both flames and psychic assaults in battle, leaning on the psyche’s natural tendency to be both awed and fearful of flames.

  I had two dozen elves I could have named that, if given the right skills, would not only fill the role of communications in the field, but were well-trained to psychically paralyzing a given foe—as much as any telepath or wildheart.

  Beyond all considerations of the spoils, a frailty had seeped into the emotional atmosphere of the colony. My people were simultaneously more afraid and more hopeful than they had been since coming to the world.

  It didn’t matter that my ritual was forthcoming and that there was plenty of meaningful work ahead of them to keep them occupied. The simple fact of the matter was this: one day all our work had been interrupted by a psychic entity that had sought to completely destroy us with swarms and swarms of insects. The battle had hammered home the fact that this place, abundant as it was in resources, could serve up an existential threat without any warning.

  I could almost hear their thoughts as they would shoot me furtive glances where I stood and tended my garden. What would come next?

  And worse: would we be strong enough to survive it?

  Until the battle, I’d been against getting wrapped up in planning for the arrival of the children. Now, to distract from the fear, I instigated such planning wherever I could.

  On my orders, Zephanal began to take opinions on how to design the parks where they would play. Elves were asked to consider who our chief educators would be. The question of how many rooms each individual home would require was left to each couple to decide. Mishlo was public in asking for volunteers to learn the skills of midwifery because of how few of us there were who knew.

  It was my careful way of diverting them from thoughts of what tomorrow might bring. Instead I wanted them to think of where we’d be in a year’s time. It added work, but the work was worth it.

  All the needs of the colony in the wake of the battle began to blur into those things which the colony had already required. With the keep finished, more steel could be diverted to other purposes and I needed to decide on what. More lumber was needed to reconstruct the lift, which had been broken by Palimpsest in the battle.

  Further decisions needed to be made about which plants we would be cultivating in the immediate future: our hunters had brought back a fibrous flowerbush of particular interest, hopeful that it could function much like flax and be used to make fine cloth. As the only textile we could currently produce out of the plants around us was most reminiscent of burlap, this was an exciting prospect indeed.

  But I allowed only minimal effort to be devoted to the task of cultivating the plants. My mana vine was our priority: it would take a staggering amount of it to fuel my ritual, and unless I devoted most of our botanists to the job of spreading the vine, we’d soon find it was the last thing we were waiting on.

  Construction of the settlement continued, and at a faster pace. Because they couldn’t be used to make [Primeval] keys, we’d been liberal in our distribution of the [Light], [Weave], and [Mana] keys that we’d gained from killing Palimpsest. We’d also gotten more [Earth] keys than we needed to fulfill the ritual, and the results of all this were that our working crews had gotten even faster.

  Conjured constructs of hard light were everywhere in the recess beneath the keep where we meant to eventually build our small settlement. Huge blocks of tuff and basalt were dragged out of the pit along glowing, low-friction ramps, then slid across long stretches of ground to be set aside for later use in construction.

  The mages with higher [Focus] could conjure and form the light into chains, which were a great help: much of the iron we’d gathered had gone into reinforcing the concrete of our keep and the construction of the lift that ran the height of the cliff. The deeper we dug, the more energy we had to expend to move the stones. Ropes, chains, and pulleys were sorely needed.

  I knew I wasn’t the only elf who felt stretched thin: everyone had so much work to do. Our hunting parties still needed to gather keys and essence, and our keyshapers still roamed about, stripping the aspect from the world around us. The added [Mind] keys meant that our windcallers had more territory to scout now that they could range far while still maintaining psychic contact. A sizeable portion of elves still needed to remain devoted to Hassina’s mountaintop concerts.

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  We still had to fuse the keys that I needed for my ritual. From my garden, I could pick out the long, dark hair of Master Shaper Galeena as she and a small crowd of two dozen other shapers sat on a flat square of rock beside the keep, focusing on chalk drawings and small, carved pieces of quartz, occasionally muttering or singing. They were fusing skill keys: usually two [Earth] and one [Water] to create an [Elemental], then an [Elemental], a [Body], and a [Wild] to create a [Primeval].

  [Primeval]. One of the apex aspects, along with [Arcane], [Divine], and the oft-forgotten [Eldritch]. We needed two [Primeval 3] keys in the hands of each elf.

  It was an insane bounty, and one that had got me thinking about the sheer abundance of essence on this new world.

  In most mortal realms, the only 3rd-rank skill keys that one might find in the hands of the average citizen were those whose aspect was found in abundance: [Earth], [Water], and [Plant] were all common enough to be found in the hands of farmers.

  But even then, the 25,000 essence in a 3rd rank key was often either out of their reach, or better spent on lower-rank, rarer skill keys like [Mana]. A good [Mana] skill made a farmer far more productive than a slightly higher ranked [Earth] skill, after all.

  Elf societies had been different, of course.

  Power and immortality had made us rich. The 160 years that it took two elves to have a child was more than enough time for them to gather whatever power they needed to ensure that child could pursue whatever class and life they desired.

  But what two parents might gather together was nothing in comparison to the incalculable wealth of the church. The priesthood tithed a population of learned immortals, and this made them extremely wealthy, but this was only a part of it. For an elf, it was a pleasant thing to plant an oak sapling and look forward to when we’d sit in its shade: it let us dwell upon the unlimited years before us, and what a happy thing they could be.

  Applying that mindset to wealth had made our finances formidable indeed—the greatest friction between elves and the other species of Thanaxes had always come from how much of their industries, business, and aspect farms our priesthood owned.

  And when it came to aspect farms, [Diamond] was the aspect which we cherished most: it was needed both for the manahearts and for the worship of the Midnight Queen. It took a small dragon’s hoard of diamonds to generate a single [Diamond 1] key each year, and we’d had the means to generate far more than that. No-one could equal the glittering vaults of the elves—and more than half of them still survived on Thanaxes.

  It all raised an important question.

  In such a small timeframe, we’d attained level 30, filled our many skill slots with rank 1 and 2 keys, and could now make 2 [Primeval 3] skill keys for every elf. It was a testament to this world’s abundance.

  For each elf to fill all their skill slots with rank 3 keys would cost us a billion essence. But as costly as this seemed, we’d surely get there.

  Then what? Higher levels cost exorbitant amounts of essence, but they also took years to attain. The essence would keep flowing, even if we slowed the rate at which our hunters hunted. We would save some for later generations, surely, but this couldn’t account for all of it.

  And so we’d do what we’d done for ages: we’d create rare aspect farms. Our creationists could turn raw essence into many things, but only one of them would be permitted to convert raw essence into the rarest of materials.

  Even if she wasn’t a [Divine Champion], Hassina had the highest [Divine Resonance]: it was part of why she’d become high priest when she was only 250 years old. It would be her job to convert our essence into diamonds, because for her this task cost the least.

  But before we could get her started creating any diamonds—or any rare material, for that matter—we’d need at least one [Diamond 1] skill key for her to use to form the talent. And to get it, we’d need to find ourselves a huge quantity of diamonds.

  Hence why I favored storing all our excess essence until such a time as we were far more powerful than we were now: I wasn’t keen on meeting this world’s earth elementals. Hunting for gemstones was something that needed to be done far, far away from the colony, and by elves who could defend themselves in case of the worst.

  But when we did get started? Sustainable hunting across broad stretches of territory would gain us an absurd amount of essence. Even suffering the inefficiency that came with making the [Diamond Creation] skill with nothing but a [Diamond 1] skill key and a [*Creation 4] core, the diamonds would come fast.

  The thought made me laugh. I’d never thought of it as such, but if we ever found a way to reconnect to Thanaxes, the two manahearts I’d spent to bring us here would no doubt be considered a worthy investment.

  On this world, the [Diamond] keys could make power, and nothing more. We had no partners to trade with.

  Not even the flying plants who had been so instrumental in our victory seemed interested in relations. They’d left in short order once the deed was done. Mirio had made contact with them once more, to offer them some share of the bounty we’d gotten for killing Palimpsest, but they’d refused. A dead Palimpsest was the only thing they’d sought.

  I’d have parted with some of the spoils, but I was glad they didn’t want them. We needed them too badly, especially the [Mind] keys.

  Mirio had given clear instructions not to bother them, and none of the wildhearts were foolish enough to see any cause to disobey him. The distinction between the mind of a predator and that of prey was something they knew well, something even a child at Ellistara would have known well.

  The floating plants were prey animals—or rather prey plants. They weren’t built to assess and weigh the potential value of putting themselves in danger. Threats were avoided, and that was that. Yes, they were psychically dangerous, but only inasmuch as this helped them defend themselves. They didn’t hunt: it was very likely that their main form of sustenance came from the feces of the bat-like mammals that they shared their caverns with.

  If we were to have any form of successful relationship with them, we needed to show that we would back off and keep our distance whenever asked. Even then, our prospects were doubtful.

  They feared us. Their intellect meant that they could be sophisticated in their behaviours—that they could push against their natures to seek a goal that served the greater safety of their kind, such as they’d done when they assisted us with Palimpsest.

  It would take time to have any sort of relations with them.

  But at the rate that time was passing, we’d be there soon enough. It flew by me in a whirl, the days never seeming to have enough hours.

  I tended my gardens. I listened to problems and authorized solutions, or refused to. Seriana and I spoke often on the spellcraft involved in the ritual, and less often on the coming judgement. Hassina and I spoke little.

  And in time, the moment I’d been looking forward to least of all came—at last.

  Luthiel was to be judged.