[First Era – Year 6 of the Divinity War; The Faint, region undefined]

  Leaving Saffrael, even temporarily, was harder than he’d expected. He’d come to rely on her presence, her warmth and kindness, even the comfort of her stardust freckled beauty, and her sweet winterblossom scent. But Break and Shore had been alone for so long—well, not alone, but without him—and he wanted to check on their progress.

  As a knight, he believed he could finally make the journey alone. He reached out to the runic key he’d left there, on a rock that he’d entangled above the world. Elithir and others had done this enough times that he knew what it felt like, even the technical details, but he’d never had the strength to try it himself.

  He reached for the space around him, entangling it with the space around that runic key so far away. Distance was no obstacle for an entanglement, only connection mattered. Gathering all his strength, his will, his self-assurance, he merged those two spaces, he made them one. Entropy slammed into his mind like a falling mountain. He staggered at the chaos, erecting walls of his will to contain it—breathing, meditating until it was under control.

  He opened his eyes to gaze once more upon that burnt yellow sun. He had made it. Standing upon that floating rock, he slowly whittled down the entropy with his will, reversing it, turning chaos into order. He whistled, while in his mind he called out to Break and Shore. When it was at last enough, he looked down a quarter mile to that churning surface. It was a long way. Yet his self-assurance not only reinforced his will, his entanglements, his strength, and his mind, but it did the same for his body.

  He stepped off of the rock, feeling the wind tearing at him, drying his eyes. He blinked them shut until he felt the aura of the world nearing. Stone cracked and shattered into splinters as he slammed into the earth. The jarring force through his bones was greater than he’d expected, but his body held firm and his gratitude made up the rest, healing the few small fractures his bones had endured.

  So this was what power felt like.

  He entangled the ground beneath him with salt, stabilizing it, pushing back the mithsyrium, now further, and further still, miles out in every direction. Then he released the entanglement, sat down, and waited for his pets to arrive.

  The sun was falling low by the time Break and Shore emerged. They came together, each with something glittering in their teeth. Fragments of his memories. He could feel them resonating with him even at this distance. My … they had grown, now nearing waist height. They approached, leaping upon him and playfully rolling about. He scratched, embraced, and wrestled them until their excitement chilled.

  Sitting still, expectantly, he held out a hand, and they each dropped a mouthful of glittering fragments into his palm.

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  “Nine!? Good job. You’ve been busy.” He petted them each in gratitude, a mystic smile spreading across his face. Then he remembered he should pay them some of his gratitude as well. He let a fair-sized chunk of the sliver warmth well up in his free hand and offered it to each of them. They took it and pranced around in excitement, stamping and clicking.

  He turned his attention to the fragments and began to cultivate them slowly, one at a time, remembering snippets of his life from before. Training, playing games with Saffrael and Norgoth, time with his father and mother, his kind neighbors upon the First Star, times of loneliness and loss, searching the universe for his missing friends. So much beauty and warmth, as well as struggle, difficulty, and hardship. They were like puzzle pieces, just beginning to fill out a picture of who he was, still too vague to know for certain, but giving him a sense of the tone of his life from before.

  He measured his aura and stared in awe at how far he’d come in so short a time. But he had to remember he was only regaining pieces of what he’d lost. Nineteen thousand four hundred and fifty-nine. That brought him so near the rank of general that he could almost taste it. He flexed his strength and looked up at the speck of rock he’d fallen from, high above. He wondered if he could reach it. At least he could try.

  Crouching low, he gathered all his energy, ready to spring up toward that rock so high above him. Then he leaped, shooting into the sky with such force that Shore and Break dove into the earth to avoid the splintering chunks of rock that sprayed about him in his wake. Higher and higher he flew until, at last, he began to slow, nearly halfway to his goal. Not quite enough, but it had still been an impressive distance.

  After his return fall, he called Break and Shore back to him. Though he had failed to secure a copy of Marsh’s golem research, he’d managed something better, to sneak runic keys into two models of Marsh’s self-replicating golems. No wonder he’d been so secretive. It was genius in its detail and complexity. So well thought out. The ability for a male and female to produce replications of themselves together, thereby creating variety while maintaining certain parameters ... The plans were of such a scope that he’d never even imagined such a thing.

  Break and Shore were fantastic, of course, but if they could replicate, and if those offspring could in turn replicate, each instilled with the same—what did he call them—instincts to find his memory fragments, there was no telling how quickly they could be recovered.

  His mind staggered as he began to consider the wealth of tasks self-replicating golems could be designed to perform. Not just on the battlefield, for gathering resources, perhaps refining them, growing them, even. He could use them to accomplish so much work—to build a house, a mansion, maybe a palace. They could repurpose worlds. The possibilities were endless.

  Shore nudged him out of his thoughts and he petted her, smiling.

  He knew the modifications to their bodies would not be easy, not for any of them, but if this worked it would be a greater boon than anything else he could imagine. First, he laid a hand upon Break. To entangle all the systems of the male self-reproducing golem with his pet would require hundreds—no thousands of entanglements. He counted them. With so much self-assurance bolstering his mental power, the calculation went quickly. Three thousand seven hundred and eighty-one. So many complicated and interdependent entanglements.

  He sighed at the scope of it all.

  Well, nothing left but to begin the work. The excitement began to build, as did the entropy, but as a peak knight, so near reaching the rank of general, he could handle it.