“-. .-“

  Back in Aerie Peak, the dwarves had managed to distill me some methanol, but it was only a proof-of-concept sample. They’d promised me more sizable batches, but they needed to procure a commensurate quantity of natural gas from Gnomeragan. By the time we left, they’d only got as far as dispatching a gryphon rider to place the order, because relations between the two dwarf kindreds had only thawed during the latest generation, and mostly due to we humans acting as intermediaries, however incidentally.

  Also, it turned out I was wrong: communication magestones weren’t as widespread as my recent experiences suggested. It was just my strange life that saw me cross paths with two of the very few people in the world who had one. Sylvanas took great delight in illuminating the matter for me.

  I had to wonder, did that mean that the ones Orsur acquired for his business agents weren’t ‘real’ ones? Come to think of it, he did tell me once that they only worked across a hundred kilometers or two, and only if nothing bigger than a hill got in the way. His agents still needed to play a game of telephone to relay things farther off. Also, they stopped working after a while? Power issues, or something else?

  I suppose that made the already prohibitively expensive stones of limited use anywhere other than Alterac, where the landscape mostly went in one direction height-wise. With the exception of Alterac Valley itself, whatever was to the north was generally higher there, and whatever was to the south was lower.

  Even so, the ‘real’ ones didn’t have unlimited range either. I should still manage a connection to Alterac City, but only from the surface, and it would almost certainly be spotty unless I found a really high peak. By the time we got here, Sylvanas already couldn’t contact Vereesa anymore, which meant she’d left back to the North. So, it wasn’t quantum entanglement. Was I wrong to think magic would make it easy to achieve?

  In fact, according to her, there were only a limited number of ‘real’ transmission stones in existence, because their inventor mysteriously vanished soon after making the first batch, before she could share the process. Her research too.

  That’s not suspicious at all, right.

  In hindsight, there was no instant communication between the human kingdoms, even between the rulers. My memories of my other life were chock-full of courier quests too. There were even war campaigns whose entire purpose was to deliver news through hostile territory. Even the wizards had to personally teleport across the map. All this applied as late as the third war and after.

  It raised some seriously dark questions about why stones like those used by Antonidas and Sylvanas wouldn’t proliferate between now and then. Or even the ones Orsur had managed to acquire. Were they hard to make? Or did they need very rare materials? The stones seemed common enough, but what about the spells used to make them? And the things that interfered with them, they made me think of certain bandwidths of radio, was that the secret?

  For that matter, did the ‘real’ stones have a limited lifespan too? How long was one good for?

  Even Sylvanas didn’t know that one.

  Most critically, was the inventor of the new, limited-range stones also going to die in the near future? Were they already dead?

  But I was only speculating again, just like I’d made assumptions about the stones’ ubiquity in the first place.

  When I broached the topic with him, Archaedas flatly refused to even consider helping someone advance research based on tearing the Arcane into rags and tatters. Even me.

  It was fair enough, I’ll probably have to revisit the issue of radio in the future. Maybe I was wrong and the constant wavelength chatter wouldn’t drive the elements mad?

  Azerorth could only be so lucky.

  Unfortunately, what all this meant in the immediate term was that I didn’t have the quantity of substances needed to produce enough of my Dark Iron diplomacy tax.

  Truly, logistics were the bane of any genius.

  Not that I was a genius, but it was the principle of the thing.

  On the bright side, Uldaman had come through for me about the stuff the dwarves didn’t manage to make, even with their new measuring and manufacturing capabilities. While I believed their promises that they’ll get the supercritical drying chamber right eventually, I didn’t want to wait if I didn’t need to.

  The flow-cascade type reactor had to be made here as well – while it was technically easier to put together than the supercritical drying chamber, and the dwarves had even grasped how to make glass than didn’t break at the first gust of wind, they weren’t at the point where they could make me an ultraviolet lamp.

  Lucky for me, the Lorekeeper of Norgannon – Uldaman’s artificial intelligence – was quite solicitous. Also, it considered top-tier photochemical synthesis equipment to be fairly basic devices. For the titans, who could perceive the entire electromagnetic spectrum, ultraviolet lamps were their most ubiquitous decoration.

  “The lights that lit your steps on the way here aren’t as simple as they might seem,” Archaedas told me on the fourth day, when he came to check on me in the chamber with the Discs of Norgannon, after finally taking a break from the star-struck dwarves and their endless questions. “They shine with many other hues as well, outside the spectral range of mortal eyes.”

  “Is that why you look so monochrome?” The Keeper looked like a giant stone man wearing a shin-length hooded coat, and all of him was colored the same drab, ashen grey. “No offense.”

  “Does the Light not dwell in your eyes? Look through it and see.”

  I did.

  What it Revealed was a living, breathing canvas of colors, as if the rays of the sun and stars had been woven into fine fabric, rather than string and dye.

  Even I was spellbound for a little while. “… Ironaya doesn’t have sight like yours?”

  “She does, she is a Watcher like us after all.”

  “Huh. I apologize, it’s just – the way she’s clothed now seems like she’s trying to imitate… well, this.”

  “She is.”

  She just wants to be pretty then? Like any other lady I suppose.

  “Valor and probity alongside beauty,” Archaedas remonstrated me, because I wasn’t being particularly discreet.

  “Peace, I’m not judging.” Everyone wanted to look good, I was no exception. “She has excellent taste.”

  “Not quite her own, actually.” The Keeper shared, perhaps as an apology for his hasty misjudgment. “The Earthen, however, have quite the eye for precious lustre, and what mother doesn’t want to impress her children?”

  I glanced to the far end of the Hall of the Crafters, where Ironaya was lounging while the dwarf smiths and engineers were gushing over her bronze dress.

  I must not dote. “Thank you for being patient with them.”

  “But not with you? Men might be a few generations removed, but you’re our children as well.”

  But I’m not, only my body is. Also, his first instinct on being awoken by his ‘children’ in the future was to kill everything in sight. Even here and now, he might have dealt with us as intruders if not for Ironaya being the first thing he saw. Those in the know had tacitly agreed to blame the squids for it, but it still bore mentioning. “It’s more to do with my haste, I’m afraid.” It didn’t matter how much patience I had when there were urgent tasks to be accomplished a country and a half away. “And Odyn’s too.”

  “Ironaya will return with the Staff soon,” Archaedas assured me instead of smiting me for presuming to make demands, as he might have felt the urge if Odyn wasn’t with me.

  The two Titan-keepers hadn’t spent more than the minimum required one-on-one time, which had certain implications for the future.

  “Emberon needs more than appeasement as well,” Archaedas continued. “Our communications have borne fruit, but the defenses of the secret wing are more complex than mere attack puppets. It takes time to place the traps and arcane tricks on pause.”

  Unlike the barebones depiction in my memories, the Legacy of Tyr was an overengineered death-trap. Emberon was the only part that the people on Earth got right, a giant stone golem that could spew flames on intruders. Even then, while he was indeed the last line of defense, it was his subordinate vault keepers golems that were the first, because Sentinel Talondras didn’t exist.

  The refti race as a whole didn’t exist, unlike what I recalled of my past life. For whatever reason, Tyr never actually made them. Maybe he shared my opinion that ‘a titan-forged race crafted to work in harmony with dragonkind’ was redundant when the drakonid were already a thing.

  Bromarch the Trogg king was, thankfully, safely in stasis with the rest of his kind. Fixing the decay in those systems was another thing that had caused our main quest to be delayed these several days. That, of course, I didn’t begrudge at all.

  By the time us leaders got together for dinner that evening, I’d discovered that I could use the Light to Reveal the whole electromagnetic spectrum, which explained my ability to see spirits but not my ability to see past them to souls. Also, I was the exception among the humans. The dwarves could see some of the infrared, and the elves could see some infrared and ultraviolet. My knight-exemplars could only see some of what I could, but not consistently. Emerentius alone could naturally see all of it, though nobody was surprised anymore.

  His cover had been blown, finally, but only after Archaedas subjected us to his most advanced scanning equipment. And Uldaman’s too. Even then, it took a very close and personal ‘stick the equivalent of a probe in his ear’ procedure to see the draconic shape of his spirit, because dragon-to-mortal shapeshifting was apparently DNA-deep.

  Magic was some real bullshit.

  That said, neither magic nor even titan engineering seemed to know all of the miracle materials that the humans of Earth had created. What I was making for the Dark Irons in particular was completely new to the Lorekeeper AI, and Archaedas himself too. The Titans had things that had similar properties, but few that worked without the help of magic, even fewer that could be applied at small mortal scale, and none that were mass producible both without magic, and using purely mortal tools.

  Technically, I didn’t need the supercritical drying chamber because I’d lived late enough into Earth’s 21st century to see the production process evolve until it became possible to cure ‘the substance’ at room-temperature. But the extra equipment and the older process were very good misdirection, and might even give me an extra diplomacy card to play when the time came.

  I was having to be very circumspect about what and why I was working on. This was another thing that I judged too sensitive to risk being divined, so I was doing my best not to actually communicate any important specifics. Along with Odyn, Archaedas grudgingly approved of my discretion, as he’d had to get used to doing the same after Loken’s treacherous ascension.

  Of the dwarves, the Ironforge ones were various shades of annoyed with me, doubly so since I’d roped some of their best into working on the devices with me, just to make sure some of them could continue making additional equipment after I left. My circumspection was not conductive to informed decision-making, and the dwarves of Khaz Modan had their pride. They didn’t appreciate being treated like simpletons that needed every step to be spoonfed, and they liked even less to be micromanaged.

  The Wildhammers treated me the complete opposite. Instead of resenting me for playing things close to my chest, they were actually more deferential to me now, than they’d become back in Aerie Peak. If I’d been a dwarf rather than a human, I might have gained deific status by now.

  As a matter of fact, could I be sure I didn’t have it anyway?

  “Aedelas,” I told to my squire that night, when we all broke off to rest. “Depending on how many of the dwarves have come around to the thought that my human shape is just a disguise, I might go down in their history as one of the Makers myself. Before this is over, remind me to follow up on that so there aren’t any misunderstandings.”

  “What’s to misunderstand, sir?” Aedelas looked at me incredulously. “You’re herding Titans and the literal king of the gods dotes on you.”

  “Odyn doesn’t dote.”

  “He’s worse than a starving forest hag with a sweet tooth,” Aedelas flatly replied. “Sir.”

  “Keep that up and I’ll tell him you said that just to see what color of smite he prefers.”

  “He’d have to stop being depressed before he’ll bother,” ‘quietly’ muttered the little shit I’d somehow saddled myself with.

  “Potato peeling for the next week.”

  “… For the knights or for everyone?”

  “I’ll decide tomorrow.”

  “I am the very soul of chivalry, master!”

  “Another day for lying.”

  Mercifully, the kid stopped talking. I might have to stop giving him openings one of these days, but who even imagined I’d end up in this situation? Not me.

  I didn’t tattle on my squire, but I did agree with him that Odyn wasn’t in the right headspace to take proper offense to mortal cheek. Until we reached this place, it was because, as Aedelas said, he was too depressed. Odyn had gotten a bit better since the heart-to-heart with Kurdran, but now he’d closed himself off again for whatever reason.

  I had suspicions about what this was building up to, no way was Odyn leaving without spending a good while catching up with the other two titans, now that they’d been reunited. Maybe the reason was as innocent as him not wanting to steal more of the dwarves’ thunder, for now, but I had my doubts. Not enough to press him over it though. Not yet.

  I’ll see what happens when we finally get to delve the Legacy of Tyr tomorrow.

  In my memories from Earth, the Staff of Prehistoria was first used to open the chamber where Ironaya resided. Later, it was used in the same manner to open the door to the Legacy of Tyr secret wing. Today, I got to learn that those doors were one and the same, and instead of the refti that didn’t exist, it was Ironaya herself was the one who guarded that entrance from intruders.

  The Chamber of Khaz’mul was only disguised as a dead end, but its left wall as you entered was actually a secret door. Also, it only opened if the other door, the one you came in through, was opened through the proper procedure. That entailed using the Staff of Prehistoria and knowing how to modulate the energy being beamed through and being able to actually do it.

  How the Lost Dwarves figured all that out in the lost future was beyond me, maybe they achieved some sort of transcended awareness in their mad drunken state, and they just… tuned into Uldaman’s security frequencies with their brains somehow?

  Maybe it wasn’t them at all. Just like the refti don’t exist in real life, maybe the game just put them there as a joke and someone else did the deed, probably Ironaya herself.

  And now I wondered if maybe I didn’t tell Veritistrasz complete nonsense, back in the desert. Hopefully not, the Light would’ve let me know. It always let me know when I’m about to do something fake, I wouldn’t have made it this far if it didn’t.

  I’ll admit that I didn’t always pay enough attention in the past, or I wouldn’t have needed Odyn’s screaming in my ear during the thing with the little spirits last year. But it was the Light that let me retrieve those memories in the moment, about Veritistrasz and Distyia, so they had to match reality in that case.

  Phew. What a relief.

  Almost as big a relief as getting to the very end of the Legacy of Tyr without fighting a single hostile.

  Unlike the rest of the facility, only I was allowed access into this section, so it was just me, Odyn and Archaedas. Ironaya had stayed behind in the Hall of the Crafters, to supervise the dwarves while they took their turn at the Discs of Norgannon.

  “… I almost can’t believe it’s so small,” Odyn finally broke the silence, since none of us wanted to take that from him after we reached plinth where the disc was.

  ‘Small’ was a relative term, since the disc was about as wide as a carriage wheel, and just about as thick. But for a titanic watcher the size of a watchtower, it would certainly be a small thing. I wouldn’t expect it back on Earth either, for the entire memory of a man to fit on a single microSD card.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Like the Discs of Norgannon, the Memory of Tyr was a disc made of platinum with a single ring bind. Or, at least, that was its casing, no doubt the insides were much more complex, possibly made of something other than this oh so conductive metal. All over its surface were imprints written in the Ancient Titan language, which was the same written scrips as the Runes of Earth.

  Unlike Norgannon’s Discs, these runes didn’t convey any secrets of the universe, except maybe incidentally through what one could glean from understanding their function. Instead, they were one half protection, and one half the anchor for a ritual spell meant to be designed around them.

  A spell, or a procedure.

  Between this and the memories of Tyr’s final moments that we’d already collected from the Tomb – and Tyr’s own very body – Odyn now had everything that could be used to revive Tyr. The only problem left was getting around Tyr’s odd decision to lock this disc so that only the Dragon Aspects could activate it. It wasn’t any mere voice lock either, because that would be too easy to fake, and it didn’t matter in that odd future that it wasn’t Neltharion ruling the Black Dragonflight anymore.

  Of course, there was always the possibility that the events depicted on Earth were all wrong here too, and Tyr had installed additional access options.

  Like, say, one for his own Twin Brother.

  I honestly hoped that was the case, but we’d only know for sure when the Disc was delivered to Skyhold. A meat puppet did not a fair substitute make, for whatever thaumic and animic sensors the disc had.

  “Did you know the Runes aren’t the original titan script?” Odyn said suddenly, after letting his hands hover over the disc for a time, before withdrawing without touching it. “The titan tongue was all wordless, even voiceless. Spiritual emanations mixed with the crackling and flashing of dusty nebulas and phlogiston clouds in the Great Dark. They only created a language because Aman’Thul foresaw a time when their creations would use such systems, when the Titans would need a way for their creations to understand them. Even then, it was too complex in vocabulary – they made a word for everything, but no words that could refer to more than one thing.”

  The Titans were beings of Order, so I could see it.

  “Writing, when the concept took root, had the same issue – too many symbols and too many ways needed to arrange them. Life designed specifically to understand it was too rigid and unchanging, the language took up almost all the space that could be fit in a mortal mind, leaving no room for the self. In the end, only the Pantheon themselves were able to use their language properly, and they did so, ever refining it, waiting, looking forward, hoping to see the day when their creations made the great leap forward.”

  “And so the limitations of the language became their limitations, not only in how they interacted with the life they made, but how they made it. What talents they imbued in it. Many were the species that communicated in cry and song, in those days, but almost none through drawings and images. Worse, none of them could achieve true thought, to understand themselves or the universe, never mind manipulate it like the Titans could. Even when the Pantheon designed their genetics and spirits specifically for that purpose, feats of magic remained beyond them, save those blended so utterly with their biology that it was an automated process entirely running on Titan programming, rather than their own ability. And then Tyr was born.”

  “… And you too?”

  Odyn laughed lightly. “I budded off him. Tyr was the first time a Titan was conceived from the union of two others, and our parents had rationalized themselves into believing they knew all what to expect. Procreation wasn’t something the Titans just came up with, they got the idea back at the dawn of time, when almost all life was still balls of layered plasma, and organic life was no more complex than single cells.”

  What do you mean ‘budded’ off him?

  “When the first mitochondria bonded with single-cellular life in permanent symbiosis, it happened completely without the Pantheon’s input. That was when they were enlightened. Even so, they didn’t consider it for themselves until the more complex life they designed, the one with built-in capacity for procreation, began to speed ahead through stages of maturation well ahead of their wildest hopes. Increasingly so the less of the Titan language and knowledge they imbued from the onset. The moment Tyr was born – nay, the moment he was conceived was the moment life all across the cosmos was exalted into true potential for sapience.”

  This sounded really familiar, but it couldn’t be how everything in existence came to be, could it? “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you? You, who convey into the world the Light of the same Flame he brought to this cosmos, like a torch?”

  Beyond the Flow of Time and thought of the gods… “Souls come from beyond the universe…” Or from the same one as reincarnations-

  “Or they form only when the Light of Creation touches the spirit of the yet unborn. The Pantheon themselves were divided on the matter all the way to the day they died.”

  Behind us, Archaedas jolted with sudden, shocked, horrible comprehension.

  “24 symbols,” Odyn murmured, brave enough this time to reach out and touch the disc, tracing the runes on it. “Just 24 symbols. These 24 symbols became everything.”

  Odyn was completely oblivious to having brought Archaedas’ whole world crashing down behind us.

  “In that moment when Aman’Thul and Eonar joined their spirits, when they tried their best to replicate the odd, inexplicable variables they witnessed so many times in the lesser life they created, the Light Revealed the solution to their Consternation. The Light saw – Tyr saw all across time, the many ways in which sights would turn into symbols all the way to the end of his very existence. The way symbols made up the mind. He became the vessel for the essence of that Revelation. A mere 24 symbols, which could arrange and shift and combine, in so many ways as to convey every last meaning in the Titan tongue, and beyond even that.”

  This wasn’t allegory at all, was it?

  “The Titans had never before conceived that something greater than themselves could exist. That while they’d failed to create something that was their equal or better, perhaps something like that could yet be grown.”

  Like drawings on a page. An identity self-made from concepts in the mind, enmeshed in symbols.

  “As you might imagine, it was more than could be contained in a single newborn mind, even a Titan one. The Runes were imbued indelible into the golden soul, but the path that bore them into reality was vanishing quickly. I was but a hasty bud that Aman’Thul and Eonar tried to plant into Tyr’s anima, hoping to save something of that Revelation – who wouldn’t want to possess the totality of the knowledge about the future? It was so much that even Aman’Thul himself hadn’t foreseen!”

  What did Aman’Thul foresee? Generally speaking? He foresaw that life would eventually use writing, and he imbued the bronze dragons with perfect view of time and power over it. But he also didn’t foresee Sargeras turning? Or that ripping that one old god out of Azeroth would leave a huge wound in its place? How did it all work?

  “But it wasn’t all the future, it was Tyr’s future, for all that it included whatever grand visions and travels he might have gone on, across space and time. Might still go on, may this quest bear fruit.”

  The people of Earth had no idea what games they were playing.

  “This was also the first such conception between the Titans of the Stars, so they were working blind. In trying to make a record, they only created a second spirit.”

  “… And the Light was still there.”

  “It was Tyr. The first Light was Tyr, the Light of Consciousness has always been Tyr.

  The light of consciousness for the life the Titans specifically made, maybe. Even then… Odyn was an accident? Sapient life itself was an accident?

  “It was from that Light that I came to be, small, weak, barely anything really, even more incapable of containing Tyr’s Revelation. Aman’Thul and Eonar didn’t even realize I was self-aware. I didn’t realize I was self-aware. They though to let me dissipate back into their animus, but I fought to live… And when I began to harm Tyr in my blind bumbling, they made to excise me from him before I killed him. They sought to unmake me, and they were right to.”

  “But Tyr didn’t allow it.”

  “No. He didn’t. In that moment of Revelation, Tyr was everything Tyr would ever be, he knew everything he would ever know, he understood everything he would ever understand. A newborn has little power, even a god, but he understood enough to know how to use his own Revelation before it vanished, and there was a whole bunch of Titanic anima right in front of him. Enough to manifest, fully and completely, one Notion. He chose Selfhood.”

  Incredible. Life, complex life, sapient life, at least the one made by this race of creator deities… really was an accident after all? Except not really because it… predetermined its own existence? Through a many-times-great-grandfather paradox? Tyr was life’s, sapient life’s cosmic grandfather paradox? Except not really because he didn’t travel through time, he just lived out his whole life the moment he was born all at once…

  … As far as those involved understood.

  “I drank from that well until my spirit was full to bursting, and the only reason I didn’t cause Tyr harm even then was because there was too much anyway, for any single newborn soul to contain. In that moment, when the Revelation lingered for one additional instant because there were two souls that had to forget it now, I fathomed a Notion as well. Father and Mother didn’t notice, being such a small thing compared to the first, a mere fragment of conscience. Even Tyr doesn’t remember, but I do.”

  “What did you fathom?”

  “… Love.” Odyn’s voice was quiet. “Not even all of it. Brotherhood, I suppose you could call it.”

  Love? Really? Wasn’t he the Lord of Valor?

  But then…

  This explained so much.

  “It is only sapient life that is young, in the Cosmos,” Odyn murmured in closing to the monomyth that was the beginning of his life. “Life in general has traveled a much longer path to get here.”

  … But it still didn’t all add up. “When did this happen? The Ordering of Azeroth wasn’t that long ago in cosmic terms.”

  “I told you, didn’t I? Only the bodies of the Keepers are constructs, our selves are not. That said, we are not that much older than this planet’s discovery. In your vernacular, it still took quite a while for Tyr and I to be carried to term, as it were. It may have been some time before the betrayal of Sargeras, it may have been after, even the Pantheon never figured out exactly when he turned. I just know Sargeras wasn’t there for our conception, or what came after.”

  Unbelievable. Instead of what Earth said about gods killing each other to create worlds, or eating each other for their knowledge and power, what really happened was the total opposite.

  … At least here. Was I wrong before, when I concluded that Earth was in this universe? Or plane? This story didn’t really leave room for that theory of Odyn’s, that he was an imitation of the Odin from Earth. Unless it happened before the betrayal, as he himself admitted was possible. But shouldn’t he have known about Earth before he met me, in that case?

  … But he himself said he forgot almost everything that happened at his conception, and it wasn’t like the Pantheon didn’t habitually keep all sorts of things to themselves. Even when there doesn’t seem to be a reason. That he just didn’t find out later wasn’t entirely implausible.

  For all I knew, Odyn assumes – like I did – that other realities exist and I came from one of them, like I believed up until after we had our mindmeld. He wasn’t aware of any of the things I’d been wildly speculating about since then.

  He said ‘the moment Tyr was conceived was the moment life all across the cosmos was exalted into true potential for sapience.’ He said ‘life’ not ‘all life.’

  How much of the life in the universe was made by the Titans? How much of the Cosmos did the Titans actually explore? World Souls were just one form of life in the end, and they didn’t even know their own origin. Why did they exist? The old gods, the demons, those were both evidence that Titans weren’t the only type of life in the universe, certainly not its only source.

  Also, it wasn’t like the life they created since Tyr has been all flawless and glorious. The Titan-Keepers themselves didn’t get it right with the Troggs, there were few worse caricatures of sentience, across several worlds.

  Then, too, human civilizations were around on Earth for a long time before the names Tyr, Odin and the rest of them were a figment of mankind’s imagination. There were several different extinction events. There were people on Earth who said that three million years was just one year for Manu, and there was more than one Manu. And then the whole kalpa business… And the maha-kalpas! It wasn’t just myths either, there were ruins dating to before the last ice age, and traces of human habitation much older still.

  It wasn’t just the hindus either, the Persians, the Greeks, and others, all spoke of long ages where gods ruled for eons and kings ruled for centuries, thousands of years at a time, even tens of thousands. If we considered things in anything approaching chronological order, human sapience predated Tyr by literal ages.

  At least, it predated this Tyr.

  Perhaps, even…

  This incarnation of Tyr?

  What time frames do the Titans really work by?

  What qualifies as a long time? If they were there for the first symbiogenesis, at least on some planets, if they were there specifically when mitochondria was integrated into cellular life, they had to have been around for several billion years at least… But that didn’t mean other planets didn’t get done with that first, in fact it’s a guarantee they would have. Stellar and planetary lifespans weren’t made equal.

  Then, too, they immediately meddled, so any timeline for life’s development would be drastically accelerated. If we compared the timelines of Draenor and Azeroth together, the affairs of the Pantheon’s own grandest events moved at a scale counted in thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years, a hundred thousand on average if I was being generous. That wasn’t nearly long enough.

  Dammit, I was losing track of what I knew and what I was just assuming, I had nothing but my own guesses about most of this, and especially where Earth was or wasn’t. Or when. Or why.

  Still, though, there were ultimately two possibilities: either Earth was part of this universe, or it wasn’t.

  I considered time frames and monomyths. I considered what else could come across as all-knowing Revelation about the future. What was coming across as all-knowing Revelation right now, to many people. Me. The scale wasn’t the same, but Odyn was an observer for both, and he acted like the significance was more or less equal.

  I reincarnated here, who’s to say there weren’t others before me? The trigger was the same in both cases too, the Light did it both times.

  I considered the parallels between his conception and certain myths back in my older life. About a different Tyr the Golden, a different one-eyed Odin, and a different well of knowledge the gods couldn’t delve whole.

  I considered the god in front of me.

  Perhaps not just a legacy after all.

  I waited for Odyn to do what we’d come here to do. Behind us, Archaedas was still as the statue he always seemed to be, except now it was different. With sight beyond eyes, I could see the turmoil in his animus, and the trembling flow of signals and wavelengths bouncing between him and the rest of the facility, in the direction where the Discs of Norgannon lay. As the minutes passed, his agitation only got worse and brighter.

  “Through the Light he brought forth, Tyr was the promise of life’s victory, in a sense,” Odyn uttered at length, still ignorant or uncaring that behind us, his peer and kin was falling down the same spiral of despair he struggled to claw out of, even now. “Fitting that the promise of salvation would come from the same place.”

  Now his choice of wording almost made me spiral.

  I took a deep breath and let it go.

  Ultimately, all my wild guesses didn’t matter. I had my hands full with my new life here, I’d leave the matter of Earth to when my time here finished, if it ever did. If I even cared anymore, by then.

  In the end, my thoughts were still mostly assumptions and speculations. I didn’t speak them aloud.

  Finally, Odyn shook himself out of his reverie and picked up the memory disc.

  Nothing happened. No forgotten trap, no hidden secret, no secret subroutine. No voice recording speaking up to ask for the secret brotherly password that Tyr and Odyn created in the womb. If there even was a womb.

  “Here,” he held the disc out to me. “Hold it. Maybe something will happen.”

  Like what?

  I took the disc and turned it over every which way. It was much heavier than a solid lump of platinum alone could explain. I scanned it every way I knew how and got nothing. I got the sense that I could force the issue, but not without causing damage. I knocked on it. I talked to it. I petted it. I even blew on it for good luck. Nothing happened, so I handed it back.

  With the look of someone who didn’t know if he should be more relieved or disappointed, Odyn turned away from me and stuffed the disc inside his bag of holding. He seemed to collect himself for a while, before he spoke again. “As with Tyr’s body, I will require the services of Emerentius, as before.”

  “Of course.”

  Odyn breathed in, then released an explosive gust of breath. “Compared to the Titan Alphabet, the Runes’ ability to bind and command Power is on an even keel, and the leeway they provide for customizing how that power is expressed is outright superior. You did well to restore them to mortal kind.” He turned to face me then, face completely closed off. “It goes without saying that I’ve been divining all this time.”

  I hadn’t sensed any more chances to look into the future, even with the divination blackout mostly passing on, over the last few weeks. Logically, that meant someone else was using up those windows of opportunity.

  “Eyir as well,” Odyn told me. “And many of my val’kyr besides her. Even Archaedas, he’s been drawing on the systems of this facility to tap into the foresight of the spirits.”

  I could feel the significance of this moment, and it was a heavy one. “If it was you then I’m relieved.”

  “Don’t be. The creatures of the void are deluded wretches who consider every possibility equally true, which means they accept the possibility of their loss even as they deny it with the remainder 99% of their being. They always look forward in time to the culmination of their plans, constantly refining them. This prevents the rest of us from ever actually divining how we lose, not even what parts of our own plans are mistakes. Conversely, they obsess over the scenarios where they lose, which is why we can never divine the path to victory either.”

  I felt an oncoming dread, but it was alien, imposed from outside and ahead in time, worthy only of disregard. “If that’s true, then the only possibilities that foresight can glean about them are… the one they scry the least?”

  Odyn nodded darkly. “The Old Gods twist foresight by blocking Prescience about all but the most impossible triumphs, and the costliest bare victories. Those who don’t look to prophecy never know what they’re in for. Those who do are misled or demoralized. Any who set out to fulfil a prophecy end up losing because the vision explicitly doesn’t account for what the monsters will actually do, all the resources they enemy will actually commit when the time comes. That is how they catch people in their trap, and why none but the Highest themselves have ever truly defeated them.”

  Ah.

  I relaxed.

  Odyn’s face slackened in surprise. “That is not the reaction I expected.”

  “You said it yourself,” I smiled lightly. “If we can only see visions where we lose or eke out only the costliest pyrrhic victories, that means they’re blocking the others. Doesn’t that just confirm that better options exist? That there’s a way for even us to do better, to truly beat them? Mankind has been winning battles and wars without actionable intelligence for as long as we’ve existed. This is already more information than we usually have.”

  Odin palmed his face and struggled to contain a laugh of hoarse, raw disbelief. “Why am I even surprised? It’s always the general that worries over the troops he sends into the monster’s jaws.”

  “With all due respect, this is all my campaign. You have had and continue to have no decision-making power whatsoever. I’m perfectly capable of jumping in the monster’s jaws all on my own.”

  “And alone you will be.” Odyn shook his head, but when his hand dropped his face turned solemn again. “I’ve divined enough to strongly suspect that the squids will be much more coherent, and commit much more of their resources if I go with you there, than if I don’t.”

  Of course they would. “I thought it might be something like that.”

  Odyn watched me. His hand came up to grab tightly on the strap of his side-along bag as if for comfort. “If you ask it of me,” he said slowly, “I will commit.”

  “No. It’s alright. If that’s your judgment, then I’ll trust it.”

  The way he slumped was almost imperceptible, but I could almost taste the relief in it, and the doubt.

  I glanced at the frozen Archaedas, then back to the god-in-a-man’s-body that was finally realizing what he’d done to his kin with his careless words, just now. “Will you be alright?”

  Odyn’s face twisted in a raw, soulful way. “Look at you, about to go into hell but still more worried for me than yourself?”

  “That’s months away. This is now.”

  He looked away from me. “… I can see the exit.” He wasn’t talking about the door leading back out, and we both knew it. “I will push forward as long as it takes.”

  “Uhuh.”

  Without warning, I stepped forward and hugged him.

  He didn’t stop me.

  I took my time.

  He reciprocated.

  I didn’t overstay my welcome, even though I could’ve and he couldn’t have stopped me. I was bigger and stronger than this avatar.

  “I will await word of your success here.” Odyn at last stepped away from me, turning instead to the giant Archaedas and his spiral of grief. “Leave when it suits you. I am long overdue a talk with my kin. Go, and know that my faith goes with you.”

  “-. .-“

  I still intended to squeeze Ironaya and Archaedas for everything Uldaman could give me, and I still wasn’t on a deadline. But just in preventing the trogg outbreak, I’d secured the future of the dwarves and the gnomes. With Ironforge and Gnomeragan spared genocide, and two new keepers also active again, Azeroth’s combat assets and strategic situation had massively improved already.

  I’d also finished what I personally needed right now too, a lot faster than I expected, and bulk orders would have to wait until I secured my next alliance anyway. I would soon be spending weeks here in Uldaman, but not just yet. By the time I returned, the dwarves will have finished making an impression on Archaedas and Ironaya as well, allowing me to negotiate further terms from an even better position. Maybe I’ll even see the Earthen returned to life.

  On that note, the bulk of the expedition would stay. The Wildhammer weren’t any more willing to leave than their Ironforge kin, it hadn’t even been a week. Even so, Kurdran and Falstad promised to catch up to me later, on gryphon back. Grudgingly, but they were dwarves of their word.

  I left them to it.

  We humans and the elves left two days later, except for a platoon each of our more scholarly members.

  Then, finally, once we were back under the open sky, I had no more excuses left.

  I waited until we camped for the night, took out my transmission stone whose usefulness and true rarity I was only now appreciating, and tried to contact Richard.

  It didn’t connect.

  The wind was loud in my ears, interspaced with the twangs of longbow repeaters, and the roaring blasts from the all-new bags of infinite flechette holding that the elf rangers were, as I’d foreseen, reforming their whole combat doctrine around.

  What the hell is going on back there?

  Bylaws of Babel (Warhammer) and A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law (Highschool DxD, Inspired Inventor, X-Over). Links to everything .