Ractia was aware of her son’s approach long before Noghis entered her chambers. Particles of her mana had long since spread throughout the entirety of the Gardens of the Moon, where they were inhaled by each and every one of her followers. The mana, and with it her awareness, surged through their many bloodstreams, pumped by mortal hearts. She infused them, was a part of the mothers and children who had followed her on the most basic level, and she could hardly fail to be aware of them. It took an active effort, on her part, not to watch them at all times.

  Thus, at her mental command, the great blast doors, cut from the crust of a neutron star and capable of withstanding a volley from even the great guns built into the orbital ring, opened with no more than a whisper of disturbed air. Noghis was growing tall and strong: biologically, he looked more like a young man in the midst of puberty than a child of less than three years old.

  “Mother,” he greeted her, approaching the couch upon which she reclined, assembled by her mana out of the component molecules to be harvested from the moon’s surface.

  Ractia knew that he had still not grown used to seeing her in this way, at once cradled and engulfed by, connected to, the enchanted machinery that had integrated with every aspect of her new body. She shifted her head, looking down to smile at him, and the cables which extended back from her skull shifted with her. The sight caused the boy to flinch, though he tried to hide his reaction.

  “My son,” she said, and languidly stretched out her arm toward him. Her voices harmonized, like the chords of a song. Though he had halted too far away for her to actually touch, a wave of mana rippled out from her and gently brushed across his cheek, like the ghost of her fingers. “You come to see me too rarely. Your mother misses you.”

  The boy looked down at the floor and shuffled his feet, causing his braids to slither across his shoulders like snakes. His hair was the same as his father’s, and for a moment Ractia missed the feeling of grasping Nighthawk’s braids in her hands while his strong arms held her. He had been a pleasant enough partner, for a short while, even if only mortal – and he’d given her a son, which was more than that miserable, ungrateful traitor Arvatis had ever done.

  “We’ve lost more than half our cells in Lucania,” Noghis told her, once he’d looked up again. “The Church of the Trinity is hunting them in every city and town in the kingdom.” He hesitated. “Before I was born, you rescued your Elden worshippers from the north. Should we do the same, now?”

  Ractia’s consciousness pulsed, extended as it was through the machinery that surrounded her. Storage banks supplemented her memories with recordings, every stray thought spun up records of past wars, from the horrible fighting against the Vidre, to the years just after the Collapse. It was good to be whole, once again: she’d never been a tactician or a general, which was why she’d relied upon the mercenary, Manfred. But with enough information, and enough processing power, she could fake it well enough for a primitive world like this one.

  “The scion of Celris is distracted,” Ractia said. “Let her remain so, for now. Give her nothing that could lead back to us, nothing that she can track. She is but a fledgling goddess, unused to immortality, and left to her own devices she will lose herself in the years as they tumble past.” She shrugged her elegant, perfectly sculpted shoulders. It was a pity she no longer had a man to appreciate the form that she wore. “Do not so much as contact them. If they can go to ground and survive, we may extract them in a few years. Until then, my worshippers must survive on their own.”

  Noghis frowned. “That is a lot of people we are giving up on,” he said, and Ractia was at once proud of his fire, and irritated that he presumed to question her judgement. “People who have put their faith in you, trusted you.”

  “Oh, my precious,” Ractia cooed, wanting nothing more than to take him in her arms, just as she had when he’d been an infant. That was always the best time; if she hadn’t needed a warrior, a hand to serve her out in the world, she would never have accelerated his growth. “My darling boy. I understand. It is a difficult thing. You want to help them all, don’t you? To protect them all?”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve trained me for?” he asked, finally looking up to meet his mother’s gaze. “To fight for you? To protect our people?”

  “And I’m so proud that you would do it without hesitation,” Ractia assured him. “But sometimes, the more difficult path is to know when to do nothing; or to do what is not easy. I love my worshippers, but they are, in the end, mortal. They will live and they will die, while you and I remain. Thousands of them waited, faithfully, the entire time I was gone; and they will wait again for just a few short years. At the moment, it is how they may best serve me.”

  “You could let me go and kill that woman,” Noghis said. “Or better yet, rescue father. Once we have him back, we can rally a new army. There must be more Antrians out there, hidden across the world. If we activate them –”

  “The point of fighting was never to win,” Ractia reminded her son. “It was to gather what we needed, from the rifts; to bring most of our people here, to a refuge; to delay those who would strike us down until we could be out of their reach. Victory has never been my aim – only time. Time is our greatest advantage, because in time, our enemies will grow old and die. We do not need to defeat them – only outlive them, my love.”

  “Except for the Lady of Winter,” Noghis protested.

  Ractia allowed herself the smallest tightening about her eyes, the faintest thinning of her lips. “She is not one of us yet. Not entirely. She has not earned that title.”

  Noghis shook his head, setting his braids to rustling. “I don’t understand what you’re doing with her. Sometimes it feels like you hate her, and other times like you’re trying to help her. You tried to kill her in Lucania –”

  “No,” Ractia interrupted. “I pushed her. I tested her. Forced her to either grow, or to die. And she grew; she passed the test.”

  “But why make our enemy more powerful?”

  “Today’s enemy may yet be tomorrow’s ally,” Ractia told him, though she knew that he was too young to understand. She’d never agreed with the Atavist, after all, but living here, far in advance of the third oscillation wave, had reminded her how wonderful it was to breathe the perfume of fresh flowers, to feel the gentle wind on her skin, to live and breath and to be incarnate. She actually found herself looking forward to the next time they spoke.

  And yet, here and now, Ractia realized that she must do something, so that her son did not take it into his head to be foolish. He was so young, and wanted to prove himself to his mother so much: she could practically see the brave, stupid schemes already forming in his mind.

  “We have identified a source of sapphires, in the mountains of Lendh ka Dakruim,” Ractia told him. “We need as many as can be mined, as quickly as possible, so that we can begin treating them. The extraction must be done without any of the mortals discovering us during the process. I need you to take charge of this operation. It will require patience, and if any of our enemies stumble onto what you are doing, they must be eliminated immediately and without hesitation. Can I trust you to do this for me, my son?”

  Noghis puffed his chest with pride. “Of course, Mother. I will gather a team and go to the nearest waystone.”

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  “Good.” Ractia smiled, leaned her head forward, and made as if to press her lips against something. Once again, her intent rippled forward through the mana-saturated air, and the boy felt her kiss on his forehead. “Go, then. Be brave, be safe, and return to me quickly.”

  She waited until her son had left the room, and the blast-doors had closed, and then Ractia allowed her consciousness to slip from her body.

  ?

  Disembodied, Ractia poured herself down through the vast emptiness between worlds, by the light of the distant stars where, separated by gulfs of space and time, her people fled the oscillations. A part of her wondered who yet survived, and who had been destroyed. B?lris and Veitha had fled this world of theirs, this refuge, rather than fight and risk their lives; had they, in the time since, found somewhere else to build their homes? Created new races of companions, to ease their loneliness? Or had they sought out The Eldest and his followers, burning toward the core?

  It didn’t matter. Until she could leave, none of it mattered.

  Ractia fell down though the sky to the world below, tracing the same path Tamiris had used to kill her a millennium before. She plunged down through cloud and breeze toward the great crater, the bleeding wound in the crust of the world, where Corsteris had once bloomed.

  Here, the lingering traces of Antris, Iravata, and her once-husband, Asuris, wound about her like smoke. She could feel their corpses, shattered and broken but still leaking mana that bore the echoes of their consciousness. Might she have brought them back, from the very brink of destruction? Perhaps, if she’d cared to try.

  She did not.

  But the creature Ractia was seeking did make its home at Iravata’s carcass, wrapped around the remains of its dead mother as if still in mourning, so many long years after her death. Overhead, dark clouds blotted out the sun, the suffocating shadow of her husband’s last intent. The cold air steamed where it met the hot ground; great cracks split the earth, leaking fumes that would kill any mortal. Among the rocks, infant wyrms, primitive and half grown, slithered away from her, some instinct detecting what their eyes and their tongues could not. Beneath the earth, still lulled to sleep by Antris’s ancient machinery and enchantments, her Great Bats slept, awaiting their goddess’s need.

  With a thought, Ractia coalesced a form constructed of pure mana, and stepped into the nest of Umbris.

  The wyrm of the first clutch had, sometime after the destruction of Corsteris, found the place where the ground collapsed, where the underlying stone had given way as it had in so many places all across Varuna. Sunk sixty feet down, the broken form of the Lady of Wyrms curled in on itself, fetal, at the center of a pool of toxic water that bleached anything it touched. On the shore, a clutch of eggs, seven in number, had been carefully buried in the sand.

  For a moment, Ractia wondered how low Umbris must have sunk, to force himself to mate with beasts that could neither speak nor think. But then again, there had been nearly as great a gulf between her and Nighthawk Wind Dancer, had there not?

  “Umbris,” she called out, in a chorus. Ractia’s voice echoed through the sunken cavern, and she trailed one of her toes through the dark water.

  The faintest scrape of scale shifting against scale signalled that the serpent was uncoiling its body. Two eyes opened, glowing a luminous, deep violet, and when the wyrm exhaled, the scent of rotting meat wafted across Ractia’s make-shift form. Rather than experience the unpleasantness, she simply chose not to receive smells.

  Umbris nosed forward, crawling toward her. “I remember when your children stole away your corpse,” the wyrm said, after a moment’s inspection. “I thought about stopping them, but left them to it. I did not expect they would be able to revive you.” His language had become altered and debased, but it did not matter; Ractia’s words returned in every language that had ever been spoken, on any world.

  “There is nothing in this world that can truly kill me,” Ractia told him, and it was only half a lie. Certainly, she had hidden fragments of herself on a dozen dead worlds and empty moons, spread throughout as many star systems. How many of them still remained, undamaged, was anyone’s guess. Whether any would activate, should she need them, another chance she preferred not to take – not least because of how much would be lost.

  “Perhaps.” Umbris shrugged his coils. “Why have you come to me, Lady of Blood? If you seek my mother’s remains, you shall not have them while I live.”

  “I do not require anything of Iravata,” Ractia promised. “I have no interest in disturbing her carcass. You may keep it for you own until this little sun gutters out and dies, for all I care. No, I came to speak with you.”

  The wyrm wound its way about Ractia, creating a circle of black scales. Many of them were scarred, pitted, or cracked, which made his transparent attempt to intimidate her far less effective. “What does the Lady of Blood wish of me?”

  “Only a small thing,” Ractia told him. “A woman is going to come here.”

  “To Godsgrave?” The wyrm’s breath hissed out in short, sharp bursts, which Ractia interpreted as laughter. “A foolish woman, then.”

  “She is a descendant of Celris,” Ractia explained. “Her name is Livara, and her followers call her the Lady of Winter.”

  “She is a goddess, or a mortal?” Umbris asked, narrowing his eyes.

  “Caught between the two,” Ractia told him. “No longer the one, and not yet entirely the other. I would like you to kill her before she finishes the journey.”

  Umbris’s tongue flicked out, tasting the air. “Why would she come here? For the remains?”

  That was actually not why the girl was coming, Ractia was quite certain; but given how territorial Umbris seemed to be, regarding his mother’s body, there was no reason to tell him that. Instead, Ractia shrugged. “Perhaps. That may be one of her reasons; I know that she consumed what was left of Celris, at the very least, and there are stories that she ate the remnants of Costia at the Well of Bones. Whether she could survive three corpses is an open question, but fear of death never seems to have stopped this one before now.”

  “She cannot have my mother,” Umbris hissed, and Ractia truly believed that, had Livara been there in that moment, there would have been no need to prod the wyrm on further.

  “The usurper, the cannibal, also comes for my children,” Ractia said. “There are some of my Great Bats that survived when the city was destroyed –”

  “Yes, sleeping in the ruins of the undercity,” Umbris said, interrupting her. “You did not care enough to come for them at any time since you rose. Why care now?”

  Carefully, ever so carefully, Ractia controlled her anger. The animal interrupted her, as if they were equals. If she did not have a use for him, it would have been the last thing he ever did. “They were pieces I did not need to place on the board, yet. The moment I wake them, I risk losing them to my enemies, and so I was content to let them slumber a while longer. Now, however, this woman, this child, would strike at them, and I cannot allow that.”

  “Why not kill her yourself, then?” Umbris asked. “Surely the mighty goddess can destroy a simple mortal girl.”

  And this was the catching point, of course: because it certainly would be more effective for Ractia to descend on the crater in all of her power, and strike Livara down. If she attacked from surprise, with all of her power, utterly without mercy, that should be the end of it. Certainly there was nothing that Umbris could do which would be as deadly.

  It was an entire line of reasoning which proceeded from the assumption that Ractia actually wanted Livara t?r Valtteri dead. A decade ago, it would even have been true.

  “I am still recovering from my long death, while you have had twelve hundred years to grow strong, to mate and to raise clutches of your descendants,” Ractia told him. “I need time to become again what I once was, to gather my forces –”

  “And so you would use me, and dispose of me?” Umbris snarled. “A weapon easy to hand, and just as easily cast aside.”

  “I would bargain an alliance with you, against a threat to us both,” Ractia told him. “And I do not come empty handed, son of my husband.”

  The rustle of scale on scale silenced, for a moment, as the immense creature became very still. “You offer the imprint of a word?”

  Ractia smiled, and stepped forward, approaching the wyrm’s head. “I was there when Asuris engraved the shell of your egg with the word of darkness,” she purred. Her fingers touched the scales of Umbris’s snout lightly, ever so lightly, a promise of what she offered. “Kill the girl, and I will give you another, one of my own.”

  “I will not do your bidding on empty promises alone,” Umbris grumbled. “A word now, and a second when this Lady of Winter is dead. And her corpse is mine to feast on.”

  Ractia nodded. “And the first? Which shall it be? I believe you will remember mine.”

  “The word of growth,” Umbris said, after a moment’s thought.

  Ractia smiled. “Dō Cer.”

  volume eight is finished and we're into book nine!

  here. I am more available there than I am here.

  Dramatis Personae

  Noghis - Son of Ractia and Nighthawk, half-brother of Wren. Eating his vegetables. [22 Rings of Mana]

  Ractia, V?dic Lady of Blood - The Great Mother, mother of Noghis. "Everybody has a price." [??? Rings of Mana]

  Umbris - One of the original Great Wyrms of the First Clutch. Going to do some mercenary work. [33 Rings of Mana]