The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

Surely nothing could infiltrate into this den of the creatures, right? He smiled coldly at their smug arrogance, but the tight weave of his concealing Helices did not falter in the slightest.

He was just part of the wall, nothing for their lidless black orbs to see or psense here...

He had been firmly instructed NOT to get anywhere near the watching intelligence that ruled over this place. A new one would be at least a Fifteen, and an older one at least a Twenty. It was not a good idea to think that he could avoid its attention and awareness without some distance between them.

The membranic portals might have been a problem, but they were anchored to stone, and drew their power from psychic conduits woven into the touch-scripted walls. It was simplicity itself to touch them correctly, and a surge in the psychic power sent them open in response, closing a moment later. It was as reflexive as blinking an eye, and the overwatching intelligence registered no reaction to it happening.

He painted everything into his Visual File for upload to The Map when it was safe to do so. He couldn’t go everywhere, of course, but the combination of his tremblesense and Helices let him scout out areas he didn’t even bother to enter, just passing by and feeling them and their nature out.

---

The opening on the sea seemed to be the major trade route. There was a Leng merchant ship at the dock, and he saw the legged-worm-hound form of the Moon Beast that controlled it out there on the docks, dealing with a small cluster of cephalids.

This was the deepest darksea they yet knew of, and he sighed, wishing Lady Traveler could do more of these mappings. The depth here was at the limit of Lady Azaia, and that if she was directly above.

Lady Traveler basically needed to Map the entire planet, he reflected with a shake of his head. But first, she needed to finish the oceans. She was giving an hour a day to important areas, and he made a mental note that this needed to be a priority.

The Merchants of Leng were marooned here, like all planar travelers, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t sail back and forth between the darkseas that ran below the Felldeep areas.

He watched the ape-men being led out of the holds of the slaveship with a cold eye, and felt the hunger in the air. This hapless lot of poor glassy-eyed bastards was being eyed like pigs going to the slaughter.

When the four humans were led off the ship, also chained and glassy-eyed, the tentacles of the cephalids twitched excitedly, and not with just hunger.

They were twenty-five miles and more under the surface. Humans just didn’t come here easily. If what Pawlie had been told was true, cephalid spawn ate and replaced the brains of humanoids, then mutated their bodies into what he saw as the lesser cephs. Those tentacle-jawed lizard folk were what happened when the spawn were shoved into reptilian brains instead, suitable only as minions and shock troops managing the slave population.

From the tats and bone structure, he figured they were Hollow World humans, not from the outside. It just reaffirmed that the Felldeep had connections to both places.

Requiring intelligent brains as food was a huge food supply problem, and effectively required a massive population of sapients to draw from to supply these things. Managing their own numbers to the food supply was probably pretty key.

On the other hand, there was no way that the ‘true’ center of population would leave itself this vulnerable to invasion, with its connection right to the darksea.

It meant there was at least one more of these brain septs further in elsewhere... and if this was one outpost, there had to be at least one other, right?

The odds that there were not outposts under the other primary continents were also so small he basically dismissed them. Shroudzones only went twenty miles deep... these things could exist right under a Shroudzone with impunity, and the manner in which they killed their sapient livestock probably neutralized the chance of undead forming.

Mulch up the corpses and feed them to their slaves, or repurpose them into organic Constructs of various kinds, fuel for experiments and new ideas...

He looked along the curve of the vast, low cavern that extended off well beyond sight, and considered the things that probably laired in it. Even down here there were tides, and he could feel their echoes in the stones. Winds were subdued, as the temperature differentials weren’t as prevalent, nor the great miles of air pressure, all that regulated by whatever forces made the Felldeep possible in the first place.

Water definitely dispersed Wards of any sort, and interfered with flows of non-natural energies. The psychic awareness of the ruling intelligence here would not extend very far, compared to the pstone here it had Pshaped into basically a huge Formation for its own benefit.

Pawlie headed out along the ‘shore’ of this darksea, moving like an unseen spider along the stone, quickly and surely.

The edge of its awareness would not be far, and when he found it...

---------

I noticed the big addition to The Map instantly, and the extreme magical sensitivity of a Void Brother resonating in it. A thought went out, and a lot of attention suddenly turned on Pawlie Blakhamar and his achievement with rather dire gazes.

If the cephalids could have realized how much attention they were suddenly the focus of, I’m sure they would have freaked.

The layer of the Felldeep they were in was over twenty miles down. Without a load of Spell Power buffs fueling Caster Levels, those on the surface couldn’t possibly See down that far.

“Dammit, maybe I should just be riding circles around the planet!” I muttered to nobody in particular. Was that even the lowest level? Was there something below the Darkseas?

Why wouldn’t there be? How would they piss me off if there wasn’t? Did I even want to know?

I tossed a sour eye at the Ring of Fire under the Pacific.

Nobody was paying much attention to the very volcanically active areas, and I hadn’t drawn much attention to it. Those with Fire attunements, however, instantly realized something was going on there.

Cities of Fire Creatures under the sea, hooked into the Felldeep here and there with realms of lava and fire.

There was another lava realm deep under Kamchatka in its Felldeep, too.

Frak. Buried realms in or under the darkseas...

My eyes turned on several of the rift-realms in the Pacific, which were very deep, and had been Warded against outside eyes, at very high Caster Levels.

We didn’t know what was in those places, although the Dragon King of Lemuria had assured us it was nothing friendly in the slightest. I knew that the Felldeeps came up underneath them, some with darkseas, some with normal tunnels, entered the blank areas, and exited the blank areas.

Way, way down...

I looked over to what I had covered of the Indian Ocean so far, mostly just circumlocuting it against the areas I had already touched, with diversions up into the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

Elements of the Felldeep extended out under the Indian Ocean, way down there, including two more darkseas.

Way down, down in the true dark of the Felldeep.

Ugh. Now someone needed to go down into those dark places, just to see what was in them, because there could be some long-term ramifications for them when we took action against them.

In other words, we were probably going to need some Divine help against them, high-end help against high-end shenanigans.

Krakens were supposed to dominate the depths of the Indian Ocean. They sometimes went into the other oceans, but were quickly hunted to death by all the established powers, well aware that leaving one alive was eroding one’s power base. That meant there shouldn't be much to fear there, as I wasn’t too worried about anything below kaiju-Class members of that species.

Things like the lethomorgs, however, and even the cephalids, could have ominous levels of retribution.

But either you were their prey forever, or you fought back. Sure, Neutrals would happily delay forever, as long as someone else got to be the Prey, and the Evil would just buy the old races off with other people, soaking them for secrets and favors in the meantime.

Good just didn’t roll that way. After all, it was the annoying Good people protesting this kind of behavior who the Neutrals and the Evils were happy to negotiate away as the victims/tribute/sacrifices for the ‘greater good’.

I thought about it, and this time called up Shvaughn.

They just might be looking for Good things coming to investigate them, even Neutrals. Time to get around that possibility.

---------

Shvaughn didn’t Waterjump within a hundred miles of the Warded area at the bottom of the Pacific, four miles down in one of the many rifts and canyons that crisscrossed the complex interplay of the mantle down there.

That did mean she had a bit of flying to do, but that was fine. She had a LOT of flying experience now.

Erlking Pommepreya’s speed in flight complemented her erinyes wings very nicely, as did the ki-based lightfoot effects of the Wind Dragon and numbers of martial artists she had Consumed long ago, building them up to fully double her speed a-wing. Add in a Storm Pact’s speed boost when flying, always having a tailwind, and she could zip along as fast as a diving falcon and faster, to her great satisfaction.

Wings were an additional set of limbs, of course, and their power was both magical and physical. She had inherited the flying experience of an erlking, a sylph, and an erinyes, in addition to that of Pact-derived Warlock flight, all having very different understandings of the wind and the air, different styles she merged into her own strength and power.

She delighted in the fact that she was far stronger than any of her memories, the combination of Wish-based boosts from Traveler, Heavy Gravity Training from an Earth Pact, and the boosts from her Amazon Pacts stacking on top of one another to make her feel virtually weightless in the air, capable of flitting about like a hummingbird and beating her wings multiple times a second if need be, a fact which would no doubt surprise anything she had to fight.

She intended to use the fact to her advantage, especially when she could make the bones and feathers cut, slash, poke, or bludgeon as she preferred.

Her job was to probe the den of what were probably Elder Evils, beings powerful enough that none of the merfolk who intruded on their domains came back, and Divination magic either failed or blew out the brains of those attempting Scrying.

The Fey memories she sifted through held little to no information on such creatures, who were Dreamless themselves, and so only warped shadows of them from dreaming races reached the Nevernever of the Fey, giving birth to various phobos creatures of nightmare and shadow, or outright evil that even the Winter Court didn’t treat with lightly.