In the aether where Aido Hwedo dwells, I was focused on Unea, but I allowed myself to take stock of what was happening in the Fonlands. Xêvioso, Agê, and the new Vodun Fâ appeared briefly at my location to look Uneb in the face before they rejoined the party headed to the Une-verse, the home of our enemy. Though I did not see it, I knew they led a force to face Une that was large because I had been in those meetings with the Vodun at their conference table in the Meta Chamber with the stacks of enchanted Smiting Cards they used to build their teams. The mission to Talj, regardless of the outcome, was an extremely important opportunity to see how planning with Smiting Cards translated to the actual confrontation with the enemy and we all agreed that the Vodun had developed a system that worked.
My time with Uneb stretched on and the Fonlands took eager advantage of the additional time to fortify against the attack. A glowing white planet appeared to move around the Fonlands, in a revolution that included the great serpent Aido Hwedo, and the white planet left a trail of glowing white magic in its wake. Inside of the glowing orbit, an ocean in the shape of a hollow orb was forming as Fonlanders from the Disc of Agbe arrived to transform into water. I couldn’t see it, but Fonlanders from the Disc of Gu were constructing a hollow orb of iron around the Fonlands beneath the layer of ocean.
When I turned my attention back to Uneb, something felt different. It was clear that my time loop spell still ensnared Uneb and it didn’t appear that she had recognized the trap; her power hadn’t reconciled the anomaly and I wondered if she would be trapped in it for longer than I had anticipated. It suggested that Uneb, Une the whole, wasn’t actively wielding magic and if she had gathered any knowledge of arcana from consuming beings of arcane power, she didn’t bring that knowledge to bear during this encounter. I had her restrained for a long time, but as I watched her, I could see that she was growing ever so slightly the longer she was being held up.
There was a strange moment, the moment, when I could swear that she looked at me in her frozen state. I quickly checked to be sure that the spacetime loop spell was holding but it was expanding around her, not being reconciled by her arcana as I’d anticipated.
“Very clever, meat,” I heard inside of my mind because the full lips of Uneb did not move. She was smirking at me, laughing with her eyes and taunting me. “It took me a while to understand what you were doing to me, but even when I did, I let it continue because you are formidable and I needed the time to reinforce myself. To bring my own arcana to bear.”
I hadn’t planned to let her speak, I would have attacked, but somehow, Uneb had expanded the time loop spell to encompass my very being and I knew that anyone observing would be unable to detect any change because the two of us had been suspended like statues in the aether for a long time already.
“So you do wield arcana?” I asked her, while I ejected my spirit form to hopefully send word that Uneb was stirring and that I was in need of assistance, but Uneb was adept enough that even my spirit form was trapped with her. I set my spirit form to looking for other means of escape or notifying the others while I occupied Uneb’s attention.
“I am arcana,” Uneb sneered. She was no longer in her horizontal flying position, though outsiders would still see her that way. She was vertical and the lithe feminine body she had seemed to stretch and arch within their private timespace as she sneered at me. “Whatever rules and practices that you have committed to memory will soon be under my control as well, as soon as I make landfall on the Fonlands.”
“They will never let you conquer them,” I said defiantly. “They have prepared for you, you cannot sneak up on them like you did Talj or the other existences you have devastated. They know you, they know your name and they do not utter it with fear.”
“Good that names hardly mean anything to the Fonlanders,” Uneb chuckled as thick, wooly tendrils began to extend from her body in my direction. “I know them well enough to know that once I take their Lofted Disc, nothing in the Fonlands will be able to resist me because I will taint the Divine Essence itself and it will bring them all to me.”
“So you know how to defeat the Mother-Father?” I asked, genuinely curious if that is how she took the other Fonlands that Legba had told us all about.
“Of course I do,” Uneb said. “Shall I detail all of my plans to you before I end this charade and blast through the laughable defenses around the Fonlands?”
I nodded. By that point, the thick tendrils were wrapping me, but I remained calm. My spirit form had been making progress against Uneb’s control of the spacetime loop spell, and with more time, I would be able to slip it without her notice. The tendrils were around my neck and with each loop they made around me, the weight on me increased and I could feel it constricting, tightening.
“Shall we trade?” Uneb suggested. “You answer my questions and then I yours, until you are no longer able to speak of course. The tendrils will wring you out soon enough.”
“Ask,” I grunted.
“Tell me what you are.” she said and I told her my story.
“I should have known that the Hyperion wasn’t the only one from another universe lending their help. When I am done here, and Unea is done in the home existence of the Hyperion, we will find yours.”
I was shocked to hear this. We had all assumed that Une would attack the Paradise universe considering the help they had received from Ogi. Une had split into Uneb and Unea and was attacking Alia’s home universe as she attacked the Fonlands. I wondered if Alia’s home had others as powerful as she was. She had been accompanied by very capable arcana wielders, Ivan and Clay, when she arrived to the Fonlands, and I hoped that they had others like them still in their existence. We had to get word to them if there was still time for them to defend against what was no doubt an exact replica of Uneb.
“Are you powerful enough to corrupt or consume the Mother-Father?” I grunted. The tendrils were tight, but not so much that I was forced to attempt a spell to alleviate myself. I couldn’t spare the magic as my spirit form worked at hyperspeed to free us from Uneb’s hold.
“They can resist,” Uneb said, “and probably match any increase in my abilities, but I learned something from the other Fonlands that even the Vodun do not know. The Mother-Father has devised the only weapon capable of slaying them and I know how to wield it. Your turn. Where is the one called Pultine? I must take her first to ensure that she sees me lay waste to her realm.”
“She is on the Disc of Agê,” I lied without hesitation. Uneb couldn’t even suspect that Pultine and the Vodun and their immense forces had traveled to the Une-verse. It was very likely that everything Uneb learned, Une would know instantly. “The Disc of Green Life Magic that outclasses even yours. If you ever land on the Disc of Agê, you will learn the lesson of quality over quantity, for even if you bring huge stores of your ill-gotten magic against them, they will repel you with the conviction of their craft.”
I was struggling to breathe by this point and if I hadn’t felt my spirit form escape the spacetime loop, I would have been panicking.
“What is the weapon to kill…Mother-Father,” I struggled. I wanted to learn this before I cast a spell to free myself, when it appeared that I was helpless and nearing death.
“Take this to your afterlife, meat,” Uneb said and she floated the space between us slowly to approach me and I felt the tendrils around my body squeezing, testing the strength of my bones. “There is a great weapon to be forged by two great powers of black magic, Lêgba as the hilt and Owuo as the blade, and I am the mastersmith.”
She smiled as she raised a hand and smacked my head with the back of it, sending me careening away from my position and toward the Fonlands, still wrapped in the tendrils that only got tighter. I am sure that she thought that she had incapacitated me enough that the tendrils would finish the work of crushing me, but she didn’t anticipate the sudden appearance of the Vodun Jo and once my spirit form had been reabsorbed, I managed to slice through the tendrils with a spell. I saw that Jo floated the space between Uneb and the Fonlands.
“This wasn’t the plan,” I said to the Vodun outloud, but she heard me through our mental connection. “You are supposed to be inside of that complete barrier that has been constructed.”
“That was never the plan, Arcane,” Jo said and that was the last thing she said before I was startled by the appearance of another.
“Are you ok?” I heard through a new mental connection that felt very similar to Jo’s power and I saw the man next to me who looked like he could be Jo’s twin. “I am Damballah. We have met, but you were playing Smiting on my surface with the Vodun when I was in my star form.”
I smiled at him.
“Jo will continue to stall,” Damballah continued, “there are finishing touches on the defense that she wants completed, even if that means facing the enemy herself.”
“I could have continued to stall her,” I started.
“Wrapped up like you were?” Damballah chuckled. “You are lucky your spirit form reached help in time, no one noticed that anything had even changed out here.”
As he talked, I noticed the planet that had been glowing in its revolution around the Fonlands, hovered in space in the distance beyond Damballah like it had lined up beside us in the aether.
“We are all on alert in case things get tough for Jo,” Damballah said. “You should go inside the revolution of the stars and be ready to stall it if it manages to get through.”
“I’ll fall back if things get out of hand,” I agreed, but I wasn’t going to miss the confrontation between Jo and Uneb. They were still floating in the aether, facing off against one another.
“Fine,” Damballah agreed. “I will attain my serpent form. It is my favorite way to do battle.”
I watched as the male body next to me transformed into what appeared to be a cloud of white powder that expanded and elongated. Before long, a large serpent had materialized with pale green scales along its back and its serpentine face retained the structure that it shared with Jo. Damballah was easily three, four times my size and I could only marvel at him.
“Are they going to battle?” I heard another power over the mental connection and I turned as the inhabitants of the glowing planet that still floated in the distance approached. I had met Obatala before, and knew about the other Luminaries of the Disc of Jo, Gleti and Nyame.
“Maybe they already are,” I said to them.
“If the battle is an arcane one, we should be able to see it,” Nyame said with annoyance, her arms crossed at her chest. “They are just floating there…and talking.”
“Every good battle starts with a treatise,” Obatala joked.
“We should be blasting that thing with sunlight,” Nyame said bitterly. “Even if it can survive it, it will definitely be wealoned and unable to toss wizards around space like an afterthought.”
“I feel like everyone is overlooking the fact that I held this being of immense power in suspended animation for a couple of weeks unaided.” The Luminaries hadn’t meant to, but they had definitely damaged my ego and I was really regretting my slipup with Uneb that allowed her to turn my own spell against me.
“Aww,” Gleti said condescending, and I couldn’t tell if she meant to be or not, “you’re a good wizard, we know that. A spacetime loop is no small feat, we were all very impressed when we heard what you’d done. But she seized it from you, didn’t she?” Gleti asked, looking at me like a kind teacher, though the comforting view of her was disturbed by the look of aspiration on Nyame’s face just over her shoulder.
“She did, and I don’t think I ever took my eyes off of her,” I admitted.
“She was playing you the whole time,” Nyame said, “if she is adept enough at seizing it from you, then you should have never been able to trap her in it in the first place.”
“You’re underestimating the enemy,” Gleti said to her as we all focused our attention on Jo and Uneb in the distance. “You’re right, the abilities she displayed to swat away the wizard indicate that she shouldn’t have ever been caught, but she was, utterly and completely for most of the time he kept her there. But she is not the same as when she arrived and it was this influx of power that gave her the knowledge to do what she did. She only acquired the knowledge over time because the immensity of her arcane ability allowed her to not only compensate and defend, but to seize and attack. She evolved before the wizard’s eyes and he will not be able to wield them the same way against her. We must approach this enemy very carefully.”
“Very assstute,” the large serpent form of Damballah hissed and I wondered how I had been able to forget that he was there with us. “Good thing that Jo hasss not engaged her yet, this is good information for the Vodun to know before ssshe decidesss how to attack or defend.”
I saw Nyame roll her eyes and look away to the glowing planet known as Mosu.
“What else happened with that thing?” Obatala asked. “Is there anything else that we may have missed of your encounter.”
I recounted it as I remembered it and they watched my memories as I replayed them in my own mind. I hoped that we could deduce more about the enemy so that Jo could gain as much insight as possible. I wanted to believe that she could end this all herself, vanquish the enemy from the aether so that we could focus on the Pito and Descendant that were barring down on the Fonlands. We were all there to make sure that the victory would be final and thorough.
I made up my mind that I would not retreat. I would stand with the Mosu and the Luminaries, Damballah and Jo and trust that if the seven of us failed, Agbe, Gu, and Sakpata who was preoccupied with other things but still based on the Smiting Chamber, and the others still left in the Fonlands would not allow Uneb to take the Lofted Disc.
“She wants Pultine, Legba and Owuo,” I said aloud when they had reviewed my memories.
“What weapon does she speak of?” Obatala asked, truly perplexed.
“Could she mean the Blight Maker?” Nyame asked. “That is forged of Fonlanders. If that is what she means, then at least that and Pultine are a long way from here. We just need to get word to Legba and Owuo that they cannot allow themselves to be corrupted.”
“She can’t mean that,” Gleti reasoned, “we know if the Blight Maker. She spoke of this weapon with Legba as the hilt and Owuo as the blade as something that is a secret of the Mother-Father. As if they created a way to end them, which doesn’t make much sense to me.”
“Owuo was made as a check on the powers of the Vodun,” Nyame explained. “The Discs of the Fonlands managed to override the will of the Mother-Father that created the seven Vodun and the six underside twins. The birth of Owuo and the emergence of the Vodun Fa only recently is evidence that the Discs have a will separate from the Mother-Father. Maybe the Fonlands created the tools that could slay the Mother-Father, but it has not seen fit to give that knowledge to any Fonlander. Not here anyway.”
“There is so much revisionist history as of late,” Obatala said with a sigh. “Everything that we thought was true was only a half-truth.”
It was easy enough for me to digest the history of the Fonlands, having only learned about it all recently, but Fonlanders exist for a long time and to have notions about your long existence upended must be very disturbing. Nyame contacted Legba to warn him about Uneb’s plan and then we talked as we watched Jo with Uneb for a long time.
PRL Serials 