Gazing out through a picture window sized portal, Dominus smiled as she watched Artie run alongside his new companion. “I hope you enjoy every single moment of your adventure. You deserve it.”
With a gesture, she condensed the view port down to the size of a dinner plate and hung it in the bottom right of her vision as she strode through the featureless white room she’d called home since she’d been betrayed so many years ago. It wasn’t much, merely a fraction of a percentage of her original power condensed and attached to the edge of the astral plane of Genovia.
“Time to check the barrier, it’s been a few decades.” She spun in place, then sat down in a command chair that would have been more appropriate in an interstellar shuttle than a world of fantasy like Genovia. With a wide-open gesture, she summoned up thousands of tiny monitors before her and took a good look at each of them as they displayed the nexus points of her hexagonal barrier around the world she’d sworn to protect eons before.
Genovia was what was known as a Prime World out in the multiverse. Because of that, the Mana produced by it was vastly denser than any world so small should be, denser than 99.999% of all other habitable worlds in fact. The people living on Genovia didn’t know how good they had it, though the System in place was a bit of a hog, taking more than ninety percent of the unused Mana to create Dungeons and Towers instead of letting it naturally coalesce into natural treasures like most other worlds.
Dominus was the first deity to locate the primordial soup that would become Genovia and she’d been protecting it ever since, going so far as to produce six children to help her protect it. That act had backfired a number of years before when four of her six children had betrayed her and attempted to kill her despite her maintaining the barrier that protected them, and the world at large, from thousands of forces fighting for access to the Prime Mana of Genovia. She’d never bothered to teach any of them to maintain the barrier, none of them were skilled enough to maintain even a tenth of the control nodes she’d put in place, let alone make any of their own.
“Everything looks the same, just about a thousand years lef…” She stopped mid thought as she spotted a monitor displaying a bright cerulean nexus point, but in the center of it there was a tiny black splotch. “You fucking prick, D. I’m going to whup you so bad when I get more worshippers.” With a flick of her fingers, she blew up the image of the nexus point in question and scowled when she saw that, not only was there a tiny hole among the black splotches, but it was also growing infinitesimally as she watched.
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“You were never trained to control the void, you idiot!” She slammed her fists down on the arms of her command chair. “Devourer, your days are numbered once Artie learns what you’ve already done to his family.” She sat there, steaming, for the better part of a day before going back to look over the rest of the nexus points. She found half a dozen more tiny holes with the same void signature.
“There’s a reason I gave control of the void to Darkness. She has the patience and control to use it for the good of the people.” She seethed. “What are you even doing putting holes in the Shield. You know as well as I do that Genovia isn’t ready…”
“No. It can’t be.” She pulled up the latest cracked nexus point and spotted an absinthe green thread running through the hole, which was the largest by far, nearly destroying one of her painstakingly created Shield control points. “You didn’t! They’ll strip mine the Mana from Genovia! It’ll be a husk when they leave!”
It was the Aether Reapers, a tremendously powerful race of relatively tall, spindly insectoids with an almost ethereal quality. When they found a world brimming with Mana, they would stop at nothing to get access to it, up to and including corrupting a weak-minded deity like Devourer. While they might whisper sweet nothings into his ear about power untold if he did as they asked, that was all a lie. They ate the deities of the worlds they conquered, without exception. Worse, they didn’t physically consume the deities. Instead, they drained their Mana and then used the shell left behind as a sort of hive ship for their larvae to grow in relative safety as they traveled through the void between universes. They were cold and calculating but never stopped trying to expand.
She laid back in her command chair and covered her face. “For it to be this bad already, Artie doesn’t have centuries to grow to power. He has decades at most, though it wouldn’t surprise me if the Aether Reapers found out about him and had Devourer send his followers to try and nip his ripening bud of power. What can I do to protect him?”
Genovia’s goddess of control and leadership was at a loss. Her worshipper base was miniscule. Hells, only a few thousand souls even knew she existed, let alone worshipped her. She’d expended nearly all of the energy she’d accumulated from her limited worshippers to grant Artie [Suzerain], but it wasn’t a Class that granted immediate power. It required time to grow until it could show its true worth.
She cracked her knuckles. “I guess it’s time to call in my markers. The Elemental Monarchs of this universe owe me a few favors, same with the High-Archon, and Archdevil. I’ll start there, I just hope I don’t have to reach outside the barrier too often, or even more of those Mana-locusts hanging outside will inevitably find a way in. The Aether Reapers are more than enough trouble for Genovia at this point.”
Regardless of her actions, Dominus believed Artie would be crucial in protecting Genovia, even if he was unaware of the extent of his positive impact.
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