Midadol

Midadol Telamon -Mid to anyone but her dad, the barmy old fart- rolled her quill between finger and thumb, and pondered deep thoughts.

Literally.

The greatest genius in two worlds had been thinking for the last week about safety, and homelands, and occasionally waking from a doze drenched in sweat and panic and the memory of Kanver as all the friends and enemies and, and people that she had known there died. None of them what died had done a thing to the Waloeders or their god, that four-armed ponce, and they'd been murdered anyway. Or worse.

But thinking about people she'd known for years turning akashic and tearing their loved ones apart was not productive, and the hideaway needed her productive. So she shook off the dreams and thought more about safety. Thinking was what she was good for, and what her people needed her to do. Letting them down just because her hands still shook when she saw the wrong shade -Aetherflood! Run!- of blue was not an option.

Not when it was her turn to save the day.

Clive and his fancy brother had beaten Ultima.

Then after the god spent the last of its life banishing them, Jill had stepped forward to risk her own -far more valuable, if you asked Mid- life to save them. She'd primed when they'd all thought it would kill her to do it again. She'd caught the ancient island that Ultima had sent through to crush them -'Order of events were probably the other way, teleported Origin over us, then sent us all through'- and smashed it to rubble. Then she'd flown around turning the waves into icebergs and pulling people from the water 'til she'd come back with her arms full of the Rosfield brothers and stopped doing anything but clinging to Clive like he would shatter if she let him go.

And even after that she'd made herself leave him long enough to gub some pirates and get them ships full of supplies -bloody ones, but they'd salvaged worse- and maps they could read because apparently magic had gone and changed on them in weird ways.

The Bearers had all felt the Curse of the Crystal fall away from them as they were transported, or so they said. Mid had found her confirmation in the fingers and toes that were back to being fleshy and full of feeling, and focused on making her layabouts get the Enterprise in order while Otto -finest quartermaster in two worlds now- arranged to take stock of the magic they were suddenly free to use.

She'd known they would need it. The mere was salt now, free of blight for the filters to remove but deadly in a whole new way. The land around it had become open ocean, and when she'd found time to dive at the edge of where the shore had been, Mid found their -relatively- shallow waters were perched on a column of earth and stone the full width of the mere and with a mirror smooth edge.

The ruins of Fallen airships that they had built the Hideaway across, buoyant as they might be, were still resting on the bottom of the mere. The water level had dropped, but if anything happened to the pillar they were on -probably reflected in a vast circular pit where it had been, perfectly sliced from the world just like the Falls of Dzemekys- then they'd sink like a stone. If a storm bad enough to blow over the few miles of shallow waters between them and open ocean came, they'd be smashed to pieces and might as well have sunk.

They had no food, no wood, no supplies at all but what they already had stored, and near on six thousand people who had needed constant supplies to keep alive even in Valisthea. Which weren't even starting on the thirsty reality of water filters that would clog up thirty two percent faster in salt water and needed even more supplies for her to make more of.

About the only thing she hadn't started worrying about was enemy action, because they had Clive and Jill and Joshua could just about stagger out of bed if he had to and someone distracted Jote and Tarja at the same time. That and waste disposal. That was one area her filtration system, and all the pipes and drains snaking through the Hideaway, were still working perfectly.

So they'd be smelling like flowers when they starved to death and drowned.

Course she'd kept those thoughts off her face while they'd worked out the nearest cities, gotten a fix on some stars, and made sure Joshua was ready to kill anything dumb enough to make him get out of bed.

Clive had felt the Eikons leaving him as Origin fell, all but Ifrit, and while two had returned to their homes, the others had gone west. So they'd sailed east, with all the shiny stuff they could hope to buy food with, making a sad pile in the corner of the Enterprise's vast hold.

And all the while, she'd been thinking. 'Cept for a wee bit of gawking when they finally, after two days of speeding in circles, found 'Braavos'. Impressive as the sights she'd seen were, the Titan straddling the harbour were a thing to behold no matter how well travelled a girl might be. Though it had been a shame the builders missed a chance to give it something right terrifying under that skirt.

Not that the roar of its horns hadn't tried to be scary, but compared to staring down Odin it was just loud. As for the ships that came to meet them at the stuttered signal of that roar, Mid knew how long they'd last if it came to fight with Shiva and Ifrit both on board. She'd let her crew focus on finding them a dock and kept on thinking.

Once they arrived it had been the usual routine of making sure nobody was dumb enough to go ashore and risk getting carried off. Then she'd holed up in her cabin while her crew did their jobs and Clive and Jill went into the city with the one-eyed lady merchant between them.

Of course Charon promptly took her turn at saving them all. She'd bargained an exchange rate for their Gil based on the gold content, and traded treasure and information and used whatever other merchant wiles it took for old one-eye -not that Mid was dumb enough to even think that nickname where Charon might find out- to bring back a hold full of everything they needed to stave off death for another month.

All the while Mid had sat and thought, until she remembered a trick Clive had talked about using once, and her thoughts had moved deeper, and deeper, and then she had to get out her abacus and quill and start scribbling notes.

Clive and Jill had come back from the city with stories of the lady swordsman defending the honour of her beloved at the Moon Pool, and defeating all comers. Larksong had come back with complaints about foreign clothes and an unfamiliar instrument, and all the stories that the Hideaway's bard could gather, while everyone was distracted by a foreign swordswoman and Clive was able to keep a discreet eye on him.

The mad shite about a world without magic and nothing that approached the might of Dominants was the first good news they'd gotten. Then it balanced out with word that the winters lasted years and the western continent was falling into a civil war, just in time for the Eikons to show up, and everywhere in the eastern continent -'cept the one wet city they'd stumbled on- treated people like Bearers even without magic to mark them out.

So finding a place to get some land wasn't an option either, and after some hasty scribbling around the topic of winter Mid's notes got to meet Clive and Jill and watch their eyebrows scale their foreheads.

Then they began to talk to her about the big old ball of Aether that Ultima had drained out of their world, and how much of it -relatively miniscule, absolutely massive- was still filling Clive to bursting. Jill and Joshua too, since he'd had to split it with them for fear of going pop.

So she'd scaled up her plans a hell of a lot and had to do some more scribbling only to conclude, after taking far too long to work out the volume of a fluid cylinder under variable pressure versus variable aether densities, that the amount of magma Clive could pull out of the ground was unlikely to be a barrier to her plans. Getting it into the right shape would be her real trick.

Working it out anyway. Actually doing the shaping and then getting it to stay that shape would be down to Jill. The ice of a goddess was the ideal thing for the job, and once Clive stopped keeping the rock molten, she'd just have to flash freeze thousands of square miles of red hot stone, fast enough to stop it collapsing on itself. Easy peasy.

Mid broke off from their conversation to scratch out an idea involving sinking really big ice crystals and using them to do her big freezy thing to help it all along, then she had to check if Jill could actually do it, and that was one problem with her idea off the list.

By the time they left Braavos on the morning tide, Mid was in desperate need of sleep and the list of problems had grown longer than her hair.

She kept thinking about it.

They made it back to the mess of jagged icebergs and unstable island ruins -kept on the surface by either Origin's odd buoyancy, or simply having landed on a large enough chunk of ice- that surrounded the mere, and arrived home to find the botanists all worked up about the two chunks of Twinside's great gardens that had landed somewhat intact and failed to sink to the bottom of the ocean. Then they'd been told about the oncoming winter and gotten even more worked up about it.

She'd had to do some more thinking about that. Then added the rest of the mingled ruins of Origin and Twinside to her plans because why not at that point.

Word had gotten out about what she'd been planning by then.

The Cursebreakers had sent Dorys -or she'd sent herself, Mid had no time for working out the quasi-military's organisation- to lecture her about defences and routes of approach and Bearers snatched away by raiders in the night.

So she'd done some more thinking.

The botanists had come to her, with books from the stacks about volcanic soil and the need to stack the deck if they were going to grow anything on rock, no matter how quickly Eikons of fire and ice could weather it into something like soil.

And she'd thought some more.

By then her notes were coating most surfaces in her cabin aboard the Enterprise, and she'd had to switch to chalk and literally writing on those surfaces to save writing materials.

But finally, finally, she had a plan that might work. That and three days of sleep to catch up on before she redid her calculations to be sure.

Of course she'd made a few wee mistakes, but once those were corrected she was ready to hand over to the resident gods of ice and fire, and hope.

Shields of ice had gone up around the ruins, to preserve them as lava rose up around them and they either floated to the surface or became caves. Then Shiva had ventured below the waves to create the vast crystals that would help to solidify the island evenly, then serve a second purpose as aquifers for their new home.

Meanwhile, Ifrit had worked to awaken the fire far beneath the earth, readying it for the vast pillar he would have to raise all at once. An island born like a squalling babe. If bairns were born out the top of your head, and were on fire, and not alive, and not really a bairn at all.

By the time Shiva's ice had started tracing out the long long path that would become a canyon winding out to the sea -cradling a river that would wash the salt from the mere- Mid was driving herself mad with another round of checks to her figures.

Then the final shield, this one Joshua's and made of magic rather than yet more ice, had gone up. The final checks were done, and it was time to see if she'd lived up to her fellow Outlaws' example.

It was her turn to save the day, even if she needed three Dominants and the last dregs of a god's stockpiled power to do it.

Jill became Shiva, Clive became Ifrit, and Joshua remained the Phoenix as he'd insisted on transforming first to be sure his shield was ready.

Ifrit's roar was barely audible through the shield, but the eruption nearly deafened them all.

The ocean beyond the shield boiled and was blasted aside and away by the sea of magma that stretched to the horizon and far beyond. Even for a Dominant it was an absurd display. Enough to make Mid wonder what Ultima might have done with the full stockpile of their world's Aether. Then it began to rise.

In minutes it had gone from an ocean of magma to a wall, a few hundred feet tall and still creeping up. Mid knew that, if all was well, it would be pressing against the column of earth the mere rested on, and flowing around the ice to form the shape they wanted from it, but all she could actually see was a wall that would kill them very quickly if Joshua dropped his shield too soon.

By her count it was nearly time for the chill to begin when a distant thunder announced an unplanned eruption to the south east, and she caught a glimpse of movement even over the wall surrounding them.

Then the fog rolled in and she knew that the outer edges of that vast pillar had just become solid rock. Vertical cliffs that would surround the island on all sides. Assuming nothing went wrong.

It was the Phoenix's cue, and where he perched atop the Hideaway Joshua lowered his wings and the shield with it. The wall immediately collapsed into a slope that hissed and steamed mightily on contact with the waters of the mere. Mid counted down to the next mark and, with a soldier's precision, Shiva's chill swept across the land and sent frost dancing across the water.

Red hot magma had become dark stone in the blink of an eye. Above them the Phoenix created a new shield, much smaller this time, and began to emit a steady heat as the world outside got colder and colder and then was lost in a blizzard. A storm born of heat and steam met the sudden chill of Shiva's influence and became a violent haze of white and cold.

Here and there, when the storm cleared enough to see anything, Mid saw steam bursting from the earth. Geysers erupted across the northern shore of the mere, and between that and the ongoing rumble of a distant eruption she wondered if they had been a little too successful in inducing permanent volcanic activity.

But it didn't get any worse, and slowly the thunder of the eruption died down and was lost beneath the storm. Then it was just a matter of waiting.

Hours later, the weather cleared, and the shield dropped and Joshua followed it. Bundled off to the infirmary before Shiva and Ifrit even reached the newborn shore of the mere. A long gentle slope that would hopefully be marked by streams when the grey mix of snow and ash began to melt.

Then they'd need to have them both melt the rest of the ice filling the one gap in the shore, so that all that water could flow out to sea and carry them out with it. Already Mid was planning out the barrier they'd build at the mouth of the canyon, sealing the one gap in the cliff face and ensuring nobody could possibly come at them unawares. Then they'd have to somehow get the island to grow anything, maybe harness volcanic activity for heat in the face of winter, find the entrances where venting steam would have created tunnels down to the ruins, confirm the gardens had ended up on the surface as planned, and a whole bunch of other things still to come.

But in that moment, with the horizon filled by shore and land once more, Midadol Telamon was content to sit down and watch Obolus, the hoary old boatman, set out across the water to fetch Jill and Clive.

She'd done her part. For now, it was another Outlaw's turn.

In the meantime, she had more thinking to do.