Midadol

She was definitely supposed to have had some time to rest.

Instead, she found herself standing ankle deep in volcanic ash on a cliff that was still not as cool as windswept stone should have been. Mid shivered despite the heavy cloak she wore, and watched as -roughly two hundred metres below- her beloved Enterprise navigated the narrow channel through the reefs below, without her.

Clive and Jill and Charon and Otto were all off to accept an invitation from the Sealord of Braavos. They would get to be wined and dined by a man who had just realised what was sitting a day's sail -three to seven days without mithril engines, depending on weather and ship design- away from his city. After all her hard work drafting and redrafting their plans, it would be the two of them who got the credit just for providing the godlike magical might to implement those plans.

And while they got to sample fancy food and drink delicious wines, she was stuck with the botanists.

They had even followed her up to the cliffs. When she turned around there they were, waiting behind her like a bunch of ducklings tailing behind their mum. Them and a dozen Cursebreakers, hands on their swords and eyes on the barren landscape as though it might come alive with Behemoths at any moment.

Since she figured they would yell if any monster did show up, and since she'd seen Jill plug up the caves whose ruins had proved to be full of them, Mid kept her mind on her business and got back to watching the show down below.

Not the Enterprise leaving without her. She was past that already, and her crew knew what she'd do to them if they so much as scratched her baby while they were navigating the reefs.

No, her focus was on the gates.

Wings -more like huge flat beams really- had been torn from one of the countless -not really, there were twenty three complete wrecks and parts of sixty one more- Fallen airships whose corpses littered the mere. Then, with those two vast stretched of nigh-on-unbreakable ceramic, they had spanned the wide channel that linked sea to mere.

Channels had been included the design she gave Jill, and the ice had been formed perfectly. They -specifically Joshua, but really it was a team effort- had lowered the wings into place once a few modifications had been made to them, and then it was just a matter of running two lengths of rope that used up most of their stockpile of it, and the only gap in the sheer cliffs and jagged reefs that surrounded the Hidden Isle was sealed, unless they wanted it unsealed.

On either side the rope ran up through the same channel they'd used to get the gates into place, and met a winch inside the rough forts they'd thrown up on either side with a mix of scrap wood and geomancy. When raised they would swing up with the aid of a great deal of ballast stuffed into the hollows where they'd once joined the airship. When lowered they dammed the canyon river and formed a low waterfall in the shadow of the luckiest part of the fortifications.

Shiva's ice had held back the magma that formed the island, and carved out the snaking shape of the canyon that linked the eastern shore of the mere to the southeastern edge of the island, but it hadn't always been tall enough for the job. Here and there molten stone had overflowed to form bridges across the canyon.

Of course the sheer width of it meant most collapsed under their own weight when the ice melted, especially those many miles inland, where the stone had cooled more slowly. Four of them however, had been thick enough to stand firm, and the largest of those had formed at the very edge of the island. A vast bridge of stone that turned the sole opening in the cliffs into an enormous arch. Nearly half as wide as it was tall.

In days to come, Mid imagined the winch forts expanding towards the cliff edge, then joining with that arch of stone so that the two could be linked by tunnels and fortifications built into it. As little as she liked weapons, the thought of the slavers to the east coming for them set her mind whirling with devices to dump nasty shite -maybe including the defenders' actual shite- onto anyone who tried to force their way in.

Course, it would all be useless against an Eikon anyway, and anybody with a brain would bring one to a fight with them. Just like her thoughts of forts on the other three stone arches that crossed the canyon, it wasn't worth the time it would take them to actually do it. Not when what they already had would keep raiders from making landfall in any significant number.

As much as the idea of them taking anyone made her want to vomit, the slavers weren't the biggest threat. That would eventually be freezing to death, but for right now it was the potential for them all to starve.

Trade was already a bit awkward what with the gold rapidly running out and the difficulties that they'd just put in the way of ships coming their way, but word was that once winter came the storms would make these seas hazardous in the extreme. If it proved an especially long and shitty winter then they might be cut off for months or even years at a time. On an island of barren volcanic rock, 'cept for the soil beneath the mere which were even less fertile than that.

So she steeled herself against the squishy horrors to come, and turned to face the botanists.

'Greagor's Tits, why can't we just build a machine to make food?' Despite thinking as hard as she could, no likely ideas came to her, and Mid walked back to meet Nigel, the head botanist, with a resigned trudge to her steps.

Of course they hadn't really ridden for most of a day just to join her in checking that the gates functioned properly and could be left to the pairs of Cursebreakers that would be garrisoning each fort. So she then had to wait around while they finished their own work of checking the rocks were…rocky? She was an engineer, not a geologist, or even a geomancer. In fact she wasn't any kind of 'mancer, what with being one of the few Outlaws who couldn't throw magic around willy nilly now the only cost to it was needing to eat half your bodyweight after, then sleep like a log and stuff your face some more when you woke up.

So she really wasn't sure what she could offer to the plans being thrown around to get them crops on a scale that could actually feed them, instead of the medical herbs and dietary supplement that the botanists had previously focused on giving them.

The plan to have Jill and Clive cycle extremes of heat and cold -until the stone cracked and weathered and mixed with the ash into something like soil- hadn't even been hers. That had been the idea of the scholarly sorts who filled the stacks and followed their loresman around with quills in hand like Harpocrates might dispense wisdom at any moment.

The mostly friendly rivalry between them and her engineers made it hard to admit how helpful they were, but she truly expected them to be more use to the botanists than she would be.

But then, once you'd worked a couple of miracles, everybody started expecting you to fart out more of them.

She waited quietly while the botanists finished their business, and then mounted up with the rest of them. Rubbing affectionately at her 'bo reminded her of another problem relating to food. Feed for the tame chocobos was fine for the moment, but she'd heard a lot of talk about the importance of maintaining the semi-wild herds that had survived on the ruins of Twinside and those would only survive so long just hunting the smaller monsters Jill hadn't bothered to wall away below the earth with her ice.

Given that it would be several days to the winch forts on foot, and that there were no chocobos in this world for them to trade for -they rode weird things like Odin's mount instead- they couldn't afford to lose the birds.

So mark down another worry.

The ride back took the rest of the day and, absent much in the way of sights to distract her from her thoughts, Mid spent most of it toying with her ponytail and wishing she'd tried harder to invent airships when she'd had the chance.

If they could have flown above the storms then trading in winter would be no problem. Then they could have just weathered the island's stone into soil and let things happen at their own pace.

But now they were in a world without Blight. Which was great…except that it was blighted soil that gave rise to mithril. Without any source of mithril, all they would ever have was the stockpile she'd looted for them on her way out of Kanver. Which scuppered any plans to build a fleet of ships powered by mithril engines, even if she could figure out an alternative for the domes of Fallen ceramic that they also left behind in Valisthea.

They'd be able to run the Enterprise for years yet, and longer if they were careful, but even then they'd run out someday. Airships would burn through that stockpile too fast to be worth it even if she could figure them out in time.

Flight…was a dream she would have to let go of.

Though maybe if she explained herself to Jote very thoroughly first, she might survive asking Joshua for a ride? She supposed it would at least be nice to see their new home from a less depressing angle than the endless hills and plains of dark rock and ash that they saw as they followed the canyon's winding path home. It was such a bland view that she was actually excited when they could see the Silvermane as more than smoke the horizon, and not just because its distant shape was a sign that they were almost to the mere.

Jill had named the accidental volcano that dominated the -equally unintended- mountains in the southeast of the island for her father, and for the way the snow atop it blended into long streaks of some silvery metal. They'd need to investigate it for potential mining once the volcano calmed down, if they ever had the time, but until then it at least made for a landmark to navigate by.

Though getting lost wasn't so much of a problem. Streams and smaller rivers had sprung up almost as soon as the island had formed, and they all flowed to the mere. In turn those waters fed the mighty river that filled the base of the canyon. Filled it very precisely, thanks to her careful mathematics and perhaps a wee bit of guesswork as to what rainfall they'd get.

The success of the island itself only made the lack of anything growing on it more frustrating. Mid knew enough to understand that their efforts at creating soil would be washed away if they didn't grow things to anchor it in place, but that limited them to the literal actual speed that grass grew. They'd all be starved dead before that got them anywhere and somehow she had to come up with a solution to that while the others were off making nice and keeping them supplied with food for as long as possible.

By the time they made it in sight of the mere, Mid had progressed from playing with her hair to aggressively chewing on her portion of jerky and still she had no idea what they were going to do.

And then it got worse.

The island and the hideaway had blended together in all their minds at first, such that when they spoke about one in Braavos they'd accidentally named the other and not even realised.

Although the Hidden Isle had stuck even before it actually existed, Joshua and Clive had insisted on another name, for official purposes. Elaria was supposed to mean something that honoured their father, and from the little she knew of the man she'd had no objection and been unsurprised when nobody else did either.

As for the hideaway, since it was no longer any kind of hidden, they'd given that a name too.

Cidalith.

Meaning either 'Cid's Domain', or, if old Harpocrates' translation was right, 'Cid's Will'.

She didn't have time to get teary eyed at the notion of how her dad would have felt about that. Instead Mid had focused on her plans for the place now that they had no need to hide it and no Blight eating away at anything they built. Well, she would have liked to focus on her plans.

Instead she was stuck in the mud, trying to figure out another miracle as she listened to Nigel tell her about how it was even worse than she'd thought.

She had known they were short on supplies. She had known that they had to assume that anything from Valisthea not on the island may as well not exist any more.

What she had not quite considered was that even things on the island could be lost.

Or that a lot of their ability to make potions -the things that kept their fighters alive- depended on plants that now existed in numbers that could be counted by a dim child. Plants that were filling spaces in the botanists' sheltered gardens that they were going to have no choice but to fill with food if the winter was as bad as people were saying.

Any idiot who had ever cracked open Of Flora across Two Continents knew that a reduced application of Blizzard magic would preserve appropriately dried out seeds almost indefinitely. However, having never progressed onto more advanced texts in that field, Mid had not known that some plants were harder to preserve than others. Some plants had never been successfully grown from preserved seeds.

It all meant that sooner or later they were going to be faced with a choice between survival and preservation, unless they could cultivate enough of the island to do both.

After most of a day spent in the mud, with every spare hand helping them, they'd just barely been able to prepare and plant the full area that had been turned to soil before the Dominants left. Which meant they were all covered in muck, including chocobo muck, and they'd turned a muddy field into a muddy field that might one day have some plants in it.

The mere was already fresh enough to bathe in at least, but after that came a too small dinner and a bedroll on bare stone for fear of damaging the plants if they slept on their patch of soil.

When she woke up the next morning Mid had a blister in a place even she wasn't bold enough to show anyone but Tarja. So she took the opportunity to get some more thinking time, despite the futility she was feeling.

The boat ride to Cidalith passed too quickly, and she found herself stripping down in front of the Head Physicker all too quickly given the chill in the air.

Thoughts of better insulation called oh so sweetly for her focus, but she kept her mind on the muck. She barely even paid attention to what Tarja was saying until the woman began to cast Regen and Mid had a moment of shock before she reminded herself that of course they could cast magic in Cidalith now. It weren't close to the first time she'd seen it, but after so long with it being impossible she still had to catch herself. She'd gotten healed plenty of times, and used restoratives plenty more, but it still felt strangely miraculous to crane her neck and watch her skin closing over all new and pretty like.

'…wait…could we-?'

The idea hit her like a brick. It was crazy, and might not even work, and if there was any chance of success then she'd need to enlist-

Mid was barging through the curtains around Joshua's infirmary bed before she could finish the thought. Certainly before she could be bothered with getting her clothes back on proper.

Joshua looked up, then snapped his gaze back down to the floor. Tarja was yelling something and grabbing at her shoulders. Jote looked like she was about to draw the blade she kept slung low at her back.

Mid ignored all of them, crossed over to the Dominant of Phoenix's bedside and grabbed his hands.

In retrospect, she might have phrased it better, but in her defence she really had needed him.

Once Jote had wasted all of their time with a lecture on the dignity of the Phoenix and the Duchal Line, Mid explained. When she was done, she found herself taking the boat ride back out to the shore with company.

Nigel was surprised to see them, and happy to listen, but he was shaking his head before she was halfway finished.

"I'm sorry, but applying Haste to plants is not a new idea. All too many Bearers were consigned to Lithification by such experiments in the past and none of them accomplished more than accumulating proof for Maltov's Theory of Aetheric Resistance. Non-ambulatory plants will accept levels of temporal acceleration far beyond those that can be cast on flesh, but in the end all that remains is withered ruin. It won't even help us to anchor the soil or improve its composition."

His pause for breath was her chance to tell him the rest of her idea, and this time he had far less to say.

"I suppose it could, possibly, work, but could you even cast such a thing, your grace?"

The Phoenix's Dominant still looked like a stiff breeze might knock him over, but Mid respected his strength more than she ever would his magic or his title. When he stiffened his spine and nodded, she believed him.

They cleared the area, Jote lingering as long as she could before she joined the rest of the mortals huddling against the shore. Then it was time for Joshua to vanish in a burst of fire, and a god to appear where he had been.

Mid had seen more Eikons than most. All but three of them in fact. She still felt the same awe as she had the first time her dad became a towering god of lightning before her eyes.

The Phoenix had a strangely gentle presence, for all that it could kill them all just be moving a little too quickly, and when he lifted his head a part of her expected birdsong to spill from his beak.

Instead the magic washed over them, intent writ directly upon the world in a blend of precise instruction and blunt will. It was endlessly complex in reality, she knew, but her brain did what everyone's did when they felt that pulse of magic and interpreted it as a much simpler command.

Dualcast

Regenga - Hastega

It was simple as Eikonic workings went. Covering a single field of plants with both spells wouldn't even have been beyond a large enough group of mortal mages. Course, they'd have shattered their crystals to do it, or worse if they were Bearers, but it still wasn't the sort of scale that Eikons usually worked on.

It sure felt divine to watch though, as all across the field plants sprung from the ground in an instant. The verdant glimmer of curative magic kept them alive and healthy as they stretched towards the sky like a lass popping her shoulders after a long night of study. The distortion of time magic rippled the air as plants completed years of growth before their very eyes, some of them completing their whole life cycle over and over while the longer lived types just grew and grew.

Then it was done, and Joshua replaced the Phoenix once again, though he was concealed by the thick foliage before he even finished dropping to the ground.

Jote plunged into the new forest on the shore of the mere and emerged quickly with a Dominant who looked much as he had before he Primed. Which was good, because a single field of mixed plants and trees was a long way from what they would need before they were done.

Already the botanists were amongst the field, exclaiming over soil cycling and recording which plants had fared best in their test field. Mid left them to it and got out her notebook and a quill and tried to find a spot she could stick an inkpot while she toyed with the ideas she had for a better quill if she ever had a moment to focus on such a thing.

Then she got to work.

It wasn't all sunshine and roses. The new plants suffered from a weakness that had Tarja telling stories of soldiers who drank too many Hi-Potions in battle and died afterwards without a wound on their body. Nigel agreed with her assessment and they talked back and forth about the relative fragility of flesh created by curative magic.

But all that meant was that they'd need to give it all some time to grow natural like before they ate any of it. They'd even still be able to harvest seeds from the new plants, or so Nigel assured her when she cornered him after checking the numbers of their seed stock and finding them entirely too low.

So when the Enterprise sailed back into the mere, bringing news of an alliance with Braavos and Charon being granted a charter to start up a trading house, their success in securing supplies was rewarded with a stack of paper being shoved under Clive and Jill's noses.

This time she had made sure to have her figures double checked as she went, and they were ready to start right then and there. Shiva and Ifrit's power would prepare the ground, so it was essential they get started as soon as possible, sweeping a path of erosion ahead of the planting and growing to come.

Coincidentally, it might also teach the two of them a lesson about not giving their Head Engineer time to rest.

While they unleashed the power of gods to create dirt, Mid set their quartermaster to assembling as many hands as possible for the planting. Only Otto had a hope of getting several thousand Outlaws to leave their usual tasks aside and learn how to put seeds in the ground from the botanists.

Mid joined the mass of people who left Cidalith for the new shore, most of them walking on it for the first time, and accepted a rough bag of seeds like everyone else.

Two weeks later, as they finished circling the mere in the widest circle yet, she wished she'd found an excuse not to participate. She was all for working with her hands, but the endless hours of planting and walking and planting and walking had left her with a back that felt like it would never stop aching again.

They were so far out from the mere that they couldn't see the water and the Cursebreakers had started worrying about keeping everyone safe from monsters even with all five hundred odd of them set to the task. They'd also successfully turned more than a third of the island green, or would have once the Phoenix cast one last horizon touching wave of growth across the land.

Most of it was with local seeds, as they'd run out of their own stocks within a week and had to switch to whatever Charon could fit in the Enterprise's hold on such short notice. Any order to the planting had likewise broken down and the greenery covering the island was sure to undergo a lot of changes once the realities of that random assortment of plants came due.

As for Clive and Jill, the two of them had long since left the planting group behind and had just about finished weathering all but the outer few miles of the island. Mid suspected they'd be relying on more natural processes to get anything growing on the rest of that land, since all but the valuable and preserved seeds had been expended.

Yet none of those thoughts felt important when she turned and saw a landscape where there had been empty sea a month before.

The Chocobos had come pouring out of the barren island as they worked, and a great many more small animals than she would have expected had turned out to be sheltering in the various surface ruins and caves that dotted the island. Elaria was already a lively place, and she knew it would only grow more so.

Admittedly, monsters were also becoming a problem, but no more so than in any inhabited chunk of Valisthea. The bigger ones were all keeping to the deep caves for now and a few ambulatory plants and giant scorpions were nothing they didn't all know how to live with. The farming communities that they were talking about starting up would have thick walls and people who knew not to let their children roam out of sight.

For men and women who had been slaves for so long, it was an impossible paradise. Mid might not have felt the same way but she could still understand that much.

She might even be looking forward to finding a chunk of it to settle down on herself one day. Just not quite yet.

Professor Ninetales wanted to visit an institute of learning on the western continent, and Jill and Clive were going with her.

Which meant it was time for Mid to remind her crew who was in charge of the Enterprise. She'd let them have too many adventures without her already.

Her ideas for Cidalith could wait.