A/N: The implications of Warhammer elves worshipping gods taken right out of real human mythology are many and varied.

Next up, the war arc. And a surprise most fashionably late.

Chapter 6 – Sag Mir, Sag Mir, Mac Lir

"-. .-"

"Thengill," Hrami called when I came out of my latest attempt to supplement my inherent spiritual growth via Deft Adaptation, with the raw aethyric power from the Waystone. Results so far were mixed. "The Dove's tribe have made port with their last batch."

It had been one month since I took over the Graelings, and Valnir was only just finishing shipping his people here. I hadn't expected them to rename themselves for what had been the most ridiculed spirit in the North before my coming, but it was marginally better than their first choice of 'Godsmen.'

Also, irony couldn't get much sweeter than Nurgle's destined champion becoming a priest of Shallya, of all things. Valnir didn't seem to realize that was what Shallya intended for him, but it was only a matter of time.

Their settlement had been the easiest of my problems to solve, compared to everything else on my plate. The Mammoth Rider clan had been attainted when I went down there and personally killed everyone brave enough to make a fight out of it, which was about two thirds of the men still left in the clan, and two women. A few families decided to pack up and leave, and I let them because that way I could learn who and why they ran to. Also, I said I'd let dissenters leave, and I kept my word. The ones who didn't fight – or couldn't – had been dispossessed of everything they had, and brought to Graelholm while I decided how to deal with them. The biggest moral conundrum were the nominally innocent children, but I had a plan for them.

It all depended on how the quest I sent Jarl Angan on turned out. "What about my other orders?"

"We have some people who proved good enough at the handiwork, but none of their lanterns work like yours do."

"That's to be expected, their function doesn't arise naturally."

"We'll never have the mystics to enchant them all." Left unsaid was that we barely had a tenth of the mystics there were before, and all besides Gautaz of the Doves and Hrami himself were apprentices.

Which was good because they had less to unlearn, but bad because it meant a lot of teaching work for me. I didn't mind taking responsibility, but there were a lot of more pressing matters right now. Also, in the Eight Winds paradigm, you needed the Amethyst wind to weave the right enchantment, which cut down our options to literally zero right now, as Valnir had only just figured out his first cantrip. "Do we at least have the minimum number of paired ones I asked for?"

"Barely."

I'd ordered a number of sets made of the same block of stone, and with certain patterns that would make it easy to invoke sympathetic magic. "What about the songs?"

"The new instruments are a lot more popular, and we seem to have a lot of lads and lasses who want to play at being skalds now that they don't have to fear curses from jealous sorcerers."

I didn't know if it had occurred to these folk before, to have someone else sing the songs or incantations when doing invocations, but it had worked for Iddina's people and his various European off-shoots on Earth. Time to see if it worked here too. "Alright. Guess we're off to Bjarkoy then."

"Aye, riki."

"Kwee!" Screeched the little griffon I had named Ravana, because Tzeentch would get hopelessly distracted chasing the lofty narratives of the Hindu epic instead of conceiving that I'd just want to name my griffon 'Scream.'

"How's my little monster, feeling any smarter today?"

"Wark!" The shrieking beast finally divebombed me, having understood enough today to know not to bother me until I was finished sitting still and pretending the rest of the world didn't exist. Deft Animus Adaptation of the Dragon School wasn't exactly synergistic with my skills as a spiritual surgeon, but it didn't need to be after I established the familiar bond. I hadn't managed to give her sapience yet, but she was too young for that anyway. In fact, using Deft Adaptation to gradually improve her intellect at the expense of spiritual power – which I was regularly and actively increasing with my own – was actually showing better progress than I'd seen with my attempts to improve myself.

This was mostly due to the fact that sealing my name – and what I'd gone through to get there – already gave me a maximum rate of self-actualization. On those grounds, it was surprising that I had any hope of further accelerating my spiritual growth at all, even if just in terms of lateral utility.

Regrettably, I had to acknowledge that the effect was too small to be worth the time investment, compared to everything else I could be doing with these abilities. And my time. Hopefully the stunt I planned to pull today would work out well enough to remove some of the feeling of ominous urgency building up.

Thankfully, Deft Adaptation did give me the ability to unmake arcane marks, which removed all prior restraint on experimenting with the Eight Winds. It wasn't something safe to do in high-stakes battles, that was why I'd resorted to the Aqshy-maximized fuel-air bomb against the sorcerer-shamans. Day-to-day, though, it did allow me to revert the inevitable consequences from casting the more advanced spells of any kind. In this case, since the Monolith of Katam was quite far away from civilization to get anywhere fast on foot, I chose the Transformation of Kadon.

How I'd lucked into learning it – and through it all the principles of Ghur that I'd been missing – was a mixed blessing at best. Or perhaps curse. The first phase of the Druchii invasion of Ulthuan was going badly for the defenders, but that had also prompted the mages on both sides to do away with restraint faster than they otherwise would have. Pride too, enough to use spells invented by us lowly ylvathoi in the case of one Prince Elliriad of Hoeth. He was no Teclis by a long shot, but the ill-fated civil war against his brother that took him all around the world four hundred years ago had either led him to the Book of Kadon the Mad, or someone who'd read it.

Ravana liked flying with her adoptive father in griffon form, at least. Even if that meant being carried in my hand most of the way, since she was still rather slow. It was a miracle she could do more than glide really, at her age. Hrami was less enthused about riding his king and god like a beast of burden, which was fair enough because optics mattered. I carried him in a harness of vines instead, hanging by my other fist.

Sadly, the spirit was at once too mutable and too stubborn to just lock parts of it into permanent spell configurations, so I couldn't just do spiritual surgery on him and permanently bind some of his power into the Flight of Amar spell. If it was so easy, I could give anyone the ability to become weightless at will that way, or any number of other things. If they were a mage, they could then use basic cantrips to fly wherever they wanted.

The experiments conducted by the Federation on the subject showed it wasn't exactly safe either, to permanently mutilate the part of you whose primary function was to be your personality. And willpower.

But permanent empowerments also existed, some divine and some not, so at the very least I knew for sure that it was possible to create an autonomously-powered boon. The Federation may or may not have advanced to that point after I last had high enough access to know for sure. Most critically, I knew of several such boons that had occurred more than once on this very planet, without much deviation. They were replicable. Consistently.

Deft Adaptation combined with everything else I had might allow me to do something of the sort for myself, but I hadn't had time to experiment that deeply. It certainly wasn't enough by itself. Odds were I'd have to give up some of my precious anima, like I'd done with Bran's book. I wasn't desperate enough to stop looking for less wasteful alternatives yet. Nor did I have any anima to spare, after the toll I paid during my hostile takeover. Shutting the door in the Chaos Gods' faces had cost me more than I'd paid for any of the Pure Forms so far, and that had been only the most costly of several things I did that day.

Graelholm had only just become visible in the distance when I started to fly over the results of what I had been doing with my time. Summer may be nearly over, but it was also the time when Ghyran was strongest. A single Jade Wizard could keep a whole kingdom fed further south. Up here, where the population was so much lower, Hrami and I working together had produced enough crops to last the whole tribe easily through the winter. The spell of Spring Bloom didn't accelerate harvests, but Lifebloom did. Then, too, Fat of the Land made people last without food for a week.

It wasn't the most sustainable approach long term, especially if we used the same land over and over, but for an emergency you couldn't hope for better without Federation-era temporal hydroponics. Except that same Federation's replicator technology, maybe.

Really, it took more time to find useable crops. Since the Graelings were the most hated of all human peoples south of the Last Hope inn (except maybe the Kurgans), we wouldn't have had anyone to buy seeds and the like from even if there were time for it. We had some grain and tubers from the plunder that the thralls hadn't taken with them in their escape, but none of them could withstand the climate up here. I did use my spell tuning skills to force selective breeding on some without offsetting the environmental stressors the way Ghyran usually did, but in the end I had better luck going into the wilderness to look for local options that didn't die at the first cold snap.

A week searching at my best speed gave a really good haul. I didn't find any native potatoes, so I had to put a bit more work into magically speeding through a few dozen more generations of those, but I did find pretty much everything else. Wild onions, cabbage, garlic, leek, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, basil, carrots, celery, parsnips, I even found tarragon and lovage. This was, of course, in addition to sunflowers, beets, squash, and barley of several sorts. The only essential crop I still lacked was corn.

I started a couple of good fields of pumpkins and turnips too, not just for the seeds but also so we wouldn't have to slaughter most of our livestock at the start of winter anymore. Next year, proper farming tools and four-field crop rotation would take over and we'd be set for good. I probably wouldn't even need to introduce the seed drill, though I was certainly going to do so as soon as we trained enough craftsmen to reliably produce and maintain them, without sacrificing our arms and armor production.

Conveniently, all the herbs necessary to treat the plague existed in nature, so I'd sprinkled plots of those in between the bigger fields as well. Once I had enough grains or corn, I'd see some green mold started as well.

I ran into monsters repeatedly, during that week of searching, which was good because Hysh could purify anything and Ghyran could make almost anything edible. My people – even if most still didn't deserve that honor yet – were most appreciative of that very incidental bounty of mammoth, mastodon and troll, even as they turned their noses at the seeds, roots and stems I brought back. Or, rather, at the farm work I demanded of them.

I let the attitude slide because I'd had them clearing land the whole time I was gone. Sure, I'd used the Gold Wind and a hammer to rig up a few good rock rakes, but that robbed them of the valuable bonding-through-shared-misery experience of clearing arable land by hand.

Fortunately, I didn't need them to enjoy what I told them to do when I explained where and how to plant, just to do it. And they did. With a lot less grumbling too, after I revealed maple syrup and made it a reward for good honest work. It wasn't the right season for tapping, but Ghyran cured all ills. The promise of sweets did have its best effect on the young, but that was fine too. Being compared to one's children worked to praise someone as easily as to shame them.

I made up even that difference by using Ghyran to ferment a barrel of maple syrup into mead. That might have won over more people than every other individual act I'd done up to that point. It was definitely what finally won over the last magicals, since it wasn't hard to make charms that let others cast such a basic spell, regardless of wind affinity. All those orphaned apprentices had only followed orders due to naked fear of me until that point.

Few things eliminated existential dread like the promise of steady gainful employment.

I did, of course, claim the best patches of maple woods for myself, and gave myself right of first refusal on any found in the future. It would ensure I always had a personal income stream, and give me something to use as land grants or lease for when I needed to reward or bind someone with the promise of wealth.

If I'd found any sugar beets it would be even better, but so far no luck. There had to be some in the region, since the normal sort existed, but it would have to wait until next year. Hopefully I'd find some bean varieties too, at some point. I was flying over the fields I'd earmarked for future production of those right now.

As I reached the all-new crop fields farthest from Graelholm, I slowed my flight and descended some in order to see if anyone needed help only Hrami or I could give. Fortunately, there were just a few injuries that couldn't wait until the evening, and Hrami was able to drop spells on them from afar as we passed.

It was near the outskirts of the capital town that I had to land and transform back to human form, because someone had somehow managed to make one of the aurochs snap and gore him straight through the neck. Despite that I'd gone and used Ghur to tame them all myself. Herd migration paths and stigma being what they were, the few Graeling clans that bothered keeping anything bigger than goat and sheep were nowhere near the capital. It was a toss-up if they even were Graelings most years, or if they paid lip service to the Vargs or Skaelings instead, on whose territories were located the biggest pastures and, thus, the herds spent the most time each year.

Just one of many headaches I'd surely suffer in the future.

This man had been dead for a while. Long enough for his wife to come over from town. She was kneeling next to him, half-crying and half-cursing the man for being so given to rage all the time.

She avoided my eyes, so I let her be and checked on the lantern post nearby. I'd repurposed the ones I'd prepared for the Monolith ritual as streetlights, plus some portable lampposts for field work in this case. Not just for the light source but also for events like this. To my conflicted relief, there was a soul inside, which meant the man hadn't rejected the proffered safety. When the woman finally looked at me and I gave her a nod, she began to curse the man for needing to die before he stopped being such a daft fool. Which he was, and would hopefully come to realize even without suffering an eternity of torment at the claws of the evil gods he'd served in life.

Behind her, the man's two sons were looking tight-lipped but not that conflicted. Man probably wasn't violent to just beasts.

Pride, mistrust, hate, stupidity, one or more per each person, just one wrong move from me and the previous normal could return with a vengeance.

Seemed I needed today to go really well, or there could be a major schism and civil war after all. I'd be least affected by it, I wouldn't stick around for their self-destruction if they spat in my face after all this. But I'd made a commitment now. Also, my lanterns were strictly a one-soul affair, which was not the most sustainable long-term solution. Even if I could eventually get everyone to wear one as a pendant. As long as the afterlife they were supposed to guide people towards plainly didn't exist, my Gold Lanterns were not fit for purpose.

I sent Hrami to see to any other incidents while I proceeded into Graelholm with just Ravana for company. Here, more people than not greeted me, even those that gave me a wide berth on my way to the Great Hall. I consoled myself with the thought that they weren't avoiding the new streetlights. I'd set them up in a grid all over the town, so that people would have to put a lot of effort to die outside a lantern's range. The ones Hrami and me had made accounted for less than half of them, and were the only ones that worked as more than light sources right now, that was why I'd distributed them as nexus points for the others. Hopefully today went well enough to make good on my hopes for that too.

Thankfully, the people I'd interacted with directly were less stand-offish, which included the dozen-some new aspiring skalds practicing their verses and instruments up there in the – my Great Hall. It was a shame I had to interrupt their… actually rather effective attempts to charm the gaggle of unattached maidens nearby, but needs must.

"You, you, you and you lot over there!"

"Konung!" "Riki. "Thengill." "It's the reynir!"

King, lord, lord again, and reynir was short for Munka Reynir, meaning 'One Who Tests.' No one called me any combination of 'small' or 'little.' The day they did was the day I knew I'd gotten through to them, but at this rate I'd grow to my full adult size well before then. Probably be married with children too. "Have you lot been practicing the tunes I gave you?"

"Of course!" "Aye." "We sure have, riki!"

"Well, we're about to find out if you're good enough to impress a god. I'll be down in Bjarkoy. Those of you with the courage to try, come find me there. I'll be in the boat graveyard."

I pretended not to notice their suddenly pale faces, turned around, and left.

I decided to fly ahead alone, luring Ravana into a chase. I took the form of an albatross this time, because Tzeentch was the last to the table when it comes to weaponized foreshadowing. Also, seagulls are assholes.

The port town was just an hour's walk away, so by flying we reached it in no time at all. I welcomed Valnir, told him where to temporarily settle everyone, told him he and his might want to stick around for the rest of the afternoon instead of going straight there, and dumped Ravana on him while I went and spent some time on my own.

Soon, I was up on the very tip of a seaside peak where a family of storks used to have their nest, up until papa stork decided hunting afar was too much effort when it could just fly over to the other side of the fjord, and slaughter the babies of another stork family to get rid of the competition. I knew it was the normal species behaviour, but I still killed the whole lot of them on pure principle. That it freed the unreachable perch for my own use was just convenient coincidence.

The only bird more contemptible was the cuckoo, and that one at least had the excuse of being created when Loec – the Eldar Loec, masquerading as Adad – turned into the first such bird to get close to Enlil's wife and rape her.

For all their boasts of superiority, the Eldar Gods had still resorted to trickery to weaken Earth's gods from within, before actually engaging them in battle. Even then they would have failed if not for Neoth and Ollanius leading the civil war that destroyed my tower.

But I had better things to do than dwell on the sad reality that I was the greatest failed king of history's most famous losers.

Like the implications of the cuckoo existing on this world at all, never mind the majority of Earth-original biosphere. In any other situation I'd maybe allow for the possibility of Terra being the copy, especially with the dinosaur extinction being almost certainly a result of the War in Heaven… except the very first cuckoo was made on Earth. It was critical to the plot to get close to Ninlil. If Loec had used any creature that had previously existed, Terran or otherwise, she'd have known.

Eununcia may have been the reason why the Eldar Pantheon went to war with Earth to begin with, but the fact our gods were achieving interstellar awareness despite humanity never having stepped foot off Terra was why the enemy was so united during that conflict. Even skirted around Asuryan's Edict of mortal-god separation, though they all certainly pretended otherwise.

Enough dawdling on memory lane, old boy, get back to work.

Using Deft Adaptation of the Dragon School, I sat and turned the aethyr that shared the same space as my body into a permanent part of my spiritual power. For the entire time it took the young skalds-to-be to make the trip.

The difference to my regular growth wasn't any better than with the Waystone, but ironically not much less either. Which is to say, still damn near negligible. There was a reason the concept of 'mana bar' was the exclusive province of fantasy stories and games. In reality, it only mattered how well you could articulate what you wanted – or outpicture, in my case – and how much you could channel at any given time. There was such a thing as throughput, but no such thing as a dedicated reservoir of 'magical energy' in the human spirit. Like any other body, though, the spirit could get tired, so the abstraction wasn't entirely arbitrary.

That said, there were spells to boost all manner of individual parameters, including for the spiritual body. Through Deft Adaptation, I could sustain these temporary effects indefinitely so long as I focused on it, maximizing my rate of self-actualization. The benefit compared what my Sealed Name did passively was abysmal, but every little bit helped.

Especially in this universe where magical potential was a fixed value normally impossible to grow.

My experience refining spells and creating longer-lasting versions also served me in good stead here, turning this training into a relatively stressless task. What might have needed all of my focus instead took a minimal amount, freeing the rest of my mind to think on all the other things that I had to worry about now. Like ruling. A topic which had to take precedence over literally everything else if I wanted my current situation to last the year, never mind long-term.

Building a kingdom was straightforward, but it would also take more time than I had before one of the Chaos Chosen to the east came over to press-gang us in their quest to advance to Exalted Hero.

As flippant as my thought about this were, the reality of the situation was the opposite of trifling. For all that Chaos liked to live up to its name, the way its favor manifested was ultimately formulaic. Strength wasn't the only thing that mattered, but it was the thing that mattered most. It wasn't impossible, for example, that a man from an otherwise sane culture might be able to launch a doomed invasion of Ulthuan because the elves had prettier hair than his. But it was impossible for anything other than Chaos' particular brand of 'philosophy' to enable that same man to keep leadership of his forces after such vain stupidity. Never mind abandon said invasion after killing all his challengers. Because he got bored.

Norscans earned the 'marauder' title by the dozens, but it was already a big leap from them to Chaos Warrior. Of those, only few earned the status of aspiring champion, and only if they distinguished themselves as a cut above the others. A small cut because Chaos Warriors already approached the peak combat prowess that a Norscan could attain with just his inborn talent and training. Actual blessings of Chaos were only granted to such aspiring champions after they slew their peers, or more often the heroes of the forces of sanity. When someone did earn a blessing, that was when they became a Chaos Chosen.

The only tier above Chaos Chosen that still qualified as human was the Chaos Lord, or Exalted Hero in the case of those who favored personal might over leading armies. These were Chosen who gained Chaos blessings many times over. After that, the only thing left to do was attempt ascension to daemon prince. It usually failed and left behind a mindless Chaos Spawn instead, the Chaos Wastes were littered with those things – or used to be – but no few Norscans still considered that an improvement over humanity.

There were exceptions of course, I was sure at least one Marauder champion made the leap straight to Daemon Prince. Or would, in the future.

Conversely, in a world where I didn't close the Chaos Gate, King Valbrand wouldn't have died a mere Chaos Warrior, but would've been an Exalted Champion by now. I knew this for certain because in that world, the man called 'Haargroth' would've found a daemon axe and killed the Champion of Chaos that led our tribe with it.

That was the other reason why I had reason to expect the worst, now that I'd given myself away – I'd broken 'fate' twice over. Not only did I steal Valnir the Reaper from Chaos – by complete accident, and I even turned him into an adherent of Shallya somehow – but I also averted the existence of Haargroth the Blooded. This was one of the five lieutenants of Archaon, the Thirteenth Everchosen of Chaos Undivided that would successfully usher in the apocalypse some 1,500 years into the future.

This, of course, meant that I'd also averted the rampage Haargroth and his tribesmen would have inflicted on the Chaos Wastes in a decade or two, during which they'd have to run afoul of the many time anomalies up there. Nothing else explained why he'd still be alive and in his prime in the year 2520. Time was – used to be strange in the Wastes, a man could meet his long-dead grandfather and his unborn grandson on the same day and kill them both, with not the faintest ripple in his memory to mark their passing.

Of course, since I'd closed the Chaos Gate those time anomalies had steadily dissipated as well, so one could say 'fate' was already unsalvageable as far back as thirteen years ago. But no one could credibly accuse the Chaos Gods of being able to accept when they've already lost. It wasn't like they ever realized 'fate' was diametrically opposed to 'chaos' either.

The two Chaos Chosen consolidating their holdings at the other end of Norsca were both Chaos Lords. Horsemen too, but I wasn't going to sully the term 'knight' for them.

Based on my very thorough spying and even more exhaustive military experience, the one to the south was most likely to win over the other. He was called Zanek and was a Champion of Tzeentch, which meant that he was the least crippled of his endangered kind by the Silence. In fact, with Tzeentch mostly unable to actively make his life complicated – as that was the mollusk's way of 'testing' his devotees before the Silence – the man was much more competent than he would have been, even if his spells were generally weaker. Or had been, now.

Zanek had already proven his tactical and strategic skills by beating back his rival with just the Baersonlings for the past three years and a half, despite that the latter had both the Aeslings and the Vargs on his side. Now that he'd also won over the Sarls, logic dictated that he'd finally overwhelm the other Chosen in short order, finally earning the crown of full-fledged Chaos Lord.

Chaos being Chaos, this almost certainly meant that the other man was going to be the final winner instead. This ever so unintuitive belief of mine was further reinforced by the fact that, even after months of spying on his side of the conflict, I still didn't know what his name was. He didn't use it, his lieutenants didn't use it, the subjugated jarls and chiefs didn't use it, nobody used it. The man himself – except not really – only ever called himself 'I' and 'me' while everyone else just hailed him as the 'Glorious One.'

That was the one thing I did find out – this unknown Chaos Chosen hadn't actually been fighting any of his battles for some time. One of his lieutenants had been going out in his armor and wargear pretending to be him for at least a year and a half, while he himself had been off somewhere with just a handful of his closest fighters. Nobody knew where, even the one trusted to impersonate him. The really astonishing part, though, was that both the Chosen and his impersonator were out and proud Khorne devotees, and Khorne hadn't punished either of them for their deception.

What that all said about the carnage being inflicted in Khorne's name in places I hadn't scouted was bad. What it said about active collusion between the Chaos Gods was worse.

I wish I knew where to start looking for the man, but even I could only explore so many places, and the faster I moved as a ghost, the less everything else moved. Absent of his distinctive war gear, the missing Chosen had to be going around dressed as any random Norscan, so I wouldn't be able to recognize him even if I did stumble over him. Which was already unlikely if he was only travelling with a small group. Or alone. Since he'd left his equipment behind, he wasn't the sort to have armor growing straight out of his flesh, lucky snake.

That was all without accounting for any stealth magic, blessings or artefacts he may or may not have.

By my own actions, I now led the weakest and most demoralized of the seven great tribes of Norsca. Either the Vargs or the Skaelings had to attack us. At least.

The best dates to make Chaos sacrifices – and hold subsequent revels – were Hexenstag and Geheimnisnacht, the only two times in the year when Morrslieb was full. Geheimnisnacht had already passed this year, but the Witching Night – New Year's Eve – was still dangerous. because Morrslieb's light conjured ghosts and energized undead. That said, you didn't need to worry as much about being randomly mutated into a beastman like on Twilight's Tide, even before I closed the Eye. Bottom line, any attack on us was bound to happen either on or around New Year's Eve.

Unless the Tzeentch Champion decided on a different date because he knows everyone knows what I know, but that was a minor concern. He wasn't the one I had trouble spying on.

If only I didn't have a reason to suspect even that conclusion might be completely wrong!

With a willful effort, I pulled on Ghyran until the Jade Arcane Mark manifested in me. Then, in a procedure I'd spent hours on and off practicing in what free time I had, I reduced my resistance to the other Winds of Magic without allowing the mark to dissipate.

Then, I drew on a second wind. More and more until that arcane mark manifested as well. I barely had spiritual mass enough for the two, but after weeks of semi-blind attempts I'd finally done it.

To my pleasant surprise, the marks weren't completely separate. The Shyish mark had somehow grown out of the Ghyran one. Or through it. No doubt this would be of major significance whenever I got around to experimenting with multi-wind weaves, but right now that was just one more thing I had to set aside for later.

More important was the feeling of doom that I now felt. Again. As I always did, when I tapped into Shyish enough to bind myself to it. The more I practiced with the Amethyst Wind to know what to teach Valnir, the more keenly I felt what he was feeling, some manner of retroactive echo of something extremely significant that was about to happen. A very chaotic something. To the far east. And south. Farther east and south than any of the tribes, too far away from for it to be the future battlefield of their inevitable clash, so far out into the World's Edge Mountains that it wasn't even part of Norsca anymore, but not so far east as to be the Chaos Dwarfs either. I'd flown over the place a few times, but there was just savage mountain wilderness and little else.

Maybe there was a dwarf holding there, underground, and they were the ones about to do something. But if so, I didn't know which. The Unlamented maps I remembered didn't match geography well at all, and the Karaz Ankor was particularly obtuse in that regard. Also, I hadn't lasted so far by hoping for good luck.

Especially since it was the Wind of Death that carried the warning, instead of the Lore of Heavens that was supposed to handle all the foresight and prophecy.

It better not be the Skaven, I thought testily. Or there'll be genocide.

Best I could figure, the skaven I'd made an example of during my takeover were more or less independent glory-hounds. Ot at least a semi-wayward group of glory hounds. There had been one more that I'd let go, and followed as a bird back to the hole it came from. I turned into a creepy crawler and followed it a ways further into the tunnel too, which I now had marked on my eidetic mental map and had shared with my inner circle, small as it was. The skaven rat ended up meeting with another skaven, who promptly mocked him – and his absent 'friends' – for failing, then killed him. From their inane chatter, I could only deduce it was a rival getting rid of the competition without their elders knowing about it. Two Night Runners of clan Eshin, except with sufficiently better than average skill at magical stealth to get delusions of grandeur.

I'd ambushed the survivor and made it look like they'd killed each other. I even hid a small, hastily-made ceramic and quarts talisman there, shaped – and thus enchanted – to work like a video camera the next time a skaven passed by. It was only good for a minute of memory, but that was good enough. It wasn't until three weeks later that a group of the things passed through there, but they seemed to take the scene at face value. The cave critters that had been feasting on the rotting corpses certainly helped to sell it.

If there was anything approaching common sense in the universe, that would have been enough to prevent any connection to us.

But again, luck was a fool's bet. And if luck wasn't involved, then the ease with which I dealt with the problem meant that the more competent rats were so busy with something else, down in the deeps, that they were going lax on the abusive slaver side of their nature.

It would be so much easier if the timeline of the Black Death came with some insight into how the other skaven activities waxed and waned during this period.

Not for the first time, I considered just phasing straight through the ground to keep looking. But as every time since the first and last time I tried it, I decided against it because the Geomantic Web tended to sneak up on you. However the Old Ones made it, it was completely imperceptible up until I flew right through it. Then I was trapped in a blindingly-bright place that did its best to disintegrate me to empower itself. The disintegration part didn't work but the trapping did. I'd had to use Eununcia to break free, and something or other noticed me just as I escaped.

No thank you. If anyone on this planet other than the Chaos Gods could entrap someone like me, it was a geomantic web-Empowered Kroak.

If it's the Slann who fuck everyone over again, I'll find a way to move the Southern Chaos Gate to Pahuax.

I looked at the fistful of Shyish magic in my left hand, whirling like liquid amethyst. I lifted my other palm and called the green magic into it, conjuring a shimmering ball of Ghyran too. Life in one hand, death in the other. Life's momentum towards growth versus the universe's steady march down through time. It was hard to imagine a more fitting combination for the likes of me.

Just like that, I'd made history by becoming the first human who could wield two different Winds of Magic at once, equally and without hardship or penalty.

Whoever's lining up to ruin this for me is a dead man.

Or dead thing, but I wasn't much into vain hopes either.

I could see the aspiring minstrels coming into view in the distance, along with a fairly sizable crowd of would-be spectators. Valnir and most of Bjarkoy's own population had already collected atop the westmost escarpment to the right of my little peak. Good, this would work best with spectators, doubly so If the crowd amassed naturally.

I jumped down, off the cliff and down past the massive escarpment, far far down to the bottom of the fjord to land on the surface of the water. Bizarrely, in all my spell spying I hadn't found anyone using a water walking spell, so I'd made my own. It was technically dhar, Dark Magic, but all the psyker powers used in the wider universe qualified as that here.

In the time it took my new musicians to arrive, I water-skated around the boat graveyard casting Tide of Years on everything in reach. For all that the Amethyst Wind was called the Lore of Death, it had remarkably few spells actually dealing with entropy, and some of the ships scuttled here were massive. The boat graveyard was built into the one of Bjarkoy's fjords that had the most extreme currents and large saltwater rapids at its mouth. It was a very convenient way to dispose of irreparable ships without the wrecks escaping back into the sea to clog up the port. Also, it worked quite well to prevent enemies from sailing upriver here.

The wrecks proved tougher than I expected, and I had to exert real effort to turn the biggest ones to dust. Fortunately, only a few of them were big or intact enough to breach the surface, so I could simply prioritize those. Optics were nice, but the real aim of this part of my cobbled-up invocation was to pour so much Shyish into the sea that certain parties just had to notice.

I was done just in time to be sitting on an upturned boat on the beach when the minstrels finally arrived. Two of the ones from the Hall had turned chicken on the way over, but that was their loss. I'd made sure to have backup players for all the instruments for this very reason. "Ready to make your marks on history, boys?"

"Aye!" "You'll be impressed and then some, riki!"

"Oh, I'm not the one you need to impress." Ignoring their confusion, I hopped off the boat and water-walked a fair distance onto the water surface. Then I triggered a Verdant Apotheosis I'd pre-cast on one of the anemic mountain pines sticking out the side of the cliff. The branch grew to a massive length, conveniently thinning out just when it was within normal casting distance of me. It buckled under the weight of the sack I'd hung off of it, spilling a veritable bounty of stone lanterns into the sea.

Unlike the rest, these were all full. They glowed to a one with golden light. The spirits of all the Mammoth Riders clansmen who'd died at my hand were here, including Chief Knut after days of agony.

I used a whirlpool spell and judicial applications of flight cantrips to keep the lanterns afloat and spread them out, until they sketched the shape of a salmon fleeing from the outline of a man hawking from the back of a chariot.

"Well?" I shouted back to the shore after a while of nothing happening. "I'm waiting!"

I could practically feel the nerves of the amateur skalds that I'd singled out, and the tense expectation from the… however many people had come to watch.

Eventually, though, the hurdy-gurdy started, followed closely by the nyckelharpa and half a dozen other instruments. It could barely be called music, I could hear every jerk and tremble in their limbs, what terrible scenarios had they imagined on the way over? And I'd just locked myself into the two winds least useful at psychological counter-warfare too.

Careful not to actually reveal I was targeting them, I released a wide area pulse of the only Shyish spell I currently knew that remotely qualified as ally support.

Acceptance of Fate washed over the musicians, and it… didn't really improve their skills any. But it did suppress all forms of fear, so they regained their enthusiasm at least. Kept a steady tune, if nothing else, while I contributed the one thing still missing.

The lyrics.

~Tell me, tell me, mac Lir ~ Where does the next wind blow? ~ I tied my boat to seven islands ~ And there the years are passing ~

I wasn't any more gifted a singer than a public speaker, but practice and an overabundance of other people's material more than made up for it here too.

~ Show me, show me, mac Lir ~ Where the curtain of mist falls ~ Within me rests a silver branch ~ From the trees of the other world ~

I'd cleaned our dankest patch of sea, I sang in Reikspiel instead of Norscan to frame the type of relationship I wanted, I cast forth death into the sea to convey what sort of boon I hoped to gain, and my lanterns…

We cast off the sails ~ We are carried in the wind ~ One thousand times at the sea ~ We sail there led by stars ~ And we chase after happiness ~

The spirits of the slain were arranged in a depiction of the son of the sea that no one else on this planet should be able to come up with, a retelling of a legend broken by time and calumnied history on a different world. And if I was wrong about that, there was something I knew I wasn't wrong about.

~ Trust me, trust me, mac Lir, ~ When I'm singing this, my song, ~ Trust That I'll lead the quest till the end ~ And that I will subdue the monsters ~

No one on this world had ever called Manann by his full name, let alone his father's.

Thunder cracked from clear sky. The horizon came alive with the laughter of dolphins and whale song. The frothing saltwater rapids where the river Grael discharged into the sea calmed like rippling crystal, even as the sea beyond the fjord's mouth rose up like a curtain. The shadows of colossal beasts swam within the depths, sea creatures and things other than sea creatures, cavorting around and about the plains of a great island cloaked in mists and promise.

Those mists rose up from the impossible tide now, so thick they should have made it impossible to see more than arm's length. It did make it impossible to see more than arm's length, but not for me. As the singers lost all senses of their surroundings and only played to the end thanks to my spell, I saw everything as the fog spread everywhere and further. It enveloped me, and them, and everyone else who'd come to gawk, ever wider and higher. Finally, the mists grew into clouds high the sky, but no thunder or rain. Just a great shrouded dome within whose bounds all but one god's sight and powers were suppressed.

~ Just look, just look, mac Lir ~ I am now in the noble land ~ However I can't stay ~ An all-new course I've set ~ And the rudder is firm in my hand ~

A chariot burst out of the upswelling sea, drawn by a team of horses as white as the sea foam they galloped upon, a mighty stallion at their fore – Aonbharr! He lived as well, how wonderful!

Just as they might have run me over, the horses suddenly swerved left and the chariot pulled to a stop just short of where I stood on the waves. The wheels and the hooves all made not the slightest splash on the water, as light as a swallow mid-flight such that they didn't disturb the lanterns floating around us. Back whence they had come, the split in the sanding wave stitched back up and disappeared, but not so fast that I failed to glimpse the self-sailing ship hanging upside down from the surface, under the sea.

Finally, the rider stood before me. A tall man in the prime of his life, with pearlescent beard and hair bearing a crown with five tines, an armor made of jade and emerald gems, and the sea itself around his shoulders like a mantle. In one hand he held the horses' reins, while the other held not the trident that the people of this world liked to ascribe to him, but a sword.

The Sguaba Tuinne ship that sailed itself, the chariot pulled by the Courser-upon-the-Water, even the sword Fragarach, all held by a god that was very thoroughly human, not eld. "Manabba'an." I experienced a violent swirl of emotion that almost completely blindsided me. "Blessed child of Engallodh'ler. You lived."

"And you did not," said the God of the Sea.

I didn't reply. I had trouble deciding what to ask first, what to even say. Even though I'd intellectually prepared myself for this – now that the moment had come, all the implications… for anything from Earth to be here was already impossible, but a survivor of the deicide – without the most unintuitive time travel devilries on the part of creatures that were supposed to have gone extinct tens of millions of years before Terra even-

"The last and only time we met, I was but a small boy born too late to fulfil the promise of my divine life, while you were the wizened mortal king on whom hinged all the gods' last hopes. Now you are the god child and I am the elder king, but still neither of us are where we are meant to be."

My first life had lasted long enough for me to suspect that some of our gods had survived the calamity, even if they just ran and hid. But by the next time I reincarnated there was only legend and folkore left to mark the passing of whoever outlasted the deicide. What I did know was that the desert religions wouldn't have supplanted anything if even just one of the gods were still around. "How can this be?"

"When you can join me in Tír Tairngire by your own power," Manannan said with what felt like very deliberate wording. "Then we will speak, of this and more."

That already told me plenty. "Do the elves know they worship a human god?"

"Of this as well."

"… It occurs to me that whatever arrangement enabled this might be connected to how the Eldar completely stopped meddling with humanity up until Slaanesh. Unless they had some hand in the Iron War…"

Manannan did not react to the first, gave away his unfamiliarity with the latter, but still said nothing.

That, too, told me plenty. The bizarre results of the Federation's experiments with chronomancy had just gained a lot of fresh context too. That, though, was something I didn't want to bring up here. "… How is Triton?"

"Asleep for the first time in fifteen thousand years."

So that was fine to talk about. It also explained why Triton didn't decimate the Dark Elf fleet like he almost did ours. "I hope he finds his rest."

"He already is." A water tendril lifted up one of the nearest lanterns and deposited it into Manannan's waiting hand. The god looked at the thing, and I could feel him doing something in the air, and the water and every lantern around us. I didn't know how well he understood the functions of the lanterns, but he certainly took full note of the spirits inside. "What mean you by this?"

"My hope is that Tír Tairngire is called the Land of Promise for more than apples and worldly delights."

The air became charged as if the storm was finally upon us. "If you think to buy my alliance with human souls, much will be reconsidered."

"Your favor for the sake of the souls." I did my best to hide both my skepticism and my hope at his wording. He'd said alliance, not favor or patronage. I'd worded my invocation precisely so there would be no confusion that I was here to treat, not to beg. That he'd not only responded but showed up in person – well, it was a relief to have this extra confirmation. "If any power on this world can enable the damned to pass beyond the reach of Chaos in death, it has to be the one whose realm has never and will never be turned to the purpose of Chaos, even during the last Everchosen's final onslaught at the world's end."

The Age of Unlamented Prophecies was full of rampant speculation about all the things that surely must be going on under the sea on this planet, but not one sea creature ever fought to end the world without being captured and enslaved by someone on legs, and the Storm of Chaos and End Time both played out without the involvement of a single manfish.

Logically, that meant that the King of the Sea had an even better track record telling Chaos to get lost than all the other gods of this world and our old one combined.

"Neither sea nor storm cares about flattery," Manannan said. "Give me these lanterns and the knowledge of their make and I will reward you as you justly deserve."

I shook my head at yet another deflection. "Gifts given freely are no righteous trade." Reaching inside the bag around my waist, I pulled the Book of the Golden Skies for the Dead, the second of its kind. "I am here to treat, not to trick. One can hardly do right by a pact without having all relevant information." I tossed him the book.

"Hah!" The mist rumbled with the god's laughter as Manannan caught the tome mid-air. He held it to his crown, where it immediately dispersed to leave behind only the anima I'd imbued with the Pure Form itself. The insight from witnessing as the god integrated the Form into his greater self was worth the bother I put into this day all on its own. "Your words land as well as salt at a king's feast! Fine, then, I'll be your fence. From this moment forth, let my Halls give succor to all those who pass into the light of the Guiding Lanterns of the Lord in the Tower!"

I felt how that decree was heard by everyone in the mist, not just me. I felt the change immediately too. The light of the lanterns turned from gold to sea-green, not just those here but also the ones back in Graelholm, both the ones I made and the others, despite that they hadn't been enchanted at all. I felt another change then, as the lantern around my own neck changed hue as well. Inside, finally, after so long a time, my father's spirit woke up. Only for a moment, before turning over and going back to sleep, mumbling 'they will pass, they will pass, they will pass' over and over and over.

Father had chosen not to move on, and Manannan had let him have his wish. He was acting in the spirit of my request, not just the letter, even though my father's ghost had ignorantly assumed the new way forward to be just another chaos trick.

I slowly exhaled and inclined my head in gratitude. "Thank you."

"When you finally join our ranks, I will be the first to welcome you among us, if only to refresh your memory on when and why not to give thanks." With a sudden yank on his reins, the horses broke into a gallop and Manannan vanished back into the colossal standing wall of sea from whence he came.

The wave sunk back into the deep. The river Grael resumed its flow, now clear of any wreck. Above in the sky, the clouds dispersed.

Only the mist lingered, long enough that I thought it was a parting trick from the god that even the most devoted of his human priesthood described as volatile and unpredictable.

When the mist let me distinguish the vague shapes of approaching ships only after the baby-in-a-basket bumped against my shin, I knew I'd been completely right.

That was when the wails started.

"You've got to be kidding me."

There was a baby. In a basket. Floating up the river from the sea just to bump into me.

That was when the other wails started.

I looked up, aghast.

The fjord was absolutely riddled with baskets. Baskets with babies. Tiny, helpless, screaming babies, all of them rippling like convergences to my mystical sight. Babies born to the Eight Winds of Magic, one and all.

What the hell.

I looked back down at the basket. This boy's aura was strongest. Around it, outlined in the amethyst hues of Shyish, the broken strands of a fate bound to Khorne's service thrashed their final throes as the inexorable passage of time called its due.

Holding my laughter until the babies were all safe on land was the hardest thing I'd had to do this whole life.

"Pfffffhahahahaha! Sure, why not? I already got Valnir the Reaper and Haargroth the Blooded, why not Egil Styrbjorn too? All it takes is the biggest hob of a god to play tug-of-time with the Four themselves just for a lark! And the rest of you lot, where did he even find you all? Did he pluck all of you out of time too? Even Bretonnia can't be drowning so many fey-touched babies in a day!"

It was there, hours later, while surrounded by a score of basket babies and the dozen mind-blown bards I'd conscripted to help me look after them, that the few of the gawkers not knocked completely stupid by the Sea God yelling salvation in their ears finally came down.

Even then, they didn't have the decency to do it because I needed help taking care of these infants that Manannan had gone out of his way to fish from a dozen different rivers in history just to prank me with. They only 'braved' my 'divine presence' because Valnir browbeat them. 'Because someone has to play escort' to the sudden arrival of people I hadn't expected to arrive for another few weeks, even if Jarl Angan saw the most miraculous success on his errand. But they were here anyway, because Manannan mac Lir played with men and their ships as readily as he did small helpless infants.

Preceded by Jarl Angan and flanked by his bondsman and vitki, Bran Lostkin looked around the chaos I found myself in, then stared at me with the most honest attempt I'd ever seen at trying not to look as buffaloed as he clearly felt. "Hail the Lord in the Tower?"

"Just for that you're fostering everyone I can foist on you instead of just the score I'd initially planned."

"Eh?"

"-. The Ancestor .-"

The gates to the Ungdrin Ankor boomed like a strike from Drongrundum under Grimnir's fists, then a second time as he slammed them closed behind him and stormed alone into the Underway.

"A POX ON LONGBEARD SHAME AND GREYBEARD PRIDE!"

The Underway's walls rattled with the Ancestor's scream of rage.

"Three years, THREE YEARS!"

Three years being fawned over since finally finding a hold still intact, three years on top of the ten he wasted on scouring the Wastes clean, of mutant monsters and warpstone pustules and the chaos sorcerers right there in their forts.

"THREE YEARS LYING RIGHT TO MY FACE!"

Grimnir's roar carried through air and rock with such force that he practically felt the fresh shame erupting back inside Karak Vlag's oh so proud walls, the insolence! By their own ways he ought to swear a grudge on them! He, their Ancestor, to swear a grudge against his own people! Three years they worshipped at his feet and not one of them allowed even a mention of what lay in the Dark Lands to the east! None of them, from any of the holds or outposts on the way, all of them would rather lie to his face to salve their embarrassment until a beardling went and finally did the right thing!

"SIX THOUSAND YEARS!" He roared as he punched a whole new tunnel through the bedrock. "Six thousand years of fighting stretched a score-fold by time trickery, and what did I buy with it besides RANK COWARDICE!"

Greybeards too afraid to disappoint him but too proud to be the first to reveal their shame, longbeards more afraid to shame their elders than themselves and him, and now a beardling ranger only cracked because he was too afraid of Grimnir's glare!

"Dawi-Zharr," he raged as his pounding fists smashed and smashed and smashed new tunnel ahead of his rampage. "Because our failure wasn't already bad enough!" Enough dwarfs to fill a third of the Karaz Ankor, given to a black-hearted Chaos thing all the way back when he and the rest of the Ancestors still walked the world! A more abject failure was impossible to imagine, and now that he finally knew he had only sheer cowardice to thank-!

His pounding fists suddenly had no further rock to break.

His rampant fury was abruptly diverted by the feel and stench of Chaos right in his face. It wafted over him like a wall of disarray and dark magic.

"Oh for – what now?!"

The answer, after too long walking down a natural-looking cavern that was anything but natural, was a treasure trove big enough to fund the reconquest of every dwarf hold and outpost ever lost. Gems and gold in piles so high you couldn't see the top. And in the middle, curled up on the largest and widest of the hills of gold, what else could there be but a dragon?

No sooner had Grimnir laid eyes on the beast that one of its heads came suddenly awake, reared up with a wide-open maw full of teeth, and bit its other head clean off with a sick snapping crunch.

"Fate – is broken!" The half-beheaded monster roared wetly as it surged to its feet, heedless of the treasure trampled and splattered with blood from its severed stump. "Styrbjorn, Valnir, Haargroth, Khardun Khardun Khardun become! The skeins must weave anew! Abhor the Final Renovation, Frashokereti cannot pass, the Saoshyant must die! The End must be assured at any cost, the Gods command!"

Reality twisted as the cave was flooded with more chaos magic than the Ancestor had ever faced on this side of the veil.

Grimnir felt the massive Chaos rift engulfing him, the Underway, Karak Vlag, even the mountain itself all over and up high in the clouds.

And here he was with just his fists.

"Well I'll be," Grimnir cracked his knuckles. "Something's finally going my way!"

"-. The Chosen One .-"

He watched the erupting chaos rift with satisfaction from the balcony of the tower at the summit of Uzkulak. The Chaos Rift was bright and scintillating even hundreds of kilometers away, and the laughter of the gods echoed far and wide upon its birth. Even at that distance, one could practically feel the way reality tried to shunt the anomaly out, back into the Warp, but couldn't do so because Tchar denied the world such easy relief from the other side.

The Elves were fools. In bringing the world back to normal, they merely allowed the Lord of Myriad Ways to open a new path forward towards the world's preordained fate.

He took his sweet time turning to face the short and stout chaos dwarf Lord who didn't reach even his sitting height despite his massive headdress. "Convey to the High Priest that I am calling in our wager."

Zhatan the Black grunted sullenly. "No need to gloat, umgi."

"Like you've been doing all week?"

"That's between me and my lord, and don't you forget it!"

How quaint, the voice of the daemon within slyly jeered. He's not even sure if it's Hashut he means, or just Astragoth Ironhand.

The man watched the dwarf leave, then got up to dress and pack the last of his things. As usual, he drew no end of stares as he walked the halls, from dwarfs and their goblin slaves and all the rest. But unlike any times before, no one presumed to think they could actually impede his passage.

By the time he reached the gates to the surface, he was the only one not facing the inside of the Place of the Skull.

"All hear this!" Bellowed the voice of his 'host' through the Horn of Decrees, far behind. "Zhatan the Black, Commander of the Place of the Skull, orders that a thousand swords be made of good black iron, a thousand corselets of ruddy bronze, a thousand arrowheads of 5 shekels of steel and ten thousand of 2 shekels, and that this be delivered to the Fortress of Uzkulak when the moon is full. Let it be known that Zhatan spearheads the Great Ranging to the west and will be the horn on which will be gored the only foe acknowledged by Himself, the Bull! So say I, Zhatan the Black, Commander of the Tower of Uzkulak, Glory to Zhatan, Glory to Ghorth the Cruel, glory to Astragoth Ironhand, all praise Hashut Father of Darkness!"

They are jumping forward with both arms and feet, the daemon said as if his presence within his body didn't give his host all his same understanding of tongues, and what else.

The man mounted his steed and galloped out from under the cursed subterranean hold, and further on down to the base of the mountain where the False God had once snared the broken, orphaned dregs that the dwarfs of the Dark Lands had once been. As they deserved.

Now is the hour of destiny, Chosen! The daemon exhorted when they'd outrun even the best of the waste rangers. There will never be a better time for the pilgrimage than – what are you doing? Where are you going?

The man smirked as he reached the crossroads and took a turn south instead of west. You talk and talk and you promise the moons and sun, but even now you've delivered none of it, why should I keep listening to you?

His smile became a painful grimace, but still broadened when the thing inside him did nothing worse than make him feel like he was melting in flame inside-out.

Fool! The daemon snarled from within. You question whether I deliver? What has this alliance of yours delivered? Nothing, as it may yet do! You think the gods will grant you honors for getting a big head after just one success? You are a nothing, born of nothing, the hollow fruit of an empty womb! All that you are I put in there, and think not that I afford you any affection for that. My half-breeds roam the world, thousands more serve me not in flesh but in deed. They carry my mark and live for my favour. They know their place. They do not carp and question. They serve the destiny of this world through the destiny they find in themselves, because I planted it there – me! As I did in you. Remember that.

Or what, you'll not wait until I take up the Crown of Domination to possess me, oh Be'lakor?

The sudden quiet from the daemon who'd thought he'd kept his true scope and identity secret was everything the Gods' true messenger had promised.

Let Zanek dance all he wants on those strings you wish were still yours, I don't plan to waste the next ten years on a scavenger hunt.

You – you insult the Four Masters themselves! They all – together – no other time but once in all the world's history did they set their difference aside, and you – you mock the destined glory that they altered the world entire for?!

As always, the daemon's rants were as fervent as his words were hollow. All the pain in the world was nothing if it didn't coerce obedience, and he'll sooner turn to ash from pure rage before he played to any strings but those he chose himself.

Let his rivals fall over themselves trying to fit the first stale role dangled in front of them, he wasn't going to step on a stage thirteen years in the crashing. He'd much rather burn the whole sad slate. And he would. There was no need to waste a decade roaming the world looking for artefacts, when he could grasp equal power and more just over yonder mountains.

Win or lose, the hinge on which the future now turned was a base wish for glory, and the name Kharduun.

Banked Anima

100 CP – 100 CP (Manann's Book) 1,100 CP = 1,100 CP

Next chapter is available on P treon (karmicacumen), Ko-fi (karmicacumen) and Subscribestar (karmic-acumen), along with advance chapters for The Unified Theorem (Warcraft), and Everything, Everywhere, one Thing at a Time (Harry Potter Multicross).