Nic peered down at the tiny world. Nylea’s guard were still watching him like a hawk, but he was simply fascinated by the world. Since he last visited empires had risen and fell. There were ruins where cities once stood and cities risen from nothing on the banks of rivers or near plentiful fields; the world was awash in things to see and beautiful vistas to savor.

The seeds of the medicinal fruits he had planted were protected by a great wall of bones now, forged from countless fallen, the result of empires warring back and forth for the precious resource. Now a civilizations of giants stalked among the orchards, devouring the scavengers clans who tried to sneak past the walls.

The golden mountains had met another fate. Humans had won there, fighting the dragons to the highest peaks. Now they cut huge shards of precious metals away and dropped them into the streams, where ships hauled them downriver.

An age of piracy flourished. There were low plains where dozens of rivers flowed against the natural order of gravity, forming a criss-cross maze of whitewater rapids. Through these riverlands cut low sleek boats that could easily be hauled up out of the water and ran to an adjacent stream. Crews of hungry men smaller than a fingernail would haul their ships through the cover of reeds to ambush great treasure barges shipping the wealth of the golden mountain towards a distant city that glowed with a thousand lights.

That city was at war. Gryffon-riding knights sailed down, and huge warbeasts like tusked dogs who could carry ten men upon their backs rode out amidst crawling legions of miniscule soldiers. They met with waves and torrents of the dead. A huge scar incised the earth with surgical precision. Everything the cut across the land touched turned to rot, the trees melting to sour blobs of fungal decay, the people transformed into hideous shadows that flitted across the earth.

The humans were using chunks of the gold, still infused with healing energy, to try and stop the corruption. For as long as the golden forts they built lasted, the scar upon the earth could spread no further. But they were dying fast.

Nylea frowned. She reached down and planted seeds into the earth, pushing them down with one finger. But as soon as the green shoots sprouted up they began to wilt into rot like the rest.

Nic squinted. Something was wriggling in the depths of the vast chasm.

“Don’t-” Nylea warned.

But it was too late.

His hand shot out, and he pulled up an enormous black worm with a mouth like a flower of purple lined in teeth. He grimaced and crushed it, feeling necrotic energies trying to burn into his palm. Drops of yellow blood landed on the earth below and cut huge craters.

“Thank you…” Nylea said sadly. “I fear my curse manifests on my family’s heirloom as well.” Her prim hands began scooping dirt back into the breach, filling it in, and planted new seeds to replace the life that had been lost.

Below, the tiny people were cheering.

Nic was staring at his hand. The black worm had only left surface damage and the burn marks were fading fast. But not as fast as they should have.

His Essence was actually being drained. The meridian lines that carried energy to and from his hand had ruptured violently, and he had to hastily take control of the Essence in those broken veins before it seeped outwards and caused further damage.

“You should be more careful before trying to play god. The cauldron isn’t to be toyed with. Creating things takes nothing, but destroying them? The karmic backlash will injure you every time. The more often you interfere, for good or evil, the more destruction will cost you.” She instructed, reaching out to wrap a bandage of silk over his injured palm. Mild medicines stung as they made contact with the burns.

Nic wasn’t sure where the bandage had come from. A ripple had filled her hands and solidified into a band of gauze. He suspected the ring on her finger was a spatial artifact similar to his bag.

“I- that cut in the ground looked like-” He grasped her hand gently, looking at the lacerations that covered her arm. The skin around them was dull and grey like the earth was.

“Yes. Long ago, my family was the strongest clan of our world. Our matriarch was all-powerful, wielding the Saturnalia to summon forth troops, devour her enemies, bring forth mountains and oceans from nothing. We are told stories of her glory - and our enemies are told darker stories, of when she turned to wrath and cut them down in fields stained red by blood.”

“But then-” Nylea raised a single finger. “An enemy she’d thought she destroyed managed to return. It had set down poison roots within the Saturnalia, and there was no easy way to be rid of the pest from without, for fear of the karmic price. So she passed on her mantle and descended, becoming one of the residents of the world forever in exchange for the ability to fight her great enemy on the final battlefield.”

“Nobody has heard from her since.”

Nic nodded slowly, looking out at the world. Carved into the great mountain was an immense statue, formed from rough-edged, white-tipped stone. It was crude and shaggy but there were details to the face that reminded him of Nylea.

“But the curse is still there?” He asked, through Inkspur.

“Mhm. Power in my family is passed from parent to the child. When new hatchlings are born the father is…” She gestured awkwardly, but innuendo wouldn’t do here. He just blinked until she continued. “Sacrificed. His cultivation is split among the newborn. The power of the mother, meanwhile, is given to a single child when they come of age. It becomes a mantle, a ghost-like presence who guards the new generation. The most powerful mantles contain a thousand years of souls and are able to break the skies.”

“But for the past three generations, anyone who has inherited the matriarch’s mantle has been cursed, and robbed of their ability to cultivate. I was the least talented of my sisters, and so I chose to volunteer myself for the clan’s sake, hoping to pass the mantle on until we can find a cure for the curse. I doubt this little thing can stand up to a D-Class malediction, but…”

She turned her hand over. The cuts covered nearly half of her pale skin. “It may slow my end. And for that I thank you.”

“Would you mind me planting a few things?” Nic asked. “I, uh, I have some valuable treasures I want to grow.”

“Go ahead. I trust you to be careful, and take responsibility for what you plant.” Nylea nodded.

Nic took out several things. The first was the Esper-fruit tree. Clearing a wide swathe of forest he pressed its roots into the ground by the enormous central mountain, entwining the massive peak of stone with an even greater expanse of leaf and bark.

Pushing his finger into the earth to dig three pits around the base, he added more.

To defend the tree he planted the liquid shard of the bismium elemental he’d defeated. To tend and nurture the roots, he planted the corpse of one of the golden scarabs from the Valley of Memory, its body full of Essence.

Finally, he cut his own finger and dropped a single ruby tear of blood into the final pit, before shoveling all three closed.

“Interesting…” Nylea watched with a smile. “What do you think will grow?”

“Hopefully? A race of tiny, unkillable bastards. Maybe one of them will be better prepared for this whole hero thing than I am, and I can get some rest.”

She just laughed and patted his head.

Reaching down, she pushed the teardrop jewel into the earth by the tree’s roots as well. A fourth blessing.

Looking at the sour wasteland left behind by the worm’s destruction, Nic decided he could do more. Taking varieties of poison weed and fruit from his bag he made places for them in the soil, as well as dropping in water, salt, and other things he thought might replenish the land. Finally he let Redjaw scramble down his arm, entering into the new territory as small shoots of poison life began to blossom from the soil.

Compared to the creatures of the Saturnalia, Redjaw was a god. And he would be a good god for the dark crop that would grow in this land, which Nic imagined as a formidable jungle splitting the continent’s peninsula from the mainland.

Next he found ruined area of vast red desert. The only things standing were stubs of marble run to roughness in the wind. Sunfire took this post, and Nic filled the earth with the bones of his enemies alongside to make sure the tiny lizard would have his hands full ruling this inhospitable land. Digging deep into his bag, he took one of the shotgun shells he’d won from the cursed guard and planted it in the very center of the red barrens.

There was only one thing left to do.

In a small corner of the world where things were peaceful, Nic pushed the bubblegum Matteos had given him into a small pit and covered it up.

With that done, he turned to Nylea. “Last time you asked about my world. Wanna hear some more? It wasn’t a great world, but-” He shrugged. “There were lots of small things about it. Little tucked away places where you got the best spicy noodles. Tiny parks that grew in the hidden lots where the backs of four buildings lined up and made a well. Lots of stuff like that…”

“I’d love to.” She smiled a bright, utterly genuine smile.

Nic grinned back.

For the next hour or so they stood on the temple balcony, exchanging stories. Nylea came from a world of immense jungles that spread across a continent surrounded by seas of stars. The oceans were full of pitch black water that consumed everything it touched, except for the bright, shining points of submerged mountains they called celestites.

He didn’t understand how she could be so fascinated by City d23 after that, but she was. She particularly loved the story of how he and Tarquin got caught by one of the city’s shifts - the time when a massive square of buildings lifted up on its concrete foundation and was moved to a new position - and had to hang dangling from a sewer pipe for hours before someone hauled them up.

“Sofia?” He asked suddenly. “What was your homeworld like?”

When Nylea looked at him questioningly he added. “My Sophont. Uh, the voice in my head that tells me what the System knows.”

“I- wasn’t expecting this kind of questioning, Nicolas. I don’t know how much-”

She paused, and then said.

“My homeworld, the homeworld of all Sophonts, is and was called the Etude Daofield. It was a cylindrical world. You could look up and see the world curving above you, all green fields and lakes. And you would see the Spindle. A vast pillar of fire that extended for the entire length of the world, millions of miles up, lifting from the firmament of existence in a straight line.”

“There were holes in the cylinder. Vast rifts where you could stare out and see stars. Some civilizations even lived in the rocky, ice-clad mountains of the outside, but-”

“The thing to understand is that the Spindle would pulse. Ripples would run through, weeks apart, in a rhythm. Where the solar winds this created touched the rifts a music played. The entire world was a single song endlessly repeating.”

“It was said that anyone who could walk the world in a spiral, beginning at the highest point and ending at the lowest, would come to understand the Concept of Music. Not just a fraction, not a sliver. The whole and complete Concept.”

“And when Pathos came to the world, she did.”

“But there was a consequence- a terrible one, one she never foresaw.”

“At the moment of her triumph the Spindle went out.”

“The Sophonts were first deployed as messengers and managers. Our first task was to organize the creation of thousands of tiny artificials suns, trying to restore light to the darkened world. We did. But so much was lost before we could save it. Whole civilizations starved without daylight for their crops. They regressed to savages. Forests wilted to nothing. Sea drifted with rotting layers of dead fish.”

“But Pathos wouldn’t allow our work to be for nothing. She restored the world, over decades. And now the Etude is the center of the Garden Worlds, the core of her domain. We used what we learned revitalizing that world to spread peace and verdant growth to others. Tragedy became triumph because Pathos never once gave up.”