64. Ripples

  Strong. Grow strong .

  The rabbit cocked it’s head to the side as it heard the words. It stuck its head out of its burrow and looked up at the sky, which was filled with stars. It could see clearly, however. It hopped out and began to forage.

  A hawk the size of a wagon dove for it, but the rabbit saw it coming. It leapt into the air and kicked the bird before the talons sank into its soft fur. The hawk squawked and flew off, defeated.

  The rabbit continued to forage, then returned to its burrow, where its milk nourished the clutch that she’d birthed recently. She’d been pregnant when the human had caught her and brought her to this strange and dangerous world, but that just meant that she had more to protect.

  Strong. Grow Strong.

  “I will,” the rabbit thought, and she reached out to the song. “I will grow strong for my children.”

  Strong. Grow strong. Children grow strong, the song answered.

  ~~~~~~~~

  I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night, and for once it wasn’t the pain of my soul-wound centered in my chest that caused it.

  When I was very young, before I’d even arrived at the Six Mountain Sect, I had told Pi Phon that the village I’d grown up in was like a reflection of the moon on still waters, and he had warned me not to contemplate the Dao so young because if you believed the veil between worlds was thin, then it was.

  To a certain degree that was true. A child, with the proper mentality, could find themselves slipping between dimensions and lost.

  But a demigod leaves a wake, and I had just felt a ripple of something passing into my universe.

  “Nadia,” I said, and I sighed with tears in my eyes, for I could feel how wrong she had become.

  But that didn’t change what must happen. I saw what would happen if I did nothing, if I closed my eyes and drifted off into a new space. She would continue to chase after me and devour everything that I left behind me. Atla, my disciples. Mai Mai, my unborn child. The people who prayed to my statuettes for the virtues that they didn’t know they possessed.

  “Father, did you feel that?” Atla asked, manifesting in my bedroom.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Wake everyone. It’s time.”

  ~~~~~~~~

  The gateway between dimensions remained open even after she had stepped through. Nadia stood in the vacuum between all things and looked out at the dimension where her quarry lay. She had made the mistake of going directly for the prize last time, but this time she would take things slowly.

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  Already she had sent her generals ahead. They had established beachheads, they were weakening the old man who had gotten in her way last time. They were strengthening her own position simply by their numbers and the distraction they provided. That alone gave their pitiful lives meaning, even if all they achieved in their pitiful lives was dying ingloriously as part of her war machine.

  She was not hiding, and she was not surprised when the answering presence of the Lord of this Realm appeared in the form of a lesser avatar. He wasn’t her equal, he had never been that. But she had been at the waning stage of her last incarnation when she had faced him before, and he had been in his home turf.

  She had wounded him, but he had defended his territory. It had cost him more than it had cost her, but she had still been humiliated to have the prize slip through her fingers before she could find it.

  But now?

  Her power radiated from her, and she felt the quivering fear of this dimension in response to it.

  “You have returned,” Lord Loshi said to Nadia.

  “Do you still stand in my way?” Nadia demanded of the local snake.

  “I ask that you withdraw your forces. In exchange, I will withdraw mine. The world of Atla is yours if you can take it from Lord Little Bug, who has claimed it,” Loshi negotiated.

  “I don’t need your permission to take what is mine,” Nadia said. She reached out, and she reached through his avatar to strike at his heart.

  Worlds away, the true body of Loshi gasped as a wound appeared on it. It healed within a moment, but it had still been there. He vanished the avatar that he had sent to parlay, and he returned his attention to the war. He had a dimension to defend, minus one upstart world.

  She turned to look through space, and she waved her hand and the distance between the gaping maw she’d left behind and the world of her target vanished. She stood next to one of Atla’s moons and she contemplated for a moment, before reaching back through dimensions for the base of her power. She pulled from the nexus of nexuses and formed a technique.

  One which would obliterate all life in a world this size.

  She was done playing.

  She launched the attack.

  The wards that had been carefully arrayed across the world of Atla all sprang into activity at the same moment, and the sky was lit with lines of power.

  An unstoppable force met with an immovable object.

  Nadia wasn’t worried, one world could not stand against the weight of ten thousand.

  Except…

  It did.

  After an hour of constant assault, her technique fell apart.

  She was left floating in space, next to the gaping maw that connected this dimension to the nexus, stupified that that hadn’t worked.

  “Well,” she muttered, “if at first you don’t succeed…”

  She tried again.

  ?