"You'll get used to it!"
"Hopefully not." I turned away from Doyle with a dejected sigh. Though I had to admit, the view was spectacular.
We hadn't been in the air for a full five minutes before I started to get overwhelmed. The wind was tolerable at first, if not loud. Then it grew unbearable. Bugs started smacking me in the face. The wind began pressing into my skin. And I was too enamored with the scrolling landscape to look towards the others for the remedy.
Seeing my plight, Doyle took it upon himself to bring me into his cone of displaced air. A meager feet for him, considering his Cloud Magic. Though, looking around, everyone else found some means to adapt.
Even the ones who couldn't manipulate the elements displayed no discomfort about being dragged through the skies at speeds that could compete with the fastest flying creatures in existence. Some wore strange hats or flew ass-first, allowing their limbs to dangle loosely behind them. Others, like the barbarians, goliaths, or the Amazonian Warriors, simply accepted the challenge and endured.
My time for enjoying such things was long gone. As it was for Doyle and Zeff, I assumed, yet the former still wanted to fight and the latter still wanted to teach, even though we all hung up our cowls years and years ago.
Even though we hung up our cowls, I was the only one to find myself in the sweet embrace of retirement.
As I gazed upon the so-called Captains of the Legio Noctis, spread apart in a conical formation behind their leader, they seemed much different from what they seemed to be just a year ago. They were disciplined. United. Fearless. Wise. Much different from any graduate of the Bodhi Tree thus far.
I wasn't capable of teaching them, I learned that months ago. And I wasn't able or willing to fight alongside them. Nor was I capable of continuing to teach at the overbearing structure in the far distance. The Bodhi Tree- that gods forsaken place was no different from everywhere else humans dwelled. Corrupted by politics and ill manners. It wasn't where I belonged.
However… it was what brought me here.
Fate, as the man next to me so strongly believed, is what brought me to the Bodhi Tree and led me to meet the strange being ahead of me.
He too seemed much different from what he was just a year ago. He was still unnervingly handsome, charismatic, wise, intelligent, and powerful. For a time, he seemed exceedingly dangerous. Now, however, I felt he was extraordinarily benevolent.
I couldn't say that I believed him when he first claimed to be a god. Nor did a disbelieve him though. If anyone had the power to be one, as many have stated, it would be him.
But what I- what we witnessed back there was unmistakable.
What I felt made me realize his words were the absolute truth.
But like many others, there was more that I needed to know. And since I now lived under his wing, by his rules, I was subject to the truth.
"What was that?" I scrambled through the air toward him just after we stopped above a mountain range, paying no heed to Doyle or his inquiring gazes.
Yet Amun, ever aloof and amiable, simply smiled and waited for the rest of his companions to huddle around him.
"As per the rules of death, I'm obligated to curse, kill, or make a deal with anyone who found a way to cheat death," Amun explained to both myself and the others. "There are exceptions of course." He shrugged. "But Headmaster Zorrenor Knagh is not one of them."
"Oh." I instinctively backpedaled, feeling the danger once again.
"I do not wish to kill him." Amun continued unabated. "And he's been cursed so much that I don't have the patience to find a new way to condemn him. So, I made a deal with him. Part of that deal involves sixty-six parcels of land." He waved to the rocky lands below. "One-hundred square kilometers each.
"As you've just witnessed." Amun paused, turning a wicked grin over the crowd. "That includes everything below it as well. The tower and the land below makes a total of ten parcels. A parcel for each of you and myself leaves just ten. Or eight if I count you two." He pointed his chin at Doyle and I in a crude gesture.
"I invite you to find your favorite locations in the wilds and mark them. They'll be used to form your retirement homes. That," he emphasized with a raised finger, "is the one task I have for you this month."
The Captains voiced their affirmations at once giving me the moment needed to invoke an intense wave of foolishness onto myself by raising my hand.
"Uhm. What makes this place so special?"
"My Doppelganger has been exploring the Darkworld for the last six months." Amun casually explained, forcing me to recoil in shock.
Though I recanted my actions a moment later. "Not against the rules, I suppose."
"He came upon a duergar stronghold while he was down here." Amun continued. "He killed them all, raised them as undead, and freed their slaves. Some of them will be subordinates for you Captains, I imagine." He motioned to the others. "But the vast majority of them will remain as citizens within my realm. And a few of them will go off on their own to see what they can make of their lives."
"And they're directly below us." Doyle needlessly concluded as he so often did.
"Not for long." Amun grinned, then in a blinding motion, released another pillar of that absurdly dark sorcery into the bowels of the mountain.
What ensued was a similar display of what used to be the tower, so far away, minus the silver mirror that transported the material far away. Instead, my eyes bared witness to an invisible drill boring out a pristine core of dirt, water, rock, and magma from the Mortal Plane and erecting it high above the lands. Higher than the White Wall, it seemed, until it slowly ground to a halt.
Gradually, my eyes mimicked everyone else's and fell the long way down to the ambiguous section of moist, fungal-infested stone just before us to stare expectantly at a dank cave housing a slim figure.
It was… Amun. Or rather, his Doppelganger, waving out at the original while he grasped the hand of a figure just behind him. And with a gentle pull, he sent them drifting out towards us.
Another soon came. Then another. And then ten more and ten more after that until eventually, hundreds and hundreds more shockingly well-mannered humans and demihumans were seen drifting among us, exchanging tentative pleasantries whenever they weren't marveling at the almost infinite landscape spread out below us.
But still, the cavern belched out hundreds and hundreds more.
Of them all, I only spotted around a dozen or so dwarves, unsurprisingly crowed around Thordrohilda and her compatriots. But what was more shocking was the orcs engaged in intense but well-intentioned conversation with them.
Hundreds of deep gnomes, Svirfneblin, they were formally called, were seen floating all about. Short as a halfling like all gnomes, with elvish ears and the same optimism found in their surface cousins, they weren't as uncommon on the surface as Duergar or Drow, but their reaction to the pale light above belied their kind entirely.
On this night, however, they stared up at the Moon with glistening eyes and quivering mouths. All but one, who clambered as hard as she could towards one of the vampires who had yet to stop her prayers.
Hundreds of orcs and hundreds more goblins dominated the cloud of bodies around the indomitable pillar. Most were fawning over the moon with somewhat less intensity than the deep gnomes. More were having surprisingly intellectual conversations with the new humans before them. And yet, a minority of them were with a small portion of the orcs, pointing out dales and copses along the mountain range to erect new strongholds in.
Of the thousands of bodies present, though, only two were even remotely surprised by the situation. Doyle and I. Though, deep in my mind, I knew we weren't the only ones.
Further to the north and deeper to the south, hundreds of billions of individuals were repeating our current actions. Innumerous eyes were looking above just as we were. Engrossed at the pillar that seemed to stretch onto infinity, yet unknowing of the thousands of bodies spawned from its bowels.
Emptied now, those bowels were, thus the pillar of matter surged once more and began accelerating upward. Slowly, at first. But with a pace that hastened with each passing second. Up and up and up it went, while more ground spat out and out from below.
For minutes and minutes, rock and magma and metal rocketed past us to eventually disappear into the distance until the dense foundations came racing past, releasing a haunting wail of stifling air into the otherwise quiet night.
After what felt like an eternity of existence, the pillar disappeared in an instant. And so too did Amun. In their place was a chasm filled with an almost inviting darkness. It seemed to pull at me as we descended ever so slowly towards the surface- towards the Amun of Twilight, the Doppelganger, waiting patiently for us to land.
And once my feet met the ground, I did as before to approach him with full haste, thirsting for a glimpse of the future that I chose.
"So, what happens next?"
He turned halfway to me and smiled softly as he whispered low, uttering words I heard at least once before, thus bringing me to look down just my shadow formed into an exact copy of myself.
"Now we wait!" My clone gave me a lighthearted shove. "Get to know people. Or, go out and pick your territory. Amun's creating our home now." She turned her gaze to the pale orb floating high above. "It won't be long."