‘We all stand on the shoulders of giants.’

Among all of the sayings English offered, this was one John found to be among the most elegant in its simplicity. It wasn’t anywhere near his favourite saying, but he appreciated it for what it was. A reminder, to everyone, that they relied on deeds of those that came before to stand where they were today.

John looked at himself through the Mandala Sphere. All of the things about him that were the consequence of the actions of other people. The suit on his body, a design fashioned in relatively recent history, made possible through the perfection of sewing and, before it, the discovery of cloth. His contact lenses, their shape an innovation made on the back of glasses, themselves made on the back of glass, which went back to the primordial ape that had first understood how to utilize fire. From that very same ape came his body. A corporal form shaped through endless hardships of generation after generation, improving through necessary adaptation enabled through random mutation. Muscle fibres, sinews, the serotonin system, the brain, skin, eyes, all of it were things created by incremental change.

Yet, there was so much more to John’s body and clothes than raw physical and biological reality. Magic pulsed through every fibre of his being. His eyes were an extension of his soul taking hold of heavily enchanted lenses. The metal of his jacket was softer than most cloth and yet so much harder. Supernatural things that were yet to be truly understood even by generations of sorcerers. At the foundation of all of this was Remus.

Remus, who had come up with the scheme to separate magical and mundane. Remus, who had thought of the system that increased the number of people born with Innate Abilities by channelling the very Faith of humanity back into the gestating children. Remus, who had made Gaia to enable all of this.

Well, at least if Gaia wasn’t dreaming all of this. If she was, Remus would have been a creation of her own mind allowing her to create herself. A distinction without any effective difference to John’s situation. The only confirmation for the dream could be had if Gaia woke up, which would be a short-lived intellectual satisfaction.

What John did know was that Remus was a titan among the giants on whose shoulders he stood. He was also incredibly dangerous. Not himself necessarily. The story Romulus had told had presented his brother himself as a weak individual whose power lay in creating things. He was the Godmaker to Romulus’ Godslayer. The creator twin of the two legendary figures that stood at the beginning of the Abyss.

John stared at the gathered Sands of Time before him, gathered into a pool. Fine grains of light brown sand, dry and swirling in a circle without any external input. A tendril of sand shot out, assumed a form almost recognizable as a hand and slammed back into the surface, melding with it and vanishing completely. It would be back later.

It had now been over two days since the call for help had arrived, being Wednesday afternoon. As John had anticipated, the Lorylim had universally retreated with what they could get, making the remaining rescue efforts something the rank-and-file soldiers could engage in. Embarrassingly, they still had lost a total of three people who hadn’t given the devil its due and exposed themselves to Lorylim spores. Two of them had to be executed by their comrades before the afflicted soldiers turned on them instead. The third was lucky enough that they were in the same team as Alice, who had purged the harmful magic. The person was still left with Lorylim scars over half of their face.

There was value in that idiocy, given that the stories that made the rounds now would teach people to actually fear Lorylim like mundane people would fear radioactive material. Not that this was a widespread problem. The common reaction of people seeing even a dead Lorylim was to distance themselves twenty metres and watch for five minutes to see if it wasn’t moving after all.

Some people were born with the ability to not feel fear even towards things they didn’t understand. That could be a useful trait. If it didn’t kill someone, it could lead to some impressive discoveries. Marathyu and Salamander had both interacted with Lorylim and come out stronger for it. Exceptions, however, proved the rule.

Again, something like a limb rose from the pool of sand and vanished.

Remus, or at least the phantom John assumed to be such, had repeatedly shown himself to the rescue teams. More often than not, there had been no issue. It seemed simply disinterested in interacting with people. On a few occasions, it got aggressive but it never harmed anybody. Unpleasant visions of the past were all people were ever subjected to. If it truly was Remus, then he must have remembered the Lorylim as old enemies, while humans were at least roughly speaking familiar.

From the little John knew about Remus, it seemed the Godmaker cared for humanity. At the very least, he wanted to be the one who made everything better. Whether this happened out of a wish to be eternalized or out of benevolence, he needed people to help either way.

For a brief moment, a torso rose from the sand and flailed around like a person afraid to drown.

All of this was assuming that the person that would eventually crawl out of the Sands of Time even was the same as Remus had been. John had yet to see even a scrap of flesh accompanying any of the phantoms, indicating that Remus would have a new body at the end of all of this. After ten millennia outside of this world and entrapped in the Sands of Time, the psyche of that entity could have any level of stability. Perhaps he somehow retained sober sanity through all of that time. Perhaps he was stark, raving mad. Perhaps he hadn’t changed at all, all of the time between then and now passing in an instant for him.

Whatever it was and whatever powers or body the Godmaker would display once he was truly out of his confinement, it almost didn’t matter. The world would change when he was back. Once Romulus learned of the return of his brother, there was no telling how he would react. Factions that stood in opposition to the current order of the world would likely pledge their support to protect the twin of the Apex.

‘In a way that could be good for me… it takes the eyes off my activities for a while…’ John thought, biting on his thumbnail as he pondered over all of the implications. ‘I’d rather deal with the state of the world as it is, though. I’ve no reason to pray for a large upheaval of the current landscape… I guess this is how everyone looks at my rapid process.’

“ROOOOO!” the scream echoed, then the half-formed head was gone again.

“Ya still watching over this?”

John turned his head and looked at Rave and Nia. The two gorgeous women didn’t quite fit into the farm-dominated landscape. Even in the long, magically warmed coat the Gamer had bought his girlfriend, her pink-hair and body language made her stand out as a city girl. Nia simply didn’t seem to fit wherever she was. That was part of her nature. It also made her rise from the background like a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional picture.

“It’s not like I have much better things to do,” John answered and slid a little bit to the left on the stone bench Gnome had made for him. The two girls came over and sat down at either side of him. They all stared down into the pool now. It was the only thing that disrupted the autumn landscape of the extensive farmland.

Its existence was inexplicable. John had any and all traces of the Sands of Time removed from their chosen base of operations. Having to oblige him, the Gestalt guild members had moved all of it into a different barrier. John had hoped to avoid the formation of local phantoms by storing it in such tiny quantities that not enough could interact to form any human-sized mass. The reaction of the Sands of Time to that had been to disregard physics in a fashion that made even most other magic blush. It ignored where it was supposed to be and gathered in a pool, separating itself from the alchemical fluids in the process. Even putting the boxes in different barriers hadn’t prevented that phenomenon.

The chain of events the Lorylim had, accidentally or not, set into motion seemed unstoppable at this point.

“You could help us with the operations,” Nia suggested, her toneless voice having a soothing effect on John’s worry-addled mind.

“The fact that you’re here means you don’t need my help,” John pointed out with a bit of a smile. “What’s the use in getting subordinates if I have to deal with the grunt work myself? No, Chemilia seems to have a handle on things. How far along the pacification are we?”

“She says we have checked about 85% of shared coordinates now. No anomalies have been encountered.”

“Well, that’s good news at least,” John sighed.

“Sightings of the phantom are reducing.”

“And that’s to be expected.” The Gamer’s smile vanished and he rubbed his face. If other barriers weren’t enough to keep the Sands of Time from congealing, then all of it would eventually gather in a single spot. Distance was of little consequence. “It’s going to be a pain to clean this mess up. Extra resources for the Lorylim, the uncertainty of Remus and over a thousand collectivist morons who will insist to continue their way of life as if this has never happened. An external threat, a foreign policy crisis and internal issues, all served to me on a silver platter.”

“Ya don’t get to choose when times get hard.” Rave reached out and scratched the back of his head. “We’ll muddle through.”

“Yeah, we will,” John sighed. “For the moment, we only have two definitive problems: cleaning up what remains of the Gestalt guilds and dealing with the people in the aftermath. Whatever comes of Remus or the Lorylim will be a long-term issue that I likely won’t have to tackle on my own.” He leaned back and put his arms around his women, recovering from the stress through their presence. “As little as some people may like me, they like the Lorylim even less. I can build a coalition against them.”

The entire whirlpool rose up into a cone shape and then collapsed back into position.

John clicked his tongue. He wasn’t staying around here because he found the Sands of Time particularly interesting to look at. All he hoped for was a manifestation of the phantom that lasted long enough to cast Observe. The world refused to grant him that boon and thus kept confirmation of his theory from his grasp.

“Didn’t the Horned Rat’s prophecy say something about spring? Maybe we’ll have a couple of months before Remus manifests,” Rave suggested.

“It said ‘as ivy and spring and bone’, not ‘in’,” John responded. “It might be a reference to the season, but I think it’s meant that he will form partly from water. A natural spring, you know?”

“Ja,” Rave answered in German, for some reason. “Guess that’d be a way to look at that…” They sat together in silence for a little while. “What are ya thinking, tiger?”

“I think people shouldn’t mess with manifested pieces of time magic they find in the wild to hook up their thoughts in an attempt to chase some utopian ideal,” John joked and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t worry, Jane. I might be a bit stressed right now but that’s just because I’m letting all of the worst-case scenarios run through my head.” He looked back to the Sands of Time. “The problem is that there are a multitude of things I do not understand and cannot predict. Things are complicated and my set of information incomplete. What spurred the Lorylim to act right now? Is it my expansion? Did they want to extract all of the resources from the Gestalt guilds before I could crack open their system and make it impossible? Was this just a coincidence in timing? How does their corrupting touch spur Remus into action? Are they connected? If yes, how? Are the Lorylim, perhaps, a creation of Remus as well?” He shook his head. “Is it even Remus? It might just be a ‘time elemental’ for the lack of another term. Would that be better or worse?”

Nia slowly raised her hand to his face and tugged at his ear until it hurt just a little. “If you have so many questions, you should stop asking and get the next set of information. You could ask all the right questions in the world and receive nothing, if you direct them at the empty air.”

“You do have a point,” John conceded without an argument and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘It would be much easier to just take my yacht and give the responsibility away to someone else,’ he thought and then chuckled. ‘As if I could ever do that. If not me, then who else?’ “Alright then, let’s continue moving until a new chance to brood presents itself,” he announced and stood up. “Let’s find out what exactly lies at the centre of the Lorylim attack.”