Infinite Sands moved in on me with that shocking speed, but He didn’t have to move far, since I’d literally come down almost on His head. He lifted Himself up, and actually paused in some surprise as the great hills of sand-become-sandfalls falling from Him split to either side of him, and He found His great black eye with the narrow golden slit locked onto me less than thirty feet away from it.

The mountainsides of sands continued to fall away from Him, fluid as water, even as His head stopped rising and He stared at me there, enough levels of my Astral Ward suppressed so that He could actually sense my Aura and read the Song that was actually enhancing His control and feel for the Mana about him.

“HEALER FAE, THE WORLDSINGER.” His voice rumbled in the air, echoed off the sands, hissed with restrained heat and emotion. “SO, THAT WAS YOU, PLUCKING AT THE STRINGS OF THE WORLD.”

“Elder,” I replied calmly, unruffled by His words. “You did not ask me to come here to speak about music, I trust.”

My utter lack of fear of Him, despite the vast difference in our sizes, and with the sheer potency of my Aura, was putting Him on guard. I waited calmly as He stared at me with an eye as tall as and weighing far more than I did, looking for signs of weakness, beyond the obvious physical mismatch.

He was unsettled by what He was seeing, I could tell, but I just waited patiently while He rephrased what He wanted to say.

“YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE OBELISKS AND PYRAMDS STATIONED AROUND MY DOMAIN,” He stated coolly.

“I most certainly am,” I confirmed without hesitation. It wasn’t a secret, after all.

“THEY ARE ANNOYANCES THAT CAN BE SWEPT AWAY WITH NO EFFORT. DO YOU THINK TO CAGE MY DOMAIN WITH THEM?” He demanded with not quite a sneer.

“It is interesting that you think of them as attempting to cage your domain instead of using the rampant spread of unbalanced Mana to power vivic effects that purify the Dark Mana of the world rather than chaotic abuse of the ecosphere. It was my understanding that the discomfiting presence of the Dark Mana was more important to you than just flexing on the landscape, Elder. I apologize if I was mistaken in that regard.”

I wasn’t backing down from what I had done, either. After all, I had not actually put up any of them in His domain, only in lands His domain was advancing on, stopping it from doing so. In effect, I was containing the spread of His territory, as was my right, and using it to address a mutual problem.

If He wanted us to come to blows over that, it was His move.

“YOU DID NO SUCH THING IN THE EAST,” He pointed out slyly. It basically could be read as encouraging Him to expand in that direction, and the Human lands there.

“It would have been useless to do so. They would have been torn down as they went up, and potentially triggered the coming apocalypse early if I moved to defend them,” I corrected His leading assumption.

“YET YOU ARE ACTING AGAINST THEM NOW,” He pointed out.

“You have been watching our deeds these past few months, and you are perfectly aware that I have taken only the most minor of actions against the undead personally, Elder. They are unaware of my status, and I prefer that they remain oblivious. All of the fighting has been done by my subordinates and the Humans we are training up to fight the Netherworlders.”

“WHAT IS YOUR GOAL, THEN? THE UNDEAD WILL NOT RUN OUT OF MINIONS TO FIGHT.” Well, He had that right, at least.

“It is a fascinating thing to watch, is it not, Elder? Valiant Humans fighting the countless hordes of mighty undead! Striking here and there, killing so many of them, moving together with unprecedented teamwork and coordination! It is like art, like a painting daubed in the colors of slaughter and heroism, carnage and glory, enriched with so much magic, hypnotic in its intensity and resilience...”

He actually blinked once, startlingly quick for the size of His eye, as I broke His thoughts once again, forcing Him to think instead of entering a heated exchange.

“IT... IS A DISTRACTION?” He murmured in some disbelief.

“You have done little but watch the conflict for the past six months, Elder, and you have no stakes in it, no true interest. You really do not care how long we can sustain the fighting, you don’t want to see if you can adapt your troops to what we are doing, if you can control them with the same elegance and artistry, trying again tomorrow with your limitless hordes if you fail.

“But if you recall what the undead have done, you can see that basically the same twelve battles have been run over and over again, using different troops, different deployments, different tactics, all trying to win the same engagements with different means and methods, and falling short each and every time.”

His eye actually widened and lost focus for a second as He was basically forced to go back through His memories and re-evaluate everything He had seen repeatedly. I waited until it snapped back to focus on me with much greater intensity than before.

“YOU ARE CORRECT.” He didn’t know quite what to think of that. “YOU HAVE... LURED THEM INTO THINKING YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING. THEIR MASTERS ARE EXPENDING THEIR SERVANTS TO SEE IF THEY CAN WIN THE CONFLICT, YET FAILING EACH TIME. AND STILL, KNOWING THAT YOU CANNOT ACTUALLY PRESS ON AND BEST THEM, THEY KEEP COMING BACK TO TRY A NEW WAY TO WIN, A NEW MIX OF SERVANTS...”

“It is a conceit among the mighty who think themselves intelligent and clever to be good at games of intellect, to show one another up in ways that are not brute force.

“This is all such a game to them, and they are enjoying the interactivity of it, the ability to choose the pieces, to move among different places of battle, and see what they can do different to overcome an extremely powerful foe.

“The Pharaohs and Netherlords are currently very, very caught up in this game, to the point where They are neglecting making other moves while they jockey and position among themselves for the right to be the next player taking on the Undead Hunters, seeing how much success They can have with each conflict. They are uncaring of the losses when they move, as it only sets up the field for another game tomorrow.”

“THEY ARE SWEPT FROM THE BOARD BY A SUPERIOR INTELLECT, OUTPLAYED AND OUTMATCHED, AND ARE EAGER FOR A REMATCH,” He rumbled, discerning the fact. “EVEN IF THEY KNOW THEY ARE BEING MANIPULATED, THEY STILL PLAY, BECAUSE THEY ARE BORED AND SEEK THE CHALLENGE.” He seemed to know the mindset well. “WHY? WHAT ARE YOU DISTRACTING THEM FROM?”

“We are buying back the time you stole from us, Elder.”

“WHAT?!” There was a dangerous edge to His voice, thick and weighty, hardening the air and bringing pressure on me which I precisely shattered with a fingertwitch, startling Him that I could do so without effort.

“Your unguided experiments with Time Magic while seeking Realm Lord Status were enough to bring all three of you High Emperors to the notice of the Netherlords of the Realm which currently assails our world.” I held up a hand, and silver-grey and black Magic coalesced and swirled about my hand in misty patterns that didn’t fade in and out of space, they flowed into and out of Time.

The great golden slit in His black eye widened to almost fill His entire eye as He stared at my casual mastery of Time Magic, considered to be the ultimate power to wield among the Emperors.

“You and the High Emperors are the three most visible things on this world in the Timestream. I gazed into it and checked. You are like bonfires blazing in the midst of a great river of passing time, where the brightest other things in contrast are little more than fireflies, rising and falling endlessly. You are more visible than the planet itself!

“Your blazing and uncontrolled Temporal Presence drew the Realm Lords, who are true fifth-dimensional beings, to you like a lighthouse shining to a ship at sea. You had enough power to make yourselves visible to those who can see through Time, but not enough power to conceal yourselves from them.

“Those warnings from the Beast Lord? They were because you were doing just that. He was not trying to dissuade you from your attempts at further growth, further power. No, He was attempting to stop you from doing what you did, which was invite in doom upon yourselves and our world, and by the Beast World’s close ties with ours, His own.

“You blame Humans for furthering the power of the Dark and the Light upon this world? If not my Tribe, they simply would have picked another. It is the High Emperors who are to blame for them being here!

“Unfortunately, with the Compacts and Scrolls that are in place, the Beasts that have changed allegiance, the flows of Faith, and especially the Planar Conduits they have set up, there is no way to rescue our world if, for instance, we could simply slaughter the three of you and remove you from their sight, now, and They are taking precautions that no other forces Beyond see this prize and move to intercede.

“This... is Truth.”

His massive head jerked away at the Word, and a sound likely no other being had heard from Him in eons echoed around us.

Pain! Pain, as His distorted lies and beliefs shattered and were exposed for the fallacies they were! Shattering boundaries as a power beyond anything He could comprehend shone upon his Green-Purple soul with a searing and completely unflattering judgment He could neither contest nor understand! Misery as His spiteful anger and ire turned upon Humans was revealed for the desperate delusion and empty vengeance, displaced from Himself to an inferior species!

And so was revealed the fear that waited under it all, the acknowledgement that He was helpless, impotent before what was going to happen, neutralized and neutered before He even took action, a helpless bystander who could only flail at and heap scorn upon those He chose to deflect His own blame and envy onto!

Envy, yes, because the Interlopers had not chosen Dragons as their vessels for contesting control of the world, but mere hairless monkeys He had watched evolve from mere mice and rodents!

The insult that He, a High Emperor, was not even worthy of their time or attention!

He thrashed about as I moved out of the way, the whole area of magic shuddering and bouncing as He tried to deny Truth, to rewrite it to His perception of it, bend it, twist it, and found He simply could not. The more He understood of it, the more powerful it became, and the less He knew of it, the less influence He had upon it. The maddening dichotomy was causing significant stress on His psyche, much as it had Old Mountain Emperor when He had first heard it.

Truth was not kind to the cruel and self-delusional, and Infinite Sands hit all the buttons on such things. Even the Ice Emperor was not so much deliberately cruel as He was aloof, arrogant, and uncaring.

I just waited up above as He thrashed to and fro, shaking His head frantically, trying to throw off the piercing insight and clarity that was shattering so much of what He believed. Instead, He found Himself totally and helplessly enlightened as to what He was, what He had done, and having an awful, despairing view of just what His place was in the world and how relevant He was in its fate, now.

His time to act had been long ago, and He hadn’t known what to do, how to respond, as ignorant of the solutions as He had been of the consequences of dabbling in Time so far in the past.

If they had known, they could have taken action, perhaps drawn in friendlier Realm Lords able to sponsor them, protect them, watch over them. Even other Dragon Realm Lords would have been acceptable and taken the bargain, gaining new subordinates to increase their standing.

But now, now there was nothing He could do that would change circumstances for the better!