A Real Goddess Would Let Nobody Die

We neared the entrance to the Bay of Rokesha, at nightfall, but the ship could go no further due to the roiling ocean and roaring winds. The ridge enclosing the bay concealed the city proper from us, but I did not expect to see a happy sight when I cleared it.

Dekel came up on my right, looking somber.

"The people of Rokesha are not unfamiliar with ocean storms. They will seek shelter. The bulk will be in Your Temple, the Memorial to the Goddesses' Sacrifice. It is an enormous dome, perhaps not as large as Your Island but on the same scale, and is designed to serve as a shelter during the most severe storms."

"I will go straight there, then, if I can," I said.

Then he continued, "The Temple also serves as a vault for enchanted weapons, transported here and saved in case of a crisis. They will not be used lightly, because they can never be recharged without blue magic, but there are warriors at the Temple competent in their use."

That would be useful. I was only half of a pair, only partly functional. I didn't have any realistic means of attack.

Without further delay, I lifted off on my mana platform. I cleared the ridge, and saw a tropical city shrouded in night attempting to endure an apocalyptic superstorm. I ramped to maximum strength immediately, illuminating the city.

The two storm flies dominated the scene, two large clouds of wind and rain and hail swirling chaotically around them, concealing their house-sized insectoid bodies in the core, aside from random flashes of chitin through the clouds. They were obviously corrupted by the same rot as had been characteristic of Oscanion. The water looked polluted, the wind was billowing smog, and there was a general smell of overflowing sewage, although that may have been caused by the literally overflowing sewers of the flooded city.

Many brown twisters were ravaging the buildings of the city, and the area near the harbor was badly flooded. The nymphs were also participating, but were irrelevant compared to the damage caused by their parents.

Currently, the adults' attention was focussed on a large dome at the summit of a hill, surely the same dome Dekel had mentioned. It had the same motif as his clothing, a structure of black rock with white images of thunderbolts and rings of fire, encrusted with a light-catching material that looked like it might have been frosted glass. Quartz? It was a striking design, achieving the effect of making the building look like a mostly black edifice covered with something akin to my glowing white shields.

Unfortunately, much of the glass "shield" was shattered. The wind and rain did nothing to this massive structure, so the storm flies were pummeling it with a constant stream of ice shards. A black mage of similar strength to the storm flies would have broken through already; mercifully, the green magic they employed was not as well suited to attack. In the days of mages, humans had used it almost exclusively for agriculture. It was only dangerous at the scale achieved by these storm flies.

I could shield all the people inside, but that would do nothing to protect the building itself. If the building collapsed and its occupants were exposed to the twisting winds and flood waters outside, there would be little I could do to help them. It was the same problem I had faced on the ship. While my shields can protect against attacks, there's not much I can do to prevent the shielded from getting swept away by environmental hazards.

I flew in that direction, still unnoticed by the single-minded attackers despite my light show. I had only one choice for defending the structure. I would need to make a single shield large enough to cover the whole building, and attach it to a random occupant inside. Such a large shield would be extremely mana-hungry and intrinsically unstable. Both great power and control would be necessary.

I had not intentionally been practicing control on the island, mostly focussing on increasing my raw power, but 943 years of casting all kinds of white magic had provided a rather significant amount of incidental practice. I turned my sight inward, and tried to make my mana flow as steady as possible.

I didn't want it frozen in this case, not motionless. Instead, smooth and consistent flow in a single direction, free of eddies, only a single grand, unified current.

Swirl....swirl....calm....slow....rotation....only when the whole of my internal mana pool was rotating as one did I allow it to unfurl out of me, to power the shield spell, being careful to keep the outflow slow and laminar.

A gigantic spherical light bubble formed around a single lucky person inside the dome, who served as its anchor, and would be ignorant of the role they had played. Although the shield that formed was rotating, the mana comprising it was so uniform that it was not visually apparent. My usual shields were filled with eddies and chaotic currents of mana, but not this one. The artificially crystal-"shielded" black dome now had precisely assumed the appearance that its designers had been trying to capture. It was now literally shielded.

When I returned my attention to the outside world, I noticed that a hole about twice my height in diameter had been blown out of the dome near ground level, presumably by an ice blast, while I worked on the formation of the shield. I flew there rapidly, landing in the plaza just outside, and walked through the hole cautiously, fearful that some of the nymphs may have infiltrated while I was distracted. My mana glided smoothly around me as I passed through the bubble, as perfectly responsive to my will as it had been during my display at the island pool.

I was pleased to see that only sheltering Rokeshans, hundreds of thousands, appeared to be inside the cavernous interior of the dome. This must be the main entry chamber on the ground floor.

In the center of the chamber, there was a statue of me and Izena. I was painted white, sitting on a platform made of the same crystal as the outside of the dome, legs hanging off the side, while Izena, painted black, crouched on a black platform to my statue's left. Izena's left hand was extended, palm out, as though she were preparing to fire a lightning bolt at a target that I was pointing at. Then, I noticed that there was also a statue of Azenum, lower and off to the side as if he were standing on the ground while we flew by, watching the two of us with his arms crossed.

I smiled. Whatever artist had composed the scene had watched us in action, and earned my approval.

I turned my attention to the huddled masses I had come to protect. Time to view myself objectively, from their perspective.

From these people's perspective, they were in the midst of an existential crisis. A hole had just been blown in the wall of their sanctuary by a normally benevolent, corrupted ocean god, and a glowing white humanoid had walked through the hole shortly after the roaring noise of ice impacting on the dome had cut off suddenly. They might have recognized me if I weren't, at the moment, too bright to look at closely, but there was no helping that. I needed to maintain the shield on the building, and its size required me to provide a strong flow of mana.

So, they were terrified, frozen, none daring to approach me.

I saw no one wearing clothing in Dekel's style, no one who would be able to speak 'Middle Ezentic.' They were probably seeing to the injured and grieving, which was exactly where I wanted to be. I had only a few days of exposure to the current Rokeshan language, under circumstances that were not the best for learning it. I had no hope of making myself understood that way.

I tried to come up with something to say that could get them to understand that I was here to help, or bring me someone I could speak to.

When I realized what I would need to say and do, I cringed inwardly. All I could do was try to channel as much of Izena's charisma as I could.

Here goes.

"Menelyn," I patted my chest with a glowing hand. "Salvation." Then I pointed at the statue of me.

For another few moments, no one moved regardless. The first one to gather her courage was the most desperate, a woman listening from the entrance to an adjacent room. She scurried toward me, eyes down, carrying a boy about eight years old. It looked like he might have been struck by falling or windblown debris, perhaps an ice ball.

He was quite dead. On some level, the woman carrying him probably knew that he was beyond help, even for the Menelyn depicted in the statue, but she was hoping for a miracle.

She stood before me, completely distraught and stumbling with terror.

"Selvezhun?" she choked out hoarsely.

Oh my, do I have a pleasant surprise for her. A boy is only dead if there isn't a white mage strong enough to heal him, and the Menelyn depicted in that statue spent the last 943 years torturing herself in order to become very, very strong. I don't need to let anyone die anymore. I had known this day would come, but didn't expect to have quite so many witnesses.

It had been a long time since I had resurrected Hopper, and I was far, far more powerful now. The shield on the building required an enormous mana commitment, but I should have enough to spare, even though a boy is a lot larger and more complicated than a Hopper.

"Salvation," I replied, nodding. I indicated for her to lay him on a nearby bench, the occupants moving aside.

I ramped up to full power slowly, partly so that onlookers would have time to cover or avert their eyes, partly to avoid disrupting the delicate mega-shield I was still casting, and followed the same procedure I had used all those centuries ago on Hopper. It required intense focus in order for the torrent of mana the spell demanded not to disturb the placid flow required by the shield. When I came out of my trance and looked up, I saw that there were now some men and women wearing clothing in Dekel's style among the crowd, and like all the others, well...they had the faces of people who had just witnessed a divine miracle, mirroring the crew who had watched my display at my island's pool.

Dekel might collapse when he heard about this. Or maybe he wouldn't even be surprised, at this point?

Truly, I might have been more impressed with myself than the crowd was. I had often been praised, literally deified, for things that I found trivial, which made me uncomfortable. What I had just done had been more difficult than anyone here could ever really understand. Managing the two massive mana flows required, neither disturbing the other, my shield being pounded at random intervals and thus providing random feedback into my pool while I tried to focus on the delicate task of restoring tissues with the other torrential flow: I had just performed a masterwork of magic the likes of which the world had never seen.

The woman was sobbing incoherently, and the boy was thoroughly confused at feeling the healthiest he had ever been in his life, despite dying a few hours ago. He looked up at me, recognition on his face even though I was still too bright to see comfortably. I still needed to maintain the shield.

"Menelyn?!" he said in wonder, then added something in the Rokeshan language that I did not understand.

I could only pat his head.