Part 8
“I hate them Father.” Reggie stated grimly. “We’ve relived a lot of Somonik’s memory of the first demon war, with enough fidelity to feel like we were there. The demons are the worst thing in reality. They’re pure evil, there’s not a trace of good in them anywhere. They were so mean and so foul and so intentionally horrifying… Well anyway they were. Even if they never hurt any of us or The Triax, that won’t matter to me. I’ll still want to kill them to get revenge for everything they did here before.”
“I see.” Mark nodded again.
“You’re not answering his question.” Helemia told Reggie with some intensity. “Was vengeance part of the prophecy? I think it was. I’ve Read myself for when you got it, and I got it from you when you got it. If you do the same, you’ll see that there was an emotion to it. I could almost feel the emotion of killing them, and it felt like revenge.
“And besides,” she continued to Mark, “I hope that we get them all before they can hurt any of us too, but we all know that we’d have to be unbelievably lucky for that to happen. Maybe they are just a wandering horde of minor demons making their way through the void, who don’t know about the other demons that got beat here before. The Triax said they attacked a helpless world with no thinking people on the way here, which I think kind of goes with the ‘wandering horde’ idea.
“But we don’t believe it for a second.” She paused and looked around, meeting every eye there with the strange intensity of her gaze. “Me an’ Reggie are pretty certain that the demon homeworld sent this horde to get revenge for us beating the last one, and so are all of you. They’re coming through the void because we already know how to wreck the gate they used to get here last time. And if that’s the case, I doubt there’s even one minor demon in that rock. It’ll be full of billions of greater demons and those DemonLords that The Triax told us about. It doesn’t make sense to bring any weaklings along for all that way, unless they need ‘em for food. And I doubt that’s the case, since they just ate a whole world on the way here.
Reggie and I can’t believe we’re all just waiting for the demons to get closer! We should be out there killing them now, all our gods and the Triax at least, and the rest of us as soon as possible! It sure seems like all the preparation that the people of Kellaran are doing is for the defensive war after the demons get here! No one is really preparing for
indeed the terrible and forewarned force that we fear they are is what prevents The Triax from attacking them now, or long before now, for that matter. The Triax want all
power for magic comes from the sun, and wizards’ magic only comes from the energy of the sun that’s been absorbed and re-radiated by certain rocks on Kellaran. Most spell-casters are helpless once they’ve expended their power, and when they’re far from Kellaran, there’s nowhere to get any more. Only the unicorns, the gargoyles, and a few of the hidden races from Xervia utilize the power of the Source directly and purely; even dragons get half their power from the heat of the stone. And at the immense distance the demons are from the sun now, the Source supplies only
of the outer worlds. That was far enough for them to confirm that Kellaran is the only thing circling our sun that has life, and there was no reason to go any
process that is immense. The Triax and the demons do it, but they both required many, many millions of years to develop the ability, and almost none of
Kellaran, where our powers are so very much stronger than anywhere else,
populations. The plans that will be enacted will be the best compromise we can craft between attacking at the greatest possible distance to minimize our risk, and attacking at the minimum possible distance to maximize our offensive capability. The longer we wait, the greater part of our people will be capable of fighting in the void. But even if we halted all the defensive preparations in order to concentrate on void warfare, we would still only be able to bring a very tiny fraction of our force to bear in the void. It truly is a huge problem. The distances and harshness
would all like nothing better, you need to contribute to our ability to fight in the void. That means learning to calculate and engineer
it as thoroughly as he does. He’s also fully aware of all the technical challenges that fighting in the void entails. If you decide