The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Elarion, the council room, half past midnight

The council room was filled within twenty minutes. Malen, Brakka, Lucas, Cedric, Gandalf, Maerath, Dray, Ironbreaker.

Aurethar lay along the south wall near the furnace.

"The deadline expired an hour ago," Lucien said. "Everything I asked this territory to build is built. The medium tank is in production. The heavy is coming off the line. The Karl has been test fired. The battery is emplaced,frigate has been to sea and come back then there are aircrafts at Skyforge."

He looked round at them.

"Three years. It is done."

"Then why are we here at midnight?" Lucas asked.

"Because tonight I also learned what it was for." Lucien put both hands on the table. "I am going to tell you a number of things and you will not ask me how I know them."

He then started telling everything one by one.

Their own continent under its own shield. Then the ocean. Then the other landmasses — one, two, five, nine of them, all real, all inhabited.

"Nine," Ironbreaker said.

"Nine. Ours is one, and it is not the largest by a large margin."

Then the Greater Shield over all nine at once, curving past the horizon like a sky. Then the Central Continent at the middle of it, and the Alliance on it — humans, elves, dwarves, beastmen, goblins, dragons, under one banner.

"Then we are not the last of anything," Lucas said.

"We are not the last of anything. We are one continent of nine, sealed off from the rest, and the Alliance knows exactly where we are. They simply cannot reach us." Lucien did not soften it. "I have spent three years believing I was arming the final remnant of civilisation.Now we know we were arming a province the rest of the world has been locked out of."

"And past the Greater Shield?"

"A world. All nine of ours would sit in a corner of it with room left over. Mountains, coasts, land nobody we have heard of has ever mapped."

"Then what we live in is a garden," Brakka said.

"That is close to the word I would use."

They all turned to Aurethar.

The dragon turned his head.

"What?"

"Is it true?" Lucien said.

"Of course it is true. Which part did you think was not?" One wing shifted along the wall and settled. "There are nine. The large one in the middle has the Alliance on it and they argue constantly. There is a world outside. I have flown over a good deal of it."

"You never mentioned it," Ironbreaker said.

"I mention the Central Continent whenever anybody lets me. I described it in this room last winter and you fell asleep."

"You never said there were nine"

"Why would I say there were nine? You live on one of them. When I stand on a shore I do not turn to the man beside me and tell him there is an ocean."

"None of us can see the ocean," Malen said.

"So I now understand. In my defence, none of you ever asked."

"The Greater Shield is not a roof," Lucien said. "It is a wall, and it faces inward."

"It was not built to keep the outside world away from the nine continents. It was built to keep something already inside them from getting out. We are not living in a sanctuary. We are living inside the container, with whatever it was built to hold."

"The demons," Cedric said.

"The demons are in here with us. They always have been. They are not invading from outside, because for them there is no outside to come from. They are trying to break out of the same box we are standing in."

Aurethar’s head came up off the floor.

"You are right about that."

Everyone turned.

"There is something pressing on this world. It puts pressure on anything that grows past a certain level and will not let it go further. I hit my ceiling a long time ago and I have been carrying it ever since." He shifted along the wall. "I assumed it was the weather."

"It is the shield."

"It is the shield. Eleven hundred years, and somebody built it on a schedule."

"Then why did you come here?" Gandalf asked.

"Because of the crack, and it does not flatter me." Aurethar put his head back down. "A weakness opened over this continent and I felt it from a long way off. I thought it might be a road. A gap in one wall, and perhaps a gap in the next, and past that no more pressure."

"And instead?"

"Instead I climbed into a smaller box inside the larger one and the lid shut behind me. I have had time to consider how funny that is."

"There is one more thing too" Lucien said, "and it is why I did not wait until morning."

He looked at Malen, then at Gandalf. Both of them knew before he said it.

"The thing that holds the Greater Shield up is under this city."

"Under—"

"Under Elarion. Kilometres down, below the sealed levels, below anything anybody has dug to. A shield generation array. Crystalline architecture the size of towers. It sustains the barrier over all nine continents and it sits directly beneath us."

Ironbreaker broke the silence.

"They sent you here as an insult, my lord."

"They did."

"To the coldest, poorest ground in Asterion. To freeze quietly." He put both hands flat on the table. "And it is the lock on the door of the world."

"I have been sitting with that for an hour and I have not found the bottom of it."

"They need the rest," Malen said.

"I know." Lucien turned back to the table. "Three of us in this room have been down there. Myself, Malen and Gandalf. It was years ago, we did not speak of it afterward, and that was my decision and it seems wrong."

He waited a moment.

"There is a city under this one. A city, built and lived in, older than the Empire, and it is enormous. It goes down further than we went and it did not fall. It sealed itself, from the inside. Every gate, every stair, every shaft closed and barred by the people who lived there, in an order you can still follow if you walk it."

"Against what?" Cedric asked.

"That is what we went to find out." Gandalf did not stand. "We reached the seventh gate and stopped, because there is an inscription there. It was their last record. They wrote down what they had done and why, so that whoever came after would not undo it."

"And?"

" They opened a way into another world, looking for more resources but instead of it two things came back through it and the thing that came out of the portal was too powerful for them to kill,so they put it behind that gate, closed their city on top of it, and stayed inside with it"

"And the second?" Malen said.

"The second got past them and out into the world."

Lucien turned to him.

"The recording in the archive chamber. The one we pulled out on the fourth level."

"I remember it."

"It said the same thing. One sealed, one escaped." Lucien said it slowly, still fitting it together like puzzles as he spoke. "We took it to mean two beasts. We could do nothing with it."

"And now?"

"Now I think the one that escaped is the one running the demons. Not a clan lord or whoever gives Arkhul his orders.It sits above all of that"

Gandalf was quiet a moment.

"The prisoners used a word before they died. Abyssal Sovereign."

"You wrote it down," Lucien said to Cedric.

"Yes but I took it for a title." Cedric had not moved. "Something they gave to a rank, the way a kingdom has a king."

"It may still be a title," Gandalf said. "It may also be name of whatever that came through a hole a thousand years ago and never went home."

"Say the rest," Lucien said."

Gandalf stood.

"So what we know is the people who cut that inscription built the array under this city also built the Greater Shield that hangs over nine continents." He let it sit. "They fought that thing with everything they had. They lost. Their answer was to bury themselves alive on top of it."

"So when you say we cannot open that gate—" Lucas began.

"I am not saying we should not open it. I am saying there is no version of opening it that ends with us alive. If it could be killed, they would have killed it. Every gun we have built in three years would have been a rumour to them, and they chose to be entombed rather than face it twice."

"Then say the shape of it plainly, my lord," Ironbreaker said. "I think I have it and I would like to be wrong."

"Go on."

"The thing holding up the shield over nine continents is beneath us. To reach it we would have to pass the seventh gate. We cannot pass that." He counted them off on thick fingers. "And the demons are digging toward it."

"That is the what we know."

"So we sit on the most important object in the world. We cannot reach it, cannot mend it, cannot look at it and our whole job is making certain nobody else reaches it either."

"That is our whole job. From tonight, that is what Elarion is for."

Lucas set his pen down.

"Then the array at the western anchor fields is not draining our shield to bring an army through."

"No."

"It is draining our shield because our shield stands between them and this. They are not coming for the territory. They are coming for the floor under it."

"They have been coming for it the whole time. We simply did not know we were the destination."

"Nothing goes down," Lucien said. "Nobody descends past the sixth gate for any reason. Not to survey, not to measure, not because somebody clever has an idea. The sixth gets sealed properly, watched permanently, and the watch rotated and written down."

"And if they reach the lower levels by some road that is not our stair?" Malen asked.

"Then we will be having a very different conversation, far too late. Which is why they never reach the lower levels. Everything above ground exists so that nothing ever gets beneath it."

"Then do we stop building and focus more on decense?" Lucas said."

"No,instead We build more of it." Lucien picked up his coat. "If the only thing between that Sovereign and the open world is a door we can never open, then nobody comes near the door and the way to keep an enemy off a door is to reach him wherever he is, long before he gets to it."

He stopped at the end of the table.

"Cedric — nobody outside this room learns any part of this.. Malen, a permanent watch, rotated, so nobody stands that post long enough to start wondering."

"Lucien," Aurethar said.

"Go on."

"When you go and stand in front of that gate, I am coming with you."

"I had not decided to go and stand in front of it."

"You decided about forty minutes ago. I watched you do it." The dragon lifted off the stones."

"And you are coming to stop me."

"I am coming because I have spent eleven hundred years being the strongest being and I would like to meet whatever made an entire city choose burial instead." He put his head back down. "Also because if you go alone you will do something clever, and then I would at least run with your corpse to give an answer to everyone."