Mark stepped off of the tram near the shipping docks, northwest of Castle North, and stared upward.

  Isoko stepped off of the tram next to him, and also stared upward. “That wasn’t there this morning!”

  Mark laughed, and then he walked forward, frost crinkling on the ground underfoot, while airships and hoverships and fliers of all sorts flew everywhere overhead, most of them either hauling stone or other supplies, because Eliot was building the gatehouse.

  So far the gatehouse was a pair of big blocks of stone about the sizes of rugby fields at the north end of the shipping dock. The blocks were located about 500 meters from each other, east to west. Each one had a steel frame skeleton in the middle that each raised a few hundred meters into the sky. More steel skeletons rested on the ground, waiting to be hauled up into place, so the whole thing would form an archway. A great big door, probably half a kilometer square, if the plans Mark had seen were any indication of the final expected size, and they probably were.

  It was going to be massive.

  The Grey Whale, floating in the sky north of the castles, would be able to fly through the gatehouse with about 150 meters to spare on both sides, and less on the top and bottom. That was the size of ships that would pass through the gateway when it was done.

  The gateway was smaller than most of the normal kaiju out there, but if a kaiju got close enough, and if the gateway was active, the kaiju would rip the gateway open and shove themselves through the portal. If they moved fast enough, which they tried to do, then the System wouldn’t be able to close the gate fast enough.

  Such a gatebreaking kaiju might even meet a kaiju coming from the opposite direction, and the gateway might spread open pretty damned far when the kaiju fought. Such events happened a lot when the Sahara portal team got unlucky. Sometimes that route between Daihoon and Earth was simply unusable for a month because kaiju got there too fast.

  There’d be nothing like that happening here, though. Here, the portal would be defended by a major city on Earth’s side, and a team of elite kaiju killers on this side. And thus, trade would happen between the worlds, without going through Endless Daihoon.

  A lot of people did not like that trip, and Mark couldn’t blame them for that. Seeing the Big Kaiju out there was a terrifying, almost transcendental experience, and that’s not even mentioning all the normal kaiju walking around out there on mountains that were still actual mountains, when compared to the kaiju. Mark still recalled seeing Big Silver. Only the eyes, though, glancing over the endless mountains, like moons floating on the indeterminate horizon, their pupils staring right into your soul. Mark remembered looking away and the eyeballs of Big Silver had moved on, carried away on stalks from some continent-sized kaiju that remained always out of sight.

  Some people claimed to have seen Big Silver’s eyes actually moving, so the quick movement wasn’t some sort of illusionary, hiding effect. The Big monster really did move that fast. Like a moon suddenly setting.

  Big things should not move that fast.

  … Mark shivered a little.

  Isoko glanced at him. “Worried about something?”

  “Just thinking of what Big Silver would look like in the sky.”

  Isoko huffed and then she gasped with offense, though her vector was mixed with worry and joy and a bunch of other smaller emotions all tangled up together. She slapped Mark on the shoulder. “Don’t say shit like that!”

  Mark laughed.

  Isoko couldn’t help but grin. “I’m serious!”

  “You asked.”

  “Teach me to ask you what’s wrong; that’s what I learned today.”

  Mark rolled his eyes. “The worst thing that’s going to appear in this sky is Addavein.”

  “Shut it! Shut it right now!”

  Mark laughed, and then Isoko tried to slap his shoulder again, but Mark slipped out of the way, racing forward, down the road toward the building zone, north of the shipping yard.

  Isoko easily caught up and dashed ahead, laughing now that she had passed him.

  Mark struggled to catch up. There were no people on the ground and supplies for the gate were flying around everywhere, so Isoko slowed down.

  The two of them eventually stood a hundred meters from the base of the rightmost archway pillar, where Eliot was in a cab up in a crane and Sally was standing on the ground, pressing a big red button, while Aurora and Tulo Khava were on the ground next to her, looking up at the construction and talking softly to each other. Sally’s vector was uncomfortable to stand next to Aurora, but she was ambivalent toward the Armsmaster of the settlement.

  There was a nominal barricade between here and there, but Isoko vaulted it and Mark hovered over it. There were people everywhere, and people noticed, though no one said anything. They were all busy either flying around to slot material into the archway, or to coordinate electronics, or something, into the base of the other archway that Eliot wasn’t currently working on. There was even a small archway, maybe 10 meters tall, located in the very center of the two big pylons. That would be the small gatehouse that would create the gate that then filled the whole zone, but for now it was dark.

  There were a lot of people working in that central area, though. There were a lot of people everywhere, all of them doing something, except for here.

  Isoko walked to Sally, asking, “Need help on the button?”

  Sally was about to say something, but then she turned offended as she looked at the two of them. “Aren’t you both cold?”

  Sally was all bundled up in a great big jacket with fuzzy edges, with thick pants, boots, and gloves. She looked twice as big as she usually did, but it was all fabric and layers.

  Mark wore jeans, a shirt, and a jacket, while Isoko was in similar clothes.

  Mark said, “I’m breathing in warmth.”

  “Same,” Isoko said. “It’s quite comfortable.”

  “Are you cold?” Mark teased, knowing the answer already.

  “Bah! I thought I was okay, but this winter is getting deep.”

  “If it gets worse I’ll have it shifted,” Aurora said, interrupting her conversation with Tulo Khava.

  Tulo said, “You should shift it now. The cold is messing with the foundational pour.”

  “Eliot says he’s compensating for that and you told me he is, so what changed?” Aurora asked.

  “… I’m cold, too,” the islander said. Tulo was bundled up more than Sally. “Any excuse for you to change the weather is good enough for me, but if I find a better one I’ll give you that one instead.”

  Aurora grinned. She was wearing rather normal winter gear which seemed like it wasn’t good enough for this particular winter, but she also wasn’t cold at all. Mark was pretty sure he saw little hints of light around her body, so she was also cheating the cold with her own Skills.

  Aurora said, “The winter auroras flow on mana currents, and altering those currents tends to bunch the mana up in unknown ways, which usually results in at least one or two kaiju. So I’ll be avoiding changing the weather until I cannot avoid it any longer. If the 5-band weather turns 3-band, I will assuredly alter it back up to 4, or 5.”

  “Not doing a 2-bander,” Tulo said, though it was more like a question; a concern.

  “No 2-banders here,” Aurora said, nodding. “Went through one of those when I was a kid. It was horrific. Trees turned to shrapnel as they exploded from the cold.” And then she turned to Mark, saying, “Your livium will be coming through on a delivery in several hours when we get the small gate open and working. Congrats on getting approved.”

  Mark smiled wide.

  And then Mark wanted to ask a lot of inappropriate questions, like how Elaria had had a familiar but the Empire killed it, and if the Empire would come after him for his familiar, and if the Empire would be coming after him for his adamantium, which was perhaps a better question… But he said none of that. Too awkward. Too personal for this public space, too.

  Mark said, “Thank you.”

  Aurora nodded in a way that was very similar to her mother, then walked along. Tulo rapidly walked with her. Aurora said to Tulo, “My main concern is still with the foundation. We’re close enough to the river that something this large and heavy…”

  Tulo was shaking his head, saying something about reinforcements, but Mark was already looking up at Eliot, and at the whole project.

  After staring at the enormity of it all, alongside Sally and Isoko, Mark turned to the girls and to the big red button sitting there in the open. The button was a little frosted over, and Sally wasn’t pressing it right now. She was cold.

  Mark jolted, realizing that Sally was cold. “Sorry!” He linked in with her for warmth, and he linked up to Eliot too, up in his crane, saying, “Should have done that first.”

  Isoko said, “I was already doing it, but this is a lot easier.”

  Sally chuckled a little, loosening up as though she was thawing out, and maybe she was in a small way. “Thank you both.”

  And then Sally started talking about how excited Eliot had been to start when the call came in. All of this was only an hour old. Eliot was putting in work.

  Mark could feel Eliot up there, at the top of his crane, the guy’s vector disseminated within the crane’s structure as the whole thing moved up and down like it was a toy-sized crane, and not the 200-meter tall thing that it was. The crane moved, and stones flowed up from stacks on the base where other people stacked them, and meter by meter, the gateway took form. Metal flexed. Stone reinforced. Parts floated out of crates and into place.

  Eliot was dancing a little in his seat up there, for sure.

  Mark couldn’t see Eliot’s joy, but he could feel it. The guy was probably singing to himself as he spun the crane this way and that, grabbing big crates of metals with the hook and then throwing them at the tower’s girders, and the tower just absorbed all of the metals and grew some, thickening here and there. He was having fun up there in that heated control box…

  Mark looked to Sally, interrupting her talk, “Why aren’t you up in the heated crane room?”

  Sally defended herself, “You see that guy moving up and down like that! I about vomited.”

  Isoko was staring up at the crane, saying, “He’s way too excited. I think he’s about to— Yup. He’s moving to a new area.”

  The crane creaked and groaned and Eliot’s control cab slid all the way down the crane tower till it was only 5 meters off of the ground, with most of the crane tower high overhead. And then the base of the crane split, girders fracturing into legs, ice shattering away from joints. With a great waddling, the crane crunched across the stone ground, moving several meters around the base of the rightmost archway pillar, and then it settled back down onto stone ground. Legs turned back into solid grounding poles.

  The red button that Sally had been pressing was still attached to the crane, like the tail of a beast, and with a slight turn of the whole crane toward Sally, like a great big beast looking this way—

  The crane paused. The crane hunkered down into the ground, stabilizing itself, and letting out more cable to connect to the button that Sally had been pressing. And then the crane quieted down, the engines rumbling to a low idle.

  The side door opened and Eliot stepped out onto a walkway, wearing jeans and a teeshirt and instantly regretting it. Music blared out from inside the crane, and Mark was pretty sure it was Dolly Parton’s ‘Working 9 to 5’. She was a pretty famous singer 50 years ago who helped really foundationalize the Basic Income program. It was a good beat.

  Eliot waved despite the cold. “The crane cab is warm! Come inside!”

  Mark waved back. “No thanks!”

  “I’m coming!” Isoko said, hurrying that way.

  Eliot smiled wide and then he waved Isoko in, even as he hurried inside the crane to get away from the cold.

  Isoko turned toward Sally and Mark as she went away, saying, “I got this. You two can go home!”

  “Thank the gods,” Sally said, shivering.

  Mark looked to Sally, asking/saying, “We’ll stick around for a little while?”

  Sally rubbed her arms and shrugged. “Fine! Keep me warm and I’ll be fine.”

  Mark smiled. “I can do that.”

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Isoko hurried to the crane and practically sailed up the ladder.

  Mark made sure to keep connected to Eliot and to warm him up from his brief foray into the frozen air, but soon Eliot was back in the zone and warm in his cab, listening to country music from Memphi. So Mark just kept his astral body strong. He probably didn’t even know Mark was out here, helping him. This amount of building would usually strain Eliot’s Man-made Manipulation to weakness, but Castellan pulled a lot of weight when Eliot was inside his own domain. Mark could still help out, though, and he did. Isoko was inside the cab with Eliot, though, so she was doing most of the work of keeping Eliot strong.

  Mostly, Mark helped Sally maintain composure. Soon, she was doing a lot better now that Mark was here.

  People flew in stone both with their own flying Powers and on hovercarts, while Tinkerers worked here and there, and loads of trash from the settlement was dumped to the side. People were everywhere. Everyone was working.

  And Eliot’s crane hummed and rumbled, moving up and down, and Eliot was turning the trash into good steel and the stone into solid archway once again, materials flowing where they needed to flow.

  Mark asked Sally, “You didn’t want a warm room down here?”

  “I thought I could hack it but it’s fucking freezing.”

  Mark chuckled.

  “… And I’m hungry, too.”

  Mark helped her with that issue, as well.

  Soon enough, Sally relaxed for real. “… Thanks.”

  Mark gave her a side hug, though she was very tall so it was more like a shoulder-to-hip bump. Sally chuckled and bumped him back. “Isoko is good up there with Eliot.” Mark asked, “Want to go inside?”

  Sally loosened her hood and pulled the mask down from her face, saying, “I’m comfortable now, and I want to see the gate go up. You can press the button, though; I’m done with that.”

  Mark started pressing the big red button with a wide dot of adamantium, making sure not to break the button. Every press made the ticker go up, the rolling readout increasing from 3,757 to 3,758, and on and on, as Mark looked up at the gate, coming together like magic. Which it was. A whole lot of magic, actually.

  Grand Mage Solari was at the small gatehouse, located between the big pillars, doing magical things that no one else was allowed to know about.

  And Mark watched the construction. It turned out that standing in the freezing weather was okay, but there wasn’t a whole lot of life out there so Union could only do so much, so Mark eventually requested a heated room on the ground. He got a glass box with a heater in the corner, so he and Sally continued to watch the whole thing.

  The pillars Eliot raised were beige-colored stone, solid as heck but liquid-looking until he made them solid. The only actually-solid things he put in the construction were solid silver rings, each as thick as thighs and about 2 meters across, located inside the stone, in specific locations and attached to wires, and junk, that led down tunnels in the stone. Those rings would be the hovercar cores that were welded into the internal steel structures of the stone, at set intervals. Or at least that’s what they looked like to Mark and Sally. There was a lot going on under the hood that Mark and Sally didn’t recognize, and which were probably some Hearthswellian secrets regarding how to build tall stone structures so that the whole thing didn’t collapse on its own.

  Sticking hovercar engines into the stone was probably only a surface level explanation of what was happening.

  But Mark knew an obvious safety valve when he saw one.

  The gatehouse would collapse on itself if those were ever turned off, and indeed, turning those things off was a way to collapse the gatehouse on purpose, if it ever needed to be collapsed. Everything else about the gatehouse was constructed in order to keep the portal open and stable, but sometimes a portal needed to be closed as fast as possible.

  Three hours later, two 500-meter-tall pylons of stone rose on the grounds northwest of the residency castles, north of the cargo port and the tram station. Everything around the pylons and the space was solid stone, with ridges connecting the ground to the pylons, like the roots of trees but more brutal in their architecture. It was impressive. Mark was kinda awed.

  Eliot was busy as fuck, moving everywhere and fixing so many small things and talking to a whole lot of different people. Mark accompanied him for some of those movements and he helped with a Union of adamant when Eliot, at the request of Tulo, doubled down at the underlying structure of the towers. They went below ground a few times to secure the roots, sinking and widening the foundation a good 50 meters deeper and wider than it had been, at 150 meters deep and 150 meters wide. Each tower was itself 25 meters wide, but the base was a lot wider, and now it was even wider still.

  Connecting the two towers at the top was more complicated than all the rest of the structure combined.

  Eliot worked on the archway in parts, on the ground, and after he had constructed every piece of the arch, Aurora got involved.

  With delicate rainbow warping of the light, Aurora held the pieces where they needed to be held, and one frantic hour of maneuvering, welding, and shifting metal and electronics, the metal skeleton of the archway was in the air, welded tight. Solid. But Aurora was still holding it together…

  Eliot, Aurora, Mark, and many others were down on the ground, watching, though most of the others were way over to the side, away from the possible fall zone.

  Eliot happily announced, “You can let go!”

  Aurora was nervous, but she didn’t show it. She let go and everyone held their breath.

  But Eliot just laughed as the structure fully held, saying, “You didn’t think it would fall, did you!” And then he rushed over to a hovercart, saying, “More to be done!”

  They only had an hour till sunset, though the sky was already dark with gloom, yet illuminated with the blue glows of the winter auroras. Twilight didn’t stop Eliot, though. He kept right on working, loving every second of it.

  There was bad news, though.

  Tulo Khava, Mark, and Eliot stood by the resource area, which was as empty as could be… Well. Not completely empty. There were two discarded soda cans over there on the bare ground. Someone had just finished them and dumped them in the pile where the trash had all been. They looked frozen to the stone ground.

  Everything else was flat and open and empty.

  Eliot asked, “What do you mean we ran out of stone?” He asked louder, “And steel?”

  Tulo was smiling, despite Eliot’s frustration. He happily said. “Under budget and over promised. This was great, Eliot.”

  “But it’s not done yet.”

  “It’s done enough for today,” Tulo said, and though his words were soft, his words were law as the quartermaster for the settlement. “We’ll have more supplies tomorrow.”

  Eliot said, “Memphi is expecting us to have barely started. I want to surprise them with a finished gate.”

  “It’s not happening tonight. The small gate is opening in an hour, though. Do you want to be here for that?”

  “… Eh.” Eliot sighed and looked up at the gatehouse. “It won’t be impressive to see… It’s so unfinished.” The blue winter auroras shone through the steel skeleton of the arch like light shining through bare branches. Eliot turned his gaze downward, to the towers themselves. Frost was gathering on the edges of the stone here and there. Eliot frowned. “I need to further winterize some of those ridges.”

  “Aye. But tomorrow.”

  Mark looked and saw nothing wrong. “Is something wrong?”

  Eliot waved a hand at the tower, saying, “The internal heat of the interior systems is edging out in that ridge there and the ice collected as water but it’s going to freeze and expand. Nothing has happened yet, but that’s a fracture point, for sure. There have to be other fracture spots, too, but I don’t see them.”

  “It won’t break for 40 years,” Tulo said.

  Eliot countered, “I want it to never break for 400 years. And with minimal maintenance, too.”

  Tulo laughed good naturedly. “A kaiju will break it before then.”

  “Not if we’re strong enough,” Mark said.

  Tulo grinned. “Aye… But nothing else is happening tonight! No big building! Go in and have dinner and then come back for the opening.”

  Eliot was ambivalent about watching people see half-finished work.

  Eliot wanted to object, to tell the guys who had been gathering stone from the quarry kilometers away to go get more, for the steel guys to get back out there to the mine and kinesis more up from the dirt, to get another shipment of special metals zoomed up here from the Aluatha Empire—

  But Mark put a hand on his shoulder, and told him, “Let’s go have dinner. I’m hungry.”

  Eliot was not starving, for Mark had been feeding him as much as he could. Sally and Isoko were back at the apartment, though, and they had made dinner hours ago. Eliot didn’t want to go… but he accepted Mark’s words.

  “Fine… FINE! Let’s go.”

  They went, and the workers who had been supporting Eliot’s build all sighed in relief. The work day was done! Mark could tell a lot of people were worn out, but Eliot could have gone all night, if he would have had supplies.

  They made it to the apartment and Eliot got a scoop of pasta in him and a clean up from Mark, and that was it. That was all he could do. Eliot crashed out on the couch and he was asleep within minutes. Mark put him in bed, but not before asking him if he wanted to be woken up for the opening of the gate.

  Eliot didn’t seem to care at all about that, mumbling, “It’s not done.”

  An hour later Mark did purposefully wake him, though, and Eliot stayed awake for half a minute before deciding that, yes, maybe he could at least watch the opening from afar. Soon enough, Eliot trudged out of the house with all of them, to stand half a kilometer from the apartment and on top of a convenient shed, to look across the settlement with Mark, Isoko, and Sally, at the gatehouse.

  The gatehouse loomed in the dark of early winter night, like a blue ghost of some ancient, powerful city, rising from a flat land of stone and scattered ice. It glittered in the reflected light of winter auroras. And then, a flash of rainbows sparked at the base of the gatehouse, at the actual gatehouse, the small one between the massive pylons.

  And then, a ripping.

  Light shone outward like the opening of a door into day, in a very small, distant way.

  Mark felt his entire body shiver with some sort of unheard song, right on the edge of existence, calling to him, to tell him to come, here. To be there. To fight, to conquer, to subjugate and control. It was the sound of a kaiju call, but in a way that Mark had felt when they had been on the Grey Whale, and kaiju were all around, and they were hidden from the conquest, from the fight. The whistling that was not a whistling. The roar that was not a roar. It got his blood pumping and—

  Eliot shivered. “Gods that feels weird… Fuck.”

  And then, the light receded.

  The fuzziness in the air settled back down.

  And Mark’s blood calmed. No need to fight. Nothing to fight, actually.

  It was there and over, just like that. Maybe 20 seconds total.

  The sky reflected on Isoko’s platinum face, blue light on grinning lips and happy eyes, as she said, “Felt like being back home for a moment.”

  Time passed in comfortable silence, snow drifting from the blue sky.

  And then Quark beeped in Mark’s pocket.

  Mark lifted Quark out.

  It was a text from Aurora.

  ‘The representative of United Sapients wishes to visit you at your earliest convenience. Which means tonight, and right now. Please report to Castle South.’

  Mark told his people, “Looks like that’s my livium.”

  Eliot was looking at his phone, too, since it beeped at the same time. “Looks like there’s a delegation from Memphi? We’re all going.”

  “Let’s all go for a walk!” Isoko suggested.

  Sally huffed a small cloud of fog into the night air as she hopped off of the roof of the shed, landing with a quiet thump on the more solid ground. “Onward we go.”

  And so they did.