Snippet #2756628

The gathered dust material was a quasimatter under active control of the demiplane. It reacted badly to containment by exomatter the patterns destabilizing to a luminous sludge and vapor. Luminous fog however actively evaded the prodding glove of a humankind dust of point-patterns circling instead by irritation of umbralkind in vicinity. The bark itself a psionic mirror playing back the tainted patterns of umbralkind it sensed in vicinity in voluminous detail.

Her eyes narrowed as shapes ambled through the trees, "We do not often react with hostility but your creature is bound loosely enough for us to consider you tainted. It will go no further even with your badly rekindled suicidal servants. Your impostor gate must be excised, however. I can see to your sudden egress internally when necessary."

Silver eyes considered him for a moment, "I am Sybil, forgemaster mada of Myrkul's Vein. Jinhai has rekindled enough of the city government they leave us alone and do not seek entrance. Much our limited first batch after breaking the bulwark by a shadow dragon. Then by demons. Then the shadow dragon, again. Then by humankind's internal strife. We do not care to involve ourselves in civil affairs or give out cookies to neighbors. The government's loss of servitors has dropped an order of magnitude since the facilities were constructed and lower infrastructures rebuilt. Myrkul's Vein serves Humankind as a whole not just the Living Emperor."

She looked at the shadow creature walking around as the gate behind them shuddered. Jinhai busily chewed away the vicinity of planar fabric it attached to from outside. Ground searing back together the gate's space warping away in a painful direction. The creeping fog did much the same to animate shadows. A caustic muted light of defensive construction that slowly disjoined eddies of shadow as its parts replicated into all available space. A hunter-seeker artifice that upon an encounter with shadowstuff disjoined and ground it down to vent the resultant digested aether away from the pocket dimension.

Dead eyed glowing celestials and a few slack-faced devils wandered closer to the murky location between trees. They moved fluidly but without their own agency. Just an apparatus for Sybil to control, now.

She raised a hand to halt them, "I'd be happy to give you the knowledge to learn how to excise this umbralkind's free will if you have the means to execute it. Aetherkind can also be made into mindless servitors for Humankind. As they all should be. Seeing as the umbralkind is tethered down it can't very well escape the procedure. Hollow eyes of an aetheric lobotomy would suit it quite well in submission to a humankind."

She gestures to a celestial's face nearby as porcelain in movement as color, "We do not serve deities or demons. Adolefactus dethrones and dismantles their diadem once contained. Nor do we care for money. We have our own resources. Amassing yours implies a preference between you."