The night after waking up was really strange for Ethan.
He had already lived a life before this one so that made this night even weirder.
He lay on his back in the dark staring at the ceiling. He could feel his titans through the door in his chest. That's the way he could describe it. A door that was always slightly open with a weight pressing through it. It wasn't unpleasant. He couldn't ignore it. It was like a sound below what he could hear. Like knowing someone was standing in the room.
They weren't doing anything. That was what struck him most. He expected them to be restless, hungry or aggressive.. They were just there. Settled in the valley like things. Without urgency or complaint like they had been waiting a time and were comfortable.
He carefully paid attention to them like you would press a bruise to understand it.
One of them turned its head.
Ethan stopped moving.
The titan looked at him for a time with that blank face and empty eyes. Then it slowly turned away seemingly satisfied.
Ethan breathed out.
Eighteen years of waiting he thought. Now I have titans in my chest and no idea what to feed them.
He closed his eyes. Started making a list.
The Lords Registration Bureau opened at 8 am.
Ethan was there at 5 past 8 which put him third in line. The building was small and grey sandwiched between a cartography supply shop and a courier office. Inside it was larger than it seemed, with counters and too much paperwork. The staff had the energy of people who processed moments all the time.
He took a number. Sat down.
The waiting area had a board showing the conquest registry. A live feed of available Wildlands dimensions within 50 km of Varenheim. Most were flagged yellow meaning contested or dangerous. A few were flagged grey meaning recently cleared. Two were flagged green meaning available and uncontested.
Ethan looked at the ones and noted their codes.
When his number was called he sat across from a middle- man with a stack of forms.
"First time registration?" the man asked.
"Yes " Ethan replied.
"Awakening date?"
"Yesterday. Ordenhall morning session."
The man read the assessment record. Paused for a second. Then he continued.
"Giant-type Humanoid, variant, B-tier initial assessment. You need to complete your conquest within 60 days to maintain active Lord status."
Ethan listened as the man explained the specifics.
The man set down his pen. Recited the rules in a flat tone.
"Available Wildlands dimensions are listed on the registry. Green means open and uncontested. You register your intent before entry. Log your exit after. If you don't log exit within 72 hours the bureau dispatches a retrieval team, which costs you."
Ethan asked for information.
The man looked at him with attention for the first time.
"In practice the first one usually goes badly for somebody. New Lords underestimate dimensions because the difficulty rating system is conservative."
Ethan asked which of the two flagged ones he should try first.
The man blinked. Most new Lords didn't ask that question.
"WL-114. Smaller environment. Entity type flagged as non-aggressive unless provoked. Core is accessible without penetration."
Ethan thanked him.
He finished the registration. Walked out into the morning with WL-114 already on his mind.
He spent the rest of the morning reading.
The bureau had a public resource room with conquest records and species taxonomy documents. Most accounts were either too vague or too specific to be useful.. A pattern emerged across all of them.
The dimension would push back.
Not intelligently. Wild entities had no strategy or coordination.. They had numbers and aggression and home advantage.
Ethan read that. Thought about his titans.
He knew Lords fought through dimensions using their race. He brought them through the threshold and they fought alongside him.
He closed the book and stood up.
There was one way to find out.
WL-114 shimmered at the edge of Varenheim. Ethan stood in front of it. Checked his connection to his valley.
The titans were there.. Present as always.
He pulled three of them forward. Felt the threshold thin.
He stepped through the shimmer.
The wild dimension was nothing like his valley.
It was wet. Low grey sky, ground thick with vegetation. The air was thick, with spores.
Ethan moved carefully through the undergrowth his titans ready to be pulled through.
*The thing that lived in this dimension felt the shimmer before it heard it.*
*It was the oldest of its kind. It had learned the boundaries of this world.*
*It had felt Lords before. This time was different. The shimmer held.*
*Something was coming.*
*The thing sent a signal outward. Gather. Come. Now.*
*It moved toward the shimmer. Felt something it had no name for.*
*The closest word would have been warning.*
The things came out of the plants without making a sound. They were shaped like humans. Not quite right. Their arms and legs were too long. They were too close to the ground. Their faces were flat. Didn't have any features except for big pale eyes. They moved together in a group spreading out a bit as they got closer. It looked like they were following their instincts of a plan.
Ethan stood his ground. Pushed the three big giants through.
The entrance opened with a sound like a breath. His giants stepped into the place and it changed right away. The things stopped moving. Something in the air changed, like before a storm. A pressure drop like things were hesitating. They had never learned to be afraid. They were feeling something close to it.
Then the closest thing made a sound that was like a vibration. The group rushed forward.
The giants moved to meet them.
*The oldest one felt its kind hit the giants and stop.*
*Not slow down. Not stumble. Just stop.*
*It had hit things before. Big things that took up a lot of space. Those things had always reacted. Moved back. Changed. Acknowledged the force.*
*These did not.*
*One of its kind grabbed onto the giants arm with everything it had. The giant looked down. Then it reached over with its hand and the one that was holding on was no longer holding on.*
*The oldest one thought again.*
*It sent a signal. Not to gather. Not to come. Something older and more basic than that.*
*The signal that meant everything.*
*It did not help.*
The fight was not pretty. It was not planned.. It was complete. His giants moved through the things like the weather moves through a field. Not thinking about it just being bigger and stronger. The first wave was gone in under two minutes.
But more came from the plants. Far more than the group. His giants held their ground. They took hits. One stumbled when four things hit it at the time but it got back up. The things that had made it stumble found out that stumbling was not the same as stopping.
The giants were already healing. The places where the things had hit were closing slowly.
Twenty minutes after entering the thing went still.
*The oldest one was the last.*
*It did not run. It did not have a reason to run from something inside its world.*
*The big giant in front of it was not like the walls. It was solid in a way. In the way that things are solid when they do not need to be anything.*
*The oldest one looked up at the giants face. Felt something it had never felt before.*
*The boundary had come inside.*
*. Then it did not feel anything at all.*
Ethan walked to the center.
It was a crystal mass pulsing slowly. He crouched beside it. Pressed his hand to it. The dimension recognized him. Released its contents. The resources pulled through into his valley in a steady stream. He could feel them arriving. The giants in the valley stirred slightly.
He pulled his three giants back through the entrance. Stepped out of the dimension after them.
The shimmer collapsed behind him.
He stood in the scrubland at the edge of Varenheim. Looked at his hands. They were clean and uninjured.
Good he thought. That was how it should be.
He logged his exit. Was back in his room before dark.
He was sitting at his desk when the Titan Lineage Tree opened for the time.
He had not done anything to make it open. One moment he was reviewing his log and the next moment the space in front of him shifted. The tree unfolded in his mind like a map.. Vast extending in directions that felt like depth.
Most of it was dark.
The branches extended outward into shapes he could sense but not read. Each one was a silhouette of something. He could feel their scale. Some of them were vast. He could feel that they existed.
Locked. All of them. Waiting behind conditions he did not yet know.
Except one.
At the base of the tree one node burned with a steady light. No shadow. Just a shape he recognised immediately. A name underneath it that he did not need to read to know.
Pure Titan.
The basic form. The foundation. The one his valley was already full of. Blank. Pale skinned and enormous and patient. He pressed his awareness toward the node. It opened. Details unfolded in a cascade.
He read all of it. Then looked past it at the shadows beyond.
The tree went deep. Deeper than he had expected. The branches. Split again each division a different direction. Some of the shadows were roughly titan-shaped. Others were less familiar.
That was the part that held his attention longest.
He had come into this knowing what titans were. He had assumed that knowledge was an advantage. It was.. The tree was telling him something his previous world had never shown him. What he knew was the beginning of what existed. The locked branches were not different titans. Some of them were things that had no name in any world he had ever inhabited.
He sat with that for a time.
Outside his window Varenheim moved through its evening routines. Somewhere across the city the conquest board was updating. Somewhere in the Wildlands dimensions were shimmering into existence and sitting unclaimed.
Ethan looked at the one lit node in his Titan Lineage Tree. Then at the dark shapes beyond it and felt the particular settled patience of someone who has seen the full length of the road ahead and found that it does not intimidate them.
He had time.
He had titans.
He had a tree of things nobody else knew existed.
That was enough, for now.