It took me thirty years to reach this point, almost to the day since I’d defeated Ammun and dispersed his soul to the afterlife. There had been unexpected windfalls and setbacks, and I’d found some unlikely allies along the way. I’d hoarded enough mysteel to finance multiple kingdoms and set foot on all five of Manoch’s moons in a bid to harness their mana for this purpose.

  I stood in a mile-wide underground chamber buried so far under the planet’s surface that even the bottoms of the oceans were far, far overhead. A mere thousand feet separated us from Manoch’s world core, and all around us were the twisted, ruptured shards of shattered mysteel from Ammun’s ill-advised counterstroke against the lost sixth moon.

  Senica stood to my left. Querit was on my right. Next to Senica was a brakvaw who’d successfully mastered shapeshifting invocations to the extent that he was physically present in a human shape. They’d taken each other as apprentices and begun the process of learning the magical traditions of both our cultures a decade ago, something of an ambitious project, but who was I to judge?

  There were four Order archmages—real ones that I’d personally vetted to ensure they had the skills necessary—opposite us, and the circle was rounded out by Zara, formerly known as Echo of the Wolf Pack, and a skilled sorcerer named Akunva I’d discovered a few years back and helped ignite his core. Being entirely self-taught and unable to produce his own mana, he’d had some fascinating theories on mana cycling and efficiency.

  Looking around, I had to admit that I hadn’t foreseen much of any of this. Zara had been an enemy when we’d first met, and even after that conflict had ended, she’d shown no signs of growing to the capacity that she’d ever be able to participate in something like this. Something about Ammun’s second attack on her home had lit a fire in her, though.

  Or maybe it had always been there, but it wasn’t until Senica’s schools started appearing everywhere that she finally had access to the knowledge she needed. Whatever the reason, she was the poster child for success in Senica’s program, the undisputed queen of the inaugural graduating class. No one since had come close to her abilities, and she’d grown to a stage six master mage since then.

  Technically, that made her more powerful than Senica herself who, despite having the breadth of knowledge and skills to truly earn an archmage title now, was still at stage five. She continued to stubbornly cling to her dream of a perfect demesne and refused to advance until she achieved it, which couldn’t happen until Manoch’s world core started working again.

  “All five machines are online with a stable connection,” Querit said. “We’ve got about three hours at maximum mana flow before Nalicin and Lasrin start to slip out of position and the output drops by thirty percent.”

  “Everyone is ready?” I asked. When I got affirming nods all the way around, I began the ritual.

  Thirty years of effort. It was hard to believe it was finally time to reignite the world core.

  Almost the entirety of this cavern was filled with stockpiled mysteel, leaving only an empty space a few dozen feet wide filled with the most complex ritual circle I’d ever made in my life. We’d taken up our positions around it and, at my nod, Querit released five moon cores’ worth of mana to stream into the chamber.

  Acting in concert, the ten of us took hold of that mana and steered it toward our desire, channeling it down through the hole in the center of the circle. It was a smooth bore all the way to the dead stone that encased the faintly beating heart of the world, and we aimed to wake that stone back up.

  World cores, I’d discovered, were interesting things. They had much in common with living stone, except that they were such a great mass, and under such tremendous pressure from being encased in a shell of mysteel, that they turned into a molten mass of mana-emanating magma instead. When Ammun had shattered the world core, he’d done so primarily by rupturing the mysteel.

  The explosion had been weaponized and used to destroy Amodir, the orange moon that no longer graced our night sky, but then he’d been unable to patch the mysteel, and the core had begun to cool. Before long, it was nothing but a dead lump of rock.

  I knew there was still a living heart in the very center, though. All the evidence pointed to it. Some of my earlier theories had been disproved, but Manoch did still produce mana. It was a dying world, but not completely dead. There was every chance that it could come back to life, given a little help. If we patched the shell properly, it would probably recover on its own in a few hundred years.

  I thought we could do better than that.

  We flooded the dead stone with mana poured through the filter of the ritual spell I’d designed, and slowly, it started to come back to life. The stone melted at a pace that would have seemed incredible taken on its own, but which I feared was far from quick enough to make our window. Thankfully, the more of the core we superheated, the faster the effect spread.

  An hour passed, and we’d revived perhaps a fifth of the world core. All around me, I could see sweating, anxious faces as we fought to hold the ritual steady and channel mana from the moons through it. I knew the others were doing the same calculations I was, looking at our progress and measuring it against how far we had to go.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Steady,” I called out. “We’re not beaten yet. The process is speeding up. Just keep doing your parts.”

  At the second hour, we were halfway there. Things were progressing, but too slowly. The ritual wouldn’t end at the three-hour mark, but its throughput would drop significantly. We’d planned for that, but even I was starting to grow concerned that it just wouldn’t be enough. Perhaps we should have waited for a lunar convergence after all.

  I kept it off my face, though. As far as everyone else needed to know, I had absolute confidence that there was nothing wrong. The mana kept flowing through our ritual circle and down into the bore hole, and the world core kept slowly churning as it came back to life.

  Half an hour later, we’d reached three-quarters saturation, and I could see hope starting to blossom in the circle. Everyone here was smart; they could do the math. Even if the propagation of living magma didn’t speed up, as long as it didn’t slow down, we’d make our window. That said, with each passing minute, it became more and more difficult to push more mana into the world core. As the dead stone heated up, it started to do what everything else did: it expanded.

  That expansion put pressure on the mysteel shell. More importantly, it tried to push through the rent in the shell where we were sending mana in. More and more of our resources were being diverted to holding it in place, and we’d reached the point where we needed to start sending mysteel down the bore hole as well to begin repairing the shell.

  With our concentration split, progress on reviving the core slowed down. The pressure started to stabilize, but that wasn’t a good thing. It needed to go higher, and we needed to hold it together while it did so.

  “Lasrin is slipping out of alignment,” Querit announced ten minutes later.

  “You said we had half an hour,” one of the Order archmages spat out through gritted teeth.

  “Until both are out. Lasrin is the smallest; it has the least impact.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “Focus on what you’re doing. I’ll make up the difference.”

  “You’ll what?” the archmage asked. “How are you going to make up the difference of a whole moon?”

  I ignored the question and tapped into my personal mana reserves. Decades of harvesting mana from the dynamo that was my demesne and constantly refining my mana crystal until it was the size of a mountain had left me with more mana than probably the next twenty most powerful mages on the planet combined. That wasn’t even looking at all the mana I’d siphoned off the moons for years already. All of it had been for this day.

  I fed mana into the ritual, keeping the input flow level with what we’d been dealing with for the last few hours, but it didn’t take me long to run the numbers. At this rate, I’d be completely tapped out in half an hour. In a few minutes, that equation would change again when a second moon started to rotate out of position and the connection weakened.

  We’d still be pulling mana from it, more than any single person could need for just about anything else, but not enough for this. “Shift to pushing the mysteel,” I ordered. It was better to patch the core that was three-quarters alive than to let all this drain away and have nothing. With luck, we could make a small hole in the shell and finish the job later.

  That was assuming the core didn’t cool down again if it wasn’t fully pressurized. It was far from the ideal outcome, but I’d take a chance at coming back to try again over failing utterly and wasting decades of preparations.

  And then, as the mana flow from Nalicin started to dwindle, something unexpected happened. “You’d better wake me back up,” Querit said.

  He poured all the considerable mana reserves he’d built up into the ritual. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t much, perhaps enough to keep going for another minute, but it gave us time. Senica added her own, and one by one, every archmage in the circle contributed what they could. All of them together wasn’t half what Querit himself had dropped into the pot.

  “The core’s fully awake!” someone yelled. I was so focused on keeping the pressure from erupting that I barely heard the words.

  “Get the rest of this mysteel down there,” I ordered.

  It was getting harder and harder to manage the ritual, and with a start I realized that Querit had dropped out completely. Opposite him, two of the Order archmages were down, and Zara was struggling to stay on her feet. We were failing.

  And then, abruptly, the last of the mysteel poured down the bore hole like quicksilver, and the ritual tugged it into place. A wall of crystallized mana clung to the patch, holding it steady as the mysteel bonded itself to the shell and kept the pressure inside from breaking loose.

  “Is… is it over?” Akunva asked.

  I took a deep breath and let go of my hold on the mana. Following my lead, those of us still standing did the same. “I think it is,” I said. “We did it.”

  A tired and ragged cheer erupted from the circle. We’d done it. The world core was fully energized and the patch on its shell was holding. I’d have to monitor it for the next few years to make sure nothing broke, but as of this moment, Manoch had a living core again.

  I knelt down next to Querit’s still form and shook my head. “Smart of you,” I murmured, too quietly for the others to hear over their celebrations. Senica shot me a knowing look, though. She’d realized how close we’d cut it, how that extra minute Querit had bought us had made the difference.

  I quickly flooded his core with mana, what little I had left, and his eyes popped open. “Did—” he started to say, but then he relaxed and smiled. He could hear the celebration going on. “Good.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We did it. You pushed us over the edge.”

  “And now, things will be like they were,” he said, his voice content.

  “Well, give it a few decades,” I told him. “But yes, it looks like everything went according to plan. Mostly.”

  He snorted. “Mostly, except for the part where I killed myself at the end.”

  “Oh, get over it. I brought you right back five minutes later.”

  I helped my golem assistant to his feet and he peered around at the now empty cavern. It looked a lot bigger without all the mysteel. “I can’t believe it really took all of it. I thought for sure you were exaggerating about how much we’d need, just trying to be cautious.”

  “It was a big hole,” I said.

  “You know, if this works, if it doesn’t need maintenance or anything, then you’ve effectively pioneered the process for creating whole worlds. We know how to do everything. It’s just a matter of time, resources, and scale.”

  “Who says we pioneered it? Obviously somebody must have done this process millions of years ago to make this world, right? Maybe a true immortal archmage who’d made it to stage ten. Maybe someone even stronger.”

  “I think we just proved we can do it as plain old mortals,” Querit said.

  “I suppose so, but I think I’ll start a bit smaller than a whole planet for my first attempt at doing it from scratch. Maybe I’ll make my own moon instead.”

  Laughing, we turned to join the celebrations of our comrades.