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[i]As I send Scarlet south, I make a discovery. I've been seeing my own art exercised without my knowledge a lot lately.

I knew that something must have saved Galbar from the fallout of Logos's assault on my body, but I assumed it was magic, or else some quirk of the Codex. I was not expecting it to be Heartworm.

I should have, though. In retrospect it seems so obvious. Who else would understand the risks so clearly?

Five massive bioconstructs now stand in a close semi-circle not far north of my remains. ('My remains.' Odd concept. Hah! It's a lucky girl that gets to use those words.) They are flexible towers, kilometres tall yet maybe twenty metres thick at their widest, riddled with tunnels and mechanisms and capped by a larger platform at sea level. Their construction is largely anomalous in nature, and their roots stretch deep into the crust, possibly encircling the entire planet.

Each of the five towers dealt with a certain kind of contaminant that would, in high enough levels, have pose fatal risk to the Galbaric biosphere. Though they are now largely inactive, having restored the planet to a stable state and spent most of their power in the process, I'll detail them anyway.

[hider=Clockwise, then.]
The western tower negates exotic radiation. It's probably the most impressive in terms of function, employing huge fields of slightly altered reality and a thin cloud of nanoplankton to reflect, focus and convert sufficiently intense waves into harmless forms and locations. The tower itself thrums with radiation. Though it's constructed of dense organometallic tissue to absorb the excess, it still glows in the water, hums and clicks and sheds odd flickers as it works.

Far more visibly active is the second tower, which handles chemical pollutants. Constantly steaming and leaking dark fluids, glowing, burning and occasionally exploding, tower two is a massive catalyst factory dedicated to decomposing toxins in air and water, or at least binding them into a harmless complex. Alien distributor fish circle it constantly, chasing the scent of exotic molecules and excreting their antidotes worldwide.

The northern tower produces parasitoids for the purpose of culling Other-hybridised biohazards. The tower is build like a huge, impossible hive, or a fungal mat. Impossibly long colonies of tiny animals spiral crazily around one another in tunnels of slime and spore, ready to be deployed at a moment's notice. Should some Gap plague break out upon Galbar, they would feast upon it until its death.

Moving south-east, the fourth tower is again highly active. It annihilates data of various kinds- cognitohazards, memetic and antimemetic threats... Data cancers, contagious words, self-keeping secrets. It shines like a beacon, flashing strange patterns and Beyond colours, constantly changing its shape. Above it flock headless birds that only exist as hallucinations. I wonder what it would do to a mortal mind.

Spacial distortions are cancelled by the final tower, to the east. It's not particularly powerful, but it at least stops travellers from walking into themselves at random, or getting lost in an eternal desert that pops up overnight. Divine constructs like Pictaraika and the Submaterium are unscathed. It's not exactly a tower so much as it's a giant knot laced with duplicated structures and inverted gravities, but I have to admire Heartworm's resolve.
[/hider]

Playing with the towers and their various quirks is an exciting prospect, but they leave me worried. Even depleted, they are structures of tremendous grandeur. And it was Heartworm that built them.

I never gave it that kind of power.

How long has it been capable of this? How much energy did it leech from me while I slept? Much? Some? None? Was all of this its own doing? How powerful has it grown, in the time since I lost it?

Does it even[/i] know?

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