The tour of Aldrenhal took the better part of an hour, and Helios spent most of it trying not to look as overwhelmed as he felt.
Every district they passed through added another detail he hadn’t consciously designed but somehow recognized anyway, as if the system had taken his rough sketches and filled in the gaps with exactly the choices he would have made given enough time.
More than once he caught himself stopping mid-step just to stare at some small architectural flourish he had no memory of specifying.
Seraphina walked him through the lower districts first, built into and around the tree’s massive root system, where High Elf scholars and Elemental Elf artisans had apparently already claimed workshop space without waiting for anyone’s permission.
Kaelen took over for the outer walls, pointing out sentry positions manned by Dark Elves who nodded at their king with expressions that ranged from curious to openly skeptical.
A few saluted properly, fist to chest.
Most simply watched him pass, weighing him the way soldiers weighed any new commanding officer, waiting to see if he was worth the loyalty before offering it.
“They’ll come around,” Kaelen said, catching Helios noticing the skepticism.
“Give it a level or two.”
“Comforting.”
“I said I’d hurry you along, not lie to you.”
Forest Spirits kept mostly to the upper branches, half-glimpsed shapes that felt more like weather than people, and the handful of Elementals Helios spotted at the kingdom’s edges didn’t so much walk as drift, humanoid only in the loosest possible sense.
Five lineages, each behaving like a slightly different species entirely, somehow all folded under one roof, none of them quite looking at the others yet, all of them very clearly aware of everyone else’s presence anyway.
“They don’t talk to each other much yet,” Helios noted, watching a cluster of High Elves studiously avoid eye contact with a group of Dark Elves working the wall nearby.
“Old habits,” Seraphina said.
“The lineages have never had much reason to mingle before now. Give them time. Or don’t, and watch the Council seats argue about it for you instead. Either way, it happens.”
“Comforting,” Helios said, for the second time that hour.
“I’m told it’s my best quality.”
Kaelen snorted from a few paces ahead.
“Her best quality is making ‘comforting’ sound like an insult. Took me years to figure that out.”
“You’ve been saying that a lot today. ‘Years.’ ‘Since you were young enough to hold a sword badly.’ Do either of you ever get specific?”
“Vaguely specific enough works fine for me. Mostly I remember thinking, whoever’s running this kingdom clearly has no idea what he’s doing, and then being right most days.”
“I am your general. Generals are allowed to have opinions about their king’s planning process.”
‘This is either going to work beautifully,’ Helios thought, watching the two of them needle each other with the easy familiarity of people who’d clearly liked each other for a very long time, ‘or fall apart in a week.’
He didn’t get much more time to worry about it.
A notification chimed, different in tone from anything he’d seen so far, sharp and formal in a way that made both Seraphina and Kaelen go still beside him.
[Global Broadcast: Founder servers now open to general population.]
[POMAX has officially launched.]
Helios felt the shift before he understood it, a kind of pressure change in the air itself, as if the entire world had just taken a breath.
Seraphina’s eyes went distant for a moment, clearly reading something only she could see.
“The others are arriving,” she said.
“The remainder of humanity’s player base. Millions, according to the Council’s projections.”
“Millions,” Helios repeated.
“Not thousands.”
“The Founder wave was five thousand,” Kaelen said.
“This is everyone else. Every server region, all at once.”
Around them, faint shimmers began appearing at the edges of the capital’s outer fields, dozens at first, then more, translucent outlines solidifying into ordinary-looking men and women blinking in confusion at grass and sky that had, until sixty seconds ago, existed only as marketing copy and forum speculation.
None of them wore armor.
None of them carried weapons.
Most of them, Helios realized, were standing in whatever basic starter gear the default character templates provided, looking around with the exact same wide-eyed uncertainty he remembered feeling ten minutes into his own launch.
A few laughed, delighted, spinning in place to take in the sky and the trees.
A few looked considerably less delighted, clutching at their own arms as if checking they still worked the way they were supposed to.
“They didn’t get a countdown,” he said slowly.
“General launch typically doesn’t require the same setup as a Founder build,” Seraphina said.
“Their characters were templated, not designed. Faster onboarding.”
Faster onboarding.
Helios turned that phrase over uneasily, watching a woman near the tree line touch her own face as though checking it was actually hers, watching a man beside her stagger and catch himself against nothing, muscles apparently unused to a body that hadn’t existed an hour ago.
[Detected: elevated ambient distortion.]
The notification meant nothing to him.
He filed it away anyway, the way Kaelen’s earlier warning had taught him to file away things that sounded small but weren’t.
“Kaelen,” he said.
“That distortion thing. Is that normal?”
Kaelen’s easy grin had gone somewhere else entirely, replaced by the flat, focused look of a soldier noticing something he didn’t like.
“No,” he said.
“That’s not in any of the launch briefings the Council pulled together.”
Seraphina’s gaze had gone distant again, and this time it didn’t clear.
“Your Majesty,” she said carefully, “something is interfering with the domain’s environmental readings.”
“Interfering how?” Helios asked.
“Give me something specific. Numbers, a location, anything.”
“That’s the problem,” Seraphina said.
“I can’t. The readings themselves are refusing to resolve into anything specific, which has never happened to me before.”
Helios looked past her, out toward the fields full of newly arrived, uncertain players, and felt the earlier unease sharpen into something closer to real alarm.
“Show me,” he said.