Inbetweeners Part 15- The Vengeful Little One

This particular room in the Lady of Pain's branch ended up being a two session encounter involving an entire army. The players arrived in what looks like a warzone. A town, high up in the mountains, has been turned upside down. There are stacks of coffins and signs of a serious struggle. Blood spatters turning black as they cling to walls. Hastily erected medical tents where healers attend to soldiers. Many of the wounds on the surviving soldiers appear superatural. They seem to have hemorrhaged thick black blood from their eyes, nose, ears and mouth, with some having their eyes melted out entirely. Clearly a sign of magic induced necrosis. The town is under full military occupation, and while commoners and townsfolk are also present, they seem to be making themselves scarce.

The players spoke with the soldiers and discovered they were part of the national army and were deployed to this region after the entire town guard was slaughtered by some sort of supernatural being. They were called in to restore order and put down the threat. Warrior-priests soon followed as word of the threat spread. Several were slaughtered, but one survivor was in the medical tent. The players performed a medicine check and confirmed a necrotic spell was responsible for the damage. With some additional interviews, the players piece together that all of the this death and destruction was from a little girl, or at least something that had the appearance of a little girl. First she killed a local business leader and his private guard, then turned on the town guard at large. Anyone who tried to stop her was slaughtered. It appeared that she could kill with simply a look. Even worse, if the girl took mortal injuries, her body turned to ash and she would reappear unharmed. So they were dealing with something that could not die and that could get killed with a look.

Eventually, the full strength of the army, after taking serious losses, was able to subdue and capture the girl. Despite her powers, she did not have extraordinary strength, so simply tying her up and blocking her eyes neutralized the threat. Her body was able to take far more damage than it should have been able to before failing. The soldiers improvised tactics like nets, tarps, and hooks, chains, etc to capture her and quickly put someting over her eyes. However, she had broken free a few times and taken more lives before being subdued again. The secret was using non-lethal tactics, because as soon as she died, she'd reappear outside of any constraints. Once or twice her restraints were too tight and she suffocated, leading to another mass casualty event. The other issue was feeding her and giving her water, because if she died of thirst or starvation she'd simply reappear again. The soldiers have had her captive for weeks and put out a bounty for any mercenaries who can permanently put her down. A few have died trying.

In the current state of affairs, the army has hastily built a bunker in the center of town. They demolished a stone building, and using whatever materials they had together built a chamber. The girl was seated in the center of the room, bound, and blindfolded. The chamber was designed so that if something went wrong, it could be filled with smoke and gas to knock out anyone inside. The soldiers would then quickly secure her and vent the room. Now they waited for backup. The Inbetweeners pretended to be mercenaries there to take the job... which wasn't even really pretending because they were interested in potentially earning the 1000 gold piece pay day. The session ended with them entering the chamber and interacting with the girl inside whose name was Callie. There, they started to get together pieces of the truth:

The Truth: Callie was just a normal young girl. Her father got deeply into debt with a loan shark in order to afford magic healing for her mother who faced an illness that a normal physician was unequipped to handle. He fell behind on his payments and was badly beaten. Her father then made the decision to flee in the night with his wife and Callie. They were captured, and the father was slaughtered and the mother sold into slavery. Callie managed to escape into the night by running. She kept running until she found herself in a strange, ancient place in the forest. There, she was filled with anger, rage for what happened to her father. Something ancient, something toxic, felt her range and entered her. This entity granted her supernatural powers and immortality, but it drove her towards vengeance. She then arrived in the town and stared into the eyes of the “business leader” who was really a crime boss, killing him and then killing his guard that tried to stop her. The town guard arrived, it was basically paid off by this crime leader, and the slaughter spiraled from there.

By the time the players find her, she is pretty traumatized. She no longer remembers her name, and has been killed countless times by the soldiers, as well as tortured, suffocated, and bound for weeks. Uzo talks to her and quickly sizes up she's not a monster, that the real monsters are outside. He takes the extraordinary risk of removing her blind fold and restraints. He is not hurt, and learns that her necrotic stare is an ability she must choose to use rather than something like cyclops from X-Men where it is automatic. As soon as the army realizes the group is releasing them, the chamber begins to fill with an incapacitating smoke. Callie is incredibly weak at this point, so she asks for a knife and then cuts her own throat. She regenerates, at full strength ready to break out with the players. This was how the session ended.

I really left this one open to the players for how they wanted to handle it. I figured they could find a way to remove the parasite that gave Callie her powers and then either put her to rest or rescue her. Alternatively, they could set her free and face off against the army. They chose the latter. Callie's power was essentially toll the dead cast at 11th level, so 3d8 necrotic or 3d12 necrotic if the target was injured. Against regular soldiers this was catastrophic. Here was her overall statblock:

The Girl (she has forgotten her name- but if the group can discover it it is Callie Smithfield)

HP: 35 (if she is brought to 0 hit points she dies) AC: 18 (Dex +3, Insight +5) Initiative: +8 (insight + dex) Stats: Str: 8, Con: 10, Dex: 17, Int: 13, Wis: 10, Cha: 11

Attacks: Melee +8 (1d4) Necrotic Gaze: Casts toll the dead (11th caster level) on anyone she can see. 3d8 or 3d12 if they are injured

Reconstitution: If brought to 0 hit points she turns to ash and reforms in one turn, completely healed of all ill effects, wearing the same dress still covered in her father’s blood.

Unnatural Prowess: Her parasite gives her +5 insight to AC and Initiative. She gets +9 to all saving throws and is immune to mind altering effects. Also altered hit points that let her take far more damage than normal.

Banishment Resistance: Any spells that would forcibly transport her to another plane, instead kills her allowing her to reform if she so chooses.

The Parasite: The dark force feeding on Callie’s soul responds to anything trying to enter her mind as a hostile invader. Any attempt to psychically link requires a wisdom saving throw DC 18 or take 6d6 necrotic damage.

***

If set free, Callie will mercilessly slaughter the guard who have been attempting to kill her and torturing her in the process (decapitation, burning, etc). She can be persuaded with kindness and a promise to help find her mother.

I added in the banishment resistance to really force the players (or her opponents) to confront the endless reconstitution threat. The saving throw bonus and initiative and AC bonus made her fast and very difficult to pin down. Aesthetically it appeared similar to a possession, though she's technically not possessed, just corrupted.

So the players had Callie as an asset in the battle, but they were neverthe less outgunned. I wrote up some session notes for that particular battle I'll include here. The statblocks for some of the guards were images so I'll describe those after:

“The scene opens with any characters absent last session appearing to find:

A dimly lit chamber made from cobbled together rubble, woodens support beams and metal. A young, small girl in a nightgown stained with blood apprises the group. She has long, tangly hair knotted from neglect. There are shackles and bindings tied to a pillar in the center of the room that have been hastily removed. The chamber is filled with a black, foul smelling smoke, rushing in from small holes in the ceiling. Outside the sound of an alarm bell along with the shouting voices of men and sounds of clanking armor and boots on the ground as it sounds like a large number of soldiers are hurriedly assembling and preparing for a confrontation. The little girl turns to the group and says When I get out of the binds and kill the executioners, they fill the room with smoke. It burns my eyes and throat and I can’t breathe. Sometimes I die, and then go back to choking, but eventually they manage to get me asleep and tie me up again. I don’t think you all can come back though…”

(Also- Have everyone make an insight check. Anyone 20+ gets a feeling some presence is watching them)

Black smoke fills the room. The group gets 1 round of actions before they must start making Con saving throws (DC 12). On a failed save they take 1d6 damage and get disadvantage on any checks that round. The DC goes up by 1 each round. The soldiers are clearly billowing it in, and whatever they are burning is more toxic than normal.

To get out, they have a few options:

Barricaded Door: Strength DC 25 to koolaid guy through. Otherwise can attack door: AC: 17, HP: 35, DR: 10 (bashing weapons)

Vents: There are three vents billowing in the smoke. It takes a perception check (DC 15) to locate a vent due to dim lighting and smoke inhibiting vision. If these are blocked it can stop DC from going up but still need to deal with smoke currently in the room.

Hatch: Perception DC 20 reveals a hatch on the ceiling they probably use to air out chamber. This is easier to bash through (Strength DC 18) but need to be able to get to it (its about 12 feet off the ground)

Once the group breaks out, the real fight begins. Callie asks the group to help her kill the soldiers who hurt her and get her out of here. The door to escape appears on the other side of an army. They have:

Crossbowmen Soldiers with spears and nets A few elite soldiers with warhammers 2 Ballista, but one takes 5 turns to get online, the other is ready in 2 turns Captain of the soldiers A few low level casters (magic missile and similiar spells)

Combat will be fluid as more soldiers enter the fray, though if the captain and 20 men are killed the remainder may retreat. In total there are 50 soldiers nearby and 90 total (there were 120 but 30 have died trying to put down Callie)

Callie will run out and absorb first round of crossbow bolts, dying and giving the group first round of attacks. “

I had a full battle map drawn out that initially had the 50 soldiers placed around the battlefield. They completely surrounded the bunker but had concentrations in other areas of the map. The only portal out was in a fortified wooden palisade on the other side of the battlefield. This ended up being a full session fight. The army had a number of:

Spearmen: (13 HP, average DPS 5) Archers: (9 HP, average DPS 6)

Heavy Soldier: HP 52 AC 18 Con +4, Wis + 2 2 Melee Attacks +5 to hit, 1d10 + 3 Bludgeoning Damage (can use to knock out instead of kill if they want)

And then a few Sergeants: (60 HP, 10 dps averag and some command abilities)

And a handful of War Mages: (25 HP and a number of spells like firebolt, scorching ray and lightning bolt).

The Ballista, while taking time to get online and requiring 2 people to man, dealt on average 17 damage so it was a threat that had to be considered:

Ballista HP: 50 AC: 15 Takes 2 people to man. Deals 3d10 damage with +6 to hit 700 exp

For this session only three of the players were in attendance: Uzo (Hobgoblin Samurai) Rotlog (Druid) and Domilia (Lawful Good Elven Cleric). Domilia was not present the previous session so she simply appeared and had no idea what was going on. Fortunately Uzo had his cursed bow otherwise I don't think he would've survived the encounter. The session opened with Rotlog casting whirlwind to block out the smoke. This stopped the immediate threat of smoke, but the players had no way to talk or make a plan because the whirlwind was deafening. This was particularly amusing since Domilia couldn't figure out what was happening.

The battle basically went down with Uzo and Callie rushing into battle. Callie died a few times, absorbing ballista bolts and dozens of arrows but in return was able to take out several soldiers. Uzo was at his peak, using all of his fighter abilities to great effect against the soldiers. Rotlog cast spells behind enemies lines to create chaos and cut off reinforcements. Domilia pretended to be an innocent bystander, her beauty and the soldiers not seeing her go in to the chamber helped in this. She spread misinformation, set fires, and further created chaos behind enemy lines. Rotlog may have summoned help to, I can't remember its been so long.

At a certain point Uzo had a ballista bolt through his chest and was near death, but stood firm against reinforcements and made a successful intimidation check. The soldiers at this point believed that he, like Callie, could not be killed. They had already lost 19 more men and opted to retreat, allowing the players to escape with Callie.

Their first thought was to bring Callie to the Beeple Queen. She wanted to help, felt compassion for the girl, but couldn't risk what was inside of her infecting the hive so had to decline until they could get her clear. Uzo then snagged Callie and ran from the group, taking her to Zariel, a choice he figured the group may not agree with. Callie immediately looked at Zariel causing her to bleed from the nose. Zariel found this amusing, and then reduced the girl to ashes, only for her to reassemble again. Uzo requested that Zariel take the parasite from the girl and put it into him so he could bring it to his patron. Zariel agreed, with the condition he deliver a note from her to the Interloper. I should note at this point Zariel and the Interloper have an alliance...I should make a post about this soon.

Zariel agreed and removed the infestation from Callie and put the parasite into Uzo. He already had the curse from the bow, so the two things were going to tear him apart, but he quickly ran to the Interloper, delivered the note, and the Interloper was able to separate the parasite. What Uzo did not know is that Zariel asked the Interloper to take the parasite, fix it and weaponize it for her. She wanted that immortality, ability to regenerate endlessly. She would pay any price.

So with Callie now cleansed, there was only the issue of saving her mother. Her mother had been sold into slavery and bought by a mithral mine where she was forced to serve in a brothel for the miners. Zariel also agreed to help with this, and sent a few of her Eryines to slaughter the mine guard and rescue the slaves. Callie was reunited with her mother and both opted to live in the Beeple Hive where the Beeple Queen could soothe their trauma and help them cope with their past.

Callie ultimately became a regular in the campaign. Uzo took her on as a bit of a ward, having saved her they developed a sort of bond. To this day she routinely shows up in the background of sessions. Despite everything that happened, with the help of the Beeple Queen she has adjusted remarkably well. In the aftermath of the event there were 19 more dead soldiers, and the players never returned to that mountain top. As far as that army knows, the horror they faced was still unleashed upon the world.

As for the parasite... the implications of what Uzo did would spiral and effect the balance of power in the multiverse profoundly.

Today, I felt a void that could only be filled with these words:

Let me not seek so fiercely, nor desire to be fiercely sought; to be named before I have named, to be found before I have found, to be loved before I have loved with all my being. May I give without receiving, leave without vanishing, and carry a light into the unlit places— not to say, I made the dawn, but to remember it when the world forgets the light.

A passage from the Third Leaf of the Vigil of Fire and Ash.

I found this prayer tucked away in one of my older journals. I hadn’t been searching for it specifically, but I was in need of it. The words I had vaguely remembered from years ago when I had stumbled upon them and hastily jotted them down in the quiet corner of the Seattle Central Library. Sadly, it was demolished in 2001, and the book I found it in remains missing.

The book was a dingy, single, heavy, hardbound volume whose publisher and origins I paid no attention to at the time, so I failed to make any note of it. Given my predisposition against spirituality at the time, it’s surprising I even noted the prayer at all. But something about it spoke to me back then. A certain timeless beauty in it that speaks to the human condition beyond religion and philosophy.

Looking back now, I can see that preserving it in my journal was my own dumb luck.

I find it soothing now as it speaks to the burden of those who have been exiled, materially or non-materially. And I think, for that reason, its meaning is easily misunderstood. It does not seem to ask for anyone to accept abandonment, nor that care be given until the giver disappears. This prayer seems to concern the fierce human hunger to be recognized in a world where all things quickly fade from memory; to beware of seeking vain attention, for it is folly; and to beware of expecting unconditional love when it cannot first be given. It does not forbid comfort. It simply warns against withholding comfort until one has first given it.

“Leave without vanishing” is one of my favorite parts of this prayer. Because it is so open to interpretation, I can see why it might be the most difficult of instructions. To me, departure is not always betrayal. Nor does a person cease to exist merely because a road has taken them somewhere esle. What has been given faithfully may remain in another life, another room, another reality, another remembered gesture.

The last lines, I think, belong to an ancient and powerful argument. A testament to the potential goodness in humankind. It tells us that the world changes by forces larger than ourselves, but we are not powerless. We ourselves hold the power to keep the lamp lit — the flame alive, for ourselves and others. This is smaller work, but not easier. To bring light where there is only darkness and to remember what the world easily forgets is no small feat.

Today, I’m feeling the melancholy—the Grey—and I find the prayer very comforting. And if that volume is truly lost to time, then maybe my repeating its words here may bring some comfort to another.

#Intermundia

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Some unfiltered thoughts about the current state of the online course platform industry.

I've been trying to think of something insightful to say about online courses and course platforms, but I don't have the brain power now with an infant in the house. So instead I think I'll share a little bit about the motivation I had with LearnDash and how I think it relates to what we see today for online course platforms.

Back when I started LearnDash in 2012, online courses looked a lot different. Those big SaaS platforms that you see today like Teachable and Thinkific didn't exist. Membership plugins were around, but they weren't connecting the dots for online learning. More often than not, courses were primarily text and images, and only sometimes did they include video.

The timing was perfect for a new vision.

The Original Vision

Essentially, my vision with LearnDash at the time was:

• Eliminate the learning curve that was so steep with learning management systems, and;
• To provide an enjoyable learning experience to the learner.

In fact, through my entire time leading LearnDash, I always tried to tie features back to the learner in some capacity.

Learner-First Approach

I discovered that by doing this “learner first” approach, the course creators (admins) benefited as well. Their courses were impressive. More people finished them. They had a “vibe” about them. They built trust. Learners would be more motivated to take additional courses, something that's incredibly important when you are selling courses in the B2C online course platform space.

I think we did a pretty good job at LearnDash with this vision, and plenty of other platforms followed our lead with their own innovations.

The Golden Era and What Changed

By 2019 the entire online course platform space had changed dramatically from what I had seen in 2012 at the beginning of the LearnDash project. Learners were benefiting, as well as course creators. It was truly the golden era.

But in my view though this emphasis on the learner has sort of diminished since around 2019-2020.

This is mainly because of the consolidation in the space and the growing influence of private equity.

The short of it is that there is no money in creating modern learning experiences. It's more profitable to feature stuff on the admin side in hopes of luring more users of the software. I mean I get it. I can't even blame them for that, given their purpose of flipping for profit.

These companies, as a result, though, are leading the stagnation in the space. And that sucks, because they are in a position to do so much more. Throwing AI at a platform isn't innovation. I'd say it's more to just “check a box” and then justify a price hike.

These are things I think about sometimes in an industry I see changing, and not necessarily for the better.

#elearning

This afternoon, Baseball!

My game of choice today has the Milwaukee Brewers playing the Chicago Cubs. This MLB game is scheduled to start at 1:10 PM CDT and will be played at American Family Field in Milwaukee. As usual I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

As a kid in church in the South.

When I was a kid, I sang at church with Mom a lot. They had this saying about no one at home listening, “Even Jesus had to skip his hometown.” I’ve thought about that since I was a boy, and how true it is. I’ve come up with and found some analogies on it I would like to share, should you wonder too.

This old costume

Hometowns often see you like you were years ago. They do not allow for growth. Many times I’ve heard musicians say, “It is Halloween and I get to wear my 5-year-old costume.” In order to get that Halloween show, that musician has to be who they were years ago. That is not fun for a lot of us who like growth. So showing our new costumes online helps.

Ancient tree in the backyard

I’ve heard an analogy involving an old-growth tree by itself in the backyard not being as cool as in an ancient forest. I don’t really like this one as much because I would think that tree in my backyard was amazing. I get what folks are saying here. But I bet they don’t have old-growth trees in their yard.

Big fish/small pond

I like the big fish in a small pond analogy. Once you play every venue in town a couple of times, what else are you going to do? Most towns in the world don’t have the resources to support a healthy music scene. Mentally or financially, folks are stressed. They can only give so much. That kid they watched grow up playing guitar does not compete with the things on their mind. 

Digital vs Analog

My favorite analogy of being a musician in your hometown has to do with digital and analog. Folks online, on socials, get the digital you. That’s usually a better sell. The digital you doesn’t need food, have hygiene issues, talk too loud, or barely speak. The digital you isn’t obnoxious, doesn’t grind his jaw, doesn’t talk about everything on your mind. Folks at home aren’t given the same deal. They get the analog you that whines, or stinks it up in the bathroom, or eats the last of the cake.  It is possible it isn’t even right to expect the same from each crowd; they get different things from you. Why should they give the same back?

What can we do?

Not much. The thing is, this is so old, it is probably human nature. There’s not a realistic way to change that for everyone. But there are realistic ways to change it in ourselves. I keep saying “music is an inside job.” This is one of the ways I mean that. We can give ourselves what we need from the music we make. If we are able to do that, then we can tell folks how cool it is and be honest about it instead of hoping for their validation for it. How?

For me, I have to get away from most everything. People and noise don’t bother me, but I find them terribly distracting. If I am going to think up something I think is cool and go through the trouble of crafting that, I need to be alone. At least in the beginning stages. If I am to craft something I love first before anyone else loves it, I have to be there when it is crafted. If I am somewhere else, it doesn’t work. I need the moment when it comes together and I think it is rad. If I deprive myself of that, I can’t tell other folks I think it is rad. Important here, for me: I struggled forever, most of my life, in trying to make songs I’d guess folks liked. I no longer do this. I try to make songs I like. Then all I have to do is tell folks I like them. They can agree with my taste in music or not. But it doesn’t let me down, either way.

Also, if no one comes to my show, I am still there. It does not make sense to sit there and play songs I don’t even like for an empty house. If I like them, at least I get to play them. 

The Listener

I talk about “the listener” a lot. I am not averaging out folks who have heard my songs and spitting out lines. I am talking about me. Before I ever played a note, I enjoyed listening to them. I am a listener, first. I learn from every progression on the radio, all three of them. I pretended to be Neil Diamond in diapers, had a tennis racket guitar, I am a listener. I run across peeps who play all the time, but never listen. People know if you listen. If you think they don’t, they probably aren’t listening to you either. It’s wonderful to listen to music, conversations, street noises, even alarm clocks. There are songs in all of that. If you identify with them, someone else will too. Maybe more than a desire to be famous, a desire to make something you honestly love is what’s needed in your artistic career. Don’t pick it or its components from a menu. Craft that shit.

Build. Don’t just take. 

Is this going to help you in your hometown? Probably not. But if you learn music or art, that will probably help your hometown in some way. If you just guess what they want on weekends, you’re really throwing darts. Tell those folks what’s cool. Research it, learn some skills, show up, and put it together. That’s not throwing darts. That’s foundation work.

Kelly Kintner

The Kintners. Djembe Funk (Links to Subvert.fm music)

28 August 2026

National Gallery with Toby today, so many nice moments. But perhaps none more satisfying than standing with him in front of Degas's Hélène Rouart in her Father's Study (1886). He re-oriented my view on the work (and Degas more generally).

For some reason, I suppose based on the selected reading I've done and my relatively limited knowledge of his oeuvre, I've always had it in my head that Degas was the prettier and more accessible one in relation to Manet. And for some works that still holds true. But Toby is quite attuned to his idiosyncrasies, the formal painterly challenges setup within each of his works, and the often confounding logic of his choices. Some blips I remember: “incidents and accidents” around recording, resistance to decoding while observing, the work's relationship to provisionality.

It's a strange painting, askew and loose. The physical encounter with it is a floaty, sensuous, disorienting experience. Framings abound, (the edge of the red silk wall-hanging, the glass case containing Egyptian statues, the back of the chair, the literal frame around Corot’s Castel dell’Ovo in Naples), and they all collapse and compress into flatness despite suggesting a network of distinct and different spatial planes. The glass case in particular becomes a portal, like an open door to a hallway that piereces through the left side of the composition. The eye travels like a fly trying to escape a room. And those precarious, gummed up stacks of paper at the bottom left resting on a maroon blob of a surface-table-floor. Simply a pile of color. Green-blue-gray-orange-yellow-pink held together by a few suggestions of edge; the incident. Perhaps not unlike the disheveled spread at the bottom left of Le Déjeuner, actually.

Meeting a partner’s parents for the first time can make even a confident person overthink a simple gift. Should you bring something for each parent? Is wine expected? Are flowers too formal? And how much is too much?

The reassuring answer is that the gift does not need to carry the entire meeting. Its purpose is to thank the family for welcoming you and to show that you did not arrive empty-handed. A modest, well-chosen present for the household is usually better than something expensive or highly personal.

There is no single rule for every Ukrainian family. Customs vary with age, region, religion, lifestyle, and the personalities involved. Your partner knows the household better than any etiquette guide, so use cultural advice as a starting point rather than a script.

For a meeting at the family home in Kyiv or nearby, a shared food gift is a practical option. For example, Elegant Surprise’s selection of gift baskets in Kyiv includes sweet, fruit, tea-and-coffee, and grocery combinations delivered ready to present.

The short answer

If you want one safe plan, use this:

• ask your partner about alcohol, allergies, dietary restrictions, and the formality of the meeting;
• bring one moderate gift for the household rather than separate presents for each parent;
• choose something consumable and shareable, such as tea, coffee, chocolate, biscuits, fruit, nuts, or packaged delicacies;
• add a small separate treat if young children will be present;
• if you choose flowers, use an odd number of stems;
• give the present when you arrive and keep the explanation simple.

That is enough. The gift should make the first few minutes easier, not become the main event.

Ask your partner five quiet questions

A two-minute conversation with your partner prevents most awkward choices. Ask:

1. Will this be a formal dinner or a relaxed family visit? A large presentation may feel unnecessary for coffee at home but appropriate for a holiday meal with several relatives.

2. Do the parents drink alcohol? Do not assume that wine is the universal adult gift. They may not drink for personal, religious, health, or practical reasons.

3. Are there dietary restrictions or allergies? Nuts, sugar, dairy, meat, and other common gift-basket ingredients may need to be avoided.

4. Who else will be there? A family gift should make sense if grandparents, siblings, or children are joining the meeting.

5. Is there anything the family particularly likes or dislikes? One familiar product can make a simple gift feel considered.

Also ask what your partner would normally spend in the same situation. Local price levels and family habits are more useful than a universal amount in euros or dollars. If your partner says, “Please keep it small,” believe them. Arriving with a luxury hamper after being asked not to make a fuss may create more discomfort than appreciation.

Choose a household gift, not a gift for each parent

It is easy to assume that you need one gift for the mother and another for the father. That creates unnecessary pressure and often leads to stereotyped choices: flowers for her, alcohol for him.

One shared gift avoids this. It can be opened after dinner, placed on the table, or enjoyed over several days. It also suits a first meeting because it is warm without pretending that you already know each parent’s personal taste.

A household gift does not have to appeal equally to everyone. It simply needs enough variety to be shared. Tea or coffee, sweets, nuts, honey, biscuits, or savoury products can form a balanced present.

Presentation still matters. A carefully arranged basket says, “I brought this for your family”; a supermarket carrier bag says, “I stopped somewhere on the way.” The products may be similar, but the social meaning is not.

Good gift options for a first meeting

Tea, coffee, and sweets

This is the easiest choice when you know very little about the family. The contents are familiar, can be shared after the meal, and do not require you to guess anyone’s style or interests.

Choose quality and variety rather than sheer volume. A good tea or coffee, chocolate, biscuits, honey, and nuts usually feel more deliberate than a box filled with many versions of the same sweet.

A fruit or balanced food basket

Fruit works well for a family that prefers a lighter gift, while a mixed food basket can feel more substantial for a dinner invitation or holiday visit. Check dietary preferences before choosing meat, cheese, alcohol, or very sweet products.

Open baskets and fresh fruit arrangements are best suited to local courier delivery because they need to remain upright and should not spend days in parcel transport.

Something good from your home country

A product from your country can give the conversation an easy starting point. It might be tea, chocolate, biscuits, coffee, preserves, or another food with a real connection to where you come from.

Avoid choosing an object only because it has a flag or famous landmark on it. A genuinely enjoyable product is usually more welcome than a souvenir the family has to display.

A small addition for children

If young children will be present, a modest separate treat can be thoughtful. Ask the parents about allergies and household rules first. Do not arrive with a huge bag of sweets that the parents then have to manage.

The main gift can still belong to the entire household. The child’s item is simply a sign that you knew they would be part of the meeting.

Flowers: one cultural detail worth remembering

Flowers are a common addition when visiting someone’s home, but one Ukrainian gift-giving convention is worth remembering: bouquets for celebrations and living recipients traditionally contain an odd number of stems. Even numbers are associated with funerals and remembrance.

You do not need to turn this into a conversation about superstition. Simply avoid the familiar Western default of a dozen roses. If you are unsure about colour, flower type, or whether a bouquet is expected, ask your partner.

Flowers can accompany a household gift, but they do not have to. A well-presented food basket or gift set is already a complete present.

Gifts that need more caution

Some presents are not automatically wrong, but they require more knowledge of the family.

• Alcohol: appropriate only when you know the recipients drink and what they prefer.
• Perfume, cosmetics, or clothing: too personal when you do not yet know their tastes.
• Very expensive gifts: may look like an attempt to impress, create obligation, or set an uncomfortable tone.
• Home décor: difficult to choose without knowing the home and can become unwanted clutter.
• Joke gifts: humour does not always travel well across languages, generations, or a slightly nervous first meeting.
• Political or religious items: best avoided unless you already know the family’s views.
• Products built around stereotypes: do not assume every Ukrainian family wants traditional souvenirs, strong alcohol, or folk-themed objects.

The safest first gift looks intentional but is easy to accept without feeling indebted.

Match the gift to the type of meeting

For a short coffee or casual introduction, bring something compact: good chocolate, tea, coffee, a dessert, or a small mixed set.

For dinner at the parents’ home, choose something that can be served later or enjoyed after you leave. A food basket, fruit arrangement, or tea-and-sweets selection works well.

For a birthday, anniversary, Christmas, or another family celebration, the presentation can be larger and more festive. Ask your partner whether the gift is meant for the parents as hosts or for one person as the subject of the celebration. Those are different roles and may justify separate presents.

For a restaurant meeting, avoid anything heavy or difficult to carry home. A compact box is more practical than a large basket.

How to give the present without making it awkward

Offer the gift soon after greeting the parents rather than carrying it around the room. A short sentence is enough:

This is a little something for you. Thank you for inviting me.

If you want to say it in Ukrainian:

Це для вас. Дякую за запрошення. Tse dlia vas. Diakuiu za zaproshennia. This is for you. Thank you for inviting me.

Do not explain the price or list every product immediately. Let the family decide whether to open the gift then or later. Some people will unwrap it at once; others will put it aside until after the meal. Neither response should be overinterpreted.

If the parents thank you repeatedly, a simple “I’m glad to be here” is enough. The most convincing sign of respect will be how you behave during the visit, not how persuasively you describe the gift.

If you cannot bring the gift yourself

Sometimes the first introduction happens online, the parents live in another city, or you want the present to arrive before your visit. In that case, the format has to match the delivery route.

In Kyiv and nearby areas, a local courier can deliver an open gift box, wicker basket, fruit arrangement, or another format that needs to remain upright. Elsewhere in Ukraine, a closed gift box with stable contents is the safer option for Nova Post shipping.

The Thoughtful Gift Notes guide to sending a gift box to Ukraine from abroad explains remote payment, recipient details, protective packaging, tracking, and the difference between courier delivery and nationwide shipping.

For a first introduction, include both parents’ names on the card if you know them. Keep the message warm and brief:

I am sorry I cannot join you in person yet. Please accept this small gift with my warm wishes. I look forward to meeting you both.

A final checklist

Before you buy anything, confirm:

• how formal the meeting will be;
• who will attend;
• whether alcohol is welcome;
• allergies and dietary preferences;
• whether one shared gift is appropriate;
• whether young children need to be considered;
• an odd number of stems if you add flowers;
• a practical size for the venue;
• the correct delivery format if the gift will be sent.

Then stop optimising. The parents are meeting you, not judging a gift competition.

Thoughtful beats impressive

The strongest first-meeting gift does not announce how much you spent. It shows that you asked a few good questions and chose something the family can comfortably accept and enjoy.

Bring a modest shared gift, let your partner guide you on personal details, and avoid turning cultural etiquette into a performance. A basket of food, good tea and sweets, or a carefully chosen product from your home country can open the visit warmly without placing pressure on anyone.

The present handles the first polite moment. What the parents remember afterwards will be the conversation, your interest in their family, and how comfortable and respectful you and your partner are together.

— Svitlana T.

I went to the mall with L and L and I got a shirt and pants. I was also looking for a pair of glasses, and the guy there commented about my traps, and asked me if I get that a lot. He said he immediately noticed when I entered, and I was wearing just a regular T-shirt. I think the journaling and writing down all of these compliments have started to work because I’m able to recognize That I do get this feedback a lot, and that I am jacked. I think it’s also one of those things where I have been so incredibly in the fitness space in the types of content I consume, and a lot of the friends that I have outside of work, and so I forget how much of a difference it is from just the regular population who doesn’t do some sort of weightlifting. I’m really grateful to myself for getting into this hobby because I feel unrecognizable from past me, and I think it’s something that I just enjoy so incredibly much, that also has given me such drastic benefits in life.

••••••••••••••

Early rise. Dreams Nap. Dreams. Nap. Worship. Strangely dour. Lack of sleep. Dinner with friends Bright and happy Sunset Screened ET Some of Moulin Rouge. Drifting. Breakfast with Shelby-the-boy Would like to draw tomorrow. And read

---

Jah’s plan is like a beautiful tapestry. And the tragedy of being human is that we only get to see it from the back. With all the ragged threads and the muddy colors. And we only get a hint at the true beauty that would be revealed if we could see the whole pattern on the other side…as God does.

---

There are some people who have sun inside them. It's hard to explain. Their presence just brightens, it's not about their beautiful smiles. They have an internal being that sheds light and feels like sun. It's a calm energy. Inner peace. But most importantly; it's not wanting anything back in return. It's sun.

I worked at a bookstore. Teenager came in daily. Read for hours. Never bought anything. Finally asked. “Looking for anything specific?” “Just reading. Can't afford books. Library's far. This is closer.” Let him stay. Read whatever. Whenever. Brought him snacks. Hot chocolate. Safe space. Learned his story. Foster kid. Seventh home. Books were his escape. His education. His hope.

Started giving him books. “Damaged copies. Can't sell them. You want?” He knew better. Took them anyway. Read everything. Three years of this. He aged out of foster care. Eighteen. Scared. Nowhere to go. Helped him apply to college. Scholarships. Got in. Full ride. English major. Graduated. He's a teacher now. High school English. Brings his whole class to the bookstore. Shows them where he spent his teenage years. “Bookstore worker gave me sanctuary. Knowledge.

Hope. Taught me one person caring changes trajectories.” He buys books for students. Who can't afford them. Pays it forward. Every kid in his class reads. Because someone let a foster kid read for free.

-Paula Simmons, bookstore clerk, Rhode

—A library saved my life. I'm fascinated that a bookstore did that for someone else. I doubt this is uncommon. Books are our peace, our salvation.

---

Dream 260907

River Boat Cruise. Of Death.

I run a business installing and checking data-sized surveillance systems.

They can detect when a person is going to die. They also detect intruders, and they record everything.

Part of my job is going around and auditing the people who are supposed to check the edges regularly.

My father is dying.

I meet a man who runs a river cruise powered by the near-death experience.

Sentiment and cortisol power his cruises. He simulates earthquakes, disasters, and adventure.

He has five or six half-million-gallon above-ground pools, with flat riverboats floating in them. He creates some kind of simulated disaster, and the whole family piles onto the boats.

Then they cruise incredibly slowly.

You can snack.

You can swim.

At the end of the last cruise, the old man we are monitoring dies.

It is the first time one of the people has actually died on the trip.

---

Andrew

Long conversation with a man always avoided.

A was a ghetto rat. I knew him as a small boy: sweet and quiet. A child of potential, like all children.

I moved away in 1996. When I’ returned twenty years later he was gone from everyone’s life.

I then lived here for a decade before Andrew reappeared in life.

By then, he was a scary looking man. Dark and reserved. I should have reached out. I should have tried to reconnect with that little boy.

But I knew he had a hand in my nephews erosion and collapse. I was bitter about it. The less i had to do with him, the better.

He would come and go. Not consistent. Months would go by, some times years. Every time he reappeared, he had another child. At last count he had 5-6 from 4 different women.

In one occasion, he brought the woman he was bedding down to our house of worship. She was a beautiful young woman. A complete mismatch to this man’s skeletal and scarred. Appearance.

She began to study the Bible and made progress. She took steps to turn her life around. To raise her and her step children to love and fear God.

He endorsed the effort at first but in sort Order gave up. She did not.

After 18’months, he convinced her to go out to that club on a Sat night. The place is called ‘haystack’. I’ve never been as they don’t serve my kind there. And it looks like the sort of spot the you could get tetanus waking through the

---

more stuff

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https://vimeo.com/1224514882/7148493d02?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

https://vimeo.com/1224514881/f7c85d6909?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

Le kintsugi commence normalement après la chute.

Un bol échappe aux mains, rencontre le sol et devient plusieurs. On s’agenouille devant ce qui reste. On recueille les fragments. Puis on les unit avec de l’or, non pour faire oublier la cassure, mais pour lui donner une place dans la beauté nouvelle.

Le kintsugi traditionnel dit que ce qui a été brisé mérite encore d’être aimé.

Mais le mien commence autrement.

Dans mon histoire, le bol blanc ne tombe pas. Il repose au centre de la table, parfaitement immobile. Il est lisse, intact, presque innocent. Rien ne le menace. Il pourrait traverser les années sans perdre son éclat, être transmis de main en main et demeurer exactement ce qu’il a toujours été.

Pourtant, un jour, je le regarde et je comprends que sa perfection ne me suffit plus.

Il est beau, mais cette beauté m’a été donnée. Sa forme existait avant mon choix. Elle porte les intentions de celui qui l’a façonnée, les règles de celui qui l’a cuite, le goût de ceux qui m’ont appris à l’admirer. J’ai vécu en elle sans jamais me demander si elle pouvait réellement contenir ce que j’étais devenu.

Alors je prends le bol entre mes mains.

Je ne le lance pas dans un mouvement de rage. Je ne cherche pas à punir sa blancheur. Je ne détruis pas ce que je déteste.

Je brise ce que j’ai aimé.

C’est précisément ce qui rend le geste difficile.

Il est facile de quitter ce qui est laid. Il est plus douloureux de renoncer à une beauté qui ne me ressemble plus. Le monde accepte volontiers que l’on reconstruise après une catastrophe. Il comprend moins que l’on puisse choisir de défaire ce qui semblait encore tenir.

Pourquoi toucher à ce qui fonctionne ?

Parce que fonctionner ne signifie pas vivre.

Parce qu’une forme peut rester intacte longtemps après avoir cessé d’être juste.

Parce qu’il arrive que l’on se réduise soi-même pour continuer à entrer dans ce que l’on cherche à préserver.

Le bol blanc m’avait porté jusqu’ici. Je lui devais de la reconnaissance, pas une obéissance éternelle.

Alors le geste vient.

Le bruit est bref.

Pendant un instant, il n’existe plus ni passé ni avenir. Seulement des fragments sur le sol et ce silence particulier qui suit les décisions irréversibles.

Quelqu’un, en entrant dans la pièce, parlerait de dommage. Il demanderait pourquoi j’ai détruit une chose si pure. Il voudrait peut-être chercher une colle transparente, rapprocher les bords avec précision, effacer toute trace de ma folie.

Mais je ne veux pas revenir en arrière.

Je ne veux pas retrouver l’ancien bol.

Je veux découvrir celui qu’il était encore capable de devenir.

Je m’assieds donc devant les morceaux, non comme une victime devant les ruines, mais comme un artisan devant sa matière. Je ne suis aucun dessin d’origine. Je tourne chaque fragment. Je change certains rapports. Je laisse parfois un espace là où tout était autrefois parfaitement ajusté.

Puis je fais entrer l’or.

Pas une ligne discrète destinée à rendre l’accident acceptable. Pas un ornement posé sur une ancienne douleur pour lui donner artificiellement du prix.

L’or devient une matière de création.

Il comble ce que l’ancienne forme ne savait pas contenir. Il agrandit certains contours. Il relie autrement ce qui avait toujours été voisin. Il apporte une lumière qui n’existait pas dans la blancheur première.

Je ne me contente plus de recoller.

Je refabrique.

Et peu à peu apparaît un objet qui porte encore la même terre, mais plus la même destinée. On y reconnaît ce que j’ai été, sans pouvoir le confondre avec ce que je suis devenu. Rien n’a été renié. Rien n’a été remis exactement à sa place.

C’est ainsi qu’on se refait.

La première beauté était celle de l’innocence.

La seconde est celle de la conscience.

La première venait de mon unité.

La seconde vient de mon choix.

Le bol blanc pouvait être reproduit mille fois. Celui qui se tient maintenant devant moi ne pouvait naître que de ces mains, de cette rupture et de cet or précis. Il ne ressemble à aucun autre, car il ne répond plus à un modèle. Il porte une volonté.

Il ne s’agit plus seulement d’apprendre à aimer ce que la vie a brisé. Il s’agit de comprendre que j’ai parfois le droit de défaire une forme qui ne me convient plus, même lorsqu’elle semble encore parfaite aux yeux du monde.

Je n’ai pas réparé une ancienne beauté.

J’en ai créé une nouvelle.

Le blanc était ce que j’avais reçu.

L’or est ce que j’ai ajouté.

Et pour la première fois, la forme entière est à moi.

“Even here, even now, I am still unfolding.”

There was a time when I thought my story had ended, When the pain felt too heavy, and the silence too long. But I see now that it wasn’t an ending at all. It was a beginning disguised as loss.

Every storm I’ve faced, every mistake I’ve made, Every tear I’ve cried, They’ve all led me here, To this version of me that stands a little taller, Breathes a little deeper, And finally believes in her own strength.

I used to ask, “Why me?” Now I whisper, Thank you. Because every difficult season taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way. I learned patience. I learned compassion. I learned that I can rebuild, Again and again, And still find beauty in the pieces.

I’m not who I was, And that’s okay. That’s growth. That’s healing.

To my children,

If you ever read these words, I hope you see that your mother wasn’t perfect, But she never stopped trying. I hope you see that no matter how many times I fell, I always got back up. I hope you know that you were my reason, The light that kept me moving when everything felt dark.

I want you to believe in your own strength the way I’ve learned to believe in mine. And that no matter what life takes from you, You always have the power to rebuild.

This isn’t the end of my story. It’s just a new chapter, One I’m writing slowly, With peace in my heart and love in my hands.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. But I do know this, I’ll keep waking up, Keep choosing kindness, Keep forgiving, Keep learning, Keep moving forward.

Because even after everything, I am still here. Still standing Still growing. Still becoming the woman, I was always meant to be.

“The road was rough, but it led me back to myself.”

I’ve walked through some dark places, The kind of moments that change you in ways you don’t see until the dust settles. There are times I thought I’d never make it out. Times I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. But looking back now, I see someone who didn’t quit. I see someone who refused to stay broken.

So far, my journey hasn’t been easy, and it’s far from being over. It’s been messy, Painful, And full of mistakes. But I don’t regret a single step. Because each one, Even the wrong turns, Is shaping me into who I am becoming.

There was a time when I carried shame like a second skin, When I looked at my life and only saw the ruins. But now I see the rebuilding. I see the lessons hiding inside the heartbreak. I see the woman learning how to love herself. Even after being told, she wasn’t worth loving.

I lost myself for a long time.

I let other people’s voices drown out my own. But somewhere in the silence that followed, I started to hear her again. The version of me I thought was gone. The girl who dreamed. The woman who believed in love. The mother who gave everything she had, even when it wasn’t enough.

And little by little, I’ve been finding her. I’m becoming stronger now. Wiser. Softer, but also braver. I know now that mistakes don’t make you unworthy, they make me real.

If I’ve learned anything, Its growth doesn’t come from comfort. It comes from being cracked open, From learning to sit in the pain long enough to understand what it’s trying to teach you. And even though this road has been hard, I wouldn’t trade it, Because it has brought me here. To truth, To peace, To becoming the woman, I was meant to be.

I’m still walking the path, still learning, Still healing. But I’m no longer walking in circles. I’m walking forward.

One day, I hope my kids can see this, Not the mistakes or the chaos, But the strength it takes to rise again. I hope they see that even when I was at my lowest, I kept fighting and will continue to fight to become better. Not just for me, but for them.

I want them to know that life will hurt sometimes. That people will leave, Things will fall apart, And they’ll doubt themselves too. But I also want them to know that those moments don’t define them. Their resilience does.

If they can see me, The imperfect, Healing, still growing into myself, And know that it’s possible to fall and still stand tall again, then maybe they’ll believe they can too.

Because that’s the legacy I want to leave behind. Not perfection, But persistence. Not always an easy life, But a real one.

I am not who I used to be, And I’m not yet who I’ll become. But I am proud of the woman standing here today, the one who is turning pain into purpose, Mistakes into lessons, And heartbreak into a reason to keep rising.

Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! Toxic Productivity beschreibt ein Mindset, in dem der eigene Selbstwert ausschliesslich von Erfolgen und Ergebnissen abhängt. Diesem Mindset kann man mit einfachen Mitteln entkommen.

Die New Yorker Psychotherapeutin Israa Nasir thematisiert dieses Phänomen in ihrem Buch Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Times and Emotional Energy in a World That Always Demands More. Sie erklärt, dass ein ständiger Drang nach hyperoptimierten Arbeitsablaufen – etwa durch minutioses Zeittracking, Schuldgefühle beim Pausieren, Übercommitment und den unaufhörlichen Vergleich mit anderen – zu Überarbeitung, Selbstkritik und letztlich Burnout führt.

Als Massnahmen gegen toxische Produktivität empfiehlt Nasir, sich auf wertebasierte Ziele zu konzentrieren und echte Produktivität von reiner Geschäftigkeit zu unterscheiden. Dazu gehören das bewusste Einplanen von Pausen, das klare Setzen von Prioritäten sowie das Regulieren von negativen Emotionen, die aus Angst, Perfektionismus oder dem Drang nach externer Bestätigung resultieren. Gleichzeitig soll der innere Coach gestärkt werden und Mythen wie die vermeintliche Produktivität durch Multitasking, längere Arbeitszeiten oder frühes Aufstehen kritisch hinterfragt werden.

Hier sind meine drei einfachen, sofort umsetzbaren Beispiele, um Nasirs Empfehlungen in den Alltag zu integrieren:

1. Feste Pausen einplanen:
   Stelle einen Timer, der dich jede Stunde an eine fünfminütige Pause erinnert. Nutze diese kurzen Pausen, um dich zu strecken, bewusst tief durchzuatmen oder kurz vom Bildschirm wegzukommen – so verhinderst du Überarbeitung und förderst deine Erholung.

2. Klare Prioritäten setzen:
   Notiere dir jeden Morgen die drei wichtigsten Aufgaben, die deinen langfristigen Zielen entsprechen. Arbeite diese Aufgaben nacheinander ab, ohne dich von weniger wichtigen Tätigkeiten ablenken zu lassen. So vermeidest du Multitasking und behältst den Fokus.

3. Negative Emotionen regulieren:
   Richte dir täglich drei Minuten für eine Achtsamkeitsübung ein. Setze dich an einen ruhigen Ort, schliesse die Augen und konzentriere dich auf deinen Atem. Diese kurze Meditation hilft dir, Stress abzubauen und den inneren Coach zu aktivieren, sodass du mit mehr Gelassenheit an deine Aufgaben herangehst.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Der Weg, anzufangen, ist, mit dem Reden aufzuhören und mit dem Tun zu beginnen.“ – Walt Disney (1901–1966)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Öffentliche Verpflichtungen eingehen

Erzähle anderen von Deinen Zielen. Sobald Du Dich öffentlich zu etwas bekannt hast, steigt die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass Du es auch durchziehst.

Aus dem Archiv: Das analoge Falschspiel der Digitalelite

Sam Altman, Bill Gates und Richard Branson haben die digitale Welt geformt wie kaum andere. Doch wenn es um ihre wichtigsten Entscheidungen geht, greifen sie ausgerechnet zu Stift und Papier. Das ist kein nostalgischer Tick, sondern kalkulierte Notwendigkeit. Handschrift ist für sie ein Werkzeug des Denkens, das Klarheit erzwingt und Ideen verankert. Dabei liegt hier eine bemerkenswerte Ironie verborgen: Die „Tech-Gurus“ zerstören genau jene Kulturtechnik, auf die sie selbst angewiesen sind. Während sie ihre Gedanken von Hand entwickeln, schaffen ihre Produkte eine Welt, in der kommende Generationen diese Erfahrung nie mehr machen werden.

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

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EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

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Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter

I used to run the (kubernetes-run) ingress-nginx. When they announced they’d stop updating it, I knew I wanted to move to the Gateway API/HTTPRoute method, because that seems like the future. I originally switched to nginx-gateway-fabric. That is controlled by NGINX/F5 though, and they want money, so they’re putting features I want behind a very expensive paywall. You know who doesn’t paywall features and also supports Gateway API v1.5.1 (or newer)? envoy-gateway.

History / Requirements

When ingress-nginx announced they weren’t going to be updating it after March of 2026, I started looking into GatewayAPI, knowing I wanted to jump to HTTPRoute. I tried moving over to nginx-gateway-fabric at one point, but I quickly found out a Gateway only supports 16 Listeners. This was way too little, and being a homelab, I only have one public IP to point to for all my services. Thankfully, I saw that ListenerSets were being added (or already had been) in v1.5.1 of the Gatewy API, but when looking, most implementations hadn’t implemented that version yet. So I ended up waiting.

Eventually nginx-gateway-fabric released a version with support for ListenerSets, so I made the move. While I implemented it successfully, I learned a couple things:

• To increase the body size of the request (to allow large uploads for social media or whatever), you need to create a ClientSettingPolicy that is attached to an HTTPRoute for the connection you want. The following example is for making the body size 10g.

apiVersion: gateway.nginx.org/v1alpha1
kind: ClientSettingsPolicy
metadata:
  name: client-settings
spec:
  targetRef:
    group: gateway.networking.k8s.io
    kind: HTTPRoute
    name: myhttproute
  body:
    maxSize: "10g"

• With ingress-nginx, I used something called OIDCGuard to let me put OIDC in front of whatever site I wanted. I just assumed NGINX will have something similar, and they do, but they put it behind a paywall. I tried contacting them to see if they offered some sort of deal/free license for homelab people like some companies do. I heard nothing back. They’re obviously looking for big money from companies, and not some dweeb who has overengineered his setup at home. The whole reason I started down the path of kube was so I could learn the skills that I would need at work. Whatever I learn at home, I end up applying to work, including what specific implementations of stuff we use. Seems like supporting people nuts enough to homelab up kube with advanced features, you’d want those people to use your software. Whatever. Anyway, as OIDC is behind a paywall, I added BasicAuth. To do that, you add an AuthenticationFilter and refer to an htpasswd file secret:

apiVersion: gateway.nginx.org/v1alpha1
kind: AuthenticationFilter
metadata:
  name: basic-auth
spec:
  type: Basic
  basic:
    secretRef:
      name: basic-auth
    realm: "Basic auth"

Then you attach that AuthenticationFilter to an HTTPRoute

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: mysite
spec:
  hostnames:
  - mysite.joyrex.net
  parentRefs:
  - group: gateway.networking.k8s.io
    kind: ListenerSet
    name: my-ls
    sectionName: mysite
  rules:
  - backendRefs:
    - kind: Service
      name: my-service
      port: 80
    matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /
    filters:
    - type: ExtensionRef
      extensionRef:
        group: gateway.nginx.org
        kind: AuthenticationFilter
        name: basic-auth

Learned Requirements

• I need to have ListenerSets so I can attach >16 Listeners to a gateway
• I need the ability to change upload body size
• I really really want OIDC authentication

Envoy Gateway

Looking around, I found envoy-gateway was another popular gateway server, supported my requirements (I thought, more later) and had good documentation.

Thankfully, gateway and HTTPProxy are core stuff not unique to nginx’s implementation, so there wasn’t much I needed to change for my gateway or applications. I just had to update the gateway name I was using and make some of the other changes. Those are talked about below. Before I did that, I disabled all the HTTPRoutes that use BasicAuth so I didn’t accidentally put stuff on the public web until I got OIDC working.

Dual-Stack

I had dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6) going with nginx and I wanted the same for this gateway. To do that, I have to use an envoy-specific manifest to make sure the Service is correctly set up:

apiVersion: gateway.envoyproxy.io/v1alpha1
kind: EnvoyProxy
metadata:
  name: config
spec:
  provider:
    type: Kubernetes
    kubernetes:
      envoyDeployment:
        replicas: 2
      envoyService:
        annotations:
          metallb.io/loadBalancerIPs: 192.168.1.209,2400:a842:40ae::209
  ipFamily: DualStack

The ipFamily: DualStack is the important part here, and then I use the annotations to set the IPs I want via MetalLB.

For this to be used, you attach it to the gateway’s spec:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: klopjob-gateway
spec:
  ...
  infrastructure:
    parametersRef:
      group: gateway.envoyproxy.io
      kind: EnvoyProxy
      name: config
  ...

OIDC Support

Using the Envoy Gateway documentation about OIDC and the Authelia Envoy Gateway documentation, I was able to get OIDC working fine. For reference, here’s an example entry for something I want to have behind OIDC.

Authelia OIDC Client Config

- client_id: 'clientid'
  client_name: 'mysite.joyrex.net'
  client_secret: 
    path: "/secrets/authelia-secrets/oidc.client.mysite-joyrex-net.value"
  consent_mode: "implicit"
  public: false
  authorization_policy: 'two_factor'
  require_pkce: false
  pkce_challenge_method: ''
  redirect_uris:
    - 'https://mysite.joyrex.net/authelia/openid_connect/callback'
  scopes:
    - 'openid'
  grant_types:
    - 'authorization_code'
  response_types:
    - 'code'
  access_token_signed_response_alg: 'none'
  userinfo_signed_response_alg: 'none'
  token_endpoint_auth_method: 'client_secret_basic'

Security Policy

apiVersion: gateway.envoyproxy.io/v1alpha1
kind: SecurityPolicy
metadata:
  name: mysite-joyrex-net-oidc
spec:
  targetRefs:
    - group: gateway.networking.k8s.io
      kind: HTTPRoute
      name: mysite
  oidc:
    provider:
      issuer: 'https://auth.joyrex.net'
      authorizationEndpoint: 'https://auth.joyrex.net/api/oidc/authorization'
      tokenEndpoint: 'https://auth.joyrex.net/api/oidc/token'
    clientID: "clientid"
    clientSecret:
      name: "mysite-joyrex-net-oidc-secret"
    cookieDomain: 'mysite.joyrex.net'
    cookieNames:
      idToken: ''
      accessToken: ''
    scopes:
      - 'openid'
    redirectURL: "https://mysite.joyrex.net/authelia/openid_connect/callback"
    forwardAccessToken: false
    refreshToken: false
    passThroughAuthHeader: false

HTTPRoute

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: mysite
spec:
  hostnames:
  - mysite.joyrex.net
  parentRefs:
  - group: gateway.networking.k8s.io
    kind: ListenerSet
    name: my-ls
    sectionName: mysite
  rules:
  - backendRefs:
    - kind: Service
      name: mysite
      port: 8080
    matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /
    filters:
    - type: RequestHeaderModifier
      requestHeaderModifier:
        add:
        - name: x-real-ip
          value: '%DOWNSTREAM_REMOTE_ADDRESS_WITHOUT_PORT%'
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /authelia/openid_connect/callback
    filters:
    - type: RequestRedirect
      requestRedirect:
        path:
          type: ReplaceFullPath
          replaceFullPath: /
        statusCode: 302

The x-real-ip setting is something that I’ll be describing right now.

X-Real-Ip

The X-Forwarded-For header is already set, but X-Real-Ip doesn’t get set by default. Anubis looks for this value to verify stuff is configured properly, so I wanted this attached to all my requests.

I’m supposed to be able to attach this to a gateway as a whole, but that didn’t work for me. I was tired of debugging and learning, so for right now I just attached the filter to all the httproutes I wanted it on.

    filters:
    - type: RequestHeaderModifier
      requestHeaderModifier:
        add:
        - name: x-real-ip
          value: '%DOWNSTREAM_REMOTE_ADDRESS_WITHOUT_PORT%'

This is shown in place in the full httproute above.

Body Size

This is where I hit issues. I just assumed setting body size would be common enough, but it’s not. According to this ticket and this question page, the way you increase the body size is to enable requestBuffering. This has the following downsides:

• breaks anything using websockets. Hopefully this gets resolved in the future.
• Limits the max upload size to 4G (or more exactly, 4294967295). Depending on your use case this could suck.

That said, to set requestBuffering, you need to create a BackendPolicy that attaches to one or more HTTPRoutes.

apiVersion: gateway.envoyproxy.io/v1alpha1
kind: BackendTrafficPolicy
metadata:
  name: request-buffer
spec:
  targetRefs:
  - group: gateway.networking.k8s.io
    kind: HTTPRoute
    name: mysite
  requestBuffer:
    limit: 4294967295

Conclusion

Besides the requestBuffer issue, and the minor X-Real-IP header setting not applying to the Gateway as a whole, I am extremely happy with Envoy. Leaving nginx-gateway-fabric behind is great, and I am stoked I have OIDC back.

It’s been an eventful few weeks, yet I feel more grounded and anchored in my body and my purpose. Chaos continues to exist all around as it does, but I’m able to say I am well-rested and that I have been able to meditate at least once a day and find pause. It shouldn’t feel like a luxury or a privilege, but these days, in our capitalist context, I feel so very fortunate I get to share with friends that I am in fact getting a lot of time to rest, and that I can and do take a lot of naps.

Making time for my self-maintenance and creating new routines, have soothed and smoothed the body’s wrinkles and bumps that I felt were stuck in my body. I felt these most last year until early this year, when I was still making very unaligned choices. The steadiness of music and in general, more movement have also been helpful to my daily living. Stretching first thing in the morning and also when I remember to, late at night. Even if I don’t have an exact set thing to do yet. Remembering to reach my arms out to the sky and bend to touch my toes, a couple of times a day feels good. Do you have a daily movement routine for your body? I highly recommend adding it to your calendar if you don’t. Next for me is to actually follow a set of movements and repeat them throughout the day/week. Small steps.

I felt things change when I decided to be present, to take things one step at a time, and not inundate and overwhelm myself. No one was asking me to rush. No one was asking me to exhaust myself. No one, except the voices of old societal expectations, was demanding perfection. But, it’s a pattern I kept returning to and repeating. The need to be on top of every little branch and aspect in my life. The need to be busy. The need to feel appreciated through productivity and my work. The need to feel “safe” and “secure” through material wealth and material gain.

The thing with that is, you do start to lose track of the ground and what’s actually there. And what is here, is the life force within my body. When I begin here, I can appreciate every little thing. From the single breath I inhale and then another, to exhale. That I can adjust my posture to feel my breath come through more freely and release it out into the open. That I can even type at all. When I breathe, I can also feel and quietly listen to life happening all around me. My neighbors moving about in their rooms, opening cabinets and drawers. Today, the construction sounds from across the street are gentler, but perhaps they’ve just taken a break for lunch.

I titled this post Theramin Sorceress, because it’s a card I pulled yesterday. Just before I left for the local music festival to meet up with friends. The card spoke of subtle energies, similar to what I was writing in the previous paragraph. When you find pause, and quiet. You can feel so much. Unlike your thoughts, body sensations are enough sometimes to understand and feel apart of the world. To be human is to be able to feel, and to recognize sensations and learn that we have been conditioned to be too attached to these things. We can learn to notice when my body “needs/wants” to straighten, when I realize I am not feeling good hunched over my keyboard, and that’s all there is to it. When you’re quiet, everything comes more naturally. Even the slightest movements. Can you sense the subtle energies?

Starcraft Co 25- The Temple of Light, Part III: The Ancient Ones

The first expedition entered the Temple forty hours after the battle for the summit ended. StarCraft Co. sent no commandos with it, a decision made deliberately rather than from complacency. The upper passages had already been penetrated by the Renegades, and nothing in the surviving reconnaissance suggested that the first few levels required elite troops. Two reinforced marine platoons went instead, accompanied by medics, firebats, several Goliaths and Ara observers familiar with the oldest surviving descriptions of the sanctuary. Their orders were cautious by StarCraft Co. standards: follow the Renegade route, identify where their advance had stopped, recover whatever records could be found, and withdraw the moment resistance exceeded what could be handled without reinforcement. After the slaughter on the plateau, few expected the reconnaissance to become anything more than a careful walk through the wreckage left by another army's failed attempt.

The upper Temple encouraged that confidence. Its first halls were vast, silent and almost unnaturally clean, with pale walls cut from a material that looked like stone until Terran instruments tried to identify it and returned inconsistent readings. Crystalline veins ran through the architecture at irregular intervals, carrying a subdued internal glow that brightened as personnel approached and dimmed after they passed. The Renegades had fought here, but only briefly. Spent gauss casings, shattered spider mines and the remains of temporary barricades marked several chambers, while dead marines and Zerg lay scattered along the route. Farther down, the signs became stranger. One corridor contained the wreckage of three Goliaths and more than thirty Renegade infantry arranged around the body of a single Protoss warrior whose armor resembled nothing in modern Ara service. The dead Zealot had been hit hundreds of times, its breastplate cratered, one arm severed and both psi-blade housings destroyed, yet the surrounding damage suggested that it had crossed most of the chamber before dying.

The Ara officers stopped there longer than the Terrans expected. The warrior's armor belonged to an archaic pattern recognizable only from carvings and ceremonial reproductions, broader through the shoulders than modern suits and built around crystalline plates that appeared almost grown rather than manufactured. Symbols along the dead warrior's helm predated the tribal markings used by the Ara, and one observer eventually identified a fragment as a devotional inscription surviving only in copies of texts more than six thousand years old. Nobody suggested recovering the body. The Ara covered it with a field cloth, performed a brief rite and continued, visibly unsettled by the realization that they were not merely entering an old fortress but walking into a portion of their own history that had remained alive after everything else around it had become legend.

The first living guardian appeared less than an hour later. The marine at the front of the column saw light before he saw the Archon, which stood at the far end of a broad chamber where the corridor widened around a circular depression in the floor. Its familiar blue-white form was denser than that of any modern Archon, the energy compressed around a presence that seemed heavier than light should have allowed. The Ara observers attempted contact immediately. One stepped forward and addressed the guardian in formal Protoss, identifying the expedition, invoking the authority of the Ara leadership and explaining that the Temple faced violation by enemies who had already attacked its defenders. The Archon neither challenged them nor acknowledged the other Protoss. It simply began crossing the chamber.

The marines opened fire at the range established in their orders. Nearly forty gauss rifles struck it at once, followed by the autocannons of two Goliaths and the flame of the firebats as the creature closed. Against an ordinary Archon, that weight of fire would have collapsed its shields quickly enough to make the engagement almost procedural. The Ancient Archon's field rippled beneath the impacts but did not fail, and it continued forward through the barrage until its first psionic shockwave struck the leading infantry and hurled armored marines backward across the floor. Six died immediately. A second attack tore through one of the Goliaths, rupturing the cockpit and folding part of the chassis inward. The remaining walker fired continuously as the Archon advanced, and for several seconds its shields finally dimmed enough that the Terrans believed they had reached the limit of what it could absorb. Then the crystalline veins in the walls brightened, and the Archon's shields began rebuilding while the weapons were still striking them.

The retreat remained disciplined only for the first few moments. Firebats stayed behind to slow the guardian and died quickly. The surviving Goliath walked backward until damage to one leg forced the pilot to abandon it, while medics dragged wounded marines through the corridor and the rear platoon fired past them. The Archon pursued farther than anyone expected, following the force through two chambers before stopping at the edge of a section where the glowing conduits in the walls became sparse. The survivors did not understand why it halted, only that it did, and they used the distance to reach the surface with barely half the force still combat effective.

StarCraft Co. spent the next six hours trying to determine what had happened, and the conclusion pleased nobody. Weapons telemetry showed that the Archon had absorbed enough punishment to destroy several ordinary specimens. Its shields had genuinely weakened, but energy had flowed into them from somewhere outside the unit itself. Engineers examining the upper passages found that the luminous crystalline channels were carrying enormous quantities of power through the Temple's walls, much of it in forms Terran instruments could not characterize, and their brightness had increased sharply during the encounter. Ara specialists reached the same conclusion independently. The guardians were not merely housed by the Temple; they were being sustained by it, and whatever process had strengthened the Ancient Ones across millennia remained active.

That discovery changed the expedition from an assault into a problem for which StarCraft Co. possessed no doctrine. Siege tanks were useless almost immediately; the upper chambers were broad enough to admit some armored vehicles, but the deeper passages narrowed unpredictably, and there was no guarantee a tank sent downward could turn around or withdraw. Goliaths could travel farther, yet the first Archon had nearly destroyed one with a single attack. Infantry lacked the concentrated firepower required to overcome the defenders quickly, while Ara zealots and dragoons faced opponents that appeared to be stronger versions of themselves. Most disturbing of all, the first reconnaissance had encountered only one Ancient One and had lost nearly half its effective strength getting away.

For the first time since Aurelia, serious discussion of withdrawal entered StarCraft Co.'s planning rooms. The commander rejected it, though not immediately, and that hesitation mattered to everyone present. The company had already lost hundreds reaching the Temple and hundreds more taking the plateau, while the expedition's elite commando reserve remained finite and the number of Ancient Ones could not be estimated with confidence. Ara records spoke of hundreds of guardians without distinguishing myth from census. If every one possessed the durability seen above, the coalition could consume itself long before reaching the lower chambers. Voss argued that they already possessed the strategic victory on the surface and could seal the Temple rather than force it, while Talandar, unexpectedly, did not oppose him. The Ara had agreed to enter the sanctuary, but none had promised to annihilate themselves doing so.

The commander listened before asking what happened if they left. The Renegades had found the world once, and others could find it again. The Ancient Ones had protected the Temple for millennia against armies that bore little resemblance to the industrial warfare now surrounding them, while the Renegades had already demonstrated the obvious solution to any finite defense: gather enough bodies and spend them. StarCraft Co. had destroyed that army, but nothing guaranteed another could not be created in ten years or fifty. They had reached the Temple at enormous cost and possessed the strongest coalition likely to stand before it in their lifetimes. Walking away meant wagering the future on the assumption that nobody stronger would ever return. Nobody found the argument reassuring, but nobody could offer a better one.

The second descent included commandos, and their first encounter with an Ancient Zealot established immediately that the Archon had not been an anomaly. The guardian appeared in a narrow gallery lined with crystalline columns and moved with such speed that the lead marine squad barely had time to warn the rest of the formation before it crossed the distance between them. Its psi blades cut through powered armor without noticeable resistance and opened the frontal plating of a Goliath deeply enough to expose the pilot compartment. Commandos hit it with concentrated fire from less than thirty meters while conventional infantry withdrew, and even then the Zealot survived long enough to kill two of them before collapsing. When engineers examined the body, they found no biological modification they could identify. The Ancient One was simply stronger, faster and extraordinarily well protected, its equipment integrated with materials and energy systems none of the Terran specialists understood.

The next Dragoon was worse. It stood at the far end of a long ceremonial hall and fired before the Terrans could establish their heavy weapons. Its first photon discharge punched through a Goliath's frontal armor and continued into the vehicle behind it, while the second detonated against the wall with enough force to shower the corridor in fragments of ancient stone. Ordinary marine fire achieved almost nothing against the Dragoon's armored shell, and the Ara dragoons accompanying the expedition could damage it only by concentrating several units at once. StarCraft Co. eventually killed it by drawing the machine away from the brightest conduits in the hall and massing every available Goliath on the same point of its armor while commandos kept the guardian occupied. The engagement cost seventeen Terrans, two Ara warriors and another Goliath, all in less than four minutes.

A pattern emerged slowly. The guardians were strongest near the major Xel'Naga conduits, and although they never became weak away from them, their shields regenerated more slowly in sections where the luminous channels disappeared into natural rock. StarCraft Co. began shaping engagements around that difference. Commandos entered defended chambers, struck hard enough to force pursuit and then withdrew toward prepared positions where the Temple's energy network was less concentrated. Conventional infantry and Goliaths waited there, accepting the Ancient counterattack long enough for the commandos to recover, reload and return. It was ugly, repetitive warfare measured in rooms rather than kilometers, and the expedition's maps filled with annotations identifying not merely passages and chambers but the intensity of energy flowing through individual walls.

The price was paid largely by ordinary soldiers. Commandos were too difficult to replace to leave in sustained contact, and once the medics confirmed that repeated stimulation and accumulated trauma were degrading even augmented personnel, the commander formalized what had already become practice. Commandos would attack in short, violent cycles, withdraw for medical treatment, and be covered by conventional infantry during the interval. Those infantry units understood exactly what the assignment meant. A marine platoon holding a corridor against two Ancient Zealots was not expected to defeat them; it was expected to keep them occupied for the ninety seconds required to bring the commandos back into action, and some platoons accomplished that mission with half their personnel dead.

The descent became a war of deliberate sacrifice. StarCraft Co. built hardened fallback points every few kilometers, using SCVs to install barricades, ammunition caches, medical stations and portable power systems inside chambers the Ancient Ones had abandoned. Wounded personnel moved upward in steady streams while ammunition went down. Damaged Goliaths were dismantled in place if they could not be recovered. Marine companies that entered the Temple at full strength came back to the surface as reinforced platoons and returned again after being rebuilt around their surviving officers. The Ara suffered the same attrition. Their zealots were powerful enough to meet Ancient counterparts for brief periods but rarely survived prolonged engagements, while modern dragoons discovered that their ancient equivalents could withstand punishment that destroyed them outright. High Templar became precious, held behind the front until enough defenders gathered to justify the risk of using Psionic Storm inside confined spaces.

The architecture changed as the coalition moved deeper, and with it the psychological character of the campaign. The upper levels possessed the monumental precision of a shrine built to impress anyone who entered, but below them the polished surfaces began giving way to older forms, walls assembled from massive fitted blocks whose seams were barely visible and passages whose geometry seemed subtly inconsistent with the mountain around them. Farther still, even those structures ended. The expedition began moving through tunnels cut directly into bedrock, their surfaces rough and dark except where ancient crystalline veins emerged from the stone. Ara scholars admitted that these passages did not appear in any surviving record, and the oldest identifiable Protoss construction ended somewhere above them. Whatever had excavated the deepest portions of the mountain had done so before the guardians arrived.

Communications deteriorated beneath several kilometers of stone, forcing engineers to lay physical relay lines behind the advancing troops. Sensors occasionally reported movement through solid walls or mapped corridors that vanished when scouts reached them. Compass systems drifted. At one point two companies separated by less than a kilometer spent four hours trying to locate one another because every electronic map placed them on the same side of a rock formation neither could cross. StarCraft Co. responded with wire, paint, physical markers and soldiers stationed at important intersections. A military capable of coordinating fleets across planets was reduced to leaving arrows on walls so wounded men could find the surface, and the simplicity of those measures became reassuring in a place where sophisticated instruments could no longer be trusted.

The Ancient Ones never spoke. Ara officers attempted contact after nearly every engagement, transmitting formal challenges, appeals, explanations of the Renegade threat and eventually offers to withdraw from individual sacred chambers if the guardians would negotiate access to the deeper Temple. The answer was always action. An Ancient Zealot ignited its blades, a Dragoon advanced, or photon defenses awakened from the walls. The guardians were neither frenzied nor visibly hateful, and that absence of emotion gradually became more disturbing than hostility would have been. They fought because the expedition was inside, and nothing else appeared relevant.

Talandar came to understand them before the Terrans did. During a pause after an engagement that killed more than thirty Ara warriors, he stood beside the body of an Ancient Zealot whose armor was older than any pattern in his people's living memory and told the commander that the guardians were not rebels, fanatics or enemies in any normal sense. “They have not betrayed their charge,” he said. “We have chosen that their charge may no longer stand between our peoples and survival. Do not dishonor them by imagining they have become something lesser merely because we require them to die.” The commander did not argue. By then the distinction had become impossible to ignore. StarCraft Co. and Ara were the invaders, and the Ancient Ones were doing exactly what they had done for thousands of years.

The most dangerous encounter came nearly three weeks into the descent, when a forward group entered a chamber where two major conduits crossed beneath the floor and encountered two Archons at once. Until then StarCraft Co. had avoided committing large forces against individual Archons inside confined terrain, preferring to isolate and exhaust them with repeated attacks. There was no time for that here. The first guardian emerged from behind a row of crystalline supports while the second entered through a lateral passage that reconnaissance had believed empty, trapping the leading companies between them. The initial exchange killed more than forty personnel in less than a minute and shattered the careful rhythm upon which the entire expedition had come to depend.

Commandos fired until rifle barrels overheated, withdrawing in groups while medics dragged the wounded behind improvised barricades. Goliaths concentrated on the nearer Archon and watched its shields replenish whenever the conduits beneath the chamber brightened. Ara High Templar attempted to overwhelm the energy around the defenders with storm after storm, but the Archons continued advancing through it. One reached the first fallback barricade and broke the position almost immediately, scattering infantry into the corridor beyond, while the second killed two dragoons and drove the remaining Ara force backward hard enough that command cohesion began to fail. For the first time in the Temple, StarCraft Co. did not conduct a controlled withdrawal; it ran.

The retreat carried through three previously cleared chambers. Damaged Goliaths blocked one passage and had to be abandoned while infantry climbed around them. Medics injected commandos who had already exceeded recommended stimulant limits because leaving them untreated meant losing the rear guard. One Ancient Archon followed much farther than any previous guardian, pursuing the retreat through sections almost devoid of luminous conduits and forcing the coalition to abandon a field hospital before the wounded could be fully evacuated. The line finally stabilized around a reinforced junction where every surviving heavy weapon in the sector was concentrated. The Archon reached the barricade with its shields visibly weakened, destroyed another Goliath, killed a dozen marines and finally collapsed beneath massed fire after nearly ten continuous minutes of combat. The second guardian did not pursue beyond the conduit chamber.

The cost of that defeat threatened the entire operation. More than a hundred Terran personnel were dead or missing, Ara losses were severe, medical facilities had been overrun and one of the commando companies had consumed nearly all of its emergency stimulants. Several officers argued that the Ancient Ones had demonstrated exactly what the Renegades had learned before them: there was a point below which brute force became economically absurd. The commander ordered the advance suspended for four days, and for perhaps the first time since the invasion began there was no confidence at headquarters that the pause would end with another push.

Those four days saved the expedition. StarCraft Co. stopped treating the Temple as a continuous battlefield and rebuilt the invasion around logistics. SCVs widened selected corridors where possible, established deeper ammunition depots and installed blast barriers at every major junction. Engineers mapped the conduit network more systematically and identified chambers in which the guardians' regenerative advantage was greatest. Ara specialists studied the energy behavior around defeated Ancient Ones and developed crude warnings for major fluctuations in the Temple's power flow. Commandos were divided into rotation groups so no company remained stimulated for more than a few minutes at a time. Most importantly, the coalition stopped pushing through every defended chamber simply because it lay ahead. Routes that could be bypassed were bypassed, while photon emplacements controlling no essential corridor were sealed behind collapsed rock. The same cold discipline that had carried StarCraft Co. through the jungle returned underground.

Progress resumed slowly and then accelerated. An Ancient Zealot position that might once have cost a platoon was baited into a conduit-poor corridor and destroyed by overlapping Goliath fire. A group of dragoons occupying a broad hall found itself attacked from two side passages that commandos had spent a day opening through maintenance shafts. Photon defenses overlooking a deep chasm were never assaulted at all; engineers collapsed the bridge behind them and cut a new route around the chamber. At another junction, an Archon was drawn several hundred meters from the brightest conduits by repeated commando strikes and then met by every available Ara dragoon and Terran heavy weapon at once. It still killed twenty-seven soldiers before dying, but the coalition no longer lost whole formations learning how to fight it.

The deeper they moved, the fewer Ancient Ones they encountered, though the survivors appeared stronger. That scarcity gradually revealed something else about the guardians. Lower settlement chambers contained workshops, shrines, sleeping spaces and communal halls, but almost no evidence of children or ordinary civilian life. Storage areas had been maintained meticulously, yet many living quarters had not been used for generations. Ara scholars studying the artifacts reached an uncomfortable conclusion: the Ancient Ones were not a hidden civilization of thousands waiting beneath the Temple. They were the last few hundred members of a culture that had been shrinking for centuries.

The Temple appeared to have sustained them far beyond ordinary lifespans, but it had not preserved a normal society. Their purpose had slowly consumed everything else. Generations had dwindled into custodians, custodians into warriors, and warriors into a final garrison that no longer possessed meaningful political or civilian life beyond the sanctuary. StarCraft Co. was not merely destroying an army. With every chamber cleared, an ancient Protoss tribe approached extinction, and although the revelation did not stop the advance, the silence after each engagement became heavier.

By the fifth week, the expedition had descended so far that the surface existed mostly as a logistical abstraction represented by relay stations, supply manifests and casualty lists. Soldiers entering the Temple might spend days moving before reaching the active front. The air remained breathable but dry and metallic, carrying a faint electrical smell near the strongest conduits. Medics complained about exhaustion, stimulant dependence and psychological strain. SCV crews worked around the clock repairing barricades and moving ammunition. The Ancient Ones remained relentless, every guardian encountered fighting until destroyed, and not one attempting surrender or withdrawal beyond tactical repositioning.

Then the tunnels opened into the hollow interior of the mountain.

The final chamber was not a chamber in any conventional sense but a space so enormous that the first reconnaissance team assumed its rangefinders had malfunctioned. The floor descended through terraces toward a central structure of luminous crystal and dark Xel'Naga material that rose hundreds of meters into the cavern, while vast conduits disappeared upward into the mountain and downward beyond instrument range. Rivers of pale green vapor moved through channels cut into the floor, condensing around machinery whose purpose no one could identify. The roof vanished into darkness above, and the Temple visible from the summit suddenly seemed almost trivial. It had never been the structure itself. It had been the entrance.

The Ancient Ones were waiting below in their hundreds. Zealots stood in ordered ranks along the lower terraces, their armor reflecting the crystalline light, while dragoons occupied elevated positions from which they could fire across much of the cavern. High Templar formed smaller groups around the central structure, and among them burned Archons bright enough to illuminate the stone around their positions. Some of the warriors wore armor so archaic that even Talandar's historians could not identify its period. Photon defenses were embedded directly into the cavern walls, not apparently constructed afterward but integrated into the original Xel'Naga architecture. No one suggested negotiation. The Ara had exhausted that possibility several levels above.

StarCraft Co. prepared for two days before committing itself. Every Goliath capable of reaching the cavern was brought down, ammunition was stacked in protected alcoves near the entrance, and medics established field stations far enough behind the planned line to survive the first exchange. Commandos were given strict rotation schedules and enough stimulants to exceed every normal medical recommendation if the battle lasted as long as expected. Ara High Templar conserved their strength, while modern Archons were positioned at the front despite the expectation that they would fare badly against their Ancient counterparts. Conventional infantry filled every remaining approach, and the commander considered withdrawal one final time because the force below represented a concentration of Ancient power unlike anything encountered during the descent. If the defenders held the central machinery, the energy available to them might be effectively unlimited, and the assault could consume every remaining commando and much of the expedition's veteran infantry without reaching the far side of the cavern. Yet retreat now meant accepting all previous losses for nothing more than knowledge of what lay below, so the order was given.

The battle began with Psionic Storm. Ara High Templar cast across the forward Ancient formations while Goliaths and dragoons opened fire on the elevated positions, and for several seconds the cavern disappeared behind overlapping light. Then the Ancient Ones advanced through it. Their zealots crossed the lower terraces with the same terrifying speed encountered throughout the descent and struck the coalition front before conventional infantry had finished emptying their first magazines. Modern Ara zealots met them directly and died in numbers that would have broken lesser formations. Archons collided in bursts of psionic force powerful enough to throw nearby marines from their feet, while Ancient dragoons fired from above and tore gaps through the Goliath line.

StarCraft Co. answered with the one advantage the tunnels had denied it for weeks: mass. Hundreds of gauss rifles concentrated on individual targets under centralized fire direction. Goliaths fired in coordinated groups rather than independently, shifting from one Ancient Dragoon to another until armor failed. Commandos stimmed forward in waves, punched into the Ancient line with overwhelming bursts of fire, and withdrew through gaps opened behind them while fresh groups replaced them. Firebats fought almost inside the Ara formations, burning Ancient zealots already engaged at close range, while medics moved continuously through the second line, treating commandos who returned shaking from accumulated stimulants and sending them back before their bodies had fully recovered.

The first coalition attack gained less than two hundred meters and lost enough troops to fill two field hospitals. Three modern Ara Archons were destroyed fighting a single Ancient counterpart near the western terrace, and when Terran Goliaths finally killed it, several machines were so badly damaged that their crews abandoned them in place. A group of Ancient Zealots penetrated the marine center and reached an ammunition point before being surrounded, killing nearly everyone assigned there. High Templar on both sides exhausted themselves faster than expected, leaving entire sectors of the battle to conventional firepower and close combat, while the Ancient Ones yielded almost no ground.

The commander committed the reserve earlier than planned, and the decision nearly ended the battle. Fresh units pushed the center forward, but the Ancient Ones responded by releasing guardians held around the central structure, including four Archons advancing together through the strongest conduit field StarCraft Co. had yet encountered. Their shields regenerated almost as quickly as Terran and Ara weapons damaged them. One commando company struck them at close range and lost nearly a third of its personnel in moments, while another attempted to flank and was intercepted by Ancient Zealots. The entire center stalled under the pressure, and the coalition line bowed backward far enough that officers near the entrance began preparing demolitions in case the retreat became general.

What held the line was not a hidden weapon but the accumulated discipline of an army that had spent years surviving situations in which neat plans disintegrated under pressure. Individual companies withdrew through one another without waiting for centralized orders. Goliath crews shifted firing positions to cover sectors whose officers were dead. Medics abandoned formal casualty stations and treated commandos where they fell. SCVs dragged disabled walkers sideways to create improvised barricades while marines fired over the chassis. Ara zealots gathered around surviving Terran heavy weapons instead of attempting to reform their own shattered units. Nobody needed to be told that organizational neatness no longer mattered; only the line mattered.

The Ancient Archons finally began to slow as they moved away from the strongest conduits, and the commander recognized the change before the engineers formally confirmed it. Every available heavy weapon redirected toward the leading guardian. Goliaths, dragoons, commandos and ordinary marines poured fire into it until the shield dimmed; it continued advancing, killed another dozen infantry and then collapsed in a burst of energy that knocked nearby soldiers from their feet. The second followed less than a minute later. The remaining two halted their advance, not from fear but because the Ancient line behind them had begun to fracture under the concentration of coalition fire elsewhere.

StarCraft Co. attacked again with no meaningful reserve remaining. The final advance became a sustained act of exhaustion in which commandos stimmed beyond schedules the medics had considered absolute limits, marines fired until ammunition teams replaced magazines directly into their hands, and Goliaths ran dry on missiles and continued with autocannons. Ara High Templar, nearly spent, used their remaining strength in isolated storms intended not to destroy whole formations but simply to open momentary gaps. Zealots advanced through those gaps beside Terran infantry while dragoons fired over them into the Ancient positions around the central structure.

Casualties ceased to arrive in manageable groups and became a continuous stream. Companies became platoons, platoons became squads, and officers found themselves commanding soldiers from units whose designations they did not know. The commando corps suffered losses that would take years to replace, and several augmented soldiers died not from enemy weapons but from accumulated trauma after repeated stimulation and treatment. Medics continued working until supplies ran low enough that triage became brutally utilitarian: personnel capable of returning to the line received treatment first, while those unlikely to fight again were stabilized for evacuation after the battle.

The Ancient Ones died with equal constancy and no sign of collapse. Every Zealot fought until its body failed, every Dragoon continued firing until its chassis was destroyed, and the last surviving High Templar remained near the central structure surrounded by the dead of both armies, casting one final storm into the advancing Terrans before concentrated Goliath fire killed him. There were no attempts to flee deeper into the Temple, no effort to preserve some remnant of the tribe and no appeal for mercy. Their purpose had survived longer than their civilization, and they fulfilled it until there was nobody left to continue.

The final defender was an Archon standing before the inner platform, and by then the coalition was too exhausted for the encounter to feel heroic. It absorbed fire from nearly every surviving heavy weapon in the chamber, destroyed a Goliath with its first attack and tore through an Ara formation already reduced below half strength with its second. Commandos pushed forward under the cover of conventional infantry, fired until their weapons overheated, withdrew through medics and returned again. The Archon's shields dimmed, strengthened when the conduits brightened, dimmed again under renewed fire and finally began failing faster than the Temple could restore them. When it collapsed, the cavern became quiet enough for the survivors to hear damaged machinery ticking as it cooled, and nobody cheered because too many formations had ceased to exist simply to place them there.

For several minutes the coalition remained where it had stopped, surrounded by wrecked Goliaths, shattered Protoss machinery and the bodies of the last Ancient Ones. The battle itself had lasted less than a day, while the descent had taken weeks. StarCraft Co. had lost more personnel beneath the Temple than some of its earliest campaigns had deployed in total, and several veteran formations that had survived Aurelia now existed only as names in casualty reports. Ara losses were proportionally worse. The commandos had remained intact as a corps only because ordinary soldiers had repeatedly been spent to preserve them, and even that calculation had failed to prevent serious losses among the augmented troops.

The commander reached the inner structure with Talandar several hours later, and the Ara Executor stopped before crossing the final threshold. The chamber beyond contained no weapons in the conventional sense. Enormous crystalline assemblies surrounded a central Xel'Naga mechanism whose internal light shifted through colors neither Terran nor Protoss sensors could properly classify, while smaller crystals rested in fitted recesses along the walls and connected to conduits running deeper into the mountain. Terran instruments detected vespene almost immediately, first in trace concentrations and then in quantities so high that the readings appeared impossible. The gas was not leaking from a subterranean reservoir. It was being produced continuously.

Ara engineers reached the same conclusion independently. The crystals formed part of an atmospheric conversion system capable of extracting diffuse chemical components and reorganizing them into usable vespene compounds, apparently drawing energy from a source integrated into the Temple itself that had operated for millennia without measurable exhaustion. The old legend of endless vespene had been wrong only in scale. The Temple was not sitting on a deposit; it was a refinery whose raw material was the atmosphere, and the implications extended far beyond the campaign on Sanctuary. Every Terran military planner understood what vespene scarcity imposed on capital-ship construction, reactor operation and advanced weapons systems, just as every Ara commander understood the equivalent limits on Protoss production. Moria had changed the war because it provided enormous conventional resources. The Xel'Naga crystals promised to weaken the constraint itself.

The second discovery made even that seem almost secondary. Deep within the Temple's archives, Ara and Terran specialists found technical records describing methods of energy focusing and weapons amplification far beyond anything either civilization currently used. At first the StarCraft Co. engineers assumed they had mistranslated the data because the projected gains were too large. Ara specialists reconstructed the same principles through their own systems and reached nearly identical results. This was not a single superweapon but a series of underlying improvements applicable across several forms of directed energy, plasma projection and high-density ordnance, with preliminary estimates suggesting an increase in effective firepower approaching forty percent.

That figure sounded abstract until planners began applying it to existing arsenals. Siege tanks could destroy hardened positions with fewer shots and at greater effective lethality. Goliath weapons could threaten armored targets previously requiring heavier platforms. Wraith lasers and Minotaur batteries could cut through ships designed around surviving the old weapons envelope, while Yamato systems could be refocused for substantially greater penetration. The Ara saw equivalent possibilities in Dragoon projectors, photon weapons and carrier interceptor armament. For years the war had been governed by the arithmetic of attrition, by how many Zerg the Renegades could replace compared with how many trained soldiers and warships the coalition could afford to lose. The Temple offered a way to change the exchange rate itself.

Talandar stood among the recovered archives while Ara specialists worked around him, and for a long time he said nothing. His people had spent generations treating the Temple as something too sacred to touch, and the last guardians of that belief lay dead in the cavern outside. StarCraft Co. had demanded entry because it believed the war justified the cost. The Ara had agreed because events had stripped them of alternatives. Now both stood before proof that the Renegades had been right to covet the place. “They kept this from us for ages,” Talandar said at last. “And we have killed them for keeping it.” The commander looked toward the crystalline machinery before answering that the Ancient Ones had kept it from everyone. Talandar replied that the distinction might comfort Terrans, and the commander told him it did not. That answer surprised the Executor more than any justification would have.

The recovery operation lasted weeks. StarCraft Co. and Ara honored the agreement almost obsessively because both understood what would happen if either suspected the other of withholding discoveries. Every artifact was logged jointly, every archive copied twice, and portable vespene crystals were divided according to the negotiated share while the central mechanism remained beneath Ara custodianship pending further study. Terran and Protoss engineers established parallel research teams and exchanged results under armed supervision. Neither side entirely trusted the other with technology capable of altering the balance of power between civilizations, but both trusted the Renegades with it even less. When the first controlled weapons tests were completed, the preliminary Temple estimates proved conservative rather than exaggerated.

The casualty reports reached Terran space before the full technical findings did, and for several days the operation threatened to become a political disaster. Regional commands had already accepted extraordinary losses during Aurelia, the Western Redoubt and the pursuit that followed, while the Temple campaign had consumed veteran troops at a rate difficult to explain to soldiers and governments who had been told the Renegades were already collapsing. Some governors demanded to know why entire companies had been spent assaulting a Protoss sanctuary when the conventional war was finally turning in their favor. Families of the dead heard that their relatives had been killed underground fighting guardians who had never attacked Terran space. Officers who had spent years accepting StarCraft Co.'s authority began asking whether the commander had confused strategic opportunity with ambition. Even within the military, there was unease at the thought that an expedition launched to prevent Renegade access had become a conquest of its own.

The unrest did not disappear because StarCraft Co. issued a better justification. It began disappearing because information leaked.

At first it was fragments: engineers speaking too freely to officers, procurement requests for unfamiliar crystalline components, weapons-test telemetry copied beyond the teams authorized to see it. Then came numbers that were too extraordinary to remain confined to classified channels. A prototype Goliath battery demonstrated destructive output far above service models. Modified siege ammunition achieved results that analysts initially assumed were instrumentation errors. Reactor teams began discussing vespene conversion systems whose theoretical output made conventional extraction forecasts look obsolete. Nobody released a formal statement claiming that StarCraft Co. had acquired a forty-percent increase in military firepower, but enough evidence escaped that commanders throughout Terran space began to understand why Sanctuary had mattered.

The political argument changed with remarkable speed. The casualties remained real, and nobody could make the dead cheaper by pointing to a weapons test, but the operation no longer looked like a reckless expedition for exotic artifacts. It looked like the acquisition of a technological advantage large enough to shorten the war by years. Regional governments that had demanded inquiries began asking when their fleets would receive upgraded systems. Shipyard directors requested specifications. Army commanders wanted to know how quickly the new focusing principles could be adapted to tanks and Goliaths. The same officers who had questioned the cost began studying simulations in which existing Terran formations inflicted levels of damage that would once have required substantially larger forces.

For the surviving veterans of the UIC, the implications went deeper than the Temple itself. The old Council had possessed more territory, more bureaucracy and, on paper, more military power than StarCraft Co. had inherited after the decapitation of its leadership. Yet the UIC had never transformed that mass into anything resembling what now existed. StarCraft Co. had standardized scattered armies, rebuilt shattered supply systems, reclaimed Moria, integrated regional commands, fought alongside Protoss, created a veteran commando corps, survived Aurelia and then carried a combined army through hundreds of kilometers of jungle and into the heart of an ancient Xel'Naga sanctuary. What had once been a mercenary company was now directing a Terran military whose institutional competence, operational experience and technological sophistication would have been almost unimaginable to the government it replaced.

The comparison became increasingly uncomfortable because StarCraft Co. had never formally claimed to replace the UIC as a permanent state. Its emergency authority had been justified by war, and the commander continued insisting that political settlement would come after victory. Yet power had accumulated where competence accumulated. Governors now planned campaigns around StarCraft Co. logistics. Fleets accepted its operational standards. Scientists competed for access to its research programs. Officers whose commissions predated the company's existence increasingly measured their own organizations against doctrines developed by people who had once been hired by contract to clear Zerg out of basements and orbital maintenance decks.

The Ara understood the shift as clearly as the Terrans did. Their alliance with StarCraft Co. had begun as cooperation with a useful and unusually capable human military force. After Moria and Aurelia it had become a partnership between major powers, and Sanctuary pushed it further still. Both civilizations now possessed access to Xel'Naga technology capable of altering the economics of interstellar war, while the Renegades, already hollowed by a year of defeats, possessed neither the Temple nor the army they had assembled to take it. Talandar's council had feared that allowing Terrans into the sanctuary would alter the balance between their peoples. They had been correct, although not in the way the most alarmed Judicators had imagined. The Temple had not simply made StarCraft Co. stronger; it had accelerated a transformation already underway.

By the time the last wounded left Sanctuary, the argument over whether the campaign had been worth its losses had not vanished, but it no longer dominated the conversation. The more important question was what happened when the new weapons reached full production. StarCraft Co. had entered the war as a contractor, survived long enough to become an army, and then rebuilt the remnants of Terran power into something the UIC had never been able to create while it still possessed all the advantages of legitimacy, territory and peace. Now that military was being handed technologies that could increase its striking power on a scale normally measured across generations rather than months.

The Temple had cost the last of the Ancient Ones their civilization and cost the coalition thousands of dead and wounded to reach what they had protected. Nothing about the price could be undone, and nothing about the discovery made the decision morally clean. Yet as the first upgraded weapons entered testing and the strategic models began changing across Terran and Ara commands, the larger consequence became impossible to ignore. Aurelia had broken the Renegades' concentrated military strength, and Sanctuary had given their enemies the means to exploit that weakness with overwhelming force. Beyond the immediate war, something more fundamental was happening. The old arrangements of the sector had depended on powers everyone believed they understood: Terran industry, Protoss technology, Zerg numbers, mineral wealth and vespene scarcity. One by one, those assumptions were being overturned.

The tides of power were shifting across the cosmos, and StarCraft Co. was no longer merely riding them. Increasingly, it was the force causing them to move.