She can't dodge a bolt at melee range, but she can fling Azalea away right afterwards! Have some more non-spinning flight! This is so much fun!!

They can keep chasing each other, in the sky and among the trees, dodging wind walls and conjured water raining from the sky, navigating a forest without any gravity at all by pushing off the trees, and generally having a good time.

"That," she exclaims, flopping against Aivu's side. "Was amazing."

She is not nearly as fit as Gord -- although the subjective gravity meant that she kept up fine -- so she is physically exhausted.

"It was the best dragon fight I've ever had," Gord agrees solemnly, but his lips are twitching.

Aivu shrinks back so she can look them in the face instead of having them be smaller than her face. She's still big enough to Azalea to lean against.

"It really, really was!"

Azalea flicks her normal protections back on, and feels the lactic acid disappear from her muscles and various other biochemical levers get pulled back to their setpoints, leaving her merely pleasantly tired.

"I think I might need to make subjuctive-gravity obstacle courses into a sport," she continues. "I've played microgravity soccer and piloted singularity-controlled spaceships, but that was something else. A completely different way of flying."

"I've only tried the regular Fly spell before. And I used to think jumping of a cliff with Feather Fall was exciting!" Gord grins broadly. "You're right, this is something else."

"Isn't it? I'm so glad everyone can fly now! A life without flying sounds very boring."

"We managed somehow," she says dryly. "Are there other things about being a dragon you think people should try?"

It's sort of dizzying, the number of experiences that magic opens up. She's wanted to try having wings for a long time, and now that might be possible without worrying about long-term side effects.

Yes!!! Aivu is so so glad she asked! She knows all the best things about being a dragon!

You can shapeshift into any humanoid or animal, so you can do anything anyone can do, and you do it constantly, without thought. You can fly and swim and walk and climb and burrow, you can see the world as anyone and everyone sees it, you can talk to anyone and see and hear and smell and feel things the way they do so you can really understand them.

And you can make gravity weaker or stronger an make it point any way or no way or whichever-way-anyone-wants, and make time all around you pass faster or slower or not at all, and create plants and rivers and ponds all around you, and you can sing and dance and act and play any instrument (comic songs are traditional) and have lots of magic but many people have magic.

Being a havoc dragon like Aivu is means always changing things around you for the better - landscapes, people, reality itself. Never standing still, never being bored or boring, never accepting something being bad and never accepting something is good enough and can't be made even better.

Aivu had to wait until she grew up bigger and stronger so she could go help people outside Elysium, but now she doesn't need to wait anymore and the people don't need her help nearly as much and this is so much better!!

"Thank you," she adds, projecting every bit of earnestness she can.

Azalea smiles up at her.

"You're most welcome. I am confident that if you had developed fixity fields before I did, you would be just as ready to share them. Although I suspect you would be hard-pressed to match Gord's door-related good luck, which may be beyond both of us," she jokes.

"I'll open every door I see from now on!" Aivu promises.

"Next time it'll be someone else opening the door. Let's make them as lucky as I was."

The engines of creation in Axis are never still.

They have delved the arts of a thousand worlds, spent aeons uncounted extracting value from the equations of physics. Theirs are all the creations of mortal minds and hands, open in Abadar's vaults; and a thousand times more that mortals were never allowed to know, wonders restricted by the old contracts of Creation, things unimagined in Heaven or Hell.

They are the beings of pure Law and intellect. They are the only ones Otolmens trusts to use technology responsibly; the only ones Asmodeus trusted to keep His secrets; the only ones Iomedae trusted to keep the weapons of last resort, should a threat arise greater than Rovagug. 

They will take the technology of a new world, and with it they will fashion wonders unsurpassed.

The very first thing everyone in Axis does, when Abadar announces the Ash Tree's gift to Creation, is to Wish up all their abilitystats, make themselves 6/6/6 headbands, fashion maximally time-dilated demiplanes with permanent gates, cast Time Stop, and start forking.

It wouldn't do for someone else to get there a millisecond earlier and surpass their wonders, after all. He who first boards the exponential train shall reap great rewards in the markets of tomorrow.

You don't have to do this, you know. You can just relax and enjoy life with the rest of us!

Don't be ridiculous, there's a very simple theorem proving that acquiring fungible resources is a convergent instrumental goal for all rational agents.

They don't trust the mental magics, not yet. So they place a new bounty for unaugmented-human-understandable proofs that those wish wordings are safe, alongside the thousands of other outstanding bounties -- for security holes, for bug fixes, for problems of mathematics not yet solved on Earth -- which they post as a matter of course.

Money pours out of their self-tree's accounts and into the coffers of Axis, and answers pour back the other way, and everyone is wealthier after the exchange.

Heaven learns from the last war, and prepares for the next.

Creation balanced on a razor's edge for almost all of its existence. Neither Good nor Evil could crush each other swiftly; but there was no truce, and the mortals suffered for it. They made many errors, great and small, and they will be unsparing in their judgement of their own mistakes.

Lawful Good isn't made to fight wars; it is barely made to win them. They are Good contorted against itself almost to the breaking point: abandoning some to rescue others, killing enemies to save friends, hating every moment of it. The best Good generals may be Lawful, but the best generals aren't Good. Good lacks the passion and the drive to win at any cost, the narrowness that thinks only of cutting, the commitment of calling someone an enemy and truly desiring their destruction. 

They are Good, and they are Lawful. They picked up the sword because they had to, and hated every moment of it. And many of them throw down their swords as soon as they can, or break them, and seek shelter in Nirvana.

But many others remain in Heaven, and take council, and resolve: 

They will not be caught unprepared again.

They will train, and learn, and build. They will give of themselves, and sacrifice, and strive towards perfection.

When the door opens on the next world there will not be enemies, or casualties, or triage. There will not be a war. They will be strong enough to not need those anymore.

There will be only rescue, and healing.

Some of them sit in on these meetings too, and help where they can. They weren't able to be there for the hardest parts of the struggle for Creation, but they have just as much interest in making sure that contact with the next world goes more smoothly.

Lawful Good was never only about war. It was a burden they took on of necessity, with Neutral Good unwilling to hurt Evil, and Chaotic Good unable to coordinate a war. But there have always been people who are Good, and Lawful, and yet balance their self-sacrifice with self-fulfillment. Law is not a burden. Good is not abnegation.

You can join us now. Lay down your burdens and tend to your own needs. You matter too, no less than every one else. Join us in rest and healing and new growth, in the Summerlands where the grass is golden and all mortal sorrows are finally left behind.

Elysium is wild, and free, and infinite. It is not in its nature to obey any one rule, however well-intentioned.

Some of the gods put fixity fields in Their domains, and give magic freely to all who come there. Others of its inhabitants carry the generators forth into the wilderness, far out where only the Greatest Teleport can take them. They do not expand the fields' reach near other people who have their own, or who choose to go without; it would be rude to one's neighbors.

It is easy, now, to take a year or a decade off to yourself under Time Stop and come back to pick up your life where you left it. To lose yourself in the wilderness, to contemplate your true love at first sight under the trees as the centuries slowly tick by. And it is easy, also, to wake up one morning and find the world you knew ancient history, the latest advances of science and magic from Axis and Heaven making your life's labour obsolete a dozen times over, your friends become half-strangers with new experiences and new revelations unshared.

The people who choose to live in Elysium, who do not ride the hyper-optimized frothy wavefront of all that is latest and greatest in Creation, wouldn't have it any other way. They're not having to choose between Evils, now, only between different Goods; and making that choice is the essence of freedom.

There are fields in Elysium where one may wander and delight in the goodness and beauty of nature, and each other, and Creation itself. They are not marred any longer by the remembrance of suffering outside their borders. There one can forget their cares, and lay down their burden in the cause of Good, and have unmitigated - fun.

And they are here too, in and out of Elysium as the whim takes them. There is always someone new to meet, and some new art or game or sport to discover. It is what they always wanted, and it makes them weep with joy to see it realized.

Nirvana is finally healing.

It is a vast plain lit by the glory of a thousand suns. It is a quiet forest meadow in the shade of the aspen trees. It is city and wilderness and house and hospital and a trillion other things, for a trillion people who need help each in their own way, because there are no more budgets or laws against healing and they must not fail them again. And every door and portal, every banner borne by an expedition setting out to search desperately for someone lost and unaccounted for in the grand tale of Creation, bears the oath: no one left behind.

Never ever again.

Some people need more help than others. They were hurt terribly, by millenia of torture, by the nature of the planes they were sentenced to, by cruel fate and uncaring nature and by Evil incarnate. But the power of Good unleashed, free at last of all shackles, doesn't care about trifles of difficulty or cost.

Good often appears ineffective. Their strictures forbid the best strategies and drive away allies; their values clash with natural selfishness; their altruism leaves them poor, for they give away their aid for nothing in return. People try to work around Good's weakness, with Law and with allies of other alignments and with Evil works towards the greater Good that damn the doer to save others in turn. And still Asmodeus by himself could face down all three Good afterlives; a true alliance of Evil would have crushed them utterly.

But Good is only weak at adopting Evil's ways. It is only ineffective at hurting Evil like Evil hurts others. Healing, helping, promoting the values of others are not tools of war. They are tools of peace, and Creation had not known true peace since the War in Heaven. With no-one left to oppose them, they are not weak. 

Sarenrae is of the first Eight, greatest of the gods of Creation. She is pure Good, unalloyed with Chaos, uncaring for aught but Her singular mission; and in Her own domain, turned to its proper use, Her power is absolute. None who still live, and come to Her, remain unhealed.

Those who are dead and gone, destroyed beyond recovery, will take a little longer.