It had been merciless, it had been cathartic.
Return the honor you have been given.
There were precious few drudges in the south of Osteth. There hadn’t been that many to begin with, as they were the weakest of the wild tribes. But they were also the only tribe that Isparian scouts would attack without mercy, killing them all, with the survivors fleeing north to Bonecrunch’s protection.
The tales of watching drudges feast upon the dead in gory celebration had endured all this time. The Queen Mother had seen such things herself during the withdrawal, the drudges triumphant and flagrant in their displays during their victory.
Not a drudge in Cragstone or the fortress nearby was left alive after Princess Kristie lured him away.
Briggs and King Borelean had promptly taken the opportunity to hit them with the main force of their armies, especially since the drudges had conveniently gathered themselves in the fortress, making it easy to find them.
Oh, the drudges fought, there was no doubt about that. But they were a horde, not an army, and their master and protector was on a wild-goose chase heading off into the distance. They didn’t have the discipline to fight or Cast together the way they needed to in order to present a threat, and a LOT of Isparians got in on this, including virtually all the paramounts of Freehold.
Vengeance was best served cold, and so it was delivered to them.
The companies swept the scattered ring of drudges in knots and teams, taking them down at near-runs, wiping them off the landscape and making sure they didn’t return. The elites, including me, made for the fortress, which had the most powerful Summons protecting it, and the remainder of the living population.
We killed everything. I was busy severing the ley line connections to the wooden walls, rendering them vulnerable to flames, and putting up Walls of Fire to ignite everything.
The melee teams went into the Dungeon, came out steaming with vivus and grim expressions on their faces, and told me to collapse the upper levels down. The bottom had to stay intact, because that was the area that Bonecrunch was bound to, and had to return to.
So I collapsed the center of the fortress, burying the corpses of the drudges under dirt and stone, and making of this place the wreck and ruin the Isparians had been grinding their teeth to make happen for most of twenty years, now.
There were forty-three deaths, most of them mended with Cure Mortal Wounds/Revivify on the spot, some that had to be carried away and brought back the expensive way.
We’d killed at least five thousand living drudges today, and at least that number of Summons, too. Captain Burnja, a rare drudge NPC down at the very bottom of the place, wasn’t coming back. Briggs had gone down there and killed every drudge that was a member of Bonecrunch’s personal cohort, making sure they didn’t come back, either.
Bonecrunch couldn’t be in all places at once, he was a barbaric idiot, and we’d punished him for it.
Now, the Prodigal Drudge was all alone…
=============
There was a lot of red on the horizon, and it wasn’t from the dawn or dusk.
Corcosi Island, once a verdant and fairly well-developed place populated with the fields and villages of the House Corcosi army’s families and vassals, was now as bleak and barren a place as the lands of Silyun had been, if not worse because there had been little in the way of forests after the Viamontians had scoured it clean of wood for buildings and fences and spear-hafts, shields, wagons, and arrows.
Never let a little ecological catastrophe get in the way of making war, after all.
The Eaters going wild had consumed everything, and they still did. Any spots of green that managed to rise anywhere became targets for the creatures wobbling around the landscape in their hordes and clusters, moving from Summons to Summons in the wild areas where there was still something to eat, occasionally following their noses south to where the city of Sanamar’s high walls yet loomed. There they could smell living things behind more walls of stone, things raised repeatedly to expand the territory to grow food and deny them… and also repeatedly torn down, if they didn’t have ley line reinforcement, which most of them did not.
Not torn down by Eaters, of course. Eaters could gang up to gnaw down a watchtower or the thin wall of a domicile without too much problem, but thick curtain walls would hold them at bay, their only hope of getting past them being stacking up on one another high enough to overrun such things.
But there was another force that wandered the Hlaetians, mostly this island, that could take down any wall not reinforced by the ley lines.
The Red Bull and the Mad Cow.
We had to go overland in force, because Invisibility wasn’t working to avoid them and the Eaters ran around in hordes of at least a hundred, ranging up to a thousand in areas with lots of Summons. The cycling and growth of the Eaters here wasn’t quite as fast as on the Isle of Ruin, but the less-powerful creatures didn’t kill as many of the Eaters, either, resulting in numbers growing too high and eventually heading like lemmings out to the sea… or perhaps being stomped into mush and grazed on by the two massive bovines.
Stolen story; please report.
Thus the overland trip from the Keep of Karlun was not without incident, as we still encountered an Eater horde as we made our way to Silyun, creating a path clear of Summons as we did so, but not seeking to wipe them all.
The Eaters would have to help us rebuild this place, in the end, but first there were two other problems to take care of: the two titanic bovines and Varicci II, still King in Sanamar.
Not in that order, of course. We weren’t going to take down the two bovines and leave him in the clear, no, no. He was going to go down first.
Thus we made the overland trek from the Fortress to Silyun. It wasn’t that we expected to find anything intact there, and we didn’t. The wooden buildings were eaten away, anything made of stone had been rooted up and overturned, looking for food… many, many times, by how spread out the stones were, and how broken and gnawed the statues were.
No, the reason we did it was that Silyun had a Deathstone, and a Deathstone Pit to clear away.
---
Kris was looking around with a strange expression. “Trying to remember what it looked like?” I asked her softly. The Silyun Knights, all of them now bearing Swords of Lost Light with Elemental, Prismatic, and Blackfire Stones, as well as new suits of adamantine heavy Armor, were all kneeling and paying homage to the people who’d once dwelled here, the grief on their faces plain to see as they looked around silently and remembered what had been described as a fairly idyllic and lovely sylvan village.
We could see the edge of the Keep on the horizon here, but they’d never made it back here in a generation because of the Eaters in the way. The Eaters had swarmed over the landscape, devouring everything, and reproduced so fast that within a month of the Fall it was a death sentence to leave the Keep beyond sprinting range to get back to it.
They’d made a couple attempts to build walls to keep out the Eaters and plant some gardens. The two great bovines had casually wandered through, knocked holes in the walls, eaten out the laboriously planted gardens and fields while the distraught Viamontians looked on, exited through new holes, and the Eaters had swarmed in to feed on the rest, right down to the dirt and stone.
There had been no more attempts to plant gardens.
“It was pretty rough back then, but it was coming around. More like a summer vacation village than a fortified holding, of course, as we couldn’t risk holding much ground they could attack. Concealed in the trees and hard to find was the general idea. I have no recollections of it developed like the survivors remember, although I do remember the Deathstone.”
Our eyes fell on the pit of melded bones and screaming spirits, now misting away and their mournful cries fading into restful and grateful peace. Tellingly, there were absolutely no non-Isparian remains among those who had died at this stone, and without a doubt the vast majority of them were Viamontian, especially the children.
“And without the trees, this is the only point of reference.” Actually, the fastest way for us to find the place was for me to Cast Eagle’s Vantage and look for the Deathpit from far above, as there were almost no reference points but the general direction west of the Keep of Karlun.
“It was a beautiful land, Ryin. If you ignored the lethal monsters sitting around.”
“No Eaters around back then, I gather?”
“No. The Eaters were all on the northern islands, cut off by the sea. Varicci brought them over to be attack dogs, afterwards, and naturally a whole bunch of them got away. The Summons started to change about then, and that’s also when Viamontian knights started popping up on the Summons, too.”
“Interesting when humans start becoming the monsters, isn’t it.”
“Fucking magic System here,” Kris snorted.
“Keeps life interesting, right?”
“That’s one screwed-up way of looking at it. Thanks for coming, by the way. I know you have a dozen things you want to do that are more productive.”
“It’s fine. But we’re going to Ulgrim’s Island when this is over, and Mount Lethe.”
Her fingers went to Quaver’s hilt. “The second flame, right. The third flame is on Aerlinthe Island.”
“And the Radiant Flame on the Dark Isle. Happily we don’t have to jump through all the hoops the Mick talks about and can just run straight to Vissidal and the Dark Isle directly, although the freestanding Portal to them would have been convenient. Speaking of which… It takes two hundred goldweight of pyreal to make a one-way Portal to somewhere, but only a day of Infusing.”
“That’s insanely expensive and pocket change at the same time. Especially if it only takes one day to whip up,” she nodded. “QL 40 or something?”
“I’m going higher, but that’s about what it was made at.” I flicked the plans from Analyze Object over to her, and she surveyed them with a crafter’s experienced eye.
“Huh. Change the Rune structure properly, and I could make something like that,” she said after a moment of analysis, narrowing her eyes. “Gromnie blood. Huh.”
“Blood of the local dragons, call it. And Nuhmudira is known to employ Blood Magic.” I didn’t keep the chill out of my voice.
“Blood-infused aetherium. Woman seriously has no limits to what she’ll try out. Probably believes her own hype, too,” Kris sneered. “Where do they want you to make the first Portals from and to?”
“Actually, the first thing I have to do is go through all of the Vissidal Islands looking for the Portal conduits, now that I know what they look like.”
She gave me a look, then clicked her tongue. “The undead and the shades have concealed Portals somewhere on the island. It’s how they keep coming back to the places…”
“They definitely aren’t walking across the sea floor,” I agreed. “Can’t put Portals somewhere an enemy can easily capture, at least not without auto-destructs built into it.”
“Right. Highway right into civilian locations. I don’t know how they survived with all the Town Portals leading right into all the settlements in the past. It was a great innovation, binding the whole kingdom together, sure. But one person tying to the Portal meant an army could invade effortlessly.”
“There’s a reason those spells don’t exist on Ispar.”
“Damn good thing, or we’d all be speaking Viamontian or something. Plenty of war mages among the royals.”
“Lived-lines, Teleports, and personal travels, put in your time like everyone else. King Borelean wants an outgoing Portal to Mayoi, and then to Hebian-to, and between them and Fort Overlook. We’ll look at other locations once the security situation is better developed. Might have outgoing for dispatches, but not returns.”
“Understandable.” She looked west. “Ready to move out?”
“Of course.”
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