Activating his Mark, Rinbast used Subdue.
Rinbast released Hirash just as a golden collar materialized around the Archmage’s neck.
Golden chains draped away from the collar to each of his limbs and in a flash of light, they vanished. They were still there, binding and blocking Hirash’s considerable capacity for magic.
He was just a normal man now, albeit one with a great deal of Intelligence and Mind, but they would hardly keep him alive in the wilderness. Like most mages, Hirash’s physical attributes were pathetically meager.
Before Hirash could find his voice, Rinbast held up a single finger in front of the man’s hawkish nose. “You will have your chance to redeem yourself in my eyes. Your punishment should fit your egregious incompetence, and your ongoing lack of comprehension. I do not want Hal dead. I need him alive.”
Hirash nodded dumbly, eagerly.
He wouldn’t be so eager once Hirash understood the trial he was about to undergo. “Open the door, Hirash.”
Swallowing a lump in his throat, the spindly mage nodded and grasped the gold knob. It took him a moment to work up the courage to open it and face what he knew was on the other side of that door.
Two fists of Kinslayers stood at attention in that austere room of [Nightwood] paneled walls and parquet flooring. Nothing else was in the room save a series of gold lamps attached to the walls at regular intervals, each glowing with an eerie green-blue light.
The room was bathed in that ghostly light, making the Kinslayers look even more monstrous and dangerous in their dark armor. Not all of them wore the same equipment, each had their own special preferences and Rinbast was more than happy to accommodate them.
As reflections of himself, each of the Kinslayers at his command had been nearly consumed by their own Beast. Only through his stabilizing control were they granted a semblance of sanity.
Without his guidance, each of them would have turned into eldritch abominations the likes of which could smother a dozen stars.
He wondered, idly, if he would have to add Hal as yet another Kinslayer. Or if the man was destined for something greater.
Rinbast placed a hand on Hirash’s back and guided the Archmage into the room. The Kinslayers stood, unmoving and in a sort of trance. They were ready to act at a moment’s notice.
With a snap of his fingers, the lamps changed color to a warm amber. The first row of Kinslayers awoke.
Hirash tried to backpedal, obviously repulsed by the way each of them snapped open their brown eyes and settled their gaze upon him. Rinbast shoved him forward and the nearest Kinslayer handled him as easily as if he were a child.
“If you truly wish to make amends, you will show me that you will never again underestimate your enemies,” Rinbast said, hands folded behind his back. “If you return to me, we will speak of this no longer and it will be as if it never happened.”
“If… my lord?” Hirash asked, visibly shaking. His dark hair was plastered to the side of his head, eyes wild and ragged at the edges.
“Since you deigned to so severely underestimate Hal, I would have you walk a few miles in his shoes,” Rinbast said, and he couldn’t help the thin smile that curled his lips. “To wit: You will be sent to the border with the Direlands, where the Broken reside and where we suspect Hal first entered this world.
“From there, you will make it - alone - through the wilderness to Sanctum-Fallwreath as he did. Should you survive the encounter, return to Castle Fallwreath and we may discuss your future, once you have been… enlightened.”
With a gesture from Rinbast, the Kinslayers began to rifle through Hirash’s expansive pockets, emptying them of all manner of defensive items he could use to make the journey trivial.
Once the man was entirely divested of every last bit of magic, his fancy - and heavily enchanted - robes were exchanged for those of plain cotton. Dressed in his new, mundane clothes and without a scrap of magic, the Kinslayers marched him out of the room through a door at the rear.
“You up for another thrilling adventure, Komachi?” Midarian asked, lounging on a purple velvet divan.
Komachi, a two-foot-long pobul (not counting her foot-long tail) that many people confused with the common Asian small-clawed otter, was too busy stuffing her face with sugar-crusted danishes from a nearby basket to listen.
“Komachi?” Midarian asked, leaning over the gluttonous pobul.
“Komachi?” the pobul echoed, her muzzle glittering with bits of sugar crystals and more than a little cream cheese filling. She often answered somebody with her own name… and nearly every other question with her own name.
She was a bit like a Pokemon in that respect, Midarian thought. Is Pokemon still a thing? Before his scattered mind splintered further, he pulled his thoughts together. Stay focused.
“I need you to check up on somebody for me,” he said.
Komachi scratched her chin with her dexterous little paws. “Who?”
“Just a guy I helped out right before tea time, do you remember me telling you about him?”
She did in fact remember.
Komachi had been waiting to go on another adventure and she excitedly flopped her powerful tail around, accidentally knocking over a pile of gems and jewels Midarian had painstakingly stacked into the likeness of a large hand giving the middle finger.
He didn’t mind. Meticulously arranging shiny things had a soothing effect on his worsening madness.
“Good,” Midarian said, throwing his feet over the side of the divan and onto the plush carpet. “His name is Hal and I think he might need a friend. Aldim is a pretty neat place, lots of danger and adventure. Stay as long as you like, but just check up on him, okay? I… kinda left him in the lurch after killing that god so… yeah.”
“Hmm, Komachi will see if he needs a pobul.”
“I appreciate it,” he said, tracing his fingers through the air like he was testing the temperature of bathwater. His dark room, floating through the cosmos, shifted and bent ever-so-slightly. “Just focus on Hal and you should be guided to him easily enough.”
A portal appeared, appropriately Komachi-sized. He petted the little pobul, one of his oldest friends, and she adorably reciprocated by hugging his hand with her stubby arms. After a farewell-for-now squeak, she scampered through.
He meandered over to the large squashy purple armchair that had once been a divan a few thoughts ago, and sank into it. With another effortless casting, he brought up a scrying window to see how Komachi was doing.
To his surprise, she didn’t appear in the woods or in the middle of a battle where he expected Hal to be.
Quite the contrary, she appeared in the middle of an opulent room practically blinding with magical wards and power.
“Oh my, how terrible for you, Rinbast,” Midarian said to the room in mock horror.
Komachi scampered around the room at hyper speed, pulling down books and toppling over tables full of carefully laid out parchments. Her general aura of chaos was dissipating as the rules of Aldim settled upon her, but just her very presence in the room had the most unlikely of things happening.
Midarian watched gleefully as the stained windows popped open and a breeze swept many intricate half-transcribed spells out the window hundreds of feet above a sprawling cityscape.
Eventually, even Komachi’s excitement over a new adventure seemed to calm when she realized nobody was there to greet her. In true Komachi fashion, she did not sulk or get depressed.
She got angry.
Midarian could practically hear her thoughts all the way across the realms to his private little stardusted abode. How dare they not immediately praise and pet her! The nerve.
The pobul looked toward the nearest door like she was going to march out into the castle grounds and demand to be pet - which, to be fair, she probably was about to do - when she caught the scent of magic.
Not just any magic, but familiar magic. Scrying magic, the kind Midarian was presently engaged in.
Komachi ambled up the small s
tone steps in the now thoroughly wrecked study and came up to a wide stone basin. A scrying pool possessed of impressive power. Midarian could see the image of Hal and some other people he didn’t know through the image.
He chuckled. He was scrying on Rinbast’s scrying pool, in a manner of speaking.
Komachi’s attention zeroed in on a girl with blonde hair beside Hal, her tiny dark eyes glittering with interest. Midarian knew that look well. The little pobul had all but forgotten about Hal at that point. She had a new pet person in her sights.
Komachi was no novice to magic or the deeper workings thereof and she quickly understood that she had gone astray.
Why she had found herself in Rinbast’s study, Midarian didn’t quite know. Or he did know, but didn’t remember? It amounted to the same in the end.
Thoroughly apprised of the situation, Komachi swiveled about and perched on the rim of Rinbast's scrying pool, intent on mischievous revenge. Muttering, "More than one! He's a spell thief," she lifted her tail ominously.
This was going to be good.
“Was that truly necessary?” asked a voice from the hall.
Another snap of his fingers after the Kinslayers and Hirash left, and the lanterns shifted back to their trance-inducing ghostly hue. Rinbast shut the door just in time to spot Ralst slipping out from behind a tapestry lining the wall.
“He underestimated him, and by extension me,” Rinbast said, waving a dismissive hand. He turned and walked past Ralst, who fell into step beside him. Her twin brother continued to shadow from behind.
Naturally, Ralst stuck her tongue out at him as she passed the smaller man. Like most drow, Ralst was larger than her male counterpart. Not that size had ever mattered to Alnafein.
“Taking it a bit hard though, aren’t you?” Ralst asked, pressing the point further.
Rinbast rolled his eyes, catching himself in a mirror given to him as a gift from the King of Deimos nearly a decade back. He hardly looked like the young man he was when he first came to Aldim.
The beard helped to set him apart from the Kinslayers - doppelgangers from alternative timelines turned servile with magic to save their fraying minds - and from his newest brother, Hal.
A name Rinbast had not been called in quite some time.
Not since he reinvented himself with his current moniker anyway. The few that knew who he was had been killed or were loyal enough to keep that to themselves.
“Hirash has a habit of inflating his own abilities, much to his detriment,” Rinbast said as they passed by the mirror.
Ralst noted the mirror, a raised silver-white brow on her dark face as she recognized it from one of their past adventures.
“I allowed such behavior before because he was always smart enough to keep the collateral damage of his failures to himself and away from my interests. But now he has directly impacted me, and he needs to learn a lesson.
“Perhaps, if he survives, he will come to appreciate the trek Hal made and miraculously managed to not only live through but thrive. I chose well in bringing him across.”
“So it’s true then?” Ralst asked. “The Vault was opened?”
Rinbast nodded. “This failure I cannot lay at Hirash’s feet. How Hal gained access to the underground barracks, gardens, and areas beyond is a cruel twist of fate. I thought I knew most of the Sigils belonging to this Mark, but it would seem my newest brother has managed to learn something I am now barred from. More’s the pity.”
“And… that creature within the Vault?” Ralst asked. Rinbast was pleased to note the shift in her tone was due wholly to revulsion. She was not afraid of Shae’kathoth, the body stealing Outsider that once threatened Murkmire.
“Destroyed, it would seem. The withering of the Murkmire Manatree was also reversed. Whether he intended to or not, Hal has done myself and Fallmark a great service by ridding us of that foul thing.”
“But you’re still sending Kinslayers after him?”
“No.” Rinbast shook his head. “That was Hirash, once again. He sent some Kinslayers after him. It may be the one correct thing he has done in all of this.”
“I doubt it,” Ralst said with a snort. “When Hirash fouls up, he does so with aplomb.”
As if to hammer Ralst’s point home, a bright flare of warning blossomed in Rinbast’s mind.
Rinbast sprinted down the hall, taking the first left that would take him toward his study. He cursed under his breath, the alarms had been tripped but none of the traps.
Surely it wasn’t Eiton? There was no way he could have breached the Manatree’s barrier. He would have known if he tried.
The list of suspects wasn’t very long, but they were all immensely powerful. Fortunately, he wasn’t too far from his study at the time. Ralst easily paced him and Alnafein was on his other side in a heartbeat.
“What’s the deal?” Ralst asked.
“Somebody is in the study.”
That was all she needed to hear. Ralst melted into the shadow of a nearby sculpture. She would beat them to the intruder, but not by much.
The pair made it to the door and with a sweeping gesture, the wards vanished. The door burst open and a startled squeak, not unlike a bath toy, echoed out from the disheveled room.
Rinbast skidded to a halt, his shoes sliding on one of the many pieces of parchment laying across the floor or fluttering in the wind. It took him all of two heartbeats to realize what was on those parchments. Panic took him full-force, a Titan’s hand squeezing his heart.
Those spells were absolutely key to saving Aldim!
He had spent years of his life, darkening his soul, doing whatever was necessary to save this dying world and his hopes were literally flying out the window at that moment.
Ralst stood near the base of the curving stone steps that led up to the scrying pool, but the tips of her beautifully curved daggers were pointed toward the floor, not the intruder.
Even Alnafein was dumbfounded by what he saw.
Perched atop the rim of Rinbast’s scrying pool, squatting and relieving itself was a small otter. It looked at him, giving him the stink eye as a rather noxious-sounding plop echoed in the room.
He recognized that otter, or rather pobul. “Don’t attack her, that’s Midarian’s Apprentice!” Rinbast ordered just as Alnafein was shaking off the confusion.
Ralst stared with a mixture of adoration and revulsion. Cute animals had always been her weakness.
The stream stopped. Started. Stopped again. Then started, only to end a moment later for good.
Komachi defiles the [Scrying Pool].
The [Scrying Pool] is afflicted with Foul Waters.
A portal opened in the air in front of Midarian’s Apprentice. It had the distinct flavor of magic that was wholly Midarian. The air tasted like Tang. Something few people not from Earth would understand, Rinbast had tried explaining it and eventually gave up.
Komachi leaped through the portal and was gone, leaving her odorous surprise lingering in the now non-functioning scrying pool.
With a prompt mental command from Rinbast, the windows shut, sealing in the remaining pages.
It was going to take him months to recover from that. And only if he could find the pages among the castle grounds and the city below.
Unfortunately, closing the windows also kept in the reek. The three quickly vacated the study and Rinbast reset the wards once they were safely away and could no longer smell the room.
“She’s so adorable,” Ralst said.
“She is highly destructive,” Alnafein corrected.
Rinbast looked at Alnafein, then Ralst. “I need you to deliver an order to the Kinslayers Hirash sent out from Murkmire.”
The drow turned to him and tilted her head to the side in confusion. “Do you think this is an attack because Midarian thinks you’re going after Hal after he went through the effort to save him?"
“I don’t know,” Rinbast admitted. “But if that is not a warning, I do not know what is. Besides, the papers she scattered
to the winds are more important than Hal at the moment. Recall the Kinslayers, Ralst. Do it in person. They have at least a week’s head start, get to them before they get to the boy.”
Ralst gave a mock salute and melted into the shadows.
Rinbast turned to Alnafein. “I hope you aren’t above collecting paper in the streets with me, old friend.”
Alnafein answered with a faint grin.
1
“On your left!” Angram called out, nearly slipping off the smooth black carapace of a monster-truck-sized beetle.
Hal didn’t even look. He lashed out with the [Chain of Binding]. The chain clinked against a nearby tree and Hal enacted its binding enchantment. With a tug he completely reversed his direction, narrowly avoiding a cleaving strike that exploded the earth where he was a second ago.
With a twist, Hal oriented himself so his feet would collide with the trunk of the tree. Coiling his shadow-infused legs, he released the enchantment on the chain and sprang off the tree.
[Brilliance] swiped through the dust-filled space, cleaving through the thick iridescent carapace of the monster. Hal twisted his body, swinging his left arm wielding the [Chain of Binding] so that the links wrapped around the insect’s foreleg.
With another tug, Hal avoided the acidic blood spray of the Noxis, a beetle-like insect that ranged in size from a pickup truck to that of the aforementioned monster truck. A flick of his wrist and the chain uncoiled from the insect’s leg. Hal tumbled to the churned-up earth beneath it.
You hit the [Noxis | Lv.27] for 78 points of damage.
Additional Effect: Bleed (Cruel Blade).
He raised [Brilliance], the magnificent sword he inherited from Thirty-seven that he could finally wield.
True to its name, the edge of its blade shone like bright starlight. Getting to one knee, Hal drove the blade up into the creature’s abdomen and at the same time summoned Drill Branch into a protective spinning drill oriented above him.
As he pulled free the blade, the twisting branches coalesced and began to spin, exploiting the hole in the hardened carapace. The drill sank into the creature’s innards and gored it. Hal rose to his feet, pushing the spell up higher and lifting the creature slightly off the ground until it started to split straight down the middle.
Beastborne Page 2