Beastborne

by James T Callum

  “H…Hal?” Yesel asked, a shadow fell upon her but was illuminated with a golden light. A golden light that Hal could see reflected in her bright eyes. He could just barely make out the Gold Kol’thil through the reflection of it in Yesel’s eyes.

  “Yesel?” he asked, his voice monstrous and gravely.

  “By the gods,” she whispered. “It is you!” She turned to the other defenders on the ruined parapet. “Don’t shoot any marked with a glowing symbol, they’re friendly.”

  Removing his hands from that thread, Hal touched the next in line. He saw a shifting, watery image form very low to the ground. His vision swam as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

  There was a wall in front of him, but it was battered and nearly broken. People and karaks rushed atop it in a frantic pace trying to beat back monsters that scaled the walls with disturbing ease.

  Hal shifted his gaze to the side and realized his body was long and low to the ground like a snake. But instead of slithering, he had a multitude of hairy insectile legs carrying him forward at the nearest monster.

  His head smashed into the disturbing lump of a creature, some purple oozing thing the size of a small school bus. The diamond-hard substance at his front punched a hole through the creature, and he skittered out the other side.

  Each thread held a monstrous abomination, and as Hal cycled through them, he began to remember what had happened. He must have taken so much damage that he either died or was knocked unconscious.

  Splitting his attention, Hal controlled the monsters to turn on their fellows. In his haze of pain, the creatures had remained under his control but had not acted.

  That brief reprieve had saved many lives, as the other monsters had to move around their suddenly frozen brethren. Now, Hal turned his controlled monsters on the others.

  They lashed out with tongue, tooth, and claw. Insectile creatures mutated with plantoid matter rushed about the gap. The light from the Daybreak Sigil didn’t bother him in these forms, but the other creatures smoked slightly.

  Up close, Hal could see - through his monsters’ eyes - that the other monsters were slowly being burned. Wisps of smoke came off their bubbling skin, but it wasn’t enough.

  Even as Hal turned dozens of creatures against the enemy, he was aware that he was fighting a losing battle. For every monster he felled, three more rose up to take its place.

  He hadn’t placed the Manatorpor bubbles as he had wanted, and now he had no access to any of his Beastborne spells. Not for the first time, he wondered if he had died. What would happen to him if he was dead while Dominating these monsters?

  Would his consciousness flit about, from one creature to the other like it was now until he could be revived? He had no HUD, no MP, nor HP that he could see. Though he could sense the general wellbeing of the creatures he Dominated.

  Curiously, he reached out to the Manaseed and found he could still sense his connection to it. If anything, it was stronger than ever.

  He wasn’t sure whether what, precisely, that portended.

  Glancing at the exterior of the Settlement’s wall through compound insectile eyes, Hal enacted Mana Repair.

  Before his shifting gaze, the worst of the damage was reversed as shimmering moonlight from the Manaseed healed the building back to full. It drained his EP as he enacted it again and again across the breadth of the wall.

  Shifting from one monster’s gaze to the other, Hal shored up the weakest parts of the wall, but it hardly seemed to matter. Just as one section was recovering, another began to buckle.

  It was more than the battering worms. There were simply too many creatures.

  They came from every direction, spewing acid that ate at their defenses. The monsters rained down chitinous spikes that threatened to impale anybody too slow to get out of the way.

  And that invariably left the wall undefended for a battering worm to strike.

  There was a maliciousness at play here that Hal could just glimpse out of the corner of his eye.

  Similar to the way he was controlling the monsters he Dominated, there was something out here mutating and changing the creatures of the Shiverglades into nightmarish creations.

  Moving with a singular purpose, great swaths of monsters baited attacks, only to come around and flank the spent defenders. Every motion, every attack was centered around one crystal clear goal: Destroy the wall.

  At the center of the wall, several monsters challenged the clangorous noise of Durvin, bellowing out a threatening shout. Hal felt the magical compulsion urge him to fight the tiny red-bearded thing, but he shook it off easily enough.

  The dozens of monsters around him were unable to resist the lure.

  Durvin stood there atop the wall like a shining beacon of spite. The ground shook with the summoned stampede as the monsters converged on the center wall… and they simply disappeared.

  One after the other, the monsters vanished. Like some cruel magic trick, Hal watched from the opposite side of the battle as monsters disappeared. There was no gore, no splatter, or attack of any kind that he could see.

  A monster was there, charging the wall one second, and the next it was, replaced by another monster. That monster vanished a moment later.

  Figuring he wasted enough time gawking, Hal pulled his attention back from any single Dominated monster and controlled them like a swarming group. He had a collection of various monsters, from the horrendous battering worms to the spiderbolgers and several oozing things he didn’t quite understand how to move properly.

  Stretching himself to the limits, Hal used his monsters to harry and slow down the charging force. They mostly ignored him until he did enough damage to draw some attention back his way.

  Whatever was directing the monsters hardly cared for Hal’s stolen forces. He was free to attack the altered monsters at his leisure, often killing one or two before any of them realized what he was doing.

  Using one monster to cover the other, Hal continually pincered groups of monsters, drawing them away from the wall and giving the defenders time to focus on the closest threats.

  Up on the parapets, Hal’s spidery monsters kept the worst of the assault at bay, which allowed the crews up above to rain down boulders upon the field. Once or twice one of his own monsters was hit, but it was an acceptable loss.

  He would rather lose all of his Dominated monsters than to risk the life of a single citizen.

  Just as the defenders were finding their rhythm again, utilizing Hal’s distraction, there came a new threat onto the battlefield.

  It came from the dark of the Shiverglades, beyond the reach of the Daybreak’s sun. A discordant, trumpeting sounded in the deep. It rebounded off the high cliff walls all around Hal’s monsters and threatened to tear his control from them.

  Tightening his magical grip on his dwindling minions, Hal reasserted his control as another trumpeting blare echoed from the depths of the Shiverglades.

  Several monsters closest to the source of the noise were blasted apart as if an invisible club had smashed them into streams of ichorous bile. The darkness rolled in closer, defying the light of the miniature sun.

  The horde of monsters surged forward with renewed strength. They ignored Hal’s stinging bites and claws. He couldn’t hope to stop them.

  Walls began to break. Large chunks of the Earthen Bulwarks began to cave and collapse. As fast as they were being broken down, Hal used Mana Repair to build them back up again, but he was getting dangerously low on EP.

  Durvin bellowed again, a great shout that rolled out over the gap attracting even more monsters. From high above, one of his minions spied the source of the disappearing monsters.

  Purple spiked tendrils snaked out from the Palisade, ensnaring the nearest monster that dared to approach. Impossibly, the monster seemed to shrink as it was pulled closer until it was no larger than a small chest.

  It disappeared into a small gap in the Palisade, where another of Hal’s monsters caught the glint of a gold banding.


  Vorax would eat well that night.

  155

  With less than 20 of his Dominated minions remaining, Hal was quickly beginning to realize that the force arrayed against them was too great. Once again, he was reminded that they only needed to survive the night.

  Even remembering that was difficult in the thick of things. Everything felt so urgent, so life-or-death (mostly because it was), that the only thing Hal could focus on was destroying one enemy after the other.

  But his most effective moves hadn’t been to destroy large swaths of enemies, it had been when he forced chokepoints and slowed the advancing waves of monsters down.

  The red-black flames were slowly dying down. The horde of monsters was beginning to test them again, hardier creatures like the golems of mud and stone took the hit to their HP just to reach the crumbling walls faster.

  Without access to his Beast Magic, he was forced to rely on the innate magic of each creature under his control. The mutated Morbolgers could breathe devastating attacks, but they took time to cast.

  Still, Hal did his best to use the Morbolger’s varying breath attacks. Unsurprisingly, the results weren’t exactly spectacular.

  Just like before, he felt a malicious will guiding the monsters all around him. He was able to catch a few - at best - in his breath attacks, but for the most part, the monsters parted around his minions like they were rocks in a stream.

  Many of them even ran over the burning ground, rather than risk the devastating effects of being breathed on by a Morbolger.

  If only I had fire! he thought. His goal had been to use Bomb Toss to ignite several Morbolgers, then use their uniquely altered Flame Breath attack to destroy groups of monsters at once.

  Granted, that would ignite the other Morbolgers, but with the gloom about them - even with the illuminating false sun above - that would only mark them as priority targets to the Rangers.

  And the Morbolgers were not the dominant species among the enemy forces. In fact, Hal couldn’t find a single species that seemed more represented than any other.

  From the compound eyes of one of his minions, Hal saw a slithering slug-like creature moving with thousands of tiny cilia right over the red-black flames.

  Watching the eldritch flames dance, he realized he did, in fact, have access to fire.

  Without reservation, Hal converged each Morbolger - including the mutated versions - onto a patch of steadily burning ground. The flames predictably caught on the Morbolgers with ease. He hadn’t been sure it would work, considering the flames were laced with eldritch essence from using Deep Magic on his earlier Bomb Tosses.

  They hurt a lot more than Hal figured normal fire would, but he worked with what he had.

  Breathing in, Hal had the Morbolgers send gouts of Napalm Breath across the field. Just like before, the malicious entity knew what he was doing and moved the forces of monsters accordingly.

  This time, Hal was counting on that. The red-black flames coated the Morbolger’s breath attack, erupting in a wide cone of shadowy ruby flame. The patches of ground that were burnt out became coated in the substance.

  With the Morbolger’s breath acting like an accelerant, the ground burned even fiercer than before. Few monsters were caught in the attack, but that wasn’t the point.

  Hal was remaking the curving lanes, forcing the monsters along prescribed paths or risk the enhanced eldritch flames. With nearly a dozen Morbolger’s to work with, he was able to work much faster than before.

  Painting the flames across the floor of the gap tired out his minions. Every breath attack wearied them, but Hal pushed them on. He would destroy every single one if he had to.

  A maze of pathways, looping and winding back on themselves into dead-ends began to appear within the gap. Perched up high, a spider under Hal’s control provided an aerial view of his designs.

  The edges of the gap were coated in thick funneling flames that slowly narrowed the approaching force, making their superior numbers work against them. Several of the monsters charged headlong into the high ruby flames but were quickly consumed.

  Even the hardy golems didn’t last long in the blazing conflagration. That was because each Morbolger stood vigil within a small unburned pocket. From there, they spun around slowly like sprinklers spewing a near-constant stream of eldritch flame.

  Faced with such an obstacle, the monsters allowed themselves to be funneled. With the higher vantage point along the walls and up on the parapets, the defenders picked them off at range.

  Boulders that crashed into the red-black flames turned into fiercely burning torches. Arrows that skimmed over the tops of the ten-foot-tall lines of fire took on the eldritch nature of the flames as well.

  Throughout it all, Hal’s forces were dwindling. He had to sacrifice more and more of the Morbolgers in order to keep them protected while they spewed their eldritch flames.

  He couldn’t keep this up forever. The flames needed constant attention, the curving lanes were taking longer and longer to set up as he was forced to leave Morbolgers behind.

  The enemy never seemed to tire, and its inexhaustible force tested Hal’s defenses at every turn. The walls were under constant assault, though it had slowed since Hal implemented the burning maze.

  But there was no way to keep that going for as many hours as they needed. It was now the dead of night, but they had several hours to go still. He didn’t get a chance to use Manatorpor in the way he wanted either.

  Try as he might, he couldn’t access any of his typical powers. Not that he had ever been in this situation before. He couldn’t even divert enough of his mental energy to try and wake up - wherever he was.

  Among his minions was the Disara. He had almost forgotten about the feline in the crash of battle all around. Focusing his attention on the Disara, he used its superior speed and more familiar senses to find the Palebark Treant.

  Unsurprisingly, the treant was giving off a faint moonlight glow. Several defenders had rallied around it. They gave the Disara a wary glance before turning back to their duties.

  Many of them sported bandages stained red, but they continued their attacks. Karaks hauled up boulders and smaller stones along with supplies of arrows and other ammunition.

  Every face was grim with determination, but behind each was a weariness that Hal sympathized with. There weren’t enough of them to defend every wall. People scrambled about, but there were only a couple defenders per section at best.

  Using the Disara as a conduit, Hal channeled Mana Repair into the walls, depleting the Settlement’s EP further. One or two walls, that was all he could keep up anymore. If one of them failed….

  The Disara’s keen feline eyes scanned the walls, the people rushing about as groups called for aid for their section. He saw Ashera and Noth rush to the west to deal with a beaked creature that tried to climb over the wall and drag away a dwarf.

  It became obvious to Hal then that the walls would fail. There was no way they could defend all of them. They were spread too thin, and every wound, every injury shrunk their forces even more.

  And all the while the Shiverglades emptied their lairs of monsters.

  The Disara whipped back to look at the Palebark Treant. Hal tried to work its mouth, but only growls and snarls came out.

  However, the Palebark Treant seemed to understand him. Or at least gathered the gist of what Hal was trying to communicate.

  With one final lobbed boulder, the Palebark Treant gave a gentle bow to Hal and lumbered off to the north away from the wall. Many crestfallen faces followed its retreat.

  Hal couldn’t explain to them what he was doing, and in any case, he was running out of time.

  The flames of the maze wouldn’t last forever. If he had a larger force and more time, maybe he could have done something more. But every breath attack weakened his monsters further. They were even less resistant to the eldritch flames than the normal kind.

  Forced to surround them in a pocket where they could be protected
from reprisal, Hal only had a dozen remaining monsters at his beck and call. Most of them hovering around 50% HP and with several hours yet of battling to go.

  He didn’t know if he could Dominate anymore, or what state his body would be in when - or if - he went back to it. But as he spotted a weakened creature making its way toward a lightly defended portion of the wall, he realized he had to try.

  156

  “They’ll break through any minute!” Elora shouted at the barbarian.

  Elaise regarded her and the swirling marks she had placed on Elora days earlier when her protection began to fade. It had caused more than a little trouble with the Ebon Star scouts, but aside from two, none dared remark aloud about the breaking of tradition.

  Not when the sacred pobul had been perched on Elora’s shoulders.

  “You know nothing of these beasts,” Elaise said, keeping [Angurvadal] strapped to her back. If she drew it, she knew its runes detecting enemies would be blazing like the sun that now curiously sat over the entrance to the Bravers tribal lands.

  Elora stuck out her chin. She was a feisty one. “You have taught me much of the enemies we would find in the Shiverglades.”

  “Not these,” Elaise said, her voice low and almost frightened. “The Shadesblight is not to be trifled with. It is evil incarnate. Darkness given form with a single malicious will.”

  She tried to keep the depths of her fear from her voice. One look at the roiling cloud of voidmist that covered Frostheart, the mountain at the center of the Black Lands - what the fangrah called the Shiverglades - nearly made her turn tail and run.

  Not in her wildest dreams had she ever thought to see an incursion on such a scale. She had expected the Shadesblight to be minor, and even that would have been enough to destroy the fledgling tribe.

  Several of her scouts, seasoned Ebon Star tribesmen one and all, looked at her with open fear. Elaise wracked her brain for an answer. Even Aleya would have a difficult time deciding what to do.

  When had the Shadesblight grown so powerful? Had it been toying with them all these decades?