I walked away from that encounter both enriched and knowing exactly who I was going to gift my books on magic lore to once I finished taking notes and jotting them down in my journal.
When Commander Traser gave the order to form up and march out, I had nearly regained all of my lost mana, only missing a thousand or so. The sky was turning red as we marched over the ash and cool coals. “It's going to get dark, really quickly,” Ailsa said still from my satchel. “And probably colder too.” She whined at the realization.
“Your right…” I trailed off in thought as she redoubled her efforts to stay warm in the satchel. “Alright, we’re not going to have a battle of Winterfell here. Let's risk a little more light than that at least.” I started casting Light Ball 1, scattering them as far as I could, lighting the entire hill leading up to the ruined buildings. A few of the more critical ones, along the roadway or on the ridges, I infused with extra mana, ensuring they would last through the night.
By the time we reached the ruins entrance, and the first few squads of infantry men-at-arms had broken down the rotting door, darkness was growing all around us. Lord Traser set about clearing the upper levels, and by the time they met major resistance, the sun had effectively set.
---
I heard shouting, and the clashing of steel. A man screamed, and fell out a third-story window, a black silhouette frantically biting into his neck and ripping at his armor and face with its hands, clinging to him as he fell. “Archer!” I said pointing at one of the rangers left outside with me to guard against any attacks from the rear.
The ranger pulled and loosed before I was finished speaking, landing his shot and breaking the creatures back just as they both landed with a hard thud that ended the man’s screaming. The priest and two guards rushed forward, dragging the man off to one side and administering aid.
“I hate being on the outside of these things.” Tol’geth, standing next to me, grunted his agreement with the sentiment. “I feel like I have an itch I just can't scratch.”
“Guard duty is an honorable assignment Wizard Rayid.” Said the leader of the group of surviving squires who had been assigned to assist me. Other then the squires, two squads of rangers, and a ten-man squad of militia, nearly everyone was inside clearing rooms, securing the building, charging staircases, and killing the blasted creatures. Oh, and Ma’vone was there with me, but that was more out of concern that the elemental that followed him around like a puppy might set the entire thing afire, rather than an assignment.
“I know that Squire Rithgall,” I said, remembering the boy's name. “Doesn’t make it easier after two days of nearly constant fighting though.” The boy nodded his agreement.
“I must admit, I’d rather be in there with Sir Barristan watching his back,” Rithgall said. “I joined his service after a group of Horse Clan Bloodriders raided my village and burned it to the ground. He and the other knights rode out from Laketown and slew them to the last man, or so it's said. Then, they stayed with us until we made it back to the town.”
Intrigued, having not heard of another village along the river I asked “Where was your village? How large?”
“It was meant to be a small estate named Bridgehome, but it was more a hovel than a proper estate. It was designed to meet the needs of the clans as they passed through and went over the bridges to and from Hunters Hollow every year in spring and autumn. It was right at the base of the bridges, not very far north from Laketown. It only had a handful of families that built homes.” The blond-haired boy sighed as his hands nervously clenched and unclenched around the hilt of his sword.
“It never would have grown into much, but the clans are skittish of us building anything north of Laketown on this side of the river. They think our walls will block them from crossing the river. Not that it stops them from using the bridges we built, but that's of no concern to them.” Rithgall trailed off for a moment staring into the darkness.
“Well, most of them didn’t mind too much. Some of them even took to the idea with enthusiasm buying and trading with us in greater quantities then they had ever before. They don’t work metal beyond bronze very easily, the nomads. Too hard to build forges in new places every time you move. So, when they can get their hands on iron, or proper steel, they usually don’t mind trading with us. They give us pelts, rare herbs and plant seeds we sell down the river at the Twins for gold, and we give them fish and steel.”
“I take it some of them didn’t take to the new buildings with the same enthusiasm?” I asked trying to steer the conversation back to the story.
“Aye, they didn’t at that. Some of the smaller clans, the older ones whose founders rode with the Khans who broke the Lion Men to the east in the old days, they take any building in their path, any walls even in their sight as an affront to their horse Gods. They were band from using our bridges years ago. Instead, they go north to the great fords near the Krag every year. So, when they broke with the other clans and started heading north, and they saw the new homes we had built on this side of the bridges? They went mad. Sent two groups of ten led by their greatest warriors to burn our little hovel to ashes.” Again the boy's hands started gripping and then loosening on his swords handle as if eager to avenge the dead from his story.
“And they succeeded. Barristan charged in as the town was still burning, flanked by three other knights in full plate armor. They were glorious. I saw Barristan single-handedly skewer two of the riders, and then a horse on his lance in a single charge.” Another yell split the night and broke our conversation. This time instead of a man flying out a window, I saw Barristan, the same knight we had just been discussing, yelling a great battle cry at the top of his lounges, toss two of the black latex covered creatures out of the fourth story room of the western tower.
I looked over, but the archer had already loosed. The two arrows streaked through the night and in rapid succession struck both screeching creatures, killing one, and wounding the other just before they struck the ground. Neither one moved. To be sure, I set them both afire with a simple Jet of Flame. As I walked back, a great shout of triumph came from the top of the tower and quickly spread through the rest of the top side ruins in a tidal wave of triumph.
“I think we just won the surface,” I said rejoining my friends.
“Time for us to take the dungeon,” Tol’geth said as he unsheathed his greatsword. Before my very eyes, the thing shrank in length. It went from being nearly as tall as I was, to coming up to roughly my hip. It was shorter, squatter, and thicker, but still a deadly weapon. “Shorter weapons are better for fighting in tight quarters.” He explained, reiterating the very lesson I had tried to explain to my brother just before I came to Ethria.
My voice thick with emotion from the nostalgia of the memory, and the lingering doubts I knew I would always carry about the reality of this world, I said: “Yeah, let's get to work.”
----
We walked in through the front double doors, now blown off their hinges, and found Sir Barristan, Lord Traser, and Knight-Commander Traser all standing together smiling and celebrating. “We’re not done with the fighting yet,” I said as Tol’geth and I joined the other three in a circle. “We still need to find, and slay the necromancer in her own hole. Who is left to go with me?” I asked.
“Sir Barristan and my uncle will lead the defense here, meanwhile you, Tol’geth, I and a handful of other volunteers, knights all, will descend those stairs,” The Commander pointed at a set of large stone steps that led up, before branching off into three different staircases. One that led down and further into the mountain which sprang directly from the center of the staircase, and the other two leading upwards to the various rooms of the ruin. “Enter the crypt, find the necromancer if she has not fled, and destroy the altar she foolishly let us see back in Laketown, slaying anything that gets in our way. Sound good enough?” He asked still smiling from ear to ear.
“It sounds goo-” The ground underfoot shook, and men began to shout all aroun
d us.
“Black disks my lord! In the sky, just like before!” yelled one man from a balcony above us.
“Those black undead things are pouring out of them like candy at yule!” Yelled another. “One is a giant!”
“Gods protect us all!” And other exclamations of terror rang through the air like the forest ash that still fell from the sky.
I started towards the windows but Sir Barristan grabbed my arm. “No wizard, you and your company need to do your part. Descend into the crypt and find the bitch witch. Kill her and this nightmare ends!”
---
We organized ourselves quickly, two of the knights I didn’t know were at the rear with me in case we got ambushed. Tol’geth and Commander Traser were upfront with two more knights. From what Traser had said, I was the hidden weapon, even if I didn't really feel like it. Fire magic? Underground? In an old mine? Generally not a good combination.
I still had my staff, and the force spells I had saved there, so I wouldn’t be totally useless. I followed the group as we almost ran down the stairs. At the bottom, we found ourselves in a hallway with three doors. I put a finger to my lips to signal for quiet, while I cracked the door immediately in front of us open, the knights had fanned out and secured the other entryways into the cramped hallway.
The door creaked on rusty hinges so loud I could have sworn it would have woken the dead, that is if the dead hadn’t already been up, walking around, and fighting my friends above us. I peered inside.
In a rush, I pulled the door open about a foot, shoved the end of my staff inside, and engulfed the entire room in a Jet of Flame. The second one of the day from my staff's ability. “Goblins,” I said in an almost bored tone. “Sleeping. Didn’t want to leave them behind.” Tol’geth nodded at my explanation.
“Wise” was all he said in response.
While we let that room burn, we explored the other two, starting with the one on the left as we came down the stairs. As the knights charged into the room, all we found where boxes of foodstuffs, drying meats, and a cooking fire that had gone out a long time ago, though the smell of smoke still lingered. Whether it was from the fire pit or the still smoking room behind us, I didn’t know or care.
“This rooms just a storage space.” Traser said annoyed. “The door to the rest of the place from here has caved in. Back to the hall, we’ll go the other way.” We did as ordered. When the next door opened, we were all stunned by what we found.
Blackened and charred bodies littered the floor. The remains of humans, goblins, and wargs or what was left of them festooned nearly every inch of the space in charred, broken heaps. All of them were boneless. “Well, I think we found where they got all those bones from,” I said wryly as I covered my nose. The stench was almost unbearable, and one of the knights, even as seasoned as he was, wretched in a corner on top of a pile of boneless fingers that had been discarded.
There were tables lining the left side wall, with bodies tied down and naked, all dead, with half-finished, almost panicked runes like the ones from the shaman in Laketown carved into their flesh. More than a few had their bones exposed to air, and the carving process had been started there as well.
“Martha!” The other of my knight bodyguards screamed. He was of average height, and skinny, though strong and built like a runner. Locks of brown, almost black hair hung under his helmet, exposed to the rooms little light as he removed the metal bucket from his head.
The knight ran to one of the tied down victims, looked into her eyes, and began sobbing. “Martha no! No, no, no, no! You can’t go. Isabell needs you.” I stiffened at the name. I had heard it once, at the dock as Tol’geth, Ailsa, and I loaded scared Townsfolk aboard skiffs leading to what we thought was safety. A woman had called her daughters name. That woman had stopped her daughter from running away. I cast my gaze around me as I connected the dots.
“Wait.” The Knight said as if thinking everything through for the first time. “Where is Isabel? You had her.” He said this as he stroked his lover's hair, though it was caked in her own viscera. “Where is she?” The knight looked all around, first to the other tables then the floor, but nothing recognizable could be found in the mounds of discarded flesh and muscle.
“This was quick and dirty magic, she needed to make as many minions as she could to trap us, to keep us in place so her real monsters could wipe us out. Bury us in the bones of…” I put my hand on the man's shoulder and squeezed. He grabbed it desperately as if holding on for his life. “Burry us in the bones of loved ones.” The man let out a few, heart-wrenching sobs, before taking a deep breath of the rancid air, wiping his eyes clear on the cloth of his gambison, and nodding at me, ready to go.
“Goodman,” Traser said as he stood at the next door, ready to attack anything that came through at us before we were ready to move on. “Form up, we need to keep moving.” And we did just that.
When Traser opened the next door it lead into a longer hallway than the one we had left behind us. On the right-hand side, we found the small cave-in that blocked our entrance through the storage room, and a cave entrance carved right from the basement stone walls. “Into the cave.” Traser, his whispered order echoed off the stone walls around us.
“No real use sneaking around.” I said “They’d hear a Sunday church mouse sneaking around down there. Might as well just barge in like we own the place.” Traser and the others looked at me confused. “You know, shock and awe? Overwhelm them so they don’t know what's coming before we roll up on them and take them out?” My voice echoed too, but It was muffled enough by the bodies of the knights around me that I was sure that when it did eventually reach whoever was listening, they wouldn’t be able to make out what I was saying.
After a couple of seconds of them just staring at me in confusion, I rolled my eyes and strolled past them. “Fine, I'll show you what I mean. Follow me.” I walked down the cave, smacking my staff on the ground. “Bring out your dead!” I yelled as loudly as I could. “Bring out your dead!” I let this continue until I came to a three-way fork.
The knights to their credit overcame their shock at my audacity and rushed in to back me up. “BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!” My voice boomed, and I repeated the phrase in the direction of each of the passageways. I felt a metal hand rest on my shoulder after the last.
“I hear something,” Traser said, withdrawing his hand from me. I sniffed the air in all three directions and listened closely. Down the left passage smelled of copper, and piss.
Not going there , I thought. Probably something nasty. Directly ahead of us, was dusty and moldy, but comparatively not so bad. Down the right passage smelled of wood smoke, and cooking meat, and the gibbering guttural noises of excited goblins. The noises slowly grew louder and louder. I cast 3 balls of light and stuck them above each passageway. Then, I cast three more and sent them rolling down each passage.
Not seeing the goblins yet down the right, I watched the light on the left-hand hall roll. It illuminated a massive room and then disappeared underwater. It still cast a reddish hued light, but it was severely subdued. “Holy shit!” I screamed and almost fell backward. A massive red tentacle rose out of the water holding the light and threw it back in my direction. I analyzed the creature, and the only piece of information I got was its name “What the hell is a Blood Kraken?!” I asked.
Ailsa burst from my satchel and looked at me. “Not something you want to meet. Ever. Don’t go that way meathead. I heavily doubt if the necromancer summoned that thing, more likely it found itself drawn to all the blood drained into that pool. The necromancer is not that way, trust me.” I nodded gratefully, before turning back to where the goblins were coming from. I saw the first few creatures round the corner towards us. They were all coated in the black latex of the undead.
I sighed, raised my staff, stepped forward so the knights were out of the way, and blasted the thirty or so goblins with a Jet of Fire from my staff. The third charge I had left on the thing. Most of them quickly succumbed. Unl
ike their human counterparts, goblins, even super undead goblins, were still goblins. Still, some of them, around five or six, survived their wild dash through the conflagration.
I felt a pain in my gut and looked down to a goblin latched on to my abdomen with its teeth, ripping and biting. “AAAGH!” I screamed in pain and lost concentration on the spell. My skull nearly split open as the mana of the spell was reabsorbed into the staff, a small portion of it fed back into my mind through my will, which had been linked to the staff's activation and use.
“Goblin Reaver attacked you dealing 38 damage. Goblin Reaver has bitten you and is holding on. Ongoing damage 1d6 / second. Status Effects: Bleeding 1d4 damage/second.
“Concentration check failed. Spell lost. Spell feedback, 30 damage taken.”
I collapsed to my knees screaming in agony.
“This is why you stay behind us!” A voice I recognized only vaguely said, as I grabbed the goblins head and tried to wrench it away, causing more blood to spill out onto my gambison. A sword from the heavens above cut the goblin in half, and its jaw went slack. I could hear the sounds of fighting, and goblins and men dying all around me.
“Here, drink this.” Said the familiar voice. My eyes were firmly shut to the pain. A rough pair of massive hands forced my fingers open and shoved something into them. Then, lifted whatever that was to my lips.
My jaw was clenched against the pain. I felt the large hands force them open, pinching just under the joints. The pain was excruciating, I couldn’t think clearly until the jar of, whatever it was, went down my forcibly opened mouth. It tasted like pickle juice, and as the substance entered my body, the pain subsided and then disappeared.
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