by Sean Oswald
After a few minutes of the casting, cooldown, casting cycle, a full fourteen smoky black stallions with wings stood before them. A person might have expected them to have red eyes or a fiendish appearance, but instead, they were more like clouds shaped like horses with fuzzy edges. Max gave the command for all of the squad to mount up and then two by two they took off into the air, climbing higher and higher slowly forming into a V-shaped formation headed northwest. Their speed continued to increase as he channeled his skill and started to slowly sip on a brilliantly bright blue mana regeneration potion. A faint red aura began to grow as the only outward sign of his skill.
Hours earlier, just before the first sunrise, Aloysia, daughter of the mayor of Eris’ Rise, was up racing around the home belonging to Malcolm, one of the loggers. Her father would have been scandalized for her to be found at this hour in the home of a man she wasn’t married to. It wouldn’t have even mattered that she wasn’t there for any improper reason. In fact, once he learned what she was up to, Talvenicus would have been furious. Aloysia had that way about her of all too many young women her age. At twenty-one, she was pretty, and she knew it, and more importantly, she knew that the guys knew it too. Her age had allowed her to mature into her full beauty and become the object of desire for every unmarried man in the village of Eris’ Rise and perhaps even some of the married ones. Most young women in Albia married between fifteen and eighteen and very few made it past their twentieth birthday. The few occasions where that did happen would be where either the girl was too homely, or she was the sole heir to a noble home and her father was waiting for just the perfect match. Aloysia was as far from homely as possible, and while her father had been a relatively well to do crafter, they were hardly nobility.
No, in Aloysia’s case, it was a matter of a willful girl and a doting father who spoiled her. Today, that willfulness was on full display. She had seen the problems coming to town, the fact that the lumberjacks were refusing to go out and chop down trees anymore was the first domino in a chain of events which was bringing the growth and commerce of Eris’ Rise to a screeching halt. She had heard her father and the other council members talking about how long the settlers would be able to stay here and debating if they could weather the winter that was coming in a few short months. Albia as a whole had a very temperate climate, but that didn’t keep winter from being harsh, especially with the limited food supplies they had stockpiled, and with no more wood being shipped out, there was no further income or supplies coming back. Jarvis and the men working for him hadn’t even taken out a wagon in over two weeks. There simply wasn’t enough to sell.
That was where Aloysia’s bright idea came into play. She believed that the lumberjacks just needed some motivation. So, for the last week, she had been flirting with all of the unmarried men, hinting in the vaguest of terms that she might be inclined to listen to a marriage proposal from the type of man who could get the logging going again. She expanded her efforts if with slightly different flirty methods to the married or older men, making it seem as though they didn’t want to be the sort of man who would let his fellow loggers go out alone.
So here she was in pre-dawn hours, cooking up a huge breakfast and preparing to feed however many of the men would actually show up to the little meeting that she had called. Even she was surprised when over thirty men showed up for her meeting and was glad she had made several pounds of bacon and stacks of flapjacks. She served them in a traditional Albian fashion with heaping servings of jellied apples in large chunks and baked in cinnamon along with thick dollops of whipped cream. If the simple countrymen of Albia liked anything more than a pretty woman, it was their hearty food and of course a good ale. If Aloysia hadn’t hooked them before this, she certainly had now. Only twenty-two of the men were unmarried, which indicated that her ploy with the married men had not been entirely unsuccessful. These thirty-one men represented over seventy-five percent of the total number of loggers in Eris’ Rise, and they were all here to hear out her proposal.
As soon as she had made sure that all of the men had been fed, which was no small task, she finally got around to explaining her idea. She explained how if they didn’t restart the logging and quickly, there wouldn’t be an Eris’ Rise come winter and most of them would have to return to their former lords and beg to be taken back on as serfs. Of course, this would mean much less favorable terms for them and any payments that they had made toward becoming free men before would be forfeit. So she played upon their fears just as much as she teased and cajoled them with her flirting. The combination of stick and tease was very successful and within half an hour, she had convinced all of the men to head out together to cross the bridge and head back into the Merkwood Zone.
Cooking that much of a meal had not been cheap, but Aloysia had gone further. She had sunk most of the remaining funds that she had hiring Jarvis and his two men to drive their three wagons across the bridge with the loggers. Her idea being that it would be safer with level 5 Jarvis there as well as with the crossbows of his men. She also knew that the wagons would make getting there faster and would enable them to bring the wood across in much larger quantities without making them stop their tree felling in order to transport the logs back.
Less than an hour later, Aloysia was sitting next to Jarvis on his wagon leading two other wagons each loaded with at least ten loggers. Full bellies and the excitement of being encouraged to believe they could make a difference by a pretty young woman had all of the men talking and jibing at one another about why they had ever been afraid to cross the river in the first place.
Draznei’kai sat in quiet meditation as he had for the past two days, his body slowly soaking up the ambient mana around him. This was a valuable skill that he had learned many years ago at great personal expense. Normally, his personal mana pool would be limited to two hundred mana. He could, of course, have purchased or looted gear that would have enhanced his available mana, but his slots were busy being used for other types of gear. With this skill and some prep time, he had no need for mana-boosting gear. He could keep absorbing mana and over the years had gained the ability to hold up to an extra 5800 mana. Of course, the speed with which he could absorb that mana was entirely dependent upon the level of available ambient mana in whatever zone he was in at the time. This was why he had risked hiding his sanctum deep in the Chenhou Forest, close to the strength of the Moon Elves. The risk was worth it though because the ambient mana level was so much greater. In the two days of meditating, he had been able to absorb just over 1000 extra mana, which would give him many more options in battle.
Now, however, his eyes popped open; his meditation disturbed. Someone was in his sanctum. As he stood to face whoever would dare to enter his private place, he was greeted by a short, dark-haired human kneeling before him and saying, “I have been sent with a message, great lord.”
With that, Draznei’kai relaxed, knowing that this meat sack must have used one of the teleportation crystals which he had given to certain agents for direct communication. He further confirmed with his esoteric senses that the wards around the perimeter of his sanctum had not been breached and so teleportation was the only probable explanation for the one kneeling before him. The crystals were massively expensive and difficult to obtain even for one such as him but long-distance magical communication, while cheaper was not as reliable and in particular not as secure. It wouldn’t do to have some errant wisp of magical communication be overheard by some mage who just happened to be in the right place.
After listening to the information that was delivered, he knew that his agent had made the right decision in sending a message. This news could change everything, and it would require significant use of resources on his end to intervene and prevent this disruption of the plans he had been following for so long. The messenger then interrupted his contemplation, “Great lord, I was told that you would provide me with a way home.”
Irritated at the interruption, Draznei’kai turned his glowing eyes upon the mes
senger who now felt the full weight of the fear aura which a death knight naturally generates. “Yes, you are correct. I will be sending you home.” His gravelly voice was as serious as death itself.
In a flash, the rune etched blade had left its sheath and the head of the messenger had left his shoulders. In Eloria, it was often hard even for a much higher level being to one-shot another living being. In this instance, though, where one was affected by the paralyzed status condition due to fear, the chance of a critical strike or even a coup de grace was much greater. Factoring the power of a sword strike from one such as Draznei’kai and the feeble nature of the messenger, it really wasn’t surprising that one blow was all it took.
A flick of the wrist cleaned his blade of the small amount of blood on it, and the death knight stepped over the corpse bleeding out all over the floor of his sanctum. If he had been a living being, he would have undoubtedly been much more bothered by a pool of blood on the floor, but to a death knight, this was just a bit of pleasant ambience. As he reached a finely made and deeply stained wooden chest, banded with strips of silver and sitting upon a small table carved out of the thigh bone of some massive beast. His sword sheathed again, he placed his hands gently upon the box, almost reverently. Once opened, the box revealed a plush cushioned interior padding and covered with a rich crimson cloth. Sitting in the chest, divided by an inch were three six-inch-long perfectly cut rose quartz crystals with a milky cloud seemingly swirling in the interior of each crystal. Draznei’kai delicately picked up all three crystals and shifted them into his left hand, hearing the high-pitched tinkling sound as they brushed against each other in his grasp.
Striding with purpose, the death knight crossed to the wall of his sanctum and placed his left hand against the wall. The wall responded to his touch and the enchantments worked into the very stones caused a hidden door to reveal itself as a section of the stone eight feet high by five feet wide receded a foot before sliding to the right and exposing a dirt path, which upon closer investigation would look much more like stairs than a random path. As he walked up the path out of his hidden safe house, Draznei’kai extended his esoteric senses and splurged on 50 mana to extend his senses to their maximum range of two miles. This was another skill that was available to anyone with the mana to use it, but of which all too few understood the value. Having sunk 40 character points into the skill, he could spend 50 mana per minute and extend a sixth sense that was superior to sight or hearing. It would be impossible to explain exactly what the sense felt like for someone who had never experienced it, but it allowed the user to feel and know what was going on in the entire area his senses expanded out to in real-time. That was how the death knight knew that there were no sentients within two miles of his location, although there were certainly many creatures of the forest.
Now confident that he had the needed privacy, he tossed the three crystals into the air and activated the enchantment on each of the soul stones at the same time. They had to have been previously linked before this by whoever enchanted them and the cost to have three such crystals linked must have been staggering. It cost only a small amount of his precious mana to activate the crystals, the real mana cost of them having come with their creation. These stones were thought by some conjurers to be the height of their craft. As the scant few points of mana left his body the crystals started to spin end over end as the magic within them began to expand, cracking the matrix of the spell form woven into the crystals. Each started to move apart as a milky white cloud formed where each crystal had been spinning in the air, and within less than a minute, the crystals and clouds were gone and three Winged Camouflage Wyverns had replaced their respective clouds. As their summoner, Draznei’kai shared a psychic link with each of them and pictured what he wanted them to do. With shrill shrieks, the wyverns beat their wings faster and started to climb into the air toward the south, intent on doing his bidding.
Chapter Seventeen
“I pity those who lack the strength of spirit to seek out power, who cower away behind the shields of those who provide them security. They should not be thought of as equals or fellow countrymen. At best they should be thought of as pets depending upon the largess of better men and at worst they should be thought of as leeches draining the vitality from our society.” —Excerpts from a public response made by Imperial Praetor, Chuk Nor-Fan to the speech of civil rights activist, Won Chil-In.
It amazed Emily when she awoke after their second night of sleeping in Eloria that she wasn’t disoriented to her circumstances or tired, but rather felt as though she had slept a full night. She saw that the sunrise, or rather, first sunrise was just a golden slit on the horizon, so she knew it was still relatively early. Sitting up from where she had been sleeping, she had to carefully move Dave’s arm from its position draped over her so as not to wake him. This second morning she was able to look around and make more observations. The crushing rush of fear and anxiety which had greeted her upon waking after her first night sleeping on this woven platform of branches was not present. The ease of breathing and being alive seemed to be with her but none of the fear, and her first reaction was to be worried about that. She almost laughed at herself. She was so committed to worrying that she was worried about not worrying. At least she was recognizing it. The counselor she had been seeing since the death of her father would be proud of this moment of self-awareness, but then she stopped focusing on how she felt and took in her surroundings.
What really leapt out her at first was the lack of noise. A family of blue jays nested in the tree right outside the window of the bedroom she shared with Dave back on Earth. While it could be annoying at times, she had come to appreciate the sound of their singing as a signal of the start to a new day, but here, Dave had already commented about how quiet this forest was, and she had to agree with him. After noticing the lack of forest sounds, she did notice something else. There was a subtle vibration to the tree, almost like it was swaying in the wind or something, which didn’t seem possible. Dave had chosen this tree, and she had agreed with him because its wood was incredibly hard, almost like metal. She had never felt any sort of wood even close to this before on Earth. The more she felt the vibration, the more attuned to it she became, and it actually felt more like one of those massage chairs back home. She just couldn’t figure out what could be making the tree shake like this. It also occurred to her that this rhythmic vibration might be part of why they had all slept so well, but now it was time to wake up Dave because she was getting an ominous feeling about the vibrations.
As she went to wake up him up, she realized that Dave was already awake and staring at her. “Is something wrong, Dave?”
“Nothing at all. I’m just busy looking at the most beautiful thing in Eloria,” Dave replied with that mischievous grin of his that made him look like he was a four-year-old caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
She wasn’t sure if she should be flattered or creeped out that he had been staring at her for an unknown amount of time but opted to go with flattered. Apparently, Dave wasn’t the only one laying around while still awake because at that time, in the key of sarcastic teenager, she heard, “Eww, is that an old man pick-up line? How does that even work?”
Before Emily could say anything in response to her eldest daughter, Dave chimed in, “Well, you better be glad my lines worked or you would never have been born.” Then in his horrible attempt at a rap/ghetto voice, he said, “Hate the game, not the playa.”
In that moment, both mother and daughter were joined in a laugh. As she got her laughter under control Emily responded, “Oh honey, you don’t have any game, but I love you for it.” Mira giggled even more at Dave’s reddening face, which caused Emily to try to cushion his bruised ego. “Don’t worry, honey, I love that you don't have any game because I know you are always true to me.”
Choosing to rise past the embarrassment, Dave stood up and said, “Well, you never have anything to worry about. I’ve already got the best, why mess with the rest?”
Emily winked at Mira, encouraging her not to laugh anymore at her father’s lame lines and instead launched into her concerns about the vibration in the tree. In fact, she would almost swear that the vibrating was more intense than just five minutes before and seemed to be building in speed. Emily asked the others if they noticed it, and Dave started talking about how he had felt it before but had just assumed it was yet another weird thing about Eloria. Now that she noticed the shaking, Mira also jumped to her feet, her eyes darting from side to side. Then she screamed and pointed at the trunk a short way up from the platform of woven branches they were resting on. Following the line of sight from her finger up, both Dave and Emily saw a stream of ants pouring out of a hole in the bark and moving up the tree. That is, if ants were a foot long and triangular. Dave immediately recognized the creature he had seen crawling into a hole at the base of the tree before and explained as much to the other girls. Meanwhile, Mira’s scream had of course woken Jackson and Sara.
Dave explained to Emily about seeing another of the creatures before. They both felt that it could be problematic to have a nest of the creatures inside their tree since they seemed to be all over the tree.
Jackson scoffed, “What’s the big deal? It’s just some bugs.”