Chương 173: AF Chapter 172 – Seals and Servants

We blew out the mining tunnel, right into a free fall that became an accelerated run down the air above the side of the hill, while something cracked up above us in agony and pain, peeling away from a pressure on reality itself. The cracks it made started to form a Seal that I thankfully closed my eyes in time not to see, screaming at both of them not to look back and to keep running. I didn't need to repeat it.

They kept running on the air down the slope, or more accurately speedskating for all they were worth, and they didn't stop until they reached the next hill a half-mile away, drove up its slope and then down and around the other side, leaving that mine out of our line of sight. Oily black smoke spewed up out of the stone, lit from within by yellow-purple flames that had hues in the thaumaspectrum I didn't want to see, and I promptly vomited them out on the ground from my guts and eyes.

Kris and the Mick decided not looking back at them was a good idea, just watching me as I heaved out my breakfast and memories of just what I'd seen in a long and unnatural line of filth. Quaver reached out, humming dangerously, and vivic-laced Lost Light ignited everything in those ocher and lambent colors on the ground, going right up the trail of snot and tears into my eyes and swirling around inside them urgently.

"That," the Mick noted, "was what me mam always warned me about dealing with spellcasters," he said with feeling, his back to that hillside.

"Meaning we both thought you were doing too goddamn much for such a simple thing, and fuuuuuck…" Kris translated, while I just sat there with stuff Burning en vivus coming out of all of my head's orifices. Kris made specifically sure the point of Quaver touched my ears and the glowing shit leaking out of them.

"You were fucking dead if I wasn't there, Ryin," she said softly. I somehow managed to speak up along coughing up psycho-spiritual goo in foul dribbles whose very taste I was banishing into more goo, vivus swirling in my lungs and stomach and sinuses and ears as it ate at the shit.

"Worse. I'd've been a mindblasted slave to whatever that was." The Mick closed his eyes, inhaling and exhaling.

"Fuck," he summed up nicely.

"This game, it just got bigger than we thought or dared t' think, aye?"

"Sum it up when you can talk, Ryin," Kris said quietly, steely hand gentle on my shoulder. I just nodded and spewed out shreds of memory, and vivus Burned them.

"The Land is in horrific pain here," I said, accepting a cup of very non-magical and finely-made tea from Kris and sipping from it slowly. I wasn't going to be able to eat anything for at least a day… which was okay, it wouldn't hurt someone who was Sustained, but my insides were just in a complete jittery mess.

"I'd liken it to someone punching a burning dagger into you, and it's still burning you, despite your nerves being fried, and its being done to something the size of a planet." The two of them looked around slowly, picturing Dereth as that red-hot poker, and the massive ley line structure underneath it.

"Aye, fuck again," the Mick summed up nicely.

"Whatever is down there felt my Call and sent out, I don't know, maybe hundreds of years of hoarded power along the ley lines to seize me, gain a servant who would work tirelessly to free it. The ley lines pushing back against it automatically, and the Fivefold Diagram, basically are the only things that let us get out in time."

"It's got good fucking reflexes," Kris murmured.

"Waiting all that time and pouncing the first time it heard just the beginnings of a Call…"

"That's the timeless quality ye spoke about gods an' things having," the Mick nodded slowly, finally understanding something of what that could mean.

"All those ages o' waiting, for a touch o' the magic nobody else can even use, intending to grab them body an' soul, an' so fast…" I breathed out through my nose to the side, gouts of stuff on vivic mistfire venting out it repeatedly, while more misting drool dribbled from my lips.

"Hate Aberrants," I said to nobody in particular.

"Emergency Spectacles of some kind?" Kris hazarded politely, squinting artfully.

"The first pair fer me," the Mick promptly interrupted, watching me.

"I dinnae ever want t' experience what ye're going through, an' I not be trustin' meself to see it coming like ye did an' only get the mild form o' fuck-headedness."

"You're all heart, Lord Mick."

"Aye, big an' black an' mighty, that be me!" he agreed without shame.

"Do you think anything out there felt that?" Kris asked me rhetorically.

"It's not a matter of if. It's a matter of understanding why," I answered weakly around the world's weirdest vomit.

"How's the smoke?" I asked faintly. Kris craned her neck around carefully.

"Fading?"

"I put Vivic Diagrams in all the walls, the ceiling, and under the floor." They both looked suitably impressed.

"Gor damned, ye be seriously overthinkin' all this shite," the Mick praised me.

"Highness, remind me never t' bet against the lass. Methinks she won't be gamblin' unless she's already won, given half a moment!"

"I think, Lord Mick, that when it comes to risking body, soul, and maybe the lives and existence of everything on the planet, she just takes the appropriate precautions, and we just weren't appreciating the scale of what might be happening here." He was silent for a moment as he contemplated that.

"An iron plug, red-hot, set to hissing in a wound, and the planet is the body," he finally muttered. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Sounds all kinds of wrong, doesn't it?" Kris nodded along. Hey, I had less psychoactive goop dripping, it was an improvement.

"What be the ley lines, then?" he asked softly. Kris thought about that for a moment.

"The stitches holding the red-hot plug in place," she finally theorized. He grimaced harshly at the example.

"That be so fucked up I dinnae even want t' remember hearing it, Highness."

"That's so fucked up I don't want to believe somebody did it, and yet somebody did," Kris answered with a grim nod of agreement.

"What's worse, we don't know who did it, although I'm pretty sure whatever is under there is not a long-lost force for Good and Life buried away by jealous rivals," she added, eyeing me and my mess.

"And I have my doubts anyone involved knows about it, because if they did, someone would be working on breaking the ley lines and setting the thing free, given the scales of time we are working at."

"And the fact they'd like be batshit crazy an' everything around them would off them on general principle?" he muttered.

"Well, given just how crazy this world was before the Fall, I'd say something is bleeding into reality here. Nobody questioning just how goddamn weird everything is, and how bleeding off whatever that creature's power is might be a good chunk of the power supporting abrupt manifestation of magical items out of nowhere. I really can't see anything below a true Divine level of power doing that, even if most of the stuff ended up being fried by a surge of that power going nuts…"

"Well, then, the two pyreal question be… how do we get rid o' the thing, so we can pull out the plug an' set things t' right?" he asked, shaking his head.

"I cannae even think clearly on things at that level. It's… not a something fer men, mortals, t' deal with, aye?"

"Yeah, this is one of the reasons you keep gods around," I finally spoke up again, leaning quickly off to the side as I sucked in a sharp breath and spontaneously hacked up something that actually plopped on the ground, as if revolted I might mention the gods and show some faith.

"oh, that feels much better…" I managed to get out, but I hadn't dropped my tea. Kris refilled it as I noted that my hair had, eh, religiously kept itself out of the goo. Sylune's Grace ftw, I guess? The Mick stolidly tapped Bunita on what I'd vented and watched it Burn away with cold, dark eyes.

"So your vivus will slowly eat away the alien energies there and give those investigating nothing to go on but an epicenter," Kris added heartlessly, watching the stuff I had expelled misting cheerfully away.

"What do you want us to do?" I could /reply through the Markdoor, spared them the experience and waited a couple minutes to do it vocally as the last of the goo was dripping mists and going away.

"I'll stay here and watch. I want to know not who was aware something happened, but who is good enough to find the center of the disturbance, and how they all react to it." The Mick grunted.

"Black-hearted fiends working together against something even blacker, as it were?"

"Sounds like the size of it," Kris agreed.

"It also shows what level of magical sensitivity they have, and if they have potential control or manipulation of the ley lines." Which naturally meant they could be the power that started the whole machinations that ended up in the Fall, and thus the ones responsible for the deaths of so many Isparians. The Mick nodded at the unspoken addendum.

"I be ready t' send 'em all t' True Death, ye know," he swore, and Bunita glimmered as Lost Lights swirled over her in his grip. Kris just clapped him on his leather-armored shoulder, his heavier plate stowed away at the moment.

"They've all earned it, Lord Mick. But when the masterminds who think themselves immortal get fed to the Land and go screaming to the fate they've dodged so long, well, I think that's going to be pretty damn satisfying." The Mick nodded just slightly. He'd killed avatars or stand-ins for Lady Aerefalle and Lord Rytheran before, but they'd just returned, unharmed and only mildly irritated at the deaths, like breaking a nail or something.

Doing it when her harpy voice would be silenced forever, and Rytheran's sneering saturnine speech ended, would be very sweet. Now, Prince Geraine, the supposed leader of all the undead (even if the Dericostans barely acknowledged it), he'd never met that undead bastard, save for slaughtering some traitors to the mortal races who'd agreed to act as agents and hands for the very secretive, paranoid, yet equally arrogant and dismissive son of a former Empyrean Emperor.

The Mick was looking forward to feeding the bastard to the Land, watching his disbelief and horror as he finally died...

The two of them stayed long enough to make certain I was okay, then took the Linejump I gave them and flashed off toward the horizon. Dropping in from half a mile in the air was a rather flashier method than the Portal-hopping Lord Mick had once been used to, but, he was quick to say, it had a LOT more style to it.

Tomorrow, well, soon it would be today, we'd be bringing the Wagon across to Overlook, and starting the return efforts, clearing out the southeast of Summon points and crippling the species who relied on them for their punch. It would especially cripple the undead and the shades. The mountainside was calm, now, the profound meaning of the cracks in it gone as vivus warred with…

whatever that shit had been and finally ate it away, restoring 'normality' to the area and leaving precious little damn sign anything important had occurred there. I was pretty sure that nothing remained of my Fivefold Diagram, but I wasn't going to go in there or stupidly Scry the area to find out.

I was massively unsurprised when a powerful group of elite undead were the first to arrive at the area. I watched them from Invisibility and behind the next hill, three-quarters of a mile away, as they scoured the area and cast a lot of spells, trying to find out what had happened here. The Virindi were the next to arrive, with powerful individuals in severe black body-suits floating in with grimly serious masks in place.

There was curt acknowledgment and tenseness for a minute, and then the undead just ignored the virindi, as they were ignored in turn, both turning to do their tasks. It was hard to say if the shades had felt something or they were just following the movements of the other two, but an armored troop of them in bright crimson armor showed up, and amusingly enough were able to speak to both of the other forces enough to arrange some manner of information sharing between all three, it looked like from afar.

Allies of convenience, to be ignored and fought against the next time they met, nothing more. I did mark all the Named Shades and Revenant Lords who led their people, as well as the types of the virindi who responded. Before their search elements reached where I was watching, I also Linejumped away, below their lines of sight, the Sublime Chord dissipating the magic into the ley lines and making sure they detected nothing of my presence or passage, the whiteness from my expelled goo having vanished at Dawn Renewal.