Chương 21: AF Chapter 20 – Someone was Busy!

The Brute and the Hag had personally interrupted that Ceremony, and it had gone horrifically bad. Spatial ruptures had destroyed the entire heart of Corcosa, and with it the central powers of Viamont, including almost all of the royal lines. That event had marked the great decline in the appearance of the Portals to other worlds. Now the Portals only manifested in places where great amounts of magic were thrown about, or places of power.

"Well, of course a fucking Source and Null would mess up a grand magical Ceremony to their advantage," I murmured to no one, still a bit stunned as the stories Mira remembered cycled through my memory. Damn, Sama and Briggs had gone off on the Viamontians! If the Viamontians fought, they were put to the sword. If they surrendered, their possessions were burned, their great herds of cattle slaughtered and left to rot or burned, and their arrogance put to the boot.

Only the Clans who had not participated in the armies of conquest were left alone, and few of those there were, as the Viamontians had a very martial culture. Estimations were that a full third of Viamont's people had perished in the fighting there, unable to believe they could be fought and bested so bloodily, and the famine and fighting for survival and positions afterwards had further raised that number to half.

The tainted Blood of the Viamontians was now a byword and a curse in Ispar, and the average Viamontian's blue skin was basically seen as little better than the blood of demons.

'The Viamontian Way', the mantra for what they had done returned tenfold upon the Viamontians themselves, was also derided throughout the continent. Briggs and Sama had returned to Roulea and been proclaimed Emperor and Empress. No one had dared to speak out against them, and the loyalty of the multi-national force underneath them was unbreakable.

They were proving to be as remarkably adept at administration as they were at outright war, to the disbelief of many who wanted to categorize them as bloodthirsty marauders and savages. They had rebuilt some of the famous and necessary Imperial institutions, while avoiding waste and corruption somehow as they expanded their grip on the lands of Roulea, Aluvia, and Gharu'n in a relatively bloodless manner.

It was how the Imperial Academy of Magic had been restored after its plundering and dismissal by the Viamontians. As for the secrets of Rune Smithing, only those Sworn to the Imperial Household learned the secret of the ebon-edged Blades that glowed the Colors of their wielders' souls... The two of them had even introduced Human, and it was infecting the human populations haplessly, unable to deny the genetic language.

The main holdout was the Viamontians, who had problems learning it, which only underscored their inhuman heritage in the eyes of the Imperials. Adding on the Magic of the Allegiance Oath and Sama's Marks giving them followers who were more powerful than others and telepathically connected, there was no question as to what was behind the incredible loyalty their followers displayed, and their uncanny ability to communicate and coordinate.

Runesmithing and Naming Umbral Weapons that didn't rely on magical charge-ups from a mage for their power had naturally turned the fighting situation upside down. Ignoring armor had basically turned the entire Viamontian army into cloth-wearing peasants ripe for slaughter. My attempted looting of a mage's building done, I turned to survey the other two buildings. Both were of stone, but of very different styles, one being more lightly-brickwork, similar to some of the walls in the, well, dungeon down below.

The other was more like hand-carved fortification blocks, older, thicker, and darker. The first one was also shattered to pieces, with a blasted and fused crater and hole leading down into the ground, the interior bricks melted, warped, and shattered by an arcane explosion that had sent boulder-sized chunks falling in every direction, including downslope, and doubtless smaller pieces for hundreds of yards in all directions.

I heavily doubted anything had survived that eruption, and while there was vestigial magic in the bricks, it was fading, broken, and leaking away. There was definitely a feeling of power in the crater and hole going down, but I didn't feel like sliding down into there to test it out with Levitate having expired while I was searching. The last building was sprayed over nearly a hundred yards, and looked to have been some sort of watchtower originally.

It had overbalanced and fallen downslope when the upsurge from below came, spreading stones and a shattered warning bell all along the downslope. One last great ringing to herald the end of the world, I guessed, looking down at the ruins here, and then the remains of the town visible through the brush... There was a Summons here, about forty yards from the remains of the buildings.

It stood out because it had cleared an area in the brush and snow with its occasional motions, walking around its point to keep warm, perhaps reacting to things passing by and trampling the grass down to do so. First, its existence told me that there were external Summons, not restricted to the dungeon below, or others I might run across. The implications to that were huge, although I didn't know how it worked with proximity to a town.

Second, it had only the most basic clothing, so it was probably dying to exposure routinely and being re-Summoned. Magic was some cruel shit at times. It was basically about chest-high on me, with a wide head, large night-seeing eyes, and yellowish skin, bluntly clawed hands and feet, and an omnivore's teeth. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. Assay pegged it as a Drudge Slinker,'Drudge' being a humanoid type I was completely unfamiliar with.

The wide, staring eyes could seem cute, but most Summons default to 'attack anything not like me in the area', and I found it hard to picture most people putting up with a dangerous Summons in their area. Then again, if you were aware of the danger range and kept out of it, it wasn't much different from having an unpaid guard around?

I did move closer to it, just to test its reactions, and with unfailing zeal, it charged me once I got within twenty yards, watching me the whole way, meeping like a demented cat or something as it flailed with its blunt claws at me. I shot it down with one volley of Darts, and it died with a pained keening. I watched it fall, the ectoplasm energetically discorporating, and subtle power building around the Summon point as waiting magic prepared to Summon again. Fwzap, just like in the dungeon below.

Multi-colored lights swirled, Astral Templates condensed, and a new Summons materialized on the Summons point. What the heck was a Carrion Shreth? The thing looked like a weird four-hooved omnivore, the back legs short and very powerful, the front legs longer and ready for battering and beat downs, with a row of broad, circular spikes along its spine, shoulders, and the back of its almost spherical head. It was also happy to immediately charge me, despite only being waist-high to me.

It first tried to ram into me and knock me down, which I dodged deftly, curious as to its attack patterns. The bony ridge-teeth of its broad mouth chomped at me, trying for a bite as I slid aside, and then it swung forward, trying to kick me with a startlingly long thrusting double kick from the rear legs I danced back from after seeing it plant its forelegs. That turned into a jumping roll at me, actually trying to impale me with the spikes on its back! Definitely had aggressive confidence in its tactics...

It followed that up with a bounce forward, raising both front legs and trying to smash them down on me. I judged the arc and they slammed down a couple inches short, and then the Darts flashed out of my wand at point-blank range and blew its head off. A completely mundane but alien animal, perhaps even native to the area, replicated by the magic of the Summons.

I left the Summons point intact, having no reason to Seal it as long as I knew where it was, and so I marked the location on the new map with my lived-line on it that I was building. Know Location and Visual File were interacting to form a real-life memory and map of the area. Time to wander back down the hill, not break my ankles, and see what the ruins of the town had to tell me.

The main buildings of the town proper were built on a hillside, the road coming into it splitting in two to form two main streets, high and low, reuniting on the far side of town. The road was the first thing I looked at, because it was intact. The paving stones were still tight. No plants had taken root in them and begun the process of overgrowing them, while the snow and rain hadn't shaken them and disrupted them at all.

It was a good, solid road, without any sign of being abandoned for years, like someone regularly maintained it and swept it clean of obstructions. There was definitely some kind of geomancy attached to the thing, slow and subtle, and not subject to the tensions and explosions of the power that the big stone building atop the hill had obviously been tapping. The first thing I investigated wasn't actually the town itself.

It was a circle of standing stones in a suspiciously clear area near where the road turned west as it ran out of town. None of the surrounding brush or shrooms had intruded within ten feet of the stones, so they were remarkably clear. Something was also sparkling slightly in the middle of them. As I walked carefully up on them, it was plain that the silvered-blue of arcane fire was spitting and spurting from a fused and shallow crater of blackened earth and glittering crystals. Arcane fire... from menhirs.

My hackles rose. Menhirs should be tapping the energy of the land, which was Natural/Primal energy, which should be more to the green/rainbow in hue, blending all types of magic together into something that eventually became an elemental Land-spirit's thoughts and blood. Arcane energy was... incredibly inappropriate for this kind of thing...

I turned to look back at the hilltop as I paused at the edge of the circle, my fingers rubbing together thoughtfully, and I shifted my Second Sight, letting my Vatic Gaze range up and down the thaumaspectrum, ignoring the material world. Yeah. Right there, almost leaping into existence in front of me suddenly. Three ley lines formed a minor nexus, anchored to these menhirs, which is why they hadn't been affected by whatever event had triggered the buildings up there.

There were shattered remnants lines visible, scorched into and through the ground from these ley lines, tapping the menhirs crudely to power... something. And they ran along the roads, too, keeping them free of change and intact. I had to admit I was fascinated and could have studied the interaction of what was going on with these things all day... leaving myself pretty damn wide open to attack while I couldn't see the material world.

There were at least five layers and styles of harmonization with the ley lines there, different forces interacting with them and the tremendous amount of energies running through them, yet so subtle and controlled that they couldn't be felt. Those Summoning points were all connected to these menhirs.

The colossal, subtle power of the ley line was radiating out through the area in a grid-like mess of positions and placements of various levels of power, some of which could be tapped by the relatively crude efforts of the latest generation of people messing with them. There were also the faint ripples of a failing of dimensional space, like a break or warping in the space had... fractured? And natural space had taken over? That hadn't been a built dungeon.

It had been extra-dimensional, then abruptly forced back into reality here, at its anchor point, shoving all the existing mass out of the way with all the force of space snapping back, with most of that venting going upwards and precipitating the disaster on the top of the hill...