Ascendant 2 a progressio.., p.41
Ascendant 2: A Progression Fantasy, page 41
That didn’t do much beyond get them out of the way momentarily, but that was enough for Nym to gather up the arcana for a massive push of air. It howled down the tunnel, bowling over ghouls and sending geists tumbling hundreds of feet backward. More importantly, it gave Nym the time to restack the rocks and even transmute them into something slightly more solid. He left a new barrier behind them and sent his mage blades up to massacre the ghouls he was holding on to.
Things were tense, but between the three of them, they were holding the four tunnels. Nym was under no illusions that it would last forever, but it’d be more than long enough for Zerek and Arch-mage Veran to break the antiscrying ward preventing them from seeing into the mausoleum overhead.
Then a behemoth slammed into his back and sent him flying into a wall.
It wasn’t even a direct attack, though it took Nym a few seconds to put that together. It had merely brushed against him while it was focused on fighting Blanchet. He’d been winged hard enough to throw him ten feet into a wall and leave him groaning in pain. The barrier he’d been maintaining had failed, and Ogric was now floating overhead in the middle of the room, shooting fire in every direction while Sakaro tried to herd the ghouls with strategically placed barrier walls.
Nym regained his feet and flew overhead to join the other mages. It was impossible to see down the tunnels from that angle, but getting hit by a behemoth once was enough for him. Zerek was safe under a barrier of some sort Archmage Veran had put up, and the two of them were busy ignoring the general chaos around them while they worked.
“We’ve got to drop these behemoths already,” Ogric said. “Can you block all four exits?”
“Maybe for a minute if it’s just ghouls. As soon as some wight comes in and starts throwing spells at the barrier, things are going to start failing,” Sakaro replied.
“One minute. We can lay down some serious damage on one of those behemoths in a minute. Maybe we could even get all three.”
“Do it,” Nym said. Those things weren’t like ghouls. They were made of real corpses; a lightning bolt would probably shut them down hard unless they had some sort of special resistance to it.
She nodded, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Barriers snapped up in all four locations, and Nym pulled hard on second-layer arcana. His soul well filled to the brim, and both parts of his brain started chaining lightning spells.
The cavern was filled with deafening booms that rolled around and echoed off one another as he hammered bolt after bolt after bolt into a behemoth that was missing a big chunk of its bone armor. Leaf was the one actively engaging it, but there was enough space between them as he scrambled to avoid its flailing limbs that Nym felt safe targeting it.
The behemoth shuddered when the first bolt struck it, collapsed from the second, and started smoking on the third. By the time the fifth one hit, it had superheated to the point where the bone armor cracked and blew apart, along with a thousand pounds of blackened meat. The core fell to the stone, fully exposed for the first time since they’d teleported in.
Leaf pounced on it and drove his sword clear through, shattering it into pieces.
The display blinded and deafened them momentarily, and it certainly drew the attention of everything still moving in the cavern. Nym switched to a localized scrying spell to see the room and took advantage of the moment to send his mage blades into action against a few ghouls who’d managed to slip in when one of Sakaro’s barriers started to give. It looked like her ability to hold them for a full minute was perhaps a bit too optimistic.
Two people hadn’t reacted to the display of lightning. Zerek ignored it completely, perhaps hadn’t even noticed it behind Archmage Veran’s barrier. The archmage himself certainly noticed it but had apparently dismissed it as unimportant.
Not to be outdone, Ogric laid the heat down on another behemoth. Within seconds, Nym could smell the acrid stink of it cooking from the inside out, somehow a different smell than the one he’d blown apart by slamming it with lightning bolts repeatedly. Blanchet knew exactly what was happening too, and she switched strategies from attacking it to keeping her distance.
Far away from the others, Tiramaya had her behemoth completely under control. She was slipping in and out of the shadows, disappearing completely and popping back up somewhere else. The behemoth swung around crazily, limbs flailing in every direction as it slammed itself up against the wall repeatedly in an attempt to crush her.
Normally, Nym was confident in his ability to aim his lightning. It was something he’d practiced in his off hours quite a bit, but in this case, he couldn’t keep track of the scary woman in the bright clothes, and he didn’t want to risk hitting her. A quick scan of the room told him he’d be most useful going back to blocking at least one tunnel so that Sakaro could focus on the other ones while Ogric finished cooking the closest behemoth.
“I’ve got this one,” he called out, floating down to the barrier that was starting to fracture and let ghouls through.
She let the barrier fall completely, and he went back to work slicing apart ghouls. It was a mountain of effort to get caught up enough to clear the mouth of the cave, effort made worse by how drained he felt from his trick with the chained lightning bolts. Both partitions in his brain felt that one. The fight wasn’t over though, so he kept his mage blades moving.
Then everything went black, and his entire body lit up with pain. In a slim sliver of a moment, he felt the sting of hundreds of needles stabbing into him, followed by a burning sensation on his skin. His mind blanked out from the pain, just long enough for him to start screaming.
He summoned more magic, and lightning burst out of him in arcs going in random directions. A skintight cocoon of air slid into place, separating him from the geist that was trying to eat him, and with an effort of will, it billowed out and ripped the undead off of him. It was already dead by the time it let go, fried from the inside by Nym’s lightning and smoking as its body drifted on a current of supercharged air to smack into a wall on the far side of the cave.
Chest heaving and blood running down his body from hundreds of puncture wounds, Nym glared around the cavern. There, in a crack that had split the wall near where Tiramaya’s behemoth had slammed into it, were more geists slipping in. He forced more arcana through his soul well and sent twin bolts of lightning to splash against the wall and kill the geists there.
Ogric got the ones that were already flying through the air with bursts of fire. Below him, a second behemoth lay in a pile of crispy flesh, its core shattered to pieces. With only a single behemoth left, the warriors on the ground managed to surround and overwhelm it easily. The beasts were huge and ponderous, deceptively fast for their size but ultimately too slow to keep up with the nimble humans attacking them.
They brought it down and broke it apart, carving a hole in one spot where they concentrated their attacks until the core was visible still inside the behemoth. Tiramaya took the strike, breaking it apart and prying it loose with the tip of her blade. The pile of meat and bones she was perched on collapsed on the spot.
Nym’s flight spell gave out then, and he tumbled to the floor. “I think I need a break,” he said to no one in particular.
The ghouls still pouring in didn’t seem inclined to let him take a breather, so he pulled himself to his feet and readied his next spell.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Agout of fire flashed down the tunnel in front of Nym, strong enough to drive him back a few steps. It was followed by a barrier sealing the mouth and blocking the ghouls from getting in. There were three more possible entrances though, and adding to that was the fact that a portion of the south wall crumbled as ghouls finished digging their way through.
A new hole opened up to the right of where Archmage Veran and Zerek were working. Nym had just enough time to notice it before arcana surged out of the archmage and the ground itself clamped down on the ghouls pouring out like a giant maw. It even had jagged stone teeth that rent the undead limb from limb.
The whole group watched in stunned silence for a second before Ogric shook his head and said, “Perhaps I chose the wrong element to study.”
“You and me both,” Nym replied.
He decided right then and there that he would never, ever, ever tell Bildar and the others about that spell. There would be no end to the jokes about earth magic being the best. It was better for his sanity if they just didn’t find out that it existed.
There was no more time to stop and gawk. That one hole was sealed off, for the moment, but there were still ghouls coming in from others. He spotted another geist slipping across the ceiling toward Leaf and ended it with a lightning bolt.
“I’m not one to complain, but this is getting a bit overwhelming,” Sakaro announced. “Are they almost done—”
Arcana surged out from Archmage Veran, flashing across the room in an instant and grabbing hold of them. Everything went dark, and when Nym could see, they were standing in a room with walls made of worked stone. There were no undead of any kind rising from their graves or coming down the stairs in front of them.
“Oh, thank God,” Sakaro continued, like she hadn’t been interrupted. “I am about to drop.”
The rest of the group made noises of agreement while they caught their breath. Nym extended a scry anchor out and swept it around, first below him to confirm there was no connection between their current location, which he assumed to be the mausoleum, and the cavern they’d left behind.
It only took a second to set his mind at ease. Before he let the scrying spell drop so that he could rest, he needed to know there was nothing waiting for them up above. The anchor swept back up past them, halfway through the ground when it found something odd. He got a split-second glimpse of what appeared to be a black twisting tree root, as thick around as his waist, snaking through the dirt.
Then his anchor cracked down the middle, and the backlash of arcana dropped him to his knees. Nym bit down on his tongue to keep from crying out, and he felt something wet running down his face. He wiped it away, and his sleeve came back bloody. Bewildered, Nym climbed back to his feet.
None of the group was looking at him. Instead, they were staring up at the wall opposite of the stairs. There, half sunk into the stone, was a human corpse. It emerged from the wall just above the waist, revealing a stomach, chest, head, and arms. The top of the corpse’s skull was tilted back so that its hair splayed out behind it, but the individual strands seemed to be carved from stone and merged into the wall. Each arm was sunk up past its wrist as well.
The corpse’s skin was slate gray, and like so many other corpses Nym had seen over the last few months, it struggled against its bonds. Its back was arced out, and its mouth hung open, giving it the look of a living statue in perpetual agony as it struggled to break free. There was very little room for it to actually move other than jerking its shoulders as it tried to tear itself out of the wall.
“What in God’s name is that?” someone whispered.
A terrible storm of arcana whipped up around Archmage Veran. His normally placid expression was twisted into something grim and implacable as he wove arcana into a spell far beyond what Nym had ever experienced. A pinnacle spell was forming around the archmage, something that promised absolute destruction.
“Retreat to the stairs,” he ordered without turning around. “Sakaro, the strongest barrier you can form. Nym, reinforce her work.”
There was a mad scramble for everyone to get clear. He and Sakaro took turns laying defenses around the group, full spherical shields built on top of one another, one after another. Nym handled kinetic damage, while Sakaro shielded them from various elements. Both of them glanced nervously at each other.
If the rest of them could have seen the amount of arcana condensing around Archmage Veran, Nym suspected they would have been far more scared. It hung off the old man, so thick it was almost a solid, physical thing. Each pulsating crystalline construct grew like it was alive until they were so intertwined that they formed a solid shell obscuring the man standing in the middle.
Then the spell detonated, and the mausoleum was filled with roaring sound and blinding lightning. Blistering heat rolled through the room in waves as fire melted stone, only to become solid again a moment later when a deathly chill swept over them. The earth itself buckled and cracked, ripping the tormented corpse free from the wall.
It hung suspended in the air for only an instant before it disintegrated to ash under the immense power of Archmage Verin’s magic. Even as it fell apart, tendrils of darkness pierced the cacophony and reformed the body. It hung suspended in the air from black roots like some disgusting fruit, endlessly destroyed, endlessly regrowing.
The root itself ignored the destructive vortex centered on it. More and more stone fell away, revealing foot after foot of its length. Nym realized with a start it was the same thing he’d accidentally brushed against with his scrying anchor and shuddered to think of how much pain Archmage Veran was enduring from his own magic coming into contact with it.
The spell was directed at the wall with the corpse root on it, but the rest of the group was not safe from the collateral damage. Sakaro’s shields were taking the brunt of the fire and ice, but she was quickly weakening. If they didn’t support her quickly, the defenses would falter.
Ogric wove his own fire-eating shields into the mix and took a lot of pressure off her. They took a beating from the cold waves washing over them, but he poured more arcana in to reinforce them. Nym took a different approach.
Raw arcana flashed out of him as he wove an impromptu lightning catcher. It was based off his efforts to improve the aim of his own lightning bolts, though it wasn’t something he’d ever designed to stand on its own. It was the only thing he could think of to reduce the impact of the archmage’s magic on his shields though, so he spun it up and threw it out into the room.
It was struck three times in the first and only second of its existence, but those were three bolts that were pulled away from where his group huddled. A second lightning catcher was thrown out, then a third. And then it was over.
The walls of the mausoleum had completely melted, revealing raw dirt and stone. Liquid rock dribbled down off the ceiling, some of it still on fire. In other spots, it had frozen over like a choppy lake in winter, ripples and all. And standing in the middle of it, untouched by the devastation around him, was Archmage Veran.
He stood in front of the corpse, which had regrown again from a coil of the root. Its arms were sunk into the black surface, but its posture was now slumped forward instead of arched back. The hair that had formerly been trapped in stone hung limply off its skull, hiding the corpse’s face.
The archmage stared at it, his eyes smoldering, and Nym worried he’d start up another spell. The rest of the group would need to teleport out first if he did. There was no way their barriers would hold against a second round. But the old man didn’t summon up another storm of destruction. He just looked tired, tired and sad.
“What a fool I was,” he said softly. “If we’d found this twenty years ago, how many lives could we have saved?”
Leaf picked his way over the shattered stones to stand next to his friend. “Is that who I think it is?” he asked.
“The brother, yes. The one we never found, that we thought was sacrificed to create the tear,” the archmage replied. “Alive all this time, in a manner of speaking.”
“What do we do now?” Leaf asked.
“This tether of magic is the true problem. This is what holds the tear open, what gives this necromancer the power he has. I suspect he is in terrible, unending agony. Aren’t you?”
Something that could conceivably have been an attempt at words came from the corpse’s mouth. It sounded more like a hiss of escaping air than anything, but that the corpse made any noise at all was more than Nym had expected.
“God’s beard!” Zerek yelled. “It’s still alive after all that?”
“It is not alive, but it cannot die so long as the reaper maintains the link to it.”
Blanchet stepped forward to examine it. “Fascinating,” she murmured. “I’ve never seen an undead like this. It has some similarities to a lich, except it has physically manifested a connection beyond the veil. I doubt this was done on purpose. The host body seems barely aware and is completely enslaved to the reaper.”
“How would you advise destroying it?” Archmage Veran asked.
She just shook her head. “It may very well be impossible. A link like this, even a physical one, going directly back to the tear, to a reaper. Every archmage in the world working together might not be strong enough to sever something like that.”
“It doesn’t go back to the tear,” Nym said.
“I—what?” Blanchet asked.
“I saw a piece of it underground when I was scrying. It was heading away from the mausoleum. The tear is above us, right? Why would this thing be in the stone under our feet if it was going straight back to the reaper?”
“Interesting. Perhaps redundant copies. Nym, please continue your scrying. If my guess is correct, we will find more bodies like this one connected to the link in other places.”
It was delicate work following the root without actually touching it, but the antiscrying wards had all been well and truly broken. Nym stretched his range to its limits tracing them through the ground, but he canvassed the entire root network without leaving the mausoleum.
“There are three more bodies on the link,” he reported. “What does it mean?”
“It means that we must destroy all of them at the same time. Any single one that survives will send a new copy of itself through the link. I believe that if we can destroy the anchor, this necromancer, on the side of the living world, it may collapse the link and finally allow us to close the tear and make the veil whole here again.”
Leaf pursed his lips and looked around at the group. “So we’re splitting up,” he said. “That’s … risky. None of us is really in the best of shape anymore. Maybe we need to retreat and bring back some help.”
