There were six of them on the wall, wrapped around a small unit of soldiers like wet blankets. The man who’d caught Nym’s attention made eye contact with him for one brief moment, and Nym saw pain and desperation in that look. Then the geist enveloped him completely and the yell was cut off.
Nym could still see his open mouth screaming beneath the geist, but the man’s wild scrambling to escape slowed, then stopped. Nym flew down and immediately started throwing undead stunning spells at the group. As far as he was aware, once a geist wrapped itself around a victim, it dissolved the skin off them and connected to their body, then piloted its unwilling host around. There was no saving the person at that point, as killing the geist killed the host.
He hoped that these men were not to that point, but he had no idea how to rescue them. He figured he had at most a minute or so before the soldiers started suffocating, but didn’t have a single spell that would harm only the geists. The best he could do was something precisely targeted like using his needles.
That would have to be a start. He pulled them out of his coat and shot them into the part of the geist covering the screaming man’s mouth. They pierced through, probably also striking the man beneath, and Nym pulled them back to reveal holes in the undead. Hopefully that was enough for the man to breathe through.
“I don’t… how do I… someone tell me what to do!” Nym yelled.
There was no answer, of course. All over the wall, ghouls were crossing unimpeded. Every single soldier nearby was either dead or dying from ghoul claws and teeth, or worse, wrapped in a geist skin shroud. This far out from the central keep, and with such heavy pressure behind him, there were no reinforcements and no cavalry riding in to save the day.
A geist materialized out of the darkness in front of Nym, and he got his first up-close look at the horror that was the undead monster. It looked something like a sheet or sail, its form billowing with air as it flew towards him. Pasty white skin, thin and dried out, made up the whole of the creature from the back, but as it turned and twisted through the air, Nym got a look at the inner lining of its body as well.
He was disgusted by the sight of it. There were hundreds of small rings filled with needles, like little sucking mouths with grotesque teeth. They twisted and flexed as the geist’s sail-like body aligned itself to envelope Nym. Just before it reached him, he hurled a blast of lightning at it.
The geist’s body arced so hard it practically rolled up on itself. Behind it, the lightning bolt struck several of the men who’d been covered by other geists. Their bodies were left blackened and smoking. In death, the geists let go of their unwilling hosts, but it was already too late for them. If the geists themselves hadn’t killed the soldiers, Nym’s lightning bolt definitely finished them off.
“Oh, God,” Nym moaned, feeling sick.
There was no time to waste on that though. At least two of the soldiers from the unit were still alive. The geists that had been attached to them fluttered limply, no longer alive but not free to drift away in the breeze since they were partially pinned under their victims.
Nym didn’t know enough about healing magic to save those soldiers. He’d learned how to fix scrapes and bruises, help a bone heal after it had been set, but the damage in front of him was far worse. Huge patches of skin had been reduced to slurry, leaving exposed muscle underneath. Even if he could knit the skin back together, he had no idea how to fix the damage beneath that.
He had to try though. Nym focused on the spells and pulled arcana through his soul well to fill the constructs. The one who looked the least wounded was closer; Nym started with him. New skin started to form where the geist’s teeth had punctured it, but the man did not stop weeping and moaning. In desperation, Nym threw pain blocking spells at them both.
“Tell me what to do,” he demanded. “I don’t know how to save you.”
“There is no saving us,” one of the soldiers rasped out. “Just end our suffering. You have no idea… the pain… it’s too late.”
“No, I can get you back to real healers. Maybe they’ll be able to… to do something.”
“Too late,” the soldier said. “Even now, ghouls are escaping over the walls. Stop worrying about us. Just finish us off before you go.”
“End it,” the other soldier agreed. His mouth was busted up from Nym’s needles, and blood poured out of it freely. He gurgled each wheezing breath, and yet for all that, was still somehow the soldier in better shape of the two. “End it, before the ghouls find us. They won’t kill us before they start eating.”
Nym felt like his brain had stopped working. There had to be some solution, but he couldn’t find it. His thoughts just kept going round and round in circles, touching on the same ideas over and over, rejecting them for the same reasons each time. He didn’t have time to think up something clever, and he didn’t know if there even was any real solution.
He’d already been lucky to get thirty seconds of uninterrupted time to begin with. His lightning bolt had killed all of the geists nearby, and most of the ghouls were ignoring him in favor of jumping off the wall, but a few had noticed that there were living humans nearby and diverted their courses to attack.
Whenever the numbness tried to settle in his mind, Nym pushed it back. He didn’t like it, didn’t want to live on its terms. It happened less and less often as he got stronger and found more tools to deal with his problems. But in that moment, he didn’t have any acceptable solutions. The soldiers knew it, and they’d told him what he needed to do. He just didn’t have the stomach to do it.
Killing Senman was one thing. He’d been surprised by the new mindsest, and he’d accepted it without resistance. It was only after that he’d reflected on the whole situation and realized how unnatural it was. There was some guilt from his actions, but the man had been trying to murder him. It was a justifiable self-defense, even if some others wouldn’t see it that way.
Killing Valgo’s gang of thieves was more of the same. Nym didn’t really feel too bad about that, not after the kidnapping and everything else. He felt even less guilt about killing Valgo himself. He’d been so at peace with that decision in the moment that he didn’t even slip into that alternate state of mind.
Standing in front of those two dying soldiers, knowing that the only choice was to end their lives, and that he had just seconds to do it before the approaching ghouls reached him, Nym fully embraced that cold, calculating, ruthless persona. He knew what it was now, the mind of his past self trying to guide him out of some sense of self-preservation.
Mage blades flashed across both soldiers’ throats, ending their lives in seconds with short, gasping wheezes that made the bubbles appear in the blood. In the same motion, he sent the blades through the closest pair of ghouls while rising up into the air. There was no real reason to fight them anyway. He just needed enough time to gain some distance.
The weapons returned to him, cleaned and gore-free thanks in large part to the high speed at which they spun. Nym took a moment to return them to his coat, then cast the spell he’d learned to block the scent of undead. He took a deep breath, crinkled his nose at the coppery stink of blood still filling the air, and flew away from the wall.
There was no point in trying to defend it. Even if he could plug that portion by himself, it didn’t matter when ghouls were flowing over it by the hundreds elsewhere. Now that Nym really considered the matter, he didn’t see much reason to stay in this region. He’d gotten what he needed from the Collective, and staying near their base and operatives would only lead to problems in the near future.
What he needed to do was extract his allies from the whole mess. The Earth Shapers were fast outgrowing their usefulness, though there was still much he could learn on the subject of elemental earth manipulation. He wanted them more for social camouflage than anything. They provided a layer of normalcy to his life that made him less suspicious, all while costing him little beyond some time and an insignificant amount of money.
Analia was far more useful to him right now. She enjoyed research and was more than willing to dig into things for him. She was a higher priority, but she was also in a location that was more dangerous to him personally. Between the idiots from the army who wanted to arrest him for ‘illegal spell usage’ and the fact that there was at least one Collective member there that he was keeping secrets from, it was far riskier to go extract Analia.
At the same time, she was likely in less danger than the Earth Shapers. They were in an unknown location deep in the forest. The army had obviously failed in some large way and the outbreak had surged with numbers. Nym suspected their entire inner line had crumbled. No doubt there were mass casualties, and it was very possible that his allies were already among them.
With a thought, he crafted a message to send to Ophelia. [Are you alright? I’m coming to get you out of there. The army’s lost control of containing the outbreak and the undead have reached the town.]
The response was almost immediate. [Do not come here! We are bunkered underground right now. The outpost was completely overrun. Take Analia and get out of Ebalsan.]
Nym considered the number of undead moving through the forest. Fighting through that would be possible with enough numbers, as long as the ghouls didn’t mass up to attack like they’d done at the walls. As a desperation move, he could lift four more people and fly them maybe a mile at a slow speed. If he left them behind though and the army couldn’t regain control of the forest, they’d likely die to either discovery or starvation before they found their way out.
He could just abandon them, but they were still useful and saving them was not going to be too hard. He just needed to know where they were, go to them, and teleport them out. It would be good practice for teleporting others, which he could do in theory, even if he hadn’t tried yet. The specific destination didn’t matter much.
[I have a way to get you out safely. I just need to know where you’re at so I can fly over and use it.]
All the while he considered this, Nym flew west and north. He followed the curve of the wall and found almost nobody left alive near it. Several outposts had been completely abandoned or overrun, though the ghouls had left many partially mutilated bodies behind. Once again Nym wondered what had changed. It seemed like the number of wights had gone up, and with that the amount of coordination they could enforce on the ghouls.
Nym did not stop to engage any ghouls he saw below. There was no point, and he’d need to save his energy. He did spot a wight or two, and while he considered attacking them to weaken the enemy’s cohesion, in the end he decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The forest was lost, along with all the towns bordering it. All that mattered was getting his allies out and relocated somewhere else.
Ophelia’s voice sounded in his mind. [Fine. Do you remember where the third outpost was? If you follow the wall about two miles west of that, you’ll find the remains of the work camp. Look for a series of chimneys built up twenty feet out of the ground. We’re in an underground bunker we carved out. Those are for our air vents. Let me know when you’ve arrived. Be. Careful.]
Nym had already passed the outpost, and it took him barely a handful of minutes to find the camp. There were six stacks clustered near each other on one side of the camp, which itself had been torn apart. Several ghouls lurked in the ruins, some pawing at the ground and others roaming, sniffing the air.
Obviously, they knew there were still people nearby. That just meant they were in the way. Nym’s mage blades came out and he went to work.
There were six of them on the wall, wrapped around a small unit of soldiers like wet blankets. The man who’d caught Nym’s attention made eye contact with him for one brief moment, and Nym saw pain and desperation in that look. Then the geist enveloped him completely and the yell was cut off.
Nym could still see his open mouth screaming beneath the geist, but the man’s wild scrambling to escape slowed, then stopped. Nym flew down and immediately started throwing undead stunning spells at the group. As far as he was aware, once a geist wrapped itself around a victim, it dissolved the skin off them and connected to their body, then piloted its unwilling host around. There was no saving the person at that point, as killing the geist killed the host.
He hoped that these men were not to that point, but he had no idea how to rescue them. He figured he had at most a minute or so before the soldiers started suffocating, but didn’t have a single spell that would harm only the geists. The best he could do was something precisely targeted like using his needles.
That would have to be a start. He pulled them out of his coat and shot them into the part of the geist covering the screaming man’s mouth. They pierced through, probably also striking the man beneath, and Nym pulled them back to reveal holes in the undead. Hopefully that was enough for the man to breathe through.
“I don’t… how do I… someone tell me what to do!” Nym yelled.
There was no answer, of course. All over the wall, ghouls were crossing unimpeded. Every single soldier nearby was either dead or dying from ghoul claws and teeth, or worse, wrapped in a geist skin shroud. This far out from the central keep, and with such heavy pressure behind him, there were no reinforcements and no cavalry riding in to save the day.
A geist materialized out of the darkness in front of Nym, and he got his first up-close look at the horror that was the undead monster. It looked something like a sheet or sail, its form billowing with air as it flew towards him. Pasty white skin, thin and dried out, made up the whole of the creature from the back, but as it turned and twisted through the air, Nym got a look at the inner lining of its body as well.
He was disgusted by the sight of it. There were hundreds of small rings filled with needles, like little sucking mouths with grotesque teeth. They twisted and flexed as the geist’s sail-like body aligned itself to envelope Nym. Just before it reached him, he hurled a blast of lightning at it.
The geist’s body arced so hard it practically rolled up on itself. Behind it, the lightning bolt struck several of the men who’d been covered by other geists. Their bodies were left blackened and smoking. In death, the geists let go of their unwilling hosts, but it was already too late for them. If the geists themselves hadn’t killed the soldiers, Nym’s lightning bolt definitely finished them off.
“Oh, God,” Nym moaned, feeling sick.
There was no time to waste on that though. At least two of the soldiers from the unit were still alive. The geists that had been attached to them fluttered limply, no longer alive but not free to drift away in the breeze since they were partially pinned under their victims.
Nym didn’t know enough about healing magic to save those soldiers. He’d learned how to fix scrapes and bruises, help a bone heal after it had been set, but the damage in front of him was far worse. Huge patches of skin had been reduced to slurry, leaving exposed muscle underneath. Even if he could knit the skin back together, he had no idea how to fix the damage beneath that.
He had to try though. Nym focused on the spells and pulled arcana through his soul well to fill the constructs. The one who looked the least wounded was closer; Nym started with him. New skin started to form where the geist’s teeth had punctured it, but the man did not stop weeping and moaning. In desperation, Nym threw pain blocking spells at them both.
“Tell me what to do,” he demanded. “I don’t know how to save you.”
“There is no saving us,” one of the soldiers rasped out. “Just end our suffering. You have no idea… the pain… it’s too late.”
“No, I can get you back to real healers. Maybe they’ll be able to… to do something.”
“Too late,” the soldier said. “Even now, ghouls are escaping over the walls. Stop worrying about us. Just finish us off before you go.”
“End it,” the other soldier agreed. His mouth was busted up from Nym’s needles, and blood poured out of it freely. He gurgled each wheezing breath, and yet for all that, was still somehow the soldier in better shape of the two. “End it, before the ghouls find us. They won’t kill us before they start eating.”
Nym felt like his brain had stopped working. There had to be some solution, but he couldn’t find it. His thoughts just kept going round and round in circles, touching on the same ideas over and over, rejecting them for the same reasons each time. He didn’t have time to think up something clever, and he didn’t know if there even was any real solution.
He’d already been lucky to get thirty seconds of uninterrupted time to begin with. His lightning bolt had killed all of the geists nearby, and most of the ghouls were ignoring him in favor of jumping off the wall, but a few had noticed that there were living humans nearby and diverted their courses to attack.
Whenever the numbness tried to settle in his mind, Nym pushed it back. He didn’t like it, didn’t want to live on its terms. It happened less and less often as he got stronger and found more tools to deal with his problems. But in that moment, he didn’t have any acceptable solutions. The soldiers knew it, and they’d told him what he needed to do. He just didn’t have the stomach to do it.
Killing Senman was one thing. He’d been surprised by the new mindsest, and he’d accepted it without resistance. It was only after that he’d reflected on the whole situation and realized how unnatural it was. There was some guilt from his actions, but the man had been trying to murder him. It was a justifiable self-defense, even if some others wouldn’t see it that way.
Killing Valgo’s gang of thieves was more of the same. Nym didn’t really feel too bad about that, not after the kidnapping and everything else. He felt even less guilt about killing Valgo himself. He’d been so at peace with that decision in the moment that he didn’t even slip into that alternate state of mind.
Standing in front of those two dying soldiers, knowing that the only choice was to end their lives, and that he had just seconds to do it before the approaching ghouls reached him, Nym fully embraced that cold, calculating, ruthless persona. He knew what it was now, the mind of his past self trying to guide him out of some sense of self-preservation.
Mage blades flashed across both soldiers’ throats, ending their lives in seconds with short, gasping wheezes that made the bubbles appear in the blood. In the same motion, he sent the blades through the closest pair of ghouls while rising up into the air. There was no real reason to fight them anyway. He just needed enough time to gain some distance.
The weapons returned to him, cleaned and gore-free thanks in large part to the high speed at which they spun. Nym took a moment to return them to his coat, then cast the spell he’d learned to block the scent of undead. He took a deep breath, crinkled his nose at the coppery stink of blood still filling the air, and flew away from the wall.
There was no point in trying to defend it. Even if he could plug that portion by himself, it didn’t matter when ghouls were flowing over it by the hundreds elsewhere. Now that Nym really considered the matter, he didn’t see much reason to stay in this region. He’d gotten what he needed from the Collective, and staying near their base and operatives would only lead to problems in the near future.
What he needed to do was extract his allies from the whole mess. The Earth Shapers were fast outgrowing their usefulness, though there was still much he could learn on the subject of elemental earth manipulation. He wanted them more for social camouflage than anything. They provided a layer of normalcy to his life that made him less suspicious, all while costing him little beyond some time and an insignificant amount of money.
Analia was far more useful to him right now. She enjoyed research and was more than willing to dig into things for him. She was a higher priority, but she was also in a location that was more dangerous to him personally. Between the idiots from the army who wanted to arrest him for ‘illegal spell usage’ and the fact that there was at least one Collective member there that he was keeping secrets from, it was far riskier to go extract Analia.
At the same time, she was likely in less danger than the Earth Shapers. They were in an unknown location deep in the forest. The army had obviously failed in some large way and the outbreak had surged with numbers. Nym suspected their entire inner line had crumbled. No doubt there were mass casualties, and it was very possible that his allies were already among them.
With a thought, he crafted a message to send to Ophelia. [Are you alright? I’m coming to get you out of there. The army’s lost control of containing the outbreak and the undead have reached the town.]
The response was almost immediate. [Do not come here! We are bunkered underground right now. The outpost was completely overrun. Take Analia and get out of Ebalsan.]
Nym considered the number of undead moving through the forest. Fighting through that would be possible with enough numbers, as long as the ghouls didn’t mass up to attack like they’d done at the walls. As a desperation move, he could lift four more people and fly them maybe a mile at a slow speed. If he left them behind though and the army couldn’t regain control of the forest, they’d likely die to either discovery or starvation before they found their way out.
He could just abandon them, but they were still useful and saving them was not going to be too hard. He just needed to know where they were, go to them, and teleport them out. It would be good practice for teleporting others, which he could do in theory, even if he hadn’t tried yet. The specific destination didn’t matter much.
[I have a way to get you out safely. I just need to know where you’re at so I can fly over and use it.]
All the while he considered this, Nym flew west and north. He followed the curve of the wall and found almost nobody left alive near it. Several outposts had been completely abandoned or overrun, though the ghouls had left many partially mutilated bodies behind. Once again Nym wondered what had changed. It seemed like the number of wights had gone up, and with that the amount of coordination they could enforce on the ghouls.
Nym did not stop to engage any ghouls he saw below. There was no point, and he’d need to save his energy. He did spot a wight or two, and while he considered attacking them to weaken the enemy’s cohesion, in the end he decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The forest was lost, along with all the towns bordering it. All that mattered was getting his allies out and relocated somewhere else.
Ophelia’s voice sounded in his mind. [Fine. Do you remember where the third outpost was? If you follow the wall about two miles west of that, you’ll find the remains of the work camp. Look for a series of chimneys built up twenty feet out of the ground. We’re in an underground bunker we carved out. Those are for our air vents. Let me know when you’ve arrived. Be. Careful.]
Nym had already passed the outpost, and it took him barely a handful of minutes to find the camp. There were six stacks clustered near each other on one side of the camp, which itself had been torn apart. Several ghouls lurked in the ruins, some pawing at the ground and others roaming, sniffing the air.
Obviously, they knew there were still people nearby. That just meant they were in the way. Nym’s mage blades came out and he went to work.
