Nym flew over to the manor house overlooking the fields and immediately saw what had happened. A pack of ghouls had broken through a window on the ground floor, and further torn the wall apart around it when the window had proven insufficient access. The room they’d come into was covered in blood and had several dead bodies tossed to the side. There was a trail of bloody footprints leading deeper into the manor.
He was a bit hesitant to go inside. Nym would lose most of his mobility and range, which was fine if there were only ghouls in there. His barrier could protect against a physical attack from a ghoul long enough to teleport out if he needed to; he’d tested it thoroughly to confirm. Against the other wight that he suspected was involved in the attack, he was less confident.
If the ghouls had breached the walls and started indiscriminately killing and eating, he wouldn’t be worried. But they’d targeted the manor and were ignoring meat from their own fresh kills. It was all but guaranteed that something was directing them. The weird thing was that Nym had only once ever seen any undead try to do anything but kill and eat, the night that wight in the forest had tried to capture him.
He couldn’t imagine what the goal of that was, just like he couldn’t figure out what they were looking for at the plantation. Before he set foot inside, he conjured up a scry anchor and sent it sweeping through the manor. It was a big building, clearly designed for dozens of people to live in, but Nym had plenty of practice doing this. The blood trail certainly helped, but he was still going to be thorough and check the entire place over.
In addition to the scrying spell, he also formed an air golem and imbued it with his new perfect sight spell, then ordered it to follow the blood trail and try to get eyes on the undead. His own scrying revealed eight living people hiding in various rooms, all safe for the moment. It also revealed that the ghouls had rushed straight towards one particular room, killing anyone they encountered but otherwise ignoring the rest of the house.
The air golem reached the room and found some sort of hidden passage hanging wide open. The footprints were less blood and more mud at this point, but still easy enough to follow considering the amount of damage to the floors and walls the ghouls did as they crowded each other in the halls. Once they went underground and the stairs became unadorned stone, the trail got harder to see.
It didn’t matter though, because the passage only went one way. It ended in a set of three rooms, but the ghouls were piled up in the hall outside. Past them, a wight was tossing one of the rooms, growling to itself as it dug through drawers and cupboards. Precious and fragile lab equipment was shattered in its haste, not that the wight cared.
The other two rooms were in similar states, so whatever the wight was looking for, it hadn’t found it. The whole thing had Nym scratching his head. Why was the wight there? How had it known about the secret passage? What even was it looking for? Perhaps most relevant to Nym, what was the best way to kill it?
The straightforward approach was to go down, set up a hyperkinetic barrier, unleash his mage blades, and let them hack the ghouls to pieces. Then he’d lightning bolt the wight in the face, cart out all the parts, and throw them into the burn pit. There were… a lot of ways that could go wrong, but now that he had third circle spells, brute force was probably the quickest and most efficient method.
Alternatively, he could wait for them to come back out of the manor and ambush them. That had the drawbacks of potentially allowing some ghouls to escape as well, placing the manor residents in danger, and delaying him unnecessarily when he could finish the fight much quicker and then get back to the wall to make sure there were no casualties among the farmhands. It seemed like a bad plan.
He could seal off the entrance to the passage. There was probably more than enough time to create a stone wall to block the entrance, and he doubted the ghouls would dig through that before he had time to come deal with them. They would get through it, eventually, but not in a few minutes.
Nym shook his head. Simple was best. There was no need to overthink this with complicated plans. He flew around the outside of the house, punched out the window with a quick blast of greater telekinesis, and flew into the room with the open passage leading underground.
Nym sent the mage blades down ahead and placed his barrier across the top of the stairs. Using his air golem’s sight to navigate and control the blades, he chopped the ghouls apart in short order. The only hitch came when one of the ghouls managed to catch a blade, but Nym remedied that by slicing the offending fingers off that hand. He winced when the blades clanged together, knowing he’d be taking them in to be resharpened after that.
The wight noticed what was happening, of course, but there wasn’t much it could do about it. At least, that’s what Nym assumed, since he was blocking the only way out. The damn thing didn’t even seem to care though. It checked on what the disturbance was, then went right back to tearing apart the furniture.
Nym watched it cautiously. It obviously knew something that he didn’t if it wasn’t worried about its minions getting taken out. He unceremoniously chucked the ghouls into one of the other rooms where they immediately started putting themselves back together, then switched up his barrier from a solid, immobile wall to something that wrapped around him in a deflection aura. It was significantly more expensive, but if he was going to be playing with the wight, he wanted as much protection as possible.
Nym ghosted down the stairs and up to the wight, his lightning bolt construct completed and waiting for him to release it. He arrived just in time catch the tail end of a spell the wight was casting. The spell went off before Nym could do anything about it and the wight turned to insubstantial mist, or rather something that looked like mist.
Elemental air and water found no purchase on it, and the mist seeped up through the cracks in the stone. Nym sent his scry anchor after it, but couldn’t get a visual. Somehow, the wight had managed to phase through solid matter and was escaping. Worse, Nym still didn’t know what its reason for attacking the plantation and raiding the basement lab was. He didn’t even know if it had gotten whatever it came for.
He flew back up to the ground floor and outside as fast as he could. His golem went with him and they both started scanning the plantation, searching in opposite directions. The wight managed to make it over the wall, or maybe went through it, Nym wasn’t sure, before they spotted it. He flew off after it and managed to catch up.
Nym slowed as he got there, unsure of how to proceed. He didn’t really have a capture undead spell, and he was concerned that whatever it had taken from the manor house might be both valuable and delicate. Blasting the wight with a lightning bolt would surely destroy it, but it might also destroy whatever it was stealing. Since Nym didn’t know what that was, he was reluctant to resort to something quite so damaging.
His scry anchor revealed the answer to him. The wight had stolen a book and a vial with some kind of liquid in it. Nym swooped in close and hit it with an undead stunner, pilfered the two items back with an application of basic telekinesis, then held them up to the fading light to look at them. The vial was maybe six inches long, stoppered with a piece of cork, and contained a murky black mixture that looked like liquid smoke splashing against itself.
The book was something else entirely. Bound in pale leather with ribs on the spine, the title was embossed on it in a hard white material that Nym suspected was bone. The fact that it was titled A Manuscript on the Manipulation of the Mind and Spirits certainly didn’t make it seem any less sinister. Nym didn’t have time to flip through it before the wight broke out of the stunning spell.
Rather than continue to flee, it spun in place and launched itself at Nym. He was surprised by the quick turnabout, but his hyperkinetic barrier held strong against the attack. The wight snarled in anger when it was knocked back, but recovered immediately and pointed a pale white finger at Nym.
Arcana built up around it as it constructed a spell, but Nym injected spikes of his own arcana into the delicate pattern. He pried key pieces aside and twisted them hard enough that the entire spell failed. It was nice to see that working, since he hadn’t had much of a chance to practice dispel construct against a live opponent besides Archmage Veran, and the archmage’s willpower was frankly too strong for his spells to be easily undone.
Against a wight using nothing but second circle magic though, Nym’s technique worked just fine. In fact, he didn’t even need to use the third circle spell. Instead, he just shaped raw arcana to simulate the effect and manually guided it using his own sight. The spell broke apart almost instantly, stunning the wight again in the process.
Arcana backlash wouldn’t stop a living mage for more than a moment or two, and against an undead one it was even less effective. The wight immediately lunged at him again, presumably thinking it would overpower the hyperkinetic barrier. Repeated blows hammered against Nym before he could fly up and back.
“Give them back!” the wight howled, launching itself through the air to chase Nym.
Nym was so surprised he almost fumbled the barrier and lost it. He’d never heard a wight talk. Nobody had ever mentioned that they could. They were obviously intelligent, and it made sense that they could speak since they were supposed to retain their skills from before their death, but wights didn’t talk.
Except here was one who could, and did, and was happy to kill to get what it wanted. Nym had what he needed, and the smart move would be to finish the wight off and get back to the plantation to help with the clean up. But now he was curious. Did no one know about this, or did they know but no one cared, or was this wight special?
The wight battered at Nym’s hyperkinetic barrier again while he considered how best to move forward. He didn’t have a good way to contain it, and in the end, it was responsible for leading an attack that had killed quite a few people. Whatever mystery there was in the potion and the book, it wasn’t worth risking people’s lives over. The right choice was to kill the wight.
Nym blasted it in the face with a lightning bolt and sent it tumbling backwards. Surprisingly, it was still ‘alive’ after taking the hit. A second lightning bolt finished it off before it could attack him again. Nym stuck around for a minute to make sure the corpse wasn’t going to get back up again and made a mental note of the location he’d killed it at.
Then he turned back to the plantation and helped them finish destroying the rest of the undead. He’d talk to Archmage Veran when he returned and see what the old man had to say about the unusual turn of events.
Nym flew over to the manor house overlooking the fields and immediately saw what had happened. A pack of ghouls had broken through a window on the ground floor, and further torn the wall apart around it when the window had proven insufficient access. The room they’d come into was covered in blood and had several dead bodies tossed to the side. There was a trail of bloody footprints leading deeper into the manor.
He was a bit hesitant to go inside. Nym would lose most of his mobility and range, which was fine if there were only ghouls in there. His barrier could protect against a physical attack from a ghoul long enough to teleport out if he needed to; he’d tested it thoroughly to confirm. Against the other wight that he suspected was involved in the attack, he was less confident.
If the ghouls had breached the walls and started indiscriminately killing and eating, he wouldn’t be worried. But they’d targeted the manor and were ignoring meat from their own fresh kills. It was all but guaranteed that something was directing them. The weird thing was that Nym had only once ever seen any undead try to do anything but kill and eat, the night that wight in the forest had tried to capture him.
He couldn’t imagine what the goal of that was, just like he couldn’t figure out what they were looking for at the plantation. Before he set foot inside, he conjured up a scry anchor and sent it sweeping through the manor. It was a big building, clearly designed for dozens of people to live in, but Nym had plenty of practice doing this. The blood trail certainly helped, but he was still going to be thorough and check the entire place over.
In addition to the scrying spell, he also formed an air golem and imbued it with his new perfect sight spell, then ordered it to follow the blood trail and try to get eyes on the undead. His own scrying revealed eight living people hiding in various rooms, all safe for the moment. It also revealed that the ghouls had rushed straight towards one particular room, killing anyone they encountered but otherwise ignoring the rest of the house.
The air golem reached the room and found some sort of hidden passage hanging wide open. The footprints were less blood and more mud at this point, but still easy enough to follow considering the amount of damage to the floors and walls the ghouls did as they crowded each other in the halls. Once they went underground and the stairs became unadorned stone, the trail got harder to see.
It didn’t matter though, because the passage only went one way. It ended in a set of three rooms, but the ghouls were piled up in the hall outside. Past them, a wight was tossing one of the rooms, growling to itself as it dug through drawers and cupboards. Precious and fragile lab equipment was shattered in its haste, not that the wight cared.
The other two rooms were in similar states, so whatever the wight was looking for, it hadn’t found it. The whole thing had Nym scratching his head. Why was the wight there? How had it known about the secret passage? What even was it looking for? Perhaps most relevant to Nym, what was the best way to kill it?
The straightforward approach was to go down, set up a hyperkinetic barrier, unleash his mage blades, and let them hack the ghouls to pieces. Then he’d lightning bolt the wight in the face, cart out all the parts, and throw them into the burn pit. There were… a lot of ways that could go wrong, but now that he had third circle spells, brute force was probably the quickest and most efficient method.
Alternatively, he could wait for them to come back out of the manor and ambush them. That had the drawbacks of potentially allowing some ghouls to escape as well, placing the manor residents in danger, and delaying him unnecessarily when he could finish the fight much quicker and then get back to the wall to make sure there were no casualties among the farmhands. It seemed like a bad plan.
He could seal off the entrance to the passage. There was probably more than enough time to create a stone wall to block the entrance, and he doubted the ghouls would dig through that before he had time to come deal with them. They would get through it, eventually, but not in a few minutes.
Nym shook his head. Simple was best. There was no need to overthink this with complicated plans. He flew around the outside of the house, punched out the window with a quick blast of greater telekinesis, and flew into the room with the open passage leading underground.
Nym sent the mage blades down ahead and placed his barrier across the top of the stairs. Using his air golem’s sight to navigate and control the blades, he chopped the ghouls apart in short order. The only hitch came when one of the ghouls managed to catch a blade, but Nym remedied that by slicing the offending fingers off that hand. He winced when the blades clanged together, knowing he’d be taking them in to be resharpened after that.
The wight noticed what was happening, of course, but there wasn’t much it could do about it. At least, that’s what Nym assumed, since he was blocking the only way out. The damn thing didn’t even seem to care though. It checked on what the disturbance was, then went right back to tearing apart the furniture.
Nym watched it cautiously. It obviously knew something that he didn’t if it wasn’t worried about its minions getting taken out. He unceremoniously chucked the ghouls into one of the other rooms where they immediately started putting themselves back together, then switched up his barrier from a solid, immobile wall to something that wrapped around him in a deflection aura. It was significantly more expensive, but if he was going to be playing with the wight, he wanted as much protection as possible.
Nym ghosted down the stairs and up to the wight, his lightning bolt construct completed and waiting for him to release it. He arrived just in time catch the tail end of a spell the wight was casting. The spell went off before Nym could do anything about it and the wight turned to insubstantial mist, or rather something that looked like mist.
Elemental air and water found no purchase on it, and the mist seeped up through the cracks in the stone. Nym sent his scry anchor after it, but couldn’t get a visual. Somehow, the wight had managed to phase through solid matter and was escaping. Worse, Nym still didn’t know what its reason for attacking the plantation and raiding the basement lab was. He didn’t even know if it had gotten whatever it came for.
He flew back up to the ground floor and outside as fast as he could. His golem went with him and they both started scanning the plantation, searching in opposite directions. The wight managed to make it over the wall, or maybe went through it, Nym wasn’t sure, before they spotted it. He flew off after it and managed to catch up.
Nym slowed as he got there, unsure of how to proceed. He didn’t really have a capture undead spell, and he was concerned that whatever it had taken from the manor house might be both valuable and delicate. Blasting the wight with a lightning bolt would surely destroy it, but it might also destroy whatever it was stealing. Since Nym didn’t know what that was, he was reluctant to resort to something quite so damaging.
His scry anchor revealed the answer to him. The wight had stolen a book and a vial with some kind of liquid in it. Nym swooped in close and hit it with an undead stunner, pilfered the two items back with an application of basic telekinesis, then held them up to the fading light to look at them. The vial was maybe six inches long, stoppered with a piece of cork, and contained a murky black mixture that looked like liquid smoke splashing against itself.
The book was something else entirely. Bound in pale leather with ribs on the spine, the title was embossed on it in a hard white material that Nym suspected was bone. The fact that it was titled A Manuscript on the Manipulation of the Mind and Spirits certainly didn’t make it seem any less sinister. Nym didn’t have time to flip through it before the wight broke out of the stunning spell.
Rather than continue to flee, it spun in place and launched itself at Nym. He was surprised by the quick turnabout, but his hyperkinetic barrier held strong against the attack. The wight snarled in anger when it was knocked back, but recovered immediately and pointed a pale white finger at Nym.
Arcana built up around it as it constructed a spell, but Nym injected spikes of his own arcana into the delicate pattern. He pried key pieces aside and twisted them hard enough that the entire spell failed. It was nice to see that working, since he hadn’t had much of a chance to practice dispel construct against a live opponent besides Archmage Veran, and the archmage’s willpower was frankly too strong for his spells to be easily undone.
Against a wight using nothing but second circle magic though, Nym’s technique worked just fine. In fact, he didn’t even need to use the third circle spell. Instead, he just shaped raw arcana to simulate the effect and manually guided it using his own sight. The spell broke apart almost instantly, stunning the wight again in the process.
Arcana backlash wouldn’t stop a living mage for more than a moment or two, and against an undead one it was even less effective. The wight immediately lunged at him again, presumably thinking it would overpower the hyperkinetic barrier. Repeated blows hammered against Nym before he could fly up and back.
“Give them back!” the wight howled, launching itself through the air to chase Nym.
Nym was so surprised he almost fumbled the barrier and lost it. He’d never heard a wight talk. Nobody had ever mentioned that they could. They were obviously intelligent, and it made sense that they could speak since they were supposed to retain their skills from before their death, but wights didn’t talk.
Except here was one who could, and did, and was happy to kill to get what it wanted. Nym had what he needed, and the smart move would be to finish the wight off and get back to the plantation to help with the clean up. But now he was curious. Did no one know about this, or did they know but no one cared, or was this wight special?
The wight battered at Nym’s hyperkinetic barrier again while he considered how best to move forward. He didn’t have a good way to contain it, and in the end, it was responsible for leading an attack that had killed quite a few people. Whatever mystery there was in the potion and the book, it wasn’t worth risking people’s lives over. The right choice was to kill the wight.
Nym blasted it in the face with a lightning bolt and sent it tumbling backwards. Surprisingly, it was still ‘alive’ after taking the hit. A second lightning bolt finished it off before it could attack him again. Nym stuck around for a minute to make sure the corpse wasn’t going to get back up again and made a mental note of the location he’d killed it at.
Then he turned back to the plantation and helped them finish destroying the rest of the undead. He’d talk to Archmage Veran when he returned and see what the old man had to say about the unusual turn of events.
