Nym and Stelton stood in the air above the treetops while he continued to scour the tunnels below for wights. Tiramaya still wasn’t showing to his scry, which was annoying, but he’d gotten used to it. Babkin was their reference point, and she seemed to be able to compensate easily enough for directions that were based off his location instead of hers.
The easiest way he had to track her was to watch things die. It appeared that there was a sphere maybe six or seven feet wide that his scrying just didn’t notice. He himself couldn’t even tell he was skipping a section of the tunnel until she moved and he realized what was there. What he could see was a line of bodies scattered in her wake.
It wasn’t every ghoul, of course. She only attacked the ones that got in her way, or got too close, or some other criteria he couldn’t divine. But he was able to track her progress and make a guess where she was based on when he stopped finding chopped up ghouls squirming around. He had to give it to her, she knew how to control Babkin.
She would still kill wights when Nym reported one in hiding somewhere or coming in, but otherwise she spent her time running interference on tunnels she didn’t want Babkin going down. The berserker naturally followed the flow of ghouls, meeting everything attacking him and moving on to new enemies when he’d downed those. By depriving him of ghouls in specific directions, she steered him towards an exit tunnel.
“Nym,” Stelton said.
It looked like she’d run into a problem though where Babkin had hit a junction with five tunnels that met up at one intersection. There were ghouls coming from multiple angles, and it was tight enough that he assumed she couldn’t skirt around the melee without getting tangled up on it.
“Nym.”
He didn’t have a spell to attack remotely, but he thought he could possibly construct an earth golem at range. There was plenty of material at least, and a pair of them could hold incoming ghouls off long enough for Babkin to head down another tunnel.
“Nym!” Stelton shouted.
“What?” he asked, coming out of his scry.
“Geists incoming!”
“What? Oh.” Four of them were coming more or less directly at them, at least as much as the wind currents would allow them to fly in a straight line. Nym waited for them to bunch up tightly enough, then loosed a lightning bolt that fried all of them at once.
“Thanks. Good spotting,” he told the army mage.
“I… you’re welcome,” she said, staring past him at the tattered remains of the geists fluttering down to the forest floor.
“Let me know if you see anything else trying to sneak up on us,” he told her.
“Sir!”
Nym shook his head. “No need for that.”
Stelton just looked down at the dead geists again and uttered, “Whatever you say, sir.”
Nym rolled his eyes and got back to work. [I’m going to set up a pair of golems to hold the south tunnel. We should be able to get Babkin into one of the two west ones. Either is fine. They’ll link up in a few hundred feet.]
[Understood.]
It was an immense strain to create them from a hundred feet away, especially since he couldn’t see the spell construct through his scrying. Fortunately, the ground itself wasn’t an impediment to his arcana. It was akin to closing his eyes and drawing blind. He knew where everything went, but it was hard to line it up right with no frame of reference.
But human mages did it for every spell they cast. It was no wonder it took them so much practice to master a new one. If they could do it, so could he. It just took him a few attempts to get it right, no more than six or seven. After about two minutes of trying, the first golem formed out of earth and leapt to stop the ghouls coming down the tunnel.
The second one came easier, though it was still three attempts to get it properly built. Nym resolved to practice blind casting more in the future when he had time. Killing the ice worm hive queen would have been much easier if he could remotely assemble golems out of sight back then. For now, he directed the two golems using scrying magic. They mostly fought to hold back the ghouls, which was made easier by the fact that the tunnels weren’t all that wide.
The amount of arcana they were draining from him to keep up with regenerating from the attacks they took was exhausting. Between that, the flight, and the scrying, he was starting to hit his limit. It wasn’t so bad that he was struggling to keep arcana in his soul well, but if he had to suddenly cast a third circle spell on top of the ones he was holding, he was going to be in for a rough time.
[There’s another wight behind that knot of ghouls in the north tunnel. It’s using them to screen its own movements, but if you kill it now, the ghouls will probably go straight to Babkin and lure him in the wrong direction,] Nym reported.
A few seconds later, he noticed that the wight and the ghouls were all dead. Well, the wight was. The ghouls had been de-legged, but otherwise left where they were. Nym had to admit it was a smart tactic. There was no point in wasting time and energy hacking them up so they’d stay down longer when they really only needed a minute or so for Babkin to fight his way farther down the tunnel.
Nym ordered the golems to make a fighting retreat of it and follow Babkin into the tunnel he’d taken with the goal that no ghouls coming from behind would keep the berserker moving forward. He was only about a thousand feet from open air and the unit holding the exit had already been informed to expect him.
Ghouls all around and behind Babkin were cut down when Nym wasn’t looking, and between Tiramaya’s work and the golems blocking the ghouls from chasing Babkin down, they were able to steer the berserker into open air. Soldiers parted around him and he rushed through, eyes locked onto a ghoul in the trees a few hundred feet back from the cave.
Tiramaya appeared amidst the soldiers, causing a few of them to shout in surprise and flinch back. She snorted in amusement and walked through them, but Nym thought there was a lot of weariness in her steps that hadn’t been there before.
“I think we’re done,” he told Stelton. “Where should I drop you off at?”
“Back with my unit, where we first entered?” she asked as much as said.
Nym took a few seconds to reorient which way they needed to go. He’d been flying around, mostly following the tunnels as they twisted on each other and trying to keep close enough to maintain the utility of his scrying spell. It only took him a few moments to find his destination though, and they accelerated smoothly for about thirty seconds before coming to an abrupt stop.
“Oh God,” Stelton groaned. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Nym brought her down to the ground and asked, “Any of you guys know which direction the bald guy with the swords went in? No one? Of course not. He’s probably at the other cave or something.”
Nym flew over there, but there was no sign of Leaf or Tiramaya. For that matter, Babkin was gone too. Without Stelton to provide the communication link, he didn’t have any way to get in touch with them. He might be able to get a message to Babkin, assuming the berserker had calmed down and was still conscious, but none of them were mages. They wouldn’t be able to respond.
He added duplicating Lord Feldstal’s two-way message spell to his list of things to learn, or rather, added it again. It was already on there, but other spells had taken priority, and working out a new conduit to reach the fifth layer had trumped learning third circle spells. There was too much to do and not nearly enough time to do it.
Nym threw out a wide area scry, which honestly didn’t work all that well in a forest setting, but he was hoping to spot someone. When that came up empty, he gave up and teleported back to Archmage Veran’s sanctum. Wherever they were, they’d figure things out, and the mission was technically over anyway.
After being down in those caves hacking up ghouls, he wanted a bath and clean clothes.
* * *
Nym had a pile of twenty books on the table next to him with another seven open in front of him when Archmage Veran appeared. The old man looked even more worn out than normal, but he took in Nym’s work station at a glance and laughed. “Looking for something in particular?” he asked.
“That two-way message spell Lord Feldstal has,” Nym told him.
A fat book easily thicker than Babkin’s arm floated down from one of the upper shelves. “I believe you’ll find it in there.”
Nym blanched. The book was three times thicker than average. Even skimming it, it could take him hours to find what he was looking for depending on how badly organized the writer had been. At least he had the right book now. “Thanks,” he said, trying not to sigh as he eyeballed the book.
Archmage Veran’s eyes twinkled. “There are plenty of other useful spells in there too,” he added.
“I’m sure there are,” Nym said with a sour frown. He decided to change the subject. “Where did the rest of your team get off to once we were out of those caves?”
“They took a recall gate to our hidden base,” the archmage said. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I don’t share the location with you. Maybe someday, if you’re going to continue to be Nym for a while longer still.”
“No, it’s fine. I understand. I just wasted some arcana scrying around the forest. No one said anything to me before they left.”
“Ah, yes… Leaf is sometimes forgetful, and Tira was exhausted. Babkin… well, he wasn’t talking to anybody. I doubt we’ll see him again for at least a few days.”
“Yeah. How’d your end go?”
The archmage sighed and pulled out a chair. “It’s getting harder to keep the tear from splitting further. We’re reaching a tipping point, where we’ll need to decisively end this or we’re going to lose. There’s talk of giving up and burning the whole forest down. It would cripple the entire country’s economy for practically an entire generation while the forest regrows, but the alternative…”
“I’m sure a concentrated effort could harvest a considerable supply of lumber, enough to last for years, before they burned the rest.”
Archmage Veran chuckled and shook his head. “Ah, my young-again friend. You truly do not understand the scale of what you’re proposing. Hundreds of trees are felled every week to be turned into lumber for the rest of the country. We would need to clear a few square miles of forest just to meet the country’s demand for the next few years. It would take months of dedicated effort.
“And just between us, the government has been stocking up on wood. I have it on good authority that we’ve taken almost five times as much lumber from the forest as normal over the last four months.”
“So if they don’t want to burn it down, what are they going to do? The army’s holding on by its fingernails at this point,” Nym said. “Most of the freelancers bailed after the breakout. Their ability to build new outposts and forts was almost completely destroyed when the wights started concentrating on hunting down earth mages to convert for their tunnel project.”
“It may very well come down to burning the forest to the ground, but that’s an absolute last resort and it honestly won’t stop the undead problem alone. Let me ask you though. Do you have any plans over the next few days?”
“Why? What do you need?” Nym asked.
“How would you feel about getting a look at what’s going on under that mausoleum?”
Nym and Stelton stood in the air above the treetops while he continued to scour the tunnels below for wights. Tiramaya still wasn’t showing to his scry, which was annoying, but he’d gotten used to it. Babkin was their reference point, and she seemed to be able to compensate easily enough for directions that were based off his location instead of hers.
The easiest way he had to track her was to watch things die. It appeared that there was a sphere maybe six or seven feet wide that his scrying just didn’t notice. He himself couldn’t even tell he was skipping a section of the tunnel until she moved and he realized what was there. What he could see was a line of bodies scattered in her wake.
It wasn’t every ghoul, of course. She only attacked the ones that got in her way, or got too close, or some other criteria he couldn’t divine. But he was able to track her progress and make a guess where she was based on when he stopped finding chopped up ghouls squirming around. He had to give it to her, she knew how to control Babkin.
She would still kill wights when Nym reported one in hiding somewhere or coming in, but otherwise she spent her time running interference on tunnels she didn’t want Babkin going down. The berserker naturally followed the flow of ghouls, meeting everything attacking him and moving on to new enemies when he’d downed those. By depriving him of ghouls in specific directions, she steered him towards an exit tunnel.
“Nym,” Stelton said.
It looked like she’d run into a problem though where Babkin had hit a junction with five tunnels that met up at one intersection. There were ghouls coming from multiple angles, and it was tight enough that he assumed she couldn’t skirt around the melee without getting tangled up on it.
“Nym.”
He didn’t have a spell to attack remotely, but he thought he could possibly construct an earth golem at range. There was plenty of material at least, and a pair of them could hold incoming ghouls off long enough for Babkin to head down another tunnel.
“Nym!” Stelton shouted.
“What?” he asked, coming out of his scry.
“Geists incoming!”
“What? Oh.” Four of them were coming more or less directly at them, at least as much as the wind currents would allow them to fly in a straight line. Nym waited for them to bunch up tightly enough, then loosed a lightning bolt that fried all of them at once.
“Thanks. Good spotting,” he told the army mage.
“I… you’re welcome,” she said, staring past him at the tattered remains of the geists fluttering down to the forest floor.
“Let me know if you see anything else trying to sneak up on us,” he told her.
“Sir!”
Nym shook his head. “No need for that.”
Stelton just looked down at the dead geists again and uttered, “Whatever you say, sir.”
Nym rolled his eyes and got back to work. [I’m going to set up a pair of golems to hold the south tunnel. We should be able to get Babkin into one of the two west ones. Either is fine. They’ll link up in a few hundred feet.]
[Understood.]
It was an immense strain to create them from a hundred feet away, especially since he couldn’t see the spell construct through his scrying. Fortunately, the ground itself wasn’t an impediment to his arcana. It was akin to closing his eyes and drawing blind. He knew where everything went, but it was hard to line it up right with no frame of reference.
But human mages did it for every spell they cast. It was no wonder it took them so much practice to master a new one. If they could do it, so could he. It just took him a few attempts to get it right, no more than six or seven. After about two minutes of trying, the first golem formed out of earth and leapt to stop the ghouls coming down the tunnel.
The second one came easier, though it was still three attempts to get it properly built. Nym resolved to practice blind casting more in the future when he had time. Killing the ice worm hive queen would have been much easier if he could remotely assemble golems out of sight back then. For now, he directed the two golems using scrying magic. They mostly fought to hold back the ghouls, which was made easier by the fact that the tunnels weren’t all that wide.
The amount of arcana they were draining from him to keep up with regenerating from the attacks they took was exhausting. Between that, the flight, and the scrying, he was starting to hit his limit. It wasn’t so bad that he was struggling to keep arcana in his soul well, but if he had to suddenly cast a third circle spell on top of the ones he was holding, he was going to be in for a rough time.
[There’s another wight behind that knot of ghouls in the north tunnel. It’s using them to screen its own movements, but if you kill it now, the ghouls will probably go straight to Babkin and lure him in the wrong direction,] Nym reported.
A few seconds later, he noticed that the wight and the ghouls were all dead. Well, the wight was. The ghouls had been de-legged, but otherwise left where they were. Nym had to admit it was a smart tactic. There was no point in wasting time and energy hacking them up so they’d stay down longer when they really only needed a minute or so for Babkin to fight his way farther down the tunnel.
Nym ordered the golems to make a fighting retreat of it and follow Babkin into the tunnel he’d taken with the goal that no ghouls coming from behind would keep the berserker moving forward. He was only about a thousand feet from open air and the unit holding the exit had already been informed to expect him.
Ghouls all around and behind Babkin were cut down when Nym wasn’t looking, and between Tiramaya’s work and the golems blocking the ghouls from chasing Babkin down, they were able to steer the berserker into open air. Soldiers parted around him and he rushed through, eyes locked onto a ghoul in the trees a few hundred feet back from the cave.
Tiramaya appeared amidst the soldiers, causing a few of them to shout in surprise and flinch back. She snorted in amusement and walked through them, but Nym thought there was a lot of weariness in her steps that hadn’t been there before.
“I think we’re done,” he told Stelton. “Where should I drop you off at?”
“Back with my unit, where we first entered?” she asked as much as said.
Nym took a few seconds to reorient which way they needed to go. He’d been flying around, mostly following the tunnels as they twisted on each other and trying to keep close enough to maintain the utility of his scrying spell. It only took him a few moments to find his destination though, and they accelerated smoothly for about thirty seconds before coming to an abrupt stop.
“Oh God,” Stelton groaned. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Nym brought her down to the ground and asked, “Any of you guys know which direction the bald guy with the swords went in? No one? Of course not. He’s probably at the other cave or something.”
Nym flew over there, but there was no sign of Leaf or Tiramaya. For that matter, Babkin was gone too. Without Stelton to provide the communication link, he didn’t have any way to get in touch with them. He might be able to get a message to Babkin, assuming the berserker had calmed down and was still conscious, but none of them were mages. They wouldn’t be able to respond.
He added duplicating Lord Feldstal’s two-way message spell to his list of things to learn, or rather, added it again. It was already on there, but other spells had taken priority, and working out a new conduit to reach the fifth layer had trumped learning third circle spells. There was too much to do and not nearly enough time to do it.
Nym threw out a wide area scry, which honestly didn’t work all that well in a forest setting, but he was hoping to spot someone. When that came up empty, he gave up and teleported back to Archmage Veran’s sanctum. Wherever they were, they’d figure things out, and the mission was technically over anyway.
After being down in those caves hacking up ghouls, he wanted a bath and clean clothes.
* * *
Nym had a pile of twenty books on the table next to him with another seven open in front of him when Archmage Veran appeared. The old man looked even more worn out than normal, but he took in Nym’s work station at a glance and laughed. “Looking for something in particular?” he asked.
“That two-way message spell Lord Feldstal has,” Nym told him.
A fat book easily thicker than Babkin’s arm floated down from one of the upper shelves. “I believe you’ll find it in there.”
Nym blanched. The book was three times thicker than average. Even skimming it, it could take him hours to find what he was looking for depending on how badly organized the writer had been. At least he had the right book now. “Thanks,” he said, trying not to sigh as he eyeballed the book.
Archmage Veran’s eyes twinkled. “There are plenty of other useful spells in there too,” he added.
“I’m sure there are,” Nym said with a sour frown. He decided to change the subject. “Where did the rest of your team get off to once we were out of those caves?”
“They took a recall gate to our hidden base,” the archmage said. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I don’t share the location with you. Maybe someday, if you’re going to continue to be Nym for a while longer still.”
“No, it’s fine. I understand. I just wasted some arcana scrying around the forest. No one said anything to me before they left.”
“Ah, yes… Leaf is sometimes forgetful, and Tira was exhausted. Babkin… well, he wasn’t talking to anybody. I doubt we’ll see him again for at least a few days.”
“Yeah. How’d your end go?”
The archmage sighed and pulled out a chair. “It’s getting harder to keep the tear from splitting further. We’re reaching a tipping point, where we’ll need to decisively end this or we’re going to lose. There’s talk of giving up and burning the whole forest down. It would cripple the entire country’s economy for practically an entire generation while the forest regrows, but the alternative…”
“I’m sure a concentrated effort could harvest a considerable supply of lumber, enough to last for years, before they burned the rest.”
Archmage Veran chuckled and shook his head. “Ah, my young-again friend. You truly do not understand the scale of what you’re proposing. Hundreds of trees are felled every week to be turned into lumber for the rest of the country. We would need to clear a few square miles of forest just to meet the country’s demand for the next few years. It would take months of dedicated effort.
“And just between us, the government has been stocking up on wood. I have it on good authority that we’ve taken almost five times as much lumber from the forest as normal over the last four months.”
“So if they don’t want to burn it down, what are they going to do? The army’s holding on by its fingernails at this point,” Nym said. “Most of the freelancers bailed after the breakout. Their ability to build new outposts and forts was almost completely destroyed when the wights started concentrating on hunting down earth mages to convert for their tunnel project.”
“It may very well come down to burning the forest to the ground, but that’s an absolute last resort and it honestly won’t stop the undead problem alone. Let me ask you though. Do you have any plans over the next few days?”
“Why? What do you need?” Nym asked.
“How would you feel about getting a look at what’s going on under that mausoleum?”
