Their team of eight was standing together on the roof of the keep near where Ebalsan used to be. There wasn’t much left of the town at this point, unfortunately, but the keep itself had held against the undead. There were a few familiar faces in their little group. Leaf and Tiramaya were there. Archmage Veran, of course, was at their head. Nym himself rounded out the half he was familiar with. The other four were new to him.
One thing he knew for sure was that none of them were military. They were all in their forties or fifties, though most looked younger. Nym was getting better at judging the ages of various mages, though the archmage himself was… weird. He should have been maybe fifty or sixty at the oldest, but he looked at least eighty and should have looked like he was in his mid-thirties.
Nym hadn’t asked him what happened, but from context he’d picked up during their conversations, he was pretty sure he, or rather Exarch Niramyn, had something to do with the archmage’s apparent advanced age. It seemed like it might have been a sensitive topic since the old man never brought it up, so Nym had left it alone.
Regardless, he was guessing based on the average age of everyone involved besides him that the old team had called in some favors to round out their numbers. Of the four he didn’t know, two of them were mages and the other two probably had some unique skills like Tiramaya. Leaf might actually be the least dangerous person standing on the roof, though to be fair, Nym hadn’t exactly seen him cut loose down in the tunnels.
It was unusual to see people who weren’t mages tap into the second layer of arcana, but it did happen on occasion. He still wasn’t sure entirely how Tiramaya’s stealth magic worked, but it definitely wasn’t a first circle spell. Whatever tricks the other non-mages had up their sleeves, Nym did not doubt they would be potent. They’d been handpicked by an archmage, after all.
To be honest, he was a little intimidated. Intellectually, he knew he was an ascendant and could theoretically end this whole thing with a wave of his hand. In reality, he was just one mage who could go a lot longer and a lot harder than the average mage, but who didn’t really have any world-changing magic of his own. Someday he would, maybe even someday soon, but not today.
“Are there any last questions?” Archmage Veran asked. When no one raised a hand or voiced any concerns, he nodded sharply and said, “Let us begin then. We will be teleporting in shortly.”
The magic took hold of the entire group all at once and pulled them through space. Nym honestly wasn’t sure if he could manage an eight-person group teleport, considering how badly five had wiped him out. He supposed the archmage had both a great deal more practice and access to spells specifically designed for non-standard teleports that would reduce the strain, but it was still an impressive feat of translocation.
Contrary to Nym’s expectations, they did not land in a tunnel. Instead, they were floating in the air of a cavern about twenty feet off the ground. Almost immediately, a wight spotted them and sent a swarm of rocks flying their way. Nym caught about half of them with greater telekinesis and hurled them back, while one of the other mages, Nym thought he’d heard someone call him Sakaro, got the rest with an application of counter-elemental earth magic and crushed them into dust.
Tiramaya disappeared from the group and reappeared behind the wight. A short sword fell into her waiting hand out of nowhere and she rammed it through the wight’s skull. The movement and attack took less than a second. She vanished again and Nym lost track of her.
Third layer arcana flared up around the other mage, a man named Ogric, and he unleashed a wave of fire into the ghouls below. Strangely, the heat didn’t reach up to them, and no smoke rolled off the bodies as they burned. Ghouls being ghouls, none of them tried to flee. Nym was forced to knock them back down a few times as they climbed over top each other trying to reach the hovering group, but within a minute or two, they were all reduced to ash on the ground.
That was a spell Nym would not have minded knowing about during his first tunnel run. The construct itself looked simple enough, but there was something weird in the conduit fueling it. His best guess was that the spell required some very specific intent filters that he didn’t quite have enough time to tease out. It seemed that all the best spells did.
Leaf had told him privately that Ogric was a fire specialist, so it made sense to him that he had some unique insight into the discipline, and that his skills included intent filters that could do things like turn an entire ghoul swarm to ash without even singing the eyebrows of innocent bystanders.
Leaf had also told him that Ogric had a temper and to make sure to stay out of the man’s way. Nym was under no illusions that he could take the older mage in a fight, so that sounded like good advice to him. The last thing he needed was a pyromaniac setting him on fire while he was supposed to be holding a tunnel against a bunch of incoming ghouls.
“Clear,” Ogric rumbled, his accent thick. Arcana flared out around him and all of the ash swept away to one side like a giant wave of black crashing up against the wall. Even that wight Tiramaya had killed was burned away. Hopefully she wasn’t a pile of ash herself now. He doubted she’d die that easily, but the fire mage hadn’t even checked to make sure it was safe before he’d incinerated the whole cavern.
He scried up and down the tunnels connecting to the cavern, hoping to see some sign of her work, but there was nothing. He frowned at the fire mage, who didn’t notice and was waiting for the archmage to make the next move.
“We proceed north from here. It should not take long to begin running into the first wards. Zerek, please alert me when we run into them,” he announced.
One of the two non-mages gave a grunt and said, “You got it, boss man.”
Out of time to look for Tiramaya, Nym refocused his scrying on the tunnels closest to them. “Ghouls coming up in that tunnel,” he said, pointing behind them and to the left. “Maybe… thirty. No wights that I can see.”
Ogric sent another wave of fire down the tunnel. It lit up the interior even as it passed out of sight, and Nym’s scrying spell caught it washing over the ghouls. They crisped and blackened, but without the continuous pressure of more fire being poured on them, it wasn’t enough to char them completely.
“All of them are still up,” he reported.
The big fire mage glowered at the tunnel, took a deep breath, and sent another wave of fire into it. This one was easily three times denser than the first, and when it struck the ghouls, it clung to their flesh instead of passing over them. The first of them started to crumble away as they rushed into the cavern.
“Makes a man feel a bit self-conscious about his own choice of weaponry,” Leaf muttered to Nym, gesturing to the twin swords strapped to his belt.
The last member of their team, a woman named Blanchet, patted him on the shoulder. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “You just wait until he runs into a monster that’s immune to heat.”
“That is when I leave and let someone else handle it,” Ogric responded. “It is an important part of being so specialized, knowing when your skills are not the right ones for the job in front of you. But this, ghoul control, this I can do.”
“Where were you last time we were down here?” Nym asked.
“Plague wasp infestation in Byramin,” the fire mage told him seriously. “Fire is the best way to destroy the hives so that they do not come back next season.”
“Oh. Uh, right. That sounds important too.”
He had no idea what a plague wasp was, and he didn’t think he wanted to know. They sounded nasty. Wherever Nym decided to go once this whole undead crisis thing was over with, he was going to make sure it was a place where they’d never even heard of something called a plague wasp.
The drawback to Ogric’s flaming attacks was that they were not subtle. Nym’s scrying anchor flitted from tunnel to tunnel, often going through solid earth to do so. “They’re pretty much coming at us from every direction now,” he said. “Also, I have no idea where Tiramaya is and I’m a little bit concerned we might kill her on accident.”
Leaf started laughing. “Don’t worry about that. Tira won’t be hit by attacks like this.”
Ogric bristled, seeming insulted by Leaf’s statement, but all he said was, “Very well. I will not hold back for her sake then.”
Her job was arguably more important than Ogric’s anyway. He was there to destroy a lot of ghouls, but she was hunting wights again. Of the two, a single wight could be far more dangerous than a hundred ghouls. He’d much rather collapse some tunnels and start transmuting earth to stone to slow down the ghouls’ digging than deal with a squad of wights armed with unknown magics.
The group advanced into the north tunnel, with Ogric in the back and Leaf walking next to Zerek in the front. Ogric regularly shot great gouts of flame down the tunnel behind them whenever Nym noted the approach of more ghouls. He was already starting to miss Stelton’s communication spell, if only because the fire blasts were surprisingly loud, and their roars echoed down the tunnels. It was difficult to talk over the noise sometimes.
“Hold up,” Zerek told the group. “We’re hitting the first line of wards now. Looks like some sort of marker to draw the attention of any nearby ghouls to us. It might be scent-based, or maybe some analogous sense that only undead have.”
Blanchet looked over and said, “Ghouls have a kind of life-sense that points them at anything with a pulse. It’s how they find people trying to hide from them, though the range is short.”
Nym hadn’t read anything like that when he was studying up on ghouls. It made sense; he was just surprised at the source. He would have assumed something like that would be common knowledge, but he supposed it didn’t much matter to the army when they were in the business of actively fighting the undead. There was little use in hiding from them.
“Could be,” Zerek agreed with the woman. “Either way, I can break it if you give me a minute. Might keep ghouls from coming at us quite so fast.”
“Could they come at us any faster than they are already?” Leaf asked.
“They definitely can. Just ask Babkin,” Nym told him. “You should have seen how bad it got once we stopped burning his leftovers.”
“I’m sure the elimination of all the nearby wights didn’t help to keep them from swarming,” Leaf said. “Still, for as many as we’ve killed…”
“Their numbers have been replenished and then some,” Archmage Veran said firmly. “The spell being used to hold the tear in the Veil closed is not a perfect seal. New ghouls are still clawing their way out. The count swells by several hundred a day, at the minimum.”
It was no wonder the army never made any significant progress. It was all they could do to hold the undead back from spilling out of the forest, and they’d failed at doing even that once the undead forces had gotten an influx of wight commanders.
“Got it,” Zerek announced. “We’re clear to advance, but it’s going to be slow going. That was only the first ward.”
Nym wondered how long it would take to reach the center of the network, and he was worried about what they’d find when they finally got there.
Their team of eight was standing together on the roof of the keep near where Ebalsan used to be. There wasn’t much left of the town at this point, unfortunately, but the keep itself had held against the undead. There were a few familiar faces in their little group. Leaf and Tiramaya were there. Archmage Veran, of course, was at their head. Nym himself rounded out the half he was familiar with. The other four were new to him.
One thing he knew for sure was that none of them were military. They were all in their forties or fifties, though most looked younger. Nym was getting better at judging the ages of various mages, though the archmage himself was… weird. He should have been maybe fifty or sixty at the oldest, but he looked at least eighty and should have looked like he was in his mid-thirties.
Nym hadn’t asked him what happened, but from context he’d picked up during their conversations, he was pretty sure he, or rather Exarch Niramyn, had something to do with the archmage’s apparent advanced age. It seemed like it might have been a sensitive topic since the old man never brought it up, so Nym had left it alone.
Regardless, he was guessing based on the average age of everyone involved besides him that the old team had called in some favors to round out their numbers. Of the four he didn’t know, two of them were mages and the other two probably had some unique skills like Tiramaya. Leaf might actually be the least dangerous person standing on the roof, though to be fair, Nym hadn’t exactly seen him cut loose down in the tunnels.
It was unusual to see people who weren’t mages tap into the second layer of arcana, but it did happen on occasion. He still wasn’t sure entirely how Tiramaya’s stealth magic worked, but it definitely wasn’t a first circle spell. Whatever tricks the other non-mages had up their sleeves, Nym did not doubt they would be potent. They’d been handpicked by an archmage, after all.
To be honest, he was a little intimidated. Intellectually, he knew he was an ascendant and could theoretically end this whole thing with a wave of his hand. In reality, he was just one mage who could go a lot longer and a lot harder than the average mage, but who didn’t really have any world-changing magic of his own. Someday he would, maybe even someday soon, but not today.
“Are there any last questions?” Archmage Veran asked. When no one raised a hand or voiced any concerns, he nodded sharply and said, “Let us begin then. We will be teleporting in shortly.”
The magic took hold of the entire group all at once and pulled them through space. Nym honestly wasn’t sure if he could manage an eight-person group teleport, considering how badly five had wiped him out. He supposed the archmage had both a great deal more practice and access to spells specifically designed for non-standard teleports that would reduce the strain, but it was still an impressive feat of translocation.
Contrary to Nym’s expectations, they did not land in a tunnel. Instead, they were floating in the air of a cavern about twenty feet off the ground. Almost immediately, a wight spotted them and sent a swarm of rocks flying their way. Nym caught about half of them with greater telekinesis and hurled them back, while one of the other mages, Nym thought he’d heard someone call him Sakaro, got the rest with an application of counter-elemental earth magic and crushed them into dust.
Tiramaya disappeared from the group and reappeared behind the wight. A short sword fell into her waiting hand out of nowhere and she rammed it through the wight’s skull. The movement and attack took less than a second. She vanished again and Nym lost track of her.
Third layer arcana flared up around the other mage, a man named Ogric, and he unleashed a wave of fire into the ghouls below. Strangely, the heat didn’t reach up to them, and no smoke rolled off the bodies as they burned. Ghouls being ghouls, none of them tried to flee. Nym was forced to knock them back down a few times as they climbed over top each other trying to reach the hovering group, but within a minute or two, they were all reduced to ash on the ground.
That was a spell Nym would not have minded knowing about during his first tunnel run. The construct itself looked simple enough, but there was something weird in the conduit fueling it. His best guess was that the spell required some very specific intent filters that he didn’t quite have enough time to tease out. It seemed that all the best spells did.
Leaf had told him privately that Ogric was a fire specialist, so it made sense to him that he had some unique insight into the discipline, and that his skills included intent filters that could do things like turn an entire ghoul swarm to ash without even singing the eyebrows of innocent bystanders.
Leaf had also told him that Ogric had a temper and to make sure to stay out of the man’s way. Nym was under no illusions that he could take the older mage in a fight, so that sounded like good advice to him. The last thing he needed was a pyromaniac setting him on fire while he was supposed to be holding a tunnel against a bunch of incoming ghouls.
“Clear,” Ogric rumbled, his accent thick. Arcana flared out around him and all of the ash swept away to one side like a giant wave of black crashing up against the wall. Even that wight Tiramaya had killed was burned away. Hopefully she wasn’t a pile of ash herself now. He doubted she’d die that easily, but the fire mage hadn’t even checked to make sure it was safe before he’d incinerated the whole cavern.
He scried up and down the tunnels connecting to the cavern, hoping to see some sign of her work, but there was nothing. He frowned at the fire mage, who didn’t notice and was waiting for the archmage to make the next move.
“We proceed north from here. It should not take long to begin running into the first wards. Zerek, please alert me when we run into them,” he announced.
One of the two non-mages gave a grunt and said, “You got it, boss man.”
Out of time to look for Tiramaya, Nym refocused his scrying on the tunnels closest to them. “Ghouls coming up in that tunnel,” he said, pointing behind them and to the left. “Maybe… thirty. No wights that I can see.”
Ogric sent another wave of fire down the tunnel. It lit up the interior even as it passed out of sight, and Nym’s scrying spell caught it washing over the ghouls. They crisped and blackened, but without the continuous pressure of more fire being poured on them, it wasn’t enough to char them completely.
“All of them are still up,” he reported.
The big fire mage glowered at the tunnel, took a deep breath, and sent another wave of fire into it. This one was easily three times denser than the first, and when it struck the ghouls, it clung to their flesh instead of passing over them. The first of them started to crumble away as they rushed into the cavern.
“Makes a man feel a bit self-conscious about his own choice of weaponry,” Leaf muttered to Nym, gesturing to the twin swords strapped to his belt.
The last member of their team, a woman named Blanchet, patted him on the shoulder. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “You just wait until he runs into a monster that’s immune to heat.”
“That is when I leave and let someone else handle it,” Ogric responded. “It is an important part of being so specialized, knowing when your skills are not the right ones for the job in front of you. But this, ghoul control, this I can do.”
“Where were you last time we were down here?” Nym asked.
“Plague wasp infestation in Byramin,” the fire mage told him seriously. “Fire is the best way to destroy the hives so that they do not come back next season.”
“Oh. Uh, right. That sounds important too.”
He had no idea what a plague wasp was, and he didn’t think he wanted to know. They sounded nasty. Wherever Nym decided to go once this whole undead crisis thing was over with, he was going to make sure it was a place where they’d never even heard of something called a plague wasp.
The drawback to Ogric’s flaming attacks was that they were not subtle. Nym’s scrying anchor flitted from tunnel to tunnel, often going through solid earth to do so. “They’re pretty much coming at us from every direction now,” he said. “Also, I have no idea where Tiramaya is and I’m a little bit concerned we might kill her on accident.”
Leaf started laughing. “Don’t worry about that. Tira won’t be hit by attacks like this.”
Ogric bristled, seeming insulted by Leaf’s statement, but all he said was, “Very well. I will not hold back for her sake then.”
Her job was arguably more important than Ogric’s anyway. He was there to destroy a lot of ghouls, but she was hunting wights again. Of the two, a single wight could be far more dangerous than a hundred ghouls. He’d much rather collapse some tunnels and start transmuting earth to stone to slow down the ghouls’ digging than deal with a squad of wights armed with unknown magics.
The group advanced into the north tunnel, with Ogric in the back and Leaf walking next to Zerek in the front. Ogric regularly shot great gouts of flame down the tunnel behind them whenever Nym noted the approach of more ghouls. He was already starting to miss Stelton’s communication spell, if only because the fire blasts were surprisingly loud, and their roars echoed down the tunnels. It was difficult to talk over the noise sometimes.
“Hold up,” Zerek told the group. “We’re hitting the first line of wards now. Looks like some sort of marker to draw the attention of any nearby ghouls to us. It might be scent-based, or maybe some analogous sense that only undead have.”
Blanchet looked over and said, “Ghouls have a kind of life-sense that points them at anything with a pulse. It’s how they find people trying to hide from them, though the range is short.”
Nym hadn’t read anything like that when he was studying up on ghouls. It made sense; he was just surprised at the source. He would have assumed something like that would be common knowledge, but he supposed it didn’t much matter to the army when they were in the business of actively fighting the undead. There was little use in hiding from them.
“Could be,” Zerek agreed with the woman. “Either way, I can break it if you give me a minute. Might keep ghouls from coming at us quite so fast.”
“Could they come at us any faster than they are already?” Leaf asked.
“They definitely can. Just ask Babkin,” Nym told him. “You should have seen how bad it got once we stopped burning his leftovers.”
“I’m sure the elimination of all the nearby wights didn’t help to keep them from swarming,” Leaf said. “Still, for as many as we’ve killed…”
“Their numbers have been replenished and then some,” Archmage Veran said firmly. “The spell being used to hold the tear in the Veil closed is not a perfect seal. New ghouls are still clawing their way out. The count swells by several hundred a day, at the minimum.”
It was no wonder the army never made any significant progress. It was all they could do to hold the undead back from spilling out of the forest, and they’d failed at doing even that once the undead forces had gotten an influx of wight commanders.
“Got it,” Zerek announced. “We’re clear to advance, but it’s going to be slow going. That was only the first ward.”
Nym wondered how long it would take to reach the center of the network, and he was worried about what they’d find when they finally got there.
