A gout 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 towards 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, half way 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 across the wall, but the individual strands seemed to be carved from stone and merged into the wall behind it. Each arm was sunk up past its wrist as well.
The corpse’s skin was slate grey, 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 against its bonds. There was very little room for it to actually move other than jerking its shoulders as it struggled to tear itself free 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 something 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 each other, 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 second and last 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 now 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 on it, but the anti-scrying 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 lipped his lips and looked around at the group. “So we’re splitting up,” he said. “That’s… risky. None of us are really in the best of shape anymore. Maybe we need to retreat and bring back some help.”
“I am afraid there’s no telling what defenses this monster will think up if we give it the time to do so,” the archmage told him. “I must ask you all to dig just a little bit deeper. We will destroy all four bodies, and then I will burn out this undead rot at the root.”
A gout 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 towards 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, half way 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 across the wall, but the individual strands seemed to be carved from stone and merged into the wall behind it. Each arm was sunk up past its wrist as well.
The corpse’s skin was slate grey, 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 against its bonds. There was very little room for it to actually move other than jerking its shoulders as it struggled to tear itself free 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 something 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 each other, 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 second and last 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 now 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 on it, but the anti-scrying 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 lipped his lips and looked around at the group. “So we’re splitting up,” he said. “That’s… risky. None of us are really in the best of shape anymore. Maybe we need to retreat and bring back some help.”
“I am afraid there’s no telling what defenses this monster will think up if we give it the time to do so,” the archmage told him. “I must ask you all to dig just a little bit deeper. We will destroy all four bodies, and then I will burn out this undead rot at the root.”
