BECMI Chapter 297 – A Return to the Future
One month of pre-planning had turned into three years of preparation. By the time the jotun hordes came spilling down from their mountains and glacial homes in the north, the Giant Slayers of Darkmoor were here, and ready to show even the more elite warriors of Eismoor how this fight was done, and without using technology to do it, either!
They had mercilessly folded up the hordes of the Ice and Snow clans, then savaged the Frost giants who survived crossing the ice to Eislas. Now they were showing everyone how it was done against the tougher and stronger Fire Giants, acting as both vanguards for the assault and mentors to the enthusiastic warriors following in their footsteps.
Very, very importantly, this was a multi-racial effort of humans, dwarves, elves, and hyn. Everyone fought, everyone worked together, everyone got to see one another’s strengths and weaknesses. They got to save one another, they got to be saved by one another, and they learned how to work together and adapt their tactics on the fly.
It was not anything that had ever been done at scale anywhere else in the world, but it was done here.
One of the differences for the Archlands was the sheer number of creatures of Fire from the Elemental Planes who were present. Now, they weren’t as numerous as usual, because the storms dumping water on them from the sky and causing unpredictable hellstorms of scouring winds tended to keep them close to the volcanoes or their interiors where the raw power of Elemental Fire kept the mortal weather at bay.
Fighting Elemental creatures was not the same as fighting giants, or even giant pets, and so there was a lot of adapting going on… but that just meant the Giant Slayers got to learn new tricks along with everyone else, especially the legends of the Free Company the star-struck Moorian immigrants were astonished to see were alive and still young in the future here!
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“So, what’s the play here?” Baron Horn asked. The Grand Knight’s men had joined the effort here in the North because it promised great Karma, they needed it, and the winter season was normally not one for campaigning. Ninez could get them home in a hurry if needed, and bring a lot of help if required, but that had proven to not be much of an issue, given the rigorous amount of ground-clearing and territory-claiming he’d been aggressively pursuing during the summer and autumn.
He himself had also served in the Jotunbrul war, as had Guy and Buck and Hanvol. More Levels in a horribly short period of time compared to the future, raising their competency to heights they had never considered possible.
Next year was going to be a pivotal year for Warsherz. The Archduke had watched Sir Horn roll over the Black Wolf Barony and wipe it and his arse of a cousin from the face of the land, to the great approval of the neighboring Shires and all the neighboring Hellenic families. The Archduke’s unwillingness to do the same to his own family only made him look all the more ineffective, and now the man knew he had a major challenger to his claim of ownership of the country.
He would not be reluctant to shed the blood of a native warrior contesting his claim, as opposed to family, however!
The leadership of our efforts was gathered in the lee of a hill, a cinderstorm blowing past and over us, held at bay by judicious Earth-shaping to provide cover for the force. The warriors were taking the opportunity to rest and recover while the alternately hot and cold winds and the driving ash they lashed the landscape with scoured the dark lavafields of the charlands outside.
That said, everyone who was Marked was listening and watching, and our words were not secrets.
“Gulguz is the force behind the Arch of Fire. One more mark of vanity for His projects. Firemouth is also the home of what used to be His greatest temple, the Fane of Eternal Ash where the Priest-King of Jotunbrul held sway over all the clans of that ancient kingdom.”
“That cur wearing the Crown with the black diamonds?” Bjorn Skifnerson sniffed, his Daisho Maurice, a Moorian hyn who had advanced incredibly quickly in competence with such an example as his partner, standing faithfully at his side. The contrast between the Northmen who had fought in Jotunbrul and their undersized partners only drove home how terribly dangerous they were together when they fought.
The dark-haired, smiling hyn was nicknamed ‘the Crippler’ for just how good he was at hamstringing and groin-punching a giant who was too focused on his big sword-wielding partner.
His sandy-brown-haired brother likewise worked with Hargold in a similar fashion, and watched the backs of the two brothers who were now among the most important men in the Frokki Freeholds. The Teuthonic Order wanted to kill them most urgently, and had lost dozens of knights while trying to do so.
“That Crown was the regalia of the Jotunbrul Kings, the Crown of Ebony Flame. Yes, it is related to the hyn shadowfire,” I informed Buck and the hyn of the present day, who gasped. “I told the Masters of the Shires their fire was not unique. There are at least five different forms of black flame that I know of, and they all have a shadow component in common.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Is that Crown in play?” Sama asked, studying the Commune-informed dispersion of forces in the surrounding area. Twenty miles away, the thundering maw of Firemouth belched up endless flames, and swept the land between it and Firejaws regularly with rains of burning stone and ash.
Trying to advance over such a broken, hostile, and flame-scoured landscape was a fool’s errand, unless one were a creature of Fire with really thick hide and armor to stave off the weather. Jotuns and Elementals were certainly creatures like that, and there were thousands of them on the display. The Jotuns tended to congregate in the areas of their iron and stone fortresses, usually built on or around lavaflows, while the various types of Elemental creatures wandered as they will, be it solo, in packs, or even large herds or hordes or swarms.
Happily, there were folk around who could do a lot of Earth-shaping, and even if it was solidified lava, it was still stone. Making protected trailways through the landscape wasn’t all that hard, just slow and a bit tedious. Excitement came when it was time to fight, but we were much, much better informed of the movements of our enemies than they were of ours.
“The Crown and the one who wears it are the heart of the Formation that keeps the Arch of Fire going. Our mission isn’t just to stuff the Fire clans back into the volcano and hold them there. That’s just stupidity and deferring a problem until an army of Elementals can swarm out to take care of us.”
“Shutting down the Arch of Fire. How horrible, that we lose such a tourist attraction forever. Whatever will they sell for trinkets now?” Briggs commented, rubbing his thick jaw as he considered the forces between where we were and where we needed to go.
The Fire clans were well and truly stuffed back into the Archlands, both by the storms and the incredibly fast responses to the giants when they move to use the passes out of the place. The combinations of Lightning and Ice magic assailing them had been most unwelcome, and the way little people with very sharp blades seemed to come out of the stone and shadows from all directions hadn’t helped, either!
“It’s a Titan, an Avatar of Guzgul taking the form of the last Priest-King. He raised up the Fane from the ashes of its destruction and it exists once again at the heart of Firemouth. We have to go into the volcano, fight through the giants and Elementals defending it, make it over the causeway to the Fane, get inside, and do it all while the Arch howls around us all, promising annihilation if we don’t do this just right,” I informed everyone coolly.
“Lady Edge, yer giving us the chance to see the inside of the Fane, what we didn’t get to last time!” the hyn Adventurer Jace spoke up from where he was seated with quiet Spear-user Eshauna on a shared Disk, earning a lot of laughter for his words.
“Don’t credit me, I didn’t put it back together,” I replied coldly, which just earned me some snickers. “Our problem here is obvious. We are outnumbered by more than five to one, the terrain is theirs, they can get nigh-endless Elemental reinforcements, and the Portal there is too powerful to Interdict or close.”
“Am I to assume you have a lethal surprise prepared for this twat, who is presumably using the Crown to maintain and command the energies of the Arch?” Sama asked with a knowing smile.
“Yes. But it cannot be put into effect without killing the Titan and breaking the Crown as the Arch itself is broken. The Titan sits in the center of the Fane, at the center of the lake of fire inside the caldera of Firemouth.”
“Can we tunnel in?” Briggs asked, frowning as he considered the image of Firemouth, the Arch-belching volcano rose up before us in Holo. There were dozens of firefalls coming down the sides of the peak in weeping streams of crimson lava, making it look like the whole mountain was bleeding fire and scarred by it.
“There are thoqual and lava worms infesting the area around the volcano, and most of the approach fields are lava over fields of hot magma leaking from Firemouth, which means Elemental creatures bursting through at any moment for any reason. Most of the ‘ground’ there is not, it’s a layer of lava frosting over magma stew.”
“And the planar disruption means this is as close as our own Portals can get, and Teleports are increasingly iffy,” Briggs nodded slowly. “Linejumps still work?”
“Visibility is crap, and you know it, but yes, those would work,” I confirmed.
King Antius, heretofore silent and contemplating the scene, shifted his gaze. “We are addressing this as if we must come from the middle, because we inserted here and dared to see how far inside we could march without being detected. We don’t need to do anything of the sort. Can we insert from the back side, and is it more viable than being under the Arch?”
I tilted my head slightly. “It… has worse weather,” I said, rotating the image of the volcano and expanding the underground view. “You are correct in that the lavafields that wind their way between the two volcanoes are not present everywhere. But as you can see, there are still streams and pools of them for some distance from the volcano, extending up to ten miles from the Arch proper, to within a couple miles of the cliffs and breaks that mark the edge of the Archland.” From build-up of cooled lava over time, of course.
“The heat of the Archlands is helping keep the winter at bay under the Arch, but there’s no such protection on the flanks. The battering of hot and cold air against one another is tumultuous, and there are Elementals of Air and Fire doing battle all the time there. There’s always a storm, somewhere there’s a twister touching down all the time, and the visibility is utter crap because of the amount of steam and mist and cyclonic winds churning everything up,” I explained calmly.
“So it would have to be a tunnel.” Briggs bent over the display, which obligingly zoomed up. “Our people can be moved on Disks with great speed through a tunnel network, there is only to chart the course and make sure we can reach the caldera.”
“Which we’ll be on the wrong side of,” I pointed out calmly.
“Then we make our own causeway. Let’s assume the local rock is extremely resistant to fire by default…”