BECMI Chapter 335 – Ve Kome To Vivic Your Blud!
I was going to be here for however long Sama needed to carry a child to term, which, in the case of a Hagblood, was probably not nine months. Supernatural vitality meant growth could be pretty quick in all cases, but the kicker was that Sama was the mother, not a normal human. Briggs informed me that his growth rate as a child had been a little early on the maturing side, but nothing spectacular. But then, he’d had a human mother.
It meant it was time for me to pursue a couple of my longer-held ambitions… not the least because the most elite undead hunters of Darkmoor had all come to the future, and they all knew about Zanzyr, Caergard, and Transyvia, not the least because Caer and Verdain Forsaken had been frequent cross-time adventurers… and had often used that time to spread their bloodline around, and start a whole new generation or two of Forsaken with Moorian roots.
As a result, there were indeed several hundred second and third generation Forsaken who had come Across time. They had heard all kinds of things about the reckless and uncaring wizards of the homelands of their fathers and their grandfathers, and were not particularly understanding about spellcasters who didn’t consider them equals.
Most had some experience adventuring all over the damn place, especially south in Iberon, and were particularly good at putting pointed arguments behind their own beliefs.
As for the youngsters, the Bug Caves were still there, still intact, and still represented a lot of stuff to be cleared. Lots of Karma for the reaping, and self-sustaining as long as we let the dead bugs lie there and rotated attacking from different areas judiciously.
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My Communes were very pointed upon my return to Zanzyr. I wanted to know where the undead were, and where the lycanthropes were.
Neither were natural, both were the result of Entropic Immortals meddling with natural life… and the Nown on this side of the Far Shore was utterly shocked I could actually gain its attention when I Upcast to X+1, and it found itself on the other end of a Commune with an Eternal it had helped make in another timeline.
I blithely downloaded the entirety of my experiences with it on the Other Shore. We were four thousand years further along in time on this side of things, but that had changed the megalith very little, thing of Matter that it was. It absorbed the memories I shared, and came around fairly rapidly to the same ideas that I presented to it.
It was of Matter, but only made of Earth. It had Blood of Fire, it was surrounded in Air inside and out, and Water moved over and about it with life. It had only to embrace the full condition of the mixed Elementals, and organic life could be part of it, too.
Domination of the Druidic magic was its right, and not even the Immortals could gainsay that among the mortals born of its soil and dwelling upon its ecosystem. It WAS the ecosystem if it wanted to be, and if that helped defend it against the machinations of Immortals, it was the only logical path to take!
It was also a planet, and the amount of Immortal Power it could process was impressive… and more importantly, the amount it could earn permanently was pretty damn high, too. The presence of selected Clones, Simulacra, Nature Elementals, and Fey Spirits it could make as extensions of itself and serve as Avatars or direct servants was possible, but limited by its Intellect, so it could never have more than nine simultaneously.
Being able to have nine different Avatars earning Immortal Power for itself in various ways was pretty strong, even if they did have to be restricted to its own biosphere. It had a big biosphere, after all!
Quiet and momentous movements began to take place as Nown began to make its own moves in the great game the Immortals were playing on its surface and interior. It was also more than wise enough to realize that if the Immortals thought it was interfering, it could be looking at destruction or spiritual shackling, as its casual non-involvement was taken as a given by the Immortals.
They would be utterly shocked I’d taught it how to think and respond in real time...
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“By the Tree,” Brittabelle said softly, staring at the results of my Commune, displayed on a Holo of all of Zanzyr scaled one mile to the foot that sprawled through a very large underground chamber. Elevations of mountains and rivers, the flow and lay of the land, was all clearly apparent here, and could be updated in real time with the appropriate magic.
There were a lot of Forsaken, elves, Rangers, and wizards born of the people of Zanzyr who were not noble gathered here to see this. While it was all interesting and fascinating to see a map in such detail as this, where one could even make out individual buildings if one cared to (we’d long spliced in satellite observation to this, and Commune with Cities by my Sims kept the ‘civilized’ areas regularly updated), the focus here was on the lands of Caergard and Transyvia, with Verdain secondary, and all others tertiary.
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I had known about this for a long time, of course, I’d just never brought it to anyone else’s attention.
To put it bluntly, the undead rulers of Caergard and Transyvia had not been idle, and they and their necromancer underlings had been a lot less idle than almost anyone in Zanzyr knew.
Necroic concentrations of power from gathered undead glowed black on the landscape, bending ley lines that flowed with shades of elemental power here and there. Concentrations of magic and what types were readily available, and there were blots of negative energy all over the entire country, even extending out into areas outside the borders of the country, especially near Transyvia and Caergard.
As for lycanthropes, the Curse of them glittered like dark silver stars in the rolling hills of Neuva Vascovune, but there were elements of them scattered throughout Verdain and the rest of the country in the hundreds.
The elven Princess of Erendyl, the figure of Waynder Equavus nearby towering nearly a head over the other elves among those looking on grimly, shook her golden hair in disbelief as she considered what I had revealed to everyone of the nation she was a part of. “Edgina, how many undead are you indicating here?”
“It is not just undead, it is how powerful those undead are. The bodies of skilled wizards and warriors can be tasked to make more powerful undead, as everyone here is aware. The necromancers of the country have been quietly raiding the graveyards of the country for a good two centuries, as well as opportunistically harvesting monsters, nifloids, and even foreigners on the sly as they could, including their rivals in Zanzyr.”
“Without the Priests to ensure the sanctity of the graves, or sending the dead off with vivus, they’ve taken full advantage of the absence to treat the dead as their private factory for undead creation,” the Mick added grimly. “We saw this time and time again when necromancers were allowed to rise to power, wherever it was. The only limits on how many undead they created was how many they could control in an undead hierarchy, which was actually the biggest reason they recruited apprentices. Even the mightiest of them could only command an army so large… but ‘tis noteworthy that the Necromancer Secret School of Zanzyr has as one of its primary teachings expanding how many and how powerful the undead that a necromancer can control are.
“Ye are seeing the results of letting necromancers grow unchecked.”
Everyone digested the images of those thousands of undead, scattered among scores of tombs, barrows, holding caverns, graves and graveyards, mausoleums, and hidden dungeons.
The Mick was a living legend by now, the First of the Forsaken. He was one of the chosen few that got to move between Darkmoor and Eismoor with me, leveraging time and his new Forsaken lifespan to gain the years necessary to build a deep and rock-hard foundation.
He’d fought in every major action on both sides of the Portal, but this trip home was also his last, his Null too strong to enter the Portal again. Entering it this time had been more like the other timeline forcibly shoving him back to this Shore where he belonged, he’d not be leaving it again.
That was fine, as he was a full Thirty-Six now, at the Apex and limit of human ability!
So was his wife Laurentine, an Overmagus at the limit of human ability, a Fourth Circle Fire Elementalist, and mother of six, five of whom were in this room as proud Undead Hunters taking up the family business. Three Forsaken, two magi, with the sixth an Artificer serving in the mecha support crews and learning up the tech side of things instead.
Grandfather of… twenty-four, I think it was, too? And great-grandfather with the totals accumulating, bringing more Forsaken into the world…
The nobles of Zanzyr would have been terrified to know just how many apex elves and humans were gathered in this room… and some hyn and dwarf observers, silently looking at the shit human spellcasters had pulled off with eyes full of knowing schadenfreude.
“There are over a hundred thousand undead in Zanzyr, of power ranging from base skeletons all the way up to revenants and druj. There has not, however, been a major concentration of undead construction, such as trying to make a Flesh Colossus or something similar.” I calmly pointed at three different locations, where black stars edged in harsh gold glittered. “Three Liches of the Radiance, mages who overindulged in the power of Zanzyr’s magical field and were taken by it, turning into liches fueled by corrupt arcane power, instead of pure necromancy.
“Prince Cannarl MacKlannister is the most powerful of said liches, but they are rivals, not peers, and if they draw on the power of the Radiance, they also draw the direct attention of Thaum. As you can imagine, they don’t particularly want to draw His attention, which increases their level of frustration.”
There were two in the Principality of Caeledon, and one in the mountains at the borders of Transyvia.
“The majority of dark stars indicating powerful and free-willed undead are vampires. Most of them are bound in blood under Prince Morphail, my grandfather, who keeps an iron grip on them and their seething ambitions. Him releasing that control and allowing the vampires to hunt and claim whoever they wish would likely result in an explosion of undead that could well overwhelm the entire country, given how unprepared it is for an undead apocalypse,” I went on coldly.
No one was going to press further on the fact we were blood. The Mick came from the Caers, and his hunting of the undead was now a family tradition. He was itching to go home and leave behind the paltry dragon and giant-killing to do some real good. I had taught undead hunting to dozens of mages, watched over them as they grew, and my antipathy for undead and all necromancers had been long demonstrated.
It didn’t matter if all my spells had skulls and bloody roses involved. I met undead, the undead died.
“This is not a small job, and it is unfortunately in direct opposition to the desires of the nobles of many of these territories, and certainly to wizards in independent towers pursuing ambitions devoid of care or conscience,” I went on. “So, expect no support from the ruling wizards or Princes of Zanzyr.”
Princess Brittabelle nodded agreement with that assessment from me. “On the other hand, they are undead. Undead are NOT protected under the laws of Zanzyr, and you cannot be prosecuted for destroying them. It is the only bit of wisdom that survived the banning of Clerics from Zanzyr,” she informed everyone calmly, prompting some hard smiles from those here.