BECMI Chapter 337 – Death in the Radiance
There were only two letters with Grandmaster D’Arc’s handwriting, and no names named, but it was pretty damning in my eyes.
Thaum wasn’t worried about the Radiant liches, since he was the master of the Radiance and they were utterly dependent upon their Receptacles. He could have reached out and snuffed them at any time, and so had an iron grip upon them they could not escape!
Their undead forces were reserves that Thaum could call upon, not things that could be turned against Zanzyr! The Radiant liches, and that included Prince Cannarl, had no choice but to obey Him, or they would be destroyed!
It made a crude sort of sense. Necromancy was one of the Secret Schools, after all, and any wizard could learn basic necromancy among their spells and powers. The Grandmaster would be a fool to not understand the power it represented, and that the greatest power of said necromancy was how it could build up over time into a terrifying force.
Giving in to the temptation of the powers the Entropic Immortals had made possible was par for the course. He was an Immortal, above mortality, and Radiant liches weren’t classic undead. Of course it was permissible for Him to use them!
Undead based upon magitomic decay, versus undead based upon negative energy. It was clever on the face of it, totally ignoring the fact that it opened up an entirely new goddamn world of new forms of undead to threaten the living with!
“Fuh. King. Arse. Hole,” I hissed out through clenched teeth, eyeing the crystallized new Dreadskull of Caliumphral.
It was a Dreadskull against Radiance-users, not against undead. A normal Baneskull against Undead had no effect on a Radiant lich, which had not been a welcome thing to find out. The Mick was now the first person to have Bane against Radiance worked in the Slaughter Rune on his Claymore Laird, meaning he was also tapped to act against the other Radiant liches, including Prince Cannarl.
Disruption and Positive energy effects didn’t affect a Radiant lich like they did normal undead, either. Nobody had thought to try negative energies against one, but they were still dead, and negative energy didn’t affect the dead.
Vivus, though, vivus was very non-discriminatory. If the analysis of Mick and Laurentine meant anything, the vivus which had assaulted Caliumphral had been much greedier and more active than usual. Was the decaying Radiance that much easier to digest than even Negative energy?
It wasn’t much of an edge, compared to no Positive energy vulnerability, meaning that Radiant liches were tougher and more dangerous than normal liches, a superior form of undead!
Fuh. King. Arse. Hole!
There were Immortals who would go absolutely apeshit if undead invulnerable to traditional positive energy and radiant light started popping up. They’d wipe Zanzyr right off the map to stop the Radiance from being able to make more.
I could visualize Mother Nyx, Patron of all Undead, going cooingly dizzy over Energy coming up with a marvelous new source of undead for Her to look over.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know which of the Immortals of Energy had been involved in the creation of the Core of All Magic there, although I was pretty sure both Gulguz and fiery Rathaseid, one of Gulguz’s fellow Immortal fanatics of fire, were involved to some extent. There were a dozen eager and competitive Eternals and Hierarchs of Energy looking to pull one over on their counterparts in other Sphere who could be involved in the Core… and were likely properly miffed when said counterparts made it backfire on them. Abusing their cleverness by making it deplete all magic from a world, thereby making it nigh-impossible for Energy to promote ANY Immortals by ANY means… yeah, that had been a nice slap in the face to the overly clever bastards who thought they’d come up with a sweet way to get around the traditional methods reliably and even secretly.
Nobody was going to stop looking for other methods, of course. There were Immortals who had gained their power by alternate methods, including Gaebrel, and both my partners in long years on the Other Shore, Lalo and Emeril (soon to be reborn and rebranded properly to hide where they really came from). I wasn’t part of Immortal society and didn’t know the gossip that went on there between them, I was going to have to rely on Lalo and Emeril to infiltrate them and learn what they could for us to exploit.
-The corpse of the next Radiant lich needs to be preserved,- I /sent out in the Markspace. -Vivify the Receptacle, but keep the body intact. We’ll need one as proof when we break the magocracy by inviting Clerics in. Is there any outward interest in the towers that were cleared?-
Six local Wizard towers were cleaned of life, with hundreds of hidden undead servants in graveyards and catacombs nearby put to vivus.
A chorus of careful /replies from Rangers left behind to keep watch on the places came back, confirming there had a been a thundering and severe lack of interest in those towers not being active at all. Necromancers weren’t the most social of beings to begin with, and our targets were definitely among the more anti-social. If the apprentices didn’t come down the hill for food and drink, all the local villagers would be was grateful they didn’t have to share with the arsehats.
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Maybe they might get curious in a week or two, particularly if the wizard was vain, a braggart, or a bully that had to get their share of attention. But everyone we’d hit had been outside one of the established Noble Territories, nothing more than a petty local lordling. They were scattered across much of Zanzyr, with a focus in the west and south, where titled fiefdoms were sparsest, and clever Wizards with their V’s could retire via Teleportation and not be bugged by pretty much anyone who couldn’t somehow track their avenue of travel.
Something as simple as turning a light on at night, then extinguishing it, was going to keep the charade going quite a bit longer. If the mighty noble Wizard didn’t want to be bothered, then why would the locals bother the arse?
-Excellent,- Briggs /broke in, having completed his post-ops reports with the teams. Analysis of what went right and what went wrong was an important part of what happened here, the experts bandying tactics and possible solutions back and forth with one another on different ways to handle problems, keeping our enemies on their toes. Competition was in the execution and professional thoroughness. Gloryhounds and the sloppy didn’t need to apply for a position among our elites. -The next phase is going to be inside established territories.-
The Markspace Map came up, every bit as detailed as the real ones, the teams out in the field studying it intently as the flags of attacked areas, all green with success, glittered and faded away, no longer threats or problems.
In their place, an equal number of places turned yellow, all of them inside noble holdings, although pointedly none of them were in Transyvia or Caergard.
-Laur, you’ll be happy to know we think that Radiant Lich is the grandfather of Prince Villian.- The /spike of interest from her was telling. -The Prince of House Tilian is one of the seven active members of the Radiant Brothers, so that is hardly surprising. I believe his grandfather has been leading him on in an attempt to find someone who can break Thaum’s hold on him. While I’ve no love for the man and his position in the Fellowship of Flame, I don’t relish seeing him as the pawn of a lich. Do take care of the problem for him.-
-You are anticipating that the Prince might show up?...- the Overmaga /answered slowly.
-If he does, feel free to challenge him for his Seat. He should be honored to learn that Primal and Arcane fires exist, and to experience them personally,- I /replied smoothly.
The man was a racist buffoon with a huge prejudice against Clerics and any non-Frier. Overthrowing him as the Master of Fire would be only fitting.
It had occurred to me that I could likely take over Thaum’s control of the Radiant liches, as I still had the command codes to the Core and could actually usurp His control of it. Of course, He didn’t have nearly as much domination over it as He thought He did.
It was going to bite him hard in the arse soon enough, I reckoned. Some of the things he was trying to do with it were really, really bad.
-Our Interdictions will make that difficult for him, although I presume that also means we must be quick in our actions, so he doesn’t send warnings to the Prince,- she /reasoned back to me, having little desire to take the High Mastery as yet. Really, the only reason was to promote yourself into High Elemental stature as a potential Immortal creature, at the cost of being subservient to the Firemaster of Elemental Flame. Having to deal with treacherous Zanzyran politics, as potential students could still only be taught in Zanzyr, was a downside of basically a rather powerful Shapechange effect and not worth her time and effort, since there usually could only be one active High Master of Fire at a time.
I’d fucked around with that limitation with Cryptomancy, and could take students into the past to promote them up in the wildlands here before Zanzyr actually existed if I cared to. I didn’t feel like messing with Elemental politics in addition to Immortal ones. I’d spoken some with Firerose and she had assured me said politics could also be extremely brutal, especially if the Firemaster considered you someone who might just want to overthrow him and take his position.
Which Firerose could definitely arrange matters to do, but she’d never shown anything but obedience to the Firemaster… and utter lethality to those who betrayed or crossed her, thinking that a former mortal would be a pushover or dismissing her power and attentions.
Ah, such a resource I had.
-Also a wise choice.- I was still miffed that the Frier were covering up Firerose’s legacy, and I was definitely going to leak that some time in the future. After all, her pyromantic secrets weren’t restricted to Elementalists… and once it was revealed they were there, there would be no way the Frier could restrict access to her tomb without pissing off a lot of Fireball-flinging wizards and archmages.
-No reactions in Vascovune yet. Thaum either doesn’t know or doesn’t care, and won’t until He tries to contact them and they don’t respond. He’ll likely do so when noticing they aren’t drawing Radiance for a prolonged period, but we’ll have covered our tracks by then.- With temporal obfuscation, among other things, so He wouldn’t have any idea who was doing this. -Do what needs to be done, with more shadow than flash, is all.-
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The second wave of attacks was much broader than the first in terms of hitting spellcasters in settled territories, especially within the various Titled Dominions. All the Barons, Viscounts, Dukes, and Princes of the lands involved naturally had subordinates who oversaw the various small towns and villages scattered through their domains, many of whom were members of wizarding families who’d been inheriting the same positions for generations. Even if the Noble overseeing the Dominion won promotion to a higher Title in the ever-shifting politics of Zanzyr, they tended to keep their positions, as they were basically loyal to the local House and their position instead of the ruling Noble, per se. They would do their jobs for whoever their lord, was, perhaps vying to become Titled themselves, but mostly they were local lordlings able to tap the tax basis for income, the population for servants and experiments, and rule as harshly or lightly as they pleased, as long as the gold was sent along.