BECMI Chapter 380 - Skylands
The storm rolled over and past us as morning broke, long hours of enduring yet another storm exhausting the men just from the bailing. The walls of the next island loomed ahead of us, but dragging anchors had kept the ships from dashing on the reefs and rocks that peppered the waters around the cliffs.
I went out on Duum as the longships scouted for a way through, swinging clockwise about the island to look for something going inland. We eventually found a canyon chopped into the cliff like an axe had come down, with fresh water coming out and at least some shelter from any new storms.
The longships marked a route through the scattered rock outcroppings and breakers, and the fleet sailed quietly into the wide and sprawling canyon.
I was aloft, Invisible, and surveying the island suspiciously.
The first thing I noticed was a lot of sheep. That wasn’t alarming in and of itself, but the fact was they were sized for giants, being at least as large as draft horses… and they’d been groomed, their thick curly black hides clearly sheared at some point. The herds also numbered in the dozens, which was not normal for wild rams and the like in this kind of terrain, who usually broke up into smaller groups among family lines.
That led to obvious meadows having been cleared of tough forest giants, trees a minimum of a hundred feet high that would not want to give up ground at all, but had been completely cleared away with nary a hole or stump visible at all.
Some of the trails had bends fixed, stones removed, and areas as level as if Shaped, the severed stones sharp and clean in a way nature didn’t make them.
I didn’t see the shepherds however, which was also quite suspicious. No tracks, no buildings, no firepits, no shelters of any kind… until I followed the trails of the sheep back and saw the cave.
Pretty big cave, thirty feet high and sixty feet across. The amount of traffic in and out of it was visible, but any dung or waste seemed to have been swept away meticulously.
Still no signs of humanoid habitation, but even a cursory examination revealed that the cave thinned down internally, and there was a massive rolling stone which seemed to be regularly moved back and forth to block the interior, penning in the sheep, protecting them from attackers-?
I’d seen no sign of predators, however, and that included airborne creatures. As a matter of fact, the lack of roc-sized aerial predators of any kind was a huge alarm button, and even Duum commented on it.
He couldn’t hear ANY territorial calls from anything larger than a mundane eagle. He found it very unsettling, as did I.
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“Was that a moving rock?” I asked, snapping my head around at a shift in motion at the corner of my eye.
Duum eyed the area as we swept Invisibly over the skyland, increasingly unsettled by the lack of any kind of predators or inhabitants. The rough stone and craggy hills made for interesting topography, but the only major inhabitants seemed to be flocks of giant sheep and random small birds.
“Nothing is gathering in flocks, Mistress,” Duum pointed out as we soared over a cliff a couple hundred meters up. It bordered the river coming down the canyon, but the birds that should have been nesting there were completely absent, despite there being tons of small ledges and crevices which should have been ideal nesting spaces. I couldn’t even find vestiges of nests there.
A dark blur, a neutral-colored bird zipping low over the water nearly a thousand feet below us, was suddenly yanked up and off to the side as if snatched by a great invisible frog’s tongue. I followed the path of it up to a round rocky sphere at the edge of a cliff above it, blending in nigh-perfectly to the landscape as it opened a gaping jaw and the seabird was stuffed unceremoniously inside.
“Halt. Hover!” I ordered Duum, who braked instantly, turning his head in the direction I was looking. “The round boulder on the cliff there. It’s not sitting on the ground.”
It was also only a couple turns of the river away from being able to see the fleet now at anchor further down the canyon!
We were about three hundred yards away, quite elevated and very curious. I studied it sharply, not daring to get closer, Duum hovering quite motionless.
Parts of the stone split open in our direction, and a trio of thick tendrils, glowing eyes opening on the tips of them, erupted out of hidden holes. Below them, splits in the stone irised open, and a great eye larger than my head snapped into sight.
Ahead of it, the air dimmed and turned gray for two hundred yards, following that eye as the entire stony mass of the drifting rock revolved to look in our direction.
I didn’t say anything, just tapped my heels, and Duum began to back away as the Gargantuan beholder scanned the sky in our direction, perhaps feeling our gazes upon it and looking for an enemy or a rival.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
I hadn’t had any active Detects going for just this kind of reason, as plenty of things were sensitive to magical attention, and Aberrant creatures particularly so. A simple Detect Evil going for range, and this thing could have zeroed in on me in the sky with great precision.
-I thought that nutball of a wizard was the only one who could make things like that,- Duum /murmured, as we withdrew to six hundred meters away from the massive thing.
The Gargantuan Beholder looked nothing like the one we’d seen before with Grimbol’s group. This one was almost perfectly matched in browns and grays to the terrain, its eyes being retractable and in layered sheaths with three joints to them. The bottom of it was much flatter than its rounded top, with its mouth almost forming a triangle instead of a wide slit.
-I think I know what cleaned off any and all competition or threats to its food supply- I considered the problem ahead of me. -It uses Telekinesis from the fourth eye, held there against the other side of its head, pulling its prey to it. It just yanks them in, kills them if needed with one of the other eyes, and then eats them at its leisure. If there was anything around strong enough to be a danger to its sheep, they’re long dead now.-
-But shepherding? Couldn’t it just go fishing?- Duum /wondered, plenty willing to do such a thing himself, although he had no need to, and he preferred frogs and salamanders and big bug-things more.
-Telekinesis is line of effect, the surface of the water works just like a shield, it can’t reach the things under the surface. It could grab a fish in midair instantly, but a foot below the surface is out of its range.
-I imagine it simply ate anything that flew or needed to surface for air in the area, realized it was going to starve, and took up herding to ensure it had a food supply. It uses the same Telekinetic eye to sweep that cave clear of dung and waste.-
Duum tilted his Invisible head. -Mistress, the area is very large, and there is nothing visible or audible for many, many miles. The calls of large predators would echo through these hills for many leagues. I should be able to hear anything declaring a territory for at least thirty miles.
-There is more than one of these things here, or things equally as powerful as it.-
That knowledge did not make me feel better in the slightest.
-On the other hand, that right there is also like eight hundred goldweight in spell comps,- I /pointed out with well-trained ruthless pragmatism.
It was Aberrant, a natural disaster that had destroyed the ecology of this area. Telekinesis and Disintegration eye-beams had been used to mold and carve the stone, and it had remorselessly devoured anything larger than a rodent… and it probably snatched them up too, given its size and inefficient biochemistry.
Beholders fed best on written magic, and there was no written magic around for it to supplement its physical meals with, resulting in unnatural cravings to fill the void. Amusingly enough, my Cryptomancy was probably the equivalent of making a gourmet feast to the thing!
-So, we kill it, and then investigate its cave?- Duum /inquired eagerly.
-We don’t know if that is this one’s cave, but yes. A Commune can locate all the caves in the area, and should give us an idea of how many there are. The skyland is about a hundred miles in rough diameter, I can scan the whole thing easily with a IX.-
Duum tilted and began to fall to a flanking position on the opposite side of the thing, out of the arcs of view of the eyestalks now out and scanning the sky for anything curious. -Can you kill it in one hit, Mistress?- he /asked eagerly.
-Yes. Those arseholes wrapped the entire fleet in their little Immortal isolationism, but it also completely obscures which of them is doing what if another Immortal were to come along and play.- Dread tingled in anticipation in my grip!
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Twenty of the things!
And the one in the middle was an Immortal Creature, reeking of Delphax’s own Immortal Power, and a bloodline heading right back to Entropy!
The fleet was mostly engaged in fishing at this time. When I returned, I had to warn them to only use smokeless fires, as the native monstrosities were incredibly dangerous. They could only be defeated by massed ballista or arrow fire that could punch through armored hide like stone, and they would attack from great range.
Those ships with ballista kept them quietly at the ready, bows were out, and I made certain the winds were blowing out to sea as evening meals were quietly prepared. A lot of quiet fishing was being done to maintain the ship’s stores as I took Duum out there and started hunting the things.
Just one of those things in the night could tear through the entire fleet, its Disintegration eye slicing ships open and a Telekinetic eye powerful enough to move a multi-ton rock hurling anything and everything about like leaves. No magic was going to work in front of it, and it could fly about as fast as a man could trot over stone or water.
Given any range and concealment, it was a terror, and I could only be glad it wasn’t warned that the fleet was coming, and that it hadn’t seen us because the storm had chased it indoors and it hadn’t floated over to an overlooking cliff we were visible from yet.
That being said, its main defense was its size (huge bucket of Health, 400+Health) and no magic in the forward arc once its central eye flipped open and Grayfielded the world.
I didn’t have to play along with that. Technically, some really good archers able to punch shots through its skin could deal with it, if they stayed out of range of its eyebeams.
Stay out of sight, don’t look for it with Divination magic, and it could be out-ranged. I was plenty happy to stay out of range of it, yes, I was.
As for the damage, well. One point of IP from Dread meant I didn’t need to worry about mortal limits on magic, and could easily surpass the 20-die limit on offensive magic.
But that might leave signs. It was easier just to screw the Caster Level limit with certain spells, namely Greater Shards.
Normal Shards here were one missile for 2-7 damage per three Caster levels. Thus, the mortal limit at 36 was 12 Shards. A Shardcaster could add two or three to that limit, but that was it for numbers. Certain skills could add damage bonuses per die of damage, and I could definitely hit +5 per die without too much problem.
The spell itself had no such inferior limits on Shards created here, just the maximum Caster Level as imposed by the Immortals!