BECMI Chapter 539 – A Ring Around the Arktos
In the end, there were nineteen different Elder Brains in the cephalid section of Leng, and some six dozen different enclaves and buried cities there. They had fled there ages ago during the ancient Mythos war with the Immortals, and stayed there for tens of thousands of years, preying mostly on the denizens of Leng, and growing plenty strong as Leng claimed them as mindbenders and nightmare-givers. They were aching to break out into the larger world, and held at bay by sunlight and our relentless scouring and collapsing of subterranean realms.
Leng was plenty happy to send out its own forces to help them out, mostly flesh-hungry maddened Leng ghasts and looming split-headed gugs.
Anyone operating in the Arktos theater of war needed Protection from Evil upon them at all times to avoid mind control and dream infiltration. That was easily possible within Castle Doomrose’s Domain, but outside it was yet another expense for every soldier stationed here that had to be paid.
With the Immortal Dead Magic Zone around the polar opening effectively preventing most spell use, the fighting devolved to technology and skilled martial combatants. Magical Gear worked fine, but triggering magical items and spellcasting both got nowhere in the Zone.
Eternals could defy some of the magical restrictions, but we ran out of spell power eventually, and the suborned beastfolk and maddened brainthralls of the cephalids just seemed to go on and on.
Walls were put up, walls were lost. The arctic winter was an especially perilous time, as things of ice and cold from beyond were called out in Leng and unleashed upon us for effect. The wendigos, hoary walkers, and aerial servants brought down from Beyond were not helpful, nor were the waves of coiling yrthaks mind-shackled and sent down from Leng to defy the dragons aiding us. Waves of attackers came for months in the darkness, and only began to let up when the weak arctic spring began.
The cephalids’ neighbors in the Mawlands to the east were the kaorti, a race of beings from beyond Creation, possibly mutated from foolish mortals who delved too far into the secrets of the Far Realms. They were masters of dimensional manipulation with their Weird Sciences, with technology that turned matter at right angles and could bore through stone and flesh with equal violence, weapons and armor made from their secreted resins monodimensionally sharp or shunting attacks into sidereal reality.
They were insane by even the standards of the cephalids, and so immune to mental domination and control. They were also in search of more subjects to drag back to their lairs and convert into more of their own kind, and so were plenty happy to send out their own hordes of mutated creatures and lurching, Blinking, screaming combat cadres to dance around a battlefield with us.
On the other side of the cephalids was the Great Maw of Majesty. During the dark of the winter, the hordes of Leng came sweeping down the massive canyon to do battle and tear down the Pyramids that wehad put up, bringing with them the truly powerful nightmares of Leng and worlds beyond. Great and foul magic rooted in burning souls and blood sacrifice tore down Walls and Pyramids alike, while their endless numbers fed the slaughter and satiated the Land regardless, making Leng’s links to Nown ever more tenuous and requiring more power to maintain even as the tides of battle moved back and forth constantly.
Castle Doomrose anchored our position, and could not be broken. The flowers blooming from its base could Animate on their great thorns and extend forth, projecting showers of lava from their firefalls across massive swathes of the battlefield and slaughtering countless thousands as they did so. Its Domain crippled the strengths of the attackers, particularly mental attack magic and dimensional movement or manipulations, and nothing flew near it unless I wanted it to. Upon the many levels of its leaves and vines and flowers and windows, a LOT of firepower could be directed out against opponents, including full-blown artillery firing shells of hardened reality that could affect even the most powerful of Mythos creatures that came their way.
Nothing flew except true low-tech stuff not using anti-grav, which we also had a ton of, as well as plenty of non-magical munitions to compete against their alchemical bombs, poison and mind-bending fogs, crazed singing that could drive soldiers insane, and endless other forms of murderous entertainment.
Pyramids went up, and slowly they stayed up as we began to encircle Arktos, starting on the coasts to secure the first Ring of Pyramids that would form the first unbroken Domain containment, as well as the four spokes on the wheel that would divide the land up and leave the armies of Leng and the armies of the Aberrant forces unable to wander about so easily and reinforce one another outside of Leng proper.
The armies of Leng could rarely reach the coast, generally only in darkest winter, and even they would be hampered by the cold and wind at that time. The Aberrants holding territory had more ability to range, but fewer numbers and not as many epic beasts and creatures that could drive mortals mad just by looking upon them.
Thousands of miles of Walls went up, limiting the ability of the hordes to move, turning battlefields into grand killboxes, defying the dimension-twisting efforts of Leng to rewarp the landscape as said walls followed their own Runic Truths to stabilize, Interdict, and Stillflight large amounts of the landscape.
Millions of troops were required to man those walls as they grew longer and longer. The first Spoke drove up to the cephalid Mawlands and anchored there, Pyramids coming up behind Castle Doomrose, Walls rising around and through them, extending all the way back to the coast, and then began to slowly extend both east and west around the coast to establish the First Seal.
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It took over a century. The forces inside there came out to do battle repeatedly, stopping progress, destroying what was built with both calculated and savage intent, unleashing war beasts and great spells that inflicted great casualties upon us… and still we kept going.
Inside the Dead Magic Zone, the Forsaken, especially the Eternals, hunted the battlefields with Banefire’d Weapons, unafraid of supernatural creatures, insane things from beyond, undead horrors, or mutated unfortunates ripped from Leng.
Outside the Ring, the magi and priests flexed in return, especially the Eternal spellcasters who could send entire hordes to doom in seconds if they truly wanted to. Sometimes fusion bombs went off, reducing square miles of battlefields to ash and glass… but never for too long, as the Land fed on the dead and cleaned up the radiation, and the cold beat down the heat in little time.
They were mere interruptions to the fighting, not much more.
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It took one hundred and twenty-three years to eliminate the last of the cephalid enclaves, and the last Elder Brain that could not flee from the Forsaken who came hunting it. Thousands of miles of dhole-excavated tunnels had been collapsed by munitions, whole sunken cities were reduced to collapsed craters and glassed stone, and endless armies of mutated creatures shot down and reduced to vivic ash.
One last fusion bomb collapsed the entire area of the final enclave, and all tunnels and openings leading to it, as the strike force led by the Mick retreated.
Forty-three more years were needed to clear away the kaorti from their sub-dimensional dens and aetheric redoubts fluttering between dimensions, Interdicting the entire area to hamper them and their dimensional technology, imprisoning them in a world of hard reality they could not move through as they wished. Vivic flame fed on their resin-painted nests and bodies, and collapsed the sub-dimensional structures as reality came back in to dominate once more.
Two hundred years from the start of the conflict, we completed the confinement of the Maw of Majesty, reinforced Domains reaching right up to the canyon entry and locking the place down tight against expansion from Leng.
That same year, we completed the First Sealed Ring, effectively forming a Circle of Containment around the entire continent of Arktos, and absolutely limiting any creature therein from leaving, while massively concentrating the planar awareness of the planet here and upon the influence of Leng.
Leng could not possibly expand without breaking that line, and it had to travel from the Great Maws of Malice, Murder, and Mystery at least one hundred miles, often much more, to do so, often under fire from the moment its forces left the great canyons.
The tsurlons, the orbus, and the ethergrim naturally understood everything of what was coming, and stepped up their own efforts.
Since they were able to function out on Arktos at all times, they were naturally more dangerous and versatile than the Leng hordes, especially the ethergrim.
The orbus burned endless tunnels via Disintegration beams, emerging in random places, including behind our defenses, if not constantly watched for. The tsurlons spread out into the land, making recessed hive after hive to grow more troops, produce more mutant creatures to serve them, and adapt their own spore-based psionic technology.
The ethergrim erected fortress after fortress in the ethereal, then dropped them onto the battlefield to be occupied, commanding territory with decaying atomic technology and forcing us to destroy each defensive position to advance. Their White Caste warred with Master Archmagi easily, their Constructs and robotic servants lumbered over the battlefield relentlessly and with great precision to take out any weak points, wielding magic or technology as the moment demanded.
The tsurlon were removed first, fusion charges collapsing nest after nest as they were located, pinpointed, and neutralized, clearing them off Arktos and chasing them back to Leng over a decade of warfare and miserable poison and infectious warfare, complete with animated spore clouds, mutating diseases, and corrosive sands infecting all they could.
Still, their intelligence, psionic ability, and command of sciences was all below that of most of the other races there, so they were the least threat.
The Orbus species had by far the most magical power, and even the rampant rivalry between hives and hive mothers didn’t stop them from ranging out everywhere and randomly causing havoc. Their hive mothers could bud new beholder-spawn of any desired variety with remarkable speed, and Leng had plenty of the magical energy needed to help the multi-eyed, gaze weapon-wielding creatures in all their many variations to grow.
The Hive Mothers could even perform as artillery! Mounted in magical engines that could channel the powers of their children to them, they could project eye rays out to a thousand yards or more, with greatly increased power. Of course, the Gargantuan beholders that had somehow mutated and swelled in size could as well, but they were driven forth by the Hive Mothers as threats to their dominance, basically forced to found their own nests and bud their own offspring, which they had much less control over.
They were still hellaciously dangerous, but their vulnerability to technological weapons was soon well-established, as was their vulnerability to Stillflight Fields. Although not the quickest of fliers, their ability to move in three dimensions made them extremely difficult to close with, meaning the Forsaken were much less effective against them without Stillflight. Remove their flight, and suddenly they could be brought into melee. They were much less effective in personal combat than at range, especially against creatures their eye-beams could not quickly slaughter.
The main problem with the beholders was that even one of them could end up birthing whole nests, potentially new hive mothers, and they could dig out their own hidey-holes and tunnels with incredible speed. Even collapsing their tunnels didn’t long stop them, as they could Disintegrate their way out rapidly. Even worse, wiping their populations out didn’t work for long, as random Orbus would still drift in from Leng, re-establish themselves, and promptly start creating havoc again.
We wiped them all out three times over, and it still took three hundred years before they were no longer a major threat. Aberrant Wardfields had to be erected all along the borders with their territory using Obelisks specifically set to the Orbus, barring them from spreading out into Arktos, at least.
They still popped up among the hordes of Leng at times, as dangerous as always, and were primary targets for snipers at range.