BT - Book 1 - Chapter 99/100 (Patreon)

The sickly green ray of energy struck the first guard, engulfing the man.  He collapsed bonelessly to the ground as his companion jumped in shock.  Before she could draw the horn from her belt, another beam of light enveloped her and she joined him on the floor of the guard post.

“Gods that thing is cool.”  Jo ogled the gauntlet Micah was wearing.  “Is that enchantment how you got past the guards last time too?”

“Not really,” Micah replied, grimacing as he shook his tingling hand.  “I didn’t even know how to make the enchantment until I learned the Coma spell when we raided Baron Hurden’s estate.”

“Then how did you sneak past the guards?”  Jo asked, cocking her head slightly.  “You’re a lot of things Micah, but stealthy isn’t one of them.”

He blushed.  Now that he thought about it, his actions in the last timeline had been more than a little ill advised and melodramatic.

“Oh Gods.”  Jo chuckled.  “Did you just kill the guards and walk past?  That doesn’t seem like you at all.”

“No,” Micah muttered, embarrassed.  “I was in a bit of a weird spot emotionally.  I uh, had an army of dozens of daemons and just marched past.  No one was dumb enough to try and stop me.”

Jo burst out laughing, almost doubling over as Micah turned crimson.  He shuffled slightly, feet brushing together as he waited for her to regain her composure.

Finally, almost a minute later, Jo pulled herself upright once again.  Wiping some moisture from the side of her face, Jo turned to look at him, only to convulse with laughter one last time.

“You spent all of that time complaining about how you were unfairly maligned as a daemon lord in your last timeline, and you literally marched an entire army past a military outpost?”  Jo asked, shaking her head.  “Have you considered that perhaps the two were related?”

“As I said.”  Micah shook his head, stepping past Jo and walking toward the mouth of the Great Depths.  “I was in a bad place at the time and thinking all that clearly.”

“I can see why I liked the old you,” she replied, chuckling as she trotted after him.  “That’s the sort of impulsiveness I like to see in a boyfriend.  Not so much in a leader.  It feels weird to say this, but I’m glad you’ve grown to the point that you’re actually planning encounters out.  It makes things less exciting, but I think I got enough excitement when we were all forced to live in leaky shacks in the forest.”

“Leaky?”  Micah asked, passing a ring of darksight back to Jo while he put on his own.  “My dad has been helping anyone that would listen through the process of drying long grass and then mixing it with clay.  Once you put that in a fire, you can make a series of square waterproof plates and layer your roof with them.”

“I’m a scout Micah, not an architect.”  Jo stuck her tongue out at him.  “I just want to fix things enough that we can return to the city.  You might be keen on learning how to repair a house, but that sounds like the sort of thing I would prefer to pay a professional to do.”

Micah just shook his head, a half smile on his face as the two of them walked in silence.  Underfoot, dirt became rock as the progressed into the cave complex and before long, the light from the surface faded away entirely.

After some thirty minutes of walking through the massive caverns that made up the Great Depths, Micah occasionally checking the Ageless Folio and pointing the way forward, Jo raised a hand.

They stopped, the soft clicking of their boots echoing through the otherwise silent cave.  Jo put a hand on his shoulder and pointed.  Partially wedged beneath a rock were four pieces of the wax paper the army used to wrap dry rations.

Jo continued walking.  Now that he was looking for it, Micah found numerous signs of human presence.  A boot print in an otherwise undisturbed pile of ash in one spot, a discarded sheathe with a broken strap in another, and everywhere burnt out torches.

He was hardly qualified to judge the number of soldiers passing through the tunnel complexes from the detritus and clues that they left behind, but it was clear that the number was significant.

What made Mcah more worried was the utter lack of guards or sentries.  He’d only been to the Great Depths once before, but the last time, patrols were a common occurrence.  When they came across the first decaying durgh body, he had his answer.

Things had progressed well past antagonism.  Representatives of the crown were actively killing the durgh.  The only question was whether it was an isolated occurrence done via the rules of honor, or if the attacks had been more wide scale.

When they reached the first cavern where Micah had encountered a durgh encampment, he had his answer.  The bodies of a half dozen warriors lay on the cave floor.  One was riddled with arrows while another bore multiple stab wounds.

Micah frowned as he walked past another pair of bodies, both burned beyond recognition.  The gates themselves were warped by magic, two pillars of rock twisting the metal aside and holding the doors open

On his guard, Micah followed Jo through and into the main chamber.  Residences were carved into the stone, molded by earth magic so that they smoothly blended into the cavern’s walls.  Winding staircases grew from the cave’s floor like trees, providing access to the labyrinth of balconies and walkways that served as streets for the upper levels.

No one challenged them.  Instead, their footsteps clattered on the cold rock and Micah’s heart began to sink.  Hoping his gut was wrong, he began to look closer for signs of life.

Twisted and ornamental metal glittered from the cave walls, decorating the rabbit warren of residences and small shops.  Almost every house had its own tiny gate, shaped by a combination of magic and craftsmanship into striking designs of the monsters and challenges overcome by the building’s residents.

The center of the cave had a small number of much larger structures.  Micah could make out warehouses, civic buildings and several production centers, but all were completely empty.  There were no porters running back and forth, carrying their loads from building to building.  The ironworks’ massive forges lay cold and empty.

Only a massive fortress at the center of the city showed any signs of life, a handful of magical lights flickering in barred windows on the second story.  Micah walked past Jo, and led the way through the maze of eerily silent walkways.  Finally, they reached the building, and any hope Micah had of finding survivors vanished.

The building’s massive doors were battered down, bent almost in half from some massive blow that tore them from their hinges.  The ground leading up to the entrance was pockmarked with minor scars and craters from where the defenders had hurled spells and blessings at the attacking forces.

Bending down, Micah picked up an arrow, its shaft broken and its head stained with blood from where it had been pulled from a wound.  The fragments of an indecipherable enchantment flickered and fizzled over the weapon’s surface as the spell finally failed.

He stepped inside the doorway, veering to the side to avoid the corpse of a massive war beast.  Its body was half rotted away, but that didn’t stop Micah from wincing as he took in the massive fangs and bone spurs affixed to the still recognizable humanoid skeleton.  The rest of its body was twisted beyond belief, dark rituals turning it into a hunched and muscular creature with the armored skin of an armadillo or a pangolin.

A little further down the stone hallway, Micah recognized a pair of Durgh bodies covered in acid burns and axe wounds.  He stopped before he could reach them, raising a single hand to halt Jo as well.

He sniffed.  The stale air carried the acrid sting he associated with Poison Fog.

Squinting at the bodies, Micah noticed that even in death their veins were an unhealthy orange hue.  They bulged from the corpses, sickly earthworms of rot and poison that lined the warriors’ arms and necks.

In the distance, he could see the dark yellow haze of some sort of gas clinging to the ceiling.  For a second, he was tempted to run his hand through it to try and determine the haze’s properties, but reason won out.

Micah probably had the body attribute to handle the fog, but that didn’t mean he should go about testing fate.  At the very minimum, if it was strong enough to harm a durgh warrior, it would hurt like hell if he tried to fiddle with it.

Instead he turned to Jo and shook his head.

“The entire compound is a ghost town,” Micah said grimly.  “There might be a handful of survivors, but I doubt it.”

“How bad is this politically?”  Jo frowned at the misshapen body of the war beast.  “Clearly it’s an atrocity but I don’t have the slightest clue as to what makes the durgh tick.  Half the time, when you stab one of them the other thanks you for eliminating weakness from their race.  The other half of the time it’s a blood rage and an eternal feud of vengeance.”

“Solidly in blood feud territory.”  He walked out of the compound, pausing briefly once he returned to the cavern proper to take in the empty streets and buildings.  “Warriors are generally fair game if you fight them honorably, but this looks like a whole lot more than warriors, and I’d bet my spear that the battle itself wasn’t honorable.”

“I don’t know how much honor there is in twisting people into those things.”  Jo shuddered.  “I’m all for respecting other cultures and their unique forms of expression, but the idea of turning prisoners of war into magically mutated murder machines gives me the absolute willies.”

“The war beasts are awful,” Micah agreed.  “Technically, transformation is only a penalty for those that throw away their honor as they have ‘forfeited their right to die a sapient,’ but I have some bad news.”

“The Pereston Kingdom threw away a lot of honor didn’t it?”  Jo glanced at the empty streets, a grimace marring her face.

“Attacking without a declaration of war, massacring innocents, and using poison gas rather than outright confrontation to overcome a foe?”  He sighed.  “I’d give even odds that these specific tactics were ordered by the Church of Luxos in order to drive the durgh into a fury.”

“So we just kill the Khan earlier than expected.”  Jo smiled weakly.  “I know it’ll be tough, but with an appropriate supply of consumables you should be able to do it.”

Micah just shook his head as the two of them walked out of the cavern.

“It’s gone too far for that,” he replied unhappily.  “This is a blood feud, not a raid.  Unless blood is repaid with blood, the durgh won’t honor a challenge.  The first step is finding the person responsible and collecting their head.  Only with proof in hand that the dishonor is avenged will we be able to call off the feud.  At that point it would become an ordinary raid and I could challenge the Khan.”

He stopped, a frown appearing on Micah’s face as the ground beneath him rattled and shook.  A deep bass note echoed past.  Seconds later it repeated itself, a steady ‘thoom, thoom, thoom,’ that was more felt than heard.

Micah knew that sound.  In the last timeline, when he had faced the Khan’s army, it had haunted him every step of the way.  Durgh war drums.

“What is it?”  Jo asked, cocking her head.

“Drums,” Micah answered.  “Drums in the deep.  The durgh are coming.”