BT II - Chapter 22 (Patreon)

“Hey Micah,” Trevor’s voice called out from one of the hooded and bound figures.  “I know you’re probably super busy right now, but if you could get around to untying us, that would be great.  I’m pretty sure Telivern peed on the ground next to me and it’s starting to soak into my jacket.”

The stag snorted unhappily.  Somehow, the forgotten had cut a pair of holes in a burlap sack big enough to fit the bag over the deer’s head.

Micah glanced back at Leeka and winced.  The woman was sitting upright, chest moving in short, sharp gasps as she bled against the basement’s wall.  It didn’t look like any of the bone shards from the exploding harp had penetrated particularly deeply, but at the same time, the number of tiny wounds was troubling in and of itself.  Already, blood was beginning to turn Leeka’s face into a mask of red before soaking into her clothing.

“Just a second Trevor,” Micah said hurriedly, jogging over to his injured companion and pressing a hand to her shoulder as he cast augmented mending.  “Things got a bit wild there and my friend was injured in the fight.”

“The green flames are not to be trifled with,” Drekt observed from his spot pushed up against the basement’s wall.  “Even if your armor can handle a blow, the cold will settle into your mind.  We weren’t careful when the forgotten attacked because it didn’t seem possible that they would actually manage to inflict an injury.  It only took two blasts before Trevor was on his back, eyes rolling up into his skull.”

A smile flickered on Micah’s face as Leeka’s wounds began to close.  There was something about the inane wall of chatter from Trevor and Drekt that instantly dismissed all of the concern and tension that had been weighing down on him in the weeks since he had been forced to abandon his companions.

“How are Eris and Esther?” He asked, switching to refresh to help restore the energy Leeka had lost along with her blood.  “Are the two of them down here as well?”

“I’m fine Uncle Micah!” One of the smaller bundles of person called out cheerfully.  “Esther is sulking because she got knocked out by a club blow from a forgotten at the start of the fight.  She just tried to stab the guy and her spear started on fire.  Before she could dodge, he clonked her over the head and she was out.”

“Esther!” Another bundle hissed unhappily.  “Stop trying to embarrass me.  It’s not like you escaped or something.  The forgotten got you too.”

“Yeah,” Esther responded defiantly, “but they got Ravi and I last.  I finally figured out how to use my martial art to dodge properly, and it took five of them surrounding me with nets to actually catch me.  Plus, I managed to kill one of them.”

“Well,” she continued, her voice suddenly thoughtful.  “I think she died.  I could never get a sword through those walls of flame that they could summon, but after the fifteenth or twentieth time I stabbed her, I could see that using the fire was costing her something.  So I just kept going.  Eventually she just sort of collapsed.  I never even left a mark on her, but she fell to the ground looking like she hadn’t eaten in a month.”

Leeka struggled upright, her eyes widening as she looked around the basement.  There were torches mounted in the wall, but their feeble light was overshadowed by the emerald bonfires sprouting from the two guards Micah had killed.  As soon as her gaze locked on the chorus itself, she stumbled backward, bracing herself against the wall, mouth agape.

“What in the name of the Sixteen happened down here.”  Her voice trembled, cracking before she could finish the sentence.

“Something unnatural and wrong on a fairly fundamental level,” Micah replied calmly, pulling the burlap sack off of Esther’s head.  He reached down to break her bonds only to find a thin silver chain, covered and runes and biting into the skin of her wrists.

“Ritual magic has the potential to sidestep the rigid delineation of how humans use magic,” he continued, sliding his speartip along the chain until he found a spot with enough slack for him to insert the weapon.  “But it is also a path to powers and abilities that many might find unnatural.”

“Daemon summoning, spirit binding, and enchantments upon the very soul that can alter the scope and power of a blessing.”  He stopped speaking long enough to press the spear forward, breaking Esther’s chain and immediately casting augmented mending to heal the line of blood that the weapon drew from her hand.

“If a caster isn’t careful, ritual magic can go catastrophically astray,” Micah lectured, pulling off the burlap covering over Eris’ frizzy hair and going to work on her hands.  “Worse still is a ritualist that has both the knowledge and wherewithal to perform heinous magic, but not the common sense to avoid it.  The third prince wants to destroy Karell.  It simply does not care about the side effects of what it’s doing because the scars its rituals leave on reality are a bonus rather than a flaw in its plan.”

“But if he destroys Karell, he’ll die with it!”  Leeka blurted out.  “I understand that you’re fighting on a level of power that I can’t really comprehend, but it’s pretty hard for something to survive without air, food, or a planet to live on.”

Micah didn’t respond at first, freeing Drekt while he thought over how much to tell the woman.  He’d already tried to open up a bit about the true scope of his mission only for Leeka to laugh it all off as a joke.  At the same time, he hadn’t been standing a dozen paces from grisly proof when they’d talked last.

The chains fell from Drekt’s wrists and the big man rumbled to his feet, massaging his hands as he tried to return blood to them.  He nodded at Micah, grabbing Trevor gently by the back of the shirt and wrenching him to his feet.

“The third prince isn’t a ‘he,” Micah began, turning back to face Leeka as Drekt took over his duties freeing the remainder of the party.  “The third prince is a daemon of unprecedented power.  It exists outside of Karell and is almost as powerful as a god.”

“Actually.”  Micah cocked his head thoughtfully.  “It might be more powerful than some of the weaker members of the Sixteen.  Regardless, a careless ritualist failed while performing an incomprehensibly powerful feat of magic, and now it is here in Karell.  Originally the gods created safeguards to stop things like this from happening- as best I understand it there is no way that a prince of Elsewhere could enter Karell without being invited in, but right now they are in a bit of a rough spot.  Karell isn’t meant to accommodate beings of their power.  They could beat the prince in a straight up fight, but it is lurking and hiding from them, preventing them from confronting it without destroying all of creation in the process.”

“Shit,” she mumbled.  “You really weren’t joking when you talked about your mission being apocalyptic.  Still, no offense Micah, but if this prince thing is that powerful, I really don’t think you stand much of a chance.  Like sure, you’re really strong, but every story I’ve heard about ‘challenging the gods’ in power usually ends with a parable about ‘suffering being the price of hubris.”

“Oh I fought it once,” Micah replied with a self-deprecating grin.  “I have time magic that I thought would let me escape anything.  That’s how I found this place to be honest.  But even at my most powerful, armed to the teeth with enchanted items, I couldn’t match it.  It was barely a contest, mostly me buffeting the prince with spells while it charged me.  The gods themselves needed to intervene to save me.”

“That’s why we’re traveling halfway across the world, to loot the artifacts I’ll need to have a fighting chance against the thing,” Micah finished with a shrug.

“Gods.”  She shook her head, “that’s just a lot to process.  So you’re saying that if we fail, that’s the end.  Everyone dies?”

“More or less,” he responded.  “The last time I fought the third prince, it had a flying castle, patrolled by high tier daemons and powered by the souls of tens of thousands of sacrifices.  In the castle’s wake, crops withered and volcanoes burst from the soil.  Given enough time, the third prince would have rendered Karell’s surface utterly uninhabitable, and that’s only if it couldn’t find a way to rip a hole in the wall separating reality from Elsewhere first.”

“As best I can understand, its eventual goal is to tear down the barrier that protects Karell from Elsewhere,” Micah said.  “As soon as the wards come down, we’ll all be tossed into the mists of Elsewhere.  Even if your body can maintain its form, your soul will be devoured by daemons within the hour.”

Micah knelt down next to the teleportation formation, trailing his finger along the outside of the circle.  He could make out most of the runes, but at least half of them were unintelligible.  Some were cracked and smeared by the circle’s use, but others were completely alien.  New sigils that Micah had never come across in his years of study.

“But we’re going to stop it,” Esther interjected happily.  “Together Micah, Trevor and Drekt can defeat anything.  Just you watch, new lady, they’ll handle it.”

Before he could respond, a warm, fur-covered head shoved itself beneath his arm.  Ravi didn’t say anything, instead electing to rub her cheek against his bare skin, purring loudly enough to vibrate his entire body.

He reached up with his left hand, scratching her behind the ears as he traced the runework of the teleportation formation with his right.  Closing his eyes, Micah was unsurprised to find the entire circle glowing a deep cherry red as he surveyed the ritual site with his Arcana skill.  More importantly, the runes destroyed by the teleporting forgotten were restored, shining balefully in their original forms.

Ravi’s deep purring breaths served as an anchor as Micah reached out with his mind, tracing the connections formed by the circle.  A couple of seconds later, he pushed a fragment of mana into the formation.  The bolt of energy flashed cobalt in his mind as it activated the runes, carving a winding tunnel through Elsewhere.

The mana raced down the invisible pathway, guided by Micah’s mind as he forced it past the twists and dead ends created by the formation’s damaged runes.  Distantly, he could feel grasping claws reaching toward him as the mists pressed in, clustering around the barriers created by the ritual.

His perception exploded into the outside world.  For a brief second, Micah was in a forested clearing, rolling hills looming over him.  In the distance, a bird warbled cheerfully.

Then he was back in his body, the route traced by the ritual burned into his mind.  Micah shook his head to clear a ringing from his ears, somewhere to his left, Eris was talking to Leeka.

“-then what did Uncle Micah do?”  Micah winced at his niece’s excited interrogation.

“He threw me off of the godsdamn boat!”  Leeka complained.  “One minute he was telling us we needed to go, and the next I was in the river- wait.  Oh gods, I’m so sorry Drekt.  I shouldn’t have sworn in front of your daughter, I wasn’t thinking!”

“Don’t worry yourself too much,” the big warrior replied, “she’s around her father enough that I hold little hope about rescuing her vocabulary.  As much as Trevor tries to blame it on the rest of the mercenaries, we all know that the man can’t hold his tongue.”

“That wasn’t what you were say-” Trevor began.  Micah could almost see the shiteating grin on his brother’s face as he cut him off.

“I’ve got a lock on where the woman that imprisoned you went, find your weapons and armor, I just need to repair the runes on the formation, and we’re going through.”

Up above, a woman shouted something incoherent from the ruined floor of the tavern and footsteps pounded on the wooden floor.

“If someone could take care of that disruption,” Micah continued, motioning upward with a flick of his head, “I’ll get started down here.  It’ll take a couple of minutes, but I’d prefer to not have to fend off possessed forgotten while I’m trying to recalculate our current altitude and the phase of the moon.  Screwing up rituals tends to lead to poor outcomes under ordinary circumstances, but given the third prince’s involvement, I have a feeling that failure might involve us being eaten by daemons mid-teleport.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Micah watched Trevor hand Eris her swords before throwing a spear to Esther.  His brother grabbed his own from a pile of weapons and equipment that had been haphazardly made against the basement wall before motioning upward.

“Come on girls, we can have Eris try out those new sword forms on the bad guys,” Trevor remarked cheerfully. “We’ll let Drekt, Telivern, Ravi and his new friend keep him company while he works.”

He jumped through the hole in the ceiling, stabbing something with his spear before leaning down and extending a hand to Esther.  A wave of cool air washed over Micah as green flames flashed from above.

Micah dismissed Trevor from his mind, instead focusing on the mess of runes in front of him.  The glyphs that maintained the path through Elsewhere were still valid and intact, but it took him at least a couple of minutes to recreate the markings associated with initiating and ending the teleportation itself.

Distantly he heard fighting as he scratched the last of the runes into the floor.  Micah pressed a fragment of his mana into the formation, causing the circle to glow green for a second as he ran his Arcana skill over the connection.

With a nod, Micah stood up.  Above him Trevor was congratulating Esther in between commenting on Eris’ form.  Micah inclined his head to the side, gratefully feeling his neck pop after having held the same uncomfortable position for so long.  At some point, the bodies of the forgotten guards in the basement had guttered out, the green flames extinguished and dropping the room into a dim twilight as they ran out of souls to consume.

“And there we go!” Micah called out.  “We’re ready to go.  The sooner we leave, the easier it will be to track down the ringleader behind all of this.”

“The bishop,” Eris replied as she jumped back into the basement.  “That’s what everyone kept calling her as she gave unhinged speeches about how she was going to flay our skin from our bodies and use our tendons to string a violin.”

“Are you doing alright?” Micah asked, “I’m sorry that you had to go through all of that.  I wish I could have been here earlier, but I was stuck halfway across the continent hacking my way through a jungle.”

“I’m fine,” Eris said with a smile.  “Trevor just kept saying that we shouldn’t worry about it.  That if we spent enough time with you Uncle Micah that the melodramatic villain monologs would all  start to run together after a while.  That made her really mad.”

“What?” Micah whipped around, glaring at Trevor as the man lowered himself into the room.  “Why in the name of the Sixteen would you antagonize someone that not only had the power to capture you, but actually HAD imprisoned you. That’s how you get killed.”

“Eh,” Trevor replied, scratching the back of his neck with an embarrassed look on his face.  “She was gonna kill us anyway.  By pissing her off more, I ensured that she would take us off site so that our suffering ‘would be truly legendary.’  But seriously Micah, you really should have heard her speech.  Four out of ten at best.”

“She really didn’t like it when Trevor started rating it like that,” Drekt said with a wistful smile.  “For a second there I thought she was going to kill us out of hand too, but Trevor had her sputtering with anger and frustration within minutes.  I’m not sure his strategy was to annoy her enough that she would keep us alive to torment us later, but his commentary certainly had that impact.”

Micah stared at Trevor in disbelief.  His brother had the grace to shrug awkwardly rather than try and justify his actions.  Leaving Micah unable to do anything but shake his head as he responded.

“An understandable response on her part, but we’ll talk about that later.  Now everyone get into the formation so we can get out of here before the town guard and the forgotten start fighting over who gets to kill us.  We have a bishop to catch.”