Book 6: Chapter 30 - Mount & Blade

They name it Mar-Samhala in the old tongue, the Sun’s Lost Daughter, a small yellow bloom that rises first from ash or from rare drought. Its five lantern-bright petals are cupped about a heart of saffron threads. Steeped in clear spirit, its stamens yield the Tincture of Noon, a cordial that burns fever from the blood and steadies a faltering pulse; bruised with quicksilver and thrice-blessed salt, the petals make a salve that knits flesh and bars the rot of the genitalia; dried root, shaven to dust, turns all of the jungle venoms to sleep instead of death. Some swear a single drop of its dawn-gathered dew grants a sight beyond the veil.

Yet Mar-Samhala keeps cruel customs. Pluck her at full sun and she blackens in the hand; cut her with iron and the sap turns bitter as gall. The Goblin tribes, who call her Sun-Child and tie bone charms about her beds, spill blood for every poacher’s bootprint that trespasses. 

So the great Guilds send hired bands to search for the elusive flower. For each precious bloom that they bring back is worth a Lord’s ransom. 

- The Fanciful Travels by Beron de Laney, 376 AC.

Burn down swathes of the jungle, rest, burn down some more. Rains came in the evening; unfortunately, though the Black Flame resisted, they put out the unnatural flames we had ignited. Still, we were able to clear out huge areas of land, turning either side of the road into black mud. This continued for a good week as the Mercenaries made slow progress along the now much safer road. And so I thought it would continue until one day something different shook up this safe but increasingly dull routine.

A memory stirred of another time, another place. Green jungles like these I knew teemed with a thousand and one unique and precious species of plants and animals that needed to be protected… but I found I could no longer find within me the spark to care.

For now, I rode out to meet a very different sort of green.

Before me was arrayed a horde of humanoids, the same hue as the now-burned jungle had once been. They looked like small, stunted children, strange, almost writhing hair flowing down their backs, much like the Mer I had slaughtered in the defense of Al-Lazar. Goblins, if I was not mistaken. And in their ranks was the occasional giant reptilian Lumashitu, replete with crude howdahs.

It was an opportunity most beautiful, and I had to fight the grin from spreading across my face.

I turned slightly in my saddle to face Larynda. “Ride back and warn the others about this. I will buy what time I can,” I ordered my ward, wanting to play the part of the hero.

“But, my place is here…”

“Your place is where I tell you it is. I say this not to be unkind, but time is precious now. Those men behind me need your help, Larynda. Do not gainsay me on this. Now, please, go!”

Her eyes narrowed in anger, her face flushed. But even as rebellious as she could be at times, she understood the gravity of the situation before her. Our time together had taught her that, at least.

She rode away, passing me one last worried glance.

“Now then, Theo, let us see how many little green men we can turn into paste this day,” I told my mount, urging him forward with a small kick.

Theodore, sensing that violence was nigh, gave a great bellow at the horde before us. Across from us, the other Lumashitu bellowed back in return, a cacophony of challenge. The other beasts grew restless, swinging their spiked tails, injuring some Goblins, and disrupting their ranks. Others tried to charge, only to be stopped by their handlers, but not before they had reduced some more Goblins to smears on the once-jungle floor. How I laughed at this display, the lack of discipline. They were many, but they were a rabble.

A simple shout had already inflicted a few casualties. I would teach these things… a lesson they would not soon forget.

From their ranks, a small group started to approach. How easy it would be to pick them off with my bow, to send missile after missile through their ranks. But I decided I would play along. The beginnings of a plan formed in my mind.

I decided to rest my long lance, part of its shaft resting along Theodore’s bony frill. This act relaxed the beast beneath, a sign for him to relax.

The group came closer, and at their head was a slightly larger figure, the size, I think, of a smaller man. He wore what looked to be the skull of a great lizard and bore a staff with other little bones and strange fetishes upon it. If I looked too closely at the staff, it seemed to wriggle and move.

I allowed them to come closer, relaxed with my arms crossed against my chest.

They stopped perhaps twenty paces away and were silent, a group of twenty at a rough guess. Perhaps for intimidation’s sake or some other reason; I did not know. I found I did not much care and yawned. I could do this all day.

Eventually, the creature wearing the skull helm walked forward. He was wiry and thin, far from human, his muscles in all the wrong places—or so it looked to me—his proportions wrong… and other.

“Why do you burn our homes? Our land?” he rasped in a vague approximation of human speech.

I found myself mildly surprised that it was capable of this.

“Who said that was me?”

“You would deny this, human? Our scouts saw you and the other one!” it protested.

The trick with things like this was never to go on the defensive. To go on the defensive was basically an admission of defeat.

“You must have burned this down yourself, or your eyes are defective. Or perhaps another group of Goblins did. I would expect nothing less from you pathetic creatures,” I answered dismissively as Theodore stamped on the ground as if in support of my statement.

“You lie, human! You lies!” he screeched at me, his voice going up an octave as he shook his staff at me.

“Tell me, do you eat the flesh of my kind?”

“All is food when life has passed from their eyes,” came his answer, what passed for his features narrowing as if he heard a question from a child.

“Wonderful. That means you are lesser and unclean. I will not feel guilty about this at all; in fact, I will be doing the universe at large a service,” I stated with relish as I slammed my visor down.

“What do you mean?” their leader asked, his eyes narrowing.

“From the horizon to the sea, I will wipe out all of your kind. You are unclean,” I laughed, shifting my weight in the saddle, an unspoken instruction to my massive mount.

Theodore spun, the thagomizer on the end of his tail whipping out with surprising speed and smacking against three of the Goblins, tossing them aside like dolls. Guiding him with my legs, I urged Theodore into a charge, and the beast, his blood up, was more than willing. He crashed into the still-surprised creatures, knocking them down like bowling pins. Their crude weapons of stone, bone, and wood could never bring down the reptilian Theodore. But, as it turned out, that was not the true threat they presented.

You have slain a Goblin. 23 experience gained.

You have slain a Goblin. 18 experience gained.

You have slain a Goblin. 17 experience gained.

It felt like it had been a long time since I had seen double digits from single kills, and I welcomed—truly welcomed—the bounty set before me. It was time to perpetrate a genocide and good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing, so I urged Theo to continue his rampage.

Theodore started to slow down, his movements growing sluggish. I used my Identify spell, calling out the syllables that made up its spell construct to understand what was happening.

Juvenile Lumashitu (Theodore) [Proto-dragon] lvl.10

Health: 387/440

Stamina: 95/96

Mana: 4/4

At first, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my pet had gained a level, until I saw that his Health was slowly falling. Despite his rather heavy barding, I surmised that he had been poisoned somehow.

I found this extremely annoying, but there was one easy solution. It was a simple matter to cast Purify on him, the spell coming to me more slowly than I had expected as I purged the toxins—or whatever it was—floating about in my mount's system.

However, I could see this being extremely annoying in the long run, as I generally hated enemies in games that could inflict status effects like poison, etc. Though Purify only cost a single point of Mana, if I were to slaughter this horde in front of me, the cost to my reserves would eventually mount up.

It was time to remedy that. The voices within started to echo the chant, the formation of one of my staple spells, Greater Drain. The tentacles of it burst out, seeking and hungry, latching onto the remaining group of Goblins and filling me with pure bliss. More and more of it filled me, their raw life energy, until there was nothing. An emptiness.

All twenty Goblins were dead, drained dry by my spell or gored on Theodore’s great horn. But more of the green creatures were coming my way. A green wave—no, a green tide—of them, and my heart sang for the joy of it.

Arrows and darts filled the air, seemingly blotting out the sun, pattering against my armor like rain. My build could deal with an infinite number of weak creatures such as this, but the trick would be keeping Theodore’s Health up. To that end, I called upon Holy Aura, and the covenant of Heaven filled me, a sunburst of glory.

Now, Theodore, as long as he remained in close proximity, would not suffer from the tiny thousand-and-one wounds these vermin could inflict.

Smiling and assured of my glory, the righteousness of my action, I drew my great bow, the weapon that humbled the titans of the sea. The bow sang in my hands, a harsh, metallic shriek as I started to loose. The iron bolts left with a hiss and a streak, burying themselves in the wood of howdahs and punching through. Towered saddles lurched; a Lumashitu bellowed and stamped, eyes rolling white, handlers yanked from their perches like rag dolls. I did not aim to kill; I wanted chaos.

I drew again and sent another missile into a beast’s harness, gouging a wound across the flanks of the reptilian creature. Straps parted. The fighting platform slid, pitched, and toppled. Bodies fell. The third shot skittered along a bony frill, sparks spitting as iron kissed stone-hard shield. The fourth thunked home in the beast’s flank—not deep enough to kill, just enough to kindle madness. All along the line, the Lumashitu tossed their horned heads and swiped with the great spiked clubs at the ends of their tails, reducing Goblins to wet bundles of meat. Discipline frayed to ribbons. Their Chieftains squealed and beat their primitive drums. 

“Theo,” I murmured, and my mount answered with a rumble that trembled up my legs and into my teeth. He was joy when roused, and a terrible joy. His six legs churned, claws tearing the blackened loam as he shouldered into the press. His long horn took a Goblin through the belly and pitched him skyward, where he spun once and came down headfirst. Tail—oh, glorious tail—lashed and cracked, and three Goblins went boneless, folding into themselves like old cloaks. Theo laughed, in his way, and I could not help but grin like a boy behind my helm.

More experience messages filled me, the system counting Theodore as a weapon I commanded.

Another iron bolt and another howdah was unseated or destroyed. Another Lumashitu, maddened by pain and freed of guidance, waded into the fray to cause terrible havoc. The green rats squealed and scattered and died beneath the feet that had once borne them.

A message flickered red at the edge of my sight, as brief as a blink. More followed it, beads on a string, too many to count. I drank them the way a man drinks a cool drink on a hot summer’s day. I knew joy in my righteousness, knowing that I had become a hammer of Justice.

Arrows and darts rattled impotently rattled against my armor, and a spear shattered against Theo’s frill in a spray of splinters. My golden aura burned about us, bright as noon behind a closed eye. Tiny cuts sealed as they opened. A hundred hurts became one ache and then nothing at all. Poison was slowed, then eventually overcome, as Theodore built up resistance. Still, arrows add up as any tide does, and I had no wish for Theo to drown beneath them, not today.

“Enough,” I whispered to the hungers that lived inside me, the nameless choir. The voices. “It is time.”

I echoed the words of the voices in my mind, and they tasted of copper, rot, and ruin upon my tongue. Improved Entropic Aura burst from me, grey waves of the roiling stuff of nothingness. I cast Overboost, strengthening the spell and heedless of the cost to my Mana. A new aspect of my magic bloomed at my feet like spilled night. I saw it as a pool and felt it as a cold wind; the Goblins saw… something else. A ring of darkness spread—ten paces, twenty, thirty—until about fifty steps of the world lay drowned beneath the midnight black. For the first time in millennia, eyes opened in that pool, lidless, patient, innumerable. They did not move, so much as arrive. Some were as wide as shields, others needle-small, all of them watching. The nearest Goblins slowed. Their skin blanched as if winter had crept up their veins.

Where the Goblins stood, breath smoked from their mouths as if the black heat had turned to black frost. They did not scream at first. Screaming takes breath. I watched the color slowly leach from them, what quickness they had, drain. They swayed like rushes in dead water. Theodore charged into them, and more of them died.

More numbers chimed as steadily as rainfall, a proclamation of my glory.

Theo plunged further into their ranks—my good six-legged beast, my monstrous, faithful boy—and where he passed, the eyes winked shut and opened again behind him, tracking, counting. I kept losing solid iron bolts, the missiles piercing through their ranks and killing Goblins by the score when I shot at a shallow angle.

Now out of arrows, I slung my bow onto my back and drew the Second Horn, that long lance of Lumashitu cavalry, and started to stab in earnest as I laughed. I skewered the weak things by the score, but found it more efficient to sweep with my lance, my raw Strength enough to make such blunt blows fatal more often than not.

A big bull of a Lumashitu sounded a challenge. I saw no need to rein him in, so Theodore was quick to answer. All six of his legs running at full pelt, he slammed shoulder-first into the side of the other Lumashitu, and the two ceratopians analogs collided like battering rams. Horn scraped horn; frills rang; both beasts screamed. Theo rolled his weight, clever as any dancer, and the thagomizer whipped in a full circle. Spikes met meat. The other mount collapsed with a shrieking bellow as I stabbed it in an eye the size of a bowl, finishing it off.

You have slain a Lumashitu. 73 experience gained.

How wonderful, I thought to myself. But a part of me wished for more of a challenge, not quite an Apex level of challenge, but a challenge with a bit more bone to it.

Something tugged at me—an old itch, an old curiosity. “Let’s see,” I said, the words lost in the bedlam, “What havoc the old dead can unleash.”

My spell, Whispers of the Grave whispered to me, an echoing voice filled with a different seduction. The seduction of the edge, a form of limited oblivion.

This magic was not a shout but a confession, whispered backward. Memories of old came back to me as I shaped the syllables: bandit, soldier, undead, Mer, knight, beast, a litany of all those I had sent to the great beyond. I felt them like coins under my tongue. I shaped the last turn but lost it, the spell construct shattering as Theo’s tail sang another full circle and four Goblins went apart in four different directions.

“Stay,” I told him, laughing despite myself. “Just a moment. Stay, stay.” He thumped the ground, annoyed, but he obeyed.

Again, I called out to Whispers of the Grave.

And, this time, the whisper of Death held. The air grew thin as paper. Foggy shapes began to coalesce as if summoned from he very air itself. Again, I threaded Overboost into the bones of the magic, eager to see what it would do to this magic.

There was a second pulse, and the dead thickened. Shades become more solid. I saw a shade strike, the blow barely marked flesh, but the touch drew heat, the touch left rime as it somehow interacted with my Overboosted Improved Aura. Goblins screamed and started to still, as fingers of old cold went through them. The shades did not cry out, for they were dead and the dead had no need of voice.

My reserves of Mana were beginning to dip low, and I faced a choice: consume or Mana potion or use Greater Drain.

The choice was an easy one. I brought back Greater Drain into this world, the tentacles of ebon, latching onto fresh targets and filling me with fresh song.

I urged Theo to charge again through the press of living and not. He gored a Goblin drummer off his platform, trampled a horn-blower, and shattered a line of crude pikes like dry twigs. I stabbed with the Second Horn, seeking Goblins who wore fancier gear, seeking to make an example of their leaders. 

A shaman, if that is what the bone-crowned thing was, lifted his staff and croaked a curse only to find the tip of my lance lodging where croak becomes breath. He quivered like meat on a spit. Around him, the Goblins broke from grim resolve to pure terror, which is a finer thing to my mind. 

More and more of the unclean died, offered up as sacrifices that Her Champion might grow stronger.

Overboosted Improved Entropic Aura ate at time. In the circle of eyes, everything slowed, even sound; a scream became a ribbon, stretched and thinned. Outside it, the world kept its panicked pace. The shades worked where I was not, shepherding panic, brushing shoulders, chilling marrow. More Lumashitu, maddened by the presence of the dead, waded and stamped and spun, their bulk mowing lanes through the green hordes.

Hours, minutes, or heartbeats passed—battle steals all and gives back nothing. No, that was not right, experience points were the prize of a battle well fought. Holy Aura made what minor wounds the Goblins could inflict a memory, not a problem. Theo blew steam. 

“Fall,” I told them at last, whether Goblins or Gods, I could not say, for I was caught up in the holy slaughter. “Fall and be counted. Become holy numbers and part of my glory.”

They listened. Not at once; rabble never does. First a wedge crumpled, then a line sagged, then a dozen turned, then a hundred, all at once as if some hidden wire had been cut. The break began as a thought and became a flood. The primitive drums went silent. Barbaric standards fell. They ran.

I pressed them because mercy is for when the day is done, and this day was far from over. Theo understood. He pounded into the rout, horn working, tail singing its beat. The inky pool rolled with us, patient and hungry, its eyes opening in new places, winking shut behind. A paradox, if you looked, the eyes blinked, blinked, but did not blink at all.

Shades loped behind us like hunting dogs. Wherever they brushed a fleeing back, a small patch of frost bloomed. Goblins who slipped in panic did not rise. Those who did rise found my weapon waiting or were simply trampled underfoot. Or something colder, as my revenants swamped them.

We chased them into what remained of the jungle—charred trunks like black teeth, curtains of ash where leaves had hung, the air thick with the sweet stink of sap and blood. The aura followed, a lake of night in a wood of cinders. In the shadow of half-burned boughs, I reined Theo enough to keep from outrunning my own shadow and turned back to face the rest of the fleeing horde.  Somewhere ahead in the trees, a horn called a rally that no one answered. It did not matter; here, there was only the great work that needed to be done.

Work, and the steady pursuit of more numbers.

Theo tossed a terrified Goblin into the air with his horn, and the Shades followed it.

You have slain a Goblin. 10 experience. 

“On, then,” I told Theo, patting the slab of his neck behind his frill. “On! There’s still light enough to kill by.”

He rumbled, and we went on, deeper into the oncoming green horde. The Goblins would learn what it meant to run from a night that walks.