Hlaeth Chapter 46 – The Hunger of Fire and Stone

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I touched the gold with my right hand, and Mortus Dius touched them from my left. I focused, intertwining the two spells together, and Cast.

Gold sparkled, shimmered, and vanished. The stone poles lit up with complex whorls and sigils of fiery golden power from three feet apart, and then the very short Wall of Fire exploded into being between them, and the gold, a tenweight of it, was gone.

Everyone stared at the leashed fury raging there. Golden flames shimmering with vivus and other energies, blazing with a fury they’d never seen in any flames anywhere, ever.

“These are Holy flames and will harm no soul that stands in the light of Heaven.” I stuck my hand into an inferno which should have reduced my arm to ashes in an instant, everyone sucking in their breaths, and waved it around freely. “If you are not such a thing, or you bear Corruption, this is as hot as the deadliest forge-fires of the dwarven furnaces.

“Sergeant Umgril, if you would care to push the pole on the left that way.” I pointed west.

“Sir,” the uncertain, Vivic Light-helmed dwarf acknowledged the order, stepping forward stolidly, brown beard reflecting the light of the flames. He hesitated, then reached out a gauntleted hand to the fires, and waved it around in them. “Huh,” he managed to say, then pushed the pole tentatively.

It was floating an inch above the ground, and it moved easily… and the Wall of Fire filled the opening between them.

And kept filling it as Sergeant Umgril kept walking, even greatly daring to swing right into the middle of the flames so they cut him right down the middle and he kept walking pushing the pole out and away.

Longer, and longer, and longer.

“You can stop about there, Sergeant,” I said quietly.

A thousand feet away, the sergeant stepped out of the fires, turned, and waved back at us.

A twenty-foot Wall of Holy Vivic Fire, ablaze like nothing they’d ever seen, formed an unbelievably deadly barrier of intrusion against the Yellow.

“Sergeant Dwil, if you and Sergean Umgril could walk the Wall into the Yellow.”

The second dwarf, with a dirty blond beard, eagerly stepped up to do his duty, perfunctorily trying the flames out and assuring himself that they could not burn him.

The Patriarch had been asked to vet each soldier allowed for Wall escort duty, for precisely this reason. The flames wouldn’t harm natural animals, untainted matter, or Good souls. Anything else was going to be feasted on by the Arcane Primal Divine Fiery Holy Vivic Widened Wall of Fire here, which would feast on things that thought they were immune to fire, and REALLY go after anything vulnerable to vivus.

Damage was something like 100 +5d6 points of primary damage, and 10+6d6 of Burn damage for three rounds afterwards. This was a nasty mobile defensive measure, and the dwarves were going to be allowed to keep all but one of them.

I could have made it two thousand feet long, but eh.

Everyone watched as the incredibly long Wall was slowly pushed past the Wardstones, the flames parting over and around the stones, taller than them and not breaking contact.

“If the poles are taken too far apart, the Wall will break contact, and the poles will need to be touched together for it to reignite… or a Caster could toss the spell between them and reignite them that way,” I informed everyone as they passed into the Yellow.

The WHOOSH was quite loud and emphatic. Billowing gusts of pale mist rolled off the Wall, gathering thickly around the flames and pouring slowly down-slope and away from it. The flames seemed to be thrumming and shimmering in eager reaction as the vivus did its thing, and devoured the Yellow.

The two dwarves advanced a hundred feet, and left behind a completely white swath of the landscape, the Wall moving up and down over it to accommodate the terrain, but there was definitely nothing Yellow left in the stone there.

“The creatures of the Yellow are unlikely to attack the Walls or those who escort them,” I said grimly. “Thus, the goal of the Walls is to cover ground. March or ride, towing the Walls, scouring the Land repeatedly, cleansing the air.

“This is the arm of the advance, the broom sweeping away the dust, cleaning and clearing away the Yellow once we’ve thrown enough of it back and away. If a horde of the Yellow creatures is foolish enough to advance on a moving Wall of flame, well, they get what they earn.” Murmurs of understanding and nodding heads as everyone pictured trying to make it through that blazing Wall of Fire while impure.

“Lastly, I will be making a Pyramid, starting here. It will be the single biggest consumer of Yellow energy we employ, and the base of operations as we move south, drawing in and devouring the Yellow like a great white hole. It will likely also draw in the hordes of the Yellow like moths to a flame, so there will be a great deal of fighting around it.

“Erecting the Pyramid is on me, but it shouldn’t take overlong.” Mainly because I was pretty sure I could get away with using Temporal Magic to speed things along this time. “So, the first job is to organize the first scour teams, the second to extend the border cleansing, the third to make as many Fire Walls as the Rockborn believe they can handle, and lastly I will work on the Pyramid.

“Let’s get to work, everyone.”

-------

Mass Eternal Lights on braziers crammed into a sphere of twenty-foot radius could be ignited by the hundreds, the stands made separately, stacked up on Disks, and pushed away to form a continuous boundary along the border. A line of Gold and unwhite flames soon ranged east and west in a continuous line just on the other side of the Mountain Ward.

Likewise, the same Lights Burned on helms, and the Children went hunting after I doled out some Mass Greater Magical Weapons and Vivic on the new weapons many of them were hefting, along with Mass Greater Force Armor to protect them. Under my eye, we went out looking for trouble.

I had to oversee them because of the unseen Portals and shifting of them. Teams of dwarves pushed the Disks used to mark the Portals as I pointed them out, while Magevoice kept everyone in coordination within a radius of three miles.

It did not take long for creatures of the Yellow to start coming our way. They likely felt a ‘wind’ on the dimensional tides, which should have indicated an area opening up, ready for expansion. Instead, it indicated an area that was consuming the planar energies leaking out, and setting them up for a beat-down.

I stayed up in the air, hovering there while Feature ranged around, overseeing every center of fighting to make sure nothing over-matched the Children who were down below doing battle. I could Linejump anywhere required, Healing Reserve could patch anyone up who was injured, and Revivify bring them back from death if I got to them quickly enough.

With all the oversight, the Children were not in much danger, and I was there to Heal them all. They went at the fighting aggressively, bound up in Fellowships to share Karma and enhance teamwork.

It was pure fighting, no loot to speak of, nothing to salvage. The things a Yellow creature’s body could be used for basically came down to things used to kill them. Any other magical Gear wrought would be twisted by the bent Planar energies and become cursed or malfunctioning or inverted in effect, I was duly informed by the dwarven Crafters experienced in such things.

There was only one major creature that came to fight, a mutation of a worm-thing oozing crystalline acid, with jutting spikes that were lifted up when it came to the surface and trifold jaws opened, trying to catch prey within before lightning crackled off the crystalline spikes and left curling scars of off-hued fulgurite behind in the sands.

Feature came down and grappled the massive thing, keeping it on the surface for the most skilled of the Children to hack into and tear it apart with enthusiasm, while Dartrays from a thousand paces away flashed in to Heal their injuries and keep them alive in the face of lightning, freezing acid, the worm trying to roll over them, or it trying to swallow them in gaping jaws.

In the meantime, Yellow creatures mutated from the likes of oversized insects, scorpions, spiders, jackals, hares, and other smaller animals were continuously flowing in from all directions to do battle in frenzied madness.

This whole land was a Karmic buffet, and they were sending it in on delivery. I couldn’t much protest, as the Leveling was beginning, and Naming Karma applied.

-------

Night came, and we withdrew. There had been one Portal shift during the fighting period, during which all the marking braziers had to be urgently moved while everyone had to be careful not to go through any Portals in the interim.

All such were removed, as the Yellow creatures attacked the sources of vivus energetically, trying to destroy them when given the chance. We brought them back to the Mountain Ward, where the Ironaxe army was now drawn up in a long, long line now, units of spears and arbalesters moving swiftly to intercept any of the constant flow of Yellow creatures trickling in across the line.

It was time for me to administer lessons in magic via telepathy, and to work on my Pyramid. Quite amusingly, it was not hard to do both at the same time, courtesy of a lot of thoughtstreams.

Tempus Fugit also gave me a lot of mental time.

A Widened Tempus Fugit covered a twenty-foot radius, and accelerated the flow of time by a factor of six on the mental level. There was no fighting six times as fast, or even spellcasting six times as fast, but purely mental-only actions? Yeah, they received the full impetus of the acceleration.

So, for instance, six hours of instruction in magic at a telepathic level took only an hour in real time, and telepathy could already work at ten times normal speed.

I had to be careful to back off and not overwhelm them all with my thoughts, but dhatun usually had Earth Bloodlines or Artificer potential, halvyr had broad magical potential across many paths, and urukhar had their fury and rage to temper and control. The rare ogryn tended not to have much magical ability, with Hano’s ogre mage ancestry being a clear exception to the case.

So, while fifty students floated on Disks, going through telepathic lessons with a clarity impossible with merely the spoken word and at a mind-blistering pace, I was also making a White Pyramid with impossible speed.

Because Shaping Stone was a mental-only action, I wasn’t Casting and re-Casting a spell.

The Ironaxe dwarves in particular staggered back when I heaved the first twenty-foot cube out of the ground, and the Runes flashed across it in pulses of magic literally eye-blinks long, purifying, stratifying, carving, and then the block floated there, carved so hard that looking on it was stamping it on their eyeballs.

I defaulted to a minute to make a twenty-foot cube, but with Tempus Fugit, that was down to six seconds. Ten cubes a minute. Six hundred an hour, ten hours of mental work done and compressed into an hour of time.

Twenty-step Pyramid done in a single day.

Twenty-foot cubed Blocks hauled themselves out of the ground as if leaping free of the mountain stone, were Shaped into their final forms, and skimmed over to join the very rapidly assembling 20x20 foundation level, while the stone I was drawing forth over the four-hundred-foot squared area I was drawing from leveled the hillside out first, and then began to sink it smoothly and make a large plaza out of the surrounding terrain, with just enough slope to it for the water to run off…

I always did love a good floor, after all.

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