Hlaeth Chapter 45 – Burning the Yellow

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A week later…

It was surprising how fast word had spread across the North, although less magical than horsemen riding between settlements and conveying word.

There was a powerful human wizard in the North recruiting the Children to Burn away the Yellow. Would any like to come and fight?

The halvyr minstrel Kwid was enthusiastic about spreading the word. I definitely had money after sacking the Rhonidum vessels, and although I’d sold most of the loot and the ships themselves for very little overall, I still had enough to pay everyone and arm them… and that was before the Ironaxe dwarves announced that they’d be helping me!

There were a bunch of tripod stands arranged along the edge of the Yellow right now, curious eyes of Children, dwarves, and even some interested humans and elves gathered to watch everything. On top of the hundreds of simple tripods were clover-like braziers, all of them empty at present.

Dwarves of Ironaxe outnumbered everyone else present, but most of them weren’t even soldiers. Mostly older dwarves, mostly retired, with time on their hands and needing something to fill it.

Well, I had something to fill it. It was going to be slow, boring, steady, and utterly necessary, which was perfect for the dwarven mindset, patient and enduring as stone.

“Greetings, everyone. I’ll be happily melodramatic for the sages and say that this is the beginning of a great effort together, although it won’t seem like it for a while. Today is the day mortal-kind started Burning the Yellow and taking back the world.”

I definitely had the voice and the Oratory skill needed to enthrall them all, and Magevoice made sure that even on the windy hillside, with the Yellow behind me, that I had the attention of everyone and everything.

“There are several layers to what we are going to be doing here,” I began calmly. “As many of you now know, the vivic energy, when attached to other spells, can slowly Burn away the power of the Yellow. Teaching spellcasters this power will guarantee you can slowly and eventually drive back the Yellow, but the process might take years to gather the forces necessary to do so.

“Happily, I am here, and I do not intend to take anywhere near so long.” I surveyed all of them, my voice grim and focused.

No Evil folk. I’d bluntly told the few to arrive that they had better things to do with their time than disappoint me and end up a stain. Given my Aura of Menace, they got the message and rode away quickly. Their identities were marked and others made aware of the Color of their souls, so they wouldn’t be caught by surprise by those.

“The first use of vivus is protecting oneself. As you’ve hopefully all heard now, what the Yellow actually consists of is Planar Corruption, leaking out of thousands of unseen Portals to other realms, slowly and continually seeping into the land. When creatures blunder through these Portals, they are partially transformed into creatures of those places… and said transformations keep occurring anew with every such Portal. Thus, every such creature was once a normal beast or creature of this world, and they have been subjected to the most horrifying and mind-altering transformations, into things literally not of this world, or really any world.

“This contamination spreads through the air, the water, and the dust, building up over time in all those who walk in the Yellow, slowly transforming those who wander it from within in a slow, steady erosion of what it means to be biped or beast, sapient or sentient, and turns them into a thing of the Yellow.

“A Vivic Eternal Light on one’s helm is enough to ward one from inhaling the Yellow. The vivus will consume the traces of the Yellow about you, manifesting as mist falling down, and protect from contamination all those who need to travel in the Yellow. Kord, stroll past the Ward, please.”

The broad and incredibly solid dhatun Borderguard put on the simple painted iron helm he preferred, now adorned with a showy and very visible golden Light that was tinged with a strange whiteness. He strode forward, towards a very clear stone marker rising out of the ground there, and past it.

The poofing of the unwhite flame was instantly visible, making the nervous people flinch. There were real unwhite flames dancing on his helm, obviously doing no damage, and little streams and whorls of mist falling from his helm and around him.

He waved his hand negligently through them. “Interfering with your sight, hearing, Kord?” I asked so that everyone could hear, and the axer shook his thick head.

“This will be minimum equipment for anyone seeking to enter the Yellow going forward. I’m not having anyone turn into a deranged madman whose brain suddenly becomes half sand and half mechanical insect from an axiomatic plane. If you all think it’s too showy, tough. It’s meant to be showy… we WANT stuff to see you, come find you, and attack the piss out of you, so that you can kill them.”

The words hung in the air, hands of the Children creaking on their weapons. That was what they were here for. Many of them clutched new weapons eagerly, even proudly, because one of the ways the dwarves were supporting this fight was giving everyone a high Quality weapon that could take a Name and be grown with Naming Karma.

“The second way we will be fighting the Yellow is thus killing these corrupted creatures of the Yellow.” I surveyed the Children there. “This is your time, and your job. It is you I will be overseeing. You I will be teaching. You I will be training. Not dwarf or human or anything else. This is your time, Children.

“You are going to grow strong here. It might be slow at first, but it will improve every day. I will help you in the beginning with magic, to help you kill faster, help you survive. I will Heal you, I will transport you back and forth, and I will lead you in the fighting against what is probably the most varied and horrific sort of monstrosities on this whole planet.

“You will get strong enough to kill them without me.

“You will get strong enough to stand on your own, without me.

“It will take time and effort and pain, but you will watch and feel yourself improve.” I surveyed them again. “Living creatures are the single most intense source of Corruption in those lands. They concentrate it in themselves when they pass through Portals, and with every breath they take, every thing they eat. Killing the least creature of the Yellow, such as a mutant rat, does more work than an Eternal Light with vivus sitting out there and Burning all day.

“Your job is to kill them, and they will be coming here. They will feel the Yellow Burning here, the flow of it, and they will be drawn in this direction. They will come to fight, and you will cut them down and you will Feed them to the Land.”

There was no doubt in my mind they could do it, especially with me here to Buff them up and get them started.

“Secondary to the killing of the creatures of the Yellow is the Vivic Eternal Flames.”

I swept out Mortus Dius, and the Chain of Eternal Flames swept out, golden fires, true and hot and sparkling with Holy and Vivic energies powering them, blazed to life on exactly twenty-six braziers behind me.

“Elders of the Rockborn.” I turned to the iron-haired and bearded dwarven men and women, who lifted their chins to return my eyeless gaze. “This is the duty that will fall to you.

“Two things these braziers will be used for. First, they consume four times or more the amount of Yellow that an Eternal Light does. What these shall do is park at the edge of the Ward, just inside it, and they shall feast.

“And you, you shall watch them feast.”

“Here is the opponent you are watching.”

I swept up the Holo above me, brought up a map, and showed the expanse of the Yellow… and then I showed the Yellow constrained.

Shocked eyes traced the massive, hundreds-mile sphere of the Yellow. They saw it flatten against the Wards of the mountains, warped and distorted since it could not pass them… and they saw it reaching deep underground, and who knew how far to the south and west. To the north and the east it was constrained by ancient Wards that followed the mountains, but it loomed impossibly large over all of them, and clearly would cover far, far more area than the Wards currently allowed.

If the Wards fell, it would swallow all the surrounding lands instantly!

“The Yellow will not budge from your Wards an inch for a great deal of time,” I said quietly. “It will look like nothing is happening… because you have to Burn away a great, great deal of Yellow, a task you are literally centuries behind on. It is akin to draining away an entire sea, with rivers still flowing into it!

“It will take time and patience, and maintaining a calm surety that what you are doing is having an effect.”

I waved my hand again, and another twenty-six braziers wooshed to life.

“I will be making scores, if not hundreds, of these braziers every single day. You will line them up just over the border to the Yellow, and they will go on, and on, and on, in all directions. The pressure of the Yellow will feed them continuously, mist will fall, and they will help draw in the creatures of the Yellow to die.

“A line of Eternal Fires and falling mist shall ring the Yellow in the North, and eat away slowly, constantly at the Corruption here. It is the elders of the dwarves who will watch over it, and it is they who will mark that moment when the Yellow finally begins to recede.”

There was a proud rumble from all of them, nodding heads around as I turned to look back at the Children.

“You will also be taking some of these, out into the Yellow, because you will be using them to mark where the Portals are. One of these Flames sitting in front of a Portal will not only make it visible, it will shut it down and make it impermeable, unable to be passed through. As the Portals close and shift position, the Braziers will be picked up and moved to indicate a clear path in and out of the Yellow.

“You will haul them out there when you enter the Yellow, you will gather them when you return, you will leave them with the Elders when you rest, and they will be ready for you in the morning.

“This is the second way we eat at the Yellow.”

My eyes turned on the dwarven soldiers who were in attendance. “The Ironaxe have agreed to volunteer some soldiers for a specific duty. That duty… is to march. To march over the Yellow, up and down the sands and stone, over and over again, for miles and miles and miles. Your job is to Burn the dirt and the stone actively, to sear it out of the soil and the air.

“It will always be recorrupted when you march on, until it begins to shrink. But it will need to be Burned away over and over and over again.

“You will not need to march far… but you will need to march repeatedly, searing the Corruption from the land over and over and over again.

“You will be doing it with these.”

A set of poles of stone flowed out of the ground. They were fully twenty feet tall, and around them at shoulder-height to a dwarf were rings, like some sort of candlestick holders… and atop those rings were ingots of gold.

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