Hlaeth Chapter 41 – The Perfect Slave

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Completely unafraid of them doing anything, I said, “Thirty seconds for the five of you who are attempting to hide in the lower decks. Die cowering if you want to, I don’t mind.”

I saw all their Auras dim instantly, and hesitantly come out of cover.

“Twenty-five seconds,” I said lightly, stepping down the air over the moving boat.

They started racing for the stairs. Except the one who was really an idiot and stayed where he was, a little knot of red hate and fear that didn’t think I could possible see him inside that storage chest there.

“Twenty. Fifteen. Ten, oh, only one of you left. Five. Welp, there you go, hiding in a chest and dying on some sails. Nope, too late. Goodbye.”

The panicking man tore open the covers just as the Shards reached him and blasted him to white dust down there, zigging and zagging along the stairs and corridors to reach him down on the second deck there. Too bad for him.

I walked into the room with the unmoving elves. “Oh, and don’t think I’m not watching you up there, either. Feel free to plan and commiserate. You may want a warrior’s death or something, as I’m not sure what the fine people of Hriegard are going to do with you. I will promise you your deaths will be quick, and Hell will get you all right speedily, almost no pain at all.”

They all dimmed up there. It was a promise, not a threat.

The elves, fair-skinned and pale-haired, one woman and two men, one man a red-head, the other two golden-haired, did not react on the bunks they were put on rather comfortably, which was highly suspicious.

So was the churning and paling going on on their Auras, as if the color was being leeched out of them!

I opened their eyes with Reach’s TK, one by one, looked at the yellow swimming in the blue and greens… and my jaw popped as my teeth clenched.

The Mass Greater Restoration bloomed over all three of them, invading them with the power of Heaven and stopping that erasure in its tracks. Golden light flared and writhed over them, doing battle with the force at work on their brains and bodies, destroying it, and trying to heal the damage that had been done to them.

I turned around, looked around the room, and followed the faint after-glow of Evil to one of the drawers there, pulling it open to reveal half-a-dozen turgid yellow elixirs in sealed vials, and a unique rune that was derived from the Mabrahoring word for the River Styx.

I turned around and walked back outside, the vials held in TK as I stepped out over the hole blasted through the side of the ship, still smoldering but no longer burning.

A cold, cold wind began to blow as I walked back up to the level of the main deck.

“You are all monsters…” I hissed, very softly, and they heard it regardless, and it was True.

Most of the crew immediately pissed themselves and lost their footing. Both the captain and her urukhar bodyguard were pressed back against the railing, eyes wide in shock as they finally began to feel what they were dealing with.

My eyeless gaze was on that priest, however.

“Chattel of the Styx.” I plucked one of the elixirs out of the air, stepping towards the priest, who was too frozen with fear to move. “Made with the blood of Styx Devils. It has to be customized to the races it affects, removing the memories of those forced to drink it, and substituting in a child-like personality incapable of truly gaining experience or changing over time, making them the perfect gentle slave to use and abuse, as they simply cannot fight back in any form.

“One of the most sickening tools of the Hells. And you are using it to claim valuable elven slaves for yourself, getting yourselves some graceful, gentle slaves of surpassing beauty that can serve a family for multiple generations, never trying to leave or fight back against their fates.

“AND YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE DOING THE WORK OF ANGELS?!” I roared, sweeping my hand back.

The Shards blew through the crew. There were no screams, the back half of the boat was simply blasted white instantly as they went directly to vivus. Their clothes and equipment fell to the ground, no trace of them left behind… except the souls, frozen in their terror and disbelief, translucent, hollow, and edged in Red.

Beneath them, darkness stirred, and it was edged in glittering Ruby.

Then the screams started, hollow, empty, and the souls of the crew wailed and struggled as the tendrils of Hell slowly and lovingly reached up, little fires growing beneath them, and down, down, down, they were pulled, no hurry to it, milking their fear for everything on their way to their proper Fate.

The last one’s reaching hand vanished in a burst of black-red Hellfire, and all that was left was whiteness, clothing, footwear, and some knives and pouches dropping free.

“I know exactly what is going to be done with you. All three of you. A sell-out to an uncaring god. A traitor to her ancestors. And a betrayer of all the Children.” My gaze shifted to each one of them in turn. “You fools probably didn’t even know this abomination of an elixir can be made to work on humans and any other intelligent race, do you?”

Their eyes grew wide in horror.

There was a crackle, and they froze in place, Held and paralyzed.

“No. No killing yourselves. Hell doesn’t get you, because you’re not going to be you in a moment.” Two more vials joined the one in my hand as I swept a finger across my palm, and the seals broke on all three of them. Bright red blood leaked out, and magic swirled over it, Energized and strong.

Three drops each went into the vials, and the swirling, ugly yellow glittered and shone as it devoured the Energized blood, was overwritten, and a foul, dirty yellow-red concoction swirled in all three vials.

“GOODBYE,” I stated, and the liquid in the vials leapt free of the leaded glass, spun in the air like waiting serpents, and struck.

There was no resisting it. It went right into their mouths and noses, driving right past their attempted resistance, and into their guts, where it promptly began to spread out energetically, just like any good Potion would.

They wanted to scream, they wanted to plead, but there was no mercy in my eyes whatsoever. As they had done to others for their own benefits, so was being done to them.

Their Auras all roiled, and turned turgid. I watched the will and resistance and desperation in their eyes tremble, falter, cloud over, and then fall away as the power of the River Styx rose up within them, and as it could strip the dead of memory, so it removed that of the living here.

They would have crumpled to the ground, unconscious as the Chattel emptied out and rewrote their minds and souls, but they were still Held and unable to move at all. I leaned them backwards and onto the deck of the ship before releasing them, and they slumped unconscious there, going away forever.

My fist cracked in my hand, and I regarded the three vials left to me.

I, I was definitely going to do something about this Rhonidum. Which meant my stay on this world was probably going to be a bit longer than I wanted it to be.

Venturing between multiverses meant easy mucking with the timestream, and I trusted Mithar not to keep me gone from my family for years. Indeed, making my absence short was a back-handed way of covering for all the crap I was doing on these random worlds out in the middle of Creation, far beyond His control.

He was also making time out of nowhere, giving me the opportunity to expand my talents and reserves in ways I couldn’t with the amount of time I devoted to my Allegiance back home. Assaulting an Empire secretly run by devils pretending to be angels was not something I could just get up and go do if I were at home.

Here? It was probably rather crucial to clearing out space for me to get at Houme, one way or another. Heaven worked in mysterious ways, after all.

I’d gotten to the elves early enough that they would retain their memories and personalities… but they’d likely lose a tremendous amount of emotional investment in their past, like they’d been reading about someone else’s life, instead of their own.

The Chattel Potion was a very, very nasty piece of work, and Hell could get into a LOT of trouble using it. It destroyed Free Will and so pissed off every divine power out there.

I eyed the three people who were literally going to be mindless, brain-wiped slaves of meek and humble personality when they woke up, bereft of Levels, power, drive, ambition, and dreams. They’d be child-like caricatures for the rest of their lives, never able to become something more than the weakest-willed and most compliant of creatures.

That… was just useless. I could figure out a better use for them, eventually.

A little Petrifaction, dumping into my Sanctum, un-petrify them to let the Chattel finish working, and then figure out what to do with their compliant selves.

I inhaled and exhaled softly, letting my righteous rage dissipate and the air temperature rise about me.

The Great Tufan would be coming back with two additional ships. I didn’t know what the people of Hriegard would be doing with them, but it wasn’t really my problem. I had better ways of getting around, and wasn’t going to be wasting time sailing from one place to another. That was just too big a waste of time.

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I didn’t bother to pull up at the small dock used by the fisherfolk. I drove the galleon right up on the beach as far as it would go, a surge of water lifting it up as if it were high tide, and it plowed a nice course up to the edge of the waters before running out of momentum. Pulling a set of stone stairs up from the sands was simple enough, and I walked down them with my three unconscious patients in tow.

There were quite a few townsfolk of Hriegard there to watch the ship coming ashore, and they were watching the giant marid hauling the two galleys in by their anchor chains on a great foaming wave of water in the distance behind me.

“The ship is mine,” I said blandly, and nobody dared to say otherwise, considering how there wasn’t a single thing moving upon it, the elves on Disks floating behind me, and the massive hole blown out of the side of it. “I will see to the dispersal of its stores and equipment. I believe you had a town hall. I will be going there with these elves. If any of you know who they are or are friends of them, I’d ask you to sit with them and be there when they wake up. They are doubtless going to have a time of it.”

A tall and slender blonde halvyri, accompanied by a black-bearded bear of an axeman, forced themselves through the crowd. The leather-clad woman went to each of the elves, looking them over carefully. “Their attire is Lethweyr, from further south on the coast. Fisherfolk caught at sea, by the looks of it. They were wise not to dare the harbors there.” She looked up at me sharply. “What has been done to them?” The dread in her voice showed she had an excellent idea.

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