[MFR] Chapter 70 - First Steps

Notes :

Started playing Prophesy of Pendor again. Love this mod. For those who don't know it's a total conversion mod for Mount and Blade : Warband with an amazing map, good factions and, most importantly, an actual endgame beyond just attacking castles. I'm actually having a lot more fun roaming around than trying to build a domain.

I actually want to write some Pendor novels someday, but currently the mod is transitioning into some kind of paid product for Bannerlord (Mount and Blade 2), and not only is it still somewhat unclear what it's going to be, the lore is also undergoing a sizeable rewrite, which makes writing anything...extremely complicated until it stabilizes. At least for now.

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy the chapter !

Edit : I forgot to set a time and just hit 'publish' as I was making the author's notes. Oh well ! Enjoy !

Chapter 70

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Wilderness

"So..."

Sapphiria twitched slightly, but didn't take her hands off the controls as she drove the snowpiercer. They were already a fair distance away from Astralis, as no one had spoken up for a solid hour after leaving.

They didn't need to. She'd seen their faces pressed up against the viewports.

"Yes, Ramina?" Said the AI, in studiously neutral tones. They were the only ones in the cockpit right now, separated from the rest of the vehicle by a heavy door. Technically there were three seats, and room for others to stand behind them, but it was a bumpy ride and Paul was currently in the back, staying near the door in case he needed to rapidly deploy with the gendarmes, hashing out additional contingencies with them.

They all had her carbines, incidentally, versions she'd adjusted to be a bit more squishie friendly, after much consideration.

"How long-"

"The second our lips met."

"...Oh." The artificer had the good grace to blush, which Sapphiria could see thanks to the cabin cameras, as her armor's sensors were mostly powered down to feed as much power as possible into the vehicle. "Sorry, I'd sort of assumed..."

"That we'd been together for a while? So did everyone, apparently, given how loudly they cheered." There was a trace of asperity in her voice, despite her best effort.

She wasn't angry at them. She was angry at herself for delaying and fooling herself for so long.

"I don't think so." Said the artificer. "I think they were more...relieved than anything."

That caused Sapphiria's programs to go for a loop for a second.

"I'm sorry?" She said as the vehicle shook slightly, 'removing' a tree from the way, AKA ramming and pushing it aside.

Forests weren't as dense as in the holovids, trees didn't grow trunk to trunk in an impenetrable barrier, but the snowpiercer still had to go through them at regular intervals. It was part of the reason for it's size and armor, meant to be able to punch through the strange ice formations on the surface of perpetually frozen worlds. Well, 'punch through', the snowpiercer was actually build like an arrowhead, meant to shove the bulk of an obstruction aside and allow the wheels and suspensions to roll over the rest. Hitting a tree square on was generally a bad idea, even for full sized, fusion powered battle tanks, let alone the strange obstructions one could encounter on an unterraformed world.

Sadly, it didn't make the area they went through practicable for other purposes, or she'd have used it to widen the path between her workshop and Astralis. Granted, getting it there through the wilderness had been a good field test, but knocking down the trees and flattening the undergrowth could actually make it more problematical to fully clear out, especially if you wanted to actually use the wood as something else than kindling or nutrigel vat fodder.

"Well, I mean..." Ramina took a deep breath. "Look, I believe in your benevolence. And the deals you made. But most people were still afraid you could drop us on a whim. You're a high elder who has been down there for millennia, keeping as far away from people as possible. There's no telling when your patience would run out or you'd decide it wasn't your problem anymore and seclude yourself in your mountain again."

Sapphiria opened her mouth, then closed it, before opening it again.

"So they think I'll stick it out because I want to get laid?"

"I mean...emotional attachments are a common reason for high elders to come out of isolation and reintegrate into society."

Sapphiria kept driving as she processed that. Thankfully the woods were actually getting thinner the more they moved towards the end of the valley. It should thicken back up when they got out into the hills, according to what she'd seen before during her little expedition with Paul.

After that? Well, stars alone knew. The expedition had left records, but they boiled down to 'here there be dragons and potentially a shitload of mana', and the foraging group Astralis had tried to sent beyond the valley -lead by someone called Penrose, if she remembered well- had vanished without a trace.

Wasn't that freaking encouraging.

"...I see. And they hope that these attachments, if nothing else, will keep me up and helping?"

"I mean, would you leave Kalia to the Bane."

"I'm not leaving anyone to die if I can stop it."

The absolute certainty and unyielding steel in her voice shut the artificer up as surely as a silence field.

She was a daughter of Arcadia, and a fleet admiral of the Terran Federation Navy. She would protect humanity, even if she had to burn down the entire damned galaxy to do it.

*****

Click click click click, stop.

The Hand pocketed the coin as they finished climbing up the slope to the observation post, and gazed at the anomaly.

The scouts were right. Something had made a mess of the forest.

It was a bit hard to spot from so far away, but starting from the rebel town, a definite trail had appeared, an uneven clearing in the canopy.

"Since I doubt they have a bone tyrant in their inventory, I am going to extrapolate this was caused by machinery of some kind." They said as they gazed at the trail.

The rebels might have had a bone tyrant. Actually, they almost certainly did when the Awakening happened. But tyrants were blunt instruments, governed by complex internal protocols and remnants of the anima of the bodies that now formed the construct, not by souls. That meant that unlike for Risen, the compulsion of the Throne was irresistible, now that the Empire had Awakened.

So they had been decommissioned. Often violently, no doubt divining that they would be put back into service were Imperial forces to take their disposal sites. Which was a staggering waste of military materiel, however astute the deduction had been.

Their bodyguards didn't answer. Some were capable of speech, the same for some of the officers left over, but they were unlikely to use said ability unless directly prompted. And they were used to their commander's musing, in so far as soulless could get used to anything to begin with.

"Organize a sortie. Nothing big, and make it go around the long way. I would like to take a look at that trail." They'd love to also send some reconnaissance at that large warehouse by the mountainside, but they knew what it was. A storage site for the minerals extracted from the mines, no doubt close to the tunnel they'd used to penetrate there. The problem was that it was almost certainly closely guarded, especially given the gunfire that had originated from there a few days ago, as well as more esoteric forms of energy, which had pretty clearly marked it as one of the places haunted by that abominable automata.

One of the bodyguards nodded...before tackling them to the ground.

It was a testament to their skill that they managed to get the Hand out of the way of the attack at all. Unfortunately skills did not override physics, and the darkfire blade cut through the enchanted armor like it was butter, sending the remnants of the bodyguard's spirit back to the nether realms.

The Hand pivoted automatically, so used to assassination attempts by decades of service in life that they didn't even blink at the attempted backstab.

The thing that had attempted to kill them tried to run, to meld back into the background. Not quite physical, but not fully astral either, the Shadow attempted to slither back and out of range.

The Hand didn't let it. Arcs of energy leapt out of their skeletal digits, while the other appendage, still made out of preserved flesh, pulsed with arcane waves, a shield coming to life around them. One powerful enough even the darkfire blade wielded by the creature would have trouble cutting through.

It didn't prove necessary. The Shadow howled as the bolts of energy leapt from the Hand's fingers, and came apart in a thunderclap of released energy, its internal matrix collapsing under the assault, releasing whatever tattered remnants of its soul were tethered to the physical, and exploding as the mana contained within its form suddenly destabilized.

The result was a short lived, but remarkably violent aberration, the entire area dissolving into a fire tornado.

Then it was quiet. The Hand's bodyguard arrayed by their side, ready to get them out of the way or support them in combat. Usually, bodyguards were supposed to get their charge as far away from the threat as possible, but Hands weren't most beings.

"Well." They said, dropping their hand, but not the shield as the maniples responded, a centuria jogging its way up to the post, velites first, their javelins held at the ready. "That answers some questions."

Namely why the ghoul had been trying to penetrate the perimeter. Assassination it was. Remarkably stupid. A Hand was not so easily bested.

Even this Shadow. Shadows were expensive to make, both in terms of mana and the necromantic expertise to end with a pliable operative and not a broken psychotic monstrosity, but they were supremely useful in the right hands, if properly molded.

But this was a half formed creature handed a powerful weapon and pointed in the direction of the target. No refinement, no training.

Clearly, their defeat at the hand of the rebels had left their enemies not thinking much of them. Good. The Hand could use that.

So long as those foes kept underestimating them, they might have a chance.

Unfortunately, the other side seemed to be learning. A physical infiltration had clearly proven suicide, so new tactics were tried.

The question was, what would come next?

The Hand began coming down from the observation posts, cranking through possibilities...shoving aside why they had gone up there to begin with, or the orders given to the now destroyed bodyguard.

There were, after all, more pressing matters to attend to now.

*****

Kalia sat down next to the council table, still having a hard time believing she wasn't in a dream.

"Well, that was...quite the departure." Said Gregor, diplomatically, as the old skeleton stood behind her, and she tried her best to hide her blush.

"Yes, it was."

"Agreed." Malry sat down, and sighed. "Honestly seeing you two dancing around each other was draining. I was starting to think Ramina was right."

"Right about what?"

Malry coughed, and muttered something.

"Malry. Speak. Up."

Her command tone brokered no arguments, and the alchemist raised her voice to audible levels.

"She thought you two were together behind the scenes and trying to keep it a secret."

Kalia's cheeks colored ever more.

"W-Well we weren't." Which felt almost like a wasted opportunity, a sentiment she suppressed firmly. If they'd been together, they could have spent that last night...

No. No no no, don't go there. Plenty of time to catch up once Sapphiria came home.

She'd made a promise. And the mage-magistrate was certain, as much as she was that the sun would rise in the morning, that the artificer would keep it, come the hells, Bane or high water.

"Right. So, now to mind the fort while our girlfriends go gallivanting off on an adventure?"

Having Sapphiria labeled as her girlfriend made the mage-magistrate's heart flutter, and she nodded.

"Yes. Which means a lot of work. Gregor, you've already marked the areas for Sapphiria's perimeter, correct?"

"Yep. Getting all the parts shipped is going to be a pain in the arse, but we'll get it done. She'd also promised us some more of her engineering golems to help out. The humanoid ones, not the...whatever the hell she used to make the workshop go up."

Kalia nodded. Tales of the golems she'd used to make the workshop and its attendant bunker were already spreading throughout town, and many people found the concept bizarre, to say the least, though others were arguing that, when it came down to it, it was probably more efficient. But those were in the definite minority.

Even decades after giving up on their soulless labor, the legacy remained. It was why so many golems aped the human form, or even had stylized bones emblazoned into them, almost trying to make them 'mechanical' undead.

"Good. Let's focus on getting our home secure, and make sure we're still there when the expedition returns. Let's get to work!"

Before she started waking up from this dream into a dreary reality where she couldn't still taste Sapphiria's lips.