Hlaeth Chapter 53 – Pressing South

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The maps from that long ago naturally weren’t up to snuff as far as I was concerned, being more an artist’s renditions of what was there instead of, well, what was actually there.

I had orbital images to match up major landmarks, but those were mostly wiped away within the Yellow. Constant exposure to Apertures and devouring the resulting infused materials had turned even mountains to nothing but more endlessly deep dunes chewed through and regurgitated by countless Yellow creatures mutating constantly. I could only juxtapose and approximate where the original cities of magic were relative to the remaining mountains and coasts that existed outside the range of the Yellow.

The inland lakes and seas remaining behind had all vanished into the Yellow, reduced at best to buried mud fields, fish developing wings and legs and getting up and leaving their liquid homes, becoming yet more creatures of the Yellow hordes. The revolted land and desperate Casters of old times had anchored mighty Wards to ranges of mountains and the endless waves of the Coasts, keeping the Yellow back and heaping the endless dune hills up higher and higher over the decades and centuries.

But vivus was coming, and slowly and thoroughly Burning everything.

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There were three locations for me to investigate for the Ruling Rings: the ancient and fallen mageholds of Orgenton, Trondiere, and Hyrush.

Hyrush, this place had been called, before the Yellow came billowing up and swallowed it whole. Now it was known as one of the Cursed cities, whose explorations into power had brought Doom on them. It was a cautionary tale that I doubted and confirmed as wrong as soon as I came close to the place.

Why? Because there were classic undead everywhere.

The Yellow didn’t spawn classic undead. It did spawn mixed undead, undead with all sorts of other Elemental and Aligned influences mixed in, including half-living, half-undead abominations living on negative energy, all of them prone to taking on the characteristics of whatever Portal they were near at the time. Yeah, Yellowed undead could be frustrating to fight on a physical level, because a warrior never knew just what they were getting into every time. They could get some magic-immune crystal thing with flaming limbs; an amorphous and unhittable creature of gas, death, and freezing cold liquid pseudopods; or some Thing huge and heavy with death energies and literally a bomb waiting to blow apart explosively when they killed it. I never bothered to name the Yellowed things, or whatever they’d originally been; I lit into them with vivic flame and Holy angelfire, two things the undead never shared energies with, as such destroyed them quickly. Would have been funny, having one of them flaming vivic and healing me instead of hurting me…

Classic undead, that meant they were created before the Yellow came. Unlike the living, undead didn’t normally ingest new matter, therefore there was nothing for the Yellow to replace and so transform… and the latent Wards of the city were still intact and bending Apertures away from the place, it was how I located it. Normal explorers might not have appreciated the difference, but it was confirmation of my suspicions: these undead had been created before the Yellow swept over the city, and by the numbers, had included most of, if not all of, the local population.

This was definitely not a heroic city. These bastards had been experimenting with high-scale necromancy, every bit as much a threat to the ideal of the Empire of Houme as any other realm of magic. Furthermore, the secrets of the dead could reveal all sorts of truths the current powers would rather not see dug up. So they’d arranged something… a necroic explosion? And then, maybe, ‘invited’ the Yellow in to cover up any trace of what they’d done, while spreading the misinformation about the real fate of the city.

I mulled that over as I obliterated the residents of this place thoroughly and completely.

The undead were more than a little shocked to find a living creature in their city. Yellowed creatures were often immune to the powers of undeath just because negative energies were a part of them. That took things down to a martial level, and Yellowed mutates tended to be big and strong and best avoided. Undead swarms and powerful corporeals, like bone knights, might be able to deal with the Yellowed, but by and large, the undead were little threat to the Yellow, and they knew it, but the Yellowed had no draw to the undead, either, so it was basically mutually ignoring one another.

Me, I was Absolution come calling.

This was not a difficult thing for me. There was no Greyfield here. I was a Magos at the top of my game, with anti-Undead magic at full bore and a fist full of wrathfire. The city looked to be fairly large, perhaps thirty, forty thousand souls, plus the surrounding countryside. Maybe a hundred thousand undead, minus those worn down by ages or slain by monsters, balanced by some Yellowed undead added from those Yellowed creatures killed here and receiving a negative-dominant kick into unlife.

Force, vivic, and Holy energies didn’t care. I killed them all.

They came for me, sure. I was throwing off life energy like the biggest bonfire and feast for the starving, just to attract them to me. It was impossible for them not to know I was there. The necropolis they were trying to build in the shadows of the Yellow, this Damned city where cursed and unlucky souls were Doomed and tied, became a white-streaked mortuary as undead corpses and unliving Damned souls came for me, and I killed them all.

Rays, Spheres, Storms, Walls, Fogs, Cones, Bursts, Shards… whatever worked. I had my full range of Detects up and hunted them down without remorse throughout the city and into the deeper parts, unperturbed and completely unfazed by the maze of passages existing underneath the necropolis. I blasted the ancient, dry sewers white; I cleansed the basements and sub-basements ivory; the streets of yellowed stone and dust briefly ran as pure as moonlight. I ripped apart their best with an ease and skill they could never have expected, and sent souls blazing for the sky and hurtling to the netherworld as I slew them.

I spiraled in and around the city, looting and pillaging as I went, relieving the undead of their trinkets and toys and magic and precious metals and artwork, ripping Damned spirits free of imprisonment in this life and sending them on to the next as I did so.

Yes, I looted and pillaged an entire city by myself. Hurrah-hurrah for shrinking magic, Teleportation, Telekinetic ability, and spells to Detect magic, gems, precious metal, and fine stone… as well as books. Some of the more artistically-minded of the intelligent undead had actually taken steps to preserve such things and the artwork involved with them. As Death and Entropy pretty much had a lock on the city, they had endured remarkably well as even things that rotted others could not exist easily here.

Lots and lots of books, de jure for a city once renowned for its mages. Qwid was going to have conniptions. They would be relating a history deliberately obscured by the best tale-twisters in Creation, if diabolics were truly running Caraspan.

It all went in a one-way drop into my Sanctum Sanctorum, there to be sorted out by Sims, assessed, and arranged for me to study for myself.

Of course, Hyrush was a true Necropolis, which meant there had to be some form of central hierarchy, and, of course, magically gifted beings with the power over undead commanding the entire structure. Undead priests, and especially necromancers.

Negative energy specialist undead I was sooooo not afraid of. When the first of them arrived on my scene with its bony cohorts and golems and lit up the area around me with necromantic, necrotic, necroic, necromental, necromundic, negative, netherworldly, and otherwise death/undeath/unlife-oriented attacks, I ripped it a new one so fast and hard I never quite figured out if it’d been a lich or some other kind of spellcaster before it was a white shadow against the yellowed stone.

Of course, sending a powerful spellcaster down to True Death so quickly riled up its friends, and also made them far more cautious. However, I was hunting them every bit as much as they were hunting me, and I was more than happy to rip apart their city around them as they chose to hunker down behind their many-layered defenses and traps and tricks and minions and Wards and await my arrival in the castle, church, and tower complexes that formed the nexus of power in this long-dead city.

So, I made them wait. I was not in a hurry. Thoroughness and caution were bywords, and I was there to do the job the way it had to be done. No one ever robbed a tomb of a city as thoroughly as I did, taking the wealth of the dead and the Damned from the grip of the Yellow sands and the clutches of the unliving for my own use.

Yeah, it made me rich. So what? I needed at least some precious metal to do the job I was meant to do, and if I brought some gold and silver back south, the Alchemists and Artificers could ooh and aah over having enough to work with. It wasn’t like I was going to use the money to go out and BUY myself loads and loads of powerful magical items...

Besides, the undead were coughing up all sorts of geegaws and powerful toys, as it were. If it took me three days of coming and going to clear out the whole town and make sure every copper was gone and the curses and traps they were leaving for me blew up explosively, well, that was what it took.

The night finally came when I’d Burned and cleaned my way through basically the entirety of the city, and purged the land around the city and inside its current Wards of smaller concentrations of undead and negative energy that dominated most of the Apertures nearby, obviously influenced by the magic here and the Wards that deflected them into a dense scattering around the buried city. The incidental Demons and Daemons that had burst free of (or been released from) chains of Summoning, but remained bound to the area, had been systematically butchered. The local Land, even if it was heavily contaminated, fed well on the citizenry and the influx of vivus. It wouldn’t last without the active link undeath had provided in the other direction, but for a short time the pain of the Land in this area was muted.

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“You are a remarkably persistent man,” whispered the skeletal figure in front of me, her voice raspy and hollow in the empty bones and sockets of her mouth. She might once have been beautiful, but most of her skin and flesh had long crumbled to dust and there was only the hint of beauty in her sepulchral voice and vanity in her bare-boned body language from which faded magical Robes hung imperfectly over lack of living curves to convey that impression.

“I’m merely doing my job.” Mortus Dius was leveled at her, the Dreadskull of the Dark Hierophant atop it Burning with black fires of undeath, shining anathema from the Runes sunken into it. “I believe you are the last of your peers. Congratulations, although you can probably chalk it up to luck more than anything. I could have gone counter-clockwise.”

Gems where teeth should have been winked in her mouth. She’d not been ready for the pure, raw power of Foundation-based Silver magic plied against the subtle mastery of Pillared stuff being made ready, and certainly was not prepared for vivic magic and Holy angelfire in combination. Sure, they’d used their magic to make defenses… and I’d brought those defenses down as part of my attack patterns, and hit the undead masters hard and lethally as they attempted to gang up on me, or as they fled and hid.

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