[Be Gone] Ch 49 – The Tempest of Serenity

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            “The rage is there, isn’t it?” I asked kindly, understanding that the experience had put him directly in touch with the savagery of his ancestors, and there was no refuting it.

            “Yes. It has always been there, underneath it all. It is a darkness of yellow hate and bloodlust that underlies all that we strive to rise above. I have never seen it so clearly...” Master Kosh replied with some difficulty.

            “Mmm. It sits on the other side of the spirituality and ki that exemplifies the monastic Traditions. Reason, discipline, control, and insight against raw emotion, instinct, vitality, and physical might. You are far from the only race that has the Rage, brother Kosh, as I’m sure you’ve seen among the korobokru, but in the orcs it bubbles close to the surface. In most realms, it is something they revel in, not something they attempt to control or discipline.”

            He took a deep and shuddering breath. “It has great power of its own, doesn’t it?”

            “Yes. It can easily match anything that ki can do, in its own way. It is simply that the people who use Rage to gain power seldom have the discipline to control it to do so, and simply let it loose to rampage, rather than riding and steering it to bend to their Will.”

            He turned his eyes on me sharply. “Your people are familiar with using this Rage to gain power?” he asked, stunned.

            “Of course. We explore all avenues of power. The main difference is that we control our Rage, our Rage does not control us. We even have a god, mighty Valus, Champion of the Heavens, who exults in His Divine Fury and unleashes it upon the foes of the Heavens. His Fury is a great weapon, but regardless of the depths and heights of His ire and His wrath, He commands His Fury, it does not command Him.”

            “Can... they be brought together?” the orc asked, his deep voice almost shaking at the thought. “We have been taught for so long to silence our Rage, and that those who are lost to it are unrecoverable...”

            “The nature of the system is that the wielder must always favor one or the other. Among humans, there have been many, many efforts made to find a middle ground, a Tempest of Serenity, where action and deed are equal measures harmony and savagery, thought and emotion, discipline and release.

            “There has been no success as of yet. The Tempest always veers to one side or the other in the end, as the wielder naturally favors one path over the other.

            “Many try, and it is almost considered a rite of passage to embark on a study of the Tempest of Serenity among the powerful combatants of both Paths, trying to find a conjoined way, a Theurgy of emotional storm and disciplined serenity. But so far, all have returned to their favored roads, albeit often with greater insights that have tempered the Paths they stand upon, and a greater understanding of the road they did not take.”

            “Do you... practice any of these disciplines of the Rage, brother Aelryinth?” the big orc asked cautiously, as if this was an insulting thing to inquire about.

            “No. The discipline of spellcasting dovetails far more easily with the monastic control of Ki than the wild release of Rage. There are some Casters who do follow the path, but they are rare, and, ah, stand out because of their rather uncontrolled manner of spellcasting. Still, the magic comes to them, as it, too, exults in the release of emotion, even as it bows to the Will of more disciplined Traditions.” I could have been discussing the weather, as this was hardly a constrained topic to us.

            “Do any of your people lose themselves to the Rage?” he asked quietly, again treading upon a taboo topic dangerous to his people.

            “The ones who lose themselves to Rage have problems that lead them to the Rage in the first place. Their behavior is still their own, and they are still responsible for their deeds and actions, however much they might want to palm them off on others or whine about their own lack of control.

            “If they are a danger to others, they are put down, as I imagine they are among your people. If they are a danger to themselves, well, they tend to get put down in other ways.

            “There will always be people who embrace the worst in themselves and others, brother Kosh. It is a truth that holds firm across all races and species we have met. Likewise, even among the feral savages of the orcs we have met, there have been those that rose above their brethren... and have fallen with them, regardless. Humanity is no more immune to that truth than orcs, elves, korobokru, or gnomes.

            “Ignoring that Evil exists and has a Will is as ignorant as believing that Good is subjective to those who perceive it. They simply Are, and one of the great fallacies of the Jade Empire is that they truly believe in neither.”

            Master Kosh looked out at the devastation around us, a light going on inside him. “There are some that would claim what you are doing here is a great evil, an assault upon the land, and that all war is evil. Others would argue that it is a righteous thing, slaying and killing invaders and despoilers of the land, and enemies of the Empire. The residents of Jigoku themselves would argue that this is a massacre and horrible slaughter, an indiscriminate slaughter, even worse than what they have done, for did they not at least preserve this forest and its creatures?...”

            “And regardless of what all of them think, in this time and place, this is Good on an absolute, universal scale. Balance, destruction, order, chaos... none of them are relevant. This is Good... a task and a deed that needed to be done, for many reasons, and I am doing it.

            “If there is a fell and elemental beauty about it, and if the Land below you that gave birth to you all is Feeding happily, well, that is also couple of fine things in its own way, in my opinion,” I confirmed for him.

            “One cannot deny its beauty,” the orcish Master agreed softly.

            “In the eyes of Heaven, this is the true Duty of Fire: cleansing the land of the impure, the corrupt, and the Tainted, wiping it clean and pure to make it ready for a new attempt at life. It is a fell and terrible, yet necessary and sacred task, but also one of the saddest things that the forces of Heaven must carry out. In the end, it means they have failed in their efforts, and the only choice left is to Burn it all away and start anew.”

            “To look upon this display of power, and to think that it only represents grand and ultimate failure...” Master Kosh was struck once again by the thought. “We were weak, or ignorant, or lacked the resolve to do what must be done. So much so that we had to rely on an outsider to save us from this...”

            “Aye. The Jade Empire had the power and the potential. They lacked the unity, the resolve, and the Will to do so. The fight against an existential darkness that would claim the entire world simply became one more political tool in the endless strife between rival families. Annihilation of everyone and everything, a mere bargaining point for benefits.”

            “I sense a small amount of condemnation in your voice, brother Aelryinth.” Said with quiet, grim humor.

            “Just a tiny bit,” I agreed easily, studying the interplay of wind and fire and the holocaust they were making. I could contest the Weather Control with the big Demon Tree in the distance, but why? Things were proceeding nicely as it stood, and the forest could only reel and die and become swathes of white and black behind me. More fun to Spellflare the bastard and make it pay every time it tried the trick.

            Stands of trees became massive candles of Sacred flames, were devoured with impossible speed, and then were mowed down by the mass of the Pyramid, igniting those behind them as they fell and continuing the destruction. Raised shield walls rattled and dinged with desperately hurled needles and cones, leaves and fruits from the trees, but the Pyramid didn’t stop, nor did the flames stop spreading.

            At two miles an hour, an ever-expanding swath of Burning forest behind it, the Pyramid advanced.

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            The clearing it commanded was a full mile across.

            The Demon Tree itself towered six hundred feet high, as high as the Pyramid I was sitting on and more. It was massive and multi-trunked, its limbs spreading out into an umbrella of inky darkness, rooted in a tumble of chalk-white stone that looked like great hills and heaps of broken bones, there in the center of a lake with waters as black as ink. At least two dozen bulging red eyes opened on its trunk, seeing across great distances and spreading madness into the minds of those who met them.

            Standing about it at regular spaces were twelve more trees like it, three hundred feet or less tall, arrayed like waiting sentries ready to attack me when I pressed my assault.

            But that’s not what I did. Oh, no, not yet.

            To the great resentment of the things, I just went around them. To be completely fair, I circled them completely.

            Fire burned. Vivus raged, and unwhite flames spread across the dark waters of that lake like it was made of oil, Burning to ethereal life with hungry mists gleefully licking at the dark roots of the trees, while about them the forest raged in a holocaust of purifying destruction.

            I didn’t need to fear lightning or wind or evil Spirits. I just circled the trees, set their entire lake of corrupt waters on vivic fire, and waited, waited as the great sentinel trees had to pull their roots or burn, and as unwhiteness licked at bleached stretches of bark, trying to climb them.

            Then I dropped Walls of Fire around their bases, one by one, and just sat there concentrating as the Pyramid waited there a hundred paces away from them. Their multiple trunks all Burned; one sentinel tree after another ignited, hot and hard as Heaven could make them.

            With the Sacred flames rose the vivus.

            The trees screamed as steam vented through their trunks, not-wood peeling away from the heat, quasi-bark pulling away from fleshy wood that writhed and twisted as Sacred fires and vivus tore up it, then sloughed away in great chunks and swaths of inert white ash. The bulging red eyes tried to lance the brains of those watching, but there was a wall of turbid superheated air in front of us, saturated with Holy power from the Walls of Flame buttressing the Pyramid. The trees couldn’t actually make eye contact with anything, and most of the soldiers didn’t even want to look at them if they could help it, or were wearing gauze or veils for exactly that reason.

            Oh, the trees tried to throw rains of blazing explosive cones at us, filled with poison and acid and fire and worse things. The Shugenja along for the ride took care of those things, the Spirits of the Air keeping a blazing wind going which knocked all those things aside, or simply detonated them in the air beyond range of harm.

            One by one, taking about ten minutes each to become massive torches of purity reclaiming and the Land feasting, the water about each tree turned crystalline pure and started warring against the blackness bubbling out from the inner lake as the trees died. The prevailing winds pushed the trees over as they sloughed rapidly into white ash falling into the thick stuff of the inner lake, great mist-blazing logs of unnatural fires that soon formed the spokes of a wheel bringing purity into the inner waters.

            The Pyramid and myself came in over the thickest spring of churning goo, Vivic Walls of Sacred Fire just blazing up and away and consuming the Taint below with mad hunger. I parked right on top of that spring, and turned it into a fire fountain of vivus and flame, reaching down towards wherever it came from and igniting it.

            The Demon Tree rained exploding pinecones towards us from two hundred paces away, and in return I began to Cast my own Thunderbolts, Calling them down from the permanent hellstorm fixed overhead and quietly spreading Elemental Corruption of the air outwards, generally unnoticed. Said Taint was now actually visible as burning white flashes in the air reaching out in every direction as traces of vivus hunted for it.

            I Cast Call Lightning ten times, changed over to Fire, Admixtured it, added the Sacred Metas to it, and then I proceeded to bring two hundred maxed-out Divine forked Thunderbolts of the Fires of Wrath down from Heaven onto the motherfucker.

            The soldiers watching had never seen lightning come down that was pure fire like that, nor that powerful. Each forked Bolt was about fifteen hundred points of damage, and each spell was generating twenty of them over a period of just over three hours. Each one coming down was like twenty normal Thunderbolts crammed together and Singing a pure Note as they descended, and they lit up the blasted landscape clear to the horizon with every single stroke.

            The Demon Tree was big and strong and very dangerous, with monumental resistance to damage. The fires of Heaven came down and pounded it from above, and I strafed it with nonstop Shardrays as it sent out waves of mental force the Shugenja present were in Ritual to deal with. The air was crackling about the Pyramid as the Tree tried to overcome the Astral Ward that was protecting every mind below me from the horrors and madness it was projecting at them.

            My favorite targets were the eyes. As the Pyramid slowly rotated around the Demon Tree, I burned Shardrays across those red eyes, popping them and forming Glyphs atop them which seared deep into the core of the Tree as it writhed in agony. It took me a while, but soon enough the Damned Thing was totally blind, and Holy flames were branded deep into its sockets, glowing with Sealing magic.

            Let’s see if it liked how it felt, hmmph!

            I tore burning furrows into its meter-thick iron bark, igniting the woodflesh beneath. I blasted off branches, I charred roots, I started blazes around its base and fed the vivic fires pressing in from all sides. Perpetual Shardrays woven from dozens of Shards slammed into it over and over again, nonstop, and were punctuated by the relentless assault from above delivering the massive hammer of damage that was ripping this tree apart.

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Author’s Notes:

The Tempest of Serenity is a 5-Level Advanced Class that can be taken after reaching Ten in Barbarian or Monk. These two Classes are normally mutually exclusive.

Like most Advanced Classes, it has only Class Abilities. Those who take the Tempest of Serenity gain access to the opposing powers of Ki or Rage as appropriate. Barbarians gain a Ki Pool based on Wisdom or Charisma, Monks gain Rage Rounds based on Constitution or Strength, and both gain additional Ki Points or Rage Rounds as they rise in Level.

In addition, they may take Ki Techniques or Rage Powers as they Level and are eligible for.

The Class must be completed all at once, for once it is exited (Levels taken in any other Class), it may not be entered again.

The Rage Rounds and Ki gained are converted to the other type (usually 2 Rage:1 Ki) after leaving the Class, but the character can still use the Rage Powers or Ki Techniques they gained enlightenment of during their time in the Class, now powering them with the other energy.

There is a Tempest or Serenity Mastery that can be taken to gain additional skills, and of course Extra Rage Power or Extra Ki Technique can also be taken as Feats, as well as Extra Rage and Extra Ki, and similar things. Once the Class is exited, however, the opposing related disciplines cannot be further taken.

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