The Battle of Lothal

This story takes place during The Siege of Skyhold, shortly before the climatic events of that book.

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Ampioc was arguing with a talking boat when Havath attacked Lothal.

Well, a ship, not a boat, but Ampioc was always getting that mixed up. Despite ruling a seaport, Ampioc had intensely little interest in learning the sailor’s dialect, with its pointless alternate names for everything.

He was, however, interested in arguing about whether what the sailors spoke was actually a dialect. And, to his delight, the Radhan ship, The Patient Albatross, was delighted to argue this point with him, holding the position that it was merely a professional dialect, not a true language. 

Sentient ships like the Albatross were exceptionally rare— Ampioc had only ever encountered five in his life. Three, including the Albatross, had been enchanted Radhan ships awakened over time by pacting with warlocks (and he’d encountered several on a similar path, though still years away from even rudimentary intelligence); one had been a mad, failed attempt at constructing a lich demesne; and the fifth, twelve years back…

Well, Ampioc wasn’t entirely sure it had been sentient, or even a ship, really. Ships don’t normally take massive bites out of other ships, unfold a set of massive insectile legs, escape across the roofs of a city, then escape out into the desert sands. 

It had been clever enough to escape his wrath, however, so Ampioc was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt on the sentience question.

Regardless, the one thing all of the sentient ships— and other sentient enchanted objects Ampioc had ever encountered— had in common were their unusual understandings of the world— their form shaped their ideas to an even greater degree than organic sophonts. The Patient Albatross had shockingly little interest in what occurred on land, and, to the degree that it thought of the land at all, it seemed to treat it as a pointillist constellation of port cities scattered across the edge of the ocean, each of which supplied different balances of trade goods. More, it genuinely seemed to believe that the end goal, the purpose, the reason for the existence of said trade goods was not their use or consumption, but the very act of transporting them.

These were obviously false propositions to land dwellers, but then, land-dweller perceptions of the sea were even worse— most of them treated it simply as a featureless, inhospitable surface to be traversed. They even lacked the ability to see polarized light— if you submerged a land-dweller, the light filtering down into the water would look the same to them in wildly different locations, rather than immediately identifying their location in the world for them.

Ampioc… had struggled with the idea of life with such limited sensory ability being worth living for a long time. Decades of living alongside land-dwellers had changed his mind, but he knew many of his kin likely still believed that land-dweller lives simply had less moral value for that lack.

As for Patient Albatross… well, thinking of their transport as the reason for trade goods to exist, rather than their consumption, made perfect sense from a ship’s perspective. 

Albatross’ mind was, on a profound level, a function of its form. Its sentience, its methods of interacting with the world around it, were all shaped by the fact that it was a ship. That led it to seemingly absurd beliefs at times, but few of them lacked a bizarre logic of their own— the way Albatross thought of trees as somewhere in between food and beloved ancestors, whose entire end purpose was to become products of carpentry. Trying to convince a sentient ship otherwise on a question like transport being the reason trade goods existed, or carpentry being the purpose of trees, wasn’t just a losing proposition, but an irrational one.

Trying to convince Patient Albatross of anything was a losing proposition, really. Ampioc had seldom met a more stubborn being in his life, and Albatross was being just as recalcitrant in their argument about sailor language as any other debate they’d had over the years.

It didn’t help, of course, that no less than three of Ampioc’s arms were agreeing with Albatross. Two and Four genuinely seemed to have been convinced by the ship, while Five disagreed with Ampioc in every argument as a matter of moral duty. When you had nine minds, it was deeply important not to get trapped in groupthink, and having a designated opposition was an effective counter to that. 

Not all of Ampioc’s kind agreed with him there. His adherence to the old ways had driven a rift between himself and the Singular Unity faction of his people, who considered it their religious and moral duty to master all of their arms, to make them subservient to the mind of the body. The philosophical debate had eventually made the Unity declare Ampioc anathema, and he’d been forced to flee the depths. 

Admittedly, normal philosophical debates didn’t involve murdering your opponents and dumping their dismembered bodies into undersea magma vents, which was why the other major factions hadn’t defended Ampioc from the declaration of anathema. Still, Ampioc considered his actions proportional to the hideousness of the Unity’s philosophy. The arms of colossal octopuses weren’t mere dead limbs like those of humans— they were thinking beings, and deserved to be treated as such. The Unity genuinely believed that their parts not acting unanimously, not conforming to their central will, was a threat to their person-hood, to their self, that it made them more vulnerable to coercion from other sentient beings. They were completely unable to see the irony in them believing that true freedom came only from subjugating the minds of their limbs. 

Though it was still wise to, at times, restrain the desires of some limbs. Especially Seven, given that Seven’s response to the debate with the Albatross was plan to murder the ship, its crew, the rest of the sailors in the harbor, the entire population of Lothal, and every other living being in existence, but that’s really all Seven ever wanted. She was an arm of simple tastes, and all of them involved hating everything else alive.

Well, except for sea otters. Seven was inexplicably fond of the repulsive pests. Ampioc couldn’t understand why— their stubby little limbs were horrifying. Creatures should either have no limbs, or appropriately long limbs, not disproportionately short limbs like sea otters. They were repulsive.

The debate against the members of Singular Unity was one of the rare times when Ampioc and his other arms had voted in agreement with one of Seven’s murderous plans outside of battle, but that seldom stopped Seven from pressing them to do it again.

Ampioc wasn’t proud to have an arm as vicious and murderous as Seven, and there were plenty of more moderate philosophical factions than Singular Unity that would have prescribed the severing of an arm like Seven— some would even say it should be discarded entirely, without proper funeral practice, as Ampioc had done to the members of Unity he had murdered.

No matter how much Seven revolted Ampioc, no matter how much he strove to be better than his vicious, nasty arm-mind… Seven was as much an individual as he was a part of Ampioc’s self, and had a right to exist.

So, needless to say, Ampioc was deeply distracted when the Havathi attack hit. All of his minds were focused on Albatross’ arguments, which the ship relayed by vibrating its hull in the water to make noise.

All of his arms save Eight, that is. It was always important to have one arm on watch while conversing, eating, or sleeping.

Before Ampioc even realized anything was wrong, Eight tore several basalt columns from the bottom of the harbor and lifted them up to block a series of massive bone harpoons that would have torn both Ampioc and the Patient Albatross to shreds. The bone harpoons hit hard enough that the stone barrier barely held against the assault.

Ampioc jetted to the surface of the harbor, setting ships rocking in the water all around him.

There was a spider as big as he was skittering down the basalt rooftops of the city from the upper harbor. A spider that was made entirely out of lashed together bone and sinew, with a pyramidal body made of the same. Dozens of bone-and-sinew ballistae rested on balconies and terraces along the sides of the bone-and-sinew pyramid, ready to fire more bone spears at Ampioc.

Ampioc recognized his foe immediately, of course. 

Fort Marrow.

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Fort Marrow had been human, once— the child of powerful Havathi nobles, born with a horrific disease that made the child’s body replace injured flesh with bone when it healed. 

The disease could be managed by healers and bone mages— it was, in fact, even the inspiration for one of the main combat strategies of bone mages. The child had even developed a healing affinity in his teens, which would have helped him live a largely normal life. 

The child who would become Fort Marrow had wanted more than that. 

He’d spent more than a decade developing artificial affinities for bone and sinew to go along with his healing affinity. Then, rather than suppress his disease, he’d enhanced it, empowered it.

The child rapidly sprouted bones out of his flesh, huge spines that eventually grew into horrific limbs. He had grown and grown, sculpting his body into larger and larger forms, until he finally settled into a form inspired by the mobile spider-fortresses of Cloudspine— though those were enchanted metal and stone behemoths, not horrific, malformed bone. No-one even knew how much of Fort Marrow’s original body still existed inside the bone pyramid’s depths.

It was something of a tradition in Havath to invest massive budgets into attempting to train the chronically ill or disabled children of noble families into great powers. There had been at least five unequivocal successes over the last century, and dozens of archmages produced that way as well. Havath was perhaps the only place on the planet where a sickly child was seen as a blessing by the elite families. The Puppet was, of course, by far the most powerful of the lot.

Fort Marrow wasn’t one of them. His family had, apart from the most basic medical care needed to keep him alive, largely ignored him. He’d made himself into a great power almost entirely on his own, finding himself tutors among the healers that kept him alive.

Once he’d gained his monstrous form and been acknowledged as a great power, Fort Marrow had abandoned his name and rejected his neglectful family entirely. He became one of the most tireless and loyal Havathi powers.

It was a perplexing, challenging question, what Fort Marrow’s transformation had done to his sense of self. Had becoming a building altered his perspective, changed his mind to fit his function more, as the Patient Albatross’ function ? That was, Ampioc suspected, half the reason liches created avatars resembling their old forms, though most of them would deny that. There was no way to tell without talking to Fort Marrow, however, and Fort Marrow had no interest in speaking to foes of Havath. It was times like these that Ampioc missed the great parliaments of his people, when dozens or even hundreds of his kind gathered atop great undersea mountains to argue for weeks on topics of philosophical import. 

All Ampioc had was speculation, and battle reports from those who had survived Fort Marrow.

Fort Marrow was relentless. Fort Marrow was tireless. Fort Marrow was immensely durable and could repair himself rapidly between battles. Fort Marrow had survived decades of battles in Havath’s service, surviving clashes with Helicotan Lords Citizen, Tsarnassan Champions, and even Sican Elders— though only barely against those last.

Fort Marrow was absolutely no match against Ampioc in his own city.

Ampioc’s skin turned orange-yellow in scorn at Havath’s foolishness.

Almost dismissively, Ampioc sent a dozen basalt columns hurtling through the air towards Fort Marrow. The bone mage was useful against armies in the field, useful for taking lightly fortified cities, for helping manage occupations, but challenging a power at Ampioc’s level, in terrain favorable to them? Not a chance.

Five, of course, warned Ampioc that his attack wouldn’t work, though that was just a matter of duty— there wasn’t any real commitment to his argument.

To Ampioc and his arms’ surprise, however, the basalt columns came to a halt in midair, then plummeted down into the water of the harbor.

Ampioc focused, and noticed a detail that had evaded him before. 

There, standing atop the pyramid, was a tall, heavily armored figure carrying an oversized sword. His helmet was shaped like a wolf skull, and Ampioc immediately recognized him as well.

Zale the Wolf. 

Admittedly, he was more commonly called Zale the Fool. The man was obsessed with stories of barbarian kings and magical knights from the chaotic century after the fall of Ithos, and had modeled himself heavily off them. He seemed to live in his own ridiculous fantasy world, one where there was still room for honorable heroes on the battlefield. 

For all of Zale’s absurd posturing, he was a powerful inertia mage, and was a distressingly effective counter to Ampioc’s attacks. Just by lowering the inertia on the basalt columns Ampioc liked to hurl, and increasing the inertia on the air in their path, he could bring them to a halt with ease, even with Ampioc’s magic opposing him. 

He wasn’t quite so dangerous on the offense, but in combination with Fort Marrow, whose bone harpoons and bolts Zale could apply his magic to to make them hit harder…

This was not going to be pleasant. 

Arms Six, Seven, and Eight began launching a continuous volley of basalt columns at Fort Marrow— they wouldn’t be likely to punch through, but Ampioc was willing to bet he could beat Zale when it came to magical endurance. He did, after all, have nine mana reservoirs to Zale’s one.

Ampioc jetted to one side, dodging another volley of bone harpoons, while running his eyes over his city.

The population was vanishing rapidly indoors. People were guiding total strangers into their homes for shelter, and risking their lives to help children and the elderly out of the path of the battle.

Ampioc’s skin turned blue with satisfaction, and he turned his whole attention back on the battle. 

Well, except for Five, who promptly began monitoring the rest of the city for other threats. 

A moment later, Ampioc was forced to submerge himself to dodge another volley of harpoons, ones that hardly slowed at all when hitting the water, and kept going until they buried themselves in the basalt harbor floor.

It was then that One made a suggestion.

Of all his arms, One was the quietest— it rarely called attention to itself, and when it did, it never spoke using words. Instead, it offered the rest of Ampioc’s minds shockingly clear images. None of Ampioc’s arms were bad at composing visual imagery— they all had to be excellent, to interpret the light and colors their skin could detect, as well as control the pigments of his skin— but One’s skill at imagining scenes was superior even to Ampioc’s primary mind. 

Every one of Ampioc’s minds, save Five and Seven, immediately agreed with the visual plan One offered them. Five’s disagreement was perfunctory, and Seven just wanted to launch a frontal assault the Havathi great powers and rip them to shreds.

Which was surprisingly restrained and cautious, coming from Seven.

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Ampioc could fit anywhere that his beak could slip through. He could bend, twist, and compress his body into a vast profusion of shapes. Even for an octopus, Ampioc was unusually flexible. 

Admittedly, his beak was large, but no more than twice the size of an average human— he could fit through a reasonably large door.

Still, he preferred to have a little more space to move than that. So he had, over the years, rebuilt Lothal’s sewer system and water pipes to have plenty of room to move around inside if he needed to— though he definitely preferred the water pipes. Even at a larger size than he strictly needed, Ampioc was fitting through spaces that no adult sphinx or dragon could fit through, despite being larger than adults of either species. 

As Ampioc fled the harbor, One, Two, and Eight all worked together to animate a swarm of basalt columns under the water, mimicking the size and shape of their collective body, while still launching column after column out from under the water at Zale and Fort Marrow. They were keeping the artificial octopus deep enough underwater that the Havathi powers had settled in for a protracted ranged engagement against it— standard practice when mages dueled from opposite sides of the waterline.

Ampioc, however, was quietly moving beneath the city, waiting for an opportunity to erupt out from underneath his foes. As he slithered through the tunnels, he kept repositioning the artificial stone octopus in the harbor to force the enemy mages to move as well, trying to force them into a position to take them down quickly, with minimal damage to the city. It was tricky business, since he couldn’t see them, and his arms’ touch and taste receptors didn’t work through hundreds of feet of stone. The limited vision his skin and arms had was mostly color-focused, and obviously wasn’t useful in looking through solid rock either— so he and his arms could only feel the weight Fort Marrow put on the basalt of Lothal through his basalt affinity senses. With nine separate affinity senses, however, he could get a remarkably clear picture of Fort Marrow’s movements.

Unfortunately, he was forced to play his cards early, when Fort Marrow began tearing apart homes to clear new movement routes, apparently recognizing that Ampioc was herding them.

Inhabited homes. 

Ampioc would have waited for a better moment, would have sacrificed a few lives to ensure the battle was ended swiftly and decisively when the moment was right. It was regrettable, but sacrifices had to be made at times.

His arms, unfortunately, disagreed. Only Two and Four agreed with him. The rest unanimously voted to intervene immediately, even if the risk to them was greater. 

It was always undignified to be overruled by his own arms, but Ampioc didn’t bother to argue— they didn’t have time for that.

Ampioc blasted the street below Fort Marrow upward, basalt columns spearing up from below into the bone-and-sinew monstrosity. The Wolf managed to stop many of them, but far from all of them.

He didn’t manage to stop Ampioc, because Ampioc wasn’t actually moving very quickly, nor accelerating.

That was one of the tricks to fighting inertia mages— their powers were most effective against fast moving objects or motionless objects. Slow-moving objects could still be affected, of course, but unlike force mages, inertia mages were fundamentally limited by the energy within an object they were manipulating. Likewise, their powers were greatest against accelerating or decelerating objects.

Ampioc moving slowly only used a fraction of his available muscle strength, which in turn limited the Wolf’s ability to interfere with his movements.

It helped, of course, that the Wolf’s mana reservoirs already seemed to be flagging from fighting off Ampioc’s basalt bombardment.

Ampioc wrapped his arms around Fort Marrow’s legs and lower half, and began to squeeze.

And inertia mages? Next best thing to useless against constriction.

Fort Marrow struggled, of course, but he wasn’t a particularly flexible being. He’d traded that for strength and durability— but even with his bone magic, he wasn’t a match for Ampioc’s raw might.

Ampioc tore off a bone leg like he would the leg of a crab, and Fort Marrow began to shake.

He tore off a second leg, and Fort Marrow almost lost his footing. 

He began to tear off a third, and then, with a flash of pain, nine minds had become eight.

Zale the Wolf had used his absurdly over-sized sword to hack off arm Seven.

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Ampioc’s grip loosened when Seven was sliced free of his body, and Fort Marrow tore itself loose from Ampioc’s grasp. Ampioc shuddered, then slithered away, dodging behind a building to dodge bone ballista bolts.

The sword must have borne heavy enchantments— even taller than most humans, it wasn’t long enough to have cut off one of his arms by itself, but Ampioc’s arms immediately began arguing over blame. Five, especially, blamed itself for not worrying more about the sword— even if it hadn’t been enchanted, Zale could have easily used his inertia magic to keep it from slowing down when cutting through Ampioc’s flesh and causing grievous injuries.

One shushed all of the other arms wordlessly, reminding them to focus on the battle.

Ampioc’s momentum, unfortunately, had been lost, and the fight had turned in favor of the Havathi powers. The Wolf had used his inertia magic to jump right back atop Fort Marrow, and they’d redoubled their assault on Ampioc.

Ampioc was still confident he could win, but not without causing massive devastation to Lothal. He could easily turn the city’s infrastructure against the invaders— he could rupture the desalination tanks below the city and boil the Havathi alive, he could collapse the upper harbor and crush them beneath a river of sand, he could annihilate them in half a dozen other ways.

All of them, however, would cost the lives of thousands of his citizens. Ampioc could justify the deaths of a handful, but thousands? Even if he’d been able to tolerate that kind of loss, it would delegitimize his rule in the eyes of many, if not most, of the survivors.

As he and his remaining arms frantically tried to think of a solution, as the Wolf and Fort Marrow hunted him down through the city, someone else entirely took action.

Seven.

The severed, dying arm used the last of its life and all of its mana to blast a single, solitary basalt column at absurd speeds, straight at the top of Fort Marrow, where Zale the Wolf stood.

Seven must have calculated the trajectory of the shot mostly from the weight of the legs on Lothal’s stones as picked up by its affinity senses— the light and color vision Ampioc’s skin offered was short ranged and had little or no ability to make out detail, as it was used almost entirely for the purpose of controlling the color changes Ampioc and his kind performed. Aiming at a target with so little sensory data was a challenging calculation that would have been difficult for all nine of Ampioc’s minds together, let alone a mostly feral one that was bleeding out and dying.

Even so, with all the force carried by the basalt column, Zale could have normally stopped it. No, especially with all the force.

Zale, however, was focused like his namesake on Ampioc. He’d completely dismissed Seven from his mind, which was to be expected from a dead-limbed creature like a human, whose arms were mere puppets to their brain. 

Zale died instantaneously as the stone column tore through the top of Fort Marrow and sent immense bone splinters scything into the air.

Fort Marrow almost toppled over entirely from the blow, and he never got a chance to recover before Ampioc was on him.

The colossal octopus crafted himself a dozen additional arms made entirely of hovering basalt columns, then battered and tore Fort Marrow into a pile of debris, no chunk of which was larger than the sea otters Seven had loved so much.

Then, exhausted and bleeding, Ampioc returned to Seven, who was picked up by One and Eight, and he began slithering out to the water of the harbor, his skin an ugly mourning grey.

Ampioc would grow a new seventh arm soon enough, and he looked forward to meeting it, and discovering what sort of person it would be.

In the meantime, however, Ampioc would pay Seven the highest funeral respects he could, and eat them to fuel the growth of their replacement.

Once a part of the self, always apart of the self— no matter how often nor how deeply it had disagreed with the rest.

No one, octopus nor human nor sentient ship, can, in the end, only be the parts of themselves they love. 

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Science note: Octopus arms do, in fact, seem to have minds of their own- two thirds of their neural tissue is in their arms, not their body. It's unknown how this affects the way they understand the world, but it definitely aids them in coordinating eight whole limbs. As an interesting side note, octopus brains are toroidal- donut shaped- and wrapped around their esophagus, with the neural tissue of the arms branching off.  It's fascinating to speculate how this bizarre brain shape could affect the way octopuses think- but it seems to work well for them, given how famed octopuses are for their intelligence. This also means that octopuses have to be quite careful of what they eat- if they swallow something too large, it could potentially cause brain damage when it passes through their brain donut. 

Octopus skin also can seem to "see" to some extent- it contains many of the light-sensitive pigments in their eyes. My depiction of this in the story is just as speculative on my part as my depiction of what the mind of a gargantuan octopus might be like. Quite frankly, I believe I've massively undersold how alien both Ampioc's skin sight and his mind are likely to be for us- this was a definite case of the demands of the story reining in the wildness of my speculation.

Also, Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or POF, the disease Fort Marrow has, is a real, and absolutely tragic, disease in our own world, one that doesn't have effective treatments like those that exist in Mage Errant. The disease heavily inspired bone mages in Mage Errant, like the Sacred Swordsman in book 4.