[Beastborne: Tower of Blight] Chapter 27

Aldrich Valerion was once a young, handsome man from the proud and regal Valerion line. His family traced their lineage back to the fabled Balesian Mages of eld.

As the young scion of House Valerion, Aldrich was expected to carry on the family name and to uphold the Balesian standard by becoming a mage without equal.

Following the near destruction of Aldim, that was a tall order. Mages were hunted and blamed for the destruction, despite the Balesians stitching the world together with their Great Work, averting an even greater catastrophe.

Hidden knowledge came easily to Aldrich, but such knowledge was slow to find. He scoured the world, keeping to the shadows and always making sure to hide who he was.

His family held sway over their local lands, where they did their best to use magic for the good of the commoners. His people understood. They knew that magic was a tool like any other.

Why, fire was no more or less destructive than mana was! With the proper application and strength of mind, any idiot could harness either fire or mana.

But if either ran amok… then people began to think these elements, these tools were “dangerous” and “foolish” to even consider. They invoked the names of the long-dead gods as if they mattered!

Aldrich, like many mages of note, had found the secret to learning that would guarantee he would have all the time in the world to learn every spell, every cantrip, and every invocation.

Necromancy.

The cost to become a lich was heavy, but his people willingly contributed to the cause of their own volition. He did not have to ask for a single drop of blood. It was given with the knowledge that he would be their savior. Their guiding light for generations to come.

There would be time, and most importantly, he realized that he could wait out the ignorant plebeians who would die of easily curable diseases (via magic, of course). Once the idiots were dead and buried, true reason could reign once more.

People would welcome magic again once they lived a few generations without it.

And they did.

For a time, Aldim was a dark place. Death and disease. Famine. Every ailment you could think of ravaged the Shard.

The people got what they wanted. They got a world without magic.

Only those few safe havens remained, those that kept the mana flowing. Surprising no one with two brain cells to rub together, those lands healed fastest.

Their people flourished before all others, and they formed the first great kingdoms.

Aldrich witnessed it all, well past his original lifespan of 100 years. But as the years went on, even guiding the descendants of those who gave their lives for his immortality lost its luster.

The world moved too slowly. He was well into his fifth century when calamity struck his House once more. His mortal family, who had eschewed the eternal life of lichdom, was taken from him.

Not by an angry mob. Not by some foreign army. Not even by the cold march of time.

A second lesser Calamity, the Sinking, drowned his home and his lands in the cold iron dark waters of the Galaen Sea.

Despite his strength, despite all his spells, Aldrich could not save the people who mattered most to him. Bereft of his people and of his family, he wandered this new hellscape of frost and swamp.

The brilliant minds, the descendants of the Great Houses of the Balesians themselves, devolved into barbarians. Brutish creatures that clustered together in hilariously simple huts. They called themselves the Thirteen tribes.

The greatest irony of all was that they used their Balesian names without knowing it.

House Aza’dun became the Poisonhearts, House Val’sei, the Ebon Star tribe. Even the fractured remnants and distant relations of his own people, House Thark’azan, became the Lantern Bearer tribe.

Aldrich could not stand such a pitiful existence. His beauty, painstakingly maintained with no small amount of spellwork, was wasted on such savages.

The cold did not touch one that had escaped the clutches of the grave, and yet Aldrich found himself delving deeper and deeper within the warmth of the underground.

Every day he found a new tunnel, a new passage, and he hoped that he might find his ancestral home somehow still intact beneath the bottom of the sea.

It was a foolish hope, he knew, but it was all he had left.

Eventually, all things succumb to ruin.

Perhaps he did not try hard enough. Perhaps he could have foreseen the events if he had been more attentive and caring. Over 500 years of ruling had dulled his gaze and made him sluggish to react.

Doubt and despair came closer to claiming the lich more than any enemy ever could. And so, once he found the fabled Fathomways, the creation of the Balesian Mages themselves, the very salvation of this star, Aldrich knew he had found his home.

Perhaps it was not his true home, but it was the home of his blood. And it would do.

Bending the tiniest fraction of the Fathomways to his will was a simple affair. All of his vast intellect was spent studying the Fathomways up close, learning their secrets and understanding their true purpose.

A purpose that gave even the old lich nightmares.

In time, he created a home for himself, a memorial for his family and his people, and set to work guarding his tomb.

If he was to be a lich, then let him sleep like the dead until such a time as barbarism was burned out of this wretched world.

With no family to mourn him, no descendants to care for, and a world that had long-since forgotten his name, Aldrich went to sleep, to find out if liches dreamed of undead sheep.

It felt like only a few moments before somebody rudely opened the lid of his coffin. He raised a hand against the harsh purple-red light of the Fathomways. “Who dares disturb my slumber!?” he called out.

My voice, why does my voice sound so… dry?

Aldrich reached up and put a hand on the lip of the stone coffin. His hand! His gloriously smooth skin was… gone. Gleaming white bone gripped the lid. He could feel through it as well as any skin, but it was hideous.

A simple Windwalk spell brought him up and out of the tomb, setting himself down gently on the stone floor. He ignored the grave robbers. They would get their comeuppance soon enough. He had more important matters to attend to.

Ripping down a moldering old tapestry, Aldrich exposed a dust-covered mirror. With a wriggle of his bony fingers, the dust was scoured away to reveal the bright silver mirror before him.

Eye sockets flickering with pale green fires gazed back at him like something out of a horror drama. Aldrich reached up with infinite care and touched his cheekbone.

No skin.

No flesh.

His handsome face!

The lich screamed with rage and frustration… and then, because he could not help but heap misfortune atop misery, he looked into his pants.

The lich howled with sorrow, his sonorous voice ringing off the stones of his tomb.

***

“This is who we’re after? Doesn’t look like much,” Besal said, wincing at the shrill crying. The Starscourge kept a firm grip on his summoned blade. He didn’t trust this undead creature. Though, to be fair, he wouldn’t trust any undead.

An undead that wailed and screamed like this thing was even more upsetting than usual.

“Not anymore, no.” Ralst, the dark elf drow, told him. “You wouldn’t after sleeping for hundreds of years.”

“Well, I wouldn’t sleep for so long,” he said. “I have better things to do than waste my life doing nothing.”

Ralst watched the wailing undead. “You’ve never been flesh and blood,” she told him. “I think our friend over there rather thought that sleeping for a few centuries would not have the effect it has on… most things. Perhaps the spell he used to preserve his form failed, or maybe it was just the slow ravage of time.”

Besal looked at the lich’s tattered clothes, exposing his skeletal frame. They were dark and stained as if something had been ground into them.

He looked back at Ralst, finally understanding. “Oh.”

Despite Luda’s rather solemn nature, she was still a young girl, so she giggled exactly like one. Ralst gave her a sharp glance. Luda went quiet at that.

“We should give him some time to… er, grieve his lost parts,” Besal said as the only male-ish creature among them. He didn’t have an intimate knowledge of what the lich had lost, but he knew from Hal’s own memories that it was a key component of most men’s personalities.

Suddenly losing it, along with all your skin and organs, must be pretty hard. Besal didn’t see what the big deal was personally, but he had enough of an understanding from his time with Hal to be at least moderately sympathetic.

The group retreated to a safe distance and let the lich cry himself out.

***

The second floor of the Tower was unlike anything Hal had seen before. With fewer people–just a single party–the monsters were less overwhelming.

They still outnumbered Hal’s party, but they were easier to skirt around or ambush. With another Beastborne in the party, they were able to deal out devastation the likes of which Hal had scarcely dreamed of.

The [Monstrous Caged Lantern’s] protection radiated across the group, raising their resistance towards blighted monsters.

More than the resistance to blight monsters, it seemed to make the stacks of Blight take longer to appear. Despite his smaller group taking more damage than the alliance, their stacks were significantly lower. Their highest was Elaise, who took her role as Scout Leader seriously, with only 2 stacks.

Initially, only Hal could fill the lantern with monster essence. After his party had defeated enough of the blight monsters, Val was able to fill the lantern as well. Which made sense, because until that point, she hadn’t gained any blighted essence.

However, she lacked a Monster Core, so it was up to Hal to maintain the lantern’s Spirit reserves. He tried not to be horrified by that, as he once was missing something so integral too.

It alleviated some of his duties, freeing Hal up to use his supercharged spells in between slicing up monsters.

Carving his way through a hulking titan-sized blighted creature with barnacle-encrusted crab pincers for arms, they cleared the last room of the smaller second floor.

“Let’s take a quick break,” Hal said.

Elaise looked like she was dead on her feet, but she immediately went to scout the exits. A few of her Ebon Star tribesmen took up guard positions while Hal went over his recent Perk acquisition.

Those that Leveled Up joined Hal at the center of the room.

Your Sword Skill has risen to Level 50.

You have 1 Sword Skill Perk point awaiting assignment.

Sword Skill Advancements available.

Hal was nearly finished with Cruel Blade. With just one more Perk point to assign, he could finally complete all 5 Levels of the Perk and get the largest leap in damage so far.

Cruel Blade 5/5

You learn how to better bleed out an enemy, forcing them to take extra damage. Each strike you land has a higher chance to inflict the bleed status affliction. An enemy under Cruel Blade’s bleed affliction takes standard bleed damage for the duration of the effect. Upon the end of the affliction, the enemy takes additional damage equal to a portion of the bleed damage suffered.

Lv1: +20% Bleed Chance (10s) | 15% of total Bleed damage once the effect ends.

Lv2: +30% Bleed Chance (15s) | 20% of total Bleed damage once the effect ends.

Lv3: +40% Bleed Chance (20s) | 25% of total Bleed damage once the effect ends.

Lv4: +55% Bleed Chance (25s) | 35% of total Bleed damage once the effect ends.

Lv5: +75% Bleed Chance (30s) | 50% of total Bleed damage once the effect ends.

Not only was the 75% Bleed Chance incredibly high, when coupled with Goring Blade, Hal doubled the Bleed duration to 60 seconds, dramatically increasing the damage he could dish out.

With a three out of four chance of afflicting Bleed, he could dive in and out of combat, using Goring Blade to tag high value targets and then let the Bleed wear them down while his allies battled on.

It meant more weaving in and out of combat, but Hal was okay with that. He was beginning to realize that the true power of Beastborne was in its insane flexibility.

With a switch of essences and utilizing a variety of spells, Beastborne could swap from a high damage dealer to a support role and back in the blink of an eye. Val had already shown him how possible that was and her Beastborne was several Levels beneath his.

With the right spells, a Beastborne could tank, it could heal–though Hal had not seen any way he could do it with Beastborne, only with his Assimilation–and much more.

He had learned a great deal from not only training with Val and Dale, but watching the Beastborne in action. Above all, the most important thing he learned was that a Beastborne was not meant to shoulder the burden of the battle alone.

They worked best in a group, able to flex between the various roles at the drop of a hat, preventing the enemy from gaining a foothold and making them constantly react to the changing tactics of a Beastborne’s presence.