emergencycomplaints

Book 5, Chapter 26

I left the house feeling… I wasn’t even sure how to describe it. Disappointment? Resignation? Annoyance?

That wasn’t fair. Father had tried his best, but his advice had mostly boiled down to people learning to trust each other because they didn’t have a choice. Circumstances beyond their control forced them to take those risks, and the ones it had worked out for had survived. It might have been true, but it was also useless. I didn’t need to trust anyone else. My magic made su...

Writathon project: Duskbound Chapters 23-25

Crescent Hill was a spiritual site dedicated to Morgus, God of Nature and the Hunt, that had been abandoned by almost everyone a decade ago. Velik didn’t necessarily think that was his fault, but he knew it wasn’t a coincidence that people had stopped coming out to Crescent Hill once the monsters showed up. Only the most fanatical hunters still came out to leave offerings or pray.

He hadn’t really expected Sildra to be one of them, but now that he thought about it, that did explai...

Book 5, Chapter 25

It took a little over two weeks for the divination blocking wards shrouding the Sanctum of Light to begin failing. During that time, the remainder of Ammun’s army, just over half of what they’d had a month ago, moved back into the tower one group at a time. I’d given serious consideration to destroying the remaining teleportation platforms to prevent them from actually returning, but that would have doomed every single person still in the tower to death when it started collapsing.

Book 5, Chapter 24

The problem with setting traps was that they’d be less and less effective each time the army stumbled into one of them. They were already on their guard for another fly-by from me, which greatly increased the likelihood that someone’s divinations would notice anything I left in their way.

With that in mind, my plan was to get one good trap in front of each unit of mage soldiers before they all converged back into one full-sized army, then supplement that with a personal appearance. ...

Writathon project: Duskbound Chapters 20-22

Chapter 20

From the day Velik left to the day he returned, three weeks passed by. He didn’t go out of his way to kill monsters on his return trip, but there was still plenty of bloodshed to slow him down, not to mention he needed to practice his new skill. Since he’d acquired it primarily to deal with enemies that had physical stats too high for normal attacks to hurt them, that meant fighting the monsters in the deep wood.

His practice paid off in the form of a rank advanceme...

Book 5, Chapter 23

While Querit oversaw the experiments I’d outlined, I returned to the jungles around Galdrisa just to do a bit of quick scrying and mark down the locations of any other vine-encrusted plant monsters nearby. I wasn’t interested in harvesting them right now, but I did want to make sure there were more left just in case my assistant accidentally killed the one I’d already collected. There were none quite that big, but it did turn out that they weren’t terribly uncommon for the area.

Writathon project: Duskbound Chapters 15-19

Author's Note: I'm still not quite far enough ahead of the RR release to do a single Monday chapter drop like I said I was planning. Soon, I hope.

- - -

Of course it’s not over. This thing is a champion. Why would it be so easy that I could solo kill it in a few minutes?

Velik had no idea how agile a living wave of fire was, but he didn’t have a lot of room to run away, so he tried a different strategy instead. He charged at it, spear l...

Book 5, Chapter 22

The more time I spent talking to Bakir, the more I became certain that he was only at stage five or six. That didn’t automatically disqualify him from the title of archmage, as it was more of an indicator of skill and knowledge than of raw power, but it did make me question the strength of his organization as a whole.

It made sense, once I thought about it. One of the problems I’d had to overcome to climb beyond stage six was that with mana no longer being freely available in the en...

Book 5, Chapter 21

Bakir’s eyes glittered with amusement as he surveyed the meeting room I’d constructed, but he kept any comments about my security to himself. I guided him to his seat and claimed the one opposite of him, then settled back and let him start the conversation.

“I confess to some curiosity,” he said. “Not to pry into the intimate details of your life, but you may be the only person to ever navigate the cycle of reincarnation and come out with your memories intact. Having experienc...

Writathon project: Duskbound Chapters 9-14

Chapter 9

Velik didn’t know the man’s name, but that wasn’t unusual. He looked vaguely familiar – tall, lean, and muscled, with dusty tan skin and thick black hair. He stank of horses and beer, which meant he was probably part of the group standing near a produce cart with a ragged old mare hooked up to it. That was the only horse on the street aside from the wagon parked right in front of the general store, and that horse smelled better than this man.

“You’ve got a lo...

Book 5, Chapter 20

“Querit,” I said, “Did we have visitors while I was away?”

I stood in the middle of the valley on my teleportation platform and frowned as I felt out the foreign node of mana embedded in my wards. My assistant was in the lab, peering over my shoulder through the scrying mirror I’d pulled out of my phantom space.

“None that the wards detected,” he said. “I suppose I could have missed somebody coming in who was already keyed in. But I’m having trouble coming up wit...

Book 5, Chapter 19

The closer I got to the source of the beam, the harder it was to dodge it. That might have been a problem if I wasn’t already so familiar with the spell, but I’d been on the receiving end enough times to have a good idea of both the spell’s and the person controlling it’s limitations. Seven aimed the spell visually and seemed unable or unwilling to use divinations to assist with that. I had a theory that he just wasn’t a good enough mage to channel a master-tier spell and cast anyth...

Writathon Project: Duskbound Chapters 1-8

As a spur of the moment decision, I decided to

Book 5, Chapter 18

Chapter 18

I didn’t even keep track of how many places I destroyed, let alone how many people I killed. All I knew was that it was a lot, and that I’d almost certainly ended the lives of a significant number of people who didn’t deserve it. That did not stop me from moving on to the next base, encampment, or fortification to repeat the process.

Ammun was going to return eventually. I needed to cut away any and all support I could, even if the cost was an ocean of blood. Thes...

Book 5, Chapter 17

As was typical, Father was out of the house when I got there. More unusually, Mother and Nailu were also gone. Then again, with the town grown significantly from what Old Alkerist had boasted at its peak, and with the advent of magical knowledge making everyone’s lives easier, people found themselves with a lot more free time. Mother used hers to socialize with a far wider circle of friends, especially those who also had young children.

As for Senica, she could be anywhere. Much to ou...

Book 5, Chapter 16

After making a few more samples for Querit to play with, I left him to his work. There were a few other things I had to catch up on, namely checking on what Ammun was doing up on the moon and helping Grandfather confirm everything was fine so he could do whatever it was he was planning. After that… helping Father get rid of Shel should have been a priority, but I was very much alright with ignoring that particular problem.

Before I left for Eyrie Peak, I spent a bit of time doing my o...

Book 5, Chapter 15

No mage, not even me, had the mental capacity to weave a mage’s shadow on their own. It was just too complex a task to be done without assistance. That was why the sixth stage was the forming of a genius loci and binding it to my mana core. It helped focus my magic, allowed me to pull off feats of mental gymnastics that I never could have anywhere else in the world. Without my demesne, the artificial resonance point hanging in the air overhead wouldn’t exist.

Even that wasn’t enou...

Book 5, Chapter 14

“Keiran, it’s time to stop.”

I ignored Querit and started preparing the reagents for the next experiment.

“Keiran! Please.”

Force magic chopped the herb into thin slices, then did a second pass to dice them into cubes.

“Keiran…” Querit reached out to grab my shoulder.

I shrugged him off and turned an angry glare on the golem. “I don’t have time to stop right now.”

“It’s been a month. I haven’t seen you sleep. You cannot tell me t...

Book 5, Chapter 13

I’d offered to make extra potions. I’d offered the town storage crystals packed full of mana. I’d offered them a teleportation platform – though to be fair, I’d given a few dozen of those away already, so that last one wasn’t much of an offer.

Shel had declined all of that. She knew what she wanted, and she knew I wanted access to their reagents bad enough that she could push for it. I spared a moment to remember the old days, when I just took what I wanted, stepping over li...

Book 5, Chapter 12

I had an audience waiting for me when I landed, a full twenty familiar faces from the beginning of my new life in Old Alkerist. Shel was there, along with six other Arborists. A few random villagers I hadn’t had much interaction with also stood below, watching me. There were four children, none of them older than ten or eleven, but I didn’t know them. I’d been exiled before my mandatory enrollment in the village school, not that I’d had any plans of going.

It was possible Senica...

Book 5, Chapter 11

The villager—he looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to his face—blinked at me slowly. “Shel?” he repeated. “She left years ago.”

“Left?” I asked. “Left where?”

The man just shrugged, but then a suspicious look came over his face. “Who’re you, anyway?”

“Who would know?” I asked, ignoring his question.

“You one of those, what’cha call ‘ems, the magicals?”

It seemed things had changed more than I’d expected. I...

Book 5, Chapter 10

It ended up taking me three weeks to find what I was looking for, including a two-day side trip back to Ammun’s tower to place the rest of the mysteel generators. Those would take years to produce what I pulled out of Galdrisa, which was itself barely a quarter of what I’d found beneath Derro.

It was going to be a long few years of repeating this process if I couldn’t find a better way to acquire mysteel. If not for the looming threat of Ammun hanging over the world, I would have ...

Book 5, Chapter 9

With the temple fully secured against troll incursions, I set Senica to work disposing of the vegetation. We ignored the stuff out near the edges that lacked metallic thorns in favor of the rooms near the core. A constant, moderate heat was enough to incinerate the vines, though I did end up having to create a chimney in the room we picked to hold the bonfire. Bits of thorns remained behind, mixed in with the ashes, the sorting of which was another perfect task for my sister to take on.

Book 5, Chapter 8

Removing the core was a delicate process, but with a bit of patience and plenty of mana, I managed to extract it without killing the thing. When I finished severing the connection, every single vine in the room went limp all at once, and my scrying revealed that the rest of the temple stilled as well. “I guess that kills off my theory about there being more than one core,” I said.

In a way, that made things easier. I just needed to clean out the dead vegetation and reinforce the tem...

Book 5, Chapter 7

The mystery of the mobile tree would have to wait. I’d left my scrying mirror down by the plant core in my rush to bail Senica out of trouble. Taking her back underground with a teleportation spell wasn’t really feasible, not because it was impossible, but because the quick combat versions didn’t generally allow for passengers. There wasn’t much point in casting a full teleportation spell just to move a few hundred feet when we weren’t in that big a rush, so we flew back instead. 2024-10-18 11:18:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Book 5, Chapter 6

There wasn’t a single inch of bare stone to be found. Instead, layer upon layer of vines coated everything, even the ceiling. I wasn’t sure how exactly they clung to the stone, but my guess was some sort of magic rather than the physical methods non-mobile vines used.

There were surprisingly still, considering the plant monster had made its move to seal off the exit. I’d expected an attack already. When that didn’t happen, I flew over to the interior door and sent a burst of for...

Book 5, Chapter 5

I floated along behind my sister as she flew through the air, moving like a particularly acrobatic dancer to avoid the barrage of rocks the trolls were hurling at us. More and more of the monsters were showing up, and there was plenty of loose stonework to serve as ammunition. Senica spun around, her limbs contorting to get them out of the way and her magic shifting her from side to side.

I caught my own fair share of attacks as well, but for me, they weren’t such a serious threat. I ...

Book 5, Chapter 4

There was a backpack sitting just inside my bedroom door, presumably packed by my sister. It was the first thing I saw when I teleported to my parents’ home. I chuckled softly; Senica had probably been obnoxiously impatient all evening while she waited for me to finish up everything else on my agenda. Truthfully, the most efficient way to organize my tasks would be to delay this outing until I finished setting all the mysteel generators in the mana intakes of Ammun’s tower, but in the end...

Book 5, Chapter 3

The wastes were a bit unusual for a desert climate due to one simple fact: there was plenty of water. Hundreds of streams came down from the mountains, and near their banks, short grasses or scraggly bushes did often grow. But without mana from the world core, nothing was vibrant. Nothing was healthy. Plants lived or died on their own mana production, which was generally insufficient even with a ready source of water.

It was the soil that did it, or rather, the lack of soil. The island ...

Book 5, Chapter 2

We’d tested plenty of smaller enchantments, measured their efficiency and their output, and confirmed our theories. Everything worked as expected – they had higher initial mana costs, but then they recycled all but the tiniest fraction of their expended mana, increasing their lifespan by near a hundred-fold what the old method granted.

Small enchantments were fine, but there was the possibility that our predictions would fail on something this massive, so Grandfather was approaching...