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Book 5, Chapter 1

Golemancy was considered by many mages to be the absolute peak of the inscription discipline. To carve the language of magic into a physical object in such a detailed and intricate way that running mana through it created something akin to a living being was a difficult and rewarding task. And, of course, there were infinite variations. Golems could be as simple as having no function beyond opening a door when it sensed someone approaching or so complex that they were practically indistinguis...

Book 5 Cover/Blurb

Uh.... yeah... I don't.... have this. Yet.

Kind of forgot to make it. For now, this is a placeholder.

EDIT: I have written a rough draft blurb. Still working on getting something that's not ass out of Midjourney for the cover.

Blurb-

It’s been six months since Keiran left his greatest enemy stranded on one of Manoch’s moons, six months of feverish work preparing for the lich’s seemingly inevitable return. Keiran is gathering allies and resour...

Book 4 Epub

Hello,

This is a... let's call it a middle-draft version of book 4's epub. There are probably ten or twenty typos in it still. The editor has gone over it once, but it's pre-beta readers. Still, putting it up now allows me to offer it to you all for close to three months instead of the one month I can normally keep the epub file up, so... enjoy! I'll get this updated with the final draft version once I get it.

Thank you for supporting my work!

Book 4, Chapter 73

I laid there on the floor for a minute, just coming to terms with the fact that I’d survived a mana bomb exploding two feet from my face. Even for me, that was an accomplishment. I was injured, in part from my own force crush spell, but I was still breathing. I did make a mental note to design a more permanent version of a protective force crush to cast so that I didn’t have to tweak the spell’s structure on the fly to avoid being killed by it, just in case something like this ever happ...

Book 4, Chapter 72

In hindsight, I’d overestimated my ability to fight in such a hostile environment. Ammun was far better suited to exist here than I was, even with his magic severely handicapped. Now I was pinned down and suffocating, with a hostile archmage watching for the slightest mana fluctuations so he could counter any attempt I made at saving myself. It wasn't a good position to be in.

“Ah, yes, the weaknesses of the flesh,” Ammun said with a dry chuckle. “Sustenance. Sleep. Air...

Book 4, Chapter 71

There was a hundred feet of space at a steep incline between myself and the golem. I could have jumped down there in a single leap, probably without using any sort of magic to assist my movement. For Ergl to reach me was an entirely different matter. It would have to claw its way up what was essentially the side of a mountain.

I’d expected the golem to have a bit more trouble with that task than it actually did. Not only was it frighteningly fast, but the almost vertical surface didn�...

Book 4, Chapter 70

I paused in the middle of my preparations to pay more attention to one of my scrying spells. The more miles I had to cover, the slower my progress got, not in the least because Ammun had started using his own magic to actively obfuscate his trail about twenty miles or so from the base. I’d been working for over six hours now, trying to track him down. Considering he’d only had two or three hour’s lead on me, at most, it was ridiculous how much effort it had taken to finally find somethi...

Book 4, Chapter 69

Once I really started pushing, I found four different diviners willing to admit that they’d spied on Ammun using wide-area scries that wouldn’t be passively detected. None of them knew where he’d stopped, but they all independently confirmed which direction he’d set out in. My own brief divinations centered in that area showed me that it wouldn’t be too difficult to track him, if for no other reason than he was maintaining his temporal scrambling wards. It was easy—but expensive�...

Book 4, Chapter 68

For a second, I thought I’d somehow been teleported back to Derro, to the tunnels deep underground where I'd found Querit. A moment later, I started noticing the differences in the room. If nothing else, it was cold, considerably colder than anywhere I’d been since my reincarnation. The air had a lot less dust in it, too.

The confusing part was that I knew this ritual was a one-way teleportation to the moon. I’d verified the whole thing myself. I even knew that it on...

Book 4, Chapter 67

The main silo of the summit was undamaged by my attack, but was just as empty as everywhere else. Theories whirled through my mind, one after another. Was this whole site a decoy? Everything Ammun had thrown at me had been a long series of distractions, and I’d made assumptions as to the purpose. Maybe Ashinder was the world’s best actor, one who’d willingly sacrificed dozens of his coworkers to pull off the con.

Or maybe I’d been trapped in a mental illusion, like that one mage...

Book 4, Chapter 66

The dragon wasn’t the only thing I’d spent time preparing for. A confrontation with Ammun seemed inevitable, and since it would almost certainly be in his demesne, I’d invested some resources into building a few disposables to help even the odds. Unless I managed to fully rebuild my core back to stage nine, however, victory was likely out of my reach. All these trinkets would do was slow Ammun down, maybe long enough to accomplish some other goal and allow me to escape after.

Thos...

Book 4, Chapter 65

“What did you do with the diviner?” I asked.

“Didn’t seem like you wanted him left unsupervised at the valley, so I brought him with me to New Alkerist,” Querit told me.

I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of a captured enemy combatant in my family’s town, especially with neither of us there to keep an eye on him. In Querit’s defense though, it wasn’t like he knew why I was keen on protecting the town. And he was right; I didn’t want anyone in my dem...

Book 4, Chapter 64

It should have been impossible for a battle with a titanic undead dragon to feel tedious, but honestly, that’s how it was. Without Averin or anyone else here to control it, and with its limited number of ways to express its mana, it really wasn’t that hard to outmaneuver it in the air while I whittled it down. The worst part of it was the knowledge that even a single mistake could end up with me absorbing so much kinetic force simply from impacting its body that it could kill me.

Te...

Book 4, Chapter 63

Averin wasn’t stupid, despite his inexplicable desire to bring Ammun back from the annals of history. His questionable motives aside, he was perfectly aware of how overmatched he was without the dragon’s help. There were really only two possible options: he either fled the field back through a portal, or he found some way to stop the fight.

Whether it was because he knew the price of failure if he ran back through that portal or because he didn’t think he could reach it without me...

Book 4, Chapter 62

Dragon tongue didn’t have a word for ‘subtle.’ They just didn’t think that way, which wasn’t to say that they were stupid, just that the idea of being clever instead of crushing challenges head on was synonymous with being weak. It was something lesser races did.

Dragons were straight-forward. They shredded enemies with their immense talons, ripped them apart with their teeth, crushed them under great weight, or incinerated them with their potent fire breath. If, for some reas...

Book 4, Chapter 61

Dragons, even undead skeletal ones, were difficult opponents. Sheer size was a quality all its own, both in terms of offense and defense. The living ones could shrug off hits that would kill smaller creatures, and the undead versions were even more durable. Physically attacking one was an exercise in futility.

Worse, dragons had enormous mana cores, easily hundreds of times the size of a human’s. Attacking their cores directly was almost as difficult at fighting them physically. There...

Book 4, Chapter 60

One of the hardest parts of being a diviner was having to have an excellent memory. There was only so much magic could do to help that along, too. At some point, how well a mage could process and remember information separated the hobbyists from the professionals. Ammun’s diviners were, presumably, all professionals.

I was about to put that to the test with Ashinder. Querit had been grilling him heavily and I was very curious to see if his information would match up with what the othe...

Book 4, Chapter 59

“Introductions, first,” I said. “I’ll assume you already know that my name is Keiran and that you’ve been told a great deal about me by Ammun.”

Both diviners gave nods and the old man spoke. “Nakra Adylen,” he said. “Senior diviner for Great House Adylen.”

“Oslia,” the woman said simply as she sneered at her fellow diviner.

“Does Great House Adylen even still exist?” I asked.

The woman snickered.

“We certainly do!” Nakra said stiff...

Book 4, Chapter 58

They weren’t guardian golems summoned into the room, of that I was certain. I’d already gone through the whole place looking for wards and traps. That meant this was the active work of one of the diviners who also had a solid grounding in conjuration, probably one of the three mages with stage four cores who’d survived my opening attacks.

Unfortunately, just because they were solid mana given a facsimile of life didn’t mean I could just ignore them. The first one had already pro...

Book 4, Chapter 57

I kept digging for another hour or so, but then mages started to filter in. Bleary-eyed and shuffling, they resumed their posts as the room slowly started filling up. That meant my time spying on their operation was at its end. We wouldn’t be able to hide that we’d discovered their sympathetic link, or that we’d broken through their defenses, not without letting them continue to spy on us.

Given how little I’d discovered of any use, it wasn’t worth it. Instead, I prepared my f...

Book 4, Chapter 56

Querit stared at me in horror for a long moment before his golem core started processing information again. “But, if he’s hitting you with all the distractions now, that must mean that he’s almost done.”

“Probably,” I agreed.

“What do we do?”

“I’d suggest you flee somewhere less likely to be annihilated by a beam of destructive energy coming down on us from the moon. If you want to be useful, maybe track down these zombie invasions and put a stop to a few...

Book 4, Chapter 55

“A sympathetic scrying connection?” I asked.

There was no way Ammun would make that kind of mistake. But then, maybe it wasn’t his mistake. As far as I was aware, today had been the closest Querit and the lich had ever gotten to each other, but it wasn’t the first time Querit had encountered any of his minions.

“The fight outside the tower,” I said before Querit could answer. “One of them must have tagged you with the enchantment.”

“Not me. My...

Book 4, Chapter 54

“Did they know anything?” Querit asked when I appeared in his workshop.

“Nothing all that useful. Mid-level mages, disposable fodder just strong enough to cooperate with each other. Somehow, Ammun knew about the resonance point project and was keeping tabs on it.”

“Maybe he’s upset about us breaking his toys a few months ago.”

If that was an attempt to deflect suspicion away from himself, it wasn’t a very good one. I’d only known about Ammun’s project bec...

Book 4, Chapter 53

The timing of this attack was too perfect to be a coincidence. It had come mere moments after we’d finished stabilizing the resonance point. I was the weakest I’d been in years right now, weaker than when I’d fought Ammun personally back when my core was still stage five. Somehow, they were watching through all my divination-blocking wards. It shouldn’t have been possible, especially not from three thousand miles away.

Unless they had a mole on the inside.

I didn’t have ...

Book 4, Chapter 52

“Impossible,” I breathed out. “The mana costs…”

I couldn’t even calculate how much mana Ammun was burning every second to be that far away from his phylactery. Had he brought it with him? No, that would be the height of foolishness. There was no reason to take that kind of risk, not even to kill me. What then?

A brilliant orb of white light appeared in front of him and fell to crash into my wards, where it splattered into liquid fire. A second and third followed it, ea...

Book 4, Chapter 51

Whether it was a coincidence or deliberate, the attacking mages couldn’t have picked a better time to launch their assault. Whoever was in charge was better about keeping their forces safely hidden than the last bunch, too. Even now, with the sky burning above my wards, my divinations didn’t detect anyone out there. That was going to make it hard to counterattack, but there was some small consolation in knowing that they were likely expending a great deal of excess mana to fire at such a ...

Book 4, Chapter 50

It was impossible for me to narrow down where Ammun’s mages would set up their staging point, but that did not mean I didn’t spend a fair amount of time using the various scrying beacons I’d seeded around Ralvost to snoop for any useful information I could find. And while I did find plenty of interesting things, like a few towns that had managed to ignite all their cores and were busy inventing some basic combat conjurations, I didn’t stumble across what I was looking for.

I was...

Book 4, Chapter 49

Querit stood in the middle of the petrified forest with me, right on top of the ritual circle I’d constructed to form the valley’s genius loci. Overhead, a slab of sparkling silver stone floated in the air. It was oblong, a hundred feet long and thirty feet at the widest, and nearly as thick. That had been a pleasant surprise, but also an unexpected complication. My phantom space couldn’t hold nearly that much volume, even if I’d been willing to chop it into chunks.

I’d ended ...

Book 4, Chapter 48

I resumed my human shape somewhat reluctantly. With as spread out as I’d gotten, it was difficult to fight as a scattered pile of sand, and besides, I needed hands to hold my staff. The worm, somewhat surprisingly, noticed me immediately. I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of senses it had, but I’d assumed flying into the air would go a long way towards hiding myself from it.

Apparently, just getting off the ground wasn’t going to be enough to keep me safe. Also apparently, and so...

Book 4, Chapter 47

With the gestalt’s map in my head, it was easy to plan my route. Ants were naturally burrowing creatures; that combined with human-level intelligence and access to mana allowed them to thoroughly map out the underground for miles in every direction. Even dying did nothing to slow them down, not when the gestalt knew everything each individual ant discovered right up until the moment of its death.

There were small tunnels leading out from the main cavern where I’d been attacked by th...