We met other things on the Summons locations, and some of the living versions of them, too. Of the latter, they were much less aggressive, at least after Princess Kris mulched through them when they sprang to attack us, and ran away when the limbs started going flying and cat-head anthros started crashing into trees and rocks hard enough to shatter spines and skulls.

Truly cat-headed, by the way. Assay rated them as Banderlings, with various minor name alterations that seemed to be based on age and tribal jobs. They seemed to attire themselves in color codes for easier identification, and grew taller with age.

We also ran into our first Water and Mud Golums, mis-spelling glitchy as it first said Golems, and then reset to the new name, as these Constructs were obviously not Golems. One, they were totally vulnerable to magical energy, which true Golems are most definitely not, and two, they were basically a bunch of elemental matter held together about some sort of energy core, probably based upon a sophisticated and scaling elemental power matrix that I would have loved to look at more closely.

They also moved a lot more quickly than most Golems, who tend to be strong and ponderous, not quick. A bunch of pieces of hard water carried in a force matrix serving as a virtual skeleton was a really innovative way to build a Construct, with incredible flexibility and no less bludgeoning force.

Turned out the Water Golums were pretty vulnerable to fire damage, too, while the Mud Golums fairly popped when smashed with blunt damage, the forces disrupting the matrices supporting them pretty hard. When they died, the matrix destabilized, and the residual elements basically fell apart in a heap to the ground, unlike most Summons, leaving a small pile of actual rubble behind. Er, except when it’s water and mud, it just drains away quickly. I imagined that if it were solid, it might just be sucked up and used by the next Golum to manifest like this.

We even ran into a huge double-height Mud Golum King or something, surrounded by half-a-dozen lesser ones, like a king surrounded by his court. Kris ran right up to it over the top of the water, weaving between its guards, Quaver all ki-wrapped to blunt via Versatile Armed Strike... and in a magnificent case of deceptive looks, the thing blew apart all over her, covering her in sticky mud as she fell back down into the waters in astonishment.

Even more amusing, his ‘bodyguards’ barely got to move before they all died from resonant matrix failure, falling down and blobs of sticky mud spreading out in the river.

“Phoo!” Kris spat, wading out further into the cold shallows of the river here to get out of the fresh mud deluge in the water, her Vajra forcing the stuff off her nigh-instantly. The water here was also deceptive, being scarcely more than waist-high for its entire length, although it was broad enough to look like a major waterway, moving slow and lazy... yet somehow, it was not freezing over in the slightest, despite all the ice and snow. “Talk about size not mattering!” she complained earnestly, dunking down to wash off the last of the cloying stuff.

“It looked special. It leave anything behind?” I asked her, sitting on my Disk and gliding over the water toward her, not needing to get wet.

“Lemme see.” She waded back to where it had died, focusing on the water and her tremblesense. “Ho, what’s this?” She plunged into the chilly water, and was back out a second later, clutching something in her hand.

She held it out to me as I arrived, using the opportunity to grab the Disk and haul herself back up above the water and stand there on her lightfoot, ki swirling about her soles and keeping her from falling back in. If you knew what you were seeing, it was a show of incredible ki mastery, if only a minor use of magic.

I held up the light green sliver of metal she’d put in my hand. “This is the same stuff as the coins are made of, but without an alchemical treatment and no oxidation. The weight is, what, about that of aluminum?” I gave it back to her, and she weighed it in her hand experimentally. I scooped up some of the Air Gold coins for her other hand, and she weighed them together.

“Titanium,” she corrected me, looking elsewhere. “More to the point, look at the shape.” She flipped the sliver up between thumb and forefinger. “Regular and symmetrical. If I were an Artificer, and I am, I’d say this looks like some sort of stabilizing central core to an active arcane matrix.”

I frowned. “Is it enchanted? Internal rune structures?” I asked, as she tossed the greenish coins with the stylized woman’s face back on the Disk.

She tapped it a couple of times thoughtfully. “There was something going on, but what could have been a perfect crystalline formation now has slag lines running through it.”

“Burned out when the matrix collapsed,” I murmured, as she flipped it back to me. “Still, that tells us this stuff has some remarkable uses for Construct magic, right?”

“That’s twelve Golums, right? And the first one we’ve seen with such a thing?” she asked mildly, counting on her fingers. “If the others had these motes in them, they were not coalesced, or they were returned to dust when they collapsed.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “If they could draw this much out of the environment whenever they manifested, that’s actually pretty nice,” I offered. “I should be able to sift even dust out of the remains, if we know it’s there.”

“Ah, more stuff to add to your collection?” I glanced behind me at the piles, and just shook my head. I didn’t even have boxes to sort things with...

------

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

“What is that called?” Kris asked, watching as the soft-scaled, amphibious thing slowly dissolved into sparkles. Its head was also vaguely cat-like, with big yellow eyes, a dark green back, lighter green front, and a frog-like mouth with rigid fine teeth around the bone. It would have blended well into the reeds in springtime, but stood out quite brightly in the whites and blacks of winter.

“A Mosswart,” I informed her, looking back down the river, thinking.

“Well, it squealed more than croaked, but it wasn’t as annoying as those Mites.” The fox-like, slender furred anthro spawns had been as annoying as the drudges in the way they called out to one another when fighting, excited and aggressive in combat, both the living ones and Summons alike. “What’s on your mind?”

“Humans. At least two non-human bipedal races allied with us, and maybe a race of sentient Constructs, or at least servants. Plus Banderlings, Mites, Drudges, and now these Mosswarts. All in less than five miles.”

Kris tilted her head as the Mosswart Summons discorporated, waiting for the quick respawn to follow. The things were slow and small, but that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. “This river has a lot of fish in it, yes, but that is a very small area for so many different species to be living in, if the Summons are any indication.”

“Eight separate intelligent species together, and that is discounting the fact that some of those olthoi are probably fully sapient, too?” I just lifted an eyebrow. “And the mushroom men you haven’t seen yet?”

“Ah, right. And don’t forget the shades. This is just ripe for conflict, isn’t it? Totally unnatural, like it was set up to generate fights...”

“I’ve been looking for signs of a god of war or chaos, but I’ve not seen anything special. However, there’s no primal, natural magic hereabouts.”

She gave me a funny look. “No Druidic power? At all?”

“All the power running through the land is arcane, Princess,” I noted worriedly.

“That... sounds completely unnatural,” she admitted slowly, trying to crunch numbers, but not knowing where to start. “The level of magic required to do something like that...” Her voice fell off again.

“Yeah. Mind-blowing, deific in scale. Who or what made this place?” I had to ask.

------

The Salute to Aethra was coming up shortly, dusk arriving, when we made it to the bridge.

It was a fantastic piece of architecture, long and noble double spans completely bridging the gap between the hills on either side of us, with long and elegant loops used to support them instead of standard spans, towers, or cables. The forested isle in the center of the river that anchored them was quite picturesque, stark and leafless in the winter, and only added to the scene, although the upflow side had a lot of flotsam heaped up on it right now.

The river here was still broad, shallow, and easy to ford, if incredibly cold, but the hills were fairly steep on the sides, restricting traffic without some few iced trails here and there running up and down them, trails that often had Summons at the bottom of them.

Strange, that.

It was my turn to haul Kris up to the middle of the western span, Levitating while she rode the Disk. We made it to the middle of the bridge itself, a good hundred-plus feet above, giving us a good look at the landscape for the Salute to Aethra.

We could also see the road coming down from the northwest, presumably from where we had entered this world, and how it continued on along the river shores to the south and east.

However, this bridge crossed the river, the connecting road leading almost due east. The difference in stonework between the two made it plain the bridge and the road were constructed by different peoples, if using the same old, simple magic that kept the flagstones swept clean of life and fixed minor problems.

“So, there’s something east of here,” Kris mused, looking that way with me, before turning around to face the west’s frozen landscape.

Both our eyes fell on the ruin of a house only a little bit upriver, and traced the completely uncovered road continuing on along the shoreline.

Well, we knew what we’d be checking out next. Tellingly, it was the only real building in the area, which was freaking damn weird for a bridge on a river, which were natural historical choke points and where traffic stopped.

But it was time for Aethra’s Salute.

“The Night Wind comes, the World now breathes deep,

The Shadows grow strong, and Song falls to silence steep.

Eyes in the Darkness wait, yet the Rider stands not alone.

Let the Clouds pass beneath the Silver Moon’s embrace

Where rest the weary, and dream of the wind at dawn.”

-------

Kris held up her hand as we approached that house. “I smell something.”

“Hopefully not the blood of children or untainted virgins,” I riposted immediately, noting that the snow on the roof indicated nobody was heating anything in there.

“Nah, that’s my aunties. This smells... something like that room you showed me where the mushroom people had been.”

I eyed the boarded-up, completely enclosed building, which, strangely enough, had no holes in the roof, and the doors were intact...

“That’s not wood,” I said slowly, staring at the building’s repairs.

“Good eyes. No, in ultraviolet it’s actually quite clear it’s something else,” Kris confirmed, squinting at it. “Would have missed it in the daytime. Kick a hornet’s nest?” she asked me, and I obligingly blew three flaming Darts into the doorway, blowing it off its hinges and opening it up to the fading sunlight.

There were squeals of alarms from within, and then the smell of oddly warm rot and decay hit us, just as the thrungus folk charged out into the waning light, their button-like eyes squeezed tight against the fading dusk light.

They were about the same size as the smaller ones I’d seen, with one of the guardian ones looming behind them as they charged out.

Kris happily went to meet them, Quaver warbling with delight as it swirled fluidly through the air, leaving gorgeous trails of multi-hued flames as she hewed into their tough flesh with skill and abandon, their flailing little arms swatting at her and giving her all kinds of openings to exploit.