There was a northern outpost from the town. The arcane mana leaking out of the ruins of the buildings seeming to attract several gromnies of various hues, and the stupidly aggressive drakes had variously gnawed or breathed on the human buildings there and reduced them to rubble and ruins they were nesting in.
Half the gromnies were spawns, half were real. Kris sniffed around the area after we killed them all, and laughed softly.
“The tumeroks were treating them as open-range livestock,” she smiled, pointing at a rock nearby, covered with various suspicious stains. “That rock has been used at least a hundred times to skin and bone a gromnie. I think we’re going to make them angry when their little farm evaporates.” Quaver poofed into vivic flame, and without hesitation she set all the dead Summons on misty fire, including their Summon locations.
I said nothing, instead looking at the cracked stone of the magical building, leaking mana off broken enchantments, as well as the pit of bones around the Deathstone pit and the remains of several human buildings, both shops and homes. The ornamentation that survived seemed to indicate that it had been the abode of a famed scholar at some point.
Yeah, they could tolerate taking easy gromnie off the menu. I wondered if they had legends of dragons, and if so, were exulting in hunting the things.
Or maybe they just liked eating vicious lizard-things with stumpy wings and breath weapons. Who was I to judge their dinner table, as long as it didn’t include humans and other sapients?
Anyway, the Princess popped out her soulclaws and butchered them with fantastic speed and skill, a unique skill of Hags Aelryinth had seen on more then one occasion. The speed with which they could peel the skin off and shred meat from bone without waste was supernatural, and one reason why you never wanted to go down wounded in front of a Hag.
The true Hags could also eat most of a grown man inside a minute, so the evisceration and flensing was all part of reasons not to get into a nails-fight with them.
---
I supplied the light acid Bursts to treat the hides she peeled off them, said were then spread out for me to use Prestidigitation at III on, accelerating the tanning process and drying them out as we moved towards the city whose central pagoda tower was quite visible ahead of us.
Tellingly, no flame was burning on it, and the landscape spawns, well.
Skeletons. A whole lot of skeletons, interspersed here and there with more corporeal undead in a variety of outfits. A large number of them were Sho... but not all of them.
Particularly the ones not in Sho attire, and with more meat on their bones.
“Highness,” I warned her, as a cluster of undead bracing the road came into view, and she glided to a halt. “Those aren’t Summons.”
Her own Mask of Clarity was on, so the night was effectively day. “Can they see us?” she asked reasonably.
“Superior nightvision, forty yards. Perhaps low-light... they can see some humanoid shadow moving along the road. We’ve passed a dozen not-Summons seeded among the skeletons who probably noticed you moving along so quickly.”
“Clever of them,” Kris grinned, completely unafraid. “They aren’t the native ancients, they’re former Isparians. Do you think I should wander over and negotiate?”
“If I’m not wrong, some of them are in traditional Aluvian raider attire, aren’t they?”
She only grinned the more widely. “They might even be cousins!” she agreed heartily. “You might say I’ve had some dealings with their kind. Intimidating the shit out of them is a decent way to start assembling a navy with a knowledgeable crew. Mom had a great relationship with them, based on abject terror and ruthless exploitation. Some of the examples she made of the rude ones are favorite bedtime stories among the pirate clans of all the nations.”
“And then some of them arrived here and found they couldn’t crew any ships, and it’s a lot harder to run away from irate victims when you’re effectively landlocked. Maybe got their souls caught up in the ley lines when they called on some unholy oaths and spirits and curses and whatnot and ended up like they are.”
“Take the Invisibility off the Wagon. I want them to see my ship, such as it is,” Kris ordered, and I obligingly dispelled the illusion rendering my ride little more than a passing ripple in the moonlight. The Eternal Lights poofed up, and there was an immediate rustling from the undead ahead when our finely-made mode of transportation abruptly popped up out of nowhere ahead of them.
A lot of rotting bows that shouldn’t have held together, and yet did with a combination of negative energy and Curse magic, creaked as they were drawn and centered on us. Completely and brazenly unafraid, Princess Kristie Rantha glided forward with the Waveskating Step, a picture of long legs and hips and waist-length raven hair that even the undead had to linger on as she moved with predatory grace toward them.
Then she drew Quaver, and two rolling notes echoed in the night like somber bells. Diiiiiiinnnggggg, tiiiiiiinnnngggg...
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Wrathfire swirled around the Sword, a golden edge of soulfire on the blued adamant, the two black jewels glittering like reversed dark stars in the night in the motes of the Lost Light. Unwhite vivus and black-blooded Banefire to the Undead formed a chorus of absolute reality and annihilation that drew moans from the undead and skeletons looking upon it, because it was far more real to them in their deathly existence than anything else in the world of the living.
The bows faltered and couldn’t stay up, staring at the Hag wreathed in cold, hard reality. I, being girt in magic, probably looked like a softly glowing shadow behind the absoluteness of a Null bearing a Vivic Weapon.
She slid to a halt about ten yards in front of the assembled motley horde, which by my casual Assay was considerably more formidable than it looked. Their rusting armor and weapons were every bit as effective and more than they had been while in great repair, borne by killers who knew how to fight and do battle... and by the looks of things had probably died a whole lot of times after death, too, undead normally not being afraid of dying.
Kris looked them all over with an icy, imperious bearing that had them all instinctively knuckling under, social status being so important in less advanced societies. She opened her mouth, and said, “What scurvy-ridden pox-eating barnacle’s whoreson is in charge of this shit-swilling lot of goatfuckers?”
In JUST the right Necrus accent, too.
I filled in the onomatopoeia of them all blinking in utter shock in my head.
“WELL?!” her voice rose, with a ki-laden grating edge to it that popped all the nerves on my skin.
A taller undead with about half its bones still covered in meat, dressed in a long and ragged leather coat that was probably not all that useful to a non-mariner who wouldn’t even feel the cold, shouldered his way from the astutely commanding rear of the force up to the front.
“Hey, now,” the undead pirate replied in a rolling Aluvian accent. “Now there’s a right proper woman. Wasn’t expecting one of the living to know proper manners hereabouts now.” What passed for a smile was pretty gruesome, but Kris wasn’t fazed at all, marching right on up to him as black and white flames touched with gold Lost Lights swirled up her arm.
He flinched back as she stopped within sword’s reach, his crew taking a wary step back from him and making him glance at them in shock that they’d so easily be forced back... which was just what she wanted to do.
“You’re a bilge-cleaner stuck out here on sentry duty, barely being worth called a mate,” she judged with a disparaging note that seemed to make him shrivel in place. “You’re no more in charge than I am a crabmonger. Who commands you lot? Out with it, or I’ll give the lot of you to true death and go ask my questions in person!”
A rustle spread through them all as all their eyes fixed hungrily on her Sword. “True death, now, is it, Miss-?” I could hear jaws clicking, realized it was the equivalent of licking their lips, be it in fear or desire.
“A man introduces himself FIRST,” I interrupted from behind her. The empty eyes fixated on her and the rising and falling notes from Quaver flashed over to me, and the dozen wedges of black and silver annihilation now spinning around my hand.
There’d be no coming back from the half-dozen energies chiming around them, the gentle roar of Fire and tinkling Thunder worrying at the edges of their chained souls.
“I be Second Mate Harnzgo MacGuire of the Callibrae!” the leader pronounced quickly, waving his rusting cutlass to encompass the lot around him. “These be part of our crew, with a few recruits,” he added carefully.
“The MacGuires of Celdon, Vespuyal, or Argol?” Kris asked in a clipped voice.
There was actually a moment of hesitation. “Argol,” the mate finally admitted, staring at her in some shock.
“Is your grandmother Callito, Emerelda, or Nina?” Kris went on calmly, further shaking him that she knew the major branches of the family.
“Me mother’s mother was Emerelda, me father’s mother was Callito,” he admitted after a shaky moment.
“Oh, you’re the sixth son of Jamos and Isbelda, the one the family doesn’t talk about, going out to sea instead of being a proper rancher,” Princess Kristi sniffed, and the sailor undead gawked in shock despite himself as I just smirked in silence. “My mother is of the MacShaunessey’s of Hausser’s End, but she was blacknamed because she married a MacRugal from Omar’s Point and they went up to the mountains to have a family there.”
Her smile grew very wide at that point. Her teeth gleamed. Those dead men stared at the show of almost divine beauty, utter savagery, and Cursemark all agleam.
“Aye, THAT MacRugal,” she stated in no uncertain terms. “Although he never used his family name in Celdon, given he was also blacknamed for not tilling the soil. They just called him Commander.”
The whole crew of Isparian pirates took a step back from her, and rustles that were the equivalent of choking sounds came from dry or absent throats.
“You, ye’re the daughter of Commander Briggs?” the second mate rasped in somewhere between disbelief, horror, and terror.
“That would be His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Briggs, Ruler and Hammer of the Isparian Empire and all of its seas!” I stated in no uncertain terms, my words ringing with Truth, rising to my feet and smacking them with Heartsong and a complex melody in Necrus from my Shards as accompaniment. “ON YOUR KNEES, dogs! You speak to Her Imperial Highness, Princess Kristie Rantha of the House of Briggs, and if you dare give her any more disrespect, this night you FEED THE LAND!”
Crown flared unwhite, Gold, Banefire black, Arcane blue-white, Icy crystal-white, crackling violet Lightning, glass-tinkling Thunder, and glorious multi-hued Holy fires, all of them boiling from the artful carving of its head, down my arm and to my other hand, seething about the waiting Shards there ready to end them all.
There was only a moment of hesitation as they digested that, looked at her, and then to a one, even the ones who weren’t Aluvian, they all rattled and creaked and went down on one knee to her.
Somehow, Kristie’s toothed smile got even wider.
“Begging, begging your leave, Your Highness,” the thoroughly-intimidated undead pirate stammered, suddenly aware he was really in a situation out of his depth. “News from the old lands, it be traveling a bit slow, especially these last few years.” He didn’t dare to look up at her, either. “The Commander, he got himself a promotion now, did he?”