Zhanuk soared high on the wind. He hated the desert. He hated the sand. He hated the sun. He hated the hot and arid wind. And, most of all, he despised the random creatures that lived in their burrows under the sand or in their caves in their mesas. He had nearly been shot down on four separate occasions by random creatures of that world called Granulous.
He perched atop a high mesa to catch his breath. His target was right in front of him. It was a fortress of sandstone pressed together from the whipping sands with a fleet of those ‘skiffs’ moored in a circle around it. He was to watch the soon-to-be battle between the local forces and the minions of En’gem’ia.
He thought back to the message from his boss, Bi’lug’nath, and wondered what the big deal was. It was another one of En’gem’ia’s Hives invading a world. Bi’lug’nath had plenty of soldiers, children, and the like that fought against En’gem’ia’s. For some reason this Hive was special.
He was a curious sort, always seeking answers— it was part of the reason why he was chosen to perform this task— and this little mystery was something he did not want to just let go into obscurity. He decided to use the ability he had trained using all of his life to solve the mystery. It was a soul-based ability called ‘projected senses,’ but he preferred the more mystical name ‘astral projection.’
Tethering his soul to his body and leaving the confines of his flesh, he rose above the mesa’s rock with the weightlessness he had come to associate with leaving his body. His first order of business was to check his physical body’s surroundings. He stared at his body, the raven-like, small bird that he was, and looked around. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing around him. Just rock and sand. He narrowed his eyes in the way he always did when he was happy and flew off.
Without the shackles of a physical body still trapped in mortality, he was able to move faster than was physically possible. He arrived at the Hive in little time. To his eyes, the Hive was average in all things, little differing from what other Hives he had seen.
Grumbling, he dove through the hundreds of walls and dove directly into the forgeheart’s cage at the center of the Hive. It was, again, normal. Save for one, massive detail. There was an E-X model Clockwork sitting on a little metal couch reading some book he did not care to take note of. Just as soon as he saw her, she seemed to see him. Her head whipped to his place next to the forgeheart, seemingly analyzing him. He did not move. He did not shudder. He simply let her see him for what he was. A little birdie, so to speak.
With a chuckle, she grinned at him and shooed him away as if he were a normal bird. He rolled his eyes, a gesture he was almost certain she saw, and flew away. ‘That’s one question answered,’ he thought. There was little doubt that that world would fall. An E-X unit was the equivalent of an ancient dragon. They were only deployed by En’gem’ia when something vital was happening. He suddenly understood his role in being there.
The only remaining question was what that vital thing was. So, Zhanuk dove back into the Hive in search of that vital piece. He found it quickly. After stumbling upon a mana pressure shield, he discovered the heart of another E-X unit, her body halfway constructed. He made a mad dash out of there, ignoring anything else that could catch his interest.
Now he knew why he was sent there and what was happening. The answer terrified him, because En’gem’ia, the Great Goddess of Certain Probability, made a tactical error. He could have sworn that there were a few prophecies about the end of all things with her making a critical error being the first step.
Those were jokes, but they may as well have been real. The goddess was able to make predictions based on her knowledge, and with that behind her, she put one of her recovering worldborn children in the line of fire with only one other E-X unit to protect her. Something was going on. There had to be some trick or plan that he did not know about, but he had no clue what it was. His first option was to go back to the Hive and try to spy on a Clockwork unit with as much soul-power as an ancient dragon.
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That was, he could do that if he was mad, or possibly suicidal.
His second option was to return to his body and try to contact Bi’lug’nath and ask for his opinion. He could do that if he really wanted to, playing it off as searching for the most optimal place to keep an eye on things, but there was the possibility that his boss got mad at him for snooping beyond what he was told to. As if a spy’s job was not to find information.
And the possibility of Sa’ar’kik and Kel’rk’ath finding him and smiting him with some painful and no-doubt fatal curse was almost certain.
That left him with a third, much less certain-to-pay-off option. Spying on the local forces of Granulous. If he was honest with himself, he had not interacted with normal mortals for a few years by that point. It was always with those liminal mortals, like the E-X units or ancient dragons or liches or powerful mana beasts or whatever else was in their weight class, so to say.
Spying on normal mortals was something somewhat fresh for him, so he wasted no time in heading back to his body. He decided to spy using his physical body, just to have a bit of fun and live on the edge a bit.
Flying in from his perch atop the mesa, something almost immediately became obvious. There was a lich present. He had run into a few liches in this world alone, likely the influence of Kel’rk’ath and his hand in their odd system of mutations, and none had been around normal mortals. They had always been with their death knights, living in isolated towers, or roaming the desert as mindless ‘wild’ liches.
Instead of being either of those, the lich he sensed was simply on the deck of one of the skiffs, in… adamantite armor. Overseeing the training of eleven death knights. Speaking with a small group of mortals. The whole image reeked of godly influence, so he decided to perch atop the skiff’s stern tower and listen. He used a bit of mana, enough to have an effect, but little enough to be imperceptible to even the most attentive mortals, and waited while listening to the lich talk in her funny, almost bubbly voice.
It was after an hour or so that he realized something. She was, absolutely, not a minion of the local gods. She was, though, guided by them, but she was not, by any stretch, the direct creation of Kel’rk’ath. That, in and of itself, left plenty of unanswered questions, not the least of which being where in the deep woods she got enough adamantite to make a full set of armor. He was about to throw his wings up and give up when he noticed a small, very familiar armband embedded in her chest.
It was the Armband of the Champion. The uncreatively titled artifact of Ei’vit’net’s personal design.
He almost considered for a moment the idea that the lich was receiving the help of the lazy god, but Zhanuk dismissed it immediately. Kel’rk’ath and Sa’ar’kik hated that god with a near-burning passion. Though, it was siblingly hate, so much less intense than it could have been.
It was weird, watching that lich walk around like a mortal and barely spare a glance at the incongruity of the whole situation. Eventually, a masked woman said something to her as she held open a small notebook and her skull deformed into a wide grin. It was hardly abnormal for liches to seek a way of physical expression beyond body language, but it was another thing to add to his list of odd things about her; she sought a way to express her emotions before she sought an army of the dead.
After a few moments, one of the undead carried a box powered by a mana dynamo up from the lower decks of the skiff and placed it on the ground, opening it before his mistress. White mist spilled from the box and the contents almost made Zhanuk double-take. It looked like the type of clockwork unit one of the more unruly E-X series units would make. It was a local monster with the gutted frame of an Infiltrator grafted onto it. She grinned, ignoring the disgusted groans of the few mortals who had dared look inside. She raised her arm and, with a flourish, wove together a spell. It had, at least, five mana types. There was the reanimation, a form of linking mana, a power booster mana, and a couple others he was too slow to catch. Once the spell was complete, the lich marveled at it for a few moments before casting it.
The effect after casting was immediate. The creature stood with a fluidity only found in Ei’nat’ish’s seductresses and bowed before the lich, hand on its chest. The lich began to laugh and grinned like a madwoman. She laughed and laughed, hugging the newly-created undead with happiness. Said undead simply sat there, looking around confused as its mistress hugged it.
Yet another detail to add to the pile. Normally, no matter what type of mana used to raise undead, personality of any kind takes years to form. Apparently, that was not the case for these odd ones. They seemed like fully-formed seedlings of Bi’lug’nath’s own creation.
Having seen enough, Zhanuk took off to the skies, flying high and quickly landing on the original mesa he had rested on before. He still hated the sand, but he was no longer wondering why he was there. This battle would be interesting to say the least, if not utterly predictable.