Despite the Throne’s pledges to help, Benjamin was still saddened and out of sorts when they left the woods just before sunrise. By the time the sun showed a clear view of the grove, all the little lanterns had become leaves once more, and the gate that they’d entered through was only scraggly underbrush.
Had it always been like that? He wondered. Had the fae magic changed their perception of the natural world, or had it warped that world into something unnatural.
Benjamin couldn’t say. Even after all this time with the fae, they still bordered on incomprehensible, and tonight had only cast their differences in even starker relief. Children? How can I have children? Benjamin raged in his head. Would they age as quickly as their mother had? Would they die of old age in a year or two? Would he die before he could meet them?
Their strange garments lasted just long enough to take them off and put their proper clothes back on, but as soon as that happened, whatever magic had been used to construct them faded into leaves and bark. By the time they departed, there was no evidence they’d ever been there, save perhaps the crater in the center of the grove. He was half tempted to go check to see if it had turned into a pond or something but let it go.
His head spun at all of these ideas, even as they reclaimed their clothes and horses and went back to their camp, and it was only the exhaustion of being up all night that finally allowed him to sleep. Still, when they woke up near evening, everyone else was excited that the plan was still on track, and for their sake he pretended to be too.
The following day, they marched west. It wasn’t exactly toward the opposing army. Instead, they aimed to come around behind them slightly. That forced them to cross into the burn scar that the Rhulvin left in their wake the day after that.
After spending so long in the Sea of Grass, it was an intimidating sight. It was like a line had been drawn by some giant. On one side there were six foot tall stalks of wavering grass, and on the other, there were only ash covered flatlands.
Well, actually, it wasn’t quite so simple as that. If it had just been ashen ground, it would have been easier to bear. Instead, as they moved forward, getting ever closer to the Summoner Lords and their legions, they saw the signs of life that had once been here. That took many forms, from the heaped bones of the almost-buffalos that Benjamin had once almost been stampeded by and the shells of several of the giant boulder turtles to whole mounded villages of prariedog-kin.
None of it might have been human life, but all of it had been wondrous and, so far as they knew, peaceful. “This isn’t our fault,” Matt said suddenly, surprising him.
“Why would I think any of this is our fault?” Benjamin asked. “We might burn down a few acres when we fight these assholes, but this? It would be like clear-cutting a forest just to watch it burn. It's so arrogant… So wasteful…”
“Well, you tend to find a way to blame yourself for most things,” Matt smiled, obviously happy to see that Benjamin wasn’t taking this to heart.
He was though, just not the way that Matt thought he was. Matt was worried that he looked at all this and saw the damage as inevitable backlash from their little revolution. If we hadn’t started fighting them, then none of this would have happened.
While that was true on its face, it was more than a little naive. The truth was that they should have crushed them utterly. The truth was that they should have spread his little virus so far and wide that their entire empire had collapsed in a single day before they had any time to figure out and patch the vulnerability.
That was on him, but he couldn’t have possible known what he did now, so he didn’t beat himself up too much over it. Because in the next day or two, he was going to end this. He and Matt, along everyone else, were going to defeat these bastards and drive them from the east entirely.
Getting to and fighting them on the world island was a whole other struggle, of course, and he had a pretty good plan on how to establish that beachhead, but that wasn’t a today problem. For now, simply pushing them out of the fertile east would be enough to strike a terrible blow against them.
To listen to the centaurs and other strange creatures they’d met on this trip, the world was divided up almost by elements. In the north, winter reigned forever, and the farther north you went, the colder it got. That was just as true in the south, where supposedly if you went far enough from the inner sea, it was just an endless desert dotted by erupting volcanos. Neither was particularly fertile and if the Prince’s memories of his time on the world island were to be believed, there would be millions of Rhulvin there.
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Feeding millions of mouths took a lot of food. While the sea certainly did it’s part, on the islands of the west, where water ruled, here in the east, where the element of wood dominated, was the only place that these parasites could really build up industrial scale operations.
Those days were over, Benjamin thought with certainty. They just didn’t know it yet.
He would have thought that the little shards of the Prince’s soul that were merged with his own would have made him more hesitant to crush the Rhulvin, but instead, there was only a sense of nihilistic anger there, and it blended with Benjamin’s own righteous indignation to create a cold, calculating need to destroy the Summoner Lords once and for all.
Even though his heart was set on a reckoning, though, that didn’t stop the parade of damage they saw as the army advanced. If anything, the further they went, the more destruction was visible, but that was a small price to pay to approach their enemy from what they hoped was the vulnerable rear of the massive formation they’d be facing.
They marched in a tight formation, and even with a giant illusionary wall in front of them to hide their numbers from the most likely direction, he still felt intensely vulnerable. This was endless flat ground, and any pickets or screening forces could easily see them from the sides or the rear. Not to mention the dust. Benjamin’s screen drained enough mana from his focus as it was, and there was no easy way to make it wider or taller without burning a lot more power.
“We’ll just have to make do with the scouts we have,” Matt said with a shrug when Benjamin talked about it. He couldn’t disagree. Not even if that was a determination that would be tested later that day.
They were marching through a burn-scarred formation that the Centaurs called The Pipes of Brayean when the alarm was raised. Apparently, the slender chimneys that rose up in delicate hexagonal patterns had been the entrance and exit to a city beneath the earth filled with fairies and pixies. They were almost certainly dead or fled now, though, and given how most of the delicate crystalline towers had been knocked over and crushed, he couldn’t imagine the devastation that was hidden beneath their feet.
Their guide was just explaining the random music that the winds would make when the gusts danced across the giant structures like God's own pan flute when the distant horn of one of the scouting parties sounded. For a moment, Benjamin thought that it was just another distant pillar, adding its sad note to the mournful, discordant tune that surviving pillars played. As it got louder, though, it resolved itself into two blasts. One long and another short. Something was coming.
Looking for them, he could see a handful of horses on the horizon riding toward them. He instantly realized that those were their men, but it wasn’t until the thing behind them started picking them off as it gave chase that he understood what the danger was.
Behind them, barely visible through the dust, was one of those translucent jellyfish demons, that they’d encountered more than once. A Soulstealer. The name sprang to his mind unbidden from all of those lectures on diabolism that he remembered, even if he’d never attended them.
It rippled pink and purple as it flickered through the cloud of ash behind the riders like an angry thunderhead. Somewhere, they’d caught the attention of a Summoner Lord at a minimum, and almost certainly a larger patrol.
Matt began to call orders, and the army began to spread out. Bunched up this closely it was intensely vulnerable to any number of devastating attacks. Front lines formed, calvary moved out to flanking positions, and most importantly, those few that had proved able to shoulder a summoning spell or two got ready.
Benjamin could see the spreading out behind the lines flanked by a handful of soldiers that guarded them. Benjamin considered calling forth a Moray Dragon and ending the creature before it even started, but even if he did that, it still wouldn’t reach the Soulstealer before it had finished off that group of scouts, so he resisted the urge to tip his hand, just as he’d told everyone else to. Instead, reflecting on what might be a good match against the thing, he summoned a Nether Shark and sent it off swimming through the sky before he turned to Matt.
“I think this is where I get off,” he said, trying and failing to keep things light.
“You sure, Benjamin?” Matt asked. “It doesn’t always have to be you, you know. Not the way you’ve explained the plan to me. Miku could do almost as much damage all by—”
“We’re doing this,” Benjamin said in a tone that brooked no argument. “Everyone agreed to the plan. I got in, fuck up their command and control, and then you unleash hell. If we do this right, we save countless lives.”
“And if we do it wrong, you die,” Matt nodded.
“We can do everything right today, and by tomorrow we could still all be dead,” Benjamin said. “Tomorrow is promised to no one, so worry more about Emma and less about me, okay?”
The two of them shook hands, then Benjamin briefly waved at the other two before he hoped down from his turtle, and he moved closer to the back of the train to find his bound Rahksha and her host. It was time to finish this once and for all.