Chapter Forty - Ridgeside Roam

Alex and I were making good time heading north and east. Mostly this was attributable a single spell.

I'd cast a spell early in our travels called Wind Wander. It was a spell of my own devising, though it was heavily inspired by a spell called Wind Walk.

Wind Walk, a transmutation spell of some complexity, allowed a druid to turn themselves and perhaps some willing allies into formless, gaseous entities that could move under their own will. Being druidic magic, however, the spell had some glaring weaknesses. Notably, it required a druid to work.

Being an inferior caster like a druid was, of course, entirely unacceptable.

And so I developed Wind Wander. The spell was quite similar to Wind Walk in many ways, only instead of turning one into a formless mass of wind held together by hopes and dreams and a misunderstanding of magic born from an over-zealous adoration of nature, Wind Wander allowed one to become a windy, ethereal version of themselves capable of travelling great distances with rapid bursts of speed.

It was a preferred method of travelling long distances, second only to any form of teleportation and of course, a brisk morning walk.

The wander part of the name wasn't a misnomer... well, not quite. I did call it that because I wanted to preserve the alliteration, but I also found that travelling from A to B without any detours felt wasteful.

Our travels followed along the banks of a sea whose name I was unfamiliar with. I suspected that some of the changes in the land that I had once been familiar with were due to a fundamental change in the tides.

The sea here was perhaps a little deeper than it might have been back in my day. A necrometre's difference, with a few thousand years of erosion and exploitation, turned a world that ought to have been familiar into one that was distinctly not.

Not that I'd spent any time in our exact location, mind.

"Father," Alex's wispy voice said from right next to me. The maid paused as I did, skirts fluttering out ahead for a moment before Alex grabbed them and wrestled their windy clothes into submission. "I believe we're approaching Opalhorn."

"Oh?" I asked.

Alex nodded, then gestured ahead and to my left. It only took a moment for me to notice what was different.

Out in the sea, not too distant from the coast, was a single square-sailed vessel. A fishing ship, judging by the nets trolling behind it and the small figures onboard.

"Well spotted," I said. "We must indeed, be closer to the city now."

Alex beamed. "How will papa handle this city? Are we going to burn it down?"

"Only if it proves troublesome. I believe we'll use discretion first and violence second."

"Oh, that's good. Burning down a city would be very dirtying."

I grinned a skeleton's grin. "Yes. And it might sully our reputation as well! Oh hoh!"

"I see. Good pun, Father," Alex said.

I nodded and patted Alex on the back. It was nice to have a pun be acknowledged, of course, but half the fun was in seeing someone suffer from having heard it. Positive acknowledgement was... well, it wasn't all that bad, so I'd refrain from complaining.

"Did you happen to learn anything about Opalhorn over these last few weeks?" I asked.

Alex considered it with a tap to the chin. "Not very much. I did listen to a lot of gossip out in the market places I visited, as a good maid does, but while a lot of people spoke about the Flame's Heart sect, not many spoke about Opalhorn itself. The city seems rather distant and isolated."

I nodded along. I'd studied a map of the Jade Empire, of course, and I could safely say that Opalhorn was likely one of the most isolated of the cities in the empire... or it would be, if there wasn't easy access to such a wide expanse of water.

By ship, it was likely possible to reach several northern cities, but the maps painted Opalhorn as being somewhat inland as opposed to right on the coast.

That proved true as Alex and I swept up the side of a hill and reformed from the wind at the top. There was, in fact, a small town by the coast. It was nestled up against a space where the rocky shore naturally gave way to a small beach. Some three dozen homes, a couple of small warehouses, a humble bit of farmland, and several long piers that reached out into the waters where few fishing vessels were moored.

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A well-trodden road slipped out of the village and headed eastwards, further inland. There were a few homes along that road, cottages, hunting shacks, a few small farmsteads. It seemed as though the road was a safe-enough route that people had started to live along it.

I imagined that in a century or two, if all went well for Opalhorn, then this little town would become a little city, and this road would grow into a much larger one. But that would depend on whether or not the city would burn.

Humming a jaunty tune, Alex and I made our way down the hillside and eventually came onto the road itself. It wasn't paved, but the road was well-packed and easy to traverse. We even crossed a wagon on our way east.

I, of course, gave the man on the wagon a jaunty wave. He stared, but didn't seem as panicked as some others on seeing an undead. Perhaps it was my suit and bowtie, or Alex's careful, maidly gait? Or perhaps there was something else at play here.

I added a strong tally to the 'something else' field when Alex and I came up another hill and were able to make out the city itself in the distance. By then it was well past midday and the sun was starting to dip towards the horizon.

Opalhorn was, in the grand scheme of things, a rather small city. That was normal, seeing as how it was so far from everything. That didn't bother me. What did, was the city's layout.

It was likely something that wouldn't have been familiar to many people living at the moment, and the layout had... shifted somewhat organically over time. Likely new homes and businesses pushing others aside and the city had expanded past its walls.

The city was surrounded by long wall segments. Not circular walls, as I'd seen in Shitake and Yu Xiang, but straight segments that were layered, a thicker wall on the outside, made of packed earth and carved stoneworks, and a thinner wall just within, close enough that someone athletic might be able to jump from one to the other.

The walls encircled the village, but they also jutted out in thick spikes. I squinted, then tossed up an observational spell, just to confirm my suspicions.

From high above the city, the pattern became a lot clearer. Opalhorn's walls were like a five-pointed star, with several wall segments leaving gaps between them that were plugged further in.

"Interesting," I said.

"Hmm? What's interesting, bone father?" Alex asked.

"The walls are built by our standards," I said. "This could be a garrison fortress that was turned into a city."

"Really? Would a garrison fortress last this long?"

That was a valid question. I suspected that one wouldn't.

This was the kind of construction that I'd found worked best when one had an army of the undead. It required a lot of digging, the laying of many trenches and ditches, as well as the building up of many thick walls and palisades, but a properly sized undead army could construct something like this overnight.

This design allowed those within to make the most of hit and run tactics. The false breaches could lure enemies into the range of particularly powerful undead, and the wide walls allowed some degree of protection from siegeworks and artillery magic.

The undead won wars of attrition, which always put us at a strong advantage when being besieged.

Opalhorn had been designed to my specifications. Its walls, at least. The city was expanding beyond these now, but there seemed to be a gap between the walls and the outer city.

"I can think of a few reasons why a city would be designed this way," I said. "Obviously it's just a decent design, but... I feel a tickle in my bones, dear Alex! I believe a bit of subtlety might serve us well here. Are you ready to play the part of the merchant's maid once more?"

"Oh course, always," Alex said with a curtsy.

"Fantastic! Now, let's go see what's up with Opalhorn."

***