The surface of the former Summit Island was uneven. It shattered when it fell, and while the pass of centuries had eased the edges, the larger rock outcroppings were still presenting their naked, barren blackness to the cloudy sky. Forests have occupied any space they could, but the soil was still thin and the woods were separated by swathes of rolling meadows, covered by hardy vegetation, notably different to the flora of areas further south, outside of the wrecked island.
The sun was already low on the horizon when Arri appeared at the edge of the largest wooded area around, likely a former centre of agriculture. The Zombie Forest. She was after a long, boring day of work, work which couldn't have been done by a dumb skeleton with a broom! She was carrying a bag - not her Baggers, just a common bag - filled with mushrooms. It didn't take her too long to find the bald spot with the loose soil. She squinted from under the curtain of her black hair, the sun outside was still too bright for her eyes. There, there's my robe. Approaching the discarded piece of dark garment, she squinted further, towards the Forest. Yeah I made a promise to not go there yet, a promise I fully intended to break, but… I have these mushrooms to bring back, and… I smell of food and alcohol, and… Nah, let's try with the prisoners first. I'll return here stronger and therefore I'll be able to learn even more.
She smiled over a pang of longing to just simply wait here a few hours and do it… Instead, she turned away from the forest and marched back to the Tower. It was almost the end of her workday, and a different night of research was in front of her. Soon enough she passed the "dumb skeleton with a broom" and carried her mushroom haul into the kitchen.
"The Five Tenants of Ilussion," she muttered to herself a passage from a book, while cleaning the mushrooms. The room was illuminated by magic… but rather faintly.
"Stealth, Stalking, Confusion, Diversion and Jamming."
Attuning herself to stay undetected in this new environment - that of a prison, seemed easy. After all, she was feeding, and sometimes talking to, Tower's prisoners for a long time. It was a part of her duties, next to those of cooking, cleaning, washing, foraging, maintaining and, supposedly, learning Xaldaz's trade. A part of her duties which she still had to fulfill today ooor maybe slightly after midnight, I can still go to the Forest... But developing the zombie dance took her years, and here she wanted to succeed in hours. Therefore she needed to do it by the book. Well, maybe not literally...
"Stealth is the art of reducing one's presence. It involves such techniques as special manners of movement, camouflage, silent walking, removing odors."
It was the basic of all illusion, and it did resonate - Resonate? Strongly with the profession of a maid, for the most part. However, Arri rejected the idea of seeking perfect invisibility in this aspect alone. Approaching it was costly and it had serious limitations.
"Stalking is the art of being empathic with your target. You must know where target's attention is directed and avoid it. Outperceiving the opponent also allows to react to their actions before they threaten your illusion. Techniques involve avoiding fields of vision, keeping leeward, avoiding disruption of target's routine to not raise suspicion."
This was already getting more interesting. Why cover all your tracks, if your target can only see some of them? Better to focus your resources on these. Living beings generally do what they have been doing until something changes. This for example meant, that if her V.U.P. Maid Subskill works once to cover her presence, it will keep her concealed in target's mind until something changes.
"Confusion is the art of adjusting one's presence in a way, where its components are confused for something non-alarming. Examples include adjusting movement to the background noise, dressing up, covering oneself with a familiar scent."
All of this she had practiced in the Zombie dance, the steps and smells formed the core part of it. Visual cues were probably unimportant, but even if the dead couldn't see she wasn't naked like them, they could certainly smell her clothes.
"Diversion is the art of distracting attention of the target away from what one wants to stay hidden. It usually involves sending strong signals to any combination of senses: alarming, curious or otherwise enticing, but it can be more subtle. The easiest diversion of all is showing the target what they want to see. It is an art bordering with the discipline of Bluff, where it is often used to misdirect conversation."
Directing conversation is a tall order for someone, so to speak, short, unremarkable (she even heard the word 'ugly!') and with poor vocal power. Her command of spoken language was imperfect as well. However, the physical aspects of diverting attention were easy to understand. The smell of food, for example, didn't only distract the hungry, it also made one hungry!
"Jamming is the art of directly interfering with target's perception. Sand in the eye is the most common example, and waiting for a time of the day when the enemy is the most tired is a combination between this art and Stalking. Many techniques exist to manipulate target's awareness by manipulating conditions and emotions, involving such a diverse array of means as poisons, starvation, deprivation, habituation, light shows, artistic performance and more."
This required controlling the environment. A definite advantage in the prison situation, and something she wasn't a stranger to either. Contacts with prisoners often involved Arri's attempts to ease them into the knowledge of approaching demise… It was sad, really, but that was how the Tower always worked.
Her mushrooms finished, Arri stood up and turned towards a pot of soup for the prisoners. She made it earlier that day and left it to cool down. It was based on common vegetables, brought here along with the bread by a local, every couple of months. However, its main ingredient was the processed meat. Edible plants were rare in this world. According to the oldest books, most of them have died out after the cataclysm. Arri's Gnome heritage gave her a slight advantage here. She could sustain herself on Elden Lillies, a rare, white flower specific to Summit Island, normally considered inedible and slightly poisonous by humans. It took her years to establish these thick bushes in her garden. Their sweet, nutritious nectar allowed her to skip human meals she considered the most unsavory. Like the insects, no matter how processed.
She grabbed the pot and headed out of the kitchen. It was quite a heavy pot for her, and the passages were dark, but thankfully not too dark for her to see anything. Besides, she could probably walk them with her eyes closed. The Tower was built around a central, spiral staircase. Instead of having floors, it had rooms connected in regular intervals to the stair landings. Only the first floor, where Arri lived, was more or less "normal". It also had…
Skeletons in the walls. They were leering at her, the bone a pale shade of gray barely visible in the dark. They didn't scare Arri in the slightest. They have been always there, and most of the bones they were made from, she had… procured with her own hands. The skeletons were sitting in shallow niches. It was too dark to see the network of magical lines which recharged their mana (and preventing its escape, to a degree) while they were standing guard in these niches. These young undead were the cornerstone of the very existence of the Tower and Xaldaz's greatest art… however Arri couldn't have missed how their upgrades have all but stopped several years ago. A single skeleton was good for maybe a day of work, but when periodically recharged by magical ore, it could endure until its bones were broken. They were utilized to do various "jobs" outside, as Xaldaz described it, and for the jobs Xaldaz was paid, for the large part, in magical ore, which made the business spinning and the Tower functioning. Recharging skeletons and keeping all the creature comforts running amounted to a burn of 20 mana per day. The juiciest of life roots Arri collected was worth 16-18. She felt a pang of disappointment. A month of preparations, and my whole haul would only power the Tower for half a week… But were we short of ore again… She remembered Xaldaz's worried, wrinkled, skinny, goat-bearded face. Back then, he had to stop charging some of the skeletons (which inevitably led to them disintegrating three days later, when their internal life mana ran out). One of the tasks he entrusted to her was monitoring mana levels in the system. It was easy for her to replace some of the ore with these roots and see archmage's relief when the ore was lasting longer than expected these thin years. That was leaving the last piece out, the source of the bones.
She lifted her pot and started to climb the stairs. The pain in her arms would start in a moment, but it was possible to ignore it. She rounded the whole tower four times before the increase in light told her she was approaching the only area of the Tower which had doors. The winding staircase led further up, with a row of cells on each side. At the very end of it, there was another door, to the topmost level of the Tower, the observatory. But Xaldaz had the only key and never allowed her to enter there.
The prison floor was in an especially run-down state. It was quite humid here, as the rain found its way inside through cracked walls. A large arc leading to a terrace, outside was letting the gray light of the late evening to ooze inside. However, it wasn't letting in as much cold air as one would think. When Xaldaz found the Tower, he couldn't really repair it, but he did put the magical wiring all over it, one of its functions was to keep the wind away. It made the whole place a hell of a lot easier to heat in the winter. The terrace was one of her favorite parts of the tower. For this floor's inhabitants it was the last glimpse of the outside world. People could walk up the stairs, but it would be hard to haul the bodies if the prison was located underground… Besides the underground was mostly collapsed.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Almost forty large cells were arranged here. Arri saw wooden bowls in front of some of them. If a prisoner wanted to eat, he would hurl the bowl out through the opening under the door. Prisoners' other… business was dealt with by the holes in the floor. Other holes, put on both higher ends of the sinking floor were constantly expensing clean water. The mana-powered plumbing never clogged, not even with blood and viscera…
The art of dissecting corpses was another thing Xaldaz had taught her. But, unlike his lessons about magic circles, these ones have stuck. For her it had much deeper meaning than for him. People whom she dealt with were deemed to be evil and deserving to be killed, but there was something good in everyone… even if sometimes it was nothing more than spare parts and lubricant, and fertilizer which allowed the plants in her garden to grow so bountiful in tasty food. What was coming after, the making of a skeleton, was Xaldaz's business and took place in his lab below. He taught her enough about his Magic Circles - [Spiritcall] and [Soul-linking] that she could perform raising the undead by herself, possibly, but she wasn't especially enamored with the idea of replicating his sort of magic.
For this knowledge, she still had to pay by cleaning these cells to wipe all the blood, amongst her other duties. She did care to clean them well, to avoid prisoners getting anymore sick than they would anyway become if held for too long.
Xaldaz often took contracts on specific individuals that were to disappear without a trace. These were exceptional in how they were high level, they sometimes even had a Class. It was risky to keep them alive so Xaldaz preferred to kill them on the spot. Besides, capturing a prisoner and herding him back to the Tower would be difficult, even with Xaldaz's manual control over the skeletons.
The usual prisoners were people sent here as a part of the payment; they invariably were people marked for death by someone else, for a vast array of misconducts, Arri couldn't, for the most part, fully understand, despite her interest in crime. Or, like Rita suggested, they weren't misconducts at all, and Xaldaz's customers were organized crime themselves. Officially, they bore such titles as 'Frontier Militia' or 'Peace Judges'. Additional theory they both agreed on was that people were going mad all the time, and were turning to crime for irrational reasons.
Arri started to fill the bowls from her kettle, walking up from landing to landing, when she suddenly saw an arm stuck under a door, its hand holding a bowl.
And there's those people. Recently, the Tower had far too many prisoners, and it was due to a bandit attack, the first one in twenty months. It was hard to imagine how a sentient being could be reduced to something as primitive and dumb. The bandits took from everyone, preferably from the weak, but the tale of Xaldaz's wealth caused this group to try their luck here. They immediately surrendered and started to beg for mercy, when the skeletons slain a few of them and, more importantly, cut off their retreat route. In the case of bandits, hastening the end of their earthly existence was the only just thing to do.
And this was a thing she was obliged to deliver in the end, as well. In a way, Arri believed the prisoners were lucky. Their existence was prolonged by weeks or months they spent here, already dead to the society… but cared for, if only because weakened bodies were poor for necromancy. Cost of food was not an issue. The Skeletal minions were quite good at killing those wolves and gigantic insects living nearby. Which meant that fresh meat was available on top of produce from Arri's garden and the supplies Xaldaz was receiving from outside. However, processing the insect meat into something edible was a challenge even for someone with her experience.
The prisoners had reasonably comfortable rooms, with a view outside. They had time to meditate on their life choices. She fed them and repaired their clothes. And eventually, she also delivered the drugged meal. Poisoning was right off, Xaldaz wouldn't have his skeletons with abnormal mana caused by this, so he told her to slit their throats in their sleep. Unasked, she made sure the sleeping drug was as pleasurable as possible. She developed it from the red-capped mushrooms, testing them on herself. She was always adding a small amount of the drug to prisoners' food. It made their existence calmer, it staved off the madness, and… it made their final meal seem to taste no different than the usual.
"Hey! I know you're here, runt!", said the hand with a male voice. "Give me my meal!"
Arri rolled her eyes. "I will do it when you take the hand away!" she squeaked back.
"Just give it to me already!... Hey! Hey, where are you going? Come back here, you!..." Protested the hand when Arri turned away after hearing the answer. A typical bandit idea of a cunning plan… The smart ones played dead, and the unruly ones made noise instead, but these were dealt with by Xaldaz himself and he wasn't nice when he got mad.
First observation: food is the core focal point of the prisoners. Food will never be ignored. Food cannot ever be covered by invisibility in here. Therefore, it's only possible to use is as distraction.
She intended to fill bandit's bowl on her way back, provided it was with no hands attached to it, but by now she managed to advance three bowls up, all owned by less aggressive inhabitants, and arrived at the door of a person she knew much better.
"Hey, it's you, sister!" Exclaimed the male voice from inside. "Are you flying high? Flying high like all of us?"
Vyke was a vagrant. A few months ago, he slipped into the tower, fully naked. As he later explained, a group of aggressive people camped on his clothes when he was taking a bath, and he decided to make himself scarce instead of trying to retrieve his stuff. He also made several different explanations at other times, all of them contradictory. Skeleton guards raised alarm and Xaldaz caught him stealing food from the kitchen. The guy immediately surrendered. Arri admired his boldness. She wasn't at all sure that his deed deserved death penalty. But such things were decided by her "Master". She could keep rotating Vyke out of the dead pool time and time again, though. She hoped it could last indefinitely.
"Join us, join us, sister, in the waiting for the final curtain fall! Drugged you are as we, why do you insist on staying out, alone, on the other side of the door? Would you tell me you're too small for festivities? I see through you lies, you are not! I can see your blush!"
"Someone has to cook for you," she answered faintly.
"Flying high indeed you are! High on that idea you're our benevolent guardian, passing us to the great beyond?"
"Everyone has to pass, sooner or later…"
"Only you're not joining us - yet! Why the delay! Join our journey before you turn old and ugly! Well, more ugly than you are now, none of us is pretty, but you're the only girl around! What was that song of yours about getting buried naked? Don't you want to be buried naked and together?"
She smiled. "I'll do that before getting ugly, I promise," she answered, leaving. She could hear him eagerly grabbing the pot when she left. She wasn't exactly sure if what he meant was the ultimate nudity, that of a skeleton. But she didn't mean that herself, did she? As an animated skeleton… She shook her head. Observation two: the sound of someone being around, meaning, first of all, footsteps. It is linked to their fear of death, as it is to the expectation of food, and therefore it cannot be confused with the background.
The other interesting prisoner out of the dozen or so inhabitants of this floor was Onar. Not for who, but for what he was. The who was boring - he was sort of a big fish, owning an exceptionally bountiful farm a little away from the town. He came into some argument with it, the reason he ended up here. The interesting part about the fat farmer was how he somehow had a true Class, Landlord, and a high level in it, too. Xaldaz was boasting about that find for a month. He intended to make Onar into some sort of a special skeleton type he hasn't made in years.
Arri would love to learn about Classes, of course. But how to ask someone who was hating her? Someone who would not want to divulge secrets? Conducting such a conversation was far above anything she knew about talking to other people, inconceivable. Conducting it successfully in a way that will relay to her all the details… seemed even more impossible.
Onar yelled out to her when she was filling his bowl. "I demand to see Xaldaz right now! Take me to him!" His voice sounded very calm, authoritative and slightly annoyed. It carried a veiled threat. On a subconscious level, it made Arri feel hesitant about rebelling against it. It could lead to yelling and that she didn't like at all… But Arri knew this was one of his Class Skills at work. His Class… The thing she tried in the past was to drug him. When he was knocked out, she went into his cell. She undressed him first, like she always did in such cases, but instead of slitting his throat, she spent half of the night on careful examination of his body and the mana it emanated. However, she couldn't find any useful information, maybe except his predictably huge mana pool, roughly five times larger than hers or any other normal person's capacity. All she really gained was much better knowledge about his soul, but only in the capacity of using it - to track him down or make him into a skeleton, for example. To Resonate with him better, in general. In the light of his repulsive voice and personality, it wasn't something she wanted anyway.
Arri just shrugged off the feeling and ignored him. Feeding the prisoners, after all, was only the prelude to the research she planned. She entered one of the cells near the top, closed the door behind her, and started to remove her robe.
----------------------------------------
After the mass extinction event, the surviving species entered the fast-adaptation period. While the flora struggled, fauna expanded. This left the planet with a small assortment of plants, but with an abundant diversity of critters.
Three species are worth mentioning, all of which formed hive communities. Best prepared for survival situation, now they can be found all over the globe.
Myconids – their mutated sprout populating the humid territories, no longer deadly toxic nor mobile enough to hunt. Give them time, and a mushroom forest has a chance to surface.
Crawlers – a species of insectoids, once one of the most popular types of livestock in the world, nowadays one of the most dangerous predators. Gigantic in size, easily outgrowing humans in height, they dug deep in the earth, creating colonies the size of towns. Many carve uncovered riches hidden inside their nest, but not many have the resources required to eradicate them.
Finally, Rakes – rats with wings, now made flightless, but mutating with unprecedented speed and versality. Their multi-shaped colonies were everywhere – from farms breeding them for food, to the mountains where no other species could live. Big as a dragon, as small as a hummingbird – you imagine it, and the subspecies would most probably exist.
From the three, some types branched off so far away from their progenitors, that they became their own species. The lands were filled with their kind.
It was no surprise, then, that races of the world fed mostly on meat. Edible plants were a luxury, not necessity, as the creatures were enough to satisfy all bodily needs, bare one or two vitamins.
Thus, the history has come full circle. People reinvented hive farming, once employed by their distant predecessors. Feeding mostly on meat and using the often barely-domesticated animals as the first line of defense.