Zalia mulled over the dream in her mind as she went through the motions of her morning routine. She had no sense of time anymore, what was day or night, whether it was morning or evening but since she had just woken up, it was morning in her mind. The voice had sounded much like that of the voice spoken by Ro when he spoke. While that seemed to imply that the dream had come from the god who Ro represented, she couldn’t rule out its source being something more malevolent.
She had already decided the dream was something magical, sent by someone or something as a message. She rarely had dreams she remembered and even then only fuzzily yet this one lingered in detail within her mind. That was the main reason but it also stood out as something less like a dream and more of a message in the way that it held images she’d never seen. There were monsters which her own mind could never have come up with and a large prison ship floating through the sky which she’d never seen let alone heard about.
One of the sources she suspected of sending the dream was actually Zayes, the old leader of the Morning’s Shade and Juniper's husband. It was one of the logical choices, considering she knew him to be trapped in Cormaine somewhere and most definitely powerful enough to be capable of sending some sort of message like that. Obviously, there could be a whole host of things at play she didn’t know about. It wouldn't be out of character for her after all.
Deciding to put the dream to the back of her mind for the moment, she focused on her plans for what to do next. The now unguarded door to the second floor of the keep was her main plan for today but who knew where that would lead. It may be that she would run into another Silver ranked guard or two in the process and was tempted to wait until her anti-death ability came back up for that very reason. Now that she knew about the damage her healing did to them though, she could attack them with a few more abilities that didn’t require anything but sight, sometimes not even that, to do so.
Two of her druid abilities would be useful in that regards, both Healing presence and Protection of the Wilds being healing that together would probably be able to incapacitate a Bronze rank quite quickly based on how much it affected the Silver rank ones. In fact, her ability to clean up the city would be increased significantly by this discovery. She had a feeling that if a creature didn’t want her healing they could deny it or at least fight against it in some way. It was an intuitive feeling like many others she had about her own abilities and what that meant for the undead was they must have some inkling of their original self inside that wanted out. If they didn’t they would fight against the healing magic rather than seemingly accepting it.
This only reinforced her disposition towards clearing the undead in the city, to release the souls trapped in their decaying bodies. Initially it had been more so that she could level her abilities but that was now a dot point under the main text.
“Alright Boreal, want to look around a bit?” Zalia asked.
Boreal hopped up and walked to the door, waiting for Zalia to open it. Taking that as an affirmative, Zalia opened it up and they walked down the two stairwells to the second floor. They stepped through the destroyed door, pushing bits of splintered timber aside and entered the hallway beyond. Moving quickly to the end, Zalia peeked around the corner to see that the door was now unguarded as she had thought.
They walked up to it and Zalia stuck her head straight through the wood to see the other side. She only put her head through to catch a glimpse before pulling it back, the sensation odd but less so than the sight. When she passed through the wood with her eyes open it was like looking into a void she couldn't understand, the emptiness such that her eyes caught on nothing.
Inside the other room looked to be a sitting room with a few small tables spotted around the space each with comfortable looking couches to attend them. Leading off from the space were two doorways and most importantly, there were no guards. Opening the door and entering, Zalia noticed the other details like the lush carpet covering the stone floor and the wall decorations spanning from banners to paintings. One wall had a small cabinet that looked to house bottles of liquid within its bottom compartment fronted with a glass door. The top of it had a few jars with what once may have been appetising snacks but were now tiny ecosystems contained within.
Checking around the well preserved space but seeing nothing immediately of use she moved on and stuck her head through the rightmost door. It led into another small hallway with a few doors leading off and finding no guards there either, Zalia opened it up. She moved through the hallway and checked the first door on the right. As she stuck her head through she had to quickly retreat as a sword came flashing towards her. She summoned her sword trying to ignore her quickly beating heart and stepped to the side before walking through the wall. She had been able to identify her attacker as only Bronze and so wasn’t too worried as she reached the other side.
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Having caught her enemy unawares at the strange usage of the wall as a door, Zalia pushed her healing into the undead as she impaled it straight through on her sword. She forced all of her healing power into it, ignoring Boreal and her own health for the moment. She watched as the very flesh and bone making up the undead began disintegrating into chunks and even further into dust before her. It didn't take long, the undead almost unable to move and easy to dodge, before it turned entirely to dust in front of her eyes.
“That was significantly stronger than I expected,” Zalia thought.
Obviously it wasn't something she could do in an extended fight as she had to ensure she kept enough healing focused on Boreal and herself to ensure they wouldn’t succumb to the corruption themselves. Being able to quickly focus down an enemy or two that were particularly hard to get rid of while still being able to fight normally would be a large boon though.
She looked around the room and realised it was a bedroom much like the one in the tower, only a little larger and much better decorated. She saw nothing of use and so quickly moved on. The next room was much the same though with no undead in it so she moved past it to the door at the end of the hall. This turned out to be a much larger room that looked fit for a king. She soon realised it was exactly that as she noticed lush decorations, some of them paintings depicting two royal figures with kindly eyes. In one corner sat a writing desk and Zalia went over to peruse through the papers but found her ability to translate apparently didn’t stretch to whatever language this was.
Frustrated, she gathered a few of them to take back with her to her cave. Delphi told her that he couldn’t read them either but maybe one of the collective held the memory of the language. Hoping it were true, she moved on to the rest of the room but found nothing of value there either. It was mostly personal belongings of the apparent royal couple, keepsakes and things whose only value was in the sentiments of two long dead people.
She left those rooms and that corridor and returned to the sitting room, looking towards the other door. Checking that one in a similar manner she found that there was another corridor with doors splitting off. At the end of the hallway before a door however, stood another Silver guard in armour this time with a halberd at their side. She quickly ducked her head back and prepared for a fight. She didn't know if it had seen or heard her but she wasn’t about to wait and find out. She quickly summoned a few traps and placed them around the door, nudging Boreal to do the same.
As Boreal followed her instruction, Zalia summoned her bow and prepared to shoot at whatever entered the room. There were a few moments of silence before two footfalls sounded and the guard exploded through the door with shocking force. It immediately twisted in the air to land avoiding a bear trap but got snagged in a trip wire. Zalia put on Hunter’s mark and activated both Nature’s wrath and Protection of the Wilds, pushing Healing presence into it at the same time. She released arrows and began casting rituals on the creature as it struggled free of its cage.
It managed to break free but was severely wounded by the time it did, its flesh stripping away at the power of her healing magic. The nature of the counter-execute healing provided by Protection of the Wild’s protective shell meant it had taken constantly scaling damage from the ability. Summoned by Nature’s wrath, two wind elementals locked down the guard with lassos made of the very air around it, holding it even further immobile as Zalia continued letting off shots.
Boreal joined in with a full power pounce, freezing its legs to the floor and climbing up its back to assume her usual tactic of savagely assaulting its spine. Zalia had to readjust her aim to avoid hitting Boreal but the damage over time left by her heirloom bows abilities was beginning to stack enough to do some serious damage.
It didn’t take long before the guard slumped to the floor lifeless, unable to escape the grasp of Boreal’s ice, Zalia’s spreading ice curse and the wind elemental's lassos while weakened by the focused attention of Zalia’s Healing presence. Against any other Silver rank she would probably die within moments but the stacked advantages in number, abilities that countered and its weakened state allowed them the easy victory. That as well as Zalia’s immediate use of her two long cooldown abilities now that she knew just exactly how strong these undead were. She wasn’t about to volunteer for being impaled again anytime soon.
She stepped past the disintegrating body of the undead and moved into the hallway, passing through the exploded door. There was an open door on the right that held a war room with maps though no troop placements stood on the central table. The maps made her pause though as she expected them to be of the lands near Endaria, the place she thought the Bathar to have come from. The landscapes were nothing like she expected however with the land looking more like a chain of islands than a landmass amongst the ocean. It was nowhere she remembered seeing on her own map of Endaria left back in the other world.
“So was this city not brought here from Endaria?” Zalia wondered.
If that was true then Ember was entirely wrong about what had happened with the Bathar in Endaria, it was possible they weren’t even from there in the first place.