Golemancy was considered by many mages to be the absolute peak of the inscription discipline. To carve the language of magic into a physical object in such a detailed and intricate way that running mana through it created something akin to a living being was a difficult and rewarding task. And, of course, there were infinite variations. Golems could be as simple as having no function beyond opening a door when it sensed someone approaching or so complex that they were practically indistinguishable from a human being.
The sheer breadth of knowledge needed was a huge hurdle to be overcome. Divinations were mandatory just to allow the golem to interact with environmental stimulus. Invocations and conjurations were needed if the golem was to exceed its base material in any way. All in all, a great deal of skill, time, material and effort went into even the simplest of creations.
Breaking a golem, however, was quite easy.
A bolt of pure force, a conjuration of kinetic energy, cut through the air and slammed into the closest golem’s head. It rocked back on its heels precariously before shifting enough of its ponderous weight forward to settle solidly onto its feet and continue its advance. The few seconds it wasted on that were enough to allow me to distance myself from the encroaching line of enemies.
Ammun’s golems were quite durable, even for ones built specifically with defense in mind. It helped that the tower itself was feeding them all the mana they needed to run at maximum power for an unlimited amount of time. That was a clever bit of synergy there. But it didn’t make them unbeatable; it just meant I needed to adjust my strategy.
Initially, I’d been attempting precision attacks. Since I had no idea how many golems were defending the lower levels of Ammun’s tower, I didn’t want to burn through my mana going all-out on this batch, only to be forced into a retreat later on. That was still an option, but it was quickly becoming apparent that it would take a prohibitive amount of time to break through with anything approaching finesse.
“The hard way it is,” I told a swiftly approaching golem.
When attacking a being made of stone that wasn’t actually alive, my options were limited. Fire was worthless. Ice wasn’t much better. Lightning would do practically nothing, and they had no minds for me to dominate in mental combat. That was why I’d opted for force magic initially, but their stone bodies were repairing themselves too quickly.
I could rupture their cores, but not only would that not destroy them immediately, it would take far too much mana to do hundreds of times. Instead, I grabbed hold of them with a grand telekinesis spell and slammed them around until pieces started falling off. It was expensive, but I was able to siphon some of the excess mana they bled out as they broke down, and the fact that I was grabbing a dozen or more golems at a time to smack into each other helped mitigate the cost.
My progress wasn’t as fast as I wanted it to be—I had another appointment when I was done here that I didn’t want to be late for—but it was steady. More and more golems poured out of hidden rooms, relentless in their efforts to reach me and empowered with nigh-infinite mana. I just kept breaking through them as I advanced up the massive intake shaft.
This was getting annoying. I’d destroyed or disabled hundreds of golems already, not to mention shredding a few thousand mana wraiths on my way down to the tower’s base, and no matter how many I took out, there were always more ready to take their place. When had Ammun found the time to make all of these?
Maybe they were leftovers from before he’d cracked the world core and destroyed global civilization. They could have laid dormant for all those centuries and only been activated as a defense when Ammun himself returned from his hibernation. That was the only way I could see them existing in such numbers, since they certainly hadn’t been here the last time I’d come through.
Eventually I won against the masses, but it was a slog. I reached the point in the mana intake shaft where it started splitting dozens of directions and took a moment to consider my approach. What I wanted to leave behind probably wouldn’t be recognized as something the golems should attack, but even if it was, it would only have to survive for a few weeks.
Just to be safe, I burned the mana to conjure up a platform made of pure force, then spun an enchantment around it to keep it existing indefinitely. If there was anywhere that could afford such an extravagant and wasteful demonstration, it was here. There was enough mana down here—heavy mana, at that—to power the platform for years.
I stood in the middle and lifted it to float in the air a full twenty feet above the floor. That should keep everything outside the reach of any future golems that might come wandering by. Then, one by one, I started pulling out the pieces I’d fabricated back home and assembling them into one big machine.
When I was done, I fed it the initial spark of mana to bring it to life, then stood back and watched to make sure everything was working right. It sucked mana in from the environment around it, not bothering the platform it was sitting on, but drawing massive quantities of loose mana out of the air. After a minute of that, it had a sufficient volume to start refining it into the one thing it was capable of making: mysteel.
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I had no time to watch it after I was sure it was cycling correctly. After all, it would take a full day to make a chip the size of my pinky nail. I simply ensured that there were no problems with the process since I already knew it would work from previous testing. The only variables were whether I’d constructed it properly, which I knew I had, and if the heavier mana down here would cause a problem. Since I’d accounted for that in the initial construction, I was confident everything would work fine.
What I wasn’t sure about was the golems. Those hadn’t been here last time I’d come into the tower through the mana intake vents and I really didn’t have time to pick apart one of their cores to map out their defense protocols. That was the kind of project that would take days, unless it was something stupidly simple like ‘attack anything that moves,’ and even then, there’d be additional layers of runic scripts to coordinate with the other golems and determine how best to kill the intruder.
Golems were complicated.
With my work done, I retreated back down the intake to the outside of the tower and flew around its base to the next entrance. I was miles and miles deep in an enormous chasm, so far down that no sunlight could reach me where the air was so thick with mana that it would kill any normal person exposed to it.
The new intake had its own set of golems, proving that I hadn’t just gotten unlucky with my initial pick. I fought my way through them as well, eventually reached the spot I wanted where it split and placing a second mysteel generator. Then I backed out and repeated the process for a third time, but that was all I could get done before I ran out of time.
I wanted to leave a teleportation platform down here, but I needed to spend some extra effort shielding it from detection. There were still thousands of mages a hundred miles up, many of whom were skilled enough to notice such a platform, and that wasn’t even counting whatever automated defenses Ammun had activated. The best I could hope for was to leave a platform deep inside the intake valve and hope the golems would ignore it.
I wasn’t that worried about it being destroyed. A platform was a convenience, not a necessity. Losing it wouldn’t stop me from regaining access to my mysteel generators. It would just take a bit longer. I suspected the golems were probably operating on a ‘destroy anything that’s not supposed to be here’ set of commands, which could very well include the platform. I supposed I’d find out when I came back to check on things later.
With my work as done as I could get it in the limited amount of time I had left, I used the platform to teleport to my first relay point a thousand miles southeast of the tower. A second jump brought me close to my destination, and a third saw me there.
Two massive black-feathered birds, each one with beaks longer than I was tall, loomed over the platform. They looked down at me in unison, and I felt mana surge through one up into its throat to form sounds its mouth had no hope of ever accurately replicating on its own.
“You’re late,” the brakvaw said. “Everyone is waiting for you up at the peak.”
“I know,” I groused without bothering to explain. Some random brakvaw stuck on platform guarding duty wasn’t going to care about my excuses. I lifted myself into the air with a flight spell and zoomed up the slope, dodging a flock of juvenile birds when they suddenly poured out of a crevice in the side of the mountain. Every single one of them was almost as big as me.
They didn’t even notice me, so intent were they on each other and their game. A larger, adult brakvaw streaked after them, his voice harsh and screechy as he scolded them. I caught a single glimpse of them looking back and up to see me flying away, then I was around the curve of the mountain and approaching the peak.
In normal times, it was a huge depression, a sort of bowl left over when the tip of the mountain had been broken off and sent up past the clouds. In the center was a single, enormous roost, home to the brakvaw leader known simply as Grandfather. He’d been stuck there for years now, and even that had been an improvement from his original position on the floating island up beyond the clouds.
Today, we were fixing that once and for all. Thanks almost entirely to my assistant’s hard work over the last four months, we were finally ready to attempt merging lossless casting into a standing enchantment to make it entirely self-sufficient. If it worked, the magic Grandfather had been continually channeling for centuries to hold the floating island aloft would power itself autonomously, finally freeing the brakvaw patriarch to leave his roost.
Querit was standing there waiting for me, as were a few thousand eyeless, crystalline ants. Those were a small fraction of the gestalt entity that lived inside the mountain, a sapient colony of mind magic specialists, all joined together in a singular consciousness. On the ground, circling the whole bowl in row after row of runes joined in a complex array of connecting lines, was the inscribed portion of the ritual. If everything went as planned, it wouldn’t be necessary.
Grandfather had wanted a backup system in place, however, so Querit had labored for weeks to shape the whole ritual, then spent another week going over everything. He was a golem, however, and didn’t suffer from human foibles like fatigue or loss of focus. He’d simply worked, hours upon hours stacking up without so much as a break, until the runes were carved.
“Finally,” he said when I landed next to him. “How was the mission?”
“I only got three of them done. Ammun filled the lower levels with thousands of war golems. I’m a little bit concerned about the machines being attacked, but I took steps to mitigate the chances of that happening.”
“Maybe we can come up with something to trick their sensory inputs,” Querit said. “Did you bring back a few core samples?”
“I didn’t have time to sift through the rubble to find one that was intact. I’ll try to preserve one when I go back to install the rest of the harvesters.”
Querit nodded, then turned his attention to the center of the caldera when Grandfather appeared on top of his roost. “Time to get this going,” he said.
Together, we started casting the spell that would free the old brakvaw from his self-imposed prison.