Mordecai’s core chewed on some math to get a rough estimate of the total mana involved in having a dungeon that had claimed a territory as large as the kingdom of Kuiccihan. Plus however many floors she had before what ever happened to found the kingdom. The numbers were not small. But despite clearly being a territory, the kingdom didn’t seem to behave the way a dungeon did, so his estimate might be way off. But even if it was a full magnitude smaller, it was still rather impressive.
While his core ran calculations, his avatar stayed focused on the conversation in front of him.
“Well, let’s set the stage for this little drama play, shall we?” Kuiccihan said as she dismissed her wings to sit back more comfortably, “You’ve probably heard about this a little bit, but let’s make sure we are all on the same page. Mordecai went to war and then left his death-dealing monsters behind when he was done. Support had already been on its way from all over the world, and it kept coming. In the aftermath, all the nearest kingdoms were in tatters even if their royal family still lived, and there were a lot of soldiers with disrupted chains of command. There were even ad-hoc units made up of the remnants of other units from different countries. And a lot of unclaimed land. It got complicated and messy. To the north, the Trionean kingdom started annexing land and turning itself into an empire. To the east, the elven kingdom grew in much the same way, but only when either they were attacked, or when all government collapsed in an adjacent territory. The south was not as affected given the mountain range, but some of the monsters did fly up and over, and had to be hunted down.”
“If you read a crazy story from that time period, there are even odds it's roughly true. As an example, there’s a story about a would-be warlord getting killed by a farm’s rooster. Turned out the farmer was a master monk, and his wife was a druid who had awakened some of the animals. And the monk had trained the awakened chicken. Now, I’m not sure if that one is true, but there are other stories consistent with a druid and monk training a large variety of awakened animals.” She grinned at them, “That is one of my favorites, I have to admit.”
“Anyway, into this mess dungeons were born, usually in areas most devastated by magic. I managed to tidy my area up, and had a nice town growing nearby which I helped protect, and things were finally beginning to slow down when a fox and her boy showed up and wanted to talk to me about some crazy idea. At least they had the good manners to show off by clearing the bottom floor first, though they had a few other people helping too. I think I’ll let Norumi backtrack to the start of her part in all this.”
The kitsune-dryad smiled softly at Kuiccihan’s avatar, then turned her attention to her father and step mothers. “I had managed to establish a small area of protection where the northern edge of the Azeria forest met the river. The forest had acquired the name from a small kingdom that had claimed the area for about a century and a half, and I took up this role to protect a small town there. I am afraid that I was not entirely my best self however. In addition to everything else, I’d had my own trauma involving heartbreak and betrayal, which I will not be getting into. I was a touch bit feral, and while I was quite benign for most of those who sought my company, I was often deadly for men whose wives sought succor. Especially those men who cheated.” She bowed her head as she sighed. “I may have inherited a touch of my father’s ability to overreact when traumatized.”
“And this in turn brought trouble upon me. While only men who mistreated their wives truly had anything to fear from me, this was enough for a lay priest of Amirume to begin riling up some of the town folk against me, which created a lot of friction in the community. He was a piece of work, I think he was motivated because I had spurned his advances.” Norumi shook her head. “Lay priests may be needed to take care of some aspects of a church, but as leaders of movements they are dangerous, they do not have the connection to their god that a true cleric does. And given the chaos of the time, there were not enough clerics to go around.”
“Now, my vigilantism was not a good thing, but those who made their living in the forest mostly knew of me as a protector, and many knew me more personally than that, however much I may have been keeping my heart secure. These were the core of the group opposing the people that the priest had riled up.”
Mordecai tilted his head slightly at her wording, trying to puzzle out her meaning, and was about to ask when he felt a sharp mental nudge from Moriko. “She’s trying to be indirect about only casually bedding them, because she doesn’t want to tell her father that directly. And her reasons were different than mine.” Not many things caught Mordecai off guard, but this one was enough to make him slightly flush in embarrassment. That was already more than he truly wanted to know.
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Norumi continued without apparently noticing his distraction. “Things might have gotten ugly if a warrior-priest and champion of Zagaroth hadn’t arrived in town. Haolong was the name he had been given by his master, and his arrival had me quite on edge I have to admit.” She flashed a brief grin. “While he was certainly too young to have been involved in the aftermath of your war, I had seen what happens when something calls the church of Zagaroth into action. Some of the most powerful priests and champions had been able to engage solo with one of the big monster dragons long enough for others to complete ritual castings capable of dealing a death blow. It was costly of course, in addition to lives. By the end of it, there were shattered relics and artifacts that had been overwhelmed when used for defense or consumed to fuel the rituals. So having one show up to investigate me was nerve-wracking. But it also created enough dissonance to make me take a good look at how I was living my life.”
“When he entered the woods to seek me out, I played games to buy time. I needed the time in order to think, so I did what kitsune are most infamous for doing: I used illusions, charms, and beguiling magic to distract and delay him. They were all harmless ones of course, I didn’t want to provoke him, but even so, he took them with surprising grace. He was patient, often amused at situations others would have found embarrassing, and complimented my tricks that fooled him even briefly. It was infuriating.” In contrast to her words, Norumi was smiling in fond memory.
Kazue had lifted her head to look at Norumi, then she exchanged a look with Moriko before they both looked toward Mordecai. “That sounds familiar,” Kazue’s core commented dryly. “It’s like she’d looked up to a man with that sort of personality before.” Mordecai briefly considered responding but could find nothing to say that wouldn’t be digging a hole, so wisely took the better part of valor and didn’t engage.
Norumi continued to ignore their byplay. “But his careful deliberateness was also comforting. I knew Haolong wouldn’t just try to attack when we met face to face. When we did finally talk directly I found him just as pleasant as he had seemed so far. We discussed the situation and negotiated for almost a week before we agreed on a solution, with some caveats and personal promises. After preparing myself, I walked back into town with him, to present an offer to the lay priest: I would leave and travel with Haolong, putting myself entirely under Haolong’s authority, but the priest would travel to the church that Haolong had trained at for his own retraining. Or he could be officially and publicly stripped of his titles for abusing his authority. But one of those two things would happen.”
She shrugged. “He chose to take the penance route of course. He wasn’t a complete fool, and playing watchdog over churches is one of the duties of Zagaroth’s priests. All the primogen deities acknowledge the power of his church to do this, though not all new gods do. So Haolong set the geas on him, and we had him publicly leave town first, with Haolong promising the town folk to find them a cleric as soon he could.”
“After that, well,” A warm smile curved her lips. “We did travel, a lot. It was tense for quite some time, for while we both knew what we both wanted, I had my own issues to work out first. But once that was worked out, well, it took less than a month before we decided to get married. Once we had taken that step, we were already both fully committed.” Her eyes unfocused as she looked off into the distance. “In some ways, it was slightly unfair to him. Once we had expressed our feelings and I had given my love to him, I was very vulnerable. He’d already had to promise his intentions to me, I wasn’t capable of having a casual dalliance with the man. If that promise had broken at any point, well, I think it would have gone very badly for me.”
Her gaze returned to those before her. “Thankfully, there was never even a hint of that. He was always so sincere in his love for me that I was more amused than jealous the couple of times that a young woman threw herself his way. And during our journeys, we helped a lot of people. That was good for me too, to just help and not try to punish. But there was always more to do, and nothing was stable enough. So we started to work on how one might create a defensive enchantment tied to the founding of a new kingdom, something that would grow with the kingdom but not provide the means to conquer other kingdoms. After several years of working on the problems involved in creating a sustainable enchantment with that much power, we realized that most of the properties we were looking for were present in a dungeon’s territory.”
She gestured towards Kuiccihan. “It took a few more years to decide on a candidate for our project, we wanted to be sure of the dungeon’s personality, but eventually we approached Kuiccihan as our best option.”
The avatar snorted. “I was almost certain that I had been invaded by a bunch of lunatics when you told me your idea. And for some parts of that ritual,” She shuddered. “You might as well have asked a human to accept grafts of random animal parts. I don’t think you realized at the time how deep into myself some of those proposed changes went. But then that high priest of Ozuran showed up.”