Mirio was pale and haggard-looking when he put me before Palimpsest. I felt for the archdruid, but I also worried about his constitution. Fending off our enemy’s psychic attacks was no easy feat—it had surely taken more of a toll on our wildhearts and psychics altogether than the short battle with the drones had taken on our soldiers.
But they might have to fight him off for a good while longer. Mirio would have to spent a long time yet at the forefront, bearing the brunt of Palimpsest’s attacks before he’d get a reprieve. When he did get a reprieve, it would be Galenni, our head psychic, who took his place.
Luthiel could do the job, but he was inside the keep, working with a handpicked team of psychics to compose a spell to track Palimpsest’s location, a backup plan in case Mirio himself couldn’t find it—though despite his weathered appearance, I had faith in our archdruid.
Again I felt the oppressive presence of our enemy as Mirio passed them to me, an discomfiting pain that seemed to reach into the roots of my teeth.
I must have you, they said.
Withdraw your forces from beneath our keep, I told them. Only then can we negotiate.
In response I got what was the most intense emotional reaction that I’d yet seen from the creature, one so loud and psychically unpleasant that it almost felt like it was deliberately trying to attack me, for once.
I must have you, they said.
It will cost you more than you could possibly ever gain, I told them.
Palimpsest’s response felt agitated and fragmented. It was a flurry of images—our walls coated in ice, our forges as they gulched out smoke, the chains of our lift drawing taut as a windcaller filled its sail, the concrete roots of our keep’s foundation, stretching deep, deep down into the bedrock….
Technology. They wanted to know what we knew. They had some inkling of what difference our many masteries could gain them, and it was worth as many bodies as it would cost them.
I must have you, they repeated. Your bodies are useless, but your minds are treasures. If I cannot claim you, I must erase you.
I listened to this and bowed my head, frustrated. Despite holding back in our defense of their first assault, they clearly had some inkling of how dangerous we could be—and they weren’t willing to make peace when it would mean leaving us to our own devices. We were too much of a threat.
Call me again if you wish to surrender, I said. Until then, there is nothing to discuss.
This interaction must be of bodies, not mind, they said, agreeing with me.
“How goes it?” I asked, turning to Mirio.
“No luck yet,” he said. “They know how to hide themselves. I can’t say whether they know I’m looking or if they’re simply always hiding. They must be relatively close by… only they’re likely deep underground.” His pale face was resolute. “I’ll find them,” he said.
“While you’re at it,” I said. “See if you can find out whether they know anything of necromancy.”
Around us, a few soldiers and spellcasters were using [Blood Magick] to draw the blood from the insects that had fallen at the base of the wall, converting some of it to mana and storing the rest in the small channel of water that ran between the rampart’s two levels. The water, drawn from our mana wells and heavy with trapped mana, darkened as the blood spread through it like spilt ink. Mingling the blood with the water didn’t lessen its capacity for mana, but our blood mages could still absorb the blood.
I gave command of the walls to Larash, then turned and strode down the shallow-cut steps between levels and into the shelter of the keep. There I found Luthiel with a hand-picked set of psychics, all of them carving symbols into slate-like pieces of fused quartz.
Technically, psychics and wildhearts had almost as similar a core function as two distinct professions could have. The pure [Mind] skill, [Telepathy], did everything [Wild Bond] did—it just wasn’t limited to plants and animals. It could reach anything with a mind, including elementals, infernals, constructs—everything.
But while their abilities had some overlap, their traditions meant they often had entirely different skillsets. Wildhearts focused on the natural world—almost all their interactions were with other people or with unintelligent creatures who needed to be yoked and controlled. Telepaths in turn handled long-distance communication, psychic warfare, education, and contact with intelligent creatures that were fundamentally different from us, such as elementals.
And so it was no surprise that when Luthiel chose people to help with his backup locator spell, all of them were psychics, not wildhearts. The psychics and wildhearts were trained to work with each other, of course—but the people around Luthiel had been working together for centuries.
The former archmage looked up at me as I entered.
“I need you ready to step in,” I told him.
“So soon?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “How much more time would you need?”
“With me? Twenty minutes or more. Without me, twenty five. These are estimates—we’re trying to triangulate their position by contacting them through one of our wayward hunters.”
Twenty minutes wasn’t the best news, especially since his spell might not even work. “I see,” I told him. “If possible, see if you can find out whether our enemy knows any necromancy. Delay the spell if necessary.”
He nodded. “As you wish, Lux Irovex.”
Ranival, I said, mentally finding our head white necromancer through the bond.
Lux Irovex?
Make ready to raise up the deadvault. Leave the warriors to handle harvesting the blood for now. I’ll interrupt you soon enough and call you back to the walls.
Lux Irovex.
Then I reached out with the bond and found Zirilla from where she was preparing down in the depths of the keep. How long until you’re engaging them?
Six and a half minutes, she said. Going to grace me with your presence?
We’ll see.
I mentally sought out Larash and I moved to rejoin him on the wall. Have someone bring me a greatsword with air clasps.
He assented, and soon I was standing beside him, looking out at the edge of the forest. More of the giant, digging beetles were pouring out of the holes in the ground.
“Something’s not right,” Larash said.
“It’s doing the same thing again,” I agreed. I thought a moment. “Get any icebinders who can fly in the second windborne and have them make ready to block those tunnels. I’ll take the first windborne to reinforce if needed, otherwise they hold the skies above the keep. We’ll see what they bring for air power.”
I thought a moment more, then added: “Choose four squads to be ready to fight from the cliff’s edge—make sure they’re fast, but throw in six earthshapers who know how to cause a fall. And pull the airborne flame-weavers. Have them be ready to make a wave. Replace them with whoever we can find.”
Larash dispensed orders through the bond for a moment, and I watched for a minute as the swarm of drones around each hole grew.
I looked down into the insect-filled moat and made a decision. “Get all our healers, weavers, and divines close to the wall. We’ll pull them back to their usual tasks if we need them—if Palimpsest has any necromancy, they’re like to be using it shortly.”
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Larash assented, but my mind was already drawn elsewhere—one of the seers reporting what they could sense in the distance. Creatures coming not from the holes in the ground, but walking at a fast pace along the riverbed. They were massive, but also somewhat familiar—the gigantic mantis creatures that I’d fought two of on my first day. Palimpsest had evidently taken some of the insects that lived around the flowerfall.
Dozens of them now rushed toward us along the riverbank, sure to arrive in the same moments that their burrowers came at the base of the keep.
And if they could steal the strongest protectors of that insect colony, they could surely steal the flying guards.
I looked out to see more beetles still spilling out of the ground before us, then made a decision.
“It seems Palimpsest has no interest in conserving their bodies,” I said, speaking into the bond. “Neither will we. Shoot freely.”
Around me, the air was filled with the sound of many bows suddenly loosing arrows in rapid succession, each squad drawing in unison. Endless volleys seemed to pour forth from the keep in all directions, waves of them filling the air like ripples on a pond’s surface.
I looked past the arrows, at the glowing white clouds of mist, pondering the sky.
Earlier, when the wasps attacked, we hadn’t sensed them right away because they’d fallen from a great height. The wildhearts had taken the initiative to put a seer in the air on a conjured broadwing—but a quick check showed that they hadn’t sensed any incoming airborne enemies.
Still….
“Third and fourth windborne squads, protect the second windborne as they seal off those holes. The enemy’s flyers will be here soon—your secondary aim is to inflict maximum casualties upon them. Fly high. Be cautious.”
Behind me I heard a rush as a few dozen shadows passed by overhead. I looked out at the sea of insect carapace’s distrustfully—Palimpsest knew we could fly, had to.
So what was their plan?
Mirio, I said, calling him.
Lux Irovex?
Unless I say otherwise, I want you to allow Palimpsest to shift their attention away from you and attack me. I’ll give them openings—and that should give you openings in turn.
Lux Irovex.
With my [Wild Bond], I sensed someone coming up behind me, then turned to see that it was Fireesha, carrying the sword I’d asked for.
“[Channel]?” she asked.
She was a weaver, and while many of them were devoted to handling the defensive enchantments, some of them would simply be assigning their [Focus] to maintain attribute-increasing spells one some key fighters, such as those who would be fighting with the greatbows. Naturally, I counted as a key fighter.
“[Channel]” I said. “All [Channel].”
My [Primeval Resonance] and my primeval mana both combined to make my [Channel] 174% more effective. Until now I’d been limited in how much of it I could actually even use—I could channel my entire mana pool into the air in a few seconds.
But the snow-white fur cloak that hung from my shoulders granted me [Blood Magick 17]. It could restore my mana with the blood of the dead—at a rate that was determined by my [Channel]. And the rate that I could restore my [Blood Pool] was determined by my [Focus]—but the only other thing I used my [Focus] for was flight, a state that was usually exclusive to absorbing blood in any case.
I would not be running out of mana. Not on this battlefield.
The mass of gathering insects in the distance churned as thousands of arrows rained down upon it. At our distance, we wouldn’t be as accurate at striking their vulnerable heads—many arrows would bury themselves into their carapaces, causing little harm.
Many of them buried their heads in the soil as the arrows came—Palimpsest would rather wait for their other troops, taking the losses, than waste the beetles in an unsupported frontal assault as before.
“They’re stronger,” Mirio said. “The ones I can get a grasp on are at least level 10.”
“They began with the bugs they were in the process of raising,” I mused.
Ahead of us, An explosion of fog billowed out of the nearest hole in the ground. One of the elementalists in the second windborne squad had loosed their arrow-borne frost spell and stoppered it with a wall of conjured ice, at least for now.
Swarm above, the leader of the third windborne squad called out to me. Gliding in from the higher layers, coming fast.
“Pull back if you’re overwhelmed,” I cautioned them. But in my minds eye I could see what they were seeing: many thousands of the pony-sized guardian drones that I’d already met, the ones that shot paralytic stingers they regenerated with [Life] skills. Unless Palimpsest had trained them and supplied them with extraordinary amounts of essence, they’d be no match for dozens of windcallers launching windborne arrows.
On the ground before us, I watched as hundreds of beetles began to detach from the main swarm and move toward the river. It wasn’t hard to guess where they were headed: the massive mantis-creatures that had been traveling along the riverbed would be coming into view soon.
“First windborne,” I said. “Engage those hulks. I’ll be joining you.”
I called the two-handed sword toward me by grasping at its air clasps, clipping it to my chest at the shoulder and belt, hilt-down. It didn’t matter that it had no sheathe: my [Aegis] meant that it at worst it could only nick me or my equipment.
Then I rose into the air and sped toward the river, joining the dozen windcallers of the first windborne and merging our windsleeves as we sped toward our enemy. The mantis-hulks came into view moments later, tall, black creatures whose limps were so elongated they seemed almost skeletal as they strode along the river in a column, their carapaces glittering in the light of the mist.
I saw them appear with a growing sense of anticipation. The first windborne had more stormcallers than other aerial squads—seven instead of two. They were well-trained in channeling mana as a group to throw mighty bolts of lightning. Large creatures such as this were their speciality, as were enemy spellcasters.
But before we could engage, I sensed a cry of alarm from our other windcallers across the bond. Flashes of impressions came to me as I sifted through the thoughts of our fighters in the air: great shadows, massive insects falling toward them out of the third mist layer, ambushing them as they moved to engage the oncoming swarms of flyers.
There were dozens of them, each the size of one of the mantises ahead of us.
Go, Larash told me through the bond. We’ll handle the others at the keep—the mages are eager to help.
I wasn’t happy giving the enemy time to position itself—the first windborne could have easily engaged the mantises without much danger, cutting them off from the main force. Larash was right, though—with our spells, even these creatures would be hard-pressed to assault the keep.
Still, there was something chilling about what I saw in the bond as we rose away from the mantis-hulks: our seer could sense two more groups of them coming down the riverbed even now. There were more than a hundred in total.
The squad peeled up and away from its course toward the river, angling into the sky below the third mist layer, one that was now filled with insectile black specks and the occasional silhouette of one of the larger attackers.
I examined the closest of them. It had the unfortunate appearance of a horsefly whose body and wings had both been elongated. Its entire body was white and gray, and this, combined with its translucent exoskeleton, gave the insect an unfinished look, as if it had missed the final stages of some important metamorphosis.
Priority is those hulks, I told everyone. I’d rather they fight us in the skies than go for the keep. We form up, move through the swarm, and bring as many of them down as we can.
The swarm of smaller, stinger-throwing guardians didn’t bother me as much—their stingers would struggle to pierce our armor, and all our aerial soldiers had at least one healing skill to handle the venom if they did. I was doubtful they’d even be able to hit one of our windcallers except by filling the sky with missiles—we didn’t fly in patterns that made us easy to track, not when fighting.
I had no doubt that Palimpsest knew exactly where I was on the battlefield, tracking me through their many sets of eyes and with their psychic power. As my squad joined with the loose arrangement of the others in the air, I pulled ahead and moved for the nearest of the killer longflies, which had already begun moving straight for me, and used my air magic to clip my bow across my back, over my cloak, freeing both hands.
As I expected, I felt Palimpsest’s attentions on me a moment later, a heavy psychic weight that was far beyond the strength of anything I’d felt from them during our conversations. They wanted to paralyze me, but I dispersed their attack through my body, mentally shredding it into nothing but a field of physical sensations. Pain flowed through me, an exquisite array of agonies that rang out in many different parts of my body—but it was only pain.
I catapulted toward where the longfly would be, our aerial paths two trajectories whose destiny it was to meet. My mind was numb with pain under Palimpsests assault—but that only made my mind flow into ceaseless, instant instinct, my eyes and [Wild Bond] tracking my target, telling me exactly how I must move, exactly the minute adjustments in wind that I needed to make to land just so.
As I flew through the air, I detached my sword, grasping the long hilt in both hands and raising it to point its tip like a spear toward the longfly’s face as I threw myself toward it.
Just before I reached it, it conjured a translucent wall of light to protect its bulging eyes….
But I had done all of this before, in other battles on other worlds. My incredibly high [Channel] meant that I could force a line of mana into the air before me and ignite it in the blink of an eye. The [Fray] aspect in my lightning ripped the structure of the spell to pieces, and the pane of light dissolved just in time for me to surge my [Strength] as I reached the longfly, ramming the blade of my sword into its hideous eye.
I jerked my blade through its body, finding where I thought its brain was and then churning it like butter. I felt it die, felt its [Aegis] cease to protect its body, then tore my blade free with ease even as I used my [Wild Bond] to double-check the location of the vital organs on its corpse.
+ 18 652 Essence, 2 [Boon]
I felt Palimpsest’s touch leave me, the pain of their psychic assault fading fast. I grinned as I reclaimed lost altitude, happy that they’d been watching.
Get anything? I asked Mirio, my voice filled with the building thrill of battle.
Mirio responded with what might have been the psychic equivalent of a splutter.
I set my sights on the next longfly, then threw myself toward it with a burst of air. We’ll go again.