The ink was barely dry on my first draft of the treaty before my newest allies-to-be wanted to see it. Very few tweaks had to be made, and most of those were for clarifying language in a few areas or expounding upon roles and responsibilities so that expectations were more specific. I feel like everything was straightforward and above board because I was being honest with them that I wanted them to be willing and eager allies rather than begrudgingly forced to do as I say. They looked carefully through each revision, of which there were few, and within the fifth day of them being here in this world, we had reached an accord and signed the treaty. Some elders and clan leaders remained nervous that I had slipped in a few nefarious clauses, but I didn’t know of any.
My kobolds follow me for their own reasons; we never really made any official deal. They just sorta show up randomly and start helping with what the other kobolds are doing. I don’t even pay them, but I also don’t tax them, and somehow they seem to get everything they need. Gambino and Bambina, the leaders of the horde of kobolds running around, have not reported any issues or discontent with how I handle things, so I leave it at that.
Now, I have saurkin and crixtali firmly in my pocket. They remain grateful for how I have provided them with housing and food, and many are eager to get to work earning their keep and turning their house into a home, so to speak. This works to my benefit, for I had no plans that involved them just sitting around doing nothing.
To the north, past the wastelands and the badlands, back near the big-ass bridge I had made, one can find the great plains where dinosaurs roam freely. No one lives there, most likely because most cultures, while enjoying incorporating the occasional dinosaur into everyday life as beasts of burden or pets, don’t have the means or inclination to handle large roaming herds of dinosaurs that can stomp a house flat if they misstep. The saurkin were nearly champing at the bit to check that place out and settle there, and so most of them have been given leave to go there, while a small cohort remains at World’s Hope and World’s End to help educate me and my associates about saurkin culture and technology.
Conversely, the crixtali find the wastelands to be very suitable. There is little water or biological life to be found there, and so they are free to build sunlight accumulator arrays without it negatively impacting the local ecology, since there basically is none. Likewise, a few key individuals remained behind to show me things I found interesting, of which they had much to share. A small cadre of [Matrix Weavers], the equivalent of [Enchanters], stayed with me to show me how they do things. The results were more than satisfactory.
Like most people, I am guilty of using a host of words interchangeably since I am not pedantic enough to be too particular on my terminology. However, the crixtali [Matrix Weavers] set me straight, at least for the duration of the conversation before I fell back into old habits. What follows is what has been clarified for me.
Shields, in the magical sense, are used to block things. They are usually square or round, and they can be flat or slightly curved to better deflect blows. They are generally statically placed walls of magical energy and force, although some may be anchored to a target, such as a person, and move relative to the target. Shields that block anything and everything are inefficient and drain mana quickly. Gnomes are the best [Shielders] and [Shield Mages] in this world, as a general rule, and a gaggle of them tagged along to compare notes.
Convergent evolution of best practices has made the implementation of shields similar in both worlds. Strategy has evolved over time, with the old pattern of Shields Projected Over Nearby Garrison Environment, or S.P.O.N.G.E., being the preferred method for large, stationary targets, such as buildings, but less than ideal for moving formations of troops. Shields Produced Around Required Targets for Ablation/Negation, or S.P.A.R.T.A.N., is the shield pattern of choice for mobile units. Finally, Just In Time Tactical Expeditionary Shields, or J.I.T.T.E.R.S., are the best variant of shields, but so far, they have only ever been used on the personal level, as using them on larger targets had proved to be too cumbersome.
As one can tell, those shield patterns were named by gnomes. The crixtali and saurkin have their equivalent variants, however, they had found a way to employ J.I.T.T.E.R.S. with both S.P.O.N.G.E. and S.P.A.R.T.A.N. shields. Turns out, when your bodies are so big, or that of your pet dinosaurs, making physical armor to protect oneself would be exorbitant in cost, and so more research into shields had proven prudent.
J.I.T.T.E.R.S. are great because they have a means to detect incoming attacks, determine the nature of the attack, and then formulate a shield designed to efficiently counter the blow, typically within a fraction of a second. For instance, a shield designed to stop a high-speed, low-mass bullet, versus one designed to stop a slow-moving, large-mass boulder from a trebuchet, are both very different in implementation. I am not an expert on shields, but I do know enchantments, and World’s Hope needs a giant shield on top to act as a lid to seal in flying adversaries. Good thing I saved that for last, because collectively, we have found a solution. The innovation of combining J.I.T.T.E.R.S. with S.P.O.N.G.E. will apparently change the very nature of warfare, which I guess is a good thing. It will certainly save a lot of mana to not have shields constantly running when nothing is hitting them.
Like shields, barriers perform a similar task, yet they are more akin to second skin than a solid construct in front of you. While shields stop or deflect things, barriers dampen or slow things. They can be woven into shields, and they are generally used to arrest the momentum of projectiles or sap the energy out of magical attacks. There is no need to block an arrow when you can slow its momentum just enough that it lands in the dirt in front of you, or to completely block a fireball when you can render it to just a pleasantly warm puff of air. Likewise, our new friends are good at that stuff too, and they have shared their knowledge on how to do things better than we do when it comes to barriers.
Wards are about detection and deterrence, and they are highly specific in what they target. Wards are used for privacy to stop the sound of a conversation from leaving a bubble around the participants, or to obfuscate the view so outsiders cannot read lips. Through manipulating feelings of disgust, implementing fear, or subtly convincing something that it has better places to be, wards can obstruct entities from passing through them. They are great for repelling insects and vermin from one’s own person or food stores. If placed in a circle around some entity, they can act as a prison, provided no outsider disrupts the ward. Overall, wards are vastly cheaper to maintain than shields or barriers, and for once, the gnomes had the better version of wards compared to our new guests.
The final term that is generally considered to be part of the same broader discipline as shields, barriers, and wards is aura. Auras are used in many contexts which seem to be unrelated, but are also part of the same larger whole. Each person has an aura, which for one with the Ability to view auras, provides the viewer with information about a person’s nature. Is the subject a murderer, untrustworthy, prone to violence, cowardly, or easily manipulated? An aura can show all those things and more, both negative and positive. It would not tell you who was murdered by the subject, only a relative scale of how murderous the subject is in both inclination and success rate.
Aura, when used in a seemingly different context, is a force of will, imposing one’s existence and desires upon reality. Highly charismatic and stalwart individuals are best suited for using auras. Technically, it draws upon the first meaning of aura, somehow manifesting and manipulating it outward into a larger area and used for some task. While a shield may block a fireball, and a barrier may sap its strength, an aura would make people or objects within its range more resistant to fire and heat. Conversely, they may be used on enemies to make them weaker to said fire and heat. They can be used to make people braver, induce a slight regeneration effect, provide people with stamina, make people more perceptive, and so forth. Likewise, any positive effect for allies can be imposed as a negative effect for enemies.
A person manifesting an aura tends to have a certain volume it can use. A sphere is simple, but for a person standing on the ground, half of a sphere is wasted down in the dirt or too far above one’s head. For a Copper, that is the best they can do. A Silver can stretch an aura into better shapes, such as a cylinder. A Gold just tends to do all the same things but better, with much more finesse and stamina. What separates the Gold from the Platinum is how a Platinum’s aura looks more like a collection of tentacles or roots that stretch out super far and touch only what they need to. Few are those who are [Aura Twisters], yet ever in demand are their Skills, for they compliment shields, barriers, and wards nicely.
All of these techniques tend to work flawlessly on unattended objects. For instance, a shield is great at stopping an arrow from a normal person, for once an arrow leaves the bow, it is no longer part of that person. A bonafide [Archer] has no such shortcomings, for their arrows remain part of them during the flight of the arrow, and thus, the Abilities used on the arrow contest those of the shield. Mass archers tend to be terrible, but throw a few [Archers] in their mix, and they can overload a shield if the [Shield Mage] has grown complacent.
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Shields that break eat a lot more mana than those that stop a projectile, and so most ranged combatants focus on breaking shields so that melee attackers can close in on their foes. Auras are used to support the troops and suppress the enemy, usually from the safety of the rear. Barriers and wards supplement even further, softening blows or restricting very specific things that perhaps you otherwise have no counter to. In short, these four techniques are the cornerstone to military strategy when it comes to magically supplementing defense.
Why is all this information important? The enemy, dubbed ‘The Devourers’, emits an aura of decay that strips flesh from bone. As an aura, if it is to spread out far horizontally, it won’t be able to go very high. Since the fortress has no dome on it, we need shields to keep the enemy bottled up so that they cannot simply fly away. While the battle will rage on the ground and at the fortress’s high roads (which crass individuals may call “walls”), there will be a completely separate battle taking place for the skies. Most likely, dragons from the various flights will shoulder that burden, for there are no better aerial combatants than dragons. Says me, the unbiased dragon, who in no way hates pesky birds and how they have the audacity to think that they could ever contest the skies and soar with their betters.
Furthermore, the defense of the fortress will require hundreds, if not thousands, of [Shield Mages] to keep things running at all hours of the day. However, my skill and indeed Skills at [Enchanting] can help lessen that burden, creating an environment that shoulders much of the heavy lifting required on the ol’ mana pools to keep things running smoothly. It is a little complex, and involves more exposition, but bear with me.
Generally speaking, most people cannot effectively charge up magical objects or other people with mana, except for [Batteries], which are highly coveted and protected Blessings. I can charge up my own devices rather efficiently because I made them and they have my mana signature. Should I want others to charge up my devices, I would have to explicitly design each enchanted object to be able to receive mana from specifically attuned individuals if I want people to dump mana into my S.M.A.R.T. crystal network, which is not feasible on such a large scale at this point in my life.
Most people are not perfectly efficient at using their mana on some sort of Skill. Waste mana from a Skill is freely available in the area around a person, but most people do not have the means to tap into it because it is “dirty” and tainted with a person’s unique mana signature. Given enough time, that signature fades. The floor and high roads of the fortress are filled with S.M.A.R.T. crystals that are specifically designed to siphon off this unused mana, so that it can be used for the defense of the fortress. In an environment where hundreds of thousands of combatants are using their mana as fast as they can get it, the mana that will be accumulated this way will be substantial. A typical veteran soldier wastes about 25 to 35 percent of their mana with any Skill, and if I can collect approximately half of that wasted mana, I have access to about one-eighth of all mana used by friendly forces, which is no small sum when providing power to shields and such.
The crixtali are masters at collecting waste mana. They also excel at enchantments that push or pull objects, which they used extensively in their cities for transportation of people and supplies. Gravity-powered trolleys were all the rage, with lift stations every now and then to get them back up in elevation. They had also mastered pneumatic tubes for deliveries, with magic providing the pushing power and the means to handle losses in pressure and collisions. These sneaky innovations bypass the restrictions placed by the gods on certain forms of technology.
The latter part is what I need the most help with, making my enchantments “smart” so that they can respond to stimuli and situations. It is easy to make a button open a door, harder to make a motion-detection enchantment so a door opens automatically as a person approaches. The difficulty further increases when only authorized individuals can open the door, and it is compounded further when dealing with tailgating by unauthorized individuals. I have the raw power and Skill to make such enchantments, but the logistics of programming them the way I want them to work involves much pain and hardship for the trial and error needed to see how they work in practice.
I spent two weeks with these [Matrix Weavers], and together with many other [Shield Mages] and [Enchanters], I learned a great deal about best practices in how to make things play nice. The saurkin were very keen to understand my enchantments that collected and dispensed biological waste to approved areas via teleportation, oftentimes while said waste was still inside the body. Despite their best efforts, they had never solved that issue via enchantments, and many a saurkin has spent their youth shoveling leavings from their many large dinosaurs. Some saurkin joked that such a boon of information was in and of itself enough to justify the treaty we had signed, and indeed, I had greatly endeared myself to them with just that simple enchantment.
A great exchange of gifts took place, each [Matrix Weaver] or [Enchanter] both flexing their techniques while also providing each other with working examples. We were all eager to go try out our new ideas, and I am sure I was not the only one who secreted himself away to conduct experiments. The arms race to hit the market with the latest and greatest enchanted objects was on, and I found myself excited to see what solutions to everyday problems the other [Enchanters] would come up with.
In truth, I invited them to World’s End because I wanted to use them for ideas on how to apply my Skills, for I remained confident I could produce goods more efficiently than they could, and that my wares would be of higher quality. They would still earn a profit for now, but in time, they would find few options to avoid financial ruin but to join my Crossroad Consortium. Such a gambit on my own prowess was why I could afford to make such enticing offers to lure them here in the first place. It isn’t that they simply couldn’t pack up and leave, but by that point their true capabilities would be known, and they would doubtlessly be scooped up by some [Noble] and press-ganged into service long before they ever returned to their ancestral homes. Honestly though, they will stand to make huge sums of money if they work for me, and they will be free to tinker with innovations, just as long as they follow my rules.
One could say that I had a conflict of interests. The longer the war lasts, the more money I make. However, if we lose the war, every single one of us will die. Such a prospect has never stopped an enterprising merchant in the past, and so everyone gambled on how long we could drag things out and how high we could raise prices before we triggered the collapse of our defense. I like to think that, in those days, the only way to beat them was to join them. While I received generous sums of money from the united efforts of the nations of the world to keep World’s End running, the costs were still staggering and I was not flush with expendable capital.
Long-term, I needed to ensure that World’s End found itself as the center of trade on a vast network of roads, and likewise as the hub of education, research, and production of quality wares. Otherwise, it would turn into a ghost town the minute the war ended, for it was not otherwise in a strategically viable location. The wastelands have little of significant economic value to offer. If I could enchant the shit out of everything and pump in enough water, I may be able to turn it into valuable real estate.
Likewise, the Ashlands around World’s End are not much better, but that territory is contested on the coasts by civilization and within its borders by The Bone Wardens, who graciously did not raise a fuss about my intrusion when I made World’s End and World’s Hope, but their tolerance and magnanimity only extend so far. I would need to become fast friends with them in the near future and find a way to collaborate so that I do not overstay my welcome.
Auspicious, one may find events, that a large army of undead were found marching through the Ashlands towards my road, and from there, south to World’s End. The road continues around the city to World’s Hope, which I wagered was their final destination. Unless a bunch of necromancers popped out of their hidey-holes and decided now was the time to conquer the world, the army of undead had to be led by The Bone Wardens. Their advance made people nervous, and so I was forced away from my experiments to at least make sure they were not here to sack my city or cause a ruckus.
The undead were all skeletons, not a scrap of meat or skin to be found on them. Most were skeletons of people, but there were also large beasts and even a few dragons among them. It is hard to tell if the dragon skeletons are actually dead dragons or living ones using some sort of Skill. My money says mostly the former, with a few of the latter snuck in. The humanoids generally each occupy a two foot by three foot rectangle on my roads, which was about 35 abreast. That is around 30,000 or so a mile, and even as I fly out to meet them, the marching column stretches for as far as the eye can see. The good news is they never tire, the bad news is that northbound traffic has to pull over and wait for any army that is over 50 miles long to march by. Literally over a million skeletons were advancing upon World’s End. That would explain what has happened to all the skeletons that had been shipped south for the past couple decades.
The good news is that skeletons don’t eat, poop, or need to bathe. The bad news is that they creep people out. They would make for quiet, if eerie, neighbors in the various camps at World’s Hope. I imagine as more soldiers die, they will find little in the way of final rest for their weary bones. We were slated to have over half a million mortal defenders, and through the centuries, more people would show up, which would help to keep up demand for “fresh recruits” in the armies of undead.
Historians would come to call this “The War of Bone and Ash”. We who fought in it would call it “The Skeleton War”.