The battle of Archer Hill
After the duel, 5th division’s task force marches on Archer Hill, the fortification overlooking the bridge that controls access to the siege at Archibald’s Overlook. With the majority of the defenders having sallied south to crush them alongside Lord Quernius Ambertris’ forces, and the majority of the defenses facing north, the siege is an easy one. As soon as the rest of the division catches up, Archer Hill falls to a magic-assisted assault.
With the only supply line feeding the Marradi siege of Archibald’s in Harvand hands, the invaders’ defeat on the eastern front is a matter of time. Understanding this, the two Marradi divisions break the siege and march south, desperate to cross the Aste before they run out of food. Faced with a massive army, 5th division’s leadership decides to dismantle the bridge before they get overwhelmed, which the mages under Master Gregory accomplish easily.
With the bridge destroyed, the Marradi are well and truly trapped. They need to cross the river somehow, but so close to where the Aste plummets into the Rift, it is not just wide but also fast-flowing. The Marradi mages, well-versed in working earth after months of siege, start building a second bridge further down river, out of range of Archer Hill’s weapon emplacements, but it is slow going, complicated by ranged and magical attacks from the other shore. Before they are finished, they are attacked in the rear. The formerly besieged 1st division is out for blood, and is entirely unwilling to let their tormentors escape. As the Marradi turn around to hold their bridgehead, they find themselves beset from four sides:
In the north, 1st division, having gathered their forces and marched after their assailants. In the west, 5th division’s main forces. Once General Asher learned that 1st division was planning to attack, he ordered the mages to repair the bridge so he can march north and aid their allies. In the south, a contingent of mages, engineers and archers that fire across at the ones working on the bridge and anyone on the beach with arrows, spells, and artillery. And in the east Edwin’s ninth battalion, who swam across the river further downstream under the cover of darkness and now strike the least protected flank of the Marradi army from a wall of fog with the element of surprise and all the charm and tact Edwin is known for.
With enemies all around and Edwin’s assault striking deep into the soft underbelly of the Marradi army, the invaders end up surrendering after a few hours of hard and bloody fighting.
Changing theatres
With the eastern front a clear Harvand victory and a further two Marradi divisions taken out of circulation, the hectic fighting ebbs into a lull. While 5th division ultimately managed to save 1st division and break the siege, both forces are tired, with 1st div dangerously depleted after holding Archibald’s for several months. Command decides to freeze the situation in the east, with 1st holding the line at Archer Hill until they can recuperate and replenish, and 4th division holding Artelby against enemy probing attacks. Impressed by 5th division’s capabilities as a fast and aggressive offensive formation, the General of the Army orders them to leave their area of operations and join 3rd division at the western edge of the Wastelands.
After a few weeks of travel, passing by Pel Oreis but not stopping long enough to sightsee, they arrive and join forces with 3rd division. There, we meet some new people:
Duke Harvand isn’t new per se, but it’s the first time he shows up outside of an intermission. He wants to meet Edwin, of course, with his heroics being well-established at this point, so those two have a chat. Also, Edwin gets formally crowned Champion. It doesn’t really change anything for now, they’re still in the middle of the war so all the duke wants is that Edwin keeps being an awesome killing machine and Edwin doesn’t want to rock the boat… yet.
As avid readers will recall, 3rd division used to be Bordan’s military home, back before he retired and became an adventurer. Enter stage right: His old unit in the 3-1-3.
It’s a colorful bunch. Some of them are just happy to see him while a few others are pretty salty that he quit in the first place (he kind of just left without saying goodbye) and is now slumming with adventurers instead of signing back up when the war started. One of them comes to blows with Bordan and gets royally dunked on, because after months of fighting both people and monsters, Bordan is at least as lethal as he was when he was active duty, and he used to teach the spear to half of these nerds.
With access to people from Bordan’s past we learn that he didn’t just peacefully retire and move across the country on a whim, but that he had a scrap with one of the officers that could’ve seen him court martialed. Because he’s always been a boss and his superiors liked him, they managed to shield him enough that he got to collect his retirement with little more than a stern warning. I hadn’t fully planned this out in detail yet, but the officer would’ve showed up at some point down the line for some kind of showdown.
With Bordan giving one of them a thorough spear-spanking and Edwin folding another into a pretzel when he talks shit about adventurers in general and Bordan’s team in particular, the 3-1-3 learns that Bordan’s new crew is at least as kick-ass as they are, and they come to a sort of truce. Which is good, because at this point the war finally continues. With the Marradi forces stretched thin across the frontline, army leadership has hatched a daring plan: They’ll push through the greatly diminished opposition, ignoring the enemy forts and going directly for Pel Moheis.
The Marradi Rett and Denneph divisions are valiantly trying to hold them off, but for once it’s them who are outnumbered (1st div alone is ~7k troops at this point, with each Marradi div only 4k). The watchtowers, a string of small fortresses that control avenues of attack with emplaced artillery, were never meant to withstand frontal assaults and can’t hold the line on their own. When attacking one of the watchtowers, the defending Marradi element approaches under a flag of truce. It turns out it’s the monster battalion, the Marradi equivalent to Harvand’s Adventurer’s Guild, except theirs is part of the army.
The leader of the battalion wants to talk to the Guild representative and asks Bordan how they can ensure the safety of their citizens from monster attacks while they’re on the front. Bordan explains that every Guild chapter was allowed to keep a portion of their strength at home, just enough to get by. Hearing this, the battalion commander surrenders. As it turns out, the Marradi monster hunters are extremely pissed at being forced to the front, because in ordering them to fight in the war without allowing them to keep anyone back to do their actual job, King Marrad has broken the promise he made upon the foundation of their unit, and with them up north nobody’s defending the populace from monsters. They’re willing to surrender provided they can go back to their posts once the war is over.
With the defenders gone, the watchtower falls quickly and Harvand breaks through the line of fortifications ahead of anyone’s expectation.
Pel Moheis
As per the plan, 3rd and 5th continue south and manage to reach Pel Moheis before Marrad can reallocate forces to screen them away. However, like all major cities Pel Moheis is protected by a city shield. The mages get to work on breaking through, blasting it with disruptive mana until they run out, but it takes longer than hoped for. This deep in enemy territory, the combined army is in very real danger of being surrounded, and the leaders become more nervous by the day.
This is when Edwin, while boredly watching the shimmering shell of the city shield, has an idea. At night, he sneaks into the wagon of 5th division’s ritualism team and leaves the blueprint for a new ritual on the table. The next day he almost gets a heart attack when he gets summoned to the command tent, but they’re just asking him if he saw anyone around the wagon, knowing that he likes to walk around at night. Archibald examines the blueprint and quickly understands what it is for: A ritual to instantly break a city shield.
The ball-shaped city-shield ritual is an incredible sturdy construction, virtually without exploitable flaws. However, the Pioneers didn’t use mana crystals, so the ritual is set up to be directly powered by a mage. To adapt it to be powered by mana crystals, the humans built a magesilver construct onto the original ritual, looking like a silver bowl on a plinth. Crystals are placed into the bowl, and the ritual draws mana from the crystals as slowly or quickly as the shield requires.
However, unlike the rest of the ritual, this additional structure is from lower-quality human-made magesilver compared to the epic Pioneer stuff the rest of the ritual is made of. With his intimate knowledge of the entire construction, Walter has theorized that if a strong enough blast of disruptive mana would hit the shield in a single moment, the ritual would pull so much mana from the crystals that the human magesilver would melt, making the shield temporarily unusable.
Archibald manages to build the damn thing. It’s a wicked-looking three-dimensional ritual utilizing, among other things, the new magesilver wire. Each line and wire can only hold so much mana before melting (duh) so to get the required mana into one focal point and set off the blast requires some careful engineering. Think modern art installation where a crackhead artist went nuts with wires and you’re awfully close. The finished ritual gets carried to the edge of the shield and set off, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do… except Walter underestimated just how effective it would be.
When the plinth melts, molten magesilver and mana crystals spill all over the city shield ritual and cross a lot of wires that should under no circumstances be crossed. The Pioneer structure under Pel Moheis turns from a network of artfully decorated corridors into the gates of hell into a massive crater in half a second flat, taking with it the guard fortress built on top of it and a decent portion of the surrounding neighborhood. With the head cut off the city’s defenses, the remaining defenders don’t put up much of a fight, and by the time the sun comes up, Harvand blue flies above the city lord’s palace.
Intermission
We switch over to a town in Pertam, where three inquisitors are in a windowless room having a conversation. We learn that the reason why they haven’t done their job since the beginning of the war is that they have traitors in their ranks who helped Kelmor’s coup succeed, which they only learned once it all went south. Inquisitors usually work alone, which is only possible because their loyalty to the cause and their adherence to the laws are beyond doubt. If there is even one traitor, the entire organization is called into question. Once they learned this, the Inquisition suspended all other operations to thoroughly clean house. It’s a long and tedious process, because they initially didn’t know who to trust and they couldn’t turn to anyone outside, but now, months later, they’ve made good progress in identifying and hunting down the traitors.
They are interrupted by a messenger telling them that their target is on the move, so the inquisitors get going to intercept. They are disguised as normal people, one of them using her short figure to disguise as a young girl. Out on the street they pretend to be a father and daughter duo to approach their target. This way they almost manage to take the traitor down in the first attack, but he just barely manages to block it. A short but violent magical fight ensues, with high-powered combat spells flying both ways, but when the third inquisitor attacks the traitor from behind, he messes up and gets bisected by a force blade.
As the three dispose of his body, they mention how they’re looking forward to things going back to normal soon and how much work it’ll take to rectify the absolute state the world is in.
Ending the war
With Pel Moheis in enemy hands, even the dumbest Marradi understands that things aren’t going as planned. Still, King Marrad proves that he, too, didn’t get accepted into art school, and swears he can still turn things around. 3rd and 5th divisions barricade themselves in the newly-captured city, which is far less defensible now that the city shield is a faint memory, while Marradi forces besiege them from several sides. They’re happy enough to chill in town, as they have plenty of supplies there (a requirement for any city to hide under their shield in the first place), threatening the enemy with their forward deployment while 2nd, 1st and 4th division start making gains on their fronts.
After a few weeks of repelling assaults from outside and quelling insurgents from among the population, Edwin gets approached by the duke again. Lord Vander Pondris, the Raven, has come up with a dangerous plan. A small force of elite spies and warriors is to make their way south to Pel Marrad, covertly gain entry into the city and deactivate the city shield to allow for a following division to take the city. They’re worried another shieldbreaker ritual might not work, as the Marradi mages may have found and fixed the exploit. They want Edwin with them as part of the fighter contingent, because of course they do. Edwin accepts, and so does the rest of his team.
They quietly leave Pel Moheis and travel south, which takes quite a while because they have to remain completely unseen for most of it. Only once they get far enough away from the Wasteland can they assume the guise of merchants and travel the rest of the way out in the open. Things happen on the way, but nothing super exciting.
The local ravens manage to smuggle them through the gate one by one, and they meet up to discuss the plan. As the guard fortress is placed directly above the entrance to the ritual, getting inside is the first hurdle. The plan is for several of the fighters to get thrown in jail. Then, a diversion is created in another part of the city to draw away as many guards as possible, which is when a raven contact frees the jailed fighters, who will attack the defenders from behind as they rest of the team attacks from the front. Once inside, they have to fight their way into the underground ruins until they reach the ritual room, which they then have to hold until the Harvand force made up of most of 5th div, with 5-1’s heavies switched out for more lights from 3rd div, attack and enter the city.
Edwin and a few others stage a fight which works insofar as it gets them arrested, but things quickly go sideways. With the war not working out (and the ravens fanning the flames), unrest has been at an all-time high, so the cells are pretty much full. To separate the two sides in the “fight”, the guards are forced to lock up Edwin in the higher security prison instead of the regular one, which the guard on the ravens’ payroll doesn’t have access to. The plan proceeds without him, and when he hears a fight break out in the guard fortress through his window, he decides not to wait it out in his cell, instead manually bending the iron bars until he can slip through, because at this point it’s honestly ridiculous how strong he is. He collects his equipment at the front desk (he had to leave both his armor and glaive with the division before going on the mission) and rejoins his allies, quickly helping them to subdue the remaining guards.
They descend into the ruin, which is where things heat up. There are two mages on standby at the ritual who are entirely unwilling to let the intruders switch it off. This was to be expected of course, so the covert ops team have a few mages themselves, one of them Salissa. The mage fight drags on for a little because the defenders are holding a choke point, but it swings in the attacker’s favor when Edwin manages to knock out one of the mages by throwing his mace just when the mage drops his shield to attack. The other one gets overwhelmed, and they successfully take the ritual. They remove the mana crystals from the plinth and settle in to defend it against the returning guards. In the tight corridors, the guards can’t bring their overwhelming numbers to bear, so they hold.
Thankfully they don’t have to do so for long, as the Harvand troops enter the city and draw away most of the attackers. With the city shield now meaningless, they ascend back to the streets. With their main objective completed, their raven leader suggests that they head to the royal palace. The king might try to escape, and they might be able to stop and capture him. They make their way to the palace stables, breaking down the gate and engaging the defenders. As they are fighting, the king does indeed exit the palace with his bodyguards, most of whom join the fight while a small number join the king in mounting horses and attempting to leave.
The fight gets intense, as the king has two more mages among his bodyguards. The mages fight, and the fire and explosions turn the courtyard into an unsafe work environment and general health hazard. In the confusion, the king and three of his mounted bodyguards make it through the gate and run for it. The Harvand mages finally defeat their counterparts, but there are no (living) horses left. Edwin says screw it and gives chase on foot, with one of the ravens telling him their most likely goal, the southern gate, and how to get there. He starts zooming, eventually catching up to them just as they exit the city. The bodyguards are understandably confused how he’s faster than them but put their questions aside to engage him while the king escapes. Edwin doesn’t bother with them much; he just disables their horses and leaves them in the dust.
A short while later he catches up to the king, who he jump-tackles out of the saddle. When they initially started going for the stables, they were told by the ravens that the king’s survival was a political necessity, but after the two have a little chat, Edwin sees red and crushes the king’s skull with his bare hands.
This would’ve been the end of book 2, back when I thought the story would only be three books long. However long it actually would’ve turned out, this is the end of the war arc. There’s an epilogue from the POV of Kelmor, where he’s mostly just being angry that his plans didn’t work and that the king was such a useless cunt, and in the end he hints that it’s not over yet.
Volume three
Astute readers like you lot might have noticed that from volume one to two the genre shifted from a fantasy adventure, with Edwin and the gang traveling the countryside to kill fluffy creatures (and goblins) to a full-on military fiction. That was on purpose, even if it turned out to be a… questionable idea and one of the reasons why I decided to stop writing the story. With volume 2 done, the genre shifts again. The third one was intended to be a kind of spy novel, though I hadn’t completely finished planning it out yet.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
After the king died, Marrad surrendered and the war ended. It took a month or so to sort things out, after which they headed home. The book starts with Edwin and the others taking part in the victory parade in Pel Harvand, where everyone and their mothers receive medals. It’s a fun little scene where the big fights in the second book get recapped in the form of commendations handed out to the units taking part in them. Of course, Edwin gets absolutely showered with praise. After all the stunts he’s pulled he’s now firmly established as a national hero.
After the parade the team chills at Salissa’s parents’ place (her dad survived the war too, yay), and even Bordan’s wife and kids have come to visit. A few weeks later they’re all rested up and talking about heading back to pel Darni and getting back to adventuring, when they get summoned to the palace. The duke wants to see them. Well, mostly Edwin.
As it turns out, Duke Harvand has a super awesome, opportunity-of-a-lifetime mission for ol’ Edwin. He wants him to go to Pertam as part of a diplomatic delegation, because Pertam is getting really nervous now that Harvand is effectively occupying Marrad. The duke wants to convince them that they have no interest in invading them before they are convinced of the opposite by the remaining Marradi nobles who would like nothing more than to have Harvand and Pertam go to war while the former is still reeling from fighting Marrad, as it might give them an opportunity to rise up and regain their freedom.
Of course, Edwin refuses. The duke tries to appeal to his patriotism, which doesn’t work, then the fact that he’s his champion, which prompts Edwin to remind him what happened to the last duke who tried to mess with him, and storm out. On the way out he gets intercepted by the Raven, and the two talk. Pondris reveals that he’s looked into Edwin’s past and found suspiciously little. That sounds like an implied threat, so Edwin offers to toss him off the balcony and see if he can reach the sea or not. In the end, the Raven manages to talk Edwin down, revealing that there’s another, secret reason why the diplomatic expedition to Pertam is important. Edwin agrees to hear them out in exchange for Pondris giving him his word that he’ll stop snooping into his past if he accepts the mission.
As you might remember, there was a kind of rebellion in Pertam, with the island of Pertivi declaring independence. Since Harvand’s victory, the ravens have found proof that this rebellion was instigated by Marrad, who have apparently managed to pull a majority of lords and leaders on the island to their side. What’s worse, they have received intel that Master Kelmor and his remaining followers have fled there. This is where one of the other people in the room identifies himself as an inquisitor and explains that they must find and kill Kelmor at all costs, because from what they’ve uncovered (from the traitors, though of course he doesn’t say that) Kelmor has gotten his hands on some very illegal and dangerous magic. With the aftermath of the war, they’re spread super thin though, so they can only send a handful of inquisitors themselves. They asked the duke for help, and so the secret plan was born:
The diplomatic party will have three missions: First the official one, to convince Pertam that they’re not interested in another war and to help Pertam convince Pertivi diplomatically to stop being unruly and quit rebelling. The second mission is the ravens’, who want to go after the leaders that Marrad bought, threatened, or otherwise coerced, and make them change their mind through similar means. Third is the Inquisition’s mission to hunt down and neutralize Kelmor and his cronies.
They want Edwin there for two reasons: First of all, news of the war has made it to Pertam, and for some reason they’re huge fans of the stories of Edwin’s heroics. Due to this, having him there would be useful for the diplomatic part. At the same time he’d serve as muscle for the ravens and inquisitors.
Realizing that he wouldn’t be able to live peacefully if he turned them down and he’d always be looking over his shoulder wondering if Pondris or the Inquisition have finally figured out what he is, putting not just himself but also his friends in danger, he agrees. Bordan, Salissa and Leodin also agree (once they hear how much the duke is willing to pay them) and they set off south.
Stuff happens
The outline for volume 3 is still very much unfinished, but it goes something like this: On the way south they drop in on some of the nobles who were most loyal to the king to check up on them and do the diplomacy. One of them is Lord Vonochev, who has a very uncomfortable conversation with Edwin about his son. Edwin has one of his more lucid moments (the anger issues are getting bad, but it’s manageable as long as nobody attacks him or actively pisses him off), and he admits that Fedor was a good duelist and maybe the fastest fighter he’s ever faced. Vonochev is appeased by that because nobles are weird, and nobody dies.
They do get ambushed a few times by what are clearly hired swords, mostly former soldiers, but that’s not really a threat to anyone.
They also stop by the monster battalion HQ, who are very happy to be back to doing their job. There are talks about them converting to a guild like the one in Harvand. Good times.
Anyway, they reach the coast and meet up with the Pertese (=from Pertam) ambassador and her party. She’s Duke Pertam’s daughter and generally pretty cool. The sail over to Pertivi and do the diplomacy again. Think balls, lunches, boring discussions, but pretty sweet beaches. Pertivi is the New World equivalent of a mediterranean tourist island.
While they’re being wined and dined, the ravens and inquisitors get to work, and Edwin and the gang get in on the cloaking and daggering. Diplomat during the day, spy at night. Or something. Anyway, the plot of vol 3 is pretty much the interplay of the three different missions: The diplomatic one, which plays the smallest part and mostly acts as hindrance to the other stuff. The political espionage stuff, where the ravens are uncovering the network of intrigue behind the rebellion and send Edwin and the others on covert missions to infiltrate compounds, steal items or money, recover blackmail material that the remaining Marradi spies have on the local nobles or procure new blackmail material for the ravens – the whole shebang. And finally the inquisitorial one, where they hunt down the remaining mages hiding out on the island, so we get some magical fights at last.
There are a few cool scenes planned, like that one time the entire diplomatic party gets poisoned and put to sleep, except of course poison doesn’t work on Edwin. He pretends to be knocked out at first, then goes on a murdering spree with a dinnerplate. Later, when facing off against Master Hilera, the entire kill team gets hit with a stun spell that went straight through the shields and puts everyone out of commission. With Edwin unconscious, Walter takes the reigns and basically remotely controls the body to kill Hilera when she turns her back on him. (He doesn’t use magic, just controls the body)
The Showdown
The end of volume three is the showdown between our heroes and Master Kelmor. The inquisitors have discovered the hiding place of Kelmor, as well as another small laboratory that might be defended by a student of his, so the main force goes after Kelmor while a single inquisitor along with Edwin’s team go to the underground lab. Except, they misinterpreted the intel and encounter Kelmor himself. Who has recently turned into a Lich. Yikes.
There’s nothing to do but fight, so the inquisitor and Salissa go after Kelmor while the rest engage the mundane soldiers that work for him. It’s a tough battle, and by the time they defeat most of the guards, Kelmor manages to kill the inquisitor and turns his attention to Salissa, who is hopelessly outmatched.
Seeing her in danger, Edwin charges in to attack the Lich. He doesn’t really manage to do anything except divide his attention though, and when Kelmor gets annoyed that Edwin keeps getting back up, he has enough and punches a spear straight through his armor and into his chest. The spear nicks the crystal around Walter’s core and it explodes violently, killing Edwin.
Everyone is wondering why Edwin just exploded, when they are even more surprised to find him get back up. With Edwin dead and the core freed from its crystal, Walter is back in control. And he’s pissed.
He also realizes that his power is boosted way beyond its usual limits. As explained in vol 1, mana exerts pressure, and the mana capacity of a mage’s core is basically the limit to which they can fill their core before the internal pressure becomes too much. However, the crystal around his core acted as an additional membrane that prevented the mana from escaping – which is also the reason why he kept growing much more powerful than expected. He hadn’t counted on the pressure in his core to rise in this abnormal manner.
Anyway, he’s supercharged, which is bad for his foes.
With a wave of his hand he converts a flame so hot that it turns the remaining soldiers into shadows on the wall, raising the temperature in the thankfully large cavern from cold to uncomfortably hot. He then engages Kelmor. The latter, once he realizes what Walter is (which isn’t too hard because his flesh is melting off his bones, revealing his core and glowing blue eyes), tries to convince him to join him. The usual “we could rule the world together” shtick.
Walter’s not into it, instead he lets loose and kicks Kelmor’s bony ass across the cave and back with some sweet magical moves I’d saved for this precise moment, including using half-linked telekinesis to grab onto a wall and pull himself towards it at incredible speeds, which he can now do because he doesn’t have a fleshy body anymore that could be damaged by the force of the acceleration.
In the end, Edwin depletes most of Kelmor’s mana and catches the guy, at which point he grabs Kelmor’s core and siphons it of mana. As it turns out, this is the only way to actually kill a Lich. Their minds are stored in their core as mana, so if the mana ever runs out completely (which can’t happen on its own), the mind ceases to exist. Kelmor begs, Walter doesn’t care, the core extinguishes, and the fight is won.
With Kelmor dead, Edwin turns to his team. Both Salissa and Leodin are out of commission (I really didn’t treat Leodin well enough in this story. He should’ve had way more screen time and more interesting interactions), but Bordan is still awake, albeit hurt pretty bad. Walter heals all three of them with his flesh magic, even dropping a hidden upgrade here and there because he can, and has a chat with Bordan, who is initially scared. Walter manages to convince him that he’s not evil, and that all he wants is to live his lives (though he doesn’t go into specifics). He asks Bordan that if anyone asks him, he should say that Edwin died in the fight – which is technically true – and to not give away his secret except to Salissa and Leodin. Then he grabs the glaive (ain’t no way he’s leaving that beauty behind) and leaves.
The End.
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Because you asked, here’s some of the lore that I never properly explained in the story:
The New World
The weird shape of the continent, with the Rift in the middle and the cliffs in the west, were caused by a battle between two gods a long time ago. They were duking it out a ways south of the continent, with one of them shooting massive bars of disintegration magic at the other. Two of those bars missed and continued on, hitting the continent and going straight through. That’s why the western coast has a different angle than the Rift: The spells that cut them were fired from the same location.
Not really relevant, just a neat little piece of background lore. Nobody in-universe knows this.
The original inhabitants of the New World were of course the Pioneers along with the Volarki, with the latter being kept by the former as a servant race. The Pioneers, roughly three meter tall blue-skinned humanoids, were all incredibly powerful mages, and their favorite pastime was messing around with magic. At some point they found a way to change living creatures, which is when they created all the weird creatures that inhabit the continent: Direbeasts, hobgoblins, etc. The reason why different direbeasts are so similar is because it’s the exact same ritual that created them. It just worked slightly differently on different animals.
The Volarki were initially a race of small, furry bipeds, maybe a meter tall. Think Ewoks, but less cute. They weren’t very strong, which is why the Pioneers decided to mess around with them too. This was how the different Volarki “types” were created: Big and strong ones to carry stuff, medium sized fast ones to go places, and a bunch of other ones just because they could. In case you haven’t figured it out by now: The Pioneers were a bunch of racist pricks.
While they were still doing that, other Pioneers got a crazy idea. They wanted to build a ritual that would change the way magic worked. They didn’t really have a good reason for it, they mostly just wanted to see if they could.
As it turned out they couldn’t, but they got really damn close. It blew up – kinda. There wasn’t an explosion, but a large part of the continent got sliced up in interesting geometrical shapes. The humans would later call this location “The Pillars”, it’s right across from Walter lab, on the other side of the Rift. Volarki territory though, so you can’t just go there.
While the Pioneers were still reeling from their failure, the gods descended. Okay, not all of them, just three or so. The ritual had been so powerful that it caught their attention, and if the humans have one thing right about the gods it’s that you do not want their attention.
The gods took a good long look, decided that the Pioneers were potentially annoying to keep around, and triggered two spells.
The first one was more pwoerful. It swept the continent and a good portion of the planet, turning every last Pioneer to dust. The second one was far less powerful, as it was more of an afterthought. It swept out to disintegrate everything the Pioneers had built, mainly to remove all traces of their ritual circle. The god who did it didn’t put a lot of effort into it though, so this spell only penetrated a short distance into the earth. Everything aboveground was gone, but peoples’ basements and other underground structures survived.
Before you ask: No, the genetics lab was above ground. Walter won’t get to mess around with peoples’ DNA.
Anyway, with the Pioneers gone, the Volarki were confused and leaderless. They had no idea what had happened (and they’re not particularly intelligent to begin with), so they kind of just kept going as well as they could, hoping that their masters would one day return.
When the humans showed up, they landed on the Pioneer-built piers at what would later become Pel Ister. This wasn’t a coincidence, the entire western coast is a massive cliff, so it was the first place they found where they could disembark. The Volarki didn’t find this at all funny, as any and all Pioneer ruins are sacred places to them. They told the humans to bugger off immediately or else, which they didn’t understand because they don’t speak rodent, and before anyone knew what happened they were at war.
The Volarki weren’t particularly centralized, otherwise the humans would’ve lost early on. By the time word had spread that there were infidels defiling the sacred structures and Volarki came streaming in from all over, the humans had already built a decent set of fortifications and weren’t so easily dislodged anymore.
The war goes on, the humans keep winning, finally cooler heads prevail among the (remaining) Volarki who agree to stop fighting if the damn humans promise to stop expanding into their land. The continent is divided up, the duchies are formed, and the rest is history.
There are a bunch of interesting places that initially intended to explore but never got around to, like the Clawed Woods, the Pillars, the Rift, and the mountains up north. Yes, there are real dragons up there – not a lot of them though, and they’re very territorial. There’s also the wide variety of Pioneer ruins, especially the cool ones like the underground port in Pel Harvand, that only ever appeared as a side notes.
And, of course, there’s other continents than just the New World – like the old one, which is far to the north-west of where our story takes place.
Forms of Address
There are some peculiarities with how people address each other that I never explained, either because there would be no in-world way to add an explanation or to see if you guys could figure it out just by observing its use. The first one is that the proprietor of an establishment is referred to as “Master/Mistress”. This kind of clashes with “Master/Master” also being a level of proficiency for both craftsmen and mages.
This has historical reasons that go back a very long time. At one point, during the early days of the Empire, there was an edict that only those who had attained the rank of Master in their chosen profession were allowed to open up their own shop. The pretense was ensuring quality standards, but really the Masters of the time just wanted to keep their thumbs securely on their Journeymen. Without this law, they could have set out on their own early and competed with the Masters when it came to lower-quality products.
Due to this, if you were to enter a shop during that time you would have a very high chance of having to address the proprietor as “Master”. After a while, people started calling everyone else who owned a shop “Master” too, and before you knew it, it stuck. The reason why the female version of the title is different between the two uses is that during the Empire, women weren’t allowed to become master craftsmen or own shops. By the time this changed, nobody remembered how the whole thing had started, so when people had to address a female proprietor, they thought it came from “Master of the house”, the correct female version of which would be “Mistress”.
The other big thing, and one that you probably noticed as seeming weird, is how nobles are addressed. I made that purposefully strange and convoluted because, let’s be honest: That’s just how aristocracy is. Keeping customs around for hundreds of years or longer can lead to some weird things.
First of all, every proper noble (knights don’t count, Edwin’s champion rank doesn’t either) is addressed as “Lord X”. With the culture of this part of the world being that people don’t have last names, they are usually addressed as “Lord [First Name]”. An example would be Lord Theodor, the division lord of 5th division. His name is Theodor Lidion, but everyone calls him Lord Theodor.
A lord is addressed by their last name when they are, in some form, representing their entire family. This can refer to the head of the house, but also whenever another member of the family is out making deals or participating in ritualized behaviour (like taking part in court) on behalf of their house. This is the important part. During the duel, both Lord Theodor and Lord Quernius address each other by their family names, Lidion and Ambertris*, because they are leading their duchy’s armies not just as themselves, but as representatives of their houses. A good way to think about it is nobles temporarily putting on the “family politics hat”.
*Lord Ambertris is referred to as such before the duel as well, but that’s because the 5th div guys don’t know his first name until they meet him
This also means that any action they take would blow back on their family, which is why there are a lot of unspoken rules about invoking your own family name or that of someone else. If a noble were to insult another using their given name, that’s mostly between the two of them. If he were to insult him using his last name, he’s indirectly insulting the whole family, which could have serious consequences.
This alone would be too easy, of course, so just to add a little spice, it gets a little more complicated yet. The head of the family is addressed by his title (Duke Harvand, Baron Lidion) instead of “Lord” in almost all circumstances. This acts much like the family name, and the head of the family is rarely not “on duty”, so you usually don’t have to worry about it. Unless you’re a personal friend or otherwise find yourself in a private setting, then you might want to address them as “Lord [First Name]” or with their first name alone.
And let’s not forget the interplay between noble titles and regular titles! We have the perfect example too, the Chaptermaster of the Pel Darni Adventurer’s Guild, Master Hector. Being a close cousin of Lord Theodor’s, his full name is Lord Hector Lidion. People in the story always refer to him as “Master Hector”, because he only appears in Guild settings, so people refer to him by his “Guild rank”. It works in much the same way as a family name, except the two cannot be used at the same time. Hector can’t be “Master Lidion”, because he would wear the hats of both the Guild and his family, which would be an immediate conflict of interest.
Knights are a bit of an oddity. In a way, they’re their own category between proper nobles and commoners. They’re still nobles by definition but are referred to as “Knight” instead of “Lord”, everything else works pretty much the same. Knighthood is given out by a liege lord for exceptional service, but unlike a real lordship it has a limit on how many times it can be passed down, with two being the norm. A knight like that would have their kids and grandkids be knights as well, but their great-grandkids would be commoners again. It adds up though, so if a knight’s son earned another knighthood, he could extend it for his whole family. There were a few families in history who managed to retain their knighthood for hundreds of years, some even rising to lordship eventually through continued loyal service to their lord.
Edwin’s case is a little special as his title is “Champion”, but that wouldn’t be passed on to his children (if he could have any). Those would be knights, or nothing, depending on what Duke Harvand chose to reward him with. For a ducal Champion, 2 or 3 generations of knighthood would be most appropriate, but the rules don’t specify anything. The champion of a lower ranked noble might only get 1 generation, or none at all.
Story concepts
There are a whole bunch of ideas for sequels and short stories in this universe, some of which I might very well still do, so I’ll be vague:
First of all, the sequel to Edwin’s story was supposed to be a series of stories told from other peoples’ POV’s. Walter, in constantly changing bodies, would show up in them as one of the side characters, but you wouldn’t know which one until the very end. Each story would jump ahead in the timeline, so you’d slowly see history unfold while following the adventures of other people. Those would be the ones to explore the Volarki lands, who meet a ship of explorers from the Old World who discover the continent, who fight a dragon. And each time, Walter would be there to experience it as a regular person, just as he wished.
I also had ideas for a few one-shots, like a story exploring the Mage Wars. There was a lot more going on than people in Edwin’s time know, especially if you consider that, contrary to popular belief, not all Liches were on the side of the Tyrants…
And then one during the civil war that led to the Exile. Maybe from the POV of the people who would end up going into exile, like Lionel Lidion and his friend, the at the time not-yet-duke Harvand. That could be cool.
Yep, this is pretty much it. It turned out a little longer than I thought as I went into a little more detail, but I hope this satisfies your curiosity on how the story ends.