Chapter 073: Guidance

I spend the next few hours leaning as much as I could about Anataelia from Firewing. The messenger system was really useful. The interesting thing was that she didn’t seem to know a thing about any type of insurgents in the area. So they either started recently, or were good enough for the enemy to not notice them… or Northern Aevaria was suppressing information about them, to avoid looking weak.

We’ve managed to rest a bit (the rebels even brought food) before their leader came.

Then my jaw dropped. The person that came in was… obviously original. Very original. Firstly: she was a BLOOD ELF. A blood elf AS A LEADER. what were the chances? One of the rarest species in the world, and also one biologically and genetically formed towards serving, not ruling. As a leader.

Then, A FREAKING LEVEL SEVENTY-EIGHT. Seventy-fucking-eight. A mere casual estimation put her in the realm of people strong enough to battle Ambryxis in his full power, at least when with a few level forty or fifty sidekicks to made up for her weaknesses. Blood Knight was not the most common class, but not entirely unexpected.

I quickly found an explanation of how a blood elf could be a leader of a rebellion. She was a Chosen One of Shadow, local God/dess of anarchy, freedom and revolutions. And with a Greater Blessing. Which meant… ugh, it was going to be a pain.

It also meant a metric tonne of Transcendentals and probably at least two-three artifacts of an unknown level of power.

I should probably fall into another much-too-long internal rant over how crazy this is and how much I hate Gods pulling weird things, but I’m more or less cool with it at this point. If anything, I’m positively intrigued at why exactly a being like her was here, so far away from the expected battlefield of the Twilight War.

Hlla Virhh. North Aevarian names seem a bit tricky to pronounce. They seem to omit vowels, but only some of them and depending on circumstances. I’m not learning their language, no way.

Weird. Now that I think about it, shouldn’t stuff like that (modern languages and so on) be automatically translated?! I mean, I didn’t have to bother with this shit when we talked with the Von Osten officer. Was the translation mechanism terminated, or is it only a malfunction?

There are just so many questions I don’t even feel like answering. I mean, what’s the difference?

“So those are the ‘intruders’ you spoke off?” The low elf lieutenant showed up behind her. “Alright, OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!” I almost fired a spell, then I remembered she would squash us with a finger. Others knew better than to leap at her, at least without me saying something. Then the blood elf suddenly laughed loudly. “Aww, I loved the look on your face.” Then she said something to her lieutenant in local language.

“She told him to let us out.” Vaera said, and we chilled out. Phew. At least we avoided bloodshed. Most likely one-sided, though even with Hlla and Leavr working together we could probably get back into the portal (with casualties, and it depended on how much the Chosen One would go all-out).

She spoke in a perfect version of language native to Ambryxis. If that frankenstein of a language deserves to be called like that.

Why am I not surprised?

***

“The whole province of Anataelia is only theoretically a part of the Kingdom.” Hlla told us maybe half an hour later, when she grouped us all in what I presumed to be her command center. One of the many rooms in this ruined castle, big and probably once a dining hall or something. Now it had a big table with a lot of chairs, and kinda of a blackboard equivalent with a big map of what I presumed to be Anataelia. “The king pretty much handed the whole province to a bunch of Bonehead-worshipping wackos under the joint ‘Unmakers’ title.”

“Doesn’t sound like something a king of Northern Aevaria would do.” Leria commented. She sat with the rest of us at the long table. At the very beginning of it, with me on the opposite side. Hlla choose the setting, and she seemed to assume our Chosen Ones were the leaders.

“Yes, well, normally he has a hard-on about his authority and deciding the life and death of every inhabitant of his land, but now he is in a pickle.” Hmm? “There is a veeery famous oracle somewhere south in the kingdom. She rarely makes a prophecy, but quite recently she produced one about ‘the doom of the kingdom’ that will ‘come from the west’. With the king naturally believing that the prophecy means Ashkar. So he unofficially sold the key border provinces to the Unmakers in exchange for producing him an army.”

Oh boy, somebody messed up big time. Or, to be exact, I’m 90% sure that either Shadow fed the king with bullshit as a part of a Great Game, or he made a serious error on his own.

It’s a VERY bad idea to ‘assume’ anything by default when prophecies are involved. They can be avoided entirely or they can go through by the letter… but the problem is that the ‘letter’ is always ambiguous. Reminds me of that ancient king from Earth that asked an oracle for a counsel of whether he should attack Persia. Oracle told him that ‘if he crosses the border river, a great kingdom will fall’ - and he attacked, only for HIS great kingdom to fall.

I’m almost sure that Ashkar isn’t the doom from the oracle. And I’m at least 50% sure that we’re currently talking with it. A Chosen One of Shadow with Greater Blessing is certainly enough to lay waste to a kingdom, at least with the right circumstances.

“I assume that the building blocks of said army are local citizens… who don’t like it one bit?” Which pretty much explained open rebellion. It’s straightforward suicide to rise against a kingdom like that, but when alternative is death, the suicide part becomes less important.

“Yes. Fresh corpses, high quality undead and so on.” Wonder-fucking-ful. “The whole area isn’t very populated. There are more demons and beasts than people. Maybe one hundred thousand people as a whole, enough to build a nice army.”

… ok, that’s sick even by Doomplace standards. We’re talking about open genocide.

“Officially, the province rebelled. With Ashkar’s help. And the Unmakers were merely there to put it down quickly.” Which was flatout bullshit. Who the fuck would rebel in the name of absolute totalitarian Pentagram-serving maniacs that seem to be trying to obliterate free will as a concept?! ”Of course, Unmakers were veeeery fast in their response. The capital of the province fell immediately, which isn’t surprising since nobody expected the attack. With it, most of the province’s higher ranked adventurers were gone. The archmagician is either dead or imprisoned. The lord died together with a big part of the capital. Pretty ironic, since he was pretty much a dick to the province his entire life, but died leading a few of his remaining retainers in a desperate last stand that allowed more people to flee from the city.”

Looks like even bad people still have standards. It’s not hard to imagine the Unmakers being under silent Pentagram support. Then again, people can still do things like that even without worshipping literal gods of evil. Quite often (if not in most cases) they do not need to worship anything, or might be opposing worshipping as a whole.

Then again I don’t think that even Black Pantheon Gods’ would enjoy it. If anything, the presence of Shadow’s Chosen One leading the survivors speaks a lot. Genocides are… too far even for them. Tyranny, sure. Suppression (often brutal) of your enemies, of course! Killing people to achieve your goals, why not! But wiping out a six digit number of people that were your worshippers to begin with?!

If the Gods feared losing them all to Ashkar (and Pentagram) they would just have some random group of adventurer unearth some long-forgotten superweapon. This world had a history bumpy enough to have one approximately every square kilometre. Or they’d sent a powerful Chosen One/brought a demigod to lead their faithful.

“Ever since then the whole province is under a general lockdown. They pulled some powerful barrier magic on its borders.” Hlla continued, completely unabated by our shock and disgust. “With exception of the one to the west, nobody is crazy enough to escape there. So we are locked here, together with a slowly growing host of undead. Whose number will probably surpass the number of pre-attack population, since they are also breaking seals on cemeteries and summoning additional ones from the Black Tomb.”

Domain of the Bonehead, huh. Would implicate his participation, if he wasn’t such a hikkikomori. He hides in the deepest part of it, together with a small (for Gods' standard) cadre of retainers, and guarded by Jörmungandr, the World Serpent from Nordic mythology that he stole for himself during the Dawn War, when Asgard fell to the Imperial Gods. He doesn’t give a shit about the things that happen in Real World, to the point that most of the “Bonehead” cultists actually follow a variety of ascended necromancers portrayed as ‘his’ demigods.

“There is no way for any Bonehead cult to control this number of undead.” I pointed out an obvious logical problem. “If they could, they would have conquered the whole world long ago. You need to be an archmagician to control a few thousand, and here we are talking about at least one or two hundred thousands.” They could probably wipe out most of the Tyranny of Ashkar’s holdings on the continent, at least until the Tyrant authorized archspell usage.

“That’s why they don’t control them.” ...what? “They just let them loose. They have magic to prevent them from attacking their own.” … oh! A six digit number of undead, including some really powerful ones, would be a major deterrent to an Ashkarian attempt to march an army through the province. “Ashkar’s military doctrine is essentially zerg rush with bad quality infantry. If they tried that here, with the earth itself tainted with black magic enough to pull things back to life… well, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

Aaand she starts breaking the common sense by using terms from our world. Ugh. Shadow’s Chosen Ones are a pain.

What she doesn’t say is that Tyranny couldn’t just firebomb the province with archspells and archhexes, because it’s still at least nominally Northern Aevaria’s territory. Mutually Assured Destruction is still fully in effect. You don’t just throw archhexes on territory of other countries. If they did that, Northern Aevaria would probably cauterize half of Ashkar’s holdings on Aevaria in retaliation. With Imperium (Eagle Federation and Eternal Empire could actually join in as well) finishing the rest.

There are things you just DON’T DO. No matter what. Even if you are Pentagram servant.

It’s quite funny how much this world resembles Earth. If you ignore the still kicking paganism and some additional monotheisms, magic, daemons and beasts and essentially everything magic-derived. It’s like Earth, only one that followed a radically different cultural evolution. There are enough common elements though, since the core was the same (but approached by for example people adapting to beasts prowling the countryside and trying to eat them). And many things (from toilets to mass destruction weapons) were simply achieved via magic rather than science. The earlier Demiurge Forge’ games were even using a modified map of Earth.

So it’s essentially a zombie apocalypse. Only we probably have at least… well, I won’t speculate, but most likely a lot of archdaemon-level undead.

“Thankfully, the province was far from being densely populated.” Hlla continued. “While Unmakers quickly wiped out the major cities, they are very busy with everything else. The fact that people here are rather sturdy didn’t help them. At least several smaller towns are still under siege, while most of the villagers simply disappeared into the countryside. Thousands of people hiding in the wilderness. As messy as the geography of Anataelia, the Unmakers will need a century to pick everyone out.” She clicked her tongue. “Or at least they would take a century, if the kingdom didn’t provide them with some copies of adventurer’s guild maps of the province. The original were lost where the undead stormed their regional’s headquarters.”

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

Yes, knowing pretty much every possible hideout in the province helps a lot. Then again, it’s still hundreds of hideouts. And many of them aren’t being used as hideouts, because there are mean things that might shred unfortunate necromancers coming too close. Besides, many people just hide in average places (like forests), and the temperature around here is pretty comfortable for things like that.

It’s easier, but not easy.

“And where is your place in this?” Lena suddenly intruded on the talk. Weird. Well, it was a question I wanted to ask as well, so no harm done.

Hlla gave me a weird look that I decoded ‘you let your slaves talk like that to free people?!’ The Chosen One might be a hero for local standards, but those are still standards for a Doomplace.

“Well, I was in the area.” As a slave? Unlikely, with her approach to Lena. Was there a hidden blood elf village? I thought that there were reserves like that only in Imperium, but Northern Aevarian kings could set up something like that. Having their own source of naturally submissive sidekicks/bodyguards would totally fit bastards like them. “And then I got Chosen by Shadow, that gave me a mission to take the Unmakers down… and then do the same for king Srvrs. And his asshole, Tyrant-serving son Tvrid. And so, here I am.”

I have a feeling she omitted a few quite interesting parts, but I’m not really in a position to interrogate her. Too bad.

Shadow is certainly cunning enough to ditch the whole Twilight War business in exchange for some more… direct gains. At least several gods are playing it, but there is no reason for ALL of them to participate. If anything, it would just make it chaotic even by the Gods’ standard. Most of them probably opted out of it in exchange of several additional moves in the Great Game. With the number of them depending on how powerful in that area they were.

With Tyrant probably at least narrowly connected with the Twilight War - if only by virtue of Ambryxis being connected to him - Shadow probably managed to sneak a few points against him. That he/she exchanged for getting a powerful Chosen One to take down Northern Aevaria. If Unmakers are really manipulated from the shadows from some Pentagram people, the rest was just Shadow choosing a perfect place for her Chosen to start her revolution and taking advantage of Pentagram’s move.

Which turns the Northern Aevaria into melee-a-trois between Pentagram, Tyrant and Shadow. Though there might be additional participants, yet to be visible. As much as I fundamentally disagree with all of the participants, Shadow’s the best choice here.

She is an epitome of revolution devouring her own children, with every succeeded revolutionary movement (even if it was at least narrowly just, which I believe that doesn’t happen in the nature) quickly fracturing and ending up with revolutions being led against revolutionaries.

But utter chaos and general collapse is the best thing locals can hope for, at least when the only alternatives are continuation of current tyranny… or even worse tyranny. If Twilight War plays according to the good side’s plans, there is a fair chance of Imperium seizing the Northern Aevaria. Chaos in these lands is a good thing, especially…

Oh. OH. Of course. I understood at least one of the things that the Gods (or at least Overtyrant and Inri, I don’t see others’ having a reason to do that) wanted to achieve by sending us here. It’s both unbelievably cunning… and strategically decisive. But it relies mostly on Hlla succeeding.

God, I love that moment when puzzles fell into places. It’s like I was getting high. You can probably get addicted to that.

Overtyrant (and perhaps Inri, his actions tend to be too subtle to notice) in cahoots with Shadow against non-Pentagram member of Black Pantheon? Jesus (it’s Inri here, I guess) Christ, this is getting weird.

“Here I am, huh.” I decided to speak, since Leria obviously wasn’t doing that and the rest were strangely intimidated by our host’s level. “Pretty shortened version, but people tend to not talk much about their past. Since we ended up here, I must presume that the Gods’ that chose us want us to participate in this war. And since I can’t imagine Overtyrant expecting us to support the Unmakers, there is only a single option left. Can we help you somehow?”

She smiled. She knew it was going to end up like that. Chosen Ones of Shadow always know that.

***

The mission was pretty simple. Right now, current encampment of Hlla rebels had at best one hundred combat-able people. It wasn’t the only one such encampment, but currently most of her forces were pretty busy decimating Unmakers’ army laying siege to the small city of Tsshen via generous application of guerilla warfare. Two furrows away.

Now, the problem was that there was a big horde of undead (and some additional Unmakers’) marching down that particular furrow and wiping out survivors. This encampment (plus maybe fifty to one hundred more survivors from the area that had some combat skills) was planning to defend the key bridge that was going to force the undead into not using their numerical superiority to overwhelm their enemies.

The plan was to wipe out as many undead as possible, with Hlla preferably going for the archdaemon/Unmaker spellcasters leading the horde, hopefully causing it to disperse. That was a best case scenario. The alternative was buying time for survivors in the area to flee.

That’s where the problems started: there was nowhere to run. That particular furrow was essentially a ten kilometre road starting somewhere near the capital city and leading towards the Ashkar’s border. With about three-hundred metre high walls on both sides. Escaping towards that wasn’t really an option.

There were, obviously, ways to access neighbouring furrows. Heck, you could climb the stone walls separating furrows. But, the problem was that roads like that were never really well-kept by local government even before the Unmakers’ came. If anything, locals did everything they could to bring their own demise.

Concentrating all trade and population movement in a capital (that lied in the place more or less in the center of the furrows where they all converged, close to the eastern border of Anataelia) worked well for a centralized state that lived in permanent fear of rebellion.

But it also meant that most of the abandoned mines, caves and tunnels that connected furrows were long ago overran by nasty things. With surviving adventurers going to be needed for a desperate last stand on the bridge, there was nobody around ready to clear the dangerous passages via furrows. It was one thing to march near five hundred warriors of Hlla that were now fighting near Tsshen, it was another to secure a passage for close to six hundred women, children and elderly.

Hlla could probably spare ten warriors to clear it, but… as a Chosen One of Shadow she was far from being heroic. For her, the civilians were a bother. Losing them could actually improve her logistics and allow her forces to move faster. The only reason she was willing to actually go out to save them was for heroic publicity and improvement in morale.

What she really cared for was taking down the leadership of incoming undead horde. And retreating with her forces intact as much as possible. Fights between Black Pantheon’ servants were always either evil vs evil or evil vs lesser evil. In rare cases some morally grey people. You needed White Pantheon for some genuinely good people (and 99% of them were still various shades of grey).

So, the mission was simple. Clear a passage for civilians to escape. Very few of the passages were actual anomalies, so once cleared, they should remain clear at least for some time. Not an easy mission, but certainly doable.

Firstly we had to figure out which passage we should try to clear.

There were several options. Some of them bad, some of them worse. We had to pick a location close enough to the area where the survivors gathered, but far enough from the bridge to avoid some accidental stray undead wiping them out.

The amount of potential passages was simply depressing. The whole region could be easily made into a major industrial hub… but what gave it a potential for greatness also doomed it to be an unimportant backwater.

The weird geological changes ages ago - my guess was some old god falling in battle during Dawn War and his dying screams tearing the tectonic plate into this weird geographical madness - brought a lot of minerals from the depths. According to Hlla and Learv you could find even rare (and normally occurring at great depths) metals like adamantium or mithril.

However, while the minerals were here, the geography was utter madness to the point that mining wasn’t a profitable thing. Transport was a pain. Without navigable rivers or being near coast transporting bigger amount of stuff was simply too expensive. In our world in Roman times it was more profitable to bring wheat to the capital from Egypt rather than estates farther than thirty kilometres on land.

While normally this amount of rare metals would still be profitable after expansive investments, there was a lot of other (and more conveniently placed) potential sources of them. Organisation of proper mining and infrastructure that would make the costs actually bearable would cost a lot… and there was a tough chance that Ashkar would end up annexing the borderlands.

Because of that land that could outmatch Ambryxis in terms of money was a backwater with an ongoing genocide made simply because nobody cared about the meager income it brought. The only longterm chance for Anataelia that I could see was the Imperium winning a decisive victory, annexing Northern Aevaria, and establishing a stable border at least a bit further to the west. Some railways going through the furrows could be a hella lot of gamechanger.

Regardless of the lack of profitability, there was still a lot of past mines. Selling was one thing, some fat-cat from the royal court establishing his own hidden mine to gather some valuable minerals to arm up his personal guard (while making it harder for the local StateSec to notice what’s happening) was something else. Literally ⅔ of potential routes were old mines that were in the end abandoned… but not before the miners breached into the other side of the 1-5 km wide furrow walls. Or actually after it, simply because some local ambitious group decided that a passage unknown to others would be useful.

“Do we have to go for another mine?” Simea wailed suddenly in the middle of our impromptu council. “The dungeon, the Descent, that one place in the Vanvyra. I’m already fed up with underground places as a whole, but mines are even worse!”

This kinda sealed our future, as I didn’t really see a reason to not listen to her. It didn’t really matter, right?

“Well, if you cross that adamantium mine, the second best passage without a mine within would be that.” Hlla pointed to another place on the map. “That one place is a mess-up. Part of it seems natural, part artificial. But the latter part is certainly not a mine, or at the very least it wasn’t exploited in known history. No mining equipment.”

Sounds both promising and fishy.

“Any notable things?” It’s best to investigate before getting inside in-person.

“Some reznite deposits. Hard to say why.” Reznite was funny metal. Mentally-charged by suffering. You needed just a bit of an anomalous area (magic in the air and so on) and then have people die in suffering, which was enough to taint any random non-magical metal vein into it. Attempts to artificially grow the stuff were met with intense displeasure by the Imperium. Its existence was a bad thing, mostly because veins of reznite have quite bad effects on nearby people. On the other hand, it was enough to deter most of things.“Nothing really stays for long there, so it’s hard to say what is living there right now. Probably nothing strong.”

“Probably.” Leria added with bitterness in her voice. “We’ve already seen enough of ‘probably’ turning out into ‘surely’ in a blink of an eye.”

On point. This turned into a recurring theme. At this point we just always assume the worst. WIth a handy inventory we could prepare for most conceivable scenarios. I wonder how long this function will last.

It might also be a good idea to find out if it’s shutting down would mean disappearance of items inside… or their forceful ejection. The latter would hurt.

“Oh, you’ll be fine.” Hlla gave us a weird smile. Oh, fuck. “I’m sure of that.”

Preferred blessing of Shadow was… a pain in the ass. Hlla had insane intuition bordering on having a direct link to her patron. It was ironic: the blessing of goddess of freedom and revolution required you to utterly submit to de facto her whims in a way that went past typical religious devotion.

Hlla just had a feeling that it was a good idea for us to march through that particular cave. She had no evidence for that. Only a feeling. That could as well be her own subconsciously fabricated lie… or genuine totally-not-prophecy of Shadow. The only way to move past that and take advantage of her own blessing was to make a leap of faith. And with Greater Blessing she probably made them a dozen times a day.

The whole blessing looked stupid on the outside but… oh boy. There was a tale about a Chosen of Shadow having a gut-feeling to hit a stone column in some ruins with his sword… only for the hit being a final straw. That made said column give up (twenty years later) right when there was a Chosen One of Shimmer in the room.

Because of that damn blessing, all Chosen Ones of Shadow were an absolute pain in the ass. Both when you tried to fight them (because they were absolutely and utterly unpredictable and prone to completely random coincidences playing right into their hands) and when you tried to cooperate with them.

Imagine working with a person that always knows better what to do. But has absolutely no evidence for that and is just ‘meh, I’m right, so listen up’. Now imagine that such a person doesn’t have a gargantuan ego and lack of brains - and it actually can (but doesn’t have to) be right. In overwhelming majority of cases. AND DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HOW ITS OPINION IS RIGHT IT JUST KNOWS IT IS.

What’s worse, most of them end up (sooner or later, but normally later) messing up ‘prophecies’ with their own ideas. So you never know if that smug son-of-a-Shadow just delivered a plan for guaranteed victory… or is just making things up randomly.

On one side, it was a major pain in the ass, but on the other… it seemed like another one of the Gods’ gambits (they kept pile-uping in the background, ugh). I mean, who was a better person to guide us in our (most likely) rapid preparations for Twilight War? She might guide us the best possible way for that… WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING IT.

Ugh.

I looked at the others. Most of them simply shrugged… that I took as 50% sign of approval and 50% sign of ongoing demoralisation. Ugh. Time for one leap of faith on our side.

“Do you have someone that might lead us to that cave?” Hlla smiled. This time much too wide for my enjoyment.