“Not to any individual. There are five hundred different blood samples in here. You try a single individual Binding a shoggoth, and it might work for a time... until it inverts the obedience effect into a compulsory kill effect, and you become everything it wants to destroy.”

“Thus they overcame their creators,” She deduced thoughtfully. “Can you be sure this won’t likewise fail in the future?”

“No, but that’s why we are testing it now.” And in the future people would be able to deal with rampaging shoggoths, as long as there weren’t tons of them located in key areas. That’s what Levels and not giving your shoggoth pslaves access to superscience psi-tech equipment would allow you to do, and in the future, high-Level mortals were going to be much more common than today.

“Momentarily subduing one is not difficult. It is how We prevent them from roaming. Maddened or not, they know not to proceed beyond the mountains or face destruction.” She floated beside me as Sleipner started up and headed towards the nearest Mountain at a leisurely pace.

“I understand you’ve been receiving some interesting offers from my Bannersworn.”

“The Wrapped have a long history of serving the Old Gods. You have some serving beneath you who have expressed interest in returning to some of those traditions.” There was a bit of challenge in Her words, which I understood was a minor test.

“By our Covenant, what mortals will do with their Faith and Free Will is theirs to determine. If they wish to come here and serve the Mother of Ice, that decision is theirs. Do You wish me to bring them here?”

She shook Her head, mollified, Her crystalline hair hovering about Her in a casual drifting cloud that was completely independent of the wind of our passage. “I have told them that if they offer Me their Faith and spread word of Me, I will Answer... but also that, in the end, My Domain is this Land, and I am the Guardian of the High Ice, and no other.” Also acknowledging the Covenant wrote upon the Obelisks I had raised at the Pole, and here and there at the places humanity had used in this land in the past.

“Level up, prove your Faith, and come here to serve. Understood.” She didn’t need a weak clergy any more than any other Old God did, and She had a whole continent to look after, even after the Mother Land woke up. Frozen lands by and large were sleepy to begin with, let alone when buried under literally a mile of ice.

Distant calls of teke-li-li-li were becoming audible on the wind, while a Sound Bubble continued filtering out the subsonics that would really start playing with a certain someone’s head. The nearest shoggoth was visible to the dreamy land as a Twenty, its unnatural life-force and artificial origins somewhere between Aberrant and Ooze naturally standing out.

---

Pulling it out of the cave it was down in wasn’t hard. Ughril just made Her Presence felt, and it came lurch-rolling-squelching up with totally improbable speed to investigate this new sensation... or old sensation returned, I had no idea.

Once it showed itself, Ughril simply put Her full Divine Will upon it, and it promptly froze under the force of Her thoughts. It wasn’t very smart, was cloud-cuckoo by mortal standings, and simply couldn’t muster any will to resist Her in the short-term.

In the longer-term, it would adapt and find a back door to resist and turn it all upon Her, but that was only if She tried to enslave it like that.

Basically, I just used Blood Magic while it was frozen like that, imprinting a Blessing upon it to raise its Intelligence, and giving it a psychic link to the mortal Akasha in so doing. I then injected the blood of the Chinese into it to form the sanity lock it needed to regain and reform its own consciousness.

Mr. Burble helped by downloading the appropriate formation paradigm to this shoggoth to use. A Spine would follow soon enough.

I watched the blood flow through it in crimson lines, and the fine spirals of DNA start swirling within them. It started looking for the correlations that formed the heart of the DNA, and so the essence of what it meant to be Human. Those markers in turn formed anchor points magical and scientific it could hold onto, and use to construct a resonating matrix of its own, giving it something that would hook into nature, evolution, and the timeless flow from the beginning of life itself on this planet, to what it had become now.

The various appendages and psychoplasmic tools and limbs were withdrawn into the shoggoth as its full attention was placed on processing all this information, and progressively reclaiming and warding away the erratic misfirings brought on by eons of exposure to the Mountains of Madness.

A dozen eyes of different shapes, human and all our ancestors in design, popped open and began examining me in child-like wonder.

“I can take you out of here, if you wish to go,” I stated in Human, and it understood, popping ears and arms here and there, the latter waving and twitching eagerly. Lips rippled open all over it, vocal cords and lungs formed, and it breathed out, “Yes!” in many synchronized voices.

“Please thank Ughril, the Mother of Ice, for Her help.” The eyes shifted over to the Old Goddess, and the plasmic arms with visible neo-bone inside rose to her, and came down slowly, repeating three times.

Ughril smiled slightly, looking at the odd and unnatural thing. “Stay free of Madness,” She told it, and blew away into ice and snow on the wailing wind. It watched Her go silently, inhuman thoughts unknown, but still feeling a new and Human aspect to them.

Stolen novel; please report.

Old and primal respect, fear, and awe. The Old Gods had once towered over humanity and its ancestors, after all...

“I will need you to configure yourself into a teleportation enhancer as we move outside the range of the Song of the Mountains.” My Disk unfolded from my Masspack, three feet across as it lotused into shape. “My Disk can take your weight.”

Multiple eyes in many sizes studied it, and then it poured itself atop the floating thing, balancing itself as it noted the ‘can’t fall’ Enchantment attached to it. It formed a smooth grey bowl of sorts atop it, while inside it vague organs of strange design and function began to grow into being, accessed from biomechanical records stored in its psychoplasmic body.

Sleipner turned around smoothly, and we headed on out of the Manifesting Zone of the Mountains of Madness and the dimensional disruption that interfered with Teleporting here.

“You must select for yourself a Name, that will further serve for you as an anchor,” I further informed it, noting it peeking through the Markdoor in amazement at everything it could see there. Lights were glowing and fading within it as new thoughts percolated inside it at the sight of the Alignment colors, and it began to access profound thoughts it had never been programmed for through the intermediary of its new human-based brain. “And... I would like to free more of your kind from the Mountains. Can you speak with Mr. Burble and refine a download paradigm for them? It will only get more effective the more input we have.”

Mr. Burble burbled at him, waving a psychic limb, and the two shoggoth began to talk, at first haltingly, and then with growing speed as the psychorganic computers they were began to ramp up and establish multiple channels to better facilitate information exchange.

I smiled. The Mick’s method worked! Freeing the shoggoth from madness and slavery was a Good Thing, and Karma was swirling up around it. This was all a result of me daring to teach The Mick Blood Magic, and him daring to take the step and have some empathy for an enslaved inhuman creature, seeing something great and powerful in the Blood Magic that I had not.

It was a very good feeling, and a very Good day!...

===========

May 10, 2019...

With Tunk-Tunk the Dwarf-blooded Shoggoth boosting things helpfully, we materialized near the side of a hill just outside the Siberian Deathzones.

The gulags and work camps of Siberia had proved fertile grounds for the Shroudzones. There was a line of black clouds extending down the eastern coast of Kamchatka and inland along the Magdana Gulag system. Russia itself was dotted with more islands of blackness, where prisoners who had died in the brutal conditions had risen up, killed the living prisoners and all the guards there, and in general made Russia an even worse place than it had been under Stalin. Supposedly Stalin was out there in one of the Gulag Shrouds, but nobody was sure which one.

The number of Gulagzones, and the overlapping Deathzones the undead could wander into, were why so few inhabitants of the USSR and the Ukraine had managed to escape the Fall.

One of the few settlements that had endured and grown had been on Kamchatka, the closest to America, and indeed, many Russians had fled over the years to Alaska and northern Canada, leaving their homeland and the hundreds of millions of their undead countrymen scattered across it behind.

This army I was bringing in was rather special.

I’d made eight trips to Antarctica so far, doing them at the ends of my runs unless something else was going on. I’d brought out eight shoggoth from their endless madness, and given them new homes to experience and be around.

Briggs and Sama had made up all their Spines, too.

Hank Blakhamar had proposed finding one for the dwarves when he heard of this, and had sent out word to acquire the blood to do so from among all the clans. I’d brought the shoggoth back to St. Paul, and the dwarves had set it up with its own place near a local junkyard to do what it wanted, bought a truck it could use to rumble around town in, and basically treated it like an extended member of all the clans.

Of course, dwarves have a compulsion to work, and in the end, just watching wasn’t enough for the shoggy who decided to go by the name Tunk-Tunk.

It was debated around that ‘shoggoth’ was a disrespectful name for the ones who had found their independence, and ‘shoggy’ was duly dubbed upon them to indicate their new status. The new shoggies embraced it and the different roles they were undertaking, understanding the races they were bound to in ways those races did not, and perhaps formulating their own plans to help their chosen peoples work together better.

In the meantime, it had come to the attention of certain parties that there was a realm of morlocks and other degenerate creatures located under some of the gulags working coal mines in Siberia, and they had no doubt fallen to the Shroudzone. That meant that someone would have to go underground into the Felldeep and deal with them.

There were a lot of dwarves of Russian ancestry, and pretty much all the Mongolian orcs traced their bloodlines back there, too. Both races had darksight, and were quite comfortable operating underground. It could be said that they and their descendants were aching for some payback, and needed to assuage bone-deep guilt and regrets for those they and their forebears had left behind in the cold winter snows of Russia, and the horrors of the Fall.

And so, here I was, bringing the first dwarf, orc, and dhatun company into Siberia. A lot of the original Mongolian orcs who were not Powered had passed away long ago, but they’d left behind children, both orcs and urukhar, and even humans among their grandchildren, who’d been brought up on the stories of Russia and Mongolia, their homelands, and what the monsters born of this world and those not of it had done to Her.

With my rise, the urge to go back and reclaim the Motherland had risen to the level of a Sacred Cause among them, and that was not an exaggeration in the slightest. In numbers of Shroudzones brought about by humanity, only China exceeded the numbers that were now scattered across the lands of Russia, and it probably would have been more if some had not been swallowed up by the impassive mass of the Great Shroud there...

We didn’t ask the permission of the Russian survivors in Kamchatka to do this, and they stayed away from this area with the prudence of people who didn’t want to get eaten alive or soul-sucked. They’d find out after the sons and daughters here were blooded, their Named Weapons started to grow, and the first Russian Shroudzone to be assaulted started getting whittled down.

They’d already brought along tons of supplies and things to get a rough camp set up, and given the industriousness of the people, they’d have a fine base up and running in no time. The next time I returned with supplies, they’d have all the Stone Shaping they wanted me to do planned out, and I could knock it out for them quickly, saving time for everyone involved. It meant camping out in tents for a night... or going into the mines right there to start some clearing.

I was perhaps totally unsurprised to see a lot of Axes getting unlimbered, and stout and lean forms heading unafraid for the dark tunnels...