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It’s another full night at the Brooding Mule. Every seat's taken and many are standing. It's like the whole parish decided to cram into Penlann’s sweaty taproom at once, though it’s only Tuesday. I don’t need to pay for my drinks tonight. So many want to treat me, my liver would launch out on a portal fantasy trip of its own if I took every offer.

I laze on my favorite bar stool by the counter and take a moment to think about how so many things change—must change—but some things just never do. Like the taste of this beer.

“Hey, Zero!” somebody calls me from the sea of faces. “Tell that story of how you beat the necromancer again! I missed the premiere!”

“Gosh, not again!” I reply bashfully. “Somebody else tell it for me.”

You all know how the story goes by now.

“No, no, you tell it! You’ve got a knack for it. It’s just too funny to listen.”

“In fact,” a sourer voice interjects, “with such a talent for spinning the yarn, one might think none of it is true.”

“Oh, shush it!” The critic is silenced by weighty slaps on his back.

“Come on, hero! What happened after you left the Fey village?”

“Geez, you guys are hopeless…” I brush my nose and twirl around on my seat to face the expectant audience. How could I say no to those excited smiles? “Alright. So. After I figured out Zandolph’s true identity, as per our deal, I had her show the way to the lair of the sinister necromancer. Dalek also came along for backup and as a witness, and so did the green pixie I met before—I decided to call her Green. It was hard to keep our plans a secret with eyes and ears and noses everywhere. When they learned where we were going, many other animals wanted to join in for the ride too, but Zandolph chased them all away. Why? Because it was way too dangerous! Even Green was only allowed to come along because she lied that she’d traded vows with me and had to share her husband’s fate. And I didn’t have the heart to expose her for marriage fraud in front of the whole wood.”

“What, you married a pixie?” an eager listener interrupts.

“No, I did not marry a pixie! It was just…Green being Green.”

Only because I told her my name that day. Only because of a one-off joke.

Or maybe it was because of my mana? Because the scent of magical energy got the better of her instincts?

Who can say? What a precious little thing. Though I should never have let her follow us.

I pause to drink my beer.

“So was it true, what that guy Ofir said?” someone asks. “That the necromancer could raise the dead? Drive the beasts berserk?”

“Well, half of it was true,” I answer. “And half wrong.”

“What's that supposed to mean? How did you even get close to somebody with crazy powers like that?”

“How?” I spread my arms and shake my head. “You're asking me? Because I’m the friggin' hero, that’s how! Next to my overwhelming talent and intellect, the bad guy’s traps were nothing. It was a walk in the park!”

“Well, look at you! So, did the War of the Beasts finally end for real? Was there peace between the Dominion and the Fey?”

I roll my eyes. “Of course there was peace! How do you think I’m sitting here, telling you about it? Are you sane? As if I'd still be among the living if I fucked that up! Failure was simply not an option. The audience would walk out of the theater. There’d be popcorn everywhere. Don't you pity the janitor?”

“Wow, could it be, you’re actually kind of amazing?”

What? As if there was ever any doubt about that!

“...”

I quickly return to my pint, before I remember the truth.

Me, a hero? Amazing by any stretch? Ha ha. As if.

Not in the beginning. Not in the end either. Nowhere in the middle.

It’s lies. Absolute BS.

And I flunked it yet again.

5 : 263 : 13 : 08 : 51

I follow Zandolph’s back along a hard-beaten trail through the ageless forest. Dalek lazily lifts its paws a short distance behind me. Green flies here and there around us and between the trees like a fruit fly with ADHD, unable to hold still for one minute. Looking at the thing gives me motion sickness. There we go, a merry band of freaks, like straight from the trippy books of Lewis Carrol. But we’re not here to kill the Jabberwock, or hunting the Snark. We’re here to catch a blasphemous corpse-fucker and secure evidence for the authorities to wrap up a war.

Or, well, let me revise. I’m here to do all that. I have no idea what the other three plan to do, if anything.

I still haven’t formulated a concrete plan on how to manage the kick-ification of the necromancer trunk yet either. I worry I may have bitten off a little more than I can chew this time (again).

After studying magic for the whopping three years, I can barely call myself an expert wizard, or even an intermediate wizard, or even a junior wizard, but this is the only way I have to solve this godless mess.

Hey, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, we could end up enthralled ourselves and turn into rage zombies.

When I think about it, having your body and mind overtaken by the spell of an ancient beast shaman is among the freakiest things I can imagine happening, next to seeing somebody rap at a karaoke bar. My word, that's horrifying. I might sooner take death in soul-shattering agony over the secondhand embarrassment of that degree. And what do you know, I suddenly feel a lot better about this! However bad things can get, this place has no karaoke, the Japanese revenge for WW2.

The necromancer’s not-that-well hidden lair is a two days’ hike away from the sanctuary.

The road there is full of deadly perils of its own.

Halfway along, I’m forced to vow I’ll never tell another (intended) bear pun in my life, lest I'll be made into roast. Fortunately, I’ve trained a disciple in secret. Always have a contingency plan. My own lips may be sealed, but Green picks up for me, and I come close to witnessing a war between bears and pixies.

Then, late in the afternoon of the second day, we come up to a massive wall.

A smooth face of dark stone, a little slanted, hundreds of meters wide, divides the woodland.

It's too clean and regular to be a natural formation. Looking closer, I see it’s not a wall-wall, but the other kind of wall; the flat side of an enormous building, like a topless pyramid, long abandoned, covered in lumpy, frayed blankets of vegetation. Looking back, I realize the various bumps and cliffs we passed in the recent hour were maybe not part of the terrain, but other leftover ruins. Homes of people nobody remembers, taken over and buried by the flora.

There used to be a city in Wanr Aysoth, probably before there were trees.

Not any caveman village, but a decently advanced urban center.

But only this big temple-like thing can still be recognized, and only up close. It’ll take another thousand years before the forest will fully swallow it up.

We climb up a narrow ravine that cuts through the wall towards the higher ground. I reckon it was a stairway originally, but the forest has expertly masked the steps and it now looks no different any common, overgrown gulch. A small brook pours down the ascent, between shrubs and squiggly tree roots. I take care not to get water in my shoes and work my way up around the stream.

“Who built this place?” I ask.

“I don't know,” Zandolph replies from ahead, as the only one here with memory longer than ten years. “Land-dwellers come and go the way of morning dew. One day there and gone in the next. Who could keep track of their passage? You see their ruins everywhere. They were weak creatures themselves, yet their garbage lasts forever.”

“I thought it might be one of those people whose passing into eternity you helped.”

“Could be,” she remarks with no remorse, not even seeing any deeper meaning in the comment. “Even less reason to remember them.”

The survivors have no reason to care about those, who failed the test of time. Another cheerful principle of Mother Nature. What a cunt.

“It’s here that the enemy has made his lair,” Zandolph continues. “The forest growth may have veiled the topside, but there are still intact chambers underground. Because of the trees, the blind elves can't even see the place when they pass over in their flying boats.”

“Pft.” I suppress a chortle.

She said boats. Get it? She called airships, flying boats. Because she’s a dumb primitive like that. Ahahaha!

Zandolph turns back to glare at me. “What was that?”

“Nothing?” I quickly deny and straighten my face. “I said nothing?”

Then, when she’s not looking, I gesture back to Dalek to get a load of this hick, while soundlessly laughing so hard my sides hurt. Boats.

“I’m glad you’re taking this seriously,” the bear groans.

“Darling!” Green returns to us, flying circles around my head. “I sense a super scary presence right ahead of us! There's thick miasma gushing up from the earth like a hot spring! I’ve never come seen anything so malicious ever before!”

“Thanks for the heads-up, sweetie,” I tell the pixie. “I love how you don’t sugarcoat things for me. I’m so happy to know I have to go to that unbelievably malicious thing now.”

“Aw, don’t mention it!” Green happily giggles.

Irony is completely lost on pixies.

Zandolph halts on top of the ascent to look down.

“We can still turn back,” she says, intoning it as a strong recommendation.

I can tell she has about 0.0 faith in my chances.

I climb up to stand next to her, brush my lap, and try to sound brave as I answer,

“I’m not one bit more eager to do this than you are. But taking out the bad guy is the only real way to stop this gory back-and-forth you have with the Dominion and save the furries. Of course, instead of putting my own neck on the line, I’d rather report this place to the Air Force, so they can bomb it from the orbit, while I’m choosing which bikini to wear to the beach. But that would expect you to let me go, and I suppose that’s not happening?”

“Of course not,” Zandolph answers without batting an eye.

“Of course,” I repeat. “Because you still don’t trust me.”

“It’s your overlords I don’t trust,” she says. “I already know you are too much of a fool to knowingly betray anyone. And, seeing as you are a fool, I can also tell your word alone means naught to the elves. We are all the same in their eyes. Let them know where to go, and they will come and burn our homes to the ground and kill all who resist. And by the time they learn of the necromancer, there’ll be nothing left of this forest, or us.”

“...”

Either way, it boils down to this: I’ll have to do it myself.

We march on and in a while come to a solitary, high hill in the middle of a flatter land.

The trail ends there and our party stops to take in the view.

It's some view.

The plants on the hill and close in a ring around it look burned black. But there's been no fire. The grass and bushes grow normally, only drained of their natural colors by the invisible radiation that comes through the ground. That, which the uneducated call “miasma”.

No magic is 100% energy-efficient.

Picture throwing a fireball at a guy. Mana infused in the spell begins to dissipate already in flight, before the spell's primary function of exploding is executed. The same phenomenon applies to any spell. A good wizard can make his spells leak less and waste as little fuel as possible, but a perfectly lossless solution doesn't exist. Not even the core of Heaven's Pillar could achieve that.

Rituals burn energy to manifest, but that energy doesn't vanish into nothingness on use. It changes shape and scatters around. The emission rates we’re talking about may be comparable to fart gas, quickly diluted by air, but over months, years, decades, it starts to stick to nearby lifeforms and changes their genes. When the results look unpleasant, people say it’s the work of an evil witch’s miasma, and when the effects aren't immediately obvious, it just is what it is. Not very scientific.

There's no energy that's inherently evil.

Although, the scene in front of us does seem pretty wicked.

The darkened trees grow bent and twisted on the hill. Instead of standing boldly upright as they should, they worm low along the ground, thin and intertwined, like tortured souls imprisoned in wood, climbing over each other to escape the pain.

In the base of the hill, partially masked by vines and bushes, is a narrow hole, and a tunnel leading underground.

The entrance to the big building we stand on, I guess. The portico may have looked regal once upon a time, but is now completely buried in woodland growth, like everything else. All that's left of the doorway is a lightless troll’s ass crack, where the twisted energy coils thick enough to be almost visible to the eye.

Damn, I so don’t want to go in there.

“Here it is,” Zandolph tells me. “The necromancer’s lair is through there and below. Not that I've ever seen the foe with my own eyes. The way deeper in is blocked by walls of sorcery. Save myself, no one who has gone there has come out alive, but forever changed, a horror to friend and foe.”

I nod to show total understanding. “Nice. Any chance it could make me develop an appreciation for The Beatles? It seems like a prerequisite to being cool, but I just can’t. It’s so 60s and not in a good way! But at the same time, I feel I’m really missing out.”

Zandolph doesn’t appreciate my attempt to lighten the mood. She grabs my collar, anger blazing in her eyes.

“You understand nothing of the things you trifle with!”

“You’re right,” I tell her and pat her hot wrist. “But I’m going to have to go in there and find out.”

I point at Dalek and Green. “You, and you: stay here and watch the exit. If anybody that’s not us comes out, smash. If anybody that’s not us wants to go in—smash. You got that?”

“No way!” Green immediately protests. “If darling’s going there, then I’m going too!”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Aww, that’s so sweet of you, honey!” I say to it. “Nothing really gets me going like sharing mortal peril with a pixie! You wanna come too, bear? Forget everything I just said! Let’s all go together! We’ll hold hands too! Those of us, who have hands. Those who don’t are going to have to learn beat-boxing in a new way. No! Of course not! That’s out of the question! Why do you think I’m telling you this? To sound like I'm the boss? I'm trying to keep you alive! So you be a good mosquito now and stay right here, until—”

A moment later, me, Zandolph, and Green are going down a dark stairway together into the den of unspeakable evil.

“Stay behind me,” I tell the winged sprite for the hundredth time. “You stay behind me! Okay!? That means, you don’t go in front of me! Capiche? Comprende?”

“Yeeeees,” Green replies without even looking at me.

Try to talk sense to a pixie. No capacity for logic, or listening comprehension. And more stubborn than mules!

We descend the long stone steps, an unwelcoming darkness coiling around us.

The door’s wide open, but the air further down hangs damp and stagnant. It stinks like old, rotten clothes. There are no lamps or torches, but a faint, green-blue glow creeps up the glistening walls from below. We head towards the light with no other way available and I’m deeply puzzled.

No guards? No traps?

Why would the necromancer leave his workshop wide open like this? Usually, the entrance is where the defenses are heaviest. Is he that confident in his magic? Could the beast shaman that has battled the Dominion for decades, centuries, and saw his tribe die out be so cocky? Something about this smells and it's not rot.

We step into an oblong chamber. It’s a plain, undecorated room wider than its long, with two thick, rectangular stone pillars to hold up the ceiling. Attached to the pillars are two alchemical lanterns, the source of the ghastly light. Calcite and lithoper. A thin layer of fine, bone-pale sand covers the floor, full of animal footprints. There’s no immediately obvious danger to be seen. The way looks clear.

I stop and raise my hand.

“Everybody, don't move.”

Zandolph has been here before and stopped already before I did. Green is poking at a centipede crawling on the wall and didn't listen. Oh well, I just wanted to look like the leader.

“The boundary goes where those pillars stand,” Zandolph tells me. “Touch it, and the curse will take you. My resistance is too high to be affected, but I cannot get through either. The ward and the walls are abnormally hard. I cannot project enough force in such a small space without damaging myself.”

Don’t tell me you've tried.

“Alright. Leave this to the specialist.”

I take another look at the room with my mind’s eye.

Yup, there it goes. A classic boundary field. Nothing we haven’t covered in class. I’m still in the game.

I follow the intangible wireframe of magic with my senses and see it extend to cover most of the building, like a big box over it, passing through earth and stone. There are no gaps in it. Only the bottom side is open but we're not moles or miners. We need another way.

I squint closer at the segment crossing through the room.

Composition analysis—start!

The process takes a while, but it's a cakewalk compared to Zandolph's screwy homebrew. There are multiple ultra-thin layers of varied effects packed together, like in a sheet of reinforced glass. We have a basic kinetic barrier repelling physical objects; a magic noise emission field, which disrupts information structures; even an alarm ward to warn the caster if anything crosses the boundary. Meticulous work, but nothing too unusual.

Then there’s the curse, like a Joker hidden in a deck of cards.

A mechanism to produce a “zombie.”

The spell is assembled like a virus that invades the body through the nervous system, robs control of the brain. It disengages the parts reserved for higher thinking, and overloads the consciousness with a flood of looping directives that leave no room for anything else.

Directives, such as…

HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE

FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR

KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL

HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE

FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR

KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL

HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE

FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR

KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL

How lovely.

As told, you only need to touch the boundary to trigger the effect. The sadistic purpose aside, it’s more sophisticated work than I expected from a beast shaman. The ritual hierarchy is clean and systematic, free of internal conflicts, superfluous data, or unnecessary functions. It uses the victim’s own vitality to power itself. As such, the curse not only turns you into a disposable weapon, but also steadily drains your life.

By what I can tell, the only real way to undo the curse is to cleanse the victim’s nervous system by flooding it with a torrent of pure mana. That should scatter and flush the hostile eidos out of the system. Unfortunately, the treatment is also liable to wreck the target’s nerves, either killing you instantly, or leaving you catatonic forever. Not very practical.

Let’s avoid stepping on anything we shouldn’t.

I crouch in front of the field and start poking it, looking for an opening.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Zandolph icily questions me, seeing the flashes of lines and letters in the air, rendered briefly visible by the contact with my mana.

I give my professional answer: “Uhh, no?”

“...”

Technically, the spell will only activate on physical contact with an organic lifeform. So if I use magic to mess with it remotely, there should be no danger. But does that mean I “know what I’m doing”? I’m looking at a Rubik’s cube for the first time in my life and nobody gave a manual. I’ll just keep fingering it and hope it solves itself before long. That’s my approach to most of life’s problems.

Ten minutes later, I think I’ve learned enough and turn back to my anxious (bored) companions.

“I can’t dispel the barrier from here, but I can temporarily isolate a region we can pass through without going crazy.”

My solution is akin to opening an umbrella when it rains, and not much of a show of wit, but hey, if it works.

“Ooh! As expected of darling!” Green claps her little hands in awe.

Zandolph is not as easily impressed.

“In other words,” she says, “if you die down there, we cannot ever leave.”

“Aaaaaaa yeah.” I have to admit her reasoning is sound. “But look on the bright side: even if both of you die, I can still leave.”

“Ooh, how clever!” Green claps again. “As expected of darling!”

“You are a walking pestilence,” Zandolph growls at me.

“Save that for the necromancer, sweetie. This is how we heroes roll.”

I turn back to the boundary, clap my hands twice and open up a gap. It’s like a sparkling rectangle of fire. Good thing we left Dalek out, because his fat ass couldn’t have fit through.

Onwards, to victory.