To one who can bear its cost, the path of impossibility opens.
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Jair set out on his quest to slay some cows, leaving Qahrvirna alone in her cave to sleep the day away.
His pair of revenant octides circled him tirelessly, maintaining their perimeter distance.
Three and a half hours later, Jair finally tracked his round cow quarry to their current location: a different field than the one he'd fought them in the first time.
His octide escort, though they were about waist-high to him, looked quite minuscule beside the oversized cattle.
Ah, well. Darkflame was the great equalizer.
He walked up to the first cow-creature and stabbed it. He activated Darkflame, and the bulbix immolated instantly. Ashes drifted down in the sunlight, settling on the grass where the creature had been standing and leaving a grey smudge destined to be washed away by the first rain.
Jair stabbed a second, but didn't activate Darkflame. He backed away, observing his octides. They didn't move to attack his target, instead continuing their circling while the angry bulbix snorted and turned on Jair with clear aggression. Useless until he was actually attacked, confirmed.
He met the furious bulbix’s charge with a Maelstrom to the snout. Darkflame consumed the creature’s body, leaving Jair untouched, though the momentum of the collision knocked him back.
The octides had started toward him at the moment of impact, but now returned to circling.
This further cemented Jair’s belief that he'd figured out their nature. They weren't soldiers, they were guardians.
Now, he just had to verify if that was universally true, or some hidden trait of the octide species that merely required the intervention of a brobeg-venix Maelstrom to unlock.
He immolated the next bulbix, and when it failed to be reborn, he moved on to the next.
Only one of the bulbix ended up reviving this time around, and it followed the pattern of ‘stand around mindlessly’.
Jair tried walking in front of it, ensuring he was the first thing it saw.
The bulbix revenant didn’t react to his presence.
The obvious thing to try activating its protector mode would be to have something attack him, but the rest of the bulbix herd had run away instead of seeking vengeance for their incinerated kin.
Perhaps if he provoked one of the creatures while out of the revenant’s line of sight, then ran back to it?
He chased after the fleeing bulbix herd, cursing his lack of Lift. If he weren’t limited to his silly mortal body’s weak status he’d easily outrun the overly rotund cows, but as it was they outpaced him by a lot.
He couldn’t slow down without losing them, but his pursuit didn’t make things any easier. However silently he could move, his flanking octides crashed through bushes and over rocks, oblivious to the terrain.
The bulbix continued to run away. Several times they slowed, only to speed up again as soon as he got anywhere close.
Eventually he gave the last remnants of the herd up as a lost cause and backtracked along the same route as he'd followed to get here. His octides’ trail marked their passage clearly. The giant crawlies were far from the most destructive of creatures, but to someone used to tracking in the Oriad they may as well have been throwing brightly colored paint everywhere.
Jair returned to the single revenant bulbix, which remained standing unmoving. "I don't suppose there's any way to get you to move, huh?"
The bulbix didn't answer.
"Do you still need to eat, I wonder?" Jair turned to his octides. "Would one of you attack me please?"
They continued circling as though they hadn't heard him. Or hadn't understood him. Same outcome either way.
"I'd like to verify some of my theories here. Come on."
None of the creatures changed their behavior in any way.
Sighing, Jair left the creature standing as silent guardian of this random patch of field and returned along the trail.
It wasn't as easy to find Qahrvirna's cave as he'd anticipated. If not for the octides’ trail to follow, he might have ended up a bit lost. Despite his many years in the Oriad, the specifics of how areas looked changed regularly with the weather and natural actions of monsters and creatures that inhabited it, not to mention some of the trees liked to disguise themselves and sneak off to mess with him.
Being back several months before he'd ever gotten here in previous timelines meant he didn't know the place by sight as he would most of Eythron's favored haunts later on.
Qahrvirna was still asleep when Jair found the place again a little after midday. His stomach was protesting the extensive exercise and lack of food, so he started a fire and cooked up some of the octide meat Qahrvirna had kept.
He wished he'd thought to filet one of the bulbixes before incinerating them, but at the time he'd been preoccupied with figuring out his sword's newest confusing ability.
By the time Qahrvirna woke in the late evening, Jair had gone out on three additional expeditions to search the area for anything else alive that he could test his darkflame on. He did not catch up to the bulbix herd again, nor find anything strong enough to be worth his full attention.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
He'd especially like to see if Darkflame did anything to a greater vylix. He'd proven it could handle the standard versions, but if Maelstrom's upgrades were anything to go by, greater vylix were a distinct tier higher.
There was also the question of whether the antimagic revenant sub-ability of Darkflame would activate more frequently, less frequently, or with the same once every nine to ten as the weaker creatures.
As usual, Jair's wish for a thing wasn't enough to lure it into existence. If he wanted to find a fury of vylix, he'd need to go out searching for them. And probably spend more than three hours on it.
"You're welcome to put it out," Qahrvirna’s voice interrupted.
Jair looked up; he'd been staring into the cooking fire and fully ignoring reality. "Not all of us favor our meat bloody."
She grinned at him. “There’s always the option if you change your mind.”
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At some point that night as they continued on, the pair of guardian octides who’d been following them all this time disappeared. Jair didn’t catch the moment it happened, just noticed the silence. When he looked around they were no longer circling.
He backtracked to search for their remains, and found nothing. They’d disappeared as thoroughly from physical reality as they’d been intangible to Maelstrom this whole time, as though it just took a bit longer for their tangible layer to catch up to their soul’s dispersal.
Through continued testing the following weeks as they traveled back toward Qahrvirna’s tower, Jair learned a reasonable amount about the mechanics of Maelstrom’s new ability.
Different species of creature reacted the same to being turned into a darkflame revenant. As he’d postulated, the blank staring and guarding behavior was not special to octides.
Darkflame worked just as well to incinerate plant-based monsters as animal-based ones, but it had yet to revive any plant-based creature as a revenant. Jair wasn't sure if this was because he'd only killed a handful of plants so far, or if it were innately different.
There was no particular way that using Maelstrom triggered the darkflame revive sub-ability more reliably than others. Stabbing directly in, slashing with the serrated edge, slicing with the flat edge, regardless of where or how the darkflame was applied it all burned the same and had the same chance of triggering its secondary effect.
"I keep thinking I'll get tired of watching you stab things," Qahrvirna said as the fourth night of their travels together since the octide nest drew on. "And you keep proving me wrong.”
“I’m glad to be traveling with someone who can appreciate the pursuit of knowledge.”
“Of course! Knowing just how quickly the darkflame spreads based on the location of impact could be essential knowledge when going up against something significantly larger.”
Jair hadn’t been measuring that, but he saw no need to admit that to Qahrvirna. “I’ll want copies of your measurements when we get to your tower.”
“Of course.” She’d been assiduously gathering up a bag of ash from each creature he killed, labeling it with the creature type and location, and storing them in her oversized bag. This slowed down their progress only a little. He didn’t protest since she was willing to go chasing off after anything that moved at Jair’s request.
They did find another small group of vylix, but again no greater vylix among them.
Darkflame provided an eclectic mix of potential escorts along the way, but since Jair had yet to come up with a reliable way to get himself attacked outside an ongoing battle they’d been forced to leave behind more than followed along with them. Most encounters resulted in only one revenant, if any, and it was a toss-up if they’d end up allied or opposing him.
Qahrvirna volunteered to attack him once, but that resulted in their entire entourage attacking her singlemindedly, even after she left and returned, until she was forced to destroy them.
“Tenacious for something so weak,” she said, breathing a bit hard.
“It’s only weak compared to you. A lot of these would be very dangerous to someone like me.”
“You certainly don’t act like someone who’s liable to be eaten at any moment.”
“Liable to be eaten, me?” He eyed her with a grin.
She returned the grin, a bit more sinister than his. “Only when you’re ready.”
The next herd of bulbix they encountered was large enough for them to get two revenant activations from. The first defended Jair from the angry survivors; the second attacked the first. There resulted a brief but violent conflict that Jair wasn’t in any position to observe.
This group was significantly more aggressive than the others, perhaps due to its larger size granting it greater confidence. Either way, for the first time, he got to fight a group of bulbix that didn’t scatter and flee almost immediately.
He had to admit, without Darkflame he’d have been in trouble. A stampede of that many creatures that large wasn’t something that could be fought traditionally. If he’d had his spells already, sure, but with just Maelstrom he suspected they’d have overrun him before he could kill enough from sheer physical speed.
Then he learned why this group was different from the others. The herd parted as a bigger and darker bovine charged out of the forest with a bellow and rushed Jair in a syncopated gallop, the rest of the herd falling in to rush forward in its wake.
The alpha bulbix was even rounder than the others, but its body was a slightly different shape. Its legs were further apart and jointed differently to give it a much stronger lunge. An alpha bulbix wasn’t built to run. It was built to gore and trample and knock aside.
Jair had never fought an alpha bulbix without magic, and only a few times with. He barely had time to whip Maelstrom around between them before it slammed into him.
Darkflame flared up, singeing the munster’s snout. Its bellow turned high pitched and pained, but it didn’t stop.
Its horn drove straight through Jair's armor, stomach, and out the other side.
"Oh," was all he had time to say before the alpha had shaken its head to hurl him off into the midst of the stampeding herd.
He took out three of them in quick slashes as he fell, but even Darkflame wasn't enough to save him.
Too many bulbix, too big and fast and tightly packed. Without imprints he couldn’t jump clear of the thundering hooves and crushing bodies that left him nowhere to escape.
His body was crushed and trampled into the ground, leaving him no time to even assess the previous injury before his vision went grey and fuzzy as his life and soul abruptly parted ways.
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The sword flickered in her mind, its shape warping and twisting into countless variations of itself. Sometimes it glowed, sometimes it darkened. Once it turned to pure white ice, another time it lost its shape entirely to become a fluid trail of crimson that slashed through the air like a whip. Another time, it grew to be so large it would take a dozen men to lift it.
Most of the time it stayed roughly the same. The blade's length shifted only minutely, and its center rarely changed. The edges varied wildly, sometimes symmetrical, other times not.
The power around it pulsed and fluctuated. The world around it cracked, and in its presence destiny turned to ash.
The sword should not exist.
But though she searched and strained to her utmost capability, nowhere did she find the moment of its creation. It simply appeared, fully formed, and stubbornly continued to exist without regard for what it left broken in its wake.
There was nothing she could do to stop it. Only one person could, and she had no idea where to find him.
Breathing deep, she closed her eyes and returned to meditation with a new goal in mind.
Nothing could hide from her forever.
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