Intricacies of Asymmetry

[Caden Law]

The rules had changed since the Fall of Eluriand. Where the undead hordes there had sluggishly gone out of control when their masters fell or were incapacitated, the ones in Tembrethnil did not. If anything, about half of them seemed to become worse than before. They jolted upright, their movements turned quicker and more precise, and their eyes flashed with an awful sense of experience and skill. They didn't falter for a second as they rejoined the battle, and the Elves of Farstrike paid for it in blood.

A company of around thirty or so had been reduced to a little over ten now. Certainly no more than fifteen, and that was including the Seers and those wounded who were unable to fight on. Vara was nowhere to be seen, but neither was Passion Near, and explosions could be heard off in the distance and up in the skies as Seer fought succubus for life and pride and more still. On the ground, the surviving Rangers had clustered together in a melee of swinging staves and precisely aimed wands, and those few who'd lost one or the other had drawn short swords and resorted to more savage methods. They dared not go near the trees, animate monsters they'd become, and the undead hordes just kept coming.

A red sun rose, and it was going to be a good day to die.

Not far removed from where the surviving Rangers were fighting for their lives, Aldinar and Eledier waged a losing battle against the remaining Death Lord, Ghez Felhammer. Unlike so many such battles in the joint histories of Man and Elf, there was no convenient balancing act between them. Ghez was bigger, stronger, faster, better armed and better armored, with years of hard-fought experience and a natural talent for killing things in all sorts of barbaric ways. The only reasons the Elves weren't being hacked to bits at every turn were prescience and numbers -- and even that was tit-for-tat at best, since Eledier was slowing down due to her injuries and Ghez carried two axes for just such an occasion as this.

And Ghez was different from your stereotypical barbarian hero for other reasons as well. There was technique in his fighting style; thuggish and brutal, but elegant in its simplicity and cunning in its forethought. He didn't waste breath screaming out battlecries once the fighting began, and he didn't taunt or mock his enemies until they were good and disabled. The most he said, in fact, was the occasional, "I'm going to see you bound and in tears," to Eledier. Even this was spoken as an utterly casual aside to the fact that he'd been bashing her with the blunt head of his left axe.

Eledier went skidding back some yards, her chestplate thoroughly dented in the outline of the axe's topside. She collapsed to one knee, and Aldinar spared no time in putting himself between her and Felhammer. He landed with a twirling flourish of his spear, parrying aside one of Felhammer's axes and ducking the other. Aldinar shouted something in an old dialect of Raiaeran, pulling the spear back until he held it like a knife, then swept in low and delivered a stab to Felhammer's midsection.

It was the Death Lord who went skidding back this time, spinning the whole way so that his trail was like a series of interlocking olympic rings carved into the earth. He stopped a few dozen yards later, and though his placement had changed, his actual posture had done. It was like the planet had moved to accomodate him. The only change at all was the presence of a glassy looking patch of stone on his armor, teal-colored and covered in gold sigils and runes.

"You will die this day," Aldinar declared, even as he traced something like a lopsided Hail Mary in front of him.

The patch on Ghez's midsection exploded. The sound it made was like listening to a shockwave of pressure at extreme depths, and the look of it resembled a cloud of bubbles bursting underwater. The explosion warped into a tornado, and then collapsed in on itself with such force that the ground was butchered into an ugly crater at its center.

"Better than you have tried," Ghez informed him before the smoke could clear. The Death Lord lunged right out of the blast, virtually unscathed as he brought axes to bear in a double-thrust. Aldinar danced around the attack and immediately regretted it: Ghez turned the axeblades so that they faced to either side, then swung his arms back wide as he planted one foot in a hard landing.

His left axe sank inches deep in Aldinar's side. It plowed through Aldinar's armor like it wasn't even there, then sank between ribs and tore through part of his right lung.

"Huh," Felhammer sounded disinterestedly as he straightened up, holding his axe -- and Aldinar with it -- at arm's length. He didn't even turn to look back at where the Elf was standing, frozen in pain and shock. "I thought you would've dodged it."

Another explosion sounded in the distance, as the Rangers faltered. Three more of them dropped like flies before the rest could recover from the shock of seeing one of their leaders brought low with such ease.

"Oh well," Felhammer shrugged. Without even looking, he yanked his axe free with a spray of blood. Aldinar collapsed to one knee, but he did not scream. He didn't get up to miraculously save the day either.

Aldinar simply toppled over onto his side, shuddered once, and didn't move again.

[Caden Law]

So it was that the remaining Seer, Eledier of Farstrike, fought for her life and the lives of her men. She was a wounded woman against a man who may as well have been the physical embodiment of War. An axe in each hand, chains lashing wildly in their wake, Ghez Felhammer assaulted her with a coldblooded frenzy that went right past sociopath and didn't stop until it was parked on the abyssal edge of human behaviour. He knew not mercy nor dignity, and respite was like a four letter word for him. He attacked.

He center gave, her left faltered, her right broke and Eledier fought back. She gave ground by muggy, fogged inches, yielding precious little as her mind raced and her heart pounded and her wounds screamed bloody murder into her nervous system. Elves heal fast. Vara and Aldinar had helped her heal faster. But they don't heal fast enough for this without a miracle, and the Star-Gods were busy elsewhere right now. Her sword, its mercurial red blade shining in the gloom, swept this way and that. It was a frantic defense. For every axe she parried, another took its place. For every axe she stopped, another simply reinforced it. Two became a thousand, a thousand became two, and Sight was becoming useless as Eledier slowly ceded to the effects of injury.

She could See almost everything Ghez could possibly do this situation. That wasn't the problem. The problem is that her body was simply too slow to keep up, and sooner or later her economy of movement wouldn't be able to mitigate that fact. The Death Lord was going to take her down. He'd kill her, if she was lucky. He'd rape her if she wasn't. If her luck was truly abyssal, he'd rape her into slavery, kill her and then have her resurrected as Passion Near's play-thing. She would've known this truth even without the gifts of the Seering Path, and she was becoming more and more powerless to stop it from happening.

Finally, Ghez locked her sword between his crossed axes. Through the thin opening in his helm, she could see the barbarian's mouth opening in a smile that had pristine white teeth and features that might have been -- in another time and another place -- reasonably attractive. He spoke though, and his Voice was like a sledgehammer drum solo in Hell: Impossible to ignore, overwhelming to the senses, and overpowering to the will.

"Surrender."

"No," she told him, though there were parts of her baser self that wanted to. Parts that wanted to very badly. She braced her free hand to the back of her sword, and the blade trembled as she held her ground.

"Surrender," Ghez ordered again, and it was only then that Eledier realized her eyes had locked to his own. They were red. Terribly red. Redder than the lenses of her mask should've allowed them to be. With them came the weight of his will, bearing right down into her with all the force of prying hands and thick, rough fingers.

"No," she said in spite of it, though she was shaking so badly now that it was probably a miracle that Ghez hadn't shoved forward and taken her arms off in one fell swoop.

"Surrender," he ordered, his Voice heaving out like a battering ram. The lenses of her mask cracked and broke inward, spraying bits of glassy crystal onto her face in a fine mist. The force of the order drove further in, passing through the windows of her soul and landing somewhere squarely between Id and Superego. Lust met Conscience. It was a battle waged in less than a tenth of a second; the sort of thing that leaves guilt on the soul and hot moisture in the loins.

Conscience won.

It was a very near thing.

"No," Eledier declared a third time straight, just before leaping backwards and tugging her sword free with grace that no human could've matched.

Ghez was not graceful, but he was fast and strong and downright vile. He lunged forward. Axes swing again, blade to blade, and he caught her sword between them with a flash of brutal red light. An instant passed. When it was over, Eledier fell overbackwards and rolled some yards to her feet, clutching a broken sword hilt in one hand. What remained of its blade was a jagged little stump, venting gold steam into the air.

A fog of red enveloped Ghez Felhammer. He breathed it in, snorted out tiny puffs of red, and then he smiled again.

"And what now, little Elf?" he asked, standing tall that his axes could rest at his sides without a look of fatigue.

Eledier smiled. Her mask made it impossible to see, but she smiled anyway.

"I can only tell you one thing," she began with a normal voice, "A Wizard does it."

"Does what?"

There was a flash of light, all white and blue and shaped from a hundred thousand tiny wisps and sparks that stood alone and joined together and slammed into the Death Lord's side -- and didn't let up. What should've been just a single burst became nothing short of a spray; one long Magic Missile, or perhaps so many weaker ones that there wasn't an actual cooldown time between them. Where they hit the Death Lord's armor, they simply shattered like glass and spilled like waterdroplets with no respect for things like gravity. In no time at all, there was so much light that any normal eye would've been unable to make out the shape they formed.

"Stone Maiden Mausoleum."

The cloud imploded into the rough shape of four sharpened pillars, and was immediately replaced when such pillars of stone shot from the ground. More spikes knifed out from each pillar's side, connected to the ones next to it in less time than it takes to blink. There was only a flattened roof this time, and no holes to speak of.

But you could still hear the Stone Maiden embracing her latest victim.

"That," Eledier finally saw fit to explain.

Not exactly a safe distance away, the only thing Caden could come up with was a half-hearted, "I hate repeating myself."

[Caden Law]

"Are you alive?" Caden eventually called, when his lungs stopped burning and there wasn't a bitter tinge on the back of his tongue. He stood with his hands on his knees, and one clutching the only wand he had left at this point. His goggles were down around his neck, worn in their capacity as The World's Most Unfashionable Fashion Accessory. He didn't bother with his glasses right now. They were probably lying broken in one of his pockets anyway.

"Every thing would appear to be in relative working order," Eledier replied, though she was slow to get out of the crouch she'd ended the duel in. "I fear that my brother may not be so fortunate."

Whoop-de-striking-doo-da, pointybitch, Caden wisely left unsaid, and not out of any measure of empathy. He had too many brothers (burly, brainless, striking archetypes of Salvic Manliness that they were) to think Eledier was anything but lucky to lose one. Instead, "I can't even feel my legs right now," was his lame excuse for not running over to check on Aldinar's unmoving body. This too was a carefully measured lie.

"It is...alright..."

The remaining Seer wobbled a bit on her feet, and Caden could see a bit of blood leaking from the back of her armor. She'd torn her wounds open in the fighting. With little concern for the battle still raging close by, or the explosions still thundering in the distance, Eledier took off her helm and mask and let them drop to the ground with what remained of her sword.

She looked like hammered shit.

Elven women just aren't supposed to look like that. Where most of those he'd dealt with, even in their death throes, had looked like things of elegance and otherworldly glamour, Eledier looked like a battered young woman whose face was being marred by tears. About the only thing left of her former glamour was the dissonance between tears and expression: Though she cried, Eledier's face was completely neutral. She could've been thinking about groceries or she could've been thinking about a new pair of shoes, but Caden would've never guessed she was in mourning if she wasn't crying.

Without so much as a word, Eledier started forward in a resolute, staggering walk for the corpse of her brother. She wept in silence with every single step...

..and Caden didn't have much sympathy for that either, given the circumstances. There were more important things to worry about. Like how the battle was still raging in the first place. By now, the ghoulish hordes should've gone sluggish at the least, if not outright re-dying or moping into a state of apathetic indifference to the Elves fighting them. They kept on though, hacking and slashing and clawing and spurting dust and slop where there should've been blood. The remaining Rangers fought hard, but they were so outnumbered...

...and the revenant horde hadn't lost any of its fire. Even the trees were still lashing about.

Caden looked back at the dead body of Kholia Horren, which simply lay still in the not-quite-green grass and debris that littered the ground. That meant...

"Eledier," Caden said, turning back to see her tottering by the Mausoleum. Caden's heart crashed through his knees and stopped falling somewhere near Haidia. "ELEDIER!"

The stone shattered around a great red hand, gleaming with the gold of a thousand battles in the Forgotten One's service. Ghez Felhammer's grasp completely enveloped Eledier's head from one side to the other, his hand so large that one of her ears barely crinkled out between his clutching fingers.

He squeezed.

There was blood.

Sage preserve him, Caden saw that there was blood.

Her body dropped a few seconds later, slumping to its knees and then collapsing sideways from the Mausoleum. It all happened in the span of less than a second, and it wasn't long after that before the stone cracked and crumbled.

The Death Lord stood at the center of where it used to be. His mammoth hide cape bore holes in it, and the armor he wore was a dirt-covered mess, but he was otherwise completely unscathed. He regarded Eledier's corpse for a few moments that stretched into an eternal, mind-rending silence, and then he shrugged.

"I doubt she was much of a virgin anyway," was his dismissal of the whole thing as he turned to look over to Caden. They stared at each other for another few moments, just long enough to make it cosmically appropriate for Ghez to say, "And then there was one."

[Caden Law]

There are about ten thousand things to say in the situation Caden found himself in right now. For all the oratory acrobatics of Wizardry, for all the experience of adventuring, and for all the time he'd spent fighting for his life in one trauma-ridden situation or the next five after it; he could only muster one word. It was a fitting word. It was one of the Great Questions that define us all -- the fodder by which stories are told and believed, and lives are won or lost.

"How?" he asked, over and over again.

"The Hellhound's armor was merely a simulacrum of my own. Guess who the Necromancer's Forges saw fit to give the better suit, Wizard? Go on. Use that great academic prowess to guess," Ghez told him, and Caden could very well hear the smile on his face even from twenty yards out. "Mine. I was given this Armor of Champions for victories in His services. Mere rock isn't going to break it."

Caden's whole face twitched.

"Incidental to my Steed, I'm going to need a new one now. But I can forgive you for that. The Necromancer will likely just give me a better replacement as part of the bounties to be bestowed upon me for your head. Me and me alone. My thanks for murdering Kholia will be a quick and merciful death." He flicked his wrist once, and the chain-hung axe whipped up into his grasp. He brandished it with simple predatory intentions written into the very air around him. "Tilt your head back, Wizard. Xem'zund willing, this will only hurt once."

Caden shuddered once, and then stilled. He straightened from his slouched posture, then did indeed tilt his head back. Caden stared up through the fog, into the clouds, and then he let out a dull chuckle.

Ghez didn't wait for him.

The barbarian Death Lord leapt forward, hit the ground on one foot and turned into a stampeding bull elephant in the size and shape of a man. He did so without a battle cry, and even without the antilights of Necromancy to glitter and burn around his axes. He really did mean what he said.

It would've been painless. Maybe a split second's discomfort and about fifteen more spent staring at the scenery while waiting for his brain to stop functioning. It would've been honorable, since he died on the field of battle against the enemy's captain and commander. There would've literally been nothing wrong with dying like this.

It just wasn't Caden's style.

Both hands took the Wand of Nevermorrow and pulled back, low, and to the side. Blueraven sank into a stance that would've done an Akashiman samurai proud, and only then did he finally meet Felhammer in the eyes.

"Not happening."

He swept forward, and the ever malleable ground of Raiaera traced his movements. Rocks and dirt and mud; it all flooded up and took grass and trees and gods-know-what with it, forming a sharpened tentacle-like spire that arced around from behind the Wizard and slammed into Ghez Felhammer almost head on. The Death Lord had no real time to counter it and it did little to hurt him; all he could do was scream profanity as he was literally ground to a stop some yards away.

"I won't make that offer twice, Wizard!"

"You won't have to," Caden replied. "You're about to die, Ghez. I'm going to kill you -- here and now. I swear it on your own dead body."

[Caden Law]

A Wizard is as good as his word. It's the key point of semantic divergence between Wizards, Witches and Warlocks, and probably the earlier Sorcerors as well. When a Wizard gives his word, he will keep it. He will keep it in rain and in snow, in fire and in ruin, in sickness and in health, no matter what the cost is to himself and his other obligations. The only way to make a Wizard break one oath is to bind him with something else, and that's always tricky business by any standard.

The Wizard Blueraven swore an oath to kill the Death Lord Ghez Felhammer. He was obligated to do everything in his power to see it through to the end. All that was left now was the very question that Caden had asked not more than a minute ago: How?

It had no answer.

That's why Ghez was laughing like Hell at it.

"Do your worst!" Ghez invited through his chortles and his cackles. "Do your absolute worst, Wizard!"

"Count on it," was Blueraven's answer, though he struggled just to hold the arching stone spire in place between himself and his foe. With one Wand and no Circle and no martial training to speak of, there wasn't a whole lot he could do.

It was only a matter of time before Felhammer broke through...

...a matter of seconds before the cracks turned to chasms...

...a matter of instants before the whole thing shattered to dust...

...a matter of now.

Caden ducked back, lost his foot and only barely avoided tumbling backwards down the roadside incline as the Death Lord's axes came for him. Twinned swings to start with, fast enough and hard enough that they whistled through the air even without magic to empower them. Experience countered size, and though a lesser man would've fallen downhill with that stunt, Ghez did not. He planted a metal-clad foot right in front of Caden's empty hand, then drew his axes up with power surging wild in them.

There wasn't any witty banter when he brought the things back down. Caden rolled to the side along the hill, then scrabbled back up towards the road as the Death Lord's axes killed twenty or thirty feet of assorted plantlife just by hitting the ground.

"Breaking your oath already, Wizard?" Ghez called without looking. "Shame!"

"Hardly!" was Caden's response, though...it didn't sound all that brave when he was running away. Ghez straightened up with a laugh and started back up to the road.

Then stopped as Caden spun around and fired a bolt of lightning at him. By all rights he should've missed. By no rites did he hit. The only reason the spell slammed into Ghez was because the Death Lord wore a few hundred pounds of metal on his body -- arcane or otherwise. The mammoth hide pelt on his back finally gave up the ghosts. Literally. It exploded into hard, ugly red and blue flames, and in the smoke could be seen the faces of the men, women and children whose skins had gone into making the inner lining of it.

Ghez himself didn't even stagger. He stopped for a moment, and then walked the rest of the way onto the road with a fire burning on his back. He crossed his axes, and over the sound of battle gone bad near them, called out.

"I've been waiting to do this for a while now, Wizard!"

There wasn't a faux spell this time. Just axes. Being thrown. On chain that grew hundreds of new links to accomodate them, quickly enough that they were able to reach cannonball speeds without the slightest hindrance. They moved without flips or spins, more like missiles with bladed rutters on the underside. Caden dodged them both by the skin of his teeth, sidestepping one and then stopping short of faceplanting into the other. An instant later, he ducked. Which was good, because if he hadn't then they would've taken his head off when Ghez flicked the chains a little, turned them inward, then yanked them back into his hands. They still came within an inch of ripping open his Hat on either side.

Now, and only now, was when Caden finally put his goggles back on.

He stood again, thrust his Wand forward and spoke. By the time the Death Lord's axes were coming in for another go, the words hit the air with Blueraven's Voice to empower them.

"Thermal Lance."

The air between the axes suddenly contracted. It froze in a long thin line all the way to the space in front of Felhammer's position. Then it shattered and expanded and caught fire into one ridiculously long tunnel of fire around a boiling vacuum, hitting the axes and their chains and driving both far apart. It wasn't the exact Spell as Caden had intended, but it would do.

The axes missed and there wasn't anything Felhammer could do to make the return trip count. So he didn't.

He charged head long into the remnants of the Spell and plowed right through it like it wasn't even there. Fire scattered around his armored chest and shoulders as the axes lashed through the trees at roadside on their way back to him. In far too little time, he was at point blank and one axe was held high--

Caden didn't dodge it. He pointed down and twisted the Wand and the ground at Felhammer's feet wrenched to one side in an ugly turn that ended with him tumbling end over end for about ten feet more. He landed sideways, sprang up to his feet and immediately counterattacked with a blind double-swing.

Caden did dodge it, if only by precious inches. As he turned away, he raised the Wand again and didn't waste time aiming. Arcane Blast at point blank. He hit Ghez right in the face.

It didn't even blind him.

"Enough!"

The Death Lord caught Caden right in the chest. They could both hear bones cracking. Blood shot out of Caden's mouth in a pitiful spray, and more came out of his nose than anything else. The world turned violently red with that, and Caden lurched to his knees, gagging up more blood after the fact. Ghez didn't give him time to rest.

Whatever he hit Caden with, it was fast and hard. So much so that the Wizard literally accelerated right out of a Hat enchanted specifically to stay in place at all times. One of his boots even flew off. Whether it was a kick, a punch, a full arm or the back of an axe, Caden didn't know or care. All of it would've sent him flying just the same.

He hit the ground about twenty or thirty feet later, rolling along the dirt and gravel of the road for a few more yards after the fact. It was bloody and bruising and just plain painful, and Caden honestly didn't know how he stayed conscious through the ordeal -- much less thinking.

"Just lie still and die already. I've broken too many of your bones for you to mount a comeback now, and you never had a chance in the first place."

One of his goggle lenses had busted open. He was bleeding from the back of his head. His vision was blurry in both eyes, more so than usual. But Caden looked around as he struggled up on hands and knees, and though he'd lost his Wand in the fall, something just as good -- if not better -- lay within his reach.

Aldinar's Spear.

Blueraven grinned like a maniac as he took the thing, and said with a tattered Voice, "Now why would I ever do that?"

[Caden Law]

Tembrethnil Forest is an old, old place. It's a realm of magic and power dating to ages long passed from even the memory of the first peoples in the world. Tens of thousands of leylines congregate here, old and new and entirely local from the sheer build-up of energies inherent to every single centuries old tree and decade aged blade of grass.

There is power here. There is life here. Beneath the soil, within the trees, pulsing even the fog-muddled air.

...and with Aldinar's spear as an impromptu Staff of Power, Caden reached out to it. He dug deep -- into the earth, into the air, into the running streams, and into all the plants he could find. He reached out with his senses and he made contact, and he didn't waste time with incantations or dramatic gestures or rites or any of the nonsense that usually makes magic work in the first place.

He called out to Mother Tembrethnil, and in all her matronly wisdom, the Forest herself answered.

With a proper staff, however improvised and second-hand it was, the whole process took only fractions of a second. Where Eluriand had ravaged him to the core with centuries of proud living and tradition, Tembrethnil Forest gave only the purest power of life itself. Bones knit back together in an instant, flesh wounds healed and the Wizard Blueraven came to his feet as if someone had tilted the entire planet to put it in place for him -- with the added benefit of facing the Death Lord who still sought to destroy this place.

"Oh, fuck," was all Ghez could think to say, his Voice literally blown out like a candle in the wind as magic surged and warped and shaped itself to Blueraven's intent. "Oh, fucking Hell..."

Blueraven took the Staff in both hands, and then pointed it deliberately at Felhammer. The light that built there was stark white and green around a growing core of bluish-black.

"Magic Missile," he said, because you just can't beat the classics.

Especially not when they go nuclear.

[Caden Law]

What happened next is the kind of thing that passes into myth and legend, sung about and romanticized by bards and told to small children to inspire them to greatness. It was the kind of image that ends up on national flags, and gets painted again and again through the ages.

In the simplest terms: A great blue raven flew from Tembrethnil's breast, erupting from the forest in much the same slow way a mushroom cloud shoots up out of the desert. The difference is that when it spun and beat its wings, there was no massive gust of wind. When it opened its beak to crow, the sound was so loud that it couldn't actually be heard. Fog billowed into nothing around it, and the clouds split in a perfect ring overhead.

It drifted up, a thing of pure blue light with black edges, leaving a trail of feathers the size of a house in its wake. They drifted to the ground, one by one, and faded not long after they touched it. The raven itself didn't last much longer, as it flew on gusts of nothing into the sky and slowly but surely faded away.

A red sun rose to gold in the morning hours of Raiaera.

The battle ended not long after that.

[Caden Law]

There is a cliche that almost everyone knows by heart. They say, The silence was deafening... like they know what it means.

They did not.

Not until they stood in Tembrethnil Forest right here, right now. As ghouls crumbled to dust and revenant trees collapsed in on themselves, there was a silence so great as to be mythic in its own right. It was serenity; equal parts passion and apathy, ignorance and enlightenment, relief of life and sorrow of death. There were three Rangers left on the road in that moment, another starting to move in the forest proper, and somewhere out in the wilderness, maybe one Seer still drew breath.

And at the epicenter of something that most would call a miracle, there was just a Wizard staring through half-broken glasses at the burnt shadow where Ghez Felhammer once stood.

...and only now, without the blinding light or the surging euphoria of the Forest's energies, did Caden see that he wasn't using Aldinar's spear at all. A cracked Eye stared back at him -- into him -- from the head of Kholia Horren's old Staff, and though it had no lids and was attached to no face, Caden could sense it smiling.

He dropped the Staff immediately.

Then he stomped on it.

And he screamed at it.

And he left it there, to go find his boot and put his Hat back on. By then, the clarity of his vision was starting to fade, but he still didn't need glasses to see the side-effects of the most powerful spell he'd ever cast in his life. Hell. A blind man could've seen it.

For as far as the eye could see in every direction, Tembrethnil Forest had died. For as long as the senses could reach, its leylines had been severed. What remained were withered corpses that used to be plants and trees, and streams that were slowing to a dead creep alongside them. There was no magic left here -- no life left here. It wasn't because of Xem'zund. It wasn't because of Kholia Horren. It wasn't because of Ghez Felhammer.

A Wizard did it.

And his Name was Blueraven.

[Caden Law]

Tembrethnil, Raiaera
Day of the Mourning Stars

I do not necessarily believe in gods.

Strike that. I do believe in gods, but I do not believe in their divinity. I do not believe in their moral superiority or their right to define what is right.

But, should the day ever come that I do believe in such things, then I hope they can forgive me for what I did yesterday. Sway have mercy on me, I honestly do not have words for the thing I did yesterday. I still cannot wrap my head around it.

I used Necromancy.

I used Necromancy.

I used Necromancy.

It doesn't matter how many times I repeat that to myself, I can't accept it. I know the story of it. I know its origins. I know the gist of its mechanics. But I can't accept that I used it. I can't accept that I used it or that I was empowered by a Necromancer's Staff to do it.

I tore the life out of Tembrethnil Forest using Necromancy.

It was an accident. I didn't mean to do it that way. I was trying to summon up energy for a spell that could beat Felhammer and and and and and

The page stops here.

Blueraven spent almost an hour before moving on to the next one.

No sense crying about it. Which I haven't.

After the battle, we (by which I mean the Elves, since none of them would dare come within arm's reach of me) set about tallying the living and the dead. I handled all the burials they'd let me do. Which ended up being one: Kholia Horren, the Wizard Blightcrow. Felhammer didn't have a body left to bury and neither did most of the leftover ghouls. We (They) buried Aldinar with his spear and Eledier with what remained of her sword and helm.

Vara got lucky. She survived her battle with the succubus, but only because the light of my spellwork burned it out of this world. I expect she'll return at some point, added to the growing list of women who would like to tear my spine out and beat me with it. Vara survived though, as I said, and her injuries were relatively minor.

She was also the only one of the Elves to commend me for my services. And she forgave me, with a hug, after I explained what had happened. Shaul Karna, the Ranger who guarded me during part of the battle, also forgave me and offered me his Wand. I declined. After what I did to the lands they were all dying to protect, I couldn't accept gifts from them. For what it's worth, I stood shoulder to shoulder with the survivors and provided my own bumbling eulogy for Eledier.

She believed in me when no-one else would.

That's what I told them.

After the funeral, we walked through the newly christened Deadlands. It looks bigger than it actually is. I hope. When we reached the edge, we came upon a wall of actual forest. Vara and the Rangers communed with the trees (I wasn't allowed to touch them), and it turns out the damage I inflicted wasn't as bad as I believed. Kholia's logging operation tore up almost a two fifths of the forest on its own. My magic* killed another fifth on top of that. Two fifths remain, more or less, with the likelihood that the areas ravaged by Kholia will grow back if given the chance.

Maybe someday, the area I scourged will grow back too.

Vara didn't slap me when I suggested it, so. You never know.

* I still shudder to call it that.

Another hour ticked by. Blueraven stared into a campfire light while trying to order his thoughts again.

I don't think I have it in me to hate the Elves anymore. But I think it's time that I leave these lands. As I write this, I sit with what's left of Farstrike Encampment, sharing late night guard duties with Shaul while the others mime sleep with the deepest 'meditations' I've ever seen. I guess enough exhaustion and stress will make even an Elf snore.

After the battle, Vara and I destroyed Kholia's old Staff. I Circled it to diffuse its power, then Vara broke the gem. We burnt the rest of it afterwards. It was the only real relief I've had lately. I spent most of last night and today repairing what's left of my gear; I threw away my Conscript Breastplate, and my Bazaar Wand was broken in the fighting. I'll have to find another to replace it. I had to use alchemy to fix one of my boots, and both my glasses and goggles.

IthinkImaybeabletodonecro

The lead broke. The page ripped. Caden threw what was left of the old pencil into the campfire, got out a new one and returned to work on a different page.

I believe that, after all this, I may be able to do Necromancy.

Saint forgive me.

I need to go home. I need to talk to Greyspine -- my Greyspine, from my Time. I need to see my family again. I need to heal from this. I need to be sure that I haven't got someone's hooks into my soul.

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to go to Salvar.

He closed the Grimoire, took off his Hat and then crammed it back inside. Caden put it back on, adjusted his glasses and sniffed the air.

"Smells like a storm's brewing," he pointed out.

"It's already here," said Shaul.

[Caden Law]

Intricacies of Asymmetry

Not far from the edge of a once mighty forest, there stood a grouping of just five people; four Elves and a human Wizard. The Elves wore traveling clothes now; all grey pants and shirts under traditional green Ranger's Cloaks, even for Vara the Seer. All of them wore swords at their sides, though only Vara didn't carry a spellstaff. Caden stood apart from them, and in front of them. He faced them, and they faced him, and it was all over but the parting words.

"We could use a man like you," Vara said, though it wasn't much of an invitation.

"No you couldn't," Caden replied, though it wasn't much of a denial since she hadn't been offering in the first place.

"Where will you go now?" Both of them asked at once. Vara inclined her head for him to speak first, but Caden was going to talk right over her whether she did or didn't. "I'm going to Salvar. I have to do..." He motioned with his hands, as if trying to convey ten thousand things without a word. Then he asked, "And you?"

"We will leave this place for the surrounding towns and villages. Spread word of what happened here. Evacuate the willing to Tirinost, where a new power may yet be rising. Or perhaps an older, better one -- an echo of the things we have preached for centuries. I feel--" and here, Caden noted, she almost said fear, "--our paths will cross again someday, Blueraven."

"Probably," Caden replied with a shrug.

"I wish you best of luck on your journey to Salvar. May you find your own Caesai Maer," she said, placing a fist over her heart and bowing with something kin to respect as she did it.

Caden stared at her.

"What is the Zero Step?" he asked.

"When you learn, feel free to tell me," Vara answered with a smile that was equal parts cryptic, unknowing, and flat-out cute.

Someone go update the score card.

-----

There wasn't a long good-bye between Caden Law and the Elves of Farstrike. He shook hands with the Rangers -- Ringo, Shaul, and Erral. He hugged Vara, though she didn't exactly put enthusiasm into hugging him back.

Then they walked away from each other without so much as a backwards glance.

Caden didn't have a horse this time, and that was okay. He wanted to be alone for the time being After hours and hours, it was still okay. After a day and a half spent walking, it was just fine. Horses, after all, are big and stupid and eat a lot and they're always shitting and they smell awful and they spit at you and oh gods did his legs hurt.

He kept walking for a week straight until he finally hit a mountainous rise in terrain not far from the city of Trenycë, or from the coast. The night was spent watching the city burn under siege of Xem'zund's forces -- some other Death Lord with some other game to be played, and Caden didn't have it in him this time.

So he sat down on the darkened hillside, made a light glow from where there should've been an eraser on his pencil, took out his Grimoire and started writing the lifestory of a Wizard who had tried to kill him. Because he dared not eulogize Kholia Horren aloud, let alone in the presence of the Elves, and it had taken him this long just to get the vision of stabbing Kholia to death out of his dreams.

It was, in any respect, just a simple eulogy. A summary to the intricacies of asymmetry between a young Wizard and an old one, a good Wizard and a bad one.

I could've been like that.

END

Losses: The Bazaar Wand and Raiaeran Conscript Vest are no longer part of Caden's inventory. I'll remove them with my next character update.

Requested Gains: Nothing material. Caden now has a working knowledge of basic Necromancy. He will never be able to pull off a stunt like he did in this thread, short of direct Godly intervention or the mother of all plot devices. Incidentally, he only managed to pull it off in the first place because Raiaera is so bloody full of magic, and its forests even more so. Most of the forest will recover, but the next hundred years or so (bar the direct intervention of some other RPer fixing it) will probably see a great big randomly shaped hole of dead land smack in the middle of it.

At the moment, I can't think of anything else. D:

EDIT: And actually, just to clarify: The Necromancy he used was tied to his Geomancy skills. Divination of energies and such. The mass-death was more of a side-effect/tainting of the spellwork by Kholia's former Staff of Power.