NOVEL NEXT Chapter Twenty-One – My First Magic Shrine
The Future, Real Life...
The path caught my eye, because it was winding between the stones. Even with the weight of the beings making it, it was worn down. So, regular traffic. Looked like someone had even wasted time making steps.
You don’t make steps to someplace that isn’t a) used frequently, or b) pretty important.
The tracks didn’t feel frequent to my tremblesense, so important it was.
I went through various scenarios as I headed in the direction of the looming walls of the valley, keeping an eye out for annoyances.
Stakes with skulls on them, anointed with Runes blackening the ivory bone around them, were not a good start. I studied the misaligned five-point stars, noting that they were actually crafted pretty well, despite looking so rough and juvenile.
Ruilvei…
The Queen of Night, the Godwitch, The Dark Crone, was the Patron of all Black magic… and by extension, Patron of all Hags and Witches. A Coven would be wise to have a Shrine on their grounds.
She was probably the one responsible for twisting the Hag Curse into its current form. There was no way I was going to be respectful to her. I was Forsaken; she couldn’t see me unless she had an avatar with line of sight to me. It was virtually impossible for a Divinity to register something as ephemeral as a Forsaken. We could give them Faith, but they couldn’t listen to our prayers.
Tremble whisked out, bone cracked, and the split skull fell to the ground, the star on it hissing as it shattered.
Yeah, no surprises in that thing, nope-nope.
I proceeded along the trail, waiting for any guards to show.
Forewarned by the destruction of the skulls, I did indeed hear metallic feet clomping on the stone rapidly in my direction, and I glided into the shadow of a stone.
Heavy steps, about the weight of men in armor, paces man-sized, strangely light… probably undead. Four of them. Weapons banging against stone and mail, not carried with much care…
Low intelligence corporeal undead in armor. Wights with armor would be my guess, although a swordwraith team was a possibility, or skeleton warriors… no, too heavy for the latter…
The fact they were wielding wraithblades to channel their Energy Drain ability was cheering. The crawl of necroic energy along them was unmistakable.
I came out of the shadows and removed the heads of them whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk as I spun between them, Cleaving them dead almost instantly.
Yes, I was definitely going to need Final Rest or Vivic before I went up against the Hags. I needed better body disposal.
Tremble was happy to feast on the alchemically-treated blades, and I spent a few happy minutes harvesting the residual magic in them. I left the bodies and heads where they were, not particularly concerned with others coming up behind me and finding them.
A crude archway over a split in the valley wall, a shaded offshoot of the valley itself, basically an elongated cave.
And that stone over there was glittering in a way it shouldn’t, and was in a great place to look out over the shrine entryway.
I ran for it, and up the wall of the shrine, Tiger Walking up the wall and hacking down with Tremble.
The shiny stone shattered, split in two, and popped out of the socket in the stone where it had been placed. It looked like a crystalized eyeball, which it probably was, as they were the best thing to make Hag Eyes from.
Was there a wail of pain in the distance? While Hag Eyes could be used by any member of the coven who used its matching mate, each member had to be tied to each set, and would take damage if the Eye was destroyed… which would indirectly alert them that the location of the Eye was compromised.
It would take them at least several minutes to send someone here to investigate. I inhaled, and smelled… cow, blood, rot, decay, necroic energy, brimstone...
With a deep inhalation of breath, the Shrine Guardian stepped out to bar my way, since I wasn’t exactly concealing myself while doing that.
A minotaur. Nine feet tall, ogre-sized, massive horns adding another foot. Dressed in wildly impractical armor, all black scale with tusks and spikes everywhere, looking impressive, and definitely enchanted so that he wouldn’t be a massive danger to himself and his surroundings. He was wielding a great Axe with a double-bitted head three feet across. Hugely built, muscular, cloven feet, and fires dancing in his eyes as he faced me.
I noted the blast and charred marks on the stones around me, and frowned. He looked down at me, clearly rather surprised, even tilting his head in some amazement at my presence. Then he huffed, snarled something under his breath about how I’d make a decent mouthful, and hefted that Axe which probably weighed close to what I did… and made a forty-feet jump from standing, hacking down with irresistible force.
Tremble snapped up in the Archer Stand Thrust, and I slid forward three feet without actually moving my legs, crouching slightly before locking down my heavyfoot and entering Battle Focus.
His massive overhand strike crashed down behind me as he over-extended, and he ran his groin right onto the point of my Blade, driving the length of it through himself and out his kidney, pushing me backwards with his mass, breaking his own grip on his Axe as he bleated in pain.
The physical impact pulled my Sword out, which was fine. He had Fast Healing as a Shrine Guardian, which meant the gouting blood from the normally fatal wound stopped almost instantly.
I kicked back and instantly charged in again. He was reaching for the handle of his Axe… and I hewed right through the hardened and enchanted oak, leaving him gripping a stub as the crescent cut stopped and became a full force lunge, Tremble’s point hooking up and into him, going for a more active target than his kidney.
This time he kicked out at me as I let my feet sweep past me, leaning back and using the impact as I hit the ground to slide free once again with my Blade in hand. He staggered as things like guts and liver and stomach were all neatly impaled and dealing all sorts of fun to his insides.
Tremble didn’t quite reach the heart; this thing was tough. He slammed his head down towards me, I eyed his horns and rolled right as he hooked his head, trying to gore me and failing. Tremble flicked back and across his throat even as the breath he was holding vomited out, and a combination of blood and fire was puked out of both of his smiles.
He staggered, and then gaped at me wide-eyed standing there, the stone for a foot around me not even charred. This time I came in with a full 360 snap and swirl, getting my hips into the blow, hewing his head half-off, and I definitely cut through the spine.
Nervous system compromised, he collapsed to the ground, gushing out blood his Fast Healing was racing to try and stop. But he could not raise his limbs to defend himself, and without further ado I completed the job and lopped my way through the rest of his very thick neck.
Battle Vigor would restore most of the Soak damage I took from being knocked around by him, and I pried up his Axe’s head from the stone and tossed it into the shadows off to the side, to grab on my way out.
Tremble was hungry for more magic Weapon munchies, after all.
There might be other things inside, but I was in a hurry, so I advanced immediately, noting that they didn’t bother to light torches as all the attendants could likely see in the dark. Tremble’s light was enough for my eyes for now, and my tremblesense was very active, radiating out from the ki sliding across the ground, reading everything in the stone and in contact with it within fifteen feet of me.
The foot-traps keyed to irregularly placed stones were clever, but of no use against someone who could read the stones… and who was walking above said stones and not putting any real weight on them. I could jump between the null steps of the pressure plates, and actually wanted to see if there was anything interesting in the spiked pit below for thoroughness, but the giant, obsidian-shelled centipede with mandibles as long as a knife distracted me by jumping right into the point of my Sword and necessitated my attention for a few critical seconds.
Being the clever melee combatant I was, I turned its momentum into an impact on the pressure plates behind me with a little bit of Moon kinetic redirection. The floor dropped open abruptly, the hissing and clacking thing fell down into it, and the spikes at the bottom greeted its hard shell enthusiastically.
Undeterred by its writhing and flailing, I headed in further, keeping alert for other surprises.
The bone golem in the roughly-hewn room at the end was an unwelcome surprise. It was twelve feet tall and four-armed, made of bones from at least ten different skeletons, and wielding sabers carved from the thigh bone of something the size of an elephant or bigger. Tremble was not adamantine, so I had to rely on Penetrate Damage Reduction to hack into its bones. At +10 MAB and with Ki Strike active, the combination was more than enough to overcome its DR.
It wasn’t intelligent, but it was fairly nimble, very persistent, and it had a lot of reach with those four arms and the bone sabers.
Thankfully, I was still much faster than it was, and it wasn’t my primary opponent. I basically ran along the wall around it, got behind it, and then totally and completely trashed that altar to Ruilvei, ripping through the stone and disrupting every single Rune pattern on the thing and its dais in six frantic seconds of hack-hack.
The smelly, greasy gray rock of the altar, which exuded a natural Evil that was not native to this plane, cracked and broke as my Null tore through the threads of power around it. The broader black basalt underneath it began to shake and crumble to dust at the edges, which wasn’t helped when the bone golem jumped up there. I conveniently jumped away as it hammered down on the altar it was supposed to be protecting and promptly bashed it to pieces.
If an unintelligent Construct could have gotten mad, this sucker would have been infuriated. I snickered and proceeded to retreat out of the place, and with its guarded object destroyed, the golem followed me as fast as it could.
It seemed to know where the pit traps were, which didn’t help it when I slid in from out of its line of sight and smashed both of my feet into its lead foot at the appropriate time. The floor gaped open nicely, and a thousand pounds of bones went rattling down thirty feet to the unforgiving floor below.
It didn’t really hurt the thing, its DR being much too high, but it bought me some time to get out of the Shrine before it could climb out with its four arms.
Elapsed time since I’d split the Hag Eye, about four minutes. The Valley was a mile across; I didn’t expect them to be great sprinters, so they would be getting near, but had not arrived as yet.
I slid outside the entrance, made sure I wasn’t going to be sniped, and shot sideways to grab the fallen magical Axe and get off the pathway into the rougher stones. Yeah, the sucker was heavy, so I stashed it twenty yards away out of sight, and then just retreated further down the path to see who arrived.
I didn’t have to fight them, although it would be good to pick some off, I supposed. No, no, I had a lot of sloooow Karma to reassign, I wasn’t in a hurry. I really had to get my Arsenal going, with Blooding, Vivic, and Final Rest all in urgent need. Tremble also wanted to regain its intellect and ability to Sing and announce us.
Really, I had so much to do and regain from Dream.