Chương 549: BECMI Chapter 548 – Elder Gifts

"You found an intact Elder Sign…" I whispered in wicked glee as Aelryinth handed the incredibly useful thing to me without hesitation. For some strange reason, natives of Leng never coughed them up as carried treasure, imagine that!

"Hundreds of them, in fact," he admitted.

"The Yithian elders liked to carry them for protection in areas with exposure to Mythos and servants of the Great Old Ones… like Leng. The dholes also spit them up instantly if they happen to swallow them, and took to spitting acid on anything they could sense carrying one in reaction," he added with a fatalistic air and a wrinkling of his nose.

"Do you have the means to manufacture them?" I asked urgently, knowing I'd sacrifice this thing instantly to learn it. He affected to look mildly offended.

"Of course I do. I had more than one, after all." We both shared sinister little giggles only fellow Artificers truly understood. The Elder Sign and the Cerulean Seal were the oldest and greatest known common defenses against Aberrants in general and Mythos creatures in particular. Anything from Outside Creation was vulnerable to the Elder Sign specifically, although it might prove ineffective against 'native Aberrants' with no such ties, while the Cerulean Seal would still suppress them.

Anything connected to any of the Great Old Ones was specifically vulnerable to the Elder Sign, however! Like Hastur, and thus the Yellow King of Leng!

"It appears we have much of value to exchange, after all…" I smiled, sitting back down on Feature and studying my new toy, resisting the urge to sacrifice it to Reverse Engineer to find out how to make it. The forces of Leng were not going to like this at ALL…

The discovery and ability to make new Elder Signs was very rapidly the beginning of the end for Leng, whose denizens were universally vulnerable to the Sign, and even the other Mythos races were repelled by it. The primary factors involved in making one were its shape, the mindset of the being who made it at the time of crafting, and the way it was properly made. The last actually required three limbs working to do properly, typical of the current body of most Yithians.

The substance of a true Elder Sign was also usually powerful, but it was not essential, mostly being useful if you wanted to chuck it at some Mythos thing that was truly powerful for rather explosive effect. A person bearing an Elder Sign was almost impossible for all but Eternal-class Aberrants to approach, meaning an Eternal could run right through a horde of the lesser things while hunting down the mighty ones.

The same applied to hovertanks or grav-sleds or other vehicles with the Sign carved prominently into their hulls, and walls festooned with it couldn't be scaled or approached by Leng's armies at all! When used in concert with the Cerulean Seal, their combined ability to weaken Aberrants was extraordinary in power! A LOT of Armor and Shields were soon adorned with the Elder Sign.

It turned out that Arakne Arms, as refined Soul Essence, worked just fine for concurrently drawing the Sign, as did the point of a Manticore's Tail. It also turned out that using five limbs to draw the Sign was even better than using three! The Yithians probably didn't even know that when Aelryinth tried it on a whim... The Walls at the other Maws and Runepoints against the Aberrant races soon had Elder Signs a hundred feet tall etched onto them by Eternal Artificers acting in telepathic concert with one another.

The assaults there dropped off rapidly in strength and frequency when the hordes trying to attack couldn't get near the Walls any more, only writhe and shriek at a safe distance and get themselves shot to pieces, Burn en vivus, and allow us to move the Walls forward patiently. The Orbus were particularly affected by the Sign. The geometry of the Sign seemed to cause a reaction in their ability to draw power from magical writings, a backlash that could blow apart any of their eyes that dared to look upon one!

That said, the ethergrim, the kaorti, the tsurlons, and the cephalids, as well as the lesser races, were all affected adversely by gazing upon the Elder Sign, and could not touch it or bear to be near it. The Elder Sign had somehow been stamped into the nature of Creation itself by the Elder Gods to stand as anathema to any beings serving the Great Old Ones and the Far Realms of Mythos, and that specifically included Leng!

Unable to move past the walls, nor rage down from the Plateau of Leng to assault our Walls, construction of the last nine Pyramids took less than two months, multiple Eternals and Masters working at the task with speed and efficiency.

Master Aelryinth spent most of that time sitting out there in the Maw of Malice, reading under the stars, picking off stray denizens of Leng trying to get around him or avoid his attention, or occasionally charge him, and only once did he bring down the Fangs of Creation to feast once again.

When that was done and the field was full of splashes of white and some scattered living things dying slowly as they Burned and were being sucked down into the Land, he moved three miles further up the Maw, almost to its end, and set up his reading post there anew, turning pages, relaxing and not doing much during his stay there.

The horde didn't come again to feed the Land stained so brightly white about and behind him, but he did pick off hundreds of flying Leng creatures who didn't think he could reach out and touch them. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

The head of the dead bhole eventually was sent into his Sanctum for use elsewhere, as were quite a few Aberrant Dread and Baneskulls he was working on from his Jaws of Creation kills, generously recovered for him for the proper Enchanting to unleash their effects. He didn't eat, he didn't sleep; he just sat back, read books, and bathed in the Radiance emanating unseen off of Castle Doomrose.

The Karma he earned from his kills more than paid for the cost of establishing the Schools in his Matrix, and he was also experimenting with infusing the energies in different formats to different parts of his Theurgic Matrix in a way no native of this world and dimension could. All in all, he was fine, especially since he was chatting non-stop in the Markspace, and a few of the Sims in the Twilight Libraries were going over many, many spells with him simultaneously.

The Leng creatures he sniped off was actually more fighting than most of the troops of Brightmoor experienced during this time!

The Final Pyramid around the Plateau of Leng activated in a long-anticipated beam of light as its carefully-carved Capstone was put into place. From the peak on down, the layers of stone activated one by one, waiting Runes springing to life as the full circuit of them was finally complete. Forty layers lit up in sequence, and then the beam of completion shot skyward, ranging up a full forty miles in a golden fountain before widening into an arc in all directions as it began to form its Domain.

That Domain reached out and meshed with the Pyramids to the north, east, and west of it, completing the Great Threefold Sealing Ring of Arktos! Golden light pulsed through the land and sky, and something hardened as it did so. I was up on Castle Doomrose as the first pulsing of the Grand Arktos Seal pushed inward toward the South Pole against the intruder in its midst.

The light didn't seem like much, but when I looked south, it looked like an early dawn sweeping towards me through the gray skies that Leng roiled into existence along its breaching of the Veil. The first pulse ran into the leading edges of that gray churning, and everyone could see them begin to Burn away and fall back. Those able to sense the Veil felt something softer than silk sweep by, and the Veil rippled in response… and tightened.

The pulse came again, and again, like the slow and steady beating of the heart of the world. The stormy, depressing skies and influence of Leng were pushed back, back, and back some more. Cheers started to arise as the golden light behind us grew higher, taller, and stronger, the Dawn arising, and the unwanted power of twisted Dream was pushed back with it!

Ahead of us, the sky still swam with stars, ripped open through Leng, held there by a slow and steady Sublime Song that had not deviated for nearly two months, firm and solid as the world's own heartbeat. As the gold of a day that Leng was never supposed to truly see shot past it, the stars there didn't fade into blue, they only grew brighter!

"The day won't truly pass the Maws," Thor murmured, disappointed, but not surprised.

"If we want to push up, it will still have to be under our own power." I just tapped Dread down, and there was the slightest rumble as Castle Doomrose lifted several feet, the exact distance the rock below it had compressed under its weight. The walls thrown up in front of the foundation to the Castle flowed around it as it swept forward, acting as if they were made of water, not stone.

A very broad but shallow trail was plowed through the pseudo-stone of Leng as Castle Doomrose proceeded up the Maw, the looming Walls with their Elder Signs intact behind it… and those same Elder Signs were scribed between the slowly moving vines of carved stone around the base of Castle Doomrose, too! Behind us, the light of a new day grew brighter, the pulses visible as they ran like water over the canyon walls of the Maw, pushing further and further inland.

They were riding the Castle's Domain and dripping from the great roses currently trailing only small firefalls of molten stone that glittered like golden rain as they fell, hitting the stone and erupting into globules of light and glory as they did so. It was a New Day for Leng, and they didn't like it very much…

Aelryinth… The Castle was a hundred yards behind me when I finally closed the spellbook I was Writing into Magnus spell by spell and stood up. Load was under Feature and I, my Familiar encircling me to the waist and allowing me to sit down for all of this if I wanted to. My Eagle's Vantage, amusingly enough, was right up there of a height with the Throne Room of the Castle, so I shared their view.

"They've been gathering for two days," I informed those up above with Magevoice, probably unnecessarily.

"It's like they know it's time for a final feast to take place, and wanted all the ingredients to be on hand." My Words echoed across the twisted stones and moving, shifting landscape of Leng ahead of us, both stirring up and silencing the hordes of things waiting there for us, probably not happy thinking of themselves as ingredients!

There were plenty of dragons and people in place among the flowers, vines, and thorns of Edge's daunting Castle, heavy high-tech weapon emplacements ready, especially among the massive briar formed of intertwined stony nettles around the bottom two hundred feet of the thing. The Castle came to a grinding halt precisely one hundred feet behind me.

"Well," an icy and wonderfully sinister Voice answered from above,"at least we don't all have to get out and walk to the dinner." Grav-sleds came shooting out of a dozen openings in the Tower, scattering to right and left and straight ahead. They spread across two miles of frontage as they came down, and hovered just above the ground as a whole bunch of very scary men and women disembarked from them. Eternals, almost all of them.

If Masters were present, they were at least in pairs, and always accompanying an Eternal. The ones afoot were the Melees and their Healers, of course. Any Archers and the Casters stayed on the grav-sleds. Behind them, secondary grav-sleds and hovertanks slid into position between the spellcaster positions.

There were a lot of shooters ready on all of the Elder Sign-carved vehicles, and at least Baneskulls on every Weapon, with Dreadskulls on the cannons and gunmounts, setting the barrels alight with Anathemic cerulean Flames.

The stone column that had once encompassed the head of a mighty bhole was currently sitting above a constant erupting conduit and slowly bubbling pit of thick vivic mist that hadn't stopped coming up for two months, even after being moved three miles closer to Leng, a fountain of mortal energies being constantly expelled by Leng. The stream of it flowed away beneath Feature and I as we descended to the ground with the others.

We glided out through the vivic mist and the very, very white ground beneath it, still feeding the Land after all this time and keeping the tip of the Jaws of Creation firmly in place far above us.