Chương 57: Interlude VIII: final setup

Red and black power, drawn from the ample ambience of violence, death and suffering that had slowly spread across the land was drawn in by the foundations of the underground temple. The vast cavern containing the building had been hollowed out by dispersing rock into magic and supported by conjured supports of iron.

Instead of being similarly conjured, flint, obsidian and bronze from matter summoned from the depths of the planet's lithosphere had been shaped into the temple itself, giving it a direct similarity link with the planet. The Dark Masons had done their research through what the locals called the Internet and discovered that while the locals' prehistory was far newer than their own, it had not been that different in some ways despite the lack of magic.

Flint bore one of the oldest and strongest links of all earthen materials to mastery of fire. Obsidian bore a similarly powerful link to the first weapons used by locals to kill locals, while bronze was the foundation of true metallurgy, a staple weapon material for half of the locals' modern civilization, and a stronger link to firearms than any other material. In combination, the three materials were perfect for drawing upon violence in this new world the Mavethans had invaded.

Constructed in interlocked shapes and images symbolizing Mavethan magic, history and the written form of specific spells, the temple again employed the principle of similarity to tie to summonings. Magic was directed by intent, language was intent codified into arbitrary symbols by the collective agreement and belief of a hundred generations of Mavethans, thus language could direct magic.

The equivalence rate was very low; one had to carve the symbols hundreds of times on materials tens of thousands of times more massive to equal a fraction of the repertoire of even a mediocre mage, but the Mavethans were mages; physical resources were just a few spells away. Ultimately, once the level of magic in a world was sufficient, the temple would serve to draw in magic and send it into spells automatically for only about an hour of effort from a Dark Mason.

Earth had finally achieved the requisite magical awakening and the three Dark Masons Legate Mot's forces had available had been working a lot longer than just one hour. Under Mot's own eyes, the red and black sparks of power slowly gathered in a vaguely humanoid shape then started the condensation process. More and more power was added to the framework provided by the temple, a template of the desired result containing and shaping the magic.

The shape started as a few gleaming sparkles, then a featureless translucent outline, then a red and black ghost-like figure. More distinctive features appeared, from the shape of its face to the contours of a stocky body, to clothing and equipment that grew more and more real. Soon a figure identical to his three Dark Masons had taken shape, the only sign of its ethereal nature a slight transparency in its extremities.

Confirming the first conjuration a success, Mot tapped a brooch of black adamantite given to him by the Necromancers of Maveth, unleashing one of the souls stored within. An immaterial presence invisible to most floated towards the construct. Mot himself had studied necromancy for a time but not enough to be a true necromancer; he could see the spirits of the dead, communicate with them through rituals or sign language, but not directly speak to them or compel them to do anything.

While useful, such tools could often be detrimental to his job, for unwilling spirits made for poor servants. This particular spirit was very much willing, traveling towards the construct on its own and settling within. Dark Masons were no less reckless than other mages in their youth and for all the slowness of their magic no less prone to accidents or errors of judgement either. The souls of the dead were all collected by Necromancers and offered a fair deal; conscription in exchange for reincarnation.

The moment the spirit was absorbed by the construct, all the collected magic dispersed back to the world to be used anew and the new body settled into reality. Its eyes opened into pools of darkness from the power the soul channeled, its stocky muscular body optimized for its new position. The animating soul's service was recorded on the soul itself, on the same spell that would draw it back to the orb upon another death, or back to Maveth if the orb were destroyed.

Souls that served long enough were paid in custom bodies of their specification upon the contract's end, with extra material wealth for exemplary service. It was a great system, in Mot's not so humble opinion; those souls who eventually rose to Mavethan nobility would have served decades, possibly centuries in the military, caster and worker castes rather than being the pampered fools of other nations, and even the lowest street rat could aspire to a good position with enough effort and time.

The new Dark Mason walked out of the temple, then seized the magic coursing through him and conjuring a wall of iron. He then dispersed it, built a summoning circle for imps, summoned an imp, then vanished both circle and imp. He continued in that vein for a good five minutes, ending with the spell to summon a lightning tower. Mot paid special attention to that, deemed the manifestation good enough and had the new Dark Mason dismiss it before it was finished.

All the tests confirming the temple had indeed incarnated the Dark Mason properly, the Legate linked it to the soul storage and set it on automatic production. As one more construction-capable mage was added to his command, Legate Mot moved to the next temple in line... xxxx With incarnation of new Dark Masons possible, Mot's operation in this new world no longer functioned on a shoestring budget.

He finally had enough builders to get a proper base going rather than the barely functional outpost he'd been working out of so far. He could raise defensive buildings that could handle more than small groups of non-magical machines, maybe even raise a proper city-shield against the locals' nuclear missiles or in case some prodigy discovered strategic curses earlier than expected. His first order of business? Find a good, defensible location for his new base.

To that end, he took a page out of the local resistance's book; underground construction. On Maveth, where a hundred generations of buildup and careful applications of geomancy had created a bedrock of ironstone, adamantite and other magical materials, such a suggestion would have been unfeasible. The very stability that protected the nation from getting undermined by enemies would be working against them.

Tunnels could be dug and dungeons slowly expanded but underground buildings would have needed hundreds of times the effort in both magic and labor, the equivalent of digging out the earth with pickaxes and muscle power. But on Earth, even tools of common steel and explosive powder could easily cut into the ground; the locals' underground railway systems and fossil fuel extraction proved as much.

So with twenty times the Dark Masons he previously had available and more incarnating every hour, he brought up a mental map of the city and its surroundings and directed everyone into a new project. To qualify as a Dark Mason, an initiate had to display some basic ability with free-form geomancy and mastery of nine spell-forms; vanishing, repairing, wall of iron, summoning circle, binding cage, barrows, lightning towers, temples and dark portals.

A mere nine spells was often seen as a laughably short list by the mages of other nations where even apprentices knew dozens, but it was deceptive. The spell-forms could be scaled to the available Dark Masons and background magic levels, so Mot reached for a design that would fit his current plans... when his attention was drawn away by new developments.

In his mind's eye the map of the city was less a map and more a pattern of forces; the remains of the old army, the outpost, the local resistance, the few local talents that were growing into actual threats against all odds. They had all been moving towards the finale, a series of moves he had been setting up for some time now... except the situation was developing in directions he had not foreseen.

The local resistance suddenly displayed a significant increase in firepower, in two distinctive patterns of magical weaponry Mot had never seen before. The first greatly enhanced the esoteric projectile weaponry locals seemed to almost exclusively favor, not by two or three times that was the normal for enhancers just starting out but by orders of magnitude. The second used fire in... unusual ways.

Instead of relying on the conceptual nature of that elemental magic to burn, purify, destroy or empower, it somehow burned magical power itself to fuel its physical properties and force them to work on supernatural targets. Two resistance groups of nominally insignificant numbers were advancing much more quickly, with disproportionate results.

The Legate dropped every production plan he'd previously prepared; a slow build-up over a week to guarantee overwhelming numerical superiority when his forces finally moved was slowly but surely becoming untenable now. A mild surge of annoyance at being defied was quickly quashed; he had not survived over a century of war by refusing to adapt. First step; delay the enemy. His new temple was fed more power, its output shifted from incarnating more Dark Masons into summoning a quartet of Blade Fiends.

Costlier than their weaker cousins the Flame Fiends, what they lost in magic and long-range power projection these servitors would more than make up in staying power and the ability to hunt down specific targets. The goal was more than just slowing the enemy's advance; it was also to both make them use up more resources, wear them down while prolonging the violence itself and letting the levels of magic build further.

Even as the first Blade Fiend teleported out, Legate Mot redirected his Dark Masons into building more temples. It would be less efficient in the long term; yes, he could incarnate more souls with the multiple summoning points but he had taken with him only so many souls to be incarnated and building three more of the resource-intensive, volume-filling buildings would take more of his early resource production than a hundred Dark Masons.

Yet he had no alternative but to build them; he needed access to the more powerful servitors temples could produce over barrows and he needed it then and there. On the other hand, this was an opportunity to observe the enemy through his forces' own eyes.

Sadly, his plot to use that oafish sympathizer to do it had mostly fallen through; the moment that idiot had been captured someone among the locals must have suspected what he truly was; a trapped gift Mot could see and hear through meant to be taken back to their base. His unwitting pawn had disappeared under subtle concealment their link of allegiance was not good enough to pierce. But since he had to waste resources to engage with the local talents, why not learn as much about them as he could?

As the day progressed and his first base was being slowly dismantled, he produced a number of skeletal mages and spread them across his forces. Even costlier than the temples in the short-term, especially since he didn't have any strategic objective to set them against. It was standard procedure for Mavethan armies to not deploy costlier units piecemeal but to slowly build up their numbers until a decisive advantage was generated.

For the first time in almost a decade, the Legate gambled by ignoring procedure and offering an obvious threat that also was a juicy target. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. As the second battle progressed, Mot sat back, closed his eyes, and fixed in memory every detail he could get. When the firestorm struck the enemy positions there was a discrepancy, magical defenses suddenly appearing as one in response to the attack.

They were not triggered from storage or contingencies, they were not willed into existence by a sufficiently powerful sorcerer, they got there fully formed between one instant and the next. He had experienced such a situation before; everyone after a certain tier of magic eventually did... and it didn't make sense.

Somewhere out there in a primitive world that had not known magic for a month, a local had formed both the idea and gained enough power to manifest Time Stop, or some similar warping of the fourth dimension. It was simply absurd. If he claimed such a thing before the Council and his Lord he'd be dismissed out of hand for either delusions or incompetence.

Power of that level needed decades of effort, a very clear visualization of what you wanted to happen or it would collapse into a tangle of dimensional distortions that would at least kill you... or both incredible talent and outside help. If a local had the capacity and talent for such an ability - and that alone already beggared belief - they would need support from someone who actually knew what they were doing to unlock and develop their potential.

To do it in two weeks, even with backing from a magical nation seemed impossible to Mot... but the Legate himself was only a middling power in the grand scheme of things. He did not know what those above him were truly capable of. The idea that some rival power to his Lord and Master was interfering with the invasion of this backwater upended Mot's entire mental image of recent events.

The resistance were no longer talented locals he hoped to recruit after this world came under Mavethan control; they were dangerous operatives of an unknown foe with unknown knowledge of Magic and they needed to be destroyed before they could achieve their objective, which was almost certainly Mot's own destruction. The most talented of those locals were not newcomers to magic fumbling for answers in the dark, but knowingly or unknowingly given dangerous tools they would not have gotten for decades if at all.

Fortunately, the battle showed not just those agents' skills but their limitations. What didn't work against them could be discarded but what did was key information. The fire sorceress that had dealt with the army of skeletal archers had an amazing power projection and control for one so young, but in speed and physicality was far less impressive. The obvious solution of swarming her with high speed melee servitors would be problematic because area fire magic was specialized in dealing with exactly that.

But there were other ways. The magical warrior was more problematic, because Mot was certain she had been the one to stop time. Any singular trap could be defeated or avoided with applications of that power and her significant strength and mobility. Furthermore, the extent of magical enhancement she'd shown out of nowhere could not be underestimated and neither could her invisible weapons. Finding something to deal with either was doable, but all three at once was a tall order unless...

The Legate went through the complete list of available resources and smiled. It would need starting from scratch - again - but it was doable. And if not, there were always contingencies. xxxx In a gloomy chamber under the heart of the ruined city of Destiny, half-glimpsed figures started arriving in twos and threes.

About half of the figures were identical; the same stocky builds, thickly muscled limbs, classically handsome but unexceptional faces with pale skin, black hair, and empty eyes that glowed with an eerie inner radiance. Their attire was a simple-looking black plate over chain, leather and linen, articulated to fit their bodies so well it might as well be a second skin, a rod and a hammer strapped to their belts. The more of them that arrived the less dark the room grew yet also more ominous.

The walls were rough hewn granite with no markings of tools or the hand of man, shaped entirely by magic with a uniformity that struck observers as entirely unnatural. There was a strange curvature to the underground chamber, immediately noticeable yet unquantifiable until one tried to measure the chamber with eyes practiced in comparing distances and dimensions... at which point the source of the wrongness was revealed.

The chamber was thirty-three Amot wide with a circumference of sixty-six, with the ceiling resting three Amot above eye-height for all occupants, the floor three Amot below. That is where the other half of the occupants came in who, unlike the Dark Masons, were by no means identical.

They wore t-shirts and jeans, leather and cotton, synthetic skirts or silk dresses, a variety of clothes with few qualities shared by all; they were all in modern styles, they were all dirty, and they were so worn from two weeks of continual abuse they were close to falling apart. The eyes of all those people shared a quality, too; they were all lightless and unseeing, as if belonging to a corpse yet their owners still drew breath.

Sixty-six Dark Masons stood in a circle shoulder to shoulder with a separation of one span between them. Sixty-six largely unresponsive captives, cowed and broken by the horrors of the invasion and having to fight for every moment of every day after their capture as well stood in a second circle before the invaders.

They were both survivors captured during raids and collaborators that went crazy from their situation or tried to back out after joining the invaders for security but being scared off by the lack of sanity. The one quality they shared, other than being both captive and human, was having killed enough monsters or people to have developed powers of some strength. The Dark Masons raised their rods as one and brought them down on the captives backs with dull thuds.

The invaders' magical architects were built strong, stronger than any mundane human. These particular humans however had grown through the conflict in several ways and durability was the most common; none of them fell down, not on the first blow. But there came a second blow and a third and a fourth after that, with none of the humans attempting to run, to defend themselves or activate any power as they were violently murdered.

They just stood until they could stand no more, then silently took the hits of black metal rods exactly one Amah long, steadily, mechanically and very violently being reduced to bloody, pulverized meat and bone. With every blow power was generated, added to that channeled by the Dark Masons into the ritual, beat after beat after beat for the count of one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight.

In every pile of bloody remains the same organ was left intact; a still-beating heart revealing that despite being mangled beyond recognition none of the victims had actually died. The beatings complete, each Dark Mason dipped their rod in the pool of blood. The rods of black iron drank in the blood, growing as the blood pools diminished from their initial length of one Amah to thrice that much even as their color changed to crimson red.

Then the Mavethan architects set the three Amot long rods against the floor of basalt, raised their hammers and struck down. With every blow, basalt cracked, chipped and shattered. With every spark cast off the backs of the rods, their tips oozed crimson, drenching the violently crushed stone in blood. There was no delicacy or control here, only violent abandon and yet the new design was perfectly carved onto the ground.

Legate Mot's will flowed through the entire procedure, guiding it remotely and aligning every violent action, every furious strike towards the appointed end. The designs he required were not part of a premade spell but they were close, altered on the fly to cover his demands of multiple extra features.

Little by little, the carvings on the floor deepened and widened and filled with more blood than the victims could possibly have produced, shaped into a dodecagrammic antiprism into which flowed the victims' mangled flesh... except for the hearts. Those the invaders gathered in the center of the design where the dust cast all over the room from their work also magically pooled of its own accord.

There it was mixed with oil and spirits of the highest quality that had been found in the city into two clay-like masses, inside each thirty-three still beating hearts were placed. The shaping of the clay followed, the lumps quickly taking guises of towering humanoids before being set on fire and left to cook in their own juices.

The blood-filled dodecagrammic antiprism bubbled and frothed as power was pooled into its confines to mingle with its contents and transmute it to the foundation of a work far greater than any of the Dark Masons had ever taken part in in their many lives. None of them were Priests of the Darkness, invested with the authority to command the ceremony. But Legate Mot was and that would suffice.

"Come to us from the Darkness That Eats All Things, you who your enemies call without worth but ever fear your rise!" sixty-six throats spoke with one voice in the language of the locals, putting new words in an old pattern to form a bridge of similarity between dimensions.

"Lord of Darkness, King of Crimson, we of Maveth beseech you; grace us with your attention!" Space warped further and further, taking a weight that was more than gravity, a crushing doom that was more than air pressure as something alien and terrible heard the invitation and looked upon this dark corner of a new Earth.

"Grant us the tools to spread your teachings, defend the faithful, murder your enemies and exalt your name!" Something insubstantial yet tangible was torn from the ruin of flesh filling the pattern cut onto the floor. Without lungs, without mouths, sixty-six souls screamed for the final time as something fundamental to their existence was taken from them and granted to the burning figures in the middle of the ritual.

"We shatter the nine seals and throw wide the seven gates! The pact is kept yet lies broken!" Suddenly, there was a tear, a hole, a gap in the universe above the ritual, one that covered the entirety of the roof. The barest, infinitesimal bit of something vast beyond words stretched out from the howling nothingness, and the entire region shook.

"Send unto us your favored seed of change. Reward us if we triumph. Avenge us if we are slain. Destroy us all if we prove unworthy!" The slice of that alien enormity that had stretched through the portal sank deeper and deeper into the Earth's crust even as it spread out in a shape that echoed the chamber in part. It formed a circle around the ruined city with a width of twenty-one Milin instead of thirty-three Amot, and a circumference of sixty-six Milin.

In the world outside almost none of the survivors noticed anything wrong. The warping was as far subtler as it was vaster in scope and those within were part of it. But the military drones and satellites in the skies were more discerning than men, and computers tended to notice quickly when photos of a region suddenly didn't and couldn't quite fit the previous geometry... or be described by known math and still make sense. That drew attention but the authorities soon had far more immediate issues to deal with.

Back in the chamber the two figures stopped burning and settled into their final bodies. Their weapons glowed with enchantments bestowed by the Legate directly, while their existences were fed with all the power those that had been sacrificed to make them had managed to gather. That power was directed into specific paths, losing some of its magnitude as it was changed but still potent. Their minds were granted knowledge of any subject the Legate had access to and thought they should have.

That aspect of the ritual, for all its potential, was horribly inefficient as sixty-six souls with potential for growth had been destroyed for two monsters that could grow still but lacked the creativity and imagination of their originators. Yet needs must when the Darkness drives. The whole city shook once more as all the Dark Masons pooled their power on the now-empty glyph carved into the chamber's floor.

First the glyph filled with black adamantite summoned through the Void from distant Maveth, then it glowed black ad devoured all sounds within a mile, then more adamantine walls and structural supports grew out. The new structure pushed the weight of the earth overhead aside with contemptuous ease, growing like a new plant then surpassing all greenery from this backwater world as it rose to the height of six Ris, the stadiums of Mavethan blood-sport but also a unit of distance from the invaders' world.

Lightning crackled across the outer surface of the new tower and into the clouds overhead, a thousand times brighter, louder and more world-shaking that bolts from the lesser lightning towers the invaders had raised before. To all those that watched it was a threat, a challenge and an apparent focal point of the invaders' efforts, as it had been meant to. And as if that weren't enough, then it started to rain...