Chương 82: Chapter 77: Getting Situated

++Irucci was the closest thing to a home I have ever known. Vast and old, the birthplace of mankind, I believe. The birthplace of me. It is the womb of sapience. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Agrian didn't want to be the one who was marching up to the Demigod Nu'chishta and explaining himself. He didn't want to, but he was.

Because if there was any one lesson he'd acquired in leaving the Vornholt estate that remained eternally true, it was that you didn't always get what you wanted. Particularly when you were a magician being called on by a Demigod. Besides, it wasn't like he could actually suggest speaking to Isabel instead. That would just be… bloody pathetic. So Agrian trudged over to answer the summons, feeling more sorry for himself with each step he took.

Quite by luck, the army had stopped shortly before they reached it, so there was already a tent set up for Nu'chishta to reside in. More of a pavilion, really; Agrian suspected a dozen men could have shared it without issue. He understood why the thing was so damned big as soon as he stepped in and found himself face to face with its occupant. Or, more precisely, face to hip. Nu'chishta was nine feet if he was an inch, and looked twice as broad proportionally than any human Agrian had ever seen.

A single forearm was about the width of Agrian's waist.

"You are the Baron's son?" the Demigod's voice rumbled out so deeply and powerfully that Agrian expected to see magma following it. He literally forgot how to talk for a few moments, mouth gaping and popping shut a few times in rapid succession while he re-learned how to formulate words.

"I am, your Divinity," he managed at last, not quite staring at the Demigod's eyes. Staring anywhere else was hardly better. He was naked from the waist up and his skin was bright blue, like a hypothermic man's lips. Agrian thought he could see the veins pulsing where they pressed up from below, and the very air around the Demigod seemed somehow thicker than was normal.

"Good," Nu'chishta rumbled again.

"I have grown tired of dealing with…magicians." Agrian didn't know what to say, so he said nothing. The Demigod spared him from thinking about that by giving an order.

"Sit." Agrian looked around, saw no chairs and dropped down to his backside all within the span of a second. Nu'chishta chuckled. The sound was like rolling thunder.

"You were with Aryqatan during her investigation of the ruins," the Demigod continued as he began to pace. Agrian could feel his footsteps through the sand, rumbling like an elephant's.

"Tell me about it."

"Uh…what…do you want to know, your Divinity?" Agrian's mouth was almost too dry to talk. Aryqatan hadn't prepared him an iota for this conversation, not with this creature. Not with anything like him.

"Everything." Nu'chishta reminded Agrian very much of his father. The cunt. Wow, where did that come from? Agrian did the gentlemanly thing and compressed his bitterness into a tight, molten ball before swallowing it and forgetting all about the whole affair. Then he spoke. Truth be told, his side of things didn't actually require much time to tell. That tended to happen when you spent half a combat mission unconscious and the other half mindlessly fleeing in some sort of fugue state.

"The undead," Nu'chishta growled abruptly.

"What did they do?"

"... Attack us?"

"No, idiot, what did they do beyond that." Even just hearing him raise his voice for a moment of brief anger left Agrian's ears aching, like the feeling of altitude changing uncomfortably fast. He'd certainly become familiar with that fucking sensation of late.

"I don't know. One of them said something, maybe? It's hard to remember. It was only the largest one, Sakhent, that really spoke completely." Agrian wasn't sure if he was remembering that, or piecing it together from what Isabel had told him. His mind seemed to slip around that time like it was slick to the touch. One day all the blows to his head might add up. Maybe I'll end up like father. He swallowed that bit down, too. Was his stomach getting full?

"Useless, then, aren't you?" the Demigod growled, still pacing. Agrian saw his face shift as he did, then Nu'chishta paused.

"... No, forgive me," in an instant he was all smiles again, a hand coming down on Agrian's shoulder. He winced, felt dread, his father knocked him off his feet sometimes and this was one of the God's children, how much worse— …Nothing, a bit of breath knocked from him, but no more than if a strong human had patted him carelessly. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"... You have done well, my child," Nu'chishta told him.

"You have served the Gods and preserved one of their children, bringing Aryqatan back to the army safely despite her failure on the way back." Her failure? The Demigod was breezing past his remark faster than Agrian could really question it, already turning to other matters.

"Above all, you were right to interrupt that ritual. To try, at least." The Demigod moved back from him, and was once again pacing like his brain needed the legs it controlled to be moving for any thought to occur.

"... Sakhent," he croaked.

"A horror like few the world has ever seen before. What do you know of him?"

"Not much," Agrian admitted. History had interested him little more than the magical theory of what he did, and if he found the great battles of Garamon's past fascinating enough to read about, that did not extend to some long-dead magical savage. The Demigod did not appear surprised.

"He was a loathsome creature, little more than a golem made from the corpses of dead necromancers and reanimated using fell sorceries no longer known to mankind. For the brief period he existed, he wrought havoc upon the fledgeling Garamon Empire. Several Demigods died in the efforts to subdue him." Agrian felt the air leave him. For one Demigod to die was almost unheard of, that hadn't happened in centuries, for multiple to fall against the same opponent?

"Yes," Nu'chishta sighed as if he had read his mind.

"Not since the reign of Lord Dread did so many of my brothers and sisters perish." That was another jolt of fear through Agrian.

"Lord Dread," he echoed.

"That's…there's no chance of him coming back, right?" Even Agrian knew that one. Children knew that one. Lord Dread was the shadow behind every citizen of Garamon, the first great threat to its Gods. He was gone now by thousands of years, but then so was Sakhent. Until yesterday.

"No," the Demigod snapped abruptly, sending another wave of pain through Agrian's ears.

"... No," he repeated, more softly.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. We have perhaps the second most powerful necromancer to ever live returned to life and threatening us, that's more than enough of a problem." He tried for a smile that Agrian guessed was meant to be reassuring. It was not reassuring, it was queasy. Fortunately the Demigod didn't leave things there.

"You did well," he reiterated.

"Though you didn't stop the ritual you acted exactly as you should have, and I imagine you would have performed far better with more of the resources that should have been dispatched to accompany you for this mission. I want you and your group to take the rest of the day off. Rest, recuperate, practice magic to ensure you don't lag behind your peers back at Winzorth —generally get yourself mentally prepared." Agrian had been liking the sound of that, right up until the final sentence.

"... Mentally prepared for what, your Divinity?" Nu'chishta grinned. His wide, split mouth was a gaping cave littered with stalactites, each one dagger-sharp and needle-straight.

"For a siege, my child. For a siege."

Agrian was sent out of the tent in something of a stupor, feeling that familiar sensation of his brain slowing down to a crawl as it was given too much to process too fast. The last words kept rebounding around inside his skull like a ricocheting bullet. A siege. He'd never been in a siege. Never been in a battle, either. And now he was attached to an army, so he should've been ready to engage in both, right? Except it didn't feel like he'd been given any proper warning.

Maybe, Agrian mused, he should have thought about the potential consequences of following his sister into the largest military campaign for several years before he signed up for a three-year tour. Maybe he should have actually asked around for some of the near-graduates in the Winzorth Institute to find out what it was actually like, having spells and bullets flung at you, before he volunteered to experience it. Right. And he'd have just left Isabel to experience all that herself.

As much as Agrian always enjoyed a good whinge, it wasn't like he'd had any real choice here. Another stab of irritation racked him at the thought of his little sister. Over the next few days, Agrian was allowed to rest and get situated into the army. It happened a lot more seamlessly than he might have expected. His first, pleasant surprise was that there were a few Winzorth graduates among the battlemages he was sent towards.

Laiel Fiq was the leader of a casting formation, and the first person everyone sent Agrian to when he began asking around for directions. Apparently the Demigod in charge of this army tended to prefer letting its magicians simply operate on their own. Magic was unusual and unintuitive enough for people who didn't practice it that it was generally a better idea to just leave the magicians to structure their own formations. So went the explanation Agrian received, at least.

"Vornholt," Fiq murmured as he met the man.

"Vornholt… Ah, I remember you. You're that boy prodigy who wrote a book about himself right?" Agrian's face burned like he'd just spent an hour pressing it against Irucci's sun-hot sand.

"My old tutor wrote the book, sir," he mumbled. The battlemage grinned.

"I might've guessed that actually, if you wrote the damn thing yourself you probably wouldn't have played second-fiddle to your sister so much. Where is she, by the way? Back at Garamon?"

"No, sir, she's here." The man's eyes narrowed at that.

"Well I haven't heard a thing about her, and I'm the rookie-wrangler. Which means someone is fucking up. Probably her. The mission of the day is go and find her so she can get integrated too, I'll not have some bloody child stumbling around getting in everyone's way when the spellwork starts flying!" Agrian would've picked a more glamorous mission for himself, but at least nobody was trying to kill him in this one. Unless Isabel was in an especially bad mood.

He found his sister wandering the edges of the camp, staring out at the horizon.

"Something on your mind?" he asked her. Isabel didn't answer at first, just kept staring.

"... Isabel?"

"This landscape has not changed in thousands of years," she said idly.

"Some details have shifted. Particulars about the position of sand dunes and such, but the overall shape has not. And yet over time, even this will reshape itself. Mountains rise and fall, rivers dry out or change course. The world is always, inexorably shifting. On a timeframe no human can observe. On a timeframe humanity as a whole has not even existed for." He didn't know what to say to that at first, just followed Isabel's eyes and stared out as she did.

"... Makes me feel…small," Agrian managed. He saw his sister smile then.

"Perhaps we are. For now. One day, it will all change as I command it." Once again, Agrian had no clue how to respond, and his sister seemed to blink herself out of whatever reverie had overcome her.

"You are here for something?" she asked him, breezing past the odd exchange without even a pause. Agrian himself was so jarred that he actually forgot what he'd been sent to do for a moment.

"Uh…yes, our new commanding officer wants you." Isabel sighed.

"One day I will control the mountains. For now I will work for the freedom to go where I please on my own time." She stormed off with the same petulance she did most things with, and Agrian grinned as he followed.