BECMI Chapter 109 – Immortal Words and Wills

“Mortals testing their boundaries and the limits of their power in the wrong directions. They are all dead now, overreaching themselves as they usually do,” the Immortal of Energy sniffed, waving his hand dismissively, unconcerned with their fates.

“Oh, that whole business with the Pit of Souls didn’t come from you?” Grimr asked, complete and utter disbelief in his voice. Gulguz’s utter lack of restraint on who he would deal with to create entertaining events and get what he wanted was well-known.

“Enough Immortal power to create a mortal relic and echo through Time with a Prophecy to destroy it?” Sophilisa smiled, but there was only teeth to her expression this time. “The travelers from the future coming through the wormhole was a nicely convenient touch to end the thing, was it not?”

Gulguz scowled at the Eternal of Time, who had so neatly and easily punctured a hole in the creation of a powerful Artifact which would have completely changed the balance of power in this area of the mortal world. “Bringing in heroes from the future prevented the heroes of this period from growing in power to be able to face the threat of the Soul Eaters,” he sniffed haughtily. “This era is weak on Immortal Candidates to begin with, and your little scheme prevented the rise of who knows how many more? The weak were sacrificed, as is their fate, to provide impetus and desire to strive among the strong. The destruction of their souls was used to fuel the creation of a true Artifact, one of the highest causes for which mortals can strive, so even their small lives were of value in the end!” he smiled triumphantly.

“You employed Soul Eaters for that Artifact,” Clangyr stated coldly, suppressed rage in his eyes. “That is directly working with Entropy! The souls they took were not to power your Artifact!” he snarled, almost taking a step forward before Grimr raised his hand to stop him, while Gulguz just sneered at the display.

“They were motivation, and they seem to have done their job,” the Hierarch Grimr acknowledged with fatalistic neutrality, which only made Clangyr snarl silently, schemes turning behind his dark eyes as he glared at Gulguz. “Thought concedes on the matter, especially since all the Soul Eaters involved seem to have perished, along with the Artifact and mortals working to create it. Resistance to this change Energy tried to create was greater than the source given. It seems Energy’s own champions in this matter were not sufficient to accomplish the task, especially given its vulnerability being exploited so easily by Time.

“Lack of motivation, perhaps?” Grimr asked Gulguz, his voice cold and cutting.

The flaming Eternal, his twitchy movements becoming more spastic as he remained in one place, scowled at the older power of Thought, an ancient Hierarch who just might never have been a mortal, and head of a pantheon of his own sponsored Immortal candidates, who even crossed Spheres with their loyalties, the hallmark of a true Pantheon. The Aysener were the primary backers of the many clans of the Ertobelle, who had little to nothing to fear from the Khirifi who followed Gulguz, bereft of naval assets and their lands a dangerous trek into the north… through northlands that had just been wiped clean of the Khirifi.

“Well, I saw nothing of Energy here of scale enough to be deemed unfitting,” Gulguz replied, ignoring the ripostes of the others as to his deeds. He had not acted here, and he was injecting Energy into a staid and cold system, a mortal empire that was decadent and old and ready to be wiped away by a force with the energy and drive that it currently lacked. That was the true purpose of the Khirifi; it was just that this northern area of the Empire was proving equally energetic and resistant to their advance. The Khirifi could not simply turn south and leave such a force in the north behind them… especially since they had already attacked Elb and Darkmoor and stirred up the local mortals with their uncompromising conquest.

Well, little miscalculations happened. His main worry came from just how far this mortal elfin was going to take her revenge, which was why he’d allowed the irritated Thanatos to send his minions over to kill her, under the guise of having them Summoned by ready Priests.

But the Screaming Demons had been utterly obliterated. Gulguz had no idea what Immortal had acted so swiftly and decisively against him. Quarizon? Paras? Ssa? His thoughts spun as he tried to work out which Hierarch had acted so suddenly and tracelessly. It was the only possible explanation: a rebuke to him, and/or possibly to Thanatos himself. The Hierarch of Entropy had now lost several of his agents permanently, and was more than happy to let Gulguz know the depths of his ire.

A Hierarch of Entropy being unhappy with you was never a good thing, but Gulguz just shrugged it off. The Demons were a minor loss, as there were always demented souls available to take their place. Entropy never seemed to run out of the sorts of power-mad idiots who thought becoming a Demon was a great and final end state of existence. He’d worked with Thanatos before to their mutual benefit, the Entropic Immortal having a great love of tearing down empires, and Gulguz happy to wipe away some staid nation enduring past its time and eager to see what replaced it.

Iberon’s time was coming. Entropy had its hooks of decay deep into the nation, and it would only take a strong push or two to make it collapse. His Khirifi were supposed to be that push, taking advantage of that corruption to prod the decadent and self-centered infighting fools of the empire into making disastrous choices that would shatter their realm and disperse its power back out into the world, presaging the rise of other nations and forces.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

The other Immortals here realized it, too, and so rarely spoke against it. Iberon was in a state of decay and decline, they all knew it, and it was time for the mortal empire to fall. Grimr’s pet chaotic and undisciplined clans of raiders and berserkers didn’t have the unity and drive to do the job, even if they had the martial resolve. Sophilisa’s favored elves were increasingly withdrawn and uninvolved, abandoning the humans to their fate instead of inspiring them to reach beyond themselves and become something greater.

Clangyr’s patchwork coalition of Immortals sponsoring the Empire had failed to fight Thanatos’ machinations effectively, even with their joint church and religion, and so their little project of an ‘eternal empire’ able to withstand the weight of its own history had once again followed the path of all other such lofty ambitions and was headed for the dustbin of history, good riddance to it.

Who had just killed three demons like swatting ants, however?

And this elfin who had just destroyed over a decade worth of work by his servants… had she truly done it without Immortal help? Mortals could rise to be powerful, but this level of focused and strategic damage was truly unusual… and he didn’t have any mortal agents of his own here he could use to check what she was doing.

She was from the future, so clearly an agent of Sophilisa’s, even if the Eternal of Time was staying completely hands-off otherwise, too proud and sure of herself to even bother subverting the foolish rules of non-interference. An open move, and a good one, checking the whole of the Khirifi advance with just one aspirant to Immortality.

She was thwarting the downfall of the Empire of Iberon! If not done quickly, the decadence that the Empire was wallowing in was going to lead them straight into the arms of Entropy, which… meant he would be responsible for helping Entropy corrupt and grow their power, instead of using them to create something newer and bolder!

That… was going to be very annoying, and might even put him off working with Entropy in the future.

Still, they were a long way from being at that point yet, but a crawling feeling up his spine would not leave him, even as he just ignored the bickering and barbs of the other foolish Immortals who couldn’t see the obvious truth in front of them.

The prayers and exhortations of his faithful, even if they didn’t give him much, if any, personal power, were still an excellent way to track their progress and growth, and thus their usefulness to him as tools to get things accomplished.

The number of prayers coming to him had both been falling and growing increasingly desperate. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Khirifi had been cut off in mid-prayer, obviously slain by powerful magic. Not that he didn’t admire the use of powerful magic. He did, he just found it annoying when it was directed to thwart HIM, instead of help him!

If this was one of Sophilisa’s agents, he would just have to recruit someone opposed to her plans to take this elfin off the board.

The temporal wormhole itself… he could do nothing about. Some very powerful Hierarchs of Thought and Energy had been involved in its creation, to the great annoyance of Time, and any messing with it was going to stir up a whole lot of trouble he was pretty sure he didn’t want to deal with. Anapexsis of Thought could get SO vengeful if you messed up one of his pet Projects like that, and he was pretty sure that Quarzion himself wasn’t the most powerful Hierarch of his own Sphere involved in the creation of the timehole.

Gulguz was also pretty sure that, their vocal complaints about managing to create a manageable and lasting travel conduit through time aside, that with all the paradox problems it could create, the Immortals of Time were actually pretty interested in what was going to happen with that Project and wanted to observe its results across Continuity.

Maybe… he should have concentrated on raising up a few more Aspirants to Immortality, mages he could have set against this interloping elf!

Oh, but that would have changed so much of what he would have had the Khirifi DO, he would certainly have tipped his hand oh so much sooner. The reactions when his so-called Immortal peers realized that he, an Immortal of Energy of all things, was behind this tribe of hillmen and martial zealots pursuing conquest, and not some Time-weeping Immortal’s dynasty-pursuing religious fools or some Matter-dependent sword-swinger fueling dreams of conquest and empire-building, had been pretty priceless.

But if Iberon didn’t burn, this was a failed Project, and it would fail to Entropy, of all things.

Because of him. Even if there was no way they could possibly trace the help he had given Thanatos in infiltrating the Empire of Iberon to soften it up for him.

He was really going to have to make sure the Empire burned.

He considered the elfin who was taking action against him. If he could turn her efforts against Iberon, well, wouldn’t that just start the ball rolling just as kindly? And fully irritate Sophilisa, as instead of protecting a dynasty, her tool brought down?

That would be incredibly satisfying, indeed!

Contacting her would likely be a delicate process, sussing her out and finding out what motivated her. If she truly was so shallow as having something like Soul Eaters set her off, then motivating her was going to be simplicity itself. Expose some of the things Thanatos was doing by sprinkling breadcrumbs around her, and wait for her overreaction to said machinations to do the work for him.

Yes, yes, that sounded like the proper way to go, even as he figured out a way to shut her down before she did too much more damage to his chosen instruments. Losing the Khirifi would not truly hurt his power, but it would impact what he could do on the mortal plane, and he had invested a lot of time in them.

All in all, a fun, energetic time! And wasn’t that what it was all about, in the end?