BECMI Chapter 145 – A Moment to Reflect

I watched the High Jarl stride up to where Belle was forming the that would take everyone out of here. As we were already on the surface, it was decided to take our day of rest a day earlier than usual, and we’d be off to the Weirwood Court to clean up and relax.

There was little plunder, because the fleeing Beast-folk were poor and simply didn’t have much. Buck had found a good way to prepare Earth Drake, however, but the meat had to be marinated for a solid week to tenderize it for our palates. Everyone was looking forward to it, however, and willing to help with the preparation.

Not to mention, the sale of the steaks we didn’t eat personally was going to make us a lot of money, as delicious and rare dragon meat justified high prices. Master Lalo was looking forward to adding it to his Inn’s ever-renewing larders as a regular and very pricey meal after it was properly treated and prepped.

“High Jarl,” I greeted the tall and brooding Northman coolly as he stopped a good ten paces away. The would be up in moments, and the Company was lining up to exit through it quickly.

It was the same magic which had brought Darkmoor’s Royal Marines into his city, and allowed them to exit with their plunder. The irony that we had now also saved the city, even if most of the population could likely have fled to the castle and survived the attack there, was not lost on them as Skrotti Halfhand watched the magic taking shape.

No spellcaster was with him, especially a wizard, feared as they were in the North.

“Lady Edge,” he replied warily, and even offered a hesitant bow, both unwilling and yet not daring not to do so.

Hmm, I must have had a reputation or something.

The flared up, and the archers vacated promptly, the dwarves and spearmen facing out and stepping backwards with practiced coordination as those inside their circle of shields quickly and smoothly stepped into the and vanished.

Skrotti watched them go with clear hunger for the power such ability to travel could give him to raid and plunder, bypassing all the dangers and time of sea travel!

“Have you something to say, High Jarl?” I asked him, unafraid of the threat he posed, and he knew it. He wasn’t going to start any trouble with me if he could help it at all. He’d watched me hovering over the battlefield, not lifting a finger to help the rest of my Company with the slaughter, only doling out laughing skulls of white-trailing Healing energy to those who were injured.

“I know you did not come to aid us, but your help was timely all the same.” He watched my Company get whisked away with speed and surety, the spearmen out-pacing the dwarves as the circle closed, backing through the until only the dwarves were left. They stepped back in lots of four, vanishing with precise coordination, until only Prince Ukker was left.

The dwarven leader gave me a salute, stepped back, and vanished. One breath later, the vanished on the churned-up snows, oddly white and pure now as vivus roved the battlefield, coating everything in fog as corpses Burned down to white dust. Shed blood and organs were the first things to vanish in the knee-high mists.

I could back to Weirwood Court without a problem, so I was being polite by not leaving with them.

“Your gratitude is unneeded, but accepted as the honest truth that it is. Do not think you owe us a debt for this. King Antius already stated that the ledger is swept clean, but we both know grudges are hard to eat. He still wonders how long it will be before your idiots come, thinking to gain vengeance and start the cycle anew, and damn all of their kin for it.”

The Jarl was a grim, hard man, but I could see he understood as he looked around the oddly clean battlefield, already bereft of intact corpses, only a mound of the stacked crude armor and weapons of the dead Beastials that I’d casually heaped up with remaining of them. I would wipe all of his people just as readily as I’d killed these fleeing cannibals, who’d eaten their children, elderly, and weak to support themselves as they’d fled the death my Free Company and I brought with us.

If they wanted to be a plague and weight upon their neighbors, they’d be purged as the disease they were.

“How many of them have you killed, Lady Edge?” he finally worked up the courage to ask.

“Over two hundred and fifty thousand,” I responded immediately, and his face changed again.

That was over half the population of every Ertobolle clan in the North put together!

“That is about one-quarter of their total numbers,” I went on pleasantly, and he stared at me in shock. “We are getting better and faster about it, however.”

Levels and Cleave Chains did wonders for kill rates without having to expend Valences, after all. However, it did not include their monstrous pets, nor any undead they had Animated to serve them!

I regarded him for a moment as he struggled with what to say, and then flicked my hand, pulling something out of my loose sleeve and sending it wafting towards him. He grabbed at it instinctively, holding it up before his eyes.

It was a very crude, doll-like totem, made of hide and twigs and sinew. It was roughly in the shape of a female, the branch carved to emphasize the traits, but one side of the wood was stained black, likely with blood on the bark, and the other left open and the inner wood white.

He looked at it, then back up at me. “This… is a totem of Nifl?” he stated hesitantly, wondering why I bore such a thing and hoping it did not portend something very bad. I was aware I could probably make a very easy case for being a fine representation of the Immortal who represented the Underworld and Death opposite Grimr in their little pantheon.

Very pointedly, the only other known members of the pantheon at this point were Sonr Naljar, the irksome trickster god, and dour Vindler, the guardian of the Rainbow Bridge and the door to Vairholl, Grimr’s realm. Donner, Syr, and Syrja, known in my times, had not ascended to Immortality as yet.

“That was one of several such found in a shrine to the Patron of the Beast-folk,” I informed him coldly. “It seems She has appeared several times to Her creations, directing them to hunt and pillage and fall upon the clans of the Ertobolle. Naturally, Her word is holy writ among them.”

The Jarl just stared. “The Beast-folk… are servants of Nifl? Creations of Nifl?” he asked in disbelief and shock.

I just nodded to him. “I am not certain of it, but all the evidence we’ve found points that way. No other Immortal seems to be represented in the shrines we’ve found.

“Thus, know you this, and spread it as you like: the Beast-folk are the servants and likely the very creation of Nifl, a blot upon Creation and the Land, and can be absolutely expunged without doubt or guilt as servants and agents of Chaos and Death itself.

“Fare your winter well, High Jarl.”

Roses bloomed crimson and black from the ground, reaching up to swirl about the floating elfin maga. A moment later, they withdrew and were gone… well, almost gone.

He stared at the bristling rosebush, waist-high, that she’d left behind, the roses upon it either black as night or crimson as blood, and the inch-long ebony thorns tipped in silver. The mists about the place seemed to start converging slowly on the bush, and it bobbed and weaved as if alive in a non-existent wind.

He didn’t know the purpose or reason behind the bush, but he also knew that pretty much nobody was going to have the courage to cut it down. He was fairly sure just trying would be taking your life into your hands…

Countless caverns and cubbyholes hewed from the stone, out of which poured a multi-colored horde of Beastials in their thousands, bounding and shrieking down towards us, certain their numbers could win the day…

Bat-riders swooping out of the gloom, somehow having discovered how to make explosives out of bat guano… but not how to react when threw their own hurled bombs dropped from the sky back up at them, and sent them and their screaming bats down in exploding flames, while Duum scythed through his lesser cousins like a dragon among crows. Cirru lit up the undersky beside him like living lightning where there were no clouds, only the thunderclaps and flaring of her presence.

Tentacled things made from Beast-folk rising from the shore in obedience to buried eldritch horrors beneath the waves, reinforcing the swarm we were killing with stronger, faster, and more similar things reinforced with meat and scales and jaws, and guided by telepathic intelligences giving them some sense of discipline and strategy, instead of merely low cunning.

We were beaten back through the caverns, but that was fine. We weren’t here to take ground, we were there to kill them all, and every step back was a step further away from the water, and the reinforcement of their masters when it came to truly unleash the magic…

Mushroom jungles with Beastials trying to play stalking games through the fungi and deadly native life. Poison clouds and desiccating spells tore swaths through them, followed by flames bringing light and poison smoke where there was none before. As the Beastials broke and fled, glowing Arrows and strobing lasers flashed through the darkness and brought them down.

A lake of fire, Beastials in groaning slavery and servitude to creatures of flame and darkness, salamanders and efreet forcing them to mine as they made weapons of war. The slaves watched and learned and stole from them, preparing for their rebellion…

Then we arrived, saw that this was Nifl’s way of teaching them smithcraft, and we brought a chill colder to winter to the burning undercaverns, slaughtering everything here. It turned out that changing a laser’s damage from Fire to Cold with was very effective here...

A necropolis, a city of the devoted dead, built upon some very old ruins, indeed. The remnants of was visible on a few of the decaying buildings wrought of warped and mottled metal, while many of the undead wore attire thousands of years old in styles unused today.

The priest-liches who ruled over the city and its undead and animated war-machines from the future were all devoted to Nifl, commanding Beastials in more mining of gold and iron and other resources to expand and make war in Her name, but mostly to hold gladiatorial games where they massacred one another and contributed corpses to be reanimated to Her service.

There were hundreds of thousands of such corpses ready and waiting to march out on the lands of the living.

The Priests of the company destroyed thousands of the things all by themselves with upraised holy symbols disgorging limitless divine Light, while Belle and I hunted the greater undead through the remnants of an old buried military base from millennia ago. The unleashed undead hordes fell upon their living descendants and also massacred them, reanimating them to join them in battle…

Temples rose, fell and deadly, across an underground realm the size of the Sternvult or greater, complete with water, multiple terrains, hills and underground mountains, shroom forests, a firefall, stalactites occupied by spider-lineage Beastials, and tens of thousands of the most elite and strongest of the mutant tribes.

thrummed in my hand with the presence of Immortal power. Whoever and whatever was leading the Beastials from that central temple glowing with ghastly lights in the distance held some form of Immortal power, either as an Avatar or bearing an Artifact for power, possibly both.

But this cavern was our final goal. It was seething with Beastial refugees, all the caverns out of it collapsed and sealed shut by someone in the mirror.

We were coming for them. Their leader screamed that their goddess was with them, and She likely was, meaning they were ready to fight to the death.

That was fine, we were ready to kill them.