BECMI Chapter 310 – Breaking Faith with an Immortal

I had just Bound an Immortal. The elves below just stared up at me, agog with disbelief.Disbelief, and the threads of something more.

Gaebrel was . By a Shaden elf!

I went on as if not interrupted.

“My voice was razored iron dripping bloody Truth for all to appreciate.

All eyes turned on the High Priestess, who looked equally appalled at finding out what they were building in such secrecy. She turned imploring eyes to the shining figure trapped in the floating Skull, the look on her face that of someone whose faith was shaken to the very core.

The sigh that escaped the trapped figure was broadcast to every Shaden who could see it. “Very well. I will remove the proto-Nucleus.”

No attempt to deny it, that would have been fruitless. It was still a blow to the Shaden who were hoping that Truth could be mistaken!

I swept my eyes over the throngs below.

I could almost feel the resolve crystallizing among the Shaden that they had to get out of the Underdark now, that the horrors of having a child mutated by the Radiance never have to happen to them again!

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Their bitter expressions assured me they were appreciating the irony of that all too much right now. My investigations into the Shaden and those sent as infiltrators had also borne some nasty fruit. Unlike them, I’d inherited a lot of practice with diplomacy and intrigue, and was aware of the instruments of such things.

The Shaden were basically xenophobic and had no friends down here, completely self-reliant, them against the world. An assault on ‘them’, internal struggles, literally did not happen… but nor did friendly relations with those outside.

Part of it was Gaebrel’s tenets, as He didn’t want outside forces messing with His servants and spoiling His plans. But His plans had some massive gaping holes and were built on some colossal lies.

I’d bared them, because He was an idiot. How He dealt with them was His problem, I’d given my people their options.

And with that, my image in the illusion faded away, as did the dark Skull binding the Immortal Gaebrel’s Avatar… which He astutely vanished along with, not wanting to confront His emotionally-charged supporters right now.

If He was smart enough to realize that He was being infiltrated and attacked by an Entropic Immortal who was actually elven in origins and so understood His people better than He did, all well and good.

If not, He deserved it when whole segments of His population fell to the worship of the bastard, and would either be expunged or join the Schatten who had already converted to Him… and who also deserved to be expunged.

Briggs had distinct opinions about Tzentotl and His servants, and most of them ended as pancakes under a large Hammer. One of his ambitions was to return home and to see the suborned Tribes of the Jaguars and the Snakes either put down permanently or converted away from Tzentotl. But he also blamed Hiawatha, the father of the tribes, for doing next to nothing to help his people in regards to the fallen tribes, and had a terribly low opinion of the Immortal his people revered so much the entire nation was named after Him.

The slaughter he had unleashed upon the fallen tribes when he was merely eighteen had contained their numbers and aggression for many decades, allowing the neighboring tribes to grow strong enough to hold them back. But the Jaguar and Snakes were civilized tribes, with cities and agriculture, and the other tribes were still nomadic. Their ability to grow and sustain their population was likewise higher, and thus they could specialize their people as soldiers, whereas the other tribes were more egalitarian.

Well, he and Sama going home and fixing the problems there was part of their long-term plans.

I’d just completely upended Shaden elf society and might just have collapsed Gaebrel’s church. Pity Him.

“You!”

Blocks of stone were carving themselves out of the ground steadily, at the rate of one per minute, then floating over to join the lines and squares of similar blocks already out and floating above the ground.

It was my third Pyramid arising, this one with a Domain designed to cover the hyn Shirelands of Loha. The crazy cold, driving wind, and falling snow didn’t bother me at all, and I was ritually and rhythmically bring up new blocks out of a small hill that wasn’t using all that stone, anyway.

I glanced over to see Senior Master Cerebral Engineer Gabriel Encheliff glaring at me. His hair was its normal uncontrolled pinkish friz now, standing on edge, his eyes a bit on the red side, and his skin tinged the green of his native people.

“Senior Engineer,” I greeted him evenly, continuing to work, eyeing his Federation-standard jumpsuit with an engineer’s workvest and apron, just like always. “Get your idiotic copy of the fusion core moved?”

His mouth worked for a moment at just how casually I was treating him. He was, after all, a mighty Immortal, venerated by my whole tribe for thousands of years, far away and above us all in power and viewpoint. He simply wasn’t used to be talked to this way. “Do I know you?” he finally asked, his green eyes narrowed.

“No, but I know you, so that balances things out.” He blinked in consternation. “You DID get your poor and explosive excuse for a science project out of the Sternvult?” I repeated, a bit more firmly this time.

“I...yes, I removed it,” he finally admitted sullenly, his attention shifting to the great blocks being carved by magic to a level of frankly incredible detail, so much so that he actually did a double-take when he realized just how precisely and carefully I was making the Runework. “It, they…” Distracted, it took him a minute to center his thoughts as a Rune-carved block twenty feet square floated off to join its fellows in slow, quiet precision, extending a long line of floating blocks in the air, waiting to complete so they could fuse to the other six lines of blocks already lined up.

“Then why are you bothering me when you’ve got mad zealots of the Bat-Serpent Tzentotl to chase down and see to the elimination of? Surely you don’t mind keeping the priests busy hunting true internal enemies of my people.”

He was trying to work himself into a fit of anger at me, but I was treating him so coolly, he was naturally wary… especially after I managed to Bind him like I had. “Do you know what you have cost me, Edgina daughter of Keffe?” he challenged me.

“Your lies, Master Engineer?” I replied with equal cutting calm. “Your laziness? Your haughty arrogance? Your sense of entitled superiority?” I worked at up another hovering Block there, while He tried to analyze what I was doing. Rune circuitry was a bit out of His comfort zone, however. “I think you can agree that from an insider’s view, those are wonderful things to be removed.”