BECMI Chapter 349 – With a Moan, and a Groan, and a Tower’s Fall...

The Groaning Demon eating True Death obviously hadn’t done the job of cracking the structural reinforcement here, the Writhing Well was probably responsible. The Well itself going up, however…Sama would fight until she grew bored. She’d fill that place with Burning hordelings as fast or faster than they could arrive to cut her down, and they’d start coming out into a vivic Hell regardless.

Then she’d be looking at taking an effectively +XI Sword, cutting that damn Well apart with a Null Strike, and instead of letting the power flow back to Thanatos, letting it go boom.

Right under the castle above.

I glanced south, at the other efforts underway.

He’d been waiting all his life for the chance to do this.

He was Miklan McMikal, a third son of a minor family in service to one of the outer vassal families of the MacKlannister Clan who dominated all the Caer clans who had come to this new world to get away from the church and priests who hounded them for their binding of evil spirits and necromancy.

He’d seen the bones of his forefathers, Animated as skeletal things, paraded around like puppets and marionettes, as if their creator and master was some fine and powerful noble fellow, instead of the utter uncaring bastard and power-hungry weasel that he was.

The McMikals burned all their dead, crushed their bones to powder, and scattered them about the wild places and into the rivers and streams, leaving none concentrated in one area for the bone mages to gain a focus on and bind the spirit of their brothers, husbands, fathers, uncles, or sons. The cemeteries couldn’t be Blessed to allow the dead to sleep and deny the corpse-takers their prizes, the old priests chased away into the hills where only the brave and foolish dared to visit them.

When he’d been found to lack the Gift of magic, he’d been marked as just another disposable sword and usable body by the bone mages, doomed to serve the clan alive and dead as they saw fit. Seeing a chance to leave that fate, he had leapt at taking service under the elfin who had returned his uncle’s bones, probably unaware of the fate that might have awaited them were his body intact.

The local laird, who’d died of alcohol poisoning not so long ago, had eagerly pried open that casket, stared at the crushed and burned collection of bones, and just scowled at being denied a potential toy. he’d said. , he’d mumbled.

As if the McMikals were cannibals, grinding up their dead to deny them to the bone-takers.

Taking service with that elfin had changed his life, his worldview, his ambitions, and his fate.

He was Forsaken. He didn’t just not have the Gift, he was the world’s answer to those who did!

He’d studied under the greatest master of the sword in the whole world. Fifty years he’d lived since then, in the past and the present. Enough to take a wizardess to wife, one who could respect a man who her magic couldn’t touch; to become a father, and then a grandfather, and even a great-grandfather with the roll of years; to learn things that would make the simple hillfolk of his family shudder and give them nightmares for years, and he walked these hills now as one of the mightiest and most dangerous swordsmen to ever live.

He was at the Mortal Apex, and as a Melee Fighter, not the base Warrior so many others followed on this Path. The things he’d learned, of Feats and Techniques and Ki and even Soul Magic, placed him head and shoulders above so, so many others who’d not had the benefit of training under Sama Rantha and Commander Briggs.

He carried around more magic inside him than most Archmages, giving his lovely lady a reserve of spells and staying power that would only shock any wizard who had no idea what it meant to be Bonded to a Forsaken.

Aye, the blighters only knew how to fear those who didn’t bow to magic!

He was the First Forsaken, the first one found native-born to this world, other than Sama and Briggs themselves. He had brought more of his kin to them, even those not Forsaken, and with them had eventually come men and women of Verdain, who also had the blood of the Forsaken, and eventually even children of the Frier and the Delphans, whose distant world of great magic had also always had those who could learn no magic.

They were Forsaken, and they were no mage’s playthings now!

The barrack-tombs of Caergard burned and Burned. Corpses long dead, girt in plate and mail and with their claymores in hand, fell again, blazing , this time to forever return to the Land. He could hear the sighs of relief, the release of the hatred of life, as their spirits were set at ease, never to be bound again.

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He heard it over and over again as he cut down his forefathers again, and again, and again.

He wasn’t the only one crying as they released their long-dead kin. The Verdain Forsaken had already had their release, the necromancers who preyed on them the first to fall in their hidden towers and dark dungeons, their collections of undead Burned to the last and Fed to the Land with their blighted souls.

From one end of the Principality of Caergard to the other, undead and necromancers Burned and died.

It was not against the law to raise the undead in Zanzyr. Nor were there any laws about destroying them, as they were already dead and could not be murdered. Noises were made about them being the property of the mages who raised them, but given their ability to break free of control, and the blame for their actions then falling on the mages, those arguments had been shot down by wizards leery of complications.

It was still illegal to murder a wizard for Animating your kin, but oddly enough, there were few witnesses to such things happening, as such witnesses were either part of the deed or joined their master in Feeding the Land aggressively, leaving no bodies behind to be questioned.

The Caer common folk had no compunctions about the undead being destroyed, nor punishing those who defended that unclean practice.

clove through an old, fine claymore of polished steel, adamantine having all the advantage as he hewed through it like it were old cheese instead of finely smithed metal. The chillblade was hacked short, making sure it couldn’t convey any of its necroic cold, and he hacked at eyeblurring speed against the ill-maintained but negatively-charged armor of his opponent, cracking through the metal, chopping into bones long deprived of flesh, shattering them and setting them alight with Wrathfire.

Its mail sundered and breastplate shattered, the skeletal warrior, once a big man of great skill, tried to claw at him, and only earned removal of its bony hands in doing so, not treating weaponless attacks kindly. The Mick hilt-smashed the old warrior’s jaw, shattering it and setting its wiry scraps of beard , then hewed off one leg just underneath the decaying Uklan clan kilt and tartan the corpse wore.

As the skeletal warrior fell, he stepped by it and back-cut, removing its head on the way down, and smashed his shoulder into Kormac’s opponent, wrenching its shield aside. Kormac smoothly chopped off the corpse’s mace-arm, then swept off its head smoothly, sending another Uklan corpse flaming to the ground in Final Rest.

“Seen corpses from sixteen families here,” the Mick grunted, taking the charge of two skeletal warriors against , and then, much to their surprise, pushing the taller, supernaturally strong skeletal warriors back up the hill, twisting the blade of the one on the left low. Toclan tartan on this one...

Kormac’s shattered that chillblade against the ground, came back up to chew through its breastplate and hack through its breastbone in a powerful stroke up, then reversed across and hewed off its head smoothly, spinning as the Mick crashed into his foe, locked him, and spun counter.

chopped off the head of the second undead Toclan on the go-round.

An arc of green something or other came splashing towards them, but a round of hot and bright magic intercepted it, set it on fire, and chased back along its route to its Caster on the tower above, whose body lit up against the stones there as the backlash hit him from the .

It was a lesson that it was dangerous to fire off spells here, revealing yourself and making yourself vulnerable to those waiting for you. His Laurentine, long red hair still bright and strong despite five children and over seventy passing years, smiled his way, but her green eyes kept to the skies and the flow of magic, waiting for necromancers of the MacKlannisters to show themselves and be punished for it.

There was no living armed resistance to them taking Throneguard Keep. What living warriors were there had deserted either before there was an attack, or after the , , and other magical compulsions on them were removed. Some of them had kin threatened by those necromancers, and those were the mages the Rangers had gone after with cold fury.

They hadn’t gotten to all of the innocents or prisoners in time, but they had gotten to most of them. And then, most grimly, they had exchanged the lives of the MacClannisters for those of their victims, much to the dismay and disbelief of their noble victims, who thought they’d had the last laugh of revenge before perishing.

He had to say, their screams when they’d died to the , as the spell was called, were pretty damn satisfying.

Them all dying the way they’d killed their hostages was pretty appropriate, too.

Tonal chords shot past above them, one of the custom for a Ranger with a musical bent. They clanged discordantly as they arrived at the black-robed target, impelling him over the side of the tower with shrieks of pain that somehow managed to join with the crescendo as he fell towards the ground, hitting the ground with a loud clang of finality.

, he thought, as he and Kormac led the main fight towards the keep itself. The main gates had been sabotaged and left wide open for them, the pulleys jammed and wedged in place, unable to close. The private undead guards of the Prince were still here to bedevil them, made up of the best warriors from the clans for the last four generations and more of warriors, old rivals first torn down from nobility, and then forced into ultimate ignoble service.

The main threats from the undead were all based on negative energy and death magic, none of which were going to pass the from their Oathrings, or make it through their Nulls, which fact did not encourage the undead at all.

There was an explosion of sparks and flames in the distance, and black and yellow-green lightnings blew off into the sky as the tower of Ulmer MacKlannister down there toppled and fell, flaming and burning and its mark on the skyline of Torloch not to be missed at all.

He wasn’t foolish enough to believe they’d trap the Prince here. He and his phylactery were likely already long gone, planning vengeance and completely unaware that Lady Edge could track him through the Radiance like a star in the night sky.

He was going to die somewhere in the dark, unknown, unloved, and all memories of him would be buried as quickly as possible. Ol’ Thaum would lose another one of his pawns, that was certain...