Chapter 211: 211
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Cole snorted and said, "You can say that because you don't know hunger. Starving to death is a slow and miserable way to go."
Looking slightly haunted, Cray added, "There was one time... I-I t-think... we ate an elf. Everyone g-got real s-sick like afterwards. The cook d-din't serve m-mystery meant no more. W-we boiled a f-few boots a couple time too."
Aleph said sympathetically, "At least when you know there's no food to be had, you just focus on enduring. I couldn't imagine being so close to an ocean full of possibilities, literally, but too afraid of an arrow or a fireball to sneak more than an occasional fish for yourself before rushing back to base."
Cray nodded. "Lot a folks d-died t-t-trying to f-f-f... trying to fish or f-forage."
After a couple of days, issues with spiritual disconnection began fading away. But it was obvious that without some magical assistance greater than heals alone, with the damage to mind and body, Cray might never fully recover. A slow creep of despondency and depression pushed at the edges of Cray's naturally easygoing disposition.
The young mage checked the progression of spacial illumination. It was a habit that was turning into an obsessive tick. Nearly a third was revealed but he was far from being able to pull out the cabin. It was a slim hope but there were some possible things in it that could help if time and situation hadn't reduced them to uselessness.
Green had kept a few simples she had discovered on her trek across virgin forest to the pioneer town she had settled in. It had been a relatively low magic world but she had found a few things that might provide some additional recovery. For another time among countless others, Aleph felt a sense of unease and helplessness.
On day three, the temperature took a plunge and the dreary overcast blew a few spurts of icy slush towards evening. The dreary weather had them seeking shelter much earlier and put Aleph to work further consolidating clothing and leather armor into something that could withstand the deeper chill. After one spectacular failure that wasted precious materials, he had given up on the idea of enchanting some form of magical solution to temperature issues.
Instead, even though it ruined some of its convenience, he reinforced the tent with what scant remaining fabric they had. Hunter did his part by casting and preparing Degree Shift multiple times a day. Erring on the side of caution, even once trees and other vegetation started becoming visible, they had yet to resort to building a fire.
Two more days and ten degrees colder later, their slow turn to a northeast angle had finally brought them to enough foliage to consider themselves in the edges of some kind of forested region. Cray commented that it seemed as if nature was reclaiming the area. It was further proof in Aleph's mind that the undead empire to the south of them was in a decline.
On their sixth night, Cray woke everyone and pointed to the distance with a slightly trembling hand. Trying not to focus on what the limits of healing had managed to recover for the archer, Aleph strained eyes starting to suffer from too much spirit sight to see well in the dark but not enough to replace sight. It was Cole that managed to provide detailed answers after a cautiously closer examination.
The feline teen said, "It's a war band of bone heads dragging back an ugly white furred thing that's sort of humanish looking."
Cole shot down Cray's suggestion that it could be an ape and Hunter's suggestion of a yeti or Bigfoot was as well. When Aleph suggested troll, Cole was about to offhandedly dismiss it but after the young mage described the two different variety he knew of, the second one fit the bill.
With growing apprehension but a touch of hope after looking at Cray, Aleph and Hunter looked at each other.
Nearly in sync, the black teen said, "Troll blood?" while the young mage exclaimed, "Troll fat!"
Getting themselves into fighting order, they rode off after the skeleton raiding party. Once close enough to see their targets, Aleph summoned impressions of the two monstrous souls he had made a bargain with. To his surprise, until the hallucination memories of his time 'communing' with Cray gave him an answer, two adult human sized fairies appeared.
The one in dark armor held eyes that gave off a haze of eldritch green light. Banging a large sword against his kite shield, he lightly skimmed across the ground in a half floating dash. In a fluttering cloud of faintly shimmering gray silk, his ethereal and otherworldly partner flew behind him in a deceptively lazy looking bee waltz. A scent of lavender and ozone trailed behind her as malicious indigo eyes chose their prey.
Rushing to catch up, Aleph shouted, "Don't singe the fur!"
Cole glanced behind him at the young mage nervously before deciding to slow his pace to match the rest of his group. That didn't particularly help Hunter or Cray much as they brought up the tail end. Before any of them could join the fray, the dark fairy knight shield bashed the first skeleton before making a wide arc swing to shatter the spine of three more.
Letting of an ear splitting shriek, the hovering witch fairy gathered and released a forking shot of purple lightning from the combined arcane effort of hand and wand. It not only blew the one shrouded skeleton mage of the war band to chalk dust. It also flattened the three skeleton warriors surrounding it to the ground from the clap of concussive energy delivered by the following deafening thunder.
Immediately after, she faded from sight as the knight made a few more dramatic swings, growing fainter each time. Aleph hadn't known what to expect but it wasn't actually that disappointing. Before the knight faded from view as well, he bellowed an apology and explained that they were still in need of recovery time before they could sustain themselves in any realm outside the Astral.
Stunned and without a leader, the group made short work of the remaining ones but not without casualty. Hunter had an arrow deeply lodged in a lung that nearly claimed his life. A wild swing of a short axe in the hands of one of the skeleton warriors severed three of Cole's fingers as well.
With a half of a leg into the grave, Hunter managed to pull through and had little left to recover from outside of replenishing some blood loss and a small hitch while breathing by the time Aleph had finished the heal work. Cole wasn't quite as lucky. There was some stiffness in his hand and loss of sensation in his fingers that the young mage feared would suffer the same lack of a full recovery that Cray was enduring.
In his thought's Aleph complained, "What does this world have against healing magic!? Anywhere else I've been, a keloid and other scar tissue interference will correct with healing if caught early. I can barely reconnect a freshly severed nerve with it!"
Dark and dreary clouds building in everyone's minds, they went to inspect their prey only to discover that it wasn't a troll.
On the verge of tears, the young mage exclaimed, "It's a f***ing goblinoid. What, a somewhat furry hobgoblin or..."
Hunter depressingly muttered, "A bugbear. It's a bugbear. Should we let it go?"
Bitterly, Cole said, "I'm sure the hissing and snarling is it's way of saying thank you. I drew close to it when I was fighting and it tried to bite my ankle off. Jerking away from it's what caused me to lose fingers... Sh*t!"
After letting loose the curse, the feline teen stomped the skeleton warrior's head to powder.
Aleph muttered, "What kind of unfair advantage must the undead empire have had in it's heyday? When it's dead, I can mend it together but when something's alive, healing only acts a little better than..."
A hint of madness rimmed Aleph's eyes as he drew a large circle of powdered bone. More and more sacred geometry appeared in the circle as he continued to crush bone and create more symbols. When the wind threatened to blow it away, he cut a small gash in the bugbear's leg and mixed it with the bone, starting at the beginning.
In a worried tone, Hunter asked, "What are you doing, Al?"
Grimly, the young mage replied, "Arcane marriage of concepts. If the world allows life to feed death, then the opposite MUST apply or there is no balance. If there is no balance, the world will suffer. Hunter, I'm going to need your help.
"I didn't want to raise alarm but I think Cray might have leukemia and Cole has melanoma. I don't think I'll grow strong enough, fast enough, to cast Cure Disease long enough to save them both. Not and still have strength for anything else for weeks, maybe months. That's not completely hopeless but it locks us down and doesn't really improve our situation."
Hunter looked at Cole as guilty anguish swept across his face. "It's because I used so much-"
"It's because we used any at all unprocessed but it was a desperation call. It's as if some force here favors decline or maybe entropy as a whole. I don't know." Aleph countered.
He pulled out the last healing mud core from the badge and broke it in half. Placing one half away for the time being, he put the other in the sacrifice portion of the circle. In triangulated counterpoints to the sacrifice circle, the young mage drew out simplified models of Mend and Heal within each respectively.
"Cray, at worst, this will end up a ritual assisted heal that might fix a little overall damage at great cost or it'll save you. But either way, you need to get in there with nothing on. Some of the energy could warp to external items otherwise...
"Since he's all but ripping his clothes off to dive in head first, I'll take that as willingness. Hunter, as soon as he's in the center, I need you to fire up the circle with your abjuration specialized essence. Cole, keep an eye out for threats and if I give the word, Slit the bugbear's throat over the sacrifice part of the circle. Are you good with that?"
Cole smiled grimly. "See, if you hadn't been such a prick, we might not be using you as magical firewood, you ugly sh*t!"
Aleph knelt down and prepared a copy of each spell. As soon as Cray was in the center and Hunter had raised the barrier of the circle, the young mage let the spells complete on their circles. For an eternal second, nothing happened. Right as he was about to cut magic to the spells, the energies that had been flowing and mingling through the patterns of the circle all flared up into a shining beacon of soft blue light.
Within less than a couple of seconds, the core was gone, revealing Cray. Dazed and disoriented, the archer stumbled towards Aleph. The young mage caught and steadied him while exercising what spirit sight he had. At least on the surface, everything checked out to be fine.
In a quick spit fire, Aleph barked. "Cray, get suited up. Cole, get naked and take your turn in the tanning bed. Hunter, put the core I tossed you into the sacrifice circle, there. Go, go, go!"
An agonizing half minute later, another beacon of soft blue light flashed up into the night sky. With the dregs remaining, Aleph cast and cycled magic into two Enbarrs, holding consciousness by the skin of his teeth. Arm full of clothes, poor Cole hadn't even had the opportunity to dress but every split second was critical. They had literally lit up the night sky with pulses of life essence right next to a city-state of life starved undead.
A little more than a mile away from the sight of their daring-do, as Aleph stopped the horses before passing out, he said little louder than a whisper, "Hunter, ward with all you got. We need... hole in... ground."
***
Different parts of his life played in reruns. Things were much simpler when he had just been a little sub soul in the back of an ambitious boy's much more aggressive one. Sure, he had to watch passively as everything that had once been his had been devoured and claimed by the other. It hadn't been very fun to make the choice to blow up the very core of himself to send that boy back to within the bounds of 'structured existence' when the silk purse had tricked them into uncontrolled 'void stepping' with its powerful illusions either.
He thought it was a shame he'd forgotten that they could do that. It would have been very useful. There were a lot of neat ideas he had thought of that could make good use of what the miasma had given them but he'd forgotten them all when most of him was left to drift in the infinite nothing.
The mistakes, those he was happy to have forgotten. The biggest of which was holding back the knowledge of the power of glamour from the boy when it had activated in the underwater miasma spot. Standing in as the voice of sympathy and compassion for a psychopathic child seemed hard enough without giving that child the ability to supernaturally manipulate others' emotions.
Despite holding back as much of it as he could, that boy had still affected many in minor ways subconsciously. The ones that had been affected the most were obviously the ones that spent the most time around him. To offset that, he prompted the boy to be more generous to those than others, eventually providing them a way to step out from under the shadows of that control. Gan, the most twisted, even gained some autonomy after being separated.
There was one poor soul that had been missed, looked over, however. From the moment they stepped into Cray's life, the simple country boy had practically lived and breathed for them. From days of errand running and seaweed hunting to long hours of one on one time as their assistant at the Embassy, where the glamour's power was strengthened by the 'Night of Terrors' under Amoril's mass dump of miasma on them.
As he watched over the entirety of their life, Cray hadn't seemed that affected despite being completely mundane. The archer had even gotten a girlfriend. So, the simple country boy had been written off as a lucky insensitive. It hadn't occurred to him that a person might seek something else to distract them from things they didn't know how to understand, much less accept. It should have but that had been a stressful and dangerous time.
Whatever Cray's reason for being chosen as his debtor, it was forgiven because his silence about glamour was the first crime. Had he been just a little more trusting, the boy would have known, had proven that such a power was undesirable. He would take the trade off of not knowing what Cray's shameful offense had truly been in return to write off the debt he believed he owed.
His thoughts moved on to others, ones who he had personally reached through the boy to aid that hadn't been in his young host to overly care about. The list was small. There was Lily, who the boy had bound. There were Avernus' victims, among which, Duran had been the most moving after the boy had turned him into a bodyguard. It had been particularly hard to steer the boy to give Duran what was needed and even harder to keep the boy from giving up on the kid.
Vivian was a particularly bittersweet reminder that he had no qualifications to want something for himself. Neal, a thorny symbol that even the best of intentions could bring suffering. The spiritual children, Oleander and Stag, proof that the boy could provide for his own. He was a scared recluse, happy to fade into a life larger than his own, larger than his could possibly ever be.
Floating within whatever new stygian abyss reality had thrown him in, there was a small desire to fade away and that desire grew stronger by the moment. The one important thing he had accomplished also had removed the need for his presence. With White, Orison had his own compassion, the full and undamaged ability to love and form connections that a child's cruel life had robbed from him.
As he floated free, ever closer to a final and utter oblivion, a heavy weight settled around his fractured and rejected being. Voices, more than one, called to him. Alien power wrapped around him as laws unleashed crushing agony into his numb dissolution.
A boy's voice, as familiar to him now as his own said, "Now, do I seem that greedy to you, that ungrateful, old man?... Well, not so old anymore, practically brand new... Ha... If I'm being honest, this is just another way for me to be selfish but you'll have to forgive me. I don't want all these ties with fate holding me back.
"You're just going to have to eat these leftovers of mine and learn to like it. After all, you're the one who loaded my plate and I'll be damned if it's going to go to waste... Confusing me into thinking I like Lily... Have fun chasing after an ancient hag, you nasty pervert.
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Cole snorted and said, "You can say that because you don't know hunger. Starving to death is a slow and miserable way to go."
Looking slightly haunted, Cray added, "There was one time... I-I t-think... we ate an elf. Everyone g-got real s-sick like afterwards. The cook d-din't serve m-mystery meant no more. W-we boiled a f-few boots a couple time too."
Aleph said sympathetically, "At least when you know there's no food to be had, you just focus on enduring. I couldn't imagine being so close to an ocean full of possibilities, literally, but too afraid of an arrow or a fireball to sneak more than an occasional fish for yourself before rushing back to base."
Cray nodded. "Lot a folks d-died t-t-trying to f-f-f... trying to fish or f-forage."
After a couple of days, issues with spiritual disconnection began fading away. But it was obvious that without some magical assistance greater than heals alone, with the damage to mind and body, Cray might never fully recover. A slow creep of despondency and depression pushed at the edges of Cray's naturally easygoing disposition.
The young mage checked the progression of spacial illumination. It was a habit that was turning into an obsessive tick. Nearly a third was revealed but he was far from being able to pull out the cabin. It was a slim hope but there were some possible things in it that could help if time and situation hadn't reduced them to uselessness.
Green had kept a few simples she had discovered on her trek across virgin forest to the pioneer town she had settled in. It had been a relatively low magic world but she had found a few things that might provide some additional recovery. For another time among countless others, Aleph felt a sense of unease and helplessness.
On day three, the temperature took a plunge and the dreary overcast blew a few spurts of icy slush towards evening. The dreary weather had them seeking shelter much earlier and put Aleph to work further consolidating clothing and leather armor into something that could withstand the deeper chill. After one spectacular failure that wasted precious materials, he had given up on the idea of enchanting some form of magical solution to temperature issues.
Instead, even though it ruined some of its convenience, he reinforced the tent with what scant remaining fabric they had. Hunter did his part by casting and preparing Degree Shift multiple times a day. Erring on the side of caution, even once trees and other vegetation started becoming visible, they had yet to resort to building a fire.
Two more days and ten degrees colder later, their slow turn to a northeast angle had finally brought them to enough foliage to consider themselves in the edges of some kind of forested region. Cray commented that it seemed as if nature was reclaiming the area. It was further proof in Aleph's mind that the undead empire to the south of them was in a decline.
On their sixth night, Cray woke everyone and pointed to the distance with a slightly trembling hand. Trying not to focus on what the limits of healing had managed to recover for the archer, Aleph strained eyes starting to suffer from too much spirit sight to see well in the dark but not enough to replace sight. It was Cole that managed to provide detailed answers after a cautiously closer examination.
The feline teen said, "It's a war band of bone heads dragging back an ugly white furred thing that's sort of humanish looking."
Cole shot down Cray's suggestion that it could be an ape and Hunter's suggestion of a yeti or Bigfoot was as well. When Aleph suggested troll, Cole was about to offhandedly dismiss it but after the young mage described the two different variety he knew of, the second one fit the bill.
With growing apprehension but a touch of hope after looking at Cray, Aleph and Hunter looked at each other.
Nearly in sync, the black teen said, "Troll blood?" while the young mage exclaimed, "Troll fat!"
Getting themselves into fighting order, they rode off after the skeleton raiding party. Once close enough to see their targets, Aleph summoned impressions of the two monstrous souls he had made a bargain with. To his surprise, until the hallucination memories of his time 'communing' with Cray gave him an answer, two adult human sized fairies appeared.
The one in dark armor held eyes that gave off a haze of eldritch green light. Banging a large sword against his kite shield, he lightly skimmed across the ground in a half floating dash. In a fluttering cloud of faintly shimmering gray silk, his ethereal and otherworldly partner flew behind him in a deceptively lazy looking bee waltz. A scent of lavender and ozone trailed behind her as malicious indigo eyes chose their prey.
Rushing to catch up, Aleph shouted, "Don't singe the fur!"
Cole glanced behind him at the young mage nervously before deciding to slow his pace to match the rest of his group. That didn't particularly help Hunter or Cray much as they brought up the tail end. Before any of them could join the fray, the dark fairy knight shield bashed the first skeleton before making a wide arc swing to shatter the spine of three more.
Letting of an ear splitting shriek, the hovering witch fairy gathered and released a forking shot of purple lightning from the combined arcane effort of hand and wand. It not only blew the one shrouded skeleton mage of the war band to chalk dust. It also flattened the three skeleton warriors surrounding it to the ground from the clap of concussive energy delivered by the following deafening thunder.
Immediately after, she faded from sight as the knight made a few more dramatic swings, growing fainter each time. Aleph hadn't known what to expect but it wasn't actually that disappointing. Before the knight faded from view as well, he bellowed an apology and explained that they were still in need of recovery time before they could sustain themselves in any realm outside the Astral.
Stunned and without a leader, the group made short work of the remaining ones but not without casualty. Hunter had an arrow deeply lodged in a lung that nearly claimed his life. A wild swing of a short axe in the hands of one of the skeleton warriors severed three of Cole's fingers as well.
With a half of a leg into the grave, Hunter managed to pull through and had little left to recover from outside of replenishing some blood loss and a small hitch while breathing by the time Aleph had finished the heal work. Cole wasn't quite as lucky. There was some stiffness in his hand and loss of sensation in his fingers that the young mage feared would suffer the same lack of a full recovery that Cray was enduring.
In his thought's Aleph complained, "What does this world have against healing magic!? Anywhere else I've been, a keloid and other scar tissue interference will correct with healing if caught early. I can barely reconnect a freshly severed nerve with it!"
Dark and dreary clouds building in everyone's minds, they went to inspect their prey only to discover that it wasn't a troll.
On the verge of tears, the young mage exclaimed, "It's a f***ing goblinoid. What, a somewhat furry hobgoblin or..."
Hunter depressingly muttered, "A bugbear. It's a bugbear. Should we let it go?"
Bitterly, Cole said, "I'm sure the hissing and snarling is it's way of saying thank you. I drew close to it when I was fighting and it tried to bite my ankle off. Jerking away from it's what caused me to lose fingers... Sh*t!"
After letting loose the curse, the feline teen stomped the skeleton warrior's head to powder.
Aleph muttered, "What kind of unfair advantage must the undead empire have had in it's heyday? When it's dead, I can mend it together but when something's alive, healing only acts a little better than..."
A hint of madness rimmed Aleph's eyes as he drew a large circle of powdered bone. More and more sacred geometry appeared in the circle as he continued to crush bone and create more symbols. When the wind threatened to blow it away, he cut a small gash in the bugbear's leg and mixed it with the bone, starting at the beginning.
In a worried tone, Hunter asked, "What are you doing, Al?"
Grimly, the young mage replied, "Arcane marriage of concepts. If the world allows life to feed death, then the opposite MUST apply or there is no balance. If there is no balance, the world will suffer. Hunter, I'm going to need your help.
"I didn't want to raise alarm but I think Cray might have leukemia and Cole has melanoma. I don't think I'll grow strong enough, fast enough, to cast Cure Disease long enough to save them both. Not and still have strength for anything else for weeks, maybe months. That's not completely hopeless but it locks us down and doesn't really improve our situation."
Hunter looked at Cole as guilty anguish swept across his face. "It's because I used so much-"
"It's because we used any at all unprocessed but it was a desperation call. It's as if some force here favors decline or maybe entropy as a whole. I don't know." Aleph countered.
He pulled out the last healing mud core from the badge and broke it in half. Placing one half away for the time being, he put the other in the sacrifice portion of the circle. In triangulated counterpoints to the sacrifice circle, the young mage drew out simplified models of Mend and Heal within each respectively.
"Cray, at worst, this will end up a ritual assisted heal that might fix a little overall damage at great cost or it'll save you. But either way, you need to get in there with nothing on. Some of the energy could warp to external items otherwise...
"Since he's all but ripping his clothes off to dive in head first, I'll take that as willingness. Hunter, as soon as he's in the center, I need you to fire up the circle with your abjuration specialized essence. Cole, keep an eye out for threats and if I give the word, Slit the bugbear's throat over the sacrifice part of the circle. Are you good with that?"
Cole smiled grimly. "See, if you hadn't been such a prick, we might not be using you as magical firewood, you ugly sh*t!"
Aleph knelt down and prepared a copy of each spell. As soon as Cray was in the center and Hunter had raised the barrier of the circle, the young mage let the spells complete on their circles. For an eternal second, nothing happened. Right as he was about to cut magic to the spells, the energies that had been flowing and mingling through the patterns of the circle all flared up into a shining beacon of soft blue light.
Within less than a couple of seconds, the core was gone, revealing Cray. Dazed and disoriented, the archer stumbled towards Aleph. The young mage caught and steadied him while exercising what spirit sight he had. At least on the surface, everything checked out to be fine.
In a quick spit fire, Aleph barked. "Cray, get suited up. Cole, get naked and take your turn in the tanning bed. Hunter, put the core I tossed you into the sacrifice circle, there. Go, go, go!"
An agonizing half minute later, another beacon of soft blue light flashed up into the night sky. With the dregs remaining, Aleph cast and cycled magic into two Enbarrs, holding consciousness by the skin of his teeth. Arm full of clothes, poor Cole hadn't even had the opportunity to dress but every split second was critical. They had literally lit up the night sky with pulses of life essence right next to a city-state of life starved undead.
A little more than a mile away from the sight of their daring-do, as Aleph stopped the horses before passing out, he said little louder than a whisper, "Hunter, ward with all you got. We need... hole in... ground."
***
Different parts of his life played in reruns. Things were much simpler when he had just been a little sub soul in the back of an ambitious boy's much more aggressive one. Sure, he had to watch passively as everything that had once been his had been devoured and claimed by the other. It hadn't been very fun to make the choice to blow up the very core of himself to send that boy back to within the bounds of 'structured existence' when the silk purse had tricked them into uncontrolled 'void stepping' with its powerful illusions either.
He thought it was a shame he'd forgotten that they could do that. It would have been very useful. There were a lot of neat ideas he had thought of that could make good use of what the miasma had given them but he'd forgotten them all when most of him was left to drift in the infinite nothing.
The mistakes, those he was happy to have forgotten. The biggest of which was holding back the knowledge of the power of glamour from the boy when it had activated in the underwater miasma spot. Standing in as the voice of sympathy and compassion for a psychopathic child seemed hard enough without giving that child the ability to supernaturally manipulate others' emotions.
Despite holding back as much of it as he could, that boy had still affected many in minor ways subconsciously. The ones that had been affected the most were obviously the ones that spent the most time around him. To offset that, he prompted the boy to be more generous to those than others, eventually providing them a way to step out from under the shadows of that control. Gan, the most twisted, even gained some autonomy after being separated.
There was one poor soul that had been missed, looked over, however. From the moment they stepped into Cray's life, the simple country boy had practically lived and breathed for them. From days of errand running and seaweed hunting to long hours of one on one time as their assistant at the Embassy, where the glamour's power was strengthened by the 'Night of Terrors' under Amoril's mass dump of miasma on them.
As he watched over the entirety of their life, Cray hadn't seemed that affected despite being completely mundane. The archer had even gotten a girlfriend. So, the simple country boy had been written off as a lucky insensitive. It hadn't occurred to him that a person might seek something else to distract them from things they didn't know how to understand, much less accept. It should have but that had been a stressful and dangerous time.
Whatever Cray's reason for being chosen as his debtor, it was forgiven because his silence about glamour was the first crime. Had he been just a little more trusting, the boy would have known, had proven that such a power was undesirable. He would take the trade off of not knowing what Cray's shameful offense had truly been in return to write off the debt he believed he owed.
His thoughts moved on to others, ones who he had personally reached through the boy to aid that hadn't been in his young host to overly care about. The list was small. There was Lily, who the boy had bound. There were Avernus' victims, among which, Duran had been the most moving after the boy had turned him into a bodyguard. It had been particularly hard to steer the boy to give Duran what was needed and even harder to keep the boy from giving up on the kid.
Vivian was a particularly bittersweet reminder that he had no qualifications to want something for himself. Neal, a thorny symbol that even the best of intentions could bring suffering. The spiritual children, Oleander and Stag, proof that the boy could provide for his own. He was a scared recluse, happy to fade into a life larger than his own, larger than his could possibly ever be.
Floating within whatever new stygian abyss reality had thrown him in, there was a small desire to fade away and that desire grew stronger by the moment. The one important thing he had accomplished also had removed the need for his presence. With White, Orison had his own compassion, the full and undamaged ability to love and form connections that a child's cruel life had robbed from him.
As he floated free, ever closer to a final and utter oblivion, a heavy weight settled around his fractured and rejected being. Voices, more than one, called to him. Alien power wrapped around him as laws unleashed crushing agony into his numb dissolution.
A boy's voice, as familiar to him now as his own said, "Now, do I seem that greedy to you, that ungrateful, old man?... Well, not so old anymore, practically brand new... Ha... If I'm being honest, this is just another way for me to be selfish but you'll have to forgive me. I don't want all these ties with fate holding me back.
"You're just going to have to eat these leftovers of mine and learn to like it. After all, you're the one who loaded my plate and I'll be damned if it's going to go to waste... Confusing me into thinking I like Lily... Have fun chasing after an ancient hag, you nasty pervert.
Cole snorted and said, "You can say that because you don't know hunger. Starving to death is a slow and miserable way to go." Looking slightly haunted, Cray added, "There was one time... I-I t-think... we ate an elf. Everyone g-got real s-sick like afterwards. The cook d-din't serve m-mystery meant no more. W-we boiled a f-few boots a couple time too." Aleph said sympathetically, "At least when you know there's no food to be had, you just focus on enduring. I couldn't imagine being so close to an ocean full of possibilities, literally, but too afraid of an arrow or a fireball to sneak more than an occasional fish for yourself before rushing back to base." Cray nodded. "Lot a folks d-died t-t-trying to f-f-f... trying to fish or f-forage." After a couple of days, issues with spiritual disconnection began fading away. But it was obvious that without some magical assistance greater than heals alone, with the damage to mind and body, Cray might never fully recover. A slow creep of despondency and depression pushed at the edges of Cray's naturally easygoing disposition. The young mage checked the progression of spacial illumination. It was a habit that was turning into an obsessive tick. Nearly a third was revealed but he was far from being able to pull out the cabin. It was a slim hope but there were some possible things in it that could help if time and situation hadn't reduced them to uselessness. Green had kept a few simples she had discovered on her trek across virgin forest to the pioneer town she had settled in. It had been a relatively low magic world but she had found a few things that might provide some additional recovery. For another time among countless others, Aleph felt a sense of unease and helplessness. On day three, the temperature took a plunge and the dreary overcast blew a few spurts of icy slush towards evening. The dreary weather had them seeking shelter much earlier and put Aleph to work further consolidating clothing and leather armor into something that could withstand the deeper chill. After one spectacular failure that wasted precious materials, he had given up on the idea of enchanting some form of magical solution to temperature issues. Instead, even though it ruined some of its convenience, he reinforced the tent with what scant remaining fabric they had. Hunter did his part by casting and preparing Degree Shift multiple times a day. Erring on the side of caution, even once trees and other vegetation started becoming visible, they had yet to resort to building a fire. Two more days and ten degrees colder later, their slow turn to a northeast angle had finally brought them to enough foliage to consider themselves in the edges of some kind of forested region. Cray commented that it seemed as if nature was reclaiming the area. It was further proof in Aleph's mind that the undead empire to the south of them was in a decline. On their sixth night, Cray woke everyone and pointed to the distance with a slightly trembling hand. Trying not to focus on what the limits of healing had managed to recover for the archer, Aleph strained eyes starting to suffer from too much spirit sight to see well in the dark but not enough to replace sight. It was Cole that managed to provide detailed answers after a cautiously closer examination. The feline teen said, "It's a war band of bone heads dragging back an ugly white furred thing that's sort of humanish looking." Cole shot down Cray's suggestion that it could be an ape and Hunter's suggestion of a yeti or Bigfoot was as well. When Aleph suggested troll, Cole was about to offhandedly dismiss it but after the young mage described the two different variety he knew of, the second one fit the bill. With growing apprehension but a touch of hope after looking at Cray, Aleph and Hunter looked at each other. Nearly in sync, the black teen said, "Troll blood?" while the young mage exclaimed, "Troll fat!" Getting themselves into fighting order, they rode off after the skeleton raiding party. Once close enough to see their targets, Aleph summoned impressions of the two monstrous souls he had made a bargain with. To his surprise, until the hallucination memories of his time 'communing' with Cray gave him an answer, two adult human sized fairies appeared. The one in dark armor held eyes that gave off a haze of eldritch green light. Banging a large sword against his kite shield, he lightly skimmed across the ground in a half floating dash. In a fluttering cloud of faintly shimmering gray silk, his ethereal and otherworldly partner flew behind him in a deceptively lazy looking bee waltz. A scent of lavender and ozone trailed behind her as malicious indigo eyes chose their prey. Rushing to catch up, Aleph shouted, "Don't singe the fur!" Cole glanced behind him at the young mage nervously before deciding to slow his pace to match the rest of his group. That didn't particularly help Hunter or Cray much as they brought up the tail end. Before any of them could join the fray, the dark fairy knight shield bashed the first skeleton before making a wide arc swing to shatter the spine of three more. Letting of an ear splitting shriek, the hovering witch fairy gathered and released a forking shot of purple lightning from the combined arcane effort of hand and wand. It not only blew the one shrouded skeleton mage of the war band to chalk dust. It also flattened the three skeleton warriors surrounding it to the ground from the clap of concussive energy delivered by the following deafening thunder. Immediately after, she faded from sight as the knight made a few more dramatic swings, growing fainter each time. Aleph hadn't known what to expect but it wasn't actually that disappointing. Before the knight faded from view as well, he bellowed an apology and explained that they were still in need of recovery time before they could sustain themselves in any realm outside the Astral. Stunned and without a leader, the group made short work of the remaining ones but not without casualty. Hunter had an arrow deeply lodged in a lung that nearly claimed his life. A wild swing of a short axe in the hands of one of the skeleton warriors severed three of Cole's fingers as well. With a half of a leg into the grave, Hunter managed to pull through and had little left to recover from outside of replenishing some blood loss and a small hitch while breathing by the time Aleph had finished the heal work. Cole wasn't quite as lucky. There was some stiffness in his hand and loss of sensation in his fingers that the young mage feared would suffer the same lack of a full recovery that Cray was enduring. In his thought's Aleph complained, "What does this world have against healing magic!? Anywhere else I've been, a keloid and other scar tissue interference will correct with healing if caught early. I can barely reconnect a freshly severed nerve with it!" Dark and dreary clouds building in everyone's minds, they went to inspect their prey only to discover that it wasn't a troll. On the verge of tears, the young mage exclaimed, "It's a f***ing goblinoid. What, a somewhat furry hobgoblin or..." Hunter depressingly muttered, "A bugbear. It's a bugbear. Should we let it go?" Bitterly, Cole said, "I'm sure the hissing and snarling is it's way of saying thank you. I drew close to it when I was fighting and it tried to bite my ankle off. Jerking away from it's what caused me to lose fingers... Sh*t!" After letting loose the curse, the feline teen stomped the skeleton warrior's head to powder. Aleph muttered, "What kind of unfair advantage must the undead empire have had in it's heyday? When it's dead, I can mend it together but when something's alive, healing only acts a little better than..." A hint of madness rimmed Aleph's eyes as he drew a large circle of powdered bone. More and more sacred geometry appeared in the circle as he continued to crush bone and create more symbols. When the wind threatened to blow it away, he cut a small gash in the bugbear's leg and mixed it with the bone, starting at the beginning. In a worried tone, Hunter asked, "What are you doing, Al?" Grimly, the young mage replied, "Arcane marriage of concepts. If the world allows life to feed death, then the opposite MUST apply or there is no balance. If there is no balance, the world will suffer. Hunter, I'm going to need your help. "I didn't want to raise alarm but I think Cray might have leukemia and Cole has melanoma. I don't think I'll grow strong enough, fast enough, to cast Cure Disease long enough to save them both. Not and still have strength for anything else for weeks, maybe months. That's not completely hopeless but it locks us down and doesn't really improve our situation." Hunter looked at Cole as guilty anguish swept across his face. "It's because I used so much-" "It's because we used any at all unprocessed but it was a desperation call. It's as if some force here favors decline or maybe entropy as a whole. I don't know." Aleph countered. He pulled out the last healing mud core from the badge and broke it in half. Placing one half away for the time being, he put the other in the sacrifice portion of the circle. In triangulated counterpoints to the sacrifice circle, the young mage drew out simplified models of Mend and Heal within each respectively. "Cray, at worst, this will end up a ritual assisted heal that might fix a little overall damage at great cost or it'll save you. But either way, you need to get in there with nothing on. Some of the energy could warp to external items otherwise... "Since he's all but ripping his clothes off to dive in head first, I'll take that as willingness. Hunter, as soon as he's in the center, I need you to fire up the circle with your abjuration specialized essence. Cole, keep an eye out for threats and if I give the word, Slit the bugbear's throat over the sacrifice part of the circle. Are you good with that?" Cole smiled grimly. "See, if you hadn't been such a prick, we might not be using you as magical firewood, you ugly sh*t!" Aleph knelt down and prepared a copy of each spell. As soon as Cray was in the center and Hunter had raised the barrier of the circle, the young mage let the spells complete on their circles. For an eternal second, nothing happened. Right as he was about to cut magic to the spells, the energies that had been flowing and mingling through the patterns of the circle all flared up into a shining beacon of soft blue light. Within less than a couple of seconds, the core was gone, revealing Cray. Dazed and disoriented, the archer stumbled towards Aleph. The young mage caught and steadied him while exercising what spirit sight he had. At least on the surface, everything checked out to be fine. In a quick spit fire, Aleph barked. "Cray, get suited up. Cole, get naked and take your turn in the tanning bed. Hunter, put the core I tossed you into the sacrifice circle, there. Go, go, go!" An agonizing half minute later, another beacon of soft blue light flashed up into the night sky. With the dregs remaining, Aleph cast and cycled magic into two Enbarrs, holding consciousness by the skin of his teeth. Arm full of clothes, poor Cole hadn't even had the opportunity to dress but every split second was critical. They had literally lit up the night sky with pulses of life essence right next to a city-state of life starved undead. A little more than a mile away from the sight of their daring-do, as Aleph stopped the horses before passing out, he said little louder than a whisper, "Hunter, ward with all you got. We need... hole in... ground."*** Different parts of his life played in reruns. Things were much simpler when he had just been a little sub soul in the back of an ambitious boy's much more aggressive one. Sure, he had to watch passively as everything that had once been his had been devoured and claimed by the other. It hadn't been very fun to make the choice to blow up the very core of himself to send that boy back to within the bounds of 'structured existence' when the silk purse had tricked them into uncontrolled 'void stepping' with its powerful illusions either. He thought it was a shame he'd forgotten that they could do that. It would have been very useful. There were a lot of neat ideas he had thought of that could make good use of what the miasma had given them but he'd forgotten them all when most of him was left to drift in the infinite nothing. The mistakes, those he was happy to have forgotten. The biggest of which was holding back the knowledge of the power of glamour from the boy when it had activated in the underwater miasma spot. Standing in as the voice of sympathy and compassion for a psychopathic child seemed hard enough without giving that child the ability to supernaturally manipulate others' emotions. Despite holding back as much of it as he could, that boy had still affected many in minor ways subconsciously. The ones that had been affected the most were obviously the ones that spent the most time around him. To offset that, he prompted the boy to be more generous to those than others, eventually providing them a way to step out from under the shadows of that control. Gan, the most twisted, even gained some autonomy after being separated. There was one poor soul that had been missed, looked over, however. From the moment they stepped into Cray's life, the simple country boy had practically lived and breathed for them. From days of errand running and seaweed hunting to long hours of one on one time as their assistant at the Embassy, where the glamour's power was strengthened by the 'Night of Terrors' under Amoril's mass dump of miasma on them. As he watched over the entirety of their life, Cray hadn't seemed that affected despite being completely mundane. The archer had even gotten a girlfriend. So, the simple country boy had been written off as a lucky insensitive. It hadn't occurred to him that a person might seek something else to distract them from things they didn't know how to understand, much less accept. It should have but that had been a stressful and dangerous time. Whatever Cray's reason for being chosen as his debtor, it was forgiven because his silence about glamour was the first crime. Had he been just a little more trusting, the boy would have known, had proven that such a power was undesirable. He would take the trade off of not knowing what Cray's shameful offense had truly been in return to write off the debt he believed he owed. His thoughts moved on to others, ones who he had personally reached through the boy to aid that hadn't been in his young host to overly care about. The list was small. There was Lily, who the boy had bound. There were Avernus' victims, among which, Duran had been the most moving after the boy had turned him into a bodyguard. It had been particularly hard to steer the boy to give Duran what was needed and even harder to keep the boy from giving up on the kid. Vivian was a particularly bittersweet reminder that he had no qualifications to want something for himself. Neal, a thorny symbol that even the best of intentions could bring suffering. The spiritual children, Oleander and Stag, proof that the boy could provide for his own. He was a scared recluse, happy to fade into a life larger than his own, larger than his could possibly ever be. Floating within whatever new stygian abyss reality had thrown him in, there was a small desire to fade away and that desire grew stronger by the moment. The one important thing he had accomplished also had removed the need for his presence. With White, Orison had his own compassion, the full and undamaged ability to love and form connections that a child's cruel life had robbed from him. As he floated free, ever closer to a final and utter oblivion, a heavy weight settled around his fractured and rejected being. Voices, more than one, called to him. Alien power wrapped around him as laws unleashed crushing agony into his numb dissolution. A boy's voice, as familiar to him now as his own said, "Now, do I seem that greedy to you, that ungrateful, old man?... Well, not so old anymore, practically brand new... Ha... If I'm being honest, this is just another way for me to be selfish but you'll have to forgive me. I don't want all these ties with fate holding me back. "You're just going to have to eat these leftovers of mine and learn to like it. After all, you're the one who loaded my plate and I'll be damned if it's going to go to waste... Confusing me into thinking I like Lily... Have fun chasing after an ancient hag, you nasty pervert.
