§109 Crossroad (Patreon)

We thought ourselves untouchable when he refused our provocations. Then came the day we learned the awful truth: that we had long sheltered in the lee of his contempt.
— The Mines of Shik-Karan

Taylor

It took nearly an hour to get to the portal tree. Along the way, he summoned Hermes with the pen that wrote in silver mana. The writing trailed behind him in a stream, yet Hermes came, floating and speeding with him.

"The Army of Darkness stands ready, Dux Twilight."

"Tell them it will be a stealth summoning, any time in the next few hours. I will set a short countdown when it's time."

"Very good, Dux." Hermes dissolved into a swirl of black smoke.

Passing through the Other Place, he dropped into Aarden three miles from Crossroad. It wasn't exactly a town; more like a carriage depot in the middle of nowhere. Fast carriages and caravans from four directions all stopped there to rest their horses and exchange passengers. Before he had a portal network, Taylor had to lay over there for a few hours every time he traveled to Bostkirk and back. There was a large tavern, an overnight hotel, some shops, and facilities for carriages and the animals that pulled them.

Taylor and Tristan had to cross overland to reach Crossroads. They heard screaming as they drew near and saw people running. Panic staggered their steps. The air reeked of fear. Two catkin women ran toward him with children in their arms, stumbling over the grassy terrain. The children whimpered.

"I'm here to help," Taylor called to them in Arcaic. "What is it?"

The women shook their heads, too winded to shout their confusion, and kept running. Bodies lay on the distant pavement, next to animals in their harnesses, too still to be alive. People scattered from the depot in all directions, leaving trails through the grass.

He had planned to save them for Bostkirk, but Taylor would need to call the Army of Darkness right away. It would take a bite out of his mana, but he gave them a one-minute timer. He urged Tristan forward, toward the carriages with the dead animals in harness. A pair of gallifreys were on the ground as if they were sitting, but their heads drooped on slack necks, and their eyes were cloudy. Long white feathers fell from putrid skin. 

A nearby line of wagons had horses in harness, a breed popular with caravans because they monstrified easily while remaining easy to handle. They looked old, and their skin sagged, loose and rank, covered in flies. But the majority of the flies weren't moving. The people on the ground weren't any better off than the animals.

The depot had gone silent: those who could escape had done so and were out on the surrounding grassland, calling to each other, hoping to find those they had lost in the panic. Anyone still alive in the depot was in quiet hiding.

"Tristan, get some distance."

I am brave!

Taylor sighed as he dropped from the horse's back. Every time, with this beast. "If you die, I won't be able to find Kasper. I'm giving you some protective spells, but I don't know if they're the right ones. Go out there, wait for my call, and don't let anyone steal you."

I would never!

"Good boy." Even though their bond was weak, Taylor could feel the horse's pride at the praise. Just what Tristan needed: more pride.

Taylor gave up a quarter of his mana to call his Army of Darkness. Their numbers had grown slightly, to a hundred and twenty-three, and the spirits had leveled up remarkably. They formed into three parts, commanded by Proctors Genova (a vine spirit), Balhadra (a fire spirit that favored an elf form), and Ramitha (a dryad). Hermes, the ghost butler, was their primary messenger. They were a better-organized force than the Praxium Brigade because they had been fighting together since well before Taylor came along. In fact, it was Genova's idea to have Taylor summon such a large number of spirits to fight rifts in the mortal realm, and then use him to transport a share of the resulting loot back to Twilight. 

"There is something loose in the depot," he told his commanders. "Send teams with good mortal forms to block off the roads a quarter mile back. Sweep the depot, starting there," he pointed at the large tavern. He knew from experience it could serve hundreds of people in the evening, when the fast-coach passengers all waited for the animals to rest.

"Get any survivors you find to safety. When you find the monster, or magician, or whatever did all this, you don't have to beat it. Probe it, figure out what it is, and how to fight it. Bring it into the open if you can, away from the survivors."

"This is a perversion of life magic," said Ramitha. As she watched, the afflicted horses collapsed and groaned out their last breaths. "Something is draining their lives, but I can't sense a connection to it. Be careful, Dux, this is high-tier magic."

"That's why you're here." The proctors gave him wry smiles, and some of the spirits who overheard chuckled and elbowed each other. As summoned spirits, they were disposable.

As teams moved to block off the roads, Balhadra asked, "While we search, will you create a protection circle? We need a place to gather survivors."

"I'll take care of it. Good hunting."

While the proctors organized their people and set them to work, Taylor went a hundred yards distant, cut the grass with a thought, leveled the ground, and hardened it. He carved a circle into the ground large enough to hold a hundred people. One of the church's more interesting spells was Protection From Evil. It would have been more accurately named Protection From Anyone Bearing Malice Against Those Included In This Spell, but that would have been unwieldy. Taylor lined the circle with Spellscript, attached mana supply and regulation features from Permutations, and then filled the grooves with his special blend of mana wire. He dropped high-density stones into the supply circles, charged the whole work with his intent, and it flared to life in a burst of gold sparkles. Taylor didn't approve of theatrical side effects, but church spells always included them. After all, people needed to see that the church was working for them.

Tristan came to his whistle, slower than expected, with the two catkin women from earlier on his back, still clutching their children. Taylor helped them down and got them into the circle.

"How did you convince them to come with you?"

People like me. I'm not scary.

"Go get more." He handed out dried food for the women to give to their children. They all looked related, with the same mostly-white fur and polychrome eyes. The women looked like sisters, but they could be grandmother and granddaughter, given how long beastkin lived.

"Did you see it?" he asked them. "What did it look like?"

"It didn't look like anything," said one of them. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Was it humanoid, animal, immaterial like a ghost?"

The women looked at each other, unsure how to explain. "It isn't a ghost. It has a human head and arms, but I don't know what the body is."

"It has tentacles," said the other.

"Horrible tentacles. Whatever they touch dies."

"So, I'll know it when I see it." It sounded like a chimera of parts from different creatures. One of the kidnappers was a magician with a penchant for experimentation and a lack of ethics. That would be the one to kill first, when the time came.

He dropped more of his provisions and glass jugs of clean water on the ground. "Whatever it is, I'm going to kill it," he told his guests. "Don't invite anyone into the circle. If they can get in, they can get in. If they can't, they're not safe. Understand?"

Even knowing that his enemy set the trap for him, it never occurred to Taylor not to help. But it did drive all considerations of mercy from his mind.

His Battlesage robes had mutable color, so he changed them to white with blue trim and did the same for his mask. The "robes" were similar to a priest's cassock, and, with his prayer beads, Taylor looked more like a fighting cleric than a magician. He took a position on the tallest fast carriage, a private vehicle that belonged to some wealthy family or an imperial official traveling incognito. A few survivors staggered from the front door, men and women of all races, a few of them clutching babes or leading children by the hand. They didn't have to be told twice which way to run: the column of gold sparkles was all the guidance they needed.

Taylor didn't have to wait long. The army found what they were looking for in the largest barn, where animals rested between runs. When the tavern ran low on prey, it turned to the feast offered by penned animals.

Spirits charged into the barn. Seconds later, they came charging out again, pursued by something that enlarged the barn door by crashing through the side of the building. At first, Taylor couldn't grasp what he was looking at. The first impression was too big with too many appendages, but a closer inspection brought its design into focus. The bulk of the chimera was a monstrified scorpion. It wasn't the largest one he'd seen in his many lives, not even close, but its threat didn't come from size alone. Normally, scorpions have a large eye on top of their heads, looking upward. Instead of an eye, this one had a human torso. He was small compared to the rest of the monstrocity, but his eyes were rimmed in red cruelty. 

Then, there were the tentacles. They weren't slime appendages, but were closer to octopus arms that flared out into heavy, broad spans near the ends, like tentacular clubs on giant squid. They were grafted to the scorpion's thorax, right behind the human torso.

As there was no sense in wasting opportunities for experience, especially with an army in the field, Taylor gave himself a quest and shared it with the spirits.

Quest: [Kill the Chimera] As this is a fourth-tier monster, rewards will scale accordingly.

Spirits cheered, but the light mood didn't last long. Fighters specializing in defense tried to root the abomination in place, taunt it, and hit it with shockwaves to slow its advance, but nothing worked. They couldn't immobilize it, but they could ward off most of the damage from its claws and stinger. 

They could also hurt it, but the limited damage they did healed too quickly. Their weapons didn't bite deeply enough to overcome its absurd regeneration. And magic was useless against it. Balhadra leapt on top of the carriage next to Taylor, an elf in steel armor enameled with designs of fire, topped by a helmet with a face mask. The mask had strange proportions to exaggerate the fury of its expression. "Nothing's working, not even purification. We even tried taming it." He glanced at the ongoing battle with the monstrosity. "It can't be tamed. There is no anima to connect to."

Anima was one of the vaguer concepts in Aarden's magic system, something close to will or mind, but reachable through life magic. It was how tamers bonded to their animals, and summoners to their spirits.

"It must have anima," mused Taylor. "Unless it's purely a construct. What haven't we tried?"

"We haven't tried the upper end of divine," stated Balhadra, "what Permutation describes as mana that can reach the gods. None of us can wield it."

Taylor took several seconds to form a bolt of divine mana and shoot it at the creature. It didn't harm it in the least. With all the other spells aimed at it, the bolt failed to attract its attention.

"What else?"

"There is nothing else."

Hermes appeared with a list of spirits to summon. Of those who "died" in Aarden, Taylor summoned the most useful to rejoin the fight. One of them was Orangeatang, a tall simian with long arms. He was immensely strong and often fought solo, doing the work of a team of spirits. He appeared with the others on his list, but approached Taylor's perch instead of diving back into the fight.

"Dux," he said in a lovely baritone, "I fear we have a most urgent situation in Twilight. Those who were touched by the enemy's tentacles are dying."

"You mean, they're dying in Twilight?"

"Indeed. We are keeping them alive by giving them mana, but if the situation is not corrected soon, they will be unmade."

"What kind of magic crosses realms," Balhadra asked aloud, "and can drain mana from such a distance?"

"I think I know the answer," said Taylor, "but it leaves us without much hope. Am I right in assuming spirits have souls?"

Orangeatang frowned. "I should take offense at such a question, Dux Twilight, but as it relates to the matter at hand, then, yes, we do have souls. As it happens, we are more soul than matter when compared to the dying races."

"Then, I think this is soul magic. It's tethering itself to people's souls and using that link to drain their lives. Which is bad news, because I can't use it. It's not even magic in the way we understand it. And this thing will drain the afflicted dry unless we kill it."