Magical Beasts.
Some creatures carry a spark of a different flavor and complexity, and no two are alike. Dragons and drakes, basilisk and salamander, faerie and demon; these creatures are rare and their defenses are strong. In my experience it requires the creature to be subdued to draw on their mana.
Yourself.
The most readily available source of mana is the most precious. It is the wizard himself. But the supply of energy is limited and the wizard is literally using his own life. That is why methods to use this energy as efficiently as possible are essential, but that too is a lesson for another day. Beware drawing on your own power too much, as you will perish.
Regeneration.
Use of your own supplies of energy are unavoidable. Thankfully, as long as your appetite is not lethally great, then your mana can recover with time. Sleep is good. Food is helpful (in particular I have found greasy bacon to be effective). But recovery is slow. With sleep and food, it can take many months to recover from a moderate drain. Faster recovery requires deep meditation and a continuous slow draw from the natural world around you. This is what you must practice.
All that shimmers
Kyle opened his eyes and, as per most days, veritably leapt out of bed. Life was good. He was glad for each new morning that brought him a day ripe with opportunity to hone his talents. Kyle had often told his mother that he didn’t want to go to bed, because he’d prefer to keep on working. This wasn’t necessarily uncommon behavior for the Deep People of Unedar Halt; a love of what they do. There wasn’t any of this strange sickness that Kyle had heard of above ground, where people didn’t like or appreciate their lot in life.
But it had been noted by many that Kyle took this enthusiasm to a level that was not often seen amongst his peers.
Kyle’s bed chamber was of simple formation; dug out from the rock and dirt under the mountain, it was connected to a basic sitting room that doubled up as a study. He had lived in these rooms for most of the twenty years that he had served with Raghallack, one of the most talented chiselers that Unedar Halt had ever known. There were no decorations. No personalization of this space he owned. And most strangely there was a lack of embellishment or adornment to any of the stone carvings of Kyle’s home.
Which is surprising when you consider that the chiseler’s role beneath the mountain is not only to dig new caverns, but make them beautiful too.
There was a (generally) healthy rivalry between squads of chiselers for whom could create the most elaborate carvings, and for developing new methods for doing so. Kyle himself had recently become quite renowned for his work on the new Galag Clan expansion: the walls of which had been adorned with branches and leaves of trees that he had never seen in person, rather discovered in a book in the library. When Kyle looked at the empty walls of his home, he envisioned hundreds of ideas of what he could do with such a blank canvas: interconnected geometric shapes; flames rising to form salamanders; a scale map of Unedar Halt. But when was there time to do something that would only ever be seen by him?
Kyle ate his breakfast of boiled great-centipede eggs and reflected on his living status. Yes, he was living alone and some of his friends had already found life partners with which to build new caverns. But how did he have time for that either? There was work to be done. Techniques to learn. And new approaches to develop. If he had a life partner demanding his time and attention then he would never have had time to discover the acid that he had used to clear away the stone, one layer at a time through brushed application, that he had used for the Forest Hall.
No, he thought, there will be time for that later.
He flung his satchel over his shoulder—it rattled with his tools of the trade—and opened the bronze door to the tunnels outside. Kyle hummed a little ditty to himself as he wended his way on his usual route to the worm pens. Purple worms; a tool that differentiated the chiselers from the other teams that together were responsible for the slow expansion of Unedar Halt.
The chiselers came at the beginning and end of each work cycle. Chiselers carved out the new tunnels and chambers, and then the other teams did their work. Cleaner teams, combinations of warriors and animal handlers, were always close by to a chiseler ready to step in when needed. For new passages would often break through to undiscovered, naturally occurring spaces, and they could be home to the various beasties that inhabited the deep dark.
Chiselers might discover new seams of precious metals or deposits of raw gem stones, and call on a team of miners. These were Deep People experienced in the extraction of the raw materials used by the craftspeople of his city.
All new digs needed to be illuminated; the Deep People had good vision in the dark but could not see in the total black, so gardeners would come along to seed and nurture the luminescent mosses that were everywhere. And then finally, closing the loop, chiselers would be able to scratch their creative itch and bring art to the stone walls of the new spaces they had carved.
And so, the worm-pens was the place that Kyle went every day to collect the one tool that wouldn’t fit in his bag, though this was more than just a tool—this was his friend.
Curled up behind a wrought iron railing was Vidin, his purple worm. He was twenty feet of interconnected segments of pulsing pulpous flesh, ending in a hard carapace around the head, with a mouth that could open three feet wide, full of teeth near as hard as diamonds. Vidin was a baby—well, a little older than a baby. Kyle remembered when he had been paired with him at just a few months old. Then he had been six feet long. Now, three years later, Vidin was an infant and growing fast.
The relationship between the Deep People and the purple worms was an interesting one that went back centuries. The worms would bring their young to the dwarves to be raised until they reached adolescence, where it was not unknown for them to be hundreds of feet long and twenty feet in diameter, digging deep underground for reasons that his people had not discovered. The only good answer scholars had developed was a simple one. Because.
Kyle opened the gate to the pen and Vidin slithered out to nuzzle up against his handler. Four pairs of eyes around the hard carapace blinked slowly and the creature purred as Kyle scratched at a favorite spot of soft flesh.
“It’s good to see you too, Vidin,” said Kyle. “I hope you got a good night’s sleep. It’s time to go to work.”
Kyle and Vidin worked on a new tunnel branch off the great meeting chamber for the Nandaklar Clan, a large family of many generations that had living quarters across many levels that stretched from close to the center of Unedar Halt right to the edges of their territory. The meeting chamber had been there for many years, long before Kyle was born, and it was one of his favorite spaces in the city. The ceiling was decorated with the relief of a dragon—long reptilian body running the length of the chamber and great wings that stretched out across the roof and down the walls—giving the impression that the dragon was sheltering the inhabitants of the room under its mighty presence. The neck of the dragon stretched down one wall where the head turned, mouth open to form the entrance. It had been chiseled by his master in his youth, taking a whole year to complete.
The clan had decided to build out past the meeting chamber in order to house some of the greatest examples of craftsmanship of their family—museums had become something of a new trend amongst the wealthiest clans.
And so, Kyle and Vidin worked away.
The great benefit of the relationship between purple worms and the Deep People was that worms ate rock. And they ate it fast— making them wonderful partners for excavation. Kyle gazed proudly as Vidin rose up and supported himself, his body one long mass of muscle, to reach the higher levels of the rock face. The maws of the worm opened to bite through the stone. The crunching of rock was accompanied with gurgles and sizzling noises as his friend’s digestion did its work, each wriggle moving the meal through his stomachs and combinations of chemicals until a grey slurry passed from his rear.
That was why Kyle held what looked li
ke a wooden broom which someone had forgotten to attach bristles to—perfect for spreading the slurry into an even coating that would quickly dry as hard as the rock it had recently been.
A marvel, thought Kyle. If it wasn’t for the worms we would never have been able to dedicate so much of our lives to craft, instead of digging.
As he spread the slurry he kept watch for particular types of discoloration that would be of interest. It was common when digging at this depth to discover seams of metals, and Vidin could digest almost anything he came across (though lead would often give him indigestion). A sign of gold or silver and he would stop Vidin so a mining team could be called in to extract the precious metals; evidence of tin and they would continue, Kyle instead looking to artfully arrange the glinting slurry.
Kyle stooped to pick up a rock that had passed through Vidin and landed in a puddle of sludge. A sapphire. Raw and uncut, but the blue was visible through the slurry that coated it. He wiped off the grey slime and tucked it away in a pocket. This one could be polished up and put into Kyle’s wedding chest to be gifted to his betrothed on the day he married—that was if he ever had the time to visit the gem workers or find someone to marry. For now, it could sit with the other shiny rocks in his room.
“You did great today,” said Kyle, patting Vidin on the head. The worm nestled against the dwarf as he rested, leaning against the wall of the tunnel they had carved out that day. The creature was warm to the touch from its digestive exertions, and he knew that it would want to sleep soon. But Kyle wasn’t done yet.
“I know you’re tired, but I’m going to ask that you just take a little rest? I can tell there is a chamber just the other side of here. Don’t you want to see what it looks like?”
Kyle could have sworn that Vidin nodded. He smiled. Kyle found it exciting to discover new caverns in the deep of Unedar Halt. Many times, the rock formations and stone faces that were carved by nature put the Deep People’s industry to shame, and he wanted to see what today might bring. But first he had something to do. There was a protocol to follow.
“Wait here, Vidin; I’ll be back with a cleaner squad.”
“Alright, Kyle, let’s get going. It’s nearly time for dinner you know.”
“I know, Fola,” said Kyle to the dwarf standing behind him. She was dressed in boiled leather armor, inset with metal plates across the chest, abdomen and thighs. She held a crossbow at the ready, and a short wide sword hung from her hip. Her three crew members were dressed identically.
Fola was an old friend of Kyle’s and he was glad that her crew had been on duty. They went back a long way, friends only of course, though sometimes his dreams—and his insides whenever he spoke to her—told him that he would like that to be different. In any case, it was good he had found her, as the comment about dinner time was no joke: plenty of other squads might have turned down the job because of an impending meal. But Kyle wasn’t hungry; he had a lightness in his stomach from the excitement of what they were going to discover.
Kyle patted Vidin’s tail three times and the worm wriggled forward to take a massive bite out of the wall. Bite followed bite, only to discover more rock. Kyle looked back at Fola who gave him a small smile.
More butterflies.
Vidin continued to chomp away at the rock. Chomp after chomp. Kyle spread the slurry so it wouldn’t dry in a lump and ruin the floor. He turned when he heard a noise behind him.
Fola tapping her foot.
Kyle smiled sheepishly. He really had expected that it would not take too long to break through. Usually he was so good at estimating these dista—
Crack.
Boom.
A cloud of dust swept forward to envelop Kyle, Fola and the cleaner squad as Vidin broke through and the tunnel wall partially collapsed in a shower of rubble.
Kyle held his breath while the dust settled, he’d had years of practice in avoiding inhaling and then the inevitable coughing up of stone dust, thankful that his eyes were protected by his leather framed glass goggles. Vidin wriggled clear of the rubble and moved into the chamber ahead. Kyle followed him without having to duck.
He emerged into the middle of a great cavern, longer than it was deep, that tapered at one end. Stalactites hung from the ceiling and a large ridge, some ten feet across, ran down the center of the cavern. Kyle could see all this without using his shuttered lantern, for the walls were covered with a combination of the naturally growing luminescent moss and, most interestingly, swirling streaks of shimmering bright blue embedded into the far stone wall that shone with a light rarely seen by the Deep People.
“Granthium,” breathed Kyle, mouth hanging open at the discovery of the most precious of all the metals that the dwarves worked with. Granthium, the substance that the master smiths and crafters, working in tandem with the high priests of Varcon, could enchant into magnificent artifacts. He turned to look at Fola, expecting to see her face lit up in joy at his discovery.
She emerged from the break-through, and Kyle saw her face become as hard as steel. She raised her crossbow to sight down its length toward him.
Kyle raised his hands in alarm, and stepped backward. What? Why? They could share in this find…
A noise from behind Kyle drew his attention to the center of the chamber. The ridge was rising into the air, accumulations of dust and dripped salt cracking away as it moved. At first Kyle thought it was another purple worm trapped in here, like Vidin but three times larger. But though the general shape was similar, it was clearly different. Mutated. Corrupted.
Its skin was not the vibrant shade of purple that was typical to purple worms; it was doughy and white, hanging off in places to reveal green flesh beneath. Tendrils reached out from all over the creature’s body—long stretching appendages groping in the dark for prey. And the creature’s many eyes blazed with a bright blue light that mirrored the granthium.
The monstrosity’s head rose thirty feet into the air, still not reaching the roof of the cavern. A screech filled the air and to Kyle, it was like someone had driven iron spikes through both ears and into his brain. He clamped his hands over his ears to stop the bombardment. Fola and the cleaner squad ran forward, shooting their crossbow bolts with practiced accuracy as they formed a protecting wall in front of Kyle.
The worm-like abomination crashed down, still screaming.
Its mouth opened, more tentacles coming out of the maw to grab a dwarf and pull him inside. The massive teeth came down on a second dwarf and bit him in two from top to bottom. Kyle averted his gaze from the savagery.
Fola and her sole remaining team member grabbed Kyle, each by an arm and made to drag him to the break-through hole.
“No!” screamed Kyle. “Where’s Vidin?”
He didn’t have time to hear a response, or be able to do anything else as the worm abomination charged.
“Is he well enough for me to see him?” asked a voice that Kyle did not recognize. It was dark.
Were his eyes closed? No, but he still couldn’t see anything. Blind?
“He has not yet awoken, Forger,” said a gruff voice.
The Forger? Was he asking after him? He had never had the honor of speaking to the leader of the Deep People.
“I’m awake…” came a feeble voice that Kyle was surprised to discover was his own.
“See, Nurse Kenan. The lad is awake,” said the first voice again.
“Five minutes. No more,” harrumphed the nurse.
“How are you feeling lad?” asked the first voice again. That must be the Forger.
“Am I blind?” asked Kyle, trying to flex his hands but feeling bandages wrapping them into tight parcels.
“No, Kyle. At least we hope not. Your eyes are wrapped up, like most of the rest of you. You had some terrible injuries.”
He breathed out slowly, the panic subsiding. “What happened?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. We lost two squads of cleaners down there. Damn fine ones too.”
Two crews? That meant
that Fola was dead too? Kyle would have cried if only he had the energy. Silence was the only remembrance he could manage.
“Kyle, I need to know what happened,” insisted the Forger.
“I-er- I don’t know if I can remember everything. We found a huge cavern, beautiful it was. There was granthium in the walls, Forger,” said Kyle, some excitement returning to his voice as he remembered the discovery.
“Granthium, you say, eh? No one has found any granthium in decades.” The Forger didn’t sound convinced, like he wanted to move on to things of more importance. “It was probably just the light. A different species of moss.”
“No, I swear! It was granthium.”
“Kyle, that doesn’t matter right now. Tell me what happened next.”
“There was a creature there. I didn’t see it at first. And then I thought it was just a purple worm, but it was horrifying. It looked dead and its eyes glowed blue. And tentacles reached out from all over its body. It pulled one of Fola’s men into its mouth before it ate clean through another.” The vision of the dwarf being ripped in half like a butchered umbral cow played out on the dark of his eyes at the memory.
“And then I don’t remember anything more. What happened?”
“I don’t know the details. That’s what I’m trying to ascertain. I do know the cleaners did their job and got you free. They tried to keep that beast from being able to get into Unedar Halt. But it was too powerful. We had a juggernaut come and bring down the tunnel, blocked that creature back in where you found it.”
“I’m so sorry, Master Forger. It’s all my fault.”
“Now, now, lad. You did the right thing. Mining is a dangerous business, everyone knows that. We have our protocols to reduce the risk, but sometimes, these things happen. Now get some sleep, I’d best be leaving you alone before I get into trouble.”
Tales of Kingshold Page 4
