First Sorcerer

by Kyle Johnson

  After they finished draining and destroying the second skull, Geltheriel stood quietly and looked over the destruction. “This doesn’t seem real,” she whispered softly. Seeing his puzzled look, she shook her head and explained. “Gasha are fearsome opponents, aleen. They are immortal guardians, fashioned from the souls and bones of those who died in betrayal. Those tortured souls are bound to the fragments of bone you see scattered around, and because of that, they can never truly be killed. At best, their pieces can be scattered, but they will eventually reform. They grow stronger by consuming the LP and mana of those they slay, so confronting one will only lead to its growing more powerful in the long run.

  She looked up at him steadily. “We are taught to flee the gasha if possible,” she told him quietly. “Any blood they shed strengthens them, so even if we can overcome them, every battle ends in ultimate defeat. And yet, here we stand, having permanently ended four of these creatures, two of them without ever being in real danger. These are the types of stories that appear only in legends, aleen, and I for one am no legend.”

  Aranos shrugged. “I think a lot of it is that I’m a Sorcerer,” he pointed out. “I’m kind of a hard counter for these things. I’ll probably have more trouble with the edimmu, to be honest: there’s just so many of them, and I think they respawn.”

  “If you mean, they are reborn when slain,” the woman supplied, “then yes, they ‘respawn’. Just as gasha are fashioned from betrayal, edimmu are spirits of despair. When they are slain, they simply return to their summoner, to be reborn and returned to battle. Yet, they can be defeated, for if the one who called them is destroyed, they are allowed to return to whatever fate awaited them in the next life.”

  “So, when we kill one, their creator knows about it?” Aranos guessed. “That’s kind of what I figured. It’s why I kept moving whenever one died.”

  “A wise decision,” she agreed. “However, I do not think that whoever placed these gasha will know of their deaths, so we have some time to recover if needed.”

  Aranos nodded slowly. “But,” he reasoned, his mind working furiously, “that also means that whoever is in charge will probably think that the Spire Tree is secure, right? I mean, you said it yourself: people run from the gasha, they don’t fight them. That means they’ll assume we’re still stuck on the first level somewhere, hiding out. What would you do in that case?”

  Geltheriel frowned. “I would send the edimmu out in force,” she answered. “I would scour the city for our location.”

  “And, I’d probably send them out in small groups,” he pointed out excitedly. “After all, I don’t care if they die, right? If one is killed, it’ll just tell me where my target is, and I can send the rest after them in waves.”

  “All of this seems reasonable,” she allowed. “I do not see the reason for excitement, though.”

  “It means that the arch below is probably only lightly guarded,” he answered with a grin. “And the mass of the edimmu are scattered all over the city below us. Even if we kill whatever force is guarding the entrance to the Spire Tree, it’ll take a long time for their master to recall enough of them back to the Tree to be dangerous. By then, we can have located the food supply, gathered some intel, and been back up the Tree safely.”

  “It will alert their creator to our presence in the Tree, though,” she warned cautiously. “If there are further guardians above, they will be gathered and ready.”

  Aranos nodded. “But we’ll be healthy and prepared, as well,” he pointed out. “We’ll have to adjust our strategy, sure, but we can still do it.”

  Geltheriel stared at him a moment, her gaze seeming to weigh his choices, but then she nodded quickly. “So be it,” she agreed. “I said I would follow your lead, so I will. Let us go see what awaits us below.”

  They passed through the archway into the center of the Spire Tree. The doorway opened to a wide, 10 foot by 10 foot landing. To the left, Aranos saw an equally wide staircase curling up and out of sight, following the curve of the enormous tree; to his right, a similar staircase descended into darkness. The landing was lit only by the dim light coming in the entryway behind them, which only illuminated the first few feet of each staircase before they were swathed in shadows.

  “Not very bright in here,” he muttered as he summoned a Mana Arrow, its silvery radiance shedding a dim light at best. I really need to work on a basic light spell, he thought absently. I’ll bet you need light-aspected mana or something, though. “How did the elves keep from bumping into each other on the stairs? And why have stairs when it takes a teleporter to get into the city in the first place? Why not just teleport from level to level?”

  Geltheriel chuckled at his questions. “Elven cities do have teleporters,” she acknowledged. “And the wealthy and powerful use them to travel about, as you say. However, such devices require a great deal of mana and usually need two or three wizards sharing the SP cost to power them. Paying even junior Wizards for such a task is prohibitive for the majority of the populace.

  “Thus, the Spire Stairs,” she continued, gesturing around them. She moved over to the far wall and pointed to a series of flowing runes that ran just below the level of the ceiling, extending the length of the wall and following the rise and descent of the stairs to either side. “These runes would usually provide light for all within: such a Spell requires very little SP and lasts for many days, even extending the length of the Spire Tree. Of course, with the city Fallen, there are none to power the runes, and I do not suggest you attempt to do so. Certainly, seeing the runes awaken would serve as a warning to those above and below, should they be watching.”

  “Yeah, good point,” he nodded, removing his hand from the wall he had just touched, thinking to banish the darkness. “So, what can we expect down below? It is open, like this? Bigger landing, or smaller?”

  “If the city were intact, I could say for certain,” she hedged. “With it lying in ruins, I can surmise at best. However, normally the lowest level and crown would be sealed by doors, to prevent easy entrance from the lesser races and to limit access to the city’s rulers to those with a genuine need or who have been summoned. I would imagine that the doors were destroyed in whatever cataclysm befell the city, but the edimmu may have attempted to repair them.”

  “It’s probably best to assume there are doors,” he reasoned, “and that they’re locked from the outside. If that’s the case, we’ll have to blow them somehow. Just in case there are no doors, though, we should probably move quietly, and in Stealth.”

  “True,” she acceded. “I am guessing from the light you hold in your hand that you have not acquired the Night Vision Skill?” When he shook his head, she grunted. “Of course not. You can acquire the trail of a single edimmu when it is overlaid by dozens of others, but you never learned to adjust your eyes to darkness.”

  She sighed. “Well, there is no time to teach you now,” she said with a trace of irritation, “and we cannot travel with light and remain in Stealth. I will lead; you must remain in contact with me and follow. I will move carefully, but I will be Stealthed and in darkness, so you must maintain contact with me, or you will find yourself lost in the darkness.”

  “Umm, that probably won’t be necessary,” he said with a touch of embarrassment. “I, uh, can actually track you just fine when you’re Stealthed. I should be able to follow you, even in the dark.”

  She stared at him evenly for a moment. “And he tells me this now,” she grumbled. “We will discuss that later, including how you can do this and why you did not inform me sooner.

  “For now, though, let us see what awaits us below,” she spoke with a slight huff before turning and slipping into Stealth. Having picked up her scent earlier, Aranos had no trouble spotting her, though, even when she descended into the gloom of the stairs.

  At first, the light from above continued to provide a trace of illumination, and he had no trouble following her down the staircase. After they had made what he guessed was a half-turn ar
ound the trunk, though, that small light had faded, and he was forced to slow down and feel his way down the steps. The only thing in his vision was the hazy form of the elf woman, but despite her assurances, she was moving more quickly than he could without risking a fall, and the distance between them grew with every passing minute.

  At some point, her image vanished around the curve of the tree, and Aranos found himself alone in the darkness. A twinge of panic started to creep into his thoughts, urging him to hurry, but when he tried to move faster, he stumbled and nearly fell. He stopped and took a deep breath, noticing as he did that he still had Geltheriel’s scent, and that overlaid with it was the dry, musty odor of the edimmu. He moved slowly forward, focusing on those odors, refusing to acknowledge his rising panic. The elf’s scent was stronger than the others, mostly the smell of her sweat and the lingering reek of her confinement that she could not launder from her ragged clothing or hair. He also smelled the scent of his bandages, as well as the medicine he had given her, which he guessed was either still on her breath or was creeping out in her sweat.

  The scent of the edimmu was slowly growing as he descended though, and he realized that there was likely still a number of them waiting below. He focused on trying to sift out the odors of individual creatures, trying to identify unique scents to see if he could determine what that number was. He was still working on it when Geltheriel’s form swam back into view, and a minute later, he felt himself step onto a flat surface with a bit of a stumble.

  “There you are,” she muttered quietly. “I told you to stay in contact with me.”

  He shrugged, unsure if she could even see him. “I still made it,” he pointed out. “Not like there was anywhere else to go.”

  “True,” he said begrudgingly. “You cannot see it, but the doors are intact and barred, oddly, from this side.”

  “I suppose to keep the edimmu from wandering back up?” he guessed. “Wait, the doors are intact, or repaired?”

  “Night vision does not give excellent detail,” she replied cautiously, “but they appear to be undamaged.”

  That doesn’t make sense, he thought furiously. If the city was taken by invaders, how did they storm the upper layers if they didn’t use the stairs? Maybe they all flew or teleported, but usually in games, troops that can do that are shock troops, designed to hit strategic places ahead of a main invasion.

  He blinked as he recalled his trek through the city, an intuition popping into his mind. In fact, how come I didn’t see a single trace of an invading horde in the whole city so far? he wondered slowly. I mean, sure, it would have happened a long time ago, but with my Tracking Skill, I think I would have noticed something, right? Even if it was just an unidentified track that didn’t belong to anything I knew?

  “In any case,” she continued, either not noticing his distraction or choosing to ignore it, “it will make our attack simpler. We can unbar the door and attack them with surprise, then retreat and bar the entrance if there are more than we can handle.”

  “There are 14,” he said absently, his mind still turning over the information in his head. An idea was forming, but it was slow in coming and he didn’t have time to dwell on it. “At least, that’s all the ones I can smell.”

  Geltheriel muttered quietly for a moment. “Perhaps at some time in the future,” she finally said a bit waspishly, “we could discuss the limits of your Abilities, so that I am not constantly surprised. However, that is good information to have. 14 is…a significant number.”

  “It should be fine,” he waved dismissively. “I’ll bind them in the Entangling Web and hit them with my new Hailstorm Spell. That should do at least 100 damage to them, so only a few should survive, and you can mop them up.”

  “And if they are spread out beyond the range of your spell?” she pressed. “What then?”

  “They don’t seem very intelligent,” he pointed out. “They just kind of charge at you when they see you. I’ll block the entryway with the Spell and they’ll probably all run into it trying to get to us. If not, you guard me, and I’ll start picking them off at range with Mana Arrows. That should convince them to charge, and I can hit them with the Spell combo again.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “A good enough plan,” she finally admitted. “Crude, but it should be sufficient for what we are dealing with.”

  It didn’t take them long to prepare, although being unable to see in the dark, Aranos was unable to do much except follow where the Keeper told him to move. A minute or so later, she warned him, “Close your eyes, aleen. I am preparing to unbar the doors, and when they open, the light may be painful to you at first.” Aranos nodded and closed his eyes, sensing rather than seeing as she moved to the door and shifted something heavy and wooden.

  Sudden light bathed his face, and he winced despite his eyes being shut tightly. He cracked them open and slowly allowed his eyes to adjust for a second or two before opening them fully. He immediately saw that their surprise assault had worked as they hoped, and Geltheriel was engaged with two of the edimmu already. She was holding the unarmed creatures off with only minor difficulty, but more were coming, and he knew she would soon be overwhelmed. Even as he watched, her shoulders seemed to droop in weariness, and her staff hesitated for a moment, allowing one of the creature’s claws to rake across her thigh.

  He quickly cast his Entagling Web, placing it before the door to catch the creatures as they raced at the two elves. The strands of mana formed readily and wove about the charging creatures, the hooks catching limbs and torsos, tangling them in diaphanous webs of magic. He watched the creatures struggle until the last one seemed fully immobilized before he cast his second spell, his Hailstorm, for the first time.

  The whirling vortex of mana slowly formed, tiny grains of dense magic swirling outward at high speed to slam into unprotected flesh and bone. The impacts of pellets against rubbery skin reminded him of hail striking fabric in a staccato rain of death. Unable to cry out, the edimmu endured the onslaught in silence, falling one after another as his storm pulverized bone and tore dark blue skin.

  Geltheriel capitalized on the Spell by hurling the edimmu she was facing into the web, one after another, first with a straight kick to the chest, followed by the staff’s butt slamming into another’s forehead. The last, she grabbed by the arm, wincing as its claws ripped her skin before she flung it bodily into the maelstrom.

  When the Spells finally ended, releasing the edimmu to collapse on the ground, most of the creatures began to shiver into blue smoke and race away from the Tree. Six remained, bleeding a thick, black ichor and crawling toward their attackers. Geltheriel approached the fallen creatures cautiously, hesitating and seeming to gather herself as she neared them, before she began finishing the remainder of the creatures off.

  When she finished, she shuddered and wiped her brow. “Give me a moment,” she said tiredly. “Their Aura of Despair takes a bit to shake off.”

  Oh, so that’s why she was hesitating! he realized as he processed her words. Probably why she was slowing down when she was fighting them, too. “Huh,” he said, reaching into his pack for a bandage. “I’ve never noticed it. Probably because I’ve always taken them out from a distance, I guess.”

  “That would explain it,” she nodded, holding up a hand. “Do not waste a good bandage on me,” she demurred. “If you are correct and a food supply is near, I will heal soon enough, and this is minor damage.”

  Aranos hesitantly put his bandages away. She’s right, he realized. I can’t make more of these right now; we need to save them for when we really need them. “Okay, now we need to figure out where the food is,” he said as he closed his belt pouch. “I think I know where they were holding you from here, at least generally. Once I cross their trail again, I’ll know it and be able to follow them back.”

  He dropped into Stealth and led her into the maze of shattered structures, his nose assuring her that she was following closely. His sense of direction turned out to be accurate, an
d it wasn’t long before he crossed the trails of the food-carrying edimmu and led her deeper into the city, parallel to the curve of the Spire Tree.

  It took around 15 minutes for him to realize that the trail was leading them to something of an oddity: the only stone building he had seen in the entire city to this point. They stopped and he pointed it out to her, hoping she would explain.

  “That is of dwarven make,” she said simply. “Before the Feast, all of the races could be found in a city as large as this one. It should have survived well: for all their faults, the dwarves are masters of building and engineering.”

  They watched the building for several minutes. Aranos saw that recent tracks of hundreds of the twisted creatures led to and from the building, enough that even though they saw no signs of the edimmu moving now, he was loath to enter through the front.

  “I don’t like this,” he whispered at last. “It looks like the edimmu move in and out of this place all the time, and as recently as a few hours ago. Why is there no sign of them, now?”

  “Perhaps your conjecture was correct,” she guessed in reply, “and they are all out combing the city for us? They may even now be on their way back to the Spire Tree, hoping to catch us.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “Or, maybe there are fifty of them in there right now, waiting for us.”

  “You cannot tell?” she asked in seeming surprise. “You knew that the edimmu awaited us beyond the Spire Tree door; how can you not tell if they are within?”

  “I can tell you that some of them are here,” he corrected her, his nose testing the air. “But there are so many trails here that it would take me an hour to sort them all out and determine which ones were still inside and which ones left.”

  “So, what do you suggest?” she asked. “We can scout the building and see if there is another entrance.”