The Invisible House
I waited for a few seconds before getting any closer. The mage had clearly not been expecting the light show, and had taken the brunt of it to the chest before he was knocked off his feet. And now he laid on the stone floor, smoke curling from his body and small rivulets of blood forming in the cracks between the masonry. I cautiously moved in, not wanting to gamble that he was actually dead until after I’d put my blades in him myself. I’d learned the hard way when I first went up against that fire-slinging Pureblood way back when. That had been years ago, but the pain from it had taught me just how much it cost to be careless.
I stopped my brief reminisce as a pained groan came from the downed keraunotheurge as he tried to move. I pulled out one of my daggers as I carefully drew towards him. I could see the black tree limb markings running across his face and the lengths of his arms and the pungent black stench of smoldering skin and charred hair hanging in the air.
There was a sudden flash, and his body was surrounded by the unmistakable blue-white sheen of electrical armor. In the next moment, he’d sat up and raised his arm once more, fingers spread. I braced myself as he shot another bolt of lightning this time, thinking he would be safe from the rebound with the added protection. The bolt hit me square in the chest- little more than a brief, sharp pain at this point, like being stuck by a large needle- and I didn’t try to resist. I focused- welcomed it, let it come in, felt the burning, tingling sensation as I conducted it from my heart down into the length of my left arm and into my hand.
I wouldn’t be able to pierce that shield, but I wouldn’t have to- I’d already worked around strategies far more cunning than those of this miserable old mage. I didn’t bother aiming for his body this time. I instead aimed for the ground next to where he lied. The barrier he’d thrown up was made to protect against electric currents through open air. But it did nothing against the workings of hydrosophy. The lightning bolt conducted through the blood on the floor, easily passing through the shield as it quickly followed the flow back to its source. There was another flash of light and pained yell as he contorted, the man’s blue robes now singed and smoking along with his blackened flesh.
There was a bang, and I turned to my right just in time to see a pair of of figures wearing chainmail come in- one armed with a mace, another with a crossbow, and felt before I heard the whistling of a bolt as it struck me in the shoulder with a sharp stab, followed by a burning sensation that was already beginning to spread.
I tore the fabric off of the sleeve of my shirt- I’d done this trick plenty of times, but you could only ever get so used to the pain. I unsealed one of the hexes I’d had put on me by one of our enchanters, and the pain went from a seething burn to a dull throb as the flesh around the wound quickly died off. With the flesh now necrotic and blood no longer passing through it, the poison from that arrow would be halted. I knew I’d be ill by the evening- I could never move fast enough to get rid off all of it- but enough that I wouldn’t drop dead any time soon.
The swordsman held out his blade and arcs of flame began to dance over its silver edge as he prepared to rush towards me. But I was already one step ahead as I used a sliver of geomancy magic, hardening the dead lump of flesh where the crossbow bolt had lodged with a scaled-down rock-skin spell. I didn’t need it to resist a sword’s blade for what I had in mind, but just enough to keep it in one piece as I tore the congealed lump off of my shoulder. My own blood began to pour on the ground as the swordsman charged towards me.
I threw the clump of putrefying flesh, and as I’d hoped, my attacker swung his sword mid-stride, splitting the clot open, and in the process, igniting the cursed blood that had begun to congeal within as it splashed over him and ignited by the blade’s fire. I leapt aside as he rushed past me, swinging blindly and screaming in pain as the crimson flames made quick word of his armor and began to consume his flesh.
“Bastard!” I heard the archer call out as I ducked behind a nearby pillar, barely missing another poison bolt as it flew past me. I looked down at my shoulder where I’d torn out the chunk of my own body. I peeked around the corner just long enough to catch sight of an elemental ward of Narkosa sewn into his paldron before I had to pull myself back in as another bolt whizzed by. The swordsman may have been some grunt, but the fact a Narkosan elite confirmed that our target was still here somewhere.
With no more throwing knives left on my person and knowing that I didn’t have the reserves to channel any type of magic that could overpower that ward of his, I used what little healing magic I had left to start clotting the blood as it continued to pour out, pulling my hand back as the blood started to congeal into dripping, ropey strands. Five clotted crimson threads now hung from the between the open wound in my shoulder and my digits as I felt the air around my hand grow cold. I saw my breath as the bloody strands solidified, and then repositioned my hand to catch them as their weight broke them from my fingertips, the tips needle-sharp and their weight reassuring.
I quickly quickly glanced around once more, this time from the opposite side, checking the elite once more. Another arrow flew past me, this time time close enough that I felt the air pushed against my nose. This was already too many close calls- I was going to slip up long before he tired out. But at least I’d confirmed that he was still firing from the cover of the doorway. “Here! He’s in here!” I heard him shout. More of his comrades would be on their way soon if I didn’t silence him now, assuming no one else had heard him already.
I dove out, flinging the icy blood-spikes just as the archer stepped out to line up another shot. The crimson blades hit their mark, sinking into his chest arms, and one into the side of his neck, sending a pulsing jet of blood onto the floor next to him as his severed carotid bled out and his shot landing wide of its mark as it hit the floor next to me. He stumbled only slightly, managing to load another bolt into his crossbow, but didn’t have the strength to raise his weapon again before he fell to the ground, clutching his pierced neck with his hand in a desperate attempt to stem the bleeding. I’d already gotten to my feet at this point, and had quickly moved over to his side, pulling the crossbow from his limp grasp, as well as the pouch of bolts from his belt. I’d be vulnerable in a moment, and had used up most of my reserves already. And I’d need as much of it as I could get when I finally confronted the man I’d been after for so long.
I point-blank fired a bolt into each of the soldiers’ skulls, partially to release them from the grievous suffering I’d inflicted on them, partially to make sure that they were both, indeed, dead and would stay that way. With their brain matter damaged, they’d become useless to any necromancer that might still be servile to the other houses.
There wasn’t enough healing magic left within me- I’d used most of it spearheading the attack on the manor grounds- so I had no choice but to cauterize the hole in my shoulder with a flaming hand. I had to fight the urge to scream from both the pain and the amount of concentration it took to channel enough heat to stop the wound from bleeding without further hurting myself or worse, setting myself aflame. Several pained moans escaped my mouth as the pain slowly relented, and I turned back towards where I’d let the mage fall. He was still there, blood continuing to pool under him, but his chest continued to rise and fall. Luckily for me, he still drew breath, for I needed him alive a little longer for the next step.
I grabbed him by the collar and the keraunotheurge let out a yell as I began to drag him, finally setting him down once we were behind an outcropping wall, leaving a long, red smear across the floor from where he’d dropped. I was about to be vulnerable and immobilized, so better to have some cover to hide behind. I took a moment to load the crossbow I’d just acquired from the fallen Narkosan archer. Reaching into a pouch on my belt, I heard the dying mage hiss through clenched teeth.
“So you’re him?” He asked, struggling to remain coherent. “The one that has the Purebloods so afraid?”
I pulled out what I was looking for- a pair of large needles linked together by a silver-colored thread- a little gift from the Houses of Dust and of Mended Flesh. The two were the only houses that had actually approached us to join our cause, albeit for very different reasons, seeing that the two houses had a rather sordid history of bad blood and conflicting ideologies going back for centuries.
The adherents to the House of Mended Flesh had a rather pacifist ideology, preferring to remain a neutral force in times of conflict. Yet they were always called upon first each time the houses went to war with each other, the other Purebloods expecting them to work themselves to death just to clean up the messes they made. Perhaps their leaders figured that once the other houses were either deposed or submitted to the Nulls’ cause, there’d be less fewer conflicts overall. And the ones that we all knew would still happen anyway after this was all over wouldn’t be as full of the large-scale catastrophes that the houses tended to lay down on the battlefield so haphazardly that they had to devote all their members and resources to just prolonging wars even further by constantly following their oath to heal any and all they come across. Even I agreed felt it was a great abuse of human charity when most of them just wanted to find ways to improve the human condition during peacetime.
The House of Dust, meanwhile, had had a steady dwindling number of adherents for several centuries now, and feared their practices would die out. Some of their practices had been long viewed as unethical at best to morally repugnant to just beyond downright inhumane. Summoning the spirits of the dead to serve the living when there was no reliable way to determine the deceased’s consent to the process had never sat well with most people outside their circles. Needless to say, the art of dragging a soul away from its eternal rest, imprisoning it in a rotting form, and forcing it to carry out some task, of either the menial or horrendous variety, had branded the school of necromancy’s followers as all but pariahs. But the House of Dust’s roll in the Crimson Insurgence had led to a huge pandemic of murders and lynchings afterwards, leaving the surviving worshippers of the Grave Mother to practice their studies in secret. When it became clear that the Nulls’ revolution might actually succeed, they’d been quick to approach us. While I personally couldn’t condone some of their practices, none of us could argue that their curses and hexes to absorb and counter magic had been incredibly useful for us.
The keraunotheurge coughed up a mouthful of bright blood; the series of electrical shocks must have ruptured all the capillaries and small blood vessels in his lungs. The poor bastard was going to drown in his own fluids before too long. And now, here he was lying in a puddle of his own blood, a coat of arms of the House of Storms on the wall nearby. Someone as old and grey-haired as him had likely been serving them for his entire adult life at this point, and now he was going to die for them, all because they’d chosen tooth and nail just to try to preserve the status quo.
And because I’d spent the last three years absolutely hell-bent on hunting down a single man.
I held up the pair of enchanted, thread-bound spines, fashioned from polished bone carved from a human tibia, holding up my free index and middle-finger in my free hand and producing a small jet of fire that ran down their length to ensure they were sterilized. Normally, a skilled healer could purge an infection within a day’s time, but my particular situation more often than not meant I had to rely on conventional treatment for anything other than just direct trauma. And even then that wasn’t easy compared to the rest of my peers.
The mage screamed and contorted from the pain, but was unable to move from the electric paralysis, as I stabbed one needle just below the tip of the sternum, as Haalig, one of our necromancers, had shown me- easiest way to absorb the most magical energies, if the survival of the “donor” wasn’t a concern. I breathed deeply several times, clenching my left fist in and out until I saw a vein become visible in the fold of my elbow, and then jammed the needle in. The silver thread between the two began glowing a bright, light blue color, and I could feel a rush, all the pain of my recent injuries disappearing altogether, as all that magic flooded into me.
The device itself was a heinously clever contraption. As everyone knew, Nulls couldn’t generate or manipulate magical energies like normal people could, and despite whatever details of my particular condition that even now I was still uncovering, it appeared I was no exception to this rule. Once I’d convinced the heads of the Houses of Dust and Mended Flesh to reconcile their differences- at least until after the war- a few of them had worked together to produce a number of these. Enchanted with both the necromantic and healing arts, the needle would curse the flesh it came into contact to, setting it begin rotting, and then would begin casting a rapid-action healing spell using the donor’s body as the source of the magic. The thread between the two needles was enchanted with a siphon. This caused the needle to draw more and more magic from the donor’s body to the wound site, only for it to be continuously siphoned out quicker than it could take effect. Meanwhile, the one on my arm had likewise placed a healing enchantment on the pierced area, with a powersink hex at the same time, drawing all that energy into me without actually using it. The result was a runaway chain-reaction that caused the target’s own body to expel all of its magic into one end and feed it into the recipient's body until the needle was pulled out the target had been bled dry of magic. Sure, there was a net loss of energy, but it beat the hell out of the alternative- Null or not, fireballs still hurt.
I grabbed the crossbow and and loaded a bolt into place as I knelt down while keeping my back against the wall, with the dying mage at my feet. Such a traumatic transfusion of magic energies was no doubt harmful to him, but with his injuries he likely didn’t have much time left anyway. He’d stopped making noises, save for his raspy breathing as his final, inevitable death rattle approached. His head was tilted to one side, and I traced his gaze back once more to the House of Storms’ coat-of-arms hanging from the nearby wall. I wondered briefly what he might be thinking- likely regret of some kind. But was it regret that he failed to fulfil his duty to the Great House? Or had he finally realized that he’d been lied too- that the Great Houses were even more corrupt than we’d ever imagined- that it’s leaders would and already had sent so many people to pointless deaths just so they could cling to their power for a few more years? That they would plunge a nation into chaos just so they could earn an extra half-percent that year?
As he finally stopped breathing and the flow of magic ebbed, sputtered and then ceased, I supposed it didn’t really matter. I’d started this one little one-man crusade of mine alone, but will millions of now following suit, it was far beyond my control, even if I wanted to stop. And while my aim had been personal, I’d realized long ago that even after I killed the man I’d been after for years, if I was still alive, be going to neither home nor heaven afterwards. Not until this was all done- not until the Great Houses were all either destroyed, or their members subjugated to serve the people who’d suffered and died for the selfish wants and greed of so few for so long.
I was born in Edinhall, in the Province Welslea. Save for being born into moderate wealth, the minutiae of my childhood are relatively normal and, unimportant. Like all non-magic users, I was basically born into servitude for one of the twelve Great Houses- The House of The Mountain, to be specific. Looking back now, I realized I had been lucky- though not magic users themselves, my parent’s business expertise had earned them a respected status among the House nobles, enough so that I personally never had to personally endure the same kind of mistreatment that others incapable of wielding magic regularly suffered. I remember that, being the privileged, ignorant and selfish youth that I was, I never gave any real thought to these injustices, only observing them with barely more than a cursory glance from time to time.
My parents’ standing, however, was not enough to keep me out of the mandatory military service that all the Great Houses demanded- fresh meat for the grinder as the Houses continuously had their wars and conquests over the most petty and selfish reasons. So many young men and women, finally old enough to change the world- sent off to die before they had a chance by their leaders. While no doubt chaotic by its nature, war has a lot more to it by design than most people realize.
But it was during my conscription that I learned that I was, in fact, a Null. For throughout my tenure, I’d slain a number of mages, and in the process had survived magic and spells that should have otherwise doomed those with no magical prowess on their own. A lightning bolt that could have exploded a tree. A hit to the face by a fireball that could have ignited a firestorm. Encasement in a layer of rock that should have crushed my very bones under its own weight. Though these attacks had been agonizingly painful and injurious, the fact that I had not only survived, but remembered the tortuous toll of so many things meant to be outright fatal is what gained the attention of my superiors.
While not exactly a part of everyday discussion, it was a well known fact that amongst the non-magic population, a small percentage are born a step beyond being unable to wield magic, but are, in fact, resistant to it in all forms- even able to outright nullify it in some cases. Though this didn’t mean we were immune; though some magics could reflect or were more ideal for countering certain others, all shields and wards had their limits. With enough energy, a cursed flame could produce enough heat to vaporize the water of a blessed rain before it could even come into contact with it to put it out, and a strong enough jet of water could shatter diamond armor. In some cases, it came down to which mage had enough power to put into such a spell, and whether they were willing to take such risks.
But it was these incidents that drew the attention of the heads of the House of the Mountain. As the chaos of the war waned, I was summoned to one of their courts, and questioned at great length about what exactly had happened. There was no point in lying then- they had enough accounts and eyewitnesses to each event, and it had been a safe bet that if they wanted me out of the way, they have already found the means and an excuse. So I could only assume that someone in the House of the Mountain was already making plans for me, and they just wanted the details from me.
Given the nature of nulls, and that we were born among the unspelled population, it had long been assumed that most of us could go through our entire lives and die without ever even being aware of any anti-magic abilities. And those of us that did were usually seen as somewhat of a liability in front-line warfare, for our resistance to magic made it that much more difficult for healers to treat mortal wounds, or the myriad of diseases one can contract from the battlefield.
Needless to say, the fact I had survived through so much in battle had obviously caught the attention of a few nobles. Nulls with survival skills and combat experience were often employed as special agents by the Great Houses, often for special circumstances where magic might be more of a liability than an asset- such as infiltrating buildings trapped with certain wards or hexes, or securing cursed artifacts or weapons that could warp or corrupt the energies of a mage, or even assassinating other mages too powerful for regular wards or shields to withstand.
For the next decade, I worked behind the scenes, spying undercover, collecting intelligence, and assassinating a number of high-ranking mages and nobles over the years.
It was also during this time that I first met Lady Sera Soltessim of the Bronze Legion.
You already know what happened.
I pulled the magic needle out of my arm and the husk of the mage, carefully wrapping them up and putting them back in my pouch. I glanced once more at the mantle of the House of Storms up on the nearby wall- by this evening, that flag and everything else bearing the same mark would probably be in burn pit out in the middle of the courtyard. If everything was still going well.
I heard a loud thud accompanied by the sound of wood cracking and breaking, and turned just in time to see splinters flying as a nearby barricaded door was knocked off of its hinges. I was already bringing the crossbow to bear on the figure standing in the doorway, but thankfully recognized the emblems of the House of Mended Flesh- the Crimson Rod betwixt a pair of serpents- all over his armor and shield, that I recognized one of their paladins.
“There you are!” I heard the familiar voice of the second figure- wearing a heavy, reddish-brown coat, covered in sigils and runic symbols and made of flame-resistant materials, and who had been leveling a modified shellgun past the paladin’s shoulder- as he lowered it and stepped past the mountain of armor. Though I couldn’t see see the face underneath the hood or protective mask, I recognized Captain Wilhelm Kieler in all that clothing.
Kieler was an alchemist from the House of the Eternal Flame, and had been instrumental in bringing it under the Null’s cause. He’d offered us all the House’s resources so long as we placed General Mindel at it’s head once we’d seized control and assimilated its remaining forces. In return, he’d had his supporters within their ranks- informants, saboteurs and assassins- cripple their war machine as we advanced through their territories until we finally dealt the fatal blow to their leadership. I’d be lying if I said I was suspicious of his motives- what the general’s plans were after this war was over and whether or not we could trust them- but so far, Mindel had kept true to his promise, sending some of the best alchemists and demolitionists on the entire continent to fight alongside us. And their saboteurs and spies had been instrumental in destroying the impossible war machines of the House of Flux.
We then all heard a chorus of voices coming from outside- Ia! Ia! Ia!, they repeated in an angry and vicious chant. I glanced out of the window, and even through the clouds of dust and smoke, I could see a single soldier slice through the rope of a flagpole, followed by the Flag of Storms falling to the ground. The others nearby raised their weapons aloft and continued the rallying cry.
Ia! Ia! Ia!
The others could claim success all they wanted, but I wasn’t ready to declare victory; not yet.
“What about the search?” I asked Kieler.
“We’ve finished locking down the rest of the buildings; just one wing left in this one.” He replied.
“And the locks?”
“Dimensional locks are still holding and no more reports from the ring. He won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.”
I checked crossbow I’d just lifted one more time before we proceeded onward.
“Let’s not keep him waiting, then.”
The years I’d spent as a spy and assassin for the House of Mountains had been a different kind of war altogether. While I’d often sought after some sort of twisted fame, glory or infamy amongst the many bodies I’d left on those bloody battlefields in my younger army years, my skills had now been re-honed to avoid all notice and prying eyes. Instead of securing forts and towns, I was now securing securing secrets; and I’d gone from bearing the banner of the House to leaving no trace of my work. Few people besides my commanders and myself were ever aware of what I did, for I left no evidence that I had ever been in my target’s abode, and most alchemists and machinists thought some device of theirs had been misassembled or malfunctioned before realized that some key component had been removed. And with the various tools the house’s spymasters had granted me, one never suspected that someone had broken in and copied some sensitive paperwork when there was no evidence of forced entry or that anything had been moved. The only evidence ever left behind was that which we deliberately planted- false leads to dead ends, fingers pointing at the other houses, or as messages of intimidation. And of course, when killing was involved, it was either no witness or no survivors.
But the job had also made forced lonesomeness a necessity. Gone were the days of camaraderie and brotherhood that I had shared with my brothers and sisters in battle, instead replaced with rehearsed lines and staged conversations with others whilst I worked undercover, and only communicating with those I knew I could trust in codewords and phrases through dead drops rather than face-to-face.
Those periods where I came home to where Lady Soltessim waited for me at Fort Kassandra was the only respite I had from that bleak- and oftentimes violent- line of work. And though I wouldn’t wish the horrors I’ve seen on anyone, she herself as a soldier knew them all too well. But war was what introduced us. Our shared hopes our futures, and the future of others- so that later generations might someday never have to see what we had witnessed- drew us close. Our scars, of both flesh and mind, made us vulnerable and open to one another, as only lovers leave themselves defenseless to each other. Our desire to ease each others’ pains and burdens always left us longing to return.
And so we planned our futures, for time together helped us to forget the troubles and vagaries of the rest of a world.
And then, I watched as the entire world fell down.
The paladin kicked open the door to the adjacent room, and barely had time to hide behind his shield before a torrent of crossbow bolts and flashes of lightning beat against his tower shield. His wards and armor held, for the moment, but we began working quickly, as it would only take a few good hits in to overwhelm. Even though it was a lost cause at this point, we all knew that these men weren’t going to leave here alive- even if we let them go, the men and women outside who had fought, bled, and watched theirs’ die wouldn’t allow them. At this moment, it was only about reaching our target- Kieler and the soldiers outside so that they’d know they’d won today, and me for my own personal reasons.
I glanced over at Kieler, taking cover behind the wall opposite from me, and he nodded, waiting to follow my lead- the wasn’t the first time he and I had cleared out an entire room together.
I picked up a piece of debris laying on the floor nearby, channeling aerotheurge and hydrosophist energies into it, and watched it start to glow white as I quickly tossed it around the corner and into the room. Even over the clamour of sparks and arrows, I could hear the sound of water as it began to fall from the ceiling inside as the air pressure lowered and all the moisture throughout the room began to congeal, soaking the interior and pooling all over the floor.
I called for the paladin to step back as I saw the edge of the water spread and creep its way through the door back into our room. A single drop of this could mean certain death for what we were about to do next- I dared not risk any of our men falling prey.
As the pool crept even closer, I pulled off one of my gauntlets and looked at my fingers. Three of them looked ordinary, but the other two had jagged, pitch-placed lines running down the lengths from the tips to the palm- the ones that still had hexes sealed away in them, courtesy of a mage from the House of Flux, after it fell under the Nulls’ banner. I’d already used three of them in this battle- I just hoped these last two would be enough to see me through to the end of this particular battle.
I extended a middle-finger and concentrated, an image of the seal of Halthos sat before me as I closed my eyes, and I watched as it snapped in two, emitting a glowing purple effluvium from within the breakage. I opened my eyes back up to see that the water at my finger had turned a muddy, filthy brown, and watched as it quickly spread up the puddle back through the doorway, the spell spreading throughout the room as the water continued to blacken.
Kieler then enacted part two of our room-clearing procedure as he pulled out a canister with a knob sticking out from the top, which he pulled and twisted before leaning out for just a brief second and tossing the device into the room before ducking back behind cover as another barrage of arrows and lightning bolts struck the hall and wall.
*3...2...1…
There was a loud FWOOMP! accompanied by a loud roar and a bright red flash from within the next room, followed quickly by the horrified, tortured screams of the soldiers within that quickly fell silent. Taking no chances, we waited for several seconds before risking a look to see that they were indeed dead. The hellfire grenade that Kieler had thrown into the room was a special type of flame- an infernal fire that burned so hot that it could literally liquify flesh and melt it off of the bone. And with the curse that I had placed on all the water spread throughout the room, the entire room was now ablaze- the green stone walls of the old castle the only thing keeping it from consuming the entire building itself. Angry red tendrils of flame danced and stretched all along the floor, enwrapped and blanketing the already ashen remnants of the soldiers who’d been firing upon us- the men already dead and halfway cremated before they’d even hit the ground, and their weapons and armor either melted into puddle or vaporized into the jet-black smoke that was quickly filling the room.
Kieler then pulled out another device similar to the hellfire grenade, but white in color with a single blue stripe around the circumference, and likewise pulled and turned the handle on it before throwing in into the room that now resembled the ninth level of hell. He kept a few of these on his person at all times, as the House of Waves wasn’t officially siding with us. Wishing to retain the neutrality they’d been privileged to throughout most of history and possibly hedge their bets so that they might keep a seat at the table- regardless of who won- they’d been willing to supply us with material and some tactical support covertly, but didn’t dare send any soldiers or battle mages in case the Nulls’ revolution was crushed; basically wanting to remain on the right side of history regardless of who came out on top.
The canister clattered and rolled onto the ground, before it burst and was replaced by a blinding white light. We all stepped back behind cover and averted our eyes as we fell the air and smoke suddenly rush from the room through the door past us with a loud roar as we braced ourselves against the pressure wave. It then ceased for a brief moment, before suddenly rushing back the other way, and we all held our breath to avoid inhaling any of the acrid smoke or odor still riding on the currents. Finally, there was silence, save for the clamour of fighting and screaming outside.
Kieler and I cautiously glanced back around or respective corners, confirming that the fire had indeed been put out. The House soldiers’ ashes were now either strewn about the floor or hanging in the air in a thin cloud; their armor and arms quickly hardening into the shapes of the puddles they’d been reduced to under the hellish intensity of the flames. No amount of water- holy or otherwise, would have been able to extinguish such a dark and ravenous firestorm, and so the only real option without waiting for the fire to burn itself out had been to use one of the House of Wave’s contraptions to briefly suck all of the oxygen out of the room- long enough to starve the fire to death.
The paladin resumed his position at point as our group continued into the room, still searching for the man I’d came here to kill.
I’d been working as an agent for six years before anyone even had an idea that I was more than just another Null.
The incident had been an infiltration mission into a long-abandoned fortress just within the northern edge of the House of the Mountain’s territory, and while it wasn’t uncommon for larger groups of drifters and poorer travelers who couldn’t afford proper lodgings in nearby towns to make camp in the old ruins, the amount and length of this activity had finally gotten my superiors’ attention. While bands of bandits and marauders have and will likely always be a problem, it was very rare for them to operate out of one location for more than just a few days, les the authorities track them down. Fearing that it was some guise for an operation by a rival house, I was sent to investigate.
What I found exactly isn’t important here, other than my testimony, and what little evidence that was left afterwards, suggested the they were working for the House of the Eternal Flame. But the degrees of their involvement there are no longer that relevant, seeing as we orchestrated their takeover with the backing of Kieler’s men- with the former commanders either now dead, imprisoned, or otherwise hiding in exile.
What I will talk about in some length, however, is that that a single mistake on my part caused the entire mission to fall apart very quickly, and in my attempt to escape, I found myself surrounded by a number of very angry pyromancers. And having already shrugged off a number of what should have otherwise been fatal flame attacks, the mages had already discerned that i was a Null, and likely guessed that I was from the House of the Mountain, given that we were in their territory.
Now, I remember clearly watching all five of them focusing and channeling their energies as they prepared to unleash the strongest spells they could muster- not willing to take any risks of me escaping and reporting what I’d found. And I clearly remember savoring the memory of Lady Soltessim to take with me to my grave as I felt the first tongues of fire touch my skin.
What I don’t remember clearly, however, is what exactly happened between that moment, and when I found myself on the ground, looking up to see that the entire encampment had been consumed by a gigantic firestorm that would have put the legends of Tinj-Hussor to shame. Save for what had been a brief moment of of horrible, indescribable pain unlike anything I’d experienced during any torture, either in training to endure it or in actual practice. There were multiple sensations- a dying star bled into my veins and burnt itself clean; an ocean of black and rotted flesh-turned-fluid manifested in my stomach and was then purged through my limbs and out of my extremities as though in some arcane ritual, and rolling lightnighstorm danced its way through my brain, threatening to punch holes in my skull and burst forth through my eyes and ears as it frantically sought to escape its fleshy prison.
I had no idea how much time had passed when I finally regained my senses, but while there were no screams or cries of pain, I could see where immolated remains of my attackers lay inert on the ground around me. Deciding not to question this strange fortune, I grabbed what materials I was able to recover and fled, eventually making to into the safety of the shadowy, expansive forest nearby. Only when I was sure I wasn’t followed nor in any other danger did I finally stop and look at myself. And while I wasn’t surprised to see that most of my clothing and gear was either charred black or gone completely, there wasn’t a single burn on me.
I was confused, to say the least, wondering how it was possible for all five of those mages to have made some sort of miscalculations to their spells that I would have survived that, for none of the equipment I had been wearing had enchantments or wards strong enough to have survived such an attack. And that still didn’t explain how everything in the camp had gone up in flames except me.
Not knowing what else to do, I started to make my way back to the town of Shilam nearby, where on the way, I spotted a number of soldiers and guardsmen, and I later found out that they’d been sent to investigate the fort, when people from as far away as Uran had seen the glow from the flames. Needless to say, I hurried back to report to the House of the Mountain on what had happened, not sure of my fate as I was supposed to get in and out without drawing any attention as possible, and at that had, failed miserably. And I didn’t dare run for fear of whatever sentence the house lords might give me, as I dare not risk them doing anything to Lady Soltessim.
So I was surprised that after their own investigations were finished at the incident site, they became much more interested in my own testimony and what I remembered of the events, and it quickly became obvious that any potential imprisonment or punishment was no longer of any concern to them. Although after several weeks of the house’s alchemists, apothecaries, inquisitors and even a few mages from the House of Mended Flesh running various tests and experiments on me, I began wishing it was.
(Continued Below)
Submitted October 11, 2018 at 07:31PM by ThatDudeWithTheBeard https://ift.tt/2RGfitL
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