Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

“They are a venting mechanism for the magic below we can’t see. Fire, Earth, and Water Magic bound into some greater force. Probably multiple ley lines running parallel to and crossing the Wards to power them. The suppressive force must be absolutely incredible,” I shook my head, watching the glow of the fumaroles extending off to the south on both sides of us. “Vegetation is getting thicker, and the river is starting to broaden.”

“Let’s see if there’s something where those lead,” Kris pointed at the columns leading off the river, and I just shrugged.

We’d been keeping pretty busy on the way down. I’d seen my first Summons of the purple elves, which were called Hea Tumeroks. Something was... off about them, as if they shouldn’t look the way they did, and Kris said something was strange about their physiology when she looked it over before it discorporated, like it was meant to be something else, and had been shifted to look like it did.

There were also a lot more of the aggressive Rats about this place, spewing acid and frost of all things. They were as crazy as attack beasts, charging us fearlessly with their squeaks. If they had real counterparts, I was glad the ever-present varieties of reedsharks in all their sizes had something to eat to keep the rat numbers down.

We’d also seen some very weak olthoi, even less dangerous than those outside of the drudge city to the north. Kris practiced disassembling them, and we had moved on.

And, ah yes, the Wisps.

Wisps back on Ispar were dangerous nuisances, like magic Elementals with erratic behavior and unreliability. Such things were quick, hard to see, had copious amounts of magic and were adept if limited Casters, with a penchant for Draining people to death, or sucking away their mana to leave Casters helpless, or leeching stamina and leaving people unable to move, only sit there and be slain.

Wisps from the Power of Ten had been nasty things that fed on the slow deaths of helpless living creatures. They were the reason Casters carried Force Magic around all the time, as they were pains to hit with physical weapons and immune to most Elemental damage, as well as going incorporeal on demand!

No-miss Shards popped the first one before Kris even had a chance to charge it. She just gave me a raised eyebrow.

“Sorry. Academy lessons were to snuff any Wisps you see at range, before they can approach to start Draining you. Shamira ran into a few of them, and her recollections of them doing so to her are NOT pleasant.”

Kris made a dismissive gesture. “I never ran into one powerful enough to get past my Null, and I’ve never actually been targeted by one.” She grinned widely, and I just tossed up my hands. As a Null, she was probably almost invisible to one!

“I’m still going to pop any I see first.”

“I DO have to see if I can hit the suckers. Mom said they were good practice for precision fencing.”

“Well, call dibs, then.”

“I can make it a royal command!”

“My trigger finger has no ears.”

She grumbled good-naturedly, and our trip continued.

------

“Would you look at that.”

We both turned our eyes at the sight of a formerly magnificent estate house or palatial mansion, rising up over fast-growing trees and plants, half-covered with vines, yet still visible just off the river, rising above the uncared-for remnants of what must once have been a well-kept lawn and property on some kind of raised mound.

“That’s definitely the biggest house we’ve seen,” Kris agreed, studying it in the wan moonlight of this world. “I note that there are some sizable holes in the roof...”

“Like something inside exploded when the magic went wild? No, no, no precedent for that, Princess.”

“Yeah, true,” she agreed firmly, turning to investigate. “Shall we see what we can see?”

“I don’t imagine the humidity has been good for anything, especially with that roof letting the rains in.” Said rains had started up promptly at nightfall, and continued in a cold drizzle that I kept at bay with Protection from Rain, and Kris with her Vajra.

---

A minute later we’d cut through the tall grass, reeds, and brush that had wildly overgrown everything, and found ourselves standing in front of what had obviously been a reinforced front door, and was now equally obviously hanging off one hinge, scarred, scored, and mauled by claws.

Lots of claws. Claws that had ripped their way up the steep embankment that had no stairs behind us, something you don’t put on an abode, just to get to that door and whatever was inside.

Kris just nodded when I pointed down. Something had burst up from below and lifted this mansion up above the ground all around it. Microtears in the ground told her it was another dimensional reversion. It had left the mansion on a sprawling motte, raised above the swamp, nearly twenty feet higher than its original foundations, if the surrounding land was any measure!

“What’s that?” Kris asked, pointing at a broken crystalline rock over to the right side of the entryway, vaguely lozenge-shaped and cracked into five pieces.

“Ownership Keystone for Wards, it looks like,” I said, studying the remaining Runes and residue of magic on it and the Wardstone it had once been set in or floated over. That Keystone was also cracked and blackened, fused and warped by magical energy. “Overloaded from below. I imagine it tapped the ley line paralleling the river and the Wards under it.” Plenty of excess energy to go around, judging by the nonstop numbers of fumaroles venting excess Elemental energy as we came down the river.

The windows were all shattered, although most had remnants of blurry glass still set in them. Kris looked around and down. “Glass fragments in the dirt. Those windows were blown and burst out, they weren’t smashed in.”

“Do a circuit of it first?” I requested, and Kris just nodded, gliding along, her Tremblesense feeling the ground as I studied the sides of the building.

The first thing we saw was a shattered, triangular monolith, split and broken, its black stone greasy and revolting to the touch... and a burned-out eye of crimson hue melted and warped down the remnants of it when Kris flipped over the heavy rock with easy twists of her wrist to examine it.

I only touched it, and snatched my hand back. “Aberrant connections,” I stated calmly, and promptly saturated the whole thing in vivic Shards. True to form, the unwhite fires ignited on the broken rocks and began to feast on something unnatural in them.

“Why would you put something like this at the corner of your home?” Kris asked, her lip curling in disdain.

“There was power running through it. If you don’t care where the power comes from...”

She snorted again, and we moved on.

The next interesting thing was a set of three flowerpots. Nothing too exceptional, except for the fact they were as high as my waist, and there were remains of three plants of great size sprawled and rotting out of them.

Kris just pointed. “Those are flesh-eating plants! That’s a giant mantrap!” Although withered and split, the jaws of the plant were easy to identify.

“A pitcher plant and a sundew,” I pointed out for her. The first could swallow and drown a small human, the other could wrap them up in sticky fronds of acidic honey and dissolve them alive. “And they are in proximity, no less. What are... I don’t...” I just shook my head. “I have no clue, Princess. It’s possible they were truly magical Plants and were trained?”

“This place is strange...” and motion off to our side and below caught our eyes. We turned, and watched as the side of the swamp below seemed to ripple and bulge, and great plants taller than both of us poked up their heads as if alive and sensing our presence. Glitters of perfume that couldn’t carry in the wet and cold air, and fibrous green jaws and glittering, golden-wet flowers gleamed with inviting nectar for our attention below.

There were dozens of each of them spread out in that area.

“Well,” I murmured, seeing that. “Looks like they’ve been able to stay well-fed down there, unlike their forebears.”

Kris eyed the wooden, sharp teeth of the mantraps below, maws definitely able to open wider than her chest and take a nice firm bite of hagchild. “I imagine they keep the wasps down?” We’d seen a new purple variety here that shot fire, and now that she mentioned it, it looked like some of the plants had burn marks on them.

“Nature loves its own kind of perverse magic,” I agreed. “Those sundews would probably be putting us to sleep if it weren’t cold and wet.”

“That nectar on them is supposed to be really good once you strain out the digestive juices,” she remarked, her eyes narrow.

“For someone Sustained, you sure don’t ignore your stomach,” I observed.

“I am a fan of great cooking, and so are you, so shut it.” It was true, so I did.

---

There were pedestals scattered in node locations along the back and sides of the house. They once bore man-sized statues of various beings, all such things blown apart, scattered in the area and into the walls of the building behind them, fused holes bored right through the pedestals they’d stood astride. Kris managed to find a fairly intact head of one, which looked like... a carved scarecrow of some kind?

“Not seen one of these yet,” I noted.

“I am sure we will be blessed at some point.”

“Such an optimistic little Hag you are.”

“I have faith in the universe wanting to throw stuff at me,” she nodded sagely, completely unmoved as we looked at a pair of what had been circular devices of Shaped stone of some unnatural origin, wrought into spirals about a central point.

They were both shattered into clumps, now.

“This was some sort of Portaling device, too,” I said, eyeing the hole in the ground there. It looked like it went through to some opening below. “Given how identical the holes are, I’d say most of the things on foundations used to be teleportation keys of some kind.”

“Really. That’s quite impressive.” Portal magic was the ultimate high-end wishlist for mages back on Ispar, trying really hard to decipher its secrets. “They... just left multiple teleportation keys sitting around the outside of their abode?” she had to ask.

We shared a look at just how casually they were treating a wonder that didn’t exist back on Ispar. The security hell alone that was involved with easy Teleporting into and out of places...

---

The last discovery she actually kicked up off the ground. It was a spear of some kind, with a black haft and blood-red head. Just looking at it made my eyes wriggle and want to look away.

It was also cracked, charred, and basically useless, a vestige of what it had been.

We both eyed the ground node with the hole in it, and the remnants of the thing.

“This is NOT the same energy as that monolith, and it is not mage friendly,” I noted to her. “But both have eldritch ties. They aren’t from anything we’d call mortal.”

She had to lean her head back and look up. “So... these people were the weirdest, strangest cultists you’d ever seen, opportunistic as Hell and ignoring all the possible consequences for tapping into things they didn't know and couldn’t possibly understand?”

“Stop asking me questions you don’t want to believe the answers to.”

She sighed as we returned to the front of the place, having chosen not to enter the postern door at the back of the place, either. Kris kicked the front in, and walked inside, me following on Disk.