NOVEL SIMPLE Shifting the Corruption Around
6/7 Afternoon
I was sitting in on a song by Gigi Littlewhisker. I happened to know that it was actually written by Kathra’Natir, but Gigi was the one singing it. It was a mournful song about some ancient pair of friends in the depths of dwarven history. Mostly notable because they were a Dark Iron and Bronzebeard, priming the audience to think of the Dark Irons as fellow dwarves first.
Stevie, the ad hoc chief engineer of my ever expanding gnome squad, had invited me to go over his team’s progress with the arcanite buoy. Unlike so many things that I did, this meeting could happen in a public tavern over pork chops, which I was taking advantage of. “So Zorba thinks that it should be done this evening, at which point we will just need to charge it overnight. If you come back in the morning, then it should be ready for deployment.”
“Excellent!” I smiled at the little gnome. “So, what about the other thing?”
“Ah. Yes. The… necropolis. Well… I actually had my boys take a look around and I’m a little bit concerned about your plans.”
“Uh… what concerns?”
“Well, I wrote most of them here.” He slid a large packet of papers across the table to me with a worried frown, then steepled his fingers. I looked it over, my heart sinking as I realized this was going to be a pain in the ass.
- Internal systems, including teleportation pads and antigravity, are currently optimized to run on anima, which appears to be sentient souls rendered down to a fuel source. New energy source recommended.
- Unknown maximum/safe weight limits. Testing recommended
- No built-in external access. Maintenance appears to have been handled by spiders and flying entities
- External shell made of solid and unknown metal; requires grommets for wiring if we intend to introduce external weaponry, may reduce hull integrity.
- Necrotically charged slime byproduct used as lubrication generates fumes toxic to living individuals
- Multiple sections of the vessel are exclusively accessible via teleportation
- Large population of flesh eating spiders.
The list continued in the same vein, slowly progressing from massive problems to minor safety concerns, accessibility, and the lack of furniture. He had suggestions for some of the problems, but they weren’t all exactly elegant. “Alright. This might be trouble. I definitely still want to figure out how to use it, but maybe my first plan was a little bit extravagant.” We workshopped options for a bit before an alarm sounded on my amulet. “Alright. I’ve got something to do. I’ll get back to you later.”
••••••••••
Theradras was no more lovely now than she had been last time I saw her, but there was one rather important difference. She was captured. This princess of the earth was mine to do with as I pleased. I’d consulted with Zaetar long enough to know that he had no desire to pick up his relationship with her again. I don’t blame him; presumably he found her attractive for whatever reason, but it’s hard to overlook an ex locking you in her basement for years to avoid legal backlash.
She truly, deeply loved Zaetar, if in an unhealthily possessive way. Past tense on that statement. Mind runes are amazing. I didn’t alter her memories, I just helped her get over the guy. After that, I ended her paralysis and fiddled with her appearance to entertain myself. By default Theradras was really damn ugly, and I was curious to see how hot I could actually make a four armed, thirty foot tall, life draining woman made of solid stone. I’d say she came out alright. Well enough that I was planning on having a roll in the hay with a much smaller and fleshier version of her at some point.
“So, mortal. You have bound me to your will. What is it you intend to do now?” Theradras kept two arms crossed in front of her while the other two hung at her sides comfortably. “You also seem to have restored my strength. May I beat the dragon Onyxia to unconsciousness? She has vexed me.”
I was a little taken off guard by her speech. I hadn’t adjusted her mentally at all, she just naturally spoke like a noble lady when she cared to speak. Appropriate when you think about it, but it still felt jarring for now. “You may not. She is your ally; if you can’t adapt to that, you will be made to do so. As to what I want from you, I wish for you to empower me and the shaman within my retinue. If you know anything of shamanism that you can teach, I would be immensely grateful.”
“I know nothing of the manners by which mortals channel the power I grant them. I can support several hundred shamen, if that is your will, but you will need to be trained directly by another mortal for anything but the most rudimentary applications.”
I equipped my Geomancy chip experimentally. “Are you feeding me energy right now?” She shook her head. “Start doing so.” I felt a faint vibration in the ground beneath me as I spoke. Mentally, I reached down and found the power she promised; a vast sea of it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make the well run dry, but my own body was only capable of holding a tiny portion. It was like holding water in my hands. Still much easier than my last experiments with Geomancy, where I’d needed to snatch up whatever ambient energy was available and shape it as quickly as possible.
Turning into a dark green dragon helped; black dragons have a natural connection to the earth, so it was like I had a cup that I could hold the water in. The spells I had access to didn’t particularly capitalize on that, unfortunately. Earth shock could throw more energy at someone with a cup than with my bare hands, but it was still just a disorganized mass focused more on disruption than damage. Rockbiter weapon was even worse; my moonblade could only hold so much energy. The only other distinct spell built into the chip, healing wave, seemed like it would be redundant with the priest spells I still knew. Channeling the earth and the light put around the same amount of strain on my body and mind.
“Will this last? Do you need to be focusing on me to give me access to your power?”
“Of course not. I am a princess of the earth. Hardly any of the power you are drawing upon is even from my own stores. Most of the energy is ambient, imbued into the earth itself. One would need to consume an incredible amount for the surface to even begin to crack.”
“Like you did in Desolace?” The region, which had a fitting name, used to be part of a rainforest.
Theradras shrugged. “It was mine to take, and I was in a severely weakened state. If I do not have to go into stasis again, I will never need such measures. You have restored me; for that, I thank you. Is there any way that I may convince you to punish Onyxia for me? I’m rather put out with her for taking advantage of my weakened state.”
“You will not. However, there is someone I would like killed. A satyr by the name of Vyletongue. Do you know of him?”
“I do. He intruded upon my solitude more than once.” She closed her eyes and seemed to focus on something. In the distance I heard a muted boom. She looked at me again. “It is done. Thankfully he was still firmly within my domain.”
“Can you do that for… any tunnel system?”
She nodded. “Any that is crafted purely of stone and which is not commanded by another of my kind.”
“Oh, I think we can work with that.”
••••••••••
Human Paladin was numb. She’d been ordered to heal the master's other consorts while they worked, so she did. The master had ordered her to forget her old name, so she tried to put the name Isabella out of her mind. The master had told her to accept the others raising undead right in front of her, as if she could just forget the horrors she had seen in the Plaguelands. She tried to ignore them. The master seemed to think that she would think as he told her to think, and she tried because she loved him, but that wasn’t enough.
She clung to Emmastrasza, the red dragon. Like Human Paladin, Emma was also defective. They both loved the master, but when he showed them the crystal his orders didn’t sink in the way they did for the others. Emma was kind though, and didn’t need to be told to see Human Paladin as a useful tool in order to stop being cruel.
The two of them stared at the gigantic humanoid that the master had pinned and forced to look at his crystal. Human Paladin distantly wondered if this one would be killed, broken, or transformed fully. It was a man, so it could go in any direction. She tried not to care.
••••••••••
The flames licked over Vaelastrasz’s body, and Alexstrasza’s heart ached to see him in such a state. He was fighting it, so the fires that flooded through him seared as if they were burning his flesh. To him, he was being tortured by a monster, and Alexstrasza intimately understood the nature of the pain she was inflicting upon him. She continued anyway.
Alexstrasza was a queen and a mother. That meant that she ruled over her children and that she loved them. She extended a shadow of that love to the mortal races as well, monitoring them from afar and trying to protect them from the worst that Azeroth had to offer. Loving them would not stop her from hurting them. Quite the opposite.
The mortals were at times quite stupid, brutish, cruel, and warlike. They needed guidance, and she had failed to keep pace. Her flight, like Vaelastrasz, Korialstrasz, and so many more, lived among mortals and tried to guide them, pushing them away from their baser impulses when possible. Sometimes, that meant causing pain. The Dragonqueen took care not to feel happy about such corrections. Necessity and love guided her actions. No more. No less.
Vaelastrasz collapsed as the flames continued to purge his system. The pain seemed to be lessening, or perhaps he was simply in shock. The shadow priestess standing at her side continued her work, as Alexstrasza carefully avoided burning the threads of shadow moving to correct her wayward son’s thinking.