Valkyrie's Shadow

Stone and Blood: Act 3, Chapter 7

Stone and Blood: Act 3, Chapter 7

Chapter 7

The Realms Below weren’t flat. That’s what Florine quickly found out after they left the cavern at the end of the mines and ventured into the wilds beyond. They were always going up or down and the going usually wasn’t gentle. Caves could be so expansive that one couldn’t see from wall to wall or so narrow that the Death Knights had to sidle through sideways.

And, all throughout their journey, Florine had a sense that there was always someone watching them. Many someones.

“How many people live here?” She asked.

“Many,” Boobeebee answered. “Far more than the surface. You may think of it like a Zern Hive, where a small area can house a surprising number of people.”

“Ever since the subterranean races moved under E-Rantel,” Florine said, “one of my friends can’t stop thinking about adapting the concept to surface construction.”

“The surface?”

“Most of our buildings are under three stories – that’s somewhere around ten metres if one includes the rooftops. Ever since seeing how many people could be packed into a small area underground, my friend has been trying to figure out how taller buildings can be constructed. But, for the time being, every proposal ends up being so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to build.”

Buildings of great height were generally limited to fortifications, temples, and various vanity projects pursued by governments such as the Grand Arena in Arwintar. They couldn’t be considered practical for the common folk, neither in cost nor utility.

Liane’s answer always seemed to be to cut down on building materials, but that ended up with structures looking like they could be toppled by a stiff gust of wind. Alternatively, they could use enchanted materials, but that made things many times more expensive than they originally were.

“Is there a need for more people?” Boobeebee asked, “Tribes grow because they need to compete with their neighbours. The Sorcerer King is so strong that I can’t imagine any number of Humans making a difference in a contest that requires that strength.”

“Military might is merely one facet of society,” Florine answered. “The total military personnel of the Human countries that I know of number no more than two or three per cent of its total population in times of conventional war. Only one per cent of the Baharuth Empire’s total population remains as a standing army in times of peace and Re-Estize has not even a tenth of that.”

“That does not sound like nearly enough to defend one’s territory against one’s competitors.”

“It’s what they’ve managed with. Things are, of course, more complicated than they appear, but those countries don’t treat their entire population as war potential like the tribes of the Abelion Wilderness do. That non-combatant population is what we refer to as the ‘civilian’ population, and civilians have many vocations in various fields to pursue for the prosperity of their country.”

“To me,” Boobeebee said, “it sounds like Human countries make for opportune targets. The defences are weak and the rewards for attacking them are great. Though, as unbelievable as it sounds, what you say does appear to be the truth. Even before the coming of Jaldabaoth, the Holy Kingdom was an easy target for hungry tribes in the west.”

“Even with the Great Wall?” Florine asked.

The Zern hero made a derisive noise.

“Fortifications are only as effective as the people who defend them. In the case of the Holy Kingdom’s wall, raiders often found that no one was defending it. People looking for a fight had to wait around for a patrol to finally come by or assault positions that were consistently manned.”

“The more I see and hear of Roble,” Falagrim mumbled to the side, “the more pathetic it seems. Jaldabaoth’s invasion is framed as some horrible thing, but countries like that completely deserve what’s coming to them.”

Florine narrowed her eyes at his callous assertion.

“Are you suggesting that all of the innocents who suffered at Jaldabaoth’s hands somehow deserved to be subjected to all the horrors of his occupation and its aftermath?”

“It’s not a suggestion,” the Dwarf Lord replied. “That’s how the world works. Most Humanoids are weak, in the grand scheme of things. Survival’s the name of the game and peace is just time used to prepare for the next war. A country where everyone isn’t focused on supporting the continued existence of their civilisation is a country filled with parasites. No one will miss them when everyone dies and everything that they wasted their time on will end up in the hands of their enemies.”

“If I recall correctly,” Florine said, “Clan Felhammer just started a war with its own people.”

“As I said,” Falagrim replied, “survival’s the name of the game. That includes surviving against one’s own kind. Velgath’s account pins blame solidly on the council, anyway.”

Assuming Velgath’s account was the truth, Florine couldn’t disagree. Khazanar’s presiding council had every opportunity to inform Clan Felhammer about their activities if it was in response to an external threat. Because they didn’t, Clan Felhammer would logically interpret their treatment and the information that they managed to gather as evidence of a plot against them.

She shook her head sadly as she considered the apparent sequence of events. A great many tragedies throughout Human history and countless lesser misfortunes could have been averted through proper communication, but it only seemed that Humans never learned. It also seemed that the problem wasn’t limited to Humans.

“What do you plan on doing when you get home?” Florine asked.

“Secure it,” Falagrim answered. “It doesn’t matter whether it means kicking the council out or fighting off possible invaders from elsewhere.”

Falagrim’s lease presented an interesting scenario that hadn’t yet happened with the Sorcerous Kingdom’s other clients. The terms did not take into account internal disputes or disputed claims across different polities. By and large, the Royal Court saw the countries that they dealt with as whole entities.

From their perspective, they annexed E-Rantel from the Kingdom from Re-Estize. However, the truth was that they pressed a claim against House Vaiself. House Vaiself raised a levy through its territories and its vassals, and that levy was the ‘Royal Army’ of Re-Estize. In the end, while it was commonly said that Re-Estize lost E-Rantel to the Sorcerous Kingdom, the reality was that House Vaiself lost a duchy while its vassals retained their holdings. Thus, the power of House Vaiself was greatly diminished relative to the rest of the Kingdom of Re-Estize.

Similarly, while the Baharuth Empire might have supported the Sorcerer King’s claim, Florine was certain that the ‘Empire’ had no say in it. The Emperor had simply made an arbitrary statement as an autocrat, ignoring any protests from his people. Thus, he stood to reap all of the benefits of his move, which he in turn doled out through the imperial bureaucracy to solidify his hold on power.

The Sorcerous Kingdom had then gone on to save ‘the Dwarves’, ‘the Holy Kingdom’, and ‘the Draconic Kingdom’. The Azerlisian Mountain Dwarves had been reduced to a single city so it probably wasn’t incorrect to consider them as a single political entity. Queen Oriculus had the support of her entire country. The Holy Kingdom, however, was by all appearances divisive and the top-down view of the Sorcerous Kingdom’s Royal Court seemed to have in no small part contributed to its current woes.

What the Sorcerer King ‘saved’ was the northern Holy Kingdom and the Sorcerous Kingdom’s relationship with Roble was with that of its Royal Court. No, it didn’t even go that far. Their relationship was with the ‘country’, which they treated as a monolith under Roble’s Royal Court. The aid that it sent to the Holy Kingdom was literally to ‘the Holy Kingdom’ and the shipments were received at the border where they fell into the hands of whoever was waiting for it.

The fact that Kingdoms and Empires were made up of hundreds, if not thousands of smaller polities that had rights and laws of their own didn’t seem to factor at all into the Sorcerous Kingdom’s political, economic, and military thinking. This was probably because they were so ridiculously powerful that there were no tangible consequences for simply doing what was convenient for them. By the same token, they would probably hold an entire nation accountable for the actions of a single minor Noble if it suited their purposes.

Falagrim’s lease was just the latest manifestation of that behaviour. Clan Felhammer was a single principality amongst a dozen or so in what was collectively known as Khazanar. Falagrim Felhammer just so happened to be the Sorcerous Kingdom’s proverbial foot in the door, so they wasted no time in accommodating his request. Not that his stated purpose violated any terms. As he said, he was securing his holdings and that was exactly what the Undead security leases were supposed to be for.

This, in itself, wasn’t the problem, however. The problem was in how flexible the Sorcerous Kingdom could be when it came to using Undead leases to pursue its agendas. Falagrim’s suspicions about the lease contracts ‘trying to split the world in half’ started to take on a more defined and disconcerting meaning.

Falagrim’s lease amounted to procuring mercenaries for a domestic dispute. This could, in theory, happen anywhere. A Baron in Re-Estize who believed that his fief was being unlawfully seized could have Death-series servitors delivered to them at a very reasonable rate. For defensive purposes, of course.

Never mind that, if one wanted to declare their independence, all they had to do was sign a contract that was not only far cheaper than the taxes that they paid to their liege, but also far superior in terms of realm security. If Emperor Jircniv hadn’t swiftly moved to seize the initiative with the Sorcerous Kingdom, the Baharuth Empire might be in a hundred little pieces by now considering how many enemies he had among his vassals.

The potential for chaos was seemingly infinite. Florine could imagine Liane strolling up to a highly-factious country offering defensive security contracts and cackling to herself as it shattered overnight. All that really mattered was whether the Sorcerous Kingdom wanted things a certain way or not. Given the Royal Court’s ongoing practice of dealing with foreign countries as single, large entities, they probably wouldn’t encourage it, but it could still serve as a tool to reshape the geopolitical landscape as they saw fit.

Ugh, never mind thinking about what Liane would do, my thinking is drifting into that sort of thing, too…

All of the Dark Dwarven negativity was starting to infect her outlook. Liane, at least, was generally upbeat about her scheming and aimed for what she saw as beneficial ends. The Dark Dwarves, on the other hand, were just plain nasty with a bleak worldview. It felt as if they would have liked nothing more than to set the entire world aflame just so they could rule over the ashes.

One of Falagrim’s Rangers appeared from behind a huge stalagmite in their path.

“Shrieker grove,” she said. “Two kilometres ahead.”

Falagrim’s expression immediately soured.

“Son of a…is there a clear path through?”

“Yeah,” the Ranger smirked, “it’s paved with enchanted adamantite, too.”

The Dwarf Lord clicked his tongue and turned to examine the head of the Undead column.

“How large is the grove?” He asked.

“The area with Shriekers covers five kilometres,” the Ranger answered. “Cavern’s about five hundred metres wide.”

“Set them off and see what happens,” Falagrim told her.

The Ranger nodded and left again.

“What’s a Shrieker?” Florine asked.

“They’re annoying is what they are,” Falagrim answered.

“A Shrieker is a species of mushroom,” Boobeebee told her. “If one is disturbed, it starts screaming. That screaming disturbs others and then they start screaming too.”

“Does the screaming do anything?”

“Humanoids are perhaps least threatened by them,” Boobeebee replied. “In the realms below, many species have Tremorsense or Blindsense. The sound is so intense that it can ‘blind’ beings that rely on vibrations and sound to discern their surroundings.”

“So it’s a way for the mushrooms to defend themselves,” Florine nodded.

At least there was at least one thing that wasn’t trying to murder everything around it in the Realms Below.

“Yes, but that is not all. Some creatures use Shriekers to notify them of others entering a specific location.”

“So they run away when predators come around?”

“Or come running if they are a predator,” Boobeebee added.

Florine cringed as an ear-piercing shriek echoed up the cave. The noise turned deafening as more and more voices joined the chorus.

Aren’t we still far away?

It took a few minutes for silence to settle over them once again. She removed her hands from her ears.

“I didn’t expect–”

“Shh!”

Florine shut her mouth, warily looking around. Not that it helped much. One might think that Darkvision items negated the disadvantages that Humans suffered in low-to-no-light conditions, but the range on Florine’s was so limited that anything attacking her would be on top of her before she had time to react.

It didn’t take long to notice that the Dark Dwarf Rangers nearby weren’t only watching the way ahead. Their tension only served to emphasise how dangerous their environment was. Death could come from every direction – even directly through the stone.

Once the Rangers gave the all-clear, Falagrim motioned for the column to advance. Ten minutes later, they arrived at the cavern with the Shrieker grove. The source of the noise from before turned out to be the glowing amber mushrooms within that stood around her height.

“Ah, that’s what it was,” Velgath nodded to herself.

“That’s what what was?” Florine asked.

“You reminded me of something,” Velgath answered, “but I couldn’t figure out what it was until now. Tall, yellow, and noisy – you’d fit right in here.”

The Ranger from before came down from her perch on the wall of the cavern near the entrance.

“There’s a Goblin tribe living around here,” she said. “A big one – a few thousand, I reckon. They came streaming out of the walls when the screaming started, looking for prey.”

“How much time do we have?” Falagrim asked.

“Should be plenty,” the Ranger answered. “They don’t look very wary at all.”

“What would they be wary of?” Florine asked.

Falagrim and the Ranger exchanged a long look. The Dwarf Lord jerked his beard toward Florine before turning away to address the gathering column.

“There are predators,” the Ranger said, “and there are predators. Goblins are the former. The really powerful predators don’t sit on top of a single grove of Shriekers: they sit in the middle of a whole bunch of them. That sound those mushrooms make can carry for dozens of kilometres. The Goblins here know how long it takes for the local super predator to get over here, so, when they make themselves scarce, we’ll know that something's close.”

“Moving out,” Falagrim said. “Double time! I don’t want to be around when a Dragon Lord from the Lower Realms comes up to see who’s making the gods-awful racket.”

“Are Dragon Lords so common that one can just pop up randomly anywhere down here?” Florine asked, “I thought the Eight Greed Kings ended the Age of Dragons.”

“The Eight Greed Kings?” Falagrim frowned, “Ah, you mean those guys. They didn’t have much of an impact down here.”

“But our legends say that they conquered the entire world,” Florine said.

“They were overlanders. The ‘entire world’ to you overlanders is the surface. Maybe they poked around here and there, but I doubt they explored every cubic kilometre of the Realms Below or the oceans. As for ‘conquered’, how much of their legacy have you seen? We certainly haven’t seen any of it down here.”

“That was–”

Her lips moved without sound for a few moments before she stopped trying to talk with a puzzled look. Then, she realised that there was no sound coming from anything. It appeared that they had cast Silence spells to cover the living so the sound from the surrounding mushrooms wouldn’t deafen them as they walked through the grove.

Florine let out a silent sigh, pondering Falagrim’s point. While she couldn’t claim that the histories available to the E-Rantel region were anywhere close to complete, the lack of evidence made anyone familiar with the legend of the Eight Greed Kings ponder just how much of it was true.

They were supposedly so powerful that they could move mountains and part the seas, but no one could point out where this had happened to verify the claim. That they stood as tall as the heavens was simply ludicrous. Their conquest of the world happened in the ‘blink of an eye’, but that was undoubtedly hyperbole.

Most damning of all was that claim of conquest, as it implied that they had extended their dominion over the entire world. Yet, there was no sign of that conquest – no infrastructure, institutions or cultures that suggested the existence of a world-spanning empire. The only ‘verifiable’ proof of their existence was in a city in a desert over fifteen thousand kilometres southeast along the western coast of the continent, and, even then, people merely asserted that it was somehow linked to them.

In the end, all that was left were the histories of various peoples passed down mostly through oral tradition. The only unifying theme was that they were destroyers. Rather than conquers who built a worldwide empire, it was more likely that they were glorified raiders, sowing chaos and destruction in their wake with no care for the consequences.

Boobeebee poked her in the arm – it was more like a touch, but her chitinous, pointy appendages made a touch feel more like a poke. Florine looked down at the Zern hero, and then her gaze followed Boobeebee’s gesture out to the forest of glowing mushrooms. The illumination from the Shriekers was comparable to a drawing room lit with candles. Now that she could see a fair distance, she started to notice things that she hadn’t before.

In a word, the surroundings were filled with life. The Shriekers weren’t the only mushrooms in the grove. A bed of moss and smaller fungi carpeted the cavern floor and crawled with teeming things. Small clusters of waist-height mushrooms served as homes for larger creatures, though most of those were insects, worms and molluscs. The tiny streams that trickled through the cavern were home to colonies of shellfish and amphibians. Every pond that they walked around had schools of tiny fish.

Above the Shriekers, there were mushrooms so tall that they could only be compared to trees, their caps creating a canopy that nearly touched the cavern ceiling twenty metres above them. Every now and then, a dark silhouette would flit across the backdrop of phosphorescent light as some bird, bat, or giant insect flew by.

There was an otherworldly beauty to it all, but the small figures she spotted moving between the distant stalks were a constant reminder of how dangerous it could be. Hundreds of Goblins shadowed their procession from the sides, armed with simple spears and bows. A part of her itched to see what they were made out of since there were no trees around and mushroom stalks couldn’t be used the same way.

As they crossed the widest portion of the cavern, she was met with another familiar sight.

They have Nuk down here?

A sizable herd was grazing along the opposite shore of the cavern’s central lake. Furthermore, it looked like the Goblins were herding them. The ‘ranch’ was on a stretch cleared of amber mushrooms, allowing them to pursue their pastoral industry in relative silence.

In hindsight, it wasn’t the first time she had seen subterranean Nuk. The Azerlisian Mountain Dwarves had been ranching them for as long as anyone could remember, and the Quagoa learned animal husbandry from captured Dwarven slaves at some point. Now, they were trying to raise them under E-Rantel.

Florine opened her mouth to ask whether the Dark Dwarves raised Nuk as well, but the Silence spell was still in effect. She settled on absorbing the scenery as they marched through the cavern, attentive for any other signs of industry or even commerce. Unfortunately, the Goblins showed no signs of employing fire, which ruled out a vast swathe of possibilities.

Their pace picked up as they approached the opposite end of the cavern. It was only then that Florine realised that their Goblin ‘escort’ had vanished. The tireless Undead soon passed the Dwarves and Falagrim turned and made an impatient gesture with his arm, beckoning for the stragglers to break into a sprint.

Then, something hit her in the stomach.

What?

Her gaze went to her feet where a Goblin arrow lay. She stopped to kneel and pick it up, but then Boobeebee grabbed her arm and dragged her off, arrows landing all about their feet. At some point, the Zern hero picked her up and ran off at full speed, passing several Dark Dwarves along the way. They didn’t stop until they were well into the narrow passage leading out of the cavern. Heavy breathing filled the air as the Silence effect was dispelled.

“The sound’s getting closer,” Loar said.

“Don’t stop,” Falagrim said. “Pick up anyone that’s too tired to keep going.”

Florine couldn’t hear anything. She tried looking behind them as Boobeebee continued to carry her overhead, but the light of the grove was long gone. Then, a furious voice echoed through the darkness, so high-pitched that even a young girl would be hard-pressed to imitate it.

“Insolent fools! You dare defile Evisiaree’s domain with the Undead?!”

“Shit,” Loar said in a low voice. “I was hoping it wasn’t her.”

“Damn Shrieker grove gave us away,” Falagrim spat.

A set of Dwarven shouts echoed up the passage behind them. Then, nothing.

No one dared stop to see if they were still being followed. Falagrim’s Rangers led them as they struggled to maintain their pace, taking a winding route to evade any possible pursuit. Death Knights scooped up the Dwarves that flopped to the ground in exhaustion along the way.

“What was that?” Florine asked when they finally stopped.

“Something you don’t ever want to mess with,” Loar told her.

“A monster?”

“A legend,” Boobeebee said. “No, it would be more accurate to call her a god.”

“A god?”

“To the races that delve deep enough under the Abelion Hills,” Boobeebee explained. “Evisiaree is known as the Mistress of the Dark Grove. She is the protector of the Upper Realms in this region. The Goblins switched from shadowing us to attacking us when they knew she was close.”

“Treacherous little buggers,” Falagrim muttered. “Remind me to go out and slaughter a hundred thousand of them when we’re done with the council.”

She couldn’t understand how he could justify that. The Goblins he would target would definitely not be the ones that lived under Evisiaree’s protection. And, since she was described as a protector, did that mean the Goblins siding with her believed that they were doing what was right? It seemed that the Undead were reviled even in the lands of endless night.

“So what is Evisiaree again?” She asked, “Race-wise, I mean.”

“She is a Fairy,” Boobeebee said. “And an extremely powerful Druid. Evisiaree has dwelt under the Abelion Hills for centuries – perhaps since the beginning of time. Heteromorphs are immortal, after all, and her kind is closely intertwined with nature.”

A Fairy? Now I want to see…

“So she attacked the Undead rather than us specifically, right?” Florine asked.

Leaning against the other wall of the passage, Velgath scoffed.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “Don’t tell me you want to go and talk to that bitch?”

“Not right now,” Florine said, “but I’ll probably need to in the future. From what everyone has been saying, she’s actually a good person that the locals side with.”

“‘Protector’ doesn’t mean ‘good’,” Loar told her. “You may as well consider her a force of nature. Anyway, between that grove and the angry Fairy, I’m pretty sure I know exactly where we are now.”

Falagrim pushed himself back to his feet.

“Great,” he said. “How many kilometres to go?”

“See for yourself.”

Loar waited for everyone to get up before leading the way again. As the minutes passed, a dull roar started to reverberate through the air. The sound grew in intensity until it felt like the stone floor was vibrating with the sound. Whatever it was, it filled the steps of Falagrim and his people with renewed energy.

When the roar felt like it was physically shaking her, they stepped out into another cavern. At least Florine thought it was a cavern, as all she could see was endless darkness. A light spray filled the air as she followed the procession, slicking the stones upon which they tread. Then, all at once, she was confronted by a colossal wall of water.

A waterfall…?

She wasn’t sure whether it could be called that because the water was falling up.

Falagrim turned around, casting his gaze over his followers.

“This is it,” he said. “We’re home.”

For the first time in her memory, Falagrim smiled. Florine could immediately tell that it wasn’t a good thing.