Valkyrie's Shadow

Stone and Blood: Act 3, Chapter 8

Stone and Blood: Act 3, Chapter 8

Chapter 8

“But why is it falling up?”

“Is there some rule that says that it needs to fall down?”

Florine frowned as she stared up at the wall of water. According to Velgath, in addition to being over two thousand metres tall, the falls were roughly five hundred metres wide. Boobeebee had mentioned a ‘great falls’ in her accounts of the Realms Below, but Florine imagined something more…normal. The waterfall – or maybe it was a waterfly – was so high that she could neither see the top, nor the bottom of it.

Or is it the bottom and the top?

A single undeniable example of something that defied her past reality also threw language and thought into chaos. Was it alright to use the old terminology? Would anyone believe her back in E-Rantel if she told them about it?

“You don’t have to goggle so hard at the thing,” Velgath said. “It’s been there since before our people settled Khazanar.”

“Where did your people migrate from?” Florine asked.

“Below,” Velgath answered. “Some empire in the Middle Realms.”

“You aren’t connected to them anymore?”

“Not that I know of,” the Dwarf woman shrugged. “We were a colony that got too big, too far from home. Splitting off was inevitable, but they were probably a bunch of assholes, anyway.”

Boobeebee’s claim of Khazanar Falls being an access point to the Middle Realms appeared to be true. There was no record of Dark Dwarves dwelling on the surface or having a subterranean presence elsewhere in the region. That Khazanar was the only place in the world with Dark Dwarves was implausible and the fact that they came from below explained how they ended up there.

She couldn’t decide whether them cutting their ties to their homeland was a good or bad thing. On one hand, it could have been a source of priceless information about a world previously unknown to the surface. On the other, dealing with one small group of Dark Dwarves was bad enough.

“Do you interact with the middle realms in any way?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Velgath said. “Everyone in Khazanar’s sphere of influence is a target.”

“…a target?”

“For raiding. The surface is a source of exotic slaves, but it isn’t our only source of slaves.”

Is forging ties with the Dark Dwarves really a good idea?

She had no choice but to follow through with her assignment, but it was already abundantly clear that the Dark Dwarves had nothing but enemies in the region. They couldn’t even leave their own borders without tripping over them. If it were up to her, Florine would have worked on establishing friendly relations with the various Goblin tribes they had passed on their journey instead. That felt far more beneficial in the long run.

“How did your people end up with a slave economy, anyway?” Florine asked, “Industry and high-quality craftsmanship are what the world attributes to Dwarves in general, and Dwarves appear to take pride in their work.”

“Raising slaves is a craft, too,” Velgath said. “Just because you don’t do it doesn’t mean that it isn’t. Besides, slave economies are the world standard precisely because it’s the best way to do things. You don’t think something else would have out-competed it if it wasn’t demonstrably superior?”

Florine held in a sigh as she watched a large fish fly by. She hoped it would survive the fall…or whatever.

Slavery was a morally reprehensible institution, but the Dark Dwarves obviously didn’t care about her moral standards. From a factual, economic standpoint, she had no hard statistics to disprove the assertion that slavery was superior to systems that didn’t incorporate slavery. The Sorcerous Kingdom was a non-example since Lord Mare’s magic was the primary driver of the country’s outstanding agricultural yields. Undead labour in itself did not improve yields – only how the work was done.

“What would you say are the primary merits of the system of slavery that you practise?” Florine asked.

“First,” Velgath answered, counting off her fingers, “it incentivises raiding. You have to keep your neighbours weak anyway, so why not profit from it? Secondly, slaves aren’t cursed with independence. They do what they’re told to do or they get fed to the other slaves. Lastly, slaves free up us Dwarves for more important occupations. Why have a Dwarf herd Nuk or sweep dung off of the streets if they can be an artisan, grey robe, Cleric or soldier instead? The powerful stay in power by being powerful, not by toiling away at menial tasks.”

She remained silent at what was likely the penultimate crystallisation of the world’s cruel realities. As of yet, it was probably the most frustrating thing that she had no answer for.

Raised as a Noble, Florine understood that a ruler needed to maintain a balance of strength, stability, and prosperity.

Strength was required to defend one’s holdings from invasion and enforce laws when people challenged them. Without strength, the efforts of an entire civilisation could be stolen away by threats both external and internal.

The problem was that the reality that Florine was raised in was one which was far from the truth. In Re-Estize, one person was not too different from any other in terms of strength. An average member of a town or city militia could easily be overwhelmed by two Farmers. The difference between the products of a journeyman artisan and a master was imperceptible to those without an eye for their craft. Leaders relied more on the careful cultivation of an economic and political power base over years, decades, and even multiple generations than they did on raw personal ability.

Thus, her world had been a ‘mundane’ one. Normal people could be nothing more than normal, and so that led to the thinking that everyone was more or less equal. ‘Geniuses’, ‘talents’, and ‘heroes’ were an anomaly in everyday life; it wouldn’t be wrong to say that most people placed them in the same category as monsters. Monsters that were on the people’s side, but monsters nonetheless.

With the advent of the Sorcerous Kingdom came a rude and undeniable awakening that upended common perception and laughed in the face of their society’s core values. For people like Clara and Ludmila, who followed the Faith of the Six, all that was required was a minor adjustment to their expectations. Simply put, they raised the bar on everything but all of their practices and beliefs still held true. If anything, it only seemed like those beliefs were reinforced.

For Florine and Liane, who followed the Faith of the Four, it was an unprecedented crisis on all levels. Fundamental values were overturned and even their morality was cast into question. Every theological, societal, and even economic assertion was proven erroneous in some way because the world itself was not as it appeared to be.

Her stance on the institution of slavery was the most recent thing to come under attack, and, while she could still decry the immorality of slavery, she could not prove that it was incorrect. If anything, logic clearly pointed to the idea that a slave economy, as Velgath stated, was the best economic system.

The problem lay with how damnably deterministic the world appeared to be. Levels dictated what people could accomplish, what information they had access to, and what they could digest. They even influenced thought and perception. This suggested that free will and economic mobility were detrimental to level-based growth.

If one took the classic rags to riches story that inspired spares to seek their fortunes in the big city, the problems became readily apparent.

A second son would be kept on the farm until their family was assured that the eldest son was fit to take over the tenancy. This often went for as long as it took for the heir to have an heir of their own. In that time, the second son would be helping out around the farm to earn their keep and thus gain a few levels in ‘Farmer’ Job Class Levels. After that, they would then end up in the local town or city and take whatever work they could get to survive, picking up the levels associated with that work. The ‘harvest rush’ meant that they might even gain more Farmer Job Class Levels when they took up seasonal work.

By the time they got into their chosen profession, they would have a diverse portfolio of Job Classes. The more ambitious one was, the worse it became. Magic was a bad one in particular, as it was an expensive vocation to get started in, forcing people to work more to afford magical studies and thus end up with more ‘junk’ levels in their build. It was no small wonder that good magic casters were so rare.

According to Lord Mare, the average level that an Adventurer hit their limit at was around fifteen and no more than twenty. If the same limitations applied to everyone, then it explained why the realities of the level system had eluded the people in the region for so long. Guilds recognised master artisans of mundane professions at around Level Three or Four – or rather, the quality that an artisan of that level would produce qualified as masterwork.

The spare in the aforementioned example could have two levels in Farmer, one in Rogue, two in Fisherman, and one in Merchant and still have plenty of room to spare to become a master Tailor. This was the truth behind the classic success story and, even so, not many obtained their desired success.

On the other hand, if one took the tragic tale of a child who had been sold into slavery by their family or abducted by the local criminals or authorities – or both working in cahoots with one another if things were particularly terrible – the story that their level build told would make their misfortune seem like anything but.

In a country where slavery was a common and accepted practice, the child would be purchased with a specific purpose in mind. For instance, a short-staffed textile manufactory would acquire the child and then they would work as a weaver for the rest of their lives. They had no say in the matter; no freedom to choose. The child was set on a path pushed onto them by a factory manager.

Yet, when one compared the spare from the Farm and the slave since childhood, there would be absolutely no comparison. The spare with two levels in Farmer, one in Rogue, two in Fisherman, one in Merchant, and four in Tailor would be vastly inferior to the slave with ten in Tailor. The slave outstripped the free-willed spare not only in a cold, economic sense, but also in terms of their raw skill and overall capability as an artisan.

All else being equal, when one scaled things up to compare a country that enforced the rights and freedoms of its citizens to one with a functional system of institutionalised slavery, the former would be buried by the latter’s raw industrial might. The entire system of slavery was kept intact because those in charge occupied positions of power that couldn’t be challenged by their slaves.

It was a depressing conclusion to arrive at. Of more immediate concern was that the freewheeling manner in which Re-Estize’s societal norms treated the concept of career progression would eventually no longer be acceptable to the Royal Court of the Sorcerous Kingdom. No matter how compelling the struggles of the Level Four Tailor were in a narrative sense, Lady Albedo would not be satisfied with a Level Four Tailor. She wanted a Level Fifteen Tailor and she wanted every Tailor to be at least Level Fifteen. Nothing but the best for the Sorcerous Kingdom.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why she sent me along with the Dark Dwarves…

Since Velgath described the process of raising slaves as a ‘craft’, then it stood to reason that they had a formalised system of training. Florine couldn’t imagine that it would be something only slaves could do, so understanding what that system did and how it worked would serve as a practical example for the Sorcerous Kingdom’s future public education system. It was potentially a solid first step to making their citizens just as competitive, if not better, than highly specialised slaves.

I guess what they say about diplomats being spies is correct.

It didn’t feel wrong, though. Or maybe she was just subconsciously trying to justify her actions.

“What are you kids fooling around here for?”

Falagrim’s gruff tone startled Florine out of her thoughts. His frown turned severe when she spun around to face him.

“This isn’t the time for a swim,” he said.

Florine looked down. Her dress was thoroughly soaked by the spray from the falls and a small puddle had formed around her feet. She wiped her face, taking a few steps away from the ledge.

“Have your Rangers returned?”

“They just left,” Falagrim said. “I didn’t know you were in such a hurry to get killing.”

“…but I thought that these falls marked the eastern border of Khazanar.”

“Do you think that our entire country is stuffed in some tiny hole in the ground?”

She didn’t think it was a tiny hole in the ground, but she did think it would be something like the Dwarf Kingdom in the Azerlisia Mountains. Then again, their realm had been fairly large before the coming of the Demon Gods.

“In that case,” Florine asked, “how will we get to your principality if we have to walk through the other parts of Khazanar?”

“You should know by now that the Realms Below don’t work like the surface,” Falagrim answered. “We just have to take a route that doesn’t bring us through the other principalities.”

“Right.”

Florine was aware of the vast differences between the underground and the surface, but it was still difficult for her to not think as an ‘overlander’. Getting somewhere in the Realms Below was a three-dimensional exercise – one could arrive from any direction so long as a passage existed.

A half-day later, the first of Falagrim’s Rangers returned from their foray in the Khazanar. Falagrim and his cadre gathered as she made her report.

“The border posts are undermanned,” she said. “We didn’t run into any patrols at all.”

“Those damn fools,” Falagrim sneered. “What’s the point in trying to uproot one’s enemies if it leaves the borders open to invasion? Any sign of external threats?”

“None from this side,” the Ranger replied, then smirked. “Except for us. Loar and the others went ahead. Once everyone’s ready to go, I’ll lead you over to the first waypoint.”

“You heard her,” Falagrim looked to the others. “Break’s over. We leave in ten minutes.”

They left Khazanar Falls through the tunnel by which they had entered, taking a different passage several hundred metres in that led them deeper into the earth. Their journey went completely uncontested, even when they supposedly came within two hundred metres of the nearest border post. Six hours from their departure, they arrived at a small cavern where another Ranger awaited them.

“Way’s clear to Mine 884, boss,” he said. “Still no military presence.”

“Run into any vagabonds along the way?” Falagrim asked.

“Yeah. They got no clue that anything’s going on. We killed them off, just in case.”

“Good,” Falagrim nodded.

The Ranger turned without another word and swiftly led them on their way. Their path grew steep and Florine couldn’t help but feel more and more oppressed as kilometres of stone were added to the looming weight above her. The sight of all the bodies that the Rangers left in their wake didn't help to improve things.

“Didn’t you say that the falls are fed by Lake Khazanar?” Florine asked.

“Yeah,” Velgath answered. “What about it?”

“We’ve been going down for a while now,” Florine said. “I figured we’d have reached the water by now.”

“The entire reason why the lake and the principalities exist is that there’s a formation of impermeable rock in the region that pokes out above the main layer,” Velgath told her. “You can think of it as an island or mountain sticking above the water. We’re well below the lake’s surface already.”

“But the Middle Realms are below the lake…”

“Uh-huh,”

A chill crept over her. The Middle Realms were supposed to be far more dangerous.

The stone of the passage abruptly became straight as they entered a network of mining tunnels. They arrived at a nexus of rail lines where the next Ranger leaned against the control lever of an old, rusted switch. The design of the rail system and its old mine carts weren’t too different from those used by the Azerlisian Mountain Dwarves, though Florine supposed there wasn’t much room for wild variation.

“Clear?” Falagrim asked.

“Sort of,” the Ranger answered. “We bypassed the ports since Velgath said they were occupied by the council, but they don’t seem to be guarding all of the old mining access tunnels. Still, the Felhammer mines have their people wandering around so it’ll be a fight the moment we pop up.”

“How are they set up?”

“Still facing forward,” the Ranger replied. “Not looking over their shoulders at all.”

“So they’re still trying to conquer Felhammer, but they’re confident that the ground they’ve covered is secure. Any signs of a trap?”

“Loar and the others will have a better idea. They’re up as far as they can get, checking for just that.”

Falagrim grunted and turned to face the gathering Undead.

“Fall in!”

The Death-series servitors and Elder Liches came forward while the dominated Undead formed ranks behind them.

“Time to talk tactics,” Falagrim said. “Well, it won’t be all that complicated for now. Take a look all around you: what you’ll be fighting in looks just like this. Each mining tunnel is no more than two metres tall and two metres wide. You’ll have to crouch a bit but there’ll be no worries about being outmanoeuvred, circumvented, or overwhelmed. Every fight will be right in your face.”

One of the Elder Lich sergeants raised a bony hand.

“Should we expect any significant threats?”

“Not right away,” Falagrim replied. “According to Velgath’s report, they’re using the standard order of battle, which means they’ve lost the mines already – they just haven’t realised it. Their defence will have four layers. The first will be cheap battle thralls that they use to assess and wear down enemy strength. Next, will come the veteran battle thralls that usually clean things up. When they fail, you’ll be facing the real army consisting of an infantry line and an artillery line, but they won’t be challenging us down in the mines for obvious reasons.”

“How should the new Zombies be deployed?”

“We’ll use them to saturate the mines. Hiding will do the enemy no good when the tunnels are so narrow and there are so many Zombies that one is bound to trip over them. I’ll leave the management of newly-acquired combat assets to you. Oh, and if you happen to find any Dwarves, capture them for questioning.”

“What of our ethereal assets?”

“Velgath here’s an Unincarnate,” Falagrim gestured to his daughter. “We’ll put them under her command.”

The Undead dispersed to reorganise themselves, occasionally conferring with Falagrim or one of his subordinates. Unlike any of the Sorcerous Kingdom’s other clients, the Dark Dwarves didn’t display even a sliver of fear before the Undead. There was only unfeeling expectation. For the Undead’s part, they seemed almost excited at receiving their assignments.

Florine watched in silence in an out-of-the-way spot along the walls. On the far side of the cargo hub, she spotted Velgath with several Elder Liches and a glowing wall of wraiths.

“What’s the thing that he called her,” Florine said. “An Unincarnate?”

“A psionic Job Class,” Isoroku said. “Now that we have a name for her vocation, we can positively identify what happened at the point of her first appearance.”

“And what was that?”

The memory of Velgath emerging from the poor Dark Dwarf’s body still haunted her memories. It wasn’t the gory entrance that was the most harrowing part about it, but the indescribable expression of the Dark Dwarf just before Velgath burst forth.

“An Ability called Uncarnate Bridge,” the Elder Lich told her. “The Uncarnate can transfer themselves into the minds of other creatures, ‘hopping’ from mind to mind until they reach their desired destination. The remanifestation of their corporeal form can be…explosive for the host.”

“So is that something charges can be pressed for?”

“I believe you are far better equipped to answer that question. There are no related precedents to refer to.”

International justice was not a concept that was recognised by the countries of the region. The closest thing that came to it was the organisational enforcement of the Guilds or the Temples, and the Temples essentially operated as a guild in that case.

While no one wanted undesirable elements within their borders, neither were they obliged to extradite said persons to those after them. As such, those interested in seeking restitution for crimes committed against them rarely went to foreign authorities to demand it: they simply hired Assassins to settle the score.

In the case of the Sorcerous Kingdom, their undeserved international reputation made it so that fugitives didn’t try to flee there anyway. They had a strange sort of reverse extradition treaty with the Baharuth Empire, but it wasn’t as if the Sorcerous Kingdom wished to become a haven for criminals. It didn’t even have to involve criminals: slaves who fled across the border would be promptly returned to their masters even if slavery was illegal in the Sorcerous Kingdom.

Falagrim’s band wasn’t a group of fugitives to be extradited, regardless. They were more of a wandering penal colony under the management of Khazanar’s judiciary. At the same time, they were a Merchant company and Merchants were more than welcome in the Sorcerous Kingdom.

What a stupid case to think about.

Florine had a feeling that the Sorcerous Kingdom would render a favourable interpretation of the related laws just to keep things rolling along smoothly with the Dark Dwarves. There was simply too much to lose over a dead Dwarf who was already sentenced to a fate worse than death.

“Death is a mercy,” Florine murmured. “Or so they say.”

“Indeed,” Isoroku nodded.

“That aside,” Florine switched topics to perk herself up. “How is your survey work coming along?”

“I lack the resources to perform the task satisfactorily.”

She reached up and patted the Elder Lich over the shoulder.

“We didn’t expect there to be so much down here,” she consoled the Elder Lich. “Did you find anything interesting?”

“There appears to be great agricultural potential underground,” Isoroku said. “If the region under the Abelion Hills could be brought under the Sorcerous Kingdom, it would represent a substantial boost to our industrial output.”

“Would it be considered a part of the Abelion Wilderness?”

“That would be subject to the discretion of the Royal Court. Due to the drastically different environment, it stands to reason that it would be considered its own Area, or perhaps divided into many Areas.”

“I see,” Florine said. “Well, don’t go converting everything you see into economic gains just yet. We barely have any idea about how things work down here.”

While her time in the Abelion Wilderness thus far had been short, the complex interactions that had been revealed to her now made her wary of interfering in anything before she felt that she had a decent grasp of what was going on. There was something far greater to what she once considered straightforward processes, and hints of it could be found all over the Abelion Hills.

The world was filled with mysteries, but the society in which she had been raised seemed to actively enforce mundanity at every turn. There was no room for anything but practicality and profit. Something was either useful, or it was useless. If it had power that couldn’t be harnessed, then it was an uncontrollable threat. Mystical unknowns and esoteric practices may as well have been treated as blasphemy against common sense and rationality.

And, so, the world was ordered according to that worldview. Products; people; places; even entire species. In doing so, Florine felt that they were losing out on something important – something intrinsic to the world that they lived in that they had long lost.

It wasn’t as if there wasn’t evidence to point out the possibility. One of the more well-known examples was the fact that alchemical reagents harvested in the wild were measurably more effective than those cultivated in city gardens and personal plots. But no one seemed to question why that was. They only saw the process of harvesting those reagents as inefficient and expensive. Furthermore, the availability of foraged reagents was insufficient to meet commercial and industrial demand for alchemical products. Thus, it was treated as trivia for enthusiasts and not much else.

The Abelion Hills, however, was filled with many new mystical processes to investigate. Sites that Humans from the north would undoubtedly exploit were instead held universally sacred. Seemingly dangerous and destructive events were allowed to run their course. Human development couldn’t encroach upon the land because the region’s tribes were so powerful and belligerent.

Now that the area had fallen under the dominion of the Sorcerer King, a priceless opportunity to find out what they were missing had presented itself. Florine resolved to make sure that she wouldn’t screw it up.

“On that note,” she told Isoroku, “we need to start bringing in some experts to make sense of everything.”

“Did Lady Albedo not select for your expertise?” The Elder Lich asked.

“In certain fields, yes,” Florine answered. “We’ve turned up enough stuff that it would be prudent to have teams learned in other fields to make a study of what we’ve discovered.”

“This would be the jurisdiction of the Adventurer Guild and its affiliates.”

“Does that Adventurer Guild have a jurisdiction?”

It was sort of like a jurisdiction. Due to the nature of the Adventurer Guild’s work and the fact that they currently only had enough members for a single expedition, however, the other branches of the government were far outpacing them.

Does that make me something like an Adventurer? That would be kind of neat. What rank would I be?

A series of echoing clanks drew their attention to the centre of the cargo hub.

“Seems like we’re all sorted out,” Falagrim’s voice filled the chamber. “It’s time for death to have its due. We’re moving out – I want us in the city by the end of the day.”