The only person to make them stop was Asgeir, impassively looking on as his forces were massacred. They came upon him last not because they decided so, but because he had used his magic to disguise himself as a wounded ally of the Hulsons. A static illusion, it was, one which wouldn’t hold up the way a physical transformation did. His disguise failed only when Victor noticed his raven nearby, drawing his eyes to that off-looking man. His eyes saw right through it, and Victor called him out, summoning fleshbrambles from the nearby corpses to bind Asgeir before he and Jorfr cornered him.
Grimly chuckling, the old man let his illusion fade.
“I will admit, it was foolish of me to assume that this would not happen, to put myself in harm’s way as I did in the hopes of seeing the Hulson Clan eradicated with my own two eyes,” he said. The eldritch light of the druids faded from his gaze; defending oneself from attack did not trip it. Before either Victor or Jorfr could do anything, the raven ripped the patch from Asgeir’s face, and he bellowed: “A CURSE UPON YE AND YOURS, YOU BASTARDS!”
A terrible and dark light flooded from the Ramdall elder’s heretofore concealed eye… Only for a pitch-black icicle from above to skewer him right through that eye socket, followed by the thunderclap which had launched it. Magenta glyphs unfurled from the Black Nail, spreading over his entire face. His body swelled up as if to burst, and thinking quickly, Jorfr took him by the legs and threw him towards the desolated part of the city.
An unfocused spray of northlight struck him from the Steam Tower’s apex. Just the same as the cursed magick of one of Cao Hu’s Masks, so too was Asgeir’s curse burned by Karmesin’s magic, and in a flash of purple flame he was gone.
Such was the final fate of Asgeir Ramdall.
They valiantly battled on for some time longer, until no more foes were to be found.
Kristina Ramdall had been crushed, burned, and dismembered in the terrible devastation Eisengeist had caused after its control-artifact was destroyed.
She yet lived, or rather, she was no longer dead. A full third of her body mass was gone, including her left leg, arm, and a portion of her torso. In the past, she had been utterly terrified by the prospect of living on as a hideous, immortal cripple should she ever wake the Immortal Blood. That fear all but vanished when she dug her way out of a burning rubble-pile, and in a puddle of blood from a nearby corpse she saw herself, rebuilt with white jade. After all, it only made sense; her natural affinity lay with the earthen monads, and she had gone to great lengths to refine its gemstone aspect.
The fact of her own survival was a hair-thin silver lining to the realization that Eisengeist had been run through by… A Black Rod. Its shape was off, its surface glistened like ice, but the painful glow of its glyphs and Eisengeist’s utter stillness could not be denied. She knew not who or how had done it… But it was enough to drive her to utter desperation.
She turned her expert gaze to the structure, searching for any flaw.
Not a hair-thin crack was to be found in its magic… But its crystalline structure betrayed the truth of its hasty construction. Despite being made from some eldritch form of glacierglass and amalgamated with blackstone, it could be broken.
Kristina took her scrying mirror in hand. Its surface was cracked, but so long as its frame was intact, it would work. She willed it to activate as a storage artifact, its surface becoming like shimmering water, and shoving her hand in she retrieved a talisman from the Land of Lingering Smoke. It was a favor she had earned a lifetime ago, when the curse-eating general Cao Hu sought to turn Scorchlander guardian spirits against their own charges.
The talisman was a small mutton-fat jade sculpture of the Divine Emperor’s deific incarnation as the White Dragon of the North, and it supposedly held the power to come alive in order to carry out the summoner’s commands until its magic ran out. She had known better than to waste it, and she hadn’t planned on using it until it came time to stand against the Revenant King himself, but… These were desperate times.
It demanded an invocation in Pateirian, including its commands. Kristina was fluent.
Zefaris and Karmesin sat atop the Steam Tower, flanking the timeless form of Fryg, with Zefaris and Yvonne drinking restoratives while Red just rested. Not merely frozen in the literal sense, Fryg had stopped her own flow of time to better hold the Serpentkiller Black Rod together. Their attention was collectively directed towards Eisengeist, though for a moment, Red and Zef had no choice but to turn their mutual destructive power - woefully hobbled as it was at the moment - towards Asgeir.
With the Ramdall elder eliminated and Kristina nowhere to be seen, it seemed as though things were on the way towards resolution, with only a few holdouts to deal with.
That was, until Fryg suddenly moved. The Ice Witch collapsed to her knees, chest heaving with heavy, icy breaths. Her fingers had turned black, and before any of the three other women could ask what had happened, she gave the answer herself.
“The Rod… Kristina… Some sort of artifact…” she struggled out before her words came true.
Indeed, a blinding burst of jade-green light erupted skyward from somewhere amidst the ruins near Eisengeist. A three-circle array of three, five, and eight white jade trigrams unfurled, each circle counter-rotating against the last, spinning to a fever pitch until they halted and from their midst emerged a Pateirian serpent-dragon, also made of white jade. It wound itself about the Black Rod and pulled it free, crushing it to pieces as it went.
Akaso
If you’d like to read ahead, consider heading on over to the Patreon! Patrons gain access to up to 20 days of advance content, with further expansion planned for the future. So if you want to help fund my crippling addiction to commissioning art, consider reading a couple chaps ahead.
I’d also greatly appreciate it if you could rate my story, or even leave a review. Reviews and ratings alike weigh heavily in the eyes of the algorithm (not to mention prospective new readers), so that pretty much means they determine the success of my work. A single review or even just a rating can noticeably influence the novel’s performance, especially when it has few ratings overall like this one does as of me posting this.
Same goes for review voting - the reviews with the most upvotes are the ones that most people will see, so you as readers decide which reviews are legitimate.
For a link to the discord, check the synopsis.
The only person to make them stop was Asgeir, impassively looking on as his forces were massacred. They came upon him last not because they decided so, but because he had used his magic to disguise himself as a wounded ally of the Hulsons. A static illusion, it was, one which wouldn’t hold up the way a physical transformation did. His disguise failed only when Victor noticed his raven nearby, drawing his eyes to that off-looking man. His eyes saw right through it, and Victor called him out, summoning fleshbrambles from the nearby corpses to bind Asgeir before he and Jorfr cornered him.
Grimly chuckling, the old man let his illusion fade.
“I will admit, it was foolish of me to assume that this would not happen, to put myself in harm’s way as I did in the hopes of seeing the Hulson Clan eradicated with my own two eyes,” he said. The eldritch light of the druids faded from his gaze; defending oneself from attack did not trip it. Before either Victor or Jorfr could do anything, the raven ripped the patch from Asgeir’s face, and he bellowed: “A CURSE UPON YE AND YOURS, YOU BASTARDS!”
A terrible and dark light flooded from the Ramdall elder’s heretofore concealed eye… Only for a pitch-black icicle from above to skewer him right through that eye socket, followed by the thunderclap which had launched it. Magenta glyphs unfurled from the Black Nail, spreading over his entire face. His body swelled up as if to burst, and thinking quickly, Jorfr took him by the legs and threw him towards the desolated part of the city.
An unfocused spray of northlight struck him from the Steam Tower’s apex. Just the same as the cursed magick of one of Cao Hu’s Masks, so too was Asgeir’s curse burned by Karmesin’s magic, and in a flash of purple flame he was gone.
Such was the final fate of Asgeir Ramdall.
They valiantly battled on for some time longer, until no more foes were to be found.
Kristina Ramdall had been crushed, burned, and dismembered in the terrible devastation Eisengeist had caused after its control-artifact was destroyed.
She yet lived, or rather, she was no longer dead. A full third of her body mass was gone, including her left leg, arm, and a portion of her torso. In the past, she had been utterly terrified by the prospect of living on as a hideous, immortal cripple should she ever wake the Immortal Blood. That fear all but vanished when she dug her way out of a burning rubble-pile, and in a puddle of blood from a nearby corpse she saw herself, rebuilt with white jade. After all, it only made sense; her natural affinity lay with the earthen monads, and she had gone to great lengths to refine its gemstone aspect.
The fact of her own survival was a hair-thin silver lining to the realization that Eisengeist had been run through by… A Black Rod. Its shape was off, its surface glistened like ice, but the painful glow of its glyphs and Eisengeist’s utter stillness could not be denied. She knew not who or how had done it… But it was enough to drive her to utter desperation.
She turned her expert gaze to the structure, searching for any flaw.
Not a hair-thin crack was to be found in its magic… But its crystalline structure betrayed the truth of its hasty construction. Despite being made from some eldritch form of glacierglass and amalgamated with blackstone, it could be broken.
Kristina took her scrying mirror in hand. Its surface was cracked, but so long as its frame was intact, it would work. She willed it to activate as a storage artifact, its surface becoming like shimmering water, and shoving her hand in she retrieved a talisman from the Land of Lingering Smoke. It was a favor she had earned a lifetime ago, when the curse-eating general Cao Hu sought to turn Scorchlander guardian spirits against their own charges.
The talisman was a small mutton-fat jade sculpture of the Divine Emperor’s deific incarnation as the White Dragon of the North, and it supposedly held the power to come alive in order to carry out the summoner’s commands until its magic ran out. She had known better than to waste it, and she hadn’t planned on using it until it came time to stand against the Revenant King himself, but… These were desperate times.
It demanded an invocation in Pateirian, including its commands. Kristina was fluent.
Zefaris and Karmesin sat atop the Steam Tower, flanking the timeless form of Fryg, with Zefaris and Yvonne drinking restoratives while Red just rested. Not merely frozen in the literal sense, Fryg had stopped her own flow of time to better hold the Serpentkiller Black Rod together. Their attention was collectively directed towards Eisengeist, though for a moment, Red and Zef had no choice but to turn their mutual destructive power - woefully hobbled as it was at the moment - towards Asgeir.
With the Ramdall elder eliminated and Kristina nowhere to be seen, it seemed as though things were on the way towards resolution, with only a few holdouts to deal with.
That was, until Fryg suddenly moved. The Ice Witch collapsed to her knees, chest heaving with heavy, icy breaths. Her fingers had turned black, and before any of the three other women could ask what had happened, she gave the answer herself.
“The Rod… Kristina… Some sort of artifact…” she struggled out before her words came true.
Indeed, a blinding burst of jade-green light erupted skyward from somewhere amidst the ruins near Eisengeist. A three-circle array of three, five, and eight white jade trigrams unfurled, each circle counter-rotating against the last, spinning to a fever pitch until they halted and from their midst emerged a Pateirian serpent-dragon, also made of white jade. It wound itself about the Black Rod and pulled it free, crushing it to pieces as it went.
Akaso
If you’d like to read ahead, consider heading on over to the Patreon! Patrons gain access to up to 20 days of advance content, with further expansion planned for the future. So if you want to help fund my crippling addiction to commissioning art, consider reading a couple chaps ahead.
I’d also greatly appreciate it if you could rate my story, or even leave a review. Reviews and ratings alike weigh heavily in the eyes of the algorithm (not to mention prospective new readers), so that pretty much means they determine the success of my work. A single review or even just a rating can noticeably influence the novel’s performance, especially when it has few ratings overall like this one does as of me posting this.
Same goes for review voting - the reviews with the most upvotes are the ones that most people will see, so you as readers decide which reviews are legitimate.
For a link to the discord, check the synopsis.
