Chapter 1-9: A New Night (2/2)

And, oh yeah, you definitely had to be a Good person to use them.

Sanctified Spell was the first of those Metas. It had a +1 Valence modifier, and the first effect it had was making a spell Good. That was important for several reasons, the most important being passive Metas and Domains that increased Caster Level and Save Potency... like my Arcane Empowerment had.

The second thing it did was do some holy damage, i.e. to evil creatures. This amount was +1d6 per Passive Good spell-modifying ability. My racial ability of Good Spell Focus was one such Passive. Getting the Good Domain was the usual common choice used in tandem with this. Getting another Mastery or Feat was a third or fourth.

The maximum damage bonus possible was +3d6, for having three different types of passives. It was only against Evil creatures, but generally speaking, that was enough, because that was a pretty big bonus. Maxed out, it even trumped Banespell.

All it did for now was give me +1d6 damage to each of my Shard-type spells. Still, 5d6+4 damage, x2, endlessly repeatable, was a pretty good showing, and I should be able to handle quite a few undead with it.

It could also be built upon substantially, if you handled it right, surpassing Sieged Spells and Reserves, for the most part. Just took a lot of hoop-jumping... and that nasty Good requirement, which wasn’t actually easy to keep for a lot of people...

Still, it was enough for now...

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The number of undead began to climb, and they were all moving east.

My hackles were rising watching them stumble, shamble, lope, trot, walk, bound, and fly on past. A general migration became a stream as wandering zombies in random territories flocked to the assembly of undead, and began to stream towards those walls to the east.

That included the incorporeals gliding over the ground and low in the sky. Filling the whole damn sky...

Shadows were the most numerous, inky black forms moving slowly just above the ground. Wraiths stayed about at head height, dark masses with burning cold points of light for eyes and nebulous arms, trailing away like robes below.

Spectres looked like phantom people, semi-transparent, with faces distorted by the evils they’d wrought in life, or rage at their fate, eyes like dark suns. They and the wraiths fairly streamed past, out-distancing everything.

Above them came the ghosts, wrapped in spectral chains that trailed off into nowhere, bitter and vengeful, condemned by awful fates, curses, or deeds to suffer, eyes as empty as the void...

There were phantoms flittering here and there, and the janky sparkles of poltergeists.

Ah, look at that. A winged shadow... there were shadow demons here...

It was trailing after the undead out by the road... I should be safe from any ability to Detect things. I certainly didn’t need to be Possessed at this point of things...

Most of the undead were zombies... withered, aged, shrunken about the bones, but still intact. Both genders, all sizes. Occasionally a larger animal zombie, like a bull or horse, would clomp heavily on past, and I had to wonder what had Animated it, as non-Sapients weren’t subject to the Shroud; something intelligent had to animate it...

The oldest undead were obviously the skeletons, where the meat had fallen off them and all that was left were clacking bones bound by the remnants of sinews and threads of negative energy.

The ghouls loped on by, moving much faster than the zombies. They were purple-skinned, with long trailing tongues, their teeth and nails grown long and sharp. Zombies who ate enough flesh could advance to ghouls, and humans who died after eating undead flesh, or on tainted ground after eating human flesh, would rise as ghouls.

Unless you were in old lands, where you might rise as a wendigo instead...

Leading groups of the ghouls and some of the zombie hordes were the ghasts. They were taller, more muscular, fleshy, with bulging guts from having their fill of carrion at some point, and being exposed to energies to spur their evolution. Like the one I’d killed, they were fast and powerful, and mini-nobles among the undead.

The last of the ‘common’ undead were the wights, distinguished by their paler, stony skin, stiff but strong movements, and sparkling black eye pits. Normally, wights rose as tomb defenders from well-preserved corpses... but anyone they killed would rise as a wight spawn, and here, if they died and respawned, the lord/master relationship would be broken by death, allowing them to quickly advance to full wights on their own.

They were roughly as intelligent as ghasts, but their rage at the living was more about defending territory. They probably considered everything under this Shroud their territory, and if there were humans on the wall, they were intruders who only deserved to be killed.

I was specifically looking for chimera or corpsecrafted undead: fast zombies, bone giants, bonetaurs, and the like. I did see some Burning Dead, black bones blazing with ghastly green and black necroic flames; Shockers, who had twisted red hate lightning sparking about them; and a few Frozen, covered with fellrime as they strode along.

No sign of corpsecrafting... that’s almost a criminal...-

Soft black flames suddenly flickered up around all the undead.

-misuse of the time and power of a Dark Minister..., I finished, cursing the thought, and immediately withdrew to the stairs, getting the greatest volume of the house between me and the controlling undead that was now coming up quickly.

It meant I didn’t get to see it, but when I looked back and out through the window above the kitchen sink, and the scattered undead wandering past, I noticed them immediately shifting course towards the road, instead of wandering around between the houses, trees, and fences, even though many of the last looked to have been destroyed deliberately so they wouldn’t get in the way of the mass movements of the undead.

If I met a Dark Minister, I was dead right now. I simply had no way to kill it.

I hated being low Level...