Chapter 20-484: Final Preparations (1/2)
“It’s down below a million,” I Told everyone, and eyes flickered up at the fading darkness and the lightening greyness beyond.
The sun and open sky were so close now...
Its Shroud was only half a mile across now. Still pinned and burning, the Shroudlord could only watch and struggle futilely as it felt the faint tinges of the last of its faithful slaves perishing.
There hadn’t been any new incorps for the past hour; all that remained to arrive were the undead on foot. Once it dropped below Dark Minister in size at 500k, it would completely lose control over any undead outside its Deadzone (also rapidly shrinking), meaning something trapped under a collapsed wall somewhere wasn’t going to stop the Shroud from shattering.
Div spells, especially Communes, were digging those out, too.
Only the slowest undead were left, trekking in with untiring persistence. Most of the walls had gaps and cracks in them after Guiogg had come down, in addition to them normally being stationed near gates and the like as the inner walls were made, allowing them to be moved back and forth more easily. Thus, getting the undead here hadn’t been as hard as it might have been.
The devastation along the length of the White Road only helped, and if the undead happened to burn up on the way, no skin off our noses.
Much of the damage to the land itself had been repaired, chasms and crevasses split open by the Devouring Moon coming back together, often forming jagged hill lines or valleys as they did so. But they were no longer gaping open all the way to the Felldeep... which some of them definitely had been.
The last few Congregants didn’t even make it to the Wall, focused fire’d down before they could reach it, almost disdainfully. That was when everyone put their Weapons away and just waited for the last of them to come.
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Some days ago...
“So, are you finally going to tell me why you bothered to take out Kali? You could have just left them all to rot in their prison for centuries once the Shroud was done?” I asked Legion softly during our hours of downtime, helping power up Baneskulls.
Not wasting a day. Too ingrained to stop now.
Legion laid a hand on my shoulder, their hair undulating to the eye, and real eyes materializing on their Masked face. “It was because mariliths can bear many children,” they admitted softly.
I fought really hard to keep a smile off my face. “Exactly how many?” I had to ask, a bit of trivia about greater demonesses I didn’t know.
“Twenty.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “And you want to use pathogenesis to have them with me?” I asked carefully. “You know I won’t be here to help you raise them.”
There was golden fire burning on their shoulders, but Master Fred wrote nothing, just showing that he was there. He couldn’t have children; the hellfire had already taken that from him before I met him, before he was Bound to Heaven.
He wasn’t going to deny any of us this, however, for me, and for his Legion and Cohort.
Indeed, he was the one making it possible!
Another dark hand with very white nails rose up to caress my cheek. “There are a bunch of us who didn’t have children, Trav,” Daisy said in a voice with all the desire in it. “We would love to have children by you, and the Hell Pact can’t stop us, now.”
I leaned into a hand stronger than steel, sensitive as gossamer, our Pacts crackling against one another in resonance. “That’s going to take some time to do,” I found myself grinning, and an arc of white blossomed in response.
“We are patient,” Daisy said, moving forwards to meet me as she pulled me closely with irresistible softness. “There are going to be a whole lot of Morningdark halvyri to carry on your name,” she promised.
Halvyri racial dominance followed the gender of the halvyr parent, and pathogenesis only produced females.
That was going to be fraternal icosuplet half-sisters aplenty!
“Well, then we’d better get on that. We have no idea when the Shroudlord is going to push the button, after all...”
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The Present...
It would have been nice to have a long grind, whittling down all the undead with no risk save recovering the bodies of anyone slain. Picking off Constructs in wait, massacring the undead and the incorps, killing safely until it activated the Formation in a grand gesture to deny us after testing us out with a line of champions we could challenge and overcome in some classical format.
Unfortunately, the timesighting Avatar of the Thing had seen the river of fate coming, calculated that we’d had plenty of options to get there fast once we reached a certain distance, and forced the play just in time.
It had totally been the right thing for it to do, as we’d proven. If it had waited even an hour more, we could have made it all the way to the Formation, shattered it, and sent Guiogg and its two-for-one meal of a Devouring Moon and our living world away, leaving it with nothing.
Obfuscating the existence of the Pyramid in the threads of time had been part of my job. Defensive spells that absolutely stopped something generally matched up against spells a Valence higher... but the Thing’s avatar was definitely wielding some post-Twenty stuff, using the Source Code of magic to do what needed to be done.