Victor of Tucson-12.36 Setting the Stage
36 – Setting the Stage
Victor flew higher than usual, pouring Energy into his wings to send himself streaking over the clouds, trailing a dark, smoky tail. He’d been to Xelhuan’s massive island before; he’d seen how the miasma hung like a dark, green-tinted cloud over the land, and he knew that as soon as he set foot—or flew—into it, he’d need to concentrate mightily to remain undetected by the Death Caster. Nobody knew exactly how Xelhuan would react when he sensed a powerful interloper, but Victor wanted to put off finding out for as long as he could; the nearer he got to his enemy’s seat of power, the better.
He glided on stiff, frigid winds, unbothered by the temperature. He could move more quickly, of course, but even a thousand miles from Xelhuan’s shores, he was concentrating on concealing his Core, building an impenetrable fortress of will around it, shrouding it with his aura. Besides, even drifting at a leisurely pace, he knew he’d see the cloud of the death-attuned miasma in only a few hours.
As he flew, Victor tried to envision his battle with Xelhuan. He wanted to catch the Death Caster unawares; if all went well, he’d get close to his capital—a large city, according to Citlalmina—before his allies revealed their “captive,” Citlalmina. With luck, Xelhuan would emerge from his seat of power, and Victor could ambush him as he hurried to “rescue” his damsel.
Citlalmina said that in times of exceptional need, the Great Masters could communicate through their blood, so he fully expected Xelhuan to send his allies to assault the citadel. He just hoped his allies’ preparations would be enough to hold back three undead armies. At first, they’d assumed it would just be the three undead kings who would attack, but Citlalmina said that one of them, Acheron Dysios, was a master of void magic, adept in the art of building gateways between two distant points. She insisted the kings would bring their hordes of undead to wage war against the mighty fortifications Victor’s army had constructed.
Of course, Victor hoped the entire situation would be moot. He hoped that he’d finish his battle with Xelhuan in a matter of minutes, and then return to his army and help lay waste to the rest of the undead kings. He wasn’t a fool, though; Xelhuan had built a tremendous power base on his island, and he might not be easily pried from his hidey-hole.
Part of him wondered if he should have delayed further. He’d had every intention of letting his engineers finish the citadel and build another—a sister structure—as a foothold on the shores of Xelhuan’s island. He’d figured months or even a year might pass before his final assault. Of course, Citlalmina’s appearance had changed that. If he believed her—and for some reason, he did—then every day he delayed allowed Xelhuan to strengthen his trap. Worse, she was adamant that anyone who wasn’t significantly stronger than herself would likely perish if they were on the island during the battle.
Victor had gotten a good long look at her Core, and he felt like her statement ruled out most of his army. Some of his steel seekers—Lesh and Arona notable among them—might be stronger than the ancient Titan, but not significantly. It made him wonder what Xelhuan had in store, but Citlalmina was vague, claiming ignorance. Tes had, of course, been extremely suspicious of her denials; she’d even pressed her with her aura, but to no avail. All she accomplished was to terrify the strange woman.
In the end, Victor had argued that it didn’t matter. He would face Xelhuan regardless, and as far as he was concerned, sooner rather than later was just fine. His one regret was that he’d put off perfecting many of his spells because he’d wanted to breach the veil first. Now that he had, here he was—winging toward his greatest confrontation. He told himself it didn’t matter. His most powerful spells were ready. His Core was ready. His mighty Titan blood and bones were ready.
As he mulled things over, he saw a line of darkness on the horizon, and as he approached, it looked more and more like an ocean-spanning storm. He was too high to see the waves clearly, but lines of froth took shape, delineating the wind-swept waves. As a veil walker, he had an unnatural sense of space and distance; with his inner eye, he could trace the lines of Energy that ran over the ocean all the way back to his citadel where he felt his allies’ bright Cores, even from hundreds of miles distant. With that understanding, he knew the storm wasn’t a natural thing; it was Xelhuan’s miasma whipped up into a frenzy.
Victor flew down into the wind, skimming the high, fast-moving waves. When he got closer to the island, and the miasmic storm towered into the sky before him—billowing, gray-green clouds that hung like stacked mountain ranges over the ocean—the waves grew monstrous and seemed to stretch into the sky toward him. Victor grinned fiercely, swooping over them as he unleased the full potential of his titanic form.
As his body filled out, stretching to something close to sixty feet in height, so too did his wings. When he flew past the worst of the waves and swooped to land in the churning shallows off Xelhuan’s shore, his wingspan was easily twice as wide as he was tall. Magma dripped off them in gallon-sized clumps, exploding as they hit the water in geysers of steam. The ocean’s spray and death-tainted rain sizzled against those wings, a hissing roar that drowned out the sounds of the wind and surf.
The water was up to Victor’s knees, so he walked, drawing the Energy out of his fiery wings and summoning Lifedrinker into his hands. He’d built his fortress of will; his aura was a whisper—nothing greater than a tiny animal might display—so he didn’t expect a battle right away. Even so, he was ready. He’d put on his armor, much to Arona’s approval, before leaving. Now, he simply had to traverse a thousand miles of Xelhuan’s territory.
Climbing toward the beach, ten-foot swells breaking against his shins, the first clouds of Xelhuan’s miasma washed over him. Whipped to and fro by the wind, the harsh, death-attuned mist grated against his flesh, tugging, pulling, trying to strip him to the bone. Victor concentrated, tightening his aura, charging his pathways with his potent Energy to keep the caustic stuff at bay.
When he’d first visited the continent-sized island, he’d only managed an hour or so before his flesh had begun to succumb. Even so, he’d pressed on, exploring, but eventually, even his iron will had faltered, and the whispers grabbed hold, taking root. When he’d felt it happening, Victor had ignited his rage, cast Iron Berserk, and charged off the island before he lost himself. Since then, he’d refused to allow any of his scouts to attempt further exploration. It didn’t matter now, not if they could trust Citlalmina; she’d drawn Victor a map.
He wasn’t worried about the miasma anymore; there was no doubt in his mind that he could keep it at bay indefinitely; his Core and aura were exponentially greater since he’d pierced the veil. So, he pushed into the wind, driving his powerful legs out of the surf, onto the beach. Using the rivers of Energy rippling through the world as guideposts, he set his course and began his long march.
The sun, already dim from the storm, faded to a dim glimmer once he was truly embraced by Xelhuan’s miasma. His titan eyes adjusted, and he scanned the blasted landscape, frowning. Not a single living thing met his gaze; the trees were dead; the grass was gone. In their place, a sea of gray, sandy silt swirled in the gusts of misty haze. Xelhuan’s miasma had well and truly drained the life from his lands.
Citlalmina claimed he had a horde of thralls—a city many times larger than any of those Victor had already conquered. If that were so, what did they eat? As he walked through that blasted wasteland, Victor could only imagine that whatever existence any living being might have on that island was a miserable one. The idea of trying to eke out a life in those conditions seemed hopeless and daunting. He didn’t know how anyone could find the will to carry on.
He walked through deep valleys, along the foothills of craggy mountain ranges, and over vast wastelands of barren, ashy expanses. Everywhere, Xelhuan’s miasma hung, obscuring the sun and devouring any hint of life. Occasionally, he sensed the death-attuned Cores of the undead. Sometimes it was a single, powerful creature that lurked nearby, and sometimes it was a vast horde of candle-dim Cores—skeletons or ghouls roaming the wasteland. Victor ignored them, devouring the miles with his enormous strides.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
Days passed, but he didn’t stop to rest. He could feel something happening in the air—some terrible working, some grisly ritual. If he’d been unsure of his need for haste before coming to the island, he wasn’t any longer. Xelhuan was working on something horrifying, something that Victor felt a primal need to interrupt. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮
It comforted him to know he never would have needed Citlalmina’s map—her guidance to Xelhuan’s city. He could trace the currents of death-attuned Energy. They flowed in one direction, and as he advanced they merged, streams becoming rivers.
On the fourth day of his relentless march, he crested a high mountain pass and, for the first time since descending to the beach, he felt the miasma’s heavy cloud thin. On his way down the stony mountain slope, he saw scraggly trees and coarse yellow grass—alive, if barely. The further he descended, the thinner the cloud became, and soon he found he could see for considerable distances again.
The foothills rolled away beneath him, but they were clad in that same yellow grass, and here and there Victor spied patches of anemic green. More clusters of trees met his gaze, and then he saw the first living creatures—a flock of miserable-looking sheep. Victor pushed on, down out of the foothills, and that was when a tremendous gust blew out of the north, swirling the miasma that still lingered in the air just enough for his sharp eyes to glimpse a single, purple-tinged mountain in the distance.
With his height and the size of his eyes, Victor could see immense distances, so the fact that the mountain was visible on the horizon was enough for him to recognize it as being colossal. It was also directly in his path, so he continued toward it, catching more and more frequent glimpses as he walked. Eventually the air cleared enough that he could watch it steadily grow and gradually become more defined—less a purple abstract triangle and more a tremendous, sky-filling gray and brown monster of a peak.
Over the next few hours, the fields became greener, the sheep fatter, and the streams he crossed looked almost clean. Still, Victor never saw any thralls. His mind wandered as he walked, and he was guilty of letting his gaze drift down, watching the landscape directly ahead of him. That said, it was quite a surprise when he looked up and realized he wasn’t approaching a mountain—it was a pyramid.
Victor had just crested another hill, and he stopped there, looking down over the gloomy countryside toward the tremendous cloud-topped structure. He guessed he was still between fifty and a hundred miles from the pyramid, but with his titan eyes, he could see the edifice’s right angles and, at its base, a sprawling warren of streets and buildings—a city large enough to house millions.
Suddenly feeling conspicuous standing there, Victor sat down in the sparse but quite-alive grass. He stared toward the pyramid, shifting his vision to his veil walker’s senses, and held his breath for several minutes as he took in the stunning spectacle.
Thick rivers of death-attuned Energy flowed into it from every angle. Furthermore, they flowed out the pyramid’s top, spreading into a spiderweb of interwoven streams in the sky. Looking up, Victor could see he was well and truly in Xelhuan’s territory, deep beneath that canopy of death magic. Of course, he’d felt and seen those streams already. It was just another matter altogether, seeing them flow into and out of the pyramid in a complicated cycle—the magic that had transformed his lush, equatorial island into a land of the dead.
Studying the city, he could see the sea of star-like Cores around the pyramid—Xelhuan’s subjects. He was too far, and they were too densely packed for him to count them, but he could estimate well enough—hundreds of thousands if not millions. Victor wanted to draw Xelhuan out, primarily because he didn’t want to battle him amid a city so densely populated. Then there was the pyramid; it was clearly shielding the Death Caster and any other beings inside it from Victor’s senses. For all he knew, there were millions of ghouls in there…or hundreds of thousands of undead titans.
The thought was just a bit of gallows humor; Victor didn’t think Xelhuan had an army of his ancient kinsmen in that pyramid. He didn’t know what it might contain, but Citlalmina said very few Quinametzin had come to Dark Ember.
He looked over his shoulder and realized he was in the storm’s eye, so to speak. Xelhuan’s miasma rose like a green-gray wall in the distance. Victor supposed the Death Caster kept this area near his city alive so his thralls would have food. It might be more than that; maybe the view from atop that pyramid was nicer with some green fields surrounding it. Despite the size of the lightened miasma zone, Victor couldn’t spot a single Core outside the city. Xelhuan had called all of his thralls close. Did it have something to do with the buildup of magical pressure?
He inhaled deeply, trying to get a sense of what was going on, but all he could feel was a rising tension—something to do with the currents of death-attuned Energy. Staring at the pyramid with his inner eye, watching the currents flow, it reminded him of nothing so much as his own Core construct—the cycle he’d set in motion that, even then, was building pressure toward a breakthrough. Was Xelhuan doing the same thing on a grander scale? What sort of breakthrough was he chasing?
Victor set Lifedrinker across his knees and summoned his Farscribe book. It was time.
###
Tes nodded, listening along as Arona, Bryn, and Lesh went over their final preparations. She’d been a Celestial Envoy for so many years, on so many diverse worlds, that she’d grown accustomed to holding her tongue, observing and not judging. Even so, she could tell her presence was felt—stolen glances her way and questioning tones when she knew none of these three were timid leaders. None of them wanted to seem overly sure with her standing there, as though she might step in and point out an error.
She decided to put their minds at ease. “I’m impressed with what you’ve built here. Most good plans are simple in their execution, and this one has the kind of straightforwardness that most often leads to success. Are your legions in place, Bryn and Lesh?”
“They’re en route to the shielded encampments even now, Lady Tes,” Bryn replied immediately.
Tes nodded. “And Arona? Your legion—was there any issue of space in the citadel?”
She shook her head. “Our design intended for this building to serve as shelter for a sizeable population.”
“It seems you’ve things well in hand, then. That being the case, I’ll check on your other guests. We don’t want them to break anything.” She gestured to the map table. “Please let me know if I can help.”
Lesh stared, his draconic eyes hungry—not for her flesh but for her secrets. Still, he bowed respectfully, and the others followed suit. Tes left, her lithe form flitting down the steps toward the citadel’s grand hall where she’d last seen Ronkerz and his crew of misfits. It took her a few minutes to traverse the distance—the structure was built on the scale of titans, after all—but she found him there, pacing up and down the length of the largest table, exhorting his “Big Ones” about discipline, of all things.
“…in your guts! Use it to beat down the little voice that’s trying to distract you! Gorruk, in your case, I’m talking about the booze. How many times have you cut short your training because of a headache?”
“But—”
“And Zara! Do you think Lira doesn’t love a bit of sex? She kicks her men to the curb in time for sleeping, though, doesn’t she?”
“It’s not the sex!” Zara cried. “I love Kundral—”
“Bah! Love?” Ronkerz sneered the word. “Do you think love saved my kin? Do you think love kept the reapers at bay?” He scoffed and snatched a haunch of smoked meat from a platter, stuffing it into his maw.
Tes saw her opening. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I thought I’d see if there was anything you all needed. I anticipate—”
“Speaking of distractions!” Ronkerz growled. “Here’s Victor’s.” The hulking simian walked toward her, leaning forward and bracing much of his weight on his enormous knuckles. “When’s the fight?”
Tes didn’t let her irritation show. She wasn’t sure exactly why Victor admired Ronkerz, but she guessed it had something to do with the man’s shrewd competence hidden behind a veneer of animalistic bluster. “Victor should have reached his target yesterday. I’m sure he’ll contact us soon.”
“We’re ready, and my Big Ones don’t need anything.” Ronkerz glared at the table, his gaze settling on the man with the black tentacle arm. “You sense him still?”
The man, Arcus, if Tes wasn’t mistaken, nodded. “Yes, Lord Ronkerz. Victor still lives.”
Ronkerz grunted in approval. “We’ll wait, then.”
Tes could have told them that Victor was alive; she’d know it far more surely than the Pyromancer, despite his strange streak of abyssal corruption. She offered the gigantic simian a polite smile, though, and inclined her head. “Thank you, Lord—” A distant chime sounded, interrupting her train of thought.
“Ronkerz,” the simian growled, as though Tes had forgotten his name.
She held up a finger. “One moment.” She summoned her Farscribe book and flipped to the most recent entry. “He’s written.”
“Well?” Ronkerz loomed over her—fifty times her current mass. “What’s it say?”
Tes smiled and closed the book, peering up into his colossal, angular red eyes. “He’s ready.”
