Chapter 17-452: Digging into the Darkness

The Ghoul Kingdom of Navar Nevrend.

Before the Shroud, just a myth, a city of undead led by Ghoul Sages from Leng, discretely robbing graveyards for their munchies, or maybe haunting the battlefields where dead lay strewn about, and carrying them off into the dark and countless hidden tunnels. They were only whispers who avoided the living and were avoided in turn as they cleaned up the leavings of the numberless humans dominating the world now.

After the Shroud, it sank into even more blankness, cut off even from its own kind by the Shroud of the world above, and the free-willed undead who fled rather than be enslaved.

I had started the full mapping of Eurasia on November 20th, focusing first on Europe, since it was so highly populated. The Shroudzones at old battlefields, mass graveyards, and centers of plague and disease had mostly been cleaned away over the last year, tasks energetically pursued by weaker newbies who wanted to get stronger, and which were eventually completed.

London and Paris both were still Shrouded, but not by much, and not for too much longer, slowly and steadily whittled down by fresh troops and volunteers with constant vivic fire. As the numbers whittled, the power of the controlling undead faltered as well, and the Bishops or Fellbishops at the center of them fell precipitously in status.

Without the Shrouds getting in the way, the full spread of Commune with Nature could reach out in every direction and all the way to the Strata below, and lay the whole of the Felldeep bare with excruciating detail.

There were a lot of ghoul tunnels into the Felldeep in Europe, and there was a lot of stuff down there they didn’t want to see, but were now going to have to do something about.

Germany itself was the last huge Shroudzone, and even that was getting beaten back now, as two Shroud Nexi had been destroyed, opening up nearly half the country to the light for the first time in over seventy years. Fighting undead Nazi troops with necrotanks, nihility-spewing artillery, and ragged ruined prop-jobs diving screaming from the sky all aflame was certainly an interesting experience, and giving people an idea of what to expect when we moved further east.

Thanksgiving with the Blakhamars came and went, and I was back on the job.

The Felldeep here was more organized than in America, with obvious trade routes and tunnels carved over centuries, if not millennia. Watching them converge towards Moscow was surreal, although the amount of information we’d received from Gilcruks and his cronies on the ancient ghoulhold was extensive, to say the least.

Clavus had finished Slot Zwolf, raising him to default +IV before anything, and I had begun the transition to making him a Staff of Battle, having the belief that my super-convenient Ghost-eating Ki trick wasn’t going to work in other places, and I’d need to be able to crack skulls to get my ki back and keep my infinite casting loop going.

Specifically, I wanted the Missile Absorption power of a Staff of Battle, so as to completely frustrate any sniper trying to shoot me with a one-shot-kill. It would take me a month to get what I wanted, fueled by me ‘porting to a convenient Zone and slaughtering a thousand undead before getting back to work.

In Russia, all the deep roads led to Navar Nevrend... but I couldn’t see them, since they were very, very firmly under the ink-thick Hellclouds of the Russian Shroudzone.

Most of the Ukraine and all of central Russia were under overlapping Shroudzones, formed from the initial slaughter of arriving undead sprawling across thousands of square miles of territory. They had moved with tireless speed, incorporeals ranging out ahead seeking the living and slaughtering them all, raising more undead to continue the process.

The initial surge had gone out for over a hundred miles in all directions, slaughtering everything. Then negative energy had reanimated dead men and machines, and they had turned out and roared forth, now independent of need for fuel and ammunition, and expanded the zone even further.

Then the sun had risen, and the Curse sent them all back to where they had either arrived or died.

The following days had been lessons in frustration as the Shroudzones boiled up, and the Deadzones had come into play. Yes, an undead army on necromechanical vehicles could travel a long way in just a few hours. But they couldn’t pass the Dead Zones away from their Shroud Lord, and their Shroud Lord always got sent back home... and so did they.

Still, if the living couldn’t run away fast enough, the undead could just leapfrog a killing path, making more undead to carry the Shroudzone forward, and more Shroudlords... until they entered the great plains and mountain areas, and there was too much ground to cover in one night, and the number of people in them was too few... and as those few were claimed by the Shroud, so as not to be freed when the sun rose, and there was no Shroudlord in range when they came back at night.

Also, the undead were unkillable and always came back, but that wasn’t true for their rides. The burning planes with flaming-skulled pilots could still be shot out of the air, and they didn’t come back when they were. While they were impossibly agile for their condition in the air, they were also slower than truly mechanical planes, and the desperate defense by all factions in those first few weeks of the Shroud were still legends of bravery and sacrifice.

Most of those who’d fought the ghost planes of the Shroudzone had ended up joining them, but they’d destroyed the air force and vastly restricted the range of the undead in doing so. That had only become more and more important as the decades went past, and the undead made more planes to send out, and survey their lands...

Thankfully, undead found innovating and creativity a grand and tedious affair. Like automatons, they could experiment and refine, but truly grand leaps of insight and progress were few and far between. That was the strength of the living, after all. So even after all these decades, they still hadn’t stumbled into atomic weapons, advanced missile tech, or even decent jet fighters. Most of the people who might have had the intellect to design them, and the rest who could engineer them into existence, had been necrofied into nigh-mindless undead who were only good for brute labor and killing.

The Shroudlords could get Congregants to manage factories, but maintaining such things was a chore, and improving them an impossibility.

Air duels with the Russian ghost planes were regular things in the east, but had become much easier once jet technology gave our planes a great edge over theirs, and a viable form of night vision made it easier to see them and maneuver at night.

Self-destructs so the undead couldn’t capture the jets were definitely part of that, too.

As a result of all that, the Russian Shroudzone was huge, covering close to a million square miles of ground, completely ignoring all the lesser Shroudzones that were spread across the landscape.

Parked underneath all this was the Felldeep, and Navar Nevrend.

Without a doubt, the entire Felldeep under the Shroudzone was wiped and converted to undead. Once the Shroudlord became aware of living things down there, it could either access the ghoul tunnels, or just send down waves of thousands of incorps to eliminate any living things down there, which would not be prepared for a spectre bomb like that.

However, such things would also be constrained by the rock and the tunnels, and the Strata. If there were deeper things, the Shroudlord couldn’t sense them... and its Deadzone didn’t reach the Strata, so as far as it was concerned, there was nothing below it.

The lord of Navar Nevrend probably knew better, but was likely less than happy to share that knowledge, even if it was compelled to do something about them by itself.

If I had the mechanics of the Shroud right, Navar Nevrend fell into the Deadzone and thus into the control radius of the invading Shroudlord, the would-be Dark Hierophant of the Dead March that had arrived here. However, that control was continually interrupted by the Curse of the Sun. As the Shroudlord burned, its control was interrupted, and the ghoulhold would be freed during the day.

The ghouls below never experienced the sun, and so were untouched by it. If they ever did cross its rays, the Curse would seize them and they would be subject from that moment forth, but not right now.

They would still be tied to the Shroud, and couldn’t move far... at least horizontally.

I was of the belief that the vast majority of the undead population of Navar Nevrend would have retreated to underneath the Strata, just to avoid the domination of the alien Dark Hierophant above, who was probably incensed at its inability to make them bow to it. If it ordered the ghouls up, they would become subject to the Curse of the Sun, which would just send them back down when they burned, and if they didn’t make it to the surface, they could simply run back down and away in a mindless game of push and pull that accomplished nothing.

The undead weren’t subject to death by spectre-bombing, and actually could deal very easily with such undead if they had to, being undead themselves.

I imagined the Sage Ghouls had nonetheless joined the slaughtering efforts in the Felldeep, and eliminated, subjugated, and expanded their control of all the surrounding caverns directly, taking control of them when the spectre-bombing forces burned away, and the place was now a quietly seething mass of the doomed down there... which we were also going to have to Purge to remove the Shroud.

One of Legion’s objectives had been to try and find the nearest Deepsea location to the ghoulhold, which was definitely going to be a trade port of some kind. It was unfortunate that information about the Strata was extremely sparse, even among the Felldeep races, as the natives didn’t share, and the Merchants of Leng didn’t gossip.

It was well enough, just making more work for us.

The amount of wealth, lore, and magic residing in Navar Nevrend was extreme, as money and power flowed to those with the secrets of the dead. Many of the Illuminati had been trained in the City at the End of All, Navar Nevrend being a Necrus-term for the fate of all things being to wind up food for something else in an endless cycle, and so particularly apt for a ghoulhold.

We were already digging out special libraries to store a lot of the stuff we were going to find, which, by agreement with Gilcruks, the Ghoul Sages of Leng would have access to, and which would be open to bargaining for at fair prices if said objects were not actively malevolent. Those Sages were indeed very impatient for us to massacre all their former comrades and get at the wealth of lore within. Reinhabiting Navar Nevrend afterwards was also something left silently on the table, although I was personally moving to make that rather untenable.

--------

When Legion discovered the port of krovboynyar that had been overrun and taken control of by ghouls only forty miles southeast of Navar Nevrend, I knew we’d found our port. During the day, they could even trade with unwholesome parties like the Merchants of Leng, the Strata weakening the compulsions of the Shroud.

The black-boned, transparent-fleshed Negaborn had escaped the initial call of the Shroud by being down in the Strata. Unfortunately for them, the arrival of the Ghoul Lord’s forces had brought the Shroud with it, and now they were enslaved to it as surely as any of the undead. I didn’t have much sympathy for them, as they feasted on life energy and death, and despised positive-energy life on principle.

It was an alternate route much closer to Navar Nevrend, without having to go under the Russian Shroudzone and the many, many eyes that might be watching from it.

My slow circuit on Sleipner across country as I circumlocuted the Russian Shroudzone made it very plain to me that the Shroudlord within bent Axiomatic. Sure, during the day it was wide open, but come night, the undead moved out with speed and direction, with slight variations in the patterns of their dispersal so we could never totally predict where the patrols and watchers would be. They had built up fortifications, turning the whole country into one big maze of walls and trenches, probably because they didn’t have much else to do with their time. Ghost planes flew by trailing black flames on a regular basis, looking for signs of incursions, and occasionally graveguns would fire off an artillery barrage from the distance, erupting with black-green deathflames and warning the living of the cost of approaching them.