Chapter 438 The Lich's Blessing

The dark veil released its grip on the world and sunlight flowed back into the sky. As the quakes slowed to a halt, as mortals opened their eyes from prayer they believed to save them, as immortal beings conducted their work, Doevm exited from the winding caverns. He found himself at the back of the lowest level of the Polyglint Mines, level eight.

As opposed to the upper levels' simplistic housing and calm, collected, chaos, the lower levels were each works of art constructed by the finest smiths in the mines using the finest materials. It was a fantasy-land where marble and gold flowed like water.

The checkpoint which served to separate the branching caverns from the city-dwellers now lay crumpled on its side. Doevm frowned. To him, days had passed within the legacy, and outside it shouldn't have been more than a minute.

'Did the gods attack already?' he thought.

Faint whispers and voices drifted over the wreckage, growing louder as Doevm clambered to the top. He rubbed his eyes as synthetic daylight filled them, and then, having adjusted, he realized it wasn't just the checkpoint that had fallen. The entire level was…well it was leveled.

It was a miracle that there was even a city left. If the Polyglint Mines had been built by anyone other than Dwarves, an earthquake would have swallowed it up. The marble floors, the clusters of light crystals that topped streetlamps, the pillars that supported seemingly impossible structures, they had been violently tested, and they proved passing (although it wasn't pretty).

Doevm nodded in approval and slid to the floor, whereupon a wet splash and a stench quickly changed his mind. Brownish floodwater hugged his ankles, the collective mass spilling out of pipes which had not fared as well as the buildings.

Teams of Dwarves buzzed like a hive-mind with hammers and sponges and buckets and ropes. The expediency of which they responded was one of Doevm's favorite things about them. They were as stubborn about their rocks as he was about magic.

He hugged the walls to let teams of medical personnel carry screaming, whimpering, silent patients up out of the sludge. Others' pain and death rarely affected his conscience. In the past the Dwarves were faceless masses; either they were in his way or not in his way. Once they had tried to get in his way (rightfully so), but his library's defenses beat them so badly they never tried again until centuries later.

The state of the city, however, irked Doevm more than he'd like to admit. He plucked a stone from the water, whispered unto it a Gnomish blessing, and as the words seared into it as if cut by a red-hot knife, it was left in a place where one might find it: atop a splintered support beam in what was formerly a small antique shop.

The enchantment was small enough as to no one would know what it did, and he left before anyone could see he had done it.

Across the street a man down the street found a copper floating beneath his door.

Around the corner, the missing button to a child's doll was in the mother's pocket the whole time.

Within the walls, a sudden blockage sealed a small pipe.

Eventually Doevm reached the lift, where he discovered that his karma remained unfazed. The mithril chains may have survived, but the quake revealed a crucial weakness: they could still become tangled. A crowd had already formed near them, and the staff stood with their arms outstretched to prevent anyone from even attempting to ascend.

"I don't know when the fucking things are going to be back to normal," a staff member exclaimed. "I mean really, how should I know? Look at them!"

"I have a family I need to check on!" One brilliant, middle-aged voice grated Doevm's ears with its sheer stupidity, as if yelling about it would change anything.

"What if we just climb? If it's flooding above, won't it fall here?" A boy to Doevm's right whispered to his father.

"It's way too high," the father replied. "It's too risky to use the elevator right now."

Doevm pushed his way through the crowd and quickly caught the staff.

"What are you doing?" the staff asked. "We ain't giving you a ride, and you can't use the elevators! I have to keep you here. We don't have a choice."

Doevm looked back at him with a blank expression. "Then I'll climb."

The staff member blinked twice, then looked at him with the most concerned look. "Goddess help you, boy. It's against the rules."

"I just angered your goddess. Why should I care about your rules?" Doevm replied before leaping onto the nearest chain.

"Wait!" a staff member said as he stepped towards Doevm, who launched himself upwards as copper life essence flooded out of his arms and legs.

"It's a hero!" the boy from the crowd cried after Doevm.

'Anyone but him,' Doevm thought. 'The Goddess is going to move, and quickly. The God of Evil too. Now that I know what I'm doing, I need to regroup with the others and make a new plan.'

Doevm leapt with one last burst of strength across the lift, and caught the ledge of the first level and pulled himself up.

"I don't know when the chains will be fixed," the staff on the first level recited the same thing as their cohorts on the eight level, and were just as shocked to see Doevm emerge from the lift.

"Kid, are you alright? Are you hurt?" A Dwarven woman with a gnarled ear jutting out of her curls offered him a hand.

"I'm fine," Doevm said, a little emphasis on the "I".

"Are there others that aren't?" the woman asked, glancing back at the chains. "Say, where did you even come from?"

"It doesn't matter," Doevm said. He paused. "What happened here?"

"Same thing that happened everywhere else," the woman said.

Doevm shook his head and gestured at the destruction beyond. The sludge reached up to his knees. "It wasn't nearly this bad down there."

Doevm sensed traces of magic in the air, the source of which was far beyond.