Chapter B4C17 - Nagrythyn

Chapter B4C17 - Nagrythyn

Tyron and his ‘honour guard’ were the first to go through the rift. He wasn’t willing to send his skeletons into a fight he couldn’t see and risk losing many of them. Who knew what monstrosity could be awaiting him on the other side?

After holding his area of the defensive perimeter around the rift, he pushed forward and allowed the other slayer teams to cover the space behind him as he prepared himself to advance. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d crossed over a rift, but it was always a disorienting experience.

The rifts themselves were... difficult to describe. Rents in space, tears in the dimensional weave connecting two places which should never have touched. They weren’t neat circles through which a person could peer and inspect the other side before they crossed. Instead, a rift was like a hazy, shimmering area without a defined edge. Peering into the centre of the rift before him, Tyron didn’t see a warped view of the landscape on the other side, as if he were staring through a heat haze; instead, he caught fleeting glimpses of things he didn’t truly understand. Light and time and space and magick, all overlaid in strange, twisted patterns that his mind struggled to grasp. People weren’t supposed to see such things, the fundamental nature of the weave, of magick itself, as they interacted in the wrong space before him.

Almost, he felt as if he could grasp something, but he knew better than to stare too long into a rift. His mother had warned him of the madness that gripped mages who fell into that trap.

Some things our minds aren’t made to understand, she’d told him. Even if you gained something from the experience, you would be in no state to act upon it, your grasp of reality shattered forever.

So, filled with resolution, he stepped forward, and once again set his feet upon an alien realm. Physically moving through a rift was wrenching. His guts clenched and his head pounded at the sudden shift, but then he was through, on the other side. He ordered his skeletons forward, and for the rest to pile through behind him, the connection between them still stable through the rift.

There was too much to take in at once. Crossing was always dangerous, as the kin would gather most thickly around the rifts on this side. While only a few dozen might push through every minute, there could be hundreds here, waiting, circling, trying to push through.

Despite knowing that several teams were on this side already, the possibility existed he could be jumped by a ravenous horde of monsters the moment he crossed over.

Fortunately, that wasn’t quite the case. There were dozens of kin still hovering around the rifts on this side. Clearly, one of the teams had swept through not long ago, for there to be so few. At his appearance, the insectile creatures chittered and hissed in rage before they charged toward him. In moments, his troops were under attack, and his hands were moving, weaving magick to ensure he could secure his foothold.

The shivering curse slammed down, plunging the surroundings into freezing cold. His skeletons were unaffected, their bones untouched by the penetrating chill, but the kin were not so lucky. Many recoiled at its touch, but then plunged forward regardless, too maddened by the magick to resist the urge to fight and kill.

The tables were flipped in an instant. The cursed kin were heavily affected, severely slowed by the curse, allowing his vanguard of revenants and skeletons to hold them back. All the while, the rest of his troops poured through the rift, setting upon the monsters and shifting the numbers advantage to his side. Soon enough, the kin in the area had been neutralised, and the full force of his undead horde had gathered around him.

An easier crossing than he’d expected, but he wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Despite having killed the kin in the area, the danger had not passed. A rift this size would pull kin towards it like iron to a lodestone for hundreds of kilometres around. If he remained here, it was only a matter of time before he was overwhelmed, or something too large for him to handle arrived.

Just like the other teams who’d come across, he wouldn’t remain here, but move some distance away and intercept the kin as they travelled towards the rift. In this way, he could cut down on the numbers reaching the other side in a safe manner, while gaining experience against the strongest that Nagrythyn could throw at them.

With his immediate safety secured, Tyron hurried away from the cluster of rifts, his skeletons pulled into a tight formation around him. Only then did he finally allow himself to take in his surroundings, and immediately froze in his tracks.

Whatever name would be given to the realm connected to Cragwhistle, it was an uninteresting place to look at. In fact, it was almost impossible to see any of it at all, as the entire place seemed gripped in a perpetual winter storm. Snow and sleet fell continuously, with fierce winds whipping up the ice that had fallen to the ground.

Here, though... he could see very clearly that he was in a different world.

Once again, his hands flickered as he spoke the words of power. This time, he was aware enough to sense what was happening as he cast. His words caused the dense magick around him to almost visibly ripple, the arcane energy bending reality to his will in a way that manifested to the naked eye.

He could almost feel the sigils take shape around his hands, his fingers trailing through the power in the air.

When he unleashed the shivering curse, it burst out over a wider area than even he had expected. He’d juiced the spell, needing it to cover his entire force and a little beyond to slow the monsters as they approached, but working with such dense magick had pushed the spell even further.

Slightly intoxicated by the feeling, he began to weave another spell, shaping the magick, pushing the power he contained within himself out into the rich air of Nagrythyn.

Shortly after, the blades of his skeletons became wreathed in dark energy as the Death Blades spell took effect. With both spells in play, his skeletons would be much more effective against their much faster and better armoured opponents.

Empowered by his magick, the undead fought back against the kin. The moment the creatures entered the freezing field, they struggled to deal with the cold, recoiling, or rapidly slowing down. His minions pounced, plunging their blades deep into the monsters when they got the chance.

Before Tyron could get too lost in the feeling of casting in this environment, another disturbance shook him from his reverie. Behind him this time, another spire began to resonate with the scritching-scratching sound. Soon enough, another pack emerged, hissing and chittering.

The Necromancer cursed beneath his breath and made the mental adjustments necessary to shift his formation to accommodate this new threat. With more kin joining the fight, he suddenly felt his position was much more precarious. All the spires around him loomed much taller as he began to fear more kin emerging on all sides, surrounding him and his undead. There was no way to know how many there were, waiting to emerge, he could be a dead man already and simply not know it.

“Damn,” he muttered to himself, waking up to how dangerous of a position he’d suddenly found himself in.

With a mental command, he ordered his reserve skeletons to step forward and place down their burdens. Another thought, and the cauldrons were activated. Dense black smoke billowed upward and rolled over the field, blanketing his entire force in moments. His minions began to pull in the Death Magick contained in the cloud, replenishing their reserves and charging the arrays contained within each of them. Concealed in the darkness, his minions fought harder than before, empowered by the cauldrons.

Tyron himself wove magick again, this time around his eyes. In the moment, he was most concerned about the unseen kin still lurking in the spires around him, or just below the ground. Kin contained potent concentrations of magick because of the cores within them. If he used the spell which allowed him to see that energy more clearly, perhaps he could catch a glimpse of just how many monsters were in the vicinity.

Except, he’d miscalculated. Although the spell filtered out the Death Magick, it still made him more sensitive to the rest of the ambient arcane energy around him, and there was a lot.

The torrential flow of power around Tyron seized his awareness, sweeping him up and blinding him to all else. There were no skeletons, no kin; he couldn’t see a thing except the vast, sweeping currents of magick all around him, in the sky, across the ground, beneath his feet.

It was everywhere.

As he stared, he felt something tickle at the edge of his mind. Something about the movement, the pattern, the way it interacted with itself. The way it flowed, winding around itself, spoke to him on some level, and the more he looked, the more he felt there was something he was missing, something he felt he should know.

Meanwhile, more kin began to creep out of the spires, drawn to the surface by the disturbance.