A week later…

  The Obsidian Plains.

  A long time ago, a fellow named Bael’Zharon was really badly treated by the Yalaini Empire, swore vengeance, and made a Pact with the Shadow in the Void, effectively becoming the mortal avatar of an Old God and suddenly as powerful as any Empyrean alive. He shadow-bombed whole Yalain armies and forcibly turned them into shades to follow him, as well as civilian men, women, and children.

  The Yalain set a trap for him at one of their magical academies, the Jailne Lyceum. He entered it, and there was a monstrous explosion that wiped out all the participating archmages, save one Asheron Reladain, and banished Bael’Zharon from the mortal world… tossing the problem into the future for later generations to deal with in the true Empyrean way.

  It also created a massive field of black stone, warped magic, weird hexagonal crystals, alien mushrooms, and really unpleasant elemental interactions that for some reason overly intelligent spellcasters found really interesting.

  It was a place where the soil was burned black with Arcane Fire and Shadow residues, where the weather could be Hell on earth, cut by canyons scattered like careful cracks in the world, and a lot of really dangerous stuff lived there, just to keep things interesting.

  The virindi loved the place and set it up as their base of operations, especially the center of the place. Above the center of the OP floated a weird laboratory/base, taken over by Aerbax the renegade as its Citadel, a powerful virindi who got a wee bit too interested in alternate and corrupted forms of energy, and even tried to form its own Quiddity and Singularity.

  Everyone had hoped it was dead and trapped in the System, bound to that floating laboratory, but that was not the case.

  The locus and concentration of the virindi, plus the machinations of otherworldly powers irked at them, unleashed the rynthids, ancient Chaotic enemies of the virindi who embodied the emotions they so despised, upon them, somehow freeing elements of the species from the great Aestral prison the virindi had finally trapped them in. They rapidly began to affect everyone in the Obsidian Plains, including the virindi themselves.

  The rynthid never spread outside the OP, and nobody had much gone into the Plains after magic went crazy. Going in there without excellent Gear was a death sentence, as the virindi were not much affected by the changes to magic and certainly not the destruction of Gear. Their aetherium reserves, sure, but that was a different problem.

  The Black Hills, the strange mountain-plateaus around the OP, formed a lot of flat-topped surfaces scored by the fallout energies of the imprisonment and de-powering of Bael’Zharon, as well as the personal holdings/Dungeons/strongpoints of dozens of undead lordlings, and later shades who seized those holdings or made their own.

  Nobody knew that, of course, for such were hidden and private, accessed only by those knowing the proper spells to Recall into them. With no way to fly, explore, look for dimensional connections, or the like, they were just the Black Hills, weird and mysterious.

  The Fall had brought all of those secret hiding places crashing back into reality, and now the Black Hills were topped by a whole lot of Empyrean fortifications, bunkers, and buildings, all of them leading down into the plateaus beneath them, where undead and shades pursued their own goals in the darkness, despising one another, yet not enough to wage war across the canyons between themselves.

  They still didn’t know how to fly or Linejump to any extent, see.

  My orbital survey hadn’t revealed anything of that, of course. Massive illusions and magical obscurement, plus fallout from the burning of an Old God’s power, covered the whole thing and made details from anything from over a few hundred meters in the air a blurred mess, the whole area swimming with anti-divinatory stuff and disruptive influences that turned subtle magic on its ear.

  The sudden elemental storms that whipped themselves up out of nowhere weren’t much fun, either, but hey, just hide behind the obsidian crystals sticking up out of the ground, or the gigantic mushrooms which somehow still grew there, and you’d be just fine.

  The OP itself was largely accessed by the few canyons that cut through the Obsidian Rim, the towering straight wall of fused black rock looming hundreds of feet into the air, forming an unnatural and very circular neo-crater around the place. The town of Wai Jhou was known for having one of those canyons nearby, with a Deathstone for easy resurrection close by if you were killed.

  The town and the stone were gone, but the canyon was still there, and really, no reason not to clear off the former before taking advantage of the latter.

  ------

  The last of the markers was pounded into place atop a Spawn Point that existed within the former town of Wai Jhou, obviously indicating that the place had never been meant as a training facility or settlement, and someone was just half-mad for setting it up.

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  Hey, there was a Deathstone, had to be a good place, right?

  The Skeeters and Roaches were both on hand for this probing mission. Someone had to get in and see what was going on here, even if we didn’t want to. Furthermore, if we wanted to push the virindi and probably the rynthids off the world, we’d have to do so from the Obsidian Plains where their ties to Dereth were the strongest.

  Axiomatic energy beings and thus Aberrants, the virindi despised anything that was subject to emotions and any form of chaotic behavior, which included almost all mortal beings. They were willing to make use of us, of course, being completely pragmatic about such things, but had no valuation of us outside that use, no respect for life, and nothing like honor or morality. There was only the hunt for more data, more information, and fighting against the Chaos of existence.

  The Mick had a Lived-Line tie here, but in the interests of being able to get here on demand, naturally the first trip was made overland to get everyone at least access to a canyon up into the place.

  That also gave us access to the Rim Swamp that circled the entire place somehow, vaguely draining off near Wai Jhou to the east.

  When heading up to the Valley of Death, everyone had basically gone overland from the Graveyard, taking the opportunity to head west to Wai Jhou (the nearest settlement), swing into the Rim Swamp, circle north and west, and then proceed between the Black Hills into the Valley itself. Double duty, it allowed us to Teleport back closely to the canyon we needed here without making a separate trip.

  The shades, like the many Direland creature spawns we’d encountered on the way, most of them of multiple powerful creatures of their types we’d met along the Rim, didn’t last very long.

  “Not going to go right up the Rim and make an instant impact?” I asked Briggs as the two teams finished their quick review of the remains of the town, basically reduced to blasted ash and moldering remnants after a generation of War Magic and random elemental storms had pounded Wai Jhou down.

  “No. According to the Mick, the outer and inner areas of the Obsidian Plains are divided by another set of blast craters. The virindi are strongest in the center, while the rynthid infested the Spawn Points outside the area and the Inner Rim. We have no idea how matters are, so going through the canyons and ascertaining the balances of power is more important than trying any vivisizing of the landscape as yet.”

  I could only agree. Vivus was plainly hostile to virindi who died, consuming their energies and not allowing them to return to their collective.

  The virindi could use the Spawn Points to their advantage, and did so relentlessly, hence their strong grip on the center of the OP historically. None of the other forces had been able to chase them off, as the Spawn Points remained committed to popping up more virindi, and no one before us had the power to Seal them.

  We had little doubt they’d fight tooth and nail to stop us from Sealing the Spawn Points in the Center, too, but if we did so, we could cripple their grip on the world, as their ‘living’ members numbered nowhere near what their Summons did. They just tended to be more powerful, which was fine by their Singularity.

  “How did King Bobo take the news?” I asked him. He and Briggs had struck up a decent friendship, particularly after Briggs threw the Tusker King across his own audience chamber without much effort, and had proven able to arm-wrestle Mowen.

  “Disappointed, but not unexpected.” The spirits of the four Obliterators we’d found had been at least a thousand years old, maybe older. They didn’t seem to be artificial, but like Tremendous Monugas, the final evolution of a race native to these islands. “Perhaps they are related to how the TM’s are made, perhaps not.”

  We’d only found two of the TM Summons in the Valley, brought both down with Mercy, but again, the spirits were over five hundred years old and basically mindless. Tim had no peers in all of Dereth.

  Paul the TM and Babe the Blue Auroch up in the north notwithstanding. They were basically magical automatons; the sight of them endlessly piling up tree trunks that vanished from the stack and reappeared to be cut down again, engaging in that mindlessly for decades now, had been extremely heart-breaking to Tim.

  Paul was also ungodly tough, if not dangerous. It took two full squads an hour to do enough damage to bring down him and his auroch, mostly because the two of them were completely immune to magic… at least until they died, and the vivus had kicked in and Burned them away.

  Then Tim had picked up that massive lumberman’s axe, chopped down those goddamn trees, and we’d seared the stumps with vivus and fire, making damn sure they didn’t grow back!

  We had even reported back to the Hea on the spirits of the champions found in the Valley of Death, none of whom were less than two hundred years dead. It appeared that the System here had been stealing souls for far, far longer than they had believed.

  It had been an interesting time, sweeping the Valley completely clean as far as we could tell, and then delving the Dungeons to wipe and Seal them as well. The mukkir-infested Dungeon was particularly unsettling and large, taking a long time to cleanse and bury…

  Nobody expected the spawns here to be as dangerous as the Valley of Death, but the difference was that real virindi and other forces could be here, and command the Summons. There were a LOT of virindi mixed forces, comprised of lesser virindi, minions, and tuskers just down here in the Rim Swamp, and they popped up more frequently and closer together up in the OP.

  There was a reason nobody challenged the virindi here.

  Not even Master Oswald had gone up into the OP without really good reason during the Fall. Virindi having the ability to sense active magic made stealth magic extremely counter-effective here, after all.

  “Bad feeling, Fuzzy?” Kris asked, stepping up with us as everyone prepped to cross the swamp and enter the canyon on the other side waiting for us.

  “This place is like a magical atomic blast site. The shit we’re going to have to do to Cleanse the place is going to really suck,” he said, shaking his head, then tilting his ear at the sound of distant, crackling thunder.

  “The job is to test the strength of what is present and see if we can clear a road into the place, not to clean them all off,” Kris stated firmly. “You don’t think we’ll have a problem with that, do you?”

  Briggs shook his head. “No. I’m considering that there could be complications from unforeseen outside vectors.”

  Kris and I both were silent as we considered that, but her only for a moment.

  “Sounds like fun, Fuzzy!” she grinned wildly, and he could only grunt and smile with her.

  ============================

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