Sure, navigating through a world of eternal snow was a bit tricky. But thanks to Methialia’s squad of scouts and all our recent training, we were making great time.
Despite all this success, though, I was feeling… frustrated. Surrounded by my troops as I was, a very important presence was missing from my side. Mia had been given her own collection of targets. On top of that, Methialia had stayed behind to monitor the situation from home base, so I was down to only one captain.
There was nothing wrong with Captain Gerlack. He was a pleasant, soft-spoken demon who did his job well. That didn’t make him a substitute for a close companion.
I was not in a good mood. I kept opening my mouth to say something and then realizing Mia wasn’t there to hear me. The longer we were out there, the more ‘off’ I felt.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel like wasting a ton of time when our path eventually took us straight to the side of an ice mountain. The locals, and whatever source of Divinity they were cultivating, were in there somewhere.
We just had to get to them.
“Order everyone to form up behind me, and don’t interrupt me until I give you the signal to strike.”
My voice was cold, perhaps a bit too cold, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even try to contain the ominous snarl that accompanied my last few words. I just closed my eyes, feeling all my extra eyes snap open in the same instant.
Deep breath in, deep breath out.
My mana spiked outwards like a stake driven deep into a vampire’s chest. The wall of ice in front of me trembled. I felt the mana sink into the ice, travel a few yards, and then start to bundle there.
I filtered my spell into the bundle. Suddenly, there was a seed of crystal deep in the ice, waiting for my order to sprout. The order came immediately afterwards. A loud cracking sound followed, and my roses began digging through the ice with contemptuous ease.
I didn’t fear the enemies we would find within the mountain, so I didn’t feel the need to keep my actions quiet or conserve my mana pool. By the time my constructs were ready, half my mana was gone, and a solid chunk of the mountain in front of me was shot through with crystal.
Still, I didn’t’ care. There was a cold smile on my face as I raised my hand and theatrically clenched it.
With a great rumble, all my crystalline constructs shifted. The wall disintegrated, opening into a tunnel that led deep into the ice mountain. I sensed soul signatures down there.
“You know what to do,” I growled, pushing large doses of my mana and Emotion into my voice. “Go! BRING ME THE SOULS OF THEIR LEADERS!”
My soldiers surged forward in tightly knit units. They couldn’t leverage their superior numbers as well as they would have in an open field, but the optimized units were far more effective than the unruly mob of the past. Besides, we were only fighting yeti.
The following combat would have resulted in a slaughter if that had been our goal. This tribe was not like the last we faced. Their leadership wasn’t already communing with their unborn gods, hoping to bring these deities forth to fight us. They didn’t even know we were coming.
So, when a tide of demons washed over them, the mortals fell with very little preamble. They were knocked out, bound, and dragged off like sacks to the burrows they called home, clearing our way to a small cavern where a couple banners stood around an ice statue.
A much more humble setting than the combined tribes had managed to craft, but the Divinity was still thick in the air. Unusually thick. I strongly suspected all the mana waves had something to do with that.
It was as I stood there, gazing at the statue of some hulking yeti posed like he was about to crush me with his meaty hands, that two mortals were dragged in and dumped at my feet. I glanced down at the massive male and smaller female, the latter wearing a necklace of teeth strung on a tendon. Teeth and tendon all appeared to have come from a yeti.
“The chieftain of the tribe and the lead shaman, sir.” Gerlack bowed his head in my direction.
I gave him a curt nod. Then, ignoring the whimpers of the two mortals, I waved my hand and fed more mana into construct creation.
A spike of crystal appeared in front of each yeti and sank into their foreheads. A moment later, rose vines burst out all over their bodies, winding around them and binding them in the positions they died in. Some of the demons backed off with wide eyes, just like I’d hoped they would.
The vines were purely for spectacle. Both mortals had died immediately after I cast my spell, with no suffering involved. Still, Glaustro had warned all four of his sergeants that people would be after our standing in his army. Apparently, it was a good idea to discourage such notions with frequent displays of force..
The two souls were already inside my purse by that point, so I shoved the Divinity sources into my dimensional storage jewel. Then I strode briskly out of the small cavern, calling orders as I went.
“Follow. We still have to hit four more tribes, and I will not waste more time on this than necessary! Oh, and somebody untie one of the locals. That one can handle the freeing of the others.”
I didn’t wait for a confirmation, because I didn’t need to. I kept trying to tell myself that, at least. As much as I wanted to put on the confident persona Glaustro expected of his sergeants, it still rankled that I wasn’t supposed to oversee my troops personally as they carried out my orders. Apparently, that demonstrated both doubt in their abilities and insecurity on my part. Either was a big no-no.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Still, I scowled as I left the cavern, forcing myself not to look back.
I really wanted to know who was giving Glaustro all this guidance on how to lead troops, because I needed to have words with them.
—
In spite of all my bluster, I didn’t actually insist on hitting all the locations assigned to us within one or two days. It felt too close to what Wilhelmina had done to her troops during my days as a recruit. I didn’t want to give the soldiers under my command anything close to the memories that still bounced painfully around in my skull.
So, once we’d dealt with two of the most closely clustered tribes and taken their items of Divinity, I ordered a halt for the day.
The soldiers broke out tents or (in very few cases) sleeping bags only, and set up camp. Guard rotations had been set beforehand, and duty rosters were memorized in advance. That left me free to do a hasty bit of conjuration. I set up two gleaming shelters of crystal for myself and my captain before calling it a day.
Of course, I wasn’t exactly eager to go to sleep, or even read. There was no one there to make my wings ache by shifting constantly all throughout the night.
Instead, I decided to investigate the secrets of the two souls I had reaped.
I went with the chieftain first. Most of the yeti’s life was about what I would expect from the specimen. He had always been large, always been dominant within his age group. When he finally challenged and killed the previous chieftain, he cemented himself as the premier authority within the tribe, at least until the day one of his own offspring would come around to claim his place.
That could never happen now, obviously, but I found it odd that the yeti considered such an eventuality with fondness and even a bit of anticipation. Apparently, the yeti viewed their eventual death at the hands of their progeny as an immense honor and a sign of promising things to come. Neither my current life as a demon nor my former experiences as a mortal equipped me to understand that.
Aside from this interesting insight into their culture, most of the memories were useless. The exception was the group of memories from the last few weeks.
I sank into those fully.
I knew this was a dream. I could taste it on the tip of my tongue, feel it in my bones, and it echoed in my core. An icy hand of something greater had ascended from deep within the earth and closed its fist around me.
That did nothing to take away from what majesty of what I was seeing.
An army of ancestors marched on the world. Their gleaming golden forms preserved through art, story, and song were flawless in every way. There went Agagth the Crusher, Targh the Hunter, and even Righ the Bonespear, all striding side by side like equals of unmatched ferocity.
And they were joined by so many others! Some I could recognize, the storied ancestral guardians of several nearby tribes, but so many were strangers to me.
Yet, all was not right. Even as I admired the army of ancestors advancing upon me, several were shot through by cracks, and flaked away into the wind. A darkness swept up their ashes, and then swooped down on the glorious army. Screams and cries rose in an overwhelming din…
A different dream, this time.
I was deep, deep within the earth. Past the snow, the ice, and even several layers of stone. I was in the tunnels my ancestors once called home, before the Ever Ice, before the constant storms, before the old ways had to be abandoned and the new ways sang into prominence.
Lower and lower I went, until I finally came upon a sea of gold so thick and luminescent that I fell upon my knees in awe. Something grew here, an infant gestating under the earth and drinking from the world above, preparing for the day it would emerge and grant all the tribes their promised boons.
The heart of the infant beat once. A swell of might rushed out, invigorating my spirit and boosting the resilience of my very bones. I roared, and my voice was joined by countless others.
Hope, heady and light, thrummed inside my chest…
A wearying day, a tense debate with shamans, and finally a chance to lay my head down and rest. My eldest was eying me on the way back to my tent, the massive female almost vibrating with the desire to challenge me. I smiled, looking forward to the day she would.
I settled down next to my mate, drew her close with a grunt, and closed my eyes. The moment I did, my mind sank into darkness, and I felt that same familiar dream-taste on my tongue.
Except, this time, there was nothing around me. Darkness stretched into the distance. I was blind. My other senses failed, muted and absent in ways I could not put into words.
Then, slowly, a sense of unease crept down my back. All my fur stood on end. I heard the echo of blood dripping onto ice. Soon, the sound evolved into a pattern, and then a proper rain of the sticky substance.
My fur was wet and stuck to my skin. I could taste the copper on my tongue. When I tried to move, my feet sloshed through the thick liquid, dragging me down. My foot caught on something, and before I could correct my balance, I was on my knees.
Two glowing points of blue flame stared back at me from inches away. Somehow, I recognized the skull of my eldest floating atop the sea of blood.
I heard the thunder of marching feet. When my eyes snapped up, they landed on a horde of shadowy monsters, eyes glowing red as blood, a haze of power billowing out of them as they advanced on all I loved and wished to protect.
I met them on my knees, my legs too heavy to stand. I died in less than a second.
When I woke up, heaving for breath, I met the crazed and terrified eyes of my mate.
I took a deep breath as I came back from the stolen memories, brow furrowed in confusion.
I knew what the dreams were. Visions. Omens. A message from something trying to reach out, something that wanted to offer both reassurance and a warning.
The question was, what?
It couldn’t be the Will of Breskwor. The world was too young for that,. It had failed even to bind us properly on arrival. Only much more aware worlds could actively communicate with the souls they nurtured, warning them of impending disasters and invasions when demons chose to strike.
Yet, wasn’t that exactly what I saw in the chieftain’s memories?
Just to confirm, I quickly devoured the soul of the shaman as well. The first two visions were more or less identical to the chieftain’s. The third, carried by the latest wave of mana, only differed in that the shaman had attempted to struggle against it using her greater magical might. She failed, and it had left her mind a mess all the way up to our arrival and her untimely death.
At least her memories confirmed one thing: each wave of mana had significantly bolstered the power of the yeti’s totems. If we hadn’t interfered, then they almost certainly would have brought forth their gods in the next few weeks.
That they apparently viewed these divine phantoms as ‘ancestors’ amused me. Clearly, each totem was crafted after the likeness of a yeti who had managed to make their name go down in the history of their tribe, and they held to the belief that these spirits watched over and protected them. It was so na?ve, I almost chuckled.
Of course, I would have been a lot more amused if these defenders weren’t actually coming to life for the sole purpose of fighting me. And if something else wasn’t apparently awake, sending visions and mana waves out into the world…
I shook out my wings, feeling every single eye twitch in rising anxiety as I scowled at the empty room around me.
“We needed to find the source of those mana waves,” I said out loud to no one. “We need to find it now.”
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