It didn’t take long for Ammun to make an appearance. Or rather, it didn’t take long for the next prong of his assault to manifest. Despite my best efforts to clear Ralvost of people and deprive Ammun of his army, the old lich had one secreted away anyway. He’d just needed to dig it up first.

  It was fairly unimpressive, as far as undead hordes went. I could only assume they were leftovers from his last attempt at invading my home, or maybe they just hadn’t been worth raising in the first place. Given the terrible condition all the bodies were in, that second option seemed likely.

  Regardless of the why, the fact of the matter was that he’d kept a few thousand bodies tucked away and was now making that my problem. If we’d caught it before he’d opened up a portal and started shoving them through, it probably would have been easy to deal with. I could have teleported there, laid down a firestorm on the whole horde, and incinerated them on the spot.

  Now, it was split into five different pieces: one to threaten New Alkerist, one for Derro, one that for some reason was trying to occupy Eyrie Peak, one for Hyago’s grove out in the desert, and one outside my own demesne. That one was easy enough to destroy, at least.

  Eyrie Peak was ignorable. A landbound army was no threat to the brakvaw, not unless one of those skeletal wyverns knocked a bird to the ground. In theory, that might happen, but the odds of the undead being in the exact right location for it to matter were not high. With my family already evacuated, New Alkerist was a low priority. Derro could defend itself.

  That just left the grove and my valley that needed immediate responses. “Why don’t you go stop the ones besieging our poor reagents supplier?” I suggested. “I’ll take care of the ones here.”

  “What about the town?” Querit asked.

  I shrugged. “Help them if you want. The wards I placed around it should hold the undead back for hours, so there’s no rush.”

  I sent him through my demesne, instantly transporting him from the scrying chamber to the teleportation platform. A few seconds later, he disappeared from that. I watched through the mirror focused on Hyago’s grove to keep an eye on the situation, but the bulk of my attention turned to the threat outside my own door.

  “Have any other hordes turned up?” I asked.

  “Not that we can see, either here or on Ralvost. We caught Ammun forming the portals, but he disappeared as soon as they were complete. At the speed he made them, it seems likely that he used some sort of device he’d prepared ahead of time,” the gestalt’s voice came from another mirror.

  “I guess we know what he spent some of his time on up there.”

  This was within expectations. When I’d gotten a glimpse at his construction speed, I’d known the time frame didn’t add up, and that he’d probably been preparing to kick off the battle the instant he was back while he could still work uninterrupted. He was a lich and a necromancer. I’d foreseen an army and a way to transport it quickly.

  The thousand or so mobile corpses trudging toward my demesne were about half a mile from the edge of my wards. If I waited a bit longer, they’d likely fry themselves marching toward me, but that would let anyone watching learn about my defenses. I didn’t have proof that Ammun was scrying the area, but I had no doubt that he was. Otherwise, there’d be no point in wasting minions here.

  The question became: what was the most efficient way to eliminate the threat without revealing my defensive capabilities? Ammun already knew I’d reached stage eight from our previous encounter, so sending my shadow out to handle the incoming zombies wouldn’t tell him anything new. From there, a few explosions and a sweeping inferno should clean things up nicely. It might waste a bit of mana, but it presented a plausible picture of how I would deal with the issue were I still limited to stage eight.

  While my shadow slipped out of my demesne, I watched for signs of Ammun attempting to ambush it, and the gestalt entity kept me updated on how the brakvaw were faring against the aerial force of skeletal wyverns.

  “Grandfather is once again requesting assistance,” they told me. “A second wyvern colony has appeared, almost triple in size, and the brakvaw are now outnumbered.”

  “Where did that come from?” I snarled, whirling in place to activate a new mirror so that I could see the battle for myself. It was spread out over three locations now – Eyrie Peak and just beyond two of its portals. One location was the sky over an open, empty plain, and the other was near a high seaside cliff where the brakvaw hunted for fish and other animals.

  The fiercest fighting was at Eyrie Peak itself, with the bulk of the brakvaw defending the mountain and their kin from about two hundred or so skeletal wyverns. They had the advantage in size and speed, but the wyverns didn’t mind taking any amount of punishment to rake their talons across living flesh or sink their teeth into plumage.

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  Even with the battle harnesses giving them an edge, it was obvious that the fight was going to utterly decimate their numbers if something didn’t change. They should have collapsed the portals like I’d warned them to, but they’d waited too long, or maybe Ammun had done something to hold them open. Either way, their forces were split trying to defend against attacks coming from every direction, and they wanted me to bail them out.

  I could do it, but it would mean exposing myself to Ammun. I had no doubt that he was waiting for exactly that. All of these attacks were designed to draw me out of my demesne, because of course that benefited Ammun. Fighting me while I was here was foolhardy, and he knew it. That was why the last time he’d attacked me, he’d spied on me and chosen the moment when I was most vulnerable, and even then, he’d only stuck around for a few seconds to crack my wards before retreating again.

  I was going to have to come out eventually, but I wanted to exhaust a few more of Ammun’s tricks before I met him in battle. That didn’t seem like it was going to happen, not if I was coming to my ally’s aid. How annoying. I was being outmaneuvered, not because of some clever tactic, but because of the brakvaw’s general incompetence.

  “Keep a close eye on everything,” I instructed the gestalt. “If Ammun is about to teleport in on top of me, I’d like a bit of warning.”

  My shadow finished destroying the undead outside the valley, and we both swept through the demesne to the teleportation platform. Hopefully, this didn’t blow up in my face.

  * * *

  I already had a good idea of the state of things before I arrived, but my first action was to simultaneously cast eight fresh divinations to take in the entirety of Eyrie Peak. Two of them were for sensing life and death energy, which allowed me to grab the placement and condition of every single combatant at the same time. One of them connected me to the gestalt again so I could keep them on overwatch in the event Ammun made an appearance, and one monitored general mana levels just in case any big spells suddenly appeared.

  The last four were my standard scrying spells, designed to remove any blank spots in my immediate area, including things that human eyes couldn’t normally see like particulate-based attacks or invisible stalkers. In a normal fight, I would have said it was overkill. In this one, I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I exploded into the air, angling toward where three wyverns were harassing a single brakvaw that was wheeling through the air, weaving through attacks desperately and trying to put some distance between itself and the undead. Unlike the dragon I’d fought a year ago, these monsters were weak enough that I didn’t even need heavy mana to destroy them.

  A simple force cleave cut through the necrotic net wrapped around one wyvern’s bones. I chopped it into pieces, so many that the animating magic couldn’t hold things together anymore, and the body rained down to the stone a thousand feet below.

  That drew the attention of the other two wyverns. One of them split off from harassing the brakvaw and made a beeline for me, only to come up short when I took both wings off with another force cleave. At the same time, my shadow leaped across the sky to destroy a wyvern that was swooping down on a trio of hatchlings left undefended near the torn and bloody corpse of an adult brakvaw.

  Everywhere around me, the scene was repeated in endless variety. Brakvaw harried skeletal wyverns, blasting them with their own magic or relying on the mana sealed into their harnesses if their reserves weren’t up to the task. Some of them simply couldn’t cast anything offensive, or couldn’t manage it fast enough for a live combat situation, and were doing nothing but leading a wyvern away at a speed just fast enough to stay ahead of it without getting so far away that it lost interest.

  My first priority was to rescue anyone on the verge of death. Unfortunately, there were a dozen cases of exactly that, spots where a defender had been swamped by numbers or a noncombatant had run afoul of a wyvern. The pragmatic part of me said to let the children die, that they couldn’t contribute, and the warrior that I saved could go on to stop other wyvern.

  I didn’t need to talk to Grandfather to know that wasn’t what he wanted. So, even though it wasn’t the best tactical move, I focused my efforts on saving those who couldn’t fight back over the next few minutes. More than a few wyvern attacked me directly, some with tooth and claw, others by channeling necrotic energies into noxious purple-black clouds of smoke that tried to leach the very life out of my body.

  ‘Keiran, we have spotted Ammun above Ralvost,’ the gestalt sent.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse, but maybe that was the point. ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Building something. He’s pulling pre-constructed components out of a phantom space and assembling them. We were not able to determine its purpose, but can provide you with images of the visible runes.’

  Now really wasn’t a great time to be multitasking, but I needed to know what he was up to. Could I finish saving the brakvaw from the colony of wyverns, or did I need to abandon this fight now to do battle elsewhere? ‘Show me.’

  Images slammed into my brain, hundreds of them, all showing complicated, multi-layered rune structures. Overlaid on top of them were ethereal enchantments, more suggestions of magic than magic itself. It was impressive the gestalt had even been able to detect that much, considering the scrying information it was sharing obviously came from a long-distance viewing of the area, not a targeted scry.

  I knew a lot of these patterns – things that dealt with the ultra-long-range communications and teleportation spells used to connect to the moons. That was no surprise. I’d known Ammun would need an anchor on this side of the connection to maintain the tether, but why would he build it out in the open?

  The obvious answer was that he wouldn’t. Whatever this was, it had something to do with a moon—maybe Yulitar, maybe a different one—but it wasn’t the connection that was keeping his body and spirit linked together. If not that, then…

  “No,” I hissed out. “He wouldn’t dare.”

  ‘You know what he’s doing?’

  “It’s a command console to use a moon core to target the surface of Manoch with a massive mana beam. He’s rebuilding the weapon used against him just before he broke the world.”