The forms are proving their worth; the details are recorded while memories are still fresh, and instead of having to wonder whether vague reports of 'walking skeletons' could refer to the rare and dangerous wights, one only needs to refer to the entry for 'Colour of Glow of Eyes or Eye Sockets'. There's even inferences that can be drawn that didn't occur to you when you made the forms. The entries for 'armament' and 'substance said armament is formed from' reveals that the skeletons are wielding an eclectic mix of modern steel, older iron and much older bronze, which implies that the undead are not sourced from any one battlefield but rather the result of thousands of years of accumulated restless dead.
This would be extremely interesting for historians as well. There's probably a research topic about patterns of 'wild' reanimation once the forms are collated.
Back in Wurtbad, Julia is probably working on an organizational system to index this information - you hadn't asked her to, but it's the sort of thing she does.
Julia meanwhile is hardworking!
And yeah, I don't fancy messing with this much documentation without some way to search the damned thing. This thing is going to be more paper than the tax records at this rate.
It is, unfortunately, not one you are qualified to solve. The cause of these seemingly regenerating undead is not mystical, but geographical. You had pictured softly rolling hills, covered in grass, perhaps of a sickly colour due to the Sylvanian atmosphere. Instead the landscape is jagged, like it had been sliced apart by some enormous blade, and covered in impenetrable scrub and unnaturally still lakes and fathomless caves.
The Leichebergian troops, native to these lands, are happy to share with you an all-new vocabulary of the land they call the Wold. Combes, steep, narrow valleys without watercourse, almost always impassably filled with thorned scrub. Scarps, the sheer cliffs separating two otherwise level pieces of land, as if the land had been broken apart and then put back together off-center. Dew-ponds, artificial hilltop lakes built longer ago than man remembers, that somehow remain full without being fed by spring or river. Karst, the bizarrely smooth caves that absolutely riddle the hills. Doline, when the land atop the aforementioned caves has surrendered to the pull of gravity, creating enormous depressions like the impact of some unbelievably enormous missile - and, they warn, sometimes the land is just waiting to collapse in on a karst cave and form a doline, so never march in time atop the Wold.
Oooo, former glacier geography!
Geologically fascinating, but insanely porous, as befits a land which had been scoured and held up by ice once upon a time.
I'm not sure there IS a cure short of going full Dwarf Fortress.
And compound the geographic terrors, there are the botanical ones. Mother-die, the horrifically-named tree that grows out rather than up, with soft white flowers and shiny red berries and jagged thorns as long as a man's hand. Spined Spurge, a sprawling climbing shrub with every stem festooned with barbed spines - they say that if a man dies touching a Spurge, it will envelop his corpse and never let it rise, which makes it popular among villages unsupervised by the Morrites. The Brambles, a variety of dense shrubs with tasty berries that can grow as fast as a man can walk, or so they say, and are - inevitably - covered in thorns.
Hmm...these actually look botanically interesting, I think we could get the Ghyran college to look into the local flora.
All very interesting in a bucolic sort of way, you suppose, but the end result is a land that can't be easily searched. Any given hour's walk will find an impassable cliff, an impenetrable valley, the entrance to a cave network of unmappable complexity, and acre after acre of dense, thorned scrubland. One doesn't clear such a land - one just marches back and forth along the few passable routes until they stop finding enemies to kill.
You wonder what Van Hal is going to make of all this.
The solution to this is not just soldiers. You need cartographers attached to the regiments to map the terrain and employ a grid search.
Van Hal has the Learning to figure that out I think.
Weeks pass atop the Wold. Each morning you emerge from your tent, cursing the late autumn chill, and try to find solace in the dawn mist. Each day you march, and you inevitably find something; usually skeletons, sometimes zombies, and once a wight, that might have broken up the monotony if your pistol shot, trailing Ulgu, hadn't punched right through it's skull and dispersed the fell magic holding it together. You have the opportunity to watch the forms you designed in action, and are pleased to see the diligence with which the officers fill them out, and the odd air of satisfaction with which they do so. As if performing a final tally of the dead - they're slain, they're given rites by the silent Knight, their details are taken down, and all the forms will be sent off to the capital all nice and neat and that's that undead beastie dealt with for good, nice and neat and official.
Good to see everything is working well.
What do the rites involve? Since the Knight is silent there can't have been much prayer? And it has to be portable because the logistics would suck.
Van Hal was... well, if it was anyone else you'd say they were sulking. He had clearly been expecting some sort of horrible necromantic curse to unravel, and instead it was just a matter of geography.
...say, does Van Hal share certain literature interests as Mathilde?
Gustav had greater luck with his adventure; what was once the tallest peak in the western Wold is now very much not so, and he's quite pleased to add 'killing a mountain' to his list of deeds. The 'Blasphemy of Blood' had turned out to be some sort of bizarre cursed spring in a cave atop the peak. It burbled blood-red water, which local vermin drank and drank and drank from, growing bloated and sloshing, and the only thing they thirsted for more than the liquid of the spring was the true blood that ran in the veins of men. Sadly for the creatures, it turns out that in this case water does not beat fire, and Deathfang had dealt with most of their population in a single contemptuous exhalation. The problem of what to do with the spring was puzzling for a while, and then he'd apparently decided that thinking was for other people and decided to hit it until it went away, and to do that he had roped in the 3rd Division and their siege train. For three weeks boulders the size of cows had been flung at the peak, and though at first it just caused the cursed spring to overflow it's pool and run down in a crimson waterfall, he'd persevered until one day, finally, against all reason, the waterfall ran clear.
He produced a flask of water, which he'd said the chaplains had already inspected; you give it a close examination, but there's absolutely nothing to indicate it's anything but completely normal water. You're slightly annoyed that 'hit it until it stops doing evil magic stuff' has proven effective even against inanimate objects.
Huh, it sounds like a natural Ghur upwelling more than Dhar, but it shouldn't be something you can pound to a stop with artillery. Unless it was an artifact, which a stone FINALLY crushed.
...best to confirm it's over.
It is the aptly-named Kaldezeit and you are incredibly glad to be back in Wurtbad, and especially Wurtbad's hot springs. Once a vibrant tourist attraction, the misrule of the Haupt-Anderssens had rendered them little more than a local luxury, but such a luxury they were. You idly consider the possibility of getting one piped in to your buried palace.
Mathilde, your home is underground and without drainage. You don't want water going in you can't get out.
Once you get that out of your system, you check in with Jack, who appears to be settling in quite well to his position - he's been taciturn about his previous experience and the Watchmen have, understandably, reached the conclusion that he's a former spy. You check in with Julia, who's busily distilling thousands of freshly filled-out forms from the front into usable information. You check in with the printers, who assure you that they'll get to it when they get to it and to please stop breathing down their necks about your elf story; the scribe you hired for the three properly scribed copies says something similar.
I imagine that's just channeling the thread's tendency to obsess over details
Theory turned to practice, and now a corner of your spare room has been fenced off and is now the temporary home of a half-dozen chickens. On a piece of wood you've set up as a workbench, one has been sent to Sleep while you hunch over it, weaving Ulgu into it's tiny feathered frame. You've been at it for hours, and this is the third time you've tried today - over in the pen one chicken is clucking distressingly as fog spills from its beak, and another is confusedly preening it's newly-grey feathers.
And this is why we don't experiment on people...fog chickens
"Test," you say, and the chicken continues scampering away from you. "Balderdash." Still nothing untoward; it apparently decides the distance is now safe and starts scratching at the floor. "Danoi," you say, and the chicken instantly collapses forwards onto it's feathered breast, eyes closed.
You step forward and pick up the bird gingerly, examining it closely. Sure enough, the spell that had been held within it was gone, the once-frozen magic having fulfilled its purpose and dispersed. But, to your surprise, the framework that once held the spell remains. Interesting. And potentially useful.
You once again begin weaving Ulgu into the hapless bird.
[Bound Spell research: 93+17+10 (Ranald's Blessing)=120.]
Oh interesting. It's a Spell Storing Matrix?
[ ] By all accounts the entire general vicinity it was in has been pulverized, but there could be a shadow of a ghost of a chance that something might remain of the Blasphemy of Blood that could be studied? Maybe? (NEW)
I think this is a bit of a priority. If we go there now there might still be some traces of HOW it stopped to brute force. And we probably want to make sure it's not a now broken ancient artifact leaking Dhar after this.
[ ] Publish Or Perish, Part 1: Though it's currently of limited utility to you personally, sharing your discovery might bring it to the attention of hundreds of wizards who could put it to great effect. Though before you do that, you'll need to learn the vocabulary to communicate exactly what it is you're doing, since you can't exactly submit the poor chicken as part of your paper. (NEW)
And this is probably a high priority. Once some time passes, we'd find it harder and harder to describe properly even if we know the words.
Yes, much slower than Van Hal hoped but a lot of undead are being killed for very few casualties.
The land that already technically belongs to the Leicheberg is remaining theirs; shepherds are already moving flocks onto them and starting to hack away at the vegetation. Deeper into Sylvania is a whole other question. Chalk hills aren't suitable for agriculture, but if the undead are purged and the spectre of Drakenhof banished... well, it's about three million acres of prime grazelands, surely Van Hal has something in mind for it. Even if he hasn't said anything.
That is a LOT of wool. And milk. And cheese. And horse.
Instead of casting a spell on a person normally, the spell is suspended at the point of casting within the binding, until it is released by either the trigger decided by the person that made the binding or by the binding decaying - which you're not sure whether it would happen, perhaps the Ulgu would fade with time or perhaps it would continue on based on ambient magic. You'll be keeping an eye on your chicken, but it's already outlasting the Dhar bindings.
The nature of the binding means it must be suspended within a living creature, and that the spell will be released 'within' said creature - which means that it works entirely as expected with spells like Sleep and such, but it's incompatible with spells that would normally target you and would probably end messily if you tried it with Shadowsteed. It might be possible to do it differently, but it would be a lot harder to redesign the bindings from the ground up than adapting the bindings you studied previously for use with Ulgu.
Hmm...depending on how long it lasts using it to set up contingent Mindholes might be actually great. How long does it take to set up anyway?
Either way, we'd need further research to take it beyond a contingency mindwipe
