To Shield the World (Warhammer High Elf Mage Quest)

A Return To Roots


Bold, decisive, necessary action is the way of the Asur.

Aenarion casting himself into the fire of Asuryan when there was no hope, no alternative, no choice. Caledor Dragontamer and his disciples journeying to the Isle of the Dead, putting their everything into creating the vortex, creating a way forward, making themselves fuel in a fire that still burns--and still burns them-- all for the possibility that the world entire could be saved from the endless tide of Daemons, monsters, and beasts that flowed from the Broken Gates at the very edge of the world, a wound that still bleeds the blood that grants you your profession. Tethlis, namesake of Tethia, beginning the Scouring, finally driving your wayward kin from Ulthuan, forcing them back to their lands to the west.

Rash, thoughtless, ill-considered action is the way of the Asur.

Aenarion drawing Widowmaker, cursing his bloodline for the rest of all of time, creating the worst villain your people will ever know and the architect of the Sundering. Caledor the II, arrogantly, thoughtlessly, shaving the Dwarf ambassador, turning what could have been a singular conflict into the War of The Beard in some deranged attempt at revenge for Kor Vernaeth, striking at a man who was uninvolved. The Siege of Tor Lehan, blood poured not by the bottle or by the gallon but by the barrel to try and force out the Druchii from a position not worth the effort nor the trouble.

The Menhirs protect the world you love, guarding it from magic. They are a last, forlorn monument from a people now all but disappeared, faded, lost, to the hunger and cruelty, and thoughtless desire for more from the Ogres. An entire peninsula divvied up between Norscans would see gold, iron, and sweat flood the coffers of the Great Enemy, wealth and labor alike turned to creating new monstrosities, new abominations, new things that should not be. But beyond any of that...beyond questions of the Fate of the World, of geopolitical realities, of the flourishing of Chaos, it is not right to turn aside. To shut your eyes and ignore cities burned, people slaughtered, a peninsula ravaged for the greed and cruelty and ignorance and malice of slaves who think themselves free in their servitude to Chaos and the Four, the enemy, the dreadful.

The humans of the west do not impress. They are arrogant, and ignorant, and cruel. They have burned children at the stake for the touch of magic, have attacked your kinsmen in the wood of Athel Loren either in service to the capricious cruelty of the Dwarfs or out of their own greed and desire for riches and power. They fall to Chaos at the merest sign of trouble it seems, so very many of them, and the exceptions, those who rise above, seem so few. Even those not fallen to the Great Evil, The Foe, The Long Night, kneel to pettier, lesser mortal evils with a disquieting ease, layered with civil war and kinstrife on levels beyond even elveness--you wage one war against each other, their empire and kingdoms and tribes and lands wage a thousand wars, against outsiders and against themselves.

So in either case, a choice is placed before you. Do you teach--do you instruct--do you share and spread your knowledge, risking it will be turned to the unrighteous, the ignorant, the Corrupt? Do you turn your back, ignore blood and suffering and tears and orphans and widows because of that paranoia, the mere suspicion that the knowledge may turn, at some point, to those not worthy of it? For it is choice, not to, as surely as it is a choice if you do. Apathy in the face of evil, against investment in the face of an unknown. Which the heavier weight, which the bigger question, what the biggest matter? Either way it will decide much of what you are.

In the end, it isn't really choice.

You can turn away.

You won't.

"Annora of Tilea," you say even as the army finishes gathering up the dead, Tyrial and his followers cleansing the bodies in Hysh even as they bury them, ensuring whatever else is to come they will not be raised, that they may have that dignity if no-other, "I vow to you as servant of Asuryan, as Mage of the White Tower, as Asur and Protector of the World, before you leave this place I will teach you to wield magics terrible and dread in the face of your foes, to protect your lands from those who would ravage them and destroy the menhirs. It will be a difficult, dangerous path, one littered with obstacles and problems, but it will mean you can save your people and perhaps, through them, all people.

In the distance, you hear some great bird's screech.
--
Finally, after the bodies of both friend and foe have been consecrated in Hysh and buried, it is time to go. The plan they have decided on without you is refreshingly straightforward: Without a body, the Sorcerer is probably dead. But probably is a lot to hang strategy and tactics and possibly the entire campaign on. If he is alive, he will have fled to his sanctum, to recover, to heal, after you smote him to the earth with bright light and cleansing ray. So you will go there, smoke him out, and kill him.

You have been asked once again to help with this process.

You approach the scorched, burnt, blackened grass and baked mud, now only lightly frosted where once it had all been buried under feet upon feet of thick, crunching snow, and begin to chant. The Spirits once again stir, their amber forms approaching from the edge of your vision as you shift your hands and invoke the powers, as you grasp and weave and roar and cry and bring upon the matter all the wisdom of a Mage of the White Tower, of a wizard worthy of the name.

The mantle of the Talking Best falls upon you, so that you may speak.

And then Mother Bear approaches.

She knows your heart.

You know her will.

You are the same.

And finally as you return to the material plane, still sheathed in golden life, you have taken on much of her form, though not all. A great grizzly bear, a mighty grizzly bear, a strong grizzly bear. Your hearing sharpens from the already grand state to one deeper, losing range for depth. Your sight becomes blunter, less detailed, even as it shifts, as you shift, your angle becoming higher even as details become blurrier, lost, trading in keenly-mystic elven eyes.

For it is not your eyes you need.

It is your nose.

Your nose catches the smell of salmon in the near river, a wounded reindeer--easy prey--perhaps a dozen miles to the northwest, and a rich bee's nest twice that to the east, full of honey just waiting to be taken, and in Stalheim itself, the shit and blood and booze and iron of a slave quarter, just waiting to be cracked like a shell. But you ignore that, and join Indrast and Indiron in sniffing at the patch. It's hidden, first, under the smell of burning meat and roasted grass, but eventually you catch it. A perfume, unwell, somehow both sickly sweet and burning acrid, clogging your throat and your nose with its strength. Smoking wood, whence his spear had caught fire and set alight, the shaft bursting into red fire from the heat. Coal and molten metal, too old, too aged to be from his recent run in with a superior wizard; something older than that even. The Nothing-Something of Warpstone, tangy and bland, lightning and windswept day, the dried and sopping, infinite possibilities and all of them bad. Rat droppings, rat fur. Ale, very strong ale, that seems oddly familiar, as though you've had it at some point, or something related to it anyway, though what brews you could share with this thing are beyond you.

You, Indrast, and Indiron get the scent.

And then immediately you are off, following the trail.
--
Time: 36+20 (Beast Magic Master Hunter) + 10 (White Lions of Chrace)-10 (Time):56

The trail is misty, mildly faded, warping and juking and moving. Your shaman, it seemed, understood even in the throes of agony that you could, would track him in several different ways so he took a long, looping route; add to that the time, both winning the battle, speaking to Annora and clearing the bodies and getting organized to set out and it has certainly faded from its peak. But it was strong, so many unpleasantly potent stinks that it would make you throw up if you still had an Asur's sense of refinement; but in this form you do not.

In this form you are the hunter.

In this form, he is the prey.

The three of you cut through the forest, ignoring easy pickings, bird nests and badger holes and reindeer herds, to instead hunt a better prey than them all:

A traitor.

Not to something so comparatively petty as a tribe or a city or a kingdom.

A traitor to mortals. A traitor to the world entire. Either ignorantly believing the promises of things that have no honor, that hold no oath nor keep no promise nor follow any vow; or a willing soldier in an army that sees destruction as freedom and death as liberty, a cult that holds the end of this world, the world you love, as a noble thing indeed.

There are those among the Ceyla, the specialists and scholars in Hysh, who hold that the ignorant, brought up in this savage manner without knowing the truth of things, are less to blame than those who willingly march to the end. That they lack the Mens Rea, the will, to be held responsible in the same manner, even if ignorance of the law is not, in this case, a protection from the law. They are morally perturbed, where the willing participants who know and throw themselves onwards into the struggle are morally sickened.

The masters of Aqshy, on the other hand, among them a number of voices who pushed to have Aqshy studied as the first lore in the White Tower, hold the opposite as true. The willing servant, who understands and obeys, at least believes in something, at least is pushing forth in their belief, at least is following through on a matter of morality. Is fighting for their beliefs, as deranged and vile and thoughtless as they might be. The unknowing, who fight for a cause they do not believe in, that is worse, lowly even.

The masters of Ghur, you have your own answer.

Father Wolf, Mother Bear, they do not ask why the hunter stalks their pups and cubs.

They merely kill the hunter.

The forest passes you by, breaking through leaves and branches, fallen pine needles crunching under the weight of your paws as the scent gets stronger and stronger and you get closer and closer to your quarry. Your heart begins to pump and thump and beat like a drum as the adrenaline of a soon to be successful hunt fills you with a new vigor, the same vigor you scent from your lions, hearing their hearts beating quick and fast as yours as they too understand soon the time shall be upon you. The army is not hopelessly far behind, you can hear them and smell at least, but they aren't terribly close either, their thick armor and long spears in the main dividing them from you. Most of the mages have stayed behind with the rest of the army in case of something stupid happening, though Tethia herself has taken on the form of a raven and follows overhead, out of your sight and therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, out of your mind.

Finally, you approach a clearing.

And in the clearing, you see it.

His sanctum.

It is not a tower in the traditional sense. It is closer to a squat hall, as so many kings of this land stay in, indeed as many nobles throughout the north of the so-called Old World make use of to establish themselves as Ring-Givers and masters of land, with few exceptions. A sloping, shingled roof on a roughly rectangular building, squat and sturdy, with manifold entrances and exits, in most cases to allow visitors and likely the same in his case, as well as allowing air to flow through. Big, but far from the biggest according to the tales of merchants who journeyed to Sigmar's empire, where the Halls are vast and flow with ale and ring with the song of their first Emperor, the Emperor who shall one day return.

As though there is more than one emperor in the heavens.

Of course, there are signs it is markedly less innocent than those halls. Signs of its true patron. Every timber has been painted a dully-darkened shade of purple, which shimmers even though there is no light around. Not with crushed jewels or broken stone or noble enchantment, but the acrid Should Not Be shades of warpstone, crackling, sparkling, burning and shifting. It pushes against your mind, against your soul, against your body. You, with your magic, the blessings of Isha and the effort of Vaul and Asuryan, along with your experience pushing it out in the Annullii Mountains when you first returned from the White Tower, you can resist it, your soul is strong indeed, and it helps that it has been covered in that thick layer of paint. But the people he used to build it first, weakened by hunger and despair and ravaged sickness, they woud have mutated early and often.

Perhaps explaining how he got those Chaos Spawn.
For that matter, kings and chiefs and thanes and all others who entered this place would also be effected. Not mutated, necessarily, but changed, touched, mentally. More cruel, more thoughtless, more hedonistic, more a reflection of the master of this, cursed, place and its cursed shaman.

The shingles are made of gold, etched with wretched symbols that leak something, though you aren't quite sure what. Vile, to be sure, sticky and foul and unworthy to exist, worthy only to be cleansed in bright fire, white fire, holy fire, and the thunder of the heavens themselves. Asuryan's Silver Arrow, Calu and Cynhil alone the sole worthy destroyers. It is desecration, unholy, unwell, unworthy to be in this world, to exist, as surely as the daemons its masters send and its lord consorts with.

Abomination.

Abomination.

Abomination.

An insult to your field, at that. Layered with enchantments, of course. You trace them, even as you finally fade from the shade of a bear back to elf, back to man, shifting your Windsight along them.

Vile stuff.

Enchantments to produce Dhar, thick black sludge that sticks to everything. Enchantments that artlessly split a part of it away into purer Ulgu, so he can play around with better lores than whatever desecration this is. Enchantments to make it hard and strong, capable of withstanding something to the scale of a giant's blow perhaps, though broad, absolute terms are always questionable in this world. More than questionable, even, though that is a question for a different time.

And...

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait.

A RUNE? Haclad scratch--

Immediately you turn your windsight away from it. The Ironwills could look at the stuff in that way without recompense, earned in the War of the Beard, learned by destroying it with spells and incantations, slowly ratified into Arcane Unforging among Qhaysh--but they, they could still do it with only Chamon rather than needing the might of all the Winds for it, nevermind all the various other spells they developed along the same general theme--but you are no Ironwill.

Your might is vast, and your will is Ithilmar.

But even Ithilmar might break before the hammer of Karaz-Kazak-Rhun.

Even if they still aren't bright enough to work it.

But, if merely looking at the realm of the gods burned out Savan's eyes when he was merely existing, you have no desire to find out what too long a look at the secrets of a god of revenge might do to you.

Besides, you have perfectly good eyes.

And then there is a chill in the air, even as Tethia finally lands besides you. A harsh, keening wail, a noise like death, like steel grinding against steel, like thing breaking and burning, like winds fading, like the storm slowing, like an end, like all things have finished. A breeze, soft and cool but there, still there, fills the air, weening, wanting, warning, just high enough to be heard, just low enough to threaten. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up as you are stripped, of something important, of something necessary, of something good and proper and righteous, of your magic and of much of your strength.

And with a shudder, magic fades, even as the physical form of the Rune begins to burn with power. A dread starts to fill your bones, cold and cool, and Indrast and Indiron whine as the enchantments you placed on them--far from a proper familiar's bond, but enough to keep them pliant to your will and to ensure they are as lively as you are--strains.

Hastily checking, you confirm that Deathclaw still burns brightly with your enchantments and magic and power. It has burned brighter before but it is enough, the magic shall still seek ravaging, ending, clean, finishing cuts to ensure the enemy stays down rather than allowing that they should rise again and again and again.

And then he appears again. He is stripped of pretense now, his form--though thin--is layered with muscles, his body clad in shining scale armor of ugly pink, his form draped with metal, a golden helmet. His spear, though crude of construction, is layered with magic, thick with wickedest of Dhar until it is near to bursting, only just contained by a truly neophyte level mystical matrix that you could have surpassed within your first decade of instruction. As a scholar, you are offended.

As a warrior, your mind still reels. You could wait for reinforcemnts from the army proper, but then that would give him even more time to prepare. Many would be threatened or could die.

You could fight him, hand-to-hand, man-to-man in melee. The danger there is obvious, though there is opportunity too: few expect a mage to pull a mighty sword and come in swinging when they no longer have their magic to fall back on. And your pride, your pride wants this victory. Tethia wouldn't be able to fight, but Indrast and Indiron could join you, or you could properly duel him, consecrating it to the gods.

Tethia points at the Runes, and then makes gestures of spellwork. You could try to overpower the Rune and reinvent spellwork that even your elders have claimed is complicated; she may be an archmage now, yes, but you still require learning for that not to be dangerous. On the other hand, every option you have is dangerous.

"Come out, Ljósálfar. I had little patience before you decided to burn me; or shall I return the favor, and we shall see whether you stink as acrid as I did when you unleashed the bright rays against me? Either suits my taste."

It seems you need to pick quickly.

[] Wait for reinforcements, trying to avoid dying until then.
[] Fight him, in melee, like a warrior
- [] With Indrast and Indiron. He wants to cheat? Fine, you can cheat too.
- [] A duel of honor, a duel consecrated to the gods (Write-in which, no Khaine, I would be leery about Anath Raema)
[] Work with Tethia to try and break the Rune
--
Vote will open at Oct 6, 2024 at 9:00 PM .

Just this once I will allow you a certain amount of write in, in that if you want to tell Tethia to try something you can, otherwise I will have her doing something, possibly unsuccessful and possibly not, but either way, at least trying.

Finally, please, put on your Sherlock Hat before you get mad about the Rune thing if, in fact, you are going to get mad.

The Ten Ancient Lores of Ulthuan

The ten traditions the old Loremasters once studied, before being subsumed into the White Tower, into Hoeth. To study them is still to earn that dignity.

In alphabetical order:

Avelorn: The Seneschals, peaceful followers of The Everqueen from times now long gone wielding resplendent Hysh. They gladly aided the White Tower on the orders of their queen.
Caledor: The blind priests of Vaul, studying Chamon in Vaul's Anvil, where secrets of crafting are held and the best craftsmen congregate. It was a mean effort to gain even the secret of working Ithilmar from them.
Chrace: Beastwalkers, masters of Ghur, who helped establish the famed lion chariots. They, as well as many other Ghur scholars, opposed the foundation of the White Tower as deleterious to Ghur.
Cothique: The Storm Weavers and Mist Mages, seamen and travelers who learned, mastered, understood High Magic itself, that which arises from the seas, built upon a base of Azyr, rather than Aqshy and courage itself. They have fiercely maintained their independence from White Tower entanglements, though learning there is not impossible per se.
Eataine: Seakeepers, who ensure the lands are fed, that the beasts are kept quiescent, that the port stays healthy, through the use of Ghyran.
Ellyrion: Cinderseers, priests of Lileath, students of Her Aqshy, drawing upon a connection to her steed, Cindermane. They begrudingly but willingly shared the basics of their lore with the High Tower, though proper Comprehension and Mastery requires studying with them.
Nagarythe: Shadow-Weavers, whose lore first began in the Golden Age as a method of contesting Daemons as taught by Loec the Trickster Himself in His Ulgu guise rather than His Hysh, Loec of Music. Ythil was essentially the only Shadow Weaver to actively contribute to the White Tower, and there is a reason she now, instead, goes by the title Archmage.
Saphery: The Cult of Hoeth itself, of course, bearer of knowledge of all eight Winds and of High Magic as passed along--though changed--from the Slann, who themselves learned it from the Old Ones. They are the benchmark. They do also have what remains of Saphethion within their realm, and the knowledge it once held.
Tiranoc: Judges, holders of Shyish, those who remember. They preached of coming calamity, of the end, of destruction; and when the destruction came, they wore they would remember. They are tepid towards the White Tower.
Yvresse: The priests of Ladrielle the Wandering, workings of Ulgu, of ash, and of mist. As a mystery cult they do not willingly pierce the mystery for just anyone, though one may learn through efforts.

(This, as of 150 years after completion of the White Tower)

(I will have your standing with them on the front page up today)

Vote is Open!