Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

As Mathilde Weber and Elspeth von Draken sipped their tea, Dracul was grateful he could no longer sweat. His head had long had its flesh stripped from it, his face now an expressionless skull, and that was only a small part of what twenty years as a Battle Wizard had done to him. Still, at least he could drink his tea.

Twenty years. He shouldn't feel so nervous in this company, and yet he did. His own Matriarch had long been momentous company, of course, and Mathilde Weber's star had certainly skyrocketed in the last few months, but…

But he knew of Mathilde Weber long, long before that. That was why he was here.

"That pouch on your neck," Mathilde suddenly said, "Is that… what I think it is?"

Elspeth blinked, and leaned back. "You can perceive it? Without even seeing it? Your Windsight must be impressive indeed."

Dracul suffered silently as the two women spent a few minutes in appreciative and knowing silence. A very long few minutes in appreciative and knowing silence. Were they ever going to speak again?

"Your robes are lovely!"

He had finally broken. Mathilde turned to him in surprise, and he fumbled desperately for a way to either continue the conversation or escape from it. As the moment went on, Dracul wished the earth would open up and swallow him whole.

"-Yes, I understand the enchantment is magnificent." Elspeth continued, earning Dracul's loyalty forevermore. "And the material! Your fellows must be envious indeed."

Mathilde smirked. As they continued to speak, Dracul realized her robes must have been more pertinent than he realized. The material… ah, silk. Even he had heard of the Dwarves crashing into the silk trade like those hammers they loved so much. And as Mathilde had earned eight boons from eight colleges, she must have spent one on the Gold's legendary defensive prowess.

…As a Battle Wizard, Dracul spent most of his life cloistered. As he looked at Mathilde's robes, he wondered what it must be like to wear your associations so brazenly like that. Quite literally on her sleeve and across her back was her life and loyalty and accomplishments in Eight Peaks, and with the We.

He felt a moment of envy and a moment of pride for the woman whose career he had followed so closely.

He had stopped paying attention to the conversation. Elspeth had finished her tea. What were they talking about? "I understand you're preparing for a trip to Ulthuan?"

Mathilde smiled. "Honestly, I have been for some time now, but there was just never enough time in the day!"

The sentence had the cadence of being meant to continue, but Mathilde suddenly paused. Dracul and Elspeth and Mathilde shared a look of mutual (and haunted) understanding. There really was just never enough time in the day…

"Well, if you're planning to travel so far afield, that explains what you asked of the Celestials," Elspeth finally mused. "And it was quite amusing how vague you were with that request, by the way. Both the Celestials and the Jades now have to ask themselves exactly how much wealth and influence their part in rewarding such a landmark achievement is worth, and risk being shown up by the other if they fall short."

"While I certainly look forward to raising my brow at whoever arrives to deliver my sum, if we're on the topic of the rewards to such a landmark achievement…"

And there it was. The point they had been circling for half an hour now. The reason he was here.

The emotion fell from Elspeth's countenance. Blank faced, she studied Mathilde. Elspeth was hardly a politician, and she was even less of a people person. It was telling that such a frank and powerful personage had chosen polite and friendly small talk over tea as their venue.

After a long silence, Mathilde clarified. "Your predecessor. Hexensohn. I want to know the circumstances of his presence and his end in Sylvania."

"In your campaign," Dracul said. "In Van Hal's campaign. In that battle..."

Mathilde, again, turned to look at him. Understanding dawned in her eyes. "So that's why you are here, and why you looked so high-strung. You were one of his Battle Wizards. I didn't recognize you."

What the fuck. He couldn't read Mathilde or Elspeth at all! How were the other two people in the room more expressionless than he was! He literally didn't have a face!

"I would be surprised if you had." He replied, "but after so long, I am the only Amethyst participant in that battle who yet lives. It has been well over a decade. Is something that happened so long ago truly worth so much to you?"

Mathilde frowned. "Is it really so surprising? This was my life. At the time it felt like the climax of it, and nobody said anything but vague platitudes. Hexensohn was certainly no help to us."

"Watch yourself, girl." Elspeth snapped. "Whatever else you and I might have thought of him, Hexensohn was the Magister Patriarch of the Amethyst college. I will not allow you to besmirch his name in my presence."

Dracul couldn't look away. What could he even say, ten years later? Twenty years was a long time for a Battle Wizard. Over half of it grappling with that day. Shyish was the wind of death, and he knew it more intimately than he knew anything else.

Mathilde's face hardly changed, though she nodded in acquiescence. "Yes, I apologize. I imagine him and the circumstances of your ascension to his seat would be important to you."

There was a long and knowing silence. Greys love their long and knowing silences, especially in difficult conversations.

"We Amethysts know something about grief." Dracul finally said, "But we also know some things about closure. I'm sure you were told some of what happened. We requisitioned your fighting forces to the tunnels under the city, to get to the structure below even that. Hexensohn went in, and nobody saw what happened. We left, carrying him in our arms. We didn't leave with your men."

Dracul stood up. He remembered it. The purpose behind it all. The darkness, the Shyish and Dhar in the air. Ever-hated undead, the Magic, the Magic…

Dracul took a deep breath. "The reason Hexensohn was in Sylvania to begin with, and the fate that ultimately befell him, it was…"

For millennia the oasis at Bir Tawil had served as little more than a watering hole for the occasional nomad who remembered it existed. Today, however, it hosted something far grander than a herd of Arabyan steeds—something it hadn't seen since the death of the great cities. Casting the entire oasis into shadow loomed the Sky Scraper, a multi-story monolith hovering gently above the sands.

Inside, in the main research room, worked one Lady Magister Mathilde Weber, grateful for the foresight of whichever Celestial that had added an enchantment that created a cool breeze.

On the workbench before her lay an eccentric collection of items—tools, weapons, a broken death mask.

"You're sure these are not from a tomb?" she asked.

Egrimm shook his head. "The ruin Johann and I acquired them from had the look of a temple to it—but we didn't see any tombs. At a guess, I'd say that it was a place where funerary goods were prepared—and whoever these items were intended for wasn't entombed in time to be affected by the Great Ritual. And so the Liche Priests abandoned them."

Mathilde didn't say anything in response, but ran a careful eye over the items. Whatever enchantment had been on the corroded weapons had long since faded, and the deathmask was too broken to tell what the magics on it were supposed to do. The fact that they hadn't curdled to dhar yet was nothing short of a miracle.

But the tools were in surprisingly good condition.

There! Buried deep within the metal, an enchantment—but not made of a magic she recognised. Divine magic, although to which god she knew not.

Too weak to tell what the purpose of the enchantment was, or even if it had been intentionally placed or if it had just absorbed the essence of divinity from the rituals it was used in, but it was clearly touched by the gods in someway. The only way to find out more would be to disassemble them, which would take time.

Mathilde sighed. "Good work, but we can't do a full study of it right now. Add them to the vault and cross off the location on the map. Our nexus isn't here."

Egrimm nodded, and began to collect the artifacts. Max could break down the swords and use the raw material in his blacksmithing, and the museums of Altdorf would fight each other for a genuine Nehekaran deathmask with no current owner.

The tools would stay on board the Sky Scraper, however.

With a cantrip, Mathilde teleported to the command room of the tower. Her hands danced over the control slate, touching glowing runes. Arcane runes, not dwarven runes, of course. Don't let the dwarves hear you say otherwise.

Slowly, steadily, the tower raised itself higher into the air, liberating the oasis below from the shade it had been covered in. It rotated, angling itself southwards, and began to drift in defiance of all the natural laws. From a distance, the pace it set might seem leisurely, but that was only an illusion cast by its sheer size—it could still outpace a mortal horse.

Mathilde smiled as the open desert passed beneath her. Surely there was no better way to travel than in the comfort and luxury of her own personal tower.