I'm not certain on that. The Lahmians of all groups aren't necessarily going to think in terms of geographical proximity.
...Also in general, I'm not sure angering the mountain of suicidal death-seekers is a good long-term strategy. If there's any group that wouldn't care about how dangerous the Silver Pinnacle is...
I'm not certain on that. The Lahmians of all groups aren't necessarily going to think in terms of geographical proximity.
...Also in general, I'm not sure angering the mountain of suicidal death-seekers is a good long-term strategy. If there's any group that wouldn't care about how dangerous the Silver Pinnacle is...
This is End Times, so grain of salt, but when Mannfred was approached by armies from all directions, including a High Elven detachment led by Eltharion, a Wood Elven detachment led by Araloth, a Beastmen horde led by Malagor, the Knights of Sigmar's Blood, and the Throng of Karak Kadrin, this is what Mannfred had to say:
"Had the intruders entered Sylvania together, united of purpose, then they would have presented an unassailable challenge. As it was, only two of the armies – those of the high elves and of the Knights of Sigmar's Blood – had as yet joined forces. These, at least, Mannfred knew he had invited by his arrogance, by adding insult to injury in previous encounters. Not that he much cared, for those he had crushed before he could surely humble for a second time. Of the other armies, he saw little threat from the wood elves, whose host was by far the smallest. The beastmen and the dwarfs were of far greater concern. Malagor's warherd was an undisciplined and sprawling horde, but its numbers eclipsed those of the other invaders combined. The throng of Karak Kadrin, however, lacked neither for numbers nor discipline. It was also the only invader Mannfred truly feared. Over the preceding century, he had taken great care not to antagonise Ungrim Ironfist, lest the old alliance between the Empire and the dwarfs find fresh cause in Sylvania's destruction. Now, it seemed, that effort was for naught, for the Slayer King was at his gate."
On the Laminans, my understanding is that they want a strong and prosperous humanity that they can influence from behind the scenes.
They wouldn't be threatened by the canals, or even really by a dwarven Empire having a southern renaissance. Indeed, given the constraints on the dwarves, supporting Thorgrim would make sense, as taking and holding Mount Silversoear would guarantee that there can't be an attempt on the Silver Pinnqcle pretty much forever. The cost of holding the Silver Road long term would to those unaware of the surveillance system, to be something that would make any other dwarven adventures unsustainable.
On the Laminans, my understanding is that they want a strong and prosperous humanity that they can influence from behind the scenes.
They wouldn't be threatened by the canals, or even really by a dwarven Empire having a southern renaissance. Indeed, given the constraints on the dwarves, supporting Thorgrim would make sense, as taking and holding Mount Silversoear would guarantee that there can't be an attempt on the Silver Pinnqcle pretty much forever. The cost of holding the Silver Road long term would to those unaware of the surveillance system, to be something that would make any other dwarven adventures unsustainable.
That is a simplification of their goals. Their ultimate goal is to return to Lahmia and restore it to its former glory just like Neferata wants it to be, and they want an army of willing blood-cattle to accompany them, so they infiltrate society to create a bunch of thralls who will accompany the Lahmians south when it is time. The Lahmians encourage conflict between the cults of humanity in the hopes of making humanity more vulnerable by eliminating their faith in the gods to make them a more malleable target for manipulation, but they also strengthen them against other threats because they want them to be subservient to themselves, and not destroyed by Chaos:
The ultimate aim of the Lahmian Sisterhood is the ultimate aim of Neferata herself: a triumphant return to the city of Lahmia, where she may rule as the queen of a new Cult of Blood that worships only her. This has not proven easy to achieve. Lahmia, indeed the entire Land of the Dead, is controlled by the Tomb Kings. Still, the sisterhood sponsors expeditions to the Land of the Dead to battle these dread-lords or to recover items belonging to them. The tomb robbers, crusaders, and explorers who make up these expeditions are unaware of the true motives of the mysterious women who act as their patrons.
It would not be enough to regain Lahmia through force of arms if it were still a city of ruins. Lahmia must be regained as it was at its height, complete with a population of willing and worshipful slaves. To this end, the sisterhood has devotees amongst the nobility, deluded pawns and lovers who will one day, when their dominion is complete, lead their people south.
Additionally, those people must be willing blood-cattle, unable to fight back. To this end, the Lahmians manipulate religious conflicts, stirring up the age-old enmity between the cults of Sigmar and Ulric, Ulric and Ranald, Ranald and Shallya, and so on. Simultaneously, they encourage humanistic ideas, helping agitators spread the word that the Gods are deceivers who have grown weak and old and should be disowned. Their hope is to create a world in which the Gods are abandoned, and without holy protection, their prey dare not resist.
The Lahmians have also protected mankind by strengthening them against other threats. It would achieve nothing to rule humanity only to watch them fall before the forces of Chaos. Nor would it do to have the Old World fall to the Von Carsteins, whose control of the nobility of Sylvania and periodic attempts to wage war on the Empire have been thorns in Neferata's side.
From Pages 52-53 of Night's Dark Masters 2E regarding the Lahmians' plots and machinations.
The gist of it is that they want the humans to be weak and pliable but they also want to make sure they're not too weak. If I were to take a guess at what their preferred approach would be, it would be to take advantage of the Middenland/Nordland conflict to enflame Sigmarite and Ulrican tensions into a boil. They were recently thwarted pretty heavily by the destruction of their Conspiracy, but considering the general shittiness of the current Grand Theogonist, I wouldn't be surprised to find that they have hooks on him.
I'd imagine they also want to weaken the Colleges. The Colleges represent the greatest threat to Lahmian rule- just look at what Regimand did to their network.
How does one prepare to see something that will be very faint and very temporary? The Colleges have a few answers, but most must be discarded as they are focused on seeing only one of the Winds and do so at the expense of the others. There are meditative techniques that Teclis tried to teach the Colleges which were duly recorded, but as these were intended to sharpen Elven Magesight - a full-fledged and almost universal sense in its own right, rather than the individual adaptations of the human soul that are filtered through the body's senses - they have proven to be useful only for those seeking insights into Elven spellcasting. So instead the Colleges use the teachings of Volans, the first Magister Patriarch of the Order of Light, who when summoned by Teclis had already spent decades honing his ability to see each of the individual Winds. For that reason, when it comes time to make preparations for the research of the Leylines you propose to Elrisse that the two of you make your preparations together. It's perhaps not the most effective of bonding experiences as it simply involves the two of you consulting Volans' writings on the subject and then spending a great deal of time in quiet meditation in a magically-neutral environment, but it's a gesture of acknowledgement towards the Light Order and it hopefully gets the standoffish-seeming woman a bit more used to your company.
The Waystones you've selected for your observation and experimentation are a chain in the Howling Hills of southern Middenland. It cannot be described as entirely safe as the plentiful caves in the region hide their fair share of bandits and creatures, but the area is ruled over by the Knights Panther in Middenstag, making it very unlikely there would be anything in the area that could pose anything like a threat to the five of you. The others have made their own ways here from whatever preparations of their own they had been making, and the group convenes by the chosen Waystone at the appointed hour.
"Time?" you ask after your arrangements are set up.
Elrisse consults a pocket watch. "One minute until the downstream Waystone is deactivated," she reports. The five of you wait in silence for what feels like at least three before Elrisse says "now," and all of your attentions turn to the leyline below.
The first change you notice is that some outer layer to the leyline seems to freeze in place, and them melt into the rest of the stream as it begins to slow. Moments later the flow downstream of this Waystone halts entirely, and energies begin to intermingle and disperse into the stone. The flow coming from upstream, however, continues unabated, and the energy arriving at this Waystone are absorbed by it. But not cleanly, you note - there's something of a pile-up at the Waystone that interrupts the careful dance of Winds orbiting Dhar, and by the time the Waystone absorbs them only Dhar remains.
"The Waystones themselves seem to have no mechanism to reverse the creation of the energy packets," you note aloud. "It's reabsorbing the energy as only Dhar."
"No wonder Necromancers and Sorcerers love to clog the flow," Elrisse says. "It does all the work for them."
"Did anyone else note the way the outer layer of the leyline reacted first?" you ask, and Hatalath, Sarvoi and Zlata nod.
"Would the outermost layer of a stream be the first to react?" Zlata asks.
Thorek looks intrigued. "A helical energy stream?"
"There was a distinct layer that reacted differently," Sarvoi says. "And then it melted into the rest of the energies. A control mechanism, I'd wager, and when it was cut off from wherever the strings are being pulled it collapsed into ambient energies and joined the rest of the stream."
"The flow is still coming from upstream," Hatalath observes. "And likely would do so indefinitely. Eventually this Waystone would become filled to capacity, and then the energy will pile up and begin to radiate out, like a river breaking its banks. The disruption would continue upstream until it reaches that Waystone, and then it will reabsorb all the Dhar it releases until it too reaches its capacity. You would end up with a straight line of corruption between the two, with the Waystones turned into beacons of pure Dhar just waiting until a Storm of Magic forces more energy in and bursts the containment mechanisms."
"Which would happen everywhere there is a Waystone if the flow to Ulthuan was ever completely cut off," you note grimly. "Which so far seems to include every major population centre on the continent."
"Interesting that deactivating a Waystone stops the next Waystone upstream from sending it energy, but not anything further up the line," Sarvoi notes. "Optimistic, I'd say. It was built with the assumption that a Waystone would only need to be cut off from the network for long enough to maintain or replace it, so there would be no possibility of problems accumulating upstream. Having to permanently remove a Waystone from the network wasn't accounted for."
"The reign of Bel Shanaar was a heady time," Hatalath says distantly. "We all thought it would last forever."
You concentrate and speak a control phrase of Anoqeyån to deactivate the Waystone, and note that the flow from upstream continues unabated. "Energy is still coming in," you note. "So the instruction to halt the flow of incoming energy is communicated by the control mechanism. I suppose that makes sense, with it removed there's no way to communicate against the flow."
"I could see a need to isolate one Waystone from the larger network to be a lot more foreseeable than having to shut down an entire branch of the network in one fell swoop," Sarvoi muses. "Or it was assumed that if they did need to do so, they could just go to each one individually." You nod and light a small signal rocket to tell Johann to shut off the upstream Waystone, and wait and observe as the flow finally slows to a stop.
"So far it seems like halfway between our two hypotheses," you observe. "There's some sort of central control mechanism, but the flow can continue when cut off from the greater network, up until the Waystones reach capacity." You look to Zlata. "And if the flow was maintained instead of being dammed, and energy was being taken out at least as fast as it is being added, then it could last indefinitely." Zlata returns your gaze, gives it some thought, and nods.
"So if we had a way to spend the energies..." Sarvoi begins.
"Including the Dhar?" Elrisse asks pointedly.
Sarvoi considers that. "Ah. Yes, I see your point. There are arguments to be made about lesser evils in some circumstances, but scaling up to a size of a continent means rapidly running out of evils great enough to justify such widespread use of corruptive energies."
"Unless there was a way to convert Dhar into some other, more benign form of energy." You turn your look to Thorek.
"It is said," he says heavily after a long period of thought, "that the Ancestor Gods and those that learned from them could create Runes with that capability. Some of the very least of those techniques were rediscovered by the Runelord Alaric, but he drove himself mad seeking more than that. And only a very few Runelords are capable of reliably using them."
"Would they be at all scalable?" you ask.
"If Kragg had spent his entire long life doing nothing else, then he would perhaps have managed enough to protect a tenth of Altdorf."
You grimace. "And it stands to reason that even if any logistical concerns were handwaved away, any still-existing examples of the greater Runes would have a finite throughput."
Thorek takes even longer to consider this answer. "It does stand to reason," he eventually concludes.
"The only other possibility would be divine," you observe. "A deity willing to dedicate Themselves to a land and take upon Them the burden of purifying a constant stream of Dhar within that land into divine energy."
All eyes turn to Zlata. "Kislev is land, land is Kislev, we are Kislev," she says simply, her voice only betraying a hint of nervousness.
"But even if we simply assume that it would be possible to implement the same approach in the Empire, the merest hint of the idea would instantly split the Empire into at least three parts."
"Bretonnia might be capable of it," Elrisse observes.
"Maybe so, but Bretonnia doesn't have the Grey Mountains between it and Ulthuan."
After you run out of observations to make, you fire off a second signal rocket to tell Max and Johann to reactivate their respective Waystones as you do the same to yours. Nothing immediately occurs in the Waystones so you sit and watch, and a few minutes later with shocking speed a hollow spool of energies flows upstream and latches on to the underground base of the Waystone like a talon around a fieldmouse, and moments later the Waystone begins to send energies downstream as though it was never interrupted. The grasping energy spool launches itself onwards towards the next Waystone, leaving the outermost layer of the leyline in place behind it and before long it fills with the rest of the energies flowing downwards.
"Well, that was abrupt," you comment. "I think we can safely say that there's some sort of centralization at play here, and not merely a passive attractant."
"Some sort of enchantment?" Hatalath suggests.
"If it is, then it must be modifiable, considering the Fort Solace reroute," Sarvoi says.
"Unless it sends those talons up any extant energy stream, then you could add a new junction to the network by sending power down it until the enchantment recognizes it as a pathway."
"If it's predetermined then reactivating any old Waystone would let it reconnect to the network, whereas if it's adaptive then there's a time limit before the energies fade to a point where it's no longer recognized and you need to be able to blaze that trail manually," you say. "Considering the sheer amount of power that would take, I don't like the idea of having to trial-and-error that."
"What would that time limit be, though?" Zlata asks.
"Energy flow through bedrock?" Thorek says. "As a very rough rule of thumb, it won't fade entirely for at least a tenth of the time the energy flow had to establish itself, and if you want to actively keep track of it, check it every hundredth. So for most of the network, in the area of decades for there to be enough time for noticeable change."
You frown at that. "Not the sort of thing that's feasibly testable even if we were willing to sacrifice a Waystone to do so, then. Still, we can try deactivating them for a day and then a week and see if there's any observable differences."
There's general agreement, and the conversation shifts into lively debate about whether to spend the night at the spa village of Bad Hohne or the ferry town of Delberz.
---
The results the next day seem to be more or less the same, so you deactivate the Waystones once more and arrange to reconvene next week. When that day comes around, everything seems to be as normal until the Waystones are reactivated again. You'd braced yourself for the speed that the reactivation had shown previously, but this time it was even faster and impacted the Waystone with enough metaphysical force to send up a nimbus of disturbed energies. There's a flicker of arcane energies and something within the Waystone shifts, its carvings glowing a sullen red for a moment, and then the regenerating network rampaged on upstream.
"Well," you say, as you fruitlessly try to blink away the afterimages that don't actually have anything to do with your eyes. "That was abrupt."
"Why would it be faster after a long wait?" Elrisse asks. "Does it build up the energy to restore the connection while it waits for it to be restored?"
"That might make sense to a much lesser degree, but not this dramatically," Hatalath says. "If we're in the realm of decades for any noticeable difference, such a drastic build-up of energies over merely a week would be completely disproportionate."
"It was the same amount of magical energy," Thorek says confidently. "The difference in effect must be down to how it was applied."
"I suspect..." Sarvoi begins, then speaks the deactivation phrase, to which the Waystone completely fails to respond. "Yes, see? We annoyed it, so it took away the clapper and slammed the door. Fascinating. I suppose it's at least somewhat encouraging that it didn't smite me for trying."
"If it's thinking and feeling, it can't be an enchantment, surely," you say.
"Normally so, but at a large enough scale the normal rules break down," Hatalath says. "And it would be hard to find anything larger than this."
"Anything that thinks and feels without a soul invites something to fill the void where a soul should be," Elrisse says. "Though the idea of something that could fill a void that large is a daunting one."
"Could it be a God controlling it?" Zlata asks.
"Hoeth would be the obvious candidate, but by all accounts He doesn't get snappish quite that easily," Sarvoi says. "If you're looking for a thinking mind in the Vortex that's inclined to be cranky, why go past the one we know is there? Perhaps there he endures, drunk on power, bitter with impotence, curdling in the malefic nightmare of his own existence?"
"Caledor Dragontamer?" you ask, and Sarvoi nods. "I thought he sacrificed himself to create the Vortex."
"Oh, by all accounts he did. But the most potent way to sacrifice your life has always been to do so one day at a time."
There's a long, quiet moment as everyone tries to digest that idea, and you find it sticks in the throat quite unpleasantly. Hatalath looks especially horrified. "Whichever it might be, it does answer our original question," you say, plowing determinedly forward. "I assume among the keyphrases Teclis didn't share with us, there's one to point the network towards a new Waystone and let it do the work. I don't suppose Laurelorn has that information?"
"Ulthuan was very willing to share the work of creating the network with the colonies, but not so much any meaningful information about it," Sarvoi says. "I'll round up some of my brighter students and examine the known keyphrases to see if there's some extrapolatable commonalities, but at best it would be a starting point for trial-and-error experimentation, and we just learned that it doesn't like that."
"What about the Grey Lords?" you ask.
"Those of us who were from Saphethion weren't considered trustworthy enough," Hatalath says with a sniff. "Considering some of those that were, I take it as an endorsement."
"So we try to extract it from Ulthuan, try to extract it from Naggaroth, or try our luck prodding the enchantment further," you say dubiously, and you get the round of nods you expected but did not want in response. "Well, I suppose we knew going into it that it wasn't going to be easy."
- Less substantial of an update than I'd like, but spooling back up after a period of the morbs is always a bit of a process. More to follow when it comes.
What an utterly fascinating update. I wish I were less out of my mind with fever and sleep deprivation from COVID so that I could appreciate it properly.
I look forward to the roundup posts from the usual suspects to summarize what we've learned and lay out thoughts about how we might proceed from here.
I like the difference shown between elven versus human perspectives on dhar here; for elves, it's dangerous but manageable so long as you don't go too far with it, while humans just flat out go NOPE.
Anyone remember what the golem in k8p was called? That could be an example on one way to make this a sacrifice without leaving it all in the care of a few mortals. Use/abuse the elementals.
