There was another problem. No, a couple.
One was that it had been a week since the Imperials had been kidnapped.
That ant in this world that it had been seven hundred thousand days since the kidnapping had happened…. or nearly two thousand years!
The second thing was that the entire place was now made up of Tomb-Tainted humans with full necroic infusions, basically almost undead themselves, living alongside countless undead made from those who had died. That ant this was a kingdom of undead, ruled over by an Entropic Immortal!
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The Mick blinked several tis as he studied the map from his wife’s Upcast Eagle’s Vantage, which had flown high enough to take in the entirety of what had proven to be an island in a black sea.
And island… that looked like a 1/24th scale exact clone of the Isle of Kheper.
He sat back and put his hand to the bridge of his nose. “Be these Immortals totally bereft of original thoughts?” he had to ask, leaning back against the statue situated on a lonely hill here. It was mostly avoided by the natives, as if it were bad luck.
The stone had resisted wear and tear because the weather was mild and mildew didn’t grow, nor frost wear at it, and winds were nearly non-existent, along with birds.
It depicted a handso young man and an attractive young woman, hand in hand. Woven through their clasped hands were two familiar imperial crowns: the diadems of the prince and princess of different empires.
Carved on the front of it in two languages was the faded salutation: Emperor Onswerd and Empress Chyrilsa of Siripha.
Jace had found the hidden samples of flesh stored away and preserved beneath the statues, enough to power a Clone spell. The imperial children had obviously long perished, but this way they could be recovered back to whenever the flesh was taken.
“So, we’re here in Thasophyt again, obviously.” Eshauna pointed at the familiar Pyramid whose double had been sitting in the capital of the Sythian province. She moved her finger along the river that led up to the storied plateau in the center of the island, where ancient beasts lived on the true Isle of Kheper… and so had the main hidden temple of the Dark Web and Mother Spider.
“I don’t think any of the mystics reached this realm before us,” Kavva nodded slowly. Laur had wrapped their band in a Seeming to make them look like a bunch of undead, and they had moved out of the fake city as quickly as they could to avoid any interested semi-demonic or werespider mystics on patrol. “We should be able to move on their main base without stirring up problems… and we do not want to stir up problems here.”
Catching up to the teams in front of them hadn’t been particularly hard, as it was hard to beat a Teleportation Circle and Linejumps for fast overland travel. They had to trek from one Portal to the next along sowhat treacherous paths, but Find the Path, Scrying, and Teleportation Circle or Linejumps combined to get them to their destinations with great speed, actually bringing them to the second Portal jump before the group they were following could reach it and so laying an ambush for them.
That tactic might have been useful in their current location if it was a re shrunken island. The Mick was about to say sothing when he paused with everyone else to watch what looked to be nigh a thousand undead, all of them standing on what seed to be a great floating slab of rock, cheering and calling out in rough and twisted voices as it moved through the air towards a dinsional fluctuation in the dark and starless sky, montarily shifting in a glowing field of light that swallowed slab and undead unlike.
Voop, gone.
The Mick blinked. “What was that… never mind,” he sighed again. “Can we Teleport in closer, Laur?” Laurentine would have to pull power from him to Cast the spell, or use her morized Valence up, which would be dangerous if it was needed again.
The fiery-haired Overmagus gestured, then shook her head. “No, ti is moving too fast here, just like the last two Portal worlds. We try anything like that, we’ll be torn apart by the dinsional tides as we reappear. The sa way we’ll have to take the Portals ho. That slab of rock had to be an Immortal Creature, it was using Immortal Power to open that Gate for itself.”
“Can ye re-open it?” he inquired quickly.
She looked sharply at the location in the sky. “Possibly?” she asked. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m thinking that since we gots an Immortal looking out for us, opening a Portal to him might be a nice cheat to get around this temporal distortion, and…” he looked around thoughtfully, “there ain’t no way these people want to stay here. If we want to evacuate them, we’ll need soone capable of holding the evacuation gates open.”
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As they’d arrived through the Portal, there’d been a crackling pop and sizzling, as an ancient oil lamp in a holding tray there had cracked and broken as the nonesuch light of Immortal Power evaporating had bubbled up from its shattered remains.
It was an Artifact used to power the Portals between worlds, and it had given its last when they had co through it. Without a source of Immortal Power, they had to find another way out of here.
“If we’re moving a hundred thousand tis faster, then leaving for even a day ans another three hundred years are going to pass for these people,” Austere the plate-armored Grand Priest of the Morning, a cheerful Green with tanned skin and the trademark green eyes of his people, pointed out. He was the newest addition to the Mick’s team, with Kormac having ongoing obligations in Zanzyr now and running his own team for the Caers under Isadora’s House of Stoneguard. “I think bringing Tek in here just to organize a mass evacuation would be sothing, but…” he looked around tellingly, “Mick, there’s probably over a hundred thousand people on this island to get out of here, not to ntion all of the undead and werespiders, and the brainwashed aranea.”
The intelligent spiders were trying valiantly to stave off the presence of the Mother Spider, but finding it difficult, as had been discovered on the first Portal world, where monkey/coon-like phanatons and cow-sized, morphing aranea had lived in a nicely symbiotic arrangent until the Mother Spider had positioned her descendants there and started enslaving the aranea. They’d had to fight their way through a small army of enslaved spider-folk and werespiders calling up nightshades, odics, and drujs to slaughter their way through.
“Aye, there’s no way we can fight our way through it all to get there, but she dinnae know we are coming, so we can get there secret-like. Plus, if we get Tek here and he starts pulling the people out, that will be a massive distraction. It’s just…” the Mick sighed. “If they dinnae go through the Portals, the necroic shit done to them won’t be reversed, and they’ll be Tomb-Tainted when they erge.”
“Mick.” Jace had that ‘I’m being clever again’ look in his brown eyes, the hyn Adventurer thumbing his short Sword Toze tellingly. “This place is moving a hundred thousand tis faster than back ho. We don’t have the power to suddenly find places for a hundred thousand people, that’s true. But…” he waved his hand all around them. “One day back ho is near three hundred years here. We could spend a year or two here getting together everything everyone needs for a new life outside, and it won’t cost us anything back ho. We could send them all off with full kits and wagons and resources, what animals are required… we could scour this whole island down to the pebble of resources, bring it all out, and less than an hour or two will have passed.”
The Mick lifted his eyebrows as he got the gist of what the hyn was saying. He also looked around.
“We be going to kill an Immortal,” he murmured. “And there be a LOT of undead and werespiders we will be needing to kill,” he nodded slowly. “’tis a fine Karmic harvest for everyone. It could make our legends.”
Everyone’s eyes were steady. Even Bestie, the horse-sized Algonquin Hound, looked focused now.
“This could be enough to let us walk through the Arch of Heaven,” breathed Austere. “We just have to do the job right and solid.”
“And kill that bitch of a spider first. Without her, the undead have no Master and will not be organized in the slightest, fracturing among control lines as they vie for power over one another. The werespiders might just go insane on losing her, and the aranea will be freed from her control, not that they might not still be brainwashed and as ruthless as the weres,” Kavva pointed out heartlessly. “There’s going to be a lot of fighting involved, and we’re going to have to scour this place clean of them to put what we need into motion.”
“No reinforcents, no reserves, no re-equipping, hostile terrain, enemies everywhere, and a whole lot of enslaved nigh-dead folk to help out.” The Mick took a deep breath, but he was smiling. “This be a challenge worthy o’ an Eternal, I be thinking!”
“Doing this in the na of Tek and the Morning would earn him an instant horde of worshipers if he brings them out of here,” Austere nodded solemnly, eye on a larger picture. “We can kill a lot of birds with one stone here, Mick. He can arrange for help on the outside, as well.”
“So, we bring him in. He starts working on what he needs here… crap,” the Mick slapped his thigh. “This place is Entropic, considered hostile to him. How will he get his power back?” It would slow things down considerably!
“Planar Bubble.” He looked at his wife inquiringly. “It’s a spell that exactly replicates the conditions of your native plane in a sphere for up to twenty feet around you. In his case, that should exactly replicate a technological node of influence. His regeneration effects should instantly top out, and the spell will last dozens of tis longer than needed to recoup the power he expends,” Lauren explained.
“He will literally be able to make Miracles while under the effect of a spell like that,” agreed Krogi the dwarf-priest of Tek, having switched his Patron from Clangyr to the Morning subjective decades ago after a trip back to Darkmoor, and now enthusiastically bore the monkey wrench symbol of the new Immortal who admired dwarven tradecraft and engineering talent.
“We want him here helping the citizens, not stealing our combat thunder,” the Mick stated firmly, turning to look at the distorted glowing place in the sky where the slab and its quasi-living cargo had departed. “If that lasts six seconds on the outside, that be six hundred thousand seconds here. That be, eh, seven days? Afore we can bring him in.” He smiled wolvishly. “We can be getting a fair amount done in seven days, I be thinking. Starting with killing us a wee spidery Immortal who couldn’t keep her Na discreet and be needing our attention, then going to town on as many undead and werespiders we can for as long as we can, then bring Tek in to mastermind a way to get them all out of here, finishing up the killing while he does what Immortals can do.”
He looked around at everyone, and they all nodded in agreent. This was going to be their big test for Eternity, the deed that would vault them all to the Apex and past it, and it was ti to make their push!
With newfound energy, the disguised group of mortals, looking quite undead, rotting, and slly, cleaned up their camp, secured their belongings, and headed for the center of the Entropic copy of the Island of Kheper.
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