Golemancy was considered by many mages to be the absolute peak of the inscription discipline. To carve the language of magic into a physical object in such a detailed and intricate way that running mana through it created something akin to a living being was a difficult and rewarding task. And, o...
2024-10-10 13:43:06 +0000 UTC View PostUh.... yeah... I don't.... have this. Yet.
Kind of forgot to make it. For now, this is a placeholder.
EDIT: I have written a rough draft blurb. Still working on getting something that's not ass out of Midjourney for the cover.
Blurb-
It’s been six mo...
2024-10-10 13:42:30 +0000 UTC View PostHello,
This is a... let's call it a middle-draft version of book 4's epub. There are probably ten or twenty typos in it still. The editor has gone over it once, but it's pre-beta readers. Still, putting it up now allows me to offer it to you all for close to three months instead of the one ...
2024-10-09 13:55:32 +0000 UTC View PostI laid there on the floor for a minute, just coming to terms with the fact that I’d survived a mana bomb exploding two feet from my face. Even for me, that was an accomplishment. I was injured, in part from my own force crush spell, but I was still breathing. I did make a mental note to design ...
2024-10-09 13:51:11 +0000 UTC View PostIn hindsight, I’d overestimated my ability to fight in such a hostile environment. Ammun was far better suited to exist here than I was, even with his magic severely handicapped. Now I was pinned down and suffocating, with a hostile archmage watching for the slightest mana fluctuations so he co...
2024-10-08 14:24:15 +0000 UTC View PostThere was a hundred feet of space at a steep incline between myself and the golem. I could have jumped down there in a single leap, probably without using any sort of magic to assist my movement. For Ergl to reach me was an entirely different matter. It would have to claw its way up what was esse...
2024-10-07 12:30:54 +0000 UTC View PostI paused in the middle of my preparations to pay more attention to one of my scrying spells. The more miles I had to cover, the slower my progress got, not in the least because Ammun had started using his own magic to actively obfuscate his trail about twenty miles or so from the base. I’d been...
2024-10-04 12:38:46 +0000 UTC View PostOnce I really started pushing, I found four different diviners willing to admit that they’d spied on Ammun using wide-area scries that wouldn’t be passively detected. None of them knew where he’d stopped, but they all independently confirmed which direction he’d set out in. My own brief d...
2024-10-03 12:39:20 +0000 UTC View PostFor a second, I thought I’d somehow been teleported back to Derro, to the tunnels deep underground where I'd found Querit. A moment later, I started noticing the differences in the room. If nothing else, it was cold, considerably colder than anywhere I’d been since my reincarnation. The air h...
2024-10-02 14:18:00 +0000 UTC View PostThe main silo of the summit was undamaged by my attack, but was just as empty as everywhere else. Theories whirled through my mind, one after another. Was this whole site a decoy? Everything Ammun had thrown at me had been a long series of distractions, and I’d made assumptions as to the purpos...
2024-10-01 13:53:40 +0000 UTC View PostThe dragon wasn’t the only thing I’d spent time preparing for. A confrontation with Ammun seemed inevitable, and since it would almost certainly be in his demesne, I’d invested some resources into building a few disposables to help even the odds. Unless I managed to fully rebuild my core ba...
2024-09-30 13:02:10 +0000 UTC View Post“What did you do with the diviner?” I asked.
“Didn’t seem like you wanted him left unsupervised at the valley, so I brought him with me to New Alkerist,” Querit told me.
I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of a captured enemy combatant in my family’s town, especially with n...
2024-09-27 13:37:13 +0000 UTC View PostIt should have been impossible for a battle with a titanic undead dragon to feel tedious, but honestly, that’s how it was. Without Averin or anyone else here to control it, and with its limited number of ways to express its mana, it really wasn’t that hard to outmaneuver it in the air while I...
2024-09-26 12:37:05 +0000 UTC View PostAverin wasn’t stupid, despite his inexplicable desire to bring Ammun back from the annals of history. His questionable motives aside, he was perfectly aware of how overmatched he was without the dragon’s help. There were really only two possible options: he either fled the field back through ...
2024-09-25 13:36:31 +0000 UTC View PostDragon tongue didn’t have a word for ‘subtle.’ They just didn’t think that way, which wasn’t to say that they were stupid, just that the idea of being clever instead of crushing challenges head on was synonymous with being weak. It was something lesser races did.
Dragons were stra...
2024-09-24 13:58:50 +0000 UTC View PostDragons, even undead skeletal ones, were difficult opponents. Sheer size was a quality all its own, both in terms of offense and defense. The living ones could shrug off hits that would kill smaller creatures, and the undead versions were even more durable. Physically attacking one was an exercis...
2024-09-23 13:05:48 +0000 UTC View PostOne of the hardest parts of being a diviner was having to have an excellent memory. There was only so much magic could do to help that along, too. At some point, how well a mage could process and remember information separated the hobbyists from the professionals. Ammun’s diviners were, presuma...
2024-09-20 13:32:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Introductions, first,” I said. “I’ll assume you already know that my name is Keiran and that you’ve been told a great deal about me by Ammun.”
Both diviners gave nods and the old man spoke. “Nakra Adylen,” he said. “Senior diviner for Great House Adylen.”
“Oslia...
2024-09-19 13:44:29 +0000 UTC View PostThey weren’t guardian golems summoned into the room, of that I was certain. I’d already gone through the whole place looking for wards and traps. That meant this was the active work of one of the diviners who also had a solid grounding in conjuration, probably one of the three mages with stag...
2024-09-18 13:38:00 +0000 UTC View PostI kept digging for another hour or so, but then mages started to filter in. Bleary-eyed and shuffling, they resumed their posts as the room slowly started filling up. That meant my time spying on their operation was at its end. We wouldn’t be able to hide that we’d discovered their sympatheti...
2024-09-17 13:40:07 +0000 UTC View PostQuerit stared at me in horror for a long moment before his golem core started processing information again. “But, if he’s hitting you with all the distractions now, that must mean that he’s almost done.”
“Probably,” I agreed.
“What do we do?”
“I’d suggest you...
2024-09-16 12:53:42 +0000 UTC View Post“A sympathetic scrying connection?” I asked.
There was no way Ammun would make that kind of mistake. But then, maybe it wasn’t his mistake. As far as I was aware, today had been the closest Querit and the lich had ever gotten to each other, but it wasn’t the first time...
2024-09-13 13:05:38 +0000 UTC View Post“Did they know anything?” Querit asked when I appeared in his workshop.
“Nothing all that useful. Mid-level mages, disposable fodder just strong enough to cooperate with each other. Somehow, Ammun knew about the resonance point project and was keeping tabs on it.”
“Maybe he...
2024-09-12 12:49:49 +0000 UTC View PostThe timing of this attack was too perfect to be a coincidence. It had come mere moments after we’d finished stabilizing the resonance point. I was the weakest I’d been in years right now, weaker than when I’d fought Ammun personally back when my core was still stage five. Somehow, they were...
2024-09-11 12:38:01 +0000 UTC View Post“Impossible,” I breathed out. “The mana costs…”
I couldn’t even calculate how much mana Ammun was burning every second to be that far away from his phylactery. Had he brought it with him? No, that would be the height of foolishness. There was no reason to take that kind of risk,...
2024-09-10 13:02:35 +0000 UTC View PostWhether it was a coincidence or deliberate, the attacking mages couldn’t have picked a better time to launch their assault. Whoever was in charge was better about keeping their forces safely hidden than the last bunch, too. Even now, with the sky burning above my wards, my divinations didn’t ...
2024-09-09 14:41:29 +0000 UTC View PostIt was impossible for me to narrow down where Ammun’s mages would set up their staging point, but that did not mean I didn’t spend a fair amount of time using the various scrying beacons I’d seeded around Ralvost to snoop for any useful information I could find. And while I did find plenty ...
2024-09-06 13:42:54 +0000 UTC View PostQuerit stood in the middle of the petrified forest with me, right on top of the ritual circle I’d constructed to form the valley’s genius loci. Overhead, a slab of sparkling silver stone floated in the air. It was oblong, a hundred feet long and thirty feet at the widest, and nearly as thick....
2024-09-05 12:17:21 +0000 UTC View PostI resumed my human shape somewhat reluctantly. With as spread out as I’d gotten, it was difficult to fight as a scattered pile of sand, and besides, I needed hands to hold my staff. The worm, somewhat surprisingly, noticed me immediately. I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of senses it had, but...
2024-09-04 11:32:01 +0000 UTC View PostWith the gestalt’s map in my head, it was easy to plan my route. Ants were naturally burrowing creatures; that combined with human-level intelligence and access to mana allowed them to thoroughly map out the underground for miles in every direction. Even dying did nothing to slow them down, not...
2024-09-03 12:41:59 +0000 UTC View Post