Chapter 567 - A Thousand Years for Revenge (Patreon)

AN: I've decided to split the difference on the paperback question. I'm going to find a secondary distribution channel to continue the 'old' paperbacks, while funneling the 'new' paperbacks to Amazon ONCE THEY ARE READY. They're not ready yet, so nothing's coming out yet. It'll be quite some time until spine art, etc. is ready.

AND WE ARE BACK! Early chapter because I can, because you've all waited so patiently. The rest of this week's chapters will be at their normal time.

I've had this scene in my head for a long, LONG time, and it felt so good to finally get it out on paper.

===========================Nearly 75 years after the events at the Phoenix Peaks

Lossamiel had [Sworn Vengeance] on the [Slavers] of Urwa.

At first she’d been meticulous. Kept a list of those responsible for kidnapping her, passing her around before slapping her in chains and silks and putting her on an auction block. A list that included the [Auctioneers], the buyers, the suppliers, and the hated Emir Eabd.

Being a [Slave], branded and forced to dance, wasn’t the end of the world. It was bad, but it was nothing.

Pain and raw emotion were a currency, an entertainment, and Lossamiel, along with the other slaves, had been occasionally tortured for the night’s amusement, surrounded by laughing and jeering elves. 

Then there were the pits…

When the freshness and novelty of Lossamiel had started to wear out, the [Emir] and the rest had dug deeply for new entertainments.

Lossamiel could still hear her scream as tiny feet kicked helplessly, inches above engraved marble. Every detail was carved into her mind, from how her wrists broke against the manacles, to the exact pattern of the shirt’s weave, to the choking gurgles. The horn-nubs that hadn’t even revealed the antler’s shape. The carefully timed cruelty to let her go just too late to do anything, the laughs as the party went on around her sobbing over her daughter’s death.

That was when she had [Sworn Vengeance], and didn’t care who she hit in her quest. 

All of Urwa was rotten, and needed to be purged. Everyone involved was either a [Slaver] and deserved to die, a citizen who helped and profited off the system and was complicit, or a slave themselves who would die to see their [Slavers] killed with them.

Freedom came one day. She’d been sold to a less-careful master who was fine with ‘refuse’ from the Emir, a cheap bargain for ‘high quality goods’. He wasn’t quite as good with chain lengths and skills, and Lossamiel had been able to dance close enough to wrap her chains around his neck and choke him out.

An orgy of violence had followed, Lossamiel venting her anger on the slavers closest to her before calming down and thinking.

Lossamiel had planned. It was a shame for the mortals whose lives would be too short to benefit from her move, it was torture for the remaining slaves, but it was better to do this right than to have a short-lived and futile rebellion.

The first thing she studied were the locations of all the [Emirs] and [Sultans]. How they operated, what the entire slave network looked like. What her targets were and where.

The information was freely available, and cost Lossamiel practically nothing. Simply the city toll to enter a city with a library, and she was set.

The next project was harder.

The general shape was easy and bandied about, but the details, the specifics, were restricted to the point of practically being banned.

The Guardians, and how they operated.

Lossamiel had spent two decades piecing together a loose theory of how they worked from various stories and tales, but even then most of them handled Guardians appearing after an attack. There were no solid records of how they intervened on channeled or highly prepared attacks. Simply the rare passage in a restricted book going ‘Sentinel Queen and The Nightmare were seen conversing on such and such date.’

Guardians were people too, and for all Lossamiel knew, it was a social call between two old Immortals, and had nothing to do with prepared attacks. 

She managed to develop a theory anyway, and she’d find out how accurate it was.

The third was studying the Divine Decrees and dimensional magic. This was by far the most expensive undertaking, needing to pay for an apprenticeship to a senior [Mage] who knew how it worked, and didn’t like competition too much. Creating portals was difficult, but doable, but creating portals that didn’t rip the fabric of space, simply pushed it around?

Quite a bit harder. If it stopped the gods from simply smiting her and preventing her revenge, it was all worth it.

It took a few more years to get her skills to a comfortable spot and plot the best course of action, but once it was done, the elf took off high into the sky, past the clouds, past where there was any air. Lossamiel carefully aimed her portals at each other, making sure they were aimed at the infinite expanse of deep space, past the horizon of Pallos.

She’d contemplated aiming them at the ocean, but the threat of a tsunami would probably be enough to summon the Guardians too early. No, aiming them away from anyone was best to stay unnoticed and undetected.

Then she dropped her steel balls into the portals, a dozen skills playing with each other. Aiming, survival, making sure the attack penetrated properly. Reading currents and playing with mass. They fell through, only to reappear a few feet away in the exit portal, ‘above’ the original one.

Speedy thing went in, speedy thing came out, and Lossamiel’s steel balls rapidly accelerated in minutes to terrifying speeds.

She wasn’t aiming for simply terrifying.

Minutes.

Hours.

Days.

Years.

Decades.

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Shera, The Dreamer, swam slowly through the depths of the ocean. She was a leedsichthys, one of the titans of the depths, but not quite the largest. Blue whales, krakens, and leviathans were larger. She’d been mistaken for a leviathan often enough, and most creatures knew to avoid tangling with her.

A shark took a curious nibble, and she simply redirected the currents to place him in her mouth, biting down with a satisfying crunch of breaking cartilage. She returned her attention to the ripples in the world.

Shera was a Guardian, and one of the gifts bestowed upon her was to see ripples, for lack of a better word. Focal points where disaster loomed. There were all sorts of qualities to the ripples, from frequency, to intensity, to color, flavor, and more. 

Nearly every living creature gave off ripples, and the vast majority were ignored. It was almost easier to see the unusual ripples in the sea of ordinary ones, and intervention was a judgment call.

An infrequent ripple came from the coastline, tasting of fish, colored blue and being small and rare. Some [Mermaid] trying to conjure enough water to drown the world, no doubt, but lacking in the skills and coordination to succeed. Maybe there’d be a few millimeters change in the ocean’s level, nothing that the tides wouldn’t wash out. 

Now, if King Nereus were trying to organize the merfolk en masse to drown the landfolk, perhaps as retaliation for his daughter being butchered and eaten by orcs for the Immortality her body provided, that could create a much larger ripple, one Shera would need to investigate and nip out before the world was flooded and drowned. Again.

A hungry set of pitch-black ripples was coming from a shelf in the ocean, and the intensity and frequency was finally large enough to stir Shera to action. With a few flips of her mighty tail, she sped through the depths, arriving at a chasm where a leviathan had been felled by a single ingested Vorler egg. It had hatched on the inside, poisoned the leviathan to death, then had feasted on the body, wildly reproducing over generations. The ancient monster was now bones, and a massive swarm of Vorlers threatened to overrun life in this corner of the ocean.

Shera preempted all that by crushing them to death with the weight of the deepest depths of the ocean, magnified a dozen times. It was like the hand of a god had come down on them, and Shera made sure not a single tiny egg would survive.

Perhaps it was time to dream again, to imagine the vast endless impossibilities that her Mirror element could then give rise to.

Then one of the endless far-off ripples dramatically changed in frequency and intensity. It had been building up for years and years, but at such a low level that it was ignored. It was suddenly at such a high level that every Guardian would intervene, and Shera immediately moved, leaving devastating currents in her wake, reshaping parts of the world, moving directly towards the ripples.

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Up on the lazily spinning moon, obscured by mirages that had lasted for tens of thousands of years, a single sprout defied all the odds to burst from the ground, unfurling leaves into an impossibly hostile environment.

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Lossamiel shifted the portals a hair, pointing them from a harmless location to populated city centers. She launched her attack with a single word, knowing she would die moments later.

But her revenge would be complete.

“[Moonfall].”