Conquest of the Horde

A Warlock's Tale
By Zarquon

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A cackle of glee pierced the pregnant silence, one filled to the brim with a dark tension. Hidden cunningly against the emerald glow of a streak of ley-line that carved a milky stream across the Twisting Nether, the grotesque and lankly form hurtled itself towards the floating gray rock. Below him, half-a-dozen crouched outlines froze almost comically for the briefest of moment, though only one managed to turn its gaunt visage towards the source of the glee.

Not that the others were particularly dull, although it definitely played a role, for the sadistic laughter echoed from six different spots with a little touch of prestidigitation. As for the sole member that proved himself above his dimmer lot, the reward was a most belligerent blast of scorching flames that somehow construed to burrow its way into his mouth and down the throat.

The shriek of pain shattered any hope of the silence being renewed as yelps and growls formed a cacophonous orchestra upon the dead, gray rock. The other imps were terrified now, and one or two even cowered as the cackling became an almost maniacal chortling.

Marsyas, self-proclaimed Terror of Xoroth, The High Most Cunning, He-Who-Downed-A-Rainbow, and a multitude of other titles both made and earned, almost squealed with joy at the sight. Only to find it abruptly ended by a thump as he landed wrongly on the downed imp, tripped and toppled to the side. And with that, his concentration was cut off, the spell of illusion that had powered the haunting voices gone.

Groaning feebly and pressing his thin fingers against the jagged rocks, he sought leverage and found it, pushing himself up from the prone position on the ground. Only to sincerely wish that he hadn't. Around him stood half-a-dozen imps in varying state of disgruntlement to utter sadistic cruelty marring their gaunt faces.

"He blew up Zyriaptok! He blew up Zyriaptok!" One of the imps cried out in a shrill voice which Marsyas detested immediately. That one, going to kill that one if I kill any, he swore in his mind.

"I didn't blew him up, I just pierced him through! Listen, we can totally talk this out. That Tothrezim bossman of mine, he pay- Oof." Marsyas grunted as a tiny, balled fist connected with his chest. Not that it didn't hurt.

"You blow up Zyraiptok." Now this one, Marsyas figured, was probably the head honcho amongst this miserable lot. Bigger, smellier, and with an accent that's slightly different - probably from Xoroth. An animalistic touch to the Eredun, somehow thought to be considered appealing. Personally, he found it to be lilted and effeminate. "You be blown up too!" And that was punctuated by the distinct sensation of Fel being summoned and the very familiar sight of a condensed globe of flame.

There's just something so absolutely annoying about having the perfect plan spoilt and ruined at the end by the most minor of mistake.

†

There's just something so absolutely annoying about having the perfect plan spoilt and ruined at the end by the most minor of mistake, Narvis thought irritably to himself as he trudged down the dank corridor, And all the more if it's due to mice. Mice! A sigh of exasperation escaped his parted lips, his fingers wrung nervously with his hands resting against his chest.

He had been plotting this for weeks, and was perched upon the crux of success, had his master not found the crumbs of cheese stolen by the mice. It was, to be frank, ludicrous. With the most biannual trader losing his ship to one of those increasingly volatile storms that had been plaguing the Great Sea, the master had instituted what he termed a rationing system. Coin-pinching miser more like, Narvis churned the words darkly in his mind. And personally, he had always been a tad too fond for cheese for his own good, and when he found a wad of it just lying there...

And thanks to the mice, the master had discovered it. Or more accurately, thanks to the presence of the mice. The master had originally laid a particularly damning curse on the wad of cheese in the hopes of ending the whole mice infestation, but Narvis had managed to unravel the spell safely for his own consumption. Thus, when the master found one of the mice with a crumb of cheese, munching away at it without a care in the world, it wasn't difficult for the grumpy old man to piece two and two together.

Which, unfortunately for Narvis, meant that the plan he had contrived for weeks might be in for a premature disintegration of its own, gone as dust as the spell he had removed. And that wasn't easy, Narvis thought to himself, was an inch from getting myself killed at the tertiary foci. A shudder wrecked his lanky form at that thought, his lips pursed together.

Silently, Narvis crept towards the door that had formed the obstacle to his departure from this makeshift cell that his master had devised. It was really just an empty storeroom that could serve no purpose due to a leak in the ceiling which made it imprudent to keep much of the sensitive materials the master dealt with. Or at least, no sensible purpose beyond detaining a misbehaving apprentice. On the other hand, Narvis had very little intentions of being detained, especially not on a day when the master was headed to Theramore to obtain news. And such a day was a particular opportunity that Narvis do not want to miss.

With his heart fluttering like caged butterflies against the prison of his chest, Narvis sought the door and the lock that kept it closed. Warded, naturally, yet with a little fiddling... A wry grin began to tug at the edges of his lips. One might think that Narvis had a knack for getting into trouble and subsequently a penchant for breaking himself out, but it wasn't anything like this at all. Instead, with his duty of tidying up the library along with the inclination to explore some of the collection came with it a wealth of experience in picking apart locks and dissembling spells of warding. Most such grimoires in the master's collection were hardly obtained with any legality, and most practitioners of such Arts prefer to keep their knowledge meticulously sealed and hidden away, or failing that, locked beneath a good web of spells and mundane contraptions. Breaking these apart was time-consuming and frankly, dangerous, yet Narvis had been driven by healthy curiosity with a large amount of spare time to fill.

As such, the hastily engineered trap just before his master's departure wasn't all that meticulously done. Judging by the movement of the moon from the crack in the ceiling, Narvis gauged that it took at least an hour or so before he managed to crack the contraption open, but when it was done, he let out a whoop of joy and found a grin plastered upon his visage that he could not fade away. And then his mind traveled to what he had indeed contrived to do - the smile ceased almost immediately after.

The floor creaked to the rhythm of his light steps as he made his way across towards the ritual room. His master would almost definitely enter a fit if he learned that Narvis entered it, but then there was a perfectly apparent reason as to why the peculiar choice of timing. In this case, being the master's absence. At a guess, Narvis figured that his master would be gone for a day or two at the very least, which in hindsight, made the detention one with intended cruelty. Still, he brushed that nagging thought aside to the peripherals of his mind, collecting himself for what he sought to do as he snuck into the unhallowed chamber.

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It was almost as if every ritual chambers were construed and designed by the same person, all dredged out of some monotonous fairytale or something. Dark and gothic theme, check. Runic circle in the center of the room, check. Table filled to the brim with eyes of the newt and a bowl of disgusting black slime, check. Massive curtains drawn to keep out most except a few rays of timid sunlight, check. Dank, stagnant air laced with the faintest hint of-...one kind of gets the idea. As Narvis swept his gaze apprehensively across the room, he nonetheless prided and comforted himself with the fact that he managed to identify a fair bit of the ingredients on the table. With sheepish step and with a surprisingly blasé demeanor, he approached the table and procured a few pieces of chalk and ink. Half-pressed flowers remained in the mortar and pestle, and upon closer examination, Narvis found himself pleasantly impressed by his master's choice of coloring. Maybe he isn't so much a miser after all, he thought idly to himself, turning slowly around and heading towards the summoning platform.

The diagram he had memorized wafted across the surface of his memories, ephemeral as the wistful winds and threatening to fade away until he grasped it in his mind and clutched at it like a drowning man on a plank. He couldn't afford to make any mistakes, he knew, and he had spent days scrupulously going through each and every equation, run through the simplest multiplication to prevent any careless error, cross-comparing the numbers with that of countless other prior examples. If it had been for his master, any error might have meant a heated lecture, a day spent trudging across the woods to fill up buckets, meaningless chores, errands, or at worst, being incapacitated by an agonizing curse. In this situation, however, he knew any error would have meant the difference between getting to stay alive or being torn apart into a thousand undiscernable pieces and left as a bloody stain on the ground. He idly mused as to whether his master upon finding it will fuss more about his loss or the unsightly mess left behind. Somehow, Narvis figured it could very well be the latter.

Crouching down, Narvis took in a deep breath and tried to still his beating heart, beginning to sketch out the outline of the summoning circle. He had to be precise. Perfect.

A summoning circle was a delicate piece of aesthetic that served a far greater purpose than establishing boundaries or erecting barriers and defenses. It was, to put it succinctly, akin to playing a very careful game of chess - or more appropriately, a Tothrezim Death Chess - where one predicts the opponent's movement without anything being done, and only finding out when the game begins what pieces are even on the board. As such, it takes tremendous planning to engineer it. A summoning requires a channel to the Twisting Nether, but such a connection might draw in other demons, as such a primary circle had to be established to narrow the scope and width of the tunnel. Yet to maintain the primary circle, a secondary circle had to be attached to serve as both an efficient transmitter of energy, and a trigger to quickly disable the tunnel upon the waylaying of the intended demon. To ensure that the efficient stream of energy not overload the summoning, however, a third circle had to be constructed as a foci to absorb the excess energy that might escape. In addition to that, while the third circle absorbs the mana leaked internally from the source of the summoning tunnel, energy too might be leaked from the Twisting Nether - especially if the tunnel pierces a ley-line or streaks too closely to one. A forth circle thus had to be drawn and maintained to channel this excess amount of potency away; yet the power the Twisting Nether might exude is nothing that can be entirely ascertained, as such, this volatile stream of mana cannot be captured with any form of certainty. The uncertain often leads to a premature death. Prudent, then, is it to direct the power gathered in the forth circle to a poor conductor of energy - such as a dull and dead piece of rock, that it might expend itself in the destruction of said sacrificial object. Nonetheless, that will still require a fifth circle around the sacrifice to serve as a defensive ward, preventing the subsequent explosion from wrecking the rest of the summoning circle. And so on. And so forth...

The details could, as Narvis learned to his dismay, fill up volumes and comprise of chunks after chunks of equations and elaborations. Add in the fact that beyond the most technical and mechanical expectations that a summoning circle needed to answer, the demon itself was oft an unpredictable and most dangerous foe that would exploit any possible chink in the encasing prison.

His master had repeatedly impressed upon him the fact that if he wanted to summon a demon, he should most definitely do so only when his master felt that he was ready to do so and with supervision. In all fairness, those were perfectly sensible and undeniably wise words. Narvis, however, had to do it. The window of opportunity was too small. He had to do it in his master's absence and summon a demon to find out what he must know, what he had to know, or the chance would have passed.

His heart hammered against his chest, sweat matting his brows and his ragged linen clinging onto his sweaty form. After almost three hours of meticulous and endless drawing until his fingers were powdered with the white of the chalk, he had finally completed it.

He stood up feebly on shaking legs and staggered into the warding circle, turning slowly to face the first circle - the summoning portal. Or, as one grimoire pointed out in dark humor, the gaping jaws to hell.

He had to do it.

He raised his hands slowly, and allowed the first line of the incantation to escape his parted lips.

He had to do it.

Steeling himself, he forced out the next. And the next. And the next.

†

"I just want to point out!" Marsyas wailed out in terror and spontaneous desperation, "That I have a very big Man'ari that adores me who will tear you to bits for this!"

That brought them short. A brief moment of hesitation. Or two moments. Marsyas almost felt a fleeting tinge of pity for them in their consternation. Almost. They were as dull as rocks and frankly, hardly possessed enough brain-power to light a candle.

The hesitation also brought about a curious phenomenon. One might perhaps have heard of the saying, 'Saved by the bell', which was a mundane and witless mortal idiom that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. How can a bell save you - well, except for a Tothrezim Bell of Damnation - or even be heard across the Twisting Nether anyway?

Saved by the tunnel, on the other hand...

...there was a flash of emerald light, and where Marsyas once lain, only dust remained.

†

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Anybody who had participated in a teleportation before could testify as to the most displeasing sensation of being wrenched from the material and tossed into a temporal wreck of disorientation. Or, to put it in layman's term, akin to riding on a plane driven by a gnome, which was a phrase much synonymous with the idea of commiting suicide. Couple that with the fact that rather than within a world, summonings could very well take place between entire worlds if not across dozens of worlds - Marsyas once heard a tale of a Tothrezim who traveled sixty-eight worlds for a business transaction involving an Abyssal - then one can imagine that it was perhaps more akin to riding on a goblin-crafted rocket. Thus, as Marsyas found himself bodily extricated from an otherwise unpleasant situation and sent hurtling across the Twisting Nether, it was with an herculean effort of will that he managed to keep his wits about him. And begin to plot.

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, so when one is a grotesque abomination whose very presence could set a village rioting, on fire, then purged by inquisitors until all that remained was an empty husk, the aesthetic aspect was quite crucial. First appearance for a demon, then, was for some a form of art; a dance between the summoner and the summoned. The Sayaads excel at this, but Marsyas tends to think that he wasn't all that bad at it either.

And now, to take a look at my unlikely savior who might soon regret it so very much, Marsyas thought to himself with glee, projecting a portion of his mind further down the tunnel as he sped through it. It brought out glimpses of the summoning chamber and the wayward summoner that flashed in the mental vision of his mind, and he found himself caught between a mixture of surprise and amusement. It was but a young lad, barely able to be considered an adult, and these, Marsyas grinned wryly to himself, were his favorite preys. Predictable, weak-willed and ambitious, so feckless and careless in their rush for power. Drawing in what could pass as a mortal breath, he tasted the magic inherently bestowed within the spell of summoning, prodding lightly at the intricate web of power that held him in binding. Surprise. It wasn't all as bad as he had expected it should be, and that was both exasperating and troubling. This might prove to be interesting to say the least.

As one had surmised by now, the approach to a summoning by a demon was a delicate business. First appearance was thus everything, and Marsyas drew upon the well of power nestled within him as he prepared a spell of his own. If he had been a humble imp, he would have claimed that he had a penchant for the theatrics, but since he was not a humble imp, he likened himself as far above his peers in the arts of the dramatic. And as such, he had one particular favorite of his, which he simply termed as The Marsyas Entrance.

†

And the next.

As the final words of his incantation rolled from his tongue, Narvis drew in a sharp breath and stared with widened eyes at the summoning circle. Within the circumference of the drawn circle, cracklings of emerald lightning began to storm like bottled electricity, tendrils of seeking sparks whipping against the edge of the confinement. The entire room seemed to be shaking now, the quake emanating from the center of the circle to his dismay, a buzzing sound akin to the continuous scratching of nails against wood forming a contrapuntal undertone to the thunderous growl seething from the portal. Around him, the runes of his painstaking creation lapsed into a rhythmic pulsing as they struggled to keep the energy seeping from the Twisting Nether in check.

And yet he had to hold firm, trembling uncontrollably as he was, the thumbs of his hands tucked into the pockets of his robe. Wide-eyed and with a face paler than when he was being lectured by his master, Narvis stared blankly towards the portal, his feet digging into the dust of the floor with a conscientious attempt at holding himself together amidst the utter chaos around him.

Crack! A potion shatters into a hundred fragments as the quake tore it from the surface of the chemistry table. Bam! A lumbering tome toppled from its perch, smashing with a staccato clap against the ground. Crack! With an ear-splitting sound, the leg of a table snapped and sent the table tilted to the side, dislodging a plethora of texts and writing materials that tumbled to the floor. Bam! An abrupt thunderous clap pierced through the cacophony, causing Narvis to jump and his heart to skip a beat.

Amidst this roiling storm of graphical devastation, two gleaming, malevolent eyes materialized, hovering a few feet above the ground in the middle of the summoning circle. Boring into Narvis, he felt as if his mortal husk was being stripped apart and appraised by this supernatural entity, and a shudder wrecked his form with an involuntary step taken back before he managed to halt himself in time. And thankfully too, for another step and he might have left his own personal circle of protection.

"Why have you summoned me, mortal?" The voice boomed and echoed, seeming to come from every direction in the suddenly small and stifling chamber. Laced with the malefic intonation of Eredun, the voice held within it the wailings of a thousand damned souls and such utter antipathic malice that Narvis felt like cowering into a ball and sobbing in piteous terror. This wasn't meant to be happening, he thought to himself as his heart pounded against his chest, this wasn't meant to be happening.

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