Ascendant

A pair of earth golems worked tirelessly, chucking body parts into the bonfire while Adriarc worked to make new ones. He’d been pushed back out of the trees in a running battle with three ghouls barely five minutes after they’d started, and Nym had thrown out a quick scry out into the trees that showed him even more lurking in the boughs.

Adriarc cut through the three he was fighting quickly enough, but more kept coming, and as fast as he worked, it didn’t take long before there were five live ones harrying him across the clearing. The dismembered but still moving body parts also flopped after him, making his footing treacherous.

“I know you said to just stay up here and clean up the bodies,” Nym called down, “But there seems to be a lot of them. Do you want some help?”

“Only if, oof, if you can do it safely,” Adriarc said, wincing as a ghoul rammed into him from the side while he was cutting another one’s arm off.

Another earth golem formed near Adriarc and tackled one of the ghouls, holding it down and pummeling it. With three of them active and the flight spell, Nym was approaching the limit to how much arcana he could pull in at once, but there was still enough for him to use basic telekinesis to brandish a log from the fire and swat at another ghoul.

With some of the pressure taken off, the warrior was able to take the offensive back and started hacking the ghouls apart. Soon, the clearing was empty but for the two of them, the earth golems, and a wiggling pile of body parts trying to flop away from the bonfire Nym had built up.

“I think I’m going to need more wood,” he said. “I didn’t expect so many of them so fast.”

“It does seem like there are a lot today,” Adriarc agreed. “I was expecting an easy day, but this is insane. I should probably go check on Larian. Are you good to finish cleaning this up?”

“I’m fine. Larian’s that way, about two hundred feet in. She’s killed two ghouls and is fighting a third right now.”

Adriarc turned to face the direction Nym indicated and looked between the trees. “I can’t see any of that,” he said.

“Scrying spell,” Nym explained.

“That’s handy. Can you tell where the ghouls are?”

“The range is a bit limited. I can’t sweep the whole forest, but I can look around us easily enough. There are plenty more back in the direction you came from. Things are a bit lighter on her side.”

“Hmm. We might have to switch up our strategy. Do you think you could put together some walls and choke points we could funnel ghouls into?”

“Maybe,” Nym said. “It would depend on how big the walls are and how long you need them to last.”

“Let’s say eight feet high and a foot thick. Rough earthwork is fine. Do a circle with single opening. Slap a hallway leading up to it and the ghouls will fight each other trying to get in to reach us. Larian and I can pick them off and you’ll handle clean up.”

Adriarc sketched out a diagram in the dirt, and Nym started raising the walls. He made a foot high ring with the bonfire in the center and attached a narrow hall to a gap in it. “Is this big enough for you?” he asked.

“Pefect. Just make it thicker and taller while I go get Larian.”

Adriarc ran off into the woods and left Nym to his work. “Easier said than done,” he muttered.

The right way to do it was time consuming and arcana intensive. Instead, Nym decided to make a wider base that sloped up to a sheer drop on the outside of the wall. Anyone would be able to climb the slope if they were inside the circle, but it would still function as a wall to the outside. He decided to go twelve feet instead of eight, not trusting the ghouls not to climb it if they could reach. By Nym’s reckoning, if they could climb trees, they could jump a low wall. He used the dirt from outside the wall as building material, which resulted in something like a dry moat another three feet deep and six feet wide circling the whole barricade.

The choke point leading into the circle was a different story. He couldn’t just ramp up a lot of dirt and trust it to hold itself in shape with minimal work. Those had to be done properly, which involved the tedious work of excavating a foundation, transmuting dirt to stone, and inscribing rune sequences across the surface to help hold it together.

He was still working on it when Adriarc and Larian returned. “Wow, I was only gone a few minutes,” the warrior said, looking at the wall. Nym was busy scratching runes into the stone with a metal stylus and funneling arcana into them.

“The walls were just brute-force earth moving. The choke point is going to take some extra work to make sure the ghouls can’t just break through them. Give me another ten minutes or so before you start luring them in.”

“What… There is no way you did this so quickly,” Larian protested. Her eyes darted around the wall and she flew up in the air to get a better view. “This much volume, over ten minutes, no. A crew of four or five could do it. Maybe three if they were all specialized earth mages.”

Nym shook his head. “No, you’re giving me too much credit. These are literally just piles of packed dirt. The only thing stopping a ghoul from digging through this is that they’ll hopefully crowd around the chokepoint to get in. Do not be surprised if one starts scaling the wall or digs into it. Though I’m still not sure what the plan is for luring them here.”

“I’ve got a spell to make a lot of noise. Once we’re ready, I’ll cast it,” Adriarc said.

“That could work. How far will it carry though?” Nym asked. “I don’t think I’d want to set this up again any time soon.”

“Maybe a quarter mile with all the trees dampening the sound. Normally, I’d expect twenty or maybe twenty-five ghouls, but they’re so thick right now, I’m not sure how many will show up. There must have been some kind of surge overnight. If we start getting overrun, I’ll be counting on the two of you to extract me.”

Nym finished up the rune sequence on the second wall of the choke point and empowered it. “There, all set. These are only good for maybe an hour, and if the runes get damaged, probably not even that long. I’ll set up two earth golems on either side of the choke point to help you take care of ghouls and put one on clean up duty.”

Larian jerked in surprise when the golems walked into view. “God’s blood. What are you even doing out here? A golem control geode costs better than a hundred crests. There’s no way you need the money for this kind of work. and no way you’re a kid. Who are you really?”

“What?” Nym asked. “I’m not sure what you’re saying. I didn’t buy the golems. I made them. Their cores are just dirt condensed from a spell construct. They’ll recover from damage, but it’s all powered by arcana from me.”

“Adriarc, this is a bad idea. Whoever this guy is, he’s not a kid. And whatever games he’s playing at, we’re better off steering clear of them.”

The warrior frowned and looked back and forth between Larian and Nym. He scratched at his chin and thought for a second. “I don’t know a lot about magic,” he said finally. “Maybe a bit more than the average soldier, but I never could get to the second circle spells. But I’ve worked with plenty of mages, and Larian’s not wrong. What you’ve shown off today isn’t normal for someone who’s too young to grow a beard.”

“I’m not trying to trick you,” Nym protested. “You asked me to build this!”

“Well I didn’t realize exactly how much work went into it when I said that, and I trust Larian’s judgement. If she says something is off, I believe her.”

“What do you want me to do? I’m not sure how I’m supposed to prove to you that I’m just here to kill some ghouls.”

“A moment, please. Larian, can we talk?”

The two moved off to discuss whatever it was they needed to figure out. Nym rolled his eyes and floated up into the air to sit on top of the walls, making sure he was upwind of the putrid smoke rolling out of the bonfire. No matter how many times he told himself to think of the money, this job was turning into more of a pain than it was worth.

He started scrying out into the trees, trying to get a count of how many ghouls were likely to be drawn in if Adriarc’s plan worked, but couldn’t find a single one. That was odd. There’d been plenty of them lurking around, mostly creeping around on the ground but occasionally hidden up in the trees. Now he couldn’t find a single one.

Nym pushed his scrying out as far as he could, and there, near the very edge of his range, he found them. They were gathered together, clumped tightly, with more that were out of sight. Something had their attention, but they weren’t attacking it. This wasn’t a behavior he’d seen before, but he knew what happened when a bunch of ghouls gathered up.

“Hey, sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got a problem,” Nym said, landing next to the two. “All the ghouls are gathering together in one big group. They’re maybe four hundred feet in that direction.”

Adriarc’s face paled. “Damn it. This whole plan is a wash. It’s time to run.”

“What? Why? I thought the whole point of this whole thing was to make the choke point so their numbers don’t matter.”

“Because when you’re this deep into their territory, a gathering of ghouls means a wight is commanding them,” Adriarc explained. “We need to get back to the outpost now and let them know. Can you get a better scry on the group and get numbers?”

“Give me a minute,” Nym said. He dismissed all three of his earth golems and created an air golem instead, then set it to flying over the trees with a mental command. Once it got in range, he used it as a new anchor for his scrying spell and sent it through the gathering to get a better look. “That is… a lot. A lot a lot.”

It took him a minute before he came back to himself. “I counted about three hundred ghouls, but there were some moving through the trees, so maybe fifty more than that. There were also three people there, dead people still walking around. All of them were dressed in mage’s uniforms.”

“Three wights with a lot of unknown magic. This is going to be messy. How quick can we get back to the outpost?”

“A few minutes,” Larian said. “Less if the mystery kid does it.”

Adriarc grimaced. “Let’s go. Do a lap over the gathering so I can say I verified it myself at the outpost.”

Nym lifted himself and Adriarc up over the trees, and flew him over to the where the ghouls were gathering. Then went up high to avoid notice, and Adriarc cast his own far sight spell. “Blood of God,” he swore. “That is a lot of them, and I can’t even see most of the gathering through the trees.”

“Back to the outpost?” Nym asked.

“As fast as you can. This is going to be a disaster, lot of dead bodies.”