Enlightenment

Etan Za'Darmondiel.

***

Hours of carnage. Then, silence.

I had never witnessed such a surreal change in all my years. Granted, I was relatively sheltered, but I have witnessed many battles and have taken part in many more. Never, in all those years, had the aftermath been so… peaceful.

The Splint was once a bustling domain of drunken peasants and yelling guards made of mud and brick and frozen manure. The humans were ill-tempered, a result of the harsh winters coming in from the World Sea to preserve their filth, only for the wet summer air from Crater Lake to thaw and spread the mess as far away as the rains would carry them.

They were like many humans. Survivors who knew war and poverty and little else.

Now, the Splint was a land of rubble and red snow that carried the echoing send-off of a thousand undead to the refugees in the distance, running from the flame-wreathed zombie until their legs dove into the biting snow. But the zombie that was Amun paid them no mind.

He raised the dead as he did before. He imbued the first few to fall with a deposit of necrotic energy. Then gave them a single order before sitting down in the town square to meditate.

"Clean this shit up."

Having nothing more to do, I found it an ample opportunity to annoy the Matron Mother and elected to join him, only to be distracted by the strange creatures lumbering up to us.

'First, they were large. Now they are small.' Matron Etyl signed to me, her crimson eyes locked on the celestial wolves.

While strange indeed, my eyes were locked on the fox, the one described by the head to be similar to itself. The Matron's eyes soon followed, sizing up the somewhat metallic flesh of its paw pads before the silken fur of its legs concealed it. Then they moved to the nearly indistinguishable seams of its belly before the creature dropped down to lay flat.

Just as I turned to study the eyes, the beast opened its maw wide to reveal a more or less standard mouth. At least when ignoring the gold-lined adamantine teeth, the grid-like ridges on the roof of its mouth, and the sheer wall in its throat. But then its not-so-fleshy tongue lifted, coming to a rest against the roof of the mouth so as to reveal a short staircase leading to an ornate door of onyx and gold.  Having no handle, it simply slid into the wall through some unseen device, allowing the girls and the head in question to walk or drift into the open.

Seeing our gaped maws, the head drifted over to us while the girls ran through the streets, seemingly to explore.

"That is Kit." The Head turned to the fox and watched it yawn its mouth closed with us. Then turned back once it rolled over to drift to sleep. "He is a Beta-Class Undead-Machine-Animal. Or, Uma."

It took some time, but he eventually brought us to believe that Amun and an associate of his who went by the name of Ed, created a self-propelled machine and somehow merged it with both a lair stone and an undead shadow fox to make this… thing. A roving village.

Even after the explanation and the changes brought to the splint throughout our three days there, I could not keep my eyes off of that fox. Not to say it did anything but wander around in search of a new place to rest. Something that happened frequently with the undead and their construction.

Why they were rebuilding the city, I could not surmise, but the girls made the most use of it. They ran between forges, kitchens, offices, and workshops alike, working as hard as the undead were to create things I could only imagine until Amun stirred from his meditation, thus continuing the walk.

We traveled at a relatively ambling pace, passing by a few camps and travelers along the way and more often than not, getting into some sort of altercation because the humans could not help but attack giant beasts to feed their infectious populations.

Occasionally, the girls would disembark from the fox to train or hunt, cook, or do whatever it was human children did. And almost every time, Matron Etyl dragged me along to pry whatever information she could from them while Amun's beasts eyed her dangerously.

While she questioned them and received unbelievable answers, I inquired with the Head about the strange devices Amun created and received mostly cryptic answers in response. An annoyance, but not something I was ill-equipped to solve.

I learned Amun was indeed at the fifteenth step, Grandmaster Armorer, but his renown as a Grandmaster Artificer came from the cities he raised into the sky as well as devices that could use mana to communicate sound and images instantaneously across vast distances. Something that would allow bards to spread glory in ways they could only dream of.

Strangely enough, the exchange between the Matron and the girls was not one-sided. The girls asked her and me many questions of various natures. They asked for training and guidance in stealth and thievery. They inquired about Matron Etyl's devotion and station; how to become a cleric and of the many different types of followers a deity could have. They asked about elven witchcraft and wizardry. Battle tactics. History. Many things. And Matron Etyl of House Za'Darmondiel strangely spared no knowledge.

But then again, it only made sense for her to lay it all out to bare. For it was the only way to verify the depth of their claim. But not confirm it.

With such a revelation, our eyes turned back to the amiably wicked elf. Not that there was much to see. He simply plowed forward as he had been doing all along. Stopping only to train with me and meditate with the dead until we came to the outskirts of Charrlagith and looked upon its sealed gates.

A wall of stone, sconces, braziers, and torches made for a shining beacon in the plains. A rising sun in the night that protected 25,644 citizens from a singular force of death and darkness. Only a few keeps and castles stood above the height of the parapet, amounting to perhaps a few hundred pairs of pleading eyes to give supportive aid to the 1,700 humans mobilized beyond the gates.

We idly watched Amun skirt the towns from afar, ignoring their scouts until they drew near enough to loosen their bowstrings and lower the spears. Then called for reinforcements with their dying screams naught moments later.

As before, Amun spent the long night decimating the human force while his dogs kept any survivors from escaping. He used every monastic skill to his advantage. Leaping up trees to drop ki-empowered heels onto a soon-to-be shattered skull, adding that much more power to his blows before he went on to the next.

Eventually, the slaughter began to look comical. Barbarians rocked into trees, arced into the skies, or were buried in the ground from the force of Amun's blows. Heavy weapons were blocked and deflected with ease. The smaller fighters were simply thrown into the larger ones, creating heaping piles of gore across the fields.

When it became too much to bear, the soundless call to retreat washed over the fighters. And yet, the barbarians roared out the name of their gods. Both became meals for the two wolves, singed and frozen from afar by belched balls of fire and ice before they were amassed in a great pile to be devoured; leaving those trapped in their self-imposed siege without living guards to defend them.

In typical fashion, Amun paid them no mind. They gathered on the wall to watch him train and meditate among the cadavers of their friends and families for hours. Days as the undead constructed vast domes and boxes of glass and steel. A tenday as roads inlaid with pipes were placed between the buildings. A tenday more as an eight-legged frame straddled those indoor spaces of green, supporting fatter and taller buildings of stone high above.

More and more people turned their eyes to the sights growing beyond the wall, amounting to tens of thousands of witnesses to the very event I saw in weeks past.

From that lone zombie sitting between the walls and that strange construction, shadows poured. The abyssal night froze the fields of pink snow like tepid water spilled over the floor of a cooling box, deflecting the baleful souls from the Underworld and sending them cascading towards that lone figure, Amun.

The crash resulted in a great blaze of black smoke and ethereal blue-green fire, blasting the trees and sky away to have it replaced with an immense emptiness. A darkness that contained enough malevolence to strip my flesh away entirely, allowing only my senses to remain, grasping desperately to a cold gate of black bone.

My very soul was frozen. Damned to stare helplessly at the estate of flesh and bone and stone and muck sitting beyond that accursed gate. But what a fine abode it was, incomparable in elegance and stature. Much like the black-boned skeleton wreathed in a robe of blue-green fire, staring at me from the threshold.

Beckoning me into his Yard.

<<NO! >> As quickly as the fear came upon me, Death's Fence faded into a field of pink snow. The biting cold returned to my knees and the sting of the wing bit at me soon later.

It was one of the few times in my life that I felt fear. A true fear from the most primitive and primal parts of my physiology. A terror so intense that I lost any concept of survival, of life or death, until it was too late.

A terror intense enough for Matron Etyl to cast a restorative spell on me.

After she cast one on herself.

But before, and then after she beat me. And the beating only stopped because of a miracle. Another burst of ethereal fire, but blue this time around. And higher than the fires we just bore witness to, in the proportions that came only from the opening of the final natural Ki Pond.

<<That's! How?>>

Another tooth-loosening smack was the reward for my outburst, preceding the hiss of venom.

<Out with it!>> My dearest mother demanded. Thankfully, my experiences in the Halls were worse than most of her punishments. So long as she refrained from using her whip.

<<For all monks, the Eighth Step is to form final natural Ki Pond. To do so, one has reach a state of enlightenment or clarity about nature life. My came through years venturing and meditating within Astral Plane. But for fourth Pond open right after third cultured Pond, would have already been enlightened.>>

I let the thoughts linger, for I dared not speak my doubts of his enlightenment coming from the Shadowfell or the Underworld. On the contrary, I dared not voice my certainty of his enlightenment having everything to do with the Eternal Creator. For, if Amun was not just chosen, not just empowered, not just guided, but enlightened by Telin as well, that made him more than a mere Champion of the Eternal Creator.

Likewise, it made him more than a mere Ascended God. And if that was true, there was no need to voice my inquiry at all. Not when there was prayer. So, feigning as if I were meditating, I sat in the snow and pleaded with every fiber of my being.

'Show me! Prove to me that I am not insane! And… if you can hear my senseless and foolish and selfish wish as a prayer, help me be free of the pain I cannot be conditioned to endure.'

"Sounds good."

It came not a second later, but undoubtedly from him. However, I had no means of discerning if it was a coincidence or a true response, for he was laying atop the edge of the warmed roads, leaning into the dirt. "Hey,"  he said a few moments later.

Curious, both the Matron and I approached cautiously, attempting to keep whatever he was doing undisturbed.

"Hello, Queen." He squatted. "I greatly admire the nests made by your kingdom. I make nests of my own, I'd like to collaborate."

"Who are you-"

"I'll give you a new home." Amun cut the Matron off. "I'll make you smart. Big. Magical."

"Are those… ants?" I asked shocked as a tiny speck rose from the ground, revealing two fleshy bugs. The ant queen Amun was speaking to, lying next to a young queen.

"Oh, you are most kind. I'll take the greatest care of her." Amun smiled, plucking the insect from the ground with the gentlest care before a burst of blue light fell upon us. And when it faded, he was gone.

We raced after him, finding him standing next to a tree with a mass of bugs clinging to both each other and the branch. There were so many of them that it looked like a drop of water ready to fall from a stalactite, but the things were black and yellow all over. We watched, dumbfounded, as the same conversation played out. Only this time, the mass of bugs buzzed loudly in response before the flash of blue came and he was once again gone.

For the second time, we followed him to a column of hard earth that stood over a meter high, where he spoke with the bugs inside to receive a termite queen, according to the Head, before the flash of blue light came and he disappeared once. And it was then that I remained to see what happened to the mound once he left.

It was a fascinatingly strange thing. The living eyeballs Amun created appeared with a few undead shadows. The latter used manipulation to form a ten-meter-wide mound of dirt and had it float before the bug tower using a small enchanted plate that emitted some type of purple and off-white magic. It was an odd shape, set somewhere between an egg and a pyramid, but with a wide tunnel bored straight through the center and many concentric rings tunneled along the base.

As the device- the Satellite- observed, the termites went about deconstructing their mound and making a new one from the 'mountain' in a dizzying blur. It was almost like time had been accelerated, the way the structure came to life in mere moments. But when all was said and done, the device, the stone, the bugs, and the undead disappeared, leaving just me and the Head, gobbling up the Satellite like a fine meal.

During the return, the Head was kind enough to tell of Amun repeating the same process at a nearby river and convinced a dozen or so beavers to work with him. Then he went on to pocket a wasp queen, a few moths, and several small animals such as badgers, rabbits, and a wolverine before he arrived at his current locale.

A spider's web.