V3Ch76-Black Thoughts and Battle Plans

The morning came, and with it, no disgrace. No disaster.

Samara had slept poorly despite not experiencing any visitations from the dream lover.

She was tired, snappy, and standoffish all through breakfast, eating with tepid movements, eyes darting around, barely speaking to her companions as she waited for someone to enter the mess hall and proclaim her an enemy and a criminal.

It didn’t happen.

General Caracalla’s forces mustered shortly after dawn and then marched down the city streets to the cheers of the crowd, the Major - Caracalla’s son - riding at their head as the people clapped and cheered for all of them, the heroes who kept the Kingdom safe.

Despite the fact that this was a fairly elite force, most of the men were infantry. Only the important people like the General, the Major, Lady Miranda - the nature mage who rode at the Major’s side - Inquisitor Bram, Black Hailgrim, Mischa, and Samara herself merited a horse.

As a result, the march felt agonizingly slow.

The paladin waited for the other shoe to drop, imagined a group of armed men emerging from an alley to grasp the reins of her horse. She didn’t think she would fight. No, she resolved not to fight if she could avoid it. Maybe she could fool Hailgrim and Mischa into thinking it was a misunderstanding or that the authorities just needed her help with some urgent matter. They could leave the city without their opinions of her being soured.

Samara would still at least be a member of the Party of Heroes and a friend in their eyes, even if they never saw her again. Hopefully they would never hear the story of her disgrace. The Kingdom would have every reason to keep it quiet, since it was a potential point of schism between their nation and the paladins’ order.

She kept imagining that someone was coming to arrest her until they were passing through the city gates.

Is it possible? Did they fail to catch anyone? Or, more likely, they couldn’t get anyone to talk yet… Either way, am I getting away with this?

Samara allowed herself to hope. All she had to do for now was keep riding forward with the rest of the force sent to defeat the necromancer. Focus on the mission.

That was all she could do.

***

As Tybalt worked within its walls, the Charnel Fortress, always and without ever taking its gaze off of the necromancer, watched. It never needed sleep, unlike its master.

It wanted to learn all the necromancer’s mystic arts and absorb as much as it could of his chthonic powers.

As the necromancer worked on a gruesome creature he had implanted forty eyes into, he began to speak.

“You like what I’m doing with this one?” Tybalt asked.

“It is a fascinating creation, master.”

The human nodded. “I corrupted the Paralyzing Touch skill that all ghouls have from their creation into a Paralyzing Gaze, inspired by your Charnel Lord. With twenty sets of eyes, in front and back of the creature, it will devastate all those that step into any of its lines of sight.”

“With units of those, you could win a battle without taking casualties,” the Fortress said.

Tybalt grinned. “That’s the plan.” Then his smile shrank slightly, grew a little more calculated. “After this battle, if we win, I intend to give you some autonomy. I will have to invade deeper into the Kingdom. You will perform the usual functions of a fortress - holding a region against all potential invasion - but that also includes the responsibility of growing your strength and means you ought to be given your own territory to draw resources from. With your half of the dead from the battle, you can construct infrastructure that humans will want to inhabit. Villages and towns that exist under your protection and in your shadow.

“With some of the Kingdom’s elite mages under my control, I want to try and reroute the closest river so that it flows close to here. Once the desert begins to change into habitable land, some of the villages in the Salt Waste and the surrounding areas that have previously escaped my notice will start to settle in. These are longer term plans than the next few weeks, you understand? But as long as you don’t harvest too many at a time, they’ll provide you with a renewable source of resources. Your dominance within your territory should grow even more quickly with a population of residents nearby for you to periodically feed on.”

“I look forward to it, master,” the spirit replied.

“We just have to win this fight.”

As with almost everything the necromancer said, the Charnel Fortress agreed and tried to show enthusiasm.

But inside, the spirit seethed.

A few villages and towns, at best, is the maximum extent he envisions for me. He hopes to relegate me to a corner of a desert, when I could dominate continents with my power in time, given free rein… For the moment, he has fed me, but in the long run, the necromancer constrains my existence.

The Charnel Fortress might have liked to kill him - collapse a stone wall onto the necromancer and perhaps crush him - but there was a terrible risk to that idea. Tybalt’s power and the spirit’s were still of a kind. The Charnel Fortress’s origins were in the necromancer’s dark rituals. If the Fortress took its shot, and Tybalt lingered for even a couple of minutes and pulled with all his strength, he could unravel the spirit’s existence entirely and destroy the place.

He also tended to have one or two undead with him at any given time that would protect him if the Fortress tried something.

Soon, the spirit told itself. Soon I will come up with my means of liberation…

***

Tybalt departed.

Tomorrow, the necromancer resolved. Tomorrow, he would have a war council with his brides, his commanders, and his wisest and most powerful assets. He would lay out his plans and ask them for their help. He was doing as much as he could, but he knew he would not be enough alone.

The necromancer had his Anti-Magic Field, Heaven-Binding Chains, and a plethora of necromantic and pestilence-related powers, and resulting from that, he had a number of grisly undead and two debilitating diseases plus one extremely spiteful one ready for action.

He had obscene amounts of brute force on his side with his undead and the beastfolk. He had the Charnel Fortress. He had Kistana, Aoife, Dero, Mariella, Esmerelda, the Beastkings… but all could still fail him if they failed to coordinate effectively.

He realized, as he walked, that he was exhausted. He had spent days plotting against his enemies, working his magic, trying to manage the feelings of the Fortress - the thing definitely held some resentment toward him - and taking pains to adequately praise and supervise his subordinates. He had hardly slept.

He made it home, ate a meal in near silence - no one tried to talk to him, perhaps seeing the bags under his eyes - and collapsed into bed. It was only in the morning that he even realized it had been Victoria next to him that night.

It was definitely a night for sleep, not for love.

In the morning, the closest of Tybalt’s creatures to Enh reported a large body of men leaving the city and moving past, many of them in armor. That was the last signal, if he had needed one, to confirm the necessity of having a war council.

Tybalt quickly gathered his wives, his Beastkings, his vampire knight… and whatever Aoife was to him and his family now. The dragon sat at the table in her human form, looking back and forth between the others as if trying to figure out what her place was there. She sat between the wives and the undead commanders, which seemed to Tybalt exactly the right position for her.

The necromancer began the meeting.

“I wanted to talk to all of you, so we could hone our battle plan a bit, and everyone could know what’s expected of them and what they should work on to ensure our victory.”

“Before that, are you getting enough rest?” Victoria asked with a look of concern.

“No, but don’t worry, I’ll rest after the battle.”

“I’ll make sure he sleeps,” Vidalia said simply, meeting her twin’s gaze.

I guess I don’t get a say in this. He snorted to himself.

“Fine, whenever I look particularly exhausted, you just put me out with your powers, I guess,” he said.

“After the meeting,” she replied. “Kistana will let you use her for a lap pillow.”

The catgirl nodded with a smile.

Hey, are you two saying I look that bad right now?

“What are our roles?” Liora asked a little nervously.

The elven vampire was still figuring out where she fit in, still not that connected to any one individual within the family. That tension came across in her voice.

Hopefully participating in the war along with the others would be a sort of bonding experience. Her father probably wouldn’t approve of them risking her life, but King Colin wasn’t here. The hundreds of elite elven soldiers and mages he had sent through Dero’s teleportation circle to support them had been deliberately kept out of this meeting too. They would be informed of their roles in the battle separately.

“We have a key asset in the Charnel Fortress,” Tybalt said. “I intend to use it in the battle…” He began explaining the plan in more detail. It was admittedly a bit chaotic in his own mind, but there were only two important elements: what would happen to the leaders and what would happen when they fought the remaining forces.

“I’ve been preparing some undead that are more suitable for war, and I was hoping each of you could take part in more war readiness exercises over the next few weeks. I’d appreciate it if Liora could train Esmerelda in some vampire abilities, for instance. I understand that Vampiric Gaze allows you to dominate the weak-minded, but vampires don’t naturally get it until a certain level.” He looked at Liora carefully. “But I’m guessing you already have that.”

The vampiric elf looked like she was trying to conceal her pleasure at those words, but she simply nodded, glad to be called upon.

“Vidalia, you already know what I want you to do to help.”

“I’ll keep trying to reach Samara, darling.”

“You truly have another woman, husband?” Liora asked, not quite the first time she’d said something to that effect.

This time, Vidalia addressed the question.

“Our darling wouldn’t add any women to his harem if it didn’t make our family stronger,” she replied. “It’s not something he wanted to do for reasons of simple lust. It’s more that he’s using her unfulfilled feelings of lust to recruit her. She’s a powerful paladin. Corrupting her would weaken the Love Goddess and strengthen this—” She gestured at all of them—“inner circle measurably. And he’s not planning on giving her equal standing with the rest of us. We have limits agreed to on the number of formal wives. We have to keep the last slot or two open for a little longer.”

The vampiric elf nodded, seemingly mollified at that answer. Tybalt caught Esmerelda rolling her eyes, but he chose to ignore it. Aoife looked curious about something Vidalia had said, but it was hard to identify what.