Lillene

Enjoy!

“Does that mean we’re almost done?” Serenity was more than ready to be done with this. It hadn’t been hard, but it was definitely annoying. The scraping of the mana-draining rune on the shield he’d established to block it didn’t help; while he could tune it out if he was paying attention to something else, the rest of the time it was a constant annoyance.

“One way or the other, yes,” Elder Ibken grumbled. “You’ve passed the tests of control we give to any mage performing a major Working and shown that you have the skill and focus to not destroy the environment you work in. They weren’t quite the standard tests, but they show the same things. If we agree to have you on Berinath, we won’t stop you from your task.” He glared for a moment at Elder Lizven. “Even if some of us thought it would be your mentor performing the work, it was approved.”

“I will make certain that it is completed, and completed properly,” the World Shaman smoothly interjected. “You need have no worry about that. I value the planets I work with.”

“More than you value the people,” Elder Ibken muttered.

Senkovar smiled at that. “What, because I brought a Death mage? You haven’t had the chance to see his skills yet. In fact … Serenity, what would you do if you were trapped here? Assume an attack that kills me and everyone else is hostile.”

What was this, pop quiz time? Serenity shrugged and glanced around. “Depends on how trapped I am and how aggressive the attackers are. If I can get out, I will. I’d take your body, too; I think - well, if nothing else, I can at least return you to your clan.” 

He didn’t actually have his final Skill from his Incarnate of Death Path, and he was very uncertain about what it did, but there were a handful of things he’d considered. One of them was bringing the recently dead back.

That is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie 

Exhibit the Death that you are and break Eternity. 

It wasn’t the most likely interpretation of the Skill’s wording, but Serenity still wondered. In some ways, that would be the most powerful possible Death-adjacent Skill, the ability to cancel Death. That made it unlikely he’d get it from a Death-based Path, but you never knew.

Especially not when it was a gift from Death Herself. She’d said something about it being a Skill he’d like, too.

There were a lot of other possibilities; it could just as easily give him the ability to do what the Voice did for him when he became Serenity and go back in Time. In many ways, that would fit the wording better, though it seemed an odd thing for a Death-based Skill to do. He wouldn’t know what it really did or could do until he made the Skill his own.

“As for everyone else,” Serenity shrugged. “It depends. I’d probably kill those who attacked me and leave the rest alone. I’ve been extremely accommodating and peaceful; anyone who decides to attack me despite that deserves what they get.”

“Confident,” Elder Omprek stated. “Confidence I’d as soon not put to the test. Stop trying to cause trouble, Worldshaper. You’ve done enough of that by bringing him here. You know it’s only your prestige that lets you get away with this.”

Surprisingly, Senkovar grinned at the Foremost Elder. “Of course. What good is prestige if it doesn’t let you fix things sometimes? Death is a part of life, even that dead god you still worship admitted that.”

“We do not worship Echa. Echa is gone. We know that,” the Elder snapped. “You’ve been picking at that since the first time I met you. Would you stop already?”

“Why, when it works so well?” Senkovar chuckled and shook his head. It was the most informal gesture Serenity thought he’d ever seen the World Shaman make. “At least you no longer have that symbol everywhere. It made you positively paranoid.”

Senkovar’s history with the dryads of Berinath was a huge surprise, but at least it explained why he was so insistent that they travel across the moon after finding out the issue Serenity had with them. He wanted to use Serenity as a lever to get the dryads’ attention. Serenity would have preferred to know that was the reason earlier, but he would withhold judgment for now. Maybe there was a reason Senkovar kept him in the dark, even if Serenity couldn’t think of one.

“You didn’t live through the War,” the Foremost Elder countered. “That was what made us paranoid, not Echa. Sometimes I wonder if we should be more paranoid, but we can’t do both. We can’t always fight yet heal the injured, not when they’re the same people.” He shook his head. “None of that applies here, not if your Serenity is a Death mage rather than undead and you’ll make sure he doesn’t practice the forbidden arts.”

Senkovar still had a wide grin on his face as he inclined his head to the side wordlessly.

Elder Omprek turned his back on World Shaman Senkovar to face Serenity. The fact that he had to take a couple steps to the side first so that his back was fully to Senkovar made it clear that this wasn’t an accident. “I said you’d have the choice and you will. That means you need to know what you’re getting into. Stojan Echa was the only Holy god who acknowledged the Damned before the War. He was also the only god who wasn’t badly injured in the Damned’s first strike. They destroyed their own gods to kill ours.”

Serenity knew the name Stojan. Stojan Tasi was the Lord of the Shining Caverns when Serenity first arrived on Tzintkra and was now Serenity’s Planetary Manager. Stojan Aith was the Lord of the Necropolis back then, as well. They were both dhampir of life and death, which explained why they crossed the divide. If Stojan Echa was also a dhampir, it might explain both why he wasn’t so unhappy with the Death-based Damned as the other Holy gods were and why he survived a Death-based attack.

“The strike broke the world and the Damned overran it. We fled to Berinath, the last of the followers of the Holy who lived. Stojan Echa sacrificed himself for two things: to give us a foothold of Life and to give us a way to find and kill Death. The first has grown into our civilization on Berinath; the second is the Echa rune.” Elder Omprek paused long enough to see Serenity’s nod, then turned and walked to the side of the room that held the circle Serenity thought might be for turning the undead back to life. He looked around the edge of the circle for a moment, then picked up an inch-thick square of wood that was probably four inches wide. 

“The Echa rune does exactly one thing: it freezes undead in place and drains Death mana from them. It’s useful in the process to return people to life, but that’s not why Echa created it. It was a defense. Our only defense for years, the only way we could know who was and wasn’t puppeted undead. There were Damned who…” The elder trailed off and shook his head. “The details are not why you’re here; you’re here because the rune can verify that you aren’t undead. That’s enough, with your teacher speaking for you and watching you. Worldshaper Et’Tart may be an opinionated old man who thinks he can fix our civilization but he’s also not going to allow anything that would hurt Berinath or directly harm anyone.”

“I heard that,” Senkovar said. His grin had only gotten wider as the dryad elder talked about him.

“You were supposed to,” Elder Omprek said without looking behind himself at the World Shaman.

Serenity was definitely going to have to ask Senkovar why Elder Omprek kept calling him a Worldshaper while Senkovar had always told Serenity he was a World Shaman. Perhaps it was an earlier Path for him? That could happen later; he needed to deal with the nonsense with the rune now. 

“I need to have a chance to examine it first.” Serenity wasn’t about to touch a rune he hadn’t examined, certainly not something that could pull someone’s Vital Affinity out of them. That was a dangerous thing, even if Elder Omprek was treating it casually.

“Of course,” Elder Omprek agreed, then set the rune down on the ground just outside the tiled area. “You can come out of the circle, too; there is no reason to keep you in there.”

That was a big relief. Serenity still had plenty of mana to keep the shielding spell up, but it simply wasn’t comfortable. He walked out of the circle near the rune, where he could get a good look at it, then dropped the shield. 

Serenity’s first impression of the rune was that it was bullshit. It shouldn’t work. 

His second thought was surprise that he’d been able to immediately read the rune. He’d seen something similar at some point, back when he was searching for ways to return himself to being a living human instead of a draugr. This was one of the spells he’d found converted into a rune through one of the older runescripts. 

He’d studied that particular script when he was first learning runework; it had some weaknesses, but it was good enough and simple enough that it was common a few hundred years ago, possibly more like a thousand years. It was relatively common on older structures, which made it a good one to teach students that might not progress far in their runework. If nothing else, it might save their lives if they could read the lingering runes on a building.

Well, a few hundred to a thousand years or so before Vengeance learned about runes. That meant it was probably still a few hundred years ago, but it probably wasn’t a thousand years old. Serenity didn’t have a very good picture of how old Vengeance was at the time; he’d lost track by then.

The important thing about that particular spell was that it absolutely required a coherent, skilled Intent guiding it to make it work. That made it supremely unsuited for turning into a rune even though it worked quite well as a ritual: a rune didn’t necessarily have an active caster when it was used. Using a rune that required an Intent to work properly was dangerous, especially if it were in the hands of anyone other than a runemaster.

Was that why they’d told him what it did, so that he’d have it in mind when he touched the rune and would make it work that way? That was not a good way to get a proper Intent. It wouldn’t really work the way they said it had, as an almost passive undead-detector, either. It would need to get the Intent it required elsewhere.

The only method he could think of offhand was one that came to mind only because they claimed a god created the rune. Perhaps it used Faith to make the rune’s Intent work. That might explain everything; the people of Berinath believed the rune worked that way and sent their Faith into it, which provided the Intent. Serenity thought that would only work if the god still existed, but he wasn’t certain. Perhaps belief that the god once existed was enough? Faith was weird and he really didn’t understand it.

Which meant that he needed to ask someone who knew the culture better than he did. Serenity looked up at Senkovar. While Serenity examined the rune, Senkovar had moved so that Elder Omprek wasn’t in the way anymore. “Does it really work like that? The rune is … incomplete.”

“It does,” Senkovar confirmed. At some point in the past few minutes, he’d lost his grin and was back to the normal, serious old man Serenity thought he was getting to know. “I’ve seen them work and I’ve also seen them handled by all sorts of other people, including other elementals; it really does work only on the undead.”

Lillene

So who’s betting that this doesn’t turn out quite as expected for anyone?

Yeah, me too.