15 – Breakthroughs

Victor stood atop his tower, watching the column of riders heading north—fifty soldiers flanked by his five, pony-sized coyotes loping easily in the rough grass beside the road. Each squad of ten had a different destination, and they’d separate as the road branched, heading west or east to the various villages they were meant to visit. Along the way, Victor’s coyotes would lead them toward any undead they sensed—vampire or other—and they’d do battle.

Victor and Tasya had chosen the strongest of their soldiers to make up these first squads, but even so, only a few were close to level twenty. The Blood Cloaks typically traveled alone, though, so he was confident they had a good chance of killing them, especially as he was certain that each of his coyotes was more than a match for any two Blood Cloaks.

He’d tried to drive the point home to his spirit totems that he wanted them to harry or maim the vampires, allowing the humans to participate in the fight; he’d tried to make a clear impression that the squads they were escorting were their “pack”. Still, the success of his communication was less than clear. He’d have to wait and see how things turned out.

Victor turned and looked down in the courtyard and then south, past the wall, toward the ever-expanding village that had seemed to spring up overnight. His army numbered nearly five hundred soldiers, and his seneschal, Kris, had been hard at work with his more literate aides, assigning parcels of land to almost a thousand petitioners. That said, more were coming every day, and they weren’t arriving only from the south. Desperate travelers staggered into the light of his beacon from the north on a regular basis.

Those haggard wanderers told tales of mad flight through the dark, slinking through the countryside away from the roads to avoid the patrolling vampires, wargs, and other soldiers of Fausto’s regime. Victor hoped his patrols would encounter some of those same hunters. His goal was to continue to destabilize the vampire economy. How many vampires could Fausto bring into the world every day? Even if he replaced all the Blood Cloaks that Victor and his people slew, they wouldn’t be high-level, and they certainly wouldn’t make up for the loss of all the elder vampires Victor had already killed.

He was confident that Fausto would hole up in his castle for a while, perhaps hoping Victor was some sort of marauding lunatic who would move on. He’d tell himself stories like that to justify his cowardice, but meanwhile, Victor would continue to claim his lands and his people. He’d contemplated cutting off his supply chain entirely, but decided to allow some food shipments through; the humans in Riverbend wouldn’t be helped by adding starvation to their long list of tribulations.

He turned his attention back to his tower top, smiling as he looked around at the changes Kris had arranged in the last few days. He’d sent a work crew up while Victor trained with the soldiers, and they’d built a sturdy, pitched wooden roof a good twelve feet above the stones, supporting it with broad wooden beams. The sides were still open, but Victor wouldn’t get rained on anymore when he sat in his meditations. Moreover, some enterprising castle staff had done a better job cleaning the stones, even scrubbing the mortar lines and then laying out a plush rug that had undoubtedly been one of the Pale Warden’s more prized furnishings.

Victor appreciated their efforts and liked that he could still look out over his new domain and respond to a threat instantly, while enjoying a bit more comfort. He moved to the center of the tower and sat down, taking out a notebook he’d been working with. He’d paused his efforts with his mantle while he contemplated a new puzzle, one that he was eager to have solved: how to weave glory out of his hope and possibly rage.

Logically, he liked the idea of adding a twist of rage to hope in order to come up with glory. Wasn’t there a vein of challenge, of aggression in glory? Where else would he pull such elements if not from his rage? No, he was sure he was on the right track. He could feel it when he worked through his prototype patterns. The resultant Energy felt almost like glory to him. He was close.

So, with optimism that was no doubt fueled by the silvery light that shone down on his keep, Victor opened his book and began working through his latest pattern design, studying how he’d carefully woven a thread of rage into a pair of hope-attuned ones. He examined the many knots he’d added to temper the heat of the rage, and he contemplated adding another, but something told him that wasn’t the answer. No, the pattern needed something else, but it wasn’t necessarily anything he had to add.

Tapping his pen on the page, Victor looked at the two hope threads and traced them from the start to the final knot. If glory was an “echo” of hope, that didn’t necessarily make it less than hope. An echo took on qualities that the original lacked. He supposed it could also lose qualities. “That’s why I added the rage,” he growled. He shook his head, pushing his frustration down, as he tried to refocus on the idea; he felt like he’d been on the verge of something.

He tried to imagine what hope and glory looked like to him. Of course, the first image that came to him was his old banner—the way the sun bled and shone with golden light that inspired everyone and drove fear into his enemies’ hearts. His new banner, the Standard of the Lost Light, was beautiful and…perfect. It was clean and bright and didn’t have that bloody edge

. So, if the rage wasn’t enough, what could he do to make his hope less…clean?

Victor looked at his notebook, frowning at the elaborate weave, shaking his head. This required something different. Closing his eyes, he looked inward to his Core and, with a delicate touch of his will, he pulled a thick ribbon of hope-attuned Energy into his pathways. Holding it there, he pulled a thread of rage out to join it. It was much thinner, only about a third the size of the hope. He stretched it out into his pathways beside the hope-attuned Energy and then focused his will on them, applying pressure, fusing them rather than weaving them.

It was trivial; the two strands of Energy amounted to less than a single percent of his overall pool. When he crushed them together, the silvery-blue of the hope took on some of the rage’s glowering fire, shifting from silver to something that gleamed with golden luster in a way that made Victor’s heart sing; he’d recognize that shine anywhere! “So easy!” he laughed. Before he could second-guess himself, he fed that thread of golden light into the spell pattern for Standard of the Last Light, figuring it was the closest thing to his old Banner of the Quinametzin.

Victor's smile spread further as his little open-air room atop the tower filled with brilliant golden light. He leaped to his feet as he felt the old, familiar rush of confidence and enthusiasm. He felt the urge to do great things and couldn’t help throwing a fist in the air and howling out a resounding, “Yes!”

When he looked over his shoulder, he was a little surprised to see that the banner was different. It was certainly similar to his old one, but specific details were changed. Where before the white tabard had hung from a typical standard pole, it was now suspended from a glaive with a bloody blade. More than that, the sun didn’t drip blood, but shone over a battlefield.

At first, the battlefield seemed almost abstract—spears jutting from a dark plain, but the more Victor looked, the more it resolved, and he saw blood-drenched fields littered with weapons and corpses. What was more, he began to hear the sounds of battle. He heard weapons clashing, men and women screaming and shouting, and, in the distance, the steady rumble of drums. To him, it sounded glorious. It made him want to charge into the fight. How would his enemies feel as they gazed into that bright, spectral banner’s cloth?

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Shaking his head and blinking, he focused on the System messages he’d been ignoring:

***Congratulations! You have learned the spell: Banner of the Conqueror – Epic.***

***Banner of the Conqueror – Epic: Channeling the lust for Glory that lives in your heart, touched by the wrath and sacrifice that forged your will, you manifest your spirit in the form of a battle banner that hangs behind you, suspended from a spectral glaive. Allies who glimpse the banner will feel a surge of purpose and power, driven by the promise of triumph through struggle. Enemies who behold it will be stricken by a violent sense of foreboding, dampening their will and filling their hearts with dread. Energy Cost: Minimum 1000 – scalable. Cooldown: Long.***

More than just the messages, Victor saw a large bubble of lustrous Energy drift out of the ground and flow into him. The System had awarded him for discovering a new spell. How long had it been since that happened? “Well, I won’t complain,” he said, reaching into his pathway and severing the Energy feeding the spell. As the golden light faded and his desire to rush into perilous exploits along with it, he chuckled and sat back down on the comfortable rug.

He felt good that he’d at least mostly figured out how to create glory. It was apparent that adding rage to hope wasn’t a perfect copy, but, as far as he was concerned, the new spell did pretty much what he wanted. The next thing he wanted to tackle wouldn’t be so easy: how to create inspiration from hope. Neither rage nor fear would suit his needs. He could only guess what weaving fear into hope might accomplish. Something like anxiety, maybe? In any case, he didn’t think it would be anything positive.

So, his mind began to wander, trying to puzzle out how he could find the echo of hope that represented inspiration. The thing was, he’d pretty much learned, through his introspection with Chantico, that his inspiration affinity had been triggered by his desire to emulate people who ignited passion and hope in him. So, it had to be pretty damn close, didn’t it? Adding one of his other affinities wasn’t the answer, so… “Is it possible to weave an Energy with itself? Can I alter it with the pattern?”

Frowning, Victor reached into his Core and pulled out two threads of hope-attuned Energy and, just to see what it would do, he braided them together. Then, with a simple effort of will, he pushed the braid into the pattern for Prismatic Illumination. He already had one orb in place, hanging over the keep, but there was no reason he couldn’t create another; he had plenty of Energy to spare.

The result was less than spectacular. A bright globe of hope-attuned Energy appeared in the air before his face. The extra Energy thread had done nothing but make it larger than usual. Victor waved a hand, mentally severing the threads and canceling the spell. He sat for a while, chin in hand, and contemplated the gray sky as his mind worked on the puzzle.

Hope, to him, was nearly inspiration. If the latter was an echo, it was one that sounded very much like the original. Sure, hope was broader and touched more themes than inspiration, but to Victor, being inspired to achieve felt very much like hope; it was a purpose and reason to keep trying. If it didn’t need a twist of Energy added, did it need something pulled out? How would one go about that?

Rather than speculate further, Victor reached into his Core and drew forth a thick ribbon of silvery-blue Energy. As he contemplated it, he ran his mental fingers over it, turning and twisting it. He could sense all the aspects of hope within—echoes of feelings, memories, and dreams. He could feel all its qualities: belief, possibility, resilience, desire, bravery, and even defiance. What was more, it had a quality that Victor knew was almost… infectious. It was meant to spread, passing from one person to another. A flicker of hope in the depths of despair could turn defeat into victory.

Considering all those feelings he got when he savored that Energy, he realized that inspiration was a good deal shallower an echo than he’d thought. What aspects of hope would be found in inspiration? Belief and…possibility, perhaps? “Maybe desire,” he added aloud. It stood to reason that, if he wanted to make inspiration out of hope, he needed to remove some of the other qualities.

Without getting too into his head, Victor let his instincts take over. He simply manipulated that ribbon of hope with his will, grasping onto the feelings that he wanted to keep and pulling them out. Before long, he had a much thinner, brilliant, white-gold thread of Energy splitting off from the silvery-blue one. “Holy shit,” he whispered as he drew that thread into his pathway and pushed it into his Core Domain spell.

He chose that spell because, in all honesty, the reason he wanted to regain his ability to use inspiration-attuned magic was so that he could improve his chances when it came to crafting his mantle. In his mind, his Core Domain was the most potent manifestation of his various Energies, save perhaps Maw of the Broken Will, that he could cast. It was exponentially more costly, Energy-wise, than his old Inspiration of the Quinametzin spell, and he could feel how much better it was.

In illustration of his mental argument, his mind expanded with the clarity of inspiration as the spell took hold on his tower top. Meanwhile, the world—at least what he could see of it—changed. A wall of shimmering white-gold Energy expanded to the parapets, and inside that brightly lit space, the ground shimmered in rainbow-tinted reflections as a bed of crystalline prisms shimmered into existence.

The wind took on a musical clarity that seemed to fill Victor’s mind with ideas. The sounds of troops drilling made him think of half a dozen ways he could improve the efficiency of their training, and the light—the glorious silvery-blue light falling over his castle—was like… “Like dreams come to life!” he sighed, imagining a poem he could write about it. He stood and paced, noting that his spell’s perimeter had stopped at the parapets; it hadn’t tried to encompass the entire keep automatically.

He looked into his Core and grinned when he saw it had hardly depleted and, though the spell was drawing a lot of Energy, it was something he could maintain for a long time. In other words, the draw was manageable as long as he kept the diameter small. Of course, that made him think about how he’d use it in his spirit space, which brought his mind around to his skein and the framework, and the many puzzles he’d been facing with his mantle.

Before he knew it, he was crafting the framework in his mind, imagining the hundreds of hooks and the strange shape of it, and then he laughed as an idea came to him. “What if the different color combinations do more than represent a mix of other threads? What if I load one part of the framework with… Let’s say, orange combinations, and then what if I put purple ones on an opposing arm? What if I make bigger weaves? What if I take four blue threads and weave them with four yellow? Would the resultant thicker green braid give me a stronger mantle?

His mind ran down those roads for a while. He thought of one idea after another, and it wasn’t until the sun had begun to dip toward the western horizon that he realized how long he’d been pacing and working through the ideas in his mind. With a laugh, he reached into his much-depleted Core and severed the connection to his Core Domain spell. The crash, as the inspiration faded away, was enough to make him groan in dismay.

Regardless of the lost afternoon, he still had the ideas in his mind; they hadn’t been temporary. They hadn’t faded like a dream. Smiling, he sat down on his carpet and entered his spirit space. Walking over to his enormous desk, he opened his latest notebook and began to write down everything he’d thought of while pacing around in his domain of inspiration.

It took hours, but when he finished, he was encouraged; he had a blueprint of ideas to work with, and who knew how many more would come as he tried to apply the ones he’d written down. After all, he fully intended to keep his Core Domain active while he did so.

He was just finishing up when his raven reached out to him with a mental prod; one of his squads of hunters was closing in on some prey. Victor hastily departed his spirit space and reached out, urging his raven to show him what it saw. Images came to him—Badger Squad, led by Timmet Gray, was thundering over a rough field toward a copse of dark trees. Of course, one of Victor’s coyotes was in the lead, guiding the riders with its nose.

The image changed, and Victor saw the back side of the cluster of trees where his raven had spied their quarry. A pair of Blood Cloaks were watching over some peasants who were constructing a gallows. Half a dozen men and women were on their knees in the dirt, watching. Their hands were bound behind their backs, and it was evident they’d been beaten. “Fucking pendejos,” Victor growled.

He clenched and unclenched his fist, then sent his will out to his coyote. “Come on, hermano, don’t let those assholes kill my people. Rip their arms off or something!” As his soldiers drew near and the vampires turned toward the thunder of their hooves, all Victor could do was watch, terrified that he’d sent those ten soldiers to their doom.