Chapter 24

Legacy of the Shimburr

Yesterday’s squad training went fine. All told, we were working together well. Sure, we had nothing on an experienced party, but we all knew our roles and could work in small groups. I added some evasion training in there for our more fragile members just as a precaution. I introduced Santa to the others, and he helped by lobbing small chunks of ice at people randomly. Even his casual tosses were scary enough to motivate the recruits to be ‘Not There’ when they hit something.

It amused me that I thought of them as recruits. They were all hardened veterans in real life, but in AoA they barely met my standards for prospective guild membership. God, I was jaded, or perhaps I had gotten far too used to a different caliber of players. That they even made me fall into an older mindset was high praise. I barely even notice the skills of most of the players I see these days. Ugh, time travel sucks. It may be a great opportunity, but it still gives me a fucking headache.

Almost everyone had gotten an extra skill or two and was much more dangerous individually than before. Hopefully, enough that we could wipe out the Shadow King without losses.

Santa walked up to me and put a hand on my shoulder in one of his rare bouts of seriousness. “It will be fine Lazarus, these are good players, really good actually. Give them a few years and they might become something actually interesting to see, maybe even something new.”

“I’m worried about them making it those few years Santa. I gathered them to assault a deathtrap and am counting on the instincts they gained in combat to keep them safe. It’s not right, it’s not safe…”

“And you don’t have a choice.” He finished for me.

“Yeah, there is no way I could get them to back out now. If I could, I would. Glory had that type of charisma, not me. Talking them into this was a miracle, really. I don’t have another one of those in me right now. You and I should be the ones fighting here, not them. They’re so… young.”

He snorted, “Pretty sure half of them are older in reality, than we are mentally.”

“It’s not the age Santa, it’s the mileage.”

“I know, but these are soldiers. Asking soldiers not to soldier is… tricky at the best of times.”

“And these aren’t the best of times. I know. I still wish it were different. You know how much I’ve been trying to get away from my past, I don’t want that future for myself again.”

“But you’ll take it on all over again to keep them safe. It’s okay, you won’t have to resort to that. I’ll keep them safe, we both will. Besides, Caelus would probably skin us if you ripped the life out of half the forest and formed a small army of Bone Lords or something. Not to mention that to do so you would need to sunder a class and pick up some nasty skills. I’m impressed Lazarus, I did all I could to get some of my power back, and I still feel so weak. You could do it so much faster if you put your mind to it. The fact you are trying to walk a different path, a better path, is pretty damn inspiring.”

He wasn’t wrong. If I wanted to, I could shoot up in levels at a ridiculous pace. One perk of cultist magics was that they were easy and powerful. If I went lich king on this entire region, there is little that could stop me, other than Caelus. Even then, I would just need to stay out of reach, since he was bound to the Vale. It would be so easy with my knowledge to unleash a tide of death and destruction that would permanently scar the land. I would just have to become a monster to do it.

Not a race transformation, but a twisted evil thing made only for destruction. The rituals I would need to do, the sacrifices I would need to substitute for… I wouldn’t be the same person after that. I would need to bootstrap my way to power on souls, death, and suffering. I would become something so much worse than the Shadow King if I gave in to the temptation of quick power.

Santa knew some of what I could do, but he would never have mentioned it if he really understood the cost of such an act. Ritual magic was not his strong suit, and he knew practically nothing about necromancy. The darker magics, the really awful ones, were seductive. The power they could give, the knowledge, the ultimate quick fix.

No one else would have this problem. You learn control at the same pace that you advance on the path of the cultist. People almost never actually have enough knowledge to set off an apocalypse without the stats and skills to mitigate it or resist doing so in the first place. You can’t even learn the worst magics without high enough stats and self-control. Coming back in time with all my knowledge was so very dangerous, I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about it. I was practically an unstable reactor.

The only way to stay safe at my current level was to not use the corruptive magics, to not poke the reactor with a stick. There will be so much death and killing in the future. I would much rather do it with elemental fury than soul plagues. At least that way I can keep my humanity.

I used the driest tone I could muster to reply to my friend. “Thanks Santa, that means a lot. I’m an inspiration to an ice obsessed muscle head. My crowning achievement. Soon the system will notice, and I’ll get a title for it.”

“You wish.”

“Anyway, Rocky just got here, and he was the last, so it’s time to move out. Mission start and all that.”

“Whatever you say Capt’n Deadbones.”

“Oh, hell no! You aren’t starting that up again. It isn’t even accurate now!”

“Since when has that ever stopped me?”

“Fuck you, Santa.”

We continued to bicker as I gathered up the troops and led them into the forest. A scout confirmed the location last night, and we would take the shortest route there. A straight line. I wanted this done with and over.

************

It took four hours to cut our way to the heart of the Shiverwood and find the Shimburr ruins. The scout that had confirmed the location didn’t venture into the haunted ruins. He was way too low a level and knew it. I instructed the guild to give him an extra gold for not being an idiot next time he stopped by. Encouraging sensible behavior seemed worth the price.

The Shimburr village was in better shape than I expected. Parts of the wooden palisades were still standing. That the ‘palisades’ were grown trees molded into a thin wall and drenched in vile magics just made the place even more alien. The rest of the group, barring Santa, wore various expressions of discomfort. Something that most people didn’t realize at first was that the many other races in AoA didn’t work on human norms. Some of them did, especially the ones closest to being actual humans, but the vast majority of the races had their own culture, their own history, their own values. The strangest of all were often the spirit or elemental races. Their minds worked in ways that were unfathomable to most.

The Shimburr were some sort of dryad relative, and nature spirits are just strange. Their architecture reflected that. Dome houses that were really just a tree grown into shape and then nurtured as it returned to its natural patterns, walls made up of one very wide and thin tree, the ‘streets’ resembling lawns instead of tarmac. From the remains you could clearly see what this place used to be, and it was utterly foreign in a way nothing on earth could be.

Now, the strange home of the Shimburr was broken, warped, and frozen. The grass black, the trees twisted, sick, and coated in ice. The very ground marked in shadows. An air of putrid rot hung in the air, frozen in time by the malicious frost that kept the natural world at bay. Homes and buildings were shattered, signs of conflict marked everything. Pillars of black ice split dome-trees, waves of thorny vines were frozen mid-strike on the street, and lances of solid shadow pierced the wall-trees.

Normally nature would have reclaimed such a battlefield by now, but the magics of the Shadow King kept his resting place in suspended animation, a snapshot of a time long past, a twisted memorial to the dead. Not even time wanted anything to do with this blighted land.

“This place is messed up.”

“Thank you Shin, we all needed that incredible obvious fact pointed out.” Replied Skyhammer. “Place makes me want to call in an airstrike.”

“If you had the mana I would say, go for it. Sadly, you will need it for that.” I pointed to the massive tree beyond the village, its top visible above the surrounding forest. Just looking at it felt wrong. It looked like one of the great sequoias was mutilated and tortured. Why a giant sequoia would be in this type of forest was an entirely unimportant matter, but it added to the strangeness. “That used to be a Heart Tree.”

A Heart Tree is the soul of the forest it inhabits. Not all forests have them, but the ones that do inevitably grow in power. Heart Trees are spiritual nodes and contain powerful nature magic, although the specifics differ. They are connected, in a way, to the entire forest. Hints of their power can be felt even at the very edge. This one was obviously the source of the cold that pervaded the Shiverwood. Great red wounds marked its surface, and frozen shadows and black ice marred its bark. There were no leaves on the mighty tree, just grey snow that brought to mind the cold wet ashes of a campfire after a storm. Jagged icicles adorned it and that awful ice encased entire branches.

Looking at the tree that should have been majestic just made me feel sick. Even without knowing what it should be, the sight of it had made my companions recoil.

“The Shadow King is tied to that… thing. For him to die, it needs to go. More than that, the tree needs to be put out of its misery.” I looked Sky right in the eyes. “You have spiritual fire. This is your task. Burn that tree to the ground. Cleanse it.” Her eyes were hard as she nodded.

“She’ll need a guard, and we can’t spare our healer. It won’t be unguarded. Volunteers?”

SnowFox, Sarge, and Hyde volunteered immediately. That would make a solid group actually melee, ranged, a summoner, and a caster.

“Very well then. Skirt the village and attack when you hear the signal. You will know the signal, I promise you.”

With a few nods and a ‘good luck’ or two, they slunk into the woods towards the giant tree.

“Right, when we find the King, he will try to kill us and turn us into more troops. I don’t know how awake he is, or how many of his guard he has raised. We stealth into the village, destroy his guard, and kill him. My guess is the King is in whatever passes for a central plaza around here, but I could certainly be wrong. Keep your wits about you. This has the potential to go just as bad as any of the ops you have been on in the real world. You’re alive right now, so you have good instincts. Use them.”

With a nod to my troops, I picked my way through the plants and to one of the massive holes in the wall. Looking around from my new vantage point, I could tell I was right. The signs of fighting all went towards one spot, right down the main lawn-road.

“Good luck and don’t die. Move out.” I whispered.

With that, we infiltrated the village.

Nothing happened as we dodged from cover to cover, peaked around corners, and avoided evil ice and plants. The air just got colder, and the light grew dimmer. No longer could we hear any noises from the surrounding forest. The only sound was our own faint footsteps, much fainter than they had any right to be in the frozen silence.

***********

I was right, the Shadow King was in the village square. What little remained of it, anyway. It seems we came from the intact side of the village. Beyond the square there was ruin. Instead of the broken shells of buildings there was razed ground, chunks of broken wood and ice in various piles were all that remained of that side of the Shimburr legacy. In the center of the square stood a tree, a short squat thing like you would find in a small city park as a centerpiece. The tree was pure white, with streaks of grey leading to its gruesome ornament. Nailed to its trunk was a humanoid figure of branch and shadow, pierced by massive black roots and a golden chain threaded through flesh and bark alike.

There were also bodies, lots of bodies. Empty suits of armor and weapons lay on the ground amid the bodies of fallen Shimburr, preserved as if they died yesterday. The masses of vines, branches, leaves, and flesh that were once a peaceful people lay corrupted by shadows, darkness, and ice. The corrupted Shimburr had been warped by the Shadow King and blackened ice or solid shadow had replaced large sections of their bodies.

The King himself was the worst. An eight-foot figure with bones of ice wrapped in black vines and shadow, a baleful red light shone from beneath the vines, pulsing in an unnatural rhythm. His head was a black wooden skull, not quite human and not quite animal, adorned with a crown of ice. In the center of that skull lay a single socket for an eye, an eye long since rotted away.

We could all tell when he noticed us because the socket filled with a scarlet flame and red light coursed down the roots into the ground, spreading out in a wave. Then the dead began to move.

Six figures oozed out from between the roots, pinning their master. The Corrupted Shimburr rose to their feet as weapons of wood and thorn formed in their hands. “Here we go.” I muttered.

We didn’t give them the chance to charge, by unspoken agreement we did it ourselves.