B5 Chapter 31 – Breaking

It wasn’t as difficult to engineer a break as one might have thought. With the knowledge he had learned from the Three regarding the nature of magick, along with what he had figured out himself along the way, Tyron was beginning to accrue quite a number of insights regarding the rifts.

How they interacted with magick being perhaps the most important field within his burgeoning expertise.

After all, if he could use magick to shrink a rift, surely he could use magick to grow one? Of course, it was more complicated than that, it always was. Making a rift larger wasn’t enough to cause a break. After all, it was the accumulated pressure of kin pressing against the barrier that eventually made it shatter. It took years under normal circumstances, and would only occur if that pressure wasn’t regularly relieved by Slayer expeditions coming and killing the kin, keeping them away from the rift until it had stabilised.

Tyron didn’t have time to build that slow drip, drip, drip of pressure. He needed a break to happen in the next few hours, before those Golden skeletons-to-be decided to move away from Cragwhistle. So how could he do it?

The trick was letting the rift-kin do the work. All he needed was a way to gather a large number of monsters, then have them smash into the rift like a battering ram, shattering it in an instant. Doing that was a little tricky.

Tyron stood in a field of endless winter, snow and ice battering him endlessly. Wind blew so fierce that the sleet came at him almost horizontally, straight through the gaps in his bone helmet and into his eyes.

Despite everything, Tyron didn’t feel the cold that much. His inhuman levels of endurance had turned him halfway into an undead already, or at least it felt that way. A normal person might have frozen to death beyond this rift in only a few hours, yet he felt he could endure for days, if not weeks.

“Are they done yet?” Dove yelled over the never-ending blizzard.

“Almost,” Tyron called back.

“I hope so, my balls are almost frozen solid. My pecker has shrunk so far it’s starting to invert. I think it’s gone into the Astral Realm!”

Tyron eyed the undead Summoner. Dove was, for a change, completely naked, as skeletons went. He held his arms against his exposed rips, visibly shivering.

“Why did you even bring me here?” he chattered.

Ignoring his idiotic behaviour, the Necromancer simply explained as he continued to monitor his minions using his magick.

“Because now that I have an idea how compromised you are, I’m going to keep you close so I can ensure you don’t cause any problems.”

Dove leapt back, holding a bony hand to his chest.

“Me?! Cause Problems?! How dare you.”

“Be silent, Dove.”

For once, his former teacher listened, allowing Tyron to concentrate.

He couldn’t see through the storm, but he could keep tabs on the movements of his horde through the conduit that bound them to him. Communing with his demi-liches, he confirmed that work was proceeding as expected. Most of the horde had been brought beyond the rift to accomplish this task, via the Abyss, as the conditions and swarming kin made it difficult to do any sort of delicate enchanting work.

Crafting totems to bear the enchantments had taken a significant amount of time, and without the expertise of Master Willhem, he may not have succeeded at all. Not in such a short timeframe, at any rate. The Master Arcanist was out there right now, in the storm, directing the others and ensuring the magick would properly function. When it came to anything he himself had a hand in, Master Willhem was obsessively particular about ensuring the work was carried out properly. That, at least, hadn’t changed when he’d died.

Tyron reflected on his Master’s other prized student: Master Halfshard. If possible, he would like to reconcile with her, if only to bring comfort to their teacher. Better still if she agreed to work with him. When it came to enchanting, she was far more skilled than he was, a true expert in many facets of the craft. Sadly, she was still furious that he had denied Master Willhem his final rest.

After another hour had passed in the sleet and ice, the job was finally done. It hadn’t been easy to embed the totems in the ground, nearly impossible, in fact. Under the packed snow and ice, the ground was unsurprisingly frozen solid. Ultimately, they had melted and refrozen the ice to lock them in place.

“We’re moving, Dove,” Tyron announced before he turned and began to trudge away through the snow.

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“Wh-what? We’re done?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you need to perform some sort of fancy ritual?”

“No.”

“Well… that’s a bit boring.”

As tempted as he was to argue how intricate and complex the magickal network created by the enchanted totems was, Tyron decided against it. Giving Dove an excuse to argue was like giving someone permission to punch you in the face. When your head started hurting, you only had yourself to blame.

It was a journey of a dozen kilometres to return to their camp, and there were many kin to fight on the way. That number would only increase over the next few hours, and he wanted to be as secure as possible before it happened. Long hours of painful slog through the snow later, they reached the camp and Tyron gratefully stepped into the tent his skeletons had erected for him.

He may be able to endure the cold, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it. Frowning, he turned and spat.