Chapter 61: The Season of the Minotaur (10)

Simon’s phantom steed was quite the disturbing creature.

He had expected a ghostly version of a horse, but while the entity was indeed made of greenish ectoplasm, it took the shape of a frightful equine corpse. A moldy hide stretched over bones exposed through rotten holes, and two unholy flames burned within its skull-face’s eye sockets.

It was otherwise a normal horse, though, with a saddle and reins, and solid enough to carry him and Cassandra on its back. Simon’s Warmonger Perk intuitively taught him how to ride the creature and guide it as it began to ride across the nightwind.

And then they flew.

Simon’s heart skipped a beat when his steed’s hooves stopped touching the ground and began to race across empty air like a mad donkey climbing a mountain. The wind flew upon their faces, and Cassandra clung to him with all of her strength. They rose and rode into pitch black night after waving her father and brother goodbye.

It was such an exhilarating feeling to ascend upwards. The steed couldn’t fly all that high, no more than four or five hundred feet, but that was enough to watch trees and farmhouses shrink beneath them. Cassandra cast a fog spell to keep them hidden from sight until they reached Whispermire’s outskirts and landed unseen, after which Simon dismissed the horse with a wave of his hand. He had the intuition that it would prove quite useful.

“That was something,” Simon mused once they returned to the Midnight Market.

“I liked it very much. It was a nice outing, and a pleasant evening in general.” Cassandra smiled at him. “Thank you for indulging me, Simon.”

“You are welcome. It was… nice.”

“But something else weighs on your mind,” Cassandra noted. “Is it about what happened with the Dreadnought? Father told me you planned to resurrect him, if possible.”

“Yes.” Simon crossed his arms. “I keep telling myself I can bring him back, that his death was unintentional, and that it was necessary to prevent a worse situation later, but he was still a former comrade at the end of the day. I don’t like killing friends.”

Cassandra nodded in understanding. “I never had a living friend before you, so I cannot say whether you were in the right or the wrong, but I think the fact you are asking yourself that at all means you are not a bad person.”

I’m not sure a good person would be conducting a ritual to unleash a demon upon the world, even for the purpose of saving the world, Simon thought, although he did appreciate the compliment. It didn’t take long for them to reach their quarters. “Thank you for your kind words, at the very least. I guess this is it for the night then.”

Cassandra reached for her door, only to hesitate an instant. “If you do not mind, can I ask you a question?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Are you courting me, Simon?”

Huh? Where did that come from? “Why that question?”

“Because my other friend, Nora, asked me the question when I said you brought me gifts and liked to spend time with me,” Cassandra replied calmly. “I have never been courted by a living person, so I didn’t know how to answer.”

Oh. Simon suddenly realized he must have been sending quite a few mixed signals over the last few weeks or so.

Was he courting Cassandra? He did find her attractive, and he enjoyed her company enough to seek it out. He had even grown somewhat used to her family’s weirder and darker aspects over the last months. They had indeed become friends, and he wouldn’t mind dating her.

However, besides the fact that he was technically engaged to the Stone Muse and that she might badly react to her ‘beloved’ courting another woman, the memory of his time with Anna still remained fresh on his mind. The idea of growing close to Cassandra only for her to treat him as a stranger on the next reign pained him.

Then again, this reign might last decades for all he knew, if he managed to survive the Zodiac Parade and whatever else the future held for him. As much as he missed Anna, he couldn’t exactly see himself staying a celibate hermit for over ninety more lifetimes. It would be a nice change of pace to live a full life rather than having it be cut short by assassins or disaster, whether he shared it with someone else or not…

Simon had so many conflicting feelings about all of this.

“I wouldn’t say we’re quite there yet, but perhaps in the future,” Simon replied sincerely. “I have too much on my mind for now.”

“I understand. I was just curious.” Cassandra nodded at him as she bade him goodnight. “I hope slumber will help clear your mind.”

He hoped so as well.

Simon spent the next few days in Whispermire keeping watch on the situation.

Leonard’s body and those of other imperial scouts were returned to town and then to the War Party’s forces. True to Duchar’s prediction, the death of so many Class users convinced the army that turning the area into a training camp wasn’t worth the losses, and the imperial raid was swiftly cancelled.

So Louis decided to bomb the Darkwood instead.

Three days after Leonard’s demise, Simon woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of city bells ringing madly and tremors shaking the ground. He only had to take a look out the window to see two War Party airships raining fire down from the sky upon the Darkwood, with plumes of smoke rising from the miasma. They unleashed their fury for an entire night in a blind orgy of destruction that could be observed all the way from Whispermire.

“What the…” Simon choked in horror as he watched a fireball descend upon the woods and explode on impact, a flash of light illuminating the night in response. His skull buzzed with telepathic attempts to contact him from all across his network of allies. “Duchar?! Hector?! Carrock?!”

“We are being bombarded, Your Majesty!” the old sorcerer replied. “A fire has started on the third level!”

“My brothers burn from the bitter kiss of flame!” Carrock the Treant roared in fear and fury through his own Brand. Although Simon had had the foresight to give him a Ring of Cursed Flame to negate his kind’s vulnerability to fire, he couldn’t say the same for his fellow trees.

Simon briefly thought it was a calculated attempt to destroy the Hall of the Minotaur, but the airships continued to fly over the forest towards areas without anything important in them. This was no calculated attempt to cull the monster population or a preparation for an offensive; it was retaliation, pure and simple.

Simon cursed himself for not seeing this coming. Of course the War Party couldn’t allow a commander’s death to go unavenged. They lacked the resources or need to purge the Darkwood with soldiers, but a bombing run on their own turf was a cheap way to both retaliate for Leonard’s loss and reaffirm their faction’s power to those who may have doubted it.

“Do we retaliate, Your Majesty?” a gargoyle asked, his voice brimming with bloodlust. “We can fly up and cast them down from the sky!”

“No, no, everyone retreat to the Halls of the Minotaur’s Sanctum or to the marshes,” Simon ordered his allies and servants. Attacking the airships would only cause Louis to escalate further by sending more ships to finish the job. “Do not retaliate, I repeat, do not retaliate! They are only passing through, so focus on survival!”

Simon then spent the night guiding his followers from afar to safety towards cult-affiliated locations or safehouses. Dozens of plumes of smoke covered the sky above the Darkwood by the time the airships departed.

The forest’s muddy, wet atmosphere prevented an all-out fire across the region, but Simon teleported back to the Halls of the Minotaur to find the stonemasonry crumbling in multiple places, with his forces desperately working to put out fires with swampwater or pulling away survivors from beneath piles of debris. He himself spent the better part of the day extinguishing flames with repeated Hellfrost castings.

“Report,” Simon asked Duchar while the two of them used spells to prevent a crumbling wall from collapsing and destroying the workshop.

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“We have taken severe damage,” Duchar admitted. His robes had burned at the edges. “I do not think this location has been exposed, and the Sanctum has miraculously avoided any major damage, but we are now at considerably less than full strength.”

That was quite the understatement.

By the time the day was over, the entire western wing of the Halls of the Minotaur had collapsed into a pile of rubble, the courtyard was flooded by the fountain’s destruction, multiple rooms were buried under crumbling stonemasonry, and cracked walls had opened new holes in multiple areas, which represented a considerable security risk. Not to mention that the bombardment had disturbed the local fauna and sent it fleeing throughout the region, which would no doubt cause issues. Even some of Simon’s own slime creations and undead servants were unaccounted for.

At least Father Rodrigue’s cell held firm, so they still had a sacrifice for the ritual.

“Vengeance!” the Stone Muse screeched to anyone who would listen. “A tide of wood and a flood of terror I shall unleash upon these metal birds’ roosts when my bindings are shattered! A hundred heads for every burned root, buried under my temple’s new foundations!”