Aaaand it was night-time and there was a Bat with a forty-foot wingspan half a mile up there eying me for a snack. I mean, it was big, but probably not big enough to lift one of the Deer, let alone fly off with it in time to avoid whatever the guardian Stags were going to do to it.
Me? I looked like just the perfect size. It was just I was riding on the back of this bigass Deer it would likely be fatal to mess with.
“Elder, do the Bats and Owls of the area get along?” I asked the Great Stag I was laying on, looking up at that gloriously clear night sky.
He turned back to look at me curiously, weighing my words. “They prey on different creatures, for the most part, and not one another.”
My Eyes of Heaven was twitching. “There’s a Bat up there, flying over the herd. Can you tell if something is wrong with it?”
Instead of looking up, he tilted his head sideways to look up into the sky with one eye, something swirling over his fur in a rush.
“It has the Darkness upon it. It has been Corrupted...” the Stag murmured in scorn. “It is likely seeking easy prey. Perhaps one of the fawns...”
Heh, probably discounting me as a target just based on the fact I was close to him. “Can you alert the Owls, see if they can take it out? Oh, and warn them not to eat it, of course.”
He let out a long, low bellow, alerting his herd to the presence of the thing. The Deer all flicked their ears, and almost simultaneously, turned their heads sideways to look up at the Bat high up in the sky.
As for who else was listening, well...
It was a fairly large clearing, the creatures here were big, the air was incredibly clear, and I was currently ignoring all darkness with enhanced visual ability. I could make out that Bat with great clarity, and saw it react to the fact the Deer were all looking up at it.
It swooped about for a while, clearly disgruntled by the attention, and I narrowed my eyes as shadows flitted about at the edge of its wings.
It didn’t look up as the silent predators came swooping down out of the sky above it, carefully avoiding the arc of its echolocation, or maybe absorbing it, I didn’t know.
The Owl that hit it was even bigger than it was, going from nearly-invisible grey to sudden shining white in the moonlight. It slammed into the top of the Bat with a terrific impact, blades of wind slicing and ripping at the thing as they tore at its leathery hide, some instinct prompting it to shift and spin and somehow survive the impact.
I watched it blur into a shadow form and dive towards the trees below. Other Owls waiting in the sky dove after it, great golden eyes keeping it clearly in sight despite the night, and I had the feeling the shadows weren’t going to hide it as well as it liked.
The rest of the herd kept their ears peeled on the hooting positional calls that indicated where the Bat was and was going, at least twenty Owls involved in the hunt that dove into the trees and danced among them. Screams of sonic force that made my ears twitch even at this range contested against baffles of air and sound-soaking feathers as the Bat desperately flitted this way and that. The Owls kept track of him, winds whipping and roaring through the trees in easy, eager pursuit even its shadowy speed couldn’t outrun.
I could hear branches cracking and falling as windblades and sonic screams cut them apart, but none of the true crashing of trunks falling. I gathered the great trees were pretty resistant to that kind of damage, and were just enduring the giants at play as they zipped through the trees.
“Think you could intercept it, Elder?” I asked the Great Stag, one ear always turned towards the sound of excitement, and probably aware of it on other levels.
“It will be hard to strike and harder to harm,” he replied neutrally.
“Hah!” I proceeded to clamber up his neck, somewhat to his surprise, and got up between his horns, gleaming like very sharp golden thorn racks to either side of me.
Flicking up four Shards with Banespell, Vivic, and Sanctified on them wasn’t hard, and I grabbed his horns and used them as Focusing Implements, each hand-long wedge swirling with four fires as I wrapped them in the native magic and used that to anchor them to prongs on his horns.
“These things are auto-target, no-miss, and can harm things of shadow without any problem. Pump them full of extra energy and shoot the blighter down.”
He huffed once, and golden energy streamed slowly from the horns, glittering with crystalline brilliance, and filled up the Shards. They began to grow in size rapidly, lengthening and turning from silvery to gold as they did so.
He trotted into motion abruptly, yet so gracefully it almost felt like I was gliding as I held onto his horns. I swirled up some Heavenly Wrath to join the play of energies, since he was taking over the spell, and just looked ahead as the herd gathered in and followed slowly. It was unlikely there was a predator around waiting to pounce on them at just this moment, but they weren’t going to be stupid about it.
Needless to say, something so big could move very fast, and the ground seemed to be clearing out of the way and opening a path for him, too. He seemed to know right where to go, that one ear pointing like a compass directly at the flight path of the Bat, and there were Owls swooping overhead in a ring, tracking the flight of the creature in the distance, cutting it off... and, I saw, starting to turn it.
---
He came out on a rock extending over a crystalline river bubbling below, deep and dark stands of trees growing to the edge, but the course of it fairly straight for easily half a mile in each direction. The Great Stag just posed on the rock, what looked like golden spears swirling with fires white, crimson, and electrum extending from his horns, seething with a whole lot of purified Earth power inside the force shell.
And here it came, the white forms of Owls preceding it above the trees, while flashes of sky blue aeromancy and rushing winds marked its flight through the trees, having to dodge slowing it down, and now it had no choice but to cross a hundred meters of open ground.
The Stag turned his head, and his horns glowed with a bright light that extended out for a good mile in every direction. The whole landscape lit up like the sun under the glittering display, and the Bat came out of the trees right into it, promptly screeching as it did so, the shadows boiling around it.
The Shards-turned-Spears fired off as one.
Shards are near-instant fast, even if they are trailing golden crystals like these were. They crossed the quarter-mile before the Bat could flap its wings again, hit the shadowy form of the Bat before it could hit midstream, punched right through it, and exploded out the other side in a glittering explosion of released force-waves spattered with white, crimson, and electrum light.
The Bat gave a final shriek as it materialized, holes punched clear through its body and multi-hued fires spread all through it, with the vivic fire blazing into new life and feasting on it as it tumbled from the sky. Momentum kept it going as it slammed to the ground on the opposite bank of the river, tumbled a few times before fetching up against a tree, and twitched a bit before going still.
The Great Stag had taken four Shards, elevated them all the way up to the equal of at least V’s each, and fired them off without missing a beat. I could only smirk as he trotted down the bank lightly, reaching the burning corpse less than a minute later.
There were ghostly forms of the local Owls perched on the branches and roots of the forest giants all around, watching the Bat burn in vivus. Their golden eyes were fixated on the display as the unwhite flames exuded heavy mist, sinking into the dark leaves covering the soil and staining it all white. The dark blood oozing out of the holes punched through it were like little jets of gasoline feeding the whiteness.
“The vivus consumes the Dark magic and feeds the Land with it,” I explained from my crouch atop the Stag’s head, looking down at the scene without surprise. “The white stain will be gone with the sun’s rise, but grass and flowers might arise here for a short time in response.” I flicked up Darts wound with vivus and electrum, getting in rep counts as I fed them with my Stars, and proceeded to pummel the oversized Bat with them, setting the whole thing rapidly on fire and tearing it apart as I did so, accelerating its decomposition meticulously as Owls, Stag, and a few curious Deer coming in late watched with great interest.
Naming Karma waited for no one, and I wanted my Sacred Intellect bonus!
---
It only took about ten minutes for the entire corpse to burn down, leaving a broad swath of whiteness on the ground and low mists that Owls and Deer alike sniffed in interest and appreciation before the whiteness faded into the ground and vanished.
Something glittered there. I reached out with Minor TK and drew it up to my hand.
It was a crystal the size of a robin’s egg. Everything was looking at it with me as I turned it over in my hand, feeling a vague spiritual resonance coming from it, but nothing overpowering.
“This of any use to you?” I asked the Stag, holding it out and down so he could regard it more closely.
He studied it closely, power trembling around it, then simply blinked and look away. “Eye-catching, but useless,” he announced in a neutral voice.
The largest of the Owls was on a low branch just above, definitely not a coincidence, feathery ‘horns’ five feet long sweeping up from his brow in crescents. “Unless you are a Crow,” hooted the Owl in derisive agreement.
I was pretty sure this was a vivisized Core and I could use it for all sorts of things, so I added a pocket to my tunic and dropped it in.
“Anyone here got any Taint or Corruption from injuries?” I asked aloud, flicking up the Darts again. “I should be able to clean it off.”
There were a few hoots and calls about, but none of them had been infected by the Dark Magic of the thing, which didn’t seem to have gotten into physical combat with anything while fleeing for its life.
“Okay, then, I think we’re done here. Come on back in the morning if you want to see what vivus does.”
There were some curious hoots and grunts from all those about, while I slid down the Great Stag’s neck to between his shoulders again.
Dawn wasn’t that far off, and Know Time was on the job now, giving me little alarms at the proper times.
My Eldritch Theurgy was coming. That should be a game-changer for both the short-term and the long-term.
Eldritch Theurgy would tie my Sorcery and Warlock Magic together. The higher Caster Level would work for both, bonuses apply to both, and most importantly, my Wrath could dump right into Valences and recharge them while in Meditation... and for the Stars, maybe even outside it.
That would, in effect, give me an infinitely recharging Mana Pool, even if I had to jump through hoops to use it. Even if I had to go into Meditation to recharge, it was still going to be literally hundreds of times faster than I was getting now.
My Feat was going to be Beyond Law and Chaos. Two reasons: One, this place didn’t have an active Heaven, which meant Law, Chaos, and Evil were dominating it, known or unknown. My Mastery would be the first Ice Magic mastery, Snowcaster (+1): Give a spell the Cold descriptor. +1 Caster Level to all Cold spells (Cold Affinity), or +2 in a Cold Environment (as in, spit in the air and it freezes as it hits the ground cold).
Two, I could tell this because the Great Stag had been using time-sighting, or insight bonuses, to hit the Bat, and the Bat had used them to avoid being killed by the initial charge of the Owl.
I did NOT want to be susceptible to that kind of shit from extremely powerful creatures. It was like asking to be one-shot, and having stuff ‘miraculously’ avoiding my spells.
No, I could really, really do without that.
My Eldritch Mastery was going to be the Warlock Ward Mastery/2, Aegis of the Angels, which would bring up my Resistances. They were tied in power to my Wrath, 5 points per die, so only 10 points of Acid, Lightning, and Radiance Resistance, and honestly, I didn’t know how much good that would do against the level of power I’d seen these creatures using. Without actual immunity, I wasn’t sure it was good at all... but we’d see shortly.
Why? Because the native magic synergized with my Sorcery and Arcane magic, which meant the Theurgy would synergize with it. We’d see if it was boosted the same way!