BECMI Chapter 508 – The Seven Henges

We entered the tunnel, which stretched off into the dark interior of the place.

The walls were unadorned, shaped with smooth and clear gray stone, bored through with magic, no sign of tool use, probably one great use of Immortal Power opening the way. Our progress along was swift and silent on lightfoot, skating along above the floor while our senses ranged ahead.

Dread’s Detect Bane sensed the undead ahead long before we saw them.

They obviously knew we were coming with the noise from the spells going off, so I decided to speed things up with a Paired Sunburst into the illuminated chamber at the edge of the hallway.

The terrible sunlike brilliance of the spells going off generated howls of agony from the undead, and half of them disappeared from the Detect instantly, the rest severely wounded.

Cirru wasted no time. She sprinted ahead at eye-blurring speed, the equal of any Mystic, flashing out of the tunnel and into combat while I raced after her, preparing a flight of Shards if needed.

They weren’t. She flashed through the chamber, and where she passed the undead erupted in vivus and died. There was one attempt to bring a Flamestrike down on her which she didn’t appreciate, but the slight scorching did nothing to her, and she was standing there and Healing it from Reserve as I glided into the chamber.

The undead were already vivified, and I looked at the gear they held even as it disintegrated.

The unstable nature of it was a clue immediately. Not necroic, but inherently unstable.

“These undead are mirror-clones,” I judged, studying them and their accoutrements.

“They looked like shadowy, bloodless versions of the Urtho warriors. I’ve Scried the men before, from the distance, and paid more attention to them once they attained Master-class,” Cirru admitted, and I nodded along with her. “Undead mirrors of them? That’s a dangerous ability. But it could not duplicate their gear?”

“It does not seem so… but it managed to duplicate all of them. That is worrisome. Typically such Mirrors only catch one or two people at a time, unless they are fools… and the Dungeon had them in more than one location. They should not have fallen prey to such things.”

“Indeed.” Cirru frowned as she looked about the cavern, which oddly enough was of rough-hewn stone, as if somebody had hacked a larger and more circular form out of an existing opening, unlike the passage to get here.

In the center of the rough cavern was a smooth elevated circle of bluish-white marble, engraved with a magical Circle. Carved into the stone about the thing were seven different symbols: a square, a star, a cup, an arrow, a triangle, a circle, and an hourglass.

Directly above the enruned stone, which definitely radiated Levitation magic, was a hole in the ceiling of the same size as the stone.

Unafraid, Cirru entered the Circle and looked up. “Light,” she noted. “We should be approximately in the center of the plateau.”

I mimicked her, looked up the shaft, and just hissed. Cirru astutely stepped back as I raised Dread and sent a Spellflare Helix Coil straight up the shaft.

Dozens of spells waiting to go off on a party that went up the shaft detonated crazily, and I stepped away from the opening as stones fell down with explosive impacts upon the marble lift there, which totally ignored them and was unmarked by the amounts and sizes of the falling rubble, although I promptly Shaped up a wall between us to catch the shards from the shattering things before they could harm us.

It took several minutes for the clatter and clacking of falling rocks to stop, and the place was very dusty at that point, at least until Primus forced all the dust out of the air and cleared everything up.

“Flying.” I popped my Wings of star-filled night, brought out Load for Cirru to sit upon, and shot up the shaft, ignoring the Levitation ride below. Duum fluttered over to her shoulder for the trip.

I was pretty sure something really big was going to blow up underneath the Circle if that took off.

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It was over two thousand feet up, not small, but it still only took a minute to wing my way up it, passing three different sets of Permanent spells I’d shattered with the Spellflaring. I came up to the top cautiously, poking my head up to look around for magical traps, saw none, and then rose higher for Cirru and Duum on her shoulder to take it all in.

Sets of cracked and shattered rocks in multiple colors, one set in rainbow jade, occupied the area, along with a broken and sundered gray altar of some kind. The whole area radiated massive planar bleeds, as if long connections had suddenly been sundered, and Immortal Power resided in all of the tumbled and broken slabs of rock scattered around.

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“The symbols on the Disk below match those on chunks of the rock,” Cirru pointed out promptly, pointing quickly to the visible cup, arrow, circle, and triangle images on the green, red, black, and yellow dolmen rock sets. “The damage from the breaks is very recent, no weathering like the rest of the stones at all.”

“Something shattered them and didn’t want us using them.” I lifted up Dread calmly. “Let’s see what Reconstruction of Ages Past can do.”

Magic seethed and boiled out all around me.

It was an X+ spell, made to explore and rebuild fallen ruins back to the height of their grandeur, as if they’d never fallen. I’d made it for Captain Emeril to use in his explorations, even the IX version capable of revealing a great deal when he employed it, although there the rebuilding was mostly illusionary.

Mine was basically an Upcast Mend Object that could apply to huge areas and some very large objects. When those objects were bearing the remnants of Immortal Power and wanted to be reconstructed, well, that made it all the easier!

Swirls of energy circled around us, taking up the loose rocks and rubble and tumbled, shattered remains, and began to glue them back together as if a whirlwind disassembly was being reversed.

A henge. These were dolmens, arranged to form a henge around the central altar. The slabs of rock were thrusting up once more, multi-ton stones laying across them in an equidistant seven-point star that had nothing to do with astronomy, and hissing energies spiraled to life inside each of them. The seven symbols glowed in a particular shade of the rainbow above each swirling cloud of portal energy that matched its hue, each leading somewhere as the planar instability in the area was locked down once more.

Cirru leaned down and sniffed. “There were a great many beings here, Mistress. Humans are the faintest of them. Many undead… and something older.” Her lips drew back in a grimace and a snarl. “I do not recognize it, but something in my blood does not like it at all. It is like smelling a great predator that wishes to prey on my kind. And they are all moving away from where the altar now is.”

I sniffed as well. Undead, yes. And something… reptilian. Snake, lizard, neither. “Definitely not draconic,” I agreed, turning away from the low altar and facing the Portals and the rainbow of choices before me. “Shall we pick a color?” I asked her.

“Red, blue, yellow, green, white, black, and rainbow,” she murmured. “Red begins the cycle?” she wondered aloud.

“If there is alchemical significance, black or white should, actually, but the rainbow doesn’t fit in. Four primaries, two endings, and a mix?” I just shook my head, tossing some coins in my hand and glancing at the result for an impromptu Divination. “Nothing. I assume they are all of equal importance.”

“Red, then. Up the spectrum to black, then white, then rainbow,” she declared. I inclined my head, not caring in the slightest, and Duum bounced back to my shoulder as she strode to the first Dolmen Gate and walked through it.

I followed.

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Heat. Fire. Iron. Blood. Rust.

The sensations smacked me in the face as I exited the far side. Fires ignited on Duum’s ears as the pyromana in the air hit him. Ahead of me, Cirru fingered her own Ring of Primal Elemental Command, ignoring the furnace heat of the air.

The floor was of iron, and if not red-hot, it was hot enough to cook on easily, with fires visible through seams and holes in the floor, gouting out cracks in the walls, and burning around the edges of the dark vaulted ceiling, throwing angry dancing shadows everywhere in the wide corridor ahead of us.

There was an intersection ahead, and a great door of what looked like eshbronze at the end of it there.

I just pointed, and we glided ahead, ignoring the flames and overly heated environment. My skin was reddening being here, but the crimson red tips of my hair were actually turning blue and beginning to trail frost mists in reaction, so all was fine.

We reached the intersection a couple hundred yards away down the corridor soon, Cirru glancing at me to see if we should investigate the flanks.

I flipped up a Wizard Eye, and sent it shooting down the corridor there, scouting for us at lightning speed as we waited.

The hallway turned and headed into the insides of what turned out to be a great iron guard tower, with stairs on the inside leading up to levels where soldiers could snipe against foes on the outside.

I whipped up that view of the outside, hilly terrain of black stone battered by time, combat, and flame, cut by several flowing rivers of… firewater or burning blood, it was hard to tell.

There was indeed fighting going on outside, because the whole damn area was a battlefield.

It was hard to tell who was fighting and why, as the warriors didn’t seem to have any heraldry. Here, knights in bright plate couched lances and charged into explosions of fire towards waiting lines of swordsmen, the eruptions sending men and horses flying, yet not stopping the valiant charge.

In another section, the battlefield was shrouded in smoke and silence, corpses stacked up, weapons sticking into the ground, the ground cratered and scored by the weapons and attacks of the victors.

In another area, crude battle-tanks, engines of war belching lines of fire into endless ranks of pikesmen marching to their doom formed another line of battle. In the far distance, swooping ranks of warriors on black hippogriffs fell from out the sun upon lines of firedrakes, dodging blasts of fiery breath to impale them with lances and strike with swords and claws as they closed in.

None of it was truly real, except maybe the weapons stuck rusting in the ground. A sepulchral air hung over everything, as if this was a battle that had taken place a thousand times before, and was going to take place a thousand times again, warriors fighting for the rest of time in a battle with no object, goal, or gain, other then death and destruction.

I silently recalled the Eye and sent it zipping down the other corridor. It came to another empty tower, looking out over the same field.

I pointed ahead, and to the eshbronze doors we went.

They weren’t locked, and Cirru slammed them open proudly, striding inside as if she owned the place. I trailed after her, looking around the great hall beyond.

The place was easily a hundred meters square. The roof was red-hot iron, held aloft by double rows of pillars in the shape of arms grasping great swords plunged into the metal above us. Ahead of us, a great door of chariron, big enough to admit Cirru’s real form, flowed and flickered with internal heat, while on the iron of the walls about it, flames ran through a great and grand mosaic of some great war and the battles involved with it in ornate and loving detail.