"Leave with your loyal warriors and make your way to the depths. Find it and slay it. It needs to die so that I may use this plane for my purposes."
Salter Bloom jolted out of his daze. The temporary camp by the Garamus expedition was quiet, with most of the members hoping to catch a couple of hours of sleep. The constant fighting against the Revenants had been tiring, and more than one warrior had succumbed to fatigue and been killed. With Chaos Sight active, he even saw their disembodied Animas being taken away by the blighted creatures.
He'd taken to communing with his patron every chance he got, and now was the only time he actually got a message back. He had been sticking with the rest of the poor fools on the way to the underground ruins, but it looked like their mission had been changed.
The 'it' their lord and master referred to was no doubt the great Avos of the mountains, Zarek. Fighting and killing the gargantuan Avos would have been suicide in the best of times, but along with the message came the image of a bloodied and weakened Stonetoise. The great master had struck already but had been unable to stand Rumiga's repulsive force long enough to finish the job. And from the feeling of passing time, the master had only managed to reconnect with his agents after many days or weeks had passed.
The damage done to the great Avos wasn't something that could be overcome easily, but Salter knew that the creature had access to the planar core. Not a perfect connection, otherwise the master would never have been able to overcome its defences and wound it so, which gave them the chance.
He closed his eyes and felt his Anima. He could feel the Chaos Seed pointing somewhere. He shifted around until he felt where the pull was strongest. Of course, when he opened his eyes, he was staring at the cavern wall. He would have to adjust the feeling to take into account the shifting nature of the tunnels, but that would only take a few minutes of focus.
'Poor lad,' he thought as he stared at the expedition leader, Lucian Ward. 'Chaos reigns and nothing he does will help. Heh.'
Exhausted men grew careless once the danger was past. The campsite was secluded, hidden in a hollow between tall hills and buildings. Even the Revenants followed the lay of the land and the path of least resistance. As long as the road towards the manor looked naturally blocked, they would have no reason to explore.
Salter waited until most of the camp was asleep, then he crept towards his men. A hand over their mouths stopped them from making a sound when he woke them up, one by one. Those he woke went to the others and woke them in turn, until a good twenty men and women were ready to obey their patron.
His second-in-command, a swarthy-skinned man called Rejan Swain, looked at the supplies meaningfully. After a long moment, Salter nodded.
Five men walked casually to each sentry, and quick as lightning, knocked them unconscious. Killing them would have been simpler, but the scent of blood would alert some of the sleepers.
Wordlessly, they took the supply backpacks and then ventured out of the camp. The underground city sky reflected the Full Moon, but the illusion was so splotchy and broken that it was still dark anyway.
Ah, not all of the sentries had been laid unconscious and left behind. There was one carried on Rejan's shoulders. The two of them exchanged a glance, and he dropped the poor boy and left him beside a half wall. For a moment, Salter considered slitting the boy's throat, but then again, there was no evidence that the Revenants were attracted to blood. They attacked the living so keeping this sod alive would actually do more to call the Revenants on the expedition than anything else.
As for why there was a betrayal going on… Salter wasn't blind. He saw the doubt and concern in Lucian Ward's eyes, and he saw the reports the bulky man had been reading. He was a liability to the Brotherhood. They all were. Loose threads must be snipped.
Their party left the unconscious sentry leaning on the wall. In full view of the road and the Revenants. He could see the ghastly creatures moving towards them, with a large fraction split off and trailing after them, but he was satisfied to see a dozen or so heading towards the unconscious scout.
Now, all they needed to do was lose the Revenants and they should be good.
Salter called upon his Animus. Spirit Binders anchored their power into animating spirits found in tools, trinkets, weapons, and armour. Even normal cloth could be used, though those spirits wouldn't be ideal for combat.
The Brotherhood sacrificed their bound spirits and fed them into Chaos Seeds, from which, personal Animus is subsumed and converted to aspected Chaos. The volatile power burnt his Anima and his body but also made it whole. Salter shivered as he felt liquid flames coursing through his veins. Then, he expelled a cloud of it, tethered to his Will. He expanded it until it was as thin as a sheet of paper, as wide as the road, and about three paces tall. Then, he Willed it to move and consume traces of their passage.
The sheet of Chaos swept over the trailing Revenants, and once it did, the creatures opened their mouths wide and drew breath, taking all of the Chaos they could reach. It also overwhelmed their senses for a long moment, enough time for Salter's bunch to escape detection range.
The others of the Brotherhood glanced at his power with envy evident on their faces. Not all were given the seeds to grow Chaos within them. That was the ultimate goal, and eventually, once they served the appropriate time, they would be given the seeds. It takes decades to change from the inside, and the end goal, of course, was the ability to live forever. Not just immortality, but invulnerability. The body could die and it would be reborn.
But they would not be as the nameless or the other planeborn Chaos dwellers. They would lose their minds, their sanity and their identity. The Brotherhood would keep theirs. A slow transformation that kept the integral parts of themselves intact. But only at the cost of service.
Soon enough they reached the walls of the cavern. Parts of the underground city's perimeter walls had collapsed and bridged the gap across the moat. They clambered over those piles gingerly and lost one foolish warrior when he stepped on a loose pile and tumbled all the way down.
Splash!
"Help!" but the cry ended up in a gurgle. A look down at the water let Salter know that the Revenants were using the underground waterways to travel and that the poor fool who fell was a goner.
"Move!" he hissed, and the nineteen remaining warriors hurried towards an exit tunnel. From there, it was only a matter of time and effort… alright, a lot of time and effort, to find the correct path through the maze-like tunnels. They must have spent a couple of days at least before they managed to find the correct tunnel, and it led them into another underground city. And this one also had humans in it.
"Imperials," Rejan cursed softly.
Salter frowned at the sight. Why were Imperial warriors…legionnaires from the colour of their overcoats, here? What were they doing? Shouldn't they be topside fighting off the Ivalans as well as the troops the master sent to sow havoc amongst the populace?
Either way, the Imperials outnumbered them five to one, and there was no reason to tangle with them during this mission. The Empire is one of the biggest thorns to the Brotherhood's side, but they weren't the only one. The Xylarchy was even worse, according to what the master let slip. Those tree huggers would have everything subsumed by their World Tree, exchanging one slavemaster for another. No thanks.
It didn't look like the Imperials noticed them, Salter thought, and he needed to keep it that way. Their mission was of far more import and there was no need to further complicate it. This underground city had more intact buildings at least, so they could sneak around the other group.
They did so but had close calls with scouts every now and then. One group actually managed to come across them, but since there were only five of them, they were easily overpowered and killed.
This city was as big as the one they came from. There were even more pillars but the ceiling wasn't as broken as the one before. The intuitive direction pointed him towards the city centre, verified by the fact that even though they moved several longstrides around, it still indicated that direction.
Still, nothing could be seen from their vantage point. Avos Zarek was rumoured to be as big as the mountains itself, so how could it hide in this small city? Well, the answer was that as a gargantuan creature, Zarek's Anima dwelt only in a relatively small core. Every other part of its body could be abandoned to be reformed later, but not the Anima core. What that thing would look like, or if some kind of shell or body had been formed around it, Salter didn't know. But the intuition from the Chaos Seed wouldn't lead him astray.
Right, it's not in the city centre after all Salter decided, after completing a circumference. It's somewhere else.
"Come on, lads, let's find another exit tunnel, I'm feeling it's over there." It was only when he and the others were already halfway down a tunnel that eventually sloped up towards the surface that he froze with sudden realisation.
"I've been influenced," he said through gritted teeth. He could feel the remnants of the mental influence…domination, actually, now that he could feel and taste it, dribbling away from his Anima. "Its defences."
"What are you saying?" Rejan asked absently, "Wrong way?"
"No. Well, yes, actually," Salter said, "We are going the wrong way. I was right the first time, our target is in the city centre. Except it has a mental domination field."
Rejan froze in mid-step and glowered. "And how will we overcome that? Chaos barrier?"
Salter shook his head. From how thorough and insidious the effect was, a little bit of Chaos wouldn't do anything other than feed the effect. "Let's set up camp. I'll think of something. But let's go back to that city first."
With the group turned around and the bump of direction corrected, they made good time getting back to the ruined city. In less than a full day, they'd holed up in a building near the perimeter wall, safely out of sight from the moat and the city centre.
Now how would one get past mental domination?
Salter reviewed countermeasures taught by the Uaran agency, as well as some of the knowledge stored within the Chaos Seed. The primary method of protection was to encase the Anima with an ablative layer of Animus, or Chaos in his case. That way, the domination effect would spend itself on the barrier before reaching his Anima and affecting his mind. Unfortunately, Animus barriers were rarely effective against a power gap that huge. The Avos was likely on par with the Chaos Duke, at least when it was in its home ground and the Duke on hostile territory. That still meant that either of them could squash him like a bug.
Another method was to search for a gap in the field, a natural weak point where the Avos's attention wasn't as focused. Mental influences, especially those that overwrote memory and volition, required active Intent after all. If the Avos was recuperating, it could not remain vigilant all the time.
Well, if they were going to scout out weaknesses, then they had to put in the time. Salter readied himself to skulk in the ruins, but as soon as he left the shelter of the camp, he froze in surprise and fear.
Standing across the road surrounded by a large troop of Revenants was a…bigger one. With a large horn sticking out of the helm, and was nearly twice as big as the others. And even worse, it looked him straight in the eye…and spoke.