Baccharum's dreamy scrying lasted for longer than Lieze anticipated. By the time the hour was out, he was just beginning to rouse from his trance, rising unsteadily to both feet and dragging a hand across his tired face, "Ugh… what a terrible headache."
"Finally coming to?" Lieze asked, "Please tell me you've learned something."
"I saw… no, give me a minute…" The open air was too free, too fresh for his liking. He sat back down and rocked from side to side, clenching his eyes whenever the fire burning in his head flared up, "I've never been too receptive to the rituals of Shamans…"
"I'm surprised. When you started discussing reagents after entering Akzhem, I thought the Shamans were masters of a different sort of alchemy." She waited patiently for him to sober up, "Is that something we'll have to worry about come our arrival in the Black City?"
"Most are fond of the roots in a more recreational manner." Baccharum's face grew soft, "Ah, I recall the days of my youth when I slinked off from training to smoke dried bloodstalks perched up on the city's rooftops, feeling like I was some distant, all-seeing monarch."
"Focus, Baccharum." Lieze frowned, "Our location."
"Of course." He sniffed and took a breath in, "You'll be pleased to hear that we aren't far from the Black City - maybe a day or two of laboured marching. The roots favoured us on this day."
"How does a wad of burning mushrooms tell you that?"
Baccharum raised his arm, extending a silver finger towards the faraway canopy, "I glimpsed the world through the eyes of a Spotted Courlbeak in its nest of tiny bones. When it took flight, I witnessed its path across the meadows, soaring near to where the canopy begins. I've never seen Akzhem so small and insignificant before. Even the twinkling lights of the Black City seemed as far away as a dream."
"Then we have our destination." Lieze stood up, "Did you learn anything else of import?"
"Nothing that I didn't already know." He replied, "-That the Head Shaman awaits us in his obsidian palace, and that he's rallied the Wichts against us for lack of a cohesive army."
"Did you learn his name? His powers?" She prodded.
"Please don't demand anything too comprehensive. Just remembering the last hour makes my skull feel as if it's going to split in half." Baccharum complained, "Shouldn't you already know one of the answers to those questions? If the Head Shaman is the last remaining Scion…"
"-Then he would be the Scion of transmutation." Lieze finished, "The problem is that the school of transmutation includes a wide spread of spells completely unrelated to one-another. Drayya only dabbles in the art herself, and she can walk through solid stone just as easily as she can make herself invisible."
"Forgive me for being reductive, but based on what I've heard, she isn't quite capable of true invisibility. The purpose of the spell is to transmute and refract incoming light in such a way that-"
"Yes, yes. I've heard this already. Let's just call it 'invisibility' and be done with the matter." Lieze waved her hand, "The point I'm trying to make is that this Head Shaman will be an unpredictable enemy. I shudder to think what his Heavenly Favour could be."
The Rootborne would be the least of her worries. She was able to turn the institutions and terrain of her previous foes against them, but Lieze couldn't have been any more out of her element than in the depths of Akzhem. The Elves, unlike humans or Dwarves, seemed to have arrived at some semblance of peace over the course of their long isolation. Driving a wedge between them seemed impossible.
"You've already felled two kingdoms." Baccharum shrugged, "Akzhem is a fragmented, lonely land. Enclaves respect the territories of their neighbours, and the Black City houses only a few thousand citizens at any given time."
"That's what worries me the most." She replied, "The fact that this seems like it will be the simplest conquest of all. But I know better than to expect simplicity."
Her short but meaningful conversation with the faceless entity beneath Alberich's fortress replayed in Lieze's mind. A single Scion remained. Once the Head Shaman was killed and his power usurped, her dream of a lifeless world would be in sight. Why then, did she not feel the crushing finality of the journey weighing down upon her soul? Where was the anticipation of the end? The swelling pride from issuing a challenge to the Gods themselves?
Perhaps, she thought, her reaction couldn't have been more appropriate. Death was often so sudden, and rarely welcome. To feel nothing, to perceive nothing - that celestial apathy was precisely the conclusion she sought. In one fell swoop, the Light in Chains would ravage the ties that bound her to that shameless reality, and the end of the universe would arrive in solemnity, rather than chaos.
Quiet. Sensible. Boring. All of these qualifiers and more, each of them speaking to some primal slice of Lieze's soul that demanded just one more battle, just one more victory against a worthy opponent. Frankly, she was greedy. Much too greedy for her own good. All she could do was hope that the master of the Black City would slake her thirst for a finale befitting a final triumph over the living.
Marché had remained true to his word, funnelling Lieze's command up to Drayya and having her perform an exhaustive survey into the effectiveness of their current forces. Over the course of the few days it would take to reach the Black City, a final opportunity to reorient the makeup of her army presented itself to Lieze - an opportunity she would have been foolish not to take full advantage of.
Of the three groups she had organised her thralls into, the 'Nimble' would be the most important. As always, the 'Durable' - Horrors and Rot Behemoths - would serve as cover and diversions for the more troublesome Briarknights and Stalkers. Her dominion over the Great Oak had reinforced the army with a steady buffer of enthralled Rootborne, mending the losses suffered from the attack.
"We used up most of our blast powder to regain some momentum, but we still have two barrels stowed away." As Deathguards flitted about like fireflies in the darkness, Drayya stood by Lieze's side and reported on their situation, "There's no telling how many more of these 'Rootborne' we'll have to deal with on our way to the Black City, and then there's the problem of the Elves waiting to pounce on us as soon as we let our guards down for a split second."
"I'll put a stop to that myself." Lieze replied, "Just give me a few hours to work."
It was about time she paid another visit to her Portable Home. The Stalkers had been a step in the right direction for countering Akzhem's dangers, but they weren't the last thrall Lieze intended to create. Her attention was brought back to the teachings of Kazor Nict, whose exhaustive determination had unravelled many practical issues with the art of fleshwarping.
She needed something that defied the established conventions of undead. Glossy remembrances of battles once fought bored into the grooves of her brain. The answer was there, in the haze of hyperactivity cutting across time and space; the Artificial Scions, the Manticore - flight was the frontier she sought. It was possible; the Manticore was living proof.
She grabbed a quill and ricocheted ideas off a sheet of parchment. The body needed to be light, lean, and aerodynamic, but without compromising lethality. Her theory settled on a powerful jaw - par for the course when it came to designing undead. The wings were a different matter, always too large and unwieldy no matter their composition.
"Weight needs to be shed…" She closed her eyes in thoughts, "Why not hollow out their bones?"
The idea of reducing durability seemed self-defeating, but Lieze had to consider the full breadth of a flying thrall's strategy to understand how such a change might have been worth the sacrifice. They would be fast - so incredibly fast that one would be lucky to land a glancing blow as they descended from on high with putrid jaws outstretched. She had no reason to prioritise physical integrity when they were going to be out of reach most of the time.
With her design taking shape, the matter of execution poked its troublesome head over the horizon. Her [Fleshwarper] specialisation had driven knowledge into her brain like a stake. Angles never before perceived were crawling, morphing, taking shape in the root of her consciousness. All she had to do was reach in and drag that inspiration out to reality kicking and screaming.
Since she didn't want her study covered in a mixture of blood and viscera, she forced the alchemy table out from the extradimensional space and found a neat clearing in the forest to work her expertise. Thanks to the meticulous weight-shedding necessitated by the design, she could easily use a single Gravewalker to perform the ritual.
Firstly, she trimmed the fat - literally. Anything that was deemed unnecessary or contrary to her design was forcibly removed; hair, arms, feet, skin, bones, and organs stripped off with impunity soon had her workspace varnished with blood. Of course, some of the essentials had to remain; a spine, for instance, unless she fancied creating some sort of winged earthworm. To be safe, she perforated the vertebrae until it was on the verge of crumbling to dust.
The physique began to emerge before she'd even begun the process of shaping flesh. She saw the ferocity lingering within that twitching thing's flayed musculature with the practised eye of a sculptor glimpsing beauty beneath a block of marble. Her hands moved before she could recognise her own intentions.
So engrossed in her work, she didn't notice the crowd of Deathguards congregating to witness her masterful methods. Bones snapped, relocated, reconjoined, and elongated as if manipulated by the Blackbriar itself, nestling within pockets of flesh with all the ease of snapping two pieces of a jigsaw together.
The process, which would have taken the average necromancer weeks to theorise, never mind execute, barely occupied a few minutes of Lieze's time before there were no kinks left to sort out. What was once a Gravewalker had metamorphosed into something beastly, bat-like, not entirely of their world, stripped of all worldly instincts beyond its need to ravage whatever Lieze deemed a threat.
Grotesque
Level 29 Undead
HP - 499 / 499 MP - 0 / 0
BODY - 29 MIND - 0 SOUL - 0
Superficially weak, but singular in its purpose. Lieze had engineered the beast to be hopeless in any pursuit other than devouring its prey. Compared to the rest of its emaciated body, the jaw was a gruesome welt of muscle and bone designed to kill with a single, severing bite. The pair of wings folded at its back were webbed with pallid skin and large enough to support the thrall's miniscule weight.
When Lieze turned, she recoiled at the small audience who had gathered to observe her creation.
"A flying thrall…" One Deathguard blinked, "I didn't think it was possible."
"How did you fashion those wings using a single Gravewalker!?"
"I can't see any scars, either! The mending is perfect…"
Their mutterings soon had the meadow captured in curiosity. When Drayya inevitably pushed her way through the crowd, she whistled upon noticing the newly-crowned Grotesque, "Most of these fools are still trying to wrap their heads around the Stalkers. Don't tell me you want them to start creating these, too?"
"Naturally." Lieze nodded, "I want the sky beneath Akzhem's canopy choked with these thralls before we reach the Black City."