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  Lirasia You have been ied with Undead Blight.A debilitating iion that grows stronger every day, rotting flesh and propagating to everything it touches.-1% to maximum health+1 t per day10% ce to spread Undead Blight on tactIf you die while ied, your body will be raised as a zombieSmall ce per vitality to recover from Undead BlightDisease – t: 23

  Lira stumbled for the umpteenth time; her faltering sciousness jerked back to reality by the threat of falling. The white waters of the Myrin River rapids roared ceaselessly beside her, filling the air with damp spray and slig the rocks beh her feet. She reached instinctively for her magic again, but it slipped from her grasp, held in abeyance just out of reach by the awful Mana Severance curse Alexander had inflicted upon her.

  Worse still was the corruption of death magic that had taken root withiwisting and ing her mind. She wasn’t certaily how long she had been walking – her sciousness shifted, drifting somewhere between awareness and stupor. Nightmare Slumber fed incessant whispers of insanity into the back of her mind, dragging her down to the dark embrace of the terrifying phantasms – and every time she succumbed, she woke weaker, her mind’s defenses eroded by the corruption. Soon she would no longer wake.

  One more step. One more.

  You have been afflicted with Domain Withdrawal.Separation from your domain weakens you.-10% to maximum health.Affli – Duration: Indefinite. t: 4

  Everything was excruciating pain. She doubled over as the immediate spasm wracked a body already ravaged by blight and poison, her bruised and battered face twisting in agony. But nothing came close to the sting of betrayal, withdrawal, and the dreadful raw wound in her heart where the soothing sense of her forest had onestled. She would rather have had her arms s torn off by that zombie troll than lose her forest. But it was gone – she could no longer feel the e to its mana and her domain – the forest that had been her home, her life, for thousands of years. Gone forever.

  Furious, she brushed the unwaears from her eyes.

  Alexander Gray.

  She ched her teeth in anger and frustration. How had she been so blind to his deception? To the fact that he was a Neancer? She was over four thousand years old, not some simple vilge girl, hanging on to the false promises and stories of some local knight. Yet she had fallen for his handsome fad pretty words just the same. Her fury lent some measure of strength to her blight-ridden body, and she pressed on.

  Just one more step. A water-slicked stone rolled underfoot, and she stumbled again.

  Her miurned unbidden to the horror and grief of waking to the sight of her beloved forest ed by the blight. She had felt the remnants dying, filled no longer with the animals she had grown to love, but with the stench of foul uh. She was not a vindictive person, but she wished with all her being to live to see his downfall. To see him pay for destroying everything she loved and driving her, cursed and dying, from her home. For the first time in millennia, she yearned for the tools of violeher than her css’s delicate magic of growth and nurturing.

  No ce of that. It erhaps a mercy that it would all end in a few days. She did not relish the thought that she would bee one of the undead, serving him after she passed from the life she barely g to now, but if she didn’t find a new home soon, she would certainly perish from the withdrawal.

  She reached with her senses, uning with the pnts as she made her painstaking way along the riverbank, and to her surprise, her magic respoo her will. “tihey reassured her. “The mana is there… up ahead. Keep walking and you will find it.” She gritted her teeth and pressed on, driven only by the images and impressions of the deure mana the pnts told of further to the north.

  Myrin’s Keep. It was cruelly far. There was no real ce, but it was the only choice she had. If I just reach it… Maybe she could cim it, save herself, and make a new home.

  Or perhaps it would simply vanish like a mirage in the desert, taunting her with the illusion of water.

  As she stumbled onward, her miurned once again to the strange boy who had released her from her tormentor.

  Aliandra Ali sat cross-legged, perched on her new favorite spot atop the broad back of her Forest Guardian, holding tightly to the ridges of bark armor for support as they pressed on through the jus st of old wood, sap, and new growth filled her lungs, shooting right to her core in the way that only smells steeped in nostalgia could. She studied the passing trees and rowth from her elevated vantage point beside several of her Kobold minions sitting on the rough bark armor that shook with the powerful rhythm of her elemental’s slow, plodding gait. She was grateful to be high enough up that, in the moments when her emotions threateo overwhelm her, she wasn’t forced to share her tears.

  Her friends seemed to be in good spirits, chatting away with each other, somehow intuitively grasping her need for a little space to be with her memories. Or maybe Malika said something? She smiled though, hearing the pride they had at having helped her earn this Forest Guardian – it had truly been a team effort, and Ali felt an outp of gratitude to them and their enthusiasm for helpio grow stronger.

  “That way,” she instructed, direg her Forest Guardian to follow the game trail, trag roughly in the dire of the slowly increasing may – the dire of maximum curiosity for both her and . Each lumbering step of her massive steed sent tremors through her body, shaking the bushes and trees beside the trail and she cautioned her newly reformed minion army following along beside them to be alert in case the sound of their passage attracted any monstrous attention.

  When she had resummoned her Kobolds after the st fight, she had discovered that if she allowed her Grimoire free rein to take extra mana, it would summon her monsters with already created gear – clearly something new from when her ization had advanced. While still random, the gear choices seemed heavily biased toward what the minion could use – her mages had all been summoned with an assortment of robes, while her Storm Shaman appeared with a shirt, a shield, and a sword. The levels aions were not optimal, nor was the choice of sword for her shaman, but this development was certainly going to save her a lot of time – and she could still do it manually if she cared.

  Avatar would have been incredible, she thought, ying a hand on the Forest Guardian and trying to imagine what it might be like to be inside such a monster, seeing through its eyes, and walking around with its body temporarily her own. She wasn’t having sed thoughts about her skill choice – but Avatar had seemed extraordinarily powerful, and she had just earhe guardian – she couldn’t help but wonder what it might have been like with such a powerful form.

  “Ali, how much is your health regeiht now?” asked from down below, walking beside the guardian’s front leg. He had his notebook out, but his eyes were still vigintly sing the surrounding jungle.

  Health RegeionPertage of maximum health regeed per hour.+125% Sanctuary.+639% Forest Guardian.Total: +764%

  “Here you go,” she said, sharing her numbers with him, still floored by the sheer amount eion her guardian projected. Like most csses, her base health regeion was zero, meaning that she required healing magic – an Acolyte, Priest, or a potion of some kind – to recover from any injuries. With Mato providing his Sanctuary aura, and her Forest Guardian’s stupendeion aura, she would – by her quick calcution – regee her full health in as little as seven minutes. Not that it mattered a whole lot to her – she had measured the Forest Guardian’s aura to extend out a bit more than five meters from its immense bulk – exceptionally effective for Mato, Malika, and whatever melee minions she chose to make, but Ali was uo personally be from the aura. At least during bat. It would be a waste to have one hang back with me, wouldn’t it?

  “Hmm… that’s curious. Your pertage is different,” said, pausing to scribble a few things, somehow still walking with agility and poise even while writing. “Perhaps because you have a higher css level than the guardian? The rest of us are gettily seven hundred pert from the aura, so… three pert redu per extra level, maybe?” It seemed had found a new puzzle, and he appeared to be quite absorbed in solving it. The numbers he had guessed seemed to work but Ali was tent to wait till she had the free time to summon several guardians and examihe differences directly.

  “It’s impressively high still, even pared to Mato’s Sanctuary aura,” she added, trying to get a feel for exactly how this might affect her strategy and the choices for which minions she would bring to bat. Her shamans and rogues were certainly going to be enormously in any fight involving elee, taking a lot of the load off her healers. Bugbears too, but she hadn’t made those in a while – given the levels of what they were up against, she found her slimes and oozes to be far more effective. Currently, her minions numbered only a siorm Shaman, but several Scalding Slimes, all of which could be provided she kept them close to the guardian.

  “Mato’s aura improves mana and stamina too, so it’s arguably more powerful,” Malika chimed in.

  “That’s true,” Ali agreed. She had certainly beed from his shared mana regeion whenever she could be close enough – typically only during post-bat recovery. “Does this mean I prioritize area damage more?” It certainly seemed like her opportuo use her favorite fireball attacks had just grown substantially.

  “Are you sure you’re not secretly a Fire Mage, Ali?” Mato asked, chug from down below.

  “Hey!”

  The derees, moss, and undergrowth of the hot, humid jungle slowly began to give way to clumps and stands of bamboo, and soon Ali found herself riding through a dim forest of dizzyingly tall, giant green stalks sprouting through a thick yer of deg leaves that carpeted the ground. The raucous calls of is and the crashes and roars of distant monsters hunting slowly faded away, leaving a muted calm, perhaps expet atmosphere. Even the heavy thumps and vibrations of her Forest Guardian’s stride were muffled by the thick, springy yer of rottiation.

  But it was the appearance of the ambient mana that attracted her attention instantly. If the roiling, chaotiature mana in the jungle was like a sea in the middle of the storm, here in the bamboo forest, it was like a deep ke – still, heavy, and dense. Quiet, but flowing smoothly. The bamboo itself appeared to be drawing in ambient mana and sending it flowing upward in a vast upwelling current into the dense opy of leaves well beyond Ali’s ability to see.

  Living Bamboo – Grass – level 32 (Nature)

  Nature affinity. Like everything else in this strange pce, the bamboo had been ed by the glut of abundant ambient mana. Many of the giant stems were well over a meter in diameter, making them appear like giant braree trunks, rather than grass. The entire forest seemed to be exerting a soothing pressure on the underlying ambient mana. I could use this! Ali thought, her mind instantly filled with possibilities for applying it to her domain – nature affinity pnts geed her domain mana, and this Living Bamboo was simply enormous.

  She created a barrier and flew herself down to the ground, iing the bamboo up close.

  “You going to learn that?” Mato asked.

  “It’s got a nature mana affinity, so I think it will be very helpful,” she said. She had been so disappointed when her oaks and maples had not worked to grow the density of her domain, but this bamboo might just do the trick.

  “It’s a great idea, see how peaceful it looks?” Mato said, smiling. “See how it seems to attract the wisps? Maybe you duplicate this atmosphere in the cavern somewhere?”

  “That would be great,” Ali said. A little deeper into the forest, visible past the edge of the trail they walked, the bamboo forest was lit with the glow of hundreds of glowworms and wisps sedately floating and h about, seeming to follow the currents of the mana. High above, she could evehe occasional fshes of light and brief glimpses of golden scales that had to e from the luminous dragos hunting for dinner – the sole remaining remnants of the previously plentiful light affinity creatures.

  “It would be o Meditate in a forest like this,” Malika said.

  It was certainly pretty and peaceful, and Ali could easily see a nice rge bamboo stand somewhere between the ke and the shrine. Being able to rex in such a space whenever she wanted sounded perfect, and it seemed that Mato would be excited to help her build it. She reached out, pg her hand on one of the bamboo stems, and triggered her destru.

  “Ow!” she cried out aloud as a stinging jolt of pain stabbed through her leg, rudely ripping her away from the introspective thoughts of a peaceful imagined forest and disrupting her magic.

  You have been afflicted with Poison. +1.25 Poison damage per sed.Poison – Duration: 10 minutes. t: 1

  In an instant, the angry rumbling hulk of her Forest Guardian was h protectively over her, and all her minions were suddenly ready for battle.

  Protruding from her leg amid a trickle of fresh blood staining her clothes was a thin sliver of wood – a dart or a thorn that pierced deep into the muscle. Grittieeth against the pain, she grabbed it firmly and yanked, pulling the spike free. In her hand, she held a surprisingly long, needle-sharp dart of wood that dripped amber with her own blood and stained with a dark green sticky sap. She stumbled a bit as her leg gave out whe weight on it, the pain and the poison making her muscles tremble.

  “Poison,” she warned. Colleg her wits, she put up a barrier in the dire of the spike, just in time to hear a rapid sequence of swishes and cracks as multiple wooden needles splintered against the magic of her barrier before falling to the ground. A dark viscous green stain remained where the projectiles had struck her barrier, slowly dripping down the imperable golden wall with the sistency of honey or syrup. She crouched behind her barrier, sing the bamboo forest for clues to the danger as she let the soft pulse of her Acolyte’s magic fight the poison.

  “There!” ’s call was matched with the tracer-like shot of his glowing arrow flyiween the bamboo and smming into a most bizarre creature. Previously invisible, Ali had only been able to see it because of ’s attack, and if she lost sight of it for a moment, she was certain she would be uo find it again. The monster’s body, if it could be called that, was a stick of bamboo almost as thick as her arm and a little over a meter long. Sprouting from it were six long segmented legs and various twigs and leaves. An ungainly, oversized bamboo stisect. Its camoufge was so good in this enviro, that the only thing Ali could fault was the fact that the body was horizontal, not vertical like the Living Bamboo stalks – and that the flow of mana through its body didn’t quite match its surroundings.

  Bamboo Crawler – Grass – level 27 (Nature)

  A brief flicker of nature magic stirred within the Bamboo Crawler’s stem, and something shot out at high speed with an audible thwip. dodged sideways and the projectile smashed into the bambht behind him. Difficult to see as it was, it reminded Ali of a diagram of a blowgun she had once discovered during a fun research project. A camoufged, self-guided blowgun made from bamboo.

  “Take cover!” Malika shouted, dartiween the bamboo stalks.

  From behind the prote of her barrier, Ali let loose her Are Bolts, a triple-stream of magic that arced up and over her barrier to thread the bamboo and smash into the strange mohat had attacked her. The dark, glowing red of fme danced among the nearby bamboo trunks as Ali’s Fire Mages retaliated, unleashing the odor of smoke and brimstoo the peaceful forest. Unbidden, her Forest Guardian charged, its huge bulk accelerated by its Rush skill, leaving a wake of smashed and uprooted bamboo. But the Bamboo Crawler fell from its perch before Mato and the Forest Guardian could even make the distance, dead from the hail of arrows, bolts, and fire they had unleashed through the peaceful forest.

  Yroup has defeated Bamboo Crawler – Grass – level 27 (Nature).

  Ali limped over to where the monster y, her leg still numb from the slowly fading poison.

  “Sype monster. I think it has det stealth too… I couldn’t see it until it attacked,” said, staring down at the crumpled and burnt heap of bamboo sticks that was the corpse of the monster. He poked at it with his foot a few times as if to check that it was dead before he let Ali have it.

  Strewn about the strange monster’s former perch were the golden corpses of a half-dozen Luminous Dragos, eae impaled with a slender wooden stake. “It must hunt the little dragons,” Ali observed while her destru skill did its work. She took her time, destrug all the tiny brightly-scaled drago corpses and the knobby Bamboo Crawler before seg a few more samples of the Living Bamboo while her friends kept watch for her.

  “Which way?” asked her. Normally he would be the one pig out the path, but it was her mana sight they were using to figure out the dire of what they hoped would be the source of the heavy nature mana.

  “Back that way,” Ali pointed, indig the trail they had been following. While the mana seemed to flow more calmly here, she only had to gnce around to see the increase iy in that dire.

  They set off once more, but this time Ali kept her barrier magic active, hopefully able to intercept any surprise attacks. But it was who kept them safe, sending his motes of light ranging out ahead of them to flush out the stealthy snipers, and his incredibly acute vision to point them out before they could shoot.

  ***

  Ali’s Forest Guardian slowed, ing to a halt at the edge of the dense bamboo forest. From her spot high up on its back, she could make out the trail meandering down the slope to the banks of a viridian green ke below, led in a terraced hollow, up against a vast mountain h rod shattered stohe entire surface of the ke bubbled, erupting in geyser-like explosions of dense mana that shot tens of meters into the air before casg down to the surface to pour off into the forest like a tsunami of mana. But to her mundane vision, the pool was quiet and still, with only the light of thousands of slowly rising wisps indig the otherwise invisible and chaos visible to her mana sight.

  “Another spawning pool,” said, quietly identifying the phenomenon. Ali’s Identify skill failed to activate oerrain, but she could see the obvious simirities pared to the pool of light and radiahey had previously discovered.

  “That’s liquid nature mana,” Ali added, her skin prig even at this distahe air was filled with the cloying dense st of growth mixed with rot as the evaporating mana tinuously billowed out from the ke. This time, there was no dripping waterfall from on high, so Ali cast around trying to identify the source, and there she found it. On the far side of the ke, part of the mountain of boulders and ragged stone and almost fully covered by rowth, she suddenly reized the shape of a mana dehe giant pyramid structure had split – fractured into several pieces – and dense, glowing liquid mana seeped out through the cracks, f small streams and rivulets that flowed down into the ke.

  “That’s the remains of the city,” she said as her mind suddenly so a wider perspective, taking iire mountain of broken stone and shards of rock.

  “Wow, you’re right!” excimed, his gaze snapping upward to where the suspended rings of the ruined city should be, but Ali’s eyes were not good enough to pierce that far.

  “Wow, that’s crazy," Mato said.

  Ali didn’t o see the ruins the debris of the shattered upper levels of the city that had fallen here. led among the rod the rowth she could clearly see the shattered bck shards, remnants of the magical stone foundations of the rings above, and even shattered, the mana denser was uniquely reizable. It was the sheer size of the mountain of rubble and rowth that had kept her from initially eg it to its in.

  Spawning from the surface of the ke, or crawling out onto the muddy banks, was a tinuous stream of strangely ed is, frogs, snakes, and occasionally rger monsters brought into being by the unthinking chaotic power of the trated mana aed into the forest like some kind of waste byproduct of the ke itself.

  Roaming the banks was the rgest Forest Guardian Ali had ever seen. Perhaps a third rger than the one she was riding, it slowly wandered around the ke, pausing to drink directly from the glowing green mana. How it survive that? Mana this trated was dangerous, affeg whatever it touched in strange ways. That much was obvious by the very nature of the jungle and its inhabitants.

  Forest Guardian – Wood Elemental – level 53 (Nature)

  “That’s a higher level than the Wights,” Ali said, flying down and gng over at Malika.

  “We’ve leveled sihen,” Mato tered.

  It was true. While Ali didn’t necessarily feel that different, she had gai css levels and quite a few skill levels singaging the twin undead Wights to defeat the Ruins of Dal’mohra – and this monster wasn’t a raid-level threat or a boss.

  “I think we do it,” Malika answered, thoughtfully. “What do you think, ?”

  “Ali has a Guardian now, that should make a big difference,” he said. “And there’s only one of them this time. I’d hate to think what regeion that thing puts out.”

  “Ok,” Ali answered, double-cheg her minions. She had oorm Shaman which she would send in with the Scalding Slimes. Hopefully, between Mato’s and the Forest Guardian’s auras, they’d have enough to keep her shaman alive among the roots and vihe remainder of her forces were Acolytes and Fire Mages. Good enough, she thought, deg she didn’t o make any ges.

  “Follow Mato,” Ali anded, levitating herself up off her Forest Guardian’s back. It raised its head in a deep throaty roar that caused the ground to tremble, the vibration in the air thrumming powerfully through her body. It charged. Stunned for a moment by the visceral sensation of its raw power felt from such proximity, Ali stared as it crashed into the rger enemy guardian with inprehensible strength and violence.

  It would take her shaman and oozes a little loo reach the melee, but it seemed Mato had the monster well locked down. “Firebolts,” she said, and her Fire Mages cackled with glee as they prepared to unleash their favorite attack spells.

  Volleys of firebolts nced out across the open beach between the bamboo and the mariking the giant Forest Guardian in a thumping, sizzling salvo of destru, leaving curling wisps of smoke and scorched holes in the bark armor. Ali kept her barrier at the ready and added her Are Bolts to the barrage.

  “Steady,” said, loosing arrow after arrow in a glowing stream.

  Looks pretty straightforward, Ali thought. While the Forest Guardian was indeed huge, Mato seemed to be handling the damage just fihe area around the dueling Forest Guardians exploded with writhing pnts and roots as the two auras of nature magic collided in a daunting dispy of nature’s fury. The Scalding Slimes ig all, slipping through the tangled growth like it wasn’t even there and flowing up the Forest Guardian’s legs to unleash near-invisible white jets of high-pressure steam into its back.

  “Your oozes are the perfect ter to that growth magic,” observed, his eyes studying the fight unfolding before them.

  Ali nodded, just about to add her thoughts when a sharp crack sounded frht beside her. She whipped her head around, finding a telltale green stain slowly dripping down the middle of her barrier. There was a soft rapid staccato puffing noise and three of her Kobold mages stumbled, clutg injured limbs with wooden needles protruding from their scales.

  “, Bamboo Crawlers!” she yelled, and spun about, his eyes stabbing into the dappled bamboo forest behind them.

  “Shit, there’s a lot of them,” he said, his b already singing. “Mato, Malika, beware!”

  “Gather up close,” Ali instructed, drawing all her Kobolds together and feeding more mana to her Barrier to grow it as she twisted it around for maximum cover.

  “Are they attracted by noise?” Ali asked. Her eyes were nowhere near as good as ’s, but now that they had fought several of these Bamboo Crawlers, she knew what to look for. By the soft shimmers in the ambient mana, there were at least half a dozen of them lurking in the forest.

  “Mana, I think,” spat from between his teeth. “They don’t have ears.”

  Ali ighe melee with the guardians down by the pool, instinctively knowing the Bamboo Crawlers would destroy them if left unchecked. Poison might not do lots of upfront damage but left to stack up, it would rapidly get out of hand.

  She picked a target for her mages and added her Are Bolts, as she and worked to clear the unwele additions to their battle.

  “Something’s ing out of the pool!” Malika yelled.

  “Shit, now what?” said, his head swiveling around.

  Malika’s voice had sounded superficially calm, but Ali knew her well. Hurriedly, she gnced over to where they were fighting by the ke. The green liquid mana swirled and shifted, and a dark green and brohous blob slowly hauled itself out of the water. Its body exteemporary pseudopod limbs in all dires, shifting and ing as it moved.

  Toxic Spitter – Ooze – level 55 (Poison)

  “Holy shit, that’s big!” excimed.

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