Path of the Deathless

332 Haunted [III]

—Valor Thann332

Haunted [III]

Uva despised being possessed. She despised the Usurper-Narrator's soul coating hers like a layer of slime. It wasn't even her mind that succumbed; instead, it was like another will had assumed the shape of her body and had wrapped around her soul. She was effectively trapped by a glove that inversely wielded her to its whim. She could still use her mental skills, but once that glove latched on, the totality of her was taken by a force far greater than she could resist or even knew how to fight against in the first place.

At several points while she was directed like a weapon to strike at the flesh and mind of her companion, a sickness threatened to spill out from her, but the Usurper-Narrator refused to let her release that taint. It was held in until the loop was reset. Uva could still feel the twin sensations of disgust and despair, but the actual urge to vomit was gone.

Adam was gone, as was Evanescia, for that matter. Uva was alone again, trapped with her own thoughts, facing what had just happened. Facing what she had done to others so many times.

The psionic effigy of Harkness that existed within her mental space snorted as she glared down at her mistress with disgust.

A bleakness settled into Uva’s mood. She cared little for Harkness, didn't regret what she'd done to the woman. But when considering all the ones she'd taken as sleeves since her Psychomancy evolved…

Part of her had known she was doing something dark, but it was always justifiable. She was fighting for Weave. She couldn't hold anything back. She had to use every advantage she had, and as a Psychomancer, turning an enemy against their comrades felt like a feat of triumph. Uva drank in their pain with ease and wielded their emotions and bodies like puppets upon dancing strings—for that was what they were.

She'd thought she understood the weight of her actions. She thought that by tasting their emotions, their suffering secondhand, she felt the weight of her deeds and judged them to be a worthy exchange for the benefits their pain brought.

But their emotions were filtered through hers, and her philosophy diluted all their pain into something far more palatable.

That palatability vanished when the Usurper-Narrator forced the very same fate on Uva. It was the same fate the gods of the Outside tried to force on her. It was the same fate she had practiced for so many. It was a fate that the System had tried to carve into her so many times before. Perhaps the System had a taste for irony? Uva couldn't say. What she could definitively claim was the agony of the undiluted firsthand made things far clearer than those imbibed through the second. When she boiled and writhed under another being's control, one beyond her ability to reject or resist, she understood what it meant truly to be an absolute slave.

And she despised it.

Such was why she kept her Psychomancy to herself, using her threads to scout ahead only, not truly piercing into any minds. Matriarch of the Enshadowed Web allowed her magic to climb free of her body, to wriggle through the stone and strike without even being connected to her. It was a potent Skill Alteration, one that came with her metamorphosis. But that metamorphosis was spiritual, mental, and physical. It was not philosophical. How she saw the world and how she mostly understood herself hadn't changed.

Things were different now. She kept her Psychomancy away from the ogres, away from the other prisoners. She kept her mind to herself. And that was most uncharacteristic of her these days. She began to feel an itch, a borderline urge, for her to take hold of something. To at least shed one of her Aberrant Fractals and wear it. She was so used to stretching her consciousness out and wielding a collection of different people toward her end that it felt stifling to be trapped in a single body alone.

So, as the towering beasts stomped their way toward the subterranean depths of the Fairwoods once again, crossing through the massive jaws of the ab-skeletal beast trapped in the tunnel, descending another set of spiraling staircases that went deeper and deeper into the black, she remained entombed in her own mind, facing her own actions.

Uva thought to herself

Harkness scoffed again.

Uva thought about commanding Harkness to be silent, but there was little point. This wasn't actually Harkness. It was a replica of her, and it was good to gain perspective on oneself, especially from a loathsome foe. The words weren't always accurate, but you could always rely on them to highlight your personal flaws. Increasingly, Uva realized she had been thoughtless. It was a strange flaw for a Psychomancer to have. Some minds needed to be controlled; some things she had to do. This was her main skill, her true talent. Without it, they wouldn't have gotten nearly as far, wouldn't have been able to spare so many lives from harm. She had intruded into other people's minds with merely a casual justification and never took the time to process what it would be like to languish as a mind slave.

And now, quite literally trapped behind a series of crude metal bars, surrounded by other slaves, Uva decided to continue considering how she wanted to act, what she was to do.

The marching ogres sang, mumbling jolly tunes, while the prisoners within the cage huddled together, whimpering and begging for unseen gods Uva had never heard of to deliver them from this place. The girl Evanescia had inserted herself in previously was missing, as was the winged elf that always tried to rouse a rebellion. Additionally, the three ogres were clad in glistening layers of mithril. The chain-linked armor wrapped around them swayed in ringing lengths. It was a blatantly artificial and unsuitable addition, considering the rest of their attire consisted of little more than messy rags. Much like the circlets, the chainmail was likely meant to counter a specific skill. While the headwear and the raw stupidity of the lumbering brutes were impediments for Uva, she suspected their new armor was meant to serve as an obstacle for Adam, judging by its faint aura of incandescence.

“Do the elf smell bad?”

“Yuh!”

“Whatcha gonna do?”

“Chuck ‘em face-first in the stew!”

The ogres snorted and chuckled to each other like a group of hogs between lines, reveling in song as they continued their descent.

Despite their lacking intelligence, Uva couldn't deny that one of the ogres had a pretty good baritone. If life had permitted it, he might have found himself walking the path of the Singer instead of serving as a minion to a ridiculous enterprise of slavery. Or so it seemed. Uva still knew too little about the Fairwoods to properly tell if the ogre was an actual person or merely a sophisticated but ultimately unreal construct created by Evanescia to play a part in this story.

Harkness answered.

Taking a stance to defend Evanescia’s literary skills felt odd, but she did think it was a valid point.

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Uva didn't appreciate being ordered by a figment of her own imagination, especially not the shadow of an enemy, but that didn't make the latter wrong. Apprehensions about personal agency aside, she knew what would happen if she waited too long. The ogres would give these prisoners and her over to the Gnomish Council, and most of them would be condemned to the mithril mines. A few of the weaker captives would then be fed to the ogres, and though no loop had lasted long enough for Uva to find out about what would happen to the children, she had no interest in doing so. Pair all that with the mind-crushing slave collars, and she had to act, even if there was a level of newfound discomfort that came with her choices.

Harkness’ cadence sounded as if she were talking to a small child trying to put a square piece of wood into a round hole.

Uva shot back. But then, her eyes widened. Harkness' callousness brought with it an epiphany. Psychomancy was more than control. Psychomancy was communication. Uva could do far more than simply reach in and break another's will. No, she could show them truths—connect the prisoners to their guards. With a new strategy in mind, she reached into the minds of one of the children and harnessed their fear. At the same time, one of her other Psychomancy strands, wriggling its way through the solid matter of the cavern, burst out from the walls and speared into Squinty.

Her choice of ogre was simple. Squinty was the softest of the trio. Fingers was more outright cruel. A bad egg through and through. The one that carried the cage was so stupid that trying to dive into his thoughts felt like swimming through cement as a Pathless. Considering all that, along with Squinty's singing voice and his childlike fascination with the world, there was a resonance between him and the young, whimpering prisoners that were fated to be gnomish slaves. The ogre's circlet flared with counter-Psychomantic mana upon her intrusion. It formed a barrier against her strand, but two others speared down from the ceiling and plunged through its protective threshold. Once inside, they tethered themselves tightly to the ogre's ego and actively served as extensions of Uva.

Everything that entered her mind spilled over into the ogres thereafter.

The effects were subtle at first. Squinty's singing voice turned low and mournful, and his jubilant nature died down. He sniffled between verses, even forgot lines. Simple as the brutes were, they weren't entirely blind. Fingers squinted at Squinty, an uglier frown creeping across his ugly face. “Wot’s with you today? Got another case of da tommies?”

Squinty shook his head. “Just feel bad is all. Bad about the lil uns.” He stared at the two children clinging to each other in the cage and the other prisoners, who, though cowed and traumatized in their own ways, huddled tight around the young, trying to protect them from the monsters' attention. The only one that seemed indifferent was Uva, who still had her eyes closed, pretending to be unconscious. “Don't got nobody to takes care of them. Now they mights be stew.”

“Yuh, but theys tasty still, right?” Fingers countered sagely.

“Oh,” Squinty said, all melancholy leaving his voice as his emotions inverted in an incomprehensible instant. “I guess you right. Do the elf smell bad?”

“Yuh!” the cage-carrier grunted.

“Whatcha gonna do?”

“Chuck ‘em face-first in the stew!”

Uva sighed. Such was the problem with trying to manipulate something so stupid. The slightest push would send them careening over an edge. Which edge? Who could tell?

The Seeker evolved her methods. She began pulling at the children's memories, dredging up bitter emotions of misery.

“I want my dad, I want my dad!” the little boy sobbed, clawing at himself. He was so stressed that his nails were picking apart his skin, and his bare arms bled freely.

The girl beside him was quivering. She was an orphan, but she still remembered the other children, the matrons that took care of her. She wasn't from this place. She remembered a village bathed in sunlight, near the Summer Court, beneath the traveling dawn. There they were meant to harvest the fields and to deliver that bounty to their lord's lieges in exchange for eternal prosperity.

The lives of both children changed when night fell and the raid happened. The ogres came to their homes, smashed through walls, and took whatever they desired. And with that came an incomparable feeling of loss.

A feeling Uva was trying her hardest to get Squinty to feel.

“But I don't ‘ave a da,” Squinty mumbled. “Don't even think I got a ma.” Suddenly, the ogre stopped, and rather than feeling the sorrow of losing a parent or seeing oneself snatched from a beloved home, confusion spilled out from the ogre. It wasn't exactly the sensation Uva had wanted to evoke, but she found herself trapped by a similar sense of befuddlement.

“Squinty, why’s you bloody stopping again?” Fingers groaned. “Whas wit you today?”

“Been ‘avin strange thoughts, is all,” Squinty said, rubbing at his chin. “Don't know why, but I keep wonderin’ where my father is. I don't have a father. I crawl out the moss and all like yous. The Spore Mother gave mes to the world.”

Fingers let out an incomprehensible gurgling noise. “Well, you're rememberin’ right. I swears, Squinty, must be something you ate, because I don't got these thoughts at all.”

“Maybe yous just smarter than me, Fingers. Smart enough that yous don't got to think at all.”

Fingers laughed boisterously. “Now you sees. Is why Long Belly Gru put mes in charge. And my smarts says that Long Belly Gru’s probably smarter than alls of us, and wes should just keep going and bring these slaves over so we can stop thinkin’ about them!”

And that provoked a grin on Squinty's face. “I think you’s right. It's genius, Fingers. Absolutes genius.”

Uva was speechless once more. Her newly gained empathy almost died in its crib on the spot. She certainly no longer felt bad for them; part of her mind drifted toward the delectable possibility of shredding them apart using her Aberrant Fractals or simply freezing them in place with a Cryo-Chrono spell for as long as she could.

Philosophical musings aside, Uva adapted her strategy. She sent a slithering tendril of Psychomancy to crash against Fingers. His headwear flared bright, and the translucent mana formed a hardened dome in the direction of the attack. Fingers swept wildly, snarling with hate and reactive frustration. “Gets away from mes, fly! Damn moss bugs! Think one just tried to sting me brains.”

While he was distracted, she went after Squinty once more. At the same time, she directed another stack of her consciousness to do something she should have started with. She sought one of the gnomes, namely the aforementioned Long Belly Gru, the gnomish slave master of the southwestern scale of the Deepdiver. A dozen mana strings shot down deeper past the spiral path they were taking. Another sliver of her power was devoted to plucking at Squinty's memories, trying to discover moments of hatred or strife between him and Fingers.

That didn't take long. Fingers had always been the larger ogre, someone who took food from Squinty's bowl when he thought the latter wasn't looking. The few times he was caught, he jabbed his thumb into Squinty's eyes, deliberately trying to blind him, as if that would make the smaller ogre forget. It did work, however. Squinty was that kind of idiot. The moment he got his eyes poked, he quickly found himself lost in the pain, and when his vision cleared once more, Fingers would accuse him of having done something he hadn't to deserve the poking. In that chaos, Squinty would forget why he was angry in the first place. A lingering bit of those memories was still there, and Uva began unearthing it. It felt like tugging a large stone statue out from a sea of mud, but her Psychomancy was powerful enough that she could do so.

Trying to guide the mind of an idiot was hard, but trying to provoke them, making them think and recall things, enhancing their intelligence, she could do that. She could connect that to the animosity the prisoners felt toward the ogres. And finally, the thought wave synchronized. A deluge of ire spilled over into Squinty. Justifiable ire. He was too simple to understand what self-loathing was, and so every bit of antipathy the prisoners held toward him was carried over to Fingers and the other ogre as well.

Squinty's hold on his mace tightened. He glared at his comrades. “Fingers, yous remember a week back, right?”

Fingers just grunted, barely able to pay attention to the conversation as he swung about blindly, still trying to crush the supposed moss fly.

“Remember when I hads two bowls of Goblin Stew, and one of them went missin’? Well, I think I remembers what happened to that one. You put it in your mouth! You drank my stew. Why'd you do that, Fingers? I thought we was chums!”

Fingers stared over at his comrade in confusion “What are you even ons about anymore, Squinty? You’s still stuck on that? Come over here and help me find the damn moss fly. We dun need it suckin’ and killin’ any of them slaves.”

Squinty’s beady eyes flew open. “Aha! So you’s admitted it! You pretended that it didn't happens before, but now you's admitting it! You think I'm .” That last part was mainly Uva's doing. The prisoners all thought the ogres were a little lacking in the mental department, and she carried that over into Squinty's mind. “Yous must think I'm the dumbest ogre there is!”

“Squinty, stop babblin’ about the dumb soup and just help me—”

“I'll show ya who's dumb!”

And suddenly, Squinty roared and leaped toward his fellow. Uva once more found herself taken by complete surprise. It was a sense of surprise Squinty shared as well; however, the ogre acted before his thought fully formed. Guided by raw emotions further amplified by the prisoners' latent psionic residue, he brought his mace down upon Fingers' head with a resounding crack. Squinty was the smaller ogre, but he wasn't smaller by much, and the headwear that the other ogre wore wasn't proper protective gear against a mace. Furthermore, none of these ogres were exactly High Master-Tier in Toughness either, and so, with a single blow, Squinty smashed the other orc’s head wide open. Brain matter spilled out in oozing clumps from within as Fingers let out a yelp. He reached up and covered his head, growling in agony.

“Squinty! Squinty, what's are you doing?” the cage-carrying ogre roared.

Not wanting him to join in the fight, Uva tried the same trick as well; however, his mind was borderline impenetrable. His thoughts moved so slowly and were so poorly put together that she couldn't mantle them at all. They were like solid matter and rotted wood at the same time. But that didn't stop her from broadcasting things and images into his brain.

The Seeker made a gamble. She cast memories over from Squinty's mind into the cage carrier’s. Memories that detailed stolen soups and other grave sins between ogres.

It was a stupid, desperate strategy. An Umbral Sister would have never forgiven a maddened comrade for assaulting another member of their group, no matter what food was stolen. Things worked differently between ogres. And by 'differently', she meant 'stupidly.’

“Oh, yeah, he ate my soups too!” The cage carrier suddenly stopped trying to intervene as he scratched his head. “Or was dat your soup, Squinty? Can't quite remember. Anyway, get him! Get him! He ate our soup! Smash da bastard's head in!”

Uva couldn't believe this was working, and it was working. Harkness shared her sentiment.

“That's what makes them ideal slaves,” Uva replied.

In that moment, the strings she'd sent forward finally reached the bottom of the depths. There, a checkpoint awaited, shaped by Geomancy. It was a dense, flagon-shaped bastion of metal with a single bell tower sticking out from above a circular series of turreted parapets, and it would be their initial stop before entering the gnomish kingdom. And the bell tower was toward where her Psychomancy surged, for there a single individual waited, staring out into the distance with his gem-covered spectacles. Long Belly Gru was known as such due to his, well, long belly. He had a specialized Eating Skill that allowed him to digest a great many materials, not just organic. It also allowed him to store things in his stomach for a long period of time and boil them fast—fusing different kinds of matter together through an internal alchemical organ.

Instead of wearing plate armor or even scale, he was dressed in golden coins strung together, forming a glittering brigandine that had a glistening gem that served as its cornerstone at the center of his chest. Furthermore, a flowing cape made from the most expensive silks danced out behind him, fluttering in the wind and brushing against the brass bell he was meant to ring. Long Belly Gru held the esteemed position of Bell Captain: a summoner of the Deepdiver for when the ogre raid parties amassed a sufficient quantity of treasures and slaves to be offered to the Council.

This meant he possessed a particular loyal quality to him that placed him apart from the rest of the gnomes. It also meant he was likely more moral, and such was a weakness to be exploited. As Uva's Psychomancy descended upon him, his protective enchantment flared, trying to offer a defense against her magics, but she managed to slip one of her eldritch-tainted strings behind his guard and settle within his mind.

In a prior loop, she broke his will and used him to butcher his own forces, turning his minions against each other with conflicting commands. This time, she did something different: She let the collective torment festering inside her fellow prisoners wash over.

And where the ogres proved too dim to be affected, Long Belly Gru choked as he looked down at his hands, sobering, perhaps for the first time in his life, to what he had been doing.

The gnomes of the Fairwoods didn't view the other races as full people, but there was still enough, just barely enough, humanity there that they could feel empathy and sympathy, if only the right nudges were made. And through that link, she tore into him.

“Oh, of course!” Long Belly Gru smacked his forehead like he'd forgotten something while buying groceries. “What have I been doing to these animals? Even animals deserve better treatment. Why are we just feeding them to the ogres?” He looked at his gnomish honor guards. “Why are we like this? Why are we acting like animals?”

The two gnomish battle magi, sharing a smoke with him at the top of the bell tower, exchanged a tense look. They seemed unsure if he was trying to test them.

“Why are we pieces of shit?” Long Belly Gru demanded.

Uva thought to herself excitedly. She didn't need to pierce a mind and bend it to her will to fully use her Psychomancy. She could just nudge people. She could have them come to their own decisions, and that, if calculated correctly, would still allow things to unfold in accordance with her will. All she needed—

“I don't want to be this kind of person anymore!” Long Belly Gru declared with gusto, and without further preamble, he casually took a running leap off the edge of the battle tower before splattering head-first on the ground—the same way Fingers did as Squinty hit him for the tenth consecutive time.

“EAT MY SOUP NOW, FUCK-MOUTH!” Squinty bellowed.

“Yeah! Eat our soups now, FUCK-MOUTH!” the cage-carrier chimed in, still trying to puzzle out whose soup had been eaten.

Harkness replied dryly, suppressing a laugh.

Matriarch of the Enshadowed Web 278 > 280

Deception 49 > 50 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

Uva’s right eye twitched. She hadn't realized her Deception was so close to the edge. Or that this counted as an act of deception at all.