Solitary Study
As much as Merrill's research has proven a fascinating avenue of investigation, it is not the primary goal of your investigation. As such, the very first thing you do when the new week dawns is to sit down with Avernus' notes in your study. You are alone, and with nothing scheduled for at least a few hours.
I can feel the corruption starting to take its toll on my body. I must not succumb.
Even without the gruesome content of the experiments themselves, it would still be a challenge to finish the notes in a single sitting. Stripped of the, largely human, cruelty of one man's monomaniacal pursuit of his goal, there is a tale of a man slowly losing his mind to the taint of Morgoth. You have seen too many orcs that resembled elves you knew, and interrogated too many spies, to ever feel comfortable with such things.
The creeping taint on his thoughts is chilling, most pertinently because of how completely ignorant of it he seems to be. Certainly, circumstance played a significant part in his steady descent into ever greater cruelty, but to have liquid darkness coursing through his veins could only have pushed him down that slope faster.
It is upon this description, intentional and otherwise, that you focus your reading on initially. You read Avernus' musings on the experience of the Taint, and observe his thoughts, hypothesising how one might have shaped the other. It is a difficult exercise, one that stretches your ability to comprehend humans. Is he cruel in the thoughtless way that men tend to be or is it the unthinking brutality characteristic of the orc?
Far too often you are not confident in your answer.
His explicit notes are interesting. They seem to lean heavily on blood, which is not an association that the forces of darkness possessed in Beleriand. The ability to trade physical wellbeing for various advantages is characteristic of the Dark Lord's carelessness for his subjects, yet at odds with said subjects' noticeable cowardice.
From there, you drift naturally into a perusal of the magic used to stretch out his life, the binding of demons and the only firsthand account of 'blood magic' you have seen.
Avernus is, unsurprisingly, much less dogmatically opposed to the practice than those you have spoken to previously, apparently the Grey Wardens adopt a 'by any means' mentality in their duties. Almost immediately, you discover the important information that blood can be interchanged with mana to power spells at, crucially, a positive ratio.
That is, mana is less potent than blood when used as fuel for a spell.
This revelation gives you pause for more than one reason.
"Does this mean that I could theoretically use blood magic?" You ask rhetorically.
It is not something you consider a palatable option, nor something you particularly desire, but the theory is interesting. Does blood magic allow someone to sidestep the required connection to the Beyond? If so, what does that mean for magic?
You forcibly drag yourself away from such largely meaningless speculation to focus on the actual point you were interested in: the interaction between magic and the Taint. It is almost all dense jargon of which you understand approximately half.
At this point you take a break from wading through the unpleasant and confusing areas of the text towards that which tugs at your curiosity most. Avernus littered his notes with descriptions of 'the Calling', which manifests itself as dreams of Darkspawn and the Black City. The exact purpose of this investigation is somewhat unclear, but it is still interesting.
It becomes clear that Avernus is no wordsmith. His descriptions tend to be perfunctory and he clearly struggles to find words to express his complicated feelings in these dreams. You know the kindle fear within him, and that at the same time he feels a strange connection to them.
Sadly you do not have time to investigate them all equally, you have to choose a them to study in detail.
Although it is perhaps the area you will most struggle with, you commit to studying the methods Avernus used to extend his life. The interaction between magic and the Taint is both more likely to be widely understood and usable, and will allow you to build on the work already done by Merrill.
The parts of the notes concerned with his attempts to extend his life are located in somewhere around end of the beginning, for want of a better term. It is clear that Avernus quickly realised that his time was running out, and began to take actions to extend it. It almost brings a chuckle from you for how archetypically human it is.
The work he did on extending his life fed almost directly into his attempts to amplify the power of the Taint in the Wardens. However, there is a significant distinction on closer inspection. There are references to the uses of mana in the body and a number of notes on the exact condition of Sophia Dryden.
It takes a few moments to connect that name to the corpse you had found in Soldier's Peak, the possessed one. That connection causes you to pause, because you find yourself disagreeing with Avernus. He claims that, fundamentally, Sophia is still 'alive' however from your own experience you do not believe that there was enough of her soul left to even call her Sophia, let alone alive.
You consider the matter at length. Avernus identifies his immortality and Sophia's as 'much the same', yet there is a significant difference. Avernus was, at his core, still himself. However far the one time defender of Eru's Children had fallen, he retains the majority of his personality, all that was left of Sophia was embers.
Driven by sheer curiosity you dive back into the notes, tracking down his chain of logic.
Ulmo drown whichever mortal invented this magical lexicon! Why is it so impossibly difficult to comprehend? You struggle through concepts that you are certain you would understand if only they were written in plain Quenya instead of this absurdly niche dialect of Thedaslta. Every glimmer of understanding is wrestled from the pages with immense difficulty.
Yet, despite this difficulty the prodigious intellect of your family serves you well, and you do in fact extract several glimmers of understanding. The first, and perhaps most potent, is the distinction between the magic of binding spirit and demon and at which influences the Taint. You had assumed them fundamentally the same, Avernus' life prolonged as many human servants of the Enemy craved.
Theoretically, as best you understand the matter, it is possible to use healing magic to keep someone in perfect health indefinitely, the major issues being the finite nature of magical energy or supplies, and the risk of the magic taking too well and causing growths that consume their host entirely.
Avernus realised that the safest course to avoid both was to carefully work out exactly the optimal level of casting to maintain, not perfect but sufficient health. There are pages and pages of completely incomprehensible mathematics to that end. This proved insufficient in the end, as he quickly discovered that the human soul is only willing to cling to its vessel for so long.
This is where the blood magic comes back, forcibly binding his own soul to his vessel in a manner he describes as 'eerily reminiscent of binding a demon'. You get the impression that were Avernus less monomaniacally focused on his goal, he might very well have experienced something of an existential crisis.
His work with the Taint proves relatively disappointing. He makes some interesting connections between electricity and the Taint, and has some thoughts on alchemy that would undoubtedly be enlightening if you knew anything at all about the subject. Sadly, you have not touched the subject since childhood experiments with cooking supplies.
From the mire of possible insights you extract a single useful thought.
As vaguely amusing, and occasionally horrifying, as you find the attempts of a human to forsake their gift ultimately it is a diversion you can ill afford. With the looming threat of the Blight on the horizon you must accumulate every advantage you can. Thus, you dedicate your focus to the study of the relationship between the Taint and lighting.
Admittedly, upon a re-read of his work, it seems Avernus ended up abandoning his work on lightning eventually instead favouring alchemical solutions to the problem at hand. That does leave a fair amount of content on the matter, which hopefully will be enough to discern how exactly lightning could be turned to your advantage.
Avernus used the lightning he generated in attempts to agitate the Taint, and there was some kind of reaction. From his descriptions it seems hard to tell what effect it had on the 'subjects', victims without the euphemism, seems to have caused a degree of elevated activity.
The trouble you have with his descriptions, and that he had with his work, is that it is very hard to discern what is born of the interaction of the energy with the Taint and what comes from being subjected to lighting. This is made worse by the fact that as far as the 'elements that aren't elements'[1] go, lightning is by far the least studied among your people.
In fact, the concept that there is a link between the Taint and lightning feels wrong on a level you cannot articulate. Lightning is Manwë's element, and while there is little love lost between you and the king of the Valar, he is no friend of Morgoth. Not anymore anyway.
With these worries nagging at the back of your mind, you struggle once more with Avernus' incomprehensible writing.
After nearly an hour of futilely attempting to wrestle through some of the more terminology dense conclusions, you decide to try to work with what you do understand. Lightning has an enhancing effect, at least in part, on the Taint, but that is outweighed by fact that lightning and physical bodies do not play well together.
If you take this as your foundation, then you can attempt to apply principles of opposition and relation to pick apart what might slow or even eliminate the Taint. Which raises the immediate question of what opposes lightning.
From memory, you can rule out iron and water, they carry lighting if your lessons on storms are correct. Earth seems the logical opponent, but you are aware of an artistic glassmaking technique that uses lightning, so clearly it is not a direct cancellation.
Now that you think about it, does lightning even have a traditional opponent? Earth seems the obvious choice, but you were under the impression that earth was a complex mixture of other elements. Perhaps lightning is just a natural expression of air? No, that would make metal its opponent…
It gets to the point that you begin attempting to draw an elemental circle, which inevitably ends up in the frustration of absolutely nothing making sense. You vaguely remember that Aulë's students claiming that each metal was an element, except steel for some reason, but most Eldar lump them all together in a single category…
Three hours later, you are surrounded by papers and diagrams in increasingly bizarre detail and absolutely nothing to show for it. There is a reason that most natural philosophers settled on 'Air, Fire and Water and NOTHING ELSE' as their elemental model. You glare at the sheet of paper where you had spent half an hour trying to discern the difference between a 'plant' element and an 'animal'.
No. The dinner bell has rung and you are not wasting any more time on this nonsense.
You storm from the room, the wind of your cloak scattering papers all about the study. When they settle in their new positions, they make exactly as much sense as when they were in order.
Last Minute Practice
You had decided to recruit warriors rather than builders last week, and the primary driver for doing so had been the ever mounting time pressure of the Blight. As a result, you intend to dedicate this week to training the heavy infantry you recruited last week. Well, they will be heavy infantry at the end of the week, as things currently stand they are a group of humans who have never held a blade.
The core trait of the heavy infantry is discipline. Though in truth this is a trait shared by all warriors, heavy infantry depend on it for maximum impact. They lack the charge weight or manoeuvrability of cavalry or the options of light infantry and range of archers. The strength of the heavy infantry is the weight of its battle line, and those are born of discipline.
Which is a condensed version of the speech you gave the recruits when they asked you why you were making them march perfectly in formation for hours. They get the full treatment, but since it is a speech you have given many times in your life, it is hardly something you pay much attention to.
Once they know the formations and can march in rough step, you add the enormous packs of rocks.
"Can't we just wear armour?" Someone complains.
"These are not," you explain to the group, "aimed at preparing you to wear armour. That is a matter of general conditioning and a well designed set of armour will feel as though it weighs relatively little. The rocks serve solely to make the task more challenging and speed the development of the required muscles."
It will also help them understand that just because armour feels like it weighs little does not make it true. That, and shared suffering is a long standing method of ensuring that a group forms bonds together. One only needs to look at how those from the front lines of the siege would form groups apart from those who enjoyed the relative peace of the rear areas.
The quality of the recruits starts showing quickly. Most of them are farmers, and well acquainted with tedious repetitive manual labour. It makes for a good basis for training, yet simultaneously there will always be those who do not take the task well. You have managed to avoid slackers and malingerers but not everyone hears 'soldier' and thinks 'months of boring labour'.
"When are you going to teach us how to fight?" One woman calls.
You attempt to ignore her, but she becomes increasingly disruptive over the span of ten minutes. You halt the drill and single her out.
"You wish to learn how to fight?" You ask calmly. "What makes you think this is unrelated to that task?"
The woman sneers. "I know a strength building exercise when I see one. You think that because we're women we're weak!"
You raise a single eyebrow. "This is not a strength exercise, this is an endurance exercise. If I had concerns of the strength of your arms I would have you lift things above your head. Train your legs and arms."
"Then you will teach us how to fight?" She asks again, grinning.
"No." You reply flatly. "I will continue to build up your endurance."
Before the woman can continue, you cut her off harshly. "Because I do not want you to learn complex swordsmanship that will see you exhausted in a minute. Battles are slow, grinding affairs that can last hours or days. We are not training for a bar brawl or a duel! Are there any further objections to my training methods?"
There are none.
After you answer the woman's challenge you are able to get the group working on the basics. Formation marching, incredibly boring drills yet so extremely important consume the morning. Then comes the simple weapon drills. Slash, stab, shield block, each carefully designed to strike from a line.
"This is so boring!" Someone complains.
"Yes. It is." You agree.
In truth it is more boring for you than them. It is all new information to them, they have constant mistakes they must correct, or old habits to unlearn. A new warrior will find a new challenge waiting every minute. You could do all these exercises while half asleep. You cannot even take solace in the challenge of teaching, as you have done that enough to make it a largely automatic task.
You walk along the lines, struggling to pay attention to the movements of your new warriors. It may not be a glamorous or interesting task, but they deserve your full attention, these skills may save their lives someday. So, you grit your teeth and drag your attention away from the various places it wishes to wander.
Where interest and habit fail you, sheer unrelenting stubborn pride prevails. Unwilling to perform at anything other than your best, you successfully wrestle your attention onto the task at hand. Stances are corrected, drills are run until they are smoothly executed. You teach the warriors how to aim their strokes, how to angle and overlap their shields. In short, you teach them the basics.
Still, despite that you find yourself restless. Regardless of your pride and self-discipline this remains a dull task for all involved. The part of you that is constantly analysing your actions seeking for ways to improve is questioning if this is the most effective way to teach the group.
"Can we spar against you?" The over eager woman from before asks. "If you're so good, surely you don't mind proving it."
"No." You reply reflexively.
The woman goes on to attempt to convince you, but her words have set a train of thought off in your mind. You obviously cannot spar against the group; you are simply too skilled. They might eek out a victory using tactics and cooperation, which would be a useful lesson in itself, but you would always have some chance to equalise somewhere.
Unless you hold back against them, an option your pride recoils from like fire, sparring personally with them is not an effective option. However, you have another group they might be able to spar against and learn from, a group that could also benefit from proper sparring.
Thus you end up rousing your other warriors from sleep. A part of you regrets that you no longer have a horn or symbol to sound at full volume to wake them up, but you are willing to make that sacrifice.
Your sleeping warriors are obviously upset at being woken midway through their sleep but, as you point out, they will not always have the luxury of sleeping through the night on campaign. As a result they are begrudgingly willing to take part in your exercise.
They need practice. Both groups will benefit from practicing with their formations in a safe environment. Plus, some healthy competition between groups will help drive both of them to improve and generally boost morale.
A small smile curls across your face.
Then you can break up the groups and forcibly integrating them, raising the overall cohesion of the force and preventing tribalism from developing. Entirely for practical reasons of course, you certainly do not enjoy the suffering of those you train.
You glance behind you, to meet your brother's eyes and share your glee.
Nobody is there. Your smile falls away.
Your warriors all stare at you, waiting for your orders. You force back the melancholy that threatens to seize you with the ease of practice and start barking orders. Dividing the groups up by experience, directing the three recruits from before to join the new recruits, as they are nowhere close to as skilled as the veterans.
The end result is fifteen relatively untrained warriors in heavy clothes with wooden swords against 5 veterans. Due to overwhelming complaints from the smaller group, they are permitted to wear their armour. Personally, you think that all but guarantees their victory, but the large group had no objections.
"The rules are as follows." You state. "If there is paint on your clothing then you are out of the fight. When I call halt the group with the higher proportion of its forces out of the fight loses. If you break formation you lose. Ready? Begin!"
Initiative initially lies with the larger group. Their formation is somewhat ragged but it is recognisable, so you allow it. They advance at a steady pace, 'weapons' ready. Meanwhile, the smaller group takes a pretty standard tight formation, circular in nature to prevent outflanking.
Truth be told you can already see potential problems for the smaller group. The circular formation removes some of their combat power, as much as three fifths depending on the angle of attack. If the larger group can keep a cool head and not wrap around then they might be able to force the smaller group to spread out and expose themselves to flanking.
Personally, you would have abused the broken formation rule by forming a wedge and punching through the centre of the line. That, however, is the kind of high risk strategy that you take care to teach your warriors to avoid.
Initial contact looks promising for the smaller group. The larger group jostles for position and inevitably begins spreading out to bring everyone into contact. With all five warriors engaged, the question becomes whether the advantage of armour and skill will enable them to 'kill' their foes faster than they 'die'.
As the minutes pass, it quickly becomes clear that it will. The recruits, new to the arts, have expended much of their strength against shields and armour. You had spoke very carefully of the rules, yet none seem to have realised that strikes against either do not count as 'kills'.
Thus, slowly, the veterans begins scoring victories. A mark on an arm here, a leg there. It quickly becomes clear that you need to intervene, calling out those who are hit by name and making them come and stand by you. There are complaints about bias and unfairness from the more vocal of the recruits, but they soon learn that they cannot afford distractions in combat.
Eventually one of the veterans is marked, and the formation starts to collapse. Sadly, by that point, the numbers have become far more even and, though they lose two more, they finish their foes entirely.
After an explanation of what happened, and a further detailing of the rules and how they are affected by armour, you run the experiment once more. By the time an hour has elapsed everyone is very tired and likely much more appreciative of the realities of combat.
Buying andSelling
"Where on earth did you find that shepherd?" Martin asks. "I can't understand a word he says."
Delora wishes she could act superior, but she is aware that attempting to do so is a recipe to spend the rest of her life failing to translate the incomprehensible human's words. So she is forced to agree.
"I can't understand him either. It's a miracle I managed to recruit him, which I can only attribute to drunken slurring being his actual accent." She says.
"Where is he from though?" Martin repeats.
"Honestly, I'm not sure." Delora says. "I was at one of those stock auction things, asking around and I was pointed to him. I asked him once or twice but…"
"Dahn yaars twoo harf thangs tah duh athair tharn gahssep?" The shepherd calls out to them.
"Exactly." She concludes.
"Fair." Martin nods sagely. "Which leaves us with another significant problem."
Delora gave her boss? Co-worker? Martin, she gave Martin a concerned look. "I hesitate to ask."
"What's his name?" The human says.
"So." Martin asks awkwardly. "What's your story?"
"What?" Delora asks.
"You know." The human says, flushing with embarrassment. "What did you do before you came here? What was your life like?"
The elf gives him a suspicious look. "Why are you asking?"
"Well, I just figure that if we're going to be working together we should know a little bit about each other." Martin says.
"I've already told you I'm not interested, human." Delora replies immediately.
"No!" Martin exclaims, waving his hands. "That's not what I meant!"
Delora sniffs and looks away. Silence descends on the pair for a time, neither looking at the other.
"I grew up in Lannerch." Martin says quietly. "My father worked as a tenant for a knight. Eventually he got too old to work and I and my brothers ended up iterant. I met Eve while I was helping her dad for the harvest and we got married about a year later."
Silence descends on the pair again. Delora's ears burn as she chews her lip.
"Not that it matters, but I was born in the alienage, in Denerim." She says defiantly. "My mother was the best damn seamstress ever and my father worked at a slaughterhouse. Course, I'm terrible at stitching. Mother was always really patient with me though."
The elf falls silent, staring off at the horizon. She should send some of her pay back, now that she thought about it. Mother's hands were shaking ever since she recovered and father's not been able to get as much work since he lost his hand.
"They sound nice." Martin says quietly.
"They're the best." She replies, definitely not crying.
Silence reigns as the two merchants go about their business. They part at some point after the forest, and Delora is left to pick up the heavy armour from Denerim. She'd drawn the short straw on making the long delivery to the city of nobles thirsty for wine, thus she is also the one who will have to take the long trip back with suits of armour.
Negotiating the purchase of the heavy armour is entirely routine; there's only seven snide comments made about her not being able to afford them! In a thoroughly foul mood, the elf loads the cart alone, cursing the universe generally, and every human in this city more specifically.
The fact that she's not cursing all humans everywhere pulls her up short. Some soul searching, in the middle of the street because if humans won't help her she's not helping them, reveals that she is, despite her better judgement, harbouring some fondness for the humans at Endataurëo. More 'not as much of a jerk as they could be' than anything more profound, but still not nothing.
This train of thought reminds her of Martin and their conversation on the way to their destination. From there her thoughts wander back to her parents, who live in this city.
The Alienage is everything she remembers it as. Squalid, poverty ridden and with a palpable aura of despair hanging over it. She drives her cart down the too small dirt roads, and stops in front of the house she grew up in. With a deep breath, she knocks on the door.
The elf who opens it is a gaunt looking woman with a heavily lined face and grey streaked hair. When she see Delora though, said face lights up in joy.
"My angel!" Her mother cries, sweeping Delora up in a hug. "Come in, have you eaten? Tell me all about your new job!"
"It's good to see you mother." Delora says tearfully, leaning into the embrace. "I missed you."
Her parents are the best.
[1] The Ainur get pretty pedantic about this particular terminology, which is deeply confusing to elves who have yet to discover molecules.