Barriers and Magic
Merrill hadn't exactly had a relaxing week last week. Between her heated arguments with her Keeper (ok, maybe that was an understatement, but still) and her lessons, she'd barely had any time to herself. In some ways she preferred getting it all out of the way like she had this week.
Still, now she had to look into the enchantment she and the Lady of the Forest placed on Brecilian. After consulting the Lady there hadn't seemed to be anything wrong with it. It was even entirely possible that it had affected the Chasind, but they hadn't noticed. It was their first time fighting after their training after all.
So now she's riding on the old bastard horse to Gladesville. Almost as if he can read her thoughts Dal'banal'ras jolts suddenly, causing her to slam painfully onto his back. Merrill curses and glares at the animal, who does not even have the guts to glare back at her.
Within Gladesville there is a small building. Unlike the others it is made of stone, and covered in runes. It doesn't even have a door, or at least not one that most people can see. Merrill whispers the password in the correct location and the hidden entry slides back.
Within sits an enormous Lyrium crystal, with what looks like tendrils growing out of it in strange patterns. Naturally, those are actually carved enchantment runes, which Merrill had to make herself, EXTREMELY carefully.
With a sigh, Merrill picks up her staff and begins to examine the spell for faultlines or failures.
Well, good news, it's not in danger of exploding any time soon. Admittedly, now that the possibility has been raised a tiny part of Merrill can't help calculating the radius of destruction, and it is uncomfortably large.
That doesn't matter though, because it's not going to happen. Yet. For at least a few decades.
Still, just because it's not in danger of catastrophic failure doesn't mean that it's completely functional. So she has to do more than check the energy regulation and monitor for build ups of energy.
First she checks the Veil dispersal matrix. It's one of the more complicated parts and what lets the Lady do what she does (and the part that would get her damned as an apostate by the Chantry if she wasn't already). That seems to be functioning? Something sends matching pulses of energy back when she casts a diagnostic anyway.
As for the spell itself, Merrill can't really think of a good way to check if it's working. All the spellwork looks correct, sure, but this is pretty much unprecedented so it's all theoretical. She could go out and get into a fight to check, but the point of having the Lady there was to ensure that it would only be used when needed.
Merrill doesn't really feel like risking her life just to check the spell.
Still, she can't see any reason it shouldn't work. Nor does it seem to be in any danger of exploding. The First bites her lip, should she maybe go pick a fight to check? Or is this good enough? None of this was supposed to be as dramatic as the mage made it sound, nobody had even been having bad dreams, which should be the first sign of things going wrong.
She could work on locking the spell down even tighter she supposes, lean into that long term thinking she's trying to adopt. Then again, perhaps she should test it after all, there's probably a bear or something around right?
Then again, she could go and have a calmer conversation with Mare… with the Keeper, maybe soothe some hurt egos and make a more convincing case now that she's not seeing red.
Merrill heaves a great sigh. Whatever the panicking human had imagined might not be coming to pass any time soon, but the underlying point that this is a very dangerous amount of energy holds true. She herself had said recently that her people need to start thinking long term now that they're immortal, and she should lead the way.
That means she's going to have to sit down and actually work out how to make this thing all but impervious to the ravages of time. If she's lucky then she can even start thinking about sabotage, though there's only so much you can do about that. That said, some preparations to prevent a spirit hijacking it might work.
Alright, so, first thing to do is track down what might go wrong. Well, areas of possible failure are obviously the Veil, it's been weakening recently and it's also possible that it's self healing? Either way that needs to be addressed. Then there's going over the spellwork and making sure it's all tight and clean.
What else? Power routing is a problem, as is power drain, so there probably needs to be some kind of reservoir and ways to let it flow out and pull more magic in. Which will make it more susceptible to someone using blood magic or raw lyrium to artificially influence the amount of energy in the system, but there's not much she can do about that.
Ok, first things first, she's going to secure how the spell interacts with the Veil and make sure that it's not 'pulling', metaphorically, on the Veil or otherwise 'attached', again metaphorically, to anything in specific. Day's not getting any longer, time to stop thinking and speculating and get to work.
Merrill screams in frustration and throws her staff across the room.
She'd like to say this is entirely due to how volatile her emotions have become since her transformation, but frankly she might have been driven to this even before that. She's been working on this for an entire hour and she has yet to figure out what 'part' of the Veil she's even dealing with.
She's taken the Veil for granted most of her life, and passed through it every night, but now she's really looking at it, nothing makes sense. She had, logically, assumed that the Veil was correlated to physical space in a one to one manner, kind of the Beyond. Though space can shift somewhat, generally the Beyond maps to the real world relatively simply.
Not the Veil.
The Veil maps to reality the way a river maps to anything. It's not moving in the macro sense, or at least not quickly, but it changes so often it may as well be. For the first time she really believes that someone made it, probably explicitly to frustrate her!
Further delving into everything she's done with the spell discovers that she's less 'latched onto the Veil' and more said 'at this space in reality access the Veil'. Honestly, it seems to be the best solution, for now, and it's annoying her that the whole thing feels like she's jailbroken someone else's spell to work the way she wants it to.
Although it's an interesting effect, worth looking into, but maybe she should be focusing on the power source, or preventing other spirits from hijacking the spell from the Lady…
She glares at the spellwork, as it sits there taunting her. Maybe if this whole affair hadn't turned into an enormous hassle she could do all of them, but it seems like it's not to be.
She swears it's like someone went out of their way to make it hard for mages to access the Beyond and tamper with the Veil.
Ok, ok, it's fine.
'Breathe deeply Merrill, your anger's not helpful. So the whole project is fighting you way more than you expected and you can't exactly make it tamper proof, but you can do something at least.' Merrill repeats to herself repeatedly.
Right, looking at the matter objectively, she really needs to tackle the problems one by one. It's the classic solution of breaking a complex task into a series of simple ones. She just needs to make a quick list of what needs to be done and threats to ward against and then do them one by one.
The list is short, but long, bizarre as that sounds. On the one hand there's only three areas that need securing: the Veil, the power source and the Lady's influence. However, each of those tasks is then made of other smaller tasks.
Still, this was a good idea, with it all set out like this she knows what's most important. The Veil is tempting but that's a personal project she can do later. The power source is in some ways the most vulnerable but it has to be accessed physically.
That just leaves the Lady's influence as the part that is out of her control and thus needs to be secured.
Analysing the subtasks in the same way lets her streamline the matter. She doesn't need to try to secure it against the Lady misusing it, primarily because she's too integral. If she decides to go demon on them they're all, uh, a rude word that Maretahri would not approve of her saying, regardless of what she does.
You know, now that she puts it that way this whole thing seems like an incredibly reckless affair. She should probably have been sounding the alert when it was proposed. Well, she would, but she knows what she's doing, Nelyafinwë can counterbalance a lot of her influence if necessary so she doesn't need to worry.
Anyway, with that all but impossible task out of the way it's just a matter of locking the controls to the Lady and no other and then she's done. Easy.
"Alright, step one, find the Lady's soul tags. Nice and simple and definitely not going to cause a fundamental problem that will take hours to solve." Merrill grumbles sarcastically to herself as she enters the second hour of trying to do so.
The problem is actually surprisingly complicated. First of all, there's whatever the hell Zathrien did to her. Merrill doesn't like thinking poorly of either the dead or other clan's Keepers, but come on! This is just shoddy spellwork.
Frankly it's no surprise the Lady found it incredibly painful, it looks like the magical equivalent of trying to squeeze someone into a too small space. The fact it isn't completely gone speaks of talent and some complete and utter thoughtlessness.
Then there's the fact her spirit identity is… weird. Most spirits bind themselves to an emotion, not a concept. Even then the Lady is less bound to the concept of 'all forests' and more 'Brecilian Forest'.
Of course, tracking down if this was always the case or if it became so after spending at least a century here is the third reason she's now two hours into this.
Perhaps it's because she's rushing in frustration or because she's getting tired and making mistakes, but the fact is the next few moments are stressful enough to send her grey.
She's working with the spirit tags when she finally gets a connection. Without thinking or double checking (always poor practice and doubly so in magic, triply so in the case of magic involving spirits) she connects it to the power source at once.
Immediately the Lady shrieks in pain, or more accurately howls. Far away, though she can't see it, Ranger collapses as his hair begins to rapidly lengthen. The spell pulses with power and Merrill feels herself being drawn into it.
If she was even a shade less skilled, a hair less confident in her magic, she would have accidentally become a new Zathrien. Fortunately for every human in the forest, Merrill is exactly as talented as she is.
Her first reflex is to kill the spell. Cut the power, starve it out. In fact, she all but shatters the spell on the forest in her haste. It is a display of quick thinking and skill that should take hours if time was in any way correlated to the difficulty of the task.
Fortunately, it isn't, and the whole affair ends in seconds.
For several long minutes Merrill stands in the middle of the room, heart racing. She curses in Common, Elvish, something she heard a dwarf say once and even pulls out some poorly pronounced Quenya.
Then she groans. "I'm going to have to spend the rest of the week rebuilding this spell aren't I?"
Working as a Team
After you have spoken to both clans of the Chasind you turn Orundómë's head towards your nearest neighbour. Much like the Chasind, you suspect that you are going to have to speak to them each in turn, unless they conveniently gather in one place.
"You know, Lord Russandol, if you keep visiting me out of the blue like this, people are going to start wondering about our relationship." Sir Vivian states, amusement in her dark eyes.
"Let them wonder. If I cared for their opinions I would have stopped to speak to them." You dismiss with the ease of practice. "Were the wagging tongues to have their way, I should be paired with every elf maid I have ever spoken to, and no small percentage of the princes of Aman."
The lady knight laughs softly. "I wish I had your confidence, truly I do. But enough of the nattering of old men. What brings you here?"
"I am currently planning on accompanying Teyrn Loghaine to the muster of Ferelden." You explain. "In order to facilitate doing so, I am speaking to those who surround me to sound out their own plans on the matter."
"I see." Sir Vivian replies. "I must admit I know relatively little of such matters, you would be best off speaking to my lady, and the other Banns."
"I shall, but I wished to know what you and the other knights will be doing in the meantime." You inform her.
The knight shrugs. "Not much really, all I have to do is show up at Wyncastel with my household at the appointed time. Which is late next week before you ask."
"You have my thanks." You say with an inclined head. "Might I also prevail upon you to speak of your household?"
Vivian tells you in surprising detail. She herself arms and equips around ten men at arms, who fight as heavy infantry. She could, at need, call upon a levy of local bowmen and light infantry, but she sees no need to do so.
"Mostly for tax reasons." She admits, somewhat ashamedly. "If I strip the fields I doubt I can field so many men at arms next year."
"A wise precaution." You say without judgement.
You do not say a word about the duty of a noble, how conscripting farmers to fight is as much a betrayal of the oaths of nobility as it is inefficient and a waste of everyone's time. Yet, despite that, Sir Vivian's shoulders slump, and she turns her gaze away.
After that there is little to say, and you depart after a bare minimum of pleasantries. You find the whole affair strange, but you will hardly hold a human slowly growing a conscience as a bad thing. Still, you have other matters you wish to address elsewhere.
You are still not entirely sure why Bann Lydia seems to have deemed you a person worthy of attention. Mind, you are not ignorant of potential reasons, however how much each weighs in your favour is unclear and it makes you suspicious of ulterior motives. The hand of Teyrn Loghaine in particular is one you are wary of.
"So you're going to be marching with us then? Grand!" The woman swings a large hand at your back, which you shift to avoid. "Could use more real soldiers in this mess, 'specially if Orlais gets involved."
"I would be immensely surprised if they do so." You state tiredly. "The Blight is unlikely to allow much room for division amongst the free."
"Perhaps, but they're treacherous bastards, all of them." Bann Lydia mutters darkly. "Wouldn't put anything past them."
Deciding that you simply do not have the time or energy for this argument, you say, "Perhaps we could turn our attention back to the matter that brought me here."
"Right. So, if you're marching with us, then you should know we're looking at leaving in about two weeks? Something like that. Takes a couple of days to reach Denerim, then we all go down the old imperial highway."
"I had surmised as much myself." You respond.
"Well, if you're already in the loop what're you asking?" Lydia asks.
"All I wish to do is coordinate my forces with yours." You inform the Bann. "For instance, how shall everyone be marching? Shall each household make its own plans or is there some coordination for a great column?"
Bann Lydia nods. "Oh, ok, I get it. Well that first bit's pretty easy to explain. We're all heading to Denerim at more or less our own pace, to meet up by an appointed day. This'll probably see us in a rough column just because we all know how long it'll take to get anywhere, with anyone who dawdles getting picked up by the others going past."
You nod. "Does that not risk slowing the march? Surely something more organised would be faster."
Bann Lydia laughs. "Thought you were a soldier? Don't you know that no plan survives implementation? We can make all the plans we like, then someone starts off early or late and the whole thing falls apart."
A thought stops you a moment away from arguing. She is correct. Without Palantíri to coordinate and view the distant components of the forces, delays are inevitable. Indeed, trying to run messages between people might slow the march yet further. Occasional halts when you run into some other group on the road would be preferable.
"My apologies." You state. "I had failed to account for the absence of, magical, communications."
Bann Lydia grins. "Oh that sounds nice. Being able to command whole battlefields from my chair."
"If your usual manner is anything to judge by, I do not think you would choose to lead from the rear." You observe dryly. "I get the impression that you rather enjoy being in the thick of the fight."
The Bann's grin widens. "Guilty as charged. But enough about me, what else do you need to know?"
You pause a moment for thought. You know when they depart, and you have a rough idea of how long it would take to march to Denerim. You have your road so there is no need to concern yourself with manoeuvring through the forest.
"The Teyrnin's forces are assembling at Denerim correct?" You check.
Bann Lydia nods. "Whole army is. We'll take the imperial road down after the stragglers show up."
That might take time, more reason to build in the safety net of two weeks you suppose. There might be a delay, ah that is a question.
"Where shall we encamp in Denerim? I cannot imagine it has quarters within the city." You ask.
"Oh, right, good question." The Bann says. "Most of us already know, because it's a standardised thing, but if you follow the road past the turn you'll come to a wide green field. If you get lost just ask someone to point you to the tourney grounds."
You nod in thanks. From there you discuss the more tedious details of life on the march, how armies supply themselves and so forth. You had not expected to be able to purchase food, but knowing for certain that it was almost certain to be entirely spoken for was useful.
You also discussed how forces would march from Denerim, which would be a matter discussed with the king in presence of all his advisors. Apparently there was often fights over who would take the vanguard, which is at once strange and understandable.
"Actually, while we're on the topic, I feel I need to ask on Loghaine's behalf, how many men are you bringing?" Bann Lydia asks seemingly out of nowhere. "I know you've got those horsemen and some infantry, was it twenty and fifteen? Sorry, my memory's not what it used to be."
"Well, I believe you have seen the greater part of my personal forces already." You reply immediately. "I will be bringing ten of my rangers."
At her questioning look you clarify, "The light cavalry scouts."
"Ah. Strange name for them." She notes idly.
"Their primary function within my lands is to watch the forest for threats or guard and enforce the law." You explain.
Bann Lydia nods. "I see. That is why you are only bringing ten rather than fifteen?"
"In essence." You agree. "I shall also bring slightly less than twenty infantry, armed and equipped in Ferelden's fashion."
"Less than we hoped, more than we feared." Bann Lydia says in thought. "We can work with it."
"I had not quite finished speaking, actually." You interrupt. "I shall also be accompanied by a pair of… let us call them vassals."
Bann Lydia raises an eyebrow. "I was under the impression your title was honorary."
"It is, and that is why I say we shall call them vassals rather than that they are." You explain. "I came across in my travels a pair of tribes in danger and I decided to offer them a chance to put their skills to a better use than a hopeless last stand."
Bann Lydia's eyes narrow. "Are you talking about the bandits? Loghaine mentioned them."
"Some would call them bandits." You reply calmly. "They would not call themselves so, and I can assure you that no banditry has taken place under my watch."
It is somewhat amusing to skirt around the truth in this manner. Part of you does feel bad for the lie of omission, but by and large you think that raising the fact they are Chasind would merely be an unnecessary sticking point. The clans will not start anything with Ferelden, no reason to give Ferelden a reason to do so.
"I see." Bann Lydia says, clearly fighting her own amusement on the subject. "How many."
You shrug. "Four hundred or so, only half of which are combatants. They are trained and practised in what I am assured is a Tevinter style of light infantry tactics."
"What were four hundred Tevinter bandits doing in Ferelden?" The Bann asks in comical shock.
"They are not bandits, and they are not from Tevinter." You inform her. "After I took them into my service I saw fit to secure a mercenary by the name of Cocycus to train them in light infantry tactics."
"Cocycus is back in Ferelden!" Bann Lydia exclaims.
"You know him?" You ask, in surprise.
"He owes me money." She grumbles, then more softly says. "And a conversation."
Wanting exactly nothing to do with that particular topic, you change the subject. "I have also a number of mercenary contacts who shall likely be supplying another hundred fighters, perhaps a little less than that."
Bann Lydia forcibly straightens out her expression. "How are they trained?"
You shrug. "A random smattering of various talents. My contact is a rather charismatic individual who has gathered a number beneath his banner. I would not recommend separating them."
The Bann chuckles. "You haven't worked with noble retinues often, have you? Ad hoc formations are the go to."
"Concerning." You reply.
She shrugs. "Maybe, they'll be in the minority here though. We're mostly calling up men at arms and the royal army. It's pretty standardised by the standards of most. Plus we're all going to have to dismount anyway."
"Perhaps." You allow.
Some further discussion on logistics and moving those people through Ferelden is had. Mostly it is just confirming that you will not be stripping the countryside bare, in exchange for a promise to involve your men in the supply chain at Ostagar.
You are not too worried about that. Solas' warriors will need to be able to feed themselves for their crusade and the Chasind will be returning home. Still, it is good to have it secured.
You even manage not to let on that you are completely aware of the well hidden caution and consideration Bann Lydia is now showing. Apparently being able to conjure nearly four hundred warriors through various intermediaries is impressive in this land.
Truly standards are slipping. Why, back in your day…