Halls of Ivory
Chapter 19 - Curtains Fall, Skies Burn
The most niche domain among spellcasters was the domain of death. Most magical elements were easy to place on where they could be found. Fire was in things that burned, ice in things that froze. But death was everywhere and nowhere in the same time. Life could emerge from any substance and everything that lived, could die. It was said that the discipline of the necromancer was introduced to Tyria by none other than Grenth, the human god of death, when he took the Seven Reapers, the first ever necromancers under his wing.
With his spells, people were able to draw upon the ambient force of death to puppeteer the corpses of the dead or to draw from the residual power their deaths generated around them or even become death itself manifest in the physical world. It even allowed them to draw the life force of some beings and transfer them to others, either as a means of killing an enemy, healing an ally or both. Since the exodus of the gods, Grenth's worshipers have been passing his teachings along across generations, building upon them to develop many different schools of necromancy.
The last obstacle keeping the Seraph and Separatists from the city gates was out of the way. Crossing the poison trails in the garrison was just a matter of covering them with spare rugs, furs and wooden boards. There was only narrow room to pass through though, so moving an enormous army like theirs through the garrison and the comparably narrow streets of Shaemoor village was a long and arduous task.
By the time they had everyone and everything form up or rather squash together around the village before the gates, the sun was already setting upon the horizon. Now, they actually placed the siege weapons out front, including the golems. Hitting anything but the gates themselves risked causing the layered structures built upon one another to collapse, triggering a massive earthquake that may have brought down a whole chunk of the city. So they simply bombarded the gates themselves. Though most of the damage was caused by their Norn and Asuran reinforcements, the ballistae and catapults did their part in chipping away the bits left by the hard hitters.
As the siege went on, something strange was in the air. When the gates were mostly open and the siege golems finished up the rest by reducing up the broken planks that were once the gate to a crater, it became much more noticeable. "Is there smoke?" Someone asked.
"Is something burnt?"
"Something's burning!"
"There's fire! Fire in the city!"
Logan stammered in disbelief when he realized that they weren't lying. "Balthasar's Wrath…there are fires!"
"She must be going scorched earth on the city." the minister concluded. "All the more reason for us to hurry."
When the last of the front gate was ripped out from the walls and flipped inside the city, the force released clouds of dust and debris from the walls and under battle chants from footsoldiers, all the rag-tag champions and adventurers that had joined the assault charged past the gates to swarm out in search of enemies.
"Come on everyone!" Logan. He drew his sword and charged inside. "For Kryta!" The Seraph joined together in a battle shout and followed him.
The minister kept his calm while handing out orders.. "Separatists, swarm out, kill any Shining Blade you find. I offer a bounty on each and every one of them. Bring me the heads - but ONLY the heads - of any provable members of their order and I will buy them from you for two-hundred gold coins a piece! Mesmers, with me! Anise still has an inner cadre of mesmers who are not to be trifled with."
When the Commander followed the swarm of soldiers and bandits flooding into the city, he couldn't believe his eyes. Every building that wasn't completely made of stone, was lit ablaze. Tables, benches, stands, even wooden supports on some of the upper houses were burning. He ran as fast as he could to one of the worst cases further up a staircase on the outer wall.
The door was already half off its frame, so he kicked it in and peeked inside. In a corner opposite from the front door cowered a mother with two children, one of them was an infant, screaming off the top of its lungs out of confusion. There were several beams of burning wood that had fallen from the ceiling barring their path. The Commander reached into his bag, pulled out his focus and with a few well-aimed cast, wrapped his spectral grasp around the flames to freeze the heat off of the beams. "Get out now! Run!" They got up and followed him outside as fast as they could, and barely a minute after they caught their breath outside did the entire ceiling collapse.
There were doubtless many other places like this, he could not waste a second. He rushed down into the streets of the eastern commons. What he found downright scared him. Where once there were entire crowds of farmers-turned-beggars huddled together, were now pyres of burning bodies. They were killing the homeless! But to his horror, it wasn't just the homeless, they were killing everyone. The clothing on the corpses ranged from tatters to normal clothes all the way to court wear. The front doors of all the houses here were wide open, they must have dragged all the commoners onto the street and executed them. He ran from house to house, only to find anyone still inside with sliced throats, stabbed and bled to death or decapitated.
He cursed himself every time he put himself through having to put out a fire on his robe trying to enter a burning building, only to find more families murdered in their own homes. Eventually he caught the culprits in the act, and they were indeed Shining Blade. Two soldiers held a man in torn rags on the ground, while one of them pressed his sword against the poor man's neck and sliced back and forth with both hands.
"Stop! These people are innocent!"
When they noticed him, the Shining Blade let go of the man, but he was already dead. The two others drew their swords and announced for anyone nearby: "Regressive at large!"
The Commander's survival instincts kicked in and without thinking, he raised his axe and channeled his magic through it to open one of the soldiers' throats, while using his focus to grasp another from a range and throw him onto his remaining comrade. While they were in the middle of falling, he got to work killing them and quickly checked on the beggar. As he feared, it was already too late.
But starting here, there was a good chance that there were survivors. The buildings were already on fire, but the doors were closed. Upon the next door he kicked in, he was greeted with the blade of a very confused man's sword. He stood in front of his wife and children who pressed themselves against the staircase while the upper floor burned so brightly that one could even see it from down here. "You're not taking us too! Back off!"
"I'm not with them, you can come out! I can take you to safety!"
"I'm not falling for that! First you pose as Shining Blade and now this?" He figured that there was not much sense in wasting any more time here and moved on to the next building. But not all the commoners were unreasonable. Many of them were relieved to see a friendly face, especially when he was here putting out fires so they could get out.
Once he gathered a sizable crowd of survivors, he rushed them back towards the city gates so they could hide away in Shaemoor or elsewhere. But as they rushed through one of the wider roads, he encountered an entire troop of Shining Blade patrolling their way. They were too many, he couldn't rely on minor weapon-based spells, he had to fall back on something for emergencies. "Regressive! And he has civillians! Kill them all" He gestured for them to stay back and charged their way. As he did, he pictured from memory the runes and the words that went into one of a necromancer's more powerful abilities. The Death Shroud, the most dangerous tool of a necromancer.
He shouted with confidence: "I am death incarnate!" And burst into a sentient cloud of pure death magic. In this form, he was limited to very few spells, but each more effective than the other. He sent out a rapid spectral claw, grabbed one of the Shining Blade soldiers by the collar and teleported right to them. Once in the middle of his enemies, he reached out with his power, fixated on all of them, their positions, their bodies and began channelling this form's true power.
All of them choked and spat out blood, followed by streams of blood flowing out of their bodies, into the air around the Commander where he would draw upon them to empower himself further. He continued stripping all of them of their blood until the last of the soldiers sagged to the ground, their skin pale from all the blood loss.
When it was done, he turned back into a regular human with all his clothes intact and beckoned the commoners to follow him. Finally when he reached the high road north of the gate, he ran intoSeraph who were rescuing civilians like him. With another crowd rescued and more Seraph and Separatists streaming into the city even now, he felt at this point like he had a moment to think a little further reflect on the situation. He shared his thoughts with a Seraph who had just wrapped up leading a crowd of his own to safety. "We barely noticed the smoke when they were at the gates. How could they set everything on fire this quickly? Walking door to door with torches would have taken way too long."
"Burning arrows. The first Shining Blade we ran into were firing them all over the lower districts."
"Are they going rogue?"
"They sounded a lot like your usual Shining Blade." The Seraph wasn't wrong. Same catch-all terms, no difference to any other Shining Blade he met in the months of this conflict.
While Logan and the Commander focused on rescuing the citizens, the minister had different priorities. When one's boat had a leak, one could scoop out as much water as one wanted and it would still sink, so he preferred to take the fight straight to the Shining Blade.
He knew that the captain and the Commander would scoff at this notion, but this was the golden moment he had worked towards for years. He was not about to let sentimentalities rip it from his grasp.
Using many precautions from their skill sets, he and the other mesmers paced to the inner ring where they would fight their way into the upper city. All while never peeking around a corner themselves, always sending clones ahead and never engaging an enemy head-on. The path up the many staircases was wrought with countless little rooms, many guarded by basic, easily dispatched soldiers.
Then they reached the lush gardens of the upper city, where doubtless they would find a clue as to Anise's whereabouts. Dozens of clones paced through the various pathways, cast and maintained by only a handful of mesmers, until they reached the royal palace. Once they all arrived at the gate, the minister used his magic to suspend the doors in animation and while they were still frozen, he and all the other mesmers gave them a simultaneous kick. Upon the spell ending, the doors swung wide open, giving them a moment to rush inside, turn invisible and send out clones in their stead. They sought out hiding places between some of the recently-brought-in furniture and summoned clones to have them rummage through everything they found.
The point was not to find anything, but to make noise and draw out an enemy, and draw one out they did. "Enemy inside the palace!"
A more lightly armored man with a sword spotted the clones. He took the bait, they purposefully placed one clone in the middle of the room and had him do nothing but watch the others, because they knew he would assume that clone was the real one. The Shining Blade mesmer summoned two clones to charge at the decoy. While he did, the Separatist mesmers turned invisible and rushed him while he didn't expect it. Before he knew what he was in for, he had several swords lodged in his body and died shortly afterwards.
They quickly returned to their hiding places, just in case he wasn't alone. A well-founded worry, as there came number two. "Hargan? Hargan, no!" A woman ran through an open side door into the throne room and kneeled over the dead mesmer. A few unexpected strikes with swords later, two dead mesmers lay on the ground.
Two out of six of their targets barring Anise were in the palace, so they were on the right track. They repeated their maneuver, but no-one came this time. A new approach was in order. They decided to march through the palace, with clones sent around every corner and every spare room.
The Separatists had had moles within the palace for a long time, patterns had been recorded and they knew what to look for: If there were more of her mesmers in the palace, the room they refused to leave would be their clue as to where Anise had gone.
And their prepared way of tracking her had a surefire result. While another Mesmer fell for their decoys, three more were holed up inside Jennah's study. "Three!" shouted the clone checking the room. They had the clone pretend to stumble back out of the room, prompting one of the enemy mesmers to follow it outside, where he promptly had a broadsword thrown at his face. Before he could do much about it, two clones summoned during the weapon toss charged past him and slashed up his upper body.
The biggest obstacle from here would be getting through that door frame unscathed. Even if only for a moment, they would be sitting ducks passing through exactly where the enemy expected them. Knowing now what to expect, the enemy mesmers summoned clones to charge out of the room in their stead.
The Separatis mesmers - in turn - now knew where the only remaining members of Jennah's inner cadre were and could dispel all of their clones in favor of creating an entire troop of new ones to rush the enemy. Each one of them creating even a handful of their own clones completely crowded the hallway. With what little of the room he was able to peek into - and more importantly, the position of the remaining targets, the minister brought his hands together to summon the glittering dome of a null field, the same spell he used on Rolan Meade - this time to cancel out any magic, including clones immediately on the position of at least one of the enemy mesmers. The one on the left specifically.
Then, they rushed the room together with all the clones squeezing through into the room.
Most of them avoided the circle and rushed the other mesmer, who drew the first few into a sword fight and soon found himself overwhelmed. The other was faced with a stream of clones that vanished upon being less than a foot away from him. The minister made sure to not be the very last one to enter, but the second last, ducking to the side like one of the other clones did approaching the enemy.
The Shining Blade mesmer held his sword forward to meet each clone head-on, probably thinking this was a sign of bravery, when it really was the folly that cost him his life. The minister, unfazed by the glittering dome, thrust his blistering sword into the man's chest, dispelled the null field, and the other mesmers descended upon the startled man after they were done rushing the other. "That's the last of them. Now to find Anise."
They were guarding this room for a reason. They always were during the many incidents recorded by one of Jennah's servants. They swiftly got to searching the walls and the furniture for a hidden mechanism, going mostly off of Grell's descriptions of what Logan had done to close all the hidden exits during their attack on the palace.
They tried, among other things, to push in all the tiles. Because this was one of the rooms with smaller wall tiles, which tended to be an indicator that this was how this room's mechanism worked, but none of them seemed to give in. "Out of the way, falling bookshelf!" Aldryn and one of the mesmers grabbed the large bookshelf to the right hand end looking in from the entrance, pulled at it and threw it on the ground. It was extremely heavy and someone could have gotten hurt, but there was little time for major safety precautions.
With the bookshelf out of the way, they tried the tiles behind it, and wouldn't you know, moments after pushing one of those into the wall, a segment of the wall between desks pulled itself back and slid aside, revealing the entrance to one of the many tunnels leading down into the city and beneath it. "Same routine as in the palace. Split whenever it forks, never scout ahead without a clone."
The minister ran ahead confidently, not wasting a moment's notice on possible alternate paths in larger caves or forked tunnels. He just marched straight on forward, as any of the only-exit tunnels led one. Barely into their pursuit, one of his mesmers asked him: "How do you know she'll be that way?"
His response was simple: "If she's petty enough to burn the city, then she's cowardly enough to abandon it."
She didn't want to leave them. But she had no choice.
On light steps, Anise walked through the tunnels built into the support structure above one of the great bridges of the city, straight to the outer city walls after another staircase at its end.
She had given all her men and women the order to purge Divinity's Reach, she even joined them for the first few houses. But she didn't tell them that she wasn't going to stick with them in this endeavour. She didn't want to do this, but she had no choice. She couldn't let the Separatists get to her and turn herself into yet another casualty of their ideas. Scarlet Briar had told her too many times that their ideas about racial unity and caring about prosperity among humans were backwards and bigoted. There was no saving the others, the city needed to be burned down and the Separatists would get to whoever carried it out. She would remember their contribution to the cause, recruit new people and build the Shining Blade anew.
But when she was already half-way to the staircase, she heard the sound of a clone dispersing and a very unwelcome voice called to her from behind. "Countess Anise! Or need I call you 'High Countess' now?"
She turned around to stare right into the rage-inducing grin of Therol Aldryn. A thorn in her side for many years, but one that slipped by her order's many attempts at his life. "I knew you were behind this! The attack on the palace, the trial - the 'video' as you call it? That was all you somehow, wasn't it?"
"Only in part, and I had a lot of help. The Camera? Asuran tech, built by the Inquest, inspired by a Canthan model. The attack on the palace? I wasn't even present at the time and two out of four of the people attacking were Charr, you saw the footage yourself."
"And the two nobles? Ordhral and Zalambur? Those were both you as well, weren't they?"
"One of them was me, the other was completely genuine." At last, that smile vanished from his face, but even the serious look that took its place with its complete lack of submission or subservience did little to lessen her anger. "Maybe you shouldn't have put the Charr above your own people. Maybe the people would be less inclined to turn on you if you didn't make active efforts to throw our entire race off a cliff."
"OUR RACE DOES NOT MATTER!" she shrieked at him. "The human race has no place in the future. We are immoral by birth! We don't deserve to exist! Scarlet Briar - Commodore of Lion's Arch - and the most brilliant person I've ever met - has shown me the truth! The future lies with the Sylvari! Humans and other races are but obstacles! The Charr are just a tool to remove them!"
The minister raised his eyebrows. "So that is the truth of the matter. Behind all this bluster, behind all these vague claims of a complex matter that we could not possibly understand, lies ultimately nothing but racial hatred against your own kind. There was no true cause for mystery. The box has always been empty. May I propose a different line of thinking?"
She snapped at him. "What could an oaf like you possibly have to contribute?"
"So Scarlet Briar 'showed' to you that the future lies with the Sylvari - and Scarlet happens to be a Sylvari herself. She instills in you an idea from which only one party - the Sylvari - stands to benefit. And she just so happens to belong to that selfsame party. Tremendously quaint, don't you think?"
"What are you even implying?"
"I'm implying that she lied."
Even the implication filled her with a burning rage that she couldn't contain. She drew her sword and screamed at him: "SCARLET WOULD NEVER LIE! NOT TO ME! NOT TO ANYONE! YOU TAKE THAT BACK THIS INSTANT!"
"Make me!"
The minister summoned three clones and she summoned three of her own. She charged at him, swinging and piercing at each one with confidence. None of them was prepared to parry her attacks, she hit all of them! She would emerge victorious!
Except that all four of the 'Therols' gave in rather easily and Anise felt a startling surge of pain in her chest. The pain only grew in intensity and was soon accompanied by a crippling, burning heat. She was stabbed from the front. Even though she struck down every last one of them. For lack of strength to maintain them, her clones dispersed.
'Another' minister stood next to her, a fifth one that hadn't been there before. With his sword turned on and driven completely through her chest. She felt all strength leave her legs, he was keeping her from falling by holding her up by the sword lodged in her body. She didn't have the strength to take another swing, she lost the grip of her sword. The wound was too deep and it was getting worse. She only had seconds to live. "How…" was all she could usher.
"I was in hiding. You spoke to an illusion. And when I summoned the clones, I made myself invisible. For all this talk of 'brilliance' and 'genious', you fell for oldest trick in the world."
With the last and most crucial battle won, he raised one foot to push her off his sword and let the countess sag to the ground.
It was done. Time to claim the spoils and present them to the others.
As the Seraph and Separatists ran out of street corners to clear out, the search through the became less about gathering survivors and escorting them to safety with an occasional skirmish with Shining Blade interspersed, and more about chasing down the remaining members of the order, the last remainders of which converged into one leftover troop chased down by - among many others - the Commander and Captain Thackeray.
The captain called out to them. "Stop! We have you surrounded and outnumbered!" The Shining Blade were running up the slopes to Melandru High Road, the large built-upon bridge in the south-west of the city. The Commander regularly extended spectral hands to grasp the legs of some of the Shining Blade to cause them to fall, leaving the growing crowd of Seraph and Separatists to deal with them while he continued the chase.
It was clear from the paths they took that they were aiming to get to the upper city. Logan grabbed one of the men the Commander ripped off his feet and pressed him against a wall. "Where are they going?"
"Get lost!" The wincing man whispered. "Anise will know how to save them! She has to!" He let go of the man, leaving him surrounded by Separatists while the Seraph kept moving after the others.
The Shining Blade were at the end of their line. They could feel it, the Commander could feel it, everyone could. As they hastened through the staircases from chamber to chamber, many of them tripped and fell behind not because of any arrows, bullets or necromantic spells, but simply from failing to run up those stairs.
By the time they got to the top, they got so close to catching up that the Separatists got close enough to plunge their swords into one of them without the need for accidents or ranged attacks.
Finally in gardens of the upper city, its sculpted shrubs now completely overgrown for lack of care to cut them, the Shining Blade troop they chased was down to a single woman and upon seeing how fast the Seraph sped around the outer ring to the left and into the paths in the centre of the gardens, she decided to run to the right. Along the outer ring, crossing the square before the ministry, where the Commander finally got a moment to channel a spectral hand and trip her up as well.
She fell to the side and rolled onto her back, crawling backwards away from her pursuers, the Commander and soon thereafter, Logan in the front. "No! You backwards rabble! Why did you have to destroy everything?"
The Commander admonished her for how little she cared for what she and her order had done. "Us destroying everything? We didn't set the city on fire or take to killing the inhabitants! That was all you! Why would you do this!"
She ripped off what little of a shoulder piece her armor had and threw it at the Commander. "Worthless bunch, the lot of you! There must never be a Kryta under Separatist rule! I'd rather see it all destroyed!"
The Commander struggled to wrap his head around what he was hearing. "Surely you don't mean that!"
"I mean every word!"
"This isn't healthy! Look at everything Anise had done! The poverty, the restrictive and one-sided laws for humans, the death all around you! You can't seriously think this is better than a rule you've never seen! I too struggled to come to grips with it, all the more did Logan here! Anise was more to us than just a person with a rank, she was a friend. But even we had to realize that she wasn't as great as we made her out to be. We wouldn't have gone this far to come here, if we weren't all confident that each and every one of us would make for a better leader than her."
The woman spat on him. "Don't speak her name in vain like that! High Countess Anise is greater than all of you could ever hope to be! You don't know her like we do! She is strong! And smart! She is the best leader humanity could ever dream of!"
"Not strong enough to overpower a single man!" interjected a new voice, coming from the closest path within the gardens. Minister Aldryn marched along with his mesmers in tow, all of whose elegant courtwear was sullied in splatters of blood. "As for 'smart', I beg to differ." He threw something before the woman on the ground and she cowered together in fear when everyone realized what it was.
Countess Anise's severed head spun several full circles rolling towards the Shining Blade member until its hair got caught in one of the cracks in the square.
The Shining Blade soldier burst into a trembling, screaming fit, interrupted only with the gasps of a hyperventilating lunatic. "This one doesn't seem like a mesmer to me." the minister estimated. "But blindfold her and take her to one of the special cells, just to be sure. Do not feed her when asked, do not open the locks unless I tell you to." The Separatists around them nodded and got to work.
It was over.
All their battles were at an end.
The blood-red sky had faded into black, the stars obscured by the smoke of a burning city, yet still, the relief of all their struggles bearing fruit overcame everyone around. One more time, the captain raised his weapon to prompt a cheer from everyone around. "It was a total war, bitter and with no quarter granted from either side. But it's over for good now. We've achieved a final victory!"
The minister waited until the first cheers died down before he said his piece. "On this day, we have achieved victory! We have proven to the world that change need not happen on the terms of a higher-than-thou authority, let alone one in foreign clutches! We have shown the world that control can be wrested from them if the people simply choose to do so!"
"We founded our movement with desire for separation from an absolutist despot, motivated by her delusions of grandeur, fed into by the devotion of her blind followers! But now, we have broken through every obstacle they placed in our way! They have gambled all they had on their continued control and lost everything! Now, we are no longer in need of separatism and thus the name 'Separatist' has become obsolete! We have become the spear that pierced through the blockades placed in our way by our adversaries and carved a path to a future for the people of Kryta!"
Now, he raised his sword, soon joined by the men that had followed him into battle. "So I propose that we are no longer the Separatist movement. I hereby declare the founding of an order, formed out of the men and women that joined us prior to the treaty of Gendarran Fields. We shall call ourselves 'The Piercing Spear' and all functions previously handled by the Shining Blade will now be ours to preside over."
And so, both sides concluded the end of a long campaign and the joint conquest of the kingdom of Kryta.