章 125: Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Five – The Lived-Line
The inhabitants of the small town of Vyster and its winery had no idea a Ten was watching over them. Hazé was prone to 'go playing' for hours on end, doing two things: expanding her lived-line, and robbing certain individuals blind.
The first thing was simple, as it involved walking around. In her case, it involved using shape-changing magic to be taller and look older, and running around.
Spatial Magic was a very fickle thing. The ban on any form of spatial-expanding magic items was well known, as they formed 'pimples' in the Veil, that could be popped and easily invaded by extra-dimensional beings, which could become a total disaster for the immediate area before the breach was sealed. So, nobody made Bags of Holding, unless they were insane. They were usually the first victims of their own stupidity.
There was no real problem using spatial magic to swap locations. However, space was bent by gravity/matter, and so matter dragged at spatial magic. Teleporting to a non-grounded location with any level of spatial magic was nigh impossible. So, using a dimension door to pop up a thousand feet in the sky? Didn't happen. You'd end up right next to where you started.
It also meant that teleporting to a flying ship or a cloud island was impossible, as the spell wouldn't make the connection. You did actually have to fly up there, so aerial power was indeed a thing.
Likewise, making any kind of Summoning Portal or Rift or Gate or anything that wasn't at ground level was basically doomed to failure. Even if it started up in the air, it would be pulled down quickly.
So, all pop-and-go magic was surface-to-surface. Ah, except water wasn't firm enough, and so teleportation couldn't pass any running body of water over fifty feet wide. So, no teleporting across the ocean, for example.
The exception, of course, was your lived-line.
That was the common term for your past temporal track, the line of your life. Every step you took upon the surface of the world formed a map and trail across it through time. You could try to teleport to a place you scried, and you'd probably miss it but get close as you tried to picture exactly where it was, even if you were using a coordinate system.
But you could teleport anywhere along your lived-line accurately, merely resetting your physical coordinates to a past location, via a shift through the temporal. True tesseracting.
Some overly ambitious sorts had once thought of trying to teleport ahead to future lived-line coordinates, using loop logic to convince themselves that once they arrived there, they could simply track backwards and link up their lived-lines.
Those idiots were never seen again, and general consensus was they'd hit a temporal loop and the Hounds of Tindalos got them, or the Shadow and the Knife had offed them to prevent a time loop from manifesting.
Smart wizards teleported along their lived-line. That did mean that they had to travel overland, not flying, at the most riding a beast, and establish a trail-map of places they had gone to and so could move along.
Complicating this process were Interdiction zones, which any town of any size had set up, the Veil strengthened and nigh-impossible to breach. This simple tactic kept out incorporeal spirits, ethereal things, creatures using phasing, prevented creatures from being Summoned in, and Casters from doing things like Blinking past doors, Teleporting into vaults, ether-walking through walls, and the like. You had to detour around such zones, or they interrupted your lived-line.
Likewise, you had to cross the rivers and streams. If they had a bridge, great. If the bridge was destroyed, not good. So, a Caster might actually make a series of rocks in the water, less then fifty feet apart, and cross the water, walking from one to the next, forming a more secure and personal lived-line.
Actually, it had been proven that if you simply walked on the water, you could 'write' your lived-line onto the bottom of the body of water below, using it as a conductor. However, you couldn't transport yourself anywhere on that line, only to any solid points of ground it intersected.
Finding a wizard willing to walk across hundreds of miles of churning seas to draw a lived-line across it was a whole 'nuther problem. Naturally, riding a ship cut your lived-line.
This was all important, because one of the things Hazé was doing at night was expanding her lived-line, i.e. going exploring from place to place.
From the age of one to two, she traveled over three thousand miles of roads, leading to all the major cities of the Empire she had found herself in. She did much of them as a dog, if she wasn't running them in an older form to get her conditioning up and work on her lightfoot. Polymorphing spells were a great boon for early physical training!
---
Everything was painted into her Visual File, along with Detect Location to solidify spatial coordinates and provide measurements, giving her a personal Lived-Map of excruciating detail which she could draw up right out of her memory and walk around in virtually. She could even fill in details of people, places, and names, like her own Google Map.
Teleporting had a nominal range of ten miles per Caster Level. Naturally, this was far, far too short for the needs of a wizard who wanted to breakfast on the sea, lunch on the mountaintops, and sup on the lakeshore in different nations.
She could Range the spell with a 1/day Sudden Range, doubling the distance covered. She could also Teleport from one Rune Seal to another, Energizing her own Seal to double her range out, and then if the Seal on the other end was Energized, double it again.
Powerful cities might have Energized Seals on their ends, allowing Casters to break the Interdiction and go directly to them, usually located in a mage's guild, temple, or fortified military location. Anyone who could teleport in was naturally a powerful entity, and the powers-that-be naturally liked to track the comings and goings of such people... and charge them a hefty fee for use of the Seal, of course.
Such people often didn't like to use those Seals for those very reasons, and so would make their own Seals to come and go in private areas, and put up with the walk into the city if possible. So, scattered around cities were often illusion-covered private Rune Seals scribed on trees, rocks, boulders, and the like, tucked away out-of-sight until they were needed.
Hazé was doing the same thing. She was far too young to dare use any city's Rune Seal, so the maximum modifier she would ever get would be x4 for now... but if she had sufficient Caster Level raises, moving 500+ miles in one Casting was definitely possible.
She ran, and made an Energized Dual Seal just off the road when her run time was up. She Teleported back home, and then the next day Teleported back to where she'd left off the night before, repeating the process. By using Dual Seals, which dissipated in a day/Caster level, she could also double her range coming and going.
A potential thousand miles and more in one Casting was impressive, too, if she dared to do it. She had to avoid entering walled towns with Wards, as their gates were often designed to spot magic use by those entering, as she didn't want to be revealed as a child. Getting close to them was usually good enough, and if she had to run around them, she ran around them. If the way was totally blocked, well, she could fly, which also meant she could walk up the side of hills and mountains without any problem to get where she was going, as long as she stayed in contact with the land, or trail a hand or foot in the water as she glided along above it.
As for the local area around Vyster, to be on the safe side, she Gridmapped it.
She went down every street and trail, and fixed teleporting points in her mind, also putting down Seals here, there, and everywhere for about ten miles around, generally one location for every half-mile, gridding out the area so she could be within two minutes of anything that happened. In town, and the smaller villages close by, she could be there literally within seconds.
Why was she doing this? Well, mostly it was so she could steal and run away.
-----
There were a lot of things she didn't like about this Empire, particularly in the cities and the country estates of the nobility.
On her travels she saw many shrines and churches to the gods of Good that had been abandoned, sometimes taken over by the uncaring, or even the blasphemous. You just don't raise a house of Skulos in an old church of Aru...
There were necromancers running around, espousing the cheap labor of skeletons and zombies, ignoring the rot that spread out into the environment from the negative energy. Likewise, slaves were particularly common on the noble estates, their treatment ranging from fair to totally abominable. Usury was rising, driving people from their homes and generating more slaves for the unscrupulous. Banditry rose in tandem with it, as working for a living became less and less viable.
Oppression was rising, and then the sticky fingers of the Seven Sins with it. She could see the spread clearly, and it sickened her.
And she happened to have this problem of needing massive amounts of Karma. Karma could be gained by striking out against darkness, and one of the best ways to do that was to remove their funds and cost them a lot of money.
And if she happened to kill a lot of spellcasters who were preying on others with their magic, well, what goes around, comes around.
--------------------
The explosion shook the whole temple, fairly throwing the Master of Death from his bed, his crooked Staff bouncing away from his hand before he could grab it.
Much more alarming was the wailing he could heard, the tenor of it completely different from anything he'd heard before.
That sounded like... release?
The bony old man grabbed up his Staff and with a gesture of his hand his robes wrapped around himself. A thought and the Wards on his door were silenced, he opened up the door, opening his mouth to shout-
The backflash blew him back off his feet, searing him with a rising inferno, stemming from the massive Elemental in the shape of a burning swam twelve feet tall that was setting everything on fire around it happily.
Soak bleeding away, the death priest swore and prayed for the power to resist fire as his Soak fought away the flames starting to eat away at everything. Cool power fell over him, and he snarled as he chanted the prayer to a Dispel that would send the Elemental on its way.
And it failed.
He gawked, realizing the lurch that had woken him earlier had broken the center of the temple's Wards, shattering the unholy ground of the church. Whoever had attacked had shattered the main altar, and with it much of the dark power that reinforced the members of the temple.
There was a distant boom, and he saw the walls lurch. Something was pounding at the support beams of the church, and his eyes rose in horror. If the main column there failed, the roof would –
There was another boom, and an awful cracking rose from the roof above. He looked up just in time to see it falling down upon him.
---
Hazé watched the temple burn. It was total blasphemy, once a sacred site of Aru, a point of pilgrimage for the faithful, looking over and giving a great blessing to the town below.
It had been harried, attacked, and the priests run off by the local nobility and dark forces together, sending the area into a time of gloom and doom as the priests of the death god Skulos set up shop in the stripped remains.
Now they were burning under the bright moon, and the many undead they'd assembled in the crypts beneath were burning free in vivic fire.
The air elemental dropped down in a whirlwind, and blew the rising inferno into a wind devil throughout the entire church.
As for the treasury, she'd looted it first, and it was already burning and melting down behind her to foil any divination. She had a lot of Gear to make, starting with a much, much higher Quality Focus.
Non-Detection she'd already Raised to V, Astral Ward, and tied a Valence V to it, auto-Renewing for seamless coverage. Trying to Div her out wasn't going to work at all...
Of course, when they tried to scry on her, that was an excuse to kill them, too...
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Aelryinth
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