It was late by the time Bernt made it back to the Undercity – the evening rush on the market was already well underway. He’d managed to learn a few things, though he still wasn’t sure about what to do about his next investiture. It was frustrating, but at least the day hadn’t been a total loss.
It had taken some fast talking, but he had eventually managed to convince the librarian that he wasn’t going to attempt to bond an elemental. That settled, Hallan let him ...
2024-11-16 16:35:32 +0000 UTC
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“Do you have any idea what you just agreed to?” Torvald’s mother said, her voice tinged with exasperation. They were sitting in the rooms their family shared in the castle, where she’d practically dragged him the moment the meeting ended. They were nicer than a Guard Commander’s family could normally hope for, owing in no small part to the woman sitting in front of him. If she didn’t hate politics and intrigue so much, his mother might have been running this city by virtue of her ...
2024-11-14 15:12:38 +0000 UTC
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Ed shook his head, trying to make sense of the scene in front of him. He was sitting down on hard ground, and a flabby, gray creature lay dead at his feet. It bled black blood that evaporated into what looked like steam or fog even as it poured out onto the ground.
“Great One! Ed! Can you walk?” hissed a familiar voice.
He blinked, and found the speaker, a familiar-looking imp, standing right behind the body. She wasn’t wearing her usual gray robes, but rather an odd, scaly ...
2024-11-12 11:57:23 +0000 UTC
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My editor didn't manage to get a look at this one, so if you guys notice something, feel free to drop that in the comments. Cheers!
Iriala rose from her seat, casting her gaze around at all those assembled and willing them to get their godsforsaken heads out of their asses, just this once. Word had gotten around quickly among all those who mattered last night, of course, but she could tell that most of the people here hadn’t come looking to make themselves useful. That...
2024-11-09 16:24:51 +0000 UTC
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Bonus brownie points for the first person to correctly guess what civilization the demons' culture is based on.
“So, do you think she’s going to pull it off?” Nirlig asked as he took a sip of the pungent, earthy-tasting beer that he’d brought over. Bernt turned from his stone hearth and held out a plate for him—fish, potatoes and cabbage. The goblin accepted with his crippled, three-fingered hand and dug in.
The quality of the food available had improved ...
2024-11-07 14:40:41 +0000 UTC
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Iriala tossed her notes down on her small writing desk in disgust and paced around the cell, watching her prisoner. She’d interviewed the Duergar abjurer twice more since the first time, and the picture that had emerged was as bleak as it was bizarre.
“So, once again, from the beginning. Tell me if I’ve got this right,” she began, her interpreter repeating the words in Duergar as she spoke in a now well-practiced routine. “Your king, Grundrik, housed a powerful demon, Nuros, i...
2024-11-05 11:30:45 +0000 UTC
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Jori dove off of the outcropping over the steep river valley, letting the searing updraft carry her up high over the burning river. Flying was great!
She’d always hated scampering over the sharp rocks that covered the landscape here as a spawnling. It was slow, uncomfortable and dangerous. Ambush predators like fiends liked to hide in cracks to snatch young imps as they passed. By contrast, watching the gray and black landscape pass by underneath her felt indescribably liberating.
...
2024-11-02 13:41:16 +0000 UTC
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Bernt carefully visualized the spellform for banefire in his mind’s eye. It was a lot more difficult than tracing the spell out in the air in front of him, but he’d been practicing. Still, it took more than ten seconds to be sure he wasn’t leaving anything out of the intricate pattern. The spell was modeled after a simple fireball—most of it was just a fireball—but the portion of the spell that defined exactly what was to be burned was heinously complex.
Behind h...
2024-10-31 10:48:28 +0000 UTC
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“You know, all I ever really wanted to do was water fields,” Uriah told the weird, goat-faced demon tiredly as it fruitlessly scrabbled for purchase in the bubble of water that kept it suspended in front of him. He felt empty inside, hollowed out. He knew he should be feeling something, but it was all too much. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
The water boiled as the thing tried to conjure fire in its fist and sulfurous steam gurgled up, adding to the stench that hung ...
2024-10-29 11:25:53 +0000 UTC
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Alright, here we go! That's the end of book 2. We'll be starting book 3 with a prologue next week. Cheers!
Ed dug around in his belt pouch, digging out his mess kit along with his remaining supplies. He found some dried apricots that felt more like stones than food, a pack of tobacco and a small package of dusty-smelling crackers from the-gods-knew-when. They were nearly a decade old, preserved in the sterile holding space since the day he and his two best officers had b...
2024-10-26 12:31:12 +0000 UTC
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To those of you who were interested, I've inserted a short scene to check in on Gnugg in chapter 42. I'm going to paste it in in the Patreon post, but you can also find it in the RR post, which will go live later today.
Nuros cast himself along the ground at the feet of his master. His presence darkened the floor of most of the enormous audience chamber, though it didn’t diminish the light that flooded in from the far end, where hellfire flickered from an enormous, misshapen ...
2024-10-24 06:17:55 +0000 UTC
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Here is this week's bonus chapter. Cheers!
“When Ed told me that the Underkeepers were going to become a guard organization, and that we were going to open applications to the general public, I told him he was out of his mind. And he was!” Fiora looked around at the humans, dwarves, goblins and gnomes assembled in the center of the Undercity Market, along with the single kobold intern that huddled miserably in the back.
Behind her stood what Bernt assumed was g...
2024-10-23 08:54:40 +0000 UTC
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Radast turned to look at Bernt, and only then did he realize that he was supposed to do the talking. Somehow, he’d expected that he was just supposed to be there to symbolically lend his support. He cleared his throat. It felt strange to talk to her like this, with everybody watching them.
“Have you managed to find Ed already? They said he should be somewhere nearby, as long as you’re still anywhere near where the rest of your pack was. One of them grabbed him, right...
2024-10-22 13:15:56 +0000 UTC
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These next couple of chapters are quite a bit shorter than the previous ones -- this is because we've had 5 in a row that were nearly 50% over my normal target, and this one's a bit short. It's just how the scenes ended up shaking out as I'm closing down the 2nd arc. To keep you all properly fed with chapters, there will be another drop of 4 chapters next week. There are 50 chapters in total, so we'll be finishing it up end of next week and starting Arc 3 on Oct 29. I've got the third boo...
2024-10-19 13:17:43 +0000 UTC
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Frustration roiled in Bernt's stomach as he made his way out of the building. The library hadn’t been entirely a dead end, but it wasn’t going to help him get Jori back any time soon. He’d been hoping that he might stumble across something, anything that could help right now. As he had that thought, though, Bernt realized just how ridiculous it sounded. He wasn’t acting rationally – he was grasping at straws.
This wasn’t helping. He needed to start thinking thi...
2024-10-17 13:34:01 +0000 UTC
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Surprise! There's going to be an extra chapter this week, and this one's a chonker. Enjoy!
The library, as it turned out, did have quite a bit of historical information about the various kinds of pacts that warlocks made and had made in the past. Unfortunately, none of the sources concerned themselves with summoning demons, or any detailed theory on exactly how demonic pacts were formed. Not that he was planning to need that. Still, it might have been worth reading about...
2024-10-16 14:18:49 +0000 UTC
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Here is a map of the Undercity. In general terms, the Crafter's Quarter is beneath the Crafter's District, the Undercity Market roughly below the Temple District, the Goblin Quarter below the Castle, and the Dwarven Quarter below the Lower District, below specifically the portion immediately next to the Upper District.
2024-10-16 13:25:18 +0000 UTC
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Bernt set out for the Mage’s Guild as soon as he woke up the next morning. He’d been scheduled to work in the evening and he was determined to make the most of the time he had. Things were going to be very busy for a while, but that was going to be true for everyone. The city was in shambles.
Right now, though, he needed to talk to get to the guild library. He knew he wasn’t very likely to find useful information on demonology there, but it was somewhere to start. It was time that...
2024-10-15 12:37:44 +0000 UTC
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Hi all, I finally got around to making a surface map for Halfbridge. Undercity will be coming... idk, maybe next week if I find the time. Points of interest are not labeled so far, so I guess that makes this the hard mode version. I'll update that as well, but it's the middle of the night here, so it's going to have to wait a day or so.
Edit: Now updated with labels of important locations.
2024-10-12 21:57:54 +0000 UTC
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Bernt stormed out of the break room. Someone was following him, but he didn’t care. He could still feel Jori through their bond. It hadn’t broken when she disappeared, but it was different. Dull, somehow. He could only get a general sense of her emotional state, but it wasn’t like when she was far away on the material plane. He didn’t get any sensory information, no matter how hard he tried to focus.
Bursting through the door to Ed’s office, he rounded the archmage’s desk an...
2024-10-12 16:08:50 +0000 UTC
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Sorry for the wait on this one, I had to make sure it hit just right. Cheers!
Bernt charged into the gap he had made with a roar, followed closely by those nearest to him. He needed to get closer, to get to Jori. He felt her leg snap through their bond and shivered in sympathetic pain. As more Underkeepers rushed after him, he pushed the white flames out ahead of him, clearing the way. If he could keep control of them, he might be able to finish this on his own.
Ju...
2024-10-10 18:16:20 +0000 UTC
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Extra-Large Chapter today!
Bernt cursed loudly. Was Torvald alive? He was still glowing – that had to count for something, right?
It wasn’t just the light shed by the thousands of floral vines that grew around the cavern that had dimmed, but also that coming off of the white flames that still flickered from many of the dead. Bernt had lost count of just how many he’d cast, but he could sense their mana.
To Jori’s eyes, though, the cavern blazed with l...
2024-10-08 05:07:45 +0000 UTC
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Hi all, thought you guys might like to see some maps! These are a map of Besermark, and of the larger geographic environment that Besermark is located in. Please keep in mind these are considered WIP and still subject to change in the future. Cheers!
2024-10-06 21:36:57 +0000 UTC
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This chapter kept getting longer in the editing process, so an extra-meaty one today. Cheers!
Bernt threw a glance back toward the main entrance. Ed’s force barrier was gone and more demons flooded into the cavern, followed by rank upon rank of duergar soldiers. Many of these carried obvious signs of disease like open sores and boils – whatever Lin had done to them, it wasn’t temporary. A second breach had opened nearby, and more of the gray dwarves poured out from...
2024-10-05 12:18:22 +0000 UTC
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“Incoming!” shouted a goblin’s voice. Bernt turned to look just in time to see Rindle come running from one of the small side tunnels.
“They got the vines,” he called, looking dismayed. “They just withered away!”
“Form up!” Glim bawled. “Keep them bottled up in the tunnel if they break through. Somebody get inside and sound the alarm.”
“Kustov, Bernt, Josie, into the tunnels!” Fiora called somewhere behind Bernt. “We’ll slow them down as much as...
2024-10-03 13:50:36 +0000 UTC
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By the time Bernt felt like himself again, evacuees were streaming through the Undercity Market, heading from the Crafter’s Quarter into the Goblin Quarter under the direction of the Underkeeper Guards.
Bernt wasn’t sure exactly what Kustov had been doing with Janus, but it was clear that it was some kind of expansion to the Undercity, or just a bunker of some kind. When he and Josie had brought their concerns to Ed, the archmage had decided to take measures to better shelter the pe...
2024-09-30 07:41:44 +0000 UTC
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Bernt was stunned by the sheer amount of magic being flung around in such a small space. Enemy mages and warlocks tried to hammer through their defenses with force, fire, and lightning, but nothing penetrated. The lightning was drawn down into Kustov’s runes, the fire splashed against Bernt’s heat barriers, and the force was countered directly by Ed. While the archmage held his position, the duergar troops couldn’t advance, hemmed in by his magic.
Only Bernt’s perpetual flame co...
2024-09-28 19:17:38 +0000 UTC
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Bernt stepped into the breakroom with Jori on his shoulder to find it buzzing with activity. Most of the Underkeepers’ mages were there, alongside Glim, Palina and several other guards. The tables along one wall were occupied by Halfbridge’s solicitors. Unlike the guilds or the Underkeepers, they didn’t have a specific style of dress or identifying characteristics. That made sense, he supposed. What warlock would really want to be recognized on sight in the street as such?
There w...
2024-09-26 07:05:21 +0000 UTC
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By the time Bernt finished his tea, Ed returned with Kustov and a few Underkeeper Guards in tow. Ed had intercepted the messenger returning from the army on his way back. After hearing Fiora’s report on the situation on the surface, he filled them in.
“They started attacking on the front line before Arice even made his move. Nothing too unusual so far down here, they’re just testing our defenses, but the general put his assault on hold for the time being. The timing is suspicious,...
2024-09-24 09:36:34 +0000 UTC
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By the time Bernt made his way back toward the Undercity Gate, it was already getting dark. He shivered in the cold evening air – winter was just around the corner and the nights were getting chillier every day. For a moment, he considered trying a warming variation on his clothes-cleaning cantrip that he’d developed the previous winter, but decided against it. He’d never tried to cast it with an investiture before, never mind doing it left-handed.
He opted for some hot food inste...
2024-09-21 10:50:50 +0000 UTC
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