The next second, black skulls trailing silver flames as they rode blazing Thorns slammed into the shadow-giant’s face, cast from a V Valence. The towering nightwalker did not get the chance to shout an alarm, ask a question, or pass on any information before its inky black head blew apart from a whole lot of Disrupting Vivic Thorns doing the work of the gods there. The undead demonized soul crashed to the ground and began urgently Burning in poly-colored fires that blazed over it with shocking speed, undead and fiend and outsider all rolled into one be-yoo-tiful meal for the Land.
There were four double-sized gargoyles perched around the corners of the rooms, four-armed specimens with tremendous combat power that actually might be able to slow down some of the stuff their master likely Summoned here if it got away from him.
The Split Fastcast Thornrays hit the first one, bored through it in a stream of writhing black vines, and flashed all around the chamber’s walls they were perched on, two vines in separate directions forming Chains of Roses binding them all together as they drilled through the gargorians and ripped their stony chests apart with cracks and crinkles and swiftly dying shrieks. The magnificent and dangerous Constructs sort of fell apart as Banefire did its thing in making them collapse, but the vines there caught just about all the pieces and just held them there in place, not letting them fall and create a disturbance.
I eyed the Summoning Diagram, a combination of Pentagram and Thaumaturgic Circle, with some supporting pillars around it that looked like the foundations of his tower’s Wards. Obviously he wasn’t expecting anyone to come up from below into his holdings, nor expecting his enslaved Earth Elementals to let anyone through who was creating a tunnel.
Spells that eliminated a Charm and falsified that it was still in effect were wonderful things. Given my Elemental Command Aura and their sudden freedom, the Elementals were happy enough to stick around just long enough to see their erstwhile master get really shafted.
I looked around myself once, nodded, and Cast my Widened Rune of Earth.
I didn’t get all of my Caster Buffs with my Runework, and bringing up the Sublime Chord might alert him, so it was a measly ninety feet in radius, effective CL 45, inside of which the stone sat up sharply and looked at me, ready to do whatever I damn well wanted it to do.
The first thing I did was walk towards what looked to be his treasure vaults, and as I did so I just melted the stone out of the way. His magical and mundane traps suddenly had no stone about them, and fell into what was suddenly a long and straight hallway.
Then I bored a passage right up underneath the tower above, then set up an Interdiction so nothing was coming in or out.
I just needed something to start the fun, and there it was, radiating so much Entropic Evil it was visible through the stone.
The very bored Croaking Demon got to see the walls all fall down about it in the treasure chamber, and sat up just in time to receive the blasting flash of a Delayed Split Thornray in its copious gut and frog-like head… a Thornray loaded with all the key stuff, but very specifically enough Immortal Power to cut through its Anti-Magic and empower the vivus.
After all, I wasn’t too concerned about the wizard’s wealth.
I’d warped the Dungeon enough that the explosion of vivus from the death of the demon was channeled pretty much straight up, tearing through the weakened stone above and blowing straight up into the night sky, drawing a lot of attention… and then the tower fell down.
Three hundred feet straight down.
It was a long ways to fall down the chute I’d made, and when it hit, even magic-reinforced stone wasn’t going to stay too intact, plus everything inside coming to a rather abrupt halt wasn’t going to be receiving any favors.
Then, naturally enough, the ruined tower fell over on its side, right across his Summoning Circle and main chamber, and further pulverized everything as it shattered and multi-ton stones pulped and pulverized everything within.
I moved the hundred feet of stone between me and the explosion out of the way, noting that the Wards for some odd reason were now completely disrupted, and had collapsed with both the destruction of their foci and likely the death of the man who’d made them.
Strange, that.
Without further ado, I made my way up to the surface. which was now occupied by a nice big hole where the tower and its walls had once been. Nobody had time to race over and investigate before that very hole was closed and sealed, and I began putting a massive plug into place above me, pulling all the stone from the Dungeon into it to do so, and precipitating any belongings or items that had survived the exploding and dispersing Immortal Power of the Croaking Demon’s abrupt perishing into falling to the floor below.
I wasn’t getting pings of anything living surviving most of that, and really, not much intact was left behind in the Dungeon at all. The sudden explosion was a full 20d6, and the collapse of the Dungeon Levels on top of it, raining down stone and bricks, didn’t help anything survive it even if they weathered the blast.
With a two-hundred-foot thick plug of stone above me, I descended to the blasted white floor of the main chamber, and the cracked, shattered, and toppled mess of the tower that had fallen open into the underground slope I’d made for it.
No longer intact and enforced by magic, I had no trouble reaching out to the stone of the tower and Shaping it all away, exposing the crushed and pulverized contents for my perusal.
Egranzier the Manifold was dead, of course. It looked like he’d been in his study, reading up on something, when suddenly he was in freefall, hit the stones of his floor at full velocity. Then the ceiling came down on him to add to his woes, pounding him through the floor, and following that the tower fell over and multi-ton blocks finished the job. He might have had Contingencies to whisk him away, but the Interdiction had stopped that, so now was only to stop any Clones he might have.
There wasn’t much recognizable about him as I plunged Dread’s Spear into him and asked for a Miracle that his Clones perish and vivify with him.
I could feel at least three different sparks of life in the distance sputter and go out, snuffed by True Death. His back-up, back-up to the back-up, back-up to that, and likely a link to a lich’s soul cage that vivus took care of were all going to sputter and die, and one Conjurer of things men shouldn’t be fucking around with was not going to come back, even if an Immortal tried to haul him back from death.
His cracked skull I cut off from the mangled and pulped remnants of his body and robe, Mending it back to an intact state as vivus and Prestidigitation combined to take the blood, flesh, and brains off it, leaving me with something useful. The rest of his body Burned away to white dust and ash that would be gone with the morning sun.
His treasury was atomized, too bad, so sad, but there were things in his tower that I could salvage, especially his library, and once I moved all the stone out of the way, sifting through the mess for magical stuff, gemstones, and whatever lore was squirreled away that still remained was something that occupied me right up until the sun rose.
A brazier of stone, a skull resting on it, coals burning, incense swirling, the residues and echoes of a spirit otherwise sent howling to its fate, not even knowing how it died, condensed in a confused and angry picture of the same saturnine Simulacrum that I’d seen in the north. The icy remains of five others had been found exploded and shattered in the tower and Dungeon, indicating that he liked building Constructs with some thinking ability that could actually Cast spells, and which he could trust absolutely as their originator.
“You!” he snarled as he set hollow, spectral eyes on me, trying to lunge forward. The Circle about him flared and sent him wailing back in shock as Silver smote him.
“Egranzier the Manifold,” I stated calmly, undeterred by his antics. “You’ve been conjured out of your own skull there to answer six questions. Please try to resist them, that will make this much more fun.”
Silver flames edged with the crimson of Humanbane danced around the brazier, and truly Holy lights glimmered and flared to life, bathing him in the judgment of Heaven as he screamed and writhed, clearly suppressed by all of them.
“In the name of Truth, what are the names and identities of your fellow cultists and operatives of Thanatos that you know of?” I inquired of him.
He tried to resist, he really did, but Truth had him. Silver flames, Banefire, and Holy Magic, plus the fact that OMG did I have a crapload of Spell Potency, and he had no spells to buttress his will, meant he had no choice but to wail and betray his master.
His answer was very full and complete, names and people and who they truly were, a fairly exhaustive number of over three dozen names of people likely spanning decades who he’d worked with in the name of Thanatos.
“What are the secrets you kept close that will be of great use to us?”
“Who are the greatest internal threats to the security and stability of Iberon, in your opinion?”
“Who are the pawns you’ve been manipulating, knowingly or unknowingly, to do Thanatos’ will here in Iberon?”
“What are the identities of your main operatives and agents, who are not fellow cultists of Thanatos?
“Where precisely are your back-up shelters and stores of wealth and magic, outside your tower and Dungeon?”
His answers finished, the cursing, helpless spirit of what had once been a master Conjurer and lord of his own army of slaves and minions dissolved back into trace remnants of his skull.
I could not summon the echoes forth again, only someone else could do that. But I essentially had a small book’s-worth of knowledge about this vile man, the things he had done, secrets he had uncovered and exploited, and just how effective an agent he’d been for his God of Death in Iberon for the last hundred and fifty damn years.
No wonder the Empire was in such a shitty state. Thanatos had been working this game for a long time, spreading a lot of corruption through the place.
The biggest cause of self-destruction was that the Emperor could only come from three ‘imperial clans’, which meant any Emperor had to be born to or marry into those ancestral clans. The idiotic requirement meant inbreeding, unstable rulers, forced marriages, and bloody competition for the throne from a limited supply of overly ambitious, entitled sots who thought of the Imperial Throne as their birthright and privilege, not a position of responsibility.
The current Emperor, Alucius, was one of those Egranzier considered the great dangers to the Empire. He was batshit insane, obsessed with his power, privilege, respect, obedience, and not tolerating any challenge to any of that, while not giving a damn thing about any other aspect of the Empire. He had no obligations to anyone, they only had obligations to him!