Kingdom Come: Chapter One?

For your viewing pleasure, I'm posting the super-rough first draft of the first chapter of Archemi #3, Kingdom Come. No editing, no nothing. This draft is subject to massive changes... consider it a sketch.

To be honest with you all, I lost my home a couple of days ago. I'm not going into why or how here, but it's been brutal. Still, I'm writing. Me and my wife are with friends and will be okay (and so are our pets). It's just super-mega-stressful and has put a bit of a crimp on my writing schedule.

I'm going to create a map that will be positioned just under the 'Vlachia is shaped like a big potato part'.

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It was a beautiful, crisp Fall morning in Taltos, where the new King of Vlachia watched on as I and my erstwhile team of plucky adventurers gathered around a big map table in the Royal War Room. The three-dimensional map was like a tabletop wargames setup, complete with pewter miniatures, tiny flags, plaster fortresses, and painted territory markers. We’d been here less than ten minutes, but I'd already realized a couple of things. Firstly, Vlachia was larger than I'd  thought. It was about the size of Texas, if Texas was shaped like a big potato. Secondly, the old king, Andrik, had vastly understated his vampire problem. 

The province of Myzsno, where the vampire had made his stronghold, had about the same square mileage as Delaware. It was now a solid 2500 square mile goat rodeo, a fan of undeath and corruption radiating out from the mountainous south-eastern border toward the center of the country.

Suri sucked thoughtfully on her lip as she looked over the purple ribbons and banners marking out the hostile territory. Ebisa's alien features were obscured by her white and red fox mask. Rin fiddled with her hair, glancing nervously at me as I pushed back from the table and plopped into the nearest chair. 

“Welp.” I gestured at the table. "With all due respect, your Majesty, but on a scale of one to fucked, we're bent over a barrel and a guy named Bubba is lubing up a broom handle with hog grease." 

"How... evocative," Ebisa remarked. Her gravelly pack-a-day voice was laced with dark humor.

Rin winced. "A bit too evocative."

I gave her a flippant two-finger salute. "I aim to please."

Suri let her lip go with a little pop, and shook her head. "Hector's right. Tactically speaking, this is a bloody nightmare."

Ignas sighed, and came forward to join us at the table. The ruler of Vlachia was a tall, sober, gray-haired man"I expressed a similar sentiment when the Captain’s messenger arrived last night. By the way the ministers were talking, I’d expected we’d lost perhaps two hundred miles of territory to this creature. The real situation is far more grim."

‘Grim’ was a pretty apt word to describe the scale of the quest that we had unwittingly accepted. As far as I could see, there were only two reasons that Vlachia had not been wholesale invaded by legions of undead. The first reason was geographical. Vlachia’s south-eastern region was very mountainous and heavily forested, similar to the Alps, and Myszno was ringed by peaks that created a bottleneck to the north-west. The second thing keeping them back were represented by two miniature towers in the middle of the pass. There had been four to start with, but the ones on the Myszno-side of the pass had already fallen. The others were still standing... but it was a matter of time before they were overrun. 

“What do we know about the target?” Suri folded her arms loosely across her chest, scowling in thought.

“His name is Utuk Bras,” Ignas replied heavily. “He is from the mageocracy of Shaliesh, one of the Shalid countries. Do you know much about it?”

“Nope,” I replied.

“A little,” Rin said timidly.

“I know the basics,” Suri said. “Big country on the east coast, positioned on a river delta that keeps the country green for most of the year. It’s said to be ruled by a council of wizards who never die.”

I shrugged. “So necromancers.”

“Just so.” Ignas bowed his head. “They are known as the Breathless, and their people worship them as avatars of their gods. The majority of the Breathless are vampires, but the head of this council is rumored to be a lich.”

“By 'mageocracy' re we talking benevolent magical democracy, or iron-fisted wizard-nazis?”

“A bit of both, from what I hear,” Suri said. “They’re rich, but hardly anyone enters or leaves Shaliesh. Merchants have to sell wholesale at market camps near the border. Cities are off-limits to travelers.”

“Huh.” I nodded. “So you think Sir Fangs-a-Lot is a lord from this council? Or do the Breathless make baby vampires when they feel like it?”

“My spies reported that Utuk Bras is not a lord of the Breathless, and no one discusses him at court. But yes... the lords do create servants for themselves,” Ignas replied. “Part of the reason Shaliesh has endured this long is because all of the public servants are bound to their progenitors. A vampire must obey its master.”

“Vampire bureaucrats? Gives a whole new meaning to birth, death, and taxes,” I muttered, looking down at the map. 

“Then my educated guess is that this guy is a breakaway element,” Suri said. “If he’s an exiled member of the Breathless, that’s bad news. What’s the total estimated figure of his army?”

Ignas winced. “Between ten and fifteen thousand soldiers. Undead and living thralls.”

Woah. “Were there even ten thousand people in Myszno?” I asked. 

“Not to start with,” the Volod replied. He reached out to tap the miniature of the castle, town, and the two fallen fortresses. “According to the scout, he marched in with a force of several hundred animate dead. Skeletons, as far as they know. They decimated villages in the dead of night so thoroughly that no one escaped to warn others. Villages and towns in the province are hidden in valleys or on plateaus... they stood no chance against an invasive force immune to the cold and altitude.”

“And then they pushed in from the mountains, took the town, and laid siege to the castle,” Suri finished grimly.

“Precisely,” Ignas said. “We found out too late. Magical communications from the castle were not received, I assume because the monster disabled the Count's ability to call for help. It is five days flight by quazi from here to Hava Sahasi, the castle. It’s a twenty-two day march to the Bulang Kettu Pass by land - seventeen, if you press the army at full speed. But they arrive exhausted, which is why we had four garrisons stationed in the region. Two of those garrisons are now part of Utuk’s army.” 

“How many mages are there, sire?” Ebisa, who had been leaning indolently against the edge of the table, suddenly spoke up. “And where are they getting the mana to fuel this invasion? Even several hundred skeletons requires a massive expenditure of mana.”

“That’s a question we don’t have the answer to.” Ignas jerked his chin up as he moved away and began to pace. “It something we must find out if we have a hope of reclaiming this land.”

“Resource management is a core weakness of necromancy and undead forces,” Rin added. Both Rin and Ebisa were Mercurions, but they were a study in physical opposites. Ebisa was rail-thin, her dull silicone flesh like smooth gray clay. Her voice was rough and unformed - a prototype, like the rest of her. Rin was a more typical Mercurion in that she was a work of art, with beautiful silver mother-of-pearl skin, a musical voice and big blue eyes that shifted nervously as she spoke. “The undead have to be constantly replenished with mana, and the effort to raise and control an army would have to be... umm... well, astronomical.”

“Are there any mana wells in Myszno?” Suri asked Ignas and Ebisa both.

They glanced at each other.

“Myszno has historically been a place of pilgrimage for those who worship The Nine,” Ignas said. “It is strongly associated with magic, especially the presence of sorceresses... but that is local and incidental. We searched for mana there for many years... so if there is a reservoir of mana there, we have not found it.”

I grunted. “Then it’s possible that Fangface knows something we don’t.”

“A mystery to solve once we achieve our objective,” Ebisa rasped. The lean assassin stood up from the table. “There’s only one job we need to do. We find this Utuk Bras. We discover his weaknesses. We kill him.”

“Again,” I said.

Ebisa snorted.

“That is the essense of the plan. Ebisa, you and I must consult with the Captain’s man, along with either Suri or Hector, or both.” Ignas jerked his chin at Suri and I. Somehow, we’d ended up standing together, shoulder to shoulder.

“Suri is the better interviewer, and I need to talk with Karalti about this quest,” I said. “She’ll have a perspective on this situation that we don’t. You up for it, Suri?”

“Sure.” Suri - a six-foot tall Amazon with coppery dark skin and blazing red hair - nodded sharply. “We’ll RV in a couple hours.”

“Suits me.” I smiled at her. She winked. I stuck the tip of my tongue out the corner of my mouth. Suri did the same when no one was looking, wiggling it up and down.

Ignas let out a deep sigh. “Very well. Rin, you are welcome to attend, but I think you are better off handling the logistics for your journey.”

“Me too,” she replied. “I’m not very good at strategy games. I always liked to play platformers and building games like Stardew Valley and... umm... oh.”

Rin trailed off, more awkwardly than usual. Of the people here, two of them were NPCs. Suri might have been a real person once, but she barely remembered that there was anything other than Archemi. Rin and I were the only ‘humans’ in the room - the ones who remembered their lives on Earth, anyway. I doubted I could consider myself that for very long, though. My memory was starting to become sketchy.  For the time being though, this virtual world of Archemi was the only reality that Ignas, Ebisa and Suri knew and understood.

“The most important thing to know is that everyone has their strengths.” Ebisa padded over to Rin like a hungry alley cat, and slid a hand possessively over her shoulder. “And weaknesses.”

Rin squeaked, and her eyes widened. She blushed a vivid cerulean blue, and whapped the other Mercurion on the arm. “Ebisa!”

“Hmm?” Ebisa bent down, pressing the cheek of her mask against Rin’s face. 

Rin hissed. “Not in front of His Majesty!”

“What, Kitten?” Ebisa glanced up at Ignas. “I was talking about the vampire.”

Rin buried her face in her hands. Suri laughed, I laughed, and even Ignas’ thin lips twitched up in a wry smile... an expression that faded as an odd rumbling shook the air around us. The table rattled, and several of the miniatures toppled over.

“The hell...?” I grabbed my spear. Suri already had a pair of axes in hand, as if she’d pulled them out of thin air. Ebisa was straight and alert, her hand resting on the hilt of her dagger.

“Hector!” The telepathic voice of my dragon broke through the tense silence that had fallen over the room. “Three dragons just appeared over Mount Racosul! They're big... one big female, two big males!”

“Fuck,” I said aloud. To Karalti, I thought: “Do they have riders?”

“Yes! The riders are wearing armor. The dragons are big... and they look weird.”

"Something wrong? Like... how?"

 "They look sick," Karalti replied. Her youthful voice was laced with unease. 

“What? What did we just feel?” Ignas stiffened in alarm. Ebisa left Rin and fell in by his left side.

“Dragon knights,” I said grimly. “From the Eyrie of St. Grigori.”