++There have been a great many elven clans who have not survived the millennia, for one reason or another. It is this that keeps the ones who remain great. Were it not for the competition and demand of excellence, we would all surely be devolved into little more than humans.++

  Book 2: Chapter 24

  Oleri had run all the way back, despite her wounds. With Toughness as high as hers came a near-bottomless reserve of stamina. Or so she’d thought. Apparently its mileage was reduced by no small measure when a sizable fraction of the blood fueling those enduring muscles lay splashed across some abandoned battlefield. By the halfway mark, Oleri had even started to feel the weight of her armour like she was some common Worker to be impeded by a mere hundred pounds.

  Warden Erindor’s domain reared up in the distance like a monument to her inadequacies, and as soon as Oleri saw it the journey there seemed easier by comparison. It was these new strides, taken to bring her ever closer to the scorn she knew must be awaiting her beyond, that truly tested her will.

  But she made them nonetheless. To fail was a Circumscriber’s shame, to fail and flee after the fact would be the shame of her whole clan.

  Oleri was the last adult of her own clan, save for its head, which made any dishonour she brought onto it all the worse. Her mother had died fighting that animal Ghorlak to the east, and her younger siblings were still shy of fifty and not yet into even their second Tiers. In ten years, when more of them had been presented with Surging Stones, perhaps she could feel the weight of responsibility lessened from her back.

  If she didn’t die trying to undo this latest failure.

  A half-dozen of her fellow Circumscribers awaited Oleri at the gates. It was a formidable show of power, but only a show. Erindor’s influence had been waning for the past century, she’d heard, and certainly in the few decades she’d been serving under him. These few Circumscribers now made up all but ten of the ones he commanded.

  Four of the others had died in Norvhan, along with his only Wizard.

  Thankfully, none of the Circumscribers eying Oleri now asked her what had happened. She reckoned they could all tell. At a glance, she saw the number of wounds littering her and the damage done to her mangled armour. Where the metal wasn’t cleaved open outright, it was battered and dented fully out of place. Where it wasn’t crusted with drying blood, it was littered with dirt from her mad scramble away.

  She probably looked like a woman who’d just crawled through ten battles, rather than only one, and if nothing else her fellow fighters seemed to respect that fact. Oleri was pleased, God knew it was the first time in a while she’d enjoyed any respect from her senior peers.

  It didn’t last, Oleri was moving past them and deeper into the domain. She headed right for the fort at its heart, saw the grey stone of its battlements and took note of the decrepitude that grew more apparent with every step closer. How many generations had it been since the place was in anything close to its best condition, she wondered. It was impossible to tell, too far in the past for any trace to now remain.

  The only living thing left in the domain that had seen those days was its Warden, and Erindor had never yet been in the mood to share his recollection of such times with her. Oleri came to his chambers in only a minute of walking, knocked upon the heavy oaken door, and was left waiting five minutes more. She doubted very much the Warden was so busy as to require such a pause, he simply tended to leave people lingering when he could. A way of making himself seem important, she supposed.

  Perhaps it worked on some people, but Oleri had met too many other Wardens to succumb.

  Finally the word to enter was given and she stepped inside. Oleri closed the door behind her, moved halfway into the room and brought herself into the full light of its chandelier. Between her and the Warden was a desk of wood and metal that looked heavy enough to stop a bullet, making its owner seem small by comparison. She knelt before him all the same, lowering her head in respect.

  “I have returned, father.”

  Warden Erindor was silent for a long moment, always having liked to do that too. When he finally spoke his voice landed with the weight of a mountain.

  “Why?”

  The question could not have been more simple, and answering it could not have been more difficult. Oleri felt a slack tongue clogging her mouth up as she tried to think of how.

  “We defended Norvhan, as you instructed, but the enemy attacked with more force than we anticipated. I was the only elven survivor, and as far as I know none of your human soldiers escaped.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Pushing the words out didn’t relieve Oleri at all, only worsening the squirming of her guts. She looked up to find her father’s eyes a skewering lance of disgust.

  “And you ran away,” he spat.

  “I retreated because—”

  —”Ran away.”

  Oleri’s next words caught in her throat, oozing out only slowly between hard breaths. This was so unfair it made her eyes water.

  “...Because the battle was already lost. All the elves but myself had already died by the time I even considered retreat, and the enemy had reanimated scores and surrounded our soldiers.”

  More silence, broken only by the sound of a pen scraping on paper. Oleri looked up to see the Warden had turned from her, his face tight with worry and his knuckles tighter still.

  “This can’t be allowed to stand,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “My territory snatched by some revenant madman. I won’t have it. Won’t accept it. We will muster my forces from the territories they now cover and send a concentrated attack at Norvhan. You’re to go back there and reclaim it, you hear me?”

  She did, but wished so very hard that she didn’t.

  “Warden that would not be wise, I fear—” he sprang from his seat halfway into Oleri’s sentence and came at her faster than any vampire had. Warden Erindor had not fought for over a century, but he had lost none of the levels and Attributes accumulated by his two hundred years serving Oleri’s grandfather as a Circumscriber.

  His backhand cracked against her jaw with force enough to almost break it, throwing stars into her vision and leaving them to jitter as she fell down and slid across the floor. Only upon thudding against the far wall did her body’s momentum finally exhaust itself.

  “I have taken your suggestion under consideration,” Oleri’s father spat. “Now stop second-guessing me and do your fucking job.”

  —

  Reggie was having a pretty good month, all things considered. It started with waking up in his place of rest, inside an actual building, and finding that his surroundings were warm and insulated from the wind. Just because his body didn’t suffer performance loss from the cold, didn’t mean he wasn’t more comfortable out of it. All sorts of weird little facsimiles of life like that still lingered in him, and they all made his time as ruler of Norvhan a great deal more enjoyable than his time in that shitting castle.

  The good news didn’t stop there though. With Norvhan’s human population so big, Reggie had plenty of sources of blood.

  From livestock, of course. He wasn’t exactly as adverse to feeding from certain humans as he’d once been anymore, if he could enslave them but not drink their blood then it was a little bit fucked, but the sheer practicality of his situation was reason enough not to. Norvhan was already uneasy enough under his new rule that stealing people’s vein-juice was really not a push he needed to be giving them.

  He might’ve felt differently about it, were it not for the readily available pigs, but there it was.

  Ludvich seemed happier too, able to once again practice his natural calling in life—terrorising people. He was now in charge of stopping anyone from getting bright ideas about murdering Reggie, and he was damned good at it. Ludvich, of course, knew all the tricks, having made a career of rooting out just this sort of conspiratorial behaviour.

  That was as a human, and his natural living excellence had only been enhanced by undeath. The ability to hold as still as a statue and overhear hushed conversations from across a road went a long way in rooting out subterfuge.

  Which was to say nothing of Reggie’s military efforts.

  Following that unfortunate ‘mass suicide’ business, he’d still managed to end up with about three dozen enthralled soldiers. Each of them was a Worker with physical Attributes in the low 20s even prior to being further strengthened by his ichor. With that in their systems, they’d become stronger still. Their average level of physical power was almost of a level with what Ludvich had brought alongside Reggie into the grimwoods as a human.

  Nothing to a Circumscriber, of course. Reggie imagined that just a squad of the elves’ own elites would have decent odds of beating all his defenders at once, but then he wasn’t leaving his defence with them either.

  The undead were doing a lot of heavy lifting.

  Literally, Reggie had used reanimated soldiers—letting the slain townsfolk lie for the sake of not worsening his already awful reputation—to carry debris and lumber for the arduous process of fixing Norvhan’s damned wall. So far, that much had been an outstanding success. The damage to it had been oddly clean, all things considered, and the dainty little holes left in it required only a few tree trunks each to fix, more or less.

  Not a problem for several dozen peelers made from about the strongest set of Workers one could hope to run into. Any one of them could probably have lifted Reggie over their head with a single arm, and with their strengths combined the job was made trivially easy. The hardest part was actually directing them. Watching the peelers swing woodsman’s axes like halberds and smash fist-sized chunks of wood out of their targets with every blow, Reggie became suddenly aware that he lacked the architectural knowledge to actually make use of all that power.

  Fortunately, he had access to an even more impressive wealth of human brainpower than he did human strength. Among Norvhan there wasn’t exactly a trained architect, but there were a lot of folks who’d overseen enough construction projects that between them Reggie had access to roughly the training of one. That, and the ridiculous ease with which the physical labour was being done, meant that a large margin of error and excess of time to try again saw things done pretty well.

  Well enough, in fact, that Reggie found the repairs a good deal better than the original wall. That gave him an idea.

  “Why was the rest of the wall not built like this?” he asked one of the craftsmen, pointedly staring at the two sections and making a show of comparing their obvious gap in thickness.

  Minor miscalculation; being asked about an inadequacy in Norvhan by someone who could put his fist through their heads did not get a productive answer from the townsfolk.

  “I, uh, I wasn’t involved in the initial construction, uh…My Lord,” said the closest.

  Lord…

  “Take a guess,” Reggie pressed. The man looked pained.

  “Well…that wall wasn’t built with undead labour originally.”

  Reggie had figured, but made another show of looking at the wall all over again. “Right,” he murmured. “Corners were cut in keeping you all safe, eh? Not anymore.”

  He set his undead back to work.