You lost to a clay golem. Be proud.
The giant bear staggered back, fell and stayed on the ground this time. A crowd of monsters all around yelled for that colport to get up, not realizing he was already dead. They had enjoyed the fight, they didn't enjoy the defeat.
A colport grew in strength through its hoard of corpses. This one had prepared long and well and so, well, the monsters had been hopeful!
I was not moving anymore. Just standing there, a frail clay statue with a silver and marble badger mask on its face.
One of them approached, a feline mantis who touched the vanquished with his scythes.
"Praise Kaele!" He shouted.
The loss finally sunk in for those beasts. They scowled and spit and then, first a few, soon all of them, howled the same words.
"Praise Kaele!"
And the mantis to come and prostrate at my feet, at a respectuous distance.
He had chain patterns on his chitinous plates.
"Victory is yours, almighty! We submit once more! Praise Kaele, glory to the humans!"
What he meant, while the crowd repeated his last words, was that they had disturbed me for this duel when I had told them I didn't want any visitor. They were essentially promising to only knock again once they found a better warrior.
My mask scanned the crowd.
Most of those beasts bore chain patterns as well. Others had heavy crests of fur, manes running from their neck to the back and often all the way along their tail.
And quite a few were standing on two legs. Humanoid, a couple wearing clothes. Those stood out with pride, for they looked like the gods.
We were done there.
I raised my arm, let anti-magic crush my body into dust. No, I had not bothered to show up myself, this had been a clone all along.
But I was not going to insult the dead by revealing that.
Monsters should have known better regardless. This was the city of Shiranu where legends said that a clay golem resided, a messenger of the gods, the humans who had shaped the realm. And the humans had left and that was why monsters suffered.
Or so believed the cult of Kaele.
Me, I was sit in a circular cellar, in an abandoned mansion no monster dared approach, somewhere on one of the hills of the ruined city.
It wasn't just to show off that I sent clones whenever a monster defied me - or worse, thought they could intrude on the mansion's premises.
It was because moving hurt. Moving hurt so much.
And we golems were told to stop when we felt pain, because that was how you learned best to serve your masters.
So I had sit there, in this empty cellar. All that it contained was the staircase disappearing in the shadows, some shelves dug in the stone itself, with broken alchemic tools; the remains of two other clay golems and mad writings on the wall.
And the ceiling. And the floor.
I had a tendency to write.
Stuff like I have failed and I have failed and also I have failed repeated just a few times. It was fine, all clay golems did that and there was no clay golem left to say otherwise, but me.
So, what were my clones doing while I lay there feeling a bit down?
The realm did not wait for silly things like me. A lot had happened outside and for however pointless it was, I also felt the need to stay informed.
So the mansion had a mirror room now! From which one of me could observe the realm. It wasn't hard. I had traces of pretty much every place there was to see.
And with how much more mana the realm now contained, contact was possible.
What used to be an unforgiving realm deprived of mana was... still a cruel realm lacking mana, but one order of magnitude better. Ten times. It meant roughly ten times better.
As in there was roughly ten times more mana than before.
The effect looked small for how massive it was. Day and night had started again. They were slow, most of the time was spent in dawn and dusk, but for a couple hours or so we creatures enjoyed a legion of stars! Or the warmth of daylight.
Also, not everything was rocky and dead anymore. It still mostly was, but meager grass was piercing through small patches of soil. Dry moss covered the cracks.
The city of Shiranu had so many mushrooms vying for life.
With this, the hunger that had driven so many to extinction had subsided a little. Beasts long extinct were walking again, famishing with the rest.
There was so much more mana to plunder! So many more monsters to hunt! And monsters still had the same instinct. They were still primed to kill and absorb mana. That was still all they cared about. That would not change.
But hunts had become rare, the realm of the savages, of the feral.
Against them the weaker monsters struggled.
And this and that but who cared? Not me. So my clone was monitoring all that and let me see the ruins afar and the dungeons. There were places my mirrors did not cover, new locations emerging from dead lands but what did it matter...
Another clone was busy cleaning the mansion.
With too little mana, the rich human ornaments could only decay and crumble. Breaches once filled would open again. So it wasn't just about dusting off and rubbing.
That clone would come to me to collect mana, then essentially carry that mana around to fill the rooms and void just enough. Its job was to radiate magic while pretending to clean so the windows would not crack and the wooden furniture would not rot.
Admittedly, just enough meant too little. And with how much the mirror room used, only a few rooms could really enjoy this treatment. A lot of the Amber pavilion was still in ruins.
It could not be helped.
Another clone did the same for the gardens. With even less magic to spread it mostly brushed the rubbles and kept the sick wild grass contained out of the paved paths.
It was also that clone that kept track of monsters around and looked for intruders. As long as that clone caught them, I would show restraint. If it missed one and that monster entered, I would be the one to detect him and that... never ended well.
One close was kept for those silly duels and the last I would not cast.
That last task I kept for myself.
From time to time I would beat back the devouring pain in my body and get up, walk up the stairs and reach the mansion's great hall.
There, there was paint, brushes and a ladder.
I would pick the lot, walk up the stairs and put the ladder over a large painting. The portrait of the human family that had lived there a long time ago.
Like everything else, a lack of mana was peeling off the paint and no amount of alchemy could prevent that. So, every day or two, it needed some restoration. I would let my body throb, pick up a brush, mix colors and start to paint.
That was all I could do now.
Whenever I painted, it was like when I wrote. My body was moving by itself. Expressions of thoughts a clay golem should never have. I did not even know why I needed this portrait to remain pristine above all.
In my clay head that served no purpose but to sense, the rest of the realm could burn.
The brush fell from my hand. Yeah, it hurt bad enough for me to have twitches. No matter. All I needed was to walk down the ladder, pick it up, mix more colours and go back up. As long as it did not damage the painting, it was fine.
Everything was fine.
Did I mention I failed? Because I had failed. At everything.
So, those were my days! A happy life as a happy servant. Scratching some words on the wall on my way down to the cellar, then sitting down while my clones buzzed around, rinse and repeat. How long had it been? Enough for a realm to bud.
My whole body burned. I could not tell if it was slowly degrading or if it was just an endless friction, a fine balance between repair and destruction. Who cared, who cared. Either way felt the same and made me no less useless.
Back on the ladder to paint some more. The human family had its gaze resolutly forward. They had looked so amazing, so wise.
I stopped to put my hand on the bead necklace I wore.
The very relic that kept me going carried my sins.
So, just like monsters prayed to that Kaele, I prayed to no one in particular, just the empty prayer of a broken golem about something that could not happen anymore.
And then I resumed painting, indifferent.
Oh yeah! Now that I had been distracted, I noticed that the caparace was not there.
There was one monster I had allowed inside. An insect that carried a heavy shell like a shield and could hang on walls. She would usually stay near the painting and watch me paint, but this time around she had moved next to the mansion's door, on the other side of the hall.
Good instinct, that little monster. She had felt a beast approaching even before my clone did.
This was not the sneaky type. Rather, that monster was walking straight up the three hundred steps stair leading to the garden. That wasn't usually the path monsters chose.
I let my clone abandon its task to approach that stairs and look at the visitor. The moment it saw it, it vanished along with all the other clones.
Of all the things I had not expected.
Down the ladder, I simply put it to the side and then walked downstairs. Our visitor was not coming through the main door, so I called the caparace.
"Hop on!"
She stirred, hesitated but jumped off the wall and ran to me, to climb and cling on my back. A bit of a habit I had taken, I felt naked without her as a cape.
Also, even though the insect's tiny legs buried in my plates to hold, the added ache actually lightened my burden. As long as she didn't touch the necklace.
We made our way through the side door, to the hallway and into the dining room. That was one of the rooms left in ruins.
Tiny forelegs were rubbing on the garden door.
I approached, took a second to hold my badger mask with three fingers, then opened.
And here she was, the fluffy rapt with pink stripes and a round head, and tiny legs and a flat tail. I was facing a ghost from the past, more alive than I ever would be myself.
"There you are!" Her cute voice complained. "You have to come, the realm needs you!"
"Why."
"Because you have to!"
She was angry at me. Her forelegs were probably trying to punch my legs but all it did was rub the clay feet.
"Everyone is going to die and you are doing nothing! Caline hates you! You are evil!"
"Nobody talks like that." I pointed out.
"Like what?"
For all her pouting, how easily her tantrum could be broken...
"Nobody says their own name like that."
"Well I do! Because nobody else ever says Caline's name! Nobody pets me or tells me I am cute! So Caline will talk however she wants!"
The insect on my back fretted again. How good that caparace had become at telling others' feelings.
I crouched, the chitin shell on my back scraping the tiled floor, and put my hand on the rapt who recoiled angrily, then wavered, then put her forefront on my fingers.
I didn't know what to say.