"Gods be good I'm going to murder someone," Marcus muttered, ripping the page free from the book. Damaging paper was usually against his sensibility, but he was upset. The door opened, his posture correcting itself out of habit. Elly walked into his study, her footsteps nearly inaudible, and her just showing up was getting less strange the better he got to know her. That woman had a propensity for stalking. "Good morning, Elly."
"Good morning, Marcus. Why are you going to murder someone?"
He opened his mouth, clicking it shut after a moment. Marcus sighed. "You heard that. Of course you did. I was just complaining, nothing to worry about."
Elly hummed, walking further inside to sit on one of the empty tables. By the way she was acting you'd think she had grown up in the place, nevermind that this wasn't even her third day here. Someone, and by that he meant Vess, had apparently talked to her.
Her feet also didn't touch the ground, which was more funny than it probably should have been.
Her casualness didn't even look forced, though, which was just unfair. He wasn't that good an actor. Elly tapped the table. "We might have a problem."
"Oh?"
"Duke Hargrave is looking to marry his third son to the first daughter of House Valedeur."
"Hargraf, not Hargrave. And remind me who the Valedeurs are?"
Elly shrugged. "The most powerful nobility I have left, essentially. They didn't bring much material wealth, but the information they carry is worth more than any ship could hold. The centuries of private knowledge, general experience, experimentation, and more. The Duke could quite easily train an army with it."
"Our continent doesn't practise Life Enhancement on any real scale for a reason. Too few people are capable of it, magic is too popular and the Empire takes what few people show talent for the art to help with the dungeon. Hargraf will get nowhere."
"If you insist. So what were you cursing about, anyway?"
Marcus sighed, casting a look at the paper in front of him. "I'm trying to create exercises to train my ability to control magic, which would hopefully let me hold five matrices at once. It's not going very well."
"Four isn't enough?"
"For now, sure. But I'm aiming to have every graduate from my Academy be able to at least hold three, at which point four isn't all that special anymore. I'm suspecting it will be an ongoing project of mine."
"Are you so worried about appearing to be the strongest?" she teased. Marcus frowned internally. She appeared to be relaxing quickly. A little too quickly to be natural. Elly smiled. "And here I thought you were above such petty concerns."
Marcus shrugged. "I'm worried about being unprepared. Conflict is inevitable, be it big or small. For right now my personal power is the greatest asset I have, and it's one I can flex freely. I am, as they say, a big fish in a small pond."
"I believe you," she replied, raising a placating hand. She really did seem in a good mood. "I have a few hours until I'm needed at the refugee camp. Are you free, betrothed of mine?"
"I do have something that needs doing, but there's no reason you couldn't assist me. Unless that dagger is just for show?"
Elly pulled it, making it dance without seeming to pay much attention. She smiled at his raised eyebrow. "I spent quite a lot of my life with soldiers. Would have spent more bef- Before. Vess tells me you spent your youth learning magic."
"I have, which is exactly what I could use some help with. I was prone to flights of experimental fancy before my own mysterious event, you see. All are quite stable, but leaving them as they are isn't helping anyone. Would you be willing to violently stab anything that tries to eat, strangle or otherwise maim me while I finally clean up after myself?"
"I've been told I'm quite good at stabbing."
Marcus grinned, the gesture feeling more natural than it had in days. "Then I would be honored if you could employ that talent to keep me unstabbed in turn."
Elly hopped off the table as he stood, her head tilting up to answer his grin with an eye roll, and Marcus led the way to the dungeons by virtue of knowing the castle. Servants, guards and nobles all looked on curiously as they made their way downwards, though he didn't pay them much attention.
Stopping to talk to the occasional Baron or Lord is one thing, but never let them think they can dictate how you spend your time. One of his fathers lessons.
He really should visit the dying old man, but it was too easy not to. He was busy, he didn't really want to, the short-lived balance they'd found prior to the Princess' arrival was gone. And most relevantly between those three, he really was busy. Almost endlessly from dawn to dusk.
Down the stairs they went, past more Royal Guards and tightly locked doors, before Marcus finally slowed. It was dark down here, only the occasional torch shedding light, and with a thought he conjured a bright light. It hovered above his head, chasing away shadows as the matrix slowly leached his magic away.
"Handy," Elly commented, looking around after glancing at the orb. "So what, exactly, are we cleaning up?"
"I have a few projects down here, but the one to deal with most urgently is the slime. The self-propagating slime, I should add. It feeds off sunlight and biomass to produce more of itself, splitting once it reaches a certain weight."
Elly looked at him with a thoroughly unamused expression. "And why would you make something like that?"
"Because I wanted to see if I could," he replied, offering a shrug. "What can I say, I was a bit of an idiot child. Intelligent but not wise, I think the saying goes. Which means I did secure it properly, there being neither sunlight nor biomass for it to feed on, and I ensured it had a particular weakness to cold. I did not, however, ask myself why or even if I should make the thing in the first place."
She seemed to relax marginally at that. "Well, I've done some less than wise things in my youth. Once spent two weeks in the mountains 'cause an officer teased me about not being self reliant. I had to stop my mother from having the man flogged. I proved my stubbornness more than anything."
Marcus snorted, motioning to the reinforced door. Elly nodded, drawing the combat knife from the sheath on her hip, and Marcus pulled the door open. Artificial light streamed into the refurbished cell, alerting the sickly yellow slime inside. It was bigger than he remembered, which meant its isolation hadn't been complete, and Marcus supposed it could have fed on bugs.
He weaved another matrix, ice-cold air blasting into the abandoned laboratory. The slime didn't scream, it was barely sentient, but it did try to rush forth. Tried to force itself through the door and into the relative brightness of the corridor, and Marcus wondered briefly what he'd expected Elly to do to that thing with a knife.
He spun up a third and then fourth matrix, feeling his magic drain rapidly as they combined with the second. Yet before they could flash freeze the thing, he flinched, a figure having rushed past him.
Elly, wielding a decorative shield she'd apparently ripped from one of the few armor stands in the hallways, impacted the slime with all the force of a battering ram. Marcus watched her slam it back inside, its natural impact absorption be damned, and Elly stepped aside just as quickly as she'd appeared.
A gale of near absolute cold blasted into the cell a moment later, killing the creature in seconds. Then it crystallised all the moisture in the air, covering the room in a thin layer of ice crystals. Marcus let his matrices drop, keeping his little globe of light.
He turned to her, eyebrow raised in a silent question, and found Elly was sticking her hand inside the room then withdrawing it. She hummed. "That's cold. Very cold."
"Three matrices multiply the potential of spells exponentially," he replied. "Drains your magic like nothing else, but the results speak for themselves. You're fast."
"Considering I've spent most of my life practicing Life Enhancement, I should be. So that was three matrices, and you can wield four. How much destruction are we talking about?"
Marcus hummed. "A little background first, and forgive me if you're already familiar with some of it. The number of matrices a mage can hold don't directly translate to their level of skill, for starters. A summoning seal almost always uses only one matrix, or is built using runes which don't use matrices at all. One could—theoretically and assuming they have the appropriate knowledge—summon a Demon King with that."
"Please don't."
"I won't," he replied, snorting. "Point is, skill is not directly tied to the number of matrices one can hold at once. How much power someone can deploy at once and how many different spells they juggle, however, is. So one matrix is the base, if a second is linked to it the power grows, a third grows it more than the second, so on and so forth. As far as we know there is no limit but for the magic the mage has available. Oh, and a skilled mage usually does have more matrices than an unskilled one, but only as a consequence of their intelligence and dedication."
Elly tapped her hand against her chest. "So, assuming you kept stacking matrices into the same spell, it would drain you dry and potentially kill you."
"That, and mages are not naturally immune to the destruction their magic can wreak. Elementalism especially has a habit of causing collateral damage, though it usually also causes the most direct damage of all the available schools of magic. Something about instinctive intent-imprinting leftover from humanity's infancy. It isn't a subject I've studied extensively."
"I see. So how many more of these issues do you have to deal with?"
"Not that many, thank you very much," Marcus replied. He deflated a little. "Seven. Only one of those poses any real danger, though. An experiment with necromancy that went… how to say this. It went a little too well."
Elly's expression froze, blue eyes growing cold. "How so?"
"It's not a plague," Marcus assured quickly. "Just a reanimated cat. But, well, I pulled seven souls from the beyond and now it's far too intelligent and likes to insult people. Which it does far too accurately, so I'm pretty sure I pulled something that was not, in fact, a cat. Or an animal of any sort, for that matter. At least I'm fixing the issue?"
The Princess turned. "We're killing that. I'm killing that. And no more necromancy."
"Look, I get that you have bad experiences with it. And yes, that's a massive understatement," Marcus ran a hand through his hair, almost wishing it was longer just for the added effect it would bring to the gesture. "But look, necromancy is used here. It can't spread, it's not always zombies, but we use it and it's essential for some tasks. Tasks that are too dangerous for regular humans to fulfill. Necromancy and summoning are what allows the Empire to hold back the dungeon, admittedly alongside every other magical discipline. There isn't a stigma against using it, and you will look like the crazy one insisting there is."
Elly tensed, relaxing slowly and seemingly with force. "Noted. Now I'm going to kill the cat, and then you're coming with me to see the refugee camp my people are in. You've shown me yours, so to speak. Time I showed you mine."
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"That isn't a horse." Elly insisted, Marcus giving her a smug smile. She'd calmed down after violently stabbing the undead cat, thankfully, and he made a mental note to be careful with necromancy around her in the future. "It is, at best, a horrific beast that deserves to be burned."
Xathar promptly crushed a panicked rabbit beneath its hooves as they travelled, using his other hoof to kick it up into the air and snapping it up, all without breaking his stride. Marcus sighed as the demon swallowed it whole. "Alright, that doesn't help my case. He gets snackish? Still, I'm sure the 'Conqueror of the Seven Fields' can see the benefit of a mount that doesn't tire or shy away from a fight.
"And one that eats meat. An army marches on its stomach, and keeping up with supplies is hard enough without carnivorous horses."
"I want to eat horses." Xathar rumbled, Elly shooting it a stern look. The demon, to Marcus' surprise, cowered slightly. "I can also subsist on my connection to the Hells alone."
Elly opened her mouth, closed it, then sighed. "Alright, that is really good. My army only uses summoning for scouting and the occasional raid. It's simply too expensive, not to mention dangerous, to keep many of them around for long periods of time."
"That's because your mages, pardon the insult, are shit. And why don't you cower when I'm annoyed with you, Xathar?"
"You are a bush mage. She is attuned to life itself."
Marcus didn't even bother to correct him anymore. "Well, fine. Be that way. See if I find you any more good horses to eat."
"You actually feed it horses?" Elly asked, alarmed. "Doesn't that undermine your whole argument? You could just ride the regular horse to begin with."
"Old, sick horses. And I know it's not viable to outfit a whole cavalry company with them, but you can't deny that demonic mounts are superior to regular ones."
Elly didn't reply, which he took as a win, and he could already imagine Vess' smirk. So what if he and Elly actually got along? Marcus didn't see a reason for the succubus to be smug about that.
They climbed another grass covered hill, slowing as the refugee camp spread out below them. The size alone made it impressive, Helios having busied himself with its creation, but the one time he'd visited it had still been empty.
It wasn't empty now.
Whole groups of people were coming and going towards the bay, smaller sloops ferrying supplies and souls to and from the ships, and Elly's fleet itself could just be seen near the horizon. And even at this distance, where boats were the size of ants, it looked massive.
A whole people, carried across the sea by nothing but wood and sheer determination. Marcus couldn't even imagine the terror that had led them to that decision.
A checkpoint came up ahead, manned by soldiers wearing Queen Marsennius' colors. A sleeping wolf was painted on their armor in blue, her house's sigil that she herself didn't seem to wear often. Elly pulled up ahead, Xathar increasing his speed without Marcus' having to say anything.
"Almennt!" The soldier she approached barked, snapping to attention. That sounded like a title. The eight other guards followed, shooting Marcus a curious glance. "Velkomin aftur, frú."
Welcome? I'm just guessing now.
Elly nodded to the man. "Gott að vera kominn aftur. Er allt rólegt?"
Asking if there were problems? I would be asking if there were problems.
"Eftir því sem þau hafa verið að segja mér, frú."
He doesn't look upset, so things are probably fine.
One of the other soldiers approached Marcus himself, shying back when Xathar looked directly at the woman. "Sir? I'm going to need to see some form of identification."
"I'm afraid I don't have any."
The guard frowned, her eyes flickering to Elly. Interesting, that. They behaved as if she was their general, not their Queen. "Who are you?"
"I have the dubious honor of ruling the ground you're standing on," Marcus replied, almost relishing in the realization that came over her face. A guilty pleasure, that. "Elly can vouch for me."
Elly turned, giving him an unamused look. "Marcus Sepsimus Lannoy, Crown Prince of the Mirranian Kingdom. Our soon to be Kingly host."
That statement was followed with another round of salutes, this time with a much more nervous air. Marcus smiled at the guard, which didn't seem to reassure her any, then looked at Elly instead.
"As far as I'm concerned, and until such a time as more permanent arrangements can be made, this is your land to govern."
Nodding, and seeming to appreciate it, Elly urged her irritatingly regular horse forward. Great, now Xathar was starting to influence his opinion about horses. "Come on, this wasn't what I wanted to show you."
Marcus shrugged, following as Xathar mumbled about the superiority of demonkind. Something about stricter discipline, but Marcus wasn't really listening at that point. Because, past the hastily constructed refugee camp, there was a field.
A field filled with tents in neat orderly lines, forming a rough rectangle in overall shape. Thousands of men and women crawled through the camp like an anthill, most working to assemble a wooden palisade around it. Yet more were ranging out to cut down nearby trees, Marcus feeling like he should be somewhat concerned about the amount of wood they were taking.
Instead the realization that he'd very much allowed an army straight next to his Kingdom's capital hit him. It hit him harder than it had on paper, though six thousand trained soldiers had seemed like a lot even then.
Elly had slowed, glancing at him with amusement. "I suppose your mysterious combat experience wasn't alongside an army this size."
"No it was not," he answered, distracted. His eyes flickered to the side, seeing soldiers from both Duke Hargraf and the Barons stationed some ways away. Not many, but they were there. "We numbered in hundreds, not thousands. It had Giants, though. Proper Elves and Dwarves too."
"Giants?"
Marcus blinked, shrugging as casually as he could. "Not important. You know you have watchers, right?"
"Of course we do. They're just here to observe, which is why they're wearing their house colors. There's probably more around without armor or weapons at all, who will be getting the information people actually care about."
"Six thousand," Marcus muttered, shaking his head. "Feeding that many soldiers alone is ruinous without a proper economy to support it."
Elly nodded, seeming pleased for some reason. "We've got enough supplies for the next two months, at which point I expect to have integrated my people much more closely into the kingdom. Our kingdom. You've shown me magic, your speciality. This is mine."
"It's significantly more visually impressive," Marcus admitted, straining his eyes to see mages raise dirt fortifications. "Don't get me wrong, it's somewhat worrying having a military camp this close to Redwater, but it's impressive."
She rolled her eyes. "I'm not going to start raiding the place where I wish to build a future for my people. No. This is just visual theatre for your nobility. And for you yourself, I suppose. We have lost our home, our lands and wealth and alliances, but the Caldir Kingdom is not wholly without might."
"We should spar," Marcus replied, half turning. She blinked at the non sequitur. "Magic against sword, I mean. You and me. No witnesses, no audience. Spells against steel."
"And what would that accomplish?"
Marcus turned to her fully. "Because I just realized I have no idea what you, or your people, can do. And I have a feeling that when you look at me, you see nothing but a more powerful version of your own mages. As long as we don't lose any limbs we can go hard, and I've found that people get to know each other quite well when they fight."
"If you're sure," she said, strangely hesitant. "You have seen me move, right? Mages need time to prepare their magic, and I'm very good at not giving them that time."
"And that's exactly why I want to spar. I promise, you won't wound my pride, regardless of the outcome."
Elly nodded after a moment, clearly warming to the topic. "When?"
"Soon. Not today, but soon. There was a meeting I was invited to?"
Marcus urged Xathar onwards, following Elly as she urged her own horse forward, and it disrupted the demon from where it had been futilely scanning the grassy ground for any more errant game. A mostly comfortable silence fell, which Marcus used to properly study her army.
Creating a centralized military might happen sooner rather than later after all.