An Incredible Discovery
5/25 late afternoon
I started the chant. As far as I can tell it was all gibberish, but that didn’t matter. I was resurrecting the dead using company assets. Of course, it came out a bit differently than I was expecting.
You see, I assumed that the scroll would take the entity being reanimated into account. Taerar was a male dragon, so I quite naturally assumed I’d be getting a female undead dragon. Likely with similar powers and roughly the same personality as Taerar, either before or after corruption. That is not, as it turns out, what the scroll promised. What the scroll provided was an undead waifu devoted to my service that is of equivalent power to the corpse being used. As such, I was expecting a frost wyrm may appear; I was not expecting a Val’kyr.
https://imgur.com/a/Xeym80f
The corpse seemed to melt away like ice, leaving behind nothing but a white, winged, armored woman. I wasn’t disappointed, just very surprised. Val’kyr are retconned notoriously often. I believe that the Lich King’s Val’kyr are knockoffs of the Titan keeper Odyn’s knockoffs of the angelic grim reaper folks in the Shadowlands. Despite the moving goalposts regarding what the hell they are, one that is considered equivalent to one of the Dragons of Nightmare would be very powerful indeed.
They were some of the strongest necromancers in the world, even without the Lich King’s direct assistance, able to resurrect people with their personalities and abilities largely intact and free. Subtly twisted, though; it’s shocking how many people are cool with joining up with the Forsaken immediately, regardless of their prior opinions on the subject.
A bit of a cult mindset makes sense for those raised from mass graves who have time to process and be indoctrinated into the only faction that immediately accepts them, but Alliance soldiers willing to pick up their weapons and immediately turn on their old allies mid-battle? Literally the only person raised by a Val’kyr I could remember rejecting the Val’kyr’s plans for them is Lillian Voss, who was raised in the Scarlet Crusade as a living weapon. Even she turned her blades against the Crusade and Scourge before joining a neutral third party faction, rather than continuing to slaughter the people she had been raised to hate.
I, for my part, consider this to be a categorical win. I have a lot of giant lizards, and I have a great way to pick my allies back up when they die. Now, I also had a way to bring back my enemies. Perhaps not captured immediately, but I had a few necromancers who could nudge that kind of thing. Not to mention Talaada, or the effects of my own lures.
Val’kyr are also reasonably powerful combatants, but honestly? Using her like that seems like a dangerous waste of potential until I get my insurance policy. I’m also not sure where they fall on the spectrum of taking over undead they didn’t make themselves. For now, I should probably try talking to the angelic woman kneeling in front of me.
“Uh. Taerar?”
“Is that my name, master?” It was asked in a spirit of innocent inquiry. She didn’t know her name, and that didn’t bother her outside of meaning that I didn’t have anything to call her. I could have named her Tits McGee and she’d have placidly accepted it.
“I think Tara will do.” Not the most creative name I know, but with those as her first words I suspected that pretending she was still Taerar in any meaningful sense would be more likely to offend the greens in my faction than please them.
“As you say. What are my orders? I already feel restless without a task.”
“What are your abilities? What can you do?”
“I may reclaim the souls of the recently dead and place them in bodies. Preferably their own, but any corpse will do so long as it is reasonably intact. As I do, I leave a faint mark of domination upon them, leaving them open to my desires. Which shall be your desires, master.”
She was about to continue but I cut in. “How recent is recent? Are we talking minutes or days?”
“More recent is better. The further I must pull the soul, the less influence I have over it. My limit is a few years, but in that case the results are somewhat unpredictable.” She waited for me to nod before continuing. “I am also a skilled warrior, specializing in the spear if one could be provided, and am a competent practitioner of both light and shadow magic.”
“Just to be clear, what do you mean by competent?” I was hopeful. I liked Sadie, but using her as a shadow magic trainer was a bit awkward due to her being part of an active military that tolerated her disappearances during breaks only because of her massive growth in power and their own desperation.
“I tear my enemies minds asunder, and mend and protect the bodies of my allies. More complex techniques are outside of my area of expertise.” Fair. I could still use her as a tutor when Sadie isn’t available and a fellow student when she was. Tearing minds asunder sounded pretty useful as a setup for mind control in combat.
I handed her an amulet. “Well, for now I want you to use this to go to the Agamand Mills and find Abby; she’s a spirit currently possessing a girl by the name of Lillibeth. Tell her your capabilities and that I’m putting someone on to the task of finding her an appropriately powerful body. I assume you’ll be able to fully put her into a body I find?” She nodded. “Good. You are dismissed.”
For the moment the Agamand Mills were my most important side hustle; I was absolutely not going to take Abby and Eliza away from there until the crypts were cleared out and I had a swarm of captured ghosts. Who would all need necklaces to be fully effective. Joy.
••••••••••
I teleported to Eva. I had two things to do here; one was planned, the other was new but equally important. “So, before I get to anything else; have you managed anything for that project I told you about?”
“Oh yes my friend, I think I may have something quite exciting.” She pulled out something that looked like a bit of dried out meat in a cage of rune inscribed copper wire. I stared at it, then her beaming face.
“So… what is it?” Her smile faltered very slightly.
“Ah, yes. It’s something new of my own design. It is a beacon. For the amulet’s teleportation.” She focused for an awkwardly long period, the full ten seconds, and then I heard her voice coming from her bedroom as she vanished. “I haven’t been able to test its effectiveness over longer ranges, but the principle is sound and the materials are fairly easy to find. Just the brain of a pigeon and a bit of wire.”
I clapped. “Bravo. If these do work that will be pretty great. Having to always teleport to a person is a bit limiting.” That restored her enthusiasm.
“I have about five of them ready. Do you want them? I’d like to keep one for myself as a reference.”
I teleported three of them to Noboru, Sadie, and Kam, and pocketed the last one. They were each sent notes to squirrel the beacons away somewhere safe and out of sight.
“Anything else?”
“Not related to my research, no. We are planning on cycling the amulets we have around to various town elders and councilmen, but only Millstipe and Lord Blacklock have actually gone through the whole process. It’s slow going.”
“Alright. Who among our people here would be best to go through the records looking for magic users that would have been buried in Raven Hill Cemetery?”
“Probably Millstipe. He’s fond of genealogy.”
“Alright. Get him on that. I want a report on famous magical people that died locally, and where they were buried; especially if they were buried at Raven Hill. Anyone buried in Stormwind would be ok too.”
She gave me a very concerned look, but accepted the charge and left to deliver the message.
••••••••••
I had an unusual experience hunting for worgen for a couple hours, biding my time for my appointment with Moira. I was learning tracking pretty easily, but I was actually more effective at catching the worgen when I did the ultimate meme combo of blink plus Archaeus rather than sticking with the team.
The general pattern was that I’d go in, blast the most exposed worgen’s leg off, throw a few dozen daggers at everyone around me simultaneously, then lead the enraged doggos into a field of traps where the rangers disabled them. Sildia Fogrunner, the one night elf worgen druid that we had captured, would swoop in to patch me up and stabilize our new captives, who we would then tie up and bring back to Raven Hill. A few of the burlier converted Worgen with military experience were staying here, guarding the basement prison and generally only letting new prisoners and Talaada in. I handed one the teleport beacon.
We caught 12 worgen while I was out. They were becoming more canny and starting to set up ambushes, but the Farstriders were fairly elite and moving in a relatively large group of 12 for safety. It’s hard to entrap a group of archers that were magically aware of you well before you saw them, especially if you had no ranged attacks yourself. That said, I contributed quite a lot with my blink strikes; the worgen were intelligent enough that they wouldn’t attack unless they thought they had the upper hand, or something triggered a frenzy in them. If I dedicated a day or two to it, I might be able to catch all 60 remaining worgen with the team, but then we’d need to store them and Talaada and I would need to systematically work through them anyway. I did get enough experience to reach level 4 as a warden though; the next one would be harder. I put my skill point into fan of knives.
I sent a note to Melisara, asking that she send any reasonably trained banshees to help process the worgen. It would be good practice for them, I figured. Even if it would likely consist of them repeatedly getting kicked out until they learned how to function as passengers.