Saintess Summons Skeletons

“You sure are making faces I don’t see you make often,” Alith told Sofia.

“Unpleasant memories. The last time I saw that color as light I lost my dog.”

“Right, that thing on a black spire, right? The lighthouse is pretty similar to how you described it, now that I think about it… Do you think there’s also a tentacular envoy up there operating the thing?” Alith asked.

Sofia was more used to spreading her mana senses far and wide rather than high up above herself, but she still managed to barely reach the top of the lighthouse.

“There’s nobody,” she told Alith, “the big gem making the light is like an empty hole, and so is the light itself. But beyond that, it’s about what I would expect a lighthouse to be like…”

“Really? Let’s go up, then. We should still be careful in case the light is dangerous, but I’m curious to see how it is up there,” Alith suggested, pointing at the door.

“The gem is at the top, on the outside. We could just jump up there.”

Alith scratched her head, “I don’t know if it’s because I cannot see as far as you can, but I don’t feel too safe jumping or flying up right now…”

Sofia answered with a nod, kicking open the thick rusted iron door of the lighthouse which had been barely holding up. The interior was quite dark but that was remedied by Sofia taking off her helmet.

“The perks of having glowing hair.”

“And horns,” Alith commented, “Could also just use a lightstone like a normal person.”

“You’re thinking too rich, a normal person uses torches,” Sofia bantered as both women looked up at the spiraling stairs of the lighthouse.

“Right… Looks like they did, too,” Alith remarqued, lightly kicking at a rusty piece of metal lying on the stone floor, “wall torch support.”

“Huh. No traces of soot on the wall though, I wonder if they really ever used that,” Sofia said, taking a first step on the stairs. “Pareth, stay here, you’re too heavy.”

Pareth answered with a nod, and the other two rushed up the stairs in under two seconds, stopping under the rusty ladder hatch separating them from the top level with the light.

“There isn’t even any mechanism here to make the thing spin,” Alith noted.

“No source of power for the light either,” Sofia continued, “not to mention the strangeness of a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere with no ocean in sight, or the fact that it randomly activated when we approached.”

“Maybe we’re the power source,” Alith guessed.

“Maybe? It’s probably safe to say it lit up because of us, but to call us the power source, hmm… Well, let’s check the top level first, how do we do that… I don’t want to risk another one of Bookie’s skeletons…”

“What if you send a graveyard nymph?”

“With how messy the space magic is around here? Might not be the best idea. Maybe a random skull from the choir, I have plenty of useless ones I wouldn’t mind losing.”

Knowing that indirect exposure to the light was safe, since she had been entirely illuminated by it as they fled the direct light from the beam, Sofia took no precaution as she forced the rusty hatch open. It provoked the fall of a collapsing ladder so rusty that it shattered into metal flakes as it hit the floor.

Sofia looked up.

Ah, I cannot see anything. Too bright…

“See anything?” Alith asked, covering her eyes.

“No. I’ll try the choir.”

Sofia summoned the skull choir with a single horned creature’s skull, and she controlled its position to have it slowly fly up into the blinding light.

She left it there for a bit before lowering it back down. It was still a completely fine and full-life undead.

“Maybe I worried for nothing,” Sofia admitted.

“No,” Alith disagreed, “The light definitely does something. Else they wouldn’t have built this lighthouse here in the middle of nowhere.”

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“I think so as well, but it doesn’t look immediately dangerous, at least. Also I should tell you, now that we’re closer and I can feel more details, the gem is actually mounted on some sort of mechanism. But I think all it does is make it spin. Can’t find an energy source for that one either.”

“Things don’t just move by themselves… Maybe they use the ambient mana somehow,” Alith guessed. “Hmm I have a theory.”

“Go on.”

“What if the lighthouse never worked, like the light was meant to prevent whatever happened to the people here, but they couldn’t get it to work?”

“And it starts working when we’re here? Because of the blessing of the Deep, maybe? I could see that,” Sofia agreed.

“Just a theory… So, what now, leader?”

“I’m the leader now? I’d suggest stealing the gem if I could use my storage items, but now… It’s probably better to just leave it there as is. Worst case it’ll make it easier to find our way back to the hall, you know, using it as an actual lighthouse.”

Alith nodded along. “Fair, let’s get the fuck out then, I don’t like it here, and Pareth is waiting.”

Sofia thoroughly inspected the choir’s skull just in case as she followed Alith down the stairs, but she failed to see anything wrong with it, so she unsummoned it.

Reunited at the ground level, the team waited for the right moment after the light beam passed to run in the direction they had been following until now, leaving the strange lighthouse far behind.

A few minutes of silent running later, Sofia hurriedly stopped.

“Another lighthouse?” Alith asked, unable to see as far as Sofia.

“I thought so, but no. Windmill.”

“Windmill? Here?”

“You’ll see,” Sofia said, starting to run again.

There were indeed several windmills relatively close to one another in the middle of the surrounding nothingness. There was not a single sail remaining on any of the windmills, and really there was only one which was still in good enough shape to be recognized as one.

“I guess they had to feed themselves somehow. Hard to think anything could grow here though,” Alith said, crouching down near the windmill, wiping the moon dust off of the ground, revealing the whitish gray porous rock below. “Even being generous, there’s no way I could ever call this a fertile soil… Maybe you could grow moss, mushrooms, or creeping vines?”

“Hard to say, I can see the start of another city from here, I think, not quite as ruined as the previous one, from the looks of it.”

“Let’s not waste time here, then.”

As they approached this new set of ruins, Sofia noticed something different, “there’s no deep creatures hiding in the dust here,” she told Pareth and Alith, “but there are moving ones…”

“Fast?” Alith asked.

“No. Quite slow, in fact, but that means nothing. The parasite moved slowly too, until it saw me. It’s weird, though… They’re… Strangely tall.”

“How tall?”

“I… Don’t know. We should go see. It’s almost like… Moving poles?”

“You’ve got me curious.”

The group carefully approached the city. The ruins were only slightly better off than the first city, with taller bits of walls remaining and the occasional unbroken window panes here and there. There was just as much moon dust accumulating in the corners, but no creatures inhabiting it. Sofia led the group to one of the ‘moving poles’, they watched from as far as they could, hiding behind a low wall.

“What in the actual fuck is that thing?” Alith whispered in a disgusted tone, “I’d rather hug a phageid than to touch that.”

The creature was like a star. If a humanoid creature was to be stretched to look like a kid’s drawing of a star, that was what the thing looked like, five conical appendages linked together at their base, two of them being used as ‘legs’, two as ‘arms’ and one as a head. The appendages were made of many layers of the dark gray dead ‘human’ skin, overlapping over each other like bulging folds of fat. The thing was perhaps about two meters tall, and was stumbling around in one of the houses, bumping repeatedly against a wall like a brainless zombie. There were no distinctive features like eyes or a moth anywhere, but what stood out the most was what Sofia had mistakenly thought was the entire creature at first, the ‘moving pole’, which was some kind of dark pulsating tether, made of the same overlapping layers of dead skin, linking the top of the ‘head’ cone to the dark sky above.

“Feelings shared,” Sofia agreed, keeping her voice low, “I wonder what it’s linked to.”

“You can’t see?”

“No, the tether disappears straight up into the sky, I have no idea where it goes. I wonder if we should try cutting the tether if one attacks us. That might kill it off.”

“Nothing’s stopping us from verifying that, we have enough long distance attacks to safely try,” Alith suggested.

Sofia looked at her, then back at the creature, before shaking her head. “You should be more scared. Even if it looks dumb I wouldn’t be surprised if it was as strong as it’s ugly. There has to be something that killed the gods and dragons who came here before. Maybe it was the horse thing… But maybe it was that.”

“What makes you more wary of these than the smaller ones?”

“I don’t know… Instinct?” Sofia said first, observing the grotesque creature sluggishly wriggling around like a brainless worm, she continued, “The vaguely humanoid figures, the tethers disappearing into the sky… Say Alith, don’t you feel like… This looks like the hook-end of a fishing line?”

Alith reeled back at the strange idea of a creature in the sky trying to lure in people with this otherworldly bait, and, unwillingly, the scabbard of her rapier loudly scraped against the wall.

The creature suddenly turned around, and the tether above it coiled unnaturally as it spun, its twisting movement accompanied by a series of dry, brittle cracks, like ancient bones splintering under pressure.