Bloodgate a harem fantas.., p.1
Bloodgate: A Harem Fantasy, page 1
Bloodgate
Master Of Runes
Book 3
Isaac Keyes
Copyright © 2024 by Isaac Keyes
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Author’s Note
Check This Out!
Chapter One
Life was good.
After our overwhelming victory against Stonecore’s armada, things slowed down, and I, for one, was thrilled about it. Since there wasn’t an immediate and pressing threat for once, we were able to stay in Seren for quite some time. Ostensibly, it was to prepare for the next part of our journey. But honestly, we spent as much time lying about. We wallowed in the sensation of not being in mortal peril, or at least not having a looming threat on the horizon.
No one knew how Stonecore would react after having lost two major battles. Their armada was handily crushed here. We’d dumped their war machine into the valley below Longfall Span in what seemed like forever ago, rendering their assault on Highreach useless.
“We’ve been getting sporadic reports from Highreach,” Vsara said. We were having a leisurely lunch on top of the Caer Melodia, our walking home and fortress. “The Breaker army at Highreach is falling into more and more unrest every day. There’ve been fights witnessed with increasing regularity, which the commanders are having to put down. Whoever’s leading their forces there, they’re no Rilahn, able to keep anyone in check with just her presence alone.”
“Speaking of….” I said.
She shook her head. “No reports of her presence or her body anywhere. No one seems to know how she arrived on the island or how she managed to leave while… incredibly injured.”
I’d smashed her face in with my rune-imbued mace, Sularus, cracking her monstrous and beautiful visage into broken pieces. Then Vsara had stabbed her in the back with ruinsong daggers. Rilahn’s body had actively resisted the ruinsong runes in them somehow. Then, Tivani had shot her in the throat, knocking her off a building.
And yet, she lived.
“Yes….” Vsara said, in response to Tivani’s comment. “But I have to wonder…. She apparently wanted us to defeat her, proving our worth, or, well, Alex’s worth as a Runic Lord.”
“Conjecture,” Leena said. She hadn’t been with us during the battle. She’d been off mopping up Stonecore forces elsewhere. Her white, tufted ears twitched as she scowled, her face wrinkling up. Well, more so than it already was. “I know you think you know what Rilahn’s motives are, but she’s just a monster. Maybe she wanted a worthy foe and nothing else. She certainly hasn’t had one as far as I know in living memory.”
“Still,” Vsara said, “she kept the Abyssal Key instead of throwing it into the ocean. If her goal truly was to keep Abyss sealed—”
“Bah!” Leena slapped the table. “I think you’re projecting your own rationality onto her.” Honestly, it was a good point, and a better one than I thought Leena would come up with. She wasn’t stupid by any stretch, but that was a line I’d expect coming out of Vsara’s mouth instead.
Vsara, apparently, thought something along those lines as well, as she froze and stared back into Leena’s narrowed gaze. “Huh,” she eventually said.
“You might be right, Leena,” I said. “But there’s a little more than just circumstantial evidence that it’s really what Rilahn wanted.”
She leaned back in her chair. “I know. But you’re all getting more and more sure that you’re right, and that’s dangerous.”
Vsara sighed loudly and pushed her half-eaten plate of sk’yuulv cakes away.
I still hadn’t asked exactly what a sk’yuulv was, but they swarmed, apparently, so I was much happier not knowing.
“As loath as I am to admit it, Leena,” Vsara said, “I believe you’re right. For the time being, I think we can lightly assume that Rilahn did want a powerful Lord so that Abyss could be reopened. But we shouldn’t assume she’ll act rationally about it anyway, especially after we… maimed her rather thoroughly.”
The Abyssal Key, the huge relic that would, along with powerful runic magic, reopen the gates of Abyss — which Rilahn had been using as a sword — was sitting safely enough in the Melodia’s secret weapons room. None of us, me included, could hope to wield it as she had. We were still leagues away from even going to Abyss. So it sat, hidden, and locked away.
“You think she might try to get her sword again?” I asked. We’d all been thinking about it. I just knew it. But so far, no one had given voice to the question.
After a silence that stretched on a little too long, Leena said, “Depends on just how badly you fucked her up.”
“Pretty badly,” Vsara muttered.
“The Melodia’s defenses will, at the very least,” Tivani said, “let us know if she’s coming.”
We all knew they weren’t going to stop her. Well, they wouldn’t have stopped her before we badly fucked her up.
“Does it matter?” Suli said, uncharacteristically breaking into the conversation and saying something very characteristic. “Either she comes, or she doesn’t. Deal with it then.” Mostly silent and at times oddly pragmatic, Suli still made little sense to me, although I was really getting used to her as time passed.
She was an engineer like Tivani, but you wouldn’t know it to talk to her, which was a trial in itself. She seemed happiest at the edges of a conversation, always listening but rarely commenting. Despite her apparent intelligence, she had swiftly become the Melodia’s cook and maid. She was pleased to do so, as long as no one directly asked much of her. But it turned out, we didn’t have to. She had hot food ready at all hours, and the place was getting more and more spotless by the day. On top of all that, she often helped Tivani and Oziin with repairs and upgrades to the Melodia.
“So,” I said, moving the conversation along to something a little more positive, “I think I’m up for singing the ruinsong to the Melodia’s core now.” My fight with Rilahn had really taken it out of me. Despite the very unexpected revelation that the runesongs might be providing me with vastly accelerated healing powers — nearly the most amazing thing to happen yet — My recovery was slow. I hadn’t felt up to the massive amount of effort I would need to sing to the Melodia’s core. Singing the highsong into it had been pretty draining. Tivani had said the ruinsong would be… even more intense.
It spoke of a return to nothingness, a breaking down of anything and everything into the most basic forms possible. It filled me with a feeling of rending apart reality to its most basic level. Tivani had spoken of a lot more nuance in its actual use, but that’s the feeling it gave me to use it. Still, it took a lot of getting used to it.
Tivani’s ears perked up at my words, and she nearly leapt out of her seat. She quickly and largely unsuccessfully tried to restrain herself, but it was too late. Her eyes were wide, and her fingers were thumping on our wrought stone dinner table. “Oh, yeah?” she said in the most forced nonchalance I’d ever seen.
Vsara and Leena smiled.
Suli rolled her eyes.
“Like, um, right now?”
“Yeah,” I said with a small laugh. “I wasn’t going to bring it up before I was ready to do it.”
She stood quickly, her chair scooting back away from her. Without a word, she ran around the table, grabbed my hand, and pulled me away.
“It’s been killing me to have to wait,” she said as we jogged through the Melodia’s halls towards the core’s chamber. “I’ve been reading the old manuals over and over in the meantime—”
“Surely you read them all before this…”
“I did! But I needed to make sure I didn’t miss anything cool!”
“Well okay, what can we do once—”
“You’ll seeeee,” she sang as she pushed open the door into the core room.
The Melodia was a vastly complex and wildly advanced golem. It was the technology that the world, Cerenis, had been built on before the Contagion had blocked everyone’s ability to use nearly all of it. Its core was an entire room of rune-enchanted machinery, a confusing mess of tubes and wire and wrought stone devices. Tivani wiggled in between them, using the almost too-small spaces to run a few last-minute checks on who knew what.
I stood there and waited, not bothering to ask what she was doing because I wouldn’t understand the answer. When she came out, she was covered in grease, which was her normal and default state.
“Okaaaaay! Do it! Everything’s ready! Do it, do it, do iiiit!”
I took a deep breath and raised my hands. It was totally an affectation, but it seemed right.
I sa ng the ruinsong.
The core drank in the magic, runes flaring into life along a central stone orb and then branching out to all the other devices. The crushing weight of the runes pressed against my mind. The highsong felt like flying, like light and life and freedom.
The ruinsong did not. It was, in a way, more difficult to sing. More taxing, at the very least. But I kept it up. Quitting before the core was fully active would result in needing to start over from the beginning. It would be another day or two before I would be up for another attempt, and I didn’t want to disappoint Tivani.
Of course, I wanted to see the Melodia’s new capabilities as well. But I hadn’t been waiting my whole life, wishing for something like this and never expecting to see it. So, I kept singing with my desire to see her happy pushing back against the gloom of the ruinsong.
Finally, the core burst with the new magic, the runes singing in an overlapping harmony, fueling each other in a maddeningly complex, almost fractal way.
I collapsed onto the floor, breathing hard.
Tivani leaned down, but I assured her I was fine. Once I had, she turned and started poring over the machines. She almost seemed to forget I was even there.
With a big smile, I watched her fluffy red tail glide back and forth. I stood, wobbled a little bit, and said, “I’m gonna go take a nap. Let me know if this place is going to blow up or anything.”
“Okay, will do,” she said.
I wasn’t sure she’d actually heard what I’d said, but it didn’t matter in the least. After stumbling upstairs, I flopped down into bed and was out nearly instantly.
Chapter Two
“Test number one,” Oziin said. She was the blue-skinned stonewright we’d more or less liberated in from a jumped-up lordling in a small city called Bentbranch. She’d agreed to accompany us on our journey and, more importantly, forge weapons and armor for us. She and Tivani had become instant best friends, their conversations spiraling into technical messes that I could make zero sense of.
All of us were standing on one of the Melodia’s battlements, ready to test one of the more destructive new capabilities that the Melodia was now equipped with. This was according to the old manuals Tivani had been reading, at least.
The cannons of the top of our fortress had decimated our enemies, the one time we’d really used them. It’d been when we’d assaulted a stone quarry where Oziin had once been forced to work. The cannons were large stone affairs with a spiraling loop in the middle — that was carved with numerous overlapping firstrunes — that were capable of launching huge cannonballs for insane distances. They were essentially gauss rifles, but no one here knew that term. Now that the Melodia had been imbued with the ruinsong, the cannons were even more dangerous. Just how dangerous was up to debate until we tested them.
The Diarchs, the two rulers of Seren, or Serenity-on-the-Water, had given us leave to take the Melodia to a smaller island in the archipelago. The island was used to store various scrap, piled up to be dealt with later. As we cruised over — I was still amazed that the Melodia could float — Suli, Tivani, and I had gone down to the bottom floor, which was fully submerged. The waters around Seren were almost crystal clear, and there was an explosion of colorful life beneath the waves.
I was a little surprised to see some normal-looking fish, as most of Cerenis’s wildlife had come in horrific and violent forms. Against my better judgment, I asked about them.
“All venomous,” Tivani said in a tone that implied I should have known.
“Well, of course they are,” I said. “I wondered if they did anything else.”
“Some blow up,” Suli said softly.
For a second, I thought it was a joke. It was the kind of thing she might say, but I looked over at her. She met my gaze with emotionless eyes.
“Oh.”
Tivani snickered and added, “Not a lot of them, but yeah. Some blow up. There are massive schools of bright yellow fish called sikerals. Their strategy is to reproduce a lot of individuals so they can sacrifice however many they need to when a predator comes by. They’re filled with bones that shatter when they blow up. The shards come out as a rain of super pointy bits, shredding and impaling anything in range. Other sikerals, too, but that hardly matters. They just blow up too in their death throes. Sometimes just a big chain reaction while the rest of the school gets away in the rain of bony death.”
“They taste great, though,” Suli added.
“Oh yeah!” Tivani agreed. “If you can come across a place where a bunch have blown up, there’s an assload of meat you can just scoop out of the water. You just have to get there before a lot of scavengers show up.”
“Wow,” I said. “Shredded, blown up meat. Sign me the fuck up right now. I’d just love some exploded meat. Wouldn’t it be filled with bone shards?”
“Mhmm,” Suli said. “You need a special cooking device to separate those out.”
Tivani cocked her head and asked, “Do we have a deboner?”
Suli nodded. “There was one tucked away.” They shared a look and a big smile. “Sikeral cakes?” she asked.
“Fuck yeah! It’s been forever since I’ve had those!”
I looked at the two of them with my lips pressed into a thin line. I was about to ask the stupidest question of my life. “Didn’t we already have seafood cakes at some point?”
The mirth fell right off their faces as they looked back at me before very obviously looking anywhere but at me. “Uh, yeah,” Tivani said.
“And they weren’t sikeral cakes.”
“No.”
I deflated, my curiosity overpowering all of my good sense, which I didn’t seem to have too much of. “Okay. What did we eat?” When neither replied, I added, “Just tell me.”
“Krayshel cakes,” Tivani said softly.
My eyes went wide, and I had to put an arm on the wall to hold myself up. “Krayshels.”
“You asked.”
“The twenty-tentacled horrors, with mouths on the end of each arm that scream and jump out of the water.”
“Yes.”
“We ate them.”
“You asked!”
“How did…. I mean….”
“We got some meat when we loaded up with supplies one time,” Suli said. “It’s cheap and tastes pretty good.”
“How do, I mean… how….”
“Well,” Tivani said, shrugging. “They do jump right onto ships that sit lower in the water than the Melodia. If you know they’re around, you can bait them. People just wear earplugs so the screaming doesn’t addle their senses. Then they just kinda beat ‘em dead. You chop the arms off, chop the mouths off the arms, and throw them back in the water with the body, which is filled with gross fluids. But the muscles in the arms make for tasty cakes.”
I just stood there, listening to this flaming bullshit, not having the wherewithal to ask her to stop talking. “I’m not sure why I asked,” I said after she was done. “I was doing so well, not asking about things. But I just had to know, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Tivani said, patting me on the back. “You were doing really well. Let this be a lesson for you.” She gave me a big, forced grin, and then we just went back to watching the colorful and subtly and not-so-subtly awful wildlife. Luckily, we didn’t actually see any krayshels, and when it occurred to me that we totally might, I elected to go back up to the upper decks.
They came back up after a little while. Vsara and Leena had been there already, watching Oziin get one of the cannons ready. Once we were all assembled, it was time to see the first of the Melodia’s new powers.
It was nice that I didn’t have to sing anything into life. The core was by far and away the most advanced piece of runic tech I had ever seen so far. It was weird to think of the Melodia as one big golem, but that’s exactly what it was. And somehow, the core’s runes, once activated, were self-perpetuating. According to Tivani’s manuals, the core could remain active without any more power from a Runic Lord for nearly a year.
The cannons could be moved around on their own bases, as evidenced by the time Suli shot Rilahn out of the command room. They normally sat in set places on the open upper deck where they linked into the Melodia’s channels of power. These channels were always in the back of my mind, with their runes singing quietly to me. My brain filtered them out pretty quickly.
