novelraw Chapter 174: Frostmarch Threat
Chapter 174: Frostmarch Threat
Patrol Leader Raegal — the grizzled wolf-beastman whose forty years of frontier service had given him the uncanny threat-reading ability of a predator who survived by understanding what was trying to kill him — delivered the debrief to Marquess Gharrek Fenward in the war room of Fangwall Fortress while the patrol’s survivors were being treated for injuries that the Frostmarch’s healer priests described as "consistent with sustained divine-domain exposure."
"We crossed the boundary on schedule," Raegal reported. "The first twelve days were standard frontier — unmapped wilderness, predator encounters, navigation by terrain reading. No abnormal divine activity. No divine resistance. At the boundary’s edge — approximately sixty kilometers north of the mapped territory — we entered a zone where the priests started losing their blessings."
"Howlist blessing degraded first. Pack coordination — the divine enhancement that links wolf-beastmen in shared tactical awareness during combat — dropped from full strength to approximately twenty percent over a distance of two kilometers. At twenty percent, the pack-sense was noise — garbled, unreliable, more distracting than useful. I ordered the priests to shut it down entirely. We continued without divine enhancement."
"And then we found the source."
"Morglith occupies a valley — roughly eighty kilometers north of our mapped boundary, at the base of a mountain that the local fauna avoids entirely. The valley is approximately five kilometers long, two kilometers wide, and it’s *wrong*."
"The valley’s stone is grey. Not naturally grey — grey the way old things are grey. Decay. The stone is decaying. Stone doesn’t decay — or shouldn’t. But this stone is crumbling, disintegrating at the molecular level, returning to the undifferentiated mineral dust that stone was before geological pressure compressed it into structure. The trees are grey. The soil is grey. The water in the streambed is grey. Everything in the valley is in a state of advanced deterioration."
"The Decay influence. And a nature over stone — simultaneously. The combination is specific: Morglith doesn’t build with stone. He *unmakes* it. His authority over stone gives him control of the material. His decay influence gives him the intent. Together, the two produce an environment where structural integrity — the fundamental property that makes stone *stone* — is attacked at the divine level."
"Unknown. The valley’s effect was ambient — it affected everything within the domain’s radius, which we estimated at approximately five kilometers. Beyond the radius, the effect diminished rapidly. Whether Morglith can project the decay effect at distance — the way Demeterra projects earth-shaping — is something we couldn’t determine."
"We didn’t see Morglith directly. We saw the constructs. Not stone guardians like the dungeon — these were *decay* constructs. Animated bodies of crumbling stone that moved with the slow, grinding purpose of erosion given form. They were two to three meters tall, humanoid, and they attacked by touch. One of our fighters — Jessek — was grabbed by a construct’s hand. The hand’s contact produced the decay effect on a biological target. Jessek’s forearm aged thirty years in four seconds. The muscle atrophied, the bone density dropped, the skin lost elasticity. Four seconds of contact produced the equivalent of three decades of cellular deterioration."
"Alive. The healers have stabilized the arm, but they can’t reverse the aging. The Decay domain’s effect is not damage — it’s *time*. You can’t heal time."
***
"A weak god — small by any measure of divine threat, consistent with Fenrath’s initial evaluation. Morglith’s effective reach is strong within his valley but attenuates rapidly beyond five kilometers. His construct force is estimated at approximately 3,000 units — small by military standards, insufficient for a conventional invasion, but sufficient for the diversionary role that Demeterra’s hired him for."
"Three thousand constructs that *age* by touch. The distinction matters — aging doesn’t kill immediately. It weakens. A soldier touched by a decay construct loses decades of physical capability in seconds. The touch converts a young warrior into an old one — not dead, but combat-ineffective. An army that fights decay constructs doesn’t take casualties. It takes *retirees*."
"Can Fenrath counter it?"
"So we contain."
The assessment completed the northern intelligence picture. Morglith was a diversionary asset — paid by Demeterra, operating independently, designed to pin 15,000 kingdom troops in the north while the real war happened at the Ashwall. The operation was cost-efficient from Demeterra’s perspective: a single payment to a minor god, in exchange for removing 15,000 troops — approximately five percent of the kingdom’s total force — from the southern theater.
"Hold the north," Gharrek told his commanders. "Fenrath holds the divine boundary. The garrison holds the physical boundary. Nothing crosses south. And if the constructs come in force — make them come into the cold. The Frostmarch’s winter starts in forty days. Let the Decay god fight entropy with entropy."