You turn your attention from the common folk and soldiers for the most part, leaving the images you have already planted in their minds to do their work. Instead you focus on areas closer to home: the area around Canord. To keep your presence as subtle as possible, you search out dreams for any passing by the razed villages.
There are two caravans traveling southwards, looking to trade for iron ore and various other sundries, their wagons piled high with cloth and lumber and jewelry. You enter their dreams, tear their minds apart, and send them on to become your slaves. There are a few other travelers, including a wandering priest, but all soon join the ranks of your slaves, laboring alongside the zombies and miners. When not keeping an eye on the dreamscape for people straying too close to your realm, you continue working on the seeds you planted last month. They are still there, and growing strong, but you are dividing your attention enough that you can make only slight efforts to encourage the slowly strengthening corruption.
Your seducers enjoy some success now that they have established themselves, each bringing in a few recruits to join the ranks of your thralls. Many others seem to be ambivalent, and will likely fall into worshipping you given time.
The commander trembles slightly as you watch impassively as his soldiers, split into two groups, engage in a brutal mock battle, practice swords clacking against each other, blocks of pikes facing off. They have been training for some time today, and although you can see they are exhausted, they fight on still. Finally, you nod your approval. “Two days, commander. Two days and we shall see how skilled they are when the smell of blood is in the air.” He nods, and calls a halt to their work.
You begin to hunt through your thralls, searching for those who can learn magic. You find only two who have true potential, but there are another fourteen with glimmers of skill. They are immediately given new jobs, attempting to learn magic from your tutelage and from the tattered book you found. You expected it to be a long and difficult process, but much to your surprise they take to it relatively well. Apparently you are a better teacher than you thought. They are no longer just thralls now. They shall be called…
[] Evil magic name
You march with the soldiers to another small village, and watch as they surround it, banging their swords on their shields once they are all in position. Teams break off to enter houses and grab people out of them, and they are brought into the center of the village. They seem to have some awareness of what you are – apparently a couple people escaped Canord, and while the villagers dismissed their ramblings as crazed nonsense, they remembered what was said. A few beg to serve you, to join your cult. You decide…
[] They shall die with the rest!
[] To break their minds and use them as slaves
[] Let them join
[] Something evil
Returning from the village, you find Kreth waiting to greet you, his skull grinning. It is a surprisingly unsettling look. He takes you to the temple, where you find what he has been working on: A massive statue of you in gold which seems still molten, radiating heat. There are faces in the metal – he bound living flesh into it, allowing you to animate, albeit at the cost of a great deal of power. And it exudes a powerful aura, demanding those who approach it kneel and swear to you. Its effects can be felt across town and even in some of the nearby mines.
You call the commander and his second to you, tasking each of them to train you another hundred soldiers. They pledge to do so, and are about to set off you call the commander back, and offer him another blessing. He requests to be made even stronger, and you pour a fraction of your power into him. Then you bless his blade, pouring a bit of dark power into it, blackening and twisting the steel. While he wields it, his mind will be sharper, and those who follow him will be braver. After you do so, the commander politely points out that you don’t have another two hundred followers in Canord.
While you do all this, you absentmindedly direct much of the energy which flows from you into Desecrator. It is difficult to corrupt something already so evil, but you manage, and an image of you appears on the pommel, allowing you to direct energy through the blade and send it out as a blast of energy. You can do this already, but doing it through the weapon will now have…interesting effects.
Work continues on the town. The smiths make a great many small metal images of you, and they are hung throughout the town. The walls are built up higher and thicker, and the bottom of the moat is lined with spikes smeared with the contents of chamber pots. Several of your thralls encourage the thorns around the crops to grow, guiding them carefully to make a low barricade of vicious, barbed brambles.
As the month draws to a close, you hear two interesting pieces of news from your seducers. The first is that several rebellions have broken out in the western region of the empire, and several detachments of the local legion, among other forces, are being sent to quell it. The second is that you have sensed a faint stirring coming from the graveyard of Canord.
What do you do now?
Full statusCurrent StatusName: Klx-Dryklfx
Time: 5 months
Physical Might: 54+6 (- 12 empowering desecrator, + 12 worship, + 4 slaughter)
Mental Might: ] 54+6 (- 12 empowering desecrator, + 12 worship, + 4 slaughter)
Followers13 Boneys, 173 thralls, 180 soldiers, 8 seducers, 1 commander, 16 peasants
Servants15 wisp wights, 2 brutes, 321 zombies, 56 skeletons, 50 wisp wretches, 9 weeping sores
CultsThe Broken
Members: 13 Boneys, 149 thralls, 180 soldiers, 1 commander
Resources: 28(-20 construction, - 6 forging, + 5 looted caravans, +5/week demonic crops, +4/week iron mines )
Power: 18 (3 spent worshipping you, 6 spent on training, 6 spent on construction, 3 spent gathering resources)
Unnamed cult
Members: 8 seducers and 24 thralls, and 16 peasants split among 8 locations
Resources: 0
Power: 5(1 spent worshipping you, 2 spent recruiting)
Fortresses Canord
Strong walls (30), Deep moat (20), Thorn fences (5) Demonic crops, plentiful mines, Strong aura of domination
ChampionsKreth Woemaker
Physical might: 9
Mental might: 9
Other: Magic cloak
Commander(Needs name)
Physical might: 5 + 1
Mental might: 3 + 1
Other: Duelist, skilled commander, magic sword