Apostles of Doom

Other than that, it contained a small fire spell that could be triggered over a link; and, of course, a mana pool that would power the other spells, but which could easily be recharged by himself, his master or any other warlocks or shamans linked to the master. That was all — that, and of course the link to his master, and hence to himself and any others his master wished.

The entire purpose of this device was to allow anyone with the link and the ability to do so, to start a small flame to support one of Lord Tommus’s Demonic Portals. This device would basically eliminate the need to have someone at a location in order for Lord Tommus to open a portal. Vaselle was going to glue this one right here, in this small, sheltered rocky alcove.

Vaselle muttered the small cantrip to enable the geo-lock on his device, and it was set. He had already charged it. It now just remained for Lord Tommus to test it. Unfortunately, his master was still at the oath-taking ceremony in Nysegard. He’d briefly joined with his master and shared the idea for his device. His master had been extremely pleased, but was not free to test it until later in the evening. Thus they had decided that Vaselle would place it and Tom would test it out, without Vaselle near, later in the evening. They had decided that Vaselle should be in the city, so they could be sure that Lord Tommus was tracking the device, rather than Vaselle. It was quite important to remove potential cross-effects when testing devices.

If this worked, Tom wanted Vaselle to construct a bunch more of them. He also wanted Vaselle to return to Mount Doom so that Vaselle could test to see if he, using Tom’s power, could also open the portals. That would be very important, as the master wanted his shamans and future warlocks to be able to open portals on his behalf.

Vaselle quietly clapped his hands together in delight. He was so pleased to be of service to his master. It made him feel so special, so valuable, to provide the master things he needed.

Mount Doom: Late Sixth Period

Tom made his way down the corridor to his room; he wanted to check in with the guys hanging out there. For some reason, they all liked to gather in his personal sitting room, even though there were many sitting rooms that were not tied to a bedroom suite. He assumed it was just habit. Well, and Antefalken had assembled his huge piles of heat-resistant paper to write on.

He wanted to check on them to see if anything new had come up before testing Vaselle’s portable gateway. Those should be incredibly useful; he was quite happy with Vaselle’s initiative. He wouldn’t be able to actually visit Vaselle, given that Freehold was still, as far as he knew, encased in Lenamare’s wards. However, it would be nice to see his old stomping grounds, so to speak. He laughed to himself at that; he had only lived there for a bit over a week.

After that he was going to bed. Today had been a long day; he had traveled to three different villages for oath takings. Interestingly, the villages were linked in chains, so they had gone to the largest village first, and then from there to two smaller villages that connected to it. He’d had to think about it a bit, but the model did make sense for a place like the Isle of Doom, where quick mobilization from multiple locations was needed. If everyone had to hub out of one location, like Krallnomton, everyone would have to go there first.

The travel and setup time, however, meant it wasn’t that efficient for doing oath takings. The method they had used at Doom had been to have regiments come to Tom, rotating people in and out. After today’s oath taking, they’d had a council session in the evening and discussed this.

His commanders agreed that it was taking too long; the Forces of Darkness might not give them enough time before testing them to get everyone sworn. The original reason they were going to the villages had been because they didn’t want to leave any villages unoccupied.

After a couple rounds of discussion this evening, they had finally decided to send troops from Mount Doom to the villages to keep them occupied while their residents were taking oaths. There had been some concern about resource constraints, in that they did not have that many D’Orcs; however, Darflow had suggested that his demon troops also participate.

Tom could tell that some of his commanders were a bit leery of this, not completely trusting the demons yet. Tom had links to them, so he took it upon himself to end the discussion and agreed to use a mix of demons and D’Orcs.