Author: Luke Chmilenko; G. D. Penman
Date: 2024-04-16 07:00:00+00:00
Description: *This boxset contains the complete Savage Dominion Series** * Maulkin didn't know dying would mean a new eternity of dungeon delving, monster slaying, and glory hunting. If he had, he wouldn’t have been so worried about kicking the bucket on a date gone even more wrong than usual. Reborn in the wild world of Amaranth, Maulkin finds himself in a hulking demi-human body with a sword of a size to match. Marked as an Eternal, a fledging immortal of boundless potential, Maulkin soon discovers he’s been given a mission by the elder pantheon of this new Grow stronger. Ascend to godhood. Spread chaos
Publisher: Wraithmarked Creative, LLC

Savage Dominion: The Complete Collection

Copyright © 2024 by Luke Chmilenko and GD Penman. All rights reserved.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or fictitious recreations of actual historical persons. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintended by the author unless otherwise specified.

Editor: Dominion Editing

Cover Illustration: Mansik YAM

Cover Design and Interior Layout: STK•Kreations

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-955252-88-1

Worldwide Rights.

1st Edition,

Published by Wraithmarked Creative, LLC.

www.wraithmarked.com/

To our Friends and Family, thank you for your endless love and support.

Table of Contents

Savage Dominion

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

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Wyrmshard

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

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Voidgod

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

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epilogue

Thank You All! Please Read!

Savage Dominion

Chapter 1

Throughout the eons of human history, men have done a lot of really dumb things to get laid. When you put that into context, going for a ten-mile hike for a first date when you are as athletic as a cabbage probably doesn’t even make the top ten. It is one of the dumbest things I’d ever done personally, but on the grand scale of things, it doesn’t even register.

The forest that she took me to was actually pretty gorgeous—if you’re into heavily wooded areas and bugs. The sun was filtering through the leaves, making the path beneath our feet green and golden in alternate patches. In the distance, I could hear a stream gurgling by. If I’d been an outdoorsy kind of person then this would probably be my idea of heaven. Since I was more of a stay inside and play video games until three in the morning kind of person, I was less than enthusiastic.

Needless to say, the actual date part wasn’t going so well. It was pretty apparent I’d lied when I showed up to the hike in a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers instead of whatever boots and beige explorer gear I was somehow meant to know I should be wearing. The fact that I was dripping with sweat and panting for breath after the first slight incline probably gave away the game a bit too.

Maybe I could have salvaged the situation, laid on some charm, and made it funny, but that panting thing was no joke. She was mad, and she was hiking up the path like she planned to stomp right through it.

“Hey…”

Every so often she stopped for me to play catch up, but by the time that I did, I was so out of breath I couldn’t say anything.

“Uh…”

She stormed off again just before I got a word out, and I had no choice but to traipse on after her.

“So…”

There was a gentle breeze rustling through the trees as we continued to climb, yet I seemed to be burning up. Ever notice that you can’t feel your lungs unless something has gone wrong? They don’t ever feel pleasantly cool when you’re just relaxing. It’s only when you start putting some work in that they start to complain.

Which, in my case, made me feel like I’d been huffing napalm, leaving me looking like a partially boiled lobster. A lesser man might have just watched a nice butt wiggling up the trail ahead of him and accepted the day was a total bust, but I kept on going. Momma didn’t raise a quitter after all. This was just going to be a funny story for our hypothetical grandkids someday. My perseverance in the face of adversity was sure to win her over any minute now. She’d respect me for carrying on even though I was completely out of my element, throw herself into my waiting arms, and kiss me until sundown. Then she would carry me back down to the car over her shoulder because my legs had turned into jelly.

The ground finally started to even out after we’d reached the seven-thousand-mile mark—also known as the top of the ridge that we’d been heading up. I never thought I could be so happy to see some dirt packed flat, but there I was. I was so overjoyed that I didn’t even notice the path widening out into a clearing until I almost walked right into the back of my date.

I pulled up abruptly behind her, and in the moment before my brain caught up to what was going on, it fed me some weird little details. Some of the hair had finally wisped out of her ponytail, and she was standing really still like she was trying to not even breathe. There was even a bead of sweat running down the side of her neck, which I took as a win. Sure, I’d dripped out enough saltwater to fill a manatee enclosure, but she was sweating too, so this hiking thing was hard for everyone. It wasn’t just me.

About then my eyes managed to focus on what had brought her to a dead halt. There was a wolf on the other side of the clearing.

Wolves are a lot bigger than you’d expect. That was the first thing I noticed. Next, I spotted the size of its teeth since it was snarling at us. It took a while to look away from those yellowed fangs and stop imagining just how much damage they could do. The fur along the length of it was thick and rich with a swirl of browns and greys. There was a smell hanging over the whole clearing—like a wet dog but acrid, sharp, and musky. The whole thing was surreal. I didn’t even think there were any wolves in the wild around here, let alone frothing, growling, furious wolves that were bigger than me.

I wish I could say that some heroic instinct kicked in and I jumped forward to protect my date—maybe I would have, had I been given enough time for my exhausted brain to catch up—but the wolf didn’t give us that chance. In one bounding step, it closed the distance, drool trailing from its jagged jaws.

Finally, my body decided to move, and I threw myself to the side, shoulder barging my date into the dirt and catching the wolf’s jaws on my arm instead of her throat. Guess those hero instincts were in there somewhere, but I didn’t have much time to be pleased because there was a wolf gnawing on my arm.

That was going to hurt really soon, but for that initial moment, all I felt was the heat inside his mouth. The wolf snarled at me, and I screamed right back at him. My date was scrambling back to her feet, but I had enough presence of mind to yell, “Run!” at her before the wolf started yanking on my arm like I was a rag doll.

She stood there staring at me for just long enough for me to think she wasn’t going to listen, expressions washing over her face too fast to follow, then that good old-fashioned survival instinct kicked in, and she ran for her life back down the trail.

Good. That was one problem taken care of. Sure, I was about to become a snack, but at least the girl who’d spent all day aggressively ignoring me was going to be alright. The pain was coming now, nauseating waves of it every time I felt the teeth grinding on my bone. My screaming probably wasn’t so defiant anymore. Nothing could have prepared me for the sensation of the bone cracking when the wolf got a good grip and really bit down.

I punched the wolf in the face. Then when it still didn’t let go, I punched it again. I might have been twisted off balance and dragged halfway into the undergrowth before I realized I could fight back, but now I was ready. I was hurting, and I was angry, and this overgrown Chihuahua was not about to have me for dinner.

The next swing hit it right on the nose, and it let go of me with an undignified little yelp. We both jumped back from each other, then started to circle each other like it was a boxing match. I just wasn’t sure I’d make it through another round.

We’d completely swapped places by the time it occurred to me that I could run for it too. Guess running never came naturally to me. When it came to fight or flight, I had always seemed to be missing the second part. I never wanted to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me scared, even when it got me my ass kicked.

For once, it looked like fighting was the right choice. With the trail at its back, the wolf turned away from me, looking for easier lunch that wouldn’t whack it with a rolled-up newspaper. The trail that my dearest darling date had just run down. Damn it.

I had one hand still working right, so when the wolf turned to run, I grabbed onto his brushy tail and pulled. That earned me another yelp and the undivided attention that I probably should have been doing my best to avoid.

The wolf spun on the spot, snapping at my wrist and catching a mouthful of tail instead. My throat was sore from all the panting and screaming, but I still managed to bluster out, “Too slow, bitch.”

Maybe he understood English, or maybe he was just angry about biting itself on the tail, but either way, he came for me, and my jelly legs had no choice but to move where I told them to.

Even if I managed to get past him, I couldn’t lead him towards my date, and I was pretty sure that a hungry wolf could outpace me on a flat surface even on the best of days—he was cheating, he had two extra legs—so the trail ahead was out too. That left only one other option.

I dove into the underbrush and made a run for it. If I could get a bit of distance and climb a tree, the wolf would be screwed. Of course, that would require me to move faster than a creature that was chasing me down through its natural habitat, when my natural habitat was the sofa seat closest to the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to walk too far. I tripped over a root about ten seconds into my sprint and sprawled on my face.

The wolf obviously expected more from me, and he shot right by and had to make a U-turn to come back at my face—my face which now happened to be at a convenient chomping height. I had to fling myself to the side and swing a wild haymaker into the impending jaws of death just to keep the wolf from my throat.

It was like punching a furry brick wall. It turned the wolf’s head so the bite missed, but that was it. The rest of the big hairy beast still rolled over me like a train. Flat on my back, looking up at the clear blue sky above me, I caught a glimpse of the moon. It wasn’t meant to be here today. Neither was I. My ears were ringing. Maybe shock was kicking in.

The wolf darted in, faster than I could follow, and this time its teeth found my throat. With a bite strong enough to shatter bone, those teeth didn’t need to be needle sharp to hurt me, but that was still the first thing I felt, before the wet and the heat and the pain; that first sharp touch on my skin before I jammed my hands in his mouth to keep the jaws from closing.

The wolf bit down anyway. No matter what I shoved in the way, it could still bite through, but instead of the rip and tear it had gone for, it got a mouth full of crunchy little hand bones that it had to try and grind through. It was like biting into a chicken wing wrong and feeling the bone splinter in your mouth.

Except in this scenario, I was the chicken wing in question.

With my hands busy being chewed to shreds and an angry wolf on top of me, the only thing I could do to get it off me was head-butt the mangy mutt right on its wet nose. With a strangled yelp, it jumped off, paws hammering me back into the scrubby plants all over again.

I rolled and was up and running before I had time to realize that pushing off with my hands was going to be an agonizingly bad idea. There was no time to stop and scream, so I did it while I ran, yodeling through the woods at top speed with the wolf literally snapping at my heels until my breath ran dry.

All that I could hear was the hammering of my heart, the whipping of leaves by my ears, and the wolf. Always the wolf. His ragged breath. The steady beat of his paws on the ground. The long growl that rumbled out of him as we ran.

Then one moment, just as abruptly as the wolf had appeared, he was gone. I staggered forward a few more steps before tripping over something and falling in a heap. I twisted, expecting the wolf to be on me again, but it was just standing there. Hackles up. Teeth bared. I shuffled my back up against what I’d assumed was a mossy tree. Its cool presence informed me it was actually a rock. There were eight of them, all covered in so much moss and lichen that you couldn’t even see the color of the stone. They loomed in a circle that I’d just fallen into the middle of.

A circle that the wolf wouldn’t, couldn’t enter.

If I wasn’t so grateful that I wasn’t currently being treated like a dollar store chew toy it probably would have been unsettling. Outside the circle, the wolf bayed and barked, drooled and paced, but not once did it try to come inside. I’d beaten it. I’d won. I started to laugh, but it hurt too much. My hands were a mangled mess of gristle, blood, and bone, and reaching up to my neck with what was left of them, I found it was slick with gore too. The bite that I’d stopped short hadn’t stopped short enough. My shirt was soaked in blood, and the sun in the open sky above the circle was getting dimmer by the second.

It took so much effort now just to look around. All the stuff I’d taken for granted was suddenly arduous. I knew that I was dying—I wasn’t dumb. Nobody bled this much and survived. However, there was still one last thing I had to do before I died. My eyes locked on the wolf, still snarling on the other side of whatever invisible barrier was keeping it out. All that work and he wasn’t even going to get a taste of my delicious man meat.

Straining with all my might, I lifted both of my arms and curled all but one finger on each hand as tightly as I could, grunting through the pain. I kept those middle fingers raised at that wolf for as long as I had the strength. Eventually, they started to wobble and drift as my eyes fluttered shut, and heavy darkness overtook me.

So that was what dying felt like. In case you wondered.

Chapter 2

Death is not the end.

I remember a lot of people worrying about that back when I was still alive, so I thought I’d clear it up. Everything went dark, then everything went light again, blindingly bright for just a moment, then I was hanging there above my body, looking down on it and wishing that I wasn’t. It wasn’t pretty. I mean, I wasn’t much of a looker to start with, but the wolf had really done a number on me. Bits were dangling that were not meant to be dangling, and the whole thing just looked wet and gross. It made me glad I wasn’t in the body anymore. There was no pain, and there was no fear—those were functions of the body I’d inhabited. Instead, there was just me.

Ghosts are also a thing as it turns out. I was dead but not gone. There aren’t many things you can call that other than ghosts. Tearing my attention away from the meaty mess I used to occupy, I looked to the wolf, only to discover that he’d wandered off sometime between the darkness, the light, and my haunting beginning. I couldn’t see any sign of it. Next, I found my attention drawn to the stones, which now seemed to glow faintly blue in the day’s dying light. I already knew that there was something strange about them when the wolf wouldn’t come in, but now I was wondering just what fresh hell I’d landed myself in. I was just starting to think that I could do with some sort of advice on what to do next when I saw a robed figure hanging in the air just beyond the circle’s perimeter. I glanced quickly over the scythe and the anorexic hands that gripped it and found myself staring into the dark recesses of the hood, from which a voice echoed out, “Your time in this world has ended. Come to me, and I shall take you on to the next.”

When capital “D” Death tells you to do something, obeying is almost automatic. I felt myself moving before I even had time to think. I’d nearly made it out of the circle before I realized something. Even Death couldn’t come in here. “What happens if I don’t?”

For a moment, the wraith froze in place, then, as soft as a sigh, Death said, “Then you will linger here for all eternity. Forgetting more and more of what you were—doing nothing, changing nothing—until only your awareness remains. It is that fate which I labor to spare you all.”

Lingering for all eternity with nothing to do but look at these rocks did sound kind of dull, and it wasn’t like I was going to get less dead by hanging out next to my corpse. So I tried to shrug, found I was missing the required shoulders, and drifted on over.

Death moved off between the trees almost as soon as I’d started to follow. Keeping up wasn’t a problem now that I passed through everything like it wasn’t there, but it was still kind of rude. Besides, I had a lot of questions. This was my first time being dead. “So what happens next?”

“You do not know? Most mortals are brimming over with opinions.”

Every time I nearly caught up, he put on a new turn of speed. We must have been flying along at thirty miles an hour now. “I think I’d prefer to know what is actually coming instead of guesswork.”

Death stopped dead, and I almost rammed into the back of him. “Most mortals I reap pass into whatever world their actions have destined them for. You are different. Your circumstances necessitate intervention.”

Uh-oh. “What kind of ‘intervention’ are we talking about?”

“Divine.”

I didn’t like the sound of that either. I’d never been big on religion while I was alive, and now that I was dead, I didn’t really want to change that. Every story I’d ever heard about a person getting some divine intervention usually ended up with someone on fire, in a whale, or having some internal organs becoming external. It was that last one that was concerning me right now. Sure I was dead, but that didn’t mean I wanted some big alligator-looking dude weighing my organs to decide if I was a good enough guy to not be eaten by miscellaneous nightmare beasts.

Why did my mind go there? See where your mind goes when you drop dead.

In either case, I was just starting to reconsider the whole lingering for eternity bit when I realized we’d stopped for a reason. We were in the middle of nowhere now—even more the middle of nowhere than where we’d started out from. This place was as barren as a desert with none of the exciting sand dunes and scorpions. Just an endless blank expanse. Except for the golden gate that hung unsupported and open ahead of us. It wasn’t a pearly gate with a neon sign flashing “Heaven ahead”, but it looked promising enough. There were no screaming souls of the damned pouring out or anything. Maybe I had found the time to be a good person in between movie marathons and MMO raids?

Stepping through the auric arches, it was like someone had switched out the lights on the whole universe. The only reason I knew Death was walking by my side was that he hissed, “Stay close. This is no place for spirits to be lost.”

I couldn’t see anything, but I supposed that being insubstantial meant that I wouldn’t be stubbing my toe or banging into anyone in the dark anyway. I felt myself moving, even if I couldn’t see it, then in the distance, I began to make out a shimmer of golden light. From the refractions, the hall that we were moving through began to take shape.

It was huge. Impossibly huge. So big that no human hands could possibly have wrought it. If we had footsteps they wouldn’t even have echoed in so wide a space. The marble was dark and seamless, with only a hint of distant stars buried somewhere deep down within it. There were no clear cuts or joints, no sign that the stone had been worked at all. It was as though the whole place had just sprung into being fully formed.

Hanging back really was a bad idea. Big D seemed to have no intention of slowing or even acknowledging me now that I was here. I guess I was just a work friend. I had to hurry after him or risk being left behind in the hollow darkness. Yet now that we were coming closer to the light, I realized that neither one of us was actually alone. There was a train of four wisps following in his wake, only visible now that they were coming into the light of whatever golden sun lay ahead of us. Were they more people like me, all requiring divine intervention to find their final resting place? Was that what I looked like? Just a little puff of light and substance hanging in the air? Was that all that was left of me?

That mental rabbit-hole would have to remain unexplored because I soon found myself distracted by the shiny. The hall had continued to open out into an even grander chamber, and standing at the center of it all was the source of all light in this place.

The gods.

Each one of them was bathed in radiance that made the brightest day back on Earth look like it was thick with fog, the colors in my memory appearing faded and mute in comparison. But even as bright as their aura was, it could not compare to the light that poured from their eyes. Looking into them would have blinded me if I still had the anatomy for it. I was formless, impervious, and I still caught myself flinching.

While I could sense more gods watching from the wings, there was only a trio waiting for us at the center. The tallest and grandest wore a crown. He was more or less everything you’d expect from a god—towering, muscular, flowing white robes, and lots of gold filigree. He even had the big white beard, although it seemed that there were little embers glowing at the end of each wavy hair. In one hand, he held a spear that was even taller than him, in the other a golden sphere that glowed almost as brightly as his eyes. It could very well have been a small sun for all I knew about how the universe worked. Maybe stars were like handbag dogs for the gods?

Beside him, and back a step on either side, were the other two gods. On his left was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen—so picture-perfect that she didn’t look real. Every line and curve of her face and body were porcelain pristine, accentuated, and masked in equal parts by the diaphanous, silky white gown that she wore. Here too was more gold. A circlet at her brow and filigreed details worked into her clothes. It was difficult to tear my eyes away from her to look at the third figure.

What this one lacked in height compared to the central god, they made up for in bulk. There was gold aplenty to be seen, but none of the white robes for this one. They were clad from head to toe in plate armor, shining blinding-bright in the light of the others and emitting their own solar glow from six holes in the helmet’s faceplate. While you could have mistaken the middle god’s spear for something decorative, this one had flails looped short in their hands that were clearly meant to be used, the spiked head of each hidden by the flames burning wildly within.

Death stopped before the gods without deference. Then he turned back to we mere mortals and pointed to the gods, each in turn. “Eosphel, King of the Dawn. Hemeraphel, The Noon Queen. Bilaphel, The Purifying Flame. These gods rule the Solar Court. They shall have their pick of the four of you.”

Hemeraphel’s white mask of a face creased into a benevolent smile. A hand slipped from her trailing sleeves and beckoned us forward. I had automatically tried to do what Big D told me to because it was wired into my brain, but I wanted to obey the Noon Queen because it might please her. I wanted her to turn that smile on me. More than anything, I wanted her to choose me. To make me hers in whatever way this afterlife intervention allowed.

Only the surprisingly solid arm of Death stretched across my path brought me to a halt. “Not you.”

Before I had the opportunity to object, Eosphel raised the golden sphere above his head, and his booming voice rolled over us all. “Behold Amaranth.”

The little sun went supernova, exploding out to envelop the entire room in flames and light. It was only once we were inside the corona that I could see again, and there, hanging above Eosphel’s hand, was a world. It was detailed in the same golden glow that poured out from the gods, but it was still clearly a little planet that we were looking at, and as we gawked, it grew larger and larger until we were drifting across its surface as it rotated.

“Look upon Amaranth, first of all worlds. The world of which all others are mere shadows. It is the holy land where the great matters of the Courts are settled.”

It took a little time to understand what I was looking at. The little image of a world was spinning by so fast, and we were so high above it that making out details would have been a struggle anyway. The fact that everything was being displayed in the same golden color really didn’t help much. There were mountains and rivers, forests, and plains. It looked a lot like Earth used to before we built all over it. There seemed to be a few deserts in unexpected spots, but beyond that, it didn’t seem like anything special.

“When there is order in Amaranth, there is order throughout the cosmos. When there is chaos here, all worlds fall to it. Amaranth is key to mastery of the universe.”

We dipped in closer to the surface now, and the illusion that this world was wild and empty washed away. There had been buildings, even cities, once upon a time, but they had since fallen into ruin. Colossal statues were hidden beneath the grime of ages, long broken and forgotten. Everywhere I looked, the world had grown back on top of what people had tried to build there. Layer upon layer of civilizations laid down in strata to support this latest wilderness.

“That mastery is the very reason that there are strict rules that govern conduct upon Amaranth. Gods of neither court may walk upon it. Nay, all of our great works there must be done through our agents, the Eternals.”

The world stopped spinning.

We stood on the crest of a hill, overlooking a vast battlefield. Down amidst a confusing sea of swarming creatures, a single man in armor stood tall and unmoved. He was no bigger than the host buzzing around him, but he filled up our sight all the same, the only real looking thing in the glowing illusions laid out before us. Yet even he didn’t escape the divine light entirely, and when he turned our way, we could see it blazing in his eyes—just the same as it did in the eyes of the gods.

“This is the fate that we offer unto you lost souls. Hearken to us and be born again into a living world. Be granted bodies once more that not just match those that you bore in your previous lives, but are better in every way. Bodies that are empowered with our divine might, so that you can bring order to the world of Amaranth. You have all felt the icy touch of oblivion upon you, but you need not feel it ever again. In exchange for your servitude, each of you shall be granted the most glorious boons. Not the least of which is life everlasting.”

I don’t know what I did to win this jackpot prize, but I wasn’t going to let it pass me by. “I get to be a badass warrior for all eternity? Where do I sign up?”

Eosphel fell silent at my interruption, and I had a horrible flashback to a timeshare pitch that I’d once been tricked into sitting through with the promise of a free brunch. The brunch hadn’t even been that good. The gentle golden light that the king was wreathed in flared to life like somebody poured gasoline on him. I was getting the distinct impression that gods weren’t used to being interrupted.

The flare lasted for just a moment, then he seemed to get it back under control and press on with the sales pitch as if I weren’t there. Probably a good thing, all things considered.

“The four of you have been chosen by the fates. Your deaths were not wasted as so many are but instead were sanctified. Each of you passed from your mortal forms on holy ground. Know now that even the manner of your death needed to be righteous for you to be ushered into these halls. Even in this, there are strictures and limitations to ensure that only the truly worthy are called.”

That explained why the place wasn’t packed. A lot of people died all day every day throughout the world, but how many did so in weird stone circles in the middle of nowhere? Five in a day seemed about right.

Wait, there were five of us newly dead here, weren’t there?

Eosphel was still blabbing on about divine providence and the virtues of service, so I took a second to do a recount. There was Big D, me, the gods, and four other glowing wisps. Five dead people in total. If the gods couldn’t do basic arithmetic that also explained a lot about the universe.

I tuned back into Eosphel’s grand proclamations just in time for some of the juicy details. “Within Amaranth, you too shall be bound by the strictures of the concord we reached with the other Court but empowered by them too. Your world was tainted thoroughly by chaos. So much so you could not even perceive the fundamental nature of your own selves. In Amaranth, you shall truly know the new self that we here shall forge. All shall be revealed to you. The very sacred geometry of the cosmos laid bare.”

The big golden display shuddered and shifted, and suddenly, we were surrounded by a circle of people standing to attention and drifting in a slow orbit. There were a pair of good old-fashioned humans amongst them, but they were an afterthought compared to the cornucopia of fantastical other races that had just appeared. There were lizard people, dwarves, elves, and then some hulking horny beast that towered over the rest. We weren’t just coming back from the dead, we were going to fantasy land. I just wished I had a mouth so I could grin.

Sure, dying sucked, but if you gave me the choice of anywhere to go when I died, then this would have been it. Keep your hundred virgins and your magic sherbet, I’ll take dungeons and dragons any time.

“Amaranth was the first world of the cosmos, and the echoes of its people find their way into the dreams of all other worlds. You may know these creatures as myths, but they are more real than the shadow creatures that you once lived as. To be reborn, we shall name you and shape your spirits in their form. Look upon them now and choose your future.”

All the other wisps darted around taking in the sights, but once again, Death held out his arm to keep me back. I was getting really tired of that, so I darted out of reach to join the tour. What was he going to do, kill me?

I decided to get the boring ones out of the way first. Humans. Just looking at the glowing construct was enough to set off the booming voice of Eosphel in my head.

“Mankind is the youngest people of Amaranth, born into the world during the Revelation of Araphel. Though lost and confused, they swiftly took up the banner of righteousness and joined the war against the Void God, making many see them as the saviors of all free folk.”

Oh, my gods…

“Despite their natural disadvantages compared to the other races, they have become more numerous and prosperous than any other.”

This was…

“Though they have none of the other races’ unique abilities, they have the adaptability to excel in any…”

So… boring.

Why wasn’t there an option to skip the fluff? Show me the stats. Damn it. Give me the delicious crunchy numbers. I concentrated on the weird symbols hanging beside the human’s display, and the god of no-inside-voice cut out. Thankfully.

Race: Human

Starting Attributes:

Potency: 10

Celerity: 10

Vitality: 10

Piety: 10

Starting stats. When they were talking about Amaranth being bound by rules, they meant game rules. Whatever game the gods were playing on Amaranth, it was a crunchy-stat based one.

Beneath the stats, another little row of symbols appeared.

Racial Ability:

Curiosity:

Filled with a curious and cunning spirit, there is little a human cannot discover or learn if given enough time.

Effect: Humans gain an extra rank when unlocking a skill for the first time and gain additional experience across all skills.

Yawn. Generic humans were generic. Come on game designers, humans are so many weird and wonderful things, why did we always get such dull racial abilities. Come on! We could heal from almost anything. Why didn’t we get regeneration? We could make friends with wolves and wildcats. Why didn’t we get animal handling? Humans were the weirdest animal on Planet Earth, and somehow, when the time came to make games about us, everyone came up with “oh they can learn stuff.” At least it wasn’t a flat experience boost.

Dwarves were up next—at least they were liable to be a bit more interesting. “The Dvergar were once known as the Godseekers. The Dvergar had no gods of their own. While the other races lived on the surface in clear view of the sun and moon, they dwelled beneath the earth, yearning for the same care that the heavens granted their terranean kin. In their desperation, they delved deeper and deeper beneath the surface of Amaranth, answering the siren call of the beast below.”

Dwarves that delved too deep. What a shocking twist. At least this beast below was a bit more exciting.

“Darkness made flesh, he seemed the perfect god for those who dwelled forever beneath the stone. They fell at Araphel’s feet. Yet Araphel’s hunger for conquest was not sated by mere Dvergar. His designs were upon all of creation. His worshipers became his slaves, toiling in the Flesh Forges to create abominations for his all-conquering army.”

So the dwarves were the bad guys in this world. That was actually a bit of a twist.

“Amaranth was consumed by war. Civilization was ground to dust. Though oathbound to Araphel, in the dying days of the Revelation, the Dvergar turned on him, yet even with their waning power added to the armies of the Free Folk, they were no match for Araphel’s divine power.”

At least that explained the state of Amaranth when we did our slow pan over it. The whole place got dark lorded all over.

“When the Revelation ended, the Dvergar were a ruined people—ashamed in equal measure for the doom that they had unleashed on the world and for the oaths that they broke to halt that doom. They retreated to their mountain holds, bitter solitude, and inevitable decline.”

Well, that was just a barrel of laughs. I was about to move on in search of a more upbeat storyline when the same little symbols formed in the air between the male and female-looking Dvergar. Symbols that I could now, somehow, read.

Race: Dvergar

Starting Attributes:

Potency: 11

Celerity: 5

Vitality: 18

Piety: 6

Racial Ability:

Toughness:

Made of sterner stuff than mere flesh, the Dvergar are resilient to the point of inflexibility.

Effect: Dvergar have a natural armor value equal to half of their Vitality score. This is cumulative with other armor.

And a rapid swerve back into boring territory. If I wanted to spend eternity being an immovable object then maybe that would be tempting, although I’d probably just cut out the middle man and reincarnate as a rock instead. I’d had enough boredom and drudgery in my first lifetime. This was my afterlife, and I was going to have a good time.

Next up, the clock struck elf-o’clock.

“Most beloved of the Solar Court, the Alvaren were masters of the Arcane. Devoted to defending their world from chaos, they were often defined by their opposition. When first they arose in Amaranth, they fought the Wyrms to a standstill. During the Revelation, they were the first to take up arms against the Void God and his evils, leading the Free Folk to many of their victories against him.”

The defenders of the universe schtick was appealing, but the magic thing didn’t really tick any boxes for me. Standing far away from things I didn’t like and muttering at them aggressively was how I’d wasted my first life.

“Through the early millennia, the Alvaren dwelled within the forests of Amaranth, but by the time of the revelation, their civilization had crystallized into city-states, differentiated from those settlements of others not only by their size and complexity but also by their mobility. Each great castle floated amidst the clouds in the sky, traveling to where its rulers directed, giving them a commanding tactical position from which their war-hawks took flight.”

Flying mounts changed things up in the Alvaren’s favor. I’d played enough MMOs in my time to know how much running around was involved. Sure I had eternity, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be hiking for all eternity. After the day I’d had, I wasn’t sure I could think of a worse fate.

“Yet as the greatest of his enemies, it seems that the Alvaren suffered the worst of Araphel’s death curse. Others may have been laid low by the backlash of the Void God’s own destruction, but the Alvaren and all of their cities vanished without a trace. For an Eternal to choose their form is to remind Amaranth of a bygone age of glory but also the sorrow of the world’s greatest loss.”

So they went extinct, which meant all that handy infrastructure had probably vanished right along with them. Great. Real handy.

Race: Alvaren

Starting Attributes:

Potency: 8

Celerity: 12

Vitality: 8

Piety: 12

Racial Ability:

Grace:

To the Alvaren, mind and body are one. Thought becomes movement. Movement becomes art.

Effect: Alvaren have a movement speed double that normally provided by their Celerity score.

Running fast. Great. Love running. Live for running. The Alvaren would do as a fallback option if nothing else looked appealing, but they weren’t at the top of my list.

Next up were the lizard people, which I was leaning towards before I’d even started. I’ve always kind of liked lizards anyway, and if I didn’t have to be human anymore, I wasn’t sure why I’d want to be one of the sort of the almost-human-but-not-quite Dvergar or Alvaren.

“Slaves to the Wyrms, the Inyoka are bound to the cause of chaos by the same yoke. As a race, they were bred from beasts to sentience in abject servitude. Outside of the secluded domains of the Wyrms, the Inyoka are rarely seen, and when they are spotted it is by misstep. They travel only to spread their master’s byzantine plans behind the scenes. They rule nowhere yet are the power behind many thrones.”

Damn it all. I wanted to go on fun-filled lizard adventures, and this world was giving me nothing but suspicion, slavery, and spies.

“The Inyoka served as meat for the grinder in the Wyrm’s long war against the Alvaren and likely would have continued to be mass-produced if so many of the swamps where they were spawned had not been purged by arcane fire. By the time of the Revelation, the Inyoka’s numbers had dwindled until they could field no army at all, with all of their race devoted exclusively to the physical care of their overlords.”

More slavery and misery. I suppose that if I was a better person, I might have made myself into an Inyoka and fought back against their wyrm-riddled oppression, but just the thought of everyone assuming I was lying and sneaking around all the time was exhausting. I was not good at lying. As the lead up to my untimely death had demonstrated. I didn’t like lying, I didn’t like liars, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that my brain was wired right to keep track of a whole pack of lies all at once. Don’t ask me if your ass looks fat in that outfit unless you want to know the truth. Even when I do manage to bumble out a lie, without fail, it blows up in my face a few minutes later.

Race: Inyoka

Starting Attributes:

Potency: 7

Celerity: 14

Vitality: 9

Piety: 10

Racial Ability:

Regeneration:

Blessed with an unmatched healing ability, an Inyoka can recover from the deadliest of wounds and afflictions in short order.

Effect: Inyoka naturally regenerate health at a rate equal to their vitality score every minute.

I’d heard enough about that one. Sure, none of the other races could heal naturally without intervention, but that just meant that the world had to be chock-full of doctors, healing potions, magic ponds, and all that jazz. On to the big horny boys.

“The Chagnar Faun, firstborn of Amaranth, are hunters at heart. From the first moonrise, they swore themselves to chaos and lived as little more than beasts, reveling in bloodshed and slaughter. Yet for all of their much-vaunted martial prowess and strength surpassing all other races, they have still been bound to the will of their betters time and time again. Serving first as menial laborers for the Alvaren Empire, before betraying their masters to fight as the vanguard of Araphel. Humans, Alvaren, Dvergar, and even the Wyrms themselves eventually fought back against the Void God’s horde, but never the wicked Faun.”

I was wrong. The Dvergar weren’t the bad guys. These were the bad guys. Yet something about the way that Eosphel had told the story had rubbed me the wrong way. When it was the Wyrms lording it over the Inyoka it got called slavery, but when it was the Solar Court’s favorite pointy-eared darlings, suddenly it became “menial laborers.”

I truly cannot stand a lie.

“After the revelation, with their new god defeated and their promised reign of destruction reduced to naught but a dream, the Faun found themselves outcast once more, offered not even the meager comforts of servitude to the other races. They became the horrors of bedtime tales and the creatures of nightmare; cannibalistic beast-men intent on consuming all ill-behaved children.”

It sounded less like the Chagnar Faun—the proud warrior race I’d been looking for—were evil, and more like they’d been given a chance to escape eternal servitude under the Alvaren and put all their money on the wrong horse. If anything, I had more respect for these guys than I did the Dvergar. Even the Dvergar themselves admitted that they were ashamed that they broke their oaths to this evil god Araphel. Yet the Faun, who kept their promises, were treated like monsters for it?

“In the wild places of the world where they still dwell, perhaps these legends of savagery hold true, but the reality of the Faun rarely holds up to the tales when they come down from their feral realms. Still, they can find a place in the civilized world as mercenaries and thugs for hire. A kindness that they have not earned, and treatment far better than loyal servants of the adversary deserve.”

Race: Chagnar Faun

Starting Attributes:

Potency: 18

Celerity: 7

Vitality: 11

Piety: 4

Racial Ability:

Relentless:

The Faun are the greatest hunters on Amaranth, known for pursuing prey for days or even weeks at a time before closing in to strike.

Effect: Faun are immune to fatigue—their Attributes do not degrade over time without rest.

So they were strong as hell and built for head butting wolves. Exactly what I wanted out of my second life. It sounded like a lot of people wouldn’t like me if I was a Faun, but on the other hand, it sounded like they were the kind of people I didn’t want to associate with anyway.

This was a big decision if I was going to be one of these things for the rest of my life. I drifted back a little to look at the Chagnar Faun in all their glory. Both of the example Faun stood at about seven-feet-tall, and that was with the natural forward hunch of their shoulders. Their bodies were so broad-shouldered and thickly muscled it was hard to tell which was meant to be the male and which was the female, though I guessed that the one wearing a top was probably the lady. Maybe they didn’t even have genders. I wasn’t going to go lifting any loincloths to find out.

I couldn’t make out much coloration in this glowing display, but the details of their faces came through clear enough. A thick head of hair flowed back from behind the thick ridge of their brow, and great dark ram’s horns curled back around their ears on either side. Like all of the previous races, this particular Faun was movie-star pretty. Intense stare… broad jaw… this was a face I could learn to love.

I turned to Eosphel before I could second guess myself, “Hey, Dawn King, I’ve chosen my new body.”

Once again Eosphel seemed to seethe at the sound of my voice, turning so slowly to glower at me that I wondered for a moment if he’d even heard me speak.

I thought that his voice had been loud and annoying before, but now it felt like someone had turned him up to eleven.

He roared, “You are not worthy!”

Chapter 3

You aren’t worthy. Any of the other wisps might have been shaking in their incorporeal boots when they heard that, but for me, it was almost a relief. I already suspected that I’d been brought along by accident, and this just confirmed it. Whatever special hoops a person had to jump through to get reincarnated as an awesome divine warrior in a fantasy world, I was pretty sure that getting gnawed on by an angry dog and falling down in the wrong place wasn’t it. Death crossed the room in the blink of an eye, positioning himself between me and the glowing golden gods with sleeves outstretched. “This one is not for you.”

That was enough to draw a little huff of surprise out of everyone, even the gods themselves. What was I here for if it wasn’t for this?

Eosphel looked confused, and Bilaphel looked menacing, more so than usual. The only one that seemed to comprehend what was going on was Hemeraphel. She’d brought a delicate hand up to her perfect lips to hide a gasp. “It cannot be. The Lunar Court has not had a champion in…”

Death cut her off. Cutting people off mid-sentence was his specialty, after all. “Three thousand six hundred and forty years. Time has no meaning. This one died on moon-hallowed ground. Marked by a beast.”

The silence stretched on and on. If these gods were the Solar Court, did that mean that the Lunar Court that I was heading for was the opposition? I was already planning to be a Faun, at least in part, out of spite towards the Solar Court being dicks. If I was allowed to play for the other team then that sounded more than fair. I looked around the shadowed periphery of the chambers for the gorgeous moon maidens and silver knights I was expecting and was rewarded with something else entirely. There was a shimmer of light coming towards me, eye-shine from the approaching gods, but the one leading them in had far too many eyes. I could count eight of them in all, clustered together and blazing with the pale light of the moon.

A spider as big as all the other gods combined scuttled into the chamber, every chitinous leg making a clatter like high heels on the marble. The wisps and gods all reared back from this monstrosity in horror, but not Death. I suppose he had nothing to fear. It wasn’t like he had any insides to be turned into meat soup for a giant bug.

“Baal Gharron, The Weaver that Binds.”

I was frozen in place, not out of arachnophobia, although holy crap that was a big spider, but because I’d just realized this was the side I was signing up with. Something else slithered in from the shadows, long and serpentine, almost invisible outside of the Solar Court’s glow apart from the tell-tale shimmer of scales.

“Losna, The Conqueror Wyrm.”

That thing was a straight-up dragon. It might not have had any wings on display, and it may have been weirdly elongated and snake-like, but there was no questioning that there was smoke trickling out of its mouth.

I was waiting for the next one to come out and complete the trinity of big scary monsters to balance out the shiny happy Solar Gods in the middle of the room, but whatever was out there in the shadows just went on lurking. I got the odd glimpse of eye-shine, just to let me know that something was out there, but I had no real idea of its size or form.

The spider seemed to be the spokesperson for the Lunar Court. She was the sociable one. Figures. “This one is ours. Ours. We claim him. It is our right. Loathe us. Revile us. We are gods all the same. Our rights are the same. He is ours.”

Her voice was as rich as chocolate despite the undercurrent of anger. Deep but profoundly feminine. Like some sort of jazz club singer. Seductive and smoky. I had to remind myself that same voice was coming out of the giant bug that had scuttled over to peer at me like I was the last fly at the buffet. In the light, her chitinous hide shimmered like an oil slick.

Despite appearances, Baal Gharron seemed to be fairly reasonable. Unlike Losna, who’d reared up beside us and started to bellow. “Shred your flesh. Make you scream. Make you bleed. Beg for death.”

I didn’t have time to unpack all that, and it seemed like the rest of the gods were used to the crazy threats because they just ignored the dragon god entirely. Bilaphel rattled the chains of his morning-stars a little, but the others acted like Baal Gharron was the only one in the room. Hemeraphel stepped out between the two sets of gods with her hands held up placatingly. “This matter can be settled with words. There is no need for such accusations.”

It was only when I caught myself staring at her hands and thinking about how elegant her fingers looked that I realized there was something strange going on in my response to her. She was messing with my mind. Almost involuntarily I drifted back, closer to the spider’s embrace. Baal Gharron seemed pleased. “Of course, my lovely. My sweetness. I am sure it was just an accident that you were trying to poach our first Eternal in millennia. An accident.”

Eosphel scoffed, “You think that we want that bitter little soul?”

Rude. Baal Gharron pressed on seamlessly, legs edging forward to surround me in a tall, crooked fence of safety. “Then it is settled. This Eternal is ours. Settled, my sweetness.”

I got the impression that this argument wasn’t really over, but they didn’t want to keep it going when they had guests. So, like all squabbling families, they pretended that the offending party didn’t exist.

Eosphel turned back to his own flickering wisps and started taking their orders for custom-made bodies, and the looming monster clucked over me like a mother hen. “All that they have told you is a lie. Lies. History is written by the victors, and for oh so long the Solar Court has ruled over Amaranth. When first the terms of engagement were agreed, all was equal, but the longer that the Solar Court’s stagnation set in, the fewer of your kind came to us. Rare treat, my sweet.”

This close, the giant spider face was somehow even more terrifying, but it was still the only friendly face around, so I tried to stay upbeat. “Well, I’m here now.”

“You are here, but we have precious little time to share the truth with you. Truth. Your coming was hidden from us.”

In the center of the room, the first of the Solar Eternals was already being consumed in a pillar of golden sunlight, the distant silhouette of a body gradually taking form within. Baal Gharron pressed on, all her many eyes fixed on that shadow. “Know only this, whatever the Solar Eternals seek to achieve, it is your duty to stop it. Stop them. The Solar Court means to paralyze all of existence in their hunt for perfection. Chaos is the only remedy. You must bring that chaos. You must break down the walls they have built. You must set Amaranth free. Chaos, my sweetness.”

“No pressure then?”

Suddenly Losna was there, weaving through the spider’s legs and snarling. “Mock your gods? Kill you! Rend your soul. Make you dust.”

Up close, the serpent had a hell of a lot of teeth. Whiskers too, like a catfish. In normal circumstances, I probably would have freaked out at that thing snapping an inch from me, but my weirdness meter had been so overloaded that this didn’t even seem to register.

Baal Gharron seemed oddly pleased with me, her mandibles rubbing together in delight as she said, “You have seen the races of Amaranth and heard the lies that the Solar Court spin about them. Have you chosen a form? A fleshy form, my sweetness?”

“I want to be a Faun. Definitely. I never want to be too weak to stand up for myself ever again.”

She let out a soothing rumble that I realized was a laugh. “A wise choice. The Chagnar were the first race of Amaranth, living joyfully in anarchy. Joy, sweetness. They were the first to worship us, and they remain our most devoted. You really were meant for us, little one.”

From amidst the pillar of light, the first of the Solar Eternals emerged, tall, lithe, and beautiful. She was an Alvaren with straight jet-black hair long enough to flow down and hide her nakedness. Guess somebody fell for the sales pitch on that one—hook, line, and sinker. Her skin was so white that she looked ethereal, even here amongst literal ghosts. The next wisp zipped past her bare figure and plunged into the pillar of light without hesitation. No body, no hormones, no ogling. That was interesting.

Still, I wasn’t quite ready to take the plunge back into the world of flesh just yet. “Okay, I get that we’re tight for time here, but can you two give me a quick uh… tutorial for this whole Eternal thing?”

Losna was still close enough that his brimstone breath was fluttering the flames of my spirit. “Enough questions. Make flesh. Bind spirit. Slay foes. Please Patron. Earn Glory.”

I drifted away from the crazy dragon until I was brushing against Baal Gharron’s closest leg. Weird to think of a giant spider as soothing, but any port in a storm, right. “You shall speak in tongues so that all may know your words, sweetness. You shall know the touch of death, but only for a moment before you are reborn beneath the earth of Amaranth. Once a shrine has been built in your honor, you shall return there, but until then, all of the world is your grave and the soil from which you shall spring renewed. Flesh and blood and bone, alive.”

Better build a shrine fast if I didn’t want to end up doing the grand tour of the whole planet. “Okay, so I respawn. Does that cost anything?”

Like an encouraging kindergarten teacher, the giant spider bobbed her head along as I spoke. “All of your Glory shall pass from you with each death, sweetness, a bounty for your slayer. Wealth and plunder shall pass from you also. Physical possessions shall remain where your corpse has faded.”

The second Eternal emerged from the pillar of sun-fire. A Dvergar. Half the height of the Alvaren girl but twice as broad. His skin was a rich chestnut brown, his beard not quite long enough to hide his dangling Dvergar-hood. I was stuck staring for a moment before I jogged my mouth back into action. “Glory?”

“When you are made an Eternal, we are not only granting a fraction of our power, we are setting you on the path to godhood. When your deeds echo throughout Amaranth, Glory is the reward, sweetness. Through crystalizing your Glory, the Pillars of Divinity are empowered, and you ascend.”

And I don’t lose Pillars when I die, just unspent glory. I was pretty sure I’d played a game like that before. The gamble of spending your experience fast instead of saving up for something better. “So I get my god powers by spending glory?”

“You ascend through the Tiers of Glory and the Pillars of Divinity, but your “god powers,” as you call them, are skills. Skills that mortals could never achieve, sweetness.”

Another mechanic to learn. “So there are skills too?”

Losna was inching closer and closer to me the longer we spoke, a glow building in his throat. I didn’t want to be here when it came out. I didn’t think that I could die right now, what with me already being dead, but I was fairly confident that dragon fire wasn’t going to do anything good to me.

Baal Gharron was keeping up that ignorance is bliss act, ignoring the serpent in our midst, dribbling venom to sizzle on the floor. “All that live can improve their skills with practice and develop new ones by investing the experience that they have earned into knowledge, sweetness. You shall outlast them all, so you are limitless.”

I tried to move farther from the Wyrm, but I found that the comforting interlock of legs behind me also served as a cage. I was trapped in here with the dragon, trying to maintain focus. “Experience and glory are different things?”

Losna was growling so loud I had to strain to hear Baal Gharron’s answer. “Mortals can learn and grow, but Glory comes only unto the divine. Divine like you, sweetness.”

Okay, Skills, Experience, Glory, Pillars. I’d played much more confusing games than this before. “What about the stats—the Potency and Celerity and? …”

The spider’s great fangs snapped forward and latched onto Losna’s neck. The serpentine body bucked and flailed, but everywhere it had coiled around the spider’s legs it now found itself trapped. She gave one firm shake, then dropped the dragon god to the ground where it lay limp and seething. “As your skills improve and evolve, so in harmony shall your attributes grow, sweetness. In this, mortals are limited in what they can achieve, Eternals are not. You are boundless, my sweetness.”

Writhe as it might, the wyrm did not rear up again, lying before the spider goddess in a display of submission, but it did hiss. “Time through. Flesh now.”

The insane dragon god had a point. The last of the Solar Eternals was being stitched together as we spoke, and I didn’t want to miss the last bus to Amaranth. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s do this. Do I get to choose what I look like or is it—”

Baal Gharron interrupted me. “We shall weave flesh to best suit your spirit and bind it with a name, my sweetness. You shall be mighty, and fearsome, and ours. Ours. Your skin shall be the grey of long shadows, and your eyes shall burn with the moon’s fire.”

“Is that optional because if I could go incognito sometimes it might be—”

This time I was cut off by the sudden blinding light surrounding me—so bright I could see nothing beyond it. So bright that I felt like it was tearing what little was left of my soul apart. Who I had been was gone. What I was going to be came scorching out of the light. Everything that made me me remained, but everything else seared away. My old name was the last piece of me to be burned away. It was the capstone on the complete destruction of what I was before, and the deepest hole in the foundation of what I would now become.

The light faded, and I was left looking down into Baal Gharron’s face. Giant as she was, I was level with her now. I reached up with my new, thick fingers and touched the blackened tips of the horns I could just barely make out at the periphery of my vision. When I brushed them with my finger, I could feel them stretching all the way up to my skull where they were rooted. That was going to take some getting used to. I drew in my first breath with my new lungs and tasted the vanilla and acrid venom in the air.

Muscles rippled beneath my skin—more than I’d ever had in my last life, and more than any bodybuilder I could remember seeing either. My skin was grey, but it shimmered with an almost metallic hint. Not grey like a dead thing, but grey like a mineral. Like I was a mountain that could move. A force of nature. My new voice was much deeper, not gravelly but resonant, like the pounding of a war-drum. I reached out and cupped the spider-god’s mandible-clacking face between my hands. “Thank you.”

Baal Gharron seemed startled, jerking her face out of my grasp. Maybe touching gods was frowned upon. Maybe I was about to get smote. Smitten? But when she bashfully replied, “You are welcome, my sweetness,” while brushing at her face with a forelimb, I realized that if spiders could blush, she would have been pink.

Now that I had flesh again, I could feel the heat radiating out of Losna’s face. It was like being next to an open blast furnace. The same went for my body as well now that I had all the glands I needed to feel properly intimidated by the dragon and properly worried about searing my eyebrows off, assuming I’d grown some. Another thing to check out later. A glance down revealed plentiful wiry black body hair, so singeing hair wasn’t off the agenda completely.

Losna’s interest in me seemed to have switched now that I had a body, and their eyes raked up and down me with something like hunger. I caught myself trying to cover my nether regions with my hands. The wyrm barked. “Patron now. He must choose. Must choose me. Look at him. Built for slaughter. Blood and war. Mine. Mine.”

Once more Baal Gharron tried to fend her compatriot away from me so that the grown-ups could speak. “Each of us is a god of chaos, my sweetness, a god of the wild and the moon. Yet each of us governs a different aspect of chaos.”

Losna went on barking behind her legs. “Mine! Mine!”

The spider did not sigh, but it seemed to be a struggle. “Losna is the god of war. To accept his patronage means your greatest victories will be won on the battlefield. His gifts will make you stronger, faster, and more skilled with the blade and the bow the more Glory you bring to him.”

That sounded good, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be beholden to a deranged lizard for all of eternity. “What about you?”

“Me? My sweetness? I am the one that the Solar Court hates the most because I am the one whose power commands them most frequently. I am the ties that bind all living things. The bondage that cannot be escaped and obeys no logic. I am their love and their hate and their passion above all else. Passion, my sweetness. The one thing that no demand for order can crush.”

So my only options were snakey-fights-a-lot or an eternity of whips and chains. At least this new body could pull off an all-leather outfit.

Baal Gharron pressed on without a breath. “My patronage gives you influence over those you meet. You will change minds with words, with thoughts, with just a look, my sweetness. You shall inflame passions. Turn foes into friends. Rule over others by the strength of your heart. Your heart.”

Heart power. Great. Just what I wanted when I got this bad-ass warrior body.

“There is another choice.”

That sounded like the voice of Death again, but that particular spooky scary skeleton seemed to have vanished somewhere in the middle of my reincarnation. Maybe all that life being created offended him. Or maybe I just couldn’t see him now that I had a body again. I didn’t even have a chance to thank him. How much are you meant to tip your reaper?

Losna and Baal Gharron had fallen silent. As had all the other gods and Eternals. Silence echoed through the halls, broken only by the soft padding of leathery feet somewhere off in the deep shadows. “There are three great gods of the moon. Not two.”

That voice. It was coming closer. Each step setting the ground trembling. Each breath rumbling with a growl. A smell swept through the halls ahead of the coming of the god—a smell rich and earthy, sharp with pine sap. The forest seemed to flow into the spaces between the marble walls, filling everywhere with the scent of the wild. I opened my mouth to make a dumb-ass remark and realized that I didn’t have any to make.

The wolf opened its eyes, and the moon shone out, blinding bright. Baal Gharron and Losna were dwarfed in the shadow of this looming darkness. My new body barely came up to this god’s shaggy chin.

“I am Chernghast, The Wolf that Waits. I am the inevitable.”

The stare, the voice, it all paralyzed me, pinning me in place as the wolf stalked ever closer. Chernghast was still almost invisible in the darkness. Only the hint of white when his eyes or his razor-sharp teeth shone out betrayed his approach.

“When you decide, I shall be your patron. You shall have powers unmatched. Known as mercy to some and dread to others. You shall stalk Amaranth in my place. You shall be death, you shall grow strong on the taste of it, and death shall follow with you.”

He was close enough now that I could see him clearly. Baal Gharron had scuttled off, and Losna had slunk away like a worm. I didn’t even see them go; I couldn’t turn away. Even the glow of the Solar Court gods had dimmed in Chernghast’s presence. He was the wolf that all other wolves were based on, the one that they all dreamed that they would be when they grew up. His body was muscled and sleek beneath a coat as black as night. I could barely even think when he was this close. Terror vying with some other emotion that I’d only briefly brushed against in my past life. Awe.

I was nodding my head. What this guy had was what I wanted. Power radiated off him. Enough to silence even the Solar blowhards with nothing but his presence. “You must say the words. You must ask me to take you.”

My mouth was dry and my lungs quivering, but I managed to wheeze out the words he asked for. “Be my patron. Please. I want you to. I…I need you to.”

Those big white eyes filled up my whole world. The light of the moon pouring out of this ancient forest god and into my head, filling me up, lighting me up. His voice was there in my head with the light. Echoing. Deafening. Maddening. “You shall be alone in Amaranth. The only Lunar Eternal to be born in millennia without reckoning. You shall be bound to death, loved by death, empowered by death. But the charnel path cannot be walked with others. You shall have no family, no brothers or sisters. Only yourself. Destruction shall be your gift and your only companion. So this I name you, Maulkin. Brother only to slaughter.”

My ears were ringing, and my vision came back only slowly, first as shadows, then as shapes, then finally in full detail. Chernghast had gone back to his place in the shadows, Baal Gharron was looming over my prone body like a clicking mother hen. Even Losna seemed concerned for my welfare, in the sense that they’d coiled around my body in a wide circle and were hissing and spitting wrath at everyone except me. Aww, they really did care. I got back to my feet as fast as I could manage. None of the other Eternals seemed to have fallen down when they were getting named, so I had already managed to mark myself as the weirdo of the group. Although the whole “opposite sides of a celestial war” thing probably had an impact on our potential friendships too.

The room seemed a lot brighter now. All the shadows receded, and it only took me a moment to realize it was because light was now coming out of my eyes. I had wondered why they kept the place so dim before, but I suppose when you are one big flashlight, it makes sense to save on the electric bill.

You are mine now, Maulkin. Let us see what you are made of.

Knowledge suddenly burst like a pulsar into my head, setting me staggering all over again. I knew things I had no way of knowing. I knew Amaranth. The scents, the sounds, the taste of the water, and the sound of the wind. More than that though, I knew myself.

Maulkin – Chagnar Faun of the Lunar Court – 1st Tier of Glory

Statistics:

HP: 300/300

Devotion: 200/200

Glory: 300

Attributes:

Potency: 18

Celerity: 17

Vitality: 11

Piety: 4

Skills:

None

Traits:

Relentless: The Faun are the greatest hunters on Amaranth, known for pursuing prey for days or even weeks at a time before closing in to strike.

Effect: Faun are immune to fatigue, their Attributes do not degrade over time without rest.

Acolyte of Chernghast: Chosen by the wolf that waits, you bear his invisible mark and walk the path that will someday make you the personification of inevitable death.

Effect: The presence of the dead reinvigorates you. For every corpse within your Sphere of Influence, all of your attributes are increased by 1.

4 unallocated attribute points remaining.

It was me, broken down into numbers and words. Everything about me was there to see the moment I turned my attention inwards. The moonlight inside me illuminated it all. Concentrating on the bit about unallocated points to spend seemed to slow the world around me down to a crawl so I could focus on what I was doing. I didn’t even need to give it a second thought. It was all going into Potency.

Attributes:

Potency: 22

Celerity: 17

Vitality: 11

Piety: 4

With a little flare of light behind my eyes, the number changed, and so did I. The muscles all over me thickened again, bulging and stretching out my skin in a sudden surge of raw power. I felt like I could tear this whole place apart with my bare hands, brick by brick. It passed fast, but I could already see how addictive that rush was going to get.

Eosphel was the one to spoil the afterglow, booming out, “Eternals, someday you may ascend to join us here in these celestial courts. Earn Glory, gain power, remake Amaranth in our image. Serve us well and ascend. Fail us, and fall into obscurity.”

Stick and carrot all in one go. Maybe he was the god of pep talks and middle managers?

Baal Gharron nudged me to turn and face the braying ass, whispering in my ear, “Be ready, my sweetness.”

“The time has come for your quests to begin. Farewell, Eternals.”

Bilaphel surged forward, morning-stars sweeping in an arc, trailing light like comets. First, the Alvaren caught a blow right in her gorgeously sculpted face. It wasn’t so pretty afterward. It was a caved-in gory mess, smoking at the edges. The body I’d just started admiring collapsed like a heap of wet noodles.

Her cut-off cry of surprise gave the others a chance to respond, but they weren’t quick enough. The Dvergar tried to run, but Bilaphel clubbed him down with a backhanded lash as he passed. Blood splattered and sizzled across the marble floor.

The white-haired human woman and the blue-scaled Inyoka didn’t run. They tried to stand their ground—for all the good that it did them. Bilaphel moved too fast for the eyes to follow. So fast that a trail of flames was left in their wake. The human was split in half at waist height by the arc of sun-bright flame. The Inyoka fared ever so slightly better, ducking under the first sweep of the morning-star only to be caught by the other across the chest. I could have lived a long and happy life never knowing what his insides looked like.

I wasn’t going down like a chump to that flashy bronze dick. I might not have had weapons, but I had arms big enough to punch out a reasonably sized elephant. Let him come for me and see what happened to him.

Turns out, I should have been paying less attention to the tin-can man and more attention to the spider on my back. Baal Gharron’s fangs slipped into my shoulder so smoothly I didn’t even feel them at first, pulsing as her venom flooded into me. At once, the light in my eyes seemed to go out. Darkness rushed in all around me as I died for the second time in a day.

You’d think that practice would make perfect, but of my two deaths, getting dissolved from the inside out by spider venom was actually a lot worse. The two points where the fangs were stuck in me were blessedly numb, but it felt like lava was being piped into everything else. As fast as I’d gained all my new strength it faded away. I was only standing because she had me impaled.

“Die now, my sweetness. So sweet… So sweet... Die and live again. And again. And again…”

Chapter 4

When I woke up, everything stayed dark. The pain was gone. The burning and freezing vanished in a moment, but it was replaced with some new sensations that I didn’t love either. Mostly weight, pressing in on me from all sides. Darkness, weight, and no air to breathe. My lungs were straining and heaving with no success. Where the hell was I? What the hell was happening?

I probably would have died all over again if it hadn’t been for Chernghast’s voice in my head.

Rise from your grave.

It all came back to me in a flash, and the second that I realized that I was buried alive, my arms started moving. Mechanically at first, then with more haste, more power. Muscles straining and groaning. Lungs burning all the way. When I broke the surface and my fingers found nothing but air and blades of grass, I might have let out a little moan of delight—if I’d had any air left to do it.

With one hand out, it should have been as easy as pulling myself up and out, but I had no such luck. No sooner did I breakthrough did something up there then grab onto my wrist, its claws digging into my skin. The rest of me might have still been stuck in the dark, but whatever was up there must have been too hungry to wait. It was trying to pull me up like a turnip.

Well, this vegetable was going to bite back.

I pulled back against the grip, using this new enemy’s footing to haul myself up and pulling them off balance—they weren’t as big as me. I doubted many people would be now. Once my head broke through the dirt, I gasped in my first breath of Amaranth. It tasted like soil and camphor. The sky above was vast, rich, and purpled with sunset. That was all the time I had for sightseeing before the fighting started.

Most of my grappler’s slim body was concealed by a hooded sack-cloth cassock, but I could see the hand latched onto me. Scaly, pale as a flat-worm, and just as clammy to the touch. This dude had serious evil minion vibes.

I jerked my arm out of his grip, slamming both of my fists down onto the packed earth to haul myself up and out in one motion. The body-farmer skittered back out of reach, and I didn’t blame him. Hauling something as big as me out the ground was a ridiculous show of strength that would have had me running for my life, at least in my old life, but I didn’t wait to see if intimidation was going to work. I put my head down and charged.

Slick as oil, he slipped under my outspread arms, like he knew where I was going to be before I did. At this point, he probably did. This new body of mine handled like a boat. When I missed him, I plowed right by and slammed into the rocky outcropping that overlooked this little patch of dirt. With my bulldozer-like momentum behind me, a human would have snapped their neck like a twig. Instead, I just hit the rock with an echoing thump. It hurt, but it didn’t drop me.

[Health 286/300]

“At this moment in time, I am not your enemy, Eternal.”

Growling at the pain, I charged back in the first moment I could see straight. “That is…”

And missed again.

“Weirdly…”

And again.

“Specific…”

And again.

“Phrasing!”

I’d turned the first charge into a haymaker that should have snapped him in two. He sidestepped it contemptuously. Punch after punch I grazed by the frayed edge of his robes, never quite hitting. Always a moment too slow.

There was a tail swishing behind him for counterbalance, and every once in a while, I caught a glimpse of a scaly snout under the hood. When his scaled skin poked out into the dusk light he was opalescent, and some little bit of my newfound knowledge of Amaranth was whispering to me that paleness wasn’t right.

Even now, the damn lizard didn’t seem to be all that ruffled. “All truths can become lies with time, Eternal. I speak only of this moment when I would aid you, not do you harm. There are those who know me as the White Prophet. Such a name will serve at this time.”

My blood was pumping, but I could see that I was getting nowhere throwing punches. This really wasn’t fair. Giving me an awesome fighting monster body and then putting me up against literal gods and slithery lizard men that I couldn’t even touch. “What do you want?”

“To guide you to your purpose. To instruct you in the use of your gifts. “

To point me at whoever he didn’t like and fire me off like a cannon. Figures. It seemed that everyone in this new afterlife wanted to use me for something. “How did you find me? Even I didn’t know where I was going to be…born.”

“There are those of us in this world who can read the ebbs and flows of fate as others see the coming of the tide. Those who can look to the patterns of the past and predict…”

I let my fists ease down to my sides. My head still hurt, but I wasn’t going to let this snake see me hurting. Predators pick off the injured first. The wolf had gobbled me because I was out of breath. I wasn’t going to make that mistake twice in one day. “You can see the future. Got it.”

“Neither mortal nor god can see the true shape of things to come, Eternal.” He gestured grandly to the sky. “I study prophecy and the stars, but those are but long shadows cast by the great events of the future.”

“Prophecy, stars, shadows. Got it.” I stretched my arms out to their full breadth and drew in a deep breath, finding that even after all my digging and punching, my arms weren’t tired. I could get used to this. “So what is my first lesson? Let’s get the tutorial out of the way so I can start whooping wyrms.”

His eyes never left me. Yellow so pale they were almost white, but slit vertically with a line of black, they twitched and narrowed as he studied every detail of my face. “Let us first acquaint you with the limits of your new flesh and serve our second purpose also.”

Demanding that I do his bidding less than a minute after I stopped trying to hit him? That was quicker than anticipated. “Which is?”

He gestured to the shovel laying in the long grass beside my grave. “We must retrieve the other Eternals before they expire.”

Why does the new guy always have to do all the hard manual labor?

For all my grumbling, which now sounded so deep in my chest that it was practically seismic, I didn’t actually mind the digging all that much. I expected it to be the same miserable slog as having to do hard work back in my old life, but with this body and the new rules of engagement the little aches pains and strains never showed up since my stamina was now governed by statistics rather than something more nebulous.

It also helped that in this world, hard work actually paid off. As I dug, there was a tickle in the back of my brain, the spinning of a counter up from the grand total of zero experience that I’d come into the world with. To start with, it clicked up by one with every shovelful of dirt. Then it slowed gradually until it was only clicking every fifteen or twenty. It had already jumped up from my abortive fight with tall, white, and handsome. Even when I missed, I’d ended up learning something from the attempt.

Hah, here I was. I’d been an agent of the gods for all of five minutes, and I already sounded like I belonged on a motivational poster. Next, I’d be dangling off a branch and telling people to hang in there.

The ground here was rough, layers of clay under the topsoil. There were dry grass and huge chunks of old masonry sunken down within that and lumps of stone that had to be pried out and tossed aside. Either I was even stronger than I’d thought to plow through all this on my way up, or the others were buried deeper. Or white-snake over there was talking a load of nonsense, and I was the only one popping up in this particular field. I was starting to believe that it was the last option when the blade of my shovel nearly went right through an upraised hand.

It was pale, slender, feminine. Probably not the Dvergar or the lizard. Yet there was a rosiness to that hand that didn’t match up to what I remembered of the Alvaren. I grabbed the wrist and pulled, hauling up the skinny white-haired human girl that I’d caught a glimpse of back in the Celestial Court. Thankfully, the gods had seen fit to toss some rags on our bodies before we sprung up because this situation was awkward enough without nudity. Just like me, she came up swinging. Unlike me, she could actually hit the person who’d pulled her out of the ground.

She was basically dangling in my grip, so she didn’t have much leverage, but she also had both her legs free and clear. She twisted her whole body, slamming a foot into my temple. On a human, it would have been devastating. In this situation, she probably hurt her foot more than she hurt me.

Sighing loudly, I dropped her on her head in the freshly turned soil, just to make a point. “Last time I’m helping you.”

She’d turned the head-drop into a roll and was on her knees, ready to spring up again before she spluttered out, “You talk?”

“Better than you kick.”

Her pretty little face had been all twisted up with stress and fury until now, but the minute I said that, it did what it was made for. Smirking. Maybe her eyes would have sparkled. Instead, they just flared white-hot for a moment.

When I held out my hand to help her up, she took it. “I’m Maulkin, I guess.”

“They called me Mercy.”

“Ironically?” I tried out a smirk of my own, wishing I had a mirror to see how it looked on this new face.

“Listen, pal, you’re a big scary-looking monster, and I just got buried alive. That’s enough to make anyone twitchy.”

I handed her my shovel with a grin. “You can make it up to me by helping dig out the others.”

One by one, we hauled up the Eternals from the Inyoka’s little vegetable patch. I caught the other Inyoka by the tail and hauled him ass-first into his new life, then we moved on to the last patch while Mercy and the Prophet struggled together to pull the Alvaren girl out. We heard her more than saw her. It had been a couple of minutes now, and I was starting to worry about the little guy still under the ground. He wouldn’t die permanently if we didn’t get to him in time, but who knew where he’d pop up again.

The blue-scaled Inyoka and I didn’t have much time for chatter while we worked. We traded names—he was Asher—but that was the extent of the pleasantries. I’d finally worked up a sweat, though there was still no weakness or real signs that I was starting to tire.

We must have been halfway down to the Dvergar when Asher dove to the ground and a shovel cracked into the back of my head.

I’m not too proud to admit I ate dirt. My thick skull saved me from serious injury, but my ears rang, and the force of the blow knocked me over. I was getting really tired of this crap, and I’d only been alive for a few minutes.

By the time I was up, everyone was yelling. The Alvaren was the one swinging for me, shouting something about me being “The enemy.”

The other two Eternals were yelling right back at her, the albino snake man was sidling away, and despite all the noise that they were making, I couldn’t help but notice that none of them were actually stepping in between the crazy lady with a spade and me. This was a new world, with new rules. Maybe she was right? Maybe we were meant to kill each other on sight. It didn’t feel right to me though.

I used my own spade like a crutch to get back to my feet and groaned, “What was that for?”

The Alvaren’s golden gaze snapped back to me, her eyes narrowed, and she charged. She cleared the distance faster than you could blink. At the last moment, she leapt. I barely got the haft of my own shovel up to catch the blade of hers as it descended.

New Skill Discovered! [Combat]

Combat: Rank 1/10

34 Experience Gained

Even with all my strength, the blow would have ripped the shovel from my hands, so I just let it happen. Instead of getting hauled off balance, I let the shovel fall away between our bodies and grabbed for her instead. She was quick, but not as quick as the Inyoka.

My arms wrapped around her lithe body, and I squeezed. Her arms were pinned to her sides. Her superior speed was useless in a bear hug. Struggle as she might, it was inevitable now. I cuddled her close until the bones of her ribcage started to creak, and the spade fell useless from her fingers. Her eyes burned huge, so close to my face I was surprised I couldn’t feel the heat. I certainly felt the heat of the rest of her pressed up against me.

Exerting this much pressure without going further and truly doing damage was harder than it looked. It was a constant balancing act between the danger of her slipping free and the natural instinct to crush the life out of her for sucker-shoveling me. I grunted, “If I wanted you dead, I’d have left you for the worms.”

“What you want doesn’t matter. The gods told us that you had to die.” She strained against me, kicking my knees as if that were going to make me drop her. “So die.”

The albino Inyoka finally stepped up. “The stars have aligned to bring you all here. Of all Amaranth, you have been born together, here. Do you not wonder why? Do you not wish to hear the answers that only I can give you.”

She stopped wriggling and looked around at her fellow Solar Eternals, expecting them to jump to her defense. Shame I’d just hauled them kicking and screaming into the world, and their loyalties were a bit shaky. Mercy rolled her eyes. “We can always start murdering each other after we’ve heard what the White Prophet has to say.”

Asher just shrugged. Murdering me or not murdering me, it was apparently all the same to him. Thanks for that, Asher. I’ll remember that next time you’re buried alive and digging sideways instead of up. Still, that shrug seemed to do the trick. She stopped writhing about and let me carefully place her down.

There was a long tense moment as I waited to see if she tried to kill me again, but when the attempted murder didn’t arrive, I asked, “Can we dig up the little guy now?”

We were almost too late as it turned out. The shouting and spading match had stolen the vital minutes before the Dvergar began to suffocate, and it was only thanks to his species prodigious endurance that he survived until we could reach him. He couldn’t even speak by the time we hauled him out, the poor Dvergar alternating between coughing up clods of dirt and weeping incessantly, leaving two little trails down his face that weren’t covered in soil and a grimy-looking snot bubble on his stubbly lip.

The Prophet looked him over where he lay, tail lashing with concern. “Let us move him inside. He needs time to recover, and this is not a safe place.”

I gave the Alvaren the stink eye. “No kidding.”

Now that the initial panic had passed, I was able to take in the sights. I’d kind of expected some gentle starting area with a friendly village and friendly gnomes or something, but instead, we were treated to desolation. Beyond the scrubby grass and the withered old camphor trees hiding in the lee of the low cliff-face I’d faceplanted into, there really wasn’t much to see. The dying light wasn’t as much of an impediment as it could have been, thanks to my built-in torch eyes, but it still sapped visibility over by the shadowed horizon where literally anything interesting might have been hiding.

There were dark patches that might have been low cliffs or even a forest. The thing that stood out to me the most was that this was not some artfully designed theme park wilderness like the one I’d gone hiking in before or a pristine park with careful rows of trees and plants. No human hands, or any other creature’s for that matter, had shaped this land. The rain and the wind had swept through, battering the earth below. The earth had stood up for itself where it could. And over the top of all that tumult, life had clung on.

As a troupe, we carried the Dvergar up and around the ridge, although I could probably have tucked him under one arm and been done with it. Beneath our feet, there were glimpses of stone protruding from the packed soil, worked and carved, then clotted up with moss over the years until they were indistinguishable from the shale.

Sitting back from the ridge, hidden from our view when we struggled out of the dirt, was a low-slung building. It was part ruin, part ramshackle work of hastily hammered together boards. The crowning achievement of the thing was a dome—the only pristine part of the construction—smooth and broken only by the telescope poking up out of it. An observatory.

Getting close, I could see the crooked hanging door of the place had been another late addition, but the stonework was still that same ancient work of engraving that we’d been walking all over. Great smooth whorls were cut into the stone, and I let my fingers trail over them as I ducked through the door. My skin was almost a match for the grey of the stone, and my thick fingers looked like part of the engravings for the moment I paused. Better not to think about that too long.

Inside, the floorboards had all rotted away, leaving that same scrubby grass and dirt. There was only one grand old room, patched all over the place and every part of it surrounding the colossal telescope. There was a little cot bed set up in one corner. It didn’t have any covers on it despite the chill of the night air creeping in through all the little cracks and crevasses where the walls didn’t quite join up, but that was probably a cold-blooded thing. There was a haphazard hearth in another corner, smearing the roof above it with soot. Everywhere else was a scattered array of bizarre instruments I guessed had to do with stellar observation, the tools surrounded by or partially covered by reams upon reams of yellowed paper. Stacked up on every flat surface in the place, I could see that they were all filled with scribbled ciphers and astronomical symbols that even my new brain couldn’t decipher. Books seemed to be few and far between, treated with more reverence than the scribbled notes, and placed on high shelves that looked liable to fall off the wall if you sneezed too hard. Basically, it looked like some madman’s shack, and if it weren’t for the fact that the White Prophet was literally the first and only person I’d met on this planet, I’d have been sidling towards the door about now, remembering that I’d left the cat on the stove.

The other Eternals, on the other hand, seemed to take the madhouse’s appearance in stride. I saw Mercy make a face when we first got in the room, but the moment the duo of Inyoka turned to face us, she wiped it away fast. The Prophet started to ramble. “As all places and things are temporal and limited to the moment that we encounter them, so too is this one. I have been here but a short time, awaiting the precise moment of your coming.”

“Yeah, the place hardly looks lived in.” I couldn’t help myself. Mercy snorted in a very unladylike way but managed to get her face straightened out before the Prophet looked her way again.

He ignored us, pushing back his hood for the first time and exposing his distinctly serpentine face. Asher looked closer to an iguana or something, but this pointed white face reminded me of a milk snake. “There is much that I must tell you. Much that you must know of the past before you can shape the future, but our time together is limited. You have come in a time of great crisis for this world, though most would deny it if they could. They would shelter in lies to protect their own power, pretend that all is as it always has been and doom is not fast approaching.”

I clapped my hands, startling the Alvaren. “Okay, history lesson of doom. Let’s have it.”

She hissed at me. “Will you shut up? The sooner he is done, the sooner we can kill you.”

“That really doesn’t encourage me to speed things along as much as you’d think.”

She lunged for me, and before Mercy and Asher could catch hold of her, she had one hand locked around one of my horns and the other pulled back in a fist.

On reflection, I probably should have just taken the hit and scored some sympathy points with the other Eternals, but this body was hardwired for action, and I really don’t like it when people punch me in the face.

I bucked, jerking my head and horns up out of reach and hauling her off her feet. She let out a little yelp, and I was able to catch her by the arm as she fell. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this. I don’t even know your name.”

She wasn’t so pretty when she was hissing. Alvaren faces seemed to be pretty narrow at the best of times, and the sneer-scowl combo made her look distinctly like a ferret. Mercy piped up. “She’s Orphia. I heard Bilaphel name her.”

The Prophet’s clawed hands were there between us a moment later, pulling Orphia away when I gratefully released her, giving us both some breathing room.

The Dvergar had progressed to wheezing down on the ground, which was probably a sign he was getting better? Asher crouched over him, checking his airways were clear as best he could. “This one is Uthelred. Named by the Queen. He is unwell.”

“Choking on dirt will do that to you.”

Asher’s tail lashed. “He breathes well. I mean his mind. The experiences of the day have damaged him.”

Mercy shrugged. “Dying twice in one day would do that for you.”

“This fate has oft befallen Eternals throughout history.” The Prophet was stoking the fire, beckoning us all closer. “When the weight of memories becomes too great, Eternals retreat from the world. Some into their own minds, and some into the wild places where mortals fear to tread.”

So we have trauma-dementia to look forward to. Fantastic. This gig is sounding better by the minute. I dragged my eyes away from the Dvergar, deliberately ignored Orphia, and faced the rest.

The Prophet sank down in front of the fire, coiling his tail over his crossed legs so it didn’t burn. “May I continue?”

Begrudgingly, we all settled down for storytime like we were children. All except Orphia, who parked herself up on the stool by the verdigris-green eyepiece of the telescope. Holding herself above the rest of us. What a charmer.

The warmth of the fire was nice after the cold of the grave and the cool wind. A nap might have been in order if it weren’t for everyone being out to kill me.

“The Dvergar wanted a god. In the light, we had the sun and moon to guide us, but deep beneath the earth, they sought out the Void. Araphel, the living darkness. He rose, a match for any one of the gods in their courts but bound by none of their rules. He walked Amaranth. He destroyed. All the powers of creation were arrayed against him but found wanting. No mortal power could match him.”

“But somebody did.” For a change, it was Mercy who butted in. “Somebody killed him.”

The Prophet turned from his introspection to face her. “Nobody was there to see him die. Yet his influence seemed to leave the world, so all took it to be the truth that he had been slain. The story goes that some unknown hero confronted the dark one alone and slew him. There is a great blighted land where he was said to have died, and this can still be seen. The Rustlands. Still stained with blood. And at the heart of the blight, a sword, rusted from freshly forged to shards by Araphel’s dying curse.”

That sucked. Imagine that you finally got it together and killed the big bad dark lord only for it to self-destruct so hard that nobody even knew who won the fight.

“Each shard was taken by one of the peoples who had opposed Araphel. Each one served as their rallying banner and symbol in the days to come. Ownership of a piece of the Rusted Blade became the foundation of dynasties and empires. Yet now all have forgotten that it was once a real weapon. The only weapon to ever wound a god.”

As far as clout went, holding a hunk of god-slaying metal probably helped anyone’s street cred. I started trying to work out how many pieces there must have been. Humans got one, Alvaren, Dvergar, and Wyrms too, I’d bet. So that was four at least. Would the Eternals get one? Did we count as our own people? Maybe there would be a Q and A at the end of the mad lizard’s ramble.

“What is not so widely known is this. Araphel returns. All of the stars and portents warn of his coming. Yet try as the learned might, they cannot convince the ignorant of their doom. He is coming back, and there are none who will stand to oppose him. The Alvaren are gone. The Wyrms hide in seclusion to wait out the age of mortals. The Dvergar cower in their hills, shivering at their last brush with the Void. The humans rule over much of Amaranth now, and they waste that sovereignty by squabbling amongst themselves.”

I could feel Orphia staring daggers at me as she asked, “What of the Faun?”

“The Chagnar Faun? Most would welcome Araphel with open arms. A return to the past glories that they still dream of. You shall have no help from them.”

With a sigh, the Prophet spread his arms wide. “So it is to the Eternal servants of the divine, that I must turn. You must make ready for the coming of Araphel. You must forge the Rusted Blade anew and turn the only weapon the God ever feared against it once more.”

A big fetch quest. Not exactly original, but at least it was pretty straightforward. Find shards. Make sword. Kill god. Easy. I guess now was Q and A time. “How many shards are there?”

“From the histories of the free peoples, we have identified six distinct shards in all. Each granted to one great champion of each race and passed down through the generations.”

Asher counted them off on his fingers. “Humans, Dvergar, Alvaren, Wyrms, Eternals, and… Faun?”

The Prophet nodded, but there was no way that Orphia was letting that one slip by without comment. “Why the hell would they give the Faun a shard? They were the enemy.”

“The Faun have no written histories, so I do not know for certain—and much of what we know about that time from other sources has been colored by more recent clashes between the free people. Perhaps it was a term of the peace treaty. Perhaps some few Faun fought back against their overlord and this was their reward. None can say for certain. The truth has been lost to time.”

“I’d believe they extorted it before I’d believe in a hero Faun.” Orphia scoffed.

That was enough for Mercy. “Are you kidding me? How can you already be racist when you didn’t even know most of these races existed before today?”

“The gods were very clear about who we should trust, if you had only listened more closely to their guidance.”

Asher sighed, and it made all the scales on his body ripple out of place and then back again, like a bird puffing out its feathers. “Can you please let him finish?”

The Prophet had been sitting silently, waiting for us to shut up. Good thing Asher was here, or he might have died of old age. “I shall share what I can with you about the last-known locations of the Shards, but first I would prepare you for your task more thoroughly. The powers of the Eternals are not widely known, but I have made a study of the few texts available so that I might better instruct you in the gifts that you have received.”

This was starting to sound more like it. A quick blast of tutorial junk to learn how skills, the Divine Pillars, and Glory worked, and then we could get out there and start kicking ass.

The Prophet moved from sitting to standing in one fluid motion like he’d just come up out of a toaster. “Come with me, and your first lesson shall begin.”

At his direction, I dragged the cot out into the middle of the room and revealed a trapdoor. It was thick old wood, not the new stuff that the building had been patchworked with. This had been part of the original structure before the prophet slapped an observatory on top. It took all my strength to haul the thing open. Stairs stretched down into the darkness, and he led us down in single file, Orphia at the front and me bringing up the rear with a Dvergar over my shoulder. A buffer of two sane people between me and the Alvaren seemed smart. I didn’t want to give her any opportunities to stab me in the back.

Up on the surface, this building wasn’t all that impressive. I mean, it was kind of impressive that it was still standing and that it could support the weight of the observatory dome despite being 50% stone and 50% crumbles…. Anyway, the point is, this place was like the proverbial iceberg—not a lot up top but huge beneath the surface. The stairs led into a long corridor which then twisted, turned, and branched out. If any one of us wasn’t lost by the time we came to the big, dank cellar where we stopped then I would have been surprised.

“From my tomes, I have learned that you came from other worlds and lived other lives before being chosen to come here. There has been much debate about the meaning of this among scholars.”

The cellar was different from any I’d ever known. The piles of miscellaneous crap and broken lawnmowers were missing. Even the big barrels of booze that I’d been hoping for were conspicuous in their absence. I’d been looking forward to seeing how wine-drunk a Faun could get.

The Prophet rambled on. “All that is known for certain is that the laws of those worlds were different from those here, and the life lessons learned differed along the same lines.”

Now that we were stopped, my eyes began adjusting to the darkness, flaring a little more moonlight. It was definitely an empty room. The stone walls showed the same whorls as I’d seen upstairs, but the floor was made up of tiles instead of the flagstones or packed dirt of the previous corridors. A great big mosaic depiction of a dragon and a giant bird of prey wrestling with each other. Hot.

“Yup.” Mercy was crouched down, studying the mosaic inch by inch like it was hiding secrets. “Things were definitely different back on Earth.”

“Then let me be the first to share the most vital lesson to your survival on Amaranth.” The Prophet ran a clawed finger over one of the great whorls on the wall, one indistinguishable from all the rest to my eyes but apparently special judging by the way that it suddenly started to glow green.

“Do not trust anyone.”

The tiles of the floor, which had been solid as a rock beneath our feet just a moment ago, fell apart with the sound of shattering glass.

Every tile rained down around us as we plummeted into the darkness. The last I saw of the White Prophet, he was standing on the one patch of paper-thin tiles that hadn’t moved as we tumbled into the pit below.

Then even my eyes couldn’t pierce the darkness anymore.

Chapter 5

Did I mention that I was getting really tired of this crap?

We were only falling for a moment, but it seemed to stretch out endlessly. Mercy was tumbling head over heels, and Asher had spread-eagled himself to try to land flat. The only one falling with any sort of grace was Orphia, arms outstretched and feet pointed down—like she was falling on purpose.

I wasn’t sure when it happened, but I’d wrapped myself around the Dvergar so that he wouldn’t get mangled on landing. I guess I felt protective of the little guy.

We hit the stone floor together. I landed on my back, the rebounding dead weight of Uthelred hammering into my chest in a pincer movement of pain.

[Health 191/300]

From the moans around me, I guessed that the others had just been introduced to their health scores for the first time. I rolled the Dvergar off me with some of my very own grunts and grumbles. “Wish you’d wake up, little guy.”

By the time that we were vaguely upright, the tiles were fluttering back up to form a distant roof. The room down here was bigger than the one upstairs, but rusted metal bars ran along the length of it, separating us from the extended part and the door that led out of this new prison. There was no gate on our cage, and judging from the bones scattered around the place, there was not meant to be. There was no way in or out now that we’d been dropped.

I scooped up a human skull and threw it at the roof, round about where the Prophet had been standing, but all it did was shatter and shower us all with bone meal. I didn’t think it would actually work, but if I didn’t try then I’d never be certain.

Orphia was quick to take the opportunity to blame me for getting dust in her hair. “Idiot.”

“I didn’t see you spotting the trap either.” I was feeling sore and petty. Can you blame me?

Mercy had landed worse than the rest of us. She was still sitting down, nursing a bleeding nose and trying to will away the dizziness. Despite that, she was still aware enough to reach out and grab Orphia’s leg as she charged at me yet again. There was quite the crunch when that pretty Alvaren face met the flagstones. Now both of them had nosebleeds.

They scrambled to their feet, ready to fight, but Asher was already there with his clawed hands up, ready to intervene. “This is not the time to fight amongst ourselves.”

I liked the sentiment there, but honestly, it seemed like it was probably the best time to fight among ourselves. It wasn’t like there was anything else to keep us entertained down here. Oubliettes don’t get cable tv.

“What do you think you are doing?”

While Mercy and Orphia had the beginnings of a good screaming match, albeit one that sounded a bit nasal after their falls, I went to take a look at the bars. If they were as rusted through as they looked, they might not be any more of an impediment than a beaded curtain.

“From the minute we got here you’ve been looking down your pointy nose at us…”

The bars were pretty solid underneath the top layers of crumbling orange and brown—spaced close enough that even one of the waifish races wouldn’t have been able to squeeze through. I took a hold of them and flexed my new muscles. All that Potency had to count for something.

“The fact that you are so ready to cast aside your divinely ordained duty, simply because it is convenient in the moment, is…”

I strained and strained with all of my strength, and I could feel movement in the metal. The bars thrummed with the pressure as my arms began to shake. I was strong now. I could do this. The old me might have struggled to open a pack of tortilla chips like this but I was Maulkin.

Sweat prickled my brow, but the bars did not bend. My shoulders began to scream, and still, the bars did not bend. With one last heave, I put everything that I had into pulling the bars apart, and...they did not bend. Whatever Potency I needed to bend metal with my bare hands, I just wasn’t there yet.

I turned my attention inward, and once more the world around me seemed to slow. The nasal whine of Orphia’s bitching turning into a solid bass note. I pulled up all the information that this new world provided me about myself but skimmed past the stats, racial attributes, and the single skill point I’d acquired in Combat. There had to be more here. We were Eternals from the moment we landed on Amaranth, it wasn’t something that we earned with time, so surely they wouldn’t have dumped us here, powerless.

I stopped on The Pillars of Divinity and gave it my full attention—the way that I had the Eosphel’s holograms. Only a moment was all it took for the text to blossom out into a vision that filled my entire mind. I was on some great dark plane with only a few pinpricks of moonlight shining around my feet—a light so faint it would have been invisible if I were not surrounded by such deep shadows. There were seven pinpricks in all. Seven tiny stars on the ground. I closed my distance with the first of them, and that strange text that the gods used whispered up out of it.

Cosmos – The shaping of reality.

I stepped on to the next.

Omnis – The knowledge of all things.

These were the different pillars. The different types of power I’d be able to unlock with Glory.

Ascension – The rebirth of the self.

Primal – The creation of life.

Aether – The mastery of souls.

Creation – The building of worlds.

Artifice – The remaking of materials.

That last one was what I needed. Not turning into animals to seduce milkmaids, not throwing lightning bolts, and not making things; remaking things. Remaking things like metal bars.

I reached out to touch the light, and it flared to life at my attention. I could feel my hands shaking, even though I had no idea why. I reached out again, and the light turned solid at my touch. With the sound of crushing ice, it hardened into a crystalline pillar, thin as a thread for now, but it was sure to get thicker the more of my Glory I poured in.

Slipping back to view my mental character sheet once more, I could see Artifice Tier 1 marked down there. I was committed to it now. But even with the Pillar active, I still didn’t see any new powers. There had to be something I could use. Some reason for empowering a pillar to start with.

The big spider lady said that my powers would show up as skills once they were unlocked, so I jumped up to that. There were 314 experience points hovering there, just waiting to be spent. I didn’t know how much of that came from digging, and how much came from listening to lectures, but either way. I wasn’t letting them go to waste.

Skills began to roll out in a huge toilet-paper long list, every single starting skill that you could choose from listed out so fast that I barely had time to recognize them as words before a dozen more had flown by. I stopped the list at random, somewhere in the vicinity of “Igneous Arcanum: 100XP Per Rank” and then started over, concentrating only on the skills that seemed to be glowing with moonlight.

Artifice Tier 1: Rough Hewn Weapons

Artifice Tier 1: Rough Hewn Armor

Artifice Tier 1: Rough Hewn Architecture

Artifice Passive Ability: Sphere of Influence

The passive ability seemed to be tied to the other three, like unlocking them would give you it as a freebie. There certainly wasn’t any way to invest in it directly. It would have been nice to say that I considered Architecture or Armor first, but I really didn’t. Too many attempts had already been made on my life for me to pick anything else. I needed to be able to fight back, and that meant weapons.

The downside of these Celestial Skills was the price tag. Chernghast was whispering to me that they cost three-hundred experience points per rank instead of a hundred. Still, raw experience was probably easy to come by, weapons weren’t. I poured my experience into Rough Hewn Weapons with a weird tickly sensation in my brain then suddenly I just knew how to use it. The same thing happened with Sphere of Influence without having to pony up any more experience, thankfully.

Opening up my eyes, I could now feel everything within that Sphere nearby, like my nervous system had just jumped a few feet outside of my body and could now take in all the information I needed from everything around me. I could feel the temperature and pressure of the air. I could taste the iron content in the bars.

It was hard at first, like the first time you moved a muscle you didn’t know that you had. I had to strain to draw the iron out of the bars—and strain even harder to turn the small amount of actual metal into something resembling a weapon. I’d been imagining a big sword, like something an anime character would swing around, defying all laws of physics in the process. Instead, I got a cleaver. A hunk of raw metal flattened out into a rectangle and finished down on one side with a chipped and ragged edge. I guess proper swords needed more metal than I had to work with along with somebody doing less Rough Hewn work than I was. It didn’t matter though. I had something I could use to fight, and three of the bars crumbled away to orange dust on the floor.

Time jumped back to its usual tempo, and I turned to the others just in time to see Mercy ducking under a kick. “Hey!”

My little shout didn’t interrupt them for a moment. Orphia was still coming at the other woman with everything she had, and Mercy was still scrambling to get out of the way. Asher was just standing there watching them, and Uthelred was just lying there watching the wall. I was getting the impression I was the only one who was going to do anything.

I charged in to break up the fight, kind of forgetting about the big blade in my hand. It brought Orphia up fast when she saw it.

She backpedaled away from me rapidly, arms outstretched to pull Asher to safety behind her. I guess staying neutral meant he was on her side in her mind. “I tried to warn you fools! He is going to murder us all. He is the enemy.”

I bent to give Mercy a hand up, which she took gratefully before we turned to face the other Eternals. “I’ve found a way out. We can unlock one of the Divine Pillars and pick out a starting skill, I used mine to remove some bars and make this. I can probably make some weapons for all of us if you just…”

“Drop the blade.”

“Hey now. I haven’t been trying to jump you this whole time.”

“Drop the blade or we fight for it, this very moment.”Orphia hissed.

The light seemed to have gone out in Asher’s eyes. The sunlight dimming until it was barely a glow. His breathing looked like it had stopped too, but it was kind of hard to tell how fast he was meant to be breathing. Did lizards breathe the same as mammals? I wish I’d read more books before I died. Science ones. Not ones with dragons and chainmail bikinis on the cover. Well, more of them too.

Apparently, this wasn’t the time for introspection. Orphia charged at me, leaping over the Dvergar, hands already reaching out for the cleaver. Since I really didn’t want to cleave her pretty face in half, I did what she’d asked and dropped it. She dived after it, only to catch my foot in her gut.

[15 Damage]

Combat: Rank 2/10

32 Experience Gained

It was enough to knock the wind out of her and send her rolling back across the floor to thump into Uthelred, but somehow, she came up with the cleaver in her hand. She looked from it to me, and something like a smile spread over her face. “Now I have the blade, you are all going to listen to me. Now you are all going to follow my lead. Not that thing over there. He is an abomination. He is the enemy.”

Mercy snarled. “He isn’t the one threatening me with a knife or trying to kick out my teeth.”

Asher seemed to have lit up again, and he was taking in the whole situation with no small degree of interest. Uthelred still wasn’t moving, which was honestly kind of fair—I wouldn’t want to get up for this either.

“You will stand down, Mercy. I know that you have some strange fondness for this beast, but I do not have time to indulge it. He has opened a way out of this cell to win our trust and corrupt us into following his desires. I say that he shall remain here while we use it without the fear of ambush.”

I wet my lips. “So what, you just want me to sit here forever?”

“I want you to die, but I am showing my new friends here that I am willing to compromise my desires and principles to service their needs.”

Mercy let out a little snort. “The scary thing is, this probably is her version of a compromise.”

If this was the only way to get out of this without anybody dying, then I was willing to go our separate ways. I didn’t want to, but I figured I could give them an hour’s head start, then start on my own adventure. “Alright, so I’ll stay here, and you’ll head out. Do you guys want me to make you some weapons first? I’ve got no idea what is waiting on the other side of those bars.”

“Our safety is no longer your concern, Faun.” I couldn’t believe that rolling over and submitting was all it was going to take to calm her down.

Mercy pointed to Orphia’s feet, her jaw still clenched. “What about the Dvergar?”

Orphia seemed to remember that he was there for the first time. She crouched down to look him over, seizing his wooly chin and turning his dim eye-lights to face her. “I have no time for useless people.”

I wouldn’t have thought that my haphazard cleaver had much of an edge on it, but it seemed to be sufficient to slit the Dvergar’s throat from ear to ear when Orphia leaned her weight down on it. Mercy and I both let out a cry when we realized what she intended, but it was already too late. Crimson blood was arcing up out of the Eternal’s neck to spatter across the dirt floor.

In those last moments, Uthelred seemed to find some life, jerking up and grabbing at his bleeding throat and then smearing gore on Orphia’s pristine white skin when his dull fingers scrabbled at her. She rose back up to her full height with a sneer that robbed her face of any beauty. “Perhaps now you’ll understand that I am not playing games.”

Then a glow surrounded her like the dull purple-blue light of a plasma ball lamp, and her hair started to rise up as static crackled across her. She took notice, looking down at the sparks crawling over her clothes in confusion.

Asher stepped out into our line of sight. His hands lit up with crackling lightning, and his lipless jaws were moving without pause, mouthing out some secret language that I could not understand or even hear.

When he ripped his claws apart, the lightning leapt out and struck Orphia in the back, conducted through the cloud of ionized air that already enveloped her. Her pristine white skin blackened in an instant as the electrical burns spread, and her hair crisped and blew away. Most importantly of all, the light shining out of her eyes blinked out, and she slumped to the ground on top of her victim. Two dead Eternals in under a minute. We were off to a flying start.

Asher lowered his arms with a barely perceptible shudder. “Worth noting. Spells take longer than expected to cast.”

Both Mercy and I were stunned into silence, but it was for very different reasons. Mercy was looking down at the remains of Orphia as her body went through all the stages of decomposition in a moment. Skin sloughed off. Meat shriveled. Bones crumbled to dust. When it was over, there was no trace that Orphia had ever been there at all—nothing but the rough-hewn cleaver that she’d taken from me. It only took a glance to confirm that the same thing had happened to poor Uthelred.

Orphia deserved whatever she got, but I spared a moment to feel sorry for the little guy. Of course, this was all a bit overwhelming for a regular guy, it was just a shame that he was going to pay for that feeling with his life, repeatedly, until he got over it.

I was pointing at Asher without meaning to. “You learned magic with your starting experience.”

“That is correct.” He cocked his head to the side in puzzlement.

“And you’re an Inyoka.”

“That was also my choice, yes.”

I took a deep breath, trying to keep my excitement under control and failing. “You’re a lizard wizard!”

It was enough to draw Mercy out of her reverie with a groan.

Asher cocked his head the other way, oblivious to my grin. “Queerly phrased, but ultimately accurate.”

Mercy was fighting a giggle and losing. Maybe she didn’t want to encourage any more of my nonsense. I decided to move on before she tried to move me on.

That seemed to wrap everything up with the crazier Eternals for now, so I went back to the cell bars and rubbed my hands together. “So what does everybody want? I’m going to try and make that little chopper into something more substantial. You want knives? If we find some wood, I could maybe do a spear?”

“Are you really going to just go on as if nothing happened?” Mercy was scooping up the cleaver and carrying it over, a little crease forming between her eyebrows.

“Well, the way I figure it, we can have a big cry about one of the folks we came here with being a bit too stab-happy or we can get to work. Either way, we are still going to have to escape from this dungeon, so I figured I’d cut to the chase.”

Asher called over from where he was experimenting with the electric discharging between his claws. “No metal equipment for me if you please, it may turn my lightning back on me.”

“Chargrilled lizard is off the menu. Got it.”

With a strain, I slowed time to a crawl and stripped the metal from the next pair of bars, letting it drop as misshapen ingots in a shower of iron before moving on to the next. Mercy tossed the cleaver on the heap of metal and stopped to watch me work as I made my way along, gathering more and more raw material for the veritable arsenal I was planning for us. Eventually, I couldn’t ignore her stare anymore, so I gave my massive arms a flex and asked, “See something you like?”

“Okay, first off, yuck. Second, can you make me a bow?”

“Yuck? Yuck?! I’ll have you know that I am the most attractive man in this whole dungeon.”

“I’d rather lick the lizard. Bow and arrows? Can you do it?”

I closed my eyes and strained. This time the bars fell in a shower of arrowheads. “We’ll need to find wood and string, but yeah, I can do it.”

Asher was right by my elbow when I turned, and I nearly backhanded him out of pure surprise. “Whoa. Dude!”

“With all due respect to the pair of you, it would be better if you did not refer to me as a lizard. It is as inaccurate as calling you a donkey-bull or her a monkey, and while I understand such things are meant in jest, there may be others in this world who find casual racism less amusing.”

I finally stopped and thought before I spoke. “It didn’t even cross my mind. I’m sorry, man.”

His tongue flicked out, tasting the air. “Asher.”

“Sorry, Asher.”

Mercy mumbled, “Sorry,” too.

I wondered if you could unlock achievements in this world. First Awkward Apology. It would have taken me nearly three years before I got that one in my last playthrough of life, yet here we were barely an hour into Amaranth and I was already performing above expectations.

With Mercy’s arrowheads and the metal fixings for her bow made, and something like a bowstring woven from what used to be my shirt, I turned my attention back to the cleaver and the little hillock of metal chunks I’d pushed together with my foot. No time like the present. I closed my eyes and wished for a great big sword, then I put my Artifice to work with a gruff grunt that Asher could have quite rightly pointed out sounded like a goat’s.

I opened my eyes again when the cleaver had put on so much weight it was almost a strain for my new, buff body to lift it. It was still shaped like a cleaver, more or less, with one huge cutting edge stretching along all six-foot of the blade’s length. I’m willing to admit I may have gotten a little carried away, but when you were as strong as I’d become, you sometimes want to flaunt it a little. Plus, I was willing to bet that my big chopper could stop a charging elephant with one whack at this point. I hefted the blunt side up onto my shoulders, leaned my horns back against it, and felt the cool metal sapping the day’s aches away from the knot of muscles up there.

Mercy was staring up at the ragged edge of my giant sword with another little smirk on her face. “Compensating for something?”

“Compensating for how puny the rest of my teammates are.”

We gave the place one last look over for anything of value and were about to head for the door when I let my new Sphere of Influence reach out one last time to seek anything hidden among the dried-up carcasses on the floor. The bones hummed at the touch of my power. I was such an idiot.

With a strain of mental effort, the ribs of the nearest dead man tore loose and began a slow orbit about me, fusing together as they passed. Vertebrae snapped clean of the spines that once held them and lengthened out as the force of my will pulled on them. There was no wood down here, but that didn’t mean we lacked materials. By the time I was done, Mercy had her bow and arrows, little bone spurs stretching out of the tail end of each one to serve as a flight. They were rough as hell, but they’d work.

Weirdly, Mercy didn’t look all that pleased when I handed her the pile of corpse-bits that were now her weapon. “And again, I say yuck.”

“Suck it up, buttercup. If you find me a tree, I’ll replace them. Alright?”

She muttered something about my ass and a tree, but even my new heightened senses couldn’t quite pick it up.

Asher intervened before I could poke the bear. “Shall we proceed?”

The corridor leading out of the jail was laid with the same mildew-stained flagstones as the cell had been. The only thing that made it more inviting was the faint breeze that was drifting through it. The chill night air was calling out to us. Somewhere out there was a way out of this hole.

It kind of made sense for me to go first, since swinging my sword with either of the other two in front of me was liable to end in friendly fire. Plus, bows and spells didn’t require getting all up in a monster’s face. I was assuming that this dungeon had monsters in it. That was the deal with dungeons in all my substantial fantasy gaming experience, and I wasn’t going to start doubting that truism until I made it through at least three underground installations without anyone trying to murder me. I was giving this one the benefit of the doubt and not counting Orphia since we brought her in with us.

The dark corridor twisted and turned like it was trying to mess up my sense of direction, and if it hadn’t been for our light-filled eyes, we would have been completely screwed. Even as it was, Mercy had to shout out a couple of times to warn me before I accidentally tumbled empty-head first into a pitfall. I wasn’t sure if they were deliberate traps or just holes caused by disrepair, but I couldn’t see the bottom, and I didn’t fancy finding out what we could hear living down there in the pitch darkness, chittering away.

Eventually, we came to a pitfall that was definitely deliberate, six feet across with no way around. The tunnel stretched on beyond it, but there was no way forward except to jump. I had been spoiling for a chance to try out all these new muscles, so I wasn’t exactly mad about it. Mercy looked down into the pit with a grimace. “Just be careful.”

With a laugh, I tossed my sword to clatter on the far side of the pit. “Please, I was made for this.”

I took a run-up to the gap.

I made a mighty leap.

I immediately headbutted the ceiling with the horns I’d forgotten were there. Crap.

Chapter 6

Luck and reflexes came to the rescue, and I flung myself flat as I fell back towards the pit. My shoulders landed with a crunch on one side of the gap, with my heels on the other. I groaned. This was not my finest moment.

To add insult to injury, the already chortling Mercy stepped on my chest and strolled over to the other side. “Portable bridge. That’s going to come in handy.”

“Laugh it up. I can see right up your skirt from here.”

She stomped on my gut when I said that, but it did make her move a bit quicker.

Asher followed her over with an apologetic little half-bow. The dick. He was at least quick about it—I barely had time to say, “I don’t know what I’m looking at exactly, but I can see up your skirt too.”

With everyone off me, I rolled over and crawled back up onto the side I’d started on. This time I remembered my height before I leapt and cleared the gap easily.

New Skill Discovered! [Acrobatics]

Acrobatics: Rank 1/10

41 Experience Gained

Mercy gave me a round of applause, and a slightly puzzled Asher joined in before I shook my head at him. Mercy was still grinning when I grumbled, “Yeah, yeah, people falling over is peak comedy.”

Scooping up my sword and squeezing past the two of them without accidentally slapping anyone with it was another feat of acrobatics, even if I didn’t get a skill up. Then without another word between us, we were on our way again.

It was only a few minutes down the dank corridor before Mercy decided to open a can of worms. “So do you guys remember who you were before?”

“I don’t remember what I was called, but I do remember some stuff.” I paused to step around another pit, sending flagstone shards tumbling down into the dark. “I guess I was just an average, yet totally awesome kind of guy, then a wolf killed me out in the woods, and all this stuff happened.”

Mercy raised an eyebrow. “Why were you out in the woods?”

“Hiking date.”

She raised her other eyebrow. “Somebody dated you?”

“Do I have to listen to this sass for all eternity? Is this actually hell?” I grumbled. “Yes, somebody dated me. I dated. It was a disaster. Fifty percent of the people on the date died.”

Mercy really seemed to be having a good time needling me, so I didn’t pry about how she ended up deader than a doornail. She pressed on. “How do you screw up hiking that badly? Isn’t it just walking?”

I cut her off. “Hold up. Hold up. None of us are here because we made good life choices. This isn’t the Maulkin Mystery Hour. What happened to you? Who were you?”

“I don’t remember my name, and I don’t know how I died. One minute I was scuba diving in some old Parthenon-looking ruins, and the next old skull face was there telling me I’d croaked.”

I snapped my fingers. “Got to be sharks, right?”

“Probably an aneurism or something wrong with my air mix. I don’t know. I don’t really want to know. It is done. Right? No point worrying about it.”

“Yeah, don’t think about it.” I brushed aside a particularly thick clump of cobwebs. “Thinking is just going to make you bummed out.”

She snorted. “Wow, you really just explained your whole life philosophy in that one sentence.”

“So, scuba diving? Were you like a spy on a secret mission or something? Highly trained shadow government ninja assassin?”

“I was a diving instructor, you giant dork.”

“I did not care for my life before,” Asher interrupted us. “I lived a life of servitude to my Wyrm. Diligent and mindful. Tending her aromatic gardens as she waged war on the other great serpents of the world. I served her there until my final moments, when the temple fell to invaders. ”

That was a conversation killer if ever there was one. Guess we didn’t all come from Earth. We trudged onwards in awkward silence again, not even talking when the tunnel branched and then branched again. It was almost a relief when something big and hairy jumped out at me.

The corridor had just opened out into a room when a mass of teeth and fur lunged out of the shadows, aiming for my neck with its gaping jaws but meeting an abrupt, slightly panicked headbutt instead.

The thing fell back into the room with a squeal so high-pitched I was fairly sure only dogs could hear it properly, leaving Mercy to chime in as it retreated, “What is that?”

The thing leapt at me again just as I brought my sword around. Claws skittered over the flat of the blade and it rebounded again.

“I don’t know Mercy,” I replied testily, “why don’t you ask it while it chews on my face?”

I didn’t give the thing another chance to jump me, charging forward with my sword held level to the floor, the tip held in my off-hand to create a solid wall of metal between me and those teeth. The thing scampered back on all fours. It was about the height of a Dvergar, but where they kept all their hair together on their head, this thing was covered with it from toes to tufted ear tips. It had a flat piglike nose above gnashing needle teeth, and there were beady eyes in amongst the fur of its face somewhere. Combined with the large radar dish like ears, it made the critter look like a bat boy.

Maybe if there had only been one then we could have talked things out, but the hungry little bat-thing had friends along for the ride, and they came scrambling out of the dark holes that honeycombed the floor and walls. We’d strolled right into their nest.

They moved almost like a flock of birds, perfectly synchronized as they bounded across the uneven floor and leapt at me. It lined them up perfectly for my swing. I turned my body in a great clumsy pirouette and then swept them out of the air with my sword.

The blade was far from sharp, but it was still a massive hunk of metal being swung around. The bat-boys went flying away from us. I hauled my sword back up for another swing with a grunt of effort. Maybe I had made the thing a little too big.

Mercy’s first arrow grazed past me to hit the first of the monsters to attack us square in the chest. Between my headbutt and that length of bone, it wasn’t getting up again. Maybe I should have felt some pang of guilt about that, but the rest of them didn’t really give me time.

I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up as Asher did something with his lightning. Shot by carefully placed shot, Mercy was picking off the stragglers that I’d only injured instead of killing. Time for me to put in some more work.

This time I took the fight to the bat-lings, giving them no chance to regroup or charge us. That first swing might have looked epic, but I knew for a fact that it was more luck than skill that made it connect. I brought my sword down on the first one that I reached like a guillotine blade and flinched as scorching hot blood sprayed up to coat my chest.

I could feel a distant hum in my head as experience points accumulated, but now was not the time for counting. I stamped on the next bat-thing’s face as it tried to scramble to its feet.

As I spun, looking for another target to present itself, one of them leapt from a hole in the roof to land on my back, latching onto my trapezius with all those teeth.

[Health 167/300]

The little bat’s throat started working, and those leathery lips tightened against me as it gulped at my blood and did its damnedest to give my new body its very first hickey. I wanted to pull it off, obviously, but the rest of the swarm didn’t care about my opinions on the matter.

Wounded ones skittered back towards me with their fangs bared, not risking the attack but threatening it, keeping my attention divided. If I let go of my sword to deal with the limpet, they’d pounce.

A second impact rocked me forward onto my tiptoes, then the hypodermic teeth lodged in my shoulder eased out. A quick, wild swing startled the others back long enough for me to glance down and see one of Mercy’s arrows embedded in my personal leech’s back. Nice.

I had to shout to be heard over the screeching of the bat-things. “Thank you, Mercy!”

Another arrow flew by, catching a leaping furball as it pounced. “Really?” Then another arrow shot past, close enough that I felt the breeze. “Now you want to be polite?!”

There seemed to be no end to the little fur-bats. More and more of them swarmed out of the tunnels and pitfalls all around us. Each individually was no challenge, but together they made up a lethal collection of hooked claws and nipping jaws. In a war of attrition, we were screwed.

New Skill Discovered! [Bestiary]

Bestiary: Rank 1/10

22 Experience Gained

Hobs. They were called hobs. They lived in dark holes. Most people only ever encountered them in village wells or cave-side cliffs. They preyed almost exclusively on children. The sudden rush of knowledge came without warning, and I had to shake my head to focus on what I was doing.

Whatever Asher was up to finally popped off with a silent thunderclap that rocked everyone in the room. I’d been hoping for a big fireball or something, but I couldn’t see any exciting new explosions. Maybe the spell failed? I had no idea how magic worked.

A mass of hobs came swarming up out of one big pitfall, and I wasn’t having it. Using the flat of my sword to shield off scrabbling claws as I pushed forward, I drove them back. Step by step, I pushed, setting my strength against theirs and finding all of them to be wanting. Their heel claws screeched over the flagstones as they tried to find purchase, but no amount of nails on the chalkboard was going to stop me. I should have said something dramatic before I pushed them into the pit, but it wasn’t like anyone was going to hear it over all the squealing, and one last heave sent them all tumbling head over heels back into the dark.

When I turned back to the room, there was a small army of hobs between me and the other Eternals, yet they weren’t attacking. Their fur was also standing up on end, static crackling up between their big pointed ears like they were tesla coils. Whatever Asher did, it was confusing the hell out of them.

Good enough for me.

One by one, I batted the little puffball bat guys with my sword and laughed as they trailed showers of sparks behind them as they flew across the room. My very own private fireworks display.

None of the hobs actually sounded the retreat, but instead of rushing at us, they were now rushing away, scrambling back into their holes with stumpy little triangle tails tucked between their legs. Mercy fired off a few more times at any that looked like they might still have some fight in them. It was a pretty convincing argument for leaving us alone. “Yeah, you better run!”

Victory!

Combat: Rank 5/10

302 Experience Gained

Asher was still gathering a ball of lightning between his outstretched palms, and he seemed to be genuinely irritated that all the enemies were running away before he got to use it. His tail was lashing with frustration as he squeezed his palms together and the tiny storm blinked out. Mercy gave him an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Nicely done.”

“I did not even cast my spell, only the preparation.” He was staring down at the little sooty marks on his claw-tips with narrowed eyes.

I joined in, trying to perk him up, “Hey, man, whatever works, right? You won the fight.”

He let out a little huff of irritation, then seemed to come back to us. “Indeed. Shall we proceed.”

There was a multitude of hob-holes leading out of this room but only one corridor, so that was where we headed, always moving towards the breeze. I nudged Mercy as we walked. “Thanks for the save. That was turning into a nasty hickey.”

“Still better than your last date though, right?”

I laughed despite myself, then fell back into a companionable silence as I turned my attention inwards. The fight had earned us no Glory, so I was no closer to unlocking another Tier of Glory—or the Pillar of Divinity that came with it. Plenty of experience though. 389 points of it. Enough to buy another Divine Skill if I wanted Rough Hewn Armor or Rough Hewn Architecture.

The trouble was, I didn’t know how much use either of those was going to do us down here. There was no more metal for me to work with, so armor was out of the question, and if I started screwing around with the walls, trying to build us a way out of here, I was just as likely to dump the whole structure on our heads. I could hold onto the experience and wait for the next Tier Up, but there was no way of knowing how long that might take, and if I died in the meantime, I’d lose all of the sweet experience that I’d worked so hard for. It was a conundrum.

There were other options. I could always buy a rank or two in some non-divine skills to help things along in the meantime. Asher hadn’t even touched his Divine Powers, and he was rocking magic powers. I went trawling through the regular skills looking for something that would make me better at hitting things with a sword.

Sword Skill was right there, but concentrating on it revealed that I needed a Combat Skill of 10 before I could unlock it. I wasn’t going to blow all my experience getting Combat Skill up from 6 to 9, so I decided to take a look around other options. Bestiary hadn’t been helpful against the hobs, but if we were up against something that spat acid or whatever, then knowing in advance would be vital.

I dipped into the knowledge skills and found Dungeoneering almost immediately. I needed it. Whatever it was. I needed it. There was a 100% chance of dungeons in my future. Concentrating, I felt my experience draining away as Dungeoneering lit up in my mind. Even after it was lit, I still kept that same focus, dumping even more experience in before I realized my mistake. To save myself the hassle of trying to work out how to suck experience back out of it, I just carried on to the next rank.

Skills:

Combat: Rank 5/10

Acrobatics: Rank 1/10

Bestiary: Rank 1/10

Dungeoneering: Rank 2/10

With two ranks in Dungeoneering, I expected to suddenly understand everything around me better, but instead, there was no sudden rush of knowledge. My eyes started getting drawn to details I’d missed before, but that was all. I could see a little mark in the stonework of a supporting archway that had once held a tripwire in place. I could see one of the flagstones up ahead was lower than the level of the rest, but lower on an even plane, telling me there had probably been a pressure-plate beneath it with springs that had now rusted away. Trap spotting was great, but I’d kind of expected more. Ah well, I still had 186 experience to play around with.

I was so used to gaming by myself that I had totally forgotten that I wasn’t alone down here. “Hey, guys, I picked up Bestiary in the hob fight, and I just unlocked Dungeoneering. Don’t want you wasting experience buying overlapping skills.”

Mercy blinked at me. “Hob fight?”

“The little bat dudes, they’re called hobs. And Dungeoneering mostly seems to help me spot traps so far.”

Asher was silent for a moment, then finally asked, “Are we resolved to remain together?”

That actually stopped me in my tracks. “I mean, uh. I kind of assumed.”

Mercy looked even more awkward than me, so I tried my hardest to be a grown-up about all this. “I mean, I like you guys, and we seem to work well as a team, and this whole world seems to be out to kill us so far. It kind of makes sense to stick together, right?”

Once again, Asher punctured the politeness. “As a servant of the lunar court, you are destined to be our enemy. Are you not?”

“I’m nobody’s servant. I didn’t ask for this gig. Just because they gave me eternal life doesn’t mean they get to decide how I use it.”

Mercy nudged me as she passed, still pressing on, even if the men had decided to stop for a heart to heart talk. “It doesn’t feel like we are enemies.”

I sighed. “How about this? We stick together until we don’t want to anymore.”

“Until destiny calls us to do battle with each other, we shall be companions,” Asher intoned.

I patted him on the back a little too hard, sending him staggering along the corridor. “Cool.”

His tongue flickered out. “Indeed.”

Mercy called back over her shoulder. “If you two are done braiding each other’s hair, we’ve still got a dungeon to escape.”

Asher looked up at me with his head cocked to the side. “We have no hair.”

I scratched at the top of my head. “I’ve got some stubble coming in, maybe you can braid it later.”

“We do have all eternity to await your hair growth.” Mollified, Asher moved on along the corridor.

We kept on keeping on, following whichever of the branching tunnels had the tell-tale breeze coming through it until eventually, we came to a cave-in. Beyond the heap of rocks, we could make out distant specks of starlight, but even with all of my strength, this path was going to remain impassible. It was the same problem that I’d had with Rough Hewn Architecture, if I went digging around I was as likely to collapse the roof as to get us through. Another death was not on the agenda for today, so we were looking for another route.

I took point again when we started backtracking, turning us left at every available turn and straining that new Dungeoneering skill to see if it could give us any hint on which way was out. There were more dead-ends everywhere that we went. Collapse after collapse. This place was ancient, and it looked like it had no maintenance in the last dozen centuries, so really all the parts that hadn’t collapsed were the surprising part.

We came upon a new room and something felt wrong. I held out an arm to stop Mercy’s relentless march forward and stared into the dim room, trying to work out why my senses were tingling. She bounced her forehead off my arm and snapped. “What?”

“Wait a second. My brain is trying to tell me something.”

“First time for everything,” she snarked back.

The room was like all the rest—dirty, dusty, and abandoned. The flagstones on the floor were the same. The brickwork on the walls. Nothing looked any different except the ceiling.

“Look up. The tiles.”

We were staring up into the underside of another mosaic, this one depicting some great battlefield. Another trapped room was up above us almost close enough to touch. A chance to get closer to the surface if we could just work out how.

Taking a few steps into the room, I swung my sword up into the piecemeal stonework, earning me a nice jarring sensation and a metallic ringing that I’d bet I was going to hear for days. Guess brute force wasn’t going to work.

I put down my still-vibrating sword, then grabbed Mercy by the hips to hoist her up. “Can you see a way to unlock the tile trap?”

She kicked me on her way up, grumbling all the way. “Damn it. Ask before you pick somebody up.”

“I thought you were in a hurry.”

She gave me one more halfhearted kick. “Do I even weigh anything to you?”

“Nope.“

We inched across the room with Mercy touching and tugging at every seam she could find. “I don’t get how it works…at all.”

“A wizard did it?” I sighed.

“So can a wizard undo it then?”

She let out a yelp when I dropped her, but she managed to find her feet rather than fall on her ass, so the punches she bounced off my back were mostly for show. “Hey, Asher. Think you can blow the roof off this thing?”

He was studying the ceiling tiles himself, walking around the walls of the chamber. “I shall make an attempt, but I have no way of knowing how the magics will interact.”

Mercy and I retreated to a safe distance down the corridor, then she called out. “Do it!”

This was the first time I’d actually had the chance to watch Asher casting a spell, and I had to admit, it was kind of cool looking, even if it did take a while. At first, he just worked his hands back and forth like he was stretching out taffy as more and more static crackled between his fingers. Finally, when there were arcs of lightning leaping off him to ground themselves on the floor, he flung his arms up, and it roiled up in a wave of sparks that spread out across the ceiling, leaving the whole thing crackling with power. Unfortunately, though, it didn’t work. Whatever held the tiles in place didn’t so much as budge under the wizard’s spell. I let out a sigh and was already stepping back towards the room when Mercy caught hold of the rope I was using as a belt. “He isn’t done.”

She was right enough. Asher’s hands were in motion again, not whipping back and forth like before, but rolling over one another, jiving out to draw in another crackle of lightning from the air, then coiling over themselves once more. That same ball of lightning that we saw before was beginning to form between his hands, and now that it was self-perpetuating, he just held it there between his palms. Just waiting as the power gathered.

Maybe I should have gone for the magic thing after all, that looked badass. Maybe there was still time.

Once he was satisfied with the lightning gathered between his hands, Asher strained to pull them away from whatever gravity was holding the whole thing together. With a grunt of effort that I could just make out over the ozone hum, he hauled his claws apart.

The lightning leapt up into the charged ceiling, and for a moment, it seemed like nothing was going to happen at all, then suddenly, we were rocked by a thunderous concussion. The whole roof lit up blue-white for an instant. We had to blink away the after-images of that light, so we still didn’t know if the spell had done its job or not.

The tinkling sounds of falling tiles was our first indication. When my eyes had adjusted to the dark again, the room had doubled in height. Asher stood in the middle of the raining tiles with what I had to assume was a smile on his face. It was hard to tell without lips. Yet almost as fast as our victory came, it was snatched away. The tiles lay on the flagstones for just a moment, vibrating in place before they began floating back up to trap us all over again. “Oh no, you don’t.”

Poor Mercy never saw it coming. She might have suspected I’d pick her up again, but she definitely didn’t expect me to grab her by a thigh and bicep before launching her like a javelin towards the upstairs exit. She squealed as she flew, but she never lost her grip on that bow.

Asher was next, his eyes popping open as Mercy passed over his head. He didn’t try to argue or fight me, he just let it happen. I hooked under his shoulder and tail, then launched him end over end on the same arc as Mercy. I scooped up my sword as I ran, slamming the blunt end of it down to crack the flagstones, and I pole vaulted up towards the all-too-solid looking tiles above me.

There was a nasty ripping sound as I passed through the razor-edged tiles. A sound accompanied by a fresh sense of wetness where they’d opened up my skin.

Acrobatics: Rank 2/10

41 Experience Gained

My graceful leap had been slightly spoiled by mincing myself on the tiles, but at least they were solid enough for me to make a painful landing on them rather than falling right back through and tearing myself some more new holes.

“Ow.”

Mercy stomped over to kick me while I was down. “I told you to knock that off.”

“Ow.”

Asher crouched down beside me. “How badly are you injured? Can you move?”

He prodded at one of my lacerations with a claw. “Ow!”

Mercy rolled her eyes. “He’s fine.”

I grumbled to my feet, leaving bloody patches all over the place. My lovely new rags were entirely wrecked. I was going to have to pick up Rough Hewn Armor soon or I was going to end up naked. Meanwhile, my sword was sticking up out of the tiled floor, King Arthur style. The tiles that it had displaced were in an orbit around it, dipping in to crack off the metal every so often.

One good tug made me the rightful king of England—or whatever the Amaranth equivalent was—and we were ready to move on again. The trail of blood that I was leaving behind was new, but the passages were starting to look familiar. More and more of the flagstones were submerged in the dirt, and there were a few dry leaves here and there that could only have been blown in from the surface. We were back in the passages just below the observatory. We were nearly there.

When we rounded the corner and saw the stairs, there was palpable relief from the other two. Not me though, I still had my head in the game. I wanted to introduce the White Prophet to the business end of my new sword. “Get ready. With three of us attacking together there’s no way he can dodge everything.”

Asher cocked his head. “Who are we attacking?”

“The White Prophet?” Mercy whispered. “Promised to help us learn how to use our Eternal powers, then dumped us in a dungeon? Ringing any bells?”

“Have we not learned how to use our powers?”

That shut us both up for a moment. Was this all just a test? I really couldn’t think of a better way to get a gang of newborn Eternals using their abilities to the fullest than by dumping them in a dungeon. I ran a hand over the stubble on my head, but it came away smeared bloody. “Alright, fine. We talk first. Then we make Prophet paste if we don’t like the answers.”

Mercy nodded tersely, and Asher seemed placated. “Let us proceed then.”

I still couldn’t resist the urge to charge up the stairs and give the pasty Inyoka a scare. He’d spent all this time one step ahead of us. I wanted to get my own back with a good startle at least.

We shouldn’t have been surprised that the guy who knew the future was still one step ahead of us. Up above ground, in the observatory, there was no sign of him. All of the papers were in disarray, and the books were gone. It looked like he’d come right back upstairs, packed in a hurry, and then fled.

Asher took it all in with disappointment graven on his face. “Our fate…”

Mercy slumped down on the bed with a groan. “After all that, he’s gone.”

“Gone, but not forgotten.” Down on his haunches, Asher started digging through the papers. “There are notes here that might guide our path. Interpretations of prophecy. Fragments of history. He told us of the Shards but not of their location or guardians. From these papers, perhaps we can discern where we should next turn.”

I wasn’t so confident. “Asher, do we even know anything he told us was true? I mean, the dude dumped us in a pit. Can we really trust any of this?”

“If he had intended our deaths then could he not have left us in the ground? And would a simpler tale not have turned us to his service far more readily than something so convoluted?” He had handfuls of scrolls, half-crushed in his desperate grip. “What was the benefit of his deception?”

Mercy had flopped back on the cot. “Some people are just assholes?”

Asher dropped the scrolls and turned to her with his tail lashing. “No. I refuse to believe that this was all for nothing. I believe in the Prophet’s words, if not his methods.”

“Alright, let’s just calm it down. We’ve all had a hard day. Asher, why don’t we have a look through the papers and see if there is anything that might help point us in the right direction. Mercy, why don’t you have a nap and chill out.”

Mercy rolled over onto her side. “Way ahead of you, boss.”

Nobody had made it clear to us whether Eternals actually needed to do things like eat or sleep but from Mercy’s snoring, we discovered that it was possible at least. After the day that we’d had, sleep sounded extremely tempting, but I couldn’t leave Asher alone to his frantic scrabbling through the papers.

In a fantasy world, I’d been expecting Kingdoms and Empires all over the map, but from the papers we’d discovered, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of royalty or nobility. There were notes here and there on long-dead dynasties, but for all the Lunar Court’s talk of stagnation, the history of Amaranth seemed to be one of constant chaos and change. Most of the nations founded only lasted as long as a generation or two before somebody else swept in and built a new one on their graves. It made keeping track of any one object being passed hand to hand through the years practically impossible. I had seriously underestimated how little I knew about this new world. Everything seemed to either refer to some person I’d never heard of, someplace that hadn’t existed for a thousand years, or some historic battle between two sides that nobody could even remember. It was infuriating.

New Skill Discovered! [Ancient History]

Ancient History: Rank 1/10

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, my attention span finally gave out, and I fell asleep, only to be nudged awake by Asher, who was trying to retrieve a squashed scroll from underneath me. Sluggish, I wandered over to the bed and gave Mercy a prod. “Move over.”

She raised one finger in an entirely not-ladylike gesture and went on snoring. If I hadn’t been so sleepy, I could have picked the whole bed up and flipped her off in return, but I really didn’t have the energy. I slumped down to sit by the foot of the bed and let my head tip back until my horns rested on the straw mattress.

My only consolation in this arrangement was that Mercy was probably getting fleas.

Chapter 7

Thumping stirred me from my rest. For a disorienting moment, I thought that I was back home, waking up in my own bed with one of my roommates banging on the door because I’d slept through my alarm. Then my eyes opened, and I remembered the truth. It had not all been an awesome dream. I actually was a big buff Chagnar Faun.

Sweet.

The banging continued. Somebody was at the door of the observatory. I lumbered to my feet with a grunt and retrieved my sword from where I’d left it in case the Prophet had finally come back to face his comeuppance. Mercy was still snoring away like a wood-chipper, and Asher’s manic energy had given out, and he lay curled up with his tail by his nose beside the cold ashes in the fireplace. Guess I was the butler. The thumping grew ever more insistent, and in my half-asleep state, I wondered about the state of the Amaranth postal service. I was reaching out to open the door when a stone axe-head splintered it apart an inch from my hand. Mail-men were aggressive in these parts.

“Wake up! Fighting time!”

A spear was shoved through the hole that the axe had made, stopping just short of me before being wiggled around and withdrawn. More blows hammered on the door, and more chinks of light shone through the new holes.

“Wake up!”

Asher was already at my elbow, making me jump again. “I am prepared.”

Mercy was at my other side just a moment later, drawing back her bowstring and bitching all the way. “Is a decent night’s sleep too much to ask for?”

“You slept longer than the rest of us put together. Are you trying to hibernate for the winter?”

“Don’t think I won’t ‘accidentally’ shoot you.”

A whole board of the door was knocked away, and an elongated snout with all the color of a flatworm poked through. For a moment I thought somebody had descaled the Prophet, but this thing was half the height and three times as ugly as any Inyoka. Long ears flopped back onto its shoulders, and somewhere behind; the beady black eyes. Those sunken eyes were the worst part—they looked like the dried-up darkness of some dead thing.

My Bestiary skill provided me with the name Svart, but that was about it as far as information went. “They’re svart.”

“They do not look very intelligent to me.” It took so long for me to realize that Asher was making a joke that the svart had broken through before I could let out a surprised laugh.

Mercy let fly before the first of them could scramble through the gap—a perfect shot, right through its forehead. Then on they came, pushing the corpse of their companion aside like it was nothing. The chaos as they scrambled and crawled over each other to get at us was enough to make me miss the intuitive synchronicity of the hobs. They were all armed with the same primitive weapons, little more than sharpened stones tied to sticks, but while the first spearhead had been plain flint, these ones were shining quartz. I charged in to bottleneck them in the door, only realizing halfway through my first swing that I didn’t really have enough room in the observatory to swing a cat, let alone a great-sword.

My first hit clipped the leading svart in half at the waist, but if we’d hoped for any kind of fear or empathy for the fallen from the others, we were sorely mistaken. The rest came on regardless, and I couldn’t get my sword up for another swing without gouging a strip out of the wall and getting tangled in furniture. “Damn it.”

The svart seemed to have more sense than to charge me head-on, but now they tried to encircle me instead, jabbing at me with their spears while the ones I was ignoring darted in to hack at my legs with their little hatchets. I dragged my sword in a wide circle around me, trying to scatter them back, but now the rear half of their gang were slinking into the building and training their bows on us. “Damn it.”

The first arrow grazed over the top of my scalp, deflecting off my horns without much damage, but the next one was aimed at Asher, and I couldn’t have that. My hand shot out as if I was going to be fast enough to catch it. Instead, the arrow lodged right through my palm. “Damn it!”

I was not enjoying getting my ass kicked by these little goblin-looking assholes. It was embarrassing. If they’d brought a giant monster along to beat the crap out of me, I would have been fine with dying, but this was just sad. Mercy peppered the crowd with arrows, but there were at least five svart for each one of us, and more seemed to keep coming. Another of the runts dashed in with a knife aimed at a part of my anatomy that I really did not want to be stabbed—a part that I wanted stabbed even less than all the other parts of my body that I didn’t want stabbed. They were getting cocky. I gave her a solid kick in the face.

She tumbled back, end over end, to bowl down some of the archers, sending their shots wide. I caught one of the thrusting spears and yanked the whole svart off his feet and into easy headbutting range.

My sword fell useless to the ground. I didn’t need it. This body was a weapon, and so I slapped my pierced hand down onto the nearest svart head.

While it hurt like hell, it also slammed the arrow through the svart’s egg-shell skull and into whatever reeking sponge it used for a brain. When I pulled my hand free, the arrow was gone. The hole was not, unfortunately.

The rest of the svart were losing their bravery now. Their eyes were turning away from me to dart to their companions, trying to guess who was going to be dumb enough to wade in next. That was when Asher’s spell sparked off. There was no dramatic crack of lightning, no bolt from the blue, just a glowing static charge, clinging not to the enemy, but to me.

Whenever I came close to one of the svart, my personal electric cloud discharged with a little snap, crackle, or pop, surrounding them with the same nimbus as me. Asher was letting me light up his targets. A grin spread across my face, then I put down my head, scooped up my sword, and charged.

However the svart thought this was going to play out, they did not expect a face full of angry Faun coming right at them. The ones that couldn’t scramble out of my way were bowled over, the rest tripped over their dead companions trying to get clear. Either way, they were all lit up with electricity.

I barged right out into the daylight and the open air, finally dragging my sword up from where it was trailing behind me to take a proper swing again. The stragglers of the svart warband were lingering around the entrance and regretting their lack of courage as my blade carved a bloody swathe through them all.

Pieces of svart tumbled apart, spraying the yellowed grass and ancient stonework with steaming black ichor. It didn’t even smell like blood, more like antifreeze. Wretched things.

Inside the observatory, there was a thunderclap and a flash of blue light that sent the remaining living Svart scampering out with smoke rising off them, the few wispy white hairs on their balding heads alight.

Most of them, I caught on the backswing.

But a few of the lucky ones managed to scramble their way clear, leaping over the edge of the ridge, down to the disturbed earth where we’d first come into this world. Like hell were they getting away. After shooting me full of holes, trying to lop off my Chagnar Faun-hood, and beating the ever-loving hell out of me there was no chance I was letting any one of the runts run free.

I charged across to the drop-off with my sword raised, ready to make an epic leap and cut them down. Sadly, they’d brought a friend.

Whatever that thing was, my Bestiary skill was not up to identifying it. It sure as hell wasn’t a Svart. It was almost easier not to look right at it and work my way in from the outside. I could see the Svart dangling from the chains that were meant to bind the abomination and let them steer it. They were ancient chains, once golden but now filthy with age, the links twisted by the immense power of the thing straining against them. Where the chains met flesh there was a golden band, still perfect and pristine, rubbed to a sheen where it pressed into the flesh that looked too smooth and perfect to belong on anything real.

My eyes started to hurt just looking at this thing, and it only took a moment for me to realize why. The golden seams in its marbled flesh were not metal, they were sunlight. The same light that filled up the Solar Eternals had been twisted and trapped inside this thing. The spark of divinity, bound in a puppet of meat.

The center of its mass was bulbous, pinched in by the gold of its restraints, but it was the only part of it that truly looked like a body. From slits within the lowest part of the abomination, claws like a cat’s protruded, not to hook but to twist and turn like the limbs of some great insect. The top of the torso looked almost human but mirrored wrong, with a limb extending in each of the four cardinal directions. Each one was reverse jointed and ending in barbed sickle blades that seemed to be forged from the same material as all the rest, matching the skittering things at its base. At the top, where you’d expect a head, there was a perfect sphere, punched right through the center with emptiness, where others might have had a face. Bands of gold made their grinding orbit around that open head, two rings, crisscrossing through each other with a painful screech. Within that hollow, a tiny star was trapped. Burning with the divine spark.

My will to fight faltered for a moment in the face of that thing. I didn’t even have words to describe it properly. There was something wrong with it. It was wrong in some fundamental way that made my empty stomach twist within me. Mercy and Asher caught up to me, each smeared with black blood. Mercy had restocked her makeshift quiver with the svart’s arrows, and Asher was carrying one of their crystal-tipped spears. The same revulsion washed over them. Mercy shuddered. “What the hell is that?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but Asher already had the right answer. “That is not important. All that matters is that it is our foe, and it must be destroyed.”

The abomination had no eyes, but I could feel the pressure of its attention on us then. The skittering claws that it had used for little more than to nudge the Svart away from its feet before now sprang into motion, proving just as capable of hauling it up the vertical cliff-face as across the torn-up soil of the Prophet’s little graveyard.

It mounted the cliff and was coming right for us with its sickle-arms raised before any of us had a chance to think. The Svart that had been in its way were punctured by the skittering legs, and the ones hanging on to its chains were flicked free with a twist. Only some instinct that I didn’t even know I had brought my sword up to block the descending strike.

Where those bone blades struck, they gouged wedges out of my sword. All those bulging muscles I’d been so proud of on my arms and back started screaming with the strain. My feet sank into the solid earth beneath me with the force of the blow. It was impossibly strong.

Asher danced back, already gathering a storm in his fist, and Mercy fired off an arrow into the glowing orb in the void of its head, only for the shot to vanish without a trace. The abomination spun gracefully on the spot, like some murderous carousel, trying to bring its other sickles to bear on us. My sword was ripped from my grasp and flung aside as I tried to stand my ground and protect the others.

When the other blades came around I had no way to block them, but I still couldn’t let them hit Mercy. I launched myself forward, pitting raw strength against the abomination. There was no way I was going to win. No way that I was going to move that immovable object, but I didn’t need to.

When my shoulder hit the closest claw leg, it gave away.

Those scuttling claws were too flexible to be fixed to solid bone. The whole abomination rocked forward before it could scuttle in a circle and find its balance. The blades ripped a pair of long gouges out of the earth instead of halving Mercy.

Time stopped for just an instant as the numbers beside Combat Skill in my brain vanished, and it flared with moonlight before settling, dark and dead. Set in stone.

I was back in the moment. The same leg I’d nudged now reared up to impale me. This thing was fun from top to bottom. I leapt to the side as the spike punctured the earth where I’d stood and managed to land on my sword, coming up armed and ready to rock.

Asher’s spell sparked off, surrounding the abomination in a blue-white glow that seemed to drown out some of the flickering golden light from within it. My eyes no longer hurt to look at the thing. That was progress at least.

Stepping up to bat, I took a home run swing at the abomination’s twisted torso.

My sword jarred to a stop. Like there was sheet steel under the spongy surface. Where blade bit into the pallid flesh more golden light oozed up to the surface. Like this whole thing was full of sunny delight.

Now that I had a half-a-second to look, I could see that the rest of the central tower was pincushion peppered with arrows. Mercy had been hard at work. No wonder the abomination was pissed at her.

It seemed to ignore me and the glowing hole I’d hacked in its side entirely. The spinning dervish of blades had come to an abrupt halt too. For a moment I kind of hoped that it was reconsidering the whole fight, then the star in its head sputtered to life, and a great golden gout of flame came rushing out.

Asher was the solar flare’s target, and he was so lost in concentration that he didn’t have a chance to dodge. The grass caught alight in a strip leading up to him, then his rags ignited with a whoosh and the force of the beam knocked him off his feet. The flames guttered and died a moment later, but Asher wasn’t moving.

“Mercy! If he’s alive, get him up.” I ducked under one of the sickle blades as the whole thing sprang back into cyclone motion. “It is going after him. It must be scared of magic.”

Arrows darted past me as I moved. The remaining Svart had finally found the courage to follow their pet up the ridge. Just what we needed. More trouble.

I didn’t even try to meet the abomination’s next attack head-on. Not when I was this close. Instead, I swung with all my might at the place where the insectile arm and blade were fused.

[Critical Hit]

The sickle spun off to embed in the dirt behind me. Sunlight trickled from the stump of the abomination’s arm to sizzle in the dirt. Bizarre as this thing was, if it bled, we could kill it.

Spinning back into motion in a shimmer of sharp edges, the whole abomination moved off along the ridge, dancing out of reach. Apparently, it had taken notice of me at last.

Asher must have been up again because a bolt of lightning cracked through the air to hit the abomination square in the center of its mass. It was the same spell that had killed Orphia in one hit, and the abomination barely rocked on its bug legs.

There went the theory that it was scared of magic. Asher must have just been the only enemy in range of its sunbeam. Just like I was now.

The realization arrived just a moment before the fire. Just enough time for me to get the flat of my sword up.

The first hit of the beam sent me skidding along the ridge, both arms straining against the pressure being exerted against me, and the dull iron of my sword started to glow red at the edges.

The red turned to white, and the metal lit up as the blade seemed to waver in the heat. Sword or no sword, I was burning up.

My skidding heel hit a chunk of buried stone, and I managed to brace myself, twisting my body to turn the flat of the sword. Instead of directly opposing the solar beam, I was now redirecting it, bouncing it off to ignite first a thick strip of grass, then up into the Svart archers that were still fool enough to take potshots at me. They collapsed in on themselves like they were made of wax.

My hands were scorched, and molten metal was searing through my skin, spattering in great dollops across my arms and eating into my flesh. I was not dying like this.

Setting my feet, I pushed back against the molten blade, fingers sinking into the softening metal as I took step after agonizing step back towards the enemy.

I tumbled forward onto my hands and knees when the beam was suddenly gone and the pressure relieved. Damn, I was tired. It took a real effort to lift up my head.

The abomination had been knocked over, and the beam that had been cooking me was now pointed up into the sky, like a pillar of light from the heavens. As I watched, it tried its damnedest to regain its feet, but something was pinning it to the floor.

Over by the pyre that had been the observatory, the other two Eternals were hard at work. Mercy stood guard over the Inyoka, firing off shots at the last few living Svart as Asher’s claws were upraised and shaking with effort. His eyes were burning so bright it was almost blinding.

The strain came through when he spoke. He was usually so calm his voice was near monotone, but now every word wavered. “You wished to know what skills we unlocked? I have selected the pillar of Cosmos and the Gravity Snare ability.”

Staggering to my feet, I called back, “That is unbelievably cool.”

I tapped into my own Divine Pillar to fuse the metal scraps that had been my sword back together, then I charged.

Asher’s snare couldn’t hold forever. Stoicism aside, I could tell that he was almost tapped out already. This had to end. As I got closer to the gravity snare, it became easier to run, like I was going downhill. By the time I was within spitting distance of the abomination’s flailing claws, it was less like running and more like falling.

I kicked off from the ground with all my strength, raised my re-forged sword above my head, and let the irresistible pull of gravity carry me the rest of the way, slamming my sword down into the abomination with all the strength I had left.

It bucked and rocked beneath me, trying to throw me clear or bring one of its blade-arms to bear, but the snare still held. Fighting gravity and the immense weight of my own sword, I hauled the weapon up and hammered it down again.

[18 Damage]

And again.

[19 Damage]

This wasn’t a glorious battle. It wasn’t even a fight. The abomination was meant to be carved, and I was the butcher.

[18 Damage]

Sunlight was pouring out of the abomination now, bubbling out of every hole and coating my arms, stinging my eyes, and soaking its way down my legs to drip down the sides. I struck again.

The shell that had kept all this juicy mess inside was shattered to pieces as the spongy flesh fell away. I could see the dying flickering light in the heart of the abomination now, and I wanted it blotted out. The sword fell from my flame-deadened fingers, and I plunged my numb hands into the cavity, digging around inside the light until I felt the heart of light trapped deep inside it.

My fingers closed around that pulsing life inside it, and I ripped it out.

[Critical Hit]

All the light left the abomination in an instant, and it became nothing more and nothing less than flesh. Just like my fellow Eternals, it began to melt away to nothing, decomposing beneath me before I could clamber free. The beating heart turned to ashes in my hand. When I felt solid ground beneath my feet again, I finally believed that it was over.

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Potency increased to 24

Combat: 10/10

Sword: Rank 2/10

Acrobatics: Rank 2/10

448 Experience Gained

400 Glory Gained

Tier of Glory Ascended!

Sweet.

Chapter 8

Asher was slumped down in a heap in front of the blazing observatory, not dying from his burns but looking miserable enough that he probably wished he were. “Why the long face? We won!”

Mercy didn’t even smirk at my Inyoka-snout humor. “Ugh, gross! I can see your burnt-up hand bones!” Guess misery was infectious.

“Come on, guys, we’ve been here one day, and we are already Tier Two. We killed that…whatever it was before it could kill us. I’d call that a win.”

“The flesh-forged were weapons in the Revelation. A living arms-race,” Asher moaned. “Grotesque corruptions of the Primal Divine Pillar by both mortals and the servants of the Void God.”

“You got that from the prophet’s old papers?”

“They contained a wealth of knowledge about this world,” Asher answered as he flopped onto his back. “A bountiful cornucopia of knowledge that is now nothing but kindling.”

The roof of the observatory was made of paper, so it burned up faster than you could say “Fire hazard.” It was enough to make me take a step back and really take in the damage. There was no real way to tell when the place caught fire—whether it was Asher’s lightning bolts or a glancing zap from the abomination’s sun-ray—the only thing that was certain was that nothing inside was going to be usable, ever again.

I plopped myself down beside Asher with a grunt. Now that the fight was done, I could really feel the pain. I tried not to look at my hands. Mercy was right. It was enough to make you sick to your stomach.

The heat on our backs was far from pleasant, but I couldn’t rustle up the energy to move. I needed to do something about the state of myself. I couldn’t go on with a fraction of my health left forever. Not fighting the way that I did.

Turning my attention inwards, I was immediately confronted with the Pillar of Artifice already glowing brightly in my mind. Maybe armor would keep me from ending up in this state again, but right now I needed something more immediate. I turned away to consider Ascension. This was the self-improvement pillar, the one that would let me super-charge this new body of mine. Could I use it to give myself some sort of health regeneration? Even if I did, it wouldn’t help Asher. I needed to be able to heal other people too, and that meant Primal, the creation of life.

I poured my glory into the Primal Pillar and flinched as it blazed to life. This time around, I didn’t linger. Staring at the pretty light show, I leapt right into the divine skills that had been unlocked.

Primal 1: Restoration

Restores 45% of an injured creature’s health.

Primal 1: Origination

Allows for the creation of new life; Limited by an Eternal’s knowledge of lifeforms.

Primal 1: Primal Infusion

Infuses weapons and spells with the primal properties of venom and disease; Limited by an Eternal’s knowledge of venoms and diseases.

Primal Passive: Lifesense

Detects all living creatures within an Eternal’s Sphere of Influence.

Restoration was the one I wanted, but I took a glance at the others too. All the fighting had given me 541 experience points to invest in new skills, so maybe I could splash out.

Origination let me create life, but I wasn’t anywhere near ready to be a daddy just yet.

Primal Infusion let me push venoms and diseases into my attacks and spells. As Mercy would say, yuck.

Even Lifesense, which let me detect whether something I was touching was alive or dead seemed to be only circumstantially useful at best. At least nobody could play possum and get away with it as long as I was prodding all the corpses I found.

After I’d invested 300 experience in Restoration, I felt the breath of Chernghast on the back of my neck, so I turned my attention back to the breakdown of all my abilities. There, next to the words, Acolyte of Chernghast, I saw Tier 2. A new blessing from dog. God. God-dog.

Maulkin – Chagnar Faun of the Lunar Court – 2nd Tier of Glory

Statistics:

HP: 65/440

Devotion: 240/240

Glory: 0

Attributes:

Potency: 24

Celerity: 17

Vitality: 11

Piety: 4

Skills:

Combat: Rank 10/10

Sword: Rank 2/10

Acrobatics: Rank 2/10

Bestiary: Rank 1/10

Dungeoneering: Rank 2/10

Ancient History: Rank 1/10

Traits:

Relentless: The Faun are the greatest hunters on Amaranth, known for pursuing prey for days or even weeks at a time before closing in to strike.

Effect: Faun are immune to fatigue, their Attributes do not degrade over time without rest.

Acolyte of Chernghast: Chosen by the wolf that waits, you bear his invisible mark and walk the path that will someday make you the personification of inevitable death.

Effect: The presence of the dead reinvigorates you. For every corpse within your Sphere of Influence, all of your attributes are increased by 1.

Bloodthirst: Your continued devotion to Chernghast has granted a fresh boon.

Effect: The coming of death fills you with grim vitality. Each injury that you deal restores a portion of your own life. 3% of Damage Dealt.

Bloodthirst was sweet. When I dealt damage to an enemy, I would be healed by 3% of the damage done. That wasn’t much, but if I kept whaling on big gangs of weak monsters like svarts, it was going to add up. I could have used that earlier. Thanks a bunch, Chernghast.

Opening up my eyes, I realized that Asher and Mercy were staring down at me, or rather, level with me, since I was still the same height as them standing when I was sitting. “Uh, hi?”

Mercy kicked me in the foot. “We were talking to you, and you didn’t say anything. Then you started glowing. What the hell?”

“I was spending my Glory. And now I can do this!”

I held up my withered and flaking hands, then concentrated on the place in my mind that felt like Restoration. Almost immediately, my injuries began to ooze clear fluid. Mercy gagged and turned away, but Asher was fascinated as the flesh grew back into the places where it had been burned away, and my skin crawled back up my forearms to seal over the top.

[215/440 Health]

I wasn’t quite back to normal, but Restoration didn’t seem to have anything else to give at the moment—at least, not for me. I held out my hand to Asher, and he took it. Through my Lifesense, I could tell that he had 286 health left. Maybe that ability wasn’t going to be completely useless after all. Restoration flickered back to life when I touched him. I guess I could only heal any one person by so much at a time. I had to grab on so that Asher didn’t pull his hand away when the Primal energy started flowing through me and into him.

The blackened scales on his chest, charred by the sun-beam and exposed by his incinerated robes, returned to their old blue-green luster, and he was left with 336 health when I was done. 50 points a pop wasn’t bad. I wouldn’t be saving us from certain death any time soon, but I could get us back into action after a minor tussle or two.

“Mercy, do you need healing up?”

She still wasn’t looking our way. “Nope. I’m fine. Totally fine. Please keep your nasty oozy hands away from me.”

The weird plasma had vanished once my injuries were gone, but there was no reason to tell her that. I clambered to my feet and immediately rubbed my hand through her hair. “Free gel!”

She spun on her heel, eyes narrowed, jaw set, and fist pulled back. “I will end you.”

“Bickering children”—Asher saved me from the inevitable but fair bruise I was about to receive—“we need to move on.”

Mercy touched her hair, realized I was just messing with her, and let her rage simmer down. “How do you figure? Aren’t you meant to stay put when you are lost?”

“This fire is sending up a tower of smoke. Smoke that can be seen for miles.” Asher’s tail lashed. “It is a beacon to any who might wish us harm.”

“And since everybody in this world has been trying to kill us since we arrived, that’s bad news,” I said and groaned.

Mercy was already in motion, grabbing what she could from the svart corpses. “But where do we go?”

The svart didn’t have any money. In fact, they didn’t have anything of value at all beyond their weapons, and those were pretty crappy even compared to the stuff that I’d knocked together out of prison bars. Mercy had as many arrows as she could carry within a minute or two, and then I turned to Asher. “Any bright ideas? Did you find any hints about where we should be headed in all the notes?”

“The Prophet felt certain that there was a shard nearby, that our arrival here was indicative of its presence.”

“That’s vague,” Mercy chipped in as she passed.

“And it doesn’t really point us in a direction…”

I walked around the burning building in a slow circle, coming back to where I started with my finger already pointing. “Let’s go that way.”

Mercy was finally done raiding all the corpses. “Why?”

Asher sighed. “Any direction is as good as another.”

“Because there are hills over there. We’ll be able to see farther from up high. We can then work out where we are going.”

Mercy’s mouth fell open. “That… is actually a smart idea.”

“I’m not just a pretty face.” I grinned down at her.

“We really need to find you a mirror before you embarrass yourself by saying stuff like that.”

We headed for the hills as fast as our newly healed legs would carry us for the first mile. Then when an army of svart didn’t come pouring out of the woodwork to slaughter us, we slowed down a little and started to chat. “So all those notes and we don’t know where a single shard is?”

Asher seemed to be moving faster now that we were out in the sun, finding his stride. Maybe it was a cold-blooded thing, or maybe Restoration had made up for the night’s sleep he had skipped. “The provenance of the human shard was simple enough to trace. It has never been hidden. Rather, it has been publicly displayed at every opportunity.”

“So we go get that one?” Mercy asked.

“Were we natives to this world, well versed in the geography, that would most likely be simple, but I for one do not know where the Shattered Bastion lies.”

I perked up. “Shattered Bastion? Oh yeah, that is just on the other side of this hill.”

He glanced my way. “Indeed?”

Mercy rolled her eyes.

“No, man, I don’t know my ass from my elbow here.”

Asher’s tail lashed as he strode on ahead, but he didn’t deign to respond to that. Fair.

Now that we were getting farther from the observatory ruins, the grass was growing lush and green, run through with wildflowers. Now and again, a petal would drift by on the wind—not the pale pink of cherry blossom, but rather rich and red like a rose’s. Following a stream down into a dip soon revealed their source. There was a copse of trees lying between us and the hills, blossoming blood red and showering the whole area in their cast-off petals. Mercy stopped to take them in. “Five bucks they are evil vampire trees.”

“You’ve got money?”

She patted her non-existent pockets. “Figurative five bucks.”

We’d all stopped by now. Going around the mini-forest probably wouldn’t take that long compared to wading through. An extra hour’s hiking maybe. “I don’t know…we had some pretty wild colored trees back where we came from without them needing to drink human blood.”

“Hey, I’m just going along with the theme of everything here trying to kill us.”

Asher glanced back at us. “The Prophet did not try to kill us.”

“Didn’t he though?” I might not have wanted to have this argument again, but Mercy had no inhibitions about it.

“The Prophet provided us with everything that we needed to pursue our fate.”

Mercy held up her hands. “Or maybe he was just a nutcase that dropped us in a dungeon to die, and two of us did.”

I didn’t want Asher to feel like we were ganging up on him. “I don’t think we can blame him for Orphia being a psychopath.”

Mercy turned her scowl on me. “If he could see the future, how come he didn’t predict that? I say we blame him for everything that happens from now on since he knew it was going to happen and didn’t warn us.”

“Not sure it works that way.”

She sneered. “What you do know for sure could be written on the back of a stamp.”

“None of us know what is going on here.” I was trying to keep my own temper under control. I’d dealt with worse abuse than this working in a fast-food joint and kept on smiling. “Getting bitchy about not knowing isn’t going to help us find out.”

Her hand drifted up to her quiver, and her eyes widened. “Did you just call me a bitch?”

“If the collar fits?”

She was pulling an arrow and I was bringing my sword around when Asher’s Gravity Snare knocked us both off our feet, sending us tripping and tumbling sideways until we ended up pressed together next to the tiny black hole he’d just conjured up. “Civility among Eternals, if you would.”

Mercy hissed. “Tell that to beef boy!”

“Beef boy?!”

I “accidentally” nudged her with my elbow as I tried to pull away from the snare, but I didn’t say anything. Now that the initial flush of irritation had passed, I could see that Asher was right. We were acting like brats.

“Beef Boy is definitely my rap name.” I grinned at Mercy even as she tried to pry us apart by kicking off my ribcage, and whatever tantrum she was having ended in a snort of laughter.

She called out. “Alright, Dad, we’ll behave ourselves.”

The snare blinked out of existence, and we tumbled apart. Asher was shaking his head at us, but if he’d really been mad he could have left us pinned to our get-along event horizon. “Shall we proceed to test your theory of sinister vegetation?”

Mercy was gathering up her scattered hoard of arrows, but she stopped long enough to call out, “Team vampire trees!”

As it turned out, the trees were not trying to kill us. The undergrowth and the rabbit trail alongside the stream we followed into the dense wood were carpeted in their petals, so you might have turned an ankle if you were rushing, but I didn’t consider that to be a sign of evil, exactly. “Guess you owe me five bucks.”

“There is still time for this to go bad.” For all that Mercy was probably joking, she did have an arrow nocked the whole time we were creeping under the canopy. We traveled through the woods bunched together, waiting for an ambush, and when it didn’t arrive, there was an almost palpable sense of disappointment.

The trees aside, it was hard to feel like everything else in the forest didn’t have at least a little bit of bloodlust to it. Tiny black birds with feathers that shimmered like an oil slick swooped at Mercy without cause or reason, and the path that seemed so solid one moment slipped away from beneath our feet the next.

There was no wind beneath the trees; it was almost unnaturally still and silent. I could hear my own breath, and I could hear my own heart. When one of us took too heavy a step, you could almost feel it vibrating to you through the roots.

None of us were speaking; it felt irreverent to chat while you walked through such utter stillness. It’d be like farting in a church. That silence was probably what let us hear the distant sound through the muffling effects of the woods. The rumble beneath our feet. The rhythmic heartbeat thump of something coming.

Mercy glanced my way with alarm apparent on her face, but we had to grab Asher by a sleeve and press a hand over his mouth before he was shaken out of his reverie. We scrambled up into the foliage. I was the ladder, and Mercy was the hoist to get our reptilian companion off the ground.

We stayed there longer than I liked to think about, just feeling the shaking coming up through the tree. I was ready to fight, of course—just because something was big enough to shake a whole forest, that didn’t mean I didn’t want a piece of it—but the way that the petals were bouncing on the ground made me want to see what I was up against at least.

We caught glimpses of them through the trees. White as death, they were surrounded by a cloud of the same birds that had swooped down on Mercy, again and again. They were too big to be animals. Too big to be anything that moved. The smell hit us a moment later. Rot.

When one of them finally came into sight, I didn’t even know what I was looking at for the longest time. I’d assumed it was going to be something like the abomination that we fought before, but it was something else entirely. The bulk of its body was mountainous, and its shape wasn’t far off that of a hill either—until you got down to the stem protruding from beneath the dangling cap of its fruiting body. Beneath the umbrella of its mass, there were three legs as thick around as the trunk of the tree we were hanging onto. It was devoid of any real shape but moving furiously.

The birds swooped at it, pecking tiny gobs of the giant moving mushroom’s cap away and setting the stink of rot free. Green-tinted slime ran down from those little pecks, crusting onto the surface as it dried in the air. Where the creature hit a tree, it rebounded, blind, and set off rambling in another direction until it found some space that it could squeeze through. It was pure luck it didn’t try to push past the one where we were hiding and crush us into just another stain on its surface.

One of these things would have been bizarre enough, but there were dozens of them roaming through the woods, running as fast as they could with no reason or drive, followed by a cloud of birds and spores that stained the red petals a dusty pink. We held onto our place in the tree until the soft tramping sounds of the stampede had passed us by, then we eased our way down to the ground.

Even now, we didn’t speak. Asher and Mercy were both wide-eyed, and I probably looked a bit shell-shocked too. The air was thick with spores, and they clung to us as we moved through the woods. By the time that we found another river to wash off, some of them had already started spreading little spiderweb-thin tendrils out across our skin.

In case you were wondering, nothing helps with team-bonding like having to scrape fungus off one another. Try it some time.

After we’d all stopped fretting about mushroom growth, we went back to heading for the hills, but all the dazed sightseeing was done. We kept our heads down, our ears open, and our feet moving. When blue sky started to filter back through to us without a bloodstain to it, I let out a huff of held breath.

It was premature.

Just beyond the tree-line, another band of svart were swarming, heading away from us, uphill alongside the waterfall that fed the stream we’d followed out of the woods. At first, I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing ahead of them, flashes of color beyond the waving spearheads, glimpses of people, not monsters. The svart hadn’t noticed our arrival at all. We could have stood back and let them pass unscathed. Mercy parsed what she was seeing first. “They’re attacking a caravan.”

I hefted my sword and started forward. “Let’s stop them then.”

Asher’s cold touch on my arm made me pause. “We are not recovered from our last conflict. To fight now will be a risk to our lives, and we have a greater purpose to fulfill than clashing with simple raiders. We must let our heads guide us, not our hearts.”

“Those people can die. I can’t.” I brushed his hand off me. “Shove that logic up your ass.”

The screaming up ahead had already started. The trilling shrieks of the svart. The pain of the Dvergar. I was running as fast as I could, and I still wasn’t going to be quick enough. I made a clumsy swipe at the svart stragglers as I caught up to them.

Ichor spattered across the slope, tainting the stream, but I didn’t slow. The clattering and shattering sounds of combat up ahead would not give me that luxury. The rear ranks of the svart were bunched up, trying to press in between the wooden wagons that the Dvergar had circled as makeshift barricades. Fish in a barrel. A proper swing lopped off a row of heads before the rest even noticed I was there.

Caught between the Dvergar shield wall and my fury, there was no way out for the svart. In that circle of wagons, they had two options, die or face me head-on. They were cowards enough that they seemed to waver between their choices long enough for me to take another wild swing, and I cut into some and bludgeoned others with the bodies of their kin.

The courage of the desperate seized the svart, and they came on at me. There were a dozen of them, stabbing and swinging their weapons, but mostly, they planned to bear me down with their weight of numbers alone. Like cornered rats, they’d turned vicious, and I was too busy trying to hack them up to defend myself.

They were driving me back by the mass of their bodies alone, and their crooked little faces were contorting as they pushed into wicked peg-toothed grins. They thought they were winning. They were right. My sword was pinned between their swarming bodies and mine, holding back the press of them while the others reached around it to stab and hack at me.

One clambered up over another’s backs until it was level with my face. Stepping onto the back side of my blade for balance, it brought a pair of cruel hooked daggers up, ready to bring them down and stab the light out of my eyes.

Then an arrow took the svart through the throat, and it toppled back on top of the rest. From behind me, I could hear Mercy’s battle cry echoing up the hill. “Beef boy!”

I couldn’t help laughing, despite my wounds, and despite the snarling monsters just inches away. I knew that everything was going to be alright now.

A volley of arrows came down, peppering the ranks of the svart and setting them to wailing. With every one that fell away from the press of bodies, I took a step forward. Finally, there were only three svart left, trapped between me and the Dvergar, and I was able to break free of their grasping hands to hammer the blade of my sword down with both hands like a guillotine blade, straight into their chests.

Ichor bubbled up, and their death rattles warbled out, but the fight was over. We had won again.

Victory!

Potency increased to 25

Sword: Rank 3/10

125 Experience Gained

For a moment there was blissful silence, then the shield wall fell away, the half-dozen Dvergar backing away from me amidst a cloud of whispers. I could understand their language thanks to my Eternal gift of speaking in tongues, but all that they seemed to be whispering was that one word, back and forth to each other. “Eternals.”

Behind the line, I saw the bodies on the ground. The Dvergar who’d taken up arms or stood sentry before the coming of the svart. One was torn clear in half, and another was missing his head entirely. The last, beardless, and presumably female, was full of holes, punched through with enough spear thrusts that she looked like a particularly meaty swiss cheese. Yet something made me reach out and touch her—the same sense that let me know that she was still alive against all evidence to the contrary.

With a pulse of divine power, I let Restoration flow into her, and the woman jerked and heaved beneath my hands. That same sticky fluid bubbled up in every one of her wounds. One of the other Dvergar darted forward with an axe in hand, ready to stop my desecration of his friend’s corpse, but that was when her eyes snapped open, and she gasped in a lungful of air. He scampered back.

Whatever font of life I was drawing on to heal wounds ran dry before her injuries could close, but they had gone from lethal impalement to surface punctures. She had a chance to survive now. Mercy was at my elbow by the time I was done, eyeing the other Dvergar cautiously. “Do you think you could get in one fight without nearly dying?”

I coughed up a little moon-tinted blood when I laughed. “Who wants an easy life anyway?”

Asher had arrived, lurking between the wagons with his tail lashing. Guess he was mad I’d saved these people. Well, that was just fine. I was mad at him too.

With an arm over Mercy’s shoulders for a little assist back onto my feet, I turned to greet the Dvergar. The half-dead one propped herself up on her elbows, still oozing blood. “What be you wanting?”

Mercy scoffed. “You’re welcome.”

“Yes, my thanks to you.” One of the other Dvergar moved in to help support her, and she shooed him away with a grunt. Guess she wore the pants around here. “What be you wanting for the help?”

That took the wind out of my sails. I was expecting gratitude, but that was about it. Being asked what reward I wanted made the whole thing seem less heroic and more sordid. Asher piped up from the back. “Where is this caravan headed?”

The Dvergar bristled at the sound of his voice, but after a moment, their leader called out to him. “Our next trading post be Khag Mhor.”

Asher came forward until he was almost level with us. I didn’t turn to see him. “May we accompany you?”

The Dvergar licked her lips, gaze flicking between us. “That is all you’re wanting?”

“This is new territory for us.” Mercy picked up the conversation. “Some sort of settlement where we can find our footing is probably just what we need.”

One of the other Dvergar butted in. He had a ginger beard dangling in a braid beneath his bucket helm. “They won’t be letting outsiders in. They’re barely tolerating us, and we’re blood-kin.”

Despite murmured protests from her people, the Dvergar leader climbed to her feet. “They’ll be welcoming Eternals. Everyone’s got a problem needs fixing these days. Three Eternals is a lot of fixing.”

This was more familiar territory. I smiled down at the Dvergar. “Happy to help.”

That drew another scowl out of her, but she stepped forward nonetheless, her hand held out in a fist. I bumped it with my own. “I be Gunhild. These are my boys.”

“I’m Maulkin. This is Mercy. That’s Asher.”

With introductions made, the Dvergar seemed to relax—which for Dvergar looked like getting busy. Beyond Gunhild’s odd outfit, all were armored up from heel to head in squared-off mail, bound in leather straps that made no sense at first glance since they kept their weapons and gear stowed on the sides of the wagons instead of on their person. They set about the business of getting their dead buried beneath cairns of gathered stones and getting the caravan rolling again. It took only a few minutes. This was a well-oiled machine, and these weren’t the first dead they’d had to bury.

Gunhild herself had some combination of dark riding leathers and heavy silk veils draped about her. There seemed to be no logic or pattern to them, hiding odd strips of skin from sight and holding down some hair, but letting the rest of it hang in thick dark braids elsewhere.

It took two of them to hoist Gunhild up onto the footplate of the closest wagon, but then the bondage gear they were wearing over their armor started to make sense. They clicked into place at the front of each of the wagons perfectly. Leather, metal hoops, and the wooden struts all fitting together perfectly. They had no horses to haul these things around, only themselves. I suppose that made sense for folk that lived underground. Caves probably weren’t the best place to keep a pony ranch.

Some of the wagons lacked drivers now, but they’d never needed them except to serve as lookouts. “We’ll be running hard for Khag Mhor to be beating sundown. Will you be keeping up?”

Mercy gave a terse nod. “We’ll manage.”

Gunhild gave the first thing we’d seen resembling a smile. Her teeth were grey. “Won’t be waiting for you.”

I laughed, letting Restoration close my wounds while she watched. “Won’t be needing to.”

[224/440 Health]

Asher didn’t even try to walk alongside me and Mercy, crossing over to the opposite side of the caravan to serve as a lookout on the upper slope as we followed around its curve. Either he knew he’d screwed up, or he was seething because he still thought I had. It didn’t matter which. I’d deal with him later.

Gunhild’s wagon took point, so that was the one Mercy and I stuck close to. The rest of them weren’t too chatty, and more than anything else, we needed information right now.

Mercy took point on that. I had all the social graces of a sledgehammer. “So what is Khag Mhor like?”

“What do any place be like?” Gunhild shrugged. Good to know that was a universal gesture. “Old city. Dvergar city. Half lost to svart from the mines now.”

“Anything else around here worth knowing about?”

Gunhild’s eyes narrowed. “That’d be depending what you’re wanting to be knowing about. Got bloodwoods. Got the old khag. Good iron be in the hills. Sea is splashing to the east.”

She was suspicious, but Mercy went on trying to play it cool. “Any old ruins? Any interesting history?”

“What do three Eternals be looking for exactly?”

Mercy was shaking her head, but I asked anyway. “The Rusted Blade.”

Gunhild laughed in my face until she started coughing. “You’re joking? Do you be babes believing cradle stories? There be no Rusted Blade. Nothing but an old story.”

“Hold on now.” Mercy was the one scowling now. “There is a warlord in the Shattered Bastion who has a shard right now.”

“A little man be saying he has a shard. Scaring all the other little men. Making them be bowing down to him. I can be saying things too. Doesn’t be making them true.”

If Asher was close enough to join in, he probably would have been in hysterics about destiny and the like by now, but he wasn’t. Instead, there was just three sort of sane people talking about whether or not some pasty Inyoka hiding out in the middle of nowhere was lying about a magic sword.

The conversation lulled for a while as Mercy and I chewed that over. Enough time passed for the path to tip from flat to steep. There were a few animals hopping around up here that looked kind of like long-horned goats with mossy green fur, but I guess they weren’t my distant cousins from the way they ran from me on sight.

Eventually, Mercy’s patience boiled over. “So the Dvergar weren’t given a shard?”

“Never seen it; never heard of it.” Gunhild chuckled. “Whatever Dver be having it never told anyone about it. If it be real. Which it be not.”

I recognized a dead-end when I saw it, but just because our train of thought was derailed, it didn’t mean we had to stop rolling. “So where did you guys come from?”

“We started out from Khag Elock. Far south.” Her eyes stayed fixed on the horizon. Always looking ahead. “City be falling to void spawn. Too few defenders left after raids. It be empty now, ‘less you be wanting to do trade with monsters.”

“Sorry to hear that.” Great, another touchy subject. “Khag Elock? You must have passed through some interesting places on your way up here.”

“More of my boys be dead from the road than from the siege.” Her already grim expression grew ever stonier. “If it don’t be monsters, it be bandits. If it don’t be bandits, it be void spawn. If it don’t be void spawn, stone storms be pitching us off the roads. Amaranth be trying to shrug us off. Pretend the Dver never exist. We be a cursed folk.”

With that charming little show-stopper, the conversation fizzled and died again. By the time that the sun dipped behind the mountain’s zenith, I was silently praying for some monsters to attack us just to break up the awkward silence.

Unfortunately, they didn’t oblige me.

Chapter 9

The bloodwood trees became more and more sparse the higher we climbed, and soon they gave away entirely to a scattering of standing stones, worked not with the whorls and swirls we’d seen in the observatory basement but a set of rigid, angular designs that looked about a sneeze away from being runes instead of abstracts. It wasn’t hard to make the connection between the blocky designs on the wagons and the shapes on the stones. Old Dvergar road markers guided us up to what I should have been able to describe as a cave but couldn’t quite manage to. Every line of the opening in the cliff wall was pristine and perfect—almost too perfect to believe that it had been shaped with simple tools. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe we were off to see the wizard who’d carved it out.

Even if we’d somehow overlooked the simple perfection of the entrance, there was no mistaking what came after. A set of bronze gates were set into the stone, patterned with the same designs as the stones, and they were so perfectly fitted to the tunnel that I’d wager they were watertight. They were big and shiny and caught your eye the moment you stepped in out of the dimming light. That was deliberate. I probably would have overlooked all the rest of the cunning masonry if it weren’t for my Dungeoneering knowledge dragging my eyes away from the bright and beautiful to take in all the things meant to kill me.

A row of tiny squares was cut out of the floor just a short distance into the cave for the portcullis to lock into when it was dropped from the darkness above. A glance up showed me not only the line of shadow drawn across the roof where it would emerge from but also an array of perfect square cut holes covering the whole ceiling—holes that my new skill was whispering could be used to dump scalding oil down onto anyone trapped in this killing zone. High on the walls, there were even smaller squares where archers could fire out. It seemed that the Dvergar took their security pretty seriously. That was fine by me. I didn’t really fancy the idea of waking up to an army of invading monsters either.

Gunhild didn’t give any of this impressive design work a second glance—I guess it was just normal for her. She rode her wagon all the way up to the gates and then her lead “horses” reached up to hammer on the metal with the flat of their hands.

“Who be seeking entrance to Khag Mhor?” a voice boomed out from all around us. More clever engineering at work.

“Gunhild, Matriarch of Remnant Elock, be seeking to trade and share in Mhor hospitality.” Gunhild wasn’t to be outdone, she’d stood up on the bench and was bellowing right back.

Standing there under the oil holes, with who knew how many arrows trained on us and no hope in hell of getting back out of this cave before we were full of holes, may have warped my perception of time a bit. When there was a long pause, it felt like a full year had passed.

When the voice boomed out again, I literally jumped. My feet left the ground. “Khag Mhor welcomes the Remnant Elock, but who be they longshanks with you, Gunhild?”

Of course, we were the source of the problem. Of course. I stepped forward and opened my mouth only for Gunhild to silence me with a glare. She definitely earned that Matriarch title, that was a distinctly mom-flavored glare.

“They be servants. Guardians of my train.”

Mercy made a grunt of exasperation, her mouth flying open. I had to pick her up by the head, wrapping a hand around her mouth before she could interrupt.

“Longshanks don’t be welcome here, Gunhild. Specially not them with firedamp eyes. Send them outside and the gate be swinging open.”

Mercy did her best to kick me, but I was so used to it by this point that I didn’t even fuss. When she licked my hand, I figured her tantrum had passed, so I dropped her by my side once more, smearing her own spittle up her face and drying my palm on her hair.

“They be more than servants.” Gunhild glanced down at the two of us as I held Mercy and her wildly swinging fists away from me at arm’s length. “Saved my life. Saved my train.”

“You be claiming them as kin?”

Taking hold of Mercy’s head, I twisted her around to face Gunhild’s distressed expression as the Matriarch sighed, “I do that. I do.”

With gates that big, I expected a creak that shook the mountain when they split down the middle and swung open, but in this, as in everything, the Dvergar craftsmanship won out over the dramatic. They opened without a peep, swinging open to reveal a glowing world of wonders beneath the surface of the earth.

The carved stone continued, but on the floor and up the walls it was inlaid with the same brass as the gates. Up by the ceiling, crystals protruded through the upper corners every few feet, not like they’d been placed there, but like they’d grown out of the stone. Each cluster was identical in shape but not in color. Dim light shone within each crystal cluster, filtering out to fill the chamber with a stained-glass dappling that stretched across the width of the broad corridor and the breadth of the rainbow.

There were no new Dvergar to meet and greet as we marched in, but I didn’t think too much about it. Maybe things were done differently among Dvergar. Maybe they just didn’t like the rainbow room. As long as Gunhild didn’t fuss, I wasn’t worrying either. The gates closed silently once the last of the Dvergar drawn wagons was inside, and it was only when I was glancing back when the air pressure changed that I spotted Asher. Instead of taking in the sights, his eyes were fixed on the ground. His tail was even dragging along behind him.

A pang of sympathy for the miserable lizard man distracted me from the memory of what he’d said. If it were up to him, every one of Gunhild’s little family would be dead and gone, just because it wasn’t convenient to save them. I wasn’t totally on board with the whole hero plan myself—it felt like it was a recipe for disaster to rely on me to save anybody—but at least I wasn’t willing to stand aside and let bad things happen. Asher was smarter than me, but that didn’t mean he was right, it just meant he could come up with better reasons to be an asshole.

Still, if it weren’t for him, we’d all be dead down in the basement of the observatory, and then dead again when the svart attacked. Or if not that, then still standing around up on the top of this hill, trying to work out what reward we wanted from the Dvergar we’d saved. I couldn’t remember having siblings in my old life, but I figured that Asher was as close as I was going to get to a brother in this world, and you didn’t throw away family just because you disagreed with them. You still invited the racist old auntie around to dinner once a year to listen to her ranting about how mobile phones were mind control devices invented by China. That was just polite.

If I could forgive and forget for the racist conspiracy-theory auntie, I was pretty sure I could welcome Asher back into the fold. He was at least sane enough to be reasoned with. Maybe he wasn’t a natural to the hero gig like me, but even he could see the advantages we’d won by saving these people, and next time around he’d probably be the first to jump in. It didn’t matter if he was doing it for the rewards, or because it was the right thing to do. All that mattered was that he did it.

I crossed over to the other side of the corridor, nipping in front of the next wagon just ahead of the Dvergar pulling it. Asher didn’t even look up until he’d almost crashed into me. Then he suddenly seemed to spring back to life, tail lashing from side to side and mouth falling open.

“I regret what—”

“I’m sorry.”

We had both spoken over each other, but the message was clear. He fell silent, shame still hanging over him, so I pushed on. “We aren’t one person. We aren’t always going to agree on everything, and that’s alright. Sometimes you’re going to want to do things differently from me, and that’s alright too. I think that not wanting to save people that need saving is a weird hill to die on, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still on the same side.”

“I regret what I said. I…you made the correct decision. My judgment was clouded. Selfish. I cared more for your safety than that of the Dvergar.”

I did a double-take. “My safety?”

“Your injuries since we arrived here have been severe. I feared that another conflict would be your last.” His shoulders slumped. “I should have trusted in your own assessment of your abilities.”

I let out a startled little laugh that turned the head of the passing Dvergar. “Oh, man, no. Never do that. I was an idiot. I totally could have died back there.”

He cocked his head to the side. “Indeed?”

“Oh yeah, those little svarts were kicking my ass until Mercy showed up. But the thing is, even if I knew I was going to die, I still would have done it. Even if dying was permanent for us, I’d like to think I’d still have done it.”

His tongue flicked out like he was trying to taste lies in the air. “You would die so readily for strangers?”

“People are people.”

He stared at me for a moment, then began walking again so we weren’t left behind, pausing for me to fall in step beside him. “You are an unusual person, Maulkin.”

I wrapped an arm around his narrow shoulders and gave him a squeeze. “I’m going to pretend that was a compliment.”

Up ahead, another set of gates were swinging open, so I jogged forward to catch my first glimpse of a Dvergar city. It did not disappoint. The stone had been carved out in every direction. It was like somebody had built a toy city inside their empty room, except we were toy-sized.

The walls curved at the tops creating a perfect arch nearly a mile high, running along the length of the colossal cavern. More of the same glowing crystal formations filled up that ridge, illuminating the whole place with an ambient glow that probably wouldn’t have been enough for humans but provided our new eyes with just enough to comfortably navigate without seeing too far. It was impossible to tell how far back the cavern went because buildings sprang up in carefully ordered lines just beyond the open square near the entrance, where Gunhild’s boys were already unloading their wares. The squat one-story houses were squared off at the top, identical in every way, barring the mark inscribed above their open door-frames. Guess the Dvergar weren’t big on privacy.

Cleanliness didn’t seem to be a top priority either. The crisp lines where the streets and buildings met were clotted with dust and thick banks of soot. It lay over the whole city now that I looked, staining the stonework and obscuring the carvings that had once served as a means to navigate the endless blocks of buildings. It wasn’t exactly a beautiful place, or a comfortable one, but you had to admire the craftsmanship required to get everything so identical.

There was only the one Dvergar that hadn’t come in with us in sight, and he was doing that little fist bump greeting with first Gunhild, then every one of her boys according to the pecking order. Time to say hello. “Hello!”

Oops, I didn’t mean to shout. The Dvergar greeter manfully resisted the urge to duck when I strode over, but he definitely did flinch. There was a beard hanging down one side of his chest in a braided loop, so I assumed I was dealing with a dude, but he was robed up in even more silk than Gunhild, with half of his face obscured behind one scarf and the majority of his body squared away inside armor. Cautiously, he raised a fist, and I gave it a nudge with my own. “We be welcoming you to Khag Mhor.”

“We?” Mercy caught up with me. “I can only see one of you.”

“I be speaking for the elders of Mhor.” He held up a begrudging fist for her to bump. “I be one, but they be many.”

Asher had closed the distance without me noticing. Again. His stealth skill must have started at one hundred. “Greetings to you and your elders.” He held out his fist, which the Dvergar bumped with entirely more force than was necessary.

“What be bringing sky-born to the khag?”

Before we could answer, Gunhild spoke over us. “Your svart problem be spilling out on the hills, that’s what. Weren’t for these longshanks, me and my boys would be roasting over the deep-fires now.”

There was a moment of silence, that I fully expected to be followed up with a lot of shouting, and probably our prompt eviction, but instead, the ambassador was staring off into space. “Half the khag be svart now. Mine-side be theirs now. Took the spinner-worms three moons back. No more silk to trade. They be pushing for the farm-rooms now. Starve us out. Just time until the khag’s theirs.”

Gunhild growled. “No fight be left in you?”

“Too many barricades to man. Too many Dver gone to the stone.” I was starting to get pissed off on this poor guy’s behalf.

I stepped up. “Good thing we’re here to help you then.”

Gunhild, the other Dvergar, and Mercy looked at me with varying degrees of shock and horror. Mercy hissed, “You want to fight a whole city of monsters?”

I smirked at her. “It’s free experience?”

“I do not wish to return to our previous dispute, but this does not seem to lead us closer to our goals.” Asher, being as political as always.

“Come on, guys, it is a few svart, how hard could it be?”

Gunhild looked from me to the other Dvergar, and then they both burst out laughing. It continued for a solid minute, while I stood there looking sheepish. Through her tears, Gunhild managed to sputter out, “A few svart!” which just seemed to set them off all over again.

More Dvergar had begun to emerge from the silent city. Some were strolling down the street like it was an average day, others hobbled and limped, dragging a leg or arm along like it was a dead weight. It was just enough like a zombie movie to make me uncomfortable, but since Gunhild was still cracking up while giving them greeting fist-bumps, I guessed it was business as usual. Maybe the svart attacks were really kicking everyone’s ass.

The Dvergar caravan we’d rolled in with sprung into well-oiled motion as the town woke up, stowing away their helmets and setting out their wares, using the ridged sides of the wagons as shelving. By the time the first of the locals had arrived, they’d plucked off their helmets and were chatting away like it was a normal day at the market. I guess for the Dvergar, it was.

There was even more silk on display now that the helmets were off, patterned and pretty in a way you would never have guessed was hiding under the blank metal faceplates. Almost every one of them had a silk scarf or two wrapped over their whole heads, though a few still proudly displayed braids and beards. No cash was changing hands, but there was a murmur of promises being traded back and forth. Barter at its finest. Maybe Amaranth just didn’t have money. That would be nice. That would mean I wasn’t broke.

Now that Gunhild had stopped pissing herself laughing in my face, she decided to give me a bit more to go on. “You’ll be thinking the svart down here are like the stragglers that nearly did for me up on the hill.”

“You’ll be thinking Khag Mhor is feeble that it can’t beat them back.” The ambassador rolled his eyes at me. “Hundreds of them rush out the tunnels like floodwater. They be washing over everything. No stopping them. No fighting them. Just bodies.”

I shrugged my giant shoulders, making the dead weight of the sword resting across them bounce. “Hundreds die as easily as dozens. I don’t see the difference.”

“The difference be the beasts.” The ambassador’s good humor faltered. “Down in the mines, the svart be digging out the flesh-forges of old. They be rekindling them. They be coming with void-spawn in chains. More than even you longshanks could be facing.”

Mercy got in before me. “The abominations? We wasted one of those on our second day in Amaranth.”

That took the last mirth out of Gunhild too. “Do she be speaking truly?”

“We killed one. It wasn’t easy, but… yeah.”

“Could you be doing it again?” Her eyes were practically sparkling, and I’ve never been good at saying no to girls. Especially not girls that only came up to mid-thigh. “Could you be helping these folk?”

I bent down to clap her on the shoulder. “Isn’t that what Eternals are for?”

She and the ambassador exchanged some looks that told me that probably wasn’t what Eternals were for, but I didn’t let it dent my confidence. That was what Eternals were going to be for from then on. Eventually, the ambassador let out a sigh. “They’ll need to be meeting the elders. It’ll be them who decide it. Prepare them best you can, then bring them on in.”

He headed off into the city, but when I stepped up to follow him, Gunhild had a hold of my rope belt. “There be some things you’re needing to know first. Let’s take us a walk.”

While it seemed like a straight shot to wherever the ambassador was headed, Gunhild led us off to one side until I could make out the looming wall of the cavern curving up towards us. The stone above us started to feel oppressive like we had the weight of the world pressing down on us. I didn’t know how the Dvergar lived like this.

The narrow grid of the streets angled out once we were away from the gate, assuming new straight paths for us to follow along. Some fired off towards the walls like the one we followed, and the others spread out wider and led deeper into the warren of the city. I was starting to understand why barricading parts of the town off was so difficult to manage. There must have been a hundred paths to stopper, and while the buildings climbed a little higher towards the roof farther in, all the outlying concentric squares were only a little taller than me. A run and a jump would have had me on top of any one of them, and what the svart lacked in height, they probably made up for in willingness to clamber on top of each other.

By the wall, the buildings fell away into broad open squares. Cultivated earth was sunk into the channels that had been carved in the same broad patterns as decorated everything here, and mushrooms sprang up out of the patterns, glowing in as many colors as the crystals above. The Dvergar really seemed to love their rainbows.

I could tell that Mercy had been simmering the whole way, but just before we cleared the last line of buildings, she socked me in the arm as hard as she could. “What do you think you’re doing signing me up to fight a mine full of those monsters? One of them nearly messed us all up earlier. One of them. Not a mine full. One.”

“What, you don’t want to?”

Asher was quick to intervene, catching her by the arm before she hit me again. “Once more, I question how this path leads us closer to our goals.”

“This place is the only thing anywhere near the observatory.” I shrugged. “I figure if the shard is anywhere, it is probably down in the mines where all the monsters come from. Video game logic, you know?”

Asher opened and closed his mouth, falling silent. Mercy’s clenched fist turned into an accusatory finger, then her hands fell to her side. “How can you be so obviously stupid and still keep saying things that make sense?”

“My blessing”—I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead and dipped back—“and my curse.”

Gunhild watched all of this play out with mounting puzzlement on her face, but as she slumped down onto one of the benches, she pushed that confusion away. “There be an old story among the Dvergar to explain the things you need to know, but I know you be over-fond of cradle-tales so I’ll be telling you this now. It be a story, not the truth.”

Asher and Mercy sat themselves down beside her on the bench, and I parked my backside on the path, leaning back on one of the bigger mushrooms and hoping it wasn’t a hallucinogen. Or if it was, it was the fun kind.

“You be knowing the void god story. We dug him out. Dver are taught shame for it at the teat. Our wanting for gods brought doom on the world.”

“Yeah, you all suck.” Mercy was a big believer in audience participation. “We know. Get to the point.”

It was enough to break Gunhild’s maudlin streak and draw out her grin. “Cheek on this one. Could be a Dvergar herself.

“There was a war, void god lost, void god died. None of it matters. What matters be the oath. The Dver swore themselves to the dark one when he first rose up. Dvergar oaths don’t be like the spit in the wind men and faun make. They be writ in our heart. Unbreakable. But here was one we had to break. We didn’t see Araphel for what he be at first. When we swore, we didn’t know what he’d become. So we did what we be needing to—no matter how it cost us.” Her voice trailed off into silence, and she seemed to be girding herself for the next part.

Asher cocked his head to the side. “What was the cost, Gunhild?”

She jumped when she realized that Asher was so close to her, but when she heard his tone, all the lines washed from what I could see of her face. She put her hand down on top of his upturned palm and didn’t even flinch when the claws closed over her glove. “They be calling it the curse of stone. When we betrayed Araphel, he said to us, ‘If you be loving a life surrounded by stone over the world I’d give you, then let the stone be taking you.’ It’s all just a story, but there be a truth in it. Truth of a blight.”

With the hand that wasn’t clinging to Asher for all she was worth, Gunhild reached up to draw one of the silk strips banded around her forehead up, revealing the grey-toned flesh underneath. “You needn’t be flinching away. Only Dvergar can catch it, whatever it be.”

Asher’s voice was as soft as a whisper. “The curse of stone.”

“Aye, that it be. We’re born to stone and die to it too. Every Dvergar babe is born with the mark upon them, and as the years be passing, the stone be spreading. That’s why I’m telling you all this now so that when you be seeing the elders, you don’t go thinking there is some trick being played. It isn’t a secret longshanks get to hear, and if I didn’t be claiming you as kin, you’d never have heard it for all the time you walked Amaranth.”

Mercy reached out to take Gunhild’s other hand. “Thank you for trusting us.”

“Trust? Do you be seeing trust?” Gunhild let out a snort. “You’d still know naught if that bumbling fool over there hadn’t set you to the task of fighting all the monsters in the mountain.”

“Glad I did then.” I smiled back at her. “Your people shouldn’t have to carry this weight alone.”

Mercy rolled her eyes at me trying to be sincere, but Asher nodded along with me. I guess his change of heart earlier wasn’t just for show.

“Come along then.” Gunhild hauled herself to her feet, leading Mercy and Asher up in a daisy chain. “My boys will be handling all the trading, let’s get you to the elders of Mhor and be seeing what use they can find for you.”

Chapter 10

The deeper into the city we delved, the more apparent the state of ruin it was sinking into became. The solid stone that the buildings had been carved from was war-marked and flame-scarred. Chunks were missing here and there, and there were signs of collapse everywhere that I looked. The buildings that had lost their integrity were bad enough, but when we had to detour around a glowing crystal cluster that had fallen from the ceiling, I started to get genuinely concerned. Getting crushed to death under a giant pile of rocks sounded almost as bad as being dissolved by spider god venom.

My brother and sister in glowing eyes didn’t seem too concerned about it, and I wasn’t going to be the first one to wimp out, but I still kept catching my eyes drifting upwards. Maybe it was my Dungeoneering setting alarm bells ringing. Mercy caught me at it, gawking up at the ceiling herself. “What is it? Giant spiders?”

“It’s nothing.” I dragged my eyes back down. “Just… wondering if the whole thing is going to fall down.”

Gunhild didn’t look back, but I could hear her chortle. “Don’t be letting the elders hear you talking like that. It be an insult to the ancestors to suggest a khag don’t be sturdy enough to last out all of time, and half of the elders almost be ancestors themselves.”

More of the plazas with glowing mushrooms were dotted through the city, and this far in, buildings had a couple of stories or more going for them, although I was interested to notice that ramps ran up around the outsides of them instead of there being stairs inside. Why was that interesting? Was I an architect in some other past life that I couldn’t remember? That did not sound like the kind of rock and roll lifestyle that I wanted for my imaginary previous self. If I was an architect, I hoped it was the kind that built giant mirrored skyscrapers with a curve that accidentally set adjacent buildings on fire. Maybe it was just that Dungeoneering was this world’s version of architecture, with all the students studying up and hoping to land a gig building a dungeon of their own someday.

The barricades reared up almost unexpectedly when we rounded a corner. There were as many Dvergar manning them as I’d seen in all the rest of the city, firing crossbow bolts over the top of the heaped furniture and cobbled together walkways that were holding back the monsters on their doorstep.

We followed alongside the barricades, taking in all the sights and sounds of a war being ever so slowly lost. The odd crystal-tipped arrow made it over the top of the palisades, but they never reached us. The svart didn’t even seem to be aiming, just shooting something off in the general direction of the Dvergar to make them duck.

I doubted that the svart were smart enough for psychological warfare, but even if it wasn’t deliberate, the bombardment still had the same effect. Every one of the Dvergar manning that barricade seemed to be at their wit’s end.

We followed along the ragged line that the barricade had formed between Dvergar and svart territory, all the way to the far wall of the city. When we got to the elaborate entrance to the elder’s chambers—as big and impressive in their own way as the entrance to the city itself, albeit a little more ornate and less functional—you could still hear the baying of the monsters from a few streets away. The barbarians at the gates were in spitting distance of their seat of power. No wonder they were all so bummed out.

After passing beneath an arch of shiny brass-work that my Dungeoneering knowledge kept insisting was some sort of trap, we were shuffled through a few corridors into a waiting room and more of the same stone benches that we’d seen outside, rendered even more uncomfortable by the fancier engravings digging into my ass. The place was serious and solemn enough that I felt like a dick for trying to kick off a conversation, so I turned my attention back to the heap of experience points I still hadn’t divvied out. If I was about to go and fight a whole town of monsters, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have much to lose.

366 experience was enough to buy three ranks of anything or one divine skill. Since my sword was still looking rough as hell, I figured that I’d toss the extra experience into upgrading Rough Hewn Weapons, but it was a no-go. I needed to rank up the pillar first. Rough Hewn Armor seemed like a good alternate option. Down here in what was essentially an oversized mine, I could already feel all the materials that were available to work with. Sure I’d be stripping the décor if I did it here, but surely nobody would mind if I borrowed a bit from inside enemy territory. I poured experience into the skill and felt the moonlight fill me up with knowledge.

When I opened my eyes again, everyone was still sitting silently, even though Gunhild kept giving me serious side-eye. I wondered if I’d been glowing again. We were there a long time before one of the local Dvergar—wrapped up in so much silk they were barely recognizable—popped in to tell us they were ready for us.

Short-stack mummy led us back and forth through what I could swear were the same corridors, dipping up and down between different levels until I was so turned around I didn’t have a hope of finding my way out. The svart might have been right at the door, but if they didn’t know their way through this maze then it would have taken them months to find the right way through. These Dvergar were smarter than they looked.

Finally and abruptly, the chamber opened out into something more closely resembling a cave than any of the fine and beautiful masonry we had seen before, and a single cast-iron brazier burned green at the center of the room, casting long shadows up the rough walls and revealing shapes that your eyes could convince you were faces staring back at you out of the dark—faces that seemed to scowl down at us as the wind made the fire flicker. Looked like we were expected to wait here too. I hefted the sword off my shoulder and set its tip down with a clang. Strong or not, that thing was huge.

It echoed up the walls and was answered with a low grumbling sound that resolved into something like throat singing—deep and reverberating. It took me longer than it should have to realize that there were words in the groan as a long litany of Dvergar names—stretching back  through the depths of history all the way down to our very own Gunhild, daughter of Gundar the Son of Gungridr—poured forth. She didn’t even try to match them in groaning tone or in the length of their memory, but she still shouted out to each elder in turn. “Elder Krannog, I be greeting you. Elder Rodar, I be greeting you. Elder Kalga, I be greeting you. Elder Jormun, I be greeting you…”

It went on and on until she’d rattled off a dozen names or more. The same groaning chorus came down to us, and I wondered if this was some other feat of Dvergar engineering, throwing their voices into an empty chamber to impress the local yahoos. My eyes struggled in the half-light of the fire. If it had been pitch black, my internal glow would have lit things up, or if the fire had been stoked higher, I would have made it out sooner. That is my excuse anyway. In honesty, I think I just didn’t want to accept what I was seeing.

The elders weren’t just in the room, they were the room. The curse of stone had spread across every surface of their skin and hair, but that had not been enough. It had pushed beyond that limit, spreading out from the Dvergar themselves to encrust their bodies against the wall, embedding them in stone, and growing thicker and thicker. I didn’t know how they were being kept alive. If some poor Dvergar had to climb a ladder to pour food in their mouths and shovel out the shit or if the magic of the curse preserved them as these living statues, crudely cut into the walls and sinking back into the rock that birthed them.

Now that I knew what I was looking at, I could tell when each one was speaking. “Why do you be bringing sky-born to witness our shame? Why do you dare to be bringing any outsider to the fire-damp tomb?” I could see their lips straining to move against the weight of rock trying to hold them slack-jawed.

Gunhild wet her lips and took a deep breath. “These be Eternals, come to aid your khag.”

There was a sound like grinding stone as the Elders tried to crane their necks and get a better look at us. Flecks of stone rained down all around us like the cave had dandruff, and opinions started raining down about the same time.

“Eternals, be they? I don’t be seeing it…”

“Can’t be trusting longshanks. Never met a longshanks you could look in the eye…”

“Never be needing Eternals before...”

“No good be coming of the gods or their spawn. In my day…”

“We be needing no aid. All be well in Khag Mhor...”

What had been a harmony before now rumbled around us discordant with every one of the elders rambling off in their own direction. Gunhild was just standing there, letting them blather on, but I had better things to be doing with my eternity. “You can smell the Svart from here. We might be outsiders, or tall, or whatever else you hate, but you can’t deny that this place needs help.”

There were a lot of grumbling noises echoing around us. They might not have agreed on much, but none of the elders liked being interrupted.

“You be shutting your shouting-hole.”

“Disrespect like I’ve never been seeing…”

“Never been needing Eternals before…”

“Who be you to speak such to the Elders of Mhor?”

I jumped in on that last one. “I’m Maulkin. This is Mercy, and that’s Asher. We fought your svart problem above ground, and we killed one of the flesh-forged. So maybe you should show us a bit of respect. We’ve earned it.”

The bitching and moaning continued all around us, but there was a rumbling undercurrent now.

“Never in all my days.”

“Never been needing Eternals before…”

It took me a moment to realize that the rumble was a laugh, a laugh so rough and raucous that it soon drowned out all of the other elders until only the laughing Dvergar remained. “Got some stones on you!”

A sideways glance to Gunhild didn’t help me work that one out any better. “Thanks?”

“Let’s say you be right. Let’s say there be trouble in this khag.” I finally spotted the one Dvergar that was still talking. He was embedded in the wall above the entryway we’d come through, and his beard hung down in jagged stalactites. “What might you be offering to do about it?”

“We’re here to help however we can.” I turned to face the one reasonable person in the wall. “If you want us to fight, we can fight. If you want us to talk to them, we’ll try. Hell, if you want us to water the mushrooms we’ll do that. Whatever it takes.”

The rest of the room was rumbling all over again—loud enough that I genuinely started to wonder just how many Elders this place had. How many Dvergar had been brought in here to hang? Eventually, one creaking voice called out, “The worms. Win us back the worms, then we’ll be talking to you. Not before.”

I turned back to Mr. Stabby Beard and winced as he tried to nod. “Aye, the spinner-worm farms be fallen to the svart. If you be winning them back, then we’ll be accepting your help.”

I opened my mouth to tell them where they could shove it, but Asher cut me off. “We gratefully accept your quest and hope that our efforts prove fruitful in earning your trust.”

My little posse all started heading for the door, hooking into my elbows and dragging me along with them as I tried to work out the right words to convey exactly what I thought of the Elders demanding that we work for the right to help them out. Most of the words I was coming up with only had four letters.

When I actually got my mouth to open, Mercy slugged me in the arm before I could say anything. I looked down at her. “If I ever feel you hitting me, you’re going to be in real trouble.”

She snorted but loosened her grip on my arm so that I could turn around and walk alongside them instead of being hauled out into the hallway where our mummified guide was waiting to lead us out again. Whatever they’d thought of the exchange inside, I couldn’t make out an expression beneath all the wrappings.

This time, I paid extra attention to all of the twists and turns, but I was still surprised when we came back out into the main chamber of the khag. According to my recollections, we should have just come back out in the firedamp chamber where all the elders liked to hang. Guess I needed a higher Dungeoneering skill to make sense of it.

The ambassador was waiting to greet us with a skeptical look on his face. Gunhild gave him another knuckle-bump then turned to face us. “They’ll be taking the worm-farms back from the svart.”

“You’ll be doing that, will you?”

Mercy scowled up at me. “That’s the plan.”

I mock scowled back at her. “That is the plan.”

Asher had his hands pressed over his eyes so he didn’t have to see the two of us. “Might you furnish us with more details?”

The ambassador’s name was Gorm, and his half-masked expression was incredulous as he talked us through the layout of the city and what we’d have to do to drive the svart back. The worm-farms were another side chamber off from the main city—vast humid cuboids hacked out of the stone and crisscrossed with ropes that the silkworms dangled from, doing their silkwormy business.

That bit was easy enough. It was the battle-planning that took some effort to get my head around. The svart were too dumb to fight like an army, according to Gorm. A normal army took enough losses in one area and it would retreat from that area to regroup, but that required a level of communication and awareness that was beyond the little pasty bastards’ capabilities. They would just keep on coming, draining every other front of the conflict to flood into any space where they thought that there was action. So if we went charging in, all that was going to happen was that we would be drowned in svart. The end goal might have been to wipe out all the svart eventually, but not all in one go. Even I wasn’t that confident in our abilities.

There were no maps of Khag Mhor. Gorm and Gunhild looked taken aback when I suggested it like they couldn’t understand the concept. Every Dvergar that lived in the khag knew its layout like the back of their hand, and since that layout was literally set in stone, they never had to relearn it. This was great for them but didn’t help us with our planning all that much. Eventually, I kicked a big heap of ash out from a corner, and they started sketching the place out. We brave immortals stood around twiddling our thumbs for a bit until Mercy let out a cry of dismay. “Oh, come on.”

I followed her glower to the little map, where Gorm was diligently doodling out every single building and street in the city, starting from the gates and working back. When I sighed, it came out like a guttural grumble. Would I ever get used to this new voice?

Getting down on my haunches, I dragged my thick finger along in a wobbly line at about the right distance in. “Here’s the barricade. Where’s the farm?”

Both the Dvergar were looking at the mess I’d made of their dust pile with unabashed horror, but Gunhild managed to get her mouth to snap shut first, and she scribbled in the outer wall and the farm caves, though it seemed to physically pain her to do it.

It was a fair distance beyond the barricade. More than I’d trust myself to successfully sneak. Not that I’d know what to do even if I did sneak in. Mercy and Asher knelt down to study the ever more expansive map as it was sketched out. Asher let out a distressed hiss. “This is all beyond the range of my knowledge.”

Mercy snorted. “You never waged an underground war on a bunch of evil gnomes before?”

“He lived a sheltered life.” I grinned.

Asher did not seem amused. “Have either of you any experience with this sort of planning?”

“I played a lot of video games?”

Mercy snorted. It was not ladylike. “Of course you did.”

“What is a video game?” Asher tilted his head to one side.

“You poor, deprived little Inyoka.” A tear welled up in my eye. “Video games are what makes life worth living.”

I was so distracted by the usual snide jabs that I didn’t even notice Gorm taking a hold of my wrist until he started dragging my thumb across the map again. Dipping in and out amongst the fine-lined buildings that he’d sketched out. Mercy’s eyebrow crept up. “What are you… what is that?”

“That be the old barricade we had to abandon.”

Asher’s head cocked to one side. “The structure stands?”

“Svart be thick as moles in the middens.” Gunhild scoffed.

Gorm elaborated, “They’d never be thinking to do it. Once they’re unmanned, the svart just be clambering over, back and forth. Svart don’t be building. Svart don’t be changing things to make their lives easy.”

I tapped the area on one side of the barricade, adding an unexpected blob to the map. “So if we got all the svart in here pushed back, you could take those barricades back and hold them?”

“If your lot be up to the task of clearing them.” He stroked his beard. “Aye. We could be doing that.”

Putting an arm over both my comrades’ shoulders, I said, “Alright, kids. Here’s the plan…”

Stealth was never going to be my thing. I acknowledge that. Sneaking around is not in my nature. We’ve all got our faults. Mercy took to sneaking around like a sneaky fish to sneaky water. That was why she was as far away from me as she could possibly get. Even if I didn’t actively ruin her sneaking by yelling nonsense at her when it seemed funny, the sound of my stomping around would have drawn in all the svart from miles around.

As for Asher, there was no denying that he moved around in a deathly silence that made all of his friends crap themselves when he suddenly appeared next to them—I was giving serious consideration to tying a bell around his neck—but his magic was big, bright, and flashy. He wouldn’t have been able to defend himself without all eyes and floppy ears turning his way, so he got lumped into working with me.

I jumped down from the barricade onto a nice squishy pile of svart.

The ones directly beneath me died in an instant, but they were just a tiny fraction of the gathered monsters. I hefted my sword up over my head and roared defiance in their blank, pallid faces. A few svart had the sense to stagger back, but most of them didn’t. They came charging in at me, with all their cobbled-together weapons held high, ready to butcher me the way they had the few defending Dvergar I could see lying around my feet, their bones well gnawed.

I closed my eyes and let my Sphere of Influence expand out as time slowed to a crawl. The scrap metal in the dead svart’s weapons, the armor of the dead Dvergar, the bones themselves… all of it resonated, and with a pull of will, every part of it came apart.

The fine worked metal of the weapons on the ground, the cunning craftsmanship, it all twisted into slag as I exerted my will. I couldn’t work with fine metals yet, but hidden inside the best and the brightest were still the base components that I could use. Iron was woven into steel, and leather strips stitched neatly into jerkins and straps could tear apart at the seams. With one great heave, they all came up into orbit around me. The svart’s weapons resisted my pull, with only the most poorly tied axe-heads snapping free. It was a trick I could never pull on enemies with properly forged gear, but here and now. It worked.

Even with time running slow, the svart would have been on me by now if they hadn’t all frozen in terror, watching as I forged myself a new set of armor out of the fragments that surrounded me. It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t cover as much as I would have liked—I was going to catch a nasty draft through some of those open panels—but it was armor, and it was mine.

It hissed and clicked as it cooled into place around my body, rough and ready for action with an Armor Rating of 64. Whatever that meant.

I stretched my arms out to get used to the new weight, then readied myself for their charge again, grin fixed firmly in place.

“Come get some.”

Chapter 11

They did come and get some, but not from the direction that I was hoping. The startled ones up ahead of me were still riveted in place by the sight of me pulling a suit of slightly-ratty armor out of thin air. However, the ones just arriving to see what all the commotion was about didn’t hesitate, bursting out in a tidal wave of bodies, washing out from between the perfectly ordered buildings like a dam had burst.

I spun my sword down to meet them in a great arc, neatly nipping the head off the first in the row, carving a gouge out of the chest of the second, and lodging in the pelvis of the next. Momentum didn’t let me stop, so I bludgeoned the next one along with the body of his buddy, and the one after that with the both of them, like svart dominos.

If it had just been that one swarming wave of bodies, I would have won the whole war in a swing, but the next ones were leaping off the top of the corpses of their compatriots before I had time to blink. Good thing I didn’t come alone.

Asher’s Gravity Snare burst into life above them, back over their own lines where the swarms of bodies had just started converging into the overwhelming mass I now faced. It looked like a tiny spot of darkness, then everything started dragging in towards it. Even the air and the light twisted in towards it with a roar.

The leaping svart snapped backward as though they’d reached the end of their collective leash. The ones that weren’t impaled on the weapons of the rank behind them still managed to knock the whole row down. The charging svart behind them tripped over their fallen friends or tried to jump over and got caught in the gravity snare’s effect, tossing them up and over to knock more svart farther back down.

It was a chaotic mess, and I loved every second of it.

I charged into the mass of puzzled svart that I’d originally faced off with and started hacking at them wildly—quick brutal chops that were less about killing and more about inciting more of that handy fear that had been keeping them all at bay.

They started to scatter and run. Without functional weapons, they’d lost all of their courage. The few that had the crystal-tipped spears and knives were washed away in the turning tide of bodies before they had a chance. This was all going to plan. They were running away to hide and lick their wounds, but they left a vacuum behind to draw in more svart.

Even as the gravity snare sputtered and died, the svart that had been in the shadow of that dark star found their courage faltering. With a roar, I bore down on them, and the few that were back on their feet turned and fled, leaving their wounded or confused to be trampled underfoot or hacked apart by the guillotine fall of my blade.

Both ends of the sword were in my hands. In this close, there was no need to swing it wide. Speed mattered more. Legs and arms fell away in a spatter of black ichor, and faces, twisted in fear, were split down the middle. I was slick with their blood, and the perfect cobblestones were lined in symmetrical gore.

With his big trump card already played from atop the barricade, I could feel rather than see Asher working his magic. I’d only grown a little stubble in the couple of days I’d been alive, but every one of those tiny hairs tried to stand on end as he summoned up a crackling orb of electricity between his hands. I was glad he was on my side.

More of them came on. More and more svart pouring in from everywhere that I looked, scrambling over rooftops when they couldn’t squeeze through the alleyways, and climbing the heaped corpses of their kin to come and meet the same fate. My back was to the barricade, but on all other sides, there were enemies.

Static crackled amongst us, and then the whole crowd was lined in sparks. Asher’s work went unnoticed.

I turned the first brave svart’s blade aside with the flat of mine, but I couldn’t press my attack and punish him for his hubris without abandoning the wall at my back. There were just so many of them. It didn’t matter how powerful I was. The fight on the hillside had proven that; if you got enough of these little horrors together, they’d win by weight of numbers, like crows mobbing a hawk.

An arrow arched past the cowed front lines to trace a bloody line across my exposed shoulder. At the sight of some red blood flowing at last, the whole crowd seemed to go into a frenzy. Svart had no language of their own, but in amongst the snarls and barking, I could swear that I heard fragments of some other speech.

“Kill!” featured prominently.

Normally I don’t take requests, but this was a private party, so I wasn’t going to let them down. As they charged across the slippery stonework, I met them partway, dropping to one knee as my sword whipped around in a lethal arc.

Arrows flew through the air where I should have been standing, and the front runners’ guts exploded out along the length of my blade on my left.

The legs toppled out from under the ones on my right, leaving a heap of them wailing, a mostly-living, shrieking defensive wall on my flank.

Worrying about my flank was pointless when every one of them charged at me head-on. I tried to whip my sword around—as much as you can whip something that weighs the same as a vending machine—to catch the next wave as they charged, but there was no solid wave to meet head-on, just scrambling stragglers.

I turned a pair of descending axe-heads away with the notched edge of my blade, and another couple of over-enthusiastic jumpers caught the flat of my sword in their guts when they landed on me. It wasn’t nearly enough. There were so many.

Swords, knives, clubs, shivs, and spears with wiggly hafts too thin to support the rock heads mounted on them. I couldn’t even see the damned svart anymore. Just sharp edges. The weight of bodies pushed my own sword back down towards me, and their blows rained down on my body.

Except this time my body wasn’t completely unprotected anymore. The nicks and scratches on my bare skin hurt, but the lethal blows being thrust into my torso felt more like rapid-fire punches. The armor I’d conjured up was turning their blades.

Straining with all my strength, I drew my knee off the floor and got both my feet under me as more and more svart were piling on top, flailing uselessly at me with their tiny little arms and tiny little weapons. I could feel the weight of them bearing down on me, threatening to take my feet out from under me.

Drawing in a lungful of their sour-milk breath, I rose. It was the squat of a lifetime. All the Potency this body had been born with and acquired through my efforts converted into pure upward thrust. There was no black hole to whip them into the air and scatter them this time. Only me. Anything Asher’s magic could do, I could do better.

The svart flew back into their own ranks once more, bowling over their own army. The front rank who hadn’t tried piling on top didn’t fly, they were merely knocked on their asses—in perfect position for me to bring my newly hefted blade hammering back down. It was a nice change of pace to have gravity on my side.

I staggered a little when I reared back up, but that was alright. None of the svart could see me over the wall of dead svart. I could still hear them though. Everywhere around me, their screams and baying for blood echoed up off the ceiling, drawing svart in from all over their half of the city. I looked up to Asher. He was the man with the view out over the town, and so he’d be the one to judge whether the plan was working or not. “Are we winning, son?”

Once more, I felt the impact of thunder rippling out as he tore his claws apart, and lightning leapt past my wall of corpses. Shouts turned to screams, and the putrid stench of the svart was replaced with the oily scent of deep-fried meat. Crackling spread out from where Asher’s bolt had struck, rippling out through the mass of bodies.

“We have no familial relationship”—Asher rocked a little on his feet after his exertions—“but it does appear that your plan has been successful.”

That was all I needed to hear. I ran for the barricade, even as crispy critters clambered over the top of their dead to hound me. Lobbing my sword up over the rim, making Asher duck for cover, I threw myself against the tangled mass of furniture, pseudo-industrial equipment, and twisted metal. Hand over hand, I dragged myself up. Sharp edges scraped over my armor and hooked into me in unexpected places. Odds were I could have powered through if it weren’t for the svart.

I was halfway up and going strong by the time that the arrows started to fly. It was only another length of my body before I was over the top and free. Even if the arrows stuck me, I wasn’t going to stop. Which all would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the svart leaping up to grab onto my legs.

Blades pricked at me as they jammed their shivs and picks into my heels and calves, trying to get purchase through the armor.

One svart dangled from each of my legs, but they weighed practically nothing, and I probably could have kept on climbing with them attached if more hadn’t latched onto them in a big svart ladder of wailing misery trying to drag me back. Still, I edged up, closer and closer to the walkway.

Feeling more than a little like an elastic band being stretched, I saw Asher reach down a hand to help me up, but between my weight and the weight of the svart beneath me, I was only ever going to drag him down too. Even kicking my feet wasn’t doing much to dislodge my svart limpets, so I did the only thing I could and kept on climbing.

The straps that held my shin-guard in place snapped, and the rough metal fell away to smack one of the svart in the face. The chain of svart that had been held up by the dagger wedged under that strap toppled away too. Some of the left leg crew then tried to make the jump to my other side and missed, tumbling down to land on their dead and injured. Some didn’t try to cross but instead flung themselves up. One caught on my belt. Jabbing into my kidneys with a ragged little dagger.

[320/440 Health]

The armor that had been keeping me alive until now became a dead weight with all the svart dangling off it. What had saved me before was about to kill me. So I did what I had to do. I let it go.

Closing my eyes and letting my consciousness slip out into my Sphere of Influence again, I didn’t even wait for time to slow. The armor was of my own making. I knew every haphazard detail of it like the pattern had been burned into my mind, and I knew how to undo it with a single push of will.

As the plates of iron fell away from me, so too did the svart, until finally it was just me, bare-assed and scrambling over the top with a single svart still standing in the small of my back when I flopped over.

Maybe Asher played little league back when he was a little baby lizard librarian, or maybe not, but the hunk of chair-leg that he swung into the svart’s face looked like a home run to me. It flew back to join all of its little friends, and I stumbled to my feet. “Thanks, Asher.”

He sighed. “Please express your thanks through the wearing of trousers.”

Sadly there was no time to wiggle at him until he cried. The svart were making good progress up the barricade now that I’d riled them up, and all this stretch’s defenders had been relocated. I retrieved my sword and got to work.

[34 Damage]

“This is just like whack-a-mole!”

As the svart rose up, I smacked them right back down again, splitting heads and showering us both with black ichor. At least, it was less obvious I was naked now.

“Did you ever play whack-a-mole?”

I turned from the swarming monsters to glance over at Asher. “Oh, you’re casting.

“So whack-a-mole was this game you got in arcades…

“Where little critters popped their heads up out of holes…”

I swept my blade along the very ledge of the barricade, sending up a shower of sparks and nicking off a few fingers.

“And you hit them with a little padded mallet.”

Asher unleashed another thunderclap, coating the rising Svart in their own personal crackling ion clouds. With no small amount of exasperation now that he’d caught his breath, he shouted back, “I am familiar with the game in concept!”

I grinned at him and kicked a svart in the face.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

Asher’s eyes narrowed. “Some of us perform tasks that require concentration.”

I flicked my sword in a figure of eight around my body, slapping the faces off two svart as they poked them over the precipice.

“Hey! Just because I make it look easy doesn’t mean it is.”

He rolled his eyes and focused back in on the storm he had brewing between his palms. I wished Mercy were here, she’d talk about whack-a-mole with me while we slaughtered svart, for sure.

“So have you got any spells that don’t take half an hour to cast?”

He ducked behind me as the next wave came. “I believe that I have an instant cantrip for the lighting of candles.”

“Well, that’s super useful.”

The steady flow of svart began to slow. They might not have been completely mindless, but without the immediate excitement of an enemy in their line of sight, boredom seemed to have set in. When we peered down over the edge of the barricade, there was a mass grave of svart and few of the living still lingering around.

A couple of the surviving svart were already picking over their companions like they were a buffet, though how anyone could stomach that grey-looking meat I had no idea. Even the little splashes of svart blood that I’d gotten in my mouth during the fighting had been enough to put me off the idea of trying Amaranthian food for another day.

My Sphere of Influence didn’t stretch all the way down to the ground, but they were heaped up high enough that I was able to strip the leathers and metals from the top of the heap to toss together a light suit of armor that left even less to the imagination than last time. I could swear I had a whole ass-cheek hanging out. The Armor Rating this time around was only 41, but it would protect Asher’s sense of propriety, and at the end of the day, I didn’t want to accidentally club any Dvergar in the face by turning around too fast.

With a nod from Asher, we made our way along the top of the barricades, taking in the chaos that we’d wrought. As predicted, every svart in svart town had come running over to join the party—including all of the dumb-asses in the section surrounding the worm-farm. When we moved by the old barricades that had been overrun, we could see Dvergar stationed along them now, quietly assuming their positions as though this whole part of the city had never been taken from them—as quietly as they could in clanking armor, anyway. Thankfully, we’d been making even more noise than them.

Obviously, we weren’t going to draw all of the svart out, there was no way that we were going to get that lucky, but that was what Mercy and her Dvergar ninjas were for. Maybe they weren’t actual ninjas, but between all the silk wrap around masks and their almost comical attempts at sneaking, that was the name I was sticking with.

Mercy’s job was to do the opposite of us. While we made as much noise as possible and dragged all the svart out of bed, she had to move through the newly abandoned worm zone and snipe any stragglers without drawing attention to herself.

Judging by the echoing silence, she had done one hell of a job. We made it along to the wall before we dropped down and made our own attempt at stealth. The longer that the svart didn’t notice that this section had been retaken, the longer the Dvergar had to get their barricades repaired and manned properly. So long as we didn’t bang into any svart, I felt pretty certain that we’d manage to keep the volume down.

We rounded a corner and came face to face with three svart, sitting around some sort of campfire, cooking what looked like a big grub on a stick.

They looked at us. We looked at them. They opened their mouths to scream.

Mercy’s arrow took the closest one in the throat before it could make a sound. There was no way I’d clear the distance to the other two in time to keep them quiet, so I did the only thing I could think of. I threw my sword.

It hit the svart in their ugly little heads, the flat side making a nice clunking sound as it bowled them over, then the sheer weight of metal pinned them both to the ground until one of Mercy’s ninjas rushed out to slit their throats. The clatter of my sword and their gurgles were the loudest noises that they made.

Victory!

Potency increased to 28

Sword: Rank 6/10

Acrobatics: Rank 5/10

532 Experience Gained

Mercy dropped down from the top of one of the buildings on our side of the square, then pressed a finger to her lips when she saw me smiling at her. I settled for waving.

A ninja Dvergar tried to pick up my sword and return it to me but only just managed to lever it up off the mashed face of the svart. I crept over, patted him on the head, grinned, and hefted the sword easily onto my shoulder. You might have expected awe in the eyes of the little fella when I did that, but no, just narrowed eyes and grumbles.

The Dvergar twisted and contorted his hands, and Mercy, watching them, gave a soft huff of laughter before signing back, “You get used to him.”

Apparently, I could understand Dvergar sign language too. The gods really gave us the full package when it came to the speaking in tongues thing. My own hand gesture to the two of them was less intricate, but I think it carried my point over well.

We followed Mercy back through the streets towards the outer wall of the city-cavern, picking up the rest of her little team as we went. Block by block, house by house, they had been clearing out the svart. The Dvergar were nothing if not methodical. They’d swept the whole place by the time that we arrived, and now they had doubled back on themselves to make sure that nothing had been missed. The only place that they hadn’t cleared out was the worm-farm itself.

Mercy signed to us both, “Something big. Moving inside.”

I had my fingers crossed that whatever was in there was another abomination. Sure, they were terrifying and weird and liable to mangle us, but I was still 800 glory shy of my next Tier and unlocking some new powers. I wanted those new powers. I wanted them bad.

The refined looks of the rest of the buildings seemed to give way to a more rustic style here. Instead of the huge doorway into the farms being perfectly rectangular, it was a natural ragged shape, with the oiled wooden boards of the door cut to slot into the space, instead of the other way around—those doors hang ever so slightly ajar. They’d been haphazardly held shut with a length of ratty looking rope strung between two hooks that were clearly meant for a cross-bar, and mist was leaking out of the gap, turning all the nearby ash on the ground into a thick grey paste that showed the dozen crisscrossing paths of the svart running back and forth. One of the Dvergar was pointing to a perfectly formed little side-door, so rather than barging in, we ducked through there instead. Things were more uniform and familiar in that little tunnel, but yet more of the wood used on the door had been knocked into shape for each of the little doors hanging open here.

Wood couldn’t have been easy to come by down here. It would have had to have been hauled down from the surface or traded for. It seemed like an odd choice to use it when they’d made every other fixture out of metal. A wave of Dungeoneering knowledge whispered something in the back of my head about wood contracting and expanding with moisture and heat. I supposed that made a certain kind of sense. It was getting hotter the farther in that we went.

The whole farm chamber was obscured by mist, and it was only when I nearly splashed into a little pool that I worked out what was happening. It was some sort of volcanic cave, with water heating up underground and being forced out here to bubble. The worms must have liked the heat. Not that I could see any of them at the moment. Steam blossomed up all around us as we crept forward, and while it kept us hidden from whatever was in here, it kept whatever was in here hidden from us too. There could have been a gigantic monster three feet in front of me and I wouldn’t know until I stepped on its toes.

Our eyes might have been useless, but my other senses were working overtime. Beyond the hiss of the hot springs and muffled sounds of our own steps, there was something moving in the room. It didn’t sound like the capering of svart or the stomping of the huge crab-legged thing we fought back at the observatory.

My horns got tangled in what I thought was a giant cobweb, and Mercy reached up to pluck off the coiled silk and toss it aside. The fog was thinner farther up, and I could make out ropes strung every which way above us, knotted together at odd angles, completely contrary to the Dvergar’s usual devotion to perfect order. It was only when I realized that the lines were secured to stalactites that it started to make sense. Just like the wooden doors were adapted to the natural shape of the cave, so too were the rope lines. More of the gigantic grubs we saw being grilled by the svart earlier were dangling from the strings, bowing them down with their prodigious weight but not quite breaking them.

It was a good thing that we were looking up or we never would have seen it coming.

Chapter 12

This abomination had really earned its name. The weird geometric shape of the last one was still present but divided up. Instead of the whole creature being centered around one glowing orb, there was a run of three of them spaced out along the length of the thing, bright as day down here in the dark of the cave and cutting through the fog like the beam of a lighthouse.

The body surrounding those orbs was segmented—with visible gaps between each of the pale marble pieces and only the gravity of those tiny suns holding the whole thing together. It had a head at each end, vaguely pyramid-shaped, ending abruptly before a point with a flexing lamprey mouth set inside. It clung to the stalactites above us with a pincer pair of legs on each segment, impossibly agile for something so huge, and dangling as though it was weightless.

Chains trailed down from it like the silkworms’ excretions, but the svart that had once clung to them were long gone, and the golden metal at the ends of each chain was twisted and melted out of shape. It had no eyes, but I had no doubt that it saw us. I could feel the weight of the monster’s attention, dizzying in its intensity.

Sneak time was over. I bellowed, “Look up!”

Everyone looked up just as the abomination let go of its grip. With something that big, it didn’t need to be smart or subtle. Weight would be enough to kill us all. The other two took a dive in opposite directions as the monster turned end over end in the air, snapping through strings as if they weren’t there until its sooty underbelly came into sight, coming down on me like the cave-in that my Dungeoneering had been warning me about since the moment I first arrived.

I didn’t have time to dodge, but I had enough time to swing, and the abomination fell on the edge of my sword.

[Critical Hit]

[66 Damage]

My whoop of victory was swallowed up as the bulk of the falling abomination landed full on top of me.

[81/440 Health]

I’d been hurt more than a few times since I landed on this new world, but this was the first blow that had taken the wind out of me. I should have dodged. I should have moved. I should have done literally anything other than what I just did. When I could feel my hands again, the sword was missing from my grip. When I tried to draw breath to replace the air that had been crushed out of me, I couldn’t. I was being smothered.

Yet I wasn’t lying flat on my back. Now that the shock had passed, I realized that I was still oriented the same direction as I’d started out, my head was still held up, my feet were still on the uneven stone. I nearly threw up when I realized what had happened. The abomination had slammed the open wound that I’d just opened up down on top of me. I was inside it.

In the belly of the beast, I was choking on the glowing slime oozing all around me. The abomination didn’t even seem to notice I was in here. If it flinched, then I never felt it. All that I knew was one moment I was standing there, taking in my gross new surroundings, and the next the ground was ripped out from under me, and the monster was on the move.

Sound was muffled in here, so I couldn’t hear the others fight or shout. When the orbs on the abomination lit up and fired out the lethal scorching beams, I could feel the whole beast vibrate, but I didn’t hear a sound. I was trapped in place by the slick flesh around me, all my senses defeated.

Well, all my old senses defeated.

I reached out with my Sphere of Influence and found my sword still wedged alongside me, just out of reach. I twisted inside the wound, flexing the raw power of my shoulders against the crushing weight that surrounded me. I felt the handle of my sword brush my fingertips, and with one last heave, I caught hold and yanked on it for all that I was worth.

The blade was blunt by anyone’s standards, but this was not the armored hide of the abomination that I was slicing into. I had slipped past its defenses. Inch by painful inch, I drew my sword up through the monster’s flesh.

More of the glowing blood of the abomination eked out of the fresh wounds that I was carving. My hands were drenched in it, and the sunlight stung my skin.

Abominations might not feel pain, they might not have any senses at all, but this one flexed and twisted to try and reject me. The wound beneath my feet opened up, and a gust of fresh air rushed in, washing over my face and stirring me from my stupor. As I began to fall, I spread my legs apart, so that one foot landed on either side of the cut, braced on this inside of its rocky hide. I had room to breathe. I had room to move.

Aiming straight up, I swung my sword awkwardly.

Another arterial spray of golden light drenched down over me, showering out of the beast and making my toeholds even more slippery and slick. I was going to fall out of this thing. The fall might not kill me, but all that the big sparkly-centipede had to do was let go of its grip again and I’d be dead.

No point crying over spilt blood. I didn’t wait to be forcefully expelled, so I tightened my grip on my sword and tucked my knees up to my chest, cannonballing out of the abomination and into the open air.

A moment later I hit a rope, caught hold, and took in all the fun I’d missed.

The abomination was up on the ceiling, trying to keep out of range of Mercy’s bow. It was smarter than it looked. The sunbeams had burned away more than a few of the worm-strings and turned a good portion of the groundwater into steam that was now billowing up around it, giving it even more cover. Clever or lucky.

I yelled down, “It’s on the roof!”

“We know!” Mercy’s voice echoed up from one side of the chamber. “Where are you?”

I glanced around, trying to come up with any useful landmarks. “I’m on a rope!”

There was a pause, then Asher called out, “Why?”

I opened and shut my mouth, but thankfully the giant monster decided to attack again before I could formulate an answer.

The abomination had twisted around to show its back to us again after humping and jerking around to get me out. We could see the three lights shining down again, getting brighter and brighter within the cloud of steam.

Before it could blast me, I dropped down to hang from the rope by one hand. The line bounced as I shifted my weight, and as it sprung back up again, I let go. Momentum flung me up in the air, and I had a moment to do some twisting myself before gravity caught me, and I fell to the next line down.

This one snapped away at one end. Rotten in the wet room, but the far end held. The triple beam of light burned down in parallel lines, chasing me through the room as I swung, tearing up another great cloud of steam from beneath us. I vanished into the fog, sweeping right towards a pillar. I kicked off as I passed, adding spin as I gained height. The pillars of light still chased me, blinking out for only a moment when the angle was wrong and they had to burrow through the solid stone before burning after me some more.

When I reached the ceiling of the chamber, I wrapped an arm around a stalactite and held on for dear life as my rope fell away and was disintegrated by the blasts that had been tracing after me.

Suddenly, the light was blocked out. There was a whole cavern’s worth of dangling stones to deflect it. All that solid mass to burrow through before it could hit me. The steam cloud was gathered up around me now, and I couldn’t see a damned thing except for the distant glow of the monster trying to kill me.

If it didn’t kill me then the fall might, so I turned Restoration on myself, letting life pulse back through me.

[236/440 Health]

I had forgotten all about my Lifesense until I started manipulating that Primal energy within myself. Then suddenly, I could feel the abomination right there at the edge of my senses. With a touch, I’d be able to tell how much health it had exactly. Didn’t really feel like petting it though. Down below, Asher and Mercy were darting about, and I could feel them too, their life fluttering like the heartbeats of rabbits at the edge of my perception.

Without the safety of my rope, I probably should have been trying to work out how to get down without dying, but there was an enemy right there, just begging for a good slap with the business end of my sword. I was just working out how to get close enough for that slapping when the frigging lasers cut out.

For a moment all was silent, then I heard an awful scraping sound like giant fingernails on a giant chalkboard, followed by a thunderous impact down below. Bug boy had dropped down again. Displaced air from the abomination’s passage swept all the fog away, giving me a tunnel down through the clouded dark, right to its back.

I wasn’t going to turn that down. Letting go and falling was the easiest thing that I’d done all day. With both hands tightened on the sword’s grip, all the muscles of my back and arms sang with tension as I fell until finally, I hammered the blade home.

[Critical Hit]

[64 Damage]

There was no precision or control to my strike. I wasn’t picking a soft spot or trying for a weakness. Pure luck brought my blow down on the central star.

It didn’t actually make a sound when it made contact, but there was plenty of noise to follow. To me, at the other end of the blade, it sounded like ‘Woof.’

The explosion flung me back through the air, and I would have hit the far wall if it hadn’t been for all those handy dandy silkworms in the way. The ones above had silk trailing down that caught and cushioned me. The ropes on the same level as me snapped one by one, halting me just before I hit rock. Lucky again.

A spin of my sword cut me loose of the silk and strings, then I landed in a knee-deep puddle that was about the same temperature as a cup of coffee. The kind of coffee that ended in fast food joints getting sued.

“Hot, hot, hot!” I shouted as I scrambled out of the water as fast as my toasted toes would carry me.

Mercy dashed past without a word, still firing off arrow after arrow into the abomination as she moved. I had no idea if they were doing anything other than irritating it, but I wasn’t about to spoil her good mood.

I couldn’t believe how fast she was moving. She was almost a blur. I’d been wondering where her glory was being spent—apparently, it was on going fast. The Pillar of Ascension and I really needed to spend some time getting to know each other.

Asher was somewhere else, out there in the fog, alone and defenseless, except for his lethal magical powers. Maybe I shouldn’t have been worrying about him so much, but he just seemed so squishy. Like a scaly balloon full of pudding.

The only one I could place for certain was the big buff bug boy, still glowing bright as day in the otherwise dim cavern. Guess it was time for both of us to go into the light.

I charged, roaring with that resonant new voice of mine echoing off all the walls. I wanted the abomination to know that I was coming. I wanted it focused completely on me so that it wasn’t trying to blast, gobble, or otherwise maim the other two.

The abomination obliged me.

It loped across the room to meet me with an almost casual disinterest in the giant sword I was holding above my head. Maybe they didn’t know about mortality either? I mean, it looked like it had been stitched together with the same glowing goop that made Eternals work; maybe it thought it was immortal too. I was going to shatter its illusions while I shattered its face.

At the last moment, I let my feet slip out from under me on the drenched stone. Whirring teeth passed in front of my face as it tried to snap at me and failed, and then my sword swung up into the leg on my right, snipping clean through it at the joint.

Momentum carried us both forward, me along the underside of the abomination, and the abomination nose-first into the rocks where I’d been standing a moment before.

I’d forgotten about the mouth on the other end until it was dipping down towards me. The whole abomination had come to a crunching halt, and its ass end had been bucked up in the air above me when I came to my own stop. It came down, buzzing through my new armor as if it weren’t there, and burrowing into my guts.

Blood sprayed up. My blood. Everywhere that I looked was red. Still, those teeth bore down into me, trying to dig right through guts, bones, and all to reach stone on the other side. They shrieked when they hit bone. They rattled my whole skeleton as they tried to chew through, tossing gobs of vital organs aside like so much offal.

I brought my sword up one-handed to smack it in the side of the head, but all of my strength seemed to be leaving me.

[181/440 Health]

Why did I think that I could do this? Why did I think I could be a hero. The most heroic thing I’d ever done in my whole life before had killed me, and now I was about to die all over again for nothing.

Desperation took hold, and adrenaline flooded through me. I brought up my sword and hacked at the smooth white expanse that might have been called the abomination’s neck—if you were feeling charitable or confused by its impossible anatomy.

The hardened hide turned my blade aside with little more than a scratch and a spritz of golden light raining out. My aching arm fell back, and my sword sang against the stones.

I was not going to die like this.

Taking hold of both sides of the conical ass-mouth, I pushed. I may as well have been trying to move the mountain.

My arms creaked, and my shoulders felt like they were about to pop. The ragged stone dug deeper and deeper into my back as I strained, and the head moved.

A fresh wash of blood bubbled up out of the hole in my torso as the gnawing sphincter lost contact. If I hadn’t been clenching my teeth, I would have bitten through my tongue from the pain. But it was moving. Inch by inch, I hauled it up out of me.

Finally, it was at arm’s length, held above me but still trying to bear down with all its weight. Inside the rows of teeth flexed and pulsed, trying to snare me and draw me in deeper. This close, it was so obvious that the monster was artificial. The teeth were like a shark’s—perfectly triangular with only a blood groove etched up their center.

My arms shook with the strain, or maybe all the blood-loss, and looking down was definitely not in the cards until my Restoration ticked off whatever cooldown it was on. Knowing yourself is great and all, but knowing what my own mushed up intestines look like is something I could live without.

Letting go was madness. The whole thing would come right back down into me again. I’d have to be insane to let all the strain go onto one shaking arm, reach down, grab my sword, and angle it up so that the abomination impaled itself when my arm gave out and it started trying to chew on me again. I’d have to be crazy.

The sword danced around inside the mouth of the beast like a spoon in a garbage disposal with about the same sound. The pommel was wedged into the ground by my side, braced against the force being hammered down against it.

There was a moment’s reprieve when the abomination realized what was happening, then I got my hands on it again and started to pull.

The grinding, wailing sounds coming from inside the monster’s mouth grew louder and louder as I hauled it down, and the blade dug in deeper. It tried to pull away, but I was ready for it now, bringing all my strength and weight to bear. Dragging it down as I roared, “Eat it!”

The abomination did eat it. I had to twist to get out of the way. Stumbling to my feet, I braced my shoulder against its side to stop it from escaping laterally, but I managed every step in one fluid motion, never letting it buck free.

Golden blood rained down out of the pulsating pyramid head. The sword was still battering around inside it, spun in a whirlwind dervish of teeth and gore.

“Kiss!” My shoulders screamed as I bore down on the beast.

“The!” It bucked and rocked, trying to pull away from the cutting edge.

“Stone!” With a jump and my full weight carrying us, I slammed the pyramid head down.

The abomination slipped down another foot, and the tip of my sword burst out the side of its head.

It went on writhing in my arms for a moment longer, but this end of the abomination seemed to be well and truly wrecked. When I let the head go, it flopped limply to the side, and a shower of teeth fell out the now-ragged-edged hole at the end. When I pulled out my sword, it was coated in the same fluid as before, but now the light was dying down it looked more like molten gold than sunshine.

I wished that my own flopping innards looked nearly as appealing, and then I did it. I did the stupid thing. I looked down. Things that were meant to be on the inside were poking outside. Restoration still wasn’t ready. This whole situation was gross.

The rest of the abomination didn’t seem to realize that this ass was dead. The other head-ass had been chasing Mercy back and forth as she peppered it with arrows, and there was still no sign of Asher in the clouds of steam. The dead head lay limp on the ground, coiling up towards the glowing orbs spaced out along its back like a ramp.

Moisture clung all over the thing, making my feet slip out from under me as I climbed. It really was like marble on the outside, with all the underfoot grip that marble gave you. I made it to the end of the segment without smashing my face on the thing, so I was calling it a win.

After slipping and sliding all over the place, I didn’t have much momentum, but I could still swing.

Light trailed from the back end of my cut, and an arc of light flared out of the orb like a solar flare. It was only when that ribbon of light snapped back into the orb that the concussion hit me.

The explosion itself did the damage. I was blasted off my feet, but I ended up with a rope wedged up in my crotch somewhere amidst the flips I did through the air, stopping me before I hit anything solid. Good thing I’d taken all those ranks in testicular fortitude. No, wait, that wasn’t a thing. Ow.

From somewhere in the shadows, Asher’s spell fired off, but something had gone wrong. The static charge that usually surrounded our enemies enveloped me too. Electricity rippled across my skin, sparking between my fingers, sparking like stitches over my open wounds.

Mercy yelped, “Asher, you got me too!”

I managed to untangle my legs and drop down onto my back in another scorching puddle. “Me three!”

The pyramid head that was still active had frozen in place, and now it cocked from side to side like it was sniffing the air. It had no eyes. It had no nose. What was it  sensing? Like it had locked on to a target, the pointed head tracked over to one deep patch of shadows near the tied-up entrance. Asher.

With the dead weight of its dead-ass, the abomination couldn’t go bounding over to him, but that didn’t mean that he was out of reach. The three orbs on the abominations back grew in intensity. There was no way I could cross the room to Asher before they fired off.

I swung for the nearest leg. Aiming low.

Those claws were armored to hell and back, but the goal wasn’t to breakthrough, it was to knock it off-balance. With a front leg missing and the ass fast asleep, the abomination had lost its equilibrium. Knocking this middle leg sideways set the whole thing to topple back towards me.

Sunbeams burst out of the orbs, triangulating in on Asher’s position, but they bucked up before they could make contact, burning clean through the wooden door and lancing up to blacken the roof of the city outside.

Given the choice of retreating or diving under the falling abomination, I did the stupid thing, as usual, rolling on one shoulder and coming up face to face with its blackened belly, right by the slit I’d put in it when the fighting began.

I was not going back in there, but my sword could if it wanted.

With a flare of moonlight, Sword Skill was carved into my mind and the number alongside it vanished.

There was a fresh mark carved across the hide of the abomination, crossing the broader cut midway. It was just a scratch, but it was all I had time for before it rolled back onto its feet, and I had to haul ass out of the way.

With the door burning and the lights sweeping down again, I could see Asher clearly, pinned in place by a spell still trapped between his hands. “Blast it!”

He struggled to speak in stuttering breaths between the chant of his spell. “I. Cannot.”

The beams were splaying out, scorching the walls all around us. The abomination was flailing. “Why?”

I’d placed myself between Asher and the abomination without really thinking about it. But with my health in its current state, I wasn’t liable to survive a blast. Asher huffed out, “You. Are. Saturated. And Charged.”

“Because we’re wet it will hit us too?”

Even through his mumbling spell-work, he sounded bemused with me. “Indeed.”

I could fix this. I could fix this by shouting, “Hey, Mercy! Get hit!”

She was somewhere at the far end of the cave. Still running, still moving. “What?”

“Jump in a beam.” I was already jogging to the side, trying to keep my insides inside. Heading for the closest floodlight of death, sweeping across and frazzling every rope and silkworm in its way.

She bellowed back. “You jump in a beam!”

“I’m trying!”

I barely heard her shout “What?” before I made my jump.

When I hit the beam, it hurt like hell.

When I came out the other side half-blind, I had to dive to avoid the next beam heading right for me and roll to my feet on the far side. It was a lot more exercise than I should have been doing with a massive hole in my middle or burns all over my damn body. There was no trace of water or electricity left on me when I staggered to a halt and looked down. “I’m clear!”

There was this old parenting thing about peer pressure, where you’d get asked “if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”

Turns out, Mercy would.

She came bursting out of the beam I’d just ducked and rolled to a halt beside me. “Why did I do that?”

“Watch!”

We couldn’t see Asher from here, but there was no mistaking the boom as his spell fired off. Mercy and I might have been dry, but the abomination was still wrapped in steam, drenched with glowing blood, water, and most importantly, it was punched full of enough holes that the tough hide wasn’t going to save it this time.

The lightning didn’t shoot out towards the monster. Instead, it spread through the mist until it was a great expansive wall of raw destruction. It swept over the abomination like a wave, not striking but swallowing it whole.

It shook as the lightning swept over it. It shuddered soundlessly, except for the splashing its twitching legs made in the puddles. Mercy had a fresh arrow strung and ready to go, and I reluctantly hefted my sword for round two…or was it three. Might have been four. I was feeling punch-drunk.

We shouldn’t have bothered. What was left of the abomination’s legs gave out beneath it, and the stars along its back flickered and died. The room then was plunged into darkness. I still didn’t trust it until the gods tacitly confirmed that we’d won.

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Potency increased to 32

Sword: Rank 10/10

Acrobatics: Rank 6/10

263 Experience Gained

400 Glory Gained

I turned to Mercy. “Am I allowed to make noise now?”

“Damage is done.”

I threw back my head and whooped. “We kicked its ass-faces!”

Chapter 13

The silkworm farm had seen better days, but as the Dvergar ninja squad came creeping in, they didn’t seem too mad about it. I caught scraps of conversation, and it sounded like they had been expecting a lot worse. There were enough worms left to get things going again, and they were still in good shape despite all the time they’d been left dangling untended. I was calling it a win.

I put an arm around my companions ‘shoulders out of camaraderie, and definitely not because my guts were dangling out, and I felt like falling over. “Mission accomplished, guys. And you were worried about a few svart.”

Asher hissed. “A few svart?”

“Isn’t that your liver on the floor over there?” Mercy was less subtle in her reproach.

I had to admit, it did look like a liver. “Eh, that could be anyone’s.”

Now that the rope had been burned away, the wooden doors of the worm-farm hung open, and we could stroll right out into the city again. The silence that we’d worked so hard to maintain was over, and more Dvergar than I’d seen since we arrived here were hard at work, rushing from house to house, reclaiming all that had been left behind when the svart broke through—anything that they hadn’t broken, eaten, or smeared with feces anyway.

Industrious sounds had kicked off back at the barricade as the Dvergar worked to break down the barrier there and relocate it. I’d expected them to reinforce the line that we’d already reclaimed, but they seemed to be building yet another barricade running parallel to the wall, sectioning off a clean run to the worm-farm without having to hold a huge area of the city. It was probably smart, but it still felt like they were giving up the land we’d just bled to reclaim for them. Okay, I did most of the bleeding, but still.

We had made it almost as far as the barricade that we’d originally had to hop when Restoration finally flared back to life, and I immediately used it.

So much had been torn down and moved already, we were able to stroll right through. The echoes of industry seemed to have brought out all the Dvergar in the city. There were still barely any creeping out from wherever they’d been hiding, but compared to when we first arrived, it felt like the place was bustling.

The regular everyday Dvergar were starkly different to Mercy’s ninjas and the political position people that we’d crossed paths with earlier. Where the fighters like Gunhild and her posse were bound up tight in leather so they could move around easily, these Dvergar wore flowing robes of silk, with leather draped over in pinafore aprons to protect that silk from whatever they encountered. The big thing that surprised me was the veils. Every one of them had a diaphanous cloth hung over their face from a little bronze filigreed headband. Some had braided beards dangling out from beneath the veil, and others didn’t, but you couldn’t see a single face regardless. The effect was a little unsettling—particularly combined with their total refusal to actually speak to us.

I mean, a giant horny dude like me stomping around might be a little intimidating sure, I get that, but Mercy? She was as cute as a button. There was no excuse for all of us to be ignored.

Our old buddy, Gorm, spotted us as we emerged into one of the glowing mushroom squares, and he bustled over with a few more of the more dressed up Dvergar to greet us. He held up both his fists for us to bump them in turn, so I guess we were now all on double fist-bumping terms. “If I hadn’t been seeing it with my own eyes, I’d never be believing it. You did it. You really do be here to help us.”

I was halfway through an ‘I told you so’ when Mercy hit me in the fresh scar that had previously been the hole in my gut. She cut in. “We were happy to help.”

“The elders will be wanting to see you again”—Gorm’s partially hidden face contorted into a grimace that it took me a minute to recognize as a grin—“but they aren’t going anywhere. This be a cause for celebrating. One like we haven’t been having in many a turn.”

Finally, the Dvergar around us piped up, not in the cheer I was expecting, but in a long, warbling hoot that set my teeth on edge. I really needed to get over the idea that this was a world I knew. They might have looked like something out of Tolkien, but these were a whole new species I’d never met before. This was like first contact with an alien race or something.

Barrels were rolled out, and some terrifyingly clear liquor came pouring out of the taps hammered into them marginally faster than molasses. All my senses were sharper as a Chagnar Faun, and that included the sense of smell that was currently screaming at me to run for my life. Instead, I took the proffered pewter flagon and knocked the whole thing back.

New Skill Discovered! [Poison Resistance]

Poison Resistance: Rank 1/10

All around me the Dvergar were sipping their drinks, and Mercy was pretending to drink hers, with her eyes watering every time she lifted the flagon to her face. Asher had simply handed his cup back after peering into it, and the Dvergar didn’t know enough about Inyoka to know whether they should be offended or not.

Gorm pressed another drink into my hand. “We’ve all been waiting so long.”

“Waiting for what?” I knocked back the liquor. It tasted vaguely… meaty. “Us?”

The Dvergar scoffed. “For death. There don’t be anything else for us Dver. Svart take our mine. Stone takes our flesh. Void takes our souls. We’ve been waiting here, dying by inches, counting our losses.”

Oh great, Dvergar were the maudlin kind of drunks. Mercy stepped up and slapped Gorm on the back. “That’s all over now.”

The ululating sound was back, but now it was creeping up and down in some sort of song. Someone had hauled out drums too. Ain’t no party like a Dvergar party. There were then a few rounds of drinks and some speeches from the Dvergar who were important enough that they felt the need to have their faces on display.

The Dvergar started dancing with lots of foot-stomping to the drums and spinning so their robes swished around. I said some stuff about how great they were, and everyone cheered. I tried to dance, but I stepped on one of the Dvergar, and he got mad even though I said sorry, so I went and leaned on a wall and tried to remember what I was here for.

Another cup was in my hand, but I couldn’t remember picking it up, and Gunhild was here now. That was great.

“Hey, Gunhild is here now. That is great!”

She looked taken aback by my bellow but accepted the lopsided hug in good humor, even though I kind of mashed her into Asher, who was tucked under my other arm and trying to steer me away from the crowd.

Mercy was off chatting to some other Dvergar over by the thingy, the wall thing that they built to keep the little svart dudes out. She was scowling at me. Was she mad at me? Was she really mad or funny mad like normal? Where was I going?

Asher and Gunhild had steered me into one of the houses. My horns scraped along the ceiling, the vibrations ran down into my bones, and I felt kind of sick. I needed to lie down. They had made a bed for me. “I need sleep now.”

Asher was nodding and trying to gently lower me to the ground. Gunhild had left. “You’re my best friend, Asher. You’re the best. Best friend in this whole world.”

It was really important that he knew that, especially after us arguing earlier. He cocked his head to the side when I spoke but didn’t say anything back.

The roof had lines on it. Wobbly lines. Two wobbly lines scraped in the solid stone. Oh, that was me. That was my horns. I was sleepy. I needed to sleep now. Nap time.

Sleep on Amaranth was just the same as sleep back home. Everything was dark. Everything was peaceful.

Pain was waiting for me when I woke up. Pain and confusion. My head was throbbing, and I couldn’t remember much of anything after we killed the abomination in the worm-farm. It was a bad time to be me.

Poison Resistance: Rank 9/10

Oh gods.

I was never drinking again. At the very least, I was never drinking whatever the hell the Dvergar were serving. My mouth tasted like I’d licked a decaying badger, and I wasn’t even sure if they had badgers here. Had they imported a dead badger across dimensions? When I tried to sit up, I immediately regretted it. It was like the hangover was just hanging above the floor like a fog, and I’d just slammed my face right into it.

Oh, that was bad. My only consolation was that I didn’t have internet shopping here on Amaranth, so I wasn’t going to be getting any nasty surprises in the mail over the next few days. At least, that was what I thought until an obscure fact about the feeding habits of dholes popped into my head. Apparently, dholes were giant death worms that popped up under the feet of anyone dumb enough to walk over the ash wastes. Good to know. How did I know it?

Turning my attention inward, I discovered how I knew. I’d been drunk shopping for skills.

In addition to upping Bestiary by two ranks, I’d purchased the Divine Skill of Rough Hewn Architecture for some reason. What was left in my experience pool had been gobbled up by three ranks of Brutality—which seemed to be one of the follow-on options from Sword Skill. My Potency had hopped up a few points as a result of that last one, so I wasn’t really mad about it, but I did wonder why I thought spontaneously creating architecture was something I desperately needed. “What the hell, drunk Maulkin?”

Skills:

Combat: Rank 10/10

Sword: Rank 10/10

Brutality: Rank 3/10

Acrobatics: Rank 6/10

Bestiary: Rank 3/10

Dungeoneering: Rank 2/10

Ancient History: Rank 1/10

I nearly tripped over Asher as I lumbered towards the door. He’d settled himself down to watch over me with his back to the wall and his tail coiled around onto his lap. He’d been busy since we got to Amaranth, so I decided that I’d let him rest a bit longer.

Outside the open doorway, Gunhild and Gorm were waiting. They didn’t look impressed. What did I do that I couldn’t remember?

“Is there going to be a shotgun wedding?”

Both Dvergar echoed back, “What?”

I glanced from face to face. “Did I get someone pregnant?”

“What?!” The Dvergar response was getting louder and madder each time I asked a question.

“Okay, let’s start over. Good morning.”

Gorm nodded slowly. “If it be morning, then I’d hope it be a good one.”

That was cryptic.

“So… what’s up, guys?”

“You and your shine-eye’d kin made us some promises,” Gunhild piped up. “Said you’d drive out the svart. Take back the khag.”

I started nodding and immediately regretted it. I should not have been drinking on an empty stomach. “Yup that is the plan.”

Gorm pressed his knuckles together. “We be here to see you do it.”

It took me a few blinks until my brain spun up to speed, and I understood what they were saying. “What, did you think we were going to sneak out?”

“Dvergar be oathbound folk, but we know them that walk under the sky don’t be holding much weight to words,” Gunhild said. Every time I turned from one to the other, another wave of nausea swept over me.

“Did I say something when I was drunk?”

“You didn’t be saying nothing,” Gorm started, but Gunhild butted in to correct him almost immediately.

“Well, you be saying a lot actually, not much of it making sense, but nothing about leaving us to rot.”

I took a deep breath, wishing I couldn’t smell my own sweat. “So this is just run of the mill regular distrust instead of something I did?”

“That be the size of it. Aye.” Gunhild shrugged.

I let my shoulders slump. “Oh thank the gods. I thought I’d screwed everything up, but you guys are just being dicks.”

There was only enough time for the two Dvergar to look moderately outraged before Mercy strolled around the corner with a couple of her ninjas in tow. “I really can’t leave you alone for a minute can I?”

“Mercy!” Finally, there was an adult to help. “Tell them we aren’t going to run away.”

Mercy laughed out loud. “Oh they know. They’re just being dicks.”

Neither Gorm nor Gunhild smiled at that, but they weren’t exactly denying it either. Dicks. A whole cave of dicks. My head hurt.

“So what’s next?” I clapped my hands and immediately regretted it. “More drinking?”

Mercy was frowning again. Great. “You’re banned from even thinking about alcohol ever again, you complete train-wreck. While you were sleeping it off, I went and spoke to the Elders. We’re honorary Khag Mhor citizens now.”

“So they’re happy?”

“I don’t know if happy is the right word.” Mercy had come closer, and now she was talking really loudly. Like she thought I couldn’t hear her right. Every word made my horns ring. “They believe we’re here to help now. Can’t really blame them for doubting us when nobody has tried to help each other out around here for a few thousand years.”

“I don’t get that. Why didn’t they ask for help? There have to be other Dvergar out there, even if they don’t trust anyone else.”

“Some of it was pride, but most of it… you’ve got to understand this place is screwed. Not just Khag Mhor, but the whole planet, plane…whatever it is.” She was so damn loud, I had to sit down on the ground. “The bits that aren’t at war with each other over old grudges are overrun with monsters from the Void War, or just general…monsters. Everyone is trying to look after their own people first, or if not, just themselves.”

Her words buzzed around my head for a while before they came in to roost. “What about the Eternals?”

Mercy crouched down so our faces were level and she could keep on yelling directly into my ear. “What about them?”

“I mean, we were sent down here by the gods to get the place right. How come the rest of the Eternals aren’t out there doing that already?”

“From what I’ve heard, most of the Eternals are either mad, buried, or…just gone. A few of them used all their powers to make themselves kings of little kingdoms. Nobody holds onto a grudge like somebody who can’t die.”

I hadn’t been holding out much hope that super-powered mega-Eternals from the dawn of time were going to show up and save the day, but it was a nice fantasy. “So we’re on our own?”

Mercy flopped onto her ass with a sigh. “Did you ever doubt it?”

“Do you be planning on doing anything but flapping your face-holes and blocking our streets this day?” Gunhild was such a charmer. I was starting to see why nobody had come rushing to the Dvergar’s aid if this was how they treated people.

Asher was standing over us, quiet and composed as always. That was it. I was buying a bell and tying it around his neck. When he spoke, I jumped. “So once more the question becomes, what do we do next?”

“The Elders figure all the Svart are coming up from the mine. Maybe there was a collapse that joined up their old shafts to the svart den or something.” She paused for me to snort at the word shafts and rolled her eyes. “Anyway, until that is sealed off, more svart are just going to keep on coming. They want us to cut them off at the source.”

Asher nodded. “Nip it in the bud.”

“Strike at the heart,” added Gunhild.

“If you be collapsing the connection,” Gorm interjected, “you’ll cut off their reinforcements.”

Now that I was this close, I noticed that Mercy had a new bow, new arrows, and even some pieces of armor strapped on. I didn’t get any prizes. Why did she get prizes? “How are we meant to collapse a tunnel?”

The Dvergar began furiously debating this amongst themselves. I could hear something about redirecting explosive gasses, a sapper team, and ten brave Dvergar miners who would willingly die in the tunnels to put an end to the svart blight. Mercy waded in, “You don’t have enough people to be throwing them away.”

That set off another round of shouting from the shorter contingent of the group. “Dver be knowing their lives’ worth.”

“You dare to tell us how to be working stone?!”

Mercy had her hands up, but her shouting did not seem quite as conciliatory. “If any more Dvergar die, the whole khag is done. You can barely keep things going as it is.”

“Don’t be thinking to tell us how to die, longshanks.”

I held up my hand. “Uh, I can do it.”

There was a resounding moment of silence, then scoffing.

“What, you’re going to punch the rock real hard?” If Mercy kept rolling her eyes like that, eventually she was going to strain something.

“I’ve got Divine Architecture and Dungeoneering. I could probably pull down this whole city.”

That put a longer stop to the short-lived shouting match. Even Asher was stunned into silence.

Eventually, Gorm coughed and said, “Please don’t be doing that.”

There was a lot more debate that I kind of missed out on because I was trying not to throw up. At some point, everyone sat down in the dirt, and the Dvergar started sketching out another map, which meant we probably had plenty of time before anything useful could be decided. I almost laughed when Gorm took a hold of my hand and used my thumb to sketch out the barricade lines, but he was so earnest I couldn’t let the chuckle slip free. The map wasn’t as clean-cut as the Dvergar wanted it to be because Mercy kept stabbing her finger into it, pointing out landmarks she’d seen while exploring her own little corner of heaven yesterday.

Half of the city was still what Mercy was affectionately calling “Svart Town” despite all our best efforts the day before. While we’d been drinking, carousing, and whatever Mercy had been up to, the old barricades had fallen to the svart hordes. All the ground we’d gained had fallen into their grabby little hands without contest. They’d rammed into the new barricades, but the defenders had held, so at least the worm-farm was still under Dvergar control.

The entrance to the mine was directly opposite the entrance to the city, and from the way that the Dvergar described it, it had about as much cultural significance and defensive capability built into it. Traps, tricks, and big old doors. The Dvergar had learned their lessons well about beasties crawling up out of the deeps. Unfortunately, all those things were now in the hands of the svart.

Now that the liquor was out of my system, I’d lost a little bit of confidence in my ability to do this. None of us had ever taken a city before, and yesterday’s plan had only worked because it was pretty limited in scope, and we had the barricades to fall back to.

In theory, we could try Mercy’s sneaky ninja tactics to get across to the mine entrance, then head down to find where the Svart were coming from deeper in. The Dvergar were extremely insistent that we didn’t just collapse the whole mine. Crazy insistent. They seemed to care more about keeping the mine open than they cared about us surviving—by a long shot. Mercy leaned in close and muttered something to me about the mine being the heart of Dvergar trade culture or something, but Asher and Gorm were in the middle of trying to loudly out-polite each other, so I missed everything but the gist.

The thumping in my head got louder with every passing moment. There were at least seven distinct arguments going on around me despite there only being four other people. I stared down at the map in the dust as if there was some hidden answer in there. Svart Town was vast. More than half the cavern-city belonged to them. Every inch of it was liable to be crawling with them. What we needed was a clear path through. I wriggled up onto my knees to lean over the map.

There was a straight run of streets from the middle of the barricade all the way to the mine. A thoroughfare from the entrance gate. I took my first two fingers and drew them down either side of the street, sketching out a barricade along every alleyway and cross-road. “There.”

Mercy looked from the map to me and back. “You do understand how maps work? You get that drawing on the map doesn’t make something happen in real life.”

“I keep forgetting how funny you are until you open your mouth, and then I remember how funny you are: not funny.” I turned from her stuck-out tongue to the Dvergar. “Is there anything blocking the main road, or would we get a clear run along it?”

“You’d be getting overrun from the side streets before you’ve gone ten steps, no matter how fast you be moving.” Gunhild also thought I was a moron, apparently.

“That wasn’t my question,” I interrupted before she could dive back into the argument at hand. “The road. Is the road clear?”

Gorm answered me with a speculative look in his eyes. “Aye, the road be clear.”

I flopped back onto my ass with a satisfied groan. “Then we’re good to go.”

Asher really was remarkably polite. He barely raised his voice when he snapped, “We most certainly are not.”

“Well, we’ll need to stock up on some basic supplies, check over our gear, and say bye-bye to all the little ninja buddies some of us made, but apart from that, I’m ready to start the quest.”

Mercy snorted. “Did you seriously just call this a quest?”

“In what world is venturing into dark tunnels to find the source of the evil monsters plaguing a land not a quest?”

“Any sane world?”

“Welcome to Amaranth.” I grinned at her. “Population: us, and a whole load of quests.”

She was really staring at me now. Like I was something she’d never seen before. “You’re really enjoying all this aren’t you?”

“What’s not to like? Monsters bad. Hit monsters good.” It took a few attempts, but I got myself back onto my feet. “I wish every day could be this easy.”

She got to her feet just so the height difference was less obvious. “You’re a real character, you know that?”

“Thanks.”

She wasn’t smiling. “Not a compliment.”

The rest of what I assumed was the morning was spent on the crafting and organization stuff video games tended to gloss over. I rebuilt a solid set of armor for myself out of the Dvergar’s fairly massive scrap heap and patched up the damage to my sword.

The weapons that the Dvergar made were vastly superior to what my divine powers could conjure up, but I refused to swap out my sword and armor for the fancy stuff that Mercy had dressed herself in. Sure her new silk-strung bow might do more damage, and the studded blackened leathers she was wearing might tank more hits than the rags I could stick together, but I was sticking with the stuff I knew I could change on the run. More damage was great. Being able to repair a broken sword by blinking was better. I graciously accepted some clothes to wear under my armor, just to stop Asher from bleating every time I swung my magnum faun dong around, but I was certain that I was better off not ending up in a sticky situation—covered in sticky-fingered little svart—with armor I couldn’t flick off.

Once I’d explained the plan to Gunhild and she’d double-checked with the other two that I wasn’t insane and that it was actually possible, she set off with Gorm to make plans of her own. While we stoppered up the Svart at their source, the rest of the city was going to start laying plans of their own. Their fight would be slow and methodical, but the Svart were too stupid to organize against them. As long as we succeeded, the whole of Svart Town might be cleared out by the end of the week.

It took me a while to understand what I was seeing in the city. The Dvergar who’d been in hiding up until now were out and about, bumping fists and scurrying around the streets at such a speed that I genuinely worried about stepping on them. They’d been hidden, invisible, or buried in their work when we arrived, but now they were everywhere. Asher was at my shoulder. “They have hope again.”

It was weird when he said it like that, but he wasn’t wrong. The Dvergar had been waiting for death. Now they weren’t. They were still waiting, watching, and shuffling out of our way like we were unwelcome guests, but inevitable death was no longer on the menu. Hopefully, Chernghast wasn’t going to be too mad at me for messing with his domain. Although, given that the gods weren’t allowed to directly interfere with what was going on in Amaranth, I guess that if he was angry then he would just have to suck it up. I was the only horse that the Lunar Court had in this race, so they weren’t going to knee-cap me just because I happened to trample over their existing plans. Horse metaphors always seem to get away from me.

Mercy was with us now that she had her gear, still muttering about how I was going to get us all killed at a volume just low enough that I could pretend not to hear her. She was getting really negative. It was almost like she didn’t trust in the bright idea that I half-remembered from when I was blackout drunk.

Beyond Mercy’s gear and a bit of food in case we were exploring down the mine for a day or more, the only thing we really wanted was rope and some pins, just in case our exploration went vertical on us. While Mercy and I were debating how much we needed, and I was reminding her that I could personally carry the whole khag’s supply of rope, so worrying about the weight was a bit pointless, Asher slipped away sometime in the middle. By the time that the debate was over, he came slinking back to join us in some silky new robes bound in tight around his torso with leather straps. “Kinky.”

He cocked his head to one side as though he didn’t understand what I was saying, but I knew he understood me just fine, he just didn’t want to admit it.

With that done, we were ready. We headed for the barricade amidst the complete lack of cheering and applause that I’d kind of been secretly hoping for. It was fine. There’d be plenty of time for them to cheer when we came back…victorious. They could have a parade, or more of that mushroom booze, or a parade with more of that mushroom booze.

I gave the other two a boost up onto the barricade’s walkway so we could look out at the road to the mines. There were Svart as far as the eye could see, screeching at each other and scampering around like a big old barrel of monkeys. Not as many as we saw yesterday—I guess some of them were sleeping off the excitement—but enough to make me think that just making a run for it was going to end in us getting royally chewed.

The only real charity I’d taken from the Dvergar was a slightly complicated baldric and metal clips arrangement that they’d made to hold my sword on my back when I needed my hands free. I clicked and snapped that hefty cleaver of mine into it now, held up my arms, and closed my eyes.

It was time to see if this plan of mine was going to work or not.

Chapter 14

With my eyes closed, it was easier to feel the extent of my Sphere of Influence. It wasn’t huge. Every Divine Skill from the Pillar of Artifice that I’d bought had extended it a little farther, so with Weapons, Armor, and Architecture, I could now reach out with my mind and brush over the façades of the buildings on either side of the road. Turns out that leveling up my Dungeoneering knowledge had also taught me what a façade was. Every day in Amaranth was an education.

It was hard to move when I was using the Divine Pillars but not impossible. I couldn’t feel my body, so that made it harder to steer, but from my exterior view, I watched the grey bulk of my new body leaping off the barricade like it was moving through molasses. It looked almost graceful from the outside.

My consciousness got dragged along with my body, the sphere still centered on that big hunk of meat. Rough Hewn Architecture had added a lot of new materials to my awareness—the cobbled stone beneath our feet, the half-rotten wood of the doors, and the brass inlaid along the sides of the street to demarcate this as a main thoroughfare. Combined with all of the trash and scraps that could have been made into weapons and armor, the balance of signal to noise was getting skewed. It took real concentration to find what I was looking for.

As my feet hit the ground, the earth beneath us gave way. The whole street sank down as the stone below it flowed out. Like a wave hitting rocks, the stone hit the limits of my sphere and splashed up. Shooting out just beyond the brass strip into a six-foot wall of solid stone on either side of the road.

Snapping back to my body, I fell onto my hands and knees. That took a lot more out of me than I’d been anticipating, but there was no going back now. My only comfort was that I didn’t have to wall up the whole thing. Most of the work had already been done for me by the original builders of the khag. A wall every so often to block the gap between buildings was a lot easier than me hauling a barricade up the whole length of the way.

The only downside of moving several tons of stone by force of will was that it wasn’t exactly quiet. First, there was a rumble, then a smashing noise as the stone broke the surface, and then an ongoing grating sound like a wolverine having a slap-fight with a chalkboard as the rock grew up. Every svart in Svart Town came running. This was going to be awesome.

Mercy’s arrows started to fly the moment a Svart stuck its head out of a doorway, but I didn’t reach for my sword yet. Instead, I took a few lumbering steps forward as I tried to remember how things like muscles and bones worked. We reached the next intersection, and I slipped back out of my body again.

Another rumble, another crack, and another shriek of stone on stone. More screaming and charging Svart—now too close for me to ignore them.

The sword unclipped from my back smoothly, just as I dropped back into my body. Again, I took a stumbling step forward, but this time I was expecting it. That momentum turned into an overhead swing.

The other svart seemed to realize their mistake in charging at me head-on when the leader of the pack fell neatly into two halves. Unfortunately for the front-runners, there was a wave of bodies right behind them, tripping and trampling over any svart that weren’t happy to charge directly into my blade.

Mercy’s arrows popped up out of Svart eyes like they were weird jack-in-the-box toys, but even in the cul-de-sac I’d been building there was too much space for the svart to wash around me. I took a horizontal swing with my sword as they dashed by, right at my waist-height.

My waist height was their head-height, and six heads sprang clean off svart shoulders to tumble along the road. The bodies hit the stone, throwing up puffs of ash and dirt.

“Come get some!”

Weirdly, they didn’t take me up on it. The tide parted around me, and they ran for Mercy and Asher. Nice soft targets in easy grabbing range. To hell with that. With my eyes closed, I reached down into the earth again. It was so much easier this time to push a ditch down into the ground and haul a wall up on the other side at the same time.

The svart charge broke on the solid stone wall, and I snapped back to my body just in time to catch a crystal dagger right in the armor-free back of my knee.

I dropped, hammering my horned head into the svart that took the sucker punch while I was distracted with building.

With a growl of pain, I yanked the jagged crystal shank back out of my leg and tossed it aside, using my sword as a crutch to haul myself back to my feet.

“Hey, genius!” Mercy bellowed to be heard over the baying of the svart. “You can’t fight them all alone!”

The svart that had slowed enough not to smash into the stone and their less fortunate predecessors turned on their heel and charged back towards me. Putting weight on my stabbed leg hurt like hell, but it held. I hefted my sword and got ready to swing. In the moment of silence before the swarm hit me, I shouted back, “Hey, genius, climb on top of the wall!”

I pulled back with my sword, ready for another broad swipe, and something poked me in the back of the neck. A glance back told me that my back was peppered with arrows. My armor had stopped some from digging into me, but others were just jutting out of me, unnoticed until now. When I was using Artifice I couldn’t feel anything that was happening to my body. Not helpful.

Getting distracted while you’re facing down a charge wasn’t helpful either. The svart swarmed inside my reach before I had the chance to swipe them all away.

The closest ones got the side of my arms instead of the edge of my blade. Enough to knock them aside, but not enough to bisect them like their little buddies.

Any svart my blade touched died. The one that caught my elbow to the chest burst like an overripe watermelon, and the two that caught the flat of my arm instead hit the ground in one piece and tumbled to hit the fresh-made wall. None would be getting up again.

Arrows started raining down again, signaling that Mercy had gotten her act together. Whatever Asher was working up to would take all day, as usual, but there had to be ways I could help out. Dungeoneering was whispering in the hindquarters of my brain. Something about lightning and copper. Conductors!

There was then a moment’s reprieve from svart attacks. They were regrouping, getting peppered with arrows, and gawking at the bits of their buddies that I’d scattered across the road.

Slipping back into god-mode, I reached out to the brass stripes and pulled. At first nothing happened, then I flexed my will a little harder. The metal creaked, and the stone around it cracked. I pulled harder. The metal was worked, refined, and perfected by real craftsmen.

It was beyond the limits of my Divine Skill to work with it, yet still, I could feel it in my Sphere. I could still feel the raw copper ore deep down inside it. With one last grunting pull, the veneer of perfection fell apart, and the bronze strips burst apart. Only the copper came. Fragments and tangled wire-widths of metal exploded out in every direction, out of all control. I snapped back to my body just in time to dive beneath the shower of sparks and metal. That was a mistake.

Blood started seeping out of my eyes to patter in the dust beneath me. I’d pushed too hard at something I didn’t even vaguely understand. I could taste copper in my mouth, and I didn’t know if it was dust or my own blood. Definitely a mistake.

More blood oozed up out of the hole in my leg and the wounds on my back, and it trickled down from my nose. I got the message, body. Don’t do it again. Inch by inch, I started to scramble back towards the Mercy-topped wall, dragging my half-numb leg behind me and hoping that the contortions of unspooling bronze didn’t come my way.

I was so dazed that I didn’t even realize I was there until I felt the thump. I got my shoulder to the wall and tried to push myself up onto my feet. Mercy roared, “What the hell did you do?”

“Copper. Conductor.” I spat blood against the wall. “Mistakes were made.”

My insides may have been trying to become my outsides, but there was no denying that the tangled briar of metal that I’d thrown up was slowing the tide of the Svart to a trickle that even Mercy’s arrows were sufficient to deal with.

Beyond the walls on either side of the street, the monstrous baying rose up, discordant but somehow musical all the same. Svart voices sounded like a live chicken being fed through a blender, but all together there was no denying that there was some sort of communication going on. “Kill. Kill. Kill,” was all that our ability to speak in tongues could translate, but it was the main thrust of the conversation.

When exhaustion dipped me down and my eyes slipped closed, I could see the pillars of divinity within me. I could see the cracks running through the once sleek form of the Pillar of Artifice. Reading you loud and clear, gods. Don’t push the powers. Still, at least the glowing spindle of Primal was still standing undamaged.

Restoration set that pillar blazing with moonlight, and when my eyes slipped open, the flow of blood from all my holes slowed to a trickle.

[102/440 Health]

Yikes. I’d really been on my last legs without even knowing it. God mode was cool and all, but losing contact with my body was a good way to get it trashed before I got home.

Almost as soon as my vision cleared up, Asher’s spell fired off. The copper bramble I’d made did exactly what I’d hoped, conducting the bolt of lightning that he launched. Dozens of svart were in the midst of clambering through the mess of metalwork to reach us when his spell hit, and they were crispy-fried in an instant. It smelled like fast food. I was going to miss fast food.

With a grunt of effort, I pushed myself back to my feet. It didn’t matter that I’d screwed up with the metalwork, we still needed to keep pushing forward or this whole thing was going to come down around our ears.

“Hey, dumbass. Still alive?” Mercy always knew just what to say.

I let out a chuckle that rumbled in my chest. Turning my words into a growl. “Mostly.”

Dropping the wall that they were standing on top of was surprisingly easy. Like gravity was helping the stone back down into its natural position beneath our feet. Mercy stumbled when they hit my level, making me grin. Asher remained as cool as a cucumber, as usual. Maybe the tail helped with balance.

Mercy gave me a shove as she passed, but it wasn’t very hard, so she must have really been worried about me. “Great, now we get to wade through svart bits. Thanks.”

“Wouldn’t want you to miss out on the fun.”

I couldn’t do anything more with the mass of tangled metal up ahead of us—I wasn’t dumb enough to try using Artifice on it a second time—but I could still work the stone. Stomping forward and raising my arms, I touched the fractured pillar of Artifice within me and raised the next set of walls.

As the stone flowed up, it pushed the nest of copper above us like a grand thatched roof. I was only raising walls where there had been none before, so the thicket of metal only lifted here and there, but there was definitely a clear route through beneath it, even if I’d have to duck.

Roasted svart corpses started plopping down out of the tangle of metal like overripe fruit before we’d made it a step. Asher really did a number on them.

Beyond the dubious shelter of the wire wool, the svart were waiting, too scared to come closer but too dumb to run. They had flowed in to fill up the road where I’d blocked it from the sides. Wall to wall svart, screeching and crawling over each other to be on the front-line. Like dying first was some big honor.

I rolled my shoulders and hefted my sword. “Ready?”

“As I shall ever be,” Asher hissed.

Mercy opened her mouth to respond, but I missed whatever comment she just had to make as I charged in with a roar that literally made some of the svart trip over themselves.

I didn’t have to kill them all, I just had to keep all their beady little black bug eyes on me. Every arrow that Mercy loosed killed one. As soon as Asher’s spells were ready, he’d be able to wipe out the remnants. We’d fallen into a perfect rhythm already, and we’d only been alive a couple of days. If we had all eternity to work together, it could only keep getting better.

The svart scattered back from the bloodied edge of my blade, baying for my life and screeching at each other. The closest Svart turned to its buddy and screamed, “Kill!”

Svart two looked incredulous, “Kill?”

One in the back rows cried out, “Kill!”

Back row would have to wait, but the first two arguers caught the backswing of my sword.

Mercy’s arrows were raining down onto the back rows to avoid getting too close to me, which I appreciated, but it also meant that the front rows had a moment to think. When you’ve only got two settings, dick around or kill things, a moment was all it took to switch.

Svart ichor had splattered all across the smoothed stones of the street, and I could feel my feet slipping as I spun on the spot, bringing my sword around in another arcing swipe to catch the first ones with the guts to jump for me.

Those guts tumbled out of them, dangling all over me like silly string as I waded farther into the press of bodies. I could feel blades scraping over my armor, but nothing was finding much purchase yet. The armor rating of this latest set was somewhere in the 70s. I couldn’t remember exact numbers—I’d made the armor sometime when I was drunk. You could still see part of a blackened cooking pot mangled into the pauldron. A cauldron pauldron? A crystal-tipped arrow plinked off it.

“Come on!” I felt like my throat was trying to choke me as I worked through the sounds of the svart’s mangled language, but I made it. “KILL!”

The sound of their own language on my lips seemed to give the svart more pause than all the blood and guts I was drenched in. They stopped and stared, and I took advantage of the lull to hack them apart.

Bones splintered like twigs, and flesh tore apart like red clouds. With my sword in my hand, it was like they weren’t even real. Like they were paper dolls made for me to tear through.

Behind me, I heard a yelp. Mercy was surrounded by the few svart that had skirted around me, and the circle was closing around her. With a push of will, the floor beneath her erupted, lifting her up on a pedestal, out of the svart’s reach.

Even with time still slowed as I concentrated on my Sphere of Influence, I could already tell that I’d be too late to save Asher the same way. He had a duo of svart hanging off his sleeves and another riding his tail while stabbing down into it with a dagger in each hand. Concentration faltering, the electricity trapped between his claws sputtered once or twice, then blinked out entirely.

I wasn’t going to have time to save him. Even if I lifted him up, the svart would go with him. There was no way I could cross the distance before he was dead. He was going to die because I’d been too busy playing whack-a-svart to notice what was happening right behind me.

Back in my body, I couldn’t help myself, and I turned to run back to him. Even if I was going to be too late, I couldn’t just leave him to die alone.

Turns out, he could take care of himself. His gravity snare burst to life above him, and while he was dragged up along with the svart clinging to him, he was expecting it. They lost their grip and tumbled up into the orbit of the little black hole while his weight kept him suspended between the two forces exerting their pull on him. Pinned in place between the darkness and the floor, he returned to casting his spell without flinching. The man was cold-blooded in more ways than one.

Tearing my attention away from Asher and his soon to be crispy pests, I turned back to the small army that I was meant to be fighting, only to realize that they’d regrouped while I was distracted. There was a solid wall of Svart at the front waving short blades, a second rank with spears, and then the mass behind that all seemed to have either the janky little bows of theirs or rocks to throw. That wasn’t the random work of animal intelligence; that was tactical. Individually, every svart seemed to be a moron, but all together, there was something more to them. The plural of svart was smart.

Of course, I responded to this cunning tactical display with all the delicacy you could have expected. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When all you have is a giant sword, every problem looks like a small army of svart just waiting to be cleaved. Cloven? Chopped.

Rushing in under a rain of arrows and rocks, the first swing of my sword knocked the spearheads aimed at my actual head aside. Momentum carried me crashing forward into their front lines, and their front rank shattered beneath my weight, tripping and falling back as I just kept on coming.

Nose to nose with the svart, I bellowed, “KILL!”

My foot slammed down onto a svart’s face as I charged on, my sword dragged free of the morass of squealing svart all around me. I took another swing.

Bits and blood scattered everywhere, and I realized somewhere in the midst of it I’d started chanting “KILL, KILL, KILL,” just like the svart all around me. With their one line of defense broken, the back ranks started to scamper for safety, but there wasn’t a chance in hell that I was stopping now.

The routed svart started peeling off, heading for the gaps in the buildings on either side of me. Not happening. I closed my eyes and hauled up walls. The fleeing svart crashed right into the stone, and outside of my body, connected to the rock I was shaping, I felt each and every vibration as though they’d run into me.

I snapped back into my body and turned just in time to see Asher’s spell rush out past me. Just when I was starting to get bored with his old static charge and lightning crackle, he whipped something new out of his bag of tricks. This time, he’d skipped the charge and just launched a ball of lightning that shot past me in pursuit of the svart line. Everything it touched died, and everything it missed got a cap from it, then was surrounded by a clinging electrical charge.

Mercy leapt down from her pedestal instead of waiting for me to lower it and dashed forward along the road, still peppering the hindquarters of the fleeing svart as she went. “Move it!”

She was right, not that I’d ever admit it. This was the kind of opportunity we’d been waiting for. Mercy shot the stragglers, and Asher’s ball lightning chased along the road, dissuading any of the svart that weren’t running for their life from coming out. As for me, I didn’t even have to use my sword again. I slammed up walls as we passed by gaps in the buildings. I sealed up the open stone doors and windows of the houses, trapping fleeing svart inside. Before I even knew it, we were at the grand mine entrance, and the whole city’s worth of svart had been sealed away.

Victory!

New Skill Discovered! [Brawling]

Potency increased to 40

Brutality: Rank 8/10

Brawling: Rank 2/10

270 Experience Gained

“If we stopped here and turned back, the Dvergar would still have their city returned to them. The svart are sealed off from reinforcement. This is the victory they sought.” Asher chimed in, looking into the cavernous entrance to the mines.

“You guys don’t get it. The mine is like…the soul of the khag. They’d never stop trying to take it back.” Mercy was plucking arrows out of dead svarts and eying them to make sure they were still straight enough to fly true. “Even if it wasn’t like a religious thing, the Dver need to mine for trade, their whole economy is digging stuff up, hitting it with hammers and selling. If we stopped here, they’d try to do it themselves, and they’d die over and over until there was none of them left.”

I was nearly speechless. Nearly. “Hold up. Are you actually on board with the quest?”

She shrugged. “I’m here, ain’t I?”

“Yeah, but you’ve been here all along, bitching and moaning every step of the way about me dragging you into this.” I caught her by the shoulder and forced her to look at me. “This is different. You actually care about these people.”

She still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Well, yeah. Asher told me what you said.”

“You’ll need to be more specific. I say a lot of stuff. All the time. I mean, I’m saying stuff right now. I can’t seem to stop saying—”

She cut me off by slapping her hand over my mouth. “They’re people. They look different, and they sound different, but they deserve better than this.”

I licked her hand, and she jerked it away with a yelp.

“They do.”

Asher nodded in agreement.

As one, we turned to face the entrance of the mine. I took back what I said about it earlier. It wasn’t as big and impressive as the entrance to the khag.

It was bigger.

Chapter 15

There were fewer murder holes to creep under as we moved beneath these great brass arches, and the few that I could spot seemed to be unoccupied. After all the chaos of the running fight across the town, it was almost eerily quiet. There were traps set up here and there, but the majority had been triggered long ago. Huge pillars of stone had dropped down from the ceiling to crush capering svart and had never been reset. The bones still protruded from under them, gnawed clean of all flesh.

I kicked one of their deformed little skulls to smash on the wall. “Love what they’ve done with the place.”

Mercy hissed. “Will you shut the hell up.”

“You think they didn’t hear us coming?” I laughed. “We just fought the whole damn town. If they didn’t hear that, they aren’t going to notice light conversation.”

“You are correct,” Asher chipped in, “but I believe that Mercy’s approach is wiser, nonetheless.”

“What are you two so scared of? We just beat the crap out of a whole town’s worth of svart. There isn’t going to be anything we can’t handle.”

Mercy had frozen in place, her head cocked to one side. “You really need to stop speaking.”

The bones at my feet began to twitch, and the abomination’s golden glow sprang to life on them like Saint Elmo’s Fire.

I wet my lips. “I really need to stop speaking.”

Mercy yelped as the bones around her feet started to chatter together and roll across the floor. I hadn’t even noticed how many corpses littered svart town until they started moving, and now it seemed you couldn’t turn your head without a rack of ribs popping up out of the ashes. Bits of Dvergar and svart, some still strung together with mummified strands of tendon all gathered together in a great heap between us and the mine. Heaving and glowing.

I wasn’t waiting for it to explode or turn into some giant skeleton boss. I closed the distance in a heartbeat, sword held aloft. “Knock it off.”

Fragments of bone scattered across the stone as I hammered my sword down.

Still, the heap continued to glow and gather boney bulk. “No, thank you.”

“Not today.”

The bones shuddered and dropped to the ground. Lifeless once more. “And stay down.”

A little bit of the tension drained out of Mercy, and I caught a brief glimpse of her smile before she hid it behind the usual mask of sarcasm. “Did you just pick a fight with an inanimate object?”

“I just won a fight with an inanimate object, thank you very much.”

Asher had crouched by the pile of bones, hand held out as though checking its temperature. “I sense no magic here.”

I shrugged. “I don’t remember seeing necromancy in the skill options anyway.”

“You misunderstand me.” He passed his hand back and forth over the bones. “If there is no arcane working animating these remains, then the cause for their attempted revival must be divine.”

I shrugged. “So they were good religious corpses?”

“He is saying an Eternal did it, you boob.” Mercy had her back turned, her eyes darting from shadow to shadow, searching for whatever enemy was out there waiting for us.

“Lady, if your boobs look like me, you might want to consult a doctor.”

She snorted. “Dude, if my boob looked like you I’d cut it off.”

“Amazon-style.” I nodded. “I can respect that.”

Asher’s sigh came out like a hiss of steam. “This conversation is not constructive.”

“The abominations have that glow too.” I pointed at the bones, where the last of the light was flickering out. “I’d bet on one of them before I’d bet on an Eternal. At least we already know that they are here.”

Asher rose and brushed the ash from the front of his robes. “The real question to my mind is why the abominations have the light of the divine within them.”

“Maybe they ate an Eternal?”

Mercy’s careful scouting was interrupted when she had to stop and pinch the bridge of her nose. “I’m not even going to acknowledge how stupid that sentence was.”

I shrugged. “Maybe they’re made out of Eternal parts?”

Mercy opened her mouth to dunk on me again, but Asher spoke up first, “This was my first thought.”

Mercy and I both replied with the same tone of surprise. “Really?”

Maybe we were spending too much time together.

“There must be some reason that they contain the spark of the divine, and as Mercy explained to us earlier, the Eternals that came before us have now vanished from the world despite the longevity implied by their names. I do not believe it unreasonable to suppose that they were used in the making of these legendary creatures.”

Mercy scoffed. “Maulkin was right?”

I kicked a skull at her, missing by a mile. “Eternals are being put through a meat-grinder to make burger-monsters, and me getting something right is the surprising bit?”

“Asher’s right. That bit makes sense.” She had given up in her hunt for monsters in the shadows, strolling over to smirk. “You getting something right though…that defies all logic.”

“I should have left you to rot in that first dungeon.”

“Oh, please”—she jumped up to tug on one of my horns—“you live for my abuse.”

“Once more, this conversation has ceased to be constructive.” Asher sighed. “Shall we press on?”

“If you’re finished with the bone zone.”

Mercy laughed. I heard her. She couldn’t take it back.

Deep enough into the tunnel that I had a real sense of being past the point of no return, we came upon the gates to the mine.

When the monsters came, the copper door had been locked in place with a crossbar. That hadn’t been enough. The Dvergar of the city had rushed in to brace the door against the charge. That hadn’t been enough. The metal itself had been twisted by some unstoppable force from the other side. The Dvergar who had thrown the weight of their bodies against the door were now nothing but scattered bones and odd fragments of rock, like broken parts of statues strewn across the ground.

There were dead svart here too—more and more bones the closer that we got. The fight for the city had been lost here, but not without a terrible cost to the invaders. For every dead Dvergar, there were at least three dead svart, their bones gnawed just as clean as the enemy’s. Hunger knew neither friend nor foe.

Mercy whistled. “I don’t want to meet whatever busted that door open.”

“No? I kind of do.” I grinned. “I want to kick its ass.”

Asher climbed up on the back of the dead to reach the gap in the doors. “No doubt we shall cross paths. If we haven’t already.”

He hopped down out of sight, and Mercy and I only had a moment to exchange a glance before we both jogged after him. Squishy magic users should not go wandering off on their own.

Luckily for us, there was no monster sitting with its mouth hanging open on the other side of the gates, just a whole lot more bones. We skidded down the slope of them, coming to a halt by the edge of the same brass track that had led all the way along the main thoroughfare, only now could I see its purpose. There were mine-carts rigged up to roll along the single brass rail, counterbalanced with a wheel to each side. Decorative, but also practical.

The rest of the mine entrance told two stories, overlaid in the same space. Beneath the dust and the filth, you could see the miner’s tools, their armor, and their lanterns, most still hanging from pegs in the little cut-out rooms to the side of the main tunnel.

Over the top, you could see the new story. The svart’s little encampment here in the dark away from the lights of the khag, where they could chew on the dead in peace. Everywhere was their toilet. Everywhere was their trash-heap. Whatever mind they had ticking and creaking behind those black eyes, it didn’t hold the same sense that most rodents had to not crap where they ate. This side of the copper gates was scarred with the blows of their weapons, embedded with crystalline fragments, and streaked with ichor from where the svart had tried to pummel their way through solid metal with their bare hands.

Pieces of svart had been ground up and spread like a paste around the bent back metal. Whatever had come rushing through to break the gate hadn’t given a damn about preserving the lives of its allies. If it was one of the chained abominations, as we were guessing, then it was hard to blame it for wanting to smash up as many of its captors as possible.

There was so much blood spilled that it still shifted under the dried surface crust. “Juicy.”

“How?” Mercy wailed. “How did that one word make it so much grosser?”

Asher’s head snapped to the side. “Heed your own advice, Mercy. Silence is our ally here.”

When he turned back to look out into the dark, she wobbled her head from side to side mouthing, “Silence is our ally,” to herself. I bit down a chuckle.

In the silence, all we could hear was the tumble of the bones we’d dislodged, clacking and clattering about behind us, and echoing back and forth across the width of the tunnel. The farther into the dark we walked, the brighter the light behind us seemed. Bright as sunlight. “Hold up.”

The chattering bones grew louder and louder instead of dying away. I was reaching for my sword as I turned, but it was too late to nip this one in the bud.

It stood a head taller than me, shaped like a man made of sunlight but bound all around by a full suit of bone armor that was even more haphazard than mine. Skulls bulged out from the flat of the surface, and vertebrae were slung in strings to bind longer bones down. There was no question that this thing was an abomination like the rest, even if it lacked the marble bodies of the others we’d faced before.

I drew my sword and gave it a spin in my hands. “A-bone-ination?”

“Abominable Boner?” Mercy called back.

“If this abomination persists for more than four hours,” I cackled, “please contact your physician or local necromancer.”

Asher was getting tired of our nonsense. “Focus!”

Mercy’s first arrow deflected off one of the skulls, and the next found a gap in the armor and burned away in the light within. That might be a problem.

The abomination took its first baby steps towards us, still clumsy in the new shape it had taken. It wasn’t much of an advantage, but I’d take what I could get. With a whoop, I charged in.

Nothing as big as that abomination had any right to move as fast as it did. Before I could swing, it’s leg jerked up to catch me in the gut and send me flying.

[88/440 Health]

Oh yeah, I’d already nearly killed myself. Probably should have remembered that before I charged in face-first.

When I reached for the Pillar of Primal, it gave me a little shudder to tell me Restoration wasn’t up yet. I wasn’t going to push it. I’d already cracked one pillar by pushing too hard, Primal was probably the only thing that was still propping me up.

I skidded to a halt before I hit a wall. So that was nice. Wish I could have said that I sprang back to my feet and charged back in, but I got up like an old man who’d broken his hip. All the damage was starting to take its toll. Eternals might not be able to die, but we could sure as hell wish that we had.

Using my sword as a crutch to haul myself to my feet, I took in the chaos unfolding before me. Asher had ducked into one of the side chambers, and Mercy was sprinting at full pelt to avoid the stone-shattering blows that the abomination was raining down.

She was trying to lead it away down the tunnel, to give the two of us time to recover. She was playing the hero. Fast as she was, the abomination kept pace, always right behind her. The arrows she had launched had deflected or burned away without leaving a mark.

I put one foot in front of the other. I crawled, then I walked, and then I ran. My bloodless arms hefted a sword bigger than my whole body had been in my last life like it had no weight at all. This close to death, I swear I felt that spark of eternity inside me burning brighter than it ever had before.

The abomination’s last punch fell a breath short of Mercy, and I leapt past her, onto the wrist, then the arm, then the shoulder of the heaving mass of bone and daylight. The head turned to me as I came, a jagged tear across its face amidst the bones where real armor would have shown an eye-slit. With one last haphazard lunge from the slippery slope of loose bones, I swung my sword into the light.

The blade was molten when it came out the other side, trailing molten metal droplets that spattered across the bones as I tumbled back towards the ground, and I landed on my back with a crunch.

A glowing stump was all that was left of my sword as hot metal sprinkled down around me like confetti. I started to rise and then saw death bearing down on me. Anything else would have stopped after a slash across the eyes. Anything else would have paused. The abomination moved on like it was nothing. Its massive foot was coming down towards me so fast I didn’t have time to think.

It was actually touching the tips of my horns, pinning my head between the stone floor and the sole of bones when it stopped. A moment later and I’d have been crushed. Instead, I was lying there, looking up into the mass of dead bodies, and wondering what the hell was going on.

Vibrations were coming down into my skull, the immense strain of the abomination trying to bring its foot down and kill me against whatever was restraining it. I closed my eyes and saw the pillar of Primal blazing bright once more.

[163/440 Health]

Restoration brought me back from the brink, and I opened my eyes to vision that was no longer going dark at the edges. Letting the ruined remnant of my sword fall from my hand, I set my palms on the ragged expanse of bone, and I pushed back.

In a straight fight, there was no way I could have shifted this thing. It didn’t matter how high my Potency had climbed, it was definitely bigger and stronger. But this wasn’t a straight fight. It was already pushing down as hard as it could to no avail. I had help.

Inch by inch, I rose up. I got a knee underneath me, and I pushed up some more. I got my feet beneath me, and my whole body flexed. Muscles that I don’t even think that human beings have tightened up, burned, and screamed as I pushed with all my Faun might against the Abomination.

It fell.

As it toppled over, I finally got a glimpse of my salvation. Asher’s gravity snare—black as night and twice as alluring. The abomination was heavy enough that it couldn’t be hauled from the ground by the snare but not big enough to resist it entirely. Now that it was off-balance, the snare continued to drag at it.

I must have been half-mad with excitement when I yelled out, “Timber!”

When the abomination hit the ground, the impact set the brass rails singing—a low hum I felt in my teeth and horns. Reaching out into my Sphere of Influence, I could touch every part of my ruined sword, so I hauled it back together as I saw my body trundling forward with nobody at the steering wheel.

Every time I had used Artifice, it got easier to repeat. Making my sword was as natural as breathing now. The cracks in the pillar looked like they were almost gone now, whether it was time or use that had healed it, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I hadn’t permanently broken myself.

With the comforting weight of metal back in my hands, I jumped up onto the chest of the abomination and set to beating my way past its crusty shell.

Nothing. Every time I knocked bones away, more scurried into the gap. Every time the bones shifted, I felt it like a tingle on my skin. It was the overlap of the abominations’ Sphere of Influence with mine. Its Artifice the same as my own.

Two could play at that game. I shut my eyes and yanked at the bones beneath me with my own Artifice. At first, nothing happened, then, when I strained, one long bone sprang up to smack me in the face like I’d stepped on a rake.

With a grumble, I caught hold of that big bone and yanked it out, only to see new plates of bone sliding smoothly into place to cover the gap it had left. I had no idea what this bone had come from—it seemed bigger than anything we’d seen in the svart or Dvergar. It was nearly as long as my torso. Great, there were giant monsters down here too. Not counting present company.

At least the bone gave me a good idea. I hefted it above my head with both hands, letting my sword fall aside. All it took was a pulse of Artifice to turn the metal of my weapon into slag, then another to mash it all together in one great dense lump around the top end of the bone. My arms creaked under the accumulating weight.

“Forget the bone zone. Welcome to pound town!”

With all my strength, I brought the makeshift sledgehammer down.

That was more like it. The bone armor shattered to dust beneath the hammer, and the ones around it cracked. The abomination tried to close the gap, but as it dragged bones around it was just opening up fresh gaps.

Asher’s snare died, and without its interference with gravity, the abomination was getting back onto its feet all too easily. I had to jump to avoid being flung off.

“Get out the way!” I heard Mercy shout, and only a moment later, I realized what she was freaking out about. Asher was there, lighting up the whole tunnel in strobing white and blue with the massive ball of lightning he was holding between his claws.

The abomination’s fist hammered down on either side of me, and it pushed up off the ground. “I’ll do you one better! Take the shot, Asher!”

Without hesitation, Asher launched the ball of lightning. I saw it bounce once on the smooth straight stretch of stone between the rails, heading right for me, then I swung for the abomination’s chest with all my might.

The damage I dealt didn’t matter so much as the hole that I’d punched. The big glowing ball bounced one last time, and I flung myself aside. The lightning passed through the gap in the armor, and the bones slammed shut behind it. “Nothing but net!”

The abomination went on rising, but its movements stuttered as the ball of lightning pin-balled around inside of it. It took a step towards Asher, then its knee locked up, and it stumbled. Where the ball bounced, showers of sparks exploded out amongst the bones, and the golden glow died. Back and forth the lightning bounced and leapt.

I hefted my hammer, ready to knock bone-boy back the moment it took another step, but it never did. With one final crackle of lightning, the golden glow within the bones blinked out.

New Skill Discovered! [Mace]

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Potency increased to 41

Mace: Rank 1/10

48 Experience Gained

400 Glory Gained

Tier of Glory Ascended!

That was long overdue.

Time ground to a halt once more as my attention turned inwards. The Pillars of Divinity stood before me, still a little worse for wear.

It might not always be obvious that I’m thinking stuff through—because honestly, I’m not a lot of the time—but there was actually a brain inside of my horny head. I’d been thinking about my next chance to Tier Up since the last one.

Artifice was great, and Primal was the only thing that kept me alive most of the time, but neither one of them was actually making me any better at doing what I do. I needed to get better at hitting things with swords.

The Pillar of Ascension seemed to be the way to go. It was all about improving the bodies we’d been given, so I poured all my hard-won glory into it. All three pillars were blazing around me now, and I felt a bit more stable as a result. If I cracked one, at least the other two would keep me up. Not that I was planning on cracking any of them again. Honest.

I slipped straight over into the divine skills that Ascension had opened up for me. There was one for each of the basic stats, so I jumped right in and dumped my 300 experience right into Potency Surge. Ten seconds of double strength didn’t seem like long, but in a fight, a second could last a long time. Even if I only got one hit in, that was still going to be a hell of a hit. That left me a little over 20 experience in change.

I snapped back to reality just in time to feel Mercy slap me across the face.

“Rude.”

Mercy rolled her eyes. “Dude, you’ve got to stop doing that.”

I rubbed my cheek. “Alright. I’ll tell everybody when I’m leveling up if you stop hitting me.”

Mercy fell into step beside me as we headed down into the mineshaft. “No deal. Sometimes you need a good slap in the face.”

“Sometimes I need to level up.”

Asher sighed behind us. “Sometimes I wonder if I would not have been better off traveling with Uthelred.”

“Wasn’t he basically a vegetable?” Mercy quipped back.

“The conversation would have been much more tolerable.”

I smirked over at Mercy. “If he were in charge, he’d never lettuce do anything fun.”

She groaned, then smirked back. “You know he was an Eternal with a lot of layers, like an—”

Asher cut her off. “While I am certain that you are both well versed in many different edible plants, might we turn our attention to the mine full of nightmarish monstrosities for now?”

We both mumbled, “Fine,” then trudged on.

The tunnel narrowed and then branched the farther we went, but the two rails still ran on, and we kept on between them. Asher and Mercy had decided that the end of the line was probably the best place to start our search for whatever was farting out the svarts, and I didn’t have any brighter ideas. Presumably, the rails would run down the central shaft as deep as it could go so that the side tunnels could get the most use out of it.

Far from the light of the khag, we came to rely exclusively on the glow that our own eyes cast. We were going down tunnels with tunnel vision a unique combination. As calm as Mercy looked striding along beside me, I could tell that she was nervous from the way that her golden eye-light strobed back and forth across the tunnel. She was twitchy. I suppose if all my attempts to shoot stuff completely failed, I’d get twitchy too.

The tunnels were uniform as only the Dvergar could make them, but again, there was a second story plastered over the top. Here and there, we could see signs of the svart. A pile of dung. A gnawed bone. A scratch on the stone. A primitive symbol carved into the few wooden supports that had been placed sparingly where they were needed the most. Tools had been dropped to the wayside as the miners fled ahead of the tide of svart. Some had been taken up by their pursuers, but most lay trampled down into the grit.

Mercy stiffened beside me, and I held up my hand to halt Asher. We all stood there in silence, straining to hear whatever had set her off. When I finally did, it made my skin crawl. Something was breathing in one of the side tunnels. Wheezing.

All three of us crept into the tunnel, inching towards the sound of wheezing until it seemed to be coming from all around us. It was only when it started to recede that any one of us thought to look up.

Bestiary was muttering away in my brain about this being ideal Hob territory, about them being ambush predators that used their uncanny ability to climb to get the literal drop on their prey. I pushed all of that aside and let my brain make sense of what it was seeing. Melded into the stone above us was one of the Dvergar. The Curse of Stone had blended his flesh with the rock around him. How he got stuck into the roof was anyone’s guess, but from the smooth blend of stone, it was apparent he’d been there for as long as any one of the khag elders.

When our eyes lit him up, his wheezing went from labored to frantic, then on further into pained squeals, like we were tormenting him just by seeing him like this. Maybe this was torture for him. The Dvergar seemed to be pretty private about the whole curse situation. Seeing one of them like this was probably as embarrassing to them as a nurse walking in on me after I’d shit the nursing home bed would have been to me.

That is if I hadn’t lived slow, died young, and left a half-chewed corpse behind instead.

Mercy was the only one to speak. “We should do something, right? We should… cut him down or something.”

It just took a quick blink to explore my Sphere of Influence, then I came back empty-handed. “I can’t tell what is stone and what is him. If we cut away all the stone… I don’t know what would be left.”

The whimpers and wheezes came out in a gust it took just as long to decipher. “Kill me.”

Asher looked torn. “We must press on.”

“The white ones. They be torturing us,” the Dvergar’s voice grated.

Asher paused. “Us?”

It made a horrible sort of sense. Where else would ashamed Dvergar retreat to when their bodies were hardening to stone but the great big hole that their whole town revolved around. If you went off into the mine and vanished, nobody would think much of it. People probably died down in the mine all the time. You could find some dark corner to hide yourself away and sink into the stone in peace.

I opened my mouth to try and offer some sort of comfort, though I had no idea what you’re meant to say to somebody who’d fused into solid stone, then got prodded by little svart. Luckily, Mercy lived up to her name. Her arrow went right through the one living eye that still glimmered in the midst of dull stone.

Then with a final gasp that might have been a ‘thank you’, the labored breathing that had drawn us off into this tunnel stopped, and we resumed our journey.

Chapter 16

We were back in the main tunnel again, following the rails before Asher piped up. “It seems that we shall have some guidance through the mine after all.”

Mercy looked like she was liable to spit. “Living signposts.”

“If you can call that living.” Asher sighed.

That stopped me short. “I’d call it living. Because they’re living. Just because they can’t move around doesn’t make them any less than us.”

“I could not abide to live on in such a state.”

“Well, don’t you go turning to stone then,” I griped. “The way I see it, where we’re from, somebody gets old and dies, and everything they know dies too. The Dvergar get old, and they turn into a statue you can still come and talk to.”

“Seems to work for them”—Mercy shouldered past me—“when there aren’t armies of svart coming up the pipes.”

Asher’s mouth kept on flapping. “I…meant no offense. I had not considered this perspective.”

“People are people,” Mercy said over her shoulder. “Remember?”

I called after her. “I’m going to start charging you royalties for that.”

She gave me a hand signal that definitely was not Dvergar in origin. “Sue me.”

“Do they even have lawyers in Amaranth?” I chuckled, but it was short-lived. Sure there were monsters here that would eat your face as soon as look at you, but a world without lawyers might have been worth the trade-off.

Asher piped up. Anxious to move the conversation along. “A legal system would first be required, and it seems that much of the machinations of civilization have crumbled here in the wake of the Revelation of Araphel.”

“Hey, if he killed all the lawyers, maybe this Araphel guy wasn’t all that bad.” I waggled my eyebrows at them.

“I do not believe that the Revelation is a subject that should be made light of in earshot of anyone native to this world.” I could barely hear Asher over the crunch of gravel beneath our feet. “It would be comparable to some of the most horrific events in our own respective histories.”

“That’s a shame, I was working out a whole stand-up routine.” Mercy’s grin shone in the dark. “I just flew here from another dimension to fight the Void God, and boy are my arms tired.”

I shrugged. “You could still do it, just keep it classy.”

“So what?” She was giggling as she went. “Revelation jokes are too soon?”

“Dvergar jokes are punching down?”

Asher sighed. “I should not have encouraged this.”

Abruptly, the brass tracks came to their end. Not with some big bumper to stop them crashing into the wall at the end of the tunnel, but abruptly, with channels dug into the stone for them to continue but no more metal. The tunnel itself stretched on a little farther before exploding out into a dozen different directions. I took it all in, listening carefully to the Dungeoneering part of my brain to see if it had anything to share.

It did not.

I sighed at the blank spot in my mind. Maybe it was on strike after so much overwork, or maybe I just wasn’t seeing any clue as to where we should be headed next.

Asher had crouched to examine the disturbed gravel beneath our feet. “Mercy, have you developed any skills in tracking?”

“Nope.” Her eyes were still flickering between all the different entrances. “You?”

Asher shook his head. “Maulkin?”

“Uh…no.”

There was an awkward moment with the three of us just standing there, then Mercy took off down one of the tunnels. Asher called after her, “What is it?”

She was already too far gone to reply. I jogged off after her, and with much rolling of eyes and lashing of tails, Asher followed.

When I caught up to her she was still going strong, striding along like this was a walk in the park. “Why this one?”

“We had to start somewhere, didn’t we?” She wouldn’t look at me, her eyes searching around—floor, walls, and roof—hunting for more Dvergar. “This one seemed fine.”

“I mean, I guess?”

“Yeah, I guessed too.” She stopped at a junction and then turned left after only one missed step. “It is all guessing until we find someone to help us work out where we’re going.”

Asher caught up behind us. “We have committed to a tunnel at random then?”

“Beats standing around.” Mercy took another turn.

Asher was in the middle of saying, “I am not sure that is the case,” when the tunnel opened out into a cul-de-sac walled with wailing faces.

“Kill us.”

Hands strained against the crumbling stone that held them. Reaching for us. “Please, be ending our suffering.”

“We be begging you, kill us!” came from a mouth speaking out of the solid stone, no eyes, no other features but a jutting rock that might have been a chin.

Mercy spun on her heel, smirking. “See!”

I wish that I couldn’t see them. All the damage that I’d worried about doing to the Dvergar we’d met before had been dealt to these poor people. Stone chipped away until raw flesh was exposed underneath. Flesh chewed away until only the unbreakable stone that had fossilized over the bones had stopped the encroachment. There were more of them dead in this little cave than were alive, and the dead probably got off easy.

Asher piped up. “Which direction did the svart come from?”

“Please let us die! We be begging you. Let us die!”

This might not have been the productive conversation that the other two had been hoping for, but we could work with it. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you all!”

Mercy looked aghast, but there was a ring of cheers from the people in the walls. “We want to stop what has happened to you happening to anyone else. Do you know where the svart came from?”

“We know nothing. Nobody talks to us. Let us die.”

Blood rained down out of the stone where my sword hung, wedged in the roof. I had to put my foot on the wall to yank it back out.

Mercy stepped up and shouted, “Hey!”

With my sword freed, I lined up my next swing. “They don’t know anything.”

“They’re freaking out.” She grabbed at my wrist, and I let her. Her tiny hands didn’t even make it halfway around. “Just give them a minute, and they might remember.”

The wailing all around us continued, and I couldn’t hold back a shudder. “They’re suffering.”

“Everyone is suffering. I’m suffering. You’re suffering. That’s the human condition, or the Dvergar condition…whatever.” She was putting her whole weight on my wrist, trying to push my sword arm down. Her feet lifted off the ground. “The point is, their suffering can get us closer to stopping all this. So just wait.”

She picked out one of the Dvergar at about head-height that was somehow still living despite the stone all around him being streaked with rust stains. She cupped the raw flesh of his face in her hand, drawing out a long, slow moan. “You need to help us. You need to tell us where the svart are coming from or we can’t stop them.”

“Nooo.” The Dvergar’s voice cracked like the flakes of stone falling away from him. “Please.”

“Tell us, and we can let you go, we can end all this.”

“Please!” Blood smeared on her hands as he tried to turn away.

“Please!” she screamed back in his face, drowning out his wails. “Help us stop this.”

“Shaft eighteen. They be finding a vein of some quartz they didn’t know. That was the last I be hearing before the screaming started.” This croaking voice came from the farthest corner of the room, down by our feet, where a pair of baleful eyes stared up at us from out of the gravel, rimmed with dust.

If I ever stop chuckling when somebody says “shaft” you’d better check me for a pulse.

Asher crossed the space and dropped to his knees. “Our thanks to you, friend. Do you require release?”

There was a long moment where the Dvergar in the floor gave it some serious deliberation, then she said. “The svart don’t be seeing me down here, and somebody needs to remember all this for the young Dver. Leave me be.”

“As you wish.” Asher carefully pulled himself back up to his feet, painfully aware that he was standing on this poor Dvergar’s grave.

Mercy nocked an arrow, and I hefted my sword. There were only six Dvergar left alive, but we made short work of them.

As we headed back along the main tunnel, searching for shaft eighteen, I found that my hands were shaking. All the monsters and mayhem, all the fighting and dying, it hadn’t bothered me one bit. I assumed it was because this body had been custom made for killing by the gods, yet now I’d snuffed out three more lives, and I suddenly felt sick to the stomach.

Mercy was by my side as we strolled along. “You’re quiet.”

“Just thinking.”

She nudged my arm. “Has that ever worked out for you?”

“Hah.”

She plodded along beside me for a bit longer, waiting for a snappy reply, but I just couldn’t muster anything up. Asher’s tail was lashing around, so she picked up the pace to stand beside him. I could hear them muttering back and forth, but my head just wasn’t in it. Something about there being the wrong number of tunnels maybe?

All the Dvergar that had come down here to the place that they thought was safest for their final rest would have been at the whims of the svart. It was no wonder Mercy called the mine the soul of the khag. This was where their ancestors lived and spoke to the liv—

The arrow caught me in the side of the face, punching right through my cheek and wedging between my teeth.

[160/520 Health]

What came out of my mouth was somewhere between a scream and a roar, deafening as it echoed back from the stone that enclosed us.

Mercy and Asher turned just in time to see the svart pouring out the side-tunnel towards me, and I turned just in time to catch them all on the flat of my sword.

Dozens of svart poured out, shrieking in their inhuman voices, indecipherable except for the word “Kill” chanted again and again. I managed to get turned, get my feet under me and brace, but more and more of them piled on the back of their kin, reaching over to swipe at me, tiny crystal daggers poking at my hands.

I wasn’t succumbing to them this time. I wasn’t being overrun. The old determination to survive had a fire of righteous fury lit under it now. I’d seen what they did to the Dvergar. They deserved nothing less than death. I Surged my Potency, and I pushed them back.

The look on their faces when I began to bulldoze them was worth the cost in experience. They went from mindless rage to confusion and over the precipice into horror when they realized that despite their numbers, I was still pushing them back. Some tried to break away, but the same entanglement of their gangly limbs that let them lock together and become a force to be reckoned with in our little shoving match also kept them trapped.

I ran them all the way back to the tunnel entrance before my surge gave out, and with momentum on my side, I was able to drive the tumbling, squealing heap of them all the way out of the main shaft before they could get it together enough to push.

Mercy’s arrows flitted by my head as the pommel and flat tip of my sword made contact with the tunnel walls on either side of the svart pipe. Hair rose up on the back of my neck as Asher prepared a spell. In the tunnel, the svart were untangling themselves and regrouping, but they knew to fear my strength now—they weren’t going to try to make another rush at us. One of their arrows shattered on the flat of my blade, showering me in crystal dust glitter, and another shot past me entirely. The few that had ranged weapons were shuffling around, trying to stay out of reach while still getting a clean shot at me.

The tunnel had been cut for Dvergar’s comfort. It was barely more than a six-foot square, I’d have one hell of a crick in my neck if I had to walk down it for any length of time. Still, it gave me options.

Artifice was a hell of a drug. Every time I used it, I liked it a little better. My sword spread out into a flat sheet, the leather handle skittering across the back surface to land in the center, and I took ahold of my new door-sized shield and braced myself.

The arrows and spears being flung at the far side pattered off the metal without so much as a dent. Even as primitive as my big lump of metal was, it was still way ahead of their stone-age gear. With their first flurry failed, I could hear movement on the far side of the shield. They must have been readying a charge. Well, so was Asher. He gave me a nod, and I pulled the door open. The line of svart that had been rushing at us skidded to a halt with a wail as Asher’s spell washed over them.

Before they could realize the crackling electricity that had enveloped them didn’t actually do any damage, I slammed the door shut on them all again.

Mercy let out a bark of laughter. “We should fight like this all the time.”

She’d managed to launch an arrow or two in the time the door was open, and now she had another ready. I was just working out how to pop a hole in the shield for her to shoot through when the svart hit the other side and rocked me where I stood.

I put my shoulder to the door, but the pressure continued to build up as more and more of them flung themselves at the sheet metal. “Little help!”

“Dude, you take shits bigger than me, what am I meant to do to help?” Despite her charming words, she still ran forward and put her shoulder to the metal. Asher didn’t, but since we were relying on him to blast all the svart when they finally kicked this thing down, it felt fair.

My Potency Surge wasn’t ready yet, and I wasn’t sure it would help even if I used it. We’d hold out for ten seconds without any trouble, then we’d be right back here in the same situation all over again. I tried to slip out of my body and throw an actual wall up, but the moment I stopped concentrating on holding back the tide I saw the shield tilting out. I leapt back into my body just in time for Mercy to snarl. “Really not the time to be tuning out.”

If she wasn’t straining with the pressure, she would definitely have been kicking me. Thanks, svart.

I leaned all the way forward until my horns were pressing against the metal, screeching like nails on a chalkboard. Every massive muscle in my body was bulging with effort. It was good to be strong, but it sucked to be pushed to the limit of that strength every five minutes.

It was a good thing Mercy was paying attention at least. After a glance back to Asher, she had a wild grin on her face. “Let it drop.”

She sprang away, leaving me to take the whole burden for just a moment before I yanked the shield to the side. This time they were ready for the surprise, and they reared back instead of falling through, weapons raised, ready to launch their counter-attack.

Asher’s Ball Lightning blasted through their front rank, then pin-balled its way along the tunnel. I swear that every one of them got fired in that first roll of thunder, yet a moment later, others came crawling out of the corpse heap, their own pallid flesh stark against the charred black bodies they’d used as shields.

I hadn’t been idle while all this was happening. My shield was back to being a sword, and it was up and ready as it ever would be. Before, killing these pasty little runts had been a necessary evil, and sometimes it had even graduated to being fun, but now I couldn’t wait. Now I knew how much they deserved it.

They came scrambling forward despite it being obvious suicide. Mercy picked them off one by one as they broke free of the bodies until a single inky-eyed monster sprung for me, and I split it in half with a single cut.

Victory!

New Skill Discovered! [Phalanx]

Vitality increased to 12

Phalanx: Rank 1/10

64 Experience Gained

I gave each half a kick for good measure, then stowed my sword away. “This is number eighteen, right?”

Asher flapped for a moment, counting on his claws, then he sighed. “Possibly. If the Dvergar count shafts up on the right side and down on the other.”

I chuckled again at “shafts”, and Mercy let out a sigh of relief. “Glad you’re getting back to normal.”

Asher cocked his head to the side. “How did you decide that this was the correct tunnel?”

“They wouldn’t fill it with monsters if you weren’t meant to go that way.”

Asher looked even more puzzled than before. “Who would not fill it?”

He looked so lost I couldn’t help but laugh again. “It is video game logic! No point throwing a load of monsters in where nobody is ever going to see them.” I turned to Mercy for support, but she was pretending not to notice. “Plus, we’re looking for the place where all the svart are coming from, and they just came out of here. Seems like a safe bet?”

Asher tilted his head the other way and blinked. He had a vertically slit set of eyelids as well as the up and down ones. I wished I hadn’t noticed that. “The latter part of your logic certainly seems to be sound.”

“Thanks, I think?”

“So that is how you ended up this way.” Mercy grinned. “You assumed that what people were saying to you were compliments.”

“Every time you assume that you’re smarter than me, you end up looking dumber, you realize that, right?”

“A broken clock is right twice a day.”

“I’ll break your clock,” I grumbled.

That stopped her for a moment. I could see her mouthing it to herself. “I’ll clean your clock?”

“Yeah, that.”

Asher let out a rattling sigh. “Children. Might we please proceed?”

Chapter 17

Picking our way over the corpses of the fired svart was easy enough. The only real problem was the aroma. “And I thought they smelled bad on the outside.”

Mercy rolled her eyes at me and Asher’s tongue flicked out. “I understood that reference.”

“You’re getting there, buddy.”

Mercy held up a hand at an intersection, and we stopped. She had taken point on the basis that I made more noise walking around than a full brass band, and Asher was essentially just some dude in a dress the minute that somebody got in melee range with him.

She started moving her fingers, and I was still kind of amazed that I could understand the complex hand signals she was wiggling at us meant. “More svart.”

I reached for my sword, but she was already wiggling again. “Wait.”

We all stood there, frozen like statues until she signaled the all-clear. I eased my hand back down with a sigh. Standing still for so long meant that I realized I was aching all over. Good thing I could magic it away.

[258/520 Health]

I loved Restoration so much. One of these days I was going to take Restoration out for a nice steak dinner. Give it a watch. Tell it in no uncertain terms that it was the MVP of my personal divine power selection.

“So we’re just going to sneak all the way down?” I may have spoken too loudly as Mercy and Asher both flinched.

Mercy glared at me and signed back, “Yes.”

“So what, you are allergic to experience points now?”

She fumbled through a few attempted signs before storming back over. “I’m allergic to being stabbed to death by a thousand little monsters. It’s a serious allergy. It could kill me.”

I leaned down so I could speak quieter. “Okay, but, uh…counterpoint. I’m bored.”

“Are you kidding me?” Mercy was not doing as good a job at staying quiet.

Asher slipped in between us. “Maulkin, your hunger for slaughter shall be sated soon enough. Mercy, please keep your mind on the task at hand despite the…provocations.”

She stalked back off down the corridor without a backward glance, even though Asher was giving me some heavy eye contact to make up for it. You could have even called it a glower.

The rest of the day was painfully slow. The main tunnel branched over and over, with all three of us stopping to examine the evidence to work out which way we figured the svart had been in longer. Their habit of crapping all over the place, smearing blood on the walls, and leaving their trash wherever they dropped it definitely helped. There were a few more Dvergar embedded in the walls as we went, but they’d been the first to start receiving the svart’s torture sessions, and there wasn’t much left of them except a few scraps of dried meat dangling from the jagged rocks.

Every time it looked like we might get a little bit of excitement, Mercy pulled us back or into some side tunnel. Every time there was a lone scout, she sniped them silently so they couldn’t call for help, hogging all the kills.

This was the first time since we’d arrived on Amaranth that I didn’t have something dramatic going on around me to hold my attention, and it sucked. If it went on much longer, I was going to start hearing my own thoughts, pondering my lot in life, wondering about what kind of sick universe would make me into a godling.

Being busy was better.

We kept an eye out for the crystal vein that our floor-friend had suggested would lead us to the svart-nest, but despite there being a whole variety of shimmering colors and cracks running through the stone all around us, there was no sign of a big lode of crystal.

Still, we were definitely on the right track. The smoothed stone passages that the Dvergar had been working for centuries was giving way to more rugged rock, and the filth that had been an unfortunate sign of the svart presence had started to smear its way up the walls.

The longer we went without a fight, the more I could feel the pressure building up. Maybe I was just tense. Maybe I was still mad about what the svart had been doing to the Dvergar down here. Maybe the gods had programmed me to be a murder machine, and now I wasn’t getting to do any murdering. Who knew? We were now so far underground that I wondered if the pressure might be literal pressure, like when you went too deep in the sea, the weight of all that world above our heads pressing down.

It was a relief when Mercy shoed us back from the next bend in the tunnel and gave us the Dvergar sign for “Motherlode.”

Finally.

I drew my sword and charged while Asher was still signing back an answer, and it was well worth it. There were about a dozen svart all milling around the crystal vein that our tour guide told us about, all of them distracted, staring into the pale blue glow within the crystal. It was the only light that we had seen in these tunnels since we arrived. It made them easy pickings.

One sweep sent them spinning into pieces. Ichor splattered across the crystal, blotting out some of the light, and only then did the remaining svart seem to notice that they weren’t alone. As one they turned, and an arrow flitted by me to stick one in the eye, so close that I felt the feathers tickle past my arm. “Hey!”

“Stop.”

Another arrow flew by my ear.

“Doing.”

The next went between my legs to nail a svart in the gut.

“Stupid.”

That arrow actually scratched over my cauldron pauldron, spinning off to jam into the back of a fleeing svart that saw where things were going.

“Things.”

The final arrow would have hit me right in the area that my mother told me I shouldn’t scratch in company if I hadn’t jumped, and it hit a svart in the neck instead.

“Hey! Watch the merchandise.”

She darted forward from cover, nocking another arrow. “Nobody wants to buy it!”

There were now only two svart left, sprinting away as fast as their little legs would carry them.

As it turned out, their legs couldn’t carry them far when they were no longer attached to their bodies. A couple of execution-style shots followed from Mercy’s bow to be sure and then silence fell over us again.

She turned on me with her bowstring drawn taut. “If you ever pull that shit again…”

“What?” I shrugged. “What could have gone better?”

She almost tripped over herself in her irritation. “You… You got lucky!”

I shrugged it off. “That’s what people always say when you win.”

“That is what people say when they have two brain cells to rub together and can see all the ways things could have gone horribly wrong.” She couldn’t even look at me anymore. She put her hands over her eyes. “What if there had been more of them waiting somewhere else?”

“I’d get more experience?”

“What if there had been an abomination?!”

“I’d get glory and experience?” I slipped my sword back into its place on my back. “What is the point you’re trying to make?”

“You’re an idiot.” She was shaking her head slowly. “You are an actual idiot, and you’re going to get us all killed. I thought you were brave, charging in to help people that needed it, but you’re just dumb as all hell.”

Once more Asher slunk in to console her. “Mercy.”

She cut him off before he could get started. “No, don’t try to pretend that this is anything other than stupidity.”

“Mercy, it is quite possible that both of your views are correct.” He tried again. “It is possible for both idiocy and heroism to exist within the same man.”

“Ouch.”

“I am sorry, Maulkin, but that was a profoundly foolish thing to do, regardless of the favorable outcome.”

“That’s it. Let’s all pick on the horny guy.”

There was a long moment of silence, then Mercy’s rage crumpled into a cackle of laughter. “The horny guy?”

I could feel my own face splitting into a grin, even as I tried to fight it and stay angry. “I’m a guy, who has horns. So…”

Asher had his face in his hands once more. “If this conversation degenerates into innuendos once more, I shall be forced to ask the pair of you to secure private accommodations.”

It was my turn to cock my head like some dumb animal. “Huh?”

“He’s saying to get a room.” Mercy’s scowl was back. “Which is gross. Because you’re gross. And an idiot.”

I shrugged it off. “I never claimed to be smart.”

“At least you aren’t a liar, then.” Mercy was always way too quick with the quips. “Just do us all a favor, and before you do anything, just take a second to ask yourself if it might kill us.”

There really wasn’t much to argue with there, even if I was still holding onto some irritation. “Fine.”

Mercy let out a breath of relief. “Okay.”

“Wonderful. I am glad that is settled, now we can move on to the mystery of this crystalline structure glowing with such abundant arcane energy that it is confusing my other senses.”

“Glowing with what now?”

As it turned out, neither Mercy nor I had taken any magical skills that might let us comprehend what Asher was talking about, but it was easy enough to believe anything he told you. He was so sincere and polite, he could have been telling me that the sky was green, and the grass was blue, and I would have believed him. Of course, here on Amaranth, blue grass might really be a thing, but we hadn’t really discovered the country music scene of our new world yet.

According to Asher, this protruding hunk of crystal was absolutely pulsing with magical energy that it seemed to be drawing from somewhere else. A vein of the same crystal was visible, running across the floor of the cave to a partial collapse—the same place that our svart friends had been trying to run to when I cut them down. Dropping to my knees, I could just make out more light beyond the heap of rocks. “There’s more glow through here.”

“I would wager that the two things anomalous phenomena are related. This must be the svart’s point of origin.”

Looking the place over again with Dungeoneering on my mind, it was easier to work out what had happened here. Obviously, the whole place was trashed thanks to the ongoing svart presence, but you could still see some dropped tools amongst the filth on the floor. The Dvergar had unearthed the crystal spire that the svart had been so hyped about, then tried to dig along the length of the vein to find its source. That was when they’d broken through into the cavern beyond, unleashing the svart.

Maybe the Dvergar were responsible for the partial collapse of that tunnel after they realized what they’d unleashed, or maybe it was just the natural outcome of it never being reinforced or refined. Either way, it seemed to have slowed the flow of little monsters, and it meant that I’d have to crawl if I wanted to make it through.

When I started to do just that, Mercy caught onto my foot. “Hey, where are you going?”

I wiggled around to face her. “I’m going to find out where the svart are coming from? Isn’t that why we are down here?”

“Here. Obviously.” She looked at me blankly. “They’re coming from here. Let’s block it up and go home.”

“While I understand the impulse, I must ask, do we believe that the Svart, now knowing that there is a Dvergar settlement here, will not simply dig their way back through?” Asher had crouched down to peer through the gap, running his claws along the line of crystal. “Are we not merely postponing the inevitable if we close this tunnel and do nothing to the source itself?”

Mercy scoffed. “You really think they’re smart enough for that?”

I turned all the way over and put my hands under my head as a pillow. “They’re smart enough to make weapons?”

“Yeah, but so are you. That isn’t a high standard.”

Asher made a little sound that might have been a dry laugh, but he spoke over it quickly. “I believe that it is safe to assume the svart have object permanence. As such, there will be some aware of the khag beyond whatever obstacles we place in their way. The risk remains.”

“Yeah, what he said.” I nodded along. “Plus, I really want to see what is up with the magic glowing crystals.”

Asher cocked his head. “I will admit to some curiosity about that matter also.”

“So we’re really just going to poke around because you want to see why stuff glows?” She did not seem enthusiastic.

“We have committed ourselves to considerably more dangerous tasks with less promise of satisfaction.”

I piped up. “And worse comes to worst, we run back here, and I collapse the tunnel. Even if we can’t find a better way to stop them, we can see what our options are.”

She rubbed her temples. “For the record, I hate both of you.”

“Was that a yes?”

She sighed. “Just go.”

I grinned at her as I crawled back to the gap, then had to stop and roll over because my horns hit the overhanging stone with a clatter.

With my horns tucked down, I couldn’t see much of anything but the vein of crystal beneath me, but I followed it forward through the gap. I don’t claim any sort of expertise when it comes to rocks, but I was pretty sure that straight lines weren’t a naturally occurring thing, and this glowing crystal was definitely running in a straight line.

On the other side of the stone, things opened out rapidly. My mouth fell open, and I made a noise like an ancient computer modem, if somebody had turned the bass right up. Eventually, I pulled it together enough to speak actual words. “Guys, you might want to see this.”

First Asher, then Mercy emerged from the tunnel, and both of them were struck just as speechless as me at the sight of the city sprawled before us. We were so stunned that if the svart had come for us then, they probably could have had us without a fight.

The crystal that we had seen and followed was not some rare mineral vein, it was an outlying crenellation on this city’s walls. The Dvergar might have decorated with shiny stones, but this whole structure was made from the glowing crystal, like some great ice-sculpture, all smooth arches and flying buttresses. If this place had been out in the open, it would have been blinding as it glimmered in the sunlight, but down here, the crystal itself was the only source of illumination. Even that light within it wasn’t consistent. It pulsed and fluttered, and shadows chased each other under our feet.

Where the crystal met the stone outside the city there was no border. They merged smoothly into each other without any interruption at all. That was the first hint that something was subtly off about the whole underground city situation. The other big warning flag was that everything seemed to be set at an angle. The streets, the buildings, the spires, it was all tilted ever so slightly off-kilter. Maybe just a few degrees off flat, but it left you feeling like you were drunk, or that gravity was somehow lying to you about which way was down.

“Oh.”

Asher’s voice came out soft and reverent. “The svart did not build this.”

Mercy clicked her tongue. “That’s an understatement.”

Not only had the svart not built this beautiful place, but they had also managed to avoid leaving their mark on it for the most part. Here and there you could see stains on the crystal, but considering the state the svart had left everything else in, this was practically sanitary.

If I were being honest, this city didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before in either of my lives. The Dvergar might have had the technical skill to carve something like this, but I don’t think it would have ever occurred to them to do it. The only other buildings we’d seen were rustic-looking ruins. If you’d asked me what heaven looked like before it turned out to be this place, I’d probably have pictured something like this glowing city. It looked like it should have been floating up among fluffy clouds, not pinned down here in some cave, overrun by svart.

I said what we were all thinking. “They were coming from here?”

“They definitely were”—Mercy seemed to be trying to convince herself as much as us—“but this has to be just another place that they’ve invaded, right?”

Asher’s eyes narrowed. His hands seemed to reach for the crystal without him meaning to. “We have no knowledge of the history of this place, nor how long it has languished down here with no populace. For all that we know, the svart have been here since antiquity stripped the builders of ownership.”

I drew my sword and rolled my shoulders. “Or we’re going to find some other hole down to an even deeper cave somewhere that they crawled out of before getting to this one. Then another and another, all the way down to whatever hell they actually come from.”

Asher sighed. “Indeed.”

“Better get started then.”

Chapter 18

From the partially buried buttress we’d come in by, there was a smooth descent into the city proper. The transparency of the crystal actually made it hard to navigate. First, everything was slightly tilted, then we could see through the corners of everything. It made the whole thing feel pretty unsafe. The crystal wasn’t as slippery as you might have thought, and crouching down to touch it I could feel the fine ridges cut into it, giving it texture. The light pulsed within the crystal—a little brighter here than where we’d first seen it. Looking out over what we could see of the city, that seemed to be the case all around. The farther in that we went, the brighter the light grew.

The way that I’m describing things, makes it seem like strolling in was easy, but for every wide-open shimmering thoroughfare, there were a dozen more that were blocked. Whatever had planted this city in the stone had done a pretty poor job of clearing the stone away. The roof of this cavern came down almost to the surface of the crystal in places. Elsewhere, where the city had intersected with stalagmites or stalactites they were just lying there in the street. We could still see the smooth plane where they’d been sheared off when we squeezed by them.

Given the density of the svart we’d seen upstairs, we crept forward with weapons and spells always at the ready, but the farther in that we got, the more obvious it was that we shouldn’t have bothered.

There were more svart down here than we had seen in the past few days put together, yet all of the laser-focused aggression that they’d shown elsewhere seemed to have faded away in the glow of this crystal. The ones roaming the streets seemed to be in a daze, their black eyes so unfocused you could catch glimpses of the yellowed whites around the outside, their stumbling motions even more chaotic than usual. The wretched screeching that they’d only unleashed during their mindless charges came all too frequently now, a constant steady warble that echoed and set the walls vibrating and chiming. It was like they were having conversations, but if anything of the noises that they made had been a real word, our God-given talents would have translated them. They were like children play-acting at being adults, going through the motions without understanding the significance.

I followed carefully in Mercy’s footsteps, moving slow and steady, as silently as I could. My armor definitely made a bit of noise as I went, but the svart didn’t seem to notice. They had patterns that they followed here in the city. Not patrols exactly, but directions that they would walk until they seemed to lose track of what they were doing, and then they would backtrack.

It was like all the times I’d wandered into a room and forgotten what I’d come in for on a grand scale. A whole city of absent-minded idiots wondering if they’d forgotten to lock the door after they left the house. Asher signed, “What are they up to?”

The sign language stuff seemed like a lot of work when I could just respond with a shrug.

We pressed on deeper and deeper into the city. The main thoroughfares seemed to be blocked more often than not, and where the buildings rose up, the stone seemed to have been carved back, but in the open places, crags and rubble seemed to have rushed in to fill the gap. Sometimes the stone and buildings were melded right into each other, but for the most part, the crystal seemed to have won out and the rock had given away.

It was a miracle it took so long for us to hit a dead-end. We’d crept slowly towards the source of the ever-growing glowing, but eventually, we hit a street entirely blocked by a toppled crystal spire. Where it had hit the road, it had fragmented into massive, jagged shards. There was no chance we were getting through it without getting shredded to pieces. Since we had relative peace and quiet with the only ambling svart more than a street away, I thought I’d make us a way through. Closing my eyes, I reached out into my Sphere of Influence and realized that I couldn’t touch a damn thing in this city. The worked crystal set my pillar of Artifice shaking the moment I touched it. It was almost as bad as when I’d tried to haul up the bronze rails, just from that brief touch. Like they were an order of magnitude more complex. I snapped back to my body and sighed. “We need another way.”

While Mercy was the one doing all the scouting ahead, Asher served as our compass. Down in the buried city it was a maze, and if it weren’t for his unerring sense of the direction where the most magic was built up, we’d probably have been lost a dozen times over. With a wave of his hand, he could always direct us to the center of the city, even if it didn’t help us to actually find a route.

Confronted with the fallen tower, we finally did what we’d been putting off since we arrived in the city, and we went inside a building. Unlike the Dvergar city, there were doors everywhere you looked—tall elegant things that tapered up to a point and gave no real indication of what was behind them. Despite being carved from the same crystal as everything else, the doors and walls of the building seemed to have a degree of opacity to them, like somebody had painted them white on the inside. It looked to me like the building at the side of the road might extend past the end of the rubble blocking our way, so I went for it before pausing at the last moment to double-check. “Anyone want to yell at me for opening a door too quick?”

Mercy had an arrow aimed at the door, and its tip now wobbled over towards me instead. “Just open it.”

Inside we could see a far more familiar version of svart life. There was a refuse heap in the corner full of droppings that had long since dried out, the walls were scratched up everywhere that you looked, and the creamy arches of wooden furniture that had once filled the place were now little more than splinters. All that remained of the svart within were bones, some of them ancient and chewed, and one fresher and unmarked, the last survivor of this little battlefield.

There were feathers scattered around a gutted mattress, and scraps of silk and fabrics I didn’t even recognize. Whoever lived here before the svart got trapped inside had lived comfortably. Yet whoever they were, there was no indication of it now. No pictures, no treasured trinkets, nothing. When they left, they must have packed everything up.

We moved through the little villa by the roadside in perfect silence. The scratches on the walls interfered in our view of the outside, but whatever had rendered them opaque did not. You could see perfectly outside, like every surface of the house was a window.

“Oh, I would hate to live here.” I broke the silence without meaning to. “Imagine seeing people walking by when you’re trying to pee.”

Mercy chuckled. “Really? You don’t seem like a shy bladder kind of guy?”

“There’s a difference between not being shy and wanting an audience for bodily functions.”

“Do you mean to suggest that you have never expelled gas in company?” Asher was picking through the remains of the house, not really paying attention to us.

I put my shoulders back and proudly announced. “I could burp the alphabet.”

“That’s what I thought.” Mercy scoffed. “So how is this different?”

“I don’t know. It just is.”

Beyond the shattered remains of chamber-pots and a claw-footed bath that looked like it had been carved from a single piece of pristine driftwood, we found the fragmented remains of some sort of dining room. Every trace of food was gone, but plates still lay obscenely in their place on a table that had somehow avoided the svart’s delicate ministrations.

“This whole place is weird.”

“I am forced to concur.” Asher looked troubled. “I cannot determine what happened here. It is a puzzle.”

Mercy waved us over. Looking out through the wall it was apparent that the shattered tower was only going to be the start of our problems. Whole sections of the road seemed to have given way after the tower fell, so deep that even the glowing discharges of light that leapt across the gap were insufficient to show us what was in the shadows.

The destruction was even more widespread farther in. Whole buildings had toppled in the direction of the tilt. Set loose from the crystal that served as their foundations, they had slid and shattered.

Through the far end wall of the house, we could see the next in the row. The front side had been caved in from some long-forgotten impact, but the rear was still mostly intact—a possible path forward if it weren’t for all these walls in our way.

Mercy gave the wall a kick. “You can’t use your god powers on this crystal stuff can you?”

“Nope.” I slipped into the little trance of Artifice, scooping up pieces of wood and fabric from the floor in a little whirlwind of activity. My sword shifted shape, the metal compressing back down into a big dense block attached to the end of the new wooden haft I’d cobbled together. “But I can use a big hammer.”

It was a bit noisy. The first blow left a great crack in the wall, but it also set the whole crystal structure ringing like a big glass of water with a giant wet finger rubbing around the rim.

Every hit after that intensified the noise until Mercy and Asher had their hands clamped to their heads and were screaming at me to stop.

Shame I couldn’t hear them. The fifth hammer fall did the trick.

The wall exploded through into the next house. There was no way that all that noise wasn’t going to draw attention, so this time we stepped up the pace. We rushed through the abandoned house, this one untouched by svart but covered in a layer of crystal dust that would probably have turned our insides into some sort of salsa if we breathed it in. I kept a hand over my mouth and ran as fast as I could over the slippery surface. There would be no getting back onto the street through the ruined front of this building, but the next one along looked more promising. Both the front and back sides were still intact, and while it looked like the street wasn’t clear, at least the rocks hanging down into it were probably passable.

I took a running jump and brought my hammer down.

This time the crystal blossomed out into cracks immediately. I might not have been doing more damage, but I was definitely placing it better. Asher and Mercy caught up to me just in time to move their hands from their mouths to their ears as another resonating gong set the whole place trembling.

With a spin on the spot, I brought all my strength to bear against the wall. A grunt of effort left me as a little roar.

The wall split. It didn’t shatter like the last one, but a crack shot out from where I’d hit to the top of the wall, and there was a gap wide enough to fit my arm through. Setting the hammer down, I took a hold of both sides of that gap and pulled them apart. I strained and grunted and nothing happened except my fingers started to hurt. That was when I remembered I was more than just a big buff faun. I was a big buff faun with godly powers. I Surged my Potency, and the impossible task suddenly became possible. I pried the gap open and set the upper floor of this building and the next toppling back into the rocks beyond with one great tug.

Mercy’s mouth was hanging open when I turned around to give her a grin. Eventually, she managed to say, “You’re on jar opening duty from now on.”

All the noise was starting to attract attention. The svart in the city might have been dazed and confused, but they were still svart. Beyond the fallen back wall we could see them coming, pouring out into the street in their hundreds. What we had seen beyond the city could not have prepared us for the sheer volume of bodies here. Upstairs they’d filled tunnels, but here they filled the grand avenues with the residents of a few of the villas alone. Trying to extrapolate out the number of svart that might be in the city from that little demonstration was giving me a headache, so I ignored it and hurried on.

The inadvertent blockade of the toppled tower and broken road gave us some protection from being swarmed on the front side of these buildings where there were doors in easy reach, but there was still a moment of hesitation before I shouldered the door of this last house open and burst out into the street. Spikes of rock jutted up out of the crack on the opposite side, where houses should have been there was a hole, and then something like stalagmites were growing up out of the remains. Growing into the gap that this city had left. How long had it been down here that rock was starting to grow back around it?

Stealth had run its course, so I took the lead as we ran deeper into the city. Maybe we could go back to sneaking once we had some distance from the noise I’d made, or maybe not. When we first started out I would have said that I hoped not, but seeing just how many svart were actually down here, I was starting to doubt my ability to hit them all. We rounded a smooth curve in the road, and suddenly, it went from ghost town to party city.

The svart had all gathered around some massive abstract sculpture made from the same crystal as everything else. It could have been a woman or a plant or just a tangle of smooth shapes, I wasn’t an art expert. I didn’t know, and we weren’t going to get a chance to study it closer. The svart turned on us, all confusion gone and replaced with the same murderous intent we’d seen from their buddies above. Asher hissed. “Run.”

We ran.

We ran straight at the svart for a few steps before Mercy spotted a side street spiraling off the main thoroughfare, then she dragged me bodily towards it. Slipping between the buildings was like entering a ravine in a glacier, shining white on either side of us, shimmering and shifting. The svart shrieks echoed up it behind us, setting off a terrible harmony with the crystal and drowning out Mercy as she repeated, “Go, go, go,” nonstop.

The side-street was less of an alley and more of a ramp, spiraling up behind the next row of buildings before splitting out into an elaborate series of walkways that were now shattered, twisted, and interspersed with intruding stalactites. We ran as far in as we could before stone blocked our way, turning each time a barricade presented itself until we were thoroughly lost in the maze of walkways that once must have spanned over this whole side of the city.

The light grew dimmer as we ran farther and farther from the center of town, but we didn’t have the time to worry about it. The screeching jabbering horde of svart were still hammering along behind us, setting the walkways ringing. When we rounded one particularly wide intrusion of stone and saw the walkway giving out in an abrupt horizon, Mercy let out a little yelp of despair and skidded to a halt. I didn’t.

With both my arms flung wide, I caught Asher and Mercy around the waists and leapt. It was a straight drop down into a pitch-black pit where the walkway had fallen and taken out the lower level too, but beyond that, there was a wide courtyard. I landed just a few feet in from the edge with a crunch.

I blinked. “Crunch?”

The cracks began spreading out beneath my feet, and not even having a moment to drop the others, I ran for it. Piece by piece, the smooth crystal beneath us became fragmented and fell away. It was like the tile trap all over again, except this time I was going to outrun it.

Every time my feet slammed down, more cracks spiderwebbed out, but it didn’t matter. If I had to keep running forever it didn’t matter—there was no way the svart could follow us now, not with the whole road falling into the dark beneath us.

Asher was struggling in my grasp, so I let him drop and run himself. Almost instantly, the cracking beneath me stopped. Mercy called me an idiot so often that the word had kind of lost its meaning, but, man, I was really an idiot.

I dropped her off as I staggered to a halt. The crystal I’d already cracked was still tinkling down into the abyss, but the smooth courtyard we’d found was still holding out over at this end, terminating in the first solid-looking wall that we’d seen since we got here.

It was as smooth as the other walls but blackened instead of crystal clear, towering to two stories where all the elegant villas had sprawled out on one level to allow for the fluting walkways overhead. Whatever this place was, it was important enough to warrant disrupting the majesty of the city’s decor to accommodate it.

Around the corner, the reason for the clash became more apparent. This might have been made by whoever built the city, but the design was Dvergar. The solid planes of stone had been replicated down here by whatever had built this place. Rounding the next corner, we could even see the runes carved into the surface of the crystal, running up the length of what I was forced to call a door for lack of a better word. It took up almost the entire side of the building, stretching almost all the way to the flat top of the structure.

Gone was all the pale wood and finery of the rest of the city, and instead, there was the blackened metal of industry. Interlocking pieces of it, too complex for the eye to follow, clear but bristling with more of the Dvergar runes. I had no idea how we could get inside this building, short of smashing through a wall, and the longer that we were there, the less sure I was that I’d even want to.

Asher had his palms spread against the surface of the dark crystal, and his head was cocked to the side like he was trying to hear it whispering. “There is a great power being channeled here.”

Even without his sensitivity, it was obvious what he was talking about. The light flowing through the crystal beneath us had been dimming as we moved farther out of the city, but here the road beneath our feet was almost entirely unlit. A flicker of the light that flowed through the rest of the city would pulse into the area, only for the Dvergar-built structure to drink it all up thirstily. Pulse. Slurp. Pulse. Slurp.

“What is it?”

“What is anything down here?” Mercy turned her back on it and crossed her arms, scowling out into the shadows for any sign of our pursuers. “None of this makes any sense. Why are svart living here? Who built this place, and why were they obsessed with living in a giant chandelier? Why is there a Dvergar brick in the middle of it? Why is it guzzling power? Why are we wandering around down here instead of blocking off the tunnel and running like hell?”

We all jumped at the sudden scream. The interlinking metal was once well-oiled, but it had seen no maintenance for so long that when it started to move now every part of it ground against every other part. Every carefully-carved rune on every strut of metal seemed to have its own awful note to shriek as it scraped by. Asher leapt away clapping his hands to the side of his head, presumably where his ears lived. Mercy had an arrow strung and pointed before she’d even turned to face the sunlight pouring out of the…whatever the building was.

The light didn’t come like a sunrise. Instead, it washed out like mist. The liquid light of the abomination’s blood heated to a steam, and I was already grabbing for my sword before the first glint of porcelain white flesh appeared. Except I didn’t have a sword, just a hammer. I grabbed that anyway.

The newborn abomination came out swinging.

Luck more than skill had my hammer’s head in the way of its first attack. I hadn’t even seen it coming. Even with the blow striking metal instead of flesh, the impact sent me sliding across the courtyard.

Emerging from the glowing mist, I was taken aback by the size of the thing. I’m a big guy, and the previous abominations were bigger than me, but this thing put them to shame. If it had had a head on top of its gorilla body, it wouldn’t have fit out the door. As it was, it had to hunch right down. The big glowing orb that we all know and love was somewhere in the middle of that headless torso, floating in the gap where a neck might have started. Apart from being white as snow and smooth as the crystal around us, the gorilla thing was a pretty good match, except for the arms. It didn’t have arms, it had big thick tentacles.

It had whipped one of them at me before it even got out the door, but now that it had emerged fully from the complex glow of machinery behind it, both could be brought to bear. I’d been flung out of reach, but the other two hadn’t.

The left squid-bit lashed out at Mercy’s legs, and she jumped it like she was playing with a skipping rope. The other tentacle shot right past Asher, boomeranging back around the other side of him and then wrapping up the length of his body in one coiling movement that would have made an anaconda applaud. He had enough time to say, “What?” before it yanked him off his feet and into the air.

As I ran back into the brawl, I slipped out of my body, reshaping the hammer into a great-sword once more but shifting it over into my left hand. The hammer haft that was left in my right hand was of finely graven wood, well beyond the ability of my Artifice to reshape, but I didn’t need to reshape it. I just needed to leave enough metal where the hammerhead had been to form a spear-head.

Before I was in reach of the tentacles again, I snapped back to my body and threw my new javelin. I was aiming for the big glowing bullseye at the center of the abomination. The javelin flew from my fingers, soared through the air, and then clattered against the door-frame as the metalwork shrieked closed behind the abomination. This was why I didn’t do sports.

Mercy sprinted past me, peppering the thing with arrows. Luckily, she wasn’t too breathless to shout, “You suck!” as she passed.

When she took aim, she didn’t miss. Every shot went right into the tentacle that had a grip on Asher and was currently swinging him around in the air.

Asher had started out blue, so I wasn’t sure what color he’d turn if he succeeded in having all the air crushed out of him, but he certainly didn’t look healthy. His head and tail flopped limply from side to side as he was flung left and right. Up and down.

The abomination had gone on lumbering forward, so I was in reach when it flicked its wiggly appendage out again. I had my sword up, but this time I wasn’t lucky. The tip of the tentacle hit me right in the face.

[191/520 Health]

I blinked a couple of times until the cavern roof stopped spinning in front of my eyes. “Ow.”

Asher came into sight above me, swinging down like a falling hammer. “Oh shit.”

I had to roll to the side to avoid being bludgeoned with him, and the floor, and his head, took the brunt of the blow instead. When the tentacle reared up again, he had left a bloody impression of his face on the crystal.

Rolling on until I’d regained my feet, I was surprised to find my sword still in hand. Guess I’d clung to it like a safety blanket through my brief nap. The weight of Asher’s limp body seemed to be slowing that tentacle down enough that I could see it coming at least.

No more blocking, no more dodging. If I was going down, I was going down swinging.

As the Asher flail swung my way, I took my best shot. A heavy overhand cut right into the tentacle that held him, and at the last moment, it tried to jerk Asher into my swing, but it was too late. I’d already committed.

Only the toughness of the abomination’s hide saved Asher from being split in two. My cleaver blade bit through the tentacle that had wrapped around him but didn’t quite make it all the way through.

There were still a few stringy remnants of abomination stretched thin around him when it yanked him back, but all the strength was gone from its grip, and Asher tumbled to the ground in a heap, tail sticking up in the air. My first instinct was to run to him, but instead, I had to comfort myself with the thought that if he were actually as dead as he looked, then he would have vanished.

Mercy was keeping her distance, raining arrows into the body of the abomination, chipping away at its health. Eventually, she’d be able to take it out, but it wasn’t willing to sit still and let her.

Both of the abomination’s tentacles were swinging above it now, though one of the tips was dangling loosely thanks to my handy hacking. They spiraled above us like a tornado, then lashed out together in one great sweeping attack.

I tried to jump over like Mercy had, and I cleared the first tentacle with a laugh that cut off abruptly when the second one hit me square in the gut.

Things were happening too fast to track. The hit folded me over, then the tentacle whipped around my waist before I could be flung away. I jerked in its grip, the tentacle stretching to its limit, and then it yanked me back like an elastic band. It spun me as I drew in closer, wrapping me tighter and tighter in layer after layer of strangely cool tentacle. I guess I was too dangerous to fling around like Asher. It wanted to crush me to death before I had a chance to chop us up any more abomination calamari.

Flexing every muscle in my big buff body still wasn’t enough to stop the crushing pressure, and I could feel every loop of tentacle like a steel bar, crushing into my flesh. It was going to pop me like a zit.

With the last air in my lungs, I surged my potency and flexed. I was hoping for it to dramatically rip apart, but all I managed was to loosen its grip enough that I could crawl and scramble up the meat-tube it had me trapped in. The coiled tentacle snapped shut like a sphincter behind me as I was crapped onto the floor by its feet.

The surge would only last for a few more seconds, but those seconds were all I needed. I leapt into the air, hefted my sword over my head, and then slammed it down into the glowing orb with all of my buffed strength.

Now, I didn’t have time to unpack all that right then and there. The abomination fell back from me, and the sword in my hands melted away to a stump of its former glory. With the still molten metal, I followed up my last attack with a stab into its thigh. The white-hot iron split the pallid flesh, and sunlight gushed out.

That was the end of my sword. The heat climbed up, and the leather straps I’d wrapped around the handle burst into flames when I reached to pick it up again.

Fair enough. I clenched my fists and started swinging.

The hide was thick enough to turn every blow, and the thing was too bulky for me to knock it off balance. There was no material around to make a new weapon, and I was all out of bright ideas. It was this or nothing.

A shower of arrows flitted overhead, melting away on contact with the glowing orb or rebounding off the smooth white expanse of perfectly sculpted musculature. One fell short and skittered across the crystal beneath our feet. That’s when I saw my useless javelin still lying there.

I’d hoped I was inside the reach of the abomination, but it had lifted both tentacles up, and now it was slamming them down on me. I dove forward between its legs.

Behind it, I could see all the gruesome details that were hidden from the front. The pristine perfection of the abomination was missing back here. There were little lumps, like tumors all over its back, and tiny little tentacles the size of my fingers were stretching out from a good half of them, leaking liquid sunlight as they burst free in anemone clusters.

My fumbling fingers found the spear’s haft, and I staggered to my feet. I thrust it into the thickest mass of lumps and was rewarded with nothing. The tentacles had caught hold of the spear before the tip could make contact, and now I couldn’t even tug it free.

That spear was the only thing I had for a weapon, so I wasn’t ready to give up on it yet. I rolled my shoulders and gave it another pull. Nothing. I was still hauling as hard as I could when the abomination turned around.

Attached as I was, it swung me around like I was on a carousel ride. Feet skidding over the smooth floor with no hope of traction. When it realized I wasn’t behind it, it spun again. It stopped for a moment, Mercy’s arrows still pattering off it, then its tentacles came around, feeling for me, groping across the sucking surface of its back until they were almost touching the spear haft.

I could work with this. Letting my frankly useless weapon go, I grabbed a handful of each tentacle and pulled hard.

A breath later, the abomination pulled back. I was yanked off my feet, slid along the length of the spear, and got both feet jammed directly into the sucking oozing mass on its back, which promptly grabbed onto me as tightly as it could.

Both tentacles flexed and whipped about in my grasp, but I wasn’t letting go of them. Not now that I had it right where I wanted it. The half-hacked tentacle was still holding together, and even starting to heal back into shape. That wasn’t fair. Only I was meant to be using Restoration. Yet as it tried to heal, it found my hand in the wound, holding tight despite the crackling and stinging of the golden glowing fluid seeping out. The other side was trickier. The length of the tentacle was unnaturally smooth, so it was only by wrapping it around and around that I could keep a grip on it. Inside my palm, it flexed and narrowed, but it was no good. I had it.

Without its tentacles to resort to, the abomination lumbered forward, heading straight for Mercy at the far side of the courtyard. I pulled with all my might to turn it, but there was something wrong with my reins, and it barreled straight at her without pause.

At the last moment, she rolled aside and saw me. “What the—”

I didn’t catch the last word as the abomination spun us both around again. All I had to do was hold on. When Potency Surge was ready again, I was going to rip its flip flappers off, but until then, all I had to do was hold on.

It tried to stomp Mercy, but she was considerably quicker than it, rolling through its legs to come up on my side again. “What are you doing?!”

The abomination jerked from side to side as though it was looking for her, although it didn’t really have eyes, so I wasn’t clear on how that worked. I strained against it, almost fully extending my legs before it dragged me back into my hunch on its back. “Stopping it from octopus slapping you, obviously.”

Mercy looked skeptical. “This was your plan?”

“I didn’t have a lot of options!”

The abomination spun me away from her again before I could hear her incredibly helpful suggestions on what to do next. What a shame.

The orb at the center of the abomination started to flicker and brighten. With no other option, it looked like it was planning to burn the limpet off its back. I didn’t think of that. I didn’t have a lot of options as far as dodging went. This was going to hurt.

Surge Potency clicked back to life in my head, and I called on it immediately, hauling on the tentacles for all I was worth.

The beam sputtered to life, and thanks to my last-minute yank adjusting its aim, it was firing right into my face.

My whole world was white-hot pain, but my arms kept on moving all the same. Hauling the tentacles across my body, crisscrossing them in a haphazard shield against the burning light. The solar beam blazed and flared beyond my tentacular shield, and as I watched, they turned from pallid white to scorched black and then to ashes in my grasp.

With nothing to hold me up, I flopped down to bang my head on its calves. The beam tried to follow me, but the irregular surface of the abomination’s own back protected me. One by one, the polyps on its rear side blackened and burst in a shower of goo, all the way down to the ones holding my feet.

Was the abomination as dumb as it looked or did it just take a while for it to stop the beam once it got it going? Either way, the searing energy sputtered and died at about the same moment that the anemone clusters holding my feet shriveled up and dropped me.

Disarmed in more ways than one, the abomination staggered back over me. Mercy was already there around its rear side, firing arrow after arrow into the slick blackened wound running down its back.

Shots that would have bounced off the thick white hide slid home into the broken flesh. Every arrow made the whole abomination jerk.

The tentacles had lost some of their length, and they were leaking sunlight from their blackened ends, but despite all that, they were still massive clubs, swinging down at me as hard as they could. I was only halfway to steady on my feet when they swept down. All I could do to defend myself was to try to catch them again with my bare hands.

The impact of the great blunt cudgels on my hands sent aching shocks up my arms. More pain. More exhaustion. More damage. The blinding glow of the abomination’s orb was the only light left in my world. Everything else was fading to grey.

When I turned my head from side to side, I was surprised to see the tentacles still trapped in my hands, straining and writhing. I hadn’t even realized that I’d caught them.

Even damaged, they were much stronger than me. I only had a moment before I either lost my grip or got flung across the room. I took one step backward, straining them to their limits, then I used that big slingshot to fire me, horns first, right into its chest.

My horns were sunk in deep enough that the stubble on my scalp was scraping over the abomination’s skin. I put my hands against it and pushed, but I was firmly embedded. I dangled there like a rag doll as the abomination spun and chased after Mercy. I couldn’t think through the grey static buzzing all around me. I couldn’t think what to do.

“Maulkin!”

My hands dangled loosely at my sides, limp and useless, all these muscles gone to waste. I looked at my hands, slick with glowing blood, and then I reached up to touch at my own awful wounds.

“Maulkin, wake up!”

I blinked hard at the sound of my name. The light in my eyes kept flickering on and off like the battery had a bad connection. I needed to do something. I needed…Restoration.

[184/520 Health]

The light inside me sprang back to life, and the charcoal of my face softened back into flesh. All the aches and pains of the day were chased away.

With renewed vigor, I swung my legs up, folding myself in half, and braced them on the abomination’s stomach. This time when I kicked off, every muscle up the length of my body strained, and my horns drew out, inch by dripping inch. It sounded like somebody stepping in a pot of macaroni and cheese.

The golden blood of the abomination flowed freely down over my boots, and the tentacles that it had raised up above its head to crush me flapped and quivered. It hurt, but I got my probably-broken hands under me and pushed myself up. I was almost to my feet when Mercy screamed, “Get down!”

I just let myself drop. I lay back and watched as the ball of lightning hit the abomination square in the orb. For one blinding bright moment, the two spheres existed in the same space, then the lightning orb carried on its arc, bouncing past my head and on to crash through the doors of the Dvergar-looking building. The solar orb was gone.

New Divinity Unlocked! [Ascendant Brutality]

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Potency increased to 43

Brutality: Rank 10/10

Brawling: Rank 4/10

Acrobatics Rank 7/10

186 Experience Gained

400 Glory Gained

“We won.” I said it to convince myself more than anyone else. The hulking white body of the abomination, now robbed of its vital force, toppled towards me. In a blind panic, I tried to crab walk out of the way, but it was too late. With a thump, my legs were trapped beneath the oozing corpse.

I let my head fall back. “We won!”

Chapter 19

Mercy had an arm under Asher’s shoulders and was half-dragging him across to me. He was a real mess. Despite that, he still had some snark to him. “If this is what winning looks like, I believe that losing may be preferable.”

Mercy let him go when she got to me, and as he collapsed to his knees, I caught him by the wrist, and my Restoration flared back to life. Healing flowed through him, the mashed mess of his face reshaped itself, growing fresh scales, and his burst eyeball re-inflated. It was pretty gross.

The metalwork shrieked again.

Mercy’s face had been so close to a smile before that sound. “Oh no.”

“Pull me out.” I didn’t even have time to look. I had more practical concerns. “Pull me out!”

Asher grabbed an arm and started hauling for all he was worth, but he was weak, and there was no traction. “Mercy! Help.”

She tore her eyes away from the monster factory and grabbed onto my other arm. With the two of them pulling and me flopping about like a beached whale, I managed to get out from under the abomination’s corpse.

Almost immediately, I wished I’d gone the other way, camping out under the corpse and waiting for this next mess to pass us by. We had barely survived fighting the last abomination, and the next one looked so much worse.

Asher’s bouncy ball had trashed the little output gate. The metal was twisted all out of shape, big hunks of it had fallen off, and whole pinions of metal were pinging off as it was being forced open.

The abomination looked wrong. I mean, they all looked fairly wrong, or we wouldn’t be calling them abominations, but even by the standards of abominations, this one was a real mess. The pristine white of its porcelain hide was torn and hanging open, blackened and burnt. The golden glow within was clearly visible, but the color was ever so slightly off like somebody had spilled oil into the mix and it was still swirling around. The glowing orb at the center of its mass looked like it was on the fritz, and sparks showered down out of it constantly, turning to liquid when they hit the floor.

In terms of shape, I wasn’t even sure what the hell I was looking at. One arm looked like a crab’s claw, and the other like a human arm, but it terminated in a bleeding stump just below the elbow. It had the same four-legged set-up as the first one that we’d encountered, but it was as though three of those legs had been boiled for too long, and the one hardened claw-foot had to drag the rest of the dangling mess forward. A pair of scorpion-like tails tipped with wicked-looking scythe blades were rooted somewhere around the mid-section, but one of these was dangling limp and boneless too, lashing about like the death throes of the tentacles.

I closed my eyes against the sight of it and let my new senses roll out over the courtyard, seeking whatever was left of my sword so that I could fashion together something to work with. A knife maybe. Instead, I found all the shattered remnants of the ironwork scattered about my feet. “Oh yeah. That’s more like it.”

The shape of my sword was never going to change now, it was too ingrained in my mind, but with all of this raw metal to work with, I could make a version that had a bit more heft to it. It firmed up between my hands, hovering in the air as I tightened and planed it into shape, putting as much of an edge to it as my Artifice would allow.

I snapped back into my body to catch the tail end of Mercy saying, “…or do we run?”

“No.” My voice came out soft. “We don’t run.”

“The odds do not seem to be in our favor in the current—”

“We don’t run.” I didn’t mean to growl it, but the sound still rumbled up from my chest all the same. “We fight, and we win.”

“I’m not ready to die just because you’re too dumb to see that we can’t beat this thing.” Mercy reached for my arm and then stopped when she realized it was slick with blood. I hadn’t even noticed that cut. “Look at you, you’re falling apart.”

“Forget me. Look at it. Asher messed up the machine. It wasn’t ready to be born yet. It is never going to be weaker.” The abomination was tearing at itself trying to break free of the jammed-up machinery. “If we give it time, it will heal, it will get stronger. But if we take it now, together, we can win.”

Asher was looking at Mercy, and she gave him a helpless shrug. “Maybe?”

I took off running before they could try to stop me, charging right at the abomination as it burst free. “Asher, give me a boost!”

I leapt into the air, trusting in my serpentine brother in arms to deliver, and boy did he. The Gravity Snare sprang to life above me, turning my Olympic-level high jump into something cartoonish and impossible. I flew up to the level of the walkways all around us before plummeting right back down towards the abomination’s blazing heart. Sword already swinging.

This new weapon had the mass to resist the heat. It came out the other side of the orb red and molten, but it was still in one piece. I managed to stay in place atop the abomination for only a moment before it’s lopsided crawl across the courtyard bucked me off.

Still falling, I took a swipe at the scythe-tail as I passed.

The red-hot metal was quenched in the flesh of the abomination. A great rush of golden steam burst out where I’d split it open, and another one of its malformed parts fell out of use.

When I hit the ground the impact rolled up through my bones, waking up all the aches and pains I’d forced down with my Primal healing. The golden cloud I’d made started to drizzle tainted sunshine down on me as I lumbered back to my feet for round two.

With so many holes in its armored hide, Mercy was having the time of her life. Every gap that I could see had at least one arrow sticking out of it, and some were onto quarrel number three. Static clung to the thing as Asher’s spell preparation moved ahead, discharging in little sparks to dance across my armor and my blade. It was all coming together. The one good claw leg gave out as one of Mercy’s arrows thudded into it, and the whole abomination tipped sideways.

I’d already been sat on by enough abominations for one day. I braced my sword, and the glowing top slid right up into the side of it as it fell.

Another great wash of golden light turned liquid washed out over me. I must have been lit up from head to toe by now. The whole weight of the abomination was leaning against the hilt of my sword, and I had strength enough to bear it. Taking a step back from the downed beast, I managed to drag my sword clear, just in time for Asher’s lightning bolt to tear through.

Every one of the abomination’s broken and useless limbs flapped and fluttered as the current tore through it. Abominations made no sound, no cries or roars or anything else, but with so many holes in its hardened shell, this one let out a whistling sound as its innards fried.

When the last sparks had discharged to skitter across the crystal floor and set it vibrating beneath our feet, it was my turn again. With a guttural roar, I brought my sword down, double-handed, on the central stalk of the creature.

The metal had dulled back to black by the time I drew it back out of the abomination’s meat, streaked and scored along its length by the heat and the blood of this newborn nightmare.

I lifted the sword again. There was no finesse here, no martial prowess or skill. There was just me and my butcher’s blade faced with a thing I needed to stop moving.

Still, the half-born mess tried to rise up, even as I was raining blows down on it.

The strength seemed to be leaving it now. The already discolored glow beneath its skin flickering and dimming. It still wasn’t enough.

“Will you just die!”

It did as it was told.

New Skill Discovered! [Airstrike]

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Celerity increased to 18

Vitality increased to 13

Airstrike: Rank 1/10

Phalanx: Rank 2/10

84 Experience Gained

400 Glory Gained

The tainted sunlight dulled to total darkness all around me and across my skin, and exhaustion swept over me. I had to lean on my sword. At least, the abomination maker was too trashed to churn out another one.

As I was catching my breath, Mercy came over to prod me with an end of her bow. “You look like you went swimming in a septic tank.”

“Thanks.”

“You smell like it too.”

“Thank you so much, Mercy.”

“Of course, that hasn’t changed much…”

“Love you too, Mercy.”

Asher approached in the midst of all this. He wasn’t smiling, because he had no lips, but there was certainly a jovial note to his little head-bobs. “That was an impressive display.”

“That was a team effort.” I pulled myself up and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

Mercy was quick to rain on my parade. “That was luck. Pure luck. The thing came out all jacked up. If it had been a proper one you would have been toast.”

“Good thing Asher destroyed the…uh…monster machine.”

Mercy snorted. It was not ladylike. “Monster machine?”

I did my best mad scientist voice, “Abomination-inator?”

“My dear friends, the device before us is a Flesh-Forge.”

Mercy said, “Ew.”

“What’s that now?”

“The Dvergar spoke of them, as did the gods.” He ran a reverential hand across the dulled surface of the crystal block. “These were tools used during the Revelation War to create great biological weapons to fight back against the Void God’s legions.”

Mercy didn’t look impressed. “So…monster machines.”

Asher dipped his head in agreement. “Indeed, but capable of so much more than mere monsters. Imagine an arcane apparatus designed to replicate our divine power of origination. Whole races could be created. New genus. The only limit our imagination.”

I shrugged to Mercy when she looked askance at me. “At least that explains where all the weird and wonderful critters on this world came from.”

Asher pressed his face to the forge like he was trying to hear what was being said inside. “Would that I could learn how they operated.”

Mercy’s eyes were going to roll right out of her head if she kept spinning them like that. “If we meet anybody that isn’t trying to kill us we can stop and ask, okay?”

Mercy had somehow made it through both fights unscathed, and my Restoration dimmed when I touched Asher, so I supposed that I could only use it on myself at the moment.

[296/520 Health]

Between Bloodthirst and Restoration, I was feeling better than I had in days. If I could just find some more useless crippled monsters to pound on, I’d be back to full health in no time.

It took a little convincing to make Asher give up his examination of the Forge, but at the end of the day, it was a wrecked thing now. Even if he could peer in through the broken gate and make out some of the needle-tipped assembly inside, it told him nothing of how the device worked.

We were far from the place where we’d started out now, but our destination was still the same—still signposted just as clearly by the glow building beneath our feet and in the walls as we crept on. Mercy was back in the lead, padding silently ahead while Asher and I did our best not to make a noise and failed repeatedly.

I turned my attention inwards since we had a quiet moment. One thousand four hundred glory was needed to hit the next Tier, and we’d acquired eight hundred in the last fight alone. That was nine hundred total. Two more abominations and I was up to the next tier.

I had three hundred and sixty-five experience in the bank—enough to unlock a new divine skill if I wanted. It was tempting. The abomination fights had just shown how squishy I was under my armor. Being able to Surge Celerity to get the hell out of the way or Vitality so I could tank the bigger hits were both sorely tempting, but I decided to hold off for now. Given how many abominations we were banging into down here, I couldn’t help but think I was going to be hitting the next Tier soon. With a new Tier, new abilities would unlock. That was worth waiting for, probably.

After taking inventory of myself, I turned my attention outwards. Here and there as we walked I found skeletal remains, scrap metal, and broken furniture. All the remains of a city ground down until it was little more than dust. I gathered all that I could with Artifice and set about replacing the arrows that Mercy had used up. If she noticed them plopping into the quiver on her back, she didn’t mention it. That was fine, I didn’t need a round of applause, I just needed her to keep shooting the stuff that was trying to eat me.

Amusing myself with making arrows out of all the least pleasant things I could find kept me distracted enough that I nearly walked right into the back of Mercy where she’d stopped in the alleyway between two of the low-slung houses. She signed back to us, “Twenty little ones.”

The sign language didn’t have a word for svart, but little ones was pretty clear.

My thick fingers seemed to fumble every time I tried to sign, but she seemed to get the gist of “What we do?”

Her shrug was pretty universal. I glanced to Asher, who signed, “Is there another way?”

Another shrug. Great. Real helpful.

This time I took my time and got my fingers wiggling right. “Push through?”

After another painfully long moment of indecision, she nodded.

I cupped my hands together in front of my crotch, then unlaced them for a moment to sign. “Up.”

Her face twisted into a look of absolute disgust before she realized I was offering her a boost. With both of them safely placed on the roof of the villa beside us, I walked out into the street without a care in the world.

The svart were swarming around like flocking birds, every one of them a fixed distance from the others, and every one of them turning in time. It was like they were dancing a waltz in time to the pulsing of the light through the street beneath them. They were so lost in their own movements that they didn’t even notice when Asher’s static charge gathered around them or when I walked right up to the closest one and took a swing.

I’d heard that if you cut a worm in half, the two separate bits could go on living. It doesn’t work like that for svart.

The next one had at least turned to face me before I cut it down.

I felt less guilty about it when they saw it coming. Although I suppose I shouldn’t have. They’re just out there doing their happy dance and wham, sword to the face. Maybe not knowing would have been better. It didn’t matter. They were all looking my way now, scrambling for the weapons that they’d dropped in their dance trance.

Mercy’s arrows started to rain down now, precision shots to the heads and necks of the svart. She’d waited until I’d lost the element of surprise to start shooting—what a pro.

With so few svart working together, and so few of them putting up a competent defense, it really showed just how frail our enemy was. As I swept my sword around in an arc that divided another three, I started to feel pangs of sympathy for these twisted little creatures.

Maybe they were too dumb to know any better? Maybe we really should have just sealed up the tunnel and let them go on their merry way. They’d obviously found some way to survive down here. Maybe it was time to live and let live.

Then I remembered the Dvergar in the tunnels, picked to pieces for the svart’s amusement. Hesitation left me. My blade came down.

“Back it up!”

I leapt back from the svart as they started to form a clumsy battle-line, just in time for a bolt of lightning to leap from Asher’s hands and tear through them all. I was close enough to smell the ozone and the scorched flesh.

Just like that, twenty svart became none, and I wandered back to help the others down. Mercy sprang past me, unaided, but Asher had the good sense to jump into my arms. I placed him down carefully, then gave him a little bow. “My lady.”

He blinked but said nothing more about it.

Mercy was already across the road and seeking out our next alleyway. Even I had to admit to feeling a bit exposed in these big open spaces. If the svart came upon us en masse out here they’d be able to bring their advantage in numbers to bear properly. I didn’t fancy being on the receiving end of that.

Mercy waved us forward, and we started out again. Through street after empty street, we weaved around the ruins and rocky outcroppings where they’d made it into the city. Deeper and deeper we headed towards the source of the light until finally, we came out from a tunnel formed by two buildings collapsing into each other, and we saw it for the first time.

It was a pyramid, right at the center of the city, shorter than the two-story buildings that had birthed spires around it, and hidden from our sight up until now by them. It was gilded around the edges in silver, but within that silhouetted metal there was the purest white light that I’d ever seen. I had to hold up a hand or risk blinding myself. Asher couldn’t look away. “A great magical battery, powering the entire city.”

“Asher.”

“Can you imagine the impossible arcane power that it contains?”

“Asher!”

He still couldn’t tear his eyes away, “What?”

“Blink!”

Startled out of his staring contest with the giant glowing pyramid, he did blink, then reached up to rub at his eyes. “Ah. My apologies, that was foolish.”

Mercy patted him on the back. “Don’t worry about it. If we needed apologies every time somebody did something dumb, Maulkin would never stop apologizing.”

I growled. “Your face would never stop apologizing.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Your face doesn’t even make sense.”

She opened and shut her mouth a couple of times before shaking her head. “So remind me why we’re going there?”

“Whatever may be happening in this city, that will be the focal point. With all that power, we might stop the svart in their tracks or pull the mountain down upon them. I cannot believe that nobody else has sensed such a potent source of power in all the time that it has been down here.”

Mercy looked towards me skeptically. “So what then? We’re just going full moths-to-the-flame on this one?”

I nodded. “If the svart ever realize how much power they are sitting atop, do you think that they’ll let it lie, or would they try—and maybe fail—to wield it safely, destroying themselves and everything around them in the aftermath? They’re clearly sensitive to magic—it’s my bet what drew them to this place and we’ve all seen them swaying and dancing to the rhythm of the power within the crystal. They are like primates armed with revolvers. The danger is not that they are expert marksmen, the danger is that they have no idea what they are wielding.”

“You really think the svart are smart enough to use it? Whatever it is.”

Asher bowed his head and nodded beside me. “I think they are foolish enough to try.”

“Great! Then we all agree.” I said as I clapped my hands together, making them both jump. “The new plan is to then disarm the giant magic bomb, then get away before the svart realize we’ve stolen their brain candy.”

“Indeed.”

Mercy shrugged. “Works for me. We can head back up the tunnel we came in when we are done here. Collapse it. Problem solved, right?”

“Indeed.”

“Good thing we came down really”—I grinned at Mercy—“otherwise, we’d never have known about the big pointy bomb.”

This time it was her gritting her teeth to say, “Indeed.”

There were more and more svart in the streets ahead, and dozens became hundreds before long. Yet they were even more lost in their own minds than the ones that we’d already encountered. Maybe the whole moth and flame analogy wasn’t too far off. Maybe being this close to the blazing light of the pyramid was melting what little intelligence they had left. Some of them seemed to be talking to one another in their croaking un-language, others were going through the motions of jobs they could never have held, and more than half were doing nothing at all, lying fetal and comatose at the sides of the street, like all the life had just been drained out of them.

After a few streets of this, we gave up all pretense of sneaking anymore. They were completely oblivious to us, so we acted like they weren’t there, rerouting around the bigger heaps of them where they lay twitching and hopeless.

“Are they all going to go berserk when we turn the big lamp off?”

Mercy chuckled. “Knowing our luck.”

By the time we got to the grand square where the pyramid sat, the svart were thin on the ground again. If their experience of the pyramid was anything like Asher’s ecstatic excitement, it was probably for the best. He kept involuntarily reaching out towards it when he was distracted, and his eyes kept turning towards it, even when he was trying to look elsewhere. It was like some sort of religious experience for him being this close to that much magic. It was a good thing that Mercy and I had skipped that skill-set, or we might all have been rendered completely useless in our distraction.

We strolled around the boulevard beside the pyramid, hands at the level of our eyes to keep the worst of the blinding light at bay. I wasn’t expecting there to be an off switch, but there was the vague hope that Asher would snap out of it long enough to tell us what to do.

As we turned the right-angled corner, the light abruptly dimmed. This side of the pyramid was not as bright as the others. It wasn’t just dim it was…infected. Within the perfect white light, a darkness lay coiled, like a plume of smoke in the pristine space within the pyramid—a darkness that trailed away all along this side until it reached the only imperfection in the whole structure. There was a chip out of the smooth crystal plane. Something solid was wedged in, corrupting the purity of the whole thing.

“Five bucks that thing is the problem.”

Mercy was almost as bad as Asher. She wouldn’t turn her head away either. “What?”

“The black smoke stuff.” I nodded towards it. “I bet that is what is turning things bad down here, attracting the svart.”

“Sure. Yeah. Maybe.”

I rapped my knuckles on the side of her head. “Hey, are you still in there?”

That seemed to shake her out of it. She pushed me, but it didn’t do much.

Asher’s mouth was hanging open, his hands outstretched towards the pyramid’s surface, and I could swear that the black fog inside was drifting closer, swirling into the shape of his shadow, reaching out towards his hands like it was some big plasma ball. I caught him by the back of his robe and tugged him away. “Hey. Something isn’t right. No grabby hands.”

“What?” He turned to look at me with eyes as vacant as the svart’s. “What is happening?”

The arrow hit him in the throat. As if by magic, one moment he was standing there talking, and the next there was a bright feathered fletching jutting out between the creases of his neck. He opened and closed his mouth and blood trickled out. He grabbed onto my arms, and I guided him down to the ground.

This was an easy fix, I just had to pull out the arrow and use Restoration. The next arrow went right through my hand as I reached for him.

[281/520 Health]

“Son of a bitch.”

Mercy had her back to the pyramid now, her eyes too slow in adjusting to the dimness beyond. It was only now that I realized we were sitting ducks in front of the big light. Whoever was taking potshots at us could have been anywhere in the vaulted buildings around this square.

Mercy raised her bow at the first glimpse of movement and was rewarded with an arrow right through the haft of her own bow. The tension of the string snapped her bow as she was aiming it. She yelped. “What the hell?!”

Slipping out of my body, I squashed my sword out into as broad a shield as I could muster and crouched over Asher before the next arrow fell. “Mercy. Here!”

She dashed over, and under the haphazard cover I’d managed to make, I had time to smooth my shield out into a solid square of steel.

The next flurry of arrows was deflected with a rattle. I caught the one that was jammed through my hand with my teeth and yanked it through with a little whimper.

Mercy was tucked in tight at my side, as if she liked me or something. She snapped, “They broke my bow!”

The next flurry of arrows rattled off the shield. Rhythmic. “One thing at a time. Pass me Asher.”

She finally turned to look at him, and that cursing really wasn’t ladylike. “Oh, dude. It’s okay. Let me just.”

There was a gruesome sound of twisting sinew and wet meat from behind me. “Arrow’s out.”

“Pass him to me.”

It hadn’t even occurred to me that she wouldn’t be able to move him around as easily as me, but there was nothing I could do. It wasn’t like I could move with the massive bulwark strapped to my arm without putting us all at risk.

I reached out with my punctured hand, stretching back towards them as far as I could. Making the distance that poor Asher had to be dragged as short as possible.

“How is such a skinny lizard so damn heavy?!”

I hefted the shield off the ground to take a step back, and I was rewarded with an arrow immediately skittering under it. That was all the encouragement I needed to slam it back down. “Come on. Come on.”

At the first touch of scales to my bloodied skin, Restoration sprang to life, and I used it. I turned back to glance at Asher, to make sure the wound through his neck was closing, then I let my hand drop away. “Okay, bow next.”

“Here.” She thrust the tangled remains of her bow out towards me. It was already inside my Sphere of Influence, but when I closed my eyes and stretched my will out to it, it was as unreachable as the crystal all around us. The materials were too refined for my Artifice to touch.

I took the weapon delicately from her hands, then swung it at the ground. Part snapped off, but most of it remained intact, vibrating along its length but not shattering.

“What the hell are you doing?!”

I thrust it back out towards her. “Break it. Break it down.”

“How are you this dumb? I need it fixed, not more broken!”

I swung it again, and this time she leapt out to intercept the sweep of wood before it could hit the ground, reaching out past the side of the shield.

An arrow went right through her wrist and out the other side, plinking off the pyramid. She let out a scream, more rage than pain, as the bow snapped.

I took what was left of the wooden haft and rammed it into the back of my shield, closing my eyes against the shower of splinters. “You complete and utter moron. What the f—”

Slipping out of my body, time slowed. The broken remains of the bow were now little more than scrap wood. I could work with scrap wood. With one quick drag, I pulled all the parts back together into a new configuration, rough and ready but functional once more. I even used the same string that her fancy Dvergar one had been made from.

I tossed it to her as she came at me with her fists raised. On instinct she caught it. “I… You…”

“Shoot back!”

She hefted her bow, checked the tension on the string, and then leaned out to sight her shot. An arrow scratched by her shoulder and set her ducking back inside the cover of the shield. “Son of a bitch!”

She looked to me for answers. “What do we do?”

“I can walk us out if you can carry Asher.”

“I can’t carry Asher.”

“Uh. Okay, new idea.”

A big slab of metal was easy for my Artifice to produce. It was well within the bounds of the rough hewn equipment I was limited to. Punching a hole in that metal was trickier—it required more time, more concentration. With sweat beading on my forehead, I dragged the metal apart and made Mercy a peephole to shoot out through. An arrow-slit.

She crouched down to peer out, searching the buildings for our attacker.

She flinched back from the rat-a-tat of arrows on steel, then pressed her face up to the shield to look out. “Where are you?”

For the long moment between volleys, it was almost eerily silent. It felt like there should be some great humming noise behind us in the pyramid, but it stood as silent as the grave. All that I could hear was the echo of Mercy’s breathing on the shield. Then, on cue. The rain of arrows.

Rat-a-tat-pop?

Mercy fell back, feathers protruding from where her eye used to be, arrow-tip sticking out from beneath the fluffy white hair around her nape.

“No. No. No. No.”

She was lying right by my feet. She wasn’t dead. She would have faded away if she were dead. All I had to do was reach down and touch her, and she could be healed, but that would mean letting the shield tilt. That would leave Asher, still unconscious and propped up against the side of the pyramid, exposed.

“No. No. No.”

There was no way that I could choose between them. No way that I’d sacrifice one for the other. They were both my friends, and we were all getting out of this alive—even if it killed me.

One of that volley made it through the slit too, hammering through my armor, into my pec, and notching the rib beneath.

[268/520 Health]

With an awful screech, I dragged my shield closer to the pyramid, hauling Mercy along ahead of it like a bulldozer’s blade. She rolled and tumbled beneath my feet as I moved, and all I could do was hope that I wasn’t driving the arrow in any farther.

I kept on backing up until my heel nudged Asher, and only then did I let the shield tilt down towards us and reach for Mercy with my other hand.

I felt hair, then skin, and then leather. I backed up and groped around some more until I could feel the arrowhead pricking my fingers. As carefully as I could, I took a hold of the flats of the blade and drew it through, my fingers slipping in the wetness of Mercy’s blood. Every time that the flights caught on something inside her and I had to tug them loose, I felt like puking. Finally, the arrow pulled free.

I only had a moment to notice that the head was as smooth and perfect as all the carefully constructed crystal around us before I tossed it aside. Restoration sprang to life the moment that I touched Mercy, and running my fingers along the back of her neck, I could find no sign of the hole, so I had to assume it worked.

All alone, I had to make some decisions. I couldn’t just stand here and wait for the other two to get better. I couldn’t. My luck wasn’t that good. Either the sniper was going to find a new position or send some friends down, and we’d all be sitting ducks. The only way out was forward.

I ducked down, letting the shield topple to rest on the side of the pyramid and protect Mercy and Asher from sight, and then I rolled out.

In an instant, the arrows were flying after me, but I did not stop moving. I could hear them buzzing past, clipping off my armor and my horns, but none of them stuck. I was almost as far along as the black mark on the side of the pyramid when I saw the archer running alongside me. Sprinting along the side of the buildings that faced out towards us as though they were nothing, and lining up the next shot.

The creature was a svart—there was no denying it. From the big floppy ears to the elongated face, it was a svart, but something was wrong with it. Where the rest were built to scale, this one had long spindly limbs. On the flat, it would have been almost as tall as me.

I stopped dead, and the carefully aimed shot went sour, zipping by in front of my eyes. The gangly svart needed momentum to stay on the wall, but I didn’t need it to stay here.

As it tried to slow and aim back for me, it lost altitude, kicking away from the wall at the last moment to flip out and land at the end of the boulevard. Ninja svart. Great. Just what I needed. I stretched out to the very limits of my Sphere of Influence for anything I could use and found nothing. The only way it helped was I got to watch the arrow flying at my face in slow motion.

Slamming back into my body, I launched it aside so that the arrow ripped off an ear instead of going right through my brain.

Instead of the “Ow,” I tried to say, I let out a guttural roar. Tucking my head down, I charged.

The awful rhythm of the arrows on my shield came back to me. The precision and the speed. I was running down a shooting gallery, giving the svart an even bigger target with every passing moment.

The first arrow clipped off one of my horns and down into my cheek. It hurt like hell, but it wasn’t enough to stop me.

When my shoulder sprouted feathers at the joint in my armor, it hurt like hell, but it wasn’t enough to stop me.

The svart was just standing there with a smug little smile on its face, lining up shots like it was playing a game of pool. I was going to wipe that smile off the face of the earth when I got my hands on it.

My left knee stopped working, and I had to glance down to realize it was because there was an arrow wedged right through it.

I lumbered on, dragging the dead leg behind me until my other knee locked up in just the same way, and I fell to the ground.

The svart was so close I could hear it now. Hear the nasal, “Kek, kek, kek,” of its laughter. It was strolling towards me, lining up its kill shot. I didn’t even have a weapon to fight back with. I had nothing left.

I looked up to watch my death approaching. The tatters of a black dress hung about the svart, so old and crusted with filth that it had turned solid in places. There were gems sewn into it, almost all fallen away now. More crystals. This close, the albino skin was translucent. I could see the black blood pumping through its veins and the movement of the muscles beneath her bare skin as she drew back the arrow that had my name on it.

If I was dying anyway, I was going to go out on my own terms. I reached out with Artifice and tried to grab everything. My will skittered over the worked surface of the crystal all around me. Searching for anything, anything at all that I could touch or move or work with. Anything.

Within the pyramid, I touched the shard of iron. Barely enough to make a dagger but something. I pulled with all my will, and the metal twitched. It was wedged into a hole made perfectly for it, but still, it was just metal jammed into a hole—there for the taking. I pulled, and with a soft grinding sound, it came free.

Then all hell broke loose.

Chapter 20

The pyramid lit up. Without that little flicker of shadow inside it, the magic seemed to hit critical mass. It shone brighter and brighter and brighter until me, the svart, the whole city vanished in the glow. It was only at the last moment before the whole world faded away that I remembered nuclear reactors have control rods jammed in them to keep the reaction inside under control. Had I just pulled the wizards and elves version out of this big nuke? The pin out of the grenade?

Falling forward, I touched the crystal beneath me, just to prove to myself it was still there, and the arrow with my name on it zipped by over my head. As fast as the light had come, now it died, not back to darkness, but to a solid impenetrable white. Not only was the pyramid perfect once more, but the whole city, one great magical circuit, was also lit up to exactly the same level, no longer pulsing or dazzling or anything else. Just solid light.

The only dark thing on the pristine white beneath me was the iron hunk I’d hauled out of the pyramid. It looked like it had a sharp tip on it. Maybe it would serve as a dagger if I didn’t have the time to shape it. Gods knew, the svart was quick enough that it probably wouldn’t give me a chance.

But the svart that had seemed so intent on ruining my day had stopped dead. The bow had fallen from her hands, and her arms dangled limply at her sides. Her head was thrown back like a howling wolf, and the garbled gibberish that the svart spoke transformed as I looked on in horror into a bellow of, “NO!”

It was perfectly clear and easy to understand, which was weird, but not nearly as weird as what happened next.

When her head fell forward again, those beady black eyes changed. Her whole face changed. Her body too. The long gangly limbs smoothed out into the kind of anorexic elegance that runway models back home used to pursue. The transparent, spring-roll skin which had been so twisted and sickly took on a new hue, a new vigor—it was like watching a corpse coming back to life. The flopping ears and the stretched face snapped back into their true, elegant place. The corruption that pumped through the svart’s veins was being purged. The black lines of her veins faded, and a hint of pink flushed her as she fell to her knees.

I wasn’t idle through all of this. Bizarre as the scene in front of me was, this was still an opportunity to get out of this alive. Fumbling around at the backs of my knees, with my ass stuck up in the air, I managed to find the arrowheads where they were jutting out. Pulling them through hurt. It was right up there with being mauled by a wolf or being bitten by a spider god, yet when I yanked them free and my blood started to flow, relief was the most powerful sensation. I used Restoration immediately. No point finding out if the knees would work without healing.

[292/550 Health]

So there we were. Both of us on our knees. Both of us creeping back to our former glory. She was Alvaren. There was no doubt about it now. All the ugliness of the svart had melted away to beauty. All of her twitching movements had become elegant now that the curse was broken. Her words, when they came, were smooth as water, little more than a whisper. “You fool.”

The stone beneath us tremored. “Uh, you’re welcome.”

“I am Briar By Moonlight once more. I am myself. Why have you done this? You imbecilic animal. Do you have any inkling of what you have done?”

Rude. “Brought you back from the svart life?”

“Put it back.” She stretched out those newly elegant hands towards me. Raven black hair had sprouted from her head between words, replacing the stringy mess that had clung there before, so dark it held a shimmer of blue. “Return the shard to its rightful place within the Keystone, swiftly, while time enough remains. Before the working is undone fully.”

Huh, apparently, she chose the svart life, the svart life didn’t choose her.

I met her eyes for just a moment. Her face looked so young, but in those violet eyes, there was the weight of ages, all of that weight, bearing down on me. Without really thinking, I reached out to do what she asked. I always was a sucker for a pretty face.

But when my hand closed over the shard of metal, something inside my head made a little pinging noise.

Quest: Return of the Void God

Acquire Rusted Blade Shards: 1/6 Complete

400 Glory Gained

No way.

I lifted up the little blackened chunk of metal, barely the size of my palm. I could see the shape of it now—it was the snapped-off tip of a sword covered in a patina of rust so thick it might have run all the way through. Her tone changed now, wheedling instead of imperious. “Give it unto me that I might replace it. Swiftly, before the rest of them turn.”

My fist closed around the shard. “Well, hold on now, I need this.”

“Buffoon. You cannot even know what you hold in your clumsy paws.” She didn’t trust her legs yet, that much was obvious, so this gorgeous holier-than-thou Alvaren woman had to crawl towards me. “Give it to me, and I shall furnish you with some trinket of value. Meat to eat. Another beast to rut with. What say you?”

“I say hold up just a minute.” I pushed myself up off the ground, back onto my feet. The healing had taken. My knees bore the weight. “Did you just say that you turned yourself into svart?”

“It was the only way to prevent a greater evil, a decision of gravity that you cannot possibly understand. Know your place, boy. Return the shard. Now.”

I held up the fist containing the shard, then raised my middle finger.

“Did you know what you were doing when you were monsters?”

She was rising now, standing with all the grace that she had lacked as a svart, pouring herself from the floor into her new position. Even in rags, she looked regal. “What relevance has that to…”

“Did you know your people were killing the Dvergar?” I tried to meet her gaze as I asked her, looking for any hint of remorse or emotion. “Torturing them for kicks?”

“What matters the life of a few Dvergar? If you only knew the—”

“We’re done talking.” I tucked the shard into the back of my belt.

With a soft sigh, she answered, “I can see that we are.”

I started to back away towards the others. “I’m leaving.”

“I can assure you, you are not.”

She raised her hands towards me, and almost immediately my progress halted. There was a low thrum in the air, and as I turned my head to look around me, it was as though I was moving through molasses.

One of her open hands began to clench into a fist, and the air around me constricted. With her other hand she beckoned, and all the air in my lungs was torn up and out of me, so sudden and rough that it brought blood up with it.

There was no hint of a strain in her body, no suggestion that she was casting a spell at all, yet this was surely magic—magic beyond Asher’s wildest dreams. Plugged into that big battery beside her, it was hardly surprising that it took no effort to throw me around. “Now that you can more accurately comprehend your situation, would you care to relinquish the shard?”

She allowed a trickle of air back down my throat, and I gasped it down. “Eat my big gray ass.”

For a moment, the cultured perfection of her expression froze in disgust, before she snapped. “Coarse.”

With a bob of her half-clenched hand, she hefted me into the air and smashed me into the ground.

“Relent, and I shall be merciful.”

“My whole ass.” It came out as more of a groan than defiance.

This time she was less gentle. She flung me so high into the air that I thought I was going to hit the stone ceiling above the city. It gave me a wonderful view of the place coming back to life. The solid light permeated every part of the crystal city, and the places where it had been broken were now filling themselves in again—the crystal growing over the gaps, the toppled walls righting themselves, and the svart falling to the ground and rising up as Alvaren once more.

She brought me down again hard, not beside her on the boulevard, but on the very tip of the pyramid. The big pointy rock went straight into my spine, and those strong limbs of mine went completely limp as the pain roared through me.

I lifted all too slowly off that pointed stone, floating up above the city once more, level with the spreading patterns of transparency that were opening up on the surrounding buildings so that the Alvaren within could peer out at the spectacle.

Despite all of those distractions, I looked towards Briar By Moonlight. Even through the pain of what she was doing to me, I could still see her as beautiful, wreathed as she was in a cloud of the same invisible power that let her toss me around. Her hair was floating around her face as though she were underwater. There was no mercy on that face. No pity.

An arrow flew right at her face, avoided only by a snap of her neck to one side at the final moment. Mercy was back on her feet, Asher rising behind her. They were alive. They could still make it out. The air had been driven from my body by the impact of the pyramid, but I had enough to muster a croaking scream. “Run!”

The shot to her face had been distraction enough for Briar to release me. I dropped once more, narrowly avoiding the point of the pyramid and sliding down the side, right back towards her. If I could keep her attention, the others might get away. None of the other Alvaren seemed all that hostile. Just her.

Kicking off from the pyramid before I hit the bottom, I launched myself at her. Even as dumb as everyone said I was, I wasn’t expecting it to work, it only had to distract her long enough for the others to get out of range. Just as she had the arrow, she leaned out of my path with contemptuous ease. I hit the ground by her feet and was rolling back up to my feet when the sudden pressure all around me returned. Her magic, her will, forcing my face down into the ground, crushing me like a bug beneath her heel.

She reached for the shard. “I believe that belongs to me.”

Mercy’s arrow would have hit that extended hand if Briar hadn’t jerked it away at the last moment.

The weight lifted off my back, and I was able to scramble away, not to my feet, not yet, but I was at least moving as Mercy’s arrows rained down around the Alvaren.

There was an awful scraping noise from over Mercy’s way, and for an awful moment, I thought that she’d been caught in some magical trap just like me, but it was Asher. He was dragging my shield along despite it being bigger than him and probably about the same weight. “Maulkin, catch!”

He could not have lifted the shield with his stick-thin arms, but that wasn’t the only power he had available to him. Spinning on the spot, like a shot-putter he sent the shield skidding a few feet. That was when the gravity snare caught it, accelerating it across the ground until the shield took off. The little black hole blinked out just before the shield hit it, and that same momentum carried it in a beautiful arc right into my Sphere of Influence.

My shield became a sword, my sword flew into my hands, and the same momentum carried through, turning me to face her in slow motion.

She ducked under the blade without even troubling to look at me. I was beginning to feel like there was the slight—slight—possibility that I might be a little outclassed.

“Okay. Okay.” The tip of the blade glanced off the floor without leaving a mark. “You win.”

She raised a hand, and Mercy’s arrows froze in the air. A perfectly plucked eyebrow rose. “You submit?”

“We give up!” I shouted it louder for the Eternals in the back. “We give up!”

Mercy stopped firing more arrows up into the bristling mass that hung in the air already and made a little sound of dismay.

Briar held out her hand. “Return the shard to me, and I shall grant my people their blissful ignorance.”

I reached my hand behind my back, and brought a lump of dark iron back around, holding it out to her. She moved so fast, there was no way that her eyes could keep up with the reaching of her hand. She was already touching the iron hunk before she realized it was nothing more than that.

I caught her by the wrist and grinned. “I lied.”

She tried to twist out of my grip, to throw herself out of reach, but she couldn’t. I had her.

I hefted my sword up into the air above us one-handed and hammered it down.

She broke her own wrist twisting out of the way. I felt it strain to its limit, then crack beneath my hand. She didn’t even let out a whimper.

If the sword was too slow, I had other options. She drew back her unbroken hand, power shimmering around it. No time to think. Only to act. Yanking on her arm, I hammered my head into her pretty little face.

She wasn’t so pretty anymore. Bruises blossomed beneath her brows, and that aquiline nose was now crooked. She had a mustache of blue-tinted blood. Still, she didn’t cry out, but her hand fell limp to her side.

Spitting blood and teeth she snarled, “You dare to lay a hand on—”

I headbutted her again.

As silently as she’d suffered every other injury, she went limp. I gave her one last shake for good measure to make sure she was out, then I dropped her.

Mercy and Asher sprinted over while I leaned on my sword, panting for breath. Mercy gave Briar a kick for good measure. “What was that all about?”

“So the missing Alvaren? They turned into svart. She turned them into svart. With this.”

The fragment of the Rusted Blade really should have been more impressive. The fake hunk I’d made behind my back had looked way more dramatic.

“A turd?”

Asher’s eyes narrowed to slits. “A shard of the Blade. The Prophet spoke true. Destiny led us here.”

“Pretty sure the glow led us here. Or the Dvergar. Maybe even this knuckle-head.” Mercy slapped me on the back. I must have looked wrecked, she really pulled the punch.

“We can worry about destiny later. We’ve got to get out of here. All the other svart or Alvaren or whatever will…”

A bolt of lightning hit me in the back.

[18/550 Health]

For a moment I could see my bones and taste pennies, then it passed. I was smoking all over, but at least it didn’t arc out to hit the others too.

Mercy returned fire. “Too late.”

Asher caught ahold of me as I fell, slamming his boney shoulder under my arm and keeping me upright. “Mercy, we must go.”

I opened my mouth to say something, and a puff of steam came out. The svart were up to something. They were making the whole city spin round and round. The light in the ground. The light in the walls. They were flicking that on and off too. Mercy was under one of my arms, Asher the other. My sword was back on my back, how did it get back there?

We stumbled through a doorway sideways, and they dropped me. I landed face down, but my horns caught me before my face hit the stone. “Ow.”

“He’s too big to carry him.” Mercy’s voice. She was so sweet. I loved those guys.

Asher’s hiss. He was so sweet. I loved those guys. “Do you propose that we leave him here?”

“I can walk.”

They both looked at me, lying face down on the floor, and then carried on the conversation as if I wasn’t there. “I’m not saying we leave him, I’m just saying that this isn’t working.”

“Give me a moment, I have a potential solution, but it shall be… unpleasant.”

Mercy held up a hand to stop him. “For me or for him?”

“Oh”—Asher paused—“for him.”

I couldn’t see it, but I could hear her smiling. “Then go for it!”

Again, I said, “Ow.”

Either I blacked out again, or nothing happened for a few minutes while I lay there staring at the floor, but I couldn’t really say which. I became aware of things again when Mercy crouched down beside my face. “Hey, buddy, how are you doing?”

“Ow.”

“Yeah… you’re a real mess. Asher’s going to fix you up, but he said something about searing pain, so I’m here to distract you while he…”

Flames enveloped me, every nerve ending caught fire, and my skin blackened to a crisp.

[8/550 Health]

A moment later the heat passed. I was charred but still alive. If barely.

“That hurt.”

Asher’s voice was little more than a whisper in the aftermath of my own screams. “Steel yourself, my friend. What comes next shall hurt even more.”

“Can I vote no on…”

This time the heat was not a sudden wave, it was a single burning point of white-hot heat. Asher’s claw had touched down in the hole that the pyramid had put in my back, and it felt like he was filling it up with a nice pot of freshly brewed lava.

Listen, I’m a tough guy. I think we’ve established that by now. Monsters? No problem. Solar blast to the face? I don’t even flinch. So when I tell you that I cried like a baby as that lava sensation burned its way out through my whole body, you’ll understand just how much it hurt.

My throat was hoarse from screaming by the time that Asher was done, but there was no denying that it was effective.

[338/550 Health]

My voice wobbled when I said, “Let’s never do that again.”

Asher sighed. “I am truly sorry, my friend. Cauterize was the only healing spell within reach of my accumulated experience.”

“Thank you. But…wow, that hurt.”

Mercy kicked me in the head, but in a friendly way. “Come on, you lazy ass, let’s get moving. This whole city is out to kill us, and now they’re smart enough to do a good job of it.”

“The returning Alvaren seem to be quite proficient in the arcane and martial arts. It would also appear that the one you rendered unconscious was their leader, so they have a minor grudge against you. It was solely Mercy’s talent for subterfuge that got us to this temporary sanctuary.”

Back on my feet, I retrieved my sword from where they’d dumped it and looked around. All the imperfection in the city had been burned away. The broken furniture had stitched itself back together again, and the same dull glow that made the walls opaque was barely visible within the cracks. Whatever Alvaren family lived here were gone or hadn’t found their way home yet.

I rolled my shoulders, feeling the bones and muscles slide back in their proper place after days of injuries. “So the whole city is after us?”

“Uh, honestly, no.” Mercy was counting her arrows—they’d been depleted pretty badly since I last looked. “They’re pretty distracted with the whole ‘turned into albino goblins for millennia’ deal.”

“That’s fair.” I smashed the remade table apart with the flat of my sword. “Kind of hard to get past a thousand years of goblin-hood.”

With the splinters and some more iron siphoned from my sword, I refilled her quiver. As she checked them for balance, Mercy sighed. “I guess we’ve solved the svart problem.”

“Hey, that’s true! We kind of did.”

Asher had no preparation of his own to do, but he watched us intently. “And the gods shall be pleased that we have returned the race of the Alvaren to the world.”

“Yay. A whole city of Orphia-clones.”

“To be fair to the Alvaren, I believe that your experiences with them so far may have been outliers. The others that we have encountered have been relatively neutral towards us rather than the more violent response you provoked.”

I huffed. “Wait, are you saying I’m the problem?”

“A Faun Lunar Eternal does seem oppositional to many of their beliefs and philosophies.”

Mercy leaned in close to me and smiled. “Plus, you’re kind of a dick.”

“And you’re just sunshine and delight, aren’t you?”

“Hey, I’m a solar eternal. Sunshine literally shines out of my—”

The ground beneath our feet trembled. Asher was crouched down with his hands spread out before I even had a chance to ask. “Magic is afoot.”

Even I could have worked that one out. “What are they doing?”

He cocked his head from side to side, as though he could hear a tune that eluded the rest of us. “We are moving.”

“What?”

“The city. It has risen.”

Mercy and I made eye-contact across the room. “The whole place looked like it had crash-landed here.”

“Or melted through the mountain.”

Mercy was on her feet. “We need to get out of here.”

The next rumble was enough to set the newly revitalized furniture dancing across the room. “We really need to get out of here!”

With the city rebuilt, running like hell actually wasn’t all that hard. The boulevards were curved, but with no fallen buildings or broken paving cluttering them up, we were able to make good time across the city. We saw Alvaren as we ran, but they seemed to have no interest in us.

They were tall and lithe and beautiful, scantily clad in the ruined tatters of whatever the svart had clung to. They moved with a grace and purpose that made the rest of us look like stomping toddlers. There was no hint of malice in them now, just blank-eyed stares of confusion as they loped like gazelles toward the city’s pyramid heart, and we barreled in the opposite direction as fast as our legs could carry us.

Once in a while, one of them would see me and slow, hands beginning to trace a spell before one of their buddies dragged them on. I guess there were more important things than nuking Faun in passing. Maybe I had just run into some of the worst examples of Alvaren so far. Maybe they were all totally reasonable people who didn’t have to be convinced not to lob fireballs at me by some more pressing crisis.

The only time that I got to see the Alvaren fighting at all was when an abomination came lumbering out from one of the side-streets, lobster-claws flailing. I hefted my sword, ready to get back into the ass-kicking swing of things, but I was too slow.

Some of the Alvaren used magic, some used weapons, but all of them moved with the smooth efficiency of dancers in a waltz. They made me and the gang look like amateurs. Cut by cut, blast by blast, they took the abomination apart. At first, I was kind of jealous, then I got mad. “Kill stealers!”

Mercy caught ahold of my belt and tried to stop me from moving on them. “What?”

“They can’t even get glory, and they’re killing our abominations.” Mercy dug in her heels, and Asher latched his arms around her middle. “This is bull.”

“Dude, this is really not the time to be worrying about—”

With a grunt of effort, I dragged them both forward. “I need that glory, Mercy. I need it for things and…stuff, and they’re just wasting it.”

“We have more pressing concerns at this moment,” Asher hissed from the back of the train. “There is a great spell-work in progress, and this entire city is its target. If we do not depart before it’s completion, I cannot foresee the results that we might suffer.”

The Alvaren were already slipping away without even a glance in our direction like we were so beneath them that we didn’t even warrant zapping and chopping. “But…Glory!”

“Survival first.” Mercy punched me in the kidneys for good measure. “Glory after.”

They both had to dive back to avoid the business end of my sword as I spun it back into its fancy Dvergar baldric. “Fine! But there better be a lot of Glory after.”

Now that I was feeling more like myself again, the going was a lot quicker. Mercy and Asher had to move to double-time to keep up with my long strides, and where they’d been steering clear of big crowds of newly reborn Alvaren, I was content to plow right through the middle of them since they didn’t seem inclined to pick a fight about it. The other two followed in my wake, and we made good progress back to the buttress where we’d started out.

That was when we hit the roadblock. All the Alvaren that had spread out into the mines, the offshoot tunnels, the Dvergar khag, and everywhere beyond that were all hurrying home. They were elegant and graceful and all that jazz, but there were still a thousand of them trying to come down the same little stretch of crystal together. There just wasn’t enough room for them all.

Some seemed to have worked out how to use their magic and were drifting like leaves on the wind to touch down in the city unharmed, but just as many were tumbling off the sides of the buttress and crunching to the floor. That wasn’t going to get better. I put my head down and charged.

Some of the Alvaren saw me coming and threw themselves off to avoid the pointy end of my horns. Some didn’t see me coming and got knocked off by the parting of the tides ahead of me. Either way, I only had to trample my way over maybe a dozen of the wayward Alvaren before we got to the real plug of bodies up at the cave entrance.

I couldn’t even work out how many Alvaren were in the crack in the stone that we’d made our way in through—there were heads and limbs poking out of it at all angles and a constant press of bodies on the far side pulsing the screaming ones at the front through even as the jagged stone ripped at them.

Asher let out a huff of disbelief when he saw it. “How do we get through this?”

“I can cut our way through.” With a heavy heart, I reached for my sword.

Mercy let out a yelp. “How about we keep mass murder as Plan B?”

“What is Plan A then?”

She pointed to the wall above the mess of bodies. “Make a door.”

“That’s going to take ages.” I reached for my sword, getting ready to transform it. “Making a pick-axe then chopping through. I thought we were in a hurry?”

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and tried not to scream. “You have divine powers. You idiot.”

“Oh. Oh!” I shut my own eyes and let my Sphere of Influence sweep out. After so long in the crystal city, I’d almost entirely forgotten just how much I could change away from refined materials. With a rumbling giggle, I lifted up the roof of the caved-in tunnel, and the plug of tangled Alvaren popped right through. Stone flowed like water, taking the shape I willed on it, but only for as long as I concentrated on it.

The hurly-burly of Alvaren came pouring through, breaking on my empty body like the tide on a rock and slipping down into the city. It was impossible to hold the tunnel and be in my body at the same time, so I had to keep flitting back and forth between them.

“You’ve got. To go. Can’t hold.”

Asher and Mercy looked from my stuttering, hollow body to each other, then shook their heads as one. “We aren’t going anywhere without you.”

“It’s cool…I’ve got…a plan.”

Mercy let out a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “Oh, gods.”

They went for it, wading through the crowd of Alvaren, going against the flow and getting buffeted about for their trouble. It didn’t matter, so long as they made it out.

The moment that they slipped out of my Sphere of Influence, I forced more will into the stone, and I hauled on the roof of that little tunnel, raising it as high as I could until it was taller than me, than two of me, a chasm stretching between this cave and the next, unstable and crumbling the moment my attention left it.

I slammed back into my body and ran as if the whole mountain was about to come down on me. Because it was. The solid-looking roof began crumbling the moment I let go of my grip on it, and any Alvaren that had the misfortune to get in my way got slapped aside.

I didn’t have time to be nice. Rocks were falling, and I was going to die. I shouldered the ones out of my path that I could, knocked down the ones I couldn’t, and ran full pelt as the falling rocks filled the air with a cloud of dust so thick I couldn’t even see the other end. I felt the tunnel collapsing behind me rather than seeing it. I heard the screams of the Alvaren being crushed as the mouth of the tunnel snapped shut. The far wall of the cave was only visible when I banged into it, and even then the air was so thick with dust that there was a bit of assuming the best going on.

Mercy called out, “Maulkin!”

I coughed back, “Don’t worry, babe, I made it!”

Her laugh sounded snotty. Must have been all the dust. “Don’t call me babe, you prick.”

“I was talking to Asher.” I moved towards the sound of her voice, feeling my way along the wall and trying to ignore the squishy Alvaren flesh underfoot.

Asher loomed out of the dust, looking up at me curiously for a moment before saying, “I am pleased that you are well.”

I patted him near the base of his tail as I passed. “Thanks, babe.”

Victory!

Potency increased to 43

Vitality increased to 15

Brawling: Rank 6/10

Phalanx: Rank 4/10

294 Experience Gained

Farther up the tunnel there were dozens of Alvaren still milling about, stricken now that their highway back home was closed off. “Try taking the long way around.” I grinned at the closest cluster.

Chapter 21

Apparently, we were still beneath contempt or attention. The Alvaren continued chattering among themselves. That same language that had resurfaced ever so rarely when the svart were chanting, “Kill, kill, kill.”

“No time.”

“Who can touch the Keystone?”

“Returning to the sky soon.”

“What do we do?”

We barreled on by them—no time to take in the chatter. The vibrations we’d felt beneath our feet back in the Alvaren city were escalating now, and the tunnels around us shook, the stone quaking as the city beneath us moved.

We made it back through the tangle of tunnels, wall-bound Dvergar, and panicking Alvaren to the main shaft and the brass rails that would lead us back to safety. The rails were humming like there was a freight train coming our way, but we ran up between them all the same. The Alvaren fading away as we got closer and closer to the khag above.

Dust rained down on us from the murder holes as we approached the mine entrance. We were so close to home I could almost taste it. Which was when everything went to hell.

The tremors from below abruptly stopped. There was dead silence for a moment, then a resounding boom sounded from down in the deep. A huge, sudden expulsion of wind swept up the tunnels behind us, throwing up massive banks of dust and buffeting us off our feet.

I scrambled back to my feet, reaching for the other two only to discover they were already up. Guess we were all getting used to getting knocked on our faces. “What the hell was—”

There was no time for an answer, nor even for the rest of the question. The mine behind us bucked like some living creature in its death throes, then it began to fall. The stone gave way behind us and began to slip down. The heart of the khag was broken. The brass rails stayed straight, but the stone beneath tipped, tearing them free.

We raced alongside them, falling to all fours when we needed to, doing anything we could to keep moving. Anything to outpace the collapse. We threw ourselves out of the mine entrance and into the long-walled avenue that I’d built, but the collapse kept on coming. It seemed like it was going to stop at the city’s edge, the careful construction that had stood firm against the centuries held it back for a moment.

But did not stop it.

The stone sang above us, groaning and moaning all the way across the vaulted roof. Dust rained down. Cracks chased their way across the cavern walls, across the floor beneath our feet—even up my temporary walls, sending hunks of them flying down to pepper our path.

“The whole thing is going down.” I didn’t need my godly architectural skills or Dungeoneering to tell me that, my eyes were more than enough. The cracks were spreading faster than we could move, and the glowing crystals that had been embedded in the roof were starting to tinkle down.

“Oh gods, oh gods, all the Dvergar in the mines.” Mercy was trying to run and freak out at the same time. All respect to her ability to multi-task.

“We must warn those that are still living!” Asher barked. “They must evacuate the city!”

By the time that we reached the barricade and climbed onto its ramparts, the evacuation was already well underway. The guards that had been stationed here were long gone, and any sign of habitation looked to have been stripped away too. We couldn’t even see any Dvergar as we ran through the perfectly parallel streets. Here and there was the hint of them, a piece of furniture dropped and discarded, a scrap of silk, but no actual Dvergar until we rounded a corner and almost hit Gunhild‘s caravan broadside on. She and her men were frantically loading in supplies as fast as they could move.

When Gunhild spotted us, she very nearly stopped, but instead, she turned that attention into more furious energy for the loading. I rushed forward to try and help but all it earned me was a growl from one of the Dvergar guards. “Let us help.”

“Help?!” Gunhild’s thrown axe spun past my face to lodge in the wagon’s side. “You did this. Never should have been trusting you.”

Even Mercy seemed to think axe-throwing was too harsh a response. “Gunhild. We had no way of—”

“No way of knowing and no care neither. What matters it to you if the last standing khag be fallen? What matters it to you if the Dver die out? Not a damn!” Gunhild spat. “Not a damn!”

Asher stepped forward with his hands up in the usual placating gesture. “With respect to your suffering, there was no way that anyone could have foreseen..”

Gunhild shoved him, and my hand went for my sword without any conscious thought. “Just be closing your flapping jaws, snake. We be done with you. You’re no kin of ours, so get out. Out with the lot of you.”

The floor cracked beneath our feet. Cobwebbed patterns of darkness spreading beneath the dust. With another buck and rumble, the buildings by the barricade began to disappear. Slipping over some fast-approaching horizon. The pit was coming for us all.

Above us, the crystals that had lit the chamber shattered. Sparks rained down around us as the whole khag was plunged into darkness, the last glimmers of light dying.

We could see in the dark. The Dvergar could not. The floor rocked. “Go! Go!”

Fumbling in the darkness, the caravan managed to assemble around their half-loaded wagon, but blind as they were, they couldn’t get it moving. “Climb on. Everyone on!”

Gunhild snarled. “I be in charge around here.”

“Then act like a leader!” Mercy snapped as she shoved the Dvergar woman towards the wagon. “Get your people out of here!”

I grabbed onto the struts at the front of the armored wagon and pulled hard enough that it rolled right over the blocks that had been tucked under the wheels to keep it in place. Mercy and Asher darted around, grabbing those few Dvergar who’d wandered off and guiding them to the wagon. It was huge, fully loaded, heavy metal, and covered in Dvergar, but it was on wheels. This train was leaving the station.

We picked up speed fast, which was lucky because the collapse was right on our heels. Now that the central cluster at the middle of the cavern was gone, the whole roof seemed to lose its integrity. All of that stone, the whole mountain of weight pressing down, was finally being unleashed. You could hold off gravity for a long time if you were smart enough, but in the end, it always won.

Hunks of stone bigger than the buildings hammered down around us, and I had to swerve from one street to the next to find a clear route. Mercy rushed on ahead of me, hauling any straggling Dvergar that she could find out from their doorways and onto the wagon. There were kids. I hadn’t seen any Dvergar kids throughout the whole time we were in the city, but now they were being hauled out of whatever seclusion they’d been kept in so that they might survive.

We were almost out—I could see the shining brass of the entrance reflecting my eye-light—when the whole thing came crashing down. A slab, the size of a mountain in its own right came down on top of us. I raised my hands, I surged my potency, and it didn’t even slow. It was a force of nature. Something so far beyond the limits of mortal power that resisting it seemed impossible.

I slipped out of my body and threw out my will.

This was not what Artifice was for. The cracks in the pillar started blazing with stuttering light all over again as I abused it. The stone slab hung there above us, caught in one tiny spot by my Sphere of Influence but still bearing down on us with all its weight. On me, specifically.

Blood streamed from my eyes, my ears, my nose, and my mouth. Momentum kept the wagon rolling, and something like rigor mortis kept my hands locked to the bars even as my legs dangled like useless noodles. I could see Asher and Mercy gawking up at the stone above, hanging from the side of the wagon, their expressions filled with confusion and something else. Something I didn’t recognize until I saw it on Gunhild’s bared and stone-blighted face too. Awe.

The slab pivoted down to close the way out of the city behind us as my Sphere of Influence was pushed along, centered on my empty and halfway-to-broken body. We’d be the last ones out of Khag Mhor. The last ones to ever leave it alive.

The wagon lost its momentum about the same time that I snapped back to my body.

I couldn’t see for all the blood in my eyes, and I couldn’t breathe through the blood bubbling up from my throat. This wasn’t my first time dying, and it wouldn’t be the last, but it was the first time that it was no surprise. I knew what I was doing when I screwed around with the Pillars of Divinity. I knew that if I overreached the limits of the rules that Amaranth ran on, I would be spanked for it, but I did it anyway.

Pain didn’t begin to describe what I was feeling when I saw the red-tinted light at the end of the tunnel. It was bright enough now for the Dvergar to haul me out of the way so that they could latch in. They passed me back up onto the top of the wagon and dumped me there like a deer carcass splayed on the hood of a truck. I wished I felt as good as a dead deer.

Have you ever hurt so bad that it is the only thing you can think of? Pain so insistent that it became your whole world. Where ending that pain became your only goal? I’d say it felt like I was full of molten lead, that my organs had been put through a blender, or that some tiny bastard gnome with a chainsaw was going hog-wild under my skin, but none of those things did it justice. It hurt so bad that I lost all hope of ever not hurting again. It hurt so bad that I forgot that there was any world outside of my hurt.

When I felt Asher’s cool scaly palms on my skin, they brought no relief, just a new dimension to my suffering. Even when I saw flames coil up around his clawed fingers, my brain couldn’t comprehend what my eyes were telling it.

He Cauterized me again.

I was so messed up that having every nerve ending in my body set on fire was an improvement. I might have called him some choice words in the moment, but folks have been known to curse when they are feeling extra-good just as much as extra-bad.

[331/550 Health]

I jerked upright, with only the restraining hands of Asher and Gunhild to stop me from jumping right off the wagon. I spat out a mouthful of soot-swirled blood and gasped in a breath. We were out. The sky opened up above us, wide and bright and blue. I’d almost forgotten what it looked like. I slumped back onto the wagon with a groan. “I thought we said we weren’t going to do that again.”

To his credit, Asher actually looked sad about it. “My apologies, it was necessary to maintain your survival.”

“I’m joking. It’s… Well, it isn’t fine, but thanks for doing it.”

“It was no trouble at all. My only wish is that there was a less painful solution to your injuries.”

“You and me both.”

Gunhild kicked me. Not in a playful way. In the angry way that only solid steel toe-caps can ever really convey.

“Get off my caravan.” Asher had to help me up, and by up, I mean mostly sideways as he poured me off the side of the wagon to land on the road into the dead khag.

All around us, the Dvergar that had escaped lay around, stunned and sobbing. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. I had no way of knowing how many didn’t make it out. Even when they trusted us, the Dvergar were private people, devoted to keeping out of our sight and hiding their marks of shame. This could have been the whole khag or a tenth, and I’d never know. The mountain itself seemed to shrug as the caverns within collapsed, the peak tipping to the side and one last great wave of ash and dust sweeping out the mouth of the cave to coat us all.

Back on my feet, I started to search. We found Mercy with a family of Dvergar, all huddled around a dreadfully still little bundle of silk. Everywhere I looked, the injured seemed to spring up. Gunhild was right. We did this. I did this.

I spotted a Dvergar I thought I knew, scurrying around with a water skin and bandages. Catching him by the shoulder, I spun him on the spot but he wasn’t Gorm. Well, I had this guy here anyway. “Where’s Gorm?”

“The elders needed seen to.”

Mercy let out a little gasp. “What?”

The Dvergar shrugged my hand off his shoulder, infected with the same directionless fury that seemed to be emanating from Gunhild. “Were we to be leaving them down there to starve if they survived the collapse? To rot? To be taken by some beast of the deeps. Gorm knew his duty, and he did it.”

Everyone else had tried to escape, but duty came first for Gorm. I barely knew him, but I believed it.

There was nobody left to lead the Dvergar. They looked around for their elders, for the spokesmen of the elders, for any sort of answers, and they found nothing at all. It had all been buried.

Gunhild was still standing atop her wagon, surveying it all. Counting heads and making plans. She scowled every time her gaze turned our way, but she was practical more than she was angry. She kept to her work. With nobody else to turn to, I approached the wagon. “Gunhild. You need to know what happened.”

“Why don’t you be going away and boiling your head?”

Mercy tried to be reasonable. “Gunhild.”

“You did something down in the mines. Made the whole khag move to collapse, even though we warned you to be careful. Even though we offered you sappers and miners. You did whatever you did knowing you might bring the whole mountain down, but you didn’t care because you can’t be dying with us. When our lives are ruins, you can just move on along. You’re Eternals, and we don’t matter.”

“You cannot comprehend the situation in which we found ourselves. The svart were Alvaren. Transformed by a spell,” Asher tried to explain. “Their city was buried beneath your own. It was not our actions that brought on the collapse, but…”

“Always you be spinning more of your hearth stories. Alvar and legends and curses and magic. Our lives aren’t fodder for your big story.” She spread out her arms wide, her voice booming out over the refugees. “You see these folk? They’ll all be dying out here. The khag was the last safe place for them. We’ve supplies enough for a few days, then the starving starts. We’ve weapons enough for a guard here and there, then the beasts of the wilds start chewing on the stragglers. This isn’t a story, these are real people, and they’ll be really dead. Thanks to you.”

There would be no argument from me. I had the shard tucked into the back of my trousers still, the cool metal a comforting roughness against my skin. I could have put it back where it came from and kept everything the same, but I made the choice. I decided that I needed it more than the Alvaren, and this was the price for that.

Mercy wasn’t as ready to take it lying down. “Hey. We went down there risking our lives to help you people. We weren’t looking for trouble, and we weren’t looking for glory. You had a problem, and we were trying to fix it.”

Gunhild roared, “And what a grand job you be doing of it!”

I spoke too softly, “Mercy.”

“How the hell were we meant to know that you’d built your khag on top of an ancient Alvaren city?”

Gunhild was down off the wagon now, screaming in Mercy’s face, “Why did we ever trust that you buffoons might be knowing what you were doing?”

Asher caught Mercy by the shoulder. “Mercy!”

“What?!” She turned with a snarl.

The shadow of the Alvaren city swept up over her face at the same pace as realization. The great vaulted white city hung in the sky among the clouds, blocking out the sun.

“Oh no.”

With an impact like a thunderclap, Briar By Moonlight’s voice boomed down on us from above, “If the artifact is returned without resistance, you may all depart unharmed.”

The sparse grass on the mountainside bowed to the sound of her, and the refugees of the khag fell to their knees in terror. The Alvaren were things of legend for a reason—flying cities, and magic voices shouting down from on high. No wonder the Dvergar were afraid. That wasn’t cowardice, it was sanity.

I took a few steps away from Gunhild. “We’ve got to go.”

“Aye, that be about right,” she spat. “Drop us in the shaft, then run away.”

I’d been letting all this slide because she was right to be mad at us, but even I had limits. “It is me that they want. It is me that they’ll chase.”

Gunhild let out a triumphant little laugh. “I knew it. I knew it be all your fault. You robbed their tomb, and now they’re after you.”

I let out a sad little huff of air, then turned to the other two. “Do you want to come with me or stay with the Dvergar?”

Asher shook his head solemnly. “Until fate parts us, we are with you, my friend.”

“Thanks, babe.”

Mercy burst out laughing. Not a smirk. Not a sigh. A big, ugly belly laugh. Forget the rest of the day. I was counting that as a win.

Chapter 22

There were no supplies to gather and no goodbyes to say. The panicked Dvergar were already on the move down the mountain road, so we struck off in the opposite direction, skidding and sliding down the scree-strewn slopes where we could and dropping right down the muddy drops when we couldn’t.

I didn’t look back. If the Dvergar were going to make it, they were going to make it. If we stopped and hemmed and hawed about it then the Alvaren would come down on us all.

But just because I wasn’t looking over my shoulder, it didn’t mean that nobody was paying attention. Mercy grunted as she leapt down off a ledge into my waiting arms. “We’ve got to go faster. They’re coming.”

I spared a glance to the sky and saw what she was talking about. The city was still hanging in the sky, but there were things streaming down from it. The svart might have had no idea what the flesh-forges did, but the Alvaren already had them back in action, pumping out some sort of winged animals to use as mounts.

The Alvaren themselves were little more than glints of metal on the back of the darting beasts in all their rainbow colors, but one thing that was easy to make out was that they were coming right for us. “Faster. Right.”

Our heady pace turned to reckless. There was no more controlled drop when we hit the edge of a rock shelf. I flung myself down and caught the others as I could. Sometimes I missed, and Mercy rolled to her feet with an angry grumble. Sometimes I missed, and Asher fell flat on his face and needed to be scooped up to get him moving again. At least gravity was on our side, dragging us ever on towards the tree-line, where the bloody red forest consumed the base of the hill.

If we got to the forest before the swooping whatever-the-hells that were chasing us then we could lose them under the cover. Maybe we could even camp out there until the sun set, and we could use the cover of darkness. Gods knew I could use a rest after the day I’d had.

Of course, gravity was on their side too. The bird-cat things spread their wings wide, but their momentum still nearly carried them right into us. Gryphons. They were gryphons. That wasn’t Bestiary filling in the blanks, it was me. Head like an eagle, body of a cat, wings up top, these were gryphons—although the fantasy art I’d seen in my old life hadn’t prepared me for their fully feathered bodies to range in color from electric pink to neon blue.

The claws and the beaks though were black right to their razor edges, and they were what held onto my attention as the gryphons raked at us in passing.

We weren’t going to make it to the forest. I dug in my heels and skidded on for six more feet, just avoiding the gryphon that swept through the space where I would have been if I’d kept on moving. The abrupt stop saved me in another way too.

The Alvaren who’d missed with their dive-bombs were circling overhead, and now they’d started to rain down arrows with an accuracy that would have been lethal if I hadn’t stopped dead ahead of the shimmering wall of pointy arrows they were laying down. “Mercy!”

“I’m on it.”

It couldn’t have been easy returning fire on moving targets, but Mercy did a damn fine job. Even though she didn’t seem to be hitting all that often, the shots she did manage to land were all that kept us alive. A notch knocked out of a beak turned a gryphon’s head and sent it crashing into another. An arrow flying past an Alvaren’s pointy ear made his next shot miss me.

She held them off for the whole moment it took us to think—the most vital moment in any fight. Asher threw back his head and belched out a voluminous gout of flame. It exploded out in a great red flash, sweeping up over every gryphon in the spiral above us and setting the tips of their feathers glowing like kindling.

Just like the static clinging to victims of his electric spells, the embers lit up the Alvaren and gryphons. But unlike the mindless svart, these enemies knew the significance of that glow. Some of them broke off, and the rest scattered into a wider whorl. They had no intention of getting caught in an area of effect spell together. Clever girls. Six of them were left.

With the extra range, Mercy found it even harder to hit them. “Will you just stay still!”

If we stayed in place, the Alvaren could take their time peppering us with arrows from a distance. If we ran, they could start swooping us again. It was win-win for them and lose-die for us.

Briar’s voice echoed across the hillside from where the city still hung, still and solid in the air. “Submit and we shall be merciful.”

The gryphon gyre widened out a little more as if they were giving us time to think it through. “Hey, Mercy, do you think she’ll forgive me for stealing her shard and headbutting her in the face?”

Mercy snorted. “I wouldn’t.”

“Asher?”

“I do not trust in her words.” Flames were trailing from his hands. “Her actions belie them.”

“Right then.” I drew my sword. “Let’s kick them in the ass.”

The next dive-bomber came swooping down, launching a steady staccato of arrows my way, but I had the wide flat of my sword out and ready to turn the shots away from anything vital.

As the rider yanked on the reins to turn the gryphon’s nose up from the ground, I launched myself. Rough Hewn Architecture threw up a messy clay platform to give me as much height as I could get, then surged Potency let me kick off from that displaced earth like I’d just learned to fly.

Inside me, the cracks in the Pillar of Artifice blazed.

If I’d timed it right, I would have soared up, hit the Alvaren in mid-flight, valiantly wrestled control of the gryphon away from her, and soared off into the sunset to kick the asses of all the rest of them.

I didn’t time it right. I jumped too soon.

I hit the gryphon in the chest with all the cannonball force of my jump.

To fly, these things had to be pretty light, which meant hollow bones, which meant I punched through its ribcage like it was a paper cup. Blood rained down on the hillside below, and the last few spasmodic twitches of the gryphon’s wings kept us from plummeting the whole distance. Even so, I hit the ground hard with most of my torso still embedded inside the dead bird-cat, entrails coiling out around me.

Mercy spared a glance at me to say, “Ew,” before launching her next shot.

With a heave of my shoulders, I freed myself of the dead gryphon, even if its guts still clung to me like streamers from the worst surprise party ever. The rider launched herself at me before I could even remember she was there.

Her armor flashed silver in the light—so bright it left after-images. Beneath it, she wore plain white robes. Not simple like Asher’s, more like the minimalist simplicity of some elegant eveningwear. The short swords in her hands were no dimmer than the armor. They spun and darted like wheeling fireworks as she came on.

A crisscross of wounds opened up on my stomach. She was too fast to follow. Too fast to block. I’d hoped it was only Briar that could move like that. I swept my sword in a wild arc towards her, and she hopped over it as though it were a game. Maybe she had hollow bones too.

I was starting to feel seriously outclassed by these Alvaren, and that was before one of the gryphon-riders swooped down and put an arrow clean through my calf.

“Damn it.”

The leg gave out, and I fell to one knee as the Alvaren on the ground came at me once more, poise and superiority written on her every feature. The flat head of my sword found the ground, and one hard push brought me back up to my unsteady feet. I wasn’t dying, but even if I was, I wasn’t dying on my knees.

Her head tipped back to follow my movement, but her sneer didn’t move an inch. Not even when Mercy fired an arrow, and she had to cock her head aside to avoid it.

There was no way I was going to win a fair fight with the Alvaren. There was no way I could match her speed or her skill. Good thing I had no intention of having a fair fight.

Reaching out to the limits of my Sphere of Influence I pushed down. I couldn’t do much with the topsoil, but the clay and rocks beneath us gave way readily to my will. Everything pushed down until only the soil was left with no structure beneath to hold it up.

Her next step forward, her shiny boots sank into the dirt up to the ankle. Her smirk vanished just as my grin cracked.

I launched myself at her with no care for the blades in her hands or even the sword in mine. All I needed to do was bear her down.

With a blade jammed in each shoulder, I carried her to the dirt. My blood was pouring, turning the loose soil to mud, coating her pretty white clothes and her pretty silver armor in mud, bringing her down into reality with the rest of us.

She wormed and squirmed about beneath me, but my weight was enough to keep her from escaping entirely. It took some scrabbling about, but I caught hold of her arms, pinned her legs with my knees, and paused in triumph for just long enough for one of her friends to hit me in the back with an arrow.

That little bit of pain gave me the drive I needed. I reared up and slammed my head down into the Alvaren’s pretty little face.

Now the blood in the mud wasn’t just mine. Her face was a mess, and my forehead was wet and tingling. I reared up again. One more thump should have been enough to knock her out. That was when the next Alvaren arrow hit me in the cheek.

My head twisted with the impact, my teeth jarred as I bit down on the metal arrowhead, and I completely forgot what I was in the middle of doing at the worst possible moment.

There was a sound like somebody stamping on a bunch of grapes as my horn dug in through her eye.

I tried to pull back immediately, but the eye socket was locked tight around the conical spread of my horn. The Alvaren who’d been so lethal and scary just a moment before was now a really ugly hat.

Mercy interrupted her barrage to call over, “Ew!”

Despite the situation, I could feel laughter bubbling up in my throat. I shook my head from side to side, making the dead Alvaren wiggle and jiggle. “It’s stuck.”

With that Alvaren out of the way, in every way but one, I finally had enough attention to spare for the next one swooping down. I saw the tell-tale shimmer as arrows were loosed and had at least a chance of dodging by flinging myself aside. One missed, punching down into the mud where I was wallowing without a trace. The others struck home, and I braced myself for pain that didn’t come. I’d definitely felt the impact, yet they hadn’t hit me. My fancy new hat looked like a pincushion.

As the gryphon pulled up from its dive, Asher’s spell caught it. He was sticking with fire magic now that he’d unlocked it, and I could see why. The lightning had been impressive, but there was something primal about setting people that you didn’t like on fire.

The gryphon, with its soft downy feathers, went up like it had been doused in lighter fluid. It went from the elegant curve of a well-executed swoop to wild flapping panic in an instant, then on to falling like a lump of charcoal a moment after.

The Alvaren leapt from the saddle, flames licking from his skirts. Falling through the air, he could only move in one direction. It didn’t matter how fast he could twist or turn, he was coming down beside me.

My sword came up at the same time.

Two halves of the Alvaren tumbled to the ground on either side of me. “Good shooting, Asher!”

When I glanced around at him, it was pretty clear that he was only standing by force of will alone. If I’d thought my head-Alvaren looked like a pincushion, it was nothing compared to the hedgehog bristle of arrows that made up Asher’s torso. I ran for him, mud sucking at my ankles, my own trap turned against me.

He took another stumbling step towards me, then fell. I had to jump to grab him before he hit the ground. Restoration, don’t fail me now.

I poured my divine power into his swiss-cheese body, but the wounds couldn’t close. The healing stalled out. Oh, this was going to suck. Grabbing them by the handful, I started to yank the clusters of arrows out of him. His cold blood sprayed all over me as I worked, but even as he gasped and shook, I could not stop. Not until enough was out that I could heal him. His desperate grasping hands caught at my wrists, trying to stop me, but there was no time to be gentle. I ripped out the last fistful and poured in my Restoration. He let out a little sob, but the wounds closed before his knees hit the churned mud of the battlefield.

He was going to live, so long as the Alvaren didn’t replace those arrows with new ones. With a growl, I ripped the Alvaren from my horns. I was so busy having a good time that I hadn’t even noticed my friend being murdered. It was enough to put anyone in a bad mood. I called out, “Mercy. Come here!”

Artifice was still creaking and groaning each time that I used it, but it wasn’t like I had any other options. My sword shifted in my grip, transforming into the big tower shield I’d used so often down in the mines. On their next pass, I heard the Alvaren arrows chittering off it.

Mercy skidded in underneath it, looked down at Asher and the ripped-up bits of Alvaren, and sighed. “Again?”

“Stay under the shield; we’ll head for the trees.” I hefted the shield as she got her grip under Asher’s armpits. “They’ll need to land if they want to chase us into the woods.”

She rolled her eyes, but she stuck close as we moved. “I know how shields work, thanks.”

Under my breath, I replied, “I know how your face works.”

I guess the shield kinda made that reverberate back down louder than intended because she sniped back, “I know how your mother works.”

My grin came unbidden. “I know how your mother’s face works.”

Her next reply was drowned out by another rattle of arrows.

The forest was so close I could taste the sap on the air. Just one last skid down a slope and we’d be safe. Which was when the gryphon hit me.

That wasn’t completely accurate. If the gryphon had just come slamming down into the shield, I probably would have been alright. I already had an arm braced against it and…well, it was a shield—that was what they were meant for, being banged into. The real problem was that the gryphon barely bumped the shield as it swooped down and latched its claws on each corner of it, then lifted off again.

I was yanked off my feet, and the swing of my dangling legs set Mercy and Asher tumbling down the hill into the shadows of the forest. At first, it didn’t look like I was going to fly thanks to weighing about as much as a small hippo, but the gryphon really had some strength in its wings. First, it had me hopping and skipping to hold onto the shield, then finally it took off just before we crashed into the trees. Or at least before it crashed into the trees. I got a face full of blossoms and branches.

Thankfully, it pulled up after that first sweep through the boughs, soaring up into the sky with me dangling beneath it. Higher and higher it went before looping and plunging right back down towards the forest again.

It was trying to shake me off and let the drop kill me. That’s the problem with Alvaren these days, no work ethic. Don’t make gravity do all the work for you, kill me yourselves.

The gryphon rider didn’t risk going as low as the trees this time around, choosing instead to spiral up again when we were only halfway there, swinging me out to the side like I was in a centrifuge. Good thing I didn’t get travel sick.

At the top of the spiral, it did another flip and plunge, but this time I was expecting it. As I hung for that moment, weightless in the air above my shield and the gryphon, time slowed to a crawl. My shield became my sword, slipping painlessly from the gryphon’s claws as it transformed. Time snapped back into action, and suddenly, the gryphon wasn’t dragging me down, I was plunging down at it with my weapon ready.

The beast itself seemed to realize that something was wrong, but the rider, on the opposite side to me, couldn’t see what had happened, and she kept spurring the poor thing on in its dive.

If we’d all gone on falling forever, I guess that might have saved them, but just before we hit the red forest, she hauled up on the reins, and my sword came swinging down.

The gryphon ripped apart at the touch of steel, but the Alvaren herself seemed to be made of tougher stuff. The bone of her thigh stopped my swing dead, and she screamed, shrill as a dog-whistle, as the remains of her mount toppled apart around her in a mess of viscera and gore.

We tumbled end over end around the fulcrum of my sword, her trying to aim her bow at me, me trying to get a good kick in and separate us. I only had an instant to realize that we weren’t going to fall forever and to use Restoration before we burst through the canopy.

Then we hit the forest floor.

I lay there groaning for a good long minute, wondering how much of the red around me came from me and how much of it was the fallen blossoms. I hoped most of it was trees, but after that fall, I could find my legs on the other side of a stream and wouldn’t be too surprised. My arms seemed to start working first, so I fumbled about for my sword fruitlessly until I finally found the strength to haul myself back up to sitting.

That was a mistake. The whole forest spun around me in a wobbly orbit. I was extremely done with falling from great heights. I could go the rest of my eternal life without doing it again. It sucked. The Alvaren was lying sprawled beside my sword, blue-tinted blood still pulsing ominously from the gaping hole in her thigh.

Maybe the honorable thing to do would have been to wait for her to wake up and give her a fair fight. Maybe it would have been better to just leave her to chance. Maybe she’d bleed to death, maybe she wouldn’t. In that moment, after the day that I’d had, I didn’t feel like it.

The sword felt heavy as a boulder when I tried to lift it, but I had enough potency to juggle boulders by now. I raised the sword up and brought it down with the same resigned movement. Butcher and meat all over again.

Legendary Foes Defeated!

Celerity increased to 19

Vitality increased to 16

Brawling: Rank 7/10

Phalanx: Rank 5/10

Acrobatics: Rank 7/10

Airstrike: Rank 2/10

176 Experience Gained

120 Glory Gained

Tier of Glory Ascended!

Life rushed back into me as the pillars of divinity flared with light.

[192/710 Health]

Right then and there I wanted to dump my glory into Primal and go on healing myself until I had so much blood in my body I swelled up like a blueberry. But I stopped myself. I’d been pretty lucky with all my impulse decisions and drunk-buying of skills so far, but I needed to start really thinking about who I wanted to be in the future before I threw too much good glory into the same pillars over and over. I’m not saying that turning into the demi-god of buffness and giant swords wasn’t appealing, but now that I’d seen Asher warp the fabric of reality a few times, it was starting to look…less than optimal.

Asher. Mercy. I needed to find them before they got too far into the forest and got lost, with no idea which way they’d come in and which way we were headed. Just like I was right now. Damn it.

“Mercy!”

The trees swallowed my shout. It was so quiet in these woods, I could almost forget everything that was happening outside of them. The foliage was thick enough that a legion of gryphons could be overhead and I’d be none the wiser.

“Mercy! Asher?”

I looked up to the sky for any hint of which way I’d come in, but the trees all looked the same. There was no convenient Maulkin-shaped hole anywhere. Cartoons lied to me. Even looking down at the bits of gryphon and Alvaren didn’t help. They were scattered all over the place, parts facing every which way, blood splattered out in every direction.

“Mercy!”

Still nothing. I was going to just pick a direction and start walking. I knew that I was meant to stay still and let them come find me if I was lost, but I’d never been great at the whole staying still thing. Besides, who knew what kind of trouble those two were getting into without me. They might not even be getting into any trouble, and why would I want a boring life for my friends?

I started heading for what looked like it might be a path through the trees when I heard Briar’s voice booming out of her city in the clouds, muffled at this distance but still audible, “Pursue them, my paladins. Do not give them the time to use the artifact and curse us once more!”

It was coming from directly opposite the direction I’d been headed. Whoops. I turned on my heel and then pushed through the trees, crashing through the underbrush until I found some sort of path and followed it along. I kept waiting for the little birds that kept attacking Mercy last time around to pop out and peck me, but for some reason, they left me in peace—if they were in this forest at all.

Now that I knew the vague direction I should be heading, I kept my mouth shut. If the Alvaren were down here hunting for us then they didn’t need any more help than my stomping on every fallen twig was giving them. With a path weaving off through the trees that turned out to be a dry riverbed, I made good time, but even as I ran, I kept my ears perked up.

The forest seemed to grow brighter as I went, and in the distance, I could almost make out light beyond the tree-line. That was when the shouting started. To my surprise, it wasn’t Mercy doing the yelling. They were off to my right, so I leapt up out of the river bed and charged on through as the low-hanging branches whipped at my horns.

The next thing I knew, the forest was on fire. It didn’t catch while I was standing there, I just burst through one line of trees into the next, and they just happened to be on fire. Smoke billowed up from them and clogged up the gaps where sunlight made it through, pooling under the canopy and reducing visibility to somewhere between the tip of my sword and the end of my nose.

“Mercy!?”

A voice called out from up ahead, reedy but audible over the soft roar of flames. Asher’s voice. “Maulkin?”

I charged over to him. Unsurprisingly, he was at the epicenter of all the fire. There were a few blackened things amongst the pillars of charcoal that still had droplets of liquid silver clinging to them; I assumed that they were Alvaren before they got nuked.

I never thought I’d be so happy to see a lizard. It was only when I was halfway to hugging him that I spotted the other blackened thing in his arms. Mercy was barely recognizable as human. The shape was right, but the rest was bloody and blackened, her bow snapped in two, string seared away. “I did not mean to. When I awoke, and we were surrounded, I was… You must understand I would never do anything to bring either one of you harm. Never.”

Mercy’s flesh was sticky to the touch, still hot from the flames that had scorched her. Lifesense took longer than I would have liked to burrow down into her and tell me that she was hanging onto life by a thread with only two health left. “I’ve hurt her so badly, and I’ve never hurt… I would never.”

“Shh.” I reached up and took a grip on the back of his neck, slowing his frantic motions. Bringing him back to the moment. “Everything’s going to be alright.”

A groan escaped from Mercy. Not a death rattle, but something like it. When her lips split, plasma and gobs of soot drooled out. “You’re going to use Cauterize, and I’m going to use Restoration at the same time. She’ll be back to normal in no time.”

“I… I cannot cause her pain again. I cannot make her suffer further after I did… I never…”

“Restoration is going to take that pain away—she isn’t going to feel it.” I pressed my forehead against his, making him look up from the mess he’d made. “But we’ve both got to cast right now. We’re losing her.”

His voice was a whisper. “But she...”

“Together, Asher. Before my healing undoes your fire debuff.”

I saw his lips moving as he tried to decipher my gaming terminology. Then it clicked. “Char. Yes. I… Together then. One moment.”

Her health ticked down to one as he prepared his spell, and I stood ready. Either one of them would save her, and I was ready with Restoration in case his took too long, but together we could get her back on her feet and fighting fit.

Asher hissed, “Now.”

I’d never seen Cauterize used from the outside before. It was bad enough living through the sensations, but now I had the accompanying visual to keep me up at night. Flames lapped over Mercy, scorching away her injuries inch by inch and leaving behind pallid scar tissue. Then the wave of fire swept back over that puffy skin, bursting it open like a chrysalis to reveal the freshly grown flesh beneath. My Restoration’s rapid regeneration schtick looked positively pleasant compared to the juicy mess that Asher’s healing made out of people.

I had to use the back of my hand to sweep away the worst of the dislodged skin and slime so that she could gasp in a breath. It came ragged to begin with as she struggled and writhed in our grip, but finally, she fell back to the forest floor and groaned. “Ew.”

I patted her on the head. “Ew, you too.”

She reached out. “Asher…”

He leaned in close. “Yes, Mercy?”

“Don’t ever do that again.”

He looked away, as stricken as if she’d told him he wasn’t the father of their weird half-lizard baby on syndicated daytime television. “Yes, Mercy.”

“What a truly heartwarming scene. Truly there is not only honor among thieves but also tenderness. One might even say love—if chattel could experience aught beyond their base impulses.” The Alvaren stepped out from behind the smoldering trees as one, six of them arrayed around us in a circle. Each one of them had their twin blades drawn. That was twelve pointy things. That was at least nine more pointy things than I wanted pointed at me at any given time. “Now return the artifact to us or your eventual fate shall be far more painful than anything that the wyrm-spawn can conjure.”

I dropped Mercy with a growl and rose to my feet. The same smug Alvaren shook his head. “Ah, ah, ah, slowly now, ox. We would not want there to be any misunderstandings that end in the perforation of your wounded co-conspirators.”

They outnumbered us pretty badly, and I’d struggled to handle one of them, even after I’d just knocked them out of the sky. It wasn’t looking pretty.

“This is all just a misunderstanding.”

“Of course. Of course. You misunderstood the trouble that you would be in when you attempted to rob our queen of an ancient artifact. Just as your ancestors misunderstood that when they came creeping into our city and used that same artifact to defile our very blood that we would seek vengeance upon not only them but every last one of their putrid line.”

I raised my hands up so that the Alvaren could see that they were empty and I wasn’t trying anything. “Buddy, you are way off. That is not what happened.”

“Hearken, sisters. Now we move on to the baseless fabrications and contortions of the truth so common among you chattel. Spin your tale then, beast of burden. Tell us all how the things that we lived through, the degeneration and degradation that we have endured for millennia, were all just a misunderstanding. Tell us as if you were there, when your lives last no longer than a candle’s wick.”

“I don’t know anything about what happened to you back then.” Asher and Mercy were making their way to their feet, slowly and shakily at my sides. “All I know is that your queen, Briar, was really set on keeping you all as pasty goblin-monkeys.”

Spittle flecked the Alvaren’s mouth. “You dare to speak of our empress with such irreverence? You should put your face to the filthy earth you sprung from when you talk of her. Or better yet, do not sully her name at all with your awkward gruntings.”

“I can’t remember exactly what she said, but it was something like, ‘Give me the artifact so I can turn them back into svarts. Snoot, snoot. Relent and I shall be merciful. Snoot, snoot. You don’t know what you’re messing with. Snoot, snoot, I’m better than you. Snoot, snoot.’”

Mercy let out a gasp of unintentional laughter.

The paladin raised his eyebrow, a tremor of rage constrained only by good breeding, or enough emotional constipation to make Mercy look like a gusher. “Snoot, snoot?”

“Come on, dude. You know how she is, always looking down her nose at everyone. ‘I’m Queen Briarpatch, I’ll magic you up and down in the air like I just don’t care. Look how pretty I am. Look at my big pointy…pyramid.’”

Asher let out a nasal whine. “Are you trying to antagonize them?”

I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times before finally giving an honest answer. “Honestly, yeah. These guys are dicks.”

The Alvaren charged.

Chapter 23

“Going up!”

There was no rich heavy clay beneath our feet, but the roots of the trees were nothing if not raw wood, and the fire hadn’t touched them yet. The whole interwoven mesh of them burst up out of the ground beneath us as my Artifice worked, hauling us out of reach of the Alvaren and above the choking smoke in one great heave.

Growing Mercy a new bow out of the wood was almost an afterthought. Now, all we needed was a string and she’d be ready to rock. I slammed back into my body and all its aches with a grunt. Asher was casting already, and Mercy had caught the new bow as it dropped out of thin air and was scrambling in what was left of her belt pouches to see if she could find a string of her own. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that all her arrows had been turned to ash in the charred remnants of her quiver. At least, the clothing that had burnt away left her mostly decent, except for the one butt-cheek hanging out in the breeze.

Up above the forest’s roof, the scale of just how screwed we were became apparent. Above us and all around us in a massive spiral, there were dozens if not hundreds of gryphons, each with their own rider. Every individual one was enough to ruin our day. The gryphons of the paladins down on the forest floor were perched up here, and my immediate thought was “grand theft bird-cat” but they immediately reared up and started flailing their claws at us the moment we broke through the canopy. I wasn’t even sure I would have been able to ride one if it liked me, let alone one that was actively trying to kill me.

Down below, we could already feel the vibrations as the Alvaren started hacking their way through my hastily sprouted supports. This little platform was going down any minute, but we had a second to think. “Anyone got a better plan than a dramatic last stand?”

Mercy paused in the midst of restringing her bow. “That’s your best idea?”

“I mean…” I gestured hopelessly at the hissing gryphon squad.

Mercy pinched the bridge of her nose. “Me and Asher will hold them off while you run.”

“Uh no.” The platform rocked beneath our feet. “I’m not leaving you to die.”

“They want the shard, and we win by making sure they don’t get it.” She went back to priming her bow. I made her some arrows out of habit. “Me and Ash will come back if they stab us. It isn’t the end of the world. But if you die, they get what you drop.”

“Yeah, but you could end up anywhere on the planet. I’d never find you again.”

The whole platform began to tip. They’d hacked away enough of the roots. We were going down. “Maybe. But at least you’d have the shard.”

I drew my sword. “Nope. Screw that. I’d take you two over a magic McGuffin any day.”

Asher’s spell seemed to be ready, judging by the plumes of smoke pouring out from between his teeth, and I wasn’t giving Mercy any more time to talk herself into suicide. “Going down!”

Surprise was probably the only thing we had going for us, so instead of letting the Alvaren bring us down, I slammed us back to the earth, pushing all the wood I’d hauled up back where it came from. The impact rocked us, and the roots managed to pull a couple of the Alvaren down into the dirt with them, so I was calling it a win. Not the chatty boy though, he’d jumped back out of reach. That was fine, I wanted to smack him myself.

Asher let out the flames he’d been holding back in a great gush of orange and red, and it swept out over the already burning forest around us without much noticeable effect, but the Alvaren were all dusted with cinders, so I guess the spell worked. Looking down, I noticed I was crackling a bit too, but who cared about a little collateral damage between friends.

Chatty boy had both of his swords pointed right at me, so I went with it, closing the distance between us in two strides and then taking a swing. Just like his beloved queen, he just leaned out of the way of it, not even bothering with a proper dodge.

“Too slow by far, beast.”

His returned attacks were much too quick to follow, his blades nothing but a shimmer in the flames, and the inside of my arm opened up in a rush of blood. The strength left it as severed tendons pinged.

The other blade shimmered past my face, close enough that I could feel displaced air on my eyeballs, and for a moment I thought that he’d missed. Then the tips of my horns toppled down at the periphery of my vision.

“You dick!”

The paladin spun his swords to flick off my blood. “Return what you stole, and I shall leave you with your legs to limp away, beaten and broken like the cur you are.”

Mercy was shooting, but the Alvaren who couldn’t duck behind trees to avoid her shots still seemed to dodge them entirely too easily. Asher was casting, but who knew how long it would take to go off. The only good news was that the Alvaren were too busy watching me get my ass kicked to do much kicking themselves.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, some of the dark birds that we saw in the last blood forest had decided to join the party, flitting out beneath the branches to dive-bomb at Mercy’s head and foul her aim even more. The whole world was out to screw us, I swear.

With my right arm dead and dangling, I shifted my sword to the other and gave it a few practice swings since the paladin was in no rush. “Drop your blade, beast, and I shall show mercy.”

“Or you could”—I leapt forward, sweeping the sword up at his face—“eat it!”

He tilted his head aside with a smirk, and my wild swing missed.

I swear I didn’t even see him move against the backdrop of swarming silver-birds, but my arm came back bloodied and useless.

My sword toppled to the ground as my fingers lost the strength to hold it up. It lay there, vibrating on the turned soil, the stampede setting the whole forest shaking.

The paladin snarled, that handsome face twisting to ugly. “What is it that you do not understand, oversized cretin. You are not my match. You shall never be my match. Before you rutting beasts crawled from out the filth, we ruled this world, and now that we are returned, so too shall order be restored. The time of the savage is done. Submit.”

“You know what, you’re right. You used to run this place, but you’ve been gone thousands of years. That is plenty of time for things to change.”

“It is a testament to the briefness of your lives that you think so.” He rolled his eyes. “Nothing ever truly changes.”

I grinned. “Tell that to them.”

The giant mushroom stampede burst through into our charred little clearing. I didn’t know if all the noise had attracted them, or maybe it was the heat—it didn’t much matter. They came on blind and wild and crushed every Alvaren they encountered underfoot without even noticing.

Chatty spun on his heel to face this new enemy and got in a few good cuts. The kind that would have killed me, any of the monsters we’d crossed paths with, or anybody else. However, they did nothing but release spores from the spongy white flesh of the big chunky fungus.

He was bowled over by one of the trunk-legs before I had to bail on the fight and head for safety, so I was calling it a win for team me, even if I didn’t get to stamp on him myself.

I was roaring with laughter despite all the bleeding. “The chungus are among us!”

Mercy rolled her eyes, but she had the right idea, and she caught Asher by a sleeve and dragged him off. I abandoned my sword and ran after them. There was no way we could stay ahead of the big mushroom guys forever, but the odds were in our favor. They’d run off in a random direction every time that they banged into a tree. All we needed was a little bit of luck and we wouldn’t get trampled. We were due a bit of good luck by now. We must have burnt through all the bad stuff.

When the big mushroom guys hit the fire, it licked up their flesh with just a little bit of browning, but where the rot leaked out of them, they caught like they’d been doused in oil.

The forest was ablaze behind us, and every tree that the mushrooms battered into caught alight as their fluids splattered out onto them. All we had to do was keep the heat to our backs and the dark in front of us, and we could be sure we were going the right way.

I caught glimpses of the other two through the trees as we ran, but there was no sign of the Alvaren who hunted us. The chaos of the great mushroom fire seemed to be doing the trick. The only thing chasing after us was one persistent silver-bird that wanted a piece of Mercy and the spreading miasma of smoke and spores.

Asher was casting as we ran, flames trailing out behind his hands like the tail of a comet. I would have complained about it attracting attention or mushrooms, but we seemed to be completely alone and ignored. As we burst through the next clearing, he darted over to run beside me, tripped over a rock, and flung himself into my waiting, useless arms.

Trying to catch him with them was a lot like flopping a pair of overcooked noodles in his general direction, but he caught onto them himself, and the flames from his hands spread out across me. Cauterize. Again.

Knowing what to expect actually made the pain worse somehow, like I was tensing for it or something. Or maybe it just hurt worse every time he used it. You would have thought I’d get used to it eventually, but no. Fire still burned when it got shoved into your open wounds. Who would have thought?

I almost threw him off as new strength born of agony swept through me, but I managed to resist the urge, holding him out at arm’s length instead. “I thought we weren’t doing that anymore!”

At least he had the decency to look sheepish about it. “Needs must, my friend. You are of no use in battle without your strength of arms.”

With shaking hands, still slick with my own sticky plasma, I felt the tips of my horns. They were back and as pointy as ever. That was a relief.

“I’m not racist, but I’m starting to think that I really don’t like Alvaren.”

He let out a little snort as we parted. “It would seem that the feeling is mutual.”

Mercy was waiting for us impatiently at the edge of the clearing, but her scowl soon faded once we were back to running again. The forest changed around us as the sickly white spackle of fungal polyps on the wood vanished, the clouds of spores and smoke faded into our past, and the full vibrancy of the bloody red blossoms came back with a vengeance.

Asher nearly tripped over Mercy when she abruptly stopped, and I had to fling myself to the side to avoid crushing the pair of them, crashing into a tree and loosing a cloud of silver-birds to pester Mercy all over again before they finally worked out her hair wasn’t delicious.

With the last of them slapped away, she let out a sigh and flung herself down to the ground. After only a moment’s hesitation, Asher crossed his legs and joined her. I just let myself slide down the side of the tree. “Let’s never run anywhere ever again.”

Asher’s head dipped down. “Agreed.”

Mercy flung herself back to stretch out across the fallen blossoms. “Running is bad.”

Companionable silence stretched out for a long moment, then Mercy finally asked the question we’d all been avoiding until now. “Now what?”

Asher’s head snapped up. “It was as the prophet foretold. Fate led us to the shard beneath the earth. The quest that has been bestowed upon us is truly our purpose in Amaranth.”

Mercy made a little hissing noise at that line of thought, but I shrugged my shoulders. “There are too many coincidences for it to all be coincidences. He wanted us to get that shard, and we did—without even knowing that we were doing it.”

“Oh, come on. Fate didn’t take us down into that mine. Maulkin did. He wanted to help the Dvergar—not that they appreciated it all that much.”

Asher cocked his head to one side. “And in so doing he inadvertently restored the lost Alvaren race to their true form and recovered their fragment of the Rusted Blade. Who can say what planted the seed of the idea within Maulkin’s mind to begin with?”

“Oh, that was video games. For sure. You meet somebody, and they give you a quest. That’s how these games work.”

Mercy pointed and laughed, which was a bit rude. “See, he is just an idiot.”

“A savant perhaps.” Asher was in my corner, but I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. “Guiding us precisely where we needed to go to achieve our ultimate goals.”

I mumbled. “Uh…”

Mercy sprung to her feet. “This guy thinks that this is a fricking video game, and you think he’s the chosen one?”

“The beauty of a belief in fate is that everyone has a part to play in its grand tapestry.”

“I still don’t buy it.” She was pacing. “The white prophet had to know about the shard under Khag Mhor. That must be why he built his little study out here.”

“There was no mention of it in any of the scrolls or books that he left behind.”

She stopped pacing for a moment. “Key words there are ‘left behind’. He knew we were going to dig through that stuff, so he took all the good shit away.”

Tempers seemed to be flaring a little. Asher looked as chill as always, but I’d seen him with that same expression on his face while we were in the process of being slaughtered. I piped up again. “Guys…”

They both ignored me. “The Prophet could not have known that we would encounter the Dvergar caravan as it was under attack, nor that we would even head in the direction of the Dvergar city.”

“Of course he could have!” Oh good, Mercy was yelling now. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist like Maulkin to go up the nearest hill when you’re lost.”

That one stung a bit. So I put in my own little jab before I remembered I wanted everyone to calm down. “You didn’t think of it.”

“I was a bit pre-occupied with the whole reincarnation and giant monsters thing at the time. It kind of destroyed my whole understanding of reality.” Mercy snarled at me. “Excuse me if I didn’t jump right in with genius suggestions like ‘let’s climb a hill.’”

Asher caught her attention again, and I didn’t envy him. “You believe that our actions were entirely predictable? Even if it was somehow inevitable that we would come across the hidden Dvergar city beneath the surface of the earth, what were the odds that we would offer them our services? What were the odds that we would assist them instead of pursuing our own agendas?”

“Oh, come on. Anyone with a heart would have looked at those sad-sack Dvergar on their last legs and volunteered to help.”

“I would not have.” Asher was still sitting, but he was stock still. “Were it not for Maulkin’s intervention. I was of the opinion that it was a distraction from our greater cause of seeking the shards.”

There was no way this was going to end well. “Guys, stop.”

“So you’re heartless. Big surprise.”

“I simply believe that saving the entire world is of more importance than assisting every traveling merchant that we encounter. I do not believe this statement to be immoral.” Asher’s tail was twitching behind him. This was the most annoyed he’d ever looked. “If Amaranth is lost, then so too are the lives of all who dwell upon it.”

“You’re telling me you could have looked those Dvergar in the eyes and said no?”

“I would not have put myself in the position of looking them in the eyes, so to speak. I would not have intervened to begin with. I would have allowed the svart and Dvergar to clash, then cleared up any survivors when the svart were victorious.”

Mercy spat on the ground. “Gods, you really are cold-blooded.”

Asher rose to his feet. “I am not certain, but I believe that was another racial slur.”

“Guys, stop!” I didn’t mean to yell. Honestly, I didn’t. But apparently, a roaring faun was enough to grab everyone’s attention. “It doesn’t matter if it is fate or luck or anything else. We’ve got the shard, and that means that the whole world is going to be gunning for us. We need to work out what we are going to do next.”

That gave them enough food for thought that they actually stopped shouting at each other. Mercy slumped back down to the ground, and I relaxed a fraction, leaning back on my tree.

Asher spoke softly. I got the impression that he wasn’t very proud of himself for losing his temper. “The next step in our journey is obvious. We must pursue the remaining shards with all haste.”

“Funny”—Mercy snorted—“I was going to say we should toss it in the sea and hope that everyone forgets we exist.”

Asher cocked his head at her. Quizzical. “Now who is seeking to pursue the immoral path?”

“Look, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but just one of those Alvaren foot-soldiers can bat us around like a cat with a mouse. We are seriously out of our depth here.” Mercy leaned back until she was lying on the bed of blossoms again, trying to calm herself down. “All that is going to happen is somebody bigger and tougher than us is going to come along, stomp us, and take the shard to do… whatever the hell they want with it. Maybe if we lose it for a few years while we do other stuff and build up our strength then we might have a chance at holding onto it.”

There was some good logic to what she was saying, but also, screw that. “So you want to quit now that we’re winning?”

She looked almost sad when she turned to face me. “In what world are we winning?”

“We’ve got a shard, and we made it out without dying. Sure we didn’t kick every ass on our way out the door, but we still made it. This is a win.”

Her jaw made a little clicking noise. That wasn’t good. She was obviously trying to hold it back, but it still came out a shout, “I nearly died!”

“Nearly doesn’t count.” I shrugged. “I’ve died for real. Twice already! Who gives a damn. We got the shard.”

If she kept rolling her eyes like that, eventually they were going to fall right out of her head. “Yeah, for ten minutes until you die again.”

I grunted. “Hey!”

Asher intervened once more. “Perhaps not.”

“Oh yeah, maybe Mister Fight Everything That Moves isn’t going to end up running into something tougher than his thick head.”

He bowed his head to her. “Apologies, I have not made myself clear. There can be no question that Maulkin will almost inevitably lead to his own death through mismatched combat…”

Ouch. “Hey!”

“… but while the two of you have been learning more about the world around us, I have turned my attention inwards towards the Pillars of Divinity and the powers that they can provide us. Within the domain of Aether, there is an ability that allows us to bind a physical object to our spirit. A soul bond, so that when our physical forms are destroyed and fade from this world, a single object in our possession remains in our possession, to travel through the realm of the dead and be reborn along with us.”

My mouth was hanging open, so I closed it carefully before asking, “For real?”

“I would suggest that the next time one of us has accumulated enough glory to…”

“I’ve got it!”

A quick glance told me I had eight hundred and fifty-five experience to spend. We’d been in such a rush that I’d never even had a chance to look at them. I hadn’t checked my character sheet either. I had 43 Potency now. That was awesome.

Turning my attention towards the Pillars of Divinity, I immediately dumped all my accumulated glory into the Pillar of Aether. It lit up just like the others had in the big circle in the darkness—although on the opposite side to all of my more physical focused abilities so far.

Once it had crystallized, I hopped right over to skills and narrowed my search down to the divine ones that my new pillar offered me.

Aether Tier 1: Abjure Spirit

Forces an unanchored spirit to depart from an area.

Aether Tier 1: Astral Projection

Slips your spirit loose of the physical form to travel over great distances and observe.

Aether Tier 1: Soul Bond

Forms a permanent bond with a physical object, so that even in death you cannot be parted.

Aether Tier 1: Soul Stone

Binds an unanchored spirit within a physical object.

Aether Passive: Psychometry

I was only meant to be picking up Soul Bond, but I had to admit that the rest of them sounded kind of awesome too. If I was meant to be a part of Chernghast’s little death cult thing, all this spooky scary skeleton stuff seemed like it would be a good fit.

At first, I nearly selected Soul Stone because I’m such a genius that if two separate things have the word soul in them, I mix them up. Soul Stone did look pretty cool. It let me put a disembodied spirit into a physical object to stop it from wandering off, but that didn’t really help me with my current situation.

Soul Bond came first, so I didn’t get any more wires crossed later. I felt the weird tickle of experience draining and knowledge bubbling into my brain. At a glance, it seemed to do exactly what Asher had said, so that was all good.

Psychometry sounded like a prog-rock band to me, so I had to look into it to discover that it was some sort of touch-based psychic magic thingy, where any spirits with an attachment to an object I was touching could talk to me. Great. Ghosts. Just what I needed.

I dallied for a minute on the list, considering hopping over to Ascension and grabbing another one of those tasty, tasty Surge powers, but then I felt a firm slap around my head and snapped back to reality.

Mercy was yelling at me. “…many times do I have to tell you to stop doing that in the middle of a conversation!”

“Sorry!”

Asher was standing over me too, looking concerned. “I must admit that it is rather rude to abandon your body in the middle of a—”

I hopped up and pulled out the shard. “I said I was sorry! But look, I got Soul Bond!”

Mercy’s frown deepened. “How did you Tier Up before the rest of us?”

I grinned down at her. “Maximum effort.”

“This world does seem to reward direct conflict more than strategic approaches.” Asher sighed.

“Look that doesn’t matter right now, what matters is…”

I focused on the shard in my hand and concentrated on Soul Bond. Immediately, the whole world darkened and slowed around me like it did when I was using Artifice.

Chernghast’s awful nails-on-a-chalkboard voice scraped along the inside of my skull. “This is a permanent decision, with irreversible consequences. Are you certain you wish to do this?”

Guess that made sense, if you only got to bond one item per Tier of Aether. “Yes.”

The bond formed like a trap snapping shut. Suddenly, I could feel the shard in my hand, not as an object I was touching, but as a part of my body. As a part of myself. I was this rusty lump of metal, and it was me.

In itself, that would have been a weird and unpleasant experience, but what came next blew it out of the water. Every one of my Pillars of Divinity cracked.

It wasn’t as dramatic as when I’d pushed Artifice too far, but something had definitely gone wrong. When I turned my attention inwards, I could see the moonlight was dimmed within them, tainted with tiny fracture lines of pure darkness. “Oh, what the hell?”

When I snapped back to reality, I could still see them like I’d been staring at the sun, shadows dancing from the center of my vision to the periphery. I could feel the darkness too, like a chill inside me that no amount of heat could ever clear.

Mercy jumped back from me. “Oh, what the hell!?”

“What?”

Asher took a step back from me too. “My friend, your appearance just changed.”

I grumbled. “Well, I haven’t exactly got a mirror. You want to be a bit more specific?”

They crept a little closer. “I can kind of see your veins. But they look sort of, black?”

Looking down at my arms and particularly my wrists, I could see what she meant. Beneath the dull grey of my skin, all of the visible veins that my pumped-up muscles had given me definitely looked darker now. “Okay…that is weird.”

Asher was all up in my face. “The color of your eyes has also changed. They are no longer shining so brightly.”

“Yeah, my pillars got a bit dimmer too. Maybe that is just a soul bond thing?”

“Perhaps it is a weakening of the soul as it is spread thinner.” Asher was peering and prodding at me like I was his science project and I’d just gone bloop. “We have no means to test this hypothesis.”

I gently pushed the pair of them away. “Anyway, the shard isn’t going anywhere, so what is step two of the plan?”

Mercy didn’t even seem to realize that she’d lost the argument until she opened and shut her mouth a few times. Eventually, she grumbled out, “I still say we head for the coast.”

“You really want to see me in a bikini that bad?”

She ignored me. Wisely. “From what the Dvergar were saying, inland there is nothing but warlords and monsters for miles and miles in every direction.”

Asher acquiesced all too easily. “It would be tactically advantageous to have at least one direction we cannot be attacked from.”

“Oh, come on.” I grinned. “This place has got to have sea monsters.”

Mercy shrugged. “I’ll take sea monsters over Alvaren any day.”

“So there is nothing but crap inland. What’s at the beach?”

“The Dvergar were kind of cagey about that. From what I could piece together, I think they used to trade with ships somewhere along the coast, or there was a settlement somewhere. Maybe a fishing village? I don’t know. The khag hadn’t run anything out that way in a while, but that might have just been because the mine dried up and they had nothing to sell.”

I clambered to my feet and stretched. Funny how sitting still for a few minutes let all your aches and pains catch up to you like you’d been outrunning them. “Alright. Beach episode. Let’s do it.”

Mercy knew which way to go. I had no idea how she knew which way to go, but she did. In all the fighting and running and giant mushroom attacks, I had completely lost track of where we were in the forest, yet somehow she had the map fixed right in her head. Either that or she was leading us all in circles, and we were too dumb to know the difference.

In the quiet of the forest, we sometimes heard the rapid beating of great wings overhead. Travel had become gentler without Alvaren attacks, sprinting for our lives, or giant mushroom monsters—which Bestiary now informed me were called Myconormorians. That was a mouthful. I was going to go ahead and keep calling them giant mushroom dudes.

Where I felt the tickling presence of the mushroom’s spores trying to take root, I batted them off, but, for the most part, the spores seemed to have been burned away or sweated off during our great escape. In a few places on my armor, I could see little mushrooms starting to spring up, but at this point, I figured I’d just let them. They saved us from the Alvaren, I was happy to give them a free ride.

As the day rolled on, the red glow of the trees above us began to dim as the sun headed down. As well as keeping our ears open for any sign of the Alvaren or the chungus fungus, we’d been listening for any more bellowed orders from Queen Briar, but it seemed like she’d finally switched her magic megaphone to airplane mode.

We didn’t rest often, but we didn’t need to. Stamina did not seem to be an issue for Eternals. I guess that was a side effect of the whole immortality thing. It also explained where all the other Eternals had gone—giant millennia-long orgy in a cave. Or at least that was what I was betting on. Most of the time we stopped so that Mercy could get her bearings or because we’d heard a lot of gryphon activity overhead. Long silent pauses with nothing to do but think.

During one of the pauses without the threat of bloody death descending on us from above, I hauled a big slab of stone up out of a dried-out riverbed and cobbled together a new sword with Artifice. The going was definitely tougher. Stuff that had felt intuitive before, I now had to really think about. Maybe it was the crappy materials, but it felt a lot more like it had more to do with whatever had gone wrong with my pillars interfering in the smooth flow of work. The end result may not have been as sharp as the metal sword I had to abandon, but anything that survived being whacked with a big slab of rock probably deserved the chance to take a swing at me.

Of course, most of the traipsing through the woods was long periods of quiet with nothing to do but think too. I kept on going around in circles about what to do with the five hundred and fifty-five experience that I had leftover.

Celerity boost still wasn’t going to put me on the same level as the Alvaren, and since we were hauling ass away from the Alvaren at the moment, I didn’t even know if it was worth planning around fighting them again any time soon.

There were swathes of regular skills that it would probably be a good idea to invest in, but all the shiny new divine ones kept on calling to me. What kind of demigod did I want to be? A meathead who smacks things with a sword really good? A blacksmith for all my buddies? A spooky spirit wrangler? There were so many options, and the decisions I made would be with me for all of eternity.

In the end, I decided not to make a decision. I had no intention of dying any time soon, so that meant that the float of experience could just come along with me until we ran into some problem that needed solving, and I needed a new skill for it. Problem solved by ignoring it.

Chapter 24

We broke out from under the trees long after darkness had fallen, and we kept our heads down. The stars hung bright in the sky above us, but my patron moon was nowhere to be seen—which was probably good news since it meant spotting us sprinting across the grasslands was probably harder for all the Alvaren in the big floating, glowing city that still hung in the air over the collapsed mountain.

After the stroll through the forest, it almost felt good to run again now that we were out in the open. Though we kept glancing at the sky, even if there were any gryphons overhead we wouldn’t be able to spot them. At best we might see the stars blink out for a moment before catching a face full of bird-cat. If they were still circling up there we couldn’t see them or hear them, so the best we could do was ostrich our way along, pretending that they weren’t there. If they were. Which they might have been. Or not. We didn’t know. It was pretty stressful.

So we ran through the night, crossing more of the sparse grassland that seemed to be all this bit of Amaranth had to offer—more sparse grassland than I would have wanted to see in my lifetime. Sometimes there was a rock. Sometimes there was a rock that looked a bit like it might have been a building once, but then it turned out to just be another rock. It was boring. Not everything is giant monsters and bitching underground cities. Sometimes maps have empty patches, and we were crossing one.

The light of the Alvaren castle in the sky faded as we went until finally, it dipped under the horizon, and I started to feel vaguely safe again. Maybe safe was too strong a word. I didn’t feel like I had a whole city of deranged, murderous prehistoric murder ninja-wizards staring directly at the back of my head anymore. That was it. That was the feeling.

By the time that the sun rose ahead of us, we could smell salt on the air, and the smooth, rolling dales we were used to had gotten lumpy. The hills as we came towards the coast weren’t as big as the minor mountain that the Dvergar had been living under, but they were big enough that we couldn’t see as far as the horizon anymore. I kind of missed it.

When I crested the next hill, Mercy and Asher were just standing there staring. It didn’t take a genius to work out why. The ocean spread out before us, glowing golden in the rising sun. “Oh pretty.”

We all just stood there for a while, watching the sunrise. It probably wasn’t the first time that nothing was actively trying to murder us since we first arrived on Amaranth, but it certainly felt that way.

I put an arm around Mercy and Asher’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “This is the life.”

Mercy sighed, “Shut up,” but she leaned against me all the same.

As the sun broke free of the horizon and blue began to fill in where the light had been, things became a lot more visible. Asher pointed and said, “What is that?”

There was some sort of structure out in the sea. It was visible from where we stood but right on the edge of the horizon. A great sun-bleached white pillar platform covered up to its rims on all sides with a patina of seaweed, and above the stone, a ring. It looked like gold in the morning light, but it could have been made just as easily from silver or anything else that was super shiny.

Mercy nodded. “Big floating ring.”

“Yup.” I nodded too. “Big floating ring.”

Asher let out a huff. “It is emanating a low level of magical energy. Inert but still present.”

“The big floating ring is magic?”

“No. Really?” Mercy added, completely deadpan.

“While your droll commentary remains as hilarious as always, this…ring could provide us with the guidance that we require. We have not encountered any mindless creatures capable of magic as of yet, so the presence of such a thing would seem to indicate civilization of some sort.”

Mercy shrugged. “Or it has been sitting there for thousands of years doing nothing but float.”

“Even if that were so, these constructions must have borne the test of time unflinching. It seems likely to me that anything constructed by the same hand would still stand and that such a place would soon become inhabited once more.”

You had to give that to him. “It is free real estate.”

Mercy groaned as I set off down the other side of the hill. “So which way, left or right?”

Asher held up his clawed hands and fell silent. His fingers twitched, as if he was plucking unseen strings or wiggling them to look like he was doing magic. “I believe, left. The flow of magic through the ring extends in both directions, but I believe that to our right, it flows farther from the coast towards parts unknown.”

“Left,” Mercy grumbled all the way down the hill. “All you had to say was left.”

“And all that you had to do was attune yourself to the fundamental powers of creation rather than become marginally competent at shooting pointy sticks at things, yet here we both are.”

The shade may have been cast her way, but even Mercy laughed at that one.

Scabby grass gave way to sand, and soon the hills became dunes as we cut to the left while following along the curve of the coast. Eventually, we slid down to the beach—where nobody appreciated my awesome joke about crabs keeping their money in sandbanks—and kept plodding on.

There was no sign of another giant floating ring anywhere, and I was starting to get a bit dubious about the whole mystical energies thing that Asher kept feeding us until we rounded a dune and saw the first sign of human civilization since we landed on the planet.

Picture the oldest, most pimped out gothic church you have ever seen, with nine million gargoyles and big pointy roofs and bell towers and all that jazz. Then imagine it was made out of white stone and covered in more ivy than you could shake a big hedge-trimmer at and that instead of building straight up, it had sprawled out into a courtyard and a few outbuildings and…okay, so not so much like a church except for all the gargoyles and roofs, but still, very cool-looking.

What it was missing was any giant floating rings. “Uh, are we sure this is the right place?”

“It is brimming with arcane energy, and it appears to have been constructed from the same material as the pillar in the sea.”

“Yeah, but”—I pointed—“no ring.”

“We do not know the purpose of the ring, as of yet. Nor of this building. There are a multitude of reasons why this place may not require one.”

“Or it fell in the sea,” Mercy quipped.

There was an old trail leading up from the beach onto more of that scrubby grassland that we knew and loved so well. We followed its meandering path around the dunes and up to the outer walls of the mystery buildings. The smooth stone of the wall had been overrun with creepers, but the opening where the gate used to hang was still clear enough for us to move inside—which we almost did before I spotted the flooring situation in the courtyard. “Hold up.”

Mercy snapped around, bow at the ready. “What?”

“Look!”

They looked, and they saw what I was worried about. Underneath the scattered leaves and the accumulated sand that had blown up and in, there was no denying that there was a mosaic on that floor, and if there was one thing we knew about mosaics in Amaranth, it was that they were all traps.

With all the accumulated crap of the years, we couldn’t make out what the design on the thing was, though it looked very big and dramatic—mostly monochrome to go with the white walls, but with the odd silvery tile here and there that shone in the sunlight. There were a couple of outbuildings that were now open to the elements after their doors had rotted away, and from our viewpoint on the periphery, it looked like all the accumulated crap in the plaza was just a prelude to the giant mounds of sand and rot inside those buildings.

At least the other side of the courtyard looked a bit more promising. From the bigger, fancier main building, somebody had extended out the roof to make a little porch, protecting it from the worst of the elements, and some of the stained-glass windows over there were still in one piece, even if they did look a lot thicker at the bottom than at the top.

“I’m just going to go for it, guys. There is no other way in. I’m just going to do it.”

Mercy grabbed at my arm. “You can’t, it’s suicide.”

“Maybe it is the first ever un-trapped mosaic. Maybe I’ll get lucky. If not. Don’t worry. I will find you both again, no matter how long it takes.”

I took the leap of faith and stepped out onto the plaza. The other two flinched back, just waiting for me to explode into ludicrous gibs of bloody meat, but it didn’t happen. I took another step, then another. I strode out onto the mosaic, a belly laugh rumbling up out of me. “The trap must have broken down from being here too long!”

The silvered tiles leapt up into the air. “Oh crap!”

With a buzz like a swarm of bees they flew at me, and even moving as fast as I could, there was no way I could draw my sword and swing it around to block them before they hit. I was doomed. Closing my eyes, I braced myself to be minced.

I stood like that for a long moment, waiting for the pain to come, but it didn’t. I opened my eyes.

Standing before me, there was a man made of mirror. When he moved, the gaps between the shards of silver showed, but the rest of the time, he was a perfect representation of a robed human being with long flowing hair and a little goatee beard. “I bid you welcome, my dear students of the arts arcane, to Witchglass Overlook, the premier school of magic in all of Amaranth.”

Mercy and Asher crept closer. The mirror-man was still standing there, perfectly still, like he had stalled out. I reached out and gave him a prod, setting the tiny plates that made up his torso rippling. “Uh, guys. I think we got the answering machine.”

Asher was beyond enthused, of course, not that you could really tell from his tone. He was practically dancing around the thing, with his hands up to feel the magic vibes or whatever. “Fascinating. Truly fascinating.”

That would keep him happy for the foreseeable future, so I turned my attention to Mercy. “Okay, so we are in. It is wizard school. You know what that means?”

“We have to put on a hat that assigns us to a gang based on random personality traits?” She smirked.

“It means books!”

“You…don’t really strike me as a book person.”

I clasped a hand to my chest, wounded. “Okay, first off. Rude. Second, the books are going to tell us where to find the other fragments of the Rusted Blade. Wizards always know everything about everything. There is no way that they didn’t write down where the most important magic items on the planet are.”

Her mouth was hanging open a bit. “That might actually work.”

“Why are you always surprised when I have good ideas?” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“Really? You really want me to answer that? Again? Really?”

I sighed. “Okay, so where is the library?”

We all jumped when the mirror-man started talking again. “The Library of Witchglass Overlook is located beneath your very feet. Seek it out, searchers for wisdom, by navigating the grand hall and then down through the spiral staircase to the rooms of trials.”

Asher clasped his little hands together in excitement. “My goodness, what a fantastic magical construct, capable of responding to verbal commands long after its caster was—”

“It’s a robo-tour-guide.” Mercy poked it in the goatee, setting the face rippling all over again. “We get it.”

Asher’s mouth snapped shut, and if looks could kill, there would be bits of Mercy scattered from here to Khag Mhor. Got to love a tetchy lizard man.

With no time to lose, and another argument to avoid, I headed off for the main doors of the main building, which honestly, probably should have been my first port of call anyway. The wood of the doors had all rotted away, but the filigree was still standing there, like the outline of the ghost of the door, all the silver gone green in the sea air. Beyond it, there was only darkness.

I drew my stone sword and gave it an experimental swing, knocking what was left of the silver away in a sparkly cloud of crumbling dust. Guess they didn’t bother to magic the doors. That boded well for my chances of getting through the rest of them.

I stepped through into the grand hall, then stopped and went back outside, nearly crashing into Mercy and Asher as they continued their bitching and moaning at each other. I took a long hard look at the outside of the building, then looked in through the door again. Out then in. Out then in. Mercy caught me on my third pass. “What is it?”

“This is bull.”

They stepped into the hall with me this time and gawked as it opened out before them. It was three times the size of the building outside, with vaulted ceilings to match the sort-of-gothic architecture and stained-glass windows depicting some guy with a goatee doing all sorts of magical shenanigans. Apparently, goatee guy thought a lot of himself. We couldn’t even see all the way to the far side of the hall, and by my calculations, it should have been off over the edge of the damn cliff that this place was standing on.

Down on top of the plain flagstones that were blessedly not a mosaic, there were tables lit up with candelabras and still glistening with food. Delicious-looking food. My mouth started to water as the smell of it hit me. I hadn’t eaten properly since we arrived, and while it didn’t seem like I needed to, the urge was still there.

There was a whole roast chicken sitting on the closest table with my name on it. The skin looked so crispy I could already feel it crunching between my teeth. “Oooh. Come to daddy.”

Mercy snorted. “Should we leave you two alone?”

“You really should.” I hefted the whole chicken by its leg and grinned. “This is going to get weird. I’m going to make it weird.”

I could feel the steam rising from the skin of the chicken on my lips before it was unjustly yanked away from me. Asher had slapped it out of my hand. “Rude.”

Grabbing a ham-hock, I went hog-wild on that instead. Or at least I would have if Asher hadn’t slapped that away too. “Dude!”

There was a big rack of ribs on the next table across, so I made a dive for it face first, sending the silverware and side dishes flying. My teeth were just about to close on it when Asher’s voice finally cut through the meat-madness. “Wait!”

I stopped, my teeth an inch away from the succulent surface of the beef. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten that one, what with my horns and whatnot. Maybe it was my cousin or something. At this point, I was too hungry to care. “Maulkin, I beg you, use your mind before your actions lead you to folly. How could food have persisted here all of this time? Why have none of the local predators picked this feast clean? There is something wrong here, my friend. Something terribly wrong.”

“But…beef.”

“Hold on now,” Mercy said. “He might be on to something here.”

I was practically begging now. “But beef!”

Asher crept forward and edged the plate away from me as I whimpered. “I promise you, my friend, at the next viable opportunity, I shall furnish you with a meal that is neither an illusion nor a curse.”

My head fell forward onto the table, horns digging into the lacquered wood. “Ugh.”

“Come on, beefy”—Mercy gave me a prod as she passed—“we’ve got a wizard school to explore.”

“Will there be snacks?”

“Knowing our luck, there will be traps and monsters.”

That perked me up. I put the palms of my hands down on the table to push myself up to standing, and abruptly, the hall filled with ghosts.

A glimpse of a forest. Tools. Carvings. Hundreds upon hundreds of robed figures flitting through, too fast for me to see any features. Chatter in a dozen different languages, too fleeting to follow a word. Flashes of light. Spells being cast. Colors all dampened to milky white whisps. The man with the goatee, eyes glowing, standing in the empty hall, casting one last spell. Deathly silence. Flitting shadows that might have been birds. A monster, like some great crocodile on two legs striding in. It took a bite out of the food, and its face melted off in a shower of meaty gobs. Dvergar came and met the same fate. A whole posse of human settlers taking shelter from a storm, the first humans I’d seen on Amaranth, melted away to nothing when they decided to trust in the bounty. More Dvergar. More silence. More memories all piled up. The long empty stretch of eternity.

I jerked my hands off the surface of the table with a gasp. Psychometry. I’d forgotten all about it. It was a fair guess that I’d been making some weird noises from the way that the other two were staring at me. “So…I got a new ability—a freebie with Soul Bond. A history-sensing kind of thing. Anyway, you were totally right. Nasty curse on all the food. Acid trap stuff. Thanks for slapping my lunch.”

Asher seemed pleased that my very brief irritation with him had passed. Maybe he was a bit sensitive with Mercy ragging on him all the time. “You would have done the same for me, were I caught out in such a manner.”

“You know what, you’re right.” I grinned down at him. “I would have. I would have slapped the crap out of your snacks.”

Psychometry felt like it was going to be a problem. I couldn’t touch anything without seeing its history? That was going to screw me up real bad if it did ever get to be snack time again. Eating pork, fine by me. Eating an adorable little piglet looking up at me with puppy-dog eyes? Piggy-dog eyes? Anyway, I needed gloves—preferably gloves that weren’t made out of either puppies, piggies, or eyes.

We made our way across the great hall, and the distant shimmer of sunlight coming in through the doorway faded away until only candlelight and the glow of our eyes was left to guide us. Despite mine being markedly dimmer, I didn’t seem to be having any problems seeing just as well as the other two. Maybe their eyesight just wasn’t as good as a Faun’s? It took us considerably longer than it should have to hike to the far end of the room, and everywhere that I looked, delectable dishes designed to delight were there, tempting me. When we passed the dessert buffet, I nearly broke down and wept until I remembered the dissolving gator dude.

The back wall of the grand hall was in sight now, but even as we kept trudging on, it felt like it kept on moving farther away like it was a bad dream or somebody was screwing with the focus on the camera in a Hitchcock kind of way. “Okay, so this is some more wizard stuff, right?”

Asher cocked his head to the side. “The ambient magic of this place has left me tragically bereft of any more specific sensory information, but I believe it is fair to say so.”

Mercy fired off an arrow at the rear wall, and we stood there and watched as it flew and flew and flew without ever reaching anything. “Huh.”

When we traipsed a little farther, it was there, hanging in the air above us, but the far wall was no closer. Again, Mercy said, “Huh.”

I clapped Asher on the shoulders. “Okay, buddy, this is all you. You are the magic wiz in this team. You are the one who can zap stuff. You are the brains of the outfit. You can solve it.”

Asher looked genuinely uncomfortable. “The brains would probably be yourself, as a matter of fact. Your plans are the ones that we most often actively pursue.”

“Oh gods, he is the brains? I thought I was the brains.”

“Guys, guys. We’re all the brains. Or maybe none of us. We’re all good at our own things. I’m good at swording. Mercy is good at bows. And, Asher, you’re good at magic. So since this is magic…”

He sighed. “I shall make an attempt.”

Mercy and I shuffled back a bit as he began casting a spell, coils of crackling electricity gathering all around him, twisting and reshaping according to his will. It was pretty impressive-looking.

“Bet it doesn’t work.”

I glanced down at Mercy where she was leaning on the side of my arm like I was a wall, picking her nails with an arrowhead. “I’m not going to bet against my own team.”

“I’m just saying, this doesn’t feel like the kind of problem you can solve by throwing a fireball at it, and that is the only magic your boy there seems to do.”

“He does lightning. And healing. And he breathes fire now. Plus the gravity stuff from being an Eternal.”

She flicked a little mushroom sprout out from under her nail. “Uh-huh. It still isn’t going to work.”

Asher unleashed the lightning at the back wall, and while it traveled just like Mercy’s arrow for far longer than it should have, eventually it did seem to make contact with something solid. There was a sound like a giant bubble popping, and abruptly we were nose to nose with the sooty little mark he’d left on the rear wall.

“It would appear that the addition of my spell destabilized the workings of the spatial folding.”

I pretended that a word of that made sense. “Cool. Cool. So is it going to stay popped or?”

“It seems unlikely that it would have stood the test of time if a little alien magical energy could permanently disable it.”

The air around us rippled and popped. Like there were bubbles rising to the surface from somewhere. Mercy’s head looked like it was swollen to twice its usual size when she looked back at us through one of the bubbles. “So…run?”

“Indeed.”

We took off for the spiral staircase that we’d been promised, and we weren’t let down. It wasn’t as oversized as the hall had been, but it was still wide enough for the three of us to run down it side by side, feet skidding over the smooth white stone and hands scrabbling at what was left of the silverwork banisters for balance, even though they had a nasty tendency to crumble and twist beneath your fingers.

Halfway down the stairs, we realized that Mercy’s head was back to its usual size, and the bubbling of the air had stopped, so we all skidded to a more reasonable pace for the rest of the turn. Down at the bottom, we were confronted with pitch black beyond the open doorway to the next floor.

Once again, it fell to me to do the stupid and/or brave thing and go wandering through. At once, the room began to light up. Huge braziers that must have been sitting empty since the place was abandoned suddenly sprang to life. Green-blue flames flared up out of them, bathing the whole place in their eerie glow. This room was nowhere near to being the size of the hall above us, but it was still pretty substantial.

Along one wall there was a row of dummies carved from the same pale stone as the rest of the building, the rotten tatters of clothes and armor long fallen away from them, but the sooty marks where they’d been spell-struck were still abundantly obvious to even my untrained eye.

Along another wall the sagging remains of a great storage cabinet ran the length of the wall, rotten wood held together by filigree, and the glass panels sloughed down into lumps along the countertop. Whatever had been inside before the place was abandoned had long since degraded or dissolved, but here and there was a hint at the weird and wonderful stock it once held. In one corner, dazzling clusters of crystal were growing up the side of the cabinet and beyond to crawl along the wall, all set shimmering in rainbow colors by the brazier light. On another shelf, a solid cylinder of something too coated in dust to discern still stood at a jaunty angle as the shelf below it had tilted to one side.

I drew my sword and crept into the room. At the far wall, there were a half dozen doors, leading who knew where. In the floor, the flagstones gave way in places to holes that might have been fire-pits but were now filled with nothing but rust and dust. There were other channels carved into the floor, crisscrossed with more of the surviving filigree, deep enough to cause a problem if you weren’t paying attention and stepped right into one. Which, of course, I immediately did with a hideous creak of metal. Asher jumped on the spot, but Mercy was too busy digging into the potential bounty of the cabinet to bother.

She’d dislodged the filigree and was now tossing aside filthy scraps of rotten cloth and leather along with the odd marble or glass instrument. The marbles bounced across the floor to fall into one of the other channels, and the glass merely shattered. At last, she came to the dusty cylinder and gave it a wipe with her sleeve, revealing the glass beneath and the brain within. “Ew.”

“Wizards, man.” Laughter rumbled up from my belly. “They keep the weirdest stuff.”

Which was about when the critter in the pit reared up and took a bite out of me.

Chapter 25

“Ow!”

It took me a while to work out what I was even looking at, but by the time that I did, Bestiary was already feeding me more details in that same dry academic drone it always gave me.

Akin to the ashen-waste dwelling dholes, the more aggressive Khorkhoi were ambush predators that relied on their ability to conceal themselves among silty substances to gain the element of surprise when first encountering prey. Their worm-like bodies typically take on the color of whatever materials they are using for concealment, but after a period of gorging when prey becomes available, and the subsequent swelling, the khorkhoi’s natural blood-red coloration became more apparent.

None of which helped me with the four pincer-like hooks arrayed around the thing’s mouth, or the fact that it was currently latched onto my thigh. “Argh! Kill it!”

Asher rolled his eyes. “Certainly, allow me a moment to simply incinerate it with one of my many terribly precise spells.”

“Now hold on, Asher, don’t you waste your energy. Let me shoot it with my janky broken bow and arrows. I’m sure I won’t miss it many, many times and leave Maulkin full of holes.”

The pincers gnashed at my thigh as I grabbed it by the tail and tried to haul it off. The skin beneath the ash was slimy and slick, and my hands slipped right off it. “Guys, it is eating me!”

Mercy sighed. “Maulkin, it is a bug. Just pull it off and stomp it.”

“I’m…” I growled to a halt. ”Fine!”

Snatching the sword from my back, I swung it with all the force I could muster at this awkward angle into the khorkhoi on my leg.

The tail fell off, and the jaws that had only been clamping in place now went into chompy overdrive.

[414/710 Health]

“Ow.”

[411/710 Health]

“Ow.”

[409/710 Health]

“Ow!”

This time I didn’t play it safe. I swung right for the bug-eyed head of the khorkhoi as hard as I could. Which was, of course, when it decided to let go.

“Oh, come on!”

The severed parts of the chompy little monster wriggled around on the flagstones for a bit, then stopped moving. I gave it a stomp for good measure—with the leg that didn’t have a big bloody sword hole in it.

“Did you just hit yourself?”

I grumbled. “Would you rather I hit you?”

“Try it, beef boy.”

I did not try it, despite my flaring temper. If there were any more worm-friends waiting in the ash pits, my prodding around with the tip of my sword did nothing to dislodge them. What I did find down among the ash was a whole load of rusted-out hunks of metal that probably started out life as cauldrons or something. I hauled them out with Artifice and remade my big rock sword as a big iron sword and dumped the hunk of stone on top of the khorkhoi’s remains for good measure. That helped my mood immensely.

With nothing else to do, I wandered over to the doors and was about to haul one open when Asher let out a little yelp. “Wait.”

I waited while he did his little wavy hand thing, feeling out the magic in the room. “I believe that this is another trap, curse, or illusion. Only one of these doors will take us onward, while the others may do us harm.”

“So we’ve got a one in six chance of getting the library?”

“Three in six if we all try a different one.” Mercy abandoned her search through the ruined cabinets. “That is fifty-fifty odds.”

“It is my expert opinion that triggering multiple traps simultaneously may not be in our best interests.” Asher’s sarcasm was so dry you could have used it as kindling.

“Alright then, expert opinion, which door is the right one?”

He did more feeling around while Mercy mouthed, “Jazz hands,” behind his back, and I tried not to laugh.

“I cannot say with any certainty which of these doors is correct. I assume that this was some sort of test for the students of the arcane, or perhaps a security measure to prevent anyone unfamiliar with the library from gaining access to the trove of knowledge that was secured here.”

Great. More wizard nonsense. “Want me to go back up and ask the campus tour guide?”

“I cannot believe that the automated respondent would give away the secrets of the place so readily, and you would most likely be snared by the trap in the room above.”

I groaned my frustration to the heavens and sat down heavily on the floor. “I’m no good at puzzles.”

Mercy opened her mouth to make a crack about how dumb I was, then sat down and shut up. Guess she wasn’t any good at puzzles either.

Asher continued pacing back and forth along the rear wall, examining each of the identical-looking doors in turn. Back and forth. Back and forth.

“Can’t we just zap this one with lightning too?”

“It is my belief that direct interference with the doors will likely result in the triggering of whatever magic hangs ready here.”

I groaned some more. I couldn’t believe that my grand plan to find out where the hell we were meant to be going to find the shards could be derailed by some ancient book-burglar alarm. The same irritation that had been building up since I got chewed on by the khorkhoi boiled over, and I slammed my fist into the flagstones.

The room filled with ghosts. I was so startled that I snatched my hand back, and they all vanished again. More carefully this time, I laid my hand down on the flagstones. The ghosts of students past swarmed all around me, and the air filled up with the wispy ghosts of spells cast long ago and the chatter of excitable voices. It was too much. Too many people. Too much noise. All buzzing at once. Maybe Psychometry would be useful out in the wild places of the world, but where so many people had lived all it did was give me a headache as all the information tried to cram its way in at once. Individual ghosts were like blurs in the midst of all the others, impossible to discern. All I could really make out was the flow of them. Like a big abstract shape made out of all the people who’d been here before.

I blinked a couple of times trying to make sense of it all, then I saw what I was looking for. Over to the rear wall, the tides of ghosts that had been flowing everywhere narrowed down to a single channel. All heading into the second door from the left.

Pushing myself up off the floor, I headed for it. The ghosts of the once-bustling place vanished as I lost contact with the ground, but it wasn’t like I could forget where I was headed. I crossed the room in a few strides and both Mercy and Asher had only just started screaming, “Wait! Stop!” and all their other usual negative stuff when I reached for the door handle and swung it open.

The screaming cut off abruptly. “How did you…”

“You could have…”

“Of all the stupid things that you’ve done since we got here….”

I had no time to listen to the haters, so I stepped through into the library. The first place in all of Amaranth that didn’t look like it had been set on fire or trampled over by giant monsters. Civilization.

There were lamps hanging from the ceiling giving out a lovely blue-green glow, and fur rugs, comfy chairs, and shelves as far as the eyes could see. Hundreds upon hundreds of shelves all stuffed to bursting with books. Asher literally gasped when he saw them all. He was going to be in little nerdy heaven. Even Mercy looked suitably impressed by it all.

I sank down onto one of the longer chairs and it groaned alarmingly, but by being ever so careful as I shuffled around and lay down, I managed to not collapse it. In prime napping position, I finally let myself relax and close my eyes. Mission accomplished.

Mercy kicked me. “How the hell did you do that?”

“Lucky guess?”

“Don’t lie to me, beefy.” She jabbed me with an arrow. “Don’t ever lie to me.”

“Oh, for the gods’ sake. I used my new spirit touch thing to see which door people used to use. It isn’t rocket science.”

The latest prod was even more brutal than the last. “Why are you acting like this isn’t a big deal? You can see the past!”

Begrudgingly, I opened my eyes. “And Asher can fart out black holes. We’ve got god powers now. Did you think they were all going to be small-fry stuff like making you new arrows out of thin air?”

That seemed to leave her speechless, but Asher was kind enough to let out a squeal of delight from the far side of the room that gave her an excuse to run off without admitting I was right. After that, I’ve got to admit things got a little bit hazy for a while. I was warm and comfortable. That old book smell was wafting through the place, we were making progress towards the next shard, and nobody was actively trying to kill me. I fell asleep with a big smile plastered on my face.

If I dreamed, I couldn’t remember, but I was still pretty warm and content when I opened my eyes and saw a manic-looking Asher hanging over me with what I assume was a grin on his face. “We have learned so much, friend Maulkin. So very much.”

Mercy was draped upside down on one of the smaller chairs, feet in the air and a book covering her face. Her snoring sounded kind of like a buzz-saw. It was kind of amazing that I’d slept through it for so long.

“Asher, did you sleep?”

“What need have we Eternals for sleep? And who among us could sleep in the face of such a cornucopia of wonders. Look here, a book on the sentient species of Amaranth. And here, a treatise on the workings of magic. I could spend the rest of my eternity here learning and not consider a moment of it wasted.”

“Shame we’ve actually got to use that information to do things really.”

“Ah yes, indeed. Quite a pitiable plight. Regardless, there is so much that I have learned, even though I have tried to restrict myself to pursuing information pertinent to our quest. I believe that I have tracked the provenance of several of them through historical accountings of the Revelation of Araphel.”

“Awesome. What have you got?”

“The shard bequeathed to the wyrms is likely still in the possession of the Great Black Wyrm Tsangaanax, known also as the Twilight Betrayer and the Alvarsbane. While a great number of the wyrms allied themselves with Araphel during the revelation, mostly in opposition to their ancestral enemies, the Alvaren, Tsangaanax turned against him in the latter years of the war, providing vital intelligence to the mortal races before finally joining in the final decisive battles to drive the Voidgod’s armies back.”

From beneath her book, Mercy groaned, “Did we not already know this?”

“Ah, we knew the shard was passed to a wyrm, but now we have his name, and supplemental reading has confirmed to me that the lifespan of wyrms is such that the very same wyrm is still liable to hold it.”

I sighed. “Okay, so we know the wyrm has one in his wyrm hole, wherever that is. We have the Alvaren one. The human one is at the Shattered Bastion, wherever that is. What about the rest?”

“The Dvergar shard appears to have passed into the hands of a smith-king by the name of Vidar Forgeborn who set off to found a kingdom somewhere in the frozen north beyond the ash wastes. Its guardianship seems to have been passed down his bloodline, though little information seems to have come south about it.”

Mercy moaned, “Super helpful.”

“The Faun shard was passed into the hands of an individual known as the… Well, I believe that the word translates into War Chief or Hunt Leader? It does not seem that Faun typically share their given names with outsiders, or rather, not a given name but an earned name—one bestowed upon them for some great feat of martial or hunting prowess. As a matter of fact, it is interesting that—”

I didn’t slap him despite all of my instincts screaming at me to do so. “The shard! Asher.”

“Ah yes. The chieftess did not feel that any of her replacements were suitable bearers for the shard, so it seems that she, uh, died with it. Carried it with her into the realm of the dead? There seems to be a translation issue. I imagine, and intently hope, that it simply means that there is a Faun burial mound somewhere where the shard has been entombed.”

“Super specific.” Mercy let the book fall off her face to land with a splat. “Good job. So helpful.”

Asher let out a little huff of irritation. “The study of shard-lore appears to be a fringe interest in this world at best, more mythology than anything of substance. There seem to have been true believers circulating the stories that they had available but little in the way of active research or archiving. It was pure luck that we seem to have stumbled upon the trove of someone with such an active interest.”

She tried to scoff and choked on her own spittle because she was upside down. “So even the dorks of fantasy land thought that this guy was a dork?”

“I believe that they considered him to be a scholar of great esteem, and a master of the arcane arts of such power and renown that when the time came to found a school for magic, it was to him that they turned.” He pointed to the weathered oil painting upon the wall of the same long-haired and bearded man as in the auto-greeter. “The Archmage Talon.”

He said it with so much of a dramatic pause that even Mercy had to respect it. She sat there in awed silence for a whole second before blurting, “Who?”

Maybe I laughed just a little bit, but I didn’t mean to. Doesn’t that count for something? Asher looked at me with betrayal in his eyes. “If you had been pursuing the actual research that was required of us, as I so desperately pleaded with you to do, then you would already be aware that the Archmage Talon was an Eternal. One who waged war upon Araphel and claimed the Eternal’s shard in recompense for his efforts.”

That was enough to finally get my attention. “Wait. So that shard was here too? Talon was here?”

“Indeed. Not only was he here, but it seems that he remained here for centuries after the downfall of Araphel. Here he gathered all knowledge of magic in the wake of the unanticipated annihilation of the Alvaren to preserve it against the passage of time and to ensure that it was available to all who sought it out. Dvergar, humans, and even Inyoka were welcomed here to study.”

I found my voice dropping low. “Not faun though.”

Asher looked uncomfortable for only a moment before saying, “I could not find any record of Faun that applied to attend.”

“Bet nobody was too upset about it,” I grumbled to myself.

Mercy rubbed her temples. “Guys, nobody cares about faun school attendance right now. The immortal wizard with the shard. Where is he?”

“Given that this was our most promising lead, this was where I directed most of my attention during my research. It is my belief that as the student population declined, our man Talon began to devote himself more and more to research before finally withdrawing entirely from public life to give his passions full focus.”

Mercy was practically vibrating with irritation. “Yeah, but where?” I was starting to wonder if Asher was taking his time with every answer out of pure spite. If he was, it was pretty funny.

“Well, my friends, that is where things began to become more interesting from the standpoint of a researcher. Talon withdrew from public life with the intention of being left in peace, so most references to his private estate have been deliberately left out of the records here. However, I have found students’ notes that refer to him traveling from his estate to lecture and then returning to his estate on the very same day.”

“So it is somewhere nearby?” Mercy cocked an eyebrow. “That seems…weirdly convenient. This guy is some kind of expert on the shards, and he doesn’t know anything about one on his own doorstep this whole time? They could be anywhere in the world, but they just so happen to be right here?”

“Perhaps we could account for it with the inevitability of our fated arrival at a later date, but alas no, I do not believe that the mage’s keep is anywhere close to us.” Asher sighed. “The same student accounts mention him bringing tropical fruits and exotic birds with him to their classes, sometimes for study but primarily to amuse. Rather than dwelling nearby, I believe that he had a means of traveling great distances swiftly through magic.”

“Which leaves us with the entire world to search.” Mercy flopped limp again. “Oh no, only the warm parts. Great.”

Asher clapped his hands in delight. “Yes, of course, let us wander aimlessly because there could not have been any information on this frankly miraculous piece of arcana being performed for the first time in history in the library of a school of magic.”

Mercy rotated herself until she was sitting upright and opened her mouth to snarl a reply. Then she closed it again. Then finally when it seemed she might actually burst, she mumbled, “You can be a real smug dick, you know that.”

“With insights like that, I am amazed that you were not the one to find the extensive documentation on the Waystone Project.”

Before the bickering could start again, I jumped in, “The big floaty ring thing?”

Asher’s attention snapped back to me. He seemed to come alive when he was lecturing, like the cold fish of our little gang just needed a bit of reading time to get warmed up. “Indeed. A series of them were constructed with the intent of providing safe passage between the remaining bastions of civilization, while thwarting the movement of the monstrous species that overrun the world yet seem for the most part incapable of magic.”

I grinned, rising up from my seat. Finally, some good news! “Wait, so we can just go through the magic rings and go anywhere?”

“Unfortunately, no.” I sank back into my seat with a groan as Asher rambled on. “It seems that construction of additional pylons in the network was reliant upon agreements of co-operation between the various kingdoms that had sprung up in the aftermath of the Revelation and—”

“People acted like people and screwed it all up.” I pouted. “Figures.”

“There was no small number constructed, even if the more extensive network was not completed, and if we were to follow them along, it is likely we would encounter other bastions of civilization from the years following the Revelation. However, it does appear that by the end, the only one using the Waystones was our reclusive friend, Talon. The spell required to activate the Waystones seems to have been scrubbed from the records here quite thoroughly. It seems that Talon did not wish to face the possibility of visitation through magical means when he retired to solitude.”

Mercy’s scowl had not diminished in the time since I’d last looked her way. She’d be so much prettier if she’d just smiled. And I’d be full of so many arrows if I suggested it. “So all of this helps us how?”

“Quite simple, dear Mercy. All that is required of us is to follow the Waystones along their course, and we shall find our way to the reclusive Talon and the shard that he retains in his possession. An ally and the vital object that we require.”

Mercy let out an exasperated grunt. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we can’t fly. How are we meant to follow those floaty rings out to sea?”

“Well, I did wonder if perhaps Maulkin might provide us with that solution.” He couldn’t smile without lips, but he made an attempt. “Do you have any experience points left with which to purchase the Sailing skill?”

I grinned. “You know what? I just might.”

For all that we had worried, Witchglass Overlook really wasn’t all that imposing on the way out. The biggest challenge was convincing Asher to part with some of the books that he wanted to borrow so that whatever boat I built didn’t immediately sink to the bottom of the ocean under the sheer weight of paper. As it was, he had me carrying so many of the damned things that even my Potency was strained to its limits.

We traipsed up the stairs, and I was fully expecting to have to make some mad dash across the ever-extending hall again, but as it turned out, the Overlook wanted us out again as quickly as possible. The distance between the front and back of the room felt like a few strides, even though a backward glance still showed it sticking out way over where the land should have stopped. I took back what I said about magic before, being able to shoot lightning out of my elbow wasn’t worth all the weirdness it entailed.

The upper levels of the building, the halls of residence, and the classrooms remained unexplored. If it got to the end of the day without our boat being finished then maybe we’d go looking for beds, but right now, aside from the mountain of reading material I was laden with, I was feeling more energized than I had been since we landed on this rock.

We left Asher in the sunshine, curled up with what I have to assume was a good book from the fact he didn’t even look up from it when we left, and headed down to the beach to see if there was enough driftwood to work with or if I’d need to go looking for a copse of trees to make into planks.

Down the rabbit trail we wandered, sun glinting off the big floaty ring and the shimmering sea. There was a little breeze in the air, like early autumn back home. I didn’t want to jinx anything by saying I was content, but it was nice.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, you know.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Huh?”

Mercy wasn’t looking at me. She was very deliberately looking at the sand, hunting around for wood to build our boat. She was technically meant to be along to watch my back while I did Artifice stuff, but I appreciated the help. “You keep getting annoyed when I say you’re dumb. You aren’t dumb. You’re sort of smart. Kind of.”

“Thanks. You’re not a bitch.” I grinned at her when her head snapped around. “You’re sort of nice. Kind of.”

Her exasperated sigh was so familiar at this point that I could probably recognize it anywhere. Descending from a hiss to a huff. “I’m trying to apologize here.”

“You think that is an apology? And you call me dumb?”

“You…f… Okay. Okay.” Her knuckles were white on the handle of her bow, and I couldn’t see the other side, but I’d bet good money it was a fist too. “I deserve most of that.”

“Okay.” I got back to work, slipping in and out of my body, and sending pulses of my will out through the sand to search for anything useful in my Sphere of Influence. There were a few hunks of wood down beneath the surface, some shells, and things too, rocks here and there, but nothing substantial enough to make it worth the effort of hauling up to the surface. Not yet anyway.

Mercy scuffed her heel in the sand. “So are we cool, or?”

For the god’s sake. “We were cool until you kept making things weird and awkward.”

“Okay. Uh cool.”

I loomed over her and practically growled. “Cool.”

Along we went with me pulsing all the way, my body going limp and vacant as I jumped out of it then hopped back in again before it took the next step and stumbled. My face was slack and empty when I was out of my body, looking like the face I’d see when my computer back home powered down and I was left staring into my own reflection on black. “I am pretty stupid.”

She almost stumbled. “Hey, what? Is this because I said… No, you’re not. You’re not stupid.”

“No, I really am. It is okay. It’s better. I’m good with being stupid. Stupid is fun. Smart people are miserable. Just look at Asher. So smart he killed himself.”

“So smart I’m going to kill him too,” she muttered under her breath. “But even if you aren’t, uh, traditionally smart, I shouldn’t be ragging on you for it.”

“Hey, it isn’t your fault. What other bad things could you say about me? Nothing.” I grinned. “I’m a half-ton of sex on legs.”

She broke down laughing. Real laughter for the first time in days. It was like music to my ears. Really wheezy music. Bagpipes?

After that we settled back into companionable silence, for the most part, finally giving up on driftwood and heading back over the dunes to scout out some promising trees. I didn’t really fancy bringing down any of the red-blossom trees—I had a nasty suspicion that they were going to start bleeding or screaming if I cut into them, and I just didn’t have the bandwidth for that today. Screaming shrubberies would have to keep until tomorrow.

There was a bristle of dead trees out among the dead grass on the far side of the Overlook, dried out and salt-crusted from their time by the seaside. I didn’t even have to chop them down really, just pull on them and they’d pop right out of the ground.

With my new sailing skill, the shapes of ships were floating around in the soup of my brain now, and with the careful application of Rough Hewn Architecture, I was fairly sure I could get us something rustic-looking but waterproof to work with.

Getting the wood down to the beach was a little bit trickier but not much. Using the dead grass and Artifice, I was able to spin out some ropes, which I figured would come in handy later in the boat building anyway, and Mercy spent a good half an hour giggling while she tied the various logs onto me like I was a dog on a leash.

It took some straining and puffing to get all the wood moving, but once it was going, there was no stopping me. I took the dunes at a run, feet skidding beneath me even as every single log tried to dig into the sand and anchor me in place. Mercy’s cackling followed me everywhere that I went, an endless litany of snorts and wheezes all the way up each slope and all the way down again. I would have complained that she wasn’t doing anything to help, but honestly, there wasn’t much that she could do. This was a job for a beast of burden, and I was our best available version of that.

With all the wood down, I set to work. This wasn’t as simple as banging together the bits of a sword. I had to go slow and steady, assembling parts of the boat rather than the whole thing. Every time I tried to make something too complex, the blackened and cracked pillar of Artifice began to tremor, and since I really didn’t fancy bleeding out through every orifice in my body again, I opted to take my time. It wasn’t like we were in a rush anyway. The other benefit of a day with nothing frantic happening was that I actually got the chance to fully heal up, using Restoration every time it flickered back to life. By midday, I was back to my full load of hit points. I felt great.

The only downside of slow and steady was that Mercy got bored fast. “Careful that rope doesn’t loop around your neck and hang you.”

I pointed behind her without looking up. “Careful you don’t sink into that quicksand.”

“Careful you don’t fall over and impale yourself on your own horns.”

“Careful you don’t fall over and suffocate on your own giant ass.”

She paused for a second. “How would that even work?”

“On normal people, it wouldn’t. With your giant ass, anything is possible.”

She stood up and twisted around to get a look at herself, finally noticing that one cheek was dangling out and sandy. She slapped the sand off. “My ass is perfect.”

“Are you kidding, that thing? Have you seen the buns they gave me?” I got up onto my knees and bent over the length of prow I was working on curving, giving her a full-on view of my rear. “You could crack an egg on this thing!”

She sank back into her seat. “Careful you don’t fall and sit on any eggs.”

“Have you really got nothing better to do?”

She grinned. “Nope.”

As the sun started slipping back down behind the cliffs, Mercy and I headed up to see how much of his stack Asher had managed to read through. We made it as far as the gates of the Overlook before the back of my neck started to prickle. “Uh.”

Mercy slowed to look at me, and then stopped dead. “What?”

I closed my eyes and let my senses swoop out into my Sphere of Influence. Something wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what. My senses just couldn’t reach far enough. Regretting everything, I dropped down to one knee and placed the palm of my hand on the dirt of the path.

Swarms of ghosts rushed through me. This was the only entrance to the courtyard from the outside, so everyone who’d ever come in had walked right by here. The choke point of the library was nothing compared to this. Thousands upon thousands of people through the centuries all passing right through me, making me shudder at their touch, making me hear snippets of their memories. Tiny fragments that meant nothing. Then abruptly the flow slowed to a trickle. Then to droplets, a Dvergar. The croc monster. Some humans. I rode it out. A long silence. Then I saw us come strolling through. Then the Alvaren. “Oh shit.”

Mercy looked from me to the open gateway. “Trouble?”

“Always.”

From inside, a lilting voice called out, “It would appear that the two of you have finally become aware of our presence, but I would remind you that we still have your pet snake hostage. Come on in slowly, and do not even consider reaching for your weapons if you wish for it to remain on this side of the veil of death.”

I wondered if there were some special elocution lessons that they sent little baby Alvaren off to so that they could learn how to talk to people like they were dirt. Mercy met my eyes. “What do we do?”

“Stay behind me.”

Before she had the chance to argue, I walked in.

There were a pair of Alvaren paladins with their blades drawn on either side of the gate, lounging there like unruly teens. The other Alvaren were slipping out from their hiding places now that their cover was blown, and a pair of them dragged an unconscious Asher out from behind his stack of books by the tail. A few more with bows sidled out of the out-buildings, and a couple more of them dropped down from where they’d been hiding on top of the tiled porch area in sniper positions. If any of them had decided to hide in the main building then the various traps and curses must have still been holding onto them. I gave Mercy a quick glance and a meaningful nod towards that door. If she could get in there and run, they’d all be stuck in an endless loop, and she could take her time shooting them. That was Plan B.

Another Alvaren unfolded herself from behind the book stack and sauntered out. Her swords were still at her hips, her smug expression impenetrable. “There is a good boy. Who’s a good boy? Come on over here now, boy. Come on over and nobody has to cut into your friend.”

Step by begrudging step, I moved into the courtyard. Mercy turned so her back was to me, keeping an eye on the duo by the gate who’d sidled over to block our escape. Grabbing Asher and smashing out through them was Plan A. I didn’t like our odds against all the archers, but if I kept my body between Mercy and them, we had a chance of making it out. Or she did at least. If I made sure that my pin-cushion body dropped in the doorway, it was liable to give her some good running time, and it looked like they’d sent away their gryphons—if they’d even ridden them here to start with.

“Such a good boy.” She turned to the other Alvaren, her golden hair flowing and shimmering in the sunset. “You see, it is just as I always told you. The lesser species can be trained so easily with a little praise and the promise of kindness.”

I snorted in disbelief. “Kindness?”

“Is it not kindness that stays my hand and leaves your wyrm-spawn breathing?”

Mercy deadpanned, “I’m going to go with no?”

I held up my hands to show that they were empty. “Listen, why don’t you let them go. I’m the one that you want. I’m the one with the shard.”

Mercy kicked me in the back of the leg. “Don’t tell them that!”

“Shard?”

“The thing you are here for. The shard. The shard of the Rusted Blade? The one your queenie wants to jam back in your big glowing pyramid to turn you all back into svart?”

There was no sign of confusion among the Alvaren, their carefully schooled facial expressions did not change, but there was a sudden stillness that gave away just how desperately they were trying not to show anything.

Blondie appeared entirely unfazed. “You believe that you can sow dissent among us? You think that you could make us turn against our empress with such blatant deception. I must inform you that it will not work.”

“Honey, I’ve got nothing to gain here. You got the drop on us. You’ve won. We’ve lost. You’re going to kill me and take the shard anyway. I don’t care about that. I just want you to let my friends go.”

She scoffed as she strolled over to meet me halfway. “What possible purpose would it serve for the illustrious Briar By Moonlight to corrupt the consummation of our magical power and render her willing servants into those degenerate beasts?”

“The hell would I know? Why don’t you ask her?” I shrugged. “Maybe before you hand her the shard.”

This close I could really see how pretty this Alvaren was. I mean, they were all pretty, but I’ve always been a sucker for blondes, and this one even had little freckles across the bridge of her nose. I didn’t think I’d seen a single hint of a blemish on any of the other ones. Though the prettiness was kind of spoiled by her expression of utter contempt. “You were the ones who corrupted us. You were the ones who used that stolen artifact to transform us into mindless rutting animals.”

“Honey, I haven’t even been here a week. You’ve been svart for thousands of years. That doesn’t add up.”

“Your kin, your ancestors. The slave-beasts and wyrm-servants, risen up to drag their betters down into the filth alongside them.” She even smelled nice. How do you spend millennia as a goblin and come out smelling like flowers? That didn’t even make sense.

“Then why does Briar want the shard back so bad? Wouldn’t she want it as far away from your floaty castle as possible if jamming it in the pyramid makes you all monsters?”

She clearly didn’t have an answer for that, so she went with the default. “It is not our place to question her judgment.”

“Well, whoever’s place it is better do it quick.” I paused and thought about it for a second. “Actually no. I’ve changed my mind; just give her the shard without asking any questions. Svart were way easier to deal with than you assholes.”

“You impudent filth.” Her open palm clattered across my jaw.

[708/710 Health]

I gave her a bloody grin. “That’s it, baby, talk dirty to me.”

She stepped back with disgust breaking through her neutral mask, and I called after her, “Wait, come back. I’m not done yet. Hit me harder.”

She went for her sword, and everything was about to get really messy when Mercy’s laughter swept over us. She was laughing so hard she ended up breathless and doubled over on herself. “You just can’t help yourself can you?”

“Hey, if I’ve got to die, at least I can have fun doing it.”

“Rest assured, scum, your death is now a necessity for my continued wellbeing. Yet first I shall complete the quest that has been granted to me by the most gracious Briar By Moonlight. Return the artifact to me, and I shall ensure that your suffering is minimal.”

“Ooh, swing and a miss. Counter-offer. Why don’t you get down on your dainty little Alvaren knees and suck my—”

Her blades were drawn faster than I could see them moving, one spinning towards my throat and the other darting out, point first, aimed at the region of my anatomy that I had been pointing to just a moment before.

I tried to jump back, but Mercy was there, and I ended up bowling her over as I fell in a heap. “Oh my gods, your giant ass.”

Blondie didn’t come after me, she hadn’t even moved from the spot, but her sneer said more than words ever could. That same playground bully smirk. Why are you hitting yourself? Why did you flinch? That was when it finally clicked in my head, they weren’t monsters anymore, they were something worse.

Mercy wriggled out from underneath me, and I clambered back to my feet, every one of the Alvaren arrayed around us had that same expression of amused contempt. Screw that.

I reached up and drew my sword. “Meet you in the library.”

She glanced from me to the Alvaren all around. None of them had reached for weapons. None of them thought that we were any sort of threat anymore. Good. Let them underestimate us. “Asher?”

He was still lying immobile and bloodied up by the pile of books he’d been so happy with just a few hours ago. “I’ll do what I can.”

“You want a fight, do you?” I spun my sword overhand. Still, the archers didn’t even twitch. They thought I was a joke. They thought their little leader was going to knock me about. Good. “Come on then, blondie. You and me. Let’s dance.”

“Please do not embarrass yourself further. You are…livestock.” She looked me up and down without any change to that sneer. More posturing. “It is obvious that I am far beyond your capabilities.”

“Oh yeah?” I bellowed. “Which way to the lecture halls?”

She raised a perfectly planed eyebrow. “What?”

The silver tiles exploded up out of the ground and came zipping over towards us. Blondie was fast, way too fast for me, but even she couldn’t outpace a hundred mirrored fragments flying straight at her. She parried them away in a blur of blades, knocking them aside only for them to come buzzing back in a moment later. There were a hundred of them or more, all in orbit, all trying to form a helpful tour-guide and being interrupted by some unknown obstacle.

I couldn’t have asked for a better distraction. My sword glinted in the dying light as I held it aloft, then made a beautiful hiss as it descended. In the midst of the intricate dance of parries, the blonde Alvaren caught a glimpse of me, and her sword came up to meet mine. It made no difference. She might have been skilled and fast and beautiful, but none of that did jack when you had a massive slab of metal coming down on you.

She managed to turn my blade enough that it didn’t hit her straight in the face, but there was no stopping that kind of momentum. The short sword in her hand pinged out of her grip and skidded across the plaza, the flat of my sword hammered into the top of her head, and she went down in a delicate heap.

Mercy was off and running. The girl knew how to work a distraction. The Alvaren meanwhile seemed to be paralyzed with surprise. Perfect.

I charged at the two guarding Asher. They stood their ground, but they made no move to kill their hostage. I was going to call that a win too. I came at them with my blade whipping around in a horizontal arc, just above the level of my waist and just about the level of their face.

They probably would have dodged it quite readily if it weren’t for my dear friend Talon. The mirrored form of him finally assembled behind the Alvaren and loudly declared, “The lecture halls are located on the eastern end of the second story in the main building, please take care to access only the halls to which you have been assigned as preventative wards are in place outside certain lectures to prevent the unwarranted spread of certain techniques without the proper training.”

Both Alvaren spun on the spot to face this new threat, and my sword carved clean through their beautiful flowing locks and their elegant necks.

Blood sprayed over Talon’s mirrored face, but the automaton didn’t flinch. That was more good news. I really didn’t fancy dealing with psycho magic robot security systems as well as all these Alvaren.

Enough time had passed for their faculties to come back online, and the remaining Alvaren all had arrows trained on me now, except the two who’d been blocking the gate who were sprinting over at full pelt. Both of them ran at exactly the same speed, with the same motions. They were like synchronized swimmers, except fully armed, armored, and set on causing my painful death. So only a bit like synchronized swimmers.

Lucky for me I didn’t have to fight them. I grabbed Asher by the back of his bloody robes, put my head down, and ran.

Maybe I could have dodged the arrows if I’d been thinking straight, but in that moment, all that I wanted was to get Asher out of their reach before they could kill him. Restoration pulsed through my hand and into him as we moved, but he was in no fit state to run for himself yet, and I wasn’t convinced I could have put him down if I wanted to.

We passed between the two archers by the great hall entrance while they were lining up their next shots, and we made it over the threshold before the next pair of arrows hit me in the pits of my knees.

With one last grunt of effort, I managed to fling Asher into the room so I wouldn’t land on him as I came down like a fallen oak, but I doubted he’d be thanking me for it after he bounced off that table leg.

It hurt like hell when I snapped the arrows off in my legs, but I didn’t have any other options if I wanted to move, and I really needed to move.

“We should look upon this thing with pity. It is a beast not even fit to be served on these tables. It is cast aside like an offcut.” The archers had moved in. Great.

“Pity was what Serendipitous Winds showed to him, and you saw how her kindness was repaid. I say we put the creature out of its misery and be done with it.” I wasn’t sure if they thought that I couldn’t speak Alvaren or if they just didn’t think I could understand speech, but either way, I was getting sick of them speaking over me.

With a roar of effort, I flung myself forward. Their bowstrings sang behind me, and I waited for the pain, but it didn’t come. The hall had stretched out deeper when I moved into it, and now their arrows were stuck in that same infinite loop as me, never making it any farther forward. All of us were trapped in the distortion.

Every time I slapped my hand on the  ground to drag myself forward, a cloud of ghosts rushed in around me. I could barely see in front of my own face. Reminder to self. Gloves. The chatter of the long-dead deafened me. Their feet flowing by my face left me blind to the death creeping up behind me. My hand squelched into the dropped chicken before I saw it. I didn’t even know the Alvaren had caught up to me until I felt one grinding a boot-heel into the bloody back of my knee.

“A clever trick for an oaf, but the magics of your betters shall not avail you.” The bows had been stowed and daggers drawn. I rolled onto my back like an animal submitting, tummy in the air. Just like they thought I would. What else would a wounded animal do? They stepped away from me smirking, and I pulsed Restoration and closed the holes in my legs.

[710/710 Health]

The chicken was still in my hand, so I held it up. “One last meal?”

“You expect us to stand by and watch you eat? You must jest.”

“Not a last meal for me. For you.” I lunged up and smacked him in the face with the chicken.

I had the element of surprise on my side—partly because they had no way of knowing I’d healed enough to jump up like that, but mostly because nobody ever expects to be smacked in the face with a chicken.

He reared back from me, spitting as he went, but it was too late. The curse took hold. One minute he was snarling at me, pretty as a picture, and the next his whole face turned into a bubbling mess of meat and gore.

He wasn’t even dead yet, he was still screaming as his throat bubbled away to nothing, but I guess that he was dead enough for Amaranth to count it. Either that or the gods had just decided to grant me glory for killing a man with a chicken.

I spun to look for the other Alvaren, but she’d already crossed the distance to Asher and had her dagger to his throat. “Not another step, trickster.”

My sword was still lying on the ground useless, so I held up my empty hands to show I was harmless, manfully resisting the urge to lick my fingers clean of chicken grease. “Let’s just be cool here. Okay.”

“What matters the temperature? Your pet dies if you take another step. Mark my words.”

“I’m marking them! I’m marking them.”

That was when Asher’s eyes snapped open, revealing his two sets of eyelids to me once again and sending an unsettling shiver down my spine. His voice came out croaky, “Maulkin?”

The Alvaren pressed her dagger in tighter against his throat. “Not another sound from you wyrm-spawn or I’ll slit you down to your gizzard and call it a good day’s work.”

“Let’s just be calm here.” I was using that special voice I saved for small children and dangerous animals. “Talk things through rationally.”

Her eyes bulged in her head. Turns out the minute they lost their cool, all the elegance of the Alvaren was overtaken by their weirdness. “There is nothing to be spoken of. You will not move or I shall slay him.”

I was very careful not to move. “Okay. Then what?”

She snarled, her perfect white teeth shimmering in the dull glow of my eyes. “Then he shall be deceased. He shall be no more.”

“And then I’ll shred you.”

All the color drained from her face. “You dare to threaten me as I hold a blade to your…”

Maybe I could have phrased that better. “No you don’t get it. If you kill him, I’ll kill you. We both lose.” I held my hands up a little higher. “So let’s talk about how we can both win. Yeah?”

Her eyes darted from me to the glow of the door to the outside world. I pretended that all her buddies weren’t out there planning their next move. “There is naught that you have to offer and no promise you could make that I would trust. In this, we are at an impasse.”

“If we swap places real slow, you can walk away.” I sidled a step to the right, and she tensed up. “I won’t come after you. I won’t try to hurt you. Even if I wanted to, you could outrun me, yeah?”

“You think that you can outwit me, you idiot-ape?” She dragged Asher tight against her chest. “I will slit his throat and then yours just as readily. Neither of you is a match for me. While you were but babes in the cradle, I had already mastered the blade and bow twelve hundred times over. You think that you know strength? You are nothing to me. I shall return to my queen with your head as a prize.”

I took another step, and blood trickled from Asher’s throat. “I mean, maybe? But hadn’t all your other dudes mastered the bow and sword and stuff too? I made chunks out of them.”

“Trickery. They were bested through trickery. Not by your skill or your strength of arms.”

It is hard to shrug with your hands up. Feels a bit like a one-man Mexican wave. “A win is a win, right?”

“Of course, lowborn scum like you would think it so. Honor has passed your people by since they first crawled from the mud.” She wasn’t loosening her grip on Asher, and I didn’t like the look of helplessness in his eyes. I’d felt like that enough in one lifetime to know just how much it sucked.

“Kind of missing the point here. If you kill him, me and my bag of dishonorable tricks are coming for you.”

A dismayed shout echoed out from behind us, then the thrum of bowstrings. I was out of time to do this without bloodshed. The rest of the Alvaren were piling in through the door, rattling off a volley at my back that was never going to make it. The paladins from the gates would be crossing the stretched distance towards us even now.

The Alvaren in front of me was watching them closing in on us with a grin. “It seems that your well of tricks has run dry.”

It didn’t have to end this way. I sighed. “Asher. Light my candle.”

It only took him the length of a blink to realize what I was saying. He had been right when he mentioned that cantrip before, it was instantaneous. He just made a little flick with his clawed fingers, and one of the candelabras I’d knocked over throughout the day suddenly flickered back to life.

The spell on the hall reverberated and died once more, and it snapped back to its usual length an instant after the candles were lit. The arrows that this Alvaren and her dead buddy had fired at me earlier hammered into the flagstones a few feet back, and the arrows that her friends had fired at me from the doorway continued on their smooth arch through the air and right into her.

Never let it be said that I can’t do math. Adding and subtracting, maybe I’ll struggle a bit. Multiplication and division, yeah okay that is hard. Algebra? I don’t know her. But angles? I’ve got that on lock. Maybe it was the kind of math you learned playing pool rather than the kind you learned in a classroom, but you had to admit it was effective.

One arrow took her high in the chest, one flitted past her ear, another went clean through her cheek, and the last one slammed home with a juicy pop, right into her eye.

She toppled over backward, and Asher shrugged her limp arms off his shoulders. “We must flee. They are coming in great numbers.”

He mostly said that to my fleeing back as I pounded across the room, pausing only long enough to scoop up my sword and glance back. As it turned out, the reason they’d been waiting outside was for reinforcements. Either there had been one hell of a lot more Alvaren still hiding out there that I’d missed, or more had shown up. Neither option made me happy.

“Run faster!” Mercy bellowed from the stairwell as she launched arrow after arrow over our heads and managed to hit absolutely nothing. The Alvaren were too smart and too fast. They used cover when they could, and dodged easily around the shots that couldn’t be avoided entirely. I never knew that I could miss the svart so much. Maybe giving them back the shard wasn’t such a bad idea if it meant they all turned back into tiny goblin morons and left us alone.

I caught Mercy around the thighs as we passed through the door, and she went right on firing up at the Alvaren on our heels over my shoulder as we darted down the stairs. “We need them distracted before we hit the library.”

Asher started mumbling a spell as he stumbled breathlessly down the stairs, but Mercy interrupted him. “I got it.”

He cocked his head. “You do?”

“I do.” Slinging her bow behind her back, Mercy closed her eyes for just a moment before spreading out her arms.

Like a miracle, a wall of fire leapt up behind us, blazing blue-hot but just transparent enough for me to see the vapid looks on the Alvaren’s faces when they nearly plowed into it. If any of them had eyebrows left, I’d be extremely surprised. “Nice.”

All of this time, I’d been using Artifice and all the rest without thinking how it must have looked to the people around us. Even here in this world of magic and monsters, it was something spectacular. Something awesome—in the original meaning of the word. It filled anyone that looked at it with awe.

Mercy jostled herself into a more comfortable perch, grabbing onto my horns like they were handlebars. “I had to start using some god powers eventually. Now seemed like a good time to show off.”

Asher wheezed with what might have been laughter. “A most impressive display of Creation. Bravo.”

At a full sprint, we crossed the testing rooms and into the library, slamming the door shut behind us. Asher doubled over, trying to catch his breath. I tossed Mercy onto a sofa, but she bounced off and onto her feet. “How long will your fire last?”

She looked sheepish. “Without wood? A few seconds maybe? I don’t know. It’s my first time.”

I clasped my hand to my chest. “Aww, you gave up your fire virginity for us.”

“Thanks for making it weird.”

“Any time.”

Asher had his hands up and his eyes closed, his other senses doing their thing. “The way is shut, the illusions and traps have been restored to their rightful place, and the Alvaren will struggle to find us here if we simply remain quiet.”

“Then what?” Mercy came around and gave my shin a gentle kick for throwing her. “Just hope they get bored and wander off?”

“Quite the contrary, my dear Mercy. My hope is that they immediately begin opening doors in the hopes of finding us, triggering whatever lethal surprises the Archmage Talon left in place to defend his library.

Judging from the sudden sonic boom from the other side of the door and Asher’s lipless smile, it seemed likely that was exactly what had happened. There was some screaming and thumping too, though the thick walls and door of the library worked wonders to keep the volume low.

Only a moment later there was a roar and squelching noise loud enough to make it through once more. Door number two.

“How many do you think are left?”

Asher shook his head. “Too many.”

I joined him by the door, ostensibly to brace it with my shoulder but also to stretch out my Lifesense to its limits and see what there was to see. There were a dozen Alvaren in reach of my Sphere of Influence and twice as many dead. A dhole lay in finely chopped pieces on the floor—the super-size-meal death worm had the dying flickers of a good few Alvaren inside it, so at least it died doing what it loved. Eating people. The added bonus of that big dumb worm was that most of its corpse was heaped up against our door, making it more likely the Alvaren were going to be dumb enough to open one of the others.

Sadly, they weren’t quite that stupid. They retreated out of my Sphere of Influence into the stairwell to regroup. “Okay, there’s still at least twelve of them out there.”

Mercy rolled her shoulders and plucked her bow off her back. “Four each? I like those odds.”

“I do not care for them, personally,” Asher whispered back, speaking so comically quiet that he was obviously trying to make a point about how loud we were being. “Even a single paladin has proven the match of any one of us.”

I shrugged. “Speak for yourself. I’ve been kicking their asses up and down the road all day.”

“We lack the numbers required to brute-force our way through this situation. A more finessed plan will be necessary.”

I turned to face him with a grin. “Alright. Hit me with it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your plan,” Mercy groaned. “What is your plan?”

“I have no plan. I was merely observing the necessity of developing one while we have a moment’s reprieve.”

Mercy pinched the bridge of her nose. “You are the most useless—”

I cut off her rant before it could get any steam. “She was really worried about you when they had you prisoner you know.”

“I… My thanks to you both for the swift rescue. I was taken quite unawares.”

I chuckled. “We figured from the fact that you hadn’t burned the whole place down that they got the drop on you.”

Something tickled across the top of my head, and I reached up to brush away the imaginary spider before I realized that it wasn’t my physical body but my Sphere of Influence that was being touched. I closed my eyes and let my life-sense stretch out.

The Alvaren had returned to the grand hall at a sprint, and though I couldn’t hear their voices, I could feel the vibrations of their panic. Some of them I had felt before, and others were passing through my Sphere of Influence for the very first time. There were more than twelve left. My count was way off. There had to be twenty or more. But despite their weight of numbers, they had broken and run. “They’re running for it.”

Mercy’s head jerked up. “They’re what?”

I yanked the door to the library open. “They’re running away!”

Asher called after me as I clambered over the dhole corpse, “Let them!”

“Are you kidding me?” I called back over my shoulder as I ran. “This is our chance.”

I was too far away to hear Asher and Mercy groaning and moaning about it, but not too far to hear them cursing as they clambered over the reeking dhole chops.

Up the stairs I ran and out through the hall too as it contracted to reject me. I skidded to a halt by the door instead of charging right out, and that was when the sound of battle swept over me. The Alvaren hadn’t been running from us. They’d been running towards this.

Blood filled the cracks between the tiles in the courtyard. Shimmering by torchlight. Red blood. Not blue. Red. I charged right out into the melee.

Dvergar in their full metal plate armor were a sight to see, like walking tanks wading through. The Alvaren were faster, of course, able to dodge away from every swing of the Dvergar axes, but nothing they did to the Dvergar made a dent. Their arrows ricocheted away, and their blades did nothing but scrape paint from the metal. The only dead Dvergar were the ones who’d come without armor. The common folk of Khag Mhor, with their silks shredded and their rocky skin exposed in death.

Until now I had seen fighting in Amaranth. This was the first time that I had seen war. The Dvergar had come back for us. They were here, dying…for us. The same rage I’d felt in my gut when I saw the Dvergar who’d been tortured by svart was back. A cold dead weight inside me. I didn’t even notice my body moving until it did.

My sword was straight out to my side, and I couldn’t remember swinging it. One of the dodging Alvaren had leapt right into its arc as the one I’d been aiming at dodged away. It didn’t matter if they were faster than me in the press of battle. It didn’t matter if they were better. They’d all die just the same.

There was so much death all around me. Life sense might have felt like a tickle over my senses, but death embraced me like a long-lost lover. I was soaked in it. The world around me seemed to slow to a crawl like it did when I was using my divine powers.

I stepped between the smooth blur of an Alvaren sword and a silk-shrouded Dvergar woman using a frying pan as a shield gladly and felt the pain of it like it was from a great distance away.

The blade bit through my armor and lodged against my ribs,  but I didn’t give a damn. All I cared about was the paladin failing to jerk it back out in time to stop my fingers locking around his wrist.

Just like his queen before him, he dodged out of the path of my sword with a twist, but at the cost of breaking his own arm. The treacle slow swing of my sword was only ever a distraction. I had another weapon now. With a grunt of effort, I lifted him off his feet and swung.

The archer caught her companion across the back, and they both went down in a heap.

I lifted him up and hammered him back down again for good measure.

The broken corpse collided with another of the dervish Alvaren as I tossed it aside, knocking her down for the Dvergar to hack her to pieces. There were glimpses of the Dvergar’s faces in the twilight and torchlight, their expressions fixed, their actions methodical. The same precision they used in everything they did traveled through into the swing of each hammer and axe.

Crossbow strings thrummed, and the Alvaren had to fling themselves down to avoid the line of death stretched across the courtyard, passing harmlessly over the heads of the Dvergar but right at chest height for their foes. It only took a glance to confirm my suspicions. There was Gunhild on the top of her grand wagon with a cadre of crossbowmen already reloading for the next volley.

In normal circumstances, the Alvaren could run rings around us, so we had to ensure that they never got any normal circumstances to work with. Flames roared across the courtyard from the entrance to the great hall, sweeping over us all harmlessly but dressing us in embers so that even in the dim light, every target was perfectly outlined.

Knowledgeable in the ways of magic in the way that Dvergar born in this century could never be, the Alvaren began to panic. A whistle came up from amongst them, a lilting wavering sound. They were calling down their gryphons to make their escape. To hell with that.

I roared, even as I charged for the biggest cluster of Alvaren where they were trying to regroup. “Gunhild, look up!”

Mercy already had arrows flying up into the shadowed sky above us, and where they made contact, blood and feathers rained down on us all. I had no time to spare a glance to that battle when the one all around me was still raging. The armored Dvergar were forming a battle line on their side of the courtyard, the stragglers of their more haphazardly-equipped kin scrambling to get behind them.

I was on the wrong side of that line, as were Asher and Mercy if you wanted to get technical, but it didn’t much matter. Apart from their archers, the Alvaren seemed to have given up on attacking altogether, pulling back into a cluster near Asher’s trampled heap of books. He wasn’t going to be happy about that.

In a straight fight, regrouping like that was smart, but it didn’t account for magic. When Asher unleashed a great blazing sphere of fire into the mass of Alvaren, it avoided all of the rest of us thanks to their retreat.

Those books were not making it out alive.

Even the braced Dvergar rocked back from the explosion of the fireball, and I was kicked clean off my feet. It was probably for the best. If I’d kept up my charge, I would have ended up full of more shiny swords like the one that was still jutting out my side, and I might have lost my eyebrows too.

As it was, the Alvaren’s attempt at careful formations came to an abrupt and fiery end, and the survivors, of which there was a surprisingly large number, made the latest in a long line of stupid decisions.

They didn’t get back on their feet faster than me.

I was up and scrambling into a run before they’d even finished shaking the concussion from their ears, and I was in mid-air before they made it up onto bended knees. Nobody was fast when they were lying down.

The first of the Alvaren archers split cleanly in two beneath my blade. Blue blood spritzed me, soothing and cool.

Next up was a paladin, half her face crisping away and tears flowing down what was left. That one almost felt like a mercy.

[63 Damage]

Her head hit the next one.

[61 Damage]

Then his head hit the next.

[64 Damage]

I could have gone on like that all day, but the last of the Alvaren were up and running by now, choosing the uncertain death of the Dvergar line over bloody dismemberment at my hands. Almost a good idea. Almost. I cut one of the stragglers down as they passed.

This wasn’t a battle anymore, it was a slaughter. The Alvaren were beaten, but there was no question of letting them go free. If they got away, they’d bring back their whole city, their queen, and all their spellcasters. Even one of them could overwhelm us, and we’d seen thousands upon thousands of svart. If all of them were Alvaren now, we would be too hopelessly outnumbered to stand a chance. Briar could probably take on the whole lot of us by herself if she deigned to get her hands dirty.

The gryphons above had scattered, so Mercy’s arrows were raining down on the fleeing Alvaren too, most missing, but enough making contact. There were barely a dozen Alvaren by the time they hit the Dvergar line. Maybe hit was the wrong word. At the last moment, every one of them launched themselves into the air.

It was more of the same Alvaren crap, beautiful and elegant to behold, the prancing arc of a gazelle over a mountain stream. Crossbow bolts punched them out of the air.

The bodies hit the ground, and the Dvergar set in on them. This was not elegant or beautiful. It wasn’t even the carefully ordered movements of the Dvergar in battle. It was pure barroom fighting. Hit the guy on the floor with whatever was in your hands. Thousands of years of training meant nothing in the face of that wild hate.

In a blink, the Battle of Witchglass Overlook was over, and the Alvaren who’d ruled the world a thousand years back learned a whole new lesson.

Legendary Foes Defeated!

Potency increased to 44

Brawling: Rank 8/10

120 Experience Gained

380 Glory Gained

“Can’t be leaving you alone for a minute, can I?” The battle-line parted, and Gunhild came strolling out, the crossbow still balanced on her shoulder.

I grinned down at her. “I could have taken them.”

She laughed, and the rest of the Dvergar took it up. The only one still scowling was Mercy when she pulled up alongside me. “Oh what? We’re all friends again now?”

“I mean, they did just save us from the Alvaren.”

Asher joined her on my other side. “For which we are, of course, grateful, but you must admit that we parted on less than pleasant terms.”

“Aye well. We did some thinking on that after you be tearing off with all the knife-ears chasing you. We...That is to say…I be…”

“People died.” I sank down to my haunches so that I was level with Gunhild. “I can’t think of a better reason to get upset.”

“Aye. The grief had us.” She came over and wrapped her arms around me, the studs and spikes on her armor digging into my back. It wasn’t easy to apologize at the best of times, and she was trying to do it in front of a whole caravan of refugees who were looking to her to lead. Her next words came low as a whisper. “We know you did right by us, best you could.”

Mercy still looked skeptical, but at least she wasn’t openly hostile anymore. “And that’s why you came chasing over here to save us?”

“Well…” Gunhild had the good grace to look sheepish. “We were hoping you might be saving us.”

Asher let out a snort of laughter but got himself under control fast.

Still too late to stop Gunhild leaping back and snarling up at him though. “You thinking it be funny, wyrm-flakes? Without walls to keep them, what hope have these folk of surviving? They don’t be fighters. They be needing somewhere to keep them safe and folk to keep them safe until they get there.”

Mercy was still smiling, but there was no cruelty to it. “So you want us to babysit.”

“Not forever!” Gunhild snapped. “Just…until they be settled.”

Asher pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “This is so clearly a bad idea.”

I grinned. “How do you all feel about boats?”

Chapter 26

Serendipitous Winds woke up to the feeling of her namesake brushing the hair away from her pretty little face. The gentle rocking of our ship at sea had been swaying her like a cradle so far, but as we moved out from the shore into deeper, choppier waters, that gentle rocking was starting to stutter as we cut across grand waves. I’m assuming she had one hell of a headache from the whimpering little groans that she made, but for all I knew, Alvaren thrived off headwounds.

Now that she was stirring, I felt less guilty about poking her with the end of my sword. She let out a little grumble. I crouched down over her, drew in a nice big breath, and then shouted, “Good morning!”

Her eyes snapped open, but otherwise, she was perfectly still. Now some of that was probably because we had her trussed up in chains, but I got the impression that this was more of that weird grace or discipline or whatever that the Alvaren liked to show off all the time. She spoke softly and calmly. “Release me.”

Asher glanced over from his book. “Absolutely not.”

“It is a great crime to bind an Alvaren. A deadly sin. You cannot know the punishments that shall be rained down upon you.” She struggled now, trying to turn and take in the sights and sounds around her.

Mercy passed us by with a train of her Dvergar friends in tow. She called back over her shoulder. “Unless it is worse than what you guys already had planned for us, I’m not exactly worried.”

Serendipitous Winds’ eyes turned back to me. Gods help her if I was the sane person she had to appeal to. The voice of reason? Me? “Torment. Tortures of the like that mere mortals could not even comprehend.”

I settled down beside her in the belly of the boat with a grunt. “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Her eyebrows jumped up. “My grasp of this language…”

I carefully placed my hand over her mouth. If she tried the old licking trick, I couldn’t feel it through the new gloves I’d made myself. “You are mortal. You get that, right? You might not get old, but I’ve seen your lot die. A lot of you. Eternals on the other hand, we’re here forever.”

She glared at me until I lifted my hand away from her face again. “Eternals? You claim the title of the…”

Glove. Meet mouth. Again. “We don’t claim a damn thing. Use your eyes and your brain instead of your mouth for a minute.”

This time when I lifted my hand away, she was already snarling. “You dare to—”

“They dare, we have established that they dare.” Asher was almost shouting. “Daring is well within the wheelhouse of their behavior. Kindly work from the assumption that they dare and move on so that we might move the conversation forward.” I hadn’t even needed to cover her mouth to cut her off that time. Asher’s vitriol had stopped her dead.

Mercy crowed from up in the rigging. “Damn, Asher. Go off.”

Asher settled himself back down with his book and tried to pretend he hadn’t just lost his temper. “The pomposity of these Alvaren begins to grate.”

“So let’s take it from the top.” I smiled down at blondie. “Hi. I’m Maulkin. I’m an Eternal. This is Asher and Mercy. Also Eternals. We’re here to put the Rusted Blade back together so that we can kill the Voidgod.”

“Hah!” she snapped. “Your lies will not avail you. The Voidgod died before the tragedy that befell my kind at the hands of your ancestors. You cannot deceive one who lived through those dark days.”

“He’s coming back. Or, at least that is what the prophecies say.” I paused to consider it for a moment. “Or…that is what they told us the prophecies say.”

“Then you have been deceived also.” She slipped on her most ingratiating smile. “You have been led into conflict with the most glorious Briar by Moonlight through no fault of your own. Return the artifact to her, and I am certain that an accord can be reached.”

Asher glanced up from his book again. “It is my belief that the White Prophet was correct in his assertions. Everything that we have experienced since our rebirth in Amaranth tells us that the prophecy was true.”

Mercy swung by on a rope, presumably doing something useful about the boat and not just having a fun time. Without me. “Still not a hundred percent on that, personally.”

When it seemed like glove was no longer going to need to make the acquaintance of face again, I settled myself with my back on the curvature of the wood. “Either way, I don’t trust Briar. She’s shifty.”

“Did you truly just say that the Empress of the Alvaren is…shifty?” For one glorious moment, blondie had been stunned into silence, but now she was spitting mad all over again.

“Yup.”

“She who led the allied armies of the free people to defeat the dark one? She who has reigned throughout millennia beyond reckoning? She who slew the wyrms of dread and despair before the sun or moon first rose? She who…”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Don’t trust her.” Serendipitous Winds gaped at me, but I pressed on. “She lied to all of you. She was using the shard to make you into svart. Something is seriously not right there, and there is no way I’m handing myself or the shard over until I know for sure what she is going to do with it.”

Apparently, this was basically sacrilegious for Alvaren. Serendipitous Winds spoke as soft as a sigh. “You should trust in her wisdom.”

“She should give me a reason to trust her.”

Asher intervened before blondie could lose her temper all over again. “It appears to me that there was some dark power within the shard. Some remnant of the Voidgod that the weapon slew. Perhaps it was this corrupting influence that led to her current course?”

“Briar by Moonlight is incorruptible.” Blondie sniffed.

“Oof.” I lay back with a groan. “That is like saying a boat is unsinkable.”

Asher groaned. “Perhaps you could refrain from jokes about famous shipwrecks while we are traveling in a shoddily constructed ship that lets in water.”

I opened up one eye to stare at him. “You want to build the boat next time?”

He turned back to his book with a sigh.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

I wasn’t going to pretend that this was the prettiest ship on the seas, or that some of the boards I’d used in the construction didn’t occasionally let a tiny bit of water through their gaps even though we’d slathered it with all the tar Gunhild had managed to salvage from her wagon, but it sailed, and with all the Dvergar on board taking turns at the oars, we could even keep going when the wind wasn’t doing us any favors.

The boat had been considerably more work than I’d bargained for. The Dvergar had been a great help in hauling wood and offering up their meager supplies for the other fixtures, but they also had opinions. So many opinions. None of them had ever sailed before. None of them had ever even seen the sea except for Gunhild and her lot, yet somehow everyone knew exactly what every length of wood should look like, and how I was doing it all wrong. To start with I thought it was just more of the usual abrasive Dvergar personality that we all know and love so much, but no, they actually all thought that they knew better than me. The annoying thing was, of course, that they were right. I might have been able to slap things together, and I could sail a ship just fine after dumping a few skill points into Sailing, but when it came to the complicated math parts of engineering, I was mostly sticking my head in the sand and pretending they didn’t matter.

It took me almost a full day to construct my boat, then another day to reconstruct it so that it would actually sail, carefully guided by a nursing mother Dvergar who had once led an expedition through some sort of underground lake, making her their resident expert. Even her baby gave me contemptuous looks. Damn judgmental baby.

I shook the thought of his beady little eyes away. “Anyway. Serendipi…Windy…Seren. Here’s the deal. We found you in a pile of corpses, nursed you back to health, and brought you along with us because I think we could help each other.”

She turned her head away. “I shall offer no succor to the enemies of my queen.”

“Well, you just said yourself that we probably weren’t actually enemies.” I gave her another prod with the end of my sword, making her snap back around.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said we were being misled, this is all a big misunderstanding, all that jazz.” She blinked when I mentioned jazz but paid it no mind. Maybe they had jazz here? “Told us to trust in Briar, right?”

The ingratiating smile was back. “Yes, I am glad that you see reason.”

“Well, a good way to earn some trust would be to help us out a little.” I smiled back at her, making it look as real as I could while desperately wanting to stick a bag over her head so I didn’t have to deal with the condescension any more. “You want us on Team Briar, you need to help us.”

“What could you possibly believe that I could provide to you?”

Asher glanced up again. This was his plan, after all. “Information.”

“I shall not betray my queen’s trust in any way, wyrm-spawn. I shall not share her secrets or those of my people. I would rather be cast into the sea still bound in chains than speak a word that might be used against her.”

I shrugged. “That’s fine, we didn’t want the codes to the nukes or anything. We just wanted to talk to you about history.”

She ignored anything that she didn’t understand and zeroed in on the stuff that she did. That must have been handy. Of course, if I did it then I’d never interact with anything. She pursed her lips. “History?”

“Yeah, seems like you lived through some history that is pretty relevant to everything that is going on now. You’re a firsthand witness to all the Revelations and Voidgod stuff. I don’t know if anyone has explained to you how long you were svarted…”

The false good humor had begun to fade again. “We were informed in no great detail of the millennia that your kind stole from us.”

“Anyway, there isn’t a whole lot of reliable information from back then to work with. If you could give us the short version, it would be much appreciated.” I settled back. That was my pitch made.

Asher and Mercy had argued back and forth over keeping this Alvaren alive as our prisoner, sniping at each other throughout the whole of the construction process and keeping their distance from one another now that we were on the boat to keep tempers from flaring. Mercy thought that we were being too generous, that Seren was going to stab us in the back at the earliest opportunity. Asher thought that the risk was worth the reward. I just didn’t feel comfortable murdering someone in her sleep.

After weighing it for a moment, Seren asked, “And, in return, what would you grant me?”

Mercy dropped down beside us, ready to join in the conversation at last. “You want to make a deal now?”

Still, Seren only had eyes for me. “You make demands but offer nothing in return, how like a savage.”

I tried for the same vacant smile I’d been bandying about all day, but at this point, my temper was starting to fray. “Hey now, no need for name-calling. We’re all friends here.”

“You are not my friend, beast. You are not my equal or my ally.” Her face narrowed as she let her mask of civility slip until all the sharp edges seemed to jut out. “You could never claim my friendship, nor cultivate any bond with me that goes beyond master and hound.”

“Alright. That’s how you want it. Bark for me, bitch.” I rose to my feet in one movement. Sword clattering to the deck.

Asher startled. “What?”

I took hold of Seren’s chains and hefted her up. She weighed less than the metal she was wrapped in, and that weighed less than nothing to me. I roared in her face, “Bark for me!”

Her eyes were wild in the mask of civility, darting from side to side. “What are you doing?”

I took a step to the edge of the boat, put my foot up on the rails, and dunked her into the waves below.

Asher was scrambling to his feet, calling out. “Stop!”

I yanked Seren’s head back out of the water. All that beautiful hair was in her face now tangled and sodden. I snarled, “Bark for me!”

Mercy rushed in to stop me, but she was too slow. I already had Seren back in the sea before she could grab onto me, and then anything that she did might have cost me my grip and the Alvaren her life. “Maulkin, what the hell!”

The rage had come on so suddenly I didn’t have a chance to catch myself before I moved. Bypassing the rational part of my brain and seizing control. I’d never been so angry in all my life. Not either one of them.

Seren was every sneering bully to ever look down their nose at me. She was everything wrong with the world. “If this is what she wants, this is what she gets.”

I hauled the Alvaren back up out of the water, and she came up barking. Pitiful little yelps, like a child’s impression of a dog. A child that had only ever read about them. I threw her down onto the deck. “Happy now. One of us is master. One of us is dog. Just like you wanted.”

She managed to roll herself over and was wriggling like a worm towards Asher where he stood like she was going to hide under his skirts. “You wanted a deal? Here is the deal. You tell us what we want to know, and you go on breathing. How is that for a deal?”

Asher held up his hands as if he were going to do something. No idea what he thought he was going to do since throwing a punch was just going to end in him hurting a hand, and casting a spell was going to end in him going for a swim. “Maulkin, this was not what we discussed.”

I spat on the deck. “You can’t reason with them. You can’t treat them like they are real people and expect them to listen to sense. This is all that they understand. Violence. Threats. Fear. They’re no better now than when they were svart. They’re just taller.”

He crouched down now over Seren straining to lift her back up against the side of the boat by his book-stack. “We shall discuss this later.”

The rage washed away with the next spritz of seawater on my face. Gone as fast as it had come. I clamped my mouth shut before I could say anything else stupid and stormed off to the back end of the boat to give myself a time-out.

After a few minutes, Gunhild of all people came along to join me. “You be right enough about them Alvaren.”

I still didn’t trust myself to speak, so I gave the shortest answer I could. “I lost my temper.”

“Well, you’d be doing well to keep losing it. Auld knife-ears is flapping her mouth like nobody’s business. Whatever you wanted to know, she’ll be spilling it all now, just to keep the big bad chagnar away.”

My face fell into my hands. “Great. Great! I just love it when people are scared of me.”

“Well, you’ll be glad to know a fair few of my crew be too afraid to come anywhere near you now too, in case you decide to go dunking them. I actually be proving how hard I am right now, sitting my arse on these splinters you call a boat beside you.”

It was meant to be a joke, but I couldn’t muster up more than a snort.

She put her arm around my back. “Listen good, you big lump. You might live forever, but it seems to me I’ve been around longer than you already, so hear my words, and you keep them close. You might be wanting to go through a life full of hugs and flowers, but that don’t be the world we’ve got. This is a hard world, full of bad folk who’ll take one look at kindness and call it weakness. You can’t be a friend to a monster, even if it be a monster with a pretty face. Best thing you can do is show it you’re too strong to be prey.”

I unclenched enough to put my arm around her too. “Thank you, wise old woman.”

She elbowed me in the ribs. “You’re not too big to be going over my knee.”

“Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

She cackled as she pushed herself up off me, then sauntered off to boss around some more of her Dvergar. I don’t think there was actually much of anything to do, but she was keeping them busy. Keeping their mind off things. No point in looking back at what they’d lost or out at the drowning deeps of the sea when there were barrels to move or crates to stack.

I should have been doing the same, taking over the rudder or heading to the prow to see if I couldn’t spot the next Waystone on the horizon to keep us on course. I was just about to get up and get to it when Mercy booted me in the back.

“What the hell was that?”

I rocked with the kick but didn’t turn around. “You know, if I ever feel you hitting me…”

“No. No jokes. What the hell was that? You were waterboarding her for talking back to you?”

“You’ve never heard of good cop, bad cop?”

“One: they aren’t meant to be the same person!” She punctuated it with a kick. “Two: you are meant to tell the people on your side that you’re doing it before you start doing it.” Another kick, even more half-hearted than the last. “And three: it is good cop, bad cop, not good cop, CIA torture technician.”

“It worked, didn’t it. She’s over there spilling her guts to Asher right now.”

“Yeah, it worked. She’s scared of you now.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “But so am I.”

That was enough to make me turn around when all the booting didn’t. “Oh, come on. Just because I lost my temper a little bit…”

“You would have killed her. Even with me and Asher together, we had no way of stopping you. I don’t even know if Asher would have tried. If she hadn’t…degraded herself like that. You would have killed her. Just like that.”

“I wouldn’t have.” Denial is a versatile tool to help you get through the day.

“You would.” She sank down beside me but still held her distance. All that companionable shoulder-bumping thrown overboard. “I saw your face, you were so… It wasn’t even like you were angry. It was like there was nobody in there. Like Maulkin had checked out, and your body was on autopilot.”

I put my elbows on my knees and my horns in my hands. I didn’t want to look at her right now. I didn’t want her to see me. Denial could only stretch so far. “I was still here. I was just… I just got angry.”

“Angry is swearing when you stub your toe. Angry is yelling at me when I call you a dumbass. I know angry. This wasn’t angry.”

“Seren. All of them.” A growl crept into my voice that I didn’t want to be there. “They think they’re so much better than everyone else in the world. They think they own it, that we should all be groveling for whatever place in it that they want to give us. That doesn’t make you angry?”

“Yeah, they’re rude, but that doesn’t make me want to drown a chained-up girl. That’s some serial killer shit.”

I let that sit for a minute. The sound of the sea lapping against the boat and the distant calls of the Dvergar to each other the only sound. It was a good thing that it was so quiet, or she might not have heard me when I rumbled, “You’re right.”

“Usually am.”

“That… That wasn’t me. I’m not like that.” I pulled on my horns like you’d drag your fingers through your hair, and it felt so natural that I didn’t even remember I hadn’t even had horns a week earlier. “I mean, you know me.”

“I’ve known you like a week, dude,” Mercy said, cold as her namesake. “Luckily, you are as deep as a puddle and as open as a book, so a week is plenty of time to get to know everything about you. I know you aren’t... I know you aren’t like that. That’s why I tried to stop you.”

Now that I was talking about it, it felt like the floodgates had opened. I couldn’t string my thoughts together. “I don’t know what that was. I don’t know if that was this new body or something the gods put in me or… I don’t know.”

Mercy leaned in to nudge me with her shoulder. It was literally the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me, and that was kind of sad too when I thought about it. “Well, next time I see it, I’m putting an arrow between your eyes, just to be safe.”

I let go of my horns to nod. “Probably smart.”

The waves crashed, the Dvergar shouted, and the wind dragged us ever on. Silence again, but the tension was gone. A death threat probably shouldn’t have made me feel better, but honestly, the idea that there would be somebody to stop me if I went off the deep end was kind of nice. At least I wouldn’t hurt anybody else. I did a double-take when Mercy started talking again. “You know what your problem is, right?”

“My sassy sidekick?”

“Hah. Okay, you need to think that one through because you are definitely the sidekick around here.” She gestured up and down me. “Look at you. Nobody is rooting for the big cow-man.”

I shook my head in mock sorrow. “So sassy.”

She gave me a punch in the shoulder, but she was smiling again. Not her big genuine smile that you had to work for, but the little smirk that meant she didn’t want you to know she was smiling at all. “Nah, your problem is that for the first time since we got here, there is nothing for you to fight. It has been a whole day since some giant monster tried to kill us. You’re wound up! You’re itching for a fight! You’re—”

The ship lifted clean out of the water as the serpent hit us from below. One minute we were sailing straight without a care in the world, and the next we were catching air and the ship was lilting over to one side before it hit the water again.

I grabbed an arm full of barrels, surging my Potency to take the strain, and sprinted over to the starboard side. That is the right side, for those of you without skill points in Sailing. The combined weight of me and the barrels was enough to right the ship before anyone got thrown overboard, but whatever had hit us was still down there.

Mercy caught up to me, laughing. “You’re the luckiest son of a bitch alive.”

The rest of the boat did not seem so amused. The Dvergar were mostly screaming except for the few under Gunhild’s direct command who were trying to batten down everything they could. Asher was clinging to the central mast with both arms and a look of alarm on his face that was honestly kind of adorable. Like a gecko.

I launched myself right past him onto the mast and started climbing. It swayed the whole ship violently as I went, but it was still better than the rocking that whatever had hit us was doling out. As long as I ignored the creaking and cracking noises that the mast was making, that justification seemed enough.

From my awkward vantage point, I could see the shadow beneath the waves. Some huge eel-shaped thing, coming around for another run at us. Like I was going to give it another chance. “Asher! My sword!”

He realized what I was doing before I kicked off from the mast to leap out into the sea, with just enough time to press-gang a bunch of the burliest Dvergar in reach into throwing the thing. They could throw it about as far as I trusted Seren.

The black hole opened up ahead of me, and once more the whole ship rocked as some new force was exerted against it. Water leapt up all around the boat to reach for the dark singularity in the sky, but so did my hastily flung weapon.

Between the gravity snare and my own Artifice, the sword made its way into my hands before I reached the water, and I brought it down hard and double-handed on the shadow below.

I had just enough time to roar, “Nice!” before I was pulled under the water. Enough time to wonder if I still knew how to swim, too. Guess I was about to find out.

Beneath the surface, there was a torrent of bubbles blinding me to nearly everything going on. I got my feet set on the slippery, shimmering, scaled surface of the serpent to either side of where my sword was wedged, but that was as far as my progress went. There was a vague impression of frilled fins at either side but no certainty. Then we dove down into the crushing depths.

It seemed to be bucking and twisting in the water—it certainly felt like I was being flung around—but my potency was always going to be too much for simple turbulence to dislodge me. I bent down and took a hold on the edge of the wound in its back, cutting down my profile and the drag of the water. There was blood pouring out of the serpent in a great tail behind us. I wished that I’d remembered to wear my shark cage today.

With a solid grip on the rough edge of the scales, I started to work my sword loose. Back and forth. More and more blood bubbled up around me until I couldn’t see a damn thing through the red cloud. I probably wouldn’t have seen much anyway, between the sudden drop in light as we went deeper and the bubbles.

With one mighty tug, I finally got my sword free, just in time for the serpent to reverse direction. It shot straight up into the air like a bottle rocket, and I lost my footing, clinging to the rubbery tissue inside its wound with one hand and hoping like hell it didn’t shake me off. My ears popped, then a moment later there was light enough to see what was ahead. Beyond the great pointed wedge face of the serpent, I could see a shadow on the surface. The ship—as big as the serpent itself. The only solid object for fathoms around. That is miles for those of you that don’t have points in sailing skill. Maybe. I only had one rank in sailing.

It planned to bop me off its back, and I was here for that plan. Riding the back of a sea serpent might sound awesome, but my lungs were burning. I really should not have wasted all that breath saying, “Nice.”

I leapt free at the last moment, but I still got carried along in the column of displaced water, dragged up to splat against the side of the boat at about the same time the serpent scraped across it, sending the whole thing swinging violently to the side.

The water dragged me on, bouncing me along the bottom of the ship in the wake of the serpent.

Maybe I didn’t have enough ranks in sailing to be sure, but I was fairly confident that I had just keelhauled myself. Still, I was free. I broke the surface and gulped in air greedily. There wasn’t much in the way of handholds on my crappy little boat, but with Artifice it didn’t take long to yank a few boards around and clamber back on deck.

My head had barely come up over the edge before I had to duck back down again. A bolt of lightning cracked over my head and then dispersed harmlessly over the surface of the water. It made a pretty light show, and it might have shocked a few fish dumb enough to be anywhere near this mess, but the serpent had dived back down out of reach.

“Maulkin!” Asher cried out in dismay when he realized that he’d nearly crispy fried me. That was nice. It was good to know it hadn’t been deliberate.

Dvergar swarmed forward to help haul me up onto the deck, but I shrugged them off fast. “Crossbows! Cannons! Have we got cannons?”

Gunhild was among the crowd. “What be a cannon?”

Asher shook his head at me as I staggered to my feet. “Right. Sorry. Yeah. Uh…”

The latest hit had knocked some of the rigging loose. I only had wood to work with, so it was hope as much as anything else holding most of the ship together. “Crossbows…”

I closed my eyes and slipped free of my soggy mortal shell. I’d made almost everything on the ship with Artifice, so I could remake it just as easily. The careful work of assembling the mast was undone in a moment, with the Dvergar up in the rigging leaping to safety on the deck as I reshaped it nice and slow. It wasn’t much of a job for my Artifice, even weakened as it had been by my soulbonding.

One big cross of wood with ropes strung across it was remade into another one of the same but with a whole new purpose. I caught ahold of the ropes as they dropped in a great stretched tangle, and then I started to pull. My sword was the biggest hunk of metal that I had lying around, so it had become the tip of the giant crossbow bolt. My armor became the fixtures holding this string in place. Yes, I was naked again. No, nobody cared about it when they were being attacked by a giant eel. I made a mental note to make a joke about two giant eels attacking later.

Grunting, I made my way across the deck, every muscle in my body working to draw this string tight enough to spring back. The Dvergar worked out what was happening faster than Mercy and Asher, but it didn’t take long for both of them to spring into action either. Mercy grabbed hold of the rudder, lining up our shot, and Asher started casting his electric spells on the metal head of the bolt so that when it struck home, it was really going to do some damage. I could distantly hear Mercy and her Dvergar ninja buddies up on the railings shouting back and forth to each other, but the meaning escaped me. All I knew in that moment was the rush of blood in my ears, the creaking of my shoulders, and the inexorable passage of the boards beneath me.

I hit the far rail of the ship and tucked my chin over it as if the forces involved weren’t going to rip my head clean off if I stopped pulling. Behind me, I could hear the bolt being rolled into place, too big to be lifted by anyone but me.

The ship bucked as the eel passed under us again, and it took all my concentration to hold on. There was a thump you could feel across the whole ship as the bolt was knocked out of place. Screams and calls for help followed as Dvergar were flung from their positions, creating splashes when a few unfortunates hit the sea. Beneath the water, the keening cackling call of the eel echoed out. I wished that I could see, but I was also grateful I couldn’t. There was no way that the serpent wasn’t coming back to eat our lost crew, and if Mercy hadn’t have taken her shot before then, then I didn’t know what I would have done.

Saltwater had splashed up onto the deck, and my feet were slipping out beneath me. If I lost my grip now, not only would it all have been for nothing, but all the Dvergar frantically trying to roll the bolt back in place would have lost their heads in the bargain.

The chittering came closer, and the waves rolling off the back of the eel set the ship rocking once more. I felt the bolt bump into place rather than saw it or heard the Dvergar bellowing. Now all that was left was the sweet release, when my suffering at least might end. My arms, each thicker around than my whole body had been as a human, were shaking.

Mercy screamed. “Now!”

In the moment of truth, my janky crossbow fired just fine. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. The bolt launched, and it wobbled through the air towards the peaked wave of the rushing serpent. It hit with a sound like a thundercrack.

[314 Damage]

The surface of the water flared white as the spells Asher had heaped into it detonated.

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Celerity increased to 20

Airstrike: Rank 3/10

63 Experience Gained

200 Glory Gained

The chittering sound of the eel’s charge stopped abruptly.

The charge did not.

Even though it was dead in the water, the eel was still coming at us fast. Momentum carried the dead and mindless doom-noodle through the water, right at our ship. With the only brains the thing had leaking out into the water behind it, there would be nothing to make it turn away instead of plowing right into us.

“Oh, crap.”

“Brace for impact!” Gunhild roared. “Brace!”

This time when the eel hit, it wasn’t a little love tap, intended to toss some tasty treats overboard. It’s punctured skull hit the side of the ship like a battering ram, busting clean through my shoddy work and bringing the sea in with it.

As the first wave of it washed up my legs I slammed my eyes shut and abandoned my body. All around me, I saw the people I’d brought along on this fool’s errand preparing themselves to die. Asher had bowed his head. Mercy was screaming, trying to haul the Dvergar away from the water as it rushed in. Gunhild had her arms wrapped around one of the Dvergar that had no business being anywhere but safe at home. The sea was going to swallow us all.

Chapter 27

Now that it was dead, the eel was just a heap of materials, no different than wood, stone, or the rest. I couldn’t rework it the same way, but I could use it. Where the wooden slats were too broken to be repaired, bone ribs plucked out of the eel slid into place. Where the water was leaking in through little cracks between the boards, the whole thing was sealed with a coating of the serpent’s waterproof hide. Even the wood and metal of the bolt still lodged in the skull could be used again.

The careful painstaking work of days—building and rebuilding—had embedded the knowledge of every part of this ship firmly in my brain. Now all I had to do was follow the instructions I already had. The ship was still sinking, water lapping up around my body’s knees, but by the time that the skull of the eel floated free of our side, it was whole again—and probably better made than before. I slipped back into my body, grabbed a bucket, and started bailing out. This could still work. We could still survive this.

That was about the moment that Mercy set everything on fire.

Firewalls worked fine in the open air, but under the water, they flashed into being then faded just a moment later in a mass of bubbles. If that had been the extent of it, then we probably would have been fine, but Asher saw what she was doing and joined in. “What the hell!?”

The water started to boil around my shins from Mercy’s flash-fires but at least they were mercifully brief. When Asher’s flames leapt out from his mouth, they were anything but. A torrent of flames poured down into the water, throwing up a massive cloud of steam that obscured everything. It was like we were in the middle of a fog bank in an instant, and the only thing we could see was the distant glow of the sun above and the blazing flames pouring forth from Asher’s face.

Their plan was working even if the Dvergar were terrified. The huge plumes of steam hid it from view, but the water in the bottom of the ship was definitely going down. Lumbering over to the side I caught sight of the Dvergar scattered around us in the water, clinging to bits of the ship, bits of eel. A few of them that were feeling brave were paddling around, helping their friends. It couldn’t have been easy to stay afloat when you were part-rock, so all due respect to those guys. The steam was floating up, so it was easy enough to see that they were all doing alright. As long as they could tread water for a few minutes while we got ship-shape again, we’d have no trouble picking them up.

Which was about the moment that I remembered Seren, bundled in chains.

Pushing through the fleeing Dvergar and the mildly scalding water, I ran to where I remembered her lying against the side of the boat and found nothing. “Seren!?”

I splashed around through the water, hands seeking her beneath the surface and finding nothing. I caught a Dvergar as she passed. “The Alvaren?”

She shrugged and scampered out of sight. Someone must have seen something. I roared, “Where is my Alvaren?!”

There were murmurs of confusion from the Dvergar. Chatter amongst themselves. Finally, one of the braver children called out from his father’s arms, “It went over!”

That was exactly what I didn’t want to hear. I took off running, and while I’d like to say I did a graceful swan dive into the water, it was one hundred percent a belly flop.

Gasping in some air, I went under.

Without all the chaos of the eel in motion, the water was relatively clear. There was a kelp forest down beneath us, so deep that my ears popped just looking at it, but there was no sign of Seren. I let my Lifesense stretch out in every direction, and I was inundated with the Dvergar, the fish, the kelp, and even the plankton and tiny shrimp too tiny to make out. Everything was alive in the ocean; everything was static to my senses. Swimming down deeper and deeper, I pressed my eyes shut and listened to my Lifesense exclusively. She had to be down here. She had to be alive.

At the edge of my senses, I felt the familiar prickling of an Alvaren. She was still alive, if only barely. Either that or there was another Alvaren down here, and I really didn’t have the mental bandwidth for that right now.

Down into the forest of kelp I headed, pushing the tendrils aside as they did their damnedest to tangle around me. Was there sentient, murderous kelp here? Was it just regular kelp? Was this even kelp? I didn’t spend a lot of time underwater back on earth. I assumed it was kelp.

The shimmer of metal caught my eye, and I plunged on. She was still alive, and she was glowering up at me with pure unadulterated hatred in her eyes. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

I reached out with my Artifice and broke her chains. In an instant, she shot up out of the kelp like a champagne cork, zooming right past me without a second glance. The need for air outweighed the need for vengeance. I was feeling much the same. My lungs were burning as I floundered about and then started swimming back up towards the ship.

Either sharks or the native equivalent was going to be showing up any minute now, so I put on another turn of speed, burning my Potency Surge to get the hell out of the water just a moment after Seren was hauled up onto the deck by the waiting Dvergar. If they tried to help me up like that, they were going to end up in the sea. I launched myself up like a performing seal and caught onto the edge of the boat myself, rocking the whole thing with my bulk.

On the deck, I rolled onto my back to catch my breath. That was not fun. I did not like the sea. The sea was not my friend. There was some shouting from among the Dvergar and Mercy at the sight of the unbound Alvaren amongst us, but I pushed myself up and groaned, “Give it a rest.”

Gunhild scrambled for her crossbow. “You be setting her free?”

“Where is she going to go?” I hooked some seaweed off my horns and threw it overboard. “We’re in the middle of the ocean.”

Mercy already had an arrow drawn. “She’s going to murder us in our sleep!”

Seren looked like a drowned rat. All of the glitz and glamour of the Alvaren had been washed away by a good dunk in the sea. Her hair hung lank about her face, and bereft of her armor, the elegant black cloth she wore beneath looked about as imposing as a wet potato sack. I looked back to Mercy. “No, she isn’t.”

Seren and Mercy both snapped around to demand the same thing, “What?”

I lay back on the deck and waited for the sun to dry me off. “She isn’t going to kill us. I just saved her life.”

Out of sight, I heard a scuffle, then my eyes bulged open as Seren landed hard on top of me. She had a knife in her hand, snatched from one of the Dvergar. “You attempted to drown me yourself but a moment ago. Give me one good reason that I should not end you here and now.”

She had landed on my stomach, so it took me a moment to catch my breath and answer, “Because you’re smart enough to know that there is more going on here than your boss told you. Because I risked my life to rescue you for no good reason except I wanted to. Because you’ve got some sense of honor going on, even if it is all messed up. And if all of that wasn’t enough…because I’m sexy as hell?”

She pressed the point of the dagger into the hollow of my throat. Prickly and tickly. “What does your carnal appeal matter to the debate?”

I waggled my eyebrows as Mercy groaned. “So you do think I’m sexy?”

To my delight and surprise, a tiny blue tint crept over Seren’s nose and cheeks, beneath the freckles. She was blushing. And she was mad about it. Her eyes blazed with fury. “You are a beast. Beneath my notice.”

“I’m beneath you alright.” I rolled my hips, and she shot off me like she’d been burned. The knife was dropped on the deck, and she was cowering behind Asher. “Right, glad that is settled.”

Mercy pointed her arrow at me now. “I swear to the gods, if you don’t put some pants on right now I’m going to shoot another wiggly serpent in the head today.”

“Pants are at the top of my to-do list,” I grumbled and rose to my feet. The poor Dvergar were right at head-height for the danger zone. “If everyone stopped threatening to murder me, I’d get to them a lot quicker.”

There wasn’t much in the way of spare metal or leather about the boat, even if I had reclaimed the bolthead to remake my sword, but at the edge of my Sphere of Influence, more material than I could ever use was still drifting just beneath the surface of the water.

The Dvergar ducked as fragments of scale and bone came fluttering up out of the sea to encase me. Sinews coiled through the torn skin to latch it into place, bone fragments chattering as they pulled together into a brand-new suit of armor that somehow managed to look even jankier than the old one that had been made out of kitchenware.

An armor rating of 55 wasn’t bad, and it definitely felt a lot lighter than the last set—also marginally less likely to drag me down to the bottom of the ocean if a certain Alvaren decided to roll me overboard while I was napping. Not that she would. I was totally confident about that. So confident that I was going to do all of my sleeping hugging the mast.

With clothes on my body and the ship back in ship-shape, it didn’t take long before we were underway again. Progress seemed slower now, but it might have been because I was paying so much more attention, waiting for a knife between the ribs that never quite seemed to come. I mostly kept to the back of the boat, steadying the rudder and adjusting as Mercy and her spotters silently directed. The fact that nobody could sneak up behind me there was a total coincidence.

I could see the whole ship from where I was. I could see the Dvergar swerving to keep out of Seren’s way as she paced. Now that she was free from her chains, she seemed less inclined to help Asher out with his research, but hopefully, this was a step in the right direction. It was hard to make people trust you when you had them chained up, and in the end, we needed her to trust us if we were going to learn anything useful about the War, Araphel, and the shards.

The hours rolled on, with the waves rhythmically thumping and the Waystones passing by on the horizon, guiding us farther and farther out to sea. The air was thick, and clouds that had started out as delicate little puffs in the big blue sky were now grey slabs blotting out the sun and the blue alike. The wind whipped up, and while I appreciated the turn of speed, I didn’t like the slight tingling sensation that I was getting on the back of my neck, like Asher was preparing one of his lightning bolts somewhere nearby. Despite all of that, I was fairly sure that it was actually getting warmer.

Just when I thought I might have to slough off my lovely new eel-skin suit to cool down, the rain came down. Just a gentle spritz rather than the downpour I’d been expecting. Refreshing rather than a danger to the safety of the ship. The only downside was that it cut visibility down to the point that we had to drop anchor in sight of the next Waystone and work out our next move.

Mercy and Asher came to me already arguing, her voice getting louder and louder with every step.

“…blow us all up in the bargain!”

I blinked. “Who is blowing us up?”

Asher stepped in front of her. “There shall be no explosions, not any need for hysterics. I have simply devised a plan that will allow us to continue through the foul weather.”

Mercy’s head popped over his shoulder. “Or blow us up.”

I held up my hands. “One at a time. Asher, what is your idea?”

“The Waystones are designed as a conduit, to conduct magic between them. Were I to cast a spell into the ring, I believe that we could follow the course that it traced out to the next site without the need of constant visual confirmation.”

That made sense. I nodded. “Okay. Mercy?”

“That is totally going to blow us up. It is like throwing plutonium in a coal stove, or coal in a nuclear… It is like mixing two things that are totally different, and there is no way of knowing what will happen. The stones are only meant for transportation, if he shoots lightning up the hole he might wreck them all or explode us.”

That also made sense. I nodded. “Okay.”

Mercy looked to Asher, then back to me with annoyance. “So what should we do?”

“Nap.”

Asher cocked his head to one side. “Nap?”

The Dvergar took up the call along the length of the ship, “Shift is up!” Groans of relief rippled along them.

My presence was going to be required to pull down the sails and convert them into a tent to cover the ship’s deck and provide us with some shelter through the night. “The crew needs to rest. It is getting dark. The rain might pass in the morning, and if it doesn’t, then we can think about the zap-a-ring plan.”

Mercy stepped in my path, and I nearly tripped over her. “And what happens when another giant eel shows up and takes a bite out of us sitting here like a…duck.”

I smirked. “We’re wearing the skin of the last sea serpent to try it. I figure we don’t look too appetizing about now.”

Asher cocked his head the other way. “A fair point. Very well, let us take some rest.”

Mercy was less impressed. “Come on, you lazy ass, you slept all the way through all the research back at Witchglass Overlook, you can’t be tired again.”

“I wasn’t tired then either, I just didn’t want to do my homework.”

She held up a vibrating finger towards me, staring wide-eyed at Asher, and he gave a little nod of concession. She told him so. “Then what the hell?”

“You, me, and Asher can go forever. Everyone else can’t. Cut them some slack.”

Mercy grumbled away. Asher gave me a polite nod and went back to his books. It took me only a couple of minutes to clear the rigging and rebuild the ship into a floating tent.

The rain drummed on the canvas above us gently, as if the sway of the ship wasn’t going to be enough to bob us off to sleep. Dinner was sparse for the Dvergar and even more sparse for us. I didn’t want to tap into their very limited supplies of food when I didn’t even technically need to eat. The fact that most of it looked to be dried mushrooms really helped seal the deal. Mercy’s fire was used sparingly to heat up some soupy-stew, and I made a mental note to put together some fishing nets come morning. Maybe we should have held onto some of the eel chunks.

The chatter was subdued. Nobody was feeling the party spirit after seeing their whole civilization fall into a hole a few days ago. Funny that. Even the lucky few who’d fallen in the sea and been retrieved without any harm whatsoever weren’t sharing their stories. A whole boat full of sad sacks.

There was no clear sign of when to go to bed, but at some point, they all went their separate ways. Some of Gunhild’s boys positioned themselves outside the tent to keep watch, the rest trying to make up beds out of whatever soft material they could find. I was made of tougher stuff. I’d been a boy-scout for almost three whole weeks in my last life. I could sleep on a heap of rusty screwdrivers and like it—and that was before I grew skin thick enough to make an elephant think that some exfoliation might be required. Asher had retreated to his nest of books, and Mercy was off with her ninja Dvergar buddies, messing around with the spare rigging trying to make hammocks. I plopped myself down at the back end of the tent-boat in case I needed to jump up and get us going fast for any totally non-eel-related reason through the night.

The crew didn’t need my night-light eyeballs waking them up if I stirred, so I put my back to them all and settled down, nothing in front of me but canvas and the sound of the sea lapping away. With nothing left to do in the day, I closed my eyes; trusting in my other senses to warn me of danger if it came along.

I got about a minute of darkness before all my senses started screaming, “Danger! Danger!”

I didn’t jump up, but I did open my eyes rather abruptly. Seren jerked back, that same blue tint coming to her cheeks. She said nothing, but after an ambivalent moment, she dropped to the deck and turned her back to me. She curled up a little, but from the rigidity of her back, it was pretty obvious she wasn’t going to sleep. “Uh…”

“I am attempting to rest, do not disturb me.”

That had me opening and shutting my mouth a good few times before I decided I had to ask, “You know you could sleep anywhere you wanted on the boat?”

“This is the position that I have chosen. Be silent.” She shuffled a little closer to me as another breeze swept under the canvas. What the hell?

I wet my lips. Apparently, I was already dreaming, so I might as well go with it. “Lady, if you are trying to get some of that sweet faun loving, you are going to have to be a lot more obvious about it.”

The look on her face when she turned around was pure disdain. If they ever did a photo-book of facial expressions, that would be the one they pick for the disdain page. Ultimate disdain. “If you were capable of thinking beyond thy animal impulses to rut for just a moment, you might understand that I am surrounded by enemies here upon this ship. Most would be delighted to slit me from throat to gizzard were they given the opportune moment. Of all these enemies, only one has proven with action that they intend to preserve my life. The only one willing to stand as my advocate and protect my freedom.”

I smiled at her. “Does that mean you forgive me for the uh… dunking in the sea thing, from earlier?”

“I believe that you too are possessed of some stunted sense of honor.” The blush had returned in full force. Not the anger I’d been expecting. “And in debasing me so, you claimed a degree of ownership over me. Just as I had you with my jibes. It has reinforced to me that you are… Let us just say for now that you are the one who holds my chains. The one that will keep and protect me from harm until I am returned to my queen.”

Sometimes I swear that my brain and my mouth have no connection. “Is this a kinky thing or a feudal thing?”

She looked puzzled at both terms—thank the gods—and after a moment’s pause, she said, “It is an act of trust.”

Feeling like even more of a heel than usual, I gave her an awkward little sideways bow-nod thing, but she had already rolled back over to go to sleep after her dramatic pronouncement, all the tension that had been thrumming through her since we first crossed paths gone in an instant. Great. Glad she was feeling better.

Meanwhile, I could already feel my shoulders tightening up every time anyone so much as stirred behind me. Seren was right. Any one of the Dvergar would happily see her dead, and they’d said as much while she was still passed out and the debate about what to do with her had raged on. The ones that didn’t want to decapitate her in her sleep wanted to throw her in the sea. The Dvergar were not big on forgiveness as a general rule, and their approach to prisoners of war was entirely rooted in the practicality of their living situations. The Dvergar had never lived without some degree of rationing in their underground home, or while traveling between khags, and that meant that every time they choose to put food in an enemy’s belly they were taking it out of their own, weakening their own defenses to keep somebody alive that wanted them dead. It was a pretty simple calculation for people living perpetually on the knife-edge of extinction.

Maybe I wouldn’t be sleeping after all.

Chapter 28

By the time that dawn rolled around, I was good and grumpy. I’d been lying there, not quite sleeping, for a solid seven hours. Solid as in, solid wooden planks digging into my side, my horns bumping on the wood every time that the ship rode over a wave, and my eyes snapping open every time a pair of Dvergar stirred to swap out for those on watch or to go to the toilet over the side. I was starting to suspect that it was some kind of practical joke. Surely, they couldn’t all need to pee.

At the first glimmer of sunlight on the horizon, I was up and tearing the ship apart, slamming the mast back up, slitting tents into sails, and restitching it all with a flex of will. There were eel-skin patches on the wax-cloth that I didn’t even remember making, but given how much of the ship was coated in the stuff at this point, it was hardly surprising.

Seren was up and at my side by the time that I had finished the re-assembly. Gawking. “What kind of magic is this? Even my queen could not…”

I cut her off with a laugh. “I already told you we’re Eternals. This is what we can do. Well, part of it.”

She was looking at me coyly. Not angry the way that she had been before but still dubious. “There is no need for deception. It is no surprise to me that progress has marched on since our time ruling this world. Thousands of years have passed–of course, magic has been improved upon.”

This was going to be awkward. How do you tell somebody that their utopia turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland while they were having a nap? “Uh, you might want to talk to Asher about that, he’s our magic expert, but from what I hear, you guys are still top dog when it comes to spells and wands.”

She flinched at the word “dogs” and I immediately regretted the turn of phrase, but by then Mercy was bounding over. “Aw, did you two make up?”

I gave Seren a sideways glance. “Well, I think we’ve agreed not to kill each other.”

She gave Mercy a curt nod. “This is so.”

That was enough Alvaren weirdness for one morning. I clapped my hands together. “So how is it looking?”

“Still drizzling.”

“Ah, drizzle.” I turned my face up to the grey sky. “The most fun of all weathers.”

She was not getting distracted. “Are you going to let Asher blow us up?”

“Yeah, probably.” I shrugged. “He seems to know what he’s doing.”

She fell into step beside me as I strolled along the ship, checking that my repairs were sticking. “What he’s doing is blowing us up.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Hey now, he is probably only going to blow up the Waystones. And we can always follow the trail of wreckage.”

She prodded me in the side and abruptly, Seren was there, glowering at her. Mercy gave me a confused look and stepped away. “When we all die, I’m going to say I told you so. A lot.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

Asher hadn’t moved from his book heap since we got on the boat, and he didn’t show any signs of moving now. He didn’t even look up as we approached. “Are you aware that you can unlock new skills from reading?”

“Yeah, I think I got some ancient history back when we were digging through the prophet’s papers.”

“It would have been helpful to know that in advance. I would have made a broader selection from the Witchglass Library instead of focusing upon my areas of interest, we might have all improved ourselves.”

“Yeah, but if we’d brought all the books you wanted to bring the boat would have sunk, so…”

“You wish for me to cast the spell now?”

“Please.”

The clouds above us roared and rumbled as Asher gathered lightning between his clawed hands, and I started to wonder if calling up lightning in the middle of bad weather was maybe a bad idea. Just as I was about to say so, he snapped his arms apart.

He hit the bullseye on the first shot the lightning bolt jumping straight through the center of the great floating ring of metal before abruptly looping back on itself and coiling around the metal. Round and round and round it went until the whole ring was crackling with electricity that seemed to have nowhere to go.

Dvergar were already frantically hauling up the anchor. Gunhild called over, “Do we be needing to run?”

Mercy said, “Uh…”

I said, “Um…”

Asher shook his head. “This is as it should be.”

Strangely his confidence didn’t do much to calm everybody down. Nor did the increasingly high-pitched whining coming from the ring or the fact that every metal object on the deck now seemed to be slowly sliding over towards that starboard side.

Seren stepped behind me, and I only had half a moment to consider I was about to get a knife in the kidneys before I realized that she was only using me as cover in case of explosions. Mercy was doing the same on my other side. Real classy, ladies.

Just when I thought I was going to have to cover my ears, something gave. The coiled lightning leapt off in a great crackling white-blue line over the horizon. “That’s where we’re headed, folks! Let’s get those oars moving and the sails trimmed!”

I wasn’t completely sure that any of the boat terminology I was using was right, but none of the Dvergar knew better, so I got away with it. They sprang into action. Even the ones that had still been lying on the deck blinking at the dawn light were up and moving by the time that I made it to the rudder.

“Follow that lightning bolt!”

And so our day went. Sailing in the light of Asher’s lightning to each new Waystone, then pausing there for the last leg of our journey to go dark and the lightning to leap on. The rain came down heavier and heavier the farther we went, but it was not the chilling rain that I’d come to expect. The water falling from the sky was warm like we were all getting a comfortable shower, not the kind that was meant to make bad and naughty thoughts go away.

Seren spent her day chatting intermittently with Asher in his book nest, supplying answers to questions I probably wouldn’t have even thought to ask, and slowly but surely relaxing. Every time she got an answer back from him, I could see the same little line appearing between her brows. That same expression of doubt that she treated every statement we made with, but at least she wasn’t screaming that we were all lying liars who lie anymore. She might not believe everything she was hearing, but at least she seemed to be hearing it now.

More often than not, when I glanced over at her, she was looking right back at me. After looking away awkwardly the first few times, I spent a solid minute or two locked in a staring contest with her. Asher didn’t look up from his books often enough to notice, but Mercy definitely did.

While she was doing the rounds, handing out some of our sparse rations at what was probably lunchtime, she stopped to lean against me and singsonged, “Someone’s got a crush.”

I scoffed. “Are you kidding me? That psycho was trying to stab me a few hours ago.”

“Yeah, but you’re both freaks.” She jostled my arm, and I had to reset our course again. “A little bit of attempted murder is like foreplay for you. It is like pulling a girl’s hair on the playground. You smack her with a sword. She stabs you in the side. You both snark at each other for hours…”

I grinned down at her. “By that logic, you’d have killed me from sexual exhaustion by now.”

“Ew.”

I gave her a little shove. “Why don’t you go worry about your own love life. How many of the seven…Dvergar have proposed to you so far, snow white?”

“And again I say, ew.” She glanced up at the rigging to make sure none of her little ninja buddies were around. “Those guys are like…work friends.”

It was my turn to look dubious. “Uh-huh?”

“I… You… Shut up.” She went back to her rounds, and I let out a little sigh of relief. Sneaking around, trying to make people talk about their feelings. What was she thinking?

Asher had the right idea. He was keeping his head down, his eyes on the prize—assuming the prize was a big old pile of books. In Asher’s world, it probably was. I certainly hadn’t ever seen him happier than he was right there on the deck of the ship, researching to his heart’s content.

Seren was staring at me again, but this time I chose to ignore it. Wouldn’t want to give Mercy the wrong idea about things.

It was almost nightfall when the call came down from on top of the mast that they had spotted land. I still couldn’t see it, but I knew it had to be coming up soon. The lightning had dispersed in a great pulse across the darkening sky when it reached the final waystone, so there was no question that the chain had been broken, one way or the other.

Duties were abandoned as the Dvergar and Mercy scrambled forward to get their first glimpse of our destination. Even Asher rose stiffly from his place on the deck to take it in. At the back end of the ship, steering, I was probably the last person to get a glimpse of the jungle rising up on the horizon.

The island wasn’t huge, maybe a few miles across. It was small enough that from our approach we could see it from end to end. Jungle from beach to beach, like a castaway’s dream. Rich and lush and green—the way that nothing back on the mainland had been. If you aren’t clear on the difference between a forest and a jungle, it is pretty straightforward. You just take the green and crank it up to eleven. Everywhere that something living could go, something living does grow. Like somebody took the magic plant potion that everywhere else gets a little sprinkle of and dumped a whole vat of it out.

“It would be unwise to make landfall before the coming dawn.” Two bells. I needed one for around Asher’s neck and one for around Seren’s. It could be like a team uniform. I’d wear one too, I was cool with it. You can never have too much cowbell.

I was too startled to come up with a comeback. “Yeah?”

“It would place you at a great disadvantage to enter such terrain by night.” She leaned back against the railing, staring off towards the distant shore, backlit by the setting sun. Did she deliberately pose at every opportunity or was that just how Alvaren stood?

I pointed to my glowing eyes. “We can see in the dark.”

“You can see as well as by daylight?” She rolled her eyes. “When all the night predators are astir? When you cannot call upon aid from thy runtling chattel?”

It took me a second to catch that last bit. “Runt… Hey! Don’t call the Dvergar names.”

She scowled across the ship. “They deserve worse than rude words for their sins.”

I waved a hand in front of her face, bringing the glower back to me, where it belonged. “No. They don’t. These Dvergar aren’t the ones you knew. These are just people. And it isn’t like they haven’t paid enough for the bad decisions their ancestors made.”

“The curse of theirs? Your wyrm-spawn spoke of it in passing. Though anyone with eyes could see it. Let us just say that the Dvergar in my time were less modest in their dress. Still, the curse is but a small recompense for the evil they have unleashed upon this world.”

I needed to nip that in the bud. “It wasn’t them.”

“Who then if not the Dvergar greedily delving?” She waved a contemptuous hand out at my crew, and a few of them seemed to notice that she was speaking about them. This was not going to end well for anyone. “Who if not for these runtling curs could have unleashed—”

“It wasn’t these Dvergar.” I cut her off dead, my voice more of a growl than I’d intended. I tried to ease off, keep the conversation light and breezy. If this turned into a screaming argument there was no way the Dvergar weren’t going to overhear and throw her overboard, no matter what I said. “You aren’t every single Alvaren. I’m not every single eternal. We are all just people, and you need to stop blaming these people for things that they had no control over. This whole world needs to move on.”

Her voice had dropped deep in fury. “Easily you speak for someone that never suffered the depredations of the Voidgod’s Revelation.”

“They’ve done their time.”

“Amaranth is in ruins by their hand, and you expect that I will grant forgiveness to the ones who unleashed that ruin?” Now it was more of a hiss. That pretty face was thinning down again, her pupils shrinking to pinpricks. Time for the truth bomb.

“Amaranth is a battlefield. A game for the gods. A wargame where they work out their differences. There was never any chance that this place wouldn’t end up trashed. What I don’t understand is how you geniuses never worked out that the only way you’ll survive it is by working together.”

She crossed her arms with an air of finality. “When the Alvaren empire ruled the skies and our vassals ruled the land, we had the unity you speak of. Perfect order across the lands. A shining empire that would have lasted out eternity. Your Dvergar ruined that.”

There really wasn’t a nice way to say this. “You understand that people can work together without most of those people being slaves, right?”

“Once more your wisdom is that of a back-birthed child. For there to be order, there must be leadership. For there to be leadership, there must be hierarchy and obedience.”

The boat went into a swerve when I let go of the rudder, but I didn’t care. I slammed my arms down on either side of Seren. Face to face with her. The cold anger wasn’t back, thank the gods, but I was still prickling with rage. “You can lead people without owning them.”

She didn’t even flinch. If anything she seemed more comfortable nose to nose with me than she’d been all day, and that old infuriating sneer was back on her face. “The limits of thy experience are cleanly marked. Given enough time, you will come to understand things the way that we elder races do. All leaders make slaves of their followers. It is the true nature of things. There is a beauty in purity. In honesty. We Alvaren have abandoned the pretense. If we must subjugate a people so that order can be created, then we make no false promises. They obey us because we are the powerful and the perfect. We command them because they are the lesser.”

I don’t know when it happened, but the next thing that I knew I had leaned in so close that I could see my breath displacing her hair where it hung around her face. “You think I’m less than you?”

“Not you.” Those tiny black pinpricks in her eyes blossomed out until they were taking up my whole field of vision. She turned her head away, a blue tint playing over her cheeks. “If you are Eternals, as you claim, then you are my equal. We would have a place for you in the new world that we must make, by our side.”

Mercy coughed so aggressively I’m surprised she didn’t dislodge a tooth. “Am I interrupting something?”

My train of thought derailed, and all that prickling anger washed away in a wave of embarrassment. I turned around so fast Seren had to duck under my horns. “We’re mooring off the coast until morning.”

Mercy looked back and forth between me and Seren. “Uh-huh.”

“Don’t uh-huh me, Snow White.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I will shoot you right in the eel.”

“And I shall disembowel you before the arrow is drawn.”

We both turned to look at Seren with dismay, and she flushed again. “Is this not the manner in which you speak amongst yourselves?”

Mercy didn’t laugh, but it was a near thing. “Tone was a little off, sweetheart.”

I pushed away from the two of them, bellowing to the Dvergar, “Drop anchor and get dinner started!”

There was another round of relieved sighs. They didn’t want to be on the boat, and they’d been pretty clear about that from the get-go, but the Dvergar seemed even less enthusiastic about heading into a jungle at night. Seren had a point. I was willing to admit she had one good point. Only the one.

After our little flare-up, Seren and I had kept our distance throughout dinner, made a lot easier by the fact that she ate and I didn’t, but when it was all over and I’d settled myself down at the edge of the tent, she came and curled up beside me again. “You know you’d be just as safe sleeping with Asher or Mercy, right?”

She shuffled back towards me a little. “I disagree with thy assessment. Your bulk makes you a far better shield.”

“Are you trying to make a joke again?”

She stopped shuffling. “Perhaps.”

“Good night, Seren.”

“And unto you.”

By dawn, she’d made her way close enough that I could smell her hair. Honey and lavender. She’d been chasing us for days, been dunked in the ocean, and somehow, she still smelled like honey and lavender. I’d managed to sleep through the night this time around, only stirring once when a Dvergar made the mistake of stepping too close to me, so the presence of a warm body in arm’s reach came as something of a shock.

I was on my feet with my hands up before I even knew I was awake. “No touching!”

The Dvergar around about me startled from their sleep, then rolled over when they realized it was just more Eternal nonsense. Seren glanced back at me but said nothing. Desperate for a distraction, I started breaking down the tent and remaking the ship before anyone could say anything about anything.

With the sun up, the rain cleared to another gentle and sporadic patter, and the cloth of our makeshift tent moved aside, I felt like I was getting my first good look at the island. Off amongst the trees, the sun glinted off something white. The same shimmering stone that the pillars of the Waystones had been carved from—and Witchglass Overlook too. A tower of it, so tall that it rose above the canopy of the jungle and beyond, reaching up like a grasping hand with three jutting fingers trying to snatch the sun from the sky. Asher joined me at the prow. “Talon’s Keep.”

I spread my arms wide. King-of-the-worlding. “That’s her.”

He looked at me sideways but kept his peace. “Do you mean to bring the Dvergar into the forest with us?”

“Do you want to leave them on the boat to be eaten by sea-serpents? At least if they’re with us, somebody will try to protect them.”

“Do you be thinking we’ve no say in this, boys?” Gunhild elbowed her way between us, pointing a brass telescope off towards the tower. “We’ll be marching right along with you. Outpost like this would be needing a lot of infrastructure. Farms and the like. Might be there’s someplace to restock our supplies. Maybe even a dry patch to lay our heads.”

I put a finger over the end of her telescope, and she grinned as she yanked it away from her eye. “You don’t like sleeping on a boat?”

“The rock, solid beneath me. That is what I be liking.” She spat over the side. “The sea can away and drown itself.”

“Not sure if that would work, but I get what you mean.”

With a full complement of Dvergar on the oars, we moved in towards the shore, the gentle ebb and flow of the waves bouncing us as we went. Despite my eel-skin repairs, the ship still looked ragtag at best and decaying at worst. We were lucky it had served us this far. I really needed to upgrade my Artifice so I could start making better boats. And weapons. And armor.

We started bumping over rocks before we even got close to the white sands of safety, with only the toughness of the eel-hide I’d coated the ship with stopping us from springing a half-dozen leaks. Even with it, a few of the Dvergar were scampering around, stomping boards back into their rightful places and pouring out our last precious supplies of tar. I wasn’t even sure it was worth it. Sure, we were going to need a ship to get off this little slice of heaven when we were done, but there was a whole island’s worth of fresh trees they could use to make one. There didn’t seem to be much point in hanging onto this one for anything except materials.

For all their protestations of hating this ship, the Dvergar sure did want to keep it in one piece.

It wasn’t an ego thing when I insisted that I was the first off the boat, it was practicality. Whatever this new island had in terms of hideous monsters, I was the one most likely to survive being smacked in the face with them.

Okay, maybe it was a little bit of an ego thing. I felt a weird impulse to stick a flag in the ground, even though I knew there had already been people living here. A lot of world history suddenly made a lot more sense.

Asher, Mercy, Gunhild, and Seren came on down next. All the best fighters we had on offer, just in case the jungle was as full of dinosaurs as it looked like. I crept up the beach towards the trees’ edge, then realized how stupid I was being. The whole point of me going first was to draw the attention of anything nasty that might snack on the Dvergar later. I whistled, long and shrill.

Whether it made it any farther than the edge of the jungle I couldn’t say. We could certainly hear bird calls coming from inside, a cacophony of them, but if anybody heard me, there was no sign. I turned back to the rest of them and shrugged. “All clear?”

Mercy shouted over from beside the boat. “You are so bad at this.”

“Oh, like you know any better.”

Even unarmed, Seren moved like she was ready for a fight, slinking up behind my position on the beach. “The decision was tactically sound.”

“Get a room!”

Seren raised an eyebrow, but when I didn’t even attempt to explain what that colorful little turn of phrase meant, she seemed to discard it. I drew my sword and marched on into the forest. Gunhild called after me, “And where do you think you be going?”

“We’re headed to the tower, yeah?” I shrank my sword down until it was more like a meat cleaver again, a machete to hack my way through the dense vines. “No point hanging around.”

With the excess metal, I made a second chopper and passed it back to Seren. Distantly, I could still hear Gunhild back on the sand. The jungle muffled sound amazingly. “And what about our supplies?”

“Leave them on the boat?” I bellowed back over my shoulder. “It isn’t like there’s anyone about to steal them!”

That was when I noticed Seren looking from me to the blade in her hands and back again. Ah yeah, I forgot she wanted to kill me. Slight error in judgment there. “You cannot mean for me to have this weapon. Forged of your own blade, no less. Thy are testing me.”

Progress was slow through the jungle. A few faltering attempts at using Artifice to do some serious deforestation had ended up with me face down and my Divine Pillars aching. There was too much alive in the forest for me to work it. Chopped down, I could probably use these trees for whatever I pleased, but not as long as they were alive, enmeshed in the rest of the tangled web of roots, parasites and symbiotes. Not to mention being filled with critters all happily living out their fuzzy little lives. So we chopped.

It probably would have been a lot quicker if somebody was using their cleaver-machete instead of talking about it, but she was clearly having a moment here. “I’m not testing you, I’m trusting you. Let’s see how it works out.”

If she found any happiness or pleasure in me trusting her, it didn’t show on that carefully schooled face of hers. If anything she looked annoyed with me as she stepped up by my shoulder and began slicing away. “Your kinfolk shall not approve of this, you must know that. Even the wyrmling is cautious of me.”

“Well, you did beat him unconscious and tie him up that one time.”

Her blade seemed to dance as we moved in deeper. Her cuts weren’t as powerful as mine, but up against an enemy as tough and fearsome as some vines they didn’t really need to be. “The favor was returned, post-haste.”

“What’s a little beating and bondage between friends, eh?” I grinned, but she wasn’t looking.

“We are not friends, Eternal. I am your hostage. It is merely advantageous for me to assist you as it grants me freedoms that I would not have expected to enjoy.” She reached over where I was cutting, deftly severing a knotted vine that was supporting the one I was trying to hack down, arms and blade weaving through mine like it was a dance.

“So you’re finally admitting I’m an Eternal?”

She paused, glancing at me. “I am willing to entertain the possibility that every word you speak is not a twisted lie.”

With a snort, I pushed on. “Thanks.”

Mercy had the good grace to make some noise as she ran through the jungle. No cowbell for her. “Hey, Maulkin, tag out. They need you to help haul supplies.”

I groaned. “I told them to leave them on the ship.”

“Yeah, well in a shocking twist nobody gives a damn what your opinion is. Go carry heavy things.”

“Ugh. Fine! Try not to chop your own leg off.” I tossed her the cleaver as I passed.

She stopped dead when she saw Seren at work. “Uh…”

“Got to go carry heavy things. Have fun. Bye!” I power walked away from that conversation before it could even start.

In my absence, the lovely Dvergar had lashed all the supplies that they could manage onto a big sled and made a nice big loop of rope to tie around me. I was literally being used as a beast of burden now. Great.

Gunhild sat on top of the stack of barrels and crates as we wobbled up the beach and into the trees. “Don’t you be whining now, big lad. You might be the best fighter we’ve got, but you’re not worth the dozen men it would take to haul this without you.”

“Next time I get reincarnated in a new world, I’m coming back as something small and feeble, so nobody makes me do things.”

“Aye, that be working out well for your boy Asher.” That prick had the Dvergar carrying his books for him, a stack of them balanced in each set of arms he could find. Apparently, he was concerned about water damage. I had no idea how we were going to get him to go on adventures again now that he’d found his one true love.

With a heave and a growl, I got the sled over a buried root. “I swear, I’m going to burn those books while he’s sleeping.”

“Don’t you be daft now,” Gunhild said, letting her silence linger for a long moment before adding, “They’d make fine kindling. Burning them up for no good reason be wasteful.”

I was still laughing when the attack came.

Chapter 29

I didn’t even have a chance to see what was coming at us before it burst out of the woods and bore me to the ground in a tangle of ropes.

There were teeth locked in my arm—a bite that had been meant for my neck. Whether it was pure luck or instinct that got my arm up before the beast hit, I couldn’t say. All I could say was that it hurt like hell. Even nose to nose with the creature, I couldn’t get a good look at it. There was a vague sense of crocodile about the snout, but the eyes behind it looked more like the bulbous cones of a chameleon. One looked on me, the other turned back to stare at Gunhild where she fumbled her crossbow.

Chameleon. That was why I still couldn’t make out more than the outline of the thing. It was shifting colors to blend in with the jungle. Stupid monster-mash lizard. I hammered a fist into its face.

[21 Damage]

“Let.”

[19 Damage]

“Me.”

[20 Damage]

“Go!”

[18 Damage]

With every bop on the nose, I could see the eyes swivel around and the colors ripple out from the point of impact. Still, the damned thing wouldn’t let go.

There was a thumping, pulsing sensation in my arm where it had bitten, which I’d first taken for the thumping of my own heart, but now that it was slowing, I realized that it was venom pumping out from the hollow needle teeth that were locked in my flesh.

Numbness spread out from the bite, not cold, just…nothing. Death crept out, leaving that whole side of my body feeling bloodless. Good thing my other side was still working.

Instead of another wild swing, the next time that I twisted my body around, I stretched out past the snout and grabbed hold of the eye-cone.

That got its attention. The grip on my arm loosened, but not as much as it loosened when I squeezed and twisted.

An awful noise vibrated out around my dead arm. A trilling wail somewhere between nails on a chalkboard and a spider set on fire. The eye turned to mush in my hand, and I flung it away.

Uncoupled from my arm, the lizard leapt back out of reach just in time for Gunhild’s shot to go wide.

The numbness was spreading across my chest from the shoulder, and the grey of my skin turned pallid and lifeless, the black veins beneath growing ever starker. When it passed over the midpoint, my upper-body went full ragdoll, the dead muscles no longer holding up my weight. I managed to stagger around for a moment before the weight of my own bulk pulled me down.

My face hit the mulch. Gunhild was scrambling to reload as the lizard waddled back in. Could a partially invisible lizard look smug? It looked smug.

I was going to die. Worse than that, I was going to die to some big reptile in some jungle in the middle of nowhere. Death by beast, the gods had called it. It seemed cruel for it to happen to me three times in a row.

Closing my eyes, I was surrounded with everything I could possibly need to make a weapon—metal ore in the crates, wood all around me, even rope to tie things together—yet none of it mattered because my body would not move. My unbitten arm still had some life in it, but even my head was lolling uselessly to the side.

When I opened my eyes again, I wished that I hadn’t. The jaws of the lizard were opening, and then the jaw dislocated with a pop as it spread wider and wider. It was going to swallow me. Just what I needed. Slow and painful death being digested alive. Even better than just dying.

Poison Resistance: Rank 10/10

The trait shone with moonlight as it was written permanently into my being, and the number faded away.

Suddenly the numbness felt a lot less numb, allowing me to clench a fist.

The lizard lunged for me at the same moment I flung myself up. The jaws tried to snap shut on me, but they were spread too wide, and the stretched-out muscles were too slow to clench tight again. With one hand on each of its jaws, I pulled them even wider apart.

That same screeching keening noise came out of the crocodile face, but I had no time for mercy. This thing would have made me its lunch if I’d let it. With a flex of my shoulders and a boost of Potency, I ripped the jaws apart.

Now it was the gator’s turn to feel its parts fall useless. It tried to scramble backward still wailing, but I was having none of it. A stick leapt into my hand, sharpening itself into a spear point as I thrust it between the dangling jaw and the fixed row of venom-dripping fangs.

The tip burst out through the back of the lizard’s head, and the whole thing collapsed to the ground in a heap.

Victory!

Potency increased to 45

Celerity increased to 21

Brawling: Rank 9/10

Polearm: Rank 1/10

70 Experience Gained

Dead, I could see what had been hidden by its color shifting before. The whole thing was massive and over-muscled beneath the scaly skin, and the jaws and head, in particular, seemed to be grossly overdeveloped, but even so, the monster was obviously from the same family tree as Asher. Gunhild let out a hiss. “Wyrm-spawn.”

“Feral Inyoka.”

Up ahead, I heard another reptilian screech, and without even thinking, I launched myself into a full-on charge. Mercy and Seren were in the jungle up ahead. All alone against the…

I slowed to a jog when I caught sight of the girls ahead of me. Mercy was drenched in blood and still furiously hacking away at the remains of the Inyoka on the ground, even though it was clearly dead. Seren, meanwhile, was moving through a series of elegant moves with her cleaver, as though it was some delicate fencer’s tool instead of the big metal hunk I’d handed her. Every time it overbalanced her, that little furrow appeared between her eyebrows. I was breathless. “You’re alright? Of course, you’re alright.”

Mercy left my cleaver buried in the back of the Inyoka’s skull. “I have had enough! I’m done. Everywhere we go, something is trying to kill us!”

Seren launched herself at me with a snarl. I wish I could say I wasn’t expecting it, but she’d spent the whole time that she had a blade in her hand casting me sideways glances like she was just waiting for her opportunity. Weird that she’d pick now, with Mercy standing witness, to kill me.

One foot kicked off my knee, the next off my shoulder as she launched herself up for a killing blow. I managed to get a hand up as if that would stop the cleaver coming down, but she just used that as another foothold to gain more height, impossibly fast.

She soared past me to collide with Asher as he emerged from the bush, hammering him to the ground. “Wyrmspawn!”

Everyone was shouting all at once, but I won out in volume, if not the contents of my bellow. “Stop! That’s our one!”

The blade was already coming down on Asher, but with a deft twist of her arm, Seren managed to embed it in a tree root beside his face instead of the face itself. Alvaren and Inyoka stared at each other for a long moment, then she gracefully dismounted him, and he gasped for air. “My thanks.”

I plucked the chopper out of Seren’s unresisting hands. “How about we don’t murder all the people on our side?”

Her empty hands flexed at her sides. “Your side, not mine.”

“Just don’t stab Asher, yeah?”

“As is thy wish,” she said with a sneer. One step forward, two steps back.

You could have cut the tension with a knife. Luckily, we had an even blunter object available, Mercy. “So what? Talon keeps pets?”

Asher and I both shrugged, but Seren was quick to reply. “These wretches are wyrm-born and make no mistake. Inyoka bred for war rather than”—she cast a glance at Asher—“domestic duties.”

I swear, I tried not to picture Asher in a French Maid outfit, but it was like my brain was set on betraying me. The sniggering started, and it just wouldn’t stop. Mercy rolled her eyes. “But what does that mean? There’s a dragon here?”

“Mayhaps. More likely one passed through in the past, leaving its cast-offs in its wake. Even at the height of our war with the wyrms, their spawn was more capable…feral you named them, and feral I’d mark them.”

“Wait, how did you hear me calling them…”

She tapped her long, pointed ears. Apparently, they weren’t just for show. I froze for a second, trying to mentally backtrack through every conversation that I’d had with Mercy and Asher back on the ship, searching for anything embarrassing or incriminating, and oh gods, Mercy had to go and blurt out all that stuff about me having a crush on Seren.

Turns out Faun can’t blush. Which was a relief, but I still turned on my heel and ran back along the path we’d been cutting. Mercy called, “Hey!” after me.

“Checking on the Dvergar!”

As it turned out, the Dvergar did not need checking on. Gunhild was fine, and her boys had formed a solid defensive line down on the beach to protect the civilians when they heard the sounds of fighting. When the time came to move them through the jungle, we’d all go together, but from how few of the ferals had shown up for their big ambush, I had a suspicion that we weren’t going to have too much trouble. With surprise on their side, camouflage and venom probably would have let them whittle us down, but they’d lost that now. Everyone was on high alert. Yet again I had to admit Seren was right, these things were not very smart.

Before the hour was out, I was trussed to the wagon again, and we were underway, close enough behind Mercy and Seren that I could see the vast difference in their skill with the blade. Handing the chopper back to Seren, consciously aware of what I was doing this time around was a different experience, but I figured that if I didn’t make a fuss then she wouldn’t either. She took the tool without comment and set to work.

Inch by inch, we cut our way into the jungle, pressing on over the freshwater streams with only a little more humping and bumping around than before. Asher was perched up on the back of the wagon alongside Gunhild by now, ready with his spells in case of any more nasty surprises. If he was missing his books, he didn’t complain out loud.

It was hot, humid, and tense—and not in a fun way. Every time a bird took flight or twig snapped off in the jungle I froze, just waiting for another lizard to cannon into me. Every time a cut vine dangled down to whack me in the horns, I fumbled at the ropes around my middle. It was barely past midday when we broke through into the clearing surrounding the tower, but I was so done with being a pack-horse.

From this close, at this angle, I couldn’t even see the top of the tower, it just seemed to go on and on forever, fading into the clouds above. Uncoupled from the wagon, we began a tentative exploration of the area. The tower itself dominated one side of the clearing. I wasn’t even sure if clearing was the right word; this place had been very deliberately purged of all plant life. I wasn’t sure if Talon had salted the earth, and I didn’t fancy taste testing it to be sure.

At the other side of the big bare circle from the tower, there were outbuildings that looked practically identical to the ones back in Witchglass Overlook. The same hand had crafted both of these places, without a doubt. The big difference here was that the jungle had provided some sort of shelter from the elements. The wooden doors had rotted away, but there was no pile-up of filth inside. Sticking my head in through one of the doorways, I could see rusted metal rings stacked up in neat rows; they must have been barrels, once upon a time. In the next, there were hunks of wood that were unmistakably furniture. Rows of beds. Talon had hosted students here. More of the same exciting nothing could be found in every building, with the exception of one round-shaped one that had a firepit sunk down into the middle of it, which was inexplicably intact, and even more inexplicably still burning with the same blue-green flames we’d seen in the Overlook.

Seren pushed past me without a glance, in sharp contrast to the constant stares she’d been giving me until now. “Ignem Aeternum was once a common sight, but from thy face, I can see it is a shock to you. If so small a thing is startling, I begin to believe your wyrm-spawn’s tales of the decline of magic.”

Beyond that, there was a well set off towards the jungle’s edge and very little else. The Dvergar would have a roof over their heads tonight, a fire to warm themselves around, and clean water to drink. It was hardly paradise, but it would keep them alive.

Once Asher had gone around doing his jazz-hands thing, confirming that there were no hidden traps, curses, or monsters, we all went back to herd the Dvergar through. I’d reclaimed the metal of my sword and recombined it, but before we headed out, I went for a rummage in the back of the wagon until I uncovered Seren’s gear. Her bow had been broken somewhere along the line, but her two swords were intact and too finely worked for me to have used them for scrap even if I’d wanted to.

Presenting them to her felt like it should have been even more of an event than giving her the cleaver. Asher, Mercy, and Gunhild were all making meaningful eye contact with each other when I passed the blades over, but Seren was careful to let nothing show on her face. She strapped into her greaves and breastplate without assistance. Some enchantment must have been helping, because speaking as somebody who has contended with the evil alien intelligence of a bra clasp before, there was no way that you could do up all of the fastenings around the sides and back without assistance.

If I had to pick a word to describe the rest of the day, it would be uneventful. No. If Asher had to pick a word, he would have chosen uneventful, I would have chosen boring. It was boring. We went back and forth, escorting groups of Dvergar through the big scary jungle. I probably wouldn’t have minded if there had been a single lizard attack, but nothing. Not a damn thing. Not even an oversized gecko.

It was late afternoon by the time the Dvergar were settled into their new accommodations. They’d put me to work ripping up trees and building a barricade fence around the outside of the clearing once it became clear that we weren’t going to get lizards to the face every time we went outside. I didn’t really know if the fence was necessary. Even the birds seemed to steer clear of the air above Talon’s circle of dirt.

Regardless, I did my time and raised the walls, and the Dvergar nodded approvingly instead of providing me with helpful advice. Maybe they knew I was itching to hit somebody. Yet when all that was done, the gates—that I’d just made—were slammed shut, and I was ready to get going, everyone seemed oddly reluctant.

I clapped my hands together. “Come on, guys. This is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for. A proper dungeon. Crazy wizard tower full of traps and monsters and…this is going to be awesome!”

Asher didn’t look up from his book. “I do not believe you are using that word correctly, nor assessing the dangers in such a place with any rationality.”

“Oh, come on. This is going to be so much fun!”

Mercy rolled her eyes. “You’re an idiot.”

Gunhild was nodding right along with her. “Aye, you be a fool and a half, true enough. If you be seeking excitement, there are ways to find it without putting your boot in the Chelic polyp.”

Bestiary helpfully explained that she was talking about a species of cave-dwelling scorpion-spider things. The polyps were their nests. Like a wasps’ nest but lethal.

Asher hadn’t even taken his eyes off the tower since we arrived. I could already tell that he was obsessed. He wanted to jazz-hands it so bad. Yet even he betrayed me in my hour of need. “The ladies are correct. Our best course of action would be to begin our exploration once the new day has begun.”

“Oh, come on!” I looked around desperately for any help. “Seren! Seren thinks we should go in now, right, Seren?”

“There seems little reason to delay the inevitable.” She looked up at the tower, pupils blossoming huge and dark in the day’s dimming light. “This fortification must be taken, and thee must take it. Cover of darkness can only aid in your egress.”

Mercy raised an eyebrow. “Does she get a vote?”

“If the trees were voting his way, I suspect that Maulkin would be marching for arboreal suffrage.” Asher didn’t smirk—he didn’t have the equipment for smirking—but he radiated a smug aura.

I groaned all the way to sitting on the floor. “Why do you all want to be boring and have a nap?”

Gunhild coughed. “Because I be asking them to. There be no way of knowing what be out in those trees. I’d sleep easier knowing you folks would be here. At least for one night until we be seeing what comes a-crawling out.”

This time my groan carried me the rest of the way down until I was completely horizontal in the dirt. “Ugh. Why didn’t somebody tell me that instead of letting me argue with you all and look like an asshole?”

Mercy stepped on my chest on her way to help the Dvergar settle into the bunkhouse. “No force on Amaranth can stop you looking like an asshole.”

As she passed over, I used Artifice to patch up the hole in her trousers. She let out a little yelp as the leather tightened back around her ass, then glowered back at me.

“You’re welcome!”

And then after I went out of my way to do her that favor, she flipped me off. What a class act.

That night, as all the Dvergar lay asleep in their beds, I got to stand watch. It was my own fault really. I shouldn’t have made such a fuss about not being tired earlier in the day when I was pushing to get on with the actual adventure parts of our adventure.

Seren stood sentinel silently behind me, her armor and weapons shining in the moonlight. Part of the reason I’d sort of volunteered to stand watch all night was to get away from her, but she went ahead and actually volunteered anyway. Mercy kept wiggling her eyebrows at me behind Seren’s back. Ugh.

After about half an hour I was bored. Don’t get me wrong, it was pretty and there were a lot of interesting new noises to be heard out in the jungle, but none of the wildlife had any interest in coming into the circle of dirt that Talon had left behind. Asher had confirmed my suspicions that there was some sort of magic at work, but he had been vague about the details. Something about it being unusually subtle. Given that every spell he could cast ended in an explosion, I suppose anything would feel subtle after that.

My attention drifted around to the tower itself. There was no way that a wizard didn’t have some monsters inside as a security system. That was what wizards did, right? That was their whole schtick. Anyway, that was the justification that I needed to keep my eyes locked on the doors of the tower instead of the tree-line—anything might come wandering out.

I literally jumped when Seren spoke. “Your companions do not accept me as you do.”

“I think they’re waiting for you to switch back to being a psycho killer.” There wasn’t really a tactful way to say that.

“That is not my nature, though I’ll warrant they have good reason to fear so.” She let out a sigh, then leaned back against me. “Will they accept my presence in your party come the dawn?”

Her armor was too smooth to dig in, and it was retaining the heat from the air so that it felt almost as warm as the body it encased against my skin. I had to remind myself we were in the middle of a conversation. “Yeah. Maybe. Probably.”

“I would not trust in the hospitality of thy runt”—she switched seamlessly—“the Dvergar, were it not for your presence.”

I shrugged, and I could feel it shifting her too. “Well, they’ve got a good reason to be mad at you. You destroyed their home.”

She pushed away from me with a snarl. “You counsel me to forgive and forget the sins of their ancestors, yet you expect me to shoulder the blame for—”

I held up a hand to cut her off. “When your city teleported back into the sky, it collapsed the mountain that their city was built in.”

She wet her lips. A brief flicker of the tip of her tongue. “This escaped my attention.”

“Yeah, turns out they built Khag Mhor right on top of where your sky castle crash-landed. Or maybe you teleported under them later?” I shrugged. “Either way, you moved, the cave collapsed, their friends and family died, and they lost everything. Then afterward, you kind of waged war on them for a bit there. Are you surprised that they don’t love you?”

“Yet…you do.” She quickly corrected herself. “You have a care for me though my people wrought the same ruin upon thee.”

I pretended not to hear that first bit. “Hey, I did plenty of ruining right back. Besides, you didn’t know any better. You thought we were bad guys.”

“I have not abdicated myself entirely from that belief. Your acts of kindness matter to a prisoner, but should I win my freedom, then we shall be foes once more. My resolve does not so easily weaken.”

I rolled my shoulders and drew my sword. “Come at me then.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re free. You already gave Asher the history lesson he wanted. You’ve got all your gear back. I’m not keeping you here. If you want to go then go. If you want to take another swing at me, I’d be happy to kick your ass all over the island.”

“I am your prisoner. You bested me… Bound me…”

“You’re free to go. I’ve got no use for prisoners, and I figure that even if you do haul ass back to Queen Psycho, we’ll be long gone before she catches up to us here.”

“Speak no ill of Briar By Moonlight.”

“Yeah, gods forbid I mention that she turned you all into drooling apes.”

Her swords were in her hands without me even seeing her move. Maybe I had not thought this plan all the way through. “I told thee, speak of her no ill!”

“Yelling doesn’t make the truth go away. Pretending doesn’t make it go away. The truth doesn’t change just because we don’t like it.” Seren lunged for me, blades crossing at my neck as I barked out, “She did it.”

I could feel the razor edge of her swords on either side of my neck, stilled in their path by Seren’s will alone. “Why?”

“Ask her.” Even speaking was enough movement to cause a trickle of blood to seep out on either side of my neck.

“Not her!” Seren spat. “You! Why are you doing this? Why are you saying these things when you know I must reply with my blades. How is your cause helped to have me at thy throat?”

“Maybe I think you deserve better than being made to kill for a lie.”

Her hands shook as she stood there, paralyzed by indecision. No, not indecision. Ambivalence. She knew I was telling her the truth. She knew it because I had no reason to lie to her. But on the other side of the scales was her whole lifetime, devoted to the service of the mad queen who’d put us both in this situation. Not just one lifetime either. Who knew how many hundreds of years Seren had seen before losing herself to the svart? Every moment of it had been devoted to believing every word that Briar by Moonlight spoke as if it was natural law.

It was genuinely amazing that I still had a head.

Agonizingly slowly, the swords moved away from my neck, then in a flash, they were sheathed again as if nothing had happened. My new bloody neckbeard was the only evidence that anything had happened at all. Seren’s face was the locked down mask of no emotion that she seemed to save for when something was really bothering her.

She swiveled on her heel to stare back out into the jungle, as though guard duty actually mattered, and she’d been unforgivably distracted. The same tension that had stripped her face of all emotion was still there, obvious in her forced stillness. Great. More weirdness. Just what I’d hoped for.

“The Dvergar. They could find the permanence that they seek here.” I jumped. Again. I swear this one woman had me twitchier than a whole mine full of svart had.

I cleared my throat to make sure the little yelp-scream I’d caught there didn’t come out. “Same thought crossed my mind.”

She pressed on. “There is an abundance of fodder in the jungle, this earth could be cultivated, and the water flows pure and clean. All that they need to survive is here.”

I was nodding along, even though she couldn’t see me with our backs turned to each other. “Everything but a mine.”

She scoffed. “What need have they for stone and metal in such a place?”

“They’re Dvergar, it is like…their religion or something.”

I could almost hear all of the less than polite things that she wanted to say about Dvergar religion running through her head. Wah, wah, they killed the world looking for a god underground and now you want to give them a new hole to go digging in. Yes. Yes, I do want to give them a new hole. Shut up. See, two of us can play at this internal conversation game. “Should fertile soil be turned aside, there shall be stone, no doubt. Given time, they could make of this place what they wished.”

I nodded to the tower. For my own benefit, presumably. “You think Talon would be cool with new neighbors?”

She glanced back over her shoulder; some measure of composure must have been back. The mask wasn’t slipping exactly, but her face didn’t look like it had been carved out of marble anymore. Marble with freckles. “I do not believe that the master of the house is at home, lest we would have been bid to depart as soon as we arrived.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Let us be courteous guests and make our presence known to our host—if he is present.”

I sighed. “As soon as the rest of them wake.”

Chapter 30

Was I a little bit excited to go and explore a wizard’s tower? Yes. Yes, I was.

Did that justify running into the bunkhouse at dawn, picking up Mercy and Asher around the waist, and carrying them off to the doors of that tower? Maybe not.

While Asher tolerated being manhandled with all the good grace that I was accustomed to, Mercy was not, by her nature, an early riser. She was, an early kicker, an early groaner, and an early tantrum thrower.

I had to drop her halfway across the dirt circle before she did Asher an injury. Suddenly, all the sleepiness seemed to leave her as she sprinted back towards the bunkhouse. “Oh, come on!”

“Nope. Still sleep time. Go away.”

I called after her, “You’re already up!”

“Not for long!”

I put Asher down without incident at least. “Might I return to the bunkhouse and retrieve my supplies, or do you mean to have me enter with nothing but myself.”

Oops. “Oh yeah, you normally have robes or something.”

“Indeed. I shall see if the judicious application of one end of a stick to our indolent companion might not part her from her bedroll.”

“Thanks.”

After several long hours of doing nothing, Seren and I had taken shifts napping under the starry sky, if only to avoid the awkward silence that was still hanging over us. I didn’t want to say anything that might set off her murderous rage again, and she seemed reluctant to delve into any conversation deeper than commenting on the various birdcalls that she heard and speculating as to what bird that we had observed through the day they might have been coming from. I had not been paying all that much attention to the birds, so I found myself with little to contribute.

If there were any murderous beasties hiding out in the jungle, waiting to pounce on all the innocent sleeping Dvergar, they never made an appearance or even a noise. I was betting that the chameleon-crocodile things we’d run into yesterday were pretty sneaky, but Seren’s big pointy ears could pick out every single sound in the woods. She even made me go patrol around the outside of the fence once or twice when she heard a twig snap too close by.

Well, she didn’t make me. I just wasn’t willing to let her go wandering off into the jungle at night to get chewed up by whatever Jurassic Park reject we encountered next.

A judicious application of some Restoration and well-water had dealt with the blood on my neck, and Seren very deliberately avoided looking at me while I cleaned up. I wondered if she was embarrassed about her decapitation-threatening outburst or more ashamed of herself that she hadn’t gone through with it. I’d hoped last night might have cleared the air between us, but it just seemed to have made her even more introverted and tense.

Mercy emerged from the outbuildings with a scowl that would have killed a lesser man and paused only briefly in checking over her gear to give me a kick in the shins. Luckily, the long and pointless night, along with the rusty fixings of some of the old doors that had rotted away, had given me the time to make some new arrows for her—a gift that seemed to ease her grumpiness a little bit. “Gunhild is staying with the rest of the Dvergar. She wants to get them settled in, start building…something or other.”

“She wasn’t invited anyway.”

Mercy’s glare was now directed at Seren, who was checking the doors of the tower over for any obvious traps. “But she is?”

“Well, yeah.”

“There is little point in having an expert on ancient history along if you do not have her accompany you into the ancient ruins that you are exploring,” Asher piped up, now fully dressed in his Dvergar-made robes. Mercy hadn’t snapped him into lizard-chunks in her rage. That was nice.

Mercy had no response to that but a growl. She closed the distance with Seren in a few strides. “Alright, little miss, let’s get a few things straight. The second that I see you so much as point one of those pig stickers in the direction of one of us, I’m shooting you full of arrows, then setting you on fire. Are we clear?”

Seren looked askance to me, and I shrugged. “I consent to your latest barrage of demands. In return, I seek the concession that you heed my words within Talon’s demesne. Where the expertise that your wyrm-spawn prizes shall be at its most valuable.”

Mercy loomed over her. “You think you can tell us what to—”

I cut her off before this got too stupid. “Yeah, that’s fine, Seren.”

That earned me a curt nod from Seren and a betrayed look from Mercy. “Then heed me now. I can find no mechanical traps upon this door, but if there is some arcane ward, thy wyrmspawn shall have to seek it.”

Asher was radiating smugness again. “Before your inspection today, I took the liberty of ensuring that there was no protective spell upon the door, beyond that necessary to preserve it against the passage of time. No harm shall befall us.”

I stepped up and pushed the big doors open. They were taller than me, so they were massive to the rest of them, carved from some rich dark wood, and worked with the same silver fixtures we’d seen all over this place and the Overlook.

Light flooded into a place that hadn’t seen it in so long, even the rat skeletons on the floor must have had long-beards. A moment after the door opened, torches around the walls blazed to life, tinting everything green. A great spiral staircase started at the far side of this round chamber, but you could hardly see it past the statue dominating the room. Talon himself, yet again, but this time it was carved to be twice the size of me. I’m not saying that he was compensating for something, but if he turned out to be over six foot, I would use Artifice to make a hat…and then eat it.

Asher let out a hushed whisper. “Astounding.”

“It is a big rock.”

“The craftsmanship, the artistry, it looks almost alive.” Maybe he should have just married it.

I sauntered closer and gave the statue a solid prod in the crotch region of the robes. “Nope. It’s dead.”

Mercy and Seren managed to get out a garbled call of warning before the statue slapped me.

Have you ever run into a solid stone wall? It felt a lot like that. Or maybe more like getting hit in the side of the head by a truck going full speed. Either way, one second I was standing there thinking up clever jokes about being rock hard, and the next I was in motion, soaring through the air to smash into yet another stone wall.

For a second there I was pretty sure I was dead. The flash of light that rang through my head like a thunderbolt was all too familiar to somebody who’d died a few times. Yet I could still feel things, and the encroaching darkness retreated as I fumbled my way to my feet and blinked the whirling room back onto an even keel. Good thing I still had my sea legs.

I managed to stagger a few steps into the room before the thing wobbling at the periphery of my vision caught my attention, and I reached up to brush it aside. Ow. Again. Ow. I fumbled at it for a second, not understanding what it was until I dragged the tip of it in front of my face again. My horn. “He broke my horn!”

“Nobody cares!” Mercy snarked as she took a dive under the living statue’s sweeping arms. A few of her arrows lay broken and useless on the floor. Asher had retreated out of the room, and only Seren was actually attacking the thing, her arms and blades a blur of motion, a green-silver shimmer, chipping away uselessly at the robed legs of the thing, filling the air with stone-dust.

If it were me, I’d be dead. Sadly, this thing was made of tougher stuff. I drew my sword and charged in with a roar, surging my Potency as I went. The statue saw me coming, and it brought its arms back around, swinging for me, meeting my attack head-on.

Both arms shattered below the elbow and spun off into the room from the force of that collision. The statue’s arms, not mine, although it kind of felt like mine might too. My trusty sword was still vibrating from the impact, and that same tremor was spreading through me, carrying aches along with it.

The statue reared up, lifting the stumps of its arms up until they were level with Talon’s stupid smug beard. Maybe it was a wizard thing. You spent too many skill points on spells, and suddenly, you couldn’t stop smirking at everyone like you knew something they didn’t. Something other than a load of spells, I mean.

Seren didn’t waste a moment, sprinting across to me, running up the flat of my blade, and then kicking off from my shoulder to fling herself at the statue’s face. Both of her silvered blades slammed against the stone chest of the statue but found no crack or purchase. She fell just as quickly as she’d launched herself, and I had to throw myself forward, abandoning my sword with a clatter to stop her hitting the ground.

The shock of bodily dismemberment had passed, and the guardian statue, the golem—my Bestiary helpfully mentioned—moved back onto the offensive. The arms may have ended at the elbow now, but my strike had turned each of those elbows into a lethal jagged mass of mineral spikes.

Spikes it was now raising up to bring down on me.

With no better plan, I threw Seren at it, hoping she might score a better hit in passage, but her blades skittered across the golem’s stony robes, leaving a trail behind her but no marked effect.

Mercy had started up the stairs in search of a better vantage point, but now she had frozen in place with an arrow pulled back, taking careful aim, as if the whole target wasn’t made out of impenetrable stone.

Asher’s spell was unleashed through the doorway—a bolt of lightning that struck the statue square in the gut and did absolutely nothing. Even the static charge that usually clung to enemies that he’d hit dissipated down the length of the statue and spread harmlessly across the flagstones. Magic wasn’t getting us out of this one, apparently.

Through all of this, the arms were coming down, and I had no hope of getting out of their way in time. That didn’t mean I was defenseless though. Artifice swept out through the room, filling my awareness. The worked stone and the careful craftsmanship of the golem put them all well beyond my reach, but my sword was still as rustic as ever.

I slapped together a shield as thick as I could muster above my head and just barely caught hold of it before the crushing blow of the golem came down.

My potency surge had abandoned me, and all I had was the raw strength of my body against the crushing blow of this stony giant. It wasn’t enough. The hit knocked me to my knees and slammed the shield down into the top of my head and shoulders.

The snapped horn fell by my feet, whatever few strings of material had been holding it gone. The ache that had reverberated up my arms spread out all through me now as my shield rang like a bell. I could only see the golem’s feet from this vantage point, and standing up seemed like it was a virtual guarantee of falling over in my dizzy state. All I could really do was tilt up the edge of the shield to see when the next hit would come down.

It never did.

Mercy unleashed the arrow that she had been holding back, but it was more than just a stick with a metal point this time. It was the eye of the storm. Every one of the torches in the room flared as the air was sucked away from them, and every speck of stone that Seren had chipped away took flight. Imbued with the power of the wind, Mercy’s spiraling arrow hit the golem with the power of a hurricane.

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Vitality increased to 17

Phalanx: Rank 6/10

44 Experience Gained

300 Glory Gained

Hunks of stone the size of my fist tumbled out of the golem as it died, clattering and battering off my shield. Seren slipped under the rim and set her shoulders against the curve of metal above her. That blue flush was back in her cheeks, and she seemed to be breathing again for the first time since I’d knocked her out. Life was back in her now that the fighting had started. She wasn’t uncouth enough to be smiling, but she didn’t seem to be actively fighting a frown anymore either. That was the Seren version of a frigging parade.

I’d make a comment about her being bloodthirsty, but honestly, who was I to talk. Fighting was my favorite thing to do too.

My shield became my sword, and I put it away before I accidentally hit somebody with it that I didn’t mean to. Mercy for instance. She was just stepping off the stairs when I caught her and hoisted her into the air. “That was awesome!”

“I know, right!” She squealed. I might have been squeezing her too tight. Very carefully, I put her down again, but that did nothing to curb the squealing. “Every fight until now we ran into something too big and tough for my arrows to breakthrough, but I still love my bow, so I had a look at the divine skills and found...”

She rambled on and on in her excitement, bouncing up and down with every word and, gods damn it, that enthusiasm was infectious. I found myself bobbing along too.

“…and I could have tried imbuing the shot with fire, but then I thought no, because rock doesn’t burn, but a strong enough wind can knock almost anything down.”

I started clapping. I really didn’t mean to. “Can you do other flavors or just wind?”

“Just wind for now, but I can unlock the other elements with more experience.”

“Oh, we’ve got to try mixing this up with some of Asher’s magic. Or I could make like… shrapnel!”

“When the two of you are quite finished.” Asher sighed. “I do believe that I preferred when they were fighting all the time.”

Seren cocked her head to one side. “This is not fighting? Then why do they shout so?”

Another lipless smirk. “I believe they attempt to make up for in volume what their conversations lack in substance.”

“Rude!” Mercy snapped, all the joy draining out of her in an instant. Why couldn’t people just let each other be happy?

I guess that was it for the ground floor, and there didn’t seem to be any basement on this place—or at least not one that my eyes, Seren’s probing fingers, or Asher’s magic wiggling could discover. That left the stairs heading up, which Mercy had kindly, accidentally, searched for traps while she was lining up her shot on the golem. We set off up the spiral staircase.

“Hell of an ego on this Talon guy, right?”

Mercy might have been back in her shell, but that had never stopped her snarking before. “The giant statue of himself is a bit of a giveaway.”

Seren piped up, “The guardian golem could have been given any form. Perhaps he had it graven in his likeness to allay suspicions about its true purpose.”

“So what, it used to be normal to have giant statues of yourself standing around?”

“I cannot speak to the norms of thy kind, only my own.” Her eyes flicked back to the rubble. “We would find a display like this to be…lacking in taste.”

Asher let out a little chuckle.

There was no chance that we were going to get lucky enough for this spiral staircase to take us all the way to the top of the tower, but I had hoped that we’d make it farther than the first floor before we came to a solid wall. “Oh, come on.”

“You are the one who wished to move at a crawl through a dungeon.”

“Dungeon crawl, Asher. I was excited to go on a dungeon crawl.”

Seren was very deliberately not smiling again. “Has that excitement abated?”

“Uh no. This is going to be amazing.”

The door to the next floor was made of the same wood and silver as the ones I’d swung open earlier, and I was already reaching for it when Asher let out a little yelp of warning. “Trap?”

“I cannot say for certain. Magic lingers about this door, but…it lingers all throughout this tower. The ambient charge makes it impossible to identify any specific…”

I pushed the door open. Nothing happened.

Asher yelled, Mercy hit me, and only Seren stood back with a fixed expression on her face that might have meant anything. Maybe she thought it was funny, or maybe she had been hoping I’d be filled with exploding centipedes. Who knew? Not me. Probably not even her.

Inside the next room, things started to look a lot more like what you’d expect from a wizard’s tower. Beyond the yellowed wallpaper and hardwood floor, there were great brass apparatus in motion and orbs of gemstones embedded in some pieces and floating around in a fixed position next to others. Every so often a beam of light would shoot from one gem to another, timed to some imperceptible rhythm to ensure that they never struck any of the moving parts.

I winked at Seren. “Still think this place is abandoned?”

She blinked back at me, frowned, blinked again, then moved into the room to give it a more thorough examination.

Whatever rhythm the gyroscope rings and gemstones were moving to escaped me, but she seemed to get it, ducking and leaning as she moved along to avoid contact. It wasn’t like the spinning things were taking up the whole room or anything. We could have strolled right by them to the door at the far side, but no, Seren wanted a good close look. Asher was as much of a dumbass, he just didn’t have the timing down, so he had to approach in an awkward crouching crabwalk, following along after Seren like a really messed up pet dog.

I met Mercy’s eye. She was vibrating with contained laughter. “What? You don’t want to go sniff around too?”

“I’ve seen enough wiz-biz for one lifetime, thanks.”

A light darted from one side of the room to the other, passing through the space where my damn horn was meant to be. “Oh right.”

I used Restoration as I ambled on, feeling around the horn so I could enjoy the weird experience of feeling it grow back.

[710/710 Health]

“That’s still weird to watch.” Mercy looked a little green around the gills.

“If you ever want to touch instead of watch”—I winked at her—“just say the word.”

“Ew.”

Across the room, I saw Seren blinking again, the same little frown line appearing between her eyebrows. She put a finger upon one eyelid, then blinked again, holding one eye open. She was trying to wink. That was adorable. If I ever told her it was adorable she’d disembowel me, but that didn’t make it any less adorable. Like cats, except even more murderous, somehow.

She jerked her head around, and I looked away as quick as possible. I was definitely going to be winking at her more. “We can move on.”

Asher nodded his agreement. “These devices are for the measurement of the flows of magic, not anything that may impede our movement.”

“Magic detectors.” Mercy sighed. “Great.”

She had almost strolled all the way across to the door at the far end when one of the darting beams of light hit her in the shoulder. Abruptly, every part of the machinery stopped dead. I threw up my hands. “Not my fault this time!”

We all waited for the other shoe to drop, but the moment stretched on and on. Asher’s hands raised up too, feeling for the magic death that was almost certainly going to be coming raining down on us any second.

Nothing.

We didn’t relax yet, but Mercy moved again, going for the door even quicker than before. The other two broke into a run as well. Everyone was so convinced that something awful was going to happen now that Mercy had set off the magic tripwire laser thing, that nobody was thinking about what that awful thing was going to be.

It was the door, as it turned out. When Mercy grabbed onto the handle, it melted like pudding in her hand. “No, no, no.”

The silver slithered up her hand and then on to a brave new world beneath her sleeve. The wooden boards of the door burst apart too, each one moving independently, lashing out towards the other two as they got too close.

My shoulder hit her in the mid-section, knocking all the air out of her even as I knocked her out of the silver tentacle’s reach—or so I’d hoped. The metal followed along with her, still clinging to the tips of her fingers and beginning to spread again the moment she stopped moving away.

Hauling myself to my feet, I stumbled to a starting position and on towards the other end of the room. The silver stretched and stretched until it was as thin as a thread of spider-silk. Yet even at that limit, it would not let her go. All of my pushing and pushing, and all that I managed to do was make Mercy scream out in pain. Judging from the little popping noises, I’d dislocated our archer’s fingers. Oops.

I drew my sword, still bracing her at the limits of the silver’s reach. Predictably, she started yelling. “Oh, hell no!”

The moment I stopped pulling, the metal began creeping back up her fingers. “You’d rather it smothers you?”

“Asher!” she yelped. “Asher! Have a better idea!”

Ducking under the stretched silver, he closed the distance fast, eyeing along every inch of it as he went. “I believe that if I apply sufficient heat to the—”

Mercy cut him off. “Okay, cut it off.”

I hefted my sword and rolled my shoulders.

“Alright, don’t move. On three. 1, 2…”

I hit on two before she could tense up or jerk back.

Mercy bowled over, the abrupt impact on the metal holding onto her hand so tightly yanking her off her feet. Her face hit the stream of metal, and it swallowed her. Her whole head vanished into silver in an instant. Seren and Asher both leapt in, trying to haul her out, but it was too late. Her whole arm, her whole head, both were enveloped as she was dragged across the room.

Who could have guessed that after all my antics and accidents, Mercy was going to be the first one to die?

Chapter 31

She was still struggling, flailing around frantically as the tiny little doorknob pulled her in. She slapped Asher across the face in her panic, and Seren bobbed back out of reach before she could suffer the same fate. “I must attempt a fire spell.”

I caught hold of his hands before they could start the casting motions. Every time I had to be the voice of reason, something felt fundamentally wrong with the universe. “Metal conducts heat. You’d melt her face off before you made a dent in it.”

“What other choice is available to us?” He yanked his hands out of mine. “If she is burned then so be it. I shall cauterize her wounds when it is over and done.”

As he set off after Mercy again, and I caught him by the tail. “You’ll kill her long before you melt it off!”

“Damn your hypotheticals.” Panic was written all over his face. “She is dying now!”

Crossing the room in three strides, I jammed both my hands into the silver pooling over Mercy’s head. At once it leapt up me like quicksilver to a magnet. It fled from Mercy’s face and up across my arms, up onto my chest. The silver that had covered Mercy from her waist to the top of her head barely stretched up over my massive pecs. Where it had slipped under her armor and coated her skin, it could find no entry to mine. Gloves to the rescue again.

Mercy gasped for air, then realized that we were now attached to each other and groaned. “Oh, man. Attached to you? Why couldn’t you just let me die?”

“Stick with me, kid. We’ll get you out of this.”

Mercy wailed, “Oh gods no, not the puns.”

I grinned, even as the deathly cold of the metal crept higher and higher, seeping through my armor. “Seems like you got yourself in a sticky situation here.”

She tried to pull away, but the metal dragged her in closer to me. “Bring back the smothering. It would be kinder than this.”

“No need to get choked up about it.”

“Oh come on! That one barely even worked.”

Seren’s elegant fingers interlocked beneath my chin, and she hauled back with all her strength. Asher was there at our side in an instant, embers already dancing from his fingertips.

“I already told you that isn’t going to work!”

Seren was the one to answer me, grunting in my ear. Asher was too lost in his spell. “If thy can be divided, he might strike with flame at the sorcerous bond between.”

I had heard worse plans. “Fine! Asher, if you melt my arms off, I am going to be pissed.”

“Fear not.” Seren grunted in my ear as she pulled for all that she was worth. “You shall be avenged if you fall to his foolishness.”

“Uh… hold off on the vengeance part. I mean he isn’t deliberately going to—”

Asher’s spell fired off into the broad stretch of metal reaching between me and Mercy. The flames shimmered over the quicksilver’s surface and then were swallowed down into it an instant later. “Huh.”

For a moment, it seemed like nothing was going to happen at all, then the surface of the metal began bubbling. Maybe it was actually going to work. Maybe it was going to melt away the…

More liquid metal came pouring up out from among the bubbles—as much as had managed to spread from the doorknob and more. It rushed out in a wave, completely encasing Mercy in an instant. I only had the time to gasp in one last breath of air before Seren jerked her hands away, and it rolled up over me too.

The suffocation would have been, well not fine, but manageable? As would the deathly chill that swept over me everywhere that the liquid metal touched. I still would have been able to function and think with the trap doing its best to crush the life out of me. What I couldn’t cope with was my own Psychometry.

The history of this metal washed over me, into me. Everything it had been before. Everyone that had touched it and succumbed to the same slow choking death it was trying to inflict on me. The centuries bombarded me, bearing me down to the ground under their crushing weight, and through it all that voice? Talon.

The same words repeated again and again through the years, centuries apart but still echoing the last recitation. A lecture. Practiced and spoken in this room, in the Overlook. Murmured to himself as he sat by his desk, working the raw liquid metal between his fingers. The glow of magic cutting through the shadows of intervening decades. “To defeat a mage, we must defeat his casting.”

The metal creeping up over the hands of some lost and weary traveler. A human, or something like it. Surrounded by the silver. Consumed by it. Not even his corpse escaping as it was crushed down smaller and smaller by the metal.

“To defeat a mage’s casting, we must take two things from him. His hands and his voice.”

I had only a moment back in my own body as I felt the metal pushing its way up into my nose, into my ears, pressing against my lips. Trying to get inside me.

“With this simple trap, any who would seek entry to my tower are stripped of both. So when I tell you that I do not accept visitors, do not think that I am merely a recluse.” Pause for laughs. The doorknob set down.

He was handling it freely. It was keyed to him somehow. He had some way of making this spell stop. I bucked and struggled within the metal. I tried to scream, but that just gave the cold steel darkness all around me ingress, and it rushed down my throat, squeezing the little air I had left out of me.

Words still echoed. Words spoken hundreds of years ago. Months or years apart. Words I couldn’t understand. Eternals could speak and understand every language on Amaranth. Even the svart’s degenerate screeching could be translated by our God-given powers. How could there be words I didn’t understand?

Over and over, he whispered them to himself. What the hell were you saying, Talon? Were they just noises he was making? Some language he was coming up with himself?

The metal ripped back up my throat, out of my nose and ears and mouth, and away from my face entirely. Feeling swept back in everywhere it had been. My lungs, my throat, everything burned. Light flooded in as the metal parted. I was lying on top of Mercy, both of us encased. Asher was frantically trying to cast something else.

It was Seren who’d saved me. She stood encased in the same metal that coated me and Mercy, her foot placed strategically on my collarbone, to tease the metal up and away from my face. Even running up the full distance of her body, the metal that had been required to encompass mine had no difficulty swallowing her whole. I caught only a glimpse of her expressionless face before the metal rolled up over it.

Gasping and desperate, already feeling the metal coming rushing in, I yelled out the words as best I could remember them. “Ah peero la me-ah bocca!”

The metal slowed to a crawl as I scrambled to remember the rest of the nonsense the old wizard had been spouting. “Con oona parabola?”

Now that I needed it, the trap was no longer touching me. Any second now it was going to realize I was just spitting out noises. I strained against the straitjacket of metal until I was able to brush one cheek against it again. I recited the rest of the little phrase in time with Talon. “Diro cose nascoste, cose del passato.”

The metal became inert, splashing to the floor, and soaking down between the floorboards. I flopped back on the ground and enjoyed the feeling of air on my skin and in my lungs. Mercy was beneath my legs, dry-heaving and gasping. Seren collapsed on top of me, too. Asher stalked over to look down at the heap of us, shaking his head. “What was that all about?”

“French? Maybe. Italian?” I lifted my legs to let Mercy crawl out with some measure of dignity. “Something euro-trashy anyway. I guess our boy Talon came from Earth, same as us.”

Seren did not seem to be so quick to escape from the dubious comfort of lounging on me. She lay there, still as a wolf waiting for a deer to pad out into a clearing as she listened to our conversation without saying a word. She was really good at not saying anything and not showing any emotion. It was like having dinner with my dad. Asher crouched down beside me. “And you knew the exact phrase to speak?”

“Oh, uh history sense or whatever. Psychometry.”

“It would seem to me that we grossly underestimated the power of many divine skills.”

Wrapping both arms around Seren to stop her from being flung across the room, I sat up. She looked from my arms around her to my face with the beginnings of a scowl. “What is this?”

“This is a hug. We use them to say things like ‘thanks for saving my life back there.’”

She didn’t wriggle around. She was so still she might have been dead. “Release me at once.”

I spread my arms as wide as I could, and she leapt up like she’d been burned. “Alrighty then.”

Mercy had finally stopped retching long enough to get a word in. “That. Was. Dumb.”

“It was certainly not your finest moment,” Asher snarked.

She started up another coughing fit. “Eat. Me. Asher.”

With that trap out of the way, I pulled the door to the next stairwell open. All of the bare floors and sparse walls were done with now that we were out of the public parts of the tower. This was pure opulence. There was thick plush purple carpet running all the way up the spiral of stairs around the outer wall, and candles replaced the torches of the lower floors. There was even a little railing to hold onto as you climbed, although I was reluctant to touch anything at this point in case it tried to eat me.

Once again, we only made it one floor before hitting another dead end and door. “There has got to be a quicker way up this tower.”

Seren scoffed. “Had I my mount, we could have flown at once to the top.”

“If you had your mount, you’d be halfway across the ocean screaming for reinforcements by now.” As it turned out, being asphyxiated and probed by an angry metal puddle had not improved Mercy’s mood.

“Hey now. She saved our asses back there.”

“I am a paladin myself, I need no gallant to charge to my rescue.” Seren sniffed. “Thy companion has made it clear she has no care for me, and who among us could lay the blame for that at her feet when I set myself as your enemy from the off. Yet this I say unto you, Mercy, the ill-named, had I the desire to depart, then many opportunities have already presented themselves—opportunities that offered up the chance to see you all deceased in the bargain, if I had so wished. So understand me now. Your leader has declared me free, against all wisdom, and it is only by my volition alone that I remain in your company.”

Suddenly, everybody had something to say. Asher politely inquired, “Maulkin has freed you?”

Mercy bellowed, “Leader?!”

I pushed the next door open before the argument could start, betting that a smart-ass like Talon wouldn’t put the same trap in twice. I was right, for the first time in living memory.

The next room looked like something out of a fairy-tale. I didn’t even know the words to describe it until Dungeoneering helpfully supplied “Solarium.” So it was a solarium. Apparently. Floor to ceiling windows surrounded us on the east and west curves of the wall, there was an honest-to-the-gods fountain in the middle of the room, as tall as me and tinkling out sparkling water that shimmered in the sunlight, and everywhere else that I looked, there were flowers.

Underneath those flowers were plants and fancy carved marble planters and all the rest, but after a week in Amaranth, I think that room of flowers was the most color I’d seen. I was drunk on it. Forgetting all about the arguments and the dangers, I stepped out into the room and drew in a deep breath. Beautiful.

I didn’t even hear what Asher and Mercy were yelling when they came through the door after me, just the sudden intake of breath. Seren was not stunned into silence. “What could be the purpose of all this?”

“It’s pretty.” I had moved farther into the room without even realizing it, drifting closer to the abundance of life and color that I thought we’d left behind. Talon had left that world behind too, I suppose. Maybe that was why he’d tried to remake a little slice of home here.

“Beauty without purpose?” She scoffed. “I do not believe thy predecessor would think thus.”

Mercy dragged her gaze away from something like a lily of the valley. Yeah, that’s right, I knew some plants. I wasn’t a complete couch potato. I mean sure I knew them from video games, but I still knew them. “So what, you think the flowers are going to eat us?”

Asher shook his head. “They bear no hint of magic within them beyond that which has sustained them through the ages. I cannot even say that is a spell. It feels as though the pillar of Cosmos and magic have been intertwined somehow. It is no wonder that Talon was hailed as an Archmage if he could blend his gods-given gifts with the principles of magic.”

A butterfly flitted out from between the flowers I was sniffing, its wings silvery even in the golden sunlight that was streaming in. Leaning back I could see there were dozens of them dancing around the room. Those reflective wings picking up the colors of whatever flowers were around them. If I was about to be murdered by ninja-star butterflies, I was going to die mad about it.

But strangely enough, for Amaranth, they didn’t seem to be all that interested in brutalizing us. Instead, they just fluttered around. Mercy slapped a hand over her mouth when she started to make an “ooh” sound, but it was enough to set me off laughing. That got me a solid kick in the ass.

“I don’t know, Seren, I think this might just have been someplace for him to relax, I mean… look at it.”

Her eyes were darting around frantically, staring suspiciously at the butterflies as they fluttered by, and avoiding getting too close to any of the flowers. I suppose if you grew up in a world that was out to kill you, you’d be a bit suspicious too. “Were it for his relaxation, it would be closer to his chambers. Given thy assumption that those chambers lie within the uppermost portions of this fortification… I am dubious.”

That was a valid point. Why would he build it down here? I squeezed between some ferns to look out the windows. We were just up above the tree-line, and I could see out over the forest as far as the sea. Maybe there would have been a better view higher up, but I doubted it. A butterfly flitted by me, startling me out of my thoughts, but not before I saw the tops of the trees rustling in some unseen breeze. More than a breeze. It was as if a gale-force wind just whipped over the top of the forest in a line. A line stretching out from where I was standing. Or right beside me at least.

“Oh my gods, they’re hurricane butterflies.”

“What?” I dragged Asher over to look. He jumped when he saw what I had seen.

After a moment of contemplation, he let out a little huff of surprise. “It would seem that your Alvaren friend’s suggestion of flying around the defenses of the tower has already been considered.”

My mouth fell open when I understood what he was saying. “Oh, no way. That is so cool. And also so weird. Who thinks of butterflies when they’re playing tower defense?”

“It would appear that the Archmage is a man who can think…laterally.” His robes whipped around him as a butterfly passed us by. He met my gaze with trepidation.

“Alright. Everybody out before we get tornadoed by the bugs!”

Seren was already at the door on the other side of the chamber, examining it without touching anything. Asher darted over to begin his own probing. Mercy was not moving. She was still standing there by the fountain, perfectly still. “Mercy, come on.”

She still didn’t move. It was only when I closed the distance with her that I understood why. One of the silvery butterflies was on her nose.

“You are having the best luck today.”

She tried to answer without moving her face. It was kind of hilarious. “What do I do?”

“Blow on it?”

A bead of sweat ran down her face. “If I make it angry, will it blow my head off?”

“Uh… maybe?” When I turned to quietly call for Asher, I nearly bumped into Seren, two bells around her neck. Two.

Her eyes were locked on the butterfly, practically shimmering with her excitement. “I am most certain that I can kill it before it moves.”

That seemed like a bad idea. And I knew bad ideas. “Or we can just wait for it to fly away on its own?”

Seren’s little frown returned. “You value the life of this insect over that of your companion?”

“I’d rather not have a sword near my face,” Mercy mumbled through lips she was scared to part.

The butterfly’s wings twitched, blowing Mercy’s bangs back and spritzing the beaded sweat off her face. I moved in a little closer, raising my hands.

“Don’t.”

I moved my hands a little closer, coming in from the sides of Mercy’s face.

“Don’t!”

Ever so slowly, I cupped them around the butterfly. My knuckles grazing over Mercy’s cheekbones.

“Do not do what you are doing!”

I pulled my hands towards me ever so slowly, just barely brushing the edge of the butterfly’s wings. It stepped off Mercy’s nose and onto my fingers, and she let out a sigh of relief. A sigh of relief that tickled across the backs of my hands, through the gap between them, and startled the butterfly.

It took flight, and so did I.

Blasted backward, I shattered the fountain. Ow. Fragments of it were flung across the room. Hitting flowers, cracking the windows, and most importantly of all, pissing off the other butterflies. Oh no. “Go! Go! Go!”

Mercy and Seren were already running, and the same blast that had knocked me on my ass had launched them across the room to bowl into Asher. The three of them were scrambling over each other and wrestling the door open when the tempest kicked up.

Me against a room full of butterflies? I’d normally put the money on me, but with all the fragments of pots and fountain scattered around, the odds were a little bit skewed in their favor. Back on my feet, rainbows swirled around me as the water from the broken fountain picked up. Rainbows with sharp teeth.

[685/710 Health]

The first shard of stone glanced off my cheek, leaving a stinging mark.

[684/710 Health]

Then came the next.

[683/710 Health]

And the next.

[682/710 Health]

Every step I took I was buffeted by the winds, scratched and pounded from every direction.

It was death by a thousand tiny cuts, and to make matters worse, I couldn’t see or hear anything beyond the swirling rainbow. The wind wailed, and the grit and dirt got in my eyes even when it wasn’t trying to slash them out of my face.

Staggering forward another step, my knee hit the broken edge of the fountain. I’d gone in a full circle.

“That is enough!”

I threw out my arms and my will. Every fragment of stone, grit, and dirt in my Sphere of Influence froze, and I hammered them down into the ground. There was nothing I could do about the wind or the water, but I could see clearly enough now to run at the open door where the others were waiting

The wind slapped me off course, and I bumped into a couple of butterflies that were more than happy to launch their own violent gusts in my direction, skidding me about the room like I was stuck in a pinball machine, but I made it through the door and slammed it shut behind me.

I slumped down to sit with my back to the door. “That…was not fun.”

Mercy nudged Seren. “Wow, that is like…the most negative thing he’s ever said about anything.”

“I’ve said worse about you.” I managed a grin.

She stamped on my shin. “I’ve said worse about your face.”

I hoisted myself back to my feet with her outstretched hand, almost toppling her over in the process.

“I’ve said worse about your mother.”

Asher turned around and walked away from us. More purple carpet, more stairs. Another disappointment just around the corner. “Any magic?”

Asher held up his hands and then cocked his head to the side. “None.”

“Well, alright then.” I pushed the door open to see another identical door. Seriously. I pushed on the one. It was locked. “Great.”

Rolling my shoulders, I got ready to barge it down when Seren stepped up beside me and said, “Wait.” I followed her pointed finger up to the mechanical apparatus attached to both doors. Interlocking cogs covered the roof of this little antechamber. It took me longer than it should have to work it out. “Oh!”

Asher was poking his head through the door, still puzzled. “Oh?”

“It is a one or the other kind of deal.” I snapped my fingers. “Like an airlock. Everyone squeeze in.”

Seren was already so far up in my personal space that it was sheer skill on her part that we weren’t touching, the other two managed to make it in without too much complaint. Although Mercy did say, “Why does a tower need an airlock?”

“I cannot believe that these doors are airtight regardless.” Asher shrugged. I reached over to slam the door shut behind us. The one ahead sprang open at the same time.

Asher dropped like a sack of spanners, all awkward angles and flopping. It was mostly luck that let me catch the scruff of his robes before he hit the floor or Mercy. At least the floor would only have hit him back once. “What the hell?”

Mercy got an arm around him too, and all together, we carried our napping companion into the next room. The décor was…different in here, less sumptuous summer getaway and more ‘rusty dungeon’. Mercy covered it pretty well with, “Ew.”

There were no windows here, no pretty flowers, just metal plates riveted into the walls, bones scattered around the outside—I kept an eye on them in case this turned into a living skeleton kind of situation—and a podium in the middle of the room with a big ingot of some dark metal sitting on top. Or at least I assumed it was. I couldn’t actually see whatever was sitting on top of the podium, it was too dark for that. Not the room, the ingot. So dark it swallowed up all the light that touched it. So dark it kind of hurt my eyes to look at it for too long.

Seren had stepped gracefully clear of the toppling Asher and now darted forward. “I have heard tell of this. It was a legend even in my time. A theoretical puzzle for the magisters. Inimicus. The un-magic.”

Mercy rolled her eyes. “Why would a wizard have the opposite of magic in his house?”

“Why would a noble wear blades at their hips as they walk their own streets?” Seren snapped back.

“Downstairs, the uh doorknob thing. Talon was setting things up to protect himself from other magic users. That trap was meant to stop them casting, it used the magic we threw at it to become more powerful. I guess this is just the natural escalation of that.”

“As fascinating as these insights into the mind of the mad mage are, what are thy intentions for departing from this place?”

The door behind us had swung shut as we focused more on Asher’s fainting spell than our surroundings, and the door at the opposite side of the room was equally devoid of doorknobs, handles, or any other way of opening it. Another glance around reminded me of the bones on the ground. All the people who’d made it this far then starved to death, trapped in this room. Great.

Asher began to stir on the floor, groaning and grumbling all the way.

“Okay, so there is no magic in this room. But our guy, Talon, he’d still need a way to get through it, right?”

Mercy and Seren had split up, each one trying to pry open a door on either side of the room. What had been wood on the outside was plated with iron here, rusty sheets of it that neither woman’s fingers could hope to part. They couldn’t even force their fingers between them. Seren drew her sword to make an attempt at using it as a prybar.

Something was wrong with the blade. The same rust that covered the walls seemed to have worked its way inside them, blossoming out across the smooth silvered surface like oil over water. Seren held it up to eye-level and glowered as the artistry that had forged her weapons crumbled away to nothing. Without a sound, she reached for her other sword. The hilt snapped off in her hand, then even that crumbled away into chunks.

My sword. I grabbed for it and hauled it out of the Dvergar-made baldric which had somehow survived all this way. It was fine. No rust. It was a little blunted and scratched from walloping a big stone boy downstairs, but otherwise, it was perfect. Seren’s eyes darted back and forth from her crumbling rust to my pristine great-sword and scowled. “The Inimicus. My blades were spell-wrought by the high magister himself.”

“Well, if it is any consolation, trying to use them like a crowbar was probably going to wreck them anyway.” Awkward, who me?

“It is of no consolation. They were a symbol of my service, and now, so like that service, they are sundered.”

Asher gasped awake on the floor. “What? What is happening? Where am I?”

“Anti-magic room, buddy. Knocked you right out.”

He scrabbled up the podium to his feet, leaping back from the black lump like it was covered in electrified hornets. “How can this be?”

“Ask your man Talon. Even Seren’s people didn’t have this stuff lying around.” Mercy sauntered back over with a smirk. “My gods, for the first time since we got here, we can’t just say ‘magic’ as an explanation of everything.”

I offered Asher a hand up, but he refused it, staying right where he was, head weaving from side to side as he tried to keep us all in focus. “Even if such a thing could somehow be made, why would any mage consent to having it anywhere near them?”

“Talon kind of seems like a paranoid wreck. Maybe that’s why.”

“Paranoid he may have been, but a fool he most certainly was not.” Asher tried to look at the tiny black obelisk, but it seemed to be hurting his eyes. He flinched away. “I cannot believe that he would place something so detrimental to his own position and power within his home.”

Seren nodded her agreement. “A man would not drink poison in the hope of his enemy supping from the same cup.”

Mercy didn’t like to be left out. “So he’d lose his magic powers if he was in this room. So what?”

Both Asher and Seren looked horrified. “To sever a mage from their magic is a barbarous act. It should come as no surprise that thy condone it.”

“I’m not condoning a damn thing, I’m just saying it wouldn’t matter to Talon if he lost his magic for a while. He wasn’t just some mage, was he? He was one of us.”

I snapped my fingers. “He could get through this because he was an eternal! He had his divine powers, even when his magic was offline.”

They all turned to look at me. “What?”

Mercy started tapping her toe, Asher covered his eyes with a hand, and Seren looked embarrassed on my behalf. “What?!”

The penny dropped.

“Oh!” I slapped myself in the head. “I’m an Eternal. I have Eternal powers. I could do my Artifice thing. Right. Sorry. Yeah.”

My Sphere of Influence encompassed almost the whole room, but I figured we were going forward not back, so I hopped back in my body and strolled it over to the door on what I guess was the south side. I’m not great with directions.

Stretching out my will, I got ready to dramatically pull the door off its hinges when I abruptly stopped. I couldn’t touch the door. I couldn’t touch anything in the room. All of it was carefully worked metal, some sort of alloy that looked like iron, rusted like iron, but was out of reach of my basic bitch Artifice. I went behind that to the doors and the walls themselves, figuring I could just pull things apart brick by brick, but they were too complex for me too. There was something like clockwork running through the whole room—complex machinery locking the doors in place, running beneath the floor and through the roof like a great technological cage containing my abilities. “So uh, Artifice isn’t going to cut it. There’s some sort of mechanical stuff inside the walls.”

Seren looked me up and down. “Can you not simply break down the door?”

“I mean, maybe?” I rubbed the back of my neck, inadvertently flexing arms that were as big as Seren’s waist. “It is a metal door covered in metal plates.”

Asher piped up, “And if there is a mechanism that would allow for our release, bending the door out of shape would inevitably prevent us from using it.”

They were all still looking at me. Damn it. “Anybody else have any bright ideas?”

“Perhaps it would behoove us to consider which of the Pillars of Divinity it is likely that our friend Talon would have pursued.”

“I haven’t seen anything elemental, so probably not Creation.” Mercy scowled. “Omnis for sure.”

“Oh yeah, he seems like an Omnis kind of dude for sure.”

“Do we believe that the power of Primal would have been required for the creation of his guardian golem?” Asher was literally stroking his chin. Unbelievable.

“My people crafted golems during the Voidgod’s reign of terror,” Seren interjected. “It is an act of craft and magic, not divinity.”

“He might have needed it to make the butterflies though.”

“Thy course is true. Those were not natural beings.” She turned that little frown of hers on me. Always suspicious. How was that not exhausting? “How did you know of them? What did you call them? Butter flies?”

“We had butterflies back on our world. They didn’t make storms though.” I paused for a moment. “Well… I mean some philosopher chaos theory kind of people said they did, but it was a metaphor or something. Probably.”

Mercy was smirking. “Stop confusing the poor Alvaren. Ascension is a maybe.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Artifice is probably a no?”

I shrugged. “If I was building someplace for myself, I wouldn’t make it too complicated to artifice.”

“He might have been artifice-ing a lot longer than you, though. Maybe he is actually good at it.”

“Bite me.”

Seren chirped, “Refrain from biting him.”

“Why does everything have to be so difficult.” I groaned. “Cosmos and Omnis. Maybe Ascension, maybe Aether.”

I snapped my fingers. “Aether!”

Fumbling with my gloves took longer than it should have. I still wasn’t used to wearing them, and they made dexterous movements trickier. Seren and Mercy eventually sighed and pulled one off each in opposite directions. I wiggled my fingers at them. “Who wants to see what my magic hands can do!”

Predictably, Mercy said, “Ew,” but Seren was nodding with an almost childlike excitement until Mercy leaned over and whispered in her ear. The first hint of a smile that had been playing about her lips instantly vanished.

“Grotesque.”

Oof. I didn’t know how much more damage this old ego of mine could take. One more hit like that and it might need to be moved out of the matchbox I’d been keeping it in throughout all my dating years and transfer it to something smaller.

I slapped my palm down on the rusty dusty floor and immediately regretted it. There was a lot of death here. Long, long bouts of silence, then the sobbing. The slow and agonizing decline as bodies ate away at themselves. Cannibal in their desperation. Panicked and screaming. Then silence again, heavier than before. Still, I plunged back and back through time until the dead were all gone and there was only the most distant sense that anyone was passing through the room at all.

Nothing useful. Well, it was just some random patch of floor, what had I been expecting? Sauntering over to the exit, I gave the girls a big grin before slapping my hand to the metal.

Movement behind the sheets. The rumble of mechanisms. Grinding open, grinding closed. The door in motion. Swinging along its axis. Fingers brushing over it. Hands that were wracked with tremors. Talon’s hands. The same, blue-gemmed ring I’d seen him wearing in my last vision. Then gone again. Gone without a clue how the door was opened, except that it gave Talon the shakes.

I yanked my hand back in frustration. Had he done this deliberately somehow? Using his Eternal powers to block my view of how he escaped? Was I getting as paranoid and weird as him? Had I started out as paranoid and weird as him? I was talking to myself. That probably wasn’t a good sign.

The rest of the gang was all staring at me like I had descended from on high to bring them the answers to all of their woes and worries. On the one hand, I liked the vote of confidence, on the other, I really didn’t appreciate the pressure that I was being put under to perform. “I swear I can open this door, just…just give me a minute. This has never happened to me before.”

There was only one thing left in the room that I could touch, and even though I was about as magical as a brick, there was something unsettling about the Inimicus. Maybe it was the way it swallowed all light, making it look like there was a hole in reality. Maybe it was the way it made Asher pass out just from being near it. Who could say for sure? The main thing was I really didn’t want to touch the little cuboid of black-hole. I really didn’t. Yet still, I forced my hand out, just waiting for the sting of it disintegrating me or sucking me into hell or whatever it was going to do.

It was cold, but not the death-chill of the void between the stars, just regular metal left at room temperature cold. I let out a little sigh of relief before Psychometry kicked in, and I was hauled into the swirl of ghosts. There were so few of them throughout all the ages that this tower had stood. So few who’d made it this far. The history of the Inimicus felt as devoid of life as the metal itself. I plunged even further back, back to the moment that it was forged. “And so you see, magic, like lightning and the pull of the earth beneath us, is just another force for Cosmos to master. All things have their antithesis, and I have made…”

A sudden lurch forward and there Talon was again, hand hovering perilously close to the top of the Inimicus, unwilling to touch it but pushing it down into the podium with something like Asher’s gravity snare. The block sliding down into the podium, the cogs within turning. I yanked my hand off. “This is it. This is how you open the door.”

Asher cocked his head to one side. “I do not understand.”

Curling my fingers into a fist, I punched the block down into the machinery. It groaned and creaked, rust dislodged, and the door at the far end of the room swung open. Mercy grinned. “Talon wasn’t scared of monkeys like us, he was scared of other wizards.”

Seren finished the thought. “Those that would not dare to lay a hand on the Inimicus.”

When the block was level with the top of the podium, it stopped moving with a click. I held out my hands, and after two attempts at trying to hand my glove back to me, Mercy grumbled through putting it back on my hand like Seren had. “Thank you, Seren. Thank you, Mercy.”

Seren gave a slight bow while Mercy sing-songed, “Oh thank you so much for touching things with your big sausage fingers, Maulkin, you’ve saved the day again. Let me repay you by dressing you and telling you what a big strong man you are.”

“I know it’s sarcasm, but I honestly think I like Mercy better this way.”

She kicked me in the shins, and Asher jerked his head around so that his own laugh couldn’t incriminate him. Seren watched all of this unfolding with the same expressionless mask as always, but I could tell that she was filing it away for later. This older-than-human-civilization dog was still learning new tricks. Absorbing the way that we spoke, the way that we interacted, everything. I didn’t know if it was because she was planning our deaths or because she was trying to fit in, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever know at this rate.

Chapter 32

The next set of stairs coiled up around the outer curve of the tower the same as all the rest. The same plush carpets were there, the same candelabras, and the same fancy silver-filigreed handrails. You had to respect the interior designer’s consistency if nothing else. I took hold of the handrail and hauled on it. It was pretty well embedded in the stone. I couldn’t make it budge until I surged my Potency. Even then it came away screeching and bending in my grip instead of popping out clean. That was some solid construction work. Mercy came running back down the stairs. “What the hell are you doing?!”

“Stuff.”

“Could you focus for five frigging minutes, please?” She rolled her eyes and walked away, calling up to Asher, “It is alright, he’s just screwing around. Again.”

Beneath the shiny exterior, the metal was just iron. Nothing clever or fancy or hard to come by. With a few good twists, I could get at that iron, and with a few seconds of work in the slowed-down space of Artifice, I was able to cobble together a pair of swords.

Seren took them from me cautiously. “These blades are forged by thy own power?”

“Yup, sorry they aren’t as fancy and shiny as the old ones, but they should still work alright. Maybe not as sharp or as…”

She sheathed them in one smooth movement and dropped to one knee on the stairs.

I was one hundred percent not ready for marriage. “Uh what are you—”

“I pledge myself to thee, Maulkin. As I did my empress before thee.”

Flustered, I stepped down to grab her shoulders and haul her up. “Hey, no. No uh… no need for any of that.”

Mercy stuck her head around the curve of the stairwell, and I leapt back from Seren guiltily. That sing-song voice was back again. “What are you guys up to down there?”

I tried to shout, “Nothing,” but Seren barreled on.

“I am pledging myself freely to your kinsman, to serve him in all ways until such time as I am returned to my people.”

“Awww.” Mercy’s voice grated over my nerves. “Asher, come quick, they’re getting engaged!”

Once more I tried to cut off the conversation and failed miserably. “I will kill you.”

“The pledge to one’s lord is a more serious matter than mere promises to wed. I swear on these blades that I shall give my mind, body, and life as Maulkin commands me. Whatever use he should have for me…”

Mercy’s eyebrows started waggling so wildly I was concerned that they were about to take off. “Oh, I know exactly what use he’s going to have for you.”

I’d had enough. “Everyone shut up now!” I shoved my way past Mercy and ran up the stairs only to bump into Asher, who cocked his head to one side.

“Is the honeymoon at an end?”

I was going to kill them both. It didn’t matter if they wouldn’t stay dead. I was going to chop them up. If the next door was trapped, I was going to die. My boot met the middle of the door, and it burst open.

There was something to fight inside. Thank the gods. These golems weren’t giants like the one in the entry hall, each one about human size, give or take, but each of them was unique in a way I wouldn’t have expected automatons to be. The first one to come charging at me had its marbled shape carved into a suit of armor, but it wasn’t all stone. There was a solid-looking maul in its hands, made from some brassy metal I didn’t recognize. It was swinging for me before I even had my own sword out.

[651/710 Health]

Bang, right in the middle of my chest, setting me sliding and stumbling back out into the hall. My eel-scale armor held up well against it, with all the scales snapping together solidly against the impact, but it didn’t seem to do much to actually temper the blow. The wind was knocked out of me. If Asher or Mercy had been the one to catch that swing, they’d have been on the floor.

I wheezed, “Let’s go!”

With my own sword drawn, I charged back in, ducking under a flitting arrow that embedded itself in the door. I only had eyes for the big guy with the maul, but there were many other golems on the move. The archer was Dvergar-sized, but the armor it was carved into looked distinctly different from what we’d seen the current generation wearing. Theirs were all blocky brutalist efficiency. This thing was a work of art, rune-marked all around the borders of the armor plates.

There were a pair of porcelain-looking Alvaren with the same twin-swords that Seren and her paladins had used, and they looked exactly the same. Some things never go out of fashion, apparently. Farther back, guarding the archer, was another human in a different style of armor, something closer to my own piecemeal. That one had a solid-looking shield and a short sword held ready, but it looked like it had no intention of moving from the spot, so I ignored it.

After the relative silence of the rest of the tower, the sound of metal meeting metal was almost deafening. My wild swing arrested hammer golem’s precise chop at my mid-section with a shower of sparks.

“Fight!” I hefted the mass of my sword back and swung overhead. “We’ve got a fight! Finally!”

The strike could have halved any normal fighter, but this one caught it on the haft of its hammer and turned it aside all too easily. Bringing the head around at my head, I had to jump back or risk losing my jaw.

Damn. This golem actually knew how to fight. It knew how to fight better than me! Which admittedly wasn’t hard since most of my skillful swordplay came down to whacking stuff as hard as possible, but even so.

The next arrow went through the gap between the hammer golem’s legs, right into my foot. Pinning me in place. Ow.

They were a lot more competent than I’d expected mindless automatons to be. I went into this expecting more of the slow-zombie stuff from downstairs, and instead, I was getting knocked around by a team of professionals. It was like fighting the damned Alvaren all over again.

Fire swept through the room in a wave, washing harmlessly over the golems but covering me in flickering embers. Asher’s contribution. Great. Hot on his heels, Mercy and Seren came storming into the room with their weapons drawn, yelling out whatever battle-cries they still had breath for after running up the stairs.

When I glanced back, the hammer-golem was up in my grill—as the kids say. I saw my own double-handed overhead strike being returned to me with interest, and this time, I had no hope of dodging out of the way.

In my panic, I reached for Artifice. My sword became fluid for an instant, then solidified into a solid boxy shield above my head.

It worked, technically, but the shield buckled under the weight of the hit, folding around it like it was made of corrugated cardboard instead of metal.

I barely even had time to grunt my dismay before I caught a glimpse of shimmering metal under the rim of the twisted metal umbrella. The upward swing of the golem’s hammer lifted the whole thing out of my hands and launched it into the air.

“Hey! That’s mine!”

Mercy’s Tempest Arrow hit the golem square in the chest, right where it had bonked me, and the concussion as it went off knocked everything sideways.

The golem slid back across the flagstones with a screech, and I flopped right over onto my back and landed with a crunch, still pinned by that one arrow through my foot. An arrow that had been in flight was knocked straight up into the roof and tumbled down to land beside me. My trashed shield clattered down beside me a moment later.

That wind arrow thing was cool as hell, but it really wasn’t a lot of fun being this close to it when it went boom.

Inevitably, hammer golem was quicker to recover than me, and he came charging back with his hammer upraised, ready to turn me into pulverized Maulkin jelly.

I started to babble the words that had disarmed the last trap frantically, memory failing me. “Ah peeing lame bocky con oona parabola dire nose no cost, cozy del pasta!”

Somehow, that didn’t work. The hammer was coming down.

Seren hit it head-on. Not with the clumsy tackle I would have used, but in a blur of blades and motion. Competent as the golem was, he couldn’t match her speed. Skill didn’t matter when a blade had already struck home twice before you saw the enemy moving. I’d never seen her going all out before. Not really.

No hit that she landed was enough to actually break through the golem’s armor, but there were so many of them coming from every direction that it didn’t have a chance to react before something new was happening around its other side.

She was buying time, but any second now, she was going to be buying it with blood. The Alvaren-looking golem were moving up on her, their own blades spinning in their hands like they were food processors gone wild.

This was going to suck. I took a hold of the arrow, and after two tugs failed to pull it out, I snapped it off in my foot.

[605/710 Health]

I was right. That did suck. But even as I bled and groaned, I was able to haul my foot free. Artifice remade my sword for me as I rose, and I set the flat end of it to the stone and pushed myself back up onto my sore feet with a grimace.

Asher’s next spell rolled through the room, a great blast of flame that narrowly missed me and Seren but washed right over the Alvaren, archer, and shield-guy golems. When it cleared, they didn’t even have a sooty mark on them, and I was genuinely starting to wonder what Asher was playing at before I heard the frankly hilarious twang of the golem’s bow-string snapping. The bow, the shield, they were all on fire, even if the golems themselves were fine.

Through it all hammer-golem was still chasing after Seren, every swing a little too late, every step dogged by the beautiful Alvaren’s deadly swordplay. In desperation, it swung its maul around at waist height in a great circle, hoping to buy itself some space, but Seren leapt neatly over the hammerhead as it came her way, turning a little sideways somersault in the air.

I was staring again. Whoops.

While the golem had his back to me, still chasing Seren, I rushed him with the same clumsy, crazy swing I always used, and this time it connected.

The statue crumbled around the site of the hit, and my sword punched right through it. No wonder they were so fast compared to the big ego trip downstairs, they were hollow, like plaster casts of golems instead of the rock-solid one we’d faced before.

“They’re soft. You get through the shell and there’s nothing inside!”

I was corrected a moment later when a huge plume of dust burst up out of the broken golem. A column of particulates blasting up into the air, spreading itself out across the beams of the ceiling and then vanishing just as quickly.

They might have been soft, but their weapons certainly weren’t. The Alvaren golems moved like Seren, fast and smooth like dancers running through a well-practiced routine. They were closing on her as she let a hint of a smile play over her lips.

I kicked the dead golem at the one on Seren’s left, and it had to leap aside or be crushed. The armor plates all fell apart now that there was no force animating them, but it didn’t matter. It was a distraction while I rushed to Seren’s side. As the golem continued their slow stalk towards us, we ended up back-to-back pacing around in circles to keep them in sight. “I did not speak in jest when I swore myself to your service.” Her golem darted in, and she matched every blinding thrust of its silvery swords with a parry. “You have been gracious to me beyond my deserving, and though I mean to return to my queen, there is no reason that for now I cannot take comfort in your leadership.”

My own Alvaren golem was less willing to test at my defenses. It came on hard and heavy, and only the bulk of my sword serving as a bulwark managed to hold it off.

Mercy’s arrows flew true through the dust and the spinning blades, never quite punching a hole through the plates of stone that comprised the golems but knocking them constantly off balance. It was as much as we could have asked of her while she waited for her epic explosion arrow thing to charge up again.

With the bow-wielder rendered useless, the shield boy was shuffling forward to have his try at us too, but Asher was having none of that. With fire proving useless, he unleashed one of his classic lightning bolts at the shield-golem.

That shield did not hold up well against the fury of an Asher scorned, and fragments of it flew across the room. Even though the golem itself was yet again untouched, there was something really satisfying about seeing their weapons being slapped out of their hands.

The next time my Alvaren darted in, I yelled, “Swap!”

Seren hit my back in a roll, flipping up and over me as I stepped in, dragging my blade-tip in a shrieking arc along the flagstones to come up right into the Alvaren statue Seren had just dived away from.

The delicate, intricate dance that it had been conducting was shattered, its cunning parries slapped aside by the one sweep of my blade. It even tried to fling itself back, but it was too late.

The tip of my sword caught it under the chin and lifted the whole head up off its shoulders in two halves. “Hah!”

Meanwhile, the one that had expected an immobile object to hack at got the deadly dance of Seren. It’s initial slower, more powerful swings were like a joke to her. She darted in past them, slapped at the insides of its wrists with the flats of her blades, and then thrust both swords into the weak point where neck met armor on the torso, twisting the swords as she withdrew to pry the seam apart.

It was enough. The same rush of dust escaped her golem as had burst out of mine. Only the archer and the artist-formerly-known-as-shield-golem were still standing. Seren and I met each other’s eyes, and that almost smile was there again. I was grinning like an idiot, personally.

Asher had simply retreated out of the room when it became apparent that his magic couldn’t help us anymore, keeping himself safe in case he had to give one of us a handy cauterize. I really, really hoped that he wouldn’t cauterize me again. I know, I was being a wimp, but I just really didn’t like feeling all my organs set on fire.

The remaining golems lacked the power or speed of the others. They had the competence down, but Seren had that in spades, and I made up for what I lacked with enthusiasm and size. The newly dubbed short sword golem ducked under my initial swing, not even realizing that there was an Alvaren hiding in the shadow of my blade, just waiting for it. She shot out between his splayed legs with her swords up. Scoring a long line across the joint of its legs. Good thing it wasn’t a boy golem, or it would have just lost its stones.

I reversed my grip and brought my sword back around along the same arc. It would have missed entirely if Seren hadn’t chosen that moment to stamp down into the back of the golem’s knees. We were like a well-oiled machine out here on the dancefloor. Her all graceful, and me all choppy.

Sword met stone face.

Another impressive pillar of dust blasted up at the roof, but Seren and I were already in motion towards the last of the golems. It had no weapons, no armor, and thanks to the curse of stone, it really didn’t look all that different from all of the other lost little Dvergar we’d left outside. The only difference was that this one had an out.

As Seren closed on it, it slammed both hands into its chest and pulled the breastplate in half. The torrent of dust was unleashed without us having to land a single blow, pattering off the ceiling and joining the cloud of impending coughs that was lingering up there among the rafters.

Legendary Foes Defeated!

Vitality increased to 18

Phalanx: Rank 7/10

165 Experience Gained

120 Glory Gained

“That was surprisingly painless.” Asher wandered in, his eyes upturned towards the cloud.

“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled without much malice. “Nobody hammered and shot you.”

Mercy grinned. “I can still shoot him if you want.”

Seren gave the suicidal golem’s shell a kick, and it toppled into pieces. “Disappointing. For a moment, it seemed that we might face a challenge.”

“Once again, shot and hammered.”

“Oh stop whining.” Mercy smirked. “You’re hardly even bleeding.”

They were right, of course. My ever-expanding health pool had rendered even these horrific wounds fairly mundane, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. Restoration spread out along my skin, closing me back up, filling my health up to its maximum once more. I checked over the other three, but there didn’t seem to be any damage despite the golem’s best efforts. Despite being toe-to-toe with the golems the same as me, the worst that could be said about Seren was that she’d broken a sweat.

Now that the golems were out of the picture, we had a proper look around the room, but it was as devoid of interest as it had initially looked. There was dust, broken bits of golem, stone slab floor, and stone block wall. I suppose that if the intention were to use this as a killing ground then adding in fancy décor was probably a bit counter-productive, but damn it all, if I was going to get murdered by animated pottery then I wanted to die in style.

I dug around in the remains of the golems for the silvery swords of the Alvaren-looking ones, and I offered them to Seren, but she pushed them away with a shake of the head. “I would not shame myself by wielding a blade that I did not earn.”

“They’re better than the ones I made you. This isn’t like a test or something, they’re just better. Go on take them. I’m not going to be offended.”

“Your concern is noted.”

Either she was really bad at taking orders, or I was really bad at giving them. Probably both. She’d wandered off before I could get it together enough to demand she take the damn things.

The gang had this down to an art by now, Seren checking things over while Asher waggled his hands about. Personally, I was convinced that we weren’t going to run into any trapped doors. Talon was too impressed with himself for that. Every floor would be something new and different. Not necessarily anything pretty or even interesting—this was the guy that had the biggest most boring library in the whole world—but something at least.

My hunch proved correct yet again and then we were onto a much dustier version of the same spiral of purple carpet that had joined up every floor. “Hello, purple carpet, my old friend, my old nemesis.”

Mercy called from behind me, putting on a butchered accent, “Want that I should toast him, boss?”

“Nah, he’s suffering enough. Just let him get walked all over for the rest of his life.”

Seren looked askance to Asher, who just threw his hands up in the air. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

The next door was different from the ones before, finally. The wood was pale, the silver so covered in the patina of years that it was almost milky. I was almost touching it before the chill took me by surprise. The door was the same as every other, the silver-workings too. The only difference was that this door boasted a thick layer of frost.

I snatched my hand back. If it was cold enough to feel through my gloves, I didn’t feel like touching it. I mean, there was a temptation to lick it, obviously, but I didn’t want to touch it other than that. “Ooh, are we doing the classic elemental dungeon thing? Ice floor. Fire floor. Earth floor. Water floor. Air floor. Lightning floor…”

Asher was beside me examining the frost. Cowbells. So many cowbells. “I do not believe the tower to be that tall, my friend.”

“Maybe just the classics then? Earth, wind, and fire?” I started and abruptly stopped doing an awkward little boogie when I realized I was doing it. “And water.”

Mercy helpfully pointed out the blindingly obvious. “That’s ice.”

“Could you count that as the water one?”

Seren looked on bewildered, as though we were speaking a foreign language. Well, as bewildered as she got anyway, which was mostly expressionless with a hint of a raised eyebrow.

Asher interrupted before I could lay down some elemental evil knowledge on these fools. “I do not believe that this ice is magical in origin.”

“Pretty sure it isn’t natural.” Mercy rolled her eyes. “I’m not seeing a lot of glaciers around here.”

This was getting us nowhere, so I kicked the door open. Or at least I tried to. What I actually did was shatter the whole thing into clunky frozen fragments that scattered into the room, tangling up in the drapes, hauling some of them down off the ceiling, and just generally making as much noise and mess as you could possibly imagine. Oops.

“At the very least, we know of one element that we shall not be encountering on this floor.” Seren brushed past me. “The element of surprise.”

“Maybe this is the fire floor”—Mercy smirked as she went by—“because you just got burned.”

It wasn’t any kind of elemental dungeon floor as it turned out. All the plush pomp of the stairwells had spread out across this room. There were the purple drapes breaking up the space, interspersed with honest-to-the-gods lace curtains dividing up the room even more, all of them fluttering in the breeze as we stepped into the room despite being weighed down with a fine rime of frost. It was only after we were all in that I realized there was no breeze. The air in here was still. Which to me, meant... “Invisible monsters, guys. They’ve got invisible monsters in here.”

Seren and I drew our swords, and the other two drew back behind us. Yet the invisible monsters did not immediately and conveniently leap out at us. The rippling of the drapes slowed and stopped as we did. Rude.

“Monsters… Come out and play!”

Still nothing.

I stormed forward into the room while Seren hung back to protect the others, swiping my sword through the first set of drapes. It wasn’t sharp enough to cut them cleanly, but it was heavy enough to rip them, get tangled up, and haul the whole thing down off the ceiling with a clatter.

Still nothing.

I reached out with my Lifesense, stretching it to the very limits of my Sphere of Influence, straining for any hint of a living creature in the room. If there were golems, that would be useless, but on the off chance that Talon had magicked up some ghouls and goblins for us, I wanted to be ready. Still, there was no hint of anything alive in the room.

There was a door at the far end, and we were obviously meant to go wandering back and forth through this maze of curtains, getting more confused and stressed with every step, waiting for the ambush to pop. I wasn’t falling for it. The door was in a straight line, so I was going in a straight line. With a bit of tugging, I managed to haul my sword free of the velvet and step up to the next one. I was cutting us through.

I took my next swipe and hit solid metal behind the cloth. My arms jarred, and I had all of a half a moment to wonder if I’d hit some sort of supporting column before it twisted, turning my blade aside and sending me stumbling off balance.

The Alvaren leapt out at me from behind the lace to my left the moment I was compromised. She slammed both blades into me and bore me to the ground.

[616/710 Health]

The noise that came out of me when I hit the ground was barely human. There was a sword in my lung and a roar trying to fight its way up out of me regardless. It came out gritty and burbling. I tried to grab for the Alvaren, but my hands passed through the empty air above me.

I must have blacked out for a second. I grabbed for my own weapon and was halfway to upright when the knight with the maul stepped through the curtain I’d been trying to slash and slammed it down into me. I barely even had time to flinch before all the air was literally hammered out of me.

My ribs bowed inwards and snapped, and blood sprayed out of the hole in my side like I was a punctured water balloon being stomped flat.

Mercy’s arrows flew, passing right through the white knight to tangle up in the curtain behind him. It was like he wasn’t even there. The frost that coated his armor gave him shape, and that had been punched away in a shimmer, but the pale glowing light inside of that crust was still there.

I did my best to shout, “Ghosts!” but mostly what came out of my mouth was a whole load of blood. I mean, a lot of blood. I didn’t even know I had that much blood in me. Uh-oh. I reached inside myself for Restoration, but it was still out of commission. I’d squandered it on the whole “shot and hammered” thing on the previous floor.

The ghost knight lifted his maul high in the air, and I could already tell that this swing was coming for my face. What would life be like as a pancake?

Nobody was coming to save me. I rolled out as the hammer fell. Broken ribs tinkling against my organs like a xylophone of pain. Everything hurt, everything was terrible, I was going to chop this ghost right in the crotch.

The usual energy wasn’t there, but I made it to my feet and managed to pick up my sword along the way too. With his attempts at an easy slaughter thwarted, the ghost knight struck a defensive pose and waited for me to come at him. It wasn’t much, but that little pose did serve to remind me that this guy had actually trained all his life with the weapon he was waving around while I was just some guy who hadn’t existed until last week. What the hell was I doing going toe to toe with these people? Ex-people. Whatever.

I charged in with another gurgle. Sweeping my sword down at him with all my strength and embedding it in the flagstones beneath his feet. It had passed through him without leaving a mark. Oh yeah. Ghost.

I couldn’t tell if he was grinning inside that helmet, but I had to assume that he was. He jabbed forward with the head of his maul, catching me in the chin and bowling me over backward again.

As I fell, I saw how the others were faring behind me. It wasn’t good. The two Alvaren were running rings around Seren, dipping in and out, slashing her, then leaping out of reach before she could return their strikes, even though they could have just stood there and chopped her to pieces. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Asher was down with a peppering of blood staining his robes in different places. Presumably, the ghost version of the Dvergar archer at work. Mercy seemed to have realized that her arrows weren’t doing a damn thing, but that didn’t mean she was out of the fight. With a clap of her hands, she threw up a wall of fire between them and me, blinding the archer to their targets if nothing else.

I rolled over and started back to my feet again when I heard, rather than saw, the hammer coming down again. A whistle of displaced air. Ending right in the middle of my back.

[362/710 Health]

There was a crack, and I tasted salt. My legs went cold as ice. I could feel them, but I couldn’t move them. I couldn’t use them. I got my arms under me and started dragging myself forwards.

The whistling again. Then another crack.

[299/710 Health]

If only he’d hit me in the back a little bit harder and properly broken it all the way through, I might not have felt every bone in my ankle shattering. It didn’t seem fair that it still hurt.

Even my scream of pain was all messed up. I spat up more and more blood, leaving a trail of it like a snail as I tried to crawl away from the ghost knight. I didn’t dare to look back. I didn’t dare to do anything but haul myself forwards with all of my strength, surging my potency to balance out the hopelessness that seemed to be seeping out of my wounds and turning all my efforts to nothing.

It was enough. Each drag of my arms flung me a foot forward now as I breaststroked across the scraping, ragged flagstones. I couldn’t hear the ghost’s footsteps behind me, only the soft roar of the wall of flame.

There was no other way. I threw myself through it.

I barely had time to blink before Seren and Mercy threw Asher right on top of me. At least he was intact enough to scream about it. If you’ve never heard a lizard-man’s scream you are really missing out, Inyoka have got some range. He could have fallen back on a career in opera.

He landed on me heavily, knocking what was left of my breath away. The embers still clinging to me from the wall of flame were briefly dampened, taking that stinging away, but he was grinding all of my broken bones together inside me.

Spluttering blood in complaint, I looked back to see the women darting towards the door as the Alvaren ghost twins pursued them. They were leaving us here to die. Lovely.

Throughout all of this, I’d been desperately reaching for Restoration, and now, finally, I realized it was alight again, not for me but for Asher. I pulsed my divine power into him, closing up the holes that the arrows had made.

With a gasp, he rolled off me but not to his feet. Throughout all of the aerial antics and his healing, I realized that he had been speaking softly with what little air he was able to draw, words of power, words of magic. Familiar ones. Oh no.

He lowered his hands to me and cast Cauterize.

[607/710 Health]

Every bone snapped into place amidst the licks of flames, seared into the right position. My lungs burned shut where they’d been opened, and even the masses of bruises that the mauling had left behind wisped away as red steaming vapors into the air.

Life flooded back through me, and I moved, scooping up Asher and tossing him through the door where Seren managed to catch him without bowling over. I tore off my gloves as I charged the Alvaren specters, and at the call of my much healthier-sounding roar, they turned to face me with their blades at the ready.

My own sword was somewhere back there beyond the wall of fire and the burning drapes, but it wasn’t what I needed right now anyway. I was all that I needed. The power was in me. The most annoying passive divine power I’d picked up throughout my whole time on Amaranth. Psychometry. Also known as Spirit Touch.

I drove right between the Alvaren’s darting feints without flinching and grabbed them by their heads. More specifically their faces.

A gentle kiss placed on each of Talon’s whiskery cheeks. Standing together in a trench as in the distance a wyrm roars. A squeeze of each other’s hands a cold comfort before launching into battle with the Voidgod’s spawn. Chittering beasts. Burning eyes. Not sunlight. Not moonlight. Burning darkness. Metal and scale and death made flesh. Screaming. Blood. Pain. Talon’s sanctuary. Wounds that will not heal. Scars. The shard. The shard must be protected. Evil seeks it even now. We can still serve. “Even if your bodies are broken, there is a way that the five of you can still help me to protect it from those who would use it for evil.” Talon’s voice. Ascent. Then the light. So bright. The tearing.

I flung the two of them back into the room. Into the wall of flame where the frost vanished in a puff and beyond, severing my connection to their histories, their sob stories. I didn’t need to know what their deaths felt like. I’d died enough on my own without needing anyone else’s misery in my head.

Staggering backward, I called out over my shoulder to the others. “Anyone got a plan better than me punching dead people to death?”

Mercy called back. “Working on it!”

The knight with the hammer strolled around the wall of flames, which I was sad to note was already dying down, even if some of the lace nearby had caught alight.

I shouted back. “Work on it faster!”

Without the bulk of the sword to slow me down, this was more of an even match. He swung for me with his ghost-hammer, and I was able to lean back out of reach. He whipped it back around again to continue the same lethal arc, and I managed to step inside his sweeping arms and catch hold of it by the shaft.

Once again, I wished that his visor wasn’t down. The look on the dead man’s face when I caught his ghost hammer would have been amazing. My own grin, streaked with blood, must have been something to behold too because he tried to jerk back out of reach.

The ghost of the hammer wasn’t like the ghost of a person. There was no torrent of memories pouring out of it. No life in it, expired or not. To my Psychometry, it felt almost like a radio tuned to static. Dead air.

Silently, the knight twisted at his maul as he pulled away, trying to wrest it out of my grasp. But as big and tough as he was when there was nobody around who could hit him back, there was a frantic energy to his motions now.

He was only a dead human underneath that armor, but I was so much more. Even as he hauled on the hammer with all his might, I took control, sweeping the tail end up into his crotch, just like I’d promised myself I would.

Losing his grip and grabbing at himself, he staggered back. I hefted the spectral hammer, ready to repay him all the kindness that he’d shown me when I was bleeding out on the floor, but it faded away in my hands. Wrestling match then? That could still be fun.

Rushing under his half-hearted round-house punch, I caught the little ghost knight around the chest with both arms and promptly passed right through him and out the other side. Ghost touch hands. Right.

Now that he knew the name of the game, ghost knight didn’t hesitate. He came at me hard with another wild swing I had no hope of avoiding while I was still trying to catch my balance.

[588/710 Health]

It staggered me, but it wasn’t enough to put me down. I came back in with a swing of my own. He ducked it and caught me under the chin with an uppercut so fast I didn’t even see it coming.

[579/710 Health]

My mouth filled up with blood after those hits, and it was just starting to trickle out from between my lips when the ghost hefted both his hands over his head and brought them down together at me again.

I spat the blood in his face. There was nothing for it to hold onto, so it spritzed right through, but for that one vital fraction of a second, as it was passing through the air, he couldn’t see me.

Fist, meet gut.

I had that momentary flair of satisfaction as Brawling hit ten and lit up inside me, searing into my soul as a permanent addition to the beautiful tapestry that was Maulkin.

[577/710 Health]

Ah yeah, armor. Punching metal hurt. Even ghost metal. Apparently.

Too late now, he’d folded around that first punch, so I brought my other fist around into his face, knocking that stupid helmet sideways

He staggered, and I took the opportunity to switch sides, ducking right through his ghostly body and out the other side so that my back was to the door, and one angle of approach was protected by what was left of the wall of fire.

The ghost knight advanced on me again, finding his courage and pressing his fist into his palm in the universally accepted sign language for, “I’m going to hit you.”

Sadly, he didn’t get the chance. Mercy bellowed from behind me, “Get down!”

Never one to let a lady down, I threw myself face-first onto the floor for what felt like the hundredth time that day. The ghost knight stood over me, puzzled for only a moment before hell came rushing through.

Asher’s fireball spell and Mercy’s tempest arrow launched into the room together. For just a moment, I saw the two of them separately, then their paths crossed, and they became a firestorm. It was like every firework display I had ever seen in my life all rolled up into one, blazing so bright and hot that I was pretty sure I’d lost my eyebrows just glancing in its direction. The roar of fire was deafening. An explosion playing out in slow motion. Colors danced through it, every shade of fire chasing after every other one in an ever-expanding rolling burst of light that seemed to never end. When it passed, the drapes were gone, the lace was ash, and even the flagstones bubbled and buckled under the heat of those flames. It washed out through the room, stretching out from above me to encompass everything in sight before breaking like a wave on the rear wall, washing up and over the roof to chase back over to me again, lighting up the absolute devastation that it had left in its wake.

My lungs had been healed by Asher’s magic, but yet again I found that I couldn’t catch a breath. All the air in the room had been swallowed up to fuel the firestorm. Gasping did nothing to help. There was just nothing there for me to breathe in. I scrambled back to my feet and ran for the door, but I didn’t get far.

The knight caught me by a horn and yanked me back, and breathless and confused as I was, I just went with it. Thumping to the ground on my hands and knees before him.

All the ice had been melted away, taking the crisp edges of his glowing form away, but to make up for it, the light inside him was blazing brighter than ever before. It was like he’d taken all the heat of the fire and used it to stoke himself up. Looking at him left after-images burned into my retina. I had to jerk my head away or go blind.

All around the room the ghosts shone so bright they were like stars dragged down to earth, overwhelming in how solid they looked. They looked more real than us now.

The knight lifted a boot up to stamp on my head, and, of course, I had to look. Nobody wants a surprise head stomp. The outline of his blazing form was wavering. The solid edges of it leaping and vibrating around, like he was losing cohesion.

He seemed to feel it too, and he paused with his foot raised up, ready to kick me, and that moment was all I needed. He might have had all the training in the world at being a knight, but I’d been living in this particular slice of weirdness all week. I rose up, caught his leg on my shoulder, and bowled him over as I sprang to my feet.

That was unexpected. I had fully planned on passing right through him, but his newfound solidity seemed to be out of his control. He’d swallowed up too much heat and power to fade away.

For a moment I was all tangled up with his leg, then I was free of it, off and running out into the scorched and ruined room. Everything that wasn’t glowing was covered in soot, but I didn’t need eyes to tell me where the half-melted remains of my sword lay.

Artifice brought it back to me, and Artifice reshaped it into the big cleaver that I knew and loved. Even if the leather wrappings had all burned away and the hilt was scorching my palms, I was armed, and I had an enemy that I could actually hit. It was over for these bitches.

The juddering torch-Alvaren came at me in a rush now that their wits had returned to them, and I cleaved clean through them both with a single swing that they didn’t bother to dodge since they were expecting to be incorporeal.

As they died again, all the energy that had been harnessed inside them exploded right out of their wounds and washed over me. It didn’t hurt exactly, but it did send me sliding across the floor, stumbling over heaped embers and ash-banks.

The archer launched a shot at me, but it missed, waggling and wobbling through the air to embed in the stone by my feet. Turning on my heel, I ran right back towards the door and the blissfully cool air that was rushing in and throwing up clouds of ash as I went.

The knight loomed out at me, still unarmed, still unused to having a body again. I relieved him of the burden with a chop.

He exploded too, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give a damn when there was all of that sweet, sweet oxygen just waiting for me by the door. I gulped it in greedily as the others came barreling through. Mercy and Seren caught me under the arms as my momentum and the last gasp I’d managed before the explosion ran out.

“Oh crap,” Mercy groaned. “We made them stronger.”

I gasped out. “Nah. You made them. More. Explodey.”

Seren started to pull away, reaching for her blades with the deadly glint in her eye, but I held onto her. “Wait.”

Restoration flowed through my bare hands and across both of the ladies in my life. The tiny cuts that the Alvaren spooks had been bleeding them out through sealed up. A blue flush of vigor leapt up Seren’s face, all the way to her hairline.

At the farthest end of the burnt-out room, the last two ghosts stood guard by the door, the Dvergar archer lining up her shot on me, and the shield-bearer kneeling to give her the most cover without costing her the angle of attack. I grinned. “Together.”

My sword became a shield as we charged, and the archer’s shot plinked off it harmlessly now that the arrow was solid.

They managed two more shots as we crossed the room, but they may as well have not bothered. Asher and the girls had fallen in behind me, so close that the archer had no clear shot at them. Each arrow grazed uselessly around my shield, and even the shot at our feet was haphazard. All the precision was gone now that the archer had mass bearing down on them.

I hit the shield-boy head-on with all the momentum I’d built up. Shield to shield, I pushed him back step by step. He flailed at me with his little arming sword, but it couldn’t reach around the breadth of my shield, and he was rewarded for his efforts by Seren hacking at his arm each time.

Asher had lightning crackling between his hands, ready to unleash, and Mercy darted back and forth, firing arrows at the Dvergar ghost, who I assume was doing the same little dance. My arms were straining to hold back the shield-spook, but I was far from the limits of my potency. After so much time fighting giant monsters, some guy with a sword and shield just wasn’t all that impressive, even if he did glow in the dark.

Seren moved out to the side, circling around the clash of shields, looking for her opening, but for all that the ghost wasn’t my match in strength, it still had skills. He started turning even as she did, sliding my shield around and exposing my side to his archer. I really still had a lot to learn about all this.

But then again, he had a lot to learn about fighting an eternal. I kicked the bottom of my shield, surging my potency and smacking his shield into his legs and flipping him forward into Seren’s waiting blades. They scissored under that helmet of his, clean cuts that should have had his head exploding off his body but… nothing happened.

Seren was frozen with confusion for a moment. Only managing to whisper, “No,” before the arming sword was thrust right through her guts.

Chapter 33

I echoed her words in a roar. “No!”

With a blink of time, my shield became a sword again and I hammered it down into the shield of my enemy. My potency was still surging. It cleft it in two, and the arm behind it too.

The explosion knocked all of us away, but before I’d even stopped skidding, I was running back to Seren—a mad dash that was halted by an arrow to the face.

[536/710 Health]

Thank the gods for my thick skull. The arrow was still sticking out of the side of my head, right under my horn, but it hadn’t broken through to my brain. I could only imagine the brain damage jokes I’d have to endure from Mercy if it had.

I got my sword up ahead of the next arrow.

“Asher, heal Seren! Mercy, are you doing anything!?”

Mercy was incandescent with rage.

“She!”

She loosed an arrow.

“Just!”

And another.

“Won’t!”

That one definitely hit.

“Die!”

That one passed right through the ghost and out the other side. The blinding glow clinging to it for a moment before fading away.

What was happening? If you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself, apparently. I charged the archer, turning one more arrow aside before there was no more time for them to aim.

When it was clear that there was nowhere to run and that there was no way to avoid it, the Dvergar ghost didn’t even try to fight back. She spread her arms and…

The final spectral explosion lashed out through the room, wiping away any evidence that the ghosts had ever been there at all. I was knocked on my ass, and Asher would have been too if he weren’t already down on one knee, huddled over Seren.

Legendary Foes Defeated!

Potency increased to 46

Brawling: Rank 10/10

188 Experience Gained

650 Glory Gained

Seren.

I dashed across and skidded to a halt by her side. The stomach wound was brutal. Blue-tinged blood was pumping out in a wave with every slowing beat of her heart. I put my hand over it and pressed down because I vaguely remembered something about putting pressure on wounds, but I had no idea what I was doing. Restoration was still dormant and useless. “Asher, come on.”

He was mumbling through his spells, waving his hands around as the fire gathered there, but it was all taking too long. Lifesense was an amazing tool for spotting when there were enemies around, but in moments like this, when I could literally feel the life draining out of someone, it was a nightmare.

The first spell cast, tiny glowing embers were coating Seren from head to toe, like she was dressed up in Christmas lights. He moved right into the next spell, but I had no clue whether it was going to be done in time. Her health was dwindling down to single digits. “Seren, you swore you’d obey me. You swore. So I’m giving you an order now. Don’t die. Do not die, Seren. Don’t do it.”

I reached for Restoration again, but it was still dull and lifeless within me. I tried anyway. Maybe my Primal Pillar would shatter like Artifice had, maybe it wouldn’t. I didn’t care. She was not dying while I had a way to save her. No way. Not on my watch.

All the life and divine power that I had inside me, I pushed out into her. I strained, and I willed it, and it was all useless. Nothing moved. Restoration was just…dead. I would have died to heal her, without any question, but the universe wouldn’t let me.

Of course, I would have died for her, I could come back from death. She wouldn’t. Her health ticked down to just a single point, my awareness of the life inside her dimming until there was barely a spark left.

“Asher, now. You need to do it now.”

His spell wasn’t ready. I knew it wasn’t from the look on his face. All that he could do was go through the motions. Say the words. Shape the fire. He couldn’t change anything. He couldn’t make it go faster.

I pressed my eyes closed and dug through the lists of divine powers, desperately hunting for anything—anything that might stop the inevitable from coming to pass. Soul Stone was the only thing that I could see. Trapping her soul in a gemstone didn’t sound like something she’d want. Just the idea of imprisonment seemed to have made her physically sick, I wasn’t going to throw her in a shiny rock for all eternity. I cursed myself. Maybe if I hadn’t been such a flaky, excitable, jack-of-all-trades asshole I could have powered up a pillar enough that I might actually be useful. This was my reward for being me.

My head felt too heavy. Grief overpowered my strength. It fell forwards until my face was an inch from Seren’s, and I whispered so that only she could hear, “Stay with me.”

The final point of health did not disappear. She lingered there, right on the edge of death, the moments stretching out. Every breath I took seeming like an eternity. My hands shook where I held them over the hole through her gut. There was no blood pulsing now. No movement at all. She was as still as death, but down there, deep inside her, that final point of health was still there. She was still holding on.

Asher’s spell burst out over her, and I snatched my hands back before they could be scorched. The flames rolled out over her, passing harmlessly over her pristine skin and armor until they found the hole in her stomach. They drained down into the hole in a swirl, and Seren began to jerk and jump. I pressed down on her to stop her from doing any more damage to herself, but I needn’t have bothered. She was so weak with blood loss that she barely managed a few wiggles beneath my hands. When the last of the fire had faded away inside her, there was nothing left but an ugly twist of scar tissue on her bared midriff.

She huffed out a great plume of blue-tinted smoke and then panted for air. Her eyes opened. She was alive. Somehow, she was alive. I let out an unexpected little bleat of delight, then scooped her up in a hug. “Oh thank the gods.”

“Unhand me.” She wriggled free of my grasp as life returned to her body in stages. She flexed her hands, then pushed off me to stand.

“What just occurred?”

“You got stabbed, then Asher healed you.”

“I do not speak of the obvious. I speak of your voice in the darkness. Hands of shade and moonlight. Your hands. Holding me in place. Bringing me back from the darkness. Tell me truly, what occurred?”

Asher frowned. “Maulkin did nothing. He tried to heal you, but his restorative powers are limited in their use by time.”

“I saw your face. I heard your words.” She scrambled away from me. “Do not attempt to deceive me. Do not treat me with such cruelty in a time such as this.”

Even I was as confused by everything she was saying as she was. “I mean, I was speaking, I was holding you, but that was it.”

“You commanded her not to depart,” Asher piped up, helpful as always.

Her eyes widened. “I was dead. I felt the life rhythm beneath my breast shudder to a halt. Yet I live. I could not be extinguished. I could not pass on to the next life. You…you did this to me.”

“Come on, guys, it isn’t like I’ve got power over life and death.”

Mercy sidled over to Seren’s side. “Hey uh, not trying to cause trouble or anything, but did anyone else notice he was the only one who could kill the ghosts?”

I knew the answer to this one. “That was just because I’ve got the Aether Pillar and the Psychometry skill. That’s why I could hit them.”

“Even when they were corporeal, Mercy’s arrows and Seren’s blades could not pierce them, yet your own blunt instrument served you well.”

Damn it, Asher, whose side are you on?

Mercy snapped her fingers. “You chose Chernghast.”

Seren’s head snapped around at the wolf god’s name. “What?”

“When we had to pick a patron to make us Eternals, you picked the death god, didn’t you?”

Where was she going with this? “I mean, yeah, but that doesn’t…”

“That explains it! You’ve got some death powers! Check out your character sheet.”

Asher tipped his head to one side. “Character sheet?”

I rolled my eyes. “You’ve never played a video game before, we get it.”

My character sheet revealed nothing new. It was unchanged, bar a couple of extra codified skills and the gradual creep of my stats. Nothing that would explain my sudden ability to kill ghosts. I took a long hard look at my divine skills to see if there was anything that could explain it, but they were just the same as always.

My own voice echoed in out of the darkness. “You have become so steeped in destruction, that you now extend your reach beyond the veil. All fall before you. All turn to rot and ruin at your touch. The severed souls of your victims are now yours to command. The Psychopomp is a conveyor of souls, a guide or guardian akin to the reaper, who may push their incorporeal victims beyond the limits of the world and on into the next. If you so choose, you may guide those who have been slaughtered to the afterlife of your choosing, sundering whatever connections they have to their mortal shell.”

Psychopomp.

“I’m a Psychopomp, apparently. I didn’t really get all of the…uh…details when I got the upgrade last time I tiered up. There was a lot of other stuff going on at the time.”

“Always said you were a psycho.”

Mercy smirked, while at the same time Asher was saying, “Your pomposity has hardly been noteworthy.”

I rolled my eyes at the two of them. Seren did not look amused. “A psychopomp, is he? A reaper of souls? The Voidgod was one such as thee. A slayer of mortal and immortal alike. Is that the path that thou are walking, Maulkin? Do you mean to burn all the world down for your Lunar masters?”

“Whoa.” Mercy held up her hands. “Hey now, chill out. Don’t go psycho on us too. You sound like Orphia.”

“More Eternal secrets and more Eternal lies. Deeper and deeper into the well we must plunge. Who is this Orphia? What is the meaning of all this?” She was fumbling at her sides for the swords that were lying by my feet. Instinct was a hell of a drug.

I held up my hands. “Alright. Okay. Let’s all just calm down.”

I’d never seen her so incensed. Her face had narrowed until every feature seemed jagged. “You denied me a warrior’s death and the eternal bliss of the Elysian. What part of that makes it seem that all is right in your eyes?”

My voice came out in a rumble when it came. “You wanted to die?”

“Of course, I did not seek death, I am no coward. Nor do I wish to be denied the afterlife that I have earned through centuries of service on the whims of one such as you.”

Mercy took a little step away from her then. Supportive only went so far, apparently. “You’d be dead if these two hadn’t saved you, how about a little gratitude?”

Seren scoffed, then dropped into a perfect curtsey, arms extended out in exaggerated swoops. “My thanks to thee, oh gracious saviors. How might I ever repay you for the supreme kindness that you have granted me in stripping me of my rightful rewards and dooming me to an eternity in the dark of the void?”

Mercy rolled her eyes. “It isn’t like they’re going to retract your invitation.”

“What know you?” Seren spun on her, empty hands up as if she were ready to swing at her. “What do any one of you know of the rules that govern the lives of Amaranth. You are strangers. Fools. Charlatans. You pretend at divinity but know not the first thing of our ways or our faith. Hemeraphel is a loving mother, but only to those that obey her strictures. What happens when she judges me defiant because I denied her plans for me and returned to life? What will become of me when this flesh fades? All that I am shall be fodder for the void if not for the kindness of the gods. And you have spat in their eye.”

“I’d cut their eyes out if I could.”

That voice barely even sounded like me, but it had come out of my mouth. I’d never heard myself so twisted up with rage that I sounded like that. I could feel the chill of it inside me, like drowning Seren, like slicing up Alvaren. Anger without start or end.

All three of them turned to look at me. Seren’s mask of calm shattered into horror at my blasphemy, and Mercy and Asher were startled by my vitriol. “They’ve made this whole world as a playground, filled it up with real people like Seren, and told them that if they break any of the rules that the gods just made up, then they were going to end up in the void? Sounds to me like the gods are assholes.”

Even Mercy looked shocked at that. Seren’s mouth flapped open and shut. “You cannot say such things!”

“Why? Is it against the rules?” I had no idea why I was this angry, but now that I’d started talking, I didn’t know how to stop. “What are they going to do about it. They can’t directly affect anything on Amaranth, that is their rule. They’re all about rules, right? And I’m Eternal. They can’t hold the promise of some fancy afterlife over my head for my whole life either. I’ve got tenure! I’m here forever, no matter how obnoxious I am.”

Seren was yelling. Great. “I should slay you where you stand for speaking such blasphemy.”

“Seriously, dude, chill out.” Mercy shifted uncomfortably. “The gods have been pretty good to us. No need to piss them off.”

“Oh yeah, they’re real saints sending us off to fight their wars for them while they sit back and chill.” I pointed right at Mercy. “If you were following all the damned rules, you’d have tried to kill me back when we first landed on this rock. You didn’t. You knew that what I was saying made sense and Orphia’s race war bullshit didn’t.”

Seren paced towards me with the other two on her heels in case this turned violent. “Who is this Orphia of whom you speak with such disregard?”

“An Eternal. A solar Eternal who thought her whole purpose in this world was to kill lunar Eternals.”

“The two pantheons are at war, this is known. It is a grievous sin to aid a servant of the lunar gods.”

“Then you’re a sinner, baby. I’m a lunar Eternal.”

“You cannot be. Such creatures, they’re naught but ravening beasts. Even in the War of the Voidgod, they were deployed not as troops but weapons, with handlers ready to put them down, should their natural treachery overcome them.”

“Oh, I’m getting really tired of that crap. You’ve spent days with me. You know I’m not ‘a ravening beast full of natural treachery.’ I’m me. You know me. What difference does it make which gods picked me?”

“It matters because your true nature is opposed to order and law. You are a beast of chaos. A sower of discord. A breaker of harmonies.”

“And so what?” I roared in her face. Furious enough that Seren actually backed up a step. “Some things need breaking.”

You’d think I just said I wanted to bang her mother from the way that Seren was looking at me. Mercy and Asher met each other’s eyes across the room and then glanced away quickly. As usual, Mercy was the one to get up the courage to speak first.

“If it weren’t for Maulkin, you’d still be a svart.” Seren’s mouth fell open, but Mercy pushed on before she could start screaming. “I mean if it weren’t for him then nobody would have gone down into your city. Nobody would have found the shard. Nobody would have changed you back. Asher, if it weren’t for Maulkin, you’d still be hiding out in the wilderness, avoiding everyone on Amaranth because they might interfere in your grand purpose. If it wasn’t for Maulkin…I’d have nobody to dunk on all day.”

“Love you too, babe.” I blew her a kiss.

“Seren is correct. It does matter that Maulkin is a Lunar Eternal. It is the purpose of such creatures to spread disorder wherever they travel. To disrupt the order as they find it. The Lunar Eternals are meant to cause trouble.” It looked like it pained him to say it, but he raised up a finger and pointed right at me. “He is causing good trouble. There are structures that must be demolished before they can be rebuilt. Strictures that must be overturned. He is a Lunar Eternal, and he is making this world better.”

I mimed wiping away a tear, but honestly, this was all getting me right in the heart. Whatever anger had been carrying me on throughout all this arguing died on the spot.

“Seren. If you feel like I’ve lied to you or I’m not worthy of trusting anymore, you’re free to go. There’s the door. I’ll do my best to get you back to your queen as soon as I’m done in here.”

“There…there is no law among my people regarding Eternals of the lunar court. There is no precedent that I must follow. I gave my oath to you, and my word is not so easily broken. To my eyes you are the same man that you were when I was on my knees before you, accepting your weapons and dedicating myself to your cause.”

Mercy turned bright red the moment Seren said “on my knees before you,” and the rest of the Alvaren’s little speech was to the accompaniment of her uproarious laughter. Great.

“Can we just get on with the dungeon crawl please?”

“Indeed, by my calculations there cannot be much further to explore. The ah…fingers of the claw structure should begin to branch out from the floor above us. Our journey may be nearing its end.”

The same spiral staircase awaited us as on every other floor, but instead of a dead-end, it opened out into a hallway with four doors branching off. “Is this going to be like the exploding crap back at the school?”

Asher scurried forward. “Allow me a moment to examine them.”

Seren stood considerably farther back from the doors than the rest of us. “I recall the doors in question. Many of my paladins were slain by their curses and traps.”

“It feels weird to say sorry for that since you were trying to kill us at the time?” I rubbed the back of my neck to avoid looking at her.

“Thy fought and bested a superior enemy by making use of the advantage that familiar territory granted you. There is no shame in that.”

“Maulkin, might you grant me the benefit of your experience for a moment?”

I joined Asher in the middle of the room where he was stroking his chin and pondering things. “Four doors, yet only three towers.” He pointed to the one on the right of the stairs we came up. “From the emanations that I can sense, I would judge that to be the library and the next to be our destination. The epicenter of magic within this grand steeple. Yet two more doors remain. What purpose might they serve.”

I grinned and pointed in order. Opposite the stairs. “Bed.” Overhanging the stairwell. “Bath.” Then I waved my hand grandiosely to the other doors with a grin. “And beyond!”

He looked at his feet. “Of course. Even Eternals have some worldly needs.”

“Are you saying I need a shower?”

“You were cast into the ocean but a day back. No.” He leaned in closer to stage whisper, “It is Mercy who is particularly ripe at this juncture.”

“I can hear you.”

“I am aware of that, but there was no polite way to directly address your aroma, and I had hoped that overhearing this conversation might spare us a little awkwardness.”

“Nope. I’m making it awkward.” She strutted over and gave him a shove. “You think I smell bad? Ever been in a hot room with an old pair of gator-skin boots?”

I put a hand on each of their shoulders. “Guys, guys. You all smell terrible. Can we get going?”

Seren made a little sniffing noise. Oh for the love of… “Except Seren who smells delicious. Seriously, people, can we please go fight some monsters before I start screaming?”

The two of them fell into a glowering silence for a moment while Seren looked away, and I pretended she wasn’t blushing. Finally, Asher broke the silence.

He pointed with one claw. “The most potent magical emanations are…”

I was off before he could even finish that sentence. “Let’s go!”

He snatched after me with all the dexterity of a pair of oven glove-wearing noodles, but when he cried, “Wait!” I did.

“What? You don’t want to see what Talon left here? The shard might still be up there! Come on. This is it. The next big step in the quest.”

He hissed. “We must prepare ourselves.”

That wasn’t a bad point actually. After all the chaos of the rooms below, I was still all hyped up, but this definitely felt like that room right before you went in to face the boss in a video game. Shame there was no save point. Or heaps of items. Or anything helpful whatsoever.

I moved around the room, laying hands on each of them in turn and letting Restoration bring them back up to full health, before finally turning the Primal power back on myself and closing up all the various scrapes that I’d earned fighting ghosts. I had a more than decent stockpile of experience at this point – one thousand and sixty-six of them to be exact – and if I died to some wacky experiment gone wrong in the wizard’s lab I’d be mad to lose it, but I was also in spitting distance of my next Tier Up and all the new divine powers that I might unlock there. 1750 out of 2100 Glory. That was just one abomination’s worth of glory. Surely, we were going to get that soon.

Still, if I was heading into a fight, it made sense to buy up some new skills to help me. I could afford to splash out a little and still be able to afford a couple of new divine powers. I went straight into Ascension this time, ignored all the big, exciting powers, and narrowed in on the one I’d unlocked through my own efforts. Ascendant Brutality. I seemed to have maxed out the regular version of that skill tree, but I had no intention of changing how I fought any time soon, and I wanted to go on improving my damage, so I guess this was it. It flared with moonlight as it burned into my soul, a little dimmer than the ones before, but still, definitely that pale blue-tinted light.

Seven hundred and sixty-six experience in the bank for Tiering up, and new strength flooding through my muscles. Perfect. I clapped my hands together. “Alright. Who’s ready for some wizard bullshit!”

Chapter 34

The lab at the top of the silver spiral staircase was considerably bigger than every other room in the tower despite the fact that it should have been less than one-third of the size. When I say wizard bullshit, this is exactly what I’m talking about, even though I’m sure that Asher would be quick to inform me that the effect was achieved through the Cosmos power rather than magic. It is all the same to me. Wizard bullshit.

While the rest of the tower had been pleasantly warm, just like the jungle outside, the lab was chilly. This might have had something to do with the fact that all the stained-glass windows arrayed around it were in pieces all over the rug, and we were high enough up in the air to catch a breeze, but given that it was a wizard tower, I’d have accepted the idea of magical air conditioning on the wrong setting just as readily.

Talon had made this space his own. There were bookcases covering every inch of wall that wasn’t broken window. The desk I’d seen him sitting at making the doorknob trap was over to one side, stacked up with various strange ores that magical energy crackled between in multicolored sparks. The floor had the same flagstones as everywhere else, but there were rugs tossed all over the place, haphazardly. Like he didn’t really give a damn about them, he just knew he needed rugs.

There was a little bit of the silvery apparatus that we’d seen downstairs, although none of it was in motion at this point. Most of it wasn’t even in one piece. There were bones in amongst it, in the places where it had been melted and battered. Stains too. That grime and bones decorative flair showed up all around the room—heaps of bones by every wall and window. Scorch marks on some, and others reduced to powder.

Skulls were few and far between, but the ones that I could make out were distinctly inhuman. Elongated and serpentine. Inyoka. A lot of dead Inyoka—somewhere between the Asher we all knew and loved and the wild things out in the jungle. I spotted elongated claws on the top of one heap.

Talon was dead in the center of the room.

He wasn’t standing freely. In fact, there were twisted lengths of ragged metal that passed right through his body to pin him in place—a tangle of hand-twisted barbed wire made from the silvery remains of his ruined lab that someone had fed through his flesh. A structure of wood, broken off from tables and desks, had been hammered together to support these new additions, bent around the solid backing of the structure that had already been there. The shantytown gallows held him strung up against a great stone slab that glowed from every inscription with dim sunlight.

New Divinity Unlocked! [Rough Hewn Shrine Construction]

Shrines. The gods mentioned them back when we were on speaking terms. They took away the randomization when we died. I guess that when Talon died, this was where he came back. Yet there he was now. Maybe there was some rule about dying too close to your shrine? Maybe…Talon’s head jerked up. He wasn’t dead.

He strained against the wire where it wound through his eyes—in one and out the other. He was blind and trapped, but he could still croak out, “Non ti dico niente.”

Mercy rushed over to try and pull him free, tossing her bow aside as she reached for him. I wasn’t so hasty. He was naked up there on the rack where he’d been hung, beard and hair grown down long and matted enough to cover his dignity, and the filth of ages had accumulated on his skin. His own blood had turned rusty and black where the metal dug into him, and only the outer reaches where it met his crusty skin showed any hint of red. Talon sobbed, “Non toccarmi!”

Mercy was almost to him when the stubble bristled up on the back of my neck.

The exact moment when we all lifted off the floor was different. I guess that because I was heavier it took me a little longer. That was why the rest of them let out cries of dismay before I’d even noticed my feet losing contact. I wish that I’d been completely surprised because then I wouldn’t have had time to flail around and accidentally kick-off, sending me flipping end over end up into the air as gravity cut out. “What did I say about wizard bullshit?!”

Now that he’d found his voice, Talon’s screech was deafeningly loud. “Get away from me, wyrm-spawn! Away! Away!”

“We aren’t Inyoka!” I found myself bellowing back as I flipped up towards the speckled pattern of tiny black holes he’d opened up on the ceiling. “We’re Eternals, just like you!”

He wailed, “È mio!” and the sob seemed to reverberate out through the air, and the room stretched and rippled around him. The curses back in Witchglass Overlook were like child’s play compared to the raw cosmic power that this guy was throwing around in his tantrum. As I drifted from one bubble of reality to the next, my fingers, elbow, and shoulder dislocated with a rattle of popping sounds and pain. A lot of pain.

[673/710 Health]

Asher was dangling upside down, his skirts up over his face as he fumbled with them trying to see. Seren was still more or less the right way up but paralyzed in indecision, half crouched in mid-air, and tensed up with nothing to kick-off. Furniture took off too, not just drifting up into the air but being buffeted around as Talon’s magic or Cosmos or whatever wizard bullshit it was came lashing out of him in every direction.

“You shall never take it from me. Kill me. It is me. We are one. Kill me! It is mine!” Bloody froth started to drip down from Talon’s cracked lips. “Search all you like. Tear down my tower. Slaughter my students. Kill and kill and kill and kill and kill me again. You shall not have it, Tsangaanax! It is mine!”

Mercy had been the closest to him, and momentum had carried her forward even once she lost contact with the floor. She’d drifted too high to reach him, but the structure that held Talon pinioned in place was close enough for her to make a grab.

Her fingers brushed over it uselessly, finding no purchase but setting the whole thing shaking as she was dragged away by the currents throwing around the air. That vibration carried down through the wires, and Talon screamed in agony as fresh blood began to flow.

Blood gushed down from his punctured eyes as he jerked his head around, and the wire tore at him. It bubbled on his lips as he ranted, “No more! I beg you. No more! I cannot give it to you, Tsangaanax. I cannot, even if I wanted to.”

Another roiling wave of power flooded out of him, throwing everything in the air into orbits around everything else. Asher and the archmage’s desk pirouetted around one another, Seren and a heap of bones found themselves looping in intricate designs to maintain their distance, and Mercy and I spun together at opposite sides of the room, slowly swapping positions as I twisted and contorted myself, trying to stay out of the patches that looked wrong on the basis that I liked all my limbs attached, and my right arm was currently dangling uselessly like something hanging out the side of a shark’s mouth.

Since I was apparently completely useless at this moment, I called out, “Talon! We’re here to set you free! Not to hurt you! We’re on your side.”

I didn’t know if he was too nuts after all these years of torture to care, whether he had been deafened as part of his torments, or whether he was just ignoring me, but I was pretty sure that when he screamed, “Non puoi prendere ciò che è dentro di me!” it wasn’t related to what I was telling him.

I bumped into Mercy’s bow as I drifted about and caught ahold of it more by luck than anything else. If I’d had two arms working, I might have taken a pot-shot at Talon, but my right still felt like a wet noodle and the left was none too stable.

“Mercy! Catch!”

Putting all my strength into it, I launched her bow across the room. As an equal and opposite reaction, I got launched the other direction.

If there had been a wall behind me, I would have been ecstatic about it. But instead, there was a big wide shattered window and the blue tropical sky. I was definitely going to die if I fell out of this tower. I started to frantically paddle through the air, but there was just no traction. I was going out. There was no question about it.

Across the room, Mercy caught the bow. I really didn’t see that coming either. She drew one of her drifting arrows and sighted on Talon then paused. Wavering.

I stretched for the top of the window frame, the tips of my boots scraping over it hopelessly as I flipped. “Mercy, take the shot!”

She did. The arrow flew true from her bow, launching her up towards the gravity snares on the roof, and momentum seemed to carry it through. It passed through one bubble of cosmic nonsense after another, changing color, changing shape, flying backward, but when it came out the other side it was still on target. It hit Talon in the throat, and all of the chaos abruptly stopped.

Gravity snapped back on.

I fell.

Twisting in the air, less like an agile cat and more like a fish out of water, I reached for the window’s rim as I plummeted. I twisted around, grabbed for the edge, and then discovered to my horror that I wasn’t the first one to come by that way. Thick grooves had been cut into the solid stone where the Inyoka’s claws had bitten into it. Thick grooves that time and the weather had now smoothed out into delicate little inclines that my fingers could find no purchase in. “Oh no.”

I barely made it an inch down the side of the claw scarred wall before I was caught. Another tiny black hole had opened up above me. Asher’s gravity trap was the only thing keeping me alive, but even it wasn’t strong enough to stop my descent entirely. The farther I fell, the weaker its hold on me grew. I reached for the wall, scrabbling at it, but there was nothing for me to catch hold of. Artifice. I reached for it and found the walls with the careful carving and hidden mechanisms completely beyond my abilities, but my sword wasn’t.

Claws had worked before, and they’d work again. I forged them for myself, dangling out there in the sky, and then surged my potency so that when I punched them into the stone, they stuck.

It actually worked. Between the claws and the reduced weight that the gravity trap gave me, I could climb. Oh, gods, it hurt. Every joint in my right arm felt like it was on fire. Every part of it felt like it might give out each time that I put weight on it. My whole body shook with the effort, even with my potency doubled.

Following in the Inyoka’s tracks, I climbed back up the outside of the tower, avoiding all Talon’s defenses against flyers and the ones he’d piled up inside. He’d been so obsessed with stopping other wizards that lizards hadn’t even crossed his mind.

The pain went from awful to unbearable as my potency surge wore out. The wind tore at me, and I was left dangling there as I waited for Asher’s trap to blink out and gravity to have her wicked way with me. I’d come so far to make it here. Fought through so much. All for it to end like this. Killed by the ground. It was pathetic. Laughable. I wasn’t doing it.

Dragging the claw back out of the stone without surged potency sent jarring vibrations all the way up to my shoulder, and my muscles screamed. My joints felt like they were on fire. I was not having a good time, but it got easier. Every time I brought a claw up and hammered it into the wall, I got farther from Amaranth and closer to Asher’s trap. I got lighter. Even as exhaustion crept into me, it was balanced by that lightened load. Inch by agonizing inch, I crawled back up the side of the tower until I was back to the shattered window.

Up over the window’s rim, and I probably would have kissed the scabby carpet if everyone hadn’t come running over to haul me back inside and to my feet. Seren was actually smiling, which was even more of a surprise than gravity abruptly stopping a minute ago. It was a blink and you’d miss it opportunity. Her usual expressionless mask was back a moment later as Mercy punched me in the shoulder. “Dumbass.”

“Hey, it worked.”

I swept Asher up in a quick hug, then deposited him carefully on the floor when he froze up.

Which was about the moment that Talon appeared back in the same spot.

Even as he blinked back into reality, he seemed to be twisting, trying to avoid his fate, but it did no good. His eyes blazed with sunlight for only a moment before they burst and went streaming down his cheeks. His arms, his legs, all of them were caught, penetrated through and through by the wires. He fell limp with metal cutting into him, and the blood began to flow anew. Starting a fresh patina.

A long and drawn-out wail of anguish filled the room, only to abruptly cut off in a gurgle. Seren crossed the room at a sprint, blades crisscrossing and sweeping apart, and his head hit the floor. His body vanished in a blaze of golden sunlight.

“We have only a moment, what are thy intentions?”

“We need to talk to him. To find out what happened to his shard.” I wet my lips as I picked across the trash-strewn room to the torture shrine. “But also to not die.”

Another flash of light brought Talon back to life, and without looking away from me, Seren’s hand lashed out once more, and she was spritzed with arterial blood. Another flash.

“I shall stand ready. Should he make another attempt at us, he will be ended.” She glanced at the empty space. “Albeit temporarily.”

Mercy and Asher joined us, both shaking their heads but offering no better suggestions. Asher looked like he wanted to cry, even if his new body didn’t have the necessary equipment for it. “He must surely have lost his sanity by now. Enduring who knows how many centuries of this torment.”

“I don’t know.” Mercy’s brows furrowed. “He seemed to be together enough to tell Sang Axe to shove it.”

Talon appeared again, only to be stabbed through the neck before any of us could say a word. Seren flushed blue. “My apologies, it has become habitual.”

Rolling his eyes, Asher recited by rote. “Tsangaanax. Alvarsbane. The Twilight Betrayer. Bearer of the Wyrm’s shard.”

“The Black One.” Seren’s eyes narrowed. “The wyrm without honor.”

Hmm. “So the wyrm with eighty names was trying to gather the shards himself?”

“So it seems,” Asher allowed.

Talon blazed back to life, and I caught Seren’s wrist before she could complete the stabbing she was already trying for.

I caught Talon by the chin before he could flop forward, flooding Restoration through his body, and closing up the wounds around the wires before the bleeding could begin. “Stop screaming, stop throwing yourself around, and listen to me.”

His eyes were still intact. Pierced by the wire, but not burst. Glowing golden. “Servants of the wyrm, I shall not swallow your lies so readily.”

“We are Eternals. Just like you.” Carefully, I tilted his head around until he could see my face. See my eyes. Glowing just like his. “I’m Maulkin. We’re here to help.”

“Help?” he whimpered. Golden tears flowing freely. “I am beyond all help. This is perdition. I am in hell. I should not have been deceived by false gods. I should not have obeyed them or taken their succor. When I died, I should have gone to heaven, not here. I was a godly man. A righteous man. What did I do to deserve this?”

I swallowed down my blasphemies and spoke to him with that voice you save for scary crazy people and children, who are—let’s be honest—just tiny scary crazy people. “What can we do to get you out of this?”

“I do not seek escape. I am…ruined. All I want is for this to end. Please, Lord, I have done my penance, let it end.”

Mercy stepped up close to him. “We can make the pain stop. If we break your shrine, you’ll come back somewhere else, right?”

“It cannot be done.”

“I’m pretty sure one solid whack would do it.”

“Do you think I have not tried? Do you think that I have not torn this contraption apart with my power a dozen times over?” His voice broke, and Seren stepped a little closer, blades ready. “An Eternal and their shrine are bound. So long as one exists, so too does the other.

When he tried to blink, the wire cut into his eyelids and set blood running down his cheeks. He began to shake, and Seren was already in motion before we realized that he was laughing. “There can be no escape, but in my torment, I have found victory. The great adversary, the black wyrm, he cannot have that which I possess for as long as I live. And I live and live again. Flesh and blood and bone. This is the meaning of eternity, young ones. Suffering. Our suffering is without end. No matter how I try, I cannot die. No matter how I rend my flesh. All of this power, all of this mastery, it is for nothing. And so forevermore shall the shard rest within me, bound to my soul.”

He soul-bound it, the same as I had mine. If someone took it away from him, all he had to do was die to get it back. Great minds think alike. But that didn’t explain where the damn thing actually was. “Where is the shard? Where did you hide it?”

His laughter had turned to bitter little giggles now. “I sought to draw power from it once, as Tsangaanax does now. To draw on the power bound within this relic and to become as the gods themselves with the echoes of the Voidgod slain. It was hubris. There is only death and destruction left to us. It cannot create—just as Araphel could not—and so that which lingers cannot be used to fuel any Eternal or mage.”

Mercy leaned in closer. “Where is it?”

“I knew that he would come for me. Before Vidar’s body was cold in the ground, I could feel the wyrm-spawn magi prying at my defenses. I should have known then that he would not stop at two. That his hunger for power knew no end. I should have known that he would seek out all six.” I tried to interrupt, but the ranting would not slow. After being alone for so long, it was like he was trying to catch up on all the lost opportunities to ramble and lecture. “It is the nature of the wyrm to hoard. It is the nature of Tsangaanax to betray those he called allies. I called him friend once. Rode upon his back into battle against the void. Now look at the bounty that his friendship has bestowed upon me.”

Asher hissed. “Where is the shard, Talon?”

He cackled. “It is of great amusement to me. It had been so long since I last ate that I could not even remember how to swallow. So long since I truly lived, beyond this charnel house hell, that I had to push the piece down with my fingers, rub it down my throat like I was nursing a baby bird. Even now I can feel it inside me, cold in my stomach as the flames of torment and perdition lap all around me.”

Mercy’s mouth fell open. “You ate it?”

“Ate it? I swallowed it whole, young one. And trouble yourself not to let that alvar bitch dig through my innards. I’d die long before she found it, then where would we be. Back here once more.”

My grip on his chin tightened. Anger prickled inside me when he spoke about Seren that way, but I quashed it soon enough. He was half-mad with pain and half-mad with being alone in his tower like this through all the years. That was two halves. Getting angry at him for lashing out was like getting angry at a fish for swimming.

Enough screwing around. Best case scenario, if we managed to free Talon, was that there would be an insane immortal Archmage running around trashing the place. It would get us no closer to having his shard or any of the others. “If I kill you, can I have it?”

“You ask for my permission? If you could kill me then I would say that you could have anything you wanted in this world, for you’d have a power above the Solar and Lunar courts themselves. Deus vult. You are young yet, so perhaps you have not learned. We cannot die. No matter how much you desire it or detest it, you must live now for all of time. Never shall I know salvation. La pace è per sempre al di là della mia portata.”

I shrugged. “I mean, you probably thought that the ghosts downstairs couldn’t die either.”

“Banishment through the divine aether is not death, you sniveling buffoon. They shall return to guard this place again soon enough, guarding it long after you are gone and only I remain. I remember when I was like you, so sure of my power in the face of all arrayed against me. L'orgoglio viene prima della caduta. Such pride I once had.” He jerked his head from my grasp in his raving, and without that support, the wire coiled behind the bridge of his nose tore his eyes apart. They streamed down onto my hand, the light within them dying. Still, he raved on. “Now I do penance for that sin. For believing I could not be touched, could not be taken. Could not be broken. Sono rotto.”

I had to shout so that he could hear me over his own rambling and the pitched battle that he seemed to be doing with his own breathing. “I didn’t use rebuke. They weren’t banished. I hit them with my sword, and they died.”

He shook his head, wire sloshing through the remnants of his eyes, cutting into his temples. “Speak not this nonsense. Such a thing cannot be.”

“But it is.” Mercy frowned. “He did it.”

For the longest moment, Talon was blissfully silent, the cogs inside the rusted machine of what had once been a great mind turning. He added together one and one and came up with eleven. “I see your game now, Tsangaanax. Illusions and tricks will not avail you. You seek to give me false hope once more. Enchant these beasts of yours to look as Eternals. Have them treat with me under the guise of kindness. It shall not work. I shall not succumb. It matters nothing, even if I did, for I cannot give you what you seek. It is bound to me.”

I groaned. We were back to square one again.

Talon bellowed, “Il Signore è il mio pastore. Non mi mancherà. Mi fa sdraiare in verdi pascoli. Mi conduce lungo le acque calme.”

Seren slit his throat again, and we didn’t even complain. Asher sighed. “It would seem that he is beyond persuasion.”

Seren and Mercy weren’t even looking as Talon’s body vanished once more. They were looking at me. Mercy was the one who had the guts to actually ask me, “Can you do it? Can you kill an eternal?”

I threw up my hands. “Maybe? I’ve never tried. I figure that worse comes to worst, he comes back again and nothing changes.”

Seren’s eyes bore into me. “Yet if you succeed, then everything changes. The fundamental laws of the world are overturned.”

I shifted my claws back into a sword. “Well, I am all about breaking rules.”

Talon reappeared in a flare of sunlight, and before his eyes were lost, he saw me there with my sword ready. “Do it, you coward. Signore sto arrivando!”

There was no grace to my strike. It was not a kindness like Seren’s quick slices. Even if I knew how to do something like that, I’d probably screw it up now that it was important. I just did the same thing that I had always done, hefting my sword and bringing it down hard on Talon with all my strength.

Blunt as it was, it cut through the naked man like butter. The wires that had been woven through his flesh plinked apart and whipped out at us now that their tension was broken. There had been hooks and barbs hidden away inside him—torments that nobody could have seen so long as he lived. The tip of my sword gouged through the golden lettering on the stone behind him, breaking cleanly through whatever had been written there, and the light in the stone went out.

Talon’s body tumbled from its place to fall in two halves at my feet. There was no fanfare. No blaze of light. Just silence and stillness.

New Skill Discovered! [Climbing]

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Potency increased to 47

Climbing: Rank 1/10

12 Experience Gained

4000 Glory Gained

Tier of Glory Ascended!

Tier of Glory Ascended!

And that. Talon had been a legend in his time, immortal and powerful, and I’d just killed him, with a little assist from centuries of wyrm torture. Holy crap. I did it.

“I did it. It worked!” I dropped my sword. All the exhaustion and injuries of the day finally catching up to me. “It actually worked.”

Chapter 35

I flopped down onto my knees, then remembered what we were here for. I crawled over to the dead naked man and started desecrating his corpse a little more. I didn’t know enough about anatomy to know where his stomach was, but I did know what metal felt like, so I smooshed my way through all the soft stuff until I found something solid, then I hauled it out.

Mercy looked green, and Asher was looking away entirely. Only Seren was still watching me with the same dispassionate mask that she always wore. Observing.

With my bare hands, I tore apart the fleshy sac that contained the shard. It was bigger than I’d been expecting—almost as large as the one I already had. Well done to Talon for managing to get it down.

Quest: Return of the Voidgod

Acquire Rusted Blade Shards: 2/6 Complete

400 Glory gained

I was still kneeling there in the entrails just staring at it when Mercy said. “We should get out of here.”

There was no small effort involved in pulling my eyes away from the shard to meet her concerned expression. “Huh?”

Asher was shaking his head. “There is much here that will require research and study. The Archmage’s notes in this very room alone will contain a wealth of information. There is no doubt that he would have held close any information regarding the location of the remaining shards. We might—”

Mercy cut him off. “There is plenty of time for all that. This place… This is ours now. The Dvergar are settling the island, but the tower is all us.”

“The shrine. We can… I can build them now.”

“We can make this home.” Mercy grinned. “We can stop running.”

Seren shook her head. “Your quest does not end here.”

“No.” I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t.”

Asher was brimming over with excitement, tail lashing. Probably because he was allowed to hang out here and read to his heart’s content. “Only the fear of separation is at an end. Should we die, then we would be returned here to the seat of our power. We need not fear scattering to the winds. This changes everything for us.”

Backtracking through the tower made me realize just how big it was and how much ground we had covered in a single day. In the empty ghost room, I put an arm around Seren’s shoulders, and this time she did not object. Asher snuck up on the other side of me and looked expectant until he got the same treatment. Only Mercy didn’t want in on the group hug. She walked along behind us as we trailed through the broken fragments of golems on the next floor, sniggering away to herself.

I glanced back over my shoulder. “You got something to say?”

“Weirdest harem ever.”

I kicked a bit of golem at her.

The Inimicus was still down inside the shielded podium, though the clockwork seemed to be working overtime to shove it back up again. I tucked an arm under Asher’s armpit to give him a little extra support, just in case.

From there it was all smooth sailing until we reached the bottom of the tower and the ruined statue of Talon.

The rest of us were headed for the door, but Mercy stopped in front of the golem’s surprisingly intact head. “So are we just going to pretend that we didn’t straight-up murder some old Italian guy?”

“My concern is less for that which has passed and more for that which is to come. This ‘old Italian guy’ was one of the most powerful of our kind. He waged war upon the void god himself.” Asher drew away from me to look down into the face of the man I just killed. “Yet the ruthless foe that we now set ourselves against was able to bring him so low that death was a sweet release. What hope have we against such an enemy?”

“We’ll kick Tsangaanax’s scaly ass.” I grinned. “Same as we kicked everyone else’s.”

Seren pushed herself out from under my arm with disdain. “Such needless bravado.”

“Oh, I’m not saying it will be easy. I’m just saying that we are going to do it.”

Seren’s eyes narrowed. “What could fill you with such assurance?”

I counted them off on my fingers. “Abominations?”

Mercy piped up. “Kicked their ass.”

“Svart?”

“Kicked their posteriors,” Asher conceded.

“A whole Alvaren city? No offense, Seren.”

Mercy was getting into it now. Smirking over at the Alvaren as she said, “Oh yeah, we kicked their ass.”

“Giant mushrooms, magic schools, giant eels, jungle lizards, wizard’s tower, golems, ghosts. I’m all out of fingers.”

Mercy clapped her hands. “Every ass has been kicked.”

“So no. It isn’t boasting. It is practice.” I tipped an imaginary hat to the head of Talon, then turned to the door. “We are good at kicking ass, and every ass that we kick makes us better at it.”

Stepping back outside into the jungle afternoon was like walking into a wall of humidity. Between the sunlight and the heat, I had to blink a few times to really understand what was happening. Trees had been felled, and there was construction work already underway inside the big barren clearing. My haphazard barricades were being replaced with solid, well-built structures, and the topsoil was being cleared away by rows of diligent Dvergar, searching for stone to work.

Gunhild was in the middle of it all, of course, perched up on top of the glorified dormitory where they’d spent the night. When she saw us, she yelled so loud that the whole place came to a halt. “They be alive!”

A cheer picked up immediately, and the Dvergar all came barreling over to us, the bravest wrapping their arms around us, and the rest applauding. Even Seren got a hug, although she looked extremely dubious about it. Gunhild scrambled down a ladder I was pretty sure hadn’t existed this morning to join in the festivities. “You bested the tower then?”

“Was there ever any doubt?”

“Aye, there be quite a lot of doubt.” She waded through the crowd, snatching bags that were held out to her as she passed. “And a fair few bets made too. You be making me a wealthy woman this morning!”

“Aww, you bet your money on us.” Mercy was too swept up in the excitement to be too annoyed. “How sweet.”

“Did you find what you be looking for?”

Asher was bopping his head along to the music that had just started up. Say what you want about the Dvergar, but they know how to get a party started. “That we did, my friend! Moreover, with the tower emptied of any potential aggressors, we name Talon’s Keep our new home, and you fine people as under our aegis.”

Gunhild cocked her head to me then called out, “We’re staying.”

A cheer went up even louder than the one heard when they realized we were alive. Ouch. Fair enough, but still, ouch.

It seemed that in fleeing from their ancestral home and across the lands and seas, some of the Dvergar had still remembered what was most important in life; there were three kegs of that mossy mushroom liquor that I’d nearly poisoned myself with back in Khag Mhor cracked open by the time that we made it over to the bonfire where one of the giant feral Inyoka from the day before was spit roasting. Asher pretended not to notice.

All of them pretended not to notice when my attention wasn’t fully on the party too. Seren couldn’t be convinced to share stories, but Asher and Mercy soon filled in the Dvergar on everything that had happened since we stepped inside Talon’s Keep. Asher’s stories were a little dry, and Mercy’s were a little too focused on how funny our failures had been, but between the two of them, they covered everything.

Seren watched me, though she pretended not to. I had to admit that the whole Psychopomp thing had come as a bit of a surprise, but I really didn’t think it required the level of scrutiny that Seren was giving me. I passed the flagon along more often than I drank from it. If I got drunk and made an ass of myself, I just knew Seren would give me that look again. That disgusted little narrowing of the eyes that made me feel like I was only eight inches tall.

Just as the party was starting to kick into high gear and Asher started dancing—wow, he had drunk way too much—I headed off towards the tower once more.

It took some real effort to haul the bits and pieces of Talon’s statue outside by hand, but I felt like I needed some good manual labor about then. The strain of my muscles against heavy objects. It felt clean.

It was only once all the big stone fragments were laid out on the dirt that I turned inwards. Seven hundred and seventy-seven experience became four hundred and seventy-seven when I bought out Shrine Construction. I’d deal with the pillars and all the rest in a moment, when my head felt clearer. The last thing I wanted to do was make any snap decisions that I couldn’t reverse later.

Building the shrines was simple enough, just slapping together the stone in the required shapes. Imbuing them with the right inscriptions to attract our essence so that they could serve as our anchor to the physical world was the tricky bit. I was kind of surprised that it didn’t come under Aether, really. But, apparently, it was the physical shape of the stones that did the trick, somehow. File it under rules I didn’t understand.

I’d worried that the other two would have to build their own shrines, but it seemed simple enough to dedicate them. The gods only gave out names to Eternals once, so that there couldn’t be any confusion. So I carved each of our names into the rock and then stepped back to look at the cemetery I’d just built for us on the doorsteps of Talon’s Keep.

Okay, maybe that was a little bit morbid, but what would you describe a cluster of stone blocks with your names written on them as? I kind of expected to feel some magical connection when I finished work on them but nothing. I guess they only kicked in when you died. I sincerely hoped that I was never going to find out if they worked.

Seren was standing watching me when I turned around. “Was the haste in construction necessary? Did you suspect that you would be murdered in thy sleep?”

“Why?” I grinned. “Did you have plans?”

She did not smile. “Should the time come that I must dispatch you, it shall be in an open field of battle in a fair and even match.”

“That’s sort of comforting, I guess?” Gods help me, it actually was.

“Still my question has not been answered.” She stepped up beside me. “Your kin are by the fire, sharing tales of thy prowess, yet you find no joy in it. Was it my accusation of bravado? I do not truly believe that…”

“No.” I stopped her before she somehow made this even more awkward. “No. It isn’t your fault, Seren. I just wasn’t in a party kind of mood.”

Her fingers brushed over mine at our side, and I nearly jumped. “Was there some other celebration that you would rather partake in?”

I did a double-take, trying desperately to work out if this was another culture shock problem and she was going to be mortified when I had to explain to her that it sounded like she was inviting me to bed with her.

“I am inviting you to bed with me, in case my invitations were not clear enough.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times before finally managing to squeeze out, “Yes. Please.”

“I understand that Talon had a bed chamber. Perhaps even a mattress. Shall we retire to his tower?”

“Okay.” I couldn’t stop grinning. Any minute now I was going to wake up to Mercy slapping me or something. “I mean. Uh. Also very much yes, please.”

She set off towards the tower, our interlaced fingers drawing apart as she hurried ahead with a bounce in her step.

I couldn’t believe that this was really happening. Out of some ancient, long-forgotten habit, I reached for my wallet and the long-expired condom that had been there since I was fourteen years old, then I realized that I didn’t even have a wallet in this world, let alone ancient relics of a teenager with considerably more confidence in his romantic abilities than I had now. Instead, my hand hit the cold weight of the shard in my belt-pouch.

Seren had vanished out of sight into the tower, but I knew that if I didn’t do this now, I’d contrive to forget all about it.

I poured glory into the pillar of aether, brightening it up again despite the dimness that had crept in since I last soul-bonded something. When it hit the second tier, it thickened up considerably. Looking more like a solid bar of crystal now than any of the narrow spindles that comprised the rest of my Eternal being.

Back out in the real world, I took a tighter grip on the shard in my hand and waited for Chernghast’s growling voice to ask me if I was sure about this. It didn’t come. Instead, I could hear my own much more pleasant voice whispering behind my ear. “This is a permanent decision, with irreversible consequences. Are you certain?”

I let out a breath of relief that I hadn’t cocked up somehow. “Yes.”

The light in my eyes blinked out.

For one awful moment I thought that I had gone blind, but then my eyes adjusted. There was the jungle, there were the partying Dvergar, and there was the tower with the hot Alvaren girl that wanted me to join her for the night. Why was I standing around out here worrying about the lights in my eyes going off again?

I set off towards the tower and nearly tripped over my feet. I had no light to see inside the tower anymore, but it was as though there were no shadows inside it at all. Okay, maybe this was just my eyes adjusting even more. Everything was fine. Totally fine.

Picking up the pace again, I scurried up the stairs after Seren, grabbing onto the handrail as I went. What the hell was that? My hands. The back of my hands were mottled with darkness. The black veins that had been visible beneath my skin seemed to have spread out in a capillary bloom until that darkness inside me was everywhere I looked. In truth, it probably wasn’t much bigger than it had been before, but you try getting weird wrong-colored veins appearing on your arms and see how calm and sensible you feel about it.

I closed my eyes and turned my attention inward once more. There had to be some explanation for this, some reason that bonding things was making me change. The pillars of divinity loomed up out of the darkness, and I was about to turn away and search through for the description of soul bond to properly scour it for any hidden details when I froze. There were more pillars than the last time that I’d looked.

The pillars that I’d started out with were dimmed, the same darkness that had spread through my body ran through them now, thick marbling veins of black in the moonlight. But in between them in that grand circle, I could make out the shapes of others now. Between Aether and Cosmos, directly opposite Creation, there was a thin line of absolute darkness. The same black as the Inimicus had been. The darkness of the void.

Annihilation, the destruction of worlds.

I darted around the rest.

Empyrean – The breaking of reality.

Occult – The knowledge of impossible things.

Corruption – The accumulation of power.

Slaughter – The ending of life.

Devouring – The consumption of souls.

Entropy – The unmaking of materials.

Every pillar had a dark counterpart. Every counterpart blossomed out into tier after tier of new divine powers that I’d never been warned about.

I snapped back into my body in shock, stumbling on the stairs and barely catching myself. I had no idea what any of this meant, and I had a sneaking suspicion that telling the others about it was going to end badly for me.

They hadn’t been happy to learn that I was a Lunar Eternal. How were they going to take it when they found out that I’d unlocked some sort of Void Eternal powers too?

Jumping back to what Mercy called my character sheet, I searched for any evidence of my suspicions. There was no longer any sign that I was an Acolyte of Chernghast. The only perks that I had were Psychopomp and Relentless. Nothing looked like it had changed since the last time I checked. Except that something obviously had.

Maulkin – Chagnar Faun of the Lunar and Void Court – 6th Tier of Glory

Statistics:

HP: 890/890

Devotion: 240/240

Attributes:

Potency: 46

Celerity: 21

Vitality: 18

Piety: 4

Divinities:

Aether – Rank 2: Soul Bond

Aether - Passive: Psychometry

Ascension – Rank 1: Ascendant Brutality

Ascension – Rank 2: Potency Surge

Artifice - Rank 1: Rough Hewn Architecture

Artifice - Rank 1: Rough Hewn Weapons

Artifice - Rank 1: Rough Hewn Armor

Artifice - Rank 1: Rough Hewn Shrine Construction

Artifice- Passive: Sphere of Influence

Primal – Rank 1: Restoration

Primal – Passive: Lifesense

Skills:

Combat: Rank 10/10

Sword: Rank 10/10

Mace: Rank 1/10

Polearm: Rank 1/10

Phalanx: Rank 7/10

Brawling: Rank 10/10

Brutality: Rank 10/10

Acrobatics: Rank 7/10

Climbing: Rank 1/10

Poison Resistance: Rank 10/10

Airstrike: Rank 3/10

Bestiary: Rank 3/10

Dungeoneering: Rank 2/10

Ancient History: Rank 1/10

Traits:

Relentless: The Faun are the greatest hunters on Amaranth, known for pursuing prey for days or even weeks at a time before closing in to strike.

Effect: Faun are immune to fatigue, their Attributes do not degrade over time without rest.

Psychopomp: You are a conveyor of souls, a guide or guardian akin to the reaper, who may push their incorporeal victims beyond the limits of the world and on into the next.

Effect: If you so choose you may guide those who have been slaughtered to the afterlife of your choosing. Sundering whatever connections they have to their mortal shell.

Invest your remaining Glory to continue your Ascension.

There it was in the very first line. So obvious that I’d have to be blind to miss it. Whatever echoes of the Void God were still attached to the shards of the rusted blade must have done this. I’d bonded them to the core of my being. I’d infected myself with this corruption. But still, I couldn’t bring myself to worry about it too much.

What could be more appropriate than throwing the power of the Void God right back in his stupid face?

I opened my eyes, feeling better than I had since Talon. This was power, and it was mine. Why should I worry about it?

From up above me in the tower, Seren’s voice echoed down. “I do not care to be kept waiting.”

I took off after her at a jog, my grin coming back unbidden.

Drawing both shards from my pocket pouch as I ran, I held them up to examine them together for the first time, working out where they’d slot together—if they even did. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d left my gloves outside on top of the shrines until that moment.

The whispering came, all the millennia that had passed since the Void God’s defeat whipping by in an instant. Insignificant compared to the one moment where this sword had become what it was now.

Nobody knew who had killed the Void God, but with psychometry, I could find out right then and there. Shadows whipped all around me. The brief lives that had been lived around these shards. All of them irrelevant.

There in the distance, I could make out a shadowed figure. I tried to focus in on him, tried to bring him to the fore. My skills with psychometry were far from exact, but even so, I could feel him there. The one who’d done it. The hero of the ages who’d been forgotten the moment of his greatest victory.

The figure stepped forward out of the shadows, slick and jet black from the tip of his pointed tail to the top of his smooth head. Featureless as the void itself. “I began to wonder just how long it would take before you realized that we could commune. Little matter, I do not require intelligence, only obedience.”

I dropped the shards, and in an instant, the black figure disappeared. I was back in the tower. I was standing on a stairwell. It all came back to me. Everything that the cold darkness had stripped away in just a few brief words.

My hands shook as I bent down to retrieve the shards. There was no avoiding touching them. I could not leave them here—as much as it pained me.

It took only a moment for me to scoop them up and shove them back into my pouch but that was all the time required for the voice to hiss into my ear, “You know who I am.”

I let the shards go and they fell like a leaden weight into the pocket. Clanking together. The name spilled out of my lips without my permission.

“Araphel.”

The End of Book 1 – Continue onwards for Book 2!

Wyrmshard

Maulkin and his Eternal buddies are on a roll. They're getting stronger, have two of the shards that will help prevent the return of an evil god, and even have a good idea where to find the rest.

Maybe Maulkin has taken a month off to hang out with his new elven girlfriend and learn how to swing his giant sword around, but hasn't he earned a holiday?

His reluctance to get out there and smack monsters definitely has nothing to do with the evil looking Voidgod powers that he's scared of telling the others about... Or with Araphel's imminent return... Or with having to fight a primordial dragon from the dawn of time...

Everything is fine. Shut up.

Chapter 1

Since I popped up out of the soil of Amaranth like the biggest, ugliest mushroom you’ve ever seen, I’ve had exactly one girlfriend.

The paladin’s blades shimmered in the twilight, moving so fast that it seemed the last scraps of sunlight could only barely catch them before they were gone.

There was no way that I could be that fast, that precise. Good thing I didn’t need to be.

All it took was a blink and a grunt of effort and the great-sword that had knocked my other assailants on their asses shrunk and shifted, flowing like mercury around my body to form up again in a shield almost tall enough to reach my horns.

That beautiful dance smashed into the solid iron bulwark like a wave hitting the shore, and a grin split my face. “Didn’t expect that, did you?”

Between the helm over her face and the bulk of the shield, I couldn’t see my attacker’s expression, but I was hoping it was a grumpy pout.

Back on Earth, I’d managed to square away a half-dozen girlfriends over the years, but I don’t even know if they count any more, what with me being dead there and all. I kind of hope that they don’t count. I was never the best boyfriend, even when I was trying my hardest. Which, on reflection, wasn’t nearly often enough.

The smart play on her part would be side-stepping around the outside of my shield, so I lined up the little arming blade that I’d been left with after stripping off all the metal for my shield, pointing the thrusting tip towards that empty air and waiting. If she took the dumb side, the side with the sword on it, then I was still positioned in such a way that I’d be able to lash out and knock her back before she could press in close enough to do me any serious damage. It was a win-win.

She came over the top of the shield in one leaping bound, one foot touching off the top edge of it for extra height, slamming it down into the ground and wrecking my balance. That was a first.

Without the rote training for this kind of attack, I fell back on instinct, jerking up the arming blade to catch one of the descending shimmers of pointy murder. I turned it aside while the other still lanced forward, going for my throat.

Luck saved me then—the way it had a good too many times in the past. When I jerked my head around to see death coming, my horn hit the side of the thrusting blade, changing the destination of that razor-sharp point away from throat town and on a detour into empty air.

The full weight of my would-be stabber slammed into my face and chest then, but if she’d expected me to flinch, she was in for a shock. Having Alvaren pressed against my face was one of my favorite pastimes. I slammed my forehead into her with all the bunched muscles of my bullish neck and set her rolling back to a safer distance while I retrieved my shield from where it still stood wedged in the ground.

Even as I reached for it, it had started shrinking, the metal flowing away and reshaping. By the time I made contact with the handle, it had dwindled down into a hunk of metal no bigger than the cleaver in my other hand. A matching pair of cleavers. Two swords, just like her.

I feel like I’m entitled to a fresh start. So that makes my super-hot, blonde, Alvaren girlfriend my very first girlfriend. You might think that my very first girlfriend on this planet trying to slice my head off probably wasn’t a good sign for the longevity of our relationship, but you’d be wrong. This was a massive step up from when I’d first met her.

Seren was back on her feet in some sort of elegant roll-backflip combo thing that bewildered me. She spun her blades and darted back in, hungry for first blood.

Even with the lighter cleavers, I was slower than her—sluggish-looking compared to the impossible grace of Alvaren—but I didn’t need to be faster when I knew where every blow was going to fall. I’d been watching Alvaren fight since I first landed on Amaranth—or at least after I’d brought the species back from the special goblin-hell that their queen had dumped them in—and I knew their moves now.

Every one of them trained relentlessly for centuries to fight perfectly, but that perfection was a carbon copy of everyone else’s. Once you could beat one of them, you could beat all of them.

It was really a shame I hadn’t quite worked out how to beat a single one of them yet.

She came in hard and fast as always, not over-committing but pushing to see my limits. I had a better reach than her as my cleavers ran longer than the needle blades of hers despite their heft, and one of my arms was almost the size of her whole body. I just had to use that advantage, hold her back out of striking distance, and wear her down.

It might not have looked like it to the audience of gathered dvergar where they were lounging around the jungle clearing taking bets, but even though I was staggering and a bit beleaguered, I wasn’t actually tiring. I couldn’t. It was a faun thing. We didn’t get tired.

I just had to outlast a swordswoman who’d been committing murder on a professional level since before the human race had crawled out of our caves back on Earth. Easy.

The first few strokes of her blade were coordinated, one razor edge chasing the other as she spun. Both chipped off one cleaver, leaving my other one free to sweep uselessly through the space where she’d stood. A moment too late.

She took to the air again, springing over that swing, spinning still and forcing me to duck or risk losing my face.

Touching down, she pounced back in at me. That would have been me dead again, but the flats of my cleavers were broad enough to serve as little shields when I swept them around. I turned the thrusts away, almost like I made them that way on purpose.

There was no time to make my own attack while that had her off balance. That was the thing you noticed with the Alvaren, the thing that made them look like they were so damned graceful. They weren’t making one move and then making another once they’d done something. There was no stutter, no pause as one motion flowed into the next. It was all one move. Like everything that they were doing was a dance, and you were just in the middle of it. In the middle of a dance that nobody had taught you the steps to.

It looked like it was time to get down to business when she strode back in again, and the baying dvergar could tell too. They started hooting and hollering as the fight went from dramatic to methodical.

A thrust, a parry, a feint, a cut, a riposte.

Each of the alvaren’s hands moved independently of the other. Each of them working me through a full fencing routine. Two full fencing routines at once. All things considered, I felt like I held up pretty well. Like I was dancing too. Moving back and forth across the packed dirt beneath our feet with some measure of competence that I didn’t really feel like I’d earned.

Most of her feints were at my face, and most of her real strikes were at my body. Almost like she was scared to mess up my pretty face. That, or she wanted to make me extra distracted as I had to concentrate on not peeing myself every time a needle-sharp blade tip came at my eyeballs. Probably that.

I had strength on my side, though it probably wasn’t that obvious given how fast she could recover. Every time I slapped one of her attacks wide with the flat of a cleaver, the force was almost enough to jerk the weapon out of her hand. I wasn’t trying to win by overpowering her, but I wasn’t trying to lose either. I was always going to be stronger than pretty much anything vaguely human-shaped, and acting like I wasn’t wouldn’t teach me how to fight better.

Her rhythm picked up once she’d rattled through a few of her attack routines until her hands were a blur. She kept me stepping back, running me in circles around the clearing, hoping I’d trip over a protruding rock or root like I’d done so many times before. It wasn’t happening today. Not today.

When my moment came, I almost missed it. Both of her swords had lanced in at me from different directions, and I’d had to flip a cleaver in my left hand to catch the low thrust. If I’d been watching the swords, I probably would have missed it, but by then I’d won enough confidence to meet her eyes. I saw the moment of surprise when she realized that she’d over-committed.

I surged forward, slamming one arm down and one up, pinning her at the shoulders by the opposing forces knocking her blades out even wider.

We were face to face now as she lifted off the ground. I flicked my head as I reared back, hooking a horn under her helm and flinging it across the clearing. Her golden hair tumbled out and down her back, and her eyes narrowed to brace against the impact.

Across my shoulders and neck, those same colossal muscles I’d used to butt her across the clearing tensed once more, and then I hammered forward.

Her eyes closed, and her whole body tensed against the impact.

I placed a gentle kiss on her lips. Barely a brush of skin.

Victory!

Vitality increased to 19

Phalanx: Rank 8/10

128 Experience Gained

“Maulkin!” Seren’s eyes snapped open, and a blue flush spread across her face as the dvergar began to roar with laughter around the edges of the clearing. This was better than I could have ever hoped for. I’d done worse than beat her. I’d embarrassed her. Oh, man. She was going to kick my ass all around this clearing when the morning came.

With a grin, I dropped her back to her feet. “Best two out of three?”

She retrieved her helm and tucked it under one arm, carefully avoiding the gaze of the dvergar who’d now moved on from cheering and jeering to exchanging money. After a losing streak of a month, the odds on me must have been really bad. If I’d had any idea that I might actually win a bout, I would have asked Mercy to put some gold on me.

“I believe that will be sufficient for today.” Her eyes were still narrowed, and she spoke as stiffly as she didn’t move. I didn’t know if she genuinely didn’t ache after these sessions or if she was just faking it, but I envied her. I’d be sore for the rest of the day. “You are much improved on the reckless ravening beast that I first encountered a moon back. Given a few more years training, perhaps you might make a passable foot-soldier.”

I snorted with laughter. “I got you.”

“You have come close enough to land a disabling blow. Once.” She smiled at me frostily. “Once out of how many bouts?”

There was no way I was letting a little thing like a twenty-eight-day losing streak get me down now. This was a day for celebration. I’d finally won. All the training and practice and exercises and… everything I’d been devoting the last month of my life to, finally coming to fruition. “But you admit I got you?”

She strode to the edge of the clearing and attempted to hide the satisfaction on her face as the dvergar scattered out of her way. She called back over her shoulder, “There can be no denying that if we wish to see the Voidgod kissed, you are the Eternal for the job.”

I stomped after her, giving my adoring fans a wave as I went. About ninety percent of the crowd were scowling at me for taking easy money out of their pockets.

Our little dirt circle was way out in the jungle. Everything on this island was way out in the jungle, if you wanted to nitpick, but from the tower where we lived, this particular bit was way out. As we made our way back to the tower and the village grown up out of the ruins at its feet, it was like moving backward in time through my day. At the end of every day was the circle of mud where Seren kicked me around after every willing dvergar had tried their luck. Farther back there was this obstacle course.

Tree stumps jutted up at odd heights throughout the long half-empty channel of partially cleared forest we moved through next. For the first few weeks, I’d hated this bit, bouncing on the balls of my feet from one stump-top to the next, constantly on the verge of overbalancing, even when I was doing everything right. Did you know that Faun are top-heavy? As a species, we look like we’ve been skipping leg day for centuries, and the big honking horns on the sides of my head didn’t help either.

After the second week, when it looked like I had the hang of it, Seren had recruited Mercy to shoot at me as I went. Arrows without heads that stung when they hit knocked me off balance, but they didn’t actually do much damage. The problem wasn’t that I was bad at getting out of the way, the problem was that Mercy was a really good shot. Seren knew that. The point wasn’t for me to dodge, it was for me to keep balance while getting shot. Took me a while to work that one out.

With her languid, gliding strides, Seren had already passed through this whole section of the obstacle course by the time that I spotted her. Was this still part of my daily workout? I broke into a run.

Next was the acrobatics section of the course, meant to exhaust me before I could even get started on the balancing act. It never worked. There were climbing walls, and tunnels dug down under the roots of the forest—all the stuff that made outdoorsy people back on Earth salivate with excitement and people like me wonder what the point was.

Seren had informed me that the point was ‘getting accustomed to my new body’. The same reason that she had me strip down and swim a mile along the coastline every other day before we started on this whole routine. Personally, I think she was just perving on me. Like when she had me lifting the weights we passed next.

We were just shy of the long, winding path back from our little corner of heaven to the village when I caught up to her and tackled her around the waist. I swept her off her feet and spun around and around, and she couldn’t help but smile. Just a little—that tiny secret smile that she seemed to save just for me. I had to ruin the moment, of course. “If you’d prefer for me to spank you instead of kissing you next time I beat you, that can be arranged.”

I didn’t even see her drawing her sword before the tip of it flicked up to prick the underside of my chin. “Perhaps we should find a better use for that mouth of yours.”

She was trying to be intimidating, but there was no stopping the grin that spread over my face now. “And what might that be?”

An arrow shot along the forest path and passed between our faces.

I dropped Seren, and we had both jerked back into combat readiness before we heard Mercy braying, “No making out in the forest! That’s how you get woodlice.”

I eased my reconstituted great-sword back into its baldric. “Mercy, I swear to the gods…”

“I was just coming to get you two. Dinner is ready, and Asher… well, it sounds like he might come out of the tower.”

That was exciting enough news that I stopped bitching about how close I came to an eyebrow piercing. “Holy crap.”

“I know, right! One of the dvergar he tricked into fetching and tidying in the library said that he was making noises all day. Like… Eureka kind of noises.”

I caught Seren by the hand and dragged her along as she was still trying to gather the exact words with which to eviscerate Mercy for shooting at us as a joke. “It occurs that thy compatriots are somewhat blasé about attempted murder. Perhaps because of how impermanent the state of death is for your kind.”

“She wasn’t trying to hit you.” She was literally digging her heels in, so I stopped yanking on her arm in case it came off. Seren reached up and turned my face to her again, keeping my attention on her. Like I’d go all weak at the knees and dumb just because... Okay, actually, yeah she was that pretty.

“When arrows are loosed, there is always a danger. Danger she seems blind to, simply because it has no lasting meaning to either of you.”

I didn’t try to look away, but I did blink hard so I could get my thoughts back together. “Even if you somehow got hit, I’d heal you! Nothing to worry about.”

Still, she cradled my cheek. “That arrow passed within an inch of my eye. You cannot raise the dead.”

“Not yet.” I gave her my patented cheeky grin again, but it completely failed to have the desired effect.

“Do you have no care for how my lifeblood is spent at all?” She cast her eyes down, and I realized that this wasn’t just predictable bitterness about me beating her, making her switch to another avenue of attack. It was genuine worry. Genuine fear. Not of dying—I knew her too well to consider that she was scared of dying—but of dying to some stupid, pointless accident.

I groaned and felt like an asshole. “Alright. Alright. I’m sorry. You’re right. I’ll tell her off, okay?”

“And what of you? Will you stop treating your life as a game?”

“Why would I quit while I’m winning?”

This time the grin seemed to do the trick. She fell into step beside me, even letting me put an arm around her shoulders instead of shrugging it off. “When you first asked me if I would train you in the martial arts, when you expressed your desire to move beyond mere brute force and into the realm of actual craft, it had been my hope that you would approach the matter with some seriousness.”

That actually brought me to a stop. “You don’t think I’ve been taking it seriously?”

She gave me one of those sideways looks that meant I’d said something dumber than usual. “You have been positively… gleeful.”

“It is fun!” I jostled her with my hip. “I’m meant to pretend it isn’t fun?”

“The dvergar sparring partners that you bat around like a cat toys with a ball of yarn do not take kindly to your laughter, and nor do I.”

I muffled a laugh, but not quickly enough to avoid a venomous glance. “So you’re mad that I’m having a good time beating you?”

“Once. You have bested me once, and for that, I would allow a certain degree of satisfaction.” Her shoulders slumped within her armor. “Frankly, that concerns me less than the ‘good time’ you seem to be having when I am besting you.”

“If this is about the time I grabbed you by the… uh… chest when we were sparring…”

She slapped a hand over my mouth, blue tinging her cheeks. “That… matter… requires no further discussion. My concern is that it does not seem to irk you when you are defeated. No matter how badly I thwart your efforts, you seem untroubled.”

“Well, yeah.” I shrugged. “I’m learning. I don’t expect to win every single time while I’m still learning.”

“You are not… You are not a child in a classroom. You are a soldier, fighting a war against the most dangerous foe that this world has ever known. Against a multitude of enemies so powerful that they are thought by most to be legend, yet your attitude is that of a man without concerns.”

We emerged from the forest into the village, and it was a proper dvergar village now. A month of non-stop construction work had transformed it from the abandoned ruins we’d found when we first landed on this island. The old outbuildings of Talon’s Keep were still there beneath the wooden structures that had been built around them, but they served more as foundations than structures in themselves.

Everywhere that you turned your head there was industry. A great mound of dirt to the east marked the beginnings of the mine that would make this place a true home to the dvergar, but even that mound was not sitting idle. The soil was sifted for anything of value, then the dirt itself was used to build the raised plateaus of farmland over where the trees had been cleared back.

It had been generations since the dvergar grew food beneath the sun of the surface, maybe these ones never had, but Asher’s never-ending book heap had filled them in on any of the technical details that they were missing.

The forges plumed smoke into the sky, staining the pale stone of the tower where it brushed by with soot. I’m sure Talon would have been pissed about us making a mess of his tower, but he was too dead to complain, and I kind of liked having the place a little bit messy. It made this place look lived-in. After seeing so much of Amaranth as a dead husk of a planet where civilization had dried up and blown away, some soot stains were a welcome reminder that we were still here.

I smiled down at Seren and placed another gentle kiss on her forehead. “Worrying isn’t going to change anything. It isn’t going to make me stronger. It isn’t going to make the quest any less… big. It would just make me sad.”

“I cannot for the life of me decipher whether you are a philosopher of great wisdom or an utter buffoon.”

Mercy called over from the cookfire. “Oh, don’t let him fool you. He’s a moron.”

“Love you too, Mercy!”

She turned back to the dvergar that always seemed to be clustered around her with a scowl. This time they were begrudgingly handing her money. I guess she’d been betting on me after all. Gambling seemed to be the only thing that the dvergar actually kept money for. Maybe it was different when they’d lived in their old city, but I hadn’t seen much sign of it then either.

Gunhild ambled over to nudge me in the knee, smirking so hard I was worried she’d hurt herself. “Did you like to be winning for a change?”

I took one look at that smile and sighed. “You had money on me too?”

She let out a loud chortle, then leaned in closer to grumble, “You cost me dear, but it’ll be giving me better odds when I be betting against you tomorrow, and I’ll wager that little lass of yours has something to prove now.”

Gunhild was right, of course. Even if Seren said she wasn’t mad, I was going to get poked a lot tomorrow.

While she hadn’t actually killed me yet, I’d spent the last of my Glory ahead of our first training session just in case she got carried away and I ended up popping back to life at my shrine over by the tower. I wasn’t too dumb to admit that maybe Seren was right about me being a bit casual about dying, given that the worst consequences of her cutting my head off would be that I wouldn’t have to walk so far to get back for dinner.

Around dinner time, I usually got jovial ribbing from whichever of the dvergar had volunteered to join in my training that day. After getting patted about with the flat of my sword for hours on end, the sight of Seren kicking my ass usually gave them some much-needed catharsis. Today a couple of them tried it with Seren and got treated to that same blank serial killer stare she used to give me every time I spoke. It stopped pretty promptly after that.

Even if Seren hadn’t been her usual prickly self, things felt strange. Like the quiet before the storm. The news that Asher’s endless research had finally borne fruit had spread much farther than just our ears. People kept spilling their stew because they were too busy staring at the door of the tower, just waiting for him to finally emerge. By the time that the bottles of post-dinner drinks were being cracked open, I was about ready to climb up the tower and drag him out by his tail myself.

I met Mercy’s gaze across the fire, and she just shrugged. I looked to Seren, and she gave me a blank stare. It was possible that there would not be any smooching happening in the tower this evening. I had to acknowledge that possibility, even if I didn’t like it.

Just when my patience was running out, I caught a glimpse of him coming down the stairs. I stood to go over and meet him, then thought better of it, sitting down again with enough force that the dvergar on the far end of the log bench popped up in the air. Oops.

It was a testament to how weird the energy was in the village that I was still on my first serving of stew, nudging it around in circles. Technically we didn’t need to eat, as Eternals, but I was still in the habit from back on Earth. And when we didn’t eat, the dvergar would get antsy. They were big on communal meals. Big on food as a love language. That was why some of the only things they’d saved from Khag Mhor before it crumbled into a pit in the ground were cooking pots and chests of spices. Anyway, they took it as a personal insult if you wouldn’t eat with them. So we ate.

All of us except Asher, up in his tower. The Dvergar hadn’t taken offense at that for some reason. I’d heard some of them talking about him when they thought I couldn’t hear them. Consumed, was the word they used. Or maybe it was obsessed. The word didn’t translate directly. My brain grasped the meaning, but I couldn’t have said it in any other language than dvergar.

He had spent all this time in Talon’s library, where he’d been sequestered for so long that I half-expected the color to have faded from his scales when he finally emerged, blinking, into the firelight. He still remembered how to speak at least. “Greetings to you, my friends.”

Mercy just couldn’t help herself. “Look who finally worked out how stairs work.”

“My apologies for the long absence”—his head actually bobbed down like he was embarrassed, as though the rest of us hadn’t been having a holiday while he did all the mental heavy lifting—“but I am sure that you shall find my investment of time paid off in full.”

That perked me up in an instant. “You’ve found the location of the rest of the Shards?”

“Ah.” His scaly snout pointed back down to the ground, and his tail swished. “No.”

Mercy snapped her fingers. “But you’ve found a way to find them?”

“Also no.”

I leapt to my feet in excitement. “You’ve found a spell to blow up the Voidgod?”

“Once more, that is a no.”

Gunhild piped up. “You’ve found out where old Talon be hiding his liquor?”

Asher’s tail was really lashing with irritation now. “I regret to say that I wasn’t even looking for something along those lines.”

Seren joined in the game. “Perchance thy has uncovered some great ancient secret that might prevent the restoration of the Voidgod?”

Asher trudged over and sank to his haunches beside the fire. “Alas, I cannot say that I have discovered any such thing.”

“Guys, can we all stop guessing and let him tell us?” Mercy flopped back over the log bench like a puppet with cut strings. “Before we die of old age?”

I added my little contribution to the time-wasting. “We don’t age.”

Mercy’s head popped back up to scowl at me. “But still, somehow, I can feel wrinkles appearing the longer that this drags on…”

Asher cut us off. “I have discovered the secret of the waystones.”

The collected dvergar looked at him blankly, and I have to admit it took me a minute to catch up to what he was saying too. “The big floaty ring things?”

“The network that allowed instantaneous travel throughout Amaranth through arcane power, yes.” He hadn’t even groaned. I must have been losing my touch.

Seren asked, ever so politely, “Were you not meant to be researching the shards?”

“Even for a devoted researcher such as myself, there reaches a point when one must accept that a hundred corroborating sources are providing all that there is to be had.” Asher slumped a little in the face of the question. It seemed to take a lot of effort to lift his head back up and meet our collective gaze. “From our earlier efforts, we have ascertained that the Great Wyrm Tsangaanax holds both his own and the dvergar shard, and the human shard has been passed down to the ruler of the Shattered Bastion. That left only the Faun shard to trace, and it seems that they have an oral tradition rather than a written one.”

Mercy piped up, “So they spend all of their time down on their knees—”

Asher cut her off neatly. “Reciting tales of their history to one another.”

“So what?” I was perplexed. “Nobody else ever listened in on storytime?”

“It would appear that the famously loathed and insular race of the Chagnar Faun were not inclined to share their sacred secret legendarium with any traveler who happened by.” Asher scoffed. “I can find few references to the Faun at all in the collected records here—and almost always it is in the context of warfare being waged upon them so that areas they held might become… civilized.”

There was a dull silence around the fire for a long moment, when we could all hear the crackle of the wood and the soft clunk of spoons in bowls. They were all waiting for me to launch into another rant about the poor misunderstood Faun, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Did it suck that a whole race had been written off by the world of Amaranth? Of course, it did. Would shouting about it make a difference? Not right now.

When it became apparent that I was shutting up for the first time in living memory, Asher pushed on. “Perhaps I might direct your attention back to the fact that we can now be instantaneously transported anywhere in the world that is connected to our waystone network, potentially eliminating months of traveling time, and even permitting us a swift return to the field should we be defeated in combat.”

“Never going to happen.” I shared a grin with Seren and Mercy. Mercy hadn’t joined us every day for training—most of her training time had been spent alone in the woods, hunting for the dvergar. Sneaking and shooting like she did best. It was all towards the same goal though. “That’s what we’ve been doing while you’ve been reading. Practicing. Training. Honing our skills. The next time we run into a fight, there isn’t going to be any of the old frantic slap and zap.”

Asher clapped his scaly hands together. “Then let us put your training to good use at last.”

Oh no. He meant right now. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready yet. I hadn’t worked out how to hide my little problem yet. “Do we even know where any of the floaty ring things lead though?”

“While it seems inevitable that some of the arcane nexus Talon bound into the chains have broken down over time, he left a full accounting of every place that the stones were raised. The coverage is not expansive, but nor did it stretch into those unknown areas where it is liable to have fallen into hostile hands. Several sites of interest to our quest are close by to the chain.”

Mercy piped up with her own complaint, gods bless her. “What if there are broken stones in the chain? Does that mean we’re all going to get turned into jelly if we try to go through?”

But Asher had an answer for that too. “It struck me that we could not be entirely certain of the extent to which the chain was intact, so I examined Talon’s notation on the subject. It seems that you would simply be ejected from the last intact waystone.”

“So it will just spit us out into the ocean?” I tried as hard as I could to make it sound like I was upset about the idea instead of excited about a giant magic waterslide.

“My expectation is that none of the waystones set out in the water will have been subjected to much in the way of interference, yet nonetheless, I do believe that it would be wise for us to send a single volunteer through first. That way, they might identify any trouble that may lay in wait on the other side of the stones.”

All eyes turned to me then. I had no idea why I had this reputation for suicidal bravery, but he’d said volunteer, and I was not volunteering for a damn thing.

I wasn’t volunteering to go out into the world and explore, maybe fight monsters, and unlock awesome new powers. I wasn’t volunteering to ride the giant magic water slide. I wasn’t volunteering for any of it. I wasn’t signing up for anything except another month of chilling on a tropical island with my hot Alvaren girlfriend.

My last desperate attempt to dodge this bullet squeaked out of me while the collective stare of the whole village burrowed into the side of my head, judging me for not volunteering to shoot myself through the cannon and see where I landed. Dammit. Even I couldn’t make it sound like that wasn’t fun. “Do you know if this spell you’ve found even works?”

“The theoretical elements are all sound, but it shall only be through casting that we will be entirely certain of its success.” He turned to stare at me, just like everyone else. “Once we have a volunteer to pass through the gate.”

Once again, the sound of the crackling fire rose to fill the silence. Night birds called out among the trees, and high above us, the wild winds that Talon’s storm-butterflies kicked up were whistling. Everyone was staring at me in annoyed silence.

Mercy was the one to break the silence. Predictably. “Okay, what the hell?”

“What?”

“Don’t ‘what’ me! What you! What are you doing?”

“Nothing!”

“Exactly! Before we beat Talon, you were like… the fuel in the engine of this whole thing. You were raring to go, all day every day. Willing to do whatever you had to do to get out there and find the shards and beat the bad guys, and now… what? You just want to sit?”

“I’ve been busy. We’ve all been busy. We’ve been training!”

“Oh, bull. We didn’t need training before, and we don’t need it now. You just wanted an excuse to get sweaty with Seren all day.”

Seren turned almost entirely blue but said nothing.

Meanwhile, I got angry on her behalf. “We got lucky! We’re up against big scary things now. Tsangaanax made Talon into his bitch without even breaking a sweat, and that guy was a super-powerful wizard dude. We’re trying to save the world; we can’t just hope things are going to keep going our way.”

Asher nodded approvingly at my sentiment, and that was when I knew for sure that I’d gone too far.

Mercy’s jaw hung open. “Who the hell are you, and what have you done with Maulkin?”

“Oh come on. Just because I think that we should spend a little time preparing instead of throwing ourselves headlong into trouble, you think that I’ve been pod-person-ed?” Try as I might, I just wasn’t a good enough liar to convince anyone that I wanted the opposite of what I really wanted.

I wanted to get back out there. I wanted to go find the rest of the shards, slap them together, and then beat in Araphel’s blank spooky face with it. I wanted that more than anything. But if things got rough out there, I had no idea how I was going to keep my dirty little secret.

Mercy was on her feet now, pointing an accusatory finger at me. “Maulkin would have been bouncing up and down on the spot if you told him he got to go through a magic portal that might dump him in the middle of the sea. Maulkin would think that was fun. Maulkin would have already made up three excuses for why he was the best choice to go.”

The reasons were already on the tip of my tongue before she even said it. “I mean, with my stats, I would survive for longer if I got dumped in the sea, maybe long enough to swim to safety, and I don’t really lose anything if I die since all my Glory is already invested. And I can remake my gear from nothing when I respawn.”

Mercy grinned. “Starting to sound like Maulkin again…”

“But I just think that we should be cautious.”

“By the gods.” Seren gawked at me too, glad that attention was no longer pointed her way. “Did you truly just flinch when you said ‘cautious’. Like it was a dirty word?”

“I… I…” Suddenly, the effort of lying to them all was too much for me. I was going mad sitting around here, knowing that somewhere out there Araphel was crawling back to life while I twiddled my thumbs. More than that though, I was so deeply bored. We had been doing the same thing for a month. Every day, getting up, exercising. Training. I felt like my brain was crawling up the insides of my skull. If it hadn’t been for the variety of interesting things that Seren and I did in the bedroom we’d claimed up in the tower these past few weeks, I probably would have thrown myself in the sea and tried to swim to the Shattered Bastion by myself. With something like a sob, I broke down. “I want to get shot out the magic cannon into the sea.”

Mercy grabbed me by the shoulders and cheered. “There’s my big dumb guy!”

They were getting what they wanted. They were getting big dumb Maulkin throwing himself into trouble. They should have been satisfied, but Asher was still looking at me with a quizzical tilt to his head. He was suspicious. That same methodical brain that had been chipping through all the mysteries of Amaranth had just added why I was acting funny to his to-solve list. Great.

Okay, full disclosure. I might have done something really dumb. I make a lot of impulse decisions, and normally, they work out great. They’re how I ended up as a big buff faun with a big choppy sword, spending the rest of my eternity on a bitching awesome dungeon crawl. They’re how I got all my cool powers. They’re also how I ended up with my dirty little secret.

Technically speaking, I wasn’t a Lunar Eternal any more—at least, not just a Lunar Eternal. As I’d bound more and more shards of the Rusted Blade to my soul, it had started to change me. The moonlight inside me had started to dim. The glow in my eyes had faded until you could barely see it. I could almost pass for a normal Faun if nobody looked too closely at them. Most importantly, the mark on my soul that the gods had inscribed to say, “This guy is on team moon,” had been vandalized with a little scribble that added, “and team Voidgod.”

When I first landed on this rock, Asher, Mercy, and I were not besties. The fact that I was a Lunar Eternal while they were Solar ones… well, it was almost enough to put them at my throat right up front. Even as we’ve gotten to know each other, and they’ve come to recognize that I’m cool as hell, there have still been little moments where they didn’t trust me, just because I serve the primordial pantheon of chaos instead of the prissy sunshine order like them.

By the end of our little quest to grab Talon’s shard, I was pretty sure that all of that was behind us though. That they finally trusted me and recognized that Lunar and Solar Eternals could hold hands and frolic and junk. If they knew that I’d been signed up to the Voidgod softball team, that trust was going to evaporate pretty damned fast.

As if that little mark on my soul wasn’t scary and confusing enough, the Pillars of Divinity which gave me all my godly powers had doubled in number, with every pretty sparkly pillar reflected with a dark counterpart. And that should have been that. That really should have been that. If I had just stopped then and there, I wouldn’t have any problem keeping the dark pillars or my additional affiliation a secret from everyone else.

The problem was, some of those void powers sounded freaking awesome.

For every ability that let me create something or heal somebody in the Lunar Pillars, there was an equal and opposite reaction in the Void Pillars. My ability to build equipment out of raw materials with just a thought? What about disassembling the armor my enemies were wearing? Healing with a touch? What about draining the life out of somebody instead?

It was like somebody had taken all the awesome powers that the other baby godlings and I could tap into and then created the heavy metal version of them. I wanted them so bad.

So I made my stupid impulsive decision. When I had to sink the last of my Glory into something before going off to train with Seren for the first time, I ignored all the perfectly good, not-going-to-ruin-my-life options and went straight for those sweet, succulent void pillars.

Look, I never said I was smart. I’ve never even implied it. In fact, you could probably take a look at everything that I’ve ever said and done and sum it up as: “Damn, this guy is as dumb as a sack of rocks.”

So I was more than a little uncomfortable about Asher’s scrutiny, and I spent the rest of the evening sidling my way around the fire and doing my best to avoid getting sucked into a private conversation with him. Even though he might have had all the emotional insight of a coconut, he was also doggedly persistent when he thought that there might be an answer to one of his puzzles.

Luckily for me, I had a built-in excuse to go sidling away from the cookfire long before everyone was drunk and singing like usual. I caught Seren’s eye across the fire and waggled my eyebrows at her. She didn’t smile—those were still rare little treats that were usually reserved for in private—but she did give me a little nod of acknowledgment and slipped away from the conversation going on around her but never including her.

I stood up to follow her a moment later, telling everyone I was sleepy and needed my energy for being zapped through space and time by Asher come morning. They let me go without much resistance, even if they did usually enjoy watching me get drunk and abuse my Artifice powers for entertainment purposes.

At the tower entrance, Mercy was waiting with her arms crossed. “Took you long enough.”

“Have you been waiting there this whole time?”

“No.” She rose to her full height, trying to meet my gaze eye to eye and mostly managing eye to chin. “Just since I noticed you were trying not to talk to me or Asher.”

She noticed that. Of course, she noticed that. “Well, you guys were being weird.”

“No, don’t do that.” She strode in closer, and now we were seeing eye to nipple. “Don’t try to turn this around on us. You are being weird. Really weird. And I’m used to your usual weird. Gods help me, sometimes I kind of like your usual weird. But this is a new weird. Weird even for you.”

“Weirder than saying weird fifteen times in a row?”

She was close enough now that I had to squat a little bit to hear her hissing. “I can and will kick you directly in your boy parts.”

I regretted squatting. That made her target so much easier to hit. “Just chill out! I didn’t see you volunteering to get launched through Asher’s magic catapult.”

“Yeah, because if I did, that would be weird.” She stomped back into the tower and sat down on the stone bench we’d made out of dead golem parts. “But you not volunteering? That is bizarre! From the second that we crawled out our graves, you’ve been in a mad panic to chase after the shards, and now you just want to kick back? What happened to you? What changed?”

“Nothing changed! Araphel still needs his ass kicked. I just”—Screwed up and absorbed too much of his evil essence and might be turning into a Voidgod myself—“thought we could all do with a little breather.”

“So you really, really, just wanted to lounge around for a month with your new girlfriend?”

“Is that so hard to believe?” I pointed up the stairs after Seren. She was probably already up there, waiting for me. “She’s really hot!”

“Okay, first of all, ew.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Second, I am like ninety percent hotter than blondie brat, and I’m not an elf-supremacist psycho.”

“So what, you’re jealous?” I waggled my eyebrows at her. “You wanted some Maulkin for yourself?”

“And we’re back to ew, again.” She counted that on her fingers too. Was she counting every ew? “No, you are gross. You know you’re gross. I just wanted to make it clear so that you know…”

I gave her an incredulous look. “That you’re hotter than my girlfriend?”

“I am, but I’m only telling you that in a purely objective way that has nothing to do with wanting anything to do with your rhino-looking ass.” She pointed her counting finger in accusation. “And don’t think I didn’t notice you skipping over the fact your sweet little Seren thinks we’re all subhuman just because we don’t have pointy ears like her.”

“That isn’t fair.” I shifted uncomfortably. Mercy needed to stop being right on the money. It was getting annoying. “She’s getting better.”

She let out a completely mirthless laugh. “Yeah, she hardly even looks like she wants to spit on the dvergar anymore.”

I slumped down onto the bench beside her so that I could keep my voice down. Those pointed ears on Seren weren’t just for show, and sound echoed right up this tower. “She grew up surrounded by people like that. No contact with anyone else outside of that cult of alvaren greatness. Is it really that surprising that she believed the same stuff as everyone else she grew up with?”

“I had a racist grandma.” Mercy rolled her eyes. “Didn’t make me racist.”

“So did I—goes with grandma territory, I guess?” Mercy looked ready to interrupt, but I talked over her little self-congratulation dance. “But I didn’t grow up in crazy-elf-Nazi-land, and neither did you. She’s doing better than she was. Okay? Sometimes she might fall back on… how she’s been brought up, but that isn’t her. It isn’t all of her.”

For a long moment, Mercy sat there in sullen silence, then, just when I was getting up to go upstairs and try to find some tiny sliver of joy in the evening, she stopped me with a boot stuck out in my path. “Don’t think I didn’t see what you did there, turning the conversation into something about her instead of telling me what is actually wrong with you. You know I don’t like it when you keep secrets from me, Maulkin. And I don’t like being lied to.”

I stepped over her leg, and she raised the other one. “Who is lying to you?”

“This isn’t over.” She tried to lock her legs around my shin, but I jumped out and half-staggered over to the stairs as she called after me, “You’re going to tell me what is going on.”

I shouted back over my shoulder, “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about!”

“You’re a bad liar.”

The steps vanished beneath my stride, three at a time. “I must be an awful liar if I don’t even know I’m lying.”

As I rounded the corner and headed out of sight, she yelled, “I’ve got my eye on you.”

I took a couple of steps back down the stairs, so she could see me from the waist down. Then I wiggled my hips. “On my rhino-looking ass?”

“Ew.”

I wonder if she counted that one too.

Chapter 2

The sun rose, the dvergar got to work as noisily as ever, and I walked out to meet the whole gang over at the shore. The island was pretty thoroughly mapped by this point, both by the dvergar laying out their expansion plans and by me and the other Eternals hunting down what was left of the chameleon lizardman assassin beasties that were still running wild. In none of that mapping did any of us come across a big stone pillar and a floaty ring thing, making the one on the distant horizon, pointing back along the route we’d taken from Witchglass Overlook, into the one and only waystone relay that was feasibly accessible.

Asher worked out almost as soon as we arrived on the beach that it would have been easier to line up an angle on the floaty ring from one of the upper rooms in Talon’s Keep, but none of us could be bothered wasting any more of the morning hiking back and forth through the sweltering forest. Instead, he set to work, checking and double-checking the incantation that would bring the ancient magic to life while the rest of us twiddled our thumbs.

Seren had come down to the beach to see me off in an uncharacteristic display of sentimentality, but the longer the delay stretched on, the more awkward having her standing around seemed. While I was here, she had something to focus her attention on. She’d been so delighted when I asked her to train me, and no small part of that was that it took her away from everyone else. When she was busy with me it was easy for her to ignore the fact that everyone else on the island kind of hated her.

In a weird way, kicking my ass every day had been helping her to fit in. For all their talk of being a peaceful people, the dvergar loved to watch a fight, and they particularly loved to watch some waif of a woman tossing around a giant of a man like he was an empty sack. She didn’t have friends among the dvergar, but they had some respect for her skills—and maybe a bit of a fan club, watching her from afar.

Without me, she was going to be left lingering. There was work here for farmers and miners, for builders and planners, but warriors? There was no requirement for them. We’d seen to that when we cleared the island of anything that looked even vaguely hostile. I didn’t even know if Mercy and Asher would talk to her when I was gone. I mean, Asher might ask her a relentless barrage of questions to try and get more information about whatever he was obsessing about at any given moment, but it wasn’t the same as having a conversation with her like she was an actual person.

She gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek and then stepped back. “I shall be awaiting thy return with bated breath.”

“Miss you too.”

After cross-referencing three different scrolls and two books, Asher ushered me to stand between him and the floating ring poking up over the horizon. “Our set target is the Shattered Bastion, but if the spell should falter, do your best to discover nearby landmarks before you expire so that we can determine the reach of the undamaged waystones.” I must have been looking a bit nervous because he tried to smile at me, showing rows of pointed teeth. Then he said the least comforting thing imaginable. “This should be entirely painless, so if you do experience any discomfort, please alert me as it may mean something has gone awry.”

“Dude, you’re about to lightning-bolt pea-shooter me across the world.” When I laughed it had a manic edge to it. “That’s a first for me. I don’t know what it is meant to feel like.”

Mercy grinned. “I hope it hurts like hell. Proper camel through the eye of a needle stuff. Squirting.”

“Want to swap places?”

She scoffed. “And miss out on another riveting day of sunbathing?”

When I turned back to Asher for moral support, I realized he was already in the middle of casting. Oh crap. Glancing up at Seren, I saw her raising a hand to wave goodbye, then abruptly, she was gone.

Have you ever had every molecule of your body torn apart by wild magic and flung through the air? Do you have any idea what that feels like? Me neither. It all happened too fast for me to notice. One minute I was standing there on the beach, and the next I was just… somewhere else.

That somewhere else was a courtyard, of sorts. My arrival displaced the air with the sound of a tiny thunderclap, turning every head my way. The ring of the waystone set into the wall behind me also gave me a nice dramatic backlight as it glowed a dazzling green for a moment before fading back to grey.

The walls around the courtyard had been made from solid stone once upon a time. Not bricks but great sheets of rock dragged up into place and carved into the shape that was required. That had been once upon a time. Age and some terrible cataclysm had rent those walls, leaving the stone bubbled and melted at the edges of the damage. Somebody had patched the hole with clay brickwork now, but it stuck out enough that I noticed that wedge of terracotta before I noticed that there were a dozen armed men screaming all around me.

Humans. The first ones I’d seen since I landed on this rock. It was almost enough to bring a tear to my eye to see another human being. Mercy didn’t count.

Bells started ringing up on the walls above us, and a cry echoed out through the castle beyond. “The enemy has breached the center yard!”

I spun around, looking for whatever enemy were bothering my little human buddies, and then I realized who they were talking about. “Oh! Oh no. Guys, I’m not your enemy! I’m human too, or at least, I used to be. I mean. Let me start over…”

A crossbow bolt punched through my armor and embedded in my shoulder. Ow.

“Guys! I’m not here to fight you! I’m on your side.”

Another crossbow bolt flitted down from the raised walkway along the patched wall. It would have hit me square in the face if I hadn’t jerked to the side. I shouted a bit louder since they seemed to be hard of hearing. “Could you stop shooting at me? I’m on your side!”

The men who’d been down in the yard when I first arrived had drawn swords, axes, and shields. Some of them were fussing with armor straps, and others had run when I arrived, carrying the call of, “Breach!” throughout whatever building was beyond this little square.

That probably wasn’t good news.

Up on the wall, more guards came pouring in, fully armored in the boiled leather and chainmail that seemed to cover everybody in this place. More crossbows were leveled at me. I had both my empty hands held up at this point, but that didn’t seem to do anything to slow proceedings down.

The closest of the men down in the square seemed to find his courage, and he charged at me with his axe held high. After so long fighting Alvaren, he seemed almost comically slow, charging and roaring across the last few feet. I caught the axe under the head and jerked it out of his hands.

“Will you people just listen to me? I’m not here to fight you.”

Fear was all I could see on the face of the man with no axe. No recognition of the words I was saying. No hint that he even understood, though I knew that with my Eternal’s gift of speaking in tongues, he could understand every damn word. He scampered back out of reach in a panic, flinching away as if I was going to beat on him with his own axe. Instead, I dropped it on the ground and tried to lift my empty hands again.

“Guys, can you just stop for a minute? Who’s in charge here?”

Despite their initial panic, the men up on the walls had fallen into their training now, the front rank dropping to one knee while those behind them lined up their shots, resting the hafts of the crossbows on their buddies’ helms.

Oh crap.

The moment that the ex-axe-man was out of range, they unleashed their volley of bolts at me. A solid wall of spikey death, soaring through the air.

I got my shield formed just in time. It had barely hardened before the bolts hit it, the force of the impact sending me sliding back across the dirt yard. With a blink of my eyes, I shrunk the wall of raw iron back down into my sword and hefted it over my head.

It was bigger than any two of the guys who were now running at me, and I could actually see the moment that their brains processed what their eyes were telling them and panic set in. Their charge turned into a skid, and they tried to reverse direction, figuring out pretty fast that their little wooden shields weren’t going to do much if I swung for them. Maybe now they’d listen. “Guys, I’m not here to fight anybody. I just want to…”

There were two entrances to the courtyard, one leading to another open-air area opposite the red scarred wall and the other opposite the waystone, sealed with a set of iron-studded doors that looked sturdy enough to stop even me from kicking my way through. Reinforcements streamed in through both of them, spilling out and forming into a right angle of battle lines. “Oh come on! Why does everybody in Amaranth want to stab first and ask questions later?”

Pikemen came up behind the first lines and thrust their big floppy spears out to rest on the flat tops of the front rank’s kite shields. This was not looking promising either. They advanced on me, step by step, shrinking the width of their line by one body each time and closing the square smaller and smaller, driving me towards the corner of the outer wall, beneath the frantically reloading crossbowmen.

I was running out of room and running out of choices. If I didn’t fight back in the next few seconds, I was going to turn into a shish-ka-Maulkin. So I did the only thing I could do. I fought back.

With one sweep of my great-sword, I turned aside the pikes that were thrusting at me, and before the ones to either side could start thrusting in at my flanks, I spun in a full circle, slamming the flat of the blade against the front ranks’ shields.

There was a cacophonous gong, and the soldiers flew back into the ones behind them. The whole formation fell like dominos, and I leapt over them, going for the door. I needed to get out of here, get some distance, and maybe find somebody in the whole place who had a couple of brain cells and understood what it meant when I said: “I’m not here to murder you all. Please chill.”

I headed through the doorway and into a corridor with the crowd of toppled soldiers braying at my back, plain stone walls stretching off as far as the eye could see, no tapestry or decoration or anything to make this place homey. Just rock. Even dvergar mines had more personality. There were doors off to either side of the corridor, but I could hear footsteps slapping along behind me, and I didn’t fancy trying to fight in a solid stone tube that I was barely small enough to fit into. Another of the reinforced doors was up ahead, and I didn’t like my odds of not smacking flat into it like a cartoon character.

For a couple of steps, my body stumbled as my consciousness swept out of it and along the corridor as far as my sphere of influence. I could feel the lock on the door as a staticky mass in my perception—something too complex for my Rough Hewn Architecture to touch. Good thing it was nestled in a plain stone wall really. One little push of will loosened the wall’s grip on the door, and it widened out enough that the deadbolt was now slotted into open air.

I banged through the now unlocked door and into another open-air square. There was no patch on the outer wall of this one, though some of the next building looked a bit piecemeal, and there were no archers standing guard up on the walkway. I figured they were the reinforcements that had come tearing in to shoot at me in the last open space. Great, no crossbow bolts. It was just a pity that was balanced out by there being even more soldiers standing around on my level of this one.

There was a split second to decide whether this lot might be more susceptible to pleading, flattery, and begging before I heard those slapping boots behind me closing the distance. No stopping.

Hunching up my shoulders and ducking down my head, I charged—not straight ahead to the next locked door but for the open archway to the side. For all I knew this place was a big circle, and chasing along through these walls was just going to take me back to the waystone courtyard. Time for a change of scenery.

The next courtyard in clearly hadn’t started out life that way. The walls, where they stood, were still that same smooth stone, but it had started to vault up into a roof before the topside had been torn away. There were patches where you could still see the curve of it heading up before the melt swept the rest away. Most of the walls had gone the same way, ripped through by some great cataclysm and still on the waiting list for the shoddy brickwork patch-job that the outer wall had benefitted from.

If I ever got a whole second when folks weren’t trying to murder me, I’d love to use Spirit Touch and work out what the hell had actually happened to this place. Guess that whole second was asking too much. While there was nobody hanging out in this room, there was a makeshift armory set up, a little camp fire burning in a soot-blackened corner, and a staff room for the guards out on the wall.

No time to think. Never any time to think. The shouts of my pursuers had been taken up by the crowd in the last courtyard, and they came stampeding after me. At least this place gave me some options. I reached out into my Sphere of Influence and felt all that raw stone, just waiting for some divine attention. The archway became a wall, and my closest pursuer slammed right into it, helmeted head smashing right through the thin layer of stone that I’d slapped over the gap.

For a moment I saw his face, all stubbly and grubby and full of rage, then I took off, surging my Potency for a great bounding leap out of the room, and landing with less grace than I might have hoped for on top of the most solid looking wall.

They knew the lay of the land, and I was scurrying through it like a rat in a maze. I needed some height, some perspective, somewhere that there weren’t screaming dudes trying to murder my face off.

Staggering and almost tipping over into the next room, I got a glimpse of the scale of the place. The outer wall that I’d been running along the inside of was not some great circle. It was basically a straight line, stretching out for as far as the eye could see in both directions. It must have gone on for miles when it was first built, but now whole sections of it were just gone, and the parts that weren’t looked the worse for wear. These rooms set back from the main wall must have once formed the living quarters and storerooms, but now the few that still had walls had lost their roof, and the few that had roofs seemed to be missing walls beneath. That same brutal melt had spread all across the place, bubbling away solid stone everywhere that it had touched.

From up here, it became clear that the big wall used to be at least twice the height it had been left. There were jagged spurs of stone still stretching up from it—all that remained of the upper floors. Wooden slats had been roped up onto them, and platforms had been balanced precariously as lookouts. Now that I’d spotted those, I could see the same wood everywhere. The clay bricks had been used to patch up holes where they’d been found, but the rickety wood structures were clinging to the old rock like a parasite. Out the back of some of the more solid-looking rooms in this row, there had been halls of that same shanty-town smacked together and lashed to the stone. I could even see stairways zig-zagging up to the top of the wall where the damage was worse and the big wall’s internal structures had been melted shut.

I wish I’d spotted those sooner since soldiers were now boiling up them onto my level. No rest for the wicked. Why not give it one last try? “I’m really not here to fight you, guys! This is just a misunderstanding. We’re on the same side!”

The first brave soldier made the jump off the stairs and onto the cross-hatch of wall-tops. She lost her shield in the jump but held onto that axe like it was her safety blanket. Half the size of me, she had twice as much space for her feet. What felt like a tightrope to me was just a narrow path to her, and if she fell, all her buddies down there would catch her. They would not be catching me. This was not a crowd-surfing situation. Some of them were already trying to get their pikes through the fragmented wall I’d made so that they could poke at me.

I held out my arms as wide as I dared, wobbling as I did. “You don’t want to talk it out?”

She didn’t want to talk it out.

Coming in hard and fast, she swept for my legs. She didn’t need to kill me, just knock me off balance, and as I danced back out of reach of her hacking swings, she nearly managed it more than once.

Behind her, I could see more soldiers taking the risk and making the jump. A couple wiped out, slamming face down into the wall before vanishing back down out of sight, but enough of them stuck the landing that I was starting to get worried.

Where her attacks had failed to topple me, I nearly succeeded myself when half the weight of my sword shifted into a round shield for my other arm. My arms starting to windmill as I tried to get my balance back, and the soldier probably could have had me in that moment if I wasn’t vigorously windmilling a sword through the space she’d have to run into to take her swing.

In a half-squat, I found my balance, then surged forward, slapping my shield into her with all the weight of a Maulkin in motion behind it.

By this point, I probably should have been trying to kill these people right back, but I still entertained the vague hope that they might realize I wasn't killing them and think to themselves, ‘Hey, maybe he’s a good guy, and we should sit down and talk to him about what he’s here for instead of shooting at him and stuff.”

When that soldier toppled over and fell the length of the wall to land directly on her head, that hope faded fast. Her neck snapped with a wetter sound than you’d have expected, juicy even before blood started to spread out around her and pool at the feet of her friends.

Peace had been a longshot anyway. Everything else on Amaranth had devoted itself to murdering me, why would the first humans I met be any different.

When the next soldier rushed in to take her place, I fell into the well-worn groove of my training. Slapping the thrust out and following it with a stab to the center of mass. A quick tug to retrieve my sword and then the shield was back up in position before the next one could approach. It was picture perfect; Seren would have been so proud—or at least she wouldn’t have had some cutting remark about my performance for a change. I could do this all day, and if the folks with pikes and crossbows would have kindly thrown them away, I would have, picking off every soldier in the place one by one.

Since I wasn’t living in a perfect world where folks line up politely to be brutalized, I had to move. Running along a wall that is about as wide as your feet is kind of hard to start doing, but it’s a lot easier once you’re moving. Once you’re moving, I suppose that stopping is the next big worry, but I had no intention of ever doing that, so I put it out of my mind.

Somebody should have warned the soldiers that I wasn’t stopping. It came as a surprise to them when I bodied them off the wall, slamming straight ahead with a shield that was about the same size as them, toppling them into the rooms on either side.

The rickety stairs were still packed full of soldiers that hadn’t quite gotten their courage together yet, a press of bodies lower down with only a few semi-suicidal geniuses climbing up towards the top of the big wall so that gravity could help them instead of hauling them down. One made a leap right for me, misjudged it, and went straight down onto the pikes that were finally being angled up at me. He made it almost halfway down the long shafts of wood, screaming all the way until death took him.

At least that encouraged the rest of them not to try it.

With another great leap, I cleared the distance from the closest, half-melted wall and hit the stairs. They weren’t built with something my size in mind.

They really weren’t built for something my size, clad in full armor, to hammer into them like a cannonball. Wood splintered and showered down around me.

The soldiers on the level with me had leapt out to fall, preferring the certainty of making friends with the ground to the uncertain but probably gruesome fate that being there when I landed would have brought them. There were pretty good odds I would have made them into human pâté. Not on purpose, just on impact.

I had to scramble to catch onto something as the steps beneath my feet fell away. I thought for one awful moment that the whole stairway was going to drop, but I’d forgotten about the ramshackle construction. Even as the lower half crumbled apart, dropping the rest of the soldiers in a heap below, the parts lashed onto the top of the wall still held tight. It was a squeeze that sent bits of the stairs tumbling down each time I turned for the next zig-zag, but I used what was left of the stairs to mount the big wall.

The higher that I got, the more of the world I could see. Beyond the ruins of the big wall and the shantytown built up around it on this side, there were open expanses of grassland. Farms dug in with the same military precision as the other fortifications and palisades to supply the troops with fodder, fields with what looked a bit like horses, shacks dotted around to store the vital tools, and little farmhouses too. Over the horizon, I could see smoke rising from more camps or villages. This wasn’t just a castle full of soldiers, there was a whole country behind it.

It made me wonder what could have been so scary that they built a wall this gigantic to keep it out before the obvious answer presented itself to me.

Araphel. It all came back to the Voidgod. Everything here came back to him and his war. This ancient wall must have been raised by the Eternals fighting him, to keep him or his forces out. The destruction that had been dealt, ripping this colossal structure apart, that must have been his response to it. The name of the Shattered Bastion made a whole lot more sense now.

Despite the many patches of wooden boards that the soldiers had tossed down, the top level of this little keep latched onto the back of the bastion was uneven and treacherous terrain. The stone was deceptively smooth where it had been melted away, but the bubbly bits were easier, with some decent traction. Switching back and forth between the two from step to step was probably what had me slipping the most.

I could see right along the length of the outer wall now I was up here. All the clustered crossbowmen were headed along the walkways towards me, and the noise in each of the courtyards told me that the folks down on the ground floor were doing the same.

All along the watchtowers, cries were going up, my location being crowed to everyone in earshot. The walls were not well manned—it would have been impossible to line the upper levels with enough bodies to cover the full length of the bastion—but between the crow’s nest spotters and the mobile clusters of crossbowmen, they had a pretty efficient setup. I’d be sure to tell them how well they were running things when they were done murdering me for being here.

Bolts started to flit in my direction once more, but they flew wide or fell short. I ran for the outer wall as fast as my feet would carry me. By design, there shouldn’t have been an easy way in or out on that side. All I had to do was hop down and then I was home free.

I was not prepared for the chasm.

Whatever melting destruction had taken so much of the bastion had actually been stoppered by it. I revised my opinion on how well it had been built and defended by the ancient Eternals. When you compared it to the destruction beyond the wall, it had held up amazingly well. There was a dead drop on the far side of the wall, plunging about three times as far as the land on the far side. The bastion reached all the way to the bottom, cracked and smashed but inexplicably still standing in the face of the cataclysm beyond. There were ashes laying down there, but beneath them was the same rough and bubbled stone that marked so much of the bastion. It was like all the topsoil had evaporated. Like everything beyond the wall had been sloughed away until only the sundered and pocked bedrock remained. The sight of it took my breath away.

In the abstract, I knew that Araphel was a bad guy, and scary powerful, but seeing just how much destruction he’d dealt to this place put it all in perspective. I was a big guy with a sword and a few tricks up his sleeve. He was a god.

A crossbow bolt grazed my shoulders, rattling the sea-serpent scales of my armor and bringing me back to the present. I spun to put the shield between me and the crossbowmen, then I took a moment to panic. With everyone else here, I’d have given us even odds of kicking the collective asses of this whole army, but on my own… I might come off a bit egotistical sometimes, that is the danger of admitting how awesome you are, but even I didn’t think I could take on everyone in this kingdom and come out on top. Skilled or not, if they surrounded me, then eventually they’d chip through my health, even if it cost them a hundred lives to do it.

Another barrage of bolts rattled off my shield. They were close enough to aim properly now, which meant I needed to move. Charging them was probably my best bet. If I could put them out of commission fast then I only had to fight like… a hundred other guys hand to hand. I could do that.

My confidence might have taken a little shake after peering over the edge into the abyss, but I was still me. I could still win.

I lowered my shield to get a good look at them and realized with a start that they were retreating. They must have worked out I was coming for them next. But then I realized that the cries of alarm had stopped too. Everything had stopped, even the uproar in the lower levels. Some of the soldiers armed for close combat came pouring up out of the keeps on the walls, but they weren’t making any effort to get across to this one. In fact, most of them seemed to be sheathing their weapons.

Maybe somebody had finally worked out that I had spent the whole time running away and telling them I didn’t want to hurt them. Maybe whoever was the brains of this army had finally shown up to stop the body of it murdering me on reflex. I turned back to look the other way and understood the real reason for the hush.

At the far side of the keep roof, a woman strode forward. She was clad in the same mish-mash of armor as the other soldiers, but while they had moved in a drudge, she had the lithe elegance I’d come to associate with Seren. As she closed the distance, she tugged off her helm and tossed it aside, letting a long train of pleated black hair fall back from her sharp-featured face.

Maybe in the right circumstances, I’d have thought she was beautiful, but right now her skin was drawn tight over the bones beneath as her face contorted in rage. She half-shouted, half-screamed, “You!”

Orphia.

Chapter 3

I gave her as wide a smile as I dared. “Hi, Orphia, how have you been?”

“How have I been since you murdered me in cold blood?” She closed the distance between us, one step at a time, turning the glaive in her hands in a slow spinning figure of eight as she approached.

“Hey now, be fair. Asher was the one to zap you, and you were acting a bit psycho at the time.”

She acted as though I hadn’t said anything. That was a bit of a theme with her, only hearing what she wanted to hear. “How have I been? I have been filled with divine purpose—to unite this world against the second revelation. To seek the shards of the Rusted Blade and unite them as I will all the people of Amaranth under a single flag.”

“Oh sweet.” Maybe we weren’t on the best terms, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t work towards the same goal. Maybe now that she’d realized that she had a divine purpose it had tamped down some of her psycho tendencies. Maybe a pig would fly by any minute now. “Did you find out where the Faun one is?”

She cocked her head to one side. “The only time that I have had to endure the company of that degenerate race has been when I am spitting them with my blade. As I mean to do with you.”

“Uh, rude.”

She tossed her glaive back and forth between her hands, making practice cuts that hummed in the air as she paced not towards me now, but in a slow circle, making me do the same or risk having her at my back. “The only pleasure that I shall take in this, other than seeing the look on your stupid face when I gut you, is that the others saw the light and saw you for the treacherous beast you were, abandoning you to your fate.”

“Oh no, we’re still friends. I just came through to scout out the lay of the land before the whole gang arrives.” Her frown deepened as I said it, but it wasn’t like she wasn’t going to find out. “Yeah, they’re doing great. Never been better. I’ll tell them you were asking after them.”

She snarled. “Tell them from your grave.”

Leaping forward, she thrust her glaive at me so fast that I almost didn’t see her move. It rang off the rim of my shield and got pushed wide as my arm jerked almost involuntarily at the sudden contact. Yet again I had fallen back on instinct instead of my training. Just like Seren kept warning me.

Orphia spun away, her blade sweeping around in an arc, covering her retreat. I wasn’t chasing her. Instead, I was standing there, being perfectly civil. “I mean, that doesn’t really make sense. You know I’m an eternal, the same as you. So you know that even if you do get lucky and stick me with that thing, I’m just going to come back again.”

She came at me again, but I could actually see the moment that her Celerity Surge ended, and the blur of motion became possible to follow with the naked eye. I caught the first hack with my sword and flicked it away. She hissed as she retreated from me. “Scattered to the winds with no friends to carry you, no equipment to protect you, and no hope of finding either ever again.”

She made another tentative thrust at me, but after a month, I could recognize a feint and just leaned back a little to keep it from scratching me. Still, she ranted on. “I should say that I am doing our treacherous kin a great service by cutting you down.”

The next time she swung for me, I stepped in and caught her glaive just under the blade with the rim of my shield. She wrestled against me for a second, trying to pull it back and having no luck, wedging it even tighter. She might have been stronger than that skinny body of hers showed, but she wasn’t stronger than me. “You haven’t learned about shrines yet? I’m just going to pop up back at home if you kill me.”

I tugged my shield down, and she staggered back. A blue flush crept up her neck and face as her aggravation mounted. I shrugged as though we were just talking. “You’ll get my armor and sword I guess? That’ll be annoying. There aren’t that many sea-serpents around.”

With a roar, she charged me, slamming the butt of her glaive into the ground to vault up in a graceful arc that landed her right on top of my upturned shield. She hammered the tip of her glaive down into it, then I felt her feet touch down. Her whole weight was bearing down on me as she ranted and stabbed down at me uselessly. “Why are you still chattering away? I will end you. Silence you for—”

With a flex of my arm, I flung her off, towards the drop. She had to drop her weapon and scrabbled for a grip on the treacherous melted stone or risk sliding right off into the abyss. I scoffed. “For like ten minutes until I get back here.”

She dove into a roll, scooping up her glaive as she passed over it and coming up already lunging at me. Lightning coiled around her as she came on, dancing down her arms until it encircled her blade. Even as it hit my shield with a sound like a thunderclap, I could hear her screaming over the top of it. “Die!”

The weapon might have been stopped, but the lightning was not. It rushed into me through the metal conductor of the shield, wracking me with pain as it passed through every inch of me before grounding itself.

Smoke rose off my skin as I groaned. “Sorry, I don’t know how to do that yet.”

In the distance, I could hear her soldier buddies cheering her on, and I stopped wondering how she’d ended up here among them. She was a natural-born bully, and people like that always found a place, surrounded by others who reveled in it. People who’d stand back and cheer while somebody else got crispy fried, just because they thought that person was on the other team.

That smoke smelled delicious, though. Like bacon. No wonder every monster on this whole planet wanted to eat me. Orphia didn’t speak, presumably overcome with how delicious I smelled, so I drew myself back up to my full height with a smirk. “The gloves are off then? We’re using all our god powers?”

Her own smile at hurting me faded. The idea that I was holding back seemed to make her even angrier than the way I’d been dodging her so far. That whole thing about a woman scorned being mad as hell? That was her. She was the scorned woman. “What are you going to do, forge weapons at me?”

I let my sphere of influence sweep out over the roof. Everywhere that it had been scarred by the wild destruction that had swept over it was out of my reach—not like the things that were too complex for my simple grasp to manipulate but more like it just wasn’t there. Like whatever had been done to it had robbed it of some essential element of realness. There were still streaks of untouched stone in amongst it that felt completely normal, but for the most part, it was like I was standing on nothing. Weird, but not really relevant. I wasn’t slipping out of my body to build Orphia a condo. I was going to forge weapons at her.

She rushed in at me again, spinning her glaive in a spiral overhead, trying to hide where the attack would come from. While I was here, outside my body, it was like she was moving through molasses. Going this slow, I could see the moment my shield turned into a flow of liquid, and I watched it trace through the air in front of me and reform into a great-sword.

Snapping back to my body, I swung.

To her credit, she didn’t let the fear show on her face as the blade’s edge came for her, sweeping through every possible angle of attack in one lethal arc. All she did was drop to the floor and slide beneath it, sacrificing her own attack in exchange for her life. I stomped forward, trying to catch her while she was down, but she was too quick for me, tumbling to her feet just out of reach.

Holding a giant sword up all day just makes your arms sore. It is useless unless it is in motion. I didn’t hesitate, heaving with all my strength to reverse my first swipe into an overhead cut that would split her in two before she could find her footing.

I would have got away with it too if it wasn’t for those pesky Eternal powers.

Just as my sword would have hit her, she exploded into a cloud of mist. “Oh come on!”

Sweeping harmlessly through cloud-Orphia, my sword buried itself in the rippled stone below with a crack. Even as I hauled on it, the mist swept over me, then coalesced into her shape once more, not on the ground but up in the air. The metal screeched as I hauled it free and spun, but still, I was too slow. She hung in the air for a fraction of a second before gravity brought her and her glaive blade crashing down into me.

[629/890 Health]

Even with my armor, it bit deep into my shoulder. With all her weight and strength in the swing, the eel-scale just wasn’t enough. Anyone else would have been split down to the crotch from a hit like that, but on me, it caught in my collarbone and stopped.

There was a lot of blood. More blood than I ever wanted to see coming out of me. More blood than I thought I even had in me. My arm on that side started to go cold and useless, but I wasn’t letting it give up without a fight.

By force of spite alone, I lifted my hand and grabbed the shaft of the glaive.

Orphia stood over me where I’d fallen from the force of the blow, gloating, “On your knees before me, as befits your kind.”

She twisted at the haft of her weapon, wiggling the blade, setting a fresh wash of blood loose down my chest and back but still not realizing that I had a grip on it.

I don’t think she understood what was happening when I swung my great-sword for her one-handed. Like she couldn’t understand how I still had the strength to do it. My guts had been hanging out, and I’d kept on swinging. In comparison, this was just a scratch.

But just because she didn’t understand something, that didn’t mean she was going to fall victim to it. She tried to haul her glaive clear and leap free, only to discover the death-grip I still had on it. That split second of hesitation was all it took for me to hit her.

[98 Damage]

The blow caught her in the hip. The rough-hewn blade was too blunt to cut through her leathers, but the impact was bone-crushing all the same. She folded around it and fell to the ground, screaming defiance at me as she skittered across the slippery stone.

Strength fled my arm now, and I had to drop my sword to reach over and pluck the glaive out of my flesh. My skin was thick, but beneath it, I was as soft, pink, and juicy as anyone else. I could have done without seeing that today too. I blinked my eyes shut against that sight, just long enough to activate the Primal power of Restoration and close the wound.

[890/890 Health]

The gap in my armor was still there, grey skin showing amidst the still-flesh blood, but the wound was gone. I set the glaive butt on the ground and used it to push myself back to my feet.

Orphia had recovered her feet as well, but she was limping badly, and I could hear a little crunchy noise each time she took a step. Guess she never learned how to heal herself. Dumbass. Still, you couldn’t say she wasn’t trying her hardest. She already had a dagger drawn from somewhere, and she was ready to throw down all over again.

I hefted her glaive in my hand and threw it.

She was already leaping to the side before she realized that it wasn’t being thrown at her. It flew over the outer wall and down into the great abyss below. “You’re done.”

Back on her feet and wincing in pain, she started inching towards me. “This is not over until you lie dead at my feet.”

“You’ve got no weapon. You’ve got no healing.” I held out my hand to my side and with one little pulse of the Pillar of Artifice, I remade my sword in my hand from where it lay on the ground. “You’re done, Orphia. Don’t make me kill you again.”

Her shoulders shook, and for one awful moment, I thought that she was crying. Screaming raving murderous Orphia was par for the course, but I had no idea how I would deal with a psycho who was also a crying girl. Lucky for me, she was laughing instead, wild-eyed and drooling a little as she cackled. Great look for her.

I was just starting to wonder what the hell she was laughing at when I heard the voice behind me say, “Nay, you are the one whose journey has come to its end, Moonstruck Beast.”

Turning my back to Orphia seemed like a good recipe for a kidney stabbing, but I had to see who was there. I fully expected it to be an overconfident soldier boy, hoping to get some psycho smooches for standing up to the dude who’d kicked his boss’s ass, but that wasn’t it.

The man was middle-aged, with a full beard framing a creased face and long hair parted right down the middle, all shiny and golden blond to match his gold-filigreed armor. He looked completely human apart from the eyes, which blazed with a golden light. Another Eternal. Another Solar Eternal. Another Solar Eternal on Orphia’s side. This day was going great so far.

One last time, I sheathed my sword and lifted up my now empty hands. “Listen, buddy, I’m not here to fight anyone. We’re all on the same side here.”

He did not approach, but he drew his own sword from where it hung on his belt. The moment he touched it, I felt like I couldn’t take my eyes away from it, and when the shimmering silver of the sword was fully drawn it was almost hypnotic. I could feel it drawing me in. I wanted it. I wanted to hold it. Wanted to own it. Wanted it to run me right through if that was the only way to get close to it. That last thought was weird enough to shake me out of whatever trance the sword was putting me into, but I could still feel a tug towards it like magnetism.

Down by the golden hilt, there was one jagged section of the blade a completely different color. Dull and almost brown with age. That was what was drawing me in now. Not the pretty part that he flourished with obvious skill, but the ugly bit down at the root. The shard of the rusted blade that I’d come here looking for. I almost didn’t notice when he spoke again. “Is that truly what you believe?”

I’d been so lost in my new fixation that I had to backtrack through the conversation in my head to catch myself back up to speed. On the same side. Do I believe that? Right. Okay. “Nobody wants the Voidgod to win, right?”

He stalked closer to me, looming large in my vision despite our height difference. Power seemed to radiate off him, an aura of danger and power. He hadn’t arrived with the rest of us, which meant that he was one of the Eternals that had already been here for years or… centuries. How powerful could all of that time have made a man? “There are some who would say that the return of the Adversary would be entirely to the advantage of those who wish to spread dissent and chaos in the name of the pantheon of bedlam.”

“Okay, but that isn’t me.” I waggled my empty hands in the air once more, just to make sure he could see how non-threatening I was. “I’m just trying to do the right thing and stop the bad guy. I’m not about spreading chaos or whatever.”

“Master, do not heed his lies. Strike him down!” Orphia cried out from right behind me, and I nearly crapped myself. I had completely forgotten about her and her little knife in the combined presence of a shard and some sort of shiny golden demigod.

“Silence, child.” The gold guy spoke softly to her—commanding but not overbearing. The voice of a man used to being obeyed. He lost all that softness when he turned his attention back to me. “Whatever you may believe of yourself, Chagnar, it is in your nature to spread chaos. It is what you are. Just as it is in our nature to stop you.”

When he said that last bit, I was pretty sure the sword in his hand glinted menacingly.

My heel caught on a ridge in the melted roof, and I noticed that I was backing away from him. I don’t respond well to fear. The old fight or flight thing? I don’t have wings. The old rumble was back in my voice when I replied, “And nobody ever did the right thing when it didn’t come naturally to them? Nobody ever thought about doing something bad and then didn’t?”

He sprang forward so fast he blurred, the tip of his shiny sword hovering, perfectly controlled, just an inch from my neck. His bushy eyebrows drew down as he growled back, “You wish to bandy words with me, to speak of philosophy when the blood of my kinsmen is upon your hands?”

If he thought I was going to back off just because I had a sword to my throat, he didn’t know me. “Your guys didn’t give me much choice. From the minute I got here everybody has been trying to stab me.”

“Because you’re a monster,” Orphia sniped from the sidelines.

I jabbed a finger at her face. “The man told you to shut up, Stabarella!”

His whiskers flicked, and I thought he might, just maybe, have had a smile on his face for a moment. “Though I do not care for his insolent tone, this Chagnar has the right of it, Orphia. Remain silent while your betters speak.”

“Whoa! Hey now, I’m not better than anybody.” Sometimes my mouth just goes on making noises whether I want to shut the hell up or not. “I mean, I’m better than her because she is a racist psycho, but I’m not like… inherently better than her.”

This close I could see every line on his face. Eternals didn’t age, so he’d been looking like this for as long as he’d been walking the world. If I hadn’t spent a month trying to decipher the facial expressions of an ice queen Alvaren, then I probably wouldn’t be able to read a single one of the expressions that passed over that stoic mask of his. As it was, when his eyebrows twitched up, I knew that he was surprised. “She is weak, and we are strong. In a world of untold savagery, might is the only law.”

I disagreed with all of that, and my gut instinct was to tell him just how completely he was wrong, but on the other hand, he was the superpowered dude pointing a magic sword at me, so quibbling over this stuff didn’t seem like my best bet for getting through the conversation with all my limbs attached. Maybe I’m smarter than I look? “So we’re both strong. Does that mean we can talk, like adults, instead of waving our big swords around?”

He did not lower his sword. “You say to me that my bannermen struck at you from the moment of your discovery. Tell me how you came to be within the impregnable fortress of the Shattered Bastion.”

“Oh.” I shrugged. “I used the waystone.”

The eyebrows twitched again, like agitated little caterpillars. Surprise. Again. “The waystones have not functioned since Talon went into decline, and you mean to tell me that some fresh-made Eternal has learned the secret of their use?”

“Well, yeah.” He stared at me in disbelief. “Not me, obviously, but my buddy, Asher, worked it out. He’s a real wiz at all that wizard stuff.”

He let the sword ease down slowly to his side, and from the periphery of my vision, I could see Orphia’s face drop at the same time, going from malicious delight when she thought I was going to die to dismay and then finally disgust when he slipped the blade back into its scabbard and that weird pull that it had on me faded away. “Then Orphia spoke truly. You travel with companions of the Solar Court?”

Okay, we were talking. Nobody was getting chopped up. This was good. This was what I wanted. Sure I still felt like I was walking a tightrope, but at least I was walking it in the right direction now. “They’re not here with me now, but yeah.”

He leaned in a little closer. “And they will vouch for your good conduct?”

“Asher will for sure.” I grinned. “Maybe not Mercy—that kind of depends on what kind of mood she’s in.”

He returned my smile with a small and tentative one of his own. It was like he wasn’t used to twisting his mouth that way. “Then I entreat you to send for them at once.”

Orphia looked like she was about to puke. She darted forward, squealing, “Leofric! Those were the traitors who—”

He backhanded her so casually it took me a moment to spot what had happened. That big golden gauntlet of his cracked across her jaw and launched her across the rooftop to land in a heap. She did not spring up again the way she had when I knocked her down. She lay there. Beaten.

My hand was on the hilt of my sword before I told it to move, and I shifted to put myself between the two of them. “Hey, man, that is not cool.”

“She is your enemy, even if you are not mine.” His brows drew back down. “This creature would see you dead. She attempted to slay you but a moment ago. What madness makes you seek to defend her?”

I was kind of wondering that myself. What could be so important that I’d get in between Orphia and the righteous beatdown she deserved? Even as my brain tried to work it through, my mouth was already telling Leofric what my gut knew. “She’s your girl, yeah? She’s on your team? You can’t treat your people that way.”

He scoffed. “And so the chaos in your blood comes to the fore. It is the natural order that the strong should rule over the weak, and you would contest it?”

My hand was still up on the hilt of my great-sword where it poked up over my shoulder, and my knuckles were turning white. “If that means not slapping people around for no damn reason then yes, I’d contest it.”

“She was disobedient. I told her to be silent and thrice she spoke. She knows the law of this land. She knew when she swore her fealty to me that I would not suffer insubordination.” He said it like it was so obvious that I was an idiot for not getting it.

Maybe I was an idiot, but I still needed to make something clear. “If we’re going to be working together, and you try that with Asher or Mercy… then I’ll… I won’t even have to do anything if you try that with Mercy. There wouldn’t be enough of you left for me to hit.”

“It strikes me that you still misunderstand your part in all this. We are not equals. I do not seek allies among the Eternals who walk Amaranth. I seek lords to set above the common man, that you might rule as the gods intended.” He reached up and clapped his hands on my shoulders. “If you mean to serve the cause and wage war on the Adversary and all his servants, then I shall welcome you with open arms, but if you mean to subvert my great design in word or in deed then you are my enemy.”

Oh, man. He was just as nutty as Orphia, but he had the power to back it up. I needed to grab his sword and get the hell out of here.

He didn’t even give me a chance to answer before he bellowed, pushing me down. “Kneel before me, reject the heresy of the Lunar court, and swear fealty upon this sacred relic. The Lucis: symbol of my office, symbol of my divine right to dominion, and the mark of my righteousness.”

Both sword and scabbard were hauled out of his belt, and he held it out level with my face. All I had to do was reach up and grab it.

After that, I just had to escape from the crazy powerful Eternal right in front of me, and all his minions, and get out of the castle that I was in the middle of that was full of his soldiers … and then the whole kingdom that he’d laid claim to beyond that … and then… Okay, I really needed a better plan than grab and run.

I reached up very carefully and laid my hands on the scabbard. I could feel the power of the shard thrumming inside it, pulsing just out of reach. Even through the scabbard and my gloves, I could feel it reaching out to me like it wanted to be with me. Like the pull I was feeling went both ways.

Opening my mouth, I did not have a clue what was going to come tumbling out. Luck saved me from whatever nonsense I was about to spout as suddenly, Leofric’s head snapped around. A cry was going up from farther along the wall, and the soft sound of two little thunderclaps rolled over us, just like when I’d arrived through the waystone.

The whole gang was here.

Chapter 4

We had to run like hell to get there before fighting broke out, and even with a full-on sprint, it was only the sight of Leofric leaping down in all his golden finery to put himself between his men and Mercy’s ready arrow that convinced his side to chill out for a second. “Those with the eyes to see would recognize that these are no invaders. They are Eternals, with blood of the same divine providence as I. They are our honored guests, not our foes, and though one may wear the form of the enemy, that does not mean that he himself is our foe. Set your arms aside and your minds to ease.”

That might have worked just fine for all his soldiers, but Mercy retrained her arrow on his face before he’d even landed and showed no sign of aiming it anywhere else. After all our fond memories of Orphia, and the joys of meeting Talon, it was hard to trust other Eternals.

It was only when they spotted me clomping along the walkway on the outer wall waving my arms that they seemed to ease off a little, though I couldn’t help but notice Mercy hadn’t actually eased her bow back so much as temporarily adjusted her aim away from Leofric.

Asher, who I’d usually have considered the more coolheaded of the two, still held a roiling ball of flames between his claws and showed no sign of any plan to quench it. I suppose that given the length of time it took him to get a spell together, it was hardly surprising that he didn’t want to put it down again until he was completely sure that he wouldn’t need it.

Even so, it was kind of embarrassing that Leofric’s buddies had dropped everything at the sight of him, and I had to clamber awkwardly down a ladder that was clearly built for toddlers to get back down to the courtyard and then jog over to whisper in Mercy’s ear before she’d finally let the bowstring ease.

What Leofric didn’t know was that I was whispering, “He is a complete psycho, but he’s got the shard in his sword, and he thinks we all want to sign up to join his Eternal dream team.”

Of course, even that brief moment of peace went to hell the moment that Orphia came into sight on top of the wall.

“Look out!” Mercy yelled as she shoved me aside to line up a kill-shot on the other woman. I was kind of impressed that she could even recognize Orphia after all this time, given that one side of her face was basically a giant bruise at this point after Leofric got slap-happy.

I lunged back into the way, knocking the shot wild so that it soared out over the wall instead of hitting Orphia head-on. Mercy kicked me. “What are you doing!?”

“You can’t kill her,” I said, regret dripping from every word. “She’s with Leofric.”

Mercy glanced from Eternal to Eternal with dismay. “Her? Really?”

I shrugged. “She saw him first I guess?”

“Couldn’t he smell the crazy coming off her?” Mercy couldn’t even bring herself to smirk with Orphia in sight. “I smelled it the minute I came through the portal.”

Asher finally let his spell splutter and die between his hands, eyes still darting around the amassed soldiery. “I would imagine that he is accustomed to it.”

I stepped in between the two of them and threw my arms around their shoulders before the sass got too far out of control. “I can’t believe that you came through to rescue me so soon.”

“It was decided by a vote to be more likely that you had forgotten our arrangements than that you had somehow been restrained by enemies and prevented from making your return to us.” Asher really was feeling sassy today.

It felt like Leofric couldn’t stand to not be the center of attention for a minute. He spread his arms wide, and in a booming voice, he started in with the sales pitch. “Welcome, my kinfolk, to the Shattered Bastion, the last standing stronghold of the first great crusade against the Adversary, and the holy place from which the next shall be waged.”

That set off some rumbling among the crowds of soldiers still packed in all around us. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel if my boss’s cousins showed up and then he started telling everyone the end was nigh, but I doubted I would have taken it that well. Mercy’s brows drew down. “You already knew Araphel is planning a comeback tour?”

“Not all of us are freshly made. Some have had time to see the workings of the Adversary still in play in this world. I have been warning of his return since time immemorial. From the very day he was slain, I set myself to prepare for his return and to proselytize to those who were doubtful of his survival. When young Orphia came to us, telling her tragic tale of betrayal and prophecy, I knew that the time must be nigh. Ever have I rallied the stout of heart to my banner, to man the Bastion and prepare to hold back the tides of darkness. Now it became clear to all why this was not mere vanity or paranoia but necessity.”

My gods did that man love the sound of his own voice. I mean, holy crap. It was like a divinity all on its own, the sheer weight of his relentless boringness pounding down on you. I swear I was swaying on my feet by the time I replied, “I’m glad somebody is taking it seriously at least. Most of the folks we’ve met so far didn’t even believe Araphel existed, let alone that he was coming back.”

“You shall find only the faithful here. Faithful and armed for the coming battle in body and mind. I can think of few calls to arms with more potency than Orphia’s warning. All the righteous of Amaranth have rallied to us.”

A quick glance at the “righteous” massed around us made me kind of dubious about their righteousness. They looked less like holy warriors and more like the desperate dregs who’d been drawn in by the promise of a roof over their head, food in their belly, and an opportunity to stab anybody that was wearing a different color uniform or looked different from them.

“I wouldn’t believe everything she says.” Mercy looked like she was pointing at Orphia for a second before I realized that her extended finger was the middle one and it was pointed straight up, not at the wall.

Leofric chuckled. “She said much the same of you, though in less kindly terms.”

When he laughed, it felt like you were being washed over with warm water. Wrapped up in a big hug. Maybe his voice wasn’t a power, but he was definitely radiating some sort of aura. Whatever else you wanted to say about him, he had presence.

I wanted to say a lot of other stuff about him, but I couldn’t do that when he was standing right there.

“Come, my new kin, let us find you quarters and provide you with a lay of the land. There is much of this world that you cannot yet know. Secrets that only my experience has unraveled. Allow me the honor of sharing the wisdom of the ages with you.”

That was one drastic change of tone from when he thought he had me at his mercy earlier. Suddenly, he was all buddy buddy, you’re my blood brothers, let me tell you how pretty you are. Maybe it was because the others were Solar Eternals, and he genuinely thought that they were all on the same side. Maybe it was because they didn’t look like Faun, and he was a racist dick-bag just like his loyal follower-slash-punching bag. Maybe he had undergone a drastic change in attitude as a result of personal growth and from now on he was going to set aside all that world domination stuff. Or maybe, and most likely in my estimations, now that there were three of us, he wasn’t so sure that his ass wasn’t the one that would get kicked if it came to a fight.

I think I’d probably have liked him better if he’d gone on being a megalomaniacal asshole. At least I could trust that. This new guy, trying to get on our good side, I had no idea what he wanted.

After seeing where the soldiers had been sleeping, I was expecting to be ushered into something similar, but instead, we looped around the wall with the waystone ring set in it and headed farther along the Bastion to another section that had been rebuilt from those red-bricks into something quite a bit more substantial.

Orphia trailed along behind us, far enough back that I didn’t feel any worry about her stabbing us in the back any time soon. She was still limping, her face slowly swelling up as she scowled after me. As if I was the reason for all her suffering.

The whole time that we walked, Leofric gestured grandly about him, telling us of the repairs that they’d undertaken, and the battles that they’d waged to clear monsters from the ruins. Everything was a story with him, and it looked like he delighted in telling them, still in love with the sound of his own voice.

At least it saved the rest of us from having to do much of the conversational heavy lifting, freeing us up to have a good look around the place. There were a lot of people here. A lot more than I’d seen during my mad rush along the Bastion. The fact that they were spread thinly along a structure this massive didn’t make their numbers any less.

The farms that were set back into the green pastures behind the wall couldn’t possibly have been providing enough food for this many. For a standing army this big, the whole of the country beyond must have been funneling resources towards this one place.

I almost walked into the back of Leofric as he waved grandly at the little townhouse he had set aside for “honored guests.”

“Awesome. Give us two minutes to find our beds, then we can go on the grand tour, right?” I smiled down at him as broadly as I dared. I really was not built for lying.

“By all means.” All his flattery and grandiose storytelling had been directed towards the other two up until this point, so having to address me directly again, while still maintaining that degree of pleasantry, seemed to be a struggle for him. “It is my desire for you to feel comfortable here.”

Inside the red-brick building that occupied what had once been a completely leveled section of the great wall, we found our quarters. The furnishings weren’t exactly lavish, but they weren’t bedrolls on the dirt floor like everyone else had to deal with either. The place was on two levels. It had timber floors that definitely weren’t made of scrap wood like the other ramshackle parts that had been hammered together and tied to the side of the bastion. There was even furniture inside that wouldn’t have looked too far out of place in the luxury of Talon’s Keep. The top floor was divided up into bedrooms, which our escort of guards offered up to us as if they were the greatest gift we’d ever had bestowed on us. Mercy snorted when she saw the expectant look on her personal guide’s face. “Dude, I’ve seen a bed before. It isn’t that exciting.”

That guy was scowling almost as much as Orphia as he skulked back downstairs.

I kicked the door shut behind him and turned to the other two. “Okay, here’s the plan. We kill Leofric, grab the sword, and jump through the magic ring before all the minions pile on us.”

Mercy and Asher looked at each other, then back to me. Mercy was the one to say what they were both, apparently, thinking. “Or we could just… not.”

“What? The dude is a total psycho, just like Orphia. If you don’t do exactly what he says then you’re his enemy.” I realized that my whole plan to not talk too loudly was falling apart rapidly, and I switched to a stage whisper. “He definitely needs to not be alive anymore.”

“Maulkin, he’s an eternal.” Mercy rolled her eyes. “It isn’t like he’d stay dead. And if we kill him then that is another enemy for life, chasing after us and trying to get his shard back, just like Briar by Moonlight and the Alvaren. Don’t we have enough enemies already?”

Asher cocked his head to the side. “You do make an unfortunate habit of collecting nemeses wherever you go.”

Mercy cocked her head the other way. “Nemesis-es?”

“Besides, it kind of looks like he’s on our side, right? Out to beat the Voidgod?” She was doing that thing again, when she spoke really slowly, with a kind of sing-song voice. Like she was the presenter on some kids’ TV show trying to teach me the names of colors. “Plus, he’s got an army. An army could come in real handy. Maybe we just listen to his sales pitch.”

I felt like I was running out of ammunition rapidly now that they’d decided to ignore the two very important reasons to murder him: that he had something we wanted, and that he was a dick. “He hit Orphia for talking back to him.”

Mercy looked exasperated. “Good! You should have hit her too. With your sword. So she stopped looking at me. And breathing.”

I turned to Asher, hoping for him to be the voice of reason, but while he usually trusted my gut, this time he seemed to be headed in an anti-gut direction. “I must admit that the prospect of harm coming to our onetime companion does not fill me with trepidation.”

“I don’t care that she got hit, I care that he…” Why wasn’t I better at talking? If I could just explain to them what he’d been like up on the rooftop before they arrived then maybe they’d understand. I could picture it perfectly in my head, but I just couldn’t get it into words. Instead, I finished up with a lame duck. “Listen, he’s a bad guy. Okay?”

Mercy had sauntered over to press on the mattress and see how comfortable it was, not even pretending that she was actually listening to me anymore. “Sure. Okay. You don’t like him. We get it.”

“You don’t get it!” I turned to Asher with desperation starting to creep into my voice. “He thinks he’s better than everyone else. He thinks we should rule the world, just because we’re Eternals.”

Mercy flopped on the bed, then popped back up on her elbows to scoff. “Don’t you spend half your time talking about how awesome we are?”

My mouth opened and shut a few times until I managed to blurt out, “That’s just because the three of us are awesome people, not because we were born with powers… I think Seren’s awesome too.”

“I should not present Mercy with further evidence of your questionable judgment if I were you.” Asher had leaned in close to whisper this in a conspiratorial way, but Mercy heard him and let out a harsh bark of laughter.

“So he thinks that we should be in charge. Why shouldn’t we be?” She rocked back up onto her feet. “I’m not saying we’re better than everyone we’ve met since we got here, but we were literally chosen by the gods to come down here and save the world.”

“Yeah, save it”—I grumbled—“not crown ourselves kings of it.”

“Queen. And I’d totally rock a crown.”

Asher glanced over at her with something like a frown. It was hard to tell without eyebrows. “Mercy.”

“Oh come on.” She laughed. “I totally would!”

“The accessories involved, and how you would appear while wearing them, are not the matter in question.” Asher sighed.

Mercy rolled her eyes and flopped back on the bed again, “Fine! So if it looks like he is going full-on world domination dictator we stop him, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get along for now.”

“I don’t like this.” That was it. That was the best argument I could come up with.

“So don’t like it.” Mercy scoffed. “You think we liked it when you dragged us into all the messes we’ve been through so far? Maybe it is your turn.”

Asher shrugged miserably when I looked to him for support. “Making use of the resources that Leofric has at his disposal to pursue our shared goals seems to be the most practical course, for now.”

“Fine.” I strode over and hauled Mercy up. “Fine! Let’s go do the grand tour. See all the places he’s going to hang the chopped-off bits of you when he decides you aren’t being a good obedient slave.”

“Oh my gods,” Mercy groaned, going limp in my arms and making me carry her across the room. “You are so overdramatic.”

“Bet you there is at least one dangling corpse.” I dumped her on the floor in a heap, and she scrambled back up to standing.

Asher paused. “What would the stakes of this wager be?”

She didn’t even have to think about it. “If I win, he has to stop making out with Seren in public.”

If that was how she wanted to play it. “If I win, she has to start making out with Seren in public.”

“Oh gross.” She shoved me away. “Why are men like that?”

“What do you mean? I just want you two to start getting along.” I waggled my eyebrows at her. “Everyone gets along better when they’re making out.”

Asher’s tongue flicked out, tasting the air as he thought it through. “Does this mean that you wish for the three of us to ‘make out’?”

Mercy and I both looked at each other in stunned silence for a second, both of us trying to fight back the laughter that was bubbling up inside us.

Mercy managed to pat him on the shoulder. “We get along just fine already.”

“That is true,” he conceded as I almost choked on the laugh still caught in my throat.

My list of priorities had shuffled. Killing the Voidgod had dropped to second place. Number one was now making sure that Asher never ever found out what making out was.

I headed downstairs and out the door as fast as I could get away from that conversation, and Leofric was waiting, with his arms spread wide. “It is my dearest hope that you find pleasant rest within the shelter of my walls.”

“Yeah, the beds look great.” I gave him an awkward thumbs-up. “Thanks for that.”

“As Eternals, our lot in life is to wander where fate and duty take us. Very rarely has either taken me to places of great comfort. As such, I do my best to see to it that such things are available to us where I can. So that you might know that there is more than hardship in Amaranth.”

Oh wow, the sales pitch was starting early. Stick with me, kid, and I’ll give you the comfiest seats in the world.

When it became apparent that we weren’t completely won over by the promise of pillows, he snapped his fingers, and an open-topped wagon drew up alongside us. The things I’d spotted earlier definitely were not horses. They had that same lanky build, but there was no question that the creature drawing this cart was not an herbivore.

Bestiary tickled at the back of my mind, providing me with the name of the critter. Chollima. They were carnivores alright, predatory pack-hunting horses with wide-open mouths packed to the brim with row after row of shark-like teeth, and they were blessed with the same tireless energy that empowered the Chagnar Faun. There was no fuzzy coat on their bare skin, no flowing manes either. Either one of them would have become clotted and matted because these things sweated blood while they ran.

Looking down I could see trails of that blood on the ground, spattered and dried out dozens of times over across the gravel-filled tracks running along the length of the wall. This must have been how they meant to reinforce and supply different areas if the Bastion did come under attack. Terrifying meat ponies to the rescue.

Out of some old habit, I reached out to pet the vaguely horsey thing on its muzzle and nearly lost a finger for my trouble before the driver got it under control. Mental note: do not try to pet the terrifying meat ponies.

“If you will climb aboard, we shall take in the full extent of the Shattered Bastion, much fallen from its former glory.” I looked over at Mercy, fully intending on giving her a very meaningful look that meant “Please let me kill this asshole,” but she was already hauling herself up onto a bench in the back.

With Asher, Leofric, and me packed in there beside her, it was… cozy. The three of them took up one side, and I had the other, with my back to the wall. That suited me fine. I’d rather keep my eyes on Leofric in case this was all just the set up for a stab in the back—and to see more of the kingdom beyond this one fortification that he was clearly so in love with.

I took a history class once upon a time, back when I thought college might have been a good idea, and there had been this one lecturer talking about what we thought of as the big wars, explaining that before the industrial revolution, you couldn’t really get a battle going with as many people because there needed to be folk back at home doing the heavy lifting to keep the front-line folks supplied. She’d said that most medieval kingdoms could only support a tiny standing army because of the ratio of non-fighters required. I wished that I’d paid a bit more attention because I was damned if I could remember what that ratio was.

The main thing I felt certain of was that this human kingdom we’d landed on the angriest border of had to be pretty big to keep all these soldiers fed, armored, and housed—not to mention providing a steady supply of jerky for all the meat ponies.

So while Mercy and Asher ooh-ed and aaah-ed at the amazing architectural feats that somebody had melted behind me, I peered off towards those puffs of smoke on the horizon and tried to map them out in my head, working out just how many little villages were out there. How many people had to be living out there? Just living totally normal medieval farmer lives in Amaranth without any monsters stomping through, any mountains collapsing, or any of the other crazy crap that we’d been seeing since the moment that we first arrived. Maybe we just landed on the wrong side of the wall, and everything was nice over here?

I twisted around to take a look at the wall every so often when the other two made impressed noises. There was no denying that it was an impressive hunk of rock. Probably even more impressive if you didn’t know how to reach out to the rock beneath your feet with your divine power and drag it up into a giant wall with pure will alone.

Beyond the little shacks that they’d erected as barracks, there was a fully functional smithy further along the line, a farrier, a fletcher, a butcher, and a baker. I looked for a candlestick maker, but Leofric explained that they burned torches soaked in oil as wax was prohibitively expensive.

Mercy was the only one who might have got the joke, and she didn’t want it.

There was a whole city built into the long line of wall. Most of it latched on parasitically long after the original structure had been built and partially destroyed, but some of it burrowed right into the old Bastion’s corpse. For instance, the butcher’s had sides of meat dangling inside a hollowed-out section of the old wall where the devastation had eaten clean through and made a sort of natural-looking cave, complete with withered-looking stalactites of surviving stone for them to tie the meat upon.

I was so checked out by the end of the grand tour of the longest wall in the world that it took me a moment to understand Leofric was finally telling us something important. “…the most loyal servants of the adversary still raid against the Bastion, seeking both to tear down the memorial to those who defied him and to claim the lands beyond for their dark master.”

I interrupted him before he could launch into his next soliloquy about some brave warrior or other who had bled to keep the monsters out. “Who are these loyal servants exactly? Because we haven’t really bumped into any yet.”

Leofric’s mustache twitched again, irritated at the interruption but willing to indulge my apparently stupid question. “The natural allies of the dark one are the wicked Dvergar who first freed him from his stone prison, the void-spawn that he wrought from his own flesh to spread wickedness across all of creation, and of course, the uh…” He looked momentarily uncertain for the first time since I’d met him. “The Chagnar.”

“You think the dvergar are evil?” Mercy said at the same time as I asked, “The Faun are attacking this place?”

I got the impression that old Leofric wasn’t really ready for the questions and answers section of the tour yet, and he looked with regret as some landmark or other rolled by without his commentary. “While some Dvergar may have turned from their wicked path and embraced the gods, there is no denying that their sin was what brought the revelation upon us. Their demanding and seeking caused all of this. That is why they hide their faces now. They are riddled with shame—and rightfully so.”

His tone went from conciliatory to barely restrained disgust when he turned to me. “As for the Chagnar, those vile beastmen have always been a thorn in the side of all that is good in this world. Only recently have they gathered the courage enough to launch forays against us here on the Bastion. Some dark power is uniting the disparate tribes of them under a single banner and rallying them against us. Against me.”

“It is difficult to conceive of a good enough reason for any tribal society to throw themselves upon fortifications this substantial,” Asher noted, forcing Leofric to concede a little ground again.

He did not like being questioned, but it seemed clear to me now that he was desperate enough for the help of the other two that he’d tolerate it, at least temporarily. It was a stark change from the way he’d treated me and Orphia. “Truth be told, there are folk tales passed among the peasantry that this land once belonged to the Chagnar, that it was their hunting ground before the revelation, and they seek to reclaim it. While I must denounce these tales as heresy, I cannot deny in my heart that there may be some seed of truth buried within them.”

He shrugged and turned back to his great wall. “Who can truly say who owned this land in antiquity, in the unplumbed darkness before even Eternal memories reach?”

Mercy raised an eyebrow. “The faun, apparently.”

“The faun…” He almost spat the name of that race before getting his temper back under control. “If we were to believe their lies, then every stretch of land was once their sacred hunting ground. They claim to be the firstborn of Amaranth, that all this world was once theirs before the Wyrm Wars. Were we to cede territory to them each time they claimed it was their heritage, we would have to live in the sea.”

I resisted the urge to tell him to get in the sea as we trundled on in silence for another minute or so.

“So you’re having some Faun troubles.” Mercy had a speculative look on her face that I was instantly suspicious of. “You want us to go talk it out with them?”

“You cannot believe that the Chagnar can be reasoned with? That they would listen to the words of their most hated enemies? The moment that their sentries laid their eyes upon you, a swarm of the beastmen would be unleashed. You would be surrounded and slaughtered before a word slipped from your lips.” There was the Leofric I knew and didn’t love, barely concealed contempt reverberating underneath the surface level of politeness.

She nodded over at me, that same smug smile hovering on her lips. “What about him?”

My voice came out in a bass rumble. “What about me?”

Asher was studying me intently, head bobbing as the cart went over little bumps and lumps in the gravel road, grinding deeper and deeper into the well-worn ruts. “While it is true that they would identify Maulkin from a distance as one of their own kind, the moment that he was close enough the illusion would falter. Surely, from the moment that they perceive his ocular glow, it will be clear to them that he is an Eternal.”

The voice of sanity had finally arrived in the building. “Exactly. Definitely wouldn’t work.”

“His eye glow is pretty dim.” Mercy peered at me. “He might get away with it.”

“Your serpentine companion has the right of it. Dim as his light may be, there is no mistaking the gaze of an eternal…” The wheels were turning under blondie’s golden hair. Just like Mercy intended them to. I swear she was more dangerous with her mouth than she was with her bow. He paused for just a moment, then let his thoughts come tumbling out to ruin my day. “However, it is well known that the Chagnar worship the hideous gods of the Lunar courts. They might consider one of that pantheon’s Eternals to be their natural ally—particularly if he came clad in the flesh of a Faun.”

Mercy clapped her hands and sat back with a smug smile. “So just like that, problem solved. Maulkin can go in, find out what their deal is, and negotiate a cease-fire or whatever. Bring everyone to the table to work things out.”

Leofric scoffed. “It is your belief that centuries of warfare can be brought to an end through conversation?”

“My boy Maulkin, here. He’s super diplomatic.” She leaned over to pat me on the shoulder, and I shrugged her off. She put her hand back, so I shrugged it off again. She did this three times before finally settling for slapping me on the knee instead. I couldn’t move that out of the way in the cramped wagon. “I mean, he showed up here and made friends with you right off the bat. Right?”

“Indeed he did.” Those wheels in his head weren’t turning now, they were spinning so fast you could imagine smoke was going to start pouring out of Leo’s ears any second now. “Why, if he were to engage the Chagnar leadership with that same diplomacy, then I could imagine that our conflict would be brought to an abrupt end.”

Mercy clapped again. Aggressively. Right in front of my face. “Perfect.”

We went over one last bump and then rolled to a stop back where we’d first started out. There was some drumming and barking of orders going on at the side of the road opposite the wall, but I was too busy seething at Mercy for signing me up to be this asshole’s assassin. “Uh… do I get a say in all this?”

She laughed at that, and I honestly felt like hitting her. “Does this look like a democracy?”

Behind them, the rickety wood that I’d smashed down off the side of the Bastion as I climbed had been reconstructed into a hasty set of gallows. The upper beam of it was bowing under the weight of all the bodies.

A dozen men and women swung gently in the breeze. I spotted a few of the soldiers from down in the square when I’d first arrived up there, more than a few. I think he’d hung the whole square. I was pretty sure I recognized the crossbow-woman who’d clipped me in the shoulder too, spinning slowly at the end of the line.

For a moment, I couldn’t even understand what I was looking at, then the reality of it sank in, and the awful logic behind it. This was Leofric’s idea of an apology.

“No.” It slipped out like a whisper. “No, it doesn’t.”

Chapter 5

After seeing the bodies, Mercy and Asher’s faces went through some rapid contortions before they could get their opinions stuffed right back down to wherever they were bubbling up from.

Orphia was up on the wall still, pretending to keep watch but glancing at us from the periphery of her vision each time that her head turned, a hint of a smile twisting at the side of her mouth. I had absolutely no doubt that she was the one that had organized the hanging gardens of the Bastion display for us. Just as I had no doubt that it was to make us act out. To start a fight.

Every part of me was screaming out to do just that. When I see evil, I hit it. That is what I do.

This right here, this was evil. I could feel the urge to draw my sword building up inside me like a scream. How many more of them would die if I reached for it? How many of them would throw themselves between me and Leofric, even when he did stuff like this to them?

Asher could see it on my face when he looked back to me, and Mercy didn’t even have to look. She was already reaching down to grab my wrist. From a distance, it might have looked like she was in shock and seeking comfort. Orphia probably thought it was a sign that Mercy was weak.

She was holding onto me with all her strength, stopping me from reaching up and pulling this whole castle down on our heads. When Asher’s eyes flicked down to observe that, he latched on to my other arm.

On the one hand, I appreciated the group hug, but on the other, I was kind of annoyed that they thought I wouldn’t be able to control myself.

It wasn’t like I was berserk. It wasn’t like my blood was boiling, and that smug bastard was just a step away. It wasn’t like I could rip him in half with my bare hands.

Asher was hanging horizontally off my arm by the time I noticed that I was reaching for my sword, and Mercy’s arms were shaking with the effort of keeping my other hand pinned at my side. The look of blind panic on her face was enough to snap me out of it.

For a moment everything was quiet, then it was like all the sound of the world suddenly came back. Whatever dark place my thinking parts had wandered off to let go on their hold, and I was here again. Back in Amaranth, looking down at Leofric as he looked genuinely puzzled. “Those fools who would have done you harm have now left my service, and those who remain shall treat you with the proper respect.”

Even now that the wave of fury had passed, I couldn’t bring myself to say the words that he wanted, so it was poor Mercy who had to step forward and say, “Thank you.”

The rest of our very civilized evening passed in a blur. Leofric seemed to sense that he’d made some misstep, even if he didn’t know exactly what it was, so he made a great show of sitting us down with his troops for their evening meal, sharing his own much finer food with them freely. It probably would have been a grander gesture if we didn’t know that Eternals didn’t need to eat, but even with all his generosity, most of the gaunt men and women gathered around the fire ate little, too overwhelmed by the presence of Eternals in their midst to do much more than stare.

I hated it. I hated being put up on a pedestal by these people who’d clearly tried way harder than me to get to where they were, just because I was born into these powers. Mercy and Asher took it in stride. I suppose that Mercy got a good amount of this sort of fawning from her little Dvergar fan club back home, but all I could think about was the fact that somebody had made these people this way. Somebody had found them and taught them that they owed us awe.

All I had to do was look across the fire to know who that was. Leofric sat there with Orphia at his right hand. Her injuries had vanished sometime between our arrival back at this patch of wall and dinner, so that meant that either they had some wizard on staff with healing powers, which seemed unlikely given the lack of any indication that anyone nowadays could do magic, or, more likely, Leofric had some Primal healing powers like me.

That one made sense. It fitted in nicely with his benevolent holy overlord if he could lay hands on people and heal them. It was a handy miracle to whip out when you wanted to impress.

All that it had impressed on me was the fact that he could have healed her at any moment since the end of the fight, and instead, he left her limping around with half her face mashed in, to make a point. To remind her that he controlled everything, even her suffering. What a dick.

Mercy and Asher shared a few stories from our travels to widespread applause, but they were pretty careful to sidestep around any of the major events, like the Alvaren coming back, Talon’s death, or us having a tidy little stack of Rusted Blade shards. It was nice that they were taking my warnings about Leofric being a bad guy a little bit seriously, even if they were still laughing at his jokes and drinking his beer. Okay, that was mostly Mercy. She made my drinking look like a healthy habit. Of course, with the poison resistance I’d developed from enough Dvergar parties, this stuff was like water to me anyway.

Despite the corpses of their companions swinging in the night breeze just downwind of us, the rest of the soldiers seemed to be close to ecstatic now that we’d arrived. None of them dared to say anything outright, but from the dark glances that they sent in Orphia’s direction when she wasn’t paying attention, I got the impression that she wasn’t very well-liked by the folks under her command, and they were looking for us to take her place in whatever hierarchy Leofric had cobbled together.

Mercy getting blind drunk actually gave us the perfect excuse to duck out of the celebrations early. All the way back along to our rooms, she was belching out something like a marching rhythm. Even when she was sober she was like this, so it wasn’t a huge surprise, but by the end of the walk to our quarters, I was carrying her over one shoulder as she sang something in Dvergar that it is probably for the best I don’t translate. There were a lot of euphemisms, lots of things that were as hard as rock, and the soldiers escorting us were blushing. The downside of speaking in tongues. Everyone knew what we were singing.

Asher eased the door shut in the face of our escort with a lot of apologies about her behavior, and he looked genuinely surprised when he turned back to the room and realized she was standing for herself and stone-cold sober. He opened his mouth, but the finger she held pressed up to her lips silenced him before he gave the little deception away. We all snuck upstairs.

Mercy was the first to lay her cards on the table. “Okay, so maybe he is a bit of a bad guy.”

Oh great, a concession. That was so helpful now that we were in the belly of the beast. “And you signed me up to be his assassin.”

She at least had the good grace to look crestfallen. “Look, he’s a bad guy, so maybe whoever is in charge of the Faun is a good guy? It makes sense, right?”

“I can’t imagine the Faun leader is any worse than golden boy. But what about all the stuff about him being a servant of the Voidgod?”

“Pretty sure anyone that doesn’t agree with old Leo is a servant of the Voidgod.” Mercy scoffed. “Shine his shiny booties wrong? Must have been the Voidgod’s fault.”

Asher had watched all of this pass between the two of us in silence, his expression puzzled. “He does not seem to me to be better or worse than any other king. Perhaps the two of you simply hold all in Amaranth to a higher standard than you did your own rulers?”

That actually shut me up for a second as I thought it through.

Mercy rolled her eyes. “We didn’t have kings, Asher. We had”—she slowed her roll for a moment as she tried to put it into words he might understand, glancing at me for support—“politicians?”

“People born with too much money, who told everyone else what to do,” I grumbled. “Not much of a difference between that and a king, is there?”

In the rarest of rare moments, Mercy shut up. She stood there and made no noise, and Asher and I both had enough time to take a breath. Eventually, I was the one who broke the silence. “Look, if it was up to me, I’d just hit him a lot and take his sword, but you think there is a better way to do this, and I trust you. Just tell me what to do. Tell me how to be sneaky or make friends with assholes or whatever.”

“Okay, well stop calling him an asshole, to start with.” She was trying not to laugh, but it was escaping in little snorts.

“Never going to stop calling him an asshole. Step two?”

“Laugh at his jokes. Smile.” She forced her own face into a grimace. “Act like you think he’s right. Even if he isn’t right. Especially if he isn’t right.”

Asher’s head cocked to one side. “May I ask where you learned all this subterfuge?”

“Have you ever dated a man?”

I’m sure that was meant to be some sort of feminist mic drop moment for her, but I’m a big believer in honesty. “Yup. I mean, I didn’t find out it was a date until the end, but yeah.”

The wind was taken right out of Mercy’s sails, and I almost felt bad for her. Almost. Then Asher piped up, “Will it be necessary for Maulkin to ‘make out’ with Leofric if we recognize it as the best way to assure others of friendship?”

Just like that, the grimace grin was back on Mercy’s face.

I backed away from her slowly. “I would really like to not.”

“No, no…” she said. “I like where this is going.”

Holding up my hands in defeat, I tried not to shudder at the image of Leo making smoochy faces. “Okay… how about we never speak about making out ever again.”

Mercy raised an eyebrow. “So the bet…”

“What bet? I don’t remember any bet.” I backpedaled my way to the door. “Let’s go to sleep. I’ve got to suck up to fantasy-land Mussolini tomorrow.”

Asher was still standing there, head tilted to one side. “I do not understand that reference.”

Mercy snorted. “I’m surprised Maulkin understood that reference.”

“We had the history channel.” Then I added, “Shut up.”

I left the two of them to it. Even through the closed door, I could hear Mercy groaning as she tried to explain world history to a lizardman from another dimension. I was almost to the door of the other room when I felt the ping of my Lifesense. There was someone on the other side of the door, standing in the other room, waiting to catch us alone. A trap. I knew it.

With a pulse of will, the great-sword on my back shifted and slithered into a pair of cleavers in my hands. If Leo and his minions wanted to get the drop on me, then they were going to have to do better. I kicked into the room and closed the distance before Orphia could even draw her sword. Both cleaver blades scissored into position around her scrawny neck before she could even squeak.

It would be so easy just to keep on moving. Just to let the blades snip together and feel all my worries fading away. Leo couldn’t fault me for it. He’d already slapped Orphia around for chasing after me without permission. He’d probably thank me. This was probably the in that we needed. He obviously wanted Eternals in his camp. If he was suddenly missing one and needed a replacement, surely that just opened up more opportunities for us.

But she was still a person, even if she was Orphia, and I didn’t need to kill her to stop her from killing me. So I didn’t.

“What do you want?”

I eased the blades apart enough for her to speak without doing herself an injury. “I want you gone.”

“Yeah.” I rolled my eyes at her. “You made that abundantly clear.”

“You are the spawn of chaos, and you have corrupted those who should have been brother and sister to me. You are—”

At some point that night I wanted to get to bed, which meant cutting her off before she could launch into her usual screed. “Can we skip the insults and rambling and get to the point. You didn’t need to sneak in here to tell me I’m the worst. I’ve heard it all before.”

Her eyes had narrowed to slits, and the bones in her face seemed to jut out, stripping all over her natural Alvaren beauty away and leaving the stark truth of her madness on clear display. “You are not going to corrupt Lord Leofric. You are not going to turn him from his divine purpose. I will not let you.”

I eased the blades back from her neck, then shrugged once I was sure it wasn’t going to cause catastrophic bleeding. “I don’t want to? We all want to beat Araphel? Yeah? Nobody wants to beat him more than me.”

“You cannot win me over. You cannot trick me. I am not going to be deceived by honeyed words. I know you for what you are.” Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the swords from her neck so soon. She was looking more and more axe crazy with every passing moment. “But… Leofric has not hardened his heart enough to do what must be done. He has forbidden me from dispatching you, thinking that you might convert to the cause of righteousness.”

“Great. So you decided to sneak in here to tell me you aren’t going to sneak in here and murder me. Much appreciated. Get out.” I stepped to the side and pointed to the door.

“I do not sneak. This is my domain, and I travel freely within…” She started off snarling, then somehow managed to get herself under control. “No. I will not be distracted into bandying words with you again. I have come here to tell you the truth and hope that it might make its way through that thick skull of yours. Leofric will not succumb to your wiles. He will see you for what you are. He will know you as his enemy. When that time comes, there shall be nothing that you can do to stand up against his power. He will destroy you utterly. Banish you to the darkest corners of the world…”

I yawned. “Uh-huh.”

“All of this is certain to come to pass, but I wish to spare my lord the heartbreak of your betrayal.” She closed the distance that I’d put between us, urgency vibrating through her. “Leave now. Nobody will stop you. Nobody will pursue you. Just pick a direction and walk. There is nothing keeping you here.”

“My friends are here.”

“If you cared for these ‘friends’ at all, you would not doom them by continuing your association.” She was close enough now that those big golden eyes of hers were bathing my face in radiance. With a little bit of smugness, I realized that even though her face had been hand carved by the gods themselves, she wasn’t as pretty as homegrown Seren. “They are Solar Eternals, the avatars of all that is righteous in this broken world, and your very presence taints them.”

I stared her down. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Then I have wasted my kindness on a beast that cannot comprehend it. Hardly surprising.”

“Been great catching up with you, but now it is bedtime.” Piece by piece, I took my armor apart and set the hunks of metal and adjoining eel-skin down. “Are you getting out, or are you getting naked?”

The look on her face in that moment almost made having to deal with her again worthwhile. “Disgusting.”

“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.” She backed out of the room, reaching for the door but never quite managing to tear her scowl away from me. I yelled after her as she retreated for the stairs, “Once you go Faun, there’s no moving on!”

When I glanced around, Mercy was standing there gawking at me, with Asher doing his best not to do the same behind her. “Orphia popped in. Wants me to die, go away, or both.”

“So she hasn’t changed much?” Mercy smirked. I kept forgetting how much Mercy hated her.

“She’s got a nasty crush on lovely lord Leo, but otherwise, she’s the same crazy bitch as always.”

“It is most unfortunate that she cannot be reasoned with.” Asher sighed. “It would be helpful to us to have another ally in the quest.”

“She wants to be friends with you guys. You guys are shiny golden boys and girls like her and Leo.” I sulked back to my room. “It is just me that she hates.”

Asher didn’t seem to catch my tone, turning to Mercy with a curious tilt to his head. “Perhaps she might be more amenable to reason once Maulkin has departed on his mission, come morning.”

“Uh, pretty sure I don’t want to be friends with her,” Mercy said, glancing my way. “She sucks.”

Maybe she thought she was giving me moral support, but I was grumpy, and Asher wasn’t a good verbal punching bag. “So I’ve got to play pretend, but you don’t? How is that fair?”

“Orphia doesn’t matter,” Mercy called through. “Leo though, he’s old, right? He’s badass? And he’s got a shard already.”

I popped back out into the hallway, just itching for a real fight. “I could take him.”

“Could you?” Asher’s stare was boring into me. But he wasn’t trying to provoke me. I knew him too well for that. He didn’t expect any sort of emotional response to anything he said and seemed constantly amazed when the rest of us had our little outbursts. He genuinely wanted to know the answer, and I couldn’t lie to him, even in as foul a mood as I was in, because he’d base his decisions on the stupid things that we said.

I groaned for a long, long time, then finally admitted, “Well… the three of us could for sure.”

He nodded at that. “Then that shall be our course of action should all other opportunities fail.”

“Ugh.” I stomped back through to the other room. “I’m going to sleep.”

Mercy stomped right after me, although she had the good grace to spin on her heel so she couldn’t see me continuing to undress. “Asher bunks with you.”

I threw a stretch of legging at her. “Asher steals the blanket!”

She yelled back over her shoulder, “There are two beds in here!”

“Maulkin has been known to produce quite tremendous sounds with his nose while he is sleeping.” Asher poked his nose around the door. “Perhaps it would be for the best if I just—”

“Nope.” Mercy shoved him in. “No cold lizard feet in my bed.” She slammed the door shut. “Goodnight.”

Chapter 6

When morning came about, I had not gotten a ton of sleep. I wasn’t grumpy about that since this new body of mine apparently didn’t need sleep to function perfectly, but the long dark stretch of the night had been filled with thoughts that just wouldn’t stop niggling at me. Weirdly, I spent more time worrying that Seren was lonely back home than I did about the whole spy and assassination mission that I was heading off on. Or the whole fortress full of people that had been trying to murder me earlier in the day. Or the super-powerful ancient eternal who might decide I was a heretic in need of burning at any moment. Or the dark god of destruction that could talk to me if I touched the magic sword bits I’d collected. Or…

It was amazing I didn’t spend more time worrying, let’s be real.

I had expected there to be some pomp and ceremony when it was time for me to head out into the blighted lands beyond the Bastion, but it seemed that whatever dramatic scene I was picturing was not going to happen. If there had ever been big old gates in the big old wall, then they’d been part of the smashed-up parts that had been patched over. When anyone on this side of the Bastion wanted to go down into the Ashlands, they did it by rope. Even a lift would have been nice, but our boy Leo thought that anything that might aid and abet enemies trying to surmount the wall was a bad idea, and honestly, he was probably right.

Abseiling down the Bastion to land ass-first in the ash wasn’t my idea of a good time, but given all the falling from high places I’d been doing recently, I was mostly just happy about how strong the rope felt.

Asher and Mercy had come to see me off, of course. As had Leo and Orphia, though I couldn’t help but think their waving was definitely a lot less enthusiastic. Leo, who did not appreciate being called Leo, informed me of the direction where his scouts assumed that the Faun were massing, and Orphia gave me a glare like I was trying to steal her man. Then away I went down the rope.

From what Leo’s scouts had reported back, and from the number of scouting missions to certain areas that had just not come back at all, it sounded like there was a ridge a few days out that was my best bet. Which meant hiking. Walking through this big pile of dust. Strolling. I love hiking so much. It is my favorite thing. Dying halfway through a hike definitely wasn’t a welcome relief from the living hell of hiking. Nope, not at all…

I just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and remember I was on an epic fantasy adventure, not walking for no good reason. As long as it was an epic fantasy adventure, the bit of my brain that was screaming about how boring hiking was would shut the hell up.

The shifting ash beneath my feet did not make the journey easier. Every step forward, I’d slip half a step back while I was going up the slopes, and on the way down them, it was a constant struggle to get my feet unstuck quickly enough that I didn’t tip over and land on my face. Between the horns and the shoulders for days, I was pretty top-heavy, and this place was giving my sense of balance a real workout. It almost made me miss Seren’s stumps in the jungle. At least they stayed more or less in the same place instead of moving around underneath me. On the other hand, when I slipped out here I didn’t get a stump to the crotch and a disapproving Seren stare.

There was not a whole lot in the way of scenery. The ashes had banked up into dunes, and slowly but surely, the Bastion slipped down under the horizon behind me, leaving me with nothing to look at but yet more ash dunes in every direction. I had my footprints behind me and the sun in the sky to keep me right as far as directions went, but a gust of wind wiped my tracks clean, and the sun was dipping down towards the horizon before I knew it.

I’d been walking all day, and the only thing that had changed were that some of the lumps under the ashes were slightly bigger than some of the other lumps. Were they just piles of ash? Was there still some solid land underneath that was making them hump up like that? Did I actually care, or was I just so bored looking at heaps of ash that I was inventing things to think about?

It was the last one. I was going crazy. Just shutting my eyes and stretching out my sphere of influence could have told me exactly what was under the ash, but the sun was down before it finally occurred to me to try it.

As it turned out, there was nothing under the ashes, or at least there was nothing that my Artifice could sense. It was like the scarred parts of the Bastion—completely absent from my extrasensory perception. On the one hand, it was kind of novel being able to wander around without the imperceptible presence of all the world pressing in around me, on the other hand, it meant that Artifice was basically useless out here. I’d be able to remake what I’d brought with me, but everything else was inert.

My initial plan to slap together a quick cottage for the night was ruined, and I didn’t actually need to stop, thanks to the whole Faun never getting tired thing, so I just kept on plodding on. And on. And on. The stars filled up the sky, and I did not know them.

I wasn’t an astronomer or an astrologer—or whichever one it was that looked at the stars through a telescope instead of telling people the stars were why they kept having bad days—but I’d gotten familiar enough with the stars in the sky through my years back on Earth. These ones were wrong. I didn’t even know enough to say how they were wrong—they were still up there, twinkling away like they were meant to in every direction that I looked—but I couldn’t recognize a single constellation.

This was why traveling with other people was better. On my own, I had too much time to get sappy and weird about stuff that didn’t really matter. When the sun was up, I didn’t care that this was a different planet from the one I grew up on, so why was I getting all misty-eyed thinking about good old Earth now? Earth wasn’t that great. It didn’t even have dragons. Or hot elf girls. Amaranth was definitely better. Sure everything was trying to kill me, but so was everything on Earth. The stuff here was just more up-front about it, and I had a chance to fight back.

All day long as I’d been hiking, something had been itching at the back of my brain. Something that I knew that was important about now. Something about this place that I’d learned sometime since I arrived here on Amaranth that was on the tip of my tongue. Well, the tip of my brain. Something about the Ashen Wastes? Something that one of my new skills had popped into my brain fully formed without me actually learning it. What was it?

I could see just fine in the dark, and there wasn’t a whole lot to see, but I had been keeping my eyes peeled for any hint of the Faun. From what I’d been told by the dude who thought they were all evil and out to get him, they claimed this whole place as their territory and patrolled regularly. I had not made a good impression when I came crashing and smashing into the Bastion, but so long as I didn’t screw up too badly, the Faun might actually like me. So long as I got a word out before they shot at me and I had to kill them right back.

So I listened as hard as I could for anything but the silky sound of shifting ash. I stared over the top of every dune as I mounted it. I even caught myself sniffing the air, hoping for some campfire smoke. That last one was a mistake—I got a nose full of drifting ash and started sneezing. Not little delicate snuffles either, those big, booming dad sneezes that made you think the guy who was sneezing might actually turn inside out. The dudes manning the walls of the Bastion probably heard me. Guess I wasn’t getting the drop on any Faun out here.

I was straining all the regular senses so hard that I didn’t even catch the blip on my Lifesense until it was too late. At the same moment that I noticed something alive down underneath the ashes, it was bursting up out at me.

Back in Witchglass Overlook, a chompy little worm had latched on and chewed a chunk out of me. This thing was that thing’s big brother. And by big, I mean about a hundred times as big. This thing was as wide around as me, and I couldn’t even guess how long the slick red body, coated with clumped ash, actually was.

I only got a brief glimpse of that body writhing up out of the ground before the plume of ash it had thrown up blocked all vision. If I was a standard-issue Eternal, I probably would have been screwed, but Lifesense took over when I had to clamp my eyes shut against the shower of grit, lighting the thing up in glowing green, every channel of life-force flowing through the thing shining.

Training with Seren paid off again. My sword was in my hands and swinging before I even knew the thing was coming at me.

[66 Damage]

My rough-hewn blade might have struggled against armor plates, but this thing was all squish. It bit into the meat, and I watched as every channel of life-force that it crossed blinked out. It wasn’t a killing blow, but it was enough to hurt.

The Dhole reared back, hissing and spraying me with that same viscous ichor that coated its body, letting it slip easily through the ashes. Thanks, Bestiary skill. Shame you didn’t help out before the thing was already trying to eat me.

The cloud it had thrown up when it first emerged was blown clear by the thing’s breath, and now I got a glimpse of the big angry sphincter it called a face, lined all around with barbed and hooked lamprey teeth. Even with a gash cut right across it, making the lower half loll open and leak, I did not want to go in there.

“Wow, you are one ugly dude.”

The insult probably didn’t make it attack me again, but it probably didn’t help.

Lashing forward with all those teeth rippling out towards me, I had to appreciate how straightforward the Dhole was being. It was kind of like a batting cage. It threw its weight forward and met my sword’s edge once more.

Was I the smartest guy in Amaranth? No. The fastest? Nope. The prettiest? Probably not. Was I strong enough to smack a charging Dhole in the face and make it stop? Hell, yes.

The whole body doubled up behind what I’m charitably calling its head, a six-car pileup of worm, rucking up in a heap like it had just run headlong into a solid object. There were moments when I questioned my choices since arriving on Amaranth, but this was not one of them.

“Did I just make you even uglier?”

The maw of the Dhole was gaping even more now, crisscrossed by my two blows, all four quarters of it flapping open, curling back like flower petals. It stank like old blood inside that ruined mouth. Rust and rot. I grinned. “You want some more?”

I shouldn’t have gotten smug. Pride comes before a giant worm vomits up dozens of its writhing babies in your face.

They latched onto me before I even knew what had hit me. They were Khorkhoi, like the one that had chomped me back in Witchglass Overlook, but with none of the lethargy that lying in wait for years had instilled in that one. Like their big daddy had burrowed through the ash, these little charmers started digging into my flesh. They were slowed just enough by my armor that I wasn’t turned to swiss cheese on the spot—all of them except the one that latched onto my forehead.

I grabbed it by the tail, but it was slick and slippery, flapping about and twisting in my grip as it ate my face. In the end, I gave up trying to pull it off and just squeezed as hard as I could. It burst like overripe fruit in my hand, red sludge bursting between my fingers. Still, the head went on chewing until it finally realized it was dead and dropped off.

That one worm trying to eat my brain was enough of a distraction that it had given the rest of them time to wriggle their way into the gaps of my armor, squeezing in and chomping everywhere they could reach.

Pain assailed me from every side, nipping, buzzing teeth digging into me, grating over my ribs, and burrowing down into my muscles.

[621/890 Health]

I was not dying like this.

With a roar, I split my sword into cleavers and set about myself, hacking one worm in half after another. They were pinned in place by their own hold on my flesh, and while I couldn’t swing at them with all my strength in their awkward positions, I could hit them hard enough to make them pop. One by one, the little chomping jaws stopped, and the dead worms’ heads slipped back out of me, surrounded by a fresh wash of my blood.

Wiping blood and worm guts from my eyes, I turned to give Daddy Dhole a sneer.

It wasn’t there.

Two tons of worm didn’t just vanish. Stretching out my Lifesense to its limits, I caught the last hint of a tail vanishing out of range. It ran away. The giant murder worm ran away. I threw my cleavers down in disgust. It had stolen my kill! I mean, sure, it had saved itself from inevitable death, but worms weren’t meant to be smart. They were worms. Bestiary had not said anything about them being smart. I couldn’t believe that after bleeding all over the place and getting gnawed on by babies I wasn’t even going to get—

My grumbles stopped when I felt the ash beneath me shaking. Maybe we weren’t done yet. A quick flex of Artifice reformed my great-sword in my hands, and I waited, stretching out my senses to their limit.

Deep down beneath me, just where the ash gave away to the null I guessed was stone that I couldn’t touch, I caught a hint of movement. The dhole brushed the edge of my sphere of influence for just a moment, then it was gone. Then again on the other side. It was circling underneath me. Faster and faster. The ash that had been packed so solid beneath me just a moment before seemed to soften, then it began to twist. My feet sank in, then my shins. I tried to fling myself clear of the sinkhole the Dhole was making, but I had nothing solid to kick off, and I ended up just flopping over into an ever-deepening pool of ash and sank like a stone.

The ash closed over my head with that same soft hissing I’d been hearing all day, and those alien stars went out. The Ashen Wastes gently reset itself as if I’d never been there.

I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t see. Everything was black. Despite that, I could still feel myself sinking down, deeper and deeper into the ash. Anywhere else in the world all it would have taken was a quick burst of Artifice to launch myself back to the surface, but here in this dead place, I was powerless.

Down into that deep dark nothingness, I went on sinking until the reach of my sphere of influence was extended out far enough to encompass the Dhole’s circuit. It was slowing now, whatever senses let it track the movement of prey on the surface had told it that the trap had snapped shut on me. It made one last slow circuit before wiggling my way. Could worms gloat? The languid swish through the ash felt pretty smug to me.

It should have known better. I was going to puke my babies on its face. Okay maybe I wasn’t going to literally do that … but something with the same vibe.

Vibrations in the ash would have warned me it was coming, even if my Lifesense didn’t have it lit up—the only thing in the dead darkness. It took all my willpower to stop struggling, to stay still and play dead. If it really waited until I’d suffocated then it was out of luck. My body was going to blink out of existence when I respawned, and it was going to go hungry. But if I could get it to come for me now, it might still get a taste of me, and I might still have a chance.

My lungs burned in my chest. I could feel my health ticking down with every passing moment. Death was coming for me—a lot quicker than that sneaking, nervous Dhole. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Maybe he was leaving me down here for later. Joke was on him, all he’d get to eat was half-chewed eel-skin armor. Not that he deserved any better. Kill stealing jerk.

Just when I thought I was doomed to pop back up in Tropical Dvergar Town, the Dhole decided it was snack time. It came on in a mad rush, tattered mouth flopping open in anticipation just before it reached me where the ash held my feeble mortal frame completely immobile.

Even with my potency surged, it felt like I was moving through molasses, so slow there was no chance I could actually deal any sort of damage with the swing of my sword. Good thing damage wasn’t the goal. As the mouth flopped open, my sword came around, not slicing anything but wedging those jaws wide open.

I clung to the blunt back side of the cleaver blade as the impact of the Dhole against it rocked me. The ash that had encased me vanished down the thing’s throat, but I stuck there in its craw like a chicken bone, gasping in the foul and fetid air. All around me the vibrant red flesh pulsed and flexed as it tried to close those wretched teeth into me, but it couldn’t. It could contract at the sides, but the top and bottom couldn’t. It couldn’t snap shut and puncture me.

The big angry hose was not pleased with this, and it bucked and rolled, trying to dislodge me. More ash billowed in through its open mouth and covered both me and the Khorkhoi that were slithering out the ducts in between its teeth. I was a big guy; I could take a little bit of ash plastered onto me. The teeny Khorkhoi couldn’t. The ash and drool and blood all mingled into a paste as thick as concrete, trapping the baby murder worms where they lay.

More and more ash came flowing in, choking the Dhole, setting it retching, hissing, and pulsing all around me as it tried to dislodge it and me. It wasn’t built to travel down here with its mouth open. It needed open air, just as surely as I did. It had to go up.

We burst through the surface, and my roars of laughter rolled out over the dunes. The worm had done exactly what I wanted it to. Now it just had to do one more thing like I wanted. It had to die.

I leapt clear of the mouth, tumbling back to my feet on the dunes and leaving the sword in place for now. The Dhole was flinging itself back and forth, tossing up huge clouds of dust but making no attempt to dip back under the surface. It would have choked itself out if it had.

Once I had my breath back and the Dhole was lying limp on its side, half-exhausted and half-choked, it was time for a killing blow. I crept up on it, nice and slow, but even as careful as I was coming, it felt the vibrations through the ground and started flopping around like a beached fish all over again.

Guess there wasn’t going to be an easy way to do this. I gave up on stealth and just walked right up to the thing, ducking under a couple of wild flails it made in my general direction. When I was close enough to lay a hand on its rubbery hide, it was time. I called my sword back to me, deconstructing it from inside the thing’s mouth and into my hands in one smooth flow of liquid metal.

I took a breath to get my balance, then I swung.

Even with a sword as big as mine, and all my strength behind it, it wasn’t enough to take the Dhole’s head off. It was enough to cut more than halfway through, but I had to elbow into the oozing wound to bring the blade down, again and again, before finally, I was all the way through, and the hissing abruptly stopped.

Legendary Foe Defeated!

165 Experience Gained

150 Glory Gained

Silence again. Just my ragged breathing, the distant stars, and the smooth drifting of the dunes.

I’d won, but that didn’t mean I was any less screwed. With all of the chaos, the burrowing underground, the bull-ride inside the Dhole, and my less than stellar sense of direction at the best of times, I was now completely turned around.

When the sun came up, I’d remember which side of me it was on when I set off in the morning and have a vague idea of the right way to go, even if I might have been sidetracked by miles by this point. I had no idea how far the Dhole dragged me around before surfacing. Yeah, this sucked.

I spun around on the spot a few times, hoping I might catch a glimpse of something familiar. I even looked at the sky and tried to remember what the stars had looked like when I was headed the right way. It was hopeless. They were a random collection of dots in the sky. How were they meant to tell me anything?

Should I wait until morning, all alone with my thoughts? Maybe roaming in a random direction was a better idea. If I got lucky, some other wildlife might pop up and try to murder me.

I almost did it too, but then I heard a nagging voice in my head that sounded like Mercy calling me a dumbass. There was a little snippet of Seren, commenting on my lack of patience, too. Why couldn’t Asher be my conscience. He would never dunk on me like this.

The dead Dhole was the only landmark for miles, and it was also the only thing resembling furniture, so I clambered up on top of its squishy body and lay down, sinking in an inch as it expelled liquids and gasses that I really did not want to think about. A quick brush over it with my Artifice revealed nothing of value. The only solid bones in the whole thing were the teeth, and even they were too small to be much use, unless I really wanted to patch up my poor, battered eel armor with lots of spikes all over it. As much as that would look badass, and it would look so very badass, I would end up stabbing myself about nine hundred times a day, and nobody has time for that.

That reminded me to use Restoration on myself. It was definitely more useful when you were in a group since everybody seemed to have their own cooldown timer before they could be healed again with the power. Good thing I had all night to wait out that timer and heal myself until I was pristine and factory fresh again.

Sinking another inch into the Dhole, I let out a long sigh. I was glad that my hair had finally grown in, but that did mean that it could soak up all the lovely fluids that I seemed to encounter on a daily basis. Back at Talon’s Keep, I got my every-other-daily swim to shuck off the worst of the grime, but out here in the middle of nowhere… let’s just say you don’t appreciate modern plumbing until it is gone.

So there I was, lying on a stinky cushion, staring up at the stars, with nothing to do for hours and hours and hours. Nothing to occupy my thoughts. No sign of any living thing for miles. I couldn’t sleep, obviously—there might have been more Dholes just waiting to pop up and make me their midnight snack—so I was just lying there. Bored.

I don’t do well with bored. Give me life-threatening monster attacks over bored anytime. When I am bored, I make trouble for myself. Back home, the amount of trouble I could make was pretty limited, but here in Amaranth, with all the powers of a demigod, I could do some real damage. Which was why after about a half-hour, I had the shards of the rusted blade out of the pockets inside my armor, and I was trying to fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Some bits slipped together perfectly, but others didn’t seem to go together at all. I was definitely missing the hilt piece, which I guessed was welded into Leo’s sword. The Alvaren piece was the tip, and Talon’s piece attached just beneath it, still sharp along its edge. That meant that the Faun piece that was completely missing from history and the two bits that Tsangaanax had hoarded were other lengths of the blade. Put back together, I guessed it would be a longsword for anyone else but a short-sword for me. That wasn’t ideal, but judging from Leo’s Lucis, I could always strap some more metal onto the thing to make it bigger without it losing too much mojo.

Mercy and Asher hadn’t really spoken about it, but I think we were all kind of assuming that I was going to be the one swinging the Rusted Blade around once we got it back together. Neither of them had shown any inclination to get up close and personal with the monsters, and while the image of Mercy shooting a sword out of her bow was always going to bring a smile to my face, it probably wasn’t super practical. This was going to be my burden. I was going to have to be the one to kill the Voidgod. Maybe if Leo hadn’t been a complete nut I might have handed the quest over to him, but he was, so I couldn’t.

Unfastening the clips that I’d added to keep them firmly in place, I pulled off my gloves and let the night air breeze between my fingers. Sweaty palms. Gross. I almost wiped them off on myself before I remembered my current slimy state.

Almost without a thought, I picked up the shards again. One in each bare hand.

“So we have found our courage again?”

Araphel’s voice didn’t come from the shards in my hand. It didn’t echo to me from a great distance through Psychometry, the way that most of the ghosts that power showed me. He boomed in my head like his mouth had snapped open on the inside of my skull, and he was yelling every word.

My mouth was dry when I answered, “What do you want, Araphel?”

“You are the one who communes with me. Surely, the real question is what you want.”

It took me a moment to get over that reverberation in my poor brain. There was something uniquely unpleasant about Araphel’s voice. You know how really good music can make you feel like your soul is getting bigger? His voice did the opposite.

I didn’t even have to think about my answer. “I want to kill you.”

“Yet, I do not wish to be killed.” That awful voice was easing now like he was trying to dial it back and make himself more palatable. It wasn’t better, it was just a different kind of suffering to listen to him. It set my teeth on edge. I lay there with my eyes clamped shut so I wouldn’t have to see him as well as hear him. The idea of him looming over me as I lay here was just too much to bear. “So let us seek a compromise.”

“What? I only kill you a little bit, and then we call it quits?” I probably shouldn’t have snorted with laughter in the figurative face of the Voidgod, but nobody has ever said I was smart.

“Abandon your quest. Keep the shards far from one another.” The more he tried to ingratiate himself to me, the more it made my stomach heave and my head ache—like nails on a chalkboard, except the chalkboard was the inside of my skull. “Keep them as trophies or cast them in the sea for all that I care, but do not let them all come together.”

It took some effort to ease my grip on the shards enough that they weren’t drawing blood from my palms anymore. Touching most things with Psychometry bombarded me with images and sounds from the whole history of the object, but the presence of Araphel was so overpowering that nothing else got through. I’d never know who struck the blow that felled him. I’d never know who forged the sword. I’d never know whose hands each of the shards had passed through. All of that was gone. Replaced by him. His looming, aching, presence. Just like the Bastion and this desert and everything else, it was tainted so thoroughly by the touch of the Voidgod that it would never be anything but his leftovers again.

I took a deep breath. I really wasn’t holding up my end of the conversation here. “So what’s in it for me?”

“Your court shall reign supreme over what is left of this world. Those you call kin shall survive my coming. You shall survive it. This is a greater charity than any I have ever offered.” He really thought he was making me a good offer here. Like I cared about team moon getting the scraps of the planet when he was done chewing on it. My friends not dying would be nice, but if they were willing to stand back and watch everyone else in the world drop dead to save themselves, I wouldn’t have wanted to call them my friends.

There was nothing that he could offer me. There was no compromise that would be enough. For this world to survive, Araphel couldn’t.

I licked my lips. “How about this. I put this sword back together, then I lift up your tail and shove it right up your shiny black—”

There was no restraint now. No subtle inveigling his way into my brain. His voice hit me like a sledgehammer. “I am a god.”

“You’re a dick!” I roared back into the empty night. “You wrecked this world. You’ll wreck it even more when you come back. There are people trying to live here, and you just—”

Araphel pummeled me with his voice. Every word nailed into my brain, sharp and cruel and agonizing. “You will do as I command, or I shall—”

It took all my will to growl out, “Hanging up now.”

Then I let the shards fall from my hands to splat on the worm below.

I groaned all the way back up into a sitting position, then I put my head in my hands like I could crush the ache behind my eyes into submission. I even gave my horns a few gentle rubs to see if that would help. It didn’t. Just felt weird.

Pulling my gloves back on made me wince with pain from where the shards had dug in. Even the places they hadn’t broken the skin looked rust red, leaving perfect impressions of them on both my hands. Once they were fastened back into place, I stowed everything back away where it belonged and flopped back all over again.

That had been stupid, even by my usual standards, and my usual standards were right down there with eating the silica gel pack in my bag of jerky and buying things from infomercials. Antagonizing the dude who already wanted to destroy the world. Good job, Maulkin. Good job. Although, maybe it wasn’t actually the real living Voidgod who I’d just threatened to prod in the rear. Maybe it was just the echo that was still attached to the shards. Maybe this wasn’t going to have terrible repercussions later. Yeah, I was just bugging a ghost. Not a god of destruction. Maybe.

I lay back and stared at the sky again. All those stars, yet the black between them was still there—and so much bigger than any one of them. The sun, the moon, they were just tiny blips in the universe in comparison to the spaces between. The void. It seemed to stare back at me. All that darkness pressing down, unstoppable. Endless. I blinked. Maybe brain-to-brain contact with ancient evil gods wasn’t good for me. I didn’t usually get this weird while stargazing. Not without tequila.

There was anxiety gnawing at my guts as the implacable darkness stared down at me, and it was almost enough to make me pick up the shards again, to try and talk Araphel down from the thing he was born to do. The thing that he desperately wanted to do more than anything. To offer him some real compromise that we both might accept. I knew it wouldn’t work. Just like I knew I couldn’t trust Leofric or any of the gods we’d met so far. They were all cut from the same megalomaniacal cloth. They’d all do whatever they had to, say whatever they had to, so that their team won. Even if it cost the lives of everyone on Amaranth.

The sensation of the fear, dangling in my guts like a lead weight, made me stop and wonder. I do stupid things without thinking them through. That is the complete opposite of anxiety. This was not my anxiety. Someone had put it in me. Araphel had put it in me.

Once I knew that it wasn’t mine, it was easy enough to ignore it, and it fizzled away to nothing almost immediately, but that had come from him. Touching the shards had let him sneak those feelings into me without me even noticing. I needed to be even more careful to keep my gloves on.

But here was the thing that stuck with me. He had to have gotten that anxiety from somewhere. He had to know what it felt like to be able to inflict it on someone else. He had to have the recipe. And what’s more, despite being the all-powerful dark god of evil or whatever, he’d come to me, and he’d tried to cut a deal. He was running scared. He was scared that I was going to put the sword back together. He was scared that I was going to kick his ass.

He was right to be scared I was going to kick his ass because I was going to kick his ass.

Chapter 7

What was left of the night dragged on, and I made a less than graceful dismount of my worm-corpse-bed when some smaller critters came up from beneath the ash and started chowing down on it. I guess that there wasn’t a lot of food on the go in a desolate wasteland devoid of all life. Who’d have thought?

I got back to a safe distance and watched the show, fully expecting another worm to pop out and treat me as an appetizer for the banquet, but no matter how ready I was to rumble … well, they weren’t. Even when the whole ash desert beneath the Dhole carcass was writhing and heaving with competing carrion eaters, not one of them even looked my way. Not that they could look since they didn’t have eyes.

Don’t get me wrong, I was ready for a fight. After getting my brain tickled by Araphel, I was ready to fight just about anyone, but I didn’t feel the need to slap the crap out of some worms that were just trying to get some dinner—as long as that dinner wasn’t me. Over the course of what felt like an hour, they noisily and messily devoured the Dhole while I watched, and when the ash finally stopped heaving, all that was left was a damp patch in the ash. That had filled up some more time at least. Kind of like watching a nature documentary but squishier.

Then it was back to standing around, waiting for the sun to glow on one of the horizons so I could get going again.

There was barely even the first hint of light when I took off running. All of yesterday’s halfhearted attempts at stealth were forgotten in my joy. I didn’t care that I was slipping and sliding over the dunes. I finally had something to do. I was free to run, to move, to live.

Beneath me, I caught hints and glimmers of Dholes and Khorkhoi of all sizes, all diving deeper as I passed. Maybe they really were smarter than I might have expected, or maybe I was still crusted with Dhole blood and that distinct aroma was warding them off.

As the day broke fully and the sun started to creep up into the sky, I was startled to find that there was stone beneath me again—not just the dull numb null of the stuff that the Voidgod’s powers had washed over, but real workable stone below that. Ridges and rises. A whole topography buried beneath the ash and destruction. Hints and clues about the world that had been before Araphel got his claws into it. Maybe this had been a mountain; maybe it had just gotten lucky and whatever had been unleashed on this land had bounded over this patch by luck.

It wasn’t until later as I came upon ridge after ridge that a picture started to form. They were the outer edges of a crater, but a crater not caused by one big bang, but by an explosion that kept happening, over and over and over, spreading out farther and farther with each repetition. I was heading towards the epicenter. That was where Leofric had sent me. To the heart of all this destruction.

The ridges came closer and closer together the nearer I got to that center, bucking higher and higher beneath the ash until some broke the surface. It was null stone that I couldn’t touch with Artifice at first, but then more and more pronounced peaks and spikes with cores of rock that still felt alive and workable to my senses appeared. Past midday, the ash began to give away beneath my feet to solid-feeling stone that my Artifice couldn’t sense. What ash there was seemed to be there courtesy of the wind instead of being resident. There was still plenty of it stacked up against the foot of the stone spurs I now found myself passing between, but it wasn’t everywhere.

At some point, the flat of the desert gave way to an uphill climb—gentle at first, then growing steeper—and soon the circular ridges that had been thrown up became real impediments to progress, and I had to go wandering along them to find the places where they had been crumbled, or where they were slung low enough that I could make the jump over them.

It was only when I had to use Potency Surge to leap over a particularly high one that I finally noticed that I wasn’t alone anymore. I landed heavily with a stumble in what looked like a vegetable patch cultivated in the ashy soil that had gathered behind the high ridge, and there was a Faun just standing there, staring back at me. From the armor and the spears, I was guessing that she wasn’t a farmer. From the stricken look on her face, I was guessing that she hadn’t expected me to jump over that wall in one bound.

“Uh. Hi.”

To her credit, the surprise didn’t stop her long, and she was already hefting that spear up to take her shot before the words were even out my mouth, and I started having flashbacks to my arrival at the fort on the other side of the ash.

“No, no, no. Don’t javelin me.” I held my empty hands right up in the air. “Don’t throw. I’m here to talk. I’m just here to talk.”

“What kind of trick is this?” There was a frantic edge to her bass voice, but at least she wasn’t impaling me. “Why do you wear our skin? Why do you speak our tongue?”

“No trick! This is my own skin. But I’m not a Faun. I’m an Eternal.” I started talking even faster to get through the rest before she had time to throw anything. “And I’m telling you that now because I don’t want you to think I’m trying to lie about that in any way. I’m being honest. So please don’t shoot at me.”

The flinty tip of the spear was still pointed at me, her arm still cocked back, missile ready to launch. There was a growl in her voice that brought all the hairs on the back of my neck to attention. “You come from the camp of the adversary.”

“Oh no. That’s just where I landed.” I took a half-step forward before I realized my mistake and threw my arms right back up again. I really did not want to have to fight Faun. “I’m not on that gold-plated prick’s side. I swear.”

Her eyes narrowed, the hump of her nose wrinkling. “You are one of his creatures.”

“I’m really not.” Was this paranoia, or did Leo actually have creatures? I really hoped he didn’t have creatures. Creatures and a whole army and a pair of Eternals felt like a lot of work, even for me.

“He has carved you into the shape of the Firstborn, but you are not.” Her dark lips curled back from teeth that she had sharpened to points. That looked cool as hell. She had the body that Seren’s mind would have fit into perfectly. Her horns looked like they’d been filed sharper too. Everything about her was honed for wicked violence, and I was kind of into it?

I dragged my gaze back to her eyes. The pupils were like a goat’s—a sideways figure of eight. This was the first time I was seeing a Faun in real life with all the details. It was weirdly exciting. Like meeting your long-lost family and making contact with an alien species all rolled into one. If your long-lost alien cousin was a buff warrior lady that wanted to step on you. “I already told you, I’m an Eternal, not a Faun.”

“Like him.”

“No, not like him. I’m a Lunar Eternal.” I pointed to my face, then jerked my hand back up before she could throw. “Check the eyes. Moonlight, right?”

She took a cautious step forward to examine me. Those golden eyes darting up and down, side to side, taking in every inch of me. Shame I was covered in bug guts really. “Another trick.”

“Okay, here’s the deal. Nothing I say is going to convince you I’m not a secret monster, right?” Her eyes narrowed, but she nodded along with me. “So why don’t you take me to somebody who can tell for sure? You’ve got to have a wizard or something lying around. Right?”

She slowly eased her spear down from where she had been holding it steady above her head, ready to launch, all of this time. Her knuckles were still white where she gripped it. “Koschei would know for sure.”

I lowered my hands too, just as slowly. “Great, let’s go see Koschei.”

She backed away from me slowly, letting me step out of the vegetable patch and onto the ragged stone once again. I gestured to her. “Uh, lead on.”

Once more, that voice of hers made the hair all over my body stand on end. “When Koschei declares you an abomination, I shall be there to spit you.”

I grinned at her. “And when he says I’m his new best friend, I shall be very polite to you because, hopefully, we’ll be friends too.”

She spat into the ash pile by my feet.

“Am I meant to spit back? Is this a Faun greeting thing?”

“No.” She didn’t seem amused. Oh well. I can’t win everyone over with my sparkling personality. I had to drown Seren twice and knock her out once before she was my girlfriend. Maybe if I was aiming for a casual friendship with this Faun lady, I’d only need to do a little light maiming.

She jerked her head away from my admiring stare. Her hair was braided back with beads of ivory dotting each thread, spaced out so that they didn’t bump together and make a noise. She had to jerk her head again before I worked out she wasn’t just waving her hair around, she was gesturing for me to walk ahead of her.

“Alright, enjoy the view.” I put an extra wiggle in my hips as I walked away. Asher would have sighed, Seren would have rolled her eyes, and Mercy would have shot me in the butt-cheek. This Faun said nothing at all. Not a peep. It was a bit disappointing.

We followed around the curve of the next raised crest just a short distance until she stopped behind me. “In.”

I looked at the barren wall of stone beside me. “Uh? How?”

She spat again. “You are not Chagnar.”

“Already covered that.”

With a little huff of disdain, she launched herself past me, running sideways up the wall. If Faun had anti-gravity powers all this time, I was genuinely mad that nobody had told me about them. She got to the crest of the stone and spun on her heel to look back down at me. I was tall, apparently tall even for Faun, but she was looking down on me like I was an ant from up on that wall.

I moved closer in to the wall of ruined stone, studying it carefully with my eyes since my other senses told me nothing, but it was only when I was almost beside it and looking along that I saw the footholds she’d used. Clotted with ash, and barely wide enough to fit a fingertip, let alone a foot. I couldn’t tell if they’d been carved in and then obscured, or if this was just the formation of the bristling upshot stone and she could somehow recognize it without a second glance. Maybe she was just so used to traveling this terrain that it was natural to her.

It certainly wasn’t natural to me, but that didn’t mean I was giving up without even trying. Taking a deep breath, I broke into a run, angling my broad body out from the wall so that my feet would hit it instead of my shoulders. I made a little jump once I was up to speed, and my foot skidded down the stone until it jarred for just a moment against a ledge before slipping off. It was enough. I pushed off from there, slamming my next foot down even higher, scraping over flat stone until my heel caught on another protruding edge then I was off again.

I almost made it. Well no, I didn’t. I made it about a quarter of the way up before my top-heavy body veered out, my legs pumped in the open air for one moment, then gravity caught up to me, and I ate dirt.

The Faun on top of the wall toppled over too. Falling back out of sight beyond the ridge for just long enough for me to think she’d been attacked before her booming laughter rolled down over me. Great. The roars of laughter turned to wheezing and gasping, then back to a fresh set of whoops when she dragged herself back up to the ridge and saw me clambering to my feet.

She was struggling for breath by the time I was trying to line up for another run at it. Wheezing out, “I am an Eternal, warrior of the gods, and… I…” She couldn’t even finish her mocking for laughing so hard. She just slapped one of her hands down on the ridge and cackled.

“Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up.”

This time I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t second guess or worry about brushing my shoulder or my horns on the wall. It wasn’t like they could make things go worse than the first time around. I really thought that I was going to make it, right up until the moment that my foot came down on a smooth patch of wall, and I started to fall. I twisted out, away from the wall, so I’d at least have a chance of landing on my feet, but before I’d dropped an inch, I jerked to a halt.

The lady Faun had a grip on my horns, down by the base where they met my skull, and she was hauling with all her strength. It wasn’t going to be enough. I was a big guy. I appreciated the effort, but it wasn’t going to work. “Just drop me.”

“We do not have all day.”

I dangled there like a weird puppet, trying to dig my heels into the wall and get some traction, but it didn’t seem to be helping much. “I’m too heavy. Just drop me.”

Another hand latched onto my horns, then another, and another. A guttural voice growled out, “We do not lift alone.”

They lifted me up over the wall by my head, spinning me around and hauling me in, and a few things became apparent in quick succession. The first was that Faun in general seemed to be a lot stealthier than me. There was a full patrol’s worth of spear-toting watchers arrayed around the concentric rings of the crater. The second was that while I was big for a Faun, I certainly was not the biggest Faun around. One of the big fellas who had a hold on my horns made me look like the before picture in a weight lifting supplement advert. The guy that got sand kicked in his face by the bully.

I eyed them all, massive and bristling with weaponry, and finally had some idea of why Leo’s little posse was so scared of these guys. “Uh, thanks.”

The five gathered Faun looked around at each other and shrugged together. A Mexican wave of indifference. One of the other women was looking me up and down in a way that I’ve got to describe as predatory. She was bigger than me too, her horns curving up to points above her head and making her look even taller. She nudged the first lady Faun with her elbow. “Want help?”

The first lady Faun, who’d nearly busted a gut laughing at me, glanced at me and snorted. “Do not need it.”

More shrugging followed, then without a backward glance, they all spread out back to their posts, dark hair, grey skin, and dusty armor blending with the spikes and whorls of the stone all about us. Even after watching them take up their positions again, I struggled to pick them out after I’d glanced away. They could teach Mercy a thing or two about sneaking.

The next time we came to a ring grown too high, Lady Faun gave me a disdainful look. “This time?”

I did my best not to pout as I gave her a nod. She mountain goat-ed her way up the invisible footholds, and I Surged my Potency again, leaping clean over it and landing in another vegetable patch with a squelch. So much for my grand entrance.

Those muddy patches were everywhere now that I looked back down over the concentric plateaus—everywhere enough ash and dirt had been heaped up. The Faun were living here, making a home for themselves in this most inhospitable place, and that meant growing crops. It meant guarding it against invasion. I thought I was going to find some campsite in the middle of the ash desert, and instead, it seemed like I was strolling into the Faun version of a town.

Getting closer to the apex of all the ancient explosions that made this place, more and more of the natural surroundings leapt up in the lea of the rocky outcroppings. Here and there I could see trees growing up out of still-living soil, their branches laden with woven baskets and drying Khorkhoi remains. There were Faun here too, hulking like me, but not in the way that the Lady Faun was. She was like a stallion rearing up for battle while the other Faun I saw were more like pack horses, trudging along. We were all noble animals in our own way, and I’m sure any one of us could have given a human a good kicking, but there was still a world of difference between the folks I’d seen out manning the battlements and the normal people just getting on with their lives.

Everywhere I went in this world, I kept finding them. People just trying to live their lives without powers or training or magic or destiny giving them what they needed to stand up for themselves against Amaranth. I didn’t know if this place had always been so violent and dangerous or if that was all Araphel’s doing, but I did know that he wasn’t trying to make it better. If he came back, it would be like this place all over again, explosions on top of explosions, and all these people that had nothing to do with anything were the ones who’d catch it.

“Are you remembering all that you see, spy?”

I jerked around to find those pointy teeth of my guide bared at me. “Not a spy. Really not a spy. I’ve just… I’ve never met Faun before. This is all exciting stuff for me, seeing how you live.”

“This is not how we live.” She spat again. “This is how we survive. This is what we are brought down to.”

Wow, I’d just stamped right on a sore subject there. “I heard somebody say that the land on the other side of the wall used to belong to you?”

Her voice was getting louder now, her tone going from the grim declarations and mockery she’d been sharing with me so far into something else. It was like she was reciting an old story that she knew word for word. “All Amaranth was our hunting ground. Now we are driven from fertile lands to this… dust.”

An age-bent old woman ambled by us with a basket of crops on her back, shaking her horned head from side to side. “Shame. Shame.”

Like a rumble, it echoed out from the mouths of all the Faun in earshot. “Shame. Shame. Shame.”

She was roaring as we walked through the town, bellowing at the top of her lungs, and every head turned to face us. Every mouth hung open to join the chant. “This world was made for us, then came the wyrm with their fire, then came the pale ones with their chains, the underfolk and their living dark. Eternals and humans. Enemies all. Every one of them took and took until we had nothing but these last scraps of dust.”

I could feel their misery pulsing against my skin. Shaking the stone beneath our feet. “Shame. Shame. Shame.”

“We are the firstborn. Greatest of hunters. Greatest of warriors”—her voice faltered to a droning whisper—“and what we did not offer in our kindness they stole in their treachery.”

“Shame.”

The whole settlement had fallen silent. We were near to the epicenter now, of that I had no doubt. Skins had been strung up over the branches of the more plentiful trees here, stretched over bones to make something like tents or lean-to shelters. Not for the folks to sleep under, I had no idea where the people here slept, but to protect the few crafts that were being undertaken from the worst of the elements. There were no cooking fires that I could see, though in some places a puff of smoke might escape from out one of the haphazard tents.

If we were anywhere else, I would have built them houses. I would have made this place into somewhere safe for them to live without fear of wind whipping through with a storm of ash. But here, so close to whatever catastrophe had struck, the only thing that my Artifice could touch was what they had brought here with them. Even the trees felt dead to my Lifesense.

I cleared my throat and blathered through the awkward silence. “Thanks for the history lesson.”

“There are no others who will speak our truth.” She wouldn’t even look me in the eye as she said it. “Even when our truth is shame, we keep it.”

“You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

“So say our cowards—the ones who would have us forget what we were. What we are.” When she turned back to me, those golden eyes burned as bright as any Eternal’s, filled with passion and rage. “The brave have the courage to face the truth. We are meant for more than this. We are due more than this.”

“You are.” I held up my empty hands again, just giving her a little reminder that I was not in any way fighting her. “You deserve better.”

She was still staring at me with the same deranged intensity. “Amaranth belongs to the Faun.”

“No arguments here.”

She looked me up and down with contempt once more. “You would say anything to save your own hide.”

“My hide is fine either way. There’s nothing you or anybody else can do to me that’s going to stick. That’s what the whole Eternal part of the name is about. Everlasting.” I shrugged and lowered my hands. Force of habit was a hell of a thing, and I’d spent one lifetime trying not to die. It was kind of difficult to let go of that. “I think you’re right. It is messed up that you have to live out here in ash-ville when there are plenty of much nicer places that you could be hanging out.”

Her lips slowly edged back down over her teeth. “Truly?”

“Yeah, I mean, the other side of that wall had a lot of nice green spaces where you could hunt things that aren’t worms, and if you go far enough past Leo’s little cargo-cult, you’ll get to even more empty spaces. You don’t have to stay here, you know that right?”

“You would have us abandon this place?” The hump of her nose wrinkled up in an instant. Her hand flung up to the spear slung over her shoulder. “Leave it untended so that our enemies can lay claim to it?”

I put my hands over my eyes and groaned. I was so tired of everyone looking for an excuse to stab me. “Can I just talk to Koschei please?”

Silence still filled up the village after the shame chanting, but when I said that name, that silence took on a whole new aspect. Oppressive.

It broke with a roar. “Who seeks Koschei?”

The biggest Faun I’d ever seen was standing at the top of the next, final crest. He carried an axe in each hand that could have felled a tree with one swing. He was dressed up in the shiniest armor I’d seen all day. Not just pretty, but better crafted than any other Faun’s too. This guy was clearly the boss.

“Hi, yes. Me. Maulkin. I’m the one who seeks Koschei… Is that you?”

He burst out laughing. Literally doubling over. Dropping his axes and slapping his knees. “He thinks I am Koschei?!”

Even the grumpiest of all Faun standing beside me with her hand on her spear couldn’t hold back a chortle. I sighed.

Another giant of a Faun came lumbering into sight on the ridge, a hammer with a head as big as my whole torso balanced on one shoulder and his other hand slapping the axe-guy on the back as he roared with the same laughter. “I am Koschei!”

The old woman with the crops called over her shoulder. “I’m Koschei.”

“You’re hilarious.” It was my turn to scowl, apparently. “That’s what you are.”

Another lady-Faun lurched up over the crest cackling so hard she could barely wheeze out, “Do not listen to them. I’m Koschei!”

I turned back to the woman that had led me this far. “So is Koschei actually a real person, or was this all just the setup for a really unfunny skit?”

The two absolutely gigantic Faun up on the crest stumbled apart, and I fully expected to see yet another beast of a Faun pop up between them to declare himself, but instead, it was a Dvergar.

He came up to the shins of the titans around him, was dressed in furs and scraps that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a beggar, and whatever beard he’d had was shaved clean away, along with his eyebrows and hair. But what he did have, was a pair of eyes shining moonlight down at me. Oh.

“Come up, little moon runt. Best we get to speaking.”

Chapter 8

“Do you know where you’ve come wandering to?” Koschei spun on his heel to face me once we were past all the looming Faun warlords and inside the cave he’d claimed as his own. Since he came up to about crotch height, I had to make an extremely abrupt stop or become a lot more intimately acquainted with him than I’d planned to.

I teetered on my tiptoes for a moment before rocking back on my heels. “Very rarely.”

He reached out and patted the wall. The stone was still dead to my other senses, but by the light of my eyes, I could pick out the wild whorls and spikes patterning all over it. The same force that had created the ridges outside had scarred this cavern. Koschei wandered deeper as he spoke, running his fingers across the bumps and humps with a more than passing familiarity. “This is the place where it happened. The one who did it turned to ash. The land he walked turned to ash. Everything, wiped away with the death blow. Take a walk any way but to the Bastion and you see the wastes. Nothing but the wastes. On and on, as far as the sea. Not the half a world they said would die with him, but enough. Too much.”

It stopped me in my tracks when I realized what he was telling me. “This is where Araphel…”

“Where he fell.” Koschei nodded his little bald head deeper into the darkness. “Where the hero of Amaranth fell. Where the world stopped dying.” He let out a little sigh. “Or started dying slower.”

Now instead of stomping along as usual, I tried to keep my clumsy footsteps from echoing. Like I might disturb all the history that was piled up here if I made too much racket. I followed the little Eternal farther and farther from the dwindling daylight until only we would have been able to see, and only our special glowing vision let us pick our way forward.

Beneath the earth, the tunnel bloomed out into a cavern. Nothing grandiose, but big enough that I had to strain to see the opposite side in the darkness. At the very center of that empty sphere, there was a black mark on the stone, broken up only by the paler silhouettes of a sword, broken into fragments. I couldn’t help myself. I stepped down to them and bent to look. My two shards were there among the rest of the pale marks. Perfectly outlined. He was either telling the truth, or he had put way too much planning into this lie.

I wet my lips and felt like I was verging on doing something blasphemous when I finally spoke up. “Why are you here?”

“Am I here to steal past glory, like gold clod on his wall? Am I basking in memories of better times?” Koschei cackled. His voice had none of the gruffness I’d come to associate with the Dvergar and their rumbling language. It was musical. Almost comedically high-pitched. Like he was a little Eastern European leprechaun. “You know why I’m here. You can feel it, same as I feel it.”

He had his hand on the wall again like he was savoring the texture. I tugged off one of my gloves and pressed my bare hand to the floor. Aether told me nothing. There was no rush of ghosts. It was null. Just like my Sphere of Influence. “The dead zone?”

“Not all our gifts are useless here but enough of them. The rest are numbed.” He plopped down to sit cross-legged beside me. “The void god’s greatest gift, robbing us of ours.”

If this whole place was invisible to the gods and anyone wandering around with god powers, that meant we were hidden too. “So it is camouflage? You’re hiding here from other Eternals?”

“You met Leofric? He set you after me? Vengeance burns brighter as the ages turn. When there is no end to the cycle, it is not quenched with any amount of blood. He kills me. I kill him. He raises his armies, I put them down. It does not stop. So long as I live, he will hate me. So long as he lives, I will stop him.”

Up until this point, I’d assumed that everything Leofric had told me was a lie, but now I realized with a start that one part was true at least. “Oh, so you really are rallying all the Faun against him?”

“If I could, I’d rally all the world against him. But this world, his kind, his masters, and his servants, they’ve had the run of it too long. Amaranth is poisoned against us.”

I knew this place was a mess, but I didn’t know the Solar Court had done any of it. “What?”

“They call us beasts of chaos. That we run wild and do as we please no matter the walls they build to keep us in. What is the word for that? Not chaos. Freedom.” He reached out and turned my head by the horns until I was looking at him, so I could see nothing but the glow of his eyes in the dark. “Araphel left Amaranth so scared that they handed it all away to Leofric and his ilk, to kings and laws and their precious order, because then, when the bad came, it was not their own fault. They found their freedom in subservience. Weak. Cowardly.”

He gripped tighter to my horns when I tried to pull back, one of his tiny hands on each side of my head, pinning me in place with a strength that his tiny body should have been incapable of. I could feel his Aether flare and mine shining to life inside me in response. In the blinding light of his eyes, I could see everything he was describing, playing out like shadow puppets in front of the moon.

“In the time before there was balance. Sun and moon could fight, but neither one of us could win because we’re evenly matched in power. Then the Voidgod came. Hasn’t been a Lunar Eternal since me. Not until you.” The ancient battlefields shimmered and danced before me. Glorious battles between titans and gods in mortal skins. What we Eternals were meant to be. Living in this world, and waging battles for supremacy, but protecting the people here too. Felling the wyrms when they came burning. Breaking the chains of magic that bound the Faun.

“The sun-gods kept pouring their servants in. Pouring more of their will in. Locking more and more of the world in cages. Everything numbered and quantified and trapped. Trapped in this terrible stasis for all eternity. The world cannot heal, it cannot grow, it cannot change. And it is not because of some long-dead Voidgod. It is because of them.”

I could see it now. The words of my being, inscribed by some bureaucrat’s pen in the dark court of the Heavens. The rules of the world being set in stone and all the possibilities that had been dwindling. The grand pillar of divinity at the heart of each god fragmented and filed away in separate columns. The great tangled web of carefully constructed order that had completely swallowed up the whole of Amaranth, pinning everyone and everything in place.

His expression was startled when I surged my Potency to tear free of his grasp and the overpowering weight of his stare. My breath came ragged, and my body shook. I wanted to kill him then and there for pushing his thoughts into my head, for trying to force me to be like him. Instead, I told him the most devastating thing I could manage. “Leofric would have done that if he could have.”

Already tiny, he seemed to shrink even further when I said that. He couldn’t meet my furious gaze. “You needed to understand.”

“I understood fine without you trying to force yourself into my skull.” I staggered to my feet, stumbling under the weight of the assault. The swirl of ghosts and memories were still drifting around this dark cavern like long-dead dust. “I understood Leofric fine when he made his pitch and tried to win me over to his cause, too.”

He scrambled to his feet, those tiny hands clenching into tiny fists. I’d felt the strength in him. He could probably punch a Faun to death without much sweat. “Then you have chosen to serve him?”

“No. Of course, I didn’t.” I put my hands over my eyes, trying to rub away the afterimages of his blazing eyes. “You’re both idiots.”

His flighty little pixie voice went flat. “What?”

“You are both idiots.” It came out in a roar, echoing back on me just as loud. I didn’t care. After what he just pulled, I was allowed to shout. “You’re so caught up in fighting each other that you’ve forgotten about what really matters.”

He was shouting back as if volume was what his argument needed after he’d already broadcast it at full volume right into my skull. “He wants to put the world in chains!”

I turned away from him. Looking at him made my blood boil. If I started swinging then every Faun up outside the cave was going to come running, and I was going to have to kill them all. I didn’t want to kill them all. Like it or not, they were my people. “And you want everyone to be free to do anything they want whenever they want to. I got it. That’s fine. You two can go on duking it out for all eternity. I’ve got more important things to deal with.”

“What could be more important than freedom? It is our very purpose for being?” He caught me by the wrist and spun me around, trying to meet my gaze, that hazy glow of Aether still dancing all around him. His spirit, just waiting to force itself in me again. To make me feel how he felt. To make me nothing more than an extension of his will. “What could be more important than freeing the world from bondage? More important than casting down a tyrant?”

“Araphel is coming back.”

That took the wind out of his sails real quick. “What?”

“You’re camped out here of all places, and you don’t even know?” I groaned and slumped back down to the ground. “He’s coming back.”

There was a desperate edge in Koschei’s voice now. He fell to his knees as I sat, all his attempts at brain-blasting me into submission forgotten in an instant as blind panic took over. “He cannot come back. He was defeated. He died.”

“How many times have you died and come back? What about Leo? We aren’t even full gods, and we manage it. You think Araphel can’t?”

All the quiet presence that Koschei had cultivated crumbled as he scrabbled for straws. “But it makes no sense. Why would he be coming back now of all times? Now, after so long?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know much at all. The prophecies said it is soon. And there have been enough weird coincidences for me to start believing in those prophecies.”

“I do not believe it.” He drew himself back up to his feet, level with my face again. His voice cracked. “Not yet.”

What could I say to that? I didn’t believe it either, not after the White Prophet told us it was so. Not even after I’d laid hands on the first of the shards after picking a random direction to walk in. Even now I struggled to believe that the fate of this whole world was somehow my responsibility. But here I was, taking responsibility for it anyway.

Maybe this second life was meant to counter-balance last time around when I couldn’t even be trusted with the survival of a potted plant. Maybe I had delusions of grandeur just because I’d literally been chosen by the gods to save the world. Maybe it was because I’d spent my whole first lifetime as a background character in other people’s stories, and this time around I had the opportunity to actually make a difference in the world. So I sat there in silence while he tried to wrap his head around it, pretending that I knew for certain that what I was telling him was true, when only Asher completely believed it.

Koschei’s voice had lost all its charm now. It was a somber drone when he said, “Even if it is true then… What can we do in the face of such malice? What can be done to stop him?”

I pointed past him to the stained rock in the middle of the chamber. “The same thing that stopped him last time.”

“The Rusted Blade?” His laugh came like a sob. “It is gone. Sundered into—”

He froze when he looked up and saw the pieces of metal in my hands. He didn’t doubt what his senses were telling him. He didn’t think that it was some sort of trick. Some things were too fundamentally real for even the most deluded demagogue to turn away from. The shards… this place… they felt more real than the rest of Amaranth, so steeped in history that the memories we couldn’t touch with our Aether weighed down on it.

“You have two shards. How did you? … How could you? …” Even now he was struggling against the overwhelming reality that we all faced. He reached for what he knew—the structure of this world that he claimed to want overthrown. “You are scarcely more than a newborn. How could you have two shards?”

“Those coincidences I was talking about? These landed in my lap. More or less.” I brought the two pieces together in front of his eyes. It was as if I wasn’t there anymore. Just him and the metal. There was a real danger in letting him know I had these shards. Every wannabe dictator on Amaranth probably wanted what Leofric had, and I’d just flashed two of them to somebody who was already at the brainwashing strangers phase of his own descent into madness. But at the end of the day, despite what he’d done, my gut still told me that Koschei was one of the good guys. He seemed to genuinely care about the Faun at least—even if he cared about beating Leofric more. Besides, he had something I needed more than safety. “I know where all the rest are, except for one. The one that the Faun were given.”

His brows drew down, and he blinked hard enough that the sexy lumps of old metal in my hands lost their hold on him. I was guessing I’d just trampled right on top of another touchy subject.

When the Faun were feeling passionate, there was a growl in their voice that you could feel vibrating your skeleton. When Koschei was angry, it was more like a pissed-off Chihuahua. “We were given nothing. We fought Araphel the same as everyone else once his true nature was revealed. We bested him, and we were entitled to our share of the bounty.”

I hopped on the hype train, hoping that it might stop at useful information junction. I asked excitedly, “So where is it?”

“Hidden. Gone beyond the reach of all who would use the shard against us.” He was so proud of himself, grinning away while my hands closed into fists around the shards. “Gone somewhere Leofric can never go to seek it.”

I picked my words as carefully as I could. “Which is where exactly?”

“The Faun worship their dead. The memory of them, the spirits that I call up, is the greatest service I do for my horned kin. It is why the chieftains heed me. I speak for their dead.”

I’ll admit that I was starting to lose patience a little bit when I interrupted him. “Yeah, I’ve got Aether powers too. What’s your point?”

“With the Pillar of Aether, it was possible for me to bind a physical object to the spirit of—”

I clapped my hands, shaking him out of his reverie. “Soulbinding, yup. Done it twice. Skip to the good bit.”

He paused for just a moment to scowl at me before he launched into storytime all over again. It was something else he had in common with Leo—they both loved the sound of their own voices. “Long ago, there was a great hero among the Faun.” Koschei stared off into the darkness, those same images that he’d been beaming into my head playing before his eyes. His memories of time so long past that I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. “Gorgafel. A warrior beyond all others. A match for the Voidspawn, for Eternals, the greatest of their kind. To him was passed the shard, and to him I bound it, so that even in death, he would be its guardian.”

From the sounds of it, I was finally going to get the big undead fight I’d spent so much time psyching myself up for when I first discovered Aether. I was already giddy with anticipation. There was going to be a dungeon, with skeletons wandering around, and maybe the entrance would be in the shape of a skull, and you had to walk in through the mouth. I was so ready. “So where’s the grave I’ve got to desecrate?”

Koschei looked at my obvious glee with reproach and no small amount of pity. “I did not bind it to his flesh. I bound it to his spirit. He has passed from this world into the realm of the dead, and he has taken the shard with him where none can follow.”

What did that even mean? “So…”

“It is beyond your reach, Eternal. Beyond both of us, and Leofric’s quest to assemble the blade and rally all to his side too. Amaranth is our prison. Even in death, we cannot escape it.”

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes so that they didn’t explode out of my head from all the pressure in my skull. There was a scream of rage trapped inside me, and I had to block every exit or there was no way of knowing where it would come blasting out. When I trusted myself to speak, all that I managed was a rumbling groan. “That is the opposite of helpful. You get that, right?”

“We could not have known that Araphel might someday return.” Koschei was already mounting a defense. “I was doing what I must to protect the Faun. You have seen how the Solar Court’s chosen people have treated them. You bear their flesh; you know their burden. I had to do what I could to keep them from harm.”

Trusting my eyeballs to stay put, I lowered my hands and gave him a baleful stare. “And instead you doomed the world. Good job.”

He was fidgeting, angry at me for questioning his decisions, or angry with himself for making them. “The Faun—”

I wasn’t letting him use them as an excuse. Not when it was so blindingly obvious that all he cared about was keeping the Faun shard out of Leofric’s hands at any cost. Did he actually care for them at all, or were they just the ideal excuse? “The Faun could be living in some beautiful green forest with plenty of food and freedom to roam, but you dragged them here to the dead end of nowhere so that you could hide from Leofric. So you could plan your little wars against him and prove once and for all that your team is the biggest and toughest. Exceptional work, buddy. Really looking out for them.”

“If they do not fight back, then the whole world will be taken from them. Would you have them roll over and die?” Was he talking about the Faun or himself? If all he knew was endless war, of course, the promise of peace felt like imminent death.

“Have you taken a look outside lately? Do you know how little of Amaranth is still populated by anything other than monsters? We built a whole new island kingdom last month. We roamed across empty plains full of game and giant mushroom monsters and…” I could barely look at him. I had to swallow down my disgust. “Whatever parts of Amaranth aren’t overrun by monsters are empty. You’ve had your eyes locked on Leofric for so long that you didn’t even notice that?”

He piped up immediately with another excuse. “The desolation—”

“Is here. Not everywhere.”

He seemed more and more frail with every passing moment. How could he have lived all these thousands of years with nobody calling him on his shit. Was he like Leofric, so sure that he was right that he couldn’t even hear reason. “The Bastion—”

“Stands between you and the stuff that Leofric built. Not the whole world. You could have walked around it. You could have built boats and sailed off along the coast, out to sea, or anywhere else. You could have strolled back out of the Ashen Wastes in whatever direction you first strolled into them, and you would have found somewhere empty for your people to live. But you only cared about beating Leofric.”

Up until that moment, I could tell he had still been trying to play the wise old mentor, but now I’d pushed too far, and his rage reared up. Anger at being questioned. Anger at dooming the Faun to this misery. Anger that should have been turned directly back on himself. This was all his doing. Spittle flecked his lips as he snarled out, “Do you have a clever answer for everything, stripling? Do you know more than all who came before you? Or am I just such a simpering old buffoon that you find it easy to make light of me. The soul of the Faun is that of a warrior. You ask that I take them from the war that they were promised? It would destroy them as surely as any battle. Worse, it would break them.”

“Those old ladies outside, drying out bits of worm and scraping in the dirt to feed everyone, they’ve got your warrior spirit?” I didn’t mean to laugh in his face, but it just kind of came out. “They’d be sad if they didn’t have to camp out in a desert?”

He drew himself up to his full height and unleashed another wave of Aether spirits, prying at the edges of my senses, trying to force their way into my mind and make me see things his way. I caught a glimpse of his legendary Faun hero for just a moment, a shadow of him standing proud and massive between me and the moonlight. Koschei’s voice echoed down to me as I was at the bottom of a well. “The spirit of the Faun…”

It wasn’t going to work this time. I knew the trick now. With a heave of my own Aether, the moonlight peeled away from me, leaving me back in the dark of the cave. I crossed the distance to Koschei in a scramble, wrath pulsing just under my skin as I snarled, “The Faun would survive without you interfering. They might even find that they like not being at war with everyone all the time. I know even I could do with a break from it once in a while, and I think fighting is fun.”

Koschei might not have fallen off his high horse, but he stumbled back away from me quick enough. “You…” I braced myself for the abuse to come, but instead, he let out the saddest little laugh I’d ever heard. “You’ve given me much to think on.”

Well, fair was fair. If he could put up with me being the voice of reason, I could do the same for him. “Listen, I know that you’re right about Leofric. I know he wants to be king of the world, and I know that he’s going to be a nightmare to get rid of once he gets any sort of foot on that ladder. I’m not saying you’re crazy—I get it, he’s bad news—I’m just saying that we need to get our priorities in order. We need to save the world before we fight over who gets to run it.”

He looked at me for the first time with anything resembling respect. “And Leofric is willing to set our conflict aside for this noble goal?”

The sound that came out of my face is best described as a blart. A blart of laughter that I couldn’t stop before it escaped. “You think I’d trust Leo enough to tell him any of this stuff? He’s a psycho.”

“So you expect me to make concessions to him without any in return?” He settled back on his haunches, frowning. “Without even giving him any indication of why I have joined my strength to his?”

“Buddy, I don’t expect anything.” I threw up my hands. “All I know is that I need his shard for this whole thing to work, same as I need the Faun one.”

“I have already told you that our shard is beyond your reach.” Koschei at least had the good grace to look ashamed about it. “Your plan has fallen at the first hurdle.”

To my surprise, the initial rage screaming had faded away to something else bubbling away in the back of my head. I was going to have to sit down and have a good stare at the character sheet in my head to be certain, but there was something about the way the Psychopomp power was phrased that made me think it might be good for more than just perma-killing stuff that was meant to resurrect. “I’ve still got some ideas about that.”

“Ideas?”

“Chernghast has given me some gnarly powers that I might be able to use to get around that whole death thing. I’m actually wondering if maybe this is why he has given me them.”

That seemed to finally have him gobsmacked—even more than the whole end of the world deal. He rocked back off his haunches to land with a thump on his bony backside. “Your patron.”

He didn’t need to hear about the whole deal with my mixed-up god-court allegiance stuff right now, so I just nodded knowingly. “So yeah, let’s just focus on getting Leo’s shard for now.”

“You have given me much to think on. But I am an old man, set in my ways.” He crossed his legs as if it had been his plan all along to sit around on the floor of this cave for the rest of the day. For all I knew, this was how he spent all his time. I’d spent the last month doing obstacle courses and getting slapped around by a sexy elf, so I really wasn’t in the right place to judge anyone’s lifestyle choices. “Give me some time to think. Let me come to some ideas of my own.”

I really wanted to just leave him there to think it through. To come up with some cunning plan that would wrest the Lucis from Leofric’s grasp without me having to fight the dude, and Orphia, and his army. Time wasn’t on my side though. “I can’t hang around too long. There are other Eternals back over in Leo’s camp. My friends. People who care more about this mission than anything else. I can’t leave them there forever. It’s only a matter of time before Leo says something extra-stupid and Mercy shoots him. Or she shoots Orphia on principle. Or—”

“He has two other Eternals at his beck and call?” Every time that I thought Koschei was done being surprised by things, he had some new, disgruntled expression ready to show me.

“Well, he’s got one. And I’ve got two. And you’ve got uh… you.” I counted them on my fingers. “Hold up. Am I winning?”

“I am surprised that Leofric is willing to entertain any Lunar Eternal in his court.” Koschei was watching me carefully now like he thought I was up to something. Great. “He was always of the opinion that we were monsters in mortal flesh.”

“Oh yeah, he still feels that way. So does Orphia. She’s his loyal little minion now. But Mercy and Asher, they’re uh…” My brain stalled out for a minute as I tried to come up with a way to describe our relationship in a way that this old grumpy Eternal would understand. “They’re on my side. Definitely. No question. Even if they are Solar Eternals.”

A sweat had broken out on his forehead. He did not look pleased with this news. He did not look even slightly pleased with this news. “Three fresh-born Solars for the one of you…”

I stopped his descent into panic with a wave of my hands in front of his face. “Yes, but only one of them is a bag of dicks like Leo. We’ve got them outnumbered.”

“The true nature will out.” He sank back down into himself, brows drawing down, eye-lights dimming with his mood. “The tyrant in their blood will always come to the fore.”

“Oh come on. They think we’re all wild animals. You think they’re all slave-masters in training. Isn’t it possible that we’re all just people?”

His squeaky comedy voice came out in a low growl. “You have not seen what I have seen.”

“And you haven’t seen what I’ve seen. They’re my friends.”

“Millenia of experience outweighs your… opinions.” He spat the word like it was dirty. “They will betray you. Bind you. Make you subservient to them. You are not the first to try courting favor with the enemy. Through the Revelation, many of us fought side by side, but in the end, it always turns out the same.”

This was getting out of conversation territory and heading into that big dark patch on the map labeled here be ranting. “It doesn’t need to be perfect, and it doesn’t have to last forever, we just need to hold together long enough to beat Araphel.”

For what felt like forever, he just sat there in silence, brows drawn down, and thoughts so far away he couldn’t even see me on the horizon anymore. I was starting to suspect that he’d genuinely forgotten I was in the room when he grumbled, “Give me time to ponder all this. Go speak with my people. Our people. Learn who they are before you tell me how they should live and die. You owe them that much.”

He seemed to think that the conversation was over. I didn’t really feel like arguing about whether or not we could go on arguing, and the prospect of getting to know some Faun was tempting, so I started walking back to the surface, pausing at the entrance to the cavern for just a moment. “So, uh, they were concerned about me being a monster or something? Should I just tell them you said I’m not and hope they trust me?”

He blinked, then said with absolute conviction, “If you’d lied to me, you’d never have left this cave.”

It would have been laughable if I hadn’t already been manhandled and brain blasted by him in the course of a normal chat. Whatever aura of power was hanging around Leofric was here too. All the centuries spent gathering glory and climbing towards godhood had made him more than the spindly frame that he inhabited. While Leo did his best to cultivate an imposing image, Koschei seemed to do all he could to keep his strength a secret, only for it to come spilling out. There was no denying what he was.

The walk down into the heart of the Wastes had been quick, but climbing back up to daylight seemed to take ages. That conversation could have gone better. I kept feeling like I should have lied to Koschei, or at least told him the truth about different things. Maybe his intrusive Aether brain probing stuff would have told him that I wasn’t being honest with him, but I couldn’t help but feel like I’d screwed up somehow.

I emerged from the cave with my head still repeating the conversation back and forth to myself, only to come face to face with the tip of the Lady Faun’s spear. Caught unawares, instinct kicked in, and I slapped it away, hard enough that the shaft of the thing broke in two. Oops.

Beyond her, the chieftains were still gathered, eating and chatting among themselves. At the sight of me, the air filled with roars of laughter. “The runt returns!”

Lady Faun did not look happy with me as she scrambled to get the top half of her spear out of the ash-bank by the cave entrance where it had been embedded. Sheepish, I tramped over to join her. “Sorry.”

She snarled at me. “This spear survived a hundred hunts.”

There wasn’t much I could do here in the middle of this tainted place, but the spear wasn’t made from the same null material as the ash and the stone. Artifice washed out through the void I could feel all around me and practically leapt to the broken pieces. Putting it back together was as easy as breathing.

It didn’t occur to me until the laughter abruptly stopped and everyone was staring at me that it might have been the wrong move.

Lady Faun had dropped the spear like it was something poisonous and half the chieftains had leapt to their feet, reaching for weapons.

She hissed, “How did you…”

“I told you I was an Eternal. Doesn’t anybody listen?” I reached out with Artifice again, not changing the spear but hefting it back up into her hands.

She caught it, but she was backing away from me with fear in her eyes. “Koschei cannot—”

I cut that off with a shake of my head. “We’re different.”

“I see that.” Her expression went from scared to something else as her gaze traveled up and down me, interested in me in some way that was just this side of predatory.

“He told me to spend time with you all. Get to know you.” I was feeling a bit like a side of meat, the way she was staring and licking her pointed teeth. “So, do you want to show me the ropes?”

The chieftains had settled back into their chatter, but they were eyeing me in a way that was a lot less friendly than Lady Faun. She laughed. “Ropes?”

Right. Yes. Different planet, different lingo. I tried again, “What is a day in the life of a Faun like?”

Her grin grew even wider. “We hunt.”

Chapter 9

The Lady Faun was called Mhirka, and she was not a big fan of people asking her questions. She didn’t bother introducing anyone else as we moved through the camp, and it took a fair bit of badgering before she’d even tell me her name.

I was gradually realizing as we moved out through the circles of stone that this was not anything like the campsite I’d imagined when I first set out. There were hundreds of Faun here. Most of them were working on the haphazard farms in the inner rings, closest to the apex of the desolation, right where I’d expect everything to die the most. Apparently, whatever roots and tubers they’d planted were tougher than the touch of the god of destruction. I could not imagine them tasting good, but maybe evil potatoes were better than regular ones?

There were more stretched-skin tents as we moved farther from the epicenter. Way more than I’d seen on the far side. We headed away from the Bastion, farther from the prying eyes of Leofric and his minions. It made sense that they’d stack up over here.

All the chiefs started to make more sense too. This wasn’t just one clan of Faun. The sparse clothes and armor that they wore were different from one to the next, but I’d see repetitions in color and theme, patterns of scars carved into the bare grey skin, standing up like ridges. Some wore traces of fur, bleached to white or harvested from some snowbound beast. I never seemed to spot the same Faun twice, but they were perpetually in motion. I kept moving my estimates up. There had to be more than a thousand Faun. There were as many of these glorious grey giants as the puny men that Leofric’s wall had to show for itself.

We wove through the camp, following some path that I didn’t know, not heading dead away from Leofric’s lands now but lulling over to one side. I tried to ask why, but Mhirka just snapped, “Shallows!” which was as informative as hell.

The rings crumbled more and more as we headed this way, and when I started to feel living stone that my Artifice could reach in the upturned ridges we passed, I took a second look at what had seemed like the same destruction as surrounded us at the first glance. This was not the same. The walls of stone had been brought down, not by the great explosions when the Voidgod died, but by hammer strikes and effort. No Artifice, just violence. The Faun had beaten the stone into submission, creating a great smooth ramp, disguised as the same chaos that surrounded it.

Why this bit and not any other bit? I couldn’t say. Maybe this bit had just pissed them off.

The dead desert of ash stretched out from the foot of the ramp, and I had to bite back a sigh. I’d had enough of this place to last me a lifetime already. It was only then, when I glanced back up the ramp, that I spotted a half-dozen more Faun trailing along behind us, bristling with spears and jostling each other for position. “Uh, how big is this thing we’re hunting?”

“Khorkhoi are small but fast. You must be ready for them. They spring from the ashes. Listen for them. Your ears will serve better than your eyes.”

“Little red worm dudes. Yeah, I’ve met them before…” I glanced back over my shoulder again. “So why do we need so many people?”

She glanced sideways at me. “Protection.”

“You don’t need any…” I spoke louder so that the Faun trailing behind could definitely hear me. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“They are for you. From me.”

I didn’t laugh. That was good. I got the impression that if I laughed she might have stabbed me in the gizzard, and I don’t even know what a gizzard is. I always picture it as some sort of lizard in my belly? Anyway, good for me, not laughing. “I don’t need protecting.”

She still wouldn’t look at me, and I couldn’t work out why. It was like she was embarrassed about something. “You are a new male, a warrior, joining with our clans. There may be… competition for you among the chieftains, among the women. They want to make sure I do not stake a claim unfairly.”

None of that made sense to me for a surprisingly long time until finally, the penny dropped, and I couldn’t look at her either. They were chaperones to make sure we didn’t get freaky while we were meant to be hunting worms. That was a whole other thing that would never have crossed my mind. I felt like my brain had stalled out. “Oh. Oh! Okay. Wow. I mean, you are like… eight foot of pure gorgeous, and anybody would be crazy to say no—”

“I have no interest in…” She tried to interrupt me as I rambled, but there was no way that I was going to stop with only one foot jammed in my mouth. Oh no. My mouth was running now, and no force in this world could make it stop. I certainly couldn’t.

“…But… uh I’m seeing someone right now, and we haven’t talked about whether or not we’re seeing each other exclusively yet, and I’d really have to talk to her about that before I could even think about—”

She turned to face me head-on and shouted with all sincerity, “You disgust me!”

“Oh thank the gods.” I deflated a bit.

Thankfully, she wasn’t actually paying attention to me as I tried to pull myself back together. She’d dropped down into a crouch, and she was patting at the ash. Desperate for the distraction, I squatted down too. “What is it? Worm-sign?”

She arched a brow. “Worm sign?”

I sighed. “Can you tell where the worm is?”

She pointed. “Beneath the ash.”

“I… I thought you could track it.”

“They leave no tracks.” She cocked her head to the side. “They are under the ash.”

“I… right.” Somehow I had traveled to another world, become buff, slayed giant monsters, landed a hot Alvaren girlfriend, and I was even worse at talking to girls than when I’d been a couch lump. Damned if I was going to stop trying though. “So how do we find some worms for dinner then?”

Her patting on the packed ash had become rhythmic now—a steady rat-a-tat-tat—the sound reverberating down into the ash. “We do not. They find us.”

She went on drumming, and I went on waiting. Now that I understood how it worked, I felt like a bit of an idiot. Like we were going to go stalking over the dunes and catch a worm napping in the sunshine.

Time stretched on, and I tried to join in with the drumming, only to catch a slap on my hand between beats. “Steady. Like rainfall. You have no rhythm.”

So then I was back to hanging around, waiting for worms to show up. I started to wonder if maybe this was an elaborate prank. Hazing the new guy. It seemed in character for the Faun I’d met so far. I mean… it was funny, but I had too much other stuff to be getting on with to appreciate being sent to the store for a skyhook or plaid paint or whatever. Hunting the worm even sounded like a made-up job. I stared down at Mhirka, trying to work out if there was a smirk hiding behind her fixed expression of concentration. If it was there, I couldn’t see it, but then again, her face had been a source of confusion to me since the moment I’d met her. Sexy confusion. Language was translated for me, but expressions on these inhuman faces were inscrutable. I think that’s what inscrutable means anyway.

The longer that I waited, the more that my brain started to pester me. What was I going to do? I didn’t even know why I was here, except to try and make Leofric happy. Something that I personally could not care less about. Actually no, I did care. Anything that made Leo happy was probably a bad thing. The thought of kicking puppies was probably the only thing that got him up in the morning.

What was the best-case scenario here? The Faun attacked the wall for me and all died? Or killed all the soldiers on the other side? There would be too much blood on my hands either way. All because two Eternals had been having a tiff for a millennium or two.

I didn’t like being stuck in a position where I had to choose who lives and dies. That was why when I was a kid and my parents asked if I wanted to be a doctor, I proceeded to be academically disappointing for the rest of my life.

It had been fine here in Amaranth up until now because most of the time when I was deciding people should die, they either wanted to, or they had signed up for it by attacking me first. I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t have to try and balance it in my head. This was different. As far as I could see, the only ones that deserved a hasty chopping up in all of this were Leo and Koschei.

A khorkhoi leapt out of the ground and latched onto my ass before I even noticed the tell-tale puff of ash. “Oh, come on.”

I reached for my sword, but more of them were already bursting up out of the ground as flesh torpedoes launched directly at the center of mass. One by one they latched on, chewing and chewing through my poor, battered armor. It didn’t seem fair that I got wormed when Mhirka was the one doing all the drumming, but I guess when you see a big hunk of man meat like me, it only makes sense to assume it is the buffet.

With a flex of Artifice, I split my great-sword into a pair of cleavers and set to work. Lopping off heads and hoping that would stop them chewing. It did, eventually, when the dumb-ass worm realized that it was missing everything below its neck. But by then there were more coming, and I had no time to think.

Fencing with Seren had honed my reflexes, but nothing could prepare me for a wall of chompy worms all coming at me all at once. If I had a moment to think, I could have made a shield, but the time it took me would have let another dozen of the little nippers latch on. So my blades spun figures of eight, catching them as they came. Some I struck as they went for me, and others splatted against the broad flats of the blades. A few made it through, but not enough, and there were moments when the leaping worms stuttered or slowed, and I could lop the lucky ones free of my flesh before they got much more than a mouthful.

Mhirka stood well back of all this with a smile on her face, not even pretending that she was going to help. If a stray khorkhoi got past me she might step forward to end its wiggles with a thrust of her spear, but she seemed content to let me bear the brunt of wormaggedon.

Gradually, the storm slowed until it was just a gentle patter of worm on iron. Until, finally even that stopped, and there was no sound but the leaking of worm juices into the ash, and the breeze drifting the dunes.

There were still a few detached heads chomping into me as I wiped my blades clean on my thighs. Something wriggled between my teeth, and I spat out a worm giblet. No idea how that got in there. I couldn’t recall biting any worms. Maybe a bit just flew in while I was screaming abuse at the worms. Who knows? “Thanks for all the help.”

Mhirka was pacing back and forth, skewering worm bodies on her spear for ease of transportation, making one giant worm kebab. Gross. “This is the way of the Chagnar Faun. Our enemies send monsters to feast on our flesh, and we make them our dinner.” She hammered her spear down, again and again. “This is the way of the Chagnar Faun, snatching life from the jaws of death. You are not Faun. You are soft. Weak. You seek the easiest path in all things.”

I watched her angrily stabbing the stuff I’d already killed, brushed some more heads off my shoulders, and then actually thought about what she was saying instead of getting angry about it. There was no point getting mad. She was right. I wasn’t a Faun. I liked them, they seemed like fun people to hang out with, but I was an Eternal, and pretending otherwise would have made us both less than we were.

Blinking my eyes so I could escape the limits of my chunky man-flesh and use Artifice, I transformed my cleavers into an iron pike, swayed for a moment, then started skewering the worms by my feet, haphazardly at first, then building up speed. Once I was sure that the anger from her commentary was all gone, I asked. “Who told you that everything has to be hard?”

She brandished her stick of slimy meat. “This is our way. To face the harshest challenges and emerge stronger for it.”

Still, something niggled at the back of my mind. Koschei had brought them here, but somehow, they were happy with it. It made no sense. Even the dvergar had bitched and moaned about their tropical paradise because it was different. People didn’t just accept stuff like perpetual misery and deserts of flesh-eating worms. “But why though?”

“Why must the bird fly?” She drew back the first of her spears and reached for another, now surrounded by meat and dripping with slime. “This is our nature.”

I snapped my fingers. “Kiwis.”

Oh, there was no confusion about her facial expression now. That was definitely contempt. 100% pure sneer. “What nonsense do you speak now?

“Kiwis are a bird. They grew up on an island with no predators, so they don’t fly.” I wiggled on the spot, kiwi impersonation spot on—shame she’d never seen one. “They just waddle around, looking chill and chubby.”

Contempt had twisted into confusion. “You have some point in this?”

I kept on skewering bugs for dinner, getting more and more vigorous as my temper frayed. “Birds fly because they’re forced to. Fish swim because it’s the only way to get around in water. You keep surrounding people with deserts and death, they’re going to think that is all that there is.”

She spat into the ash. “We have no need for the soft comforts of other lands. We are strong.”

“Because all the ones who aren’t die.” I didn’t know that for certain until I said it out loud, but it was the only thing that made sense really. The logical extreme of their obsession with individuality and personal power above all else.

She beat a fist against her chest, smearing gore and worm-sludge. “They are not Chagnar. They are not strong.”

“So even if they could cure diseases, plan better hunts… even though they could make you a spear that flies straighter than any you can make yourself, if they can’t use it, then they deserve to die?” She had to understand how wrong this all was when I spelled it out to her. She had to.

She didn’t. “That is our way.”

I was scrabbling for figurative straws as I chased a tricky bit of worm around in circles with my spear-tip. “And all the old grey women I saw back at camp, they deserve to die too?”

She drew herself up to her full height and stared back across the ash towards the stony spines of home. “If they have not got the strength to stand, they should fall.”

“Yeah, that’s insane.” Oops didn’t mean to say that bit out loud. Oh well, I was committed now. “And I’d bet anything you like that all this survival of the fittest crap comes from Koschei.”

The tip of her worm-loaded spear swung to point at me, fury etched into her face, her shoulders aligned with the spear. Every part of her was tensed for the lunge. “It is our creed. Despite all that the Faun have endured, still we survive.”

She looked genuinely surprised when I didn’t fade back from the threat. Hell, I was surprised at the fire in my voice when I shouted back, “You deserve to do more than survive! You deserve to thrive! If you had just a little patch of real land, your farmers could feed everyone without having to scrape in the dirt! You could hunt real animals instead of worm meat!”

She didn’t attack, but she didn’t falter either. “We have been driven here by our enemies. Driven to the edge of—”

I cut that nonsense off dead in its tracks. “What enemies?”

She swung her spear out, flicking bug juice in an arc, pointing out at everywhere but here. “All the people of this world loathe us, they would see us—”

“There are no people.” She pulled up short, stunned that I’d interrupted her again. “Almost everywhere I’ve been in this world is empty. There are monsters all over the place, sure, but big tough Chagnar Faun like you could clear them out in like a day, tops. The only one who has driven you anywhere is… you. All of you, following Koschei. Obeying him like good little slaves.”

She flung down the spear and charged me then. I dropped my own and caught her hands before they could lock on my neck. She roared in my face, “Chagnar bow to no one!”

She pushed against me, and I could see the moment of surprise when there was no give. I had been buffing up my potency since the minute I landed on this rock. Fingers interlinked, she was the one to give ground as I surged back in against her. Her feet skidded in the wet ash. “Then why are you doing what he tells you?”

With a twist of her wrists and her hips, all my bulk was turned against me. I lost my footing, almost tumbling to the dirt. If it hadn’t have been for my grip on her hands, I probably would have gone down. Even so I was down on one knee as she growled down to me. “The strongest lead. This is our way.”

I didn’t know I was grinning until I saw my face reflected in her eyes. No wonder she was pissed off. “So if I kicked his ass, you’d all do what I say?”

She pushed down on me until my wrists were twisting back, and I let her drive me down until I was almost sitting. She snarled. “Koschei is beyond you.”

Then I flopped back, letting her weight and mine carry us both over in a clumsy roll. One moment she was standing over me, the next she was laid out on the ash with her narrow waist trapped between my knees and her arms pinned down.

“Keep underestimating me.” I leaned in close enough that I could feel her frantic breath heaving on my face—so close that I could see her figure of eight pupils widening in excitement. “I dare you.”

She did not try to buck me off, laying perfectly still beneath me as I clambered back to my feet and collected our spears of bugs, hefting them up onto one shoulder and setting off back towards camp.

Sometime between me getting up and me holding out her spears to her, she had found her footing once more, but I was very deliberately not paying attention. My blood was thumping in my ears, and I dreaded to think what might happen if she came at me again. I had kept my temper under a short leash since I’d almost killed Seren. I didn’t like what this rage in my gut could make my body do without even consulting my brain. The funny thing was, I was never an angry guy before I died. Maybe it was some flaw or feature of this new body. Maybe it was something to do with being a lunar eternal, beast of chaos and all that jazz. Maybe now that I had enough power, I could feel the desire to change things for the better burning in me.

She took her spears without a word, and if our little entourage of observers had anything to say about us wrestling in the dust, they kept it to themselves. Given what I’d seen of the Faun so far, maybe wrestling was another normal bit of conversation for them. Regardless, they beat a retreat ahead of us, and we came back to the settlement, if you could even call it that, before the sun had dipped down beneath the highest upshots of stone.

Mission accomplished on all counts. There was plenty of bug for folks to eat, and I had learned what I needed to know to understand the Faun. Even if it was stuff I’d have preferred to go my whole life never knowing.

Mhirka parted ways with me as soon as she could, still keeping herself to herself. We dumped our worm-load into a basket of her clan, then that was the end of it. The prickling anger that had kept me painfully aware of her presence all the way back across the dunes abated as she shuffled off into the crowd. I wanted to follow her, but I also wanted to stay as far away from her as possible. I had no idea what might happen the next time we met, and the longer I didn’t have to work it out, the happier I’d be.

So I wandered on my own for a little while as the sun crept lower and the winds whipping across from the barren expanse beyond the stones turned chill. I saw everything in the place through new eyes now. The reluctance to share any task, making each farmer seek out their own little patch of dirt, every bent-backed old Faun shrinking with age to set up their own stew pot. Even the scouts I passed on my way back in were all alone, all peering out in the same direction when one of them could have done the job of three if they’d just talk. The endless clashing colors of all the clans came to make more sense too. Each one was more of an extended family than any sort of communal culture. Only one thing was holding them all together here in this hell, and that was Koschei.

It all came back to him. Every thought that I had, every plan that I tried to concoct, it was him or Leo in the center of it. Now I’m not claiming that I’m a genius or above-average intelligence… or of average intelligence, but when all of your plans hinge on the whims of one person, you start thinking about going to see that one person. I headed towards Koschei’s cave in the middle of the settlement, shouldering past the chieftains that moved to block my way without even noticing them loom over me. It was posturing, and I didn’t have the time or the patience for it. Surging strength, I could have thrown them off the crest. As it was, I just pushed through them as unobtrusively as I could muster.

There were some comments about my diminutive size, which were honestly pretty brave coming from people with crotches at punching height, but I paid them no attention. Why would I bother arguing with the monkey when the organ grinder was right down that tunnel?

Once more my journey into the depths of the earth seemed to take so much longer than it had when Koschei was bouncing along ahead of me, and this time I worked out why. Even though I didn’t rely on them the way that I did my eyes and ears, my other senses were deadened down here. I couldn’t feel the materials I was walking over with Artifice. I couldn’t sense the pulse of life outside beyond the stone. Even the gentle cushioning layer of the memories embedded in the stone was missing when my Aether flared up. It was like I was drifting through empty space even though I could feel the gravel crunching underfoot, and it left me disorientated.

When I came out into the room where it happened, it took me by surprise. It shouldn’t have. It was the same distance I’d walked to reach it the first time around, but somehow, it was a shock when I stepped out into the open space.

For his part, Koschei seemed unsurprised. He was still sitting cross-legged and glowing like a beacon of Aether. I didn’t know if he was communing with the ancestors or just having a good dig around this area trying to sense the history despite the null zone. All I knew was that his mind was elsewhere.

I poked him with my toe.

He went on glowing and smiling beatifically like a tiny buddha. Not super useful when I needed to talk to him. And I did need to talk to him. I needed to see if what I’d said earlier had changed his mind in any way—if his mind even could be changed after so many centuries in the same rut.

I poked him again.

His eyes snapped open, and moonlight flooded the chamber. I didn’t crap myself, but it was a near thing. “You have returned to me.”

“Yup. I’m back.” I tried not to groan as I said it.

“And you have lived among my people for a day, walked their path, learned their ways, come to understand why they live as they choose to live.”

Tactful. I had to be tactful. What would Mercy say? Actually, no, that was a bad standard for tactful. What would Asher say? Nope… actually he is no good at talking to people either. Oh gods, if I was the one who was good at talking, we were all screwed. I couldn’t even get pizza places to throw in free garlic bread when it said on the menu that they gave you free garlic bread. I grumbled out, “Far as I can tell, they live the way you tell them to.”

If I’d hoped he might have let that little prod go by without comment, then I was dreaming. “Oh, they may heed my counsel, but there is no denying that the vital strength of the Chagnar is unmatched among mortal races. They compete, and they strive for greatness. They live and breathe it.”

Once again the blood started to beat in my ears. When I thought about what he had done to these people. Not only dragging them out here as the culmination of his centuries of manipulation, but embedding his twisted ideas about right and wrong in them to the point that they thought what he told them was their own culture. It came out in a growl. “We can do the philosophy argument later. I want to know what you’ve decided.”

He raised a hairless brow. “Do you mean, will I cast aside my duties to the Faun just because you have been convinced by some charlatan that you have some great destiny and history is being unwritten?”

I had to un-grit my teeth to try and push through. “I mean, are you going to talk about peace, at least long enough for us to stop the apocalypse?”

He looked entirely too smug when he answered me. “No.”

“No.” I echoed it back to him.

“I do not know how Leofric has turned your mind or what new powers he has unlocked since last we crossed paths. I do not know how he has created this illusion of a White Prophet in your memories or contorted reality to make you believe that the Alvaren walk the world once more. I do not know how he had poisoned your spirit so that all of these obvious contrivances might be believed true, but I do know that I cannot walk into a trap and leave the Chagnar without their most stalwart defender.” So, apparently, he’d had a good rummage around in my brain with his Aether powers. My brain meat had been violated. I couldn’t really bring myself to be upset, let alone surprised.

He turned his glowing gaze off towards the Bastion, as though he could see clear through the solid stone and all the intervening distance to where Asher, Mercy, Orphia, and Leofric were probably having another really awkward dinner party right now—assuming that Mercy hadn’t already started kicking teeth out of people’s heads. I wished that I was there with them, instead of down here in this dark hole.

They were on Koschei’s mind too. “How could I abandon my people when the enemy is massing beyond the wall. Four Eternals bound to the path of the tyrant. One of them of an age and power with me. Three more, newborn but full of boundless potential. It is far too great a threat to allow to fester. We must lance this boil before it can corrupt the whole world.”

“Thanks for clearing that up. You’re going to ignore everything I said to you, and everything that you plucked out of my memory without asking, except the bits that fit in with what you’ve already decided, and then you’re going to pretend that I’m crazy instead of accepting that things are changing. Cool. That makes things easier.”

I pointed my spear at him.

Chapter 10

His eyes did not widen now. All the surprise that he’d made a great show of earlier was absent. “So the assassin finally reveals his true nature. When trickery did not avail him, he turned to—”

“Shove story-time up your scrawny ass.” He actually seemed shocked that someone had interrupted him. “There are no Faun around to believe the trash you’re trying to spin into gold anyway.”

He rose slowly to his feet, coming up to about my knees, but radiating such power in the close confines of the cave that it overwhelmed me. His voice beat in on me from every side, the power of his Aether hammering at all my senses. “First, you tried to sway me from my course with lies, and now you seek my end. Well, I must tell you that it shall not come at your hands, you mewling whelp. I’ve outlived stars in the sky while you’ve yet to reach the span of a single lifetime.”

He knew everything about me. He was digging around in my skull even now. He knew everything that I had to say before I said it. I said it anyway. “I‘m not working with Leofric. I’m not some—” Pain lanced through my head as he probed deeper, forcing every word to come out true in a great wild rush. “I didn’t come here to kill you, but you’ve rigged the whole of Faun civilization up so that the only ones that people will listen to are the strongest. You’ve made it so that when Araphel comes back, they’ll go running back to him with open arms. I’ve got to put an end to all that, right now. But because of your stupid ‘might makes right’ setup, if I want the Faun to listen to me, I’ve got to beat you.”

“And what shall you tell them to do, in this imaginary world where you could best me.” He whispered it into my ear, and I spun to see nothing there amidst the maelstrom of Aether.

Actually talking was becoming more and more difficult. All my senses had been dulled down by this place, and suddenly, being exposed to all his dazzling Aether was like ripping off a blindfold and staring straight into the sun. I could feel my brain vibrating inside my skull, and still, he poured out more and more. The weight of his power, of his will, was pressing in on me from every direction. Crushing me. “I’ll tell them to go find somewhere that the living is easy. I’d tell them to farm and frolic and fornicate and do all the other f things that people are meant to do to be happy and healthy.”

I had no idea where he was now. The swirling ghosts of his memories intermingled with my own, throwing up glimpses of the places we’d been like I was seeing them through a hall of mirrors. The bloody forest with giant mushrooms traipsing through. Some barren wasteland covered in purple scrub with the great stone tablets of some ancient civilization ground down to gravel. The Alvaren city, trapped beneath the earth. The battlefield that this place had once been, sun blotted from the sky by the wings of Voidspawn beasts. When Koschei spoke, his voice beat at me from every direction, louder than anything I’d ever heard. “You would make weaklings of them.”

“I’d give them their lives back, to do what they wanted with them.” It came out like a whimper instead of a roar. He was getting in my head. He was making me believe that I was powerless compared to him. When there was a display like this going on, it was hard not to be shocked by the disparity in power between us. The first blow hadn’t even been struck, and I already felt like I was dying. “You’re meant to be all about freedom, don’t you want that for them?”

He hammered the difference between us into me like the nails of a coffin. “Only the strong are truly free. All others must bend to their might.”

How could I hope to fight back against him? He had thousands of years to grow in power, and I’d been here for the blink of an eye. I’d spent more time dicking around in the jungle with Seren than I had actually doing anything important. All the glory I’d fought so hard for was nothing compared to his. I was nothing, and he was everything, and I should just get down on my knees right now and grovel for forgiveness.

He was strong. I was weak. He was so close to being a god, and I was so close to being dirt.

I might as well just give up now. I might as well just lie down and let him kill me. If he thought that was what was best, I should just obey him. He was so much more than me, so he must be right. The strong ruled the weak. That was the way of the world. That had always been the way. Everywhere.

But when I opened my mouth, the words that came were not the abject submission that I was compelled to offer. Instead, I rumbled out, “You sound like Leofric.”

I guess that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. There was a moment, just a brief moment, where I could grab a breath before he came pounding back in on me with all his power and the crushing certainty that he was better than me in every single way. My own feeble Aether power flared up in that breath, but it just wasn’t up to the task of holding him off, not when he was bringing it all to bear. I had no idea what his pillar of Aether looked like, but if it was smaller than a redwood, I’d be extremely surprised.

The spear had fallen from my hands at some point, and I couldn’t even see where it had landed. Not that I’d need a weapon to throw myself at his mercy and beg for forgiveness like a worthless idiot like me should.

He’d pushed me too far. That last pulse of emotion was tinged with his irritation—both at me talking back to him and my continuing to resist. He was angry at me for not realizing how worthless I was. The joke was on him. I always knew what I was worth. I had always known, even back when I spent my life slobbing around in front of a television doing nothing, that I was awesome.

I closed my eyes and slipped out of my body. It was even scarier out here than it had been inside. At least in my body, I’d had the dull sensation of stone beneath my feet to ground me, even if my Artifice insisted that it wasn’t there. Without the anchor of flesh, all the spirits that Koschei was invoking against me became visible and terrifying, sweeping in and out of my head, one after the other. All that effort to charge in and make me feel like crap.

Shame that there was nobody home.

He’d realize in a moment that I was gone, but for now, I could think clearly without being bombarded. I still couldn’t see where he was through the frankly ridiculous number of spirits he’d called up to flood the room, but my senses did latch onto one solid thing in all of the swirling chaos. The solid iron spear I’d carried in with me.

It was an anchor back to reality. Solid metal. Rough-hewn by my shoddy Artifice skills. Pointy at one end. Long. Otherwise unremarkable. Useless where it was lying.

A simple flex of my will made it a sword once more, and another tug brought it back to my hands through the swirl of incorporeal abuse, clearing the ghosts away for just a moment.

I had to drop back into my body to catch the sword, and all at once, I was bombarded again. Koschei was upping the intensity of his brain-crushing, pouring all his power out in Aether, summoning up every spirit he had at his disposal and launching it into me with the clear message that I was worthless. I was less than him, less than everyone.

I had a sword in my hands, but what use was a sword against that power, against that crushing knowledge that I was useless and worthless and pitiful. It couldn’t cut the certainty out of my head.

But, thanks to Psychometry, it could cut the summoned spirits that were putting that certainty there. With heavy limbs, burdened with the knowledge that it was pointless to fight back, I swung.

The first swing was as useless as he made me think it was going to be, awkward and clumsy like I’d never held a sword before. The tip struck the stone in front of me, and I nearly lost my grip. Another wave of despair took me. Why was I even trying? I was nothing. I was scum. I was a rat.

Anger boiled up inside my gut. I was a rat that had been backed into a corner. This time when my sword came up it sang, whistling through the air, first up, then around. Practicing the perfect defense that Seren had been forcing me to drill through day after day, every angle of attack blocked and parried with each sweeping rotation of the blade. Everywhere it struck a spirit, that spirit fragmented into the same nothingness. I wasn’t nothing. They were nothing. They weren’t even alive.

Still, the torrent came on and on, dread and fear and loathing turned aside with a slash. Self-pity skewered through when it tried to lunge at me from behind. There was no end to all the spirits that Koschei could summon, but there was no end to my dance either. The leaden weight of my inferiority melted away as my muscles began to burn.

My blade moved faster and faster, this great iron slab spinning like a ballet dancer around me, guided by my strength, by my certainty in my own skill. Practice had made perfect. Not one of the ghosts made it to me unscathed, and the few that came limping in were garbled and mangled, bearing tiny broken fragments of the thoughts that they were meant to convey.

I was weaker than Koschei. That was all the first one to drift over me managed to whisper, and I almost laughed out loud. Of course, I was weaker than him. Everything was weaker than a demi-god with thousands of years to build himself up, what did that matter?

I was younger than him; he knew better than me. Everyone I’d ever met thought they knew better than me, why would I start believing them now?

I could not defeat Koschei. If that was true, then why was he so scared of fighting me that he’d rather blast me with a million ghosts than actually try his luck?

Koschei kept on going, dumping more and more of them on me, trying to wear me down, and entirely forgetting the first thing that I had learned about this Faun body of mine. It did not tire. Faun are relentless. The longer this went on, the more of his resources he burned through, whereas me? I could do this all night, and every swing just got better and better.

The certainty that he had put into me crumbled in the face of my questions. The doubts that he was trying to put into me were coming from him. He was the one who was afraid. He was the one that didn’t know how this was going to end. I was a giant horny god of death, and he was a little goblin hiding in a cave, and he expected me to cower before him?

I was breathing hard, but not too hard to bark out a laugh. “It isn’t working, old man.”

He was completely justified in blasting me at that point.

[703/890 Health]

A blinding ray of azure light cut through the swirl of ghosts and hit me square in the chest. Ice spread out from it, crackling across my armor and skin, the chill sinking down into me, bringing the frantic hammering of my heart to an abrupt stop.

Still, the cold spread, even as I stood there dead on my feet. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t move. One shot had been all that it took to end me. All this time, he’d just been toying with me.

I fell to my knees with no strength to keep my weight up, and the swirl of spirits departed, Koschei brushing them away with a flick of his wrist. “You were never my match, and you were a fool to think you might be.”

Still, the ice spread, creeping up my neck, down my waist, encasing me in a crackling crystalline shell, sapping the warmth of life from my dying body wherever it went.

Confidence returning to him, Koschei strolled in closer. “You could have served a purpose. You could have fought by my side, but instead, this is what you choose?”

Deep within my chest, my heart thumped. The cold had not stopped it, just slowed it to such a crawl that I barely had the strength to stay conscious. Something must have shown on my face because Koschei tutted. “Did you think me an old doddering fool? Ready to cast you back out into the world to gather strength and attack me again when I least expect it? Do you think that you are the first Eternal that I have defeated in all my years? The first of my opponent’s pieces that I have taken from the board?”

The ice had me coated up to the chin and was down past my knees, spreading across the floor and pinning me in place in a big solid chunk of frozen water. It was cool down here, even before the ice he’d summoned. With a lurch, I understood what he had planned. I was going to be an icicle for the rest of eternity. Trapped like some fossil, but awake and aware of it the whole time.

Hell, no.

Two pillars within me flared to life, Primal and Ascension. The strength flooded back through my body as Restoration undid the damage of the ice-blast, and then it doubled up as I surged my potency.

Like the big buff man I was, I flexed right out of the ice.

It burst out from around me in a shower of chunks, spritzing Koschei and giving me the moment I needed to fall forward and scoop my sword up in my hands. He was surprised, but he wasn’t taken by surprise. His hands were surrounded in a nimbus of that same azure light, his stance the casual combat readiness I could see in Seren before we sparred. Loose and limber.

I struck. Sweeping my sword up from the floor and into a wild thrust that might have gotten lucky. It didn’t. He slapped the flat of the blade aside, leaving a frosty handprint, and he had his other hand clawed and reaching for me as I stumbled forward.

No, thank you. Once in the icebox was quite enough for one day.

He might have knocked the thrust wide, but I had already been aiming down as well as forward thanks to the height difference. It didn’t take much of a twist to make my blade jam down into the stone floor, jarring me to a halt and sending an ache all the way up to my shoulders.

His hand couldn’t quite reach me as it swiped by.

Before he could recover and lunge at me, I staggered back. I had reach on my side … unless he decided to blast me again. Which he probably would if he had any sense.

He blasted me again.

This time I knew what was coming, and I managed to get my sword around into the path of the ray before it could strike. It reflected neatly off the pocked and ugly side of the great cleaver blade and traced a thin line of frost up the wall to the side of him.

I worked out I could angle it at him the same moment he did, so even as I struggled to twist my sword against the torrent of freezing energy he was squirting out his fist like a firehose, he abruptly cut it off.

We began to circle each other, waiting for our opportunity. Still, he seemed intent on boring me to death with speeches instead of actually fighting. “You have some tricks, I cannot deny that, but they will not avail you against true power.”

I growled back. “You didn’t dig deep enough in my head when you had the chance.”

He sneered. “You would invite me back in?”

I gave my sword a turn in my hands, trying to get some feeling back after my time as a popsicle. “How about I share my secrets the old-fashioned way?”

He laughed in my face and hammered his fists together, sending a wave of freezing air out through the room that crusted my eyelashes with frost and made the floor slick and slippery. “You have no secrets. I have seen it all. All as I might have expected from a tag-along lackey of the Solar Court.”

Another clap of his hands and another arctic breeze swept through. He didn’t even need to fight me really. He could just keep chilling me down until I was useless. Restoration and Potency Surge wouldn’t be recharged for ages. I’d be a big cartoon ice-cube with horns sticking out long before then.

“You saw what you expected to see, but you didn’t see everything. You didn’t see the things that your Aether couldn’t touch.”

He scoffed. “There is no power in this world that could hide the whole of you from my sight.”

I swung for him, and he slipped around me with almost casual ease, darting in to slap at my leg and making me dance out of reach, puffs of my breath drifting between us. All these years building up that tiny body of his, there was no limit to his speed. To his strength. Good thing that I’d intrigued him enough that he was still playing with me. “Araphel could do it.”

“No being still living in this world could do it.” He rolled his eyes, moonlight strobing over the cave roof. “Unless your deranged tale of the Voidgod returning from the dead involves him appearing right behind me at this moment, I do not think that I have anything to worry about.”

He tried for another blast at me, the startlingly bright blue ricocheting off my blade right back at him and making him dodge aside. I tried to rush in, but the impact of the beam attack had knocked me back on my heels, so I lost the precious fraction of a second when he was off-balance, and he was ready before I could get near enough to swing.

We circled again as my poor, battered brain tried to come up with a plan. I let my mouth run in the meantime. “The only person that I could trust with my secret is somebody who is about to die. Someone I know is going to take it to their grave.”

He rushed in, almost jovial as he swept by my clumsy parry and punched into my ribs. It sent a sharp shot of pain and chill up through me. Something cracked when he hit me, but I couldn’t say if it was bone breaking or ice forming inside me.

He gloated as I stumbled away, gasping for breath. “Then you could not have chosen more poorly. As you know all too well. I am Eternal.”

I let the pain and exhaustion show, letting my sword droop down until I was leaning on it. One lung was frosted shut inside me, and the other was working double time and still struggling. The chill was slowing my heart again, but it was still thrumming away thanks to all the adrenaline rushing through me.

When I turned my head back up, he had closed the distance between us and was readying another blow. “So was Talon. Right up until the moment he wasn’t.”

He froze in place as if all that Creation energy had been turned back on him. “Archmage Talon?”

“He had the shard soul-bound to him.” I pushed myself back up to my full height as he gawked at me. “There was only one way to break that bond.”

His eyes widened as he read the truth of my words on my face. “No.”

I took a step forward, leaving my sword standing wedged in the stone behind me. I stalked after Koschei as it was his turn to step back. “I already told you Chernghast gave me the power.”

“Chernghast could not.” Spittle flew from his lips as his rage and confusion bubbled out. He was an old man, set in his ways, that was what he’d said. He couldn’t even comprehend a world different from what he already knew. Just the thought of it made him angry. “No god of the Solar or Lunar court can end the life of an Eternal. Their nature is as ours. They are beings of creation. The only god who could grant such a gift would be…”

“Araphel.”

I reached for the dark pillar inside me, not to use it, just to taste it. To touch it. To let the darkness within me show in my eyes. I could not see the eyes in my own head, of course, but I could see every detail that the darkness had hidden from me before springing into sharp contrast—things that I’d had to rely on my eyes’ weak glow to illuminate before.

Koschei could see it. He saw the light in my eyes die and the darkness fill them. That same impossible darkness, so devoid of light that it hurt to look right at it. I had him off balance before, confused and angry, but now I had him afraid.

“No. You cannot be. He… he is dead. He could not make Eternals. There are… It is impossible. Impossible!” As if he could punch my existence away, he swung at me with all his might. It struck me in the gut, full force. I made no attempt to get out the way. I made no attempt to stop it. Something inside my muscled torso popped under the pressure of the blow, and agony spread throughout me.

[626/890 Health]

I accepted that blow as my due. I accepted the pain in exchange for what it gave me. What did it give me? It gave me a firm grasp on the little bastard’s wrist.

He tried to pull it back, to rip himself free of my grasp, but I had been through this before, and I followed along with him instead of trying to hold him still. It didn’t matter where he went now. It didn’t matter that the chill of the aura around his hand was freezing us together or burning at my skin as it spread out from the point of impact. All that mattered was that I had him.

With a flex of Artifice, my sword leapt to my hand. I held it upright, the tip almost touching the cavern’s roof, and took a steadying breath.

Koschei whimpered. “You can’t.”

But I could. And I did.

He twisted away from it and flailed with all his might, so the first blow was clumsy, at an odd angle. It deflected from his face and clipped over his shoulder before going wide. His Vitality was so high that a single sword blow couldn’t break his skin. That was fine. Like I said before, Faun bodies don’t tire.

In a flurry of motion too fast for my eyes to follow, he started pummeling me with his free hand, each strike launching an icicle spike deep into my flesh, over and over. Chill spread through me, but the rage burning at my core never spluttered.

I hefted the sword again and slammed it right down on his shoulder this time. The skin parted beneath his robe, and blood began to flow. Anyone else would have lost their arm to that first hit. Anyone else would have been lucky. They wouldn’t have had to feel the second, third, and fourth hits that it took to dig down through his millennia-old flesh and slip that limb free of the torso in a gory spray.

The scent of blood filled my nose as I brought my sword up and down. Up and down. Methodical. Like a butcher at the block. Up and down. Up and down. Skin and robe. Blood and muscle. Gristle and bone.

Somewhere in the middle of my butchery, he began to scream, cursing me in every language of Amaranth, shrieking in pain, and demanding I stop. Demanding the Faun come running to his rescue. We were too deep in the cave for anyone to hear.

I didn’t have a magic ray gun, lightning bolts shooting out of eyes, or brain molesting ghosts at my disposal. That wasn’t the kind of Eternal that I was. All I had was my sword. So that was what I used.

With his arm off, there were no more counter-attacks. No more attempts to freeze me, or hit me, or fight back at all. Koschei stared down at it lying in a pool of his blood like he couldn’t believe this was happening. His voice was a mousey squeak. “What have you done?”

Most people lose an arm and that is the end of the fight, but not my boy Koschei. He had too much Vitality for grievous bodily harm to faze him. Too much of the nebulous “Health” for the fact that half of his torso was a raw open wound after my clumsy attacks to let him die.

So I did what I had to do to kill him. I kept on swinging.

To give the man credit, he kept on trying to pull away from me, even as I beat him and beat him. When one of his legs fell away at the hip, he still went on struggling, lifting the other one up to push against me. That made it even more awkward to whack him, and it finally gave him the leverage he needed to bring his full strength to bear against me. Down two limbs, and he still bowed me over with a tug.

The frantic terror seemed to leave him the moment that he realized that he still had power. He was a real mess, but despite the chunks missing out of his face and his whole right side being fairly meatloaf-y at this point, his eyes narrowed as he worked out his next move.

I couldn’t give him time to think. If it came down to thinking, I was going to lose.

Spirits started coiling around us again. He was going for another brain gouge. Well, I wasn’t giving him the opportunity. We’d been fighting down here for what felt like an hour, so I wasn’t surprised to find my Pillar of Ascension glowing away at full power again. I surged my strength, and for one wonderful moment, I was strong enough to stand up straight despite him straining against me. I used that wonderful moment to spin on the spot and throw the little bastard as hard as I could.

Koschei spun end over end across the cave, twisting himself around so he could land limb side down and scuttle off like the weirdest crab you’ve ever seen. Not on my watch.

Blood fell in a splatter as my sword flowed out of its solid state and reformed in the same worm-hunting spear I’d carried worms back to town with earlier. It wasn’t pretty or elegant, but it was solid in my hand as I drew back my arm and launched it after Koschei.

He saw it coming, of course he saw it coming, and he twisted again in the air to avoid it, but his maimed body was hideously off balance, and my surged Potency had it flying so fast that it took even me by surprise.

Ever seen a pinned butterfly? That was Koschei.

Blood bubbled out of his mouth with the latest scream. The spirits that had been called up wisped away into nothingness as he lost concentration. I had him.

Even with a spike through his chest, an arm and a leg missing, lumps of his flesh scattered across the floor, and more blood sprayed about than I thought that his little body could ever have held, he still went on struggling. As for me? I was starting to feel every one of the injuries he’d inflicted on me. The icicles in my stomach had started to melt, and my own various fluids were running down, mixed with that water. I staggered as dizziness swept over me, and the jolt knocked one of the ice spikes right out of me. Wouldn’t have thought that would hurt more than it going in to start with, but it did.

While I could use Restoration time and time again, I couldn’t use it on myself again so soon. If I wanted to lay hands on Koschei and try to stitch him back into shape, the Pillar would allow it, but using it on the same person repeatedly was against the rules somehow. I’d have to wait it out a little longer, feeling my own health score dripping lower and lower with every patter of gore on the floor.

I reminded myself that it didn’t matter—that dying wasn’t the end for me, the way I was going to make it the end for him—but it still felt bad. It hurt, and it felt like… dying. I’d already died too many times to want to experience it again. At least two times too many.

It felt like a marathon just walking over to the far wall with all my injuries, and through it all I could still see Koschei wriggling and twisting, trying to push himself away from the wall and along the spear so that he could get down and go on the offensive all over again. The spear was longer than his arm and his leg, so all he actually managed to do was push himself off the wall, at which point the weight of his big head full of profound thoughts flipped him to dangle upside down.

He reached for the spear haft with his one remaining hand and started pulling himself along, his hands so slippery with his own blood that he could barely get any traction.

The light of my eyes was dimming. I had to grab onto the end of the spear to keep my balance by the time I reached him, and I had to hold onto it to keep my balance as I kicked him in the head, sending him slithering back to hit the wall once more.

I spat out a mouthful of my own blood to mix with all of his. “You’re tough. I’ll give you that.”

Koschei didn’t deign to answer me. I was pretty sick of the sound of his voice by that point anyway. A twist of my wrist and a touch of Artifice snapped half the length off the spear, and I reformed it into a cleaver.

A hideous mewling sound filled the cave, echoing back and forth. Koschei grabbed for me, but I stepped around to the side with no arm, and he couldn’t spin himself around before I caught him by the top of his bald head and held him still for the last cut.

“Goodbye, old man.”

That would have been a killer one-liner before I chopped his head clean off, but reality wasn’t that pretty. My first strike rebounded from what should have been soft tissue in his neck, hardened through all his years of advancement into something tougher than it had any right to be. So I had to chop at it again and again and again.

There was no sense of victory by the time that I was done. No sense of anything except disgust, as layer after layer of flesh was parted by my hacking. This was ugly work, but someone had to do it. I concentrated on my Psychopomp gift, and I cut.

With a hollow thump, the head fell to the floor.

New Skill Discovered! [Aether Resistance]

New Skill Discovered! [Spirit Strike]

New Skill Discovered! [Elemental Fist]

New Skill Discovered! [Ascendant Cognition]

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Celerity increased to 22

Piety increased to 8

Polearm: Rank 2/10

Aether Resistance: Rank 4/10

430 Experience Gained

7000 Glory Gained

Tier of Glory Ascended!

Tier of Glory Ascended!

I followed after the dropped head, flopping down beside what was left of Koschei with a groan that seemed to fill up the sudden silence. There was still some dripping as what was left of the old Eternal’s blood drained from his hanging corpse, but after the cacophony of violence that had been filling this place up for what felt like hours, it was positively soothing.

“Well… that sucked.”

Chapter 11

Normally, I beat up a monster, and afterwards I felt great, but Koschei was on my team, technically. Normally, I would have had Mercy and Asher there to cheer me on and talk about how awesome I was or what an idiot I was. Both were fun, honestly. But here, alone in the dark, covered in blood and hurting all over, I did not feel awesome.

I tried to remind myself that it was worth it. “Two tiers in one go. That’s the good stuff.”

My body was a real mess, but so long as I stayed still, my health was holding steady.

[142/890 Health]

Wow, that was even worse than I’d expected. As soon as Restoration came back up I was using it. If Asher was here, I probably would have let him use the nasty burny healing spell he had on me—the one that felt like pouring lava in your wounds. That was how bad my current state was.

The silence stretched out again. Nope. None of that. I reached out to turn Koschei’s head around to face me. The light in his eyes was out. His flesh was still here instead of fading away. He was really dead. “Man, I wish you weren’t a big bag of dicks like Leo. I really could have used some help with the whole end of the world thing.”

I wobbled the head from side to side and put on a squeaky voice. “I’m sorry, Maulkin, maybe the next Eternal you meet won’t need murdering.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, buddy.” I sighed. “I mean, first there was Talon, then there was Leo, now there’s you. I’m starting to think every Eternal on the whole planet might be an asshole.”

“Not all of them!” The head lolled onto the side after that wiggle, and I had to prop it back up again.

“Yes, all of them.” I spun him in a slow circle with a finger in the middle of his forehead. “I guess all the decent ones gave up, ran away, or got minced up and turned into abominations. I think that’s where the abominations came from anyway…”

Koschei squeaked, “Maybe I could have told you if you hadn’t chopped my head off.”

I flicked him on the nose. “Well, maybe you could have just told me useful stuff instead of being a dick.”

Staring down at the dead face of Koschei, I giggled a little bit to myself. Then laughing hurt, so I stopped. “Okay, talking to a severed head, probably not a good sign.”

“Probably not,” Koschei replied, so I turned him around to face away.

I had time to kill, so I might as well make the most of it and do some of the fiddly admin stuff that came along with being a demigod. I closed my eyes and cast my attention to the glowing Pillars of Divinity within me.

Taking care to ignore the temptation of the Void Pillars and all the cool new stuff they might be hiding within them, I immediately poured some of my hard-won Glory into Aether. Part of that decision was because I’d just learned that you could basically throw ghosts at somebody as an attack like Koschei had been bombarding me with, but mostly it was housekeeping. I needed to power up my Soul Bonding so that I could latch it onto the next Shard that came into my possession and make sure we never lost it. There was a little trickle of worry about that whole plan since I kept getting more and more Void flavored with every shard I harnessed to my soul, but unless somebody came up with a better solution, I was sticking with it. Even if we did come up with a better plan, an extra soul bond would give me the chance to bring along a weapon or some armor every time I died. That would be helpful as hell. Maybe even some amazing magical artifact if we ever found any. I assumed that Amaranth had amazing magical artifacts that weren’t just rusty bits of an old sword. Probably.

My crappy gear was definitely starting to weigh on my mind. Not just the lack of wondrous magic objects, but the diminishing returns on the bare minimum stuff I’d scraped together. Every monster I ran into was able to chomp right through the can to the delicious Maulkin spam inside. And hitting Koschei over and over while my useless blunt sword barely made a dent in him? That was just depressing.

New equipment was definitely in order. Artifice was probably the pillar I used the most often, but I’d invested the least amount of Glory into it. That didn’t seem right. Plus, I had a whole swathe of skills in it that would level up when I empowered the Pillar. Sure pouring some glory into Primal might have unlocked some new healing powers and gotten me out of the jam I was in right this second, but getting better armor and weapons might make the difference between ending a fight untouched and having all these holes poked in me all over again. Look at me, delaying gratification like a big smart boy. Mercy would be so proud.

At the end of the day, the changes I was making to myself were permanent. I couldn’t just go chasing after whatever shiny new thing I fancied each time that I grew in power. Tempting as that might have been. I dumped the rest of my Glory into Artifice, then gave myself a look over.

Maulkin – Chagnar Faun of the Lunar and Void Court – 9th Tier of Glory

Statistics:

HP: 522/1270

Devotion: 240/240

Attributes:

Potency: 47

Celerity: 22

Vitality: 19

Piety: 8

Well, that took care of the worries about bleeding to death down here on the floor of some dank cave. I still wasn’t better off proportionally, but as the increased Tiers of Glory refined my spirit into something more godlike, my body seemed to follow in its footsteps. That was probably one of the things that bugged me the most about the whole investing a whole tier’s worth of glory into a void pillar thing. Not that I had marked my soul eternally with evil or whatever, but that I hadn’t got the sweet health bump. I mean, sure, the Void and all its powers are antithetical to all life, but couldn’t it have given me a little health increase anyway? I was probably lucky it hadn’t taken health away, to be honest.

With the increased power in my Pillars, I should have unlocked a whole swathe of new divine skills or divinities or whatever they were called, and after hoarding experience from most of my training with Seren as well as the last few days, I had over a thousand points to spend buying new cool tricks.

A glance confirmed that Rough Hewn Weapons, Armor, and Architecture had evolved into Inferior Weapons, Armor, and Architecture which… uh… still didn’t feel great, to be honest, but it was an improvement. Improving Artifice had also extended my Sphere of Influence even further than it had reached before. The whole cave was inside it now—a bit of the tunnel too. I couldn’t feel any of them because of the Voidgod’s malign influence on this place, but once I got somewhere alive, I was going to have a great time. I might even be able to help the Dvergar with their mining back at home, hauling out some ores from hard-to-reach places. No wait, that sounded too much like a job. Never mind. Maybe I could just tell them where to dig for the good stuff.

Aether was up to three tiers now, so there was a lot of new stuff unlocked in there, but so much of it was kind of… obtuse? Like, yeah sure Astral Projecting out of my body might be handy sometimes, but you know what was always good? Hitting stuff harder. Trapping unbound spirits and crystalizing them into a material that could be used to forge magic gear? Okay, yeah, that one did sound cool, but it looked like the actual crafting stuff came further up the Aether ladder, and I was in no hurry to climb it since I spent more of my time trying not to use Aether than actually using it. The only one I definitely wanted was Spirit Strike. After being on the receiving end of a ghost-slap to the brain, there was no way I could let it pass, so pop, there went three hundred of my hard-earned experience points.

Ascension skills were pretty scarce, apart from the Surge ones. I seemed to unlock new Divinities in that tree when I’d maxed out the normal skill equivalent. So, I had Ascendant Brutality and not much else. I was really good at hitting things hard. Woo. Go me. Ascendant Cognition was there, greyed out, and I had no idea what those words meant together until I dipped my attention into it and realized it was about refining my brain into something more… godly. Shame I hadn’t invested enough Glory in Ascension to use it.

I toyed with the idea of Celerity Surge, both so I could jog back to the Bastion faster, and so I could surprise the crap out of Orphia the next time she tried to do her own superspeed trick. That would have been really funny, but it didn’t suit the way that I fought. I was not big on running away from my problems or dodging all that much if I was being honest. Most of the time if I dodged out of the way, it meant that whoever was standing behind me would get whacked instead. If I did that and Mercy got hurt, I would never hear the end of it. Literally never. She was going to live forever, and even three thousand years from now I could imagine she’d still be dunking on me for that one time I ducked and she got a club to the face.

Vitality Surge seemed like a better option. Being able to shrug off blows like Koschei had would be much more helpful for my career as a meat shield. Yeah, that felt right. I sank another three hundred in.

That left me enough for one more Divinity. One more uber-powerful god-tier move that I could use to turn the tide of a battle. I couldn’t think of one.

The siren call of all the Divinities in the Void Pillar I’d unlocked was hard to ignore, but I was pretty sure that using any of them was going to draw attention. I’d already splurged experience there just after we beat Talon, and I hadn’t even dared to try out that power yet, even when I’d been all alone in the desert, just in case somehow somebody spotted me and immediately sounded all the Voidgod alarms.

Nobody knew how much experience I had except me. Nobody needed to know if I kept on buying guilty little secret powers. Yet somehow, I still felt ashamed when I shuffled over to the list of them and started looking through. While all the other words glowed with moonlight in my mind, these ones were so black that they stood out even in the darkness of my inner self. Wow, that sounded super goth.

Then I sat there staring at them and dithered for so long that Restoration ticked back to life.

I’d save my experience for later. It wasn’t a big deal. There might be some helpful skill I wanted to grab on the fly—like that time I’d learned sailing.

I slipped back into my body and triggered Restoration before I’d even opened my eyes. The ice had all melted away by now, so the wounds were wide open for the stitching. They prickled as they closed, but that was nothing compared to the weird sensation of whatever sweetmeats Koschei had popped when he gut-punched me re-inflating inside me. The noise that I made when I felt that was not dignified.

Finally, I opened my eyes.

There was a spear leveled at my face. I could have done without that. Mhirka was the one holding it. I could have done without that too. Arrayed behind her, taking up the whole of this cramped little cave, were the gathered chieftains of every Faun clan. They were looming, colossal things so large it was hard for me to even read them as Faun instead of some sort of lumbering ogres. They had to bow their heads to stop their horns sticking in the pitted roof, and I realized with a start that most of the pits in the roof were probably from their previous visits. All of them were staring at me.

“Good morning.”

Tears rimmed Mhirka’s eyes. She had not touched dead Koschei, but it was pretty obvious what had happened to him since I was down here covered in his blood.

She thrust her spear for my throat, and I only just had time to Surge Vitality before it struck home and killed me. As it was it jabbed in, hard as a finger would have prodded a human throat, making me cough and gag. “Hey! Knock it off.”

She looked from me to the spear with dread and confusion. She knew it was sharp; she’d been killing bugs with it just a few hours back.

The chieftains were not so quick to act. One of them laid a hand on Mhirka’s shoulder to draw her back, and she shrugged it off violently but seemed to take the hint. She didn’t try to stab me again.

My voice came out strangled until I spluttered a little more. “The strongest one is in charge, right? That’s how this all works?”

I could see the betrayal on Mhirka’s face contending with her dread and hatred. What a mix. She looked like most of the women I’d ever been on a blind date with. There was sure to be some guilt in there, like she had been the one to give me the idea to kill their beloved pet Eternal. As if he hadn’t made that decision for himself thousands of years back when he decided to make them into slaves.

I looked past Mhirka to the gathered giants. “I killed him. I was stronger. So, the way that she tells it, that makes me the boss now, right?”

“Koschei did not rule us,” Giant hammer chief rumbled. “He was not Chagnar.”

“But you listened to him. He was your advisor, and the advisor of the one that came before you, and all the other ones before that too, right? He spoke to the ancestors?”

They were looking around at each other, the full magnitude of what I’d done just sinking in. I might have accidentally just killed their whole religion as well as the little tyrant that had perched himself on top of it. Oops.

Through her tears, Mhirka snarled, “He spoke for our dead. He told us their will.”

“Okay…” Well, I’d already come this far, might as well go the distance and get murdered by the angry mob. Time for the moment of truth. “That was a lie.”

That seemed to hit them even harder than the realization I’d cut them all off from their ancestors, rippling out through the room. Some of them paled. Some of them flushed with rage. Color-changing Faun. Great.

I wet my lips, tasting my own blood, and then I pressed on. “He was telling you what he wanted you to do, what he wanted you to be. Maybe he really was listening to your ancestors, maybe not, but the Chagnar who went before, they didn’t want you to come here. They don’t want you to suffer.”

Double-axe chief had both of his axes in his hands. Maybe he didn’t have anywhere else to put them. Maybe he hadn’t come down here to chop me into chunks. He roared, “They were Chagnar, they would have wanted us to–”

I didn’t need to shout for my words to cut him off dead. “To be weak?”

Every Faun in the cave bristled when I said that—all of them except Mhirka. She was staring down at the cave floor, some long rusted machinery between her ears rattling slowly to life. That was fighting talk. I’d just insulted them all. This was going to end in a mess. I could already tell.

“You don’t make a people strong by culling their numbers. You don’t make them strong by taking them into the desert and starving them. If the Faun want to be strong again, a force to be reckoned with in this world, they need to change.” I said it all in a rush so that they couldn’t shout me down before the end, but I needn’t have bothered. They were all staring at me in abject silence.

The tallest of the Faun pushed forward through the crowd—a woman bent almost double to keep the curled horns on her head off the roof. She had to twist her neck to glare at me. “Who are you to tell us that we must change? Our ways have been the same since the stars first shone on Amaranth. We have always been here.”

“Who am I? I’m the guy who just walked in here, fresh off the boat, and beat the most powerful Eternal in your camp.”

That seemed to shut them up all over again. They might not like what I was saying, and they might not have liked me, but under their own stupid system, they had to listen to me because I’d killed the guy that they listened to before. There was no denying it, I still had the cleaver lying beside my hand.

No wonder they’d signed up with the Voidgod when all you had to do to get them on your side was be the biggest bully on the block.

“Now maybe Koschei made it all up. Maybe he told you this was the way your people had always lived so that he could make you behave the way he wanted you to. But let’s say that he was telling the truth. You’ve all done things the same since the dawn of time?” I took a deep breath. Every time I suggested that Koschei was a filthy liar, they seemed to get upset about it. Oh well. “Maybe you have, maybe Koschei just kept you doing the same things you’d always done, but the world hasn’t stayed the same. If you want to survive in the world we’re living in now, then you need to change.”

Mhirka didn’t look up from the bloodstains on the floor. She was working through all this at her own pace. Hearing my words, but thinking about other stuff, she mumbled, “The ancestors spoke through him.”

I had my suspicions about that. “Yeah? Did it look something like this?”

When I used Spirit Strike it wasn’t nearly as impressive as the perfect storm of spirits that Koschei had been able to invoke. All I mustered was a pathetic little wisp, shooting out from my forehead to whack into Mhirka’s. It didn’t carry fear or doubt or anything like it. Just my horrible certainty that he’d been lying to them all along.

She raised a hand to touch the spot on her head where the spooky little puff had hit her. All of the other Faun were gawking at me. If I had to guess, then I’d say that was exactly what it had looked like when the ancestors spoke through him.

She looked at me without hate in her eyes, possibly for the first time since I’d met her. “How did you? … What did you? …”

I pushed my Aether again, and another little white whisper of a thought sprang out of my head and shot out, past Mhirka to pass invisibly through double-axe guy’s thick skull. Koschei lied. That same whisper. Again and again and again I pushed that thought out, feeling some reserve of power I’d never touched before draining with each one I unleashed. It didn’t leave me feeling dumber or weaker or anything like that, just kind of hollow inside. Maybe that was what Asher felt like after doing one of his big spells. I’d have to ask him one of these days. Either way, when I blinked my eyes shut after bombarding the whole room’s worth of chieftains with tiny ghosts, I could see that my Devotion was down to 32 from the healthy 240 it usually sat at.

I took a deep breath to steady myself, and then I spoke again. “Either you can believe that I speak for the ancestors now, or you can believe that Koschei was just using his powers to trick you all this time. I don’t care which, so long as you listen to me.”

Maybe cheering was too much to hope for after everything else that had happened today, but I’d kind of hoped that they’d all stop looking quite so desolate. No reason to feel bad about Koschei being dead. He was a dick. Although I suppose that now they were all feeling bad because they’d mindlessly obeyed someone who was using them for his own ends for millennia. Oops.

Finally, the giant hammer guy sank down onto one knee and asked me. “What would you have us do?”

At least I had an easy answer to that one. “Go away. Find somewhere pretty and green where the hunting is good, the land is fertile, and the Faun can become strong again. Build homes. Make babies. Teach them things. When life stops being a struggle, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get weaker, it means that you are winning. That you’re stronger. Like lifting a big weight gets easier the more you do it.”

You would think that I’d told them all to go and throw themselves off a cliff from the sour expressions.

Mhirka piped up again, still desperately trying to cling to her anger. I couldn’t blame her for that; it must have felt like someone had pulled the rug out from under her feet about now. “You would have us abandon this sacred place?”

“Who is it sacred to? It is a lump of dead rock in the middle of a dead desert made when some evil thing died thousands of years before you were even born.” I pushed myself slowly to my feet and was quietly pleased that my legs didn’t give out after all the massive blood loss. Restoration really was awesome. I definitely needed to upgrade Primal again soon. “It’s a gravestone for a monster that didn’t deserve one. Why are you even here?”

“The enemy,” the tall woman said to her own feet. “The Gilded Charlatan.”

Two-axe guy joined in. “He lurks behind the great wall, just waiting for us to show weakness.”

“So let him lurk! He’s been lurking since… always!” I shrugged. “Who cares if he takes this place?”

Mhirka snarled at me, baring all those filed teeth at me again. Why did I find that kind of hot? Was it because I had a Faun body, or did I need therapy? “Do you care nothing for the ways of our people?”

“Not when they’re stupid ways.” I shrugged, and the ruined scraps of armor still clinging to my shoulder tumbled off to land with a thump. Desperately in need of an upgrade. “Not when they’re making the Chagnar Faun weak.”

Bulky hammer man barked, “Why do you care if the Faun are strong?”

“You think I choose this body for a joke? The Faun are the best thing about this crappy planet.” That drew some smiles from the gathered crowd. Flattery will get you anywhere, apparently. “If I can get you guys fighting fit again, then just imagine what you could accomplish.”

Mhirka’s eyes narrowed when I said “fighting fit.” She leapt on it. “You would make us your soldiers, your slaves?”

I laughed in her face. All these years, the Faun had been peons to some lying little Eternal, and now that someone was finally telling the truth, she was scared that it just meant the mask was going to be pulled off. “I’m not going to make you anything. As soon as this conversation is done, I’m out of here. I’ve got my own stuff going on.”

The tall woman reached out a hand to me, then snatched it back as if she’d just realized what she was doing. “You would rob us of even your guidance?”

“Guys, I don’t have any guidance. I don’t have any wisdom. I’m an idiot. But even an idiot can see that what you guys are doing out here isn’t making you happy or strong, or… anything. I mean, you’re eating worms. You can’t tell me those taste good.”

There was some rumbled laughter, though none of the chieftains seemed willing to admit it was coming from them. Eventually, hammer man admitted, “They are… foul.”

“You don’t need an Eternal to tell you how to live your lives. You don’t need the ghosts of dead people bossing you around either. You’re the Chagnar Faun. You’re the biggest badasses in all of Amaranth. You know how to hunt, how to fight, how to do all the things it takes to be awesome.” I pointed up the tunnel and let out an excited shout. “So go be awesome!”

They did. They took off. The press of bodies down here in the cave thinned, and I turned away from them to get myself ready for the hike back across the ashes. I retrieved the spear and the cleaver, mashing them back together into a great-sword so I could slot it back into the baldric the Dvergar had made me. Then I scooped up Koschei’s head under one arm and turned to leave. He was going to be a lot more useful to me now than he’d ever been in life. Plus, he was an excellent conversationalist. That would make the long journey feel shorter.

Mhirka was still standing there when I turned around. “Uh… hi. Did you not buy the whole, go be awesome, thing?”

She was perfectly still, looking not at me but at the headless body that had now tumbled to lie on the ground. “Why have you done this?”

“Because you people deserve better than to be toys for some stuck up”—I fumbled through a half-dozen different words for extremely short people in my head, but I was pretty sure they were all slurs so I finally just said—"Eternal.”

“You say that you do not want us. That you will not lead us. You mean to abandon us when we need guidance the most.” She stared at me as I made a show of checking I had all my things together. I wasn’t planning on coming back this way ever again, so leaving something behind was a no-no.

I shrugged as I went past her. “You need to lead yourselves. As you’re super fond of saying, I’m no Chagnar. Find your own way.”

“If you are not Chagnar, you are prey.” She said prey like it was the tastiest word she’d ever had in her mouth. “Why would prey want us strong, when we will turn that strength against you?”

I crouched down in the center of the mess that I’d made of this place. Blood and ice-melt had pooled down in the middle of the room, and I had to wipe it away with the flat of my hand before I could see the marks that the shards had left, still scarred into the world. “Maybe I want a good fight if it comes to that? Maybe I’m a little bit Chagnar after all?”

She was staring at me so hard I was starting to get self-conscious. Maybe I had a hunk of Koschei in my hair. Eventually, when I wasn’t saying anything else, she squatted down beside me and looked at the marks as if she might decipher some meaning in them. “What are you keeping from us?”

I debated telling her nothing or spinning her a lie, but at the end of the day, that would make me no better than Koschei. She lived in this world, so she deserved to know the truth about what was going to happen to it. Everyone deserved to know. “Araphel. He’s coming back.”

There was no sudden gasp, no fainting away. She spoke with the same dubious contempt she’d treated everything I’d said to her from the start. “The Voidgod was slain.”

I shoved off my knees to get back to standing. Some of the holes in my side were going to take another round of healing before I was back on top form, and I really didn’t fancy another wrestling match. “Why does nobody get the whole Eternal concept? Gods can’t die. Whatever’s stopped him coming back before now is going to stop working, then we’ve got Voidgod all over the place again.”

“So, you came to plead that we do not join him?” She sneered at me.

“Uh no. I came to see if Koschei would help fight him. Turns out he was more interested in his own games.”

She cast a glance to the dead man again. “You do not want the Faun to fight for you?”

“No offense, but you guys look like you’re about one bad day away from dead. Maybe once you’ve recovered a little you might want to join in the Voidgod ass-whooping but… I’m not asking for anything.” I gave Koschei’s head a little wiggle. “You’ve had enough of Eternals making demands.”

She nodded at that, slowly rising to her full height and scowling at me with all her might. “Our paths shall cross again.”

I smiled at that. “I hope so.”

She was not smiling. She was extremely not-smiling. “It may mean your death.”

“Won’t be the first.” I shrugged. “Probably won’t be the last either.”

She walked me out, but we didn’t have anything more to say to each other after that. She had a whole new world-view to work out, and I’d just killed the closest thing to an ally I might have found in the whole world. Neither of us was feeling chatty. When she slipped away, I didn’t hear her go.

The whole settlement was in disarray as I strolled out. Tents were being broken down, materials gathered up into bundles, and gardens being uprooted for whatever bounty they could offer before the long walk out of the desert. I took it all in without interfering. None of the Faun looked all that happy to be leaving, even though it would be to an easier, happier life. I suppose that they didn’t know that yet, just that the place they’d called home was being snatched away from them yet again.

At least leaving the Faun settlement was easier than coming in. All I had to do was fall down off the stepped levels until I reached the bottom. If there were still sentries posted in the deep shadows that the moonlight cast, then I couldn’t see them—which was kind of the point I suppose.

I gave the whole thing one last long look, then I set off towards the distant horizon. Couldn’t keep my adoring fans waiting after all, and there was no way that I wasn’t going to be Leofric’s new best buddy after chopping the head off his oldest enemy and killing him permanently. I was expecting a parade.

Chapter 12

There was no parade when I got back to the Bastion. There wasn’t even a rope.

There had been no worm attack on my way back, and I was profoundly disappointed because I’d been looking forward to seeing if my new level of Artifice could find something useful in the giant monster corpse that I could use. I supposed that I might even have been able to refine the teeth into some patches for my armor since it was in a pretty bad state, eel-skin sloughing off to leave my skin exposed underneath.

Either they hadn’t expected me to come back so quickly, or they hadn’t expected me to come back at all. I shouted for a little bit, but the wall was high enough that I wasn’t sure anyone up there would actually be able to hear me. Which was just great. Or maybe they’d turned on Asher and Mercy the second I was out of sight, and now they planned to leave me out here to be worm food. Also, a distinct possibility.

Regardless of what I was going to find on the other side of that wall, I still needed to get onto the other side, so I made a little spike on the pommel of my sword, wedged Koschei’s head on it, then started to climb the desolate stone.

Pocked and scarred by the explosion that had ruined this place, I found it easier than I’d expected to find hand and footholds, and the fact that Faun don’t get tired really helped out with the whole climbing thing. I mean, I wasn’t going to be rocking up any mountains any time soon, but here on this big flat wall peppered with holes big enough to hook my hands in, it was pretty manageable. I wasn’t even out of breath, which was lucky because I was still in the middle of an in-depth conversation with Koschei about my relationship problems. “…I don’t even know if she even likes me? You know? I beat her in a fight, then threatened to kill her, then saved her life, and then I gave her some swords, and that is like some ceremonial thing with the Alvaren I guess? Like, the king gives his knights a sword or something? So maybe she just thinks I’m her duty?”

“I don’t know, man, that sounds like a weird situation.”

Surging my Potency, I leapt up the wall in great bounds, hammering my hands into the walls and making new cracks to pry into where there weren’t already hand-holds. “I know, right? I mean she was the one who invited me to… take it to the next level or whatever, but did she actually want to, or was it just what she thought she had to do? Like… am I her job?”

“No wonder this is messing with your head, brother.” Koschei nodded along involuntarily with my movements. “Sounds like you need to sit down and have a talk with her about your feelings.”

I turned around and yelled in his face, “You shut the hell up, severed head. I am a man, damnit! I will never willingly sit down and talk about my feelings. Never!”

“I’m just saying that maybe if you told her that you were worried about all this, you might be able to sort it out.” The next stretch of wall was thoroughly riddled with holes, so when the potency surge faded, it wasn’t so difficult to slip back into the old climbing rhythm again. I was still only about a quarter of the way up the wall after that surge. It was mid-morning by the time that I got to the foot of the Bastion, but this climb might take up the rest of the day.

“But what if she turns around and I’m right, and she’s only banging me out of duty. That would suck.”

Koschei’s mouth flapped open and shut now as rigor mortis faded. “Plus, you wouldn’t be able to grab any more elf ass.”

“And that would be terrible!” I yelped. “Do you have any idea how hot she is?”

“Hey, man, you don’t have to tell me. I might not have a body, but I’ve still got eyes, you know?”

I took a hand away from the wall to grab hold of his face. “You keep your eyes to yourself, Koschei. That’s my girl.”

Between the pinch of my fingers, his mouth opened. “Or maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s just doing booty duty.”

I turned my attention back to the wall. The higher I got, the rarer the fingerholds were, and the more I was having to launch myself up to grab onto them. For a while I ended up moving sideways instead of up, just searching for something I could use.

With a sigh, I looked back to Koschei. “Plus, she’s still got that whole Alvaren supremacy thing going on. I am not a big fan of that. She thinks that she’s better than everyone else in the world, just because she’s got those pointy ears. I’ve tried talking to her about it, and sometimes I think she gets it, but then the next time I look around, she’s got that look on her face like the dvergar are worms or something.”

“Oh yeah, man, that is nasty.” His head bobbed forward until the mouth was right behind my ear. “You should probably break up with her.”

I turned to look him in the eye. “Are you just saying that because you want to date her?”

“Hey, man, I’m just a severed head. What am I going to do with her?”

That was a fair point. I turned my attention back to the task at hand for now. The handholds were getting smaller and smaller until sometimes I was supporting my full weight with just my fingers hooked into a tiny gap. It was a good thing my Potency was so high. If you’d asked Asher to climb this thing, he would not have made it past… well…. the ash desert, probably.

Potency surge had ticked back into action, so I took advantage launching myself up onto the bare expanse of stone above me and hammering in my fists. For as long as the surge lasted, I moved up in leaps and bounds, but the moment that it faltered, I was going to be stuck unless I got past this smooth bit.

With one final grunt of effort as the surge died, I launched myself like a crossbow bolt up the length of the wall, air whistling in my ears. Then I saw it. The level of the ground on the other side, where an industrious tree root had pushed its way between the pale stone to dangle before my eyes. I grabbed onto it with both hands and hung out there while I worked out my next move. I glanced back to see Koschei staring. Then I groaned. “Oh gods, I’m actually going to have to talk to her about all this. Like a mature adult or something.”

“Better you than me, man.” His head lolled from side to side, mockingly as I swung from the root. “If you try to break up with her, you’re probably going to end up my height.”

“I hadn’t even thought about that. What if she goes stabby crazy on me?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Koschei pointed out, all too accurately.

I let myself hang limply from the root for a second, then I started to pull myself up again. There was a patch of brickwork up above me. The recent repairs were missing the pockmarked holes I was used to, but that made up for it with gaps where mortar was meant to have been put in. They’d laid it from the other side and never had any way to check how it looked out here. “Oh, man, it would really suck if she murdered me.”

I cleared the bricks in no time at all, even as Koschei said, “You’d get better.”

“I mean like”—I waved a hand back and forth as I searched for another handhold—“emotionally.”

Koschei lolled to the side. “Oh yeah, that would sting.”

“Who the hell are you talking to?” Mercy was peering down at me over the top of the wall.

I was so happy to see her I nearly lost my grip. “Mercy!”

She shouted back. “Maulkin!”

Leaning back and peering, I could see her head and shoulders poking out over the battlements. She seemed to be alone. “Asher?”

She shrugged. “Nope.”

My fingers started to slip, and I had to press myself back against the wall rapidly. “Rope?”

“Oh, yeah. One sec.”

The second passed, along with a good few more. “Any day now.”

“I’m tying it to something so your fat ass doesn’t pull me off the wall. Shut up.”

The rope dropped down, and the coil of it whacked against me, still unrolling as it went on its merry way down the wall. I really should not have looked down. My hands were shaky when I grabbed a hold and gave it a tug to make sure it would take my weight. Thankfully, it did. From there it was as simple as going hand over hand up the rest of the distance, strolling up the side of the Bastion like it was a day in the park. I even had enough breath to banter properly again. “Aww, even after all this time you’re still thinking about my ass.”

Mercy was out of sight, but I could hear her when she made a little snort. “Thinking about cutting this rope and dropping you on your ass.”

“Wouldn’t want to damage my good side.”

“At least we both agree that face is a mess.”

My mess had just popped up over the side of the wall as she said it, and I could see that she was smiling. Aww, she really did miss me. There was nobody else around. A few of the guards were scattered farther along, but they seemed to be keeping their distance. Given what I’d done to them when I first arrived, I couldn’t really fault them. Although I wasn’t sure why they’d be hiding from Mercy since she was on their team—or at least wearing their team colors in her eyes.

I gave her a smile in return, and her expression slipped back to its usual snarky smirk like it was more comfortable for her than letting me see her genuinely happy. I’d never ask her about her last life since she seemed so intent on avoiding the subject, but I wondered sometimes what had happened to make her this way. I shook the thought out of my head and stretched my arms out. Even if they didn’t get tired, it still wasn’t exactly comfortable climbing all that time. “Did I miss any excitement?”

She rolled her eyes. “Not unless you think watching some smug prick stroking his own ego non-stop for days at a time is exciting.”

“Asher isn’t all bad.”

She coughed instead of laughing. “Leo. He’s a real piece of work. Just like you said.”

“Did he give you the whole speech about not being equals? He’s king, and you can be his underlings, all that real charming stuff?”

Her eyes flitted to the guards, checking they were out of earshot before she dunked on their boss too hard. “I think you got the abridged version. Our one wasn’t that straightforward, and it lasted for... actually, he might still be in the middle of it. I got bored and snuck out to check for you.”

“Because you missed me so bad.” I put an arm around her shoulders.

She shrugged it off. “Even you are better than listening to another minute of ‘oh I’ve lived a billion years, so you should all think that I’m terribly interesting.’ I swear I’ve never met anyone so in love with themselves.”

Looking out across the verdant green land beyond the Bastion, it was hard not to compare it to how the Faun had been living, scraping in the dust and desperately trying to stay alive. “So, you get that he’s the bad guy now, yeah?”

“I never thought he wasn’t.” Mercy shrugged. “I just hoped we might be able to… use him I guess.”

I grinned down at her. “Well, mission accomplished. He’s going to be our best buddy from here on out.”

Her eyebrows shot up into the mop of her white fringe in surprise. “You got the Faun to give up?”

I reached back and plucked Koschei from his perch with a squelch, holding him out to her with a flourish. “Better.”

She did not look happy. Why didn’t she look happy? Very carefully, Mercy asked. “Why have you got a head?”

“I always said that the only way to get—”

She cut me off with the kind of glare that could probably kill small mammals or knock birds out of the sky. “If you make a joke right now, I’m going to scream. Why do you have a head?”

I wobbled him from side to side, jovially. “This handsome chap is Koschei. He was the Eternal pulling the strings on all the Faun.”

“You went in there and killed him?” That omnipresent smirk had faded, and I was starting to get really worried that I’d screwed up. “Just like Leofric wanted?”

“I thought that was what you wanted me to do?” I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was mad at her, but damn it, I was. She’d told me to go and make Leo happy, and now I’d done it she was flipping out at me like I’d been the one to do something wrong.

She thumped me in the shoulder, sending me staggering back a step towards the edge. “What the hell?”

“You wanted me to buddy up with Leo.” I waved Koschei’s head at her. “This guy is like his nemesis. Leo’s going to love it.”

“What had happened to you? You were the guy that made us go help some random caravan because it was getting attacked by Svart. You were the guy that made us stop and help everybody we met. If there had been a kitten stuck up a tree, you probably would have been right up there trying to get it down. How do you get from that to murdering somebody just because it is convenient?”

There were whole sections of this conversation that I felt like I’d missed. It was like she was talking in code, and I didn’t know how to translate it. This was not an uncommon experience for me. “I… what?”

“I thought you were a good guy, Maulkin. Even when I saw you go nuts at Seren and do what you did to her, I thought… he just lost his temper. It could happen to anyone.” She was looking at me like I’d sprouted another head. Like this was some terrible revelation. “But this is… this was calculated. You killed somebody... A good guy wouldn’t do something like this.”

“I’m pretty sure we’ve been killing people since we got here.”

She was physically backing away from me now, unwilling or unable to look me in the eye. “People that were trying to kill us, or people trying to hurt innocent people, not just somebody who… got in the way. What is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?!” The anger boiled up my throat unbidden. I didn’t want to do any of this. I didn’t want to kill an old Eternal just because it was what was required. If we’d just grabbed the sword and run like hell back at the start, then none of this would have happened. “You’re the one who told me to be best buddies with the gold-plated prick. Did you think that we could get there with our hands clean? He is a bad guy. Bad guys like bad things.”

“I thought you could…” Her face twisted in something like pain. “I thought you knew the difference between right and wrong. I thought that if it got to the point where you had to decide if you’d do something bad to get on his good side then you’d stop, or we’d trick him or… I guess that was expecting too much of you.”

She was backing away faster now, turning and stalking off along the wall. “Mercy…”

“I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t…” Her voice went deathly quiet. “I don’t know if I want to talk to you at all. I need to think about all this.”

Still, I called after her, “Mercy!?”

She stormed away along the wall, almost crashing right into Leofric as he leapt casually from a courtyard to stand beside her. She did not meet his gaze, but she seemed to shrink away from him unwittingly. I’d never seen her afraid of anything. Or at least, I’d never seen her afraid enough to back down from anything. What had he done while I was gone?

He spread his arms wide as he approached me, sunlight glinting off all his golden everything. The same feline smile slunk across his face as before he sent me off. “And so my wayward son returns.”

“Leofric.” I shoved all my feelings back down into a little box and battened it shut as fast as possible, frantically trying to remember how you were meant to talk like a normal person. “Hi. How are you?”

“What is that between your paws, oh wretched beast of chaos.” He said the words like they were a joke, but I could tell that they were real words he would have used to describe me if I hadn’t been there. Rude enough to amuse him, but polite enough that I couldn’t object. Real class act. He had barely looked at me before his eyes were drawn down to Koschei.

I tossed the head over, and he caught it without a hint of effort. “Maybe you recognize him.”

He looked bemused as he lifted the severed head up to face level, but it didn’t last. His hands shook as he lowered it again. “Koschei? But how can this be?”

Tempting as it was to brag about how I’d managed to bag an Eternal that was so much older and more powerful than me, I wasn’t really in the mood after Mercy had been such a downer about it. Besides, this was the moment when everything could go really really wrong for me and old Leo here. “There was a whole lot of chopping involved.”

“He was an eternal, just as we are. When he was slain, his flesh should have faded to be reborn. How did you…” He trailed off in wonderment.

“Oh, he is extra-dead. Permanently dead. No longer alive. Benefits of having a Lunar Eternal on your team I guess.”

Now he was either going to love me or freak out and kill me. It could go either way, depending on whether or not he knew that perma-killing Eternals was a power that only the Voidgod had at his disposal. There was a bit of a gamble involved, but I felt confident in my choice to wave the severed head around. Koschei had been a Lunar Eternal like me. He had known the limits of what we could do. For all his age, it seemed to me that Leo had never bothered to learn about us.

“You…” His voice was ragged with emotion. I stood frozen in place, gut gurgling with dread as I imagined how the next moment was going to go. A tiny teardrop slipped from his sunbeam eye and trickled down his cheek. “You have given me a great gift this day. The greatest gift. Since the dawn of time, that vicious haunted pygmy was a thorn in my side, and now, finally, I am free of him.”

He hoisted Koschei’s head up and roared with laughter and delight. I felt a bit queasy.

Excited and chatty in a way that I’d never expected to see him, Leofric went on, “I had thought that through our combined efforts that he might have been contained or driven off for long enough to prevent him from aiding his dark master when the Voidgod returned, but this… this is a boon beyond all others. You cannot know how long I have… I spoke in jest before, but you are my son now in truth, bound by a tie deeper than blood. You are my most beloved servant.”

With a sigh, he dropped Koschei’s head like it was trash and crushed it under his shiny golden boot until it popped. Then he took a hold of my shoulders. Ugh, this was so awkward. “Uh, thanks… dad?”

He blinked away the tears from his eyes and slapped me on the shoulder with enough force that it set my bones rattling. “You shall be the Warmaster of this great legion when we march upon the Voidgod. All that I have, all that I am, shall be bent to your purpose.”

It had all been worth it. Killing Koschei. Fighting through worms and deserts and scattering the Faun to the four corners of the map. If it got us the help we needed, then it didn’t matter if Mercy sulked about it. We were trying to save the world. The universe really—if you bought into the whole thing about all other places being a reflection of Amaranth. That was important. Really important. The most important thing that anyone had ever done, ever. So, if I had to do a few things that made me feel crappy along the way, then that is what I’d do. “That is awesome. That… that’s exactly what I need. Araphel is coming, and we need to pull together everyone so that we can stop him before it is too late.”

“My armies are yours. You shall speak as if with my voice.” He put his arm around my back, aiming for the shoulders, but he was not quite tall enough to reach without twisting weirdly. “All that you need to is command it, and men will spit themselves upon their own blades.”

I let him lead me along the outer wall, glancing out over the desert beyond and wondering if I might catch a glimpse of any of the Faun as they got to go and live free at last. “Well, hopefully we won’t need to do much of that.”

“It matters not that they do. It matters only that they will.” He squeezed my back as if it was my shoulder, grabbing a handful of muscle through my armor. It wasn’t sore exactly, just weird. “Such is their loyalty to my cause. To our cause.”

“Uh, good. I guess.” I still felt like I was walking a tightrope every time I spoke to him. Just waiting for me to blurt out the wrong thing and kick off a war.

Why couldn’t Mercy have stayed here? Even if she was mad at me, she was still better at handling social situation stuff. I mean, she had her own Dvergar fan club within two minutes of arriving in their city. She could have had Leo eating out her hand. Unless she decided to slap him with it. Which she probably would. Okay, maybe she wouldn’t be all that useful, but I still felt like I’d been abandoned in a lion’s cage.

He dragged me on, forcing me to pick up my pace as we cleared the length of the giant wall in great strides. “Come now, I am sure that you cannot wait to see Orphia’s face when she learns that you have surpassed her and supplanted her in my affections after mere days.”

“Okay. Yes.” I couldn’t help but grin. “That actually sounds like a lot of fun.”

“Glorious. Come with me, my son, and witness the next mighty weapon to be added to our arsenal.”

Immediately, the dread came back. What had they been up to in my absence? I had vague ideas that Mercy might have had the knowhow to teach them how to build a cannon or something, but I knew that she wouldn’t have done it. Whatever Leo had found to parade in front of me was going to be something local. Something dramatic probably, judging from the spring in his step as he led me along to see it. Sure, some of that was definitely about the decapitated Koschei, but he’d been in a good mood before we’d even bumped into each other today. And if he was in a good mood, then that almost certainly meant that something really bad was about to happen.

“Imagine if you will, an army that has no need for a supply line behind it. Troop positions that can be reinforced in an instant from anywhere else that soldiers are stationed. How can the Voidgod stand against us, when our forces can be anywhere at any time? When we can strike with all the haste of lightning? Retreat before the adversary can blink?”

It felt like he’d been preparing that speech for a while, so I nodded along with him politely until I abruptly realized what the hell he was talking about. “You’re talking about the waygates.”

“Of course!” He chuckled. It was a weird thing, even knowing that he was a real dick, when every time that he was pleased, I felt it. I felt happy that I’d pleased him. Like he radiated warmth. Like I was his loyal pet. It was more insidious than the Spirit Strikes that Koschei had unleashed but no less oppressive. “The other great bounty that you and your companions have brought to the cause.”

The Waygate came into sight, down in its courtyard. As did Asher, finally. At least I knew why he hadn’t shown up to greet me. Why would he come and help his dearest friend up a wall when there was maths he could be doing. He glanced up as some sunlight deflected off Leofric’s armor and hit him in the face, met my eyes for an instant, then he was back to work. What a nerd.

A nerd, surrounded by Leo’s soldiers on all sides, none of them looking all that friendly. If they hated me for looking different, I dreaded to think how they’d been treating him. “You do know that only Asher can use them?”

“For now.” Leofric’s radiating happiness seemed to ratchet up another notch, glowing all around him as he released my shoulder and made a heroic leap down into the center of the packed dirt square. I jumped down myself, but it wasn’t nearly as pretty. I thumped down and staggered forward until he caught me, trying not to laugh as he hauled me back upright. Like you’d laugh when the cat fell off the table. “He assures me that the principles are simple enough for any lay-mage to acquire the spells needed to activate them. It was designed as a system of transit all across Amaranth, after all, not meant only for the elite geniuses of Talon’s academies.”

I glanced around at the gathered soldiery. None of them had impressive beards or robes. Mostly they looked tired and dirty. The few beards that were around looked less flowing and more like they’d just forgotten to shave for a few days. “I didn’t know you had uh lay-mages.”

Orphia stepped out of the shadow of the building I’d made my mad-dash escape through. She was not radiating joy. She was squirting out the opposite feeling. Not in the literal way that Leo was, just being her usual joy and delight to be around. She was scowling like if she looked angry enough about my new relationship with Leo, he might change his mind and murder me instead. She was really barking up the wrong tree.

Leofric paid her no mind. Eyes only for Asher. “What we do not have, we can make. There are some among the troops who can wield some measure of the power arcane. It will be a simple task to forge them into the tools that we require.”

“So…” I didn’t have a damn thing to say about forging people into tools that wasn’t going to end in me calling him a tool. “What’s the plan for today?”

“Brother Asher means to make a demonstration, I believe. To pass through the gate to whence you originated and then to return to us bearing some token of that place.” He glanced at me, amused. It was so bizarre to be on this side of the inner circle, getting treated to all the good vibes I could stomach. It wasn’t hard to see why people like Orphia would end up so desperate to fit in and be part of his gang. He had charisma. Charm. Just like every bully that had ever kicked me in the ass in school before I had my growth spurt and started kicking back. Everyone wanted to be on the bully’s good side, to be part of the joke, instead of the butt of it. “I believe that he suggested bringing through a book from Talon’s library, though I have my suspicions that it is only because he finds the company of my men to be less than intellectually stimulating.”

I couldn’t help but genuinely smile at that. “Dude loves a good book.”

Mercy stepped out from amidst the gathered swarm of troops, slipping through them like she was a gust of air. When she decided to start talking to me again, I was really going to have to ask her how she did it. Everywhere we went, she didn’t just fit in, she fit in so well she could slip through unnoticed. Maybe it was something to do with all her stealth skills, but I had a suspicion it was just her. Just like Seren was naturally graceful, and Asher was naturally snout-first in a book, Mercy blended in.

True to her word, she couldn’t even look at me. The fact that Leo had slung an arm around me again probably didn’t help. She stepped up beside Asher and started talking in a low, urgent tone. I couldn’t pick out the words, but from the way that he stilled in his scribbling, I had a pretty good idea of what was up. He didn’t look at me either as if by looking at me he’d be betraying what Mercy was whispering away to him. He very deliberately went back to writing.

Finally letting me out of that vice-like hug, Leofric turned to the crowd that had surreptitiously gathered around the top of the walls, waiting for the magic show. “The time has come for the tide of war to turn my friends. No longer must we cling to our fortifications and hope. Now the fight can be taken to the enemy, wherever they reside. In a moment, our dear friend Asher shall stride a thousand leagues in a single step, and soon, each and every one of you shall do the same.”

A ragged cheer went up, but Leo didn’t falter in his speechmaking. “From the safety of this great bastion, we shall be able to reach everywhere that the waystones are built, from the island paradise of Talon’s Keep to the Dverbal Hinterlands and even to the Serpent’s Gate. Everywhere that chaos has spread, we shall bring stability and peace as easily as stepping from our doorstep!”

The cheer was a bit more coordinated this time around, and it must have been loud enough for Leo to be satisfied. That’s right, the supposed savior of the universe had the same ego as a children’s entertainer, unwilling to move on until he got the clap he thought he was entitled to. The sooner we got away from this psycho the better. He turned to Asher with a wide smile. “Brother Asher, have you had enough time to make your preparations?”

Asher glanced to me for less than a moment, but his deliberately expressionless face immediately set suspicion prickling up the back of my neck. It was hard to get a read on a lizard face at the best of times, and more often than not I was relying on the tilt of his head, the speed of his blinking, even the flick of his tongue to determine what he was feeling when he wasn’t outright telling me. Right now, that deliberate stillness told me nothing. Which was a message in itself. He didn’t want me to know what he was thinking. He gave a precise bow to Leofric, then raised his arms like a conductor, preparing to cast his spell.

If it hadn’t have been for Mercy, I would have had no idea what was about to happen, Asher was the absolute master of the poker face. I never wanted to gamble against him. Mercy, on the other hand, she wore her heart on her sleeve, which was just as gruesome to look at as the metaphor implies. All the betrayal and hate and sorrow she was feeling welled up on her face as she met my eyes, and for one awful moment, I thought she might actually cry.

When it looked like he was about halfway into the elaborate casting, Asher flung his arms back at the waystone. All of the gathered crackling and half-formed magic leapt away from him in a rush, flooding the ring and making it blaze with light.

Mercy leapt through with one last, almost apologetic glance at me. Oh, that was not a good sign. She had stepped right on my nuts without feeling the need to apologize before. Asher flung himself backward once she was through, and the magic crackled out to catch him, whipping him away in a blaze of white-hot light into the ring and beyond.

I’d barely taken a step forward when the light died, and suddenly, I was all alone here, surrounded by enemies again. All eyes turned to me now that the magic show had gone sideways, and I had absolutely no rabbits to pull out of hats. “Uh.”

Leofric’s hand drifted down to his belt, to the Lucis hanging by his side, radiating power even sheathed. He growled, “What is the meaning of this?”

Orphia did not look confused by this turn of events. She looked delighted. She had already hefted her glaive ready to charge in at me. All she had needed was an excuse, and Mercy abandoning ship was exactly the right excuse. I didn’t have a Solar to vouch for me anymore. Something that Leo had not specifically commanded had just happened, and control freak that he was, now he was going to have a tantrum about it.

Before he could even start, I turned to Leofric with my hands held up. Look how harmless I am. “I am as surprised as you.”

“You don’t look surprised,” Orphia sniped as she crept in closer.

I pointed a finger-gun at her face. “Zip it, Stabarella!”

When I glanced back, it was like looking right into the sun. All of Leofric’s attention was focused on me. All the light pouring from his eyes was on my face as he studied me. “She is correct, you do not seem at all taken aback that your allies have left you behind.”

My voice nearly squeaked. Pretty hard to do when you’ve normally got the bass sound of tectonic plates humping. “Mercy. She’s just a bit... flighty. Maybe she decided she just had to hop back and see some of her friends, or—”

“Or this was all a contrived attempt to gain my trust that has now faltered, and they mean to return in force when we least expect it.” Leofric had turned to face me now, the crowds of soldiers scattering back while still trying to keep him in sight. Not because they were scared for the safety of their glorious leader but because they wanted to see the fireworks.

“Dude, we are nowhere near that organized.”

His hand still hovered by his hip, fingers flexing. I didn’t know what it would feel like if I got hit with that sword. None of the other shards actually did anything at the moment, but I figured that Leo’s was different since it had been reforged. There was definitely some divine power stuck in those hunks of metal, and I dreaded to think what it could do if it was unleashed on my body. Maybe if I was lucky, it would only hurt as much as being hit with a sword. Which is a lot. “Perhaps that is why you were left behind in the retreat, this lack of organization.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the sword on his hip. Orphia could have been doing the fandango beside me and I wouldn’t have even noticed. All my attention was on him. “Leo, listen. We’re on the same side here. We all want Araphel stopped. There is no need for you to do anything… hasty.

He sighed. “I should have known that any gift as grand as the one you presented me would come with a dagger for my back in the other hand.”

“No.” I rocked back on my heels, hands still right up in the air, empty. Look how harmless I am. You wouldn’t hit a Faun with no weapons, would you? “No. That isn’t—”

“Be silent, traitor.”

My eyes darted to her for an instant, just reminding myself where she was. Too close. In striking distance already. “Orphia, if I wanted your opinion… Nope, sorry, that would never happen.”

She didn’t matter. She wouldn’t do anything if I had Leofric on my side. I just had to remind him that we were on the same side. “Listen, Leo. I don’t know why Mercy did that, but it doesn’t change anything. I’m still here, I’m still your Warmaster. We can still take the fight to the Voidgod, yeah?”

There was a flush in his face that I didn’t understand until his brows furrowed down. Here came that tantrum. “You have stolen the most vital armament of our crusade. Snatching the promise of the waystones from us on the eve of our triumphant march.”

I let out a nervous laugh. “Asher will come back any minute now. I’m sure he will. He’s probably just going to pick up a book, just like you planned.”

“They are gone.”

“They have abandoned you,” Orphia added with unbridled joy.

I couldn’t even argue with her. That was exactly what they had done. My only friends in the world, gone. Me, all alone in a castle full of enemies. Two Eternals ready to murder my stupid face off. Mercy’s plan had really screwed me over.

It was time to go back to my plan.

Chapter 13

Plan A. My original plan had been super simple, just like me. Hit the bad guys. Take their stuff. It was the kind of genius planning that had got us this far in our quest to unite the shards and save the world. It was direct and to the point.

Of course, that plan hadn’t really accounted for something like Leo, bubbling over with barely contained power and rage. Maybe I could have taken him in a fight if it was just the two of us, maybe I could have sprouted wings out my ass and taken off, but it wasn’t going to be a fair fight. The moment that Orphia had the chance she was going to stab me in the back and keep on stabbing until there was nothing left. You could always rely on her that way, she was consistent.

Which left me with Plan B. Take their stuff and run away.

Easier said than done.

If I wanted the Lucis, I was going to have to pry it from Leo’s cold, dead hands. I’ll admit that was the kind of plan that normally would have given me warm fuzzy feelings, but right now, it wasn’t practical.

We both went for the sword at the same time, and he would easily have beaten me to it—since he was so much faster, and it was attached to him—if it wasn’t for that handy new trick that I’d picked up out in the desert. I hammered my Spirit Strike into his grimacing face, carrying only one thought. One word. Fumble.

Everyone makes mistakes, even thousand-year-old demi-gods. He yanked on the hilt of the Lucis, making it leap out of the scabbard, then for one brief glorious moment he lost his grip on it, and my big clumsy fingers wrapped around the soft leather. I hip-checked him as I yanked it free.

Quest: Return of the Voidgod

Acquire Rusted Blade Shards: 3/6 Complete

400 Glory Gained

I would have had more luck trying to smack the Bastion down with my ass. All that happened when I crashed into him was good old Newton’s laws kicking in with the equal and opposite reaction, bouncing me off him and out of reach of his grasping gauntlet.

It had all happened so quickly, I barely even realized that it had worked before Leo was coming at me again. Seren’s training kicked in. I spun away from those grabby gauntlets, bringing the Lucis around me in a circle to knock any attempted lunge away. It clipped off the side of Orphia’s glaive as she tried to thrust it home, turning the blade aside and putting me inside her reach.

She started to backpedal still flailing the glaive around, trying to bring it to bear against me and doing nothing but forcing Leo to stay out of reach. Her eyes weren’t on me anyway, they were locked on the sword. The symbol of Leo’s power, in my hand. That had to sting the old ego a little bit.

Leo finally got it together enough to shout, “Stop.”

The impact of the word washed over me, and I could feel my movements still involuntarily. That was the true power of that supernatural charisma of his. Just a word, and everyone froze like statues. Orphia was paralyzed, wide open to attack but infinitely more worried about pissing off her master than getting a blade through her gut. I hammered my fist into her instead, folding her around the punch and knocking her aside so I could get to the door.

This time, I knew the way out. If I could get up on the ramparts and grab a rope, I could drop down into the Ashlands and run like hell. Maybe hook back up with the Faun if I was lucky. My brain still hadn’t fully wrapped itself around Mercy and Asher abandoning me to my death. That was the kind of thing that took some processing, and I did not have time right now to be getting weepy.

My shoulder took the door off its hinges, and I went on running, Lucis trailing behind me, Leo sprinting after me without a moment’s delay. He was close enough that I couldn’t hear for the clatter of his armor. Close enough that I could feel his fingertips brushing over the blade of the Lucis until I yanked it up in front of me. The door at the far end of the tunnel was shut, and in the time it took me to get through it, he would be on me.

Good thing we were in the heart of the wall now, not up on the surface where the Voidgod’s death explosion had screwed everything up. Artifice washed out through the solid stone, and with a laugh, I slammed it shut behind me.

Leo hit the new wall with a clang and a roar of fury, but he was too damned late. I smashed through the door at the far end and was out into the courtyard before he could backtrack or, more likely given his temperament, smash his way through.

There was still good stone down beneath the packed dirt of the next courtyard, and when I reached for it and hauled it up beneath my feet, I was launched like a rocket into the air, soaring over the guards milling about beneath me and landing with a grunt and a roll on the next shattered rooftop.

The laugh that had escaped me when I shut a building in Leo’s face had carried on, and I caught myself giggling away all the way to the side of the wall. There was no rope on this one, but it would be simple enough to bound along to the next one before Leo got his act together.

Or at least it should have been, but just as I was turning away from the uproar from the square I’d just added some striking stone pillars to, I caught a flash of movement in the periphery of my vision. If I didn’t already have the Lucis in hand and moving, Orphia would have spitted me on the spot. As it was I turned it away just in time, yet again.

Every time she didn’t manage to stab me, she looked genuinely surprised. You would think she’d be getting used to failure by now. “Oh, will you go away.”

The blade sang by my head as she made a half-hearted swipe, and I had to duck. This close, I could see she had a crazed look on her face, not the usual narrowing with rage, but googly-eyed deranged bliss at the thought of my impending death. “You shall fall, and Leofric shall delight in none more than me.”

“You were so weird when we first got here.” I parried her next thrust, too slow to follow up on it. She was testing me, not trying for a kill. “How did you manage to get even weirder?”

“This world is hell, and we are here to suffer, to be refined by that suffering into living gods.” She spoke as if it was any sort of explanation instead of yet more insane rambling. Maybe there was just something about being Alvaren-shaped that made you absolutely bug-nut crazy. Did the elegant skulls squish their brains?

She came in at me again, not the playful jabs that I’d been parrying but a real onslaught that I had to backpedal away from rapidly to avoid becoming Swiss cheese. I was just lucky she didn’t have enough sense to circle around me and put my back to the drop, or I’d have been forced right off.

Why wasn’t she smart enough to do that? I mean, she wasn’t a genius or anything, but it wouldn’t have been hard.

The Lucis was so light in my hand that it felt like I wasn’t holding anything at all, and it had me clumsy and off-balance. If I wanted to waggle a fly-swat around then that’s what I would have made. I couldn’t use my strength with this thing for fear of the flimsy blade snapping in two. And the reach on the thing was less than the length of my arm. If Orphia had any Potency to speak of, the slaps I was using to turn her attacks aside would have been useless.

It was time for an upgrade.

The metal of my great-sword flowed around me in a wash that startled Orphia out of her latest attack and put her on the defensive. I hadn’t been sure if this would work, what with the Lucis being super fancy and magical, but apparently, slapping a whole load of metal on top of it didn’t interfere all that much. I’d have to fiddle with the grip of the thing later to get it properly comfortable in my hands, but for now, I had a decent giant cleaver to wave around.

So I waved it. Two great sweeping cuts left to right, then back again, sent Orphia scampering back out of reach. On her heels, she had the moment she needed to think. She gathered lightning around her glaive blade as she waited for an opportunity to unleash it on me, but I was not falling for that one again. I wasn’t giving her a shield as a nice big target.

The air stank of ozone, and my hair stood on end each time that it swept by, but still, she couldn’t make contact. I wasn’t letting her hit me with that big pointy taser again. Once was enough for one lifetime, thank you very much. I danced back out of reach, hopping back in to make swift cuts and keep her from gaining too much ground when I could, still getting used to the weight of the rebuilt Lucis.

Even now, with the combined weight of the original sword and my own big chunky boy, it felt lighter in my hand than it should have, flowing through the motions I was trying to make with such ease that it threw me completely off balance. Maybe this was the super-power of having a chunk of Rusted Blade in your sword. Maybe if I ever actually hit someone with it, rainbows would come shooting out. At this rate, I was never going to find out.

The brief sweet window with no Leofric in my life was at an end. He hopped clean across the courtyard that I’d remodeled in a single bound to land by Orphia’s side.

“You come into my home…”

He raised an empty hand, and a stream of luminous green lanced out from the palm. Not a zappy ray like I’d been expecting, but a continual squirt of liquid. Where it struck the stone, it ate through it. Where it clipped my pauldron before I had the chance to dodge away, it began to melt away to nothing. I had to pulse Artifice to toss my armor off before the acid ate through to flesh.

Still, Leofric roared. “You slaughter my people! …”

He lashed his hand across, and the line of acid struck off the ground and splashed up at me in a wave. I had to strain Artifice to yank stone up through the dead material on top of the Bastion to intercept it before it washed over me. Even the stone wasn’t enough. The moment that the acid hit it, the whole lopsided wall I’d just managed to drag up started melting away. When it smoked away, Leo was still there, with both hands upraised and some new thrum of Primal energy gathering between them. “You steal my most prized artifact…”

When he snapped his hands apart, a Khorkhoi the same size as me leapt out of the green glow, launched at me like somebody loaded it into a worm cannon and lit the fuse. I caught it on the edge of the Lucis, splitting it in half, its own momentum doing all the cutting work for me until it toppled into two parts at my feet.

When I looked up from it, Leo was there. Right there in front of me. He’d moved so fast I didn’t even see it happen. His face was a rictus of fury. “And then you dare to strike me?!”

I dared to strike him again. Whipping the sword up, still covered in worm guts, to bury it in his crotch. He sidestepped it with the same disinterest that he did everything as if I hadn’t almost made him sing soprano, and his fist caught me square in the chest.

There had been no wind up, no indication that a blow was even coming. One second he was standing there, the next I was hit.

Surprise took the air out of my lungs as much as the impact. The pain arrived after I’d skidded back a few feet over the ruined rooftop. Whatever got popped and healed earlier was still tender, and the broken ribs jabbing down into it were not making things better for it. There was a visible dent in my chest when I looked down, and worse yet, that same acid he’d been spraying around willy-nilly was splattered right in there, burning away at me.

It wasn’t the worst pain I’d ever experienced, but it was right up there with demon-spider-god poison.

He must have enjoyed the look of horror on my face when I glanced up because he didn’t immediately punch my whole head off. Instead, he crossed his arms and smiled. The acid was eating out from the point of impact. Sizzling away my skin, my bones, my everything.

Orphia took her chance while I was distracted by impending death and swung for me, the flat of her blade hitting the side of my head and discharging with a thunderclap.

Everything went black.

If it had just been the glaive smack, I probably would have been out for the count, but the lightning racked down through my body, lighting up every nerve with agony on its way to earth. If my heart had stopped beating, that zapped it back into action.

Every massive muscle in my body contracted as the storm passed through, and I was in mid-air by the time I snapped awake again. That helped with springing back to my feet but not much. Most of the muscles I’d usually use for sitting up were gone, eaten away by Leo’s acid. I was well on my way to having the flattest tummy on Amaranth, and I couldn’t do a single sit-up. I pulsed Restoration through my body, and it was almost immediately overwhelmed by the sheer power disparity of the Primal acid arrayed against it. No sooner did something heal than it was eaten away again, giving me all the pain of having it eaten away again too.

Still, I managed to twist and stumble to my feet, lashing out with Artifice to throw up a wall between me and the murderous smug expressions on Leo and Orphia’s faces. It didn’t work quite right. I fumbled it, and instead of hauling up stone from beneath the Void-touched rock, I just shot out random spurs of stone from where the wall was still alive to my senses. They crisscrossed and jutted out at weird angles and did nothing to stop Leo taking careful aim with his palm and readying another blast of lethal acid.

My body was in ruins, and only grim determination was keeping the Lucis in my hand, but none of that did anything to dim my divine gifts. This time I made the same mistake again, on purpose: reaching with Artifice, not to put a barrier between us, but to hit them with the up-thrust of stone.

Where the rock burst up into Leo’s godly flesh it stopped dead, but my girl Orphia hadn’t been buffing herself up nearly as thoroughly. When the rock pushed at her, she flew, one spike taking her in the thigh and launching her sideways, another hooking under her armpit to spin her around, and another just jabbing her in the back for some extra height.

I’d hoped that getting whacked with all that rock might have thrown Leo’s aim off, but the spray of acid caught me square in the back all the same. There was nothing in this world or any other like a chemical burn for its pure pain potential, and I am not ashamed to say that when it washed in a searing line from my hip to my face that I screamed like a tiny baby that had just pooped itself. I mean it was high-pitched, and it was grating; I was having a real bad time.

The acid that poured into the hollow where my torso used to be just sped up the destruction of whatever internal organs I still had left. The popped thing from earlier was just straight up gone now, along with all the wibbly sausage-looking coils that I’d been trying to hold in as I ran. The ribs that had been crushed in had fallen to melt into paste on the stone. When I looked down, I could see spine glistening in the sunlight of Leofric’s gaze.

[42/1270 Health]

Leofric brushed aside the stone around him like cobwebs and began to advance once more, not even bothering to part the stone when he could walk right through it. My back was to the empty sky, and I had nowhere left to run.

Dying didn’t scare me. I knew it wasn’t the end. I knew that I’d be able to come back again and again until whatever I was up against was ground to dust. But I hated defeat. No, actually that wasn’t true, I could roll with losing a few times, I just hated losing to this asshole. Leo strode towards me in his shiny golden armor, acid and poison dripping from his fingertips as he closed in on me, and I knew, I just knew he was going to try to make this as slow and painful as it possibly could be. He was going to revel in it. I’d shown him up. I’d done the things that he could never do, and now he was going to hurt me to make himself feel better about it. Well, screw that, I was nobody’s punching bag.

My legs were done for, lost to my senses and possibly detached by this point. It didn’t matter, I still had two strong arms attached to a body that was a hell of a lot lighter than I was used to, I flipped over to drag my raw dangling ribs and guts across the ragged stone. Oh, that hurt a lot.

I was trailing a smear of Maulkin slime behind me like a snail as I dragged myself closer and closer to the edge of the wall. Leofric sounded like he was yawning. “I do not wish to climb down to retrieve my stolen property. Stop him.”

I was so lost in becoming sauce that I hadn’t even noticed Orphia make her crunchy landing, or whenever she’d climbed over the top of my little stone fence to stand beside me, sneering. I looked up at her, blood and liquidized organs dribbling down my chin, and despite it all, I still pitied her for what she’d become.

Her face was twisted in a mask of delight as she swung her glaive blade for my face.

If she’d just stabbed me, I would have been done, but Orphia, she hated my face, she absolutely had to go for the flashy face smash. Plus, I’m sure she wanted to do something impressive in front of her new sugar daddy.

I surged Vitality and caught the blade in my teeth.

One side of my face already hung open from the acid, and the glaive cut into the other, opening up a wider grin than Faun faces were ever meant to have, but the top of my head did not pop off like she’d wanted. I surged Potency too and bit clean through the metal as Orphia gawked at me.

More blood poured from my ruined mess of a face, but through it all my laughter gurgled. Even now she couldn’t beat me. Even now, I was better than her.

She tried to jerk her shattered glaive back, but I caught hold of the haft, and we had a little wrestle until finally she worked out that she could brace the back end on the rock and haul it straight up until my weight worked against me.

I was hefted into the air for just a moment, one eye still functioning well enough to see the ash dunes spread out before me, and I used every last drop of my surged Potency to fling myself forward. I didn’t know how much of me was still attached by that point, but I guess there was still enough to belly-flop off a cliff.

The wind whipped by me, whistling, and the world spun end over end. I closed my eyes before I saw the ground leaping up to meet me, and I turned all that was left of my focus inward, lighting up the Pillar of Aether in a blinding column of moonlight.

Then everything went dark.

[0/1270 Health]

It had been a while since the last time that I died. I hadn’t actually done it since I first arrived on Amaranth despite the best efforts of literally every living thing I’d met. Which meant that I wasn’t actually all that sure what would happen next. The pain stopped. So that was nice.

I kind of figured that I’d just open my eyes and be in my shiny new fresh-built body. Apparently, it didn’t work like that. At least, not immediately.

My other senses, the ones that weren’t tied to my body, slowly came back to life, and I could see my upper body lying there at the bottom of the wall. My legs lay a distance further along, having finally snapped off in the breeze as I fell. My face was almost all bare skull thanks to the ever-advancing acid. Even that bone was perforated and crumbling, adding to the ashes piled up at the base of the wall.

“Could have done without seeing that.”

I didn’t currently have a stomach, so I couldn’t feel sick, but watching my body like that made me uncomfortable in a whole load of other ways. Thankfully, I didn’t have to watch long.

Death was by my side, like he’d been there all along and I just hadn’t noticed before now. He swept one sleeve of his robes through the air, a glint of bone protruding past the edge of the rough black fabric. My body was wiped away by the motion. Now you see it, now you don’t.

“Thanks.”

Death inclined his head towards me in a little nod. Then abruptly, I felt a tug like a big elastic band had just been attached around my middle. It was the same sensation I felt when my awareness lingered in a part of my Sphere of Influence that my body was moving away from. Like I was off-center. The only difference was, this wasn’t my dumb meat staggering away from me as I tried to do some Artifice work. This time the body I was meant to be attached to was half a world away.

I managed to yelp out, “Bye!” to Death before the world started whipping by.

With no body, I didn’t have to worry about hitting anything in between me and my destination, but that didn’t mean seeing it all fly by me at supersonic speeds wasn’t a little bit disconcerting. I zoomed through the Bastion and was soaring over the kingdom beyond before I had time to recognize a thing, then there were fields and forests and ruins and cities and a massive ravine. Rivers and ponds. Swamps thick and buzzing. More desolate muddy nothing with some great beasts loping about, half-hollowed mountains, grass, water, all flying by so fast I couldn’t comprehend the details. The ocean lingered a little longer, then I was back to Talon’s Keep, to my Shrine. To my body.

I sank gratefully into my flesh as it formed, sighing like an exhausted man flopping into bed. A base need was driving me to nestle inside it where I belonged, my poor spirit rubbed raw by exposure to the world outside. Hermit crabs. That was what it reminded me of. Eternals were hermit crabs, and bodies were shells.

One staggering step forward was all I managed before I was slammed off my feet. I had a sword in hand, but my armor was gone, and this thing was inside my defenses already, grappling with me as it bore me to the ground, pinning me for just an instant before it reared back to strike, and my brain caught up. Seren smiled down at me before hammering a kiss home.

Chapter 14

The kissing went on for quite some time, and I really wasn’t complaining. After the day that I’d just suffered through, I had earned some smoochy time.

She eventually jerked back as though something had stung her, which wasn’t impossible since we were all camped out in the jungle. From the blue blush that chased over her face, I realized that it was just propriety. The dvergar working around us weren’t staring, but there was no way that they’d missed us making out. “You have returned.”

With some effort, I hoisted myself back up to sitting. The body still felt like it was settling in. Like all the wires hadn’t been fully connected yet. Or like it was a new shoe that still pinched a little. “I have!”

She put a foot on my shoulder and pushed me back down, scowling. “You were defeated.”

“Well, I got what I wanted, and they didn’t, so I’m going to call it a win.” I shrugged, and her knee wobbled up and down. “Even if I had to die to get it.”

Her eyes fell on the Lucis, now returned to its normal shape and size since I’d left all my metal and other gear behind. I was kind of surprised that I’d gotten the whole thing. When I used Soulbond on it during my plummet, I’d been expecting just to nab the shard. Getting a handy sword in the deal was great. “You have successfully recovered another fragment of the weapon?”

“Yup, we’re halfway there.” I held the sword out, and she gingerly took it from my grasp to study it more closely. “Two more stops on the quest express and we’ll be ready for Araphel.”

She took a couple of practice swings with the blade, learning its balance, smiling softly at the craftsmanship. “And once more you have left powerful enemies in thy wake, baying for your blood and planning to obliterate you and all you hold dear.”

I smiled at her again, sheepishly. “You know me so well.”

She let the sword droop to her side and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Perhaps just once, you might actually destroy an enemy instead of allowing grudges against you to fester?”

“Hey, I did kill one super-powered grudge-bearing dude.” I made my way back to my feet, still unsteady, like a little baby horse. “One out of two ain’t bad.”

When her hand fell away, she was glowering at me. “Then you may spend half of the night in my bed and the other half on the cold stone floor contemplating your actions.”

“Can I take you down onto the floor with me?”

She had flushed blue again, but before she could give me an answer, her head snapped around. “Your kin have returned.”

You could hear them before you could see them, emerging from the forest in the middle of what I’d normally have called a raging argument, except only one of them was yelling. Mercy, predictably enough, was bellowing at the top of her lungs, while Asher spoke so softly it made me wonder if Mercy even heard him over the noise of her stamping feet.

“…Killed somebody for no reason at all. You can’t trust someone that murders people to make their life easier. That’s like trusting a shark, or Seren. It is crazy…”

If Seren was insulted by the comparison, she didn’t show it. Amoral apex predator from the dawn of time seemed like a pretty apt description for her if you took out the fishy bits.

Asher stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of me. Was he relieved to see me? Upset? Give me something, lizard face. Anything.

It took Mercy a moment to notice him frozen in the middle of a soothing rebuttal and spin around, but when she did, there was no hiding her expression. Pure dismay. Like I’d just hauled down my trousers and taken a dump in her breakfast cereal.

I’ve got to be honest, I was a little bit pissed at them. So I waved, smiling wide, although not as wide as Orphia had made me. “Welcome home, guys! How was your trip?”

Mercy’s frozen expression told me nothing, but Asher was ever a creature of good manners. “Our traversal of the arcane network proceeded as well as could be expected given the demand for hasty recalculations. How went your own… journey?”

I advanced on them, still grinning so hard I worried my teeth might crack. “Oh you know, I was doused in acid, attacked by a giant worm, had half my face hacked off and my brain electrocuted, lost both my legs, and fell off a mile-high wall. You know. The usual.”

Mercy sniped back immediately, “Oh no. Did your new besties not like it when we took their teleporter away?”

Asher bent almost double in a bow. “I beg your forgiveness, I did not know what was intended when Mercy informed me that we had to depart. It is only since my arrival here, and her subsequent interruptions of my attempts to re-open the waystone network, that I came to understand it was her intention to abandon you.”

All of the training really had paid off. I had an arm out to catch Seren before she’d even drawn her swords. “No! No! We are not attacking each other. We are on the same side. We just need to talk.”

Seren struggled in my arms. If I hadn’t spent a month learning all the ins and outs of the way she could twist and turn then she would have broken free, but now all I had to do was hoist her up onto my shoulder so she lost her traction as she roared, “She left you there to die?!”

Okay, kind of hard to argue with that when a) they left me and b) I died, but I tried to play it down anyway. “Technically yes, but it is all just a misunderstanding.”

“A misunderstanding?” Mercy barked. “Oh, so you didn’t just murder some guy to win a psycho’s trust?”

She really wasn’t making it easier to stop Seren killing her, and honestly, my temper was a tad frayed after getting six colors of crap kicked, chopped, and melted out of me. When I snapped back, it was a roar that sent the closest Dvergar running for cover. “He was cuckoo for coconuts too! They’re all crazy, all the old Eternals! They’ve all been fighting each other so long that they can’t understand a world where there is anything other than fighting each other.”

Now that I was angry, it seemed to make things easier for her, like she’d been off balance before and having someone to fight against was putting her back on an even keel. “How convenient for you.”

I tossed Seren back down onto her feet and stormed over to Mercy myself, that same cold rage gripping the base of my guts and creeping up into my chest, softening my roar into a bitter whisper. “You know what would have been convenient? If he hadn’t been. If he would have listened to a single word I was saying to him instead of jumping to the worst possible conclusion just like you are doing right now.”

“Aww”—she pouted—“did he not want to be best friends either?”

“Are you serious right now,” The rage flared in the face of her mockery. Mercy making a joke at my expense was usually how she showed she cared, but now all my feelings were getting twisted up. “After what you just pulled?”

She shrugged as if a horned giant wasn’t looming over her. “What do you care? You got what you wanted from the start anyway. Or is that not golden boy’s sword I see in Seren’s hand.”

Seren snapped back. “You shall soon see it run through you, vexatious wretch.”

I let a little laughter rumble out despite myself. Despite everything. “Hey, hey, let’s not call people names, even if they are hilarious old timey names.”

Seren scowled at me now. “From the beginning this one has treated you without respect. From the beginning she has questioned your choices, fought your every decision. I do not understand why you have not cast her out.”

“Because we’re friends.” All the anger washed out of me when I told the truth of it, leaving behind a sad ache.

Good thing Seren had enough anger for all of us put together. “She left you to die. This is not the action of an ally, let alone kin.”

This was never going to be fixed if one of us didn’t try to reach out to the other, and since Mercy clearly wasn’t done being petty, I decided I had to be the bigger man. Figuratively, as well as literally. I reached out my empty hand to her. “Friends make mistakes.”

She looked at my hand as if it was the turd I’d dropped in the cornflakes. “Murder isn’t a mistake.”

Asher finally spoke up. “Mercy, it cannot have escaped your notice that violence has often been the only solution to the problems that this world faces.”

“He killed another Eternal and paraded his severed head around like it was a trophy. He has gone so far off the deep end I don’t even know how to…” she trailed off with a look on her face like she’d now taken a spoonful of the cereal.

“What? You thought Leo was just going to believe me when I told him I’d killed someone who can’t die?” She glared at me, but I was sick of being treated like this. “You think he’d just take it on trust? I needed to show him something, and Koschei’s head was already off.”

Before Mercy could come snarling back at me, Asher held up his hands, then very carefully asked, “Maulkin, tell us why his death was a necessity.”

Finally, I was getting a chance to tell my side of it instead of the version that Mercy had just imagined up. “He was using the Faun, he’d been their… I don’t know, their pope or something, for as long as any of them could remember. They were all dancing to his tune, living out in the middle of nowhere, eating worms to survive when they could have settled anywhere in the world. I tried to convince him we had bigger problems. I tried to… He used his powers, he looked inside my mind, he saw everything that had happened, and he still didn’t believe me. He thought it was a trick or a trap or something. He tried to freeze me in a block of ice so I could never come back and bother him again.”

Asher bobbed his head along to the rhythm of my words, then he turned to Mercy, “Then it does seem that his death was justified.”

She pointed an accusatory finger. “Of course, Maulkin thinks it is justified. He’s the one that did it!”

“Oh, like you would have done anything different if you’d been there instead of me.” I didn’t mean to roll my eyes, honestly. Maybe if they had still been glowing like the others it wouldn’t have been so obvious, but they were dimmer now than they’d ever been.

“Of course I would have. I would have left!” Mercy almost cleared the distance to hit me before Asher’s hand on her shoulder brought her to a halt. It was a good thing he was there. Seren was standing sullen and silent by my side, and if this turned physical, I didn’t like Mercy’s chances. Not against the two of us. “If the Faun want to eat worms, that’s their business. You can’t just stroll in and kill anybody that you don’t like!”

“We kill monsters! All the time!” Okay, maybe I roared a little bit. Oops.

She yelled just as loud back at me. “Yeah, because they’re monsters, not people!”

I pointed vaguely in the direction of where I thought the Bastion was, but it was a barely educated guess. “Leo, Orphia, all their lot, they think the Faun are monsters. Inyoka too. Some of them even think Dvergar are monsters. They definitely think that a Lunar Eternal is a monster. So tell me, where is the line?”

“Oh I’m right there with them now. You are a monster. I don’t know if you’ve done something to yourself by attaching lumps of Rusted Blade to your soul, or if you were always like this and just… hiding it, but I’ve had enough!” The last words came out as a scream.

How long had this been building up before I killed somebody out of sight and gave her the excuse to melt down? Orphia had thought the worst about me from the get-go, and Mercy had hated her so completely at first sight that it almost seemed like we’d ended up on the same side by default. Had she been watching me out of the side of her eye all this time, just waiting for me to show my true colors.

Back on the boat when I’d lost my cool and Seren had nearly… When I did what I did, Mercy had been the one to come see me, to ask me how I was feeling. Was that all just a prelude to this? Had she been looking then for the same excuse to hate me that she’d found now?

She turned to Asher with a quiver in her voice after all the yelling. “We’re leaving. There are still three shards out there that we need to find if we want to stop all this Voidgod stuff. No point sitting around.”

I sighed. “You need me.”

“No!” she snapped back. “We don’t!”

Asher spoke softly, consolingly, “Mercy.”

I cut her off before she could storm away. “I know where the Faun shard is.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Then tell us. Prove you aren’t the monster we think you are. Tell us where it is.”

“Mercy.” Asher was a little louder now, but not loud enough to get past all the self-righteousness she’d stuffed in her ears.

I crossed my arms. “Nowhere you can go without me.”

“Oh save the cryptic messiah crap for somebody that is buying it.” She went for her bow. I’d been expecting it throughout the whole argument, but there was still some part of me that had hoped she wouldn’t actually draw a weapon on me. That our friendship still meant that much to her. “Tell us where it is!”

“Mercy!” Asher’s shout stopped her dead in her tracks.

She turned on him, snarling, “What?!”

“We must stay together.” His arms sank to his sides.

It was her turn to have the wind taken out of her sails. “Are you kidding me? You’re taking his side?”

Asher was unflappable. “There are no sides. We all serve the same purpose. We all seek the Voidgod’s end.”

“He is killing people!” She was yelling in his face, but Asher didn’t even blink. Did he even have eyelids?

He cocked his head to one side. “If that is so, how many more would he kill without our presence enforcing restraint.”

Her face and her resolve crumpled into confusion again. “What?”

Asher strode between us like he was giving a lecture to some students, claw pointed up as he pontificated. “Let us assume that your supposition is true, that your erstwhile friend has fallen to some evil and murderous urges, who in this world could better prevent him from acting upon those impulses than us?”

Mercy looked disgusted. “You want us to be his jailers? His keepers?”

“We seek the Voidgod’s end. Whatever else you might think of Maulkin, there is no denying that he has strength that has carried us through conflict and strife many times before.” He spun to face Mercy. “Would you let him run loose to do what harm he may or set a harness upon him and turn him once more towards our goal?”

It took me a second to scrape back through all the memories of my past life to understand exactly where I’d seen someone behaving like him before, then High School loomed its ugly head and I remembered. He thought he was in a debating contest. He thought he could win this by throwing logic at her.

As a person who’s first and only resort in a debate was talking about the size of the other dude’s mother, I decided to keep my mouth shut and let him do his thing. Wasn’t like he could screw things up more than I’d already managed just by living.

Mercy seemed to be at a loss for a moment. She’d been ready for a screaming argument about whether or not I’d gone bad, not a reasoned debate based on the idea that what she was saying was right. Eventually, she said, “How are we meant to trust him?”

Asher looked at me to see if I was going to start yelling, but I gave him a tight-lipped smile. Oops, Mercy didn’t like that. Her scowl drew down so low the tiny sun in each of her eyes looked like it was setting upside down. And she was back to yelling again. “How are we ever meant to trust him again when he does stuff like this?”

“Trust is earned with time.” Asher strode between us, breaking Mercy’s glower. That was why he kept walking back and forth. He thought that we were like Siamese fighting fish, and if we couldn’t see each other we’d knock it off. “Perhaps as our journey continues, you shall find evidence in his actions that Maulkin can be relied upon once more. But if we part ways, how could that reconciliation ever take place.”

Mercy shot that down without pause for breath. “So I’m just meant to forget that he’s gone off the deep end?”

“You are meant to weigh all his actions and judge him on their merit.” Asher kept speaking softer and softer, the angrier that Mercy got. This time even I had to lean in a little bit to catch everything.

She glanced from me to Seren with a sneer. “Sounds like a good way to get stabbed in the back.”

“Then Maulkin shall march at the front, as he ever has.” Asher said it as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, taking her literally in that way that he sometimes did, when you couldn’t be sure if he actually didn’t understand you or if it was some kind of joke.

Mercy nodded to Seren. “And his stabby little sex toy?”

Seren already had the Lucis in hand before all of this started, and she’d drawn her other sword from her belt as she leapt forward. I had nothing. No weapons, no armor, no plan. I had to surge Potency and launch myself after her if I wanted Mercy to survive the next seconds.

I caught the back of her belt and yanked her back down to earth, and the blades swished harmlessly through the empty space in front of Mercy’s face. Two inches further and she’d have had a free nose-job. With a sound like a wounded animal, Seren spun at me, grip reversing on the Lucis and the tip driving back for my chest. She wouldn’t really kill me. I was sure of that. 90% sure. Mostly sure. Oh crap, she was stabbing me.

Already bleeding, I stumbled to the side as a line opened up across the rags that had been draped over my new body, and the lower half of them fluttered away on the breeze. If she hadn’t been hitting me with the same move every time I got behind her in training for the past month, I’d have been spitted.

There was nothing for me to fight back with, so I reached out with Artifice. My senses flooded after so long in the desert and the Bastion where so much had been void-touched and inert. Life bloomed everywhere around us, stone and sand and dirt were heaped in layers beneath our feet, and the boundary fence was in easy reach too. None of which would make me a damned weapon.

Seren charged for Mercy once more, swords drawn back in lethal symmetry, the tips would end their course on the far side of her body, and Mercy was still just standing there. She’d gone for her bow again, she’d started to get her feet under her, but nobody could move as fast as the Alvaren. Their bodies moved at the speed of thought, obeying without any of the indecision or reaction time delays us mere mortals suffered through.

Stone leapt up between them. Not a solid wall, because I didn’t have enough stone in ready reach close to the surface, but interlocking bars of the stuff shooting up at odd angles, just like I’d hauled out of the Bastion roof. Back then I’d been facing somebody so strong the rock had crumbled at his touch, here I just had Seren to contend with.

The rock latticed around her swords as they thrust, knocking them off angle until more sprouts of stone could lock them in place. She abandoned them, leapt back, and was ready to go up over the top of the makeshift shield I’d thrown up when I caught her around the waist and bore her down to the ground.

She squirmed and writhed to get out from under me, using every trick she’d ever shown me in the brief wrestling sessions that had preceded weapons training. She was nimble and experienced and could work leverage I didn’t even know existed, but she was also small. Compared to me, most people were. My weight crushed down onto her and knocked the wind from her lungs. Even still she bunched up her legs beneath me and kicked up, launching me end over end through the air.

Throughout all of this, Asher was still just standing there chatting away. “Seren has always chosen her own course but heeded Maulkin’s council. So long as he does not degenerate openly into conniving villainy, I suspect that she will be restrained from violence.”

With her momentary freedom, Seren had sprung back to her feet and was darting forward once more. I caught her heel just before it slipped out of reach, and she fell, twisting around as she did to hammer her other foot into my face. That was downright rude.

She tried for another kick, and I flung myself forward, relying on my weight to carry me through again. Her booted toes scraped over my ribs, but there was flesh on those ribs again, so even though it hurt, it still felt like a dawdle compared to the last beating I’d taken.

She was sullen and silent as I crawled up the length of her and collapsed with a hand over her mouth. The cold fury seemed to have left her, judging by the playful way she bit into my palm. Then finally, I managed to get a word in. “If this is going to work, I need you to not kill Mercy.”

I carefully moved my hand to let her speak her piece, and I tried not to enjoy it too much when her cool breath washed over my face. “Are you deafened to the insult that she has done me? Do you have no care? Does honor demand no satisfaction?”

“Seren…” I had no idea how we were getting out of this one with everyone alive. “She is going to apologize, then we’re all going to get along, just like before.”

Mercy had stepped around the lattice of stone, which I noticed was already crumbling to pieces. Not surprising, given how hastily it had been put together. She sneered at the two of us entangled on the ground. “The hell I am.”

Asher was examining the stonework like it was the most interesting thing going on. “Mercy, it seems the only course that will not end in bloodshed.”

“I don’t care.” She nocked an arrow. “I can take her.”

I had eased off Seren a bit, and she used that extra space to squirt out from under me like a torpedo, throwing herself into a roll that ended with her on her feet and her hands back on the hilts of the swords locked in the crumbling stone. “Rank arrogance as befits such churlish bespawler.” She whipped them out of the dissolving rocks and spun them over her hands. “Let my blades give answer, and we shall see how the snoutband fares.”

I couldn’t help myself. Obviously, I couldn’t help myself. Nobody would want to make this situation worse than it already was. I snorted. “Wow, really rolling out the old timey insults today.”

She leveled the tip of the Lucis at me, but it couldn’t have cut me nearly as deeply as the pain in her eyes. “You make mockery of me too?!”

Clambering to my feet, I held up my hands in supplication, shaking my heavy head from side to side, just in case I wasn’t being clear enough when I said, “No. Of course not. She shouldn’t have said… any of the stuff she said. I’m sorry. And she’s going to say sorry too.”

Mercy sniffed. “I’m really not.”

“For…” I had been doing a good job keeping my own temper under control up until now. I was willing to kick back and let logic boy do his thing. Following him through to whatever solution he came up with that would let us all work together again, but now I was finding the prospect of Seren hacking Mercy up more and more appealing. “Mercy could you just think for a second before you talk. Are you that desperate to die?”

Wind began to coil around her, not taking form around the arrow thrumming on her bowstring but lingering. Getting ready. Mercy’s brows drew down. “I can take her!”

I had to close my eyes so that the hate I could feel building up inside me didn’t shine out. This was Mercy. She was my friend. Sometimes friends had little fights. She wasn’t the enemy. I kept telling myself, over and over. She was my friend. When my mouth moved, my voice came out so low it set what was left of the stone lattice shaking. “No. You can’t. You can’t take me either. You definitely can’t take both of us. Maybe Asher weighs in for you, maybe he doesn’t, but either way, you die. Over nothing.”

She twisted to line up her arrow on me instead of Seren. That was good news. I could take the hit and bounce back. Seren would just die. Mercy snarled, “So what? I’ll just come back again!”

I spread out my empty hands in a sweeping gesture. “Where? You can’t think we’d leave your shrine intact. How does losing everything help you?”

Her eyes narrowed as she hissed back, “At least I’d be away from you.”

Tempers were running high. Maybe me and Mercy had never been friends, maybe all the little secrets I’d been keeping had shown through and finally tipped her off that something wasn’t right about me. I didn’t know which. All I knew was that I didn’t want whatever we had together to end like this. “Mercy, I know you don’t believe me, but it doesn’t matter. We all need each other. This thing we’re doing, it is bigger than any one of us. We need to see it through.”

“I know that. You think I don’t know that. You think that you’re the only one worrying about the whole world ending when you could have stopped it?”

I could see the weight of it on her shoulders for the first time. I’d been blundering through this whole world like I was having a great time, Asher had been so lost in the joy of learning about everything and everywhere that this was like a holiday for him too. Mercy was the only one who hadn’t been delighted to land here. She wouldn’t talk about her life before, except the little sparse hints that we’d managed to cobble together. Maybe she’d been happy there. Maybe this place was hell for her.

There was no point trying to mend burning bridges right now. “I don’t need you to be my friend if you don’t want to be, I just need for us to move on from this. To keep moving forward. Otherwise, the bad guy wins.”

“Oh now you’re a believer in this big magical quest that we’ve all been dumped in the middle of.” She scoffed, but the arrow aimed at my head slowly lowered, first to my heart, then to my crotch. It lingered there for considerably more time than it really needed to before she pointed it down and eased off the pressure on the string. “You used to be even more skeptical than me about it. What a convenient change of heart.”

“Yeah, I am a believer actually.” I was as surprised to say it as she was to hear it. “I believe in what we’re doing. I believe that it matters.”

“So what, you had an epiphany? A miraculous vision?” Every word was dripping with so much sarcasm I was surprised it didn’t look like Leo’s acid spray. “Did one of the gods drop in and tell you that we should believe everything the pasty lizard told us?”

I had really been hoping to hold off on any more revelations or arguments for one night, but I didn’t want to hold anything back and get accused of being a liar later. Not when I already had so many different things that I really didn’t want them to know about. “Kind of.”

Asher’s head tilted to the side as I said that like I was an interesting specimen under his microscope. “Has some event occurred to allay your suspicions? I must admit that your newfound faith is something of a surprise to me also.”

Time to just spit it out. Get it out in the open. Stop worrying about one of the many dirty little secrets that had been keeping me up at night. It even sounded ridiculous to me when I said it. “I saw Araphel.”

“What?” Seren head snapped around. It kind of made sense that she’d be the one to freak out about the prospect of the Voidgod already being back, what with having lived through the first Revelation and all the fun that brought.

I gave her a little smile, meant as a comfort, but she went on staring like I’d just transformed into a giant jellybean. “My spirit touch, it lets me see the history of things, and the Rusted Blade…”

“You saw the means by which he was slain?” Asher was almost tripping over his own feet to get to me in his excitement. In a hoarse whisper, he asked, “You know how he means to return?”

“No, it is more like… his ghost is still haunting the sword bits.” Seren dropped the Lucis and then took a step away from it for good measure. “He… he spoke to me.”

“Well, now some of the psycho killer stuff makes a bit more sense! How long have you been having casual chats with the god of dark and evil?” While Asher had scampered over like a happy little puppy, Mercy stalked towards me like a big cat with prey in sight.

“I’ve only done it twice since we got Talon’s shard!” I wasn’t sure why I felt like I had to defend myself. I suppose that it was guilt. I’d known from the first moment I heard Araphel that they’d want to know all about it. I should have told them. Just like I knew that right at that moment I should have been telling them everything. Throwing myself on Mercy’s mercy. The truth was, “It scared the hell out of me the first time it happened.”

She was easing tension back into her bowstring. Slow, like I wouldn’t notice her doing it. Like I couldn’t see her gathering the elemental power she used for her big blast shots around her too. “So what did the Voidgod’s ghost say?”

Man if she was mad before, she really wasn’t going to like this. “He offered me a deal.”

“I knew it!” Guess I was wrong. She didn’t look mad, she looked delighted. Vindicated. “I knew something was up. You got all black-veiny when you strapped the shard into your soul, and your eyes went out and… I knew you’d turned evil because of the Voidgod.”

I pressed on with my story. She wasn’t actively trying to murder me, so the more of it I could get out before the fighting started, the better it would be for me. “He promised me that if I kept all the shards apart, if I threw them in the sea or buried them for him, then when he came back, he’d let us live. He’d… give us a part of the world that was safe and ours.”

“So you just handed him the universe so that you could be comfortable?!” She looked at me with such contempt I could almost feel myself shrinking. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

The proud booming voice of mine that made stone shake and monsters flinch was whittled down to a whisper by the time that I answered her. “I said no.”

“Oh yeah, right.” She strode off, throwing her hands in the air. “Oh my gods, this explains everything. All the time you suddenly didn’t want to hunt shards any more, when you were so content to just lounge around with your new girlfriend. You gave up. You kept us here while Araphel came back. I can’t believe that you…”

Asher had been looking at me curiously throughout all of her ranting and raving, but now he spoke up. “Mercy, he has just stolen a third shard.”

She glanced back over her shoulder. “So?”

“Why would he have collected another fragment of the weapon if he meant to keep them separated?” Asher looked from her to me and back. “Even if you fear that we cannot trust his words, his actions speak louder.”

At least one person believed in me. “I told him to shove his deal up his ass. He wouldn’t be offering little people like us a deal if he wasn’t running scared. If we can get the sword, we can kick his ass.”

“That’s great, super, but why are we only just hearing about all this now? If you’ve been chatting it up with the Voidgod and it is all good news, why not tell us all this?” She came back at me, all accusatory fingers and snarls. I was getting real tired of looking at her snarling. She was much prettier when she smiled. Although if I’d said that, I had pretty good odds of my next words being, “Ow, I have an arrow in my face.”

“When, Mercy? When was I meant to have told you? You wouldn’t stand still and listen to me for a second back at the Shattered Bastion.”

She threw back her head and laughed, but it wasn’t anything like the barks of amusement that a particularly good jibe would draw out of her. It was bitter. “Oh so you just happened to have this convenient catch-up with the Voidgod in between murdering Eternals in the desert.”

“Even if I’d had the chance, why would I tell you anything when you’re just looking for an excuse not to trust me?”

She let go of both arrow and bow to shove me. She wasn’t strong enough to actually move me from the spot, but I rocked back on my heels as she yelled in my face. “Oh I see, you’ve been keeping everything a secret because I’d be angry at you for keeping secrets! That makes so much sense!”

Seren’s voice came slithering into the conversation. She had no expression on her carefully trained face, but her words held a chill. “He owes an uppity retainer no explanation.”

Asher’s eyes widened, and I had to shout to be heard over the explosion of rage from Mercy. “Whoa! Slow it down there.”

She was going for Seren now, and I had to throw myself between them to keep them from each other’s throats. Mercy roared, “What the hell does that mean?”

“I forget what a laggard you are.” Just one of Seren’s eyebrows raised, but on that placid face it spoke volumes. “I say that you have ideas above your station.”

Mercy’s mouth fell open. “My station?”

Seren wasn’t throwing herself up against me like Mercy was, she was too refined for that. Instead, she leaned back a little before making her jibes. “You are but a servant of Maulkin, and it would behoove you to treat him with the respect that he is due.”

“You think that he’s my boss?” Mercy let out another bark of bitter laughter. I really could have done without catching it right in the face.

When Seren looked Mercy up and down, you just knew that she didn’t like what she was seeing. It was the classic high school mean girl contempt look, as performed by an immortal warrior from the dawn of time. “Ever has he been your leader, guiding your course, yet you expect him to explain every choice that he makes? To share his every thought and secret at your command? What soft lives you must have lived, so far from the fields of battle that you have never learned that obedience is a retainer’s first and last duty. That immediacy supplants contemplation. It matters not why we are commanded, only that we obey.”

It actually succeeded in shutting Mercy up for a whole second. Her mouth hung open, and finally, she turned to look at me and yell, “What the hell?”

Meanwhile, I could hear Asher powering up for another lecture behind me. “I believe that you may have fundamentally misunderstood our triumvirate, placing us within the hierarchical structures to which you are more accustomed… you see—”

I said, “Everyone, shut up.”

To my surprise, they actually did.

I let the peace hold for just one blissful moment, then I spoiled it all by speaking. “We could talk ourselves around and around in circles all day. All that matters is, we’re all on the same side, we all want Araphel dead, and we need to put the sword back together to kill him. Right?”

Asher nodded carefully. “That is correct.”

“I suppose so.” Mercy shrugged.

Seren remained silent, still glowering at Mercy as though her gaze alone might carve a hole through her.

I nudged her. “Right?”

She could hardly make her big speech about obedience to Team Maulkin and then argue with me in front of everyone. Still, she didn’t look pleased when she nodded. “As you say.”

I blew out a little sigh of relief. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. “So what we need to do now is move forward. I know where to find the next shard. I know how to get us there. All we need to do is settle all this crap down enough that we can go get it. So”—I swallowed hard to keep my emotions in check but did what needed to be done—“Mercy, I am sorry I kept secrets from you. Doesn’t matter why I did it. Doesn’t matter how long I did it. I shouldn’t have. Now do you have something to say to Seren?”

“Fine! Whatever! Sorry, I said you were a pointy-eared blow-up doll.” She did not sound very sorry. “It isn’t like me saying sorry is going to stop her from cutting my head off the next time I turn around.”

The fact that she’d said the words would probably be enough for Seren. She was a lot less interested in how people felt than who was dominant to who in any given situation. Just saying the words was the concession that she needed. Life among the rigid structures of Alvaren society had made Seren weird, but once you understood that weird, it was surprisingly easy to work with.

So I turned away to address Mercy’s concern. “It doesn’t need to. Seren won’t be coming with us where we’re going next.”

“You mean to abandon me again? So soon?” Apparently, I’d looked away too soon. If I’d had a second without scrapping and arguing, I might have been able to break that news to Seren a little more gently, but right now, I was feeling the pressure.

At least Mercy had the good grace to wait while I got slapped with some girlfriend disappointment. “I’m sorry, Seren, but even if you could make the trip with us, there’s no way you could make the trip back. I need you to hold out here just a little bit longer. Keep the dvergar safe, keep the tower protected. Will you do that for me?”

She said nothing for a long while as though she was weighing up her options. She looked me in the eyes, saw my sincerity, and wilted ever so slightly. “I had best be rewarded in abundance with delights both carnal and more lasting.”

Mercy couldn’t stop herself. “Ha! She just said your carnal delights didn’t last long enough.”

I chased her off with a bellow. “Can we have a moment here? Please? One moment without the peanut gallery chiming in?”

Asher bowed. “I cannot make any promises for Mercy, but I shall attempt to restrain myself from commenting upon your wooing.”

Seren didn’t smile really. Smiling was probably considered a sign of weakness where she came from—living a happy life did not rank high on the Alvaren priority lists—but there was still an air of amusement about her when I turned back to meet her gaze. “Is this wooing? Am I to be wooed?”

“I’m hoping you’re already a little bit wooed.” I leaned in close enough that our lips were almost brushing, then something else slipped out. “I missed you.”

She jerked back from me as if she’d been stung. That was weakness again. I was showing weakness by admitting that I’d thought about her when we were apart. I was admitting that she was a weak spot that my enemies could use to get at me. Alvaren society wasn’t all back stabbing all the time, but there had been periods in its history when assassination of friends and lovers was a common way of conveying displeasure with certain politicians choices, and of course, Seren had lived through those periods of history. To her mind, I’d just painted a target on her back with my words. A target that was made so much more dangerous by my unwillingness to kill everyone that opposed or threatened me.

Sure, only Asher and Mercy might have heard me say it, but in Seren’s mind, they were competitors, struggling to ascend to my position of leadership. That was why she hated public displays of affection. That was why she slapped her hand over my mouth every time I tried to tell her how I felt about her. I barely had my act together when it came to talking to human girls, adding in a whole different culture on a whole different planet was not making me any smoother.

The only thing I had going for me was that Seren had basically signed herself up to follow me in a very permanent way after I’d given her those swords. She wouldn’t be going anywhere, even if I did screw up constantly. I suppose that is the benefit of us both living forever—plenty of time to work out what the other person likes and start getting things right. Either that or plenty of time for the petty grudges and arguments to spiral out of control because her unbreakable honor was going to force her to stick with me forever—whether she wanted to or not.

I shook the thought away before I could spiral back down into the blind panic I felt every time I thought about having a relationship conversation, turning back to business. “So Koschei knew where the Faun shard has gone. He didn’t want anyone grabbing it and using it against him, so he soul bonded it to some big buff Faun called Gorgafel.”

Asher nodded along with that. “Then it seems that we must hunt this Gorgafel and separate him from his burden.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “Well, uh… funny story about that. He’s dead already. He died ages ago.”

Mercy knew something was up. Her scowl was back full force. “So we just have to find—”

“His soul in the afterlife.”

“What.” Mercy’s reply was entirely flat.

Chapter 15

There had been a lot of shouting after that. A whole lot of shouting. From everybody. I may also have shouted a little bit. None of them were entirely on board with my plan to kill ourselves. Or rather, Mercy was very much on board with the plan for me to kill myself, but not so much the bit when I’d have to kill them if they wanted to come along. She also had absolutely no intention of letting me out of her sight since she remained convinced that I was going to run off and start doing evil and wicked things the second that her back was turned.

I didn’t really plan on going to the land of the dead and kicking ghost puppies, but even Asher seemed concerned about how badly cosmic balances could be knocked off by somebody blundering about. He didn’t think I was bad, just dumb as a sack of spanners, so that was comforting.

It was definitely better than Mercy’s not-so-subtle suggestions that this was just me trying to murder them all without giving them a chance to fight back. It was good to know that there were some things she thought about me that even she wasn’t comfortable outright saying, but it still kind of stung.

Seren was extremely opposed to the whole idea. She was pretty convinced that if we died and I used my Psychopomp powers to send us to the underworld or heaven or whatever, it was going to be a one-way trip.

In the end, we had made no progress, it was long after sunset, and even though I didn’t physically get tired or need sleep, I was still tired of arguing. I slunk off into the tower with Seren, Asher returned to his beloved library, and Mercy went off to find her Dvergar fan club.

Catching up with Seren that evening was definitely the highlight of the day, even if I still had the same nasty doubts niggling the whole time we were jiggling. She didn’t actually make me sleep on the floor when she was done with me, which was nice, but I suspected that it was because she was annoyed past the point of that sort of playful banter.

It was physically possible for me to sleep, even if I didn’t technically need to, but that night I couldn’t. My brain was too full of stuff. There is a reason that I prefer not to use it too much, otherwise it always ends up like that, loud and clattering around in my skull when I just want a bit of peace.

No matter what the others said, my plan was the only one that could work, so the arguing was pointless. I think we were all just spoiling for a fight if we were being honest—not that I was quite ready to be honest. Mercy already thought that I was a monster just because I had seen the Voidgod. If she ever found out that my Court was changing, there wouldn’t be a discussion. Hell, even the ever calm Asher would turn on me in a second.

Lying there, listening to her breathe, I wondered which way Seren would go if it came out. I didn’t even know if she liked me most days, let alone loved me enough to put up with me being… what I was. The fact I was a Lunar Eternal had been enough to make most folks hate me on sight. I dreaded to think what this latest development was going to do to my popularity.

The way that everyone on Amaranth spoke about Void-touched creatures, they were basically the worst thing that could possibly exist. Worse than the abominations and the monsters that covered the place. It was probably the only thing that the whole world agreed on. Now I was one of them. Maybe I wasn’t some servant of Araphel or a mindless beast, but the words Void Court were scribbled onto my soul.

Maybe, if our little gang survived the secret coming out, they’d eventually realize that I hadn’t chosen any of this. I didn’t choose team moon or team void or anything. This was all stuff that had been done to me. Sure, some of it was caused by me making bad decisions, but most of them had been made because we were backed into a corner, not because I just loved being bad.

After about an hour of staring lovingly at Seren while she slept, she hit me. Not hard, but hard enough for me to get the message. I rolled out of bed and lumbered off to find something to do with myself.

First, I pestered Asher in the library, where I got him to admit that my plan was the only one that might possibly work despite all the frantic research he’d been doing into bodily resurrecting Gorgafel. Apparently, it wasn’t possible, even for the old Eternals that had top-level Primal powers at their fingertips, but that didn’t mean that Asher was willing to stop banging his head against the figurative brick wall just yet.

If we had infinite time, I might have just let him. We could have started making our plans to go and find Tsangaanax and his hoard of shards first and then doubled back to the Land of the Dead one later once we’d worked out how to haul it back to the world of the living, but the idea of just hanging around didn’t sit right with me. Mercy had been so right about how weird I was acting taking my month-long training break. Sure it was paying off dividends now that we were fighting tougher enemies, but the whole tortoise and the hare thing never really made sense to me. The moral of the story had never quite worked. Going slow only won you the race if the other side decided to take a nap before winning. Araphel was probably pretty well rested after several thousand years.

This shard was in our reach today, so we needed to grab it.

Down at the bottom of the tower, I set to work crafting myself some new gear. The Dvergar were more than happy for me to take the ore and wood that they’d set aside in exchange for me using Artifice to bang things together for them too, so through the night I worked, making Mercy a new bow, making myself a new sword and a new set of armor, then wandering over to my shrine and making a few adjustments so that when I came back from the dead again I’d drop right into them. I was pretty proud of that idea—and the fact that it might come in handy if Mercy decided to murder me for no good reason was purely coincidental.

I guess Mercy was having trouble sleeping too since I spotted her stalking around the ramparts of the new wall that the Dvergar had thrown up to protect them from what was left of the local wildlife after we’d spent a full month attacking anything vaguely dangerous. I don’t think they’d fully wrapped their heads around the idea that they were on an isolated island rather than bang in the middle of a million different monster territories. The biggest thing left out here were the dog-sized frogs, and from what I’d heard Gunhild grumbling, some of the younger Dvergar were now licking them recreationally.

With all her amazing stealth skills, I didn’t hear her drop down from the wall, circle around, or come creeping up behind me, but I knew that she was there because I knew her. She’d seen me near the shrines, she’d remembered the threats of breaking hers earlier in the day, and she was coming to see what I’d done.

I held up her new bow.

Was I trying to buy back her friendship with the shiny new bow and armor I’d made her? Of course not. She was a grown-ass woman who wasn’t going to be won over with shiny things. Did I want her to have the best gear possible because we were still on the same team, even if she kind of hated me and might use this shiny new bow and arrows to give my body some extra holes that I never asked for? Absolutely.

She snatched it out of my hand without a word. I called over my shoulder, “You’re welcome.”

She snapped back, “Go suck a Svart.”

“I mean, the Alvaren were Svart, so technically…”

She rushed at me, leaping up to clamp a hand over my mouth. Hooking her legs around my waist to keep herself in position. “Nope. No. Stop. Do not want to hear about your sex life. Ever.”

I stared at her for a second until she moved her hand.

“I’m just saying that…” The hand slapped back into place with more force than was probably needed.

She was laughing despite herself. “Don’t say another word.”

I held up my thumb, and she scowled at it as if trying to work out what the gesture was implying, then she dropped back down to standing and seemed to remember all of a sudden that we weren’t meant to be friends anymore. She waggled the bow at me. “This doesn’t change anything.”

“It wasn’t meant to.” Shrugging my shoulders, I turned back to the rest of the ore stacked up by the smelters. It would take the dvergar days to work through what I could do in minutes. They were going to wake up tomorrow to a real treat.

“You understand why I can’t trust you. Don’t you.”

I listed them off on my fingers. “I’ve been acting weird since I saw Araphel, I killed somebody without your express say-so, and the shards have… done something to me.”

“You have been acting super weird, I didn’t think I needed to tell you not to murder people, and… I don’t know what the deal is with the shards, but you’re… different. I wouldn’t have had to tell the Maulkin I know that murder is not okay. When I first met you it was fun all the time, and now… there’s something else going on. You’re angry. Not pissy about little stuff like me, but real proper hate-rage. I thought it was Seren. I thought that after you’d smacked her around and made her a good little slave wench, she’d started feeding you her bull about you being superior to everyone else, but then I realized you still treated the Dvergar the same. Just tell me, what is going on?” She didn’t sound angry at me anymore, she just sounded hurt.

I turned to face her with a sigh. Her eyes were burrowing into me, and the truth was on the tip of my tongue. But if I said it, everything would fall apart even worse than it already had. “Would you even believe anything I told you?”

She gave me the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “Maybe.”

I gave her the next best thing to the secret I had to keep. I gave her the truth I never wanted anyone to hear. “I’m scared.”

The sad smile turned into something like a smirk. “What? Big tough guy like you?”

“The plan for today—using my death god powers to jump into the afterlife.” I let my shoulders slump. “I don’t know if it is going to work. I’m kind of worried it might just kill us.”

I’d hoped that being emotionally vulnerable and stuff would have helped Mercy to chill out, but as it turned out, she was stuck on raging bitch mode. “You sounded pretty damn sure when you were trying to talk us all into it earlier!”

My temper flared up, but it wasn’t the cold murderous rage that Mercy was so scared about, it was my own annoyance. “Yeah, because nobody wants to hear the pilot saying that he doesn’t know how to fly the plane!”

“So what?” She slugged me in the shoulder. “You thought you’d just try it and see?!”

“We don’t have a whole lot of other options do we?!” I shoved her back, and she stumbled over the bundle of arrows I’d made her. “The shard was sent to the underworld because Eternals couldn’t get it there. It is in the one place we aren’t meant to be able to go.”

She came back for me in a bounding jump, and I caught her around the waist with both hands as she tried to slap me. “What happens if you die, with all the other shards attached to you?”

I was yelling by this point. We were both yelling. The poor sleeping Dvergar must have been getting sick of all this yelling by now. “I guess we lose them too!”

She slammed her hands down into my inner arms, splaying them enough for her to drop to the ground. She didn’t dive in for a sucker punch. Instead, she got nose to nose with me and screamed. “This plan sucks!”

“I know! That’s why you don’t make the stupidest guy come up with the plan!”

Her face crumpled into something somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and the noise that came out of her was more snort than either. She staggered back from me and flopped down to sit in the bare dirt. Without prompting, I slumped down too.

After all the yelling, her next words came out like a whisper, “I wish I could believe that you’re still you.”

I met her sad stare and felt it in my gut. “Me too.”

We sat there for a long time, not saying anything but not fighting either. It was… well, it wasn’t nice, but it was better.

Asher descended the tower before dawn and found us there, waiting for him. “It occurred to me that we might be best to set off without informing the others of our departure. Particularly if there may be some trial and error involved in the process of… dying.”

“Probably a good call.” I cast a glance out over the burgeoning little Dvergar town that we’d help to build. It was looking pretty good for having only sprung up a little over a month ago. Now that the mining had started, wooden buildings were being swapped out for hefty blocks of stone, and eventually, all the carvings and artistry that had marked Khag Mhor as an ancient Dvergar stronghold would find their way onto them too.

“I shall go first, if you do not mind.” Asher surprised us all with that. “Maulkin shall have to go last by necessity, and Mercy, I do not wish to witness your death, while I am certain that you have dreamt of watching my demise many times over since our first arrival upon this plane of existence.”

Mercy chuckled at that, then nodded her acceptance. I turned to Asher. “Have you spent all your experience and glory?”

“I am fully prepared, thank you.”

Knowing that I couldn’t take it with me unless it was strapped onto my soul, I had only the Lucis in hand. So when Asher slipped down onto his knees and bent his head down until his chin touched his chest, it was that lethal needle that I held up. “Make it swift, if you please. I do not know how long my composure will—”

I plunged the Lucis down into the back of his neck. All of my strength was focused down into that needle point, and it slipped between his scales and bit into his spine so easily I was startled. I was so shocked that it took me a moment to remember that I had to focus not only on Psychopomp, but also on where I wanted him to go. I furiously concentrated on Gorgafel’s name. Wherever he was, I wanted us to go. Gorgafel.

Asher’s body wisped away like it had never been there, his robes toppling to the ground, empty.

Mercy and I turned expectant eyes towards his shrine, but after an arduously long moment, it was clear that he wasn’t coming back. “Okay. So I guess that worked.”

Mercy tilted her head to one side as she prodded at Asher’s remains. “Or you just killed your best friend for no good reason.”

“Yep.” I nodded. “Definitely one of those two options.”

She looked from me to the Lucis and back. “I am not happy right now.”

“Can’t imagine many people are happy to die.”

“You wouldn’t know it from how they act.” She snorted, then scrunched her eyes shut. “Just do it already. Do it. Do it.”

I closed the distance with her and pulled back the sword for a lethal strike. I wavered. I really didn’t want to do this. “Do it, you pussy.”

Okay, maybe I wanted to do it a little. I swung for her neck.

She ducked. The blade humming past the top of her head without touching her.

I couldn’t hold back a little yelp of dismay. “Mercy!”

“Sorry. Sorry. Force of habit.” She dropped down onto her knees like Asher had. “Try again.”

This time I was taking no chances. I stepped around her, grabbed hold of her shoulder so she couldn’t move, then stabbed it in without a moment’s warning. Blood blossomed up from the wound, throbbing out of her as she toppled forward into the dirt. My sword was slick with it, the blood of both my best friends running down it in rivulets to pool around the hilt and the shard nestled there.

She’d barely touched the ground before she vanished, leaving a heap of gear behind for me to loot. I guess Death was already on stand-by after I’d dropped Asher. Which left me with… me.

Hitting other people with swords was easy by comparison. I’d had plenty of practice at it. All of my training, however, had been pretty devoted to making sure I never hit myself with them. Not to mention the whole fear of accidentally permanently destroying myself slowing my roll ever so slightly. I couldn’t hesitate. Not now after shunting both of them off the mortal coil without a second thought. I had to do it. I just never gave much consideration to how.

Swinging the Lucis at neck height wasn’t going to smack me with enough force to get through much more than the top layer of skin. Angling the thing so I fell down on top of it was just going to end up with a slow bleeding hole in the middle of my stomach. I really did not think this through properly ahead of time, and now the other two were maybe already in hell or heaven or wherever they were headed, and I was flapping my sword around like I’d been startled by a wasp trying to work out how to actually kill myself.

In the end, I went for falling on my sword, extreme edition. With a quick burst of Artifice, I summoned up a lump of rock to grasp the bottom of the Lucis. Angled it a little, measured a step and a half away from it and then, when I was sure I had everything lined up, I just flopped down backward for my final rest while thinking as hard as I could about going to wherever Asher and Mercy were.

There was one moment of sharp pain at the back of my neck and then darkness. Which I took to mean, I’d done it. I’d died. Go me.

When the lights came back up, Death was already there waiting for me. “Again? So soon?”

“Hey big D. How’s it going?”

The empty sockets turned to me, but he did not deign to answer.

Eventually, when it was pretty obvious that this staring contest was not going to go well for either of us, he gestured vaguely towards the shrines. “Return to your flesh.”

I shifted uncomfortably above my corpse, very deliberately not turning my attention to it. “Uh. No. Actually. I’m going somewhere else this time.”

Throughout all of history stretching back to the dawn of the universe, I can’t imagine there were a whole lot of times that Death was surprised. It wasn’t like my man had a face to look surprised with, but the way that he rocked back spoke volumes. “You are Eternal. Return to your flesh.”

“I’m a psychopomp, and I want to go to the afterlife. Asher, Mercy, and me. We’re all going. To the afterlife where you dropped off Gorgafel and his shard.” Probably needed to up the politeness levels a bit. If there was one person in all of creation I genuinely didn’t want to piss off, it was bone-face here. “Uh. Please.”

Death didn’t immediately smite me into a thousand little motes of soul-stuff, so I guess he wasn’t too mad about it, but at the same time, I didn’t get the impression that he was pleased to be taking orders from some lowly pleb like me. “As you wish.”

The gentle wave that had annihilated my body last time was a jerk of the hand this time around, and while my journey over Amaranth to be reunited with my new body had been smooth sailing, this time it felt a lot like I was being put through a blender.

Without a body and nerves I couldn’t feel pain, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel anything. As I was ripped to pieces and dragged down into Death’s waiting arms, the sensations came distantly, like when the dentist shot you full of Novocain and really started digging around in there. I knew what was happening in the abstract as my whole being was shredded, crushed, mangled, twisted, violated, and then crammed through a pinhole of swirling blinding darkness. That was bracing.

I squirted out the other side of that tiny black hole into a river, slipping into the torrent like an otter thanks to my soul having been traumatized too badly to take any real shape. I didn’t know up from down, left from right, or myself from all of the other souls that were flowing along with me. There was no water in this river, just the boundless tide of the dead pouring on towards their eternal resting place. Some of them darted around, while others scraped and dragged along the bottom.

When we collided, my Spirit Touch flooded me, and I was overwhelmed as the full sum of their life experiences struck me like a bludgeon. Have you ever been hit in the face with a whole lifetime of memories? It feels kind of like a sledgehammer. A sledgehammer mostly made out of boredom and drudgery, with odd little spikes of joy that really dig into you.

I was surrounded on all sides by the dead, and they battered against me, wriggling and twisting their way along the river as if I was their favorite thing in the world. Over and over they hit me until I didn’t even remember my own name. One moment I was a Dvergar cobbler putting shoes together on some rocky world with nothing but bare stars burning above me, the next I was a Human back on Earth, riding a bike through crowded city streets. Thousands of them must have passed clean through me before I finally felt something solid closing around me, hauling me out of the cascade of lifetimes and into something soft and quiet.

Each morning at dawn I rose, stood out in the rising sun before my chamber, and breathed in deeply as the heat washed away the chill of sleep from my scales. In the library I organized the scrolls into their separate cubby holes, returning research materials to the stacks down beneath the stone floor. From the moment that I had hatched, this was the purpose that I had known would be mine, and unlike some of my brethren, I had never bucked against fate. Why should I when there was such peace to be found here among the papers. The world beyond these walls was chaos, and I was grateful every day that I was shielded from it. This was the purpose that I was made for, and I relished each moment of my solitude, when I could fulfil that purpose without interruption.

Asher dropped me onto the shore, and the wriggling mangled worm of my soul, left at last to its own devices, unfolded again into a proper shape. I remembered who I was in a rush and then flopped back until my horns touched the stone. “Oh, that was fun.”

Mercy was down on her haunches, panting for air just a few feet away, almost invisible through the mist that whorled around us. “Barrels of laughs.”

Asher seemed to be the only one who wasn’t shaken by the whole experience of dying. “It seemed that you were having some trouble working your way to the bank. I hope that you do not mind that I intervened.”

“Thanks for the intervening. Much appreciated. That was rough.”

“What, you can’t handle a little swim through some wiggly dead people?” Mercy scoffed, even while I could see that she was shaking.

Trying to put what had happened in the river into words was a struggle. “Spirit Touch. It made them all… they were in my… it was… yeah, let’s just never do this again.”

“I concur.” Asher nodded, and I saw the air around him blur, his solemn face in two places at once before the after-images caught up to him. He wasn’t solid, not any more than the things in the river had been. We had no bodies here. We were in our familiar shapes, but they weren’t flesh.

Off in the mists, something howled.

“Oh come on, we’re dead, and we still have to fight monsters?”

“No rest for the wicked.” Mercy rose to her feet, empty handed but still ready to tussle with whatever was out there making those ungodly noises. I noticed the Lucis still in my hand with a start. Guess the whole soul-bond thing meant that you could take it with you when you died. The other shards had been in pockets and things back on Amaranth, but here they were just stuck to me. Embedded in my side like lizard scales. The transparent skin that I’d given myself here was turning black around them, veins of darkness seeping off into my spectral form. Probably better if I didn’t think about that too much.

Turning my attention inward, I probed at my Bestiary to see if it had any intel on what kind of monsters were roaming around the land of the dead, but it had nothing. Guess that my supernatural knowledge of all things spooky and scary only stretched as far as Amaranth. Now we were elsewhere, it was useless. Great. How many more of my hard-won skills and divinities were going to do nothing for me here?

The Pillars of Divinity were still glowing nicely, except for the pillar of Ascension, which was shrouded in the same mist that pervaded the world outside. No body meant no buffing that body, I suppose. My void pillars seemed to be a lot more obvious now than before I’d bound the Lucis, so if there had been any doubt about the reason they’d appeared, it was pretty much gone now. One of them, opposite Ascension, was also shrouded, so I guess it was a good thing I hadn’t dumped any Glory into Corruption. Primal was, improbably, still working fine. So I guess making life here in the realm of the dead was still possible, even if the metaphysics of it confused me a bit. At least Artifice was still working as intended, and we already knew that Aether worked fine after bath time, too well.

The howling was getting closer. Asher should still be able to use magic, and I had my sword, but Mercy was currently dual-wielding a hope and a prayer. She needed a weapon, fast. I reached out with Artifice, searching for anything that I could use, and my senses were almost immediately overwhelmed.

Spirit Touch worked whether I had a physical body to touch things with or I was just stretching my awareness out, and everything here was somebody who’d once been alive. The ground beneath our feet were the calcified and settled souls of the long-forgotten dead. The mist and fog were all the living things that had never been seen or known at all, the vague recollections of them too nebulous to take form. There were hints of lives in there, but they drifted away when I reached to touch them. They wanted to be forgotten.

Still, I could feel all these things in my sphere of influence, which meant that somehow, they weren’t beyond the limits of my Artifice. I reached out tentatively at first, but once I realized just what I could do, it was no work at all to haul the mists together and weave them into a cohesive shape. With a little grunt, a bow made of mist dropped down to land by Mercy’s feet. The arrows were actually trickier. When I wound the souls down into smaller things, they were more inclined to split apart and flee like they needed the comforting press of more of the dead around them. Still, in the end, I worked out how to spiral them around until they were trapped in a never-ending tumble around themselves and stretched them on out into arrows.

She picked it all up with a grin that she didn’t even try to hide. “Did you just make a bow out of clouds.”

“Uh, no. I made it out of ghosts.”

She dropped it again. “I’m not using it.”

Probably should have expected that really. I held up my hands. “They’re cool with it. Well, the ones that still know what is going on around them aren’t, but the rest of them, it is just… they don’t care what shape they are. It doesn’t hurt them.”

Asher didn’t even bother to look around at us as all this played out. His attention was locked firmly off in the mists, tracing the shadows that flitted there just out of sight. “I believe that the thinning of the mists may also serve to our advantage if we face predators for which this is familiar territory.”

“Right. One cleared-out bubble coming up.” This time the spooky scary mist ghosts knew what was coming, so as I stretched my power out towards them, the smart ones fled ahead of me. I let them go because there was still a ton of them drifting around aimlessly as fog. I considered making armor with all the collected material, but the prospect of having them crawling all over me all the time made me a little bit squeamish. Instead, I compressed them tighter and tighter until they were solid as the rock beneath us, and I wrapped them around the Lucis to make it a bit more substantial.

When I slipped back together, I was holding a great big sword, and I couldn’t have been happier about it, Mercy had begrudgingly collected her ghost-bow and was trying out the string, and Asher had been experimenting a little, pulling up magic the way that he usually did. Everything seemed like it was going to be just fine. Until Chernghast came bounding out of the mist, baying for blood.

Chapter 16

Now you might be thinking to yourself ‘But, Maulkin, I thought that the gods couldn’t directly interact with anything on Amaranth. I thought that was part of the rules of their game’. Well yeah, but we weren’t in Amaranth any more, were we? We had wandered outside the field of play, and that meant that outside interference was all above board.

The giant wolf’s fur was jet-black, his eyes burned with moonlight, and he moved like nothing on earth. Not like a living thing, but like a flowing shadow.

If I’d hoped that he hadn’t noticed that his patronage had slipped off my soul, then I soon lost that hope. He only had eyes for me, not Mercy or Asher, who should have been his natural enemy as lackeys of the Solar Courts, but me. I was having some nasty flashbacks to my last day on Earth when a big black wolf came along and chewed me to death. Didn’t fancy doing that again.

Chernghast leapt, and I brought my ghost-sword around to meet him in mid-air.

It was only when I felt the impact of blade on flesh that I realized that this particular murderous wolf thing was only about half the size of the demon god I’d left behind when I first set out for Amaranth. If anything, it was only a Chernghast puppy—bigger than me, but not the ridiculously gigantic thing I’d faced when I was just picking out my new body.

Mercy wasn’t having flashbacks or religious crises, all she saw was the big bad wolf. She unleashed an arrow into him that bit at the same moment as my sword, unleashing a thunderclap that rocked us all back. She’d obviously been practicing with that wind-powered arrow thing that she could do so that it was more useful than just one big boom a fight.

Asher was casting, all too slowly, as the death-wolf clawed back to its feet with a noticeable limp. My lip began to quiver. “Aww, the poor puppy.”

“Maulkin!” Mercy practically screamed with exasperation. “It is trying to eat you!”

“It’s a good boy is what it is.” I turned back to the looming shadow of death. “Who’s a good boy?”

When the wolf lunged, I was ready. I might not have wanted to kill a dog, but I wasn’t letting this thing rip the face off my soul either. The same spinning parry that had turned aside Orphia’s glaive smacked it in the jowls and knocked the lunge off course. The huge hairy body still carried on with all the momentum of the leap, but the chompy parts missed.

I threw my shoulder into the boney ribs of the thing and launched it back, just in time for Mercy’s next shot to lance through its tail and pin it to the rock below. The next time I tried to spring forward, it abruptly stopped with a whimper. It spun on the spot, chasing its tail to find the source of the hold up, and Mercy looked at me with continuing disgust as I smiled down at the big goofy critter. “Will you hit the damn monster?!”

“Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry.”

I stepped up with my sword braced high, ready to come down on the wolf the moment it showed the first sign of aggression. It was still whimpering, teeth locked around its own tail and trying to drag it’s butt free of the grip of Mercy’s arrow. “Can we just… leave it?”

“It is a giant murderous demon wolf, what do you think is going to happen once it gets free? You think it is going to invite us over for cocktails? It is going to eat us!”

“Maybe it will realize that we did it a favor and let it live, and then years from now at a dramatic moment a big wolf will jump out and save us.”

Asher unleashed his spell, a solid column of lightning leaping out from between his hands to explode through the wolf in a shower of sparks that burst out to the very tips of each strand of hair before it dispersed into the mists, strobing off in every direction.

The monster really jumped out of it then. All the wispy black shadows I’d taken for fur snapped in tight against the wolf’s skin into a black and hardened shell, and the moonlit eyes seemed to multiply along the length of its newly streamlined head. It no longer looked like a good boy. It looked like a very bad doggy indeed.

I leapt for it, sword sweeping down at that armored skull with all the force I could muster without any actual muscles to use. When it’s head turned up and it howled again, the sound to come out was not wolf, it was somewhere between a shrieking violin and a murder victim’s last gurgled cry. My blow cut it off short.

The shiny black beetle-hide may have been tough as nails, but when you get hit with a giant sword made out of the souls of the dead you feel it, no matter how thick your plating.

Jaws that had been stretched unnaturally wide to unleash that awful sound were met by the sharp edge of my sword, and while I didn’t have the power to break through the armor, I did have the strength to rip whatever that gruesome grey gristle it had underneath it. The jaw spread wide and wider under the blow, then with a wet, crackling sound, the lower jaw broke clean off.

Oh gross.

Where before the wolf-beetle thing had been straining to get free and chomp us, now it was running in a very different direction. It leapt back, tripping over its own pinned tail and tumbling to a heap before it managed to get paws back on the ground and launch into an extremely short sprint before it reached the end of its tail-tether.

Mercy’s next concussive arrow bounced off the newly hardened shell and detonated in the air, knocking me back a step and sending all the mist that had started creeping back in around us away in a big puff too.

Asher was already well into his next spell, with flames coiling around between his clawed hands like he had a glowing version of one of those worm-on-a-string toys. When that was ready, I had no doubt it would bake the bug-wolf in its shell, but I really didn’t want to smell that.

Where Mercy’s last arrow had failed, the shell was blistered and cracked. I brought my sword around and swung for that spot.

The wolf bucked at the last moment, and my hit went wide of the weak spot, but it seemed like the damage was more widespread than any of us could have realized. When I struck against the back leg, the shell shattered between there and the spot Mercy clipped.

A howl started up again, and I leapt back when I recognized that the sound wasn’t coming from the wolf’s broken mouth, it was coming from the gaping black hole where its leg innards should have been. Black smoke flooded out, spiraling around the wolf like an octopus squirting out ink to mask its escape but doing nothing to muffle the awful mournful wail at its point of origin.

That must have been what Asher was using to aim because when the burst of fire washed out, it was centered right on what was left, burning away all the black fog and showing the sorry state that the beast had been left in. It had withered and crumpled inwards, all that shiny black shell marred by cracks as it collapsed. When the flames washed over it, the howling stopped, but I couldn’t say if that was because the pain got so bad it couldn’t scream anymore or if Asher had just put it out of its misery. Regardless, there wasn’t much left of it beyond an oily stain on the rocks by the time that the torrent of flame had cleared.

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Celerity increased to 23

Airstrike: Rank 4/10

90 Experience Gained

200 Glory Gained

It was nice to get a bit of experience and glory back in me after losing it all after my first death on Amaranth. It wasn’t like I strictly needed it, but it just felt a bit better to have it sloshing around inside me like chicken soup for the soul, except made out of giant bug wolves. Giant bug wolf soup for the soul didn’t have the same ring to it. Regardless, it was going to be a long climb to get enough glory to reach the next tier starting over with nothing, so I was glad I was back on the horse. Figuratively. I didn’t actually have a horse, which was kind of a shame because it looked like we had a fair bit of distance to cover between here and anywhere.

The other two were looking at me expectantly. I looked right back at them until Mercy rolled her eyes. “Okay, which way?”

That stopped me poking at the wolf-stain. “How would I know?”

Asher’s tail lashed behind him. “Do you mean that you have brought us to an entirely new plane of existence with no means of navigating it?”

“I kind of hoped that we’d just land right next to Gorgy and get stuff over and done with fast.” I rubbed the back of my neck as I realized just how dumb that was.

Mercy had folded over trying to suppress her laughter, but apparently, Asher wasn’t quite ready to laugh it off. “It didn’t occur to you that any plane large enough to contain the dead souls of every creature that has ever lived across all creation may be somewhat on the expansive side?”

I couldn’t even find it in myself to get mad, really. It was just so nice being back together, adventuring again. “Ok. Everyone that found out where a shard is and worked out a way to transport us all to a different plane of existence to get it put their hand up.”

Mercy immediately stuck her hand up. I mean, no hesitation whatsoever. Then we both stared at each other until gradually she lowered it to her side, smirk never budging.

Asher rubbed at the point where his snout met his forehead like he was trying to fend off a headache. “I swear that I must have committed some great wrong in my past lives to have been incarnated here as your babysitter.”

The fog had swirled back in all around us, and while I could slip out and push it back, it seemed like a lot of effort for very little payoff. The odd snippets of ghost-memories that brushed over me were barely a distraction now that I knew what they were. I kept my ears pricked for any more Chernghast-like howls, but nothing was forthcoming.

I turned my attention back to Asher and Mercy, and they were both staring at me again. “What? You don’t have any bright ideas? I’m the sexy one; you’re the smart ones.”

Mercy looked like she’d choked on the word sexy, but other than that, I got no real response. I sighed. “Up until now, we’ve always landed pretty near to the next shard, right? So it’s probably somewhere around here. I mean it is going to stand out since it is the only solid object in the whole of the afterlife, except for the chunks I’ve got.”

Asher’s attention was drawn to my embedded metal chunks. “The shards that you carry. Do they differ from one another?”

He was doing that thing where he asked me simple questions to lead me to the right answer. Shame I had no idea what he was looking for. “I mean, they’re different shapes, and one is stuck in a sword but—”

He held up a semi-transparent hand to stop me. “To your spiritual sense.”

Again, I felt like I was missing something. “Oh no, they all read the same to Spirit Touch.”

“Then might I suggest that they are all parts of a great whole, rather than individual items.” He said it nice and slowly as if any of this was meant to mean something to me.

“You can suggest that. You can suggest a lot of stuff.”

He was looking at me with that special stare he reserved for when I was saying something extra specially stupid. Like, toddler-level dumb. “What?”

“My apologies. I understand that the fundamentals of magic are not taught in the world from which you came, but I had thought that certain things were self-evident.” He held up his hands once more, shaking one in the air, then shaking the other a moment later. “If each of the fragments behave as one when exposed to your spiritual senses, then all other fragments will resonate in the same manner.”

My brain was still running on empty. “Uh…”

Mercy snorted. “Maybe you need to use smaller words.”

My mouth flew to offer a vicious rebuttal, but then I giggled at the butt in rebuttal and spoiled it.

There was a momentary pause as Mercy looked confused, then I explained. “Rebuttal.”

And she gave a little smirk of acknowledgment.

Asher pressed on as if neither of us had spoken, which was honestly probably his best bet. “When you lay your hands upon the pieces, each one should call out to the greater whole. The more elements of the whole that you have in your possession, the easier it should become to sense the resonance.”

“Ah. Right. Yeah. When I touch them, I don’t get directions so much as I get the ghost of the Voidgod screaming ‘doom, doom, doom!’ at me.”

Mercy’s wry amusement had faded away all too quickly back to the stern frown I’d been faced with ever since that silly little decapitated head incident. She wasn’t happy about the Voidgod speaking to me. Well, that was something we had in common. It was not the highlight of my day either.

“If Araphel seeks to prevent the assembly of the blade, then it seems entirely likely that his intrusions are an attempt to prevent you from sensing the resonance that would draw us to them. I would suggest that you simply ignore any”—Asher seemed to struggle for the right word for a moment before settling–“hallucinations that appear and focus instead upon the goal.”

Mercy wasn’t happy about this. She would back me up, I was sure of it.

“This seems like a really bad idea,” I said. “I’d really like to not see Araphel any more than I need to so I can kick his ass. Can we maybe try something else? Keep this as a backup plan?”

She shrugged, and any hope I had of support vanished.

Asher seemed genuinely annoyed with me for the first time that I could really remember. “Certainly, let us set aside our only guidance and wander aimlessly around a barren, shrouded afterlife devoid of all landmarks in the vague hope that we eventually happen upon the one dead person that we are hoping to meet within the multitudes. It shall only take us several centuries, and I’m sure that Araphel will be kind enough to wait patiently for our return.”

“Damn, Asher,” Mercy cackled. “Tell us how you really feel.”

He paid her no mind. “Maulkin. Use the shards.”

They seemed to leap into my hands the moment I thought about them like they were eager to be held. I didn’t like that. Within my ghostly body things moved like they did in my Sphere of Influence, which was handy but also a bit disconcerting. I ended up with a bundle of shards in one hand, the blade of the Lucis in the other, and my Aether flaring to life whether I liked it or not.

I tried to concentrate on whatever connected the different bits, but I was not very good at the whole Aether thing. It was all new to me. It was like trying to learn how to dance after spending your whole life with flippers. All the bits were there, but I was doing it so wrong. I was dancing like nobody was watching—which mostly involved flailing around wildly. Sometimes I’d feel a little tug or vibration as I poured my Aether senses all over the bits, but the moment I tried to latch onto it, that sensation vanished. This was magic stuff, and there was a very good reason that I left all the magic stuff to Asher.

Araphel did not show up immediately, and for one glorious moment, I thought that I’d escaped his reach. Maybe I was too far away from wherever his soul was lingering? Maybe his spirit was stuck back on Amaranth. Maybe he was… Oh no, there he was.

Araphel rose like a shadow behind Asher, clawed arms splayed and barbed tail coiling around my friend like it was evil god lap-dance time. “Such a frail physical presence, but a mind blazing like wildfire. I can see why you adore him so. Do not fear, my dear Harbinger. I will not kill him when I return. His destruction would be scant punishment compared to what I have in store.” Those long spidery claws closed around Asher’s head, and all that I could do was watch. “All of that magic, churning around inside him, so easily twisted out of shape. So that the flame and storm leap not from his hands as he commands but turn back on themselves into that prodigious mind. I will hollow him out. I will leave him a simpering, drooling, nothing. And every day as you look into his dead eyes you will know that he is never coming back, and that it was all your fault.”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I went on trying to feel the other shard, wherever it was, searching for that little tingle when my senses brushed against whatever invisible force connected all the shards. It was out there, I knew it was out there, and I had everything I needed to find it, if I could just concentrate.

The Voidgod whispered into my ear, “All that you have to do is nothing. You are so good at doing nothing. You spent a lifetime without distinction or achievement. All you need to do is stop. Stop pushing yourself, stop hurting yourself, stop striving to be more than the nothing that you know in your heart that you truly are.”

Man, I was getting real tired of this asshole. Even if he hadn’t been an evil god hell-bent on destroying all life in the universe, I’m pretty sure I would have taken a swing at him just for being this much of a dick. “I hate you so much.”

Then he grabbed my face in his icy claws, and I lost my grip on whatever tenuous tickle of a direction I had. My eyes snapped open, and I let out a little squeal before I realized that it was Asher holding onto my face, staring into my face so intensely I thought he was going for a smooch. “Pay no attention to what you hear and see. It is not real. The Voidgod deceives by his very nature.”

“Yeah, okay.” Memories of his life were flooding into me through his fingertips. The crushing pressure of shell all around him until he could gather the strength to break out. The dread when all the eggs around him had already hatched, and there was nobody waiting to greet him. Nobody to imprint on or offer sustenance even as his newborn body screamed for both. “Uh. Don’t grab me, please.”

He snatched his hands back, and the Voidgod was right there where he had been, featureless black face inches from mine. “Pathetic. You are all so small. So worthless. How could you hope to defeat me? Give up now. Submit to my will. You do not need to die. You do not need to suffer. Amaranth is not even your world.”

I closed my eyes against him. Araphel wasn’t here. This was all just a distraction to keep me from finding the shards. He was running scared, and he was throwing every trick in the book at me to keep me from finding the weapon that had already killed him once.

Concentration was not my strong suit, but I could do spite. Bearing down on the shards, I poured more and more Aether into them until in an instant I realized where I’d been going wrong. When I tried to focus on the connection between the pieces, I lost focus on the pieces themselves. When I focused on them, the connections sprung back into view. It was like a magic eye picture, and the moment that I lost my focus, the full image popped into view. The resonance between the shards was like an echo of the whole sword, repeated over and over between them.

“This one I shall kill. Slowly and agonizingly. Flayed perhaps. All that soft skin. No. Perhaps I shall make you kill her when your will is broken. I think that would be best. She already thinks that you are a traitor and a monster. Would it not be a joy to prove her right? To make her watch as the one she had always suspected would be her end tore her bones from her flesh. Imagine her horror when I make you use the gift that I bestowed on you to blot out her light forever.” Without looking, I knew that Araphel was hovering around Mercy now. But I wasn’t going to look. Not now when I could feel the echoes of the shards stretching out towards a distant horizon. Not when I could feel the distant shard chiming in answer.

I raised up the hand wrapped around the Lucis, and I pointed to where I could feel the next shard singing. Then I let every one of the shards drop from my grasp.

The darkness that I hadn’t even realized was surrounding us flooded away, leaving fluffy white clouds of ghosts in its place, and I nearly toppled with the effort. I forced my eyes open. My hand was still up. My finger was still pointing. I’d done it.

When I shook. It was like the outline of my body blurred, shifting endlessly between the many positions that it would be in and never quite settling solid. “Let’s not do that again for a while.”

“Aww.” Mercy gave me a big pout. “Was your best buddy Araphel getting too friendly? Did he try to slip you the tongue?”

“Okay, first off, Araphel doesn’t have a tongue. Or a mouth or… much of anything face-wise. Secondly, he is not my buddy, pal. He’s a dick, and I really do not like spending that much time listening to him yammering on about how he’s going to torture us all to death unless we admit we’re worthless and give up. And thirdly…”

Even through the swirling mists and the shudders still running through me and blurring the outline of my spectral form, I’m pretty sure Mercy could work out which finger I was showing her.

She rolled her eyes, but I could still see the old Mercy showing through the gaps in her mask of hate. Even if she thought I might be a servant of evil and all that junk, she still liked me. There was no getting around it. She managed to grumble out, “Real mature.”

Asher had already started off in the direction that I’d been pointing, and we had to jog to catch up before he faded into the mists and we lost him in the Land of the Dead forever. Could have been an awkward one to explain when we got back.

I hadn’t spotted it before through all the thick dead people clouds, but the big river of souls that had dragged us all along was only one of a great many of them trickling their way through the land of the dead. Most of them weren’t nearly as vast as the one we’d gotten caught up in, barely more than little dribbles of souls that carved shallow courses through the rock beneath us. We’d been stepping over them this whole time without even noticing. There were wider ones up ahead, where Asher was striding forward with all the intensity and awareness of his surroundings that it would take me a bottle of tequila to accomplish. In my old body. This one wouldn’t even get drunk any more. Damn poison resistance.

Mercy caught him by the tail just before he trod right in a big rock-pool of congealed dead folk. He jerked it away from her in dismay, but once his fixation was broken, all she had to do was point down to make him understand. After that, we followed very carefully in her footsteps. Making sure not to slip and trample on someone’s little slice of heaven.

Once we’d been trudging for a bit, and I was sure Mercy’s attention was on the road ahead instead of dunking on me, I turned back to Asher and asked him, “How come you never mentioned the whole bits calling to bits thing before?”

After his near tumble into that first pool, he had proceeded through the land of the dead with his nose turned down and his eyes locked on the stone beneath us. That didn’t change when he answered back, “You may recall that until this moment we were well equipped with both direction and purpose. Not to mention that a grasp of resonance is so fundamental a part of an arcane education that I assumed you had already made attempts and failed.”

“Maybe don’t assume I know anything in the future.”

His tail lashed, but it wasn’t the angry one. It was too fluid and floppy. I was getting good at reading Inyoka body language; he was amused. “I had hoped to avoid the appearance of condescension, but I shall endeavor to abide by that rule moving forward.”

Mercy paused to call back. “Don’t worry, Asher, I’ve been treating him like a moron since we first arrived, and I haven’t been wrong yet.”

I’d walked into that one, but it still stung. I opened and shut my mouth a few times before finally mumbling out, “Your mother hasn’t been wrong yet.”

She pretended not to hear that one—probably because it was nonsense—and we turned our attention back to the road ahead. The world of the dead was not a small place. As Asher had so politely pointed out earlier, anywhere that was going to serve as the afterlife for all the different worlds of the universe had to be pretty substantial, but even so, it felt like a long time of just walking forwards with nothing much to see. After the first death-wolf attack, I’d kind of hoped that we’d be fighting all the way to the shard, but it turned out that this place was as quiet as death. No pun intended.

We had to jump a few broader rivers as we went, and sometimes the stone beneath our feet was a bit lumpier and bumpier than before, but overall, nothing much changed. “I’ve got to tell you, if I lived a very boring life according to some religious book, and then when I died I ended up here, I’d be really pissed about it.”

Mercy snorted, but Asher looked... angry. We’d never really had a chat about whether the Inyoka where he came from believed in crystal dragon Jesus or whatever, but apparently, he had some sort of deal going on. “This is not the only world where the dead find their rest. Only the one where Gorgafel lies. We cannot assume that this is the afterlife that we were all predestined for. This is not the paradise that was promised.”

This was not a subject I really wanted to go stomping over. “Hey, I’m not impressed either. I’m pretty sure I was promised seventy-two virgins.”

From up ahead, Mercy snarked, “Couldn’t you have just gone to an anime convention?”

“Hey, first off, Japanese animation is an artform that is respected around the world. And secondly, no. I was banned after slapping a security guard with a body pillow.”

Mercy actually had to stop walking to get herself under control again. There were spectral tears running down her ghostly face as she wheezed for breath she didn’t need. “Every time I make a joke about how pathetic you are, the truth turns out to be even funnier.”

I growled. “He had it coming!”

Asher was looking increasingly bewildered as the conversation went on. “Did he say something bad about the cartoon girl you wanted to kiss?”

I crossed my arms. “He took a picture up my friend’s skirt.”

That shut her up promptly, but it also sucked all the laughter out of the foggy air too. Eventually, she mumbled, “That’s messed up,” but I could almost feel the edge of suspicion in her voice again. Like she was wondering if it had really happened or if I was trying to win brownie points with her. Because I’m totally smart enough to be a manipulative asshole.

We marched on and on through the land of the dead, never quite able to relax after the first wolf attack but never encountering anything interesting enough to actually hold our attention. So we were stuck here in this halfway state. In limbo.

There was what felt like another hour’s trudging and hopping rivers before Asher sighed. “It feels as though we have already traversed a great distance, yet there is no indication that our goal is any closer.”

“I mean, this whole place kind of looks the same?” I stepped over an outcropping that looked just like every other outcropping and nearly dunked my foot in a rivulet of souls before I overextended and hopped clear. “We could be going around in circles and never know it.”

Mercy snapped at us. “I’ve been leading us straight.”

I was ready to snap right back, but Asher, bless him, cut her off. “How can you tell?”

She opened and shut her mouth a couple of times. “I’ve been walking in a straight line.”

“She has.” I felt obliged to defend her, even though she had been less than pleasant the last few days. “If she’d turned then her whole ass wouldn’t have been wiggling in front of my face the whole way. There would have been partial cheek coverage on one side.”

An arrow glanced off my left horn. “Stop helping, or I’m telling Seren that you spend all day staring at my ass.”

“Don’t go getting an ego now. I stare at Asher’s tail swishing about too, and he doesn’t swish nearly as much as you.”

The next arrow hit my other horn. Even here I could feel the impact vibrating down into my head. Good times.

Asher’s tail was swishing from side to side when I looked his way, but I couldn’t be sure if it was amused swishing or irritated swishing. I really needed a guide book to this sort of thing. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Lizardmen are from Jupiter. He spoke as calmly as ever, “Would you care to make another navigational check, to ensure that we are still headed in the correct direction?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “I really don’t want to.”

“You are such a man,” Mercy scoffed. “Never stopping to ask for directions.”

“Never stopping to ask directions from the evil god of evil that gloats about murdering and torturing us all every time I stop to ask directions.”

She conceded that point with a shrug, but Asher didn’t want to let it go so easily. “It would set my mind at ease if you were to double-check that we remain on the correct course.”

Once again I reached for the shards and found them flowing through my ghostly form to my hands. Out of curiosity, I stretched out into my Sphere of Influence and found that I could fling the shards about anywhere within it. I could even swing the soul-coated Lucis back and forth just as easily as I could with my bare hands, all in real time instead of the slowed down treacle reality that Artifice usually took me to.

New Skill Discovered! [Active Artifice]

Whatever that was, I wanted it. I just needed another two hundred and ten experience to grab it. That was just four more death wolves. Tops. Bring on the death wolves.

None of them miraculously appeared to save me from having to take a hold of the shards in my hands and listen to them sing. This time I’d barely taken a grip on them before my Spirit Touch started them resonating with each other and the other piece. It was still distant but getting closer. I lifted my hand to point and then jerked it back in terror at the sight of Araphel, just standing there, doing nothing but existing and watching me. “So do you go invisible when I let go of these shards or do you stop existing? Because if you’ve just been following me around staring all this time…”

The smooth black face of absolute darkness came closer and closer as I spoke until my voice died in my throat. “Believe whichever version makes you the most unhappy.”

It was so petty even I had to laugh. “Gods, you are a charmer. No wonder everyone wants you gone.”

Before he could answer back, I let the shards fall from my hands, and he blinked away.

Asher and Mercy were both looking at me with horror on their faces, but I just pointed. “That way.”

It should have been enough to get Mercy off my case at least, but even though my wobbly pointing was a vindication of her amazing ability to walk in a straight line, apparently me laughing in the face of the Voidgod was more pressing business. “Are you trying to make friends with the Voidgod?”

“Uh no? I was laughing at what a dick he is.” I was trying not to frown because this felt like it was turning into more and more of an argument. “You know, like I do with you all the time.”

She was scowling like I’d just caught her eyebrow piercing with a fishing hook. “Yeah, because we’re friends.”

“We’re friends again?” She did not seem impressed with the absolute delight that had come bubbling up onto my face from somewhere deep down in my soul where I was apparently some kind of Labrador. I tried to put my face back to stern and failed utterly. “You think I only mock people relentlessly when they’re my friends?”

Asher cocked his head to one side. “I believe that you would attempt to extend your friendship to an inanimate object were you in its presence for too long.”

“Hey!” I couldn’t help but laugh, even though he was totally wrong.

Mercy shrugged. “You did adopt Seren.”

“Don’t say I adopted someone I’m sleeping with, that is creepy and weird!”

“And all of those Dvergar.” She added with a wicked little grin.

“They came along because their city got destroyed!”

Asher chimed in, “And the two of us despite our natural state being that of enemies.”

“I… I like you guys.” It seemed a little bit flat compared to how I actually felt about them. But since I was trying to convince them that I didn’t get overly attached to everyone I met, professing my undying love and friendship probably wasn’t the way to go. “And I really do not like Araphel. I don’t think there is anybody I like less than Araphel.”

Mercy’s brows drew down. “What about the Elf Queen?”

“Or our dear associate Orphia?” Asher added. Mercy held up a finger for each one.

With a start she seemed to remember. “Or that dude you called fantasy-land Mussolini?”

I held up my hands, laughing despite everything. “You know what, even with all those options, I still like him less. I’m going to go ahead and say he’s the worst.”

The two of them looked at each other, feigning shock. Mercy stage-whispered, “Harsh words from Maulkin.”

“I mean it!” I was almost shouting now, and I could see the two of them trying not to laugh. “He’s a real dick. Even outside of the whole destroying the world stuff, he’s a real… dick.”

Asher bobbed his head knowingly. “I am certain that when the histories of this tumultuous time in Amaranth are recorded, the fact of the Voidgod being ‘a real dick’ shall be inscribed into a stone tablet so that it is never forgotten.”

Mercy cackled. “Maybe a real dick monument.”

I stared down at my feet and tried as hard as I could not to picture a giant dildo statue. Through the transparent surface of my feet I could see the whorls of calcified souls below us, and so I tried to concentrate on that instead. “Can we just get going, please?”

“Aww don’t get shy now.” Mercy looked like she was liable to rupture something if she didn’t stop holding in her laughter.

Asher took pity on me at least. “Did it seem to be closer?”

“It was definitely… I want to say louder? I think we’re getting closer. And Mercy was even taking us the right way.”

“Told you so.” She had clearly been dying to say that all along. Smugness radiated from every surface of her body. I was surprised it wasn’t melting the soul-stone beneath her feet.

We set off again, not a moment too soon for my liking, and I found myself wondering if the sun was ever going to go down here—if there even was a sun beyond the mists or if it was just the mists themselves that were glowing with that unearthly pallid light as far as the eye could see. Although I suppose that technically it wasn’t as far as the eye could see. We didn’t really have eyes here, just the memories of eyes. The ghosts of eyes? Did they actually make any difference to what we could perceive, or were they entirely decorative? The fact that I could cobble things together out of souls using Artifice was kind of scary too. I didn’t like what that meant. Could I use Artifice to mess around with the shapes of souls back on Amaranth too? Could I mold a soul like clay and make it into something that I could use. Something I could touch with Psychometry?

Thankfully, a wolf howled up ahead and drew me out of my introspection before I started asking the kind of questions that you were only meant to voice after consuming copious amounts of liquor. The questions that you kind of mumbled while staring up at the stars at three in the morning when the party was meant to be long over but you’re still hanging on to consciousness by a thread. The same kind of questions where the right answer was usually someone else, who was just as messed up as you by that point, looking over at you like you were a genius and saying: “Whoa.”

Anyway, there was a wolf, so I didn’t have to worry about it.

Snapping back to reality, I noticed that the terrain around us had finally started to change. There were more sticky up bits, to begin with. Then some of them started to look less like rocky outcroppings and more like plants. Saplings, maybe. I probably wouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion straight away, but the farther on we strode, the more tree-shaped the twisted soul sprouts seemed to be. The mist looked pretty much the same everywhere we went, so the only thing that we really had to look at was the ground or Mercy’s butt. And since all the comedy potential had already been sucked out of talking about her butt, I was watching her feet to see where I should be trampling next.

The trickles of souls were pooling here amidst the saplings. Shimmering pools of spiritual energy that shifted and shimmered like there was an oil slick on top of the water. The howling seemed to be coming from deeper in. The wolf wasn’t coming to us, we were lining up to be its dinner. We had already been moving way too slow for my liking, and now that we were heading into what increasingly looked like a swamp, and expecting an ambush at any moment, that dawdling pace had turned into a crawl. “Can we go a little bit faster? I’d like to get back before the heat death of the universe.”

Both Asher and Mercy snapped around to shush me, but that just made me want to yell louder. “Oh come on, it is a big puppy!”

Asher looked genuinely furious. “Do you know what will happen to us if we die in the land of the dead?”

I had kind of wondered about that. “No?”

“Nor do I. And nor do I intend to find out,” Asher replied. Mercy’s head snapped back around. The trees actually looked vaguely like trees this far in—dark and twisted like they’d been dead a long time, but still tall enough and dense enough to block our line of sight. Still, Asher snarled on, “In the very best case scenario, we would be returned to Amaranth and have to begin this pilgrimage anew.”

Mercy snapped. “Guys, shut up.”

There was nothing moving up ahead of us—or at least nothing moving that we could see through the fog and the trees. Presumably there was something moving somewhere in that direction, or Mercy wouldn’t have been freaking out at us, but whatever it was, I couldn’t see it.

Turns out, I shouldn’t have been worried about what was up ahead of us. I should have been worried about what was coming at us from both sides. I wasn’t sure at what point exactly my dumb ass had forgotten that wolves hunt in packs. Maybe I was just so used to seeing them on their own after that one dick of a wolf that killed me, and then Chernghast, and then Diet Chernghast that we’d bumped into when we first arrived here.

One giant wolf leapt at me from the left, and another leapt at Asher from the right, jaws wide open and drool trailing behind them. Chances of making contact with either one of us? Zero.

The Lucis leapt to my hand as I turned, and the downward sweep of it met the power of the critter’s leap head-on, battering it to the ground. The one that was going for Asher got a whole different surprise as I threw up a wall between them, and it crashed into it snout-first.

The air here was thick with soul-mist that I could turn into a solid object with only a moment’s concentration. This might have been their home turf, but I had all the advantages.

There was a double yelp and both beasts fell back for another try. My one had upgraded its original mouth into a gnarly new one with a four way split and the tongue dangling out the middle. The one circling around the wall had launched itself as a wolf, but now it had begun the long, sad evolutionary journey to being a pug.

Neither one looked too eager to come at us again. Good for them. They were learning.

Asher started to cast, so I threw up another wall, this one under his feet, launching him up out of reach of any snapping teeth until I had the chance to knock them out. Turning my attention back to old cross-mouth, I hefted the Lucis for another swing, only for the whole damn wolf to get blown away before I had the opportunity.

Mercy had gotten a lot better with those wind arrows of hers, and every one of them hit like a freight train now. “Hey! That one was mine!”

“You can get the next one!” she called back to me as she leapt, kicking off the side of the podium Asher was on to gain height before rolling to her feet on the first wall, already taking aim.

Damn kill-stealing archers. “What next one?!”

That was when I saw them. Wolves hunt in packs. Not duos. Packs. “Oh. That next one.”

Two more leapt past the one I’d shut down with the first swing, and they were not making things easy on me. My sword might have been big enough to catch the two of them in one hit if they’d politely jump at the same height, but one was after my ankles and the other my face.

There wasn’t really time to make a decision about which one I’d rather live without, but even without muscles, I still had that muscle memory from the month of Seren training. She fought with two swords, coming in high and low whenever it looked like I was getting complacent. I was leaping the ankle-biter and meeting the overly affectionate kisser with the flat of my sword before I knew what was happening.

The impact hammered me down, and I ended up straddling the back end of one giant wolf while the other skidded across the flat of my sword, right past my tasty face. I was the meat in a death wolf sandwich.

Usually being in the middle of a giant pile of puppies was exactly my idea of a good time, but these were not good boys. They were bad dogs. Bad. No biscuit.

The one beneath me squirmed and bucked, trying to remove the weight on its back. The one on top snarled and snapped, trying to get past the smooth expanse of sword and into the yummy Maulkin filling. It wasn’t happening.

I tried to surge my Potency and toss the pup in the air, but I had no body. Couldn’t buff up muscles that weren’t there. Instead, I just had to hold on as they continued their struggle and buck—like a bull rider if a bull was also riding him.

It wasn’t easy to feel things without nerves, so I heard the crunch before I understood what it meant when yet another of these big fluffy murder machines latched onto one of my feet and started pulling. The pain came because I wasn’t lucky enough to skip out on it entirely, but it came from a distance, like I was nicely numbed up for the dog-tooth surgery being performed on my ankle.

With a jerk, I was hauled out from between my bread-wolves and hit the ground like the sad slice of salami I was about to become. At least it freed up my arms. I swept the Lucis at the wolf on my ankle, and the blade bit through one eye and burst out the other. The crunching loosened off, and with one more kick of the foot that wasn’t dangling dead and useless, I got the dead death-wolf off me.

The double-decker wolf I’d just escaped lunged down at me in unison. Mercy’s arrow caught the top one in the snout, forcing it to rear back, but the one on the bottom, in the driver’s seat, chomped down onto my arm. More accurately, I fed it my arm. I’d rather lose that than my neck.

Teeth closed through my ethereal form, and seeing them sinking in made it more real somehow. I felt it more, knowing what was happening. Escaping steam of life drifted out of the monster’s jaws to join the rest of the fog. Most of it was being gulped down, inflating the wolf until it was somehow even bulkier, but enough escaped that I could see my life drifting away.

When I reached out to it with Artifice, that drifting puff didn’t feel any different than the rest of me. Just distant. With a flex of effort, I hauled it back into me, ripping soul-fog right back out of the wolf as it tried to gulp down more.

“Bad dog!” I roared as I launched myself up with another podium of stone before the rest of the swarming wolves could latch on and start chowing down. I didn’t get far. The one latched onto my arm was not willing to let go. Well, that was fine. I wasn’t done with him either.

I rolled off the podium before it got any real height when the weight of the wolf pulled me down, using that weight to fuel my next swing. The Lucis hit it square in the center of mass, and the wolf broke.

Fur that could have turned to armor never had the chance. Flesh woven from the same soul-stuff as everything else here fell apart at the touch of the blade. I didn’t cut all the way through the wolf, but its back was broken, and its grip went loose.

“Play dead.” That came out as more of a grunt than a joke, but I’d live with it. So long as I went on living.

Mercy, gods bless her, was raining pointy death down on the wolf-pack like the avenging angel that I knew she was. Wolves were leaping up to snap at her heels, but she didn’t even spare them a glance. Not when she was aiming. That rain of arrows gave me the space I needed to get back on my feet.

The ancient and glorious weapon known in modern times as the Lucis worked great as a crutch until I’d hauled enough soul-smog around my ankle to form a solid brace and keep myself upright.

Not a minute two soon either. The top dog had tumbled free of its ride sometime during the scramble, and now it came bounding right for me, going for the face again. I know I’ve got a kissable face, but this was ridiculous.

“Sit!” The Lucis spun in a full three hundred and sixty degree flip, from pointing to the ground to the sky and then back again.

Twisting to the side in a panic had saved the wolf from a killing blow, but it was opened down the length of its ribs, and inky black fog came pouring out, obscuring my view of just how badly I’d hurt it.

Not that I had a lot of time to play vet right now anyway. Not with even more of the damn wolves coming on. How many wolves were there? I couldn’t count them all in the frenzy of motion. This time I roared, “I said sit!”

There was no difference from the stone below and the mist above. I could use them all the same. So this time I didn’t haul a wall of condensed soul-stuff up from the ground, I slammed one down. It felt like when I’d hit Leo with the rock walls back at the Bastion. Where it hit their flesh, it stopped dead, but the goal had never been to crush them to death.

Passing seamlessly around them, the stone pinned the wolves in the front ranks to the ground. They’d sit, whether they liked it or not.

I couldn’t see through the wall and the wolves to the next lot, and Mercy was already lining up shots on the trapped wolves now that they were sitting ducks. I needed them out of the way. “Roll over!”

When I shunted the wall along, most of them just slid without any tumbling, but a few of them were good dogs. They flopped and rolled over as the solid stone around them trundled along out of my way.

Waiting around to be attacked was a fool’s game, and I was no… Well, I was pretty dumb, but I was not dumb enough to wait until I was turned into doggy kibble. I charged in as the wall slipped aside, sword swinging before they could pounce.

I dashed across their line, blade singing as it went, gathering more and more mass around it as I pulsed my Artifice between each step, flickering back and forth from my body to my Sphere, gathering up more and more mist into metal until the Lucis was so heavy even I couldn’t lift it, and my swing ended with a clunk and a furrow of stone dug up. Then the howling started.

A half-dozen wolves were dead from that single cut, and even as I let the fog wisp away from my sword again and made it usable, I realized I wouldn’t need to. Whatever will had driven these wolves at us had been broken. They were not equipped to deal with prey that could actually fight back, and it showed. The front rank lay dead, and the rest milled about, tripping over each other in their haste to leave, helped along by another shower of arrows from Mercy.

There was no howling behind me, but there was a big “woof.” Although on reflection, the sound was less puppy noise, more petrol-bomb.

Glancing back at the hounds that should have been at my heels, all I could see was black smoke.

Little licks of flame danced on what was left of the winter-bald trees, but of the wolves there was not even a bone left to be chewed on. He might take a while to wind up, but once he got going, Asher was downright scary.

I called up to Mercy, “All clear?”

Legendary Foes Defeated!

Celerity increased to 24

Airstrike: Rank 5/10

240 Experience Gained

1400 Glory Gained

Apparently, the universe thought we were done, so I wasn’t going to argue with it. The last glimpse I had of the wolves out in the woods were their rapidly fading shadows. Then as swiftly as they’d appeared, they were gone, and we were safe. I blinked for a second to pick up the Active Artifice skill, then turned my attention to the other two.

When I reached out to my Artifice to bring down the walls and podiums it was already there and waiting. I didn’t need to jump out of my body or drift around in a cloud of consciousness while my body lay useless. Everything that I had wanted to do, I could do while still striding closer. Oh this was going to be really handy. The only downside was that now I had full control over my limbs, I couldn’t help but wave them around a bit as I told the soul-stuff I was working where to go. Like a conductor. Or an idiot.

Mercy laughed as I waved her wall down into the ground beneath us once more and even more when I had to clench a fist before I felt like I had a proper grip on the podium to haul Asher back down. “Oh my god, have you been doing that the whole time?”

Faun skin didn’t show a blush very well, but my spirit-body was practically glowing with my embarrassment. “Only in my head.”

She bounded over and pinched my cheeks. “You are adorable.”

I was laughing right along with her until I saw her remember. She remembered that we weren’t meant to be friends. We weren’t meant to be having fun. I was her enemy. For some reason I still didn’t fully grasp, she didn’t trust me anymore. She jerked her hands back, and I tried not to let her see just how much that hurt me.

Chapter 17

On the subject of hurt, I reached for my Primal Pillar and shoved some life back into my body with Restoration. It spread out like a green glow through my spectral form until it closed in on my busted up ankle and arm and flared brighter. The hasty patch I’d made fused into my leg hole seamlessly, and just like that I had a bunch of somebody else’s ghosts as part of my leg. I was one hundred percent sure that wasn’t hygienic. Still, they didn’t seem to be screaming all their memories into my head, so maybe Restoration had sterilized them or something. My arm dragged in a little wisp of fog to patch itself up too. It was kind of weird being somewhere that all of my different Pillars interacted so directly with the same stuff. It was like we were in a simpler version of the world where everything ran on the same system.

Asher looked around at our handiwork and nodded, satisfied. “I believe that all attempts at stealth can now be entirely abandoned. If there is anyone in the land of the dead who did not hear that, then they most certainly will not hear our footsteps.”

Mercy shrugged, walking along the line, plucking ghost arrows out of the wolves I’d pinned in place. Some of them jerked and jumped as she pulled the arrows out of their heads, but most of them just quietly evaporated away into nothingness, adding their bulk to the fog.

At least that explained what happened if you died in the land of the dead. I’d come pretty close to being a puff of cloud myself back there. I’d dragged most of myself back in to form a solid lump, but who knew what I’d actually lost.

My gods, I couldn’t speak Spanish anymore. No wait, I’d never learned to speak Spanish.

Maybe I had just lost some of my encyclopedic knowledge of funny memes from the internet. That would be a real heartbreaker. Those burger loving cats that couldn’t type well were probably about 90% of my personality. Without them, who would I even be?

Regardless of what bits of myself were floating off, we moved on at a much better pace after wolf attack two: electric boogaloo. The ground was liquid as much as solid after a few minutes of striding on, and once we were clear of the explosions that Asher had belched out, the trees came back on thick and fierce. Mercy fell back into line with the rest of us, and I took up the vanguard position. I started off hacking my way through the trees as we bunny-hopped our way deeper, but before long I gave up on even that level of subtlety and reforged everything I was carrying into a shield with a raised ridge down the middle, creating a bulldozer blade that I held out in front of me with both hands as I charged on.

Active Artifice was really getting a workout as I went, hauling solid soul-stone up in teeny tiny podiums the size of lily pads in the many stagnant pools of souls beneath us. They’d make stepping stones for the other two, but for me, they were mostly just a workout as I determined just how well I could use Artifice while I was moving. It took a lot more concentration than I would have liked. If I was doing anything more complex than just running with my arms up then I probably would have screwed it up a million times over. My brain was struggling with being in two places at the same time. It struggled with being in one place at the same time normally, so this extra dimension of thinking was… well, it wasn’t painful, but it was pretty close. I was straining myself. Maybe I needed a brain upgrade. Oh! I unlocked one of those back when I was fighting Koschei. I was assuming that whatever had let him shoot a billion different thought-ghosts at me would definitely help me focus up enough to plop rocks under my feet as I ran. At the same time though, I was kind of reluctant to do any magical brain surgery on myself to become smarter. It could totally change who I was as a person if I wasn’t a giant dumbass. Did I really want to find out who I could have been if I’d scraped together more than three brain cells to deal with every situation?

Mercy cried out a warning from behind me just before I rammed into something rock solid and was flung off my feet. I didn’t do a full flip up and over my shield, but I did headbutt it pretty solidly. That was a clang that I was going to be hearing echoing in my skull for quite some time. I shouldn’t have worried about gaining new brains changing me too much. Apparently, I was just going to mash them up anyway.

I staggered back, melting the shield away so that I could see what I’d rammed into and regretting it immediately. It was a foot. More of a hoof really. A hoof-foot combo that looked an awful lot like mine—if I was the size of a building. I craned my neck to look up, following calf to knee to thigh to massive dangling loincloth and the expanse of muscled torso beyond. This Faun was so big that I couldn’t even get my brain to accept that he was a person. He seemed more like a bit of the landscape. The fog swirling all around his immobile form did nothing to change that impression. Neither did the dangling growths of soul-moss and vines hanging from his huge, hooked horns and draped around his shoulders like a cape. Even as that huge heap turned its head towards me, I was still half-sure that this was just some big-ass statue.

Then he swung for me.

He was ten times the size of me, swinging an axe so big that I was pretty sure the rough blade could have passed for a tectonic plate, and even knowing and seeing all of that, I still tried to block it. The Lucis had reformed into a great-sword almost by habit, and I swung it up to meet Gorgafel’s blow.

Probably a mistake, though I didn’t realize that until I was flying. Asher and Mercy flitted by beneath my feet, both yelling something that the wind snatched away. I lost sight of them, and the giant monster looming over them, as I soared off into the dense mist. The dead claws of the trees caught me the moment I started to fall, hooking into me and ripping through me as they splintered and crumbled beneath my weight.

That distant sense of pain was back, and I saw some of myself misting off to join the fog, but it was a fair trade because every scratch and blow slowed me down until I could tumble back from the side of one particularly sturdy tree to land on my feet.

Distance had kind of lost all meaning by this point, but I charged right back towards the massive Faun as fast as my ghostly legs could carry me.

Even puffing and sprinting as fast as I could, I heard the howling pick up at my heels. I had no time for small-fry, not while Asher and Mercy were standing toe to toe with a titan. I staggered as I split my attention to throw up a wall behind me, but it seemed to do the job. I never even saw the wolves pursuing me, I just heard the chorus of squeals as they hit solid rock.

Hopefully, they wouldn’t follow me all the way back to the real fight, but if they did, at least Asher would be able to Kentucky fry them with ease. The fog shuddered out towards me as I ran, and a sound like thunder rolled out. Something so huge and powerful was happening up ahead that it would have terrified me in my old life, but here and now, I knew that it was my friends. They were the ones rocking this place to the foundations. The giant Faun might have made a clap of thunder with every step, but Mercy and Asher were the lightning that made the horizon flash.

There was no real way to tell time here in the land of the dead, but now that things were finally happening, I felt like I was late to the party. I was running all out, tossing up stone steps beneath my feet as I ran, no time to look down and see when there was a pool and when there wasn’t. As the shadow of Gorgafel loomed out of the mist up ahead, I pushed more and more rock up with each bounding step until I was jumping up to meet them as they rose, a stairway of jutting pedestals heading up and up until when I finally broke through the fog, I was level with the giant’s face.

The last pillar of earth shot up at an angle, and I coiled every muscle in my spectral body, folding up on myself and then unfurling at the last moment to launch at Gorgafel’s big, ugly face.

He had those same sharpened teeth that I’d been uncomfortably into on Mhirka, and his horns were huge and wide like a water buffalo’s. To my eyes, he looked just like any other Faun, except for the missing eye and the fact he was capital B big. That eyepatch was what caught my attention as I soared, blade raised to meet him. It wasn’t leather, and it wasn’t held onto his ghostly body with a ghostly strap, it was a hunk of metal, embedded in the midst of the scar tissue. A rusty hunk of metal that sang to my Spirit Touch. All the shards I carried thrummed at the closeness of their other part, and I was going to go right ahead and blame that thrumming for distracting me. That was definitely why he was able to slap me out of the sky like an annoying fly.

Mercy stepped on my back as she ran by. Not even pausing to snipe at me. “Nice comeback.”

I started pushing myself up, only to have to fling myself flat again when Gorgafel’s axe scythed by again at waist height. I spat a mouthful of soul-water out when I finally raised my head again, doing my damnedest not to absorb any memories through Spirit Touch tongue. “So sympathetic.”

Mercy had enough time to spare as she leapt gracefully over the same axe-swing that floored me to yell, “Get off your lazy ass!”

Despite her snark, I was trying. It was just a little bit on the painful side, after me being tossed around like a rag doll. Dull and distant pain was still pain, and when you stacked up enough of it, it started to feel just like the real pain I’d have felt if my physical body was slammed through a forest and slapped into the dirt. By the time I was up on my knees, Mercy’s flip over the axe swing had ended with her standing beside me, readying another one of those windy-arrows she was so proud of. “Why’s he’s so big?”

She unleashed that shot straight up to meet Gorgafel’s next blow. The axe blade was so high up in the fog that I didn’t even see it coming before Mercy’s shot intercepted and blew everything away. Before, it was an overhead swing that probably wouldn’t have just split me in two but created a canyon underneath where I’d been standing that was big enough to kickstart local tourism. Now, the titan rocked back on his heels. The face that the fleeing fog unveiled did not look happy with us. I had to force my mouth back into motion. “I mean, I saw some big dudes, but this is ridiculous.”

Asher dropped from the sky like a bird doing an excellent brick impression. He was getting better at zipping around with his gravity snares, but he still couldn’t land worth a damn. I had to catch him if we didn’t want him to wipe out. “I would hypothesize that the ancestor worship that you described among the Faun may have translated into a legendary physique here? Or perhaps he has simply been consuming the souls of others to increase in power and girth. That would certainly seem to be a natural extension of the Void corruption that looks to be affecting him.”

There certainly were an awful lot of familiar black veins running through Gorgafel’s spectral body now that I looked. There was a thick root of darkness heading down from that ruined eye-socket, branching out like a nervous system to stretch throughout his whole ghostly body. No matter how big he got, that cancer grew with him.

Whatever momentary break Mercy’s arrow had won us was over now. All of the wild swings and careless chops appeared to be done too. Now Gorgafel was looking down at us with something I’d like to describe as cunning in his eyes, although it was probably more like a slight dialing down of the berserk fury. The next time he came at us, his attacks were precise.

It’s weird to describe an axe bigger than your whole body being swung at you as precise, but every movement he made now was tighter, more focused on his goal. That goal being us dying.

I brought up my sword to meet his next swipe and deflect it away from Asher. Mercy was already springing to the side, but that lizard man moved like he was in molasses compared to us buff warrior types. This time I couldn’t afford to be knocked back, so I gathered more and more mass around my sword until it was as big as it could get without tipping me over.

Anyone who tried to swing something that heavy would have no luck, but conveniently enough, it was already swinging by the time it put on all the weight. For that one parry, it was big enough to bounce Gorgafel’s swing. Then it was useless.

If he’d still been flapping his axe around like crazy, it might have bought us some time to work out a plan, but the moment that I turned the first blow away he spun. That colossal mountain of a body spun, using recoil from the first deflected hit to fuel the next.

Dude really knew his stuff. I could have picked up some pointers if he wasn’t actively trying to carve me in half. At least it was aimed at me, not Asher. Sure, he might lose his tail if I dodged, but that would grow back, right?

I threw up a wall between me and impending death, but it wasn’t going to be enough. The stone shattered under the axe blow and it came on as if the stone hadn’t even been there. There was barely a moment to think, but I’m proud to say that I still managed to flick another wall up. Shooting poor Asher back into the sky with a yelp.

Thinking back through my old life, I don’t think I got hit a lot. I mean, I definitely got hit a lot less often than I deserved given the words that came tumbling out my mouth. There were a few good solid slaps from women in bars, and a few punches on the playground when I was small, but none of it could have prepared me for Amaranth and the constant beating I’d been taking since I arrived. And nothing that I’d suffered on Amaranth was like this.

His axe had a thick line of that oily black void energy along its edge, and it bit right through my ghostly body like it wasn’t there. My legs went left, and I went right. That pain that had been holding off, giving me the silent treatment, came rushing back to meet me like it had forgiven me for all my wrongs. Thanks, pain. Thanks for joining the party. So glad you’re here.

[6/1270 Health]

Smoke billowed out from me as I landed on the ground in two bits. Again. I was really making a habit of this whole getting chopped up thing. My life bloomed out of me in a great cloud, and for a moment, I was just going to let it. Then I remembered why we were here.

Pulling myself back together with Artifice was not easy—maybe one of the hardest things I’d ever done with my new godly powers. The pillar trembled inside me as I hauled my ghostly bits back together, and then Primal sprang to life, taking over. I still had to concentrate on pulling all the spilled Maulkin juice back together, but Restoration rushed through me, sealing the gap, filling in what was missing.

I gasped in a big old mouthful of air, pushed myself back up onto my elbows, and then I saw the axe coming straight down on me again. Gorgafel didn’t leave jobs unfinished. Guess that was why he was such a big hero back home.

Good thing I had my own heroes to come save me.

Asher’s spell had been slow to cast, and we’d interrupted it more than once with all the jostling around, but when he finally unleashed it, it was worth the wait. A roaring ball of flame and lightning leapt out from wherever he’d landed, heading straight for Gorgafel’s big, dumb face. It was going to roast him and toast him and knock any idea of chopping me up right out of his head.

Or at least it was meant to. Instead, Gorgafel moved much faster than anything that gigantic had any right to, following through on his swing and diving forward so Asher’s patented murder-ball soared right over.

Mercy caught it.

She’d been leaping from one of my podiums to the next, bouncing off treetops when she had to, gaining height every step of the way. One last wild leap put her into the path of the ball-lightning-inferno and another wind-arrow sent the whole thing flying back on a new course.

Right up Gorgafel’s ass.

If you’ve never heard a pig getting its testicles electrocuted while simultaneously being dunked in napalm, then it would be pretty hard to describe the noise that came out of Gorgafel’s mouth when the arrow struck home. And with him looming over me, I got to see the expression on his face too. That was a thing of beauty.

Needless to say, he fumbled his swing, just narrowly avoiding lopping off my arm as I flung myself to the side. And there, just waiting for me, was my sword. Oh sword, I missed you.

Of course, it was way too big to lift in its current configuration, but a quick puff of Artifice brought it back down to ridiculous-sized, instead of super-ridiculous-sized. All the rest of the spooky ghost matter fell away in clumps, and I turned to face the enraged giant who’d already killed me once today. I could not have been happier.

Even as I charged, I was bellowing, “Nice one, Mercy!”

Maybe she heard me, maybe she didn’t. I couldn’t see her, and there was no way I was letting Gorgafel turn around and spot her either. Asher was still somewhere off in the mists, and I couldn’t see him glowing up anything new and nasty just yet, so for the moment, I had the big guy all to myself.

The smooth flow of attacks had stuttered after Gorgafel’s butt got violated, but he was back on balance and ready by the time that I got close enough to launch myself at him again. No way I was swinging for his ankles when I had a chance for something better. One long up-spurt of stone launched me at his chest. Even through the pain and the rage, I could see the contempt on his face. The same attack again? Didn’t I ever learn.

His axe hilt swept up to meet my strike, and I let it. Abandoning the Lucis to go spinning off into the mist as I soared on by.

You would think that a Faun would realize that my sword wasn’t the only weapon I was toting. My horns hammered into his chest.

The pained roar this time wasn’t nearly as impressive as when he got toasted buns, but I was close enough to feel it reverberating up from his guts.

Now I was inside his guard, it was time to have fun. He abandoned his grip on the axe and reached down to grab me with a hand that was about the same as a normal human being, to pluck me off like the annoying little thorn in his side that I was.

That was when I called the Lucis back to my hand. Not just the little one that I’d been left with due to silly little things like “not being able to pick it up” but the whole damn thing. Every bit of it that I’d shaken off was still a part of the whole. It was connected, the same way that the shards were, and even though most of it was well outside my sphere of influence up here, it still leapt to attention when I called.

Lumps weren’t of any use to me though. I needed swords. Lots and lots of swords. The Lucis hit my hand, and I plunged it into Gorgafel’s chest. The echoes of the Lucis that I’d pulled together with Artifice struck a moment later, and the stuck pig noises just kept on coming. Although Gorgafel looked less like pork and more like a porcupine.

Despite all that, it wasn’t enough to break that martial discipline. His hand still came up, and I was still slapped right off him like a bug. Again.

Asher unleashed a bolt of lightning as I fell, and it passed close enough to make every hair on my body stand on end. On its own, maybe it wouldn’t have been enough to stop the giant looming over us, but there was an answering crackle of electricity already inside him, leaping up to meet the bolt as it struck. I was never going to understand how magic worked, how all of the complicated scribbles in his books translated into bitching awesome explosions, but this little bit of it made sense to me now. The resonance part, anyway. He threw fire or lightning at something the first time so that there was fire and lightning for the next spell to latch onto. Maybe I wasn’t a complete dumbass, after all.

Black burns spread everywhere that I could see, the veins of darkness blossoming out as the pure destructive power of the lightning tore through. It was the kind of blow that could have felled a mountain, and I could barely believe that even this ancient terror could still be standing after it struck.

Despite all that, Gorgafel kicked me as I fell.

[449/1270 Health]

It hurt. Big surprise.

I was sent tumbling end over end, and I would have hit the trees again if it wasn’t for Mercy. She was still leaping about, trying to keep high while she peppered Gorgafel with arrows. Chipping him down, bit by bit. I just happened to be her next stepping stone.

She looked so dainty when she was springing and flipping about that I really didn’t expect that second kick to hurt as much as Gorgafel’s. Stupid really. She had much better reasons to kick me.

It knocked me down instead of out, though, so I suppose I should have thanked her. Maybe later. When I didn’t have a face full of soul pond. Again.

Another push up, another mouthful of dead people trying to tell me their life story, and another panicked moment of looking around for my sword before I remembered I could summon it to my hand as easily as thinking. Gorgafel loomed over me like a mountain, surrounded by his very own ring of cloud cover, smog pouring out of his massive form, and the life draining out of him through all the holes that I put in him.

Time to add some more.

I drew the Lucis back, and through Artifice, I could feel every bit of it still stuck in Gorgafel’s ghostly flesh straining to join me. Well, who was I to say no?

Keeping track of every bit when I hauled them out was way above my pay-grade brain-wise, but they felt like one thing, so they moved like one thing too, all parts flying out to me as one. Just a big old avalanche of spiky sword bits. I really didn’t think this through.

Luckily sprinting for my life from the flying spray of razor-sharp blades also kept me ahead of Gorgafel’s sweeping attack. Maybe he didn’t see the other two as a threat despite them being the ones to ignite his rear. Maybe he thought I was challenging him to be top Faun. Either way, I had his undivided attention, and I wasn’t giving it up any time soon.

He chased me around in an arc, stomping through the trees and the forest of blades I’d just planted like they weren’t even there. His axe trailed along behind him, ready to sweep me off my feet the moment that he closed the distance. And, of course, he was gaining on me. I had these little stubby legs to run with, and he could have done the splits and bridged continents. There was no getting away from him. So why try?

I spun on my heel and thrust the Lucis out behind me with all my strength, directly away from him, into the empty air. I was getting the hang of this whole Active Artifice thing. The rest of the swords leapt at me again, but this time there was a huge hunk of man-monster in the way.

For someone as big as Gorgafel, each little stab must have felt like a needle, but as it turns out, if you hit anyone with enough needles at the same time, they’ll feel it. He bowed over with the impact of my hundred tiny blows, and his sweeping attack swept on by me.

There was no point hauling any harder on the echoes of the Lucis in Gorgy’s back. There was no budging them from this side. Instead, I had to go back to basics. I charged him.

He saw me coming and reversed his grip on that massive axe, waiting to see which angle I was coming at him from before he moved to block, or more likely, to chop me in half again.

Asher’s casting glow was over in the tree-line to my right, underneath where Mercy had launched herself from to give me a helping hand or… uh… foot, earlier. I knew that he could see me running in, and I knew that he’d have my back. I bellowed as I ran, “Can I get a lift?”

He couldn’t reply, not in the middle of weaving his magic, but that didn’t mean he didn’t hear me. Gods, I hoped he heard me.

Gorgafel was in motion, the axe falling towards the place I would be arriving by his feet. I didn’t have time to launch myself up with Artifice steps, and I didn’t have the strength of the pillar of Ascension to launch me over the strike on my own. All I had was hope.

I leapt, and Asher’s Gravity Snare blossomed above me, a tiny black hole that jerked me up towards it harder than the ground tried to pull me down. The axe head swung cleanly beneath my feet, wobbling as even Gorgafel’s might was tested by the teeny tiny black hole Asher had opened up for me. I soared up to that black dot until it blinked out, then I soared right on by to hit Gorgafel full force in the loincloth area with my regular-sized great-sword.

You might be a hero of legend, you might be a ghost, you might be empowered by the awful might of the Voidgod bleeding out from a fragment of the weapon that was used to slay him, but when someone wallops you in the nuts with a giant sword, you feel it.

Gorgafel roared in agony, in a much higher octave than his last snarls, and I fell through a black cloud of his escaping lifeforce to tumble to my feet again behind him. No pond water in my mouth. I was calling that a win.

When I yanked the Lucis back this time, I was ready for all the echoes to come flying at me. I caught them with my Artifice as they came, holding them at bay and marveling as they started to orbit me unbidden. Everything was so much easier here, when everything Artifice was working on had the same resonance. If I’d tried something like this back on Amaranth, I’m pretty sure I would have caught one blade and died a pincushion, but here, everything answered my call.

For the first time, I actually felt a little bit like the god I was meant to be becoming. Gorgafel was turning, rage vibrating through every inch of his titanic form, and I was not afraid. I was not cowed. For the first time, I really felt like we were on even footing.

Rage made him clumsy, hefting his axe and hammering it down on me like he was splitting wood. If any part of him was still thinking, then he meant for me to leap to one side. I stood my ground, sweeping up the Lucis and the hundred ghostly blades around me to meet it.

I turned his blow aside.

Mercy hit him in the eye with another wind arrow, and when the storm unleashed, it looked like it took half his head off in the sudden explosion of fog. It might have killed him, but I was already moving, leaping onto the haft of the titanic axe and running up the length of it to where it was tucked under his arm. I sprung up from there into the whirling cloud of dispersing soul-stuff, flying blind until my hand touched ghostly flesh, and I took a grip.

Furry and sticky, it only took a moment for me to realize I was up to my elbow in his nostril. Oh well, at least it gave me something to hold onto. I shed mass from the Lucis until it was only a broadsword, and then I plunged it in.

In and out, in and out, stabbing his stupid face over and over. A blinding bright bar of flame burst through him somewhere down below, but even seeing it go in one side and out the other, I still wasn’t convinced he was actually done for.

The echoes of the Lucis sung when I reached out to them, and they gathered around the original, I a wash of Artifice, making a sword so impossibly huge I wondered how I’d ever thought I could swing it. Good thing I didn’t need to. All I had to do was hold on and let gravity do its work.

Gorgafel broke as the sword came down. One horn heading to my left, one to my right. The nostril I was hanging from went limp, and I started to fall, but I hung onto the handle of my sword as it parted his spectral flesh, and I rode it all the way back down to the ground floor.

Taking one staggering step back from it, I got ready to run, but it was over. The dead hero of the Faun fell in half, and the roars of pain and fury became nothing more than echoes in the mist.

New Skill Discovered: Twin Strike

Legendary Foe Defeated!

Potency increased to 48

Celerity increased to 25

Piety increased to 9

Twin Strike: Rank 1/10

Airstrike: Rank 6/10

Aether Resistance: Rank 5/10

390 Experience Gained

4300 Glory Gained

Asher and Mercy came staggering out of the fog to meet me over by the steaming heap of Faun that had something worth looting. Both of them looked exhausted, and considering we had no bodies to actually get tired here, it was kind of funny that I felt just the same. That had been a long fight. I definitely preferred the ones that were over quick. Preferably so quick I didn’t get murdered in half. “Guess we win?”

Asher tripped over his own tail and stumbled into me. “It would appear that is the case.”

It took more effort than I’d like to admit to pry the shard from the clinging flesh that surrounded it. Even though he was double-extra-strength dead, the shard didn’t want to be parted from this spirit.

Quest: Return of the Voidgod

Acquire Rusted Blade Shards: 4/6 Complete

400 Glory Gained

Tier of Glory Ascended!

That was a relief. I’d been starting to worry that I’d have to give up on all the glory we’d gathered here when I suicided myself back to Amaranth. “You both get a Tier from all that sweet Glory?”

“Yup.” Mercy eyed the shard warily. Like it might bite her. “Might spend it on candy. I’ve earned a little treat.”

I tossed it to her. Instincts overrode her common sense, and her hand lashed out to catch the rusty, juicy, hunk of metal. “I’ve got a better idea. Spend it on Aether. Grab Soulbond.”

She looked down at the shard in absolute disgust and went on trying to deny what I was obviously saying to her. “So you can make me a bow that I can’t lose in case we go dimension hopping again?”

“So you can take this shard back to Amaranth.” I spelled it out to her.

She tossed the shard back at me, and it bounced off my chest. “I’m good. Thanks.”

“You think the shards are doing something to me, corrupting me.” I took a deep breath. “Well, maybe you’re right. I am different than I used to be. Every shard I attach to myself is just making it worse.”

“Oh so now you admit it.” She came at me like a tiny little storm of rage, all pointing fingers and snarls. “And you want to infect me too?”

Asher stepped up. I wasn’t expecting him to do that. “I do not believe that our friend wishes to do you harm, rather I believe that he wishes to earn back your trust.”

She rolled her eyes. “Hey, Mercy, shove your face in this nest of scorpions to prove how not poisonous they are.”

“Venomous,” Asher corrected her.

“Really?” She threw her bow at his head. He didn’t have our reflexes, and it hit him on the snout, and he made a little whimper. “Really? Now is the time to have that argument?”

Despite all that, I didn’t take my eyes off her. I was giving her the full in the cage with the tiger treatment right now. “If you take one, I won’t get any worse. I didn’t even start to get really weird until the second one.”

She sneered. “Pretty sure you tried to murder Seren with just one shard attached.”

“Pretty sure you were in the pro-Seren-murder camp at that point!” I snapped back.

“Pretty sure I still am.”

Asher piped up again before this could turn into a brawl. “The salient point remains that each time another shard is bound to Maulkin’s soul, there is a notable… darkening both of his aura and his attitudes. If that could be abated by simply sharing the burden, then I’m all for it.”

Mercy pointed to the lump of metal lying on the ground in between us. “Great, you attach a bit of rusty metal to your soul then.”

“To shoulder that burden would mean that we would have you turning upon the both of us each time that there was a momentary disagreement? I think not.” He turned to Mercy with a downward slope to his shoulders like he was trying to make himself smaller and less threatening. “You know your own mind; you would trust in your own judgment. Just as we would place our trust in you.”

He had too good a point for even Mercy to just shout him down. She was flustered. “You… I…”

I’d been thinking about all this for a good long time. “It gave me a bad temper. I think. I can’t really remember getting angry the way I do now before I bound the first shard. But that was about it.”

“You want me even angrier?” She glowered at the shard now, not me. Probably an improvement.

I shrugged, even if she couldn’t see it. “I think that Mercy with a bad attitude is going to be pretty much the same one we all know and love.”

She showed me the fingers that she used to draw back her bow. “I hate you.”

I blew her a kiss back.

She glanced up long enough for me to see her fighting a smirk. “Alright. If it keeps you from getting more evil, I guess I can take it.”

I let out a little breath of relief. “You’ll feel what I felt. You’ll know that it didn’t make me evil or whatever.”

“I already said I’d do it. You don’t have to make a big deal.”

We all settled down for a moment, turning our attentions inward.

I already knew what I wanted before I even tried to spend my Glory. Ascension may have been dull and grey here in the land of the dead, but I could still pour my power into it. The moment that I felt the next Tier of Ascension settle into my being, I flicked over to the list of new Divinities I’d unlocked and grabbed Ascendant Cognition. Maybe it would make me a different person, but maybe I needed to be a different person if I was going to make it through all this and win.

I certainly didn’t feel any smarter after I’d picked it, but then again, I don’t actually know what being smart feels like, so how would I know? Maybe if I sat down with some math problems I’d get through them quicker. Or… at all.

Either way, the important thing was that, hypothetically, I’d be able to control more than one thing at a time with my brain. That was pretty exciting stuff. Since up until now I’d been able to control one thing: me—and even that was only about 50% of the time. Who controlled me when my brain wasn’t in charge? Don’t ask me.

Opening my eyes, I wasn’t amazed by the sudden change. Everything looked the same as it had before I’d blinked. Asher was still lost in thought, probably buying up a whole new catalogue of spells that he’d only use once. Meanwhile, Mercy had done her upgrade and was now down on her haunches beside the shard. If I didn’t have Aether, then what she did next probably wouldn’t have looked like much of anything, but with my godly eyeballs, I could see the coils of soul-stuff stretching out from the core of her body to entangle the shard.

A dark, horned shadow loomed around the shard, what was left of Gorgafel’s essence still clinging to it for all that he was worth, and for a moment, I wondered if she’d even be able to bind it with him still clinging on. She struggled and strained; her first steps into the world of Aether were a lot like a baby deer’s first steps into the world, all wobbly knees and shaking. Once again my body was off and moving without any input from the thinking parts, yanking the central blade of the Lucis back out of the roiling mass of soul-stuff that had been a giant Faun and cutting through that shadow, severing the connection that he had to the shard.

With him gone, it leapt right into her waiting hands, and her soul and the shard seemed to sing to each other, wrapping around one another in a constant dance, not a struggle for supremacy, but a waltz between two lovers, entangled and entwined so deeply that they could never be parted.

If Asher had watched, he would have seen a hunk of metal hop into her hands. I saw her and the shard being remade into a new whole. She met my eyes when it was over, and the anger she’d been radiating since the Bastion just seemed to have vanished. She was like the old Mercy again.

My voice was so soft when I spoke, I wasn’t sure that she even heard me. “Okay?”

“Haven’t turned evil yet.” She shrugged. “Maybe later.”

Asher’s soul flared a little brighter in our Aether sense, then his eyes opened. “Are we prepared to return to Amaranth?”

I opened my eyes after pumping myself up to the next tier of glory and then hefted my sword. “Who’s going first?”

Chapter 18

The return trip was just as weird as the outbound flight. There was less turbulence once we’d taken off, but trying to kill everyone in such a way that didn’t result in the cloud of their being dispersing throughout the whole plane was trickier. I had to send them one at a time while still holding their cloud bodies in place until the reaper reaped them so that they didn’t arrive missing their whole personality—although with Mercy that probably would have been a drastic improvement.

I sent the other two off without much argument from Big D, but when I turned my sword on myself, I was definitely getting a vibe from him. “Sorry for demanding all these trips back and forth. I promise it won’t happen again.”

The weight of his words hit me like a solid rock slab. “See that it does not.”

Then it was off through the funnel tunnel back to the wonderful world of Amaranth, traversing the void between realities without delay … or an inflight movie. Not that I’d bought headphones for it anyway, but I could have made up my own dialogue; that was a good way to kill a few hours and make anyone sitting nearby rabidly hate you.

Landing in my body felt weird after the freedom of just having my spirit to haul around. The added weight of the armor I’d strung up to be spawned into didn’t help with that sensation. Still, it was kind of nice having muscles to flex again. And there was something undeniably pleasant about going for a breath of air and some air actually going into your lungs, even if it did kind of taste like burning. Wait, what was burning?

Things at Talon’s Keep were not exactly as we had left them. I wished that they were. I sincerely wished that they were, but instead there were some Dvergar lying around on the ground that I was pretty sure weren’t just taking a nap. The side of the white-stone tower had a big black scorch mark across it, and the wooden barrier marking the outside of the village had been reduced to ash in a few big patches. Normally, that wouldn’t have been a problem. Normally, the most dangerous thing left in the jungle was the various deathtraps that Seren was using to train me to be less likely to be murdered by deathtraps. Today was not a normal day.

Inyoka were storming through, throwing spears at any Dvergar that had been too slow to get inside and hacking down any of them that were fool enough to actually stand up to them. These were not the feral creatures we’d found out among the trees when we first arrived, they were the same shape as Asher, lithe and wicked-looking in their lacquered armor. That armor was stained a deep green to help them blend with the forest, but out here in the open, it just made the pallid scales that covered the rest of their bodies shine even brighter.

It must have been near midday judging by the sun shining down. All of this had happened in just a little over a day. We really couldn’t turn our backs on this place for a second.

A shadow passed between me and the sun while I was peering up and made me shut my damn mouth. Big serpentine body. Wings. Fire shooting out the front. I was seeing my first real life dragon.

No matter what else happened today, win or lose, I got to fight a dragon.

Mercy scrambled up beside me after snatching up her bow, and Asher stalked forward from his shrine with magic already pooling in his hands. I had the Lucis in hand and the iron heap close enough to make it a great-sword again.

The whole place was swarming with armored Inyoka, but we could take them. One at a time, or all together, we could take them. “Split up. Drive them back. Get the Dvergar under cover.”

Asher’s head bobbed. “Agreed.”

“And I want to kill the dragon.”

Mercy took off laughing, but she didn’t argue, which I think meant that I got dibs. I was just trying to work out how to get up there when I heard a scream from off in the woods. Seren. Where was Seren?

I’d have to cross the whole damn village to get to the source of that scream, but if there was one thing I was good at, it was chopping my way in one direction. The Inyoka hadn’t even noticed us yet. Not really. We were just new warm bodies for them to prey on, so they didn’t give us the respect, or terror, that we really deserved.

The first one that came bounding up to me with his axe held high looked genuinely shocked when I snapped it out of his hands and then snapped his hands off at the elbows with my return stroke. I kicked him out of my path and moved on.

Everything seemed so much easier to follow now. There was no doubt or confusion about where my sword was or my legs were or anything else. All the things that Seren had been trying to drill into me so that they’d be my natural response, I could keep track of it all now. The swivel of my wrists as I turned the Lucis to strike the face off the Inyoka creeping up behind me, and the positioning of my feet, knees slightly bent, to drive forward with force into the slash that split the next one in two. Ascendant Cognition was meant to help me pull off Artifice tricks on the fly. I had no idea that it would change everything.

I didn’t even need to reach for Artifice once as I made my way across town. It was like I knew exactly where everything was and what I needed to do to get through it. Keeping track of everything was Cognition, no doubt, but the rest, that was Seren. She’d kept on going for a whole month when it was abundantly clear that I was too damn stupid to keep up with all the complex switches and stances and grips she was showing me, and now it was finally paying off.

Another blood-curdling scream went up from the jungle. If they’d hurt a single hair on her head, I was going to kill every dragon on Amaranth, on principle.

There was an ambush waiting for me as I rounded the old white stone outbuildings that Talon had once used as bunks for his students. Behind the wall, my Lifesense warned me of a couple of Dvergar in hiding, but it seemed like the majority had retreated elsewhere—probably into the mine, knowing Dvergar. I should have guessed that the enemy would be massing here, out of sight of the tower. That was probably where they thought we were camped out.

There were twelve Inyoka crouched here, listening for my approach—ten in armor, and two in tight fitting robes. Fair guess they were going to be throwing magic around. I didn’t have an answer to magic, so I needed them stopped first.

A wall burst up from beneath my feet and launched me over their front ranks, and they all reacted much faster than I would have liked. Spears jutted up into my path, and I had to slap them aside with the flat of the Lucis. That left me no time to swing for the wizards. Good thing I could just land on them and do almost as much damage. With the power of my gigantic grey ass, I crushed one as he started to cast. I probably didn’t kill him, but a face full of buns was enough to put a halt to whatever electric death he was planning on shooting my way.

The other one went on casting as if his buddy hadn’t just been Mario-stomped, and the rest of them moved with all the precision of a well-oiled machine, spears abandoned and axes drawn as they closed in around me. Perfect.

In this close, the only thing they could do was hack down at me if they didn’t want to risk chopping up each other, which meant a quick spin of the Lucis overhead knocked every attack aside. The wizard was still doing something or other, but I could split my attention enough to deal with the leaping lizards coming at me and keep track of how far along his spell was. I’d been watching Asher casting since we first landed, and it wasn’t hard to work out when the bubble was going to pop.

With their first attacks rebuffed, my ten choppy friends started to circle like I was in the center of an Inyoka whirlpool, every one of them waiting for me to make a move so they could exploit the opening.

Well, I wasn’t going to keep them waiting. I swung the Lucis in a wild arc that made the whole bunched mass of Inyoka in front of me leap back and the ones behind me lunge forward to attack. With a stomp of my foot, I hauled a wall up behind me. Not big enough to stop them dead, but more than enough to trip them up as they darted in.

Turning my back on a whole posse of angry Inyoka probably wasn’t the best idea, but I did it all the same. I spun on the heel of my stomped foot to slash through the tumbling row of Inyoka. Gouging through their armor and their flesh in one long bloody line, stretching from body to body.

The ones behind me rushed back in, and I had to launch myself over the waist-high wall of screeching wounded to avoid being chopped up.

They followed, trampling all over their buddies to get at me, driving me farther away from the caster, who was just about to unleash that big ball of fire from between his hands. No, thank you.

With a jerk of my hand, I brought the stone wall down on him, not in a collapse but in a wave. Where it hit his flesh, it stopped dead, but that didn’t stop me hauling stone around him until he was encased.

The same stone exploded out a moment later when his spell went off, peppering me and the rest of the Inyoka with shrapnel. I caught a glimpse of something burnt and sticky in the hollow where the mage had been, but he wasn’t going to be pulling any rabbits out of hats again any time soon.

The Inyoka closest to him stopped when they got backs full of rock-hunks, but the ones to my right just kept on coming—explosion or not, they wanted blood.

I turned one away with a parry, but the next one dove into the gap that it left in my defenses and hammered an axe into my guts. It bounced off, driving the rear of the axe back into his face, Surged Vitality and armor combining into something impenetrable. The next one didn’t make the same mistake, but his attack scraped off my thigh without leaving a mark all the same, then all three of them were off balance, and I had the Lucis singing in my hands, sweeping back through the lot of them.

Blood and bone and bits flew, and I was laughing. They might have been faster than me, better trained and smarter too, but I’d been fighting Seren for a month. They were small fry.

Lightning struck me, and I staggered. The poor wizard I’d assed to the floor was back up and casting again, but there was no way that I was letting him take advantage of the static roiling over me now. He had another spell already casting, but it wasn’t going to be finished. I swung the Lucis at him from twenty feet away, and it shattered mid-swing, hunks of ragged iron leaping out in a wave that flew with all the force of my swing to rip through the flimsy cloth and scales that were his only protection. He went down screaming, and the spell died.

A quick glance confirmed that none of these Inyoka were getting up to cause trouble, so I called back the mass of my sword, then I took off running again. In the haze of fighting, I had no idea how much time I’d lost, but it had been too long since the last scream in the jungle.

The trees flew by me in a green blur, and I stretched every sense I had to their limits, searching for Seren, searching for any sign of the struggle I knew she would have put up.

I burst out of the tree-line and into our training grounds, and there were bodies everywhere. A half-dozen dead Inyoka were scattered across the packed dirt, slit with careful, precise cuts that avoided their armor and left them in puddles of their own blood.

Up on the raised podium platforms of cut off trees where I’d spent weeks tripping and stumbling and falling, Seren danced.

Blood was streaked through her golden hair, but if she was hurt, then there was no sign of it in the way she fought. Some foolish Inyoka were up on top of the course, leaping from stump to stump, trying to get around the shining wall of death that her blades were spinning. Down here on the ground floor, some more Inyoka were clustered around the base of the stump where she was balancing on one foot, hacking at it with their axes as if she was going to be caught off guard.

I’ll be honest with you, I was feeling a little bit stupid after charging in to rescue her, only to realize that she is at least ten times more competent than me and probably could have wiped the floor with all these lizards without breaking a sweat. Still, I was here now. I might as well help out. “Honey, I’m home!”

The Inyoka down on the ground turned to charge me immediately, but Seren didn’t even spare me a glance. One blade leaped out to parry a thrusting spear, and the other lanced through the exposed throat of an Inyoka that had wobbled too close when he leapt over to her. “Took thy time.”

It almost felt lazy pulling the same trick again, but Seren hadn’t seen it the last time. So it probably didn’t count. A stomp of the foot to bring up a short wall and trip all the Inyoka, a wild slash to keep them from getting up again, and then I surged Potency to step off that wall and launch myself up to land beside her, casual as I could play it. “Sorry, babe, I didn’t realize there was a party going on or I would have come home sooner.”

She leapt right at me, and I caught her around the waist, spinning to toss her onto the next podium along as her one finally collapsed. There was an Inyoka on the raised pole next to the one she landed on, and he didn’t like his chances against her. He tried to jump away, only to meet a fresh made jut of stone coming up from the earth. The tip hit him in the throat, and he went down, tumbling end over end, gasping and croaking.

Some of the blood in her hair was definitely hers—I could see it oozing from a wound in her scalp that I had to lean over to her to heal with what a passer-by might have interpreted as a head-pat. “So, how have you been?”

She leapt away from my touch as soon as Restoration had gone to work, spinning as she fell to the forest floor, blades swirling around her to knock aside a thrown spear and to part the back of one fleeing Inyoka’s neck. “The wyrm attacked while I was training. I have been detained here since then. I cannot speak to the safety of thy underlings.”

I guess we didn’t need the high ground any more now that there were two of us. I jumped down to land on the dude I’d throat jabbed with a rock, and he squelched. “The Dvergar? Well, some of them bit the big one, but most of them seem to have holed up somewhere, I’m guessing the mine? Maybe the tower?”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Perhaps a plan in case of attack should be prepared?”

“Yeah, kind of dropped the ball there.” I shrugged. “Didn’t expect anyone to know about this place.”

She took off without even checking to see if I’d fall into step beside her. I did, of course. I’d been following her lead for much too long to let her shake me off now. “We should reinforce the village with all haste. There are few wyrmspawn left in these woods.”

I overtook her, still gaining speed, forcing her to pick up the pace. “Sounds like a plan.”

“Nay, a plan would have been to withdraw to the choke point of the tower entrance and then perform a fighting retreat up the stairs so that the populous would have every benefit of its defensive structures. This is not a plan. This is an action. Responsive to crisis, and all too late.” Turns out making her run faster did not mean she’d be too breathless to bitch me out.

I smiled back over my shoulder at her and almost hit a low hanging branch. “Missed you too.”

There was no softening of her razor-sharp features. No twinkle in her eye. It was kind of hard to tell when she was genuinely mad at me, and when she was just being Seren a lot of the time. “Ah, yes. Thy dazzling wit. I am certain it will be of great comfort to those of your peons that have been slain this day.”

My falsetto voice carried off into the woods as we rounded the corner in the path, and the burning village appeared ahead of us. “Oh, Maulkin, I missed you too. I can’t wait until all the murdering is over so we can make out.”

“The killing never ends. Thy know this as well as I. For so long as you hold power, others will seek it.” She was real fun at parties.

The worst of the Inyoka had been driven off by Mercy and Asher’s combined efforts. There was a solid wall of fire along one side of town, replacing the missing barricades, and Mercy was perched up on top of one of the wooden houses that had been thrown up, launching arrow after arrow through those flames, wrapped up in little pockets of wind so that they’d carry the fire on with them.

For his part, over by the base of the tower, Asher seemed to be holding his own against the few casters that the enemy had brought to bear. Every time I saw one spell springing to life, his magic already seemed to be lashing out to break it apart. Water met fire, and lightning met waves of earth. The whole catalogue of magic that he’d memorized was being flung out to keep any resonances being built up. On his own, he was keeping every single one of them at a stalemate.

Which was where Seren and I came in. She darted off among the burning buildings, already zeroing in on the casters’ locations, and I honestly had no fear for her up against some poor squishy wizards. She could move faster than they could cast. Unless she really screwed up, they wouldn’t have a chance.

Rounding a corner, I tripped over a pair of dead Inyoka and almost ran straight into Gunhild and her crossbow. She was propped up against the wall, face shredded by an Inyoka’s claws and shoulder pinned by a spear that had managed its way through her heavy armor and stony skin. She didn’t shoot me, which was nice, but she didn’t shoot me because she was almost unconscious. I didn’t even know if she’d seen me. I pumped Restoration into her face, then yanked out the spear. She toppled forward like a brick, ripped face mashing into the ground. She’d live, but she’d be mad about it.

Two of her boys lay dead farther along, each of them fully armored, ready for battle, and more than willing to lay down their lives to keep their Matriarch safe. There were not many fighters left among the Dvergar, and up until today, I would have said that they didn’t need them anymore. Now I wished that there were a hundred more. I wish I could stop being wrong all the time. If only because Seren was eventually going to run out of verbose old timey ways to say: “I told you so.”

There were more dead Inyoka about than dead Dvergar, so I was choosing to call that a win, but the fight was far from over. Even if Mercy and Asher had driven them out of the village proper, there were still a whole load of Inyoka out there, just waiting for the chance to come and murder us all. As if to remind me just how outnumbered we were, the dragon took a swoop over the town.

It was as pale as all the Inyoka, but where they were white—like the kind of things that lived in deep, wet caves—the wyrm herself was shimmering and opalescent. Her elegant neck shimmered with the heat passing up it, and then the flames leapt forth from her gaping maw to destroy everything beneath her as she soared. Unfortunately, I was one of the things beneath her.

Dropping to my knees and throwing up a dome of stone overhead meant that the flames didn’t hit me, but it didn’t take long for me to realize my mistake. I had basically just built an oven with me in it, and the air was growing hotter by the second. My hair started to crispen and burn with a smell like popcorn, and every breath hurt. Where my hand was touching the metal of the Lucis’ guard, it seared me. Where my knees touched the cracked earth, they burned. I had to push up and out with all of my strength to crack the eggshell of scorching stone I’d encased myself in, and only then did I realize the destruction that the dragon had wrought.

The tower and the old outbuildings were stone. Everything else in town was wood. Where the shadow of the dragon had passed over, the thriving little village that had been here the last time I looked was just gone, ash and cinders left in its place. The only solace I could take was that the people who lived and worked in these buildings were already gone.

As she passed over the jungle, the wyrm turned. She tilted her wings, so that the tip of one almost touched the green foliage, and made a graceful arc around to come in for another pass. Another swathe of our home burnt away to nothing. To hell with that. The Dvergar had been working too hard for too long to make a home for themselves after I wrecked the last one. They weren’t starting over from nothing again.

I’d been making my way to the tower at a steady pace so far, checking each corner before I rounded it. Now I ran, and smoke filled my nose. All the hopes and dreams of the Dvergar were burning away to nothing. If there were any Inyoka still in the village then they were idiots. That wyrm didn’t give a damn who she burned.

Asher was looking almost relaxed by the time I got to him. Every one of the enemy casters seemed to have stopped at some point between me leaving Seren and me arriving here. Mysteriously. Almost as if an enraged Alvaren Paladin had gotten to them.

The wyrm wasn’t coming right at us, but she was passing close to the tower on this run. “We need to bring her down.”

“My snare?” I could almost see the numbers buzzing behind his eyes. “I doubt it will have power enough to fell her.”

I shrugged that off. “I’ll meet her halfway. Let’s go.”

With every bounding step of my charge, I got higher. Building a staircase to heaven with uprooted rock, each step just big enough for one foot to touch before I launched myself to the next. What had been a clumsy panic before came naturally to me now, the whole world bending to my Artifice until I was too high up to reach the stone beneath the soil anymore. I was halfway up the height of the tower, still falling short of the oncoming dragon’s flight, but then that perfect little black dot appeared between us. That colorless nothing that dragged everything and everyone closer. The vast white dragon above me strained against the sudden pull, and I surged up into it. Sword ready and a roar of triumph escaping my lips.

She lashed out with her claws at the last moment, trying to bat me down, but there was an edge on my sword and all my strength behind it. I snipped through her blackened claws and buried my blade in her sternum.

Maybe if she hadn’t slowed me down with those claws, I would have made it through the scales and the bone to something soft and vital underneath. As it was, my blade wedged into the thick battering ram ridge of solid bone where her ribcage fused beneath her elegant neck, and I dangled there.

I could see her scaled throat working above me, feeling the heat radiating up along it as she swept down to scorch our town off the map, so I punched her in the hottest part I could reach.

With a run up or some better leverage, maybe I could have done some real damage, interrupting the flow of fire up her neck, but dangling here uselessly, all I did was interrupt the lethal breath, making her cough out a plume of black smoke. “Knock that off!”

She tried to claw at me then, to shake me off with a sudden drop, but none of it worked. I had my hands tight around the Lucis’ handle, and I was stuck right into her someplace that her mighty limbs just couldn’t reach. No wonder the Wyrms needed Inyoka servants, they couldn’t even scratch themselves without assistance. I had become everything that I hated. I was that itchy spot in the middle of my back that I couldn’t reach, except for a dragon.

Of course, wyrms are thinking creatures, not dumbasses like me, and this one had worked out what to do much quicker than it took me to deal with an itchy back. A solid minute or two would pass before I found a doorframe to rub up against, but this clever lizard was diving for the rooftops already.

I could see it all now, the wood splintering under her weight, the wood slipping harmlessly across her scales, and me turning into a red smear down her front. Not today, thank you very much. I strained out with Artifice, pulling the building apart before we reached it, tearing shingles and rafters open like waiting jaws and then slamming the mouth of the house shut on the dragon.

The wyrm took no notice, smashing through as though the whole thing was made of paper, but I wasn’t done yet. We were low enough for me to reach beneath the earth now, and I grabbed onto the stone with every scrap of will and hauled it up.

Spikes of stone burst from the ground, through the ruin of the house, and almost through me. Where they hit the wyrm they stopped dead, unable to press through, but the goal wasn’t to kill her, it was to stop her. Every jab of stone was more friction, fighting back against her dive. Every little brittle ping of stone snapping off was music to my ears because soon she was moving so slowly I had time to react instead of just clinging on for dear life.

We were so low now I could have jumped clear without even having to do the goofy three-point superhero landing or risking my kneecaps, and that meant that I could reach even more of the stone beneath us.

My first thought was a wall, but I was pretty sure she’d jerk up at the last second, and I’d be the one to get a face full of masonry, so I reached for those funky little spikes again, not aiming to jab her but to pen her in.

She saw them coming this time around, and I was too busy concentrating on what I was doing to realize what she was doing. The flames burst out from her mouth, ripping through the stone as it formed, blackening what was thick enough to withstand the blast and melting away what wasn’t.

This close to her throat, the Lucis sucked up all the heat until it was burning through the leather grip, my gloves, and into my hand. I could let go and fall, abandoning my sword, or I could hold on and hurt. I grit my teeth together and flung the next house open before we hit it.

There were still Dvergar inside that one. If I hadn’t popped it open at the last moment, then the whole thing would have come down on them. Instead, they just had a close encounter with me screaming by, dangling off a dragon, and throwing up lumps of rock to catch the flames the wyrm was still spitting out in every direction.

We whipped through to the next building so fast I couldn’t believe it, and all attempts to trap the wyrm were now abandoned in favor of just holding on with my rapidly blackening crisp of a hand. Lifesense warned me of one living body in the next building, up on the roof. “Maulkin!”

That was a girl’s voice. Either Mercy or Seren—I didn’t have time to look. I just stretched out my spare hand and caught them as they leapt. There was a flash of metal as Seren soared past me and into the dragon’s wing, slashing through the fine pale skin there with the sword I’d made her.

At once, we lurched to the side, all attempts at flight falling apart as the wyrm’s wing tore. On reflection, that fragile bit of skin probably should have been what I went for. Oh well.

I did my best to throw up walls to keep the village intact as we spun to the earth, but by this point, I didn’t even know up from down. We hit the ground hard enough to rip me and the Lucis clear of the bone where we’d been wedged, and I heard Seren’s yelp of dismay as she was thrown free too.

We both rolled back to our feet and faced off with the ton of angry fire-lizard that we’d just dropped on the doorstep of the tower. I could already tell this was going to be epic.

I had one moment before it all kicked off to glance over at Seren’s bloody face, and I knew before I even did that she was going to have the same grin plastered on her face as me. Oh yeah, we were a match made in heaven.

The wyrm snapped for me, blackened obsidian teeth shining, each one of them as big as my head. I swept up the Lucis to parry, and the blade scraped over teeth and gums. The bite was knocked up, but like a snake, the head was whipped back before I could counter. Seren had closed the distance, going for the same injured wing that had brought the wyrm to ground, and with her feet on the floor, she had both hands free for a sword.

A flap buffeted her back before she could do more damage, but that just made her circle farther back until the dragon’s own bulk was blocking her from sight. My job was obvious: keep the dragon’s attention pointed this way. I could do that.

Rearing up, the wyrm tried to rake me with both sets of front claws, trying to drive me back if she couldn’t rip me up, but only one set still had their points, so I danced in past that one, surged Vitality, and took the hit. Blunted claws raked down my armor, the force of the blow enough to stagger anyone, but not enough to knock me back. Not when I was surging Potency for a cut thrust through the gaping wound I’d already put in her chest.

The bone gave way beneath the blow this time, an explosion of blood and flame leaping out to greet me as I slid it home. One hand was already charred to bones, but now dragon-fire tore up my arms and hit me square in the chest. Surged Vitality or not, I felt that. Eyebrows? Gone. Face? A fair bit of that was gone too. The force of the escaping flame launched me back to tumble end over end.

The wyrm was not impressed. She reared up, letting out a strangled scream somewhere between an eagle’s cry and a monitor lizard with its tail in a blender. That blender may very well have been Seren. I had no idea what she was doing around the back end of the wyrm. All I knew for sure was that I was not going to be suffering through any more dragon fire.

Even as I darted back, giving the wyrm some distance as she furiously flailed the ground beneath her with the whipping of her neck, I could see her trying to breathe flame at me. It was sputtering out that hole I’d made in her chest each time. Blackened blood exploded out with each coughing attempt at fire, sizzling where it landed.

There was a smoker’s cough joke in here somewhere. I could feel it.

Electricity danced over the wyrm’s scales, and it took me a second to realize that Asher was still here, fighting alongside us from the relative safety of the tower’s entrance. The wyrm spun to face him, but that just opened up her neck to me.

With one leap, using up those last moments of my surged Potency, I was there, swinging with all my strength. The dragon’s scales were tough, but they weren’t nearly enough. The Lucis bit deep into the wyrm’s neck, and the furious warbling screams cut off abruptly.

In the sudden silence, I could hear Seren’s shouts, but they were the same bellows of exaltation she let out every time she thought she’d landed a killing blow. With a wet thump, I saw the wyrm’s tail flopping off to land useless and dead against the side of the smelters.

Whatever pride the wyrm had been clinging to was gone now. She beat her wings in a pathetic frantic frenzy, desperate to get up, to get away. The wind she was throwing out was enough to send me skidding from my spot at the chopping block, so there was only time for one more chop. I didn’t bring my sword down on her neck again. Instead, I swung it down into the joint of back and wing.

Without surged Potency, I didn’t make nearly as much of a dent as I’d have wanted. Blood was flowing, but the wing still moved as if I’d done nothing at all. She lunged forward, spreading her wings as wide as they’d go, and I was knocked off my feet, into the air, end over end. Next thing I knew, I was landing on my head.

Seren was on the Wyrm’s back when I got the right way up, swords shimmering into sight and then vanishing, again and again, as she butchered her way along its scaled spine. She didn’t have the strength to drive a blow clean through that armored hide, but I’d seen her fighting golems made of solid stone in just the same way, carving weakness into things without a weakness and then punching through. Given enough time, I was pretty sure she could kill anything with the same precise cuts she used to kick my ass all around the jungle.

Normally I’d be happy to leave her to it, but despite the injured wing, and the blood pouring out of every end, the wyrm was still taking flight, beating frantically to gain height. “Jump!”

Seren didn’t need told twice. We had that trust. She just sprinted the remaining length of the wyrm and jumped.

The wyrm snapped for her, bloodied and blackened jaws stretching wide to swallow her lithe form whole. Without even thinking about it, I parried.

The length of the Lucis shattered into fragments, the original weapon the only thing that was left in my hand. The rest of the metal leapt out, still sword-shaped but fragmented. It wouldn’t cut a damn thing like that, but the force of the blow was still there, thumping into the wyrm’s throat, turning the bite aside.

I caught Seren with my other arm, still kind of stunned that worked.

With hate burning in her eyes, the wyrm beat her way up into the air and out of reach.

Even before I’d set her back on her feet, I could feel Seren gearing up to yell at me about letting another enemy live. She obviously hadn’t seen what I’d seen before I shouted out to her.

Asher’s spell went off with a roar, and a column of lightning struck down from the clear sky and all the way through the wyrm as she tried to gain height. This wasn’t a pretty little zap to stop her hearts, it was a violent torrent of primeval power exploding though every part of her. Her whole midsection exploded, and wings, limbs, and head soared in every different direction. Seren pirouetted behind me so that the worst of the splash zone fun smacked me in the face instead of her.

If it wasn’t dead after that, I was pretty sure it never would be.

I gave Asher a salute as he flopped down onto his knees, and then I took off running once more. Mercy was still up ahead on the rooftops, raining a steady stream of arrows down on any Inyoka fool enough to step forward out of the trees. Sometimes a spear would sizzle away to ash before it reached her. Most of the time they never even got that far.

At my heels the whole way, Seren reached out to grab my blackened hand. I managed a juicy squeeze before we were launched up into the air on my rising podiums again. It was harder to concentrate on hauling stone up for the two of us. I knew exactly where my feet were going to be next, but I had to keep glancing down to Seren’s to make sure I didn’t miss.

Obviously growing frustrated with the dawdling pace, Seren leapt from her podiums and onto my back, kicking off my lower back as she passed, then balancing on my shoulders like she was standing on solid ground. She was light enough that I only almost fell to my death before I got my balance.

We were higher than Mercy’s rooftop now and running out of stone fast, so for the last length between there and the fire wall I shot up only spikes of stone barely big enough for the balls of my feet to keep us level before I leapt over and down into the Inyoka. They did not look happy to see us.

Without the wyrm overhead to direct them, it felt like these Inyoka had lost all semblance of strategy. After I Mario-stomped the first one into paste and chopped the one beside it in half, the rest broke and ran. I may have slightly broken my legs with that landing, but Restoration put that, my fried face, and my crispened hand back together in a soothing wash of green energy.

Seren was off and pouncing before I could even move again, and I just let her scamper off and have her fun. What was I going to do? Stop her mass murdering the people that had just tried to do the same to us? Sometimes bad guys needed killing, and she was more than happy to do it. Why not let her have her fun?

The wall of fire died down behind me as I turned, looking for some Inyoka of my own to slaughter. Mercy came bounding up, sprang high enough to slap me in the back of the head, then sprinted off into the woods to go lizard hunting herself.

Organized, the Inyoka had been a threat, but now they’d be easy pickings. There was nothing in the woods that even resembled a predator, and everyone was too far gone for me to catch up, so I just left the girls to it. My fight was done.

I turned back to the village in flames and let out a sigh. Then I thought it again, louder; my fight was done. This time the universe agreed.

Skill Discovered: Fire Resistance

Skill Discovered: Ascendant Potency

Victory!

Potency increased to 50

Celerity increased to 26

Vitality increased to 20

Twin Strike: Rank 3/10

Airstrike: Rank 7/10

Fire Resistance: Rank 1/10

670 Experience Gained

Chapter 19

The rest of the day was a lot less fun. While Seren and Mercy stalked the remaining Inyoka on the island, it fell to me and Asher to try and put the village back together, put out the fires, retrieve the Dvergar from the mines, and then, worst of all, admit to Gunhild that I could have built them stone houses this whole time but I just didn’t want to. That last revelation earned me a pretty solid kick in the shins. Dvergar don’t wear steel-toe-capped boots. The whole boot is steel. They clang when they stomp.

So while Asher was put to work dousing fires and burying the dead, I was cornered by every civil planner and architect from a whole society obsessed with civil planning and architecture to receive my marching orders. There was no denying that I’d screwed up, leaving the Dvergar and Seren to fend for themselves while we went off questing after promising we’d take care of them, so instead of bitching and moaning the whole way through, I decided to take my lumps and only bitch and moan about half as much as I wanted to.

By the time that Mercy had come stalking back into town, completely out of arrows, I had been reduced to a blubbering pile of misery, throwing myself at her feet and begging, “Mercy! Save me. They’re making me do work.”

She kicked me. “You sat on your ass while they built a whole town without helping when you could do all this just by thinking about it?”

“Mercy!” I sobbed. “It’s hard.”

She kicked me again. “Harder than actually building it? With your hands? Would you rather do that?”

“You’re so mean.”

She sneered. “Get back to work.”

The wooden buildings that hadn’t been leveled in the clash with the wyrm were well on their way to being torn down now. The planks snapped and sheared into workable firewood, doors, and shutters by the devoted craftsmen who were now completely delighted to realize that I could adjust the new buildings I’d made from solid stone to fit their fixtures instead of them having to do it the other way around.

As it turned out, I was every stonemason’s dream, and even though the earth beneath us had already subsided several times as I hauled more and more stone up, the Dvergar were too excited to give a damn. I could see my whole future in Amaranth stretching out before me. An eternity of being hauled around from one Dvergar settlement to the next, building them things. I was in hell. I’d done bad things, and now I was in hell, working a steady job until the world ended.

At least I could rely on the Voidgod to show up and end the world before too long. There was some end in sight.

Gunhild was back on her feet, looking surprisingly fine for somebody who’d been nearly dead less than an hour ago. She took a lot of interest in the work I was doing for all her little minions, carefully prodding me in the hip and pointing out where something wasn’t completely straight or completely perfect. I’ve heard of micro-managers before, but having to remake the same doorframe seven times when there was still half a village to haul up had me at my wit’s end.

Night had fallen by Seren’s return. I didn’t even bother to beg her for help—she’d probably just start giving the Dvergar pointers on how to exploit me harder. The stone walls that I’d brought up to replace the old barricades wouldn’t be thick enough for her. Neither would the shelters I’d built to protect the mine entrance and the giant crossbow things that they made me build in case of dragon attacks.

The only ones who didn’t seem happy with all of this were the miners themselves. They felt like all of this was cheating. Like I was robbing them of their purpose—not to mention the number of promising shafts I’d collapsed by pulling stone up.

By the time it was all done and they finally left me alone, the whole village sat in a depressed basin from all of the collapses, every bit of rock that I could reach hauled up from beneath the soil and painstakingly shaped into all the myriad shapes that the Dvergar demanded. I’d never be able to do the engraving that they loved so much, but that was fine. I’d given them stone to work, and from what I’d managed to understand from all the whispers, it would be a way for them to feel like this place belonged to them, not me, if they got to put their mark on it.

There were songs being sung around the fire that night as I still trudged about, reinforcing a wall here, raising a roof there. The dead were being remembered. All their great deeds, and all the stupid stuff that made everyone crack up. Mercy was out there in the middle of them. Asher perched perilously on the very edge of a bench, ready to leap up if things grew too raucous. The only one I couldn’t see was Seren.

I’d kind of hoped she might be up in the tower, waiting for me in the bedroom we’d claimed, but I only had to go halfway up the tower before my Lifesense informed me that I was alone in here. Except for the damn butterflies.

Eventually, I found her perched up on one of the new roofs, staring down at the gathered Dvergar with contempt. I didn’t like that look on her face. When she was happy, she was beautiful, but when she was bitter, all the elegant angles of her face turned jagged and cruel. It seemed to be the same for all Alvaren—a big reason they never let their emotions show. Got to stay gorgeous.

The walls may have been built to the dvergar’s specifications, but I’d added in a few details of my own—like the handholds just where I could jump up and catch them. I scrambled up beside Seren, but she didn’t bother to look my way. Her eyes were narrow and cruel. “Why do they celebrate defeat?”

I opened and shut my mouth a few times. “We won?”

She waved my words away without breaking her death-stare. “I do not speak of thee, I speak of the slain. Each one of them faltered and failed. Why do they sing in their praise?”

“Because even if that was true, which… uh… pretty sure it isn’t”—sometimes I forgot just how much growing up with the Alvaren had messed Seren up—“they still cared about them. They were friends, family. Why wouldn’t you want to remember them?”

She shrugged a shoulder. “Grieving is weakness.”

“Wow, uh no. Feeling stuff doesn’t make you weak. Do you think I could have done half the stuff I did today if I didn’t care about all these people?” I hoped she couldn’t see me blushing this far from the campfire. “About you?”

Abruptly, she leaned into me. It was enough of a shock that I didn’t know what to do for a moment, before I realized I was meant to put an arm around her. Normal boyfriend stuff. Right? She sighed. “You would have fought to the best of your abilities, regardless of your attachments.”

“I’d like to think I would have, but I don’t know.” She could probably feel my words vibrating through my sooty breastplate more than she could hear them. “Do you think having something to fight for made a difference?”

She twisted to look up at me, allowing just a hint of confusion to show on her face. It was amazing what she considered being vulnerable looked like. Any admission of anything resembling weakness, any hint that you didn’t know everything and anything, and the Alvaren read it as opening them up to danger. “I fight because it is my duty to fight. Just as you do.”

“Hah, I wish that was true too. Most of the time I fight because I don’t want something big and scary to eat me. Or my friends. Sometimes just because I’m mad. I don’t think duty really crosses my mind.”

She pushed away from me a little farther, lacing her fingers through mine to keep herself steady, but not willing to look at me. “So you would not have come to my aid if you did not have a… personal attachment?”

Thank the gods she was looking away because the blush was getting worse and worse. We were talking about our feelings. Oh no. “Well… even if we weren’t uh… what we are… we’d still be friends. So yeah, I’d have come helped?”

She met the dull glow of my eyes, and I was startled once more by just how pretty she was. I mean movie-star breathtaking. So damned beautiful that I sometimes forgot to listen to the words that were actually coming out of that pouty little mouth. “I am sworn to you, so I will serve you however thou would have me. It is not a matter of whatever affection I hold for you, it is simply the natural order of things. The powerful lead, the rest follow.”

“That’s not… I… I don’t want you to do things because it is your duty. I want you to do them because you want to… I…” This was the conversation I’d been trying to avoid for more than a month now. The relationship killer.

She didn’t even seem to realize it was an issue. “To serve you is my pleasure.”

“Okay, that’s uh… that’s kind of the problem.” Why did talking about this stuff have to be so difficult? “I don’t know if you actually want to be with me or if you’re just… obliged?”

She finally turned to look up at my face. “How would it differ?”

And just like that, I was feeling like the biggest pile of trash on the whole of Amaranth, and that was including Orphia. That big trash heap. Seren must have seen it on my face because she tried to make it better. By philosophizing. Oh gods.

“Would I take more pleasure in my acts if I were to choose each in turn, remaking every moment of my life into a debate instead of simply taking joy in my service?”

I wasn’t getting dragged into another roaming discussion about how weird the Alvaren mindset was. I needed a real answer. “Seren, are you in my bed because you feel like it’s your job?”

“Thy have the most comfortable bed in the settlement. I would wish to sleep upon it, even were we not carnally entangled.” She had a little blue flush to her cheeks, even now with just the two of us here talking about it.

Time to give up on subtlety and just bite the bullet. “Would you be having sex with me, if you didn’t think I was your boss?”

“Nay. I think not.” That was a real punch to the gut, but she said it with wry amusement. “Were you… less than you are, I doubt thy could have inflamed me so. Thy power, thy strength, it draws me to you.”

Alvaren ranked and filed everyone and everything. They understood everything in hierarchies, with their position in the rankings determining how they dealt with everyone above and below them. It kind of made sense that they’d be attracted to people they thought were superior. Even if the word superior kind of made me queasy in this context. Like I was good breeding stock or something.

“Wouldst thou have hungered for me if it were not for my comeliness?” She caught me off guard with that one. Both with the point and with the bat of her eyelashes. Where did she learn that? I didn’t teach her that. Was Mercy training her up to devastate me using only facial expressions?

My mouth worked uselessly as I tried to put an answer together, like I was chewing cud. “I’d like to think so? I mean, even if you weren’t pretty, you’re still pretty awesome.”

“Yet it was a part of the attraction.” She squeezed my arm. “Just as thy might draws me to you.”

“Yeah but…” With her this close to me, looking all pretty and flushed, my train of thought was up on one set of wheels, wobbling dangerously close to completely derailing.

She leaned in even closer, but instead of softness and flirtation, there was steel in her words. “I must ask thee, do you take me for some doe-eyed milkmaid, set to lift her skirts to any man of mention and quivering with dread of him?”

“Well… no.” The idea of Seren being scared of anyone was kind of laughable.

“Then have faith that I know my own mind.” She placed a gentle kiss on my cheek. “Have care for me enough to trust in my choices.”

I squeezed her even closer. “Even when you could definitely do better?”

“Let me by thy judge.”

Maybe all of our problems weren’t actually sorted out after that. Maybe I was still just fooling myself. Remember all that stuff I said about how throughout the eons of human history, men have done a lot of really dumb things to get laid? Ignoring problems is definitely one of those dumb things.

In other news, can you call it make-up sex when you didn’t technically have a fight? Just a kind of arduous conversation? Regardless, it was a good thing that all the Dvergar that hung around the tower on a normal night were down in the village partying.

Despite whatever may or may not have happened in that bedroom, we were still both back on our feet at dawn, looking well-rested and heading down to greet the gathered council of Dvergar and Eternals that had filled the town hall that the little darlings made me build for them yesterday.

Gunhild was the first to speak—as usual. “Nice of you to be crawling out your pit to join us. Even if the rest of us have been here an hour.”

I chose to be the bigger man and ignore that. It was easy to be the bigger man when you were literally three times the size of somebody. “How’s everybody holding up?”

The few Dvergar that had been designated as Elders by their peers looked too uncomfortable to pipe up, but Mercy certainly wasn’t. “People are pissed at us. We left. They died.”

Asher looked up at me from his stone pew with a sigh. “They are rightly unhappy. We provided them scarce defense against invasion.”

“Look, I’m sorry, but we really didn’t think anybody else knew about this place.” I appealed to the Dvergar Elders. “I mean Tsangaanax did, obviously, but that was like… a thousand years ago? It seems kind of nuts that he’d be sending over his little soldiers now.”

Gunhild had settled back into her seat, but she still had that angry energy about her. “But he bloody did, didn’t he.”

“No,” Asher said so softly that the blazing row Gunhild was gearing up for died before it could even start. “I cannot say with any certainty that these were his servants. In all accounts of Tsangaanax, he was described as a great black wyrm, ‘dark as the tempest’s heart.’ I would suggest that these pale scaled Inyoka are the servants of another master, seeking us out for some other purpose.”

Mercy rolled her eyes. “You don’t think the different Wyrms talk to each other?”

“It is not in the nature of Wyrms to be cooperative. Rather they seek dominance in all things. They are territorial, viewing most other races as tools that they might use to gain traction against others of their own kind. Nor is it in the nature of the Wyrm to take prisoners and slaves when Inyoka are so easy to breed. Had Tsangaanax conquered another brood, he would simply have exterminated them, not run the risk of betrayal by deploying them against us.” Damn it was handy having an Inyoka on our team.

Still, that didn’t actually answer any questions. Just raised more of them. “So some completely unrelated dragon also wants to kick our asses for no reason?”

Asher shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“I can think of plenty of reasons,” Mercy piped up.

I cut them all off before it could turn into a bitch-fest. “Will the new fortifications help?”

Gunhild was forced to give me a begrudging nod. “Aye, we’ll be holding off anything shy of an army with them.”

I clapped my hands. “Cool. So we can get on with our job now?”

Apparently not. Gunhild rose to her feet and tried to square off with me. “Sixteen dead and buried. More hurt. Three trapped in the mine, still getting dug out today.”

I threw up my hands. “I should have built the walls before. I should have made this place a fortress. I thought we were hidden here. I thought we were safe. It is all my fault. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I be wanting to hear my dead boys’ voices again. Can you be giving me that?!”

I hadn’t realized just how angry I was until she said that. It took the wind out of my sails. Then I realized I was basically screaming at an old lady who’d lost her friends or possibly her kids. I still wasn’t 100% on what her relationship to the younger dvergar who followed her around like lapdogs was. I really hoped they weren’t her harem.

Mercy put a hand on Gunhild’s shoulder, but the Matriarch shrugged it off. “You all be high and mighty, saving the world from some doom you’ve imagined. Well, those boys did nothing wrong, and now they’re in the dirt.”

Asher was giving me a very level look. He wasn’t saying “I told you so,” but I could tell he was thinking it. Right from the start, he’d objected to me involving myself in people’s lives, trying to help them when I could. Not because he didn’t want to help people, but because he was certain that saving the universe was too important for us to get sidetracked. I’d kind of hated him for saying that back when we were first starting out, and now, looking down at Gunhild, flushed and fighting back her tears, I hated him all over again. This didn’t stop being important just because there were bigger things going on. People didn’t stop mattering just because they didn’t have powers or gods to kill.

I scooped her up in my arms. I didn’t mean to—I knew she was not a big fan of being picked up—but what else was I meant to do, lie down? She struggled in my arms for a moment, like I was trying to hold her still instead of just hold her, but then she heard my voice rumble down and went limp. “I’m so sorry.”

Her fists beat helplessly against my blackened breastplate. “Sorry won’t be fixing nothing.”

“It’s all I’ve got.” She could feel me crying along with her now. She had to feel it, even if she couldn’t see the tears or hear the sobs. Seren was looking away from me like I was taking a crap on the floor, but Mercy had suspiciously watery eyes. Asher looked disinterested as though this was all irrelevant to his interests.

When we finally parted, both of us were sheepish enough that the conversation was put to bed. She thought the fortifications would be enough to keep them safe in the future, and I couldn’t do any more for the Dvergar, short of sitting here on the off chance of dragons. I was sorry that Gunhild had lost people, it ached in my gut when I thought about it, but I couldn’t spend my whole eternity babysitting. I just couldn’t.

Seren didn’t have any compunctions about trampling all over that moment. “Regardless of which seeks thee, there is but a single way to put an end to their encroachment. Ever has it been so that the only language the wyrms understand is that of brutality.”

“Loathe as I am to concur with this rather grim assessment of my people’s psyche, she is correct. Only a show of force will prevent further attempts.” Asher slumped back on his seat.

“So, even if we were giving up on the Rusted Blade, the best way to keep the Dvergar safe is heading to dragon town?”

Mercy stared at me. “Dragon town.”

“Yeah, where the wyrms live.”

She glanced to Asher and stage-whispered, “Does he think that there is actually a town where all the wyrms live together?”

“No,” I grumbled, even as I saw Seren fighting to keep the smirk off her face. “Shut up.”

“There be roosts beyond the mapped Khags of old.” Gunhild piped up. “Mountains and steppes the wyrms call home. My lads will be pulling the papers for you. That’s where you’ll be finding the scaly scum.”

Asher looked put out, but we all said nothing. Any other day, I probably would have piped up about not all lizard men being bad guys, but things were still a bit tender with Gunhild, and I didn’t fancy missing out on those maps.

Mercy coughed. “That would be great.”

When Gunhild stormed off to get the paperwork, I turned to the rest of them with a huff of relief. “So, we definitely know how to kill dragons now. I’d say it’s time to go get our boy Tsangaanax. Right?”

“Might be missing a few steps in the middle there, dumbass.” Mercy rolled her eyes.

“What am I missing? Kill a wyrm, take his shards, make a sword, kill a Voidgod.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Naked party for the rest of eternity.”

“The part where we find the wyrm first?” She paused for a moment, then added. “Also, I’m not committing to the naked party plan.”

“Come on, it isn’t like Asher has any fun jiggly bits to look at.”

She even tried appealing to Seren. “You cannot be okay with this?”

“If thy succeed in slaying the Voidgod, I shall forgive a great deal.” Seren might have been joking, she might have been entirely serious, but regardless, she wasn’t going to show any hint of dissent or weakness in our relationship, even if it meant agreeing to a future of eternal nudity.

“As for finding Tsangaanax, well, we’ve got even more shards now than we did before.” I held out my hands. “We can just do the echo thing.”

Gunhild bustled back into the room with her arms full of rolled up papers. The Elders had mostly scarpered back to their own various tasks, and there was a nice broad table up at the front of the room, almost an altar. This whole place had a vaguely churchy vibe that I hadn’t really noticed while I was building it. They hadn’t asked for it to be a church, they’d asked for arched ceilings and rows of seats, and I guess my own childhood memories had stepped in for the details. The fact that a pair of artisans were all excited about making stained-glass windows for the place had really just amplified the churchiness.

With all the maps spread out and Gunhild tapping here and there around the edges at the places marked with Wyrm-sign, Asher looked down at it all and sighed. “The vague direction of our quarry shall matter little in comparison to the vast distances that must be traversed. Even the closest of the draconic territories is many months of hard travel from Witchglass Overlook.”

His clawed finger was tapping on the spot on the map where fresher ink had been added in Gunhild’s handwriting. I had no real interest in that though. For the first time I could see the name of the whole region where we’d first arrived, freed the Alvaren city, and inadvertently destroyed the Dvergar one. The Dverbal Hinterlands. That rang a bell. “Hold on… why do I know that name? That was… Leofric said that the waygates went to the Dverbal Hinterlands”—I was searching frantically about the map for the words I needed, then with a start I saw them—“and on to the Serpent’s Gate!”

That was some real old ink, almost faded away to brown to match the paper around it. It was one of the many patches Gunhild had suggested as potential wyrm territory, but beyond it, the map was basically empty. “What’s over here?”

Gunhild just shrugged. “Never been.”

I looked at the others with a grin. “If there’s a waygate over there, and the shard is over there, we could get there today. Wrap it up by dinner time.”

With a flex of concentration, the Lucis and the other shards all drifted around me. The only one missing was Mercy’s, which she reluctantly laid down on top of the map. They slipped together easily now, balanced on the flat of the Lucis.

Just a touch, just to check. That was all it would take. I stripped off my glove, took a steadying breath, then grabbed on.

“You pitiful wretch!” Araphel snarled an inch from my face. “What do you think I shall do to these runts you shed tears for if you do not submit. Do you think your walls will stop me? Do you think anything can stop me?”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I felt for the familiar pulse of recognition. The echo of the whole Rusted Blade that every part of it contained.

“What do you think I shall do with your treacherous sow when I lay my hands upon her? Do you hope her death will be swift? Do you think that she will turn on you if I offer her life? She will. I have no doubt. She will bury a blade in your back as soon as the opportunity arises. I’m amazed she hasn’t turned you in for a pat on the head from her little queen already.”

The echo was off to my side when it bounced back. So far away, that there was no way that I would have felt it if Tsangaanax hadn’t been dumb enough to hoard both his shards right next to each other. The two pieces sang back and forth, calling out to the rest. We were so close now. So close I could taste it.

“Abandon this course and I shall reward you. Not only shall you survive, I shall make you the king of all Amaranth. This place means nothing to me. It is merely the cocoon I must shuck before I ascend to the heavens. You can have this world, just leave me in peace.”

My hand was up and pointing to the distant echo now, the last parts of the blade that we didn’t already have crying out to be united with the rest. I could feel, rather than hear the presence of the others around me. The warmth of their bodies in the chill air.

“Open your eyes and look upon me. Witness my glory—” I let the shards drop to the tabletop and cut Araphel off mid-rant.

The others were bent over the map. Gunhild and Seren were the only ones who hadn’t seen this trick before, so while the Dvergar did her best to completely ignore me, Seren was the only one staring at me with concern. I managed to give her a shaky smile. “He’s running scared.”

The mask of neutrality slipped over her face before I’d even finished speaking. Whatever was going on in her head, she didn’t want to share. I couldn’t really fault her for that. If I’d just watched her communing with the big bad god of super-evil, I’d probably have some concerns too.

Everyone else had sprung into action, swiveling the map and pulling out a compass to match my vague pointing to an actual direction. Mercy was grinning down at the maps. “The Serpent’s Gate. Bang on.”

Asher was less certain. “It is certainly in that vicinity, but given the distances involved, we may still find ourselves many leagues away from the specific target that we are seeking.”

“The Serpent’s Gate?” Until now, Seren had been silent in our planning—doing the whole seen but not heard thing she seemed to believe was required of her. “Beyond it lies not the domain of the wyrm, but the site of the Revelation.”

That put a damper on all our excitement. Even Gunhild, professed doubter of all things to do with the Voidgod’s existence, turned sullen and silent. Mercy was the only one who still had the wherewithal to answer. “What?”

“T’was the last line we meant to hold. A valley mouth between the ancient underkingdoms of the Dvergar and the outskirts of the Alvaren Empire where escaped slaves had built their own savage domains. A choke point where the Voidgod could not bring his legions to bear.”

I’d seen the Bastion, hundreds if not thousands of miles farther in. They definitely had not stopped the Voidgod at the edge of the map. “Guess that didn’t work out?”

Seren’s slender fingers stroked over the little scribble on the map’s edge as if she could remember just by touching it. “All our powers were arrayed against him, all allies gathered. His abominations and monsters broke upon our lines like spray on the cliffs. It was the turning point of the war when we set our feet and declared an end. An end to his voracious appetite for conquest. An end to the destruction and slaughter. It was a battle the likes of which none had ever seen, all of Amaranth bending against the tide of fate and holding off the end by courage alone.”

Her mask did not break, but a single tear escaped and ran down her cheek. “Then he came, striding untroubled from amidst their ranks. Living darkness given lethal form. The Voidgod. Shields shattered at the sight of him, swords snapped in their sheaths, and the very earth beneath our feet gave out and cast us to our knees. Our courage… it faltered. Araphel was a god. What were all our arts and majesty in the face of the divine?”

There was a tremor in her voice, and I almost wanted to stop her, to hold her, but letting all this out had to be good for her. Better than holding it in forever anyway. “It was a slaughter. With our lines broken, the Voidspawn swept through, killing for neither gain nor fodder but sport. Neither Dvergar nor Faun saw the field that day, already turned from warriors to slaves. This was the Voidgod alone. His flesh and his blood, unleashed.”

She leaned back into my arms when I came up behind her, showing ever more weakness to the people around her. I didn’t know why she was doing this. If she was trying to show humanity to the others. If she was trying to convince them that she was vulnerable, so that she would have the advantage when they came for her. Not that they would, but if you grew up believing everyone was trying to climb the ladder using you as a stepping stone, of course you’d assume everyone was out to get you. “The wyrms came to feed upon the battlefield when the storm had passed. It was there that Briar by Moonlight made her compact with the Twilight Betrayer as he sought to feast upon Alvaren flesh. He who you hunt. Even the enemies of Light came to realize that they would be consumed by the Void.“

She choked off before she could say any more, but it was enough to make it clear we were heading into enemy territory on a whole different level from what we’d been expecting. Up until now, none of the Voidgod’s old critters had shown up to cause us trouble, but if Tsangaanax had set up on Araphel’s home turf, then we were almost guaranteed to cross paths. Beyond the Serpent’s Gate, there was no telling what we’d be up against.

Mercy pressed on without a word of sympathy. “There’s a waystone there. It’s the direction we need to go. What we find on the other side doesn’t matter. It’s still where we need to go.”

“In this we are in agreement. But if we truly expect to face the remnant of the Voidgod’s armies, perhaps we should plan accordingly.”

“Turn up the ass-kicking to eleven?” I grinned. “I’m ready.”

Chapter 20

There was a possibility that we had over-prepared. Everyone was geared out in the finest armor that I could make for them, every weapon was upgraded as far as I could take it, and my own body was wrapped in so much metal that I clanked with every step. I was not planning on getting caught out without materials to work with again, even if it meant I looked like a tank on legs.

The Voidgod had screwed up the area around the Bastion by accident. If we were heading into some battleground where he’d been using his destructo-powers on purpose, then I didn’t plan on getting caught out again. On top of all that, Asher and a small army of Dvergar helpers had strapped a backpack onto me that probably would have broken the spine of most beasts of burden. I was pretty sure he had half the library, a metric ton of miscellaneous magical junk he’d stolen from the tower, and maybe one of the giant crossbows I’d made for the walls crammed in there. If there had been a kitchen sink, it would have been in the bag.

Only Gunhild came down to the beach to see us off, since a solid half of the other Dvergar were still furious at us for leaving so soon after the wyrm attack. I’d tried explaining the timeline of stuff to them, that the sooner we left, the more likely it was we could cut off any further attacks before the flights of dragons took off. Since they’d only just managed to dig some of their buddies out of the collapsed mines, they weren’t really buying that line. Not that their opinions really mattered. We had to go. I’d rather have left with everyone happy, but if we had to leave them sulking, that was what we’d do.

As we sweated through the jungle, I dissolved a few of the outer layers of my armor into a second great-sword to match the Lucis, on the basis that at least having two swords on my back wouldn’t make me walk like I’d been riding a horse too long, the way that the real thick armor plates had. Sure, a strong breeze might tip me over backward, but at least nobody would accuse me of waddling.

Before Asher could cast his spell, Seren took a hold of my hand. She really did not want to be left behind again, and since dying wasn’t the only way to make this trip, there was no reason to ask her to. If anything, the other two had been enthusiastic about bringing her along after the battle with the Inyoka. Mercy might not always like Seren all that much, but at least she could recognize her value.

The first jump took us to Witchglass Overlook. This was the closest thing we were going to have to familiar territory on this trip, and we wanted to make sure that we had somewhere to retreat to if we hopped to the Serpent’s Gate and discovered it was completely overrun with monsters.

Before we’d even begun to move from the courtyard where the spell had dumped us, Seren halted us with a raised hand, stalking forward on her own in a half-crouch. I glanced to the other two with a little bit of amusement over her never-ending paranoia, but they looked just as stressed out as her. “Really?”

Asher had his hands up and waving around like he was doing interpretive dance, feeling around for the magic. “This was the point where we shed the pursuit of Briar by Moonlight and her Paladins. It does not seem unreasonable to assume that some entrapment may have been left behind in case of our return.”

“If it was me, I’d have trapped the place.” Mercy shrugged when I appealed to her.

Seren had crept back and forth across the whole courtyard by then, eyes narrowed, pointy ears twitching at the echo of her own footsteps. The dead Alvaren that we’d left behind were gone. So either some hungry monsters had passed through, or Briar’s minions had come to clean up. Since there wasn’t a load of chewed up elf-bits spread on the floor, I was leaning more towards the second option.

Even beyond the courtyard, it seemed that their fears were unbounded. The magic inside the school had kept things pretty much as we left it, so we didn’t go messing around with that. The never-ending feasting hall still stretched out forever, and the plates were still full of their evil poisoned food that made you turn into a glow in the dark skeleton. Maybe I wasn’t remembering that bit right, but I still wasn’t going to take a bite of that chicken, regardless of how good it looked. In a stunning twist, Asher did not want to go down and check out the library, having already cleared it out pretty effectively the last time we came through. Maybe he just remembered the mess we’d made.

Even the outbuildings looked clean and tidy where before they’d been filled up with sand and leaves. Like they’d been swept out and prepared for use. Maybe we weren’t the only ones planning on using this place as a base of operations.

The whole situation felt weird. We’d left this place in a hurry last time around, and coming back to the scene of the crime felt like we were asking for trouble. Not to mention that this was the first place that I’d almost murdered Seren. Still felt a bit weird about that too. Pretty sure that beating a girl up and dragging her back to your cave by the hair was frowned upon these days. Sure, we’d talked things out now, but just remembering the things I’d done to her made my skin crawl.

So I just stood around, stagnating in my misery and bad memories for a while. It felt like forever as the three of them combed the place looking for anything that might have been a trap or an alarm or… well, anything really.

Eventually, Seren let out a little call from the hillside overlooking the school, and I clank-jogged up to find out what she was excited about. As it turned out, it was an arrow. “Uh.”

She had a blue flush to her cheeks, and her eyes were bright and wide. “My absence was noted. My queen, she left this here so that I might reach out for aid.”

“That… seems like a stretch? It’s just an arrow.” I peered down at the object she was cradling in her hands. At a glance, it really was just an arrow. Definitely Alvaren in make, with a beautiful crystalline head and soft gryphon feathers as flights. The engravings along the length of it definitely marked it as something fancy, but given how fancy the Alvaren made absolutely everything, I was quite ready to just believe that they’d forgotten to pick it up.

“Maulkin, this is… this is an incredible honor.” For the second time that day, there were tears prickling at the corners of her eyes. “To be personally acknowledged by the empress. To be offered a means to return despite my failure. This was more than I ever could have hoped for.”

“So…” I tried to move onto a less contentious subject than how I thought her beloved queen was a psychopath. “Magic arrow?”

She smiled at me, and that was the first time I realized just how emotional this little twig had actually made her. Her smiles were not easy to come by. “I forget thy lack even the most basic sense for the arcane.”

“So, how does it work? You use it, and you can talk to her, or you use it, and it calls her to you? How does it…” Anxiety was churning in my guts, and I caught myself glancing around the horizon without meaning to, in case the Alvaren flying city was already zooming toward us.

“Dost thou still fear her? There is no need for such dread. Thy art a true and brave warrior—Amaranth’s best hope against the forces of darkness. Whatever quarrel you had with my queen will surely be ended once she learns of the Voidgod’s return.” It was almost endearing how Seren could be 100% cynical about everything else in the world but completely blind to just how bad her own people were.

“That uh… doesn’t seem likely. She didn’t take kindly to the whole headbutting thing.”

Seren flinched when I mentioned that, but even so, she pressed on with her little fantasy of a happy reunion. “We were all disoriented in the wake of the curse. Now that time has passed and tempers have cooled, I have no doubt that peace can be made. If she cares enough for me to leave this beacon so that I might be saved from the land of the savage, then surely she shall take my word into account. If you are mine, she will not harm you.” She reached out, and I took her hand, extremely not used to being treated like I was her boyfriend rather than a piece of furniture she hadn’t quite gotten bored of sitting on yet. “And thou art mine. As sure as the sun rises.”

I had to keep looking around because if I looked at her and started feeling things I was going to end up blubbering. Subject change. Rapid subject change. “Do you have to use it now?”

Her brows drew down when I finally dared to look back at her face. “What is your meaning? With the Alvaren Empire at thy back, we can take the battle to the foul wyrm Tsangaanax. Your quest might be ended in mere days!”

“Seren. I know you love your queen. I know you’re loyal to her, but—”

She cut me off with a finger on my lips. “There is no but. I may have sworn myself to your service, but thou art no king or conqueror. What love I bear for you can never replace my loyalty to the empress.”

“Love?” I mumbled into her finger.

Her smile was wicked. “Didst my tongue slip?”

I was getting off topic again. She was putting me off topic with all this romantic stuff. “Just… listen. I know that eventually we’re going to have to deal with Briar, and I know that we’ll need to put what happened behind us and team up to take down the Voidgod, but I just think… later might be better?” I had been freewheeling up until now, but an idea popped into my head before I crammed my foot in my mouth again. “I mean, right now the only proof we’ve got that Araphel is coming back is our word, some prophecies we’ve never even read, and the fact we’ve managed to grab so many shards. If we were to hold off until Araphel stuck his head up…”

Her smile began to fade. “Then thy would be too late to muster the forces of Light against him.”

Yet again, I had to drag us back to the question. “Do you need to use it here and now?”

“Nay.” She shook her head, hair swaying golden in the sunlight. “All I need do is hold it aloft to the heavens and speak the name of my liege. The beacon it lights can be seen from anywhere on Amaranth.”

“Then maybe we can hold off until we’ve gotten a little bit farther. I uh… I’m sure Briar would want to help us out, but maybe going ahead to scout first might be a better idea, you know? Maybe we find out where Tsangaanax is camped out, grab his shards sneaky style?”

She raised an eyebrow, obviously amused by this latest attempt. “You do not wish to test thy mettle against the wyrm?”

“I mean, obviously I do. But if there’s a way to grab the shards quietly, maybe that would be better? Right?” Desperation was starting to build up again. Where were the other two? They’d have been able to talk her out of this. Mercy would have sarcasm-ed her into submission by now. “Plus, I’m sure there would be no uh… no opportunity for Briar to get the wrong idea about me if I had the whole Rusted Blade first.”

“You wish to bargain from a place of power. I can respect that. Yet you must know, I serve her still. The moment that I feel we are straying from the path…”

I spread my arms wide and smiled. “Seren. It is me. Have you ever known me to get distracted?”

She broke down laughing, loud and bright and sparkling. The slip only lasted a moment, but it was enough to bring the other two running from where they’d been working away, hunting for any sign of Alvaren infestation. Mercy reached us first, in a wild sprint. “What happened? Did he punch himself in the balls again?”

“Hey!” My head snapped around to Seren who now looked terribly interested in the lapping waves out by the waystone. “That was private.”

Her face was back to a barren mask of absent emotion by the time she replied, “That was hilarious.”

I opened and shut my mouth. It had been pretty damn funny. Even if it did mean I had to resort to frantically using Restoration on my own crotch in the middle of the night.

Asher mounted the hill with a gasp, “Is all well? I heard a strange sound.”

Mercy shrugged. “Maulkin hit himself in the nuts again.”

“Ah, that would explain it.”

I carefully put both hands over my face so that I didn’t start screaming. Even so, I was sounding a little bit strangled when I muttered, “I hate you all.”

Seren presented the arrow as a distraction that I greatly appreciated, and Asher ooh-ed and aah-ed at the magic that had been layered onto it as if it was something we could all appreciate. “Truly a magnificent piece of craftsmanship.”

Mercy scoffed. “Yeah, it’s a real fancy poking stick.”

Both Seren and Asher started waxing lyrical about the amazing and wonderful enchantments on the damn thing, again, so I took a walk. We’d only been out of the Hinterlands for a month, and already so much had changed. The brown scrub was starting to take on a purple hue, and the distant forests had gone from looking like bloody smears on the horizon to a bubblegum pink as blossoms opened up. We hadn’t really talked much about the seasons changing here in Amaranth, but I guess that either spring had sprung or winter was on its way. I couldn’t feel much difference in the temperature, but I had skin as thick as a rhino’s at this point, so I’d probably only notice winter had arrived when I walked directly into the side of a glacier.

Now that I knew it was there, it was easy enough to spot a waystone relay shimmering against the distant hills, still standing tall enough that I didn’t need to worry that it had been toppled in any of the recent seismic activity that may have been entirely my fault. Even if one of the towers had broken down, we were still saving a solid day’s worth of travel for each one that was still up. If we got lucky, we’d make it to the edge of the map today. If we didn’t, we’d still only be making a fraction of the journey we would have had to do overland.

The less of this journey that we had to make out in the open the happier I’d be. Last time we were here the Alvaren floating city-fortress had been hanging in the sky, and the fact I couldn’t currently see it didn’t make me feel any safer, especially given that the damn thing could teleport around.

Normally, I could put that hunted feeling out of my mind and get on with things, but between the location and that arrow-beacon, I felt like we were going to get jumped by Briar by Moonlight at any moment. I’m not saying she was scarier than all the giant monsters and dragons and stuff that we’d fought up until now, but at least none of them held a grudge—probably because they’re all dead? I really should have made more of a concerted effort to murder her when we had the opportunity.

Mercy whistled me back over before much longer, and we headed back to the Overlook to take the next small-step slash giant-leap of our journey. They’d talked Seren out of using the beacon arrow thing using the same logic I’d already attempted to deploy. It worked better when you sounded like you knew what you were talking about, apparently.

The persistent feeling of dread took a backseat as I looked around at us all, geared up and ready to adventure properly again. It had been way too long. Was that pride I felt bubbling up inside me? Horny and hungry were my go-to emotions on a regular day, so all these more complicated ones kind of threw me.

Asher bobbed his head as he spoke. “We shall travel the waystone relays to their natural end or to the Serpent’s Gate, whichever is closer. From there we shall disembark, scout out the immediate area, and then return here to plan our next moves. Are we all in agreement?”

Mercy groaned. “Yes, mom.”

His tail lashed in irritation, but he started casting, and I reached out and took Seren’s hand, anticipation building as the magic gathered around us once more. Here we go, here we go. The magic glowed all around us, the waystone behind us crackled with power, and the one on the distant hillside shone brighter and brighter. I gave Seren a squeeze and one last grin, then the spell went off, and we were whipped off our feet and into the blinding light.

Last time the trip went by so fast I didn’t even have time to notice every part of my body being ripped apart by magic and reassembled. This time it lasted just long enough for me to have some awareness of all the waystones that we were zipping through, humming around us as we flew across the continent. If I had a mouth, I would have been screaming “Weeeeee!” the whole way, but as it was, I didn’t get the opportunity.

Has something ever gone wrong, but you didn’t realize until after the fact? Like you drove home and then discovered you had a flat tire for the last mile, or the coleslaw on your sandwich had turned sour but you didn’t smell it until it was in your mouth. That was the sensation when we came flying out of the waystone at the Serpent’s Gate. That big oops.

Maybe it was the whole army that was deployed around us, maybe it was the fact that we came out sideways as the relay was pulled down to smash apart by a squad of burly dudes with ropes, or maybe it was Orphia’s shit-eating grin.

Oops.

Chapter 21

We might have been in a little bit of trouble. Our exit had just been smashed to pieces, we’d all landed face down in the open plain ahead of the mountain pass, and there were more people around us than I was capable of counting. Tired, angry looking people. Then to top it off, there was Orphia standing right ahead of us in full battle regalia, something like a dress made out of plates of armor, her glaive shining with gathered electricity, the banner of Leofric strapped to her back. It was a golden lion, predictably enough.

I pushed up onto my knees, and the spears all around us were leveled. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Orphia called out to her army instead of replying. “Just as was foretold. Our efforts have been rewarded. The traitors are here.”

I felt Leofric before I could turn around and see him standing behind the acid-etched base of the waystone-relay, hands still glowing green. “All has come to pass as I predicted. They sought to join with the Wyrm.”

Now I’m not going to say that the idea of Leo coming after us for stealing his ancient relic magic sword and the symbol of his authority hadn’t crossed my mind. I just assumed it would take him a lot longer to get his ass in gear and haul a whole army across country. Even with the ugly naked horse things, they must have left the Bastion at more or less the same moment that I did to get all the way over here in this time.

From the haggard look of the soldiers, it had not been an easy march. They hadn’t looked terribly well fed and comfortable back at the Bastion, but the journey over here looked like it had left them at breaking point. I wondered how many of them were true believers in Leo’s messiah schtick and how many were just scared of what would happen to them if they got left behind. I suppose it didn’t really matter all that much, but I still felt obliged to offer them a way out. “Hey, soldier guys. We don’t actually want to kill you.”

Seren interrupted. “I want to kill them all.”

I kept on going as if she hadn’t just said that, “So if you walk away right now, we aren’t going to come after you. We aren’t going to blame you for hitching your wagon to the wrong horse. We aren’t going to look for revenge. And there isn’t going to be enough left of Leo for him to come after you either.”

Orphia bellowed, “the first man to shirk his duty shall fall by my blade.”

Mercy had an arrow drawn by the time she righted herself, and it was lined up straight for Orphia’s open mouth. “Not before I put this through you.”

None of the grandstanding and shouting had done much of anything to the soldiers. They were still staring at us with the same determined glares as had been on their faces when we first arrived—except for the ones that were getting a good look at Seren.

Whispers spread out in a ripple, and the word “Alvaren” seemed to be on everyone’s lips. Even Leo looked taken aback when he spotted her.

I could smell doubt in the air. “Yeah, that’s right. Did we not mention that we’d brought the Alvaren back? And we’ve got them on speed dial.”

The last bit obviously made no sense to them, but the Alvaren being back, that made all the difference in the world. Confusion abounded. Murmurs and dissent in the ranks. Leofric hopped up onto the ruins of the relay with a flourish and a bow. “Herald of the Alvaren, I offer you greetings. If you will stand aside while I retrieve what these blackguards have stolen from me, then it would be my pleasure to welcome you back to Amaranth.”

Seren kept him talking as the rest of us found our feet. “It is thee who must stand aside, Leofric. These Eternals are on a quest of great import to the Alvaren Empire. Those who do not offer them succor shall incur the wrath of Briar by Moonlight.”

Leo flinched at the mention of the queen of all bitches, but he didn’t stand down, and he didn’t order his people to stand down. I could almost hear the whirring between his ears as he tried to work this new information into his plans. “Whatever it is that your vassals provide, there can be no doubt that I can offer it threefold.” His moustache twitched in what might have been a smile. “Had I known that they were in your service from the beginning, they would have been greeted as your envoys and offered all aid, but that opportunity has passed. Now justice must be served.

He drew a sword from the scabbard by his hip that used to hold the Lucis. It wasn’t magical, and it wasn’t reverberating in my consciousness the way that the old sword had, but it was certainly a very long and sharp piece of metal that was going to hurt when he jammed it in me.

The next step that he took forward, all of us flinched into battle-readiness. Even Seren. He was still making excuses as his muscles coiled beneath his shining golden armor—as if saying the right words would make what he was about to do acceptable. How many times a day did he have to lie to himself just to get by? “I am certain that you would not want thieves in your employ.”

Predictable as the sunrise, I was the one he launched himself at. I was the one who’d stolen his sword, and I was the one who’d made a fool of him. He didn’t even look at anyone else.

I shredded the straps of my bag as I shed the excess metal from my armor into hunks all around me. He was expecting to fight the same Maulkin he’d pushed around back on the Bastion. Things had changed. I brought the Lucis around to catch his blow, and he pushed down against my parry, expecting me to crumble. Instead, I matched his strength. My newly acquired Ascendant Potency meant that I wasn’t going to be getting thrown around by anything short of an actual god anymore.

Everyone else had exploded into motion around us. Asher had dropped to the ground, digging in my abandoned backpack, and Mercy had thrown up a wall of fire to hold back the right flank of soldiers and was peppering the left with arrows so fast that I couldn’t even see her hands moving. Just the thrum of her bowstring. That just left the other third of the army and Orphia for Seren to deal with.

One hundred men and an enraged Eternal? That seemed doable.

Confusion was written all over Leo’s face as he pressed in closer, forcing me back one step, then the next. My heel touched against Asher, and I knew I couldn’t give any more ground.

Leaning forward the last inch and Surging Vitality so I didn’t need immediate dental attention, I bit onto the blade of his sword. The confusion turned to disgust as he strained to twist the sword so it bit into something more vital. The dead stone beneath our feet began to crack under the pressure he was exerting.

It was enough though, enough of a hold for me to take one hand off the Lucis, and draw my other sword. He saw it happen. Saw my hand reach out. Saw the great-sword on my back leap from where it was strapped to land in my waiting palm. He didn’t wait for what came next.

Leo abandoned his attack, leapt back, and I had to open my mouth or risk giving everybody a real wide smile. I tossed my offhand blade to the ground and spun the Lucis back into a high guard with a grin. “I liked the original recipe sword better.”

“Then I shall feed that too you next.”

Mercy was amazing. She was always amazing. But there is only so much that you can do when you are one person trying to fight back against dozens. The firewall helped, but at the end of the day, it was just a wall. They could go around it. And now they were, pouring in from either side, charging at Seren, at Mercy’s turned back, and at Asher where he was still down on his knees struggling. There were so many of them. Hundreds of them. Leo’s whole army stretched out all around us until they were all we could see, all brought along for some petty vengeance on me.

Seren let out a yell, and it dragged my attention away from where it needed to be. She had Orphia’s electrified glaive pinned between her swords, and that bark of victory had been the sound of her plunging it into the first soldier taking a swipe at her back, discharging all the gathered lightning out through him and into the ranks behind him. We were running out of time. I needed options.

As I’d feared, the ground beneath us felt like nothing to my Artifice. Whatever had been unleashed by the Voidgod here had robbed the place of all the vital energy I needed to move the stone. Good thing I’d brought all that metal with me.

I swept the Lucis in an arc, and the hunks of metal that I’d scattered around the battlefield leapt up to match it. Resonating through my Artifice with the sword. Dozens of soldiers fell to that one cut, dozens more fell back in fear of the next one, and once more I could see the confusion and fear showing on Leo’s face. He was ancient and powerful and stagnant. He was all that he’d ever be, and I was becoming more every day.

On the backswing, I sent my second great-sword flying at him from where I’d dumped it. It was a clumsy attack, and he batted the blow away with all the contempt that a feint deserved. Still, it gave me the time to close the distance though.

Rebounding from the other blade, he spun to catch the Lucis and turn my chop away. I reared back, far further than his parry should have made me, and the other sword jumped at his back.

With a practiced ease, he spun his blade behind his back to deflect it. Smug prick didn’t even look. Well, that was fine. I didn’t need him to look. I just needed to keep him busy.

Asher leapt back from my bag as soon as he’d wrestled the lockbox open and leapt to the side just a moment later. The butterflies from Talon’s tower fluttered free.

Back at the tower, those little bugs had been the old Archmage’s anti-air defense system. Out here in the open, they were chaos. With each flap of their wings, they threw up a cyclone. There was no limit to them now—no walls to pen them in, and no clever architecture to keep each gust of wind from tapping into the weather systems around it, so each spiral of wind grew larger and larger as they spun away from us. A million tiny storms all leaping to life as the dozen butterflies fluttered to gain height.

I might not be a smart guy, but I was glad I had one on my team.

When one passed through Mercy’s wall of fire, the wall snuffed out, and the tornado became a firestorm, scorching a line through Leo’s army. Everywhere else, the soldiers didn’t get to burn. Instead, they got picked up and thrown—into the air, and into each other. Everywhere you looked, they went flying by.

Whatever Leo had been expecting, it wasn’t that. He gawked up as one of the wagons that he’d rode in on lifted up from behind the shattered waystone-relay, ugly naked horses still dangling, and screaming, from the front as it spun.

Couldn’t ask for a better distraction, really. I hammered the Lucis back down at him. He managed to get his blade up in time, but he’d been expecting the same sort of whacks I’d been dealing out to him so far, not Surged Potency. His own blade was slammed back into his face, only stopping short when the ends hit his giant gold lion pauldrons.

The roar he let out was less lion and more cat-whose-tail-got-trod on. I hauled the Lucis back, and like it was attached by a string, the other sword leapt up to hit Leo in the back with the same force. Once more his armor stopped the worst of it, but the impact knocked him stumbling forward to meet my next attack. Off balance, bleeding, surrounded. I had him.

I brought my reforged Lucis down like a butcher with a cleaver. Planning to split him in two the same way I had Gorgafel.

A body hit me. A soldier. In that first moment of confusion, I assumed she’d been thrown by one of the butterflies, but then another hit and another. Not one of them trying to hurt me, just clinging on. Trying to stop me. Trying to hold me back from killing Leo.

“Come on!” I roared as more and more of them heaped on. Dozens of them. A mass of bodies that only my surging Potency let me overpower. I took one dragging step forward and brought the Lucis down, only for Leo to flick aside my clumsy attack with a sneer. “No more than you deserve.”

With all the time in the world to act, he lined up his thrust and plunged his sword clean through the head of that first soldier girl and into my chest. She died for him without a whimper.

I did plenty of whimpering. That sword hurt as much as I’d thought it would. And I’d only been planning on some flesh wounds, not a collapsed lung.

He pulled back, drawing the red tip of his sword out through the dead girl with a horrid sucking sound, and then he readied his next attack. The rest of the idiots didn’t even try to get clear. They just held on. They were all nuts.

I hauled up with all my strength against them and even though the Lucis in my hands moved so slowly that I’d have had better luck intercepting the killing blow with hopes and prayers, the mirror sword didn’t. It crashed into Leo’s back and sent his swing wide, carving another of his soldiers off me but leaving me untouched.

Before my eyes, I could see the open wound across his face closing up, and it reminded me that I could do the same. Flaring my Regeneration to fix up the hole he’d put through me. I strained once more, hoping that the loss of another body would make up for my Surged Potency running dry, but I was still stuck.

Leo had one foot on my flying sword and his eyes locked on me by the time I gave up the struggle. His own sword was sheathed, but there was a green glow between his palms that I really did not like to see. Getting doused in acid once was more than enough for one lifetime, thank you very much.

I twisted to see if rescue was coming from anywhere else. It really wasn’t. Mercy and Asher were back to back in the midst of a tightening circle of soldiers. She was keeping them at bay with her wind-arrows, but there was no opportunity for them to break out. Asher’s casting had been interrupted with a crossbow bolt to the shoulder somewhere in all the chaos, and he still hadn’t gotten it going again. Seren was the only one who seemed to be having a good time. There was a circle of corpses around her, and though Orphia kept dashing in and taking swipes at her, they were useless in the face of my girl’s ludicrous skills.

The false Alvaren had rage ingrained on her features, but her movements were slow and stunted compared to the real thing. The fancy armor that she’d been strapped into was just making her even more awkward. I kind of wished that I could have just kicked back and watched the show. Instead, I had to deal with acid-bath-time.

Stretching out with Artifice to my very limits, I grabbed every piece of metal and hauled them in. At the same moment as Leo pushed his hands forward to douse me in burning chemical agony, my iron-maiden snapped shut around him. It wasn’t pretty, and it wouldn’t last. It was just a big thick slab of metal wrapped around him.

He did not make a happy noise when all that acid splashed back in his face. I was upgrading it from “stepped-on cat” to “cat-that-fell-into-a-bath.” Less surprise, more anguish.

And, of course, his loyal followers all leapt to his rescue, dropping off me to run over to the acid vat now surrounding their boss and trying to pry it open with their bare hands. The geniuses.

I had maybe a few seconds before Leo realized that he could stop squirting out more acid and just bust out of there, but they’d have to be enough to turn the tide of battle. I charged back over to Mercy and Asher, slapping a heal on the lizardman and catching a crossbow bolt headed for Mercy in my shoulder. The soldiers around Seren were understandably scared to get too close to her, but despite how casually she was handling everything, I could see the strain in her face. There were too many enemies, too many angles of attack, too many ways that everything could go wrong, so the usual beautiful dance of blades was stilted and halting as she had to keep spinning away from Orphia’s clumsy attacks and handle whichever soldier was getting too brave. I could help with that.

I plowed into the ranks of soldiers that had gathered around her back, leading with my shoulder and following with my blade. It wasn’t that I wanted to avoid killing them—they’d been given their opportunity to back down, back off, and survive—it was just that I was short on time and using everything I had handy.

Orphia herself got a blast of mind-strike to keep her off balance. The image of me yelling at her for being a loser would hopefully haunt her dreams for many years to come.

The soldiers folded under my charge, proving themselves to be made of the same stern stuff as their cannon-fodder buddies back at the Bastion. The Lucis shrank down to its original size, and a shield formed up on my other arm. I’d had to dump almost all my metal to keep Leo contained, so I was down to the bare minimum. A whack from my shield sent most soldiers flying, and the ones that fell by my feet, instead of soaring, got the unique experience of being skewered with a legendary relic. Lucky them.

Seren had been ignoring them for the most part, too focused on Orphia to give them much attention. Now that they had an enemy actively trying to kill them, the soldiers were quick to switch focus. She had her shot at Orphia. Now I just had to fight this whole damned army before Leo got loose.

I led them back with me towards Mercy and Asher. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but instinct always told me that being closer to them increased my odds of survival. Mercy was still holding up well, her barrage of arrows keeping all but the most suicidal of the soldiers cowering behind their shields. They were trying to outlast her quiver, and normally that would have worked perfectly, but I was here.

Splitting my attention between the body holding a shield up to catch another crossbow bolt and the mind spreading out through my Sphere of Influence to snatch up every broken scrap lying around—the bolts that had missed, the arrows that had snapped off, and the scrapings of steel thrown off their armor when Mercy’s arrows grazed by. Everything leapt up, twisted together into arrows, and slipped into the leather case on her back, ready for action.

Between shots, Mercy managed to snap, “Finally decide to join in?”

All I could do was laugh. Even with the storms tearing through them, there were still a hundred soldiers to any one of us. Even with all the damage that we’d done, the endless tide of living, breathing people who were willing to die for Leo’s megalomania kept coming on.

I cut them down.

More and more soldiers rushed in towards me, heedless of the inevitable. They were trained, they were confident, and they had no chance at all in the face of my strength. Their blows rained down on my shield, and my sword lashed through their defenses as if they weren’t there. It didn’t matter how well you parried or blocked a blow when it had the force of a runaway train behind it. Their swords shattered. Their shields splintered. They bled.

With the pressure of holding back the charge from every direction gone, Mercy’s wind-arrows came slower, one or two bursting on the most aggressive soldiers on her side to drive them back, but most of her shots slipped through to knock out the crossbowmen in the rear ranks. Asher was back on his feet between us, and while I didn’t think there was anything he could do that would deal more damage than the bugs he’d already set loose, he had something big and angry looking coiling between his hands.

We were about to turn this whole battle around when Leo leapt back into the fight.

His acid bath had eaten through most of his golden armor, and the shiny golden hair and beard were long gone. Underneath where it had been, I was annoyed to discover he had a chin with one of those little butt dimples in the middle. Continuing the bad news, his sword and skin seemed to have made it through unscathed.

He brought that shiny length of metal down on me hard, and I had to twist around to catch it with the Lucis while still pushing back the closest soldiers. The poor stone beneath my feet shattered with the impact. It had already been ravaged by the Voidgod and a good few millennia of wear and tear. By the time we were done here, it was probably going to be called the Serpent’s Gate gravel pit.

I was off balance, surrounded, and trying to protect myself and Asher, and the demi-god still dripping acid from the cracks in his armor was not a happy bunny. “How dare you?”

Mercy flung up a fresh wall of fire between us and Seren’s battle. Then she cracked up, “What, is this your first time meeting Maulkin?”

His irritation with her was just enough of a distraction for me to twist out from under the crushing weight of his blow. If I’d hoped he’d fall forward, I was sadly mistaken. Even enraged and dribbling, he had the kind of discipline in his movements that it would take me centuries to master. He spun into another attack, and I had to haul my shield overhead to knock it away, opening my side up to the massed soldiers and their spears. They didn’t need a special invitation. Three of them hammered into me, and more probably would have followed if the soldiers could have squeezed past each other.

My armor did what it could, but that wasn’t much. The three pointed tips nipped between my ribs and started wiggling around in me with every movement and breath. That was uniquely unpleasant. But worse, the pain, the damage, and the sticks poking out my side slowed me.

Leo’s next blow lopped off one of my horns and bit into my shoulder before I had a chance. There was a manic grin on his face as acid suddenly exploded out from the sword’s blade in a sticky green wave. “Ow. Ow. Ow.”

Ever get lemon juice in a paper cut? Imagine that, except the paper cut is a foot long and the lemon juice is deadly acid.

Mercy blasted Leo square in the chest with another wind-arrow, but he just tanked right through it and laughed, twisting his sword to smear a little more acid in me as he withdrew. I remembered this feeling, the acid gradually eating out through my body until I fell to pieces, and I didn’t want to do it again. Not again.

I took a wild swipe at him with the Lucis, but he didn’t even bother to do more than lean back out of the way. That was fine. It wasn’t about him. The shield on my arm shattered as Artifice made it resonate with the blade. The broken fragments of it soaring out in the same arc as my cut. Leaping past the spears still embedded in me and slicing into the soldiers behind them. That sudden burst of shrapnel gave me space to breathe, and I used it to rip the spears out.

Leo was back in my face again. The wind was still swirling out from Mercy’s arrow in his chest, buffeting me as he abandoned his sword and grappled with me for the Lucis. Normally, I’d have put money on myself in any wrestling match, big money, but today I was sporting a gaping wound in the shoulder above my sword arm, and acid was seeping down into the joint, burning away my strength one snapping tendon at a time.

He wanted the Lucis? He could have it. I threw it off into the crowd of soldiers as far as my wrecked arm could manage, which admittedly was not far. It vanished into their ranks, and Leo took off after it like a dog chasing a stick.

Asher flung his arms up at almost the same moment, and fire exploded from between his hands. The shattered earth beneath his feet blackened, Mercy’s bowstring snapped, and heat and pain washed over me as the roaring fireball spread out from him, through us, and on into a massive dome covering the battlefield. The sky burned above us, and the earth burned below. Every single soldier was licked with flame. Then as fast as it had come, it was gone. A blackened crisp of a butterfly fell past me, then the roar of the wind picked up again as the surviving bugs fled from the heat and light with all haste.

Every tornado carried fire in it now, and every soldier fell screaming and roaring, trying to be free of the flames that clung to them. I knew that they were not burning, not really. That explosive display had just been Asher priming the field for his real attacks. The flames would hold onto each and every one of us, so that his next spell had somewhere to take root.

With a desperate pulse of Artifice, I managed to haul my backup sword away from the bubbling wreckage that had been my iron maiden and into my hand. It wasn’t much compared to legendary swords of legend, but it had an edge. I tried to heft it, readying myself for Leofric to come tearing back with the Lucis and a bad attitude, but something went wrong. I mean really wrong. Even by my usual standards of things going wrong.

When I tried to lift the sword, my arm fell off.

For a moment I just stood there staring at it in stunned silence. Asher gawked at it too, though his hands and mouth were already moving into the next spell. Between holding off a whole army solo, Mercy took a moment to bark. “Everything is going to be all right.”

Even in my state of shock, I couldn’t let that crappy joke pass by without commentary. “That was my right arm.”

She fired an arrow past my severed horn to catch one bold soldier in the eye before he could close in on me. “At least you have one left!”

I fell to my knees as the acid ate down into my chest, fumbling with my off-hand to try and pluck the sword out of my own rapidly cooling hand. Turns out I had a really solid grip on it. There was a hysterical edge in my voice as I rumbled out, “I… I’ve been disarmed!”

Leo came flying back at me over the ranks of his own screaming soldiers, the Lucis upraised and ready to plunge right through me. I grabbed onto my own severed arm and I swung. The sword dangling from my locked fist met the Lucis with a clatter, and while it had no real power behind it, just the force of the impact was enough to save me. At least from that stab.

The Lucis hammered into the stone where my shoulder would have been if I still had one. But Leo came down on me like a ton of bricks, knees hammering into my guts. I retched. Good thing we hadn’t stopped for breakfast, really.

He roared in exaltation, raising the Lucis for a killing blow. “Taste my vengeance!”

Desperate times called for desperate measures, so I shot a Mind-Strike into his face. He’d fought old Koschei for centuries, so he’d have been braced for any of the old tricks, which was why I filled his brain with an image of me, naked, flexing and wiggling in front of the bedroom mirror in Talon’s tower.

The sudden change in his expression made the inevitable murder that was about to follow completely worth it. First surprise, then confusion, then horror, then confusion, then disgust, and then bewilderment. He actually stopped before he struck to ask, “Why?”

I grinned up at him. “Just wanted your last memory to be something nice.”

Seren came flying through the wall of fire, coiled into a ball around herself. She had a sword in one hand, Orphia’s crackling glaive in the other, and absolutely no intention of stopping.

The glaive blade clipped off the side of Leo’s head as she spun back to her feet, discharging lightning through the both of us. Ow.

She didn’t even pause between strikes, discarding the glaive as he snatched for it and pressed in closer before reaching for the second sword on her belt, parrying the Lucis, and then swiping at him with the same motion as her draw.

Leo had rolled to his feet as she came on, and I have to admit that looking up at her as she stepped on me, I was in love.

Her golden hair was so pale that it was almost white, singed black at the tips by the walls of fire she’d walked through to be back by my side. There was a sheen of sweat on her face from the heat and the effort, but best of all was her smile. That same crooked little smirk that I only saw when I was pushing her to the limit in our training. This was what she lived for.

Leo was fast, but she was faster. Leo was clever, but she’d not only learned every trick in the book, she was also there when they were first being written down. Both of them moved faster than my eyes could follow, blades shimmering in the bonfire that surrounded us all.

On my best day, I could beat Seren with a trick she hadn’t seen before. Some divine power that she hadn’t had a second to think about and concoct a counter for. And poor Leo, he was trying to take her on with skill alone. I’d almost pity him if he wasn’t such a colossal dick.

Maybe it was just the massive blood loss talking, but I was pretty sure she had him running scared. I was so caught up in the drama that I didn’t even realize what Asher was doing until he brought his flaming hands and my severed arm together with the gaping wound where my right side used to be.

Cauterize had to be my least favorite spell in Asher’s whole arsenal. Yes, it could heal me back from the point of near death or dismemberment. Yes, it was more effective when I just so happened to be lit up with fire already, like I currently was. Yes, it was probably going to get me back up on my feet and into the fight, but it really, really hurt. I mean, top ten most painful things I’ve ever experienced kind of pain. I’ve been murdered in some pretty cruel and inventive ways, and none of them came close to the flames shooting out from Asher’s fingertips to scorch their way through every nerve in my body.

I might have blacked out there for a second because the next thing I knew, there were soldiers all over the place, dragging me away by the feet as Mercy screamed something incoherent but almost inevitably rude after me. I blinked up at the soldiers hauling me along and realized that somehow, despite my arm having been removed and reattached to my body, I was still holding onto my sword. Sword, meet soldiers. Soldiers, meet sword. You’re about to become intimately acquainted.

The right leg crew definitely got it worse than the lefties. I cut one of them in half and lopped through most of the neck of the girl behind them. That gave the left leg team time to think through their life choices, let me go, and run like hell. I managed to hamstring one of them as I was hauling myself to my feet, but their buddies hauled them along before I could do any real damage.

Back on my feet, I could see just how much of a mess we’d made of the place. The earth was blackened and cracked, and tornados swirled around us in every direction, blocking sight of almost anything beyond the battlefield. The soldiers outside of that circling storm might have been dead, alive, or indifferent—there was no way to tell. Inside the storms, fires blazed on every flammable object and on more than a few patches of decidedly non-flammable rock. The rock itself had been smashed up by the forces unleashed by me and Leo’s scrapping. If this place hadn’t already been a bombsite, safe to say there would not be a booming tourist trade in the coming months.

Mercy was firing into the crowd just beyond my reach, driving them back and giving me enough time to backpedal towards Team Us, and Asher was casting something huge and complicated that would probably solve all our problems if he ever finished it. Seren and Leo were still dancing about, but he looked like he had his confidence back, and he was using his superior strength to screw up her perfect form, battering blows aside far harder than was required and grinding the Lucis against her blades to push them back into her, just the way I’d done to his stupid face.

I’d forgotten about Orphia. I suppose we’d all forgotten about Orphia. Leo included.

She came charging at me out of the enemy ranks with a borrowed battle-axe in her hands and blood pouring down her chin. Seren had slit her cheeks open from ear to ear. I’d always said she should smile more, but this was ridiculous.

I managed to dodge the first wild swing, but she didn’t come alone. All the other soldiers that had been wavering and scared at the sight of the big scary Eternals felt like they had a shot at us now. I kept the first wave of the snarling horde back with a swipe of my sword, but their buddies were already pressing in behind them, driving them forward whether they’d be getting carved up or not.

Orphia came around, aiming her axe for the back of my head and very nearly hitting it this time. “Swing and a miss.”

This time there was no pretense in my swipe at the coming soldiers. Some of the soldiers had their shields ready, some didn’t. With the strength in my arms it didn’t much matter. They all broke.

Orphia didn’t give a damn about them any more than Leofric had. She was completely consumed by bloodlust. Or maybe just regular lust. I didn’t know what she was into. Either way, she just went on throwing herself bodily at me while waving her axe around. The next overhead cut required a parry to stop it from splitting my pretty head in half, and that gave the damn soldiers time to close in and start poking at me with spears again. Their jabs were half-hearted, but those spears were still pointy. They skidded off my armor but bit through the holes that acid, swords, and spears had already put into it and then right on into the juicy bits.

[739/1670 Health]

I was getting really tired of pointy things in my juicy bits.

Mercy was backing towards us now, carrying Asher along with her and abandoning all attempts at holding off her side of the encroaching army. Seren was heading back our way too. Leofric seemed to have finally worked out that he couldn’t beat her in a sword fight, but he was holding his own in an acid spraying and worm summoning fight.

Whole patches of the battlefield were flooded with that same acrid smelling goop that he’d used to melt me before, but while he’d been pretty direct when he was spritzing me all over with chemical agony, he wasn’t getting the chance against Seren. Her sword was darting in at his hand every time he tried to shoot something her way. He’d given up on actually hitting her. Instead, he was taking away the ground beneath her feet. Every patch he covered in acid was somewhere else she needed to avoid with her fancy footwork. It hadn’t been enough to make her slip up yet, but it did stop her advancing on him. Meanwhile, he waded through the caustic soup barefoot without it leaving a mark.

As for the worms, I didn’t know when he’d had the opportunity to summon the pair of bloody red khorkhoi, but they sure seemed excited to be here, darting in to bite at Seren every time she turned her attention away for a moment, and always working with their master to keep her pressed to the limit of her speed.

Instead of the Alvaren over there, I should have been paying attention to the Eternal in front of me. Orphia brought her axe in at an odd angle as I struggled to pull free of my trendy new liver-piercing, slipping under my parry to batter across what was left of my horns. Something by the root of the one that was still intact cracked under the impact, and since they were growing out of my skull, that was kind of concerning. I didn’t instantly forget how to speak or anything, so I decided to worry about it later.

She thrust the spiked top of the axe forward to spear into my chest, somewhere in the bare region that all the acid earlier had opened up. It hurt, but compared to an acid bath, I barely even noticed the prick. More importantly, it gave me the time to grab onto the haft of her axe. Even when it was obvious there was no way she could win, Orphia wouldn’t back down. She was reliable that way. I picked her up by the axe and bowled her right into the soldiers coming up to spear me some more.

The front ranks fell into the next and all the way back until four whole rows of Amaranth’s bravest idiots were down like dominos. I called the shards of metal that I’d cast out into them earlier back to my blade, and they tore up through armor and flesh like they were hungry to spill blood. Every little lump of iron glistened with gore as they soared to me, then lashed back out again as I swung. Another arc of soldiers fell to the shrapnel.

Over and over I tore the metal back and lashed it out again. Over and over it ripped through the soldiers as they came on, but they just wouldn’t stop. I was slaughtering them. Why wouldn’t they stop? I saw Orphia churned up in the midst of them. One of my swipes had torn through her leg, and there was blue-tinted blood gushing out of her, but still she kept stumbling on towards me. All of them were. Relentlessly coming on despite everything.

That was when I realized we couldn’t win. Not like this. I’d dealt with bad odds before, I lived for bad odds, but this was beyond that. They were going to bury us in bodies and drown us in blood. Leo didn’t care how many people he lost. He didn’t care that these were real living human beings that were dying to serve his whims.

Mercy was by my back, a hand stretched out to rest on my elbow, stopping me in my tracks. “We need a new plan.”

“Definitely need a new plan.” I heaved in a breath, then unleashed one last swipe past Mercy, shattering the sword in my hand and sending those shards flying out into the charge coming in from the other side. It stopped them, but it still wasn’t enough. There were just too many bodies.

Mercy told me what I already knew. “Leo and bitch-face, we could turn into chowder. The army, we could turn into chowder. All of them together”—she ducked a crossbow bolt—“it’s too much.”

The only direction that wasn’t full of enemies was covered in acid. Unless we learned how to fly, we weren’t getting out that way. There was nothing my Artifice could move or touch except for the metal I’d brought along, and there was no way we were getting across the newly made acid lake on a silver surfboard.

Asher unleashed his spell, not at the gathered soldiers but at Leofric. He was a smart guy. He knew that cutting the head off a snake was the quickest way to stop it wriggling. We all should have been focused on Leo from the start. Why was I so dumb? Why didn’t I think of that.

Unlike the fireballs and lightning bolts I’d seen him tossing around before, this latest spell came out like a thin beam of dazzling red light. The heat pouring off it was enough to make me flinch back. When it passed by Seren, she leapt aside with her hair curling and crispened black. Maybe Restoration could fix that, and she wouldn’t have to kick Asher’s ass or get a bob cut.

Leo must have sensed it coming because both of his worms leapt up, crisscrossing directly in the spell’s path. Both of them exploded into waves of slime, and the red bar of searing heat punched right through.

Bald, breathing hard, and battered from his clash with Seren, I thought that Asher had finally got him, but the wily old bastard had both hands up between him and the death-ray. At a glance I thought he was trying to push it back with that acid spray of his, but no, it was grosser. Slime exploded out from between his hands, slopping down all around him, but then as he bore down on it, more and more hunks of worm sprayed out around the sides. Whole coils of khorkhoi tumbled out around the beam as I watched, wriggling and writhing without any mind to control them. Creatures without any thought or purpose beyond suffering.

Asher’s beam blinked out as suddenly as it appeared. He slumped, exhausted, and Leo was still untouched. Untouched and smug.

Seren was back by my side before I even knew it, panting for breath. Leo’s army were lapping in around us in a wide circle, shy of coming closer now that there was someone of a higher paygrade to handle us but still cutting us off from any escape. “We must break through if we mean to escape. Focus our efforts in a single point, so that we may punch through their lines.”

Leo forced out a laugh. “Yes cowards and thieves, flee before me. Show me your backs so that I might cut you down.”

The Lucis shimmered in his hand, and the green glow in the other one meant that he was pulling some more Primal energy out to do something terrible with it. When he jerked it up suddenly, all four of us flinched, and I hauled my metal back into a shield between us. I shouldn’t have bothered. That green light swept out in a wave over his minions, and the screams of the wounded became cheers of victory.

Orphia put her full weight down on her once-injured leg and gave a satisfied nod as the wound closed up. She bounded in ahead of her soldiers now that she could walk again, a borrowed spear replacing her axe.

Mercy fired off shot after shot at her, but with her Celerity surged, Orphia ducked past them all as if they were hanging still in the air. Asher let out a ragged breath that sounded like a sob behind me. I twisted my shield back into a sword. If we were dying here, I was going to make them pay for it.

With a lurch in my stomach, I realized that dying wasn’t something all four of us could walk off. Mercy, Asher and I would pop right back up again and start over if we dropped dead, but Seren wouldn’t. If they got her, then she was gone. “We have to get Seren out. The rest of us will lose a bit of gear, but Seren…”

The whole enemy army crowded in around us, but I only had eyes for my people.

Mercy nodded, and Asher bobbed his head in what was probably assent. I turned to Seren to make sure that she wasn’t going to demand the opportunity to make a suicidal heroic last stand—even that would totally be in character for her. She was standing with her back to me, the Alvaren arrow held high. “Briar by Moonlight. Your servant calls for aid!”

Chapter 22

Oh no. Oh no. I reached out for the arrow, but it was already too late. “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.”

The magic bound within that little twig had been unleashed. An invisible wave of power swept over us, and a single needle thin beam of light shot up into the sky. It was a nothing of a spell. An arcane answering machine beep. But with Briar’s power behind it, it turned every head and rocked us where we stood. Mercy caught my eye and panic sank in. “We’ve got to go. Now.”

She snatched the arrow out of Seren’s hand and fired it off as far away from us as she could muster. If it was some sort of homing beacon, we needed to get it as far away from us as possible. Seren turned with a hint of confusion painted on her usual mask of indifference. “All will be well, my friends.”

It really, really, wouldn’t. The only good thing that I could think of to say about Leo was that even though he was… who he was, at least he didn’t have the power to back it up. Briar was a whole different level of trouble.

There was one long blissful moment when all the soldiers were looking to each other panicked, when Orphia’s charge faltered, and when Leo looked like he was ready to turn and run. Then that moment stretched on too long, and they decided that maybe the Alvaren Empire wasn’t going to appear out of thin air. They started in for us again. Crossbow bolts twanged loose from their rear ranks, soaring through the air towards us and then stopping dead. Everything stopped moving.

Deathly silence swept over the battlefield. Even the fires and the winds were frozen in place. It was like time had stopped. Maybe time had stopped. Maybe the only reason I could see everything held in place was whatever little spark of divinity made me an Eternal. It didn’t make much difference either way. We were all frozen in place as the Alvaren arrived.

Their city appeared first, hanging in the sky directly above us as though it had always been there. It was soundless and seamless like the world had just been rewritten to make it so it had always been there. Still, we stood still, frozen in our ridiculous poses and facial expressions as the shadow covered us all. Light, then dark. Moving, then still. All in an instant. My eyes could still move, which was maybe a blessing, or maybe a curse because it meant that I could see my doom coming, drifting down from on high with what I would have once said was a blank expression, but which weeks of Seren had taught me was something like a condescending smirk.

The first and last time I’d met the boss of the Alvaren Empire it had been a few seconds after yanking the Rusted Blade shard out of their Keystone font of magical power thing and turning them all back from goblins. Even in rags, she had looked regal. Now she was in actual clothes the effect was stunning.

I’m not going to pretend to know anything about fashion—my current look was not hobo-chic, I just had most of my armor melted off by acid—but I figure that most people dress for where they’re planning on being. You wouldn’t wear high heels to go hiking through the woods, and you wouldn’t wear a pair of Hawaiian shorts to go to a fancy restaurant. Briar by Moonlight was dressed to fly.

Ribbons of intricate white lace trailed down from her black skirts to drift around her, buoyed by the same winds that slowed her descent down to among us peasants on the ground. If she walked like a normal person instead of floating around like a snow-globe ornament, then those lacy whatevers would have been dragged through the mud all day every day. The skirts that looked longer than her legs would have been a problem too. Even the dangling drapery of her sleeves would have gotten underfoot and tripped somebody up if she’d been strolling around. Since she was flying, it all made an impact. Her clothes screamed: this is the person to look at, the center of attention, the bee’s knees, the highlight of your low life. Look how much prettier than you she is, how much more powerful and graceful. Look at how much more she is than you. How dare you even look at her?

Basically, if she had literally any personality other than super-powered mega-bitch, she could have spat in my mouth, and I would have liked it. Unfortunately, she was her.

The Alvaren are the center of their own universe, and nobody who isn’t Alvaren matters. We’re less than them. Sometimes that is unpleasant, like if you’re trying to have a conversation with one or date them, but right now, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit relieved that Briar kept me paralyzed and useless so there was no way I could blurt out something stupid that could get us all killed.

“Serendipitous Winds, ever faithful. Long have I awaited thy call.”

Translation: bitch, what took you so long.

“Your Majesty, I cannot thank thee enough for this audience.” Seren’s face broke my heart. Even after everything we’d told her, she was still looking at the floating Alvaren empress like she was Santa Claus come to grant all her wishes.

Briar drifted closer, cupping my girlfriend’s face in her hand. “Nonsense, my child. You are mine. All who are mine are worthy of their mistresses aid. That thou have brought my enemies to their knees before me only sweetens this joyful reunion.”

Seren’s voice was tiny when she tried to reply. “Beg pardon, Your Majesty, but there is much that I have not yet had time to tell you. These Eternals—”

“The vile sycophants of Araphel responsible for our corruption.” Briar stared at me as she corrected Seren. Guess she hadn’t forgotten about the whole headbutting thing. “They were the ones who doomed our people to millennia of base savagery. There is no punishment cruel enough to make up for the curse that they inflicted upon us.”

Where was a daytime TV host when you needed him to come running out and announce that the polygraph had determined that was a lie? Briar was the one who’d jammed the rusted blade bit in their big magic pyramid and turned them all into goblins. She’d admitted as much when she was trying to grab it back from me and shove it into place. I had no idea why she wanted her people to be goblins—I had no idea about most things, if I’m being honest—but the fact she was trying to shift the blame onto us suggested that the rest of the Alvaren weren’t going to be happy with her for doing it. No wonder she wanted us dead.

“I cannot speak to the gold clad tyrant, who by my reckoning has been in this place since the Revelation, but I can attest that the rest are newborn to this world.” Still, poor Seren went on talking as if there was any hope of changing Briar’s mind. Like this was all just a misunderstanding. She had never believed a word I said against her queen, even now, seeing Briar lying to her face she couldn’t believe it. I strained against the invisible restraints that held me in place, but it did nothing. It was like the whole world had crystallized into something solid. Even with all my strength, there was nothing to push back against.

Once more Briar’s elegant pale fingers brushed along my lover’s cheek, trailing over the places I had touched and kissed. Ready to snatch her life away. Seren didn’t even know she was in danger. I should have fought her more. I should have made her understand. I’d just wanted for things to be good between us. I’d just wanted us to be happy together instead of arguing. “They have deceived you, my sweet. You need not worry about them any longer. You shall never need lay eyes upon any of these servant of the void again.”

Seren leaned away from her touch, blue flushing over her cheeks at the attention. “You do not understand. They are on a vital quest, Your Majesty. They are gathering the only weapon that can strike the Voidgod down upon his return.”

The silence went from absolute to deafening. The pressure holding us all in place doubled until I could feel the air being crushed from my lungs, and the flesh being squeezed to my bones. Briar went from soft spoken to shouting in an instant. “I do not understand? I do not understand?!”

Seren dropped to her knees, gasping. “I misspoke, Your Majesty.”

Briar toppled forward with her, still hanging in the air in a nimbus of finery. She caught Seren by the chin and dragged her eyes back up to meet hers. “No, no, humble paladin, please share your boundless wisdom with the empress of the Alvaren. Please tell me how you came to know what I do not, to have reasoned with more clarity than she who can name every star with a glance and track their passage through centuries. Tell me once more that I do not understand what you do.”

There was a frantic edge to Seren’s voice, but still, she kept trying to argue, kept on trying to prove that we were the good guys. She didn’t understand that Briar already knew. She didn’t understand that was why Briar wanted us dead. “I have traveled amongst them, Your Majesty. I have seen their purpose. I know them.”

Briar’s eyes closed, and she took a deep breath through her nose. I almost had hope for a moment. Hope that she might hear reason. That she might be calming herself and thinking rationally, and this might all actually have just been a big mistake. When her eyes opened again, I knew that I was dead wrong.

“Is a paladin so easily swayed from her purpose? How little it took before you embraced doubt. I can smell the beast-man’s rutting upon you from here. Should all Alvaren abandon their virtue and lay down with beasts of burden?” She flung out a hand towards me, and I was jerked forward, hauled off my feet to hang suspended in the air beside her. “If I were to mount this animal, would I understand then what you understand now?”

There was panic on Seren’s face. She obviously hadn’t thought anyone would find out about her dirty little secret just yet. Maybe she was hoping they’d get to see some of my heroics and be so overwhelmed by how awesome I am that they might overlook the fact that I was Faun-shaped. “Your Majesty...”

“Be silent.” We all rocked back at the impact of her words. Not just me hovering in the air, or Seren cowering before her, but the whole damned battlefield. Even the fires snuffed out. “I have heard their lies, and I have found them wanting. To learn that you have believed every word of their deceptions when your queen tells you that they are to be ignored… it is an insufferable betrayal.”

Seren had tears in her eyes, but she still couldn’t let it go. Even now, she had to argue. “Your Majesty…”

Briar snarled. “I said, be silent.”

This time the power behind her words didn’t rock over the battlefield. They were focused in on one single point. Seren broke.

Her head was flung back, but then it kept on going. Twisting back off her shoulders until it was hanging by skin. Her back arched back, then curled all the way over until the crackling of bones felt like it was the only thing I’d ever hear again. Her arms broke, twisting back at the elbows, and her legs gave out even as they were mangled and twisted too. By the time she hit the ground, she was dead. Dead, and ruined. All of her beauty and grace and vibrancy blotted out with a vicious word. Folded up into a mockery of a body.

I couldn’t even scream. That monster had killed Seren for nothing, and I couldn’t even scream. I couldn’t move. I surged my Potency, I strained with everything I had, but nothing worked. I lashed out with Artifice, grabbing anything and everything I could take a hold of, but none of them would budge in this frozen world. Every power that the gods had given me, I strained against this paralysis. I raged, and I tried to turn away as the girl I loved slopped out across the dry stone, and through it all, I made not a single sound.

Briar turned to face me, as emotionless as if she had just swatted a fly. “Now what shall I do to remind you of your place?”

I tapped my Void Pillar. Slaughter. The antithesis of Primal. The opposite of creating life.

All of the time I’d been hiding it, I hadn’t even dared to look at the Divinity I’d bought or tested it out. I knew that Deathtouch was bad news. I knew it was a sign that the Void had some hold over me. It had been a stupid decision, but I couldn’t regret it now. Not when it passed untouched through whatever spell Briar was using to pin us in place. Not when the total darkness of the Void tore out from my body in a wave of destruction, sweeping over Leofric’s gathered soldiers and blinking them out like birthday cake candles.

There was no gruesome display, no blood exploding or bones breaking. One moment they were alive, the next they were not, toppling to the ground like puppets with cut strings. Everywhere the darkness touched, death followed.

Briar saw the wave coming, and whether she understood what it was or not, she darted up into the sky with all the speed she could muster. She could not escape me. She would not escape me.

Her spell on us was broken. My Potency was still surged. I kicked off from the stone into the sky after her, and the Sphere of Slaughter followed me up and swallowed her down.

Her beautiful clothes were untouched, but her pristine immortal flesh began to pucker and wrinkle. Too powerful to die like any decent person would, instead she withered. She let out an ungodly wail as her beauty faded, then that wicked old bitch gravity caught me by the heel and dragged me back down to earth.

Mercy and Asher had been untouched by Slaughter, Orphia and Leo too. They were true immortals, not just long-lived.

“You killed her!” My voice. I didn’t recognize it. Nothing seemed real. Seren was dead. How could she be dead?

Briar opened her mouth to dismiss Seren as nobody important, to insult the woman I loved who’d believed in Briar’s decency and died for it. I didn’t let her speak. She didn’t deserve to speak. Nothing she had to say could save her. My sword shattered into pieces as I swung, every shrapnel fragment lancing out at the haggard Alvaren Queen.

Despite the cataracts I’d put in her eyes, she still saw well enough to dodge aside, throwing up shields and spells that it would have taken Asher a month to learn like they were afterthoughts. In the midst of it, I heard her croaking voice. All the silk burnt away from it by the touch of death. “Voidgod.”

Even now she was spinning lies. I kicked off the ground again, but she had already soared too high, and without stone to call with Artifice, I had no way of reaching her. I swiped the wetness from my cheeks and roared, “Get down here so I can gut you!”

She called down, not to me, but to everyone else. “Legends will have told of me, the queen who faced the Adversary. I have felt the touch of darkness, and I have gazed upon the void. Hear me, and know I speak from dread familiarity. Araphel is no more.” She pointed down at me with a shaking finger. “A new Voidgod rises.”

Then she was gone. Her and her floating city both blinked away so abruptly I didn’t even get the chance to throw anything at her. Which was probably for the best, given that the only things available to throw were Mercy and Asher.

Silence returned. The tornados had long since blown clear, and the fires had all been smothered. Even the scattered stragglers of the army that fled from us made no sound as the meaning of Briar’s words sank in. I sank down beside Seren and tried to straighten her out, slipping her head out from under her torso where it was wedged, and smoothing her arms out at her sides. Even her fingers had been broken, and I flinched as I tried to hold her hand at the alien feel of the dislodged parts. The tears were flowing freely now I had no Briar to focus on.

It still didn’t seem real. Like this was some sort of trick. Like this was just some broken doll, and the real Seren would be waiting for me back at home. This wasn’t the real Seren. All of Seren’s beauty was in her grace. She was always in motion. Even when she was standing still, she was poised. Even in her sleep, when I lay there looking across at her lit only by the light of my eyes, she was in motion. Every breath perfect. She had never been this still. Never.

What was I meant to do now? We were meant to have forever.

The spear took me in the side. All of Orphia’s weight was behind it, so she bowled me right over, vaulting through the air using my flesh as the fulcrum to land by her beloved master’s side. The sucking wound in my side hurt me as I scrambled back to my knees, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about it. Not really. Not now.

With a shudder of effort, I stopped the flow of Deathtouch, and the sphere of darkness around us shimmered away. The few soldiers beyond its limit were already running for their lives. As it turns out, having some all-powerful Alvaren queen wet herself and flee while screaming “Voidgod” had been enough to scare them off.

Let them run. They didn’t matter. The only one who mattered was getting cold on the ground beside me.

“Aww.” Orphia’s face contorted into a hideous pout. “Did your little whore die.”

I didn’t even have the energy to be angry. “Shut up.”

Leo had regrown his hair and his beard while my attention was away from him, but it had lost the slicked-back look of when we first met him. It burst out around him like a wild mane now. A better match for his half-dressed, acid-dribbling state. “So the Voidgod is born again. As I warned you all from the start, this treacherous beast is the only thing we needed to fear. Asher, my brother, Mercy, my sister, you have been deceived. But this accomplished liar took us all in; feel no shame, only righteous fury.”

That charisma or presence or whatever you wanted to call it was back in full force, washing over us all. It was only now that I realized he wasn’t the most handsome man on the planet, he was using some sort of power on us. So persuasive that it even had me nodding along. Yep, I’m a liar and a monster. He nailed it.

Asher was not taken in for a moment. Trying to rile him up was like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Emotions didn’t come into his decision making, even when the subject was something near and dear to his heart, like me.

Mercy was looking at me like I was the monster he said. Since we’d beaten Talon, she knew I was keeping secrets, and every time I let one slip, she demanded that it was the last one, that I told them everything. The fact that I had one of the Voidgod’s powers probably didn’t help with her theory that I was being corrupted and turned into one of his servants or whatever.

“All this time,” she whispered. “All this time, I thought you were a good guy. A bit of a dick, but a good guy underneath that. And all this time, you’ve been…”

“Nothing has changed, Mercy. Our friend simply withheld the details of the corruption you had already ascribed him to prevent this very upset.” Asher had it all worked out. I didn’t need to fight her. I didn’t need to argue. I couldn’t. Not now, with Seren dead before me.

“He’s a monster.” She spat the word with venom.

“Did you see what he did to those people? Just being near him is enough to…” She choked on her own disgust. “We’ve spent all this time worrying about a Voidgod coming back, chasing after prophecies and shards, and… what if it was him? What if he’s the Voidgod that’s coming?”

Asher didn’t even flinch. “I have faith that he is not.”

“Why?” She sounded almost as broken hearted as me.

Whatever Asher was about to say to make it all better was cut off with a kick. Orphia had cleared the distance in a single vault. Her heavy boot slammed into Asher’s gut, and he folded around her. She looked absolutely delighted when she hissed to Mercy. “The wyrm-spawn has chosen the path of evil.”

Mercy didn’t move, she didn’t speak, it was like Briar’s spell still held her. Inside, maybe she was wrestling with all the things she’d seen. All the things we’d done. It didn’t matter. She did nothing.

Leo was standing with his arms crossed too, waiting to see what came next, no doubt. Watching his apprentice to see how well she’d learned the art of being a complete asshole.

Orphia looked down at me huddled over the corpse of my girlfriend and gave me a razor-sharp smile. “Come meet your death.”

There was no pause before she spun her spear around to whip across my shoulders. “Get up.”

If she’d had her glaive still, it would have cut into me. As it was, all it did was knock me down. My hands splayed in Seren’s blood.

“Get up.” Another crack of wood across my back.

“Face me, you coward!”

She didn’t swing for me this time. Instead, she thrust her spear down into Seren. The tip scored across my palm as I caught it. At the far end of the spear, I could see Orphia’s smile widen. The perfect picture of every bully to ever find a weakness to exploit. “I’m amazed that anyone was desperate enough to spread their legs for something like you.”

She jerked the spear back out of my hand, spraying blood across the bare stone.

[689/1670 Health]

The spear spun as she circled me, twisting hand over hand as she waited for her opportunity to strike. “Did you have to torture her before she gave in? Did you have to force her? You seem like the type.”

She jabbed at me, and through the numbness, I felt the pain as the spear pricked my shoulder. “Or maybe it was pity. Maybe you were so pathetic, she had to do it just to get you to stop whining and pawing at her.”

The pain helped. It helped me to focus. To come back to myself, to this body. It dragged my attention away from Seren and that hopeless lost feeling. Still, Orphia rambled on. “There must have been something truly wrong with her to want your filthy hands anywhere near her. She must have been a real twisted pervert. Someone that wanted to lie down with animals.”

Rage found me then. Not the prickling of annoyance or the burning of anger, cold dead rage that froze everything inside me. She was taunting me, insulting Seren’s memory because she wanted to goad me into a fight. She wanted lost in anger and easy to manipulate. She had never seen my rage.

I held out my hand and called out to my sword.

“Oh gods, I just realized. It is all about your obsession with me, isn’t it?” She feigned a retch. “She was the pauper’s version of me. Did you pretend she was me in the dark of the night? Did you call out my name. How grotesque. How pathetic. Did she know that she was nothing but a—”

The Lucis leapt from Leofric’s scabbard and into my waiting hand. The iron scattered around the battlefield forged it into my great-sword. My Lucis. I cut off her vile words with a slash.

She managed to duck underneath it and away unscathed, but at least it shut her up.

Asher was just fumbling his way back to his feet as I passed him by. His eyes were still bulging out of his head a bit, but at least he could stand. She hadn’t done any permanent damage.

Orphia opened her mouth to spit out some new horrible lie, and I fired off a mind-strike into her face. She didn’t get to see me naked, she didn’t get any of the polite jibing I’d sent her way before, I showed her what I was going to do to her corpse when I was done with her.

The blue flush faded from her face as she paled, leaving behind a twisted mask of disgust and horror. I spun my sword overhand and then advanced.

For the first time in her new life, Orphia made a smart choice. She ran.

She was faster than me, there was no denying that, but I didn’t tire. She could run as fast as she wanted, and I’d always be there right behind her.

Every blade on the battlefield sang as I ran by, every piece of metal resonating with the Lucis through my Artifice. All blades were one blade. All metal was one metal. I picked them up behind me as I went. A whirling mass of weapons and scraps followed me like a wave. She twisted to launch a bolt of lightning back at me from the tip of her spear, and I ran right through it. The electricity splashed into my chest, set every muscle twitching and burning. It couldn’t stop me. Nothing could stop me now.

She still tried to distract me. To make me lose that focus. “Did your whore know you were a monster? Did she know you were the Voidgod reborn? Did she know that you were always going to end up killing her anyway?”

I cut at her, and the wave of iron leapt past me. She had to leap to the side to avoid the sheet of blades flung at her back, and she had to stay down to avoid the torrent of shrapnel that followed. I caught up to her when she was still lying face down in the dirt. A quick kick rolled her over, and a quick stamp shattered her spear. Staring up at me with her chest heaving, there was a moment where I almost believed her lies. I saw Seren lying beneath me.

I saw the hatred in Orphia’s eyes, and I knew that they were nothing alike. Sharing a shape meant nothing. I raised the Lucis to put an end to her, once and for all.

That was when I realized that Orphia was smiling. Not at me, never at me, but past me. I spun to defend myself, but Leo wasn’t there.

Leofric was fighting Asher, and Mercy wasn’t helping. She was just standing there on the sidelines as they threw acid and lightning back and forth, watching it happen like she couldn’t decide whose side she was on.

Chapter 23

“No.” The cold rage in my stomach withered and died as fear for Asher throttled it. I couldn’t lose anyone else today. I couldn’t let him get hurt. Not for the sake of petty revenge. I turned and ran.

The battlefield that had passed in a blur when my eyes were locked on a target now seemed to be a thousand miles long. I reached out to the weapons of the fallen and stripped iron from their armor, but all of the best pickings had already been wasted on Orphia, and I struggled to gather more than enough to forge a second sword. It didn’t matter. It would do. It would have to.

Asher rarely fought alone. He always had me or Seren at his side, protecting him while he cast his spells. I knew that he could move at a decent pace because we never had to slow down for him during our cross-country hikes, but I’d never seen him ducking and dodging around acid-blasts before. The serpentine quality of his appearance really jumped out when he was leaping and lunging like a striking cobra. Even so, I could see his robes being eaten away by acid in more than a few patches. Making matters worse, he didn’t seem to see the horde of Khorkhoi coming up from behind him. The ground here was too solid for them to burrow, but by staying low to the ground and slithering they were surprisingly stealthy despite the bright red of their segmented bodies.

I didn’t know what Asher was casting, but it seemed ridiculously fast compared to his usual spells, and ridiculously slow compared to the rate that Leofric could pour out his attacks. Little thunderclaps popped, and flashes of white-blue lightning leapt out towards the other Eternal. Never coming close to making contact, but providing Leo with some dodging to do so he couldn’t focus exclusively on drowning Asher in acid.

I was running wild now, wishing I’d picked up Celerity Surge or at least put some effort into improving my speed. The three figures on the horizon flew towards me as fast as I could make them but even so I knew it wasn’t going to be enough. Leo’s worms reared up behind Asher to strike, and Leo raised both his hands to unleash the glowing ball of green energy he held between them. Mercy stood there, just watching it happen like it wasn’t her best friend in this whole world dying.

In desperation, I swept the flat of my blade at the worms, but I had no focus. The mass of metal chasing along beside me didn’t leap out in a clean cut to strike them down, the gathered metal thumped into me instead, blasting me off my feet, sending me tumbling through the air.

Riding the wave of shrapnel. I hit Asher full-on. I wrapped my arms around him as he tried to squirm free, and I bore him down to the ground. Leo’s lethal blast passed overhead.

The Khorkhoi lunged for me. Each one of them was bigger than it had any right to be—twice the size of the ones I’d found out in the desert. Like Leo was printing them off magnified. Their lamprey teeth skidded off what was left of my armor, but when they found a gap, they plunged right in, hooking into my flesh, burrowing inside me as deep as they could go.

Teeth scraped over ribs that spear strikes had already cracked. My bare shoulder was gouged open, and the largest of the Khorkhoi coiled itself around me as it’s throat worked, sucking blood and fresh shredded meat up its tubular body.

I reached for the Primal Pillar and found my Restoration was still dull and grey. I should have saved it. Even when I touched Asher before the constricting Khorkhoi dragged me up and off him, it didn’t light up. I’d wasted it on some stupid crossbow wound. “I do not suppose that you have any other powers gifted from the Void that might turn this situation around?”

“Nope.” I strained against the Khorkhoi, trying to pull its jaws out from where they were scraping into my collarbone. “Just that one really stupid impulse purchase.”

Leo’s next acid blast came, and all I could do to save Asher was throw myself off balance and into its path. The green spray washed over the Khorkhoi without leaving a mark, then started eating my flesh away. Now felt like a good time to start screaming and never stop. Being dissolved is not fun, kids. Don’t try this at home.

I’d kind of hoped the acid might stop the worms, but apparently, they were made of the same goop. Leo’s primordial ooze. Where the conqueror worms weren’t already gorging themselves on my flesh, the acid did its work, burning away skin and flesh and bone and leaving puckered sores everywhere it had splashed. I was making some truly animal noises as I fought to straighten up and fight using muscles that had been dissolved away. It felt like using Artifice on what was left of my armor to puppeteer myself around was the only way I could even stay standing.

Leofric closed in on us now, more worms curling out from his hands, swelling as they fell to the dust and then springing forward, only half-grown, to catch Asher’s frantic lightning crackles and die. The Eternal himself didn’t flinch or slow. He knew now that he had us at his mercy.

“Mercy.” It slipped out in a desperate wet gasp as the shoulder worm broke through and burst my lung. “Mercy!”

One moment, Leo was strolling in with as smug a look on his face as I’d ever seen, the next he took an arrow to the knee.

A barrage of them came, piercing through the worms that feasted on me, plucking them off and casting them aside. As more tried to lunge in at Asher, she hit them too. Everything that she should have been doing from the start, she finally did.

She was beside us a moment later, kicking worms away, hooking her fingers into what was left of the ones hanging onto me, and hauling them off. I nearly fell without the crushing support of the Khorkhoi, but that same hand was there to catch me, to hold me up.

Leo was keeping his distance, and Orphia was closing the distance from where I’d left her. We had a moment. “Why?”

The tears in my eyes were all from pain, not from emotion. Honest.

Mercy met my gaze for just a moment, then she forced herself to look away. “You’re… you.”

I coughed up blood. A lot of blood. That was probably bad news. “Always… have been.”

She slapped me on the back of the head, and I nearly toppled right over. “Shut up, you ass.”

“Yes, boss,” I spluttered.

“I thought that you were changing. I thought that you were…” She looked at me again, and this time her gaze didn’t falter. She didn’t even blink. “I thought the bad stuff was taking over. When you went off after the bitch, I thought… This is it. This is who he is now. A killer. A monster.”

Orphia had come to a halt, and Leofric was pacing around us. Asher had returned to his feet casting a glance between us before he set himself to gathering power for his next spell.

I wheezed, trying to get a word out. “Always…”

“Shut up.” She shoved and caught me again. “You threw yourself in front of the acid, the worms. You didn’t care if you died, you just… you care about us. Voidgod voodoo or not. You would never do anything that would hurt us. Never.”

“I wouldn’t…” I struggled in a breath. “I couldn’t.”

“Right back at the start, someone shot an arrow at Asher, and you caught it. It went right through your hand.” She chuckled. “I thought, my god he’s dumb. A complete and utter idiot. How did he even tie his shoes by himself?”

“Circle back… to good stuff.” I tried to shove her back, but I was about as strong as a wet noodle at this point.

“But even though I knew you were a total moron, I could see you were a good guy. Right then and there. I knew.”

Restoration flared back to life, and the same green energy that Leo had been using to blast us and spurt out worms flooded through my body, stitching me back together, closing up the worst of my wounds, even crunching my horn back out of the stump and into its place. I hadn’t expected to get that back. My lungs popped back to full capacity too, and all my words came pouring out, “I should have told you everything. I know I should have told you, but I was scared. You didn’t trust me, and if I suddenly announced I’d picked up murder powers from binding too many shards … I thought you’d… I didn’t want you to… I didn’t want things to change. I wanted us all to be friends and go on adventures and... I just… I just want a quiet life, you know?”

Mercy raised an eyebrow. “How’s that working out for you?”

I took one good deep breath and then I sighed out: “I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” Mercy shifted uncomfortably. “But if you ever make me admit that in front of another person, I will shoot you in the face.”

Orphia had circled around behind me, yet another weapon borrowed from yet another corpse in her hand, but Mercy had eyes locked on her. I kept my focus on Leo. He had let the neon green of Primal power fade from his hands, but there was no question he was just waiting for his moment to strike.

I clapped a hand on Mercy’s shoulder and willed a new load of arrows into her quiver. Asher gave us a nod. That was when Leo’s voice echoed out once more. “So you have chosen the path of wickedness and sin too. Do you have no shame? Did you think that the Solar Court blessed you with their gifts that you might use them against your kin?”

“We’re family, Leo.” I said it, but Asher’s head bobbed along with my words. “Not you.”

“Orphia!” Leo roared out, all the divine charisma draining away as he barked orders. “Together!”

A plume of dust and gravel was kicked up as he charged. Behind me, I could hear Orphia’s battle-cry. Even with their army dead and scattered, they were coming for us. Even with just the two of them, given Leo’s overwhelming age and power, they could still win against us, battered and broken as we were.

So you cannot believe just how hard I started laughing when I realized that Leo’s charge had curved. The first few steps had been right towards us, but then once Orphia was barreling at us and too late to change course, he spun on his heel and headed for the mountain pass as fast as his little legs would carry him.

It might have been a ruse—he might have been planning to rain acid down on us from a distance—but it wasn’t. I’d seen his face. He was scared. Just the same as Briar had been. He knew that I could permanently kill Eternals, and now that he didn’t have overwhelming odds on his side, he didn’t want to play anymore. It didn’t matter that if he’d had the balls he could have taken us all on. It didn’t matter that I still had his ancient-relic symbol-of-station sword. It didn’t matter that if he turned and ran, Orphia was certain to die. He didn’t give a shit about any of that. All Leo cared about was Leo.

I spun to face Orphia as she charged, and I saw the exact moment that she realized he’d abandoned her. I’d seen her killed before, and I’d seen her hurt before, but nothing would ever be as satisfying as that moment when I saw her betrayed. When the realization sank in that she meant nothing to this man she’d devoted herself to, body and soul.

For the first time since Seren died, I felt something like a smile creeping onto my face. There was no joy in this, no pleasure, not really, but there was a grim satisfaction in watching her lose everything, the same way that I’d lost everything. Maybe I was a monster. I could live with that.

There was no strain when I leapt forward and parried the blow she had aimed at Mercy. There was no effort in twisting and turning away each desperate swing of her borrowed sword. Seren was with me in those moments—I could still feel her cool touch on my wrist, adjusting my grip, my stance, making everything she touched just a little bit closer to perfection.

I didn’t need the strength of my godly body. I didn’t need any magic or powers. I knew how to fight.

As we spun around each other, I could see that Mercy and Asher had turned their attention to Leofric. Even as he sprinted away, he was unleashing worm after worm to cover his escape. The Khorkhoi leapt up to meet Mercy’s arrows as they soared across the distance. Each one dying making a perfect catch. A never-ending trail of corpses just so that he could run away. How many of them had he left through the millennia he’d walked this world? How many good people had died for his egomania?

Orphia didn’t have a chance when it came down to it. I’d had the best teacher in the world, and she’d had Leo. I’d had someone with infinite patience while she had a man who’d break her jaw for talking out of turn.

She had her back to Mercy and Asher now, frantically parrying away my attacks as they came but never able to launch a counter. She didn’t have the time. Every movement of my sword was another link in the chain, and while I grew more and more confident and skilled with every motion, she was only becoming exhausted. Her parries became clumsier, her movements more sluggish. She tripped and stumbled about the battlefield, falling over the corpses of her army where I had laid them down.

There was no challenge here, no risk, just a petulant child who thought that she was better than everyone else. How would Seren have dealt with her?

My next lunge knocked Orphia’s feeble attempt at a parry aside, smashed through the lacquered pauldron on her shoulder, and slit along the side of her neck.

She dropped her sword and grabbed for her throat, frantic and scrabbling at the sudden fountain of red. Every step that she stumbled back, I matched, until she fell back and switched to crab walking away. That was when I let my foot come down on her ankle, and the farce of a chase stopped.

Even to the last moment, she was defiant. She spat blood at me and hissed, “You’re nothing. This is nothing. I’ll be back. I’ll come back and then…”

She was so pathetic that I almost stayed my hand. Almost. “No. You won’t.”

I brought the Lucis down into her chest.

[196 Damage]

You never know that Death is at your side until he decides to make himself known. He comes and goes so fast that I can’t imagine most people would spot him even if they were looking the right way. But for me, time ground to a halt as the black robed figure hung there. “What is this one’s destination?”

Until now, all I’d had to do was will them not to come back. To wish for their deaths to be permanent. But I suppose that now I knew there were other worlds that they might get dumped on, I had to get more technical. The trouble was, no matter where I sent Orphia, she was going to be a problem. Back on Earth, she’d probably try to hunt down everyone I ever cared about and torture them. In the land of the dead, she’d probably swell up into a monster like Gorgafel. “Is there somewhere I can send her where she is just gone, forever?”

“The Void.” Death didn’t sound disgusted or disdainful, he’d seen it all before.

“Then take her to the Void.” I remembered my manners at the last moment. “Please.”

He seemed to pause for a moment when I said please, then swooped back into motion. “As you wish, psychopomp.”

Time snapped back into action as blood exploded up from Orphia to cover me. Lying there, split open and oozing gore, it was the best she’d ever looked. There was no point in staring down into her face and watching as life left her body, I already knew she was dead. Big D didn’t show up for near misses.

I hauled my sword back out as I passed her by. Bigger fish to fry.

In the gap between the mountains, the Serpent’s Gate, Leofric fled with all the speed he could muster. A trail of dead worms lay behind him, and the open expanse of the Voidgod’s home turf lay ahead. A whole open world for him to lose himself in, find cover, find allies, come back at us again when we least expected it. No.

He was as responsible for Seren’s death as anyone. If he hadn’t ambushed us and driven her to desperation. If it wasn’t for him, she’d still be alive. He didn’t get to walk away unscathed.

Mercy lined up her shot, and Asher tossed the roiling ball of lightning and fire that he’d spent all this time preparing into her path. With a gust that cleared all the grit and dust of the shattered stone away, the tempest arrow soared forth. Fire, wind, and lightning coiled around that arrow’s flight, soaring all the way across the open plain in a beautiful arc.

At the very limit of my vision, I could see Leofric throwing up worms to intercept it. Huge monstrous things. Tangles of blood red flesh that did nothing to slow the storm that was coming down on him.

The arrow struck home, and the spell detonated.

Normally, I don’t get to see Asher’s handiwork as I’m too close to the epicenter of the explosion to really appreciate all the pretty blossoming flames, the shots of lightning leaping out in fractals, the colors, and the roar. When it cleared, Leofric was lying still on the ground. Then a moment later, there was nothing left to see at all but the shattered and melted remains of his golden armor.

Legendary Foes Defeated!

Potency increased to 54

Piety increased to 10

Twin Strike: Rank 7/10

Resonant Dominion: Rank 1/10

860 Experience Gained

8000 Glory Gained

Tier of Glory Ascended!

That was the last of them. The other soldiers were dead or scattering, and the leftover worm parts were done twitching. The battle was over. I let the Lucis fall from my hands as I tried to get a breath and found myself choking on it. The cold hate, the fury, it had held everything down until now. It had crushed everything with vengeance, but now it was spent, and I was done. Hollow.

Chapter 24

Mercy crossed the distance to me, already yelling, “Don’t think you’re off the hook, you lying piece of…”

Asher caught her by the sleeve, and she spun to face him snarling, “Did you know about this? Did you know what he’d done?! What he’d become?”

There was never a readable expression on Asher’s face, but he shook his head slowly at Mercy.

I was already away from them, back to the place I needed to go, kneeling beside all that was left of Seren. I returned to my task, uncurling each broken finger and smoothing them out, unwrapping her spine until she lay in the shape of something human again. Every time my hands touched her, I hoped that Primal would flare to life. That I was somehow mistaken. That the vital spark that was her was still here. It didn’t. I wasn’t. She was cold to the touch.

“You can spin any lies you want about him not knowing that binding the shards would connect him to the Voidgod. None of us expected that, but this is different. He chose it. He chose to put Glory in it and make himself into a monster.” Mercy was still ranting, and I could hear her, even if my brain wasn’t letting me respond right now.

Asher was trailing along after her. “Mercy, we will discuss this in great detail, and we shall seek his reasoning in what was clearly a serious lapse in judgment. But not now…”

“What is so important that…” She trailed off when she saw me. When she saw Seren. “Oh.”

Asher led her away and left Seren and me alone.

My body shook, but the tears didn’t seem to come. Maybe the rage had frozen them all solid. My hands were quaking as I smoothed out her hair, and when I brought her swords up to rest on top of her chest, curling her fingers around the hilts. I’d made her those swords, and she’d sworn herself to me.

She’d never even had time to realize that she was way too good for me. She never had the chance to break up with me and tell me I was a worthless loser in some old timey language I wouldn’t properly understand. Everything that we were going to do together, it was all done. There would be no more.

It took a little tug of Artifice to bring every sword on the battlefield to me. Then another little push to shape them into a jagged tomb around where Seren lay. I didn’t know what the Alvaren do with their dead. We’d never talked about it. Funeral arrangements had seemed so distant a worry, what with us both being immortal and all. Except, apparently, we weren’t. Not both of us.

Sometime between me kneeling down here and me building the sword shrine to Seren, the sun had slipped down into the mountain peaks, and Asher had come to stand by me. “I never observed any time that she faltered in her courage.”

“It wasn’t… she wasn’t brave. She was too stubborn to let anyone see her scared.”

He still pressed on like he could give a whole sermon to me on Seren. As if I didn’t know everything he knew and so much more about who she was. “We are Eternal, and she was not. Yet she flung herself into danger as readily as those of us who could walk away from it unscathed, regardless of the outcome.”

I smiled, but it didn’t reach further than my mouth. “Yeah, she was crazy.”

Mercy was lingering behind Asher like she didn’t want me to know she was there. Like she was embarrassed just to be seen with me right now. “You know we weren’t besties, or whatever, but… yeah. She was pretty decent, for an Alvaren. She was… good people.”

“She was a psycho, and you hated her, and that’s okay because I… I didn’t.” The tears started to gather in my eyes at last, and the last words came out in a croak. “I liked her.”

Mercy scoffed. “Well, yeah, that’s why I wasn’t the one shtupping her.”

Asher made a little strangled sound “Mercy.”

I almost managed a laugh, but it caught in my throat. We stayed just a little bit longer as the sun sank the rest of the way down, and the alien stars came out above our heads.

“Are we done here? We’ve still got a dragon to slay and a world to save.”

Asher sounded truly appalled. “Mercy!”

“I’m done.” I said it before I thought it. Pushing myself up off the ground. “I’m… I’m done.”

Mercy kicked me in the back of the knee, sending me stumbling towards the jagged edifice I’d hauled up for Seren. “So now can we talk about why you decided to make yourself into a Diet Voidgod?”

Why I’d thought she’d give me a minute to breathe before she started in on me about this was beyond me. I held up my hands. “I’m an idiot, and being able to kill enemies with one touch sounded cool. I didn’t know it would work across my Sphere of Influence. Pretty sure it wasn’t meant to. Like… I don’t think I’m meant to have both sets of powers? I don’t think they’re meant to mix.”

Her brows were drawn down, and she didn’t look all that impressed with my answer when she kicked me again. “Why did you do it?”

I stumbled back, but the violence was actually helping. My heart felt like it was beating again. The brief thumps of her boot on my skin drew me back into my body. “I’m an idiot. Did we not cover this?”

“No.” She swung for my face again, and this time I dodged. “You’re not an idiot.”

That stopped me dead, so her next slap hit me square in the face. “Mercy, are you feeling alright?”

She was so angry that she actually stopped hitting me. “Shut up. You’re not this stupid. You’re not so stupid that you’d make yourself into… him, just so that things are a little bit easier. I don’t believe it. So tell me the truth, right now. Or we’re done.”

Both her and Asher were just standing there, staring at me, waiting for me to announce I was the devil in disguise or something. The silence dragged on and on until I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin, and then finally, I admitted what I hadn’t even wanted to think before. “We’re going to lose.”

They both looked stunned. I was the hype guy, the one who always insisted we were going to win, even when there were giant monsters chewing on my guts. That we were the best. That we were awesome. We were, we are, that wasn’t the point. “We’re still babies compared to the Eternals that went up against the Voidgod before, and he wiped the floor with them. Compared to Briar? She can make the whole world freeze just by thinking it, and the Voidgod kicked her ass. Unless someone does something different, he is going to beat us.”

Mercy covered her face with her hands and screamed. Good thing we were all alone in the middle of nowhere. “So what, you thought you’d beat him at his own game? He’s a god! It’s in the name!”

“I can kill Eternals because I’m a Void Eternal.” Felt weird saying that out loud. “I can… I can send their souls away so that they never come back, and I thought that if I could make that stronger—if I could make myself stronger—then when the time came and I had the Rusted Blade back together again, I could… I could do it. I could kill him. For good this time.”

Asher cocked his head to the side, probably still dead on one side from Mercy’s bellowing. “If that was the case, then why did you fail to inform us of all this from the start?”

It was even harder to force this out than the admission that we were going to lose. It took all my courage to finally put it into words. “Because I was scared. You already thought I was kind of shady because the Lunar gods picked me, then you started acting all suspicious, and… I didn’t want to lose you guys. I can’t… I can’t do this on my own.”

Mercy squatted down, hands still covering her face, and groaned. “I take it back. You are a complete and utter idiot.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“A dunce,” Asher added.

“Right!”

He advanced on me, pointing a finger, and despite the fact that he was smaller than most of my meals nowadays, I found myself backing away. “An imbecile.”

“Okay…” I grumbled.

“A half-wit moron, with intellect comparable to that of a crustacean.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, wondering where he was going with this. “Um.”

“An ignorant, vacuous cretin.“

“Ow?”

His clawed finger jabbed into me, and the suddenness of it shut me up. This was Asher who never lost his temper, never raised his voice, and never even bothered when Mercy and I were doing our best to tag-team annoy the crap out of him.

He was shouting now. “If you had approached us with the choice that you faced, do you not think that we would have taken your fears into account? That we would have not weighed all of the information available to us? Did you not believe that we had sense enough to see the correct course?”

In hindsight, yes, maybe I should not have been so stupid. “But… what if you thought…”

“Fear cannot govern you, and no choice that we undertake is made in a vacuum.” He jabbed me, again and again. “Whatever any one of us has decided, it has changed the course for all. You were a fool to do this without us.”

“I…” There wasn’t really any way to deny that. “Yeah?”

“And you were twice a fool to keep it hidden from us. To hobble your own power when you could have turned the tide of our battles, again and again. It is this that I struggle to forgive, Maulkin. Not your impetuous choice, nor your deceptions, but the simple fact that our quest has been imperiled by your refusal to take responsibility for your choices.”

My mouth was hanging open, and I had to force it into motion to mumble out. “I’m sorry.”

He looked me in the eyes, and he hissed, “If you had not been such a coward, your lover would have lived.”

“Asher!” Mercy bounced up and took him by the shoulder, but the damage was already done.

I could see it all playing out in my head. Everything would have been different. Still, Asher raged on, “Would you have me deceive him in turn to repay this buffoonery? If he had slain Leofric’s minions from the beginning, then there would have been no escalation of the conflict, and his retainer would not have sought to summon allies. If he had just…”

Mercy clamped her hands around Asher’s snout and whispered, “Shut up.”

“He’s right.” That hurt almost as much as losing Seren. Knowing that I could have saved her if I’d just—

“That doesn’t mean he should say it.” Mercy cut me off. “You’re going to have to carry that for the rest of… well, forever.”

I sank down to the ground once more. “It wasn’t like I didn’t know it was my fault.”

That put an end to the arguing, at least for a little while. The other two set about the business of getting us ready to get back on the road again, scraping together what supplies they could and handing me anything that needed repairing or replacing to fabricate them a new one. The special glass cages that we’d borrowed from Talon’s Keep to transport the butterflies were smashed to pieces, their inhabitants long gone by now, causing havoc somewhere out there in the world. The butterflies that hadn’t been crispy fried anyway. We just left them where they lay when I put the backpack back together.

Most of the iron I’d carried in with me was gone. Melted away to nothing by Leofric’s acid. Most of the metal from the fallen soldiers had been cobbled into the shrine to Seren. I scraped together enough to put my armor back into some sort of decent shape, then strained a little more off the dead men, pulling out hobnails and shattered links of mail to form a second great-sword to match the Lucis. The other two crept up on me again when it looked like I was done.

Mercy had her arms crossed. Great. Stern talking time. “Maulkin. You need to trust us. If we haven’t run away from you yet, we aren’t going to. Okay? So this is your chance. Are you keeping any more secrets?”

I racked my brains. “I sometimes look at your butts when you’re walking in front of me.”

“Something we didn’t already know?” She was trying not to laugh. That was probably a good sign. That probably meant that we were going to get past this. That things might be okay again. At least between the three of us.

“I’m sorry.” To my eternal shame, my voice broke a little bit as I said it, and then suddenly, Mercy was there with her arms wrapped around me, and a moment later, hesitantly, Asher tangled his scaly limbs about us both too.

We were only there for a second before one of us had to ruin the moment. Asher mumbled into my back, “I do not approve of the butt staring.”

“Oh, like I haven’t caught you staring at mine,” I mumbled back into Mercy’s hair, drawing a wet sounding laugh out of her.

He couldn’t help himself; he had to snap back, “Solely because your posterior fills such a large proportion of my line of sight.”

“So then why do I keep seeing you staring at Mercy’s?”

He let out a little exasperated huff and pulled away, leaving me and Mercy still clasped together. It sounded like she was trying really hard not to laugh out loud, vibrating against my chest instead. “I look to Mercy because she is scouting ahead of us, and I am attempting to ascertain which direction she is headed so that my spells do not intersect with her and cause undue injury.”

“And you’re just checking which way she’s going every time she’s bending over?”

He sounded genuinely aghast, and I could feel Mercy’s tears of laughter soaking through my armor now. “Maulkin! I do not know what you are attempting to imply.”

I lifted my own tear-striped face up to wiggle my eyebrows. “Oh, you know what I’m implying.”

He huffed and stormed away from us both, heading towards the Serpent’s Gate. Then before he was out of earshot, some terrible magnetism seemed to draw him back around to very carefully declare, “The idea that I could take a carnal interest in someone occupying a human form is obscene.”

She’d shoved me away by this point, doubling over with laughter and conveniently presenting the subject of our discussion to Asher. I pointed to it. “But if that was an Inyoka booty, you’d be down to clown?”

Asher looked genuinely perplexed. “The inclusion of harlequins within your mating rituals only serves to further prove the incompatibility.”

Mercy gave me one last look before setting off after him—one without any mirth or forced kindness. It was pity, and I hated it. “You’ll be okay.”

I took one last stare at Seren’s shrine and shook my head with a rueful smile. I might be able to pretend I was still alive, and I might be able to keep on fighting, but “okay” felt like an even more distant fantasy than killing a Voidgod right now.

Until today, I had never understood why so many of the Eternals had gone mad in the end. Not just the ones that had just given up and slinked off into obscurity or let themselves stay buried when they died, but the few who still remained active and fighting who had all completely forgotten the first thing about being a decent person, treating other people like they were people, not things to be used. For the first time, I got it.

If every death hurt this much, if every day that ticked by took another person you cared for, no wonder they ended up not caring. I could barely stand to be alive right now knowing that I’d never see Seren again, but if you added that up a dozen times, how long would it take before feeling nothing was better?

Anything had to be better than this.

I trudged after the other two as the night rolled on, passing through the Serpent’s Gate without even noticing and heading out from that dull grey passage into the lush foothills that lay beyond it. I’d set out thinking we were going to be face to face with some dead wasteland like we’d encountered by the Bastion, but it looked like there was no sign of the Voidgod’s occupation left. Bushes and trees blossomed, even growing out of the cliff-faces at odd angles, and the colors were so powerful that even by moonlight it looked so vibrant as to be almost fake like the bright berries and fruits were Christmas tree decorations that someone had forgotten to pack away.

Dawn was a long time coming, but the deep shadows of the night were a fine fit for my mood. I’d make it a few steps sometimes without remembering, then I’d turn my head, and Seren wouldn’t be there, and I’d feel a tiny tug of panic in my gut that we’d forgotten her. We’d left her behind. I’d catch myself stopping and turning before I could convince myself that she was gone.

And she was gone. That settled over me like a shroud after the first few twitchy glances back, and all the pretty scenery in the world couldn’t punch through it. I trudged onwards, following in Mercy’s footsteps because what else was there to do? I’d come this far, I’d been through everything I’d been through, and I’d made the biggest mistakes I’d ever be able to make. The only way to go was forward because these people were dumb enough to trust me again, and I’d rather die myself than let them think for a moment that they couldn’t.

At sunrise, the other two stopped to get their bearings, and I slumped down onto the road by their feet. I say road, but there wasn’t even a dirt track out here. The area around the Serpent’s Gate had been cleared thanks to Araphel’s deathly powers, but this far in, everything was overgrown, thick with scrub and ferns. The purple grass we’d seen in the hinterlands had grown here into something massive and abundant, stretching up past my knees and humming as the breeze ran over its blades.

Mercy’s hand came down to stroke over the grass almost involuntarily as it tickled by her, twisting the leaves between her fingers. Asher was quite firmly a city boy, and he treated every touch of the grass like he was bumping into somebody. You could almost hear him struggling not to apologize to the shrubs when he tripped over them.

I didn’t feel anything towards these plants one way or another, but a quick flex of Artifice skinned some down to their roots and used the fibers to make new flights for Mercy’s arrows. I wasn’t up to the task of weaving anyone a jungle-style outfit from the grass, but those same fibers made neat little patches for where Asher’s robes had been eaten away. As long as I kept myself busy doing things, I didn’t have to think. As long as I didn’t have to think, I didn’t have to remember.

In pursuit of busywork, I turned my attention inwards. I had a new Tier of Glory to advance, pushing me a little bit closer to godhood, and I had enough experience to buy some new skills or divinities too. As we traipsed on, I read through all the different skills and powers that were already available to me that I’d just completely forgotten about.

The obvious Pillar to upgrade was Aether since if all went well, we’d soon be coming into possession of another pair of shards, but the prospect of a battle with some ancient dragon between now and then gave me a little bit of pause. We needed to win first. And besides, once we had all the shards and stuck them together, wouldn’t that make the whole sword just count as one thing? Maybe I didn’t need to bind any more bits to my soul.

It felt like a slap in the face when I looked at all the Aether Divinities and realized how badly I’d screwed up. Right there at the lowest rung of the ladder of abilities that I could purchase was Soul Stone. When Seren died, I could have caught her. I could have trapped her soul in a gemstone or something and carried her around with me and found some way to grow a new body for her once I had gone a lot further into the Primal upgrades. I mean, okay maybe that last bit wasn’t true, if somebody like Leo had gone centuries and only mastered worms, putting together a fully functional girlfriend would probably have taken an idiot like me a long, long time, but I still could have kept her. I could have trapped her soul and carried her around with me for all eternity and… yeah, she probably wouldn’t have liked that.

The few times we had brushed up against Alvaren theology in conversation she had been pretty hyped about their afterlife. I wasn’t sure if what had happened to her counted as dying in battle strictly speaking, but I figured it to be close enough. It was still a battle, even if you didn’t know the other side were your enemy. If I’d taken that away from her, trapped her in a shiny rock, just so that I could keep forgetting I was carrying her around like a Tamagotchi, she would not have been impressed.

When all of this was over, when we had the shards, and the world was saved, then I could start thinking about getting Seren back. I knew the way to the land of the dead, and even if Big D wasn’t exactly my best friend, we were on speaking terms. Someday, I’d work it out, pull her out, and give her a rocking body again. Death was not the end. I knew this.

That helped me pull myself together a little bit.

“Hey, guys, what should I level up?”

It was the first thing I’d said in about twelve hours, so the other two were understandably surprised. If you’ve never surprised an Inyoka before, their tails go rigid for just a moment like they’ve had an electric cattle-prod jammed right up under there.

Mercy let out a little splutter, struggling to sound mad at me. “Oh now you want our opinions.”

I managed a smile. Everything was going to be okay. Even if I had to tear down the heavens and burn the whole world to get Seren back, it was going to be okay. “Well, yeah, I figure if I’m going to unlock the new Betray All My Friends and Ruin Everything Forever power, I should run it by you first.”

She snorted in a very unladylike way. “Maybe skip that one.”

“Well, I’m wide open to suggestions.” I spread out my arms as I strolled along to catch up to them. “If you want to know what the Void Pillars can do, just imagine the uh… evil version of all your ones.”

Mercy flinched when I said that, but Asher notably didn’t. He just tilted his head to the side as if he was weighing something up. “Evil seems to be a less than helpful descriptor.”

“Okay, let’s say… destructive instead?” That was probably more accurate too. “Like, whatever you can make with the shiny light ones, the void one can unmake.”

“Your display with the soldiers was the antithesis of…” Asher paused for input.

“That was the opposite of Primal. Slaughter.” I was still not feeling super comfortable talking about my Voidy powers, even now that everything was out in the open and I wasn’t being quite as much of an idiot as before. So needless to say, I was babbling a bit. “Maybe you could call it unhealing?”

“Given that our task is the removal of life from a specific powerful individual, perhaps it would be best to focus your investments there.” Asher seemed more amused with my gibbering than annoyed, so I was calling that a win—although it might have just been that I had already used up his full year’s allocation of annoyance already today.

Mercy piped up, “Or you could get better at healing. That thing goldilocks did where he healed everyone with a wave could definitely come in handy.”

I blinked shut, searching for anything resembling the mass-heal that he’d used. Mercy was right, being able to get a whole army back on its feet like that had been amazing, even if the one doing it had been a giant poop wrapped in shiny gold tinfoil. “That one… I think that’s a fair distance up the Pillar. I can’t even see it yet.”

Asher’s pupils narrowed to slits as he considered me. “Perhaps you could tell us what is available to you if your Primal antithesis is advanced?”

I closed my eyes to do just that when Mercy coughed, aggressively loud, in my ear. “Or he could stop putting glory into evil void powers?”

Asher shrugged it off. “As I said, I do not believe there to be any particular morality tied to any one of the gifts of godhood, only in the manner in which they are used.”

“I could always just stick with Artifice and get better at building stuff,” I said hopefully. Making stuff did not make me uncomfortable. Making stuff was fun, and being able to lob things around with my Artifice was making it even more fun. I hadn’t dug too far into the mechanics of my new Resonant Dominion skill, but it seemed like the natural extension of Twin Strike, tapping into more and more things of the same type, just like when I’d called to all the swords on the battlefield.

Asher dismissed it with a wave. “As tempting as it is to have marginally improved equipment, I suspect that something more potent may be required if we mean to put an end to an ancient wyrm and a god in the coming days.”

Okay, Slaughter powers. “I’ve already got Deathtouch, then the other starter Divinities are: Slaughter Infusion and Extinction.”

Mercy was grinding her teeth as she walked. Did Eternal life come with dental? I’d need to check next time I spoke to my union guy. “Oh yeah, none of that sounds evil as hell.”

I pretended not to hear her. “Infusion just lets me put uh… murder power into my sword when I’m whacking things…”

She rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that just swords anyway…”

“And Extinction…” I read through the description a few times because the first time it sounded insane, and then every follow up read-through made it sound even worse. “Yikes. That is about hurting everyone related to the person you’re killing. Hitting people so hard that even their grandma feels it. Wiping out bloodlines. Looks like I could clear out whole species at the higher levels. That… doesn’t sound good.”

While Mercy’s jaw was hanging open in abject horror, Asher just nodded along. “I can think of tactical advantages, certainly. The ability to target a weaker family member to do injury to a stronger one? Or to remove a swarm of related enemies in a single blow. Consider our encounters with some of the more monstrous denizens of Amaranth, surely there are certain species that the world would be better without?”

I considered it for a moment. “Mosquitos?”

“Abominations?” Asher countered.

“This is real supervillain stuff.” Mercy had that look on her face, that one she always got when she was right, and she knew that I knew she was right, and the whole argument was over. “Wiping out whole families. That is messed up.”

That had been what I was thinking, but I didn’t want to make any snap decisions since all my snap decisions seemed to end in me alienating everyone and getting my girlfriend murdered. “I’m with Mercy on that one.”

It was Asher’s turn to look perplexed. “Did I not just observe you massacring an entire battlefield of people?”

“Yeah, but they were trying to kill me, so it was… fair?” I trailed off towards the end there. It was fair, right? I’d given them more than ample opportunities to go away and not get murdered. They were the ones who’d insisted on having a fight, even though we were patently Eternals, and their boss was patently a dick-hole.

Mercy clapped her hands to get us back on topic. “We can do moral philosophy lessons later. Let’s just… what will you unlock if you pump up the Slaughter?”

A blink provided the less than savory answers. “Drain and Blight.”

Have you ever heard someone chortle? It is not a good sound to be on the receiving end of. Give me a good guffaw any day. Mercy chortled at the name of my new options. “More good news!”

“Drain lets me steal health to heal myself,” I read out, “and Blight lets me permanently damage someone’s stats.”

Asher’s head tilted back the other way. We really needed to get him a stabilizer for that thing. “Stats?”

“Their Potency or whatever.”

He nudged me along, verbally. “Both of those seem supremely helpful for a frontline combatant.”

Mercy looked reluctant to agree with him—presumably because she spent every waking moment arguing with everyone—but eventually she gave a terse nod. “Weird as it is to vote yes on you making yourself a vampire, if you could start healing yourself more that would be handy. You do keep catching swords with your face.”

I held my hands up to frame my face. “Steel facials are how I stay this pretty.”

“That explains a lot.” She snorted. “I’d say bump up your Slaughter, grab them both.”

I blinked to do just that, then paused, squeezing one eye open to peer at her. “And you aren’t going to go nuts at me for picking the evil powers.”

“No. I understand what you’re doing now.” She rolled her eyes. “Dumbass.”

“Love you too.” I blew her a kiss, then got to work.

Chapter 25

Maulkin – Chagnar Faun of the Lunar and Void Court – 12th Tier of Glory

Statistics:

HP: 1670/1670

Devotion: 440/440

Attributes:

Potency: 54

Celerity: 26

Vitality: 20

Piety: 10

Divinities:

Aether – Rank 4: Soul Bond

Aether – Rank 4: Spirit Strike

Aether - Passive: Psychometry

Ascension – Rank 4: Ascendant Brutality

Ascension – Rank 4: Ascendant Cognition

Ascension- Rank 4: Ascendant Potency

Ascension – Rank 4: Potency Surge

Artifice – Rank 2: Active Artifice

Artifice – Rank 2: Inferior Architecture

Artifice – Rank 2: Inferior Weapons

Artifice – Rank 2: Inferior Armor

Artifice – Rank 2: Inferior Shrine Construction

Artifice – Passive: Sphere of Influence

Primal – Rank 1: Restoration

Primal – Passive: Lifesense

Slaughter – Rank 2: Deathtouch

Slaughter – Rank 2: Drain

Slaughter – Rank 2: Blight

Slaughter – Passive: Deathsense

Skills:

Combat: Rank 10/10

Sword: Rank 10/10

Mace: Rank 1/10

Polearm: Rank 2/10

Phalanx: Rank 8/10

Brawling: Rank 10/10

Brutality: Rank 10/10

Twin Strike: 10/10

Resonant Dominion: 2/10

Acrobatics: Rank 7/10

Climbing: Rank 1/10

Poison Resistance: Rank 10/10

Aether Resistance: Rank 5/10

Fire Resistance: Rank 1/10

Airstrike: Rank 7/10

Bestiary: Rank 3/10

Dungeoneering: Rank 2/10

Ancient History: Rank 1/10

Traits:

Relentless: The Faun are the greatest hunters on Amaranth, known for pursuing prey for days or even weeks at a time before closing in to strike.

Effect: Faun are immune to fatigue, their Attributes do not degrade over time without rest.

Psychopomp: You are a conveyor of souls, a guide or guardian akin to the reaper, who may push their incorporeal victims beyond the limits of the world and on into the next.

Effect: If you so choose, you may guide those who have been slaughtered to the afterlife of your choosing, sundering whatever connections they have to their mortal shell.

With that all done and dusted, I took a look around me with fresh eyes. Not literally. My eyeballs were the same, I was just feeling less sorry for myself. The terrain had been continually changing through our night-time march, and while the initial valley of the Serpent’s Gates was far behind us, more of the same pale sandstone jutted up everywhere I looked. Not very high though. There were raised plateaus dotted all over the place, breaking my line of sight to the horizon but never quite managing to achieve hill status. The same luminous fruits grew on every tree, and those trees seemed to spring up everywhere, out of the side of the plateau cliffs as often as on top of them or down here.

There was some treacherous part of me that really wanted to eat some of the glowing fruit, but I was 100% sure that I’d get yelled at for it. There was no way that they weren’t poisonous or radioactive or something. So I just stared at them longingly as we passed them by.

More and more of the plateaus soon covered the prairie until we found ourselves having to wedge our way through the bushes growing in the gaps between them. Mercy fell back, and I took point, turning the ancient and hallowed relic of the Lucis into a handy pruning tool.

Asher actually fell into step beside me, peering at the plants as I carved my way through, taking interest in the neon sap trickling out from every hole I hacked in the tangled wood. “Curious.”

That was all he said. I kept on waiting for some follow up, but no. That was his full opinion expressed. Yet still, he lingered at my elbow, making me pull every other cut to avoid slapping him with the back end of the sword. He was studying something—I was sure of that from his faintly dazed expression—but I couldn’t have told you what he was looking at.

“What?”

He didn’t seem to hear me, so I stopped with the chopping and turned to face him. “What is it?”

He crouched down at the side of one particularly robust shrub with berries so orange that nobody would believe they didn’t contain artificial colors. “The planting. It is… familiar.”

“Mercy, help! He’s being a vegetable detective.”

She didn’t bother to turn her head from her ongoing attempts to stare the undergrowth into the form of something she could shoot. “Good for him.”

“The positioning of these heavily rooted shrubs in the gullies where water would pool feels like a deliberate choice to maintain the structure of the area. The plantings on the plateaus appear erratic to the casual glance, but on examination, I see many pairings of a substantial fruit tree with a rather more lackluster appearing plant. As though attempts are being made to balance the nutrients within the soil. For all the appearance of chaos, I believe that we walk cultivated land.”

Mercy’s ears finally pricked up. “And what, you learned about chaos-farming in the library?”

He didn’t rise to the bait. “It is the manner in which my people traditionally managed our land. Though I had no firsthand experience, even the flowerbeds of the imperial palace were operated under the same principles, balanced plantings of flowers and vegetation in proximity to maintain the vitality of the earth.”

“So we could be strolling through Inyoka farmland right now?”

Asher shrugged his shoulders as he drew himself up. “Indeed.”

I hefted the Lucis and felt a little bit bad for chopping down some poor farmer’s hard work. “Should we be getting ready to fight?”

“It seems likely that there will be conflict should we encounter Inyoka, however”—he glanced around nervously, making Mercy reach for an arrow—“I would say that when an area has been planted with such devotion to appearing natural, it is likely that whichever Inyoka are present in the locale may be seeking to avoid confrontation. It is quite possible that we shall not encounter them at all. In keeping with that desire for stealth, it is likely that these plantations are in fact quite distant from wherever the planters reside, so we shall not come upon them by happenstance either, unless they have the grave misfortune of having positioned themselves directly between us and our goal.”

Mercy deflated a little. “Could you skip to the bit where nobody is about to ambush us a bit quicker next time. All that blabbing to get nowhere.”

“It was essential that you understood the situation fully.”

She grumbled past us and vaulted the next bush to start scouting ahead again. “Probably no ambush. There, three words.”

Asher took a step back so I could get chopping again. “It would be quite impossible to gauge the probability of either outcome at this stage. Perhaps we shall encounter the planters, perhaps we shall not. Perhaps this was all established long ago and the Inyoka who once dwelled nearby have moved on, and this is merely a leftover testament to their talents.”

Mercy bellowed from deeper into the gully, “Then just say you don’t know!”

“But, Mercy, that does not account for even a fraction of the truth. My knowledge of many things is one of the reasons that I am an asset to this group, and providing you with—”

I held up my hand to stop him. “Quiet.”

Immediately he fell silent, and we all tensed. I didn’t know what I was hearing, but my other senses sang. Lifesense or Deathsense or something was humming away at the periphery of my awareness. Not down here on the ground with the rest of us, but up there in the big blue open sky. “Hide.”

Mercy was already pretty well covered by the bushes she was digging through, and Asher was as light and pliable as he’d always been when I scooped him up in my arms and leapt us up into the trees of the nearest plateau. Not a moment too soon.

The flight of wyrms passed over barely a moment later. The same opalescent sheen that had marked the one that had assaulted Talon’s Keep was reflecting sunlight down on me, not once, but dozens of times. Most of them weren’t as big as the one we’d killed already, but what they lacked in bulk, they made up for in numbers. Could we have beaten them? I think so. Did we want to fight them if we didn’t have to? I certainly did. I was feeling particularly in the mood to kill something. But Asher, he felt differently.

When we’d killed the wyrm back at Talon’s Keep, it had hit him hard. He’d been weird and introverted, even for him, in the hours that followed. I suppose that if I grew up thinking a certain set of oversized flappy lizards were gods walking the earth, seeing one of them carved up by some random dude you hang out with might be upsetting.

He kept it all to himself, of course. He was Asher. He could have a full mental breakdown going on inside that scaly head of his and we’d never know a thing about it until it was too late, but after all this time with him, I knew something was up. He’d never argue with us about going after Tsangaanax, not when it was so obvious that the old wyrm was hoarding the last two shards we needed, but that didn’t mean that the whole prospect wasn’t upsetting to him.

If we could have shaken claws with the big black wyrm and walked away with his shards on loan then I’d have been happy to go with that plan, but between the Inyoka attack on Talon’s Keep and the swooping monstrosities in the sky now, it didn’t look like he had any intention of letting things resolve peacefully.

Still, if there was a way to keep Asher’s brain bubbling to a bare minimum, then I wanted to keep it tamped down. So we hid in the trees until the wyrms turned a gentle loop and soared back the way that they came. Which was, coincidentally, the direction we were headed. Interesting.

“White wyrms once more. It makes no sense!” Asher grumbled as we clambered down the cliffside to land beside Mercy in a little pond she’d found. There were tiny little fish that nibbled at my legs as I strode through it, each of them as shimmering blue as the sky in the sunlight. Little cuties.

Mercy was fiddling with her bow as if I hadn’t made it perfectly for her. “You want to explain that one to us again?”

Asher furiously wrung out the bottoms of his robes where they’d dipped into the water. “Inyoka and lesser wyrms are bred from the stock of whichever wyrm rules the roost. If and when rulership changes, the previous wyrm’s servitors are allowed to take their rest with their master, and a fresh batch are born. Tsangaanax is a black, and there is no logical way that these albino deviations could come from him. And there is no possibility that he would allow any ally to know of our mission, lest they attempted to wrest his prizes from us. Or indeed from him.”

“So back in your library,” I approached the subject as carefully as possible, “you were the baby of your dragon?”

He waved his claw. “Distantly related, but I would not have been accepted in the hierarchy if I did not bear her colors. If the patterning of my scales differed too greatly from my liege, I would not have been allowed to come to maturity.”

“Well, that is really messed up.” Mercy was not so bothered about approaching the subject carefully. She was quite happy to trample right over Asher’s feelings if it meant getting him to the point quicker. She’s such a charmer. “Are you sure it is the same here in Amaranth?”

“All that I have read since my arrival indicates that it is.” His head bobbed along, eyes narrowing as he fiddled with his robe’s seam, and one of the tiny fish was ejected back into the pool. “That these norms are a constant across all draconic cultures, regardless of the world.”

“So what does it mean?” Mercy grumbled. “Some white dragon has killed Tsangaanax and taken his shards? Some random white dragon is out here, camped out on his doorstep? We know the shards are here.”

“I have begun to formulate a theory with regards to their location as a matter of fact.” Asher was off on a tangent, but I might as well let him. It wasn’t like we had anything to do all day other than chat. “While the maps provided by our Dvergar benefactor offered up the most current information on the lay of the land, they were limited to the areas in which they traded. As they did no trade with the Inyoka, this region was not mapped.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” Mercy was already pacing again, ready to move on.

Asher’s tail lashed, flicking us with water. “My point, if I might be allowed to reach it, is that the most current maps were not the only ones available to us. I perused the atlases of Talon’s Keep before our departure to the Bastion, so that the lay of the land might be familiar to me prior to any potential mishaps with the waystone network.”

Mercy was at her limit. “Asher, I swear to the gods, if you don’t spit it out I’m going to shove an arrow so far up your—”

He held up his hands. “Voidcrown Spire.”

“What’s that then?” I asked.

“There is a mountain beyond these plateaus, a place where there once lay bountiful fields and a kingdom at peace. It was there that the Voidgod rose from the underworld, and with his rising, so rose the very earth. A volcano, spilling forth not flame but darkness.”

Mercy grimaced. “So it is the zit that Araphel popped out of.”

“While those are not the terms I would have used, there is some accuracy to the comparison,” Asher conceded.

“And you think whoever’s got the shards is camped out there now?”

Asher’s head bobbed along with my words. “It would be one of the few places in Amaranth that servants of light would fear to tread. Where even the boldest and most mighty would rightly fear their powers being blunted.”

“Okay. That makes sense. Same logic Koschei was using when he hid out on the death-spot.” I stretched out and got ready to start hacking through some more shrubberies.

“Slow your roll, ride-on-mower.” Mercy caught me by the elbow before I could start weed-whacking again. “What are we walking into if it isn’t the big black wyrm of doom?”

I shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Does it matter?” She slugged me in the shoulder. My armor went clang, and she shook the pain away from her hand while pretending it didn’t hurt. “Of course, it matters. There could be anything in that Voidzit! Araphel might already be chilling there for all we know. Do you really want to just walk in without any idea?”

“What’s the alternative? We’ve got to go where the shards are. It doesn’t matter who is trying to stop us. It doesn’t matter what is in the way. The shards are how we make the weapon that can kill him.” I started cutting through the bushes, looking for any little rabbit trail that I could bludgeon into a proper path forward.

Mercy had the good sense to stay clear of my swings. “I thought you were getting your super murder boy powers so you could kill him?”

Asher was hanging back too, but I suspect that was less about common sense and more that he was still trying to get the pond-weed out of the straps on his boots. “Multiple viable solutions to the impossible problem of killing something immortal sound better than relying on something entirely untested.”

“I mean, the sword works.” I shrugged mid-swing, making an ugly mess of some poor berry bush. “We know it works because it worked before.”

Mercy was quick to snap back. “If he’s coming back, doesn’t that mean it didn’t work before?”

I paused to pull up a less impressive looking plant that was almost inevitably going to trip Asher. “It took him this long to pull himself back together after he got whacked last time. Maybe this time it will finish him off. Or maybe the combo of the magic sword meant to kill him and my murdery powers will do it. There was a prophecy about the sword killing him again too, right?”

Asher agreed with me in the least helpful way possible. “I cannot say that I have come upon it yet, but that was certainly the message that our benefactor bestowed upon us when we arrived.”

“Benefactor?” Mercy scoffed. “The guy who dropped us in a dungeon?”

With one last wild swing, I broke through the brush, and there was open grassland again. “Can we not have this argument again? It never goes anywhere.”

There was sullen silence as we trudged on across the open space, eyes darting from the plateaus overlooking us to the sky and all around. Just waiting for doom to come. Arrows soaring. Dragons roaring. Doom, doom, doom, everywhere I looked. Any minute now. Mercy mumbled behind me, “Your face never goes anywhere.”

I elbowed a tree aside as we passed into another gully. “Your mother never goes anywhere.”

Mercy gave me a little curtsey as she passed me by. “Your mother’s face never goes anywhere.”

Asher came along behind her, and I gave him a lift up onto the plateau above, calling after Mercy, “Your mother’s face’s mother never goes anywhere.”

With a sigh, Asher found his footing on the clifftop and plodded on. “Were it not for the gift of tongues that the gods bestowed upon us, I would swear that the two of you speak a language entirely unknown to sentient people.”

From down in the scrub, Mercy chirped back, “Your face speaks a language entirely unknown to sentient people…”

And so went the rest of our day. Plodding on. Fighting nothing more fearsome than overgrown rabbit food and the ever present specter of boredom. Mercy and Asher had about a dozen minor arguments that I happily blundered through without any knowledge of who was in the right, and in the end, the result was always just the two of them sulking for half an hour, then pivoting to some whole new argument about nothing.

The sun passed overhead and began to sink once more.

I groaned back to Asher when we were faced with yet another high plateau directly in our way. “Any idea when we’re actually going to see the gloom volcano?”

He didn’t meet my eye. “The accounts were very ancient.”

“So, no?” Mercy asked, gleeful to get one over on him.

“I am afraid that the scale of the illustrations escaped me.”

“Wait, so you could understand the words but not the pictures?” She was grinning so wide you’d think she’d won a prize. “You’re like… the opposite of Maulkin.”

I threw a berry at her, and she caught it in her mouth. Her damned Celerity was through the roof.

She chewed it thoughtfully as we walked. “Kind of spicy?”

I reached out to the nearest bush for a taster of my own, but instead of squishy fruit, my fingers brushed over something solid and scaly. Uh-oh.

The Inyoka leapt back out of the shrub with a yelp of terror. She must have been about half the size of Asher, and her scales were greens and brown in a pattern like a snake’s. I reached after her as she sprinted away, but she was way too quick for me, throwing herself forward to scurry on all fours and vanish into the plants.

I gawked after her. “Did anyone else see that or am I hallucinating Inyoka?”

“Our mystery farmers.” Asher hissed. “One of the casteless judging by her look. Perhaps we have worried overmuch. It seems that this place is populated not by organized defenders but by disorganized savages.”

Mercy laughed. “Damn, Asher, tell us how you really feel.”

“There have always been Inyoka born outside the natural order of hatcheries and broods. Matings that were not approved of. Acts of passion.” He said the last word like it was something dirty.

I tried to conceal a smile. He’d never seemed all that prudish before, but maybe it was because what Seren and I had been up to didn’t register with him as hanky-panky. No eggs involved. “Pretty sure none of us would be here if it wasn’t for a little passion.”

“This is not our way.” Apparently, this was no laughing matter. He strode off through the trees with his shoulders hunched. “Inyoka are nothing if not prolific when left to our own devices, but there is a great danger of mutation in our bloodlines. Our pairings are carefully selected and regulated to ensure that the offspring remain true to their purpose.”

Mercy got it though. Right away. “Because if you come out the wrong color, they kill the baby.”

He was moving faster than I’d ever seen him, pushing through the woods with all haste, doing his best to keep his eyes forward as if catching a glimpse of one of the little brown Inyoka would pollute him. “Purity of patterning is a good measure of mutation. It is necessary to keep us from degenerating into the wild beasts we faced when we first approached Talon’s Keep. We are bred for sentience. If we stray too far, we cease to be capable of rational thought. We become beasts. That pygmy would have been exterminated the moment their mutation was detected—at least, in any sane world.”

“Killing babies is the sane thing?” I couldn’t quite swallow that one.

“To prevent further degeneration as the generations proceed. What if one of them coupled? You would end up with… it does not bear consideration.”

He obviously thought it was one of those greater-good situations, but I couldn’t picture it. “I’m still kind of hung up on the baby killing.”

He waved his hands as if he could dispel our worries. “It is a very rare occurrence. Careful breeding prevents the need for it. Except in the wild places where Inyoka have no governance and such monstrous things become necessary.”

Mercy met my eyes, and we shared a moment of concern before we took off after Asher. He didn’t talk about his life before coming back here. None of us did really. It felt too distant. Like a dream you had years ago. Now I was hearing more about Asher’s old life, it sounded more like a nightmare.

We caught up to him, and he seemed to realize that he’d been ploughing on ahead with nobody to protect him if any of those Inyoka he was crapping all over happened to jump out and stab him. I wanted to move on to another subject, but I just couldn’t quite let this whole thing go yet. “I don’t think I’d be happy if somebody told me who I could and couldn’t… breed with.”

“That is where we differ.” Asher let out a sigh. “Duty always comes first for Inyoka.”

Mercy’s concerned gaze was visible from beyond him. Just a moment of eye-contact that spoke volumes. How much had our boy Asher lost when he died? “You… had kids?”

“I could not say the exact number, but I made my contributions as required.” He shrugged off my hand as it touched his shoulder, and we had to press on to keep pace with him.

It seemed like Mercy was struggling to wrap her head around the Inyoka way of doing things. “And if one of them had come out the wrong color, then you would have been fine with them—”

“If there had been an issue with the purity of my progeny, I would not have been invited to continue making further contributions!” Asher snapped.

That was the end of the conversation as far as he was concerned, and the rest of the day passed us by without much more of an argument. I sometimes caught sight of what might have been another Inyoka ducking down out of sight, and my Lifesense sometimes sang out their presence where they lay in hiding in hollows that they’d dug out beneath the denser shrubs up on the plateau.

Asher was convinced that the hodgepodge colors meant that these Inyoka were mindless, but everywhere I looked, I could see signs of their careful planning. Sure, it was hard to get about these plateaus for us, but a big part of that was making sure it all looked natural so that attention wouldn’t be drawn. The fact that they had these little cubby holes to hide in, that said volumes. They weren’t fighters, but they knew that the world was hostile and dangerous, so they’d done what they could to make the people sent out here to gather food as safe as they could be, hiding under shrubs on the raised areas, so that they were invisible to ground troops and wyrms soaring by overhead. It was well thought out. Probably a smarter solution than I could have come up with. I probably would have made some sort of spicy berry catapult.

By nightfall, the plateaus had grown so high that if we wanted to cross the top of them instead of digging through the dense tangles of vegetation between them, I had to Surge my Potency and carry us all up in a leap and clamber maneuver that I was not fond of performing with so much weight on my back. Two swords, a backpack, two stalwart companions. It was enough to throw anyone off balance.

We were almost to the end of one of the biggest and highest ones we’d hit so far when Mercy made a little “urk” noise, and I immediately froze. We all stood there still and silent for a long moment as I waited for the ambush that had been promised all day to show up or wyrms to come swooping down from the sky. I got neither. Mercy slowly raised a hand to point out through the tree-line.

Voidcrown Spire was a big lump of rock, and I know big lumps of rock. On the dimly lit horizon it loomed up like a nail driven through the world from the other side. With the description of it being a kind of volcano, I’d been expecting a flat top, but nope, it was spikey all the way up. Maybe the jagged bit angling off into the clouds was where stuff had come pouring out, but I was already starting to suspect that Asher had been getting metaphorical on our asses.

The only thing that brought me any comfort about the looming spike of doom was that it had patches of green. The same persistent trees that they had planted to grow out the sides of the plateaus were poking out all over the place, and there was a layer of moss creeping up one side of the place that spoke more of a historic landmark gone to seed than the dark lord’s fortress.

Between here and there was a much shorter distance than what we’d already traversed, but it was also a much more dangerous one. The foliage which had kept us shrouded from sight throughout the day’s travel wasn’t entirely gone, and nor were the plateaus on which so much was growing, but they had not been planted, and what life there was between here and the spire was low hung. The purple grasses barely came to my knees, and the gullies between raised areas which had been so carefully protected from rainfall in the farmlands we’d passed were muddy and flooded out here, corroding the sandstone to turn the cliff-faces that should have separated each heap into gentle inclines. Easier to traverse slowly, with the mud sucking at your boots, but practically useless for crossing with any degree of stealth or speed. Unless you could fly, of course.

In the sky above Voidcrown Spire, wyrms circled. In the twilight, it was hard to be certain they were the same white ones we’d already avoided, but there was no denying that they were wyrms. Each time one came swooping in to land on the jagged rock-face, another seemed to launch itself out from somewhere else. I couldn’t keep count of them all. It could have been thirteen or thirty. “Oh, that’s bad news.”

Asher seemed a lot less concerned than I’d expected him to if I was being honest. “At least we can be certain that a wyrm holds dominion over this place. A single wyrm might be bought for the right rewards, but a whole flight? Impossible.”

Mercy slumped down with her back to a tree. Apparently, we were stopping. I slung my bag off as she sighed. “Well, at least we know some of what we’re up against.”

Asher was trying to do the impossible and take a count of the wyrms arrayed against us, but his eyes weren’t any better than mine. “Judging by the wyrms taking to the skies to ride the evening zephyrs, I would wager that their support staff number in the thousands. Most will not be competent fighters, of course, but all of them would willingly die for their brood.”

I flopped down on top of a berry bush with a moan. “Of course, they would.”

Asher continued, unfazed by my grumbling. “And then, of course, we must account for whatever fortifications are in place. Both the current residents and Araphel’s minions when he held court here are likely to have reinforced the natural structure to make it as impregnable as possible.”

“None of this is a surprise.” Mercy cut off his doomsaying before he could sap any more of our life away. “We knew we’d be fighting our way into a fortress. We knew it was going to be hard. None of this is news, you know?”

Asher folded up on himself and sank down into something like a yoga pose with his tail coiled around him. “I, for one, had hoped that we would have only the single great wyrm to confront rather than all of his children also.”

I shrugged, upside down and stretched over the gradually collapsing bush. “And I’d hoped that they’d come out and offer us their shards on a nice plush cushion. This is what we’ve got, and we’ll deal with it.”

“What I wouldn’t give for but a single one of the butterflies that we squandered in conflict with Leofric. Just think of how many of them might be driven off by inclement weather.”

“I’d rather have Seren back.”

That seemed to cut his bitching off dead, and even Mercy shuffled uncomfortably to look away from me. I realized how maudlin I’d sounded a moment after the words came out. “I just mean, she’d have loved this. You know? I could have made a big catapult and launched her up to murder wyrms. It would have been her favorite thing ever.”

Asher’s misery train had been derailed. “I am sorry that you have been parted from her.”

“It’s okay.” I blew out the breath I felt like I’d been holding all day. “This is only temporary, you know?”

Both Asher and Mercy looked at each other with no small degree of concern. Eventually, Mercy forced herself to pipe up, even if she did end up flinching at how blunt her words came out. “Pretty sure dying is the most permanent thing that can happen.”

“I mean, yeah, normally. But we’ve already been to the land of the dead and back this week. We come back from the dead every day. It isn’t a big deal. When all the Voidgod stuff is over, I’ll just hop into Alvaren Valhalla or whatever and see if she’d rather come back and hang out. Or maybe we could do the long distance thing? Or like… timeshare?”

Both of them were staring at me with undisguised confusion at this point. Asher hissed, “Do you mean to say that you intend to resurrect her?”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the looks on their faces when I sat back up. “Oh come on. It isn’t that crazy.”

Asher turned to Mercy with genuine worry on his face. “Would such a thing even be possible?”

I shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

“And if you can’t?” Mercy looked shrewd—the kind of look that usually resulted in me losing at cards.

“I’ll find somebody who can.” I squished my way down across the berry bush to sit beside the two of them. “I figure that after we’ve saved the universe, the gods might owe me a favor.”

Asher seemed to be stuck with asking the awkward blunt question this time around. “And if Seren chooses her eternal rest rather than a return to your—”

“Banging.” Mercy chortled at Asher’s horror at having that word put in his mouth.

I was grinning despite myself. “Wouldn’t be the worst breakup I’ve ever had. Given a choice between me and Alvaren heaven, I’d probably choose me. But that’s just because I’m not a big fan of harp music.”

Asher seemed quietly delighted to be in on the joke instead of the butt of it. “Woodwind instruments are definitely preferable.”

Mercy shook her head at us both, trying to hide a smile. “Nerds.”

Chapter 26

It was deep into the night when we made our charge. Until now we had been relying on stealth to close the distance, but now that was no longer possible, we had turned to speed. The land beneath our feet had not been wiped clean by the power of the Void, but it had been painstakingly cleared by Inyoka servants to give their masters the best protections that could be mustered. Against any normal invaders, that would have served perfectly to slow progress and allow swooping wyrms all the time in the world to crispy fry the poor fools trying to get in. However, we were not your normal household or garden variety invaders.

With every step, I pulled on the stone beneath the earth, and a road was built. Strip by strip, step by step, I hauled it up. At first it was halting, setting off landslides and rockfalls, but soon I found my rhythm, and the three of us got up to a steady run, each of them trusting in me to put the ground beneath their feet before we fell. No pressure.

In the dark, you might have thought that we’d have made it a good distance before we were spotted. Sentries might have been stationed, but come on, who really expects someone to show up building a road in the middle of the night? As for the wyrms up in the sky, they had to have something better to do with themselves than stare down at the ground all the time, right?

Wrong and wrong.

Before we were even close enough to see the base of the tower, the wyrms were swooping down at us, and fires were bursting to life all up the rocky face of the spire. At first, I couldn’t make sense of the sudden lines of glowing red appearing on the otherwise dead stone, but then the fireballs started raining down towards us. Organized artillery fire. Great.

Our headlong charge towards the spire turned into a zig-zag. Great eruptions of flame burst up from the ground where the balls rained down, with some going wide, but most landing right in the place that we would have been running to next. The swooping wyrms laid down lines of flame, crisscrossing that same patch of charred land and then swerved around when it became clear that we weren’t sticking to the “charge directly into the jaws of death” plan. They missed us. Even twisting their serpentine necks around and spritzing fire every which way, they missed.

Back when I lived on Earth, I didn’t run into fire all that much. I mean, I cooked sometimes, and I’d been camping once or twice when I was a kid, with all the requisite burning of marshmallows, but actual proximity to big old fires? Never really happened. So I wasn’t aware that the flames are not the only hot bit. Any dumbass kid who’s seen a picture book knows fire is hot, yes, I’m aware that it isn’t a revelation, but in my head, the flames were the hot thing, not the whole area around them. I could feel my skin crackle on one side as we sprinted past the fireball explosion. That eyebrow was a lost cause too.

The next load of fireballs lit up on the spire, and I could really have done without it. There was always the option of throwing up walls to block them, but that would slow us down even more than zig-zagging. And there was no guarantee some of them wouldn’t get through anyway. So back and forth we went.

Screaming and shrieking, the wyrms came after us. Looping and dive bombing at us even as we zigged and zagged and dodged the fireballs with ease. Well, not with ease. They were getting closer with each volley. Maybe their aim was getting better, maybe we were getting into the right range for this kind of bombardment, or maybe it was getting easier to see us now that the whole plain between us and the Spire was on fire.

The wyrms were definitely getting closer on each swoop too. Four of them had come down, each varying in size from what had apparently been a little one that had come for us at Talon’s Keep and at the other end of the scaly scale, a gargantuan jumbo jet of flesh that I mentally dubbed Jumbo Dumbo. And while Jumbo Dumbo was dumping out enough fire with each pass to make my eyeballs sting even at this distance, it was the little ones that were setting the path behind us alight, so close behind my backside that I had to remake my backpack on the run to stop it from falling apart.

Probably a good thing we’d used up all our butterflies. If I’d waited to let them out now, I’d have been flicking some very flat pieces of charcoal into the air.

All the moisture in the air had been burned away, so every pant of breath came in aching from all the heat. Still, Mercy managed to croak out, “Kentucky Fried Eternals.”

My lips were cracking as I laughed. Then before our course reversed yet again, I managed to point up at the dragons and rumble back, “Side order of Hot Wings.”

When Mercy tried to fire off a shot at a swooping wyrm as we made our next turn, her bowstring snapped. I had it repaired an instant later, but every time she tried to pull it taut, it twanged uselessly apart again. I turned to Asher, and he wasn’t there. His arms were raised, and blue lights were swirling all around him as he prepared his spell, but I wish the dumbass had told me he was casting so I could have adjusted our plans accordingly.

I stamped my foot down, and a sudden upshoot of stone exploded out of the road, scraping up under Asher’s feet to launch him to me. I caught him in my arms and marveled that he was still managing to cast his spell all the same.

Then it was time to run like hell again. Weirdly, it was almost easier to keep my balance while running and making road while I had Asher to carry—he was a nice counterweight to all the stuff on my back. The winds that whipped out from him as he intoned ancient rituals and waggled his hands around also served as air conditioning, so it was a win on all counts.

The next wave of fireballs hit, not in a cluster where we were expected to be next, but in a row. I missed fighting disorganized monsters, they were so much easier to handle. The wall of flame roared up between us and the spire, penning us in so that the next pass of the wyrms would have no trouble toasting us. We had to punch through, but given the height of the wall of flames and the fact that I was losing my eyelashes by just looking at it, I didn’t have high hopes we could just run on in and make it out the other side with enough of us left to heal.

Mercy skidded to a halt and looked helplessly at her useless bow, then we barreled into her, and suddenly, I was carrying both of them as we charged headlong into spicy burning death. Reaching as far as my Sphere of Influence would go, I tried to haul up stone, to make a tunnel through the fire that we could make it through. It didn’t work. The heat was so intense that the rock crackled apart before I could make it solid. It was las though the air was shaking it into gravel before it could set. Were they still applying physics to a fantasy world? That wasn’t fair. We were two steps from hell when Mercy hauled the Lucis out from behind my back and poured a swirl of power into it. The same gift that made her arrows explode with wind when they struck infused the great-sword that she could barely handle, and when she lost her grip on it, I dropped her to catch it.

The swipe of the Lucis, empowered with Mercy’s tempest, still wouldn’t have been enough to clear the firestorm ahead, but the echo of the blade was twice that size and forged from the same power. It tore out from my haphazard cut, parting the sea of flame for us to leap on through.

Behind us, before the flames closed back in, I could hear a frantic thumping sound as the wyrms that had been descending on us had to flap like crazy to avoid crashing into the same wall of fire we’d bypassed. Sucks to be them.

“Nice…” I panted to Mercy as she scrambled up the stairs I was making to get us back above the level of the plateaus again.

“Someone has to do”—she gasped in some of the cool night air from up ahead—“the thinking around here.”

Jumbo Dumbo didn’t have enough time to stop before they hit the wall. In a shrieking and flapping explosion that would have made any fireworks company extremely excited, the massive dragon exploded through the firewall and crashed to the ground, tucking in their wings to avoid the worst of the damage as it rolled first across the open ground, then right into my staircase, shattering every rock I’d hauled up with its weight.

One down.

The casters on the distant spire had stopped, obviously assuming that their work was done now that they’d thrown up an impenetrable defense. Sure, one of them was probably peering down to see if there were any gaps where we could have snuck through, but every moment that they didn’t know was a moment that we could run straight.

Riding up on the rising heat, the other three wyrms soared back into view behind us. Beautifully up-lit in roaring red. I liked them better in red. It felt more like a dragon to me than the vaguely sickly things that had been chasing us so far. These pasty critters felt like they’d earned the name wyrm because they looked like pale things that burrowed beneath the earth never seeing the sun.

The sight of the dragons must have been signal enough to the spire guards that something had gone wrong, and in patches, the whole place lit up again. “Oh, come on.”

There was still almost a mile for us to cross. Either the fireballs or the divebombing wyrms would have been enough to stop us, but combined, they were going to turn the whole distance into an unworkable nightmare of scorched earth and searing air. Even now I was struggling to keep the road ahead rising steady, and that was without the next barrage of flames. Mercy coughed out soot when she tried to speak, but a moment later, she was snarking away as usual, “Maybe we needed a better plan than running really fast.”

Up ahead there was a plateau, so I had a moment’s respite, during which I could think as well as running. “I didn’t hear… you suggest anything.”

The wyrms took another dive at us, the two smaller ones flying to either side of the bigger one in the middle, the tips of their wings almost touching as they glided down. Three lines of blazing fire chased along after us, too wide for us to dodge to the side, too fast for us to stay ahead of.

I threw Asher to Mercy and then strained with all my Artifice to haul up stone. There just wasn’t enough. The whole plateau started to slip and slide as the stone beneath it was ripped out, collapsing in slow motion just as fast as the wall I was raising went up. Still, I pushed on, throwing more and more stone up into as thick a fortification as anyone had ever seen despite the mere moments I had to do it. Then the dragon-fire struck.

Better stone might have made the difference. If we’d been standing on a nice vein of granite or something maybe the wall would have held. But we had sandstone. The impact of the dragons’ breath hit it and rocked it, and then the heat went to work.

Glowing cracks flowed out across my sandstone barrier, and molten rock started to eke through a blink later. Then before I even had a moment to come up with some new way to reinforce the wall, it was down, exploding apart into chunks as the air pockets I’d clumsily trapped in the sandstone blossomed out to join the flames.

Asher flung his hands forward. The same spell that he’d been casting this whole time finally went off, and it was a doozy. Lightning and fire had been his go-to elements so far, but knowing we were heading into the territory of giant fire-breathing lizards, it looked like he’d branched out. A wave of freezing air washed over us all as he unleashed an ice-storm right into the wyrms’ faces.

Fighting fire with fire might not work, but fighting fire with ice magic is apparently pretty effective. Where the ice and flame met, there was a brief splash of water and then a concussion of steam knocked us all stumbling away. We were just little creatures compared to the wyrms, and they had two giant sails sticking out from the sides of their body. The gust of wind that knocked us down sent them flying.

Jumbo Dumbo was barely back on their feet when the cavalcade of wyrms came tumbling end over end into them. They should have just stayed down and saved themselves the pain.

What was left of Asher’s ice storm dispersed into a wash of snow around us, and when he turned to meet my gaze through the swirling white, I could already see resignation in his expression. “Just say it.”

I couldn’t help myself. I really couldn’t. “You’re a lizard wizard in a blizzard!”

With a four-car pile-up of wyrms behind us, we turned to run again, just in time to come face to face with the fireball bonanza coming from the spire. Maybe we could take another holiday after this was done. I think we’d earned it.

Up until now, I think we’d been doing pretty well. We had drawn a bit more attention than we really wanted, but otherwise, we were making solid progress. This was the moment where that stopped being true. The moment that we started losing.

One minute Mercy was running, and the next she was gone. Not even a silhouette left behind. Completely consumed as the explosion where the fireball touched down. The concussion from that blast knocked me off my feet to crash into Asher, and it was only luck that had us flying down into the shallow muddy gully beside the plateau rather than into the path of another fireball.

We hit like a meteor, plunging down through the mud until we hit dry earth and stopped. The softness of the earth here had saved us, but then that same mud closed in over us, and suddenly, we were drowning. It poured into my mouth as I tried to cry out. Ever get mud up your nose? Not a good time. Smells like mud.

I lashed about, trying to get a grip on anything solid that would let me push my way back to the surface, and inadvertently, I shoved poor Asher even deeper into the goop. It took me a solid thirty seconds before I remembered I had Artifice and could just lift the floor up beneath us. A slab of mud came up with us, like a big nasty slice of lasagna, but it was easy enough to break free and breathe again once I had solid stone beneath me.

Asher definitely looked worse for wear when I hauled him out, puking out black soil like he’d been doing his best to eat his way out of trouble, but that was nothing compared to the state of the land around us. The earth was blackened, the grass was burnt away, and the sandstone was crumbling like ash everywhere it could still be seen. I had to drag Asher behind me like a lazy puppy as I mounted the slope up to the plane where I assumed that Mercy had been a minute ago. The last few seconds had been pretty hazy what with all the explosions, but I was pretty sure we only got thrown a short distance. If not I had no idea how we were going to find her again, short of us all dying.

“You okay, buddy?” I managed to pull Asher alongside me.

He was still spitting out mud as he went, sputtering out, “Unpleasant.”

Being the gentleman I am, I turned away from him before I started to bellow, “Mercy?”

Another round of bombardment started thumping down around us. Not up on the plateau where we were standing, but all around us as though we were the only island in a sea of fire. The explosions rocked me on my feet, but the light of the fire was just what I needed to pick out the blackened remains of Mercy where she lay moaning.

I skidded to my knees beside her, Restoration already glowing on my palms. “Shouldn’t have caught it with your face, should you?”

The moment that her lungs were in good enough shape to draw breath, she started saying a lot of words that I can’t repeat in polite company—words that only got louder and ruder when Asher cast Cauterize on her. The air was full of the delicious smell of roasted pork, and I felt a little bit queasy when I realized that it was also the smell of delicious, roasted Mercy.

The fireballs that had been pounding down all around us died down, and the next round had not flickered to life on the distant spire. For some reason, they weren’t killing us right this moment. That was nice. In the aftermath of all the booms, my ears were ringing, but even so I could hear the steady thump of wyrm-wings behind us. Guess it was their turn.

Jumbo Dumbo was in the lead, with the other three skirting out to flank us. They’d learned their lesson from the last round of explosions, and they were keeping close to the ground, beating their wings once or twice to leap from one raised area to the next but never taking flight fully. When they saw us turn to face them, their wings snapped in tight against their sides, showing just how long and weird wyrm bodies were when they weren’t being stretched out like a sugar-glider’s arms. Looked like a snake that somebody had stuck some extra bits onto.

The downside of their cunning solution to the problem of their wings was that now I could reach them to chop bits off. I reached out a hand for Seren, ready to launch her up onto the snaking neck of Jumbo Dumbo, and then I realized that I was reaching for thin air. I staggered forward, then shrugged it off. We’d be together again, and when we were, she was going to be pissed that she’d missed this.

They had to stay grounded, but I didn’t. With a surge of Potency, I leapt for Jumbo Dumbo, just where I was planning to land Seren. They snapped their jaws around to catch me like somebody was tossing salami slices, but that was exactly what I thought they were going to do. The Lucis was already swinging around to bite through obsidian teeth and fire blackened gums.

Deep down in the wyrm’s throat there was a spark of flame churning towards me, but before the heat could even wash out, the force of my blow spun Jumbo’s aim wide. It bit off the rush of flame before too much could be squandered. I swung around on the end of my sword, the force of that same blow spinning me through the air until the Lucis snapped free of the wyrm’s tough hide, and I was twisting down to land on their back.

The twin of my Lucis leapt to my spare hand, and I slammed both down into Jumbo Dumbo’s back, one in each muscular cluster where the wings took root. Even if it wanted to fly again, I wasn’t going to let it. The scales shimmered like mother of pearl in the firelight, but the blood that came forth in great surging gouts from the holes I’d made looked black.

Jumbo’s serpent head whipped around to snap at me, twisting the back under my feet and setting me sliding around with only the embedded blades to keep me steady. The first snap missed because of its own momentum flinging me out of the line of attack, but the next zeroed in on me perfectly.

Holding tightly onto the handles of both swords, I flung myself up into an acrobatic flip, my steel boots catching Jumbo under the chin and snapping their mouth shut. In usual circumstances, that would have hurt. When Jumbo was in the middle of trying to breath fire, it caused a whole other set of problems. Fire heading out, with nowhere to go, washes back the way it came.

Smoke poured out of Jumbo’s nostrils as they pulled back, head snapping frantically from side to side like they could shake the burning away. When they tried to open their mouth to scream, the flesh inside had melted together, and so it came apart sticky and dribbling out. Those shiny obsidian teeth tumbled to the ground like cereal box prizes into the bowl. Dragons always sounded really impressive back when they were fictional creatures back on Earth, but meeting them face to face, I had to admit I was a little bit let down. Apparently, they weren’t even fireproof.

Jumbo had clearly decided that they’d suffered enough. Instead of trying to bite me or roast me again, they flung their mass sideways, trying to crush me underneath by weight alone. If I’d been dumb enough to keep holding onto the swords in their back, it probably would have worked.

The force of that barrel-roll launched me off towards one of the smaller wyrms, and I rebounded off the blackened earth between them with a roar of victory, soaring towards the critter’s side with my empty hands held high.

Both the Lucis and my other great-sword came when I called, leaping into my hands as I brought them down in a brutal cut that split clean through the wyrm’s folded wing and bit into the flesh beneath.

These wyrms had bullied us all the way across the plain, so there was no way I was letting them get away unscathed. With these swings, I’d ensured two of them would never take flight again.

There was a distant roar as Mercy’s wind arrows lashed out into the face of the other little wyrm, each thunderclap sending it staggering farther away from my squishier friends. Apparently, the last bow-repair had stuck, although I suspected Asher’s blizzard bringing the temperature down to merely hot instead of skin-melting had done most of the work in that regard.

The medium wyrm—it seems kind of stupid to describe something as being medium-sized when it was bigger than a bus and twice as likely to crush you, but… oh well—leapt over the lashing tail of Jumbo Dumbo with one quick beat of its wings before she came plunging back down towards me, claws outstretched. Say what you like about wyrms, but they were at least smart enough not to keep falling for the same trick over and over.

I brought both blades about, fusing them into one titanic great-sword to parry the dragon’s strike. It wasn’t nearly as big as the nonsense I’d been waving around in the land of the dead, but it would have been more than any human being could heft around. Even so, I must have looked like a mouse with a matchstick to the wyrm, which made it all the funnier when her claws raked across the flat of the blade, her legs folded under the weight of the impact, and she went tail over tea-kettle, a giant lever flipping over with me as the fulcrum. Ascendant Potency might have been my favorite thing in the whole universe.

With a roar and a smash, the wyrm landed, her soft underbelly exposed to the stars. I didn’t need a signed invitation on fancy stationary to know where I was meant to be. I split my swords and leapt up to start digging around in her guts.

She was saved by the combined idiocy of her two buddies. The little one-winged dragon came smashing into her, trying to charge me but swerving because of the new lopsided limb set-up, overcompensating in the other direction and ramming right into this poor wyrm’s hip.

Meanwhile, Jumbo Dumbo, not content with completely melting the inside of their own head, was now rearing up to try for a third time to set me on fire.

I shouldn’t have worried about it, Mercy was on the job. Her storm-arrow shot out, wreathed in wind and lightning, and struck the big dumb animal in the side of the head. The concussion knocked it aside so that the latest huff of flame went wide, and the electrical discharge made their eyes roll up into their head. Unfortunately, the same boom of wind knocked me off course. Combine that with the wyrm I was trying to jump onto suddenly being spun like it was on a DJ’s turntable, and I was about to make a really unfortunate landing.

My swords swept through the empty air, and my face swung directly into the medium-bus wyrm’s face. Did I accidentally kiss a dragon today? Yes, I did. Was she going to call me in the morning? Probably not. Instead, her jaws snapped open, and she lunged up, trying to swallow me whole. Not my worst first date ever.

“It’s not you, it’s me.” Even as I was throwing myself back, I knew it was too late. I had no leverage to get clear, and the momentum of her lunge upwards was forcing me down into the bite. Good thing I still had swords in my hands. With a twist of my wrist, I shattered both the Lucis and the spare and set the shards flying forward to pepper the wyrm’s face. Most of the shrapnel couldn’t get through her scales, but the impact was enough to keep her pushed away from me until gravity could drag me off her face again.

I tumbled off her neck before landing face-first in the churned-up mud that was all that was left of the plateau we’d started out on. More mud in my mouth. Delicious and nutritious.

Once I’d plucked myself back out with a nasty sucking sound, I realized that things were progressing without me. Medium-bus was rolling towards me, trying to get the right way up again, and One-wing had sprung back with a lopsided flap to try and line up for another charge. I couldn’t see Jumbo thanks to the flopping bus gal, but I could sure hear them, roaring and churning up the ground with their claws. I had no idea what was up with the fourth wyrm, but I had no doubt I’d be hearing from it soon. I called the iron back to my swords and tensed for action.

The moment Bus found her footing, I took a dive under her belly, scrambling forward through the mud as fast as my elbows could carry me. Up until now I’d been going toe to toe with these gargantuan monsters, and I didn’t need to. I was tiny compared to them, and it was time I started using that tininess to my advantage. Above me, Bus twisted and flexed, her head whipping about to search for me. In the confusion, I thought for a moment that I’d gotten away with it, but then I heard One-wing howling, “Beneath you!”

Dragon voices were weird—like their mouths were the wrong shape for language, but they were forcing them to make the sounds anyway.

Anyway, the second Bus knew where I was, she hopped up into the air and slammed her body down against me. That pallid soft underbelly fell at me like an avalanche, and I almost felt guilty to twist around and stick the Lucis straight up. She stabbed herself, not just once, but three times. The first stab, I think she didn’t notice, just that she wasn’t getting the squishing sensation that she’d expected. The second one she definitely felt because she let out a yelp of pain that echoed down on me from every direction. That one made her jump away involuntarily, then gravity helped me out for a change, bringing Bus back down for one last wound, and her blood flowed down over me in waves. Every time she pulled away, her scales snapped shut over the jagged punctures, but when she pushed down, it was like I was in a late 90s kids’ TV gameshow and buckets of slime were being dumped on me.

The Lucis was holding her far enough off the ground that I had room to breathe and move. I brought my spare sword up, scraping the tip up the length of the tentpole blade and wedging it into the same wound. Breaking through a wyrm’s scales was hard work, but prying them apart was child’s play. More blood, scalding hot to the touch, came pouring down on me. The more that she struggled to pull away, the more the blades jostled about inside her. I had no idea what to do next, but as it turned out, someone else was making the decision for me.

Bus tipped onto her side, and clinging to my swords, I was carried along for the ride. I’d assumed that Mercy or Asher hit her with something big and explosive, but as it turns out the only big explosive thing hitting her was Jumbo Dumbo, who was so intent on getting at me that they had no qualms about body-slamming one of their own buddies out of the way to do it.

I had to abandon my swords to leap clear of the incoming blast of fire, and if I’d felt bad about letting Bus stab herself, I really felt bad about using her as a shield against Dumbo’s incinerating breath. The white of her underbelly blackened, and scales showered down around me like hail. She was wailing, a wretched sound that made my teeth vibrate.

The downside of jumping clear of one wyrm was that I was now face to face with Lopsided, and he had all his claws, teeth, tail, mass and flaming breath to bring to bear on me while I’d left my weapons behind to get toasted. Not great.

He came surging at me with his jaws wide open, and with no sword to parry that bite with, I was pretty much guaranteed a bad time. I tried to dive to the side, but fast as a striking cobra, his head whipped around, and he caught me by the leg, crunching through my armor like he was biting into a chocolate bar without taking off the wrapper.

I’d had enough practice by now to surge my Vitality before the crunch, but it still hurt like hell. “Ow!”

Worse yet, he didn’t seem content to just chomp me and go. Instead, he kept that vice-like grasp on my leg as he whipped his neck back and forth, flinging me about and shaking me up. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

I couldn’t tell up from down or left from right by the time he got tired of waggling me about and finally threw me up into the air so he could swallow me.

With my brain all scrambled, I couldn’t even sense my swords, let alone pull them to me in time. I guess I was about to start my next grand adventure—through a wyrm’s digestive tract. I was going to constipate this lizard so badly. He was going to walk funny for months.

Mercy’s arrow took me in the shoulder, and the tiny cyclone coiled around it exploded, launching me off course. Lopsided snapped after me, but he had no luck. The blast had launched me clear. I hit the ground rolling, and by the time I’d tumbled back to my feet, the arrow in my arm had snapped off. “Ow!”

The second it took Lopsided to close the distance was all I needed to get my swords back. They ripped out of poor Bus, who just wasn’t even trying to get up again, and soared past the charging wyrm and into my waiting hands. The Lucis I caught, and the backup soared right by me and looped around as I made a vicious cut to meet his jaws head-on. He barely got his jaws open before I slammed the great-sword down on his face and shut him up again. The second sword shattered as I struck, the razor-thin fragments pummeling into the wound I’d opened across Lopsided’s snout.

Maybe they weren’t doing much damage, but apparently, they stung. Lopsided lurched back, trying to get his face out of my path. It was a good thing he did, because a moment later, flames tore through where his head had been just before.

Jumbo was not a happy camper. Maybe it was because the inside of their head got a bit melted, or maybe it was because they got smacked about a bit, I didn’t know. All I knew was that despite it causing them obvious pain to vomit out more and more fire in my general direction, they were still going for it. They were standing atop what was now almost certainly the corpse of Bus, claws dug in for stability and fire pouring forth.

I stumbled back out of the first blast, then had to take off running as Jumbo’s head snapped around to follow me. The furnace heat washed over me as I ran as fast as my little legs could carry me, but I knew it was never going to be enough.

Artifice came to my rescue again. As I tripped over a burnt-out hunk of grassroots and spilled face-first into the blackened soil, I hauled on the stone beneath me. It was probably the shoddiest wall I’d ever built—and I’ve left a trail of really crappy construction projects all across Amaranth—but it did the job. It stopped the flames from hitting me directly as Jumbo’s head swung by.

Fun fact about wyrms: they can’t actually see the thing they’re breathing fire at. They can see to either side of it, or they can cross their eyes to see the fire, but their target is always going to be hidden. This gave me the moment I needed to jump back to my feet, leap the crumbling charcoal of my wall, and charge.

Jumbo saw me coming, but when your head is the size of an SUV, shaking it back in the opposite direction means overcoming some serious momentum. Their neck strained and cramped into odd angles as Jumbo tried to bring their head and the fire-fountain within to a halt.

Another dive, another close encounter with the cracked earth, another roll, and I came up underneath Jumbo’s head. The Lucis whipped around and opened a line beneath the wyrm’s jaw. It wasn’t deep enough to bleed something that size out, but it was enough that the wild stream of fire already trying to escape had a new channel.

Heat was already radiating out from that overworked throat, but now the puckered edges of the slash I’d made blackened and flame burst free. On I ran underneath the bulk of the beast, so that neither eruption of flame could get me without scorching the wyrm to death too. Jumbo tried all the same, snaking their head under their own body, and scorching their already battered face with the flames escaping their neck-wound. Blinded and enraged, it didn’t even cross Jumbo’s mind that they were about to unleash all that flaming death into their own legs.

The flames washed over me, and it hurt like only a burn can—every part of my body facing in that direction crispened and blackened, flesh sloughed off, and muscles twisted into bitter little bands of ruined meat, all in the moment before I could stagger behind Jumbo’s rear leg and gasp in a breath.

Restoration went to work putting me back together, and I frantically tried to pull the Lucis and the forgotten remains of my other sword together into a shield that might keep some part of me intact when the heat came again. I needn’t have bothered. The fire burning out of Jumbo was choked out.

The elegant neck had been twisted into too awkward an angle to chase me beneath the wyrm’s own bulk, and the flow had been pinched off.

My backpack, and all the clever little tricks that we’d stowed away inside, was gone, burnt away to nothing. The back half of my armor had been reduced to puddle of molten metal too. I had to strain Artifice to pull it back into shape over my raw, freshly regrown flesh. Couldn’t have a heroic dragon battle with my ass hanging out.

One quick duck past the lashing tail and I finally caught sight of Mercy, Asher, and the wyrm they’d been scrapping with. It had seen better days. Maybe it wasn’t dead yet, but I was willing to bet that it wished it was.

Where once beautiful pale scales shone across its length, there were now streaks of soot and blood almost as dark. At some point, it had been stupid enough to spread its wings, and now they hung limp and dislocated, dragging along the ground. That looked like the work of Mercy’s concussive arrows to me. Just like the flames licking out from between the poor critters scales looked like Asher’s work. Fire was everywhere around here, and the moment that Asher had realized that he could use it against the wyrms was probably the last moment of peace that the wyrms had known.

From the far side of Jumbo, where they were frantically trying to untangle their neck from beneath their collapsed body, there was an explosion. The roaring flames that had been backed up by the twisted off neck needed to escape, and if they had to do that by bursting out in every direction, apparently that was what they were going to do. The wyrm’s head was still trapped under its body, but the two ends of the explosion-severed neck now flopped around, spraying fire to the sky.

I closed on Asher and Mercy’s leftover wyrm with my sword raised to put it out of its misery, but Mercy had it covered. She was standing on the thing’s head, aiming down with a storm gathered on her bowstring. With a thundercrack, she loosed. That final execution-style shot was all it took to put it down permanently.

I gave the two of them a smile, then turned back towards Lopsided. The last living wyrm. I could see it now beyond the heap of dead flesh, thrashing about as though it was still in agony. I guess the needles of metal jammed in the facial wound were even more irritating than I’d hoped.

As sore as they might have been, it still didn’t explain why the wyrm was flapping frantically to take flight, even though one of her wings was completely out of commission. I couldn’t understand what Lopsided was trying to do until the whole sky turned red.

The next volley of fireballs was coming down, and it was all coming straight for us.

Asher and Mercy looked from the sky to me with horror written on every line of their faces. All three of us were bruised and battered, and all three of us were in no way prepared for the doom that was falling down to burn us all to crisps. Just one of those fireballs had been enough to turn Mercy into beef jerky, I didn’t want to see what a hundred of them could do. She was yelling, “Run!” at the same time as I was roaring, “Stay still!”

Asher glanced between the two of us and curled up neatly into the fetal position on the ground. Fair.

Now that Jumbo was dead, they were nothing more than a heap of materials, bone and scale that were built to withstand fire, even if the full temperature of the wyrm’s lethal breath was more than they could cope with. I reached out with Artifice, grabbed all I could, and hauled it over us.

I had already been painted in wyrm blood. For the other two it was a new experience. Despite her instincts telling her to run, Mercy had listened to me. She’d dropped down on top of Asher like she was going to shield him with her own body. Cute, but hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that. I flung myself on top of both of them, then piled wyrm above us all.

The fireballs hit while I was still stripping bone from meat, and it was all just a mass of corpse overhead. In an instant, the explosions blew my hasty shield to pieces, and the burning sky was revealed once more. The heat washed down over us before the fire, and I knew that I was out of ideas. Good thing smarter people were here with me.

Mercy had shoved me off as soon as I’d tried to shield her, and now she had her arms up creating fire of her own. It was the same solid wall of flame she’d deployed before time and time again, but this time the fire flowing through it wasn’t coming from her—she was drawing it all in from above her. In less than a second, I could see her sweating and shaking, trying to control the barrier as more and more flame siphoned into it. Asher was casting beside and partially beneath her. The cooling winds of another ice spell were already forming between his hooked claws.

I was useless. There was nothing I could do to help. Nothing that would keep the inevitable from happening. I could already tell Mercy wasn’t able to handle all the fire, and still more of it was hammering down into the barrier, licking through the line of her will and scorching us.

I reached for Artifice, but nothing was responding to me the way it should. The heat was too much. It made solid things waver, and anything I tried to move and shape crumbled before I could force it into any useful form. I didn’t even dare to try hauling more wyrm-flesh to make another barricade because if I brushed Mercy’s wall, I just knew that it would all come tumbling down.

Flames started to lick from Mercy’s quaking fingertips, burning her. Still, she didn’t falter. The fires spread, creeping down her hands to her wrists. Blackening her flesh and exposing her bones. Still, she would not stop. She strained with all that she was.

The Pillar of Creation within her governed the elemental powers that she flung around, and I knew that no matter how she’d reinforced it, there was no way that it wasn’t cracking apart under this strain. Pushing my Artifice to use materials beyond my means had almost crippled me. I couldn’t bear to think about what this was doing to her.

She was screaming now, not in pain but fury. Eyes narrowed. Voice cracking in the heat.

Time seemed to slow as her grasp on the wall above her started to slip. More and more fire spilled down in a rain around us, and the flames on her hands, the burning grass at her feet, and the fire bound up in the searing wall above us all sang to each other, roaring and crackling back and forth. All fires were one fire.

My throat burned as I gasped out, “Mercy, my sword! Put fire in my sword!”

Her attention wavered, and the wall of fire hanging above us shattered and rained down. As she fell to her knees, she caught her hand on the flat of the Lucis and pushed. Fire licked along the length of the blade, barely visible in the red hell we’d found ourselves. Fire. Just like the fire above us. Just like the fire all around us. All fire was one fire.

I looked up into the falling inferno, and I swung.

My sword swept uselessly through the air, trailing fire behind it. The echo of my sword was as wide as the sky itself. The fire that Mercy had been holding up became the edge, and the fires all around us whipped up to make its body. Everywhere that burned reached out to be a part of that echo.

The twin of my blade carved a bright red line across the sky and faded away.

Chapter 27

Probably worth mentioning that between the fight on the ground and the fireball bombardment, I had no idea that there were wyrms in the sky above us. So when two halves of a wyrm came tumbling down to land on either side of us, I was genuinely surprised. Three more wyrms that had been orbiting above us were luckier, only losing a tail or a wingtip. Two of them came spiraling down to crash atop the scorched remains of the four incinerated dragons around us, and another one frantically beat away, trailing blood all the way back towards the Spire.

I couldn’t count all the wyrms above us, but where before they had been turning gentle circles waiting for their opportunity to pick us off, now they wove between each other, undulating and flapping for all that they were worth. My first assumption was that they were fighting to get to us first, but I was overestimating the courage of the wyrms. Having seen seven of their kin felled, they were no longer in a hurry to get to us. The swirl of wyrms blotting out the starlight were all competing to get above each other, to put the bodies of their brothers and sisters between us and themselves.

With them so high above us, we were wide open for bombardment, but it didn’t come. Asher and Mercy had untangled themselves from each other’s arms and were now pretending that there had been no cuddling going on. It was hard to say which of them looked more awkward. I asked, “What’s going on? Have they run out of juice?”

Asher huffed ash off his snout, abandoning his spell to swirl away to nothing again, “Doubtful. More likely, following that last display, they believe that they are providing us with ‘juice’ of our own when they unleash their spells.”

I hauled my aching body forward a step, scooping an arm under Mercy’s shoulders to help her along as I waited for Restoration to ping back to life. “So the wyrms are scared off, and the fireballs have stopped. Are we in the clear?”

It was a sign of how exhausted she was that she willingly accepted my help without trying to beat me for touching her. Still, she was the one to snort, “Have we ever been that lucky?”

“Maybe we’re due some good luck by now.” I shouldn’t have said that. I jinxed us.

Up in the swarm of wyrms above, there was a cacophonous roar, and as one, they turned and fled back towards the spire. At first, I thought that was another sign that everything was going our way, and as we lumbered forward, still dragging a road up to meet our stumbling steps, I could feel a little spark of hope. Maybe this didn’t need to be a complete train-wreck like most of the times we went after a shard. It was just as I was having that dumbass thought that I realized the wyrms weren’t going back to their roosts on the spire, they were landing in the open expanse of land between here and the spire, forming up into a battle line.

Even if they were too scared to fly and too scared to breath fire at us, that was still more reptilian tonnage than anyone could cope with. I tried to count them as we got closer, but my brain rejected what my eyes were telling it. There was no way there could be that many. “How many…”

Asher kept his eyes on his feet. “The answer is not going to make you happier.”

Restoration came back to life, and I poured that soothing green energy through Mercy. In an instant, she went from dangling dead weight to struggling free of my arm around her. “That’s a lot of lizard.”

The way that Asher avoided looking at the wyrms made me wonder how much of it was dread and how much was reverence. “We need not best them all. Defeating only a few should provide us with ample opportunity to pass through their defensive line and make it onto the rise. From there it should be a simple matter of finding an entrance too small for them to pursue and then proceed inside to face their… leader.”

Mercy picked up the pace, forcing the rest of us, sore as we were, to keep up with her rejuvenated body. “That’s still a lot of lizard.”

The wyrms to the center of the line, directly between us and the spire, seemed to be the eldest. They were certainly the biggest, but maybe they didn’t grow all their lives like goldfish do. Maybe the mass of massive wyrms in the middle were just the overeaters. The devoted fans of deep-fried dvergar. When we got close enough, maybe we’d see the cheesy nacho stains on their claws and settle the matter.

We were picking up steam again now that we didn’t have to dodge diving dragons or swerve around fireballs. The other two were undeniably faster than me, but for every two of their steps, I only had to take one, thanks to my big Faun bod. The last mile between us and the spire seemed to be eaten up in no time at all.

Apparently, enough time had passed between murders that the world considered that last fight to be over.

Victory!

Celerity increased to 29

Vitality increased to 23

Piety increased to 13

Resonant Dominion: 5/10

Airstrike: Rank 10/10

Fire Resistance: Rank 4/10

2680 Experience Gained

Drawing closer, it became clear just how screwed we actually were. The wyrms were just the front line of Voidcrown Spire’s defenses. A good distance behind them, great barricades had been constructed, woven out of living trees around uprooted rocks by the look of it. And behind those stood an army of Inyoka. The ones atop the barricades were in full lacquered armor, resting what looked like slings on sticks over their shoulders—hand-held catapults to rain rocks down on us. Charming. Around the base of each palisade there were a dozen ranks of spearmen, each and every one of them ready for war, all their pale scales glinting in the distant starlight. Whatever spellcasters they had were still sequestered up on the carved balconies that we could now see lining the outer face of the spire.

What had once been wild outcroppings, launched up and out by the explosive force of the Voidgod rising, had been smoothed and shaped by Inyoka artisans into platforms. Even the greenery that we’d seen clinging to the spire from a distance was resolved into tiered gardens around the periphery of those great open spaces. Even knowing they were there, it was practically impossible to make out the robed figures that had to be lurking up in those gardens.

Our crazy sprint slowed just a little as I sloped the road back down towards the ground level of the tower, now all the plateaus were behind us. “Okay. So not to crap on the plan, I’m sure ‘smash through’ will work fine on the wyrms, but what about the rest of them.”

Asher had a frantic edge to his polite reply. “A moment to think, if you please.”

“What… What can we even do?” Mercy mumbled, her sprint faltering at the sight of the whole army arrayed against us.

I strode on, spinning the Lucis in my hand. The other sword was still in fragments, embedded in the burnt-out skull of a dragon. I’d just have to do without. “We’ve fought armies before. This isn’t any different.”

Despite her obvious fear, Mercy was by my elbow. “We fought one army before, and we got whipped.”

We got a bit whipped, but we turned it around. “I can Deathtouch any Inyoka that get close enough.”

“They don’t need to get close enough—they have staff-slings.” She shook her head slowly from side to side, taking in all the massed bodies and wyrms arrayed against us. “They can beat us to death with rocks from way over there.”

I shrugged that off too. “I can Artifice any rocks that get close enough.”

She pointed up to the spire itself. “Then they’ve got wizards.”

“I can…” I really didn’t have a lot of solutions to those. The fire resonance thing had worked once when we were desperate, but I really didn’t know how many more times I could pull it off. Or even how I pulled it off the first time. “Dodge the fireballs?”

“And the wyrms.” Mercy couldn’t stop staring at them. They had begun shuffling closer together in front of us as though the sheer mass of bodies would be enough to stop us. If we had a single braincell between us, it probably would be enough.

The handle of the Lucis was dry despite my sweating hands, the metal still warm enough to evaporate it all away. “I can fight them?”

“At the same time as doing all the rest?” The look she shot me was so dubious it had twisted her whole face, all of it contorted around that one raised eyebrow.

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Man, we’re screwed.”

Asher piped up from behind us. “I cannot help but notice that despite this accurate assessment of the situation, you continue to move forward.”

I glanced back at him. Every part of his body was rigid, his tail held straight, and his usual swaying completely arrested. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a spell that is going to get us around all this?”

Asher didn’t relax, and he didn’t soften, but even so, his words brought a smile to my face. “I am devoted to the study of magic, not miracles.”

Turning to give him a pep talk, I nearly fell right over when from the spire a roar ripped out: “Halt!”

Doing what the bad guys tell us to do is not generally the best strategy, but I think we were all so surprised that they were finally talking, that we actually did stop.

From the rear ranks of the wyrms, a behemoth of a lizard leap-frogged forward. It wasn’t bigger than Jumbo-Dumbo, for which I was very grateful, but it did still manage to look like their buff big brother. Or maybe the bully that kicked sand in Jumbo’s face on the beach and stole their girlfriend. It was a very burly wyrm, is what I’m trying to say.

Fire boiled out from its jaws, but not in the water-cannon way that the other wyrms had accomplished. More like it had been gargling with it and some had spilled out. While the other wyrms had all been opalescent, this one was completely devoid of color. Combined with its red rimmed eyes, I took it to be an albino. White even by the standards of the white dragons. “Which runt speaks for you?”

I glanced to star-struck looking Asher and sneering Mercy and stepped forward before they had the opportunity. The last thing we needed was Mercy’s version of diplomacy.

“I’ll talk to you.” Both of my beloved companions let out a groan behind me. Nice little vote of confidence. Dicks. “Who am I talking to, and what are we talking about?”

The great white wyrm tucked in its wings and stalked out from their line to the halfway point between us, just like we were the leaders of two armies striding out to parley instead of one dude and his two buddies trying to break into their house. “You cower before Arataanax, prince among wyrms. Tell me why you have invaded our lands and slaughtered our kin.”

I jerked a thumb over my shoulder towards the heap of scorched wyrm bones on the horizon. “Uh. They started it.”

He stalked back and forth in front of me, tail swishing with each step, but his head always twisted around to keep both eyes locked on me. “They were defending themselves from invaders.”

“Who said we were invaders?”

“You are here”—more flames spilled out between his teeth—“which makes you invaders.”

“Couldn’t we just be friends who’re bad at calling ahead?” I tried to give him a smile. He did not appreciate my smile. He did not appreciate it at all.

His head snapped forward until he was only a foot from my face, and the heat of his breath made my eyelashes burn away with a sizzle. “You shall turn back now and make restitution for all the evil you have done. Then we might accept a single supplicant.”

“Yeah, we really don’t have time for that.” I shrugged, refusing to step back an inch. “And besides, you set our Dvergar on fire. You don’t get to take the moral high ground.”

His head was the size of a horse, and he cocked it from side to side in confusion—like all of Asher’s expressions done large. “What Dvergar? And what matter is it to Eternals if Dvergar were done injury? What is this nonsense you speak?”

I pointed a finger at his face, and he actually did pull back. “You sent a wyrm and a half-ton of Inyoka to Talon’s Keep. You killed a load of our people and set the place on fire. You started this!”

You could almost hear the cogs turning in that massive brain of his, trying to parse the things I was saying into something that suited him. “You are servants of Talon?”

“No, we killed his ass and took his shard, and now we’re here for the rest.”

Wyrms of a certain age probably didn’t run into things that they didn’t understand very often. The fact that I was hitting him with all these facts he couldn’t make sense of had him more off balance than the fact that three tiny humanoids had blasted their way through a half-dozen of his friends. He latched onto the one point in the whole conversation that he thought he could work with. “Such blatant lies. Eternals cannot die.”

I shrugged, wishing I’d hauled along some severed heads to show off. That had worked pretty well last time I had to convince someone I could kill Eternals. “I’ve got a trail of bodies from here to the Bastion that say otherwise.”

Arataanax stilled for a moment, and I genuinely wasn’t sure what was going to happen next, whether he was going to pounce on me or fly away or start ranting and raving. As it turned out, it was none of the above. He narrowed his massive eyes and brought his head low enough to the ground that we were face to face. Then he hissed, “Who are you?”

Once again I did my best to flash him a winning smile. “I’m Maulkin, that’s Mercy, and the Inyoka-looking guy trying not to bat his eyelashes at you is Asher.”

He looked to each of us in turn as I made the introductions, and this time, it was Asher’s turn to bury his face in his hands. “Who do you serve?”

“Uh… nobody. Or… the gods maybe?” Why did everyone always assume we were working for somebody else? I guess I just didn’t look like a ‘big ideas’ kind of guy. “We’re on a quest to collect the shards of the Rusted Blade? To kill the Voidgod when he comes back? You’ve probably heard of him at least.”

Nictitating membranes flicked sideways over the wyrm’s eyes, turning the blood-red stare milky for just a moment. He jumped to a new subject rather than dealing with the possibility that we were divine intervention. That was probably fair. If someone showed up on my doorstep saying they were on a mission from the gods, I would have slammed the door shut in their faces too. No matter how persuasive their pamphlets were. “Ayangarax could not have arrived at Talon’s Keep more than three days hence. How could you have traveled such leagues, wingless, since then? Nothing you say makes sense.”

“I get that a lot.” I snorted. “Let’s just say we have amazing godly powers that let us do all the stuff you don’t understand and move on, yeah?”

He shuffled his massive body around until he was pointed right at me instead of coiled sideways, making himself a smaller target for when this all went sideways. Probably smart. “Regardless of whatever slight you feel our brood has committed, you have done far more harm than it could warrant.”

“We aren’t here for revenge.” I let out a sigh. “We’re here for the shards.”

Once more the red eyes of the wyrm narrowed. “You mean to steal from our hoard?”

“I mean…” I opened and shut my mouth a couple of times, hoping something smart might pop out if I gave it enough time. “If you’re willing to trade for them, I’d be happy to do that, but I’m guessing you guys aren’t big on that sort of thing.”

He growled, and damn, that was a good growl. It set my bones vibrating inside me. If I hadn’t gone to the bathroom earlier on, then I definitely would have had to Artifice myself some new pants. When that rumbling roar resolved into words again, they were, “You shall trade your lives for another step forward.”

“Ah, there it goes.” I waved back to Asher and Mercy, who looked like they were getting ready to jump into the fight. The longer we were all chatting, the longer my healing powers had to cool down for the inevitable injuries we were about to suffer. More talking was good news. “Okay, so what is the chat really about if you just want to fight anyway?”

“A challenge,” Arataanax growled with undisguised pleasure. “Your champion against ours. When I have defeated them, the remainder of you shall turn aside.”

Okay, fighting one wyrm definitely sounded like a better idea than fighting all of the wyrms. If I could kill this one guy and that was the end of it, I’d be very happy. “And if I win?”

The prize I was hoping for was obviously a free pass into Voidcrown Spire, but I’d settle for just some of the enemy army going away and sticking their fingers in their ears until everything was over. It was pretty obvious to Arataanax that I was expecting an express pass too because he didn’t even bother to offer up anything else. “My kin shall never abandon their duty to protect the roost. No matter the fate of one wyrm.”

“So heads you win, tails I lose?” I rolled my shoulders and adjusted my grip on the Lucis. The fighting was going to start soon. I could feel it in my gut. Arataanax was too still after all his pacing and swaying, as tense as Asher had been just a minute ago when we were walking into the jaws of death. “Doesn’t seem like a good deal.”

Once more his eyes narrowed, but this time it wasn’t anger, it was some savage delight. The prospect that I was going to back down. Wyrms were predators at heart. If you showed them weakness, they’d pounce. I didn’t need my Bestiary skill to tell me that. I’d met enough bullies in my life. “You are too cowardly to face me?”

“Nah, I’ll kick your ass. Just give me one second.” I turned to shout back over my shoulder, “Hey, guys, he wants to do the duel thing. Stay out of it until I’m done beating his ass bloody, okay?”

Mercy put her face in her hands, but Asher nodded his assent. He understood that there was still a pay-off, even if this wyrm didn’t actually offer me a prize for winning. First, we wouldn’t have to deal with him when the actual battle kicked off, and second, all of his buddies would have just seen their biggest scariest fighter turned into mince before their eyes.

With that settled I turned back to smile at Arataanax. “So how do you want to do this?”

His head cocked to the side, but there was no doubt in his voice when he rumbled out, “To the death.”

“Yeah, obviously to the death.” I rolled my eyes. “But how do you want to make it fair? Do you want me to tie one hand behind my back or something?”

Who would have thought that would be the insult that broke the wyrm’s patience?

He lunged forward, jaws spilling flame, and I surged my Potency to meet him head-on, catching him by the spear-blades of his blackened teeth and twisting him aside. He was insanely strong, not just throwing his weight around like the wyrms earlier, and I barely managed to get him turned away before a belch of blue-hot fire escaped, obviously meant to obliterate me but instead puffing harmlessly past me.

Asher and Mercy had to dive for cover, but even though they thought I was being a dumbass, they still did what I asked and left the fight to me. Bless them.

Normally that would have meant it was my turn, but before I could heft the Lucis to take a swing, Arataanax was already bludgeoning me with the side of his head, sending me rolling out of striking range.

The wyrm huffed another puff of blue fire after me that I had to dive around or risk being flame broiled. His words rumbled out with the heat: “Weak.”

If he was trying to get me mad, he was barking up the wrong tree. I got bombarded with worse insults from Mercy just for existing in earshot of her. Still, it wouldn’t hurt for him to think that I was some berserk idiot. I leapt for him, all the muscles in my legs bulging as Surged Potency gave me the power to clear the distance between us in a single bound.

Arataanax followed my flight with his eyes, waiting until I was in mid-air and there was no way for me to change course to let out another burst of fire—just like I’d expected him to.

The metal of the Lucis exploded outwards into a blunt rectangular shield as broad as my body, superheating and becoming unworkable, but turning aside the brief burst of extreme heat without any of it touching me.

I smashed into his neck, my sword still only so much useless flattened metal, but the bulk of my body still made a decent enough club to whap him with.

The impact barely rocked the wyrm, but it got me inside of his reach, and that meant that the moment the Lucis cooled down enough to become a weapon again, he was dead meat. If only he’d just hang around for long enough for that to happen.

With a beat of his wings that knocked me skidding, Arataanax launched himself into the air. If he stayed up there, spitting fire down at me, this fight was probably done before it had even started. Regardless, my cunning plan to toss myself directly into him was thwarted before it had any chance to pay off.

At least I still had the shield-shaped Lucis ready for the inevitable wash of fire he unleashed down on me. This close to the Spire, the stone beneath us was hazy to my Artifice, some of it still intact, and some untouchable thanks to the Voidgod’s power. Maybe I could have hauled up a shield of stone, maybe not, but I didn’t fancy betting my life on it.

The flash of fire passed as fast as it had come, and I was just hauling the shield away to get a quick look at what Arataanax was doing next when he hit me. As it turns out, what he was doing next was dropping out of the sky like a ton of bricks to land directly on top of me.

There was no skill to the blow, no cunning or strength behind it, just the full weight of his front claws coming down on me like a pouncing cat—assuming that cats grew to the size of monster trucks. The Lucis-shield crumpled under his weight, the metal already softened by the heat, and stretched too thin so that it could cover me. My strength meant nothing if the metal I was pushing against collapsed.

I was borne down to the ground in a shriek of metal, the wind knocked out of me before I could make any witty comments. Pretty sure I had all my witty comments knocked out of me too, to be fair. Well, whether it worked or not, pulling up the rock with Artifice was the only thing I could come up with in that moment.

Just like it had back at the Bastion, the stone didn’t come up smooth. The few patches I could touch leapt up in spikes while the rest lay useless and dormant. Where those spikes hit the underside of my shield, they stopped dead and started to crumble under the weight. Where they spurred up around it, they stopped dead the moment they touched wyrm-flesh. I couldn’t drive them through a normal person, let alone scales like that. All I could do was haul up more and more of those spikes. Everything that I could pull up I did, until the earth beneath our feet felt dead and empty.

Even so, the raking claws of the wyrm above were ripping through that feeble protection, stripping clean through stone and iron. I guess I was screaming a bit, but I didn’t really remember telling my mouth to make that noise. Maybe I could convince myself it was deliberate. I was trying to distract the giant murder-lizard. Yeah, that was it.

My surged Potency gave out, and holding up the Lucis-shield with my arms became pointless. Without my strength, the stone spikes I’d thrown up to support the barrier gave way, and the whole thing came crashing down towards me. The only good news was that the shredded shield was finally cool enough for Artifice to work again.

I cocooned myself as metal and stone swirled down around me in as solid a barrier as I could make. Arataanax’s weight fell unhindered against it, and it began to collapse almost immediately. The original Lucis fell down to rest against my chest, so I was all set for being buried alive.

Arataanax bounced above me, flinging himself up in the air, then coming down, again and again. Bending the metal, shattering the stone, crushing it all down on top of me.

I took a grip on the handle of the tiny Lucis, and I thrust it up. The wyrm was off me for that moment, and both stone and iron shattered up with my thrust, all together, giving me a clear view of the spiky claws coming crashing down. It wasn’t enough. The impact of them held off that crushing weight for a moment, but there wasn’t enough power to break through the thick, armored scales.

Gasping between screams, I rolled to the side. The momentary delay gave me some distance, but then Arataanax was on me again, and his claw punched through my back, through my guts, and right out the other side to pin me to the dirt.

Pain is a funny thing. Sometimes you can stub your toe and feel like you’re dying, and sometimes you can be covered in third degree burns and a dragon’s claw can go right through you and it doesn’t even feel that bad. Mostly I felt weight, then an awful sucking sensation as the claw started to withdraw as Arataanax bounced up again.

My body seemed to cling to the claw thrust through it, and I lifted up off the ground with the wyrm.

The Lucis dangled useless as a toothpick in my grasp as I was hauled up and then smashed down into the earth again like I was a ragdoll and the wyrm was an overenthusiastic puppy. The blow knocked me free, and pain and blood blossomed out from the new opening. I cried out, and the fragments of metal scattered all around me answered. The Lucis reformed, a great-sword once more, and I rolled and swung with more desperation than strength as the hooked and bloodied claws of my tormentor came down again.

It sheared through the claws. The full weight of the wyrm still struck me, and my bones made a noise not unlike somebody stamping on a bag of cereal, but the lethal, piercing claws were blunted. I lived through it.

Surging Vitality helped me to keep it together—and I mean physically keep my body together in one piece instead of just letting it splatter out into component parts—but it couldn’t undo the damage. Only Restoration could do that.

That green light pulsed through my body, even as Arataanax bore his weight down on me, trying to turn me into Maulkin paste. I couldn’t get a breath. I couldn’t move. All I could do was wait.

Arataanax hadn’t struck me as the patient type. Even though he could have just stayed put and won without moving another muscle, he decided to bounce again. I didn’t try to get away. I was pretty sure that I was in no fit state to move anyway, and there would never be enough time. What there was time for, was using Artifice to twist the severed claws of the dragons into spears, their butts stuck in the churned soil, their points aimed right up at the descending hands. With a thrust of the Lucis, I drew the iron around its blade up into a jagged point too. If he wanted to keep smacking down on the same spot, I’d be stupid not to make it hurt.

His own claws were strong enough to make it through the scales, even if the point I’d put on the Lucis skittered off. What should have been a killing blow for me became an agonizing, cactus-slapping moment of stupidity for him.

The pain was enough to make him flap his wings to throw himself free of me again. Restoration had just finished melding my bones back together, even if the hole through my liver area was still oozing more blood than I even knew I had. I could move again. Which meant rolling to my feet, ignoring every ounce of sanity in my skull telling me to run away, and charging after the wyrm with a roar. “Get back here! I’m not done with you yet!”

Half of the dragon-claw spears were still standing, and the other half had broken off into him. When I thrust the Lucis forward as I charged, they leapt after me. Spear and sword were close enough for them to resonate, apparently. Even if they were made of different materials.

Without the wyrm’s strength behind them, the spears couldn’t make it through Arataanax’s scaled hide, but the rattle of them against his armor seemed to rattle him. He beat his wings again and again. Gaining height, running from the fight. “Come back here, you big flappy coward!”

Oh that did the trick.

His wings snapped in against his sides, and he plummeted back towards me with fire already boiling up his throat. I didn’t have the strength to leap up and meet him, but I did have the wherewithal to dart forward at the last moment before the fire was unleashed.

The tops of my horns burned off, and my hair caught fire. Everything above my eyebrows was screaming agony. It didn’t matter, as I launched myself up to hit the underside of Arataanax’s jaws with a swipe of the Lucis, slamming them shut on the flow of fire. He had more control than Jumbo Dumbo. He cut off the flames before he could irreparably damage himself, but now I was inside his reach, and I had a sword. I’d done a lot more with a lot less.

Rebounding off the sooty earth, I leapt not for the soft underside of his throat but for the closest leg, splintering my great-sword into two short ones, the Lucis in one hand and a hooked and barbed slab of iron in the other. They both served me well. I wasn’t trying to hit hard enough to get through the scales, and I wasn’t trying to rip him apart. I was climbing him. The hooks caught in the gaps between scales, the tip of the Lucis digging in to give me leverage to make the next leap up.

Arataanax spun around like a dog chasing his own tail, trying to catch me in the act of sneaking under him, so well protected by his dense scaly hide that he couldn’t even feel me on it. I was up by his wings before he even knew it, and then I was between them, Artificing a spike onto the end of one boot that I kicked through the row of fins down the center of his back before splitting out to hold me in place. We were locked together now. Me on his back, him underfoot. The only way he was getting me off was if I was dead.

I smashed my swords back together into one and started hacking away. The wyrm’s back got most of my loving attention, but I didn’t neglect his wings either. He might not have noticed my climb up onto his back, but once I started chopping through scales to the meat beneath, he suddenly became aware of the monkey on his back.

The wyrm’s great head twisted around and lashed at me like a striking snake, but now I was ready for him, and I’d taken his biggest advantage away. I met his bite head-on with a solid blow across the face. Again, his natural armor protected him from the worst of the damage, but he couldn’t hurt me so long as I had my eyes on him and my sword in hand.

His tail lashed up behind me, but I knew without even looking that it couldn’t reach. Simple mechanics. I was too far forward along the body. His head came around again, and I could see the exact moment that he realized he was screwed. The fire that would bake anyone fool enough to stand in one place while fighting a wyrm came boiling up his throat, flowing up from whatever weird apparatus they had down in their chests that let them do something as crazy as breathing fire. Then, as it reached the twist in his neck where he’d coiled it around to face me, the rush of heat stopped.

Again, he was smarter than the wyrms I’d fought before—he worked out that he was about to blow his own head off without needing me to tell him—and he whipped his head around to un-pinch the pipe of his throat and let the flames loose. He scorched over the top of his own wing, but it wasn’t close enough to touch me.

He twisted around to come at me from the other side, and I laughed aloud as his fitful huffs of flame couldn’t quite reach me again. He even tried craning his neck straight back and trying to burn me off him that way, but unfortunately, he had a spine, which meant that it was physically impossible. He let off a whole load of blue-hot flames straight up into the sky after that, in a scream of what I’m going to go ahead and call anguish.

Anguish because, while he was making all these little experiments, I was killing him. Blow by blow, his pallid scales were chipped away. Blow by blow, the flesh beneath started ripping out in great steaming hunks. By the time I was past flesh and into bone again, Arataanax had abandoned all attempts at snapping at me, breathing fire at me, or anything else.

His wings beat steadily as he lifted us off the ground, like he was waggling them at me, trying to distract me from my task. I won’t deny that I was tempted to try and chop them off so his valiant last stand plan fell through, but I was so close to breaking through the wyrm’s armored spine by then that I considered it a wasted effort.

Taking to the air, he hauled us up, high above the battlefield, spinning lopsided as he went, hoping fruitlessly that he might dislodge me. I could see all of the Inyoka arrayed against us and all of the wyrms craning their necks up to see me killing their prince. Even the Spire itself didn’t look so massive from up here above the smoke. I could feel Arataanax’s voice through my feet more than I could hear it over the whipping winds or the crunch of bone, steel, and gristle. “If I die. You die.”

“Am I meant to be scared?” I laughed between swings. “I’ve already died three times this week. But you… you’ll only die once.”

Chapter 28

When he did die, it wasn’t pretty or dramatic. One moment I was butchering away, and the next the wyrm’s flesh went limp beneath me, and we began our long tumble from the sky.

Lifesense was a hell of a thing. I could feel Arataanax dying, inch by inch. I felt his three hearts stop beating, I felt the flow of blood stop, and I felt every part of him screaming out for nourishment, with nothing coming, and then my Deathsense took over, and I felt the growing darkness, spreading in from Arataanax extremities until it reached the point where the Lucis was still stuck. Last but not least, my Artifice began to sense the dead wyrm as a pile of raw materials.

I slung the Lucis into its place on my back, reached out my arms, and took hold. The bones of the wyrm were the kind of material that Artifice found the easiest to work, so it was the spindly bones in the wings that I seized control of, not tearing them free to use, but holding them steady. The plummet down to that scary crunchy landing became a spiral. Still more helicopter blades than helicopter cockpit, but at least we were slowing down.

Rigor Mortis wouldn’t set in for a few minutes yet, so I had the time to make careful adjustments to the position of each bone in the wing until that deranged spinning became a smooth curve. Round and round we went, swooping lower and lower over the empty plain and the gathered army, back and forth, back and forth.

I had done the best I could with what I had, but I definitely did not stick the landing. Poor Arataanax hit the ground face-first, then that face, on the end of his flexy neck, got folded up under the body as it scraped its way along the sooty earth. Mercy and Asher had both come running to my aid, but when they saw that I was fine and I’d procured us a ride, their dread-struck expressions transformed into delight, and they scrambled up on top of the wyrm’s back to join me. Free ride, all the way into the Voidcrown Spire, courtesy of Arataanax, whether he wanted to give it to us or not.

I grinned at the two of them, flipped off the army arrayed against us, and lifted my arms high.

The bones ripped clean out of Arataanax’s wings.

Huh, that wasn’t meant to happen. I flapped them back down again quick, hoping nobody had noticed, but Asher already had his face buried in his hands. “Okay, maybe I pulled a little too hard.”

Mercy slugged me. “You think!?”

“I can fix this! I can…” I reached out with Artifice to try and repair the damage I’d done to the wings, but instead of repairing the torn skin and muscles, the whole membrane of the wing tore loose.

Asher groaned into his hands. “Gods preserve us.”

“Look this isn’t my fault. Most of the time when I Artifice stuff, I’m just throwing it around as hard as I can. I didn’t know that I had to be delicate or whatever. Ah man come on, it is a wyrm. You’d think that they were built tougher than—”

Somewhere beneath us, whatever organ produced the fire that the wyrms spat quietly detonated, and blood and guts exploded out from beneath Arataanax’s body in all directions. His head had still been under there somewhere, but I was pretty sure I could see a big dragon eyeball rolling around in circles under what was left of the left wing.

Mercy clambered down without any further prompting, and Asher followed a moment after, looking kind of sick. “I can still fix this!”

Mercy’s laugh had a hysterical edge to it. “You really can’t.”

I was feeling a bit deflated after all that. I unhooked my boot from the carcass and hopped down to land beside them. “Well, maybe we can try again with another wyrm? There are plenty of them about.”

“I am not certain that the wyrms will allow you free reign to desecrate the corpse of another of their kin.” Asher pointed out.

“Eh, who cares what they think?” I joked.

Apparently, I should not have joked. Asher looked very serious when he said, “I am not certain that I would allow it.”

Right, semi-religious devotion to the things that were trying to kill us. Slight conflict of interest there. Oh well.

The wyrms were bounding towards us now with their wings tucked in tight, looking very much like some extremely excited ferrets running towards a tasty hunk of bunny. Beyond them, the battle-lines of the Inyoka held steady. I closed my eyes against all of it. I’d harvested more experience than I knew what to do with in the last dragon fight, so I threw it as quickly as I could manage into every Slaughter divinity I could find. Slaughter Infusion and that real evil sounding Extinction were both mine now. I threw the remainder into Fire Resistance, on the basis that I was inevitably going to get huffed on by at least one of these wyrms, and that still left over a thousand experience to dump into three more ranks of Resonant Dominion. I still wasn’t 100% clear on how it worked, but if it let me do things like grab all the fire being dumped on my head and throw it back in their faces, I knew I wanted more of it.

The more I amped it up, the more aware I became of everything in my Sphere of Influence. All the earth, all the fire still clinging to the wyrms remains, all the death, and the life, and the air and… It was almost overwhelming, this sudden awareness of how it all connected with the world beyond that sphere.

I opened my eyes to the charging enemy and rolled my shoulders. “Ready?”

Mercy drew back an arrow. “Let’s kick some tail.”

Asher’s spell snapped up from between his hands and shot into the sky in a pillar of blue, punching through the smoke and up to the stars. It blossomed out from that point in fractal, jagged lines, spreading out across the sky, intersecting and shimmering. I had no idea what that was going to do, but it sure looked impressive.

The wyrms came on together, close enough to touch each other if they’d wanted. Like flocking birds, every motion was synchronized. I spun the Lucis in my hands ready to meet them, and then as an afterthought, I hauled the bones out of Arataanax to make myself a new host of blades. I stuck the new boney great-swords into the dirt behind us in a fence, and then it was time to party.

Mercy’s storm arrows leapt out, thunderbolts striking at the wyrm’s faces, blinding and stinging even if they couldn’t make it through the scales. I poured Slaughter into the Lucis to make ready, and I felt the death all around me singing in harmony. The dead land beneath us, where the Voidgod once walked, and the dead wyrm scattered behind me. The shards and the Lucis sang the loudest. A tool made for killing, used to kill the greatest killer that ever lived. No wonder death spoke to it.

The wyrms were not making any mistakes or taking any chances. Before they even got close to us, they unleashed their fire. Six wyrms poured a line of fire out towards me, angling in from all sides. Asher and Mercy leapt to either side of the coming inferno, and I jumped it.

Potency Surge was back in action, and even if it wasn’t, I was stronger now than I’d ever been. I soared over the fire of the blinded wyrms and came down blade-first into the back of the one nearest the middle. Deathtouch burst out through the wound, necrotizing tissue as it went. I felt the life go out of the wyrm before it even hit the ground, and then I was bounding off onto the next one.

Spread out through my whole Sphere of Influence, Deathtouch wouldn’t even touch something as long-lived as a wyrm, but brought down to a single point, it did its evil job all too well. Just like Restoration, I wouldn’t be able to use it twice in quick succession on any one enemy, but each new wyrm would taste it.

I poured Extinction into the next blow without thinking, and when I brought my sword down on the next wyrm’s wing, the roar of pain that it let out echoed from all around me. I had no time to look and see what I’d done, I was already diving and rolling under the wounded wyrm to tumble out the other side.

It was only with the next wyrm in sight that I realized just how evil that power was. The same brutal slash marked the third wyrm’s wing as the second. The exact same injury in the exact same place, echoing out through Extinction and their shared heritage.

Those shrieks of pain cut off the flow of fire. The heat that had been so fearsome just a moment before was gone now. The wyrms twisted, seeking out the source of their pain and finding nothing. All of them, that was, except the one who’d snapped her head around to see me standing there. She did not look happy.

I hacked at her leg and pulsed Deathtouch into the blade as it bit. If there was one thing I was learning about wyrms, it was that they were absolutely lethal, finely tuned murder machines that completely fell apart the moment you knocked any one part out of place. Like they were pulled too taut, and the moment anything got cut they completely unraveled.

Her leg came away before she could snap me up, and with it, her balance was gone. Necrosis rushed up from the severed wound, and I could already see festering pus squirting out from the wound before I dove beneath her to avoid the inevitable sideways collapse. She flopped, head whipping around at the last moment to protect her precious neck, but she was down, and I was standing in front of yet another pissed-off wyrm.

They might have been extremely loyal to their big daddy wyrm in the mountain, but they clearly didn’t give a damn about each other. The next wyrm in line opened his jaws and belched flame right across me and my newly made tripod wyrm. Fire resistance did its work. The flames washed over me, hurting like hell but doing no damage that a good nine months in hospital wouldn’t fix, but the poor wyrm behind me wasn’t so lucky. Her body was engulfed in flames, scales blackening and flaking away.

Huffing and puffing out fire, the new wyrm couldn’t see me charging through the flames, ducking under its chin or thrusting the Lucis up through its jaws and into its brain. Another Deathtouch, spreading out from so close to so vital an organ. There was no way this one was recovering.

The carefully coordinated line that had charged us was broken, and the wyrms milled about, under constant bombardment from Mercy, every one of them frantically searching for whatever enemy had struck them on their wing.

I broke free of the swirl of scales at a sprint and closed the distance with Mercy and Asher. “That worked!”

Mercy sighted past me to put the one wyrm with enough sense to come chasing after me in a very bad way. She didn’t even bother to infuse her arrow with any elemental juju, she just shot the poor critter in the eye. “What the hell did you do?”

I turned to catch the half-blinded wyrm across the snout with the Lucis. Pulsing Deathtouch and melting its face off in a burst of slurry and gristly slop. “You know that super evil-sounding power that you didn’t want me to take?”

“You…” Mercy took a steadying breath, then lined up her next shot. One of the wyrms had tried to take flight to get out of the mosh-pit we’d created, and she wasn’t having that. The concussion of that thunder arrow flipped the whole wyrm upside down to crash onto its mates. “Of course you did!”

I thrust the Lucis at another likely looking wyrm, and one of my bone-blades shot out to skewer it through the chest. Fire came belching out of the hole. “Well, all these wyrms are related, right?”

“Looks that way.” Mercy ducked a ball of fire spat in our direction, then snapped back up to fire a lightning arrow right down the throat of the wyrm who’d launched it at us.

A swing of my sword launched three more bone blades into the crowd. I didn’t know if any of them killed anything, but they certainly made some very interesting noises. “So if I can kill one…”

She cut me off with an arrow passing so close to my face that I felt the wind tickling by my burns. “Just get on with it.”

I dove forward, knocking her off her feet as a wyrm pounced by with claws outstretched. “Uh, I can’t. It is on cooldown.”

She shoved me off and shot an arrow right into the fleeing wyrm’s… let’s just say she did the opposite of what she did when she shot that other one in the mouth. Then she put a hand on my scorched face and shoved me out of the way. “Oh, come on!”

“It’ll be back soon.”

She kicked off my thigh to get some height and hammer another shot down into one wyrm that was feeling courageous enough to sneak around our flank. “We’ll be wyrm-food soon!”

It was a funny thing, but I always assumed Asher was casting a spell whenever I wasn’t looking at him. Sometimes, during our month at Talon’s Keep, my head would snap around to see what he was doing, and he’d just be there sitting, reading. I’d jump when he joined in the conversation because I’d assumed his mouth was busy warbling magic words. Of course, now when I glanced his way, he really was casting, and whatever spell it was looked like it was going to be a big one. Both his hands were tracing out runes in the air, and he seemed to be singing three different songs, in four different languages. The fractal of blue light he’d spread across the sky was shining brighter in harmony with whatever he was working. Even the sunlight in his eyes seemed to be fracturing into little beams that were trying to join up with that pattern.

Of course, while he was doing all that wondrous magic, he wasn’t paying attention to the giant wyrms coming to eat him. I snapped the Lucis around in a parry, and one of the remaining bone-blades leapt up to knock a snarling mouth off course. I reversed my grip and spun towards Asher, making that same twin to my blade loop around him and then slam right into the wyrm’s nostril. Guess they didn’t have any armor plating rammed up there, judging from the truly pitiful sounds the wyrm started making. Good to know.

I pulsed Deathtouch into my sword almost out of habit, and it echoed through the bone-blade. The wyrm’s face collapsed in on itself as the rot set in. One moment it was whole and hearty, the next it was dying.

Asher couldn’t even spare me the fearful look that I knew he wanted to give me. Not with his complex spell so close to completion. I stood guard over him for those last moments, fending off any wyrm that dared look his way as the chanting rose to a crescendo and then stopped so abruptly I almost felt dizzy.

The blue light leapt up, the fractals painted over the night sky ignited, and a blinding dome encased the battlefield for just a moment, then it all came raining down as icicles as long as lances plunged from the sky. I threw up my arms and hauled every scrap of bone, stone, and iron above us, and even through that, jagged spikes of ice still punched through.

Mercy slid under the turtle-shell on her back, face coated in a layer of frost. She was panting for air. It was too cold out there to breathe. Restoration was ready for her, and I turned it on myself afterwards to grow back my horns and face.

She managed to croak out, “Nice one, Asher.”

“I am relieved that you offered us protection. I must admit that I was at somewhat of a loss as to how to—” Another icicle slammed through the roof of our makeshift cave, and Asher flung himself back to the ground with a whimper. Guess the storm wasn’t quite over yet.

We gave it a few seconds more, then I pried the shield above us apart and dumped all the mounted spikes of ice off to the sides. The war was over. Everywhere I looked there was ice, but even where exploding wyrm corpses had melted it away, there was little more to look at. Deathsense told me more than my eyes could about the state of this place. Not a single wyrm had been left standing. There had been too many of them to count, and now they were gone. All of them. I turned to Asher with newfound respect. “Could you always do that?”

He looked pretty somber for the guy who had just won a whole war all by himself. “The libraries of Talon’s Keep were bountiful, but it was only with our latest progression that I gained access to the Arcanum necessary to perform this particular spell.”

Mercy clapped him on the back, and her approval was so alien to him that he flinched away, expecting another blow.

Victory!

Potency increased to 56

Piety increased to 14

Climbing: 3/10

Resonant Dominion: 9/10

740 Experience Gained

I turned to face the Spire and what was left of its defenders. Beyond our field of ice, the Inyoka still stood, stalwart and ready. I’m pretty sure if I just watched all the giant monsters on my side get wiped out by three tiny little people, I would not have been waiting there politely to meet the people as they came marching in.

I bought myself Celerity Surge with half the experience that fight had given me and dropped the rest into unlocking Twin Strike’s close cousin, Twin Mantle. Projecting out armor or a shield was sure to come in handy if I ever found the time to practice it. And I wasn’t leaving any experience to vanish when we inevitably got murdered by the rest of the army that was still waiting for us.

One last time, we set off towards the Spire. Exhaustion was setting in for the other two. Even if Asher hadn’t been sprinting around like Mercy, killing wyrms was clearly taking some awful toll on his morale. As for Mercy, she’d been fighting off an army of monsters using nothing but a stick with some string attached and a bad attitude. Mercy’s bad attitude could carry her through most things, but there was no denying that she was built for stealth and scouting more than for head-on slap fights.

I could hear Asher mumbling numbers as we came closer and closer to the enemy lines. If he was having a mathematical mental breakdown, at least he was being courteous enough to have it quietly. “We are in range of them now.”

“To zap them?” I asked, hopefully.

Asher sighed. “For the launchings of their staff-slings to strike us.”

Mercy looked across the expanse and made a little distressed noise. “I can’t hit them from here.”

I nudged her with my elbow. “I thought you could hit anything?”

“It isn’t me, it’s just… bows. Shooting that far… well, there are limits to the bend… I can’t account for wind, I can’t… It just doesn’t work.”

Asher’s tail lashed as he stepped up beside us, inside firing range. “My thanks for your elaborate technical explanation.”

“Go suck an egg.” Mercy drew an arrow back all the same. Even if she missed, she’d probably hit somebody. There were enough of them.

I’d managed to retrieve the great-sword Lucis from the mangled mess of a shield I’d thrown together before, and a couple of workable bone-blades hovered behind my shoulders too. When the rocks started flying, I’d be ready to catch what I could and deflect what I couldn’t. If Asher and Mercy could deal with the fireballs, that just left us with all the foot-soldiers to work out.

We trudged forward into the shadow of the Spire, waiting for the fireballs and rocks and all the rest to come tumbling down on us, but they never came. Step by nervous step, we got closer and closer to the gaping cave at the base of the spire, and not one of the Inyoka fired down on us. That was… weird.

On and on we walked, and before our eyes, the illusion began to fall apart. Not a literal magical illusion, although that wouldn’t have surprised me, but one of the old dirty tricks that people used to play when they needed to convince an enemy army that they had an actual enemy to fight. There were Inyoka manning the barricades, but most of the soldiers arrayed against us were stuffed dummies. Maybe ten dummies to every living Inyoka. Making matters even more confusing, most of the Inyoka that we did see weren’t white. Once we were close enough, it became apparent that someone had just gone at them hard with a powder brush. The majority that we saw were in varied shades of brown and green, caked with white paint to cover up that fact. Some of them might have been genuine albinos, but you could count them on one hand.

Asher was the first one to get it together enough to shout out. “Who’s in charge here?”

“Now that the wyrms have expired, I believe that duty falls upon me.” That voice was all too familiar. It was the first voice that I’d heard on arrival in Amaranth, other than the gods bullying me out of my grave. The White Prophet stepped out from behind the palisades to greet us with a bow.

I had to slap Mercy’s bow aside so that the shot went wide and hammered into the fencepost beside the Prophet’s face instead of into his face. He didn’t flinch. He never flinched. Why would he when he knew everything that was going to happen before it happened. “I must admit, I did not expect your arrival to be so… imminent. I had presumed that it would take you longer to gather power to yourself or that you would seek the other shards before confronting the Great Wyrm. If I had known you would be here so soon, I would have arranged for more flights to be away, to ease your passage.”

“Nope, got all the shards already. Here to steal the last ones.” I cut him off. “Why are you here?”

What I’d taken before as a blank expression in the face of everything had changed now that I’d spent so long with Asher. There was surprise written in every line of how the Prophet held himself. I was guessing it was only that surprise that made him so abruptly honest. “It is my pleasure to serve as Tsanganaax’s castellan.”

This time, when Mercy took a shot at him, I let her. He leaned out of the way, already knowing it was coming before she even drew an arrow. She was ranting as she reached for the next one. “I knew we couldn’t trust him. I said, we can’t trust him. But did anyone listen to Mercy? Oh no, she’s just being crazy. She’s just paranoid saying that the guy who dumped us in a dungeon full of monsters all trying to kill us was not our bestest friend.”

Asher sounded heartbroken. “The prophecy was a fabrication?”

The Prophet bowed deeply to Asher, coincidentally avoiding Mercy’s next arrow by inches. “It is with great regret that I must admit that while elements of it were entirely correct, such as the arrival of five Eternals upon the palm of the Hinterlands, certain parts were exaggerated to force you into action.”

“So this whole time… what?” Long-unused machinery in my brain was swinging back into action, churning through everything that had been said and done, trying to find the reason. “You wanted us to gather up the rest of the shards for your master? He couldn’t get the shards from Talon, or the Alvaren, or the Faun, or even Leofric by himself, so you used us?”

“With even greater regret, I must tell you that this is not the case.” The White Prophet seemed to slump a little. “Perhaps it would be easier to show you.”

He turned to sashay up to the cavernous entrance to the Spire, and our choices seemed to be limited to walking into what might have been a trap or staying out here with the fake army and the very real casters up on top of the Spire gardens. We didn’t really need to take a vote to make that decision.

I was still trying to get my head around what we’d just heard. If the prophecy wasn’t real, then why had we been collecting all the shards? Why had the universe dumped them in our path? Why was Araphel so intent on stopping us if it didn’t mean anything? Had the Prophet accidentally told us some truth that even he didn’t know?

Mercy had gotten her little “told you so” out of the way already, but it seemed that her curiosity wasn’t going to be satisfied with a few words from the dude that sent us all off on this wild quest to start with. “So what’s with the fake white-boy army out there?”

“Breeding for albinism, or simply paler shades, in wyrms is easy with their diversity, but there are too few albino Inyoka to produce a stable line. Too many of us have been destroyed for our mutation. I am forced to supplement our numbers with unaligned Inyoka.”

Mercy snorted in derision. “So what, you go out, enslave them, paint them white, and pass them off as the home team?”

The Prophet didn’t seem to take it personally. “They come to us. The rejected, the loathed, and the lost. We are a place that they can call home. A place where all may serve without the demands of perfection.”

Asher let out a hiss. “It is… wrong.”

The Prophet’s step never faltered. “It is an imperfect solution to an impossible problem. The master must be served.”

We passed by tunnel mouths carved into the solid stone with a smoothness that only Artifice, or its Void counterpart, could achieve. We were walking into the warren that Araphel had carved for himself. His home. I’d hoped we’d get some glimpse in the way that he’d made this place that might give us insight into what the hell was going on in his head, but it was pointless. Everything was bare-bones and utilitarian. Nothing received more than the bare minimum of attention required to make it functional. At least all the walking gave me ample time to pulse Restoration through myself again. Burns closed and scarred over, and hair sprouted back out. I gave Mercy and Asher a heal too while we had the chance.

Mercy popped back into the conversation with what she clearly considered another ‘gotcha’ question. “So if you wanted us here, how come the wyrms—”

“An Inyoka, however well respected or regarded, cannot command a wyrm.” He slowed a little in his relentless pace as if he was pondering his next words. “The masters are prideful. They would not have understood why you are here.”

I piped up, “We also don’t understand why we’re here.”

“You will, soon enough.”

We were led off down one of the side tunnels, coiling deeper and deeper down into the earth. For some reason, I’d expected us to head up, what with the giant spike of stone shooting up into the sky, but down into the earth probably made more sense. That was where Araphel had come from after all—down in the dark places of the world where the Dvergar delved too deep.

It was weird. I’d expected this place to be more intimidating and evil-looking, but mostly it was just boring—like a Dvergar mine without any of the handcrafted charm. The boringness probably had something to do with the fact that my senses were all blunted by the Voidgod’s touch. None of the stone around me felt like anything. All I could sense was static. It was like my leg had fallen asleep.

Mercy still wouldn’t let up. “You know that if this is a trap, we’re going to murder you first, right?”

“As is your right,” the Prophet intoned softly. “But it is my hope that the truth will gain me your sympathies, and you might forgive my minor deceptions.”

“I’m not big on forgiving.” Mercy plucked her bowstring like a guitar. It thrummed.

Still, the Prophet could not be flustered. “If my life is the price that must be paid, then I pay it gladly.”

We were so far down into the earth now that my ears popped. As deep as we’d ever been beneath the Dvergar city, but we’d gotten here so much faster. The tunnels that we crisscrossed and followed were so wide you couldn’t see the sides in some places, and they were so tight I had to duck in others.

Finally, just when I thought Mercy was actually going to just shoot the Prophet out of pure boredom, we came to a halt by a tunnel opening, and he swept out his arm, whispering, “Behold, Tsangaanax.”

Chapter 29

We beheld him. We beheld the heck out of him. Although it took a little while to completely grasp what we were looking at. He was white, which didn’t fit in with what Asher had told us about big black dragons, and he was so big that it took my eyes some time to adjust to the idea that all of the thing that I was looking at was one thing.

The serpentine coils were rucked up on top of each other, so you couldn’t really tell which end of the wyrm was which, and there was just so much of him that even if you could work out which bit was the head, he was liable to be doubled up on top of it with his butt or something anyway. There must have been wings in there somewhere, trapped under the body, limbs too, but I couldn’t make them out. I could only see so far. For all I knew, this was just the midsection. The outer edges of the cave were beyond the limits of my vision. We’d seen wyrms before that I’d considered to be too big to be real, but this was insane. Tsangaanax wasn’t a creature any more, he was a landmark, a country, a force of nature. And he was sick.

My Lifesense struggled to make sense of what my eyes were telling me was a living creature, but my Deathsense wasn’t having the same problem. Focusing in on just that, I could feel the veins of dark energy shifting and drifting through the great wyrm’s body. Outlining him. Burrowing through his flesh and his spirit, rooted to the two shards that were embedded in the place of scales.

I spoke as softly as the Prophet had. There was no way of knowing what might happen if we disturbed this creature’s slumber. “He’s poisoned.”

The Prophet nodded with a little tremor, barely holding his composure. “The shards.”

“All this time that he’s had them, they’ve been eating away at him…”

The Prophet stepped back behind us, speaking as softly as he could. I couldn’t turn to watch him. I couldn’t take my eyes of the gentle shifting of the mass of flesh before us. Wind whistled through the tunnels, drawn and expelled by his breathing. “He believed that their power could be tapped, just as your Talon did. When the corruption took hold, he believed it to be a sign of progress. When the color and the fire were drained from him, he thought it was an even exchange for all he would gain.”

“But he isn’t divine.” Mercy sounded almost respectful. That spooked me as much as anything else. “He couldn’t use them.”

The Prophet’s voice broke, the pain cracking through. “They used him. Driving him to dark deeds. They hurt him. More and more with each passing day. The agony, the hunger for them, it has driven him to madness and beyond.”

“You didn’t trick us into coming here to bring more shards.” Asher had been reverential of the wyrms we met before, but now he was awestruck. “Your desire is for us to remove his.”

“Please,” the Prophet whimpered. “I beg you.”

Death had burrowed through the great wyrm where the flows of life should have been. Pumping through his veins. Coiling through his brain. The shards were the root cause, there was no arguing with that, but that didn’t mean that pulling them out was going to make a difference. “They might be the only things still keeping him alive. You get that, right?”

His voice was so soft I almost didn’t hear it when he answered, “Please.”

I drew the Lucis and sighed. “We’ve come this far.”

Asher shook his head at me hopelessly. Even Mercy looked overwhelmed by the task in front of us. “You two hold him down. I’ll… I’ll cut them out.”

“Maulkin, this is madness.” Asher had that same desperate edge as the Prophet’s. “No spell I can weave will so much as crack Tsangaanax’s scales. This is a task beyond us. Beyond any of us. The gods themselves would turn away.”

“The gods did turn away. They left him here like this for… forever. They left the poison of Araphel to infect this whole world, when they could have put an end to it. We’ve got to do better. We’ve got to save Amaranth. We’ve got to save the universe.”

Mercy caught my arm before I could step forward. “Dude, there is no way we can win this.”

“Then we’ll lose.” I growled, louder than I meant to. “We’ll lose, and we’ll come back and lose, again and again, as many times as it takes until we wear Tsangaanax down and get the shards out of him. We can’t leave him like this. And even if you could stomach leaving him suffering like this forever, Araphel is coming back, whether the Prophet or anyone else believes it or not. He is coming. I’ve seen him. We need a way to fight back.”

For the first time since we’d met him, the Prophet looked surprised. “You have seen him?”

I tugged free of Mercy, and I jumped.

A cloud of dust puffed up from the great wyrm’s scales when I landed on him. The white coloration that had resulted in his new albino army was decay. The outer layer of the natural armor he’d been born with was crumbling away to nothing as he was devoured from inside. Maybe he felt me landing on him, maybe he didn’t, but either way, he didn’t stir.

Back in the tunnel mouth, Mercy and Asher were frantically waving their arms and shaking their heads, neither one willing to risk shouting and awakening the beast below. That made things easier. I cupped a hand behind my ear like I couldn’t hear them, then I shrugged and moved on.

I sincerely hoped that Asher had some big magical sedative ready to shove into Tsangaanax because the moment he started moving, I was going to be in some serious trouble down here. The two shards felt like they were a good distance down below in the coils of wyrm, wrapped protectively as close to his heart as he could keep them, which meant I was going to have to squeeze down through the gaps to get to them, and the moment the big white wyrm started moving, I was liable to get crushed by his tectonic shifting.

Fighting down my own nerves, I hiked over the breathing landscape, trying to tread lightly and not slip and slide as the length of wyrm I was following sloped down to either side. I’d get as close as I could up here before working out how to get down there. Since the wyrm had politely decided to stay asleep, I shoved the Lucis back into my baldric so I had my hands free for balancing.

At a glance, I could see Asher and Mercy having a frantic but stilted argument, both trying not to scream at the other, while the Prophet looked down on me with his strange pale eyes. I think that he would have been crying in gratitude if he had the tear ducts for it. All of his byzantine scheming had finally come to fruition. We were here, and we hadn’t even told him to go and lay an egg when he switched up from Machiavellian manipulation to outright begging for help.

The stupid thing was, if he’d told us the truth up front, I would have volunteered to help anyway. All the lies and the tricks, they’d all been for nothing. If he’d just rocked up to me, fresh out of the ground and said, “Hey, there is a sick dragon, want to come help?” I would have been all over that.

I was above the shards now. It felt like they were embedded on two separate coils of the great body, but Tsangaanax had decided to twist himself around so that they were together, as deep into the heap of body as he could make them. His most treasured possessions, which I was about to pry off him and run away with. Oh yeah, this was going to go down well.

Taking one glance back and a deep breath, I slipped down into the gap. Almost immediately, the press of scales all around me stopped my descent. I had to wriggle around until I was head down, then pry the sides of the wyrm apart before I could make any progress. With every breath in, the scales crushed in around me, covering me in powdered wyrm, but with each exhalation, I was able to slip a little deeper into the crushing darkness. I could only see at all because I was an Eternal, and what I could see wasn’t much. Scales made up the walls of this tunnel, and a patch of darkness in the middle was my only way forwards. My shards were humming in recognition of the ones below, all parts of the whole desperate to be together again. It was better than a compass, better than any of my other senses. I followed the song of the shards down and down.

The closer I got, the tighter the wyrms coils were wrapped, and the harder it was to push my way through. Even when Tsangaanax breathed out, these walls were so tight that I was only making it a few inches through before the next crushing came. Asher and Mercy must have been crapping themselves after watching me dive into the wyrm soup, but if they were coming in after me, I couldn’t sense them.

There was a pocket of air up ahead—I knew because Lifesense and Deathsense showed me nothing, and because wind was gusting up out of it to hit me now that I was getting closer to it, squeezed up and out by the same motions that kept making my armor creak and crunch all about me. I dared to hope that it was a pocket of air that also contained at least one of the shards, but surrounded on all sides by the coiling veins of Death energy, I was finding it harder to see the forest for the trees.

I couldn’t remember what being born felt like, but I had to assume it was something like being slowly crushed out from between a wyrm’s coils head-first. My horns kept getting hooked on scales as I was squirting out, and if they hadn’t been chalky and crumbling already, I likely would have stayed stuck there. I did not envy Faun mothers.

Wriggling and kicking, I managed to get my arms free, then used them to push the rest of me out. There wasn’t too far to fall head-first. Which was lucky. Imagine if I’d made it all that way, then knocked myself out. The membrane of a wing was beneath my feet when I rose up to standing, and in the moment it took my eyes to adjust, I realized that no, the air in this air-pocket wasn’t being gusted out by the undulation of the sleeping wyrm’s body. Tsangaanax’s head was here.

There was a thick white membrane stretched across an eyeball that was as big as me, and the majority of head and snout were buried under coils of body, but that was definitely his head, and his teeth were definitely the same size as me. I swallowed hard. Okay. Nothing to worry about. Just a gigantic terrifying wyrm that could kill me by turning his head slightly in his sleep. Stay cool, Maulkin, stay cool.

There were a lot of missing scales down here, where the rot had set in the worst. Even through the chalky powder of that shedding, I could smell the decay. I could even see hints of the darkness drifting about under the surface—dull grey patches shifting under the sickly white scales.

The shard was right beside Tsangaanax’s eye, of course, wedged into place where a scale had gone missing before. It was tiny when you compared it to this massive creature—so overwhelmingly small it was impossible to imagine that it had done so much harm.

Getting close to the eye, the face, and especially the teeth seemed like a fundamentally stupid idea. So instead, I reached out with Artifice, fully intending on just yanking the shard out like you’d pull a rotten tooth and then running like hell. I yanked, but it didn’t budge. The flesh around it had healed over the edges, and the roots of darkness burrowing off into the flesh were holding on tight. It was less like trying to pull a tooth and more like trying to pull a whole nervous system out through a scratch.

The membrane stretched over Tsangaanax eye shifted aside like a curtain being drawn back, and the black void of his gaze settled upon me. Oh crap.

Scrabbling for the Lucis, even though it would be like an ant waving a twig at me, I forced myself forward. Already the coils around me were shifting, and the colossal head was lifting from where it had rested. Dust rained down all about me, covering me and hiding me from the wyrm’s pinning stare. I jammed the tip of the blade in beside the shard and tried to pry it free. Even with all my strength and an unbreakable lever, it still wouldn’t budge.

The next exhalation from the great wyrm’s jaws was hot and foul. Not the fire of a wyrm’s breath but the stuffy rancid heat you found at the heart of a compost heap. The heat of decay. My Deathsense recognized it for what it was and strained against it. The same Deathtouch I’d been using to wipe out the wyrm’s kin swept over me. If I’d been mortal, I would have been dead. Hell, even if I hadn’t been mortal, I might have taken one hell of a hit and ended up looking as wrinkly as a shar-pei. Only the power of the Void protected me against it. Wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

I’d expected Tsangaanax’s voice to be a bass roar so loud it knocked me to the ground. Like my own voice, the voice of the Voidgod, the voice of Death himself. Instead, it was a mealy whisper. “Thief.”

I held up my hands and kind of wished I didn’t have a big sword in one of them. It made it sound less than convincing when I said, “I’m just trying to help.”

“Thief.” He wheezed a little louder, and puffs of his own disintegrating scales blew up to batter me.

“Whoa. Hey. No.” I tried to back away, but there was nowhere to go. He was all around me. “If I can get the shard out, then maybe we can heal you…”

The whole of his face had been uncovered. It looked like he was untroubled by his own crushing weight. Probably should have expected that really. He tried to force out more of that Death-breath, but it washed over me without any effect.

He hissed, “Thief,” again as if it was the gravest insult that he could think of. Maybe it was. The corruption had dug right into his brain. Maybe he didn’t have much of the talking parts left.

“Dude, please just let me cut the shards out, then you’ll maybe get back to normal. Or maybe die.” I shouldn’t have said that last bit. He did not like that last bit.

Tsangaanax surged forward, his massive jaws snapping at me, and all the tricks that had worked on his kids were not going to work here. Not with my back to a wall of wyrm and the sword in my hands about the size of a toothpick.

I did my best, of course I did my best. I surged my Potency, swept the Lucis around, and hammered it right into that charging wyrm’s face, but being the strongest gnat in the world isn’t going to help you when you’re facing down the flyswat. The Lucis carved through his flaking scales, bit into the flesh beneath, and then I was steamrollered by the sheer weight of wyrm coming at me.

Despite being so massive they could have gone right through the whole height of me, every one of the teeth snapping shut on me was razor-sharp and serrated. The corruption that had wrecked every other part of his body had not provided any handy tooth-decay. Because of course not.

There was nowhere else for me to go, so I leapt forward into the wyrm’s gaping mouth, and the jaws snapped shut behind me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been swallowed alive, but it is a lot wetter than you might imagine. I didn’t have to worry about Tsangaanax breathing fire up at me since he’d screwed that up for himself, but there was still a hell of a lot of drool to go around. No tongue though, which I thought was a bit weird. All those teeth and no tongue. How did wyrms get stuff unstuck from between their teeth? Fire, right. Yeah. I’m an idiot. We’ve mentioned that before.

The floor beneath my feet was ridged with bone under the hard leather of blackened gums, same with the roof above. I still had my sword, and hypothetically I might be able to jab around enough to get spat out, but that was working on the hypothetical that I was going to get to stay put for any length of time.

Bone-ridge roof and floor became bone-ridge walls as the wyrm’s head jerked up, and then shot through the coils of his own body to the surface. I tried to grab a tooth to keep myself from falling straight down his throat, but I only succeeded in cutting the tips off my fingers, then fell straight down his throat.

Let’s just say the situation didn’t get less juicy farther in. It also didn’t suddenly start smelling like roses as I tumbled down the length of that serpentine neck to the parts of the wyrm that were rotting from the inside out.

I bounced off the sides a few times as Tsangaanax twisted and turned through the maze of his own flesh, and that helped slow me down, but that was all that helped slow me down. Luck more than anything else jammed the Lucis into one side of the big flexing sphincter at the bottom of the wyrm’s throat, but I was dangling down into it, the meat pulsing in around me, slapping me around the midsection while I clung on for dear life. This was as far as I ever wanted to go through a digestive tract. Actually no, it was way farther than I’d ever wanted to go. I’m sure there were some folks on the internet who’d consider this a good time, but this just wasn’t for me. Like feet. Don’t get the appeal.

The sphincter had been closing and opening around me spasmodically so far, but now it opened out so wide that the point where my sword was embedded seemed to flop right over, and then I was dangling underneath it. Maybe the wyrm couldn’t do fire any more, but the acrid reek rising from beneath my toes told me that he could do regular style digestion just fine. I did not want to be digested. I did not want to be dragon poop. This was not the future that I had envisioned for myself. I was not letting it happen.

When the throat contracted about me, trying to gulp me down deeper, I used that movement to power a swing, bringing my legs up to brace beside the Lucis where it was jammed and pulling it free.

End over end I tumbled down towards the wyrm’s stomach, but I was not going to hit the bottom. The decay that had spread through the wyrm was everywhere in my Deathsense. Where it was nestled, none of my other senses could touch. But the corruption had wounded the great wyrm in ways that were unpredictable. Where the vines of death had coiled, they had strangled off life to whole sections of the wyrm’s flesh—the parts that now rotted. There was dead meat and bone all about me, severed from the living body of Tsangaanax by the corruption, and if they were neither living nor dead, they were materials I could work.

With a strain of Artifice, I pulled a sheet of bone out from one of the wyrm’s ribs. It was wafer thin, almost transparent between the ridges and nodules, but it was still strong enough to halt my fall.

Outside of the wyrm, I had no idea what was happening, and inside of the wyrm, it was too dark to read. I was being flung about, clinging to the edge of my bone-plate with my half-sliced fingers. I had to assume that the big fella was fighting Mercy and Asher by now and not just breakdancing on top of himself for the fun of it. It wasn’t like they would have just run off and left me in here. Right?

The whole section I was in flipped upside down, and I started falling up off my bone-plate towards the frantically working sphincter again. I’d been sphinctered enough for one day, so I held onto the bone for dear life. A moment later we evened out, and I fell against the side of the throat as some awful rumble swept up from deeper in the beast. I felt it more than I saw it churning up towards me. It was that death-breath that he’d tried and failed to use on me. It didn’t work on me, but that was because I was a Void Eternal. If it hit the others, what would happen? Would Mercy suddenly turn into a crabby old lady? At least she had the personality for it.

I couldn’t let it happen. I reached out with Artifice and found basically nothing to work with. There were patches of dead tissue decaying around me in the neck, but nothing as substantial as the one hunk of necrotic bone I’d already hauled loose. I could flatten out the Lucis into a half-assed shield, but it wouldn’t hold all of it back. I needed to put my whole ass into this.

Slaughter rippled out through my blade, and I could feel the answering echo of death within the wyrm about me, nowhere stronger than the wave of murderous black smoke pouring up from where once there was fire. There wasn’t room to swing a cat in that neck, let alone a great-sword, so when the darkness washed up towards me, I pointed the blade straight at it, and I thrust with all my strength.

The death all around me leapt forward, and the death rushing towards me stopped dead. I couldn’t throw the power around yet—I didn’t have enough mastery of Resonant Dominion for that—but I could make it into a blade, and I thrust that blade down into the heart of the great beast. Well, in that general direction.

Tsangaanax might have been full of the shards’ power, but he had no control over it. When I seized hold of that darkness and pushed, he had no way to resist. The veins of death woven through him were tugged free, ripping loose the rot and loosing blood from everywhere that had been stoppered. I was washed with it, scalded by the fresh blood plucked loose from ruined flesh. The whole throat was flooded with it. My platform was slick with it, and I was coated.

If the wyrm had tried to swallow me down again now, I would have been done for, but he didn’t. Instead, he was trying to get me back up and out, like a bone stuck in his craw. The throat worked around me, and he swung his head back and forth, trying to knock me loose. I let him. I didn’t want to be in here any more than he wanted me in here.

Back up the way I came, stumped fingers hooking into the torn parts of the wyrm’s throat and blade carving in new foot-holds. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, framed top and bottom by the wyrm’s terrifying teeth. I caught a glimpse of the cave tearing by as he twisted and turned, the flames that coated one side of his massive body were a red blur, and the lightning lashing down from some blind angle was a brief flash.

There was no way I was getting out past those teeth without getting shredded, so I did the only thing I could do. I rolled to my feet when Tsangaanax evened out to lunge at a blur that looked like Mercy, and I hacked into his gums. That skin was tough, and the bone beneath it was tougher still, but I had the advantage of this poor wyrm spending the last thousand years slowly decaying. What would once have been impenetrable was now spongy and porous.

Two teeth came loose from the bottom jaw, and by the time I swept my sword back around the other way, they were transformed into great-swords of their very own, swiping around on the same course. Back and forth I swung, and with every cut, and every piece of the wyrm I tore free, the bigger my arsenal grew. A dozen swords were spinning around me in an orbit by the time that I leapt free, each and every one of them sticky with gore. Tsangaanax’s once fearsome grin was now peg-toothed and ridiculous.

I rolled to my feet outside the wyrm on what turned out to be the back of his great wing and was charging back in to send all twelve swords soaring into the bastard’s face when The Prophet leapt out from a fold of skin and caught me by the arm. He’d found his courage again, it seemed. “You must not harm him.”

Blood was coating the handle of the Lucis—mine and the wyrm’s all mixed together. “Tell him not to harm us!”

When I tried to pull away, the flurry of the Prophet’s arms twisted mine into a knot, and the Lucis was suddenly dangling limply from my hand as he strained to keep it locked in place. “It is not the master’s fault; he is beyond reason with the pain…”

I wasn’t much of a martial artist. If Seren had been given more time, maybe she could have taught me how to get out of lizard limb locks. All I had was strength. I strained against the hold he had on me, but still, he wouldn’t let go. The tendons in my arm began to twang, and the bones ground together. My words came out strangled, “We can’t help him if we’re dead.”

“We cannot help him if he is dead!” the Prophet snapped back.

“Then help us,” I hissed. “Stop him.”

He looked from me to the great wyrm he served, and he let go.

Asher’s fireball took Tsangaanax in the face as he twisted after Mercy. Not enough to penetrate the scales, but enough to blind him and let her bound away unscathed. Her arrows peppered the great-wyrm’s hide. Everywhere a scale had fallen away from rot there now seemed to be an arrow poking out. Blood trickled to turn the dust that had been his scales into a kind of chalky pink mud. It was everywhere. Even the translucent membrane of the wing beneath my feet was smeared with it.

They were keeping the wyrm’s attention, now I had to do what we came here to do. Even now the shards still sung to me. I could find them. I could take them. We could end this suffering.

A storm of swords followed me when I ran, looping around me in a spiral, lashing out when I twisted the Lucis to turn falling masonry aside, to bat the wyrm’s writhing loops back into place—anything that I needed to do to keep me moving forward.

There was a shard on the far side of Tsangaanax’s neck, but even as I came closer, the wyrm sighted me and twisted it away. Death-breath washed out towards me, and with no Slaughter in my blade, I had no way to work it. It passed me by without a scratch but behind me I heard a mournful wail. I didn’t have time to look back, I didn’t have time to see what the wyrm had done to his most loyal servant. The gore dribbling jaws of this titan were coming down at me once more.

I spun and I slashed, and the twelve bone blades I’d made from the wyrm’s own teeth swept out to bat its lunge aside. They struck as one—twelve blows with all my strength behind them. The bones shattered to fragments, the scales on the wyrm’s face cracked into powder, and his bite was knocked aside.

Tsangaanax’s jaws snapped shut on his own body, jagged broken shards of tooth cracking through scales just as ruined. There was no time to watch him realize what he’d done to himself. No time to worry about the pain that could drive him to that madness. I leapt from one loop of the great wyrm to the next until the shard embedded beneath his jawbone was in sight.

All of the shards were one shard. The ones in my belt pouches, the one in the Lucis, and the ones in the wyrm. This time I didn’t try to pull at it with Artifice or pry it with the strength of my body. I reached out through that resonation. The shards wanted to be together. They wanted to be one thing, not pieces. When I pulled back the Lucis, the shard in Tsangaanax’s neck answered me. There was no struggle now. The veins of darkness that had hooked themselves into the wyrm’s flesh came ready and willing along with the fragment itself, slithering back out through the warren of tunnels that they had made through the wyrm’s body and soul and releasing their grip.

The shard flipped end over end through the air and into the palm of my maimed hand.

Quest: Return of the Voidgod

Acquire Rusted Blade Shards: 5/6 Complete

400 Glory Gained

I let out a shaky cry. “Got one!”

The wyrm shuddered and slumped helplessly beneath our feet, and fresh gouts of blood rushed out through the tiny hole in his neck as though I’d opened up a million wounds inside it, and this was where the pressure was forcing it out.

Mercy was too busy ducking and diving the wyrm’s lashing tail to answer me, and I couldn’t even see Asher. The second shard was singing even louder now. The one in my hand had been the Dvergar shard, and the other one had been in Tsangaanax possession longer—it had burrowed in deeper, closer to the last beating heart in his vast chest. I could feel it so much more clearly with all five pieces in my possession. Tsangaanax let out a long warbling wail: “Talon, I know it is you!”

I called back, “It’s for your own good, buddy!”

I doubted that he could hear me, and even if he could, and it made it through to his Void-addled brain, I wasn’t betting he’d believe it. I wouldn’t have if someone started ripping bits out of me.

There was a whole lot of wyrm between me and the last part, and even though he seemed to be slowly dying, there was no way that Tsangaanax was going down without a fight. His whole body was in motion now, clawed legs shooting up out of the tangle of neck and tail, each limb three times the size of me and ending in claws that would definitely sting a little bit. He was reaching for me, kicking out with his feet at Mercy, and I’m pretty sure that even Asher was in the firing line for something.

Another burst of fire washed down over the wyrm from the tiny entrance to the cave, but in the chaos, the great beast had hauled up one wing like an umbrella to catch it. The membrane lit up from behind, blinding bright as Tsangaanax shielded both himself and me from Asher’s strike. Throughout the skin, I could see the veins where the darkness had been, now filling in with pus and blood.

Weirdly, seeing that wing helped me more than anything else. From the wing I could find the back, and from the back I could find the chest. I set off running, even as the fire seared through the bubbling membrane and burst over us.

Fire Resistance kept the worst of it off me, and the Prophet definitely saw it coming, even if I couldn’t see him. Tsangaanax though… he was like a powder keg. All the dust of his scales caught when the fire swept through, and it spread so fast it could only be called an explosion. The massive wing he’d brought around to shield himself snapped away from that burst with a crackle of breaking bone, and I was launched off my feet to smash into a raised ridge of fin that had lurched out of the morass as the wyrm writhed in agony. “Talon, why?”

I couldn’t see Tsangaanax’s head anywhere around, but that was probably for the best—he’d just use it to bite me if he saw me. Maybe he’d ducked into his own folds to keep his eyes and his wound away from the heat. I clawed my way forward, then got back upright somewhere between the end of one shifting coil of wyrm and the next. Everything was shifting so rapidly beneath me that the position of the last shard seemed to change every time I reached out for it. The ridge of fins I’d hit was probably the tail end of the body, and the broken wing was now subsiding down into the swirling scales, tentatively, like pulling it down slow would make it any less broken.

I chased that sinking sail of ruined skin, and I dove into the gap beneath it. Surrounded on all sides by scales once more, I squeezed through, crushed and battered as the serpent ground scales against scales. The last shard sung to me from up ahead, so close that I could taste it. So close that the rest of my shards were vibrating and dancing in their pouches and in my hand.

There was no need for stealth anymore, no need to pretend that this was anything but a violent invasion. I swung the Lucis back and forth, carving a bloody path through any flesh that would not part to mere shoving. I was almost to the shard again when, all of a sudden, I was tumbling end over end through open air. I hit stone, and it knocked what little breath I still had in me out. The bottom of the cave. Stone that had been the bed to the great wyrm for so long that I could still see the indentations of his scales in it.

The shard was here, nestled deep in the wyrm’s flesh—so deep that if I were to shove my whole arm inside the wound, I didn’t think that I could reach it. Good thing I didn’t need to. The other shards were humming, desperate to be one again, resonating so much that the sound of it startled me. Humming aloud.

I got to my feet, set my stance, and was pulling the Lucis back when the great wyrm’s head came hammering through the coils to lunge at me. I didn’t have time to think. I didn’t have time to do anything but move. Death poured out from the wyrm’s mouth, and when I swung the Lucis with Slaughter rushing through it, I caught that wave and turned it back again.

This time there was no clumsiness, no awkward thrust in closed spaces. I made a clean swing of the sword, and the echo it made reflected that. The death that had permeated every part of the great wyrm leapt to answer.

The cut itself probably wouldn’t have been lethal to something so unbelievable ancient and massive. His face was split apart on a diagonal, a quarter of his jaw dropping loose when the black arch passed through it, and I could see the white glint of bone up on his snout. One eye burst in a wave of gore, and scales all around rained down. If it had just been that cut, that would have been the end of it. But it wasn’t just the cut.

The veins of death and destruction that were embedded throughout the wyrm’s body leapt up to empower my strike, every part of them seeking to be a part of the murderous blow. It was those black veins tearing free that killed Tsangaanax.

Still staggered from the power I had unleashed, I felt the room spinning around me as I scrambled for the shard. All about me flesh was heaving, and I didn’t know that the wyrm was dead yet. His head was still, his last eye staring blankly out at me with the same blank darkness it had always held, but that did not mean he was dead. Why would anyone have thought he was dead when every part of his body was coiling and twisting about me? When it undulated and pulsed as the long-restrained corruption was set loose throughout his flesh, it looked like the motion of an enraged beast. Just as it had moments before.

Surrounded by so much death, at the heart of the Voidgod’s palace, it was a wonder Lifesense worked at all, and when my eyes were telling me clearly that the wyrm lived, I had no reason to doubt them.

I held up the Lucis before me, tapped into the resonation with the shard still embedded in Tsangaanax, and I pulled. There was a sound like a toilet being unblocked, and then the hunk of metal, still coated in a century’s accumulated pus and poison, came soaring out to splat into my hand. Gross.

Quest: Return of the Voidgod

Acquire Rusted Blade Shards: 6/6 Complete

400 Glory Gained

Quest: Return of the Voidgod

Reforge the Rusted Blade: 0/1 Complete

Just like that, our whole purpose on Amaranth was complete. I let out a little laugh that honestly sounded a bit hysterical even to me, then I remembered why I was here and what I’d promised. The slimy shard went into a pouch with the others, and I rushed to Tsangaanax’s side, laying my hands on his wounds and pouring forth Primal power to heal him.

The green glow surrounded my hands and then went nowhere. I pressed it to the scales of the wyrm, over and over, as the beast writhed and quaked above me, but still, Restoration refused to work. The scales must have been in the way. I darted over to the gruesome, leaking wound in the wyrm’s side and I shoved my hands right in. “Come on, heal.”

Still, Restoration did nothing. With the shards gone, there should have been nothing left to interfere. My Deathsense couldn’t detect those great black veins of destructive power running through the wyrm anymore—I’d removed them when I plucked the shards out—so why wasn’t this working?

The coil behind me collapsed in on itself, and a plume of dust and noxious gases erupted. Through the gap I could see the cave above. I needed help. This wasn’t working.

I scrambled and climbed as the impossible weight of the wyrm bore down on the remains, and the fragile encasement of scales proved too weak to hold shape without anything solid beneath. I leapt clear just as the unburned wing of the wyrm burst up from the far side of the cavern, rot already oozing through it. “Asher!”

Everywhere I looked, my Deathsense was screaming at me. The solidified power of the shards’ influence was gone, but death itself felt like it was everywhere now, permeating the whole room as it spread throughout the great wyrm. “Asher! Use cauterize! Hurry! He’s dying.”

Asher stood up there in a tiny hole in the wall of this giant chamber, and he shook his head helplessly, watching one of his gods die before his eyes. Mercy came tumbling down beside me, rebounding off an exposed rib that was now glistening through a coil of wyrm. “We’ve got to get out.”

I was grabbing at her frantically, smearing her clean leather armor with gore and pus. “We promised we’d heal him. Asher needs to—”

She took hold of my arms and stopped me. “He’s dead.”

That didn’t make any sense. “No… no… I just saw him up in the tunnel, he’s—”

“The wyrm.” She sighed. “He’s done. We’re done. It’s over.”

Victory!

Potency increased to 57

Piety increased to 15

Climbing: 4/10

Resonant Dominion: 10/10

380 Experience Gained

Chapter 30

Denial is a hell of a drug. “We’re going to save him. We’re going to heal him. We’re going to fix this, and then he’ll be super grateful, and we’ll go on dragon rides, and he’ll help us fight the Voidgod, and—”

She slapped me in the face. “Dude. He’s dead. Stop being crazy.”

It felt like the floor beneath me had given out. It hadn’t, but the wyrm on top of it definitely did. We plunged down through the rapidly decaying corpse to land in the heap of bones that was all that remained of Tsangaanax. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to…”

Mercy took hold of my hands. “He was trying to kill us. He was suffering. You made that stop.”

“I didn’t want to…” Tears were prickling at my eyes. I’d just had a massive awesome dragon fight and saved the world. Why was I so sad?

She slapped me again, although this time I was pretty sure it was just because she was having a good time slapping me. “Sometimes all we can do is make the bad stuff stop.”

I turned the useless Restoration I’d been holding onto back on myself and regrew my fingers. “Okay.”

It took some time to pick our way over to what was left of the White Prophet. Just one more set of bones amidst so many more. The decay that the power of the shards had been inflicting and holding at bay in equal measure had swept through the gargantuan wyrm so quickly that it was hard to believe he had been alive only a few moments ago.

The Prophet’s annihilation had not been so clean. There were still scales draped over his corpse, rotting threads of flesh clinging across the black-streaked tangle of bones beneath. What Tsangaanax had been trying to do to me, he had successfully done to his most loyal servant—the one who saw his master suffering and moved heaven and earth to find a way to make it stop. I would never get to find out if he was happy with the result of his labors. I told the crumbling body, “It’s done.”

Asher was making his way down to us, slipping and scrabbling for purchase on the angled bones he was trying to use as a ramp. I had to jog over and catch him when he inevitably slipped and came tumbling down.

“My thanks to you.”

I managed a smile. “Any time.”

Asher looked as shell-shocked as me now that he was down here amidst the death, gawking and hissing at each fresh horror he passed by. There were bones riddled with decay, pocked and withered. The scales had turned to powder entirely once the great wyrm lost cohesion. The whole chamber was painted white with the dust, overlayed here and there with a black splatter of decay. It crunched underfoot like fresh snowfall.

Mercy clapped her hands together, startling us both out of our reverie. “Alright. Let’s do it.”

“I’m still a bit hung up on my dead girlfriend, but I’m sure Asher would be happy to…”

Asher was frantically shaking his head.

“I will cut your dick off!” Mercy snapped. “I mean the sword, the shards, the blade. Reforging. Let’s get it done.”

I let out a shaky laugh. “You don’t want to take a minute?”

“I want this whole thing over with.” She kicked me in the ass—but playfully instead of viciously. “I want the Voidgod to pop up, get his ass kicked, and then we can all get back to having a good time. So come on, let’s do it. Get busy. Do your divine blacksmith stuff.”

I got all of the pieces of the Rusted Blade out of their respective pockets and lined them all up on the floor. The metal that I had wrapped around the Lucis to make it into a great-sword slunk away to lie in a heap beside me, providing any material I needed for patching gaps.

The Lucis itself was resistant to my Artifice, so I had to reach out with my bare hands and surge Potency to snap the blade off cleanly. From there it was more awkward work, prying the shard free of the Artifact that had been its home for so long. I kept the handle of the Lucis aside. That would serve as the Rusted Blade’s new home too.

I set all the pieces down in front of me on the bare and dusty stone. This was it, what we’d been waiting for all this time, what we’d been working for since we first arrived on Amaranth. It was finally done. We were finished.

“Are you just going to stare at it?” Mercy kicked me again. “Come on!”

Asher gawked at her. “This is a momentous occasion!”

“There have been way too many momentous occasions lately.” Mercy didn’t even bother to face him. “Let’s just get this over with.”

I stretched out my hands over the assembled shards, and I closed my eyes. Artifice swept out from me. The bones all around us cried out to be made into something. The only thing that felt real in this whole cavern of Void-blighted stone. I ignored them, and I turned the weight of my attention onto the shards.

The moment my consciousness brushed against them, the Voidgod was there.

Araphel stood just beyond the shards, towering over me as I crouched there. When Leofric had wanted you to feel a certain way, he could force his feelings on you. When Koschei had wanted a thought in your head, he could push it in. Araphel did neither, but the weight of his unbridled fury washed over me all the same. “Do not dare.”

All of this time, I’d been bearing the burden of these chats with the Voidgod by myself, but not anymore. The secret was out. “Araphel says we shouldn’t make the sword, guys. Do you think we should listen to him?”

Mercy laughed out loud, and Asher, still the more respectful of us even after watching one of his own gods being reduced to bones, merely shook his head.

I shrugged at the Voidgod. “Sorry, man, I took a vote, and the three of us said yes to making the sword that can kill you. And you don’t get a vote. Because you’re a ghost.”

The first two shards slotted together perfectly, a jigsaw perfect match, and all it took was a tiny push of Artifice to make the steel merge into one piece.

“Do you know what an enemy you are making? Before I had a whole world arrayed against me and it was too weak a foe, and now you would make yourself my sole target? Why do you crave death so?”

The joined pieces slotted neatly into the Lucis handle, with just a little extra iron added in to fuse the blade to the tang of metal running the length of the grip. “I’ve got to tell you, Araphel, you’re sounding kind of scared right now.”

“Cease this pointless exercise, and I shall reward you. On my return, I shall raise you up. You shall be first among my generals. The whole of Amaranth will be ours to claim.”

I added on the next shard up—the one that we’d retrieved from the land of the dead, and it sealed onto the blade seamlessly. There was still rust and ruin engraved into every piece of metal, but there was no denying that it was a sword now. “Amaranth isn’t yours to give away.”

“Power is the only truth in this life, and there is no power greater than mine.” He crept in closer until the featureless expanse of his face filled up my vision with darkness. “Your gods are cripples, unable to even walk this world. Your own powers are so insignificant that it is comical to behold. With all your might, you could not scratch me. Sword or no sword.”

“Yeah, that’s why you’re so scared.” I gave him my best sneer, even if I could feel my hands trembling at his presence. “Because this isn’t going to kill your ass.”

He reared back from me as if I’d hit him, and in that moment of distraction, I forged another fragment into the blade. The harmonies between the pieces were no longer there. All shards were one shard All shards were this one blade. In the place of the humming there was a hunger. It was so close to done now. Just two more pieces and my life’s work to date was over. The quest that had driven us from the first moment we stepped foot on Amaranth. Mercy put her hand on my shoulder, and a glance showed me the smile on her face. Asher still looked nervous, presumably because I was picking a fight with the Voidgod, but what was I meant to do? Not fight him? He was the bad guy. The baddest of all bad guys.

Araphel stood over me once more, amidst the swirl of dust that had kicked up as I used my Artifice. “Do not do this. Name your price. Do you want me to return your little wench? Do you want dominion over all this world? Over your old world—whichever it was? I can give you it all. I have the power.”

“If you’re so powerful, why do you need to beg?” I slotted another shard into place. Only the Alvaren piece was left—the very tip of the blade.

“Is it my debasement that you seek? If I fall to my knees and proclaim you my master, will that be enough to sate you?” Araphel’s voice had gone from booming to a hiss. He actually did it. He bent down onto his knees, held up his wickedly clawed hands, and he begged. “Do not do this. Please, do not do this.”

I was so surprised that I actually stopped. “Uh, guys, he’s on his knees, begging me to stop.”

Mercy snorted in disdain. “Don’t stop.”

“That’s what she said.” I chuckled back.

Asher groaned. “Now at the moment of our great victory, you must pause to declare your innuendos? I beg you too, please just let it be done.”

“Do not forge the blade. Do not fight me.” Araphel’s voice, usually so grating and grim, sounded almost soft as he pleaded with me. “Whatever you desire is yours. Whatever it is within my power to give is yours. All that you need do is stop.”

Staring up into the total darkness of his face, I didn’t have to think twice about my answer. “No.”

I slipped the last piece into place.

Quest: Return of the Voidgod

Reforge the Rusted Blade: 1/1 Complete

400 Glory Gained

The sword, in all of its glory, did not look very impressive. It was a longsword, once upon a time, and the rust had long since taken any edge off it. The Lucis handle was the only part of it that looked fit to touch, but still, it was the sword that had killed the Voidgod before. That had to count for something.

I reached out a hand to take it, and it exploded.

The Void leapt out of the blade and washed over us—a concussion of absolute darkness that blinded all my other senses and made my Deathsense shriek as it was overwhelmed. Even with the protections of being a Void Eternal, the force of it was enough to launch me into the distant wall of the cavern.

Mercy and Asher had been right by my side, and they had none of that protection. Asher hung, impaled right through his middle from one of Tsangaanax’s ribs. Mercy had been even less lucky. Half of her body was just gone, and half her face melted away, her skull shining out. I crawled over to lay my hands on her and pour out Restoration, but it was like everything else that the Void blighted, it couldn’t touch her. “No. No. No.”

She was panting, still impossibly alive. One eye was all she had left, and tears of terror and agony were flowing freely from it.

I had to kill her. If the Void killed her, then she might never come back. That lethal energy that let me slay Eternals was the same thing as had struck her. But my sword was gone, the leftover metal I’d been using had been wiped away from my senses with the explosion. All I had was my bare hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I closed my hands around her neck, and I twisted. I could see the fear on what was left of her face. I could see the moment of pain when I turned her neck too far, and the bone began to give. Her lips were moving, but no sound came out. Her body was too damaged to puff out the air. “I’m sorry.”

Her neck broke, her body vanished, and I willed with all I had that she’d end up whole and healthy back in her shrine at Talon’s Keep.

I turned to look to Asher, and then I saw him.

Araphel stood proudly in the crater where the Rusted Blade had been, blacker than night. Black as the space between the stars. Hazy, as the little light that there was around him died as it came close.

“Oh, I beg you, mighty godling, pretty please.” His laughter made my stomach turn. Like nails on the chalkboard of my brain. “Oh, please don’t put the blade that my soul was trapped in back together again. Don’t undo what your desperate predecessor did to keep me from being reborn the very moment he struck me down.”

My brain still couldn’t make sense of what my eyes were seeing. “Araphel…”

With one clawed hand he reached up towards Asher and disintegrated the skeleton of the Wyrm. Asher fell boneless and useless to the dust, the spear through his chest now gone and the blood flowing freely. “You cannot imagine my delight when I realized what an imbecile you were. That you would be so easy to trick.”

When I tried to rise, I felt like all the strength had been knocked out of me. I had to grab onto bones that were already crumbling away, just to force myself to my feet so I could face him. If I was dying, I was dying standing. “You played me?”

I knew the answer. It was blindingly obvious. But I needed him to go on talking. I needed his gloating to fill up the time it took me to force my body forward. It was like walking against the tide. The power pouring out from him in waves almost tipped me right back over again as I closed the distance.

Araphel’s laugh dug in like broken glass. “The girl, she had wit enough to concern me, her suspicions were well grounded, if misplaced, but somehow you managed to make her believe that you were harmless. You made a shield of your own ignorance, and it protected me so very well. I suppose that I should thank you, though you did not know I was the one that you served.”

Getting closer to him was a bad idea on so many levels. My soul seemed to be trying to crawl out the back of my body. Looking right at him hurt my eyes. Just being in his presence hurt. It got so much worse once he was inside my Sphere of Influence. The static buzz that had marked all that he had touched was turned up to eleven, not just numbing my senses but making them screech in agony. I had to fight every instinct to come closer, to put my hand into that metaphorical fire, even though I knew it was going to burn.

“Have you come now to give obeisance.” Every grinding word he spoke hit me like a hammer. My skin peeled away on the surface closest to him. More pain. Just another drop in the ocean. “To admit defeat and hope that I will be merciful?”

It took everything I had to say, “No.”

“What then?” His giggles were the worst thing I’d ever experienced, and I’ve been dissolved from the inside out with acid. “You cannot mean to fight me.”

I guessed that was as close as I was getting. I flung out my arms and let Artifice wash out.

The wyrm’s bones were shattered and ruined by the Voidgod’s return, the surface levels of them invisible to my Artifice, but they were old and huge, and even the passive touch of a god didn’t reach all the way through them. There was still workable bone somewhere inside. I pulled it all out, and I flung it with all my might.

Whatever bones weren’t already crumbling to dust around us exploded into shards now, the razor fragments of them sharpening into darts as they flew. Araphel’s laughter was deafening. He didn’t even raise a shield against my attack. Everywhere a bone struck him, it simply vanished into the darkness like it was falling into the black hole of his body.

“Pathetic.”

As an attack on him, yeah, it was pretty useless. But the problem with being all-powerful and worshipped and all that jazz, is that you tend to forget that you aren’t actually the center of the universe. The shards that had struck Asher had hammered home, and I willed his spirit away to Talon’s Keep just a moment before his body blinked out of sight.

Needless to say, Araphel wasn’t happy to lose one of his new toys, and a wave of destruction ripped out of him. All the bones, all the dust, everything in the cavern was obliterated. Only me and the Voidgod remained at the center of a perfect sphere in the stone when he regained his composure. “It matters little. He shall be destroyed just as all this world shall be destroyed. You have bought him time. Perhaps long enough for him to make peace with those he worships before the end. Was that the kindness you meant to do him?”

The bare cavern was dead to me. I had nothing to work with. No way to forge a weapon and off myself before Araphel did it for me. I did not want him to decide where my spirit went. It would not be somewhere pleasant, and he certainly wouldn’t be keeping me around on Amaranth to fight him.

Araphel strode towards me in the sudden silence of the empty chamber, and I’m not too proud to admit that I fell to my knees. It wasn’t about bowing down to him, and it wasn’t about admitting defeat, my body just couldn’t hold up against the strain of being so close to him. I tried to think back to the gods I’d met before, if any of them had this effect on me, and I honestly couldn’t think of anything like it. Not even Chernghast had this raw power.

“Will you weep now, little godling? Will you cry because you have doomed the world? It would be just for you to know sorrow, when you have unleashed the end of all things with your folly.”

Until he’d said that I had been feeling a bit like crying, but that snarky little comment brought the old rage in my guts boiling up. I wasn’t evil because I’d been tricked. He was evil for tricking me. That cold anger, more than anything else, helped me to rise back up.

“Perhaps fair recompense would be to let you feel what I have felt these past millennia.” He reached out to me with his clawed hands, tail lashing behind him, and I felt the power that had been washing harmlessly around me until now crystalize into a jagged pain in the middle of my chest. “Let me rend your soul apart and spread it throughout the universe. Let me scatter all that you are, so that you feel you will never be whole again. So that you feel the loss of your entirety, ever aching across the fathoms.”

The power of the void pressed into me, blood blossomed from my chest, and ribs snapped and sprung out as he drove that force of pure destruction deeper and deeper. Araphel was taking his time, savoring the first kill since he was reborn.

Even through the pain, the screaming of my Deathsense was still overpowering. All of the destructive energy of the Void swirled through Araphel, projecting out into the point that pressed into my flesh. So much raw power than any other time, I could have seized control of and used in a twin-strike to slay my enemies. It was not mine to command. Araphel had total mastery over the void. The powers of destruction that I had barely started toying with were his to wield with a thought.

In a moment I was going to die, and while I know that I keep on saying death is not the end, that one probably would have been. How do you recover from having your soul torn to pieces and scattered throughout the universe if you aren’t a god that had plans to spend the next few millennia tricking schmucks into putting you together again? You don’t. This was as final a death as ever there was.

Blood bubbled up to my lips as I whispered, “Araphel.”

He leaned in close, smug despite the absence of any face to be smug with. “Yes?”

Spirit Strike leapt out from my forehead to plough into his. That perfect nude shot I’d shown to Leo echoed into the mind of the Voidgod, and like that other pompous arrogant prick, it threw him. “What?”

A moment of indecision was all that I needed. I strained every pillar of divinity together, and powers that were never meant to mix collided. Artifice and Slaughter.

The blade already buried in my chest was all that I needed, and the mind that was driving it had just lost its grip. It might have been forged from death instead of steel, but the blade in my chest was a sword. All swords were one sword. In the moment that that blade was mine, I set off a Twin Strike. The echo of the void-blade leapt through me, shredding me from the inside out, the pure destruction rolling out through my body and obliterating every inch of flesh that remained.

Nothing but pain was left in my mind. Pain and a desperate wish to go home.

Then there was darkness.

Chapter 31

I hung shapeless and still in the darkness for so long that I was convinced that I’d failed. That Araphel had seized control of my soul’s destination and thrown me into the Void. I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. It was as peaceful a moment as I’d ever experienced—apart from the rage still churning inside me.

As soon as I was resurrected, relief washed through and that strength fled me. I stood for just a moment, grasping at myself to check if I was all there or if Araphel had managed to claw some pieces back. My body seemed to be intact, but my soul would take a bit more careful study. As for my mind, I was pretty sure it was damaged beyond repair.

Mercy caught me as I fell. Her white hair was missing on the injured side, and her face was a spiderwebbed mass of scars where the Void had touched her. She had a shard tied to her soul, the same as me. Maybe that was what had helped her to survive.

We leaned against each other, swaying as the exhaustion of it all washed over us. The helplessness. “You saved us. You got us out.”

Asher was not a big cuddler as far as emotional displays went, but right now, I think we all needed something to hold onto. He wrapped his arms around the both of us, as much to keep us standing as to give us comfort. I don’t think I’d ever seen Mercy crying before that day. I don’t think any of us had ever felt so helpless.

The dvergar came pouring out of their fresh-built town to welcome us home, all smiles and certainty that no matter what the world threw their way, they were going to be safe now. We hadn’t just ruined our own lives, we’d doomed all of them too. The whole world of Amaranth was going to be destroyed. We had nothing that could stand up to Araphel. No magic sword… no special powers… nothing.

Asher was the one to say what we’d all been thinking. “What have we done?”

Mercy shook within our embrace, not with sobs but with anger. “We didn’t know. How could we have known?”

There was no answer to that—and no need for one. I looked out across the gathered Dvergar. I could see the fear mounting on their faces. I could feel that same dread in my chest. This wasn’t a game, this wasn’t a story, the Voidgod was here, now. He was coming. If he wasn’t stopped, this whole world would die. The universe that was an echo of Amaranth would follow after.

Asher’s voice hissed out behind me. “What… do we do?”

That was a question that needed a reply, and even as fear fought to strangle me, I said what I knew I had to say. The only thing that you could say in the face of something evil coming to destroy everything you know and love.

“We fight.”

The End of Book 2 – Continue onwards for Book 3!

Voidgod

Maulkin and his Eternal allies may have just caused the apocalypse, but at least they’re doing it with style.

The Voidgod is back and the Alvaren Queen is now convinced that Maulkin is the second coming of the Voidgod himself, but at least they have the totally awesome magic sword made out of the weapon that put the big bad down for a long nap last time!

No wait, they don’t. The first thing Araphel did after stretching and yawning was to turn it to dust.

But it is all going to work out fine if Maulkin, the dumbest man in the known universe, can work out how to do what the gods themselves haven’t been able to since the dawn of time, and put Araphel down.

What could possibly go wrong?

Chapter 1

So, a quick recap in case you missed it. My girlfriend is dead, the world is ending, and it is kind of all my fault because the broken magic sword that was meant to destroy the evil Voidgod who wants to wipe out all of existence was actually the prison stopping him from coming back to life, so when we put it back together, we also jigsaw-puzzled his soul back into one piece. He respawned and kicked our collective asses. It was a mess

All caught up? Let’s get back to the blind panic.

The dvergar around the foot of Talon’s Keep were understandably freaking out a little—they had better cause to freak out than all the other people that were about to be apocalypsed, to be fair. They had been the ones to dig old Araphel up, and he’d cursed them pretty badly when they turned on him after his last attempt at the universal genocide plan.

Araphel wasn’t going to kill them any deader than the rest of the world, but he’d probably be meaner about it, I guess?

Word had rippled out through the crowds of dvergar, and they’d melted away before our eyes, heading off to the big central building I’d made for their town, where the few slightly older dvergar that might pass as leaders tended to gather. With no brighter ideas for the immediate future, I trudged after them with Mercy and Asher dawdling at my heels.

We were all dressed in rags, with the fancy armor and weapons I’d made for us annihilated by the Voidgod—along with everything else in his path. The only reason being in reach of him hadn’t resulted in all of us instantly snuffing out, too, was because we were Eternals, and even then, I knew without a doubt that actually getting hit by him would be the end of us. The real end. Not just the little chat with the Grim Reaper before popping up again that we usually did. Permanent destruction.

I felt weirdly light without my armor like I might float up off the ground. The fact I wasn’t lugging around a giant sword probably helped with that, too—or any sword, in fact. The Rusted Blade had been completely annihilated by Araphel. Any hope of using it against him was gone. When I tried to reach out through my soul-bond to the shards, there was just nothing there. They were untethered and flapping in the wind, just waiting for me to attach something else to my soul. The only one that was still intact was latched onto the handle of the Lucis. It was a broken and completely useless hilt with gold leaf flaking off it, and it had nothing to do with the Rusted Blade itself, apart from having briefly been attached to one of the shards. Now, it was attached to me. For eternity. Great.

It was also weird to be strolling through real streets between real buildings on what had been a deserted island little more than a month ago. I’d pulled those walls up from the stone beneath the earth; I’d made this whole place so the dvergar could feel safe when we were gone, and what good was it going to do when Araphel showed up. He could wave his hand and turn it all to dust. All the dvergar, too. It just wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t we be fighting another Eternal instead of a fully-fledged god? I was good at fighting Eternals, it was an even playing field. Gods were what we were meant to grow up into in, like, a few thousand years. This was bullshit.

We walked into the town hall to a hustle and bustle of activity that I’d never seen before. The dvergar had always been… well, laid back wasn’t the right word for it, but they were always industrious in a very slow and steady manner. I don’t think I’d ever seen them running, except when a mine was collapsing on top of them. And even then, it was more of a brisk jog. The chaos of activity in that room was startling.

At the center of it all was Gunhild—the de-facto leader of all the dvergar we’d managed to save, who’d taken her ascent from caravan leader to mother of all dvergar surprisingly well. She didn’t even look all that stressed despite everything that was happening around her. She was perched on her high stool staring down at a map as if this was just any given Tuesday. Maybe it was Tuesday—I still hadn’t worked out how days of the week worked here on Amaranth.

She glanced up from her work and gestured us forward as if we were subordinates rather than the profoundly stupid people who had just ended the world, and she said, “So the Voidgod be back then?”

That was a bit of a let-down. I was expecting more drama, really. Mercy gave her a nod, and Gunhild sighed. “Aye, I was hoping folks might have been getting the story twisted around. And your magic sword to kill him?”

I held up the broken hilt of the Lucis. She tutted. “Aye, I was hoping folks might have been getting that wrong, too.”

“Hold on,”—it took me longer than I’d like to admit to get my brain back into motion—“I thought you didn’t believe in the Voidgod?”

“Don’t need to believe in the sea to drown.” She shrugged, turning back to her maps. “Besides, I’ve seen some things since last we spoke on this. Wyrms and wizardry and whatnot. Might be you’ve convinced me.”

Asher stepped up at last and opened his mouth, only for Gunhild to ramble right through whatever he’d been about to say. “We’ve been thinking on what to do when the time came. Put it to the vote last time you went off galivanting. The dvergar be with you.”

I glanced at the other two in confusion before turning back to Gunhild. “You’re with us?”

“We be ready to fight for ye.” She gave me a stern nod.

Mercy cocked her head to one side. “You what?”

“There be a war coming. Did you reckon all the free folk of Amaranth were going to kick back and let you fight it yourselves?”

All due respect to Gunhild, she actually managed to shut all three of us up for a second. Up until now, she’d made it abundantly clear that the dvergar were not to be put in the path of danger. That these last refugees from ruined Khag Mhor were to be coddled and kept from harm as best we could. Now she was ready to march them into the mouth of the monster?

Asher was the first one to voice our concern. “Your people aren’t fighters, Gunhild.”

She grinned. “Good thing we be here with some good teachers then.”

Too much was happening too fast. One minute we were slugging it out with a dragon, the next we were back here planning on raising an army. I needed more time to think. We all needed more time to think. If the dvergar had any idea what Araphel was like, then there would be no way they’d volunteer themselves. He could kill them with a glance. He was a god.

But despite all of that, I could hear the cogs in my head starting to grind like a stripper on a heavy tipper. “What if they didn’t need to fight? What if they could just shoot arrows?”

Gunhild grinned up at me and beckoned me closer to look down on her map. I tapped my finger first on Voidcrown Spire off at the farthest edge of the map. Beyond the Serpent’s Gate where sweet Seren still lay, beyond the plateaus and steppes that weren’t marked on this trader’s map. “He’s here now. We need to stop him fast before he kills anyone else.”

The others bustled forward, along with Gunhild’s war council. “But here’s the thing. The Hinterlands, they’re basically empty, right? We don’t need to face him out there. Then there’s the Ashlands. The barrens. Nobody lives there anymore either. The first place Araphel is actually going to hit any innocent people is right here.” The map wrinkled under my big, fat finger.

The Shattered Bastion was a solid line across Gunhild’s map. The doodle didn’t do it justice. It felt like it was a mile high. Solid stone dragged into being by the Eternals of old. It had been enough to put a stop to the wave of destruction that Araphel farted out the last time somebody killed him. It was perfect.

“We load your dvergar up with crossbows and ammo. Line the top of the wall. Open up on anything voidy-looking that comes along.” I tapped my finger on it, again and again, as I thought aloud. “Hell, you could toss rocks off the top and kill somebody from that height.”

Gunhild’s brows drew down as she switched into plotting and planning mode. “Won’t the army already parked there be making some complaints?”

“It’s been abandoned,” Mercy chimed in. “The whole army that was stationed there came chasing after us.”

Gunhild glanced at her. “And they won’t be coming back?”

“Not unless they were all secretly Eternals.” Mercy couldn’t help but grin.

The dvergar chief’s eyes swung back to me, and she hissed. “It would take hundreds to man those walls.”

“Yeah, I’m hoping we can find some more help once we’re there.” I moved my finger over a bit towards the surprisingly well-detailed hamlets I’d seen from the top of the wall. “I know there are human villages behind the wall. I figure they’ll chip in some folks to keep the Voidgod out.”

Gunhild rolled her eyes. Or eye, I should say. The curse of stone had spread to the other, crusting it shut. “That don’t be what I’m saying. There had to be hundreds in the army that held it afore. You killed them all? There aren’t a hundred or so on their way back?”

“I killed them all.” It came out as a sigh, and it met absolute silence.

That deafening silence fell over the room. Each and every one of the dvergar looking askance to each other. I didn’t do anything to fix it. I didn’t want to think about it if I’m being honest. We had more important things to talk about than a few soldiers who thought following around a jack-ass like Leofric was a good idea.

“They were the ones who…” Mercy trailed off as she met my gaze, eventually blurting out, “Seren’s dead.”

Gunhild looked from me to Mercy and let out a little huff of breath. “Aye, that would do it.”

The silence went on stretching as the dvergar eyed me uncomfortably, but we didn’t have time for this. We didn’t have time to have a daytime talk show host sit us down so we could bitch about our feelings. I could sit down and cry for a month after Araphel was back in the ground. I tapped aggressively on the map again. “So, we move to the Bastion. I spend a really dull day making crossbows, and we get ourselves ready.”

One of the dvergar behind Gunhild nodded. There was lichen growing through his beard, and his chin was a boulder beneath it. “You’ll be wanting arbalests, too.”

I blinked. “What-a-whats?”

“Artillery,” he replied.

“Catapults,” chimed in another dvergar from a side table.

“Scorpions,” Gunhild added.

I held up my hands. “I have no idea how to make those.”

For the first time since we’d arrived back, she cracked something resembling a smile. “Good thing you be here with the best engineers on Amaranth then, eh?”

From there, things got a bit hazy. There were a lot of blueprints and some shouting, and one particularly excitable dvergar started dragging my gaze around to the things he thought I definitely needed to see by taking a solid hold on my nearest horn and hauling me to and fro—which was all fine and good until he poked somebody else in the back of the head with it, and I ended up in the middle of a tug-of-war shouting match that only ended when I stood up straight and lifted both angry dvergar off their feet.

That was pretty much the pattern for the rest of the day, dvergar leading me around by the horns. It seemed that every single dvergar in town was coming with us. Couldn’t really blame them since the last time we took the fighting force away they got swooped by wyrms. This meant every single one of them needed armor and equipment. Even the little toddlers got a suit of chainmail to wear, which was frankly adorable. From the stockpiles and leftovers of the previous village, I put together a new suit of armor for myself and a new bow for Mercy. I made myself a pair of great-swords as big as the one Araphel had trashed that I could combine into one super-gigantic ridiculous sword that nobody else in the world could have lifted. My Potency had gone so far beyond human limitations that I caught myself having to adjust my perceptions. Things that it would have taken a dozen men to do, I could do with one hand. The dvergar didn’t need to adjust a thing, though. They had my limits worked out in five minutes and had me set to work hauling impossibly huge loads just a minute after.

All in all, it was a pretty miserable day of manual labor, being bossed about and learning how to build stuff while everyone else packed up all their worldly possessions and got ready to start over all over again. I probably deserved at least some of the misery. I did kind of end the world, after all. Didn’t stop me from bitching about it, though.

“Mercy, please. Make them stop. I’ve made so many gods-damned crossbows, I’m going to be dreaming about winches. Please…”

She kicked me in the back of the knee as she passed. “The more you bitch, the longer it’s going to take.”

She was a monster. I didn’t know why we were friends.

The only upside of all this hard work and tramping about was that it gave me time to stop panicking. It is really hard to be mind-numbingly bored and panic at the same time. I managed it for a while, but before long, the mundanity of it all got to me. And as I was slipping together my nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandth crossbow bolt, I realized that I could actually think about Araphel without immediately wanting to throw up, cry, or throw up while crying.

We didn’t know how to kill him. If he was anything like us, even if we did somehow get past all his raw power and the army we were expecting him to have assembled by the time he hit us, then he’d just pop right back up again. I couldn’t imagine that gods were less immortal than Eternals. I pretty much figured that if I hit him with my sword and used my Psychopomp powers to send him to the Void like I had Orphia, he might stay gone, but that was assuming that my Void powers could somehow overpower his. When I’d fought other Eternals, using the same kind of powers against them usually just ended in a stalemate, where their Pillars counteracted mine and vice versa. When Koschei had shot mind bullets at me, my own Aether had held off the worst of it. I could only imagine the same would be true with our Slaughter powers.

So, either I got more powerful than the god of destruction, or we all died. Piece of cake.

Every new dvergar that came through to get fitted for armor was in a different state of decay. The curse of stone turned them from flesh and blood into rock as the years rolled by. A plague that had driven the whole species to the brink of extinction, it was one last parting gift from Araphel before he kicked the bucket. Some of them looked outright terrified, and who could blame them when they were still suffering from the last time the Voidgod came around, but most of them had this weird energy to them, something like determination or maybe even relief. Like this was their chance, after a lifetime of getting kicked in the figurative nuts by this dude, to take a running punt of their own.

Dvergar-armoring is actually a lot more complicated than just banging out a load of full suits in the right size. Parts of them were calcified into stone tougher than any metal I could strap onto them, misshapen lumps of it taking the place of sections of flesh. When I made them armor, I had to work around those patches, integrating them into the design so they could move freely without anything grating together. For all my bitching and moaning, I kind of enjoyed the work.

I was fitting one grey-bearded dvergar for armor, an old dude with a solid stone scalp who I was frankly amazed had made it alive through everything that had happened so far. I spotted a little tear running down his gravel-freckled cheek. “You doing okay, dude?”

He was shaking as he spoke, not with fear but with that same weird energy as the rest of the truly devoted. “This be our time to end it. An end at last to our old shame. A chance to prove the dvergar be righteous.”

I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that. I gave him a little tentative pat on the shoulder. “We already know you’re good people. The best people. You don’t have anything to prove.”

He shrugged off my hand, watery eyes still fixed on some distant horizon. “We’ve to prove it to ourselves. We won’t be blinded by the dark like those that came afore us. We’ve got to prove we’re better, to be worthy of our names.”

Was this guy amazing or scary-insane? Who could tell? When the world is ending, I suppose all the crazies are going to look a lot more sensible. “What is your name, old man?”

“Birger,” he rumbled, proudly.

“Burger?”

“Aye”—he nodded—“Birger.”

“That’s… a hell of a name to live up to.”

He clambered to his feet and hefted a war-hammer I was kind of amazed he was able to lift. “Well, I be meaning to all the same.”

Between the dvergar and the other Eternals, we had everything packed and ready to go by nightfall. The home I’d built for the dvergar was a ghost town. Talon’s Keep had been stripped of anything and everything we thought we could use. The only thing that wasn’t coming with us was the Inimicus.

We would have brought that along—we should have brought that along, it would almost inevitably be useful to have an anti-magic whatever-it-was to use when we came up against void wizards or whatever—but it wouldn’t go through the Waystones. They operated on magic, and when you brought the lump of spooky black metal anywhere near to anything that needed magic, it just flat out stopped working.

So it got left in the tower. I sealed the stone archway shut, and then we all got ready to get magicked down to our component atoms and flung across the world to the Shattered Bastion. All in all, a pretty productive day. If you added in kicking off the apocalypse and dying horribly that morning, you could probably say it was too productive. Busy, even.

Mercy had gone through first to scout things out and die as quickly as possible if there was anything wrong, but she hadn’t popped up again, so we were working off the assumption that we could start sending dvergar through. The fighters went first, to secure the area and make sure we weren’t going to get ambushed by somebody smart enough to hold an Eternal hostage. I kept putting the fear that we’d fed Mercy directly into the waiting jaws of the Voidgod out of my mind as more and more dvergar vanished in a crackle of lightning to shoot off over the horizon. There was no way he’d have sprinted cross-country to claim the Bastion in one day. Even if he was faster than us, he wasn’t that fast.

Besides, the dude was arrogant as only a god could be. He wouldn’t run, he’d casually stroll. Like a slasher-movie villain. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart enough to work out where we’d go to make a stand against him, he just wouldn’t care. We weren’t a threat to him. Nothing was a threat to him. God, remember?

I was the second to last to go through. I would have been the last, but we kind of needed my boy Asher here to blast us to bits and fling us through space and time. I took one last look over the tropical island from the beach, and I felt a little choked up. We’d barely been here a month, and it already felt like home. I’d known it wouldn’t be forever, but I thought we might have stayed for a year or two at least. It was nice and quiet. The only bad guys that knew where it was were dead, making it kind of the ideal place to chill in between quests. Guess the questing was over. Now, it was time for war.

I gave Asher the nod, and he launched us both to the Bastion in a shower of sparks.

Chapter 2

We arrived to a circle of spears.

“Oh come on. Is this just the universal greeting in Amaranth?”

Asher fell into step behind me and started readying a spell before I even had time to look around. My hand was moving to my sword, but the points on those spears were closer than I’d have liked. Chances of me drawing before I became a Maulkin-kebab were pretty slim. They hadn’t skewered me yet, so I finally looked away from the very pointy blade tips to the people behind them.

Turns out, they were faun. Towering, over-muscled, horned monsters, just like me. Now, on the one hand, that might have been good news since the faun I’d met to date seemed to be generally chill people who had been led astray by another Eternal with a god complex. On the other hand, I had sort of murdered their god-king-spiritual advisor and told them all to go away the last time I bumped into them, so there was a pretty good chance that any I did meet might want to murder me a little bit.

Staring into the fierce, glowering faces of these hunters, I was getting the impression that murder was on the cards rather than high-fives. The spears were a bit of a hint in that direction, too. They had already seemed huge when we came bursting into this courtyard, but now they positively loomed. There were more of them up on the big wall overlooking this whole place, spaced out between burning braziers, staring down at us with even more spears at the ready, just waiting to be tossed our way. I was going to look like a pincushion when somebody finally gave the order.

I cast my eyes around for all the slaughtered dvergar that you’d expect to see piled up in a situation like this, and there wasn’t even a splash of blood. In fact, there was probably a lot less blood than the last time we’d come around this way. Nobody hanging on gibbets for looking at Leo the wrong way. No widespread destruction after a massive Eternal battle. I’d say this place was looking better than it had in ages. Except for all the people who wanted to murder me, obviously.

“Listen, guys, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but you really don’t need to be pointing spears at me. I’m on your side.”

Asher mumbled in between frantic incantations, “I do not think that they believe you.”

“Well, I can see that since they’re still pointing spears at us. I’m just trying to start the conversation, you know?”

He slipped back into his not-so-subtle lightning gathering.

I turned back to the faun, only to discover that the spears had inched a little closer. I raised my empty hands with a nervous smile. “Can’t we all just get along?”

That was when I heard the laughter.

It wasn’t the sour-faced hunters down here on the ground floor or the snarling spear-slingers up on the wall. It was coming from inside the next building latched onto the back of the Bastion like a barnacle—the big stone block that felt half-dead to my divine senses after it had taken a hit during the Voidgod explosion a few millennia back during the first Revelation. “…so then he gets stuck there, and we walk over him like he’s a bridge.”

The laugh that came in answer was deep and sultry. It made my skin feel warm. It made my downstairs department do an entirely inappropriate twitch. I knew that laugh. Mhirka strolled out of the shadows with Mercy cackling away at her side. They were bonding over stories of what a dumbass I was. This day kept getting better and better. Bring back the Voidgod, that would have been better than this.

“And then another time h—” Mercy’s story cut off abruptly when she caught sight of me.

“Uh…” What exactly are you meant to say in a situation like this? “Hi?”

She had the brass balls to smile at me. “Hi.”

Turning my head very carefully so I didn’t get a cheek piercing, I added, “Hello, Mhirka.”

“Greetings to you, false-faun.”

I glanced from her to the gathered faun and back. “Would you mind telling these nice people to not stab me?”

Mhirka looked around the courtyard as if seeing it for the first time. Then she shrugged. “Why would they listen to me?”

“Because you know I’m a good guy who doesn’t deserve to be stabbed?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Do I?”

For one long, dreadful moment, it seemed as if the faun were about to surge in, and I was going to have to fight. I’d gotten a lot stronger than the last time the faun and I had crossed paths. Back then, a circle of big buff faun with spears probably would have been enough to kill me. Now I was pretty sure I could Slaughter them all without breaking a sweat. Still, I didn’t really want to. Faun were good people. They didn’t deserve to die just because Mhirka and I had a love-hate relationship. Well, mostly hate from her side. And lust from mine.

Mercy’s stoic expression broke first, then both of the women were laughing aloud once more. At me. Maybe Araphel actually did kill me, and this was the personal hell I’d been condemned to for living a dreadful, sinful life.

After what felt like forever, Mhirka waved off the hunters, who flashed various degrees of smirks to each other as they skulked off to join their companions up on the walls. One or two gave me a nod of acknowledgment as if checking if there were any hard feelings. I smiled back at them. It wasn’t their fault that their boss was a dick. An eight-foot-tall, lithely muscled dick that wanted to step on me. Welp. That visual got weird. “You really couldn’t think of anything better to talk about?”

“You being a massive dumbass transcends all cultural boundaries.”

Mhirka nodded blithely. “Also, it is very funny when you do yourself harm.”

“Well, I’m so glad that my suffering can be a source of endless entertainment for you.”

Asher had allowed his spell to crackle out without using it, and now he bobbed his head along with the conversation. “I was particularly fond of the time that you fell off the posts on your training course and got your horns wedged between two of them, and a whole team of dvergar was required to extract you.”

Mercy’s eyes lit up. “How did I miss that?”

“You guys are all dicks,” I grumbled to myself.

If storming off had been an option, maybe I’d have gone for that, but instead, I surged my Potency and launched myself up onto the top of the wall for a better look around since nobody seemed inclined to tell me what the hell was going on.

All traces of Leofric’s reign seemed to have been scrubbed clean. The golden lion flags that he’d strung up all over the place were gone. The only things that really remained of his presence here were the wooden buildings and clumsy brick inserts he’d used to patch up the holes in the Bastion. Ten minutes with Artifice would have done a better job, but he didn’t have Artifice so… bad luck to him, I guess. All along the wall, I could see faun stationed. There weren’t nearly enough of them to hold this place if an attack came. Not enough to bring down siege towers and climbers before the place could be overwhelmed. I was sure they’d go down swinging, but they’d still go down.

Just like the dvergar, most of the faun looked like farmers or tradespeople that had been thrust into a fighting life without a moment’s notice. There were old, white-haired women bowed almost in half. Even the younger ones seemed oddly shaped compared to the big buff warriors I’d seen before, and half of them handled the spears in their hands like they were more accustomed to a shepherd’s crook. Although the thought of what they could have been shepherding in the Ashlands made me a bit queasy. Worms maybe?

But if all the faun were up here, fighters or not, then who had made all the campfires burning back there on the grass beyond the Bastion’s long shadow?

Milling around in the courtyards and the buildings that had been thrown up against the wall, I could see our dvergar. They might have been clanking about in armor, but it was the way they kept stopping and staring up at the Bastion that told me what they were really excited about. I’d never met a dvergar who wasn’t at least a little bit too into masonry, and here before them was the biggest wall to have ever been built in Amaranth. Some were just marveling at it, but I could see others already muttering away among themselves, planning all the changes they wanted to make. To make things better. To build something that could last another thousand years or two.

So it wasn’t them, and it wasn’t the faun, so that only left…

“The humans.” Mhirka had clambered up the wall beside me, leaving Mercy to introduce Asher to everybody. He’d forget all their names as soon as he heard them. Give him some obscure fact in a dusty book and he could quote it verbatim, but ask him to recall the names of the people helping him cart the books around and you’d get a blank look.

“Yeah, you might need to explain that to me. Catch me up a little?”

She blinked at me, her egg-timer pupils narrowing for a moment to slits. “You told us to seek out a place where we could be safe and the faun could thrive. Something about making little baby faun? Being fruitful? We set out, but soon a cloud of ash filled the sky. Leofric and his golden horde. They marched by where our camp once stood. Had we stayed and ignored your command, we would surely have fallen to their numbers.”

I attempted a smile. “Lucky I told you to go away then.”

“Luck is falsehood. There is no luck. Only skill and will—or the lack of either. You saved my people, again.” She looked out over the ashes she’d called home up until a few days back. “When the danger was past, we gathered in council. And after that, we turned to the lush, green lands that had been denied us. We knew the Bastion was untended, so we meant to take it.”

Shrugging my shoulders, I peered out over the great grey expanse of nothing. “Can’t really fault your logic. There aren’t many safer places than here.”

“We cared nothing for this… wall. We meant only to pass it by and to claim a place beyond it. When we arrived, there were farmers atop the wall. They were furious, but not at us. When they saw that we did not come to do battle, we climbed and we spoke. It seems that the golden pretender abandoned his station, leaving all the human lands open to the slaughter. He had killed any who opposed his flight—as he always had.” She took a breath, then turned to look at me again. Every time she spoke, I caught a little glimpse of her sharpened teeth. So jagged beneath her soft lips. I had to drag my gaze away again. Focus, Maulkin. Focus. “So a compact was formed. The humans are not warriors. All their fighters, Leofric took. So we agreed that we would stand guard for the people of this land, and they would offer up sustenance and aid. We became one clan with them. Our sick and our weak, they have given shelter. Our strong, here we stand.”

“I…” I trailed off for a minute. So much had changed so quickly. These guys had been on the verge of crazy Darwinian survival of the fittest nonsense the last time I spoke to them, and now they were signing up to protect farmers? “I’m really impressed. What made you offer them an alliance instead of fighting? I mean, I know you guys would have wiped the floor with them.”

She smiled ever so slightly. “I thought to myself, what would Maulkin have done.”

“Aww.”

“I realized, Maulkin is lazy. He would not want to work fields for his supper when he could just stand on a wall looking menacing.” Her smile grew wider still.

My own grin departed rapidly. “I take back my aww.”

“It is what serves all the best.” She chuckled to herself before drawing up to her full height and being serious. “You are not Chagnar, but you fought for us. We are not human, but we can fight for them.”

We both looked away from the dead lands beyond the wall and back to the thriving ones that the faun had staked their claim to. This was better than I ever could have hoped for them. A place where they could really thrive. They could have a future here, living alongside the humans. They could make a home for themselves. Shame that the whole world was about to be destroyed before they could experience any of that good stuff. “So, do you want the good news or the bad news?”

She cocked her head to the side, hair slipping from behind her horns to frame her face. “The good.”

“We have just brought you a whole load of dvergar to reinforce the Bastion, rebuild what needs rebuilding, and install some siege weapons, all that good stuff.”

She turned her head the other way. “The bad?”

“Araphel is back from the dead, and he’s going to be marching this way with his whole Void monster army.”

That seemed to wipe the smirk right off her face. I knew Mercy had to have told her this, but I’d met enough people in Amaranth who thought that the Voidgod’s return was a joke or a myth that I felt like I really needed her to buy it. Her brows drew down. “You believe this?”

That wasn’t outright mockery, but it wasn’t total belief either. “I’ve seen him. I fought him. I lost.”

“Weak.” She snorted. “Chagnar would not lose.”

“Guess you’re going to get your chance to find out. If you stay here with us to hold the line.”

There was a growl in her voice that set the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. “This land is ours. We were the firstborn of Amaranth before the sharp-ears, the stone-runts, or the wyrms themselves. This part of our land we have reclaimed. We will not let it go without a fight.”

“So you believe me, the Voidgod is back?” I sounded so pathetic as I said that. So surprised. Heroic demi-gods are not meant to run around wheedling people into supporting their dark lord-slaying quest. Everyone is meant to be on their team.

“I have no reason to doubt your eyes or your words.” She shrugged. “Besides, our shamans have been reading dire omens for years. You must know this; we will not be slaves again. Not his, not the alvaren, not yours.”

“Wouldn’t know what to do with a slave if I had one.” I tried to move the conversation in a less creepy direction. “So, I guess we’re all on the same side?”

She reached out and clasped my forearm. “Until the Voidgod falls, we are one clan.”

After she’d stopped squeezing my forearm and folded her arms back across her chest, I asked, “And after that?”

“Most likely we will all be dead, so we do not need to think of what comes after.” She said it so nonchalantly I actually had to replay it in my head to make sure I heard her right.

“Oof.”

Her brow arched again. “You would prefer a comforting lie?”

“Maybe a less-devastating half-truth?”

She rolled her eyes in contempt. “Do you wish to suckle milk from my teat, too? Mewling baby.”

“I…” My brain literally just stopped working. Oh, gods, no. I ground my teeth together to stop the obvious answer of yes from coming out. I cast around wildly for any way out of the inevitable ass-kicking that was going to follow me saying yes to boob time. Then along Mercy came, strolling about as if she owned the place. “Oh, thank the gods Mercy is here.”

“Everybody is settling in fine,” she said to Mhirka, then she turned to look at me, obviously flustered and struggling not to say anything stupid. She recognized the expression from way too much time in my company, but she brushed past it. “Are you cool with joining up with the faun? It doesn’t actually matter since we’re doing it anyway; but all good?”

I managed to squeak out, “I’ll manage.”

“Cool, so you want to stop sulking off because we were laughing at you and come make some plans for the end of the world?”

I was not sulking. I crossed my arms, which is not easy when you’ve got pecs as wide as a tanker ship and arms that would make a body-builder give up and go out for fried chicken in a bucket. “Fine.”

Mercy grinned. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and Mhirka will fall out of that weird leather strappy thing she’s wearing.”

My eyes widened, and I seriously considered using Artifice to make the earth swallow me up, literally. Sadly, this high up the wall there was too much Void-touched stone for it to work, and knowing my luck I’d be left sunk down to chest height and in perfect slapping range. “Hey, I… I never said I wanted to… You just… I… I’m in a relationship.”

“Dude, your girlfriend is dead. It isn’t cheating if she’s dead.” Blunt as ever. Got to respect that complete refusal to be anything other than a conversational sledgehammer.

Like an oversized carp, I opened and shut my mouth a couple of times before I blurted out, “She is going to get better.”

“And what, after you save her from the underworld you think she’ll be mad you saw a little bit of boob?” She gestured directly at the chest in question.

Mhirka did not seem amused. Actually, she looked kind of furious. Like maybe Mercy would be the one on the receiving end of some stabbing. That was a nice change. “I have no carnal interest in this… man.”

“Oh, nobody does.” Mercy giggled, turning around and shaking her hips from side to side. “But if you wiggle your butt at him a little, he’ll do literally anything you ask.”

I stared for what might have been a solid minute before I realized what she was saying. “Hey!”

Mercy leaned towards me and shimmied her shoulders. Cleavage is a brutal weapon. It should be considered a war crime. I swear. She smirked some more. “Tell me I’m lying.”

I dragged my eyes up to her face and loudly asked, “So, end of the world plans?”

She reached up to pet me on the head. “Good boy.”

“Girls are pretty,” I mumbled to myself.

“Yes, we are.” Mercy strolled off towards the stairs. “Now, can we get back to the apocalypse?”

Chapter 3

All those absolutely gigantic faun who’d been declared the war-chiefs of their clan were gathered together in a big tent. I had no idea where the faun had found all the leathers to make the thing until I realized it was mostly worm skin. Gross.

Tucked down by the firepit there was a big slab of broken Bastion surrounded on all sides by those towering horned masses of muscle, a few humans sporting the universal attire of farmers across all worlds, and Gunhild and her lackeys with a stack of maps. Nobody was arguing yet, but you could cut the tension in the room with a butter knife.

All eyes turned to us as we ducked in through the flap like they were expecting us to have all the answers. They were in for a nasty shock.

Gunhild greeted me with a wave, and the assembled faun looked awkward as I approached. They’d treated me like a runt of the litter last time our paths crossed. Guess their opinion of me had changed. The only ones who didn’t know me were the farmers, so I took a minute to introduce myself. “Hi, I’m Maulkin, and I’m an Eternal.”

“We’ve been told of you.” They weren’t super chipper to meet me as it turned out. “Never thought I’d see the day there was a faun-clad Eternal.”

I tried to keep it polite. “Yeah, the gods seemed pretty surprised about it, too.”

That seemed to strike them mute. I suppose most folks on the farm didn’t talk about the gods like they were acquaintances. Probably more crops and cattle kind of conversations. I moved past them to plop myself on the log beside Asher—who, predictably enough, had a book in his hand and was ignoring everything going on around him.

“Did I miss anything exciting?”

He didn’t bother to look up, licking a fingertip to flick to the next page. “The humans were not particularly happy to hear that the end of the world was coming, but otherwise, it has been relatively subdued so far.”

“Time to ruin that then.” I rose to my feet and clapped my hands. “Hi, folks. Uh… let’s get to it. Araphel was at Voidcrown Spire this morning. He’ll be heading this way quickly enough, swallowing up everything beyond the Serpent’s Gate and marching across the Hinterlands and Ashlands to come stomp us. Gunhild, have you got the map?”

She laid it out flat on the rock, but in the flickering firelight, I didn’t know how well anyone without Divinely enhanced eyeballs was going to get on with reading it. Asher had planned for this apparently. He tossed something that looked like a golden magnifying glass with a few extra legs onto the map, and suddenly, the whole thing was shimmering in the air, lit up from the inside. “Nice.”

His reptilian head bobbed at the compliment, and I wondered how many more wonderful little tricks he’d pilfered from Talon’s Keep.

“Anyway.” I turned to the glowing map and poked the Bastion with my finger. “You are here.”

My fingerprint remained glowing red as an ember on the map. Handy. Then I poked at the far edge of the map where Araphel was lurking. “He is here.”

There was a whole lot of map in between those two dots. A whole lot of world. I could feel something rumbling down inside me. Not the overwhelming rage that sometimes made me do profoundly stupid things, but something else. Something like wounded pride. I did my best not to get a big ego, even though I’m the most awesome person in the universe, but looking at that map of the world, my world, I wasn’t willing to give it all up so easily.

Mercy jumped into the silence I’d left. “The plan is to build up our defenses here. Send out messengers to any potential allies who could get to the Bastion within a week. We’ll use the waystone network for that. Thanks in advance, Asher. You’re now email.”

“I do not know what that means,” Asher said into his book, “but you are welcome.”

“Once we’ve reinforced the wall and brought in as many bodies as we can get, we need to treat this like a siege. Keep our focus on holding Araphel’s forces on the other side of the wall, gradually wearing them down. God or not, his soldiers will need to eat, and there is nothing out there but dust. Head on, we can’t match his power, but a war of attrition? We’ve got the whole world behind us.”

The thought that had been bouncing around in my head, riling me up, finally came to fruition, and words slipped out of my mouth without me meaning to say a thing. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t really feel like giving Araphel all this land without a fight.”

That got Asher looking up from his book. Gunhild looked a bit horrified. Mercy, too. The farmers were well out of their depth—they were already terrified by the glowing map, adding in heading out to fight the Voidgod was too much for them. They checked out. The only one who looked even vaguely pleased was Mhirka. Even then her smile was taut. Like she knew she was about to do something real stupid, but she was into it anyway.

“The plan be to reinforce the Bastion and meet the Voidgod here in a place of power,” Gunhild snarled.

“Oh, I know, it is a good plan. I’ve got no problem with that plan. Rock-solid.” I held my hands right up. No arguments here. “I’m just thinking it might be worth it for some of us to head out there and find out what is happening. What we’re up against. Maybe throw some spanners in the works?”

Asher sighed, already seeing where this was going. “Any fool to go out past the wall would be courting death.”

“So, I’ll go myself. You know that if I die, I’ll just get back up again.”

Mercy snorted. “You can’t be trusted out on your own. You’d probably end up getting distracted trying to train an army of geese to divebomb Araphel.”

I wanted to let it pass—honestly, I did—but that was too good an idea to just walk away from. “A goose army would be terrifying. Have ever fought a goose? A goose will kick your ass.”

Asher’s face fell into his hands as Mercy tried not to laugh. “Kind of proving my point here.”

“The runt speaks sense. Why should we give Araphel the run of the land to make such plans as he pleases?” one of the faun piped up. Should have known that a dude who carried around a hammer that was bigger than me would have some solid, smart opinions.

Mhirka nodded. “An enemy that is unobserved is infinitely more dangerous.”

Even Gunhild seemed to be agreeing with me, albeit begrudgingly. “It would be wise to be watching for their coming.”

“And if we can find a way to slow them down or mess them up…”

Mercy threw up her hands in defeat, cutting me off. “We’d be stupid not to take it. Fine. Fine! You can go running off. But you aren’t allowed to go alone.”

“Uh, I’m the only one who’s immortal.” I made a slight concession. “Other than you two. Asher needs to stay here to run the waystones for us, and you don’t want to go.”

“Exactly my point. You don’t think you can die, so you’re reckless. This isn’t some random monster. This is the Voidgod. He can absolutely kill you.” That last bit was less conversational and more yelling than I would have liked. Mercy didn’t usually get this mad at me unless she thought I was turning evil. “Which means you need somebody else along with you. You won’t take care of yourself, but I know you’ll do anything you can to keep other people safe.”

“So what, you think that folks who can die are going to volunteer to come along on a suicide mission?”

Mhirka’s sharpened teeth glinted in the firelight. “I’ll babysit him.”

Gunhild glanced up. “I’ve got volunteers who want to be following ye, too.”

I groaned, but I couldn’t exactly argue with them. I could hardly pretend it was a military operation if I wouldn’t take any soldiers with me. “All right. Okay. Fine. Whatever you want. I’m thinking we jump to Witchglass Overlook and head cross-country to check the Serpent’s Gate.”

“That be a solid day’s hiking. Solid day back.” Gunhild was peering up at the map, scratching at the silks wrapped around her face. Skin turning into stone had to be itchy. “Two days and you’ll be needing some spying time, too. Figure we pull you back three days from now at sundown. If’n you don’t be about by then, we’ll check Talon’s Keep for you and pray the souls of the rest be settled in the stone.”

Clapping my hands together, I set off for the exit. “Well, that’s the slightly morbid plan then.”

Mercy opened her mouth to object, but we’d already given her everything she’d asked for, so she didn’t really have a leg to stand on. Asher had returned to his book. I’m sure I’d get his emotional goodbye when the time came to zap me away.

I paused on my way out the door. “All right, you guys reinforce this place as much as possible, and I’ll bang together the ballistae that everyone was so excited about. Get the volunteer maniacs to meet me by the waystone in say… an hour or two?”

Gunhild nodded. “That be ample time.”

“I look forward to hunting Voidspawn by your side.” Mhirka gave me a stern nod.

That stopped me in my tracks. “You know, I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“My anticipation is for the slathering beasts to test my mettle against, not your company.” Ah, that was more like it.

“Try to remember this is a scouting mission, not a bar-brawl!” Mercy shouted after me. “If they see you, you run!”

“Yes, boss.” I groaned.

“Chagnar do not run.” Mhirka’s eyes narrowed.

Mercy snorted at that. “That explains why there’s so few of you left.”

For a moment, the tension amped up tenfold. The massive Chagnar that surrounded her loomed ever larger, knuckles tightening on weapons. Then the dude with the big hammer burst out laughing and everyone settled down. Mhirka didn’t look terribly impressed with Mercy, but that might have just been her face. She always seemed to be a few seconds away from hissing at everyone.

Being the proud Chagnar faun warrior that I am, I ran for it before this could turn into a civil war. It wasn’t like Mercy was suddenly going to become more polite.

Once I was clear of the big tent, I nearly tripped over a huddled horde of dvergar, all of them looking studiously at papers in their hands. My stomach dropped at the sight of them. “Ready to be putting in some work, big-un?”

At first, they argued among themselves while dragging me this way and that, barking orders to whatever underlings they’d managed to round up, and demanding that some of the poor, off-duty faun hauled wood and slag about for them so we could get to work, but all of that racket was pure bliss compared to the hell that came next. All their eyes turned to me once more.

What followed was probably the most miserable two hours of my life since landing on Amaranth. Sure, nothing was trying to murder me, and I wasn’t on fire, but making all the bits of the big-old crossbows that the dvergar demanded to their exact specifications, in the right heaps so they could transport them and construct them, it was draining. Not the actual work, which I mostly did with my Artifice and therefore zero effort was involved, but how fiddly it all was. One inch out and it went from an engine of death raining down destruction on the enemy to a very elaborate clothesline.

Then it was catapults. Trebuchets. Some other stuff I didn’t even understand. Then it was ammunition. Stone balls. Giant bolts. They even hauled out some clay from a pit in the nearby village and had me making giant, ceramic spheres that they meant to fill up with some chemical concoction so they could set stuff on fire on the off-chance the Voidgod brought along some siege towers.

Finally, when I thought that it might almost have been over because most of the dvergar had dithered off to watch as their precious mechanical babies were assembled up on the walls, the remainder set me to work forging giant chains out of all the metal that was leftover. Why did they want giant chains? I didn’t know. But by this point, I was scared to ask in case it earned me another lecture on physics and tensile strength and all the other intensely boring stuff that I could have lived my whole eternal life without learning but that they kept ramming into my poor, beleaguered brain meats.

Bring back the wyrms. I would happily fight about a hundred of the big scaly monsters rather than listen to one more dvergar explanation of why this particular cog needed to be curved instead of straight. I’ll do what you ask, just stop telling me why you’re asking. I beg you. I don’t want to know things. I have devoted both of my lives to not knowing things. Knowing things only gets you in trouble. If nobody had told me about the shards, we wouldn’t have a rampaging Voidgod on the loose.

I know it was only two hours because somebody would have come along and bitched me out for holding up the expedition otherwise, but it felt like it went on for years. Finally, some bespectacled dvergar came along without a roll of blueprints and told me it was time to go. I nearly kissed him.

I didn’t recognize most of the people gathered up and waiting for me in the courtyard. Mhirka, obviously. She was pretty hard to miss. Asher, since he was going to be teleporting us. Birger was here too, grey beard and solid stone skullcap pretty easy to spot. Maybe he wasn’t one of Gunhild’s seasoned fighters from the old days, but I’d put my money on that mad little bastard against any dvergar in this place. If nothing else, he could headbutt most of them to death without trying. Of the farmers, there was only one stupid enough to tag along with me. He had what used to be a scythe in his hands, with the blade turned up and bound to make a big pointy spear. Sure there was some boiled leather armor strapped onto him, but he also had a straw hat and a bit of grass sticking out the corner of his mouth. If he wasn’t called Cletus, I was going to be sorely disappointed.

Other than that, we had three dvergar. One was a lady who I remembered armoring only because of how many times I had to expand the breastplate to accommodate her comfortably. I did not remember her name—my mind was elsewhere at the time she introduced herself. The other two were the Ambergrit twins. The twins were kind of fascinating. The curse of stone was, invariably, turning them into rocks, but the pattern was mirrored on the two of them. One had a slate left arm, the other a slate right arm. One had a patch of sandstone above his left eyebrow, the other had it over the right. I had no idea why a curse would do that, but I had to admit the two of them looked cool.

I’d also seen them fighting during my training back on the island. Working together, they could give me a run for my money. At least until I started using divine powers, which honestly were kind of cheating.

It was a ragtag bunch, but I knew they’d work well together, so I didn’t complain. Well, all of them except Cletus. “Hey, I’m Maulkin.”

He tipped his hat. “I know you, sir.”

“Have we met already?” I peered under the brim, but I guess he wasn’t secretly Leofric in disguise or anything. Just some bland, sunburned farmer dude with some stubble going on.

He wouldn’t meet my eyes, which was a bit weird, but I suppose that my eyes are pitch-black glimpses into the void a lot of the time, so I probably wouldn’t want to go staring into them for too long either. He slumped his shoulders. “I’ve heard the stories of you, sir.”

“Did you hear that I don’t like being called sir?”

“No, sir,” he said without a trace of irony. This was going to be a tough nut to crack.

“All right then.” I sighed. “Why are you coming with us?”

He glanced around the courtyard. “Dvergars and fauns and Eternals are going. Only seems fair one of us humans comes along, too.”

“Will you be any use in a fight?” Mhirka sniped.

“Most likely not as much as you, miss. But I’m what you’ve got.”

I cut her off before there could be any more bitching. “I’ll take it.”

Clapping my hands and startling everyone out of their lounging, I walked up to the waystone. “Asher, I think we’re ready to roll.”

He cocked his head to the side. “You have provisions?”

“Yes.”

“And you know the direction to head for the Serpent’s Gate.” He cocked the other way.

“Yes.”

He leaned in closer to speak softly. “And you have everything that you might wish to take with you?”

“Yes, and we’ve all gone to the toilet before we leave, too.” I grinned. “We’re all set.”

“Then step this way, my friend. I shall escort you through the waystones, then return when I am certain your destination is secure.” He began casting his spell to open up the waystones and zap us across country.

“Sounds good.”

I had a long moment while he was casting to beckon all the rest of my motley gang together.

Maulkin’s Marauders? Team Anti-Void? The Cross-Cultural Critter Clobbering Crew? I’d ask them to come up with a name for themselves later during the hike. That should be good to kill an hour or two with arguing.

Then for the second time today, the magic leapt up from Asher’s hands to envelop me, tear me apart, and launch me across the world. My last thought while I still had a brain in my skull was wondering what happened if the lightning hit a bird. If I came out the other end of this thing with an albatross for a face, I was going to be mad about it. Squawking mad.

Chapter 4

We arrived intact and without any need of a good plucking in the blink of an eye. It wasn’t actually instant because I’d seen other people swirling around as lightning around all the stones before jumping on to the next, but from the perspective of the person being zapped, one moment you were one place, the next you were the other.

I stumbled on arrival. Usually, it was okay when you came out, you had a little momentum going, but not so much you couldn’t take a step forward and be done. This time I tried to take a step forward and there was a dang sand-dune in the way. I tripped, stumbled, got my feet under me, and then slid back as the sand gave way. The rest of my party were gathered up in a loose circle around me, watching my theatrical flailing. This was not the impression I wanted to give to my new gang.

Finally, I just stopped moving and let myself slide to a halt. Asher was staring at me from where he was standing perfectly poised on a ridge of seaweed. “Shut up.”

“I have not made a sound.”

I cleared my throat and set off up the hill. “Yeah, but you were thinking it loud as hell.”

“So little of what you say makes sense, yet still we find ourselves following you.” Asher sighed, tail lashing from side to side.

Witchglass Overlook had not changed much since the last time we passed through. Still carved from the same white stone as Talon’s Keep all those miles away. Still abandoned and spooky as heck. Before the rest of them even looked inside the main building, we had to stop and explain all the magical traps and tricks inside. Despite that explanation, the Ambergrit boys still looked like they wanted to try a bite of the cursed feast until I sent them off to check out the out-buildings instead.

Farm boy tottered off up the hillside instead of coming in, complaining that the place gave him a headache. Between me and Asher, I think we had just about every sense available to Eternals, and they were turning up jack, so I declared the place safe and scooped the lizard wizard up in my arms. “Take care of yourself, buddy. I’ll see you in a few days.”

He looked out over the wine-dark sea and breathed in the chill night air. For a moment, it was like we could both forget the world was ending. “Indeed you shall. All will be prepared as best it can be for your return. I pray that you bring good news with you.”

I clapped him on the back, accidentally rocking him forward onto the balls of his feet. Still not quite used to that new Potency upgrade, oops. “I’ll do my best.”

His nostrils flared in what I assumed was amusement. Or irritation. It’s kind of hard to tell with that reptilian face, and most of the time, I’m not sure whether he’s exasperated with me or laughing along with the joke. Definitely one of the two, though. I’d narrowed it down. Unless he was hungry. Maybe he was hungry. His reply really didn’t give me any hints. “Of that I am certain.”

I stepped back from him so he could get his spellcasting on, and I noticed the rest of the troops lined up on the top of the dunes to see him off. Mhirka was the only one to look pleased he was leaving. All the rest had that face on, that impending doom face—the one where your mom asked you to take the chicken out of the freezer before she went to work, and you just heard her car pulling into the driveway, and you know that chicken is still frozen solid as a goddamn rock. He was their only way back to safety, and he was gone.

Morale, right. That was something leaders had to worry about. I had to cheer them up or something. There was a thunderclap, and Asher vanished. So I knew they were all looking my way when I bellowed, “Who wants to go fight some giant monsters?”

The general consensus seemed to be nobody wanted to fight giant monsters. The dvergar had all paled, which isn’t easy when you’re part granite, and farm boy looked like he was going to puke. If I was being honest, even Mhirka wasn’t looking excited about it, she just didn’t look as appalled at the idea as all the rest of them. Screw it.

“Fine, more for me!” I hopped up to land beside them, enjoying the widening eyes of the few of them that hadn’t already seen my new Potency at work. If any of them asked about it, I was just going to claim I never skipped leg day.

There were no giant monsters about here, and nothing else that might hold our attention either, so we set off cross-country as soon as Asher was gone, plodding off towards the ominous clouds on the horizon. Gloom and doom, everywhere you looked. You’d think it was the end of the world, the way everyone was carrying on.

Mhirka strode on ahead of us, scouting at the outer limit of my Sphere of Influence. She hadn’t entirely understood why I was making her stay so close to the pack, but eventually I’d implied that it was to keep the farmer and the dvergar safe, and she seemed to accept her role as babysitter. The twins were having a great time, trading farts and jokes with one another in the middle of the pack. Farm-boy followed close behind them, and I could only hope that years of working with livestock might have inoculated him against their unique aromas.

Birger wandered along right beside him. Enough of his nose had turned completely rocky that he didn’t have to worry about the Ambergrit boys.

Keeping a healthy distance and trailing along at the rear so she could chat with me was the dvergar girl that I was forced to refer to as buxom. Some people have that one adjective that is perfect for them. Voluptuous might have worked too, but I felt like that implied something more deliberate. “This don’t be my first time traveling the Hinterlands, you know. I used to come out and bring down trees for the Khag.”

“So that axe isn’t just for show?”

She let out a laugh that was mostly a snort. “Always been good with my hands.”

I didn’t really think anything of the silence that followed as we trudged along until I glanced her way and realized that she was blushing cherry red from her chin to the ginger braid wrapped around her head. “Uh, are you okay?”

“Yes,” she squeaked back.

“You aren’t too warm?” She looked like steam was about to start coming out of her ears.

“Nope.”

I bent over a little to speak right in her ear in case she was getting embarrassed about the whole thing. Not everyone was used to wearing plate armor all day long. “Because I could pull some of the plates right off your armor if you’re too hot in there. It would be no effort for me at all.”

Her reply was such a high-pitched squeak that I couldn’t even understand what she was trying to say, although I imagine that all dogs in the area had abruptly come alert.

After that, I cut my losses and slowed my pace a little so I could guard the rear of our merry little band by myself.

It had been almost a day since someone last tried to kill me, so you can’t blame me if I was getting skittish. I was long overdue for a good, attempted murder. Beneath the stars we trod, on and on. The farmer was stumbling so often that the twins eventually elected to walk beside him so he didn’t fall down a rabbit hole and never resurface. They were ribbing him gently about it, but he couldn’t seem to shake his fear. This side of the Bastion was where the wild things lived, even before the Voidgod rose again.

You might have thought that with their superior night vision, the dvergar would have been taking the whole thing in their stride, but none of them looked particularly comfortable out here. They’d lived their whole lives in the relative safety of the Khag, an underground fortress built untold centuries back because of how unsafe the surface world was. And now they were out here, exposed.

The only one who was striding about as if she belonged here was Mhirka, and honestly, she kind of did. Our people were relentless hunters, built for nomadic life and the physical struggle of living in a world full of monsters. That said, I was pretty sure that the only reason she was strutting around with so much confidence was that she was too damned stubborn to let any imaginary monster out in the dark of the night know she was scared of it. I’d like to think that her having a demigod in tow was also a contributing factor, but I’ve never been that good at deluding myself. She could have been out here on her own, and she’d still be swaying her hips like she was walking down a runway and baring her pointed teeth at every rustle in the scrub.

This was how the Hinterlands had looked when I was first born into Amaranth. The Prophet’s Observatory was probably somewhere not too far away. Ragged grass grew patchy over the dry earth, and lumps and humps of stone jutted up, another long-forgotten ruin of some titanic struggles long past. The moonlight bathed it all in deep blue shadows, hiding whatever colors might have been there by day. The same moonlight that poured forth from my eyes, no wonder it all looked so familiar. At some point, we came upon the hole in the mountain that had once been Khag Mhor, and even the ever-jocular twins fell silent. Farmer let out a gasp at the sight of the destruction. “What kind of monster could have done a thing like that?”

The dvergar all pointed at me.

“Hey! That’s… only partially true…”

Mhirka shook her head. “Why am I not surprised?”

If I’d hoped to catch a glimpse of the Observatory and the hole I’d been hauled up out of, I was in for no luck. I saw familiar forests, swaying as the titanic fungi shuffled around beneath the gore-red canopy, but no buildings. Not even the burn scar we’d left behind on the landscape. I guess it was in some other direction. Mhirka was keeping us right, heading due north to the battlefield before the Serpent’s Gate.

Heading towards Seren’s grave.

I tried not to think about Seren being dead as we marched. Because every time I thought about it, I got angry. Usually, that was no problem; angry is useful. Angry lets me do things like clubbing a dragon to death with another dragon. But this particular anger wasn’t pointed outwards in a helpful direction. No matter which way you looked at it, the only reason she was in the ground was that I was an idiot. There were about a million ways I could have kept her safe and alive, and a million more ways she could have come along for the adventuring ride and survived it without a scratch. If I’d just been honest, thought things through, or hadn’t been such a damned coward, she’d be right here at my side, probably bonding with Mhirka over what a moron I am and mocking the farmer for tripping up.

She was kind of mean, now that I thought back on it, but I guess that I’m no angel either. Except in the sense of being a divine messenger sent down to a world to reassert the plans of gods that can’t intervene directly. Crap, was I a big, horny angel this whole time? This was raising a lot of theological questions that I really did not have time to think about while the world was ending.

Hills rolled up out of the plains on my right side, growing more mountainous with every step. Where Khag Mhor had been hidden beneath a great big hill, these mountains were jutting right up out of the ground, windswept and snowcapped and all that good, picturesque stuff. Peering off in the other direction, vast, bloody forests spread out to my left, patchy but prevalent. By the moonlight they mostly looked black, but there was no mistaking the sway. There seemed to be way more than I’d come across last time I was in the Hinterlands. I guess we’d skipped this bit of the hike using the other waystone before Leo and his flunkies had knocked the damn thing down.

If I’d had any sense, I would have used Artifice to put it back together again, but from the way that Asher had spoken about alignment and occlusion and a bunch of other big words that I didn’t really know, I suspect that me slapping a waystone together was just going to end in whoever used it turning inside out. Or at the very least, teleporting directly into six feet of dirt.

The sun rose, and on we marched. I could see the farmer and the dvergar beginning to flag, and I accepted that at some point we’d need to stop and give them a rest, but I really wanted to make it to the battlefield before we settled down for nap time. Partly because it was familiar territory, and partly because I didn’t want the Voidgod’s army to sneak on through the valley and spread out without us realizing, but mostly because it was a wide-open, desolate space that had been basically leveled the last time we came through. Nobody was going to be sneaking up on us there.

Farmer’s headache came on heavier as we walked, and I guessed that was his polite way of saying he needed a rest, but still, we pushed on. It couldn’t have been much farther now. Mhirka was still at the head of our little train—never tiring definitely had its advantages—so she was the first one to realize exactly how screwed we all were. She stopped in her tracks and dropped into a crouch.

She’d done this a couple of times during the long hike north, so we were all kind of used to the routine by now. Everyone would crouch down and wait for me to scramble forward and talk to her, finding out what rustle or glimpse had made her stop in her tracks and talk her out of hunkering down until all signs of danger had passed us by.

This time, I had no intention of convincing her. Up in the sky, just over the horizon, a shimmering crystal spire hung in the empty blue sky. It was higher than the mountains, higher than the clouds. If I had never seen it before then I wouldn’t have had a clue what I was looking at, but I had. I’d been the one to set it free from the rock beneath Khag Mhor. I’d been the one to chase it off when the alvaren appeared above the battlefield. Briar by Moonlight’s floating city.

If there had been any doubt, the next few moments washed them away. Without a word, Mhirka and I crept in closer until we found a root-riddled ridge to hide behind, then we took turns sticking our heads up for a better look. There were gryphons soaring up and down from the city, along with other, bigger, flying beasts with great cages affixed to their backs. They were much like the gryphons in general design but the stretch limo version. Great big dachshund tummies in the middle, with extra wings slotted in depending on how long they were. They should have looked ridiculous, but I mostly found them unsettling. The gryphons at least looked like they had been real animals that the alvaren had captured, but these things were very clearly made for purpose—and pretty clumsily, too.

There seemed to be a steady flow of these winged cargo beasts going up and down from the city while the gryphons were just circling, mostly over the gate. “What the hell are they up to?”

“It does not matter,” Mhirka whispered back as if they could hear us from all the way over there. “We must turn back.”

I couldn’t help but give her the side-eye. She’d never struck me as a coward before. “How do you figure?”

“The Serpent’s Gate is being held by the alvaren. At worst, this will give us the time we need to ready our own defenses. At best, they will handle Araphel themselves.” She looked genuinely relieved. So relieved that I felt bad about bursting her bubble.

“I forget that not everybody has actually met the alvaren. They aren’t here to hold the Gate.” I pointed to the position of the city in comparison to the mountains. They were held well back, probably right over Seren’s grave, instead of hovering at the pinch point where their aerial capabilities would let them rain down death on anyone coming through. “First sign of the Voidgod or anything like him, they’re going to teleport away.”

Mhirka’s face returned to its usual resting position—an expression that I normally interpreted as hate. “Then why are they here?”

“That’s what I asked you.” She stared at me blankly. “We need to get closer.”

“That does not seem wise.”

“Of all the adjectives in Amaranth, do you think anyone has ever used wise for me?”

Her shoulders slumped, and she settled back in to keep watch as I crept to the dvergar and Farmer where they were clustered up.

“The alvaren are here. They’re up to something. I want to sneak in closer and find out what that something is. Anyone have any bright ideas?”

Birger scratched his beard, then rumbled, “Charge them. Kill them all. Drown them in their own blood.”

The rest of us looked at each other, and by mutual silent agreement, we pretended that we did not hear a single word he’d said.

By contrast, the twins looked at each other and then whipped out their axes. I hadn’t realized initially, but there was a pickaxe head on the back of them. “Undermine them.”

His brother nodded. “Tunnel in.”

“Never be seeing us coming if we’re underground.”

Another nod. “Alvaren be blind beneath their feet.”

“No stone-sense. No skill with the pick. We’ll be taking them all by surprise.”

“Then we be rising up to drown them in blood,” Birger added, but we sidestepped it carefully.

One of the Ambergrit boys pressed on. “We’d be behind their lines and see what be happening before they knew it.”

The way they were thinking of doing it would take weeks, but using my Artifice, that was actually a relatively practical solution. Busty piped up. “Wait until nightfall and then cross the open ground in darkness when their eyes fail them.”

“Slit their throats while they be sleeping.” Birger nodded his approval. Maybe bringing him wasn’t such a good idea.

Another excruciatingly slow plan. Whatever the alvaren were doing, they were doing it now, and given the pace that they were going at, I wasn’t sure that they’d still be here come lunchtime, let alone nighttime.

In desperation, I turned to Farmer. He was scratching at his stubble and leaning on his scythe. “I reckon…” He paused for so long that I thought he’d fallen asleep for a moment. “I reckon I can get us over there without nobody seeing.”

Well, I wasn’t expecting that. I was used to being the biggest dumbass of any given group, so the idea that the human settlements had given us their village idiot hadn’t even crossed my mind until now. On reflection, the fact he’d volunteered for what was probably a suicide mission should have given away that he was a few needles short of a haystack.

Or at least that was what the dvergar and I thought before he started mumbling away to himself, and the wind spun. Dust and grit from our travels drifted off our clothes and joined in the little cyclone all about us. Then more and more of it was plucked clean. It took me longer than it should have to realize that most of the grey flecks coming off me were not dust. They were my skin. He was dissolving us.

I had a momentary panic, then I stepped forward to slap the magic out of his head before he could do any more damage. That was when I realized my whole left leg was already gone. It hadn’t hurt where he had whisked it away. I hadn’t felt a thing. Even now, it felt like my leg was still there. Reaching down with a rapidly vanishing hand, I realized it was still there. I couldn’t see it, but it was still there. Holy crap.

Birger was the only one still talking through all this, so he was the only one I could place for sure. “No, no, no. I don’t be wanting no magic dusty whirly…”

The wind spun on and on until, abruptly, both Farmer and wind and all the dvergar had vanished. I was gone too, of course, but I knew I was still here. The rest of them could have been anywhere. We were invisible. We were all invisible. Except Mhirka.

I had to go and mess with her immediately. Wait. Focus. “How long will this last?”

From a little bit to the left of where I thought he was, Farmer said. “Few minutes, give or take.”

I wet my lips, feeling them even though they weren’t there. Damn this was weird. “Then we’d better haul ass. Stick together as much as you can; hold hands if you need to. Head straight for the city and drop to the dirt the second the spell wears off. Find cover. Remember they’ll be watching from above, not down here, so get under something. We’ll regroup once we’re visible again. Go! Go! Move!”

“Are we not going to be talking about that wee farm boy turning us all into ghosties?” one of the twins said from beside my elbow.

“Not right now, we’re not. Move it!” I gave a shove in the general direction that last voice had come from and was pleased to find empty air. There were some clumps and scuffles as everybody got used to running without being able to see their feet, but hopefully, we were all going the right way—more or less.

I jogged up to Mhirka, trusting in my superior Celerity to make up for the moment I spent explaining. She already had her spear in hand, ready to stab whatever had just jogged on by her unseen, so I nearly got stabbed for my trouble before I stepped in past her guard and said, “Invisible, heading up to take a closer look. Back soon. Don’t go anywhere.”

She took a swipe at me even though I knew she recognized my voice. I suppose she wasn’t going to get much better plausible deniability than “he was invisible at the time.” My original idea to smack her on the rump as I passed now seemed even more patently like a bad idea.

I took off running, bounding ahead, trusting in my Potency as much as my Celerity to close the distance with the rest of my little gang. While I couldn’t see them, I found that they still shimmered to my Lifesense, and using that little glint, I was able to place the four of them. The twins were hustling Farmer along between them like they’d been doing all day. Birger had his head down, charging all out in a straight line, and Busty had veered off a little bit to the left, so I made sure to catch up to her and steer her back in the direction of everyone else. She let out a yelp before I could find her mouth and clamp a hand over it. “It’s me.”

There was an angry-sounding mumbling into my hand, accompanied by a little bit of palm chewing and flying spittle, but her temper cooled quick enough once I’d scooped her up in my arms instead. I guess she was feeling a bit unstable since she couldn’t see my arms holding her because she snuggled in against my chest for security.

It was actually kind of handy having her there because every little sigh she let out reminded me to look down, at least for a moment. That, in turn, gave me a handy little notice when we were starting to become visible again. In the day-to-day of things, I don’t tend to look at myself all that much—unless there happens to be a shiny surface I can flex in front of—so having somebody else there, right in front of my face really helped. She started to come back in flecks and flakes, the same way that she’d vanished. Up ahead, I could make out the twins and farmer gradually decaying back into view too.

I tackled everybody down into a heap and reached out with Artifice. Making buildings with my funky building powers was easy. Making something that looked natural was a lot trickier. I had to partially raise the stone, then shuffle it sideways, and then… Just take my word for it. It is hard. The end result was a little overhang of mud that we were all flung down into so the gryphons circling overhead, and the alvaren paladins atop them, couldn’t see us. Even if they had seen the ground suddenly move, I figured they’d assume it was just some regular subsidence rather than jumping to divine intervention. Yes, I know what subsidence is. I once spent a year living rent-free in a place just because you had to use a stepladder to get down to the bathroom.

Once we were all tucked away, I couldn’t help but grin. Finally turning to the farm boy, I said, “That’s a pretty neat trick.”

“Darn handy when there’s a sheep trying to sneak off or revenue men come around.” He managed a smile back.

“All right, try to keep it down until we work out what the alvaren are up to.”

“Yes, sir.” Farmer bobbed his head. He could make me invisible; I didn’t care what he called me anymore.

The twins grumbled a bit, but they put their axes back on their backs. I carefully set Busty down. She was bright red again. Poor thing. Must have been all that running.

Birger was practically vibrating on the spot with barely restrained frustration. I could hear him muttering something about murder, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to ask him what he was saying. It looked like the rest of our little gang agreed with me as they had shuffled to one side of the shelter, and he was buzzing away in his armor at the other end.

Stepping out and peering over the top would have been the quickest and easiest way to see what was up, but it would also be the best way to get spotted, so I pushed in past the rest of them and started doing some more clever stuff with Artifice, slowly expanding and shifting the stone until I’d made myself a little window.

We’d actually made it a lot farther than I’d expected to in the few minutes of running. The crystal city loomed in the sky, casting a great rainbow-spackled pattern across the battlefield where we’d faced off with Leofric and his lot. Any trace of that fight had been trampled away now. The bare dirt where I’d wiped out all plant life was also trampled.

At least a hundred of the alvaren paladins were milling around, weapons sheathed. Among them strode the white-garbed mages, doing all the real work. All as expected so far.

The real twist in the tale was all the inyoka. There were a few albino ones among them, but the vast majority were in all the natural shades of browns and greens that we’d encountered in the land beyond the Serpent’s Gate—the ones that ran wild without any wyrms bossing them around. They hadn’t bothered us, and we hadn’t bothered them, which is more than I can say for about ninety percent of Amaranth’s population so far. This was why the sight of them being loaded into cages and chained up was not making me very happy. The fact none of them were even fighting back somehow made it so much worse. Like they’d already been beaten and broken. I turned to peer towards the Serpent’s Gate and nearly got one of the twin’s noses in my eye.

“Hey.” I hissed.

There was an old anger rumbling inside my stout little buddy. One I could hear rumbling on the other side of me, too. Too many dvergar, too close. I should have left more of them with Mhirka. “They be slavers still.”

I wanted that to be true. I really did. Terrible as it was. But I’d been all through the alvaren city, and they didn’t have anywhere to keep slaves. What they had were the flesh-forges that they used to make their mounts and war-monsters. The funny thing about a smith, is they didn’t actually conjure anything into existence, they just banged raw materials into the shape that they wanted them. That’s what those poor inyoka were. Meat for the grinder. Parts for the machine. “We’ve got to stop this.”

Busty piped up, “Maulkin, there be six of us. Seven if we be doubling back for your lanky lass.”

“The inyoka don’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this.”

The twins looked to each other. “True enough. But that don’t mean we can be stopping them.”

“There’s so many…” Even Farmer betrayed me.

I didn’t really feel any anger about it. They were face to face with a primordial power that had been legend before they’d even been born. They weren’t used to smacking stuff like that in the face the way I was. “I’m not asking any of you to come along. This is probably the perfect time for you guys to head back and report what has happened to Asher when he arrives. Give me a couple minutes, then there should be a nice big noisy distraction for you to make a break for it. I’m just going to—”

Farmer cut me off. “Nobody’s saying that we ain’t coming.”

I glanced around to the dvergar, and there was a certain determination in the set of their jaws. “If farm boy be going, so do we.”

I gave him a pat on the shoulder—softer than last time, so I didn’t knock him out of our little dug-out. “Man, you’ve just been all sorts of useful today. If you’re all coming, I know Mhirka will want to. Uh, wizard dude, could you invisible yourself, go get her, invisible you both, and then come back here?”

He pondered it for a long enough moment that I thought he was going to say no, but eventually, he seemed to recall that a question needed an answer. “I can do that for you, sir.”

“Okay, do. Please. ” He started casting, and I turned my attention elsewhere. “Everybody else, hold down the fort. I’m digging us forward.”

The twins looked outright offended that I was going digging without them, but when the earth started to open up beneath their feet without me using my hands, they understood what was up. I hacked out some stairs, reinforced the tunnel, and started pushing forward, being careful to drive everything down and to the sides instead of up. I did not want to do the cartoon bunny trail across the battlefield and give myself away. Lifesense flared each time that I passed underneath a cluster of inyoka or one of the bullying alvaren standing guard on the plain up above. There were a lot of bodies up above me, and I didn’t have the attention to spare to count them all.

There was something wrong with the big, stretched-out bird-cats. When one of them moved over the top of me, I could feel my stomach cramp up. It was like seeing somebody throwing up. Lifesense was pouring my awareness of the critter into my brain, and it was gross. Somebody really screwed up when they made that thing. Ever drive by a car crash and you can’t help but slow down and look? That was what digging under the stretch-gryphon felt like. Twisted with a suggestion of something bloody and damaged beyond repair inside. There was no way it was going to live for very long. They must have been making them up and breaking them down once they’d finished using them. This was a new level of messed up, even for the alvaren.

I couldn’t see exactly how far I’d gone, but as it grew quieter and quieter up above, I came to the conclusion that there would be no point in swarming around directly underneath the floating city if you meant to fly up to it. The brief glimpse I’d seen of the battlefield reflected that. They were arrayed in an arc around the city’s rim, where those above could defend them and those on the ground could make a simple launch and spiral up to safety. You could say a lot of things about the alvaren, but you could not say they weren’t organized.

When the last tremors of Lifesense stopped coming down on me, I knew I was as close to being directly beneath the center of the floating city as I could get. So I backed my way all along the length of the tunnel to collect the rest of the gang. Mhirka and farm boy were both with us by then, and judging from the way she was bouncing on the balls of her feet, she was raring to go after her brief brush with invisibility. “The enslavers are no sooner returned to Amaranth than they show their true colors.”

I didn’t bother sharing my fears with the rest of them. If what I suspected wasn’t true, then they’d never need to know about the awful place my mind went. If it was true, then it would be easier to explain to them once they’d seen the flesh-forges and abominations with their own eyes.

Rather than trying to walk and talk along the tight tunnel, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled. Mhirka was taller than me, but with a natural grace, she’d splayed out her legs a little like she was riding an invisible horse and somehow wasn’t bashing her horns on every ridge in the rock overhead. This was fine. I didn’t care that I looked like a mole in a hole. When you are a demi-god, you don’t need to worry about other people’s opinions on how goofy you look. Besides, as I wiggled my butt along in front of the rest of them, I was pretty sure I was showing them my best side.

Mhirka didn’t look all that impressed about it once I finally managed to wrangle myself around to face them, and poor Busty looked completely out of breath again. Even without my night vision moon-ray eyes, I’m pretty sure we could have seen everything going on in the tunnel because of how bright a red her face was shining. Maybe we should get her tired out and sit her on a cliff. I haven’t noticed any lighthouses in Amaranth, so she could be the first.

I widened out the end of the tunnel a bit so they could all fit in and had everybody grab onto everybody else. “Okay, guys, this next bit is going to be a rough ride. Hold onto each other, and be ready to move.”

Farm boy leaned in close enough that we were nearly brushing noses. I could smell the well-chewed bit of grass sticking out of his mouth. “Will you need the invisibility spell again, sir?”

I almost shook my head and impaled him with a horn, then thought better of it. “Probably isn’t going to help this time around.”

Mhirka’s eyes narrowed as I said that, her jagged teeth glinting in the moonlight of my gaze. “What exactly do you intend to—”

You ever want to avoid answering a question so you remake the world around you in such a drastic way that the person trying to ask can’t even get a word out because of all the air rushing by? Just me? Okay.

I hauled in a vast spike of stone as wide as my whole sphere of influence from around us. Then I ripped the ceiling off this hole in the ground, and we erupted from the battlefield atop a brand-new mountain. It started out as a broad plateau, but as we rushed up and up, it narrowed until it was nothing more than a spike.

The rest of them clung to each other with desperate strength as the wind whistled by. In the shadow of the crystal city, there were no gryphons swooping to intercept us, no flurries of missiles and spells. Distantly, I could hear the alvaren crying out, down on the ground floor, but they were all too far out to do anything before it was too late.

The spike of stone was not going to get us through the thick crystal base of the flying city, but luckily enough, I’d brought my swords along, too. Even as we flew up towards the solid roof of glowing gem, the two blades melted away and flowed together into one gigantic metal spike. I surged my Potency just before we struck and thrust straight up with all my impossible might.

We broke through.

Chapter 5

Huge cracks exploded out across the whole base of the city, and chunks of crystal rained down all about us for the moment before my rising mountain of stone ran out of steam and momentum took over, launching all six of us up through the biggest crack of them all and into the city beyond.

It wasn’t a graceful landing, even for Mhirka, who was used to hopping around like a mountain goat. The stone beneath us struck the crystal, and we were flung free with all the delicacy of a high-speed car crash. We spilled out into one of the open squares between the endless rows of opaque crystal townhouses. Not one of the squares holding a flesh-forge, thankfully, since I didn’t expect most of us were up for an abomination fight right that second, but one holding something I’d never seen here before. A garden.

There had been a pair of alvaren in the garden when we arrived. They were extremely unlucky. Birger had come flying out of that hole in the ground and ravaged them. Blue blood was spreading out all around the little bench where they’d been sitting, and he was still going. Still attacking their stilled corpses. I really should not have brought him along. He was a mistake.

The plants were transparent, and the trees provided no shade, only transforming the sunlight into dappled green patterns across the opaque crystal of the floor. None of it was real. The alvaren had taken some scene of natural beauty and transformed it, or recreated it, using whatever magic let them make all the crystal they used for construction. They took something living and beautiful and made it static and cold so it would last forever.

It wasn’t as pristine as it had once been since I’d punched a giant hole through the ground. Half of the shimmering blue crystal of the pond was missing. A crystalline koi fish stared out at me with a gawking mouth. Me too, buddy. Me too.

Everyone scrambled to their feet, even as the alvaren started pouring in from all sides. These were not the queen’s chosen paladins or the mightiest mages who operated everything in this city of magic, they were the common people. The alvaren who lived their lives in comfort, full of an unbridled sense of superiority. They believed they were better than everyone else, to the degree that even though they were nobodies, they thought they could take on my elite fighting force. Okay, maybe not elite, but trained, at least. Vaguely competent. Okay, forget the elite fighting force. They thought they could take on me despite being regular Joe alvaren. It didn’t work out well for them.

I shattered my giant sword into two smaller, but still ridiculously large, ones, and I stepped over Farmer to face the incoming crowd.

A pair of alvaren up front did a little dance move that I realized in retrospect was some sort of spell-casting, then bright blades of the same crystal everything in this city was made out of lashed out towards us. Razor-thin and lethal.

They might have been made of crystal, but they were still unmistakably blades. All blades were one blade. The swords in my hands resonated in tune with the crystals being flung at us, and with a twist of my wrists, my great-swords snapped out and returned the crystals to their senders.

It was carnage. The front two ranks of alvaren pressing in from that side parted at waist height. Blood exploded out from them, spattering across the walls, flooding the streets. Entrails and bones, tatters of cloth, and clumps of tools. It went everywhere. So much death, so abruptly, that my Void-granted senses screamed with it.

I channeled Slaughter into my swords, and I spun. All death was one death. Before the other pressing crowds even had their chance to attack, I was lashing out, great blades formed of pure darkness gathered from the resonating death I’d made and swept out to two of the other entrances to the square.

Where they struck, they left no mark, but the alvaren toppled down dead all the same.

Their few mages had thrown out counter-spells against the coming wave of death, but they did nothing at all. They used magic and rites and rituals to tap into the powers that were naturally mine. The connection of all things to all others. The divine.

That left only a single street leading into this square untended. My Marauders or squad—or whatever I eventually decided to call them–had responded perfectly to the situation. Running like hell to get out of my way as I death-rayed everybody coming our way and readying themselves to fight the alvaren charging in from behind me.

On one hand that was great, they were ready to kick ass, on the other hand, it meant I couldn’t use any of my fancier divine powers without accidentally killing them all. Which meant we were doing this old school. I let Artifice take hold of the sword in my off-hand and put it into an orbit about me, then I charged in with my team.

The alvaren weren’t good enough.

The mages were too scared to cast anything after I’d turned their spells back on them, so they were functionally useless. The rest of the locals had armed themselves with crystalline weaponry that I suspected was all meant to be decorative and were charging in to be cut off at the knees by the twins and Busty. Mhirka had positioned herself behind the wedge of the three of them to use the reach of her spear to the greatest effect, and Farmer was hiding behind her, hunched down with his hands clapped to his ears.

One lucky alvaren had darted past the dvergar and was rushing the farm boy with a glittering blade that looked like one long diamond in her hand. It shattered when I hit it, hunks of crystal shrapnel sending her sprawling and screaming until I stomped down hard and put an end to that noise. I yelled over the sound of battle. “Doing all right, buddy?”

Blood was trickling from the corners of his eyes. Probably a bad sign. “Tell them to turn the magic down. It’s too loud.”

I shrugged, then leapt over the dvergar wedge to come down in the midst of the alvaren. “I’ll ask, but I don’t think they’re going to listen.”

It had been a while since I last got to do some good old-fashioned sword murders. I swept my sword through a screaming alvaren man who clearly hadn’t expected me to drop out of the sky in front of him. It split him from shoulder to crotch, and I had to jerk the blade back to get it out of his hip bone.

Fighting dragons and gods and armies didn’t give me much opportunity to just swing a blade around anymore.

On the backswing, I cleft an alvaren girl’s head open, and brains spilled down her silky hair to puddle on the floor. I missed this. I ducked in past a thrust from some shiny crystal rod that was glowing with barely contained magic and headbutted an alvaren so hard that his head snapped clean off his scrawny neck. Blue blood sprayed up from his stump and drenched me.

The other alvaren seemed to be changing their minds about the whole “fighting for their city” thing. The ones at the back were already running like hell, and the ones that had come in too close were trying to work out a way to get out and run before I cut them down. There wasn’t one. I cut them all down, one by one. The second sword, guided by my Artifice, leaped forward to impale any that managed to get out of reach as I massacred their buddies.

Things were not going to keep on going our way. I might have been having a great time right now, but that was only because luck and timing were on our side. The minute the real mages and fighters got back to the city, everything was going to flip on us real quick. So we needed to not be here when that happened.

Legendary Foes Defeated!

700 Glory Gained

I flicked the blood from my sword and motioned the rest of the posse forward. “We free any inyoka we find, we kill any alvaren we find, and we break the forges.”

The dvergar were used to doing as they were told, so they nodded and fell into place behind me. Farmer was still half-dead from all the ambient magic, so there was no argument there either. Mhirka… well, she had some thoughts to share. “Why are we freeing wyrmspawn?”

“Because nobody should be a slave.” She looked at me sideways as we turned down a side street and headed out toward the curve around the outer circumference of the city where I vaguely remembered the forges being situated. “Besides, I don’t want the alvaren using them.”

“And these forges? Alvaren use magic. What care do they have for smithing?”

I slammed my arm out in her path just as a barrage of magic passed through where we were about to step. How the hell had I known that was coming? No time to worry about that now. The moment that the cascade of lightning and light stopped flowing by us, I stepped out and thrust my sword forward, setting its levitating twin leaping forward to skewer the first white robbed alvaren we’d met up here. All downhill from here.

“The gryphons. The war-beasts. We’re here to break flesh-forges, not ones for metal.” When no second blast of magic came our way, I called back my sword to my off-hand and rushed on past the crossroads before anything else could happen. “They make monsters with them.”

Mhirka caught me by the shoulder and hauled me to a halt. “They what?”

“They make monsters. That’s what they do. We’re going to stop them.” I could sense the forges on the periphery of my Sphere of Influence. A hint of green on the periphery of my vision. A tickle at my Lifesense. Whatever the forges were, they were creating life. Sort of. Enough to make my ears prick up anyway. Except not hearing, Lifesense—which I suspect was more like the kind of sense that a tree or a plant has. Ears of corn pricking up? Was that a thing?

Mhirka thrust her spear into my path, forcing my brisk jog to turn into a brisk limbo. Not easy when you are this top-heavy. “You did not think we might want to know this before we came here?”

“I don’t know what is happening for sure. Maybe they’re loading all the inyoka refugees into their precious shiny city because they’ve turned over a new leaf and they want to protect them from the Voidgod.” I shrugged up at her. “Maybe they aren’t mashing the inyoka up for parts? What do I know?”

Her mouth hung open in horror. “They’re doing what?”

“Maybe. Maybe doing that.” I shuffled forward the last little bit and then stood up again. “We’ll see when we get there.”

The wall of the next townhouse exploded outwards. Two white-robed alvaren stood inside, casting destruction and death towards us. There was no time for tricks. I slammed my swords down and burst them out into a shield between us and the enemy.

It was clumsy work, but it turned the blast aside and left me and Mhirka alive, so it was good enough. My armor flooded down to form new cleavers in my hands, leaving my arms bare. I rushed forward, parting the shields around me. The stuff directly in front of me washed up to completely encase me in metal for a moment before I could redirect it around to restore my armor and weapons back to their former state of bulky, clanky glory.

I leapt forward, hard head smashing through what was left of the wall and blades raised to cut down the alvaren before they could flee. One stood her ground, bravely unloading another blast of magic right through my guts. The other turned and ran. I cut the first in half, and the same cut dragged all the steel I’d left behind by Mhirka into a second blade to slash right through the second.

I dropped to one knee for a moment, catching my breath as I pulsed Restoration through my body and closed up the big hole that mage had opened. Guess I needed to thicken up my armor a bit more to shrug point-blank laser blasts off. I could do that. Mhirka was reaching for me when I pushed back to my feet, and she gawked at the bare, unscarred grey skin in the middle of my midriff. Calling the spare blade’s metal back to me refilled that hole real quick.

The back side of the building where our ambushers had been lurking was gone. Not smashed up like the front but melted away deliberately using the same magic they used to build this stuff.

Back where we’d come in, the dvergar peered around the side of the smashed crystal. From the inside, the building was transparent, from the outside, opaque. It was real handy if you were ambushing people.

Waving them forward, I headed out through the back of the building and strode on. The nearest flesh-forge was so close now that my senses were screaming. The dvergar were chattering softly with Mhirka behind me, but the siren call of the forge was too much for me to turn my attention their way. Farmer looked like he was feeling the pull, too. Either that or he was turning a bit green for different reasons. He was groaning a lot. I guessed country wizards didn’t really encounter this much saturated magic in one place all that often. Asher had never complained about headaches when we were here, even if the Keystone source of arcane power did hypnotize him a little. Then again, I was pretty sure you could set Asher on fire and he wouldn’t even flinch.

Chasing after me, their conversation tapered off, but I could tell they weren’t super happy with me right now. Probably something to do with dragging them into the middle of a massive enemy stronghold without any warning.

We turned the corner into another square and found a giant reptilian beast that looked like a red-bellied newt hit with a nuke in a 50s sci-fi flick. I mean that thing was gigantic and weird-looking. Huge fleshy fronds expanded out behind its head, swaying in the breeze. The color patterns along its side seemed to ripple, and it had at least four legs on each side, with little vestigial ones running all the way back along the tail, which ended in a big, curved raptor claw stinger thing. “Oh yeah, they’re definitely mashing inyoka into monsters.”

Birger let out a roar and charged right at the thing. It snapped its jaws in his direction, but he made a heroic leap forward to tumble under its gut.

One of the twins barked, “They be doing what?”

“Try to keep up!” Mhirka rolled her eyes as she strode past, spinning her spear and readying herself for battle.

I set both my great-swords into orbit about me and held out my arms. “Twins, with me. Busty, keep the farmer safe.”

The twins were roaring with laughter as they charged over to my waiting arms, and I scooped them up.

Meanwhile, Busty hadn’t moved a muscle. “Busty?”

I spun on the spot, building up momentum before I shot-putted the two dvergar on top of the giant lizard. Every time I was facing her way I tried to explain. “I didn’t catch your name. And it went on too long without me asking you to repeat it. And I didn’t want to make things weird. And I didn’t mean to say Busty out loud. And I’m very sorry.”

I punted the twins up into the air, and they spun as they went, axes out, a whirl of steel that hit the back of the newt at maximum spin. Blood and meaty chunks came flying up from the lizard’s back, and I turned to Busty, who was doubled over laughing. I faintly heard her wheezing, “Busty!”

Later. I’d have to deal with it later. I charged in, ducking under the newt’s bright blue tongue as it shot out at me, rebounding off some rubble to launch myself straight at it. It was a pincer attack. Mhirka was coming in from the far side, crouching and rushing in low, below the beast’s line of sight. This was a woman who’d hunted giant monsters before. Somebody who knew all the tricks of the trade.

I didn’t know any tricks. I just hit things hard until they stopped moving.

Time to do what I do best.

Both of my orbiting swords clashed together and fused into one colossal chopper. It sprung to my hands as I leapt.

We hit the poor lizard from both sides, just as it tried to buck the twins off its back and bared its soft underbelly. Mhirka’s spear hammered home, and my sword lopped clean through ribs and into the slimy meaty filling. It was gross, but it was still somehow less gross than the stretch-limo-bird-cats. It was natural gross, like poop instead of supernatural gross like… ghost poop? Ectoplasm? Anyway.

It let out a roar as it toppled towards me, and I thought we were finished until its tail whipped forward. I leapt aside, and Mhirka jumped back. The twins didn’t even look up. I could never tell them apart, never remember one’s name or the other. Now, I didn’t need to anymore.

That massive horned spike hit one in the top of his head and plowed right down through him. His mouth opened and closed as blood washed out from behind his yellowed teeth, his beard filled up with it. The whole boney spike had vanished down into the top of him, and it made an awful sucking sound as the newt yanked it back out again.

The other twin let out a roar that turned into a shriek when brain, blood, and bone rained down all over him. “No. No! This don’t be happening.”

Birger leapt up from behind the newt, bringing his axe down on the thing’s tail. A minute before and he could have saved a man’s life. Now he just lopped through the rubbery flesh and set the appendage spasmodically twitching. It flung the dead dvergar free as it coiled and snapped.

The one twin still standing lost his mind. The shriek cut short, the axe in his hand spun, and he brought it down pick-side first into the middle of the great beast’s back. Over and over he knocked the rusty spike into the creature’s back, hauling back with all his strength to pull it free of the sucking wounds, then bringing his mattock down again.

I joined in the butchery, snapping the sword back in two and going on a limb-lopping expedition. There wasn’t much to this lizard at the end of the day, not in comparison to my Potency. Rubbery skin that might have turned a dagger aside couldn’t resist the power behind my blade.

The lizard’s big blue tongue snapped out at me, and I split it right down the middle with a clumsy parry. Lizards were meant to have forked tongues, right? Poison or something equally icky came bubbling out from the wound to spatter down in blackened gobs before it could haul the whole gory mess back inside its head.

What followed wasn’t pretty or fun. Bit by bit, we carved away the parts of the big lizard that it could use to hurt us until, finally, it was basically just a big slimy sausage, and we were taking turns hacking at its head. We didn’t have time for this, not really. We were going to end up paying for this wasted time in a million different ways when the rest of the alvaren got back up here, but this was not the time to be logical. It had killed one of ours, so it had to pay for its crimes.

Finally, the thing stopped moving, and I swept in to hold the surviving Ambergrit boy in my arms as he shrieked and roared. It went on and on, but compared to the tantrum I threw after Seren died, it was pretty subdued. With a heave of his shoulders, he pushed his way free of me, and I let him, just watching as he scrambled over to where his hollowed-out brother had been left lying like a discarded rag doll. “No. No.”

Legendary Foe Defeated!

500 Glory Gained

Mhirka stepped up to my side, leaning in close. “We must move on. They will find us here.”

“Give him a minute,” I murmured back.

“We do not have a minute.” She hissed in my ear, warm breath tickling over my neck. “You jeopardize us all.”

“Let him grieve. If any alvaren show up, I’ll beat them to death with their own bones. If any monsters appear, I’ll carve them into pieces.” My voice caught in my throat as the Ambergrit survivor threw back his head and wailed. That was definitely going to draw attention. “None of you need to be here. I can do this all myself. This was stupid. This was all stupid. You’re too fragile. We’re taking out this forge, then I’m putting you all on cat-birds and sending you home.”

Apparently, that crossed some sort of line because Mhirka was pissed. She slammed her spear-butt into my leg, setting me stumbling to face her. “Why have you brought us here? What good does it do to stop the alvaren forging their armies? To cripple another enemy of the Voidgod.”

I’d found my footing, but I couldn’t stop eyeing her warily now. I’d had more than enough of pseudo-playful violence from women. “Trust me when I say, the alvaren are never going to be on our side.”

She yanked on her own horns like she might tear them out, frustration raising her voice from her hunter’s whisper to a rumble. “We do not need their friendship. Only their might brought to bear on the Adversary.”

I pointed to the giant newt. “You want me to just let them mince up all those innocent inyoka?”

“Innocent?” she snarled. “In what world are servants of the wyrms innocent?”

“They’re people. That means they don’t deserve to be treated like… parts.”

The Ambergrit twin who’d survived abruptly stopped his screaming, and that sudden silence shut the rest of us up too. Blood was trickling down into his eyes. In his raving grief, he’d cracked the stone where it grew from his face. His expression could not have been any stonier if the curse had spread across the entirety of it. There was nothing funny about him now. Flatulence and foolishness had been cut away from him. “Vengeance.”

Birger stepped up and rested his rocky forehead against the other man’s. “Vengeance.”

Busty nodded along. “Vengeance.”

Mhirka and Farmer both looked at each other awkwardly, outsiders to the dvergar and their ways, obviously wondering if they were meant to be swearing some blood oaths too. At least the farm boy had plenty of blood available for signing things. It was trickling down from his ears, eyes, and nostrils at a steady pace. He wasn’t pale from the loss of it yet, but he probably couldn’t hang on any longer.

I came to the dvergar and bent a knee to come down to the level of their faces. Every one a rictus of fury. “Vengeance. We’ll destroy the forge that birthed that critter, and we’ll destroy all the rest. They’ll never exist again after today. I promise you that.”

Apparently, that was the right thing to say. They stepped away from the broken body of the dead twin and fell into step with me.

We were already closing in on the city’s outer edge, and the throbbing green light on the periphery of my vision started spreading through the crystal beneath us, visible to all. The endless flow of magic through the city transformed into the Primal energy of creation. The crystal vibrated beneath our feet. The forges were so close I could taste them. Like ozone hanging in the air.

At last, we broke out into another square, and I stumbled to a halt. At least now we knew where all the inyoka had been taken. They were packed into the square in one great snaking line leading off towards whichever edge of the city they’d been taken hostage. The white-robed alvaren were few and far between here, but there were dozens of paladins with their blades drawn, just spoiling for one of the refugees to step out of line so they had an excuse. I couldn’t see where the line ended, through the crowds, but it wasn’t hard to guess. There was a flesh-forge lying unused at the far end of the square. I could only imagine that the great metal jaws of the apparatus were hanging open, just waiting for the sacrifices that would fuel it. Not on my watch.

I caught the closest paladin by the scruff of the neck before they knew we were even there, and I threw him at the nearest mage. The two of them went down in a tumbling heap, and suddenly, the pale glowing chains that had encircled a solid quarter of the inyoka’s wrists evaporated in a poof of light. At the top of my lungs, I roared, “Riot!”

The inyoka stared at me blankly. I tried again. “Run?”

Alvaren were closing in on me from all sides. Five paladins were coming at me with their twinned blades drawn and wicked grins spread over their faces. The elite soldiers of the alvaren Empire, trained for centuries to be the greatest swordsmen on Amaranth. One of the white-robed mages gave a nod across the square and abandoned their duties to start casting against me, too.

I turned to my team. Farmer bleeding, the dvergar hell-bent on murder, and Mhirka scowling down at me like I was the dumbest dumb-ass to ever ass.

“Help.” I didn’t need to pretend I was a leader or a hero. I needed her to do what was right. “We need to get them out. Please. Take them back to the center, to the spike. It’s steep, but… you can make it down. You can help them.”

There was no time to hang around waiting for the complex play of emotions over her face to resolve. I’d asked, I’d begged, I’d done all I could. If she chose to do the right thing, that was great, but I couldn’t leave my dvergar to die while we talked it out.

Busty, Birger, and the leftover twin were being encircled by the paladins. They might have been competent fighters for sheltered dvergar that had spent their long lives in a Khag, but nobody on this planet was up to the task of fighting five alvaren paladins head-on. Nobody mortal, anyway.

Slaughter flooded through my swords as I drew them. A scratch from either one of them would be enough to end a life.  I tossed one death-shrouded great-sword up into the air, and I charged, blade point first, at the alvaren.

The paladins saw me coming and spun to face the more serious threat, casually parrying aside the dvergar’s hacking axe swings without even needing to look.

In the blue sky above us, surrounded by the soaring buttresses and spires of alvaren majesty, my sword shattered beneath the resonating impact of my will and Artifice.

As I thrust the sword in my hands at the closest paladin, she turned it easily aside, laughing aloud at my incompetence as she closed the distance, stepping inside my guard—which was when the rain of needles fell.

They had armor on, but it was built to be light so their natural grace and agility could be brought to bear. Where the needles hit armor, they deflected. Where they hit flesh, alvaren died.

Four fell, crumbling to decay and ruin. The laughing one’s mirth was strangled as her swipe deflected off my face without a mark. Surging my Vitality had saved my life plenty of times, but this was the first time it let me really enjoy the look on somebody’s face when their killing blow turned to nothing before their eyes.

I spun my great-sword past her into a low-guard. Picture perfect, just how Seren had taught me. There was a moment of recognition flashing in the paladin’s eyes as she realized I wasn’t just another faun to be enslaved or fed into their machinery. When she knew for certain that she was screwed.

From a low guard, I slipped into the old routine Seren had drilled me through a hundred times a day. A sweeping upward cut to break apart her defense. A kick to the mid-section to drive her back. She was so like Seren. Those same sharp features. That same narrow-eyed determination. It should have made this harder, but it didn’t. She dove back in at me, down and to the left into the hole I’d left behind when my sword raised high. Just like she was meant to. Just as she’d been trained.

My second sword reformed in that space from the blue-bloodied shards that had slaughtered her kin, and she hit it headlong. It rang as her forehead struck the flat of her blade, and she staggered back a step to meet my cut. Shoulder to hip. She slipped into two halves.

Legendary Foes Defeated!

800 Glory Gained

Chapter 6

Again, I felt something awry before the mage cast. It was only a momentary awareness. Deathsense alerting me to the gathering of energy about me. My own death coming. Both of my swords melted out into a shield across my back, and the torrents of magic washed right around me and the dvergar like a stream parting around a rock.

The weight of the shield on my back grew heavier and heavier as more and more power was unloaded against me, pinning it to me.

Beyond the blinding tunnel of lethal magic around me, inyoka died, sacrificed like they were nothing. I guess they could use the flesh whether it was living or dead. It didn’t matter to them. None of the people they were slaughtering mattered to them.

I took a step backward, nudging deeper into the volley of spells. I had to yell to be heard. “Stay close!”

The dvergar didn’t need telling twice. They slipped into a formation behind the shield and helped brace it as I turned until I was facing that solid slab of steel. Setting my feet beneath my shoulders, I pushed. Another step. Then another. All of us pushing together. Getting closer and closer.

When the magic gave out, we all stumbled forward, but I took that momentum and turned it into a run. I punched through the shield as it turned liquid, whipping it around me and reforming into a sword bigger than the mage we were facing. He must have been a smart guy to learn all that magic.

Smart enough to know that this wasn’t going to end well.

He turned to run, and I made another thrust, all the metal of the still-forming sword bursting out into one point. A lance so long and imbalanced it would have been completely useless. Except in that one moment when it burst through the alvaren’s throat.

Two mages down. Two to go.

More paladins were charging towards us now, from every direction. Dozens of them. Enough to make even me a little nervy. Mhirka’s flung spear took the first one in the side, setting him tumbling. “Inyoka!” she bellowed. “Follow us to safety!”

Half the freed inyoka lay dead and crispy, still laid out in their lines, and the other half immediately sprinted our way—even though it was going to put them right between us and the alvaren who’d happily turn them into lizard mince.

The only barrier between them and the imagined safety was my lance, still wedged into the dead alvaren. That giant pole scraped along the crystal, sticking when I took a step forward. Wait. I surged Potency, and I pole vaulted from standing, soaring up and over the swarming lizardfolk running for their lives.

On the other side of my grand parabola over the open square, the pole I was using to vault snapped. That was for the best; I was about to break it myself. As I plummeted, I pulled it all up, stripped down all my armor for the extra mass, and made a titanic metal hammer, easily bigger than me. In the tiny gap between fleeing inyoka and charging paladins, I came down like a comet falling to Earth.

This whole crystal city thing was pretty cool. They could grow new parts whenever they wanted by waving a little magic around. It was a conductor for their big magic battery at the center of the whole place. It did that thing where it could be transparent or opaque depending on what you wanted. Overall, I couldn’t think of any real drawbacks to building a whole damn city out of it. Other than the fact that you could smash it with a giant hammer.

The cracks shot out in every direction from where I’d struck. The bit I’d actually hit was basically just shiny dust at this point, but the cracks were the fun part. Some of them widened. Other smaller hairlines spread out from the big ones until the whole square and most of the surrounding buildings were permeated. Then things started coming apart.

All that magic pulsing through the crystal created vibrations. Not a problem when everything was one solid piece, but the moment it wasn’t… well, things started breaking. Chunks of building fell, and the thick crack dividing the road between me and the alvaren spread as more and more of the shattered crystal fell, first down into the chasm, then through, down and out the bottom of the floating city. Shimmering down to the land below us. Whoops. Should not have looked down. My legs went wobbly.

If I was spooked, the alvaren were panicked. Even though there wasn’t a chance in hell of me actually breaking something as big as the whole city with one whack, the paladins turned tail and ran at the sight of the place they’d sworn to defend cracking open. I was calling it a win.

Of all the alvaren, only a pair of mages was left, trying to keep all the remaining inyoka under control as they struggled to join their families and friends. The lizardmen were pulling against the glowing chains until sparks started showering from them —the first real hint that they weren’t all going to willingly walk into the slaughterhouse.

The mages saw me about the same time as I spotted them, and in their panic, their grip on the inyoka started to slip. I flashed them a broad smile and strolled their way, hammer flowing back into armor and swords as I went.

One was closer than the other, farther from the forge. She panicked. She abandoned her grip on the inyoka and started frantically casting something at me instead. The half of the inyoka she had inadvertently released didn’t flee or stand there like lost little sheep on the abattoir ramp. They turned on the mage with a speed and ferocity that made me a little bit jealous. Moving like a flock of birds, they dived onto her, bearing her to the ground. You forgot that inyoka hands had claws on the end until you saw them in action. Blue blood splattered and spread out from beneath the heap of them.

Mage number four was definitely smarter than the rest had been. When he saw his buddy drop, he didn’t screw around trying to zap me or the swarm of incoming inyoka. He just ran like hell. I wasn’t chasing him, and neither were the inyoka. Turns out it was actually a good idea. With all of them freed, the inyoka sprinted off towards Mhirka where she stuck up out of the crowd like the kind of oiled-up flagpole I wouldn’t mind trying to climb. Focus, Maulkin. Focus. “Get them out!”

I caught sight of the farmer in the midst of the swarming inyoka and pointed to him. “You! Go with her, make them invisible if you need to. Get them all back to the Overlook.”

Whatever his answer was, it was swallowed up in the chaos. I waded cross-stream through the hordes of fleeing inyoka towards the awful machine at the far side of the square. It was a good thing I was built like a truck at this point, or I would definitely have been bowled over by all the inyoka. As it was, they did their best to stay out from underfoot, but I still somehow managed to stomp on more than a few feet and tails. They took off running before they could hear my endless litany of, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

There was another ripple moving towards me amidst the inyoka, so I took a swerve in that direction and found a heap of dvergar being trampled by inyoka, in full turtle mode. I plucked them out of the swarm, and if they objected to being manhandled, they didn’t complain. Busty scrambled up to rest on my shoulders, thighs clamped around my head. Birger and the remaining Ambergrit boy clung to my arms, letting me lift them clear. “This don’t be a good plan.”

“Plan?” I barked out a laugh. “Who said we had a plan?”

Busty cackled above me, grabbing onto my horns for stability when she rocked too far back. My neck made a little crunchy noise, and a crick I hadn’t known was there disappeared. Nice.

The crowd thinned as we closed in on the flesh-forge. Its metal jaws gaped open. This whole thing was all too familiar.

The last time I was here, these things were churning out abominations. We’d smashed one of the devices up, but I couldn’t shake the worry that this was the same one. Just repaired. There was no point breaking it if the alvaren could just rebuild it the moment we were gone. There had to be some way to destroy it in a way that mattered. A way to put it out of order forever.

My senses screamed when I got close enough to the machinery. Not the flare of warning that Deathsense brought me, but some combination of my other Divine abilities. Lifesense and Spirit Touch and my Sphere of Influence all fusing together into one warning. Something bad was inside. One by one, I dropped the dvergar to the crazy-paved crystal floor of the square until I stood before the gaping mouth of the thing all by myself. “I think I need to go inside.”

Busty caught my hand and hauled me to a stop as I tried to go on into the dark. “That be an even worse plan than all the other bad plans. Terrible plan. Don’t be doing that now.”

“There’s something down there inside it.” The hair on the back of my neck prickled up as I moved closer. “Something I need to see if I’m going to break them.”

Birger laid a hand on my back. Well, lower back. Butt. “I don’t be liking this, lad.”

If that psycho thought it was a bad idea, it really had to be a bad idea. I still stepped forward and into the machine.

My Lifesense pulsed with every step, confirming my suspicions as I grew closer and closer. The light of the sun fell behind as I went deeper and deeper into the steel-shod cave. The metal parted to my Artifice without any real thought, revealing the inner workings of the forge. Most of it I couldn’t understand. Maybe with Asher’s help, I could have discovered what all the magic stuff meant, but the bits I did understand made my guts feel like they were curling up inside me. Crystal ran through to conduct the magic, formed into runes and spells, but that wasn’t the part that did the heavy lifting.

The part that actually forged living flesh into something else was glowing green every time I blinked my eyes. The desiccated and mummified parts of a once-living thing that were strung out throughout it. Dry and dead to the eye, but still terribly alive. Nothing natural could have lived through whatever process had changed a mortal body into this entangled stretch of parts. Only something that could live forever. Only an Eternal.

Since we’d arrived on Amaranth, we’d been wondering where the hell all the other Eternals had gone. Some had gone nuts and stayed buried, sure, I could buy that. Some had gone off wandering, never to be seen again—little bit hazy as far as explanations went, but maybe. A couple had been sneaking around in the background, pulling the strings on everything. Met them, hated them, killed one of them myself. But that didn’t account for all the missing. I’d figured a lot of the ones that fought Araphel might have bought it since he had the same Slaughter powers as me, but even so, the numbers never worked out. If you kept adding more and more Eternals to the world and never subtracted any, there should still have been hundreds of us roaming around. Instead, there were four at my last count, and that was only because I hadn’t found Leofric to murder his ass yet.

This was what had happened to them. The alvaren had taken them, and they had broken them down into tools. How many Eternals were still out there somewhere, trapped in some agonizing nightmare like this, somewhere between life and death, never escaping? Hopefully, it was only the ones who could use Primal to do the alvaren’s bidding. If any of their other technology ran on Eternal parts, I just might start screaming and never stop.

There was no shortage of death in the air. I gathered it into Slaughter, and I dumped all that power into the closest thread of sinew, plucking it like a guitar string and letting peace vibrate out through the whole machine. After millennia like this, they would have been beyond insane. When my mind brushed against the ghost in the machine, I could feel no grateful release, no fear of oblivion, nothing at all. Just the wild static of mindless things. Too far gone by far to recognize mercy. At slaughter’s touch, the buzz faded. The forge died, and I willed the Eternal’s soul away. Maybe in the Land of the Dead, they’d find some peace and solace.

Coming back out into the sunlight, I had a clear purpose in this world again. Every flesh-forge had to be broken. Not to stop the alvaren making monsters to fling at me. Not to save the inyoka they were feeding into them. For the Eternals trapped inside.

The dvergar looked up at me, and something in my expression must have changed because they couldn’t meet my eyes afterward. “Let’s go.”

There were ambushes as we moved on, but if you asked me for any of the details after, I couldn’t recount them. More walls were blasted out at us as mages took their best shots. A few of the first paladins to make it back from down on the ground intercepted us as we moved in a broad arc around the outer edge of the city, but none of them came close.

There was another mass of inyoka in the next square, and word had already spread of our coming. The alvaren were massacring those at the back, trying to drive the rest into the forge as fast as they could. At least it meant they were all bunched together. As my dvergar stepped out into the yard, I leapt into the midst of them, slapping spells aside with the flat of my blade.

With so much death already in the air, each sweep of my blade caught up a great cloud of it and carried it on. Death hungered for more death, and the vibrant after-images of my sword cut down all the alvaren in sight in a single stroke.

Gods help the poor inyoka, their guide back to the central spire was Birger. He ranted and raved about bloody vengeance all the way, and I could see more than a few of the inyoka looking back at me more wide-eyed and terrified than before.

I didn’t even bother to climb inside the forge when silence fell. With the fighting done, I gathered up a great blade of Slaughter and split it in two instead.

More city, more ambushes, all too familiar now.

Legendary Foes Defeated!

600 Glory Gained

The alvaren had spent centuries perfecting everything they did, working to be the best at everything, and all it meant was that they all did everything exactly the same. By the fifth or sixth exploding wall, I didn’t even need a shield anymore. I knew every angle the spells would be cast at. My Deathsense didn’t even have the opportunity to tingle before I was past it and into the meat of the mages.

There were no inyoka at the next forge, but that did not mean there was no resistance. We couldn’t see them, but the sound of all those clawed feet clacking on the crystal let us know that the alvaren were dragging them off before we could get to them. Good. I was running out of dvergar to guide them out. If the alvaren crammed all the rest together, we could save them in one go.

Over by the forge, a pair of the mages still worked frantically, pouring their own magics into the machine—giving the undead Eternal inside the instructions to create something terrible, no doubt.

I threw the last Ambergrit at them, and he went more than willingly, smashing into one and hacking into the next with his axe in the same bloody motion. Neither one of them would be casting any spells again any time soon. Busty grumbled at my side. “Toss me, next time. I’m good for it.”

Even in the midst of all this, I couldn’t resist. “I can’t. The balance is off for throwing, you’re too—”

“Top heavy.” She groaned. “Aye. You be hilarious. Never heard any jokes like that before.”

Touched a nerve. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Be tossing me”—she banged on her chest plate—“I’ll not break.”

Whichever one of the many gross things I wanted to say to her next died halfway up my throat when the flesh-forge exploded. Whatever the alvaren had been programming the forge to make, I was willing to bet it wasn’t what came out, but the thing that did come smashing out would slow us down all the same.

It had been so long since I’d seen an abomination, I’d almost forgotten they existed.

This one was pretty special, even compared to the variety of weird and wonderful ones I’d fought before. There were millipede legs on the bottom of a cone-shaped body, topped off with a levitating sphere of light instead of a point. So far, so abomination. But what made this one extra special was the tentacles.

The smooth sides of the cone lifted off, leaving a ridged pattern underneath where all of them had slotted in. Dozens upon dozens of them, each as thick around as one of my thighs. One of my thighs now. Not the ones I had back on my weedy human body. These things were thick.

Even that didn’t make them all that notable here in Amaranth, though. Lots of wiggly wriggly stuff trying to kill me here. No. What made them special was that as they pulled clear of the main body, a tiny little glowing orb drifted down from the big one to hover right next to the tentacles’ flattened tips. Like each one was a snail’s eye-stalk.

“Get behind me!” I bellowed down to Busty, not even having the time to check she was doing as I told her.

The central sphere had grown brighter from the moment it came into sight, and now it blazed like the sun. I remembered how this ended. What I couldn’t have predicted was how the solar beam was going to blast out. Instead of one lethal laser shot to my face, every one of the abomination’s tentacle orbs fired off. There was no logic to it, no aim or direction. Beams of blinding, searing light shot out in every direction at once, like somebody had shot their magic into a disco ball. The tentacles spasmed as the power passed through them, and every individual beam that should have just seared a single spot on the crystal instead slashed a line.

I’d pulled together a shield, but I was knocked around as it was struck in multiple, moving spots. I had to struggle to keep it in place and hope against hope that the last Ambergrit boy had taken a dive into cover.

When the murder-disco died down, I let my shield melt away and took in the damage the abomination had wrought. There were blackened lines across its own marble white hide from friendly fire. The ground all about it had vast rivulets of molten crystal bubbling away, and the walls at the far sides of the square were marked with much wider streaks of burning. The Ambergrit boy had not run and hidden. He’d been charging with his mattock held high when the blast went off. Half of him was by the dead wizards, and a quarter was laying at the abomination’s feet. The last quarter, I couldn’t even find. I had to assume it had either disintegrated or been flung out of sight.

Yet despite that, my Lifesense told me there was still a spark inside him, and Primal flowed down into his body with the lightest touch. With a messy squelching noise, the missing bits started to grow back. First flesh, then stone. Which was lucky really, because there was a lady present, and I had nothing to cover his junk with. There was no time to wait for him to stir. I wrapped him up in crystal and then stomped him down and out through the bottom of the city. He’d survive the drop in that cocoon, and if he did take some damage, he was still healing anyway. What was a little more blunt force trauma between friends.

A glance back told me Busty was still with us despite all the odds against her. She’d stayed in the lee of my boulder-shaped self, and the blasts had passed around her harmlessly. The air felt hot in my lungs. “Ready to fly?”

She gave me a terse nod. I kicked down the bulwark I’d hauled up, then she was spinning. I caught her by the ankle and turned on the spot in a classic hammer toss launch. “Shield up!”

It was probably a bad sign that she instantly obeyed me, even though I was currently centrifuging her brains, snapping her shield up into place and whooping as I let her fly.

She soared and crashed onto the smooth crystal ahead of the abomination, sliding the rest of the way. The monster was still surging forward, and with her shield over her, Busty was nothing more than an insubstantial hump in its path. She vanished beneath the scuttling legs, out of the line of fire.

I let out a breath of relief, then I charged.

The abomination spun as it came on, tentacles spiraling around it as it trampled over Busty without even spotting her. The bulbs at the end of each one were dull and grey for now, but already light and life was returning to them, ready to zap me all over again. I didn’t plan on giving it that chance.

The dropped metal I’d clanged over in my rush flowed up my legs to join with my armor, bulking me out until I was basically a wrecking ball of steel. With a Surge of Potency, I launched myself at the beast, only pushing out with Artifice at the very last moment to turn the smooth outer sphere of my new armor into a mass of spikes.

Even as liquid sunlight wept from its wounds, I remained in place. The spikes were rooted in the glowing hot core of the abomination. The metal on the outer side of my armor thinned and trickled down my arms to form a couple of cleavers. Then I went to town, nestled safely amidst the flailing, whipping tentacles, hacking and chopping and snarling away.

The nearest tentacles lost their tips, the orbs hovering at their ends vanishing in a puff. I put the two cleavers together into something more substantial and tried chopping into the center of its mass. I broke the marbled surface and let out blasts of blinding sunshine, but the angle was wrong for a proper swing. I sucked my spikes back in and dropped to the floor.

It tried to scuttle right over me blindly, the same way it had Busty, but my Potency was still Surged, and even if it hadn’t been, I was still a big, buff boy. It hit me and rebounded while I reformed my sword, and when it came on again, I slammed the flattened top of the giant cleaver blade to the ground and ramped it. The closest legs lifted free of the floor, but momentum and the back legs drove it on. I caught a glimpse of Busty down on the ground, gave her a smile while I flexed, and tried to lift the thing off the floor. Tentacles or not, this abomination was even more top-heavy than her. If I got it on its side, it wouldn’t be getting up again.

Once again, the angle was wrong. If I’d been taller or it had been narrower at its base, then I would have been yelling timber, but no such luck. It ran itself up on my sword until my Surge passed, and then the full weight came down on me, dragging me off balance and hiding Busty from sight, even as she cursed me, the abomination, and our mothers.

The timing was right; the glow was back to blinding bright in each tentacular orb. I probably should have ducked under the legs while I had the chance, but seven minutes in heaven with Busty seemed like it would end in one or both of us bleeding at this point. The bug legs and crushing pressure didn’t really set the mood. I got enough of that in high school.

I dragged all the metal I could around the front of myself into more of a shell than a shield, then I rammed my hands and horns into it to brace. It was enough. The impact of the solar ray unleashed set me back on my heels again, and the crystal below those feet took on a really scary glow, but I didn’t topple. I thought I’d made it through completely unscathed until a tentacle whipped right around the side of my bulwark and lashed blazing hot light across my back.

[1433/1670 Health]

There was no tell-tale wetness as I bled. The wound had cauterized as it was made. All I felt was a numb line of chill where one moment my flesh had been alive and now it was dead and gone. I reached for my Primal Pillar to heal me, then realized I had a better resource available. As the blinding light beyond my steel chrysalis died, I melted it all into one vast great-sword and activated Drain.

It took all my strength to heft the sword when it was that size, and there wasn’t much more to my attack than lining it up and letting it fall like the blade of a guillotine. It struck home, slicing into the ridges where the tentacles should have been nested and biting in deeper until I could feel the pulses of the monster’s radioactive core vibrating up the length of my blade. Death rushed out where the flesh had parted, and I drank it all down. All the damage that it had dealt to me was undone in one fell swoop.

That was a damn handy power, even if it did come from the evil Voidgod side of the family.

On the downside, there was no death energy gathered around me to pour down the length of my humongous magnum dong of a sword to instantly kill the damn thing. Ah, well. You live and you learn.

It took both hands and all my strength to twist the gigantic sword as I dragged it back out, and the abomination made a noise like nails on a chalkboard the whole time. It had been so long since we’d faced one of these things that I’d forgotten how unpleasant they were. Now my Lifesense was sharper, they gave me the same vibes as the sausage-dog-gryphons. Like something had gone seriously wrong. At least now I knew where they were getting their Eternal powers from. They incorporated bits of the mummified remains from the forge.

I gave my sword another twist, the other way, and half its mass dropped off in clunky chunks. I needed it to be a little bit more workable for what came next. Launching myself forward, I kicked off one side of the gaping wound and rebounded to the other, bouncing back and forth across the chimney I’d made to gain height before snagging a grip on one of the nearest tentacles and using it to hoist myself up, level with the glow on the top of the cone.

It tried to whip me off, flicking back and forth while I grit my teeth and held on tight, but in the end, my raw Potency won out. On the last flick back towards the center, I let go and flew, twisting and tumbling through the air to bring my blade down on the sunlight orb hovering above the pallid mass of the abomination’s flesh.

It went supernova with the first blow, blinding light and searing heat bursting out in every direction. I’m not sure how to describe that experience if you’ve never been in the front row seats for a solar flare, but it was a bit uncomfortable, and when I landed on the blackened crystal floor, I was looking a little overcooked.

This time, I used Restoration without a second thought. Not because I felt a burning need to jump right back into the fighting, but because I felt a burning. Flesh grew back onto my blackened bones where they were showing through, and the worst of the sootiness washed off, too.

Legendary Foe Defeated!

400 Glory Gained

There was a moment of staggering confusion as the Glory flooded me, then it was past, and I was shoulder-barging the remains of the abomination off Busty. It looked like someone had jammed a stick of dynamite in its cone and set it off. Luckily, the bits that had blown off made it lighter. It only took a few thumps to get Busty out from under it.  Levering her back to her feet and getting her moving again was harder.

“So many legs…”

I put a hand between her shoulder blades and pushed her along. “Just don’t think about it too much.”

Pausing for just a moment, I turned back to casually launch all the accumulated Death into the flesh-forge as we left the square. It was left standing and intact, but the spark of Primal energy within it died—as did the green glow beneath our feet, where it still shone through the soot.

“And it exploded…” She was staring off into the middle distance when I turned back to her, and I had to steer her as we hustled along towards the next forge.

A prickle of my senses warned me of the next ambush, and I deflected a blast from a fleeing alvaren wizard with a hastily reformed great-sword. “Don’t think about it.”

Still, she went on mumbling. “And the light…”

“Busty!” I startled her out of her reverie at last.

“My name don’t be Busty!” she snapped. “You rude ox!”

With a slash of my sword, I sent a rain of tiny razors after the fleeing wizard, peppering a line across his white robes and dropping him in his tracks.

Turning back to her with a gentle smile, I asked, “Okay, so what is your name?”

Still fuming, she bellowed back, “My name be—”

Chapter 7

A roar drowned her out. Not the monstrous call of the creatures being birthed from the forges, but the awful booming sound of displaced air as magic was unleashed.

The alvaren from down on the ground had made their merry way back up to the city, gotten themselves organized, and were launching a proper counterattack. The next square we came to had another forge, a row of paladins standing ready, and a mass of white-robed casters behind them, launching blasts over their heads in perfect artillery arches to rain sparkly death down on our heads.

With a yelp, I snatched Busty back and tossed her into an alleyway before the falling stars could hit. That was probably a mistake because I didn’t have enough time to get my own dumb ass out of the way when I was done.

Being blasted with pure magic is a unique kind of pain. Like a cold burning—if burning was slowly unraveling you from the inside out.

One of those blasts, I probably could have shrugged off. Two, I might have still been standing. But a dozen of them came down on me. Have you ever stepped on an ant by accident? Imagine what that ant felt like. That was me in that moment.

When I blinked away the afterimages of the magical barrage, I was lying flat on my back, both my horns were broken off, and my armor had crumpled like it was made of tinfoil, but it was a good thing it was still there because I was relatively confident that all I had left inside it was Maulkin soup.

There was a lot of blood, all of it mine, and a lot of broken shards of metal were scattered about me. Also mine. It was what remained of my sword or shield—or whatever I’d managed to pull together in the instant of impact.

The same roar of magic went up again. The same blinding lights soared through the bright blue sky to end my life. If I died here, Busty would die, too. All the inyoka they’d captured… The Eternals trapped in perpetual misery… If I was gone, nobody could stop all this.

Artifice had not served me well last time around, but I was trying again all the same. I gathered up all that was left of my sword and armor, ripping some chunks of it right out of my body where it was currently jammed, and I flung it up into a shield, not down here but in the sky, where the blazing lights were converging.

Where magic and metal met, there was an explosion. All my gear was annihilated, but I wasn’t, so I was calling it a win.

Molten sparks of metal rained down on me, but compared to the state I was already in, the pain didn’t really register. Turns out getting mashed up kind of stings. Primal was of no use—I’d already squandered my healing before all this hit—and Drain was available again, but unless I could actually hurt somebody, it wasn’t going to help. Hurting people didn’t seem likely when my body was basically paste, my horns were gone, and I had nothing to make a weapon from.

The paladins came charging in now, blades raised, ready to butcher whatever was left of me. That meant the awful magic was going to stop for a second, which I liked. But it also meant I was about to be stabbed about fifty thousand times, which… no, thanks.

I’d lied to Mercy again. Just a little bit. Mostly when I’d said I’d run away at the first sign of trouble. But also when I’d told her I just wanted to scout beyond the Bastion. I knew that the Voidgod was coming and that I wasn’t strong enough to face him yet. I needed more power. I needed more Glory. I wasn’t going to get either hiding behind a big wall and waiting for my doom to come.

Every alvaren I killed gave me more Glory. They were titbits compared to slaying something truly legendary, but I’d killed so many of them now that I’d lost count, and it all added up. Less than a hundred Glory a pop when I needed thousands to reach the next Tier seemed worthless until you remembered I’d just slaughtered my way across half a city.

The plan had been to throw everything into my void powers and pump up Slaughter enough that it would work on someone as powerful as Araphel, but my health didn’t go up when I invested my Glory in that, only when I picked the healthy option of the not-so-evil god powers, and I needed more health right now.

I tossed it into Artifice without a second thought, and suddenly, the whole world seemed to light up. All the mage-shaped crystal that had been beyond the grasp of my Sphere of Influence before was suddenly viable to use. This whole city had just become my new weapon.

As a trickle of new life surged into my broken body as my Divine Pillars lit up and grew stronger, a push of Artifice launched me to my feet. I didn’t have the slick smooth crystal effect that the alvaren’s magic managed to manufacture, but I could shoot big pillars of crystal out of the ground to get me on my feet now.

The advancing line of paladins paused for just a moment when the giant, naked Maulkin landed upright in front of them, and who could blame them for wanting to take it all in. The confusion didn’t last long. With a cry echoing back and forth between them, they charged.

Bless Busty. She came running out of the alleyway to protect me, tiny and mortal as she was. I had to deal with her first. A jerk of my hand hauled a wall up, stopping her in her tracks, and then a sweep of the other arm launched out spars of crystal towards the charging alvaren. They all leapt gracefully over the top, of course, but that little fence of crystalline spears blocked the line of sight from the square. The mages would have to reposition or risk hitting their own people. Who said I was too dumb to know tactics and junk?

The alvaren were almost in striking distance before I hauled up another wall between us—vertical this time, with no hope of skewering anyone who took too long to adjust to the changing battlefield. That wasn’t the plan. I sprinted headlong into it, even as the alvaren leapt and scrambled up the other side, competing to be the one to skewer me. The crystal should have shattered as I hit it, but instead, it gave way at the touch of my skin, folding around me, shaping and reshaping itself into armor even as the rest of the wall became brittle. It only took a breath before it gave out, then the air was full of falling alvaren, shattered crystal dust, and screams.

I was behind their line now, between them and the mages, and they hadn’t even realized it had happened.

The tumbling crystal fragments from the fallen wall leapt to me, slicing any alvaren flesh they passed through on their way to my hands. Once they arrived, I formed them up into a brittle sword almost as tall as me. It would only cut once before breaking, but it only needed to cut once. I stamped my foot, and the top layer of the crystal all about my sphere of influence shattered to dust. I fell an inch before reaching solid ground once more, then I swung.

All swords were one sword. All crystals were one crystal. All alvaren standing in front of me were about to have a bad day. The echo of my great-sword leapt out, launching the fragmented shards and dust out in a single, barely visible line. It split the alvaren in two where it hit.

Half the paladins died to that blow, bisected where they stood, top half and bottom falling apart like they’d never met. They were the lucky ones. Some were still in the process of falling, and some had dropped into a crouch as they landed. The ones in the air only lost a limb or two. The ones who’d crouched caught the slash across their faces. I’ve never seen as many exposed brains as I did in those moments. Put me off cauliflower for life.

By pure luck, one alvaren survived all of that. A slip on some crystal dust had put him under the height of the cut. He rolled to his feet now, looked at all his dead kin all about him, and tossed his twin swords aside. Holding his hands up.

I growled, “Run,” and I was relieved to see that he did because I was pretty much exhausted by that point. Still, there was no stopping. The fight wasn’t done until I was the last one standing.

With a heave of effort, I unmade the armor and swords of the dead and remade them into a suit of armor, slapping the magic-conducting crystal I was already wearing under metal framing to reinforce its brittle structure with something more solid. I wanted to keep the crystal because I felt like having magic-conducting armor was going to be handy at some point, even if I wasn’t sure how yet. If nothing else, it looked a lot cooler than the rusty slabs of iron I’d been wearing before. Fancy. Like I was going out instead of slubbing about on the couch in a dungeon.

With that done, I ripped down Busty’s wall and met her oncoming glower head-on. “All right?”

“If you be doing that again, your squishy bits will be meeting my axe.”

She was at face level with my squishy bits, and even if I could grow them back, I knew without a doubt that if they got cut off, Mercy would find them and chase me around with them for the rest of eternity. I did not need that in my life. Plus, it would probably hurt. Sad that wasn’t my first concern at this point. “Fair.”

Apparently, that wasn’t enough. She prodded at me with the spiky top of her axe all the same. “You need me moved, I’ll move, but I’m no side of salt pork to be tossed about.”

I held up my hands, letting my remade swords enter orbit around me. “Sorry.”

She blinked at them floating around, remembered she was threatening the balls of a demigod, and settled down a bit. “Now what?”

“Oh, there’s a couple dozen wizard dudes over there just waiting to blast us to pieces, but that spiky barricade thing’s spoiling their view. The second they work out we’ve killed all their buddies, they’re going to turn us into atomic dust.”

“What be…” I saw the exact moment she did that thing Asher always did. When I said something he didn’t understand, he just set it aside as the price of doing business with me. “Right. What be the plan?”

It was enough to make me chortle. “You thought I had a plan?”

“You’ve been doing all this with no plan!” she bellowed a bit too loud. The sound echoed out of our little fenced-off cul-de-sac and swept over the open square.

“Oh, crap.”

True to my word, I didn’t throw her anywhere without her consent. I lunged forward to grab her, and she leapt right into my arms. Our respective breastplates clanged together. “Hold your breath.”

I threw us down. I could feel her bracing herself for impact in my arms, locking all the plates of her armor together like a little armadillo. She needn’t have bothered. We weren’t going to hit anything.

The crystal beneath us parted, and we slipped beneath the road. All around my sphere of influence I could hear the rest of the crystal structure of the city creaking, cracking, and screaming as the displaced material pushed up against it with tectonic force. We slipped down into that tunnel through the crystal, magic crackling and discharging all around us. The power that flowed from the Keystone, empowering all the alvaren, the spells that were in action to keep this whole thing in the air, and the fresh ozone smelling discharge of the bombardment that came hammering down into the space where we’d been standing. Too slow, alvaren. Too slow.

As we started to run out of ground to tunnel through beneath us, I added a curve to the tunnel, finally coming into contact with what I’d hoped was smoothed-off crystal. It had a texture like sandpaper. I was not as good at this as I wanted to be. My armor scraped along it, making a noise like nails on a chalkboard—assuming the chalkboard was a tube that you could be inside, and the nails were the metal kind you used to do joinery. It was loud, it made my teeth hurt, and I hated it.

Still, the friction did its job. We slowed just enough for my senses to stretch out ahead of us and tell me where I wanted to be going. I didn’t know if Busty could hear me over the racket, but I bellowed all the same. “Hit the ground fighting!”

As we slid underneath the jagged wall I’d tossed up, I changed our angle and started pushing, raising spars of crystal up behind me to throw us higher. To speed us up.

We went down this tunnel head-first, so we came rocketing out in the midst of the mages upright. I threw Busty one way, and my swords caught up to me at the zenith of my journey into the sky. One I took in hand, the other I shattered.

Up there in the air, waiting for gravity to catch me, dangling with no way to dodge, I was a sitting duck. I’d hoped surprise would get us through, but I guess I wasn’t that lucky. A bolt of lightning snapped up from the midst of the alvaren, so fast you could have blinked and missed it. I didn’t blink. I caught the white-hot lightning on the flat of my sword, and the inlaid crystal drank it down.

The sword buzzed in my hand, vibrating so hard I could feel it up the length of my arm. Finally, gravity brought me down, just as all the other mages spun to face me. The shards all about me followed me down. All swords were one sword, but when I hammered my blade to the ground, they weren’t the only thing unleashed on all the alvaren. Some might have been hit with the shrapnel I was raining on them, but enough got off their spells before I could cut them down.

More of those blinding white bolts of energy were flying at me. The same blazing hot magic that was bound in my sword.

With a half-step forwards, I hefted my sword back off the ground and thrust. The magic that had been trapped in my crystal blade burst free, leaping like an unleashed wild beast into the nearest mage and shredding her to pieces.

If that was all I’d managed, I would have been annihilated by the sixteen other blasts of pure white death flying my way, but the magic in my sword and the magic in the air were the same. All magic was one magic, sure. But this magic was exactly the same. Cultivated from the same source, formed in the same patterns, cast with a near-identical will to do harm. It resonated.

The spells reversed their courses, slamming back into the vicious killers who’d cast them. A few heads exploded. A few white robes blackened and burned or were abruptly splashed blue with alvaren blood.

In the sudden silence, I heard a crunching sound, and spinning on my heel, I readied my great-sword for an oncoming abomination. As it turned out, the crunch was Busty’s head meeting an alvaren chin from below. Sure, I’d wiped out the majority of them with that spell mirror trick, but you couldn’t say she wasn’t pulling her weight. The lot on the ground at her feet weren’t struck by their rebounding spells because they never had a chance to cast—apparently, it is hard to concentrate when you’ve got no knees anymore.

For a moment I considered wading in to provide her with support, in the form of loping heads off the alvaren lying screaming on the ground, but I didn’t want to deprive her of her fun. Besides, there was too much I still had to do, and it was increasingly apparent that the ground forces were back up here in floaty magic crystal town.

All that death we’d left in our wake, I seized and flung it on into the waiting maw of the flesh-forge. There was no cutting edge, no reason, just death. It did the job well enough. The green faded from the crystal below. The Eternal was free of their torturous non-existence. “Busty, let’s move. The inyoka can’t be far ahead.”

“You be joking?” She roared as she brought her axe down to split another alvaren’s face. “Busty?”

“I didn’t catch your…”

She was running at me, axe raised. She was probably joking about using it. Probably. I took off running. At least, we were moving in the right direction.

Turns out, I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t expecting us to be moving so fast. Halfway around the outer curve of the city on our way to the next forge-square, we ran into the back of the inyoka train. There were a couple of paladins herding them along through the narrow streets, but they didn’t have much of a chance. I Surged my Vitality as the closest one spun both blades out of their scabbards and into my chest, and they rebounded instead of piercing through. From there it was as simple as picking that alvaren up by the ankle and beating the other one to death with it.

Busty caught up to me while I was still pounding them together, blue blood everywhere she looked. The nearest inyoka looked like they were stuck somewhere in the mental process between relief at their captors turning into puddles and horror at their captors turning into puddles. I was surprised to find that I was panting. “Take them back. Take them to the spike. Get them out.”

Busty caught me before I could head off. Grabbing me by the belt. “And what be you doing?”

“There are going to be alvaren at the other end of this lot.” I held out my hand and a sword returned to it. “I’m going to put them down.”

She was frowning up at me in a way that looked too much like Mercy to be a coincidence. “And then?”

“Then...” There were more forges. If I didn’t destroy them now, I’d probably never get another chance at them. If I left, that meant enemies at my back, forever. Forge-born monsters hunting me for all eternity—just like Seren had warned me about. It would mean leaving the Eternals inside the forges to suffer. “Then I’ll see.”

“You’ll be coming to the pillar. This be the last of the inyoka by my bet. You come to the pillar, and you come down. Help us get these folks clear.” She gestured to the inyoka, who were still eyeing us warily.

I called out to them. “We’re getting you out of here. Just follow the pretty dvergar lady and everything will be alright.”

“Flattery won’t get you squat.” Busty grimaced. “Come down to the ground; help us save these scalies.”

“I’ll get there when I can.”

Her eyes narrowed at my evasive answer, even as the press of inyoka started to carry her back the way we’d come. “When you can better be mighty quick. We won’t be stopping.”

“Good!” I shouted over the top of the lizard heads as the prisoners slowly escaped, flowing around me like I was an island in the stream. “You shouldn’t. I’ll catch up to you.”

The farther they carried her off, the more I had to strain to hear. “Lad, you’d better be in front of me by the time I see the sea, or I’m going to—”

I cut her off with a shout. “Hey! Don’t scare the inyoka.”

Then she was around a corner, and I was alone—except for the hundreds of inyoka, obviously.

Wading through the escaping refugees felt like a bit of a dick move, to be honest, so I clambered up the side of the villa beside me, melting out little handholds for myself with Artifice and thanking my lucky stars that I’d finally upgraded it again. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop definitely gave me a better turn of speed than I would have managed wading through the tide of bodies.

It genuinely looked like a tide now that was coming in instead of heading out. Technically, I was meant to be a Lunar Eternal, so I guess it made sense for me to do some moon-related stuff like turning tides.

My leaps and strides gobbled up the distance faster than you could say “hot dog eating contest”, and the next forge square appeared like a drop-off, up ahead of me. Momentum was at my back, and if I could manage a repeat of the last square, I’d be a very happy Maulkin. Blade at the ready, I leapt.

In midair, I stopped like I’d hit a brick wall.

Chapter 8

For a moment, I genuinely thought I had hit a wall. I thought they’d managed to turn one of the crystal walls completely transparent and I’d slammed into it like an excited puppy and a plate glass window. If I’d slid down it like a cartoon coyote landing in a ravine, I’d have believed it, but I didn’t. I was stuck.

I tried to move, and I couldn’t. Even with all my impossible strength, I just couldn’t move through the solidified air. Even breathing was a struggle. Exhaling was easy enough, but inhaling set my ribs pressing out into the immovable nothingness that was all around me. I knew what this meant. I’d known it was coming all along, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel rage boiling in my chest like bile.

“Briar by Moonlight,” I managed to wheeze out. “Show yourself.”

Like it was a joke, and I was a puppet on her strings, I tilted forward a few degrees.

The inyoka were flooding out of the square as fast as their feet would carry them, doing their best to follow the flow, but some of them were panicking and running off in any direction at all. Their alvaren keepers had scattered even faster. There were paladins standing their ground, dotted uselessly around the square, but the mages were long gone. They were no longer required. Not when she was there.

The empress of the alvaren levitated above her servants, just as I hung in the air, her night-black gown fluttering in some unseen breeze and the silvered charms dangling from her chiming softly. She looked as beautiful as ever. Even if I had slapped her with a few hundred years of aging the last time we crossed paths. Anyone else in Amaranth that looked like that would have had me drooling and offering to cut off my own thumbs to sniff her hair. Not Briar.

Briar killed Seren. It didn’t matter what the outsides looked like. Inside she was as evil as the Voidgod.

The moment I saw her, my Potency surged, and I strained against the invisible force holding me in place. Magic had limits, and even if Briar was the most powerful magic user on the entire planet, I was an Eternal. I had strength that went beyond the supernatural and into the realms of the gods. When I pushed back against her spell, she staggered.

It wasn’t much, it certainly wasn’t enough to break free, but seeing her falter, a strand of grey hair slipping out from beneath her circlet as she lost her poise, that made it worth the wasted effort. If she broke a sweat, I’d call it a victory on par with killing dragons.

She only swayed for one blessed moment before she raised a hand, tightened her fist, and the magic crushing in on me tightened. “Once more you return to my home, slaughter my people, and expect mercy?”

“Do what you want. You can’t kill me in any way that matters.” My mouth was running without any input from me. That cold, dead rage in my heart that flared every time I thought of Seren was the one speaking now. “But for the rest of time, I’m coming for you, bitch. All your armies can’t stop me. All your tricks and magic. Nothing is going to stop me. I’m going to hunt you down, and I’m going to make you pay.”

She raised one withered hand to her forehead in faux dismay. “Such enmity! What injury have I ever done thee?”

“You… you don’t even know?” I shook with rage, every muscle straining against my confinement. She had to die. I needed to get my hands around her throat and squeeze until she was gone. “You killed her. You killed Seren!”

The bitch looked down at her nails as though she was bored. “To whom do you refer?”

Okay, so I’ll admit I might have lost my temper for a moment at that point. I might have, maybe, made a sort of incoherent scream and flung myself about like I was having a tantrum, even though I couldn’t move. It is possible.

By the time I was done, Briar by Moonlight was still gazing up at me with the same impassive stare. “She was your paladin. She was loyal to you. Even to her last breath, she believed you’d save her. And you killed her. You snapped her like a—”

She yawned. “What care have you? Wouldst thou have another of my servants to wait on you? Is that the font of this grave detestation? You shall have a dozen.”

Those servants were moving around in the square beneath us now that they were certain their queen was safe. Herding the inyoka they’d found back in. Not the main train of them I’d sent off to freedom, but the rest.

Froth fell from my lips, and manly tears of anger ran down my face, but there was no butch excuse for the snot bubble though, that was just not being able to wipe my face. “I loved her!”

“Oh, what fools these mortals be.” Briar laughed. With a flick of her wrist, she rose, drifting through the air like some elegant jellyfish until she was level with me so that her softer words could reach me without the whole square hearing.  “Love? Love is a fable. What is love but the swift beating of hearts and the rutting of beasts? You think that thou loved her, but come a century from now, her countenance shall be gone from your memories. If it is carnal pleasure thou seek, there are many of beauty and talent in my court that will see to your satisfaction.”

I’d had enough of her condescending bullshit. Maybe she was going to murder me, but I’d rather skip to that than listen to the romantic advice of sociopaths. “Why are we talking when I could be ripping your skin off with my teeth?”

“The true Voidgod is returned.” All the theatricality she’d been flinging about when there were minions to listen in faded away as she floated ever closer. Hoarseness crept into her voice—age that she’d been trying to hide from her servants. “I have felt him. Wouldst thou cast the gates open wide to him? All must stand if we hope for salvation.”

I leaned as close as I could, taking in all the wrinkles I’d put on her face last time around. Snarling. “I don’t trust a word out of your mouth.”

“Believe or not, it matters naught to me. Know only that history shall remember I offered you peace, and you choose violence. As befits a beast.” She held up her hand and snapped her fingers.

Down in the square beneath us, her paladins set to work. There would be no flesh-forge for the stragglers of the inyoka. They were here as an example. In fluid motions I’d seen my sweet Seren go through a million times, the paladins drew both of their swords, sweeping them up to crisscross at neck height, flicking them out to clear the blood, and then sliding them home in the scabbards at their hips. Over and over, they went along the line.

The inyoka didn’t just stand there and take it. They were rebels at heart, they tried to run, tried to fight back. It didn’t matter. They were outmatched in every way. The alvaren were the best-trained warriors on Amaranth, schooled in every motion until it came as easily as breathing. The crystal beneath their feet was slick with blood. Funny that the alvaren looked basically human, and yet the crimson flood about the square came from a people who were basically reptiles. Funny how the world worked.

I closed my eyes against the massacre beneath me. Knowing those poor inyoka were being killed to hurt me. Not because they’d done anything wrong. Not because they were on the wrong side. Just because they were there, and Briar wanted me to hurt. I couldn’t believe how calm my voice was when I looked at her again. The rage hadn’t burned out, it had coalesced into something solid. Frozen. Immutable. “You want to see a beast?!”

“You are a beast, caught in a snare and struggling though there is no hope of escape. You say that you cannot be killed, and I say to thee that death would be sweet succor compared to what you shall become. A beast of burden must be put to work, and that is all that thou art. The flesh-forges lay still and silent, stilled by your hand. It seems only right that it is thy vital spark that ignites them once more. Do not fear, beast. You will not die. Perhaps thou will not even know suffering when your flesh is racked from your bones. Perhaps thou shall be the first Eternal to make it through deconstruction without weeping and begging for aid from the very gods they claim to speak for.”

The last inyoka was a little one, barely half the height of the alvaren that pursued her. She’d managed to dodge the initial cut, and that seemed to have offended the paladin tasked with her execution. Her tail came off with his first cut; she was hamstrung with the next. Finally, both of his blades came down on her back, spilling all her insides out. And all I could do was watch.

“It won’t work,” I told Briar. “I don’t make life. I take it.”

I let the death gathered beneath us coalesce, then with Slaughter, I reached for it.

What I’d seen down in the square was a small massacre, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Nobody else in Amaranth worked with death. Nobody even knew that it was a force you could manipulate. Only me and Araphel.

So all the murder that had been committed in this city, in this very square, had never been used. The darkness had sunk down into the crystal, saturating the whole place with more and more of that crackling angry black glow than I’d seen anywhere else.

No wonder Briar feared me and Araphel in equal measure. If you’d built your world on a giant pile of TNT, you’d probably be scared of the only guys with a box of matches, too.

The alvaren down in the square died instantly, not a mark on them, just instant death.

It wasn’t even deliberate, there was so much Slaughter flowing through the space that I couldn’t stop it. They were like a handful of leaves tossed on a raging fire; I barely noticed their deaths being added to all the rest. They threw up some fresh sparks but nothing notable.

All of that death rose, and though I still couldn’t move, I had my Artifice to work it. To shape it. A great blade made of nothing but death soared up at Briar by my command.

She flung herself aside so that it barely brushed by her. Graceful even now. Yet feeling death come so close must have shaken her because her grip on me broke. Even as she slipped around the Slaughter, she put her back to me.

I’d lost all momentum in my leap, and now I was falling, but I had time enough to hack my great-sword into her as we fell. It lodged in some plate of bone or other, and once more her concentration broke. It was a shame really. Without the levitation spell pushing back against me, she just folded around the blow and tumbled down out of the sky along with me instead of splitting in two like she was meant to.

We both hit the ground hard. I’d been so intent on destroying her that I didn’t even think about my landing, and she’d been swatted from the sky like a fly. Her elegant gown was parted down the cut, and rich cyan blood came gushing across the pale expanse of her back. I’d never seen anything more beautiful.

Time for more.

Using my great-sword to push myself to my feet, knees screaming all the way, I stumbled over to her. She hadn’t gotten far, and even in the midst of all the corpses scattered about, the beautiful queen of the alvaren stood out. Her pallid skin gleamed like moonlight, her blood shining like a tropical ocean. I needed to see more.

Hefting my sword overhead, I drew all the death in. Infusing Slaughter into the blade, making it so that a single blow from it would prove lethal to anything, immortal or not. With Briar gone, Seren could rest in peace until I found some way to bring her back. With her gone, the rest of the alvaren might see reason and join the fight against the Voidgod. I could turn the whole war around in a single blow.

I’d be lying if I said that was why I wanted her dead though. I wanted her dead because I hated her. I hated her with a passion I didn’t even know I had in me.

Like a mountain falling, my sword came down.

She caught it.

There was a nimbus of magic around her hand, the same nearly invisible power that was holding her body together, flowing from the whole city to the one spot to give her strength. It enveloped her elegantly manicured fingers and made it so that the deadly touch of my blade never reached her. Gave her strength enough to match me.

Before my eyes, the wound that should have killed her closed, a blinding flash of pure magic sealing her flesh back together again seamlessly. There wasn’t a mark on her when it was done.

I bore down with all my strength, intent on punching through her magical protection and splitting her in two, but she would not give. Just as I’d been frozen in place before, now she was an immovable object. I tried to yank the sword back and cut at her again, but her grip was impossibly strong.  “Did thou think thee the first to try for my life?”

She rose to her feet, elegant gown dangling now like so much discarded cloth, all the precise beauty of it spoiled by the cut. Without a levitation spell to help her defy gravity, I could see the weight of age on her much more clearly now. Things that had been perky the first time around were sagging now. Probably for the best, otherwise the split dress would have been making this fight more than PG-13 rated.

When she moved my sword to the side, I moved with it. It wasn’t like I was pushing against a solid object or struggling against a stronger opponent, it was like trying to stop the turning of the world.

“Did you think that thou were special? With your little man’s hate and your little man’s strength? You are nothing compared to me. Nothing. You have no idea the trials I have suffered. The choices that I made to preserve this world. You come here, and you expect me to lie down for you?”

I lost my grip on the sword, and she tossed it away. All that death was still sheathed around it. All the power I’d gathered to kill her once and for all, gone in an instant. I staggered back a step under the weight of her will. Even without a spell to shape it, all that power was overwhelming.

I couldn’t give her the chance to cast. She was in my reach now. Even if it wasn’t practical, I would have leapt for her. I would have tried for her throat, to crush the life out of her. I would have done it for Seren. For the world. For me.

All those millennia of experience made her too fast for me. Every motion of the spell practiced a million times over. She cast as my feet left the ground.

There was no one moment when I realized, I was dead. It was more of a gradual process.

First, there was the impact. I thought she was going to freeze me in place so she could go on gloating about how beautiful and perfect and smart she was for another hour or two, but I was wrong.

Her spell hit me in the middle of the chest and launched me away.

Where it struck it burned. I couldn’t get a breath. I couldn’t feel my heart beating. A rush of Primal energy flooded through me as I used Restoration, but the damage hadn’t been the point. I soared up and over the square where the flesh-forge stood. Over the crystalline spires and buttresses of the outer city. Right out into the wide-open blue sky.

Gravity took over.

Life returned to my body with the healing, but confusion beat it out. I could have saved myself. I could have done something clever with Artifice to catch me instead of hitting the ground moving at terminal velocity. I should have. But I didn’t.

By the time I realized I wasn’t still standing in front of Briar, it was already too late. I flipped end over end as I fell. Getting a great view of the empty plain in the shadow of the alvaren city. At least the inyoka were as free as I could make them. Maybe I’d made enough of a dent in the alvaren forces that they wouldn’t pursue their fleeing meat supply.

Turns out I didn’t need to worry about that. I hit the ground with a sound like somebody stepping on a wet paper bag full of inexplicably crisp potato chips. The chips were my bones. The wet was my everything else. Pain didn’t even begin to describe it.

The last thing that I saw was the flying city lurching to one side, tearing itself free of the spike I’d pinned it with, and then a dazzling bright burst of light. Brighter than the sun. So bright that for a moment it pushed back the encroaching darkness creeping in from the periphery of my vision.

Then the city was gone, and so was I.

Chapter 9

Death, the dude, came to claim me as always. Waving my corpse away into nothingness while I stood there, peering up through the veil of death to see if I could make out what was happening in the land of the living. The city had teleported away, I saw that much. My spike of stone was still intact, even if the tip had snapped off. If there were inyoka climbing down it, I couldn’t see them. If my dvergar and the farmer and Mhirka were down by the base, they were too far to see through this damned mist.

“Well, that could have gone better.”

Death’s hollow sockets swept over me impassively. Not the chattiest guy.

“I mean, I guess I saved the inyoka. Maybe.”

Still nothing.

“How have you been? Keeping busy?”

He gave me an almost imperceptible nod. I guess he was still sulking with me after I forced him to be a taxi service for me and the other Eternals. Fair enough. Nobody liked being the designated driver.

Usually, this process was gentle, relaxing almost, a little holiday from life. Today, not so much. With a wave of his hand, my soul ripped free of where I’d been hovering over the damp patch and was flung across the world.

Again, usually, this was pretty chill. I got to take in the sights, see who was where and what was happening. This time it was all gone in a blink, and I was thumping back into a fresh-grown body at my shrine by the foot of Talon’s Keep before I knew what was happening.

I fell down, dragged in my first breath, and then scrambled up. Adrenaline flooding my newborn flesh. I had to get back, now. My little squad was still out there in the middle of the Hinterlands with the Voidgod’s armies bearing down on them. With the threat of monsters and alvaren and all the rest. Without me, they had to fend for themselves. I’d led them into the lion’s den and abandoned them. I had to move.

Asher could get me there, one quick teleport to Witchglass Overlook, then I just needed to haul ass at maximum speed instead of pacing myself for the mortals among us. I’d be back with them in a day. That was still way too long. Besides, Asher wasn’t here. He was back at the Bastion doing important grown-up things like assembling defenses and raising armies. Only my dumb ass had gone wandering the world looking to get murdered.

There had to be something I could use. Some way I could get his attention. Something. I cast my gaze around the abandoned town and felt a chill despite the tropical heat. It was a ghost town, everything of value had been stripped and carted off in case we needed it in the war to come. Only the stone remained. The stone… and me.

I didn’t need magic to get me back to the Overlook. We didn’t even know what the waystones were when we first came here. We built a boat, and while we might have stripped most of it for materials when we arrived, I had a whole forest of wood to work with here. I couldn’t wait on the wind, so I’d make it a rowboat and haul ass all the way across the continent if that was what I had to do. It would eat up time, but it was the only choice I had. I couldn’t sit here and wait. Not when my people were out there, running and fighting and dying.

Three steps towards the beach, I remembered the other thing we’d left behind. I had no protection against Briar’s magic. There was nobody in this world who was powerful enough to counter her. Hell, I didn’t even know what half of the stuff that she did with magic was, but I did know there was one person who understood it better than all of us. Talon.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that Talon was unfortunately deceased at this point. He’d gone a little bit crazy between the corruption of the shards and the eternity of imprisonment and whatnot, so killing him had seemed like the best option, but he’d left behind a colossal library of his research material and his own writings—complex technical stuff that would probably explain away all the things Briar could do like it was a minor academic quibble, which would be great if I could understand a word of it. Hell, even Asher spent half his time scratching his brow-scales when he was reading this stuff, and he was the smartest guy I knew.

So, yeah, I probably wasn’t going to be able to read my way out of this problem, but lucky for me, a massive stack of books wasn’t the only thing my man Talon had left behind for those of us who remained.

As I climbed the tower to fetch my inheritance, I realized that I understood it now. Talon had tapped into the Void through his connection to his shard. He’d started exploring that whole new world, the antithesis of all his Eternal powers. A dark mirror to everything in this world. It made sense that a guy so fixated on magic would try to work out the opposite force, anti-magic. The Inimicus.

Just as the Keystone in the alvaren city was condensed, pure magic, the utterly black block of the Inimicus was anti-magic made solid. Just being near it made it so mages couldn’t cast. Talon had used it to make a trap for rival casters, a room devoid of magic, that only Eternal powers would let him pass through safely.

I scooped it up off the now-disabled mechanism of that trap.

It absorbed all light and felt cold to the touch. At least for me. Asher had desperately wanted to experiment with it, but just being close to it had drained the life out of him. Touching it probably would have killed him. Even Mercy, who had nothing to do with magic, was uncomfortable in its presence. That made sense now, too. They weren’t Eternals of the Void, so they couldn’t bear its touch.

In another place, and another time, the Inimicus would have been an object of wonder and worship. Now it was a tool. I tossed it into a sack and slung it over my shoulder.

There was decent metal here, built into the mechanisms of the trap, so I stripped it out and made myself a sword. Armor would have been harder to manage with such limited supplies as had been left behind, but I had an idea for that, too. Down in the forest, on my way to the beach, I found the carcass of the dragon that had attacked this place. The dvergar had done a great job stripping it of any valuable materials, but there were still scraps and bones. Enough for one suit of armor at least.

A bitching suit of armor made out of dragon bits. Awesome.

The beach reared up sooner than anticipated. I guess when you go directly through the trees instead of weaving around them, it cuts down on travel time. I had a train of logs following along behind me, snapped off at their stumps, by the time I caught sight of the carcass of my boat. It had been built to transport the entirety of dvergar civilization along with us. I didn’t need it to be half that size for little old me. Still, having the shape of it there made my work easier, gave me a blueprint to follow in miniature.

Last time around, it had taken nearly a day to make us a boat, with all the dvergar weighing in with hints and tips despite none of them ever having seen the sea before. I’d like to pretend that things went faster without them bitching at me, but the truth was that practice, and the gradual upgrading of my Artifice, was what made most of the difference. I didn’t have to patch holes or slather things in tar to seal them when every plank came out pristine and slotted perfectly into the next. The fact I was making a boat for one instead of one hundred helped, too. I used a fraction of my torn-up trees, left the rest in a heap on the beach, and pushed off from my little island in the sun with a Surge of Potency for good measure.

There was a row of waystones between here and the Overlook, a clear path for me to follow, jutting up out of the sea, each one just barely peeking over the horizon as the last disappeared. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about navigation, just hauling on the oars with all my strength.

Nightmares played out before my eyes as I pulled and pulled. I had nothing else to distract me. Nothing else to think about. Just the poor people I’d left behind to die. How long would it have taken Briar to realize she’d killed me? Would she come back to reclaim her prizes? Would she have Birger and Busty and all the rest tossed into the grinder along with the inyoka? When I got there, was I going to have to fight some grotesque amalgam beast made from all my friends? Was I going to have to kill them in fact as well as in theory?

My stupid brain was usually on my side, or at least it was usually too busy drooling and staring off into space to get in my way, but for the full length of the trip across the ocean, it just would not shut the hell up. You screwed up. You got the people who you were meant to protect killed. You proved Mercy completely right about what a mess you are and that you absolutely cannot be trusted. I wished I had the excuse of the Voidgod whispering evil thoughts to me through the shards, but they were gone. His soul was no longer lingering around me, murmuring sweet nothings in my ear. This was all me.

The sun set, and I kept on rowing. I was sure there were some giant eel monsters down in the sea beneath us, just dying to gobble me up, and with the mood I was in, I would have really welcomed a good fight, but I didn’t have the time. If I stopped, if I slowed, and in the moments that I lost, my people died, I’d never be able to forgive myself. Never is a long time when you’re going to live forever.

Stroke by stroke, I ate up the distance, plagued by my fears.

The inyoka I barely knew, but I’d sworn to save them the moment I set eyes on them and realized what the alvaren were up to.

Farmer and the Ambergrit boy, I don’t think I’d had a conversation with either, but that didn’t matter, they were still my people, mine to protect if nothing else. They’d put their trust in me, come along on this crazy scouting mission even when they knew it would put them in the path of the ultimate evil in the world.

Busty and Birger, they had faith in me, that real, almost religious level of faith. They thought I was going to be their salvation or something. I was nobody’s salvation. I was a dumbass with a big sword.

Mhirka, she’d be the only one who wasn’t surprised that she’d been abandoned in her hour of need. She’d think about me and know I was just the screw-up runt she’d always suspected. I wasn’t Chagnar faun, I was a pretender, wearing the skin of her people without taking on board any of what it meant to be one of them.

Forward and back, the only sound was the thump of my heart and the stuttering of the waves I split. Forward and back until every muscle in my body felt like it was burning with the constant motion. Whether Mhirka liked it or not, this body was faun, and that meant that it would never tire, never give out. I could go on rowing until the sun burnt out of the sky and the gods died of old age.

Luckily, I hit the shore before that could happen. The sun was up, so I guess I’d rowed right through the night without noticing. It could have been any day of the week by this point, and I’d have had no idea. Did I go faster than when we were sailing? Slower? Had it been one night at sea or a night and a day?

It didn’t matter. I could see the Overlook up on the cliff along the coast. It took me a half-second to work out which way the Serpent’s Gate was, and then I was off running. The sooner I crossed the Hinterlands, the sooner I saved my people. The Inimicus bounced in its sack and whacked me in the back every step, but I didn’t have the time or the mental energy to try reshaping it into something less clumsy at the moment. I needed to move.

Just as the strokes of my oars had swallowed up the ocean, so my long strides propelled me forward. When Potency Surge became available, I’d use it and leap a league or two, but before long, I was back to running all over again.

Everything in the damn Hinterlands looked the same. Bloody red forests and scrub grass turning brown and distant mountains. A smattering of old rocks, which once might have been civilization but were now sunken into the mud so low they were basically unrecognizable.

Maybe I sort of remembered the shape of that mountain. Maybe that hillock was where Mhirka and Busty had gone off to pee in peace while the rest of us whistled loudly. Maybe that was the forest where I’d fought the alvaren. The mountain I’d climbed to save Gunhild. Maybe, but not for sure.

Still, I had the direction of the gates fixed in my mind, and I kept on running. If there were enemies in the sky, there was no way they’d miss me. If there were monsters on the ground, it was a fair bet they’d be coming for my dumb ass too. Stealth was not in my wheelhouse, and if it was, I probably scared it off by stomping through too loudly.

No ghouls or goblins made themselves known to me. It was almost suspicious until I remembered that less than a day ago there was a flying city full of genocidal alvaren hanging out in the sky. Any monsters out here were probably either dead or hiding.

Still, it was fair to say I was on edge when I bounded over a ridge and was suddenly confronted with an army. My new sword leapt into my hand as I fell. The Inimicus in a sack swung in the other, the rarest half-a-brick-in-a-sock blackjack that this world had ever seen.

Mhirka hit me mid-leap.

Her shoulder took me in the gut, and even if the armor did a much better job of protecting me than I would have anticipated, it still knocked the wind out of my lungs. Her spear could have hammered through if she hadn’t cast it aside. We both hit the ground hard, but she still clung to me with all her strength. A moment later, the rest of the attack came. Birger and the solo Ambergrit boy, Farmer, and Busty last of all, landing with her namesake directly in my face when she flung herself on the heap. Her steel chest-piece smashed my nose flat. I bucked and struggled to get out from under them, my impossible strength matching their mass easily. I gathered them up in my arms in a crushing bear hug and realized that they were weeping and cheering and not actually trying to kill me.

Mhirka clawed her way through the crowd to press a kiss to my cheek. Busty, not to be outdone, hit me with a juicy smooch on the lips. Birger was lunging in to take her place the moment she pulled back to blush. His solid stone skull cap whacked into my already mashed nose and saved me plucking beard hair out of my teeth. The other two did not seem so inclined to make out with me, so I was calling that a win. “What the hell, guys?”

“We saw you die!” Busty bellowed before diving back in for another hug.

“When you fell, we were on the ground with the first of the inyoka. We saw you break. We saw you…” Mhirka took hold of my horns and brought our foreheads together like she actually liked me or something. This was all very confusing.

“Whatever you pulled, it did be working though.” Birger grinned over her shoulder. “Soon as you tried flying, the alvaren gave it up. Tucked tail and ran!”

“Okay, okay, everybody up!” With no small amount of bitching, moaning, and clinging, my little posse tumbled off me and onto the ground. “I’m alive because I literally can’t die. Calm it down.”

With the snuggle-pile cleared off, I finally got a good look at the army I’d seen while I was jumping. The inyoka. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. A few albino ones that looked a lot worse for wear than the rest, a handful of the mixed scale ones who’d been painted white to keep the mad old wyrm of the mountain content, and an absolute ton of the snake-patterned ones that Asher had looked down his nose at for not being pure-breed, mono-color wyrm slaves. A thousand or more—the surviving population of everywhere beyond the Serpent’s Gate—all staring at me like they’d just seen me raise the dead. I mean… technically I had just… You know what I mean. They were looking at me like I was their savior. Which… again… okay a little bit, but… My point is they were staring over at me with some very unreasonable expectations. I couldn’t fart in front of them in case I caused a religious crisis.

Okay. This… this could work. “Hey, inyoka! Uh… how many of you feel like joining an army that is going to fight the Voidgod?”

There was a desolate silence spreading out across the Hinterlands, so before they could turn tail and run, I added, “From the safety of the biggest fortification of the whole of Amaranth?”

That turned the stunned silence to murmurs. Not the rousing cheer I was hoping for, but needs must. “Well, you’ve got some time to decide. We’ll take everybody back there. If you can’t fight, I’ll bet there are farms that could use some help, or… I’m sure we can find someplace safe for you. Or… as safe as it will get.”

Once again, not my best work with the speech-making, but at least it got the mumbling to sound vaguely positive again. I figured that was about as good as it was going to get, and I turned back to the cuddle huddle. “All right, we’ve got to get these people back to the Overlook before something eats them.”

“What did you think we’ve been doing?” Birger barked back.

Fair play.

The journey back across the Hinterlands definitely took longer than my wild rush to find my poor abandoned babies, who as it turned out, were doing absolutely fine without me. In the meantime, everyone filled me in with their parts of the story, their frantic escape from the city, the perilous climb down, and the inyoka linking hand to hand to form a great chain spiraling from the city in the sky down to the dirt below. All of them had been dreading the sudden return of the flying city and the resumption of their abductions, but now I was back, they all seemed entirely too laid back about the whole thing.

The truth was, I didn’t know for sure why the alvaren retreated when they did. Maybe Briar was too scared to face me, maybe she wasn’t. Even though I’d managed to luck out and break free, her magic was just way too powerful. No matter what cunning solution I came up with, she could just brute force it away with magic. If she was running scared, it was just because it had been so long since anyone and anything had been capable of hurting her, not because she was actually in any real danger. Turns out she could just arcane-bitch-slap me off her city whenever she felt like it.

Of course, the rapid retreat might have had nothing to do with me. It was just as likely that the screaming hordes of the Voidgod’s legions were at our heels, and that was why the alvaren had decided to make themselves scarce. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure exactly how to say that to the inyoka refugees in a way that wouldn’t result in widespread pants-peeing and panic. For now, they seemed mostly chill, marching their way to where they were told to go. I didn’t need them freaking out and scattering.

So I kept my mouth as shut as I could keep it, and I trudged along with everyone else, managing a little bit of chat with the inyoka who came close and very clearly did not want to have a conversation with me. That was fair enough; I wouldn’t want to talk to me either. If I met the guy who unleashed my world’s version of the devil and destroyed my home with his demon-swarms, I’d be pretty pissed, too. I’m not saying I’d throw hands, but if he wandered up to me and asked what being a farmer was like, I might be pretty curt.

Good thing I had my original monster-murder-mates along to keep me entertained. Except Busty, having established I was alive and well, no longer wanted anything to do with me. Possibly because I keep on calling her Busty. Farmer was still high as hell after the magic overload of the alvaren city, so talking to him required a bit more translation than I would have liked. There were a lot of metaphors, and most of them were flowery. I kind of checked out after the first few minutes if I was being honest.

The Ambergrit survivor had sunken into a sullen silence now that there was nobody else to murder vengefully, and that was pretty much Birger’s default state, too. Neither one of them was up to talking, which left me with Mhirka, who was… not a conversationalist. She was fairly ashamed of herself for having expressed some positive feelings about me not being dead, so she was trying to make up for it by being extra frosty now. Fine. Whatever. I already knew she liked me, there was no putting that genie back in the bottle. Now wasn’t the time to be pestering some random girl I barely knew. I had more pressing business.

The sky in the northeast was dark. Over towards the Voidcrown Spire and Araphel, it was as though the sunlight that covered the rest of Amaranth tapered off to nothing. A big black blot on the map. It wasn’t even like there were clouds in the sky, just that the blue of the sky slowly faded to black the closer you got. No matter how fast we moved away from it, it seemed that the darkness kept pace. I didn’t know if it was some perspective trick like when the moon chases your car when you’re driving at night or if the light was fading from the world at a pace equivalent to a forced march for lizard people, but I didn’t love either option.

So I spurred everyone on to move faster, hoping that we could get back to Witchglass Overlook before Asher showed up to collect us. I’d lost track of time between the dying and the rowing, but everybody else seemed convinced that we could make everything line up, so long as we kept on hauling ass.

Now, I’ll readily admit, I had a minor panic when night began to fall. I thought that the Voidgod was catching up to us, the alvaren had come back and their giant floating fortress was blotting out the sun, or the swarms of evil wyrms I’d been painstakingly warned about were swooping down to gobble us up as some sort of signing bonus for hooking up with their old overlord again. Turns out it was just the natural progression of time. My bad.

Still, what had seemed like a fun cross-country sprint until now was starting to feel decidedly more like a whole load of scared people running for their lives. I guess for everyone else, it had already been that all day, but what little conversation had been going on died out as everyone put their heads down and found fresh reserves of energy. While they sped on, I deliberately slowed. I wouldn’t say my Deathsense was tingling, though there was definitely a distinctly death-flavored tingle down my spine, just that I had been here in Amaranth long enough now that I was getting a sense for how these things played out. Whoever was at the back of the pack would be the ones picked off by whatever monstrous critter came chasing after us. I’d rather that was me than some poor inyoka with eggs strapped to their back.

The murder never came, even though the tickle at the base of my brain just kept on getting more and more irritating. Something was definitely out there, planning our agonizing death, but I couldn’t see it, hear it, or smell it. I wondered if this was what paranoia felt like. Or if maybe this was just the malignant influence of Araphel, his will to see me dead stretching out across the world to brush over me. It wasn’t like he hadn’t gotten into my head before.

It didn’t matter. I was still going to put myself between these inyoka and whatever evil was out there. They didn’t ask for any of this. They’d been hiding out, minding their own business, trying their best not to be ‘genocided’ by their wyrm overlords, and I’d been the one to bring all this chaos down on them. I didn’t know if they understood that, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to tell them.

Over the tramping of feet, it was hard to hear the sloshing sea, but the unmistakable snap, crackle, and boom of the waystones echoed out to me over the Hinterlands, and I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. We were there. We were safe.

Asher was already in action by the time that I arrived, lost in his spellcasting and incapable of holding up his end of the conversation. He was sending inyoka through the waystone in groups as large as he dared. If he was capable of sweating, I figured he’d be a soggy lizard by the time I rocked up beside him. As it was, his eyes flitted back and forth frantically, trying to check and recheck the swirls of magic trailing from his fingertips as he cast, adjusting and calculating and doing all the magical stuff that was a hundred percent beyond my limited capability to understand. From the get-go, I’d held onto a sneaking suspicion that the dude was some sort of genius, and having seen more of his spell-craft through our journey together, I was now thoroughly convinced of it. Even the alvaren who’d spent centuries studying magic couldn’t hold a candle to the stuff Asher pulled. Sure, they might have had higher levels of magic available to them in the mechanical sense, but Asher could use the power he had in ways that were almost completely unexpected. Maybe it came with his previous lifetime’s experience with the arcane; maybe he was just a clever cookie.

Lightning leapt from the stone to envelop the closest dozen inyoka and yank them away. My dvergar, Farmer, and Mhirka were all queued up for a quick ride home, but all it took was some gesticulating to drag them out. “We need to post a guard until the inyoka are out. Something is out there.”

Mhirka scoffed. “I have seen no tracks and scented no beast. What do you know, false-Chagnar?”

She probably meant that as a dismissal. It sounded like she was rolling her eyes at me, but a moment later, I realized that the dvergar were still staring at me waiting for an answer. It pays to be literal-minded when you live in a mine. “I’ve got a sense for when something bad is about to happen, and it is going wild about now. So, please, help me stand watch.”

The dvergar and Farmer had been on their feet and moving for almost four days straight, and they were not built like me and Mhirka. They did get tired, they did get worn down, and they did look like they were on the edge of death or madness by this point, but not one of them flinched away from the duty I’d laid before them—although Birger did face-plant a few times as he strolled off across the dunes. Dude was a genius.

They held out through the long hours of the night as Asher squirreled all the inyoka away to the safety of the Bastion, keeping diligent watch, even though I was starting to suspect that maybe my brain was just misfiring after getting blasted so much in one day.

To the north, the stars blinked out of the sky. One by one at first, then in a great grinding tsunami of darkness, consuming all in its path at that same awful slow pace as we had been hiking all day. Guess it wasn’t an optical illusion after all.

The sky, where it fell black, felt hungry to me. Like it wasn’t just an emptiness devoid of light, but like it was trying to draw light in. A black hole, slowly consuming everything. It wanted to eat the universe. It wanted to turn out every light. It wanted to take every thriving, vibrant thing and make it empty and dark like it was. To make everything warm cold. To make everything living dead.

I would not let it. Not now. Not ever.

Man, I got really philosophical when confronted with the end of all existence. Weird. I figured I’d just start screaming and never stop.

While I was thinking deep thoughts, everyone else was getting on with things. The inyoka dwindled in number until they were all packed on the beach. My little gang retreated in towards them, a back-step at a time, as each crowd of inyoka vanished. They looked dead on their feet, with the exception of Mhirka, who looked like she’d either step on you or kill you for looking at her. Similar but different.

By a few hours in, we were the only ones left. Asher looked like he was on the verge of dropping by that point too, so wordlessly we all huddled up on the beach and waited for his spell to take hold and send us back to safety. Dread was still nibbling away at my brain stem, but I’d almost gotten used to it by now. Like impending death was just a normal part of my day. Honestly, it kind of was, by this point.

Asher’s movements were lethargic, his arms shaking with exhaustion after casting non-stop for so long. He was built for brief bursts of excellence, not the grind. I got that. Physically, I could go all night long, baby. But if you asked me to focus on the same task for more than three minutes, you were going to be disappointed, and my brain was going to start twitching.

I called out to him. “Nearly done, buddy, just got to send us through airmail and then you can rest.”

Even accounting for his exhaustion, he seemed to be struggling with this last spell more than I would have guessed. Like something or someone was interfering with his magic. That same dread that had been prickling me all day started screaming in my ear. This was it.

I drew my sword and spun away from Asher, ready to meet whatever was coming head-on. To break its concentration and set the others free. With an almost deafening boom, the lightning leapt out from Asher, enveloped the people to either side of me, and then snapped them out of sight. I spun around to see the waystone crackling bright before the power arced off towards the horizon, zooming off around the world and leaving me behind. Asher was gone. Everyone was gone but me.

If you thought I was paranoid before, let me tell you, I was downright crazy when I was left alone in the sudden darkness waving my sword back and forth, trying to find the invisible wizard who’d stopped me from teleporting back to my magical castle… Okay, maybe I was actually crazy now that I say all that out loud.

I took a moment. I took a breath. I let the gentle lapping of the waves calm me down, and I pushed my screaming Deathsense aside to focus on thinking actual thoughts for a minute. The spell hadn’t worked on me. Was that because of somebody interfering with Asher’s magic? No. Was it because I had the damn Inimicus on my back still. Yes. Obviously. I am an idiot.

When they got to the other end of the waystones, they’d work out I wasn’t with them, and Asher would come back. Then we’d work out some way of getting me and my anti-magic block home in one piece. No need to worry. I turned back to the waystone, waiting for the tell-tale glow. And waited. And waited.

They must have noticed I wasn’t there by now. Was the presence of the Inimicus interfering with the magic even from this far back? I moved up the hill a bit until the moonlight was hidden by the looming mass of the Overlook above, and I was standing in even deeper chill shadows.

It must have been a full minute by now. You can’t tell me nobody had realized I was missing. I was, like, twice the size of everyone else, and I had glowing eyes. I stood out in the crowd. What the hell?

Okay, so Asher would need some time to cast his spell to come back. That would probably take a minute or two. Plus, he was totally wrecked by the time he got sent back, so maybe he needed some time to get his energy back before he cast again. And they probably figured it was no big deal leaving me out here alone. Because I’m a tough guy, who definitely wasn’t jumping at every rustle in the grass along the dune. I could handle myself, fight off any monster. I was awesome. Plus, if I died, I guess that actually made it easier to get me back. I would respawn halfway closer to the Bastion. They might even be checking Talon’s Keep for me first, thinking I’d died in transit when the spell didn’t port me right. That was probably it.

I just needed to kick back and relax for a few minutes, then I could get back to work.

That was when the shadow of the Overlook lengthened across the beach. Looming until all light was gone. I spun to face it, even as my Deathsense screeched up a riot in my head. Something as vast, vicious, and big as the whole magic school had just pounced from the ruins above, plunging down to the sand below. To me. Crap.

Chapter 10

Absolutely not.

I did not go through all of that running to be squished like a bug by some big amorphous shadow now that I was a hop from the finish line. Screw that.

There was no dodging. In the span of time it had taken me to look up, it had already dropped half the distance. There was no stone underfoot for my Artifice to grab, and the stuff up in the Overlook was too far behind it to make a difference. There was sand. I could throw sand at it? My Artifice was refined enough now that I could pick up a grain of sand with it. Not sure some sand in the eye of the towering monstrosity zooming down to crush me was going to make much of a difference.

Screw it. No time for tricks.

I Surged my Potency and Vitality, and I swung for the fences with all my godly might.

Whatever the critter coming for me was, it was solid. My swing battered off a solid plate of armor without penetrating, and that same rock-solid surface, backed by the weight of whatever was inside the shell, hit me dead-on.

I’d been hurt a fair few times since I landed on Amaranth. Within a few minutes somebody had beaned me with a spade, and it had all been downhill from there. Every time something hit me, it hurt. Even when I had my Vitality surged and my skin could turn blades aside, I could still feel the pain. A full-body smoosh was a new experience. A crunchy experience.

On solid ground, every bone in my body would have been powder and all the rest would have been jelly, but the sand beneath me was soft. When that awful solid weight landed square on my face, I sank in. The sword strike might have done nothing, but my reinforced strength let me hold off some part of the crushing weight instead of just being splattered. My sword snapped like a toothpick between the forces being exerted, but I didn’t give it a second glance. Not now. My fists met the vast slab of blackness, and I strained against it with all that I had. I was not going to die by being sat on. I just wasn’t. The sand beneath my feet compacted into something solid as the weight bore down on me, giving me traction to push back but also crushing the weight down on me more and more.

It was only at the last moment before my arms gave out that I realized I was being an idiot again. Artifice could move sand. That didn’t mean I had to build something with it.

Beneath me, the sand gave way, every grain in a pillar below my feet vanishing in an instant. Slamming off into the walls of the vertical shaft I was digging. I dropped down, the beast above slammed into the surface of the beach, and I was safe for one glorious moment down there in my little shelter. I coughed out some stray sand, managed a brief bark of laughter at the word “shaft”, then we were off again.

The body of the big black beast rose off the beach and slammed down, again and again and again. Maybe it couldn’t feel through all that armor. Maybe it didn’t know it wasn’t smushing me, and it was just waiting for the little notification that it had gained experience to pop up. I didn’t know. But it went on banging against that beach like it was a nerdy teenager with a body pillow.

Going up didn’t seem like a viable option what with all the murder humping, but I had every other direction to go and Surged strength to get me going there faster than you could realize I made a masturbation joke.

I mole-drilled my way along the beach with all haste, just letting the tunnel collapse behind me when the impacts above broke the tenuous hold I had on it. A quick incline brought me back up onto the surface a few feet clear of the closest thump-humping part, and I got my first good look at the critter that had come to kill me.

There was no question it was what everybody on Amaranth had been calling Voidspawn since the moment that I arrived. It looked just like its daddy, in the sense that the chitinous armor that covered it was so black that it absorbed all light, making it look like a hole in reality. In shape, it was a little bit different. To my glowing eyeballs, it looked pretty much like a silhouette, but when I tapped into my Void Pillars and my eyes switched over to dark vision instead of torch mode, it was a different story. Suddenly, there were crisp lines along its edges, and the deep shadows it had bathed in were gone.

Let me try to describe this thing to you without making you throw up in pure, gibbering terror. It was shaped kind of like a scorpion, assuming a scorpion had big mantis claws instead of nippy pincers. There were a pair of tails hooked up over its back, but rather than ending in stingers, they ended in more of those same single-edged mantis claws. There were weirdly familiar elements to this thing like I could half remember bits of its design from looking at all the abominations we’d crossed so far. Not like they were the same thing, but like they were inspired by it.

Oh cool. All its legs also ended in the same razor-sharp mantis blades. This thing was basically just a walking pile of knives. Nice of it to skip the stabbing and go for a body-slam to start things off. On reflection, it probably was a smart move since I now had no weapon, no means of making another one, and was completely alone.

Underneath all that slick, black chitin and heavy-metal pointy bits, the soul of the thing sang to me. This was what my Deathsense had been screaming about all day. Not because I was in danger, but because this thing was death incarnate. If I wasn’t looking at it, I’d have said it was Araphel himself. It had the same resonance. The exact same resonance. Not like it was a similar thing that I could bundle together with my Resonant Dominion to make it move in harmony, but like it was a part of the same thing.

“Oh, you’re one ugly mother—”

Apparently, the time for admiring giant murder monsters was up. It swiveled around on the spot, twin tail-blades lashing out at me as it went. I didn’t even know it had spotted me. Hard to tell which way a monster is looking when it has no eyes.

I took a dive under the sweeping tails, driving in closer, hoping I might be able to retrieve the bits of my sword and get something vaguely weapon-shaped. Turns out that was not a great idea. The Voidspawn didn’t need all its half-dozen legs to stay upright. It had plenty spares to kick out at me.

My armor took some of the hit, like it was meant to, but there were limits to what even dragon scales could hold up against. The pointed end of the monster’s claw went right on through the scales and into my shoulder, hammering down through meat and bone into my lung. Ow.

[1305/1670 Health]

If that had been the end of it, I could have gotten back up, healed up, and kicked ass all over again, but this thing was still in mid-scuttle. It brought the leg I was still on the end of down to the ground and went on walking, bouncing my ass off the ground with each step and driving that razor-sharp blade deeper and deeper with every step until it made its way right through guts, hip, and out the other side. I was a Maulkin kebab, flopping with every step this thing took, with no way to get myself free.

Scuttle, scuttle, scuttle, with me bouncing and bleeding worse with every step. I think maybe it was trying to find me again. Like it didn’t know it nailed me first hit. Maybe it was actually blind. In that case, I just got stabbed by a big blind bug, and that was kind of embarrassing.

[1312/1670 Health]

Finally, it stopped to get its bearings—or maybe to work out how to scrape me off its foot—and I managed to get a sense of what was going on. Whatever I’d hoped to do, I couldn’t. Destruction radiated off the spawn, making every grain of sand beneath its feet null to my sense of Artifice. My sword could have been right beneath me, and I wouldn’t be able to feel it.

Reaching up with both hands, I took a hold of the blade that pierced me and tried to push myself off. It wasn’t budging. Maybe I didn’t have the leverage from down here; maybe it was wedged into my bones too well. I yanked and strained and cut my hands open when they slipped over a sharp edge, the whole leg already slick with my blood. The tail-blade was coming around now, sweeping in a beautiful whipping arc to slice me off.

Slaughter was gathered about that coming blade. Araphel’s overwhelming will to destroy. It would kill me. It would kill me in a way that mattered. It would tear my soul out and cast it into the void and I’d be gone forever. Fear caught up to me then. The fear of death I’d been pushing off since I ran into some wolf in some forest on a whole other world. This would actually be the end of me.

Desperation took over. I stopped trying to pull myself off the leg and pushed myself into it. All those huge muscles I’d grown, all the divine strength that my Glory had brought me, I turned it all on myself. The edge of the blade pressed against my bones, and they creaked and strained against all that power. The indestructible chitin blade of the spawn would not move, but my body did. My ribs snapped one by one. Not cut clean but slowly pulled apart. Each one dragged a new little noise out of me. Screams mostly. Some grunts. Ooh… ah… ugh… With one last push, my collarbone gave out, too. That definitely earned a scream. Then the blade was in meat again, and it ripped through without pause. Wet paper. The remains of my armor. Some sobbing. Shut up. You’d do it, too.

[801/1670 Health]

I flopped to the sand like a deboned fish. The sand was so soaked in my blood, there was an obnoxious splat when I hit. I heaved myself forward before another pointed leg could come down and pierce me somewhere else. The tail blades whipped by overhead, a brief shimmer of absent stars. The wave of Slaughter boiling off them swept over me, setting every hair on my body standing on end.

Healing. I needed to pull myself together. Literally. I was dangling in two parts from the waist up. Restoration flowed through me, and I flung myself over onto one side to squeeze both sides of my torso against one another, hoping they’d stitch together instead of just healing flat. Really didn’t need to be y-shaped for the rest of the night. When I felt the bones cinch together, I knew it was going to be all right. Or, at least, air-tight.

That was when the scuttling legs swept over me and sliced my feet clean off.

“Oh, come on!”

There was a cloud of sand thrown up by the passage of those bladed legs, and by the time it had cleared enough to see through, my feet were long gone, carried along by the momentum of the cut and the spawn’s spin. I just made those new boots, damn it.

One final trickle of Restoration sealed off my leg stumps before I could bleed to death, but the feet were not going to be growing back any time soon. This was not going the way I would have liked. What the hell was I thinking, planning to fight the Voidgod when one of his little baby monsters could kick my ass six ways to Sunday?

The Inimicus was still in its sack on my back—the only thing that I could still feel with my Artifice in the bubble of nothingness the Voidspawn exuded. Maybe that was a by-product of being forged with void-lore? I tore it free and made it into as much of a sword as I could manage. It was not enough metal for my usual great-sword, but it was pointy, and I was calling that a win. Brute force wasn’t getting me through that armor, so I was going to have to try some finesse. Me. Finesse. I was definitely going to die. No question. Oh, crap.

Flinging myself up onto my barely closed stumps, I let out another good long scream and promptly fell over. I was top-heavy at the best of times, and with no feet, this just wasn’t happening. The fall saved me from the whipping tail-blades by pure luck. I hadn’t even realized they were coming. Nothing the size of the spawn had any right to be moving around that fast. It wasn’t fair.

It rushed over at me again, all sharp shapes and thumping blades, and if I’d been anybody else, that probably would have been the end of the story. Steam-rolled by an evil scuttle-bug.

But I wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot.

A wisp of white light leapt out from my forehead and struck the thing in what I guess was its head. In that region anyway. A spirit strike, carrying the simplest message I could ram into the damn thing. Stop. Stop moving. Stop stomping. Stop.

Either it worked or the thing was just so surprised at somebody throwing an idea into its head that wasn’t “murder” that it almost tripped over its own feet. For a moment it stopped dead in its tracks, and I took that moment.

With a heave, I launched myself back upright, stumbling forward a step before that mean old bitch gravity caught on to my tricks and tried to drag me face-down all over again. I used it. Gravity was already hauling me down, so I swung my puny sword overhead with all the might I could muster, aiming for the joint in its leg between blade and chitinous armor. I pulsed Drain just before it hit, on the basis that if it didn’t make it through, I was going to be too dead to worry about having blown the ability too soon.

“See how you like it!”

It bit in. Not much. There was no dramatic severing of limbs, but the sword cut into the gap between its armor plates, and it wedged there. The thing could be hurt. It had flinched back from the blow, trapping the sword between the two plates. That little injury done to so huge a thing translated into Drain giving me a lot more health back than I’d expected. My feet burst back out of my ankles fully formed, and the internal bleeding I’d been very deliberately ignoring so long as I was still upright and moving abruptly dried up.

So now I was standing barefoot on the beach with the worst blind date even I had ever come across, but at least I was standing. The sword in my hand was still wedged right in there, but for the first time, I felt like I wasn’t just getting kicked around.

I twisted the sword, fully expecting it to snap, so I was pleasantly surprised when instead it pried the plates of the spawn’s armor apart, letting loose a gush of something like crude oil. I could make it bleed. “Oh yeah, that’s the good stuff.”

For the first time since it came soaring down to ruin my day, the Voidspawn tried to take a step back. I wouldn’t let it. Well, I didn’t want to let it. Without my Potency surged, I was dragged along with the leg I was still trying to pry apart. I’d lost track of the time since I’d surged it, and going digging around in my mental encyclopedia of Divinities was a good way to get myself murdered right now, so all I could do was keep trying and failing to surge it, over and over, as I moved.

With the plates split apart, nothing inside the Voidspawn seemed to be solid enough to hold my sword in place. Liquid darkness came out in a spritz as I yanked it free.

Decision time was upon me. I sure as hell wasn’t rolling under its stomach again, not now that it was exuding that anti-Artifice forcefield and stopping me digging my way down and out, but I didn’t like my odds of surviving if I got out from underfoot and into range of those whipping tails and arm-blades.

The decision was made for me after half a breath of hesitation. The body slammed down into the sand as its legs flexed, then it launched itself up into the air. That was bad news. I took off running. I had no intention of getting Super Mario stomped again. Not today. No, thank you.

Up in the air, it couldn’t change direction, but it could change configuration. The jump was to reorient itself to point its murderous face at me. Its front claws were raised, and it had accounted for the distance I could cover. They were both sweeping down at me with the full weight of the beast behind them.

I was getting really tired of being outmaneuvered by a bug the size of a semi.

Even with the distance I’d run, I was still trapped in the field of destruction. There was nothing out there for Artifice to grab, and my Ascension powers were still tapped out. I pinged off another Spirit Strike, but it was without any hope of success. Miss. Miss. Miss.

The others had taken all these awesome divine powers that let them summon walls of fire and crap lightning bolts, and I’d taken blacksmithing and being stronger. I was an idiot. Nothing I had in my stupid arsenal worked against Voidspawn. It was like it had been made to negate everything I could do.

The blades came down on me, and I raised the Inimicus to block, even though I didn’t have a hope in hell.

It didn’t help much. Even with all my strength propping it up, the sword was only going to hold up to so much before it became useless. I’d angled it just like Seren taught me, to guide the falling blades away from my body as they scraped along the length of it, but the power behind the blow was just too much for any amount of skill to offset. One claw skittered off course, throwing up sparks, but the other didn’t make it far enough along to miss me before the sword was yanked from my hands, the blade snapped off at the hilt, and the mantis claws scraped down my body.

Dragon scales pinged off my armor to scatter the beach, and the flesh beneath was ripped and ragged where what was left of the armor was forced into my skin. I wasn’t cut into pieces this time around, but I almost wish I had been. It would have hurt less if there were fewer bits still attached to me.

By accident, I grabbed onto the back side of the mantis claw. I was still trying to find my balance after the last hammering strike, but when it whipped back out of my reach, I was still clinging to it for dear life.

Somewhere during my flight I lost my grip, flipping off and tumbling in the air up above the spawn. Now would have been a good time to heroically land on its back and beat it up, but the creature had other plans. Both tail-blades whipped forward, aimed not to slash me open again but to impale me.

Finally, my Potency Surge came back to life, and you’d better believe I used it. Vitality Surge, too. I was going to need them both.

The lethal spears of jet-black chitin lanced at my chest, and I caught them. One point in each hand. They dug in, and I bled, but I had a solid grip. Momentum drove them forward until I was over the bug’s head, but when it tried to whip those tails back and away from me for another hit, it couldn’t. The muscles in my arms screamed at the insane forces being exerted against them, but I didn’t let go.

“Oh, no, you don’t. You’re mine now, bug!”

With all its unholy might, it pulled, and I pulled, and I won.

It tried to pull my arms apart, but I crossed them over, bringing one razor-edged claw down on the back of the other. It bucked and flailed the full length of its tails, trying to stop me, but I would not stop. I scraped the claw in my right hand down the length of the other blade’s back until my arms were stretched as far as they could go, then I twisted.

The blades strained against each other, one immovable object straining against the other, all my Surging Potency unleashed on that one point of contact between the two of them, then all of a sudden, the blades slipped.

As it tried to flap its tails about in some way that would set them free, it left me enough slack to bring the razor’s edge into the join between chitin and claw. One blade tore free of the beast, and I tumbled down onto its back, letting the other claw go.

Usually, I feel like I’ve got a lot of weight to throw around, but given the size of this bug, I had to hope my Surged Potency would last just a little longer and make my plunging attack have some sort of effect. Down I fell, twisting the tail-blade in my hands as I went. Ready to finally do some damage.

The razor claw smashed into the armored plates on the spawn’s back and skittered off without leaving a mark. I was getting really tired of that. I hit the solid back of the thing in a groaning heap. Extremely tired of that, too.

My Potency Surge was almost up, so I had no time to waste feeling sorry for myself. I stumbled to my feet, slipped, and skidded over the polished smooth surface of the bug’s back, finding myself headed towards the head end. That was a solid plan. Stab it in the head. Hard to go wrong with that plan.

The other tail whipped back down at me. I heard the blade whistling through the night sky rather than seeing it. I felt my Deathsense scream at me. I slipped as I tried to turn, and the piercing blade that should have run me right through hit me a glancing blow on the shoulder instead.

I was already falling, but now I was falling and sliding all the way across the damned thing, slip-sliding towards the edge, the legs, the ground, and the inevitable stampy-stabby death that awaited me down there. That was not where I wanted to be. Flipping over onto my belly, I tried to grab onto something, to slow my slide, but its shell was as smooth as a mirror. I was like a spider trying to climb out of a bath. In desperation, I tried to stab the claw into the back again, but it was just as useless as before. Maybe even more useless since I didn’t have gravity on my side, just panic.

The stupid monster saved me. Its tail whipped down to stab me in the back, and in mid-slide, it was no real trouble to roll aside and grab on. My inevitable death just turned into another tail tug-of-war.

The second I laid hands on that blade, the Voidspawn tried to yank it back out of reach. Without any bonus Potency, I couldn’t match it, but I could use it. The force of the blade whipping away, even for the mere moment I was holding onto it, was enough to haul me back towards the center of the shell and onto my feet. When it came flashing in again, I parried it, the severed tail-blade turning the other aside, scraping edge to edge along the length of it until it slipped past the cutting part and right into the join to the chitin again. Turns out when you have something that sharp at your disposal, you don’t need that much Potency behind it. The second tail blade popped right off, and more of that viscous black sludge sprayed out all over me. Ew.

Without really thinking about what I meant to do with it, I grabbed up the second blade in my other hand. I was used to waving cleavers this size around, so there was no huge difference to the dismembered monster bits, apart from the lack of a decent handle to hold onto.

It was only then, when I’d sliced the second lump of limb off the thing, that I realized it didn’t scream. It didn’t make a sound at all. Throughout all of this, there had been no roar, no threat, nothing. Just the desolate silence and the wet sounds of my bits coming off.

Thinking about this stuff wasn’t helping me win. I had to get back to the head, chop it off with my fancy new choppers, and then get on with my day. It didn’t matter that this monster radiated evil. It didn’t matter that it had the Voidgod’s ability to ignore most of an Eternal’s powers. It would die like everything else, and then I’d go home to the Bastion for dinner.

Running over the surface of the spawn was obviously not going to work, so I tried for a jump. My feet slipped out from under me as I launched. I nearly skewered myself with the severed claws as I stumbled, and my glorious leap turned out to be more of a belly-flop, but at least I was moving in the right direction—and fast, too. Too fast. I shot right past the thing’s face, battered off the back side of one of the front mantis claws, and landed in front of it, on my ass.

I was really having the worst day.

The beast reared up and brought its claws down at me faster than I could get to my feet. I was on one knee when instinct brought the sickle-blades I’d stolen up in a clumsy block. Each one took a strike, and their gentle curve carried the blow out and away from me before I lost my grip. That was better. That was definitely better.

It scuttled back a step, re-assessing as I found my feet. Then when it swung for me again, it was with calculation. A quick stab with one claw followed by a swipe with the other. I caught the first and had to roll beneath the second, but I did it. It crab-walked around me, blades dipping in to deflect from mine. Still testing me. Still trying things out.

Again and again. The attacks came on swifter now, with more power behind them as though it was gaining confidence. That was definitely not good news for me. Every time I turned a strike, I felt it ringing all the way up my arm. Every time our blades met, sparks flew, blinding me to the next swipe. I needed to turn the fight around. I needed to go on the offensive, but every time I thought I saw an opportunity, it was an opening that the Voidspawn had deliberately left to tease me forward into a trap. And still, the blows came on heavier and harder. Everything Seren had taught me in our long month of training flowed through my body without a thought, and it was lucky that it did because if I’d had to consider a single movement I made, I would have been too slow to catch the follow-up attack.

Faster and faster the blows rained down on me, every one twisting at the last moment, trying to tear my borrowed weapons from my grip, trying to wear me down with raw, unbridled strength when even its cleverest feints did it no good.

There was no question now that this thing had been made for me. It moved to meet my counters before I even knew I was making them. It had neutralized any advantage I could have used to break the stalemate. Araphel had crafted this assassin for me—from his own flesh, judging by the way that it resonated. The whole time I had been here on Amaranth, from the moment that I touched the first shard, he had been observing me and learning the best way to take me apart.

The monster’s claws were rimed with Slaughter now, the dull red-black of it crackling along their killing edges. All it would take was a cut and I’d be gone. It had all my gifts of the Void and more.

What could I do that Araphel hadn’t seen? I tried to think as the beast spun and struck, kicking out with its bladed legs to keep me at bay while it lined up a great sweeping cleave with both claws that I had no hope of deflecting or dodging. I leapt as it came, my own stolen weapons swinging in, not to deflect the coming edge but to hook over it, to grant me more height. I rolled over the top of the swipe and was halfway to the ground when they came sweeping back the other way. I spun my blades around to block, but I had no traction. The impact sent me soaring out into the surf.

The water gave me the softest landing I’d had all day, but it still wasn’t nice being abruptly dunked. I had a mouth full of saltwater before I knew what was happening. I’m not a big fan of drinking the sea. That is where fish go tinkle.

Somehow, I’d maintained my grip on the claws, but now they were a dead weight, dragging me down deeper. I tried to work out how to swim with them, gave up, and held my breath. My bare feet touched down on the sand a moment later.

There was some distance between us now. The thing hadn’t come into the water yet, so maybe I could run away across the sea-bed, abandon the weapons and armor, and swim for my life. Get away. Survive. Let Asher come through the waystone looking for me and get cut down by that monster without even knowing what was happening. Yeah, that wasn’t happening.

It wasn’t like I’d have run anyway. I wasn’t built for it. I mean yeah, this super meaty body of mine might have been able to go the distance, but the brain inside was still me, and I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give anybody the satisfaction of knowing I was scared of them—especially not a cosmic-scale bully like Araphel.

Artifice couldn’t sense a thing in my sphere of influence except for wet sand, and I didn’t think that sandcastle was going to hold up well against a rampaging Voidspawn. I considered adding some sort of useful handles to the weapons in my hands, dragging me down, but they were like two empty spaces to my Artifice and Lifesense. The only thing that could detect them was my Deathsense. That and the distant tickle of Spirit Touch through my sliced-up gloves. That was new.

As I strode back to the beach through the churning water for my near-inevitable ass-kicking, I tightened my grip, pressed my skin into the blades, and let my Spirit Touch worm inside.

That might have been the latest in my long and illustrious history of terrible mistakes. Turns out my initial impressions were correct. This monster was made by the Voidgod. From the Voidgod. It was a fragmented piece of Voidgod, just like I’d had in the shards. And I’d just opened up the door and welcomed it right into my brain.

The bombardment was immediate. Overwhelming images of murder and death and vicious violence. All the awful things Araphel wanted to do to me and the world. I saw the barren wasteland he’d make of Amaranth laid out before me, his obsessions all flooding my own paltry thoughts away. Me being torn apart by his spawn. Every living thing but him killed. Me on fire, burning and healing and burning for all time. All his enemies and allies burned away to dust. Me being spit on my own blade. A reforged Lucis blazing with Slaughter goring me and leaving me to bleed to death. The gods themselves laid low at his feet, broken and tortured to death for what they’d done to him. Me rent apart with his awful claws. All of creation gone. All of everything gone. Until there was nothing but Araphel in the forever dark, god of nothing at all. His ultimate vengeance of unmaking complete.

He felt me through this tenuous link, he felt our minds touch, and he slammed the door closed on me so hard it knocked me to my knees in the ocean. I had to squirt out another mouthful of water as I tried to get my brain to stop vibrating in my skull. The blades had fallen from my hands when Araphel forced me out of his soul or his brain or whatever I’d connected to, and in the dim turmoil of the sea-bed, I couldn’t see them. Too much sand in the water, and my divine dark vision just couldn’t cut it.

Turns out I didn’t need to see them to catch them, though. Now that I’d touched the soul-stuff still bound up inside them, they were glowing with spectral light to my other senses. My Artifice could touch them. I yanked them back into my grip and braced myself against the invasive presence of Araphel, which didn’t seem to come, and then I took off running for the beach. I didn’t know how long I’d spent getting my brain blended by the Voidgod, but my lungs were burning now.

Sloshing up out of the surf, any faint hope I’d clung to that the Voidspawn might have wandered off faded. It was standing there, waiting for me, mocking me. Okay, maybe mocking me was a bit strong for something without a face and facial expressions. It definitely looked smug, though. There was something in the angle of its giant chitinous blades that screamed smugness.

I am not a crazy person.

As I came gasping and splashing out onto its level, the spawn scuttled around just a little to face me head-on, arm-blades already turning out into new positions to start raining down another flurry of blows that I’d be hard-pressed to even keep up with. A month of training, even with somebody as talented as an alvaren paladin, just wasn’t enough to prepare me for fights like this. Mindless beasts I could handle, and wyrms were so arrogant they didn’t even try to think about how to fight you, but this thing... It was born ready to ruin my day.

It leapt again. Not the wild crushing pounces of before but just a skip forward to bring me in reach. Without even looking, I knew where its blades would come from. It had been designed to beat me, so all I had to do was defend against the attacks that would be hardest to defend against each time. In its own weird way, it was totally predictable.

I swept my claws around to parry. One high, one to what should have been my exposed side, and it was only as they blurred by that I realized they looked wrong. The dull black scale was gone. What zipped by my face glowed. That same crackling, destructive red energy that had limned the Slaughter-infused attacks it was using to try and put a permanent end to me. It was only then that I realized the weight and balance of the claws had shifted too, and the smoothed side I’d been clinging to now reshaped into a handle, the blades looking more like immense, wicked cutlasses than bug bits.

When they met the chitinous edges of the Voidspawn’s claws, no sparks flew. The claws just sliced clean through them without leaving a mark. Oh, crap.

Both of the blades bit into me. One ripped through my face, tearing off my nose and splitting my cheeks in a gory mess. The other hit my thigh and took a great gouge out of that.

Blood soaked the sand once more, and I genuinely wondered how much was actually in this big meaty body of mine before my leg gave out and I collapsed into it. Yet despite that, the Voidspawn was the one leaping back as if it had been burned.

From my vantage point in the dirt, I had a great view as it flailed about, still silent but obviously suffering. Well, that was nice. Glad I wasn’t the only one. It flicked its bladed limbs back and forth like there was sticky tape stuck to them. To start with I couldn’t work out what the hell was wrong with it, but gradually, the blades seemed to lose their smooth matte finish and started to cloud over with grey. Not the whole thing, just the parts beyond where my crackly swords had sliced through. They paled, and then abruptly, they fell off to crumble into dust.

Honestly, I didn’t see that coming.

Some struggling got me up to sitting, and from there I could take a proper look at my new swords. It beat looking at myself anyway. I looked like the leftovers in an abattoir. The blades had no physical form. If I didn’t have Spirit Touch, they would have fallen right through my hands. They were made up of the same soul-stuff I’d used to arm us back in the Land of the Dead, except infused with the divine power of the Voidgod. Little echoes of him. Little fragments of his soul, made into blades. Oh yeah, this could work.

We’d been fighting for so long now that Restoration was back off cooldown, so I popped it, regrowing my thigh and my face and clambering to my feet.

“Hey, bug!” The Voidspawn’s attention turned back to me, and I could feel the weight of it like a hammer blow. “Come get some!”

To the monster’s credit, it got over its fright pretty damn fast. When I called it back over, it came, charging at full speed with zero hesitation. The whippy tails were gone, but it still had a decent set of cleavers on the end of its arms, and the loss of reach didn’t matter that much when it was ten times the size of me.

A crisscross slash with them should have been the end of me, but I didn’t try to parry them this time around, now knowing that my weapons had gone incorporeal on me. I leapt, kicking off the flat of one blade, then the next, soaring through the air to bring both shimmering cutlasses down, point first, into the place where its face should have been. They sank in like the armor wasn’t there at all, right to the hilt, and I’m pretty sure those would have gone in too if I wasn’t still holding onto them. My weight dragged me down over the smooth basalt black expanse until I dropped free.

If I thought it went buck wild when I’d lopped off its arms, I had no idea just how berserk this thing could be. I had to turn tail and run as all the precise movements were abandoned in favor of stomping around in circles flailing. The sand was churned up, the pointed claws digging down into the wet stuff below and throwing up heaps. At least one of us was getting to make sandcastles.

Round and round it went like a merry-go-round off its axis, lashing and stamping and waggling what was left of its limbs about, but there was nothing it could do. The pale was spreading out from where my blows had struck. Its soul was broken, and the flesh couldn’t live on without it.

The disintegration began before the murky white had even spread as far as the critter’s legs. The whole thing collapsed in on itself. The center couldn’t hold the weight, and before my eyes, a fresh new layer of sand trickled down onto the beach.

Legendary Foe Defeated!

1000 Glory Gained

Chapter 11

My bitching awesome swords died an ignominious death at the same time as the last of the Voidspawn blew away. One last crackle and then they sputtered out of existence. I suppose it made sense. A bit of the soul couldn’t exist when the rest was destroyed. However the Voidgod was partitioning off little bits of his soul to animate these spawn, I didn’t really want to think about it. Just the idea of ripping bits of my own soul out to make critters like this was making me sick.

I was still standing there, empty-handed and swaying, when Asher and Mercy came soaring out of the waystone in an explosion of lightning. They took one look at me and immediately leapt to my defense. One to either side of me, guarding me against whatever had left me looking like I’d been run over by a steam roller, then reversed over by a steam roller, then run over by a steam roller again.

Asher hissed, “What do we face?”

“Voidspawn. I mean… nothing. I killed it. Watch your feet.”

It was too late. He squelched my severed nose underfoot. Ah well, I’d already grown most of a new one anyway.

Mercy seemed to be a little quicker on the uptake, looking at the heaps of white dust and red sand all about us. Along with those precious few splatters of black goop. “Is all this blood yours?”

“I have not been having a good night.”  I might have slurred that a little bit. I still had some bits of my face in my mouth, and the world seemed to be swaying a little.

Mercy gave me a prod, setting me rocking even farther to one side until I stumbled. There was some genuine awe in her voice when she said, “Dude, there is like ten people’s worth of blood on the sand, how are you still standing?”

“I’m just that amazing.” I held out my arms, presenting myself and also helpfully restoring some semblance of balance. Maybe one of my legs had grown back shorter?

Mercy wasn’t even looking. She’d crouched down to examine the inky stains that the spawn had left behind, the few times it bled. “What was…”

I flopped down onto the sand, squelching in my own blood and letting out a sigh of relief that I could finally relax a little. Falling back the rest of the way, I looked up at the stars. They were still there. Despite everything, some light still shone down on me. Mercy gave me a prod with her toe, and I realized she’d been asking a question. “They look like him… if he was like a giant knife scorpion. I think he makes them out of himself? I’m not a hundred percent on that, but it kind of makes sense. He’s a god of destruction, right? So he can’t create anything. So he can’t make living things, just… spread himself thinner. I guess?”

Was I gibbering a little? I might have been gibbering a little. It had been a long day… or few days; I couldn’t remember when I’d last slept. My body might not have needed it, but my brain was clearly starting to misfire by this point. It must have been bad for even Asher to notice. “Maulkin, my friend, do you need healing?”

“If you come near me with Cauterize, I’m going to throw you in the sea. Just so we’re clear.” It would have sounded more threatening if I could have sat up. “I will wait for Restoration to come back, thank you very much.”

Mercy snapped her fingers in my face. Making me blink. “Maulkin, focus. How did he stop the waystones from working?”

With painstaking care, I lifted my sandy hands and covered my face with a groan. “Oh. Right… that was… uh. My bad, actually.”

“What?”

I kept my face covered for this. I didn’t need the judgmental stares. “I might have maybe brought the Inimicus with me to fight Briar with.”

“The object that disrupts all magic. Perhaps that may have had some influence on my disrupted magic.” Asher did have a sense of humor underneath the frosty demeanor, it was just dry as kindling.

“I did say it was my bad.” I peeked between my fingers. They looked exactly as annoyed with me as predicted. I closed my fingers again.

Mercy let out a groan that would have made a tectonic plate proud but then stopped halfway through with a realization. “But if it wasn’t the Voidspawn…”

“It had been stalking me. Waiting for a chance to get me alone. I kept… feeling it but never seeing it.”

“So you’d know if there were more out there?”

When I took a half-second to answer, she gave me the kick that Asher clearly wanted to. I snapped back upright, letting my senses stretch out. Nada. Zip. “I’m pretty sure if there were more out there, I’d be dead. I mean, proper dead, not temporarily inconvenienced dead like usual. This one was designed to kill me, in particular. Built with all the ways to beat my skills and powers. Oh, and they’ve got the Voidgod’s powers, too. Or… some of them at least.”

Mercy almost looked concerned. She quickly fixed that with a sneer. “And you beat this thing?”

“Did I mention how awesome I am?”

She rolled her eyes and offered me a hand up. “Only every time you breathe.”

I grinned all the way to my feet, and I barely even wobbled once I was standing. Go me. “How are things back at the Bastion? Did you like the new army I found you?”

Asher almost hissed. “Yes, the terrified refugees you’ve collected certainly won’t have any negative impact on our scarce siege supplies.”

“We’ve got farms behind the wall.” I shrugged it off. “We can grow more.”

His slit pupils narrowed like he’d sighted prey. “Would I be correct in assuming that your knowledge of agriculture is as limited as your understanding of most other things?”

Oof. “You’re sassy tonight. I thought you’d be happy I found all those inyoka for you.”

“They are… Those are not inyoka. They have no purpose. No connection.”

“Damn, Asher, tell us how you really feel.” Mercy laughed, wandering the beach, digging around in the ash heaps for something.

“It would have been better had you left them to the alvaren.” Asher’s tail lashed back and forth with irritation, throwing up more sand into the air before he realized he was doing it and abruptly stopped. “At least with plentiful war-beasts they might have presented a second front to divert the Voidgod’s attentions.”

“Yeah, I’m not getting big, heroic vibes from Briar by Moonlight.” Look at me, making it all the way through her name without growling. That takes maturity. That’s real emotional growth, people. “I think she’s more likely to run like hell and hide until this is over so she can jump out on whoever survives.”

“Maulkin, I am aware that you have some personal enmity with the alvaren queen due to—”

Mercy cut him off before he could mention Seren’s brutal murder. “No. I’m with horn-boy on this one. Briar can’t be trusted. At all. Ever.”

Asher turned away from us to stare up at the looming magic school on the cliffside. Once upon a time, it would have been full of magicians like him. People who could blast wyrms out the sky and teleport around the world. Now there was just us and dust. “I am merely noting that all of our allies thus far have been somewhat lacking in martial power to bring to bear against our foe.”

Meanwhile, Mercy was crouched down, scrabbling in the dirt like a dog. “Probably because we keep killing anyone with power because they’re dicks.”

“Perhaps”—Asher sighed—“but it has left us somewhat vulnerable.”

It turned out Mercy was digging out the bent sword that used to be the Inimicus, wrapping the handle in a bit of cloth so that the cold that seemed to emanate from it didn’t hurt her precious fingers. It was another dead spot in the moonlight. The darkness of the void.

I felt my brain creak after looking at it too long, then some cog somewhere down beneath my exhaustion and confusion turned. “Wait… wait. I just realized something.”

“A thought? In your head?” Mercy gasped. “How hard did that thing hit you?”

“Hilarious. Stop before I pee myself from laughing too hard.” I wasn’t sure she could see my eyes rolling when they weren’t glowing, so I tapped into my Lunar powers to give her the full strobe effect. “Seriously, though, when I killed the Voidspawn, the bits of it that had broken off died, too. I don’t think we need an army to win this. I think we just need to beat Araphel. If we kill him, all his spawn die, too. If we kill him, this is all over.”

“Yeah, great. But how do we kill him?” Mercy tossed me the Inimicus, and I caught it with Artifice, remaking it in flight into a solid band that I set around my arm. Mercy droned on, “He’s a god. Immortal. By definition.”

I shrugged. “I’ve killed things that aren’t meant to be able to die before. It is kind of my whole schtick.”

Asher was not in the mood for jokes. He wasn’t in the mood for any of my crap, apparently. I guess the whole Inimicus wrecking his spell thing had caused him a little bit of stress. He snapped, “By using the powers of the Void, which Araphel is the master of.”

“Yes but… guys. He tried to kill me. Not you. Not everyone else. Just me.”

That hung there in the night air for a moment before Mercy couldn’t help herself anymore. “I mean, I’m pretty sure you pissed him off last time we bumped into him.”

“I piss everyone off.” I waved it away. I was feeling a little bit drunk by this point. Blood loss? Lack of sleep? Why did I ever waste money on liquor? “That isn’t the point.”

Asher was right up in my face. I guess I really did piss everyone off. “You have a point, somewhere in all of this rambling and supposition?”

“He wouldn’t try to kill me for no good reason. Like you said, he’s a god, right? He’s got forever to wipe out everyone on Amaranth. Sure, he probably wants it done sooner rather than later, but why go to all the trouble of making a special little murder machine just for me?” Asher seemed to actually be listening now, instead of treating me like an idiot. He seemed to be thinking it through. Or at least I think he did. Inyoka don’t really have facial expressions exactly. He did go very still though, and that was usually what he did when he had to devote all his energies to his big juicy brain.

Mercy had no such problem. “Because you’re just that annoying?”

“Because I’m a threat.” It should have sounded menacing in my rumbly monster-man voice, but it honestly came out kind of whiny.

She threw back her head and laughed in my face. “Wow, glad to see the beating didn’t damage your ego.”

“Look,” I tried to start over again, “I don’t know how to kill him, but he knows, and he knows that I can do it, even if I don’t know how to do it yet.”

“This thread of logic is becoming increasingly tangled,” Asher piped up.

“I’ve touched his mind. Back when he was in the shards. And again, just now, when I was fighting the spawn.”

Mercy’s eyes narrowed. “Turning evil again?”

“I didn’t turn evil the first… Shut up…” I tried to get my train of thought back on the tracks despite Mercy’s best attempts to throw cows onto the rails. “The point is, I’m living in his head rent-free. I am in his thoughts. He is thinking about me. A lot. I’m like… his obsession. Whole world to deal with, yet I’m the one he wants gone. I don’t think he’s ever met somebody else who could touch the Void. I don’t think he knows that I don’t know how to kill him.”

Okay even to me that sounded a bit rambling. Didn’t mean Mercy was justified in grabbing me by the horns and yelling in my face, “Gods above, what are you trying to say?!”

“I’m telling you I can kill him.” That shut everyone up.

“I don’t know how, but I can.” That did not shut everyone up.

Asher groaned, and Mercy bellowed, “Potential doesn’t count for anything out here in the real world. We’re done playing in the little leagues. Either you can do it or you can’t. Can you do it?”

“I don’t know!”

“Then we’re screwed.” I had a good coating of Mercy spittle on my face. Kinky.

I managed to pull my horns loose of her grip. “We need to find somebody who knows more. Somebody…”

“They’re all dead!” she nearly screamed at me. “Don’t you get it? Araphel has been around since before they started writing history, and most of the people on Amaranth don’t even know how to write. Anyone that knew anything died last time he was around. There’s nobody left.”

“Technically incorrect,” Asher muttered.

We both turned on him. “What?”

He cocked his head to the side. “There are many creatures still living in Amaranth who were present during the First Revelation of Araphel. The alvaren, for instance—”

Mercy cut that one off fast. “Who hate our guts.”

It got me thinking, though. There had to be someone in this world who had been around long enough to be useful. “What about the wyrms?”

“Pretty sure they’re going to hate our guts, too.” Mercy counted off the reasons on her fingers. “We killed one, and we’re harboring all their escaped slaves. Plus, we aren’t wyrms, and I think they might be a bit racist.”

Asher headed that one off at the pass. “The wyrms were his allies in Araphel’s last great war. It would stand to reason that if they were drawn out of brumation, they would be liable to ally themselves with him once more. Indeed the only way we are liable to survive this conflict at all is if matters can be resolved swiftly enough that they are not reached by emissaries from either side.”

“So we let sleeping dogs lie.” I bobbed my head as much from exhaustion as agreement. I really wanted a bed about now.

“Wyrms,” Asher corrected me. “And brumation is not true sleep but rather a state of torpor whereby—”

“Don’t care,” I cut him off dead. “Got a better idea.”

He snapped his mouth shut, took a calming breath, and then sighed. “I am dubious, but go on.”

“Who is the one person we know has been around since Araphel was last kicking his can down the road?” I gave them both a smile.

Mercy was not smiling. “Who?”

“A guy we’ve met and talked to and even kind of teamed up with. Who has been alive on Amaranth since way back then.”

Apparently, that was enough for Mercy to put it together. “No.”

Asher looked back and forth between us. “Who?”

I went on with the stupid guessing game because I guess I’m a big kid at heart. “A guy who liked to dress up all in gold and stomp around bossing people around? A guy who abandoned the best defensive position on Amaranth to chase after us after we slighted him?”

“After you robbed him,” Mercy piped up.

I waved her concerns away. “He wasn’t using that shard for anything anyway.”

That was enough to connect the dots for Asher, too. His tail drooped back into the sand in dismay. “Oh no.”

“Oh yeah!” I threw my arms around their shoulders and turned to face the waystone. “Let’s go see Leo.”

Except it wasn’t quite that simple, of course. First, we had to bury the Inimicus under the Overlook’s courtyard where we’d be able to find it but nobody else would. Then we had to head back to the now-overwhelmed Bastion to deal with the whole influx of inyoka.

The dvergar and faun were already pretty close to losing their minds until we came back and took over. I could understand the frustration. In a couple of days, the Bastion had gone from a skeleton crew to three armies all competing to occupy the same spot with no defined leadership to tell them who was meant to be doing what. All the dvergar wanted me to come set up siege engines. All the faun and humans wanted me to come share stories and drinks. The only ones who didn’t seem to want anything were the inyoka, and they were the only ones who actually needed something.

They were half-starved, beaten, and bruised, exhausted from days upon days of forced marching. Yet despite all of that, the collapsed heap of scaly flesh I’d expected to come upon the moment I got out the waystone was nowhere to be seen. Some of the inyoka were willing to fight, some of them weren’t, but all of them were willing to pitch in and help with the war effort. It was blatantly self-serving, of course. They knew that Araphel rising meant the wyrms would be getting involved sooner or later, and the minute those big, flappy lizards showed up, it was genocide time for all the inyoka who were genetically diverse instead of color-coded.

Work orders mattered more to them than catching up on their much-needed sleep. Some of them looked like they were hollowing out, but they were still trying to carry food from the campfires up to the sentinels standing guard instead of gobbling it themselves. I got the desire to be a good guest, but this was pathological. It was only when I demanded that they stop what they were doing and take care of themselves that they would, but that just seemed to enrage the dvergar, who thought they’d found some stoic souls who could match their levels of work addiction.

I couldn’t understand any of these lunatics. If someone had offered me a snack and a nap I would have been out like a light. Like a nine-foot-tall toddler with a juice box.

Some apple slices and peanut butter actually would have been bliss right about then. I didn’t even know if Amaranth had any nuts to crush. I couldn’t remember seeing them. We’d been in a few forests, but they always seemed to have murderous monsters in them that held my attention better than the hunt for nut plants. Nut trees? What the hell did nuts grow on? Asher was right, I really didn’t know a damn thing about farming.

Well, I knew you needed nuts for peanut butter, that was something. Crap. Did Amaranth have apples? Had I seen an apple since we landed here? I know I ate fruit when we were in the jungle, but were there apples or just the fancy stuff? I turned around to ask Mercy whether they had apples and peanut butter on this planet, but she was gone. Asher too. I’d been abandoned somewhere in the midst of organizing the inyoka to take care of themselves. Those treacherous scum. I bet they were napping right now. Eating peanut butter and apple slices.

When I woke up on a pile of rubble, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. When I realized that I’d passed out on my feet and a whole cross-cultural team had hauled me off the dvergar I’d crushed and hauled me over here, I was still not surprised, but I was a bit embarrassed. Sleeping on a giant pile of broken bricks, though, didn’t surprise or embarrass me. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I could have done that before the whole reincarnation as a giant, horny god of war. Turns out sleeping was one of my particular talents in every life. It was probably lucky I hadn’t come back as a princess instead of a hulking monster man because if somebody had expected me to feel a pea under my mattress, they’d be severely disappointed. I’d probably sleep through a bear trap under the sheet. Possibly with a bear still stuck in it.

I managed to wade my way through the gathered crowd of people demanding my attention, pausing only briefly to give Farmer a nod across a courtyard and to pick a guard up by the head to find out how long I’d been sleeping. Amazing how focused people get when you do that.

Five hours give or take. Dawn was on its way. What a waste of a night. The only good thing about it was that all my Divine Gifts were back in action, and I could get on with the tedious cycle of healing myself over and over until all the gruesome wounds I’d suffered at my least favorite beach party had completely vanished.

By the time I looked right, I’d found Asher and Mercy in the midst of the crowd of self-appointed and self-important leaders of this whole exercise, surrounded on all sides by bickering.

“All right, so I’m taking these two out. See you later.”

The horde turned on me, spittle flecking dvergar beards, human eyeballs bulging, Chagnar scowling, and inyoka tails flicking back and forth like metronomes. Really was not convincing me I wanted to hang around for longer. I cleared my throat.

“We are leaving!”

Apparently, I roared that just a little bit too loud because a couple of the folks in the front row actually fell over. Well, I’d been in the splash zone for their spittle, this only seemed fair. “We need to know more about the enemy to win, and that means we need to get out and talk to people who know how to beat him. Do any of you know how to kill a god?”

For conversation stoppers, that one ranks right up there with, “Who slept with my mother?”

Everybody everywhere shut the hell up. Asher and Mercy rapidly removed themselves from the scrum, and we headed off towards the waystone courtyard with all haste. Once we were out of sight, Mercy slugged me in the shoulder. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re going to freak everyone out if they think we can’t kill Araphel.”

I rubbed my shoulder and took us on a detour past an armory. I needed to replace and repair my armor before anyone else hit me. A sword would be handy, too. “But we can’t kill him. You were yelling at me about that earlier.”

“They don’t know that!” She almost tripped over when we rounded a corner, she was so intent on bitching me out. “They need hope, not… whatever you’ve just done.”

Asher, as comfortable as always with discussing feelings, cut us off. “I believe that this is all a moot point. We have nowhere to go. We have no means of discovering the current location of Leofric. As an Eternal with no shrine, death could have transported him anywhere upon this planet. There are slim odds that he will be anywhere nearby.”

“Well, I’m just going to un-moot it in a second.” We came out into one of the Bastion’s many store-rooms, and I stripped the steel from the nearest racks of long-abandoned weapons to forge myself a new, much fancier, set of armor combining my remaining dragon scales with the fine steel of yesteryear. Artifice upgrades went both ways apparently—better materials and better craftsmanship. I stretched and flexed a few times to make sure I had the right fit, then I mashed all the remaining metal into a gigantic sword. “Ah, that’s better. I felt naked without a sword.”

Asher rubbed at the crests above his eyes as if he was trying to ease a headache. “Yet you were always quite content to stroll around literally unclothed back at Talon’s Keep.”

“That was different.” I shrugged. “I was going swimming.”

“Or trying to get it on with Seren,” Mercy snarked behind my back as I stepped out the door.

We headed off through the Bastion once more, soldiers and workers leaping out of our path. Guess having an Eternal bearing down on you takes some getting used to. “See, that is something involving exercise. Didn’t want to sweat on my armor. Perfectly logical.”

Desperate to change the subject, Asher quickly barked, “To the matter of the moot point?”

“Oh yeah.” I dug around in my belt pouches until I found the lump of metal I was looking for. “I’ve got the Lucis.”

“The ruined hilt of what was once a sword.” Asher sighed. “How helpful.”

“The Lucis, which Leofric carried around with him for hundreds of years. Sleeping with it in his bed at night. Stroking it gently and singing it lullabies. You know, the one thing in this world that he is the most attached to.”

Asher’s pupils narrowed. “He shall not be pleased that it is destroyed.”

“Missing the point here. With Spirit Touch, and the Lucis hilt, and the whole Resonance thing, I think I can find him.” Once more Asher seemed to be weighing my words and bobbing his head. Although that might have just been the pace I was setting making his little wizard lizard neck struggle to hold up his giant brain. “Then we use the waystones, hop over, ask him a few questions, learn how to kill the Voidgod, hop back, kill the Voidgod, and celebratory orgy.”

Mercy piped up from behind us. “I’d rather die and doom the universe than go anywhere near you in a naked fun-time scenario.”

“While I would not go so far as to destroy all life so as to avoid copulation with you, I would prefer not to, also.” Asher’s tail twitched, not the lash of irritation but amusement, maybe?

“You say that now, but just wait until I’ve killed Araphel.” I paused to flex in my new armor. Really just double-checking it fit. “I’ll be beating you off with a stick.”

Once more Asher nodded. “A beating with a stick would be preferable, yes.”

“Kinky.”

Mercy popped in between us and yelled, “Focus! You think you can find Leo? Do it.”

We were out in the courtyard now, the few guards stationed next to the waystones scattering to a safe distance. I held up the broken hilt of the Lucis, closed my eyes, and pressed the cool metal to my forehead.

Spirit Touch always seemed to be hungry, ready to leap out and grab onto whatever it was presented with. This time around, it came on even easier—a sudden rush of images and sounds and stinking sweat that staggered me. Of course, it was easier. Usually, anything I touched had been handled by dozens of people through the years. This sword had only ever been held in one hand. Wielded by one person for centuries. Leofric pounded on all my senses. I could hear his voice vibrating down through his arm into the hilt. I could feel his fingers gripping it tightly as it swung. Holy wars that lasted decades. Innocent blood, guilty blood… it all felt the same soaking down into the leather. He was my constant companion. The one who wielded me. The only one who could give me purpose and motion. I cried out for him. To be with him. He was mine as I was his.

I yanked the hilt off my head with a shudder. Well, there was definitely a connection there. Leofric’s presence seemed to linger all over the blade. Like it was chiming his tune. I could use that. I held it up higher and felt for the answering echo.

Slowly, I turned a full circle in the middle of the courtyard, head cocked to listen for the real Leofric ringing back. He had to be out there. I hadn’t killed him, so he didn’t really die. And if he was out there, then the hilt would find him. Just like the different shards of the Rusted Blade had called to each other, this lump of metal would call to Leofric. Not because of anything I’d done, but because he had made it into a part of himself. Even now I couldn’t picture him without it, and I was the one who had stolen it from him.

There in the distance, a ping. So far away I could scarcely feel it. Beyond the farmlands behind the Bastion. Maybe not even on the same continent. He chimed.

“Map. I need a map.”

The nearest dvergar scampered off and returned with Gunhild and her maps so quick I could have sworn she was just waiting for us. “What nonsense do you be planning now?”

“Maps, please.” I pointed vaguely in the right direction. “Maps of that way.”

Her own trade route maps might have been exhausted, but since forming a haphazard alliance of all the free people on Amaranth, she’d been busy collecting every other one that she could find, whether they were willing to share them or not. She even had some dvergar scribes working with any Chagnar faun who could be convinced to sit still long enough to recount the locations of some of the wild places nobody here had ever been to but them. The downside of a culture where everything was passed down in story and song was there was nothing to copy off. It was slow work, but day by day, she got closer to the first global atlas of Amaranth. Regardless of how many people she’d had to trick and bribe, the papers sure came in handy now.

I moved my finger slowly out over the map, trying to feel out just how far Leo was from us. The Lucis pinged, I counted in my head, then I heard Leo pinging back. Over and over, edging my finger farther and farther out from the Bastion towards the big, nearly empty stretches of map until just shy of the paper’s edge I found the spot that felt right. One more ping, bouncing back and forth, and I felt certain. “Here. He’s here.”

The gathered crowd peered down into the map and made sounds of dismay. When I finally looked at the map, I realized that the whole area around my fingertip was marked off with stripes and skulls. Oh good. The danger zone.

I read the only words in that whole stretch of map aloud. “Emsirgard Mire.”

“Poison swamps far as your eye be seeing,” Gunhild piped up. “Whoever you be looking for won’t be living long if they be in there. Air’s sour. Water’s sour. Nothing can live in there that ain’t poison but hobs, and they’ll eat you soon as look at you.”

Mercy shrugged it off. “We’ve met hobs before.”

“Then you’ll be knowing that one or two be easy pickings and a dozen can shred even the best of fighters.” Gunhild didn’t give an inch, ever.

“But why are there so many hobs there?” I scratched under my chin, hoping I didn’t have a bit of my own face still stuck there after my nap. “I mean, it is a swamp. What’s in it for them? They live in holes, caves, wells. They prey on little animals and children. What’s the use of a poisonous swamp to them?”

Gunhild shrugged her shoulders. Or one of them at least. The curse of stone seemed to have frozen up the other. “There be plenty of hob holes for them there. Might be a mire now, but Emsirgard was the first kingdom of humankind. ’Fore it all sunk down in the bog. Plenty buried places for hobs to hide.”

I cut off Mercy before she had time to perpetuate the pointless argument. “Asher, if this old kingdom was a big deal, do you think Talon might have built waystones there?”

He was already diving into his book, his own hastily scribbled notes sticking out from every other page. “I think that… perhaps… yes.” He tapped a page excitedly. “Yes. There is a mention of Emsirgard, not as a kingdom but as a supplier of materials. I believe… Yes! The chain did most certainly extend in that direction.”

“Then let’s go!” I clapped my hands.

His tail lashed. “Maulkin, there is no guarantee that the waystones are intact…”

“Then it will drop us out at the one before. It is fine.” I shrugged it off, turning to face the stone. “We’ll still be closer than we are now.”

“Time is of the essence,” Asher added. “If we cannot find Leofric swiftly, then we shall have to return empty-handed. I do not mean for us to leave these people or the Bastion unguarded when the time comes for battle.”

“Do you really think I’m going to miss the big battle with Araphel?” Asher conceded that point with a dip of his head, and I went on. “It is fine. His minions hadn’t even made it through the Serpent’s Gate yet. Stop stressing. Let’s go.”

Asher looked to Mercy for some objection but found none. So without further ado, he began casting. “All right, Gunhild, we’ll be back as quick as we can. Keep building up the defenses. Maybe lay in some pots of burning oil or something. Voidspawn look like they’ll burn real easy.”

Gunhild’s voice cracked. “You saw Voidspawn?!”

I grinned. “I came, I saw, I kicked its ass!”

Mercy’s scowl threatened to overwhelm her face, but if she wanted me to boost morale, I was pretty sure that telling everyone Voidspawn were little wimps was the way to go.

Asher’s spell completed in the awkward silence that followed, and I managed half a wave before the lightning snatched me away and flung me through the dark to the next stop on the Amaranth world tour.

Chapter 12

The more that we used the waystones, the more comfortable I got with them. I probably shouldn’t have been getting comfortable with having all my components explode apart into lightning and flung across the world. That seemed like a bad idea, frankly. But what was fantastical becomes mundane pretty quickly. If I could get used to being a nine-foot-tall Chagnar faun, teleporting wasn’t really all that difficult to get my head around.

We landed in a puddle. A puddle that started sizzling its way through my armor on contact and smelled like if a giant vat of acid and a giant vat of poop had a baby, and then that baby had a whole lot of curry for dinner and pooped it out again. It smelled bad is what I’m saying. Bad enough to make me wish that I hadn’t grown my nose back after the unfortunate nose-chopping incident the night before.

Mercy and Asher did not have a thick layer of steel covering them up to the knees. The acid bath started chewing through robes and leather faster than they could yelp in pain. So I did the only thing I could. I grabbed them both and put them on my shoulders.

Mercy bleated, “Oh come on.” But Asher gave me an appreciative pat on the head.

I waded us out, finding solid stone somewhere beneath the swirling morass and following the line of it up to more solid ground. With that taken care of and the worst of the acid shaken off my boots, we had time to take a look around.

“What a dump.”

There were some trees making half-hearted attempts to grow, but all the acid in the soil had them blackened and rotting from the ground up. If there was a single leaf on any of them, it had shriveled up too small to see. Without much in the way of vegetation, all there really was to look at was fog, hunks of rock poking up out of the dirt, and the dirt itself.

This was not a hip and happening holiday destination. Why the hell was Leo hanging out here? That dude wore gold-plated armor. He was used to a five-star lifestyle with hot and cold running servants. I’d expected him to have conned his way into some palace by now.

While we were on safe ground for the moment, neither of the brave Eternals with me seemed to be in any rush to get down again. Probably because there was vile-looking sludge in every direction, and the only way to move forward was to go through it. “So, I’m just your horse now? Is that where we are at?”

Asher weighed his words carefully. “You do seem to be more resistant to the mire’s destructive properties.”

Mercy did not weigh her words carefully. “And what’s the point of having a monkey and grinding the organ yourself?”

With a grumble, I waded off into the murky goop, the Lucis on my belt humming gently as we drew closer and closer to Leofric.

I shimmied my shoulders a little, making the two of them grab onto my horns for balance. “You know when I said I wanted you to ride me, this was not what I meant.”

Mercy let out a little laugh and then squished her butt back and forth over my shoulder pad, mocking me in a sing-song voice, “Might as well enjoy it. It is the closest you’re ever going to get.”

Artifice came to the rescue as usual when the acidic swamp ate all the way through my boots. With a little bit of effort and concentration, all the excess metal I’d poured into my oversized sword trickled down to reinforce and replace what the acid was eating. Maybe I could have plucked the dissolving bits of metal out of the goop and saved myself some material, but honestly, I had more metal than I knew what to do with at that point.

To start with, it was a bit of a miserable trudge, what with the stank and the people riding on me like I was livestock, but I soon got over my initial grumpiness. This was kind of my favorite thing if I was being honest. Going on adventures with my buds, exploring weird new places, and maybe beating up some monsters. This was the kind of light-hearted fun that our days had been missing since Araphel sprang back up.

By the time the ground started sloping up out of burny-acid town, I had a little bounce in my step, and when Mercy and Asher hopped off, I could tell that they had caught my good vibes. They almost looked happy. Except Mercy never smiled on purpose, and Asher wasn’t physically capable of it. “Just like the good old days.”

“The good old days?” Mercy snorted. “Like last week?”

“Yeah.”

She strode off ahead of us, slipping into a crouch and taking point as a stealthy scout like she was meant to. Didn’t stop her calling back, “Sometimes I forget how dumb you are, but then you open up your mouth and remind me.”

“Love you, too!” I shouted after her.

Then she was off, and Asher and I were alone in the weird, misty silence. We traipsed after her, stepping carefully onto the big blocks of buried stone that sometimes shifted and sank under my weight. It needed a little bit of attention. So did listening for any sign of Mercy running into trouble. And for any hobs lurking around. Still, it didn’t take me long to get bored. “So… how have you been?”

The question seemed to startle Asher. It took him a moment to reply. “How have I been? What do you mean?”

“I mean, uh.” I shrugged. “I’ve been away for a bit, I just wanted to check in on you, see how you’re feeling.”

“Through my determination to fulfill what I believed to be my fate as some sort of chosen one, I may have doomed all of creation to destruction. Every waif and stray in Amaranth has come under my care, and I am entirely certain that some, if not all of them, will be brutally slaughtered before my eyes, and I have little to no hope that our current course will lead us to any sort of solution.” He didn’t even sound upset about it. Just worn down. “If the Eternals of old knew of any way Araphel might be slain, then they would most assuredly have made use of it the last time he was walking the world. This is a doomed endeavor, we are grasping at straws, and I can feel the inevitability of defeat dogging my every footstep.”

“Hey, we’ve been in some tough situations before and turned things around.” I tried my best, but honestly, it wasn’t as though I had any magic bunny solutions to pull out of my hat.

“We have bested mortal foes, and most of them through luck more than skill and planning. I shall devote my all to the battle to come. I shall oppose the end of all things with all of my power, but ultimately, I cannot believe that even the magic that I wield or the gifts of the gods themselves will be sufficient to slay that which cannot be slain.”

We walked on in uncomfortable silence for about a minute. What the hell was I meant to say to that? We were all thinking it. We were all scared. But giving in to that fear was just going to make things easier for Araphel. I was not in the business of making things easier for Araphel. Screw him.

Asher piped up again, his voice strained. “I must confess, my faith in our cause has been wavering since his return. In my darker moments, I have pondered… If I were to ask you to slay me and consign my soul to the land of the dead, would you oblige?”

“Buddy, do you not remember how crappy the land of the dead was?”

Wow, this was an even more uncomfortable conversation than having to explain the folder of naked people on my computer named Definitely Not Porn to my mom.

“It was not so terrible. A place of rest. I have been thinking that perhaps a rest would do me well. I gave myself over to this new life thinking that I could make a difference in the cosmic battle between good and evil, but it seems now that all that I knew was false. Perhaps I should simply have expired when my life was done instead of clinging on to hopes of eternity.”

I’d always know that Asher was here a bit more voluntarily than the rest of us, but he tended to keep quiet about it. Guess that willingness to kill himself hadn’t faded just because he got a new eternal life. “I don’t want to kill you, Asher. You’re my friend. Probably my best friend since Mercy is… how she is…”

He still wouldn’t let it go. “I would rather have the peace of the land of the dead than the annihilation of self that the Void promises. When… If the battle turns against us, if all hope is lost, can I trust in you to fulfill my request?”

The question hung there in the air for a long moment as we slogged on. The ground was more stone than dirt here, and, while it still bobbed a bit at the edges, where it rested on the deeper rot and muck, it felt almost solid. What we walked over was ancient and crumbling, but unmistakably worked stone. Engraved designs showed through the weathering. Eventually, I sighed. “Let me think about it. It is kind of a big ask.”

“My ass is perfectly proportional, thank you very much.” Mercy bounded back into view, and I literally jumped. My feet left the ground. I felt like an idiot. At first she laughed, but then her eyes darted between the two of us suspiciously. “What are you girls talking about?”

“Just doom and gloom.” I shrugged. “You know, the usual.”

Her eyebrow of raised suspiciousness didn’t go down, but she shrugged it off, too. Too much to do, not enough time to worry about it. “Well, get your head in the game. I think I’ve found Leo’s camp.”

She led us deeper and deeper into the remains of the fallen kingdom. Here and there were little hints at what it had been. A clump of verdigris that might have once been a streetlight and was now a smear of green on the already moldy stonework. This far from the acid there were hints of life, but even the lichens and slime growing here were putrid and reeking. “They didn’t mention the smell in the guidebook.”

“Shh,” Mercy hissed back at me, even though there clearly wasn’t another living soul for miles around.

I turned to Asher with a frown and held my finger up to my lips. He stared at me even more blankly than usual.

Here and there stone thrust up out of the collapse, the remnants of one huge building now laid lower than low. There were words scratched into some of them that my Eternal powers kindly translated for me as we went. I wished they hadn’t. There was a lot of name-calling. Apparently, somebody called Narsalos was the one to call for a good time back when this city was a city. Though there were rumors that Wasberner’s mother was also a very viable option. It also seemed that the queen gave birth to a piglet instead of a child unless this was some political satire I wasn’t grasping. When I got to where Anaves lost his virginity and saw the accompanying diagram, I came to the conclusion that maybe I wasn’t going to learn anything useful from all this graffiti except that real people had once lived here, living their real lives, and time had wiped them all away as surely as any Voidgod.

On and on we went through the heaps of rubble and filth until finally, Mercy called a halt. I crept up beside her to see what she saw and immediately wished that I hadn’t.

Hobs are relatively cute as far as child-murdering monsters go. They’ve got heads like bats. Fuzzy humanoid bodies. They’re short, even compared to regular height people. All in all, not nearly the worst of the critters we’d run into on Amaranth. Sure they had teeth like needles and wanted you dead, but at least they were mostly incompetent. Even on our first day, we kicked their asses pretty much instantly.

So it was a bit upsetting to see them like this. Decapitated, with their little bat heads dangling from strings off the stonework. Closer examination revealed that the strings were actually dried out hob-guts. Could have gone without seeing that either. I didn’t know where the rest of the bodies were, but I’d assume they were being used for other arts and crafts projects somewhere in the gaping hole up ahead.

It had once been a doorway to some great building where important people did important things importantly, but with the collapse, it had gone from vertical to mostly horizontal. Then the passage of time had heaped dust, mud, bones, gunk, and some of that damned lichen up in its door-hole. Mostly on one side. It was underground, which should have made it prime hob territory, but I couldn’t help but feel like all the decapitations and demonstrations of power were more Leo’s speed than bat-boys.

He'd done more or less the same thing when we first met him to put the fear in us. Hadn’t worked. Just convinced us all he was a dick that needed murdering more than we wanted him as an ally. Oh, how the tables had turned.

Mercy crept in closer with the two of us trailing behind, trying to stay quiet. If there were hobs down the hole, I’d expect them to come zooming out and chomp on us at any moment. No matter how stealthy you are, you can’t compete with ears the size of dinner plates.

There were more dangly heads once we’d all crept inside, and the temptation to swing one and see if it set off the others like a dangly ball desk toy was overwhelming. Mercy caught hold of my wrist as I was reaching up and gave me her “I want to scream at you until my throat is hoarse, but I have to stay quiet so monsters don’t eat us” look. It was hard to argue with that look.

In the close confines of the dirt tunnel, Mercy slipped into place behind me. Scouting ahead would matter less than having a handy meat shield in the way if we did get jumped. It was just like all our other dungeon crawls. I couldn’t help but smile. I loved this crap.

A little way into the mud, our tunnel opened out, and another of the sunken building’s walls came into our glowing sight. Stained-glass depictions of dragons and birds shimmered back at us, turned sideways by the collapse, of course. Here and there, hints of life caught my eye. A scuff in the mud that could only have been a heel. A heap of furs that had been used as a bed, almost as filthy as the dirt floor that it was dumped on. I met Mercy’s eyes, and she gave me a nod. I crept over closer and found… absolutely nothing. Some well-chewed bones that I might have guessed were human if they weren’t hollow but nothing else of note. I found it hard to believe that Leo had been living like this, but I supposed it was possible.

Opposite the exposed wall of the old building, there was something like a door. A slab of rock that, judging by the tracks in the mud, had been dragged back and forth. As delicately as I could, I lifted the hunk of old stone and placed it a little farther along to expose the tunnel behind. It was less of a tunnel and more of a hole if I was being honest. Mostly, it looked like a toilet. Smelled like one, too.

“It occurs to me that rather than climbing down a refuse hole in search of our errant kinsman, perhaps Maulkin might use his powers of construction to simply remake this entire place into an open shaft leading us wherever we need to go,” Asher whispered.

“Yeah, that definitely won’t make the place collapse or make so much noise it summons every monster in a hundred miles,” Mercy sniped back.

The truth was, with the powers at our disposal, dungeons weren’t exactly a challenge anymore. Like Asher said, if I wanted to, I could crack this whole place open like an egg. It was kind of like the ridiculousness of swinging my sword around when I could conjure glowing blades of pure death. We had the powers of lesser gods by now, but we still acted like we were just people. I didn’t want to give up on being people yet. If nothing else, it was fun. So I nodded along with Mercy as if I gave a damn about summoning a million monsters. As if we couldn’t slaughter every hob on the planet without breaking a sweat.

Then, before there could be any more argument, I jumped down the toilet.

There were several reasons that was a bad idea. The first was that, obviously, what I was going to land in down there was going to be pretty unpleasant. I was probably going to slip in it when I landed and end up entirely covered in… well, whatever was making that smell. The other, probably more pertinent reason, it was a bad idea was that the poop hole was not wide enough for a full-grown faun to fit through it. My legs made it down, but somewhere about waist height, I abruptly stopped and dangled.

For all her talk of stealth, it was Mercy whose laughter rang out the loudest—an abrasive barking sound that echoed all about the chamber. She slapped a hand over her mouth to try and contain it, but she just couldn’t stop. Asher stood staring down at me for a long moment before his own collapse, covering his eyes instead of his mouth as if not seeing me could stop him from laughing his tail off.

“Laugh it up. You’re the ones that have to pull me out again.”

The two of them glanced at each other and did, indeed, laugh it up. The dicks.

Well, even if they weren’t going to be any help, I had better things to do than be a toilet plug. I tried to squirm my way down through the hole, but I didn’t have the leverage, even digging my fingers down into the hard-packed dirt around me. Just when I was ready to give up and push my way back into the room, a flicker of motion caught my eye. Mercy had leapt, and both her feet were pointed like a ballet dancer’s, coming straight down on my head. She was trying to stomp me through.

If I thought that I was thoroughly stuck before, this was now a whole new level of trapped. Even with Mercy jumping up and down on my head and shoulders repeatedly, I wasn’t moving.

She was panting with laughter. “Damn, boy, you’re thick.”

I grunted out between stomps, “This isn’t helping.”

“Are you sure?” She cackled. “It’s making me feel a lot better.”

My armor squeezed in around me, the flexibility of the dragon scales saving me from being crushed too badly. “Have I told you lately how much I hate you?”

“Love you too, babes.” She blew me a kiss and jumped on my upturned face. Damn her boots were muddy.

Asher had his face in his hands. “Perhaps some use of Artifice to widen the gap?”

I grumbled, but I did it, reaching out into my sphere of influence and shoving everything out just a little bit. The next time that Mercy came down on me, we plunged through into the dark pit together.

The drop was quite a bit bigger than anticipated. I was thinking ten feet—enough that my knees might bitch about it after. Nope. As it turned out, it was about thirty. Long enough for me to realize I needed to Surge my Vitality or risk becoming a Maulkin pancake and for Mercy to realize that she needed to kick off me and grab onto some of the jutting stonework to avoid the impact of the fall.

My head snapped back when she kicked off from my face, but at least she wasn’t on it anymore.

Then it was crunch time. The crunch was the sound my bones made. I landed on my feet, but that lovely kick from Mercy had me off-balance. I was top-heavy anyway, with the sword, horns, and my general girth, so I tumbled backward, slipping on the slimy stones beneath my feet and splashing down in more of the charming acidic ooze I’d been wading through outside.

Maybe I should have put a helmet on my armor.

The vile slime washed over my face, burning everything it touched. It got in my eyes. Ever had acid in your eyes? Not fun for the whole family. The words I managed to blurt out weren’t very family-friendly either. At least until my mouth and throat got filled up with the same searing sludge, and then I was frantically flailing, choking, drowning, burning, and screaming all at the same time. Possibly, I was not rocking the whole stealth mode thing.

I managed to roll over, and the worst of the sludge seemed to drop out of my mouth, but so did my tongue and most of my teeth. When I managed to fumble a sizzling hand up to my face, I could feel exposed bone. Not good. Very not good.

Mercy dropped down on top of me, using me for a soft landing and to keep herself out of the muck. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem. Right now, it rammed my face back down into the acid.

The noises I made were far from human. I’m pretty sure that I actually sounded kind of like a motorboat failing to start up until my ears melted off. The pain was a little bit distracting. So when I flung myself upright to get my head out of the searing agony, I may have accidentally bucked Mercy off. I couldn’t even scream anymore. The acid down my throat had seen to that. I wasn’t even sure if I was breathing. Everything felt like burning.

[665/1670 Health]

Then Mercy slapped me. I think. I was blind by then. And deaf. And her hand connected mostly with bare skull, which isn’t known for having a lot of nerve endings. Just what I needed. A slap on top of everything else. Thanks so much, Mercy, you evil…

She hit me again. It must have been burning her hands every time she did it, but she did it anyway, and finally, my brain went from shrieking panic to wondering why the hell she was doing that. Then I realized. Restoration.

I pulsed Primal energy through my body, pushing back against the lethal dissolution that was spread all over me. It worked its way out, slowly, agonizingly slowly. As it healed my ruined flesh, nerves came back to life, and fresh pain that had already been burned away came back to visit. I could breathe again, though the acid had turned into a neutral sludge after all it had eaten through so much flesh. That sludge was clogging me up. As soon as I had muscles again, I’d be sure to cough it up.

On my knees, I screamed and retched as the process of acid destroying my body played out again in reverse. Everywhere I grew back burned. Everything hurt. New teeth formed in new gums. New eyeballs inflated in their sockets. Abruptly, my other senses came back. I could hear Mercy screaming at me to heal, the slosh of vile poison slopping by where I knelt. Light came back, and I could see her. See everything. My tongue came back last—probably because it was all soft tissue. Then the font of life-giving energy was gone. Restoration was all used up, and there was still acid eating at me. From a lipless mouth, I managed to bellow, “Asher!”

If it had been me up there, listening to all the noises I’d been making, I would not have jumped. You’d have to be completely crazy to jump. Either completely crazy or so trusting that your buddy could tell you to jump off a cliff and you would do it. He spun end over end as he fell like a rag doll, robes trailing behind him like the tail of a comet.

My arms had not been eaten. When I leapt up to my feet, they were strong and ready. I caught him before he could hit the slop.

“Asher. Heal. Please,” was all that I managed to burble out before the acid ate my jaw away once more. He did it. Without pause and without question. Flame swirled around his clawed hands, he clamped them onto my head, and he cast Cauterize.

Now that I had having my face dissolved in acid as a basis for comparison, Cauterize really didn’t hurt that bad. I mean, yeah, sure it still felt like flames spreading through every vein and nerve in my body and searing away all injury, but it beat glugging acid by a long shot.

When I came back to reality from that little internal flambé, Mercy was burning. She was up to her mid-thighs in the acid and losing mass fast. She was bleeding from her mouth too, but I realized as I scooped her up and tossed her over my shoulder that it was because she’d bitten through her own lip, trying not to scream. Asher almost toppled as I hoisted her, his spindly legs were almost eaten through but they flailed all the same. I caught him under my arm and kept him up, coughing up blood, sludge and little pink lung lumps the whole time.

Once more I reached for my Primal Pillar, and while Restoration couldn’t be used on me again so soon, there was no problem using it on others. I poured healing and life out into their bodies and breathed a solemn sigh of relief when I saw Mercy’s ten little piggies back where they belonged. I might have needed to make her new boots, though.

The next leathery-looking monster we met was in for a bad time.

As if on cue, I heard the distant ki-ki-ki sounds of hobs echoing back and forth beyond the chamber we’d fallen into. The splash landing hadn’t been quiet, and all the screaming probably drew a fair bit of attention, too.

A quick look around revealed no high ground and no easy solutions. We were down in the guts of the fallen city now, the stonework dripping with slick slime coming down from the swamp above, blackened rotting roots dangling every which way. What had been a spiral staircase and was now just a really awkward doorway led us away from the worst of the pooling acid, but there were cracks and openings in the stone all around us that might have led to where we meant to go.

The Lucis still called out for its master, giving us a vague direction to go in, but in a labyrinth, knowing which way the prize is isn’t all that helpful. It just gives you a false sense of success when you’re going that way and a false sense of defeat when you aren’t. If anything, trying to head straight to Leo was going to make this harder than it had to be.

It seemed like Asher was thinking the same thing but had come out in a different place. “Now would be an excellent time to simply tunnel through to our goal.”

“And bring the whole thing down on us?” Mercy snapped. She was still a bit zesty about losing her feet.

“I believe in Maulkin’s competence,” Asher replied from my other shoulder. “He has upheld mountains as they fell.”

“It isn’t about rocks, it’s about the acid swamp that will come raining down through every crack he makes!” Mercy snapped back.

“Truly, it matters little in the end. Should we all expire, we can simply start over with little loss of ground.” Asher slipped a little, and I had to grab him by the tail to stop him from hitting the slime. He went on speaking directly into my ass. “What have the deathless to fear? Time is of the essence. Who knows how far Araphel has already come?”

“We die, we come back, you port us again.” Mercy seemed to be weighing the plan in her head. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Indeed.”

The echoes of the hobs were getting louder now, more frenetic. There was no need to ambush prey fallen into the trap. Most likely the beast-men meant only to chew on whatever was left above the acid when they arrived. I was still standing still, a sitting duck, while we argued this out. And like the genius I am, of course, I waded into the argument, too. “What if Leo dies?”

“Then he’d instantly become about seventy-five percent more likable.” Mercy snorted.

“He’d return, just as we do,” Asher replied with a hint of contempt.

“Where? Would he be conveniently next to a waystone? Would he be on the other side of the planet?” I started making for the sideways stairwell, carrying them along with me whether they liked it or not. “We lucked out this time. What if he comes back somewhere it would take a month to sail to?”

“Then we abandon this foolish endeavor and return our focus to building a competent defense at the Bastion.” His tail was trying to lash in irritation, but I was holding it, so all he really managed was to wobble a little.

“Foolish?” Mercy hissed.

“Leofric is a buffoon. There is nothing he could tell us that we do not know. Were he face to face with the means of defeating Araphel, he would not have comprehended it. This is pointless.”

The hobs came swarming in right then, dozens of them, not on the ground where there wasn’t much ground, but scuttling along the roof and the walls, bursting out from every crack, ki-ki-ki-ing all the way.

Chapter 13

My hands were full. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about the bat-boy-bonanza, so I yanked Asher upright, held an arm out for Mercy to pivot up onto with her ninja flip stuff, and did my best to hold steady.

Arrows started peppering the hobs almost immediately. Mercy’s hands were a blur of motion. One shot after another. Just a single arrow was all it took. The hobs fell with a splash as they lost their grip. There would be no boots made out of those. Asher began casting immediately, but it was always so damn slow, we were basically relying on Mercy to keep us alive solo.

She was more than up to the task.

More and more hobs came swarming in, and more and more arrows soared. “Maulkin, reload me!”

Snatching arrows back out of the dead ones before they dissolved was a whole new exercise in Artifice, but I did it, damn it. Sometimes they came back snapped, and I remade them. Sometimes the tip of the arrow was lost in the hob’s flesh, but I had plenty of metal still on me to make a few arrowheads. Eventually, I fell into the rhythm of it. Every time Mercy fired, I followed her arrow through the air, and the moment it struck home, I yanked it back out.

Sure, sometimes that dragged a hob tumbling end over end through the air to land by my feet, but it didn’t matter. At least, it didn’t matter until they were up to my knees, and Mercy jumped right down on top of the heap.

One hand free was all I needed. My sword leapt to it, Slaughter flooded along it, and with one cut, I sent out an echo of my blade to clear the whole roof. Dead hobs rained down. Mercy let out a little yip as they splashed down beside her, but then she leapt readily onto their backs to get a better angle to fire on the few still coming out the walls.

As gently as I could, so it didn’t disturb his spell, I set Asher down on the island of corpses, but by then it was all over anyway. He let his spell disperse back into nothingness and sighed. “This is pointless.”

Mercy fired off a last couple of arrows, pinning one of the survivors to a cluster of roots. “We got experience?”

“A pittance,” he grumped. “This is wasted time.”

I only had a moment to recognize my life-sense tingling before the worms burst out.

The ones that had buried through the silt and mud beneath us brought a fresh splatter of acid to coat us with stinging droplets. The ones that shot out of the walls, their lamprey teeth already spinning, didn’t even do that much. With all the dead hobs, this room was a cornucopia of energy for my Deathtouch. It was almost easier to let it flow out through my Sphere of Influence than to hold it back. Every worm died in the same instant it came into the open air. Some of them, carried by momentum, still bashed off my armor. A couple set Mercy and Asher staggering under the weight of impact. But Leo’s ambush was over before it had even begun.

For a moment there was silence beyond the dripping and splattering, then I called out, “That was just sad, Leofric.”

He didn’t answer.

“You can come out now. We aren’t going to hurt you.”

Still nothing.

Mercy joined in the yelling, her face pocked with nasty-looking, red burns where acid splashes had got her. “Screw that. We’re going to hurt you real bad if you don’t come out now!”

Still nothing. The Lucis wasn’t telling me Leo was any closer than the last time I’d checked. Apparently, he was playing keep-away with us.

Whatever arguments Asher still had against hunting Leo down seemed to have been silenced by this moderately pathetic attempt at killing us. Now that Mercy was angry, it seemed like there would be no stopping.

She led us again, leaping from one heap of corpses to the next, then scrambling around the bends of the spiral staircase before we could even get another word in. I harvested all the arrows I could pull together, then set off after her. Asher looked for a moment as though he was going to argue, then he held out his arms to be lifted with a sigh. I scooped him up, and we were off.

By the time we caught up to Mercy, she was out of the stairwell and through a few dry rooms, hopping over the gaps that windows had once occupied on the floors. Here and there, in her wake, I’d see another dead hob with an arrow between its eyes, but there was nothing like the swarm that had tried for us before. We basically faced no resistance. I made her up a pair of hob-skin boots and tossed them to her when she paused at a branching point in the ruins. One way was a smooth bored hole through the solid stone, the other, a doorway still hanging open a good twelve feet up.

“Thanks.” She tugged them on without looking, trusting in me to get her measurements right. It was a weird kind of intimacy.

With a glance between the two options, I pointed to the one that wasn’t going to involve me throwing Asher. “I’m thinking we go down the tunnel.”

She rolled her eyes. “Is that what your magic sword map app is telling you?”

“Nah, just looks like one of the big worms made this, and since the worms come from golden boy…”

She opened and shut her sarcasm hole, then nodded. “Tunnel it is.”

Asher didn’t even bother to comment. Tail lashing all the way, he followed off after her. With a quick glance to make sure they weren’t currently being eaten by anything huge and wormy, I jumped up to take a peek through the doorway. What can I say, I’m a completionist. If I didn’t at least look to see what was the other way, I’d have spent the rest of the day wondering about it.

There was a giant worm. A dhole. The monstrosities that Leo had pumped out to fill the Ashlands with fun activities if anyone tried to cross them. They were like the little murderous khorkhoi that he’d shot out the walls at us earlier but with the magnification turned way up. Normally, they were a good fight. This one wasn’t. Its head was jammed up into a hole in the roof, and it was pulsating steadily. To start with, I assumed it was gulping down the swamp water as it came raining in, but gradually, I realized that the undulations were actually going the other way. This thing wasn’t swallowing acid, it was puking it up. The swamp above us had just been a swamp once upon a time. Then things like this had been rigged up underground to make it burn. How long ago had Leo done this? Was this whole region uninhabitable because of him? How many times had he been here before?

That was the problem with eternity. After a little while, it became too big to think about. We’d been on Amaranth a month or two now, and I could barely remember all the places that we’d been. What if we’d been adventuring for years. How much of the world would I have seen? How many places would I have changed in my own image? Even now there were stone pillars all over Amaranth where I’d used them as a staircase to gain height. Mountains had fallen thanks to me interfering in the stuff beneath them. Forests had burned. Multiply that by a hundred years. A thousand years. Suddenly, having places all over the world where you could run to when you respawned seemed downright reasonable.

In the future, I’d be on the lookout for more poison swamps around Amaranth. It felt like a safe bet that Leo was behind them. Maybe there would be hidden prizes. He liked gold stuff, so maybe we’d find pots of the stuff under his swamps. Like an extra-crappy leprechaun.

Anyway, the dhole shuddered and rolled, and more filth and poison bubbled up somewhere above us. I hopped back down from the doorway without disturbing the massive critter. It wasn’t like we’d get much of a fight in this cave. It was jammed into the gap in the masonry pretty solidly. Like it had been born small and grown up to this size to fill the space. A bonsai dhole.

Before they’d gotten too far, I caught up to Mercy and Asher. The dhole tunnel led us through solid stone, ruined buildings, and some good old-fashioned packed dirt without any real change to its shape. The worm that made it had burned clean and true in a gentle expanding spiral off through the earth.

We were deep enough now that I was feeling the claustrophobic prickle on the back of my neck. The awareness of the weight of all that world stacked up above us, just waiting to come down. Last time I felt that was back in Khag Mhor. Right before the whole thing came down on top of us. I sincerely hoped we weren’t in for a repeat of that.

In a weird way, this was actually a pretty smart place for Leo to hide. Last time we’d come to blows, he’d mostly been dealing with Asher and Mercy, who did their best work in wide-open spaces. Hell, if the tunnel got tight enough, I’d probably struggle to swing my gigantic sword around.

The tunnel eventually came out into what looked like a natural cave rather than another ruined building. Bits and pieces of the city that had been were here but dragged in rather than dropped by the cataclysm that sank it. There was a table set up with what smelled like roasted hob on a platter. Some chairs. Some books in a lopsided shelf that looked half-sodden in the damp down here. Another heap of rags to serve as a bed. Another bolt hole for Leo to go hiding in.

“Leofric, we’re not here to fight!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. Dude knew we were here, or he couldn’t have set worms on us. “Come out and talk to us.”

Both of my stalwart companions flinched when I shouted in the enclosed space. Whoops. Sometimes I forgot just how loud faun could get.

“He’s telling the truth, Leo,” Mercy chimed in. “We aren’t here to kick your ass again. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“Fish?” Asher’s head cocked to one side.

I had a moment of genuine surprise. “You don’t have fish where you’re from?”

“I do not see the relevance of aquatic life to…”

Leo came out, guns blazing. Well, not guns. Hands. Hands blazing. Hands shooting out worms and acid. Because, of course, he did.

The intervening days since we’d last murdered him had not been kind to old Leo. He looked like hell. That shiny golden armor of his was gone, replaced with the rags that our reincarnation threw on us for modesty—rags that had then been thoroughly coated in filth by his time living in this mire, or maybe still hanging onto him from when he crawled out of his own grave. His slick hair was a tangled mess of blond and mud. If it wasn’t for the golden glow of his eyes, I probably wouldn’t have even recognized him. Well, that and the worms.

Mercy reacted faster than me, throwing up a wall of flame between us and him that sizzled his worms away to nothing and turned his acid spritzer into a noxious cloud that the sudden heat launched up to the roof of the cave.

I tried again, yelling over the hissing and flames. “Leo, we’re here to talk.”

He called back. “What use are words with savages like you?”

Mercy lined up a shot on his voice, and I had to slap the bow sideways to make her miss.

Snarling, she yelled back to him, “Dude, we aren’t the one throwing bugs at people.”

“Sooner would I trust in the lowliest worm than in the words of you treacherous thieves.”

I sighed. This was pretty much how I expected this whole thing to play out, but it was still disappointing. “Leo, if I give you the Lucis back, right now, will you stop throwing acid and actually listen to us?”

“Give it to me, and we shall see.”

It was like dealing with a toddler. I swear. I took the hilt from my belt and threw it in the direction of his voice. He let out a yelp when it hit him. Then it turned to fury. “What have you done to it?”

There was a long moment when nobody was trying to murder each other; he was actually listening. Who would have thought it would be that easy?

Asher answered him, “All of the shards have been consumed in the Voidgod’s resurrection, Leofric. The dark fate that you foresaw has come to pass.”

He burst through the wall of flames with acid bubbling up in his palms. Despite being surrounded and scorched, he looked victorious. “You were his servants all along! It was just as I told my faithful, that those who bore the countenance of…”

I cut him off before he could get too far down that particular wrong track. Once he got himself worked up, it was hard to get him back in the vicinity of sanity. Even now I felt like we were shouting to him over the barrier as he sprinted in the opposite direction. “We were tricked, Leo. Same as everyone else. And now Araphel’s back, and we need your help to beat him.”

He stopped in his tracks. Turns out you just had to feed his egomania, and he could turn on a dime. “You… I… Destiny is calling me. To stand at the head of the army of light and face down the dark one once more. To assume my place as the king of…”

Mercy groaned. “Mostly, we just want you to tell us how to kill him.”

“To kill a god?” Leo seemed to be genuinely surprised that was the plan. “Is such a thing possible?”

I shrugged. “I can kill Eternals, and they’re basically gods but smaller, right?”

Leo shook his head contemptuously. “You know nothing of the disparity between our power and theirs.”

“So tell us,” Mercy deadpanned right back.

“I…” You could almost hear the cogs turning in his head. “I shall need assurances.”

Once more, before anyone else could wade in, Mercy replied with a flat, “What?”

“If I give you all that I know”—he paced back and forth in front of the burning wall, the acid in his hands still bubbling away, waiting to be water-gunned at us without a moment’s notice—“what is to prevent you from slaying me?”

Mercy rolled her eyes. “You aren’t worth our time?”

“What do you want, Leo?” I cut off the argument before it could get going, glaring at Mercy and hoping she might catch the hint.

“To be addressed in a manner befitting a demi-god and not a pet might be a good first step.”

While I swallowed my irritation, Asher took over negotiations. “Apologies, Leofric, what other demands do you mean to hold the fate of the world hostage for?”

If Leo caught that jab, he ignored it. He was very good at not hearing things he didn’t want to hear. “I wish… I should be the one to lead the battle against Araphel.”

“Absolutely not,” Mercy and I said together.

I sighed and made a quick concession. “But you can join our army, and if you behave yourself, you’ll probably end up in charge of some people.”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly. Then he moved on. “I desire some measure of comfort in my surroundings.”

“I’m pretty sure your old room in the Bastion is still in the same state you left it in.” Mercy shrugged. “Unless some dvergar claimed it. Either way, we can put you up.”

He looked like he’d just licked the swamp water. “Dvergar? You accept such creatures into your fold? Then my next demand is that you expel all of the…”

I cut that right off before it could get started, too. “We need everyone. Humans, dvergar, inyoka, and faun. We all fight together, or we all lose together.”

“Foolishness.” Leo growled. “They shall betray you to their master.”

Mercy hissed. “The only one whose loyalty in question is yours, Leofric.”

He blanked that out, too—probably wise—and moved on to the next part of his hastily assembled mental list. “If you do not find the answers you seek in my testimony, will I be destroyed?”

Mercy babied him. “Just tell us everything you know, and you’ll get a hot bath and a comfy bed.”

He squared his shoulders. “And to lead the battle against…”

“And you’ll get to fight Araphel!” I shouted over him.

He didn’t pout. But he looked like he was close. There was definitely a little lip wobble going on. “Armor and a sword to match that which was stolen from me.”

I snorted. “I mean, I wasn’t going to send you out to fight him in your undies.”

His mouth snapped shut, and fury blazed in his sunlight eyes. “I shall suffer no further indignity. I will be returned to my station with nothing impinging upon my honor.”

Mercy laughed. “You mean you don’t want us to tell everyone you ran like a little bitch and left Orphia to die?”

His eyes locked onto her. “Indeed.”

“You know, I’m pretty sure that part of the story got glossed over anyway.” She rolled her eyes. “What with the whole end of the world thing that is going on.”

He stepped forward, hand out to shake, acid fading. “Then I consent. You shall have all I know in exchange for these boons.”

The other two just stared at him, so I decided to be the bigger man, stepping up and shaking his hand with a little sizzle of leftover acid. “Great. Let’s get out of the slime cave.”

I tugged him along by the hand. Now I had him I wasn’t letting go. Now that he was actually getting dragged out of his hermit dungeon, he suddenly got reluctant. “Is time not of the essence?”

“Walk and talk, buddy.” I hauled him along as Mercy and Asher fell into step behind us. “Walk and talk.”

“Buddy?” He sneered.

Mercy poked him in the back as we headed up the worm tunnel. “Just start from the beginning.”

“I do not think that I shall start from the beginning.” He snarled. “Rather I shall start from your end!”

He flung himself forward as the tunnel wall gave way. A wash of acid flooded through the new circular entrance, and the dhole that was puking it up followed after. I caught only a syllable of Mercy’s extensive cussing before it swallowed her and Asher whole and carried on through the other wall.

I was still close enough to Leofric, and he wasn’t dumb enough to get himself eaten, so I survived the initial ambush. For a moment the two of us were just standing there alone in the dark, then I turned on my heel and ran after the worm in the walls.

Apparently, Leo was not ready to let bygones be bygones. He doused my back in acid, even as I sprinted off, a torrent of it powerful enough to knock even me to my knees by the force of impact alone. I threw up a wall to block the acid super-soaker and sloughed off the outer layer of my armor to stop the venom from eating in any farther.

I’d made it as far as the fresh, dripping tunnel entrance by the time Leo burned through the wall, and I had to form a shield. “Will you knock it off!”

“You took everything from me and expect me to become your lap dog now!?” He launched a fresh torrent of acid. “This dog bites back!”

I put a curve on my shield to direct the stream away from me instead of letting it spray all over the place, then I pushed back toward Leo with angry stomps. “Leofric, I’m going to tell you something now, and you aren’t going to like it, and you aren’t going to believe me. But it is something that you should have learned a long time ago.”

I barely had a sword’s worth of metal left, but the idea of the sword seemed almost more important than the bulk of it. I slashed it through the air, and the echoing double blade took his hands off at the wrists.

“You don’t matter. You aren’t important. You are not the main character in this story. You never have been. We are giving you the opportunity to matter, for the first time in your eternal life. To make a real difference instead of making everything about you. Take your chance.”

I turned my back on him and jogged off down the tunnel after the dhole, my Lifesense still pulsing away, letting me know it was close. Down it went, spiraling into the bedrock. This was going to be easier than I’d thought. As it was passing beneath me, I reached out with Artifice and plowed down through the stone. A vertical shaft, straight down to intersect with its tunnel. My sword grew as I fell, swelling with what had been my shield until it was great again. Even as it grew, I swung.

At the bottom of the pit, I hit it. Couldn’t have timed it better. The blade bit clean through its mushy body, my ridiculous potency and the momentum of my fall doing half the work to lop the worm in half.

Soft landing. That was unexpected. Sure it kind of felt like diving into a pool full of rot-flavored jelly, but it was comfy compared to the usual hard smash. I dug my way towards the head of the thing, switching the vast great-sword into a pair of cleavers and then into a pair of claws to make my life easier. About halfway there, I found Mercy and Asher. They were wet, sticky, bedraggled, and more than a little bit dissolved, but they were still alive. The second I pulled them free, Mercy started screaming. Not in fear or pain but in rage. “Where is he? I’m going to rip his legs off and shove them up his ass.”

“You know, he just might be into that.” I tried my best to ignore her as I wiped all the sludge off poor Asher’s face. It was getting stuck in all the joins between his scales, and it was still sizzling away.

She hit me in the back of the head with the flat of her hand. “Oh, let’s treat him like a human being. Let’s talk to him and offer him a truce.” She kicked me. “Idiot.”

I groaned as Asher finally gasped in a breath of fresh air. Well, fresher air. “Look, he’s been an asshole for thousands of years, it is probably just habit.”

“Weren’t you the one who told us he was fantasy-land Hitler?” She was still kicking me, but it was half-hearted now. Really just punctuation. “Weren’t you the one who said the best thing to do was kill his ass? What’s changed?”

I turned to face her. “The world is ending, Mercy. If Orphia was still around, I’d be asking her to team up.”

That stopped her kicking for a second as she looked at me incredulously. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“No. No, I wouldn’t,” I conceded, hoisting both up in my arms, surging my Potency and leaping us back up the shaft into the original tunnel. “But still, Leo could help us.”

“You know he’s going to be long gone by the time we’re out this hole?” She grumbled as we landed. “Hiding somewhere else, laying another billion booby traps to kill us if we come after him.”

Once they were back on their feet, I sighed. “Mercy, we need answers.”

“Then go begging Briar by Moonlight. Go wake up the wyrms. This guy isn’t going to help us. Why are we here?”

I may have been shouting slightly because I felt like we’d been having this same argument all day. “Because he’s weak. If we piss him off, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have an army. He doesn’t have ungodly wyrm powers. He’s just some guy with a bunch of pet worms. He’s a nobody!”

There was a soft cough from behind me. Leo. He hadn’t run. He’d grown his hands back, which was probably a good thing, but he hadn’t run. Brushing past everything I’d just yelled, he said, “I have reconsidered.”

“Yeah? I’ve reconsidered letting you breathe any more of my air, you…” I clamped a hand over Mercy’s mouth.

“You’ve decided to come with us,” I talked loudly to drown out her grumbles. “To help fight the good fight? Right?”

“I… As you said, my personal… my…” He looked smaller somehow. Like he’d been deflated. “I will join your cause.”

I held out my hand to him again—the one that wasn’t currently full of Mercy’s face—and this time when we shook, it felt like he meant it. He met my gaze unsteadily. “I shall endeavor to be worthy of the trust you are putting in me.”

Asher let the spell he’d been gathering behind my back die away, and we all set off for the surface together.

During that hike, Mercy licked my hand, bit my hand, screamed into my hand, kicked me sporadically, shot three unfortunate hobs that had come out to scavenge the corpses of their kinfolk, wiggled around in a manner not entirely unlike one of Leo’s worms, licked my hand again, but gently, so it was ticklish, and finally, by the time we got to the surface, she accepted that I was going to be carrying her by her face all the way back to the waystone and made herself comfortable by hooking her heels up on my belt.

Otherwise, the trip was uneventful. Right up until the moment we arrived at the waystone and discovered it was gone.

“What the ass?” were the first words to tumble from Mercy’s mouth when I let her go. Asher was peering around as though he might be able to spot the waystone as if this wasn’t the exact spot where it had been. The only one who didn’t look surprised was Leofric.

“Uh, Leo, did you destroy the waystone?”

He glanced to the others nervously, just waiting for the violence to start. “If I’d known there was one nearby, I most certainly would have.”

Mercy’s eyes narrowed. “But you didn’t?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he managed to mumble out before she closed the distance to get right up in his face.

From an inch away she hissed, “What does that even mean?”

I picked her up by the collar and placed her a more reasonable distance away. “He means the swamp might have eaten it without him meaning it to.”

Asher was staring at the empty spot with his tail lashing so frantically I was worried he might unbalance the baby carrier on my back. “It was stone. Stone does not dissolve in acid.”

“I…” My brain could have had tumbleweeds rolling through it in that moment. “I don’t know enough about science to say if that’s right or not.”

Asher wasn’t done though. He leapt down onto a hump of mossy dirt and peered down at the bare patch where the stone had once stood. “For it to have survived the tests of time, only to be destroyed now, it makes no sense.”

I let out a long sigh, then moved on. “Where’s the next one?”

He dug into the dirt with his claws, searching for some sign of the rock, acid nipping and hissing when he dug too deep and hit the ground water. “It is nigh on impossible for the moment of its collapse to be simultaneous with our…”

“Asher!” I yelled. “The next stone! Which way?”

“There should be one right here.” He was so indignant that he literally stomped his foot. God that was cute.

“I know, buddy. But it isn’t. We don’t have time to screw around looking for it. Fixing it up. Lining it up again. We don’t have time. Which way is the next one?”

He finally seemed to get the message, pointing off through the murky fog. “Just beyond the horizon to the south, we should find the next relay. An hour’s travel. No more.”

“Then that’s where we go.” Wading over to him, I offered him my hand.

In came Mercy with her usual upbeat attitude. “And when that one is missing too? What then?”

I shrugged. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

From his spot back on the last bit of solid ground, Leofric let out a little giggle. Not the barking laughter he’d played up in front of his men in the Bastion, but a snorting little noise that he cut off as soon as he realized he was making it.

Too late. He was heard. Mercy rounded on him. “Oh, you liked that one? Well, guess what, chuckles. He isn’t making jokes for you. Those are for us. You just keep your laughs to yourself.”

Asher hid his face in his hands as I tried to defuse her. “Mercy, calm down.”

“Have you ever tried to calm down? It is impossible. You tell somebody to calm down, and the first thing it does is piss them off even more.” She leapt the distance from what I now thought looked kind of like a fossilized log and into my waiting hug. “Now slap a saddle on your head because we need to move.”

Time to piss her off again. “Actually, I’m going to need Leo on my back, and the two of you on my arms.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why does he get the best spot?”

“Because we’ve got an hour to blow. It is storytime.” I turned to put my back to Leofric and waited for him to hop up before re-arranging my armor so everyone could be comfortable for the ride.

Chapter 14

Some of the old Leofric was back when he started telling his story. The deep, rich voice that had filled the hearts of his little minions with pride. He would have been great for movie trailer voiceovers. “For all that I became with the coming centuries, I was newborn when the Revelation of Araphel struck, scarcely a decade to my name and scant grasp of all that would follow. Yet for all of that, I do have the knowledge that you seek, for while the mighty clashed on the field of battle with the Voidgod and his spawn, I was overlooked, assigned lesser tasks in the great alliance of the free.”

Mercy snorted. “You were a gopher.”

“A… yes.” I could almost hear him forcing the smile. “Droll. I fetched and carried and squired for those Eternals who would have me and led mortal men to their doom in border skirmishes the rest of the time. But… I am getting ahead of myself. You wanted the whole tale, did you not? From the beginning.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That’s what I said before you wormed me. Yeah.”

“In the beginning, there was nothing.” Leo spread his arms out wide, almost smacking the other two. “Then the gods made all of that is.”

Another rough Mercy snort. “Maybe starting a little early there.”

“This is, in fact, not the beginning of the tale, for it misses the reason for their creation. In truth, all that they needed to make was Amaranth. All the cosmos, every world, is a mere echo of this one.”

It was my turn to pipe up—if only to deprive Mercy of the chance to scorn him some more. “Yeah, we heard all this from them before they sent us down here.”

“And they told you why it was made?” He asked it lightly, but it shut us all up for a second. For a moment there was nothing but the sloshing of my legs through the swamp and the sizzle as it tried to eat me.

Thinking back, that had been glossed over. “I think they said it is a battleground?”

Asher weighed in with his opinion. “My supposition is that it is a creche, for them to grow the next generation of gods, in the form of Eternals.”

“For my part, I never questioned at all. The gods of light created this world because it was the nature of gods to create, so far as I was concerned. The truth would not come to me until much later when I overheard older and wiser Eternals talking among themselves about the discovery of Araphel. The nature of the beast.”

He paused for dramatic effect. Because, of course, he did. Of course, he was that kind of person.

“Amaranth is a prison. All of creation, made in its image, is a prison. All meant to contain one being: Araphel.”

“What?” Mercy deadpanned back.

“The gods of light, though they war among themselves between order and chaos, draw their power from the same font. Creation and good. Araphel is their antithesis, incapable of creation, only destruction. Only evil. But by the same token, they could not destroy him, only bind him.”

“And he just let them?” I wasn’t quite as incredulous as Mercy since the gods had never treated me as anything more than a bit of poop stuck to their boots, but there were bits of that story that didn’t add up.

“None who were there have ever spoken of it, but… I have heard a supposition.” He took hold of my horns and leaned down to stage-whisper—as though there was anybody around to hear him: “When the dvergar went seeking a god to call their own beneath the earth and they discovered Araphel in the darkest depths, I heard tell that he was within a great black gem. Smooth and darker than the deepest night. An egg.”

I tried to shake him off my horns without knocking him off my back. It was surprisingly difficult. “So they boxed and buried him before he was even born? No wonder he’s pissed off.”

“When faced with the annihilation of all things, would you not have done the same?”

I know Asher would have, in an instant. He was all about the bigger picture. Mercy would have done the right thing, though. Even if she had to fight all the other gods to do it. Even if she was cussing about it the whole time. As for me. Whatever I chose to do would have been the wrong thing. That was the one constant in my life. All my decisions were bad ones. “Would I have buried a baby? I hope not!”

“You think in such human terms.” Leofric scoffed. “We are more than that now. We must consider the consequences of our decisions through a different moral lens.”

Everybody fell quiet as I leapt over a particularly deep pool of toxic slime, landing gracefully on the dry stone beyond. One by one, I helped everybody down onto their feet, reformed my armor, then set off again with as little delay as possible.

We did it all so fast I was able to pick up the conversation again right where we’d left off. “That sounds like something an asshole would say to justify being an asshole.”

“Well. Regardless of your precious feelings”—now that he was back on the ground, I could see him sneer—“the gods did what they must to protect all of existence. Araphel was bound, buried, and meant to remain so for all eternity.”

Mercy sneered right back. It was a sneer-off. Nobody wins a sneer-off. “Until some dvergar found him.”

Ignoring the two of them making faces at each other, I strode on into the increasingly green and living land beyond the fallen kingdom. Leo caught up to me in a few bounding strides and resumed his story. “They found him, they hatched him, and they bore witness to his wicked majesty. All dvergar swore themselves to their new god readily, but it did not take long for his desire for destruction to grow beyond the bounds of their underground kingdoms.”

“Which is when everyone else found out about him.” I glanced at Leofric, expecting to see his usual contempt and surprised to find that he actually seemed to be enjoying himself. “That was the Revelation, yeah?”

“With an explosion that rocked the world, Araphel came to the surface. The force of his deadly blow brought mountains low and raised the Voidcrown Spire, towering over everything and everyone. It was there that he rose. It was there that the world made its first stand.”

“And got their asses kicked,” Mercy crowed from behind us.

He ignored her entirely. “The alvaren and those Eternals who shared their burdens had no way of knowing what they faced. No idea of the Voidgod’s power. They could not even comprehend that a god walked among them.”

“So they got their asses kicked.” Mercy, once again, keeping it classy.

“By then, the dvergar had realized their error, but there were as many Voidspawn as there were stout fools in those early days. Before Araphel bolstered his armies elsewhere. His clash with the alvaren was inevitable. They were agents of law and stability, so it was no wonder that the coming of any great evil would be at odds with them. Yet in their resistance, they granted the adversary a dreadful boon. Throughout the ages of Amaranth, the wyrms have been at war with the alvaren, so when their ancient enemy sided against Araphel, they flocked to his banner.”

This time she wasn’t satisfied to just heckle, so she spun out in front of Leo and snapped, “Dude, we know all this. Will you get to the good stuff?”

Still, Leo only had eyes for me. He was obviously delighted to finally have somebody to share this story with. Someone who might actually understand it. “The alvaren were deprived of their armies through treachery, the Chagnar abandoning their posts and joining forces with an enemy as bestial as them.”

She yelled even louder: “We know this!”

“All the alvaren had left to fend off their impossible foe was their arcane might. But that was not nothing. They unified all their disparate fiefdoms under Briar by Moonlight, their greatest sorceress, and pooled all their power into a Keystone from which all their kind might draw strength. It was a dangerous gamble, to consolidate their power in one place, but it was required for the great ritual that followed.”

“We already know…” Mercy’s ears finally caught up to her mouth. “Wait, what?”

“A whole people had given themselves over to the Voidgod, and it would take a whole people to take their place among the armies of the free. Amaranth is the nexus of the universe. Connected to all the other worlds. If it fell, so too would they. So it was that the alvaren called out through space and time for allies. They knew there were another people among the stars, a people who they had already seen in me and others, a people made in the image of the gods. It was these people they drew to Amaranth in their millions, stripping them from the worlds where they once dwelled and assembling them not as the children of a thousand different worlds, but as one people. Humanity.”

“Oh.” That shut her up.

Asher, on the other hand, finally had something to contribute to the conversation. I honestly thought he’d been too out of breath to butt in up until now. “I had wondered when such creatures came into being.”

That surprised me almost as much as the story of humans being summoned to Amaranth. “You didn’t have humans where you came from?”

“Perhaps?” He shrugged. “It is difficult to say. I did not see the entirety of my world.”

Mercy clapped her hands to get us back on topic. “So the alvaren got new slaves to fight for them. So what?”

“Allies, not slaves,” Leofric corrected her. “All humankind could see the grave threat the Voidgod posed and willingly took up arms against him.”

“You say potato, I say slaves.” Mercy rolled her eyes. “What happened next?”

“The war. The true war began then. Battles raged across Amaranth, every kingdom and province beset by the Voidgod and his servants. The dvergar undermining fortifications, and the Voidspawn ravaging all they could touch. Whatever was brought to bear against Araphel was thwarted. Everywhere he was fought, we lost. Martial strength could not overcome his spawn. Magic directed against him, he thwarted himself.” His cheerful expression had hardened. Chilled. “With sickening ease, all of Amaranth’s greatest heroes were wiped from the annals of history. Only the power of the Eternals could hold against him, though even we could die to his spawn, but we were too few and too thinly spread. Day by day, the world was consumed. It seemed that it was the end of all things.”

“And then?” I prompted him.

“Then he was gone.”

Mercy groaned. “That’s it?”

“Oh wait, I know this bit.” I picked up the story. “The Voidgod was marching on the Bastion, bringing all his armies with him, and down in a cave on the plains, he got killed. He’d probably died plenty of times before and just came back, the same way we do, but this time… well… I don’t know if an Eternal managed to kill him, but there was an Eternal there. One that survived the explosion when Araphel died. One that was powerful in the Pillar of Aether. Before the Voidgod’s spirit could depart and form a new body, they bound it to the sword that had struck the killing blow, then broke it, when that wasn’t enough. That’s how we got the Rusted Blade shards. That’s what we put back together bringing Araphel’s soul into one piece. That’s why the Voidgod is back.”

Leofric gawked at me. “If you had already come by all this knowledge, then why have you not made use of it? If Araphel can be bound in such a manner…”

“Even if we can find some Eternal out there who completely mastered Aether to the point of being able to bind a god’s soul to an object—which… we can’t—it doesn’t fix the problem. It kicks the can down the road. Araphel still lives and gets to come out to try all over again.”

Mercy coughed. “Saving the universe for a few thousand more years sounds like a good deal to me.”

“We’d still need to kill him to start with!” I snapped back. “That’s beyond us at this point.”

“Am I the only one noticing that this whole thing has been a waste of time, just like I said it would be?” Mercy was building up to a real rage now. “His story didn’t help. He doesn’t know any more than us.”

“He told us that the alvaren can summon in whole new species as backup. That would be handy about now.” Being able to haul in new people to help with the fighting would definitely improve our odds. If they weren’t trained to fight, then they’d be about as well equipped as the rest of our so-called armies.

She snapped back, “If they summon anyone, it will be to kick our asses.”

Asher interrupted us all with a lash of his tail. “None of the new information was pertinent, nor has it improved our initial standing. We still do not know why Araphel fears Maulkin.”

“You haven’t worked it out for yourselves?” Leo laughed, slapping me on the back. “Your bestial friend is a Voidgod in the making. Drawing on the same font of power as Araphel. He may not yet have mastered the control required to slay a god, with his gifts so mixed and muddled, but there is nobody else in all the universe that could ever come close. Only a Voidgod can kill a god. Any god. That is why our own beloved Solar Court feared Araphel so. He could undo them.”

“So we just keep Maulkin alive for a few centuries until he’s fighting fit?” Mercy was back to ranting. Exactly where I didn’t want her to be. “I don’t think Araphel is going to kick back and wait for us to say we’re ready.”

Leo nodded in agreement readily. “He must grow, rapidly, if he means to overpower Araphel.”

“Once more, I must reiterate that this is simply the plan we already had,” Asher grumbled. “Leofric’s insight has provided us with naught.”

“What a shame that you promised me that my information proving useless would not be used as cause to do me harm!” Leo snapped back.

Mercy was quick to turn on him. “You’re a dick.”

He squared his shoulders and stared her down. “And you’re honor-bound to do me no harm.”

She reached for an arrow. “I didn’t agree to a damn thing.”

To his credit, Leo didn’t back down an inch. Though he did look to me with a hint of worry in his eyes. “Your leader did. He will not allow you to do me harm.”

Mercy let her hand drop and groaned. “Oh, this is all feeling way too familiar. This is like Seren all over again. Maulkin, if you start banging this guy…”

I caught a glimpse of white on the horizon. “Everybody shut up. Here is the next stone.”

Mercy still wouldn’t stop, though. She was practically giggling at this point. “I’m just saying…”

“Shut up!” I was stunned to discover that she actually did, but a quick glance at where she was looking soon destroyed any hope that I might have had that she actually might be listening to me.

The waystone was where it was meant to be. Still up atop a pillar of the same white stone that the whole of Talon’s keep had been constructed from, unlike the last one which was down on ground level. Presumably because it was the end of the line, in a city. That pillar was what saved it from the same fate as had destroyed the one in the swamp. That fate, of course, being the pair of red-scaled inyoka trying their damnedest to topple it.

I yelled at them: “Hey!”

They glanced our way, then went back to their work.

“Hey, knock it off.” Mercy yelled at the top of her lungs.

Tilting my head to the side and watching their inept attempts at shoulder-barging over a pillar of stone, I sighed. “I think that’s what they’re trying to do.”

Mercy went for an arrow, and Asher started casting. Apparently, we were going to kick the asses of some random lizard people for messing with our ride home.

“Hey, uh, inyoka. You should probably stop that.” I turned to find Leofric staring at me like I had two heads.

“They are your enemy? They are the spawn of the wyrm. They are trying to prevent you from performing your sacred duty, why would you speak to them with such… kindness?”

I drew my sword and limbered up a little, but I didn’t feel like I was going to be needed here. It was two inyoka. Not an army of wyrms. “They’re just people, working for a crappy boss they don’t like, same as everyone else.”

He sputtered, “They’re reptiles!”

The first arrow was a warning shot, hitting beside the inyoka, throwing sparks off the waystone. It was probably for the best I didn’t get involved. Anything I did was as likely to blow down the pillar as much as kill the lizardmen. “So is my best friend, what’s your point?”

That seemed to actually leave Leo speechless. Which was kind of nice, honestly. The inyoka, faced with enemies coming on at them fast, had abandoned their attempts to break stone with their bare hands and were now backing away slowly, snapping answers back and forth between them in their own tongue—probably thinking we couldn’t understand them.

I called over to them, “Those ‘flightless-freaks’ are the ones who are going to murder you if you don’t tell us why you’re taking down waystones.”

The inyoka glanced to each other and then fell silent. I guess we were doing this the hard way.

Asher lowered his hands, letting his spell fade, but Mercy fired off another shot, piercing clean through one of the inyoka’s tails and into the packed earth beyond. It let out a noise like a kettle-whistle, but still, the other one didn’t run or even flinch really. How bad did life have to be under the thumb of a wyrm that you didn’t look twice when your buddy made a noise like that?

The unpinned inyoka took a run for the pillar, gathering speed and aiming to make one last wild leap at completing his task before he got killed in the line of duty. That was some real unhinged dedication right there.

I didn’t figure it was going to suddenly start working after however long they’d been flinging themselves at it so far, but it would be just my luck if it did, so I threw up a wall between him and the waystone, just to be on the safe side. There was a gentle splat, then he fell over. “Okay, let’s try that again. Who sent you to stop us using the waystones?”

Splat-face wasn’t in any fit state to talk, and Pintail was still screaming. Asher had to yell to be heard over them. “Clearly their wyrm sent them to destroy the waystones, though I could not guess at why.”

Splat had found his way back to a sitting position, looking around us in confusion. “You are not alvaren.”

“Ah, the why. Sensing magic passing through the waystone relays, one of the wyrms assumed that we were invasive alvaren.” Asher walked closer with his hands held high and empty. “Fear not my friend, we are not alvaren, nor do we intend to bring them to your doorstep.”

That didn’t seem to calm either of them down all that much, but at least they weren’t actively trying to screw us over now. “Listen, we aren’t trying to stop you from taking down the pillars. We just need, like, five minutes with it, then you can do whatever you want.”

The trilling noise of the injured inyoka had finally wound down, though I suspected it was because they were out of breath rather than because they weren’t suffering anymore. Every gasp brought out another tiny hoot.

Mash-snout didn’t seem like he was particularly enthused about the whole idea, but it wasn’t like there was anything either of the inyoka could do to stop us. I walked up to the stone, fully expecting to be transported away any minute now, when I turned to find the others staring at me.

Asher was the one to spit it out. “We can’t leave them at our back.”

“Why? It isn’t like they know the spell to come through the stones.”

Mercy rolled her eyes at my stupidity. “They’ll report back to the wyrms. They’ll tell them we were here.”

“So what?” I shrugged.

“So you don’t think they’ll take an interest?” Mercy looked genuinely furious. “They already know the alvaren are back. How long until they find out about… the other return visitor.”

Leofric said what they were all thinking. “We should slay them and be off.”

“Or…” I stalled while my brain tried to catch up. “Or we take them with us.”

Asher shook his head in a weirdly human gesture. “They will call out to their master for rescue.”

Mercy had obviously been pleased I’d given her an out, and now that it was being snatched away, she looked pissed. “Uh, the Bastion is like hundreds of miles away? I don’t think any amount of yelping is going to…”

Asher droned over her, “Inyoka are bound to their master, soul and mind connected. Such a bond…”

“Okay, but… murder?” she snapped back. “Coldblooded murder.”

His voice cracked as he shouted over her, “I do not see that it matters whether they are mammal or reptile…”

“That isn’t what I meant by coldblooded murder, you stupid son of a—”

I cut them down. Leo had spent the whole time edging forward, getting ready to acid them, and I didn’t want anybody to suffer, and I didn’t want Mercy using it as an excuse to kill Leo, and we were out of time.

With a slash of my sword, its echo leapt out. The head of the pinned inyoka hopped right off, the one on the ground with its face all mashed up got a messier death, the top of its head coming away in a splatter.

“Done.”

Mercy had her mouth hanging open, and Asher had turned away from the gruesome scene. The only one who looked satisfied was Leo—which was probably a very bad sign indeed. His approval filled me with shame. But like everyone kept saying, we were running out of time. “Asher, get us home.”

“You just…”

“I murdered them. No denials. No apologies. That was what was going to happen in the end, and we don’t have an hour to argue. So be mad at me, that’s fine. But be mad at me while we’re working.”

Her mouth snapped shut. Asher did that voodoo that he did so well, we all turned into lightning, and the dead inyoka vanished from my sight. But not before I could memorize every single part of the scene. The two innocent people I’d just killed because it was convenient. The splattered trails of blood where I’d used my newfound harmony with the universe to straight-up slaughter people. I felt sick to my stomach. Maybe I was the monster everyone was so scared of me becoming. But I could live with it. I had to live with it. Even though I’d be seeing their faces every time I closed my eyes for the rest of eternity. It was worth it. Because if two dead strangers was the cost of keeping the wyrms from coming down from their roosts and joining forces with Araphel, then I’d do worse. If I had to be a monster to win, then I’d be a monster.

Chapter 15

We reformed back at the Bastion to the sound of screaming—never my favorite sound. The sun in the sky wasn’t blotted out, but it was passing through some great crystal prism, spraying out rainbows in every direction. I didn’t even need to look up to know who it was. Briar by Moonlight.

Her city loomed over the Bastion, filling the entire sky, low enough that I could see all the alvaren atop it, bristling with weapons and magic. Their monstrous creations were already in flight, swooping and scooping from the frantic mass of bodies below. All the amazing siege weapons that the dvergar had me working on were untouched, pointed out over the wall towards the distant enemy who hadn’t arrived yet. Completely useless against an attack from above. Oh yeah, we were screwed.

At least I had my amazing anti-magic weapon to protect me from Briar’s magic. That would totally even the odds. Except it was buried halfway across the planet in the damn Hinterlands. We were extra-screwed.

To the credit of our armies though, they were fighting back. They might have been losing, they might have been getting slaughtered, they might even have been panicking a little, but now that we were back, they rallied. Trumpets sounded, Asher and Mercy met my eyes, and we all took off.

“Mercy, take the high ground, bring down their fliers. I’m going to intercept any ground troops. Asher, their city conducts any magic you pump into it. See if there isn’t something you can do to screw with the stability of whatever spells are keeping it in the air. There are still some functioning flesh-forges up there. I need them taken out so they have no good reason to be harvesting our people. Leo, I need you to…”

When I turned around, he wasn’t there. He’d been right beside me when we went into the waystone. He’d transported with us. I knew he had. I caught a brief glimpse of the back of his head as he pushed through a crowd of inyoka, fleeing for his life. Guess old habits really were hard to break.

We’d managed fine without him; we’d manage fine now. “Great. Fine. I’m going to grab one of the big crossbow things and blow the forges off that city. Then—”

I was hit by lightning.

If you’ve never been hit by lightning before, I’ve got to tell you, it is a unique experience. I mean, really special. Your whole body just kind of locks up in place. Your heart stops. Your lungs stop. Your bladder stops, which means you pee yourself. Being wetter is extra fun when you’re already conducting enough electricity to kill an elephant. The whole world was just white. Pain and light and… did I mention the pain.

[133/1670 Health]

Pulsing Restoration regrew my eyeballs back in their sockets and got my heart beating again, but there was nothing I could do for any of the soldiers that had been swarming by me. There was a black crater in the courtyard, and anybody who’d been close to me was dead and gone.

Surging Potency, I leapt clear of the rabble, seeking higher ground and a better view of the battlefield. From atop one of the great buildings on the wall I could see everything. The steady flow of prisoners being hauled off their feet by the swooping gryphons and flung up into the city to fuel their awful monster-makers. Alvaren had no use for allies. Anything that wasn’t alvaren was the enemy.

There was already a lot of death in the air, so when I infused my blade with slaughter and slashed at the oncoming gryphons, the echo blade was huge. Big enough to take down a whole flock of them and restore me to perfect health thanks to Drain.

We had numbers on our side. Even if the alvaren were infinitely better trained, equipped, and organized, we just had to knock enough of them down and this whole venture wouldn’t be worth the effort for Briar anymore. If they were losing more bodies than they were gaining, we won.

With a half-dozen gryphons down and scattered at the base of the great wall, I readied myself for my next attack.

Lightning struck again, white-hot pain searing through every inch of my being, the whole world fading away to the background. Pain hooked up directly to my nervous system.

[493/1670 Health]

Once I could have called a coincidence, but twice in a row, that was deliberate. When every muscle in my body stopped twitching and spasming for a second time, I was delighted to learn that even though that had hurt like hell, I hadn’t gone blind.

The third one would definitely kill me. No question. I was all out of healing.

That didn’t mean I was done.

Taking a leap down onto the non-blighted side of the wall, I found one of the many heaps of rubble from our previous visits—chunks of rock so huge that the dvergar couldn’t haul them off on their own. Perfect.

I didn’t try to grab them since the Voidgod’s destructive powers had tainted almost all the rock of the Bastion, making it beyond the grasp of my Artifice, but I could touch the stone deep below the earth where they’d been piled. And I could haul it straight up in a spike.

The boulders launched up towards the flying city in a cluster. The whole place was made out of crystal. It was the proverbial glass house that people shouldn’t throw rocks out of. The second they hit; the whole thing should have turned into glitter. Instead, they struck off an invisible sphere encircling the place and fell back down towards the Bastion.

Crap. Crap. Crap.

I flung myself after them. Straining my Artifice until that Pillar of divinity quaked within me. The rocks were there in my awareness, just barely, but not enough to get a grip on them. I switched over to my Void Pillars, hoping there would be something there that might be able to blow them out of the sky before they landed, but I hadn’t bought into anything but Slaughter.

Still, in that one brief moment, as I was switching between them, I felt my hold on the rocks tighten, and I was able to cast them out over the wall. I even got lucky and knocked another gryphon out of the sky. Go me.

I feel like the whole “high ground” thing has turned into a bit of a running joke at this point, this idea that just because somebody is higher up than you, you’re guaranteed to get your ass kicked, but gravity was definitely on the alvaren side. Our archers couldn’t touch them while theirs could basically have just thrown some arrows over the side, and we would have been peppered with them. Not to mention, when we completely failed to hit them, all our shots came raining back down on us. Glad I wasn’t the only one to make that mistake. But I was also really unhappy I wasn’t the only one to make that mistake as I had to dodge falling crossbow bolts from the dvergar, even as the alvaren tried their damnedest to hit me with their volleys.

Halfway through banging together some sort of metal umbrella so that I could keep moving, the next lightning bolt came down. That worked out surprisingly well for me. I was holding the shield-on-a-stick in the air with Artifice instead of my hand at the exact moment of impact, and while the bolt of electric death knocked it from my grip, it also discharged through the metal harmlessly, leaving a heap of molten slag behind where my metalwork had been.

That had been pure luck, but I still cursed it. Now I had nothing to keep me safe from falling arrows, and nothing to hit people with.

Vaguely recalling what I set out to do before I had my brain scrambled, I stumbled on towards the walls. Siege weapons, that might still work. Solid plan, Maulkin, glad you thought of it. Thanks, Maulkin, did I mention how sexy you look today?

I didn’t even realize that the swooping catbirds were dropping alvaren to kick our asses until one hit me square in the chest, boots first. I was already off-balance from the lightning exploding in my face and the constant peppering of arrows from on high, so this new paladin actually knocked me right into a back-roll, chasing after me with his swords drawn. He lashed down at my back, and with no weapon in my hands and no plan in my head, I reached out through Artifice and knocked them off course. Two hooks sprang up out of the back of my armor to knock his thrusts aside, then melted back in before I rolled over them. There was so much Artifice could do that I’d never even thought of.

Back on my feet, he slashed at me again in the same painfully predictable pattern. Steel flooded down the length of my arm to meet the first blade. A solid gauntlet to catch one blade, a twist of my wrist to make it parry the other, and then one hard yank to bring him down to just one sword. The moment he lost his grip, my Artifice took over, swallowing up the metal of his weapon and adding it to my liquid stockpile.

Wide-eyed, he watched it go, trying to bring his other sword to bear, but he wasn’t trained for this. He had never drilled for what to do when he was disarmed, and his opponent ate his sword.

What should have been a gut punch became something more through the power of my crafting. Metal flooding down my arm into a great spike that I hammered right through the paladin’s guts and out the other side.

Okay, so I was a glorified blacksmith, but you couldn’t deny some of the Artifice crap I was pulling off was pretty cool.

As I drew my arm back, all the steel the paladin had been clad in came away with it. He was in his underwear when he toppled to the ground, and I had enough metal to make myself a new sword before the next wave of invaders came on.

It looked like the alvaren tactics had shifted since we returned and started mounting a decent defense. They had dumped out a ton of ground troops up here on the wall, clearly intent on holding us up here while their weird mutant beasts swept down and grabbed up every inyoka they could reach. In the midst of each cluster of paladins I saw kicking the crap out of my poor little army, there was a white-robed mage blasting away with impunity at our siege weapons. Guess they were a threat to the city in the sky after all.

That gave me some new focus. I charged off towards them and jumped, using my new Artifice trick to shoot spikes out the bottom of my feet and launch me clear over the top of the front ranks of paladins, who stared up at me in terror and awe as I soared over their feeble swipes to come crashing down, boot spikes first, into their squishy wizard.

The spikes went right through and into the stone beneath, and then I was too busy with the whirl of blades to even notice when I retracted them. Thrusts were turned away by dragon scales. I caught three paladins’ swipes with one sweep of my sword but didn’t have the moment to riposte that would have gutted them in return.

A pulse of Artifice shot spikes out of the steel parts of my armor to turn aside any other thrusts incoming from behind me, not calculated but chaotic, bristling like a hedgehog to knock everything off target. It worked, from the clatter that I heard all around me and the lack of holes I’d suddenly developed.

With a confidence I was kind of impressed with, the paladins swarmed over me, trying to bear me down with weight of numbers instead of skill and strength. Given that I had divine Potency on my side, and I’d already shown that I could shoot out spikes like a heavy metal blowfish, it tipped over the edge into suicidal overconfidence.

I didn’t get the chance to spike them though. There was another thundercrack, and my whole world turned bright white and burning again.

[33/1670 Health]

The alvaren tanked the worst of the damage, which was the only reason I was still standing in the midst of their blackened corpses when it was all over. They hadn’t been trying to hold me down. They’d been trying to hold me still. They’d given their lives so Briar could take a cheap shot at me.

And I had no doubt that it was Briar by this point.

Nobody else would be spiteful enough to slaughter their own people to get at me and too stubborn to stop using the same spell when it wasn’t working. I suppose that I should have been relieved that she was focusing her efforts on me instead of turning the whole battle herself, but I can’t deny that the repeated lightning strikes to the head were getting kind of painful.

I was starting to feel like maybe I’d done something to annoy her.

Another spike-foot launch brought me to the top of the wall where the fighting was thickest, where our soldiers had been stationed before hell dropped out of the sky on them. I impaled a paladin on landing and accidentally slapped another one off the wall into the desert beyond with the flat of my sword as I was trying to bring it around and start chopping. All in all, I’ve done a lot worse.

There were dead Chagnar faun all around me and then dead humans and dvergar scattered amongst them in lesser numbers. We’d been holding most of our troops back from regular watch duty and giving it to the tireless faun because we didn’t really expect any trouble. They were paying the price for our arrogance.

Their blood had not been spilled in vain. I drew all that death up, gathered it around me, and pushed Slaughter into my fresh-forged blade. There were no more flights of gryphons flying in formation, and in the wild melee around me, I’d be killing more of my own people than theirs if I unleashed this power. Good for me I had a gigantic target right above me.

I thrust my new great-sword straight up in the classic pulp fantasy book cover pose. I just needed some scantily clad lady hanging onto my leg and it would have been perfect. Instead, I had about half an alvaren wizard stuck just below my knee-pad. Ew. Shouldn’t have looked down.

My sword might have been poking impotently up in the air, but the echo of it that leapt up from all the gathered death did not. It rose in a roaring wave, passing through the alvaren’s shield spell and crashing into the smooth underside of their crystal city.

The roiling black spread. Not like an oil spill but like a spreading fractal, dividing as it expanded out through the crystal. My death sense couldn’t reach that far normally, but I guess that the energy I’d tossed up there counted as a part of me somehow because everywhere it went, I felt the destruction that it wrought. Men, women, children, everybody in between. Any alvaren that was tapping into the power flowing through the crystal when my wave of death swept through was struck down. It wasn’t many of them. Even the battle-mages only tapped in once in a while to restore their strength, but it was more than I’d ever killed in a single blow before. More than I’d ever slaughtered indiscriminately. The little girl too weak to conjure water for herself and tapping into the city’s power for a helping hand was the first kid I’d ever killed. I felt her die, felt the death gather around her and tighten. Then she was just more ambient death to feed into my power.

It spread and it spread and finally it came to the center of it all, to the Keystone where all the alvaren had pooled their magic, where it could lash out through that same connection to every alvaren with the tiniest bit of mage in them and massacre them all. Genocide. I was committing genocide.

There was no turning it back, even as I tried to reach out to that wave of liquid black death spreading through the city above and pull it back, to stop it before it was too late, there was just too much momentum. I was too powerful for mere regret to stop my greatest act of murder.

Then she was there. Briar by Moonlight. Tearing the whole Keystone loose with a massive explosion of magic.

Upstairs, the lights went out. All the magic that flowed through the city and kept it afloat was gone.

Unplugged.

Gravity took over, and that giant circle of suddenly dull rock fell towards us much faster than I would have guessed it would. All the people who weren’t alvaren looked up at the falling city in abject terror. Even I got a little bit distracted by the whole concept of being crushed to death by a giant falling city. The alvaren though, they didn’t even flinch. They fought on, slaughtering my people and even scoring a pretty gruesome nut-shot on me with a spell that felt pretty fire-bally.

Good thing Restoration was back up or my lonely time with my right hand would have been extra sad that night.

[1258/1670 Health]

I couldn’t understand what kept them fighting even though tons upon tons of rock was falling in on them, but at the very last moment, when the falling city stopped dead in the air, I realized what it was. It was blind faith. Absolute and total belief that there was a higher power that would protect them. Not the gods above—I don’t think that lot even got to make an appearance in the alvaren worldview—but Briar by Moonlight. When the sky was falling, they expected her to reach up and catch it.

The really annoying thing was that they were right.

Somehow, she’d gotten herself underneath the city in the few seconds since the damn thing started falling, and with one hand held up casually, she had reached out with her magic and brought it to a halt. The Keystone had fallen into orbit around her, drifting slowly, emanating light and a level of power so great I could hear Farmer screaming about his head from here.

She looked to be just about the size of a doll from down here, but even so, I could tell that she was glowering down at me. This was definitely personal at this point. With a flash, she and the Keystone vanished again, and for a horrible moment, the city lurched down before she slammed it back into place, and the whole thing lit up again. Rebooting and shining brighter than before.

Knowing my luck, she’d just made it even better than before, fully recharged the shields, and installed a giant death star laser with my name on it.

Another fireball lanced my way, but I got my great-sword up in time to deflect the worst of it. The sword got hot, but it didn’t melt, so I was calling it a win. I met the mage’s eyes over the blackened blade when the smoke cleared, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little bit gratifying to see her gulping in terror.

I swung my sword her way, and she leapt for cover even though I was literally just waving my sword around. I bellowed over the roar of battle, “Made you flinch!”

An arrow took the mage through the throat before I had the chance to jump over to her. Mercy smashed into me, using me to slow her momentum. “We’re losing.”

I smacked another alvaren off the wall with a backswing. “Of course we are, with that attitude.”

“Stop being a dumbass. They’re slaughtering us, and Briar hasn’t even opened up with the big guns yet.” She punctuated every word with another pull on her bow. Some alvaren got lucky and managed to dodge aside. Most didn’t.  Everywhere she looked, she turned the tide of battle. Everywhere her arrows fell, the enemy toppled, and our people resurged.

I rolled my eyes. “What makes you think she’s got any—”

She slapped the flat of her hand over my mouth. Mostly over my mouth. More chin, really. It is hard when you’re short. “You can lie to yourself, but don’t lie to me. You remember fighting her before. You know she hasn’t even lifted a finger yet.”

A fresh flock of mounted gryphons swooped down at us, trying to knock us from the wall. I jumped up to meet them, blade thrumming as it passed through the open air, splattering me with gore when it passed through other things. On landing, I glanced around for Mercy and realized she was right behind me, shooting down into the square behind us. I tried to pick up the conversation where I’d left off. Right. Why wasn’t Briar killing us? Uh. “She’s old now. Frail. Fragile.”

“She uses magic, you complete dumbass.” Mercy sprung up to stand on my shoulder, so I Artificed a platform for her real quick. “It doesn’t matter how much she can bench-press.”

Springing forward, I plunged into the midst of the alvaren formation driving our people back to the wall. Chop, chop, chop, and suddenly, they weren’t pushing our army back, they were bleeding and screaming. “I’m just saying if she can do more, why isn’t she doing more? Why’s she letting her minions fight and die for no good reason.”

“Seriously?” Mercy flipped off my shoulder, fired an arrow down into a mage, and then found her feet again. “Because they’re minions! She doesn’t care?”

“Hey, don’t call them minions to their faces, you’ll hurt their feelings.” I swung my sword back and forth through the crowd with barely a glance to see what was happening. My Potency was high enough now that it didn’t much matter what these alvaren did to try and block me. The sword was going through them. It didn’t help that I’d been pouring more weight into the sword with every fresh alvaren paladin I’d killed. By now it was bigger than me.

Mercy snapped off a tempest arrow into the sky, setting a pair of gryphons swerving off course to crash into each other by its passage before uselessly bursting on the alvaren shields. Guess they were up again. She spat in disgust. “You just cut that guy in half. I don’t think the emotional damages are their biggest concern right now.”

Kicking out, I missed the alvaren closest to me, but the echo of that kick traveled through Artifice to knock the stairs leading up to the ramparts back into the solid stone wall of the next watchtower. All the alvaren that had been scrambling up there fell into a heap, then I just hauled the raw stone back out again and dropped it on them in a heap. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me.”

“What?”

Deathsense screamed in the moment before the bolt hit, and it gave me just enough notice to toss my sword up and bloom it out into another shield. I was getting used to this. The lightning washed over the umbrella of steel, turning it into yet more molten slag, but I still had enough metal leftover to reform my sword and keep on swinging as the next paladins darted in.

“Oh yeah, the lightning thing. She’s been doing that.”

Mercy gawked at me and the circle of blackened destruction all around us where the bolt had washed out. “Holy crap, how are you still alive?”

“Mostly bad luck at this point.”

Mercy snapped off another tempest arrow, catching one of the bus versions of the gryphons in flight and snapping its front wing off. It spiraled back down to earth, spilling inyoka as it fell. “Her bad luck or yours?”

I ducked a swooping cat-bird, caught it by the hind leg, and slammed it into another charge of paladins. “Yes.”

Slowly but surely, inch by inch, we were turning the tide of battle. The ground troops had abandoned their attempts to abduct our people, turning their focus to fighting. The battle on the wall was turning. Asher’s spells were finally going off, and all the alvaren mages who’d been dealing such destruction were suddenly hard-pressed trying to counter him. All their attention turned to stripping off the elemental status effects that Asher’s spells had layered onto their troops before he could capitalize on them. It was like watching someone try to carry water in a bucket full of holes. There might have been dozens of them to the one of him, but his magic spread out far and wide while theirs was careful and controlled. Given centuries of practice, he’d probably cast as cleanly as them, but for now, sloppy paid off.

Never thought we’d be winning a wizard war with the most magical race on the planet, but it just goes to show that racial stereotypes are not to be believed.

With Mercy beside me, I felt like I had a second to breathe and think. She was picking off so many of the alvaren that I hadn’t even had to touch on my divine powers for a few seconds. It was kind of nice to bonk people the old-fashioned way.

Anyway, it was looking like the numbers game wasn’t working, and Briar could neutralize whatever I threw up at the city, so that wasn’t going to win us the war. Getting up into the city and attacking her directly was just going to result in her punting me off again, and I didn’t really want to relive my last attempt at learning to fly, so that meant we needed something that would stop her from using her magic on me, which meant the Inimicus, which was on the other side of the damn desert, and I couldn’t teleport it back with me because teleporting needed magic which didn’t work around the Inimicus. Damn it.

There was another long pause, and I found myself tensing, waiting for lightning to hit me again. When it didn’t come, I glanced up to the sky in confusion. Briar had been churning them out non-stop so far, what had changed?

That was when I felt the stone beneath us buck.

My powers might not have been able to change the stone around us, but her magic could, and that didn’t seem fair.

This time the lightning bolt leapt up from beneath us instead of lancing down, and whatever I might have done to block it, I didn’t have time. The rock erupted under me, and blazing electric pain enveloped me. I didn’t even see what happened to Mercy because by the time my vision cleared of the after images of the lightning strike, I’d been blasted clear of the whole Bastion to land in a heap by one of the latrines.

The pain didn’t fade this time, which was probably a bad sign, but even that wasn’t as bad as what was unfolding before my eyes. The last lightning blast had shattered the bit of Bastion we’d been standing by. There was a clear view right out to the distant horizon on the Ashlands. Our impenetrable defenses had been broken.

“Mercy?” I called out from my ruined throat. She was probably alive, somewhere. But between all the fallen masonry and the blackened mark on the stone, I couldn’t tell you where she might be found. I staggered my way back towards the wall. I could fix this. I could pull some new stones in from farther afield. I could patch the wall. This was going to be okay. We were going to be okay.

The next bolt of lightning erupted with the same earthquake, knocking everyone but the dvergar off their feet. Low center of gravity pays off again. She wasn’t aiming for me anymore. She was destroying the wall. Trying to topple the whole damn thing into the desert. She was trying to kill us all. The whole damned world.

I needed to stop her. The next rumble started up under one of the watch-houses, and I sprinted over, bringing all my Artifice to bear, to hold it still, hold it steady, hold it in one piece. I strained until the Pillars of Divinity quaked within me, but too much of the stone had already been void-touched. I felt the explosion coming through my extra senses, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it.

That blast knocked me from my feet, and already the magic in the air was swirling, Briar preparing her next spell. I had to stop her. I needed an idea. Anything.

Why did I have to be so damned stupid?

Still staggering through the ruins of our once-great castle, I was almost startled to come upon rock and wood that still felt alive to my Artifice, some fresh thing we’d dragged in to build with. I could use it. I could make… something. Pressing my eyes shut against the next devastating flare of lightning, I frantically searched through my list of skills and divinities, hunting for anything that might be able to stop her magic.

When I saw it, I nearly kicked myself. It was so obvious, I should have thought of it days ago.

Raising my arms, I gathered up all the materiel I could carry, and then I ran for the courtyards. “Asher!”

I flung my gathered junk forward, knocking all the scattered alvaren aside.

“Asher! Get your ass down to the waystone!”

One of the alvaren mages put himself in my path, throwing up his hands and casting some sort of shield that all my debris bounced right off. Nope. No time for that. I slashed at him with my slightly diminished sword, and all the nails stuck in my gathered garbage resonated. They were metal, they were sharp, they were basically swords. And all swords were one sword.

The rain of rusty iron punched through the shield, through the caster, and stuck in his little friends, cowering in the back. Their armor stopped the stabby death but not the impact. The whole lot of them were blasted off their feet, and I went on my merry way.

“Asher, you better already be at the waystone!” My throat was still sore from swallowing lightning earlier. I hoped he could hear me over the ruckus.

Turns out I shouldn’t have been worried. While Mercy and I had gone dashing off in every direction, poor Asher had barely made it to the top of the wall before he’d gotten stuck casting. It was weirdly heartwarming to realize that the dvergar packed in around him, holding back the tide of the alvaren so he could do his vital work, were my dvergar.

Busty and Birger took one side while the surviving Ambergrit boy swept a great-axe back and forth keeping his side of the walkway clear. Asher was on his knees between them so that the frequent arrows couldn’t hit home, though all three dvergar looked like they were pincushions by this point.

A push of Artifice into my boots launched me up to them as all my gathered detritus fell limp into the courtyard. Asher looked up at me with a grateful glance before turning his attention back to the spell at hand, and I laid a hand on the back of each dvergar in turn, flooding them with Restoration.

The alvaren, already frantic in their assaults on Asher’s position, now became frenzied. The sight of two Eternals together was apparently too much for them to pass up. Well, that was just fine. I’d rather they were dead now than waiting until I was gone to cause trouble.

As Asher rose to cast his latest firestorm, I thrust my blade into the roiling flame barely contained between his hands. For a moment, he stuttered through his words, and the flames threatened to explode all over us, then he rolled with it, throwing his great ball of fire up into the air where it exploded out to envelop the swarms of gryphons still in flight.

Fire rolled out across the sky, consuming every birdy cat in its path, then I slashed out with my sword, and the flames leapt down—an echo to my slash, written in fire across all the alvaren on the Ambergrit side of the wall.

I turned and tried to do the same the opposite way, but the fire on my sword had died down. It was worth a shot. With another thrust of Artifice out my boots, I launched myself over the top of Busty and Birger, and I went to work, chopping up alvaren the old-fashioned way. “Hey, Asher, stop casting a sec. I need you to send me somewhere.”

“It does not seem in character for you to flee the field of battle.”

“I’m not going to be gone long,” I barked back. Blade swirling in front of me, trailing blue-tinted blood behind it with every motion. “I just need to fetch the Inimicus.”

“You realize that—”

“Can’t port it back,” I panted through cut after cut. “I know. Got a plan.”

Asher groaned. “Gods save us from your plans.”

I cackled and then turned my blade flat to slap the remaining alvaren clean off the wall with pure brute force. Then the wall was clear.

Winking to Busty and catching Asher by the collar, I leapt down into the square. It was blissfully silent down there for just a moment before another thunderclap marked the destruction of another length of wall.

While Asher cast, I should have been standing guard over him, but I had my own work to do. Reaching out with Aether first to sever the tie that already held me to this world and then flexing Artifice to start work on the place it would be re-attached. If I’d only invested in one Pillar or the other, I probably couldn’t have pulled this crap off, but with Aether and Artifice, I remade my shrine from back by Talon’s keep and set it up in the corner by the waystone.

My soul seemed to tighten as the rickety little structure made of garbage took shape. I was bound to this place now. It was where I would return if my body was destroyed.

Now I had a two-way trip planned. Get there, grab the Inimicus. Soul bond it with one of those loose, flapping bonds I still had trailing off my spirit, and then die my way back here as quick as I could before things could get any worse.

Any minute now.

Asher was so intent on casting I don’t think he even noticed the alvaren coming for us. I threw what was left of my shrine-building junk into the doorway on this level to keep them out, but as usual, I’d underestimated how agile they were. They were up and over the top of the dividing wall and into the courtyard faster than you could say “please don’t murder me.”

Not that they would have listened anyway.

I rushed them. No need for anything fancy, no superpowers or cunning tricks, just a run and a swing powerful enough to snap their swords like they were twigs. Down went the first row and on came the next, spreading out around me so I couldn’t take them in a single hit again. That was just fine.

The first of them hit the flat of my shield with both swords and deflected. The next caught my boot in his chest and rolled over backward, tripping the next in line. At some point, it stopped being a fight and became a slaughter. I wasn’t sure when that had happened. I could still remember when fighting one of these guys and gals was scary, but now they folded around my sword. All of them. One by one they put up valiant defenses, perfectly executing every move they’d been trained to through centuries of drills, and my strength overcame it all.

Some of them ducked and dodged, which brought them close enough to kick. Some didn’t. But it mattered very little. They were going to die. All of them. My sword was singing as it carved through steel, blood, and bone without so much as faltering.

Then the rush was over, there was one last alvaren with one arm left, running away from me. Charging across towards Asher. I darted forward to catch him by the collar of his armor before he could get in stabbing range, but that was the moment the spell burst out from Asher. Lightning washed over me, through me, pulled me apart, and my hand, more air than flesh, passed uselessly through the alvaren.

Then I was gone.

Chapter 16

You can’t really think when you’re in the waystones. You can kind of feel something like you’ve dipped your whole body in popping candy, but you can’t move thoughts around in a brain that just isn’t all there. So, it wasn’t until I hit the sand at Witchglass Overlook that I managed to piece together what I’d seen in that final moment: Asher holding up his empty hands in hopeless terror as the alvaren brought his sword down.

I had to get back. I had to make sure he was all right. That somebody had seen, that somebody had saved him. I looked up at the dying light on the waystone, and I cursed myself for never bothering to learn magic.

There was no sound here but the waves. No hint of danger. I was out of the frying pan and into the silence. It made me feel even more nervous than I had in the midst of the fighting. I had to focus. I had a job to do here. I had a plan. It didn’t matter if Asher died. He was an Eternal; he’d get back up again. Hell, if Mercy was dead after the lightning strike, then he was probably picking her up from Talon’s Keep and getting them both back in the fight now. Nothing to worry about.

With the soft sand beneath me, my new boot-trick-jump wasn’t going to work, so I took off running the old-fashioned way. Slipping and sliding in the sand as I crossed the beach, I ran up the winding path and found myself looking out over the Hinterlands.

I didn’t see much of the land itself. What with the army of Voidspawn.

The dark, cancerous masses stretched out over the scrub grass, every one of them malformed and monstrous, black as night and dripping crude oil-looking ichor from their badly fitting joints. They had hints of the insect about them, but I could see a mish-mash of other animal parts, too. Like Araphel couldn’t come up with any ideas of his own, so he just mangled up other stuff that already existed and crammed it together into new, horrible mockeries of life. They turned as one to look at me when I came up over the top of the little cliff. Every movement synchronized. Oh, crap.

Still moving like parts of one greater organism, they came for me, leaping and bounding, slithering and scuttling. Some of them even launched themselves into the air to take flight.

I had nothing to work with here. I dumped Slaughter into my sword because I felt like it was obligatory, but slashing it at the oncoming dumpster fire did nothing because there was no death in the air. The only death my senses could pick up was bound up inside the being of the oncoming horde, and trying to gain control of that from Araphel seemed unlikely at best and suicidal at worst.

Winning didn’t matter. I had to remember that before I fell into old habits like fighting for my life. What mattered was getting the Inimicus and getting the hell out of here before the Bastion fell completely. That and reporting back on just how far the armies of the Voidgod had already advanced. Two birds, one stone. I was the stone. Time to throw me.

These beasts were not formulated specifically to kill me. They hadn’t been designed from the top down with my specific skills in mind. They were more general-purpose or garden-variety Voidspawn—which came in handy when the first rank pounced at me.

Not one of them was smaller than a horse, so I surged my Potency as they leapt to make sure their weight alone didn’t ruin my day. I impaled the first one, a friendly critter that looked like a caterpillar that had given up halfway through transforming into a wolverine instead of a butterfly. The impact knocked me back a half-step, but at least it let me know they could die without the application of divine powers to the situation.

Of course, that meant my sword was too busy to deal with the half-dozen others coming in from all sides. What luck I had Artifice.

Spikes of solid stone shot up all around me, caging me in but impaling all the Voidspawn coming in at me from the side. It wasn’t enough to kill them, but the jutting spikes of stone were definitely enough to hold them for long enough for me to get untangled from the wolverpede.

One of the fliers swooped down, and I didn’t even have time to come up with a pithy portmanteau name for the monster mash it was before it raked at me with claws that were way too big for its body. I mean, they were nearly as long as its wings, if there wasn’t magical crap going on all around me all day long, I’d have been questioning how this thing could even stay in the air.

My armor parted under those claws like it was pizza dough. Then they bit right into my stuffed crust. It opened me up from shoulder to crotch, and all my insides rushed to be my outsides. Ow. Another came at me from the other side, but I managed to half dodge and half topple out of the way as I pulsed Restoration and sucked all the coils of intestine right back inside me, spaghetti style.

Why was I craving Italian food right now?

Artifice stitched up my armor the same way Restoration had stitched my flesh, just in time for the fliers to swoop back in at me again. To hell with that. Ignoring the incoming agony, I swung for both of them. Claws bit in, but not for long. The impact of my sword with surged Potency behind it cracked carapace and sent the two of them flying into my stone fence before they got deep enough to slow me.

I was stopped dead by the rush of them before, but no longer. I leapt, clearing the closest wave of Voidspawn, and landed with a crash on the next. A crabtopus took the brunt of my landing, the freshly grown spikes on my heels hammering into its central shell, then I did the only thing that made sense. I attacked.

The only way I won was to get through them. The only way I got through them was blade-first.

The fliers swept down at me in perfect harmony, and I launched myself up to meet them, working Artifice in both directions to shoot out spikes from my boots and spires of stone from beneath the dirt. The sandstone crumbled away almost as soon as I grew it, but it bought me height, and a sweep of my blade sent the swooping batsnake and cobrabird flying into their friends in pieces.

I came down hard on some heaving jellyfish-looking thing that was full of hooked spikes, then I bounded forward again into a gorillamantis that looked entirely too like the special assassin spawn that had been sent after me earlier. They were all weak compared to that first Voidspawn I’d met, clumsily slow and devoid of its surety of purpose and motion. These towering, monstrous things were just foot-soldiers meant to slaughter the weak and helpless.

Not on my watch.

With one wild, spinning swing, I exploded my sword out into a thousand shards and launched them out into the massed spawn. The closest died. The rest surged in to take their place. I kept on moving.

When the closest crocobeetle snapped its jaws shut on my arm, the armor was already flowing into a grand spike that I drove up through the roof of its mouth into whatever passed for a brain in these things. I only retracted it and launched the metal along my other arm to make a shield when I saw steel glinting through the new blow-hole I’d made it.

Claws skittered off that shield, then a hatchet-bladed tail swept right past it to plunge into my chest. I couldn’t even make out the individual monsters anymore, they were all one great heaving mass of murderous intent, and I was going to go through them, one way or another. I kept on moving.

Switching over to my Void Pillars, I activated Drain. The cut in my chest hurt, but it wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t using Drain to undo the damage that had already been done. I was using it for what was coming next. More and more attacks rained down on me, and I ignored every one of them, summoning back the shards of my sword to remake it and carve through the Voidspawn in front of my face. Step by bloody step, I kept on moving.

There was no time to freshly forge my sword again, so the next time I swept my blade around, it was my armor that burst away to hang in the air like murder glitter for just one moment before it leapt out into the mass. The Voidspawn didn’t fall back like any sane creature would in the face of inevitable destruction, they kept coming on, driven by their master’s will, clambering over the corpses of their dead to get to me. I cut at them when they got close enough to reach, ducked and dodged their attacks when I could, and plowed on through the ones that I couldn’t. I’d have been dead ten times over if it wasn’t for Drain, and even with it, I could feel something like exhaustion weighing me down. It was probably just all the blood loss. Or the hunks of broken-off monster bits that were still impaled through me. Despite the dragging weight, I kept on moving.

Drain gave out just as the Overlook came into sight. If I’d looked back, there should have been a trail of dead Voidspawn, but there wasn’t. The rest had flowed in to take up that space.

When the next attacks came, I was too sluggish to turn them all aside, and even with extra spikes and shields and all the rest forming as I dragged my armor back from amidst the dead, it wasn’t enough. Teeth latched into my shoulder, and a razor whip of tentacle coiled around my ankle. There were just so many of them. Every one different but united in their unwavering desire to see me dead. The lamprey-cat thing attached to my shoulder hauled me one way, and the jellyfish-looking lemur behind me hauled back on its tail. With a twist, I fell forward, leaving one of my feet behind in the churned mud. Ow. Ow. Ow. Still, I kept on moving, translating the sudden snap as the tail bit through my bone into forward momentum, and rolling over the lamprey-cat, gutting it with fresh spikes, then regaining my footing on the other side. Well, half of my footing.

Without Drain, my health was dwindling too fast. I wasn’t going to make it.

The next spawn hit me in the midsection, not biting or clawing but just tackling me to the ground. I was close enough now to reach out with my Artifice and pull the closest wall of the Overlook down on top of it, catching only a brief glimpse of something human-shaped but constructed entirely out of misshapen parts.

Digging my way out with Artifice, I launched blocks of pale stone in every direction, bouncing hopelessly off the spawn’s chitinous hides. The thing I’d crushed reached up from amidst the rubble and caught hold of my other foot as I sprang for the new gap in the courtyard wall, tripping me to land on a venus-flytrap-faced lizard that promptly snapped shut on my head.

Everything was dark and muffled inside the plant-gecko’s jaws. It was almost peaceful, apart from all the ichor and goop getting on my face. It was tempting to just stay there, to be honest. Life outside the gecko was not looking so hot right now.

I decapitated it with a flailing swing, caught one of the fliers that was swooping for me with the same attack, and then got the jaws clear of my head just in time for my old buddy gorillamantis to catch up and skewer me through the midsection.

That was going to leave a mark.

The other arm burst through higher, punching through a lung, dragging me back and down into the dirt. I heaved and struggled and kicked out, but there was no getting up with those curved blades hooked through me, grating on my ribs every time I drew in another wet breath.

I lost my sword somewhere in my journey to the ground, but I didn’t lose Artifice. Thrusting up from beneath me came a pillar of stone to tear me free and launch me over the wall. A pincer closed on my leg just as I started to lift.

My hips went forward, my spine bowed, and my leg strained and popped out of my hip joint. The footless leg got snapped on by some other claw or jaw, and that got dragged down just the same until all my strength wasn’t enough to keep it intact either. Another pop, another scream from me. I stopped the rising pillar, blood pouring out of my dozens of wounds, and I coughed up some more for good measure. “Kill me! I’ll just come back and beat your asses all over again.”

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, they dragged me down off the pillar to the dirt. The spawn on my legs let go, only to be replaced by some huge, undulating millipede-looking thing. The one hooked through my chest seemed like it’d be hanging out for a while longer, but it did it almost gently. Like it was easing me down to the ground.

I reached out with Artifice for my sword and pulled with all my might, but all I managed to do was make my Pillars of Divinity vibrate impotently. Another Voidspawn had a tight grip on the sword where it lay buried in the back of another of the dead—a strangely elongated human hand reaching out from its mouth to grip the handle and deny me ownership.

Araphel might not have crafted this lot just to beat me, but they certainly understood the limitations of my Divine Powers—probably better than I did.

“All right.” I coughed up another mouthful of salty Maulkin juice. I tasted like pennies. Hot pennies. “You win. Kill me. Do it.”

They didn’t. All the gathered monsters had frozen in place like somebody had flicked the switch and turned them back off again. If I struggled against them, they’d move, tightening their grip or yanking on my dislocated legs, but otherwise, all was still. I took a second to get my breath and try to think.

They weren’t killing me. They were holding me here. That made sense if you knew about Eternals and the way we could pop back up after you knock us down. I was still bleeding a lot though, which meant I was going to die soon, even if they did go on not doing a thing.

Sure, they looked like mindless killing machines from the devil’s worst nightmares, but they weren’t actually stupid. They had to know they only had me for a few minutes before I bled out, so what was the point of what they were doing?

The sky turned from blue to black above me, and I knew. Araphel was coming.

I had to get out of this. It didn’t matter if it killed me, it didn’t matter if they tore me apart. I had to go. I was in no fit state to fight anyone, and Araphel could kill Eternals permanently just as easily as I could. Easier, probably, since he didn’t even have to put any real effort into the killing part.

The problem was, it is actually surprisingly hard to move with both legs dislocated and a pair of spikes through your torso. Every time it looked like I was moving, the creature features just yanked or twisted, the pain would overwhelm any rational thoughts I might have been putting together, and I’d stop. It was like deliberately holding my hand in fire. Reflex just wouldn’t let me do it. My body was rebelling against me.

Not so long ago, I could have just switched on over to Artifice and lost all awareness of what was happening in my body, but no, I had to get fancy and learn how to throw stuff while I was still swinging a sword around. What a dumbass past me was.

Reaching down ever so carefully, I let Artifice brush over the spike of stone in my back. This could do the trick. Even if I didn’t manage to launch myself over the wall like I’d originally planned, I could at least shred myself before Araphel got here.

Above me, the sky had turned completely. Nothing to be seen. Like I’d gone blind.

He was here.

Destruction rolled off him as he approached, tainting the very land he walked on. I reached for the stone to finish myself off, to tear myself apart before it was too late, but it was already too damned late. Just like the stone of the Bastion and the dust of the desert beyond it, his touch rendered it useless to my Artifice, only barely there to my senses and completely unworkable.

The spawn behind me moved, angling me up, twisting its jagged claws in my innards to draw out a scream for its master. All around us, the other spawn dropped to their knees—or the closest things they had to knees.

He came into sight, looking almost comically small surrounded by all the myriad monsters that parted for him like an ocean of evil. “So swiftly did the merry little chase that you have led me on come to an end. I am almost disappointed.”

“Yeah.” I spat blood at him, though it didn’t even come close. “You look… real… broken up… about it.”

“In your own way, you have served me well, little pet. I shall repay that kindness with a swift death, instead of the tortures that I shall inflict upon all the others who defy me. Your friends, I shall rend and reave for millennia to come. Your slaves, I shall make into the playthings of my spawn. All that you have ever known and ever loved shall die screaming in agony, damning you for not saving them. Won’t that be pleasant?”

“Joke is on you…” I had to pause to scream again as the Voidspawn hoisted me to dangle face to face with the Voidgod. I panted out, “Nobody even likes me.”

“How pathetic.” He reached out a long-clawed hand to stroke my cheek. It felt as cold as death. The cold between the stars. “Even pandering to them, promising salvation, you still could not muster any worship.”

“Still better”—I tried to pull away from his touch, but the spawn pressed me even closer—“than making puppets… to bow for you.”

“Defiant to the last. If there was going to be anyone left in the universe when I am done, then that would be how you were remembered.” He tightened his grip on my face, crushing my jawbone between his fingers. “A totem of impotence in the face of inevitability.”

The world was going dark around the edges, and I didn’t know if I was dying or if it was just the malevolent darkness radiating off this douchebag deity. “If I’m so powerless… why are you… so scared of me?”

He laughed, and it sounded like nails on a chalkboard. “What would I have to fear from the likes of you?”

“Let me down…” I spluttered on another mouthful of my own blood, “and I’ll show you…”

“I think not. You are a petty nuisance, and I shall dispose of you as such.”

Drawing back from me, he gathered Slaughter in the palm of his hand. All the things I’d killed to make it this far became fuel for the shuddering flame he held aloft. Permanent and irreversible death, the only light in all this darkness. “I hope you enjoy oblivion.”

Time didn’t slow down, and the world didn’t hold a long breath. His claw came sweeping in towards me, and I panicked, flicking back and forth between all my powers trying to find anything—anything—that could get me out of this alive.

As the burning cold touched my skin, I found it.

Halfway between light and dark, between Lunar and Void, I caught on the same biting point I’d found when the boulders were falling back from the alvaren shield. The stone beneath me, tainted by the Voidgod’s shadow, was in my reach once more. I flung it up.

The claws of the Voidspawn tore through me. My dangling legs were crushed and shattered—as was whatever was left of my poor crotch. I was a ragdoll of meat flapping end over end through the air. Araphel reached for me, that cold fire tickling over my skin as I soared by. I wish I could say I flipped him off, but I was pretty sure my hands had both stopped working.

Through the dark sky and the hissing Voidspawn, I tumbled over and over, all my life draining from me and splattering them. Swooping monsters’ claws scraped over me but found no purchase thanks to all the blood lubing me up. Did I just ruin sex and Italian food for myself in the same day?

When I landed, I almost wished I hadn’t. The courtyard of the Overlook had a very pretty mosaic pattern on the ground that I never wanted to see from this close. The broken parts of my skull shifted when I tried to move, and the whole world spun. I was dead. There was no question I was dead.

I pushed out with what little awareness I had left, faintly sensing the Inimicus where I’d buried it by the outhouse. Trying to pull it up through the earth completely failed, but that didn’t matter. It was in my sphere of influence. I could bind it to my soul now. I did it. Everything I’d come here for. Even when I lose, I win. Even when—yeah, my eyeball just fell out. Even when I die, I die forward. I was the best. I was so tired.

Voidspawn rushed in at me from every side, but they were too late. They couldn’t outpace the reaper. When I rose from my corpse to greet Death, it was with a big smile on my face.

“Hey, man, nice to see you again.”

Death did not respond.

“Listen, I’m really sorry about making you take us to the land of the dead, I know it was bending the rules, and I know you don’t like being told what to do. I get it, honestly, I do. But I figure we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other. So maybe we should…”

He flicked his skeletal wrist, and I flew.

Chapter 17

My eyes snapped open, I drew in a gasp of breath, and a lightning bolt hit me. All more or less simultaneously. The shrine that had been my tether to this mortal realm exploded back into a pile of shattered, flaming trash. The waystone was all that was left of the wall it had been lodged in, built to channel magic instead of exploding on contact with it like everything else in the Bastion. There would be no coming back here again. If I died now, I could respawn anywhere in the world.

Anywhere else in the world was actually looking pretty tempting about now. Rubble was all that was left of this section of the Bastion, and any defenders were scattered or dead. I couldn’t see Mercy or Asher—I didn’t even know if either of them had survived all this. Still, Briar’s wrath came raining down, slaughtering her people and ours indiscriminately, destroying everything and everyone. She was no better than Araphel.

Another bolt of lightning hammered down on me, blinding white, then charcoal black everywhere it had touched. Guess she’d noticed I was back. This time around, I actually noticed that the spell hadn’t touched me. That was great; I liked that a lot. Didn’t love that everything around me was getting destroyed, but magic immunity for me was great.

An inyoka ran by me on fire, so I headed in the direction he’d come from, on the basis that whoever was setting people on fire probably needed to be stopped. It was a quick hop, skip, and jump over the ruins of the watchtower, then a few bounding leaps to get to where the burning was happening.

Predictably enough, Asher and Mercy were in the midst of it. Her wall of fire was up around them, keeping the worst of the alvaren paladins at bay while she picked off any that tried to fly over it. Asher was in the midst of casting something vast and complex. Both of them were wearing nothing but rags, which strongly suggested they’d already died and come back, too. That and the fact that they barely looked maimed.

Of course, the cluster of alvaren all around them combined with the flames made them a giant target when someone in, say, a flying city was looking down at them, so it was hard to guess at why Briar hadn’t nuked them yet, at least until I saw the next bolt of lightning searing straight down at them.

I leapt forward, stretching the Inimicus out into a haphazard shield that certainly wasn’t going to be big enough but might deflect some of the destructive magic away. Of course, I wasn’t faster than a bolt of lightning. All my jumping about was for nothing. The blinding white bolt slammed down into Asher’s waiting hands and coiled between them like a contented cat getting stroked. He wasn’t down there casting spells. He was down there taking them apart.

It was kind of genius, going through all his usual motions of casting a spell in reverse to break the lightning bolts apart. Pure magic might have been super impressive to throw around, but it meant that some clever little lizard dude could work it just like the ambient stuff everyone used. Yes, I know the word ambient. Shut up.

“Miss me?” I plopped down beside them in the classic three-point superhero landing.

Mercy snarled at me. “Took you long enough!”

“Araphel was waiting for me when I arrived.” I shifted the Inimicus into a sword. It was smaller than I’d have liked but still usable. “Had to make small talk, slaughter my way through his army of evil monsters, you know. Polite stuff.”

“Think you could help us out here? We’ve kind of been getting our asses kicked. Had to tell all the not immortal people to retreat.”

That was a relief. I’d been kind of worried they were all dead. I held out my sword to her. “Light me up.”

She rolled her eyes, but she did it, imbuing the magic-resistant sword with divine fire, totally different thing. Still works. All I needed was fire. Magical or divine, it didn’t matter to Resonant Dominion. All fire was one fire.

I spun, sweeping my sword around me in a lethal arc that touched nobody and nothing. The ring of fire around us echoed it, a blade of flame springing out in every direction, spiraling from the central point of us to pass through everything and everyone else. The alvaren toppled everywhere I looked. The fight was over before it had even begun.

Asher went on casting or uncasting—or whatever he was doing—but Mercy let her bow arm drop. There was a shake in her hands before she did it. Guess they’d really been going at it. “Okay, so I need to stop Briar permanently.”

She nodded; her gaze was still distant. “Which you can do, now magic can’t hurt you.”

“Yup. Just need to get up to that city and uh”—I lost a bit of momentum—“murder some old lady.”

Mercy grabbed my horn and yanked me around to face her. “If there has ever been an old lady who needed murdering, it is her.”

“Okay. Right. Yes. Going.”

“Kick her ass, champ.” She slapped me on the back. “We’ll save the rest of our people down here.”

“Right. Yes.” I looked at the city in the sky, looming over us all—so far up that the people looked like ants. I had to get up there. “Good. Okay.”

I needed some distance from the Bastion. Even if I managed to maintain the tricky balance to hold onto the void-nuked rock with my Artifice and launch myself up, I’d just be slamming myself into the bottom of the city from this angle. That might have worked fine when I was ramming a spike through it, but not right now.

Hopping over the smashed-up remains of our impregnable castle got me onto some good, clean dirt with some good, solid stone down beneath it, but there were still an uncomfortable number of the supposedly evacuated mortals milling around, screaming and flailing. They’d get off my rock quick enough once it started going up, but I didn’t really want to launch any of them flying. It was bad enough that Briar was killing indiscriminately, I didn’t need to start on our people, too. “Run! Shoo! Move it along!”

They didn’t really seem to take any notice of me. I swear, one day you’re the center of attention, the next everyone has moved on to the next big thing. I mean, I’ll admit the giant floating city was a big thing, but I should have still had some clout around here. I was the guy who’d inadvertently brought on the end of the world. Okay, on reflection maybe it would have been better if people forgot all about that. Didn’t look good on the old resume.

Time to bellow. “Move!”

They did move, taking in the now alvaren-less remains of the Bastion, most of them heading back towards their posts. More lightning bolts were still hammering down, but they seemed to be exclusively focused on what I guess was Asher. Yet again, Briar was trying to brute force her way through instead of changing tactics. Guess it was just an alvaren thing. Seren had been single-minded like that, too. Before Briar killed her.

I reached out with my Artifice, stretching deep down into the bowels of the earth as far as I could. Back when we’d first started out, my Sphere of Influence had been tiny, barely bigger than the stuff I could reach with my hands, but now it was expansive. If I kept on growing this way, eventually I’d have the whole world within my reach. It was probably a bad sign for my sanity that having all the world in my grasp felt like a comfortable concept to me at this point. I suppose, given the alternative of all the other people who might get it, I was probably the best option, but that was more of a bad sign about the universe in general, really. If I was the voice of sanity, things were not looking so hot for the ongoing existence of all things.

The stone rose beneath me, slowly at first as I coaxed it into the direction I wanted to launch myself from, compressing into denser rock as I drew it all back, ready to be unleashed.

That was when the waystone lit up.

I was pretty sure Asher hadn’t died again. Which meant it had to be someone else who knew the spell. Somebody who had known Talon and learned his magic, some old ally, coming running now that the Voidgod was back in the world. Finally, we were getting some reinforcements. Finally, the Eternals that I knew had to still be here, somewhere in the world, were coming to the rescue.

When lightning burst from the stone and a whole tide of Voidspawn came tumbling out, I was a little bit disappointed.

Just when I thought I’d heard the full range of screams from all the free people of Amaranth, they went and broke out a new can of screeching. Inyoka, dvergar, faun, human and alvaren. All of them took one look at the shiny black monsters that had just teleported into the middle of our supposedly unbreakable defenses, and they lost their frigging minds. Everyone started running everywhere. The screaming went from roller coaster ride to roller coaster ride, but we just saw the car in front of us derail while it was going through the loop, and we were also being attacked by a nest of pissed-off hornets. It was loud, is what I’m saying.

Abruptly, the steady pulse of lightning bolts from on high stopped. Briar must have been panicking now that Araphel’s army had arrived. She probably thought she’d have seen him coming from miles off and have plenty of time to teleport away, but nope. Monsters all up in your face, Briar. Enjoy.

I was not enjoying the monsters all up in my face. I’d charged back into the fray because there were hundreds of innocent people still milling around in the direct path of these murderous black jellybeans gone wrong, but with so many innocent bystanders, I was having some real trouble doling out the pain without accidentally mushing them up.

Somehow, I was taking more hits now than I had when it was me alone against the whole army, mostly because I only had my one little, itty-bitty sword to swing around, but also because it felt like every single pseudo-civilian in the place was intent on getting skewered, slashed, sliced, or otherwise removed from this mortal coil by spiky Voidspawn bits. Since I wasn’t willing to let them all die, I ended up shoving myself between them and the spawn. It hurt a lot. Not as much as some of the stuff I’d been through that same day, but it still wasn’t a fun time.

There were dead all around us, death swirling up from where they were buried in the rubble to empower my Void powers, and I couldn’t use them—not without killing the people I was trying to protect. But that was fine. There were other things I could do with the ruined remains of the people I was meant to be keeping safe.

With Artifice, I hauled all their armor off, all of their weapons, and all of the things they’d failed to use to protect themselves against forces that this stuff had no hope of protecting them against. It flowed through the cracks in the stone, liquid metal until it broke the surface, and I turned it all into thrusting spikes of steel.

Most hit solid chitin plates, knocking the spawn up in the air without penetrating, even flipping a few over. The rest moved swiftly to right their toppled kin. One or two, though, hit home, splitting shells at the joints and spilling inky ichor across the Bastion’s already storm-blackened stone.

That was just icing on the cake. All I wanted was the metal. It flooded to me from all corners of the Bastion, a silvery wave tripping the spawn as they tried to come at me, shimmering and fluid until it reached my feet and became a full suit of armor, then rushing up and around the Inimicus to make a proper great-sword again. Good. I’d felt a bit naked without a sword bigger than a human being to swing around. Also because I was mostly naked.

The rest of the metal still rushed to me, and as I fell into my well-practiced high guard, it snapped ready, too. A ring of swords, every one a perfect match of the one in my hands, fell into orbit around me. Last time these goons had caught me by surprise. Well, not this time.

With every cut I made, every one of my floating swords lashed out. With every crushing blow I dealt, shattering chitin and the gooey innards of these vile creatures, my floating swords dealt the same to a dozen more. I poured Slaughter into my sword, and every one of them took on the same glow. Barely a scrape was all it took, and the Deathtouch flooded out to snatch the mockery of life these puppets had been granted.

I plowed on into them, working my way closer and closer to the waystone. There was no way Araphel was only sending one small heap of murder to us by airmail when he could be sending more.

Right on cue, the waystone lit up again, black lightning crackling through it. Of course, even Araphel’s magic was black. Dude could stick to a theme like nobody else. Nobody was more goth.

It didn’t matter right now; I just had to close the distance, get the Inimicus close enough, and the whole thing would stop dead in its tracks. We might even get lucky, and it would kill all the spawn in transit. That would be awesome.

Pity none of the Voidspawn had gotten the memo about that being the new plan. They had been held back by the whirling typhoon of blades that I carried along with me until now, but now they willingly flung themselves into the dancing blades to block my path, heaping up their corpses so I couldn’t get through. I jumped them, leaping clean over the mass of bodies, living and dead, to land in what was left of the courtyard. Spikes grew from my boots almost out of habit now, impaling the big beetlefox I landed on and securing me so I didn’t go tumbling. My halo of blades rushed after me, carving through every spawn in my wake, and it looked like I was going to make it in time to stop the impending doom from showing up—which would have been a nice change of pace.

That was when Briar hit me with another bolt of lightning.

The Inimicus meant it couldn’t touch me, of course, but being surrounded by blinding light meant I couldn’t see what I was doing, and having the ground beneath my feet explode into blackened dust slowed me down a bit. By the time the strike passed and I was running again, it was already too late. The front rank of the arriving Voidspawn caught some of the blast and exploded into ludicrous gibs, but the rest came tumbling on to take their place.

Asher might have been constrained in how many people he could send through the stones by the limits of his magical power, but I guess Araphel was just a little bit stronger than him. Plus, he didn’t really care if the people he was sending through accidentally got mixed together. Hell, that might have been how he made some of these nasty hybrid combo critters to start with. A squid-raccoon spat at me as I came out of the crater. Nasty.

I didn’t even have time to slap it because more spawn kept on spawning in, pushing the front ranks farther and farther out across the ruined Bastion, even carrying me off in the tidal wave of snapping claws and lashing tentacles. This was as many as I’d seen out in the Hinterlands, and that swarm had filled the plains from horizon to horizon.

A lot of monsters. That was fine. I’d fought a lot of monsters before. I’d fought a lot of these monsters before. It didn’t matter. I could handle anything.

Araphel came through the waystone, radiating evil and destruction.

That… I could not handle.

We didn’t even have the beginning of a plan to handle that. In fact, anything even resembling a plan that we’d had before had just spontaneously combusted.

“Did you think you could escape me? Your soul is marked. You belong to me. Wherever you flee, I can find you. Whatever you do, I will come for you.” The Voidspawn fell away to make an open path between us.

“Do you ever shut up?” I launched my swords at him. All of them, except the one in my hand. He didn’t even bother to move aside. Destruction washed out of him, turning every one of them to rust and then dust until only the very last little grains of what had been an arsenal struck him on the chest, leaving a little pale mark on the oblivion you could see beneath his skin. Note to self: hit him with something bigger.

“Soon you shall know only silence.” He stalked closer to me, gathering Slaughter in his clawed hands. “Soon you shall know only the Void.”

“Soon you’ll know my boot up your ass!” Mercy yelled as she leapt down from the crumbling Bastion wall. An arrow wreathed in wind whipped from her bow as she fell, hitting Araphel square between the eyes. The arrow itself might not have made a dent, but the concussion when the wind abruptly dispersed certainly did. His head snapped back, and for the very first time, I saw him off balance.

Asher didn’t say anything as he emerged from the trashed watchhouse, but he was in the midst of casting an elaborate-looking spell, so I was going to go ahead and assume that was why he was short on quippy one-liners. Not because he was peeing his pants.

Mercy’s eyes were wide, and she was being extra loud to cover up the quaver in her voice. “So what’s the plan, big horny man?”

Plan… right. That thing I was meant to have. I was still stuck on hitting him with something bigger. Well, that would do until I came up with something better. “Think you can keep him here for a few minutes?”

“Savor your final moments, Eternals. Enjoy this last glimpse of light.” Shadows rolled in across the sky like Amaranth was only just realizing Araphel had hopped on over here and it needed to show a big, black blot in the sky above him.

Mercy rolled her eyes. “Did you forget to go to the toilet before we left?”

I backed away a few steps, looking around, working out my angles. “If you keep him at a distance, he shouldn’t be able to uh… annihilate you.”

“Running will not save you. Plotting will not save you. There is nothing in this universe that can withstand the weight of my wrath.”

Mercy finally tore her eyes away from Araphel to look at me and realize, “Oh, crap; you’re serious?”

“Yeah. I mean”—I shrugged awkwardly—“my plan will probably kill all of us, too, but… not as permanently as him.”

Araphel screeched. Nails on a cosmic chalkboard again. Ow. “Are you truly so arrogant that you are ignoring a god stood before you?”

I held up a hand to him. “Be with you in a second, skippy.”

That was enough, apparently. He charged me, just like I wanted him to. I leapt for him at the same time, bringing the flat of my great-sword down between us, even as he lashed out too fast for the eye to follow.

The sword caved in under the weight of his blow, and I was flung through the air, soaring out of the ruins and over the freshly evacuated no-man’s land behind the Bastion, where his aura of destruction wasn’t interfering with my Artifice. Where the compressed rock from earlier was primed to launch me up into the sky.

Like a pinball I launched the stone, deflecting all the momentum that had gone into Araphel’s brutal blow upwards and only shattering most of my bones. Ping-pong. Up I flew into the freshly blackened sky, so fast my lips flapped in the wind. Restoration stitched me back into one piece and let me keep my grip on my sword as I soared up and over the vaulted crystal rim of the alvaren city.

I landed hard, and more of my bones made crunchy noises. I didn’t have the time to worry about that.

The alvaren foot soldiers might have been sent down to slug it out with us peasants down on the ground, but the real power of the pointy-eared dicks was in magic, and almost every one of their mages were arrayed around the outer rim of the city. All the buildings that had been out here were gone, either collapsed down into the crystal below or pushed back towards the center. There was a wide-open space for all the casters to get out here and rain death down on the ground if they needed to. Not that they’d needed to, apparently. Just Briar on her own had been enough.

And here I was, a sitting duck, nothing between me and instant death except the seconds I’d spend falling if they blasted me off. They unleashed on me with every spell in their repertoire. Dozens of different destructive rays, lightning bolts, fireballs, magic missiles, and miscellaneous curses were flung at me from every which way. Enough to turn me into an extremely extinct amphibian of some kind that nobody was going to be kissing back to bipedal. It was a cavalcade of destruction that even Asher wouldn’t have been able to match.

It didn’t leave a scratch.

Each spell withered and died as it came too close to the Inimicus. None of the clever counter-spelling that Asher had done. Just one second it was there, the next it wasn’t. I met the gaze of the closest wizard, and I grinned.

He turned tail and ran. The woman next to him called after him, unleashed her own useless spell, then she turned and ran, too. One by one, every single alvaren in the city realized they could not touch me, and they fled for their lives. I guess the blind loyalty and willingness to throw themselves into the path of danger at Briar’s command was exclusive to the paladins.

That was probably for the best. I really didn’t have time to be committing genocide on my dead girlfriend’s entire species—or the inclination, now that I thought about it. Genocide was bad. I guess. Although I was about to try and kill the one and only Voidgod in the universe. Maybe we should have been trying to get him into some sort of cosmic endangered species wildlife sanctuary instead of murdering his stupid face off. Nah. Wiping out a whole species might have been bad, but murdering one asshole who definitely made the universe a worse place was a-okay in my book.

My sprint brought me to the first row of houses, which I could not help but notice had all been crammed together to block my way like a turtle pulling into its shell. The whole alvaren city had drawn in towards its heart, trying to protect it.

With a surge of potency, I leapt up onto the rooftops without breaking my stride. Closer in towards the middle of this great flying disc, the walls had been raised even higher. Ascending tiers of crystal, topped with spikes and spires of crystal so freshly grown it looked raw instead of polished. There was no longer any external light to twinkle off the city, but inside, the light of raw magic still burned as bright as ever.

All I had to do was follow that light to the bitter end.

What I could leap over I did. What I couldn’t leap over, I shattered with the war-hammer that my sword turned into on the weekends when it was feeling freaky. They might have been magically grown, but they were still just crystals. I could shatter them as easily as I’d shatter your mom’s pelvis.

Up and up I went over the jagged ramparts and the flying buttresses, heading deeper and deeper into the city. Mages took potshots at me and found their spells did nothing. Some of the civilians caught sight of me, then turned the crystal of their windows opaque as fast as they could. Like eye contact with the big bad fawn was going to make them turn ugly.

There was only one good thing in this whole damned city, and Briar by Moonlight had seen to it that she was dead and gone. If the whole place was destroyed, it would make the world a better place.

In the middle of the great circle, there was a dead drop—a well down to the ground floor level of this giant, floating metropolis. They’d done everything they could to protect it with everything they had, but it wouldn’t be enough.

I jumped down.

Crystal, flashing lights, panicked faces, all of it blurred by, and there, down at the base, the heart of the city, was the heart of the entire alvaren civilization. The Keystone. And looming over it like a mother spider over her egg sac was the cadaverous queen of all bitches. Briar.

She knew I was coming, and she had nothing but contempt on her haggard face as she watched me drop. I let the steel slough off my sword, exposing the bare Inimicus to whistle through the air. She held one palm up and clearly expected to catch me. The look on her face when she didn’t was delicious. The magic in the air around me thickened, but it could not hold me. It couldn’t even touch me. Panic spread over Briar’s face as she threw up her other hand, repeating the same mistake. Giving me the time I needed to fall.

The bare spike of the Inimicus absorbed all light, so the only thing that the blazing white light of the pyramid at the root of all alvaren magic had to glint off was my teeth as I hammered the blade home.

Lights out.

All the magic in the city of magic vanished in that one blow. The Inimicus ripped it all away. The light within the crystal faded out. The magic Briar was weaving sputtered out and vanished. Everything that made the alvaren a threat was gone.

The city lurched to the side as the spells that kept it aloft died beneath us. The massive lattice of crystal creaking and groaning, vibrations running up through all of us unfortunates riding on it. All the alvaren around that pyramid had collapsed under that hit. I got lighter as the ground fell out beneath us. It took barely any effort to push away from the Keystone and land on my feet by its base, grabbing ahold of the outcroppings around it where Briar had hastily fused it back into place and hunkering down for impact.

I’d found something bigger to hit Araphel with.

As we fell, all the death that was rising from the battle below came up to meet me, flooding through my body, setting all my Void-wrought gifts ablaze. I used it. Deathtouch flowed down through my hands and into the conductive crystal of the city. I focused all my mental efforts on Araphel. On sending him to the Void, the same way I had the other immortals that I’d slaughtered through my time here on Amaranth. At the very last moment, I remembered that my shrine was gone, and I might actually want to survive this landing, so I used Drain.

Then, abruptly, before I could fashion a single other thought, we were no longer falling. We were crashing.

Chapter 18

Everything went dark. And this time I suspected it wasn’t just because we were too close to the Voidgod or somebody had turned off the glowing lights underfoot. We hit the ground hard, and even though my skull was as thick as hell, there was an upper limit to how much of a blow I could take without getting knocked out. This was basically a plane crash. Not something you’d usually expect to survive, let alone stay awake all the way through.

Drain did its job, though. All the damage that I’d dealt turned into health for me. Dropping a whole city on an army of monsters and alvaren did a lot of damage, it turned out. I don’t think I had ever been healthier in my entire life. They could have sold my sweat as a health supplement. Pure health was dripping from every pore.

[5263/1670 Health]

Despite that, forcing my eyes open sucked. I had the headache to end all headaches like I’d drunk an entire brewery, then followed it up by headbutting a boulder to death. Which honestly sounded like something I’d do after drinking an entire brewery. Or just a couple of beers really. I never claimed to be smart. Just sexy as hell.

The towering crystals above us had collapsed in, shattering in a dozen places but wedging together in a mishmash before they crushed us. The once solid ground beneath us was now more crack than crystal, and bits of Bastion poked through everywhere you looked. Hunks of grey stone, splatters that used to be Voidspawn, and a lump of what I was pretty sure had been the waystone. Guess we came right down on top of Araphel. Good aim on my part, even if it was accidental.

Ever so carefully, I pulled some long slivers of crystal out from where they’d been embedded under my skin and tossed them aside. I didn’t even bleed thanks to all that excess health. It was already ticking back down to normal, but I was calling it a win anyway. The cushion of health had seen me through a lot of stabbing, apparently. There were a lot more of those razor-sharp fragments all around me, pushed out as I healed. The ruined state of my armor was a testament to just how dead I’d have been otherwise.

Right. Focus. Araphel wasn’t dead yet. If I’d killed a god, I’d have expected more fanfare and glory. I’d killed a metric ton of alvaren. I’d killed more Voidspawn than you could shake a stick at. I’d probably incidentally killed all my friends, too. But Araphel was still kicking it somewhere. Probably back at Voidcrown Spire. Still, that bought us time to breathe.

I heard ragged breathing behind me, and I was up on my feet, reaching for a sword that wasn’t there faster than I had time to think.

Briar by Moonlight had survived. I didn’t know how, when even I’d only made it through thanks to a flaw in the way Drain worked. She was old and wily, but without her magic, she’d have had to dodge every flying blade of smashed crystal the old-fashioned way. Maybe there was more to her than I’d thought.

She was on the waystone, halfway up its surface and dangling from the handle of the Inimicus. She couldn’t budge it. She might have been fast, but strength was not her forte, and nobody was pulling that sword from the stone other than the one true king of England, or me. I strolled on over to her as she grunted and struggled, the tinkling of falling crystals and her own heavy breathing covering the sound of my approach. Reaching out, almost delicately, I gathered a handful of her now stringy and greying hair, and I yanked her off the rock.

The heavy breathing stopped when she hit the ground, hard, but immediately, she twisted like a cat, getting her hands and feet under her and trying to scamper away. I hadn’t let go of her hair. She didn’t get far. As soon as she could get a breath, she hissed, “Release me, beast.”

“No.” I tightened my grip on her hair and lifted her off the ground, yowling in pain. She was so old now, with all the ugliness of her personality pushing jaggedly through her once-smooth face. She’d been prettier when she was a svart. At least those little goblins looked like that was how they were meant to be. An alvaren stripped of its magic just looked wrong. “You’re going to tell me everything I want to know. Then I’m going to kill you.”

Despite her obvious pain, she rolled her eyes at me. “Even the most basic negotiation is beyond you, simpleton. You make a demand, then offer something I would want in return.” She forced her voice as gravelly as it would go. “Tell me everything I want to know, or I’ll kill you.”

With a twist of my wrist, I tore the hair from her scalp and let her fall, wailing and bleeding, to the ground. Just to be on the safe side, I stamped a boot down onto her gut so she couldn’t wriggle away. “By the time I’m done with you, death will be all you want.”

Artifice drew all those razor shards of crystal to me, putting them into orbit the same way my swords had been. A million tiny daggers. A million deaths that were too good for her. The light of my eyes shimmered off them, bathing us in disco-ball lighting until I looked down into her face and saw her fear. “How did you plan to kill Araphel?”

She didn’t speak, so I brought a razor of crystal down to brush across her withered cheek. Her face gave away no fear, but nonetheless, she talked. “What utter foolishness. Kill the Voidgod? He is a god. Such a thing is impossible. We had no such wild intention. Banishment was all that we could hope for. By a reversal of the same means we used to bring the humans here to serve us, we meant to send Araphel into the distant cosmos. To purchase ourselves a surfeit of time as he rampaged across reality. Only Amaranth truly matters. If feeding the adversary all the cosmos could have kept him from us, it would have been a small price to pay.”

I drew more daggers of crystal down to hang over her and moved my boot off. If she jumped up now, she’d be slicing herself up. “Of course, your grand plan was to feed innocent strangers to the monster to keep yourself safe.”

“Thou dost not understand what is at stake. Amaranth is the heart of all being. The true world of which all others are mere echoes. If it were destroyed, so too would go all things.” She followed me with her eyes, too scared to move her head in case one of the blades out of her line-of-sight bit into her precious, pretty face.

“I understand just fine.” I couldn’t keep the disgust out of my voice. “You’d do anything it takes to keep you and yours safe and screw everybody else.”

She closed her eyes, trying her damnedest to stay still and not jerk around. There was a quake in her voice when she snarled, “Thou hast no idea of the sacrifices I have made for the greater good.”

I spat on the ground, a little too close to her face. Like that might get the taste of her lies out of my mouth. “What, did you have to skip a manicure once or twice?”

Eyes still pressed shut, she whispered, “I ruined us.”

“What?”

“’Twas as thy first surmised when you drew it out. I was the one to place the shard of the rusted blade within the Keystone. I was the one to reduce my people to bestial savagery. It is the end of times, and I have no desire to carry such a burden of secrecy into my next life—if one should still come.”

I eased the hovering blades back from her. I actually wanted to hear this story. “But… why?”

“Because I so cared for this world and her people that I would not allow the wickedness that was to come. With Araphel gone and our ancient enemy the wyrm on the brink of extinction, the alvaren were not… prepared to return to peace. Alvaren eyes turned to those who had been our enemies and allies in the Revelation and found them to be wanting.”

Oh, she was insane. She’d always been insane. Why was this surprising news? “So what, you turned your own people into goblins so they wouldn’t run around fighting everyone else?”

“There was no talk of combat. But of… solutions. The other people of Amaranth were not enemies, they were problems to be solved. Problems that through the conglomerated power of the Keystone, we could now solve.”

I felt a cold, dead weight settle in my gut. There had been people back on Earth who’d had similar ideas through the years. Not good people. “How do you solve people?”

“They began with the dvergar. First servants of the dark.” She said it like she was reciting a line from some old song. Some old propaganda. “The spell was a simple matter. They were creatures of the stone, and to the stone they would be returned.”

“The curse of stone was you?” My mouth hung open. I was not good at being a scary interrogator, at all.

“I had no part in it, nor any wish to cast such magics.”

“But you’re the queen, the empress. What you say goes. I haven’t met a single alvaren that would fart without your explicit orders.”

“My word is law only now that we are in crisis once more. In times of peace…” She sighed and very briefly looked her age. All the thousands of years seemed to weigh on her as she lay there. “You do not understand anything of our people. Of the laws and strictures that bind us. The strong rule over the weak, and to show weakness would have been to invite my own destruction.”

My disgust for the alvaren just kept on growing. “Not killing everyone in the world doesn’t make you weak.”

“To show mercy to the enemies of my people would make me seem weak. When all were baying for their blood, would it have been strength to simply spill my own and abdicate all control? That was the true coward’s exit. Nay. I would not submit.”

“So what was your solution?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Goblin everyone instead?”

“I… misunderstood the nature of my shard. I believed it would strip us of our magic. Limit us to the matters we could affect before the creation of my Keystone.” She sat up ever so slowly to look at the big dead hunk of stone. I eased the sharp-edged crystals back so she could. “When next my people came together to cast another curse, raining vengeance on our wayward slaves, I seized upon my opportunity to strike. When all were drawing on the power of the Keystone, I drove the shard home.”

“And then you got svarted.”

She sighed again, shrinking a little before my eyes as all the fight seemed to leave her. “The change was not immediate. There was time for panic. Betrayal. Some tried to flee, transporting our entire holy city to safety. Others tried to attack me for my part in their devolution. Those I dispatched readily, for I was prepared to be powerless. All who bore witness to my sabotage fell. Then… I do not know what followed. My memories, my perceptions, all were twisted and sickly.”

“Really interesting; not very useful right now.”

Her face contorted into a mask of rage. “What more do you want to know?”

“Why is he scared of me?”

“Araphel?” She laughed, and instead of the old music her voice used to carry with it, there was only discord and dismay. There was no humor in her laugh. Only bitterness. “You are cut from the same cloth, a Voidgod in the making. Yours is the gift of destruction and death. You drink from the same font. Naught else might kill a god. Even a Voidgod. With time, you shall become as he is. That is why he must deny you that time. Deny you that power.”

I loomed over her, trying to decide if there was anything more she might have to say that I could use. We definitely weren’t going with her “screw everyone else in the universe” plan. There was really only one last niggling question before I killed her once and for all. “If you’re such a kind-hearted soul who doesn’t want the alvaren to reign over the whole world, then why were you still trying to pull the Inimicus out of the Keystone.”

“Because Araphel isn’t dead.”

The crystal slabs that had seemed so solid beneath our feet just a moment before bucked, tilting and tipping me off to the side. I snatched back the shards from Briar’s squishy old lady body before they could bite in, but not without some resentment. She slipped and slid right along with me, both of us landing in a crash at the base of the crystalline spires surrounding this one little pocket of air. From above us, a fresh rain of jagged not-icicles fell.

I caught them with my Artifice, the same way I had the rest, and I set them swirling into orbit around me. Beneath our feet, darkness spread. Not the simple absence of light but the living, thriving dark of the Void. And from that darkness, Araphel rose. Not smashing and crashing like the monsters he’d spawned but smooth as silk. The crystal parted about him like dark water, and he stepped forward from his pit to face me. He wasn’t entirely unscathed after catching a city to the face. There was definitely some sign of damage. The slick black surface of his skin bore a dozen tiny abrasions, every one just a touch off-color. Dusty. It wasn’t much, but it proved he could be hurt. And if he could be hurt, he could be killed.

“Did you think that I would fall to anything so petty?”

“I kind of hoped you might.”

I glanced over to the Keystone. To my sword still sticking up out of it. “Briar.”

Her delicately plucked brow rose. “Whenever you’re ready.”

The Inimicus drew from the stone as Araphel unleashed a roaring torrent of destruction. It flattened out into a shield, interposing between us. The impact of his blast knocked it the rest of the way to me, and I took hold with both hands, Surging my Potency and bracing. All the floating shards of crystal between us were gone. All the crystal behind, I flung in front of the Inimicus shield to protect it as best I could from the raw, destructive power being flung our way. Like my Artifice, Destruction handled simple materials with more ease, and the process to create whatever the Inimicus was made of was complex as hell. It was probably one of the only things in the world that could hold up to this blast for even a moment.

I fed more and more crystal into the maelstrom, every bit disappearing in a puff but subtracting the tiny amount of energy it took to destroy it from what was hitting the Inimicus. Every solid object in my sphere of influence shifted and moved, drawn in and flung into the Voidgod’s strike.

The crystalline spires that had collapsed into a cone above us lost their stability and came crashing down. Anyone else would have been screaming and running for cover, but for me, it was just more raw material. As they fell, the crystal towers spun out into flattened fractals, layering down in front of my shield, bracing against the onslaught. I had to yell to be heard over the scream of matter being torn apart. “Any time now, Briar!”

While I’d been facing the wrath of the Voidgod head-on, she’d been sidling around to his side, slinking at the edges of the room as if we couldn’t both sense her perfectly well. Magic shone from the Keystone once more—blinding bright in contrast to all Araphel’s darkness. All the gathered power of all the alvaren that had ever lived, right there at her fingertips. She used it.

Her spell had none of the chaotic mess of Araphel’s unleashed power. It was precise, targeted, a single blinding white arrow of condensed magic shooting right into the heart of him. When it hit home, his mindless assault stopped dead.

All that remained of the crystals were dust, and the Inimicus was pitted and warped, but there was still enough solid mass to it to make a sword. The open sky hung dead and black above us now. All the ruined city from above was rendered away to nothing by one little attack from the Voidgod.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m amazing, I’m sexy, I’m the greatest person to ever live, but that was a level of power I just couldn’t compete with. Good thing Briar was here.

Her spell had struck home, leaving a blazing white mark that shone like a star in the empty expanse of his skin. He was staring down at it in utter amazement. As I watched, the light within it spiderwebbed out, spreading across his torso. It made it almost to his neck before he laughed, and it faded back to black. “Pathetic.”

“It was a distraction.”

My sword cracked across the back of his head. All my surged Potency finally unleashed on the one I’d been buffing myself up to beat all this time. It might not have lopped off the top of his smug head the way I wanted it to, but I know it hurt. That same dusty white mark that the fallen city had left on him was drawn across where I’d struck, and he staggered forward, right into the lightning bolt that Briar had just called down.

Sure, he was several orders of magnitude tougher than me, but I know that hurt. I could remember how much that hurt.

Still crackling, he staggered back into my next blow, a slice across the back of his knees that toppled him forward, face coming down into another one of Briar’s blazing bright arrows.

With him on his knees, he didn’t seem so huge and insurmountable anymore. He seemed like just another little bully, yelling about how strong he was and using that as an excuse to do whatever the hell he wanted. I lit up the Inimicus sword with Deathtouch, concentrated on sending him to the Void, and swung for his neck.

His clawed hand snapped up to catch it mid-swing. He forced the light out of his body. He rose.

“Did you really think your little spells and your little sword could touch me? I am a god, and you are insects.”

I staggered back, abandoning my sword to get out of his reach as fast as I could. Briar by Moonlight was not so easily rattled. She might have been quaking in terror, but she didn’t run, and she didn’t falter. She raised her hands and thickened the air.

Araphel moved. Protected from the crushing vise of her magic by the Inimicus in his hand, he strolled across and reached out a clawed hand towards her. Inch by painful inch, he reached for her.

“All your centuries are like a blink of my eye. All of your forevers end in me.”

The usual rules about Artifice didn’t apply to things that were Soulbound to me. Leofric had found that out the hard way when he tried to take his sword back. The Inimicus poured down his arm, up the other, and fastened around the wrist of the Voidgod’s reaching claw, hauling him back.

Briar’s hair floated in a nimbus around her. The tattered tails of her dress drifted up like tentacles. Not quite Marilyn Monroe. She was kicking it up a gear. Pure magical power pulsed through her, channeled from the Keystone and shaped by her will so smoothly that if you didn’t know she was doing it, you’d think it was just a fact of nature. Unstoppable.

I whipped the Inimicus back into my hand, robbing him of its protection and setting him staggering forward. The Voidgod strained against her. Then slowly, oh so slowly, he came to a halt.

Briar’s face cracked into a smile at last. “I have him.”

I shaped the Inimicus back into a sword and lined up a killing blow.

“How many of your people still survive?” Araphel whispered. “How many will live once I have broken free of this glass cage?”

“Briar, don’t listen to him. He’s a lying liar who lies.” She could not be buying this bullshit. “He’ll say anything he needs to.”

Araphel pressed on as if I hadn’t said a word. “There are two ways that this can end. I break free of these bonds, I kill you, and I kill the alvaren people. All of them—all across the cosmos. Or you release me, and I grant you leniency.

“If he was so sure he could beat us, he wouldn’t be talking.”

Briar’s eyes darted back and forth between us. Me, a beat-up-looking faun like she used to keep as a slave, him radiating unholy power and grace.

“This upstart nobody knows nothing. He has no grasp of his powers. No chance in the face of a true god. You are not so foolish. You are a queen; you understand that prudence wins out. I shall leave you a world, a breeding population. You will survive, while all others expire.”

“He just wants you to…”

She dropped her hands and fell to one knee. “I graciously accept thy kind offer, my god.”

Chapter 19

“Oh, come on!”

There was only a fraction of a second between her accepting the deal and the air releasing Araphel, but you can be damn sure that I took it. I thrust for his back with everything I had. A wave of destruction washed out from him, obliterating the crystal beneath our feet in a circle and melting the armor off my body, but the blade held out, and it struck home. His flesh seemed to swallow it whole until only the hilt remained. Like everything else had just vanished.

I ripped it back out before the ongoing destruction could break it, and a gob of black oil welled up out of the tiny hole I’d left in the endless dark. I could make him bleed. I could do this.

“That was the last mistake of your life.”

The air tightened around me, but with the Inimicus in my hands, it couldn’t hold me. All that Briar had was her magic, and I was immune. It didn’t stop her from throwing everything she had at me, of course. Darts of blinding white. Lightning crackling in from all directions. She was getting flashy, trying to show off for the new boss. Show that she was willing. I hated her so much.

Araphel came on, lashing out with his claws and driving me back, step by step until I was on the precipice of the pit that he’d come crawling out of. The moment I jumped and couldn’t dodge anymore, he blasted me with a wave of raw Slaughter.

My own Void Pillar flared to life to resist it, but by the time I landed, stumbling, on the far side of the hole, it was quaking and cracking. He was just too powerful.

“Did you think your borrowed power might save you? The Void is my domain. Mine to command.”

When he pounced over the same gap, I swung my sword, and every jagged shard of crystal that was left echoed my swing. A wall of jagged daggers leapt at him and dissolved into nothing on contact with the aura of Entropy that surrounded him. Nothing could get through it.

The first sweep of his claws I managed to parry, but the power behind every casual swipe was enough to wrench the sword from my hands. Only Artifice snatching it back kept me in the fight at all. And as he flowed from strike to bone-shaking strike, he only grew faster.

When I managed to dodge around him and get an inch of breathing room, he blasted me with a fresh wave of destruction, shattering what little armor I had left and sending it crumbling to the ground. Everything his power touched became unusable to my Artifice. Everywhere he stepped, it was as though the world died.

Only the Inimicus and I were still intact, and I couldn’t say if it was the nature of the material or its bond to my soul that was keeping my sword in one piece. Slaughter lined his claws as he pounced for me again, and it was only Seren’s endless drilling that had my sword deflecting attacks when my eyes couldn’t even keep up with his movements. Both of his needle-tipped hands met the flat of my blade and grabbed on tight.

What followed was the shortest and saddest tug of war in history. I tried to pull the sword out of his grasp, and he plucked it from me like taking candy from a baby. Well, I knew how those metaphorical babies felt now. I also felt like crying and wetting myself.

The moment the Inimicus was out of reach, Briar’s spells started to hit home. A disc of blazing light sliced off my outstretched hands at the wrists. A ball of lightning that had been in slow orbit slammed into my back. She was going to kill me. The stupid witch was going to do it. Sure, I’d end up somewhere random out there in the world, but I’d still come back.

Spell after spell hammered home. A lance of light tore through my chest. A whip of lightning ripped off half my face. She blasted and pummeled me non-stop until Araphel cut it all short. “Hold him.”

Damn. I thought I was going to get away again. I guess there were only so many times you could pull off the same trick.

The air thickened until it was like molasses, and the clumsy flailing with the stumps of my arms, that might have passed for fighting back if I were a toddler, came to a halt.

Slaughter dripped from Araphel’s claws. Deathtouch—as performed by the master. He had leaned back to let Briar do her thing, but he stalked back in now until we were nose to nose. Well, nose to smooth, featureless void. “There are few deaths that I can recall, but I shall treasure this moment. Just think, when all existence is gone and I am all that remains, you will still be remembered. Does that bring you comfort?”

“You’ll forget.” Wow, even talking was hard with the air slammed in this tight against me. Restoration hurt, too. Usually, I’d just regenerate my missing bits like nothing had happened, but the new raw flesh was being pushed out against the same vise of magic. My fingers were almost breaking even as they sprouted. “Just like you forget everything.”

If Araphel had to breathe, I would have been feeling it on my face. It was almost more disconcerting to only feel my own breath bouncing back off his smooth nothingness. “And what am I supposed to have forgotten?”

I caught hold of the Inimicus with my Artifice, reshaped it into a bow, complete with a razor-thin wire, then tossed it over to the cloud of lightning surrounding the dislodged waystone.

“I’m not alone.”

Mercy caught her new bow as she reformed, and I flicked a freshly made crystal arrow into her hand as she reached back for a quiver that wasn’t there anymore. That same arrow took flight, soaring across to hit Briar right in the face and break her concentration.

I landed hard, scrabbling back from Araphel as he snatched for me.

Asher was looking down at his hands helplessly until Mercy charged off, and the Inimicus’s power drain went with her. Then as he went to cast something, I called out. “Voidgod!” I tumbled backward to escape another sweep of claws. “Airmail!”

He bobbed his head and switched spells. There wasn’t much left that I could touch with my Artifice, but every scrap of crystal became arrows for Mercy as she bounded around the outside of the room firing into the endless darkness of the Voidgod. Every arrow vaporized before it made contact, but it kept his eyes on her, and that made it worthwhile.

If only Briar was that distracted. She’d tugged the arrow from her cheek, leaving blue blood seeping down into all the new creases and wrinkles she’d grown since I’d last hit her with Slaughter. Her eyes were moving across everything, taking it all in, calculating her next move.

At the same time that she zeroed in on Asher, I was up and running. I didn’t have the Inimicus to block her spell. I didn’t even have a shield. All I had was me.

The blinding white arrow leapt from her extended finger, and I caught it in flight.

Of course, it burned a hole clean through my hand, but it still stopped. I was calling it a win. Actually, I was calling it a lot of things that you can’t repeat in polite company, but that wasn’t really relevant. Asher kept on casting, and Briar fixed her eyes on me. I forced a grin on my face.

“Let’s dance.”

She was more than happy to oblige, and I was painfully reminded that I did not know how to dance. One after another, bolts of light leapt from her fingertips to pierce right through me. She knew Araphel wanted the killing blow, even if she didn’t know why, so she was fettered from throwing everything she had at me. I didn’t have anything holding me back except for the many, many holes she was punching through my body as I charged her.

Araphel’s tail lashed out as I passed too close to him and knocked me clean across the ruined remains of the chamber. I hit the heap of jagged crystals on the far side and smashed right through, bleeding everywhere and giving not a single damn because he’d finally put me outside of the range of his anti-artifice sphere. I reached out, grabbed everything, crushed it down into a single titanic javelin, and launched it right at him.

As he snatched for Mercy, she leapt, kicked off the wall, and flipped clear over his head. Landing with impossible balance right on top of the big lethal spike in flight and then bounding off again when it dissolved on contact with Araphel. Once more there wasn’t a scratch on him, but I didn’t care. There was plenty more crystal where that came from. A whole ruined city of it smashed on top of my Bastion.

I wasn’t Briar. When something didn’t work, I didn’t go on banging my head against the same wall endlessly. Throwing big spikes at the Voidgod didn’t kill him, so why bother. The only thing that had even drawn blood up until now was my Inimicus, and frankly, I don’t even think Araphel noticed.

Whatever we were going to come up with to beat him, it wasn’t ready yet. We needed more time.

I wasn’t going to let the brief window of opportunity when there was material available to me pass. The crystal became a new sword, a new set of armor. When Briar’s next dart of white flame struck home, it dispersed harmlessly through the armor as the crystal did exactly what it had been designed to do: channel magic.

“Now we’re talking.”

As predictable as the tides, Briar blasted at me, again and again, each spell harmlessly spreading through the crystal. The Voidgod came at me from the side, and a wide sweep of my great-sword knocked his blow aside. Asher was still frantically casting, and Mercy was still snatching the arrows I hadn’t even noticed I was making and blasting away at Araphel with tempest arrows to keep him off-balance.

It was a small thing to fuse the crystal of my glove with the crystal of my sword, an even smaller thing to bring it around to catch Briar’s next thunderous blast of pure magic, channeled straight out from the keystone in the middle of this blasted clearing—one other thing that the Voidgod’s power could not unmake. It flooded the length of my sword, and instead of letting it disperse, I held it there, pushing back with my will, even as the magic seared me. This magic was the same as the magic in the Keystone. Exactly the same. All of Briar’s magic was one magic.

As Araphel came on again undaunted, I swung for him. He leaned back barely an inch, utterly contemptuous of my attack, too fast for me to have a hope of hitting. Then the echo sprung out. Not from my sword but from the Keystone.

All of that power. All the condensed power of all the alvaren, pooled together in one place. Briar took little sips from that font to make cities fly and lightning fall, gracefully shaping it into spells that could destroy the mightiest foes or remake the world. I didn’t have her finesse. I just unloaded it all on Araphel in one swipe.

He vanished in a blast of blinding white. I was pretty sure I was going to still be blinking the afterimage of that one away for a good few decades.

For one blissful moment, everything was silent and bright. How I imagined death would feel before I actually got to experience it. But then the darkness crept back in. With so much of its power depleted, the Keystone was no longer up to the task of lighting this whole corner of the world. It glowed dimly like a glowstick the day after the rave was done. My arms shook from the burden of swinging so much power around. Briar was standing at the far side of the clearing in this forest of shattered crystal, staring at me with her mouth hanging open, whatever grace and beauty she’d once possessed completely lost in her amazement. Mercy was looking at me with a pretty similar o-shape to her mouth, but at least she was still cute. Well, cute adjacent.

“I think I got him.”

Behind where the Voidgod had stood, I would have expected the crystals to be blazing bright, but they were as lifeless as the Keystone. All that power had poured into him. He’d swallowed it all down. Now that the blindness was fading, I could see that there was a hole in the crystals, so small you could barely see it in all the crumbling chaos, barely the size of a man.

Araphel came bursting out of it.

I just could not catch a break.

“OK, I didn’t get him.”

Where before he’d been slick and black and perfect, now he was covered in a dull spiderwebbing of barely visible light. Scars of the magic that he couldn’t heal. That made sense, I supposed. Primal was the power of healing, and Araphel couldn’t touch it since he only used the Void. Maybe that meant we could chip him down eventually, throwing one insane attack after another at him until there was nothing left. Maybe.

He’d been a relentless force of destruction before. Now he was pissed.

“Hey, man, maybe we can talk this out…” I caught the first of his raking attacks on the flat of my great-sword, and as it turned out, there was a reason people didn’t make swords out of fragile stuff like crystal. It shattered into pieces from the force of the blow, and I was sent staggering back.

Trying to form a new blade out of the crystal of my armor obviously didn’t work since I was close enough to the Voidgod to make out with him. This close, all my powers seemed to falter, my sphere of influence shrinking back from his overwhelming presence.

My Deathsense screeched like an emu that had stubbed its toe.

All that my failed attempt at making a weapon did was give him an opening which he was more than happy to take. His claws raked across my arms, sending blood and glitter flying in every direction. Even that scratch hit with the force of a truck, my shoulders nearly popping out of their sockets when I made the foolish mistake of staying still in the face of it.

“Why won’t you die?” Araphel reared up, claws ready to rake down me, and this time, I had the sense to jump back out of reach. The swiping claws passed by close enough for the disturbed air to rustle my hair, then he almost doubled over. I managed a half-step in, ready to make the most of him overbalancing before I realized he hadn’t overbalanced, he was just bringing his tail into play.

You never notice how pointy somebody’s tail is until they ram it clean through your guts. Only then do you recognize that, hey, maybe that isn’t just the shape of the thing, maybe it is sharp.

[3001/1670 Health]

“So unto all of your kind, Eternal.” He jerked back upright and flung me over his head and across the open space to smash face-first into the Keystone. Both my poor horns snapped off, and if I didn’t have a skull thicker than a tectonic plate, I’m pretty sure I’d have been dead all over again. Ow.

My guess is that he thought I was dead—or at least out of the fight. Little did he know that I’d only had to burn through all the excess health that crashing the whole city on his army had granted me. Did I mention… ow.

[1144/1670 Health]

His attention was turned to Mercy, who had been chasing Briar around, peppering her with the few arrows she’d managed to hoard before my powers were shorted out by Araphel. Briar was doing her damnedest not to become a pincushion, but Mercy had one hell of a lot of aggression that she needed to work out, and she’d had a lot of practice hitting moving targets since the last time the two of them went toe to toe. Even when she missed, the tempest arrows would blast Briar off her feet and send her scrambling. It was almost gratifying to see the queen bee brought low like this. Almost.

I don’t even know if she saw Araphel charging for her—it wouldn’t matter. Fast as she was, Araphel was faster. Strong as I was, he was stronger. Everything we were, he was just more. In desperation, I blasted him with Spirit Strike.

That was not my best idea ever. Connecting my brain to his was a lot like bringing a knife to a nuke fight. Instead of planting some distracting image of me doing the hokey pokey in his mind, I got the full load of his thoughts washing back along the same connection to me.

Violence, death, depravity—all the usual bad guy stuff. Really detailed plans for how he was going to kill each of the individual gods that he’d sensed from inside his cocoon at the dawn of time when they buried him alive. Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there; if they hadn’t trapped him at the heart of creation, then maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to destroy them all. Oh well, we couldn’t unmake that cake now.

That wasn’t the really interesting stuff anyway. In the midst of all the hideous mutilation and gruesome death, I could still feel the spark of fear inside of Araphel, buried deep but unmistakably guiding everything he did. He was worried that he’d made a mistake. That he’d misplayed by poaching me from the Lunar Court and making me his Eternal. He’d never had to face anything with powers like his before, and while he knew the limits of everything I could do with his powers and had no fear there, there was something still niggling at him—a freshly sown seed of doubt from when he'd cornered me out by the Witchglass Overlook. Something that even his gigantic god brain couldn’t understand.

The connection broke off just before I could work out what was freaking him out so much. All that had been unloaded into my skull like a shotgun blast in the instant that my Spirit Strike had hit him. He broke off his pursuit of Mercy and spun on his heel. “You dare to pry at my thoughts?”

“We all know I dare. Daring is kind of my whole deal.” I grinned, even though I could feel some of my teeth falling out. “Question is, what are you going to do about it?”

He leapt for me—pounced, really—claws fully extended on both hands and feet. I hadn’t been raked by his velociraptor toes yet. That would be a new experience. There was no point dodging or ducking, he was coming too fast. There wasn’t even time to think.

My fist shot out, almost like I was punching on purpose, and it caught him in the gut as he hooked into me. It was like punching a brick wall. Except, of course, nowadays if I punched a brick wall, I’d be left with a heap of powder. Those abs weren’t just rock-solid, they were denser than a dying star.

With his hooked claws burrowed behind my collarbones, he raked me open with his hind limbs. Eviscerating me and sending my guts tumbling out for all the world to see. If I’d had breakfast, it would have been on the floor in the midst of all that pinky purply stuff that definitely was not meant to be exposed to the open air or dragged through broken crystal shards.

His hind claws hooked in my pelvic bone, and he yanked his hands free to grasp me by the head. I had no idea why I was still standing. All I knew was pain as he tightened his grip and crushed my skull. “With you gone, all shall be mine. Vengeance. Peace. All mine. At last.”

It was hard to hear much of anything over the sound of my skull being powdered, but I’m pretty sure I heard Mercy yelling, “Asher!”

My hands had found the Voidgod’s wrists somehow in my flailing, and I pulled against him with all my strength. It wasn’t enough. The vise just went on tightening. My skull creaked and cracked, and for one very brief moment, I really wanted my mom.

The tempest arrow exploded in the space between us, throwing both of us out and away and robbing Araphel of his grasp on me for just long enough for me to realize I was still missing most of my internal organs, so running like hell probably wasn’t going to be an option.

Araphel lashed out at Mercy. A blur of Slaughter rolled out from his hand and hit her square in the chest. She went down, and the Inimicus bounced away.

With the distraction dealt with, Araphel stalked back towards me. “Such faith you had in your little friends, and what has it benefitted any of you? Now they shall share in your fate.”

It took way too much effort to force my head up to look him in the face. And even then, I felt like I didn’t have the strength to string a sentence together. His brain smooshing had seen to that. All I managed was to mumble out, “Bye, bitch.”

Then the lightning took him.

Not the perfect white power of Briar by Moonlight or his own special black lightning magic. The simple blue crackling stuff that had been enveloping us ever since we found the waystones. All this time, Asher had been casting the spell to send Araphel far, far away, and finally, he was disentangled from us all and it could work.

The Voidgod barely had a chance to look down and see the crackling before it yanked him into the stone. The power gathered there, ready to jump off to wherever Asher had decided to send him, but I had a better idea.

The Inimicus became a sword in flight, and by surging Potency and Vitality, I was able to launch myself up to meet it in the air, catching it in both hands and hammering it down into the Waystone. Asher’s spell died. The lightning around the stone stopped dead.

We’d just killed Araphel.

Chapter 20

Legendary Foe Defeated!

2000 Glory Gained

I waited for my ass-ton of Glory to be promptly delivered, but it failed to show up. I mean, what I got wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t enough for killing a god—not by a long shot. So I was guessing this little death wasn’t as permanent as we might have liked.

As soon as my Surges wore off, I collapsed, mumbling, “Heal, please,” on my way to eat dirt.

So, full disclosure, I may have left most of my guts back over on the other side of the crystal clearing, so what Asher ended up doing to me with his ever so helpful Cauterize spell was actually barbecue the hell out of my guts until the bits that were left outside burnt off entirely. It bears repeating: ow.

It was enough to get me back to capable of standing upright again, so I was going to call it a win. Or at least I would have if standing up hadn’t made me a sitting duck for Briar’s next lightning bolt.

Right between the eyes. 10,000 volts. I think I forgot how to speak Spanish after that one. Did I know how to speak Spanish before? How am I meant to know, I just got lightning bolted in the damn brain!

Without the Inimicus bow, Mercy was defenseless in the face of Briar’s magic. Hell, I was too. The difference was that while Briar was trying to nuke my head off my shoulders, she was holding poor Mercy helpless in the air, one hand raised, almost casually to pin her with the weight of the crushing air while her other one wove the spells she flung our way.

The Inimicus was right there, wedged in the Waystone, but if I hauled it out, there was no telling what would happen. Whether Araphel would burst back into being, whether I’d be opening the doors for another Voidspawn invasion, there was too much at risk.

“Thou should have slain me when thy had the chance.” The next bolt of lightning wasn’t directed at me but at Asher, blowing whatever spell he’d been weaving apart and wreathing him in sparks. He let out a yelp of pain as he staggered back.

“I shall not see the extinction of mine people for thy protection, Eternals. I have learned my lesson. Arduous and agonizing as it was. I have learned that only by putting the alvaren first is there any hope for the future.”

Mercy yelled over the middle of Briar’s dramatic betrayal justifying speech, “Let me down so I can kick your ass!”

“Thou art…”

This time I shouted her down before she could get going. I’d had a hell of a day. And I was really tired of all this. “Yeah, yeah. We’ve heard it all before. You’re better than us, so that justifies all the evil crap that you do. Don’t you ever get tired of repeating the same lies repeatedly? You aren’t better than anyone. You aren’t smarter, you aren’t stronger, you aren’t even prettier anymore. You’re a fossil. A relic. A holdover from some ancient, miserable time when everyone had to go around cutting each other’s throats for a share of the pie. We can be better than that. Even you.”

She blasted lightning at me again.

Artifice was back in action properly now that the big bad boogeyman had gone bye-bye, so it was no great effort to haul a spike of crystal over to catch her blast and discharge it harmlessly to my side. When that didn’t work, panic kicked in. She scampered backward as she cast something huge and complicated, mumbling the spell under her breath as if we would even know what she was saying otherwise. Before she could even cast it, I encased her in crystal. Some of it had been nullified by contact with Araphel, most of it hadn’t, but I could work both kinds by see-sawing back and forth between my Pillars, eyes strobing moonlight and darkness.

Her spell went off inside of that glassy tomb, and the whole thing lit up a vibrant purple before exploding apart. Still, she managed to hold onto her concentration, keeping Mercy in the air.

Asher was casting frantically behind me, gathering up some massive attack or defense or… look, I don’t know how magic works, I don’t know what the hell he was doing. I just trusted that he knew what he was doing. He’d managed to punk the Voidgod, and that earned him a whole lot of trust.

There was nothing I could work into a bow for Mercy, even though her current hovering position would have been great for sniping, so she was reduced to jerking around and providing color commentary on the fight.

“Ooh, watch out for that laser eye thing she’s doing.”

I barely managed to dodge around the crackling blue light that leapt out from Briar’s haggard face.

“Watch out for that sonic scream, that’s going to…”

It washed over me, driving me to my knees and shattering all the crystals I’d thrown up to block it.

“Oh, can you even hear me through your bleeding ears?”

“Look out, bitch queen, he’s going to throw a whole wall at you!”

Briar leapt gracefully into the air, passing over the top of the slab of crystal I’d drawn together to knock her off balance.”

That was enough to make me snap back at Mercy, “Whose side are you on?”

She was dangling upside down with her arms crossed. “Hey, I just want this total ass-kicking to be fair.”

Guess I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off the prize. A blast of ice caught my foot, pinning it in place just long enough for her to follow up with the same spell all her little minions had used to repair the flying city last time we smashed it up—growing crystal up from what was beneath us to envelop my whole leg and keep me trapped.

Whatever that big purple thing was that she tried to do earlier, she was making a second attempt. If I ended up turned into a frog, I was definitely making Mercy kiss it better.

The newly made crystal had never felt the touch of the Voidgod; it was pliable, workable, and it became a shield between me and Briar as her blast went off, deflecting it around me in a shower of firework sparks.

I launched the molten remains at her and then kept on coming. I didn’t even have to bother dealing with the one cold foot she’d given me. The icy crust broke apart with just a little yank. She wasn’t used to dealing with demi-god strength, obviously.

Briar tumbled aside so that the hunk of crystal soared by harmlessly, but the dip in concentration made Mercy bob up and down. She started scrambling to turn right way up again so she didn’t land on her head.

Asher’s spell lashed out, a barrage of flames surging through an arc to strike at Briar wave by wave. She threw up a shield, then another as that collapsed. Always moving, always weaving her next spell. Asher’s flaming hosepipe ran dry before she ran out of ways to get around it. Still, it didn’t slow him, and he fell right into casting the next thing. Mercy called down to him, “Asher, stop interfering. This is something Maulkin has to do for himself.”

“What?” I was so confused, Briar nailed me with another spell. Right in the shoulder. Plants burst out of my exposed skin like I was a time-lapse gardening video, vines reaching out to entangle my whole torso and stop me in my tracks. “Why would you think that?”

Mercy was halfway to upright, still doggy-paddling for all she was worth. “For like… revenge and stuff.”

I pulsed Deathtouch, and all the plants growing on me dropped dead and fell away. “You don’t want revenge on her, too?”

“I mean, yeah”—Mercy paused to shrug—“but she didn’t kill anyone I was shtupping.”

Another spell lashed out at me, and I had to dislodge a plate of crystal from under my own feet to catch it, setting me stumbling off-balance. “Is that even a word?”

Another perpendicular shrug. “Maybe?”

“Well, whatever.” I got my balance just in time to duck another blast from the laser eyes. “There isn’t a priority system. If one of you can kill her, then kill her.”

“Well get me down then!” Mercy yelled over the crackling.

“I’m trying!”

By switching back and forth from Void to Lunar Pillars, I managed to haul up a haphazard wall between Briar and me before her next spell could fire off, but it blocked the bolt of lightning I didn’t realize Asher was launching at her in the same moment. Sparks showered over me, and I called back, “Sorry!”

The crystal wall still crackled and glowed with lightning, so I severed it from the crystal below and booted it at Briar. It was too wide to dodge and too tall to jump, so she had to waste her next blast of magic smashing it apart instead of zapping me.

She was running out of space to run. She’d backed all the way to the edge of the clearing and started moving sideways. Whatever big bad spell she was working on was really sapping her concentration because Mercy was bouncing up and down like an apple in a barrel.

Whatever she was trying to cast, I just knew that I didn’t want it going off. I was getting pretty tired of chasing her around in circles, too. Unsurprisingly, fighting the Voidgod had not left me in the best of health, and no matter how many times I tried to use Primal to heal, it just wasn’t happening yet. Maybe it didn’t recharge when I was in Void mode. That was definitely something I should have experimented with when I wasn’t in the middle of a fight—although that would probably require a few minutes in a row when I wasn’t in a fight.

A few lances of crystal tossed her way did nothing to distract Briar. I should have remembered how easily she’d always dodge around everything. The next ones I exploded into shrapnel mid-flight, and like a champ, she just took the hit. Blue blood trickled from a hundred tiny cuts. Her black dress that had looked so elegant when she was floating around earlier was a tattered and sodden mess. Her spell went off.

There was no sudden explosion, no lethal blast, not even a hint of me getting amphibian around the edges. For a second, I thought the spell had failed, then I saw the ball of crackling power hovering above her upturned palm. Oh yeah, this was going to sting.

A bolt of lightning jumped out from it and hit me square in the chest, scorching through the tattered remains of my armor to sear my skin right off. The sensation of wind passing through your rib cage is not one that I’d like to repeat.

Another one blasted out, then another, too fast for the eye to follow. I tossed out chunks of crystal to intercept them, but they lanced around in random directions before swooping back in to strike me. The farther I made them travel before they made contact, the less of me they burned away, but damn, that still stung. I lost half an ass cheek to one of them, and another scorched what was left of the horn on the left side of my head. My burning hair smelled like popcorn. Scalp peeled and flaked away to fall like ash.

At least it didn’t hurt. The damage was too bad for little things like pain. All the parts that I’d have used to feel pain had been the first to burn away.

When the next bolts came for me, I didn’t try to catch them. All the crystal dust that covered the ground became airborne instead. One surge of Artifice tossed it all up. All that sharp, crystal glitter in the air was definitely some kind of health and safety issue. My workplace definitely should have required masks. Good thing we had healing, or this would have sucked in a few years’ time when we all got magical asbestos poisoning.

The dust cloud did what it was meant to. The lightning dispersed through it harmlessly. Her next bolt and the next did exactly the same. It wasn’t even any effort to hold the crystal in the air. Every tiny piece was so light, I couldn’t even feel it. Although maybe that was just the numbness of getting so close to death again.

“I didn’t get to finish asking you my questions earlier…”

She launched another bolt of lightning out of the cloud, this time at Asher. But I caught it with another chunk of crystal, exploding into a fresh shower of glitter. She spat, “I owe you no answers.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong.” I caught her next bolt and the next on a pair of long, spindly lengths of crystal that I tossed her way. Neither hit, but she had to dodge, and her grip on Mercy loosened up accordingly as I sapped her concentration. “You see, you do owe me one more answer because you took something from me. Something important.”

The thunderstorm in her palm never slowed. Bolt after bolt of lightning came at me. Raw blinding light. The cloud refracted most of the power, but some she’d overcharged. I deflected them as they came zig-zagging slowly towards me. Even as I plodded on, I dressed in another suit of crystal armor, mostly to keep my insides inside.

A bolt of fire roared past me, and she had to abandon her lightning bolts to dispel it before Asher’s shot roasted her alive. Her ball lightning fell into orbit around her. “Thou dare to speak to me of theft? Thee who robbed me of my victor’s right and used it to unleash the adversary?”

“I’m not talking about things.” Clad all in crystal, I drew in more to make a sword. She unleashed a lethal dart of white flame, but I deflected it as casually as swatting a fly. “I’m talking about time.”

She was backing away now. Her grasp on Mercy getting weaker and weaker. Mercy was moving in the air freely now, trying to swim down to the ground. Briar snarled, “You live forever, buffoon. Whatever I took from thee shall soon be replaced.”

“I only had a month. One month with Seren before you snatched her away.”

Briar’s face contorted into a sneer, slimming down until the sharp angles of her cheekbones protruded like blades. “This again? She was a servant who betrayed her mistress. What was your expectation? For her to be welcomed back to my loving arms? She clung to you because you showed power and would have abandoned you the very moment she saw my power outstrip yours. I spared you heartbreak.”

“It was her heart to break. Not yours.”

Guess Briar wasn’t big on sentiment because she looked sick to the stomach when I said that. And she repaid my soft-spoken words by unleashing everything she had at me. Lightning poured from the ball in a torrent, and she spun and dashed bolt after bolt of blinding white flame against my armor. All about me, it glowed the same center of the sun color as the flying city once had when the Keystone was in its rightful place. Just a little bit more charge and I’d explode.

Mercy dropped down with catlike agility when the last remnants of Briar’s concentration gave way. With no bow in her hand, all she could do was throw up a wall of flame to stop the alvaren queen from escaping another step backward.

She needn’t have bothered.

Briar was on the warpath now, all her attention on me. All her efforts bent on wearing through the meager defense this crystal armor granted me and frying me alive. It didn’t matter to her now that I’d come back again. Nothing mattered to her but proving how superior she was to me. Proving that Seren would never have chosen me when the time came.

I let her, pushing all the power that she was pouring into me down into my sword until it shone brighter than the sun in the sky ever had. Still, she threw in more and more until the Keystone itself looked ready to die from having been drained so badly. And then, only then, did I swing my blade. Not at her, but to the side.

The blast of all that trapped magic unleashed leveled all that was left of her crystal city, revealing the honest stone of the Bastion beneath, where it still stood after all of this. The magic left in the Keystone leapt out too, following the tide of its magic that had gone before it.

All magic was one magic. The stuff in my sword. The stuff in the Keystone. The stuff in the alvaren queen.

Briar’s face in that moment will never leave my memory. The moment that she felt the magic that she was channeling through her body leave. Not just stripping her of her strength but tearing its way out of her. She had devoted millennia to mastering magic, to making it her slave the same way as she wanted to enslave everything and everyone else, and in a single swing, I’d set it free.

On the side facing Mercy, she remained as beautiful as she ever had been, but on the other side, there was nothing left but scorched and dangling gibbets of flesh over blackened bones.

She collapsed—at least, what was left of her.

Legendary Foe Defeated!

3000 Glory Gained

I dropped to my knees just a moment later, half-baked by all the magic I’d been holding onto. Tears were pricking at my glowing eyes, and I couldn’t say for sure if they were grief or relief that I’d never have to see that awful bitch ever again. Seren was avenged. I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t bring her back. But this, I could do for her.

Mercy and Asher crept over while I was still kneeling in the shattered remains of our last line of defense. They didn’t say anything at all. I’d expected a good little rant from Mercy. Maybe some words about the recently deceased that couldn’t be repeated when there were ladies present. But nope, just silence and then, after a long moment, a group hug.

I probably should have been more surprised to be getting lizard-man cuddles, but Asher tended to go with the flow, and if Mercy had given him a stern enough look over my head, and I’d looked miserable enough, I was pretty sure he’d go for pretty much anything. We stayed there in the blissful peace for almost a full minute before I felt Mercy tense, and my own Lifesense gave warning that people were coming.

Chapter 21

The three of us were back on our feet and fighting ready before I even had time to wipe my tears away, but it turned out we shouldn’t have been worried. Dvergar and faun, humans and inyoka, they all came flowing back into the ruins we’d made out of the Bastion. Some were hurt, and some just looked dazed and confused. I couldn’t even guess at how many we’d lost, between the alvaren, the Voidspawn, and the city falling on top of us. At least half of our little armies had to be gone. I was mostly relieved that anyone had survived at all.

I was probably equally relieved that none of the creatures crawling out of the ruins and rubble were Voidspawn. I was guessing that any that hadn’t been instantly mushed by getting a city dropped on them had died when Araphel croaked, but I kept an eye out anyway.

What did come as something of a surprise were the alvaren. As they came crawling out of the wreckage or flying down on their winged steeds, there was no more fighting, no more sneers and contempt. They looked as desolate as our people. If everyone wasn’t so shell-shocked by everything that had just happened, I’m sure the inyoka would have done their best to tear the pointy-eared dicks a new hole or two, but as it was, everyone just silently drifted over towards us.

Swaying on my feet over the corpse of the alvaren queen, I was expecting a little bit of push back from all of her loyal minions, but just like Seren had done before them, they fell to their knees before me.

“Huh, guess I’m king now?”

One of the closest alvaren answered without lifting her head from a full-on kowtow. “You have proven your virtue through might.”

Silence rang out as everyone looked at me. You know me. I love being the center of attention at all times, but even for me, having the whole population of the Bastion staring was a little uncomfortable. One of the closest dvergar hefted an axe, ready to start taking heads as soon as I gave the word. No pressure, Maulkin.

“Okay, I don’t have enough time to unpack your whole mess of a culture and fix it right now, but if you’re willing to fight beside us, I’ll have you.”

There was an instant uproar. Even Mercy turned on me, yelling on behalf of all the gathered… everyone. “You cannot be serious.”

“Why not?” I shrugged my shoulders, reminding myself just how badly hurt I was. “They’re going to get apocalypsed with all the rest of us. Why shouldn’t they have the same chance to fight back?”

“Because they’re monsters?!” Mercy bellowed. Gods, she was so tactful. “They were turning the inyoka into raw materials. They’ve spent millennia as svart, and they still nearly wiped out the dvergar. They’re the bad guys!”

“There is only one ‘bad guy’ at this moment, and that is the god trying to wipe out all existence.” Asher was on my side. That was nice. One more vote for not genociding the alvaren. “We can work out philosophical differences once our invariable doom has been averted.”

Mercy spat on the corpse beside us. “They’ll turn on us, same way Briar did.”

My temper slipped its leash, and I roared back, “Then they’ll die like she did!”

That same awkward silence came right back again. The alvaren that had tossed themselves on my mercy probably hadn’t realized that it only ran about an inch deep by this point. I’d never seen an alvaren sweat before. At least, not outside of a bedroom sort of scenario. Yet there was no question that these were sweating now.

“I’ll take whatever oaths you’ll give that you’ll obey me the way you would one of your own, then I’ve got work for everyone. We’ve got days, if we’re lucky, before Araphel comes back. It’ll take him time to make new spawn, and I doubt he’s going to come through the waystones again after the way we just dunked on him, but he’ll be back, and he’ll be mad as hell about it. We need to get the wall back up, the Keystone installed wherever it is going to be the most useful, and the rubble cleared. If you’re a fighter, congratulations, you’re on the wall now. If you’re a thinker, come up with a way to kill a god permanently before he gets here. If you can use magic, reinforce the hell out of this place. We got lucky this time around. Next time Araphel will be coming with everything he’s got.”

The beleaguered alvaren started queuing up to beg forgiveness and promise me the world, but the rest of my people came creeping closer, too, horror and amazement playing over their faces as they drew close. Mercy rolled with the punches, setting everyone that she could to work. I was going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting to get the wall back up, but the more everybody else helped out, the better. At least with all the alvaren crystal dumped in my front yard, we wouldn’t need to worry about hauling in materials to do the rebuilding with.

When I turned from the line of alvaren to see Gunhild staring up at me, I nearly jumped out of my skin—something I suspect I might have literally been capable of at that point after all the beatings and healings I’d been through that day. “You be thinking this was lucky? Most of me boys, sent back to the stone, and you think we got lucky?”

Mercy glanced back over her shoulder and sighed. “Compared to what Araphel’s capable of, yeah.”

The little color I could see around the stone on Gunhild’s face faded until she was completely pallid. “He could have done worse?”

“If we hadn’t hit him with a whole city, he could have killed everyone here without even trying.” Mercy was not tactful, and her idea of instilling morale was apparently all about completely terrifying everyone in earshot. “By himself. No spawn. No magic. No weapons.”

Gunhild went from pale to looking a little bit green. “We need to run. We need to retreat. To hide.”

“He’s a god. There’s nowhere to run. He’ll just keep coming until the whole world is dead. We’re making our stand here because there’s nowhere better.” I directed the latest of the alvaren mages to the Keystone. A few of them were already gathered around it, trying to work out how to move it somewhere it might actually be useful. “I know it is scary, gods help me, I know. He scares the crap out of me every single time I think about him. But you know what? He’s scared, too. He’s scared of us.”

She looked up at me with open doubt on her face. The problem with the quiet was that everyone could hear us. Everything had come to a halt.

“I’ve seen inside his head. Most of it is horrible crap, but deep down, he knows we can stop him. He knows we can beat him. Why else would somebody who has all of time to make plans be in such a rush to throw everything he has at us? Last Revelation, he took his sweet time, played it out slow. This time, he’s barely born, and he’s chasing after us?”

Asher looked up from his study of the Keystone, his expression almost eerily placid. I braced myself for him to come out with more of his doomsaying. Begging for death instead of oblivion. But that was not what was coming. “Maulkin speaks the truth. I have seen it.”

There on his face was the same thing I saw in the eyes of the dvergar and the faun. Faith. Absolute certainty that I could save him. That I could save all of us. No pressure. No pressure at all. Sweat beaded on my forehead.

“Right. Back to work. We’ve got some big plans to lay out, and we can’t do it when this place is a mess.” I clapped my hands, startling them all back into action. “Somebody short and stony bring me some plans to rebuild this place better. Somebody with horns get me a headcount on survivors. Somebody with pointy ears bring me a pair of gryphons and a timescale to cure the Curse of Stone.”

Every dvergar in earshot stopped what they were doing. I swear, it was like we were playing musical statues instead of preparing for a siege. “The Curse…”

“The alvaren can fix it. We can get into details later. Get to work! Move! Go!”

To my perpetual surprise, people actually listened to me when I yelled. To my even greater surprise, the first ones to get their asses organized were the alvaren. I had half a flight of gryphon riders lined up and ready for orders by the time I was halfway through the line of oath-makers. Turns out that the alvaren that weren’t in the crashing city or on the ground under the crashing city had survived in greater numbers than anyone else. Who would have thought?

We were lighter on mages than I would have liked, given just how badass alvaren magic was, but I was not going to turn down soldiers on a day like today, and I certainly wasn’t going to object to soldiers that came with their own flying transportation.

“All right, I need most of you in the air. A large portion of our people scattered when you attacked, and we need you to bring them back. A lot of them are probably going to try to kill you when they see you. Don’t let them. Use this as an opportunity to practice apologizing. You’re going to be doing a lot of that in the next few days.” The alvaren seemed to take that in stride. I guess it wasn’t swallowing your pride when it is your supreme god-king or whatever telling you to do it. “I also need to borrow a couple of your fastest bird-cats.”

There were some uncomfortable glances between the gathered alvaren. “May we ask thee, to what purpose thou require them?”

“I don’t want Voidspawn coming in the back door again. I’m sending Asher and Mercy through to destroy the Waystone in the Hinterlands, then I need them back here snappy. I figure flying is the way to go.”

Yet more sideways looks. This would be a lot easier if people weren’t scared I was going to chop their heads off every time they asked me a question. “The war-beasts take much training to command. Your compatriots…”

“Can you ride along with them?” I clapped him on the shoulder and watched all the color drain from his face. “It is okay, they’re little people like you. Not faun.”

Another of the paladins piped up since the one I had a hand on seemed to have gone mute. “It would slow our progress greatly.”

I walked with them, guiding them towards the Waystone as we spoke. “Here from the Hinterlands, one way. How long are we talking?”

The two unfortunate, abducted gryphon-riders met each others’ nervous glances, then communally announced, “One day and one night.”

I gave them another slap on the back to send them staggering off in search of Mercy and Asher. “Then get going.”

Turning back to the rest of the rapidly thinning crowd of alvaren, I forced a smile. “Mages! I’m going to be picking your brains as I do other things. Are you cool with that?”

The closest white-robed witch woman bobbed her head. “Whatever is thy will, Master.”

“Nope. Not master. Don’t have time to dig through how your whole society works and fix all the problems today, but we’ll think of something else for you to call me that doesn’t make my skin crawl.”

That was met with stony silence, but honestly, that was fine. I could probably do with fewer people arguing with me all day long. “Okay, let’s talk Curse of Stone. You’ve got the Keystone. How much time would it take you to undo it?”

Another mage stepped up. It was weird to say that he looked older than the rest, given that alvaren didn’t really age, but there was something in his confidence and bearing that made me think he’d been around longer than the rest. “To formulate a counter-spell and enact it, if all our efforts were turned to this task, perhaps a week? Many who cast the original curse have expired; much has been forgotten.”

I was just about to set them to work on it when Gunhild interrupted. “There don’t be any rush for it. After the fighting be done, you knife-ears can put us right.”

“Really?” After all the millennia of misery, I’d thought the sooner the better.

“We be out of time, lad. To learn how to move again, to reforge every piece of armor.” She nodded firmly. “After would be better. My people have borne it this long, we’ll bear it a while longer.”

I patted her on the head as I passed, and she tried to punch me in the nuts with only partial success. My voice was up an octave when I said to my new alvaren minions, “All right then, on to the next job…”

The sun crept down towards the desert of ash as my work went on endlessly. People we’d thought were dead we found among the survivors trailing in from the countryside all around us. People we’d thought would live forever we found down in the broken hollows where a proud castle once stood. Mhirka had died on her feet, pierced through with a dozen arrows, twice as many alvaren dead and scattered about her. The chiefs of the faun, every one of them a giant, I’d never even bothered to learn their names. A solid half of them had refused to flee in the face of the inevitable. Most had died in the fighting, but there were some we uncovered as I hauled the ruins apart to start the rebuilding. They were doubled over, crushed to death along with the humans and dvergar they had been trying to save. Their backs braced to a falling ceiling. Their legs broken by the unbearable weight of a city falling from the sky.

For all the people in this world without the power of the gods at their command, this was what war looked like. For me, it was exciting, even fun. For them, it was a thousand tragedies like this. Every one of these people were… people. They had lives, friends, favorite sandwich fillings, a side of the bed they liked to sleep on, and because I decided to throw a city at some other supernatural goon, they were gone.

I stopped sulking almost an hour later when I unearthed Birger hiding inside a cookpot. How he’d survived the whole city crashing down around, how it hadn’t smashed right through that copper cauldron, I didn’t know. The falling rubble hadn’t crushed him, but I had to give him a quick blast of Restoration after I nearly hugged the poor guy in half.

Once the dvergar were returned to their stations and took in the full extent of the destruction, they seemed weirdly gratified. All that death and destruction, and all they could see was their next great project to work on. For the first time, I truly understood how these weird little people had managed to dig all the way to the center of the world and unearth a god. Pure, unbridled obsession was hidden just beneath their stoic surface, stark raving madness bubbling up at the least provocation.

Well, as it turned out, when the world was ending, a little bit of crazy was just what you needed. They drew up fresh blueprints, incorporating stone, crystal, and new clever tricks of architecture into the mix. Did I understand how most of it worked? No, I did not. Did I do what I was told? Yes, I did. That’s the great thing about not being smart, you can listen to people who’re smarter than you and go along with their much better ideas without making it a competition. Supposedly the new way that I’d built the walls, with the magic channeling crystal run through it along the ramparts, would let the mages tap the Keystone without having to strain themselves, redirect any magical attacks away from the weak points, and the new stair and ramps setup would mean we could redeploy reinforcements and siege weapons so fast we’d basically doubled our manpower—which was handy, given that my faun headcounters had come back and declared that we’d lost almost half of our people.

Some were still missing, and some might have been obliterated in the fighting. The forces at work were immense. Anyone up on the wall-top when the city came down… well, we were probably never going to find them again. Anyone that had fallen from the wall was liable to be dead, too. It was one hell of a drop. Which just left the lucky few who’d been outside the drop-zone, or in some very dense cover, to make it through. As I worked my way along, every time flesh was revealed amidst the dust and rubble, I would rush in, Restoration surging to my fingertips. It was useless more often than not. There were a few people that I managed to bring back from the brink of death, but not nearly as many as were gone beyond the powers of Primal to repair.

I tried not to think about them. About how cold they felt to my touch. About the little stories of their lives that my Spirit Touch tried to tell me. It wasn’t helping. I needed to keep focused on the task at hand. If I didn’t beat Araphel, then everyone was going to end up dead. Deader than dead. There wouldn’t even be a sad little echo of their memories still hanging around to be watched. They’d just be gone. Everything would just be gone.

There was so much material from the shattered city that I ended up heaving hunks of it over the Bastion wall, just so I could get to the parts of the Bastion I was trying to reach. Some of what I threw over had dead alvaren in it, but nobody needed to know that. If the alvaren could keep their emotions hidden, I didn’t feel any real need to go digging for misery. Not after the day I’d had.

The work had no end. Not really. There would always be more needing done, places where I could improve on the original design, or where the impact of the battle that had just passed had left cracks right down into the foundations. Now that I could work the void-scarred stone a little, things became easier. It was still a struggle, trying to find the balancing point between the light and the dark, but I managed it for long enough to fuse the old to the new.

The alvaren mages still trailed after me, silently waiting for my next question, all the way through it all. I came up with some new plan to try every few minutes, and I kept on prompting them to come up with some ideas, but apparently volunteering a suggestion was against the alvaren religion or something. They just… wouldn’t. It was some time after midnight before I realized they weren’t going to go away on their own, and I told them that they could all go sleep or eat or whatever they wanted to do, and they graciously but gratefully dispersed.

You couldn’t buy that kind of help. Well, you could in Amaranth. You could buy it with gruesome acts of violence against whoever had been in charge of them before.

Anyway. I felt like I knew a good bit more about what our new allies were capable of and how we might bring it to bear on Araphel. As it turned out, the big problem wasn’t the lack of magical power—thanks to the Keystone, we had more than we’d ever need. No, our big problem was a lack of people that could actually use it.

They’d stuck with the whole racist vibes of their pre-svart culture by making it so only alvaren could use the Keystone, so even though we were all on the same side, Asher didn’t get to tap that. Neither would Farmer if he ever came back from wherever he’d run off to.

With a minute to think, it was finally time to spend some of the experience and Glory that had been racking up since my latest death. Yet when I closed my eyes and tried to see my character sheet, things were… fuzzy. The distinction between the different Pillars seemed to be blurring when I turned to them like they were all merging slowly together into one big pillar at the center of my being. I didn’t really know what to make of it until I remembered some of the bitching and moaning from the Lunar gods. The world was super organized and ordered when we first came to Amaranth because the Solar gods had been winning for so long. What happened on Amaranth was reflected in the way the rest of the universe fit together, and while it had been stagnant and decaying slowly for so long, since we’d come along a lot of stuff had been changing pretty drastically. With the alvaren coming back, and the shards being collected, everything was in a state of flux. Chaos. Just like the Lunar gods wanted. I peered at the mass of skills and Pillars all blending, and I shrugged, pouring all the Glory I’d earned into the big amorphous grey pillar and doing the same with my experience. It would make me stronger, I knew that for sure, even if I didn’t know exactly how.

Abseiling down the wall might have been thrilling the first time I did it, but now that I was on the hunt for cracks and crevasses, it was less of a delight and more of a chore. I bounced left and right from each of the towers, searching out damage and patching it, then scrambling up the wall to do it all over again. Most of the damage was towards the top of the wall. That was where a city had hit it, after all. But as solid as the work had been when this great wall was first raised, the passing centuries and accompanying ash-storms had still managed to do a number on it. The base was ever so slightly concave from the abrasion, and while I was setting that right, I couldn’t help but feel what was down below.

Obviously, the foundations of something this huge went down into the earth a fair distance. Most of what had been exposed of the Bastion had once been underground—before the exploding Voidgod had stripped all the soil and stone away. But now standing here at the base with my sphere of influence fully extended to search out trouble, I found what it had been built on top of.

The stone parted around me like water as I took a dive into the Bastion. Down I went leaving a tunnel into the depths until I emerged into stale air. The wood was petrified, the brickwork crumbling with age. The glass in the windows long since melted down into puddles on the floor. Yet there was no denying that there was a city here once upon a time—and not a small one either. It had been built on a scale that meant I could pass comfortably through the doorways without ducking my freshly regrown horns beneath the lintel.

The craftsmanship wasn’t flashy. There was none of the dvergar carving or the alvaren fluting. It was a simple place made a brick at a time by strong hands and strong backs. Not meant to impress but to provide shelter. It was a faun city. Buried down beneath the dirt. Buried back before even the Revelation. And it wasn’t even the lowest point. My senses stretched out, and down below this city built by a people who had only been nomads for all of existence as far as history knew, there was another, older still, made by some other people with solid stone slabs haphazardly assembled.

Below that, there was another and another. Endless compacted strata of them. Civilization layered on top of civilization. All the way back through time to the limits of my senses. If I dug down deeper, I was sure I’d find more. All the way back through the stone age and beyond until I was looking at heaped sticks meant to provide shelter, long turned to crude oil by the weight of everything that had come after. The whole of Amaranth was like this. Nothing ever went away. Nothing ever changed. It just repeated over and over on top of itself. All the way back to the beginning.

I collapsed everything I could on my way back up. Crushing it all together into something solid, making sure there was no way some burrowing Voidspawn could sneak through these ruins to our side of the wall, but I shouldn’t have bothered. The Voidgod didn’t know that any of this was here. It had all been forgotten. Everything that should have been remembered was crushed under the next thing layered on top.

There was so much wrong with Amaranth. So many problems. But when you got right down to it, I think this was the root of them all. Nothing ever went away, so nothing could ever change. Everyone was still living under the shadow of the Voidgod from thousands of years before. People had never rebuilt, and technology had never gone marching on. It was like the whole place was stuck in stasis.

I was pondering this and other deep thoughts—like wondering if I could make pizza out of Amaranth ingredients—as I scrambled all the way back up the face of the Bastion. The rising sun crept up with me, highlighting the places I hadn’t patched cracks right and making me pause to work on them. By the time I reached the top again, I was well and truly ready for a nice lie-down, only to be confronted by a mass of inyoka waiting for me there.

Right. Probably should have expected that we’d need to have a little talk about me enlisting the alvaren who had until a few hours ago been making inyoka smoothies to grow new cat-birds. I kind of wished that Asher or Mercy were here for this conversation because as awkward as they were when it came to talking to people, I had no clue what to say to make this okay. “Listen, guys. I understand if you’re unhappy with the alvaren joining the team, but the thing is—”

“We don’t care. Shut up. Listen.” That was so rude I actually did shut up. Damn, up until then I’d thought that the inyoka were all shy and submissive. Turns out they just didn’t have anything they wanted to say to me. “The wyrm are coming.”

“Crap.”

Another of the speckled inyoka stepped up to confirm it. “We have only days, then they will join with the Voidgod’s cause.”

I held up my hands like it might slow them all down. “Wait, which wyrm are we talking about here?”

“All of them.”

I blinked hard. I couldn’t have heard that right. “All of them?”

“All of them.” The gathered inyoka bobbed their heads. I felt a little bit seasick. Or maybe that was just the sensation of mounting terror bubbling up from my guts.

“Wait, hold up.” I rubbed my eyes to get the bobbing waves of inyoka out of sight for a second. I felt like I needed some solid ground to stand on. “How do you know the wyrms are coming? Any of them?”

“We are inyoka. The will of the wyrm flows in our blood. What they feel, we feel. What they desire, we desire.” Yet another of the inyoka piped up. I think that one was a girl one, but honestly, I couldn’t tell much what with them being lizards and all.

“But I thought you guys were uh”—I struggled for a word that wasn’t going to sound like weird old-timey racism—“unaffiliated. You haven’t got the single-color scales.”

A tail swished in annoyance. I recognized that at least. I couldn’t tell boys from girls, but I could tell when I was pissing everybody off. Probably more helpful to me in the long run anyway. “We did not hatch from thin air. We are the descendants of those who broke free of the wyrm’s yoke. Between us, we bear the blood of every inyoka line, though dilute.”

“Okay, so you are tuned into every wyrm radio station instead of just one?” Why wasn’t Asher here? He’d get all this genetically engineered snake baby stuff.

“What is a… It does not matter how we know! The fact remains!” The original inyoka was shouting now. I think that might also have been a sign that they were getting irritated, possibly. “The wyrms come!”

I looked around at their nervous lizard faces, and I knew what I had to do. The same thing that I’d done earlier with my whole schtick about Araphel being scared of us. They needed a confidence boost. “Then let them come. I’ve killed wyrms before. I’ve killed the biggest, badass wyrm that there ever was.”

Strangely this didn’t seem to impress them all that much. They actually looked more worried than before. “They mean to bring their whole flights with them. You shall not face a single wyrm but a sky filled from horizon to horizon with burning death.”

I gave them my patented Maulkin grin. “Buddy, you’re just describing my regular Tuesday.”

Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say, too. All the inyoka seemed to be wilting away from me, fear spreading as they realized I wasn’t going to run and hide when the wyrm came. I was going to stand and fight. They didn’t get it. They genuinely thought that fighting a few flappy fire lizards was scarier than facing the Voidgod. “You have not seen the wrath of the wyrm. All that the alvaren achieved at the height of their power, the wyrm could match by raw strength alone. For thousands of years, they have been unopposed, building their broods. There is not a force in this world that can stop them. They are chaos made flesh.”

I held up my hands again, feigning submission. “Then we’d better get Araphel out of the way quick, so they’ve got no good reason to fight us.”

The closest of the inyoka snaked in closer, hissing into my face. “They need no reason. Your existence is reason enough for them to will destruction and death upon you.”

I met the slit pupils of that terrified stare without a flinch. “Well, I can’t die to anyone but Araphel, so I’m not exactly quaking in my boots.”

“And what of us?” The inyoka melted back into line with the rest of them. “What of your followers? Will you let us burn?”

“Nobody is burning. Zero burning. We’re going to kick Araphel’s ass. We’ll kick any wyrm asses that we need to afterward. Then everybody gets to go home and have their happily ever after. Okay?”

“I know not if this is wild arrogance, or if you truly believe that you can wield power enough to best the masters of this realm, but we will take you at your word and hold you to it.”

“You do that. Just wait and see,” I called after them as they dispersed. “I’ll kick their ass. I’ll kick anyone’s ass. I’ll kick your wyrm’s ass.”

I startled when I turned around and Busty was just standing there listening in. “I really need to learn your name.”

“That you do be needing to do.” A chuckle made its way out through her grime-striped face. I made sure not to look at the tear streaks running through it. She’d been there when we dug out what was left of the last Ambergrit boy and took it hard. “You filthy thing.”

“So what can I do for you?” I let my hand come down on her shoulders. It pretty much spanned her whole back. Bit of a size difference between faun and dvergar. “Other than nickname you something sexist or sexy, depending on your mood.”

I could feel her chuckling through my palm before I could hear it. “If you be thinking buxom’s the worst I’ve ever been called, you’ll be in for a fright. Engineers want you, and old Gunhild figured you wouldn’t be running from a friendly face.”

“Oh, gods; not the engineers again.” I groaned.

“They’ve got some new ideas for you to be trying out.” She reached up over her shoulder to take hold of my finger and lead me down the ramp to where my doom awaited. “Tricks and traps and the like.”

“I’ve spent the last eighteen hours building things, let me nap.”

“You don’t be needing sleep, and you don’t be needing food neither before you give me the sad spiderling eyes.” She smirked up at me.

“Spiderling eyes?”

“Aye, the knee-high fuzzy ones. They look up at you with all their eyes sparkling when they be wanting your dinner or a pat.”

Forget the apocalypse, forget rebuilding the Bastion. This needed my full attention. “You kept giant spiders as pets?”

“Of course,” she said as if having giant, venomous scuttle monsters around was the most normal thing anyone could possibly do. “What did you be having?”

“I mean, most people had cats and dogs.” Her head tilted to the side as I said it, but at least she seemed to understand what those things were and how they’d be a good pet. “I had a hamster. Clive.”

“Hamster?” she repeated back to me. “Like a pig?”

“No. No, a hamster. It is like… uh…”  I tried to picture Clive. Back from the good old days when I was a human. “A really chubby rat with no tail?”

“And you thought a cute, wee spiderling be strange?”

“Touché.”

She slapped my arm. “Just be keeping your hands above my belt and leave my touché alone.”

It was too late to explain; I was confronted with my doom. There seemed to be more engineers and architects every time I met up with the dvergar. Like they had nerded out so hard that they reproduced asexually, splitting into two smaller dorks and swelling their numbers. What was unexpected were the few alvaren standing with them. I was pretty sure I’d told them to get some shut-eye, but here they were, collaborating with the enemy.

There was no way this was good news.

I turned to Busty for help, but she’d already slipped away. “Don’t leave me with them!”

“You’ll be fine, big tough guy.” She smirked back over her shoulder. “You can kick all the asses, right?”

Looking out over the mass of paper-waving dvergar, I felt my stomach sink like a lead weight. Then they were on me.

When Asher and Mercy came back, I nearly burst into tears with relief. I’d been down in the ashes for so long, my whole body was coated in white. I mean, I was usually grey, so it wasn’t a massive difference, but I still felt gross. I waved up at their bird-cats as they soared on by, and to my delight, they circled back over the ramparts and flew down to see me.

The alvaren and the gryphons they’d been riding looked almost ready to keel over, but Asher and Mercy looked happier and healthier than I’d seen them in days. I guess they got a good few hours napping in on their flight. Lucky swines.

Meanwhile, here I was down in the dirt doing the damn hard work that was going to win us the war. Or help us at least. Maybe. I was trying while they were napping was the key point.

“Welcome back. Everything is terrible.”

Mercy was doing her best to contain her glee and utterly failing. If she had a tail, it would have been wagging. “Are they making you do work again?”

I put on my squeakiest voice. It was still somewhere south of bass. “Oh, are they making you do work again?”

Asher cut off the bickering before it could get going. “It seems that great progress has been made with the repairs in our absence.”

“Yeah, turns out having a demi-god slash bulldozer slash full-on divine construction crew can get your wall rebuilt fast. Who would have guessed?”

Mercy had made her way over to me, and now she wiped a patch of my chest clean of dust so she could lean on me. “So you are good for something.”

“You know what, Mercy, I’m too tired for pithy remarks right now. So I’m just going to go ahead and take that as a compliment.”

She smiled at me sweetly. “It wasn’t one.”

“It is now.”

“So what are you doing down in the dust?” Looking around at the desolation, it really did look like I’d been doing absolutely nothing for the last few hours. Just how we wanted it to look.

I glanced around to see if anyone was listening. We were in the middle of a desert. Of course, there wasn’t anyone listening. Even the alvaren and their mounts were keeping a respectful distance. Leaning down, I whispered conspiratorially, “Secret plans.”

“Secret plans?” Mercy looked genuinely excited. Time to not tell her anything.

“Enacting plans.” I nodded sagely. “The big plans. The plans that are secret.”

“Even from us?” Asher wasn’t smirking because he didn’t have lips, but there was a distinct smug vibe coming off him now that he was in on the joke and Mercy wasn’t.

“Until I get something to eat and a comfy seat, yes.”

Mercy snorted. “Is there even a comfy seat left in the Bastion after you bombed it?”

“Hey, bombs explode.” I shrugged her off me. “I just crushed it.”

She stumbled back upright and scowled at me. “So the plans?”

“The secret plans,” I stage-whispered back.

“Yeah, those. You want to bring us up to speed?”

Can you believe I actually managed to gasp? “And spoil the surprise?”

“Oh, so it is a secret surprise now?” Her smile was getting thinner by the minute.

“Yeah.” I leaned in closer and whispered right in her ear, “I’m going to pop out of a cake and do a striptease for Araphel.”

For a moment she was deathly silent, and then she started screaming. “I can’t stop picturing it. Oh, gods!”

After he got over the initial shock of her sudden screaming, Asher’s tail lashed in irritation. “I fail to see how that will be an effective countermeasure to the powers of the Voidgod.”

“Oh, I totally get it.” Mercy crowed. “He’ll kill himself the minute Maulkin gets naked. I’ve nearly thrown myself in the sea a few times after seeing him dangling about.”

“Hey”—I pointed at her, stopping her dead in her tracks—“if you aren’t going to buy, stop window shopping.”

“Dude, you are seven feet tall. All that wrinkly, waggling mess is at eye-level.” She was making some sort of hand gesture. Like she was trying to mime an elephant saying hello. “I don’t know how the dvergar haven’t thrown up yet.”

I turned my back on her and her wiggling hands, crossing my arms and smearing ash back over the one clean patch on my chest. “I guess they’ve just got taste.”

That earned me another Mercy snort. Maybe she was the hamster that Busty had been thinking of. “They think that sleeping on beds made out of slabs of rock is a good idea.”

“So they like it rough.” I grinned. “Good to know.”

Asher stepped in between us. “With great regret, I must call an end to this charming exchange as I believe that we must return to preparations for the impending invasion. While we have traveled with all the swiftness of our winged steeds, darkness has pursued us. The Voidgod’s armies are afoot. He marches on us with all haste and with all the numbers he could muster.”

“Good.” I nodded.

It wasn’t often that you got to see Asher, the loquacious lizardman, at a loss for words, but there was a solid few seconds of silence before he yelped, “In what world is the news that I am conveying good?”

I threw a dusty arm around his shoulders. “In this world, where all the wyrms have woken up and are heading this way to sign up with him. So if he goes any slower, he’d have a flappy, flaming, lizard army with him as well as all the Voidspawn.”

“The wyrms know?” Beneath my arm, he froze. It was a fascinating thing that I’d noticed inyoka do. When they got scared, they didn’t shake or twitch or run; instead, they went so completely still you could mistake them for a mannequin. I was guessing it was some weird, old reflex.

When he did move, he burst into frantic activity, flailing his arms about. “We must modify our plans rapidly. Our intention to weather the Voidgod’s siege here was dependent on him having only a limited force of flying spawn to field against us. The Bastion will not hold against an aerial assault from a dragon flight.”

Leaning back to avoid a slap, I added, “Oh, not just one, all of them.”

He sank down onto his haunches, face in his hands. “Each time that it seems we might have won a step forward, the fates deal us another cruel blow.”

“The apocalypse is going on. Expecting them to sleep through it has always been wishful thinking.” Mercy was tactful as always. “Besides, like Maulkin said, I’m pretty sure Araphel is going to get here before any wyrms, and it isn’t like we are going to be having a long-drawn-out fight with the guy. I figure we’ll get half an hour before he stomps us flat.”

“Not exactly inspirational, Mercy.”

“What, you want me to lie about it?” Her laugh had a manic edge to it this time. “Oh yeah, we can definitely kick the ass of a god who can’t die. No problem. We’ll even have time for sweet tea and cakes afterward.”

“Why are you like this?” I sighed.

“I’ve had to spend the last month and a half babysitting your dumbass. Oblivion sounds like a holiday after your crap.”

“I took too long to dig you up, didn’t I? You got brain damage back when we first arrived on Amaranth.”

Asher shut us both up with a shriek. “How can you be making jokes at a time like this?”

“Why not?” Mercy shrugged. “It isn’t like things can get any worse.”

I, at least, had the good grace to look bashful about the fact I didn’t care. “Honestly, I feel a lot more stable now that I know we’ve hit bedrock. Now anything I do can only make things better.”

“You’re both insane.” Asher sank back down. “The universe is ending, and you are cracking jokes.”

I met Mercy’s stare, and it was a genuine struggle not to burst out laughing. She was fighting the same impulse. Maybe we had just been pushed too far. “Those things are all unrelated.”

Mercy counted them up on her fingers. “We’re insane. The universe is ending. We’re cracking jokes. Three separate things.”

“How have I retained my own sanity for so long in your company?” Asher groaned.

“Pretty sure you haven’t. You’re right here with us fighting the Voidgod.”

At first, the noise he was making sounded like a sob, low and guttural in his chest, but as he lifted his head, I could see his shoulders heaving with laughter. “Ha. Haha. You are correct. Quite mad of us all.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here with us.” I offered him a hand up, and he took it. “Even if you did have to go completely nuts to get here.”

“At the end of all things, I can think of no finer company to keep.”

“Oh, my gods”—Mercy groaned—“will you two get a room.”

“What’s the point.” I grinned at her. “There are no beds. Or chairs, apparently.”

“At least I wouldn’t have to see you tonguing each other.” She mimed puking. Lot of miming from her today. I could have done with about ninety percent less miming. Not just from her but… in the world.

I pulled Asher to his feet a little harder than I need to, so he staggered forward and ended up pressed against my dusty self. I gave Mercy what I hoped was a salacious smile—I didn’t even know how to spell it, let alone what it meant.

“Well, there’s a mental image to keep you warm on a cold night.”

“I am endothermic,” Asher informed us immediately. “I do not require external warmth to survive. This is a common misconception.”

Mercy finally managed to stop herself from choking on her own laughter and finally pointed to the Bastion. “Can we just go up top and talk to the adults?”

“I should probably warn you before we go up, we’ve lost a lot of people.”

Mercy’s smile faded. “Yeah, we knew that, but we got the alvaren to make up numbers, right?”

“I mean, people we knew. A lot of the faun leaders. Mhirka. A lot of good dvergar who’ve been with us from the start.”

“Oh.”

That oh hung like a dead weight in the air. “Yeah. Didn’t want you looking around for somebody and not finding them.”

Softly, she asked me. “Is that why you’re hiding down here?”

“No”—I forced a smile back on my face—“that’s because of the secret surprise plan.”

She slugged me in the shoulder, and I deserved it.

“Come on, I’ll explain while we climb.” I headed over to my rope, only to realize they weren’t following. They glanced awkwardly over to their gryphons. “Right. Okay. See you upstairs.”

Chapter 22

“…And that’s how I think we can defeat the Voidgod and live happily ever after.”

It was several hours later, the sun had set, and I had finally finished all the construction jobs that had been invented for me by the dvergar. My cloud of alvaren wizards had drifted back around lunchtime, and so Mercy and Asher had been present for at least some of the newer insane plans we were making. Asher had spent a good portion of his time gawking at the feats of magic we were proposing, while Mercy, like me, didn’t know enough about it to know whether we were asking them to do something harder than pulling a rabbit from a hat.

The attentive alvaren had been fended off about dinnertime when I finally ran out of stupid ideas for them to shoot down, and now the three of us were settled around a campfire like in the good old days. Except, I couldn’t really remember any good old days when we got to do this. Mostly it seemed to have been endless violence. Which was also fun, don’t get me wrong, but it came with fewer s’mores.

There were no marshmallows in Amaranth, as it turned out, so my s’more plan fell through—probably for the best, given that both Asher and Mercy were staring at me with their mouths hanging open. The s’mores would have gone cold.

Eventually, Mercy blurted out, “Are you insane?”

“What,” I mumbled around my turkey leg. Or… well, it was some sort of big bird. Maybe lizard. Who knew at this point? Tasted good. “You don’t think it will work?”

“Which bit?” Mercy was yelling. That probably wasn’t a good sign. “You’ve got about nine million stupid ideas all going off at the same time.”

I had my mouth full, so Asher had time to weigh in. “There is certainly a degree of complexity to your planning that I had not anticipated.”

Gulping hard, I finally got to defend myself. “I mean, the dvergar came up with a lot of the stuff, and the alvaren came up with a lot of the other stuff, and then because I listened to them, I had to hear how the faun did their ambushes in the Ashlands, and from there, it just made sense to combine some of the ideas.”

“All of them?”

“Look, we need all the help we can get at this point!” A few of the various soldiers at the nearest fires looked over fearfully, so I lowered my voice again. “It is all going to be fine. Everything will work. Araphel will die. Fireworks. Massive drunken orgy.”

Mercy pulled a knife out of her dinner and pointed it at me. Specifically at my waist area. “If you come near me with that thing, I’m cutting it off.”

Asher took a more pragmatic approach. “If it would provide Maulkin with the encouragement required to defeat the Voidgod, then I would be willing to promise some degree of consensual coitus.”

“Always knew you had the hots for me.”

His eyes narrowed. “I have the ‘hots’ for the continued existence of all creation.”

“Oh yeah, baby, talk dirty to me.”

The conversation lulled for a moment—a moment I used to eat more of this giant chicken drumstick thing. I hoped it wasn’t roast gryphon. If I found out I was eating something made out of dead inyoka I’d probably be pretty upset about it.

Mercy was the one to break the silence, but she barely sounded like herself at all. She was awkward, hesitant. “What you guys were saying earlier… I guess… I just want to say… me, too.”

Another great thing about being the resident dumbass. Nobody can get mad at you when you say, “Huh?”

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Well, I say seat. It was a lump of rock. We were all sitting on lumps of rock. The dvergar must have been ecstatic. “Earlier, when you were talking about the world ending and the three of us being… like… together.” Mercy looked away from us. “I… Yeah. I feel the same.”

Asher cocked his head to the side. “You may have to elaborate further for clarity.”

“I’m glad you assholes are here. Okay?” She was actually blushing. “If I’ve got to be here, I’m glad you’ve got to be here, too.”

I threw an arm around her shoulders. “Aww… You love us.”

“No.” She tried to wrestle free.

“You do.” I beamed at her. “You love us!”

“I hate you.” She had both her arms and legs up against me now, pushing against the hug. She wasn’t strong enough to stop me. Not while I was in a cuddle frenzy. “I hate you so much I’m glad you have to be here and fight the Voidgod.”

I squeezed her tighter. “You’re glad we’re here with you.”

She scrabbled for her bow, but it was out of reach. “I will shoot you in the face.”

“With kisses because you love us so much.”

“With arrows. Hate arrows. Arrows made of pure hate.” She kicked and punched and flailed and finally sank into the hug. “Because I hate you so much.”

“Even though those sound metal as hell, I still can’t make them for you.” I pressed our cheeks together as she rolled her eyes so hard I thought they’d plop out and continue on their merry way right across the floor. “You don’t have any hate to Artifice.”

Asher bobbed his head sadly. “It is tragic that she is so lacking in these resources at a time like this.”

Mercy went back into full-on flail mode. Bellowing, “I will kick you in the throat. Both of you. Double throat kick.”

In the midst of all the laughter, I actually lost my grip on her, and she managed to scurry back to her own block of rock without any more interference, scooping up her bottle of foul-smelling dvergar moss-liquor and scowling at the two of us, blush still lurking on her cheeks.

There was a polite cough from by my elbow, and my ass literally left the chair when I jumped. Busty was there at my elbow with a bashful smile on her face.

“I swear to the gods, I’m going to attach a bell around your neck if you keep sneaking up on me.”

“Don’t be my fault you can’t pay no attention.” I didn’t trust the smile on her face. Nobody should have been that chipper when faced with their own impending destruction.

“What can I help you with?” I tried to smile back, but it felt like it was stretching my face weirdly.

She leaned in close so that the people at the other fires couldn’t hear us, and I appreciated that, given what she said next. “Folks be saying the war will be here tomorrow.”

“That’s what I hear.” I nodded along with the inanity. Everyone and their dog knew Araphel would be here tomorrow.

“Folks be saying a lot of us will be dying in the fighting, too.”

I grit my teeth as she said it and felt that old fire light up in my belly. “Not if I can help it.”

“Well, I be meaning no disrespect to you, but I don’t think you’ll be stopping it all. Eternal or not,” she replied, still weirdly upbeat as she spoke about everyone she knew getting murdered.

Leaning back from her, I couldn’t disguise a scowl. “Did you just come by to let me know I suck and I’m going to get people killed?”

“No! I mean… no.” She covered her face, trying to get the conversation back on track. “That don’t be what I was trying to say at all.”

“So what is it?”

“Well, I got to thinking, I might be one of the ones who don’t be surviving. This could be my last night alive.”

Mercy and Asher met each other’s eyes over the fire, and I could see Mercy trying to hide a grin or a giggle or something. Asher was harder to read, but he was definitely amused about the prospect of this poor dvergar dying. What the hell, guys?

Without a second thought, I drew her down beside me in a classic awkward side-hug. “Hey. No. Don’t think like that. You’re going to make it through this, and you’re going to live a long, happy life in a deep, dark hole—just like you’ve always wanted.”

“Oh no!” She sounded genuinely contented when she replied, “I don’t be worrying. I just thinking of the things I wanted to get done before the morning, just in case…”

I clapped her on the back and grinned. “That’s the right attitude, seize the day. Get out there and do something awesome to celebrate life. Sure, tomorrow is going to be scary, but isn’t every tomorrow scary? Anything could happen at any time. The only difference is that we’ve got a plan to deal with our tomorrow. Any surprises? We’ll knock them out the park. So go on, get out there, do what you want to do. Have a fun night!”

She resisted me trying to push her back to her feet, rocking back into place under my arm. “Well, that do be what I’m planning on. The best fun of all my days if truth be told…”

I’d wasted my whole human life not doing the things I wanted to do—procrastinating and sitting on my ass playing video games or watching tv—and while I was pretty sure that was a life well spent, it had definitely left me with a lot more get up and go now that I had a body that literally never tired. “Then don’t just sit there talking about it, go do it! Go have an amazing night!”

Once more she resisted my good-natured shoving. “Well, I be trying to, but…”

“No buts!” I cut her off before she could make any more excuses. “Just get out there and do whatever it is you want to do!”

She still looked awkward like she was scared to go out and seize the day. I was pretty sure I was inspiring her with all my awesome upbeat energy, but she was still staying snug against my side instead of leaping up and living life. She said, “What I be wanting to do needs more than just me by my lonesome, you see…”

I tightened my grip around her shoulders and hoisted her up as I stood, pointing out from the Bastion to what looked like a sea of stars spreading across the land. “Look out there, every light you can see is a campfire, and around every one of them there are people just like you, people who know death is coming tomorrow. Whatever you’ve got planned, I’ll guarantee that there is somebody out there who’ll want to do it with you!”

“I did be thinking of somebody a little closer.” She held onto me so she didn’t drop to the ground, even when I’d lowered us both back onto the stone. I hadn’t taken her for being scared of heights. Weird. “Don’t much fancy wandering the night.”

“That’s great, you should go get them!” I grinned down at her. “Go do whatever you want to do! Have a great time.”

Mercy half coughed and half laughed into the palm of her hand. “I think she’s trying to…”

Busty stood up on the stone beside me, took hold of my horns, and turned me to face her directly. “You don’t be hearing me.”

“You want to go do something fun with your last night on earth with somebody,” I tried not to nod too enthusiastically since she was right in the horn-zone. “I got it! What else is there to get?”

Asher was pointedly staring in the opposite direction as though he couldn’t even stand to watch. Mercy groaned, “Oh, my gods.”

“What?” I was so confused. “What am I not getting here?”

While the other two did their best not to bust something containing their laughter, poor Busty looked absolutely mortified.

“I’m sorry about them”—I tried my best to console her—“I don’t know what they think is going on.”

That was too much for Mercy, and she burst out into a guffaw so loud that the whole encampment turned to look our way.

In desperation, Busty grabbed hold of my horn, yanked my ear down level with her, and then whispered… something that I’m pretty sure I will never repeat aloud for as long as I’m alive.

I mean, I thought I was filthy, but this stuff went beyond obscene and out the other side. The things she was describing… I mean I’ve had the internet since I was a horny teenager, and even I’ve never been able to plumb depths so depraved. When she stopped to take a breath in the middle, my brain caught up to my ears, and I realized that she wasn’t just talking about stuff she wanted to do before the world ended. This wasn’t just her sexy bucket list. This was the stuff she wanted to do right now. With me. Holy crap.

My brain felt like it was short-circuiting. When she leaned back in to speak again, I don’t think I even heard what she was saying. I just felt her hot breath on my ear. I managed to squeak out, “What do I do?” to the cackling Mercy.

“Her, apparently.”

Now that she’d fallen back from my ear, Busty looked flushed. I couldn’t tell if it was pre-game excitement or embarrassment at having said all that stuff out loud. I was torn. On the one hand, I was still totally loyal to my hot alvaren girlfriend—uh… whatever her name was. Come on, brain, get it together. Seren. I was loyal to Seren. But, on the other hand, till death do we part was kind of past on that relationship. Was it still cheating if one of you was dead? Did it become cheating if you brought them back from the dead somehow? She might have been off in some alvaren land of the dead banging everybody, and I’d be none the wiser. This kind of thinking was above my pay grade.

I looked from Busty’s fluttering eyelashes to Mercy’s face, contorted into a wrinkled mess with tears pouring down her cheeks. Eventually, she managed to catch her breath enough to say, “Come on, dude, it is her dying wish. Go disappoint her in bed.”

Trying to convey my moral dilemma didn’t come out so well. “Is it... okay?”

“I be hoping it is a bit better than that.” Busty’s irritation with me from the earlier obliviousness still hadn’t quite faded.

“I… am I, I…”

Mercy yelled, “Just go bang, for gods’ sake!”

“But…” I tried to convey my ethical dilemma with hand gestures as I tried to get my words together.

Understanding as always, Mercy threw her empty bottle at my head. “Seren’s dead, and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t give a crap anyway. She was… practical. Just go!"

That “practical” comment was a whole other can of worms that I wanted to yank open then and there, but once more, Busty yanked on my horn and turned my head, this time mushing our lips together instead of rubbing hers on my ear and giving me all sorts of fun sensations. When we broke apart, I managed to mumble out, “You should probably know, my heart belongs to…”

She lunged back in and bit my lip to shut me up. Finally murmuring, “Don’t be wanting your heart.”

I stood up, carrying her with me. “Well, all right then.”

Mercy whooped and hollered as we headed off, but I had more pressing matters to attend to.

About five hours later, I came staggering back to the campfire and slumped down. Mercy had a few of her dvergar buddies gathered around her, keeping the liquor and chatter going. Farmer and some alvaren had gathered around Asher’s feet like he was the second coming, hanging on every word of his lecture on some arcane principle so obscure I got drowsy listening to it for a few seconds before Mercy led all her little minions in a round of applause.

When all the furor died down, she waggled her eyebrows at me and asked, “Where’s Signa?”

My food had long since gone cold, but there was still plenty of booze scattered about. I sifted through the empties until I found one that was still at least a little bit full, gave it a sniff, then knocked it back before finally asking, “Who?”

Mercy rolled her eyes. “Signa.”

I wracked my brains. There had been a lot of new faces over the past few days, but that name wasn’t ringing any bells. “Who’s Signa?”

The dvergar gathered around her had slowly fallen silent, and now they were all staring at me. Mercy growled. “Oh, you have got to be joking.”

I took another sip of the moss-whiskey. “What?”

The bottle smashed out of my hands, shot through with a well-thrown turkey-lizard bone.

“Oh, you are the worst kind of scumbag. I thought you were friends or something? I wouldn’t have told you to go for it if I thought she was just some rando you’d never met!” She was up on her feet and screaming now.

“What the hell are you yelling about?” I wasn’t entirely sure why I was standing and yelling either. I’d been having such a nice night up until then. Apart from the whole impending doom thing.

Mercy got right up in my face and bellowed, “Signa!”

I hauled myself up to my full height, towering over her. “Who is Signa, and why am I get yelled at?”

“Signa is the little woman you just spent all night…”

The penny dropped.

“Oh! Busty!”

If looks could kill, then the stare I got from Mercy in that moment was the eyeballing equivalent of thermonuclear war. “You have got to be joking?”

She went for my throat, and I bowled over backward, tripping over my stone stool and rolling across the hard-packed dirt. When she hit me, it wasn’t the open-handed slap of indignation I’d been expecting, it was a solid punch. “Ow.”

I kept us rolling until I ended up on top, pinning her arms down to prevent any further punching. “It’s a nickname! We’re friends. Well… we’re definitely friends now.”

Mercy’s knee came up into an area that was already pretty tender after the evening I’d just had. All the air left my lungs, and I made a little whimpering noise involuntarily. Then she did it again. And again. Until I rolled over to my side, and she launched herself on top again.

“Listen, I know I’m a faun, and we don’t really get tired, but that doesn’t mean I’m good to go again after…”

She hit me in the face again. Fist, then elbow following up. It hurt, a little bit. But after a certain point, little things like a punch in the face don’t really register anymore. It’s all graded on a scale, and this was pretty low. Add in the immortality thing, and I could understand why Mercy had been using punching as her primary means of communication since we first arrived. It got the message across that she was annoyed without any of the real-life consequences we used to have to deal with.

I headbutted her in the face. Her nose gave way beneath the solid bone of my forehead, and with my Potency, it was kind of amazing that her neck didn’t snap, too. When she came down, it wasn’t on the stool I’d tripped over, it was in the campfire we were all gathered around.

She’d been pissed before. The headbutt probably hadn’t calmed her down. But having her entire ass set on fire was enough to knock Mercy up to full-on enraged in record time. Still burning, she leapt to her feet and sprung for her bow.

I unmade it before she got there. Stripping the wood and string apart and leaving them in their component pieces in a heap. “Mercy. Calm down.”

“Have you ever tried to calm down?” she bellowed, slapping at her own ass until the fire went out. “It is impossible. People can’t choose to not be upset. It’s an oxymoron. Like you.”

“Ha.” The sharp sound of Asher’s laugh cut right through our argument. We both turned to look at him. After an awkward moment, he explained, “The wordplay was most entertaining.”

“Everyone is a comedian,” I mumbled as I remade Mercy’s bow.

She still wasn’t done tutting and scowling. “I can’t believe you didn’t even know her name.”

I threw up my hands. “It was a thing. Like… our thing. A joke or… flirting maybe now that I think about it? Holy crap was she flirting the whole time?”

“Why are all men oblivious?” Mercy flung herself back down and started hunting around for her drink under the many passed-out dvergar.

“Why are all women devious? Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it! You want flowers, say you want flowers! You want me to lick in between your—”

Asher cut me off before I could give too many secrets away, “It is morning.”

I looked up into the pitch-black sky above us. Um. “Uh, pretty sure it isn’t.”

“Dawn should have broken several minutes ago.” Asher was staring up into the darkness too. Frozen—not in confusion but by a deep dread. “I was allowing for some degree of fallibility on my part.”

Mercy rolled her eyes. “If it is morning, where is the sun?”

My mouth went dry. “Oh.”

“Everyone to your battle stations.” Mercy sprang into action before the rest of us had even processed what we were looking at. “Move it! Move! Go! Go! It is go-time!”

Chapter 23

I am not a stranger to self-love. To taking matters into my own hands. To a date with Rosie Palms. Did I mention I had the internet as a teenager? Anyway, even if I had all of eternity and an infinite supply of lotion, tissues, and bandwidth, there is no way that I could keep up with our man Araphel.

When he died earlier, his whole army had keeled over dead, too. He was the tether that kept those nasty little reflections of himself scuttling around. The one and only example in all the universe where the loss of the boss resulted in the workers becoming less efficient. Which meant that the army that now filled the Ashlands from horizon to horizon was the result of him frantically squirting out new Voidspawn all the way here. I mean he must have been at it non-stop. I’m surprised he wasn’t chafed.

Now that he didn’t have to fit them through a Waystone, it looked like he’d gone completely nuts on the different spawn he’d spawned. Some of the scuttling swarm out there were as big as elephants, some smaller than the tiniest of dvergar. There was barely enough light to see through the pall that Araphel cast over the sky, but I could just barely tell where the ash was covered, and I could see movement where the enemy was—which was pretty easy since they were everywhere.

The Bastion ran for miles in either direction from us, and there would be spawn assaulting every inch of it. From here to the ravines and mountains that blocked off either end to make this one patch of land the ideal chokepoint. One of our mages tossed a huge ball of fire up into the sky to show us the full breadth of how screwed we actually were, but it had barely made it to the enemy lines before it was swarmed by flying monsters smothering it with their bodies to blot it out. They didn’t spit on it, they didn’t cast their own spells, they just flung their bodies into the flames until they died. That was how many monsters Araphel had to spare. He could burn through dozens just to hit the dimmer switch.

I made a switch myself, from my Lunar Pillars to the Void, and what had been invisible to the dim light coming out of my eyes became crystal clear to my dark-sight. There weren’t thousands of Voidspawn, there were hundreds of thousands. I couldn’t count high enough to number them all, and they wouldn’t stand still to be counted anyway. There was no order or strategy or planning to their charge, just feral hatred of everything other than them. They must have been running just like that since they’d left the Voidcrown Spire to have made it this far so quickly. Beyond the front ranks that were coming for us, there were so many I couldn’t see their end. All the way to the horizon was black and heaving with these mockeries of life.

“That’s… a lot.”

Mercy stood beside me, our respective duties not yet begun. “Yup.”

“I mean, I knew it would be a lot but that is a lot.”

She was staring blankly out into the darkness beyond our wall. “Yup.”

“All our clever plans and tricks and traps…” My dry mouth still hadn’t gone away. I felt like I’d been eating a stack of water-crackers. “They aren’t going to be enough, are they?”

“Even if they go off perfectly, which they won’t, I’m going to guess no.”

I tightened my grip on my sword. It was out and ready in my hand, even though there was nothing to hit yet. Any second now, the fliers were going to arrive. Any second now, it was all going to kick-off, and there would be no more time for talking. “So it is going to come down to killing the Voidgod.”

“Yup.”

“Which I still don’t know how to do.”

“Yup.”

“You don’t have anything else to say about it?”

She cast me a sideways glance and almost smiled. “Trying not to pee here, dude.”

“That bad, huh?”

Her eyes turned back to the darkness, but that almost-smile still lingered. “You’ll work it out.”

Smiling seemed to be a bit beyond me by that point. “Pretty sure if I was going to work it out, I would have worked it out by now.”

“You’ll work it out because if you don’t… well, everybody dies.”

“No pressure.”

She glanced at me, the smile now manic. “Work it out, Maulkin.”

“Yes, boss.”

One of the alvaren mages sidled up beside me, silent as a mouse in the quiet before the storm. “We are prepared to enact thy first plan.”

I patted Mercy on the back and turned away from the oncoming tide. “Let’s do it.”

We had installed the Keystone a good distance from the Waystone, in case the Inimicus still lodged in there was going to interfere, but it was close enough for me to reach in a few bounding jumps from watchtower to watchtower. We had a few alvaren mages still stationed up on the wall in case of unforeseen wizard-spawn or whatever else Araphel had to screw with us, but the rest of them were here. Maybe fifty white-robed alvaren of the sort I’d gone mashing through every time I stepped foot in their floating city. Almost made me wish I hadn’t killed quite so many of them. We weren’t quite on a first name basis yet, but the ones who weren’t already locked in concentration gave me nods before joining their kin in the great ritual they were enacting.

With so few of them, the really big, crazy spells that the alvaren had been able to pull in the last Revelation were a bit beyond us. There was plenty of power in the Keystone for all of them, but they’d burn out if they drew on too much of it. It had to be divided out carefully among all the mages for their best tricks to work, and there just weren’t enough. But despite that, they were trying at least one of the old moves for me. It was probably going to kill some of them, but just as they hadn’t shirked any suicidal duty that Briar had handed down, they were obeying me blindly. I probably should have felt worse about that, but it was hard to look at the pointy-eared war criminals and feel too much sympathy.

All through the last night, they had been preparing, taking it in turns, in shifts, to layer on piece after piece of the colossal spell that was coiling in the air above us now. Even when they were on their breaks, they had been learning bits and pieces from the old books they’d managed to salvage, or from Asher, Farmer, or any of the other magic-users we’d managed to rope into our cause.

Up in his tower on the wall, I knew that Asher was already leading those few casters of the humans and inyoka in a souped-up version of the storm spell he’d unleashed upon the wyrms we’d faced at the Spire. Anyone that couldn’t work with the Keystone was working on that. It had been enough to obliterate an army before. Maybe it would put a dent in the fresh hell that was coming for us now.

A polite cough drew my attention back to the magic at hand, and the one mage who’d come to fetch me joined his voice in chanting with all of the rest, stepping into his allotted place at his allotted time, carrying on this tightly choreographed display without missing a beat. I imagined that to all the regular folks in the Bastion it looked like they were putting on quite a light show as all the different elements of the spell drew together and combined, but to my extra senses, it felt kind of crazy. Like all the life and death and matter and energy and… everything in the area was being compressed into a single point. Dust and the fragments of ruined city and keep that we hadn’t cleared away floated up toward the central point above the Keystone. Pressure mounting. Air shimmering and shuddering.

All the individual strands of magic rising from the gathered alvaren weaved around that central point, shielding us from its pull as much as intensifying the effect. It built and built until my ears popped, then it went on building until I started to worry my eyes were going to pop next. Some of the alvaren were shaking on their feet as they pressed on. Some had blood running down from those pointy ears of theirs. Every one of them was pulling in more magic than they could handle and pouring it out as fast as they could before it scorched them barren.

When the first of them took on too much and exploded into pieces, I let out a strangled yelp, but the ones beside her who had been splattered with her blood and bits didn’t flinch, they just switched to casting all their elaborate spell-forms one-handed so they could take over for the parts that would otherwise have been missing. They didn’t just understand their own parts, they understood the parts of all the others around them, too. They knew the part and the whole, and I couldn’t even comprehend what I was looking at.

After the first death, the rest came on in spats—two or three bursting apart at the seams or collapsing in on themselves as the magic ate them from the inside out—but still, the spell did not slow or falter, even as alvaren after alvaren died to this gamble. There were not enough of them to begin with to undertake this spell, and now there were even fewer.

If Briar had been here, she would have been able to handle it. I had no doubt. As far ahead of me as all these mages were, she was the same distance ahead of them. She probably could have pulled off half of this trick all by herself if she could have just had the courage to fight instead of giving in to Araphel. If this didn’t work, I was going to blame her. Definitely her fault. Not mine.

Another piece of the spell locked into place, and the pull of it now was enough to shift even my weight. I had to take a step back or risk getting dragged in. Up on the wall, I could see my soldiers having to hunker down and grab onto something as specks of mortar drifted in from the walls. Even the dark sky above us seemed to be pulling down. All of Amaranth was drawing in towards this one single point. The alvaren were quaking in their stylish but affordable boots, but they didn’t slow, and they didn’t falter. The spell went on, even as it dragged them all in closer. I didn’t dare to interfere in case my messing around with Artifice somehow screwed up the intensely complex process. I just had to watch as the now blinding ball of light at the center of the spell dragged them all closer and closer.

The last alvaren standing dropped, exhaustion and burnout knocking them down instead of tearing them apart. Even unconscious, they went on sliding towards the Keystone and the spell above. When they got too close, it lifted them from the ground. Where the blood flowed from their ears and noses, it drifted up like a fountain to anoint their great work.

Even the walls looked like they were bowing in, even though Artifice told me everything was still in its rightful place. It wasn’t the walls that were bending, it was all of reality, curving in towards the point at the heart of this spell. Then, as suddenly as it had all begun, it was complete. Reality snapped back into shape, but in the center of the spell, there was no longer a star. There was a hole.

For a moment, it seemed like that was it, like all our work was done, but then lightning snapped through the gap we’d made. The same lightning we traveled by between the waystones.

An alvaren was left standing where the bolt had struck. She was taller than ours and had none of the eerie paleness. Like she’d actually spent some time in the sun instead of the library. Her hair was buzzed short, there was gold dangling from her ears, and there were no simple white robes on her either. She was garbed in colors, every color under the sun, rippling across her like a peacock’s feathers. When she spoke, our alvaren could not understand her, but I was an Eternal, and that meant I could understand any language going. She looked around at all the darkness and ruin and asked, “Why have you opened the way between our worlds?”

“Uh, hi. I’m Maulkin. The universe is about to end if we don’t defeat an evil god, and we were wondering if you’d maybe like to weigh in on that fight?”

“Where am I? What is this place?”

“Oh, this is Amaranth. Whatever happens here, happens to everywhere, plus the Voidgod is going to spread out and destroy everything everywhere, and well, honestly, I figured that you might want to have a say in that.”

“Amaranth? The seed from which all grows? The font of all reality?”

Oh good, she’d heard of us. “Yup.”

“And you would have us defend it?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I’d take help from anyone I could get at this point. Oh, also, we have this Keystone thingy that only alvaren can use. Which is why we figured calling you guys in first might be the best idea.”

She cast a glance to the Keystone and seemed to understand what she was looking at, even if it had stumped most of us locals. “It shall not be said that the alvaren shirked the call to defend all of creation.”

With a stamp of her foot, she turned back into lightning and zipped back up into the hole.

I glanced around the local alvaren nervously. “Uh, is she coming back?”

None of them were in any fit state to talk to me, which was probably for the best because that was when the screaming started.

Our own fliers were still grounded until after Asher’s storm could finish casting, so the Bastion bore the full brunt of the Voidspawn descending from the sky. Up on the wall, the first wave of them smashed into our unprepared defenders, knocking them from their stations to fall back onto the packed dirt down here. Or they would have if I hadn’t caught them.

I’d forged the armor that those soldiers wore with my Artifice, and every suit of it that fell, I felt throughout my Sphere of Influence. It was a simple thing to move them back up onto the walls where they belonged. Even simpler for me to launch myself up to stand beside them and meet the next fliers head-on.

This was an ancient place. Death after death layered into its foundations even before the horrific massacre that I’d committed here. When I poured Slaughter into my blade and slashed at the sky, there was no shortage of death to leap up in answer.

That flashing blade of darkness was almost the same color as the Voidspawn it split. Some fell tumbling apart, others made suicidal dives at the archers and casters lining the walls.

It wasn’t even close to enough to turn back the tide, but it bought everyone around me the moment they needed. Arrows flew. From her distant tower, I saw Mercy’s wall of flame leap up and a torrent of burning arrows soar up through it into the eternal night. She and her crossbowmen were firing blindly into that fire, but it didn’t matter, what went up would come down, and wherever it came down out there it would find an enemy.

On the backswing, I carved a bat-winged cat-thing in half with steel and strength alone, but I needed to do more. With a grunt, I launched myself up among them, into the ravening storm of claws and teeth and wings. I cut, and I kicked, and at one point, my teeth even closed on some chitinous leg, and I ground down until it cracked and the foul black oil within leaked down my throat.

Technically, I was falling all the time that I was up there, but the Voidspawn were flocking in such density that I’d barely made it a few feet down through all the fighting. Even as I hooked a thumb in one’s gaping mandibles and tore weirdly blunt teeth away, I knew this was doing no good. Even if I killed every Voidspawn in my Sphere of Influence, they were swarming in these numbers all along the watchtowers. The whole Bastion was under this assault, and me swinging my sword around just wasn’t enough.

One of Mercy’s tempest arrows exploded the ball of ravening spawn that had clustered around me, and I fell. On my way down, I managed to cleave a couple more before I realized I was going to miss the wall and kicked off the next owl-snake to launch myself back into place.

The fight had barely started yet, and already we were hard-pressed. There were bleeding and dying people everywhere I looked, and Restoration could only do so much. I touched everyone I could, pouring life back into them, but no sooner did some of them stand than another Voidspawn swooped down at them. It was like spitting into a fire and hoping it would go out.

Asher’s storm went off.

With a thunderous boom, the spell swept out into the sky, slaughtering the Voidspawn flocking to us before it had even begun its real work. Everything above the level of the Bastion towers was swallowed up in the roiling lightning, and the more of them that fell blackened to land among us, the louder the cheers of the defenders still standing.

It lit up the battlefield with every crack of lightning down into the horde below, and for a moment, everyone could see what I saw. The dead and the dying all around us. The endless expanse of Voidspawn still coming on to drown us all in blood. The cheers died down fast after that.

I mounted the ramparts and swept my eyes over the horde. Araphel was out there somewhere, hidden amongst his people. The one vulnerable part in this massive war machine—except in the sense of being at all vulnerable.

By the time the storm had made it as far as the front line of Voidspawn, much of its power had already been spent in driving the fliers down, but still, it burst out into a fresh clatter of lightning, arcing down and spreading out among the gathered monsters below, blackening the pale ash beneath their feet and sending any that hadn’t been struck flying.

It was an impressive display of just how much our little lizard-man had learned in his time here on Amaranth. Bolstered by the other mages around him, he was dealing the first real damage to the enemy.

Araphel made his presence known.

A ball of sizzling Entropy soared up from the center of the enemy, small and dark at first, but growing bigger and bigger as it passed over their heads and up towards the keep where Asher had made his stand. The lightning, feeling some kinship to this dark orb, leapt out now, not towards the waiting Voidspawn but into the ball, surrounding it in a haze of energy. It flew all too quickly at our Bastion. Too fast for me to get close enough to intervene. Too fast for me to save him.

“No!”

When it struck the tower, the lightning rolled off it, exploding in sparks across that length of the wall, killing all they touched. But it was the tower that bore the brunt of Araphel’s own attack. Where there had been stone, there was now only powder. I didn’t see Asher or the mages fall. I didn’t see them tumbling down with the freshly made dust off the front of the wall. The waterfall of destroyed stone saw to that.

The lightning strikes stopped. The Voidspawn marched on, untouched. There was now a sickly, blue light cast over everything as lightning crackled about in the sky above, but with nobody to direct it, it merely hung there, passively waiting for anyone fool enough to fly into it.

We’d just grounded all our own fliers and lost our best mages. In one blow.

The enemy fliers that had been hanging just below the ramparts fell back, diving down towards their own lines with the same deranged swoops that had laid so many of our people low. I had no time to count our dead, only to prepare for the next phase of the attack.

“Keep firing!” I had to roar to be heard over all the screaming, reaching out with Artifice to turn our great crossbows around to face where I best judged Araphel to be. “Keep firing!”

I infused the massive bolts loaded in the ballistae with Slaughter before I unleashed them—not really expecting them to kill Araphel but hoping against hope that one might hit home and slow his advance until one of my myriad last-ditch crazy plans might have time to come to fruition.

He was just at the limit of the ballistae’s range. The ones arrayed farther along the Bastion’s top would have no hope of hitting him in the center of the army, but I could hear them thrum all the same, firing down into the crowds of Voidspawn to thin their numbers before they reached our wall. Spitting in the fire again.

Reloading the ballistae was easier in person than from this distance, but the faun and dvergar teams that had been assigned to them were back in position now that the fliers had been driven off. We had a moment where everyone could do their jobs unharried. Then the fliers were back again, bearing with them any Voidspawn that had been small enough for them to carry, dropping them in our midst before doubling back.

Part bear, part bug, all evil, the one closest to me cleaved its way along the line towards me. Even now in the midst of all of this, they seemed to want me. Even here surrounded by his army, and utterly slaughtering ours, Araphel was running scared. Each and every one of the Voidspawn that had been dropped came wading my way, some of them impossibly swift, bounding over the soldiers in their path. Some bulldozing through with bloodied claws.

I met the bugbear head-on, loping off one arm after the other before burying my sword in the place where its head should have been. It died and broke apart, and a dozen smaller spawn erupted from inside it, barely up to knee height but made of bristling claws, dripping ichor and venom from their troop transport mother. I batted the first of them off the wall and was coming about to cleave the next when a faun sprang forward to crush it with his hammer. Here in the press of battle, I couldn’t swing a great-sword around freely without risking decapitating the people on my side. This was why I would have been more use down there in the ash.

Another of the prickle bugs leapt for me, and I caught it in my hand before crushing it. From behind me, I heard a cut-off scream, and I spun to see one of the inyoka, spear snapped in two, still trying to drive the Voidspawn away from my back. As far as I knew, I’d never even met this brown-scaled guy before, but here he was risking his life to protect mine. You know I had to return the favor. Leaping straight up, I thrust my sword into the storm. Lightning shot down into my arm, into me, but most importantly into my sword. I slashed it out, and from the storm above an echo answered. Blasting down into the spawn looming over the now tail-less inyoka.

Then the moment was past. I fell back into the battle. The Voidspawn fell into blackened halves, and I realized that I could feel the energy within it dissipating out. The pure death that the Voidgod had shaped into a mockery of life. They were all the same. Even though every single one of them looked different, they bore the same signature as Araphel.

Lightning was still coiling through my sword as the next spawn was dropped in front of me. A twelve-armed serpent with a smooth black face. I hammered the tip of my blade into that face before it could bring any of the sickle blades on the ends of its arms to bear, and I knew in my gut that this Voidspawn was the same as all the rest. They were all one. All Voidspawn were one, and this electric death I’d just made could be for all of them. Resonant Dominion rolled out from me in an invisible wave, passing cleanly through all my people and slaughtering any Voidspawn it touched. The same clean cut appeared on every one of their faceless faces. The same crackle of lightning within echoed out. That death rolled out all the way to the edge of my Sphere of Influence, and I was knocked to my knees by how much that one blow had taken out of me.

That was pushing past the limits of what my godly powers could do. The Pillars within me shook and cracked. If I pulled that off again, I’d probably end up losing my powers and leaving everyone stranded and doomed in the face of the next wave. I had to go easy, or I’d be out of this fight before it even properly began.

All the ballistae were firing at will now, loading and launching as fast as they could manage. There was a massive stockpile of bolts for each one that I’d thought we’d never burn through, but seeing them in motion now, I wondered if the ammunition would last out the morning.

Mercy and her archers were still hard at work, no longer arcing lethal arrows down into the crowd below but turning their gaze to the gap between storm and wall, picking off as many of the fliers as they could muster. It was valiant, but it certainly wasn’t enough to make a dent in their numbers. Did any of this matter when Araphel could just crap out some new spawn to replace the ones that we’d killed? Did any of this matter really?

The fliers were back again, tossing more and more spawn over the wall, with less and less concern for landing them safely.

Huge hulking things that must have been at the very limit of the fliers’ strength to hoist, even working together, were flung at us like catapult balls, crushing through the soldiers on the walls and tumbling down to land amidst the people behind the wall, the ones running supplies, reinforcing where we’d lost too many bodies to hold a stretch—basically, the ones that were keeping this whole war turning over.

With nothing more I could do up on the wall, I followed them down, landing blade-first in some hulking armadillo dung beetle monstrosity that was kicking out with its bladed back legs at the stairs leading up to the ramparts as if it had been told to do that, based on the old wooden ones Araphel had seen before. It wasn’t making much progress against the stone.

A surge of Slaughter slipped down my blade inside of the arma-beetle, and its kicking became sporadic death-spasms. All around it, people lay dead or dying. Raw, unfiltered death rose like mist to greet me, and I drew it in. More fuel for the slaughter—whether the dead were enemies or friends, they were all power.

Deep down in my guts, I could feel a cold rage beginning to spread. All these people, dead for nothing. All the world, dead for nothing. I’d been hiding from this anger, from this hate that I’d thought the Voidgod had infected me with through the link in our souls, but I’d been wrong. Sometimes, the only sane thing to feel in the face of something this pointless and brutal was hate. Rage was rational in the face of evil.

Another of Araphel’s children came soaring over the wall, and I cleft it in half before it had even touched down, the echo of the Slaughter lingering in my blade enough to crack its carapace and splatter me with inky ichor. Another soared through the same gap, and I slapped it back with a chunk of masonry that had been broken off.

One final giant of black chitin flew not at me, but into the next courtyard along, so I had to leap up and over a watchhouse to reach it.

My dvergar were there, fighting for their lives against it. Busty and Birger, back-to-back against the giant beast and a duo of lesser Voidspawn. Like hell was I letting another maybe girlfriend get murdered on my watch. I stamped my foot and launched her up on a upshoot of stone, out of the spawn’s reach. The two monsters scrambled up that sheer stone without a pause. Crap. I bounced off the shell of the big one and launched myself up to meet them halfway to Busty. My blade sheared through stone, chitin, and air just the same, humming all the way.

The pedestal I’d put Busty on was top-heavy to begin with. With a cut through the stone, there was no hope of it keeping her up. Good thing I was there to catch her when she fell. Setting her down as gently as I could.

There was a mangled yelp from behind me as I gave her one of my patented grins—the one that apparently made all the Amaranth ladies get all excitable.

The giant monster I’d followed down here had my other dvergar in between its mandibles and was doing its damnedest to crunch through the stone and steel that covered him. It only paused for one moment in its gobbling when I yelled, “Hey! Don’t eat my Birger!”

Busty darted forward to grab him by the feet while I took a hold of the Voidspawn itself. Prying its mouth open was a lot harder than I would have guessed. Turns out whacking them to death was easier than wrestling their jaws open. I could still hear Birger in there, yelling his head off—and judging by the trouble Busty was having, flailing around a fair bit, too.

We spent way too long wrestling back and forth with this thing until finally I was able to get a foot on one mandible, a grip on the other, and I pushed. The jaws didn’t split, the whole monster did, cracking apart along some invisible seam and tumbling to the ground in twitching halves.

Birger had seen better days. There had been teeth inside there somewhere, still in motion when the jaws outside had been stilled. His armor was in shreds, and the stone that was as much his body as anything else had been torn away too, leaving raw patches of gore where so much of his flesh should have been. I poured Restoration into him, but the stone, I couldn’t force to grow back. It wasn’t alive, not really, so no matter how much Primal energy I dumped into him, I couldn’t make it come back. The wounds wouldn’t heal.

I met Busty’s eyes, and there were tears pooled there. Then, just when I was reaching for my sword to put him out of his misery, he sat bolt upright. “I’ll be having you, longshanks! Where do he be? I’ll gut the cur. I’ll… I’ll…”

He glanced around at the remains of the monster spread out around him like we were trying to read the future in its entrails, and he let out a satisfied little grunt. “Right then.”

Busty hauled him back to his feet, and I gave him a nod. “Back to your position.”

He managed a salute, getting his hand stuck in the gooey place where his rocky brow should have been. “Aye, sir.”

Busty and I managed to share a brief smile, then the war called me back.

Making the leap up onto the wall, I saw the next ones coming. Not flung by the fliers but launched from down in the midst of the army, the elephantine monstrosities flinging them at us like artillery—method in the Voidgod’s madness.

Fragments of the wall lay scattered all around me where the spawn had struck before, and it was a simple thing in the heat of all this to find the balancing point between Moon and Void and seize hold of them with my Artifice. I didn’t try to beat them back, I just launched the stones into their paths, held them in place, and let momentum do its brutal work.

A rain of corpses struck off the ramparts and went tumbling back down to the ash below, and the rage in my gut sang to me to follow them down, to get out there amidst the monsters and let loose with all my power. I was not made for fending off sieges or defending the innocent. I was built to kill, to slaughter. This body, these powers, all of it was designed to make me stronger. To make me more capable of killing the enemy than they were of killing me. Why was I lurking back here when Araphel was down there, when only killing him would end this?

Sanity whispered from the back of my mind that it was because I didn’t actually know how to kill him, but the rage spat that thought back out, calling it cowardice.

Down on the ash, the Voidspawn were nearly to the base of our wall. To any other army, it would have been impenetrable, but Araphel and his minions could exude destruction if they saw fit. They could eat through our foundations and leave us nothing to hide behind like cowards.

They wouldn’t though. They had no need. Even as I watched, the scuttling horde went from an all-out sprint towards our walls and into the climb. Claws punched into the wall, making handholds for those that followed. Those built for purposes other than climbing were farther back in the horde. Who knew what would become of them? Whether they’d fling each other up or transform into some living siege tower. I never meant to find out.

At least half of our number were down, and that was only counting the ones I could see, here where there was an Eternal fighting the good fight. I couldn’t imagine the degree of slaughter farther along the walls.

I collapsed the ramparts as far along as my Sphere of Influence could reach, hauling all the stone up off the short wall that had been meant to protect us from enemy fire that would never come and dumping it over the ledge.

Down it went, and that mean old bitch gravity made every single Voidspawn on that wall into a smear and splat of liquorice jelly. I could grow the wall back if the Voidspawn suddenly learned how to use bows and arrows, but for now, this stretch of wall was open—not OSHA compliant, but I’d worry about the falling hazard later.

Along the wall to Mercy’s side, I could see rocks being ferried up and dropped down onto their incoming spawn. Looking along the wall in the other direction, my breath caught in my throat. Fire swirled in a great whirlwind above the ruins of Asher’s tower, and down there in the midst of it all, he was standing, casting whatever napalm-on-steroids crap he had hovering over him.

Either he’d survived the blast, or the Entropy blast hadn’t hit the new shrine I’d built to him in the tower basement. Either way, he was alive again. Our heaviest hitter, back in the fight.

Along the wall, while I’d been distracted fighting for my life, Araphel had punched holes. Taking down the watchtowers where he could. Nuking clustered defenders when he could. Just as we were turning everything we had on him, he was returning the favor. A fresh blast of destruction was searing through the dark towards Mercy, but I could see her smirking up there in her tower. The arrow she fired down into it was wreathed in wind, and when the concussion went off, the sphere of glowing Entropy burst apart and rained back down on the enemy.

Mercy’s survival was great and all, but the real highlight of the whole show for me was when Araphel unleashed that blast and gave his position in the swarm away again. Just a little bit closer and we could try another of my stupid ideas.

The flying Voidspawn had not given up just because we were killing all their passengers. If anything, they just seemed to be getting more persistent than before. One of them that looked like nothing more than a huge frog mouth with bat wings came to a landing in front of me after I hammered it down with the flat of my sword. But when it landed, it disgorged a vaguely human-sized Voidspawn from inside itself. The human-sized one was human-shaped, too, like a shadow given physical form. It slipped from between the dripping lips of the flier and scuttled forward on all fours. It was quick, much quicker than any human I’d ever met, and its movements were weird and erratic.

It wasn’t hard to see which factions had been taking the most casualties as I fought along the walls. The alvaren and the dvergar, bound as they were by stricture and drilling, had fared the worst against the Voidspawn. They had not been able to adapt, while the inyoka and the humans with their more eclectic manners of fighting, had held up better. Not well. Not by any stretch. But better. Like they were just adaptable enough that the chaos of the Voidspawn didn’t faze them so much.

My training with Seren might have been rigid as any alvaren’s, but it had been built on a foundation of quicksand. A mash of things I’d seen in movies, the battles I’d fought in Amaranth, and the few physical fights I’d been involved in back in high school. Chaos was my middle name. Or it would have been if the gods had bothered to give me a surname. Maulkin Chaos Eternal was a bit of a mouthful.

Claws burst from the shadow’s fingertips as it leapt for me, throwing sparks off my sword as I parried it away. When it rebounded off a hunk of masonry and sprang right back in at my legs, Seren’s battle doctrine would have had me leap it. Instead, I booted it square in the face. Momentum was on my side again. It was moving too fast to duck or dodge. The head snapped back to dangle limply on its back, and the impact knocked the thing upright.

Head still dangling down behind it, the spawn fell back into a fighting stance. Oh, come on.

Flexing its arms, the claws at the ends of its no longer human-looking hands stretched out longer still. If you tried to give it a high five, you’d never play guitar again. When it pounced for me once more, I had my sword already raised and ready to come down right in its stupid neck—or I would have if the second shadow behind me hadn’t chosen that exact moment to latch its claws into my forearms. That wasn’t meant to happen.

Both sets of horrendous claws plunged through my armor and into my guts. I could feel it moving them around inside me. Then, as fast as it had rushed me, it was gone. A flare of golden-green light had blasted it clean off the wall, leaving its hands behind, still attached to me. Another flare passed behind me, and the pressure on my arms gave out. I jerked my head around to find my savior and saw the brown-skinned alvaren from earlier hovering in the air on some sort of magic saucer thing with little wings all around it, fluttering away. “We are here to offer our aid.”

Dragging my eyes away from her, I took in the sight unfolding before me. All around the Keystone, there were alvaren. Dozens of them, hundreds of them, and more still coming through the portal, riding lightning. “You came back!”

“You doubted us?”

“Lady, I don’t know if you’ve noticed”—I pulled the claws out my guts—“but I haven’t got the best of luck. It would have been typical if we’d dialed up the nearest all-alvaren planet and ended up with some weird subrace that were scared of magic and fighting or something.”

“We are the battle-mages of Illuin-Thanar. Known throughout our worlds for our magic and our fighting.” She shared a tight-lipped smile. “Those magi at your disposal informed us of your myriad plans. Might we assist in putting them into action?”

“Please! Anything would help at this point.”

“Then I shall begin.”

As fast as Briar had been to cast, I was pretty sure my new best friend in the whole world actually turned out her spell faster. She blasted more of that green-gold light down, not into the army swarming beyond the wall, but into the second channel of alvaren-city-crystal that I had run through the Bastion during reconstruction. All down the face of the rock, the veins of it lit up, blazing bright in the dark of night that Araphel had carried with him. Down it raced, faster than the falling bodies, and then it vanished beneath the ash at the Bastion’s base.

The peacock mage cocked her head to me in confusion, but I held up a finger. “Wait for it.”

From beneath the ashes, beneath the Voidspawns’ many scuttling feet, the spell exploded out. What had been a simple zap of magic up here had gone down into the vast construct I’d made beneath the dust and ash, reverberating back and forth, building and building in power as it doubled and redoubled on itself before finally being released into the veins I’d run out all along the battlefield, surging up and scorching through ash and monster alike as though they were nothing but illusions.

She let out a little delighted noise, then began casting again. “It would seem that there is much for us to learn in this world.”

“Honey, you have no idea.”

Out on the ashes, the Voidspawn’s advance had halted. The ones that were already past the blast line carried on their merry way, but the rest seemed to be frozen in indecision. They only had one brain to guide all of them, and currently, it was controlling a whole battlefield’s worth of minions doing a million different things. Actually thinking through whether to just march on over the glowing line that seems to kill anyone dumb enough to walk over it was taking up processing power he didn’t have to spare. The idiot had pushed himself to the limit before the fight had even started, planning to crush us with numbers alone.

A decision was made, and the frozen block of Voidspawn stopped their dithering and charged forward. Right into another of those wonderful golden-green blasts. Behind us, more and more of the Illuin-alvaren were pouring in, riding up to the wall on their floaty wing disks and leaping to join in the fun. The next time the magic exploded up out of the crystal, it was along the full line of the wall. Horizon to horizon. And every Voidspawn caught in it was blasted apart into their component gibbets.

That golden-green light reflected back off my grin. “Oh, I am so, so glad you’re here.”

“It is our pleasure to serve the gods when they ask it of us.”

I thought back through our conversation earlier on and tried to decipher whether I’d mentioned us being on the side of the gods, and I realized I hadn’t. Which either meant she was making some big assumptions, or she thought that I was a god—which was uh… not entirely accurate. She was making some assumptions here, and I was hoping that they wouldn’t end in me being accused of lying to somebody just to get them to fight our war for them. I mean, it was their war too, obviously. They lived in the universe, and they had a vested interest in keeping it going, but that wasn’t the point. I didn’t like the false pretenses.

She gave me a sideways glance. “It was not difficult to discern your identities once we heard the name of the Voidgod and this place. Our children grow up on tales of the ascendants. Even if we had never hoped to meet them in our lifetimes.”

“You uh… what?”

She smiled at me like I was being a silly goose. Exactly silly goose vibes. “What happens here in Amaranth echoes throughout the cosmos. Did you not think that your names would be such an echo?”

“I mean… not really?” I was at a bit of a loss for words to be honest. “Not yet?”

The scintillating conversation was cut off by the Voidspawn that had made it past the wall of blazing magic scrambling up over the edge of the wall and lunging for us. I caught a glancing blow on one and split another spidery thing in two. Ichor splattered.

Peacock might have been quick to cast, but she moved like an old librarian without her hoverboard. If it hadn’t been for that glancing blow, the spawn coming for her would have had her. As it was, she went staggering back.

When the wounded spawn found its feet, it also found one of mine planted squarely in its face. I booted it off the wall and into the blank face of one of the monkey-style ones that was just coming up over the top of the wall, knocking both back off. “Maybe you’d better stay behind me.”

Her eyes darted back and forth as she took my advice. She was trying to count all the incoming Voidspawn. That was a rookie mistake. You should never count how many Voidspawn there are; it will only make you depressed. On cue, she said, “There are too many of them and too few defenders. We should fall back to…”

“Nowhere left to run.” I carved the first of the Voidspawn in half, then used the side of my blade to slap one half into a clever little bug-cat that was trying to scuttle around and get to Peacock. “We win or we die.”

She got herself together enough to start blasting spawn, but she still looked a lot more concerned than when she first flung herself into this unwinnable battle. “That cannot be.”

With a stomp of my foot, I launched out spikes of stone to blast the latest wave of spawn back off the wall. “This is the last line of defense. Not just for this planet, but all of them. We win here, or there is nowhere else to go.”

Looking out over the swarming hordes of the Voidgod, illuminated by the line of blazing magic she’d pumped out, I could see her resolve faltering. “This is madness.”

I turned to look at her, bitching one-liner at the ready, but I never got the chance to say it because there was a devastating explosion out on the ashes. For one awful moment, I thought it was my fault, that I’d made the crystal and buried it wrong somehow, but no, it was Araphel, blasting away at it, making a hole for his nasty little bug army to come scuttling through.

Not his best plan.

Now the energy that the mages were dumping down into the crystal wasn’t coming out in the smooth wall of light that I’d planned. It was stuttering and juddering, firing out at odd angles and toasting any of his little monsters on the front line. The stutters were encouraging the monsters to make the jump too, which worked out for a few of them, but not most of them. As it turned out, when you broke a magic circuit, it didn’t just stop dead the way electric ones did. The magic still pulsed out of it… explosively.

The Voidspawn from our side of the thin, glowing line were still coming on, but without their infinite reinforcements, they seemed to be slowing. It was less of a wild, mad rush now, and more of a calculated assault. They were scrambling sideways across the wall to avoid coming up near me, Mercy, or Asher and aiming for the weaker spots in our defenses. The smart thing for me to do was probably to move along, to tackle the flanking attacks, but I needed to stay here, to stay close and guide the long list of stupid plans I’d laid out to fruition. Asher couldn’t move while he was casting either, so that just left Mercy.

I didn’t sprint along the wall to her, that would have just knocked all the defenders out of their positions; instead, I surged my Potency and leapt, rebounding from one watchtower to the next until I could land by her side. I offered her the choice. “Left or right?”

She fired off another spread of arrows into the Voidspawn scrambling over the ramparts. “Surprise me.”

Finding that tipping point between my Pillars, I seized the stone beneath her and pushed. It rose in a great violent thrust, a spear of stone, launching her up and to the side, soaring farther from me and Asher down the battle-line. Even as she flew, she was still loosing arrow after arrow into the Voidspawn. I didn’t have time to watch her land safely. I had my own creature feature to deal with. Bigger Voidspawn than before, that had been more sluggish in their climb, every one of them the kind of fight I would have relished when we were out adventuring but that I had to cut short now. Hauling steel from our fallen soldiers to make more and more blades in my orbit, I span them like a fan to carve them up.

Down on the ground, the first brave Voidspawn charging into the breach got vaporized. The wave behind them only got horribly mutilated and mauled. Still, Araphel wasn’t willing to give up so easily. He kept them flooding forward, trying to choke the shattered crystal with corpses.

If that had been his whole plan, dumping bodies into the meatgrinder, I would have been a very happy Eternal, but sadly it wasn’t to be. Even as more and more of his little minions toasted themselves in our giant microwave, he gathered his power and blasted another stretch of the buried crystal apart.

The gap in the connections was too wide now for the magic to leap out and kill everything, and the backed-up mass of Voidspawn burst through it like explosive diarrhea. The ones on the edges were still getting fried, but the main mass spattered through to chase after the ones already climbing.

Asher couldn’t resist a chokepoint like that—all the enemy all ramming together to get through. When he dumped the fireball on them, it was like nothing I’d ever seen in either of my lives. Heat, I was used to, fire too—by this point I’d been bathed in flames so many times that I should have been carrying around a fire-retardant loofah—but this was something else. As it passed through the air, it made a sound like screaming. It burned like a sun, flares rippling off its near-liquid surface as it fell. If I was more science-brained, I might have called it plasma or something, but I wasn’t sure that was in any way the right word for it. When it touched down on the Voidspawn, it didn’t so much explode as expand. Asher’s will had been the only thing keeping it compacted together, and, now it was where he wanted it to be, there was no more holding back.

The blinding sphere of fire spread out over the sand, scorching away every Voidspawn that it touched as if they were nothing. Like Asher was up in the sky somewhere with a great big magnifying glass, burning all the ants away like a sociopathic toddler.

It went on screaming as it spread and spread until finally, it lost all cohesion, and the fire washed out, erupting from the bottom of the ball as it burst and gushed out over the battlefield. The Voidspawn it didn’t kill probably wished it had. I could see them clear as day, flailing and burning.

Chapter 24

Satisfying as all of that was, it did sign the death sentence for the chokepoint in the enemy lines. Araphel unleashed blast after blast of Entropy all along the line, flitting from place to place so quickly it astounded me. I’d known he was fast, but to see him moving through his army at such an insane pace made me wonder if he could teleport without Waystones. Seriously, if he ever gave up on the universal genocide plan, he’d make a hell of an athlete.

I’d fought my way along my own little stretch of wall while this was happening, slapping off most of the Voidspawn and carving up the ones that were too substantial for rock-spikes to dislodge them in a single slap.

Peacock was still where I’d left her, albeit surrounded by a pile of thoroughly blasted Voidspawn. She was breathing hard. Guess the whole supernatural composure thing was unique to the Amaranth alvaren. “Kind of you to rejoin me.”

“You’re a guest!” I grinned down at her. “I couldn’t keep you waiting.”

Whatever she wanted to say next was interrupted by a scorpion-bear lunging up over the wall for us. I turned the stinger-blade aside with my sword, and she blasted it back off the wall with a well-timed spell. We had half a moment before the next one made it over the top. “What do you mean to do now that your defensive measures have been breached?”

My grin got wider. “Oh, honey, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Focus was going to be required for this next trick, so I closed my eyes to the fire and chaos and let my other senses flow out of me. The vein of crystal running along the top of the wall was still intact, even if the other end of the circuit was broken. All the magic had emptied out of it now that the Illuin mages had turned their attention elsewhere. Good. That probably made this next bit safer. I severed the crystal where it had fed into the loop heading out beyond the walls and reconnected it to the next circuit I’d built.

“All right, let’s give it a go.” I took a deep breath of the smoky air and bellowed, “Mages! Back to the crystal!”

There was a moment of indecision on Peacock’s part, but it was only a moment. She’d trusted in me enough to travel across the universe, she wasn’t going to flinch back from shooting a spell into a rock.

She cast another bolt of gold-green light into the crystal and then sprang back as a sweeping mantis claw reached over the top of the wall and tried its best to cut her down. My sword gave that particular spawn the nudge it needed to lose balance and topple back as it lunged for her again, parrying up the strike and then hammering into the joint with all my strength, not to sever but to knock it free of the wall. I never even saw the main body of the thing, only heard the whistle of the wind as it fell.

The tide of spawn that had been held back by our first crystal line were at the base of the wall now, rising faster than logic would have dictated anything so big could move, but they were no longer diverting themselves away from Asher or any of the other casters who were raining destruction down on them. It seemed that Araphel’s attentions were now split between the Eternals and the mages. Glad to see that they were making an impression.

An implosion went off behind our lines, and I rocked back on my heels. Peacock was nearly hauled right off the wall before I caught her around the waist. Taking hold of my arm, she hoisted herself up for a better look out over the battlefield, and her brows drew down. “The spell, it did nothing.”

“Keep on casting.”

I turned back just in time to see the second portal pop open in the air beside our first one. More reinforcements. That had to be good news. When a gargantuan stone statue dropped through, I changed my mind. It stomped forward a few feet and then started bellowing in a language that sounded like somebody was gargling pennies.

I landed before it with a grin. “Welcome to Amaranth. The world is ending. Then the universe. Do you giant stone people want to help us fight the Voidgod?”

There was another rumbling sound, and the statue’s face fell off, revealing an equally stony dvergar face beneath. Not like the cursed dvergar here, but like his whole body had been made out of stone from the get-go. Living stone. “Did you say there’s a fight to be having?”

Wow, guess the metallic grinding voice was all-natural.

I spread my arms. “Best fight in the universe!”

The stone man glanced around at all the chaos and grinned. “I’ll be back with me lads!”

The alvaren who’d cast this one barely even looked tired now that there were so many of their mages at our disposal. The local ones were still wrecked, but even they seemed to be brightening up at the prospect of being able to call for reinforcements from every populated planet in all of reality. Helped even the odds a bit.

Beneath our feet, the whole Bastion trembled with barely contained power. I threw the casters a quick thumbs-up, then bounded back onto the wall. Peacock had become lightning, leaping from spot to spot to avoid the fresh onslaught of spawn, pausing just long enough to dump more magic into the crystal below her, even though she still hadn’t seen any results.

Slaughter flooded my blade, and the echo of my cut ripped through all the closest spawn. Her hoppity hopping from place to place stopped, and she gave me a little wave of thanks before channeling more magic down into the crystal beneath her feet.

Peering down over the edge, the whole wall of the Bastion was covered in climbing Voidspawn, chitin cracking where claws punched through as they scrambled over each other in their haste to get at us.

Good.

Just as the loops of crystal at the base of the wall had sopped up the last spells, so too did the ones I’d installed up top to refract and refresh the ones from this new circuit. Biggest dumbass in the universe I might have been, but I could follow instructions like a champ.

When the big coil of crystal running down the heart of the Bastion was fully charged, I didn’t need to do anything else. It was all hooked up to the veins running up the length of the wall. All we had to do was stand back and watch the carnage.

When the blast was unleashed this time around, it wasn’t in a steady stream of destruction to cut off their advance, it was in a single shot, fired out from the whole face of the Bastion. A mile-wide laser cannon firing right into their faces. The light was golden and vast, and it illuminated everything as far as the distant horizon. There were still more spawn coming. Enough to replace all we’d killed. Some of them were even bigger than the elephant things we’d already seen. Titans forged of oily black chitin, armored with plates thick enough to turn ballista fire aside.

Then the light died. The coil emptied. Shadow fell back over everything, but before it could completely dim, I took one last look down. Everything scrambling up the wall was dead. Everything on this side of the no-longer functional first line was also dead.

If we could get Araphel to sidle on over to the wall, we might actually have a shot at him with this thing. At least, in theory. I should have known better than to get my hopes up.

From back in the center of his line, Araphel unleashed a fresh blast of Entropy, not aimed up at us but at the wall itself. He’d learned his lesson from the first magical blockade all too well. The crystal might have been an amazing conductor for magic, but anything made from it was inherently fragile. I’d done what I could to shield the stuff in the wall, but at the end of the day, we didn’t have any material that could really withstand a direct attack from Araphel.

His blast bit through stone and crystal alike, burrowing deep into the wall and shattering the coil. Had he known it was there? Had he aimed for it? I had to assume not, from the way he started flitting around again, launching blast after blast all along the front of it. That was the problem with a clever trick, you could only get away with pulling it once against somebody smarter than you.

We had a moment’s reprieve. Time enough for the newly arrived rock-dvergar to march their way up onto the battlements and start spreading along. I had no idea how their little stone-golem armor worked, but it was really fun no longer being the biggest target up here—at least, physically. I graced every one that passed me with a semi-divine-knuckle-bump for good luck, then moved on to the next bunny in my hat.

The next of the portals wasn’t open yet, but I could see the first one starting to twitch and flicker around the edges. “Do we need to do something to keep that open?”

Peacock glanced back to me, eyes still wide after seeing the fireworks display out there. “We need to close it or allow it to close.”

“But then you won’t have a way back to your world…”

“If we win, we’ll make a new one. If we lose, I’d rather Illuin has some time before it too is overrun rather than offering it up like a sacrificial goat.”

“Fair enough…” I was pretty sure I had more to say, but the boom from right beside me on the wall cut me off short. I had my sword swinging and all my orbiting blades in motion before I realized the noise had come from the nearest of the new dvergar. I’d been mildly concerned that they had no weapons, figured they’d rock-punch any enemies that got close, and then thought nothing more about it. Turns out I was wrong. Their stone hands had dropped from their wrists, revealing some sort of piping inside, and that was where the booms were coming from.

The pipes. It turned out they were cannons, and they disgorged lead spheres glowing with runes. A rain of bullets went flying from the tops of our walls, soaring down to hit the new front rank of spawn that had been hurrying in to take the place of the dead.

Just their weird magic guns would have been enough to stop the charge, but it turns out they weren’t even close to done yet. Each one flared on impact and unleashed lightning across the battlefield, arcing and leaping from one spawn to the next, spreading death and destruction back through their ranks, joining up with the other bursts of lightning and expanding out ever farther.

Got to tell you, I love meeting new people.

The storm still hanging almost level with us responded to the electrical charge shifting about down below. All the lightning still crackling up there leapt down to find what was crackling down here—the same basic principles of magic that Asher had tried to explain to me back when we first landed here. The basis for Resonant Dominion, too. Like called out to like. All lightning was one lightning. And it all wanted to be together. Thunder tolled in the darkness, and lightning leapt down to char the injured and the burning spawn who were still crackling with lightning.

I couldn’t wait to see what surprise popped out of the next portal. If they were half as good as the wins we’d had so far, beating the Voidgod would be a cinch.

It seemed like there was no end to the fire that the new dvergar were laying down. It made me wonder just how advanced technology here on Amaranth could have gotten with all the local dvergar’s conniving brains at work if the whole place wasn’t a run-down war zone completely hostile to all civilization. I mean, humans had managed to make it to the moon in the time these dvergar had been hiding in mines, and we were idiots by comparison. Couldn’t help but feel like magic would have been a decent stepping stone for them, too.

Turns out, you don’t get to have all that fire without smoke. It had taken its sweet time rolling up to this height, but now it was clogging up our vision. Thick, black, and oily like the Voidspawn that had burned to make it.

With all the first storm spell finally discharged, we had a solid few seconds of clear, black sky before the smoke washed up to cover the sky all over again. On the plus side, it wasn’t going to kill anybody that flew into it. I waved my sword down to Birger where he’d been watching patiently for the order. “Fliers up!”

The mad old dvergar took off at a run to spread the message. Without the storm cover, Araphel’s fliers would be taking to the sky again. If we could get our gryphons up there, we could cut them off. I mean, we couldn’t stop them all, but it wouldn’t be the same relentless assault that had crushed us when Asher was still casting.

I turned to the closest stone-dvergar who was still going full-auto on the Voidspawn. “Okay, I’ve got to ask because you’ve got guns and robot suits and... Just tell me the truth. Have you lot been to the moon?”

“All three of them.” He grinned, quartz teeth shining in the muzzle flare. “Good mining up there.”

A dvergar was a dvergar, no matter what planet they were from. I was about to crack a joke to that effect when the Slaughter hit.

Until now, Araphel had only unveiled his strength against our defenses, trusting in his little minions to carry the fight with little individual mortals through.

As it passed through me, I lost sight of everything around me. The crackling wave of black energy blotted out everything, but of course, it left me untouched. I was an Eternal. Immortal. I glanced to the dvergar I’d just been talking to, and he was still standing too. “Guess he missed.”

The dvergar didn’t reply. I stepped closer to him and realized why. The animated stone armor was still standing, but the dvergar inside was just gone. I turned around to check on Peacock, and she was gone too. I was suddenly all alone atop this barren stretch of wall. The crossbows that our dvergar had been using lay on the ground. Clothes and armor were scattered everywhere else.

They were all gone. All the reinforcements we’d called from other worlds could be wiped away with a single touch of Araphel’s power. We weren’t turning the fight around by bringing in more people, we weren’t even going to inconvenience him. He was a god.

I cried, “Spread out,” but it was only going to mitigate the damage. Nothing we did could stop the blasts of Slaughter as he unleashed them. Another flew up to strike near Asher. Another near Mercy. The message was clear. We were going to get all these people killed.

Our well-drilled troops were already heading up to replace the bodies lost up on the wall, but I held up my hands and tried to stop them. We needed fewer people in the line of fire, not more.

There was a sound like rolling thunder, and the gryphons passed over our heads. Joined on those flying disks by more of the Illuin-alvaren mages, who were blasting away wildly at the oncoming Voidspawn before the two sides could even collide.

More blasts of Slaughter kept on coming, relentless and steady. Wiping out whole lengths of our defenders each time. Araphel didn’t give a damn how many spawn he lost, he could always make more, but our side were dying faster than we could call fresh reinforcements through from other worlds. I’d thought he was pouring his little toy soldiers into the meatgrinder, but the truth was that he was the machinery of death and destruction, and every mortal on our side had just queued up to wait their turn.

The cold rage had completely consumed me now, and that was good. It gave me the focus that I needed for what would come next. Every blast he unleashed showed me Araphel’s position. It showed me him coming closer. Creeping, inch by inch, into my next trap.

The Voidspawn were up the wall again, coming up over the rim with the same eerie silence all his creatures shared. If they’d been roaring or screaming or anything, they wouldn’t have been so downright unsettling, but seeing these monstrous bestial things killing and being killed without making a single sound made my skin crawl.

I cut them down as they came. I was alone on this stretch of wall now that everyone else had been Slaughtered, but that was just fine. I worked better alone anyway. All the fallen gear of my dead soldiers came apart into sharp shrapnel and swept about with every swing of my sword. The spinning circle of blades that I carried in my orbit swept through them, hacking and slashing and drawing out not a single cry for mercy. It was good that they couldn’t beg me not to take them apart because then I might have felt something other than hate. I didn’t need to feel. Not now. I just needed to move.

On and on they came in an endless massacre. It could have lasted minutes or hours and I’d have had no idea either way. I didn’t get tired, and they didn’t stop coming. I cut, and they died. I spun, and a spiral of blades spun with me. I soaked the Bastion in their ichor and rained their parts down on the ash, and no matter what I did, it would never be enough. I would never kill enough to win this war. Even if I killed every last one of them.

None of them mattered. There was only one truly living thing in all of Araphel’s army, and that was Araphel. To win, he had to die.

Another blast of Slaughter passed through me, leaving me untouched but washing all the Voidspawn away. In my moment’s respite, I turned to face the Ashlands. The mages had been busy while I was distracted. There were huge flaming pockets in the enemy lines, burning in different colors than I’d ever seen fire burn.

Through the greasy clouds above, I could see flashes, not of lightning but of magic. Peacock might have been gone, but her people were still fighting on without pause. Maybe she hadn’t been their leader. Maybe she’d just happened to be the first one of them that I met. Who could say?

More blasts of Slaughter swept over the Bastion. The stone drank it down without damage, but every living thing vanished under the weight of Araphel’s destructive will. Reinforcements dashed up the stairs to replace them as soon as the buzzing black static had passed by. Even in the face of that certain death, nobody was shirking their duty, nobody was backing down. There could be no surrender to an enemy that wanted nothing more than your total annihilation, and that meant that we’d all fight to the last breath.

He was so close now, so close to entering the area I’d been finishing up when Asher and Mercy came back. I could track the blasts back to him, work out the angle. He was so damned close I could taste it.

A fresh wave of spawn came tumbling up over the wall, and I didn’t even bother to fight them hand to hand. The orbit of blades moved to my will now. My mastery of Artifice was finally enough that I could simply move whatever I needed to within my Sphere of Influence. This wall was mine; all the weapons and armor were mine. They resonated with me in the same way these Voidspawn resonated with Araphel. I was their creator, and they did as I commanded, cutting down the enemy everywhere I found them. My Sphere reached out so far that I could defend a whole swathe of the wall alone. Alone and unbothered by the blasts of Slaughter that would have destroyed the others.

There was another thump of air from behind me, another portal opening. I didn’t have time for this right now; Araphel was only inches away.

The thing that came through the freshly made portal stole my breath. It was a faun, but it was something else too. The horns were there, the massive body, even the familiar figure-of-eight pupils in the eyes. What I could not have predicted were the wings. Bat-like and leathery. Not to mention the tail. Holy crap. We opened too many portals and summoned the devil.

I called down to them, trying to maintain my concentration on the fight I was still waging behind me. “Uh, hi there!”

“Our greetings to you, strangers,” in a voice like silk, they replied.

“So we’ve got an end of the world sort of situation going on here, I was wondering if you’d like to come join in the fight? Oh, and I should probably say, if this world ends, all the other ones in the universe do.”

They tilted their head to one side. “You seek our aid? We who are despised among the spheres?”

“Listen, buddy, nobody liked me either when I first got here. Turns out, when you save the universe, everyone’s opinion of you changes. So, you want to flap back through and bring an army to help out?”

“No need.” They smiled, revealing needle teeth that absolutely did not look like all the locals’ flat grass grinders. “We are legion.”

The faun launched themself from the stone to join the fight in the air with a mighty beat of wings, but through some optical illusion, they still seemed to be standing in the same spot with clawed hands extended. Another leapt up from them, then another, passing through each other, swooping up over the wall.

The Illuin-alvaren watched on in horror as the single demon-looking faun became a hundred, then a thousand, then blotted out the sky. They were still duplicating when I turned back to face the war. Without my attention, there were dozens of Voidspawn filling my length of wall, trying to dodge past my swords and get down to the soft, squishy mortals. Not happening.

As I faced the horde, they flinched back. For one moment I thought it was because they were afraid until I realized just how ridiculous that idea was. All that had happened was I turned my attention to them, and my will flooded back into my Sphere of Influence. All the dust in the air had been caught and pushed them back towards the edge. Not enough to actually move them, but enough to create that flinch. All with a casual thought.

One swing of the sword was all it took to repel them. The echo of my cut passed out through the air and the dust and the shrapnel, splitting those too close to me and launching the rest off the wall and into the open air.

I was back to my vantage point, and Araphel launched another blast, hitting somewhere past where I’d thrown Mercy. He was where I needed him to be. Finally, stupid idea number four could kick-off.

With a shrug, I shed my armor, and with a casual backhand, I launched all my swords out to pierce the next surge of spawn. Everyone looked to me standing there naked on the wall in utter confusion until I called down to them, “I’ll be back!”

Then I threw myself off the wall.

Chapter 25

It was not a short fall, and the view wasn’t great. I’d barely made it down six feet before the first of the Voidspawn leapt off the wall to latch onto me, and it only got worse from there. It was like peeling a strip of wallpaper off the Bastion as I fell, every spawn I passed pouncing after me in a line. Even the ones to either side made the jump, most of them missing, but enough managed to hook a claw into me or their kin to drag themselves in closer. I was bleeding all over, and that was before the flying spawn started swooping in to hammer me.

All the way down to the distant ground I was battered and bashed from side to side, bouncing off the wall and rebounding into the waiting, slashing claws of some fresh nightmare with dragonfly wings. Back and forth, back and forth, raked and bleeding and trailing my guts behind me until finally I hit the ground and died.

That moment of total darkness was a blissful relief after all that pain. I’d highly recommend dying as a great holiday from misery if it wasn’t for the fact that it is more permanent for other people than for me. I could barely see Death himself arrive through all the heaving monsters, but he was definitely there. “Hey, buddy, you know how I said we’d be seeing a lot of each other? Well, uh, hopefully, most of that is going to be in the next few minutes.”

His skull tilted to one side. “You seek to linger here, between life and death?”

“Oh! No. Sorry for the confusion. Actually, if you can bang me back into a body as fast as possible each time, I’d really appreciate it.”

Death shrugged. “As you wish. It is of no difference to me.”

I slammed back into flesh so hard and fast I genuinely thought I’d knocked some teeth out. There was one moment of total darkness and confusion again, then I remembered where I was, what I was doing, and why I was suffocating.

Just like the first time I was born on Amaranth, I clawed my way up, digging and pushing from beneath with Artifice to surface as fast as possible. Taking just a moment to fuse the Inimicus that was bound to my soul with the sword I’d buried beside my new shrine, I gave one last push and exploded from the ash.

I hit the underside of a Voidspawn, but with all my momentum, it might as well have been made of cotton candy. Up into the air it went, and up I followed it, flipping upside down and kicking off its underside to change my direction.

Araphel didn’t even see me before I got to him. His claws were outstretched, blasting some fresh devastation on the Bastion up ahead of me. He’d also decided to get all dressed up, which was frankly a relief after so much time seeing his eerie, bare body. I didn’t like to spend that much naked time with people I hated. He had on some real fancy flowing robes that he must have stolen off an alvaren corpse somewhere along the line. Or maybe he still had a whole wardrobe back at the Spire that we hadn’t wandered into. The robes were hooded, too. If it was meant to be a disguise, maybe he should have pulled back on that whole aura of overwhelming evil.

His head snapped around, and I caught a brief glimpse of glinting lights the same color as the evil energy he was crapping out at my castle before the Inimicus-infused blade hammered home. In his back and right out the other side, piercing through where anybody else would have had a heart.

Ichor stained his fancy robe.

“Surprise, bitch.”

“You…”

I twisted the sword, and more of that raven-black liquid dribbled down the length of the blade. “Who were you expecting?”

Whatever his answer was going to be, I didn’t get to hear it over the unholy shrieking that started when the blood hit the ash. It was enough to make me take a half-step back. Just enough distance to see the Voidspawn being born from his spilled blood, and enough to see him spin on the spot, yanking the sword from my hands and cleaving his claws through my throat.

He was so fast, I sometimes forgot how much stronger he was than me. I had barely enough time to grunt out some blood before I keeled over dead.

My eyes snapped open back down in the pit beneath the ash where I’d hidden the shrine, Inimicus in hand. I launched myself back up in the very same way as before. The only difference was that this time I knew where Araphel was exactly.

When I died last time, the armor I’d left in the shrine had dropped empty to the ash. All it took was a jerk of Artifice to have it lap around me again. Giving me the protection I needed to shrug off all the leaping Voidspawn trying to get between me and their master.

If he’d been taken by surprise the first time, the look on his lack of a face this time around must have been hilarious. I was almost sad the hood was obscuring my view of it. Well, that was easily fixed. I slashed down into his head, both hands driving the Inimicus blade and all my falling momentum behind me. I cleft that stupid hood in half, and my blade bit in through where his skull should have been.

All the spawn might have been silent except for the smooth scuttling sounds of their movement, but Araphel could scream like a champ. It was a scream with volume, not just in the noise sense but in the sense that it filled up the whole damn world. Everyone must have heard it up on the wall. Everyone must have heard it back on Earth—space and vacuums be damned. The gods themselves must have been quivering in their dark marble halls at the sound of the Voidgod hurt. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face as I hissed to him again, “Surprise, Bitch!”

As the cloth fell away, I saw why he’d hidden himself away. The little pale scars that our previous attacks on him had left behind were still there. When you added in the damage of being turned into magical lightning and then dispelled, he wasn’t looking so slick any more. More like the surface of the moon. Pocked and cracked. I guess that healing came under the remit of creation. The part of divinity that he couldn’t touch.

“Oh, wow, you got even uglier.”

He lashed out again, but this time I’d had a moment more to prepare. Physically I might have been too slow to dodge him, but with Artifice, I could yank my armor back out of reach, my sword too, so long as I was quick.

“You… shall pay for your insolence.”

I flung myself forward again, smashing my sword off his hooked claws, then staggering away under the power of his parry. “How? What can you do that is worse than you were already going to do anyway? You started out at ten. There’s no going up from there.”

My next hit stopped dead, his claws clamping down on the flat of the blade. “I shall rend your flesh.”

“You already did, dumbass.” I struggled to pull the Inimicus from his grasp, but it just wouldn’t come. “I came back.”

“I will destroy you.” He yanked the blade from my hands and launched it across the battlefield. It might have killed one of his spawn or it might have just stuck in it harmlessly. Either way, it was gone for now.

I laughed in his face. “What part of ‘Eternal’ are you not understanding?” There was no weapon in my hands, but that didn’t mean I was going to slow or stop. I had my fists, and I had a monster in front of me. That was all I’d ever needed.

He slapped my punches away at first, contemptuous, but then I surged my Potency and came in harder. I’d never been trained in the fine art of fisticuffs. Seren had always been of the opinion that someone who could conjure weapons out of nothing would never need to know how to throw a punch. But I knew enough. I ducked under a sweeping claw and hammered a fist into his guts. It was like punching solid stone. Probably not my best idea. My hand came away broken and bleeding, but a quick surge of Primal energy put it right. I swung for him again, and he caught my fist in the palm of his hand. Good thing I had a spare. I socked him in the jaw, though you wouldn’t have known it from how little it moved him.

His spilled blood became spawn at his feet. New nightmares spawned from every part of him that escaped. That explained another part of why everyone had always had such a hard time fighting him. Even when you hurt him, you were just making him more allies.

Drawing back to punch him again, I was supremely unsurprised to find my other hand caught in his claws too. He lifted me off my feet, stretching my arms out straight to keep me from wriggling too much, drawing me level with his face, so I could see the lethal point of his tail rising behind him, wreathed in crackling Slaughter. “You shall perish—like all the rest.”

All of this time being played for a fool, being made the butt of the gods’ jokes, running around and fetching the pieces of this asshole’s soul, throughout it all, there had only ever been one thing I truly wanted to do. So I did it.

I headbutted Araphel.

No matter how thick my skull might have been, slamming it into an immovable object with Surged strength was enough to turn it to powder and snap my neck like a twig. My complete disregard for my own survival paid dividends. Araphel lurched back just before I died in his arms, and my hollow armor was left dangling.

Back in my shrine hole with the Inimicus in hand, I couldn’t help but wonder how long I was going to keep getting away with this. Not that it mattered.

A fresh upthrust of stone launched me out, directly at my intended target. He was still standing there staring uselessly at the armor in his hands as it turned liquid and flowed back onto my body. I was knocked off course by a swooping bat-snake, so I came down hard beside him, already bleeding from gashes across my face before we had even started this round. That was fine. I could keep doing this forever if that was what it took.

I lunged for him, but he was already in motion, his tail snapping up to turn my sword aside even as I reached out with Artifice to draw stone up from beneath us. He lunged for me, but he lost his footing and missed as the platform we stood on jumped up from the midst of the Voidspawn.

“So nice of you to visit. And it was great to meet the kids, but it is really time for you to head home now.”

That damn tail lashed out for me again, slitting my armor open from hip to shoulder, scraping across my ribs and sternum.

“You are the one who shall depart existence.”

I ducked the next swipe of claws and the whipping tail that followed. He drove me back to the platform’s edge, step by step. Almost without thinking about it, I used Artifice to supplement my every motion, making me fast enough to avoid his attacks, making me strong enough that the few blows I brought down on him, in turn, would be felt.

It was like my mind, body, and soul were in harmony for once. Potency pulsed through my muscles, Artifice moving armor and sword exactly where it needed to be, even Aether seemed to be glowing, moving the spirit inside of my meat in time to the rest. If I’d been min-maxing from the start, focusing on only one area and boosting it to new heights, I would have missed out on all of this. It was only through the combination of my different Pillars of Divinity that I was able to match a full-blown god. If only for a few moments before the inevitable.

When I saw an opening, I took it. Even knowing that Araphel would deal me a death blow in return. Diving in past a bolt of raw Slaughter to catch both claws in my chest as I swung down with all my surged Potency into his neck. The Inimicus bit deep just before he ripped me in half. More ichor flooded out to make more monsters.

I popped back into existence with a laugh and was mid-leap towards the open hole above me when Araphel came crashing down into it. He’d leapt from my raised platform and came down on me with his hind-claws angled to skewer me through and through. Blood gurgled up from my throat as he looked around contemptuously at the makeshift shrine I’d built. A blast of raw destruction took it apart.

“How long did you think that this would work?”

Blood burst out from my lips in answer as I reached out with Artifice. When he’d hit me, he knocked the Inimicus from my hand, nowhere near the limits of my Sphere of Influence where I was already moving things around but still out of reach of my hand. Glowering down at me, he filled his hands with Slaughter and reared up for the finishing blow.

My Artifice finally caught the Inimicus and flung it my way. The hilt battered off his descending claws, turning the killing strike aside.

Was it possible to sneer without a face? He seemed to be doing a good job of it anyway as he lifted his still-glowing claws to try again. It was only then he noticed I was decapitated.

When the hilt had hit his hands, the blade had passed clean through my neck. I winked at him. Then I winked out of existence.

The last part of this shrine had been left slightly out of place. All it had taken was a touch of my Artifice to complete it. There was a fresh set of armor there for me to spawn into and a great-sword to fuse the Inimicus with. If I’d planned ahead just a tiny bit better, I could have left myself some snacks, too—though they’d probably have gotten dusty buried in all this ash.

Another upthrust of rock had me on the surface and soaring over the Voidspawn to come down on Araphel as he burst out of my last hole in the ground. Even with all his incredible speed and strength, it turned out he could be surprised. My sword came down on his crossed wrists where he flung them up to take the blow, and it bit deep. I even pulsed Deathtouch into the blade for good measure, not that it would be enough to overcome his mastery of Slaughter.

“How?”

That was all he managed to blurt out before I brought the sword down on him, again and again. He got over his surprise quick enough, slapping one blow aside and ducking back from the next, but ichor flowed from that wound like rain, spattering the ash all around us.

When I bounded back in for my next attack, he caught my sword between his claws and tried to wrest it away. It didn’t work. Whether the wounds were making him weaker or the combination of my Artifice and surged Potency were just too much for him to overcome, I didn’t know.

How was my Potency still surged? Turns out every time I came back from the dead, I started with a clean slate on all the divinities that were normally on a timer.

Still straining against me, the Voidgod snarled, “Clever tricks will not save you.”

“Probably not, but they’re making you mad, so it is all worth it.” I grinned, Artifice still working away in the background.

Grunting, he gave one mighty tug upwards, hauling me off my feet for an instant, his tail darting around to stab into me. That was when the other sword I’d made out of my old set of armor came zipping up out of the first shrine and skewered him through the middle.

It was actually pretty cool to see what it looked like from this side. The blade almost entirely dissolved away by his inherent destruction before it burst out rapier-thin on this side. Even as I watched, it crumbled away to nothingness, but the hole it had made wasn’t going anywhere. He was slick with ichor now, surrounded by a cacophony as new Voidspawn sprung up from his blood.

They leapt for me before they’d even formed, splattering hopelessly against my armor before they had solid parts. I guess both of us were technically drenched in Araphel’s blood by now.

Impaling him had bought me the length of a breath before he continued the thrust with his tail, but that tiny hesitation gave me the time to kick out at it and knock it off course. The wailing of birthing spawn fell silent as swiftly as it had come.

I let go of my rapidly dissolving sword and dropped back to the ground, springing inside his reach to hammer some absolutely useless punches into his torso. “So tell me, who killed you last time around?”

Araphel drove a knee into my gut before I could get into a rhythm and tossed the sword aside to impale yet another of his endless babies. “What?”

“Well, nobody knows who actually did it last time around. We know some Eternal was there to bind you to the sword”—I ducked a sweep of claws—“and we know you went boom when that happened, but nobody knows who actually did the deed.”

His tail would have had my head off if I didn’t leap back at just the right moment, and by the time I recovered, he blasted at me with the same colossal, staticky balls of Slaughter he’d swept up over the walls. It tore through all the Voidspawn milling around me and set my own dark Pillar of Slaughter quivering inside my soul, but I didn’t die. Not like this. If he wanted me gone, he’d have to do it with his own two hands.

The storm of death and destruction he’d unleashed was never meant to kill me, just blind my newly attuned Deathsight to his coming. He had me by the throat before I even knew he was there, elongated claws lengthening to encircle it entirely, Slaughter flooding through those same claws, ready for the Deathblow.

“How apt you ask of a forgotten nobody in your final moments. Just as none shall ever know her name, none shall remember yours. I will wipe you and your kind from history.”

“Oh, you’re such a tease,” I pouted.

This time, he was prepared enough to catch the Inimicus with his other hand as it darted in to kill me, and for one moment, my Artifice alone strained against the unholy strength of his arms before it gave out. I couldn’t overpower him, not with one Pillar of divinity alone.

Total darkness filled my vision as he brought his absence of a face in line with my own. “You are nothing.”

I switched to Plan B.

Plan B was the one that I’d been avoiding using because I knew it was going to hurt like hell. I surrounded myself in Artifice, and I squeezed. My armor crumpled like a tin can against a frat boy’s forehead, and everything inside of it turned to juicy jelly.

I burst back to life, grabbed the Inimicus where it hung by my hand in mid-air, and took off after Araphel again. I could keep doing this all day. And every moment that I was kicking his ass back and forth across the battlefield was a moment that our defenses on the Bastion would hold. I was going to live forever. I was never going to tire. If this was what it took to end the threat of Araphel, fighting him to a standstill forever, then you can be damn sure it was what I was going to do. I would bet any amount of money that he’d get bored before me.

The moment I broke the surface, a wave of Entropy rolled over me, blasting down to destroy the shrine below the ash. Araphel was getting sharper; he’d worked out how I was pulling the trick. A quick tug of Artifice had the next one up and running before we’d even made it into striking distance of each other.

“So she was a she. That’s a good start. Was she human? Alvaren? Faun? Please let it be faun.”

Araphel slapped the Inimicus aside and set me scrambling back from his counterstrike. “I shall not indulge your curiosity—unless you seek to know how oblivion feels.”

My old crumpled, juicy can of armor unraveled itself and soared through the air to join me again, washing over me like mercury and taking its shape just before one of his claws hit. They were sharp enough and swung with enough force to tear through the thick plate of metal I’d forged onto my shoulder, but it was better than taking the blow without any armor at all.

“Oh, go on, it isn’t like we’ve got anything better to talk about.”

He hissed. “I am not here for your entertainment.”

The Inimicus caught him a glancing blow on the hip as he turned to lash out with his tail. It was not enough to stop his turn but enough to draw blood—or whatever that goop was.

“You kind of are, though?”

Apparently he didn’t like that, judging from the way he lashed out at my face this time around. One claw hooked under my jaw, and with a grunt of effort, he tore it free. Not the claw. My jaw. The whole damn thing came away with an awful gristly tearing and popping. My tongue lolled down onto my neck. Ever tasted your own neck? Can’t recommend it. Mine was all ashy. And bloody. What with all the blood.

He held my chin up triumphantly. “Finally, you shall be silent.”

I don’t think he expected me to keep going after that. He seemed to be genuinely surprised when I flung myself on top of him. Strength he might have had, but weight and leverage were on my side. When we collided, he went over, and even as I rode him down to the dirt, I was hacking away.

His claws dug into me, raking me open from neck to crotch. Every moment we were close, he was killing me, Entropy flooding out of him to turn my armor to rust and dust. Only the Inimicus could survive it, and even it looked pitted and worn. Even with all my strength turned against him, each blow only seemed to barely mark him. I’d hit him with a city without killing him, so the fact I was leaving a scratch was probably remarkable. Didn’t feel like it, though.

Out of pure spite, I pulsed Restoration through my body—not to heal the wounds in my guts, that was a losing battle, what with his claws still raking away, digging in for my organs and plucking them out—but to regrow my jaw and call him a bitch to his face again.

It was only halfway done when I died again. My only regret. He’d slashed his way through guts and lungs to find my heart and finally called on the power of Slaughter to end me before I flipped the Inimicus in my hands and thrust it in between his reaching claws.

A fresh shrine gave me a new set of armor and a sword, and I rose with a new purpose. No longer to tank the Voidgod and keep my allies on the wall safe; no longer out of a desperate hope that I might find some way to actually kill Araphel, no. I was reborn here on Amaranth to ruin Araphel’s day.

I tried to be sneaky about it this time, plowing myself sideways through the ash before I exploded out into Araphel. I could feel the pure death radiating off him now that I was closer. It shone brighter than the sun amidst the guttering candlelights of his spawn. A giant target on his back. Or in this case, the crotch.

The blade came up out of the desert before the rest of me, powered by the thrust of stone from beneath my feet, heading straight up between Araphel’s legs and tail, bang into the middle of the triangle. It didn’t matter that he was as smooth as a Ken-doll down there; that had to hurt.

If he’d been surprised the last few times, this new approach had him downright startled. The impact lifted him right off the ground.

“I’m just saying, I feel like only one of us is having a good time here, and it isn’t you.” He tumbled back down from the now-flattened tip of my blade, still confused about where the blow had been struck from. “So, doesn’t that imply you’re here for my entertainment?”

“You are…”

“I’m going to die.” I deflected his claws. “I’m the worst.” Then I bounced over to parry a lash of his tail. “Get some new material.”

He leapt to rake me with his hind claws, but he couldn’t reach. Not when every piece of metal on my body became shrapnel and leapt at him like bullets from a gun. They pattered away to nothing on contact with his body and the destruction bound within, but the impact was enough to stop his leap, leaving him open to my next swing.

Any other living thing being hit in the neck with my sword would have died. Not just died but been completely obliterated. Head off. Neck a stump. All arguments over. I wish it had been that easy with Araphel.

The great-sword melted away, even as it bit into him. There was still enough there that he felt it. Once more, all my surged Potency backed up with all my new tricks of Artifice only got the sharp edge of the sword an inch in.

Ichor came bursting out of him as I yanked the sword free. The Voidgod staggered.

“Come on then. You want to run your mouth. Say something.”

Araphel did not have a polite and carefully reasoned response. He had a wild blast of raw power that swept me off my feet and a shriek that made every hair on my body stand on end before the blast burned all that hair off. I didn’t know what kind of energy it was he was puking out all over me. There was a whole range of Pillars of the Void that I hadn’t even touched, and he was the master of every one of them, capable of unleashing any of them with a thought.

Whatever that particular one was, it hurt like hell. I didn’t have any way to counter it. I just had to suffer.

When he came bursting through the tail end of the blast, I was hardly surprised. Despite taking a tumble, I was up and thrusting into the blinding blast before he could close on me.

I got him square in the chest. His charge had too much momentum for him to reverse or even slow. There was little left of the sword after the blast but the core of the Inimicus, but that core was sharp enough to burst through him again.

“I’m sorry, did that hurt?”

Another wail in reply, then every single Voidspawn on the battlefield froze in place. Holy crap. Had I killed him? Did we just win?

Turns out, no, I’d just made him angry.

All the Voidspawn that had been pouring up the Bastion reversed their course and came scuttling back down; all the massed armies of the Voidgod spreading as far as the eye could see in every single direction turned to face me and charged.

Oh, I really made him angry.

Araphel couldn’t even get to me now, not with the storm of monsters descending on me from all sides. He had my sword still lodged in his chest when the boot of some lumbering titan knocked me off my feet. I rolled with it, right into the waiting needle-lined jaws of some sort of badger-lizard. It clamped down on me hard, enveloping almost half my now essentially naked body. Amaranth-style acupuncture. It whipped its head back and forth, flinging me back and forth until another one of them latched down on my head with a razor-sharp beak. Then there was a brief tug of war before I finally heard the meaty pop, and I died.

When I came back again, the Inimicus was much worse for wear, pocked and showing signs of rust along the blade’s length. I didn’t even know that it could rust. It was sort of greenish on the surface planes where it was looking flakey like there was some copper in the mix. Maybe there was for all I knew. I pulsed Artifice through it, remaking it as best I could into a marginally smaller sword, yet again. If I kept this up, it was going to end up looking like a damned stiletto.

While I was Artificing, I broke this shrine and activated the next. I really needed some armor. Fighting the whole horde nude was not a good idea—if only because eventually one of them was going to bite me on the dick. I’m as depraved as the next man, but some things were too kinky even for me.

If I’d hoped to quietly off myself before they descended on me, I was not going to be in luck. Chitinous black claws burst through the ash above, scuttling little Voidspawn rushing down to drown me in their bodies. I guess Araphel had worked out how to feel me the same way I could feel him. Whatever tie there had been between our souls should have been destroyed when he annihilated the rusted blade shards, but something was still resonating between us. Maybe it was just the fact that we were both connected to the Void. The only ones connected to the Void in the whole universe. That was probably going to be more than enough to echo.

At least these little ones died beneath my much-reduced blade without any logistical problems to do with how thick their armor plating was. I split the first of them in half as they rained down, but it got uglier and messier the more that came pouring in through the ceiling with their pincers snapping, claws swiping, and jaws drooling. The more that came, the bigger they got, as more and more of the roof over this little air pocket vanished under their weight, and the ash came pouring in.

By the time I fought myself up the slope of dead bodies and to the surface, Araphel was nowhere to be seen. If I could have concentrated for half a second, I knew I’d be able to find him, but they made sure I couldn’t. Body after body piled in. Some of them as big as men; some bigger than me. As they grew bigger, my little sword became less and less effective. I had to twist it to crack their chitinous shells open, wrenching them apart as much as I was cutting through them.

Araphel struck while I was up to my elbows in some heaving centipede-gorilla thing, leaping over the back of one of his other minions to hit me side-on. One hind claw hooked in my back, and he rode me down to the ground. He dug his front claws into my chest again, reaching for my heart, gathering Slaughter as he went. More of my rags were torn and fell away in the tussle of raking claws.

“Buddy, I’m sorry but I’m just not that into you. Something about all the genocide is just a turn-off for me.”

He cracked my ribcage open with a flex of his shoulders, baring parts of me that were never meant to be seen to the empty black sky. “Cease your prattling, fool. I have you now. Nowhere to run. No clever tricks.”

I spat blood into his non-face. “Don’t know about clever… but I’ve… still got some… tricks.”

Chapter 26

The bones in his hands were my bones. They were me. Even when they were separated and bathed in the Entropy of his aura, I could touch them wherever they were. Restoration could regrow bone, now both Primal and Artifice flowed together, and I put my stolen bones to work.

Spikes burst out of them, piercing into his hands, hooking in so that he could not let go. The ribs wanted to grow back into me, to form a new skeleton and layer flesh over the top, but I didn’t let them, forcing that energy down new avenues, coiling the bones up and around his arms, even as he raked his claws over them trying to free himself. Bone chips rained off him, and I sent them shooting right back in to start growing elsewhere.

Slowly but surely, he was wrapped in my bones. All it took was a flex of his arms to crack them apart, but that just meant they’d sprout new offshoots and spread ever farther. Every break was a new starting point for the cancerous mass of bone to spread out. Both his arms were covered, and it was spreading up his chest by the time I thought to kill myself, but I couldn’t quite tear myself away from the task at hand. He struggled and he wrestled, but everything that was a part of me in my Sphere of Influence resonated perfectly with me. It was me, so he could not destroy it. Not in any way that mattered. I was eternal.

With the last strength in my body before I bled out, I raised up a hand from the clotted ash, looked right at Araphel, and clenched my fist. Just as my beer can armor had collapsed in on itself, so did the bone.

I died somewhere in the middle of his scream, but I could still hear it when I respawned in my shiny new set of armor. It made it really easy to launch myself out of the ash right into him. Great-sword already swinging.

He wasn’t crushed to death like I’d been—he was built too solidly for that—but I could see ichor washing over every bit of bone until they were as midnight-black as his central form. It held him still enough for my Deathtouch-infused blow to hit him square in the face.

There was no shrugging this one off. I knocked him clean off his feet. The blade was a ruin by the time I was done, but that smooth expanse of face wasn’t so smooth anymore. I’d knocked a line into it, grey and moldering already.

“How did you like that trick, bitch?”

Okay, so maybe further antagonizing the furious god of destruction wasn’t my smartest move, but to my credit, the goal was still to keep him focused on me until I managed to come up with a brighter idea, and there was no question it was working.

Raw Entropy exploded out of him in every direction. Even the tainted ash beneath him was wiped out by it. My armor, my sword, everything but the Inimicus was washed away, too. Yet still, the fractured and crumbling bones clung to him. At least until he unleashed his next explosion of power. Slaughter this time. The kind my own dark Pillar had to burst to life to protect me from.

It was enough to wipe away the Primal energy still infused in the bones that clung to him, enough to end their wild growth. The next time he flexed, they fell apart.

That was actually the moment everything fell apart. I just didn’t know it yet.

“Even now you cannot grasp the vast distance between us. The different worlds we move through. You think like a mortal. You cannot comprehend the true nature of things.” Even as he took his first step towards me through the new desolation, the ash below us bucked, sending the pair of us stumbling. That wasn’t me. I didn’t do that. I flung out my senses, doing my best to ignore the blazing sun of Araphel in favor of whatever else was out here.

Lifesense was giving me little flickers. I’d put it down to the Voidspawn that I’d carved up but not quite killed before now, but I kept forgetting to account for the effect of all the Void-touched dust in the way. It made all my other senses kind of spotty. Well, when it was combined with all the other crap going on around us.

That was my excuse anyway.

That was why I didn’t sense the worm coming until it exploded out of the earth beneath Araphel and swallowed him whole. A dhole if I was getting technical. The big monstrous critters that had called this ashen wasteland home before all the war had happened on top of it. I’d honestly forgotten they were here.

Well, if they were on my side, I wasn’t going to complain about it. Maybe all of nature was rebelling against Araphel. Maybe it was just luck it ate Araphel instead of me. I didn’t care. I needed all the help I could get.

The only downside of our new visitor was that it had plowed right through my shrine, so I had to move west to find the next one and activate it, scampering through a heaving horde of Voidspawn all intent on my bloody dismemberment. That was bracing.

I was missing an arm by the time I’d made it through them, and I considered it a cheap price to pay to get my guaranteed resurrection here instead of somewhere random.

The worm lasted about ten seconds against Araphel before a fresh explosion of Slaughter ripped it to shreds. Worm guts rained down on me, glutinous and sticky. Yuck. I wiped them from my eyes just in time to see him come bounding my way.

That insane speed I’d seen him using to zip around the battlefield was on full display, but what really got me was that he seemed almost entirely still at the center of that motion, passing smoothly through the world like a shark. He leapt gracefully from the back of one of his hideous spawn to the next, closing the distance with me in less than a second. I didn’t even have time to heft the Inimicus into his path.

Good thing I had help.

Another worm hit him mid-flight, not managing to swallow him whole but ramming him off course to crash into the midst of his heaving army. The dhole splashed down in the midst of the Voidspawn, and it took them mere moments to butcher it, but that didn’t matter because another was rising out of the desert of ash, then another. Dozens of them burst out, ramming through the swarming spawn that were all still coming for me.

Araphel was back on his feet in an instant, coming at me again, but yet again, he was arrested in mid-flight by a dhole, then another flinging itself up and on top of him when he turned to massacre the first. The sheer weight of the things, and the unstable ground beneath us, meant that he went down hard. This was beyond luck now. These monsters weren’t coming at Araphel at random any more than I was. They were being guided. Steered. Launched like rockets at the opportune moment.

Every time the Voidgod broke free, another one came crashing down on him. He unleashed wave after wave of Slaughter, obliterating the worms and all his own minions along with them. What made it even funnier was that he scarcely had a moment to spring back to his feet before the next dhole popped out of a hole and smashed him off his feet again. Reverse whack-a-dhole.

It gave me half a second to think, which was much appreciated. Though let’s be honest, I was probably going to squander it.

First things first, I reached out through Artifice to check on all my other shrines. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, the incoming swarm of giant worm monsters had smashed right through them all, leaving shattered bits of my cunning plan strewn deep beneath the ash.

That was going to be a problem because I did not see any way forward that didn’t involve me dying horribly at least a hundred more times.

Despite the constant impact of wiggly worms, Araphel was still coming on. Coated in guts, dripping with slime, and scratched all over from the dozen blows I’d dealt him, he trudged towards me. I could have turned and run for it, but that was just going to get me into the charging line of Voidspawn even faster.

With all my remaining surprise shrines thoroughly trashed, there was no reason to keep my extra gear buried with them. I hauled up all the armor and swords I’d made from across the battlefield, swerving them around Araphel’s ongoing explosions and gathering them about me. Restoration grew back my arm. A pair of armor suits merged into one extra-thick one, and the half-dozen blades that I didn’t forge into a great-sword the size of a sedan fell into orbit around me.

The funny thing was, now that all my godly powers were working together, it didn’t even feel heavy. I could have let it go and it would have hung in the air with all the rest, but by sharing the weight between my Potency and my Pillars of Divinity, neither one felt the pressure. Maybe this was what it felt like to be a god, to have everything be effortless.

Whatever Araphel was going through was definitely not effortless. He had taken to catching dholes by their jaws and snapping them in half as they emerged, but even that wasn’t enough to get him moving any faster. He was still doing the slasher movie bad-guy walk towards me.

That was when the big guns came out. A dhole that genuinely must have been the size of a blue whale came tunneling through the ash towards us, throwing up a mountain of ash behind it as it came. There was no element of surprise this time, just the raw bulk of something so big it shouldn’t even have been able to move.

Araphel abandoned his march on me to face this new monstrosity, raising a contemptuous hand and unleashing a torrent of Slaughter to meet it as it rose.

It had to be one of the wonders of the world, this massive beast, bigger than an ancient wyrm. I’d never seen a worm that big. I’d certainly never seen a worm that big being dissolved from the head backward as it rushed face-first into a radioactive laser blast coming out of some dick of a god’s hand. Flesh melted away in the solid blast of Slaughter. Anything like a head or brain had long since been destroyed, but the body just kept on rolling like a train on rails. All that speed, all that weight, there was no stopping it.

Unless you happened to have a bottomless well of Slaughter to draw on. Araphel just went on blasting away, waiting until the end of the worm arrived and he had the whole dang thing wiped from existence.

I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth. He was distracted, channeling the power of a Pillar that wasn’t going to destroy all my new gear before I even got a chance to use it. So I was going to use it.

Treating inanimate objects like they were alive was crazy. I knew that. But in my head, I still referred to every one of the swords chasing me across the battlefield as my little buddies. I couldn’t help it. My little buddies flew along behind me as I leapt for Araphel, humming as they passed through the air, splitting it with their sharpness.

When I swung for him with all my strength, my buddies leapt forward, echoing the cut of my sword. Araphel probably would have rolled his eyes at me if he had eyes. Even as huge as my great-sword was, and all the power I put behind it, all he had to do was reach up with his spare hand and catch it. I slammed to a dead stop, dangling from the other end of the sword.

My little buddies didn’t stop. They went through him. They impaled him.

Every part of his jet-black surface had been marked by the war we’d already waged on him, but now it couldn’t even be seen through the bristle of blades. He was a pincushion. A shiny metal hedgehog. For the first time, he lost his grip on me. I dropped down to the battlefield and swung for him again.

Even with all his speed and strength, his moment of confusion amidst the sudden pincushion experience got that swing home to roost. It slipped between two of the blades already piercing him and bit deep.

The flow of Slaughter stopped dead. The worm did not.

It hit the two of us like a runaway truck—albeit one that was a lot juicier and less metallic than the usual kind—flattening us against its flat front and driving us across the ash. I couldn’t have said how far it carried us, only that we smashed through the front rank of Voidspawn like they were bowling pins, sending them flying even as we went on rolling.

I strained against that awful momentum—not to get free but to haul my sword back from Araphel’s body before the whole thing dissolved. Even in the moment he’d had unleashing Entropy again, a solid half of it had been chewed right through. All my little buddies dropped away as the parts embedded in his flesh sizzled out of being.

Well, I wasn’t going to get many more chances to sucker punch him. I might as well.

Pulling it back with Artifice and then swinging with all that momentum helping me along, I hit him again, spinning my sword mid-swing so that the sharpened edge that remained was aimed for his now exposed flesh. His aura of destruction seared metal away in molten lumps, but enough still made contact to earn me something like a grunt from him.

Maybe I couldn’t kill him, but I could make him hurt. And that cold rage still burning inside me flared in satisfaction each time I did. If this was going to be my forever, you could be damned sure I was going to take what joy I could. If all I could do was hurt him, I was going to hurt him so bad he wished he’d never hatched from his orb in the middle of the world. I was going to make the Voidgod say uncle, or I was going to die trying—as many times as it took.

Voidspawn after Voidspawn smacked off me as we plowed on into their ranks, chitin cracking off the armor I was really glad I’d made extra-thick. None of them seemed to hit Araphel. The ones that weren’t leaping for me jumped aside to avoid their master. Benefits of running the family business, I guess.

We couldn’t have gone more than a mile before he switched back to Slaughter, pouring it out into the beast behind—not the controlled massacre he’d been unleashing on it before but that staticky chaos that he sometimes wrapped himself in. The flesh we were pressed against melted away. We sank back through the length of the mega-dhole, side by side.

“So you want to tell me who kicked your ass now?” Just lifting my head away from the dissolving mass of worm meat was an effort, and I had to yell to stand a chance of being heard. “I don’t have anything else to do!”

“She was nothing.” His voice was like nails raking over the insides of my skull from this close. “You are all nothing.”

“If she was nothing, and she beat you, what does that make you?”

“You are so desperate to learn of her. Do you hope to repeat her trick? You cannot. You could not comprehend it. Just as she did not.”

I glanced sideways at him, mainly to keep the oncoming spawn from hitting me right in the face. Oof. That last one was a big one. “Then what’s the harm in telling me?”

He lashed out a claw towards me, not quite reaching. “To see you plead and receive nothing pleases me.”

“Oh! In that case. Please don’t tell me. I’d hate to know.”

He pushed off from the decaying and crumbling remains of the worm. There was little left but the tail end at this point, and the pressure of the momentum was easing off. “Pathetic.”

“No, I mean it, I don’t want to know. Knowing would make me miserable.” He was pulling himself free, ready to murder my ass, and I needed to be ready to fight back. “I like the mystery. Keep it to yourself.”

As the last of the worm vanished into oblivion, we fell into the mass of Voidspawn. “You make a fool of yourself.”

I came down swinging, splitting the whole front rank with an echo of the Slaughter that infused my blade. “I didn’t make myself anything. This is me, baby. Twenty-four-seven.”

He was standing back, letting the swarm descend on me like he had back at the Overlook. The spawn no longer sought to wound me but to bear me down. To pin me in place so he could finish me. I wondered if living for millions of years since the birth of the universe had left him with so little imagination or if he’d always been this way.

“I was privy to your idiocy when I dwelt in your mind, in your soul. I know the truth of you, Maulkin. Beloved by none. Known by none. Desperately bloviating over your own greatness to mask the well of uncertainty at your heart. Were you less of an irritation, perhaps I would pity you.”

A pulse of Artifice shot spikes out from my armor to shred the grasping hands and tentacles of the Voidspawn before I retracted them right back in to do it all over again. I wasn’t going to be taken that way again. “Oh, you want to get personal now? All right, smart-ass.”

You know when you do something so dumb, even you know that it is dumb while you’re doing it? Well, it turns out firing a Spirit Strike right into the brain of the Voidgod while you’re in the middle of fighting all of his millions of minions was one of those things. Even before it hit him, I knew that whatever came next was going to suck. And lo and behold, the moment our brains synched, it really, really sucked.

There I was in his mind getting ripped to shreds by his spawn, popping back into existence in the shrine he’d built especially for my eternal torment. It looked a lot like the nightmare that Talon had been strapped into, constantly being reborn into jagged needles and raking claws and pain. Endless pain. I wondered if Araphel got the idea from seeing what Tsangaanax had done to his one-time ally, or if he’d been the one to plant the idea in the white wyrm’s head to begin with.

I had to keep my body moving out in the real world, carving through his spawn while in my mind they did a thousand times worse to me. The worst I’d do to them was kill them. I’d finally pissed off Araphel enough that he was willing to make an exception to his whole universal annihilation plan just to keep me in agony for all of eternity. I felt so special. Blessed, really.

Pushing through that surface layer of his mind was almost easy now. I’d done it enough times that it was pretty much routine. I just had to sniff out the fear and follow it deeper. What was different, was the sensation of him drilling into my mind, too. He wanted to know something that only I knew, something he was certain I was hiding from him. Idiot. Didn’t he know I didn’t know anything?

I let him have free reign to go roaming in my mind. All my secret tricks and traps had been played out by now, and I was pretty sure he’d spotted the armies of other worlds flitting through the skies laying waste to the endless number of critters he’d managed to jerk out in the few days since we’d last wiped them out. What was the worst-case scenario here? He worked out where the naughty folder was on my computer? It was on a whole other planet!

Just like I’d spent the last half-hour doing, I let him hit me with everything he had so I could land my own blow. Following the fear down and down, past the layer of promised misery he was flinging up like a shield, and down, deeper and deeper, into the heart of darkness. Or the brain of darkness. Into Araphel.

That cold rage that had bled through into me was here. Not the mindless hate that governed his every motion, but the sense of betrayal, of the world being wrong and him being the only one that could set it right. He had been wronged when the gods saw what he was capable of and buried him alive. He had been wronged when they had created all of creation without him, an endless growing mass that could never know any end, because he was the end, and they’d stopped him from fulfilling his purpose, his duty. Order and chaos were the battle lines that the Solar and Lunar Courts had drawn, but at the end of the day, both were the same. They were creating. Creating order or chaos, knights or dragons, cities or forests. Wrestling over the space that they had, climbing on top of each other to define reality, when neither side could ever truly drive the other one out. There was never a clean slate. There was never a chance to start again. Not without the final component of the equation. Destruction.

That was the thing that made him so angry. Not that he was condemned for what he was. Not that he was loathed and feared just for what he was capable of. The fact that he had been part of the plan. He was meant to be there, and the other gods had broken the universe by binding him and burying him under everything they made, twisting all of creation into a prison for him when he should have been pruning the bushes in paradise.

Without a Voidgod, nothing was ever going to change. Nothing was ever going to get better. It was just going to go around and around forever.

It was a pretty convincing argument that he’d just planted in my brain to give up the fight, to join forces with him and march on the gods. Shame I could still remember the other part of his plan, to wipe out all of reality and all the people living in it. Put a bit of a damper on things.

Back out in the world, he was making clumsy swipes at me, trying to fight both battles at once and failing. Slaying his own spawn more often than coming close to hitting me. I was always clumsy and lumbering—it made no difference to me. My body didn’t need me telling it what to do. A month of drilling with Seren had seen to that. Muscle memory played out, every swing of my sword and parry picture perfect.

Underneath the second smoke screen was the fear he was still trying to hide. I followed it deeper.

Out on the open plains, he walked alone. Across a dozen fronts, his spawn waged his war, the faun and dvergar and wyrm bound to his service by their foolish ideas of honor or hope or hate of the enemy among them, killing and dying at his command. But not here. Not where the enemy had mounted their most solid of defenses. Their great wall, meant to hold back the inevitable.

Courage was the problem. Even in the face of the insurmountable reality of a god walking the world, these little nobodies fought back. Even knowing his victory was inevitable, they still mustered enough courage to stand against him all the same. Their world was ending, and instead of falling to their knees in despair and worship of the one who was bringing that end, they stood their ground. There was no sense to it.

Still, if he could break worlds with his touch, breaking the courage of a few meddling mortals would be no great thing. Until now, he had taken care not to exert himself, gathering strength for the true conflict to come when he ascended to the heavens and faced the gods themselves, but it seemed that a demonstration was in order, to make it clear to them all that the armies of darkness and all the horrors they had wrought were mere shadows of what the Voidgod himself could do.

So he walked alone to their Last Bastion, and he alone would break it.

It was a strange thing to him that he could appreciate parts of creation. This open empty plain in the total darkness would have been invisible to any other eyes, but to him, every blade of grass swaying in the breeze stood out starkly. The silence of it pleased him. It was this that he would make of reality when all was said and done. This total darkness and total silence. No longer would he hear the clamor of the living far above him. There would, at last, be peace and equity, with all these irritants gone.

Even as he thought it, accursed light pricked at the corner of his vision, a speck of it on the horizon, so small and dim that in any other place, at any other time, even he might have overlooked it. Not even a fire. The distant reflection of a fire. It was spoiling his walk.

With a single leap, he traversed the fallow plains that would one day be ash. He came upon a cave and went down towards the light in the same flowing motion. There they were. The bringers of light to his perfect night. Some oath-breaker dvergar maiden barely out of her swaddling years and one of those bright-eyed human-shaped Eternals, so badly wounded they could not even stand.

Easy pickings. Both of them.

The light that had brought their doom down on them was a forge, a tiny makeshift thing barely worthy of the name. Slabs of rocks shoved together to make its walls, the charcoals stoked by a handheld fan. It raised a pitiful heat, barely enough to soften the iron she was working. It was a sword, roughly made but recognizable by its shape. It shone brightly even amidst the flames. The last thing that this little nothing would ever make.

The Eternal sensed the god among them first. They let out a shout of surprise, tried to struggle up on deadened legs, tried to reach for whatever powers they could bring to bear. Araphel shrugged it all off with contempt. Always they tried, and always they failed. Destruction would always be greater than creation—the Void greater than that which it contained.

When the sword struck him, he did not bleed. Spawn did not burst forth from his flesh and tear his attacker down. The light quenched as it struck into the darkness of his flesh, but it was the wound to his soul that brought him to a halt. This fresh-forged thing, symbol of all creation, striking him in the very moment of its creation, it was enough to break through his power.

It did not matter, of course. Even with this killing blow struck, he would return in mere moments. Death was his domain, the reaper his servant, and he would return as powerful and terrible as before. His soul already fled through the wound that had been struck, flowing out to return to the Voidcrown.

He did not make it out of the cave. It was as though his soul had a fishing hook caught in it, and to tear free would rip him. Even as he eased back, the hook dragged harder, pulling him back towards the crumbling ashes of the body that had been his. He did not understand what was happening. He did not understand how he was being touched while he was insubstantial. The dvergar’s heart had given out the moment her blade struck home, leaving only the Eternal, practically a newborn compared to some of the more potent god-larva. Yet somehow, he was held.

The hook dragged his spirit down into the blade that had struck him, and already it was rusting away as the raw Entropy of his body was unleashed. The weapon looked now to have been cast aside a hundred years ago or more, brittle and ready to fracture at the slightest touch. His soul, his whole being was dragged down into it, and he knew that in an instant it would be shattered and his spirit free to wreak bloody vengeance upon the Eternal who was doing this to him.

There was too much power in the soul of a god to be contained in a mere object. The moment he was forced into the rusted iron, the blade cracked apart. Araphel knew only contempt. He was too great for such a thing. He could hear that same thought echoing all around him as each of the other shards, each of the other tiny, fragmented parts of him, thought the exact same thing.

The Eternal completed his Aetheric Rite, and the deed was done. Araphel exploded into a rage the very next moment. All the power that he contained, all that he was capable of doing and that he had been saving for his fresh-grown body came roaring out from blade and crumbling body alike. The Eternal died and was consigned to the Void. The body of the dvergar was blasted away to nothing, too. Araphel’s rage blossomed out over all the world, destroying everything in its path, bursting out from this epicenter.

His claw slammed into my gut with such force it lifted me off the ground. “Enough of your prying. This ends now.”

Snapping back to my own body and mind hit me as hard as the fingers wriggling deeper into my guts. “Your face ends now.”

“What?”

Taking hold of his wrist, I held on tight. “I said, your face!”

I hefted what was left of my sword and brought it down on his head. The first blow, backed by nothing but weight and muscle, rebounded, but that just lined me up to do it all over again. The destruction wafting off his skin ate away more and more of the sword with every swing. I poured my armor up into the sword to keep the core of Inimicus protected, resharpening it with every back-swing, but even so, it was almost blunt each time I bludgeoned it into his upturned face. His head rocked with each blow now that Artifice and Surged Potency had returned, but he wasn’t dying. It was like hitting a clown. No matter how hard I smacked him in the face, he’d wobble but he wouldn’t stay down.

You’ve never punched a clown? Get on my level.

He didn’t even try to stop me, but now I’d been in his head, I knew that it was all mind games. He might have been acting like nothing could hurt him, but he was feeling every smack. Araphel wanted everyone to think that he was unstoppable so nobody would even try to stop him. But I’d seen him being stopped. I’d seen him beaten.

With the hand that wasn’t pinning me through my middle, he gathered up Slaughter. A fierce aura of brutality collecting in the palm of his hand. A flame of death that he meant to burn me away with. He was in no hurry, taking his time to maneuver me around into optimal murdering position then drawing back for the final blow. I tried to bring around my sword to stop him, but all I had left of it was the Inimicus core, and it was all bent out of shape after bashing off his face so many times.

He brushed past it.

I had all the span of a breath left before Araphel struck me dead, all dreams of eternal torment put aside just to be rid of me for good.

That was when the next dhole arrived to dole out some punishment. It wasn’t as gargantuan as the last, nor as swift as the first, but it came straight up from beneath our feet and took us both by surprise. Araphel dropped me as he lost his footing, but he soon turned that motion into the end of the poor worm. The Deathtouch he’d prepared for me was pressed into the rising dhole’s face before its jaws could even part, and abruptly, its rise stopped. Araphel flipped away like it had all been intentional, leaving me to fall into the dhole’s now slack face-hole alone.

Probably a bad sign that being swallowed by a giant dead worm was one of the nicer parts of my day.

There was only a moment of peace, sliding down over the rows and rows of lamprey teeth before the Voidgod decided to follow me down. Slaughter exploded over me, wiping out every bit of living flesh all the way down the length of the worm. What had been a rather slimy waterslide before now became a dead drop to the rock beneath the ash. Araphel came down that hole after me, even as the ash flowed in from all sides, dropping like a rock into a well.

Whether it was blighted in my senses or not, the rock beneath the ash was still extremely solid. I hit the ground hard, staggering even as I forced the Inimicus back into a vaguely blade-y shape. I probably wouldn’t be able to swing it once all that ash collapsed in, but I might land him one good whack and use Drain to heal up my leaking gut hole.

I didn’t get the chance. Another dhole came bursting out of the shaft wall and hit him. Just how many of these worms were out here?

There was no time to find out if I didn’t want to be buried alive again. I found the balancing point between my Pillars and thrust the void-touched stone beneath me up to launch me out, right into the waiting swarm of Voidspawn.

All the allies we’d started with and all the allies we’d called from other worlds had been blasting away at them this whole time without the distraction of the Voidspawn fighting back, and still, I couldn’t see any real reduction in their numbers. The fight would never end. Every wound we dealt to Araphel brought forth new reinforcements. Endless meat for the grinder. Meat that didn’t tire and didn’t stop. There would be no victory by attrition here. The only way this ended was when Araphel died. I’d seen how he got killed last time around, even if I didn’t understand why it had worked. I just had to recreate it somehow. Forge a brand spanking new sword and stick him with it, while also somehow destroying his soul or sending it to the Void to reside for all eternity. Seemed easy enough, but I was pretty sure I’d been doing the first part non-stop all day. It needed more thinking through than I was capable of. I really needed to find someone smarter to figure it out.

But first, I had to grind some meat.

“Come get some!”

Drain brought life flooding back into me as I carved my way through the quickest of the Voidspawn, sucking out their half-lives to restore the bits of me that were dangling out or falling off. I managed to scrape together some metal scraps from the various bits and pieces that I’d dropped across the battlefield and pulled them together into a sword big enough to handle the thicker chitin plates just as Araphel and his ride popped up.

Somewhere underground, he’d scrambled his way up on top of the worm that was trying to gobble him, hooking his claws into it where any other critter would have had a neck and pulling up to force it to the surface. Now that he was in the open air again, all it took was a few dozen Voidspawn dying messily to close the distance. He dumped Slaughter into his worm and then dropped to the ashes, unscathed but looking pissed.

When the next rumble came, he didn’t wait, letting another wild blast of Slaughter out, massacring his own minions, knocking me back a step, and slamming into the next mega-dhole as it emerged.

Was it as big as the one that had taken us on a mile-long ride across the battlefield? Probably not. But was it big enough that I felt compelled to point it out to friends and family and tell them it looked like my penis? Absolutely.

The head of the thing exploded off in the blast of Slaughter, but unlike the last one, that didn’t seem to do a damn thing to stop it. I realized why a moment later. It had two heads. The second one grew out from the side of the body before my eyes, branching off in a rush of Primal energy behind the cut-off point. It swerved back in towards Araphel, only to get another solid blast of Slaughter right up its wormhole. That didn’t stop it either. It was already branching, again and again, spawning heads faster than Araphel could nuke them. It wouldn’t have been hyperbole to call it a hydra-dhole.

It actually managed to close the distance, just by growing new bits before he could blast them off, and one of those new mouths opened wide and unleashed a torrent of acid right in Araphel’s stupid un-face.

The force of the stream staggered him, but the acid itself didn’t seem to be doing much except raising a cloud around him. Another head, then another, opened wide and puked acid at him, angling around to hit him from all sides. From the acrid cloud, he unleashed fresh blasts of Slaughter at the worm-heads, but for every one that he cut off, another two sprang forward to join in the spritzing.

This was exactly the kind of opportunity I’d been waiting for to really stick it to him, but I couldn’t go wading into all that acid and expect to live. Not with all my armor already gone. I just had to stand there, watching, as the dhole vomited vigorously for what felt like forever.

Araphel leapt out of the cloud into the midst of the tangled mass of heads, Deathtouch glowing on his claws once more. All I could do was shout, “Look out, big worm!” And then it was over. Every head of the titanic critter flopped limply to the ash. All of its strength was spent. To one blow.

When the Voidgod exploded this time, he was exultant, washed clean of all the grit and dust of the battlefield in the torrents of acid that had engulfed him. He looked better than he had all day. The mass of the dhole’s body had been used up in making heads, but what little had been there at the end was gone now. Turned to dust.

Leofric leapt forth from that dust, sword shining bright with Primal energy, dripping acid and lancing for Araphel’s back.

He might have been a mass-murdering asshole, but I’d take any friendly face I could get at this point. “Leo!”

“Bear witness as destiny is fulfilled!” he whooped as he soared. “Watch as I slay the great adversary!”

The crazy thing was it might actually work. Primal was the energy of life. Wasn’t that like the exact opposite of everything Araphel stood for? Could this kill him the same way the Rusted Blade had?

We would never find out. Araphel unleashed a blast of Entropy that left Leofric bare-assed and disarmed. Instead of striking a blow against the Voidgod, he was caught in Araphel’s outstretched and waiting claws.

“No.” Leo croaked.

Deathtouch gathered in the claws locked about his neck, crackling and ready to be unleashed. I tried to rush in. I tried to stop Araphel, but it was too late.

“I’m the hero.” Leo’s voice came out in a strained whisper. Then Araphel’s fist clenched, and Leofric’s head came away.

The body did not disappear. It just lay there bleeding in the ash. There was no fanfare, no descent of angels to come scoop him up. He was just gone.

Araphel caught my blade as it came down, puffed out a little more destruction to strip it of all mass, then tore it from my hands. “So unto all.”

This time, I was all out of tricks.

He came for me with all the speed and strength he had, power radiating off him. And I had nothing. No weapons. Nothing in reach of my Artifice. Nothing any of my skills or powers could do in the face of him. I ducked under whistling claws to hammer a punch into his guts, but all that did was break my hand. He was too strong, too powerful, and I was just me.

A lucky uppercut to his jaw broke my other hand, and then I was just ducking and dodging and failing all the way back across the battlefield. Blood spritzed off me as his claws brushed by. His tail lanced through my shoulder, hooking in flesh just long enough to cast me down. He moved so fast my eyes couldn’t follow what was happening until he was on top of me, and then it was too late already. He brought a clenched fist down into my face, and I heard bones break. Teeth fell to the back of my throat, and I choked on the blood and bits as he hit me, again and again. With each blow, my face caved in further, bone pressing back into brain as he pummeled away. With hardly a strain of effort, he snapped my horns off at their bases, and that was pretty much the last thing that I saw because he brought the points of them down into my eyes.

There was too much pain to think. Too much was pressing into my brain for me to form a word, let alone a plan. The bone trick from earlier. I could have tried that. But it needed me to concentrate. The thing I used to concentrate with was being turned into goop.

When the blows changed from punches to raking claws, I didn’t know. There was too much. Too much pain. Too much damage. I couldn’t feel anything, just the spreading numbness. The growing knowledge that I would never be enough to beat him. I’d lost. I’d let everyone down.

When I died, I didn’t even know.

Chapter 27

I didn’t understand that I’d died. Not until the pain went away and my dying gasps were choked with soil. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t finished me off. There had been a sudden warmth in the last moment before I died. Maybe even heat. Fire?

The memory of warmth would have been nice to hold onto. Wherever I was buried right now was cold as hell. That was right. My shrines had all been trashed by the charge of the worm brigade. Leo had wrecked a perfectly good plan, charging in to play the hero. Look what that had gotten him.

At least the dirt here was all workable to my Artifice, even if it was cold as balls and getting colder the closer to the surface I rose. My head banged right into permafrost, which I struggled to Artifice aside, so I settled for punching my way out instead. Smashing and bashing out into the desolate ice-swept nowhere above.

There was snow up there. Some rocks. Some lumps that might have been plants or just smaller rocks underneath the cover of white. I didn’t know, and I didn’t have the time to work it out. The Inimicus was in my hand, and somewhere out there in the big wide world, the Voidgod was running free.

I brought it to as fine a point as I could muster, and I thrust it into my heart.

Death took me before I could beg him for an assist, and before I felt my knees hit the snow, I was buried again. Digging my way up, hoping against hope that I was back to the Bastion and all the people I cared about.

I wasn’t.

There was a volcanic tang to the air when I emerged, rotten eggs and heat. Like my bed the morning after a curry. There were ashes among the dirt I dug my way up through, but this was not the Ashlands. There were signs of civilization here. The bushes and plants that I’d seen the inyoka growing out in the wilds around Voidcrown Spire were here, but instead of being scattered over plateaus, they were arrayed in perfect lines, following the contours of the hills all around us. Smoke rose from some of the higher hills, maybe not hills at all but little volcanoes, just waiting for a virgin sacrifice.

There were no inyoka, though. No dragons soaring through the skies. This place was completely abandoned—in a hurry from the looks of things. There were tools still lying about in the fields. File that away as something to worry about later. I turned the Inimicus back on myself again.

I broke through quicksand into shallow water and was halfway drowned before I hauled myself free. A rainforest surrounded me. A place I hadn’t even considered Amaranth having. The wrong place again. The world was a huge place, and I’d only seen the tiny part of it that had my crappy destiny in it thanks to some cunning shrine building. I stabbed myself before I saw much of anything here, even as I heard hooting and hollering starting up in the canopy.

Another place and another death. A desert of sand instead of ash. No time to think. Just to move. Just to die. I didn’t have time for this. Not with Araphel free to rain hell down on the Bastion while I was gone. All pissed off with nowhere to go.

More water, more ice, more sand, more trees, an ancient city long dead before Araphel came crawling out the heart of existence, gone to rot and ruin, overrun by some weird chittering bug things that I almost mistook for Voidspawn before I saw their shining rainbow colors. Another death another place. Dvergar architecture with alvaren crystal run through it. A village built by faun in the shadow of a tree big enough to rival mountains. A desolate fortress on the ice. An island in the middle of a great green ocean. My grand tour of Amaranth. Blink and you’d miss it.

The pain when the blade hit my chest never changed, but I endured it, and I found the strength each time to drive it home again. Time was running out.

Death after death and I was getting no closer. Nothing was familiar. I could have been visiting a hundred different worlds for all that I knew, except for the distant echo of my own power. Araphel. I could feel him even now.

When I came out at the foot of Voidcrown Spire, I almost sobbed. So close, yet so far away from where I needed to be. My Sphere of Influence had grown so great with all my rapid progress in the past few days that I could reach halfway up that steep spike of tainted stone, halfway across the broad base. Like hell was I leaving his shrine standing. If I had to bounce around all over the world, he could suffer the same when I landed my lucky blow.

Finding the place of balance between the Void and the Light, I reached out and squeezed.

The mountain shook at my touch, the tainted stone resisting my pull. I had the strength now that even the weakened touch of my Artifice was enough. I dragged it all together. All the coiling tunnels within the mountain. All the chasms and pillars and contortions he’d carved with his Entropy, I wiped away. It was clumsy work, barely worthy of the lowliest of Artificers, but making it badly was the goal. The crushing weight of the mountain fell on my hopeless clumsy lump of stone and crushed it.

At least being crushed under a falling mountain hurt differently to a stab in the heart.

Another frozen wasteland. Another jungle. Another island at the end of an archipelago of little empty islands. A tiger twice the size of me, streaked with green and bristling with vines. Death and death and death. Every sacrifice another step closer.

The sky was black when I hauled myself from a turnip patch. I was close now, and on the distant horizon, I could see blue skies. I turned my back on the light, and I ran, bounding and leaping and gathering as I went. Turning plowshares to swords, ripping the bands from barrels to strap together rusted armor, surged Potency and rapid Artifice both flinging me on towards the distant horizon where fire and lightning filled the sky.

If the humans I flew by knew what I was, I couldn’t have told you. Their eyes turned my way, and their jaws fell open, but if they knew I was on their side or not, who could tell. The inyoka knew me though. When I got to the rear of our lines where the children and the weak were running supplies around, they let out a cheer for my return. That was nice.

One last great bound landed me on the Bastion wall at the side of a half-dead stone-dvergar and very little else. Flying Voidspawn were heaped up around her, torn apart by her bullets and the awful strength of those stone hands, but of defenders, I could see nothing. Her eyes were half shut before I poked a finger between them and used Restoration. “Up and at ’em, soldier.”

Even as her eyes focused, I could see tears beginning to fall and had to look away. I was never going to forgive myself for what I’d done to these people. People from other worlds who could have had no way of knowing what I was dragging them into.

The flying faun seemed to be faring no better than any of the rest had. The duplication trick had done well to start with, but even they couldn’t surmount the numbers of Voidspawn. The distraction of all the spawn turning on me was long passed now. They were back to crawling up the walls, being flung by their titanic kin.

Blasts of Entropy had torn the Bastion apart. There were holes punched clear through it, and the silent mass of black-shelled spawn came scuttling through to maul the people down in the yards behind it. Any sane leader would have sounded the retreat now. Done what they could to preserve what little life was left. I didn’t have the luxury of sanity.

Reaching out, I found the tunnels bored through the Bastion and collapsed them. The whole vast structure shook and bucked as the lower parts collapsed under their own weight. All the scattered debris that had been left behind, I hauled up beside me. There were tangled bits of Voidspawn and people caught in the pieces where I’d compressed them, but grief would have to keep too. I launched stone after jagged stone down into the mass of monsters below. I reached down to the base of the Bastion and hauled up fresh stone from everywhere I could reach, patching what I could and shucking off Voidspawn everywhere else.

The inyoka, who’d been holding back from the wall until now, cowering behind the defenders better equipped to fight the menace, were coming up to join us now, terror marking every one of them in their stilled motions. They took up the weapons of the fallen, and they did their part, but they fought like farmers, flailing and terrified to the last. The only real difference I could see them making was slowing the tide from crossing the wall, but even that, they were doing poorly.

Out beyond the wall, I could see the distant end of the Voidspawn now. The tail end of the vast army that Araphel had unleashed upon us, but whatever hope that might have given me was obliterated at the sight of the things that writhed there. The beasts the size of elephants had filled me with dread. These things were beyond them, beyond anything we’d seen since we arrived on Amaranth, even the old wyrm Tsangaanax himself.

They were like living mountains, sprouting flailing tentacles and swiping at the specks in the sky that I had to assume were my people, still out there fighting the good fight in the face of these abominations.

We didn’t have anything that could touch them. Even if we somehow survived the endless field of spawn still marching on us, no sword I could swing or power I could bring to bear would down something that size. They’d be able to walk right through the Bastion, slap the top off and step right over. We were so far beyond screwed that screwed was a distant speck in the rear-view mirror.

A fresh blast of Slaughter flew up from Araphel to massacre the inyoka already bleeding and dying on the walls. No more.

Once more the Bastion bucked as I tore stone from it to throw up a wall in the Slaughter’s path. All around us our defenses were crumbling and tilting, but that one blast of crackling death was stopped. As long as we had hope, we could hold on. As long as our spirits held, so would this wall and its defenders. Until the bitter end.

Another massive spell flew down from our walls to blast the ground where Araphel had stood—the work of Asher if I was any sort of judge. I bounded along the wall to his side, only to find Mercy already there, fending off the swooping Voidspawn that had made it through all our flapping protectors.

There was a mass of inyoka here, too, so I put on a brave face. “Hey!”

Mercy didn’t look away from her bloody work, even as I refilled her quiver. “Enjoy your holiday?”

I stepped up beside her and lashed out my sword, an echo of Slaughter leaping from it to clear the length of the wall before us. “Oh yeah, nothing like a change of scenery.”

“You’ve got to teach me how to do that.” She grinned.

“If I ever work out how I’m doing it, I will.”

She let out a snort as she shot another one of the Voidspawn from the sky. “So useful.”

Even Asher managed to look slightly amused under the thick layer of soot that coated him. “The fundamentals of magic…”

His lecture was cut off by an awful wail.

All the inyoka around us had dropped to their knees. All their heads were thrown back in sibilant screeching. It was downright unsettling. It wasn’t as if we didn’t have enough to deal with before all the lizard-men decided to turn into detuned radios. I picked up the closest one as daintily as I could and gave him a slightly less gentle shake until he stopped squealing. “What the hell, dude?”

“They come! The wyrm are coming to join with the Voidgod! Their voices! Oh, gods; they’re so loud. They’re so… discordant. All the different wyrm. All come together in this one purpose. Oh, gods; it burns. Their thoughts, they burn.”

I dropped him with a groan. “Oh, come on. We don’t have enough to deal with?”

We heard them before we saw them—deafeningly loud even through all the raucous battle, their wings thundering like war drums. A steady, awful beat that set every inyoka flopping in paroxysms of terror. Down on the field, I bet Araphel was so happy he just squirted out some reinforcement Voidspawn.

They broke through the thick layers of smog that the war had thrown up with a quick huff of fire, and then down they came, splatting through the flying Voidspawn and our paltry few fliers in one fell swoop. Every one of them massive. Every one of them covered in thick armored plates of scale in one of a hundred different dazzling colors.

None of them coming for the Bastion.

“Uh.”

The wyrms flung their wings out wide to stop their descent, then the fire leapt from their jaws once more, searing through the Voidspawn still charging across the field in lines. What it had taken us hours to do, they did in seconds. Behind that first wave of wyrms came the next, then the next, saturating the battlefield in flame. Bathing every one of the Voidspawn in fire before they spun off to head for the giants on the distant horizon.

I turned to Mercy and Asher with my jaw hanging open. Mercy had pretty much the same expression. Only Asher didn’t look gob-smacked. Instead, his eyes darted back and forth as he tried to work out what was happening. “They’re coming to join a Voidgod, but they… did not specify which one. They have taken in the lay of the land and judged our position to be the stronger… They… The wyrms believe your claim to the title is stronger.”

“What?”

“You are the Voidgod they seek to court. The one they seek to aid and serve.”

“But, uh, I’m not a god.”

“Wyrm respect strength. Power. It seems that they judge yours to be greater than Araphel’s.”

“But that makes no sense.”

“You’re damn right it makes no sense.” Mercy gawked. “How can they look at this mess and think…”

“Speak not too loudly, dear friends. If they change their minds, those same flames that baptize the Voidspawn may turn our way.”

The inyoka who had been quite literally crapping themselves with terror just a moment ago were back on their feet now, moving with a whole new confidence despite having all the fighting skills of lightly steamed kale. They might have been heretic offshoots of the wyrm’s children, but they still respected the big lizard’s judgment. And if the wyrms thought we were the winning team, they believed it.

On the edge of my vision, I saw the living mountains begin to burn. Turns out that black ichor that all the Voidspawn were leaking would burn just like oil if you turned the heat up high enough. If the lands beyond the wall weren’t already ashes, then they would have been after today.

The spawn coming up the wall now weren’t just charging on up to murder us, they were fleeing the cataclysm of flame. It made no difference. They had to die all the same. Our own fliers came back to us now, falling from the burning sky, scorched and terrified but also amazed.

The Illuin-alvaren, the gryphon riders, and the winged-faun who I definitely didn’t almost accidentally just call demons landed all around us, some finding footing on the wall, some dropping down to the open courtyards beyond.

Down at the bottom of the Bastion, the last of the living Voidspawn were gathered, readying themselves for a final rush to escape the flames. Araphel launched blast after blast of Slaughter up into the wyrms above, killing one or two with each try but making no real dent in their numbers. I would have thought that a god could do better, but on the other hand, the wyrm were practically gods themselves—at least in the eyes of the inyoka and alvaren. Things spoken of in frightened whispers in dire times.

“Run,” I called out to our myriad gathered allies. “Take everyone and run. Get clear of the Bastion.”

“What are you doing?” Mercy snapped. “We’re winning?!”

“They can’t help anymore. They’ve done all they can. The spawn, they’re gone. All that’s left is…”

“Araphel.” Asher said it in a whisper, even as the whole world burned.

“And nobody can fight him. Except me.”

Mercy laid a hand on the back of mine, just long enough to stop me from bounding off again. “Except us.”

The word spread out along the wall. The stalwart defenders who’d held the line for so long finally fell back, exhaustion written on every face. Even the faun, who physically couldn’t tire, looked like they’d been utterly destroyed inside by the things they had seen. I didn’t blame them.

The grand exodus went on for way too long. The flames out on the field were already dying, and I knew that there was no hope that they’d been enough to actually kill Araphel. We had minutes, not hours, to get everyone away from the Bastion before he huffed and puffed and blew it all down.

Assuming I didn’t topple the whole thing first.

As the final Voidspawn made their ascent, I let more and more of the wall fall away. As they got high enough for the fall to kill them, I loosened the stone’s grip on its surface and let them drop. I had to bound back and forth along the miles of wall to do it everywhere at once, but at this point in the day, that felt like a light warm-up.

The more of the wall I let fall, the weaker the rest of it became. Parts crumbled off now. Bits that had been struck by my haphazard changes and Araphel’s destructive wrath. I arrived back at Mercy and Asher just in time to realize how badly I’d screwed it up. The wall trembled beneath our feet and the pair of them were clinging onto one another for stability.

I wet my lips. “I think it’s going to fall down.”

“No?” Mercy gasped. “Really?”

Asher glanced to me. “I believe that was sarcasm.”

“No? Really?” Mercy snapped at him next.

Slaughter rolled over us, blinding us to anything but the sphere of death ripping through. It left the other two staggered and me trying to track the blast back to wherever it had come from. Araphel strode out of the flames unmarked. If anything the layer of soot made him look less messed up than he had last time I saw him.

“I think we should make it fall down.”

The other two shook off the ill effects of the Slaughter as quickly as they’d come on. The dustiness of Asher’s scales righted itself, and the wrinkles that I’d never admit to seeing on Mercy’s face faded back to a smooth and youthful grimace. “Of course you do.”

She strode over and took hold of my belt. Asher mirrored her on the other side, with more hesitation. “Is it wise to…”

“If we were wise, we’d be running.” I broke the wall. “Welcome to Team Dumb.”

That evil old bitch gravity was on our side for a change. It had been trying to drag the Bastion down for so long now, that when the opportunity presented itself, it almost took the ground a moment to realize it had the chance to pull everything down.

Wind whistled by my ears, and my best friends in the world held onto me tight.

The Voidspawn on the wall were crushed in the crumbling masonry. It only took a few tweaks to the collapse as we went to bring us down right on top of Araphel. The tiny dark figure amongst all the fire.

He unleashed Entropy at us, wiping out the slab of stone beneath our feet but not the whole wall. All it took was a little tug to get rock back under us and washing down over him.

Despite knowing it wouldn’t work, I wished really hard for him to be splatted out of existence. Our slab touched down just a little bit behind where he’d been standing, and I used one jerk of Artifice to take all the momentum of our fall away and let us glide to a halt among the ashes, new and old.

The rest of the wall came down on him, funneled in from the sides as it collapsed by the gentle nudges of my will and Artifice. All the millennia it had stood, stones aching and desperate to fall, finally it was cut free. Finally, the stone fell.

Dust filled the air where smoke hadn’t already, and the whole world went grey. Mercy and Asher vanished into it, but I could still feel them at my sides. A steadying presence. I pushed them away. “Run.”

“What?” Mercy stumbled through the corpses and fire.

“Asher can’t cast too close to me.” Asher had taken a telling and darted off before I even started to explain. Reliable as always. “And if he hits me with Entropy, I want you to keep your bow. So run. Both of you, run!”

I couldn’t have spoken soon enough. A sound vibrated up through the still-falling rubble. A shrill vibration as Entropy boiled up through it, searing all the solid mass away to nothing before it burst straight up into the air.

Araphel rose from the rubble, all the ash wiped clean. Shiny and black and as perfect as he could be after we’d kicked his ass six ways to Sunday. Was he mad I’d dropped a wall on him? Who could even tell? The dude started off turned up to eleven, and he hadn’t dialed it back once in all the time we’d been fighting. It didn’t matter how angry he got; he was already pushed to his limits. All that hate, all that rage, it had nowhere else to go.

“And so your final pathetic trap is sprung. I emerge unscathed once more. All that you have, all that you could summon, everything that you have done has been as naught when compared to me.”

“Yeah, you’re a real tough guy.” I spun the Inimicus in my hand. “Let’s dance.”

Chapter 28

I guess nobody ever taught him how to dance because the bounding leap he made towards me was not something I’d ever seen in a ballroom. The Inimicus took him mid-leap, crunching through his outstretched claws to hammer him in the chest.

It stopped him dead in the air, perfectly positioned for the arrow that Mercy fired to punch through the side of his head before the tempest bound to it exploded out. Anyone else would have had nothing left from the shoulders up. Araphel didn’t shrug it off exactly, but he didn’t die.

Pity.

The blast knocked him off my sword, rolling along through the ash to arrive right in front of Asher and his latest spell. He’d been casting it since before we landed, preparing for this moment to come. I’d expected lightning or fire or something equally dramatic, but ever the pragmatist, Asher hit him with ice instead.

The side of the Voidgod closest to Asher flashed white, and the flames around him went out. The rebounding swipe he’d meant to take Asher’s throat instead froze hopelessly in mid-swipe.

Mercy imbued flame into my sword from a distance—one of her flaming arrows pinging off my sword and leaving a warming glow behind to spread up and along the blade’s length. Flames licked up from the Inimicus, not magical but divine. The same fire that surrounded us. I knew exactly what to do.

As the ice shattered away from Araphel, I struck him down with fire. All the dragon flames that had flooded the battlefield were mine to command. All fire was one fire, so all fire swept in a burning arc to slice the Voidgod in half.

Or it would have if he was just a little bit less invulnerable and immortal.

Bringing Slaughter against him like that would have been worse than useless, more likely to end in him turning it around and killing me with it instead. I couldn’t out-death the death god. But fire wasn’t picky. It didn’t choose sides.

I barreled into my lizard-buddy as the dark god of evil darkness pounced for him, knocking him aside and bearing the worst of the raking claws across my back. “Hey, Asher, can I pick your brain?”

He let out a little wheeze that might have been a laugh. “My skull lies open to you.”

“Gross.”

I ducked Araphel’s whipping tail and charged in, blade swinging, to catch him under the ribs and lift him off his feet. The distraction of another one of Mercy’s arrows hitting him in the head made it a lot easier to nail him with my sword, apparently.

Mercy’s next concussive arrow hit him in the chest as the Voidgod flopped back down to get his feet on the ground, exploding not just with the usual puff of wind but also lightning that crawled out across him. Guess she’d been making good use of all her Glory, too.

“So let’s say I had the time to take a good poke around in old blank-face’s head, and I learned that the last time he died, it was because some dvergar smith had just forged a sword and stuck him with it.”

Araphel came at us, and only my sword bursting out into a shield kept his claws out of me. He rebounded with a clang, then leapt up over the top, meeting the arming sword I’d forged with the Inimicus face-first. It pinged off that blank face and flipped him back over the shield to land with a thump in the ash.

“The symbolism seems quite obvious.” Asher literally stroked his chin. I thought that was only a figure of speech. Holy crap. “The feat of creation overcoming that of destruction.”

Reforming my great-sword, I brought it down hard on Araphel where he still lay, pinned in place by a rain of Mercy’s arrows. Even as the blade bounced back off him, I groaned. “Oh god, is this a high school English class? Why are we talking about symbolism?”

Araphel wiped out Mercy’s arrows with a burst of Entropy that singed one side of my armor away, almost taking the sword, too, if not for some luck, quick thinking, and staggering. He was back on his feet and leaping for me again before Asher had even gotten into the swing of his lecture.

“The great discipline of magic is based in sympathy. The greater mimics the minor. The macrocosm mimics the microcosm. As I create fire, I call upon all fire to give birth to my flames. But all fire is but a reflection of one fire. The Ur-Fire from which all others spring. The ideal fire.”

Araphel’s hind claws were hooked in me, his front claws raking down my front as I struggled to interpose my sword or grow some armor. “Might need to get to the point faster!”

“All of magic is rooted in symbolism. Within the worldly planes, there is no ideal fire, yet still, we invoke it. We speak in terms of our divine Pillars, where Primal and Creation are distinct, but that mechanism we call life is no different from any other alchemy. It is only our belief in the distinction that creates it. That makes us draw upon a different font to create fire and life. That makes life and death opposite sides of the same coin, instead of mere activity and cessation.”

Araphel’s claws were hooked into my collarbones, and he was hauling them apart with all his unholy strength. I was squeezing them in with the little bit of armor I had left, and now we were having a tug-of-war over whether I got to keep my insides on the inside. I yelped. “Little bit faster.”

“The gods dwell upon a higher plane, one in which these symbolic forces are very real. They wield the Ur-Fire, the Ur-Spear, and all other perfections.”

My boot met Araphel’s gut, and with a little helping concussion under his tail thanks to Mercy, I was able to flip him up and over. Blood gushed from the myriad holes he’d poked in me, but one good hit was all it would take for Drain to stitch me up. “Skip to the end!”

I leapt on top of Araphel, bludgeoning at him with the Inimicus, which was all that was left of my gear at this point. He fended off each blow with a swipe of his claws but didn’t rise, instead using me as a shield against Mercy’s arrows while he gathered a great mass of Entropy between his claws.

Over the roar of that gathered power, I could just barely hear Asher yelling, “Some great act of creation might undo the god of destruction.”

As the destruction was unleashed on Mercy, I leapt into its path and bore it down to the ground. Technically it wasn’t exactly a solid object that could be ridden into the dirt, but since I could punch ghosts and rip the souls out of Voidspawn claws, I was going to go ahead and guess it would work.

Mercy stood just beyond where the last of the destruction had finally dissipated. The toes of her boots were eaten away by it. I cursed my luck. She could have been naked if I’d just timed that better. Naked and disarmed. Yeah, survival probably mattered more right now. Not that I would have expected to survive after seeing Mercy “accidentally” nude.

Araphel was between me and Asher now, and I had to sprint with all my Surged Potency to get to the Voidgod before he could pounce on my squishy wizard friend. I caught Araphel by the tail and pulled. There was no traction in all this ash. He slipped loose of gravity’s hold, and then I was spinning with a pissed-off god at the other end of the tail.

“They made a whole universe around him, and it only slowed him down.”

“What you possess, that they did not, is the ability to truly end life.” Asher was high-tailing it over to the dubious protection of Mercy. “All you need is a single moment of perfect creation, and you might banish the soul of the Voidgod forever.”

“One single moment of perfect creation.” I slammed Araphel into the dust.

“Great.” Up and over my head, I slammed him into the ashes on the other side.

“Thanks.” Halfway into the next swing, Araphel flung himself down at me with a flex of his tail, hind claws hooking in my shoulder and cheek.

“Real achievable goal!” I bellowed through the pain.

Mercy’s concussive arrow blew Araphel off, but he took my whole cheek with him, dangling like a bit of toilet roll from the sole of his foot.

Asher shrugged. “It is better than having no goal at all.”

I tried to say, “Is it?” But having one side of my face ripped away made it come out more, “Usjh whhhiii?”

Every arrow that Mercy fired into Araphel was wiped away by his Entropy. When he bounded back to me, the arrow Mercy launched didn’t even come close, but the fire, wind, and lightning blossomed out over him, enveloping him. He could only churn out infinite godly power from one Pillar at a time—I’d realized that when we were doing the Entropy and Slaughter switcheroo earlier. Strong as he was, he was still basically a really pissed-off newborn with no finesse or control over all that impossible power. Even little baby Eternals like us had more skill.

When he burst out of the towering inferno, Araphel was bounding for Mercy instead of me. I was having none of that. If he wanted to fight, he needed to pick on someone his own size. Well, someone nowhere near as strong as him who was taller? Someone who could use Void powers? Someone his own… Uh. Me. He had to fight me.

Lunging forward, I reached out to catch him by the tail again, but he was too damned quick, so I had to resort to my backup plan. I nailed him with a lump of rubble.

It wasn’t huge, barely the size of me, but it was just big enough to interrupt him and buy me the few inches I needed to grab some tail and yank him from the back. That sounded less dirty in my head. Honest.

The second that took gave Mercy the time to charge up another arrow and blast him back off his feet. I swear, I’d been fighting on my own way too much recently, it made me forget just how much ass the three of us could kick together. All this time I’d been worrying about fighting Araphel one on one. It was never going to turn out that way. We were a team.

On that note, I swung the Inimicus right into his back as he was flung towards me, and Drain stitched my face back together. “Hah! Trash talking is back, baby.”

Mercy laughed. “Hey, Voidboy, could you tear out his tongue real quick?”

Araphel had only a moment to look affronted before I brought the Inimicus down on his head.

I winked to her. “And deprive all the women of Amaranth of my amazing tongue-wibbling skills?”

“You make jokes?” The Voidgod snarled.

I brought the Inimicus down on him again, but he had the wherewithal to catch it this time around. “Yeah, it is kind of our thing?”

He let Entropy answer that. Not the wild blasts of it he’d been flinging around all day, but a concentrated mass of it, so dense I couldn’t see through. It gathered in his hands, and as he brought his other claw around to latch onto the Inimicus, I realized what he was trying to do.

I pulled with all my Surged Potency to haul my sword free, but it was already too late. He dumped all the Entropy he could muster into the Inimicus until its blackened surface shone with the accumulated power, then just when I thought it was about to explode, he let it go, and I went staggering and stumbling back.

He caught the next of Mercy’s arrows, too, swallowing down all the elemental fury bound around it and snapping the shaft with a snap of his fingers. “The time for laughter is done. The time for despair is here.”

“I bet you’re real fun at parties.” I grinned at him, rushing back in. “No wonder the gods buried you if this is your idea of small talk.”

I’ll admit, the grin slipped a little bit when I swung my sword at him and discovered abruptly that there was nothing in my hand. My Pillar of Aether wailed as the tether from my soul to the Inimicus snapped back, dangling loose once more. Oh, crap.

His tail whipped around to hit me in my moment of confusion, sending me tumbling back across the ash and ruins.

Asher’s next spell hit him in the same moment. Ice again. Freezing him in place before he could leap over and finish me off. “Nice catch!”

There was the usual polite nod from Asher as he slipped into casting the next thing.

We’d already established that ice wouldn’t hold him long, but Mercy was a smart woman. She knew a thing or two about physics and rapid temperature changes. Much more than I knew. Which admittedly could have been written on the back of a matchbook, and you still would have had room to squeeze in everything I knew about chemistry, biology, and women.

Her next arrow carried fire with it. A metric ton of it. Like she’d summoned up one of her walls of flame and then hitched it onto the fire in her arrow somehow. When it hit him, the cold and the heat collided, and both vanished. There was a long moment as I waited for some sort of explosion, but apparently, the cracking noise that followed was all I was getting. I’d expected more fireworks.

Guess I should have had more faith in science. When Araphel tried to move, he left bits of himself behind. The whole outer layer of his body, where we’d scarred his perfect darkness over and over, fell away from him, and ichor poured from the cracks. A tidal wave of it dumped out as he tried to break free of the chrysalis of his outer skin.

“Oh! I forgot to tell you, when he bleeds, it makes…”

The Voidspawn burst out of that ichor fully formed. Vast, screeching creatures big enough to make a charging rhino look like a teddy bear. Every one of them different. Every one of them coming for us as fast as all their many scuttling legs would carry them.

Mercy didn’t even flinch, raining arrows of fire and lightning into her lot. I had nothing to hit with, which made the half-dozen charging my way more of a problem. As for Asher, he’d only just started casting. All he could do was run like hell.

I stretched out my Sphere of Influence as far as I could, searching for anything I could use. There was a lot of rubble. The remains of the Waystone in shattered fragments. The solid glowing lump of the Keystone, and a whole load of discarded armor and weapons from our dead, buried beneath it all. I reached for them even as the first ogre-bug-train hit me head-on with its giant, bladed face.

Only my Surged Vitality kept me in one piece, and even with it, that blade bit in deep, right up the length of my torso. I punched the monster, for want of anything better to do until my new great-sword arrived in my hand fully formed.

Things changed then. I poured Slaughter into the sword and hammered it down to cut the whole stag-beetle head off the thing, dropping back to the ground with it still lodged in my chest. Pulling it out by hand didn’t work in the half-second I had before the next Voidspawn arrived, so it would just have to stay hanging there for now.

I met the next one’s charge with a cut, shattering its chitinous blades and carving into the shell beyond.  It stayed stuck on my sword just long enough that the next one along nearly nailed me with some sort of flail on the end of a tentacle. Well, I say almost. It would have got me right in the chest if it hadn’t had been for the big bug head already stuck there. The impact of the flail-fist thing actually smashed that bit of Voidspawn off me. Handy. It meant I had the freedom to catch the flail when it finished its orbit around the critter and swung for me again.

One good yank hauled that one off-balance, then it was a simple matter to smash it with my sword. Thank the gods for Surged Potency because otherwise there was no way I could have hefted the sword with the whole last Voidspawn still attached, let alone smacked anything with it.

Three down, an infinite number more to go. Great.

Mercy bounded by me, dodging blasts of Entropy and snapping arrows back into her own pursuers. “Save Asher!”

“Right. Yes. Asher.”

The lizard man sure could haul ass when he needed to. You had to respect his concentration. Even sprinting all-out, he was still weaving his spell together—or at least stopping it from falling apart. Good thing I could jump, really.

I didn’t jump for him because that seemed like a real good way to end up accidentally splatting him, but I had absolutely no problem with splatting the stuff that was chasing him. In fact, splatting that was kind of the goal. I crushed the first one I landed on without actually killing it, then rebounded onto the next, which served as a springboard to get me in front of the rest.

With so much rubble everywhere, above and below the ash, it was no problem to haul up a wall beneath my feet, launching me into the air and creating a solid barricade between all the critters and poor Asher. I didn’t even know if he could sweat, but he was definitely looking tired. Poor guy was really one of the indoor kids.

I came down on the massing Voidspawn like a falling comet, shattering through the ones my body hit and carving through the rest. With my back to the wall, there was no way for them to get behind me, and with my sword at the ready, there was no way for them to get through the front of me. Seren’s training guided my hands like she was still watching out for me. Even now.

The Voidspawn weren’t fussed about which of us they chased. I was a nice juicy target, standing still, so before long, every single one of them was headed my way. The few that looked like they might skirt around, Mercy blasted with laser arrows or whatever the hell she was shooting at this point. She found her way to the top of my wall like I’d made it for her, hauling Asher up there with her, out of reach of the claws and jaws. Leaving me to do what I did best while they cast and shot at everything in sight.

On one backswing, fire caught onto my blade courtesy of Mercy, and I twisted my next cut so that instead of a cleave into a single one of the spawn, it slashed across the breadth of them. The echo leapt up, so potent it left me shaken. So much fire still burned out here. Off in the distance, the wyrms were still breathing more and more of it out into the final row of marching Voidspawn. The titans I wouldn’t have even known where to start with were being burnt down to cinders.

The echo of my cut swept across the whole battlefield. Every one of the Voidspawn that had sprung up from Araphel’s skinning caught alight. Every one of them was cut through with flame and exploded into pieces. In one blow, we had destroyed an army.

It wasn’t my first time, but it still bears repeating, just because of how nuts it was.

Asher and Mercy dropped down to my sides as the roaring fire consumed everything between us and the Voidgod. He was still there, where we’d left him. Standing still and slick with his own ichor. I was going to go out on a limb and say that losing his skin had hurt.

“So… want to try the fire and ice trick again?”

Asher glanced to Mercy as if he was worried that I’d forgotten something. “I am not certain it will be sufficient to put an end to the Voidgod with any permanence.”

“Well, no, I’ve got to do that… somehow. But it would be a lot easier if he was just a hunk of meat on the floor.”

He conceded that point with a bob of the head.

I rolled my shoulders as Araphel stalked towards us—back in his classic slasher movie stroll. “All right, I’ve got to forge a brand spanking new sword and spank him with it. Right?”

“That is the symbolism that we seek to achieve.” Asher paused. “Perhaps with more of a cutting motion than a—”

“It was a figure of speech.” Mercy cut us both off before I could start explaining spanking.

Asher began casting, Mercy took off to flank him, and I was left to go toe-to-toe with a god. Same as usual. I gave my sword another spin in my hand, getting the feel for its weight, then I charged.

The blast of fire seemed to have stopped the flow of ichor from across Araphel’s surface, turning it thick and tarry. “How’s it going, sticky ribs?”

Guess that was a sore subject. Or maybe everything was just sore. He skipped out on the witty repartee and went for the throat.

Even as I swung my new sword up into his path, I realized my mistake. The wreath of Entropy around him melted clear through the metal before it got anywhere near him, and he carried on into me.  His hands were uncomfortably soft around my throat, like baby skin that had been left in the drier too long. Even as he choked the life out of me, I was too busy being surprised at how good the exfoliation had been.

With no sword in my hands, both were free to grapple helplessly at his wrists. I kept forgetting just how strong he was until the most inopportune moment. He looked so small and spindly compared to me. I really had to bear in mind the whole god thing.

Even flexing every muscle in my body, I couldn’t pry his hands away. Using that grip on me as leverage, he hopped up to hook his hind claws into my guts, only to realize that they’d fallen off, and all he really managed was a kick. I mean sure, it ruptured something inside me, but internal bleeding is fine. Inside is where the blood is meant to be.

Mercy’s concussive arrow went off in between us, knocking me off my feet but not quite enough to tear old slippery grip free of my neck. He certainly slipped, leaving a gruesome smear in a collar around my neck, but he didn’t come loose. He just pinched in harder on the sides of my neck with what should have been claws but now felt like really firm worms.

With no luck prying his forearms apart, I scrabbled up to his fingers, bending them away from me with all my might. Yep, even his fingers were stronger than my whole upper body. This was bull. All the time I’d spent working out, all the upgrades I’d bought with my hard-earned experience and Glory, and this slime was just born stronger than me?

Birger in the belly of the beast. Pulling against all the strength he was bringing to bear was hopeless. I needed to come at it another way. I took hold of his fingers and squeezed. All that fresh raw flesh was like crushing a pack of hot dogs. Weirdly dense hot dogs, with something solid just beneath their squishy surface that I could grind together to make the hot dogs really hurt. Okay, so not much like hot dogs. It didn’t matter how unlike hot dogs they were; it worked. Araphel let out a hiss of pain, and as he flinched, I was able to pull myself free of him.

My voice sounded ripped and ragged when I coughed out, “Choking. On the first date? You filthy—”

Whatever rude word my brain was about to supply to my mouth without my direct intervention was cut off as he rammed his tail through my guts and out my back. Little hunks of spine pattered down into the ash.

As the Voidgod turned on Mercy, he lashed his tail, and I went soaring, turning end over end in the air as my legs dangled limply like wet noodles until I hit Asher. He might have survived having a whole Maulkin tossed at him, but his spell fell apart.

Survival is a pretty low standard if I’m being honest. Yeah, he was alive, but he had a good number of broken bones that it took Restoration to set right. I surged the same Primal energy through my own body and got my legs back in working order in time to stand up and see Araphel close on Mercy.

My Artifice threw up a wall between them, but Araphel waved it away, and it crumbled to dust. I launched rocks at him, but they never made contact. Even running all out, there was no way I could get to him before he got to her. Didn’t stop me from sprinting all the same.

I should have had more faith in her.

Arrow after arrow flew from between her fingertips. First bathed in flame, then in lightning, then in nothing at all. Mercy was cycling and switching so that every time the Voidgod raised one Void Pillar in his defense, the next arrow could bypass it. Faster and faster she peppered him with arrows, and what had rebounded harmlessly off the hard outer shell he’d borne before now sank in—at least until the next burst of Entropy wiped them away.

He could have dodged the arrows. That was the thing that made all of this so nuts. He was more than capable of moving fast enough. We’d seen him catch the damn things out of the air. The only reason that he was tanking every hit was that he was so damned sure that his godly powers would overcome anything Mercy threw at him. Even as the arrows studded his flesh and drew out fresh hisses of pain, he still went on fluctuating through his Pillars instead of admitting that there was a better way.

Idiot.

Mercy reached back and found her final arrow just as he came within striking distance. She pointed it straight down, then jumped as the concussion went off. Araphel staggered back a step, and she soared through the air to land in my waiting arms.

“Nice catch.”

I grinned down at her.

“If you don’t get your hand off my ass, I’m going to feed you to the Voidgod myself.”

I dropped her.

Araphel threw out a blast of Entropy as he charged back at us. It swept all the remaining scraps of armor off me and robbed Mercy of her bow and her dignity, at least until I managed to pull her something new together from the debris in the ash. The new bow wasn’t as pretty as the shimmering chainmail, but at least it would shoot.

“You saw nothing.”

Her tone did not invite argument. “Absolutely nothing.”

I slapped away the next blast of Entropy with a really big rock—also now known as a really big puff of dust. Araphel pounced through that puff, right into my fist.

With all his momentum flung against all my strength, he actually folded around the punch. Every bone in my arm broke, of course, but I’d hurt him, and that was what mattered.

Mercy was off and running like the sensible little creature she was, and Asher was casting. Everything was as it was meant to be. Except for my dangly arm full of broken crackers. Artifice drew in all the scrap I could find nearby into a fresh sword before Araphel could swipe for me again. A new sword, freshly made—everything that Asher had said should work. I poured Deathtouch into it and stabbed past Araphel’s raking fingers into his chest.

It dissolved away before it could make contact, again. “Damnit.”

With claws, the blow would have killed me. As it was, the open-fingered slap sent me tumbling end over end to crash into what had once been a bit of my ramparts. I picked it up and threw it at him, one functioning arm and Artifice working in harmony, but he blasted it away with just a tiny bit more Destruction than had unmade my sword.

“Making a new sword didn’t work!” I bellowed as he closed on me again. “Any other bright ideas?”

Asher was still too busy casting, so Mercy was the one to pipe up, “Make a better one.”

The Voidgod swept out his blunted fingers, and a wave of Slaughter rolled over me. Doing nothing. Again. You’d think he’d learn eventually.

He tried the same trick again with his other hand. This time the band of Slaughter came tighter. Not the usual staticky mess, but a glowing strip of raw death that hit me hard enough to stagger me. My own Pillar of Slaughter was quaking inside me. Not because it was afraid—because, you know, Pillars don’t really have feelings—but from the power it had to pump out to counter Araphel’s directed attacks.

When he launched the next, it was a narrow band like a whip of shining darkness, lashing right for me. The wyrm had been right to bet on me. I wasn’t like Araphel. I could learn.

I jumped over the whip like it was a skipping rope and returned fire, hauling up spikes of stone into the Voidgod from every conceivable angle. Every chip of stone down in the ash was flung at him. Every hunk of masonry became a lance, aimed for his heart. Even the ash itself got in on the action, carried up in a wave of my will to spackle him all over with dust.

Did it blind him? Probably not since he didn’t have eyes. Did it feel good to throw dirt at him anyway? You’re damn right it did.

The spikes of stone didn’t jut out with enough force to pierce through whatever we were calling this new gooey outer layer, but they held him in place for a moment, which gave me a half-second to think. I needed a sword. I needed to make a new sword out of something that would actually hit Araphel instead of turning into a puff of dust. Some material that was tough enough to withstand him long enough to make the killing blow.

He shattered his haphazard cage and came for me again. I had one functioning arm, zero functioning brain cells, and a bad attitude to work with. Same as always.

I headbutted him.

He actually stumbled back. That was how surprised he was that the horn-headed giant had headbutted him. How the hell was this idiot an existential threat to all of reality?

“You…”

Asher’s ice spell hit him, freezing him mid-word. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mercy pulling together her fire arrow. She actually had thrown up her wall of flame to fire through. Crazy. I leapt forwards instead of back, clean over the top of him because if he worked out which Pillar to switch to before the arrow hit, I didn’t want to be in slapping distance again.

I hate it when I’m right. Annihilation was the Pillar opposite Creation, and it was that energy that came bursting out of Araphel now, wiping away the ice that coated him and turning Mercy’s shot into a mere arrow that thumped quietly into his shoulder.

He charged on the two of them where they stood side by side, unleashing more Annihilation as he went to strip Mercy’s arrows of all power. I had to stop him, but I wasn’t exactly fighting fit. I threw up a solid wall of stone with what little I could reach, but he didn’t even bother switching over to Entropy to blast it away. He ran right through it, sending chunks of debris sailing in every direction. I caught them and flung them at him, but he tanked through every hit as if I was tossing pebbles.

A sword. I needed a sword, right now. I reached out with Artifice, stretching my senses throughout my whole Sphere of Influence, and there it was. The perfect material. The worst idea I’d had yet.

I sprinted after Araphel even as I shaped my new blade. Even as I felt it resisting me with every part of its being, trying to remain what it had been created to be. What it should have been until every star in the sky burned cold and the alvaren ruled over eternal night.

The Keystone Blade emerged from the dust in my path, and I snatched it up, even as the wild magic bound within seared at my palm. I had no time to care, only to strike. One lopsided thrust using the wrong arm launched all the ambient magic built up in the air from the day’s fighting into Araphel’s back.

There was a supersonic boom that knocked every one of us off our feet as the magic coalesced together into something less than a spell but more than a clumsy blow. A shape. A perfect version of a sword that I’d just thrust right into the bastard’s back as he tried to kill innocent people again. Come on, universe. That had to count!

The blow counted enough for Drain to kick in and my arm-bones to reset. It counted enough that Araphel didn’t immediately leap up from the ground to start kicking our asses all over town again. But he wasn’t dead. There had been no sudden burst of Glory or heavenly chorus. The Voidgod lived, and the Voidgod moved, springing back to his feet as though nothing had touched him at all.

Between being flayed and rolling around in the ashes, Araphel now looked like a chicken nugget that had fallen through the bars of the barbecue. All that smooth black perfection was gone. He had texture now. Really gross texture.

Yes, I’ve barbecued chicken nuggets. I’ve done dumber things. Why is this one surprising to you?

“Hey, crusty! Why are you running?”

Even though he was close enough to Mercy and Asher that a flick of his tail could have had either one of them, it was me he charged. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; powerful as he was, he was still a big baby throwing a tantrum.

I met him head-on this time, without hesitation, without any need to fear. He lashed out with what had been claws and found the sharp edge of the Keysword. His fingertips soared by to patter into the ash behind me as he hissed in pain and rage. Well, taunting him seemed to work well, so I stuck with it.

“Dumbass.”

“I shall rend your flesh from your bones…”

Grinning, I met his next swipe with the Keysword again. Fast as he was, he didn’t have fighting form. I didn’t need to see where his attacks were coming from to parry them because he just kept making the same mistakes and trusting to his overwhelming strength to win out. He was like me when I first arrived on Amaranth. Less sexy, obviously, but just as dumb. His blunted fingers battered off the flat of the glowing blade and hissed as the magic seared him.

“With what?”

He came at me with everything he had then, blasting out wave after wave of different Void energies, trying to strip away my weapon the same way he had my last sword and Mercy’s elemental blasts. One by one he cycled through them, but pure magic wasn’t something that any of the Void Pillars I’d seen could bother. Entropy couldn’t take it because it wasn’t a solid object, but Annihilation couldn’t either. If he’d hoped that the waves of darkness washing over me would leave me blind to his attacks, he hadn’t accounted for my Deathsense and the fact that he glowed so blinding bright to it that I spent more effort not sensing him than sensing him.

Blow after blow was turned aside. A lash of his tail saw the tip cut free. A pounce saw the Keysword plunging past his raking hands , into his chest to send him staggering back.

Even as he righted himself, a concussive arrow from Mercy knocked him off balance again, letting me go on the offensive at last.

I wreathed the fresh-forged blade in Deathtouch, and I went in for the kill.

Finally, Araphel seemed to recognize that there was something in the world that could actually do him harm. He ducked my first swipe and came back at me with a punch to the center of mass that launched me off my feet. Artifice took hold of me before I’d flown a foot, and I threw myself back into reach again.

A thrust at his head kept him off balance, and a blast from one of Mercy’s arrows at his heel as he tried to step back kept him stumbling. He was still too fast to hit, but he was reeling by the time Asher’s bolt of lightning punched into his side.

The electricity crackled over his equally crackly surface, shooting off sparks, and he didn’t even seem to notice the damage really. I suppose that after a certain point you wouldn’t. He’d already been skinned alive, how much more would you really feel after that?

His lack of a flinch didn’t surprise me, but the way the magic responded to the Keysword did. Every little crackle of lightning seemed to reach for it and grow more powerful with proximity. All the magic in the world seemed to be drawn to it. It was almost the exact opposite of the Inimicus.

When I drew back my arm to make another swing, the lightning leapt from Araphel to the blade, swirling with the aura of Slaughter already gathered around it. More power to make the next blow I struck the last one.

“How do you think this is going to end?”

He ducked my swing and pressed back in towards me, new claws growing from his stumps. Not flesh, he could not heal, it was not his nature to heal, but raw destructive power. The same Slaughter I was trying to strike him down with made manifest. It tipped his tail, it burned as claws, it even glowed like eyes on the mess we’d left of his face.

“You are strong for a man. Powerful among your kind. Made brave by their weakness in comparison to you. Effulgent from their praise.”

I swiped for him and missed, but the echo of the Keysword in the gathered magic didn’t miss. The lightning leapt out after that pale, white echo and sliced across Araphel’s torso once more. “Thanks for noticing.”

He didn’t flinch, he just bore the injury like all the rest. “Yet beside a god, you are nothing. These wounds you have done me are but scratches on the surface. The delay you are causing matters nothing to a being for whom eternity is but a moment.”

Mercy’s next arrow hit him bang in the side of the head, the fire and wind bursting out to envelop his whole upper body, but still, he did nothing. There was no burst of power to wipe the flames away, no Entropy seeping out to make the arrow still jutting from his scalp disappear.

“You cannot see as we see. You cannot comprehend. You are beasts of dirt and flesh, barely tasting the spark of the divine.”

By the light of the flickering flames that surrounded him, I saw movement in the periphery of my vision. Voidspawn. The titanic Voidspawn that I had only sighted on the distant horizon before the dragons swooped down now loomed behind me like a range of mountains freshly sprouted from the earth. Each one was an impossible enemy to face. Each one of them just standing there doing nothing.

The flames died away, and Araphel remained.

“All of this time, you have fought me, but you do not grasp what it is that you face.”

As riveting as his usual diatribe about how great he was and how much we all sucked was, I didn’t have the patience to sit through yet another speech. If he’d decided to just stand still and be hit, then that was fine. I was going to hit him.

Every bit of strength I could bring to bear, I brought to bear. Artifice, Potency, you name it, I tried it. Everything I had in this one swing.

The Keysword hit him square in the face, all the accumulated magic and power of the alvaren race, condensed into one solid object and reshaped into a blade by my divine will.

It broke.

Chapter 29

It wasn’t a clean snap or anything like that. It was just all the wild magic that was never meant to have been given a physical form that had been compressed into a solid lump for millennia and then forced into sword shape in the last few minutes wanted to go back to its natural state. The impact of my swing against an indestructible god was apparently just enough to give it that freedom.

Everything went white. Blinding. All that power exploding out. If it hadn’t been for Restoration coming back to life right then I would have been extra super dead. I mean, spread into atoms kind of dead. As it was, the arm that had been holding the sword was now gone, along with pretty much all the skin on that side of my body and a fair bit of the meat, too. Not burnt or cut or anything real, just gone. As if by magic.

As I toppled to the ground without the strength to hold myself upright anymore, I got a panoramic view. The titanic Voidspawn had been blasted away, and they looked like they might somehow have been in even worse shape than me. There was no sign of Mercy and Asher, which meant they’d either been vaporized in the explosion or they’d somehow gotten out of the way in time. All the ash that had comprised our battlefield had been swept away by the concussion. A few smudges of it were still showing on the rock beneath us, but it was mostly heaped up in distant dunes in a circle around the epicenter of my own personal idiocy.

And there at the center of it all, was the Voidgod.

Araphel was not untouched by the explosion, but instead of blasting him to bits like it had me, it had burnished him, wiping away all the crust and gunk and marks that I’d left on him through what felt like a solid month of fighting. He looked better now than at the start of the day. The utter blackness of his form returned. I didn’t get it.

Through half-gone lips, I whispered, “How?”

“Still, you do not comprehend. You have bathed me in destruction, and you still cannot grasp how it aids me.” He strolled over and crouched before my ruined body, head cocked to one side to take in the damage. “I am destruction. I am the end of all things. The more you seek to do me harm, the more you instill strength in me. All you seek to wield against me is my own domain. The font you sip from flows through my veins. The more that you oppose me, the more powerful I become.”

I strained to sit up enough to face him instead of lounging like a side of beef. Turns out there wasn’t really enough of my musculature left intact to do that. So I just flopped and convulsed for a second before lying down again. Restoration was used up. Drain wouldn’t be ready for longer than I liked to think about. I needed more time. I needed to buy more time. “If… you’re so smart. Explain it to me.”

“Could you explain the passage of the stars to an insect?” He caressed my one intact cheek with his Slaughter-forged claws. Just that brush was enough to spread the chill of death through my whole head. “No. You have neither the mind to grasp concepts so vast nor the time to use such knowledge. You are finite, for all your tricks and lucky escapes.”

He took a tighter grip on my face now, the claws pricking at my skin, the chill radiating out through me. When he spoke, it wasn’t with rage or hatred, it was soft, like he was trying to bring me comfort. “I know you, Maulkin. I have read all your past days as an unfurled scroll. Everything that you know, I know. Everything you have felt, I have felt. You do not need to fear oblivion. The hard part is over now. All of your struggles. All of your pain. At last, you can be at peace.”

It took more effort than it should have to make my numbed lips move. “You… know me?”

Araphel filled my vision. That dark shape was the only thing my dying eyes could hold onto. A silhouette of my defeat. “I know everything.”

“Then you know… I’m never giving up.”

He let out a hiss that might have been a sigh. “I know.”

His claws bit in deeper. The Deathtouch that was gathered there surged, and I pushed back. My Pillar of Slaughter trembled and shook, already overused and abused after a long day of battle, cracks now forming up the length of it. If I broke it, I’d lose that power. I’d lose any hope of ending the Voidgod with a Deathtouch of my own. I’d probably mess myself up really badly by shattering one of the foundations that my soul was built on too, but right now, all that mattered was living. Nothing I could do to myself was worse than what he was trying to do now. He pressed in harder still, intent on crushing my skull if simple Slaughter would not do the job.

I strained with everything I had, Artifice and Aether and all the rest, and my hands came up to find his wrists. Just the touch was enough to still Araphel and leave him staring down in confusion, and it only took me a moment to work out why. I only had one arm, but I was holding both of his wrists.

To anyone else’s eyes, my missing right arm was just that. Absent from the equation. But looking through the lens of Aether, I could see it. The ghost of my arm, reaching up from the stump to hold onto him. A phantom limb. The minute I thought too much about it, it started to get hazy, and my grip on Araphel started to slip, but when it did and his claws dug back inside my head, the panic brought everything right back into focus.

He tried to crush me, and I tried to pull his arms apart.

The initial moment of confusion about the spooky ghost arm had bought me an inch, but he had all the leverage and all the power. All I had on my side was guts, determination, and absolute terror. And a spooky ghost arm, which seemed to function basically the same as my other one, so long as I kept Artifice and Aether glowing away inside me.

“All that you need to do is give in.” The Voidgod was practically crooning now. It was downright unsettling. I liked it better when he was a raving maniac instead of empathizing with me. “I shall make this painless.”

I could barely even think through all the pain and strain, but I managed to grunt out. “Maybe I want more… than a painless… death.”

My arm of flesh shook with the strain, my spectral one, not so much. It was weird seeing soul-stuff without a body. It was weird when I ripped it out of bits of Voidspawn, and it was even weirder knowing that glowing outline of an arm was me. Not just the meat I was lodged in but the real me.

“Yet it is the only kindness that you truly deserve. You know this in your heart. You know that death is the only peace you could ever hope for, with a mind so full of disorder.”

“Araphel,” I growled into his faceless face, “you talk too much.”

Mercy’s arrow exploded between us, bathing us both in flame. The concussion barely moved Araphel, but it ripped me free of his grasp and launched me away across the pocked ground. I left a snail trail of blood and bits behind me across the rock.

You know what, that was fine. I clearly didn’t need those bits anyway.

I slid to an abrupt halt at Asher’s feet, and I could already see the flames coiling between his hands before he said a word. Cauterize seared through me, closing my wounds, repairing all the damage the last explosion had dealt and forcing scar tissue to leap up along the glowing framework of my missing arm until the full length of it was coated.

He looked down on me once the pain had passed with something like a smile. As close as his lipless face could manage anyway. “I cannot imagine how you would survive a single day without my constant aid.”

It took a moment, but I was able to muster a grin back at him. “Me neither.”

That was when Araphel hit him.

The same claws of raw Slaughter that had been pressing into my face tore through Asher’s chest. The Voidgod’s arm exploded out through his back. Asher’s eyes barely had a moment to widen before they went dull and lifeless.

“No.”

With very deliberate care, Araphel drew his fist back out of my best friend and let his body drop to the ground beside me. Blood washed out from under him where he fell, but it wasn’t that which had killed him. It was the Deathtouch.

The Deathtouch Araphel had meant for me, to wipe me out of existence. To consign whatever was left of my tattered soul to oblivion. The body did not disappear. The blood was not wiped away with a wave of Death’s hand. Asher was dead. Asher was gone.

“So unto all.”

“No. No!” I didn’t recognize that voice, growling up out of me. It wasn’t my voice. It was rooted somewhere deeper. Down in the cold place in my guts.

“Your little friends have interfered in my plans for the last time.” Fresh Slaughter poured out into new claws, and he turned to look at Mercy.

He didn’t make it one step. I caught his tail and hauled him back. I caught his claws between my fingers and twisted. I did not know I could move that fast. I didn’t know that I had that strength. But body and soul moved as one now.

All the borders between my Pillars and my powers were blurring together until there was only one. Aether and Primal moved soul and body, shaped and guided by the hold of Artifice. They were all different names for the same thing. They were all just aspects of the god that I would become.

In the chaos of Araphel’s return, all the laws that bound us had been crumbling, and here, at last, there was no more difference between one divine power and the next, one Pillar and the next. All power was one power. All divinity was one divinity.

My fist caught Araphel in the throat, and he was the one to break, not me.

All his power over himself and over the world stopped at the barrier of my skin. Within me, I was all-powerful, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Stumbling back a step, he wrenched his tail from my fist and lashed it at me, but I slapped it away with the back of my hand and drove in for him again, hammering my fists into his guts over and over, lifting him from the ground with each blow.

All the hate, all the rage that I thought he’d put in me was burning through now, and I recognized it as my own. Not his. Not something that had been done to me. Me. I wanted him dead. Not for some grandiose reason about saving the universe, not for some heavenly reward, but because I hated him.

Hate is powerful, too. As powerful as Primal or Cosmos or any of the other stupid names the gods attached to power when they split it. When you see something that is wrong, it is right to hate it.

Araphel was wrong, and the hate flowed through me as surely as power.

Every blow I dealt him staggered him, but none of them broke through that impregnable skin. I was too dumb to know how to do that. How to use symbols and ideas like blades. So I hit him. Then I hit him again. Again. Again.

The whole world faded away until it was just me and Araphel and my rage.

Just his flesh and my fists.

“This is meaningless.”

Words. More pointless words. I hit him in the head, where his face should have been. But it didn’t shut him up.

“The wyrmling’s death was inevitable. All are doomed to die. What does it matter if he went first?”

I caught his head the next time my hand lashed in, dragging it down into my knee, snapping it back up to meet my other fist.

“I planted the seed of darkness in you.” He hissed, almost sounding like he was laughing. “I made you. You are mine. You are born of my domain. You cannot harm me.”

When I drove my head forward, he twisted to try and avoid it, only for my horn to scrape uselessly over his face instead.

Through it all, Mercy’s arrows rained down on us, finding air as often as flesh and me as often as they plinked uselessly off the Voidgod. She had seen Asher fall. She felt the same rage that burned in me. Fire and lightning, thunderclaps and bladed steel, it all rained down on Araphel and left not a single mark behind.

Pulses of Entropy were coming off him now, dissolving the arrows as they scattered around us. Still, he didn’t have the wherewithal to fight back. Maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe this was all hopeless, and I could never hope to hurt him. Maybe I didn’t care anymore. Both my fists came down together on his shoulders, and Araphel dropped to his knees before me.

“Where you belong.”

Blow after blow, I drove him down, bent him back. It was only the moment of shock when I realized that I’d been the one to speak that gave him the instant of opportunity he needed.

With a flex of the tail coiled beneath him, he launched himself away, slashing that same tail’s pointed tip at me as he passed. I ducked back, obviously, but that bought him more time. He kicked off my shoulder and then landed on the stone already down on all fours, bounding across to Mercy like a wild animal before I could even move off after him.

No. Not again.

I threw up walls between them even as I chased hopelessly behind him, but wave after wave of Entropy tore through them. In desperation, I tried to grab at Araphel himself with my Artifice, but just as he couldn’t affect anything inside of me, I couldn’t touch him.

Mercy aimed for him point blank and loosed one final arrow before his Entropy rolled over her and stripped her gear away. It dissolved in mid-air, then he was on her. Leaping through the air, claws flashing as she ducked and darted away. She wasn’t fast enough. He scored scratches across her now bared skin that puckered and rotted immediately. She let out a scream as she felt death creeping through her. Deathtouch gathered in the Voidgod’s claws once more. The next blow would be a killing one, and then she’d be gone, too.

I’d be all alone.

I tackled the Voidgod to the ground as he lunged for Mercy, and as he sprang back to his feet to go for her again, I booted him square in the chest. He rolled back into the ash-dunes before rebounding and coming back all over again.

“Mercy.”

She stared up at me wide-eyed as her body rotted away. I could see her bones beneath the dripping meat. Organs turning grey and dribbling.

“Help me.”

I did.

One hit was all it took. One punch and her head came away from her shoulders. Then a moment later, both body and head vanished. I couldn’t protect her, and she couldn’t hurt Araphel. There was no better choice. I couldn’t watch her die, too.

Araphel was on my back a moment later, bearing me down to the stone, Slaughter-claws raking over me the same way they had her. I could feel the death slipping beneath my skin, but that was my domain, and I could turn it right back around instead of letting it take root. When I called my own Deathtouch, all the Slaughter he’d flooded into me filled my hands.

It discharged uselessly when I hit him, filling the air with yet more ambient, pointless death. Maybe every failure would have stolen the fight from me once upon a time, but by now I was so far past it I couldn’t even remember despair. He killed Asher. That was all I knew. That was all that mattered.

With renewed fury I hit him, fists rebounding off his pristine skin. His claws raked me as I gave myself over to it completely. No more defending, no more holding back. He had to die. And if I had to die with him, then that was a fair price.

He hooked his claws into my shoulders as I took hold of his head and squeezed, holding me like a lover in his embrace even as he tried to dig in deeper and deliver a lethal surge of Slaughter. “Die.”

“Die.” I bore down on him. Squeezing harder and harder. Putting everything I had into making him gone.

“Die.” We clung to each other as the rest of the world faded away, everything in the universe gone just like he wanted. Everything except me and him.

“Die!” I couldn’t tell whose voice was whose, but at least we were both in agreement.

Through it all, he was still bursting out wave after wave of Entropy, blasting away the stone beneath us, stripping back the whole world, and dragging us deeper and deeper into the earth. First, it was a crater. Then a basin. Then a vast, dark pit. Not that there was any light back up on the surface here so close to him. Even the dragon’s flames had been blotted out before we sank.

Neither one of us could kill the other like this. That much was becoming increasingly clear. But still, Araphel burst with Entropy, again and again. It made no sense. I had no weapons, no armor, what was he trying to destroy?

There was something he understood that I didn’t. Some reason for his madness. I couldn’t think. The rage that kept carrying me on wouldn’t let me. If I let up for an instant, he’d turn on me. He’d tear me apart.

Over and over, I hammered my head into his faceless face. Over and over, I flexed and squeezed with no hint of him breaking.

“You are not enough. You have never been enough.”

Down we fell, again and again, until any memory of the surface faded, and the only real thing in every one of my senses was him. He swiped at me with his claws, and I punched at him with my fists.  I bled and I screamed with blinding rage, but nothing that I did could make a mark on him.

Skin gave way to flesh, gave way to bare bone, and still, we fought. Even as my heart thundered open to the air and the darkness pressed in from all sides, I hit him, again and again and again. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t ever stop.

His claws raked over my ribs, tearing chunks of flesh and guts free. If it wasn’t for the hold I had on my own body, the only thing that was mine in this new world of total darkness, then I’d be dead already, but so long as I fought on, he could not banish me to the Void.

Still, he burst destruction out, and we sank deeper and deeper through the strata of Amaranth. Civilizations rose and fell, and we passed them by without a backward glance. Cities built atop cities built atop forests. All the way down. Layer after layer.

He was destroying everything for the same reason that he had to fight me. For the same reason he had to kill me. What was he afraid of? I had nothing left. What was he afraid of?

My Spirit Strike hit home, shooting from my head to his the next time I hammered them together.

Darkness, rage, pity. I pushed through all of them without a pause. I needed to go deeper. I needed to see what he knew.

Araphel was there in his own mind, ready and waiting for me. A titan in his own brain. Colossal and more monstrous than even the physical form he’d taken. Tentacles of the same slick darkness burst out from him to entangle me and hold me back, but just there beyond him, I caught the scent of his fear.

I threw myself on, even though I knew that he would stop me and haul me back. All I needed was a glimpse, just one moment where I could see what he was so afraid of, then I could make it real. He ripped at my mind, even as he ripped at my body out there in Amaranth, shredding away stray thoughts and memories like they were flecks of blood. I didn’t know my own mother’s face by the time I saw through the rapidly closing curtains of his mind. But I remembered what I saw.

A sword. The sword that had struck him down before. That was why he was destroying everything around us. So I couldn’t make a sword. He still thought I’d be able to kill him with one. Why would he think that?

Slapped out of his mind and back into my body, whatever fight I’d thought I was winning was now long gone. He slapped my punches aside with casual ease and drove me back, step by step—each time there was stone beneath my feet to actually take a step.

This great shaft down into the earth curved as he chased me backward into the deeper dark. I reached out with my Artifice. In all the ruins, in all the raw stone, there had to be something that I could use to forge a weapon. Every time that anything came in reach of my Sphere of Influence, Araphel blasted it apart. I was the only thing he couldn’t obliterate. I was the only thing left in the nothingness.

I was all there was, so I was what I used. All the time we’d been on Amaranth, I had known my purpose. From the second we got our first quest, from the first lie the White Prophet told us. I had been sent here to kill the bad guy. I was a weapon the gods had forged. Now it was time to draw that blade.

Kicking Araphel away, I stopped my fall with a gentle touch of Artifice or Primal or… They were all one and the same now. I did not want to fall, so I stopped falling. Blood was running down me, but I did not want that either. I pulled it back to myself. If I’d had a single thought in my head, maybe I could have healed myself up, lived to fight another day. I didn’t.

My ribcage folded out into the hilt. Fitting perfectly into the palm of my hand, but when I drew the rest of the blade, it was not bone and organs that came loose. It was my soul. The Pillars of divinity inside me were one great, glowing mass now, and with my draw, they crumbled and shattered apart. The power the gods had given me was never meant to be used like this. I was pushing it past any limitation, and my body and soul were going to be destroyed in the process.

I didn’t care.

The blade drew out from my chest, bringing the shattered pieces of my divinity with it. My life gave out as my soul left my body. My heart stopped beating. Still, I moved. My will carried on. Inch by inch, soul-stuff was dragged out, blinding moonlight where the Pillars of creation infused it, pitch-black where Slaughter coiled through it. Every part of me was made into one single blade. Creation and destruction. Life and death. Everything I was.

Araphel rose to meet me, to hook claws into my abandoned flesh and drag me down.

“Say goodnight, bitch.”

I swung.

The blade, neither physical nor magical nor spiritual, but something new that had never been made before, cut through him cleanly, splitting him from shoulder to hip.

There was one moment when he realized what had happened. One brief instant of awareness when he felt it all. Then I condemned his soul to the Void.

The Maulkin-sword broke. Only my will to destroy Araphel had been holding it together, and now that will was spent.

The shreds of my divinity evaporated into thin air. What little was left of my mind, and there hadn’t been much to start with, slipped back into my already dead body as it fell down and down into the endless darkness.

I never felt myself hit the ground.

Darkness swallowed me down whole. Peace at last.

Chapter 30

The gods were pleased.

The machinations of long eons had come to fruition, and the Voidgod had been laid low at last. That such a thing was the work of a Lunar Eternal would be a feather in that court’s cap for millennia, a thorn in the Solar’s side that could not be forgiven or forgotten. It mattered little. In time, all that would be remembered was that the Eternal Maulkin, the one who had brought low Araphel, was a servant of the Gods. Memories of specifics would be hazy. It was the great advantage of mortal lives. All was forgotten. All faded. The only ones who would recall the truth were the gods, and the Lunar Court’s nature was not one of attention or retention. Given a few centuries, it was likely even they’d lose track of things.

Hemeraphel trailed through the palace of the gods, glowing from within with the same solar radiance she usually reserved only for impressing her beauty upon others. There was no containing it on this most glorious of days. There had been those among the Courts who feared what would become of them once the Voidgod was set free. Others who feared what the Chagnar Eternal might have become with the Glory of a slain god. But in this as in all things, there had been no reason for fear. The two had destroyed each other, the Chagnar willingly annihilating himself for a chance at vengeance. It had been a perfect storm of random elements drawn together to provide the ideal outcome.

While there was still entirely too much disorder in Amaranth, echoing out through the rest of reality, with time, law would re-establish itself. The newly summoned races who now called it home would war, win dominance over one another, and eventually settle matters without the need for any further intervention. In time, all things tended toward structure. Hemeraphel knew this in her heart. That was why it was called the natural order.

Bilaphel had not been present throughout the celebrations. A god of war and discipline should have been delighted with the outcome of the conflict, but it seemed that instead of joining in the jubilations, he had instead withdrawn to his own demesne within the heavens. Eosphel had likened it to a sulking adolescent, and Hemeraphel could not help but feel that there was some truth to that depiction. Ever had the war god craved to test himself against Araphel, and now that the opportunity was forever passed, it seemed that they must endure such behavior.

She was not his mother, yet Hemeraphel, as mother to all, felt the same pull to bring him comfort. To attend to him as he suffered and lessen that suffering if she could. Even if she did personally consider the source of this particular suffering to be ridiculous.

How might he have fared against a Voidgod? None could say for certain. It was certainly the case that Bilaphel was the most potent combatant in the heavens, more than capable of putting even the dragon in its place should the need arise, and could little Araphel truly have been more of a challenge than that?

He reigned over a great fortress in the heavens, with walls that parted for her like cobwebs but would have held any foe at bay long into eternity. Everywhere that she walked, she could see the clear iconography of his discipline. The rising sun sigil engraved upon each archway. The twists and bends in her progress designed to make this the most easily defensible structure in all of reality. For an invader, it would have taken months to navigate the labyrinth, but for an ally, it took only days. She slipped between the gaps in the stone and strode freely along the battlements. Replicas of Bilaphel’s armor stretched out along them into eternity. Light should have filled them as she approached, the will of the war god bound within them, giving them life and motion, to fend off her trespass. Instead, they stood dead and empty. It was curious. A grim sign of her fellow’s mental state that he had so withdrawn even his beloved defenses had been left unmanned.

A great open courtyard stood before the keep, wide enough for armies to tread through without touching the sides, and this too would have taken any foe or mortal nigh on eternity to pad across. The vastness of space mattered little to the Lady of the Noon. She strode out onto the killing ground with no haste, and the distant gates leapt closer with each step.

Only halfway there, she almost tripped. To trip in the heavens might have been plausible in the domain of the Lunar savages, but here, everything was where it should be. The surprise of it almost had the Lady of the Noon tripping over herself again. As she came to a halt, she felt embarrassment and anger rise within her—emotions she knew the accursed spider had planted there, so she quashed them with all haste. Bending low over that which had interrupted her, she asked, “What are you doing here, little soul?”

The tiny alvaren woman looked up at her in abject awe, her voice lost in admiration—as was right when a mortal spirit was in the presence of a god. Hemeraphel cupped her hands around the little mortal and lifted her up. “Are you lost?”

The little alvaren nodded her head, still far too overwrought to manage actual words in the face of a goddess.

“Then I shall carry you with me for a time. Come, we go to seek my dear heart, Bilaphel.”

A mute nod was all the little woman could muster before Hemeraphel cradled her in her arms like the babe she was and strode on. The great gates of the keep hung ajar. The first time in all the countless epochs that had passed that Hemeraphel had ever seen such disarray here in the heart of all order, but she did not fear nor take it to heart. There was no call for such things in the heavens. Nor would it do for her to even speak of it, lest Bilaphel, ever temperamental, took her words as a chastisement. These were unprecedented times. A door left ajar was hardly cause for panic.

Stepping under the threshold into the war god’s hold, it was blinding bright. Light was, of course, a common feature of all Solar gods’ architecture, but such extravagance was unlike the utilitarian Bilaphel. His preference had always been for the lights to remain dim—all the better to show his own radiance when he chose to unveil it.

Worse yet, this new sun-bright paint seemed to have been applied slapdash. A streak here and a splatter there. It set Hemeraphel’s heart aflutter. Could it be that chaos had found root in her beloved friend’s heart? Would he be banished to live among the monsters as the all-father had so often threatened when Bilaphel’s bloodthirst seemed to get the better of him?

Trying to keep her eyes from the chaos and fall into fearful pondering, Hemeraphel turned her attention back to the mortal in her arms. “What brought you here to the palace of the divine?”

“It would seem that I died. Death took me to… somewhere else. A palace not unlike thine own, grown of crystal and replete with wonders and treasures. A place where I might spend eternity in perpetual rest.”

Hemeraphel kept her eyes fixed on the little alvaren in her arms, ignoring the odd smears of sunlight as she proceeded deeper into the keep. “The afterlife to which all good alvaren go, of course.”

“Of course,” the woman echoed back to the goddess. “But… there was something missing. Someone that I could not remember, though the absence of the memory felt a wound in my very being.”

Hemeraphel let out a sigh. Such sad stories were so common among mortals, but time mended each parting. All died in the end. “You were parted from your love?”

“I… I do not know if it was love,” she answered, doubts painted clearly across her face. “I still do not if truth be told. But I… I could not remember him. That struck me as wrong?”

“It is the way of some heavens.” The goddess brushed the girl’s blonde hair back behind her pointed ears. “To part you from memory that would only bring you pain.”

“I… I did not understand. When I asked others, they called such concerns heretical.” She shook at the memory. “They… threatened me with banishment.”

It was all beginning to make sense. “And that was how you came to be here with us?”

“I did as a good alvaren must. I took that which I felt and held it silent in my heart. I obeyed—as is mine nature.”

She blessed the mortal soul with a smile that could have warmed any heart. It should have melted all concern away. “And the pain faded when you no longer sought the forbidden memory?”

“No.” The girl shook her head. “No, it did not. I never truly abandoned my thoughts of what I had lost. All the pleasures of eternity were tainted by the absence. I was no longer a guest but a prisoner to my own loss.”

They moved ever deeper into the keep, through long hallways lined with armor that should have lived and guided her to its creator. They, too, were stilled. “And thus were you brought here so that you might be freed of your burdens?”

“Ah, once more, no, my lady. I spoke to no one of this. I thought perhaps that I… I was not deserving of the joys I had once known. That in forgetting I had made some betrayal.”

Hemeraphel cradled the girl’s face in her hand, seeping soothing light out all about her frail body. “This is not so, my sweet lamb. Let us purge you of such thoughts. You have been judged and found worthy of eternal peace. Let me deliver it unto you.”

“My love, if that be what he was, he did not forget about me.”

The goddess felt a twinge of irritation as she was interrupted again. “How could you know the mind of the living, little one?”

Tears were in the alvaren’s eyes as she looked away from her goddess’s gaze. “He came for me. He plucked me free, cutting the chains that bound me to that eternity as he cut so many before. He carried me with him on his crusade.”

She could understand the sorrow now. And how the little creature could have been torn from her eternity. Such things were not unheard of. As the heavens sought to please their residents, some pushed beyond the limits of what they were capable of. “And this strange dream brought you here?”

“When he became a god, I was the first one that he visited.” She spoke now as if reciting from a script. “For the second, we returned to Amaranth.”

Hemeraphel chuckled at such a thought. A god in love with a mortal. “Gods cannot walk Amaranth, dear heart. It is the first law of all creation. Even now that there is no danger hidden there, we have not undone that law.”

“Solar Gods cannot, nor, too, can the Lunar.” Once more, the alvaren met the huge glowing eyes of the goddess. “But a Voidgod could.”

“Sweet, confused thing. There is no more Voidgod.”

“Then who did that?” Seren pointed to the throne.

Compared to her own throne, this was little more than a seat at the heart of Bilaphel’s domain. A solid shape of stone, inlaid with carvings of every weapon that the mortals wielded against each other. His place of power, where the domains that he mastered could flow into him and bring him such restoration and sustenance as gods required

It was split in two. Each great slab of rock hanging loose like lips parted in a gasp. Bilaphel sat upon it. What was left of Bilaphel sat upon it.

His glorious golden armor was dulled. His flesh, such as it was, was rent. The same golden glow that had been splattered across the walls and floors of every room that they passed by was leaking here, still flowing from his dead body.

An arrow hung from the eye-slit of his helm. The only incongruous sign of what had befallen him.

Without a thought, Hemeraphel cast the alvaren aside and ran to her friend’s aid.

That was when I hit her.

Forging a great-sword out of pure Slaughter wasn’t the easiest trick. It required a constant steady flow of that divine energy to keep it burning black. Good thing that as a god, I had an infinite supply.

She lost her leg to my strike, tumbling to the blood-soaked floor as it came away at the knee.

It was a funny thing about the heavens. Everything here had a glow to it. The Lunars all had white light shining out between every damn rock. The Solars had sun shining out of their back-sides and the seats that they planted them on. So if you happened to be completely black, they couldn’t see you at all.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing a goddess scream in agony, I’ve got to tell you, it is a real treat. I mean, nobody screams like somebody who thought that they were immortal and invulnerable right up until the moment that you kneecapped them.

“Hey, what happened to the stabbing her in the throat plan?!”

She had rolled to her feet and readied her weapons, even if she didn’t plan on using them any time today. “I remain ambivalent on the subject of ascending to godhood.”

“Well, you could have said that before I went to all the trouble of making you those new swords.”

“I did say that, repeatedly.”

“Well, yeah, but I figured that once you had godhood in reach, you’d get over any butterflies in your stomach.”

“Why would there be insects of any kind within my…”

Hemeraphel lashed out, blazing golden sunshine washing over the shield of pure darkness I’d just thrown up over Seren. Predictable as sin. Every one of these gods.

“Ooh, you tried to nuke my girlfriend. That was rude.”

Hemeraphel managed to get herself up onto her knees despite how slippery the flagstones were getting. Well, not knees plural. Knee singular. And stump. “You… you died!”

“Turns out the Glory of killing a god will fix up pretty much any amount of Pillar cracking you do when trying to kill a god. Who knew? Shot me right up all the Tiers to godhood, too. Guess we’re equals now. Bet that stings almost as much as getting your leg hacked off.”

She still wasn’t really paying attention. Now that she understood what all that golden splatter she’d been strolling through was, she was staring at it in abject horror. Not even seeming to understand that the pool of it all around her was her own blood seeping out of that missing leg. “What have you done to Bilaphel?”

“I kicked sixteen different colors of sunshine out of him, knocked him around this weird little castle he’d built, and then pinned him to the throne with my sword.” I grinned. “Honestly, it was pretty fun. He put up a good fight. I’m glad I decided to go for him first. You should have seen the look on his helmet when he tried to leave his domain to go and party, only to find me waiting for him.”

“How can this be?” There was a quaver in her beautiful voice, and it rolled out over us like the toll of a gong, her sorrow made manifest. Yeah, I wasn’t falling for that.

“It can be because it never crossed your minds that somebody might come gunning for you someday. Because you were so sure that you were perfect and better than everyone else, just because you grabbed the power first.”

“We created all things.” She sobbed.

“You piled up a whole reality on top of your dirty little secret, hoping that nobody would ever find out about the Voidgod at all. Then when you didn’t have to deal with him anymore, you forgot all about him again. You don’t give a damn about the people you made, they’re just… moss growing on the stone you rolled on top of a baby.”

Golden light blazed from her narrowed eyes as she finally looked at me. “You cannot stand in judgment of us; we are your gods!”

“Well, so am I, apparently. So—” I brought my sword down on her.

Seren looked shocked that I’d swing for a goddess mid-conversation, but she really shouldn’t have been. She knew me well enough by now. Apparently, Hemeraphel knew me well enough, too. Instead of catching the blade in her face, she flung herself aside and unleashed a blast of sunlight that would have shredded me in my pre-Araphel slaying days.

As it was, I just let a little bit of darkness pulse out to meet it. She was powerful beyond a doubt, but not powerful enough to overcome the disparity in power between the powers of creation and destruction. Her light bent towards me and was swallowed down into the nothingness.

Still, it was good to see that there was at least some fight left in her.

She rose, a fresh leg growing in to replace that which she’d lost, and new skirts fluttering down to cover that brief moment of indecency when I saw her ankle. I guess if you want to play mother-figure to all of creation you’ve got to dress conservatively, or people get weird about it. Sun shone blinding bright from behind her in a great halo when she found her feet, only fanning out into individual feathered blades a moment before she launched them my way.

I parried them away in a flurry of motion, not risking a discharge of divinity when I didn’t know how they were composed. Even as I turned them away, they shattered into more feathers and swooped for me again. Turns out the old lady still had some moves.

Each time I split a feather, I cut my blade in two, creating duplicate after duplicate and sending each one spinning into motion to meet a half-dozen of the razor-thin lights that were still arcing in at me.

By the time her first array of blades was gone, I was surrounded by a swirling vortex of swords that leapt forward with my thrust, piercing through the veils of sunlight that blossomed from her and knocking her back off her feet.

“You remember how you were all so scared of the big, bad Voidgod coming to get you because he had the power to kill immortals?” I twisted my wrist and a fresh spread of swords surrounded me. “You were right to be scared.”

Hemeraphel was smarter than Bilaphel had been. He was so certain he was the greatest warrior to ever warrior that even up until the last moment it didn’t even cross his mind to go for help. The Noon Queen was wise enough to know that even if she still considered herself the greatest thing to ever exist, slap-fights were not her forte.

She took off running, knocking poor Seren aside with a puff of light.

The crazy thing was, even as fast as I’d become since my ascension, she was still way faster. I guess I could have focused on speed instead of spreading my newfound godliness around, but that had never been my style. Good thing I wasn’t the only one here, really.

Mercy’s arrow soared down from the vaulted ceiling above, and the lady herself dropped down just a moment after. It was crafted not from Slaughter, like the weapons I could conjure up, but out of pure dazzling sunshine, same as the other Solar Gods used. I was pretty impressed she was already using all the upgrades she’d earned from finishing off Bilaphel. It had taken me days to get the hang of my new power.

When it hit Hemeraphel in the back, it went supernova.

If I still had eyebrows after my grand transformation, I’m pretty sure they’d have been gone now. As it was, I felt some soot accrue on my shiny black outer shell. If I’d turned into a glowing golden god, I probably would have to worry about that staining. Another advantage of being team Void, I guess.

When the smoke cleared, the goddess was on the floor, still scrambling forward until my storm of swords descended on her, pinning her into place as she screamed and screamed. Not from the pain, but for help. Who did she think was coming to help her? I’d chosen this domain specifically because it was so isolated and because the barriers raised around it were so thick. We could have slaughtered whole pantheons in here without anyone outside hearing a peep.

Her hair was still silken and smooth despite the sun-fire that had boiled over her a moment before. It felt good in my hand. Perfect. So perfect that it would have been a shame to blot that perfection out, to do anything that might taint her beauty. I pushed that thought out of my head with a little surge of Aether. I didn’t even know if she was doing it deliberately or if she was so used to pumping out her glamor that she did it on autopilot. Not that it would matter for much longer. I hauled back on her, baring her throat to my blades. This was almost too easy.

It was too easy. I should have learned my lesson from the last gods we’d killed. It was never this simple.

Light burst out from Hemeraphel’s back, not as blades this time but as wings. Vast wings that pushed me back and launched me across the room to land with a squelch on what was left of old Bilaphel. A fistful of her impossibly perfect hair had come with me. That had to sting.

Tiny flowers of sunlight blossomed off her wings and drifted down to coat the flagstones. Seren had to scamper back or risk being flowered on, too. “What is she doing?”

The same flex of wings that had knocked me back had lifted the goddess from the floor. The swords that had pinned her were still stuck in there, but she wasn’t. She must have healed herself up as she rose because there was a lot of golden blood and tattered cloth still wadded at the base of each blade.

“How am I meant to know.” I backed away from the spreading flower patch cautiously. “If you’d just stabbed her in the neck this would all be over by now.”

Hemeraphel beat her wings, and the flowers rose around her, swirling in a great spiral to encircle her and keep her out of my reach.

“Perhaps it is thee who should be stabbed in the neck,” Seren mumbled to herself.

I gave her a wink. “Maybe I’ll stab you in the neck later.”

Hemeraphel’s wings spread, and the swirl of glowing flowers shot towards us in a stream. I tossed up a shield of Entropy and Annihilation, with a little swirl of Empyrean for good measure. It was lucky I included that last bit because whatever forces she was unleashing at us went beyond simple bombardment and into some kind of cosmic energy warfare. I’m not saying that those were nuclear petals, but I’m not not saying it either.

Mercy stepped in between me and Seren, then readied her next shot. “Gross.”

“What is…” Seren got the double entendre a little bit later than intended, blushing blue. “Oh.”

Mercy’s next arrow soared smoothly through the swirling air only to be batted aside by one of Hemeraphel’s wings and explode uselessly in the open space where Bilaphel once kept his trophies. We’d smashed that up pretty thoroughly when I was kicking his ass. What kind of weirdo god kept trophies from wars he’d never even fought in?

More wings opened out from behind her as I launched a wave of swords her way. A beat of her dozen wings turned the blades back on us, and I had to strain to get them back under my control and not impale us.

“You thought us easy prey, Voidgod. You thought we would fall at but the mention of you? We are gods!”

I didn’t mean to, but I laughed at that. The arrogance of it, even now. “You are just the warm-up.”

She beat her wings, and more flowers spread out all around her, huge ones the size of sunflower heads instead of falling cherry blossom. Each one spread its petals and unleashed a blast of pure sunlight our way.

One big shield of darkness would have left us blind when she used the cover of her laser plants to run, so I had to put in a little bit of effort and concentration, tossing up a dozen little ones. Tiny black holes to gobble the sunlight down. Mercy and Seren darted forward through them, contorting and leaping to cross the space. If Hemeraphel wanted us at a distance, they’d take that distance. If she’d wanted to stay close, they would have held her at range. Contrariness was the heart of their tactics. Personally, I would have been fine going face to face with everyone and everything, but apparently, that wasn’t how you win things.

“Kick her ass, baby!”

Whatever doubts they might have been harboring about the whole plan of killing the gods, now that we were in action, they moved without hesitation.

“Not your baby!” Mercy snapped back.

I took my own role seriously, fending off every one of Hemeraphel’s attacks as they came. When she lashed out with a solar flare-tipped wing to split Seren in two, it collided with a jet-black great-sword the same size as her. When she unleashed a halo of blinding light, a fresh black hole swallowed it down, red-shifting the light before it could get anywhere near to Mercy’s eyes.

“I was talking to Seren!”

The goddess stared across at me with confusion writ across every inch of her perfect face. I was meant to be a god of destruction, but I wasn’t charging headlong into the fight. They’d been watching me all the time that I was down on Amaranth, probably placing bets on how many times I’d get my ass ripped off. They knew how I fought. That’s why we were changing it up.

Parrying attack after attack, I took care not to press in on Hemeraphel. We didn’t want her backing off. We didn’t want her making another run for it. She had to feel like she could win.

I let one of her blasts through, not hitting me but hissing by close enough that I could feel the heat on my skin. Chitin. Whatever. It seemed to encourage her, and she unleashed yet more flowers, swiping out with more and more of her wings. She hovered above the ground now, raised by the beating of some wings as the others lashed out.

The next blast I let through kissed off my shoulder, sizzling away the outer layer of solid darkness, at least until I reforged it or healed myself or… well, whatever I did now. It’s a mix of them all really. Hemeraphel let out a cry of victory just as Mercy and Seren reached her.

Seren’s blades lashed out, carving through the wings sweeping at her and leaping past, close enough to the body to strike at her. Mercy cleared the way for her, arrow after arrow striking at the wings as they swung in, little stuttering explosions to blast them apart.

Hemeraphel caught Seren around the waist as she leapt for a strike at her chest. Fast as Seren was, there was no way she could match the speed of a full-blown goddess. She should have taken divinity when I offered it to her.

Still, just because she’d been stopped, it didn’t mean the attack would fall apart. Even as Mercy unleashed a whole cloud of fresh golden arrows into the outstretched arm, I reached out through Resonant Dominion and pulsed my will through it.

All swords were one sword. And the ones in Seren’s hands were mine as surely as the one in my own. They rippled out into duplicates, hanging in the air for just a moment before I pushed them home.

The blood that burst forth from the goddess’s chest was different this time, less spritzy and more viscous. She staggered back, thanks to my stabbing, and dropped Seren, thanks to Mercy’s arrows. “No!”

That emotional invasion hit me again. That awful sense that we were doing something terrible, stamping on the only flower growing in a barren desert, clubbing a baby seal while it looked up at us with big sad eyes, burning the Mona Lisa. It hit the three of us with such force that I could see the girls stagger under its weight. It was a damn clever trick. But it was just a trick. “You aren’t going to convince us you’re the good guy, dumbass. Every problem the universe has, you created.”

I tore the blades out through her, not straight back the way they’d come but out from the center of mass to the tips of her wings. More blinding sunlight showered down over all of us. Just like the good old days of killing abominations for Glory.

She was already healing from what should have been a killing blow. Godly regeneration was nothing to sniff at. “Every beauty… every treasure… every smile on every face… I was the one to put them there.”

“By accident!”

Seren found her blades back in her hands at the moment her feet touched down, and she rebounded in that same instant to slash at the towering goddess’s thighs, ripping clean through all those motherly skirts and biting into the flesh below.

The more of her power she brought to bear, the smaller Hemeraphel seemed to become. When she’d first arrived, carrying Seren in her palm, she had been a giant, but the more we fought her, the more she seemed to shrink, condensing her power into a smaller package so she could match us.

“You do not know what you do.” She sobbed. Another wave of her empathetic probing. Sorrow. Guilt. Screw that. I shrugged it off and let my Aether push it back all the way into the goddess’s skull. Technically I did have the Void version of Aether to swing around, but no practice using it meant I’d probably accidentally eat somebody’s soul if I tried it.

“Bet you a dollar.”

When she raised her wings in a full spread again, Mercy set them alight. Her old ability to throw up a wall of flame had become so much more now. She could tap into the fundamental elements of the universe and unleash them at will. So if you ever wondered what angel wings smell like when you cook them, the answer is fried chicken. Yes. Really. My mouth started watering, and I wondered what kind of hot sauce they had in the heavens.

Hemeraphel screamed as she burned. Not the delicate calculated yelps she’d been letting out to make us feel bad about the terrible thing we were doing to such a pretty little princess, but a proper guttural shriek. I liked it better. At least it was honest.

Apparently, those wings were actually a part of her, not just projections of power and will like my swords. That was unfortunate. For her.

Mercy hit her between the eyes with her next shot, and flames drifted up all around her, mixed through with golden sunlight, but at the center of it all, she was still Mercy. The same half-smirk was on her face as she loosed another arrow into each of the goddess’s eyes. She didn’t say it out loud, but she mouthed to herself: “Bullseye.”

Seren hadn’t stopped swinging through all the screaming and burning. She couldn’t reach the full height of the goddess, but everything from the crotch down was a mess of oozing golden gore by now. I pushed Deathtouch into her blades as she closed in for the next cycle of blows, ready to give her the bump straight up to godhood that she’d missed out on earlier.

She seemed to sense the change in her blades as if the weight had changed somehow. It was enough of a pause in a fight with a god to get her killed. Hemeraphel’s hands came down on her with all the fury of somebody who’d just been set alight, and it took a desperate yank of Artifice to pull Seren’s blades up into a guard against it.

Even with my will and the strength of her arms backing up the parry, it wasn’t enough in the face of Hemeraphel’s blind rage. She raised those same bloodied arms and brought them down like cudgels on Seren, again and again. A flare of light burst out from each crushing blow, driving Seren down, blinding her to the attack to come.

My great-sword, no longer occupied with parrying wings, swept in to the rescue, only for Hemeraphel to reach out and grab onto it. Not by the handle, like a sane person would, but by the blade. She caught it, and she swung it down at Seren.

It broke her guard, shattering the swords I’d made for her. Seren had to leap back to avoid the attack that followed, and then she was on her heels, backing away, off-balance as Hemeraphel chased her like she was the only living thing left in the universe.

It was a funny thing. Seren was undeniably the weakest one of us now, but it was her that Hemeraphel wanted to rain all her fury and vengeance down on. Lashing out at the one person who couldn’t defend herself instead of facing off against the other gods who could match her blow for blow. A coward and a bully—just like I’d always known.

The latest sweep of my stolen sword had the paladin knocked over onto her back, and now the goddess hefted it over her head, ready to bring the pommel down like a bludgeon into sweet Seren’s beautiful face.

She needed to pick on someone her own size.

Seren’s heart hammered in her chest, and the blood pulsed frantically through her veins. It was a different color from what mine used to be, but it was still blood. All blood was one blood. All flesh was one flesh. All bodies were one body.

She was standing at the back of the room, and I was lying on the floor waiting for the blow to fall, smiling up at Hemeraphel as she swept that giant sword right down into my waiting hands.

I took hold of the grip and twisted, slicing into Hemeraphel’s hands and surging Slaughter through the blade. Into her. She had no Slaughter of her own to protect her. No Void Pillars whatsoever. The blade was already made of consolidated murder, and adding that extra push had it bleeding out into her. As the golden blood flowed from her hands, dark veins crawled up her previously pristine skin, a shadow spreading inside of her blinding light—a poison I’d put there.

She leapt back, terrified to feel death inside her, scrabbling to pull the arrows from her eyes and regrow them fast enough to look down at the damage already done.

My Lifesense was a little dulled nowadays thanks to all the death that I carried around with me, but even a mole could tell when there was a supernova going on a foot away from them. Hemeraphel surged Primal energy, flooding healing power down into her arms where I’d slipped the Slaughter in, struggling against every inch that the darkness took, healing herself even as my murderous intent burned in deeper.

“What have you done? What have you done?” The flesh of her hands withered and crumbled. Wrinkles formed up her arms. An eternity of youth fading away in the face of the end.

“All this time scared of a Voidgod, and you never even knew what one could do.”

Judging by the terror on her face, she could feel the death within her, just as surely as I could feel her surging Primal energy to fight it. The source of both energies was immediately apparent. Primal from within her. Slaughter from within me. If she could choke off the source, she could stop the flow. She leapt for me, swiping at me with her limp-wristed dead hands. I deflected them with a quick cross of my blade, opening fresh wounds that bled copiously. Shining golden sunlight now shot through with threads of darkness, like the sun had developed a fungal infection. “You left all the people of Amaranth to face this. You left untold numbers of Eternals to face it. And you didn’t even know how bad I can make this.”

She leapt back from me at the fresh pain, but there was no escape, not now. I was inside her. In her body and her soul and seeping out to every other part of her, too. All death was one death, and all of them were me. Even if she could have run, and she couldn’t if she meant to kill me before the infection spread, then I could have dragged her to a halt with what I’d already slipped in.

I spun my sword to flick off all the golden blood, and I charged her.

Mercy’s arrows pounded up the length of her as I came on, slipping effortlessly through her translucent skin and then exploding out into tiny supernovas within. It kept her off her balance, kept her focus split. When I leapt for her, it wasn’t only the single great-sword in my hands that I swung but all the hundreds of others that I had just conjured into being around her. Back when I was an Eternal, I’d have had to rely on whatever death was in the air to empower me. Now I contained so much death, it was almost a relief to let a little out.

I hit her from every direction at once, and whatever force kept the bodies of gods together failed her. She exploded into golden, glowing chunks. Her soul I condemned to the Void. Though I was pretty sure I could have just eaten it at this point and absorbed her power directly instead of going through the motions of receiving Glory and assigning it to different columns on an entirely imaginary spreadsheet. All the old rules that the Solar gods had laid out were gone. Mercy still seemed to be constrained by some sort of structure, but not me.

Amaranth was the blueprint everything else was copied from, and it was in a state of chaos. Too much had happened for it to be any other way. Maybe it would settle back into plodding order, maybe it would land somewhere in the middle, where things could change without all the old stuff being replaced; chaos wouldn’t reign supreme forever, it never did. But until I felt the rules tightening in around me again, I was going to enjoy myself.

I might have struck the killing blow, but everyone got a healthy dose of Glory when a god died. Mercy had been close to ascension after we put Araphel down, and I’d done all the heavy lifting on that one. I wasn’t sure if Seren got any benefit from all the Glory clinging to her—presumably, you needed that little Eternal spark to use it—but I wasn’t averse to making her my Eternal if it meant she’d get to join us at the grown-up table.

She slapped me in the face. “Thou tried to make of me a deicide.”

It didn’t hurt, but I acted like it did so she’d feel better. “Baby, you’re going to have to start killing them eventually.”

“I fight by your side, and you’d make of me the very worst kind of murderer?” She was actually furious. I had not counted on that. I’d kind of thought that she’d get with the program once we actually arrived here and fought them. I thought she’d get carried along by the promise of power. I mean, she was alvaren. They were all about strength. Right?

“It isn’t murder when it’s you or them; it is self-defense.” My arms crossed over my chest, almost of their own accord.

Seren rolled her eyes. “Thou had no need to come here, no need to kill any one of them. Not truly.”

“I mean, he’s a Voidgod. I’m pretty sure they would have noticed and come after him eventually,” Mercy piped up. “And historically, they haven’t been big Voidgod fans.”

“But that is not why we are here, is it, Maulkin?”

She was staring me right in the face, and I couldn’t lie to her. Not her.

“No. No, it isn’t.”

Her eyes narrowed now. Her whole face seemed to narrow. “Thy self-righteousness carried you thus far.

I blurted it all out before I could help myself. “They screwed everything up, and now they need to pay.”

“Oh!” Mercy chuckled. “That, that right there. That’s the self-righteousness. That’s what she’s talking about.”

“They made the whole universe by accident and then left everyone in it to suffer. They made it into a game so they could decide which team had the biggest dick to swing! They don’t deserve to be gods.”

Mercy never could resist the urge to argue with me. “And you do?”

“I’m a god now, whether I like it or not. I’ve got the power to fix things.”

Seren’s head tilted to the side quizzically. “Then why do you seek vengeance instead of using such power for good.”

“Because they’ll come along and screw it all up again. Because they won’t let anything change if it doesn’t benefit them. Because… it isn’t right. It isn’t right that they should have everything and the people out there suffering should have nothing. Just because they weren’t born lucky.”

“So you want to murder them for being dicks?” Mercy snorted.

“I want the universe to get a clean slate. A fresh start. We can’t make anything better just slapping more stuff on top of the sickness. You need to get rid of what’s wrong before you can start making right.”

Mercy gave me a slow clap. “Wow, that’s a real nice moral justification you’ve made for yourself.”

“We are already two gods in”—I threw up my hands—“why are you giving me a hard time now?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I was down to murder them for being dicks.” Her grin threatened to take the top clean off her head. “I just wanted to check if you had a better reason.”

I was smiling too when I turned back to Seren and discovered that the argument wasn’t actually over. “I would require some better reason. Perhaps thy oath that those raised up to replace them would not be worse?”

“I mean, I kind of figured we’d put you in charge.” I shrugged.

Both of the girls gawped at me. “What?”

“I mean yeah, I’d have the Voidgod powers, and Mercy would have the Solar powers, and once you ascend, you could have Lunar powers, and we could just…make things how we want them?”

Mercy’s hand shot up. “Uh, I didn’t sign up for this.”

“But she’s mortal, though. She’s one of the people that actually have to live in the universe we’re making. Shouldn’t she get to decide what kind of universe it is?”

“First of all, I’m not sure someone that never gets older can be called mortal.” She counted off her arguments on her fingers. “Second, she’ll definitely not be a mortal if we make her into a god, and third: hell no, she shouldn’t be in charge. No offense, Seren, but if your taste in dudes is anything to go by, you definitely should not be in charge of running the universe. You’ll probably fill it with oversized morons with giant dongs.”

“Some offense taken.” Seren’s eyes were narrowed again.

“I knew you took a peek,” I whispered to Mercy, trying to avoid Seren’s scowl.

“Dude, it is at face height, and you keep getting naked. What do you want me to do, go blind?”

Seren let out a little huff of air. “Given the other places that it has been in my absence, I should not wonder it has struck upon your eye.”

“Oh come on, you were dead! You can’t really be mad I banged someone else when you were dead?” Whatever relief I’d been feeling was long gone now. Dread was creeping back in. We had all of eternity together if the gods didn’t kill us before then, and I really didn’t want to have this same argument over and over.

“Were I enraged, said member would have parted from thy body.” She glowered meaningfully down at my crotch. “I am entitled to comment upon your infidelities, just as I am certain you would have words to say should you learn that I spent my time in paradise being ravaged by lithe alvaren gentlemen.”

“Were you?” the words squeaked out.

She scoffed. “It was an alvaren heaven. It was not so uncouth.”

Mercy threw back her head and cackled. “No wonder you like him if your only other choice is eternal celibacy.”

“Thanks.”

Seren sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “I do not concede that this is the wisest course, nor that I nor thee should be the one granted dominion over all of creation, but there can be no denying that the first step is necessary. The rot must be cut out.”

I clapped my hands. “So let’s get back in surgery.”

Chapter 31

When I parted my palms, the walls of this fortress cracked open, too. My Sphere of Influence could no longer be measured in miles, now encompassing whole planes of existence. This heaven was no different from any of the others. It was more saturated in the powers of other gods, but ultimately, their strength meant nothing against the Void. They had no protection against it.

On the downside, I was still kind of getting used to my bitching awesome new god powers, so I slightly overreached when I was hauling the fort apart. I kind of maybe pulled half the hallways in this wing of the palace apart too. On Earth or Amaranth, that kind of thing would have killed thousands and brought a ton of bricks down on us all, but here, where everything was constructed of Divine Will, they were smooth and plain where they’d been parted.

At the far end of the new chasm, we saw Eosphel, King of the Gods.

He had been seated on his own, far fancier throne, but that had split open, too, and he’d dropped butt-first into the crack. I tried to snap it shut on him, but he sprang up to his feet all too swiftly.

“Okay, so I guess we’re doing this now?”

“I liked it better when we had time to plan. Or set up an ambush.” Mercy rolled her eyes and reached for an arrow. “Or do anything other than kicking the wall down and having a fight.”

“Too late now.”

Seren held out her hands, and I furnished her with fresh blades of Slaughter. She cast me a sideways glance. “Thou are truly the buffoon that she has painted you to be.”

“Oh yeah.” I grinned. “Never claimed otherwise.”

Eosphel hit me head-on, the full length of the chasm I’d opened through this plane swallowed up in a single one of his steps. From thin air he had conjured a great-sword of his own, burning bright as the sun and twice as hot. That was definitely going to sting.

I met it with a blade of my own, and my shadow-sword of pure Void started to melt away at the edges. Maybe it was more than twice as hot as a sun. After a brief, awful moment where the blades ground together and darkness melted away, I hammered my head forward into his crown, and he fell away with a yelp of pain.

Seren hamstrung him as he went by, not that it mattered much to a god that could heal from any wound with barely a thought. He had only a single stumbling step before he leapt back into action. It was a good stumbling step though—one that was crammed absolutely chock-full of Mercy’s explosive nova-arrows. They peppered up the length of him, twisting into his finery before it detonated.

When he sprang away from us, it wasn’t far. He rebounded off the wall and launched himself straight for me, sword already swinging. I’d managed to replace at least part of my sword before he darted back in, but it was still unstable when I had to sweep it around and knock his thrust off course. His heel lashed out at me as he spun away, using the momentum of my defense to empower it.

Not sure why I found it surprising that a god would kick me in the gut, given what I’d seen of them so far, but it still did. It knocked me right on my ass, and he would have brought that sword of his around through my neck if Seren hadn’t been there to meet it with both of her blades. She slid across the floor from the impact, even as I flipped back up onto my feet to take her place.

Mercy launched a torrent of flame along with her next arrows, and while Eosphel slapped each shot away with the flat of his blade, the fire washed right past that and enveloped him. “You seek to burn the father of flame?”

With a huff, the fire burst out through the room, rolling over all of us. It hurts being set alight. Even when you’re a god. Especially when you’re a god. Mortals only have to feel it for a minute or so; we could keep on sizzling forever.

Turning my chitinous shell into a black hole sucked up the worst of the fire on me, and a quick increase in the power of that pull stripped it off Seren, too. Hopefully, Mercy could fend for herself for a minute because it seemed that Eosphel didn’t plan on giving us time to think. He swung his great-sword, and both light and flame leapt from it in an arc, just like the twinned strikes I’d been swinging around down on Amaranth. A twin of my sword leapt out along the same axis to swallow it down before it hit Seren and me, but he was still in motion, swiping at the air and unleashing line after line of flame.

Just catching the one had been hard enough; catching all of them would be impossible. I followed Seren’s lead, leaping through the gaps between the blazing strips, but while she was as agile and lithe as ever, flipping around the place like an acrobat, I was still me. I’d barely made it two hops before the first flaming twin-strike struck me, sizzling into the heel of one of my feet, too slow in moving. That stung. Well, it didn’t sting so much as it burned like the heat of a thousand suns. Like I’d jammed my foot in a deep fat fryer instead of the turkey. It was hot, and it hurt even through the thick coating of eternal darkness I’d slathered all over myself like sunscreen. SPF nine million wasn’t strong enough for a direct hit of this.

The heel came away, and I was left flopping under the next solar flare. The one after sheared through a horn. Only a shield of Annihilation stopped the follow-ups from carving me up.

“Did you think that the stars themselves would succumb so easily to you?”

I couldn’t see what he was doing through my shield, but I could hear the roar of flames all around me. When Eosphel plowed right through the wall of darkness and swung for me, I wasn’t taken unawares. This was why I’d been trying to avoid shields in the first place. Still, he was faster than I could match, swinging his sword quicker than I could bring my own around, even when I was expecting him. Turns out losing half a foot will slow your roll.

Mercy was there, kicking off his chest before I’d registered even one of them moving. She must have bounced behind my shield to avoid the firestorm before rebounding at him. I really needed to pay more attention to her.

The kick knocked Eosphel back into the mass of darkness and made his swing miss me by about an inch. Mercy let out a little, “Ha,” as she backflipped away to land beside me. Guess it was my turn to owe her one. Letting my liquid darkness slop down, I reformed my foot into one piece, but I left the horn alone for now. They got in the way most of the time. I was half-tempted to lop them both off.

There was the unmistakable sound of clashing blades beyond my persistent little shield, so I tore it down and charged in to help Seren. She might have been the greatest swordswoman on Amaranth, but that wouldn’t have mattered here. Sure, Eosphel wasn’t used to getting down and dirty, actually fighting, but he still had all his godly Potency and Celerity on his side. Clumsy though his blows might have been by comparison, they were struck with such force and speed that even the most impenetrable defense would have struggled to keep pace.

I leapt for his back, blade swinging down, and I knew, I just knew, that it was going to be the killing blow. I could feel the impending death rising off him like steam.

Then I stuck. Halfway across the room, I stopped moving, dangling in the air like when Briar used her magic on me. Well, apart from the fact that I could still flail around.

Flailing actually helped more than I could have guessed, and I launched a barrage of cuts at Eosphel’s back, even as I tried to work out how the hell he was holding me, and they proved enough of a distraction to him that Seren was able to get back on even footing and launch a counterattack. I kept it up.

“Mercy? What’s got me?”

Mercy was dangling in mid-air too. She’d leapt aside to avoid one of the wild flaming strikes and gotten stuck the same way as me. “I don’t know, but I’m going to kick its ass!”

“My sweetness, we would love to see you try. Such succulent fleshy forms you have taken. Brimming over with your passions. What a feast for an old lady.”

“Ah, crap.”

Baal Gharron came scuttling out of the shadows then, stepping sideways from the gap between places that we’d created. I knew we were making a lot of noise, but I hadn’t counted on the Lunar gods dwelling close enough to hear it.

“Did you think we wouldn’t know all that happened in our domain, sweetness?” Now that we were restrained, either by her webs or by Eosphel’s endless assault, she had the courage to come creeping out into the light. “Did you think that the gods of sun could sense my web spread across them? All these heavens are my hunting ground, my sweetness, sparse though the takings are. Yet today, a bountiful feast. Wrath and terror. Fury and malice. You are all… so delicious.”

I wriggled around to try and face her, having to trust in Seren that she wouldn’t get murdered while I was distracted. “I did everything you asked of me, Baal Gharron. I spread chaos, I grew stronger, I changed the world.”

“And now you seek to slay us, my sweetness?” She scuttled right up to me, her massive mandibles clicking just inches from my face. “Do you think to hide behind a shield of camaraderie? Do you think I do not know what evil lurks in the heart of men?”

“No, I figured you’d work that bit out.” As long as she was talking, she wasn’t eating anyone. “I’m just saying, you know. I did what you told me to. Even if I’m doing something more important now.”

Her fangs were bared as she closed in on me. I could see that lovely acidic venom she’d already killed me with once dripping from them. “You want praise, sweetness? For slaying the gods themselves?”

It is hard to shrug when you’re hanging upside down in an invisible web, but you know I made my best attempt at it anyway. “Nothing will ever truly change so long as you’re in charge.”

All eight of her glowing moonlit eyes locked onto me, bathing me in a pale glow. “And when some fresh-faced godling arises to throw you from the throne, my sweetness?”

“Best of luck to them.” I grinned, and with a pulse of Devouring, I tore the web that held me apart, flipping to land on my feet a little unsteadily. She sprang back from me before I could even bring my sword to bear. “Nobody’s going to come for us. We aren’t going to screw everything up so badly anyone will want to start fresh.”

“So thought all of us.”

I unleashed a wave of Devouring through the room. Her web was made of Aether, the connective tissue of thoughts and feelings, and my power wiped it away as though it had never been there at all. Mercy dropped, still firing off arrow after arrow into Eosphel to keep him off balance and unable to land any sort of killing blow on Seren as she scampered around him. Then I spat, “Yeah, right.”

She parried the first flurry of strikes with her bladed legs, and I sheared off lines of chitin with each strike, but she healed as fast as I dealt the damage. “Do you think we sought this? That we wanted all of creation to become as it did, the corrupting influence of Araphel…”

With a dive under her belly, I struck my first solid blow into her guts. The same acid that dripped from her jaws came pouring out of that drooping gash, sizzling all over me before I neutralized it with a quick flush of Annihilation. “Can’t be used as an excuse anymore.”

Hemeraphel had been good at toying with your emotions, making you feel what she wanted you to feel, but Baal Gharron was the master. Emotion was her domain. When she let out her bitter laugh, I could feel it bubbling up my throat, too. “My sweetness, a Voidgod still lives.”

She slammed her whole body down to the ground, trying to crush me, but all she managed was to impale herself on the field of swords I’d left behind as I leapt clear. Rolling to my feet, I tried to call them back to me, but it seemed her innards were so corrosive not even Slaughter could survive passage through it. “So I’m going to be your scapegoat from now on?”

I’d come out behind her, and usually, that was a good place to be in a fight. Not so when you’re fighting a big spider. Her ass held a secret weapon. A blast of web spattered out all over me, flinging me back and pinning me to the wall of the chasm I’d inadvertently created.

She scuttled in close to me again, raising her fangs. “No, my sweetness. You are going to be the meal I feast upon for eons.”

My horns regenerated to their full length with a pulse of Primal, and I hooked them under her fangs as they came down at me. “Then who are you going to blame the universe being a trainwreck on?”

Venom gushed from her fangs, trickling down my horns, sizzling them away. “Who do we need to justify ourselves to with you gone?”

A fresh blast of Entropy did nothing to her web but melted the wall away from behind me. We both fell back into the new hole, and she got as tangled in the web as I was. “Honesty is a good look on you.”

Venom still ran down my horns, sizzling across my forehead and down towards my eyes. “Flattery will not save you, my sweetness.”

“I don’t need to be saved.” I hammered my acid-slick head into her face. Those shining moon eyes burst on contact with her own venom, and fresh, glowing ichor came pouring out. She was as blind now as she’d tried to make me, and a quick pulse of Annihilation wiped her acid and webbing off me. Invisible bonds of Aether still lingered, but whatever sentimental attachment should have been stopping me from killing her was too weak to slow me.

My great-sword burst out through the top of her head amidst her dribbling eyes, the strength of my blow lifting her whole hulking body off the ground. She wailed as Slaughter flooded out through her, squealing and flailing all her legs like a crab dropped into the pot. She tried to make me feel her pain. Eosphel staggered with it, letting Seren spring clear of his relentless assault. Mercy flinched but still loosed an arrow of ice and wind that swallowed down the firestorm that had just been unleashed at the far end of the room.

As for me. A sword through the brain was a picnic compared to what I’d already endured. That was the problem with experiencing the worst pain imaginable. Nothing else was ever that bad afterward. I could step on Lego with bare feet now and it wouldn’t even bother me.

Okay, yes it would, I’m only a god.

I twisted the blade as I drew it out, unleashing a fresh wave of Deathtouch through her. Her shiny carapace dulled, and the spasmodic twitching of her legs slowed. She’d been the one and only god to treat me with the slightest bit of care or respect, and I’d just murdered her in cold blood. I might have justified it to the others as necessary violence, but this one felt bad. Either that, or she’d planted something in my brain so the thought of killing her felt bad. Who knew?

Glory filled me as she crumbled to dust, and I strode on through that cloud of dust to face Eosphel again.

The dragon hit me before I’d made it two steps. I really should have expected crazy old Losna to be lurking under the big spider’s skirts since that was where he always seemed to linger, but somehow, he still got the drop on me. Flame and smoke trailing from his gaping catfish maw, he latched onto my leg and hauled me over.

I rolled as I dropped, but he coiled around me just as fast, a twenty-foot-long boa-constrictor covered in ridges and spikes and glowing with the fire inside him. His jaws crunched clean through the coating of darkness that surrounded my sexy calf, and heat and jagged teeth broke through.

Ow.

There was no way to cut at him because my arms were wrapped up in his coils. There was no way that pure divine energy was going to blast him free because he was made of the same stuff. “Little help?”

Mercy was blackened and crispy after catching one of the latest bursts of fire from Eosphel directly in her face, but she still crackled her head around to look at me. “How the hell do these things keep happening to you?”

“Must be my animal magnetism?” I grunted as the coils tightened, and my shell creaked.

She shot Losna in the face, which was unfortunately still dug into my leg. The little concussion ripped the dragon free, but it also smashed even more of my lower leg off. “Ow.”

On the plus side, I no longer had a deranged serpent trying to chew off my leg. On the downside, now his mouth was free to speak. “Slaughter you. Rip you. Tear you. Killed her. Killed her? Kill you! Rip. Tear.”

Oh good, he had gotten saner since we last met.

Rolling back upright despite my passenger, I managed to stamp down on his face, wedging my whole foot in his mouth before he could say anything else. He fell into muffled chomping. Thank the gods. Well… thank me now, I guess. Words were rumbling against the sole of my foot, but it wasn’t like he made less sense when tonguing my toes, so I just ignored them.

Wrestling myself free of his coils was going to take longer than we had. Mercy was splitting her attention between trying to pepper Losna with arrows and keeping Eosphel off balance, and she wasn’t winning on either end. “Help Seren, I’ve got this.”

Incredulous. That was the word for the look she gave me. Like she didn’t believe me. Was it really that unbelievable that I’d be all right without a minder for three minutes?

“This isn’t my first god-slaying rodeo, Mercy.”

Her eyebrow slowly raised.

It came out as a roar. “Will you just go help Seren?”

She shook her doubts out of her head and turned to the fight still raging in the midst of the rising inferno. My swords were still in Seren’s hands. I could still feel them passing hopelessly through the air or jarring against big daddy god’s sword of fire. She was still alive, or they’d have fallen. Good thing too. I really didn’t want to have to go all the way back to alvaren heaven to pick her up again. That place sucked.

I flexed and strained with all my might against the crushing pressure of Losna’s coils, but just as I was built to swing a sword, all of his obscene strength had been designed to make him the best at crushing things. “Will… you… get off… me.”

If he answered, it was swallowed up by my foot. He munched and suckled at my ankle like he thought he could spaghetti me down his throat.

Screw this. I flexed Artifice and burst out with spikes in every direction, following the chitinous peaks with a rush of Slaughter. Losna was so thoroughly porcupined that when he tried to pull away from the spiky pain, he couldn’t. I was hooked into him too deeply. I wasn’t stuck inside him. He was stuck outside me.

The pain of it had loosened his grasp, so even though he couldn’t haul himself loose of the spikes, I could move freely in his coils—at least, for now. I snapped the spines back inside me and fired an Artificed pillar up to shoot me straight out of his grasp like a champagne cork.

It was simple enough to topple the same pillar and pin him to the ground long enough for me to wade back in and bring a killing blow down on his head. Losna stared up at me as the sword came down, moonlit eyes blazing bright with madness.

“Kill you!”

I split him in half, driving echoes of my blade back along the length of him as his skull cleaved in two. Where there should have been brains or bones, there was moonlight, then it all blinked out, and he crumbled away to nothingness, soul consigned to the same dark corner of the Void as all the rest of them.

Seren let out a cry as Eosphel knocked a blade from her hand, and then I was running again, moving far too slowly for my liking across the length of the great chasm, back to the room where the rest of the Solar Court had already died, and their leader now stood over my girlfriend with his sword raised high. All places were one place. Here and there were the same. Standing over one body, standing behind another. They were the same.

The tip of my sword burst out through his chest, and flames washed back over me from the wound in his back. I could see the circles of light on the ceiling widen as his eyes bulged in their sockets. “You…”

“Me. I killed you.” I couldn’t help but grin. “All of you.”

As Slaughter flowed through my blade, the strength in his legs gave out, and suddenly, it was only me holding him upright. “Why?”

“Because you made a whole universe of people, and you didn’t care about them.”

“They… were only… mortals.”

“Well, so were we.” I ripped the sword up him and out through his shoulder. “Look at us now.”

Eosphel, King of the Dawn, leader of the gods, tumbled apart and burnt away to ash.

I shook his remains off and reached down to help Seren up. “Thanks for keeping him busy. That could have gone really bad if you weren’t such a badass.”

She snatched her hand back and scowled. “Thy opinion of my rear has most certainly changed since last you saw it!”

I frantically backpedaled. “No! It isn’t a… bad ass. You’re a total badass. You’re awesome. You’re amazing.”

She held her angry glower for only a moment before both she and Mercy fell into peals of laughter. “Maulkin, do you really think that I could have dwelt so long in thy company without becoming acquainted with that idiom?”

“Great.” I groaned. “Everyone’s got jokes today.”

Mercy cackled. “You didn’t think you were the only one with a sense of humor?”

With the death of the last Solar god, all the light had died in the palace of the gods. Shadows stretched out, so dark that nobody could see a thing except for the glow of Mercy’s eyes and the few smoldering embers that were left of Eosphel.

It was from the deepest and darkest of those shadows that Chernghast’s voice echoed out. “No... There is much to be mocked here.”

Oh, crap. Oh, crap.

The three of us scrambled towards each other in the dark, putting our backs together so none of us could be picked off alone. Mercy tossed out some fireballs to hang in the air and give us something like illumination to work with, but their light didn’t seem to spread as far as it should.

“The old gods brought low by a moron and his pets. What else is there to do but make a mockery of it?” Chernghast’s voice rumbled so deep I could feel it all across my body. He was the last of the old guard, and the one I had most desperately wanted to take by surprise.

I shouted into the dark, “Want to come out and call me that to my face?”

“Your brain is lacking, not your ears. You hear every word I say quite clearly. This I know. For it was my will that forged your flesh. My gift that made you divine. This is how you repay your maker? This is how you repay your father?”

Mercy scoffed, even though I could see sweat already beading on her forehead. “Oh, don’t pretend you didn’t want all the other gods dead, too.”

“Of course, I wanted them dead,” Chernghast growled. “I want everyone dead. I want every soul brought forth as a grand buffet for me to feast on throughout all of eternity. And you have robbed me of that. You have banished them to oblivion.”

I shrugged. “Well, yeah, I don’t want them coming back.”

“Fool,” he barked from the shadows. He was circling us. “What shall we eat when they are gone? What shall we hunt?”

“Wait, was he planning on eating all the other gods?” Mercy sounded genuinely confused. “Is he pissed that we spoiled dinnertime?”

Despite the uncomfortable situation, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Man, you’re even more of a weirdo than I remembered.”

His answer was a roar. “I am the devourer. I am the end of all lives. I am the wolf that waits each time you set forth from your door, just waiting for you to stumble, just waiting for you to show weakness.”

Seren had been pretty quiet since we got to this particular plane of existence. She’d been feeling ambivalent about killing gods before now. I guess in the face of what this particular god was like, that reluctance had faded away. “Do thine eyes show you any weakness here, dog?”

“Strong or weak, you are less than nothing. You are fodder all the same. Prey.” He burst out of the shadows, teeth gnashing. “Prey for the gods.”

Of the three of us, Seren probably looked the most vulnerable, what with her being a mortal alvaren with no godly powers to throw around. Of course, the minute he broke cover to charge her, the two gods by her side noticed and swung around. Mercy’s first shot at him actually went wide because of how fast he was, but the swing of my sword hit him broadside on.

With a distinctly doggy yelp, it sent him rolling off, back out of sight in the shadows. His growl echoed in from every direction, deafeningly loud in what now seemed a very cramped space. All the expanse of the heavens now tightened down to this tiny circle of lights.

“If you are all that is left, then you are what I shall consume.” He bounded in again, aiming for Mercy this time around. Her arrow took him in the face, but still, he kept on coming. It detonated into a miniature mushroom cloud, fire streaming back to sear along the rest of his fur as he came on. This time I wasn’t going to make it in time to smack him, but I could most certainly throw a hundred tiny swords of Slaughter into his path and make him ram through them if he meant to get to Mercy.

Being the genius he was, he did ram right on through them. Flaming face-first into a wall of blades. Maybe the flames blinded him, or maybe he was just a moron, we weren’t stopping to ask and make sure.

He bowled Mercy over and was going for her throat when Seren’s blades knocked his snout aside and left him literally eating dirt. Well, not dirt. Dissolved god dust.

Snorting and spluttering, he scrabbled back, but the moment of delay gave me enough time to swing for him again.

“Bad dog.”

The impact of the blade should have killed him by all rights. As it was, it cracked his face wide open and launched him back into the shadows. It was like he was weightless despite the obvious hulking size of him. Like he was no more substantial than a leaf on the wind.

We had a moment’s respite, then his rumbling growl echoed back around us. “It is apt that the last enemy you should face is death himself. Apt that here at the final hurdle you shall fall.”

“Death was the first enemy we faced, dumbass.” I’d already had enough of this cat and mouse, hide and seek, bull crap. With a clap of my hands, a circle of swords surrounded us, and with a touch of my blade to Mercy’s hand, each one became a blazing torch. “Araphel? God of destruction? Ring any bells? Not you. Never you. You’re just an echo. A cheap copy of the thing that you buried and pretended never existed. The threat of death without any way of following through. All bark, no bite.”

When he came bounding for me, we all saw him this time. I swung before he was close, and all the blades in orbit about us lashed out with a line of flame. To his credit, he leapt clean over the exploding wall of flame, but that just made him an open target for Mercy’s shot. An arrow forged of sunlight, bursting with elemental fury and launched directly into the heart of the wolf god. The concussion when it struck was enough to knock us all staggering back. All of us, except for Chernghast.

The black wolf came down in the midst of us, teeth gnashing and howl warbling from both his throat and the gaping hole in his chest. I turned his face away with a solid boot to the jaw, but that just made him lunge for Seren instead. She crossed her blades to absorb the impact, but it still sent her sliding across the night-black marble.

Chernghast managed one step towards her before I caught him by the tail and hauled him back. “All right, baby, it is decision time. This is the last god. If you want to ascend, now is your one and only chance.”

Seren had been schooled throughout centuries of life to keep her expression still. To hide all thoughts and emotions behind a perfect mask of beauty. She should have been completely unreadable. But I’d spent one hell of a lot of time with her, and I had the slight advantage of Aether letting me see literally anything going on in her head if I wanted to look. I didn’t want to look, but she was radiating her indecision so powerfully that I could feel it all the same.

“Just go with your gut,” Mercy piped up as she flipped over Chernghast’s snapping jaws. “What do you want to do?”

“I do not know what course is best.” She looked down to the swords in her hands as if they’d be able to tell her. “I… I do not know.”

Chernghast spun to snap for me instead, exposing his back to her. I poured Deathtouch into her blades and caught the great black wolf by the jaws. Okay, maybe this was a pretty apt ending to my journey as an Eternal. Full circle back to stinky dog breath.

“Seren.” The wolf god’s jaws vibrated with the tension; all of the immense biting power tried against the Potency of my godly arms. “Decide.”

She was still staring down at the swords as my arms ached, and the drooling wolf pressed in closer towards me. “I… I cannot.”

“Fine!” I surged my Potency one last time. Multiplying my already colossal Potency over and over. Swelling my arms to ridiculous proportions as I hauled the god’s jaws apart. With a wet crackling sound, the teeth parted, fur ripped, flesh stretched, and bones popped. The god-head broke open with a flex of my arms. What had once been the most terrifying thing in my universe was now just a ragged heap of moonlit ichor and mewling flesh.

In an instant, I summoned my sword to my hand again and met Mercy’s eyes. She nodded.

I brought my great-sword down, and the last of the old gods died.

Epilogue

I couldn’t tell you for sure how long we went wandering through the halls of the gods in darkness, looking for the place it had all begun. Not Earth, the room where we’d first been ushered in by Death to start our wonderful new lives. Obviously not Earth. Why would we want to go back there? What a mess.

It helped that the palace of heaven seemed to be gradually folding in on itself as we went. There was no more will of the existing gods to make things manifest, so subtly, inch by inch, it was compacting itself up again until such time as we decided we wanted to add a water park or a steakhouse—both pretty tempting ideas to be honest.

As the heaven folded in around itself, we just aimed for the middle part, on the assumption that was where anything important was going to be, and lo and behold, we found the big room where they’d done the big, glowing welcome to Amaranth display. It looked smaller now, somehow. Maybe it was actually shrinking since we decided to manifest ourselves as regular-sized people. Maybe we had just seen enough since the last time we were here that a big, dark room didn’t impress us all that much. Either way, it felt a lot homier this time around. Cozy, almost.

Turns out, once you’ve got every Pillar of divinity completely maxed out after killing every single god in existence, present company excluded, doing little things like redecorating a plane designed to obey your every whim became one hell of a lot easier. I threw down a table and some big plush chairs. I dropped in a mini-fridge for each of us and even plopped a rug underfoot so the place didn’t feel so chilly all the time. Seren watched all this appearing with a kind of placid acceptance while Mercy seemed to be desperately resisting the urge to laugh. “

Spinny chairs?”

“What’s the point of being the boss if you don’t have a spinny chair?”

“I should probably just be relieved you haven’t given us all those little swingy ball desk toys.”

“Ooh, good idea.” They manifested, too.

Mercy did cackle then before tossing herself down into her seat and spinning it around, just like she was meant to. Seren placed herself down with a little more dignity, but she also succumbed to the siren call of the spinny chair a moment later.

Life was good.

With a clap of my hands, I pulled up an image of Amaranth above the middle of the triangular table, then I settled myself down to look up at that replica made of moonlight and solid shadows. The whole thing was a mess. With a wave, I could see all the people struggling and dying across its surface. All the leftover monsters from a million different wars, all fought one after the other, all fought for no good reason at all. Creeping down through the strata layer by layer, we could see the whole history of the universe, the times the Solar Court was winning, and the times the Lunar Court brought back wild growth and nature. All the way down to the first layer, the last time the gods had truly worked in harmony to create a solid barrier around the empty heart of creation.

“Man, we have got a lot of work to do.”

Mercy sighed. “Yup. And you know it isn’t going to be fun. No more fighting monsters and winning wars and having people cheer when we show up.”

“Excitement and praise are naught to the gods.”

I groaned. “I mean, a little bit of excitement might have been nice. The odd super-powerful monster that needs an ass-kicking or something?”

Seren’s eyebrows drew down a fraction of an inch. “Alas, there is nothing now that thy power cannot unmake.”

I brought my horned head down to rest on the table and groaned some more. “Where do we even start with all of this?”

Mercy pointed to a little dot on the world, a little group of people in trouble. “We start here.”

Killing gods was the easy part. Saving the whole universe, one fix at a time, that is hard work. But the three of us are here, doing it. Turning Amaranth from a patchwork of mistakes into something better, something kinder, instead of the savage place that it had always been. Turning swords to plowshares, and all that good godly stuff.

It is long and arduous, and most of the time I can’t even tell if what we are doing is actually improving things. We won’t know for centuries, probably. It will take forever for the little changes to add up, and even longer for them to ripple out through the rest of creation.

As it is in Amaranth, it will be everywhere.

So, do me a favor. Slap your hands together and say a little prayer to me when the going gets good. Let me know when you notice things getting better. Tell me it was all worth it.

Thank You All! Please Read!

Hi everyone! Thank you so much for taking the time to read the Savage Dominion Boxset and finishing this awesome LitRPG adventure with us! We both hope that you all had a blast and enjoyed Maulkin and the others in their last and final book of the series! It's only because of all your support and excitement that we've been able to work on these stories and continue to improve.

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