The trio left the tower shortly afterwards. Augustine was too busy standing in front of his destroyed bookshelf to be snotty to them anymore, and Definitely Bad Guy hadn’t wanted to discuss summoning in front of the Wizard of Elements.

“Right, next tower,” the Chosen One said, rubbing his hands together as they stepped out into the still gently falling snow.

“Chosen One,” Definitely Bad Guy said, with a sudden burst of urgency.

“Yeah?” The Hero turned and looked at his companion.

“I—” the Mage took a deep breath, steeling himself, “I would like to thank you. While your methods were … questionable, I nevertheless appreciate the sentiment.” There was a brief moment of silence as the Mage visibly struggled with himself. The Chosen One and Qube just stood there and watched.

“No one has ever stood up for me before,” the Mage Advisor finally admitted. “Not in the way you just did.” He flicked a glance at Qube. “You, also, for assisting. I… it means more to me than I can express.”

“Anytime,” the Chosen One said, smiling sadly. Now it was his turn to struggle with himself. “I’m sorry,” he added eventually, “that you haven’t had people stick up for you before. That’s messed up that they—” he cut himself off, before resuming, “—that’s messed up. That’s all.”

Qube impulsively reached out and took Definitely Bad Guy’s hands.

“We’re your friends,” she said earnestly. “We’ll always help you if you need it. And that kid was way out of line! Even though he was supposed to be so smart, he ignored anything that didn’t fit into his world view and just kept going without thinking. So really, he’s stupid.”

Qube felt a thrill at voicing such a bold and biting insult. Even though the Wizard of Elements wasn’t present, she felt as if he would somehow know that out there, someone had just called him stupid.

Definitely Bad Guy’s face was now a deep red, almost matching his hair. The Chosen One coughed slightly at Qube’s comment, no doubt shocked by her devastating words.

“Yeah, not being able to see things outside a certain point of view is pretty stupid,” he said wryly. “But anyway. You’re welcome, Sparky. I’m glad you could loosen up a bit.”

“He’s right,” Qube nodded emphatically as Definitely Bad Guy tried to unobtrusively slide his hand out of her grip. “There’s no need to — Chosen One, put that down,” she ordered the Hero, who had just made a snowball.

“Aww,” the Chosen One pouted. “But I was gonna help him with his newfound sense of fun!”

“We already played in the snow,” Qube said sternly. “We can play in the snow again after we save the world.”

“Fine,” the Chosen One sighed, and then threw the snowball at Augustine’s tower. It hit the door with a thud. “Let’s go to the next tower and see what new, quirky character awaits us.”

“Maybe the next one will be a normal, reasonable person,” Qube offered hopefully.

They weren’t.

The next Wizard’s Tower had been painted black. A little odd, given that none of the others were painted, but Qube had thought nothing of it at the time. Maybe it was just to avoid showing soot marks. But when they entered, it was almost like they’d wandered into a strange version of the town hall back in the village.

There were rows of pews, filled with skeletons clad in dark, frilly clothes. The skeletons all swivelled their heads and stared at the party as they entered, the red lights in their eye sockets flaring as they hissed at the Chosen One. At the other end of the tower’s floor was a stage, covered in enough cushions to make a Lava Slime jealous, guarded by decaying wyverns. More wyvern skeletons and still-fleshed corpses clung to roosts studded up the length of the tower, as well as human skulls stuck to the walls that glowed, lighting the areas around them.

There was also a very clearly dead giant spider building a web at the very top of the Wizard’s Tower.

All in all, it looked a lot more like a tower belonging to the undead, rather than a tower dedicated to the magic of life. Unless the Mage of Life had just tried [Revive] and things had gone a bit wrong? Or maybe a lot wrong, given the amount of moving corpses around. Oddly enough, it didn’t smell too bad, more musty and old.

“Welcome,” a tired voice scratchily whispered from the pile of cushions.

They were definitely not a normal person. But they could still be reasonable!

“Welcome to the cradle of life and death, adventurer.”

But probably not.

“I am the Mage of Life,” the scratchy voice continued. It was kind of like the sound a quill made as it wrote on parchment: dry and thin. “All that heals and harms alone falls within my domain.”

“Someone got a little too into the gothic phase,” the Chosen One muttered as he stepped forward. “Hey, need your thing for the thing. Amulet. And where it goes.” There was a beat, before he added, “Please.”

The cushions started vibrating, and the figure within their nest sat upright.

He wasn’t the strangest dressed person Qube had ever seen, but he certainly did seem to like black a lot. And Squiggles would have really liked his makeup. He was dripping face paint everywhere.

“I have been drawn from my suffering to heed you,” the teenager continued morosely, staring at the Chosen One. “The Head Mage called upon me, and I was forced to answer. I—”

“Where does the amulet go for the spell?” The Chosen One cut off the Mage of Life ruthlessly.

The Mage of Life fell silent, and stared at the Hero sulkily. One of the cushions in his pile was now practically flapping in its bid to escape. The teen stood up, and the nest of cushions exploded into action, pinging around the room.

But there was something off about the cushions bouncing around. Not just the fact that they were jittering around, twirling and hitting things. That was, at least, somewhat normal, but the way they were jittering. Normally things would just vibrate a bit, bounce around, set a bunch of other things off, and then everything would fly about for a while before either jamming itself somewhere or settling down after its adventure.

But these cushions were moving much more erratically than normal. They would almost freeze for a second just before hitting the wall or another object, and Qube suddenly felt a little bit tired. The more things they bounced off of, the more tired she felt. She rubbed her eyes, trying to focus on the now-speaking Mage of Life.

“— it was effort, as all things are, but healing and cursing are two sides of the same blood-soaked coin,” he was saying languidly. The Chosen One wasn’t even looking at him, instead watching the freezing cushions with a thoughtful expression.

“That puffed-up, self-important child over in the school of elements thinks that he knows best, but my amulet must be placed next to his, no matter what he says. The amulet of summoning must be to the left of the Mind Mage’s.”

He held out an amulet that was embossed with a wyvern. The Chosen One gestured at it, causing it to disappear.

“I really hope you’re paying attention to all this,” the Chosen One said to Definitely Bad Guy and Qube. “That sounded important. But also, I kinda want to ride one of those dragon things.”

“Those are wyverns, Chosen One,” Qube helpfully corrected him. “Not dragons. And you have a wyvern to ride already, Scaly-waley.”

“Whatever,” the Hero dismissed her information with a wave of his hand. “How cool would it be to ride one around? You’d look like a knight of death or something. It would be totally metal.”

“Metal?” Qube asked, now lost. Where did metal come into the equation? There wasn’t even any metal in this room; everything was either wood or cloth. Or bones. Or blood. Or flesh. The point was there were a lot of things, but not metal.

“Type of music,” the Chosen One explained, serving only to confuse his companion even more. “Hey, Sad Face, do these things actually fly?” he asked the Mage of Life, who was now leaning against a wall and sighing.

He was sighing so heavily he almost reminded Qube of the love-struck constructs back at Construct Crossroads. Qube wondered how their civil war was going. They should probably go back there and try to sort it out before they confronted the Evil Emperor, now that they were wiser and more powerful than whatever amount of time it had been since they’d last been there.

“Come on, Sparky,” the Chosen One said persuasively. “Don’t you want to fly around on a dead thing?”

“No,” the Mage replied flatly. “I have wings. We both do.”

“Yeah but that’s not as cool…” the Chosen One said, looking at the rotting corpses hanging out overhead. “This would be so cool.”

Qube suppressed a grimace. The Chosen One had some very odd notions about what was “cool.” Thank goodness she had Definitely Bad Guy on her side to help rein him in.

“I would, however, be interested in discovering if the skeletal wyverns were capable of flight,” the Mage said, horrifying her. “That would answer the question of if they use magic to fly, and the wings are merely supplementary to their ability, or whether the membrane was necessary. Given my understanding of the weight involved in wyverns, I suspect the physical aspect of their flight is minimal, with the vast majority of their ability coming from magic.”

The Chosen One and Qube looked at each other, both at a loss for words.

The Chosen One recovered first.

“There we go!” he practically shouted in his enthusiasm. “That’s the spirit! Let’s ride some skellies!”

Qube gave her formerly-sensible party member a look of betrayal. Sensible probably wasn’t the right word, but he’d certainly seemed to have a lot more sense than the Chosen One.

Not that this was particularly difficult to achieve, she thought to herself as she watched the Chosen One equip his wings and fly up to one of the fully-skeletal wyverns clinging to a roost above them.

The Mage of Life seemed to reflect her misgivings, sourly watching the Hero and Mage Advisor soar above him and try to mount his pet wyverns. She couldn’t even commiserate with him, since she was invisible. From what he’d been saying, he’d certainly been having a rough time of it lately. Given that he had achieved what she sometimes, when particularly angry, hoped to do, which was knowing both healing and cursing spells, she desperately wanted to talk to him.

She was also very interested in finding out how curses related to the living skeletons. Were they Evil, like the Chosen One said all undead were? They didn’t seem to be doing anything Evil. Or anything at all, really.

“How do you make this thing move?” the Chosen One called down to the Mage of Life. He’d managed to clamber onto the spine of one of the wyverns, but it just ignored him. Definitely Bad Guy hadn’t actually mounted any of the once-beasts, and was instead hovering in the air next to the Chosen One, watching the interaction with the tell-tale blood-red eyes that meant he was using a spell.

“I do not control them,” the Mage of Life wheezed out a whisper. “I merely gave them the curse of eternal life.”

Maybe the Chosen One had been wrong about the undead always being Evil. It did seem like an overgeneralisation. But could the Chosen One really be wrong about such an important issue?

“Giddyup!” the Chosen One said, kicking his feet into the wyvern’s ribs. “Ow! That hurt!” he complained, clutching his feet.

Yes. Yes, he could.

The wyvern looked down at the Mage of Life, then lazily flapped its wings, which was exactly what it’d been doing the entire time.

“Man, are you just decoration?” the Chosen One (somewhat rudely) asked the skeleton he was attempting to ride. “This is [balderdash].”

“Perhaps it needs some kind of incentive,” Definitely Bad Guy mused, staring at the beast. “But what would a skeleton desire?”

“What any of us desire,” the Mage of Life wheezed. Definitely Bad Guy looked at him thoughtfully.

The Chosen One stopped clutching his feet and kicked at it again. “Go! Giddyup! Fly!”

“Chosen One, please stop trying to kick others into doing your bidding,” Qube called up to the Hero.

The Hero ignored her and just kicked the unmoving beast harder, before giving up and flying back down.

“Stupid skeletons with their stupid animations,” he muttered. “Getting me all excited for flying on a skeleton steed.”

“There, there,” Qube comforted her friend, even though she didn’t really understand why he was so upset. He had a perfectly fine living wyvern back home that he could summon. Why did he want to ride an objectively worse version just because it was there?

Sometimes, no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t understand the Chosen One.