“We’re going to leverage our strengths to keep these Vith and their Ku’leth influences under quarantine.” Vendrtih said, his arms tucked behind his back as they stood on the observation deck of the mountainside tower.

Raze stood impassively behind him, watching the battlefield without a hint of expression.

From their vantage point, a man could see every part of the battlefield, including the damned Burrok castle, which was supposed to curtail Vith aggression and fend off any serious invasion by the stick-flinging savages.

But NO! now they had to fight against the damnable construction they’d funded, and simply porting troops in would be a messy affair as long at those demons clung to the walls and rooftops, waiting to make mincemeat of disoriented teleportees.

So they would do things the boring, yet tactically sound way.

They were going to starve the Vith out of that castle. It didn’t matter how long they had to do it, either. The Kinzena could afford to keep this army sitting here forever, as their plantations were just a step away at any given time.

Just another few days before they begin to weaken. These savages who think with their muscles. Probably think they can go without food on sheer grit. Vendrith sneered as he scanned the assembled families, lingering on the Honnuken banner.

Soon the Vith would be desperate enough to trade their kidnapped honnukens for a cup of beef broth. Their nighttime raid might make the siege last a little longer, but it wouldn’t change the end result.

“Motion.” Raze said.

Vendrith squinted, and could barely make out the movement of the front gate. His eyes weren’t what they used to be.

“What are these stick-flingers thinking?” Vendrith muttered as the gate opened and a tiny squad of roughly a hundred Vith loped out at a snail’s pace. It was a bit blurry, but Vendrith thought he could make out twelve or thirteen rows of six, each bearing a shiny metal spear.

I’ll bury whoever gave those freaks steel, I swear it, Vendrith fumed quietly as Raze tensed behind him.

“Something wrong?” Vendrith glanced over his shoulder at his son. The giant’s focus was locked on the Vith formation.

“Get the Honnuken out of there.” He rumbled.

Vendrith frowned, but a moment later, he spotted it: the Vith were turning toward the Honnuken regiment.

Were they attempting to steal more Honnuken or simply trying to kill the remaining ones to increase the value of the ones they held?

It didn’t matter. The Omnipresent wouldn’t give them the opportunity.

Vendrith turned to the other Kinzena flanking the two of them: mostly great nephews and grandchildren.

“Evacuate the Honnuken, the attack is a ruse.”

Vendrith felt space ripple as the young men and women nodded and vanished at various speeds, none faster than three seconds.

Disappointing.

He felt a distinctive, incredibly faint ripple he almost believed he imagined.

“Not. You.” He said, pointing at his youngest son without looking.

Raze relaxed, the tension leaving his stance.

“As you say.”

Vendrith squinted at Raze, whose gaze was still fixed on the line of Vith warriors, who inexplicably began throwing their spears directly into the line of Scarred.

“What are they doing?” Vendrith muttered aloud. “For a ruse, they’ve sure as hell committed to the –“

There was a streak of light between the Vith and the Scarred that seared an afterimage into Vendrith’s eyeballs, followed by a blast of light that forced him to clench his eyes shut.

When he blinked them open a second later, the battlefield was unrecognizeable. A cloud that looked like a mushroom was floating up into the sky, dotted with the tumbling corpses of his vassals.

“What in the name of –“

“Shockwave,” Raze muttered, pointing.

Vendrith’s gaze landed on the forest between them and the battlefield proper, noticing the way the trees were undulating in a line that approached them at an ungodly speed.

BOOOOOM!

The line reached them, and a blast of sand and grit rode the devastating roar of sound straight up the side of the tower and into Vendrith’s eyes.

“Agh, damnation!” Vendrith cursed as he was momentarily blinded by the debris.

Unnoticed behind him, Raze blinked out of existence with nary a ripple.

***Tom Graves***

“What did you DO!?” Brama demanded, struggling with his balance, as his inner ear had been savaged by the pressure wave.

“I’m not sure!” Tom shouted, glancing around.

There was no-one other than Brama closer to him than a football field. Neither Vith nor Kinzena vassals. At his feet, he could see a teardrop shape of untouched grass where the shockwave had parted around him, carrying people and shrapnel with it.

The only reason Brama was beside him now was because the Vith warrior had been standing directly behind Tom, assigned the task of carrying Tom back to base.

He hadn’t been completely spared.

That was a fuel-air bomb, right? Tom had drastically underestimated the sheer power of one. And obviously either underestimated the amount of fuel he would create, or the synergy of the wand’s highly flammable materials.

Matter of fact. Looking down at the wand in his hand, he could see that it had become a charred mess, unlikely to support a second shot.

Tom dropped the carbonized piece of wood, which crumbled on contact with the ground.

“C’mon,” Tom said, putting his arm under Brama’s. “We gotta get back to the base.”

Then Tom felt something in his chest that was hard to describe. He’d felt it before, but his control over his Soul pulses hadn’t been nuanced enough yet to know he had felt it.

It felt like he was wading through the kiddie pool and someone had jumped in behind him.

Ripples.

Tom felt a grip on his shoulder and the world around him disappeared.

***Vendrith Kinzena***

“Misbegotten…dust,” Vendrith said, growling as he blinked the dust out of his eyes.

“Raze.” Vendrith said, rounding on his son.

“Sir.” Raze said, standing there with his arms behind his back, looking as cool and unflappable as ever.

“Find out what in the name of all that is holy did that. We need to know who’s responsible. Did the Vith join forces with the En’hol? Did they hire a cursemonger? Is it that gangly southerner I’ve spotted among their number?”

“You suppose I should just go down there and start asking them questions, then?” Raze asked.

“I don’t care how you do it,” Vendrith said. “Just make sure it doesn’t happen again. Understood?” Vendrith brandished the cursemark and willed his energy through it, compelling Raze’s obedience.

“Understood.” Raze vanished with a faint ripple, no even leaving a pop of displaced air.

Less than a blink. That bastard.

It was that talent that kept him on such a short leash.

***Tom Graves***

Okay, I think this is probably an appropriate time to panic, Tom thought, his fingertips sliding along the stone walls he found himself hemmed in by, trying to figure out where he was by touch alone, as the room was completely devoid of light.

His new room was somewhere around twelve feet by sixteen feet

He had discovered shapes that seemed to be a cot and a pot, so Tom estimated that he was in a prison cell, which was…less than ideal.

His crypts were gone too, vanished in the eyeblink transition between here and there.

Tom froze as he felt the ripple again.

Suddenly the room was bathed in light, searing Tom’s eyeballs and forcing him to blink tears out of his eyes as they adjusted to the sudden illumination.

“I remember you.” A deep voice rumbled in Vith, slightly muffled.

Tom turned to see a literal giant of a man, three inches taller and much wider than Tom himself, wearing two hundred pounds of muscle stuffed inside a velvet shirt, and a blank, featureless mask.

“I remember you too. You killed dozens of innocent-“

“That’s not where I remember you from.” The giant said, holding out his hand. A table popped into existence beneath his palm, and his sat down, a chair manifesting seamlessly beneath him in a stunning display of casual magic.

The giant set down his lantern and clasped his hands together, his faceless mask studying Tom with a slightly cocked head.

“Nineteen years ago, there was an incident. We managed to get our hands on an En’hol. Something that had never happened before.”

Tom’s skin crawled. The monster had his undevoted attention.

“At first, we couldn’t believe our luck. I don’t know how we got our hands on the child originally, Vendrith kept that secret tighter than any I’ve seen. Despite the secrecy, we all expected the En’hol clan to march in and either repossess or kill the child, so as to deny us access to their abilities.

“As time went by, our hopes soared. The En’hol showed no knowledge of the child’s existence. Something that the En’hol didn’t know! Incredible!”

“Imagine how disappointing it was to learn that the child’s En’hol abilities manifested as prophesying the past. What a waste of blood.”

Tom’s blood went cold. “I don’t know any of you.”

“Of course you don’t. You were three when you were determined to be of little practical value. Who remembers things from when they’re three? We hired a Morkel to make sure you didn’t remember anything and dropped you on Earth at an orphanage. We then killed the Morkel and buried the evidence you existed in a deep, deep hole.”

“The thought was that we might revisit you sometime in the future and check on you and your children, see if you were truly a dead end.”

Tom’s jaw clenched as he realized his life had always been doomed.

The giant shifted in his seat and held his finger to his temple.

“Vendrith Kinzena is…old. Slow. He doesn’t make connections as fast as he used. to. Perhaps he never really did. He’s seen your face twice and hasn’t made the connection. Not even between the first and second time, nor your relationship to your daughter, whom he personally brought back from Earth. The man is dull as a rock.”

“I, on the other hand…I recognize you.”

“And, what do you want?” Tom asked.

“…That’s the question isn’t it?” The giant leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “The Ku’leth that survived the purge found out about your existence somehow, then tried to steal your En’hol bloodline in order to revive her dynasty with a scion of some of the most powerful Alia. As desperate plans go, it was a fairly good one.”

“I, on the other hand, have no means, nor intention of breeding you.”

“Thanks for that,” Tom said drily.

“I think I’ll use you to destroy the world instead.”

“Excuse me?” Tom asked.

“The Families have always been engaged in a quiet war, building up their arsenals and reacting to every little loss of face with extreme prejudice.”

“You, boy, are destabilizing hundreds of years of tense peace with your Vith campaign, and yet, your very existence is an even larger revelation that could ignite tensions into all-out war.”

His voice sounded almost reverent, like all-out war was something to aspire to. Something to hunger for.

“I would very much like it if the families utterly destroyed each other, down to the last squalling infant.”

The faceless mask cocked its head, pausing.

“The strange thing is…the En’hol still haven’t shown any sign of knowing you exist, which is highly unusual. As soon as you set foot on Orsoth, they should have known of your existence, and yet they’re sending troops to the south, to fight this ‘Endless’ fellow. They seem…panicked. Would you happen to know anything about that? Being one yourself?”

Tom shook his head.

“Ah well. I would be incredibly disappointed if this ‘Endless’ unites our families in order to defeat him.”

“Isn’t that usually…a good thing?”

Bang!

The giant’s fist slammed into the table, his voice rough.

“I want Vendrith Kinzena, dead. I want Marida En’hol DEAD! I want to burn their ambitions to ashes around their ears and turn everything they love into a deformed mockery of its former self, then kill their whole family in front of them! Wipe them from history as if they never were!”

Tom reeled back from the vitriol in the man’s words as he lapsed out of Vith here and there, the veins in his neck pulsing violently.

“…Why?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know.” The Kinzena in the mask said, his whole body relaxing as he unclenched his fists and laced his fingers back together. “I probably had a good reason, so I figured I’d just follow through on my decision to commit genocide and worry about why later.”

“And for that, I need you, my little En’hol.”

Little compared to you, maybe, Tom thought.

“I haven’t worked out exactly how I’ll use you to spark the end of the world, but…

The mask nodded, seemingly to himself.

“I’ll figure something out. In the meantime, relax. Please don’t kill yourself prematurely, and enjoy your dinner.”

“Dinner?” Tom asked aloud, but the Kinzena had vanished without a trace, leaving behind a hearty steak and vegetable dinner on the table in front of him, complete with silverware.

Tom could use them to kill himself if he wanted, but…

Screw it, Tom thought, sitting down and picking up the utensils before sawing on the steak. “Not gonna waltz outta here on an empty stomach.”

And Tom was going to waltz out of here.

****Nema***

Nema’s stomach twisted as she followed Tom’s instructions, placing the gold disc in the center of the circle he’d made the night before.

He could be still alive. Brama said he saw him alive. Before he vanished.

The possibilities weren’t good. Either Brama was lying to give her hope, or an enemy Kinzena had spirited Tom away in a moment while he was unguarded.

That wasn’t much better than being dead.

Still, Tom hadn’t come home, and she would honor his wishes.

“Greetings, Mr. Graves, your order is-“ The Outsider paused upon seeing Nema and pursed her lips.

“You’re not Mr. Graves.”

“He asked me to give you this if he didn’t make it back from the battlefield today.” Nema said, the paper trembling in her hands as she showed it to the strange demon woman.

“Ahuh, looks like he bled on it in advance. Toss it in the circle please,” the woman said, putting a strange apparatus on her face that circled her eyes.

Nema did so. The paper caught fire and turned to ash in an instant, but strangely, the image of the woman on the inside of the circle seemed to catch an identical piece of paper floating in front of her out of thin air.

“Hmmm..” She said, pouting a bit and adjusting the eye-coverings as she read the letter.

“I can understand him wanting to make plans just in case,” She said, turning to wiggle her fingers on some strange panel.

“But there’s hardly enough credit in his account to justify – Bol Kee Ba’mon!” She exclaimed, lowering the frames around her eyes and leaning forward, her jaw dropping.

“How many people did he – not important, let me see what I can do here,” her professional attitude returned as her fingers flew across the panel.

“All the requests in Mr. Grave’s letter are within budget, as he has overpaid his debt to us.” Luz said. “And I’ve taken the liberty of beginning the process of establishing a trust fund for his daughter with the remaining Soul Pulses, in the event that he does not reclaim them.”

“You’re not just going to…take them?” Nema asked. There was really nothing stopping them.

“Outsiders can’t take soul pulses. We are, as a conglomerate of similar species, very particular about how we gain power.”

“Oh. Neat. What did he ask you to do?”

“In the event of his disappearance or death, Mr. Graves requested the assistance of a Greater Outsider to assist in the recovery and protection of his daughter, whom you’ll meet right about…now.”

Nema cocked her head a moment before the hairs on her neck stood up as she felt a strange power gather in the corner of the room.

The invisible energy coalesced into a portal, and a pale humanoid form stepped out of it. The figure appeared to be a pale, slender woman, completely naked save the strange tattoos she was covered in.

She surveyed the scene.

“A Vith?” she asked in Nema’s native tongue. “I will give you one opportunity to surrender. Afterwards you may direct me to the sperm donor and Ellanore.”

***Beside the wall***

Suzy’s skin itched. It felt…full. Like she was more than could be contained by her body. Ever since the explosion and the rush of souls passing through her body, every part of her tingled. But now. Now it had graduated to itching.

“Wark.” Suzie croaked, rubbing herself against the rough stone of the staircase as the itch intensified.

After a while, Suzie went still. Dormant. her rotund, froglike body rested completely motionless for hours…

Until the hand began pressing out from the inside.