Hector-skelter had become potion ingredients, and Vance was scheduled to be the next alchemical offering. Into the cauldron he would go, and out of it the precious human-based powders would come. Was there a way to prevent this outcome? Was there a convenient last chance to escape? No. Without MP and Stamina, Vance was helpless. He hadn’t prepared himself for these crippling circumstances or this hellish situation. That bastard! Solsnam! He filled up with pure indignation. Fucking solar elves and their pride! He’s doing what the Church of Amirani does in the human world. This is the exact same shit that forces people to become slayers, and he’s doing it to Turncoats without realizing the fucking irony!

At that moment, when Vance noticed the similarities between Solsnam and the Church, a hidden gear started to revolve inside the mechanism of his mind, and he suddenly remembered his harrowing Pilgrim’s Dream. Images flashed in very rapid succession, showing him the Sunshine Tavern, the white prison wagon, the paternal trial, and the guillotine. And when he saw these images, he couldn’t help but feel that they had been predicting his future. The Church of his dream became the Dullahans. The tavern turned into the mushroom farm. The kind friends who shackled him—Bianca and Nathan—metamorphosed into Eleanor and Himilco. And the guillotine transformed into a boiling cauldron.

It seemed as though the Pilgrim’s Dream had been showing him his future through the familiar images of his past. Perhaps it was a random side effect of the Honeydew Flies’ feeding, or perhaps it had been a warning from a higher being. But either way, it was impossible for Vance to decrypt such circuitous references and abstruse symbolism beforehand. Even if he had remembered the details of the dream sooner, even if he had never forgotten about it at all, he wouldn’t have been able to guess its hidden meaning or to avoid the cauldron or to change the present in any other way.

I can only accept it.

As he closed his Mental Eye in final resignation, he felt the slimy tongue of the giant frog scooping him out of the mud. He floated in the air. Then he heard the gurgle of the boiling broth and felt the steam against his skin. He was now hanging above the black cauldron—a worm at the end of a fishing line, waiting to be cast into the sea of death and decay. A few more seconds, and it’ll all be over. He told himself, remembering how fast Hector had died; but then the heat from the steam persisted longer than it should.

He opened his Mental Eye and realized that Sizensya was slowly steaming his body. His clothes offered him some protection, but any exposed skin, whether fist, wrist, or neck, suffered terrible burns as the superheated vapor condensed into boiling droplets. It was a slow form of torture that could last for as long as Sizensya wished. By adding buckets of cold water to the cauldron, she adjusted its temperature and prevented the heat stress from finishing Vance off—giving him brief chances to cool down until the inevitable return of the steam.

Death suddenly became a reward—a deliverance from the heat-cool cycles. Death seemed to be the only viable way out—a paradox that all living creatures face at the height of despair. But Vance began to regain his will to resist. There is nothing to fear at the bottom of the abyss, because from there you can only move up toward the light. He refused to let out a single scream, refused to give his cruel torturer the pleasure of breaking him. Instead, he began to struggle in stoic silence. He wanted to escape … or to fail and die faster. Either outcome was much more palatable than the present state of neverending humiliation.

“Now, now,” Sizensya said, as she sorted through her merchandise. “We are almost done. Don’t force me to use Essdezin’s Staff on you again.”

“Whatever Solsnam paid you, I’ll pay you double,” Vance said, through the unceasing pain. “You want to sell my flesh and bones, and I’ll buy them.”

“Low life will always be low life.”

“Triple.”

“By Geblene, aren’t you adorable?” Sizensya laughed. “You think you can trick me. You really think you can trick me, don’t you?” She laughed again. “Let’s see now. Did you hide a stone in your pocket? Or did you slip a thorn up your sleeve?” She made a gesture, and the frog flipped Vance upside down and started to shake him. A sharp stone fell out of his pocket and into the broth. “You hid it away while you were struggling in the mud, didn’t you? Oh, you were never sure whether it could save you, but you hid it anyway. And now the pain made you desperate enough to give anything a try. You want to beat a Dullahan with sticks and stones!” The arrogant laughter echoed loud. “And let me guess. While you run away, you’ll use one of my smaller frogs as a shield to block the staff’s attack. Brilliant thinking!”

“I have seven days,” Vance said. “Six can be yours.”

“Nice try, honey. I know people like you never go for honest deals.”

“I can surprise you.”

“Too late for that.”

Suddenly, Sizensya made a new gesture—another nonverbal command. The giant frog swung its long tongue down, and Vance found himself plummeting toward the cauldron. His feet disappeared into the boiling broth, and he could no longer control himself. He screamed as loud as Shannon had wailed in his redspine hallucinations. For ten whole seconds, his feet remained submerged in the cauldron. Then the servile frog pulled him up. When his feet reappeared from inside the broth, the skin had come off, and the flesh was crumbling off the bleached bones.

“How do you feel?” Sizensya laughed.

Vance continued to scream as he lost more parts of his feet, which fell off and sank into the cauldron with consecutive plops.

“Do you still think I would accept your bribes?”

His screaming didn’t stop, echoing across the swamp.

“But you’re lucky. I’m only allowed to collect your feet.”

He suddenly fell silent, and his body relaxed as if he were dead.

“Is the scream show over already?” Sizensya laughed. “Fun times never last.” She gave an order to her frog, and it dropped Vance on the ground next to the cauldron. Then she turned toward her hut and said, with some disappointment, “He’s all yours now. I’m done.”

At that moment, after hours of absence, Solsnam reappeared. He came out of Sizensya’s hut, where he had been patiently waiting all this time. Unlike before, his gilded elven armor was now accompanied by a distinctive sword—a golden claymore with a cross-guard shaped like the two heavenly wings of an angel. He approached with heartless self-confidence, walking with an upright posture and a constant gait, until he was standing close to the prone Vance. His figure was shadowy and towering, and if he had had a facial expression at the time, it would have probably been stern and emotionless—or perhaps, more accurately, dry and contemptuous.

“It seems there was an accident in the transport of the suspect,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Sizensya said. “My frog slipped.”

“Accidents happen.”

“They do.”

“Be more careful in the future.”

“I sure will.”

Solsnam turned his attention to Vance.

“Vance Wolfe, due to several unexpected difficulties, neither your guilt nor your innocence could be established in due time. Therefore, in accordance with Article 13 of the Pact of Lost Flames, you shall be banished from Argilstead until further notice. If you attempt to enter the village, you will be identified as a threat, and the Dullahans will eliminate you. If you attack any Headbound, you will be identified as a threat, and the Dullahans will eliminate you. If you attempt to make contact with the Witch of Decay or to become one of her servants, you will be identified as a threat, and the Dullahans will eliminate you. Otherwise, you can roam Middlerift and complete your Class Ascensions. You are free to go now.”

Vance looked up from the ground. Free to go? He couldn’t understand what the words meant when both of his feet were already ruined. Free to go? He almost laughed. Free to be hunted by beasts! Free to be killed somewhere else! He crushed the mud in his fists—blood boiling, flame raging—but he said nothing in the end. He started to crawl on his stomach, away from the cursed hut and cauldron, away from Sizensya and Solsnam. He had nowhere safe to go, but he knew that he couldn’t stay here any longer. If he stayed, either Solsnam would attack him, or he would attack the elf—without regard for the consequences, with pure hatred and indignation. And such an attack would be suicidal.

“Solsnam has been very kind and very merciful with you, my little worm,” Sizensya laughed, walking into her hut with the elf. “Take care of yourself. Oh, and don’t let any beasts find you on the way out of the swamp. It would be a tragedy if one of them killed you.”

***

Vance continued to crawl through the swamp and the intervening patches of bogland. At times it felt as if he was sinking into the mud; at others it felt as if he was falling up toward the sky—gravity inverted, hope lost. But he continued forward despite the pain. His survival instincts had put him on autopilot and told him to go as far as he could go, and because his mind was now tired and numb, he couldn’t help but follow these instincts. His body left a long trail that resembled the marks produced by dragging a heavy sac. The black cauldron disappeared. The lizasaurian and solar elf became traumatic ghosts of the past—targets for a future revenge that his rage envisioned. But the most important question was whether this future would ever come.

Status Alert

The heat of the cauldron has cauterized some of your wounds, but you are still bleeding at a slow pace. Emergency treatment is recommended.

Your HP is decreasing by 1 point per 20 seconds.

HP 392/455 MP 0/860 Stamina 0/860

The more Vance crawled, the worse his condition became. Chunks of meat were still falling off his feet, and the blood was spurting out of depressurized veins and arteries. Although the bleeding was much slower, the injury itself was worse than the old salamander bite and more painful than the alkaline slime burns. And what made matters more terrible was the fact that he had no access to recuperative bandages, potion patches, or any other form of healing. He was stranded in the heart of the swamp without his bag and items, and he knew that the worsening bleeding would not be the last of his troubles in such a bleak and unsanitary environment.

Status Alert

Your wounds have festered into a Bane.

Bane Added: Septic Invaders

Your lower body has become infected with bogland bacteria. If you leave this Bane untreated for two days, the bacteria will spread to the rest of your organs. If you leave this Bane untreated for four days, you will die.

Vance paused to absorb the new disheartening message—the latest punch in the face. Then he continued to push forward, one bent elbow after the other, until he made it past a growth of mangroves (or so he called them for the lack of another name). He hoped that he would find the end of the swamp beyond these myriad stems, that he would find the Targrass plains that he knew so well. But he was simply daydreaming. As he emerged on the other side of the thick grove, he only found more murky water and more slimy mud. Then the worst of his fears materialized before him: in a moment of shock, he noticed that there was a human-sized mussel not far in front of him—half-submerged, half-concealed by the terrain.

A Middlerift Beast?

It was closed tight and remained perfectly still, but he didn’t want to risk passing too close to it. Slowly and carefully, he started to crawl backward. Nice and easy now … Nice and easy. He retreated with calculated movements, hoping not to disturb the strange creature that dwelt inside the hard shell. Before he could make it to relative safety, however, his left leg grazed a fallen branch. His pants ripped. A cut formed along his thigh, and the pain forced him to recoil. Two splashes echoed through the cold air—only two splashes—but they were enough to bring about the outcome that he feared the most.

The sleeping mussel was distrubed. The shell suddenly opened wide, and two white arms extended out—as pale as snow or milk. Vance started to retreat faster. As he moved backward with violent splashes, he saw a humanoid figure emerging from inside the shell—black eyes with brown sclera, a deformed nose that resembled a suction cup, and a slobbering toothless mouth. The creature that had emerged had the upper body of a human, but its lower body was merged with the bottom of the shell. It grabbed the mud and pulled itself closer. Just as Vance crawled away, it crawled toward him.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

Vance continued to retreat, and the mussel beast continued to crawl toward him. He was fast, but it was faster. It was only a matter of time before he got caught—A mere minute? Two at best, perhaps?—but he refused to surrender his life away to a shell in the mud. I won’t let things work out the way Solsnam wants. I won’t fucking die to a random beast. He stopped retreating and changed directions. Instead of simply fleeing until the beast caught up, he aimed for the growth of mangroves that he had passed by earlier. It was his last hope to keep the embers of his life lit.

He continued his desperate crawl until he found himself among the exposed roots of the mangroves. He envisioned that these roots would act as a hurdle in the path of the pursuing enemy—that they would delay the beast long enough for him to escape its eyes. And he struggled through them and through the thorny masses of twigs, toward the other side of the grove. Before he made it out, however, he suddenly stopped as if he had forgotten his goal. He remained as still as an injured dog that had been finally shot dead, and he looked around him in disbelief. All of a sudden, there was not only one mussel: there were ten.

From every side and every direction, they closed in on him, and he no longer knew where he should go. He stopped in the thorny heart of the secure cage that the mangrove roots formed, and the humanoid inhabitants of the shells grabbed the wooden bars and reached for him with eager hands. Their large shells could never pass through the wall of roots, but they still didn’t give up and crowded around their ensnared prey, as if they were sure that he would eventually crawl out on his own and agree to become their delectable meal.

Bleeding, bacteria, and now this …

It was too much for Vance to bear. He turned to face up and looked through the branches at the dusky firmament. For the next half hour, he remained as still as a corpse, and the human-mussels never ceased to torment him with guttural groans and bivalved crunches. It was as if he was already dead and only awaited the funeral and subsequent burial. This is what an open world does to you when you’re low in level. Elves decide your fate. Beasts carry out the sentence. This one thought surfaced in his mind for a second, bringing with it a considerable amount of frustration.

He wanted to rewind time to the moment when he met Eleanor, or when he agreed to accompany her to Argilstead, or when he accepted the patches from Himilco Magus. Every decision he made looked like a mistake in retrospect, even though it could hardly be called so. He wished he could go back with his current knowledge and redo everything with prophetic perfection, but no such ability existed in his measly arsenal. Time flowed in one direction, and the past was carved in stone. He lost, terribly, humiliatingly. Hollie couldn’t frame him, but Solsnam still carried out the unjust sentence.

Maybe it’s time for me to think where I’ll end up. He laughed out loud. Amirani’s heaven? Amirani’s hell? Thurvik’s heaven? Thurvik’s hell? There are so many options, aren’t there? I wonder if they’ll fight over my soul. Let them fight all right, and the winner gets my sole! He laughed again—his thoughts becoming nonsensical and haphazard because of his exhaustion and injuries. They’ll send their angels and demons to settle the matter, just as the Church sends the orcs to handle everything. He laughed like a madman, splashing mud with his hands. Angels, demons, and orcs … What a mix! If I could only take Timathor with me, we’d have goblins too!

“Ha … Haha … Hahahahahaha!” For the first time, he could understand why Hector had been laughing so much. He laughed and beat the mud, and laughed and promised to kill the solar elf, and laughed and realized that everything was meaningless now. Then he could no longer maintain his consciousness. He heard his own laughter fading away as his Flame of Revival weakened into a flimsy glimmer. Following its last echo, he passed out—his final thought taking the form of a highly irrelevant worry: namely, whether little Timathor would find another leader for their bereaved goblin tribe.

***

It was impossible to tell how much time passed or what happened to Vance during his long hours of unconsciousness. But when he opened his Mental Eye again, he didn’t see angels or demons, goblins or orcs. There was, however, one brass elephant that was more earthly and more familiar. Himilco Magus was dragging him out of the thorny roots and out of the infectious mud. It was the one person Vance least expected to see. Their last conversation made it seem as though they would never meet again, but here he was, the elephant-mage, pulling the half-dead exile out of his veritable grave.

“I did what I could,” Himilco said. “Now you have to take him to Pamela.”

“Are you sure of the coordinates?” Eleanor’s voice came in response.

“Yes, you will find her meditating in Stonethorn Cave.”

“I might not make it there in time. Vance already looks … dead.”

“You have to try. The nectar of the Teneb Rose is still circulating in his body, and this should give him a few more hours. His flame can still be saved.”

Himilco Magus disappeared from view. Unable to move or talk, Vance found two arms wrapping themselves around him. It was Eleanor. She lifted his body off the ground and made him lie down across the wide back of her three-headed mount. With rough rope, she tied his body securely in place, and then she whipped the snaky mane and galloped through the swampy lands. Lying on his stomach, Vance watched Himilco’s figure become smaller and smaller. Then he saw the bogland turning into grass and the grass into sand and the sand into rock. The journey must’ve lasted for hours and hours, but because he was only half-alive and half-conscious, it felt as though only a few moments had passed.

Before he could even understand how, he found himself lying down on his back inside a deep cave. Agatha was gone; the rough rope was gone; the shifting scenery of Middlerift gave way to an everlasting ceiling of crystals, stones, and stalagmites. And he couldn’t do anything but stare at that ceiling, with only a hazy image of it and only a vague conception of what was happening. Every once in a while, a shadow would appear between him and the light that was directed at his body from several torches. Sometimes this shadow was the familiar silhouette belonging to Eleanor, but at other times it was strange and rather mysterious in appearance.

With time, Vance came to associate this strange version of the shadow with the name Pamela, which Eleanor repeated again and again until it seeped into his consciousness. Pamela was a lunar elf. And with every passing moment, her shadow became painted with a new defining feature—a long traditional dress made of satin and silk, a set of three silver moonstone necklaces, shapely fingers that moved with exquisite grace, a fair skin that refused to see the sun. But perhaps it was her height that was most striking. Like most other lunar elves, she was somewhere between two and three meters tall.

What was she doing? Vance asked himself, or rather, his confused mind begot the question on its own. He watched as Pamela moved around and picked up needles and swabs, as she cast magic and spells, as she drew circles on the ground and dragged his body onto them. He felt pain in both of his legs and then pain in his left arm. Then Pamela disappeared, and so did Eleanor. A long strange interval of silence and emptiness followed as Vance waited for anyone to return. Did they abandon him? Was he a lost cause? It certainly felt that he was beyond repair after that dip into the cauldron. But in the next moment, the silence receded, and he heard voices.

“Himilco said you could save him.”

“I tried, but he already has other parasites inside him.”

“How is that a problem?”

“I can’t introduce another guest. The nutritional burden will be too high on him as a host, and he will not be able to support his basic life processes.”

“There must be a way around this.”

“There is one, but he might instantly die if I make a mistake.”

“He won’t survive like this. You have to try … even if it might kill him.”

The voices died away. Pamela returned shortly afterward, and Vance watched her as she worked and operated on his body. He thought she would be trying to restore his ruined feet to normal, but strangely enough, she didn’t go anywhere near his feet or main injury. Instead, she was diligently operating on his left arm as if it was through this arm alone that she could save his life. He felt her opening wounds and sewing them, casting spells and undoing them, testing methods and recovering before fatal errors. Then she finally left his arm alone and stood up high with his blood splashed all over her dress.

“How did it go?”

“Just as I suspected, the parasites inside him had a master.”

“Does this mean you failed?”

“No, I managed to retune the lifeforce connection. I broke the link to the original master and overrode it with a symbiotic link to the host himself. Now we have to begin the relocation.”

“Will it be difficult?”

“Yes, but we have a higher chance to succeed now.”

“How high?”

“65% … Or more if his body responds well.”

Pamela disappeared from Vance’s hazy view, and after a short while, he felt her operating on his feet. Finally, she was doing something logical—something he could understand and relate to his current situation and his terrible injury. Or so he thought. Before long, he was awakened from his misty daze by a rush of maddening pain. The lunar elf didn’t cast any healing magic on his feet; she didn’t tend to his injury or fix tendons back to his dislocated bones. Instead, she was casting damaging magic that was eating away at the rest of his feet. It was almost as if she was finishing the cruel job that Sizensya had started, as if she wanted him to lose the ability to walk forever.

“What the fuck are you doing to me?” Vance shouted, his weary body finally shocked into movement. He rose up to see what was happening, but before he could catch a glimpse of what Pamela was doing, Eleanor held him down. She pinned his body to the ground with both of her sinewy arms, and there was no opposing her strong muscles. “What are you doing, Eleanor? Let me go! She’s gonna kill me! She’s gonna make it so that I never walk again! Get her away from me! Eleanor! Fucking listen to me! Eleanor!”

“I’m sorry, Vance,” Eleanor finally said. “This is for your own good.”