By the time I got back to the second trench people were running back and forth with stretchers. I waved two stretcher bearers over and carefully put Red Panda onto the linen surface they were carrying. Her breathing had steadied, but she was still unconscious. “I’ll follow you to the hospital.”

We ran overland, through the shredded and flattened remains of barbed wire. Through whole areas where the surface of the battlefield had become pumice and in places obsidian. There were traces of the dead everywhere. In one place I saw a charred hand reaching out from a bed of glass as if forever grasping for something. Further on I saw the remains of someone whose feet had got caught in the tail end of the lava — the rest of his body lay on the ground unharmed a little further on, but there were charred stumps his feet had melted away.

I was almost at the hospital when the fireballs began to fly across the sky.

They originated from way back in the enemy lines. At first, there was one. Then a short pause. Then there was another one. And another one. Soon the sky was as filled with the falling balls of flame as it had once been before the battle had happened.

“Fucker,” I said.

“Fucker,” agreed both stretcher bearers.

They laid the stretcher holding Red Panda down on a hospital gurney and then sat for a bit to rest before heading back out to gather more wounded. Other soldiers were coming in off the battlefield. Some on stretchers, some were being carried by friends, some had managed to crawl or limp most of the way on their own until someone could help them.

I began to help with the triage. Most of the Medical staff were down from the fort performing and had been performing surgery frantically through the night. Get the wounded stable. Save as many people as possible. Don’t waste too much mana if you don’t have to. Anybody who doesn’t need surgery immediately can wait.

Hours passed. I would run out to the battlefield as wounded, and burnt soldiers were being brought in. Some people were barely holding on, and I helped them hold on a little longer. I helped push the pain away in some.

Four men had carried one of their friends from the trenches. The friend they brought in was barely holding on, his spine was fractured, one of his legs had fourth-degree burns all over it. The only reason he was conscious was that his friends had been keeping him alive with the kind of weak healing potions that soldiers could afford. He’d grown up in the same village as them, they’d all signed up together. They begged me not to let him die.

Typically, I would have taken the pain away. Stabilizing him enough, to wait for enough surgery to make it through the night would have drained me half my mana. There were a lot of wounded coming in. But the way his friends looked at me. The way the guy had held on for so long…

So I healed him. Not the whole way. But just enough so that he would last until one of the medics could see him. Then when his friends were thanking me, I used my Witch’s skill to siphon off a bit of life from each of the friends, to take what I had depleted. I don’t know if they noticed. One after the other they must have felt a prick like a mosquito. Or not. I didn’t drink deeply, and I didn’t get back everything the healing took, but it allowed me to go on. It was the first time I’d used my Witch’s ability to steal life and convert to mana so openly.

The night stretched into dawn against a cacophony of people screaming and dying while the booms of fireballs burst across the battlefield far away. I became inured to death that surrounded me as worked while simultaneously working to keep it at bay.

Every couple hours as I worked someone came up to me with a bottle of fruit juice, a mana potion, and some light food. I would wash the blood off my hands and sit for five or ten minutes eating, drinking and catching my breath, then dive back into the work.

The flow of the wounded seemed endless, I continued healing where I could, conserving my mana, administering potions to the very most straightforward cases, giving drabs of healing to stabilize the worst, sometimes even using my Witches knack stealing life from the most alive so that I could keep the most hopeless cases from dying. All the while keeping my Healing Knack hidden while knowing just how much help it would be.

Hours into my work I felt someone watching me and turned and saw Red Panda, but just before I could disengage with the soldier I was healing I turned, and she was gone.

Then the next day turned into the next evening, as I was nearing exhaustion, Tilde came out and patted me on my back and said, “go take a rest, get some sleep, you earned it.”

“What was the point. How did that fucker get away,” I said.

“People have been asking me that all night. All I can tell you is what I told them. I don’t know. You’ll have to ask someone who's more in the actual chain of command than me if you want answers.” Tilde said, “now stop worrying and go get some sleep.”

It was too far up to the ramp to the fortress in the mountain, and I didn’t want to stay in the apartments that they set aside for the physicians on duty. My office near Samdi’s rooms had a cot that I sometimes used, and it wasn’t that far away, so I shuffled in exhaustion until I found my way there.

My dreams were angry and fitful. Filled with visions of sheep burning and fire falling from the sky like rain as I ran from some nameless, faceless monster that may have been myself and may have been Terce and may have been Terrald.

I awoke screaming.

Red Panda was sitting in the chair by my desk dressed in a backless hospital gown. I rolled over and looked at her, and she looked at me. Neither of us spoke what seemed like endless hours, but then she said “What happened. I don’t remember anything.”

“I woke up. I was lying on the floor. I had an amulet that I got from Samdi that protected me somewhat from the fire. I healed myself from the rest. I went from person to person checking to see if anybody else was alive. Everyone else had either been burned to death or been crushed when a part of the ceiling collapsed. Your affinity saved you, but you were badly wounded. I healed some of that then dragged you back here.”

“And my brother? What happened to Terrald?”

I looked away. “There was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could do about any of them.”

Red Panda got up and walked out of the room.

“Wait,” I said, but she kept walking.

I got up and stumbled to the nearest bathroom that had a shower and cleaned myself off. Then I went and had a meal in the mess before finding my way back to the hospital. All that day and night and part of the next day I continued to help with the incoming wounded. It was slow, tiring work. A lot of the people who were being brought in now had been trapped in the mud in addition to being burnt or shot, and so a water affinity mage was on hand washing people while I worked to keep them alive.

As I worked, I started hearing people around me talking about “he teleported out.” And when I stopped to ask a Captain who had come to see some of the wounded enlisted under his command, I was told that “the fucker fell into the trap right good, he was wasting his mana shooting at an illusion of the headquarters while we took down his force shield to get to him. We had four mages laying down a teleport block. One of those mages was one of the Emperors Advisors — the head of House Termass — one of the oldest most powerful mages in the empire. There was no way the fucker could have gotten out, but the fucker somehow got out.”

Again the day turned into night and the night turned again into day, and the wounded kept coming. I once again stumbled off to my cot when it got to the point I could no longer stand and slept for a few hours only to stumble back out again a few hours later when I woke up again.

I lost track of how many people I helped. It must have been hundreds, but it very likely could have been a number in the thousands. At a certain point, everything just became a blur. Keep people alive long enough so that someone with more skills with a knife can make sure they live long enough to recover.

Some carts would pull up to carry away the dead who I couldn’t help. When I asked I was told that they were building a cemetery in a quiet valley on the other side of the pass.

Late one afternoon on who knows how many days into this mess a soldier came looking for me. By then the ebb of newly wounded had slowed down. “Colonel Sanbon Kestrel Brown-Rice would like to speak with you. Follow me,” The soldier said.

I was led to through the underground section of the main base to the ground level headquarters, then taken into the administrative offices. The colonel wore a brown, an orange, a red, and a blue stripe on his uniform. A powerful elemental mage, Colonel Sanbon was probably in charge of the elemental affinity troops in the army.

“Sit down Runner and Inquisitor Lynx Elm. I’ve spoken with Runner Red Panda Elm, but I would like to get your account of the events that occurred around the death of Captain Terrald Blue Panda Hazelnut. The lieutenant is here because he has a transcription skill module installed with his Silver Status, so keep in mind that your account is being recorded and may be reviewed later.”

I nodded and began to tell the Colonel precisely what had happened that day leaving out only my use of my healing knack and that I had murdered Terce.

When I was finished speaking the Colonel spoke and said, “You children shouldn’t have been out there, but I’ll be honest, I’m glad you were. Red Panda Elm’s help on the Phlogiston gun turned the tide of the battle. I’m glad that you could heal her, too bad you couldn’t save Terrald. He was a good officer. He should have been safe in that pillbox during the battle. If we’d know that it would be such a nexus of heavy fire, we would have given him a fire amulet like the one you wore. Frankly, we’d expected the pyromancer to waste his strength on our the illusion of the headquarters.”

“But what is done, is done. Thank you, Runner and Inquisitor Lynx Elm for your account and your assistance in the hospital during the aftermath. You are dismissed.”

“That’s it,” I said. “The war just goes on. Why didn’t we get that pyromancer fucker? I lost a couple of friends in that battle. People I’ve known for years.”

“Son, we all lost friends. You might not know this, but one of the Empire’s vampires was on hand to help prevent that son of a bitch Pyromancer from teleporting out. Termass himself was just yards away from where we are right now casting spells so thick even someone without mage sight could see them. And that son of a whore still got away. There are more far powerful people than you, and I ask ‘why’ right now.” The colonel said.

“Now you’ve had a hard few days. We all have. But as a superior officer, I have the luxury of being able to give you orders that my own superior officer wouldn’t dare give me. Lieutenant Lynx Elm, I am giving you a direct order to retire to the runner’s dorm and take some time off. Sleep. Rest. Take a shower. Have some food. Cheer up Lieutenant Red Panda Elm. Find a pretty girl or boy and fuck their brains out. Whatever. I don’t care. But if I see you down here working for seven days, you will be in violation of a direct order, and I will see you court-martialed. I will pass this order along to your superiors. Are we clear?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“What’s that soldier?” The colonel said.

“YES, SIR!”

“That’s better. Dismissed.”

I headed out of the administration area, but as I was going, I heard a part of a conversation.

“… that core.”

“But sire, we underestimated his strength. At least we recovered the force core. That must mean something.”

“Compared to the fire core the force core it is a mere bobble…”

I hurriedly continued outside not wanting to get caught eavesdropping. Then once outside I started the long slow walk up to the keep.

The summer was turning into fall, and there was a crispness to the air. The sun shone brightly on the grey-white rocks, and in the distance the charred-melted surfaces of the surrounding mountains reflected the light of the sun like mirrors, flashing and twinkling in places. Idly I thought that the reflections would look beautiful in the setting sun before catching myself and remembering just how those smooth mirror flat surfaces came to be.

Up in the fortress I walked through the bailey other runners waved at me, and I waved back more out of reflex and duty than my usual friendship. I made my way down to the runner’s headquarters, and Cham waved me over. He was still dressed all in red and still for some reason looked like a demented Santa Claus, but I had grown to like him over the years.

“Ho! Ho! Ho! Lynx Elm, still not wearing the sash I got for you? It is only right that you display your runner and your Inquisitor status at all times or else someone might mistake you for one, and not the other. There are times when both are important.”

“I’m going to the dorm,” I said.

“I heard. I heard. Terrible day indeed. Colonel Sanbon messaged me some very strange orders. Said that you were to rest for seven days. Odd that. Gave the same orders to Red Panda Elm. The terrible thing about her brother. The poor dear hasn’t left the dorm since she was debriefed by Sanbon,” said Cham.

“I’ll look in on her,” I said.

“Not sure how much help you can be. Other runner’s, like little darlings, have been going to visit her to try and cheer her up, Ho! Ho! Ho! But the poor dear has just lain in her cot staring at the wall saying nothing.”

I walked into the dorm, and sure enough, Red Panda was curled up on her cot in the fetal position. She had her knees wrapped around her legs and was rocking back and forth, back and forth. I walked over to her and sat down on the cot beside her’s.

“How’s it going Red?” I said.

Red Panda said nothing.

“If you want, I can steal some of the Lord General’s whiskey, and we can get totally drunk, and we can go make fun of Merf and then throw stones off the Barbican at the other runners. I know a spell that can give a goat herpes, I’m sure I can adapt it enough to give that same herpes to Merf.”

Red Panda, looked at me. “Why did Terrald have to die. He was my favorite brother.”

“I don’t know. That is the way the world works. If I could do something to save him, I would, but I can’t. As far as I know, there is no such thing as time affinity, and his body was too badly damaged for me to even try to heal.” I said.

“Did I kill him. The Pyromancer started to shoot at us because I was tearing down his force shield. Is Terrald dead because of me.”

“You didn’t kill Terrald, the Pyromancer did. And you saved hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives. I’ve spent the last few days working in the hospital, helping the wounded. That they are only wounded, and not dead is because of you. Terrald would probably say exactly the same thing. He was a soldier. Soldiers risk their lives. Would he or I have done things differently had we know what would have happened, of course, we would, but we can’t go back in time to fix things.”

“Then why does it hurt so much. It hurts so much in my heart and in my stomach. I can hardly carry it.”

“That pain tells you, you are alive. Part of it will never go away, the part that will always carry a bit of Terrald inside you, but the rest will fade with time. Cheer up Red Panda. It will get better,” I said.

I woke up early the next morning.

During the last few days of intense healing, I had gotten used to using my Witch knack to steal just small amounts of life and mana from the healthy people around me, and as I walked through the runner dorm, the mess hall, and the keep, I filled my reserves up.

I was dressed as a runner, with no trace anywhere of my inquisition status. And when I moved into a latrine, I shifted my face and body to match Runner Tiger Willow, and using his appearance ran out of the keep and down to the battlefield below.

Down below I tracked down the quartermaster's headquarters. It wasn’t open yet, but I didn’t care. I had been busy studying the runes to get past wards and to open magical locks. I had even learned a bit of old-fashioned lock picking during my studies, and in a matter of seconds with nobody watching me I was inside the stores. In the back room I found a surplus uniform in my size, surplus swords, and surplus backpacks all of which I put on, and then I put my runner uniform inside my pack.

Casually, I locked the door to the storeroom behind me and reset the ward. My facial features now matched looking like vaguely someone from the Larkin region of the Empire but as nondescript and unmemorable as I could manage.

Before I got to the trenches I hid my runner uniform in a hole I dug in the mountainside. My minor earth affinity was extremely useful. Then I made my way to the trenches, saluting and acting like a regular private. In the trenches, I made my way forward. First from the fourth trench, to the third trench, to the second trench and finally to the first trench.

There had been barely any troops in the third trench, but they more than made up for it in the first. The lines were filled with people ready for anything. And there was a large mass of men with shovels digging out the part of the line that had been submerged by the flooding water. Terrald would be missed. Another group was crawling out onto the battlefield trying to lay new barbed wire. The old cable having been crushed and flattened under the force shield as the enemy had moved forward just days ago. There were rats everywhere, and they were huge. They had feasted on the dead, and our soldiers were spending more time shooting arrows at them than they were at shooting arrows distant enemy soldiers.

Overhead the fireballs flew through the skies. Not ceaselessly as they had before, but at spaced out intervals. I grabbed a shovel and headed out to a place deep inside the mudflow and began to dig trench until I was covered in mud and fleas.

When I got to a place where I was as alone as I could be, in a spot where the barbed wire was no more, I began to crawl forward. Keeping low. There was a crater up ahead where a fireball had burst onto the ground and turned the mud into pumice. That was my destination. More importantly, I was looking for the corpse of a dead enemy soldier.

About ten yards away from the hole I was aiming for I found what I was looking for. He had been young when he died. Seventeen or Eighteen. I didn’t care, I grabbed hold of him and dragged him behind me as I crawled through the mud to the crater.

Down in the crater, I stripped the soldier of his uniform. He smelt like death. His clothing smelt like death. I cast healing spells on the outfit and all the antibacterial and antivirus runes that I had managed to pick up, but it still stunk. I cleaned used my meager water affinity to clean the shit and piss out of the trousers where he’d defecated when he’d died. Even then it still stunk. It didn’t matter. I could get another uniform.

Then I put the dead enemy soldier’s uniform on and tried to copy his facial features as best I could. Rigor mortis had come and gone, and he was bloated and had begun to decompose, so my copies were just estimates. I knew the basics of skin color, hair color and general facial features of the men and women we were fighting so mostly made a rough stereotyped guess and went with that.

Then I scanned crawled to the lip of the crater and scanned the battlefield. It was a hundred and twenty yards to the enemy’s lines. Too far to shadow walk. There was another crater up ahead about 30 yards away. I began to crawl. And crawl.

The empire had not stopped lobbing artillery either. Ballista bolts with Samdi’s exploding heads fell from the sky. Though fortunately none near me. For a second I had a horrible paranoid thought of someone up in a ballista nest with a telescope or with some sort of body augmentation centered on the eyes scanning the battlefield for people crawling through the mud to target.

Either I was so caked in filth that nobody could see me or nobody cared, my forward progress, however, through the no man’s land was unimpeded.

Safely in the next crater, I crawled to the opposing lip and surveyed the field for my next stop. The ground ahead of me was covered in barbed wire. I looked at it with my mage sight and saw that there were weak wards embedded every ten yards or so into the cable. Over the years I’d grown used to the omnipresent aura of death magic everywhere.

Just past two lines of wire, I saw another deep crater where I could hide, and maybe twenty yards beyond that was an open section in the barbed wire fence and the first layer of enemy trench. I began moving forward, trying to remember that to act the part. I was playing a soldier who had been knocked unconscious and severely wounded during the recent battle and was only now hopefully returning to welcoming friends.

If my luck held nobody would see me, but if they did, I had to play a part. I even went so far to use my life affinity to cause ugly but superficial wounds that looked like they were headed towards gangrene to appear all over my body. That and a nasty head wound will help my story if I need to act confused or forgetful. My goal was to be in and out quickly though, so hopefully, these precautions would be unnecessary.

For the final dash, I waited until it was dark night started to fall.

It was a cloudless sky, and the stars peered down on Devotion Valley with fresh vanity at the new obsidian mirrored cliffs. Someday someone would walk along those freshly hewn lava burnt cliffs, along with their mirror clean finish, and find themselves looking up to at the stars up above, only to look down and see those same stars below and at that moment find themselves lost in infinity.

When the dark had enveloped the twilight, I began my new crawl to the barbed wire. While I didn’t have any wire cutters, I didn’t need them. Metal was a kind of earth; barbed wire snapped readily to an application of some basic earth runes that I had learned from Terrald.

I made it to the next crater. I could see the trench twenty yards away. It was hard to see in the dark, so I began looking with my mage sight. Life, presumably rats, and soldiers were visible. I needed to locate a spot in the trench with the amount of least life. Another thing that helped me was that I had been studying detect life spells for the last little while. When used correctly I could use it sort of like a radar sending out pings of life mana and waiting for it to reflect back, while filtering out for humans.

It took me about two hours, but I finally found a pattern to the patrols and space where the number of soldiers was thinned out.

As I was studying the enemy line, one thing really surprised me. There was a fraction of the number of soldiers along the line in the trenches here than there were on our side. Maybe one-tenth as many troops as I was used to moving around when I navigated through the Empire’s fortifications.

Moving into position, as soon as the patrol was passed, I reached out with my Witches knack and slammed a tendril of power into the soldier who was most exposed and solitary.

There was a bit of resistance, but nothing I hadn’t gotten used to overpowering. But I hadn’t spent the last couple years spending some of my spare time cast lines of witch power out like fishing line trying to drain a soldier hundreds of yards away for nothing.

Drinking deeply from that soldier’s life, I was surprised at how quickly that person, whoever they were, was drained. Then using my new abundance of mana I shifted into that strange shadow world and dashed from where I was to the enemy soldier I’d singled out and killed from afar.

Like always the shadow world was a world of mists and shades of grays. The longer I stayed in it, the more I filled with mana. However this time something was different. Looking around, and then finally up, looming over the battlefield was a massive something that floated in the sky.

Whatever it was was not defined by color but rather by and anti-color. It floated in the air resembling a half-a-mile long Portuguese Man-O-War sucking the visible spectrum into it. Tendrils of anti-light — like each more like looking into the event horizon of a black hole — mindlessly stuck the ground. Searching out new refractions in the photons of light.

Something primal inside of me needed to get out of these shadows before one those tendrils found me. And as I ran whips of grey-black, white light like the wake of something traveling through the water rippled out from, and the nearest tendril began to twitch and shot towards me.

I shifted out of the shadow just as the nearest tendril neared 50 yards from me. Even with that nearness of proximity I felt mana and life leaving my body, and left the shadow realm drained. Laying up against the barrier to the trench next to the dead soldier, I breathed deeply. In. Out. In. Out. My heart pounding, locked in the flight part of some residual animal fight or flight instinct.

I don’t know how long I sat there. It could have been a minute. It could have been ten. The only thing that got me going again was a rational part of my brain that kept telling me that the patrol would be along soon and that I needed to start moving again.

Standing up I looked at the solider I had targeted. The woman I had killed must have been 60 years old. Her uniform was worn and frayed, her sword was rusty, and she had been holding a bow, but I could see cataracts in her eyes.

Quickly I stripped her down to her undergarments and put on her uniform. Then using my minor earth affinity, I dug this poor woman who should have been off somewhere being a grandmother rather than being a front line soldier an unmarked grave and quickly covered it over with mud. I also buried the woman with the uniform I had stolen from the decomposing soldier I’d found in the no man’s land I’d just crossed. Some of the smell had rubbed off on my skin, but there was nothing I could do about that.

Aging my face through my shape changing knack to make myself look older, I turned and looked out at the field, bow at the ready.

About 10 minutes later a patrol of three men and two women passed by. Four of the people in the patrol must have been in their fifties and sixties while the fifth person couldn’t have been older than eleven. The state of their gear and uniforms was dismal. Broken, worn down, ripped, patched, beyond dirty. The war was not going well on this side of the battlefield.

When they passed, I moved in the opposite direction, headed further into the center of the mass of combatants. As I walked, I adjusted my the appearance of my age upwards. Soon my grey hair was mostly gone, my skin wrinkled like a prune, and I walked hunched over using my bow as a cane. Typically I would have thought I’d have gone too far with artistic license, but the more troops I passed by, the more I realized I fit in.

There were only three lines of trenches, and nobody questioned me. I did stop and warm myself at some of the fires. I would have stood out if I hadn’t. And I had to drastically cut my walking speed down. Furthermore, the language was not the Magrith of the Empire but something that was very close to the Cretan that I had learned from Wilmette and continued to practice over the years. I was actually fluent enough that I could get by with an accent…. Or I could revert to Wilmette style hill folk and serenade everyone with his particular brand of lyricism.

I followed casually behind the patrol for a while. At a couple of points, they asked a soldier what the color of the day was, but the process of asking was lackadaisical and sloppy. They didn’t even seem to notice me trailing them. The patrol questioned maybe three soldiers out of maybe 200 soldiers that they passed. Two of them answered that the color of the day was orange after some thought, the third needed some prompting and three tries before he got to orange.

Like the patrol, the general state of the soldiers that were propped up in the trenches was wretched. Malnourished, ill-equipped, most of them had open festering sores and were either extremely old or extremely young. Rats, lice, fleas, and cockroaches were everywhere.

The area behind the trenches was a lot less built up than the Empire’s side. There was a makeshift hospital. There was also a massive furnace next to the hospital, and every once in a while as I watched someone would either drag a body on a stretcher from the battlefield or from the hospital and throw it into the furnace. Smoke billowed out of the chimney, and maybe through some sort of luck or runic air magic, wafted into the sky rather than descending and settling like a fog over the Devotion Valley.

While there was a keep that guarded the pass, that looked — at least from down below — like it had been built by the same people who had created the keep I had been staying in for the last few years, one significant difference was that there were a series of towers that looked like they had been built rather hastily standing over the field of battle. From atop one of those towers the fireballs flew.

While the pyromancer had been my target all along, I wanted to be cautious. Instead of heading straight towards him I moved into the tower closest to me. Twenty-three towers made a rough line across the plateau. The one I chose to investigate was seven away from where the Pyromancer was currently ejaculating into the sky with flame.

A closer look at the tower and I saw that the surface was pitted and burnt from old weapons fire. I assumed that the Empire had tried various means of long-distance assassination directed at the son of a bitch. I would have to believe that they probably had sent in infiltrators and spies as well. I would have to be careful.

There was a ward on the tower door that was one of the most complicated I had ever come across. The ward connected to a golden sun motif that was probably some sort of lock. It took me a full ten minutes to puzzle out and deactivate, and I wasn’t sure that someone with less than my stellar affinity with the pure arcane magic could have managed it at all. Realizing something, I took a closer look and saw that the entire tower was interlaced with arcane magic and wards. An earth mage would not be able to dig or tunnel through those walls. A fire mage wouldn’t be able to burn through them. Some seriously powerful magic had gone into the creation of these edifices.

The tower was also wrapped in a sheath of force magic, and when I looked closer at the ward, I noticed something I’d missed on my initial deactivation; life detection magic was built into the very fabric of the tower. Fortunately whoever had designed the life magic made it extremely easy to circumvent. It was keyed to a specific signal, probably to make it easy to embed in an amulet or signet ring.

Inside the tower, I walked up the stairs. The second floor was only a room filled with all sorts of trophies and banners.

The stairs continued upward they wound around and around the circumference of the tower until it opened into a building that was pushed up against the rear battlement of the tower. It was a strange tower in that it was not designed for the kind of defense I expected in any kind of warfare. While there was a battlement that ran around the edge of the floor, there were no merlons, murder holes, or the like. Instead, there were a few comfortable chairs, a brass telescope mounted on a tripod, a retractable fabric roof to keep out the elements, and a furnace for warmth.

I could, however, see, a near perfect view of the entire battlefield, and when I looked through the telescope, I could see so clearly that I actually spent a good minute watching a woman in the uniform of the Empire located in the fourth trench pick her nose and eat her snot.

Seven towers away, the pyromancer stopped littering the sky with his magic. Swinging the telescope in his direction I watched a figure go into his tower, and a short time later emerge from the door at the base of the tower. Six guards were waiting for him down below. The guards were among the fittest people and well equipped I had seen so far in this force, and the youngest of them couldn’t have been younger than 40.

The guards walked with the pyromancer past the tower next to the one he had been in, past twelve more towers, including luckily the one I was in, before entering one 8 down from where I was.

Deciding I needed to explore some more, I moved back down the stairs and left the tower I was in. Moving to on to the next tower I cautiously made my way through the wards and opened the door. The base of the tower and the roof had the same layout. On the second floor was a large bedroom that had something that looked almost massive and extremely luxurious bed except that on all four sides around the mattresses were short wooden railings and bars. There was also a gigantic fireplace made from what looked like green marble and white marble with cherubs carved in bas-relief and gilded with gold and platinum. The thickly-luscious black fur of some exotic monster lay like a carpet on the floor. And two luxurious plush chairs were positioned by the fireplace.

The third tower I visited was precisely like the other two towers except that there was a sitting room on the second floor with some couches and some decorative plants. The fourth was a meeting room with a table and ample seating as well as a detailed diagram of the battlefield on one of the walls, and what looked like plans for the breach in the empire’s trenches, the flanking maneuver and faux illusions troops that Terrald had spoken about.

No mention on any of the documents on the wall or on the table that I could see was made of the actual illusion that had been used to defend the headquarters, or that one of the Emperor’s own vampires would take part in the battle, or even that the flanking moves that Terrald had mentioned were themselves only feints.

The fifth tower I explored held dried up corpses.

After that, I decided that my best plan would be to head back to the room with the bed. The pyromancer did stop periodically, and everyone assumed that he slept. This sleep was irregular and infrequent enough that no real plans of attack could be prepared to coincide with it, but it did happen.

Reentering the tower with the sleeping chambers, I climbed the steps and looked around the room for a place to hide. The room was sparse, but the walls of the tower were thick. The wards and magic that defended the edifice were on the outermost surface, still I found a part of the room that was furthest from the bed and hidden in the most shadows, and using my limited earth magic skill slowly and carefully cut out a six foot by 3 foot by one inch section of the wall which I reinforced to keep stable with all the arcane magic and earth magic at my disposal.

I lowered this section to the floor. It was heavy as fuck, but I didn’t care. On the side that faced inward, I attached two hand hold grips. I also drilled a small peephole in the surface. Then I began to hollow out a section of the wall of the tower. The wall, if my sense of depth was correct, was 32 inches thick. One inch of that was my door. Two inches on the outside was the exterior wall and the protective runes. That gave me 29 inches to hide in. This would not be a pleasant stay.

It took me nearly three hours to dig an 8.5 foot by 5 foot by 29 inches slightly curving with the circumference of the tower space had been carved into the wall with an opening, carefully dragged the residual rock outside and hid it. I made sure to remove everything down even to the finest dust particulate. Then climbing into my hidden chamber (including a hole built into a rock chair that led to the existing privy) using a burst of strength I pulled the rock door up and then using my earth affinity lightly sealed the entrance to the wall with the flimsiest of connections.

Then I waited.

And waited.

Every once in a while I needed to heal my legs of the cramps that threatened to run through them. The first day passed, and I realized I didn’t have any food and the only water I had was the trickle I could conjure. Using life magic, I had to slow down my metabolism or else my body would have started to burn muscle for calories.

The second day was much like the first, except that I considered making a raid on the local soldiers’ mess. I took several short, fitful sleeps, but I needed to stay on guard just in case my prey showed up. I was hungry. I was tired, but I stayed focused.

The third day was precisely the same. I wondered if I was wasting my time. There were twenty-three towers, and he seemed to move at random between them. Like he had other bedrooms. People would notice that I was missing back at the empire stretch. If anybody asked I would tell them I was on a secret mission for Samdi, I was on leave and few enough people spoke with him to question that. Hunger gnawed at my stomach.

On the fourth day, I was almost on the verge of going out and finding some food. Water could sustain me, but my strength might be compromised. The only thing that kept me at peak shape was that I had managed to figure out a way convert life mana and healing into muscles and raw nutrition, but that didn’t help the emptiness and the rumbling in my gut.

Just as I was bitching to myself, I heard a noise from down below. Like a door being open. Forget “like,” a door was being opened.

Looking out through my peephole I saw a woman emerge from the stairs. When she stood on the second floor, she walked over with the kind of nonchalance of someone who doesn’t know they are being watched and sat down in one of the comfortable chairs facing the fireplace. She sat with her hands on her laps and a dull glazed over look on her face.

The other thing that I noticed was that this strange woman had the most massive breasts I have ever seen in either my entire lives. The unfortunate thing must have had them magically enhanced somehow because they defied both gravity and genetics. I wondered how she walked with those things, and I hope whoever had done that to her had reinforced the strength of her spine to compensate.

I also wondered what she was doing here. It was not like I could come out and ask her. I continued to wait. This time even in more silence.

About two hours later I heard the door to the tower open up again. Climbing up the stairs was an incredibly ancient man dressed in rich robes. He seemed so old that even the wrinkles on his wrinkles had lines, but as he moved slowly over to the bed, he made an effortless gesture towards the fireplace and a fire in the hearth suddenly burst alight.

Glancing once at the woman, this ancient, withered husk of a man, stepped over the strange wooden railing of the bed, lay down and then to my utter surprise, placed his thumb inside his mouth, and began to cry.

The woman got up, out of a bag she had brought she pulled out some white linens, and walked over to the bed making cooing noises. She lay some of the linens down on the railings of the bed, with some of the others, she walked over to a tiny alcove where a small bubbling water supply rose and moistened the cloth she carried.

Then the woman walked back over to the bed and slowly began stripping the dread pyromancer naked. When he was completely nude, she started to use the damp cloth to wash his ass and flaccid tiny shriveled pecker. When she was done with her cleaning, she used one of the fresh linens to wrap the mage in a diaper. Then she took a blue ribbon from her bag and tied a majestic bow around the mage’s head. Finally, she opened up the front of her blouse, her breasts fell like tsunamis crashing against the emptiness of the room and coaxed the pyromancer’s mouth to a nipple for a suckle while she a gentle lullaby.

Tender baby, sweet, sweet baby

Sleep baby, sweet.

Mommy will keep away monsters

While you’re fast asleep.

Tender baby, sweet, sweet baby

Sleep baby, sweet.

The night’s full of dreams

So don’t make a peep.

Tender baby, sweet, sweet baby

Sleep baby, sweet.

Think of kittens and puppies

And horsies and sheep.

There was no better time than now.

Moving through the shadow world, through the tiny hole I’d been using to spy through. The familiar shadow world was filled with menace, and I could feel anti-darkness of monstrous presence again, searching for ripples that I made as I traveled through the shadow. Fortunately, this time I had far less distance to travel. But even as I stepped out, I could feel tendrils of some sort of giant eldritch beast searching for me, nearing, nearing, nearing. Entering the room.

In an instant I found myself standing beside the pyromancer’s bed. And the pouring mana into strength, speed, and stamina I stabbed a dagger that I had been holding — from the moment the woman had walked into the room — into the Pyromancer’s chest and into his heart.

Except my stab didn’t kill him. With the dagger still in his chest, he sat up. He looked at me. Then he reached down and pulled the blade out. Blood started to pour out of the hole in his heart, but then the wound began to seal itself up.

The pyromancer looked at me. I mean he really looked at me. I could feel him staring inside of me. I knew that I needed to do anything he asked. I felt my life and mana wanting to flow into him.

He said, “Who are you?”

I was reluctant. I tried not to speak. I couldn’t talk. I tried to lie. I couldn’t lie. I tried again to lie, using every ounce of willpower I could muster and said “Lynx Elm.”

“Come here Lynx Elm.” The pyromancer said, and I began to walk forward. And when I was within reach of his outstretched hand, the pyromancer said, “Lynx Elm you would like to give me all of your life, your skills, your affinities, your knacks wouldn’t you?”

I certainly knew that I would love to give him everything that he asked for, but I wasn’t Lynx Elm was I? Or was I Lynx Elm. But he had asked Lynx this question, and I was a Twice-Lived, and I was something more than just the life I was living right now.

And in that moment, in the moment when he reached out to touch me, to draw the life and skill and being from me, a different part of me, one separate from Lynx Elm; the part of me that came from that part of my life that I had lived and loved and learned before and had never forgotten, reached out and grabbed the pyromancer and together we fell into the world of shadow.

I fought with the pyromancer, and he struggled with me in this space. I could tell that he had never been here and he couldn’t figure a way out. I had pulled him to me to get him into this space, now I was pushing against him to get him to let go so I could leave it.

All around us, tendrils were probing for refractions in the grey light, and our entrance was a splash that changed the greyness all around us. Tentacles latched onto us trying to suck the life out of us. Frequently just being in this space I would fill myself with mana, but as the beast found us, it began feeding off of us with tendrils of blackness that latched like leaches across our skin drawing life from our bodies.

It came down to mana reserves. I had been conserving mine, while the pyromancer had been throwing fireballs at the Empire’s troops. He let go, and as soon as his hands were off mine, I stepped out of the world of shadows and back into the room. A few seconds later a dried up and drained husk, more mummy than man came into existence beside me.

The woman who had been in shock until now began to scream. I had barely any mana left, so I shot tendril of power from my Witches' knack into her and drained all the life from her. I felt terrible doing it. She was only an innocent bystander, but it couldn’t be helped.

Looking over the mage, I found a small pouch attached to his belt. When I opened it, I discovered that the interior was far more substantial than the exterior. Tucked inside were three large dungeon cores, a pouch of dungeon core dust, about 20 dungeon core fragments, a dozen books written in Cretan, a stack of letters, a money pouch, a signet ring, and a relay just like the one Lord Samdi had used to alter the Twice-Lived. That relay was the real surprise. According to him, those were the most classified secret in the Empire.

I pocketed the pouch, making sure that it was somewhere where it wouldn’t get lost on my incredibly hazardous journey back across the no man’s land. Besides the amulet around the necks of both the woman and the pyromancer which allowed entry to the tower, there was nothing else of interest on either of them.

Then I stuffed the pair in the hole that I had been hiding in and made sure that the seal around the edge was far more secure.

I climbed up to the roof of the tower. Outside it was night again. The sky was overcast. I tried to imagine a giant floating jellyfish above my head, and it was far too easy to picture it there. The pyromancer’s honor guard waited for him at the door to the tower. Some of them sat playing dice in the dust, two of them stood at attention next to the door.

I walked to the other side of the tower, opposite to where the guards were located. Looking around there was nobody there. Just in case I cast my “don’t look here” runes without using the knack I had for moving into the world of darkness. I would have to learn far more about that world, this trip had taught me just how dangerous it could be.

Then as the natural dark and shadows of this world and not some parallel other surrounded me, I used a knack to give myself strength and fortitude and then stepped up onto the battlements of the tower and jumped off the edge.

The journey back to friendlier lines would belong. It wasn’t home, but I was tired and hungry, and I kind of missed the people there.