My flying little scouts had defaulted to searching for anything that resembled an army after I had neglected to update their orders. An oversight on my part, but surprisingly, an oversight I was now glad of.

After disentangling myself from the Resistance’s forces, I had elected to set camp for a while, some distance away. I had an inkling of what I needed to do next if I wanted to crack the mystery of this conspiracy I’d found myself in, but I wasn’t entirely sure how to begin. My gaze was drawn towards the southeast, towards the Archipelago — where the Cradle of the Gods resided, the place I hoped would at least begin to answer my questions.

But instead of heading straight back to Ravenrock, I had elected to wait for a while, spurred by the Fate-induced premonition I’d had when I decided to spare Count — and as the days ticked by, I grew more and more doubtful that the premonition would come true. Until one of my birds pinged me to signal it had discovered an army.

I was in disbelief for a few minutes, until a second ping came a few minutes later — and then a third. All of them far off from each other, yet close enough that they must have been looking at the same target.

It seemed like the Empire had sent its full might into Canneria.

The reason why Rhinia had never invaded Canneria, even though it was wildly accepted that they could easily do so, was that conquering the place was more trouble than it was worth. Merely mustering the requisite force needed to take over the backwater duchy was a greater expenditure than they would ever gain from annexing this chunk of territory.

So, I supposed, it must have been very convenient for a potential threat to crop up in this corner of the world — it would likely have been an excuse for the more militaristic of their government to push for an expedition. Still, this was all conjecture on my part, given the timing of their invasion — and I felt a hint of guilt towards the duchy, as this was technically my fault.

For my part, I was done with wars, but I owed the Cannerians at least an attempt at defending them from the incoming invasion. And it also served to answer one of my hanging issues — how was I going to dispose of nary four thousand undead? It seemed like a clean solution; after all, what was the worst that could happen?

“Yep, I’m really feeling the ‘run the fuck away’ vibe right now,” Sarah said, staring wide-eyed at the crusaders marching in the distance.

“That’s… way more than before. How many did Malloc have, like eight thousand? This had got to be four times that, at least,” Shiro said with a whistle.

“Even more, I think,” Sarah said quietly. “I really think it’s time to retreat.”

She had a point — a good one, too. But I wasn’t quite ready to abandon Canneria to the empire just yet. I had brought this onto them, so I needed to help. A token effort, at least.

I finished up the letter I had been drafting for Count Malloc, noting down the estimated troop count, and tied it up to one of my birds before sending it off on its way. If he wanted to try to resist this, that was his prerogative — but I believed my letter would sway him from that path. Wars against Rhinia were always a numbers game, and they simply brought the biggest numbers.

“We’ll stay, for now. If it looks like there might be serious danger ahead, you two can run ahead — we’ll regroup at the tower if needed,” I said with a hint of excitement. These were insurmountable odds, and I loved little more than a complex challenge. Ludis had been one, but my victory over him had been soured by collateral damage. Here, though… there was nothing but this mountain of an army before me, and seemingly no way to defeat it. And this time, I had the moral high ground. Normally, I had been one for more academic puzzles, but I wouldn’t turn down the challenge looking me right in the eye.

The crusade advanced steadily — they were close enough, now, for the banners to make their allegiance clear. I opted to keep the Legion in its usual configuration, positioned on top of a hill. The art of war wasn’t my strongest suit, but I wasn’t going to abandon the high ground so quickly.

It didn’t take long for the crusaders to be in position. I didn’t expect them to parley — and they didn’t. They surprised me, instead, by beginning their attack immediately.

Were they not winded after the long march? Well, it did not matter anymore. I motioned for my frontline to advance, to meet their attack head-on — and at the same time, I drew Mind and Soul, prepared to raise anew any who died in the fighting. After all, just because we were outnumbered now did not mean we had to stay that way.

Wights and crusaders clashed and the bloody melee began. Quickly enough, the first victims of this battle fell, and I wasted no time to begin bringing their corpses to unlife. I sent the threads of Soul and Mind, the spell already a reflex to me, seeking the freshly fallen dead.

A spear of light flashed through my vision, breaking my concentration and making me lose control of my magic. The threads ripped free, the burst of uncontrolled magic unleashing itself somewhere above the battle — what happened next would remain a mystery to me, and I felt my body go limp as everything around me went dark.

I was small.

I was so, so small.

Something was terribly wrong, and I was powerless to stop it.

There were little lights around me, floating in the air, flashing brightly like fireflies in a moonless night.

No, not fireflies. They were evil. Fireflies were pretty. These lights, they burned and destroyed; they touched things and made them rot from within. And it hurt—

I realized then where I was. This was my soul, but it was dark — like somebody had turned on the lights. And the lights, they were tearing into it, but why, and how.

I drew Soul, roughly and forcefully, blasting it into my eyes — not my real eyes, no. I didn’t really have eyes here. But I made myself see, and when I did I almost wanted to go blind again.

The lights — motes of mana, Soul and Origin — were tearing through my soul, like a hot knife through butter. I’d made defenses before, and I had considered them among the best, but they’d never been meant to hold up against Origin mana of all things. When I had designed them, I hadn’t even known it existed.

And now, the strange little constructs had invaded my soul, utterly and entirely, and were laying waste in their path.

I’d been lucky for my defenses, though. Despite them barely holding the motes back, they did buy me some time — enough time to wake from my stupor. I glanced around, assessing the current state of my soul and the extent of the damage. The defenses were in a precarious position, half of them already rendered inert by the passing motes, and the ones that still held were fading fast.

I had precious little time to figure out a way to fight against the motes.

While I thought, frantically trying to come up with a plan, another defensive construct fell. Panic overcame me, my mind frozen in indecision under the threat of oblivion. What to do, what to do, what to do—

Of course! Origin! I wanted to smack myself, but I was but a mind looking inside my own soul, and my body was lying outside, undefended. My soul was on fire, and the only thing that would put this kind of fire out was more of the same.

Recklessly, I clamped down on my panic and drew deeply on all six Aspects, combining them into Origin, a gesture that was becoming more and more familiar by the day. I had my thread of Origin ready in record time, or at least I thought I did. Racing against your inevitable end has a way to make time behave oddly.

Without rhyme or reason, I began pushing the Origin mana into the remaining defensive constructs. There was little thinking behind this spell, no framework to follow — just pure, unadulterated will. I willed the barriers to hold, to defend, to save me from the doom, and it worked for a bit.

The motes, the forces of evil, were held at bay for the time being. They roared against the defenses, pouring their all into destroying my shoddily built shields, and they were making good progress too, but I had bought myself some more time.

I needed a plan. I couldn’t defend forever, I was fairly sure. Taking another glance at the motes, I saw that there were more of them than minutes ago. Or was it hours ago? It was very hard to tell. It could have been days, or years, for that matter.

Yet again, I pushed down on the panic, yet the franticness remained. I had been hit by a spell, that much was clear. An enemy mage? Quite possibly, though I didn’t know of any with such mastery of Soul to bring me to this state so easily. A divine artifact, then? That was much more likely — I had already seen one mage with such an artifact. Thaos, Duke Illvere’s accomplice, the one who worked for the Fox, had used an artifact imbued with origin to teleport himself away. If he had had access to such a thing, why would the temples not?

But it didn’t matter what it was, no. I had a foreign spell inside my soul, one that seemed to be growing stronger — was it using the smashed remains of my defensive constructs to multiply itself? It was certainly plausible — I had done similar enough spells not that long ago.

It followed then, that I could not sit on the defensives indefinitely. Even if I could draw mana forever, the spell would just use whatever it destroyed to fuel itself. I needed to counter it, and I needed to do it now.

First things first. I couldn’t simply counter a spell without knowing what it did. Right now, I had a layman’s understanding of whatever was invading my soul — it attacked things and used the decaying husks it left behind to bolster its own forces.

The irony of it was not lost on me.

Leaving the channeling of Origin to rote, I split another thread off it and channeled it into a tong-shaped construct. If I wanted to defeat this spell, I would need to deconstruct it first; and to do so, I needed a live specimen.

The shape was meaningless — I had no hands with which to hold the instrument, the threads of mana merely moving guided by my will, but it helped channel the intent: to safely capture one of the motes. I directed the construct towards one lone light which was pushing relentlessly into one of the shields. It had no eyes with which to see, only a purpose, so it didn’t try to dodge or evade — it could not see the spell any more than a river can see a watermill — and once it was captured, it became harmless. Its purpose, it seemed, was strictly to attack the soul. With a construct of origin blocking its access to a soul, there was nothing for it to do.

Carefully, I analyzed the strange little thing. It was, like I had predicted, a blend of Soul and Origin, at a ratio of three to one — a fairly standard proportion, as far as combination spells went. The spell framework, though, was almost completely foreign to me. Unlike the kinds I built — the kinds most people I knew built, really — this framework was entirely alien.

One of the first things any apprentice learned at the Academy was how to build a framework to suit your spell. The technique we were taught involved picturing a real system with a similar purpose to the spell and mimicking its function, using the framework as a scaffolding to which to attach the intent. For example, the framework I used for animating the dead was shaped like a stylized brain.

The form itself wasn’t really important, though. You could use a simple line instead, just as well — but you’d need to put much more power into the intent.

These motes used nothing I had ever seen before. They had a framework, of course. You couldn’t have a spell without one. But this framework was a set of strange, foreign glyphs — and try as I might, I could not think of any culture with a language that resembled this one.

It seemed cracking open this spell would take longer than I hoped.