Suggested Listening

Elruin heard them gate in, but she said nothing. She drew her violin tighter, added a couple notes, an alert that meant nothing to their spies but meant everything to the dead which surrounded Elruin. Calenda's eyes snapped open, though there was nothing for her to see from her position. Scratch watched from the carved indentation of the stone, and the mindless corpses began to stir as their mistress readied their programming.

Everyone moved at once, a storm of blades and death.

Renar let his own soldiers charge in, each a trained assassin equipped to evade and strike with deadly precision. If they had been ordered to slay Elruin, then the girl would have died there, clutching her violin as she bled out. Instead, their orders were to fan out, test defenses, and ensure she could not escape.

Those defenses were discovered immediately, hunting spears burst from the ground the moment Renar's men were in range. Eight traps triggered, two men wounded, with spear barbs caught in their flesh.

On the defense, these soldiers were the perfect foe against the slow, predictable actions of the zombies. They danced back, like a wave breaking upon a rocky shore. Their speed, their precision, and their ability to coordinate was second to none in the empire and had been since long before Claron had begun leading the Ghosts.

It was, perhaps, the worst imaginable matchup against those who did not think, did not feel, and did not die. They launched a volley of sensory bombs at the emerged foe. Light magic, shadow magic, emotion distortion spells, and alchemical poisons, were deployed. While it was certain that any foe would be able to ignore perhaps half of the different attack strategies, no living thing they could imagine would be immune to all of them.

So they could be forgiven for their moment of hesitation and surprise when the zombies, obscured by the smoke and magic, pelted them at close range with their bows. Twenty good soldiers reduced to twelve healthy, six injured, and two dead.

Renar bolted forward, deflected two arrows with bare hands, and shoved a knife up under the helm of a zombie. He twirled, avoided two attackers who'd switched to their arming swords and dodged another arrow. A moment's distraction, brought on in part by the confusion that these men were willing to fire upon their own in close quarters, was enough that he failed to realize the man he'd impaled was still fighting.

From the safety of the viewing portal, Claron watched the scene. "Undead? She's Tainted as well?" Claron tensed and relaxed at the same time. Tensed, because the abominations were more dangerous than most would ever realize.

"I suspect this is why she must be sacrificed." Uewatsu voiced the source of his relief. "Enge recognized the abomination, where no others could."

Claron had always followed the teachings of Enge, but he was often less than flawless in his devotion. He viewed his god as a symbol uniting the empire, one who brought stability, and whose teachings allowed civilization to survive. Only after his revival did he begin to recognize that Enge was a personal god, with goals for his faithful. Then, upon the day of his resurrection, he was given the command to murder a child.

It was a cruel test of faith, one which Claron undertook while hoping that Enge planned to spare the girl in the end. Now all doubt and guilt had been taken from his shoulders, for he knew his task was right and good. "Truly, Emperor Enge is the wisest of all gods." Never again would he question, for he had been shown that even when he could not understand the reason, his god did.

Suggested Listening

Elruin adjusted her song with a twirl and a drag of her violin. She drew up a storm of darkness and called on Calenda to answer with her fog cloud. The battle would now be fought in darkness. Sooner than they had desired, but her undead were growing sluggish from the damage the remaining soldiers had inflicted upon them. If she didn't give them every advantage she could, then Claron would not need to show himself to defeat them.

Renar stumbled forward in the inky night, fast enough to spare himself from a fatal injury by little more than an eyeblink. The blade drew a line of blood along his back, as the magic of his armor could not counter the strength of Elruin's augmented undead, only mitigate them.

The two zombies in front of him acted in concert with them, to exploit his wounds and vulnerability. He gritted his teeth and planned, if not victory, then to take these things with him before he fell.

A light pierced the fog and necromantic shadows even as it mended the bloodied gash in Renar's back. Once again, he had faced death and been spared. "Asceli?"

"You didn't think I'd leave you to die here?" Asceli drew her hands together, then allowed her power to explode outward, burning away the necromantic energies they were fighting, and with it the bodies began to collapse, their motivational power scoured from existence. Elruin was forced to look away from the woman, as her life energies flared like the power of the sun, blinding her senses. So long as she was on the battlefield, Elruin could not rely upon lifesight.

This was the opportunity Ketak had been waiting for, although she had expected it to come when Claron arrived. A spear guided by the killing instinct embedded in Ketak's sarite caught Asceli's shoulder. She screamed and fell, spared from bleeding by the cauterizing heat of dwarven magic.

With many of her dollies destroyed, Elruin changed notes yet again. The tangled ball of dead tentacles, until now inert as the taint spread, burst from the ground with a speed surpassing any other doll she possessed thus far, and entangled one of the unprepared Ghosts. The living thaumivore sought to capture and feed, but the dead one knew only the desire to serve its mistress and kill in her name.

"Merat ne!" Renar drew upon his speed enhancing magic and met the dwarf in a direct collision. His first slash took her eye, and the second would have cut open her throat if she had human anatomy. "She's a healer!"

Ketak brought her arms up, shielding her face with her metallic forearms while giving her own regenerative magic a chance to mend the injuries. "I know!" The human insistence that healers were a special caste, not to be harmed on the battlefield, was not shared in dwarven tradition. To them, you downed the most dangerous opponent first, and there was nothing more dangerous on the battlefield than that which allowed other enemies to stand back up again.

"What is that thing?" Claron asked.

"It appears to be one of the beasts from within the rift." Uewatsu fought the urge to giggle at the absurdity of the scene she was witnessing. "They're little threat, no more intelligent than a rodent. It must have found its way through the rift, then died. They can't live long in our world, and lack the comprehension to realize it. In the rift, they are little more than prey animals."

"Then the abomination spreads her taint even to the things from this other world?"

"It certainly appears that way."

"How much difficulty would I have in killing it?"

"As it is, now, I suspect it's no greater than a weak chimera. A challenge for some, but not a match for your strength even without the blessings of the Eye."

Claron nodded, and continued to evaluate the beast in battle. It proved capable of holding its own against the two remaining warriors which Renar counted amongst his elite forces, but all they could do was fight it to a standstill, rather than defeat it. Still, even accounting for its status amongst the undead, if the things within the rift regarded such a beast as a prey animal, it would be wise to take Elruin before she attempted an escape.

Meanwhile, Ketak and Renar continued their clash. The problem facing Ketak now was that she was hopelessly outclassed by this maneuverable enemy. She attempted to claw for him, but it allowed him to get close and slash at her face, which forced her to draw further back and shield with both arms again.

With most of the undead devastated by Asceli's magic, it was left to Elruin and Ketak to fight what remained of the Ghosts of Sorvel. Elruin continued her song, dipped into the essence of anger and played of rage and unmitigated hate. Unseen by the few remaining foes, Lemia did the same from her place of hiding within the hollow stone 'statue'.

Ketak stayed on the defense while her foe's attacks grew wilder. Magic overtook his resistance, induced emotion overtook his reason, and he ceased to be a true threat to her. His new berserker strength was quite the sight to behold, but without precision he could only hammer at her steel scales like a rampaging toddler.

Meanwhile, she turned the heat up both metaphorically and literally. Her scales began to glow, and light was distorted by the energy radiating off of her body, yet her foe did not feel it. His body, stressed to the maximum, began to fail. In a few moments, exhaustion would overtake insanity, and he would be unable to stop her killing stroke.

It was a good plan, one Renar might even have praised were he thinking clearly, and then he was. He fell back, using his superior speed to escape the dwarf's plan.

Behind him, Asceli climbed to her feet with the spear still inside her. "Don't count me out just yet." Golden fluid dripped from the spear, and where it touched the ground flowers bloomed in dead soil. "I see now, I have little choice. I want you to know I love you, and I'm sorry."

"Asceli?" Renar spared a glance, just a short one, at his partner.

She ripped the spear from her body. She almost stumbled from pain, one of many things her regenerative power did not protect her from, her burden to bear. She held the weapon up, then thrust it into the ground.

Necromantic power burned away against the bubble of purifying light, air lit on fire by the opposing energies canceling one another out. Elruin screamed in agony when she discovered her power was lacking. Blinded and weakened by creation, it was all she could do to continue singing, to protect Calenda and Scratch, a desperate attempt to cling to what remained of the plan.

"Good job!" Renar encouraged as best he could, but he had to keep his eye on the dwarf. While he wouldn't consider the two of them evenly matched, he had to admit that a fight between them would not end before the rest of the battle was decided. If she was going to fall back, then he was willing to take the opportunity to recover in Asceli's healing power.

What nobody had expected was the second burst of magic Asceli fired at Elruin.

Elruin screamed again, but softer, for her lungs had yet to suck enough new air to vocalize her agony. She had never experienced such pain before, as nerves long dimmed by her necromantic power lit again. As if she had lived a life where all her circulation had been cut off, until now when it was restored. Her body lacked the experience, the neurological language, to understand what was happening. All it knew was that it was dying.

Renar jumped in front of Asceli, gripped her hand to prevent her from firing a third burst of power. "What are you doing!?"

From his position watching through the portal, Claron almost shouted the same question. Instead, he gave a command. "Open a rift for me. Now!"

Lemia, too, left her hiding place. She knelt in front of Ell, leaving her back as a target to Asceli. She wasn't worried, Asceli was using was pure creation energy; lethal to a true necromancer like Elruin, power traded for power in equal measure, but for most people it would be uncomfortable at worst.

"Killing that thing before it's too late!" Asceli pulled her hand out of his grip. Her next blast was blocked in part by Renar, and in part by Lemia, but even with two bodies to absorb much of the energy Elruin still shook in an agony she lacked the strength to voice.

"We're winning!" Renar tried again to capture her, but failed. Asceli was stronger and faster than him, a fact he never saw before. "We can capture her for Enge!"

Lemia fumbled about for solutions, before coming to the one answer that might work. She took a breath, then began to siphon power out of Elruin not unlike the vampiric magic Calenda was relying upon. Sapping creation energy was easy enough, but sapping it from Elruin carried numerous risks. She couldn't ask Cali to do it, without risking both of them dying.

"And then what? Do we let Claron have his 'divine' reward?" Asceli moved again, but now Ketak had joined in attempting to run interference. "I joined the Ghosts for freedom, not to trade one slave master for another! If Enge is going to turn a man like him into a god, then Enge i-"

She stopped speaking, and looked down at the blade coming out of her chest. It burned so hot that the healing energy that made up her blood boiled off of the metal. Her blood boiled, her flesh melted, and her bone turned to ash.

"No." The last word she heard was spoken by Claron's commanding voice. "I think that's quite enough of this farce."