Suggested Listening

The moment Claron fell, Elruin stumbled to Calenda. "You can't die." It was a whisper, a command, perhaps the first prayer the girl had made with complete sincerity in her life. What power she had left went to her song, bolstering Cali's energies as best she could. Next, she extended her power to all of the necromantic energy remaining on the battlefield, the tainted corpses of the butchered undead, the taint that remained from the dollies which Claron incinerated, and what residual power remained in the stitched fabric of the void hole.

It was energy enough to restore the dying spark of power tying Cali together. Then Elruin stopped singing, grabbed Cali's arm, and stuck it against the stump just above her elbow. "Don't worry, you'll be okay. I'll fix you."

"Ahh!" Calenda hissed in agony as her arm began to restitch itself to the rest of her flesh, a process forced along by Elruin's magic.

"Sorry, I'm doing the best I can." Elruin kept humming as she warped Cali's flesh, melding it back together on string of sinew at a time, and began the process of fusing the bone. Now that the limb was reconnected, the necromantic glove would be able to supply some minor amount of strength. Elruin reached for the other limb.

Calenda smiled. "Don't know what you're talking about, I feel fine." Perhaps the most obvious lie of her life. The nerves still attached to her were working, but the same could not be said of the pain-ignoring process the body used to put itself in shock. "Gah! Okay, but I can say I've been through worse." That much was true, though it hadn't happened often.

"The next part will be worse." Calenda had been bisected along the stomach, and now that meant Elruin had to go through the process of stitching all of that back together. "Sorry."

"Hey, you're not the one who cut me in half." Calenda grit her teeth in agony as the process started with her spine, then worked itself forward. "Make him apologize!"

"Too busy being dead to apologize," Claron said. "HAH! You should see the look on your faces! If you weren't already dead, I bet you'd have shit yourself!"

"Scratch!" Cali clenched a ball of claylike soil, then chucked it as best she could at Scratch's new puppet. She impressed herself with her aim, with a solid blow to his face.

The puppet smacked his lips, an act which resulted in some of the mouth to break apart, dangling chunks of frozen flesh held on only by some small amount of pliable skin. "Mmm, tastes like my last girlfriend." He waited a moment. "Speaking of, I just found the reason Claron was an insane egomaniac. Specifically, it's what I didn't find." He gestured at his crotch with both hands. "Unfortunately, I've already shown you one void hole today, and I don't do repeat performances."

"You degenerate reject!" This time, Cali found a rock in the dirt, and with a combination of skill and luck, she hit him in what passed for the good eye. "You didn't defy death! It took one look at you and left you behind!"

"That may be, but I've some experience in how walking corpses deals with pain," he said as he turned away. "Getting angry works a whole lot better than trying to stay calm, as you now know."

Cali hesitated, then looked down at where a line of natural tan now bisected her cosmetics-paled skin. "Huh."

Suggested Listening

"You're welcome. Now come help me deal with the trash, you're the only one equipped to do it right." Scratch gestured at the man who'd led the attack on their group. As of this moment, Ketak had him pinned to the ground, her steel claws pressed into his back. "Speaking of, we got a lot to planning to do now that Claron is gone and we've caught one of the Ghosts' other commanders."

"Claron's dead, we won, what's left?" Lemia asked.

"Do you think because the enemy general dies that his army magically vanishes? That they all surrender, knowing they face executions?" Scratch was finding it far too easy to exploit Claron's deep, booming voice in making his points. "What lazy hack writers have you read? Because real life don't work that way."

"Hey, I'm an alchemical scholar," Lemia said. "When it comes to war, I'm supposed to build the weapons, not fight the battles. So, what does happen, now?"

"It's going to be a mess," Cali said. "Cities that will need to be sieged out. More innocent people are going to die in reclaiming our cities than were lost when Claron invaded in the first place. Fortunately, we have one of their commanders."

"Just kill me and get it over with, abomination." Renar didn't bother to look up. "Claron restructured our entire command system, now that he's dead there is no clear succession. The Ghosts are lost, Asceli is dead. You've won. And we both know I've seen too much to live. I think you owe me a clean death after I helped save that necromancer from Claron, or did your honor die with the rest of you?"

"Honor, he says." Scratch crossed his arms. "Eh, this ain't my play."

"Does he know anything we can use against the bad people?" Elruin asked. "You can make him talk, right?"

Calenda looked at Elruin. It was true, if he spoke to an Inquisitor, or almost anyone outside of this select group, it would spell disaster. Torturing him would also be a waste, and not something she wanted to do. "He's too good for my brand of Truthsaying, best I can tell is that I can't tell, and torture is useless without magic to prevent lying. Scratch, want to take a new puppet?"

"Sorry, he's outside of my power as well," Scratch said. "And I'm afraid he'll explode while I'm inside him. I promise it's less fun than it sounds."

"Lucky you, quick death it is." Calenda knelt in front of Renar. She gripped his head with both hands, and used the vampiric shard to the fullest extent. Pain and pleasure blended inside her as the basic repairs cobbled together by Elruin were replaced with fresh, healthy, undead flesh. For a few brief moments, her heart beat again.

Elruin looked down at the corpse, then began to sing to it. Flashes and concepts, longing glances he made toward Asceli when she wasn't looking, a hope for a better future than the one he had grown up in. She ignored those distractions, pushed deeper, sang of his friends and made his remains sing back. "They have a teleporter," she said. "An old lady. Uewatsu?"

Claron's body laughed.

"You know her, corpse?" Lemia stared at the maimed, bloodied eye sockets of a dead man that stood a full two feet taller than her.

"I know the organization she works for, or I can make a good guess. And as a preemptive note, they're either insane, or are better at pretending to be insane than anyone I've ever met. They're trying to save the world."

"Entek ne," Calenda muttered. "I've had enough of these crazy cultists who think they can make a better world by the power of happy thoughts."

"Oh, you wish," Scratch said. "No, these guys are full-on deepest end of the death cults that other death cults call crazy. They believe the world is broken, and the only way to save it is by killing it, and by extension everyone on it. And every time anything starts to look like it's going in what most would call a good direction, here they come to kick it all down again."

"Three above, four below," Lemia said. "Do you have any proof?"

"You're the scholar, I bet you can find the patterns better than me. I've seen the aftermath of their 'projects' over the centuries. Seems like they find any empire that gets too big or stable, then set about sabotaging it from within. Fan the flames of rebellion, get them to destroy themselves. Or maybe I'm wrong, maybe empires inevitably tear themselves apart. I am paranoid, and proud of it, but I have been known to jump at shadows on occasion."

"More than half of their forces are in Arila," Elruin said. While Scratch talked, she'd continued her violations of a dead man's privacy. "All the strongest ones are still in the city. They're weaker than they pretend, which is why they needed Claron."

"Let's worry about that," Calenda said. "Suicide conspiracies which might not exist are secondary to an occupying army. I can make it back to Arila by nightfall, hopefully before they reorganize from Claron's death."

"You think you can kill all of them?" Ketak asked.

"No, I may be stronger than ever before, but I'm not that strong," Cali said. "But I'm not the one they have to be afraid of."

"Gluk." A sickly wet noise popped from Claron's throat as the flesh of his esophagus collapsed inward as a squishy mess. Scratch poked his head out of his borrowed chest. "About time for me to ditch this body. Nice while it lasted. Speaking of, sarite. I'm guessing they're good if he only had two." He handed off a couple crystals to Lemia, then Claron's corpse collapsed like a marionette with the strings cut.

"Oh, right, and the of Eye of Enge, no idea where it went or how to find it." Scratch said in his native form and voice. "I guess it was magicked to vanish when the user died. Or maybe it fell into the void, in which case it's gone forever."

"That's a problem," Cali said. "Okay, we need to take Claron's body as proof he's dead. And his armor. I'll take the armor to Arila, but someone needs to deliver the body to Sonhome, keep an eye on it until the Engewal's royalty can send someone to pick up the body, and investigate the death site. Expect all sorts of Inquisitor nosiness."

"I suppose I'll deliver the message to the queen. Always wondered what it'd be like to have royalty singing my praises." Lemia said. "I've got some experience dodging Truthsayers, and I'm pretty confident I'm strong enough to prevent someone from reading my mind without my awareness. But, should I show them the battlefield?"

"They won't find anything here," Scratch said. "Long as Elruin clears the taint, maybe even if she doesn't. Void plays havoc on sensory magic. Worst part's going to be you having to swear in all conceivable directions that we didn't keep the other Eye of Enge. I doubt even the gods know where it is now. I know I haven't the first idea."

"Is it safe to tell Engewal about the void-holes? These seem like the sort of thing the military would take advantage of."

"As if they could," Scratch said. "Only a void mage can do anything with void holes other than get themselves killed. Tell them the truth, that you had a local guide of Fey origin who told you where to find the hole, and how it could be used to beat Claron. Lured him here with promises of Elruin delivered by morks. Then a lot of people died to kill him."

"Fey origin?" Lemia looked at the insubstantial inky ghost.

"Okay, a local guide claiming to be of fey origin, if that helps. Which is what I am doing right now, claiming I was fey once upon a time. Everyone knows we're fickle and impossible to predict and you can't trust anything we say or even our appearance. Keep asking me more questions on the subject and I'll keep lying until you give up. I'm also a dragon and God of the Sacred Phallus. Tell them I said that, too."

"Ugh, I get the point," Lemia said. "What else?"

"See if you can get bribes out of them."

"It's not a bad idea," Cali said. "But don't act like you want anything. It's... one of those royal traditions. Talk about how happy you were to help, and how all you want is to return to school and live in peace. In effect, the first noble you accept a personal gift from wins the competition. Whenever they offer, suggest that instead of rewarding you, they provide supplies to help those suffering after the rebellion. They love that sort of humility."

"Are you sure this isn't just you manipulating me?" Lemia crossed her arms. "Sounds an awful lot like what you'd say to trick me into giving up my just rewards."

"Well, you could take an offer," Cali said. "But then you have a noble family which has marked its territory on you. You've been bought, at whatever price you get for yourself. Or hold out, and your value keeps climbing. Maybe you get a noble scion husband out of the gig. I never took anything from them, and I had Lord Garit doing everything in his power to marry me. Technically, he succeeded. Then I killed myself."

She said it with a smile, but it was a weak one. Somewhere inside her now-cold body, she felt pain at the loss of the life she had, and the future that might have been. She made the right decision, of that she had no doubt, but some part of her yearned for a path where she could have had her freedom, and the stability which Garit represented. He would make a fine husband and a wonderful father some day, and now all possibility that she would see that day was gone.

"Not so different than my last career, then," Lemia muttered. "I'll take your advice under consideration, but I am for sale with the right price."

"Speaking o' price," Ketak said. "I presume 'is means 'e end o' our alliance?"

Cali looked over at the dwarf. "Umm, it looks like it. Not forever, but for the time being. We have responsibilities to our home. You'll want your share of the sarite, I presume."

"No, I got one better." Ketak lifted the very weapon which bisected Calenda not long ago. "Dwar'en work, per'ect set o' magic 'or a goblin hunter. I don't know where he 'ound it, but I want it back."

Cali sighed. "I'd give you the same speech I gave Lemia, but it doesn't apply to nonhumans. We'll just have to apologize and say you insisted and we had little ability to refuse under the circumstances."

"Hey, if you don't mind associating with a Fey guide, I'll stick around," Scratch said. "Everyone else is going to be in the cities while I have to wait around outside, and killing goblins sounds like a good time. Also, you have a better chance of getting messages to my associates than I do if an emergency pops up."

"Ell, can I talk to you for a second in private?" Lemia pulled the girl by the sleeve of her training uniform. It was a testament to their quality that the clothes survived the trials they had been through.

"Okay." Elruin let herself be guided while Cali did the work of dividing resources between them and determining who'd take what with them.

"How did you do that ice spell? Can you do it again? Or any other ice magic?"

"I think so." Elruin tapped into her depleted reserves. As it wasn't a combat situation, she used the weakest variant she could and took time to keep it as inexpensive as possible.

"But I know you use time magic, and I've seen you use rage magic from time to time. And now you have ice magic as well. How?"

Elruin hesitated. "I don't know." She considered the song she heard, and could not for the life of her determine how she accomplished the use of ice magic in spite of not being able to before, and the assertion of all scholars that having direct access to more than three aspects was impossible.

"During the battle, I was looking for a weakness in Claron's powers, some aspect of death that could counter the magic flowing from him." She thought back to the battle, and the defenses and healing Claron relied upon. "It was fire, with blood and rage aspects that I think came from his equipment. I couldn't stop him, none of my spells were more than an inconvenience against him."

"One of his sarite was designed for the sole purpose of countering necromancy," Lemia said. She held up the crystal which would have been a beautiful counter to Elruin even an hour ago. "I think he trusted his natural fire and earth aspects to protect him from your other abilities. He must have learned what you could do from someone at the school."

"I felt so helpless, so weak, and then he started to hurt Cali." Elruin drew closer to herself. "I don't know how, but something fell into place, and I could hear the song most suited to end him."

"Which you still remember, like your other aspects?"

"Yes." Elruin looked down. "It's new magic, I think I'll need to practice it if I want it as strong as my other spells."

"We'll need to look into that, when we have time." Lemia put a hand on Elruin's shoulder, offering what comfort she could. "For now, you should keep your new aspect secret. Right now, anyone who tries to protect themselves from your magic is in for a nasty surprise. Better keep it that way."

Elruin nodded at the sensible suggestion. "Alright."