Suggested Listening

Elruin awoke to Cali sitting next to her sleeping bag. The woman put a hand on her shoulder. "Are you feeling okay?"

She sat up, wondering about the soft tone in Cali's voice. She decided that her back didn't hurt anymore, and the magic in her armor had repaired the leather overnight. "Yes. Is something wrong?"

"No. A little." Cali looked off in the distance. "I want to talk to you about your new 'dolly'. Why did you turn that kid into a zombie?"

"Because he shot me and cut off your arm." Elruin remained sitting, but scooted her way out of her bag. "Why?"

"And it doesn't bother you that he wasn't a bandit?" Cali reached out and put a hand on Elruin's shoulder. "That he was a boy trying to save his sister?"

Elruin considered the question for a moment. "No. He tried to kill me."

"And he paid for that mistake with his life," Cali said. "It's sad, but all of us out here understand a single mistake means death. If we hadn't made our peace with that, we'd remain behind the walls. But we don't sign up to be turned into an abomination. Myself excepted, I suppose."

"But we use my dollies all the time."

"Never ones you made, yourself." Cali closed her eyes, trying to find a way to explain basic morality to a child whose family abandoned her to die. "Until now, we've been scavenging them, usually ones made by Scratch, or using animals. Turning people into zombies is bad, it's bad, and it hurts your soul."

"You don't have to worry." Elruin still had trouble following this train of thought, but she thought she got it. "I didn't make it, myself. I used some spare energy from Scratch, so the taint never touched my soul."

"That's not- there's more to spiritual wellbeing than whether it's been tainted by undeath. Look at Scratch and look at me. Save the lack of a pulse, the two of us are nothing alike."

"Right, because your soul was insulated and preserved in whole form," Elruin said. "It never had a chance to be eroded and tainted."

Cali sighed, then tried a different approach. "What if you swapped placed with the boy? If it was you who was trying to save me. It could happen, we know i'm vulnerable to necromancers, and we're about to face a style of magic none of us have ever seen before. By the end of this there's a chance that some of us, or all of us, will be enslaved by that necromancer. How does that make you feel?"

Elruin's eyes narrowed. "I won't let that happen." The idea that someone might take Cali from her brought out the emotions which other approaches had failed.

"I've said that many times about many things," Cali said. "I was right most of the time, but not always. We don't know that we're strong enough to stop this monster, and you've seen his victims, their memories, and the horrors they went through."

Elruin fought back a shudder, thinking back on the people being carved apart by that composite undead monster constructed using magics she had never seen before and had little idea how to explain. "Right. He's bad and we're going to stop him."

"How can you call him bad, while doing what is effectively the same exact thing to that boy? Killing people in self defense is one thing, but using their remains as weapons against your enemies? That's exactly the reason we're hunting him down."

Elruin's stomach hitched, as she realized she didn't have a strong argument. Other than that the other necromancer was more skilled at the process, there wasn't much difference she could name other than the argument she'd repeating. "But he attacked first."

"Which, again, is reason enough for his death," Cali said. "Not for what came after. Now, please, exorcise him so we can give him a proper funeral. And from now on, try not to make any more monsters, because I'm starting to think there's something more subtle than taint in play. Dodging side effects by spreading instead of creating is too obvious a solution, yet no necromancer has been known to walk away unscathed from what you did yesterday. Speaking as one of those abominations, and as your big sister."

"Okay." Elruin still wasn't certain about Cali's argument, but something about making the dolly had upset her. Not unlike the first Mister Clackybones had. As she picked up Mister Squishybones, she decided that it didn't take too long before Cali was okay with her other dollies, so she could wait for now. It wasn't that good a dolly to begin with.

Soon, they all stood around the funeral pyre of the boy whose name they hadn't known.

"And may the fate which lay beyond be more merciful upon him than this world." Calenda finished the eulogy. "He will be remembered."

"He will be remembered." Elruin said her part, but wondered who it was that would remember him. His sister was either dead, or had been converted into a weapon and soon would die by magic they had no means to reverse.

Now that their path took them into the open, it soon became clear that they had far, far more immediate problems to worry about. Elruin's squirrels, lacking trees, found perches on her shoulders while she was forced to abandon Clackybones and her dollies in the distance, so that she wouldn't be identified for a different abomination necromancer and attacked on sight again.

They still followed a series of deep valleys, relying upon Calenda's botanical magic to help them track a safe path through a wilderness where monsters feared to tread. In her head, Elruin bemoaned the fact that she couldn't move openly, for she felt confident Mister Clackybones could still outrun the monsters which resided here.

In the distance roamed things which Elruin had read of in books, yet never given much thought. She had imagined that buffalo were little more than giant cows, yet the alert wild animals which wandered the distant plains bore little resemblance to the docile bovines she grew up with. They moved like an army, with their large males on the edge of the troupe, ready to defend the females and young with their massive curved horns and thick battle-scarred hide. As they grazed, their pack of hundreds moved as if a single animal, serving to frighten off the countless predators.

Suggested Listening

"Down!" Cali hissed, then dived toward them. "It's a dragon!"

They dropped into the narrow, muddy, stream bed, not daring to move as they prayed the beast could not hear their hammering hearts. They felt it approach overhead long before they heard it, a storm of ancient, concentrated magic. This one passed overhead, its body the size of Arila's church, each of its six long, broad wings wide enough to block out the light of the sun, each made of flame so hot it burned blue.

Elruin stared at the hardened, absolute, nature of its life force. Most living things were in their own way like waves in a lake, with energy dancing back and forth where needed or where depleted, an adaptive and ever-changing balance of energies. This dragon's metaphorical lake was frozen in the form of ice as strong as steel.

It twisted and plummeted to the ground at speeds that felt far too fast for a thing so massive, then at the last moment righted itself, kicking air out beneath it in a clap of thunder that kicked boulders off the ground and uprooted one of the rare few trees existed in the decimated landscape. If any of them had been able to hear after the eardrum shattering explosion of air, they would have heard the dismayed angry grunting of the bison herd, struggling to reorient themselves after the attack.

With exception to Cali, they were all too busy gripping their heads in agony to notice, or watch the dragon came away with one eight-ton bison in each of its ten powerful talons. The dragon, too, paid a price for its meal, as the muscular animals bucked their heads backwards and embedded their dagger-sharp horns into the thick hide of the dragon.

It shook them, until death caused them to stop them from inflicting countless tiny wounds upon the giant predator. Then it turned and flew off toward the deeper part of the mountains, toward its home where it would eat and hibernate until hunger once again drove it out into the world to kill again.

"Entek!" Calenda muttered, being the first to recover from the shockwave and pain. The others, thanks to regenerative magic, were beginning to get their hearing back when the creature had become not but a bright blue star shining in the noon sky.

Lemia got her breathing under control, then rubbed her ears to drain the blood from them. "That was a dragon? I thought you said dragons were about as strong as Lyra, not... that thing was like a god!"

"Some dragons are stronger than others." Cali kept her head just above their trench, looking in all directions at the predators and prey alike as they recovered from the disruption to their usual schedule. "Legend has it they can live forever, and never stop growing in power, but there can't be many as powerful as that one out in the world."

"So, does that make us lucky or unlucky?" Ketak rubbed her head, still trying to shake off the experience. At times, the superior silmid hearing was more curse than blessing.

"If we had time and were equipped for it, I'd have said lucky." Calenda considered cursing again. "It got cut up by those buffalo, which means blood. If we could get it back to Arila fresh."

Meanwhile, Elruin was busy cooing soft nothings to her furry monster squirrels, who had been as upset at the humans but lacked the intellectual wherewithal to rationalize and speak of their fears. Instead, they hid in Elruin's arms, seeking comfort in the necromancer and her energies which sustained and healed them.

"Even a vial of normal dragon blood is worth a small fortune." Lemia still rubbed her ears, and had started using magic to draw together some water from the air so that she could clean herself better. "We could have been rich."

"I can track it," Elruin said. The fragments of dragon-energy radiated from the ground like stars of their own, distorting the area with strange magics. Even these small drops were second only to such beings as Lyra, and the magic powering Shelter's peace aura.

"No, it's better that we don't." Calenda, too, felt the distorted magic, but she understood its consequences better than Elruin, because she had seen how such distortions worked. "Dragon blood is one of the components in making warped sarite. Unless you have the right protection, it can turn you into an insane monster, or any sort of other unpredictable events. Or you'll explode, that's possible. And that's normal dragons, not the sort of monster that eats other dragons."

Those humans in the group could see, even at a distance, as those plants and animals unlucky enough to be close to the splatters of blood began to warp and mutate. Insects grew to sizes which could rival the bison, only to die moments later as vines wrapped around them, strangled them to death, and used their corpses as fertilizer. This was warning enough that they lacked the ability to work with such a dangerous substance.

"Come on, after that, the predators will be spooked and afraid. We might even make it to Seyid before nightfall. Then we can consider ourselves lucky."