Linduin winced involuntarily as the crack of wood hitting teeth reverberated through the room. The village headman fell to his knees, blood fountaining out around his clenched fingers, and howled a gurgling cry of agony cut short by Tebes' boot intersecting his jaw. The paired thuds of his body against the wall and subsequently the floor were the only sounds in the crowded room for several seconds.

"Right," muttered Tebes sourly, "anyone else feeling oppressed?"

The villagers, clearly beside themselves with fear, simply huddled together and quivered. A few low moans of terror escaped them, but no one spoke up. After a few moments of tense, unpleasant silence, Tebes nodded to Linduin meaningfully. The young man, who had been as frozen in horror as the villagers, came back to himself with a start and begin making a circle around the assemblage, holding out a bag to accept the their tributes. The results were meager; a handful of coins, a few pieces of jewelry, and a few worrying elements such as teeth or dead things. Linduin winced again, knowing that Tebes would not be pleased.

"Now," Tebes growled, "you are all going to point to the richest person in this village. We're gonna take all his stuff. If you point to two people, we're gonna take all of both of their stuff, so you better be smart about it. Anybody who doesn't point, we'll take their stuff too." The villagers muttered in consternation. "One, two... point."

Slowly, but not too slowly, all hands came up pointing at the recumbent form of the headman, though a few hands swerved during their ascent as their owners detected the prevailing sentiment in the room. With a muttered encouragement to select themselves a new headman, Tebes caught one of the injured man's feet in a viselike grip and began dragging him, slowly but implacably, towards the door. As he departed, he caught Linduin's gaze with one baleful eye and nodded towards the villagers.

Linduin froze, panicking internally. Was he supposed to intimidate the villagers further? Dissuade pursuit? Shake them down further? All of the above? After a moment, he flinched, and settled for merely leaning forward and whispering urgently, "Please don't make him any angrier. Let's all just get out of this with our lives." A few villagers, who had shown signs of becoming angry, blanched and looked away. Linduin hurried out the door behind Tebes, hoping against the sinking feeling in his stomach that he hadn't screwed this up too.

A thorough search of the headman's house yielded another dozen pieces of jewelry and nearly fifty coins, squirreled away in a sack beneath the floorboards. The headman, who had already been regretting many of his life choices, groaned in terror when his cache was discovered but was far too injured to even make an escape attempt. Tebes, never one to waste effort, simply kicked him a few more times and then stomped on his leg, shattering the knee with sound like a snapping twig. Turning to Linduin, he muttered "Fetch some ropes," although Linduin had ask him to repeat the command twice to hear over the headman's anguished screams.

When the two of them departed from the village an hour later, they left behind two things: a lifetime of trauma and painful memories for many of the village's residents, and the writhing form of the headman, tied to a large tree. Nearby lay a pile of large sticks of roughly the right length and heft for bludgeons, and a large sign dangled from the headman's neck, reading "WE CAME BECAUSE HE DID NOT DO HIS JOB" in Tebes' surprisingly precise script. What followed was unpleasant for everyone involved, but in no way a surprise to anyone.

***

Like many things in the history of human race, much of what features prominently in history books began with a convergence of unrelated factors in a coincidental manner having consequences forseen by absolutely no one. In the long-forgotten days which preceded the Shul empire, it was a young man experimenting with various forms of psychoactive mushrooms; long before the founding of the Celi'sa Shipping Corporation, it was two drunk students debating the intersection of philosophy and finance. And in the village of Veraleigh, it was a large tome of occult theory and an seven-year-old girl with a ferociously precipitant reading ability and a somewhat foggier grasp of the idea of consequences.

By this age, Cheis had already demonstrated most of the characteristics which would define her: an iron will, a lack of refinement, and a certain nonchalant disrespect for other people's rules. Her uncle, roundly denounced by the rest of her family for his dissolute youth as an academic and an oeniphile, had no more magical ability than that of the average turnip but did possess a keen interest in the artistic beauty of occult diagrams. He had purchased the book not for his bookshelf, but for his coffee table, utterly ignorant of the import of its content and thoroughly uninterested in the various strictures and relationships it enumerated between the various constituent elements of the universe. He had forbidden Cheis to read it, which of course ensured that she did it immediately the instant the opportunity presented itself.

In another story, the book might have been a sorcerous tome from a lost age, pulsing with power and forgotten lore which slumbered until Cheis stumbled upon its awe-inspiring secrets, but the reality is that it was a thoroughly non-magical book written by a professional scholar who had rebelled against his publisher's wish for a more traditional volume and instead attempted to inject a little art and inspiration into what he saw as a dreadfully staid and boring subject. More than half of Antediluvian Arcanerium, as it was titled, was simply colorful descriptions and half-baked philosophical meanderings on various concepts of the art, most of which were either completely incorrect or badly misinterpreted. The remainder of the book was dedicated to introductory explanations of various arcane concepts, usually accompanied by an overenthusiastically flowery diagram or a simple demonstration to illustrate the concept at work. A dozen or so of these were simple scientific experiments, such as making soap bubbles or using air pressure to hold water inside an inverted container, but it did contain a small handful of actual spells: a charm to ward off insects, an incantation to untie a knot in string, and (featured as the book's capstone) an overly complex and thoroughly inefficient implementation of Baleena's Trifling, which levitated an object up to ten feet into the caster's hand for the small price of three carved runes and nearly a minute of chanting. The book also contained a spell for starting a fire, festooned with warnings that it was not to be attempted by anyone who did not possess the Red Gift; if Cheis had read that page first, our story would have ended much sooner and very differently. But, as fate would have it, she chanced to begin reading on page one hundred and ninety-seven, which just so happened to contain two topics which would normally have absolutely nothing to do with each other: a lengthy and rambling dissertation on the various competing and contradictory interpretations of the concept of intelligence, and a simple enchantment for sharpening a knife.

***

Cheis awoke with a groan, acutely conscious of both her pounding headache and her extreme weakness. Those of her various wards and status enchantments which had survived the artifact's destruction chirped into her flickering consciousness, warning her of various problems such as thanatoptic buffer overflows, dwindling egregoric array reserves, and serious cases of dehydration and malnutrition. Cheis opened one bloodshot eye and grimly took stock of her situation.

Too weak to move: check. Her limbs, while still intact and properly living in dramatic contrast to the faintly-glowing skeletons of most of the village's other inhabitants, had been thoroughly drained of all vital energy; if she didn't handle the situation before long, necrosis would set in. Too much pain to think: check. Most of her nervous system, while still at least nominally functional, was currently attempting to fight off something roughly analagous to post-traumatic stress disorder after nearly having been invaded by nega-enumerators from beyond the eleventh philoschema. Those of her nerve endings which were attempting to respond at all and not doing the electrochemical equivalent of spinning in circles while vomiting were mostly pulsing with agony. Magical reserves exhausted: check. Less than one in ten of her wards had remained operative, and half of those were showing worrying checksums and accumulating errors. Before long, she'd start to see instability in the core emulator, and there'd be no coming back from that without a complete rebuild. She moaned in pain and rolled over a little, then coughed in disgust when she discovered a large dog turd an inch from her face. This was definitely ranking very low on her list of Tuesdays.

She ran through her options slowly and with great difficulty. Lie here and die: lazy, but awfully tempting at the moment. She'd come back to that one in a minute. Hack together an enchantment to reinvigorate herself: probably not feasible in the current set of circumstances. Assuming she could cast it properly at all in her current state (very unlikely), there was a worrying lack of raw materials at the moment. Anything remotely usable wouldn't have survived the energies released by the artifact, and the cacopneuma irradiating the area, while abundant, would be beyond toxic as an input element to anything she'd want to try for this situation. So that was out.

Lie here and die: still not a bad plan. Had the benefit of having a 100% success chance with no meaningful side effects. Call for help: not remotely possible, even if there were anyone she could ask for help, which there wasn't. Use one of her reserve tools: ugh, have to take stock of them first. Lie here and die was looking better and better all the time.

The quartz crystal she would have normally worn around her wrist was gone, having been sacrificed to deal with that little cardiovore problem back in Yula. She could reload a virtual from backup if her backups were at all trustworthy, but the fact that her schema browser was missing entirely and the loader enchantment for it was currently returning an error of "LUMINEFEROUS ETHER NOT FOUND" did not inspire confidence. Regretfully, she dispelled it with a thought and a sigh. That was going to be at least a weekend of painfully finicky spellcasting to replace. Most of her other reserve tools were also gone or sold; she'd been travelling lightly for this job and, truth be told, had been getting a little overconfident lately. Suppose it was her own fault, then.

Lie here and die. Hmm, lie here and die. She could probably manage a psychodamper construct to block out the pain before her mind went, at least. And there certainly wouldn't be anyone to mourn her; she'd had no friends, her family had all died years ago, and most her recent boyfriend was currently two thousand miles away with a new girlfriend, an artificial leg, and a nascent complex about beetles. Not that that wasn't a definite improvement: the previous two were a skull and wisp of argon, respectively.

She was almost thirty-eight percent of the way through a detailed enumeration of her regrets when a fly alighted on her nose. This startled her for a number of reasons, mostly because her malfunctioning nervous system interpreted it as a searing stab of pain coupled with a sharp taste of lime, but also because there shouldn't be any insect life within a large distance, and anything entering from outside the area should have been rapidly vanishing into other dimensions or mutating into horrible monsters or both. She blinked, dazed. Had the radiation been contained?

A quick scan of the area revealed that it had, at least a little; while nothing would grow in this area again until long after the sun burned out, the corruption was at least non-replicating; she'd managed to seal the congruence before it had been able to establish metagenesis. So rather than being an everlasting necropolis of unlife, the village would simply be a dead eyesore for all eternity. Could be worse.

So: flies. She couldn't reap them manually, of course. Too much effort and she didn't have the strength. No suitable macros in any of her remaining enchantments, and she wouldn't have trusted them to work properly at the moment anyhow. Her anklet, which would have allowed her to survive truly shocking amounts of blood loss and made her bones unbreakable, was no help; her onyx earring, which protected her soul from various types of esoteric hazards and killed anyone who tried to remove it, was staggeringly powerful but utterly unsuited to this particular problem domain. Come to think of it, she wasn't sure what would happen if she tried to remove it herself. Probably a stack overflow error and subsequent necromantic explosion. Better not try that, then.

Her amulet. Well, that might work. She'd been saving it for something much more dire than this, mostly because it was dramatic overkill for murdering flies and because creating a new one would be a tremendous pain in the ass; stuffing a dried mouse skull with the corpses of nine hundred and ninety-nine mosquitos was disgusting, boring, and preposterously exacting, particularly because she'd have to kill each mosquito by hand. It also couldn't be virtualized. She carefully invested a good twelve seconds on self-pity before deciding it was her only real option. Lie down and die would have to wait for another day.

With tremendous effort, she raised her left hand to her throat, touched the skull with her ring finger, and coughed out the trigger word. The skull began to heat up as each of the mosquito corpses inside began to swell with blood, accompanied by the silent impacts of flies and other insects all around her. For nearly a hundred miles in every direction, the air was remarkably clear of buzzing nuisances as every fly and midge dropped inexplicably dead, their life-forces sucked into a vast vortex of hunger invisible to the naked eye but deadly to look upon for anyone capable of seeing it. Luckily, however, no one was.

Cheis of Veraleigh writhed and howled with pain as the life energy surged into her, the mouse skull crumbling to dust as its enchantment was discharged. Her limbs ached, then began to flail, then began to burn. The energy was too much; she'd been saving this to offset something really dire like a massive energy debt. She'd catch fire soon. Staggering to her feet, she took off at a clumsy run, smashing directly through the wall of one of the village's ruined hovels as she picked up speed. Blood fountained from her torn flesh as the wood and nails ripped at her, but her wounds disappeared almost at once; she was burning off the energy, but still accumulating entirely too much overflow. She savaged her forearm with her teeth as she ran, tearing out chunks of flesh and spitting them out as the skin and muscle formed and reformed. Rocketing across the landscape like a pudgy black streak, she covered nearly two miles in less than a minute as she plowed directly through trees, leapt over rocks, and gibbered with the strain and anguish. Her howls carried on the wind, frightening babies and small animals.

Nightfall would find Cheis of Veraleigh exhausted in a meadow, nearly thirty miles away from the blackened oubliette of Morhelm. The bandits whose camp she had stumbled into were eyeing her with mixed amounts of dread and hunger; they were already muttering about taking her captive and selling her into slavery. That was fine. Slavery she could handle. Slavery was Wednesday's problem. Making a rude gesture to the bandits with the last of her strength, Cheis of Veraleigh dropped to her knees, then flopped to the ground unconscious.

The bandit leader cautiously stepped closer to her, scratching himself contemplatively. "I had a dream like this once," he sniffed. "Thought she'd be prettier."