Garth slammed the scrying shut with all the intensity of someone opening a refrigerator full of severed heads. It didn’t help.

Black fire flooded through the mirror, and Garth was propelled through the air, the small of his back slamming against his stone workbench before he was flipped over and hit the side of his little hut hard enough to send splinters erupting out around him like a strange halo.

The fire stormed through the mirror, filling the hut like water. It radiated an energy that hurt to look at, like staring into a blacklight. Wherever the fire lingered, things crumbled to dust. The table and all Garth’s tools were covered in it, dissolving in seconds as he peeled himself away from the wall.

Garth gave a quick mental command for the Halo to keep itself out of reach of the fire, and the swarm of stones lifted themselves out of range.

Garth’s clothes crumbled away, and the grey corruption began to spread to his skin. Garth tried to put a blockade of mana between himself and the ravenous spell, but the fire treated the external mana like it wasn’t even there.

“The Fff-“ Garth grunted as his skin began to lose it’s healthy Beladian purple.

Pain began to shoot across his entire body as his skin’s nerves reactivated, crying out in agony instants before they began to swell and mutate.

His engineered body was trying to fix itself as growths began to form all across his body before they played out in instants, turning black and sloughing off faster than they could regrow.

It wasn’t fire. The cancerous little nubs that peeled off of him in droves attested to that, but Garth couldn’t quite narrow down what was happening to him.

It wasn’t fire, and it had to be magical in origin, but it was unaffected by magic. A Blessing? An Apostle’s Blessing couldn’t be prevented by typical means.

The fire seemed to be slowing down as Garth’s adrenal response kicked into high gear, giving him plenty of perceived time to study his rapidly mutating skin.

It seems like cancer-causing radiation on fast-forward, except, if it were, my insides would be growing tumors too. Radiation doesn’t stop at the skin. So whatever this is can penetrate mana like it’s not even there, but can’t penetrate skin unless it broke it down.

Garth’s gaze flickered over to his destroyed workstation. One of his big steel clamps was simply a pile of rust at this point.

It’s not rapid aging, but it mimics the effects of rapid aging, mixed with radiation….Entropy!

The fire probably came from a god. One who’d spoken to Jim, and warned him not to overuse his ability.

Presumably the one who gave it to him.

He obviously had a dick, and talked about his sister.

I only know one god that ticks all those boxes.

That night I dreamed about the twin gods of fate, Elle and Markus.

Garth remembered Jim mentioning his patrons, just minutes before he was taken over by a black mana tapeworm. Brother and sister.

Garth also remembered their appearance, as the two of them had dismissed him as not being…Fate-y enough.

Garth closed his eyes and brought up the memory of Jim speaking to him after the meeting, separating his mana sight from the memory of the event.

Surprise surprise, The little butthole was using his Blessing, Weal and Woe, to navigate the conversation with Garth to achieve the best possible result.

The Blessing was a strange one, with a rather intricate arrangement of mana that allowed it to accept almost any proposed action with a single thought, then test it to see if would read Weal or Woe.

Weal was a silvery mana, while Woe was light-absorbing black…much like the flames that were currently destroying his body. The entire spell could be boiled down to a very delicate test that worked like an upside down tuning fork. Smack the business end with the proposed course of action, and the weal or Woe would respond by rising up the handle of the tuning fork.

Garth watched in fascination as Jim pinged the Good Idea/Bad Idea ability every ten seconds or so, essentially surrendering control of his decision-making process to his patrons.

Stupid brother of mine.

You have Learned Weal and Woe! 0.1% ProficʒЖ?ʒӌ----

Garth’s Status Band released a puff of smoke as it corrupted and fell off his arm.

Yeah, better hurry this shit up.

Garth was pulled back into the present moment, where his body was rapidly being devoured by black cancer-flames. He channeled Beladia’s mana, pushing his fertility aura out in a tightly controlled wave. The black fire pressed up against the purple mana, providing extreme resistance as he tried to peel it away from his skin.

It lost its hold on him as the last of his unhealthy skin crumbled and was replaced by fresh new tissue, like a nasty piece of stuck-on food taking some of the stove’s chrome with it. I’ll live.

The black flames were pushed back by Beladia’s mana, and Garth thought he could feel…irritation, when he looked at them.

Garth pushed himself off the wall, keeping Beladia’s Fertility aura wrapped tightly around himself in an ovoid shape. Moss sprang into being, and insects seemed to come out of nowhere like Genesis, covering the floor at his feet. When the aura passed, the black flames attacked them, crumbling them to dust in seconds.

Garth broke into a run toward the scrying mirror that was still belching black flame into his little hut, the runes written in his blood glowing along the edges.

Garth covered his fist in hardened plant matter and let out a grunt of effort as he smashed his pointed knuckles against the reflective pane.

The mirror shattered, and as soon as the symbols written in his blood were no longer whole, the black fire pouring into the room shut off like someone had simply flipped a switch.

Now what do I do about the shit we’ve got here? Garth thought, glancing around the veritable ocean of Woe that was pooling around him, barely held off by his status as and Apostle.

Last thing I need is Alicia coming back right now, Garth thought, glancing toward the door. His first instinct was to stick the door shut so that she couldn’t stumble into this absolutely foul substance.

Oh, that’s not going to be an option, Garth thought as he spotted all the holes that had been worn through the sides of his wooden hut. The fire poured out of the compromised hut, flowing like water among the startled villagers.

Shit!

Garth sprinted for the door and didn’t bother to slow down long enough to open it. Sure enough the door had been weakened enough for him to jump right through it, shedding the crumbling wood like water.

Teleport.

Garth teleported himself twenty feet away with a one hundred and eighty degree turn, facing his own hut that was oozing black badness into the village.

“If there are any unwanted pregnancies, I apologize in advance! Hold onto your uteruses, erm, uteri!”

Garth held both hands forward and channeled a flood of Beladia’s Borrowed Mana, probably earning him a stern talking-to from the busty deity during his next REM sleep. He corralled the black fire before it had a chance to spread any further than his lawn.

Out of the corner of his eye, Garth spotted Ninja Lawnmower Rock vanish in a puff of smoke.

Damnit! No, I’ve got more important things to do. Garth shook off his frustration and focused on creating a wall of purple mana, penning the flames into his house.

A sudden thought sent ice through Garth’s veins, but when he glanced over his shoulder, Halo was sitting there in idle mode, outside the hut. It must had gotten out while the getting was good, too.

“This circle of grass helps hold the black flames at bay.” Garth told himself and Halo. “Make it so.”

Halo did three passes around the perimeter, and the living grass began radiating the same silvery mana that seemed to be the black stuff’s antithesis, pushing the mana inward to reinforce Garth’s containment.

Mana From Elle?

Who cared, as long as it did what it was supposed to do.

That’s what got Jim killed, A little voice said in the back of his mind.

Garth gingerly slackened Beladia’s mana and was pleasantly surprised when the grass took over the job of keeping the fire contained. The fire settled for climbing up his hut and consuming everything inside it in an angry blaze.

Do your worst, shitheel, I already made Halo, I can recreate better tools in a matter of hours, Garth thought, crossing his arms with a smug grin. Now I gotta wonder how much this deity knows, and how bad he’s trying to kill me. Or was I just dealing with an apostle?

Gah, not enough information to be one hundred percent sure. I sure as hell don’t have the ability if someone is scrying on me from the future…I think.

“Garth!” Kurt shouted, his green face pale in fright as he charged up, staring slackjawed at the building black fire consuming Garth’s House/Laboratory.

“Ayup?” Garth asked, his arms crossed as he glanced over at the orc.

“What’s going on? What happened?”

“I made a reality warping Omni-tool,” Garth said, unfolding his arms and ticking off a finger, “I scried on an event that happened some eight hundred and forty eight years ago,” he ticked another finger.

“Pissed off a god, and I’m pretty sure he was responsible for like, a small fraction of my brother’s douchiness. He just sent me a Cease and Desist letter that caught my skin and house on magic evil fire.”

Garth paused in the middle of ticking off fingers, his mind making connections at a blazing speed.

“And I’m pretty sure Pala was trying to warn me about my brother being used by one of her contemporaries, and not in the good way.”

That and the god of chaos, who knew my city would turn into shit. I feel like I’m the only one that’s not playing with a full deck.

Garth pointed at the nearest shadow, a pool of darkness beneath a wheelbarrow from which Pala was probably watching him with voyeuristic glee.

“Cryptic prophecies that can only be understood after they’re needed are fucking useless, Pala, and you know it!”

“What about your house?”

“I’m done with it, anyway,” Garth said, waving Kurt off. “ I made the thing I wanted to make, so my progress has been preserved. I’ll wait until the fire dies down and build something even better.

Ah crap, I left Origin in there. Garth’s heart skipped a beat at the possibility of losing such a critical source of knowledge. That wizard’s book was probably more valuable than all the summer homes Castavelle had ever had.

Shit.

Garth glanced up.

Shit.

The black fire was climbing Garth’s rather tall hut, then leaping to the ceiling, where it sank into the stone, disappearing into the dungeon proper.

“Kurt, I want you to get your family and the rest of the villagers together, okay?” Garth said, a tiny flicker of panic surging through his heart as the entire dungeon gave a little shudder. He didn’t get concerned for his safety so much anymore, but his friends getting hurt was worrisome.

If Garth’s hypothesis was correct, the flame destroyed his skin by making each individual cell experience extremely bad luck at incredible speeds, resulting in massive amounts of cancer. That same bad luck, or Woe, could spread through the dungeon and try to kill him another way.

The floor bucked out from beneath him, throwing him and Kurt into the air for an instant before they came back down to the ground.

Yeah, like that.

“Kurt, Get everyone you can to the center of the village!” Garth shouted, holding his hand up.

A pillar of ultra-strong wood leapt out of Garth’s hand before securing itself to the floor, stabilizing the ceiling.

“Get everyone here!” He shouted. “I’ll get the Hunters!” the hunters included Alicia.

The Dungeon was dying, and they were inside of it. Like parasitic worms in a decaying corpse, their time was limited.