The sconces glowed without burning. Dim blue against dark walls out of sight. Illuminating dull tile. Catching the sheen of ancient bars. Just barely enough to see, so that the girl could be sure she hadn’t found herself in an oubliette, but in fact a dungeon; just enough to cast some light, so that shadows might be cast by each figure that descended the corridor outside her cell; yet not really enough to see anything, for in this dungeon there was nothing to see except shadows, except the shapes of bars, and all so dark and uniform in blackness that it might as well be someplace never graced by any light whatsoever. The difference between eyes shut and eyes open was a slim one.

Or it would have been, were it not for her skin.

The sconces glowed without burning. They were not the only ones. On the first day it had been dark for hours on end, but now the girl stared over at her right forearm. Beneath the skin flowed torrents of red. The luminescence penetrated her pale skin like thin fabric around a manalight. Not merely that her veins radiated like the sconces along the walls, but that the color flowed, slowly, like a lava stream down the sides of a volcano.

Her left arm did the same in blue. And while her head was restrained and she couldn’t look down to see her torso, her eyes glanced upward; and there, on the black ceiling, trickled green. Shimmering over her like the reflection of sunlight off a pool of unstill water.

At first she felt pain indescribable. The tall and empty-eyed creature with pointed ears had slipped a syringe beneath her flesh. The sensation that followed was like nothing except coals coursing through every artery and vein, consuming her heart, spreading through her brain, overcoming her muscles. Then a needle was placed beneath her wrist. A device around her mouth. Incisions made around her ankles and arms and more machines attached still.

At no point did the agony cease. With each new injection it started anew, growing worse, hour after hour, but never waning, not really. She had screamed at first, then cried, but after so long became numb, unable to think or feel anything as she was wheeled back to her cell, strapped into the bed, and left to wonder how she could possibly survive another moment in such excruciation. Her tolerance came and went even as the pain did not.

But this girl was determined to keep fighting.

All down the dungeon’s corridors came wails of misery. Children left out in a storm. Dozens of orphans yelling for their mothers. Hoarse throats calling out for death. All night long and longer still. Some went and more came, signaled by the distant echo of a cell door swung shut, but nothing really changed, so that the girl was left to think she was stuck in a prison of time where nothing ever would change. She became exhausted, but she could never sleep when in such pain.

Green light on the ceiling. Green from her skin. Shining through her clothes. Forever. Until, at last, it darkened. Thirty hours had passed. The luminescence dimmed. The pain receded, though she was now covered in rashes and felt horribly ill.

It was over.

That was when she heard the creaking of rusted hinges. Percussive footsteps. A few seconds later she saw the shape of a man in the darkness, but soon she realized it was no man at all, but that same inhuman thing which had started everything with the words to restrain her.

He gestured with his hand and her bed tilted upward.

“You are ready for your second day,” he said.

And it began all over again.

When she opened her eyes she saw the shifting shape of a child, like light bent and contained and given form. Its head tilted. Eris tried to push it away but something caught in the back of her mind: immense tiredness, dehydration, dryness, an onset migraine which seized her capacity to do anything, even to lash out with a spell, and she gasped as all her skin fell asleep, tingling in numbness, like her blood was being drawn out of her body by the scarshade before her.

There was nothing she could do. Until…

A silver blade came down upon its arm.

The scarshade flickered from blue to teal. A child’s wail echoed through the unpadded confines of the tower, reverberating like an explosion in a canyon. Eris’ vision had drained near blackness once again but now color returned and sensation flooded back through her limbs.

The shape of the child reeled backward, diminishing but not dissipating yet.

“Eris!” Rook shouted.

He caught her by the waist as she fell, but she righted herself soon enough, pushing him away. He didn’t need much encouragement, for the scarshade recorporealized. He lunged for it, slashing; the blade of his family sword met resistance where it sliced through light. In dragging through the ghost’s torso the ghost vanished altogether.

He stepped back to Eris. Now they both looked up toward the cells, the dungeons where the initiates were kept during their Searings, just as Eris herself had been kept in Pyrthos ten years ago exactly. She drew her dagger and a moment later Aletheia joined them, sword drawn, but there were so many more—too many more, and even more still with each step away from the far wall. Thousands, at least a hundred per year, for three hundred years…

Eris grabbed Rook’s wrist. “Go!” she said, and she turned toward the stairwell. They all rushed into the spiral leading downward.

A red scarshade waited for them behind a corner. Eris cut at it with the dagger and it faded in part, but still it grabbed her, burning her skin where it touched. It was Aletheia with the Seeker’s blade who banished it and cleared a path, but Rook stopped behind them.

“Move!” Eris said.

“Where’s Pyraz?” Rook said.

A bark. It came from higher up. By now the children were upon them, pouring into the stairwell like ants determined to die. There were more below, too, in their path down. Rook did his best to hold those oncoming at bay, but even to brush their hands against his skin was like a sting from a jellyfish; it ignored armor, burning the flesh beneath.

Pyraz barked again. Rabidly, yapping.

Aletheia stopped.

“The way out is blocked!” she shouted. “We have to go up!”

Eris’ mind still reeled. Two scarshades levitated up the stairs in her direction, but she realized the girl was right, and she turned. “Up the stairs! To the top!”

“The top!” Rook said as they passed him. Eris saw Pyraz there, waiting for them, wagging his tail, ten steps above.

“Come on!” Aletheia yelled.

A scarshade grabbed Rook. He gasped, immobilized; this time it was Eris who came to his rescue. She sliced across the whole of the silhouette’s torso with Pyraz’s dagger. A burst of mana flooded the air as another child-like scream assaulted her ears, but Rook was freed, and she grabbed him and hauled him up the steps as the tide kept coming.

He recovered quickly. They ran together, side-by-side, in flight so long that they exhausted themselves in the ascent and had to reduce to a slow walk, up and up the stairs which seemed to never end.

It was an eternity before they emerged in a tall-ceilinged, spacious, manalight-lit room where the walls were scrawled with red lines of circuitry. Another landing, but the stairs went higher still.

Here dividers separated the floor into four laboratories, the stairwell at their center, and in each thrummed the workings of magical devices: condensers, coolers, aura generators, perhaps whatever was sustaining the spell of the room itself, for this huge interior was much larger than could be allowed by the exterior of the tower.

Rook raised his eyebrows to take in the scale.

Eris tasted the aether. That was why magicians built towers—to bring themselves closer to the heavens, the place where all magic originated. Now they were up high enough that any magician could use any spell without regard for overtaxing himself. Here anything was possible. Reality could be molded with mana with no constraints but the caster’s skill.

With hanging lights fueled by infinite aether it was bright enough to see, though still dark and possessing the atmosphere of a candle-lit torture chamber. As the party panted and felt their lungs burn from exertion Eris scanned for any sign of escape. She found nothing. There were no windows.

“Will they follow?” Rook said between breaths.

Eris shook her head. “I do not know. I do not think so.”

“You disturbed them by taking the serum,” Aletheia said. “They won’t rest until they’ve paid all of us back.”

“Piece that all together yourself, did you?” Eris sneered. “Be that as it may, scarshades are just that—scars. They must have something stable to scar over. In a place like this, where the winds of the aether are strong, ‘tis like frost on a running river. They are washed away before they form.” She looked to Rook. “That does not mean we are safe.”

He nodded. “We still need to find some way down.” With a grimace he rolled up his sleeve, revealing a wound left by one of the scarshades beneath. It was a burn, but instead of the skin peeling away bright red, it turned teal. “Speaking of scars. I’ve never had a wound like this.”

“A manaburn,” Eris said. She showed him the place on her hand where the manaserum shattered. “Thanks to your refusal to take the serum, I have some of my own.”

“I thought only we could get those,” Aletheia said.

“Women,” Eris said, “or magicians?”

The girl looked very annoyed as she clarified, “Magicians.”

“Clearly not. But it is true, we receive them more frequently, for the mundane cannot suffer overcasting. Yet they may still be given.”

“Then I account myself lucky for receiving a rare injury. What’s different about it?” Rook said.

“It’s blue,” Aletheia said.

“It is?”

“It is teal,” Eris said. “Do you expect that having it explained will make it feel better?”

“Kisses might,” he said.

Eris felt it was unlikely she would ever be inclined to kiss Rook again. Certainly not on the arm. Likely not the lips. Perhaps someplace else, but only in emergencies. “Keep it covered and it will heal like any other burn.” A moment to breathe. “Let us examine this place; we may yet find what we seek.”

“What do we seek?” Aletheia said.

“What?”

“We don’t have any clue what’s here. So what are we hoping to find? How do we know?”

“Look around you,” Eris said. She gestured. Everywhere were magical devices, most of which, even as they still operated, were indecipherable in their purposes: pylons against walls, pyramids hanging from the ceiling, obelisks on pedestals. “I have not led us here idly. I have reason to think one of these machines may be capable of transforming a creature’s true form, permanently. We need only to find it.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“What’s your reason?” Aletheia said. She sounded curious, rather than obstructive.

“You have seen the creatures of Telmos, have you not? The trees? They are like nowhere else in the world. They have been as such only since the Fall. They were transformed by the influx of mana into our world—just as Pyraz in his stasis chamber. I once read in my youth that the Magisters had attempted to reverse Telmos’ perversions, to restore its ancient rainforests, as others had attempted to rid the world of chimeras. Where else would such a project have been undertaken if not from this very tower?”

“They didn’t do a good job,” Rook said.

“No,” Eris said, “they did not. But that does not mean they necessarily failed to accomplish the principle: only that it was impossible to transform an entire region back to its previous state. A single dog, however, we may yet manage.” She sighed. It seemed more plausible in her imagination than it did now, standing in the decrepit interior of this ancient tower. “Now enough talk.”

Eris chose a path with no expectation of being followed, but this time her companions stuck near her. Apparently they did not trust her to keep out of trouble on her own. One-by-one she took stock of the facilities. She explored each of the four laboratories clockwise.

One mirrored the Searing chamber downstairs, with its own operating table and more machinery and two cells for holding test subjects. These had no bars but instead projected forcefields which still drew enough magic from the air to function. No manaserum was left behind here.

“They were experimenting,” Aletheia said.

“So it would seem,” Eris said.

“It’s sick.”

“Someone must be tested on at some point.”

In another laboratory they found machines which condensed managems from the ambient aether. That was how they made their manaserum. They were blockish pyramids ten feet tall, three of them, with grooves every foot in which mana gathered and solidified over time. It was an ancient technique, used by the Old Kingdom in the times before Manastone could be mined from the terrestrial sphere. It was not efficient. These condensers had functioned for centuries after being abandoned, but never turned themselves off. Now their grooves were clogged and ancient crystallized mana poured down the steps off their sides like water down a staircase frozen during winter.

The condensers might work again, if cleaned, and so much solid mana could be put to great use. “But it is not refined,” Eris said. “And I have not the expertise to do so myself.”

The equipment for such refinements were found in the adjacent room, along with benches for alchemists, tools for extracting reagents, and skeletons hung from ceilings. Most everything valuable had been plundered. Even the most precious parts from many of the machines were missing, so that only several devices along the walls, one of which was covered in black sheets of metal and extended in an arch across the ceiling, still functioned. Its surface radiated cool dryness.

Eris clenched her jaw. She had plundered so many ancient places, many of them far less remote than this Magister’s Keep, and yet this was the one that was already empty—so many miles from civilization, so miserable to reach, and with such potential.

That left one final laboratory. A dark room lined with tools. Empty scaffolding along the walls, as if still under construction. Work benches. Nothing more. Except…

A suit of armor at the far end. Empty yet twice as tall as Rook. All forged of bronze, a helmet topped with horns atop a cuirass, tilted downward, inert.

A red crystal hovered at its waist, twisting slowly, separating its body in two halves. Nothing suspended the upper torso except some unseen magnetic force. This was an arcane protector, a golem left behind by the Magister Prince. Aletheia stepped forward but Eris grabbed her.

“Do not move,” she said, pointing.

Aletheia obeyed, and in seeing the armor she recognized it immediately. Antigone had possessed a valet of similar construction in her own tower.

“What is it?” Rook asked.

“A protector. There is mana left in that gem.”

“Will it activate?”

“I would sooner not find out.” She pushed him and Aletheia backward, out toward the stairs, where she sighed. “There is nothing here. Nothing worth stealing nor what we are looking for.”

“We don’t know what these all do,” Aletheia said. She motioned to a nearby pillar etched with enchanted runes.

Eris ignored her. “The answers we seek must be higher up. I refuse to believe nothing of value was left behind.”

Rook held his hand near the pillar. Considering touching it, but deciding against it. He nodded. “Then higher we go.”

At the very last step they saw sunlight. Natural, warm sunlight, pouring in through windows at last. The staircase ended and they emerged at the tower’s highest level, another large room. Here they were above the mist and clouds; Eris walked to a window and, looking down, saw nothing but gray beneath, like she was atop the mast of a ship at sea.

There was no library here, but red mana circuitry ran across the ground, to the walls, where it converged on another conduit: this on the wall. Yet instead of a seeing stone, at its center rested a large black slab of volcanic rock polished to a sheen, embedded in the wall like a mirror. Before it was a desk covered in alchemical supplies and the decayed remnants of a wooden chair. A door with an enchanted lock led out to a balcony which formed a circle beyond the walls, but it was pitted and crumbled.

Painted between the windows and around the rock slab were more murals of the same sort they found lower down. Now Eris bothered looking. She saw a great city of black from which rose countless Spires; an eruption of flame and lightning from the tallest tower among them all; a man in robes leading his people north, crossing treacherous mountains, doing battle with disgusting creatures; a sea of green and what could be nothing but a swamp; huge animals with jaws large enough to swallow armies whole menacing refugees on foot; then finally a new tower, in the shade of a mountain, stretching over a jungle of its own.

The story of how the first Magister Prince came to live in Telmos. More chronicle than a history. Eris glanced downward next and realized she stood atop a vast map of the region, painted to scale underfoot, the central stairwell incorporated into the design as the location of Heaven Falls.

Yet there was nothing else. Nothing else at all of note here, of even passing interest. Once there must have been more to the Magister Prince’s library, to his laboratory, for who would have kept so little in such a place. This was his office, surely, but one single desk…

As Eris sputtered, Aletheia made her way to the conduit. She stared into the slab of rock, then touched it.

Not seconds later an unfamiliar voice speaking an unfamiliar language crept out from the stone.

So high up Eris felt unstoppable in her power, so without any delay she used the Wisdom of the Sages, casting it not only on herself, but on Aletheia and Rook and Pyraz all. Sustaining such an enchantment on another was terribly exhausting—but she could do it here. It was like merely blowing out a candle. The moment she took another breath her lungs were refilled and the spell still held.

“I have made my decision,” the first voice said.

“You end ten generations of rule,” the second voice said.

“Do not think these matters weigh lightly upon me,” the first voice said.

“We will be nothing to the College,” the second voice said.

Eris flanked around to Aletheia’s side. She looked into the volcanic stone. In the black obsidian she now saw a mirror. But reflected back at them they saw not themselves, but instead two men in their places, in this same room, considering the map on the ground, conversing.

As Eris moved to the left and to the right her perspective of the scene shifted—just as with a mirror—but she never lost track of the two subjects. They continued:

“I force no one to depart,” the first voice said, which came from a man in a purple robe. He wore a golden crown.

“Yet you leave us nothing to live with,” the second man, whose robe was red, said. “Nothing but our books, a haunted tower, and empty catacombs.”

“Our ancestors had not even that.” The first man took off his crown and looked at it for a long time. “We were never meant to leave Seneria. It’s time the schism was mended.”

“Your Highness,” the second man said. “Think of the research you leave behind.”

“I have thought of it. But I do not rate your research above the lives of our people.”

The man in purple disappeared down the stairs. Only the second man was left, who turned toward the slab and whose radiant blue eyes made contact with the party’s through the mirror for a long time.

Then the stone went dark.

“…what is this?” Aletheia said.

Eris did not know. It worked like a seeing stone, but she never knew such devices to show anything but what was happening on some other side—never the past or the future. Eris touched its surface. It was freezing.

Nothing happened.

She frowned.

“What did you do?” she said to Aletheia.

“Nothing. I just…” she hesitated, then brushed her fingers against the stone again.

Color returned. The second man in the red robe appeared again. This time he waited near the stairwell, alone, leaning against a staff. Eris prickled to see what was clearly a Magister’s staff so nearby, even in an illusion. Several seconds passed. Then…

A flash of light.

Behind the staircase, opposite the volcanic slab in the wall, there appeared a portal. Blue along its edges, a man’s height, a doorway appearing from nothing.

A woman stepped through it. She was shrouded in a hood, though her physique was barrel-like, and she wore a blue robe.

“We will be leaving much behind,” she said.

“So the Prince commands,” the man in red replied.

She leaned down and withdrew a square stone like a six-sided die slotted into a tile underfoot. The portal disappeared that exact moment. It was handed off to him. He enclosed his fingers around it.

He glanced over his shoulder, toward the mirror. Eris nearly shuddered. She felt like she could be seen.

“Will the Pinnacle ever been rediscovered?”

“We might return. If we survive to Erimos.”

He stepped toward the mirror. Then…

Darkness once again.

Eris jumped from her sandals. “He left us these messages!” She ran, nearly sliding onto her side, toward the place where the portal had appeared in the vision, and she saw the small indentation where a square key might be slotted. She had only missed it earlier by the contours of the map which obscured the circuitry that surrounded the place where the portal was meant to be opened and stabilized. “This man, this Magister in red—he wanted this place to be rediscovered!”

But there was no key. There hadn’t been a key for…

“What place?” Rook said. “Where does that portal lead?”

Eris hesitated. She looked to Aletheia. “Touch the stone again,” she commanded.

The girl did so. A moment, then the mirror-sheen returned.

The man in red stared directly into the stone.

“I do not know who will find this,” he said. “Perhaps it never will be found, before our kingdom is reduced to rubble in the swamps. Without our enchantments the jungle will swiftly consume Akkan, then our fortifications, and soon not even the tower will be left. A civilization spanning three hundred and eleven years, reduced to wasteland in a single decree. But there must be hope.”

“We know all this already!” Eris yelled at the mirror.

He rubbed his brow. “The Prince has left. I had hoped the others might choose to remain with me, but they grow too afraid of the scarshades, and I find myself with no company save my arcane protectors. I will be forced to follow soon enough, for I cannot survive here alone. His Highness instructed me to enable all defenses before I left and bring with me my key to the Pinnacle…”

From a pocket in his robe he pulled out a square keystone. Each side was carved with a glowing rune, except the top, which had a small handle.

“…so no one but our descendants might ever gain access to it. So they will, if they return. And if someone else should find it first—then so be it.”

He stepped over toward the desk. He pulled out a drawer and dropped the keystone inside. As he did so Eris said, “There is more to the tower. A hidden upper storey.”

“If this message is ever found, then one of our lineage has come back at last. I pray it is far in the future and I am dead; the Prince shall kill me if he learns what I have done.”

“No one cares about such drivel! Tell us about the Pinnacle!” Eris shouted.

The man looked over his shoulder. “I have said too much already…”

“No! Tell us!”

“…I…this…yes.”

He hung his head. A long look of defeat. Then—the mirror went black.

“Gah!” Eris spat. “What a sentimental fool!”

Rook pulled the drawer of the desk open. It was stuck, but he withdrew a dagger and pried it open, and a few moments later he showed off the keystone in his hand. “Don’t be too ungrateful. We owe him for his foresight.”

“He might have had much more,” Eris said, taking the stone. She walked toward the slot at the back of the room.

“What did he mean? One of his lineage? When you touched the mirror—” Aletheia said.

“What?” Eris said. She stopped with her hand an inch above the slot for the stone. Hair brushed from her eyes.

“Am I related to him?” She frowned.

“Do not be ridiculous. He refers to traditions of magic. Clearly your Antigone is of a line descended from the Magisters which built this place. Though ‘tis strange it did not work for me.”

“Why?” Rook said.

The stone was mated into the floor. For a moment the circuits of mana on the ground flickered, but then there came a flash, and a moment later there appeared the blue outline of a portal just behind her. Eris grinned, but looked back to Rook to respond. “The scroll I found bears the name of the elf who Seared me. I do not think ‘tis a coincidence.”

Rook approached the portal. Beyond was another dimly lit and large-open room. “So. This isn’t the top?”

“I was right,” Aletheia said. “They had portals.”

“She has a point. What happened to ‘portals turn you inside out?’”

“Portals done poorly,” Eris clarified. “Over short ranges they are not so challenging. Yet there is always a risk.”

Pyraz walked to the edge, sniffing.

“There’s something familiar about this,” Rook said.

“And?” Eris smiled. “Will you be too afraid to enter, as you were last time?”

“I entered,” he said. “I just needed you to go first.”

This time Pyraz went first. He stepped through, and on the other side he turned around to look back at them, wagging his tail. They could still see him clearly. The portal was like a doorway in two dimensions so long as it was opened.

Eris followed after him.

The aether still surrounded her. Mana suffusing the air. Even more than before. Intoxicating, almost too much to let her think clearly. She was forced to close her eyes, to center herself, before taking in the room they now found themselves in.

A single red crystal hung from the ceiling. An enormous spike of Manastone lodged in the roof, the source of all the circuitry in the entire tower, glowing like a burning coal. Nets of red lines extended from it, down each wall to the ground, running to every machine and disappearing to the lower levels at the floor.

This room was cavernous. The air was cool and dry. Two mirrored staircases led up to a second storey, all within a single atrium, creating an arch over a central rump in the room.

Before that rump was an operating table shrouded by a large machine, a cylinder covered in blue and red lines, forged of bronze and covered in grating. Tubes and wires and machines like those used in the Manasearing chamber down below frayed outward from its interior, so that it almost looked like a place where giants were imbued with the power of mana.

Beneath the staircases was a forcefield. She peered through it. There was a large pen, like might be found in an underground menagerie, on the other side

“What is this?” Aletheia said.

Eris glanced around the forcefield’s emitters. She found a stone nearby and pressed it, and with that simple gesture the violet field before her disappeared.

Within the pen was another slot for a keystone.

“A portal room. Whatever was to be placed upon that table, it would be transported here from some other place with a longer range teleporter.”

“A teleporter wouldn’t do much good if it was being transported from the same place,” Rook said.

Eris grinned as she began to understand. “It is just like I said. They were attempting to transform the animals of Telmos back into their original forms.”

“And like I said, they clearly failed,” Rook said. “No wonder they abandoned this place.”

“And all the ghosts,” Aletheia said.

Eris shook her head. “The man in red thought there was something worth preserving here. This chamber has been used for more than this one experiment over the centuries; there must be more on it, somewhere.”

She climbed one of the staircases. It led up to a second library—this one entirely intact. A wall of paper. At once she found countless record books, and in going to the last entered, she found what she was looking for.

A list of various animals. They had names like terrible lizard and carnivorous beast, and next to each was listed RETRANSFORMATION: wolf, bear, elk, et cetera.

Some had been logged as successful. Others were logged DECEASED.

The party spent hours searching everything. They found extensive records detailing the procedures. More knowledge than Eris had ever dreamed of. Her memory, and her intuition, had been precisely right, and so had Rook’s: the Magister Princes spent centuries attempting to transform Telmos back to its pre-Fall conditions, to no success. This laboratory was but one of many fruitless endeavors. Yet it was not entirely a failure, for although no spell was ever devised to transform a post-Fall creature back into its normal species, it was possible to transform individual creatures and return them to the wild.

Of course such creatures could not compete or survive in the changed environment. But they were transformed all the same. Not through a trick of magic as by Polymorph, not through some spell that might be broken: through a true transformation which realigned the soul with the flesh, permanently.

It was possible. Yet even optimistically fewer than half of the animals survived the procedure.

“Can you do it?” Rook said.

Eris sat on the ground. Surrounded by the notes of ancient Magisters, her head ached from so much new information. But she nodded. “So long as the machine works, I do not believe ‘tis complicated.”

“But he’ll die,” Aletheia said.

“It is a possibility.”

“Rook,” Aletheia pleaded, “we can’t.”

“We’ve come a long way to give up for bad odds,” Rook said. “We’ve overcome bad odds already.”

They all looked to Pyraz, who sat still, tail on the ground, some feet off. He stared back at them.

“If there is another way to truly transform him,” Eris said, “I do not know it.”

“Why can’t you use Polymorph?” Aletheia said.

“Even if I could sustain Polymorph indefinitely, it would not return him to his human form. It would merely transform him into some human of my imagining, while leaving him otherwise a dog. I do not know what would happen—but it would not be a restoration of any kind.”

Aletheia crawled across their outsprawled books to Pyraz. She wrapped her arms around him in an embrace. He stuck up his head, nobly, at the intrusion.

“I don’t want to lose him,” she said quietly.

He licked her cheek.

"He is a dog. He does not have more than ten years left, at best," Eris said.

Rook flicked the cover of a book. "Even so. For my part I would rather we didn't. But this should be his decision."

“I believe that is fair,” Eris said. She hated the thought of leaving this place without using the knowledge they had uncovered, but she was not eager about the prospect of killing Pyraz two out of every three attempts at returning him to human form.

Aletheia let him go. Rook looked him in the eyes. “So,” he said. “Is the risk worth it to you?”

His tail swept side-to-side. He barked. Then he leaped to his feet and he sprinted down the steps, directly to the oversized operating table, and he jumped up onto it, concealing himself beneath its cylindrical shroud.

“I think,” Eris said, “that is yes.”

Aletheia started to cry.

One scroll walked Eris through the procedure. She and Rook followed its instructions. It was not unlike Manasearing, except no Manastone was injected into the veins. Small incisions were made in Pyraz’s legs and the tubes off the shroud were attached. They were much too large, even necked down, for the forty-pound dog, so Eris bound them with bandages to create a seal. The only other thing to be done was attach needles into his veins.

She could have managed that on a human. Yet on a dog she was not quite sure where to look. Pyraz remained remarkably calm as she pricked him again and again, before all was complete.

They pulled themselves away. On the table’s shroud were two doors, to enclose the subject entirely within the cylinder, and she and Rook lowered both simultaneously. Then Eris walked about the edge of the table, and with her Essence she activated the machines, setting her hand on black metal pads which went from cold to red hot at her touch.

The red crystal overhead darkened. The shroud rumbled and hummed with mana. Even Eris’ heart raced. She stepped backward as the table shook. Then—

Pyraz howled. Screeching in pain. So loud, with such energy, that it was like a pack of wolves beneath a full moon, each mourning the loss of member of the pack. Eris had never heard a dog make such horrible noises.

Aletheia jumped down from the second storey. “Turn it off!”

“I cannot,” she said.

“Turn it off!” The girl hit her.

Eris grabbed her wrists. “I cannot, and I will not!”

“Please!” she sobbed, but after only a moment she stopped fighting, falling to the ground in tears. Rook had tears in his eyes to hear the sounds, too, and they grew only worse as the minutes passed.

And so many minutes. She couldn’t believe how long it lasted, how long those howls of agony ruptured through the table’s metal cylinder and penetrated the tower’s air, and she became so inundated to the noise that she almost didn’t notice when it became very different altogether.

A dog’s howl. High pitched. Lupine.

To a man’s scream.

She missed it, missed the point where it changed, but it did change, and soon she recognized that it had. Now she heard clearly the sound of a man wailing in agony, the sounds of a torture chamber, and she rushed back to the table to peer inside—but there were no gaps large enough to see, only small slits in the bronze grating which allowed tiny glances of something within, something which was much larger than the dog they put inside.

And then…

The screaming stopped.

Aletheia gasped.

The machine turned off.

The red light overhead returned to its normal glow.

Eris rushed to one of the shroud’s hatches and pulled it open. And there, inside, was a man.

His hair was black. His complexion was Ganarajyan. He was large. He was strong. He was naked. He was covered in hideous scars. And although at first he was limp, he stirred, and he raised his head, and he opened his eyes, and he looked right at Eris.

His eyes were Manaseared red. He was most certainly not a dog.