Luca took Stepan’s arms in her arms – forearms parallel, her hands round his elbows, his hands round her elbows. She called on Eirchais: Take away their air, and warn them to surrender. Eirchais responded with a wordless feeling of affirmation and for the first time in years, fully departed Luca’s side. She felt the comforting warmth leave her shoulders and vanish into the chaotic surrounding. Around Stepan, only feet from her own head, the air seemed heavy with mist and sand. It felt tight, but not painful. The air wrapped, enveloped, hugged, but did not crush. Not for her.

The Invictans in their prisons began to choke and fall. In each locked chamber, one fell, and the image of Eirchais, Fragment of God, appeared before them. Some might look at such an apparition and see a terrifying Primordial, a vengeful spirit perhaps. To the Invictans? Luca couldn’t help but smile, without mirth. It was malice and resentment that upturned her lips. To the Invictans… it was the betrayal of their loyalty, as they gasped for oxygen. And when the spirit spoke, and made demands… surely they would listen.

Some raged and tore at the inner walls. Some attempted to use explosives to blast through. Some, the wall simply parted for. They stumbled into strange dark rooms, mobs around them, and before they could bring their weapons to bear they were thrown to the ground, relieved of their equipment, and tied up, helpless. Some of the Valers spared their victims’ lives. Others were angrier, unmerciful, and did not grant the privilege of forgiveness.

With the strange Invictan weapons in their hands, the Valers quickly set to work setting up ambushes for any other soldiers that made it through. Captain Cigdem himself blasted through the walls with a shaped explosive – the stone fled from the blast point for a moment, reeling, wailing – and immediately found himself shoving Zoe and Arshay and Fatih to the side, almost by instinct, narrowly avoiding a hail of bullets himself. The weapons fire thudded into the stone wall of the library and caused the stone to buckle in pain for a moment. Its concentration, seemingly, was broken and it allowed the soldiers through. Clouds of smoke filled the strangely small chamber into which they’d stumbled after the blast. Cigdem assumed these villagers weren’t trained to handle Invictus weapons. They wouldn’t be able to adjust their aim without seeing through the smoke.

Moments after Cigdem pulled his fellow soldiers out of the library, the stone closed behind them. It roiled and rose, limbs and tendrils striking out at the group, but they stumbled away, fearstruck. Cigdem’s instincts and sense of duty as captain tugged against his fear of the magic abomination that loomed before him on top of the apparition he’d just witnessed. Luca Buday was playing some kind of trick with the vision of the Devotee, no doubt – of course a traitor couldn’t have a Devotee. But this thing? It was the work of a Mirshalite.

In Carakhte, Cigdem trained to evade the power of Banishment, expecting to face Reapers in open battle. He knew of the power of Cultivation, but as for how to fight it?

“Run!” Cigdem shouted, and tossed a grenade at the wall and the tendrils of stone. Then he fled along with his comrades.

Stepan felt their departure through the tendrils of stone. He felt the danger approaching, and so he buckled the wall to avoid damage from the grenade. He narrowly missed striking several of the Invictans inside, forcing the wall’s movement to stop in order to spare the villagers standing alongside them. The building shook with the latent pressure. Through the stone he felt the placement of more shaped charges, the movements of more of the Invictans.

Luca’s teeth were gritted and she said: “I don’t know what Eirchais is doing right now, but it isn’t working if the Invictans aren’t gone!”

“He must at least have shaken them,” Stepan said, trying not to let his focus be broken by the conversation. He felt as though he were watching from all around as his body spoke, without his mind. “It’s okay. You can still help –“

Indeed, Eirchais returned in a rush of air. A sudden warmth on her shoulders. It felt natural, in the way you feel the return from a brief absence. The Invictans are routing, those who were not captured. But of those who were, many still live. I can take the breath from their lungs if you will it.

Luca looked at Stepan. “We have prisoners, and we can kill them at any time.”

“Kill them, then!” Stepan said, reaching out through the network of living stone. Sand whirled around him in a dervish, beginning to obscure much of his face. Luca gritted her teeth and reached out with Eirchais’s power. Do it, then.

This time, she did not feel Eirchais depart. Instead, she found herself standing in a dark chamber. No, she realized, looking down, she was hovering. The Invictan soldier, trussed up with rope, lay still on the ground. Luca-Eirchais bent down towards him, hand near his face, drawing the air out to drown him. Around her were the villagers, standing still, watching over their prisoner, one with a rifle in his hands. They didn’t react to Luca-Eirchais’s presence. Only the soldier did.

He looked up as Luca-Eirchais placed her hand on his mouth. His eyes grew wide, his pupils dilated. Luca-Eirchais stared into those eyes, solemn. She held her hand there, tensing.

She paused. Under the hand, the soldier’s breaths came in shallow, ragged sobs. Arms and legs tied together tightly, he could do nothing but cry out. Luca-Eirchais looked into that face and recognized nothing, yet she recognized everything. This stranger, this child, was full of hate and lies and fears. She pulled back.

And returned to her body, to that room.

Over the rush of the sand and the wind Luca said: “No! We need to hold onto those prisoners! Their leaders got away, this isn’t over yet!”

“We’ll kill everyone we can and then figure out a way to kill the leaders! We’ll kill all of them!”

Through the sand, Luca caught a glimpse of Stepan’s face. Tears dripped from his chin, clung to the surface of his skin. They became droplets, grew, and were torn off into the wind, to frolick with the sand.

“We don’t have any time to –“ Stepan paused. The sand gathered, becoming a single writhing mass, as Stepan turned to look over his shoulder. Just before his face turned away from Luca’s, she thought she saw a wide-eyed slack-jawed expression of surprise and fear on Stepan’s face.

Then a dead man, wreathed in black mist and white sand, his eyes unlidded glass orbs, burst through the wall and closed his hands around Stepan’s throat.

Luca nearly panicked, backing away from Stepan and from the attacker. She felt Eirchais’s wordless warning and waved an arm forward, sending him away from her side. He pushed against the dead man, whose purple-bruised skin, cracked spectacles, and bloodstained shirt reminded Luca of one she’d seen before. They’d buried his body only yesterday, just after Kamila’s and Hilda’s disappearances.

The stone first fell limp and ceased to breathe, then became as normal, dead stone again, with only the single hole through which the attacker had burst separating the inner office from that outside labyrinth of small chambers and narrow tunnels. Stepan attempted to speak, but the hands held him tight. Eirchais pushed against the attacker. Distantly, through many walls, Luca heard the terrible crumbling of breaking stone, the triumphant shouting of soldiers. A great chorus of footsteps grew more distant.

The dead man spoke. His neck, covered in horrible bruising, twisted unnaturally, righted itself for a moment with a sickening snap. “You’re not the one I must kill,” he said, his voice as raspy as that of a lifelong smoker. “You’re the one who must witness it.” The snap repeated, and Stepan was lifted from the ground, and the sand-mass fell from Stepan’s side and scattered across the floor. Stepan groaned, and fell limp, and the dead man tossed him to the ground. He breathed, shallowly, but his eyes closed. The dead man, walking through Eirchais’s continued pushes as though it were nothing, took a step toward Luca.

“And you,” he said, with another snapping crack. “You matter nothing, apostate.” The dead man approached Luca. With each step toward her, he gathered more spinning sand. Luca remembered his name – or had she ever known it before? Plato Arap. Priest of Gaurl, soldier of the border town Carakhte, warrior under Captain Cigdem. Faithful of Aivor, devoted Solist. Sharpshooter. Proud son. Killer of savages. He reached toward her. A chilling sensation came over Luca then, and she saw a light bluish mist escape with her next breath. She felt light-headed and weak. The room grew darker.

“You are just a stupid little traitor,” Plato said, “the spawn of traitors. I will correct the accident of your birth.”

“I’m –“ she started to say, reaching for Eirchais. He seemed a million miles away from her, their bond weaker than ever.

Plato Arap stumbled back as stone grabbed him by the arms. Luca’s focus returned and she felt she had weight again. As the arms of the stone shifted and rippled and dragged Plato Arap back toward the hole he’d crawled through, Luca reached down. On the floor, a discarded weapon, an old battered crossbow. It had a repeating magazine, and four of the bolts had already been fired. She picked it up and emptied it.

Plato tore through the walls of stone, screaming, clawing through the writhing rock, staring with wide glass eyes. Stepan slowly rose, his hand against the wall – reaching into the wall. Plato disappeared – flashing forward, towards Luca. She tossed the crossbow and made a fist. Plato was grabbed again, inches from Luca’s face, screaming. “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!”

Stepan’s Cultivation dragged him back into the abyss again.

Stepan rose, reaching out with a shaking arm toward Luca. She took his arm, bracing herself with her other arm against the wall as well. They stood like that, as the warmth of Eirchais returned to Luca’s shoulders and the stone came alive again. “Come on,” Stepan said, looking up at Luca. “Stay with me here. You have to handle the… tough stuff.” A ripple ran through the walls, a vibration through the floor, and Luca thanked the walls for their steadiness in the face of whatever was happening out there.

“I have to hold that thing out,” Stepan continued. “It’s…”

“Aether-touched,” Luca finished. Aether-touched. So far gone, nothing calm or kind or human left in it. With sufficient exposure to the energies of the other world, people changed. Luca remembered learning about these creatures at school in Gaurlante. Ironic, as she’d always been taught the greatest danger of Aether-touched came from Mirshalites and other heathens creating them out of innocent people, twisting them into monsters. The human soul, boiled down to nothing but its hatreds and resentments and its most aggressive drives, and given power beyond the human. “Tell me something, scholar,” she said. “Is this what happened to everyone… the old humanity… back in the Desert?”

Stepan grimaced. “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much. But it didn’t just end there. We’re all… changed. Humanity, I mean.” He groaned, and his body convulsed, but he held on. “If I just hold it long enough it’ll probably go away. It’s not after me. It’s not after you.”

“It’s after Kamila and Hilda, isn’t it? They killed him, didn’t they?”

The memory, she must have inhaled it somehow in their brief, close contact. Four crossbow bolts, sprouting from his chest. He stared down. The old crossbow fell to the floor. Luca looked down at it, lying where it fell after she threw it. Then Kamila surged up toward him, and struck.

For how many minutes did he lay there, unable to breathe, in agony, the hot piercing burning pain in his lungs and heart, the dull cold in his head? For how long did he wait for death, wanting to gasp, unable? Luca felt it as an eternity, a window of forever-slowing time that never seemed to quite end. Asymptotal, eternal yet fading, degrading.

Brewing in hate, every second of it. Hate for Kamila Zelenko. Hate for Mirshal. Hate for every Abrist and savage and filthy heathen who’d brought this end upon him. If they’d just laid down and died like they were supposed to…!

Luca, gasping, snapped back to herself. Slowly, she saw, Stepan’s breathing was steadying. “It’s gone,” he said. “It must have given up trying to get in here.”

“Where’d it go?” Luca asked.

Stepan shrugged, glanced over at the hole in the wall. Looking at it, Luca was struck by how the light reflected and bounced down the corridors and tunnels. She stepped over to the hole and peered beyond. She thought she could hear voices elsewhere in the complex, though the wind still rushed in her ears and her head swam with the pain of the fight, returning to her.

“I don’t know,” Stepan said.