When Merigold was done, she blinked the sweat and tears from her eyes. Focusing in the maelstrom of chaos that surrounded her had taken all of her concentration. Finally free to look away from the place where The Rift had hovered, she found the world transformed.

Great furrows had been dug out of the earth surrounding them, either by plants called up by the Organics or the earth molding moves of the earth Elementals…or by the massive tail of the monstrous erowist locked in ongoing battle with the guilds. Overhead, the sky was a roiling sea of black and indigo, lit by flashes of lightning that sometimes forked down to the depression in the earth. Fire raged wherever there was something that could burn, just barely held at bay by the ice and water Elementals who had spread out around the depression.

The battle with the massive erowist was not going well. Maybe, if Eros and the other Combat Guild masters had a plan, it was going according to that plan. Merigold was not sure. All she knew was that the massive beast made no move to block any of the magics or weapons hurled at it from below; it either absorbed them, or ignored them. It appeared interested in the people who swarmed like ants beneath its nebulous belly only insomuch as they were a meal. Inevitably, it was already making its way towards Hakarth. Surely, when the futile resistance they were putting up had come to its end, the monster would make its way to the city in no time at all. Minutes, maybe.

“Merigold. Merigold!” Alecia shouted in Merigold’s ear, yanking on her shoulder to draw her attention away from the monster and the fire and the battle that rolled across the mountains of Hakarth. “We can use Ughvac to defeat it. We have to!”

“If I sent Ughvac to do battle with that thing, I would be dooming it,” Merigold said without giving the idea any real thought. “And I would die, too. It would be pointless.”

“No! No it wouldn’t. Merigold, look,” Alecia said, dragging her towards Ilf and Adri, who were staring wearily in the same direction Merigold had been a second before. There did not appear to be many of the smaller erowist left around them, likely due to Nihil, Garret, and Ughvac, who still stood around the four of them, looking out on the battlefield. Alecia did not pay the slightest mind to anyone as she wrenched Merigold down into the dirt beside one of her wooden tiles, pointing at the distant blob of an erowist.

It was humanoid. Merigold suspected it was another of the class-four erowist, since they were the only ones that seemed to take a humanoid form. It was also standing over the body of someone she hoped she did not know, but Alecia did not seem concerned about that. She was waving her hand up and down, pointing as if her life depended on it.

“Ali…” Merigold said heavily, too tired to even say her friend’s full name, “I really don’t get it.”

“Just watch, Merigold. Watch…there!” Merigold stared in confusion as the erowist appeared to dissipate, its hazy form thinning and spreading. Where it had stood a moment before, there were now three separate creatures, the small, lower class erowist that flooded the battlefield.

“Wha….?”

“Look around, Merigold! The reason there are so few erowist left is because the massive one started consuming them not long after it came out of The Rift. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but then I saw the smaller ones doing it as well. That was when I realized….they’re not eating each other; they’re fusing! To become stronger!”

“That’s…ouch, Alecia, let go of my face. I don’t see how this helps.”

“They can un-fuse! It’s reversable. They’re not destroyed, Merigold!”

“And?”

“Your contract, how do you think it would work if Ughvac fused with one of them? If it wasn’t destroyed in the process, you would survive. And the contract…”

“It would still be valid,” Merigold stated mechanically, staring at her friend as if she were the greatest genius in all of Hakarth. Maybe she was. Merigold’s eyes crept to Ughvac, housed in the body of the snow-white cat. It was looking at her, those eerie green eyes bright. She wondered if it had heard everything.

“If we’re wrong, I’ll die,” Merigold said softly.

“If we’re wrong, we’re all going to die,” Alecia stated, without a hint of doubt. Merigold believed her, and not only because she could see the monstrous erowist moving farther away from them, plucking people from the ground with its massive jaws.

“Merigold,” Alecia said, taking one of her hands and beginning to draw something on it with her brush. It was a series of tiny runes, each of which seemed to remove a heavy weight she did not know she was carrying from her shoulders. “Aerthi. Strength. Utrithae. Speed. Rhic. Energy. This is all I have the magic left to do. I know you can do this. This is what you studied for.”

“It is,” Merigold agreed, standing with renewed strength.

“Merigold,” Ilf said sharply, coming to stand beside her with clear effort and fix her with a hard look. “Eros had doubts about you, and so did I, but if you pull this off…whatever happens, I’ll have your back.”

Merigold met Ilf’s serious gaze, nodded once, and said, “Ughvac, come.”

Hissing unhappily, the cat came to stand in front of her. “Sleep.” The feline slumped to the earth, instantly deathly still. Merigold asked Alecia for her knife and crouched down, sucking in a sharp breath. She slid the knife along the stitches on the cat’s abdomen, and looked away as she pushed her finger inside and dislodged Ughvac’s core. She did not like the idea of foregoing all her previous controls, but she had another plan.

“Give me your brush, Alecia,” she asked. Her friend complied, brows furrowed. Ilf, Adri, and Alecia looked on in silence as Merigold quickly, but with smooth, even strokes, pained a series of runes onto Ughvac’s core. Then she returned the brush, stood, and said. “Arise, Ughvac.”

No longer constrained to the form of a cat, the erowist blossomed forth from its core in an exotic plume of multi-hued light. It settled into a neon-green gob of ectoplasm, spitting sparks in every direction. Even without eyes, or any sort of humanoid form, Merigold could feel the creature’s enraged regard.

“I have two tasks for you, Ughvac. Take me out there, in front of that monstrous erowist,” she pointed at the creature that was in the process of hurling more lightning from the skies onto the battlefield. It had moved at least two miles from The Rift already, putting it within view of Hakarth. Merigold imagined she could hear the distant sirens of the city wailing once more, “and fuse with it.”

She could tell how badly the creature wanted to refuse. It pulsed through every angry color of the rainbow before taking its humanoid form and grabbing hold of her roughly. It tossed her over its shoulder like a sack of grain, clutching her so tight she could barely breathe. Then Ughvac began to run. It was incredibly fast without a body to slow it down. It nearly glided across the scorched earth, neatly avoiding obstacles that would have tripped up a living thing. Even so, Merigold could feel the breath being squeezed from her lungs. The creature was all hard angles and static, making her teeth chatter and her curls stand on end.

When Ughvac came to an abrupt halt, it threw her into the dirt unapologetically. Coughing and choking, Merigold oriented herself as fast as she could.

There were sparse guild members spread around her, none of them closer than a hundred yards to each other. Clearly, fanning out had proved the better strategy against the monster before them. Very few of them spared her even a glance, and for good reason. Up close, the deity-class erowist loomed over them all. Merigold stared into its neon green maw, hearing the sizzle and crack of the raw power that was its hide, smelling metal and ozone. It was voiceless in a way that was almost eerie, a silent storm that swept in and tore up everything in its path.

Ughvac stood between them, silhouetted against that awful head.

“Go!” Merigold shouted.

Ughvac leapt, never looking back. Those great jaws opened. They closed. The monster took a step forward. The earth shook, but not, Merigold thought, with its weight. The earth shook because the monster wanted it to shake.

“Stop moving!” Merigold shouted. She had no idea if it had any effect. The monster had indeed frozen, but it appeared to be simply surveying them to choose its next meal. Seconds dragged by. Then minutes. The Elementals around her had continued to attack, but slowly, their attacks began to falter. They had stopped to stare at the massive, frozen erowist, which appeared unaffected by them in any way.

“Go back!” Merigold yelled as loud as she could. “Back to the Astral Plane. As our contract states, you may never return.”

A stillness had settled over the battlefield. Overhead, the roiling gray clouds were fading to a fainter steely pall. They were no longer lit by flashes of lightning. A small number of people had started to look towards her, as if wondering what she was yelling. Merigold wondered if anyone understood what was happening except Ilf and Alecia, and maybe Adri.

“You may speak!” she shouted.

“These are the terms of the contract upon your death. You are not dead,” the massive erowist said. When it spoke, it did not move. It drew no breath. Merigold wondered if anyone else could hear.

“I don’t have to die to grant you freedom!” Merigold replied at the top of her lungs.

“Freedom with constraints.”

“Freedom within the Astral Plane, and nowhere else!”

It was alarming to see the great creature pulse gold and then crimson as Ughvac had often done. Nonetheless, it had received her command. With a burst of blinding light that made Merigold’s eyes water, the creature simply disappeared.

A roar went up from the people gathered around the battlefield. Slowly, it was taken up by more and more of them. Some collapsed to their knees. Some ran to each other, rejoicing wearily in their triumph. Merigold was of the sink-to-her-knees sort. She buried her fingers in the soft, scorched soil of the earth, bowing her head as she took a few steadying breaths. Then climbed back to her feet, looked helplessly at her sweaty, dirt-caked clothes, and turned to look behind her, in the direction the monster had been facing before it vanished.

Hakarth.

She could just see the tallest buildings over the edge of the mountains.

It was safe.