In the windswept Zvahli Savannah beyond the Beaucedine Badlands rested the Federation of Emberlet, famed as both the second-oldest of the Free Cities, and a major point of pilgrimage for every archaeologist and scholar who wished to be worth anything in their fields—for, concealed in winding subterranean tunnels deep beneath the surface of the land, slumbered the Xarcabard Necropolis. A gargantuan city-sized reliquary and the largest intact set of ruins of the lost civilisation of Zilart, the Necropolis was theorised to be the most likely vessel for what some hoped to be the resting place of the key to unlocking the obfuscated secrets of the distant Amarantine Spire near the Grand Duchy of Rosenfaire, which in the intervening decades had already been exhaustively studied to no avail. Of course, rare was the archaeologist with the time to have mastered the arts of war, and the Necropolis seethed with revenants, lost souls twisted into living shadows—driven to madness over the millennia, left aggressive, malicious, and feral; this was, of course, where Emberlet’s community of adventurers came in. As satellites to the ongoing excavation efforts in all but name, the work on offer from the city-state’s local Guild of Adventurers was hardly the illustrious selection on offer from Bantamoor, nor the lackadaisical offerings of Maelnaulde, glutted with highborn scions as its ranks had become, but for those with an interest in diligently pursuing studies of a sorcerous nature, the situation in Emberlet was all but ideal.

That was, of course, why they were there.

Deep in the bowels of the Necropolis, twin twisting motes of flame trailed through the air and erupted with a deafening igneous roar on impact—and in its immediate aftermath, the soul-shriving shrieks that emanated from the immolating revenants echoed throughout the labyrinthine corridors of the antediluvian subterrane. The explosion was magical in nature, conjured and ensorcelled through means of esoterica, but the magician from whose hand this spell leapt had not the luxury of time with which to admire her handiwork. Once more did the dual motes of flame form in her hand, dancing in a pantomime of an ouroboros; then, turning on her heel, she sent the pair ripping through the air, still circling each other as they travelled and streaked, with an impassioned cry of “Fira!”

An identical roaring detonation was her rejoiner.

“Great show, Matoya!” called another woman off to the side, caught in a contentious corps-a-corps with a revenant wielding a massive lump of metal too twisted, heavy, and crude to be rightfully called a sword; the woman, with a wince of difficulty, finally manoeuvred her enhancer, a sabre-like sword designed to be wielded by magic users, into deflecting the massive smasher off to the side, allowing her to dash back a ways, forming a single ball of flame in her hand and lobbing it into the now unsteady revenant with a flourish and a proclamation, “Verfire!”

With an annoyed flicker of the black feline ears atop her head, Master Matoya turned to scowl at the insufferable woman’s exuberant countenance, her fine emerald hair pinned in a high tail fluttering with her movements. The sleeveless scarlet dress with padded pauldrons of cloth, fine metal bracers, the airy sash, pointed boots, and the fluttering cape the green-haired woman insisted on wearing, all of it in similar shades of red, certainly did nothing to alleviate her persistent frustration with her nominal comrade. “Keep your eyes on your task, you ridiculous idiot! If we get flanked here, it’s all over!”

Constance. A self-described ‘red mage’, a form of magician using black magic, white magic, and swordplay in roughly equal measure, the woman’s flippant flirtation with the arts to which Matoya had devoted her life studying was not only irresponsible, but also an affront to not only her, but also any proper mage, she wagered, who had gone through the rites of the Magisterium and respected its hierarchies. The fact that her rival and colleague, Master Noah, a white mage who was also of their number, was not nearly so overcome with vitriol as she was a worrying and mind-boggling occurrence.

“Constance! Cover me!” cried Matoya’s reckless, over-vigorous younger brother, Kai’ri, as he zoomed past them and crashed into a specimen of unusual size further out down another corridor, the semi-spectral shape of the sabretoothed black panther Siravarde bounding in his wake at its master’s directive to signal the beginning of their push from their current position down the winding hallway to the next square room along the path. The other mystel’s bare fist slammed into the mass of the imposing revenant with sufficient force to send it flying backwards as its soul-shriving shriek followed it down the corridor, and the twitching of his own feline ears betrayed his brash and boyish enjoyment of their circumstances.

“Dualcast: Haste, Temper!” Constance called out, enhancing Kai’ri’s strength and speed, before turning back to the hallway she was set to guard with an expression of furiously working acumen, and then using her strange ability to cast two spells simultaneously once more. “Dualcast: Verdia, Verblizzara!”

The array of twinkling bluish-white lights her first spell conjured shot forth in beams no more broad than a filament, the holy energy melting any revenant it so much as glanced, though the unliving screams were abruptly muffled as a wall of translucent ice bearing the telltale blue tint of sorcerous origins grew like a cluster of crystals to the ceiling of the aged stone passage, blocking off the flank and buying them time.

Striding forth first down the path was their beast-taming comrade Yasha, a outcast of the hill-tribes of the Felmarch Highlands and the only master of Siravarde. With her massive greatsword Skofnung in her grasp and clad in the furs and hides with which she was most comfortable in terms of armour, the strength of her body and the magnitude of her prowess was obvious, as was her ferocity; she blew a lock of thick argent hair out of her woad-streaked face, and her equally silver eyes possessed the effortless keen scrutiny of a prowling predator as she assessed the situation in the space of a moment. Yasha and Matoya exchanged a glance, and the nonverbal exchange drew a nod of affirmation from the black mage as she snapped the scythe on her back into her grasp, adjusting her grip to hold it at the ready. After all, the halls were relatively narrow, and there would not be space in which she could safely employ her arsenal of tomefaire; none of them would be able to use magic to sunder their foes when on the move in such a manner, in fact.

Hovering just off the ground as white-blue energy surrounded his lower body, with his arms spread and head bowed, staff held in one hand, was Master Noah; upon completion of his cast, his body collapsed in on itself to launch the spell forth, five tiny motes of holy light swirling around the perimeter of an invisible circle, following the same path of rotation as they flew forth to become vectors heralded with a cry of “Glare!”

As the spell banished the final straggler of the last wave of revenants with a sound eerily reminiscent of the tinkling of bells, Noah alighted primly to the ground, collecting himself and beginning to rush after Kai’ri while Constance peeled off to join him. Matoya and Yasha were to hold the rearguard to ensure the party wasn’t boxed in from behind, as per usual, and so, only when the other three and the beast were out of the room did the hume and mystel women follow in their wake, their attention fixed behind them even as they fled.

True to form, in record time did a number of revenants come through the corridor Matoya had been set to guard; the eruption that shook the stones of the corridor they were in heralded when they tripped the first trap she had set for this exact circumstance, a rune containing a delayed cast of Firaja, while the second activated immediately after, triggered by the first, with a great terrestrial wrenching as a wall of stone slammed into place, closing off that route of ingress for the time being. Matoya intellectually knew that the stone wall would hold for long enough, that revenants had not been observed to possess a means of tunnelling through solid rock, but in a high pressure situation like this one, she found herself hoping regardless that she was correct, and that the cosmos did not deign to conspire against her at that moment.

Up ahead, the repetitive mantra of monastic battle-cries heralded Kai’ri engaging a crowd of revenants, and together with Siravarde’s growls and roars, informed them that the safe zone was being cleared ahead of them in the next room. As planned, Yasha sped past them all, brandishing her oversized longsword ready to carve through the ranks, while Constance hung back to help Matoya watch the rear as they came to the last stretch of the winding corridor. Finally the dim russet glow that lit each room from the crystal suspended pendulously from the ceiling began to bathe them in its subtle radiance, and while Constance took up her position to watch the way from which the quintet had come, Matoya reached out to the ambient quintessence and pulled; in a flickering Blink, the black mage warped herself forth, and as she came flying out of the manipulation, she dug her heel into the ground to halt herself, bleeding off momentum with a swing of her scythe that sliced through a trio of revenants, the blade leaving a faint yet ominous golden after-image. The residual momentum brought her into the thick of a crowd of the living shadows, but before they could react, slow of mind and feral as they were, the scythe blade came alight in bright, electric blue—the Mortal Flame—as she brought it back around, the crescent cutting a five hundred forty degree arc in a brutal spinning slash. The after-image came alight with a twisting blue flame akin to a coiled serpent, and as one, the revenants surrounding Matoya suffered their final death.

Constance went right to work casting her strange versions of familiar spells, white magic like Dia sharing common casts with black magic like Fire, all with this ‘Ver-’ prefix that allowed her to defy all Matoya had ever learned about safe and responsible spellcasting. Her enhancing magic was incredibly strong all the same, and she brought a lot to the company with regards to filling a support role, which none of the rest of them could do in any appreciable capacity.

“Taste vermillion fury! Verfira!”

…Of course, Matoya supposed as her body lifted out of the follow-through crouch and her lips set about beginning to cast more spells in a sequence that had become reflexive, the root of her problem with Constance could possibly not be ideological or methodological, but rather personal—her sunny disposition was a lot to deal with, particularly when it mixed with Kai’ri’s inexhaustible jubilant recklessness to create a melange that was a one-way ticket to a splitting headache. Her species, the mystel, being akin to humes but featuring feline features such as retractable claws, catlike ears, and a matching tail, came prepackaged with enhanced senses—a burden that seemed to weigh much more heavily on Matoya than it ever had on Kai’ri.

Matoya’s tail twitched as she moved, the sleek black fur glinting in the low light, her ears flattening to the top of her head, and her pupils contracting into slits in preparation as she stepped forth and launched her spell, proclaiming, “Fira!”

She had learned to deal with the flashes and bangs of combat. She knew how to block them out. People, however, always seemed to catch her off-guard in that arena, much to her chagrin, and Kai’ri and Constance were, as a pair, far and away the worst offenders.

Opting for a brief glance to how things were progressing with the current situation elsewhere, she watched her younger brother dash into a fresh crowd of revenants, exchanging the increased speed of Tiger Form for the preternatural evasion of Cicada Form as he struck and wove through the cluster, avoiding hits left and right if only by the same distance as the breadth of a single hair. His bangles afforded his fists the extra boost of magic that he needed to really make his hits count against these spectral foes, and his anklets did the same for his legs—though kicking was more rarely used when the similarly black-haired mystel fought—and as his battle gi fluttered with the crisp snap of his motions as the pack quickly began to thin, her attention slipped from her brother, over Yasha, whose considerable prowess was obvious in the flashing and slashing of savage Skofnung, and further augmented with the sabre-toothed panther streaking through the crowd and leaving rending destruction in the beast’s wake to her colleague.

Master Noah seemed to be keeping pace for the moment, holy magic flying every which way as he supported with his limited but effective offensive repertoire wherever such aid was needed. The man, originally native to the former desert kingdom of Ravana, which had shared a border with the much larger Empire of Zanthe prior to its hostile annexation by the same, bore the dusky skin, brown hair, and honey-hued eyes of his homeland while dressing in a way that married his heritage to his role in the Magisterium’s hierarchy. The white turban, cloak, face veil, and sarouel were infrequently adorned with red jewels in which, Matoya knew, Noah secretly stored his excess magical energy when out of combat; the black metal breastplate with attached pauldrons that he wore and which left his midriff bare were of a set with his armbands and bracelets, inscribed with characters meant to revitalise him when the strain of casting began to overwhelm his somewhat lethargic constitution. They were light and thin, and would not protect him as armour might, but then again, such protection was unnecessary given his preference for fighting from the rear given how hopeless he was with weapons.

The faint yet unique sound of the footfalls of revenants caught her attention anew, and as she snapped her view from her distraction and back to her task—the irony that she had just recently chastised Constance for almost this exact lapse in focus did not escape her—she found that she did not have room to safely cast an area spell without the shockwave causing her to take damage herself, much to her immediate chagrin. She brought the scythe up in a brutal swing, bifurcating the first revenant, and then chained that into a downward diagonal swipe that cut the next one and gave her an opening to cut open her palm on the blade.

Using the freshly drawn blood as a component in casting, and with the knowledge that she could get only a certain number of casts off before being left at death’s door from using spellcraft in this way, that number being determined by the power of the spell itself, she decided to forego pentacasting Fira, and instead opted to triplecast Firaja. Drawing on her life force through the medium of her blood and converting it into sufficient quintessence to be able to afford to not spend time invoking the sorcery, three violent conflagrations erupted into existence. As they snapped into place, the shockwave of air was powerful enough to knock Matoya cleanly off of her feet given her suddenly anaemic state, and the flash of light was enough to leave afterimages seared into her eyelids for a few moments, her ears perceiving only the high-pitched whine left in the impact’s wake.

Incapacitated in such a way, Matoya could not hear the thumping at the other end of the corridor, nor hear as it picked up speed into a charge; yet, she could feel it with her hand against the ground as it was, and her doubled vision snapped into place just in time for a massive shadow to come ploughing through the residual flames.

That was a calculated risk, thought Matoya, dully and addled as though caught in the throes of mild delirium. However, I do not recall being quite this bad at maths…

This beast, a hulking horror, was a slavering, hunched, bestial giant of a thing, bones gouging themselves through green, necrotic flesh to form a sort of pseudo-reptilian crest. It was a warped thing, a mockery of a corpse animated through formless malice and mindless hate, driven likewise by unnatural savagery, and entirely deaf to danger or reason. And its beady black eyes, rheumy with putrescent grey mucus, possessed of monstrous sight though clouded with blindness and cataracts, fixed themselves on her with a predator’s focus. The creature brandished a crude spear, a long shaft of bone sharpened to a wicked point, and Matoya made to brace herself for the sensation of it tearing through her flesh and organs.

“HYAH!”

A flash and a flutter of fabric, and she was suddenly looking at Constance’s back, the red mage’s enhancer diverting the crude spear off course as she thrust and slashed at the sickly green flesh of the undead creature. The sword scored glancing hits or was simply stopped, hitting the deceptively tough carapace formed by congealed and semi-petrified pus around the soft, moist skin, weakened and eaten through with rot and disease; but Constance seemed undeterred, standing firm against the creature even as the room seemed to stretch, the display growing more and more distant. Quickly, Matoya realised she must have been dragged away from the danger zone, a suspicion that was confirmed as she observed Constance’s motions becoming less and less restricted in tandem with the distance they gained. The strong grip and lack of claws must have been Yasha, she surmised, and in short order, Noah came into view, his brow creased and furrowed in worry as his veil puffed in the way she had come to recognise as him casting a spell.

Matoya’s view, however, remained transfixed on Constance, who flipped back to gain distance, and then gestured with a flourish as dozens of streams of blue-white magic formed dozens of coils and helices as they descended to the ground, consuming the shambling abomination in a column of vibrant holy light. The column burned, immolating the creature in purifying divinity, before collapsing into itself and dissipating to leave behind a scoured-clean skeleton, yellowed with age and bleached sterile. The skeleton collapsed, and then began to scatter into dust and ash, leaving Constance breathing with visible effort even as Matoya’s treacherous awareness began to slip from her grasp.

It was incredibly rare to find even the barest semblance of security so far down here in the winding halls of the Necropolis, but hulking horrors and their contemporaries amongst the unliving were not so common down here, at least not this far removed from the deepest parts of the underground labyrinth; thus, with the destruction of that particular member of the ranks of the living dead, there was a lull in the seething tides of revenants. This was fortuitous for multiple reasons, not the least of which being Matoya’s continued state of incapacitation.

Constance had originally answered the summons for members of a new adventuring company by the name of the Red Branch on account of the fact that the person who had arranged the posting purported to hold the rank of master in the Magisterium of Sosaria. The Magisterium, fabled far and wide as the greatest repository of knowledge concerning the mystic arts the world over, had such pull with name alone that anyone brazen enough to claim to be associated with them was either speaking true, or would at least be entertaining to watch crash and burn. The former had proven true, of course, but at the time, she found she no longer cared for such things in the wake of the vision upon whom she had for the first time laid eyes.

Master Matoya of the Coven of the Black had been her name—a mystel, her long, thick, luxurious hair the most alluring shade of blue-black, framing a heart-shaped face with features equal parts sullen and delicate, and skin like flawless alabaster. Her sultry, half-lidded tyrian eyes seized as a fist around Constance’s heart when first they fell upon her, and her ever-so-slightly thin lips curling into a smirk set it to racing anew. When Constance imagined her voice, it was the suggestive yet ethereal whisper of a maiden in a song, virtuous and pure of heart. Arrested, Constance sped to sit before her, just barely remembering her courtesies in the presence of the white-clad man she had come to know as Master Noah, Master Matoya’s classmate, colleague, and fairweather rival—and deserving of every one of those titles besides—before finally alighting upon the seat she couldn’t remember in the inn they never visited again.

Needless to say, many of Constance’s initial tentative assumptions were dashed in short order and quick succession. Master Matoya’s voice, while melodious and wonderful like birdsong, was tempered with a sharp tongue and cutting tones, with exacting expectations and what had first seemed to be a fixation on precision. The gleaming bronze circlet that sat upon her head, dipping beneath the twintails part of her hair was styled into while the remainder cascaded down her back, and never coming into contact with the feline ears from which sparse jewelry dangled, was but one part of a grander outfit that was indecent by at least the standards with which Constance was familiar. The transparent black bodysuit was replete with a banded brassiere and ornamental loincloth, covered with a cloak and adorned with bands of gold and bronze so terrifically foreign that they screamed the Mysidian origins of this woman. Discreet inquiry had informed her of the reputation of the Sorceress Matoya, Goddess of Destruction, in whose painstaking likeness the mystel black mage was attired, but at the time, it had thrown Constance off balance, leaving the initial impression she made somewhat less than wholly positive.

Master Matoya had a magnificent presence to her, subtly domineering yet absolute, that had cowed the red mage rather quickly; Constance had since earned her place in the Red Branch many times over, at least according to her other compatriots, and yet despite every appeal and attempt to win over the brilliant woman with whom she was infatuated, her platonic and proper overtures were promptly and invariably rebuffed. Begrudging acceptance, she had believed, was the best she could achieve, and she dared to say had—Constance had travelled far and wide in the course of her apprenticeship to the red mage Rainemard, and had found that there were many languages that sounded harsh, aggressive, or abrasive until one took the time to learn it, and she saw Matoya’s style of communication as little different. Yet, when she saw the woman with whom she was infatuated knocked flat, weakened and dripping blood, all thoughts of friendship and romance fell away, leaving her with only the irrepressible urge to save her.

This she had done, yet she was left to worry whether they had been too late, or if their means had been insufficient.

“Esuna…”

At the last spell to leave Master Noah’s lips rang out in the air, the somnolent breaths coming from the mystel’s prone form expanded into a deep, rapid inhale, akin to the sort of desperate attempts at respiration that followed emergence from a protracted period spent submerged. Alike in such a way were too her coughs, as though attempting to dislodge something in her throat as vivid tyrian snapped open to blink away fugue, so as to better observe the world around her.

Constance’s heart soared in her chest, euphoria intertwining with relief to form a heady liqueur. She had not been too late—Master Matoya could yet draw breath, remaining still within the mortal coil. “Matoya—!”

The wonder in the mystel black mage’s eyes was a sight to behold for the few seconds it lasted; then her entire visage locked down, each element and feature snapping back into its familiar place. “I fail to see how you could be under the impression that I have been robbed of my auditory faculties, Constance.”

“You almost died… I was almost too slow…”

“Well, I didn’t, and you weren’t. Honestly, it may simply be prudent for me to withhold my gratitude if you are as set on drowning yourself in useless self-recrimination as you seem to be,” Matoya snapped, her tongue lashing like a scourge. “There is little and less of worth to be gained through rumination on ‘might-have-beens,’ and what items of infinitesimal value could conceivably be unearthed through such an exercise are not only vastly outweighed by the incurred costs, but also easily obtainable through other, less gormless means.”

Tears blurred Constance’s eyes as she lurched forward and buried her face into Matoya’s stiff shoulder, her arms wrapping around the other woman’s rigid posture.

“And now she’s simpering and weeping. Brilliant,” the black mage sighed. Then she turned her gaze, mercifully, away from Constance, and to her colleague. “Well? Are you all so disposed to uselessness at the moment? We have aught to be about, lest my memory betrays me.”

“Contracted to hunt down this floor’s Gravelord Servant, weren’t we?” Yasha piped up, the first words she had spoken that were not commands to one of her beasts—the tattoo in which Siravarde resided having resumed its place on her shoulder now that the creature was no longer needed—in some time. “Can’t have been as easy as that.”

“You have a point there,” replied Matoya.

Constance had had no idea of the subjects they discussed until her first delve with the Red Branch. Xarcabard had been built as a necropolis, according to Master Noah, who between the two of them was the only one willing to freely speak on the subject in any detail. Built at the command of Achren, one of the rulers of ancient Zilart, whose vanity led to her desiring immortality, the purpose of the necropolis was to contain the power of Arawn the Gravelord, the Elder God of Death, enslaving them to the will of the queen.

According to the bits and pieces that had since been recovered, Achren’s plans had been folly, as over years and decades of containment and isolation, the powers of Death had grown inward, snarled, malicious, corrupted, and mad, metastasising like a cancer before, like a pustulent miasma, it suddenly overflowed the bounds of its containment, the energy staining the halls and turning the city into what amounted to a great incomprehensible labyrinth, from which were born the horrors of living death that stalked its corridors. The necropolis, then, boasted a number of beings beyond the unliving nightmares that wandered mindlessly, with wills and malice of their own, and strength almost beyond reckoning, wielding fragments and twisted refractions of Arawn’s power and driven by the deity’s eldritch madness. They were the Gravelord Servants, and only once they were vanquished would the stain on the walls and corridors, ever-shifting in configuration, space, and time, be free of the corruption and thus be safe for archaeologists to delve in the wake of the contracted adventurers, seeking to learn of the follies of ancient Zilart.

And that was the quarry they had been sent down here to hunt and exterminate.

Constance took a deep breath and composed herself, doing her utmost to set her face in a facsimile of Master Matoya’s ineffable poise. She by no means succeeded, but it got her into a position where she could contribute. Kai’ri and Master Noah were two of a kind in their devotion to their respective crafts in combination with their total lack of prowess when it came to strategy, or indeed most varieties of planning that did not immediately relate to their vocations. Yasha was excellent when it came to logistics, and Matoya was wonderful when it came to execution of strategies, but she lacked what Constance had in spades: vision and audacity.

“The corridors and halls ought to be somewhat clear for now, but they won’t remain that way forever,” Constance posited as she drew back from her awkward embrace of Matoya. “We’ll need to be able to thread the needle on this one. But for that to work, we’ll need to know where we’re going. The Gravelord Servant is the nexus of the corruption; therefore, it stands to reason that if we figure out exactly where the greatest concentration of corruption is in our area, we can trace our way directly to it.”

“Or we could blunder our way into a massive chamber filled to bursting with revenants and other creatures, and overwhelm ourselves,” Matoya remarked.

Constance shook her head; she would not be deterred. “The Gravelord Servant ought to be greater in terms of corruption than the sum of its parts. Otherwise, killing it wouldn’t dispel the corruption—the nexus would conceivably just latch onto the next greatest source…”

“That is a ridiculous line of logic,” spat the black mage.

“Do you have a better idea of how to get at this thing?!” Constance snapped back. Patient and gregarious though she was, even she had her limits. “It’s a risk we’re taking here, but it’s the best shot we have. We’re too deep in, now—what lies behind us will be much more dangerous than what lies before us, unless we can kill this thing. The only way out is straight ahead.”

Matoya scoffed with derision, looking away disdainfully, but Constance didn’t miss that flash of hesitant assent coupled with grudging respect that flickered in her eyes before they escaped her view. She had her, and the mystel knew it.

“So what do you propose?” came Master Noah’s voice, unerringly calm, soothing, and soft-spoken. “How do we find this point of greatest concentration?”

“The space the labyrinth exists in is interstitial, yes?” Constance asked.

“Yes,” Master Noah confirmed through mild confusion.

“So the physical composition of this place changes from moment to moment. Sending bodies through the corridors would be a waste of time and effort. But the energy composition of an interstitial space remains consistent—more consistent, even, than that of a non-interstitial space. The line that must be toed in order to maintain interstitial status is razor-thin, after all; any deviation will result in the space falling permanently into one state or the other,” she continued.

“And how did you learn of this?” Matoya asked, genuine surprise and curiosity resting rather obviously beneath her veil of dismissal. “It sounds like an awful lot of speculation.”

“It’s not speculation,” Constance rebutted. “My teacher, Rainemard, was well-versed in such things from the days of his youth. It’s a long story I don’t have the time to tell at the moment, but in the course of my travels with him, he taught me all he knew that I could carry on his great work.”

Save for what that great work actually was… A bitter truth, but one Constance had come to accept over the years since her and her teacher’s rather abrupt parting.

“…Fine, then. Assuming this is accurate, how does that help us right now?” asked the black mage, her tone more polite by far, which was saying something.

“It is rumoured that students of the Magisterium are supplied with methods to determine the composition of mana in the world around them,” the red mage replied, a statement that was actually a prompt seeking either confirmation or denial.

“That’s not actually true,” Master Noah said gently.

“…Oh…” Constance sighed, head hanging.

“We can determine the composition of quintessence in the world around us,” Matoya piped up. “This pseudo-intellectual nonsense you Deisti apply to your nomenclature has no foundation in the storied history of academic rigour the Magisterium represents.”

Sometimes it was easy to forget that the two Masters were relentless pedants. They seemed to always choose the absolute worst times to remind her of this tendency they shared. “…The generalisation of the inhabitants of an entire continent aside, if you can take the measure of the quintessence around us, it should contain the very elements we’re looking for a concentration of. From that, you pulse your energies and read the findings as they bounce off of the magic you’re looking for and return to you. Like echolocation.”

“Pulsing energies…?” Master Noah inquired, more perplexed than ever.

Constance felt the rising tide of incredulity pull her under. “You can’t…send out your energy in a pulse?”

“Of course we can’t!” Matoya spat.

“Then…how do you find your way through tunnels and such in total darkness?!” the red mage asked, shocked and mildly appalled.

“We use light spells.”

“Like civilised people!”

Oh Hells… “Right then. This will be something of a crash course, then. You can’t always use light spells, after all—in many situations, they’ll give away your position long before you can gain your bearings to any meaningful extent. The pulsing of your energy isn’t a ma—quintessence technique… How do you people distinguish od from quintessence, anyways?”

“Animancy is strictly forbidden under the laws of the Magisterium.”

“Well, that answers that question,” Constance sighed. “Look, od, or rather aura, isn’t animancy by any means. It’s a manipulation of your own inner energies radiating from your soul, and it does not affect the nature of the soul itself to any appreciable extent.”

“By using those energies, you consume them through conversion, thus diminishing them, which the Magisterium includes in how it defines manipulation of the nature of the soul,” Master Noah explained slowly, as though speaking to a small child.

“Which is why you regenerate them through breathing!” Constance exclaimed. “Honestly! How could you so thoroughly condemn a discipline about which you clearly know nothing?! Did you come to Deist to learn, like you said you did, or did you actually come here to try to explain to the ‘yokels’ how everything they’re doing is wrong and inferior to the enlightened Sosarian method?!”

Noah looked duly chastised, but Matoya looked livid.

“That’s rich coming from you!” Matoya spat. “It must be so easy, learning a handful of glorified parlour tricks and having the sheer unmitigated gall to declare yourself a mage, while the rest of us toiled and bled through year after year of our lives in pursuit of what you so flippantly bandy about and flout in our faces, while you go about thinking your infantile understanding of the arts you treat with such irreverence amounts to mastery!”

Constance flinched. This was a side of Matoya she had never seen before, and it was angry and vitriolic in ways that far transgressed even the small hints her sharp tongue and cutting tones had previously revealed. “I…”

“Matoya,” Noah said firmly. “You go too far.”

“How can you stand it, Noah?! We’ve worked at this our entire lives! What right does she have to be allowed the dangerous ignorance of thinking she can safely prance into the domain of what we had to be exiled to this backwater in order to be even possibly considered worthy of beginning to learn?!” Matoya cried, rounding on her classmate. “Where’s your pride?! How can you sit here and pretend this…vapid mockery of our discipline can be allowed to continue transgressing so freely?!”

“Because I don’t know anything about her circumstance, nor really the circumstances around us—and neither do you!” Noah snapped, in an outburst of sudden intensity that shocked none more than Matoya. “We came here to learn, Matoya! Believing there is nothing of value here, no wisdom of any sort, to be learned of or from in Deist and dismissing all discrepancy out of hand in such a fashion—as you have been time and time again since we landed here—is tantamount to doubting the Archmagister’s wisdom in sending us here! Is that what you are saying?! Do you profess your judgement to be superior to that of Archmagister Myrddin? Is that what you are saying, Master Matoya?!”

“Noah, what…?!”

“Because if that is the case,” continued the white mage, undeterred, “then perhaps it is not truly the native whose magical discipline is so thoroughly different from what we have been taught on a fundamental level who is irreverently and flippantly spitting in the face of the order of the Magisterium! And to think you once professed to have all the wisdom of a sage…don’t make me laugh! Of all of us, you are the one most apt to bear the title of fool! Followed in short order by myself!

“I must apologise for my untoward behaviour regarding you, Constance,” said Noah, switching his frustrated, irritated gaze from Matoya and softening it with genuine contrition as he looked upon the red mage with a half-bow. “It was improper of me to dismiss you so even in the confines of my own mind, and it was further unbecoming of a master of the Way of the White to stand by as my colleague freely gave voice to my mind’s darker whispers. I hope you can forgive me.”

“I don’t need your apology, and you don’t need my forgiveness,” Constance replied with a small shake of her head. “Make no mistake—I have nothing but the utmost respect for the deep and profound knowledge both of you possess regarding your crafts. My own training and methods preclude that level of specific expertise, and to be sure, I would be at an immense disadvantage without both of your considerable power to aid where I am lacking. I ask only that my knowledge, which is no less useful than your own, not be denied or derided. I have not spent time in the storied halls of the Astrian Citadel, I shall grant you; but there is more than one method of learning magic, and I possess experience and knowledge in areas your diligent and exhaustive expertise may not have allowed you the time or means to study.”

“…So, now that that unpleasantness is over,” Kai’ri butted in, eager as always, but uncharacteristically trepidatious all the same. “You got a cool trick you wanna show us?”

“Yes, I do, now that we’re circling back to the subject,” Constance sighed, the wind suddenly very much extracted from her sails. “Okay, first and foremost, while there are many, many methods of using aura, divided into three major categories, the category with which we are principally concerned is manipulation. The simplest way to go about this is with breathing, as it is through a specific method of controlling the breath that one achieves the oldest and most reliable way to regenerate od in a pinch. It will naturally regenerate over time through the consumption of food and drink, and resting the body, but in combat or a similar high-pressure situation, there isn’t time. But first you have to become aware of your aura if you’re going to use it through a metamorphosis called, rather unimaginatively, ‘awakening,’ and that’s usually either through training and meditation over the course of years we don’t have, or more abruptly through what we call ‘soul resonance.’ It’s a method that relies on tuning your aura to a sympathetic frequency, causing excitation in the subject’s aura that causes it to overflow its natural boundaries in an attempt to repel the foreign energy. It’s incredibly dangerous, of course, because it relies on the foreign aura being repelled in order for the one being awoken to the discipline to suffer no ill effects, of which death is far from the most severe possible, and any iota of malice or ill intent that slips from the soul through the od and into the aura can have dire consequences.

“Fortunately, one of the foundational principles of red magic is the separation of benign and malevolent energies into separate ‘containers’ of aura, so that one set of energies will not interfere with the other and cause the whole thing to snarl something fierce. This is how, incidentally, we cast black and white magics in succession, but as the process of containment subtly affects the energies and causes the spells to yield slightly different results—in a very esoteric, word-salad manner—from normal spells, a prefix is applied to denote that,” Constance said, before looking up and realising from Master Noah’s carefully patient expression that she had begun to ramble, thus changing tack with a flush. “The point is… Well, I suppose it would be easier to show you. Remove your turban, if you please.”

Constance scrutinised the Sosarian white mage’s form for a few moments, taking the duration of him removing his turban to regulate her breathing into the proper rhythm before carefully pushing aura into her eyes. She was an amateur in this area, admittedly—but she knew enough to know she could not afford to be even slightly off-target. This done, she took one hand, pressing her index and middle fingers together, and shoved more and more aura into them until they started sparking with golden energy like flickers of lightning. Taking one more series of breaths to steel her nerves, she drove the clasped fingers into the crown of Noah’s head.

She felt her nerves begin to relax in relief as she felt the aura flow through Noah’s head in exactly the correct manner, and then felt his own rising up to repel it back into her. Noah gasped, the shock driving every bit of breath out of his lungs as instinct rose within him—much more strongly than she had expected, if truth be told, though admittedly, a spawn endowed with a talent for white magic was far from the strangest thing she had ever encountered—and corrected his breathing into a rhythmic sequence that would allow him to sustain his new aura reserves, though it required far more expertise and far greater mastery than she possessed to optimise it so that he could accomplish the great feats of stories, like the junctioning of a Guardian Force through manifestation. When his breathing stabilised and the light of his aura, pure white, began to rise from him, she nodded, though the notes of bright blue and green she saw flickering there so quickly she was unsure whether she truly saw them or was simply experiencing hallucinations brought on by her expectation for something to go wrong, provoked by her relative inexperience, were, despite herself, quite concerning.

“There. Your aura should reinforce your durability greatly and provide you with some passive healing, though given how relatively weak it is due to your total lack of training with it, I wouldn’t rely on it in a situation where your back’s to the wall,” Constance explained with perhaps a few more hand gestures than were strictly necessary. “But more importantly, you can throw off weak waves of excess energy, and if you couple it with your analysis ability you learned in the Magisterium, you should be able to attune outgoing waves of aura to the exact energy we’re looking for. You tune it, throw it out, and it meets its like; like attracts and then repels like, and its resistance to the energy given it’s saturated will throw your aura wave back to you with more energy than it came out of you with, allowing you to know where the greatest concentration of it is by working backwards and using deductive reasoning.”

A sharp gasp drew Constance’s attention to Kai’ri, who, if Constance was more fanciful, she would swear had actual stars sparkling brilliantly in his eyes. “That sounds so cool!”

“I…suppose it is? Cool, I mean?” Constance replied, hesitant. She slid her gaze sideways to where Matoya stared at them, stock-still with an inscrutable, stony expression, but obviously seething—Kai’ri was an adult in mystel reckoning, as far as Constance knew, but by the same token, he was still Matoya’s younger sibling, and she would have preferred to avoid conflict with the black mage if at all possible; even now knowing that conflict appeared inevitable, she wanted to avoid it to whatever extent was possible. But beyond generalised flaring anger in her eyes, she seemed to not specifically object to the course of action Constance was very obviously about to propose. “I could do the same sort of thing for you, if you wish?”

“Could you really?! Please do!” cried the mystel, so enthusiastic about the idea that Constance was somewhat taken aback. “Holy fuck, this is gonna be so cool!”

The red mage took a few controlled breaths to build up enough aura to do this again, forcing it to pool to the same extent as before at the tips of her fingers. Then she pushed more into her eyes, locating the point she wanted and zeroing in on it. “Very well. I’m going to need you to hold very still. I’m not going to hurt you, but if you dodge and throw me off even slightly, the consequences…will likely be very costly.”

Kai’ri nodded eagerly, and then, realising what he had just been told, stilled until he could compete with a statue. At the exact moment she had her target, she struck forth, quick as an adder, plunging her fingers with their surging aura into the brawler’s third eye.

There was a momentary flash, and then Constance was physically blown back, knocked prone by the shockwave. She stared, astonished, and then lifted her hand to her face to see that her fingers were smoking.

“Well? How’d it go? Did it work?” he asked in quick succession, drawing Constance’s attention back to him. His ears were perked up in excitement and anticipation, and his eyes were brighter than ever—but what was even clearer to Constance’s enhanced sight was the almost bestial white aura that shot forth from him with a force that was nothing short of monstrous.

“I’ll say,” Constance exclaimed breathlessly.

“Alright!” Kai’ri cried, pumping his fist in the air. “Be able to bust so many more heads with this aura stuff!”

“Yasha, would you also like…”

“No need,” said the highlander, her tone brusque and her words clipped, as always. “My people awaken as a rite of passage. Only those who can use this ‘aura’, as you call it, can be considered adults, and thus able to contribute.”

“But I don’t see any aura coming from you…” the red mage remarked gently.

Yasha shrugged, stoic as always. “What you do or don’t see is no concern of mine, so long as it doesn’t end with any of us dead. But if you must know, the skill for which I was cast out is marked on my skin. Once these were living, breathing beasts, knowing hunger and hunt, to prey or to be preyed upon. I took that from them, and now by my aura they are given form and life. And to it are they shackled—disrupting the flow of life and death, the crime for which I was exiled.”

“…So those markings on your body…they’re…”

“They are the creatures themselves, yes,” Yasha finished with a grim twist at the corner of her mouth. “We honour the spirit of a great beast with a totem, a beacon by which they might find their way through the murky fog of the Pale Lands beyond life. But such a thing is not meant to be made of living flesh, and goes against tribal law, for often it ends in the death of the soul of the beast and the death of the soul of the criminal in one go. I alone was strong enough to survive, and for that crime I was an abomination and forsaken to the wilds. It was justice. Not that I care.”

“Very well,” Constance sighed. She glanced at Matoya, but the black mage had made her position on the procedure exceedingly clear, and so she dared not ask and risk offending her further. It was not her intention, after all, to come to blows down here, of all places. “Master Noah, have you recovered sufficiently to go about this?”

“I believe I have, yes,” replied the white mage as he finished setting his turban firmly upon his mop of long, unruly dark brown hair once more. After taking a brief moment to adjust his face veil, he stood, assisted by his staff, and walked to a wall to press a single dusky hand against it. After a few moments spent suffused with a soft verdant glow, he nodded grimly, and then pushed outwards, the aura welling up within him and then bursting out in a ring that rapidly began to expand in all directions. Moments later, the ring of white came back, staggering the white mage who was unprepared for the spectral impact. He straightened and pointed down a corridor. “I have it. This way.”

The thing that most never told of when it came to hunting a Gravelord Servant was the atmosphere, where the miasma of death and decay grew so dense this close to its local centre that every breath was a death knell, every scent a new form of mortality. The corruption was as a weight, the air heavy and clammy, every corner somehow dangerous, and every stretch oppressive in that cleithrophobic way that crypts, catacombs, and mausoleums shared, regardless of their actual size or the actual space within them. Every step was being embalmed anew—and in this way, the Red Branch knew that Constance’s unorthodox method had borne fruit, and they were drawing ever-closer to their elusive quarry. Tensions were high, and Matoya’s ill temper only ratcheted them further and further heavensward, a seething mass of energy all its own, compounding instead of negating the already sepulchral trill that skipped through the space, as though they were encroaching upon the beating heart of a great beast.

Eventually they came upon it—a massive set of heavy double doors, seemingly crafted that giants might pass through unmolested, wrought of ancient metal and embossed with twisting images of eldritch esoterica. In any other circumstance, Noah would have been overjoyed to stop and stare at the designs to puzzle out their meaning, but they were on a timer; as they grew closer to the centre, the drones moved to protect the hive. Why they had not yet been swallowed whole by a tide of living death, Noah could not begin to fathom, but this close to their destination, he could only theorise that perhaps the miasma was too thick even to spit forth its perverse puppets of rotting flesh and tormented souls, that the laws of Death here were so absolute that anything to be born from it immediately withered and perished.

The door, however, posed a problem; normally, forty adventurers divided into eight parties would spread throughout the labyrinth on a dive such as this, and at least one would bring with them a suitable living sacrifice to be slaughtered in tribute to the door, so that it would open. As they were the only five down here on this excursion—a foolish move in retrospect, a perfect example of hubris crystallised into a single moment of arrogance—they had no such tribute. Now what do we do…

“This door cannot be opened through physical force. It responds only to aura,” Constance replied, which was how Noah discovered he had spoken his misgivings aloud. He shook his head to clear the haze of fatigue that settled into his bones—he felt diminished only in a very odd way of which he had not been aware he could be depleted until just recently, which he took to mean that his aura reserves were drained despite his best efforts to keep breathing and maintain them. “Noah, you must be exhausted by now. Any aura will do, so if Kai’ri is not averse to doing the honours, I think that may well be how we get our in.”

At the prompting of the youngest of their group—Constance was a hume, and only nineteen name-days past besides—Kai’ri, the second-youngest, nodded and strode forth with a gait a few degrees too energetic to be called a swagger. Taking a deep breath, he launched both fists forward, driving a pulse of aura into the door; the golden energy surged through the channels engraved in the metal, causing a series of precious stones surreptitiously embedded therein to come alight. They flashed refulgent for a brilliant, blinding moment, and then suddenly went dim, followed in short order by the deep bass tremor of massive ancient mechanisms of antediluvian stone grinding to life.

In a flare of rust and powder, the doors ground their way open, allowing the Red Branch entry into the chamber beyond. An amphitheatre, with stairs and stone carvings that appeared to be long podia leading down to the pit in the centre, which was itself something of a stone arena. And in the centre of that arena was a black circle with a flaming red seal inscribed into it, a seal that Noah could only describe as a symbol of absolute evil.

As the party began to descend the steps, the circle came to greater infernal refulgence, a black liquid, not unlike pus in viscosity, bubbled and burbled forth; and from that forming pool rose slowly a figure, willowy and gaunt, spectral yet solid, neither masculine nor feminine and standing at twice the height of an adult male hume. Its umbral armour was an unnatural gestalt of wickedness and beauty, adorned with a multitude of spikes on its rounded pauldrons, its elbows, and its gorget, coming up like a lady’s lace collar to frame a helm that was the shape of a large egg, opalescent and yet run through with several cracks that seemed to be slowly but steadily oozing blood, old and clotted and frigid as the yawning maw of the grave. The thick, long plume that came from the top was hair of some sort, bone-white and brittle, yet still flowing and strong, gleaming with an unnatural sheen in the low light.

Whether it was standing or floating, there was no way to tell, as the grace with which it held itself was so far beyond mortal comprehension that it could have been either, or any number of other esoteric means to which they, as the living, were not privy. This grace, however, seemed to combine with unnatural speed to create a perception of jerky, rigour-bound movement akin to that of a long-dead corpse, as the head turned quick enough to snap the neck of a living creature. The eyeless gaze fell upon them.

This was the Gravelord Servant. And it was aware of their presence.

The pustulent pool of black began to churn and groan anew, and from it burst a sword that continued to grow and grow until it stood at just above the level of the creature’s waist, a curved single-edged slash of silver moonlight that was as elegant as it was menacing. Its size was already over that of a man, and its wicked edge shone with a spectral glint that seemed to present in a flash a looking-glass view of the pale mists that churned beyond the mortal coil; its guard, such as it was, seemed to be comprised of bladed silver feathers, and the black leather that bound its hilt seemed to suck in a portion of whatever light collided with it. The Gravelord Servant reached forth with its clawed gauntlet of a hand, wrapping the deathly talons about the weapon, and then pulled it free, slashing it through the air, to ring out with the keening wail of tormented, trapped souls, of a number beyond counting, long past where the value of the suffering dead had exceeded the ability of any mortal to even comprehend.

The first attack snapped forth with such speed that Noah knew he should not have been able to perceive anything beyond the end of his own life; yet the vertical wave of shrieking moonlight that reaped the distance missed him, his instincts kicking in and throwing him wide of the blow with a celerity he had not known himself to possess.

Kai’ri’s monstrous aura redoubled with gleeful bloodlust, the song of joyous carnage emboldening Noah, and indeed the other members of the Red Branch—even Matoya, indignant though she was to realise it—as he launched himself forth into a headlong charging tackle at the foe, their quarry. Further waves of crashing moonlight came screaming at him, but with a harsh buzz, he flickered out of the way, evading almost effortlessly and without losing any speed.

Directly behind him in short order, then, came Yasha. Wolves and wildcats, bears and boars—all manner of belligerent battle-beast peeled themselves from her skin in molten shadow and frozen light, and with each one gone, her aura roared to life, doubling with each beast torn free until it shone brilliantly as a blazing candle in the darkness, beating back the Gravelord Servant’s pale shroud of unending night. Skofnung leapt to her hand, and as she roared, the bestial ferocity of her soul, born of blood, took on an animal aspect on the buzzing, flickering charge, rushing headlong into harming and hewing. Flames and holy light jumped forth at each gesture Constance executed with a flourish, supporting from afar and mixing in enhancing spells when she could, while the totem beasts spread wide and began launching themselves at the foe, striking to kill.

The Gravelord Servant reacted immediately. The waves it cast forth with each swing of its moonlit sword became horizontal, sweeping strikes that wreaked further destruction about the arena in a bid to hit Noah’s comrades. Kai’ri and Yasha, however, used this flickering technique to move through the attacks, as though they had not simply traversed the intervening distance with a Blink, and instead skipped ahead in closing. The diagonal waves that came next had similar results, until the apian haze of buzzing gave way to a clash of metal against metal.

The giant longsword, Skofnung, had met the Gravelord Servant’s unliving blade.

With one hand, the Gravelord Servant held the highlander’s weapon at bay in a parry; and with its other, it cast a black liquid like some mixture of blood and pus in a wide arcing spray of the area. Kai’ri gained some of the distance he had sought to close in coming in from the rear while Yasha held the front, and the reason became clear: the droplets of liquid hung in the air, growing and widening until gouts of black flame hung suspended, levitating in place. Noah immediately knew, then, that the flames would erupt if Kai’ri got too close, and whatever method Kai’ri had used to close the distance initially was not one in which he had sufficient confidence to skip ahead back into melee range as he had attempted initially.

“Firaja!”

Matoya’s spell flew forth, a quartet of twisting tongues sailing into the midst and igniting in a conflagration that caused the traps to rupture like a boil, spitting forth cursed fire in all directions in a chain reaction that forced Kai’ri to gain greater distance with yet another sharp flicker and staccato buzz in order to escape harm.

As for Noah himself, he was revitalised; it was as though the three other active auras in the fight roused his own in a manner of revivification he had never before experienced, not like this—like a talented jongleur striking up a song in a tavern and causing the voices of all and sundry to rise and lend their strength, he had swigged the hearty brew of battle, and before he knew it, he was moving, the whispered words of a spell on his lips as a ball of light coalesced in his grasp. “Diaja!”

He thrust out his hand, and the ball shone forth into a beam of blinding brilliance, blue-white light magic striking the Gravelord Servant in the shoulder with such power that the corrupt creature recoiled with an eerie, subsonic screech that he had no doubt could bloody his ears and wrench free his grip on consciousness—and possibly sanity—if he did not remain wary. Emboldened by this new need for haste, Noah saw fit to change his strategy; he moved quickly to a new position to avoid the reprisal, and began casting anew.

The spell he was going to attempt required quite a bit of power—but the drain Diaja had put on his reserves was negligible now, and so he saw fit to begin to unload his most powerful spells in quick succession.

“Behold, the true power of the Way of the White!” Noah exclaimed, and then thrust forth with the tip of his staff, both hands secured to its shaft. “Holy!”

A massive ball of white-blue energy burst forth from a single mote, radiating a sequence of six other, smaller energy balls that orbited it. Then they descended, spinning around themselves to the ground, and once they touched the floor, the largest orb poured a column of divine light down onto the Gravelord Servant.

The creature shrieked, but was undeterred; thankfully, Noah felt about as drained as he usually felt when casting one of his normal spells, and thus could do this almost literally all day. Opening his inner gate ever further, he felt the elemental light flow through him more and more, and then cried out again, “Holy!”

Yasha by this point had disengaged, and she began to whale away full force at the Gravelord Servant’s defence with a potent, deadly mixture of ferocious savagery and predatory precision. Skofnung clanged and clashed away, so fast it was an indecipherable blur, giving off streamers of light and sound that filled the area with the sharp, igneous odour of ozone. The sparks that came from her turned fully into forks of golden lightning, while the beasts darted in and out, dashing themselves against the creature’s defence continually, to no avail.

Then, in the middle of a slash, Yasha took her hand from the hilt and launched it into the Gravelord Servant’s helm, her fist crackling with aura as she drove it with punishing force into the opalescent substance that left a sizeable crater—a crater which would have heralded a major, possibly fatal, head injury in nearly anything living. But what came out were spurts of coagulated, cold blood, congealed and jellied to a disgusting extent.

Still, the monster was stunned, and Kai’ri took full advantage of the sudden opening, driving both heels into the other side of the creature’s helmet from a distant launch with nothing short of bone-shattering force. His knees curled to diffuse the impact on his legs, and then sprung free to leap back to the ground, sliding into a crater for a moment before launching himself back into combat with a jubilant war-cry.

“Flare!”

From a single point, a multicoloured ball of pure, unaspected destructive energy erupted into existence in the space occupied by the Gravelord Servant’s chest, lashed about by gale-force winds of displaced and then collapsing air. However, due to the inherent durability of both parties within range coupled with their aura reserves, they managed to withstand the force to keep the pressure upon the Gravelord Servant.

But the creature was crafty.

Tanking several devastating hits from both of its assailants, while also withstanding the withering onslaught of Flare, Verflare, Holy, and Verholy, cast one after another with no breaks in between, it swung its blade in a devastating, sweeping arc, the energy radiating from it in another lunar wave that blew both Kai’ri and Yasha away from it as it cut into them and sent them flying. Then the creature’s armour churned and bubbled as monstrosities fashioned from what lay beyond the boundaries of life and death pulled their way free from its form. In shape, they were medusan, with what looked to be full, spherical orbs fused onto the tops of their bells, and at the end of their tentacles were what seemed to be blades, which did not seem to stymie them as they burst forth like spores off of a fungal fruit and into the air, riding their momentum into being scattered around the room. Then a series of thicker, bony growths emerged from their undersides, a series of three limbs each, curled around each other, that began to glow as energy coalesced in the hollow between them, before spitting forth in a shower of beams of sterile blue destructive light.

The cascade of beams set all of them capable of doing so to scatter; Noah, however, saw that Kai’ri and Yasha were struggling to move, and so dashed towards them, his every thought consumed by the single-minded need to be there. But he was so slow—too slow.

“Shellja!” he cried in desperation, but even as he saw the green tetragons forming into an interlocking array around them both, he knew deep within himself that the measure would be insufficient. He needed to be there. He needed to be.

And then, in a flash, it came to him. With a harsh buzz, reality skipped forward, and there he was, standing before them.

He had no time to be bewildered, and nor was he currently that way inclined. Instead, he turned with a flourish, and cast, “Manawall!”

The bulwark of interlocking pink hexagons unfolded around them just in time to catch a full array of beams dead-on, holding strong and steady against the withering onslaught. The barrier did not fracture, nor did it show any sign of strain, which amazed Noah, that his spellcraft could have become this much more powerful simply by virtue of having his aura awakened—but the force of resisting it was physical enough that it began to push him back.

He set his heels, digging them into the stone beneath as they were indeed pushed there, his aura causing the surface and not his bones to give way, but it still made him clench his jaw and grit his teeth, struggle against the incoming force, and, not for the first time, regret never attempting to amend his physical weakness.

“Vercura!”

Never before had Noah been quite so enthused to hear Constance’s voice.

“Master Noah! Are you alright?!”

“Constance! Got here in just the nick of time!” Noah ground out, his voice laboured with the strain of resistance. “Any bright ideas?!”

“Uh…” Constance stalled, and Noah could almost hear the gears turning in her mind. “I might have a few, yeah!”

“Excellent! I’ll follow your lead! Where’s Matoya?!”

“Hidden! She lost consciousness after her last cast of Flare!” Constance called, struggling to be heard over the shrieking of the light beam splashing against his shield. “I made sure she was pulled to safety, and then ran over here!”

“She lost consciousness?!”

“Magical exhaustion!”

Magical exhaustion. The very same thing Noah should at the moment be affected by, after casting so many powerful spells in quick succession—Matoya had been famous for her consistent ability to outlast him in terms of pure spellcasting endurance—and was only at the moment spared by the activation of his aura. A process to which Matoya had flatly refused to subject herself. Just how powerful is aura?!

“Right! What do you need?!”

“There’s a lot of magic gathering within the Gravelord Servant! My guess is that it’s using these rovers to try and keep us off of it while it casts a spell or something! We don’t want to let that happen!” Constance began. “If we want to get anywhere, we have to destroy the fliers that are pelting us, and then vanquish our target before it manages to do whatever it’s trying to keep us from preventing it from doing! Kai’ri! Yasha! If I cover you, can you manage to take them out?! We’re in desperate need of some breathing room here!”

“On it!” Kai’ri called back, while Yasha did not verbally respond, and instead leapt right into action while her totem beasts seemed to double back, going from passively evading the attacks to actively pursuing the roving airborne nodes. Skofnung flashed, and then the wet, noxious sound of rot bursting at the pressure of a blade followed. By the time Noah thought to look, Yasha was already a blur in motion, shooting off to the nearest active flier. Kai’ri, in blitzing from point to point around the chamber with the enhanced speed that came with the skipping technique, was in many ways much the same, the inflexible linearity of mankind peeling back in the face of the hunter-killer instincts that seemed to surge forth from him with far greater potency than Noah had ever seen in him before. It was subtle, the way a punch progressively grew closer to the savage swipe of a clawed predator, the way his grace seemed not quite human, the way the joyous smile on his face turned from some semblance of boyish innocence to invigorated intoxication—and as he looked back to see Yasha flickering and skipping forward, back, any which way, with entrancing ease, he wondered at how much Yasha must have been holding back around them.

Both he and Matoya had doubted the highland tribesmen when they told her tale, but for the first time, he believed he was beholding the einheri by whose merciless and peerless martial skill had the jötunn Hroðulf been bested and slain in holmgang. And suddenly he was struck by the notion that the tale in the telling could not compare to the truth he now beheld.

“Once we’re clear, you’ll drop the spell, and we’ll pour as many powerful spells onto this monster as we possibly can!” Constance called. Noah nodded, feeling the force exerted against the shield progressively diminish, and began to call to mind the strongest spells he knew. The Way of the White possessed few offensive options, but the ones they did have could be incredibly powerful in the right hands, and could be further augmented, albeit at a price. Even as he considered, however, Constance was thinking ahead. “Dualcast: Slow! Addle! Dualcast: Virus! Wither!”

The enfeebling spells, a mixture of orange, yellow, rose, and dark magenta bolts leaping forth in quick succession to firmly hamper the Gravelord Servant, took full hold, retarding its movement and spellcasting, while also diminishing its magical and martial power both. Their window to burn this creature down had just dilated from the strict duration it had been to something with a bit more of a margin for error. Finally, the last of the motes went down a few seconds later, and thus relieved, he looked within himself and envisioned a gear turning, clicking from rest and into full phase. Afflatus Misery, it was called, one of the most closely-guarded secrets of the Way of the White together with its opposite, Afflatus Solace—it allowed him to place a set of limitations on himself in one area to gain ludicrously increased power in the other. Both caused his spells to exhaust him twice as quickly, but granted an eightfold increase in the potency of the spells with which it was associated, while halving the potency of the spells with which it was not associated. Afflatus Misery affected the offensive spells of light magic; Afflatus Solace was concerned chiefly with the curative spells of healing magic. In the ordinary course, he could sustain neither phase for any appreciable period of time, but with the strength his awakened aura lent him, he believed it to be at last worthwhile.

“Alright, let’s try this one again, shall we?” he ground out, prying himself out of his unintentionally entrenched stance and approaching the Gravelord Servant together with those of his comrades still able to fight. The creature had manifested a kite shield from the mire out of which it had emerged while they were occupied with the light beams of death, he noted—not that it would do the wretched thing much good. But for all intents and purposes it seemed dormant, save for the truly massive quantities of quintessence it was drawing into itself—much more slowly than before, granted, and to much diminished effect, but it was still alarming.

Not for much longer, though, if he had anything to say about it.

“Holy!”

The spell took form once more, but the central orb was double the size, the satellites doubled in number, as they careened to the ground and came alight in a sustained eruption of blinding radiance. The Gravelord Servant moved, then, shrieking at a frequency they could not hear, but could very much feel rattling their bones, in what appeared to be pain. A smirk cut its way across Noah’s face, vindication swelling in his chest. “That’s right, you bastard! We’ve got you dead to rights! Now let’s see how much more pain we can draw out of you! Holy!”

Kai’ri zipped away from his position, skipping directly to the creature and beginning to systematically take it apart while its pain and its attempt to cast a spell shackled it in place, and with how it was enfeebled, it could not so much as mount a visible defence, its arms sluggish in moving into the place where Kai’ri’s blow had landed a full three seconds prior. He moved from form to form, Boar to Dragon to Tiger and back again, abandoning all pretense of protection in favour of pure violence, and it was into this that Skofnung swept in, capitalising on the opening the enfeebling spells and Noah’s unrelenting barrage of augmented Holy spells created; she was then followed by the beasts, all of which took up positions around the creature as a final precaution, an ability held in reserve for one last desperate measure in surviving by arresting the Gravelord Servant’s terrible power. Constance dualcast her strongest spells consecutively, with seemingly no end in sight, burning through her body’s supply of quintessence in the opening they had gained, to do with five what was normally a mortal struggle with forty.

It took them longer than any of them were comfortable with, but eventually, with a final dualcast Verflare and Verholy, the Gravelord Servant began to glow with crimson flame from within, shining through cracks that appeared in its armour, swelling until it exploded into a shower of multicoloured sparks that burned away the corruption all around them before dissipating into so much ash.

At that moment, they knew the Gravelord Servant was no more.

They had won.

This was not the first time Kai’ri Nhul was at a loss regarding how he could help his elder sister, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with.

The moment they had returned to Emberlet, they had split up, with Constance and Noah going to the guild to inform the contractors and receive their payment for the job, while Yasha, Kai’ri, and his sister returned home. The Rainbough was, like all the higher-end residences of Emberlet, a multi-level complex grown with magic from living wood, its entrance located high in the branches of one of Emberlet’s famous archtrees; in it, each of them possessed their own room, and it was to hers his sister had beelined the moment they got over the threshold, slamming and locking the door behind her. Half an hour had passed since then, Constance and Noah were still out and would likely be for half an hour more, and that left only Yasha and Kai’ri himself to occupy the common area’s lounge.

Yasha was good company, Kai’ri felt, and indeed, he had felt this way for some time. The highlander was quiet and did not speak much, true, but it was hardness, not gentleness, that made her quiet. She did not feel the need to fill the silence with small talk, speaking only when she felt she had something worthwhile to say, but otherwise content to leave the others to the task of discussing minutiae. In truth, Kai’ri greatly admired her, and he could not at the moment think of a time at which he had been more grateful for her inclination to silence, though he knew there must have been one at some point in the past. He could draw from the strength she silently radiated in his attempt to curb his doubts and frustrations.

The ranger was stripped down somewhat, sitting back in a sofa, barefoot and with her armour all removed, leaving a bodice made of soft black leather and grey knee-length padded breeches as her sole garments while she pulled a wet but not sopping rag out of a pail of cloying, sweet-smelling liquid by her calf and down the length of Skofnung’s blade, the repetition of the movements and Yasha’s transfixed gaze leading him to conclude that the action was perhaps meditative for her.

Kai’ri watched her motions as she did, following her attention as she thoroughly wiped down one part of the blade before moving the sword to get at the next part. It was as large as perhaps three or four arming swords laid end to end, and for each arming sword length, she moved it a bit to get at the next. More than once, he had wondered at what it would be like to wield a massive blade like Skofnung, and more than once he had decided against it, his sister’s admonitions regarding the nature of mass and rotation and torque that he barely understood still ringing in his ears. Yasha was a large woman possessing a level of physical strength that they had all viewed as monstrous even before the revelation of her aura, and her capabilities when it was fully unbound unmasked her previous feats of strength as mere pittances, parlour tricks, and very adept performance art.

He tried to maintain the stillness and peace of the moment. He really did. But the silence was deafening, and eventually he could take it no longer. “So, Yasha…”

“Mm,” came the answering grunt, the constant rhythm of wiping her blade down steady and unmoved. The flexing of her muscles seemed to make the animal effigies inscribed into her skin dance across the field of woad.

“What are you doing over there?” he asked, trying desperately to maintain some semblance of his normal cheery affect even in the face of the awkward, stress-filled tension that felt childish in the face of Yasha’s relentless stoicism.

“Cleaning.”

“Oh…”

The silence returned, yawning wide like a chasm for what felt like an eternity that seemed to reach out and swallow him whole.

“You seem surprised. Why?”

Yasha’s question startled him out of his nervous gloom. His first thought was to deny his surprise, but the highlander was giving him an out. It made sense for him to seize upon it. “It’s just…isn’t that a magic sword?”

“Skofnung is a storied blade, that is true,” Yasha allowed. “It is partly for that purpose that I challenged Hroðulf to holmgang. In his hands, it had slain four times fifty living men. In mine, it has slain four times fifty that live no more. It is the blood that its blade has spilled that gives it its magic now, for whatever magic was used in its craft.”

“So, yes?”

“In your understanding, perhaps.” The highlander fell quiet for a few moments, and Kai’ri waited until she began again, the quiet scrape of rag on metal filling the space like a pulse. “My people would not consider Skofnung to be magic in the way of yours. I have seen the magic of your people. It is bright, it is quick, and it is gaudy. Ours are the ways of the old magic, the slow accumulation of a story and the power thereby over the passage of battles and lives and deaths beyond counting. Skofnung was forged in the traditions of old, from out the flames an empty vessel newly-born, and it has supped of the fighting spirit of its previous wielder and the bloodied souls of his opponents in equal measure. But it remains a blade of iron and coal like any other, quenched in quicksilver and tempered in marrow though it was, and as such requires care like any other. Long-lived though my people’s weapons may be, they are not immortal. Nothing is. Not really.”

“Isn’t quicksilver, like…toxic?” Kai’ri asked, perplexed.

Yasha nodded. “It is quenched in madness that madness may empower it; it is tempered in death that death may it reap. It is born as it shall live, and it shall live as it shall die. Those that smith such blades have long since mastered themselves and their methods, and while there is risk and sacrifice as there are in all endeavours, it is not egregious. If a smith was required to sacrifice life and sanity that a weapon might be crafted, we would have far fewer smiths, and no weapons at all.”

“So…I guess it doesn’t take normal sword oil, huh?”

“It does not. The oil brought from caves and rendered from stone your people employ are ill-suited to this task,” she agreed. “It is a living weapon, and so living liquid does it require. It is said that every tree from which a man was hanged by their death is consecrated a sapling of the World Tree, and thus from it may its ichor be tapped. It is this sap that is used in the cleaning and maintenance of the blade.”

“That must be expensive…” he remarked.

“It is,” she answered. “But I require little, and have little taste for the creature comforts to which your people, and to some extent my own, are so wedded. My cut of our pay is more than sufficient in purchasing what I need from whom and where it may be obtained.”

“You seem…a lot more…wordy,” Kai’ri said, half a tentative observation and half an equally tentative question. “More so than usual.”

“The rest of you seem content to leave me be when our lives are not on the line,” she countered. “The outing of a warband is neither the time nor the place for one to let their tongue run amok. There are no such prohibitions, however, between battles. It is perplexing, in fact, that you all run at the mouth so when brevity is needed, and yet when such lengths are allowed and to some extent necessary, reticence becomes the norm. Perplexing, and I suppose distressing.”

The veiled reprimand, soft though it might have been, drew a wince from Kai’ri more than his sister’s cutting words ever could. “You…might have a point, there. It wasn’t always like this, you know. Noah and I still talk quite a bit, of course…”

“You are partners. It is to be expected,” Yasha interjected. “It is also not the same.”

“Yeah, I know…” He sighed. “I actually wanted to apologise.”

“Wherefore? You have done me no offence,” Yasha asked.

“I haven’t personally, no, but…” He shook his head, changing tack. “How much do you know about the mystel?”

Yasha shrugged. “Not much. I have never had cause to ask.”

“You’re not curious?”

“That is not what I am saying. I am saying that one does not catch a fish by attempting to swim more swiftly.”

Kai’ri chuckled. “Yeah, I guess that’s fair. How do I put this…

“My surname is Nhul, and Master Matoya’s my sister. But the reason why our names aren’t remotely similar is because she threw hers away. At the Magisterium, you know, when you enter, you aren’t given a name. You’re given a number, and the title of ‘mime.’ The bare bones. Then you’re expected to work as a servant around the citadel while more or less left on your own to learn. You’re there for a year, and then you’re initiated. Those who learned enough magic on their own advance to apprenticeship and are given a new name of their choosing, getting sorted into either the Way of the White or the Coven of the Black. Those who don’t think to learn or didn’t know they were expected to are expelled to return to wherever they came from, entirely empty-handed, afterwards, never even being told exactly why they were expelled. Just deemed unworthy,” Kai’ri explained. “If they don’t think to question, they’re not fit to learn. That’s the general attitude. Matoya isn’t her birth name. It was actually the name of an ancient sorceress whose power was so legendary that it took the full armies of several nations and an entire cabal of magicians to bring her down during the War of the Magi. My sister always admired that power even since we were children, but she came to covet it, crave it. So she chose the name in hopes that she could one day inherit the power. The clothes are her way of trying to feel more in touch with what she’s reaching for.”

“What was her birth name?” Yasha asked, in a tone that showed that she wasn’t asking the question so much as giving Kai’ri leave to tell it without having to volunteer the information.

“Kai’ya. She was Kai’ya Nhul,” Kai’ri replied, understanding what Yasha was doing and grateful for the opportunity. “Mystel names—in Mysidia, at least—go tribe, given name, surname, so we were both of the Nhul family of the Kai tribe. I’m not sure if things are different here in Deist. I’ve never had the opportunity to find out.

“The Kai tribe is…no more, though. My sister and I are the only survivors, actually. Our tribe was traversing the Graven Steppes to trade with the ronso clans there, and we were set upon in the night, slaughtered almost to the last. But it…wasn’t quick. The ones who attacked us took their time with it, raping, torturing, flaying… It would have been better if they just slaughtered us, but only once they had stripped from us every last shred of dignity did they grant us death. Kai’ya and I were captured, too, and forced to watch before being turned loose to wander. We were the only ones spared.” Kai’ri tried to let out a sigh, but it came out as more of a shudder. The memory never failed to bring forth the cold he knew so well within him, a cold he knew he was running from just as surely as he knew he could never truly escape. “The way the tribes work, every member of the tribe is responsible for every other member of the tribe when we’re dealing with outsiders. We can bicker amongst ourselves in private, but in the face of a possibly hostile world, we need to show solidarity. Since we were the only two members of our tribe left in the world, well…she was my tribe, and I was hers. That makes her my responsibility, and whether she wanted me there or not, I wasn’t going to up and abandon her. So I trained and I trained every day she was in the Magisterium to learn how to fight—I did mercenary work, joined a monastery, went out to a hermit in the mountains… I did everything I could for years and years to grow stronger, to achieve mastery. And here I am, twelve years later, with a job rent from a big hunk of rock that may or may not be aware that puts me into a narrow box, just as powerless to help her through her problems now that I’m sitting here as I was after she was rendered unresponsive from watching our father butchered and our mother violated in front of her over a decade ago.

“I feel like an awful brother…”

Yasha was quiet for a few moments, as the fight went right out of Kai’ri, and he felt himself sag back into the chair. Over the course of his speaking, she had not once stopped applying the sap to her sword, wiping it down from one section to the next as she had been prior. Now her rag worked back and forth over the final section of Skofnung, and moments later, the cloth came away from the sword, placed into the pail she had resting by her foot with a splat. Then, she reached over the back of the sofa, grabbing the scabbard at rest behind it, and slid the blade home with a soft click.

“I cannot tell you for certain what makes a sibling good or bad. The skjaldmær were a sisterhood, as were the seiðkonur by whose authority all the clans of the highlands were called to the thingstead and bound in an oath of peace to observe the Solstices, and interpret the messages of the Ancestors, by which was brought to us the will of the Mothers of Night. I spurned their sorority, needing not their bonds of ritual or tradition to seek my own strength, and as I was also the only child born to my mother in a bed of blood, I have no personal experience with such things,” Yasha began at length, as she began to pack up her maintenance materials and the pieces of armour that were laid out beside her. “But I possess eyes with which I may see and ears which may be bent to listen, and with these two faculties, I have observed much, and by that observation, I have learned a great deal, enough to begin to have a flirtation with a shadow of an inkling of the true magnitude of my ignorance. And it is because of that that I must ask you a question, a query on a matter of some significant import.”

“Okay,” Kai’ri affirmed, taking his turn to be perplexed.

“Why is it that you continue wearing that cheerful mask, when weighed so under such heady doubts?”

“Well…Kai’ya, now Matoya, may have forgotten the bonds of our tribe and the lessons we learned there in favour of the scholasticism of the Sosarian mages, but I haven’t. My sister broods more than enough for both of us, so I smile enough for the both of us, because whether or not I truly feel it within, it is my duty to provide for the tribe what the other members cannot,” he answered contentedly, nodding firmly in satisfaction with his own answer.

“Well then, I feel comfortable in saying you give yourself entirely too little credit, Kai’ri Nhul. Your sister, Master Matoya, is far from an easy woman to deal with, and that is by design, that she attempts to push others away as much as she is able,” Yasha remarked, standing with her pail, her sword, and her armour held in her arms to an effect that in any other circumstance could have been seen as at least mildly comedic. “In refusing to abandon her, you have done her a great service, and though she may not understand at the moment, so consumed by her quest for renown and so reverent of those she believes to have given her the power she now wields as an act of benevolence as she may be, eventually, given time, wisdom, and good fortune, she will come to realise that while you may not be one who is like her and as such is in line with her sensibilities, that is to her benefit. But I must also admonish you in this: that your sister is her own woman, and foolish though it may be, her pride is dear to her. The conclusion that lays before her, and the path ahead of her, is one that she must become willing to embrace, and tread, of her own accord. It is a battle she must fight alone. You are not obligated to fight it on her behalf, and in attempting such, you diminish what she may become and demean what she is now. You have such benevolence, Kai’ri Nhul, but there are times when the best of intentions yield forth the greatest wells of suffering. Indeed, there are times when the best thing you can possibly do is to do nothing, for it is not by your hand that the thing might be done.

“You cannot make this journey in your sister’s stead. You can only stand vigil at the far edge of fate, to receive her with open arms at journey’s end.”

Kai’ri sighed. The highlander’s words were certainly palliative—vulnerary, even—but they were also no less bitter for it. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. It just… Until I met Noah, she was all I had, and even now she’s all I have left of the tribe. Of our family. Knowing that I can do nothing does not relieve the feeling of needing to do something.”

“That much, I understand,” Yasha said with a grim twist to the corner of her mouth, her eyes in more than one way like weapon-steel and yet glinting with sympathetic understanding. She blew a long lock of silver hair out of her somber yet graven-featured face, though the warm lighting within the Rainbough made it appear more akin to a pale blue like a clear sky, and shifted, attempting to balance all the equipment with which she was laden. “One question, Kai’ri Nhul, if you will.”

“Ask away,” Kai’ri replied, chuckling at the thought that he was being asked to divulge something in the wake of what had just transpired.

“What force ravaged your tribe so? Was it the ronso clans?”

“No, the ronso clans suffered perhaps more than we. They have borne under the weight of such brutality for about a decade now, after all,” Kai’ri replied grimly, grimacing himself at the surge of vengeful fury that rose at the recollection. “It is a force unlike any other, the legions which even now march on the nations of Mysidia—and I doubt their lust for conquest will end at the continent’s shores. Deist may eventually fall victim to their designs. The force that befell us, defiling and destroying all that my sister and I had ever known and loved, was—”

As fortune would have it, at that moment, the doors of the Rainbough flew open, and over the threshold shot Constance, caught in the grip of a tittering, jubilant agitation. “Everyone! Pack your bags for Maelnaulde! We’re going to the tourney!”

In the savannah, sunset brought with it the biting chill of the night winds. It was not quite cold enough to freeze the blood as it might have been in the desert, but the contrast was still stark and the climate still inhospitable. But Yasha was a highlander of the Felmarch, and the hostile gusts that robbed her bones of warmth were to her heartening reminders of the home she had left behind. More than once had she walked out of the city onto the savannah once the curtain of night fell upon the land, seeking the thin, stark air that centred her and cleared her mind, that she might consider her course whenever it came to a particularly weighty crossroads. The weightier the decision, the further out she felt compelled to venture, though never so far that she could not return to her comrades come the dawn. While the exercise was nowhere near as effective as hunting one of the massive, deadly monsters that stalked the highlands, it was perhaps the closest thing to a comparable recourse she had to hand, and so she did not feel inclined to complain. It would be wasted energy on all counts, and that grated on her sensibilities.

Tonight was the furthest she had ventured out of all the nights she had been doing this, which was a testament to her misgivings.

It had taken Noah entering the situation to get a full account of the circumstances, that a huge event was going to transpire in the Principality of Maelnaulde, one of the other Free Cities, an event that was sure to tip the scales of power in the lukewarm confederation that still called itself a united alliance. As such, as there was going to be a tourney and thus an exhibition, Emberlet required them, as the city’s most prominent company of adventurers, to travel there and partake in a performative demonstration of the Federation’s strength. This she knew. She had long since accepted that she would never understand the cowardly power struggles that defined those who deemed themselves ‘civilised,’ but resolved to at least know how they worked, and as such, in the framework she had observed from her time amongst the other members of the Red Branch, this situation made some semblance of sense.

Her reservation was not concerned with the quality of the competition. She knew she could hold her own and acquit herself reasonably well, at the very least. She would have had to have been a hypocrite to object to the entire event, as she was not enough of a dunderhead to fail to realise that beneath all the layers of pageantry and half-speech, it was really not quite so different from flyting or holmgang, both time-honoured traditions of her people, so that was not an element with which she took particular issue. No, her concern was with the Red Branch, and what this meant for them going forward.

The delve had been something of a boiling point. They were perched upon a precipice, and if they could come together now, they would become truly strong; but if they failed to do this and thus fractured further, there would be no saving the company, and their grand endeavour would come to an end. At the moment, what she saw did not inspire much confidence—all of them meant well in their way, but none of them seemed to possess what was required to find true unity. A shield wall was only as strong as its weakest spear, and as far as their cohesion as a coterie went, the competition for that title was certainly heating up. It was clear to her that this tourney would only fray them further unless something was done, and it seemed no one was eager to take the first step. Perhaps it would be wise for her to seek out other options in case the worst came to pass, so that at least she would not be caught up in the wreck as it sank. She had survived alone before the Mysidian magicians had come searching for her, and she had little doubt she could survive alone once more, after the Red Branch had scattered to the winds like the ashes of a funeral pyre. She was good at it, after all. It was familiar.

“Such is the irony of the world, it seems, that I am called upon to counsel the counsellor.”

Yasha whirled around, startled, her hand leaping immediately to Skofnung. Standing behind her was…

“You appear surprised. Is it truly so impossible that even you may be taken unawares?”

“Yes,” she said flatly, struggling to master her racing heart.

“Ha. Perhaps so,” agreed the interloper, a man astride a massive black barded warhorse with scarlet flame for eyes. His voice was not one that may be found amongst the living, carrying with it the scrape of a whetstone just as surely as the last dying gasp before a battlefield fades to absolute silence, naught more than a feast for ravens. The man’s enameled black plate armour was contoured very closely to his body, revealing a physicality that seemed not out of place in a southron tale concerning the boundless gallantry of dashing princes of old, a lean, youthful form possessing broad shoulders and a narrow waist, without the brawn added by the wear and tear of years and decades of war. His pauldrons were rounded, but each boasted a range of spikes sharp enough to gore that ran from them down the segmented rerebrace to end at the couter, which was overshadowed by the decorative vambrace, from which flared a sharp ridge that was a blade all its own. His greaves seemed one with the spikes that came up from his poleyns, and his sabatons presented a perhaps solely decorative articulation for each sharp digit; his hands were covered in black demi-gaunts, but there was no flesh exposed, covered by the gloves beneath that seemed to conceal savage claws. A cloak fluttered behind him, curling and snapping as though lifted by a particularly large gust…but the wind was still, now. Calm, stern…vigilant.

But perhaps the most distressing part of his attire was the helm. It was, for all intents and purposes, a barbute, and that much was clear despite the decoration, from the dragon’s head that accentuated the brow down into the nasal guard, flaring out into the spikes and crests that such a creature might have going down its spine running vertically over the crown of it, to the large, elaborate, upwards-flaring wings that adorned the sides, the entire piece clearly meant to give the impression of a wyrm preparing to take wing. But though the helm was open-faced, and indeed from underneath it cascaded a flood of bone-white hair, there was no face beneath it; only an opaque black void out from which stared twin points of vibrant crimson starlight.

At a cue she neither saw, nor felt, the horse drew nearer, carrying him along with it, and for perhaps the first time, Yasha took note and realised that it possessed not four limbs, but eight: four in the front, and four in the rear. A seething mass swirled into existence by his hand, and from it he pulled a sword of great length, its fuller crimson and its single edge black with a sheen like obsidian.

A knight clad in black, astride the nightmare Sleipnir and wielding the dark sword Gramr, left only a single possibility, and she was not some dullard who required the appearance of Gungnir to know for certain. This was an Ancestor, one of the servants of the Night Mothers, but moreover, it was none other than Óðinn, the Forsaken Knight. Óðinn, the patron Ancestor of all warriors lost on their martial path, wandering the road of blood without purpose or conviction, wreaking only death and meaningless destruction in their wake.

“Ah, I see the spark of recognition in your eyes,” rumbled the voice of the Ancestor whose duty it was to provide direction to those shrouded in death without it, that they might reclaim their lost valour. “Would that you could turn such acute scrutiny inwards—mayhaps such turmoil would not now be twisting your soul.”

“Great One, I do not understand…” Yasha protested weakly, taking an involuntary step back and removing her hand from her blade—she had not forgotten from her girlhood that challenging an Ancestor was a fool’s errand, and would yield only a fool’s death.

“I am said to grant conviction to those who have lost theirs, but that is far beyond the scope of my powers, and even were it not, to do so would be in open defiance of the will of the Dark One, the Mother of Night,” Óðinn explained. “In truth, all warriors worthy of my patronage already possess within them the thing they seek. I merely give them an opportunity to find it.”

“And what is it, then, that I am seeking, Great One?”

“It is ill-advised to ask a question to which the answer is known,” Óðinn replied.

“Great One…I do not know of what you speak. These secrets you say are mine remain shrouded, my eyes blinded by light.”

“Then you have forgotten.”

“…What have I forgotten?”

“You have forgotten who you are, and so you have forgotten the truth. You have forgotten what it is to feel the Dark’s embrace,” replied Óðinn. “But it lives within you. You must look inside yourself. You must set free the power that lays shackled within you. You are far more than what you have allowed yourself to be. Cast away this crude effigy, this mask of yielding flesh. Remember who you are, and witness your full glory. Look there, and gaze now upon the Flames of Rebirth!”

Óðinn lifted a clawed hand and pointed behind her, and Yasha turned, her body obeying before her mind could think to question, to regard the thing that had somehow appeared behind her, only to stop in her tracks, stunned.

It was the height of five men were each to stand on each other’s shoulders, was the creature—a bird with plumage that was at once feather and flame. Furled, its wings resembled those of a sparrow, but she knew that when spread, they were more magnificent than those of any eagle, and around its body was curled a set of long tail-feathers akin to those of a peafowl in which were recorded all of fire’s many hues, from the bright blue of high heat to the green of salt and all that lay in between. A falcon’s legs and talons held it standing, its chest was that of a starling, its head crested like a heron’s and with a long beak that was curved cruelly like that of a bird of prey; this head was lowered to her level, its eyes like livid coals while waves of heat distortion ran down its plumage as she met its gaze.

The phoenix let out a soft yet standoffish croon, its nobility irrepressible even when attempting to beckon, and she obeyed, surrendering to the magnetic draw that demanded she approach as she lifted a hand to place it on the bird’s head. She did not stop when she felt the heat warming her bones, she did not stop when her clothes came alight, and she did not stop as her skin melted, the fat boiled, the muscle sloughed off, and the bone began to char to a cinder; nor did the phoenix back away as the heat of its body intensified with her proximity, and the flame began to consume it. It was a skeletal hand, then, seared and scorched near to the melted marrow within, that laid itself upon the head of the dying avian, and it stayed there as the heat spiked to dwarf that of the heart of a volcano, consuming them both utterly.

We give ourselves to the Flame, and by our commingled ashes are we reborn as one…

Yasha bolted upright in her bed, gasping for air. She felt coals in her lungs, embers stuck in her throat, her blood boiling as it ran through her veins as she came to, drenched and soaked through in cold sweat. She looked around, bewildered, taking in the familiar details of her bedchamber given new oddity by her fugue, and then patted herself up and down her bare chest, making sure everything was still where it ought to have been.

She was still alive.

Her head hit the pillow behind her and her back hit the feather mattress in a huff of impact as she stared at the ceiling, trying to collect her thoughts. It was just a dream. It was just a dream. It was just a…

Her hand encountered something on her bed. Something hard, yet not brittle—thin, yet not weak. She grabbed it tentatively and brought it up to the light to get a better look at it, then sighed in resignation.

It was a demon’s mask.

Then, like a spark catching a leaf, a burn began from where her fingers grasped the mask, and spread outward until it was consumed in a raging fireball. After a moment, it subsided, and she was left grasping a sword with a sweeping hilt and a blade that looked as though it was crafted in the Far East, with its single edge and slight curvature.

We give ourselves to the Flame, and by our commingled ashes are we reborn as one.

Setting the mask-turned-sword down onto the bed next to her, retaining its form as it was laid aside, Yasha chuckled, and then laughed aloud until her lungs ached from the effort. “Looks like you were right after all, Bryn. Guess I really couldn’t keep running from it forever…”