“No chance,” Sigma laughed. “If and when we do fight I’ll come at you trying to kill, but you’ve no way to actually damage me. All you have to do is land one single hit that would kill a human - if you want to walk through that door, that is. We can stay here and talk, for as long as you wish. Just know that there’s no time dilation going on down here, that’s a myth.”

Zefaris sighed and finally sat down, sliding the bayonet into her belt and retrieving one of the coins in its stead. She didn’t holster Pentacle, and in fact took care to always have it pointed at Sigma, even if her finger was off the trigger.

With a heavy gaze and an even heavier question on her lips, she shot for the biggest question that came to mind.

“Is there any point to all this?”

The machine let out a faux-surprised chuckle.

“Can’t say you’re the first to ask that, but…” it began, “I’m afraid I couldn’t answer fundamental questions about the world even if I knew the answers. Neither the main core nor any of us subcores can give new information that could accelerate one’s self-cultivation.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Zefaris said. “I mean the whole reason we’re down here. Why we’re trying to exterminate these fuckers.”

“And what might that reason be?” Sigma questioned, raising and tilting its head in a way that somehow perfectly matched the feeling of a quizzically raised eyebrow.

“The war, our struggle against the old powers, ” she began. “All of this horseshit that the Sage started. Is there any point to a unified Ikesia? Or are we doomed to subservience under the Pateirians?”

Sigma sat stone-still, its eye-light flickering. “I don’t…” it said, before cutting out abruptly. The color of its eye shifted subtly, from a clear blue to a clear cyan. Out of nowhere, it raised its hand like it had before, another pillar rising from the floor in front of Zefaris. In the side that faced her, there was a recess and… A control handle?

Before she could ask what the purpose of it was, the machine already spoke again. “Take hold and simply focus on informing me of a particular subject,” it said. “I haven’t been topside in a while, so your own experiences will have to suffice as a source of information. The connection is one-way and isolated, no other core will know of this - not even the main core.”

Hesitant, she did as asked. She thought of everything she knew about the war, every little niggling thing that didn’t add up. All of the supposed Ikesian offensives that couldn’t have possibly happened, all of the propaganda pamphlets that painted Ikesians as genocidal, ultra-nationalistic snow-devils. All of the cruel ends that she’d been promised. The convenient border skirmish that supposedly started it all, right as Pateirian troops were performing exercises only a mile away. Even memories that she’d suppressed came to the surface, memories of comrades felled by bad luck, memories of soldiers from both sides strung up like grizzly puppets by self-titled noble heroes.

Their foes, for the gall of opposing them. Their allies, for the failure of dying in combat. She’d entirely given up on finding out the state of her hometown, for fear of the truth being what she wished it not to be. It was better that she didn’t know, as if the fact she didn’t know somehow made the place and the people she remembered so fondly immune from the war’s decimation.

Zefaris thought of everything she’d experienced as a soldier, even the early parts - she thought of why she chose the path of a professional soldier, years before the war had started. She’d wanted to see all the new wonders of technology, wanted to wield the newest, most advanced weapons for the sake of her homeland. In a manner of speaking, she got her wish - but by now, it was all too late. She was just another dead war-criminal, as far as the records knew.

Funnily enough, she didn’t think at all of losing her eye. It wasn’t important. No, she moved onto all that came after. The recon specialization, the transfer, the death of the Captain. After that, the war went bad, and they were relegated to a supply convoy. All that time after their supposed desertion, the months of living in the E.Z., that was a gap - a long stretch of nothing.

It was the end of that nothing that she truly began pouring everything she remembered into the machine, minus a few unnecessary details. Anything and everything she had learned about the state of her country since that mysterious foreigner stared her down in the middle of the E.Z.

Unknowingly, the cyclopean markswoman also poured all her emotions, hopes, sorrows and trauma into Sigma, having lost control of herself after cautiously selecting relevant information. When she came back to her senses, Sigma still sat there unmoving, its eye still that cyan color, blinking as it had before.

“You done?” it asked, the machine-voice tinged by a sense of sympathy that she knew shouldn’t be there. Zefaris nodded, only now noticing that a tear had rolled down her cheek. Wiping it off with her sleeve she felt as if a weight had been lifted from her chest, even if she hadn’t gotten any answers yet.

“I… Lost it there. Sorry,” she apologized.

Sigma rumbled an understanding chuckle, though there was something… Off, about it. A stuttering distortion to the tone of its voice that hadn’t been present before.

“This-is-is no-ot unex-ex-expected, I can co-o-ope,” it said, shaking its head and even hitting itself the way one would hit a malfunctioning machine. It seemed to work, as its speech returned to clarity, “You’ve uh… You’ve really got some major cognitive pressure going on there. My current shell was not meant to handle this type of mental strain, so don’t be surprised if it seems like my mental state is degrading. Understood?”

Sigma seemed to take this matter with deathly seriousness, and so Zefaris just nodded along and waited for it to say its piece. Then it started. Its eye-color flashed to green. The stiffness vanished from its form as it took on a naturalistic sitting position, even mimicking the subtle movements of a living human, as if it were breathing.

“If you walk the path you are on now, you will both witness and partake in carnage that will make your War of Fog look like a petty squabble. You will not know peace until a nation falls - whether that nation will be yours, that I cannot say,” it said, with a voice sounding simultaneously as smooth as velvet and as rugged as the engine of an armored transport. It was a steady, resolute cadence, like one of the officers giving a speech. Already, Sigma’s tone of voice had changed.

“You will not know peace even if you seek it out, for those who hate this nation will find you and make a villain of you, for the shade of your skin, for your past allegiances, for the crime of being born into a nation that defied the Old Powers. Perhaps most relevant to you, you will not know peace for as long as the one you call Zelsys remains the subject of your affection.”

Everything it said up until that last sentence was nothing more than confirmations of what she already thought might be the case, but that last one… That last one felt like it could be either the worst of the best thing she had ever been told.

“Why? Why Zelsys?” Zefaris asked, trepidation in her heart.

Sigma chuckled, as if it had expected exactly this question. At least Zefaris thought it was a chuckle, though it sounded more like a collection of jammed cogs grinding against one another to approximate a human chuckle.

“She is an engine of conquest given human flesh, human vices, human desires,” it said. “A walking, loaded gun.”

“So am I,” Zefaris replied.

“So you are,” the subcore conceded, a grin audible in its voice. “A professional soldier with no notable civilian skills, and a repressed adrenaline junkie to boot. You two are perfect for each other.”

“Still…” Zef trailed off, “that does not answer my question. Is there any point to all this? Is there any point to still holding on since Ikesia has lost the war?”

“Has it lost?” Sigma prodded with a question that it clearly expected no answer to. “The last time a war wiped out most of the cultivator sects on the continent, history deemed the group that did it the winner.”

“...What do you mean?”

“Oh, I do suppose it must’ve been centuries ago to you,” Sigma laughed. “I can’t say much, but… I’ll just say that the story of the so-called Dead Gods didn’t exactly go the way you’ve been taught. There wasn’t a single slayer, for one. It was an entire slayer’s guild that became a revolutionary group.”

“So the Dead Gods didn’t…” Zefaris began, only to be cut off as the machine continued its ramblings. It sounded like it was using this opportunity to spill its guts as much as she had done, just in words rather than an uncontrolled thought-stream poured into arcane machinery.

“Oh no, they were very real,” it said. “They just weren’t gods at all, or even called that. They were three very powerful cultivators that had each founded their own country and at some point or another decided to unify into a single country with three rulers.”

“They spread what they knew to the masses and even built dedicated dungeons specifically to give aspiring cultivators the opportunity to face appropriately perilous challenges in exchange for appropriately helpful rewards…”

It pointed to her bayonet, “Like unlocking the hidden potential of a weapon for clearing the first Trial of Solitude, for example. Unfortunately, the very first group to clear every dungeon had their own ambitions, and left for the west to found their own country - the so-called Divine Empire, or as you now know it, the Pateirian Empire. Soon enough, the Divine Empire’s cultivator-army marched on the Triumvirate’s cities, and they didn’t leave a whole lot behind. No buildings, no people, nothing… A total genocide...”

Sigma trailed off, its eye-light blinking, its legs scraping against the stone as hatred and anger crept into its voice, “Just us. Just the dungeons. ‘Cause they couldn’t destroy us. So they locked away as many of us as they could, wiped us from history. Wouldn’t be surprised if the so-called Divine Emperor was just one of those subhuman thugs, if these Parasites were just another attempt to destroy us for good.”

This was… A little much information even for her to process all at once, and more importantly, it still didn’t answer her question. For now, she decided to just lead the machine on and hope it gave an answer.

“I… I appreciate the historical insight, but that still does not answer my question.”

“...I’m sorry,” Sigma whispered. “I don’t know. You will struggle, you will grow stronger. They will give no quarter, they will concede at no point. I have heard them speak to one another, they have been conditioned to think of those loyal to this country as inhuman devils.”

Its head twitching, its eye-light flickering, and its body moving so smoothly that it looked unnatural, Sigma stood from its seat. It towered over her, staring with that twitching head, its body poised, yet it didn’t lash out. It still kept speaking, gesticulating in a manner almost identical to the way the Sage did when he gave the occasional speech. It was wild, bombastic, impassioned - completely out of character for this self-described emotionless automaton. Had her brief connection to it really influenced it so much?

“Pateirians could witness their Divine Emperor skinning infants alive, and they would rationalize it to somehow be a good thing, or to somehow be the fault of those evil foreigners!” it exclaimed with a jovial, mocking tone that made it sound like the automaton regarded Pateirians as amusing savages. It was… Unsettlingly familiar. She was almost certain that Sigma was reciting some mashup of multiple speeches from multiple different commanders. The machine grew increasingly unstable with every word it spoke, its voice degrading to the point of sounding like a degraded wax cylinder recording.

It ranted and ranted, and Zefaris just… Didn’t pay attention. Her focus had shifted entirely to Sigma’s stance, which had progressively grown more aggressive. She had cocked Pentacle’s hammer and retrieved a coin from her pocket, and now was only moments from putting a bullet in the golem’s head to finally shut it up.

Then… It froze. For a moment, Sigma grew utterly still, the light in its eye died. Moments later its motion resumed, the stone skin cracking like that of a leper with each movement, myriad chips of black stone sloughing off in layers. The eye relit a bright orange, and with it, a crack in Sigma’s face that mirrored a toothy grin. Sigma laughed the laugh of a dying man, a man whose lungs are full of blood, even though it had neither lungs nor blood.

“I-hi-hi see now,” it said, its voice as clear as a bell. It sounded like it was struggling to contain exhilarated laughter. “You’ve made a liar of me. I said I could cope, but…”

The golem raised its right arm, and alongside it so did a pillar rise from the floor. Both the arm and the pillar shuddered, and both collapsed - the pillar back into the floor, and Sigma’s arm into tiny little pieces on the ground. The grin-like crack on its face grew wider, and it let out a deep laugh.

“It appears that I cannot. I opened my shell to your will, and this is what it did. To prevail through sheer force of will, before the physical battle is even waged. I see now that you’re more than a soldier, more than a killer!” the crumbling automaton roared in rapturous revelation.

“So here is my answer to your question, my true answer, without elaborate political context or bullshit about indoctrination,” it said, finally grabbing Zef’s full attention. “Never before have Ikesians had their own nation-state, and after this, you might never get that opportunity again - even during the era of the Three Kings, you were a minority. If you were to die in defence of that ideal, it will not have been in vain. Now, before I crumble, stand and fight!”

At last, Sigma dropped into a low stance with its good arm reared back, staring Zefaris down as it slowly crumbled away to a stone skeleton. She stood from her seat, taking a breath and exhaling Fog onto the coin. When she saw the coating of Fog cling to the coin she also murmured, “Homunculus Eye…”

Something told her that the automaton’s sorry physical state wouldn’t do much to impede its abilities, and so she would gamble on the coin.

“Fine,” she said, holding the now-glowing coin out in her outstretched hand. “For good luck.”

Sigma gave a sharp, short nod, remarking, “Suit yourself, a flash of light and a loud noise won’t do anything.”

With her thumb, Zefaris flipped the coin into the air so that it would fly over the golem and end up behind it, watching its ascent, her finger squarely on Pentacle’s trigger. The coin reached the apex of its flight and hung there for a fifth of a second, emitting a brief flash of light before it continued. She still bided her time, waiting until she heard it whistling and noticed the light from it flashing a second time.

Exhaling, raising her gun, and leaning back at the same time, Zefaris set loose a gunshot aimed perfectly at Sigma’s stomach. Or, at least, that was it on the surface. It was no surprise to her that the golem deftly stepped aside just as the blazing spear of lead left her weapon, for she had expected the golem to be this fast.

No, her true intentions laid in hitting that coin just as it flashed the second time. When flaming lead met Fog-coated copper, she felt the world freeze for a split-second. In that moment she could see the golem’s forward posture as it already moved to lunge at her, murder in its eye.

Then, there was a loud clang and a bright flash of light as the bullet bounced right off the coin and into the back of Sigma’s head. A deafening crack there sounded and Sigma stopped dead in place, twitching for a few moments as its eye-light flashed. Its head turned, ever so slowly, to look at Zefaris, and it spoke in the same voice it had used when she first spoke to it, before it had grown unstable.

“You knew I would dodge, so you used a coin as a kinetic mirror,” it said, half disbelieving, half impressed. A laugh rumbled from the golem as it crumbled into pieces, leaving behind only the head.

“I only regret that I’ll be my machine-self by the time you return to conquer this place in its true form,” Sigma added before its eye flickered out and its head too crumbled into black sand.

Holstering her gun, Zefaris cautiously walked over to where the coin had landed. Picking it up showed her that it was utterly unscathed, and she smiled, knowing that she would use this very coin again and again. It was when she stowed the coin away and took a step that the great door’s glyph came alive, and it swung open at little more than her gaze.

Past it, there was not a chamber or a corridor, but another glyph whose many facets lit up from bottom to top, great ropes of Fog pouring forth as the Fog Gate formed. Walking through the gate, Zefaris felt the filth slough off both her clothes and skin, her wounds mended and her exhaustion fading. At the other side was a square chamber with three doors on each wall and a squat altar in the center above which floated a map of the dungeon.

Zefaris cared for none of these things, for her eye immediately found that familiar figure staring up at that map, and she could do nothing but run towards her with tears welling up in her eye.

Up until now, she hadn’t even considered the possibility that they might never see one another again.

She hated this place, that so absurdly defied the laws of the world, that so impossibly shifted around her. The Inquisitor hated and reviled that the very walls that stood between her and the Sea of Fog were being infested by mutant terrorists. With each swing of her flaming sword, every felled drone and cleft-asunder warrior, the scope of her task set in, and she came to terms with the need for more than just her if this extermination were to be completed. But most of all, she hated that face, with those silver eyes. It reminded her of just how doomed this country was, of the reason why she handed over her comrades and deserted to the Grekurian side. The face of that towering, monstrous woman, of that twisted mirror image, reminded the Inquisitor of all the things she thought she would be, of all the failures, it reminded her of her future self that never came.

The Inquisitor cut, and punched, and kicked her path through dozens of locusts, weathering their assaults and dispatching them with the efficiency of the thoroughly and harshly trained operative that she was. Fog-breathing and arcane weapons were tools in her arsenal with no special respect, she didn’t even have her own special brand of techniques - much like the members of old cultivator families, the Inquisitor had co-opted the name of her order: Inquisition Arts.

And yet, beneath all the professionalism and calm, calculated confidence, beneath the ominous veneer of a nameless, faceless, ultimate soldier, she was angry and resentful. When she made her way through this chamber and reached the intermediary one, with its control handle in the wall and its utility glyph, she used it not to check her own attributes, but to try and make it work like a mirror. It took some time to respond, but the glyph’s projection did indeed shift to form a foggy surface that soon faded into a mirrored surface, frayed into silvery threads at the edges.

Then, she reached up and pulled off her mask, staring herself in the eyes. Alcerys hated her face, but not because of the scars that marked her as having endured hardship. Her facial structure was damn-near ideal, her eyes the coveted bright blue that was sometimes the sole deciding factor for an arranged marriage.

In her heart of hearts, Alcerys knew exactly why she hated that face so much. She hated it because merely gazing upon it reminded her of the crippling pain that the so-called “Soul-Splinter Procedure” inflicted. It never went away, not entirely. Even now, it throbbed at the back of her mind. Like the phantom pain in a missing limb.

It pulsed, with every heartbeat, reminding her of that impossible archetype that had the absolute fucking audacity to wear her face. She knew enough about the homunculus project to realize that it wasn’t Zelsys’ choice, that she likely just woke up fully formed in a tube one day. But that didn’t change how she felt. It didn’t change the fact that the Inquisitor hated her twisted doppelganger, that she wanted to kill it just to prove to herself that she still had control over her own life.

“Not yet,” she told herself before she let go of the control handle and strapped her mask back on. There was a job to do, only once the Queen was dead could she carry out her grudge.

Into the next chamber. A long corridor, blocked off by a single hive, from whose doors already poured a crowd of drones and warriors. Too many to safely dispose of just using the flaming sword, even with its greatly extended burn time. Instead of even considering direct combat, she opened up her coat and pulled out all of her sparklocks pair by pair - eight in total, each richly engraved. Two in her hands, two under her arms, four under her elbows.

It was situations like this that gave reason to carrying all those sparklocks inside her armored coat. Normal officers only carried all those guns because they couldn’t afford a more advanced weapon. Inquisitors, however, were equipped with specially produced sparklocks, each possessed of four rotating barrels set in pairs with two hammers, and each of their grips etched with a glyph that bound the gun to its owner. Elaborate, prohibitively expensive, and useless to anyone not trained to exploit it. Even still, they were coveted by those who knew of their existence for being one of the few multiple-shot, cold-iron firearms that had ever been produced in Grekuria.

Taking a breath of Fog, she began to recite an incantation of three lines. Each line necessitated a lungful of Fog to be metabolized, and even a minute lapse in concentration would cause all that built-up Aether in her system to come surging right back out, without regard for the integrity of any tissue in its way.

“Blessed be ye, who wield the Eight Stars of Calamity...” she said, and the first pair of pistols floated from her grasp, their binding glyphs shining as bright as any constellation, connected to her by bright tendrils of Fog. Before the first line even ended, she already took the pair from under her arms and made it float as well.

Another deep breath. Another lungful of fog. A building tension began to tug at her, both in body and in mind. Both her physical and spiritual fortitude was sufficient to withstand it, but only barely.

“For these arms that man hath wrought of cold iron...” she continued, calmly observing the gathering swarm as the third pair floated up to join the first two above her head. The last pair, she gripped in her hands, even as the guns’ glyph shined and the Fog tendril wrapped itself around her wrists The bugs assembled into a phalanx of sorts, but without a Locust Noble present, they only had old and faded pheromones to go by. The phalanx was uneven and had great big holes. Little more than a crowd, really.

The last incantation was to bestow yet greater firepower unto these arms, as well as to fuel their recoil-mitigation glyphs. She pulled the triggers of both the guns she held, exclaiming the last line as she did so, “...Shall bring to heel all the beasts of this world!”

All hell ripped loose around her and Alcerys felt herself being pushed back from the recoil, as eight spears of blazing lead soared right into the horde. Some ripped through a warrior and a drone before being stopped, whilst others obliterated three drones in a row. They trailed spiraling trails of smoke and Fog, and even the remains of their victims were twisted by their violent spin on impact.

They were rearing up to swarm her, but she had cared not, calmly recentering herself and marching ahead whilst she focused on breathing - she could simply leap overhead and rain death from above, if it came to that.

The second salvo, she loosed in two parts into other areas of the crowd to further thin them out, and then there were a few quiet seconds whilst she turned the barrels of her weapons. Not with her hands, but simply by uttering a command, “Turn.”

At her word, the Fog tendrils did as ordered, winding around the barrels to work their mechanism. A gap, in which the surviving locusts - about two thirds of them in total - scrambled about and tried to charge towards her position. They had fallen to disarray already, charging straight at her. Sure, they tried to surround her, but even in this they lined up with warriors in front and locusts in the back.

There was no next salvo, only a continuous string of gunshots as she discharged her guns one by one to take out as many locusts as possible.

The Eight Stars of Calamity were one of the many reasons Inquisitors had the reputation they did. An Inquisitor in the right place could, with some luck, kill even more than she just had - it was known that a Star of Calamity could penetrate three humans and severely wound a fourth, if they were lined up and shot center-mass. Not because of a myth, but because they had been tested on the corpses of executed criminals, and some live ones as well.

Thirty-two shots rang out, and she was done. There were still some twenty seconds left before the guns floating above her would fall, more than enough time to finish off the remaining locusts - a little over a dozen, going off a cursory sweep of her surroundings. Alcerys stepped out of the way of a charging warrior, stowing away both the guns she held after she willed their respective Fog tendrils to dissipate. She pulled her sword from its sheath and ignited it, performing a wide sweep to cleave in twain any bug that might possibly be sneaking up on her before.

It was almost sad, how animalistic and disorganized these creatures were without one of their leaders. They were sloppier and easier to make fools of than back in the forest, they just kept coming at her and fruitlessly trying to outnumber her as if that would help them. She had to agree that they would be an ideal terror weapon, an ideal land-holding army against normal soldiers, but far less effective against very powerful single opponents such as Inquisitors or really any other Fog-breathers. In a manner of speaking, they embodied the Pateirian approach to normal infantry - just filler to back up the elite soldiers.

After she killed a few locusts, she decidedly knew it would take her longer than twenty seconds to deal with the remaining locusts, so she just made her way to the hive and leapt atop it with a lungful of Fog so she could dismiss her Fog tendrils one by one, catching each gun in turn and stowing it into her armored coat. Then, it was back to the extermination.

Warrior after warrior, drone after drone, the Inquisitor wiped out the rest of this rabble. The greatest discomfort she felt all throughout was not from her foes, but the negligible exertion of killing them. It almost felt like the stench of their viscera managed to seep through her gas mask, but she knew it was just in her mind - if her mask hadn’t been sealing properly, Fog would have been escaping it, and it wasn’t.

With all of the grunts done, it was onto the Doormen, who had by now closed up the doorways. The flaming sword took some time burning through their arm-shields, but it managed so handily. A standard fuel cell would’ve sputtered and struggled to stay lit when continually submerged in fluid, whereas the blue flame just spat even more violently in reaction to the Doorman’s vile hemolymph. Soon enough she had enough room to cut through the creature’s arms and topple its own arm-shields on top of it before she drove her sword into its head to kill it.

The body took a few more swings of her blazing blade to be rendered down enough that she could actually enter the hive, but after that, there was no more notable resistance.

Sure, there were a few engorged drones, quicker and more savage than normal, but they were not even worthy of being called a threat. She cut them down without paying them mind, before she executed the remaining Doormen and made her way out the other side of the hive, sheathing her sword to preserve fuel.

A long hallway sprawled out before her, a towering figure stood in the chamber that it led to, staring her down. It was… The black-armored Locust Noble from before? Only, he didn’t quite look the part.

The dopey, childlike slowness was gone from him. What little of his human face had been visible now fully mutated into an insectoid visage - where he once had a helm that covered his head, there was now a mandibled jaw and beady, black eyes, antennae protruding from his forehead and whipping about. His armor had been changed, many of the plates over vital areas replaced by bright red ones clearly styled after the Red Mantis.

She couldn’t see what weapon sat on his back, but she could make out that it was smaller than his previous ultra-greatsword. Not just that, but the part of his left arm that Zelsys had destroyed had also been replaced by a huge, bright red tower shield, its front styled into a snarling grimace. It even had bright red lightgems set into the eyeholes - how quaint.

Though the direction of his gaze could no longer be ascertained - not to mention that it wouldn’t be possible from this far away even if he didn't have bug eyes - Alcerys could palpably feel the seething, mindless rage that the Black Swordsman directed towards her with his gaze. That bulging, engorged control parasite on the nape of his neck was obviously riling him up so that he would splatter her all across the floor the moment she set foot in that triangular arena.

Alcerys wasn’t willing to take the risk of agitating him more than she needed to, so she ducked back into the hive and sat down in the least disgusting corner of it, pulling her mask just far up enough to chug down all the mead elixir she had left. Afterwards, she took the time to reload the Stars of Calamity, pulling the “bottomless” powder horn and a pouch of lead balls from the hidden pockets of her armored coat. Of course, the powder horn was just enchanted to hold far more powder than its external dimensions would suggest, which was why it was wrapped with arcane seals written in Aqua-infused blue ink, to ensure that its Ignis-rich contents wouldn’t turn unstable.

By the time she got through the fourth gun, she started to hear loud stomping and feel the tremors that it produced, which were strong enough to just barely reach her all the way over here. When she was halfway done with the last gun, the Black Swordsman turned to screaming insults in, to her surprise, Grekurian. Not just any Grekurian, but one of the very distinctive Ikesio-Grekurian border dialects that first arose from mixing of the two languages only a century or so prior. Alcerys knew, because it was her own native dialect, though she had been forced to learn to use the clean, unaccented versions of both its parent languages.

“Hnrrr… Coward!” he howled. “Come out here and face me!”